The UK has experienced scorching heat like it never has before, and it is causing all sorts of problems in a country built for cool, drizzly weather.
For the first time since records began, temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius in the country, peaking at 40.3C at Coningsby, a small village in England's Midlands. It is about 1.6 degrees warmer than the last hottest day recorded, 38.7C in Cambridge in July 2019.
A new record was also set in Wales on Monday when the maximum reached 37.1C, beating a previous high of 35.2C, while Scotland topped its previous hottest temperature of 32.9C set in 2003, by reaching 34.8C at Charterhall on Tuesday.
The place is not built for this kind of heat. The footage of the fires outside London looked every bit as spectacular as the fires during the Black Summer down here in 2019.
The grim reality of this heat wave is that you can sheet ALL of it to Global Warming, and it happens the way it did because we spent the last three decades voting in leaders who were in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby.
And here we are. What can I say but, Told. You. So.
Shinzo Abe, Bogey Man Even In Death
Look, I really like Peter Hartcher's reporting and writing for the SMH. But this one had me scratching my head.
Abe didn’t wait for formal revision of the constitution. He took a series of incremental steps. He increased the budget of Japan’s so-called Self Defence Forces. He broke the longstanding cap that held defence spending below 1 per cent of GDP to today stand at 1.1 per cent. He commissioned the conversion of two warships into aircraft carriers. He pushed through parliament a law that allows Japan’s military to operate with US forces and those of other allies, including Australia. And he took the lead in the democratic world’s response to Beijing’s aggression with three policy innovations.
Yeah okay. Then Hartcher lists three ways in which Shinzo Abe tried to confront Xi's China, only to admit that Anthony Albanese is about to do the same kinds of things just to keep Australia secure against China's encroachment.
Abe proposed that Japan consider sharing with the US responsibility for the “nuclear umbrella” that protects US allies. And he said that any “Taiwan crisis” would also be a “Japan crisis”. This was an encouragement to Japan to commit to the defence of Taiwan against any mainland Chinese aggression.
Prosperity and pacifism seem no longer enough for the Japan of today. Increasingly, Japan is contemplating active defence of liberty and a liberal world order. More than any other Japanese leader, Abe has brought the country to this point. And Japan’s “martial qualities”? The ambitions of Xi Jinping’s China seem likely to test them anew.
I can't come at that closing paragraph. There's been this view that Shinzo Abe's time in power was all about remilitarising. This is hardly the case. Japan lifted its defence budget to over 1% of GDP, all the way up to 1.1%. Shock! Horror! Germany is moving to 2% and nobody's suggesting Germany's going back to the 1940s. It's not like Japan is suddenly capable of - what, invading China? Bombing Pearl Harbour? Darwin? It couldn't be further from the facts on the ground.
Shinzo Abe was in power for the longest period for as long as they hav had Prime Ministers in modern Japan going back to 1868. He did not bring a single draft for the rewrite of the constitution to the constitutional review committee, let alone the floor of the Diet for debate. He might have said he wanted to change the Peace Constitution but he hardly ever followed through on anything resembling what people feared he would do - and he had ample time and opportunity to do so but did no such thing.
Now that the book is closed, I think we should get rid of these notions that Abe was about remilitarising Japan. It makes good copy for the Herald to sell their rag, but it sure sucks as writing about the history that we just lived through.
The picture we are getting about the slayer of Shinzo Abe is in some ways rather strange. From the first note that the perpetrator claimed his killing of Abe was not political, through to the alleged findings where he fired off a home made shotgun, to how he was making other guns from common parts found from hardware stores, all add to a very peculiar picture of a perhaps very sick man. This isn't your Lee Harvey Oswald claiming to be a patsy, this isn't even Sirhan Sirhan. It's more Travis Bickle from 'Taxi Driver'.
Then again not all killings of men of history are the same. In the aftermath of an assassination you might feel bad about the lost potential - but Abe had probably fulfilled his historic mission already. This isn't about lost potential. And yet there is something very troubling - if anything what's most troubling about the killing of Shinzo Abe is that it wasn't really political at all, and thus fails to be an assassination - it is simply murder by a deranged madman. And if that is the case, we cannot ever find proper meaning to his passing. And maybe that's the point of the reportage.
That's all to one side. Yet the whole episode demands we dig a bit deeper. More on that later. There may be a blatantly political reason why the police did not identify the organisation that is the target of the perpetrator's fury.
Just for some context, I've also had discussions about political assassinations in Japan with some people. I myself have a distant relative who was a party too this thing here. My maternal; grandmother's great uncle was one of the 17 men from Mito who teamed up with the man from Satsuma Jizaemon Arimura. This is the guy, if you can read Japanese. After he was executed, he was later enshrined in Yasukuni. That's right. The Meiji government figured that the assassination of the Tairo Ii Naosuke was a patriotic act. That's the same Yasukuni shrine to which Shinzo Abe used to go for visits.
So it's not like I'm personally holding to any kind of belief that political violence is completely foreign to the Japanese. However things have to be put into some perspective.
The Meiji restoration essentially put an end to the Edo period, and with it went the Samurai. This essentially put an end to politics through violence from the general population. However, political violence carried out by military officers took their place, and Japan was plagued by political violence through the 1930s which led to World War II. It's really the end of World War II that brought about the current era where the average Japanese person is a peaceful pert, and political violence is unimaginable.
Gun laws are strict in Japan so any political violence this side of 1945 has involved blades or blunt instruments or hand-to-hand assaults. There was a prime minister who was assaulted with an ash tray in 1980. Gun violence is absolutely exceptional to ordinary life in Japan. And so to understand the outlier quality of this killer, you have to understand that somebody in this context where gun laws are strict, went and built their own guns to circumvent gun laws, and walked up to a political candidate on the street and opened fire. Does this really count as political violence of the same kind as the ones before World War II? If so, then just what the hell does this event portend?
We can't know, because we can't understand the thinking the madman who pulled the trigger. Or is this some new kind of bullshit we've not really categorised? You can see right there that information control is letting the narrative move towards this being an act of a madman.
What Was The Organisation The Perpetrator Hated?
All the same, it's starting to leak out slowly that the unnamed special organisation that was hated by the perpetrator is the Unification Church, a.k.a. the Moonies. The perpetrator Tetsuya Yamagami is claiming his family was sent bankrupt by a religious organisation, and somehow Abe was giving this organisation support. A little googling reveals Shinzo Abe was tightly linked with the Unification Church through political donations that came from the church. More importantly, his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was instrumental in bringing the Unification Church to Japan from Korea as part of his anti-communist stance. It is no surprise that Abe himself who inherited his grandfather's political apparatus through his father was well connected to the money from the Unification Church.
Was he a believer? Likely not. Shinzo Abe was a believer in whatever the hell form of Shinto that takes place at the Yasukuni Shrine. He spent a lot of political capital shoring up that one so it's hard to believe that he was also a closet Moonie. What is becoming apparent is that Abe and his faction took money from the Moonies, and in turn he offered his own support to them. He delivered some speech via video link to one of the Moonies' group wedding events and Donald Trump no less was also sending videos to this event. The speculation is running that Trump is closely aligned with the Moonies in America, and so, Abe was able to move closer to Trump upon his election through the Unification Church channels.
Money and politics have a way of going in hand. For a political party to look to a source for funding is par for the course (they literally make these deals on the golf courses). The traditional way this went in Japanese politics was through a 'General Construction Industrial Complex' that funnelled money into the LDP and then the LDP would parcel out general construction jobs from government. This old style landed quite a number of LDP politicians in prison in the 70s, 80s and 90s. As the 'GCIC' waned, so did its contributions. As the LDP went through a reformation in the mid to late 90s, it seems inevitable that they opened themselves up to religious organisations donating money to replace the GCIC.
In the case of Shinzo Abe, it appears that he was very open to taking money from the Unification Church because of his family's own history in inviting them into Japan, but also a vague similarity in stated world views. Who doesn't want world peace as a stated objective? It's this kind of banal rhetoric that characterised Abe's speeches (and also invited much derision as if he was a retard). It is not irony or coincidence then that just as his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was the target of an assassination attempt, he too had become a target.
