Nothing to Shout About

What is the environmental problem that causes the greatest distress to the largest number of individuals in Australia today?  It is almost certainly not one of the "glamour" issues that the major environmental groups focus on, such as the greenhouse effect, genetically modified crops or the preservation of old growth forests.

These kinds of issues may generate some public concern and disquiet about the future, although they do not greatly affect the perceived quality of everyday living for most people.  But noise pollution does, particularly in urban areas.

As the Courier-Mail reported last week, Queensland Environmental Protection Agency statistics show that complaints about noise are far greater than the combined total of complaints about air pollution, water pollution and waste disposal.  In the last financial year alone, the EPA and local authorities received over 13,000 complaints about noise disturbances.

A national survey conducted in the mid-1980s showed that over 40 per cent of Australians feel that their well being suffers from exposure to unwanted sound, and a more recent study found that almost 1 in 10 people are subject to levels of noise that experts regard as "excessively high".

In the case of some supposed environmental threats, such as pesticide residues or electromagnetic radiation, there is considerable scientific debate about whether there are any serious detrimental effects on humans.  But the harmful consequences of many kinds of commonly occurring noise are reasonably clear, particularly in regards to hearing loss and the damage to health from frequent disturbance to sleep.

Of course, there are state and local government laws designed to regulate noise.  Last December the Beattie government introduced amendments to the Environmental Protection Act which were intended to strengthen existing legislation by placing limits on the times and intensity of various kinds of domestic and industrial noise.

Nevertheless, the actual benefits of some of these new laws can be questioned.  Thus dogs are in breach if they bark for more than three minutes in any thirty minute period between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.  Leaving aside the difficulty of proving that the limit has indeed been broken, the permissible barking period still provides more than enough opportunity for noisy hounds to keep neighbours awake throughout the night.

Yet apart from the special case of aircraft noise, noise pollution has not produced the kind of enthusiastic political constituency that has formed around so many other environmental causes.  Although an Office of Noise Abatement and Control was established within the United States Environmental Protection Agency not long after the EPA was created in 1970, it was never a great success, and the Reagan administration was able to end its funding in 1982 without much protest.

In Australia, an indication of the general insignificance of noise as a social and political issue can be seen in the cursory treatment it receives in the current 500 page long State of the Environment Report -- only a few short paragraphs in a combined section that also deals with "waste heat".  And judging by their literature, green groups such as the Australian Conservation Foundation seem more agitated about the effects of noise pollution on marine mammals than they are about its effects on humans.

But why is noise such an "unsexy" issue for environmentalists?

I think that one of the main reasons lies in its limited potential for mobilising hostility against the status quo.  For the majority of individuals, the most vexing cause of disturbance is traffic or domestic noise.  Yet with the exception of a few very sensitive souls, at least some of the noises that may be distressing in certain contexts can be positively welcomed at other times, such as on festive occasions.

And while barking dogs, swimming pool motors and throbbing music can be very upsetting, they are not the sort of issue that can be used as the starting point for a critique of capitalism or industrial society.  Unlike less comprehensible phenomena such as nuclear radiation or genetic manipulation, such noises cannot easily be portrayed as an insidious threat unleashed by powerful corporations more concerned with profits than public welfare.  Nor can they be depicted as presenting a likely hazard to future generations.

Furthermore, it is by no means obvious that life was much quieter in earlier times, when farm animals were kept in towns, horse-driven carts rumbled across cobblestones, and church bells sounded at regular intervals throughout the night to keep the time.

So until environmental groups can work out a way of harnessing public concerns about noise to an agenda for radical social change, those of us who seek a quieter world are going to have to battle away on our own.

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Globalisation and the Environment

An Address to the 5th Annual Conference on International Trade and Research,
27 October 2000

THE DEMONISATION OF GLOBALISM

When I started to consider what I might say at an address with a similar topic to this, as a reflex action I turned to the Internet and typed in globalisation.  One of the first sites highlighted was that of our very own Pravda-on-the-Yarra, the Age.  This offered a rich tapestry of matters addressing globalisation.

The first of these was the globalisation of sex.  This did not strike me as a new dimension of the issue and I reckoned it would prove too distracting to wade through the piece.  Other articles discussed the massive wealth divide, globalisation brings further injustice, the men have it better, the gap grows wider, and even The Globalised World According to Marx.  Predictably, Pamela Bone, the lioness of the Fitzroy communes, was able to warn Age readers that the planet would pay a high price for John Howard's short-sighted policies.

You've got to hand it to the Age.  They rarely miss an opportunity to propagandise about the ruin that capitalism and free markets are bringing to mankind.

The most contemporary opposition to globalisation erupted at the recent World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle.  That meeting was convened to do nothing more than had been done in five or six previous trade negotiation rounds.  That is, having governments agree to allow their citizens the freedom to buy the goods and services they want to buy from the suppliers they favour.  Lies about the environmental effects of trade liberalisation were among a series of matters activists employed to derail the proceedings.

The precursor to the Seattle riots and those in Melbourne and Prague occurred with an even more obscure proposal, the OECD's Multilateral Agreement on Investment.  That proposal was simply to codify what is the practice in virtually all successful world economies:  namely that foreign investors will be treated no less favourably than locals.

WHAT IS GLOBALISATION?

The notion encompasses several dimensions.  Some of these are traditional, particularly trade in goods.  Others, like trade in insurance and other services, have also been around a long time and capital movements have been the mainspring of the development of the New Worlds including Australia.  The ability of nations to implement new techniques is almost the definition of a resilient and hence successful economy.  Open access to migrants, at least those capable of paying their own way, is a major aspect of this.

One vital component permitting globalisation to happen is the Rule of Law.  That is, well understood concepts of honesty and reasonableness in people dealing with each other.  This was a central feature of the growth of western civilisation as we presently know it.  Relatively unfettered trade between different political entities allowed a considerable cross fertilisation of ideas and allowed specialisation in production, while placing competitive pressures on monopolies.  And one can see, for example in the Merchant of Venice, how general courts arbitrated disputes so that even those considered to be outcasts obtained the same justice as others.  There was a very good reason why this was so.  Those political entities that did not offer the same respect for the rights of foreigners as they afforded their own were by-passed by traders.  They tended to decline in wealth and sometimes faced political emasculation as a result of the reduced capacity to defend themselves this entailed.

Trade and freedom of capital flows remain important aspects of globalisation today.  Freedom of capital flows -- or foreign investment -- allows countries that can convince foreigners they offer good opportunities and security to top up their domestic savings with infusions from abroad.  This is important for another dimension of globalisation:  the ability to copy other people's ideas.  Thus we see firms setting up overseas in non-tradeable services from McDonalds through to supermarkets, and construction.  The host countries benefit from these investments because they bring know-how and with it increased productivity.

But there is nothing inevitable about this trade and investment led growth process.  In fact, trade was much more important in places like Australia a century ago than it was in the 1970s.  The long period of peace in the nineteenth century had brought a far greater globalisation than the world was to see for close to a century -- the world was more integrated in some respects in 1900 than in 1990.  Passports, for example, were required in only the two most backward nations:  the Ottoman and Tsarist Empires.

For Australia, our policy stance turned decidedly inward looking soon after the turn of the 20th century.  This included the adoption of the tariff, supported by Australia's unique centralised wage determination system.  Such policies shifted this country towards the false god of isolationism and away from integration with the world at large.  And we slipped from being the most prosperous nation in the world in 1900 to barely making the top twenty 90 years later.

Some of the most significant steps in unravelling this were taken by the Whitlam Government -- in most respects the worst administration in Australia's history.  Whitlam introduced the first assault on tariffs with the 25% across the board reduction.

Globalisation has been a long trend, though as the setback post 1914 demonstrates it is not an inevitable one.

And all this is being further revolutionised by the internet.  Ironically, it is the internet that has allowed disaffected groups to caucus and assist each other in pushing agendas that are in general seeking to thwart the greater global interconnection that has made their caucusing possible.

For many people in these disaffected groups, globalisation can be stylised to mean:

• big business and an acceleration of what used to be called the rat race
• less job security than was enjoyed in previous times
• and a grinding down of living standards.
• For those outside major urban areas it means an intensification of the relative disadvantages that mass populations can avoid -- communications transport, culture.

To examine what globalisation means in this stylised version I consulted one of the feral sites that were prominent in derailing the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.  The site said

Citizens will have no rights to livelihood, to work, to food, to water, to safe environment.

