Via calculated risk, Asian countries are reducing their subsidies for oil in an effort to lower demand. (more)
Japanese architecture can be quite challenging, especially the modernist buildings that seem to spring out of the small spaces in the Japanese cities. For instance this house has the bottom story open via a glass wall into the street. The street becomes and extension of the down stairs living space. It is hard to imagine an Australian or American house giving up that aspect of privacy to open the house to the outside urban world.
adam : It was not without protest. There were riots.
I think it was the right decision, and it did not bring down the government, but Indonesians were never likely to simply take the end of a 30 year tax break on the chin.
cam : Pundits like Zakaria argue that this maybe better done by a strong arm dictator who is enforcing capitalism; ie Pinochet-style, but in this instance the collective recognition of it being the right policy meant that liberal democracy handled it well.
I wonder why many assume that liberal democracy is often best added after capitalism when a strong arm has finished implementing those policies.
There is that individual wealth threshold that Zakaria quoted, IIRC it is about 3K per capita, where liberal democracy becomes more stable after that is reached.
Don't know.
It appears the Reserve Bank will up interest rates in a couple of weeks out of concern that inflation is becoming too high. One of the statements from the Prime Minister is that the core inflation is still between two and three percent. The problem with core inflation is that it is an inflation reading with all the stuff that is inflating taken out. Also known as inflation ex-inflation. (more)
Futures trading came out of Edo (Tokyo) at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It was actually a response to over-taxation, and the daimyo's, in order to generate revenue, forward sold rice at a fixed price to the markets.
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The Five Articles Oath was the basis for political, social and economic modernisation of Japan. Prior to the Five Articles, Japan had been ruled by the Tokugawa Shogunate which repudiated technological change, and had been largely, though not perfectly, isolationist. (more)
The SMH notes Japan has applied to buy fighters which are, according to our esteemed defense minister Brendan Nelson, not up for sale.
cam : The Bush Administration: official who said they werent up for sale really didnt have the authority to do so. IIRC the Administration can deny weapon systems to a country (because they are dictatorships etc) by law that Congress has passed but the export nature of weapon systems are done through legislation. A Texan representation passed a bill to export the F22 through the House, but a Senate committee hid the bill and it never came to vote. The Bush Administration official who said in the Au news media that they weren\'t up for sale was doing a favour to Howard. IIRC it was after Howard did his Barack Obama and the Democrats are traitors or something. I suspect there was political horse trading between Howard and the Bush Administration.
Defence is one of the areas where Labor has better policies than the Liberals. Even though Labor made no guarantees to buy the F22, I think they just said they would look into it, it was an area of weakness for the Liberals that Labor was hammering on about it. So having a Bush Administration official say they could not be bought was sowing up that political weakness for Howard even though it wasn\'t legally true or possible. Howard has been digging his holes lately, especially in defence.
Political horse trading over defence is not cool. Especially when the solutions the Howard government have come up with as stop-gap measures are so obviously inferior - and just plain expensive. Unnecessarily so.
The three nations interested in the F22 were Japan, Israel and (tangentially) Australia. I am not surprised that Japan and Israel are pushing for it. We should be too IMO.
cam
It's been a bit lost in the swarm of corruption scandals in the last week, but we recently made a security agreement with Japan. It seems to me it is a mature and strategic policy move by the government. It's compatible both with the doctrine of regional engagement according to national interest, and the Great and Powerful Friend doctrine that has long led Australian foreign policy. We are no fans of the latter at SSR, but it's to the Howard government's credit that their fondness for US power did not blind them to more lateral opportunities.
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cam : This type of arrangement makes sense: we are Japan\'s biggest trading partner and China\'s strength is largely a fabrication of US interests anyway. China\'s military budget is 36B, ours is 17B. So at the moment they are a 2xAu. It wont always remain that way, but they are not the military threat the US is making out. Destablisation through economic volatility and one-party corruption/mis-management is more of a concern I think. The only time the politics will be a problem is if the communist party cant hold on to support and uses a nationalist policy - ie Taiwan - to try and bind the population to them. Not much different to how Indonesia used West Papua before it negotiated a security treaty with Au.
