34 minute read
SOUTH ASIA
10 South Asia Times SOUTH ASIASouTh ASiA TimeS south asia afgHanistan Has vast mineral wealtH but faces steep cHallenges to tap it
By sCOTT l. mOnTGOmery*
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TThe official ending of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan leaves a number of longterm questions, including how the country can build a functioning economy. Now that U.S. assistance has evaporated and international aid is largely shut off, what options does Afghanistan have?
One possibility resides in natural resources. Afghanistan possesses a wealth of nonfuel minerals whose value has been estimated at more than US$1 trillion. For millennia the country was renowned for its gemstones – rubies, emeralds, tourmalines and lapis lazuli. These minerals continue to be locally extracted, both legally and illegally, in mostly small, artisanal mines. Far more value, however, lies with the country’s endowments of iron, copper, lithium, rare earth elements, cobalt, bauxite, mercury, uranium and chromium.
While the total abundance of minerals is certainly vast, scientific understanding of these resources is still at an exploratory stage. Even with a better understanding of how rewarding their extraction might be, the presence of these resources will not provide a jump-start to a new economy. As a geologist who has studied the extent of their resources, I estimate a minimum of seven to 10 years will be needed for largescale mining to become a major new source of revenue.
usGs fOllOWs The sOVieTs
British and German geologists conducted the earliest modern surveys of Afghanistan’s minerals in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But it was the Soviets in the 1960s and 1970s who performed the most systematic exploratory work throughout the country, producing a large body of detailed information that stood as the backbone to more recent studies.From 2004 to 2011, the U.S. Geological Survey conducted a detailed review of available data, adding new information from its own aerial survey, limited field checking and from the Afghanistan Geological Survey. This work better identified mineral sites, richness and abundance.
No one who examines this work, as I have, can ignore the large-scale exploratory effort by Soviet scientists. Detailed field mapping and massive sampling, including tens of thousands of meters of borehole drilling, and lab analyses were performed. Given the time and money invested, it would appear high-level plans were in play to develop Afghanistan’s minerals once the country was under Soviet influence.
Based largely on this information, the USGS delineated 24 areas in the country and estimated their mineral abundance. Data packages were prepared on all 24 areas for companies to use as a basis for making bids to exploit any resources.
Chinese and Indian companies expressed strong interest, and actual concessions were granted. Arguments over contract terms and concerns about security, however, have stalled activity since the late 2010s.
mineral aBundanCe
How much mineral abundance does Afghanistan actually have? I’ll try to answer this with a brief summary of USGS estimates for metals of special interest: copper, iron, lithium and rare earth metals. Geoscientists who were part of the USGS effort have noted that their figures are “conservative” but also “preliminary.”
Regardless, it’s safe to say the resources in total are huge. Total copper resources for all known deposits sum to about 57.7 million metric tons. At current prices, the resource value is $516 billion. These are “undiscovered” resources – identified but not fully explored and assessed. If further study were to judge them recoverable at a profit, they would rank Afghanistan among the top five nations for copper reserves in the world. The largest copper deposit, which also contains significant amounts of cobalt, is the Aynak ore body, located about 18 miles (30 kilometers) southeast of Kabul. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Soviets began development of the mine but it was suspended in 1989 following Soviet withdrawal from the country. The highgrade portion of the total Aynak deposit is estimated at 11.3 million metric tons of copper, worth $102 billion at current market prices. Afghanistan also has world-class iron ore resources, concentrated in the Haji Gak deposit of Bamiyan Province. Haji Gak has an estimated 2,100 million metric tons of high-grade ore that is 61%-69% iron by weight. At current price levels, this represents a value of $336.8 billion, placing Afghanistan among the top 10 nations worldwide in extractable iron.
Lithium resources in Nuristan Province, which occur as veins, impressed Soviet geoscientists with the amount of hard rock ore (lithium is also mined from brine). Based on USGS estimates, it is a significant but modest resource in today’s terms, as exploration for such deposits has increased around the world in the past decade.
