China’s latest effort to censor an Australian book reveals there is more for us to worry about in the “Asian Century” than finding ways of making more money. Culture and politics, and the values of freedom and democracy, will matter just as much as commerce in the years ahead.

Beijing’s official complaints last September over a book published by the Australian Centre for China in the World reveal a political intolerance that is more suited to the delirium of absolute monarchy than a powerful, self-confident modern state.


That should come as no surprise. China’s power is waxing and when the communist regime in Beijing is not adding to regional tensions by aggressively pursuing its claims in the South China or East China Seas it is devoting its energies to perfecting its system of censorship, in China and elsewhere.

Just look at the furore in China over official censorship at the Southern Weekly, a newspaper in southern Guangdong province whose editorial staff went on strike after official intervention to censor an editorial calling for the rule of constitutional law.


The risk to Australia of China’s mindset is clear. Our biggest trading partner seemingly reserves itself the right to respect our freedoms selectively, especially when it comes to criticising negative perceptions of China in our media and academic institutions.

This attitude was on show a few years ago during the 2009 Melbourne Film Festival, when China objected to Australia providing a visa to Uighur activist, Rebiya Kadeer; and even more so after the publication of an official Australian Government paper on defence policy in 2009 that pinpointed China as a future adversary.


The latest instalment of this episodic bullying occurred last year, when the Australian Centre for China in the World at the Australian National University published its 2012 annual yearbook, Red Rising, Red Eclipse.

Launched by the former head of the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry, the yearbook is a series of chapters on different aspects of China ranging from foreign policy to law and order and culture. A largely anodyne though curious academic publication, it contains little to scratch the skin of the Chinese Communist Party.

Yet staff from China’s embassy in Canberra complained about a lack of balance and the feeling in Beijing was so strong that back in mainland China its digital censors blocked Internet access to the report. 


Embassy staff first went to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the mistaken belief that the Australian Government controls the content of university books. When that failed, they took their grievances to the Centre itself, a move that outraged the Centre’s Director, the renowned sinologist Geremie R. Barme, enough to prompt him to write a 13 page rebuke to the Chinese Embassy.

Geremie Barme on Lateline

“We believe that it is important to act as if the People’s Republic had already sloughed off the vestiges of Cold War-era and Maoist attitudes, behaviour and language,” Professor Barme said in his letter which is posted on the Centre’s website.

“I for one do not see how such a crude interdiction benefits mutual understanding, respect, nor indeed how it can reflect well on the maturing relationship between China and international academic and research communities.”

In a democratic polity like Australia it’s a reasonable right of anyone or any institution concerned about truth and accurate reporting to make a complaint. If a Chinese think tank started publishing crass falsehoods about Australia, there would no doubt be a reaction from Australian officialdom.


But in this case the tone of China’s complaints was all wrong and, so far from being unbalanced, the claims of the book seem eminently reasonable and unprovocative.

One of the chapters wrote of China’s newly aggressive foreign policy—and just who is going to deny that trend with a straight face? Another described the downfall of the neo-Maoist politician Bo Xilai, a major political player ruined in a grubby scandal and ejected from the centre of China’s leadership. That story has been covered globally ad nauseam. So what can be the real issue here?


The Centre is a recognised centre of sinology with influence and contacts around the world; its views matter and they influence people, including readers in China. For instance, while the Chinese embassy staff were putting their case last year, Professor Barme was visiting Harvard, Columbia and George Washington University explaining the contents of Red Rising, Red Eclipse to other scholars.

In addition to this, China’s top leadership has shown great interest in the Centre’s work. Xi Jinping, the newly appointed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, even donated 1,000 books to the Centre back in 2010 after a visit. Is it possible that China was offended because it imagined a more understanding relationship with the Centre that didn’t actually exist?



It’s not just intellectual freedom that we should be worried about either; on policy issues as well there has been a similar absolutist fervour.

Recently, a Chinese official complained about the treatment of the Chinese telecommunications firm, Huawei, which the Australian Government sensibly blocked from participating in the national broadband network. As the US Congress has discovered, Huawei has links to China’s national security community, raising doubts about its suitability for a role in sensitive projects.

But China’s ambassador to Australia, Chen Yuming, warned Australia that the price of discriminating against Chinese firms like Huawei could be to become locked out of being part of China’s economic transformation. That’s a big stick to use in a relationship that is supposed to be friendly and balanced. Can you imagine Australia threatening to lock China out of investing in our minerals and resource sector?

So perhaps the real question in this odd story is what will be the long term effects of this type of bullying on Australia’s political culture?


As Chinese investment pours into Australia and as our exports to China grow, we often forget, or downplay that China’s political system is fundamentally different from ours and that our freedoms may not remain untouched through our closer commercial relationship.


Greater efforts need to be made to explain to the Australian people the nature of the emerging challenges and the pressure they will put on our democracy.

There has been a quite public strategic debate in Australia over whether we will have to choose between the United States and China, but little has been said about the long-term political effects of our relationship with China. 


