On tariffs & the new ‘pro-Americanism’

With Donald Trump in the White House, anyone in Australian politics — and beyond — that seems too archly pro-American is just going to look naive.

That’s the first implication of the US president’s “great consideration” given to tariff exemptions for Australia on steel and aluminium that came to nothing last week.

The change at the height of American government is seismic, neither mere aberration nor the sort of macabre theatre that Trump meted out to Volodymyr Zelensky before the world’s media in the Oval Office (one French editor thus characterising Trump’s humiliation of the Ukrainian president: ‘Be strong with the weak and weak with the strong’.)

The second implication is a brutal comeuppance for those who’ve tended to pooh-pooh international institutions, like the EU, preferring instead to deal with the world as if dominated by a few major powers. Well, it may be, but the point is that Australia is not one of them, and that Trump’s US may just decide, on a whim, to cut us out of the equation.

For countries like Australia — and here’s the third implication — there is now only one line of advocacy and that is for a multi-polar world. The rhetoric of Australian diplomacy for decades about the need to build relationships with like-minded democracies in Europe and Asia, suddenly has real teeth. For Australia, there ain’t no other option.

This was the geopolitical logic of the decision to build submarines with France, by the way, before the advent of the AUKUS pact meant binning a multi-billion dollar agreement with the French without actually telling the French. The rest of Europe looked on aghast.

The dominant pro-AUKUS argument, in this regard, became that to choose French subs was to stray from the old Anglo fold. Where was the fit? The implication being that there wasn’t one.

But in fact it provided the opportunity to broaden Australia’s allegiances beyond a fairly closed circuit of narrow loyalties with the US invariably front and centre. And now that the US has ‘turned’, apparently aligning itself with the Russian autocrat, we’re on a delicate footing with the allies we snubbed, as the Brits rebuild bridges with Europe, the Germans with the French, the Poles with the Germans and the French.

Last week was about tariffs, not the far weightier matter of the national defence of Australia. So, some argue — surely wrongly — we’re merely seeing a kind of temporary inconvenience, the opening of a parenthesis that will close when the checks and balances of American democracy clip Trump’s wings, finally returning him to reason, or the hapless Democrats win the Mid-Term elections in two years (or both).

But like us, the Brits have long claimed a special relationship with the US and are now clearly revising it, as are the Canadians, as they draw closer to Europe. Since at least President Obama, the US has made a strategic “pivot” away from Europe to Asia which, reassuringly, is where we are. And haven’t we been an unswerving US ally in the Indo-Pacific for as long as anyone can remember?

Yes, but this gives short shrift to the idea that Trump, by his own definition, is not just a wily deal-maker, a rancorous grudge-bearer, perhaps, but above all an elbows first nativist. Because for Trump, politics is pure transaction: there is no moral dimension — “moral” and “Maga” amounts to a contradiction-in-terms like, say, “democratic Maga” or “Christian Maga”.

Europeans may be struggling to face up to the strategic aggiornamento but it’s going to be even harder for Australia — the necessary paradigm shift is so massive. The US relationship has been our strategic foundation stone, America the big and powerful friend we’ve assumed we need since World War II, taking over from Britain in that role. Bobbing around on distant seas, a solitary ship Down Under, the primal fear — racist, of course — was always that of the descending ‘Asian hordes’. But the old discussion around why China would invade, has been superseded by the question, ‘were China to invade, why would the US come to our aid?’

With Trump at the helm, we should presume we’re on our own. There’s not much to expect from the US any time soon. That is the big chunk of learning. Put another way: at what point, if not now, does holding on to the former ‘certainties’ re- the US amount to apathy? Captain America has become a turncoat, abandoned ship and gone East.

On restaurant dining in Adelaide

Sydney and Melbourne people tend to say that they’d like to visit Adelaide and should do, but then, well, still don’t. Things may have changed since I moved there from Sydney years ago, finishing school, university and finding a first career job. But I rather suspect that they haven’t.

On a recent visit from France where I’ve lived 20 of the past 25 years (the remainder in Munich), I was reminded that demure Adelaide probably presents a culinary experience to rival any French or German — let alone, Australian — city.

Not culinary in the sense of cuisine’s commanding heights, of ‘hats’, Michelin stars and the like. Nothing wrong with that. Like haute couture, haute cuisine is the province of a very special kind of creative talent.

But ‘culinary’ as in good food culture, broadly defined, from markets to local restaurants, wineries and cafes. The food culture that helps one interact with a city when visiting, or moving there, or reacquainting, when returning after a long stint away.

Feeling homesick when first in Paris — in fact, in a kind of phase II, the romance of discovery starting to fade — I would go in search of Italian restaurants for the familiarity of the menu and the hubbub.

Except that, because French is one of the world’s great cuisines, as is, surely, Italian, Italian restaurants tend to be expensive in France. Might the Italians be trying to prove themselves to the French? A Parisian friend once told me she would never consider serving pasta to her dinner guests.

I remember going to Paris’ 13th district, home to the city’s Asian culinary quarters, and being looked down upon when asking for a Laksa. “What is that?” came the question, after I’d given a faltering, impromptu account. Malaysian and Indonesian cuisine didn’t exist amid (or even, within), the many eateries doing combination Asian, signed as such on the front door or window: genre, “Chinese, Thai, Indian”. My first Laksa was at the Adelaide Central Market way back in the mid-80s, at a place called, Asian Gourmet. I was there again last month, the Laksa just as good as it always was.

The truth of the notion of culinary “rivalry”, is that it doesn’t mean much. Dine out in Paris, on say, beef bourguignon at a local bistro or brasserie, and you’re part of a tradition stretching back more than a hundred years. In a strict sense, it is incomparable. Still, quality has its underpinnings. Adelaide is akin to a “great cornucopia of fresh fruit and vegetables”, as a French magazine once described it, trucked down from the pretty market gardens of the Adelaide Hills about 20 minutes drive from the city centre.

It might be a sign of Paris-fatigue, or even just France fatigue, that my wife and I decided against spending the northern Summer holidays between Paris and regional Strasbourg, despite the Paris Olympics (or perhaps because of them). Instead, we opted for family time in Adelaide, sending teenage children to Sydney for their first-ever visit. You can imagine their excitement!

In the Australian context, diversity is another of quality’s underpinnings. A long-time friend belly-laughed, eyes squinting with mirth, at the list of old Adelaide restaurants I revisited, all of them local institutions from my formative years. Paul’s for fish simply and superbly done. (In France, fish invariably comes under a sauce.) Amalfi’s for superb Italian; Zapata’s for irresistible Mexican. In France, we know only the hybrid, “Tex-Mex”. I’ve never actually sighted an enchilada.

But innovation, too, exists in the City of Churches. Jake Kellie of Arkhé is doing fine cuts of meat strictly temperature-controlled with open flame only. I see in a press interview he’s recommending VDR for Vietnamese and Muni at Willunga: all fodder for my next Adelaide visit, and to prove that I realise it’s no longer 1985.