I do think
we lost an opportunity here to restate the map and Australian power
. America is weak internationally at the moment and most nations are standing back to see which way the wind blow and basically have disengaged from the Bush Administration other than what they have to. It would be a chance for us to create a treaty across the Indian Ocean and draw India and South Africa into our influence. The Japan-US-Au circle is a given and
as Gary Sauer-Thompson argues
, the US is starting to look to India as the final point in the arc to contain China geo-politically.
We had an opportunity to make us indispensible in any kind of arrangement. Our politicians lack imagination and guts in this area. I think they like geopolitical isolation and obscurity.
cam
adam : One security agreement might look like misfortune: ... two looks like encirclement. Don\'t you think an agreement with India would aggravate China without any great benefit?
Besides which, any sort of agreement with India is far more fraught with difficulty than with Japan or even Indonesia. India is a nuclear power, shares a border with a nuclear power they don\'t much like, and they only recently stopped exchanging artillery shells in Kashmir. They had a shooting war with China in the sixties over a border dispute which is still not resolved. It would be hard to engage India without antagonising China and Pakistan.
The Republic of India is a magnificient achievement in the history of democracy, but as a foreign policy partner they\'re unfortunately pretty flaky. They had reasons to play silly buggers with alliances during the cold war, some highminded, some not. But diplomatic habits die hard; it doesn\'t inspire confidence.
cam : Antagonising China: If the agreement was an Au-US-Ja-IN then yes it would. But Au isn\'t the US and can cast an Indian Ocean treaty as predominantly and economic one rather than military encirclement which any treaty that involves the US will have the suspicion of being.
Au isn\'t the US so it can make treaties that appear more benign even though they are about increasing Australian clout (directly or indirectly). I think India has to be dealt with in the same manner as Indonesia; fragile but making remarkable steps. I think they should be engaged positively, and even given a couple of chances (with an Au in the 1900s required too), though if they fall to crap, dumped very quickly and a new approach taken.
If Australia did take a two-circle approach, I would not consider it an encirclement of China, but an Australian repositioning of themselves geopolitically and geoeconomically from the South Pacific into Central Asia. It is a way of moving the map away from the tyranny of geography.
cam
Koizumi won another election
, this time achieving a majority with his Liberal Democratic party. It was previously a minority government.
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Scrymarch : Voting system: I couldn\'t find definitive word on the single/multi-preference dimension either, but the lower house is appointed by a mix of single member electorates and party list proportional voting, similar to New Zealand\'s MMP system.
Home page of the Diet
:
The present election system is a combination of the single-seat constituency system and proportional representation. Under the system, out of 480 Members, 300 are elected from single-seat constituencies, and remaining 180 by proportional representation in which the nation is divided into 11 electoral blocs which according to size return between six and 30 Members. Voters cast two ballots: first, one for an individual candidate in the single-seat consitituency, and second, one for a political party in the proportional representation election. The combined election system was adopted and went into effect to replace the long-standing multi-seat medium-sized constituency election system, which was abolished in January 1994 by a revision of the Public Offices Election Law. This election system was first used in the 41st general election for the members of the House of Representatives held in October 1996 in which 300 were elected from single-seat constituencies and 200 by prportional representation, and again in the 42nd general election held in June 2000 after reducing the number of Members elected by proportional representation from 200 to 180 by another revision of the Public Offices Election Law. (2)Election to the House of Councillors One hundred of the 252 members of the House of Councillors are elected by proportional representation from a single nationwide electoral district. The remaining 152 are elected in 47 prefectural constituencies, each returning two to eight members. As with the House of Representatives, voters cast two ballots - one for a political party (proportional representation) and one for an individual candidate. The minimum age requirement to be a candidate for the House of Councillors is 30, and that for voters is 20. It should be noted that the House of Representatives can be dissolved, whereas the House of Councillors is not subject to dissolution. When the House of Representatives is dissolved, the House of Councillors closes its session at the same time. However, the Cabinet may, in time of national emergency, convoke an emergency session of the House of Councillors. Measures taken at such a session are provisional and become null and void unless agreed to by the House of Representatives within 10 days of the opening of the next session of the Diet.This and other sources imply to me that these votes are single preference, people tend to assume that as the default.