Finally, rare earth elements exist in southern Helmand Province. These deposits mainly contain cerium, with smaller amounts of more valuable lanthanum, praseodymium and neodymium, totaling perhaps 1.4 million metric tons. Two of these, praseodymium and neodymium, are at high price levels – more than $45,000 per metric ton – and make exceptional magnets used in motors for hybrid and electric cars, but the abundance of these elements is not large relative to how much other countries have.
aBOVe-GrOund faCTOrs and GeOPOliTiCs
Mining wisdom holds that what’s in the ground is less important than what’s above ground. Market realities, security, contract terms, infrastructure and environmental concerns matter more than sheer abundance to whether resources can be developed.
Among these factors, perhaps the most relevant at present is strong global demand for the metals, particularly copper, lithium and rare earth elements, which are essential to the growing markets in renewable energy and electric vehicles.
Whether or not Afghanistan can begin mining these elements will depend on what the new Taliban government does. Under the former Ministry of Mines, a $2.9 billion contract for a portion of the Aynak copper deposit was granted to two state-owned Chinese companies. The 30-year contract signed in 2007 had a high royalty rate by global standards and required that ore smelting and processing be done locally. Other conditions included building a 400-megawatt coal power plant and a railway to the Pakistan border. Also stipulated was that 85%-100% of employees, from skilled labor to managerial personnel, be Afghan nationals within eight years of the date work begins. Though originally agreed to, these terms were later declared onerous by the companies, halting development.
Though roads exist to many ore deposit areas, Afghanistan lacks good-quality roadways, railways and electricity. Mining companies are no stranger to such challenges, yet the situation is heightened in this case by rugged terrain and the landlocked nature of the country. Railways, in particular, would be essential for transporting ore, raw or refined, to foreign markets.
There are also environmental and cultural concerns. Mining can result in major impacts to land and air quality, as well as watersheds – a particular concern in water-poor Afghanistan – if not regulated to best practices. No less, enforcement of such standards is required and has been a problem in many lower-income countries.
Close to the Aynak copper deposit is a large site of Buddhist relics, statues, temples and stupas. There are also Bronze Age mining sites that constitute important archaeological resources. Here, too, no clarity yet exists about how Taliban leaders, who ordered the destruction of the great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in 2001, might view these sites.
For Afghanistan, its resources could mean a source of longterm foreign investment, skillbuilding and infrastructure expansion, all essential for a sustainable economy. But a major question is which companies would be involved. Afghanistan is also at the center of geopolitical struggles, involving both India and Pakistan, as well as China, Iran and the U.S. That the Taliban are now in control does not make the country’s minerals any less invested with large significance.
Author’s note: In 2015, I was the instructor for a task force class in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington that produced a report on Afghanistan’s natural resources and the possibility of their acting as a basis for economic development. This article is devoted to the excellent work done by students on that task force. This article was updated to correct details about development of mining operations by the Soviets. *Lecturer, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
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Source- The Conversation, August 31, 2021 (Under Creative Commons Licence)
A map of mineral resources published by the United States Geological Survey in 2007. United States Geological Survey.
South Asia Times
11
By PraBhaT PaTnaik*
it is 30 years since India adopted neoliberal policies in 1991, though some would date their introduction even earlier to 1985. Newspapers are full of assessments of the impact of these policies on the economy, and liberalisers from Manmohan Singh downward, have suddenly become visible, lauding their handiwork, while lamenting at best that the benefits of liberalisation have been unevenly distributed. Manmohan Singh has recently said that “a healthy and dignified life for every Indian must be prioritised”. One wonders what prevented him from doing so when he was at the helm of affairs.
Such an assessment, that liberalisation greatly boosted India’s GDP growth rate and thereby improved the lives of almost every Indian, lifting vast masses of them from the clutches of absolute poverty, even though it increased income and wealth inequality in the country, would be commonly accepted, not just by the votaries of liberalisation, but even by its critics, including some even on the Left. The difference, it would appear, relates only to what weight one gives to inequality as opposed to growth.
The liberalisers would even argue that the illeffects of inequality would disappear if the growth rate in the economy is revived and increased, for which the “animal spirits” of the capitalists that determine how much investment they make have to be boosted.
