Newsletter: Week 8, 2023
A new options paper I had a hand in, Australia's unaffordable obsession, and conspiracy-mongers come for urban planning
Using Every Tool In The Shed
This week I flew up to Canberra for the launch of the latest Options Paper from Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D) – a paper I had a hand in crafting alongside my colleagues AP4D’s Program Lead Hugh Piper and the organisation’s Executive Director Melissa Conley Tyler. I have been doing some editorial work for the organisation for the past couple of years, and was honoured to be involved in this highly ambitious project.
AP4D’s objective is to understand the intersections between the various arms of Australia’s foreign policymaking (primarily development, diplomacy and defence), and promote greater collaboration between these arms to enhance Australia’s overall foreign policy objectives. Previous series of papers have focused on Australia’s immediate regions in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia.
This paper – “What does it look like for Australia to Use All Tools of Statecraft in Practice?” – driven by Hugh, has sought to understand the mechanics of Australian policymaking and how these can be best organised and fine tuned to protect and enhance Australia’s security and prosperity. This concept is about understanding the sheer breath of instruments available to Australia in its approach to the world, and how the country can utilise these tools in a more cohesive and coherent way to achieve optimal outcomes.
Bureaucracies are large and complex organisations. Often different departments or ministries will have their own objectives and modes of operation, and without clear national strategies and guidance these may not work in unison with each other. Foreign policy is not simply the domain of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade or the Prime Minister’s Office, everything the Australian government does – or indeed its state governments do – affects the overall capabilities of the country, and the way it is able to positively interact with the world.
This may seem like a niche subject matter. Very much “inside the Beltway” in American-speak. But it is important for all citizens to understand the complexity of governance and the genuine efforts made to negotiate the multitudes of competing interests and ideas that go into policymaking. At its core, an “all tools of statecraft” approach to foreign policy is about thinking clearly about the implications of every action, and being able to jigsaw these actions (or inactions) into a broader vision of the country and the way it operates in the world.
Australia’s Unaffordable Obsession
The first rule of foreign policy is that everything is foreign policy. Everything a country does, and every conditions inside a country, affects its overall capabilities. An article in The Age this weekend highlights that housing affordability is so bad in Australia that 70 percent of young Australians believe that they will never own a home. This is a critical problem for the country with a myriad of negative knock-on effects.
It is impossible to overstate the negative effects of unaffordable housing (for both purchasing and renting). Governments may see asset values reflected in positive GDP figures, but they fail to acknowledge the social malaise created by insecure housing. Secure and affordable housing is the primary building block of a healthy and flourishing society. Everything else positive flows from this – personal, social and economic.
A lack of housing security is a major factor in current low birth rates. Couples need security to start families. Low birth rates push up a country’s median age, making their “dependency ratio” – the number of tax-payers to service-users less sustainable. Australia’s median age is decent compared to other OECD countries, but is still projected to move up from 38 to 40 in the next decade.
Yet insecure housing is also a major economic opiate. Australia is an incredibly weird economy being the 13th largest in the world, but the 74th most complex (down with Albania and Kazakhstan). This means that Australia generates a lot of wealth, but does so from things that don’t actually require much skill or ingenuity. Australia doesn’t lack money, but it severely lacks ideas. Given that two of its largest exports – coal and gas – are about to fall off a cliff, this is a major problem.
Insecure housing prevents people from investing in ideas. It forces people to take work they may not want simply to afford to live. It takes people away from the things that actually interest them and the time and personal investment needed to develop ideas – across any field. Ideas economies are not driven by singular geniuses, they develop ground up, usually from a critical mass of failed experiments that allow people to hone their ideas. Young Australians currently cannot afford these essential failures.
Australia is a country uniquely obsessed with house prices. We’re addicted to the idea of ever-increasing asset value. Indeed, we don’t live in homes, we “hold assets.” But no healthy society would burden its youth the way Australia currently does. And no healthy society would take a crowbar to its own knees the way Australia is. There is a national reckoning on housing that Australia will soon have to face, as there is a pressing need to reverse this unsustainable drag on our overall capabilities.
Fifteen Minute Madness
Nothing escapes a good conspiracy these days. Not even mundane and seemingly uncontroversial ideas about urban planning. The concept of a “15-minute city” – where one’s basic amenities and services are all accessible within walking distance –has now been twisted into a dystopian nightmare were people will be caged within their suburbs, with every movement they make surveilled and scrutinised.
We live in an era of heightened anxiety that can easily attach itself to disinformation. We also live in an era where cynical manipulators will purposely twist any initiative in order to prey upon those who may not have the ability to filter poor quality information.