Australia is a grain of rice compared with China’s full course banquet of power. As economic power moves to Asia, our tiny democracy will face its biggest challenges this century and our political class needs to bring them home to the nation’s understanding.



Left leaning parties in Brazil and Australia are both immersed in corruption scandals. We can only hope our nation shows the same intolerance as Brazil does for those who threaten its integrity.

There’s a scene in Graeme Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana where local military strongman Captain Segura tells British informant Wormald that he wouldn’t be tortured because “there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea”.

In other words, the world is divided between people who expect the state to be unjust, and those who do not.

In 1958, when Greene wrote the novel, there was no doubt that a country like Australia would be of the latter while Brazil belonged to the former. But in 2013, as authorities in Brazil and Australia both face off massive corruption trials, it’s less clear on which side of the divide Australia now stands.

Some of Brazil’s most powerful men are now in jail as the country cracks down on corruption. By contrast, in Australia, as the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption starts investigations into the murky dealings of Eddie Obeid and Co, the outcome seems far from certain.

Not so in Brazil, where on 2 August 2012, 25 politicians and officials of Brazil’s Partido Trabalhista (Worker’s Party) were convicted of corruption and other charges by the Brazilian Supreme Court.

The scandal, known as the “mensalao”, or the “big monthly”, involved politicians and officials diverting funds to buy political support for the former president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The scandal has extended to the highest echelons of the Brazilian Government with Lula’s former chief of staff and top aide, Jose Dirceu, sentenced to serve over 10 years in prison in November 2012 for being the principal of the vote buying scheme.

Jose Dirceu

Judge Joaquim Barbosa, the country’s first black Supreme Court judge who worked as a cleaner to pay for law school, told the former aide that he had ‘defiled’ the role of one of the most important offices in the land.

Judge Barbosa also sentenced businessman Marcus Valerio, who acted as a kind of ‘broker’ for Dirceu, to over 40 years imprisonment for bribery and crimes of corruption.

Incredulous Brazilians erupted in celebration as the accused were jailed.

Judge Barbosa became an overnight hero as protestors chanted ‘the party’s over’. The city’s carnival district began a brisk trade in masks of his face – the ultimate compliment by the Brazilian masses.

Crusader for justice: Judge Joaquim Barbosa

After decades of political corruption made possible by a culture of impunity, the sentences represent a fundamental shift in the accountability of the Brazilian state.

It represented an end to the humiliating trials of those of the likes of former Brazilian President Fernando Collor, impeached for widespread corruption in 1992, only to be re-elected as senator in 2006 (he lost office again in 2010).

In turn, they have awakened Brazilians from their political apathy and renewed their aspirations for a state in which corruption is a terrible and unacceptable crime.

In Australia, ICAC is currently investigating whether former NSW resources minister Ian Macdonald provided inside knowledge about coal mining explorations in the Hunter Valley to former NSW minister Eddie Obeid.

Obeid allegedly gained $30 million from selling the land on which the coal deposits were found and is chasing another $30 million from Cascade.

Eddie Obeid

In his opening address to ICAC, assisting counsel Geoffrey Watson SC said that if found to be true, the corruption was on a “scale probably unexceeded since the days of the Rum Corp”.

The Obeids claim they bought the farm because of its beauty (despite only having been there twice) while their associate investor said it was for cattle farming (despite not being able to tell the court whether it was milking, breeding or agistment).

The ICAC is also interested in businessmen Travers Duncan, Brian Flannery and John Kinghorn, who were allegedly set to sell the two coal deposits in question for $500 million, a year after they bought them for about $1 million, before the deal was abandoned under suspicions of corruption.

But far from cowering in fear of a prison sentence, Obeid and his cabal of celebrated financiers, businessmen and their model girlfriends are flagrantly going about their business in the Emerald City. They are photographed in the social columns, live in waterfront mansions and enjoy listings in the Rich List.

Last weekend, the Obeids were even given the dignity of a right of reply in The Australian newspaper, an interview more notable for its contradictions and unanswered questions than its clarity.

They behave in a manner more befitting of a politician in the bad old days of Brazil than a wealthy developed country like Australia.

And why wouldn’t they? As Segura tells Wormald in Our Man in Havana, “one never tortures except by mutual agreement”. And it’s not even the first time Obeid has been investigated.

In 2004, Obeid was caught up in another inquiry into land deals in Strathfield and other Labor controlled zones in Sydney in which developers have allegedly received inside knowledge on proposals to rezone land.

In 2011, the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo estimated the cost of corruption to the Brazilian state at $6 billion per year. And lest anyone think that Brazil is so culturally diverse from Australia that this would never happen here, corruption is a slippery slope.

As the Brazilians know all too well, it is far more difficult to claw your way back from a corrupt state than to descend into one.

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When a good thing goes bad



It looked like The Wire all over again, evenings spent glued to the television, riding the thrills and spills of a modern day Greek tragedy, following the characters as they hurtled towards their terrible destinies.