Because it’s patently, obviously true that culinary Adelaide has evolved immensely in recent years — at Singapore House the offer is aptly pan-Asian; at Wah Hing the cantonese cooking is outstanding. Foodie Adelaide’s quality-in-diversity is exceptional, which is yet another reflection perhaps — certainly viewed from France and Germany — of the unique success of Australian multiculturalism, arguably our greatest claim on the world.

Arkhé’s Kellie, not yet 35, has a Michelin star (obtained via a restaurant in Singapore), which of course is rare in Australia because the stars of French Michelin don’t actually cover Australia. So you might just have to visit Adelaide, to witness one in action, including, at last, from Sydney and Melbourne.

On the strife in New Caledonia

Suddenly, the stakes just got a lot higher. The arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron in New Caledonia today — after more than a week of insurrectional violence — inevitably turns the mind to the delicate question of Australia’s recent diplomatic relations with France.

It’s a moot point how effectively Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has managed the ‘reset’ since his predecessor Scott Morrison announced the disastrous, all-Anglo AUKUS defence and security pact in September, 2021. This came hand-in-hand with the decision to scrap a multibilliondollar defence contract to build submarines with the French — without actually telling the French.

One can hardly imagine, then, Mr Albanese picking up the telephone to consult, let alone advise Mr Macron, beyond the imperative of getting about 300 Australians out of France’s crisis-torn Pacific Island territory, a mere two-hour flight from Brisbane.

That’s a shame, frankly, because there’s considerable shared Franco-Australian concern about the fate of the beautiful archipelago. And the majority view among French specialists seems to be that the current French government has made major mistakes in its New Caledonia policy, after some 40 years of rather successful appeasement.

That appeasement was initiated by the late French Socialist Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, a political mentor of Mr Macron and a good friend of Australia. He ended the bloodshed of insurrectional riots in the 1980s, which also, significantly, were triggered by high-stakes electoral reform.

This he did by kick-starting a high-integrity process of self-determination, under the so-called Matignon Accords, with a big onus on relationship-building and the forging of a common identity. The Accords morphed into the Noumea Agreement of 1998, which was to conclude with a third and final independence referendum in December, 2021.

But when the indigenous Kanak population, struck by COVID — hundreds of deaths in a small population with unique rituals for burying the dead — asked for a modest 6 to 9-month delay before the last referendum was held, their request was flatly denied by the government in Paris.

This last May 13 decision, then — in Paris not Noumea — to pass controversial election reform, put a match to the current problems. The reform would mean, according to Kanak leaders, an additional 25,000 non-Indigenous voters on the electoral role, or about one voter in five, inevitably revolutionising the domestic political equation, yet further diminishing the size of the Indigenous vote.

In Australia, both sides of politics have tended to keep out of New Caledonian politics, but the off-line view has been that regional stability is important to Australia’s own security and a French presence is its virtual guarantee. Simply put, were France to go and civilian strife erupt, Australia would be expected to get involved as the region’s largest democracy. The related still pointier issue is, were France gone, would China move in? Your problem (France), would suddenly be our problem (Australia).

Except that it already is, to some extent. New Caledonia’s only real export is Nickel, used in electric vehicle batteries, and via the injection of Chinese money, Indonesia has become the world market leader. According to the US Institute of Peace, the majority of Indonesia’s nickel mines, with processing sites and supply arrangements, are now controlled by Chinese groups. Deliberate overproduction is stripping international competition and pushing down the market price — by about 45% in 2023.

Usually overlooked — quite separately from the above — is that there’s commonality between the colonial experience in Australia and that of France in New Caledonia, as cited by a high-profile French academic on national radio here this week.

Benoît Trépied, of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), said that France had sought to establish a new society in New Caledonia exactly as the British did in Australia and New Zealand. In fact, he characterised the current strife less as a matter of electoral reform, than a post-colonial question still unresolved.

According to the United Nations, New Caledonia is a country still awaiting de-colonisation. But were France to grant it, would independence be the ultimate result? No, Trépied said, on Radio France. Kanaks would seek their own brand of “associative independence”, whereby, say, the justice system, currency and foreign policy would be reassigned to France, or at least French oversight. On the China question, he asked rhetorically: “Why would the Kanaky seek independence only to cede it to another colonial ruler?”

There would be yet further conversation for Mr Albanese in the domain of Australia’s own colonial experience. Except that there, well, we’ve just refused via the Voice referendum to recognise our Indigenous brethren in the national Constitution, or vote for the creation of a minimalist external advisory council.

One wonders at the make-up of modern Australia, the shape and contour of its history since European settlement, if Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders still made up, as do indigenous Kanaks in New Caledonia today, 40 percent of the total population.

 

 

 

Sur la crise agricole française

L’univers dépouillé du monde rural s’effiloche sous la caméra du réalisateur Raymond Depardon dans Profils paysans. Les routines de travail terriblement monotones, les dîners silencieux en famille, et surtout « l’attente stoïque d’une fin qui approche », comme les archives cinématographiques d’Harvard décrivent cette œuvre.

C’était trop pour moi lorsque je suis allé voir le premier volet de la trilogie au cinéma lors de sa sortie au début des années 2000. J’ai quitté la salle avant la fin de la projection, non pas parce que je n’étais pas touché, bien au contraire, mais car je n’ai tout simplement pas supporté d’être confronté à la métaphore de la mort lente de l’agriculture française, s’éternisant douloureusement pendant 90 minutes, sans la moindre trace de solution possible.

Lors des récentes manifestations, je suis resté sidéré devant les images télévisées d’agriculteurs déversant du lisier devant les bureaux des maires de leurs communes – pas de solution derrière ce geste. J’ai ensuite entendu parler des 400 millions d’euros de dégâts causés par ces mêmes agriculteurs sur les routes environnantes, que leurs impôts avaient probablement financées. Un ami français m’a laissé entendre que, dans les deux cas, j’avais certainement été envahi par une sorte de pragmatisme anglo-saxon, insinuant une certaine froideur, presque sans cœur, alors que les Français sont, quant à eux, toujours selon lui, “un peuple qui n’est pas particulièrement pragmatique”. (J’ai alors compris ce qu’impliquait l’approche anglo-saxonne comparativement au pragmatisme français). Après tout, je ne suis rien d’autre qu’un sujet du Roi, non seulement d’Angleterre mais également du lointain Commonwealth d’Australie, qui est encore aujourd’hui une monarchie constitutionnelle. Pour un républicain invétéré comme moi, cette petite boutade est assez gênante.

Mais l’enjeu porte peut-être moins sur le pragmatisme relatif que sur le fait que la France soit une culture très politique, alors que, l’Australie et les autres cultures anglo-saxonnes (comme la Nouvelle-Zélande, le Canada, l’Angleterre, au moins au Royaume-Uni, aux Etats-Unis) ne le sont pas. Pour les citoyens de la République française, il y a un parfum permanent de Révolution qui flotte toujours dans l’air. Et les élites vivent avec cette crainte persistante. En Australie, la politique sert essentiellement à faire fonctionner la société, afin que personne n’ait véritablement à penser à la politique afin de se concentrer davantage sur le travail, la famille et cette religion laïque qu’est le sport. Les Australiens peuvent donc être libres, comme le décrit Phillip Adams, un critique féroce de notre culture nationale de « chercher l’hédonisme au fond d’un tube de crème solaire ».

