News That's Fit To Punt - 07/Mar/2016

A Snapshot Of Sweden And Refugees

Here's a rather scary article about how Sweden is doing with its refugees. What's scary about it is that it flies in the face of the picture of tolerance and open-mindedness as being the absolute norm in Sweden. The demographic breakdown in the article goes into some depth, but I found this little bit of the interview a little startling:

ET: So why is all this happening? We have seen this dire situation unfold over many years, and yet the government seems intent in doubling down, bringing in even more immigration in recent years. The majority of the Swedish population even seems to be supportive of this policy.

TS: That’s actually not true. We have a biased media here that likes to portray the situation as you described, but we have serious scientific polls that clearly state that the majority or plurality of Swedes support reducing refugee immigration, even going back as far as the 1980s. There has always been more saying that Sweden should take in less refugees and this number has probably skyrocketed in recent months.
One recent poll I have seen, and it excludes the past months, shows very high opposition: only 8% said we are not taking enough immigrants, where 58% said we are taking too many. It’s the elite opinion that forms the consensus that Sweden should take many more immigrants – it’s almost like a religion, but it is not the popular view. 

ET: But that consensus correlates with election voting right? There is only one party that is openly against immigration and they scored very low in the last election. 

TS: Yes, it’s because that party has its roots in racism and it was taboo to vote for them. Despite that they went from 3% around ten years ago to perhaps 20% now. What’s also happening in the last few months is that the right wing moderate party, the Swedish “Tories” if you like, has shifted to the right on immigration very rapidly. You know in Sweden things shift very rapidly, it’s a consensus society. Now they are saying close the borders, deport a large number of migrants, very vociferously. The Liberals and the Christian Democrats are following suit. And even the Social Democrats, the ruling party, closed the borders in the end.

The picture we get from this interaction is that Swedish society reached some kind of saturation point whereby immigration policy overwhelmed the social capacity for Sweden to take in the refugees. Correspondingly, the vote for the far right leapt from 3% to 20% tells us that this issue is adding fuel to the rise of the far right. The tide the discourse has overwhelmed the polity to the point that Sweden has all but closed its borders to refugees. For the Swedes, as it is the case in Australia, the incredulity became, "what are they coming all the way to Sweden?"

ET: There is a huge number of male migrants that went to Sweden last year, vastly more than women. We read that the demographic imbalance in Sweden is now even worse than China. Is this correct? 

TS: Maybe in some age group, but not in overall terms of course. Some 92% of those unaccompanied migrants were male last year… 

ET: … Wait a minute, 92% of them are male? 

TS: Yes, there is definitely something strange going on. More than half of the world’s refugees are women. In World War II, when Sweden took refugees from Finland, they were children and 90% were below the age of 10. But now almost all of them are late teenagers – supposedly; we know many are older for a fact. When other countries age test it turns out that the majority are not children. And when there are crimes committed and the age is investigated, often we get these absurd reports where some of these guys are older than 30 and yet the government puts them with other real minors in schools or housing, and this is creating a lot of anger now. The media created this taboo where because they are officially supposed to be children we can’t question it, and you are fascist if you do. Yet most people can see that many are adults.
Now I’m not moralizing this. If you have an open door policy and you are incentivizing Afghans to take advantage of the system, can you really blame them? But it is an idiocy to equate anyone who questions the claim of being a minor with being a fascist.
You know, it’s really funny that the tale about the emperor having no clothes is a Scandinavian tale. Everybody can see many are not children, but then the political and media consensus will fire or at the very least censor the people who point out this plainly obvious fact. Because how can you question children running from war, using circular reasoning that anyone who claims to be a child escaping war is one and cannot be questioned. You know, a self-reported 70% are not even coming from Afghanistan but safer countries like Iran, seeking a better life.