What is kind of terrifying is that Abe's second government - as early as Feb 2014 - was accused of letting the influence of the Unification Church into Cabinet. By 2019, he was being accused that the separation of Church and State was being blurred by having so many Cabinet members who had some kind of organisational involvement with the Unification Church. And this is no ordinary denomination of Christianity - let's be blunt, it's a cult from South Korea. The cult is highly exploitative and Yamagami's leaked statement says his family lost everything to this cult. If Abe was going to endorse this church, Yamagami explained he was fair game for his grudge. The greater irony is that Yamagami himself doesn't think his act is a political act. He has expressly said his murder wasn't about politics. That might be true in his mind, but unravelling all this shows it was totally, entirely, political.
This means it wasn't just murder, it really was an assassination. I'm wondering if at a future date, Tetsuya Yamagami is going to be identified as a patriot and get enshrined at Yasukuni. Now that, would be ironic.
An assassin walked up to the former Prime Minister of Japan as he was delivering a speech and let off 2 shots. Mr Abe was taken to a hospital but died form his wounds there. The assassin Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested on the spot. He is allegedly an ex-Maritime Self Defence Serviceman. The shotgun used was allegedly hand made. He has been interrogated by police and so far has offered that he did not do it because of political beliefs or convictions. More news to come.
People have been messaging me for an opinion and to be honest, I don't really have one. If Shinzo Abe was not assassinated for his political beliefs, then he must have been killed over a personal beef which we cannot fathom right now. If anything, of all the Japanese politicians, he might have been the most likely to Abe assassinated for his political beliefs, in as much as he was vilified for a lot of strange things during his long tenure as Prime Minister the second time around.
The image of Shinzo Abe differs greatly from inside Japan compared to the rest of the world To the rest of the world, he was the affable yet staunch supporter of liberal democracy, who tirelessly met with many foreign leaders and kept the liberal democracies focused on their joint security. The tributes pouring in from world leaders are an indication of just how energetically he represented Japan and this notion of liberal democracies. Albanese, Turnbull, Scomo, Kevin Rudd all offered tributes, as have Jacinda Ardern, Boris Johnson, Tsai Ing-wen, and Nerandra Modi. The picture emerges of an active participant in global processes such as the G7 and G20.
In Japan, however, he's seen more as a throwback to an older style of politics. He is from a political dynasty of Liberal Democrats. His forebears were Prime Ministers, his father was a senior LDP politician, and his brother is currently a senior LDP politician as well. There is this unrelenting feel of nepotism, entitlement, and money-politics all entwined in the classic LDP manner. Perhaps this is why people sought to frame him as corrupt, but at the same time, none of the alleged scandals really turned up any real dirt. It was more image than substance, and the image was possibly couched in terms of an older politics from the days of his forebears.
The fear had always been he is government would somehow re-write the 'Peace Constitution' of Japan and turn it back into a fully militarist war mongering nation. The people who accused him of these plans never really found the evidence that he was doing such things. In the 8year 9 months in power the second time, he did no re-write the constitution. This may partly be because he seemed to spend an inordinate time defending himself from the suggestion that maybe his influence as Prime Minister might have been fraudulently mis-used by a friend of his wife to obtain public land to build some school.
The point is, he was hardly the militarist everybody feared him to be. If he ever really were one, he was all talk. Instead he went around the world shoring up the flagging fortunes of liberal democracies and kept working towards things like the Quad. As it turned out, he was decidedly a lot more interested in security than conquest. All this internationalism and concern for global security was maybe rare coming from a modern Japanese Prime Minister, but in that sense he redefined Japan's role in the world through better diplomacy.
And then he resigned. The last 2 and a half years of living through the pandemic made his presence a lot lighter, paler and less defined. Shinzo Abe ultimately embodied the best and worst aspects of politics in modern Japan. Perhaps then it is unsurprising that his demise comes from the barrel of a hand-made gun, fired by an ex-MSDF, non-political assassin (if such thing is even possible). The contradictory strangeness and preposterousness of his assassin oddly befits the complicated persona of his political life. Yet the plaudits are correct. Democracy and globalism lost a champion today.
The editorial at the SMH is always a bit off-putting. This might be because the editorial team at the Herald are decidedly not on the ball and seem to focus on the stupid problems of the world. Take this one here.
It started in 2011 as the O'Farrell-Baird show. Mike Baird as treasurer did a good job and built enough of a profile that when he rose to Premier it was basically a one-man band. His transport minister then treasurer Gladys Berejiklian did well too, although her public profile was subdued.
Now the state's voters have an even more mysterious double act: Ms Berejiklian as leader alongside right-wing quid pro quo Liberal deputy Dominic Perrottet.
While the Herald supported the factional deal that elevated Mr Perrottet at age 33, the economist-lawyer is hardly known outside his party. Having toiled away in the backrooms of Finance for a few years, he has served his apprenticeship and will be the face of the NSW economy as Treasurer from Monday.
But add in the relatively unknown freshman Nationals leader, Deputy Premier and Regional Minister John Barilaro, and it's a Neville Nobody leadership trio to most NSW voters.
Throw in the absence of old guarders there since 2011 – Mr Baird, Jillian Skinner, Duncan Gay and especially the much-respected Adrian Piccoli – and the nation's key state suddenly has a second-term government on trainer wheels.
Got that? The editorial thinks they were okay with Mr. Perrottet until they realised he was 33 and therefore not even Gen-X, he's a Gen-Y/Millennial. Surprise! We're all getting old here.
Frankly, the problem with these people - Berejiklian, Perrottet and Barilaro isn't their age. It's their political orientation and ideology - but let's leave that for the moment. If we're going to play demographics, then it's worth looking at these people a bit more through the prism of a more contemporary Australia.
It's kind of nice that both Berejiklian and Barilaro are second generation Australians with migrant parents, even though they come form the conservative wing of politics. It's also nice that they're not Baby Boomers trying to preserve some imaginary status quo from the 1950s and 1960s. Imagine Perrottet to be the kind of Liberal that make you want to throw up - sort of like Tony Abbott - but to be honest I don't know anything about him except he's from the Right faction which generally means, anti-science, anti-progress, anti-intellectual, pro-stupid-development, pro-fossil-fuels, pro-stupid, in the pockets of Mac Bank and likely a career plutocrat. And that's a problem. The fact that he's 33years old, seems much, much less of a problem than the ossified neo-liberal econo-babble he's going to bring to the table in a bid to privatise everything that isn't nailed down; but the SMH editorial is worried about his relative youth. *Ugh*.
Go figure.
What No Quid Pro Quo Looks Like
This TPP business is kind of strange. You wouldn't want it the way it was phrased, and based on what was leaked via Wikileaks, you really wouldn't want a bar of it if you're a sovereign state. There must have been a huge carrot in it for the non-USA countries that signed on for it, but alas Donald Trump has put the big kibosh on the thing and it's dead; dead in Washington DC, dead in Tokyo, and dead in the water in the middle of the Pacific as a result.
The Japanese government had even gone to the trouble ratifying it, which is more than can be said of Australia; they had to talk down to their own big agricultural lobby in order to get it through, which is a bit like the National Party whacking the interests of the Australian farmers in order to get it through in Australia. It's hard to imagine, but that's kind of what it took.
Mr Turnbull on Tuesday said he had spoken to the leaders of Japan, New Zealand and Singapore about how their nations could "maintain this momentum towards open markets and free trade".
Japan was "not thinking about an action with 11 countries" at the present time, Mr Hagiuda reportedly said at a press conference.
It's hard to see what was in the TPP that made it viable only if the USA was in it, but apparently that is the case from Tokyo's perspective. Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was how Turnbull's government absolutely shafted Abe's government over the submarine thing, and it was just a sitter to swing at the dead TPP's head and kill it, if Turnbull asked to keep it. In other words, "how are them French subs working out for you Malcolm?"
Malcolm Turnbull's not going to get any favours out of Shinzo Abe, and Abe's popular enough to outlast Turnbull. Turnbull might want to avoid talking to Abe at the next G-20, and that's if he lasts that long.
Did you know, there were more A class war criminals found guilty and hung at the Tokyo Trials than at Nuremberg? Yeah, there were like 7 who were found guilty of all that Nazi atrocity and hung but there were 20 who got done for the A-class war crimes in Tokyo. The comparison may be vexing - it might even be odious for some - and in many ways it's one of those moments in history where people wanted apples and oranges to be the same thing when they were clearly dealing with apples and oranges. And that's a vexing thought.
This show doesn't really go into the ins and outs of the trial itself, rather, it explores the judges who presided over the trials and the inner conflict amongst the members of the tribunal. I guess it's one tack for tackling the rather uncomfortable problems of the Tokyo Trials. I've read a fair bit about the Tokyo Trials so this wasn't exactly going to be news but you always wonder how other people would characterise the same material that you've read.
