Oh Canada!

 

Pic courtesy Rosa Miranda Sauret

In the light of Trump's recent postings on social media about Canada, it's worth recalling, gentle reader, one significant historical element of US-Canada relations.

I'm writing, of course, about the tens of thousands of draft dodgers that travelled north to Canada during the war in Vietnam, between 1965 and 1975.

One estimate puts the number between 30,000 and 40,000. 

What is interesting about this history is that it seemed to have no effect on US-Canada relations. When you think about it, that appears odd. After all, the northern escape continued unabated for ten years, and these men whether they were draft resistors or deserters, were clearly in breach of the law in the USA.

Yet Canada accepted them as immigrants and made no attempt to determine their reasons for crossing the border. This turning a blind eye arrangement was accommodated by both Canada and the US, and it's interesting to consider the reasons for this.

One rationale is that the USA had much greater concerns when it came to international relations in general and relations with Canada in particular, so long as the number of war resisters could be contained, and they didn't want to rock the boat by making an issue of their treatment.

Strangely perhaps, draft and military offences were not included in the Canada-US extradition treaty. Basically, even if the US authorities had wanted to take action, they could do nothing providing Canada accepted these young men as immigrants, and indeed Canada did.

In any event, President Gerald R Ford granted an amnesty programme for draft evaders in September 1974, requiring them to work in alternative service occupations for periods between six months and two years.

Later in 1977, Jimmy Carter fulfilled a campaign promise to pardon any draft evader who requested one. I have no idea how many took advantage of this, although a figure of 556 is floating around in the archives.

This 2018 Canadian study (in French and English) by Luke Stewart provides useful background.

My only comment about Trump's offer would be that whilst travelling, I have mistaken a Canadian or two for an American and received a thorough telling-off for doing so.

One young woman said "That's the worst possible insult you could offer any Canadian! The basis of our identity is that we are NOT American."

Should we be Very Afraid or Simply Vigilant?

Darwin Harbour - Managed by the Chinese

During the last week, gentle reader, I came across a number of Youtube discussions about our relationship with China.

Watching these provided a way of filling in the time across lunch and tea breaks during the Boxing Day test in Melbourne. Test cricket is, after all, a quasi-meditative activity, and the breaks in play are too brief to allow the beginning of any new task.

Whilst the computer screen is handy, you might as well put it to good use.

I've always been fascinated by what is perceived as a resemblance between events between World Wars One and Two in relation to the India-Pacific region and the situation now in 2025. Mark Twain had something to say about history which is relevant.

Back in the late thirties, we had an emerging power in Imperial Japan, an isolationist USA, and an Australia that was ill-prepared for conflict.

These days, we observe an emerging great power in China, a President-elect of the USA who loudly uses isolationist rhetoric and an Australia that is once again, ill-prepared for conflict. 

Obviously, the situation is much more complicated than that, and I am supremely ignorant of the art and science of military preparedness, but I certainly don't want to see the mistakes of the past repeated. 

The first three discussions deal in turn with whether China is a military threat, what we should do about it, and two fairly similar viewpoints regarding the current situation. The last is included as a piece of devil's advocacy.

The first piece is an address by Peter Jennings AO presented by the Institute of Public Affairs. He has a distinguished career in the field, specialising in strategic policy, crisis management, international security and foreign policy. He was until 2022 the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It is fair to note that both Jennings and the IPA adopt generally conservative positions on most issues.

 Jennings has a a lot to say, but in summary, he advocates building up deterrence, and seems quite convinced that the Chinese will move against Taiwan by 2027. He also points out that AUKUS is irrelevant, as it is simply too far down the track, even if everything goes to plan. He also assumes that the USA will continue to want to be involved.

I simply don't share that last sunny assumption. 

Michael Shoebridge is the Director of ASPI's Defence, Strategy and National Security Program. He describes how we might quickly develop that deterrence capacity. He references Ukraine, the Middle East, and the asymmetrical conflict involving the Houthis and the US Navy in the Red Sea. Unlike Jennings, he's not so sure that the Americans will have either the capacity or the will to become involved in our near North.