En France, la politique doit plutôt refléter ce qu’est la France : elle est au service de la beauté de sa langue, de ses paysages, de ses régions, de ses cuisines locales et de sa capitale, où règne sa classe politique. Paris est un lieu peuplé de personnes originaires d’autres régions, ou plus précisément de leurs régions respectives, avec leurs propres recettes, leurs paysages uniques et même leurs dialectes dont ils aiment parler longuement. Les politiques du gouvernement devraient donc viser à protéger, voire à privilégier ces agriculteurs, qui sont intrinsèquement liés à la cuisine, aux paysages et aux régions – aux terroirs. J’aurais peut-être réagi différemment si je n’avais vu l’ode de Depardon à la France rurale que récemment. Chacun peut reconnaître les codes du théâtre de rue dans le combat actuel, mais pas la souffrance qui se cache derrière. Quel « pragmatisme » permettrait de rester indifférent à ceux qui sont en première ligne des manifestations, à ces corps courbés, ces visages émaciés, ces yeux ternes et hagards après des années de réveil aux aurores?

En revanche, le combat actuel dure bel et bien depuis plus de vingt ans et nul ne peut nier le déclin relatif de l’agriculture française. Lorsque j’ai vu Profils Paysans, la France était le deuxième exportateur de produits agricoles dans le monde (le premier en Europe), elle occupe désormais la cinquième place (la troisième en Europe). Les enjeux qui existaient alors subsistent encore aujourd’hui : les exploitations sont trop petites, tout comme les troupeaux, les salaires sont trop bas et les subventions sont réparties sur l’ensemble du territoire national, afin que quelques bovins subventionnés puissent aller paître sur des terres qui seraient pourtant plus adaptées aux chèvres.

Peu après la sortie du dernier volet de la trilogie de Depardon en 2008, le magazine hebdomadaire L’Express a révélé que plus de 30 hommes politiques français recevaient plus de 50.000 euros chacun de paiements annuels en tant que bénéficiaires directs de la PAC. Parmi eux, le plus grand bénéficiaire, un sénateur également producteur de céréales a reçu 275.200 euros. Une nouvelle législation d’importance majeure (la Loi de modernisation de l’agriculture, LMA) avait pour objectif d’introduire un système de contrats de filières en vue de stabiliser, enfin, les revenus des agriculteurs dans ces marchés en constante fluctuation. La LMA encouragerait, selon Bruno Le Maire, ancien Ministre de l’Agriculture, les ventes locales (que l’on appelle communément le “circuit court”), en faveur des producteurs français face à la forte concurrence et aux importations internationales. De prime abord, on peut comprendre pourquoi les importations soulèvent des doutes, surtout si elles proviennent de pays situés en dehors de l’Union européenne. Quel est l’intérêt de mettre en œuvre des accords de libre échange alors que les producteurs locaux souffrent ? Cela s’explique bien au-delà du commerce international. Les liens entre démocraties de même sensibilité, mais aussi la langue et la culture sont des facteurs clés, comme ce fut le cas pour l’Accord de libre-échange avec le Canada (l’ALE, le Ceta). Le renforcement de l’influence géopolitique régionale de la France et de l’Europe compte également, comme l’a montré la mise en œuvre de l’Accord de libre-échange avec la Nouvelle-Zélande, après l’affaire avortée des sous-marins entre la France et l’Australie et l’AUKUS (partenariat de défense et de sécurité trilatéral entre l’Australie, le Royaume-Uni et les Etats-Unis). Il est également vrai que les accusations portant sur les fausses économies des Accords de libre-échange sont souvent infondées. Elles détournent l’attention habituellement prêtée aux véritables enjeux.

Depuis la conclusion du Ceta avec le Canada, l’une des plus grandes nations commerçantes du monde, les exportations européennes de produits agroalimentaires et de la mer vers le Canada ont en fait augmenté chaque année au cours des trois dernières années. Avec la France, le Canada est un importateur net de produits agricoles : les chiffres canadiens montrent un déficit de 1,1 milliards de dollars canadiens en 2023, soit environ 756 millions d’euros.

J’ai vu la presse française s’indigner à l’idée d’importer de l’agneau de première qualité de Nouvelle-Zélande. Il convient toutefois de rappeler que cela fait une décennie que la Nouvelle-Zélande n’a pas rempli ses quotas en matière d’importation d’ovins. De toute manière, les Néo-Zélandais ont tendance à vendre ailleurs la viande ovine qu’ils sont autorisés à vendre à l’Europe, car ils y obtiennent un meilleur prix. Leur droit à 38.000 tonnes complémentaires conformément à l’ALE est en fait un non-événement. Selon toute vraisemblance, il ne sera pas utilisé. Les Néo-Zélandais ont été autorisés à vendre 10.000 tonnes de viande bovine à l’Europe, une goutte d’eau dans l’océan, étant donné que les Européens mangent 6,5 millions de tonnes de bœuf chaque année. Pour ce qui est du fromage, c’est la même histoire. Il est possible d’acheter du roquefort à Auckland, et lorsque l’ALE entrera pleinement en vigueur, une variété de fromages néo-zélandais devraient être disponibles en Europe. Il s’agit toutefois d’une micro-niche. La Nouvelle-Zélande pourra avoir accès à 0,14 pour cent du marché européen, alors que l’Europe a déjà 15% du marché du fromage en Nouvelle-Zélande.

L’ALE présente de réels avantages pour l’agriculture néo-zélandaise, notamment pour les fruits du kiwi et le miel de Manuka, produit par des abeilles originaires de Nouvelle-Zélande. Toutefois, les éleveurs de bovins et les producteurs de lait ne pouvaient cacher une certaine déception face à la portée limitée de l’accord. Ne faisant partie d’aucune assemblée de nations comme l’Union européenne, le commerce international est un impératif pour les agriculteurs, étant donné que le marché intérieur est minuscule. Les droits de douane et les subventions ont été supprimés au milieu des années 80 et aujourd’hui aucun grand syndicat agricole ne revendique un retour à la protection. En supprimant les subventions aux engrais, les éleveurs d’ovins et de bovins ont réduit de moitié leur utilisation, mais la productivité est restée élevée.

Il est vrai que la France ne serait pas la France sans ses 365 fromages ou plus et sans la diversité de ses bovins de boucherie. Toutefois, il n’y a aucune possibilité que l’ALE avec la Nouvelle-Zélande, ou même le Ceta avec le Canada, menace l’existence même de l’agriculture française. Il faut de plus garder à l’esprit que quel que soit l’impact des petites (bien qu’importantes) avancées commerciales de l’ALE avec l’UE pour la Nouvelle-Zélande, son plus grand client pour les produits agricoles est la Chine, bien que Beijing soit plus loin de sa capitale Wellington que de Paris.

Si nous devions tirer une leçon de l’expérience néo-zélandaise ? Ils savent se focaliser sur leurs avantages comparatifs qui les distinguent, tout en améliorant l’efficacité opérationnelle au fil du temps. Aujourd’hui, le secteur agricole est l’un des plus productifs, des plus rentables et des plus respectueux de l’environnement au monde.