What's Good About It
At least somebody wanted to do a show about it. It's hard getting this kind of content made anywhere on any screen. Some of the stuff in it is still contentious, so the show puts on a brave face and tries to wade into some of the murkier bits.
Some of the legal problems with running the tribunal in Tokyo gets an airing, and to that extent you have to say it does the turn of events some justice.
What's Bad About It
It loses heart pretty quickly when it comes to the details and points contention. It wants to explore the personalities of the judges and just exactly what legal points with which they were wrestling.
It's really uninterested in the people on the stand, and as such you don't get a nuanced look at just what the problem is with the format of the trials. Instead, historical footage of the real people on the stand are cut in against the actors playing the multinational judges. There's something quite hokey about the whole production.
What's Interesting About It
The Tokyo Trial was an attempt to put a legal framework around the war in the Pacific and then "get the bastards". They keep coming back to the charter which tells the judges that getting the bastards is the whole point, and yet they keep finding there are real gaps in the legal frameworks to even be trying the bastards at all. They are also working with the precedent of the Nuremberg Trials and quickly run into the same problem the Nuremberg trials ran into in terms just whose authority under which such a court works. Worse still, the possibility of not being able to cleanly put the bastards away might jeopardise the very fragile veil of legitimacy placed upon the Nuremberg Trials.
In essence, the judges are working, knowing they have massive problems, but in a classic "maintain the fiction" modus operandi, they press on to get the results they want; which invites the question, how impartial were these proceedings anyway? That is to say if the judge is out to get you, how can that be an impartial trial?
That brings me to...
Sir William Webb
Jonathan Hyde plays Judge William Webb. It's a thankless kind of role in as much as Webb had a pretty awful job of corralling justices from very different kinds of judicial cultures. There are two lines of thought with Webb in everything else I've read. One is that he was a very politically minded sort of justice, the sort where political considerations were equally valuable as purely legal considerations. As such, it is not surprising that he was friendly with Douglas MacArthur in his time Australia, and that somehow translated into his appointment as the President of the Military Tribunal. Unsurprisingly he was also a High Court judge, so he knew his way around politics quite well.
The other thing about Webb is that he was a Queenslander, home of the White Australia policy (and One Nation too), so it's actually hard to imagine even for a moment that he was impartial as he says he was. In many ways he would have been the most parochially minded of the eleven judges presiding over the tribunals. In terms of performances, I think Hyde's portrayal of Judge Webb is the standout in this series. He captures the peculiar cultural stink of a Brisbane Judge that vaulted to the top of the Tribunal, really well.
In many ways it was very astute of MacArthur to place Webb at the centre because they wanted a certain kind of verdict and Webb was certainly a judge who could drive at that verdict while maintaining the facade of impartiality. I don't know if one looks upon a man like Judge Webb as an ideal, but as political appointments go, it was superb. If you have a distaste for hypocrisy, then Sir William Webb was the worst appointment. That being said, the most interesting aspect of Webb's character might be that he was against the death penalty for any of the accused. You recognise the fundamental Australian-ness in that sentiment., and that part is at least a little edifying.
The Shadow Of Nuremberg
The eleven justices essentially labour under the influence of the events at the Nuremberg Trials. The entire legitimacy of the trials hangs upon Nuremberg, precisely because there were so few laws upon which to frame the proceedings. The palpable risk for the judges is that they can't look to be any more lenient than the judges at Nuremberg. The problem for them is that the men in the dock weren't quite the same calibre of suspects as the top Nazis. All the same, the Tokyo trials found guilty for 20 A class war criminals, as opposed to the 7 found guilty by Nuremberg.
The crux of the show is what constitutes an A class war crime, and the prosecution run it up the flag that the war of aggression is what is being tried. The judges have to then scramble to find legal precedent in trying heads of government and come up short-handed, so they decide to band together and run the gauntlet. It's not the most edifying bit of legal drama we've seen. It's very hard to be seen as impartial when you know you're working toward a guilty verdict from the justice's bench.
If the series is trying to make an appeal to exonerate the A class war criminals, it makes a pretty poor case. If it is trying to ask questions about the validity of the Military Tribunal itself, it does manage to hit its target.
Nanking Massacre What?
It's kind of contentious in Japan what people mean by the Nanking Massacre. The Nanking Massacre that the Tokyo Trial trial talks about is not what the Chinese propaganda machine loves to talk about. Namely, there was an incident where the Chinese POWs were taken down to the river's edge where they mounted a desperate resistance and were gunned down. Yes, it's an atrocity, but a) it wasn't planned that way b) it's not what the current day Chinese are claiming happened in the city of Nanking.
This portion of the trial is glossed over, but infamously, the Chinese were only only able to cobble together two witnesses for the entire trial, and both presented hearsay. The show then glosses over what exactly the nature of the atrocity was, and moves on to other topics, which is an interesting choice.
Just as an aside, to this day, the Chinese government - the Communist one in Beijing - will not release the alleged documentary evidence of the big massacre that they claim took place and none of which was presented at the Tokyo Trials. To be fair, the Chinese delegation at the Tribunal was from the Nationalists who did fight the Japanese. The Communists merely triggered the Marco Polo Bridge Incident by firing first and provoking return fire from the Japanese. For this, Justice Mei of China demanded Koki Hirota pay with his life. It's a bit rich, when you think about it, but then the whole Tokyo Trial has that problem.
Radhabinod Pal's Dissenting Judgment
The most crucial fallout from the process may have been Judge Pal's dissenting findings. If you go to the Wikipedia link there, you'll find that Pal's findings allegedly opens the door for right wing nationalists in Japan to question the legal foundation of the Tokyo Trials. As long as I've read about the trials, I haven't really found a reason to disagree with Pal's findings and I'm not exactly a right wing nationalist.
The real turning point in the Japanese decision-making leading up to the war was essentially the Hull Note. Pal rightly cites that document as being critical to the process that led to the war and places the culpability of the USA in that process of decisions. I imagine that would have been rather galling for the anglophones sitting with Pal, wanting to do a Nuremberg Trial to burnish their historic reputations.
As the world moves away from the colonialist history and into something we call post-colonial, Pal's dissent is going to take on a deeper meaning. The historians trying to talk down his dissent are going to have a harder time of it.
Henri Bernard's Dissent
Henri Bernard of France had a weirder cultural axe to grind. He thought the Showa Emperor should have stood trial, and the people in the dock in front of him were mere accomplices. He also thought colonialism was okay and so Japan had certain rights to prosecute her wars to protect her colonies. It's a mindset that sort of died hard with the French, in Dien Bien Phu Vietnam and Algeria, later on.
More interestingly, he claims that if the Emperor is getting off scot free without a trial, then hanging his subjects for their roles is clearly excessive. It's an interesting kind of judicial logic that only the French might conjure up; he also argues that conspiracy is an Anglo-American legal construct and no such thing exists under French law so he can't abide punishing Shigenori Togo for his part in the Tojo cabinet as conspiracy.
It's also interesting because not being the English-speaking ally and not having had French troops fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, Bernard was relatively free of the kind of mindset that saw the Japanese as enemies - which was in stark contrast to the English speakers, Patrick, Webb, Northcroft, Higgins, (and later Cramer who replaced Higgins) and MacDougall. As a voice of dissent goes, it's more like a dummy spit than a consideration in that, Bernard wants France to be able to do what France does, which is preside over colonies and spread French culture; and to that extent he can't really condemn the Japanese leadership for wanting to do the same.
Bert Rohling's Dissent
The miniseries is built around Bert Rolling's road to a dissenting opinion. It is a better argued dissent than Bernard's which is steeped in the culture from which it emerges. It is also not as perspicacious as Pal's dissent which squarely argues against the legal authority by which the Tribunal can even proceed. The most important judgements he dissented with were the civilian politicians, namely Kido, Hirota, Shigemitsu, and Togo. He also dissented on Field Marshall Shunroku Hata, which is a very nuanced kind of judgement. Hata's resignation in the Yonai cabinet brought about the Tojo cabinet that led to war. At the same time, Hata was instrumental in bringing the war to an end.
The name that really sticks out on Rohling's list is Koki Hirota who was Prime Minster at the time Japan went to war with China. The tribunal pretty much hung him on the statement he made that Chang Kai-Shek could not be negotiated with. He meant that in exasperation as Chang made it impossible to come to any terms to end hostilities, not because Hirota saw Chang as unworthy of negotiation. He was also lumped with the responsibility of the Kwantung Army going out on its own, crossing the Marco Polo Bridge. It is a bit much to be hung by the allies for that turn of events.