Around one third of the population – according to political psychologist Karen Stenner – have “authoritarian personalities.” This doesn’t necessarily mean they are raging fascists, but it does make them susceptible to hysterical misinterpretation. Often these people* interpret policy – no matter how benign – not necessarily in bad faith (although there is a lot of that), but through a permanent and unresolvable fear.
Although people like last week’s protesters in Oxford often claim they are advocating for “freedom” this is due to how they perceive everything as a threat requiring resistance. The irony is that it is these hyperactive threat instincts that are the bedrock of actual authoritarian governance.
Those with such threat instincts have always existed, and have often been able to gain power – as much of the 20th Century can attest. Modern tools of information dissemination mean authoritarian personality types incessantly feed their own fears and paranoia, and wilfully misinterpret ideas through their own anxieties. This is leading to constant low-level forms of social disruption (as well as occasional acts of serious violence). It’s an information environment that now looks set to make a simple walk to the shops more difficult for everyone else.
*Like all dispositions, an authoritarian personality type is a spectrum of differing intensity, and also, like most things, shouldn’t be understood as either left or right (my regular reminder that these are useless terms and frames of reference, and should be burnt to the ground).
This Week’s Reading
The Lucky Country Became The Consequential Country, But We Missed The Memo
Nick Bryant - The Age
“Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appears to have attained a level of influence that more closely aligns with Australian thinking: to be respected and liked by his fellow international leaders, but not to become a hot ticket at Davos. If ever it had a prime minister with the global star power of a Jacinda Ardern, I’m not sure how Australia would cope.
Certainly, the national penchant for piss-taking kicks in, along with an aversion to the grandiose. It is almost as if the tall-poppy syndrome has come to be applied at the national level, where Australians scythe their own country down to size. The question of consequentiality is where so many outdated national cliches intersect.
However, what happens in Australia matters internationally, and at this particular moment in history it is especially worth hammering home that point. On climate change, this resources powerhouse really does have the chance to become a renewable energy superpower. The Voice referendum, as I have written in these pages before, needs also to be placed in an international context, since a No vote would be catastrophic for the country’s reputation and soft power.”
Modi Is Trying To Silence The Foreign Press. Here’s How
Arunabh Saikia - Scroll
“These surveys, which Scroll has seen, paint a picture of growing intimidation, which many respondents attributed to their critical reporting of the government. They said the government wanted to suppress coverage of the persecution of religious minorities in India and regions such as Kashmir and Assam.
Scroll spoke to several journalists who participated in these surveys. Apart from these concerns, they lamented the government’s lack of willingness to engage with them in good faith and being constantly accused of “having an agenda”.
One of the respondents in the survey made a similar point. “Even though we are diligent in going to the relevant ministry and the Prime Minister’s office for comment, people rarely respond and when they do it is to deliberately prevent any real interaction between the media and the government,” the journalist said. “Hence the government feels its views are not properly represented – it is a vicious circle.”
People Forgot How War Actually Works
Phillips Payson O’Brien - The Atlantic
“In the prelude to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for much of last year, many in the West failed to appreciate how much Ukrainians value their independence and their democracy. Some Russia-focused scholars seemed to have accepted Moscow’s view of Ukraine as a weak, artificial entity with shallow popular support. Skeptics of NATO support for Kyiv focused on Ukrainian corruption (while conveniently ignoring the impact of corruption on Russian power). In the most extreme cases, some analysts even doubted that the Ukrainians would care enough to sustain an insurgency against Russian military occupiers.
Such judgments and doubts now look foolish. Ukrainian identity was strong and resolute from the start. Many analysts overlooked the military advantages that democracies—even imperfect democracies—have over dictatorships. Although the former frequently appear messy and divided when they are under threat, they can react more forcefully, flexibly, and intelligently in part because their citizens feel empowered to improvise and show initiative as combat circumstances change. That pattern has held true in Ukraine. Despite initially having fewer advanced weapons, Ukraine fought back hard, inflicting deep consequences on Russia, which has lost an estimated half of the main battle tanks it possessed at the start of the war.”
For Many Outside The West, Russia Is Not Important Enough To Hate
Ivan Krastev - Financial Times
”Although Putin and his propagandists may be relieved by the way non-western societies view what is happening in Ukraine, the question, “why do they not hate them” also has an answer that is less flattering to Moscow. Developing countries are not outraged by Putin’s aggression because Russia has ceased to be seen as a global superpower. For countries such as India and Turkey, Russia has become like them, so they do not need to fear it. The customary privilege of regional powers is to not be hated outside their region; Moscow now enjoys this privilege.
The Soviet Union was an ideological superpower. Soviet advisers in what used to be called the third world in the 1970s and 1980s were there to stir revolutions. Putin, on the other hand, does not have a transformative agenda outside of his imperial project in the post-Soviet space. The Wagner Group in Africa are mercenaries who fight for money, not ideas. Paradoxically, it is Russia’s lack of soft power that leaves the non-western world relatively unmoved by what Moscow is doing in Ukraine.”