Where Shoebridge makes sense to me is when he advocates the use of drones, and the rapid establishment of local capacity to manufacture quantities of low-tech cheap weapons that can be replaced to meet attrition. The capacity to provide the necessary hardware to sustain prolonged conflict is vital, as the Japanese discovered between 1940 and 1945. 

A discussion that neatly ties the issues together is this interview conducted by David Speers from ABC Insiders late last year with Mike Pezullo and Sam Roggeveen. Again, they repeat a view that conflict looms, but can be avoided. Pezullo is prepared to put the risk of war as a percentage, which he concludes is 10%. Roggeveen makes the very good point that Beijing is closer to Berlin than Sydney, and questions why we need submarines that effectively shrink that distance. 

The final video is puts an argument that Australia's own military-industrial complex is what drives the media's fixation with China, and governments of both political persuasions are complicit in maintaining that fixation. I'm not sure I agree with Boreham, but some of what he says resonates with my own experience as a conscript involved in a tragic war in SE Asia driven by the politics of fear.

I wouldn't want that episode repeated.

You, gentle reader, can make up your own mind....

Broadcasting Vs Narrowcasting

Andrew Olle (Pic courtesy Australia media hall of fame)

The other day, gentle reader, I listened to the Andrew Olle Memorial lecture, given this year by Fran Kelly.

It was an excellent address, and coincided with the ABC's online platforms releasing a major restructure of their news and information offerings. One of the features of this reorganisation is the capacity for consumers to tailor content based on their interests.

On the face of it, this would seem to be a great way to develop and maintain an audience.

But after listening to Kelly's address, I began to consider a downside to this capacity of consumers to narrow their choices, based on her concept of a shared audience. Reflecting on her seventeen years of breakfast radio, she described the great sense of community that develops around broadcast radio.

She talked about the variety of listeners, the early morning joggers, the tradies on site setting up a job, the parents driving the school drop, the farmers on their harvesters, and the retirees enjoying a lie in, as participants in this community.

She's right, of course, as live radio is a medium that (unlike this one) allows you to move through your daily tasks whilst maintaining your participation. 

You can flick seamlessly using whatever app works, from mobile phone, to car audio, to radio, without the listening process interfering with the task at hand.

I thought about that against the context of the new ABC online platform which allows you to concentrate narrowly on your own set of topics, and wondered what that would do to the sense of a shared community embedded in broadcast radio.

Surely, there will be a trend from broadcasting to narrowcasting (if such a word exists), which is anathema to community.

This move by the ABC is no doubt directed by a belief that the national broadcaster is competing with the other networks for the listener's ear. I'm not sure it is, and whether a redevelopment of the platform will make any difference. 

Frankly, I believe the people determining the future of the ABC should listen to the parts in her address dealing with the threat of misinformation to the listener, and spend time and money on combatting that.

Otherwise, the prediction given in her address that within five years 90% of what is posted on the internet will be AI generated fakery*, may well come to pass.

*see 41.20 in the address.

 

Crime, Punishment and Politics

Image courtesy Brittanica

Recent elections in Queensland and the Northern Territory have seen a change in government based on policies that are tough on crime.

These policies were reduced to three or four word slogans, such as "Adult crime - adult time" in the case of Queensland, and three point programmes - "Reduce Crime; Rebuild the Economy and Restore our Lifestyle" in the case of the Northern Territory. The Country Liberal Party in the Territory is slightly more expansive in their use of the English language, but it's pretty simple stuff.

So, gentle reader, let's follow the KISS* principle, and keep it simple.

The simplicity ought to mean that if children are locked up for serious crimes in both jurisdictions, the crime rate should fall. Now that is a prediction, and not a certainty. To discover whether or not the action of jailing children lowers the crime rate, it's necessary to look at statistics.

Amongst the many learned articles available on Google Scholar on the topic is an international study. It found that there is no consensus on the impact of the criminal justice system on criminal activity, but that increasing the risk of apprehension and conviction is influential in reducing crime. It's a very detailed study and looks at statistics from a range of locations including California and New South Wales, but found no evidence that an increase in incarceration rates reduces crime.