Anyway, the way Rohling saw it was that you couldn't be trying these people with post factum laws, but you could try them for their misinterpreting their job descriptions, part of which was to not start wars. That is to say, these subjects could be tried and found guilty for fucking up their job briefs. That's certainly a much better way to have approached the Trials, but of course he failed to persuade the Anglophone justices because the Anglophone justices really wanted revenge (and they just don't bother hiding it all that much).
The Anglophone judges really believed the charter they had was waterproof in its legality. Rohling disagreed necessarily because he was at least a proper scholar of legal arguments and their limits.
Did It Do Any Good?
If the fruits of the Tokyo Trials is the Hague and the International Court, then perhaps it was worth the effort. Personally, I am a contrarian on this topic, simply because if human rights are a real thing there should have been more people from the allied side in a dock somewhere getting prosecuted. The fact that didn't happen makes the Tokyo Trials pretty much a victor's justice. It's been argued elsewhere that bombing cities wasn't illegal so the allied command should not be tried. With logic like that, you sort of wonder how anybody can sit through hours of the Tokyo Trials taking seriously as a trial. What was, and what was not up for discussion - let alone trial - was actually quite messy:
However, in respect to Pal and Röling's statement about the conduct of air attacks, there was no positive or specific customaryinternational humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare before and during World War II. Ben Bruce Blakeney, an American defense consul for Japanese defendants, argued that "[i]f the killing of Admiral Kidd by the bombing of Pearl Harbor is murder, we know the name of the very man who[se] hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima", even though Pearl Harbor was classified as a war crime under the 1907 Hague Convention, as it happened without a declaration of war and without a just cause for self-defense. Similarly, the indiscriminate bombing of Chinese cities by Japanese Imperial Forces was never raised in the Tokyo Trials in fear of America being accused the same thing for its air attacks on Japanese cities. As a result, Japanese pilots and officers escaped prosecution for their aerial raids on Pearl Harbor and cities in China and other Asian countries.[21]
Yeah right. Lots of people escaped prosecutions, full stop. (You should see the doco about the 'Einsatzgruppen' on Netflix. It's frightening how few got prosecuted for anything.) The whole point of Pal's dissent and Rohling's as well, is that the allies didn't have a legal reference from which to prosecute the Class A war criminals as they saw them. So, the absence of laws applies equally to the Axis as well as Allied command. You can't try some of them selectively from the losing side and pretend this isn't victor's justice. Not if you want it to look impartial and universal.
It troubles me to this day that the people who end up at the Hague are tinpot dictators from Africa, or Bosnian Serb leaders who, like the Axis powers, were on the shitty end of the war and got lumped with their trials. Although I found those leaders odious, I still feel uncomfortable with the whole trials they went through. It reeked of being victor's justice from day 1 and the case hasn't exactly been made that it wasn't. Then there was the trial of Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War which looked more or less like a kangaroo court. These things keep discrediting themselves.
All the same, going forwards, if the Tokyo Trials contributed the notion that all nations have rules by which they must abide, even in war, then maybe it was worth going through with the charade. It's probably going to save somebody's life, somewhere in the future. Judging by the history since the Tribunals, it's hard to say the deterrent is working.
Other parties are also issuing warnings. The crux of the biscuit is Aleppo where Assad's forces are present and the Americans want to bomb them. Th Russians are still supporting Assad, and so it flies right in to Putin's face to be even thinking about it.
If World War III really is brewing over Syria, I'd want the West to abandon its plans in Syria. It's not worth it. Aleppo has been reduced to rubble, which is bad enough, but really, the continued conflict is creating more refugees by the day. As much as Bashar Assad is a horrible dictator to let go, turning Syria into a flashpoint for global conflict with the Russians is just unpalatable. That being said, you have to wonder about the timing. This close to the Presidential elections makes Obama a lame duck POTUS who is going into caretaker mode, so this would present an opportunity when American leadership is in a political limbo. If you're Putin and you meant to go to war with America, then this moment through to the end of the year represents an opportunity.
Anyway, it is interesting how these things are lining themselves up. I don't think there will be a world War III. I just think it's interesting people in power want to toy with the rhetoric of a World War.
Achilles' Choice
I am still shocked by the passing of Seiji Hirao. 53 seems much too young. He had everything in his life that he could ever want, but 53years is all he got. He certainly got more than Achilles, I guess. Lots of Important people have died younger. All the same I'm still shocked, and it makes me ponder about the meaning of things, this and that, and the value of life.
After I wrote my little entry on Hirao, I remembered the first time I met him in 1995. I'd left Dentsu Australia and was freelancing when Bucks Night Terry rang up and wanted me to dig up an old report I'd written for Dentsu in late 1994. The report was about the successful bid for the 2000 Olympics by the Sydney Olympics Committee, and the salient points to the strategy in how they went about trying to win. Dentsu at the time were busily preparing for the Nagano Olympics but wanted to try and get Osaka for 2004.
My report would have been about 20pages long. A lot of it was based on statements in the public record as well as Rod McGeoch's account in 'The Bid', plus ringing around a few sports bodies. When I filed it in 1994, I got no response whatsoever out of Dentsu Tokyo so I had forgotten all about it, but at the time I filed it, I would have told Bucks Night Terry what was in it and he remembered it.
Seiji Hirao came through Sydney on Kobe Steelers Rugby business but somehow made Bucks Night Terry his gopher, and Terry had told him about the report because Seiji Hirao told Terry he was part of the Osaka Committee. Terry was a classic panderer - hence his strange nickname - but he was very good at it. One thing led to another and I met Mr. Hirao in the office of Mino Metals in Chatswood. Mr. Hirao didn't want to read the report, he wanted me to give him an oral digest, so I spent 20 minutes going through the ins and outs of the Sydney bid's approach as far as I could piece together. He didn't say anything, simply nodded and walked out.
Afterwards Terry told me the report went to the Osaka Committee and that Mr. Hirao wanted to go all in on the recommendations I'd written. He also had some feedback about my presentation which I won't go into here, but basically nobody likes a smartarse and I am one. After that, he went off to the UK to coach the Japan Rugby team where the team famously got that historic drubbing of 145-17. Later that year he was backing Sydney and I had the chance to go drinking with Mr. Hirao and Bucks Night Terry. It was a bloody long night. I staggered home at 3 or 4 in the morning, drunk as a skunk.
For a few years there in the late 90s, Bucks Night Terry started being an agent for Australia Rugby payers looking for professional contracts in Japan. That's how I ended up interpreting at the contract negotiations. That was all Seiji Hirao helping out Terry. Mr. Hirao would come through Sydney about once a year and I would meet him now and then. I'm not sure I got along with him so much because when we were sober, we'd never really talk. I can remember quite a few uncomfortably silent rooms, just sitting with him. He was a gregarious guy when drunk but when sober, there were simply some people with whom he'd deign not talk, and I was one of them. Maybe he was shy, but it was hard to imagine.
I learned it can suck to meet famous people. Especially those with a lifelong record of success. no mater how humble they try to be, they just can't hide their ego. Mr. Hirao was one of those characters. He wasn't arrogant or meant to be superior; he just couldn't stop himself acting that way; and he wasn't the sort to be self-reflective about it either. He was in some ways a very awkward person to be around if you weren't from rugby or of rugby or about rugby. And I decidedly wasn't from his world where he was a king.
Anyway.... I lost touch with that whole thing about the time Bucks Night Terry closed up shop with his little agency business and started a restaurant. They were good friends and stayed in touch, but I fell out of Terry's orbit. It's just how life goes. Now that he's gone I can't stop thinking about those awkward moments of silence sitting in a room with Seiji Hirao, "Mr Rugby" of Japan.
It's really rough.
I rang Terry today and he was really bummed out, but he had known it was coming for about a year. He said he wished Mr. Hirao could have made it to the Rugby World Cup in Japan in 3years time, but it wasn't to be. In honour of the man Terry said he was giving up smoking. I don't know how long that vow's going to last but the fact that Terry wanted to vow it, alone spoke volumes.
If nothing else, I am bummed out.
UPDATE:
I understated how funny he could be. I've been reading a transcript of one of his last speeches and in it is a line about how much he loved rugby. He said you have to love what you do. "Nobody I know ever became no.1 in Japan doing something they had to do because they had no other options in life".