Well if we examine this what do we find?  The countries that have adopted globalisation most readily:  US, UK, Australia, Singapore, HK Canada, have prospered most over the past decade or so.  These countries have enjoyed rising living standards and considerable employment growth.  Within the developing nations the countries that adopted freedom of capital movements and reduced tariff protection saw an acceleration of growth.  One outstanding example in Latin America was Chile.  Castigated as a 'fascist' state in the 1970s and subject to shipping sanctions from militant unions like the freedom loving Australian Waterside Workers, its policy of reducing taxation abandoning tariff and other support for particular industries pushed its citizens prosperity to the head of the Latin countries.  Its success was not lost on others in the continent and one after the other Latin American countries have abandoned the protectionism with which they sought to insulate themselves from Yankee Imperialism.  The outcome has been an end to the sluggish growth the Continent experienced over the four decades to the 1990s and a new dynamism.

The one Latin American country that refused to join this capitalist resurgence was Cuba.  Once portrayed as the model for the Continent, Cuba is now recognised as an international basket case.  It is a place to which many are flocking to see a 1950s museum piece, but a place from which its own citizens are so desperate to escape that they take colossal risks to do so.

A similar contrast can be seen in Asia.  During my lifetime I have seen the disparity in outcomes between nations like Burma and North Korea and the Asian tiger economies.  At least two Asian Tigers have overtaken Australia and enjoy income levels twentyfold those of nations that were comparably placed forty years ago.  In a less dramatic fashion, we have seen India and Pakistan, both of which have adopted insular policies for most of the post war years, being surpassed in wealth by nations like Taiwan and South Korea.  These countries started the Post World War II era in a far more wretched condition.

Environmental outcomes have proven to be better under globalisation embracing economies.  Partly this is because the economic freedom entailed in globalisation improves the capacity of economies to afford better environments.  In countries like Australia we have seen an immense improvement in things like Melbourne's atmospheric pollution, ozone, smoke, carbon monoxide now down to half their levels of the early 1970s.  Perhaps we'll even return the Yarra to a genuine fishable and swimmable condition that has now been achieved with the Thames.

Similarly improved living standards have also allowed us to set aside more land for the environmental assets we prize.  There is for example considerably more forested area in Australia today than there was a century ago.  Partly this is due to national parks but it is also due to the increased productivity of land that has made it unnecessary and unprofitable to farm marginal land.  This is in contrast to outcomes in the poorer countries where low living standards and low levels of capital force a more intensive agriculture.

Trade, investment and globalisation in general is no threat developing countries' environments.  Quite the contrary.  It offers them the surest means of alleviating environmental stress.  Better environmental outcomes also result from the same forces that bring globalisation.  The more insular economies with arbitrary law, like the old East European economies have had the worst possible economic outcomes with the eutrification of vast inland seas and air pollution in the cities.

The better outcomes in the economies embracing globalisation have come about partly because of the accompanying facets:  individual property rights and obligations.  These mean there can be no headlong rush towards a goal if that means impinging on others' rights.  This is an automatic stabiliser that has been free societies' guardian against some of the grievous environmental outcomes seen in Eastern Europe.

There is another reason why globalisation has been beneficial to the environment.  This is because it means trade, swapping information and allowing the most efficient use of resources.  This allows more economical use of land.  Thus crop yields in Australia and in those developing countries that have adopted modern, that is, global technologies have more than doubled since the mid 1950s.  Without the ability to make better use of land by specialisation -- that is by trade -- and without the adoption of improved farming techniques, we would surely have faced famine as the population controller.

Right now we are seeing a further wave of global technology in the food and fibre industries.  This is the genetic modification of plants that is allowing:

• increased plant productivity
• reduced use of scarce resources like water
• control of pests and other blights that would otherwise reduce output, in ways that greatly economise on the use of pesticides and other chemicals.

Unfortunately, we are seeing Greenpeace and other knee-jerk enemies of improved living standards embarking on campaigns not only to oppose these new products but to prevent them being tested.  Some such ill-considered opposition campaigns seek to make use of trade to force their proponents' favoured outcomes.

We have seen such actions in the past.  They stem from misplaced notions like those expressed by the World Wildlife Fund 'application of WTO rules continue to have unintended negative environmental and social consequences' ⁽¹⁾.  Yet, this proposed distortion of trade rules to promote environmental outcomes is a danger to the world trade system that has done so much to facilitate a uniquely long period of uninterrupted economic growth that we have seen this past 50 years.  There are at present just a few such impediments to trade authorised by e WTO.  But many, especially the European protectionists are looking to foster others.

Those environmental inspired trade restraints that we presently have include CITES.  This well meaning system of restraint to trade in endangered species has done a great deal to prevent the use and hence harvesting and protection of wild animals.  The rhino and elephant are dangerous creatures that destroy village crops unless their ownership is vested and the villagers can harvest them and otherwise gain, for example by protecting them for tourism.  Similar such issues are present in Australia where we foolishly prevent the export of parrots and other wildlife which transforms them into vermin competing for fodder and water rather than the incubator of a new farming industry.

Other environmental trade restraints include the Basle Convention on toxic waste.  Not only has this paternalistically imposed the wisdom of west on developed countries but it has done so in a typically heavy handed fashion.  It prevents the disposal of and recycling of batteries, computer scrap and other waste in a cost effective manner.  This denial of the most economical disposal has both a perverse effect on the environment it seeks to support, and operates to the detriment of Third World employment opportunities.  To Greenpeace, a sponsor of the Treaty, the fact that every country is now required to dispose of its own waste is more important than an improvement in Developing Countries living standards and a better environment.

We now have this taken further with the Cartagena Protocol.  This controls the trade in genetically modified products in foreign countries.  Allegedly it meets a threat to biodiversity.

In fact, it owes much to the protectionism of the Europeans, seeing their own green movements applying sufficient pressure to block these innovations and fearing for their farming communities' consequent loss of competitiveness against crops that can be grown on less land with fewer pesticides and offering higher yields.  The notion that these new products could create the Triffid mayhem that doomsayers predict is fanciful in the extreme;  the possibility that they could survive processing and long distance transport is ludicrous.  Yet we now have some new controls on trade and an aggressive green movement keen on imposing its prejudices on hapless developing countries.

These are the very ones who stand to benefit most from the technology.

Much of the opposition to globalisation is to multinational corporations.  McDonalds and Starbucks were targetted at Seattle.

This demonisation of the corporation has never made less sense than it does today.  Corporations are not remote institutions owned by an oligarchy of rich people.  They are businesses desperately trying to seek out customers and ways of meeting their ever-changing needs, and doing so with a constant eye on better techniques and other cost savings.  Competition forces these cost savings to be passed on to customers if the firm is to continue to exist.

Just as significantly, the corporations are owned by individuals, by everyone who has superannuation or any other form of saving.  And the corporations are desperate to keep our money by constantly showing us, if we are individual shareholders, or our institutional agents in the case of superannuation etc. that they are protecting and augmenting our funds.

GOBALISATION:  THE REALITY

Over the past decade or so we have seen a transformation of the Australian economy.  This has greatly enriched us.  In the decade to 1980, average wealth per capita actually declined by a couple of percent.  During the 1980's this rebounded with a 21 per cent increase.  But during the 1990s wealth per capita increased by 38 per cent.

Major stimulants to this trend has been globalisation and our adoption of it.  During the 1980's we saw tariff reform that forced Australian industry to cease being coddled and to take its place within the world economy.  The outcome was a quantum leap in productivity.  During the 1990s we saw governments react to the need to maintain global efficiency by reinforcing the importance of competition law.  This meant subjecting government owned businesses to the same market disciplines the private sector faced.  It also, especially here in Victoria, meant privatisation with the unlocking of previously hidden value and a massive upsurge in productivity.

These developments were in part a response to the avalanche of increased global interaction that technology was bringing.  In many cases the response was to the manifestations of technology rather than technology itself.  Thus, the inefficiency of Victoria's gas and electricity industries had been tolerated for years but was becoming less so as industry sought every opportunity to achieve international competitiveness.

Perhaps for the first time in a century, over the past decade, we have now embarked on a period where our productivity growth is higher than that of the average OECD nation.  Moreover, we weathered the Asian crisis without a pause in spite of our close export ties to the countries that suffered catastrophic reductions in their production levels.