And there you have it, the gnawing suspicion by Swedes that Sweden's good nature is being taken advantage thereof. I dare say these 92% male asylum seekers who are actually economic migrants are hoping to catch on with some nice Swedish blonde and live happily ever after on Swedish social security. I mean, heck, if I'd got thrown out of my country and had nowhere to go on the planet, I'd probably want to claim asylum in Scandinavia - it's not that hard to imagine why that number is skewed the way it is. 

In a way, it was easy for Sweden to be tolerant and preach tolerance because Sweden was - for quite some time - mostly homogenous in culture. The sorts of problems that arise from intolerance were geographically distant. It was easy for Swedish society to be progressive in the context of its own population being homogenous because it never had to be tested. The moment it became overwhelming, the society shut its doors. When confronted with the reality of what that tolerance actually meant in the wider world, the country had second thoughts. 

This is a scenario that will likely repeat itself in the rest of Scandinavia. it may well repeat itself in Germany as Merkel's policy of taking in 800,000 asylum seekers turns into a kind of social demographic bomb. The argument that the first world can afford to take on any number of refugees is never really put under the scrutiny. 

This is going to be rather unpopular to even question this but I've often wondered about the validity of somebody who makes their way to Scandinavia or Australia hoping for asylum when there actually are other safe countries along the way. If you ran from Syria to Turkey and Turkey gives you safe asylum, is it really valid to then travel to Scandinavia (or Australia) in hopes of a better deal? Understandably, everybody wants the better deal, but does that make it into a human right? 

Peter Costello - Tax And Spend Liberal

Here's something for you to ponder. Peter Costello thinks he should have taxed the internet. 

I'm not quite sure how he would have done it. 

Speaking to Fairfax Media in his new role as chairman of free-to-air broadcaster Nine Entertainment Co, Mr Costello recalled sitting in his Parliamentary office in the 1990s in the early days of the web, and pondering the vast future revenue such a levy could generate.

"I was Treasurer at the time. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, by the way, for governments around the world to have put a charge on the internet. It wouldn't have had to be very big but it would have raised a motza," said Mr Costello. 

"Governments would all have to agree together to do it, and the OECD was looking it at the time. It would have been hard to police but once (former US President) Bill Clinton came out and said the internet would be free that was it. Once the Americans said the internet was going to be free, the rest of the world was going to follow suit." 

Mr Costello, Australia's longest-serving treasurer, who went on to introduce the goods and services tax with then-prime minister John Howard, said an internet access tax "could have been a fraction of a cent a year and it would have raised governments' unbelievable amounts of money".

We've got to be happy that crappy plan never came to fruition.

When Even Peter Reith Calls You Out

Peter Reith was an awful minister in the Howard Government. He had the charm of a dyspeptic shark and the compassion of a broken bottle of single malt scotch. All teeth-gnashing and ideological gumboots and all. Since his retirement from Federal politics, he's turned into a sometime columnist for the SMH, and forms a rather unappealing Tory-Tag-Team duo with Amanda Vanstone. I've noted before Amanda Vanstone has written a piece telling Tony Abbott to go disappear into the night. Now Peter Reith has penned his own version.

The next election is just around the corner. Abbott is not about to win back the leadership. The only issue now is who wins the next election. And one big issue is whether the Coalition can erase Labor's claim that the Coalition lacks unity. 

The first thing Abbott has to do is to shut down his handful of supporters in the Parliament and the Turnbull haters in the media. And, by the way, it wouldn't do any harm for Turnbull to try talking to Hadley, Jones and Bolt, just to even up the conversation. 

If Abbott cannot or will not stop the destabilisation, it could be a bad result for the Coalition and more importantly very bad for Australia if Labor were able to return to the government benches.
The only other option is for Abbott to leave Parliament before the election, and to stay out of the campaign.

What I don't understand is why some people who were exasperated by Abbott's paid parental leave and its new tax, his support for changes to the Constitution, his captain's picks and many other shocking decisions now want him back, with Credlin and all.

