Choose better relatives

Dr Mohammed Haneef was arrested on bogus terrorism charges in July. When the government couldn’t prove its case, Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews withdrew his visa. He was released into immigration detention and later returned to India. Now,

Lawyers for Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews are appealing against Justice Jeffery Spender's decision to quash the cancellation of Dr Haneef's visa.

Justice Spender ruled Mr Andrews was wrong to use Dr Haneef's association with his second cousins and UK terrorism suspects Sabeel and Kafeel Ahmed.

The court heard the easiest way to view the changes was whether the Minister believed a person was mates with people who are not of good character.

You just can’t be too careful who your relatives are.

Two birds

On 28 May, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Debra Jopson reported that Australia, the land of the fair go, has been inflating its foreign aid figures. A report by the Aid/Watch organisation shows that about a third of all Australian development aid is what Ian Wishart, the national executive director of Plan Australia, calls ‘phantom aid’.

The most egregious example is the A$644 million development assistance to Iraq for 2006 and 2007.

The $644 million aid to Iraq never left Australia and is really an export debt for wheat bought from Australian farmers more than 17 years ago. A Pitt Street government insurance agency which indemnifies exporters in risky markets paid out claims to grain growers 15 years ago. The Government paid the agency, the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation, and took on the debt, which it now classifies as aid.

"They always count the Iraq money when they show how their aid is increasing ... They are pulling the wool over Australians' eyes because the average Aussie wouldn't think that paying off a wheat debt, which in effect is just a book transfer ... [is] a good form of aid," Mr Wishart said.

In Aid/Watch report, released last month, Fighting Poverty or Fantasy Figures?: The Reality of Australian aid, Flint Duxfield and Kate Wheen, write,

Incredibly, 57% or $381 million of the debt is in fact the interest accrued on the principal sum. Since UN sanctions prevented Australia from pursuing repayment, the interest simply increased over the intervening period.

Another embarrassing element of Australian overseas development aid is that

“Assistance to refugees” in an Australian context includes funding the mandatory detention of asylum seekers in detention centres in Australia and offshore in Nauru and Christmas Island. The funds Australia spends to repatriate asylum seekers back to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is also counted as ODA.

And if that wasn’t cynical enough,

Having spent $2.08 million in 2001 on Operation Gabardine, the so-called ‘children overboard’ affair, the government then claimed this as refugee funding under OECD criteria, and yet the asylum seekers involved were refused refugee status.

The Herald claims to have uncovered these additional scams

· A $27,758 payment AusAID made to the Australian law firm Sparke Helmore for legal assistance during the Cole inquiry into legal breaches of the UN oil-for-food program has been counted as foreign aid.

· Another $81,993 described as foreign aid to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004 was an Immigration Department assistance package for temporary protection visa holders in Australia.

· Half a million dollars of last financial year's $23.4 million in aid for Nauru was to be spent on co-ordinating aid, while $1.3 million went on "logistics", providing housing, transport and other costs for Australian officials.

Duxfield and Wheen further point out that A$150 million takes the form of scholarships for study in Australia.

Certainly scholarships benefit the people who are fortunate to receive them. However… scholarships can contribute to the ‘brain drain’ phenomena, in effect decreasing capacity as promising students are lured away from their home country to pursue careers in developed countries…the money could be better spent on…primary education or building the capacity of tertiary institutions in-country…the opportunity cost of 375 Australian Development Scholarships in Papua New Guinea is to deprive another 2,135 students a year of the chance to study at university [in PNG].

Although the Australian government claims to focus on the poorest nations in the region,

AusAID revealed last year that of the 2,863 students studying on Australian Development Scholarships, 40 are from East Timor, 390 from PNG, and 35 Solomon Islands. Of the 179 Scholarships for Australian Leadership Awards offered commencing in 2007 only 14 are for PNG, 5 for the Solomon Islands and 2 for East Timor.

The Australian government’s commitment to the environment is not only evidenced in its principled stand not to sign onto the Kyoto protocols on the grounds that it would be ‘bad for the economy’.

