Mission & Justice

Editorial: 26/10/08; (2 Items)

Governments have already thrown trillions of dollars into their own financial systems to save banks from going bust. They have also made it clear they will find whatever trillions more are necessary to stave off global financial meltdown. Now set these massive sums against the maximum of $60 billion a year that the United Nations said in 2000 was necessary to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to slash Third World poverty by 2015. At the very most the program to attack key issues such as destitution, high mortality, disease, polluted water sources and lack of education would have cost the First World $900 billion — a fraction of the cash that has been found to save the financial system. Yet even when rich countries were prospering, governments with a few exceptions such as the UK, fell seriously behind on their MDG promises. It can with justice be asked how they could not find such relatively small sums for the world’s poorest people but can conjure up far bigger amounts when their own prosperous societies are threatened.

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Joan Chittister; 20/10/08

Sometimes it isn’t just one thing, sometimes it takes a confluence of things to make the invisible visible and the dark light. Things like butterflies and somebody else’s mortgage and Irish bookies and attitudes all coming together, at once, and apparently independent of one another. But, underneath, not really isolated or unconnected at all. In fact, together, they say something very important to us all. If you were wondering what “globalization” really means, for instance - before, that is, you found yourself living in the middle of it - the answer lies in all of the above. A piece at a time. All leading to more of the fullness of the definition of that reality than any one of them alone might suggest. “The Butterfly Effect,” according to the work of physicist Edward Lorenz in 1961, is the awareness that a slight change in one part of a system can cause cataclysmic effects in another. Depending on other conditions in the atmosphere, “One flap of a seagull’s wings,” he said, “could change the course of the weather forever.” Bird wings on one side of the globe, he went on, can cause or avert a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe. That’s an interesting concept at best when considered in a science lab. It’s a potentially devastating one when practiced in politics.

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1/10/08

As the Bush administration attempts to stabilise the nation’s economy, we are witness to the final chapter of a period of perverse and dishonest leadership that has used its own crises to justify the expansion of its own power. This was a president who came to office on promises of modesty - who championed a “humble nation”, scorned nation building and promised a more limited role for government in the lives of its citizens. Then he presided over a six-year attempt to tear down and rebuild the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now has embarked on the most profound expansion of the federal government’s role in the private economy since the Depression. In both cases, the pattern is the same. Ineptitude led to crisis; crisis then became the argument for the radical expansion of executive power.

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Paige Taylor; 16/8/08

Aboriginal entrepreneur Barry Taylor, whose company last year won the largest contract ever awarded to an indigenous business in Australia, claims the resources sector is still getting it wrong when it comes to indigenous employment. Mr Taylor, a Nyamal Aborigine from the Pilbara and executive chairman of indigenous contractor Ngarda Civil and Mining, yesterday labelled as farcical Fortescue boss Andrew Forrest’s plan to create 50,000 jobs for indigenous people within two years. Mr Taylor said Australia’s richest man had failed to understand the importance of doing business with more indigenous companies such as Ngarda. He is also critical of Rio Tinto, which employs more than 1500 indigenous workers. Ngarda cemented its position in the Pilbara last year when it won a $300 million, five-year deal to run BHP Billiton’s Yarrie mine.

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Padraic Murphy; 13/8/08

Two families struggling with child abuse yesterday became the first to appear before the Families Responsibilities Commission - the next stage in welfare reform in indigenous communities. The FRC hearing on Cape York made legal history by being the first deliberative body with the power to quarantine welfare payments and take control of an individual’s finances. It is hoped the initiative masterminded by Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson to improve behaviour in four Cape York communities will be rolled out across the country. Sitting in Coen yesterday with two local representatives, Commissioner David Glasgow denied the measures were paternalistic.

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Phillip Adams; 22/7/08

The remittance man was one of the wilder colonial boys, a miscreant sent to Australia in disgrace rather than in chains, perhaps a ne’er-do-well son of a well-to-do or even aristocratic family given a one-way ticket. In return the family would sustain him here by sending remittances. Now the term can be turned on its head to describe the money sent back to families by tens of millions of remittance men and women who have joined migrant workforces. And we are talking big money, enormous flows of cash to the developing world. Thanks to the efforts of a young Indian economist, a rising star in the World Bank, we know that the recorded remittances are but a fraction of the real figure, a key factor in the global as well as local economies. The total amount exceeds all the world’s international aid. Dilip Ratha is a remittance man himself. As he moved up in the world of international economics he sent money back to sustain his family and to help the village, with, he admits, mixed success. A brother squandered his income and his attempts to improve the local high school continue to be frustrated. But Ratha insists the overall impact of remittances is transformational.

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