Il est d’ailleurs révélateur de constater que la Nouvelle-Zélande ne vend quasiment pas de porc à la Chine, car les Néo-zélandais n’exportent quasiment pas de viande porcine. Les cochons mangent des graines et il pleut toute l’année en Nouvelle-Zélande. Ces conditions conviennent parfaitement au pâturage de bovins et d’ovins, mais pas pour la culture des céréales. Les Néo-Zélandais ont donc tendance à importer leur porc depuis l’Europe, essentiellement d’Allemagne, d’Espagne et de Pologne.

A tale of two rugbies

Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing. To read breathless Australian media copy about the triumph of Australian rugby league in the just-concluded Rugby League World Cup, which of course, we won. Where’s the human interest in a virtual foregone conclusion?

Australia’s taken the Paul Barrière Trophy 12 times, been in every cup final bar one since 1954. Only one other country, England, has any kind of track record (three WC wins). The Kiwis have won it once. Where’s the high drama that comes with great sport in beating, as we did this edition, little Fiji by 30-odd points, Italy by 60, or our Scottish brethren, 84-nil?

It must be exciting like watching the French national football Ligue 1: Paris Saint-Germain have won eight of the last ten years. One thinks of Eric Cantona’s comment about Brazilian mega star Neymar moving from Barcelona to PSG. “He will be playing games against [lowly club side] Lorient and [even more lowly] Guingamp,” he told London’s Financial Times. “How is it possible? To be a great player and go . . . somewhere . . . (like that).” A little as if Michael Jordan had quit the Chicago Bulls for the Harlem Globetrotters.

I haven’t seen a game of rugby league from go to woe in years, could hardly name a player (younger than Paul Vautin; well, Wally Lewis, Mal Meninga and Jonathan Thurston, but not many more). Yet I was able to tell my Franco-German wife, who has some awareness of Union but has never heard of League, that we’d win the League World Cup before the first tackle was even made. Why? Because we almost always do.

My vintage is the great era of the late ‘70s, players like Graham Eadie, Bobby Fulton, Arthur Beetson, Teddy Goodwin, Vautin of course. When a Lock Forward, then still number 8, could be lanky and one the best players in the game (Parramatta’s Ray Price). Steve Knight, the Adonis-like centre who played for Manly, Wests and Balmain, taught me and my lily-livered mates “Physical Education”, including a kind of composite rugby, at Davidson High School in the northern suburbs of Sydney. We dutifully called him, “Sir”.

His patience with our quivering non-commitment, was iron-clad until, well, it would break. And he’d come running at us with the ball, shouting, “Tackle me, son!”, as we scattered in all directions like mice. (One counter strategy was to throw the pill in the air, go to ground, and cover your head.)

So I have rugby league history. State of Origin didn’t have the gravitas it does now by all accounts, but the height of a Sunday night sporting ritual in the suburbs was to sit down to dinner with the family, and League commentator Rex Mossop.

An exception was made to the golden rule in our house that dinner was not to be eaten in front of the tele, because Dad also wanted to see the match. I still play the original version of the program theme song on Spotify and You Tube, surely one of the most exhilarating themes in the history of sport on the box: “Theme from Shaft”, by thorax-busting Canadian trumpeter, Maynard Ferguson.
(http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCu9zRflDcw)

Is international sport about winning or being part of it? The former, truly, but depending on who you’re winning against and the circumstances thereof. I didn’t see a moment of the Kangaroos but will be watching the Socceroos. This will be with my wife and Paris-born kids.

The most likely outcome is that we play our three pool games and fly home. But you never know. Between 1974 and 2006 we didn’t make the World Cup at all, of course. And to return as David to the Goliaths of France and Germany, and Brazil — now that is real human drama. In 2018, the great story was Iranian-born Daniel Arzani’s brilliant arrival, this time that we’ve got three guys in the Squad of Sudanese origin (Awer Mabil, Garang Kuol and Thomas Deng). Mabil was born and raised on a Kenyan refugee camp.

Can’t the best of our Kangaroos just transmute into Wallabies and play Rugby Union, a proper international game? I tell friends here that as long ago as the 1960s the Boston Globe newspaper was telling its readers that Australia was the world’s greatest sporting nation. Football is inevitably raised in conversation, and I’m politely told something like, “But you’re strong in Rugby”. Almost no-one has ever heard of Rugby League.

There’s a web site now. “Greatest Sporting Nation in the world” puts us at six behind France and Germany. The site was congratulating Australia for winning the World Cup last weekend (though well down the page). Or might those congratulations more rightfully have gone to runners-up, Samoa, for their beautiful journey? Anyway, fortunately, there was no highlighting of that win against Scotland.

ON MACRON’S ELECTION POLICY LAUNCH

Fascinating, no? Given the fast approach of the federal election in Australia. Considering the impact French President Emmanuel Macron, standing for re-election himself in three weeks, has had on Australian politics in the past six months.

Seldom does foreign affairs have much bearing on domestic politics, unless there’s been some kind of major embarrassment or breakdown. When Macron said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison lied to him over the dumping of a $90 billion contract to build submarines with the French — something the PM denied — Australian politics shifted in a stroke, from the argy-bargy of the parliamentary bear pit, to the deeper issues of ethics, reputation and character.

But there was further Australian resonance when Macron, 44, rolled out his election time policy program last week. Like Morrison, Macron must convince voters to vote for him again — but why? And to do what? Like Australian Opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, Macron is originally from the party-political left and needs to attract the conservative electorate to win. (Macron was a Socialist Party Finance Minister before setting up his centrist En Marche party in 2016.)

Macron’s policy launch lasted almost four hours, the President using very few notes or talking points before 320 media. Some 90 minutes of exposé was followed by two-and-a-half hours of rigorous Q&A with reporters. “There must be substance,” he said at one point, the room beginning to flag. “We’re talking about the next five years.”

According to opinion-polling, a second five-year term is highly likely. Macron’s de facto European leadership since Russia invaded Ukraine, at the head of the only continental European nuclear and military power, has made him a clear favourite to win after two rounds of voting on April 10 and 24. At 30% of voting intentions currently, he’s 12-15% ahead of his nearest rival, Far Right stalwart, Marine Le Pen.

Macron won in 2017 pitching himself as “Neither of the Left or Right”, turning on the rhetorical line: “At the same time”. It’s still essentially his pitch in 2022.  To fight inequality “at the root”, while embracing economic liberalism. To raise the retirement age to 65, alongside a 50% hike in child support for single mothers. To combat discrimination in companies via a system of “testing” for firms with 5000 employees or more. To strengthen France’s independence, notably in defence and energy by rebooting the national reliance on nuclear power, at the same time as boosting renewables.

For critics, Macron’s would-be to-ing and fro-ing makes him an illegible knit of contradictions, and a soulless globalist polyglot, to boot. He was born and raised until the age of 16 in Amiens, the principal city of ‘Australian France’ by the way, about a half-hour’s drive from Villers-Bretonneux in the Somme. But he’s not considered anchored there, has no established political base there or made any real attempt to ‘localise’ his image there.