And the Narendra Modi government would claim that boosting the capitalists’ ‘animal spirits’ is precisely what it is doing through its anti-labour and anti-peasant policies, some of which the Congress, while not having a different analysis, is curiously opposing. Thus the Bretton Woods institutions’ claim that there is a broad “consensus” on neoliberal policies among major political parties, would seem also to extend to the evaluation of their effects on the economy over the last three decades.
This entire perception, however, is wrong for at least two reasons. First, it sees the capitalist sector of the economy as being a more or less self-contained sector, detached from the rest of the economy, whose main effect on its surrounding environment is simply to pull more and more labour from it. And the lament is that it has not done so sufficiently.
In reality, however, accumulation within the capitalist sector invariably impinges on the world existing outside of it in multiple ways. It draws not only labour from the world outside of it, which in an economy with massive labour reserves, is a good thing, but also land, and other resources including fiscal resources (for instance, subsidies to capitalists for boosting their “animal spirits” come at the expense of subsidies to peasant agriculture that have traditionally contributed to its viability); and the growth of the capitalist sector also pulls demand away from the traditional sectors.
Capital accumulation, therefore, invariably undermines the surrounding petty production economy (a process Marx had called “primitive accumulation of capital”), even when it draws little labour from it. Contrary to what conventional bourgeois economics says, namely, that a rapid rate of capital accumulation will simply absorb the labour reserves, thereby reducing unemployment and poverty (and if it does not do so then the panacea lies in an even more rapid rate of capital accumulation), such accumulation undermines the surrounding economy of petty producers without absorbing much labour. This means an increase in unemployment and poverty. And if the rate of capital accumulation is stepped up, then it just worsens this tendency rather than alleviating it.
This, in fact, is exactly what has happened, even going by the government’s own statistics. The undermining of peasant agriculture under the neoliberal regime, which removed all the protection given to it during the preceding dirigiste period, is obvious. It manifests itself in the fall in profitability of peasant agriculture; it is manifest, too, in the fact that between the 1991 and 2011 censuses, the number of “cultivators” (as defined by the Census) fell by 15 million; and it is painfully clear from the suicides of more than three lakh farmers over the past three decades.
Not surprisingly, the magnitude of poverty, in the most elemental sense of access to calories, and not just of inequality, has increased since the inception of neoliberal reforms. The percentage of persons with access to less than 2,200 calories per person per day in rural India (which was the original official benchmark for rural poverty), has increased from 58 in 1993-94 to 68 in 2011-12 (both National Sample Survey (NSS) large sample survey years). The corresponding figures for urban India, where the original benchmark was 2,100 calories per person per day are 57 and 65, respectively.
Matters have become even worse since 201112. The 2017-18 NSS large sample survey threw up figures which were so startling that the Modi government decided to suppress them altogether and also to discontinue these surveys in their old form. Some information, however, leaked out before the findings were suppressed and these show that between 201112 and 2017-18, per capita consumption expenditure on all items in real terms has fallen by 9% in rural India. Nothing of this sort had ever happened in normal times (i.e, barring major crop failures) in independent India.
The assault on peasant agriculture under neoliberalism is actually intensifying. The latest manifestation of it, in the form of three farm laws that are meant to promote big capital’s interests at the expense of the peasants’, is so damaging that it has brought large peasant masses from the surrounding states to Delhi, demanding their withdrawal.
Let me now move to the second flaw in the neoliberal perception. Capitalists’ investment does not just depend on some intangible thing called “animal spirits”, but is rooted in tangible calculations that they make about the prospective growth in markets. True, the response to such calculations within limits may depend on their state of optimism or pessimism (which the term “animal spirits” captures), but clearly if the market is not growing or if the growth slows down, then capitalists’ investment suffers, no matter how much subsidies are doled out to them.
Now, neoliberalism has widened income inequality everywhere, including in India. According to Piketty and Chancel, the share of the top 1% of the
COnTd. On PG 12
tHe kHarasrota river not for sale
By BhaBani shankar nayak*
The people of Kendrapada district of Odisha are fighting peacefully for the last two years to save the river Kharasrota. This river is the lifeline of farmers, fishing communities and other communities living along the river. The Kharasrota river is the source of life and livelihood for the people of Odisha in general and the people of Kendrapada and Jajpur in particular. The successive governments have failed to provide safe drinking water to the people of Odisha.