I eulogised the writers of Homeland, Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon and Gideon Raff, and pronounced all the great talent was now in television, quoting Robert McKee to my partner. 

And then I sat down to watch.



It was beautiful television. The genius of the narrative tension which had us knowing more than the characters themselves, that the war hero Brody was a Muslim and terrorist. 



CIA Agent Carrie Mathison played by actress Claire Danes

The well sketched characters of Carrie Mathieson, desperately ambitious and hiding her bipolar condition to keep her job; the battered Saul Berenson, coming to realise he had sacrificed too much for his ambitions; and the faintly duplicitous Bureau Chief, David Estes.

I was even prepared to overlook the fact that the first real characterisation of a truly ambitious woman on mainstream television was bipolar (because every ambitious woman needs a moral flaw).



When Claire Danes’ Carrie Matheson counter threatened her freelance investigator Virgil when he looked to be threatening to expose her mental state, saying that he was “up to his fucking neck in it”, I was hooked.

And then something happened.

The story line started to waver. The characterisation of Brody softened. Was it really possible for a loved and stable American marine to become a terrorist extremist after seeing his captor’s son killed, even if he had spent eight years in captivity?



Before I even had time to question my thoughts, they threw a love story at me in Brody and Carrie, killed six CIA agents in a shootout in Gettysburg and had Brody kill off two of his co-conspirator terrorists. His daughter was involved in a hit and run.

Suddenly the story line became fantastical. It took flight from reality, lurching from one random storyline to the next. The script itself became the bipolar character, throwing increasingly absurd story lines at me in anticipation that my attention was already waning.

 Ragged and desperate, it abandoned its true self.

Vice President William Walden played by actor Jamey Sheridan



It’s called paying the piper.

And this is how a good thing goes bad.



Before the time of Fifty Shades and Dan Brown, novels were constructed with such precision that there would have be no way to extend so endlessly.

The story had a start and an end point, the psychology of the characters was paramount, but moreover it had to make sense.

Not so in television, where in the last year we have seen the likes of Mad Men peter out from one of the most outstanding stories of our time to a dribbling, senseless mess in Season Five. 

As Daniel Mendelhson wrote in the New York Review of Books last year about Mad Men:

“Most of the show’s flaws can, in fact, be attributed to the way it waves certain flags in your face and leaves things at that, without serious thought about dramatic appropriateness or textured characterization…The writers like to trigger “issue”-related subplots by parachuting some new character or event into the action, often an element that has no relation to anything that’s come before.”

The Wire has been one of the few series to hold itself together – although even it had the terrible third season blues.

Television is the mirror to ourselves – our demanding, short attention spanned selves – so we can’t very complain when it starts to look like things haven’t been thought through.

But what does it mean for our wider understanding of the world when our writers are responding to our whims rather than telling the stories that need to be told?

As Alex Gansa said in an interview with the BBC’s Channel 4 “The first conversation we had with Damian and Claire was, how long can we keep the “is he or isn’t he” of it alive without feeling like we’re annoying the audience?”

Is this really the sum of contemporary writing? How can we tell a story without annoying our viewers?

But perhaps, more poignantly, is this really the sum of us as viewers? That we can’t watch anything unless it packs in meaningless twists and turns, designed to attract our attention like some sort of flashing billboard.

Before television is to claim its place as the cultural vehicle of our times, surely we need to aspire to more.

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A strong defence of Western ideas is the answer to Islamic radicalism.

Images of Muslim rage are so commonplace nowadays they would be almost amusing if they weren’t so violent.

Recall the worldwide demonstrations back in September when a kooky anti-Muslim video aired on YouTube.

Or the depraved shooting of Malala Yousafzai in October, a brave teenage girl in the Swat Valley, Pakistan who was shot in the head for resisting the Taliban’s craven opposition to educating girls.

Less in evidence are signs that citizens of the West understand the challenges to our values posed by a resurgent and aggressive radical Islam spouting sharia law and medieval sexual politics.

People do sense something is wrong within Islam although there is less surety it has anything to do with them. Any intelligent adult is aware that Islam and the Muslim world are undergoing the dislocating effects of modernisation. We all know it’s not a replay of the Crusades, where two faiths squared off and rejoiced in their fanatic animosity.

One of us has moved on from that world and is enjoying a new secular faith, but that doesn’t mean the West should withdraw from the battle of ideas and influence.

For the secularisation of Islam to succeed, the West still needs to defend its own secular faith, its values of freedom of thought, speech, respect for the individual and gender equality.

The risks of not doing that, of intellectual complacency, are as commonplace and as dangerous as Muslim rage.

When author Michael Ignatieff, for instance, reviewed Salman Rushdie’s new memoir about his life under the Iranian fatwa, Mr Ignatieff seemed unsure about the place of Western values vis a vis Islam.