Globalisation, like economic rationalism before it, is often used as a bogey word.  In both cases the words are used to impart notions of imposed outcomes on a hapless public.  Such constructions are the worst forms of Orwellian Newspeek.  They reverse the meaning of concepts that simply represent freedom for the consumer to choose for herself what to spend her money on.  Economic rationalism and globalisation mean getting government out of the way of decisions and allowing individuals to decide whether they buy one good rather than another, whether they buy services produced overseas rather than at home, whether they choose to spend their own money or save it, whether they invest at home or overseas.

Finally, the greater prosperity it brings allows us to afford the environmental services that we also value.  In addition it means the application of newer technologies which tend to be cleaner than those they replace.  Simple comparisons between countries, and within countries over time, demonstrate that improved income levels mean a better environment as well as higher living standards.

---

ENDNOTE

1. WWF International Position Statement, March 1999

Biotechnology and Food: 10,000 Years of Sowing Seeds, 100 Years of Harvesting Genes

Biotechnology Backgrounders

SUMMARY

There are two great success stories of biological technologies in the twentieth century:  the taming of infectious disease by antibiotics and vaccines, and the harnessing of genetic improvement in crops, epitomised by the Green Revolution.  Both have allowed the impact of devastating hardships around the world to be significantly reduced.  In both cases, the very success of technology has lulled us into a false sense of security.  Most people are no longer preoccupied with the danger signals of death and starvation that drove many of the original technological achievements on which these advances were based.

It is the theme of this Backgrounder that the argument that current food production methods are adequate, and that all that is needed to solve hunger problems is a more perfect distribution system, is a dangerously complacent one.  Such policies will fail to ensure that adequate cheap supplies of food are generally available -- especially given an expected world population increase of some 3 billion people by 2050.

Four main aspects of this topic will be explored in this paper.  First, the driving forces behind innovative crop gene modification will be presented -- that is, why this research is taking place.  Second, the paper will explain the role already played by gene technology in crop improvement, and will point out why better methods are needed.  Third, some of the specific details of the new gene technology and some explanation of how it is used by breeders will be given, and finally there is a discussion of the risks posed by innovation in crop breeding using gene manipulation.

HOW GENETICS IS USED TO IMPROVE AGRICULTURE

Genetically modified crops (GM crops, GM foods) represent the most obvious outcome of recent technological innovation in plant breeding, and they represent one way in which advances in breeding techniques and basic science have yielded better and quicker ways to create improved crops.  These are outlined in Table 1.

Table 1: Old and New Ways of Breeding Crops

Stage	Twentieth-Century Methods	Twenty-First-Century Methods
Finding desirable traits	Searching among closely related species.  Nature of trait poorly understood	Searching among wider range of species, completely detailed genetic maps, searching gene databases, numerous alternatives for scientifically based trait manipulation
Breeding with different parent to generate potentially useful hybrids	Desired gene contaminated with thousands of undesirable genes Cross-pollination, interspecies and intergenus crosses rescued by laborious laboratory procedures (embryo rescue)	Genetic dissection to select only the desired genetic material, novel tools (gene ferries or vectors) and methods for gene injection to enable single traits to be transferred into new hosts.  New tools (for example, detailed genetic maps, genetic markers) to speed up
Mating of novel hybrids with Elite varieties	Extremely time-consuming major hurdle for crop breeding	Gene cloning and marker technologies reduce this hurdle by minimizing introduction of unwanted genes and reducing time and labour needed to regain Elite status. (Breeding is still needed to adapt hybrids to local conditions.)

Many different approaches to targeting desirable traits are being explored.  They all offer a common, very decisive, advantage over older methods -- they enable the breeder to avoid introducing the many thousands of other often undesirable genes that are present in the donor organism.

A first step in breeding new crop hybrids is identification of the trait that needs to be improved -- for instance, resistance to a fungal disease in a cereal crop.  A search is then usually made for new breeding stock that displays intrinsic resistance to the particular fungus, virus or bacterium causing disease, and frequently it is found that plants consist of several or even many "races" which display different attributes with regard to disease resistance.  Very often it has been necessary to test wild relatives of the domesticated crop variety as a possible source of new genes, or even wild plants from other, more distant biological groups to find novel intrinsic resistance mechanisms to particular diseases.  The practical details of breeding traits from such diverse biological sources into domesticated food crops are a major experimental hurdle because crosses involving different plant species are often infertile, and potentially valuable hybrid embryos need to be rescued using special laboratory and greenhouse techniques.

If the parental stocks used in a plantbreeding programme are from the same species, cross-pollination to produce improved hybrids is much more straightforward.  But there is another problem to consider.  Existing domesticated crops called Elite varieties have undergone extensive breeding to ensure that they are high yielding or have other desired traits to assist farming, such as suitability to local climates and soils.  Natural cross-pollination introduces thousands of new traits into the hybrid and many of them are undesirable and destroy the hard-gained advantages of the Elite varieties.  Time and effort have to be spent in conventional breeding programmes to remove these undesired genes and it may take 5-10 years for a new crop to reach the market.

Advances in DNA science have created new methods and concepts that allow conventional breeding to be done more speedily and efficiently.

THE DRIVING FORCE FOR GENETIC MODIFICATION

Some major practical results of using gene technology in agriculture are given in Table 2 and they provide insight into the reasons why genetic modification is being used so enthusiastically by modern plant scientists.  The different aspects of crop improvement are listed in the table in the approximate order in which they are reaching the consumer marketplace.

Table 2: Improvement to Crops from Modern Genetic Technologies

Type of Improvement	Examples
Lower cost, more efficient production	Herbicide-tolerant plants
Environmental benefits such as smaller farm area, lower amounts of persistent chemical pesticides, substitution with more desirable pesticides	Herbicide-tolerant plants, Bt-maize
Better, faster breeding methods	Marker technologies, genome science, gene-transfer vectors, biolistics
Disease resistance, pest resistance	Bt-maize, natural plant disease prevention genes (R-genes), novel anti-fungal infection defences, virus resistance
Improved nutrition	Vitamin A-containing rice, iron-enriched rice
New crops, new products	Novel oilseeds, novel plastics
Improved yields	Probable medium-term outcome of basic plant science as exemplified by boosted rice output with maize genes

These practical outcomes are best illustrated by the story of GM crops in the US and they also indicate the likely directions to be taken by agriculture in Australia in the near future. ⁽¹⁾  It should be added that GM crops are grown extensively outside the US, in China for example.

The main GM crops in the US are currently herbicide-tolerant soybeans, insect-resistant (Bt) cotton, and insect-resistant corn.  US adoption of these new crops underwent very significant changes from 1995 through to 1998.  First introduced in 1996, 40 per cent of all soybean acreage was planted with herbicide-resistant GM varieties by 1998.  Nineteen per cent of corn acreage was planted with European corn borer-resistant GM varieties in 1998, and the acreage of cotton devoted to GM herbicide-resistant varieties was 26 per cent by 1998.  In 1997, adoption of herbicide-tolerant varieties led to statistically significant reductions in herbicide use in 4 out of 8 regions across all crops, mostly for soybeans.  These figures are supported by the assessments of Australian weed scientists. ⁽²⁾

Bt insecticide is a natural protein insecticide produced by bacteria.  Bt-insecticide-based GM technology was widely deployed in the US in the 1997 season.  Decreased use of chemical pesticides targeted at the insects against which the Bt gene protects plants was also observed by the USDA Economic Research Service in overall US statistical data.  Encouragingly, in 4 out of 7 regions, adopters of Bt cotton appeared to obtain significantly higher crop yields than non-adopters, and similar results were observed for Bt corn. ⁽³⁾

In 1999 in the US, it was expected that 40 per cent of the corn, 50 per cent of the cotton, and 45 per cent of the soybean acres would be planted with genetically modified crops, reducing the use of chemical pesticides by millions of kilograms. ⁽⁴⁾  A further benefit of GM herbicide-resistant crops is that they create more scope for minimum tillage farming, which reduces erosion of topsoil.

Most GM foods currently available to consumers are modified so that the benefits are largely realised as decreased cost of production rather than improvements in product quality.  Thus, the main economic outcomes from GM technology in the short term should be marginally lower food prices and better economic competitiveness and financial vitality in farming regions.  This should be realised especially in low-cost agricultural countries such as Australia, the US and Canada.