The people of the Kendrapada district continue to drink unsafe water from the river. The Kharasrota river provides water for both drinking needs of the people and for irrigating the agricultural fields of the district. The people living in the downstream of Kharasrota river face acute drinking water crisis both during the rainy season the summer season. The rainy season brings severe floods, and the muddy water is undrinkable. The water flow declines in the river during the summer and salty water from the Bay of Bengal enters the Kharasrota river. The water becomes unusable for drinking and agriculture. The Government of Odisha has not done anything to address this water crisis in the region.
In order to supply water to the Dhamra Port Company Limited (DPCL) in the Bhadrak district, the Government of Odisha is using its Basudha Drinking Water Scheme. The DPCL is a 100 percent subsidiary of the Adani Ports and SEZ. The Government of Odisha is spending Rs 892.14 crore to supply water to the Adani Ports and SEZ in the name of supplying water to the people of Bhadrak district. The Odisha government has Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Department of Panchayati Raj and Drinking Water Departments to implement drinking water projects.
However, this drinking water project is outsourced to the Hyderabad based company, the Megha Engineering India Pvt Ltd. The reasons behind the outsource is best known to the Government of Odisha and its leadership. This company is implementing the project in the Kharasrota river near the Gadagadi Ghat under the Barunadiha Panchayats of Rajkanika block of Kendrapara district.
The local people argue that in the name of drinking water project for the people of Bhadrak district, the Government of Odisha is implementing this project to supply water to the Adani Ports and SEZ in Dhamra as it is close to Rajkanika. The people of Aul and Kanika are not opposed to the drinking water project and water supply to the people of Bhadrak district. The Government of Odisha is unnecessarily creating disharmony between the two neighbouring districts by providing wrong information to the media and campaigns against the protesters.
The PrOTesTers Of aul and kanika are makinG six fundamenTal POinTs:
1. The Bhadrak district has major rivers and water can be used from the local rivers for the drinking needs of the district. It will be cost effective for the Odisha government as well. Why is it necessary to take water from the Kharasrota river? It is neither convenient nor cost effective. It puts pressure on the water needs of the local people living around the Kharasrota river. 2. The people of Aul and Kanika are arguing that the Government of Odisha must conduct a scientific study and environmental assessment on the impact of this project on the local communities and their water requirements. What would be the ecological impact of this project on the Bhitarakanika National Park and its mangroves? The Bhitarakanika Mangroves protect communities from regular super cyclones in the district. 3. The protesters argue that the project will aggravate the water crisis in the region. Therefore, the government of Odisha must create an environmentally sustainable barrage that can save the surplus overflow of the water to the Bay of Bengal. The surplus water can be used for the drinking water projects both for the people of Kendrapada and Bhadrak district. 4. The government of Odisha must reveal the water requirements of the four blocks of the Bhadrak district. What is the water requirement of people of Bhadrak district? How much water overflows from the Kharasrota river? What is the local water requirements? 5. The Government of Odisha must reveal the plans to stop the salt water from the Bay of Bengal entering into the Kharasrota river. It is neither drinkable nor usable for agriculture. This happens during the summer season. 6. The Government of Odisha must release all the protestors arrested by the Odisha police on false grounds and end its undemocratic police raj.
These are very reasonable concerns and suggestions by the protestors to the Odisha Government. However, the Government is using brute police force to implement the project instead of engaging with people and their reasonable demands. The Odisha government is arresting anyone opposed to this project. The peaceful and democratic protests by the local people are declared illegal by the Government of Odisha by imposing the Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). Such undemocratic move by the Odisha government shows its commitment to the Adani Ports and SEZ at the cost of local people, their lives, livelihoods and their environment.
The selling of river to corporates is a death sentence to local communities. The international experiences of water and river privatisation show that it starts with drinking water projects. These projects serve corporate interests more than the drinking needs of people. The privatisation of water and commercial agriculture led to drinking water crisis across the world. The diversion of water to mining, industries and other corporations has aggravated water crisis.