Of the policy launch, right-wing Le Figaro newspaper was impressed by the minutiae, by Macron’s phenomenal grasp of detail. But his method in fact reflected the kind of advice routinely given to foreign negotiators working with the French: emphasise the big picture.

“In France, preparation means, above all, having command of a coherent argument founded on faultless logic,” according to German management consultant, Sergey Frank. “Avoid the hard-sell and any marketing gimmicks. Instead, your presentation should be sober, well-founded and rigorous”.

One wonders at the rigour of Macron’s nuclear program, however, based on the construction of six nuclear reactors with a further eight under study, even though the first of the EPR next generation reactors, massive concrete cathedrals, is ten years over schedule and a staggering 10 billion euros over budget.

One wonders, too, at the twists and turns that led Macron to say Morrison lied to him over the submarines (not to say the suitability of Morrison’s subsequent approach: “I’m not going to cop a sledging,” the PM said).

But Macron may not, in fact, have been much offended. Beyond the idea that the Australian PM was unhappy, Macron may well have asked himself — or advisers — about the meaning of a vernacular Australian expression like, ‘copping a sledging’. One translation motor suggests, “not to go sledding”. Perplexing for Macron, no doubt, given that he’s known to enjoy winter holiday skiing on the slopes.

ON ‘MOVING ON’ FROM THE SUBS

Even the French have “moved on” from the subs, said Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton, speaking recently on the ABC’s 7.30 program. Except that there’s nothing much to suggest that the French actually have.

France’s leading Sunday newspaper reported on 20 February that, “relations between France and Australia have not improved since the conclusion of the famous (AUKUS) pact last year”. A French presidential spokesperson said: “In substance, we are still waiting for details on the partnership that the Australians want to maintain with us.”

Five months after the Morrison government scrapped the $90 billion French submarine deal in favour of American nuclear-powered boats, “no serious proposal from them (the Australian government) has been made,” the Elysée spokesperson told Le Journal du Dimanche.

Publication of the article has coincided with Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne’s visit to Paris today for an Indo-Pacific Ministerial forum involving more than 30 European and Indo-Pacific Foreign Ministers. At the time of writing, no meeting between Minister Payne and her French counterpart, Jean Yves Le Drian, had been scheduled.

It is not, in fact, as Dutton suggested, the Franco-Australian but the Franco-American relationship that has ‘moved on’. It has, “found its feet again”, to quote a Le Monde editorial about French president Emmanuel Macron’s contact with US president Joe Biden over Ukraine in recent weeks.

And if the US and France have ‘moved on’, it’s in part because the Americans have adopted a resolutely conciliatory approach. In a live interview on prime-time French television shortly after the AUKUS announcement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged (speaking in French) an error of appreciation.  “We could have, and we should have,” he said, “done better in terms of communication.” President Biden struck a similar tone seated with Macron in the margins of the last G20 meeting. “Clumsy”, was the treatment meted out to France, he said, with “not … a lot of grace”.

So, unlike the Prime Minister of Australia, the de facto leader of the Western world, sought to make honourable amends by publicly regretting a patent lack of consultation with the French.

But not only, not the words, not the actions, either.  Alongside ‘no serious Australian proposal’, the US has compromised by at least recognising that a strong European defence posture need not be a threat to US dominance — may even complement it — and by pledging to look at new ways of acting in a more co-ordinated manner in the Indo-Pacific.

On that last point, a more ambitious and creative Australia, might have sought to play a brokering role in a new era of Indo-Pacific co-ordination, an alliance of democracies in the face of autocracy. A beachhead of US support, Australia has a special knowledge of the Indo-Pacific, as do the Europeans for reasons of history and culture: the Dutch of Indonesia; the French of Laos and Cambodia; the British of Malaysia and so on.

Instead, we’ve done our bit to disaggregate the Western alliance, creating confusion among allies while working as if seeking to cast ourselves to the geopolitical sidelines in our own region.

Two major French dailies (including Le Monde) have recently drawn on the US formula in 2003, when France, Germany and Russia refused to back the American invasion of Iraq. Accredited to former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, the maxim was that the US would, “Punish France, ignore Germany and pardon Russia.” Macron in the face of the the subs fracas and AUKUS would: “Punish the UK, pardon the US and ignore Australia”.

Macron, who said Morrison lied to him about the subs deal — which the Prime Minister flatly denied — is favourite to win the French presidential election in April. If he doesn’t, the leading opposition candidates come from either a more nationalist mainstream right, or what might be called, a hard-line Trumpian populist-nationalist right. Their indignity about both subs and AUKUS runs at least as deep as Macron’s.

We’re still a long way off “moving on” from the subs.

On Australia and coal

Coal is the energy source that generates by far the most CO2, about 30% of global carbon dioxide emissions, with coal-fired power plants the premier culprit. We all basically know this, because climate scientists have been saying it for decades.

And yet rich, coal-fired Australia — coal accounts for about 75% of Australia’s electricity generation — has refused at the COP26 environment summit in Glasgow to sign an agreement with 40 countries to phase out the dirtiest fuel.

And just as international interest in that decision was beginning to fade, with COP26 and attendant media stomping off to consider other environmental issues, Australia’s Resources Minister Keith Pitt told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Australia was prepared to keep selling its coal to whomever would buy. And to hell, he seemed to say, with the environmental consequences.

“We have said very clearly we are not closing coal mines and we are not closing coal-fired power stations,” the Minister said.  “We will continue to have markets for decades into the future. And if they’re buying … well, we are selling”.

The German national broadcaster, French daily Le Monde and numerous other world media carried the story within hours.

It bears repeating: the truth about coal — the coal truth, to borrow the title of David Ritter’s book a few years ago — is that it’s shockingly bad for the environment and human health and almost 90% of it according to a recent study in Nature, ought to just stay in the ground.

For Australia, the world’s sunniest continent and one of the windiest, there’s no earthly reason why the straight-forward replacement technologies of solar and wind can’t be more rigorously adopted through large-scale investment, especially when considerable momentum already exists. An energising bright spot on the generally gloomy climate change horizon, is that the cost of these job-creating technologies has plummeted in even the past five to 10 years.

The International Energy Agency’s tome-like World Energy Outlook – or “WEO”, a sectoral reference – reported last year that solar power has become, “the cheapest electricity in history”.

And yet, just days after Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced his do-little “Australian Way” to net zero emissions by 2050, using unspecified “technology breakthroughs” — with nothing new mapped out for the critical years to 2030 — the British Prime Minister, European Commission and the United Nations all said that coal must rapidly exit the energy system if the world is to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Out with coal, says the COP26 agreement: for rich countries by the 2030s; for developing countries by the 2040s.

Meantime, Morrison’s cursory COP26 speech turned on an erroneous tale-teller’s gloat about Australia cutting CO2 emissions, when its total per capita greenhouse gas emissions are one of the highest in the world and some three times the international average.

According to Berlin-based Climate Analytics, Australia’s per capita carbon footprint, including exports, was recently nine times higher than China’s and 37 times that of India. It is also about four times higher than that of the United States (all three countries did not sign the COP26 text to phase out coal).