A staggering number of children in the world -- 200 million -- are malnourished.  "Golden rice" vividly illustrates how GM foods can greatly benefit these children, and consumers generally, by providing food with greatly improved nutritional qualities. ⁽⁵⁾  Newly developed strains of rice have been created by a team led by Dr Ingo Potrykus in Switzerland to meet the needs of people suffering from vitamin A deficiency, the world's leading cause of blindness, affecting as many as 400 million people.

Dr Potrykus' team has also created rice which has high levels of iron.  Iron-deficiency anaemia is the most common consequence of malnutrition, ⁽⁶⁾ and it afflicts some 3.7 billion people.  Recently, the long-touted potential for food crop yields to be increased by GM technology has been unexpectedly confirmed by an announcement that rice yields can be boosted dramatically -- by about 35 per cent -- by introducing maize genes to confer on rice more efficient photosynthesis.  The huge excitement generated by this early report will be amply justified if these laboratory and greenhouse findings can be even partly confirmed in practical agriculture. ⁽⁷⁾

THE ORIGINS OF GENETICS AND FIRST
APPLICATIONS TO PLANT BREEDING

In the twenty-first century, genetic modification is routinely carried out by modifying the genes within cells in a deliberate and direct way.  The outcome of experiments can be planned beforehand and new hybrids created by design, often with the aid of a computer and chemical synthesis of artificial DNA.  This revolutionary technology had rather modest beginnings.  They date back long before the science of genetics was conceived.

Jared Diamond's prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel:  A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, contains a fascinating discussion of how agriculture began near what is now Syria some 9000 years ago. ⁽⁸⁾  Both inbreeding, or self-pollination, and cross-breeding, or interspecies hybrid formation, played an important role in the origins of our staple foods.  Crosses between different species of flowering plants are, in fact, a common mechanism by which new species of plant originate.  Bread wheat, for example, contains virtually the complete chromosomal sets from three distinct grasses whose relatives grow wild today in the Middle East.

Wild grasses near the Fertile Crescent contained a high percentage of hermaphrodite "selfers".  These are plants that normally self-pollinate but which occasionally cross-pollinate.  Such "selfing" characteristics were exploited by the earliest farmers.  Occasional variants (mutants) produced seeds with a favourable characteristic that made them more useful as foods.  These variants were automatically favoured by farmers for use in the next season's crops as "selfing" would give crops in the next season similar characteristics.

In the main cereal crops, ability to cross-pollinate is not confined to individuals of the same species but can occur between species.  Bread wheat, as mentioned before, is one such inter-species hybrid.  It was originally generated in the Fertile Crescent thousands of years ago, and it is now the most valuable crop globally.  Thus, both natural evolution and conventional plant breeding can generate massive numbers of cross-species, gene transfer events.

In short, several thousands of years of mostly unintentional, non-scientific selection of plant varieties for advantageous characteristics have led to modern varieties of cereals and other crops.

GENETICS AS A SCIENCE

The concept of a gene as a particle of inheritance was formulated by Gregor Mendel in the 1860s.  This concept was later extended greatly, so that we now know that the particles postulated by Mendel and others at the turn of the twentieth century are DNA molecules, and that genes are physically carried in the nucleus of cells.  All of these discoveries greatly influenced and stimulated plant breeding and crop improvement, and have had a major influence on global agricultural productivity since the early years of the twentieth century. ⁽⁹⁾

These breeding developments rely heavily on natural genetic diversity ("germ plasm") present in wild plant varieties, and by 1900 the first germ plasm collections were established.  A solid empirical and experimental basis for the science of genetics was put in place between 1900 and 1930.  An example of the impact of this science of "Mendelian genetics" was the discovery of hybrid vigour, which explained the better performance of intraspecies hybrids.  Between 1940 and 1980 in the United States, per hectare yields of maize tripled and those of wheat and soybeans doubled.  Much of this increase was achieved through scientific breeding programmes. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Deliberate cross-species gene transfer by pollination from related species of wild grasses into wheat actually began in 1930.  The driving force for these experiments is the damaging susceptibility of wheat to serious, widely occurring fungal diseases known as rusts and smuts.  McFadden showed in 1930 that the wild grass genes from emmer (Triticale tauschii) could be bred artificially into bread wheat (T. aestivum) to create the new variety "Hope", which was responsible for one of the longest rust-free periods in the history of US wheat cultivation.

DNA MANIPULATION

Modern genetics involves much manipulation of DNA outside of cells as a technique to find out how living organisms work and to achieve practical outcomes like modifying crop plants.  Three seemingly simple ideas form the basis of these procedures.  They seem very simple but they required great brilliance, luck and hard work by many scientists to establish that they are indeed true.  These ideas are:

1. That fundamental genetic components of cells are chemical polymers that can be extracted from cells, chemically purified, analysed, and put back inside living cells to redirect their activities (discovered by Oswald Avery in 1944).
2. That the genetic material acts as precisely-stored, coded information used by cells to direct their activities (discovered by James Watson, Francis Crick and many other workers around the years 1952-1960).
3. That the genetic material can be deliberately rearranged relatively easily outside cells, in the test tube, by using certain enzymes extracted from cells, and that the rearranged information can be used by cells (discovered by Stan Cohen, Paul Berg and other workers around 1972).

These three concepts, discovered largely through academic research on bacteria, form the basis of our current ability to change genes inside cells deliberately.  In a very real sense, much of the genetics that hits the headlines in newspapers today is a rerun of the bacterial genetics of the 1970s, albeit in much more complex organisms, using far more powerful procedures and on a much more economically ambitious scale.

THE RED QUEEN

"Well in our country", said Alice, still panting a little "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen.  "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

[Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass]

The advances obtained from conventional breeding exemplified by hybrid maize and other high-performing cereal crops are not without their problems, since over-reliance on particular Elite inbred varieties ("monocultures") can lead to spectacular crop failures due to unrestricted spread of diseases such as smuts and rusts of cereals.  One approach (already mentioned) which has been enormously important in managing these disease problems is to cross-breed Elite lines with diverse wild grasses, which contain novel genes for disease resistance.  The aim of such experiments is to combine new useful genes from the wild parent with the many agronomically important genes from the Elite parent.  These breeding efforts have been enormously important in giving global food security, since about the mid-1930s, when disease problems of monocultures first emerged and, as already stated, the world currently has adequate food supplies because of them.

But, unfortunately, parasites evolve too, and new forms of crop diseases constantly emerge to cause problems with existing disease-resistant varieties.  Thus, crop breeder and pathogen are part of an ongoing race, in which the breeder, as the Red Queen suggested to Alice, if he or she wants to get somewhere "must run at least twice as fast as that!".

RISKS, HAZARDS AND OTHER OBJECTIONS TO GM FOODS

Many questions are raised about the risks posed by the artificial transfer of new genes into food crops.  Major areas of debate centre on whether novel GM crops create significant environmental hazards or whether transfer of pollen from GM crops into biologically related natural species such as weeds will have detrimental effects.  Perhaps most importantly, consumers will seek assurances that there are no unexpected hazards associated with eating these products.

Regrettably many discussions of the hazards posed by GM foods do not appear to involve rigorous scientific input.  A welcome exception to this is the series of papers in the 22 April 1999 issue of the science journal Nature. ⁽¹¹⁾

The editorial to that issue of Nature summarises the problems with this debate succinctly:

Two points about the scientific debate must be made immediately.  The first is that much of the recent outcry about the potential dangers of such foods, particularly in Britain, has been based on exaggerated claims ... There is as yet no substantial evidence that GM foods are inherently more dangerous than conventional foods.

The second point, however, is that ... many scientists feel that the widely quoted "hazards" such as the potential spread of herbicide-resistant "superweeds", have been overemphasised by the critics. ⁽¹²⁾

GENES MOVE NATURALLY BETWEEN SPECIES AS WELL AS BETWEEN GENERATIONS -- BUT MANY PEOPLE STILL DON'T REALISE IT

Moral objections, or even objections that are a tricky mixture of moral conviction and science, are often raised against GM food.  The supposed "unnatural" transfer of genes between species is a major source of objection, and it is implied that this breaks some natural law, or is at least a radically new precedent previously not part of our food supply.

For example, it is boldly stated at the start of the Australian Conservation Foundation's June 1999 Habitat Australia supplement "Say No! to Gene Tech's Bitter Harvest" that:

Genetic engineering enables the tree of life to be scrambled for the first time.  It allows genes to be transferred across species boundaries, from any living organism to any other -- animals to humans, humans to bacteria, microbes to plants, and so on.  This could never happen in nature or through traditional breeding, where sows deliver piglets and roses make rosebuds.