The decades of water privatisation has failed across the globe, but the BJP government continues to pursue and aggressively implements the failed policies of the previous Congress governments in India. The Government of Odisha follows the footprints of Chattisgarh government in making river a private property of corporates. It looks as if the BJD government in the state and the BJP government in centre are in competing to serve corporate interests by selling rivers and water resources to corporates at the cost of people, their livelihoods and the planet.
The successive governments in India continue to follow rent seeking regressive economic policies that put forests, rivers, mountains, land and other common goods for sale in the market, where corporates seek profit at the cost of people. The central government and state governments have continued with such a mercantile tradition despite of ongoing people’s movements for environmental, social and economic justice.
The objectification of environment and commercialisation of rivers put life, livelihoods and planet in danger. Rivers belongs to communities living around the river. It should be used for the greater common goods of the communities and not corporations. Profit over people is a dangerous ideology that puts sustainability of our present and the future in danger. *University of Glasgow, UK
30 years of economic reforms – a saga...
COnTd. frOm PG 11
population in total national income was just 6% in 1982 but increased to 22% in 2013-14 (the highest it has been for almost a century).
Since the working people consume more out of their incomes than the rich, a widening of income inequality that amounts to a shift of income away from the former to the latter, has the effect of reducing consumption and hence aggregate demand, which, in turn, reduces investment and growth.
Neoliberalism, in short, is afflicted by a stagnationist tendency, which, for the capitalist world as a whole, had been kept in check by “bubbles” in the US economy -- first the “dotcom bubble” in the 1990s and then the “housing bubble” in the first decade of this century. With the collapse of the “housing bubble”, the world economy has gone into a protracted crisis that has no solution under neoliberalism (which frowns upon State intervention in “demand management”).
This has affected the Indian economy as well, where, even before the pandemic, the unemployment rate in 2019 was the highest it had been for 45 years. This has had two kinds of effects on the people: one, it has greatly worsened the conditions of life of the working people, even before the pandemic, who were already being hurt by the pursuit of neoliberalism. The recent drastic fall in employment and consumption underscores this.
Two, the crisis has led to the cementing of an alliance between big capital and fascistic Hindutva groups, which sustains the Modi government. Such an alliance is not specific to India. In periods of crisis, big capital promotes and finances the political ascendancy of fascistic groups with whom it forms an alliance. It does so as a means of altering the discourse, towards a vilification of the “other”, in order to distract people from their economic predicament. While such groups in power do the biddings of big capital, they derive their political strength not from any economic solution to the crisis they offer but from shifting attention away from the economic realm altogether.
Neoliberalism, in short, while it squeezed the working people even when it was experiencing high growth, has both increased the squeeze and ushered in an arrangement that is inimical to the basic premises of the Indian Constitution, such as democracy, secularism and social equality, when it has run into a crisis.
The votaries of liberalisation miss the point that while it may have increased the GDP growth rate, it has worsened the conditions of the working people, and has undermined the founding principles upon which alone can a modern Indian nation be built.
*The author is India’s prominent economist.
does being away from your smartpHone cause you anxiety? tHe fact tHat it makes you available 24/7 could be tHe reason
By WuyOu sui* & anna sui**
Through social distancing mandates, lockdown measures and restrictions on gatherings and services, the pandemic has brought about widespread changes to how modern societies function. And everyone has become more reliant on smartphones.
One study found smartphone use increased by 70 per cent during the first few months of the pandemic. And a recent Canadian survey found more than 40 per cent of respondents are spending even more time on their phones this year. The reliance on digital technologies, including smartphones, has increased tremendously because of the need to do everything from home — working, studying, staying connected, reading the news and interacting with services, like food and grocery delivery.
The relationships we form with smartphones have recently become of interest to researchers, especially the potential negative impacts when it comes to overuse and attachment.
One relationship in particular concerns the anxiety felt when people are unable to use or be in contact with their smartphones, known as nomophobia. Nomophobia, or no-mobile phobia, is thought to be a product of the intense attachments to our devices, and is believed to be strongest among people who use their phone the most, like teens and young adults.
