Trans Pacific Partnership’s investor-state dispute settlement mechanism puts democracy in peril
Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement favours foreign investors over citizens’ rights Canberra Times, January 4, 2014 Without debate, increased rights for foreign investors will undermine our way of life, writes Thomas A. Faunce. All the indications from the recent Singapore meeting on the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) are that Australian society is about to undergo a momentous shift in its governance arrangements. The recent Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA) gives a pointer.
It includes an investor-state dispute settlement mechanism. This provides rights of foreign investors (additional to those of local businesses) to challenge our legislation where it impedes their profits overseas before panels of trade arbitrators. Our government claimed it had ”ensured the inclusion of appropriate carve-outs and safeguards in important areas such as public welfare, health and the environment.”
The Australian government has no mandate to introduce such a significant change in our sovereignty and governance. Though the present author and others raised the issue of such greater rights of foreign investors over local businesses during the preceding electoral campaign it was never the subject of major policy debate or positioning.
The insertion of such foreign investor rights into our governance system is a momentous event in the history of our democracy.According to the central document in our social contract, fundamental alterations in Australia’s governance arrangements require not just legislation but a referendum. Thus, a majority of Australian citizens in a majority of states were needed to support the creation of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme or the citizenship of Aboriginal Australians.
Yet, as a result of the TPPA, this country risks displacing the authority of citizens who live and support families, friends, local communities and ecosystems in this land, in favour of a system privileging artificial people called corporations.
The multinational corporations to which the KAFTA and the TPPA will be ceding rights to challenge our democratic laws are regarded by the law as ”people”. They can sue in courts to protect their rights. But they lack conscience, empathy, the capacity to develop virtues though consistent application of generally applicable principle, that constitute the richness of our character. Corporations can never marry or have children. They seek to fulfil a monomanical basic craving – to maximise shareholder profit.
Perhaps the big issue in our nation should not be gay marriage, but corporate marriage – using the corporations law to link a broader public purpose.
It is ironic and sad that the privileging of corporate elites over the rights and interests of our citizens implicit in such foreign investor rights was rejected by conservative former prime minister John Howard at the time of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement in 2004. It also has been deprecated by Pope Francis as part of his recent apostolic exhortation……
At the same time as foreign investors are gaining these extra rights, our government is preparing to turn more of our social infrastructure over to them. The new era for infrastructure financing involves projects financed by taxpayers and superannuants, that then are sold to private corporations who manage them…..
The deliberate disengagement of Australian citizens from the governance changes being wrought on Australia through the TPPA may mark a turning point in a wider disengagement of citizens from the political process in this country.
♦ Thomas A. Faunce is professor, jointly in the college of law and college of medicine, biology and the environment at the Australian National University. http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/trans-pacific-partnership-agreement-favours-foreign-investors-over-citizens-rights-20140103-309nb.html#ixzz2peyYTVFd
Constitutional Preamble is irrelevant: Aborigines need a Treaty!
Forget the Preamble, what Australia needs is a Treaty Woollydays, Derek Barry January 3, 2014 The new Coalition Government has been making noises on a referendum to change the constitution to recognise First Australians. The wording of the change has yet to be announced but Prime Minister Tony Abbott is saying the change would “complete our constitution rather than change it.”
What exactly Abbott means by completion rather than change is not clear from the article but I assume it means the change will have purely ornamental rather than legal force. According to his deputy Julie Bishop, the government wants to have a “deep discussion” with the Australian people before agreeing to the wording but here’s a free tip from me if the changes are purely for show: Forget it.
I say forget it, not because Australian constitutional referendums have a habit of failing, but because there are genuine things constitutional change could do to improve the situation of First Australians. The most profound change would be to turn the preamble into a Treaty, common enough in other settler countries, but the first ever in 225 years of European occupation of Australia. Unlike a flowery but pointless preamble, a treaty would genuinely acknowledge past failures and injustices and show sincere desire for a better future and more just relationship……. Continue reading
Australians will pay heavy price for government climate denialism policies
The international Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that planet earth is on track for an overall increase of 3 degrees Celsius by the year 2030.
Australia is predicted to fare worse with an average temperature rise of 3 – 5 degrees Celsius for the same period unless we drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, which sadly appears most unlikely.
Now we find our Federal government approving the gigantic ‘China First’ coal mine in Queensland (owned by Clive Palmer).
Sure, there are conditions which must apply, but if this is to proceed then we Australians will race to the top as the world’s worst polluters per capita.
in Australia we can expect more extreme weather events including more bushfires
Time to accept responsibility for climate change, Bendigo Advertiser, By IAN COOPER, California Gully Jan. 5, 2014 FOR some decades now, climate scientists have been alerting us to the consequences of man-made global warming.