I've met Seiji Hirao several times. He wanted to catch the Southern Hemisphere so badly.
On all occasions he was visiting Australia for the purposes of furthering Rugby in Japan, although the very last time I met him, he was the guest of Japan Airlines to talk about Australian wine and rugby at this very strange event I produced. It's weird when you meet famous people and they want to talk to you as if you know every aspect of their careers. He had a lot of rugby career that he assumed I would know, and his conversations would just start from some point of thought in the long line of his successful life. I would often just shut up and listen - he was unique because he was the embodiment of all rugby in Japan. Where he went, what he learned, what he applied, was all important. Every bit of it; and he had been living that life since he was a teenager.
His playing career was prodigious in Japan, representing the national team at the age of nineteen. He was somebody who had success early but also went out to the world to find just how big the world was. It humbled him and made him very frank. I recall him discussing the defeat of Japan at the hands of the All Blacks in the 1995 Rugby World Cup where he was the head coach of Japan. Before leaving Japan - knowing his team would face the All Blacks in the group rounds, - he asked his mentor if there was any one aspect of the game where the Japanese team could get an edge on the All Blacks. He was told, absolutely none. And so it became a mission to play hard and die on the pitch.
And that's how that went down.
The amazing thing about meeting Seiji Hirao was that he never ran or hid from that 145-17 defeat which remains the largest margin of defeat in Rugby World Cup history. When I - rudely, because I am a rude man - asked him about it, he smiled and said, sometimes the other team is simply too good. You can live with defeats like that. There's an important life lesson right there. Everybody is born to a different star with different talents and circumstance. Sometimes you meet opponents who have much, much more than what you can bring to the field. There is no dishonour in those losses, no regrets or recriminations.
He was very much a man from Kansai, that is to say he had a deeply rational approach to things and relied deeply upon his intuition and inspiration. I think he liked to be unpredictable to get an edge, so in that sense he was a speculative kind of guy. There was something infra-cultural about that I recognised as my own, that drew me in. He certainly wasn't short of charisma, but the bit that appealed to me the most was his fearless desire in going for the long shot. Whatever one thought of the man, you had to admire that spirit.
It is reported he was battling illness for a long while. He never made public what it was, but 53 is much too young. RIP Seiji Hirao.
Nick Xenophon made an interesting remark last week that the RBA should shift its focus from inflation and on to nominal GDP growth. This is one of those interesting shifts worth considering because which ever way you look at it, inflation isn't the problem it used to be when Keating cut the RBA independent of government, so that it could independently set rates with the ai of controlling inflation. We're at a far cry from the era when Paul Volcker tamed inflation in America through jacking up interest rates. That world seems quaint, for we haven't been in that environment sense before the Dotcom Bubble burst at the turn of the Millennium.
With the current policy, the worry is always that were inflation to rise due to fiscal policies, then the RBA would raise interest rates.
Thus we had the absurd situation last year where then Treasurer Joe Hockey was claiming the RBA had “room” to cut interest rates because the Abbott government’s spending cuts meant it “had been able to control the inflation genie”.
He said this at a point when underlying inflation hadn’t been above 3% for five years and nominal GDP was growing by just 1.3%.
Targeting nominal GDP resets the conversation.
Rather than having the government cutting spending (which reduces growth) in order to allow the RBA to cut interest rates to stimulate growth, both the fiscal and monetary arms could focus on improving growth – and it would put more pressure on the government rather than the current situation where it is leaving most of the work up to the RBA.
Given government revenue has been hit due to the decline in nominal GDP growth, making that a focus would also assist with improving the budget balance.
Yes, it would make too much sense but of course the system isn't built for quick handbrake turns of policy like that, no, no.
Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens has used his farewell speech to implore the Turnbull government to take on more debt, saying that rate cuts alone can no longer "dial up the growth we need".
Although interest rate cuts still had some effect, they worked through encouraging private borrowers to borrow more and had "possibly less" effect than in the past.
"The problem now is that there is a limit to how much we can expect to achieve by relying on already indebted entities taking on more debt," he said.
The government had far more room to borrow and spend than the private sector – owing only 40 per cent of GDP instead of 125 per cent.
"Let me be clear that I am not advocating an increase in deficit financing of day-to-day government spending," he said. "The case for governments being prepared to borrow for the right investment assets – long-lived assets that yield an economic return – does not extend to borrowing to pay pensions, welfare and routine government expenses, other than under the most exceptional circumstances.
"The point I am trying to inject here is simply that popular debate in Australia about government debt and how we limit or reduce it seems so often to be conducted while largely ignoring the size of private debt. Foreign visitors to the Bank over the years have tended to raise questions about household debt much more frequently than they have raised questions about government debt."
So it's one thing for Nick Xenophon to say we need the RBA to prioritise growth rather than whacking signs of inflation. Given the toolset available to the Reserve Bank, which is basically raising or lowering the interest rates, there's really not much more the RBA can do to help growth.
That is to say, the limits of RBA policy - any Central Bank policy - resides at the zero-bound where Zero-Interest-Rate Policy lives. Glen Stevens may well retort to Nick Xenophon, "what the hell do you think we've been doing for the last 8years since the GFC, with historically low interest rates?"
Indeed, that's exactly where the Bank of Japan is at, trying to get economic growth to happen. It's trying massive "trans-dimensional" quantitative easing and yet there are minimal signs that the Japanese economy is coming out of its long slump. The conservative Prime Minster of Japan is telling the heads of the major corporations to raise wages instead of sitting on hoarded profits. It's a wild frontier of Central Banking experiments over in Japan, and really, I'm sure they wouldn't care which came good first, growth figures or inflation figures.
I'm going to go out on climb and say something that would scare fiscal conservatives and hawkish bankers. What Australia needs is a kind of debt forgiveness. So if the economy ends up at the Zero-bound with ZIRP, the RBA needs to forgive the private sector debt and helicopter that printed money into banks. People are going to hate that because basically they'll scream "moral hazard", except when the economy has flatlined at the zero-bound, then the whole show needs a complete re-boot; and if there's one thing that keeps any economy from re-booting, it's debt.
Ben Bernanke's 'Helicopter Money', Applied
The logic for doing Helicopter money in Australia is pretty simple. People are not spending money because they're busy paying down mortgages as fast as they can. This isn't doing much good because it means the money goes from the bank to employer to employee and back to the bank without going through the economy. So you alleviate the mortgage stress, and the people will be inclined to spend their money. The government hands the printed money to the banks, buying out the debt on paper. Immediately there should be inflation because people now have money to go spend it on the next asset, That's when the Central Bank can re-set the interest rates at a more historic normal level.
Of course, it won't go that way because the bankers would lose out on long term money, but that would be the point. Somebody has to take a loss and the bank would have to get its money while losing out on future profit based on the booked loans. It hasn't happened because ultimately the economy is owned by the 1% and the 1% stands to make nothing out of "helicopter money". But the alternative is the current, comatose, low-growth low-inflation state in which we find ourselves.
The problem with QE as it's been carried out to date, and lots of it, they're finding in Japan, is that the money simply doesn't go to where it's supposed to go. The BOJ stuff the banks full of money, but the banks don't lend to sell businesses and entrepreneur. The lending practices still tend to lead the banks towards lending for fixed assets like property - and even then there's just not as much of that going around. The big companies of Japan's old industrial growth era are still profitable but they don't pay out dividends, and they don't give out pay-rises. They tend to sit on the big piles of cash and say they see nothing in which they want to invest.
The only way to make sure the money gets out an about in the economy is to hand it to the consumer and have them spend. In other words, it's like Capillarity Up economics. They cam very close to pulling the trigger on 'Helicopter money' this year in Japan, but at the last minute they held back. I guess there is something fundamentally weird for government stop simply be giving people money. Be that as it may, the Japanese may eventually have to do it; and if the precedent is set, other countries will do it. It's not like it's a new idea.
The Wisdom Of Solon And All That
It doesn't get discussed a whole lot unless you read a bit of ancient history. Solon, famously forgave debts. He also forbade the export foods except olives. He encouraged the cultivation of olives specifically as en export commodity. Meanwhile he forbade the export of foods because if staples got sent away, the poor would starve and that had terrible consequences for society. If you asked Solon, he'd object to 'Helicopter Money' as a policy but his big thing was debt forgiveness.