“Faith has no privilege, no exclusive right, and secular reason has none either,” he wrote in the Financial Times. A strange remark from the biographer of the renowned liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin and one which conveniently ignores 500 years of Western science and reason.

One voice of dissent against this supineness is writer and intellectual Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who believes that, barring military action, only a war of ideas will help move the Muslim world into a period of enlightenment and modernisation.

When Hirsi Ali questioned the conventional wisdom about Islam on the BBC’s Newshour last month, the BBC presenter was sceptical. He urged her to recognise Islam’s broad political spectrum.

That brought forth the following reply from Hirsi Ali:
“If something like that [Egyptian election results] happened anywhere in Europe or America, say to a party proposing Christian theocracy, we would be more than shocked and appalled,” she said. “So don’t make excuses about that, this is shocking, this is bizarre.”

Hirsi Ali went on to tell the BBC presenter the success of radical Islamist parties in recent elections, such as the Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, was a sign that behind the veneer of democracy in the Middle East anti-democratic forces were gathering strength.

Now residing in New York, away but not entirely safe from the threats from Muslim radicals, Hirsi Ali has become a glamorous Enlightenment-type figure, someone who could have shared a coffee with the encyclopaedists in the 18th century as they dissected the evils of the House of Bourbon.

At a time when many fashionable intellectuals are still choking down Michel Foucault’s opaque ideas and celebrating subjectivity, she is upholding individuality, reason, free speech and property rights.

Unlike the fashionable and high-minded, who sometimes benefit from a system they often disdain, she takes the values of Voltaire and Locke seriously.

She has lived in societies–Somalia and Saudi Arabia– where you can be persecuted for those values; so she takes seriously the philosophical underpinnings of Western liberalism.
The radicals want to kill her but the Western world has come to rely on for her diagnosis of Muslim pathologies, seen and unseen, and her prognostications of the threat radical Islam poses to Western values.

At the heart of her criticism is Islam’s treatment of women and by extension sexuality, along with Islam’s culture of honour and shame. She clearly sees Muslim women as oppressed and in need of liberation from a culture that treats them as chattel.

And it’s not just radical Islam that worries her. Islam itself she questions, particularly the view that mainstream Islam is acceptable and somehow normal. It’s not, she argues. It’s deeply misogynistic, violent and antipathetic to the open society. This perhaps is her deepest insight and one that might be easily missed by outsiders to the religion.

Hirsi Ali’s life story is fabled enough, thanks to her bestselling memoir, Infidel, but her star continues to shine as a result of her unfinished intellectual mission. She still has work to do, bringing the truth about Islam and what it means for Western values, into the light.

And don’t we need it. Just think of the glum, half-hearted defence of the brave editors at the French satirical journal, Charlie Hebdo, who defied the threats of the Muslim world and mocked the Prophet in their cartoons in September.

Who can disagree with their argument that they have mocked the Pope and other nabobs of religion in the past, so why stop with Islam?

You would be hard pressed to nominate a more courageous and honest intellectual than Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former Muslim, Dutch MP and friend of the late Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, brutally murdered for his film Submission, which he had made with Hirsi Ali’s help.

We certainly need more encouragement from our leaders when it comes to dealing with what some call the “clash of civilisations” after the late American political scientist, Samuel Huntington.

Islam is much closer to home for the West than it has ever been, thanks to mass immigration.
The capacity of Muslims to adapt and assimilate to Western societies is one of Hirsi Ali’s preoccupations; it relates directly to her own experience as an immigrant in a welcoming, open and free Holland.

She believes that modern multiculturalism is misguided because it traps Muslim immigrants in their old ways and their subsequent failure to assimilate leads to alienation.

Her life story proves this point. Instead of blaming the West for the problems of the Islamic world, she calls on Muslims to adapt and change, just like 14-year old Malala Yousafzai did when she became an activist for the educational rights of girls in Pakistan.

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Are we getting used to natural disasters?

It was by no means the greatest storm ever to have hit a city, or even the Americas for that matter, but Hurricane Sandy has been a startling indicator of how far advanced we already are in managing environmental disasters.

On initial impressions, quite a long way would seem to be the answer.

After Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1833 people and caused US$100 billion in damage, President George W. Bush and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were widely criticised for their slow and bureaucratic response.

By way of contrast, this time FEMA was ready to deal with Sandy with 2200 staff and US$7 billion in reserves and a communications plan for its distribution.

As people bunkered down in their apartments with films, books and children long put aside, the three leaders of the disaster team – New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie and President Obama – quickly stepped into what looked on the outside to be a perfectly organised disaster response.

Obama diverted himself from the campaign trail to dealing with the disaster and made the critical move of declaring a State of Emergency before the storm had even hit, thus freeing up resources when they needed them. He even told people to divert their political donations to the Red Cross.

Mr Christie must have given Mr Romney a near heart attack when he roundly praised the President’s rapid response as ‘outstanding’ and deserving of ‘great credit’, putting aside the vicious partisan politics which have defined the election race.