That conclusion is arrived at by the research over and over again. Having said that, there is a correlation between effective policing and the crime rate.

What to me is significant is the role of the media. Stories about home invasions, street stabbings and random violence invariably attract attention. Reports of domestic violence are not so attention grabbing, although statistically more people (men women and children) are harmed in these latter circumstances than the former.

These media reports enhance the fear narrative used by politicians to seek and hold power, but there is no reason to believe that punitive measures increase public safety and the quality of community life.

Maybe it makes sense to compare recidivism rates across various jurisdictions, identify those countries with the lowest rates,  and examine the practices that reduce recidivism. Currently, Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates worldwide (20%) which compares with the USA which has both one of the highest (68%) and shares with China and Turkey the highest incarceration rates. This map is instructive.

Incarceration rates worldwide (the darker the higher) - courtesy  Wikipedia

The countries with the lowest recidivism rates are Iceland, Finland and Norway. Maybe we should look at their practices. The Scandnavian option is deccribed here.  What is statistically clear is that getting tough on crime simply doesn't work, whereas prison reform does.

That is, unless you want to use it as a scare tactic in an election. In that context it seems pretty effective. It does nothing for your constituency, but it does get you elected.

*Keep It Simple Stupid

What Price Sovereignty?

 

This photo of a Chinese made shirt is a reminder, gentle reader, of the profound changes in our relationships with the rest of the world that have emerged in my lifetime.

When I was growing up in the fifties (yep - I'm really old) most of the clothes I wore were made in Australia.

Back then the rag trade was well established locally. 

In Sydney, for example, there were nine thousand (mostly women) working in clothing and tailoring, over four thousand in dress and hat-making, and about eight thousand in shirt making.

Today, if all clothing made in China, Bangladesh or Vietnam vanished overnight, there would be a lot of naked Australians wandering about.

Then there's motor cars. My first memory of our family car was a  green 1952 Austin A40.

Our A40's number was Q484451.

Then there was a Vanguard Spacemaster. 

Our Vanguard. Rego was Q645324 (rear only).

Both these were British imports, but by then an Australian industry had developed on the heels of Ben Chifley's push for local manufacturing, and later we owned a series of Australian made Holdens.

My first non-Australian made purchase was a Renault, but since then I've been buying cars from Japan or Korea. The coalition government pretty much chased local manufacturing away in 2013 because it was ideologically opposed to both unionised workforces and supporting local manufacturing, and there hasn't been a local industry since.

The same phenomenon has occurred in the full range of manufacturing industries, to the point where not very much is made here. We have become a country where we confine ourselves to digging minerals up and exporting them, only to have them converted to manufactured goods offshore which we then buy as imports.

Manufacturing contributes only 6.3% to Australia's GDP, and export earnings through manufacturing are 11% of the total. Only 6.8% of the Australian workforce is employed in manufacturing.

We are almost entirely relying on imports to maintain our lifestyle. This is perhaps not a large issue, except that opportunities for careers in the sector have shrunk, but I find the fact that we are almost entirely reliant on imports for vital commodities such as transport fuels pretty alarming.

Australia holds about a month of fuel supply onshore. Under International Energy Agency rules, we need to hold 90 days in reserve. We do, but most of that 90 days worth is actually tanked overseas!

Perhaps I'm succumbing to some kind of nationalist paranoia, but I find these facts difficult to accept. We seem to have forgotten our recent history.

Perhaps the election of an avowedly isolationist US administration will encourage us to take a look at our national sovereignty. 

We are, let's face it, on our own.

A Letter to Heston

I received an email from Heston Russell the other day. He is the founder of the now defunct Australian Values Party.

He is asking for an apology from the ABC for alleged misreporting.

This is what I wrote in reply - 

Dear Heston 

I note you’re asking for an apology from the ABC for misreporting.

Fair enough, but I’ve just about given up on getting an apology for the treatment of tens of thousands of young Australians from 1965 to 1972.

I’m referring of course, to the heinous National Service Act 1964, introduced by a Coalition government. This piece of legislation conscripted one in twelve twenty year olds to be enlisted in the ARA, and sent about sixteen thousand of us to Vietnam, to participate in a futile and tragic conflict which killed millions of Vietnamese, fifty seven thousand Americans, and five hundred Australians, two hundred of them conscripts. I saw two of them die in April 1970. Misreporting is a pretty venial sin compared to that.