So, the hue of Australia’s position on climate change and coal in particular becomes clearer. Not only is Australia a major per capita contributor to climate change, and extremely exposed to climate change — as per the devastating mega-fires of 2019-20 — it also has fewer geographical and physical constraints than most countries to actually dealing with climate change. Australia ought to be ardently pro, both strong national and international actions intent on enacting solutions.

And yet the ‘coal truth’ is that Australian tax-payers subsidised the coal industry to the tune of a staggering $10.3 billion in the financial year to June 30, vastly more than the GDP of many of Australia’s ostensibly venerated regional friends, like Fiji and Vanuatu, facing existential threat from climate change.

The ‘coal truth’ is that the health impacts of coal, ranging from lung cancer and heart disease to premature death, cost Australian taxpayers an estimated $2.6 billion a year.  The ‘coal truth’ is that burning the stuff emits toxic and carcinogenic substances into the air, water and land.

A fascinating essay by former political adviser Guy Pearse described the significant role mining has played in the Australian story. But he pointed out that the “rush that never ended”, as historian Geoffrey Blainey described it, has in fact been a history of boom and bust.

Today, the ‘coal truth’ is that Australia’s mining industry employs fewer Australians than McDonald’s and that Australia’s mining companies and energy producers are majority foreign-owned, so most of the profits go offshore.

If there’s no, or little action to phase out coal, the planetary bell that tolls may be for an ecological endgame at the bleakest end of what statisticians call, a “probability distribution of outcomes”. Climate Economics and Policy Centre director professor Frank Jotzo said last week, that a “cascading effect of climatic impacts” could mean, say, locking in El Niño, eventually making great tracts of south-eastern Australia virtually uninhabitable. The story then would be one of an Australian, not to say planetary nightmare, with no easy escape.

On Australia’s Covid faux-pas

The phrase ‘everything is relative’ has perhaps never meant more than in the Time of Corona. But watching from Europe, one wonders how Australia — an island continent with an excellent health and hospital system — got itself into such paroxysm over coronavirus.

You’d think our unique circumstances would make us both more aware of those circumstances, and due to them, better able to deal with the versions of the problems the rest of the world faces when finally they arrive Down Under. Alas, no.

It’s not been all bad. Australia’s controversial no-Covid strategy may look ill-adapted now but for a long time it appeared, from Germany at least, coherent and consequential. The virus could be extinguished in the Australian context, it seemed, so why not seek to extinguish it?

A paper by a group of German specialists via the IFO think-tank in Munich, applauded Melbourne’s short, sharp lockdowns for their “mobilising objective” of date-based time-frames. As much of Europe staggered through a seemingly endless swirl of floating lockdowns with no dates attached, the Australian strategy was envied for what it achieved, and for the fact that it could be tried. It could not be tried in Germany, sharing borders with nine other countries, or say, France or little Austria, sharing borders with eight.

But border control is one area where Australian policy has come to look highly culpable. Why do we make such a meal of it (when it comes to boat people, too), despite sharing borders with no other country? (Or perversely, is that the reason?) With Covid, as with illegal immigration, the ‘tyranny of distance’ ought to make controlling borders easier because harder to get to and cross. Alas, no.

Instead of reasoning and innovating, given those natural advantages, our tendency is to shut the place down, treating people like, well, sheep, even when fully vaccinated or recovered. The authorities believe, not entirely erroneously, they’ll be blamed whatever happens, so better to take the easy option of boarding up the economy and putting the stoppers on the tens of thousands of Australians trying to come home — many no doubt double-jabbed. It’s the policy equal of clamping your eyes shut and blocking your ears.

Based in Munich but traveling regularly to France, my Franco-German wife and Paris-born children, 14 and 12, are fully vaccinated, the kids getting a second shot on August 22. My wife and I have the “European Union Digital Vaccination Certificate” in our phones. Depending on our activities, we may also require an antigen test within 48 hours of departing Germany, conducted in an orderly fashion at a Munich pharmacy. If we’re asked for proof of vaccination by a train conductor or at hotel reception in France, we simply show the digital pass on our phones.

The approach, and the logic behind the approach, doesn’t feel like Big Brother — or ‘invasive’ or ‘penal’ or ‘military’. ‘Administrative’ might be a better word. Social distancing and mask-wearing also remain de rigeur,
FFP2 surgical masks only in Munich.

But perhaps France is the best European example when it comes to the vaccination or “health pass”. When President Emmanuel Macron announced the latter in mid-July, French citizens made 1.7 million vaccination appointments in less than a day. Almost 800,000 people showed up for a jab in the same 24 hours. The fourth wave of the virus was thus broken, the economic recovery, à priori, saved.

In Australia, the rhetorical not to say physical violence at the margins over lockdown, is hard to fathom. Lockdowns stop us from living normal lives, but for the reasons we know.

If I’m right and I’ll be charitable, the discontent in Australia is over curbs on freedom when there is so little Covid circulating in the Australian air. Yet to churn the air is to spread the virus that’s there, running it with ever-greater efficiency into the lungs of one’s cohorts on the front-line. Protests about curbs on freedoms ultimately serve to put further curbs on those freedoms, the more limited restrictions on which, one was protesting in the first place.

The professional protesters and “plandemic” conspirators notwithstanding, the admittedly fragile European experience seems to suggest that it’s better to deal with anti-vaxxers by arguing health care and security, the prevention of risk to colleagues, friends and family, than stigmatise people who are fearful or otherwise reticent about getting the jab.

In France and Germany, the predominant concern has moved to the possibility of new variants emerging in areas where vaccination rates are low or preventive measures like masking and social distancing are not, or no longer, applied.

The cast of pronouncements by leaders and specialists has become the necessity of adapting and anticipating. Which presupposes taking hands off eyes and ears, to see, listen and learn, wherever possible, from what has happened elsewhere.

On Germany, coronavirus and the vaccination “debacle”

What’s gone so awry in Germany? After emerging relatively unscathed from the coronavirus first wave, Europe’s heavy-weight centrist democracy has been devastated by the crush of the second. Amid what some sections of the national media have dubbed a vaccination “debacle”, chancellor Angela Merkel says that the third wave of the virus has begun.

The sense of unease is palpable, the political class on tenterhooks in the midst of a regional electoral cycle before national polls in six months. Measures to slowly open the economy after more than three months of hard lockdown, were forestalled this week, because the figures have started to rise dramatically again.

For the second year running, Easter church services will be virtual. Holiday gatherings will be a maximum of two families and no more than five people in total. Plans to resume outdoor restaurant dining, theatres and sporting venues in regions with low infections rates have been shelved.

Schools are an anxiety-generating mish-mash of stop-start open and closed.

By certain measures Germany continues to fare better than its neighbours — placing 40th on a list of 46 countries by case numbers per 100,000 population, for example. But the base line reality, not to say public perception here, is that a significant early advantage in the fight against the pandemic has been squandered.

German start-up BioNTech devised the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, but Germany couldn’t use it while waiting, like a prisoner to solidarity, for European Union approval. Then there were doubts about the effectiveness of the British-Swedish AstraZeneca jab for recipients 65-years and older. Today, 55% of new coronavirus cases in Germany are the faster spreading British variant — the main reason behind Merkel’s alarming ‘third wave’ pronouncement.