This statement is totally false.  There is, in fact, no overarching natural law or scientifically established biological function associated with containment of genes within species.  Those barriers that do exist may largely be just accidents of evolution, and there is definitely no absolute genetic barrier between species.  Recently, much new evidence for gene movement has emerged from complete analysis of the total encoded DNA message of many organisms -- the so-called "Genome Projects".  These studies have made biologists realise, with surprise, that transfer of genes between distant branches of the tree of life is the norm, not the rare exception. ⁽¹³⁾

One of the sources of the serious misconceptions about nature exemplified by the ACF statement is that the "reproductive isolation" or species concept taught in school biology is merely a conceptual model (and a simplistic model at that) which is used to improve understanding of how creatures evolve in natural populations.  It is not a prescription for what ought to be.  For many organisms, their behaviour in nature does not conform to any rule that species must be reproductively isolated from one another -- this is especially true for flowering plants, which very often form hybrids or new species as a result of natural cross-pollination between species.

Such interspecies cross-pollination, carried out artificially using conventional technology, has in the past yielded several new foods, for example, nectarines and boysenberries, and has been used extensively by plant breeders to improve a wide range of food crops.  These include potatoes and tomatoes, in addition to the cereal hybrids already mentioned.

GENES MOVE AROUND WITHIN A SPECIES TOO!

Nobel prize winner Barbara McClintock is famous for initiating a new era in genetics, which flourished from the mid-1970s onward.  McClintock's work made biologists realise that there is much random gene movement going on within cells.  This natural DNA rearrangement plays a very significant role in natural evolution of all plants and animals.  For example about 37 per cent of human DNA consists of this genetically mobile category of DNA. ⁽¹⁴⁾  The natural mobility of this DNA is very similar in many aspects to DNA rearrangements exploited by genetic scientists in the laboratory.  Extensive scientific knowledge about natural DNA rearrangements is the basis for the carefully considered scientific conclusion that the risks posed by GM foods are similar to those displayed by conventional crops.

RELIGIOUS OBJECTIONS AND GENETICS

Moral judgements of value and codes of behaviour concerning dietary laws handed down by religious tradition rest on a different set of assumptions and rules of behaviour.  But these customs are obviously very important influences affecting the acceptance of some foods, and one of the unsettling aspects about new GM foods is that they require rethinking of the reasoning behind judgements which involve religious dietary rules.

Consider the question "If I introduce a pig gene into chickens, and eat the meat of the modified chickens, am I eating pork?", which represents a common concern of this type.  Genetic knowledge can help refine the question by telling us that it is not the mere fact that the gene comes from a pig that makes it necessarily distinctive, because when one focuses on individual genes, a substantial part of the DNA from a pig is essentially the same as that of the chicken, and perhaps the objection to pork is better related to the behavioural habits of the pig and its susceptibility to parasites, which are not determined by a single gene.

REGULATION AND RISKS

One can approach the issue of whether GM crops are adequately regulated by comparing the way in which conventional and GM crops with similar characteristics are assessed.  Consider, for example, herbicide-resistant crops.  By applying conventional breeding methods, plant breeders have developed varieties of fodder clover and oilseed rape (Canola) that are resistant to synthetic herbicides.  As these varieties are considered to be "natural", relatively little attention has been given to their possible adverse environmental effects.  They are exempt from the regulatory restrictions that apply to GM crops simply because laboratory manipulation of DNA outside of cells was not involved in their creation.  Relatively little discussion is made of the movement of pollen from these "natural" varieties into other species, as there is little perception that this constitutes a hazard.

By contrast, herbicide-tolerant plants generated by DNA manipulation, such as glyphosate-tolerant cotton (including Roundup Ready crops) or glufosinate-tolerant soybeans are subject to formal registration requirements in Australia involving the genetic regulatory body (formerly known as GMAC, currently IOGTR and soon to be OGTR), the agricultural and veterinary chemical regulator (the NRA) and other regulatory bodies.  These products cannot enter the market unless vetted by committees that consider detailed submissions about their possible adverse environmental effects.  If they are food-related crops, the food has to be evaluated by ANZFA -- the Australia and New Zealand Food Authority -- which scrutinises health and safety implications of the genes and gene products introduced into a crop and the foods derived from them.  And yet, considerably more is known about the nature of the genetic changes in the GM crop than in the natural herbicide-resistant plants.

It is sometimes argued that the technology for insertion of a foreign gene is uncontrolled because the foreign gene cassette is inserted at a randomly located chromosome location.  But random insertion of naturally mobile DNA cassettes often occurs in natural varieties of plants, so no intrinsically novel risk is involved.

A similar comparison can be made between the food risks posed by GM foods and those posed by conventional plant varieties.  Food toxicity problems are found in both GM foods and conventional foods but they are perceived and managed very differently, and the extra attention given to GM foods has worked in favour of consumers.

This different management is illustrated by a GM food problem arising from a Brazil nut protein, whose gene was inserted into soybeans by Iowa-based company Pioneer Hi-Bred in the hope that it would provide an improved nutritional profile of essential amino acids.  Unfortunately, the particular protein selected was later found to cause reactions in the blood serum of people allergic to Brazil nuts and, not surprisingly, the GM soybean also provoked these adverse allergic reactions.  As a result, this novel food has not entered the marketplace.  It is worth noting that such screening is not possible with conventionally bred hybrids, as thousands of unidentified new protein antigens are introduced in the "natural" hybridising process.

On the other hand, selection and marketing of natural varieties of potato and celery, which had conventionally bred improvements to pest resistance, have in the past led to the selling of foods that were downright hazardous.  Relatively little fuss was made about them and they were withdrawn from the market.  "Many of the nightmares predicted for genetically engineered crops have already happened [in non-GM crops]", comments Tony Connor of the New Zealand Institute of Crop and Food Research." ⁽¹⁵⁾  Conventionally-bred potatoes and celery still appear on supermarket shelves without warning labels.

The above examples illustrate how public perceptions of risk are biased by the media's need for new stories which give undue attention to minuscule risks from pesticides and hypothetical fears of gene technology.  For instance, an objective assessment of the relative risks of eating food suggests that microbial contamination is a million times more damaging than pesticide residues. ⁽¹⁶⁾  More than 20 per cent of Australians suffer from microbial food poisoning each year, yet these anti-GM food biases actually get in the way of better public health and better environmental management, if only by diverting attention and investment from sensible priorities.

More compelling reasons for requiring DNA-manipulated plants to be subject to special regulation are the need to obtain more familiarity with a new technology under large-scale actual conditions of use, and also to understand the detailed consequences of a far-reaching technology involving products that are released to multiply and evolve in the environment.  The purposes of such a strategy are to ensure that any benefits it offers are not cancelled out by major unanticipated risks.  An argument can be made that many adverse consequences of new technologies are not detected by small-scale experiments but only emerge from large-scale use (for example, the difficulties attributed to large-scale use of DDT).

From this point of view, regulatory oversight is required to provide an ordered and gradual implementation of a technology so that we can identify the problems and gain familiarity with the organisms.

One widely touted concern about GM crops is the escape of genes from them into other species via pollen.  This process is not unique to GM crops, and large-scale raising of cultivated plants has always resulted in gene transfer to natural populations in those instances where there are related natural species.  There are at least 16 documented cases of pollen cross-fertilisation between conventional crops bearing herbicide- or pest-resistance genes and natural species. ⁽¹⁷⁾  This scenario is of greater concern when the relatives are weedy and, in general, it is the Brassica family, including Canola (oilseed rape), in which it is common to find widely distributed wild/weedy relatives.  When the gene introduced into a plant variety offers some specific growth advantage (for example, insect resistance due to the Bt gene), such movement of pollen has potential for adverse environmental consequences.