The ancient world is full of instances of debt forgiveness. The people in power in the ancient world probably looked at debt as something that becomes intractable and kills the economy. The Romans famously refuse to forgive debt and of course the aftermath of the Roman civilisation were the Dark Ages. So it is worth pondering what the hell we're going to do with a financial system that has created so much debt the world's GDP cannot begin to repay it. It's not likest's a problem that's going to go away. The more it sits there, it's going to chew away at the future, just as it is doing right now, only worse.
That's the historic context of all this bickering about debt. Something tells me the debt won't be forgiven, there won't be Helicopter Money, it's all going to crack up and turn to shit right before our very eyes. So much for civilisation.
It's already a fiasco, but this business of the Coalition Government not nominating Kevin Rudd to run for Ban-Ki Moon's office of Secretary General of the UN is already spinning wayward.
Kevin Rudd says he was told he had Malcolm Turnbull's strong support for his bid for the top job at the United Nations before the Prime Minister suddenly reneged on that commitment, according to private letters from Mr Rudd to Mr Turnbull, obtained by Fairfax Media.
In an explosive new development in the aftermath of the Turnbull government's official rejection of Mr Rudd's request for endorsement to run for the post of secretary-general of the United Nations, Mr Rudd has released letters, which, while only showing one side, suggest that agreements had been reached to support the Rudd bid, but that this support was suddenly withdrawn on May 1, just days before the election was called.
This is quite awkward.
Over the weekend, Peter Garrett was heard this first concert since returning to being a vocalist, that the world dodged a bullet when Malcolm Turnbull refused to back Kevin Rudd as a candidate. It's a bit cruel but I guess there's no love lost between Rudd and Garrett*.
It's not exactly a great move by Turnbull. Now he'll have a vindictive Rudd on his case and god only knows how that will play out. After all Kevin Rudd can be a spectacular media tart and if he signs up for something like Sunrise again to prefer his political opinions on a regular basis, it mightn't be long before he will actively say things to sway public opinion against the government. Rudd was always going to be better for everybody concerned, outside of Australia.
Anyway, Pleiades tells me this won't be the end of it because Rudd doesn't know how to quit. Not only that he has significant recourse with his international friends. Dr. Geoff Raby has an article in the AFR today that illustrates possible path back for Kevin Rudd. If the election/selection for the UN Secretary General does not conclude before the US election and if Hillary Clinton should win,therein every chance that a President Hillary Clinton might back Kevin Rudd for the job. At which point it's going to be an uneasy phone call for Malcolm Turnbull.
In a matrix of fifty-fifty coil flips, there's a 25% chance Turnbull doesn't have to revisit this issue, 50% chance that the issue remains irrelevant, but a 25% chance that he's going to have to eat crow. That 25% however is looming larger when you think through the fact that the next Secretary General is being selected in sync with the next US President. The US will moe than likely delay the selection until after the election, and that Donald Trump is (for al his blather) unelectable. That means there is a great probability Malcolm Turnbull will be asked to revise this topic.
* - As a side note, I've been pondering for long time why as a fellow leftist Peter Garrett's stance on things have bothered me over the years. My old working theory was that he was a prat, but that seemed too simplistic. The most accurate representation of his position might be that he is a regressive leftist. Once you understand that about Peter Garrett, the rest of it is rather easy to decode.
No Coalition MP will be able to cross the floor. Even an abstention would force the Speaker to cast a tie-break vote, creating the appearance of party weakness. Coalition discipline will need to be watertight.
2212`1`12Coalition figures have been fond of saying that a narrow majority will enforce its own discipline. That's true in the sense that it forces the party to stick together like glue. But on whose terms will it stick together?
Mr Turnbull's challenge of managing his right flank becomes that bit harder because the handful of lower house MPs who might actually take the rare step of defying party discipline at the point of voting in Parliament will need to be placated down to the last man or woman.
Those passionate outliers within the party will be empowered by knowing Mr Turnbull cannot afford to lose a single vote.
Well... one would imagine that's a two way street. If the fringy-crazy want to threaten to cross the floor, it would be over a policy that the ALP may actually want, and would a fringy-crazy rightwing nut job MP want to cross the floor just to spite their moderate PM? There can't be that many bills that satisfy both the ALP and the Greens and the fringy-crazy right wing of the Coalition. Not even Bob Katter would cross the floor to do that. It's hard to image that fringy-crazy rightwing MP of the Coalition would be going that far as well, no matter how unhappy they are with Malcolm Turnbull.
Of course Bob Katter's not happy Malcolm Turnbull hobbled Katter's friend Kevin Rudd's aspirations so maybe therein a scenario where Bob Katter crosses the floor (Katter's already signalled he's not going with the ABCC legislation).
Didn't Last The Week
In the last post I pointed out how untenable the Royal Commission that was announced was, having Brian Martin heading up the Royal Commission, and surely enough he's resigned.
Former Supreme Court judge Brian Martin has resigned as the head of the royal commission into the NT juvenile detention just days after being appointed.
His replacements have been announced as former Queensland Supreme Court judge Margaret White and, following calls for an Indigenous co-commissioner, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda.
Citing the need for public and stakeholder confidence in the joint Commonwealth-NT inquiry, Mr Martin said that criticisms of him had been "disingenuous" and ill-informed.
"However, notwithstanding the nature of the commentary, it has become apparent that, rightly or wrongly, in this role I would not have the full confidence of sections of the Indigenous community which has a vital interest in this inquiry," he told media in Canberra.
As teens like to say, "sure, whatevs". You have to love people putting up defences of their positions that fly in the face of reality. If it were exactly as he said it was, he wouldn't be quoting, would he? Both things cannot stand and one thing we know for sure is he's not doing this Royal Commission any more. You can't put a man in charge to investigate himself.
It's the peace statue that is dividing Korean and Japanese community groups, with legal threats issued to a church minister and complaints escalated as high as the Minister for Multicultural Affairs.
At the centre of the dispute is a statue commemorating the "comfort women" of World War II - the women and girls who were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese troops - which has been imported from Korea by a local Korean community group.
The group - called the Peace Statue Establishing Committee - plans to unveil the statue, which they describe as a "peace monument", at a traditional welcoming ceremony to be held at the Korean Community Hall in Croydon Park on Saturday.
The statue, which cost $35,000 and was donated by a Korean benefactor, is about 1.5 metres high and depicts a Korean comfort woman sitting beside an empty chair, as a symbol of the victims who have since died.
And so it is that we come to the Comfort Women issue, exploding on the streets of Sydney. Really, we ought to ask, should this issue be played out in Australia? Should it be played out in Sydney?
Now, this statue was meant for Strathfield but was soundly beaten back by a presentation by the Japanese community. The main plank of the rebuttal, so to speak, was that there actually is no mythical girl who was forcibly taken away by the Japanese Army to be a sex slave prostitute. Except this is accepted as fact thanks to the Yoshida Testimony of 1982, as published in Asahi Shimbun. Since then there has been much research on this area to corroborate the Yoshida Testimony, and nobody has been able to corroborate any of it. There has even been a US Senate enquiry into it and the the US Senate recognised that there was no truth to the Yoshida Testimony. Seiji Yoshida himself made statements before his death to the effect that he had made it all up.
Last August Asahi Shimbun finally retracted the Testimony as false, which has led to a class action against Asahi Shimbun for insisting on its provenance for 34 years, providing ammunition for the claims that the comfort women were forcibly taken away by the Japanese government orders. It's been such effective bullshit that people in the west are refusing to give up that talking point, now that Asahi Shimbun has retracted the claim. The new of its retraction and what it means has been very slow in getting around the globe.
So yes, the statue is inflammatory. That's the whole point. It's primarily being put there to offend while proclaiming peace and remembrance or whatever. The people who want to put it up want to do so to stick it to Japan over stuff that happened in World War II. The people who don't want it put up are fed up with South Korea trying to stick it to Japan for an apology and an extra pay out.
Except as of 28th December 2015, there has been a new apology and an agreement to pay the claimants. The terms of the agreement stipulate several things including, this is the last discussion to be had on the topic of comfort women, their recompense, their status and as a bargaining point between South Korea and Japan. Part of the agreement was for the government of South Korea to work with the activist group to remove the original statue placed in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.
Now, it should be noted that it is against international convention to stick a protest statue in front of another country's embassy, regardless of the cause. We don't do it, the Americans don't do it, nobody in Europe or Africa or the Subcontinent does it, Japan certainly does not do it in retaliation, not even Israel does it to the German embassy.