The physics of global warming is that Earth’s surface absorbs short wavelength ultra-violet radiation from the sun and re-radiates this energy as longer wavelength infrared radiation at a frequency that coincides with carbon dioxide’s absorption spectrum at approx 667 cycles per cm.
As a consequence, the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere absorb this energy as quantised energy of vibration, or simply heat; heat which otherwise would have radiated to outer space. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more heat trapped and the more green-house effect.
Put simply, “If we continue to increase the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, then Earth’s average surface temperature will inevitably rise”. Continue reading
USA dumped 110,000 containers of radioactive trash into the ocean
Where’s All the Nuclear Waste We Dumped in the Ocean? WALL STREET JOURNAL RAISES QUESTIONS DECADES LATER By Matt Cantor, Newser Staff Jan 5, 2014 – The US dumped vast quantities of nuclear material off its coasts between 1946 and 1970—more than 110,000 containers, says one official count. Today, the whereabouts of many of those 55-gallon drums and other containers is a big question mark, the Wall Street Journalreports. “Many were not dropped on target,” according to a 2010 federal report. Their location is just one of several major questions raised by the Journal. It’s also unclear, for instance, how many dump sites there were: Government reports have given numbers ranging from 29 to 60. Then there’s the question of how much radioactivity persists, since some isotopes can stay radioactive for thousands of years……http://www.newser.com/story/180117/wheres-all-the-nuclear-waste-we-dumped-in-the-ocean.html
Ireland can now sue British nuclear operators over nuclear radiation
Irish free to sue British nuclear operators over contamination 
Changes to international law will expose them to claims for damages, The Independent, MARK LEFTLY Sunday 05 January 2014 British nuclear operators face being sued for billions of pounds by the Irish government and Irish victims of any radioactive damage they cause under legal changes to be introduced this year. Continue reading
Nuclear expert emphatically rejects nuclear power
No to nuclear JACK BARNES O’Hara http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/letters/2014/01/05/No-to-nuclear/stories/201401050051 January 4, 2014 I must take exception to my former colleague at Westinghouse Electric Co. for his Dec. 29 Perspectives piece, “Atoms f0r Peace, 60 years later”, They are still trying to sell this pig to a public that needs to know the facts. The following are just a few items in response to their claims:
• It will never be known how many workers directly involved with nuclear materials died a premature death due to exposure to high-energy radiation.
• The Japanese were very fortunate that no workers were killed directly by radiation in the Fukushima incident. However, there were very courageous workers who exposed themselves to high radiation to perform emergency shutdowns. Their lives will probably be cut short.
• Millions of pounds of spent fuel from operating plants are still on site. A terrorist’s dream.
• The residue from this technology will be with mankind for thousands of years to come.
• A Chernobyl-type incident at one of the sites that is in a metropolitan area could cause a trillion dollars in damage and render the area unlivable.
There is no good answer to our energy problems and every technology has its down side, but nuclear power is not the solution.
I am sorry that I made it my life’s work.
Why successive Australian governments rejected a Treaty with Aborigines
Forget the Preamble, what Australia needs is a Treaty Woollydays, Derek Barry January 3, 2014“………..A Treaty is a political document between sovereign people and it was this difficulty that saw John Howard reject the idea 
as far back as 1988 as an absurd proposition that “a nation should make a treaty with some of its own citizens.” Yet the idea is far from absurd to the many Indigenous people who see this as the first step in the recognition of the wars and dispossession of their country and the genocide that followed. It was Howard’s assimilatory ideas in the face of historical evidence that were blatantly contradictory and hence absurd. Howard’s culture of forgetting was shared by his later immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock who told ABC in October 1998 there couldn’t be a treaty because there never had been a war in this country.
Ruddock’s idea of war was flawed as was his view of a Treaty. A Treaty (also known by its Yolgnu name Makarrata meaning thigh) was long established as an appropriate way by which whites could acknowledge Aboriginal equality and prior ownership. In 1979 an Aboriginal treaty committee was formed by prominent whites almost all came from political and intellectual left. Then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser offered to discuss treaty conditions with Aborigines while 8 years later his successor Bob Hawke spoke of ‘a compact of understanding’. But this whitefella idea of a treaty was rejected by the Federation of Aboriginal Land Councils because of insufficient consultation with Aborigines, doubts of its significance and consequences and because it would legalise occupation and use of sovereign Aboriginal lands by the Australian settler state…… https://woollydays.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/forget-the-preamble-what-australia-needs-is-a-treaty/
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 