It's because they're stupid, Peter, but then that would be a concept you would not countenance. Unfortunately for Peter Reith, this brand of stupid is particularly pervasive in the Coalition ranks. It's the special brand of stupid that forms from the fermentation of entitlement & smugness.

Generation Change

The ALP's Gen-X Crew

The Herald was making the point today that the ALP have gone Gen-X with their choice of frontbench. When you think about it, Bill Shorten is 46 going on 47 so that puts him at the older range of Gen-X, and Tanya Plibersek at 44, it's true that the ALP have indeed gone Gen-X. I have a late Boomer friend who tells me that all this demographic stuff is just a construct not worthy of analysis, except I've been writing here under the banner of 'Gen-X View Of The Universe' for a good 5 years now. It obviously means something.

What could it mean?

The Generation X politician in Australia would have arrived at Tertiary education after the AUS was disintegrated by the likes of Peter Costello and Tony Abbott in 1983, Interestingly enough, Julia Gillard was the last President of the AUS when it collapsed in 1983. If you anted a model to the fractious politics of the Julia Gillard Prime Mininster-ship, you would have found it in the demise of the Australian Union of Students, with the same cast of late Baby Boomers thrashing and trashing institutions to make their political mark. What's scary is that they're still around aplenty in the Liberal and National party ranks, and they probably still don't think much of indulging in that sort of ratbag behaviour. This explains the histrionic opposition style Tony Abbott chose to work with - because it is the method he used in his youth to destroy the AUS , headed up by Julia Gillard. Worse still, it worked again, so that may be why he's so convinced he has some kind of mandate.

The demise of the AUS and the years where there was no student lobby until the NUS got up in the late 1980s allowed HECS to be brought in. Unlike the Baby Boomers, most of the Gen-X politician would have had to pay HECS. When they say education and the opportunities it affords are important, they know what they are saying. All these things are intimately entwined.

If there is one thing that I do think is encouraging about the Gen X ALP politicos is that they are of the generation that had to put back together the NUS and have the experience of rebuilding institutions. If the ALP under Rudd-Gillard looked positively fractured, then I think the current group might be able to start from scratch and build a proper agenda that suits the time. As I wrote the other day, I'm feeling fairly optimistic about the Shorten-Plibersek team, much more so than I felt about the Rudd-Gillard team when they first rose to the level of Opposition leader and deputy back in 2006. They're not perfect human beings and they will make their mistakes. I just don't think they're as fractious and crazy as the generation of politicians who were forged in the dying days of the AUS.

Right now, the Coalition are the party of the Baby Boomers much more than Gen-X or Gen-Y by dint of the ageing population and makeup of the Liberal and National Party demographic. The fissure hasn't been more stark than any other time since Mark Latham as late Baby Boomer was taking on John Howard who was born before the Boomers. That fissure sort of leaves the current ALP firmly in the Gen-X camp with the hope of picking up a big portion of support from Gen-Y.  The question then is whether Gen-X+Gen-Y interest is a big enough voting constituency to overcome the Baby Boomers' interests in their twilight years.

Demographically speaking, Gen-X is small and shorter than either the Boomers before or the Gen-Y that follows. That being the case the duo may never make it. And if they did, they may be seen off by a Gen-Y politician. Consider the American experience. Bill Clinton was the first Boomer President, who was followed by George W. Bush who was followed by Barack Obama, all of whom are Boomers. All three Presidents won two terms, so the Baby Boomer reign will last 24years. If a Gen-X candidate won 2 terms after Obama, the next election after that will likely see a pair of Gen-Y candidates. It's entirely possible there will never be a Gen X President of the United States.

Similarly, I don't see any Gen-Xers knocking on the door in the Coalition ranks. If Abbott is replaced for some reason, it's possible the leadership reverts to Malcolm Turnbull or goes to Joe Hockey - both of whom are Boomers. The longer the Coalition stay in power, the less chance there will be of a government of Gen-Xers in Australia.

So when you look at it through the demographic filter, that's what we have with Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek: The one and only shot at Gen-X forming Government in Australia.