Where does your Australian Values Party stand on support for ex-service personnel?

If you’re serious about justice and fairness, as an ex-serviceman, you should be advocating for national servicemen, about thirty thousand who survive. Those, like me, who saw active service, have been compensated, after years of struggle, but those who served in Australia, PNG and Malaysia, have not. The DVA white card which they have now been grudingly granted offers very limited support.

Here is a piece I wrote about my experience, which is far from unique. I am one of the lucky ones. Three members of my rifle section had succumbed to trauma by the time of the Welcome Home march in October 1987. It was too late for them -  https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/reflections-on-the-fall,4404

So until you’re ready to publicly advocate for an apology for national servicemen, you won’t get any support from me. Every email you send simply reinforces my opinion that you put political  affiliation before support for veterans. Prove me wrong.

Bob Whittaker

5 Platoon, B Coy, 7RAR, 1970

Birds of a Feather

George Santos (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Troy Thompson (Courtesy Townsville Bulletin)

 

Today, gentle reader, I'm comparing two individuals who have entered positions of public office on the basis of confected fantasies. To put it in words of one syllable, they lied their way into office.

Despite the fact their behaviour is separated in time and distance, it is similar. The similarities border on the uncanny. It is almost is if it was scripted by the same writer, and to introduce a cliche, in their cases, truth is often stranger than fiction.

The first is a local.

Troy Thompson (nee Birnbrauer*) contested the mayoralty of Townsville, and won, defeating the incumbent Jenny Hill, in the 2024 local government elections.

He had previously attempted to contest the state electorate of Thuringowa as a One Nation candidate, but was disendorsed because he did not disclose his directorship of a supply chain management company that became insolvent in 2017.

Being disendorsed by One Nation should have rung alarm bells for the electors of the city of Townsville, but it didn't. What did create problems for him was his CV which he promoted heavily whilst campaigning, both in local and social media.

That CV claimed he had military service, comprising five years as a reservist in Australia, with 109 Signal Squadron before serving with 152 Signal Squadron attached to the SAS at Karrakatta W.A.

The truth was a little different. He had in fact enlisted in 1991 as a Catering Corps reservist. I assume he had hoped that Townsville voters wouldn't discern the difference between a commando and a cook.

As Townsville is a garrison city with a large military population, who understood pretty well the role and function of army units, this military reference was probably a mistake. In addition, he claimed academic qualifications including bachelor degrees in science and commence from Griffith and Curtin universities, displayed on his LinkedIn profile. He had neither.

He was sprung when he gave a speech on Anzac Day wearing a heap of medals. They weren't his, and he wore them correctly on the right, but the lack of personal medals from his advertised service  (which he should have been able to display on the left) created conjecture. The local media got on to it, and he was  referred to the Office of the Independent Assessor.

He has been stood down on full pay for twelve months, and the payment of his salary is something that Townsville residents are not all that happy about. It seems that being creative with your CV can, for a while at least, deliver optimal financial results.

The second aspiring politician was an American.

George Santos is a former US congressman and convicted felon who served in a New York congressional district before he was expelled.

He won the seat (on his second attempt) after having fabricated a CV which did not disclose his criminal record, contained a completely fictional account of his business activities, income, and personal employment history.

This fact was lost on the voters, and he defeated his Democrat rival, Robert Zimmerman in the midterms. After his victory, numerous reports emerged that his his biography appeared fabricated. Eventually he admitted lying about his education and employment history, 

Eventually, he was expelled from congress, but not before he had participated in a number of crucial votes, including the vote removing house speaker Kevin McCarthy.

After his expulsion he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He is scheduled for sentencing on February 7, 2025.

What these two have in common is their complete disregard for the truth in the quest for political power. The demise of the profession of journalism in favour of opionistas who sell discord and fiction for profit has seeped across the Pacific, and this trend is turbocharged by social media.

I doubt that it will end well.

*He took the name of the woman he married in 1996.