Friday 9 September 2011

In 2008, young Canadian graduate Jay Bahadur was working a market research job, aching to become a journalist, when – according to his Wikipedia page – he received some telling advice from experienced journalists. He was told to skip journalism school and to work instead as a freelancer in “crazy places”. The advice might well have been unconventional but, as fortune does tend to favour the brave, Bahadur ended up being the right person in the right place at the right time. He spent months in Somalia, principally in Puntland, an autonomous area of northeastern Somalia with a population of four million, more than half of whom are nomadic. Puntland is at the centre of Somali piracy, which in recent years has grown to represent a threat to one of the world’s major international shipping routes.

Somalia is by almost unanimous international reckoning a failed state. For two decades, Somalia has had no central government. Indeed, the country (a country in name only, split at least 11 different ways) has topped the Failed States Index for the last two years running.

Now based back in Canada and running a citizen-journalism website, Journalist Nation, Bahadur has since gone on to publish, at the ripe old age of 27, a groundbreaking book on one of the world’s craziest businesses in one of the world’s craziest places. The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World documents a deeply misunderstood criminal subculture in one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

In Bahadur’s book, many Somali pirates – there’s an estimated 1000 of them, split into five gangs – are revealed to be ex-fishermen. Their living was decimated by international shipping vessels illegally dumping toxic waste into Somali waters or exploiting Somalia’s lack of a navy to fish Somalian fishing grounds to the point of exhaustion. Instead, they’ve discovered a far more lucrative trade: hijacking container ships and oil and chemical tankers, sometimes hundreds of miles from the Somali coast, for ransoms of several millions of dollars – leading to a spike in the cost of conducting international trade and a massive international military response. Here’s a report on Somali piracy by Bahadur, published in The Guardian.

Jay Bahadur will be a guest of the Wheeler Centre on Tuesday.

It’s one of those coincidences for which we can claim no credit. Months ago, when we pencilled in next Thursday, 15 September for an Intelligence Squared debate on the carbon tax, we didn’t know that the government’s legislation would be introduced into parliament that very week.

The Federal government is planning to introduce a package of 13 carbon tax-related bills into Parliament next week. It hopes debate over the legislation can begin by Wednesday, but the manager of opposition business, Christopher Pyne, claims the opposition has yet to see the full legislation and won’t allow the government to “rush this change through parliament”.

The opposition would prefer members to have a week to read the legislation before it then goes before a committee for further scrutiny. The government, hoping to pass the bills before the end of October, may choose to declare the legislation urgent and, in so doing, ‘gag’ debate. It’s also hoping to save time by forming a joint committee consisting of members of both the lower and upper houses, rather than the legislation having to pass through two separate committees, as would otherwise be the case.

Under Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership, the carbon tax’s predecessor, the carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS), was stalled in the Senate despite enjoying the nominal support of the opposition under its then leader, Malcolm Turnbull. The leader of the opposition in the Senate at the time was Senator Nick Minchin, who, unlike Turnbull, is a noted climate change sceptic. The opposition withdrew its support for the CPRS when Tony Abbott replaced Turnbull as opposition leader in December 2009, whereupon the legislation was defeated in the Senate on its second reading.

Although Tony Abbott’s position on climate change has shifted over time, he is on the record acknowledging that human-induced climate change is real, but that claims its effects will be catastrophic are as yet unproven. Abbott’s opposition to the carbon tax is predicated on the notion that a carbon tax won’t reduce emissions. “[I]t’s going to drive up prices, threaten jobs and do nothing at all for the environment,” he said in a televised address to the nation in July.

Greens Senator Christine Milne has stated the Greens fully support the Clean Energy Future legislative package. The Greens would like to see it clear parliament promptly so that organisations can begin preparing for the introduction of the carbon tax and other measures on 1 July next year.

The next Intelligence Squared debate will take place next Thursday, 15 September at the Melbourne Town Hall. Speakers will debate the proposition, ‘A carbon tax won’t fix climate change.’ We will live-tweet the event using the hashtag #iq2oz