Work by Thomas Mikkelson in Denmark has shown that in experimental field trials, herbicide-resistance gene movement can occur from oilseed rape into weedy relatives.  If the same happens in farmers' fields, the benefits of this GM trait may be lost.  The gene, however, may not give any advantage to the weedy relatives if they are not sprayed with herbicide, and will create a genetic burden by which the plant is disadvantaged and unable to compete successfully with wilder varieties.  Several studies have suggested that with some crops (tobacco, oilseed rape, rice) the hybrids created by herbicide-gene escape are puny weeds rather than superweeds. ⁽¹⁸⁾

It is pertinent, however, that different cultivated crops have varying abilities to produce pollen, and several have no known natural species in particular locations, and hence a pollen transfer scenario in these cases offers minimal risk.  For example, genetically modified carnations have been developed by the Australian company Florigene, but these cannot effectively cross-pollinate, and have no relatives in Australia to which genes can escape by this route.  Similarly, cotton in many regions of Australia has no native species of the genus Gossypium with which it can exchange pollen.  Pineapple plants also do not cross-pollinate with other plant species found in Australia.

Transfer of pollen within the same species, from GM plants to non-GM plants, is a concern for the organic farming community who wish to certify that their produce is free from GM contamination.  A recent study conducted at the University of Maine's Cooperative Extension farm has found that there is little cross-pollination between genetically engineered and conventional corn plants in the field.  A Bangor Daily News story shows a glimpse of the future:

The study revealed that ... in hybrid corn grown downwind from the GE plots, there was about a 1 percent cross-pollination in the first six rows within 100 feet of the GE corn.  In the middle six rows, the frequency dropped to 0.1 percent, and in the last six rows, the frequency dropped to 0.03 percent.  No cross-pollination was found in corn 1,000 feet away. ⁽¹⁹⁾

One can only hope that similar articles in future Australian rural newspapers will provide assurance to Australian organic farmers that co-existence of GM farming and organic farms is feasible.

CONCLUSIONS

The various misconceptions about GM crops pointed out in this Backgrounder matter profoundly, because they are being exploited to create unnecessary barriers between food supply and demand.  The argument that we now should turn away from using genetic innovation because we currently have adequate global food supplies ignores both the past and the future.  It requires wilful ignorance of the fact that, in the twentieth century, better breeds of staple crops fed a greatly expanded world population.  Furthermore, it fails to take into account the long lead-time in plant breeding, and that in the twenty-first century it will be too late if we delay research on a better food supply until problems emerge.  For these reasons we should examine closely the argument that the risks of the new technology are so great that GM foods should be blocked.  Several of the premises on which this case is made are simply untrue.  Given the widespread adoption of this technology in North America and China, it is likely to continue being widely used, and the key policy issue for Australians to consider is how to obtain maximum advantage from this rapidly changing technology.

To imagine that mankind will achieve an adequate future food supply without considerable ingenuity is to misunderstand both evolution and ecology.  We need to remember that we have limited resources to deal with the challenges of the future and that by wasting them we deprive other problems of solutions.  Undoubtedly, much more debate will occur before it becomes clear where our concerns should be most focused and how these limited human resources can be best deployed.

---

ENDNOTES

1.  See Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture (25 June 1999;  20 July;  http://www.econ.ag.gov/whatsnew/issues/biotech).

2.  For example, G.W. Charles, et al., "Current and future weed control practices in cotton:  the potential use of transgenic cotton herbicide resistance", pages 89-100 in G.D. McLean and G. Evans (eds), Herbicide-Resistant Crops and Pastures in Australian Farming Systems, Bureau of Resource Sciences, Canberra, 1995.

3.  It is worth noting that although laboratory experiments have been used to argue that Bt pollen might harm the rare monarch butterfly (J.E. Losey, et al., Nature, 399, page 214, 1999;  see comments by Aynsley Kellow, Letter to The Weekend Australian, 7-8 August 1999) these disputed studies involved allowing larvae to feed on milkweed leaves, dusted with Bt corn pollen.  In the field, the behaviour of insects in making choices between different foods (see T.H. Schuler, et al., "Parasitoid behaviour and Bt Plants", Nature, 400, page 825, 1999) can greatly change the effect of toxins and there is evidence from field studies that the effect on these threatened species from Bt corn can be minimal.

4.  R.N. Beachy, "Facing Fear of Biotechnology", [Editorial], Science, 16 July 1999.

5.  See " 'Golden rice' dishes up a healthy diet", The Age, 15 January 2000;  T. Gura, "New genes boost rice nutrients", Science, 285, pages 994-995.

6.  See J.L. Brown and E. Pollitt, "Malnutrition, poverty and intellectual development", Scientific American, February 1996, page 2631.

7.  Andy Coghlan, "Filling the bowl", New Scientist, 1 April 2000, page 19.

8.  J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel:  A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, Vintage, London, 1998.

9.  See R.M. Goodman, et al., "Gene transfer in crop development", Science, 236, pages 48-54, 1987.

10.  See Encyclopædia Britannica article on "Agricultural Sciences", 1997.

11.  Nature, 398, 22 April 1999, particularly D. Butler, et al., "Long term effect of GM crops serves up food for thought", page 651.

12.  Ibid., page 639.

13.  See "One jump ahead:  Genes may move between species as well as between generations", The Economist, 17 April 1993, pages 91-92;  J. Rennie, "DNA's new twists", Scientific American, March 1993, pages 89-96;  W.F. Doolittle, "You are what you eat:  a gene transfer ratchet could account for bacterial genes in eukaryotic nuclear genomes", Trends in Genetics, 14, pages 307-311, 1998;  R.F. Doolittle and P. Bork, "Evolutionarily Mobile Modules in Proteins", Scientific American, October 1993, pages 34-40, Elizabeth Penisi, "Genome data shake the tree of life", Science, 14, pages 672-674, 1998.

14.  Beautifully discussed in "Chromosome 8" by Matt Ridley in Genome:  The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, London, 1999.

15.  Phil Cohen, "Strange fruit", New Scientist, 31 October 1998, pages 42-45.

16.  See A.S. Truswell, et al., in Proceedings of Marbou Symposium on Food and Cancer, Caslon Press, Stockholm, 1978.

17.  Martin Brookes, "Running Wild", New Scientist, 31 October 1998, page 38.

18.  See Brookes, op. cit.

19.  Bangor Daily News, Maine, USA, 8 January 2000.

Trapped as Perpetual Victims

It couldn't last.  Just as commentators were saying that the Sydney Olympics showed Australia had achieved "cultural maturity", our "progressives" showed that when it comes to cultural politics they are as childish as ever.

It started at the Closing Ceremony, with the "sorry suits" of Peter Garrett and the other Midnight Oil members.  At first, caught up in the euphoria of the event, I gave them the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps their clothing was an expression of guilt over all the money they have made from their unimpressive music and their support of foolish and counter-productive causes.

Unfortunately, it soon transpired that I was wrong.  The band was making an important political statement to the effect that no venue or activity should ever be free from moral posturing on Aboriginal matters.

The immaturity continued throughout the following week.  The delight that ordinary Australians took in Cathy Freeman's win and the prominence of indigenous themes during the Games seems to have confused the Aboriginal industry and its supporters.

How could they continue to say that Australia is a racist nation when people were so obviously pleased when Aborigines did well?  Perhaps reconciliation has effectively occurred at the grass roots level, and it doesn't need an apology or a treaty or any of the other demands that generate a warm inner glow amongst the virtuous.

So they must have felt a great sense of relief when they came across an interview with the Minister for Reconciliation, Philip Ruddock, published in the French newspaper, Le Monde.  Here was something that could be given just the twist required to restore divisiveness to indigenous issues, put the Howard government on the back foot, and ensure that Aborigines could continue to be presented as the victims of racism.

As reported in Le Monde, Mr Ruddock responded to a question about indigenous disadvantage by stating that Aborigines came into contact with Western civilisation later than people such as Canadian or American Indians, and that they had had less time to adjust.  He also said that as hunter-collectors, Aboriginal technology was not as developed.  He added that this was not a matter of the superiority of one people over another, noting that Aborigines had survived in a very difficult environment because of their ingenuity.

The actual interview with the Le Monde journalist went for over an hour.  But the published version was only around 700 words, which means that less than a quarter of what was actually said would have found its way into print.  Mr Ruddock states -- and there is no reason to doubt him -- that he also discussed other causes of Aboriginal disadvantage, such as dispossession and the damaging effects of previous policies.

Nevertheless, Kim Beazley, Meg Lees, Aden Ridgeway, and many other worthies, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, called on Mr Ruddock to resign or be sacked.  Even Richard Court, the Liberal Premier of Western Australia, got caught up in the fervour, saying that Ruddock's remarks were "inappropriate".