Some researchers have gone so far as to argue that nomophobia should be introduced into the DSMV(the manual for diagnosing psychiatric illnesses), or be treated through cognitive behavioural therapy and other psychological and pharmaceutical treatments. But these claims are rooted in a de-contextualized idea of nomophobia, which ignores many real-life interactions that necessitate the use of smartphones.
As digital health researchers who have conducted (and are currently conducting) several studies examining problematic smartphone use in postsecondary students, we argue that treating nomophobia as a mental illness or a medical condition in need of treatment is flawed and potentially harmful.
In a recently published study, we suggest that nomophobia, or the anxiety associated with not being able to access one’s smartphone, has less to do with how often one uses their phone and more to do with the context in which the phone is used. The existence of smartphones has modified social and work expectations so that 24hour availability is now often considered the norm.
There’s no question that smartphones have become an important and arguably irreplaceable part of everyday life. Just as the automobile became irreplaceable because of urban sprawl that prioritized roads over walkways, the smartphone has become irreversibly embedded into our globalized and fast-paced lives. Unlike the automobile, which is typically used for a single function, smartphones can be used in many ways — some which are beneficial to the user.
Anxiety comes from the implied demands
During the pandemic, smartphones enabled remote grocery pick-up and food delivery, facilitated friend and family check-ins and allowed services like banking and doctor’s appointments to continue. This kind of smartphone use demonstrates clear utility and convenience.
Comparatively, some aspects of smartphone use are products of larger social and occupational norms. Modern work demands such as promptly answering e-mails and attending calls have been largely supported by smartphone functions and apps (like email, video conferencing, modifying documents). This means many employers expect their workers to be available beyond 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the anxiety associated with smartphones (or lack thereof) stems more from these implied demands than the device itself.
Similar anxieties stemming from “smartphone use” have been associated with social media consumption. Specifically, research (including our own) has documented that the more time you spend on social media apps, the higher the nomophobia. Meaning the anxiety associated with being unable to use your phone stems from how it’s being used rather than the device itself.
Part of our everyday worlds
The complicated relationship we have with our phones is clearly demonstrated through how they’re marketed to us, and their features. Our phones are positioned as “creative outlets” and are reflections of our self-expression through customization and usage.
The commercial for the iPhone 12, for example, focuses on how it’s the right gadget for everyone regardless of interests and use. The commercial goes so far as to visually suggest that the phone never needs to leave your hand and can perform any function you would need throughout your day.
The addition of features such as Apple or Google Pay, face ID and digital assistants like Siri exemplifies the way in which smartphones are no longer a simple and passive device, but rather a way by which we interact with our everyday worlds.
Smartphones have become an integral technology to the fabric of modern society. The concept of nomophobia oversimplifies both how these devices are used and the potential treatments for this device-related anxiety. Smartphones clearly extend a level of convenience, communication and utility that not only allows us to operate within society but to impose ourselves on it.
We must be critical and consider how and when these devices are helping us, harming us and changing us. The potential harms of treating nomophobia as a clinical condition ignores the complex and various ways we use our smartphones. What we use our devices for and how much we use them are often constrained by external factors, like employer demands.
*Postdoctoral fellow, Behavioural Medicine Lab, School of Exercise Science, Physical & Health Education, University of Victoria **PhD Candidate, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Western University
Source- The Conversation, September 7, 2021 (Under Creative Commons Licence)
Source- somagnews.com
wealtH in australia is growing faster tHan HealtH costs: new analysis
The wealth of Australians has grown by an extraordinary $9.5 trillion or 302% in the past 33 years according to a new report released by the Australia Institute. However, despite this enormous increase in wealth, which primarily takes the form of housing and shares, the rapid growth in the assets of Australian households has been completely ignored in analyses of the costs of ageing in Australia.
key findinGs:
- Last year Australian GDP was $2 trillion but Australian households received another $1.7 trillion in capital gains as wealth increased to $12.7 trillion. The IGR compares government spending with GDP but misses the capital gains which boost capacity to pay and are heavily biased towards the rich who can afford to pay. - The big picture in Australia is that wealth has increased massively, increasing from 3.6 times GDP 30 years ago, to 6.4 times GDP now. Moreover, wealth and capital gains will continue their upward trajectory and in 40 years’ time are likely to swamp GDP even more. - The intergenerational report is supposed to question whether Australia can afford the spending associated with the aging of the Australian population. However, the IGR compares spending pressures with GDP alone.