Less than 7% of Germans have received a first Covid-19 vaccine shot (in the UK, the figure is 33%), with a strict, overly complex roll-out based on priority groupings getting the blame. People are reporting long telephone waiting times to make appointments at special vaccine centres. And General Practitioners, to their chagrin and rising anger, are not yet allowed to vaccinate against Covid-19.

“We are ready,” said German Medical Association president, Ulrich Weigeldt. “We vaccinate 25 million people against influenza every year. We have the expertise to administer all three licensed vaccines in our practices. And not … when the bureaucracy has finally faced up to reality, but immediately, on a large scale and across the country.”

Things began to unravel in Germany in late September. Deftly juggling statistics, Merkel warned that the daily case load would triple to 19,200 by Christmas, only to be howled down by the state premiers of Saxony and Thuringia, among other dissident voices, for causing unnecessary worry, “hysteria” even, in local populations.

‘Lockdown light’ was the result, until mid-December when, amid spiralling numbers, a hard lockdown was called. By then the system of track-and-trace, which worked so successfully through local authorities in the first wave, had been overwhelmed.  “It was she who was right, and I who was wrong”, said far-left Thuringia premier, Bodo Ramelow. But by then it was too late. In December, a staggering 16,000 Germans died of coronavirus, more than for the whole period March to November.

There were other problems. In the “Summer of Carelessness”, to quote Georg Mascolo writing in Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, “there was not enough support given to nursing and old people’s homes”; a coronavirus app “did not become the moon landing the chancellor’s office promised,” and the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, decrying Merkel’s “coronavirus dictatorship”, put a block (eventually lifted) on legislation designed to free her hand. The result? “In the biggest crisis of her career, Merkel could not do as she wanted”.

At the DIW think tank in Berlin, Holger Schäfer has said that German authorities “rested on their laurels a little” in the (northern) Summer. “We did not prepare for the second wave that came in the autumn. (We did not) develop a concept that would hold — on re-opening schools, on testing, on vaccination. We thought that we would do well again, and found ourselves rather powerless when the second wave struck”.

Beyond the shocking loss of life — as if that weren’t enough — it matters that Germany has faltered in the face of the crisis, despite or perhaps because of, its moderate federalist compromise culture. Democracy in Europe is under pressure.

Increasingly illiberal governments in Hungary and Poland have undermined the primacy of elections; compromised the system of justice and unleashed an exultant brand of nationalism.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, before gambling — thus far successfully, thankfully, on an all-out vaccine solution — underestimated the danger of Covid-19 and resolutely sponsored a policy of herd immunity, that may have cost lives. The UK’s vaccine record looks less impressive, however, when the percentages describe not just one but two doses, or “full vaccination”: Germany, 3.2%; UK 1.9% of the total population.

Germans still have higher levels of confidence in their government and institutions than the French, British and Italians, according to a recent survey by the OpinionWay pollster in Paris. But in the political, economic and psychological drama of the pandemic (and eventual aftermath), a total of six regional polls before 26 September national elections — without Merkel, stepping down after 16 years as chancellor — look decidedly risky.

If the ruling CDU-CSU can’t fix the vaccine “debacle”, as an editorial in leading newsweekly Der Spiegel described it, whoever her successor finally is may well be drawn and quartered at the ballot box.

The broader canvas was highlighted in a world democratic score card published by The Economist Intelligence Unit last month. There are just 23 bona fide democracies still standing on the planet, while authoritarian and pseudo-democratic hybrid regimes now govern more than half of humanity. Just over 8 percent of the world’s population still live in democracy, the EIU concluded, and democratic freedoms are being eroded, including in Europe.

On Coronavirus demos, Trump, and hyenas in Lockdown

A dip into the doldrums, followed by hysterical laughing, like a hyena, with friends on a Party App — or with the kids. So it goes, or swings, in the time of coronavirus. When not meeting the social media “invasion of imbeciles”, to use Umberto Eco’s memorable phrase, I’m watching too much television news.

Fancy the clunk-headedness of protesting the Angela Merkel Lockdown Light that’s enabled Germany to avoid the worst of the coronavirus pandemic so far. Unlike, in say, Paris or London, Munich’s major parks have never closed. Consider that Saturday protests in Stuttgart, Munich and other German cities, are against a Lockdown — as it’s lifting — that made the demos possible in the first place.

Anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and rabble-rousers of both the far right and left, are railing against restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, as they’re assembling to freely express.

But Germany’s protests pale alongside the moral carnage we’ve seen in the US. At least Trump popping pills against medical advice — his mind on the Javel under the sink? — has made clear, if further clarity were needed, that electing him to the White House was a mightily chancy undertaking.

The pandemic has reminded us that governing is a deeply serious business, and reaffirming Trump cum November, looks more than ever like the Great Non-Solution, except for those of us still angry when better-educated, smarter, harder working and more adaptable people than us, get higher grades and better jobs, even when of the wrong sex and colour.

Observers who initially credited the US President with one or two good ideas, if not his own, must now surely be seeing those selfsame ideas as the occasional eruption of a kind of wildcat mental grasping, blissfully free of strategy or follow-up. Shock tactics, whatever the dangers, at least prevent one from talking inaudibly. And while injecting bleach was not actually Trump’s idea, he quickly became its tacit advocate once the glorious thought of it lodged like a sand worm in his ear.

Strangely re-humanising as Lockdown comes to an end, is the return to more prosaic, daily concerns — like hair-cuts for the kids. My 13 year-old’s adolescent attitude means she’s refusing to get hers lopped, though long like Rapunzel’s. Resisting my offer of a ‘bowl haircut’ — cutting around a rimmed dish normally reserved for scrambling eggs — my 11 year-old, unknowingly impersonating Johnny Ramone, accepted that his mother cut his free-form with the kitchen scissors. But the result is much the same. He now looks like a small Friar Tuck.

These days my German is good enough to venture out to a hair salon or barber. I know in advance I’ll choose the barber, at €11.50, and not the upmarket hairdresser just downstairs. Like any good liberal, I seek to integrate: in Germany, I won’t spend the money I’ve got; in France for many years, I’d readily spend the money I didn’t have — a kind of metaphor for the way government and administration work in both countries.

Well, if one is thickening at the gills, hair getting long and carpet-like in a stretch at the back, one can look in profile like the top of a ham, thigh with a face on it, or hyena. Initially I was oblivious, because a second mirror is needed to see oneself from the side and my son, when still a Ramone, shattered it performing shrilly in the back bathroom. In fact, he loves opera, sings with the kids’ choir of the subsidised Volksoper here. Would never have heard of the Ramones — though, as if by coincidence, is quasi-obsessed with hyenas.

The obsession began with the marauding spotted furry ones in the cartoon version of The Lion King. But his sympathy for cretinous characters, coercive politicians notwithstanding, started with the expectorating Gaston, his feet up on the table in Beauty and the Beast; then haggard Cruella in 101 Dalmations, and Cinderella’s ugly sisters (who else knows their names in three languages?) — who by the way, like hyenas, are an intensely matriarchal society.