So far Sandy has claimed 70 lives in the US and Canada and early estimates of damages reported by the Wall Street Journal are sitting at around $20 billion, most of which is due to the sheer population density and economic importance of the affected areas.

But the most startling thing about Sandy has been the calmness of the American response.

‘The great thing about America is when we go through tough times like this, we all pull together,’ said Obama in a matter-of-fact tone as the storm approached on Monday night.

And so they did.

By Wednesday morning, as the death rate and property destruction soared, the Americans seemed to become increasingly calm.

Disaster teams swung into action, rescuing people from rooftops and the high seas, while Obama called on local agencies to cut through red tape. More than 7400 citizen soldiers had made themselves available for action, with 85,000 more in reserve.

By Tuesday, as Sandy was still in full swing, Mayor Bloomberg struck an upbeat stance, no doubt thinking ahead to getting the economy on track: ‘We have a plan for recovery and that recovery is already beginning, I’m happy to say. This is the end of the downside, and hopefully from here it is going up.’

It was a picture of what we can expect in a world where natural disasters have become the norm–and where we learn very quickly how to respond to them.

In a world of increasing climate fluctuation, the ability of our leaders to manage natural disasters is going to become increasingly more important, at least as much as the economy.

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It’s probably one of the funniest scenes in the history of comedy.

Yesterday morning French embassies in the Middle East and Africa, as well as French schools and cultural centres in some areas, closed in anticipation of attacks by extremists offended by caricatures of the prophet Muhammad published in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The Offending Charlie Hedbo Cover

They weren’t nearly as good as the Life of Brian, but a chorus of disapproval followed, with the French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault saying that while freedom of speech was paramount in France, “Is it pertinent, intelligent, in this context to pour oil on the fire? The answer is no.”

The Editor of Le Monde Diplomatique Alain Gresh added his own voice, telling BBC News Hour that while France had a tradition of being able to attack religions (unlike Britain, he added), the people needed to account for the global context.

“Imagine a newspaper in Germany in the 30s before the arrival of the Nazis making a special issue against the Jewish religion… In the context of Germany in the 1930s it has a political meaning.” 

Well, as they say in comedy, timing is everything.

If the team at Monty Python had waited until the moment wasn’t right, we may well not know the names John Cleese, Michael Palin, or more tragically, Biggus Dickus.

Pontius Pilate and Biggus Dickus

“It’s a very sensitive question,’ said Gresh. “The cartoons will “strengthen the feeling for Muslims that they are not part of this society…  that they are always under attack… that they are not considered normal French citizens.”

Drawing parallels between the Muslims in France and Jews in Germany aside, the idea that a religion is above ridicule is in itself ridiculous.

One could argue that the only reason we even have a democracy is because of the sheer terror of humiliation that our politicians face everyday. Without satire, egos run unabated. There is no more devastating, sophisticated and civilised political tool than wit.

As the English statesman and advisor to Henry VIII, Thomas More, once said, “The devil…the prowde spirite…cannot endure to be mocked.”

The events of last week showed that the frontier between the culture of Islam and the West has finally arrived and that frontier is freedom. It’s not possible to tell society that you believe in freedom of speech, but that it can only be used when the time is right.

The HuffPost reported on a demonstration in Lebanon, Nabil Kaouk, in which the deputy chief of Hezbollah’s Executive Council, warned the United States and France not to anger Muslims. “Be careful of the anger of our nation that is ready to defend the prophet,” he said. “Our hearts are wounded and our chests are full of anger.”

So ripe for satire, so plump for the picking. This cast of characters are so preposterous, their speeches so Pythonesque, that they are frankly irrésistible. When Islam starts laughing at itself, it’s going to have enough material for decades.

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Don’t blame the bogans in Bali, it’s the Aussie villa class which is changing life on the Island of the Gods

In Havana, the Americans were escaping prohibition and puritans. In Bali, Australians are running from their own success. With its cheap housing, labour at US$10 per day and a decadent expatriate community, is Bali becoming Australia’s Cuba of the 1950s?

There was once a time when travellers saw Bali as a place of retreat from the rigid uniformity of western life. Mexican anthropologist, Miguel Covarrubias, who travelled to Bali in the 1930s, became entranced with the quiet beauty and rich traditions of the Balinese.

Covarrubias’s classic work, The Island of Bali, described the elaborate systems of village rules that once existed in Balinese life, a culture which is struggling to survive the epicurean pace of economic development.

Of the 2.6 million travellers to Bali this year, almost one third will be Australian, and many of those won’t have a return ticket. But don’t be mistaken into thinking it’s all bogans in Kuta.

The Bali Bogan In Stone

Driven by the mining boom and rising costs of living in Australia, a flood of real estate business people, finance industry refugees, FIFO workers and men on their second marriages to local women are moving in en masse.

Local gossip abounds about the Australian financier who bought a five million dollar villa, employed 14 servants and insisted they wore uniforms. At the island’s international school, the teachers have been known to remind parents not to send locally employed nannies to parent-teacher evenings.