- By 2060, the Federal Government’s self-imposed cap of 23.9 per cent of GDP might be as low as 10.4 per cent of a comprehensive measure of income that includes capital gains. - And the distribution of income will worsen. Wealth is distributed much more unevenly than conventional measures of income so that as wealth increases, capital gains increase, and they pull the total income distribution further apart.
“The vast majority of wealth in Australia is held in the hands of those aged over 55. In the coming decades, not only is the wealth of Australians likely to grow rapidly but that wealth will almost certainly flow primarily to those aged over 55,” said David Richardson, senior research fellow at the Australia Institute.
“Rapid increases in wealth, like the one Australia has already experienced and the one we will likely experience in the decade ahead, are a good problem to have. But unless we reform our tax system, the benefits of growing wealth will come with significant costs in the form of inequality and economic inefficiency.
“Because Australia currently has no taxes on wealth, and collects very little income from capital gains, government revenues have not grown nearly as rapidly as the wealth of Australians. The Australian Government may keep choosing not to tax wealth and capital gains of our wealthiest people as thoroughly as it taxes the incomes of ordinary workers. However, such choices make it hard to argue that Australia ‘can’t afford’ to provide healthcare in the years to come to what will clearly be the wealthiest generation Australia has ever known.
“It’s remarkable that in the five intergenerational reports produced by the Australian Treasury, not one of them has examined the rate of growth or the distribution of wealth in Australia. How can you ask about intergenerational equity without considering wealth and the way it is, or isn’t taxed?”
Source- australiainstitute. org.au, August 25, 2021
tecHnology being weaponised to control and silence women: esafety commissioner Julie inman grant at tHe national summit on women’s safety
By saT neWs desk
mELBOURNE, 7 September 2021: Technology is routinely being weaponised against women to demean, control, and ultimately silence them according to a keynote speech given by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant at the National Summit on Women’s Safety.
In her candid landmark speech, delivered today on the opening of the second day of the Summit, details how abuse via technology has become a common feature in family and domestic violence cases and is now becoming commonplace in wider society.
It illustrated how personal and professional online harms are becoming increasingly intertwined, causing women to withdraw from situations and roles that may put them in harm’s way, further undermining their economic opportunities and entrenching existing inequalities.
“Women are disproportionately targeted in every form of online abuse we deal with at eSafety and this abuse is often rooted in misogyny and designed to demean, control, and ultimately silence women,” Ms. Inman Grant said. “And this is why we have a specific focus on women through our eSafety Women program.”
“And we see this in its most extreme form in domestic family violence situations where an abuser, usually male, uses technology to isolate, harass, monitor, stalk, and threaten a current or former female partner.
“Importantly, we now recognize that this technology-facilitated abuse can be a red flag for future physical violence as we saw in the tragic case of Hannah Clarke and her three young children.
“Our domestic violence frontline worker training and resources around TFA are key to helping support and protect these women and children but we all need to band together and do more to halt the increasing weaponization of technology against women.”
Ms. Inman Grant said that the online abuse experienced by women daily is also causing many to limit their participation on social media and is dissuading them from taking high-profile professional roles that could make them a target online.
“Our research shows that over a third of women have experienced abuse online as part of their professional lives and a quarter would think twice before taking on a public-facing role, for fear of the abuse they might receive,” she said.
“Our Women in the Spotlight (WITS) program aims to change this dynamic by providing tips and strategies as well as social media self-defense training to help women build their psychological armor and learn to interact online with impact, confidence, and resilience.
“We need to understand that online violence hurled against women is much more targeted, sexualized, and threatening than abuse their male counterpart’s experience.
“Our soon-to-beoperational, world-first adult cyber abuse scheme will provide new pathways for women who are on the receiving end of cyberstalking and threatening online abuse.
“But it’s also time for the tech industry to step up. The platforms haven’t made the kind of progress we need to see in terms of making online spaces safer and less toxic for women and this needs to change.”