But were they?  Any honest attempt to explain contemporary Aboriginal disadvantage must acknowledge that this is being assessed according to Western criteria.  What is so disturbing about low life expectancy, poor housing conditions, high levels of domestic violence, and the other unsatisfactory Aboriginal social and economic indicators is that they are much worse than those for people of European descent.

Given this, it is not wildly unreasonable to suggest that the length of time since contact is one of the factors that should be considered when attempting to explain Aboriginal disadvantage.  Certainly, it does seem that on many social and economic measures, Aborigines in the longer settled south east of Australia are better off than those in the more recently settled remote parts of the country.

Furthermore, in general terms, hunter-collecting people, with their small-scale societies, relatively simple technologies and low population densities fared much worse than agricultural peoples in encounters with Western civilisation.  Mr Ruddock was making no statements about the moral or intellectual qualities of Aboriginal people, and nothing that he said was incorrect.

Unfortunately, this was not true of his critics, who resorted to the evasions and sentimental misrepresentations that are common in public discussions about indigenous affairs.  Kim Beazley told the ABC that technologically and philosophically, Aboriginal culture was one of the most advanced civilisations to have come out of the Ice Age.

As far as technology goes this is highly questionable.  And, because the earliest writing systems were not invented until many thousands of years after the end of the last Ice Age, no-one has the faintest clue about the philosophical sophistication or otherwise of any cultures at that time.  Furthermore, even if we did know, it would be totally irrelevant.  Mr Ruddock was asked to explain the contemporary situation of Aborigines, not their circumstances 10,000 years ago.

The problem is that the self-appointed defenders of the Aborigines are so patronising.  There is still only one acceptable way to explain Aboriginal disadvantage and that is to present Aborigines as victims.  The mention of any other possible causes is seen as offensive, and prompts the kind of moral frenzy that we saw last week.

So perhaps Mr Ruddock really did get things wrong in the interviews he gave to the foreign media.  He should have explained that one of the greatest disadvantages Aborigines face in contemporary Australia is the desire of many "progressives" to keep them permanently trapped in a sense of victimhood.

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Mabo and Other Myths

Letter to the Editor:

Sir:  Though Keith Windschuttle's demolition of Coombs' and Reynolds' pretensions (September 2000) is most enjoyable, it does, however, contain some factual missteps.  Fortunately, their correction provides further support for his thesis.

First, to clarify an ambiguity, while it is true that the case brought by Eddie Mabo and others resulted in native title being recognised by Australian common law, it is not true his claims succeeded:  on the contrary, they were denied by Mr Justice Moynihan's Supreme Court judgement.  Since Moynihan's findings on specific claims were not appealed to the High Court -- the appeal was only on whether the common law recognised native title -- those findings stood.  Eddie Mabo's case may, therefore, be characterised as successful in the general, but a failure in the specific:  to say Mabo's land claim was "eventually successful" is too bald.  That most of the land claims in the original Mabo case failed is not without significance for native title's wider prospects, and makes the spread of the mythology about Mabo (which Stuart Macintyre does rather more egregiously in his Concise History) particularly unfortunate.

That Mr Justice Moynihan's judgement is notably hostile regarding Eddie Mabo's reliability as a witness is also something of wider indicator, as witness accuracy has been a bedevilling problem in recent indigenous cause celebre's:  most obviously in the Hindmarsh Island concoction but also in the original stolen generation inquiry, subsequent claims of being "stolen" and native title cases.  (Of course, a rigorous commitment to truth has not been a notable feature of the performance of much of the media and academe in these matters either).

The proportion of Aboriginal Australians nominating their religion as Christian in the latest Census is, in fact, 71.5 per cent, not sixty per cent, as Windschuttle's text states.  Aboriginal Australians are slightly more likely to state their religion as Christianity than the general population (70.9 per cent).  A further piece of prima facie evidence that Aboriginal Australians do not support separatism is that less than one in four of those eligible bothered to vote in the latest ATSIC election.  An unremarkable performance for voluntary voting maybe, but hardly a sign of a burning desire for separate representation.

One notes with interest that Coombs and Reynolds apparently both deny the contention of multiculturalism -- whether in "hard" (cultures should remain separate) or "soft" (many cultures will feed into a developing common Australian culture) versions -- that many cultures can exist within one political system without separate representation:  an implication of their positions that many would surely find unpalatable.

Peter Ryan's comments about Norman Lindsay are very apposite:  the images of strong women is one of the most striking features of the art displayed at the Norman Lindsay museum in the Blue Mountains.  There is no hint of misogyny in Lindsay's art.  If anything, it is his own gender that he seems to have had problems with, although that might be just Lindsay's teasing, to use Peter Ryan's apt term, of male pretensions.

Victoria Redux

[an edited version also published as "Recycling fiscal mistakes" in The Canberra Times of 14 October]

Victorian "progressives" are some of the most conservative people in Australian life:  repeating old mistakes in new forms seems to be a particular passion of theirs.

The most startling example of this was the Cain-Kirner government replicating in the late 1980s and early 1990s the mistakes that made the Depression of the 1890s such a disaster in Victoria.  Victoria had a particularly appalling 1890s Depression which ensured that economic dominance would pass back to New South Wales:  from 1891 to 1901 Victorian male employment fell by 1 per cent while NSW's grew by 19 per cent.

The 1890s collapse had been set up by a speculative land boom based partly on political suppression of appropriate risk assessment.  This was replicated a century later by State-owned Tricontinental and VEDC lending for ill-judged projects the private sector would not touch.  The 1890s crash was made worse by Victorian authorities mishandling a run on the banks.  This was again replicated in the 1990s with the Pyramid Building Society disaster.  In the 1890s, disheartened Victorians fled to the Kalgoorlie gold fields, a century later Queensland was the Mecca.

Take a bow (Premiers) John Cain and Joan Kirner, (Treasurer) Rob Jolly, (chief economic adviser) Terry Sheahan! Old mistakes updated and re-delivered! (Though borrowing money to pay superannuation obligations was probably a new twist).

As part of this process, the Cain-Kirner Government took a State whose unemployment rate was persistently below the national average, and, starting in 1986/87, turned into one whose unemployment rate was very much above the national average.  Under Kennett, the Victorian unemployment rate (slowly) returned to the national average -- though full-time employment has only just returned to the level it was going into the 1990 recession.

The new Victorian Premier, nice Mr Bracks, has been assuring everyone that he is not going to make the mistakes of the Cain-Kirner Government, no sirree, not him.

Unfortunately for this comforting tale, he has already started doing so with Workcover.  The re-introduction of common law rights has meant a surge in workers' compensation costs:  some firms are looking at increases in their premiums of up to 100 per cent.  Hardly an encouragement for employing people.  Indeed, Tony Harris, (in the Financial Review of 11 August) cites a Victorian Treasury report as estimating the changes will cost 9,000 jobs.

Did you think that tender concern over common law rights in workers' compensation has something to do with the workers?  Foolish you, it is all about lawyers' incomes.  As Tony Harris points out, it is not unusual for costs to consume up to half of an awarded judgement.  Sensible governments cut back common law rights, foolish governments extend them (on this matter, the Cain-Kirner Government was sensible, the Kennett Government initially foolish but later realised, and reversed, its error).

The union movement gets a lot of pro bono work from friendly lawyers:  the pay-off is the gravy-train of workers' comp.  claims.  Cutting off common law rights not merely allows costs to be contained, it reduces mightily the income stream to labour lawyers.  It is a sign of how beholden that the modern ALP is to its supporting interest groups that three of the four Labor Governments in power in the Eastern States -- the Beattie Goverment in Queensland, the Bacon Government in Tasmania and the Bracks Government in Victoria are preserving or extending common law rights in this area.  (A prime reason Kennett's Attorney-General Jan Wade was so hated is her reforms cut the money flowing to lawyers by millions of dollar).

Where the Cain-Kirner Government was foolish on workers' compensation was introducing a statutory scheme that was far too generous, particularly in the ease with which claims could be successfully made.

But foolishness over workers' compensation is far from the only sign of Bracks being a case of Back to the Cain-Kirner Future.  Despite being a remarkably spendthrift government (with a real increase in non-capital outlays per resident of 24 per cent over its term in office), the Cain-Kirner Government were low spenders on capital investment:  the Kennett Government increased capital expenditure markedly.  Since the ALP did not expect to win the 1999 election and -- an even bigger problem -- its values are inner-city but its majority comes from provincial towns, the Bracks Government suffers from agenda-paralysis.  A gap in capital projects moving through the processes of initiation and implementation is beginning to build up.