Foreign investment in the Island of the Gods is going full steam ahead with nearly a billion US dollars earmarked for restaurants and hotels during 2011, no doubt of some benefit to an island where the per capita income is around US$1200.

Amidst the wild parties, luxury villas and country clubs, a new type of Australian is being born. He’s a good times guy with an eye for easy money and at any other time in history, he might be called a colonialist. They love the “no worries no rules” culture, well, at least the rules they don’t understand.

In refreshing contrast to Australia’s tightly regulated society, Bali seems to be free and uninhibited. You can ride your motorbike without a helmet, buy your way out of traffic infringements and build wherever you want.

You still might need the permission of the banjar (Balinese traditional council) to have a villa party, but for how long can they hold out?

Driven in part by Australian mining money, there’s a property boom taking place across the south coast of Bali with high quality villas in expat hotspots like Canggu and Seminyak starting at around US$400,000 and going up well into the multi millions.

We’ve barely unpacked our bags before a craggy faced former Australian lawyer and his young Balinese wife are offering to show us some property. He told us he was sick of working the Australian rat race and claimed to have made AUD$2 million in a year.

Yet the Bali Times is filled with stories on the adverse impact of tourism and expatriates. They recently ran a story about how the traditional Balinese rice paddies (some of them up to 1000 year old) are being torn up to make way for villas bought by FIFO (fly in fly out) workers, in another their Governor I Made Mangku Pastika recently gave a speech about how tourism is hurting Bali’s poorest.

Taxi drivers told us that it’s typical to spend over an hour in traffic traveling the 14km distance between Sanur and Seminyak and the roads around Kuta are gridlocked during peak hours. But how could the Government improve infrastructure if the tourism dollars were not there to support it?

In May 2012, the chairman of Bali’s Tourism Board, Ida Bagus Ngurah Wijaya, complained that while tourism numbers were increasing, tourists were coming for less time and spending less per person.

“When they come, we have serious problems of traffic and waste. The island becomes dirty,” he told the Jakarta Globe.

While corruption remains a problem, with Indonesian officials siphoning off the bribes that people pay to build villas (because technically foreigners cannot own property in Bali), the island is suffering a new type of traveller.

As one expatriate writer told us, the problem is not the Kuta bogans, who visit Bali for their two week holiday every year and spend their tourist dollars, but the slightly well heeled who move in and buy up ancient rice paddies, fundamentally changing the culture of the island in the process.

The real tragedy of the Bali expats is that they bring with them precisely the culture they are trying to escape – endless rows of uniform luxury villas carefully constructed to generate a faux social cache that so eluded them back home.

As we sadly wait for our flight out, the gate for the Denpasar-Darwin flight unexpectedly changes. A roiling crowd of Australian holidaymakers steam down the halls at Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport, Bintang singlets stretched across fat bronzed bellies and children screaming.

As a vaguely contemptuous Balinese customs official processes the queue (our first glimpse of the real Bali?), a young Aussie girl attacks her brother and he bursts into floods of tears to the outrage of his mother. ‘You little f*&%!,’ she screams, launching her enormous body through the crowd to club both children across the ears.

The crowd stares on impassively, the children howl and the customs official’s lip turns up in a sneer. It’s only midnight at the Bogan Bacchanalia, but there’s plenty more left in her yet.

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Barclays finds itself in a major scandal over interest rate rigging. When are regulators going to clean up Wall Street and the City of London?

Two titans of Barclay’s PLC–chairman Marcus Agius and CEO Bob Diamond– have resigned over their bank’s involvement in rigging a benchmark interest rate that underpins US$800 trillion worth of loans and derivatives.

Coming after the recent derivatives losses at JP Morgan Chase, the Barclays scandal explodes the myth that global finance has been reformed after the financial crash. And it raises another persistent question: why does it appear that financial executives involved in fraud never seem to get prosecuted?

Their departures follow a fine imposed on the bank of US$453 million after it admitted to the manipulation of the Libor or the London Interbank Offered Rate. Claims by Mr Diamond that senior regulators knew of the manipulation have also dragged in the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Paul Tucker.

Criminal penalties for financiers involved in this fraud will depend in part on the results of two inquiries launched by the Cameron Government, as well as an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

And Britain’s Chancellor, George Osborne, has now called for a new financial culture in the UK. “I hope it’s the first step towards a new culture of British banking,” Mr Osborne said. 

Unlike standard crimes, financial malfeasances rarely lead to the jailing of key executives, no matter what the kerfuffle in the media or the investor community.

The email trails of traders, recorded by a bank’s IT system, are commonly there for all to see–need we recall the emails of Goldman Sachs trader “Fabulous Fab” Tourer–but for top executives the chain of evidence is often harder to establish.

In this case, however, Mr Diamond has kept a record of his conversation with Mr Tucker, which Barclays has released to the media; that has dramatically expanded the scandal to the Bank of England and will no doubt be a topic when former Barclays executives are quizzed by a parliamentary committee this week.