If the agreement of 28th December 2015 is to stand, the South Korean government has to remove the original of the statue. That's what they agreed and signed upon, and eight months later they're yet to do it. It is therefore in incredibly bad faith (and bad taste) to be sticking a replica of that very same statue in the streets of Sydney proclaiming it to be an act of peace. It's extremely disingenuous of this Reverend Bill Crews to be talking about apologies an peace.
During the Vietnam War (late 1960’s – early 1970’s) South Korea sent troops to Vietnam in an attempt to keep South Vietnam free from communism. It was reported later that many South Korean troops raped Vietnamese women and committed atrocities such as massacring farmers and aged people, and many others were forced into working as prostitutes for the South Korean soldiers. Many of these women would then later become pregnant and after these mixed Korean-Vietnamese children were born they were shunned by Vietnamese society and their soldier fathers returned to South Korea never to be seen or heard from again. The plight of these women was lost to history and not discussed until the late 1990’s when many of the victims began to speak out against the Vietnam and South Korean governments and demand recognition and compensation. To date the South Korean government has done little to acknowledge the issue but has continued to pursue further financial compensation from Japan for their own comfort women survivors and some say that their actions have become hypocritical and they are using the issue as their own political tool. In fact, South Korea orchestrated with Korean-American’s politically-driven campaign in the U.S. continent against Japan.
I'd be okay with the statue going up in Ashfield if the Korean Community acknowledge what their troops did in Vietnam and build a plaque next to it, mentioning it. I doubt they would - it's all about bullshit nationalist fervour. So unfortunately for the Reverend Bill Crews, there's not much moral high ground going around there.
It's kind of pathetic people are still fighting over this terrain, seventy-one years after the conclusion of World War II, but that's what happens when identity politics is given full rein.
Sometime last year I reported that a bunch of academic types wanted to vote Green and they abandoned the ALP. I decided to see if that were still the case, and it turns out that it is not still the case. A lot of them have headed back to the ALP. I asked why they switched back and they said it was because Bill Shorten was making a better case for himself with the policies he's put up, and back then the ALP were being very coy about their policies that it drove them to despair. Now, they do not despair so much - which goes to show political support is indeed ephemeral.
I'm certain that the Coalition are terrible managers of the economy. So it goes without saying that the ALP should get the nod over the Coalition. If anything the purgatory for the ALP seems to have been too short to be in such a good position so soon after the defeating 2013. After all, they did make a big hash government. What's troubling is that people like Tony Burke who were instrumental in making a hash of it, are still around and bound to become a minister should the ALP win. That into say, even if the ALP win, this is going to be tough-to-stomach in the new government. Should the Coalition win, then well, we know it's going to be three more years of this unimaginable, unmitigated disaster that is government by stupidity ("of the, for the...stupid").
If there's one thing that's becoming clearer in this election, it is that we really aren't given a greatest setoff choices - and this lack of a good choice is necessarily so because we've made so many people who are undeserving of office into politicians. These professional politicians exist because politics has been seized upon as a career to have. This careerism in turn is precluding the depth and breadth of thinking required to really build this nation. Instead, we have the kind of people who think it's pretty damn cool to cash in long held government assets through privatisation, trying to find ever more silver to sell off. To what purpose? - we're told it is to cut the deficit.
You know, at a certain point incredulity kicks in. Which is sort of where we find ourselves.
Shintaro Ishihara Writes About Kakuei Tanaka
Shintaro Ishihara is the rightwing conservative everybody thinks Shinzo Abe is. Let's clear about this: there are people in China and South Korea who carry on like Shinzo Abe is going to re-militarise Japan into the war machine it once was, and start invading the peninsula and continent. It' a crock of shit because in the years Abe has been Prime Minister this time around, he's barely increased the JSDF budget. When you consider the oldImperial Army and Navy combined took 70% of the budget, 1% seems like not much an attempt to re-militarise.
The point is, Shintaro Ishihara, was the politician who would love to go back to a strong Japan. He certainly was right up until the moment he retired. After all, he wrote the book "The Japan That Can Say No". Anyway... Shintaro Ishihara came to political prominence back in the late 70s as being anti-corruption and therefore anti-Kakuei Tanaka within the LDP of Japan. Now he has a bestseller that is a novel about Tanaka, but written in the fist person. A sort of imaginary auto-biography. The title is 'Genius'. In it, he goes into loving detail of Kakuei and his convictions.
It's a slight volume and covers the terrain we all know very well. If anything we don't learn much from it except for the fact that Ishihara seems to have turned the corner on his appreciation for, and appraisal of his old political foe. He really means it without irony when he calls Kakuei Tanaka, a kind of political genius and visionary. Which is pretty strange.
Kakuei was a card, and did have a big-picture view of Japan. I don't know if that qualifies him as a genius - but the book certainly is interesting. As an attempt at polishing a turd goes, it showed Ishihara has quite the intellectual stamina for such a task.
It's been accepted for a long time that as economies mature, you hit lower growth. The explanation even for this phenomenon is that as economies mature, the scope for growth diminishes. It makes sense mathematically that a jump from 1 to 2 is 100% but 2 to 3 is 50% and 3 to 4 is 33.3% and 4 to 5 is 20%. If you expand this out to the entire economy and include everybody within it, then GDP growth is naturally diminishing in returns. Conversely if you start with little, there is greater scope for growth so we find the later starting developing economies grow at higher rates.
That being said, the first world has been a good 30years where growth has been low single digits and the funding for this growth has been done through credit. We know this because countless data shows wages growth has been relatively stagnant in the same time span. As economies grow to the vanguard of development, they become increasingly like zero-sum games. If there was away of pocketing the growth, you win - and so we've seen in the stagnant wages growth, 30years of the wealthier 1% pocketing the growth.
Not surprisingly we find flagging aggregate demand, which then creates deflation. This is the very thing the governments of the first world are trying to avoid. At this point in history, we have governments that meet at things like APEC and G20, and they try to spur more growth around the globe without necessarily understanding what that would mean. And to date corporate Australia has called for an increase in productivity - which involves things like abolishing overtime penalty rates and so on.
So here's the thing. Productivity gains are strictly to do with supply-side. I'm no economics expert but I can tell you there's nothing in productivity gains that would be applicable to the grand problem of aggregate demand. In the near-zero-sum game of postindustrial economics, the 1% have played hard to win as much of the growth for themselves without actually growing the economic pie at all. It never seems to occur to them the fact that they've cut so much from people's wages has led to the sagging aggregate demand.
Over the thirty-odd years commerce and the corporate lobby has beaten out labour interests 40-0. The rise of inequality is no accident - it is directly attributable to the trickle-down economics that have cut taxes for the wealthy and apportioned more and more of the cost of government on to the poor. In fact corporations are arguably winning so much they're beating up on governments - but that is another topic. The main point here is that the corporate lobby has already won a lot without giving up much. But in so doing, it has forced out the power of the consumer it so need to sustain itself.
One of the strange outcomes of Abenomics in Japan is that a conservative Prime Minister is running around telling the major corporations to raise wages. This is because the reductio ad absurdum of seeking maximum profits by cutting back on labour costs has gotten to the point where the working poor cannot afford to be the consumers the businesses demand. For the economy to grow again, it needs to "relate"; and to "reflate", the consumer has spend a lot more to power growth. In other words, Abe's government has admitted that chasing productivity is a fool's errand when you're trying to shore up aggregate demand. You have to shore up the spending power of the consumer in a sustained manner.
So here's the thing back in Australia... under this Coalition Government we've heard noises and seen signs that they wanted to raise the GST as well as give states to rights to chart their own income taxes. They've cut back on the welfare spending because that is what all conservative governments do, while tried to figure out a way to cut penalty and overtime awards. None of these things are actually putting confidence in the consumer. None of these things are adding to the spending power of the average Joe; it's not going to help with aggregate demand. Thus it follows that for all the talk about the Coalition being good economic managers, they're really not addressing the real problem of our economy to get it growing again.
Vote Compass
The election is near and so it was time to go and do the Vote Compass test. As little indicators go, it's a nice little toy for those who want to put a grid to one's own political inclinations and where they might stand. As usual, I landed a bit left of even the Greens, and halfway progressive between the Greens and the ALP, which is much more left and much more progressive than where the Coalition are pitching their policies. Not surprisingly they thought I should vote Greens but of course I'm wary of the ideological bent of the Greens when it comes to their policies outside of the environment. I'm also not happy about the way things played out with the Rudd Government ETS discussions and the Greens' role in that debacle which in effect brought about the terrible sequence of events whereby we now have Direct (in)Action as our carbon emission abatement policy.