In the Commissioner’s speech, she also outlined eSafety’s unique approach to managing these issues on the three pillars of prevention, protection, and proactive change and the forwardleaning steps she’ll seek to take in tackling the spectrum of online harms targeting a broad range of women.
She emphasized online abuse is not different from real-life abuse and urged people to go to esafety.gov. au for all information on the subject.
more tHan 4 billion people still lack any social protection, ilo report finds
By Paul haskell dOWland* & rOBereTO musOTTO**
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed and exacerbated the social protection gap between countries with high- and low-income levels.
GENEVA (ILO News) – Despite the unprecedented worldwide expansion of social protection during the COVID-19 crisis, more than 4 billion people around the world remain entirely unprotected, a new International Labour Organization (ILO) report says.
It finds that the pandemic response was uneven and insufficient, deepening the gap between countries with high- and low-income levels and failing to afford the much-needed social protection that all human beings deserve.
Social protection includes access to health care and income security, particularly in relation to old age, unemployment, sickness, disability, work injury, maternity or loss of a main income earner, as well as for families with children.
“Countries are at a crossroads,” said ILO Director-General, Guy Ryder. “This is a pivotal moment to harness the pandemic response to build a new generation of rights-based social protection systems. These can cushion people from future crises and give workers and businesses the security to tackle the multiple transitions ahead with confidence and with hope. We must recognize that effective and comprehensive social protection is not just essential for social justice and decent work but for creating a sustainable and resilient future too.”
The World Social Protection Report 202022: Social protection at the crossroads – in pursuit of a better future gives a global overview of recent developments in social protection systems, including social protection floors, and covers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report identifies protection gaps and sets out key policy recommendations, including in relation to the targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Currently, only 47 per cent of the global population are effectively covered by at least one social protection benefit, while 4.1 billion people (53 per cent) obtain no income security at all from their national social protection system.
There are significant regional inequalities in social protection. Europe and Central Asia have the highest rates of coverage, with 84 per cent of people being covered by at least one benefit. The Americas are also above the global average, with 64.3 per cent. Asia and the Pacific (44 per cent), the Arab States (40 per cent) and Africa (17.4 per cent) have marked coverage gaps. majority of children still have no effective social protection coverage – only one in four children (26.4 per cent) receives a social protection benefit. Only 45 per cent of women with newborns worldwide receive a cash maternity benefit. Only one in three persons with severe disabilities (33.5 per cent) worldwide receive a disability benefit. Coverage of unemployment benefits is even lower; only 18.6 per cent of unemployed workers worldwide are effectively covered. And while 77.5 per cent of people above retirement age receive some form of old-age pension, major disparities remain across regions, between rural and urban areas, and between women and men.
Government spending on social protection also varies significantly. On average, countries spend 12.8 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on social protection (excluding health), however highincome countries spend 16.4 per cent and lowincome countries only 1.1 per cent of their GDP on social protection.
The report says that the financing gap (the additional spending required to ensure at least minimum social protection for all) has increased by approximately 30 per cent since the start of the COVID-19 crisis.
To guarantee at least basic social protection coverage, low-income countries would need to invest an additional US$77.9 billion per year, lower-middle-income countries an additional US$362.9 billion per year and upper-middle-income countries a further US$750.8 billion per year. That’s equivalent to 15.9, 5.1 and 3.1 per cent of their GDP, respectively.
“There is an enormous push for countries to move to fiscal consolidation, after the massive public expenditure of their crisis response measures, but it would be seriously damaging to cut back on social protection; investment is required here and now,” said Shahra Razavi, Director, ILO Social Protection Department. important tool that can create wide-ranging social and economic benefits for countries at all levels of development. It can underpin better health and education, greater equality, more sustainable economic systems, better managed migration and the observance of core rights. Building the systems that can deliver these positive outcomes will require a mix of financing sources and greater international solidarity, particularly with support for poorer countries. But the benefits of success will reach beyond national borders to benefit us all,” she said.
Specific measures to promote universal social protection were highlighted in the Global Call to Action for a human-centred recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic . The Call to Action, which outlines a comprehensive agenda for recovery, was endorsed unanimously in June 2021 by the ILO’s Member States, representing governments, workers’ and employers’ organizations.