AID/WATCH research has shown that during the decade to 2004 EFIC funded over $7.6bn worth of fossil fuel related investments, while only $67m in support was provided for renewable industries – a ratio of over 100 to 1.

Nearly 60% of the aid budget is administered through contracts with just ten private profitmaking companies that farm projects out to consultants.

A major influence on the contracting of Australian aid is the significan reliance on ‘technical assistance’ (TA) also known as Technical Co-operation (TC). Principally invoked as a mechanism for ‘capacity development’, many of the AusAID projects managed by Australian companies fall into this category, which also includes research, advisory or consultancy services funded through the aid program.

Expatriate consultants being payed upwards of $1,000 a day to work in environments where people barely have enough food to eat is one of the most criticised aspects of international development assistance. Not only do the high wages of foreign technical consultants frequently create resentment amongst local staff, they have also been shown to increases the cost of aid by at least 25%.

A lot of people experience a warm visceral glow at the mention of ‘foreign aid’ or ‘development assistance’. There are always calls for ‘more aid’, and usually at the same time, ‘cancel the debt’. Well, now the Howard government has learned how, AusAID claims strictly within the OECD guidelines, to kill two birds with one stone.

No more crumbs

Just the other day, in the context of the employers’ insatiable grasping for more and more ‘labour market reforms’, eroding employees’ basic rights further and further in the name of ‘flexibility’ and ‘certainty’, I was reminded of the ‘certainty’ that the cockies (pastoralists, ranchers) had demanded in the wake of the historic 1992 Australian High Court decision on Native Title. Even though the High Court determined that there was such a thing as native title, just about anything would ‘extinguish’ it and the native title holders were entitled to no compensation for the extinguishment of their title.

Annabel Stafford reports in today’s Melbourne Age,

"It is clear from recent judgements that, in some parts of Australia, groups of Aboriginal people will find it difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate that their relationship with their traditional country meets the standard required for a determination that native title exists," Native Title Tribunal president Graeme Neate told a petroleum and exploration industry conference in Adelaide this week.

Moreover, in some areas where Aborigines had maintained a strong connection with the land, "few if any native title rights and interests" had survived the effects of white settlement, Mr Neate said. This was because almost any land dealing — such as the granting of freehold land, even if it is never used — extinguishes native title rights.

"In other words, as a matter of law, native title has been extinguished even though on the facts native title could (exist)," Mr Neate told the conference.

Because of this, the only hope many indigenous Australians have of seeing their land rights recognised is a private company or government agreeing to give them some rights or privileges in relation to their land.

As if Indigenous people hadn’t had quite enough of relying on the generosity very colonists who had stolen their land in the first place. As if that munificence had ever extended beyond the odd crumb! ‘…agreeing to give them some rights or privileges in relation to their land’…just about says it all.

Bring it on!

‘Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the liberal The American Prospect magazine and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos.’ His column in today’s Boston Globe, may provide a different perspective for the discussion of the state of the unions on leftwrites. [my emphasis],

THE NEW York Times recently reported that the earnings gap is now the widest since 1928, with the richest 1 percent of Americans having captured most of the economy’s 2005 growth, and the bottom 90 percent getting nothing. Between 1979 and 2005, according to MIT professor Thomas Kochan, productivity of American manufacturing rose by about 70 percent, but the real wages of production workers remained flat.

This economic pummeling of ordinary Americans has many causes…But one of the big reasons is industry’s relentless assault on unions, an attack abetted or tolerated by most US administrations for three decades.

In truth, academic studies going back to the work of Richard Freeman and James Medoff document the principal reason unions have declined, from more than 30 percent after World War II to fewer than 8 percent of private sector workers today. It is mainly the result of business making clear that workers who support union drives risk losing their jobs.

Wal-Mart and other anti union companies take a more direct approach. In the rare case when local employees manage to organize a union, Wal-Mart simply closes the store. Fully 49 percent of employers threaten to move or close the worksite during the course of a union organizing campaign, according to a study by Chirag Mehta and Nik Theodore of the University of Illinois.

The employers aren’t crazy, though, because

Unions not only raise wages for members; they work for a fairer wage structure generally, both in their spillover influence on wider patterns of pay and in their political work for a fairer brand of capitalism.