Mr Agius, the former chairman of Barclay’s, quit earlier this week but he was soon followed by the chief executive, the American-born Mr Diamond and his associate, Jerry del Missier. Mr del Missier apparently instructed Barclays traders to lower their estimates of borrowing costs after a conversation between Mr Diamond and the Bank of England’s Deputy Governor in 2008.

Married to the daughter of a Rothschild, the well dressed and equally well-heeled Mr Agius must have wondered, like the former head of BP did, what he had done to deserve this?

Barclays had fallen victim to a special investigation by UK, US and Asian authorities into about 20 banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Canada and, of course, Barclays.

The investigation focussed on their involvement in rigging the LIBOR, the interest rate banks charge when they borrow money from each other. More importantly, it is a benchmark rate used to set other rates loans around the world and an indicator the financial health of the bank.

It might not look like a major case of white collar crime, but it almost certainly is that. Banks manipulating the rate stand to benefit during difficult financial periods, when the markets are looking for signs that a bank could be in trouble. 

The UK’s Financial Services Authority, which fined Barclays, concluded that the integrity of the LIBOR is of fundamental importance to both UK and international financial markets.

Mishaps and greed in the finance sector have damaged the lives of millions of people, yet the criminal justice system seems to treat offenders much as a gym manager would treat an overweight executive client with an unpaid gym bill.

This may change with stronger regulation–it did after the Great Depression–but it’s not something to expect anytime soon. 

No matter what laws are passed, the structure of modern global finance is too powerful a beast to tame. Its values and sheer lobbying power are so formidable that the types of illegalities Barclay was caught out on will return, if in fact they went away at all. 

Earlier this year, for instance, the Wall Street investment bank JP Morgan Chase revealed losses on derivatives bets worth an estimated US$3 billion; those bets now look like losing the bank US$9 billion. 

These were the same types of sophisticated financial bets which were behind the crash in 2008. Yet the CEO of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, had spent the period after the crash decrying the unfairness of attacks on Wall Street and warning of the alarmist dangers of financial regulation.

It seems little has changed on Wall Street, or in the City of London. 

Unlike Messrs Agius and Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Jamie Dimon still holds his job. But as Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, pointed out in that magazine’s July issue: “The pedestal that [Dimon] so carefully constructed for himself is now vacant”.

After the dramatic events at Barclays this week, you can add another two empty pedestals to that list.

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Berlin concedes a few goals in Brussels, but that hasn’t changed Germany’s game plan for Europe.

The crisis summit of Eurozone leaders last week in Brussels proves that even Berlin must on occasion bend to the will of its European partners.

As the strongest economic power in Europe, Germany has been eager to spread its austerity doctrine to all 17 members of the Eurozone during the current crisis.

So far it hasn’t worked, which is why the pro-growth forces of Italy, France and Spain extracted some important concessions on economic policy in Brussels from German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 

Germany agreed to allow Eurozone bailout funds to capitalise ailing banks directly and to provide loans without onerous oversight conditions from the “troika”, or the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Angela Merkel

We know this because there was no action on what would be the most effective way to lower the borrowing costs of countries like Spain and Italy—direct purchases of their bonds by the European Central Bank, a policy still banned under the Maastricht Treaty.

In return for her concessions Ms Merkel got a great deal from her Eurozone partners. They agreed on two key planks of Germany’s economic policy. A new Fiscal Pact will restrict the size of budget deficits of Eurozone members, and there will be a new banking tsar for the Eurozone’s shaky financial system.

Both are a key part of Germany’s strategy to unify Europe and to ease the crisis.

In another sign of luck for the Chancellor, Germany’s Parliament has now approved the Fiscal Pact and the 700 billion euro European Stability Mechanism.

In short, Germany got what it was after and Ms Merkel’s reputation back home has seemingly survived an electorate angry at the prospect of bailing out the rest of the Eurozone.

Ever since the election of French President Francoise Hollande, and the ouster of Ms Merkel’s key ally former French president Nicholas Sarkozy, Germany has realised that its influence on the Eurozone’s response to the crisis would likely be challenged.

Spain, in particular, had come under increasing pressure as a result of its weak banks and high sovereign debt borrowing costs. 

Put simply, Spain could no longer afford to borrow money to pay its bills let alone provide adequate funds to save its banks.

Despite Silvio Berlusconi’s departure and his replacement with someone more competent and honest, Italy was in a similar predicament, with huge budget deficits and rising costs of borrowing.

When the problems in these countries were combined with the new French President’s emphasis on the need for stronger growth policies, the balance of power within the Eurozone shifted against German austerity.

As a result, Ms Merkel had little choice in Brussels but to compromise. Italy and its pro-growth allies threatened to block a 130 billion euro Growth Pact that was a condition of agreement on the Fiscal Pact with Germany’s opposition Social Democrat Party.

It would not be too cynical to suggest that Germany and Eurozone leaders have seen the crisis, at least in part, as an opportunity to further their own vision of a prosperous, unified Europe. 