Inside Fiji’s Violent Doomsday Cult (video)
Vice News
“[The South Korean] Grace Road Church believes a nuclear-tinged Judgement Day is rapidly approaching — and that Fiji is the post-apocalyptic promised land from which they’ll feed humanity. But despite repeated accusations of abuses, including ritual beatings and forcing members to perform unpaid labour, they received a warm welcome from Fijian officials. An investigation by the OCCRP and Newstapa delved into their connections to the then-Fijian government of Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, which allowed their businesses to thrive on the island nation and gave it access to state-backed loans.”
Christopher Johnson - Foreign Affairs
“Most of Xi’s big bets have one thing in common: they keep his adversaries, both domestic and foreign, off balance. As a Leninist organisation overseeing a continual revolution rooted in contradictions and struggle, the CCP lacks, and even eschews, the legitimacy democratic systems derive from their institutions or from shared beliefs such as constitutionalism. In Xi’s eyes, that makes China’s bureaucracies possible rival centres of power, incentivising him to keep them decoupled from—and perhaps even at odds with—one another.
But isolating the bureaucracies too much risks germinating autonomous fiefdoms that are only nominally loyal to their party masters. This dilemma has plagued each of China’s leaders since Mao Zedong, but Xi has turbocharged it with his obsessive emphasis on party dominance. His solution, “political shock and awe,” mixes raw power with new institutional arrangements that bolster that power. Because it keeps China’s major security organs under stricter civilian control, this developing approach may make Beijing less dangerous than those pushing the narrative of a new cold war with China want to acknowledge. Unfortunately, it will take patience, confidence, and a steely commitment to a China policy rooted only in the national interest to find out—all of which are in short supply in today’s Washington.”
Pay Attention To Indonesia. It Will Help Determine The Future Of Asia
Max Boot - The Washington Post
“Today, like most other Asian states, Indonesia is trying to triangulate between Beijing and Washington. China is its largest trading partner but also its largest security threat: Like many other states in Southeast Asia, Indonesia disputes China’s claim over its territorial waters in the South China Sea. The United States can be a valuable ally in protecting Indonesia’s territorial integrity.
Hence Indonesia’s bifurcated foreign policy: While China is investing billions of dollars in projects such as a new high-speed rail line between Jakarta and Bandung, the Indonesian military in August joined the U.S.-led Super Garuda Shield military exercise involving 5,000 troops from 14 nations.”
Fintan O’Toole - Foreign Affairs
“Until the 1980s, anyone traveling around the United Kingdom would have been struck by the deep shared history of physical labour that encompassed the Welsh coalfields, the potteries of the English Midlands, the cotton mills of Manchester, the ironworks of Glasgow, and the shipyards of Belfast. This world forged its own bond of unity—the trade unions and the Labour Party that came, in the twentieth century, to represent a national working class that cut across regional divisions. Labour may have been, at least some of the time, radically reformist, but in terms of national identity, it was also deeply conservative. It gave ordinary people a powerful sense of common political purpose. The welfare state it created after World War II, buttressed by common institutions like the National Health Service, provided the same benefits to ordinary people regardless of what part of the United Kingdom they inhabited.
The United Kingdom’s prime minister throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, smashed Britain’s industrial base along with its trade unions. During her decade in power, manufacturing output grew by 21 percent in France, 50 percent in Japan, and 17 percent in the United States. In the United Kingdom, it fell by nine percent. This decline began a decisive collapse from which the United Kingdom’s reputation as an industrial powerhouse has never recovered. Manufacturing now represents ten percent of the country’s economic output and just eight percent of its jobs.
For one part of Thatcher’s agenda—breaking organised labor—this was a triumph. But for another—the reassertion of Britishness—it was a long-term problem. As long as the Cold War was still a dominant narrative, Thatcher’s projection of Britain as a warrior nation facing down enemies from Berlin to the Falklands compensated for the real loss of industrial power. A mythically militant Britishness could mask the day-to-day experience of decline. But only for so long. Thatcher was simultaneously pumping up a British national identity and eroding its social foundations. Over time, this contradiction was bound to have consequences for the viability of the United Kingdom.”
Tom McTague - Unherd
“In essence, the Good Friday Agreement is a grand political compromise in which Irish nationalism accepts the continued existence of Northern Ireland as a sovereign part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority of the population consent to it. In return, unionism accepts the end of majoritarian rule in favour of permanent power-sharing. The reason Brexit has proved so difficult is because there is no obvious way for the UK to leave the EU that is politically acceptable in Westminster and both communities in Northern Ireland. Constitutionally, however, the starting point for the negotiations should have been for Northern Ireland to leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the UK — unless a specific set of arrangements could be agreed by both communities.