And neither are workers.

according to the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics, surveys show that 53 percent of US workers would join a union if they could. And recent union growth is mostly in service-sector work -- the essence of the new economy.

It’s already illegal to punish workers who join unions

under the 1935 Wagner Act. But the federal government has stopped meaningfully enforcing the Wagner Act…Generally, fired workers who do win reinstatement orders have to wait for years, and punishments against offending companies are minor slaps on the wrist.

But relief is at hand.

Now the labor movement and its allies in Congress are making an all-out push to put some teeth back in the Wagner Act, with legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act. The main provision would allow a union to be certified once a majority of workers at the factory or office or store signed union cards. The bill also increases penalties for harassing pro-union workers, and makes it harder for employers to stall union recognition or contract negotiations.

Under current rules, a two-stage process requires a majority first to sign cards, followed by a protracted period leading up to an election. It's during this interim phase that employers threaten rank and file workers, and fire their leaders -- sending a powerful signal to other workers not to get cozy with unions.

The bill passed the House March 1 with the support of 243 members, including 13 Republicans. The Senate took it up this week. Republicans have threatened a filibuster, President Bush would veto it if the measure passed, and the US business elite is treating the prospect of a resurgent labor movement as the end of civilization.

The end of civilisation? Bring it on!

‘A light unto the nations’

A few days ago, I alluded to the chequered history of US and Australian treatment of refugees. The article I was discussing there pointed out that many refugees entering the US never even have an opportunity to test their claims due to their ‘expedited removal’. Australia has also made a point of violating Article 33 of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, under which ,

No Contracting State shall expel or return ("refouler") a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

After all, it’s not as if they didn’t know what was going on in Afghanistan when, for example,

In one harrowing account, a Hazara Afghan deported after 16 months on Christmas Island and Nauru - despite his pleas that he and his family would be killed - lost his two children, aged six and nine. A grenade was dropped on their house four months after they returned to Afghanistan.

Well, in case you were concerned that Israel was on the verge of blotting its untarnished record of violating human rights, according to today’s Ha’aretz, by the end of March, they will be deporting about 70 Liberian adults and their 16 Israeli born children.

Many of the refugees have fled horrific incidents since the official end of the civil war in 2003.

three years after the end of the battles, crime and hooliganism are still dominant in many regions. The Liberian refugees who arrived in Israel in 2004-2005 tell of horrors from the ostensible era of peace. Sako Popana's uncle, for example, was murdered in 2004. Popana displays a picture showing his corpse with a bullet hole in his temple. Mohammed Sharif saw his father and his two brothers murdered in 2004 by neighbors who had joined the rebels. "Two of the murderers live in my street. They can easily organize a force and murder me at night if I return there," he says.

But, in one of a number of ironies surrounding the deportation of refugees from a country purportedly founded by and for refugees, the Israeli Interior Ministry’s move arises because ‘The UN has decided that there is no longer any danger to Liberian refugees who return to their country, and is encouraging them to return from their places of exile.’

After six decades of reviling the UN (in the American Jewish Committee opinion poll I mentioned the other day, 66% of American Jews said the UN treats Israel ‘unfairly’.) and ignoring every demand ‘the international community’ has made that Israel comply with the standards it sets, it seems on this one issue, Israel is going to take the UN at its word and blow off a handful of desperate rape victims who just happen to be Muslim, and black.

Even though Israel has decided that the Liberians deserve repatriation on the UN’s say so, I doubt it will surprise anyone that the UN’s repeated demand that Israel resettle the refugees it itself expelled in 1948 continues to go unheeded.

Underscoring the Jewish state’s humanitarian credentials, especially towards Africans, yesterday’s Ha’aretz reported,

A representative was sent by the Interior Ministry on Saturday to Ethiopia, to distribute rejection letters to thousands of Ethiopians seeking to immigrate to Israel.

…The rejected applicants have been waiting in camps in Gundar and Addis Ababa for several years, in hopes of receiving consent to come to Israel. Many of them claim they have Jewish roots from hundreds of years ago, but they are often unable to provide documentation or testimonies to prove their claims.