In other words, Germany sees the crisis as a way to improve economic policy and regulation across the Eurozone, as a justification for tough budget policies, wage reductions and competitive reforms.

Especially so in countries like Greece, where Germans see corruption, dishonesty and plain laziness as undermining economic growth and threatening their own national solvency. 

As Der Spiegel magazine noted in a review of the summit in Brussels, the new Fiscal Pact will impose much tougher long term conditions on other Eurozone members.

In Ms Merkel’s view, her concessions in Brussels might be a small price to pay for gaining acceptance of Germany’s long term aims for Europe.

Nonetheless, the Brussels summit shows that European integration is not just a process driven by Berlin with other Eurozone nations been dragged along as poor cousins.

Rather it’s a collective enterprise dependent on resolving tensions (in this case) between Europe’s wealthiest nation, Germany, and its struggling European partners in Southern Europe.

Or as Italy’s technocratic Prime Minister, Mario Monti, told the New York Times after the summit, “The construction of Europe is done of many successive achievements like this one”. 

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The global community has thrown limestone dust on the grave of sustainability, but will it keep the stink away?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

As the curtain lowered on Rio+20, the United Nations conference on sustainable development held in Rio this month, one bothersome question floated over the crowd of diplomats, delegates, journalists, ngos’ representatives, ecowarriors, indigenous tribes, landless movements and the thousands who followed the summit from a safe distance.

If the world is sitting on a ticking environmental bomb why did Rio+20 and its green political nabobs put off a strict and ambitious plan of sustainable development?

That a greener future was taken off the global agenda at Rio+20 is unquestionable: the era of a grand global vision of environmental sustainability now seems buried.

What remains doubtful are the justifications for inaction. Rich and polluting countries argued that the economic crisis made it impossible to deal with issues of global sustainability at a time when their own national economies were in dire straits.

Rocinha is a good emblem for Rio+20

At the same time they suggested that the complexity of the issue, seen from a global level, meant national and more individual solutions were more appropriate. Ironically, that seems to be a point that environmental groups now seem willing to embrace after Rio+20, which is that we all must think globally and act locally.

As a result of this stonewalling on one of the great issues of the day, we now have come to terms with the fact that little progress has been made in the twenty years since the last UN conference on sustainable development. We still measure development by productivity but sustainability is a distant and confused thought.

Yet for at least four decades, we have known that the greenhouse effect is not a natural heating system, nor sunscreen a beauty product, nor mercury an exotic tuna flavor. We have long been conscious of irreversible environmental outcomes to our actions and of the enormity of making changes to people’s lifestyle choices.

At the last event of its kind, twenty years ago in Rio (called ECO 92), 116 heads of state appeared at the event from 172 of the world’s wealthiest countries and promised to invest 0.7 per cent of their GDP towards the green economy.

In 2012, only two presidents from the G8 came – Hollande and Putin – and the most the forum could agree on was the unpromising document The Future We Want. The 52 page document took days of religious retreat for all parties to reach common ground by reducing the text from 200 pages and, in the process, depriving it of all of its strength.

“It tosses limestone powder on Rio+20,” as former Brazilian Presidential Candidate and ardent environmentalist, Marina Silva, said this week referring to the practice of the Brazilian poor to sprinkle limestone over the graves of people whom they couldn’t afford to bury in a coffin, to keep the bad smell away.

Eco-consciousness came at the wrong time, or so it seems; the worries of the world are others, and politicians cannot compromise their votes to save the planet and emerging economies are not willing to pay the higher price of a green economy.

Even the environmental movement say that the crisis itself is a tangible expression of a structure that has come to its end, which needs to be rethought and re-invented, within the borders of sustainability.

“Think globally and act locally” seems to be the only approachable solution, as indicated by the successful meetings of the C40, a group of mayors from 58 of the world’s biggest cities who come together to solve environmental problems.

Those cities produce 21 per cent of world GDP and the C40 agreements could result in the reduction of emissions of 1 billion tonnes by 2030 and the creation of a network of cooperation between cities to deal with urban solid waste. This outcome clearly suggests the era of a grand global sustainability vision might be over; the vision was seen as financially too demanding and politically too complex.

Two powerful symbols of this outcome were evident at Rio+20, one physical the other intellectual.

The social and the political crowd were kept apart at a safe distance, in two opposite parts of the city. What at first seemed a purely logistical decision, transpired through the event to be a meditated act, reproducing a cruel cosmology of the modern world, where feelings cannot influence thought.

And as the Secretary General of Rio+20, Sha Zukang, correctly stated in closing, “This is an outcome which makes nobody happy. My job was to make everyone equally unhappy”.

It certainly doesn’t instill faith to hear the Secretary-General of United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, who at first was clearly unsatisfied with the result of the summit, turn around on the last day to heap praise on the event and the country which hosted it.

That’s one grave that will need a ton of limestone to keep the stink away.

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