The problem is that the exact opposite of this happened, as London and Brussels flipped the problem on its head. In December 2017, Theresa May agreed a deal which meant that whatever happened in the future, Northern Ireland would remain permanently anchored to EU law to ensure there was never any need for a land border. From this moment, the challenge became not how to ease the land border to make it acceptable to nationalism, but how to ease the sea border to make it acceptable to unionism.
This was never some mere practical tweak, but a significant constitutional change which unionism understandably rejected but has never been able to reverse.
Unless Sunak is able to negotiate a different outcome, Northern Ireland will remain permanently locked to certain EU laws. These laws can change without Northern Ireland’s consent and will only apply in Great Britain if the UK government decides to follow suit. For as long as this is the case, Britain and the EU can agree as many clever ways of managing the border as they like, but the ratchet will remain, pulling Northern Ireland away from the rest of the UK to keep it tied to the Republic.”
How Many Politicians Are Psychopaths?
Brian Klass - The Garden Of Forking Paths
“In 1972, the political scientist GS Black came up with a mathematical equation for whether someone will decide to run for office. It was this: u = PB - C, in which the choice to run is determined by the probability that you’ll win the race (P) times the benefits you’ll derive from victory (B), minus the costs of running (C).
It’s just a fancy way of saying that people make decisions with a cost-benefit analysis, which is obvious. But too many political science analyses of politicians have focused on these variables as though they’re exclusively financial. They’re not.
What’s been missing from a lot of these political science accounts of how and why people decide to enter politics is a hidden variable: an individual’s psychological thirst for power. Psychologists have tried to capture this concept, but the various measures are pretty flimsy. They go by various names: nPow (need for power); SDO (social dominance orientation); and so on. They’re certainly better than nothing, but they remain too subjective.
Nonetheless, they’re aiming to capture a crucial variable. Some of us crave power. Others couldn’t be bothered and actively avoid seeking power.”
The Children Of The Nazis’ Genetic Project
Valentine Faure - The Atlantic
“Nazism was an ideology of destruction, one that held as its primary aim the elimination of “inferior races.” But another, equally fervent aspect of the Nazi credo was focused on an imagined form of restoration: As soon as they came to power, the Nazis set out to produce a new generation of pure-blooded Germans. The Lebensborn association was a key part of this plan. Established in 1935 under the auspices of the SS, it was intended to encourage procreation among members of the Aryan race by providing birthing mothers with comfort, financial support, and, when necessary, secrecy.
When the news of Hitler’s death broke, officials burned as many documents as they could. Thiolay describes the goals of this purge: “The birth registers, the identity of the children, the fathers, the organisation chart, the names of the people in charge: everything must disappear. The evidence of the Lebensborn’s very existence must be removed.” But the Nazis’ obsession with documents made fully expunging the records an impossible task—there were too many.
A few days after Hitler’s death, a small detachment of U.S. soldiers arrived in Steinhöring, and the children changed hands: The Americans were responsible for them now.”
Jessica Valenti - Abortion, Every Day
The real crisis, the problem that needs fixing, isn’t girls’ mental health. In the midst of all this violence and dehumanisation, their depression is actually very reasonable! Girls’ brains are doing what they’re supposed to do—warning them that this is all very bad.
What’s happening to teenage girls is the fallout of the crisis, not the crisis itself. We know what the real emergency is: Men’s violence and desire to control women’s bodies in one way or another. But American culture has no interest in finger-wagging at boys to stop harassing and raping girls, nor are politicians keen to stop passing legislation that dictates the details of women’s health and lives.
And so instead of stopping this nightmare, we try to teach girls how to survive it.
James Pogue - Vanity Fair
“Food plays an outsize role in the political imagining of the right these days. Last October, Carlson released a documentary titled The End of Men, which features, among other self-proclaimed right-wing bodybuilders, an anonymous farmer who tweets under the name William Wheelwright, one of the better-known figures in the sphere where preppers, techies, hippies, farmers, naturalists, health bros, and hard-core dissident-right types—many of whom are unapologetically racist—mingle, argue, and plan with each other. The documentary advanced a view that our technologies and agricultural system are physically poisoning us, destroying our connection to our corporeality, leading to a generation of men with declining sperm counts and low testosterone. The globalist “regime,” as Mike Cernovich described it in the documentary, has weakened America on a cellular level. The film called for men to take up weight lifting and a meat-based diet. “Well-ordered, disciplined groups of men bound by friendship are dangerous, precisely because of what they can do,” the masculinist health guru known as “Raw Egg Nationalist” said, over images of the American and Haitian revolutions. “A few hundred men can conquer an entire empire,” Raw Egg Nationalist continued. “That’s why they want you to be sick, depressed, and isolated.”