The disturbing part of the vote compass survey is that it puts me so far to the left as it does when in fact I don't feel that far to the left. I maybe witnessing the great shift to the right by all parties which has left me stranded to the left of all conversation being had by the political parties in Australia. I'm not terribly radical, I don't even go protesting or marching anymore. I just write this blog here and point at how stupid the major parties are but you couldn't put me so far to the left beyond the Greens. Frankly I'm a little mortified. Where have all the hardcore left people all gone? Those irritating leftwing ideologues back on campus in the 80s? Where the hell are they now?
Probably paying off a mortgage some place.
Maybe we're all kidding ourselves in thinking that we have divergent views. Maybe the tragedy of our contemporary political state is that the views are so convergent there isn't any scope to be different or radical or interesting. Maybe the Coalition and the ALP and The Greens are a lot closer in their positioning than we normally think all of them bunched around the same old tired bad ideas that leads to this sad stagnation. The illusion is that voting one way or the other is going to make a big difference. I'm beginning to think that might be one of the big lies in our society.
For the record, Antony Green's election calculator says there needs to be a uniform swing of 4.0% to oust the Coalition. I don't know what the historic precedent for that would be for a first term government. But then, this has been a pretty awful government most of its three year term.
Hope springs eternal.
The Budget Comes Home To Roost
This really was a sucky budget so you wonder how the government is hoping to win an election.
First off, whatever consumer sentiment boost that was handed out by the RBA's interest rate cut during the day was blown out of the water by the budget.
ANZ Banking head of Australian economics Felicity Emmett said the budget appeared to have neutralised any sentiment lift from the interest rate cut.
"While the RBA's cut to the official cash rate last week is likely to have been well received, any positive impact looks to have been somewhat offset by consumers' reaction to the commonwealth budget," she said.
"According to the polls, the reaction has been largely one of moderate 'disapproval'." A Fairfax/Ipsos post-budget poll showed that 46 per cent of households disapproved of the budget while only 39 per cent approved. Although not loathed like former treasurer Joe Hockey's ill-fated first budget in 2014, the coalition's latest effort did little to buoy spirits at a difficult time for the Australian economy.
"While this is a better reaction than the one to the 2014 budget, the lack of traction from [this] budget would be disappointing given the government is now in election mode," Ms Emmett said.
"With the coalition and Labor running head-to-head in the polls, the government has its work cut out for it to win over the electorate by the 2 July election."
Way to go ScoMo!
If that's not bad enough this government's finding all kinds of problems putting its budget across as good. Take this Q&A thing that happened:
"I've got a disability and a low education, that means I've spent my whole life working for minimum wage. You're gonna lift the tax-free threshold for rich people," he said, addressing federal minister O'Dwyer.
"If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life," he went on. "That means that I get to say to my little girls, 'Daddy's not broke this weekend. We can go to the pictures'. Rich people don't even notice their tax-free threshold lift. Why don't I get it? Why do they get it?"
After a sympathetic hearing from Goldie, the question came to O'Dwyer, whose answer eventually wound its way through to missing the point of the inquiry almost entirely - with Mr Storrar's eyes all but popping out of his head at the minister's assurance that when it came to budgetary tax measures: "It's all about balance."
On the contrary, minister.
"To rich people it is a Coke and a milkshake or whatever," Mr Storrar said of tax breaks for higher income earners.
"To me it changes my children's life … People who make $80,000 a year … well, they don't even notice it, love. We notice that sort of stuff."
And it was pretty much all downhill from there.
O'Dwyer helpfully launched into a cheerful monologue about pies - growing the pie, rather than carving it up as the Greens were inclined to do - but the look on Mr Storrar's face suggested the only thing he could smell was waffle. But the minister soldiered on with her pastry metaphors. It was a bit like watching Mary Poppins trill "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" - the thing you say when you have nothing to say; then before you knew it, she'd taken wayward flight to offer a description of her plans as Small Business Minister.
These people damn themselves. One can easily imagine the ire of Malcolm Turnbull as he watched one of his ministers pretty much immolate his cause. Of course, then there was the $6000 toaster write off that Kelly O'Dwyer mentioned. It's a corker! When the SMH is making fun of you at the top of their website you know you've laid a giant turd in public.
Sydney's abnormally warm autumn will extend well into May, with unusually dry conditions inland creating late-season heat records across large parts of Australia in play.
The city has had just two days this months with maximums below the long-term average of 22.4 degrees, and most days in the coming week will be several degrees warmer than that.
With a warm start to May, temperatures will creep up to the mid-20s early next week – 30 degrees is possible in western suburbs.
"We're still missing the significant cold fronts that are normally due this time of the year," said Brett Dutschke, senior meteorologist with Weatherzone.
There's already a big pile of worrisome things to do with Global Warming so adding this on to the list of evidence is no big addition, but that in of itself is a worry because it means we've become inured to the ever growing pile of evidence indicating anthropogenic climate change is happening.
Strangely, the world is suffering from two seemingly opposite trends...overpopulation and depopulation in concert. The overpopulation is due to the increased longevity of elderly lifespans vs. depopulation of young populations due to collapsing birthrates. The depopulation is among most under 25yr old populations (except Africa) and among many under 45yr old populations.
So, the old are living decades longer than a generation ago but their adult children are having far fewer children. The economics of this is a complete game changer and is unlike any time previously in the history of mankind. None of the models ever accounted for a shrinking young population absent income, savings, or job opportunity vs. massive growth in the old with a vast majority reliant on government programs in their generally underfunded retirements (apart from a minority of retirees who are wildly "overfunded"). There are literally hundreds of reasons for the longer lifespans and lower birthrates...but that's for another day. This is simply a look at what is and what is likely to be absent a goal-seeked happy ending.
In a short yet economically valid manner, every person is a unit of consumption. The greater the number of people and the greater the purchasing power, the greater the growth in consumption. So, if one wanted to gauge economic growth, (growth in consumption driving economic growth), multiply the annual change in population by purchasing power (wages, savings) per capita. Regarding wage growth, I hold wages flat as from a consumption standpoint, wage growth is basically offset by inflation. Of course, there is another lever beyond this which central banks are feverishly torqueing; substituting the lower interest rates of ZIRP and NIRP to boost consumption from a flagging base of population growth. (There is one more boost to consumption, huge increases in social transfer payments primarily among the advanced economies...but while noted, these are a story for another day.)
Anyway, it has interesting graphs and the details make for interesting reading.
We're Getting French Submarines!
In a turn for the more interesting, the Coalition Government decided to go with the French submarine tender.
The commitment to a local build shores up the government's political prospects in South Australia, which were looking shaky amid concerns work could be sent offshore. MPs including senior frontbencher Christopher Pyne faced losing their seats if the Coalition broke a pre-election pledge to build all 12 boats in Adelaide.
But the choice of France is causing ripples with rival bidder Japan, which branded the decision "deeply regrettable" and issued a please explain.
I don't know what to make of all this.
From an Australian point of view, the government got what it wanted - 12 subs, built in Adelaide, with somebody else's tech. As an essential part of the decision, by picking the French, it stays out of China's bad books - which is spineless whichever way you look at it.
From the Japanese point of view, it looks weird because Tony Abbott came bounding in wanting to buy the subs, only to be replaced by Malcolm who put it out to competitive tender instead and chose somebody else. It's a bit more mixed because there are voices in Tokyo that didn't want to sell the tech at all, and they'll now look like the more responsible voices. After all, with allies like these, how needs enemies, they'll argue.
In a weird way, it's good that Australia picked the French because it really means we don't want to fight China, and it's good for Japan to know that Australia can't be relied on for much if it came to a shooting war with China. That being said the Americans will provide the weapons systems for interoperability. They've indicated the French subs are not as good as the Japanese 'Soryu' class subs so they'll be a bit unhappy that Australia deliberately opted to go with the French.
I guess the downside of this 'process' is that Australia was going to piss off two countries either way, but three countries if it picked Japan's tender. Based on this decision it seems Canberra and Tokyo are never really going to see eye to eye about mutual security, and that's bad (as in, I'm not going to write it's "not good" because it's worse than that, it's bad). Malcolm Turnbull was making noises about Japan still being a strategic partner but it's hard to see how he's going to make that statement stick right after he showed that the partnership didn't mean all that much to his government.
You'd sure hate to be the Australian Ambassador to Japan tonight, trying to explain how the hell a surefire sale turned into a tender and a swing-and-a-miss. There's no spinning "fuck you."