If Mr Bracks had been a Coalition Leader, we would no doubt have been hearing endlessly about his lack of vision, just as his widely criticised replacement of popular Governor Sir James Gobbo would have been written off as nasty small-mindedness.  (The contrast with John Howard quietly extending Sir William Deane's term of office as Governor-General so he could preside over the centenary of Federation celebrations could not have been sharper).

Another sign of Bracks being a new words but the same music is the appointment of Sydney University Professor Ron McCallum to head a Taskforce into industrial relations reform.  Professor McCallum has already performed similar duties for the Beattie Government in Queensland and the Carr Government in New South Wales.  While the consequent legislative changes are currently stalled in the Upper House in NSW, the Beattie Government's Industrial Relations Act 1999 provides an excellent indication of where things are likely to be heading.

The Queensland Act contains quite a range of remarkable provisions attempting to extend the position of unions and discouraging modes of engaging labour other than conventional employment -- section 125, for example, gives the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission the power to declare any contract for services to be an employment contract.  A fascinating provision for, say, franchisees or for contractors in the housing industry.

Since regulations are not costless, imposing a new set of costs and complexities on a labour market which is still highly regulated is hardly likely to improve the employment prospects of new entrants to the labour market.  We will have to wait and see whether the Bracks Government, like its Cain-Kirner predecessors, will once again drive the Victorian unemployment rate above the national average.  The early signs are not encouraging.

There is, however, a fascinating public spat over the direction of the Bracks Government going on.  The inner city Left has noticed that Bracks has not been fulfilling their hopes -- there has been a lot of "business as usual" maintaining the Kennett legacy -- and his warm remarks over how the police handled themselves during the recent demonstrations against the World Economic Forum have been the last straw.  A wave of renunciations, angry motions of repudiation and threats of resignations from the Labor Party has followed.

Bracks did cancel a proposed congratulatory barbecue with the police, but whether the Left will get much more satisfaction is doubtful.  Bracks himself is a Catholic Lebanese lad from Ballarat.  John Brumby, the former Leader and now key minister, is from Bendigo.  This is a Government in power because of provincial Victoria, led by two Labor Right boys from provincial Victoria with a Labor Right-dominated Caucaus.  Inclination and electoral calculation march together:  a very powerful combination.

But the Left feel betrayed because they were the ones that mounted the campaigns -- against privatisation, against the Grand Prix, against government secrecy, against the Auditor-General changes -- that (in the case of the last two) eventually bit, immensely aided by Jeff Kennett's own miscalculation in gagging his candidates.  The Labor Right, by contrast, were more likely to be quietly congratulating Jeff on some of his changes.

On the other hand, Kennett's failure to spread the joy in provincial Victoria (which received a disproportionately low amount of the capital spending) was something Brumby in particular sheeted home effectively.  This internal division is the biggest danger for the Bracks Government at the moment:  but repeating the past Cain-Kirner mistakes is not a solution, though one suspects that much of the Left would only be too happy to do so.

Response

Regarding Richard De Angelis's letter classing as nonsense by alleged suggestion that Australian Aborigines were still hunter-gatherers, I would have thought it blindingly obvious that the (true) statement that going from hunter-gatherer culture to the information technology revolution in two centuries (and less in much of the continent) was a big ask did not entail the (false) statement that Aborigines were still hunter-gatherers, but apparently not.  Regarding the reality of different cultural experience, I can merely agree with the commentator who wrote of those who:

...  sometimes appear to have no more idea of the nature of indigenous community here than for the most part they have so far displayed in relation to other hunter-gatherer peoples whose country has been occupied and largely taken over by the settled material culture of the invaders.  The key to understanding Aboriginal culture likes there, and even people whom one would think had the intelligence and the background and the motives to understanding often lack it

The writer?  Don Dunstan, The Adelaide Review, March 1996.

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Hidden Agenda in Petrol Protests

Protestors upset about high fuel prices don't understand the way the world works.  Taxes on petroleum products are most unlikely to come down, no matter how forcefully people complain.

Part of the reason is that no government -- even one that occasionally pretends it would like to make itself smaller -- wants to forgo such a handy means of financing its own activities.

However, the really serious stumbling block lies elsewhere, with the moral guardians of our society -- the greens, the Australian Democrats, and the posturing factions of the Labor Party.  Despite their pleasure at the Howard Government's discomfort over the rise in fuel prices, these worthies think that petroleum products are still far too cheap.

This is because petrol, like alcohol and tobacco, is a wicked substance.  Inexpensive petrol and the automobiles it powers play an essential part in our contemporary way of life, allowing the masses to enjoy an otherwise unattainable degree of individual autonomy and prosperity.

This distresses our cultural elites, who don't like sharing public amenities with people whose attitudes and tastes they despise, and who would prefer a more controlled society which reflected their own values.  But our democratic and egalitarian culture precludes them from voicing such sentiments too loudly.

So they confine themselves to fretting about the environmental damage that supposedly results from all this wealth and freedom, even though the worst environmental calamities are invariably caused by societies that are authoritarian, collectivist and poor.

While our cultural elites can't ban the private consumption of petrol, they are good at ensuring that people feel guilty about using it, thereby justifying punitive levels of taxation and other charges.  If you are unhappy about the present price of petrol, just wait a few years until some future left-leaning government attempts to meet the 1997 Kyoto Protocol targets for reducing carbon emissions.

Indeed, from the perspective of our moral guardians, in some ways petrol is even more iniquitous than alcohol and tobacco.  While all three are a source of massive profits for the hated global corporations, alcohol and tobacco have one saving grace.  Their production and distribution do not necessarily depend on large-scale industrial enterprises -- they can be easily produced by local cottage industries.  But refining petroleum is not the sort of thing you can do in your own back yard.

So organisations such as Greenpeace labour mightily to prevent the development of new oilfields.  They have achieved some success with the Stuart shale oil project near Gladstone, as their opposition has helped to put on hold the next stage of the development.  Greenpeace is now placing advertisements in the financial press, warning investors that they face great risks if they put their money into similar projects.

Even the multinational companies which manufacture petroleum products seem to feel uncomfortable about their activities, and wish they could be making something else.  Two months ago, after swallowing up a number of its fellow evildoers such as Amoco and Castrol, the company formerly known as British Petroleum announced its transformation.

Proclaiming itself 'the world's leading producer of solar power', BP stated that henceforth its initials would stand for "beyond petroleum".  Yet the amount that solar power currently contributes to BP's earnings -- and is likely to contribute in the foreseeable future -- is very small.  To appreciate the full significance of this change, ask yourself whether Fosters or Castlemaine Perkins are ever likely to adopt "beyond alcohol" as a marketing slogan.

Of course, those who foster petroleum guilt claim that unless we curb our use of oil and other carbon-based fuels, the earth's climate will experience a catastrophic increase in temperature over the next century.  A new global industry has been built around the enhanced greenhouse effect, as environmentalists, bureaucrats, scientists and others seek to cash in on public fears about global warming.

However, the scientific justifications for linking increasing levels of carbon emissions with global warming are not as sound as environmentalists would have us believe.  The earth has long experienced a considerable degree of natural climate variability.  There is strong evidence, for instance, that around 1,000 years ago, long before the large scale use of fossil fuel, much of the earth was somewhat warmer than it is at present.

And the American NASA scientist Dr James Hansen, who in 1988 played a crucial role in instigating the current greenhouse panic -- which supplanted 1970s fears about a coming "Ice Age" -- has recently had a significant change of heart.  While he still believes that carbon dioxide emissions and global warming are linked, he also concedes that too much emphasis has been placed on cutting fossil fuel consumption.

Hansen notes that other gases such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons are major causes of the 0.5 degree centigrade warming that has occurred over the past century, and that it would be less economically damaging to concentrate on reducing atmospheric concentrations of these substances.

This upset many greens, who find the prospect of serious economic damage to industrial capitalist societies a most appealing notion, especially if it helps bring about the social transformation they desire.  Indeed, as Patrick Moore, a now disillusioned co-founder of Greenpeace suggests, this is what makes radical environmentalism so attractive for them.

So instead of blockading oil refineries or attacking John Howard, truckies and other people who appreciate the great benefits of reasonably priced, petroleum-driven private transport should target their real adversaries -- Greenpeace and all the other vested interests of the greenhouse panic industry.

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