Anyway, the hyena interest has broadened. Friends who visit can be asked to watch hyena documentaries on You Tube (decline, and he goes into a silent funk). Or perhaps now to join a planned first post-Lockdown trip an hour’s drive from here to Augsburg, where he has discovered (oh no!), that the zoo has hyenas.

If I don’t get my hair cut before then, they may greet me as a shoulderless one of their own.

On Miles Davis and leadership, enabling teams

In the first degree, the new release documentary on visionary American trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis is a music film. But it also offers a remarkable insight into how to motivate, inspire and work creatively with teams.

 In fact, “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool” is probably worthwhile viewing for anyone with a role, responsibility, or simple interest in the development of others.

Davis is the black music icon whose late-’40s “Birth of the Cool” sessions ‘cooled’ the frenetic rhythms and complex harmonies of Bebop, the foundation of what we think of today as modern jazz. From the late 50s, he made a series of large ensemble records including the Spanish-tinged “Sketches of Spain”, long before the term World Music was coined. As the ’60s became the ’70s, he was in on the ground floor of jazz-rock and related fusion forms.

Davis, who died in ’91, was interested in the whole process of creative awareness, in how individuals open up to both their inner possibilities and those of the surrounding environment. Herbie Hancock, pianist in Davis’ so-called Second Great Quintet, tells Stanley Nelson’s camera: “‘Don’t lean on what you know’. What he was looking for was the stuff you don’t know.”

Davis led by example. Yet his ‘example’ was never the prescriptive, ‘Do like me’. It was, as musicologist Tammy L. Kernodle explains, “‘Do you, be you’”. More precisely, perhaps, become you.

The group dynamic went something like this: ‘If I do this, what will you do?’ Or better: ‘What can I say musically — what can I play? — that will enable you to find your way forward, in your own voice’. A lot of the time, Davis himself didn’t say much, his inflected language marked by a certain “m” and “f”-lettered adjectival monotony. But the meaning of his words, at least those we hear in the film, seems utterly clear. And he could be ghoulishly funny, the same adjective having different meanings depending on the context.

Fascinating is how Davis’ musicians became more like themselves, that their contributions were unique to the collective project — to the particular ‘here and now’. Dave Liebman, another of Davis’ sidemen, has said: “Almost to the man, most of us played a certain way with Miles that we never played again. Somehow he got you to do what he needed … and what you wanted.”

Nelson’s film features excerpts from Davis’s co-written autobiography spoken by an actor in Davis’ signature rasping whisper. Arriving with musical sketches to record “Kind of Blue”, an unalloyed masterpiece that is today the biggest-selling album in the history of jazz, Davis says: “I knew that if you’ve got great musicians, they would deal with the situation and play beyond what is there and above where they think they can.” For John Coltrane, the most important post-war saxophonist after Charlie Parker, “that was the door he needed to find his own identity,” Kernodle says.

So was Davis, clearly something of a Shamanic figure, so exceptional in his ability to activate talent, that there’s not much there for the rest of us to learn from? Certainly, he was one of contemporary music’s great visionaries. The way he ‘cooled’ Bebop, and the distinct personal sound he developed as part of that process, took him, as the critic John Clare described it, as close to pure originality as is possible in most art-forms.

But his broader, more earthly lesson was that as a team-playing leader, he had the self-awareness and confidence to believe in the liberating power of ‘the other’. He brought into his groups young musicians with attitude (black and white) not because they were like him, or conformed to some standardised ‘company package’, but because they were not and they did not.

In the language of personal development, he had a “growth mindset” (the phrase is US psychologist, Carol Dweck’s). He cultivated a formidable sense of what a given collective might be capable of, how the “complementarities” of a group of creative people, with attitude, might look and work together. Coltrane is the most famous example, his maximalism throwing Davis’ feline minimalism into stark relief.

Miles believed in both inward-looking reflective practice — “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself” — and in looking outwards, trusting one’s intuition and judgement. “You can get a direction like that when you see the right people,” he once said. “You automatically know that’s for you, y’know? In a matter of seconds.”

The regrettable in Miles, to put it mildly, lies in what “Birth of the Cool” shows of how he could be brutal towards his wives and girlfriends, some of whom mercifully speak for themselves in the film. Their compassion is remarkable. But it’s evident that, for Miles Davis, leading and working with teams, meant working and leading with men.  

Nelson doesn’t psychologise. But we learn that the little boy Miles witnessed domestic violence in the family home. We hear how, unprovoked, he was badly beaten over the head by a cop outside a New York club he was playing at in the ’50s. His crime appears to have been smoking a cigarette. That he had just accompanied a white woman to her car, may not have helped.

* “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool” opens in UK and German cinemas this week, French release will be soon.

Milestones

Birth of the Cool, 1949
Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, 1956
Milestones, 1958
Kind of Blue, 1959
Sketches of Spain, 1960
Four and More, 1964
Miles Smiles, 1966
In a Silent Way, 1969
It’s About That Time, 1969
Bitches Brew, 1970
Agharta, 1975
We Want Miles, 1982
Decoy, 1984
Music from Siesta (with Marcus Miller), 1987

On the central American migrant caravan

Central American migrants amassed on the US-Mexican border have shown the limits of the “deterrence” argument on migration variously used in Europe, Australia and the US, and it is that when governments show sympathy to asylum-seekers, migrant arrivals dramatically rise.

The false contention is that they not only invite the problem, they create it — effectively putting boats in the water, calling would-be wolves to the national gates (“stone cold criminals” and “drug dealers”, according to US president, Donald Trump).

Australia has used the argument to justify the punitive, cruel and deceitful “Pacific Solution”, that shunts asylum-seekers including poly-traumatised children into cramped and unhygienic centres for long periods on remote islands.

And it was widely deployed against German Chancellor Angela Merkel when she opened her arms to thousands of asylum-seekers congregated on a train platform in Budapest in 2015. A humanitarian catastrophe in Europe was narrowly avoided but instead of recognition for moral courage, Merkel was blamed for the crisis, ex-post facto — as if standing for a selfie in a Berlin refugee shelter triggered the surging millions fleeing the brutality of Syria.

The migrants now in Tijuana, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, must know that the White House incumbent is an anti-immigrant crusader for “zero tolerance”, criminalising border-crossings and separating children from their parents. They probably also know that he uses race, as he does national origin; religion; one’s sexuality and able body (or not), like superiority tropes to sew division in an attempt to bring people ‘on side’ — including from groups he marginalises, in fact.

But none of this, not the sheer physical and emotional challenge, not Trump baring his teeth at the Midterms — not the tear gas — has stopped thousands of desperate people from making the long and arduous journey north.

And therein lies the rub.

As ever with refugees, the story has been one of suffering, of people leaping from bridges, of tearful parents losing children in the throng. Secondary but worth noting, is that Trump’s callous politicking evokes the syllogism made known by the British Yes Prime Minister television sitcom. If my dog has four legs, and my cat has four legs, therefore my dog is a cat. Honduras has a drug problem, Hondurans are the caravan, so Honduran drug dealers will descend on the US like rain.

It’s a nasty bit of nonsense in the face of an extremely complicated problem: mass migration, and it ought to repel Trump’s god-fearing base.

Seen from Munich, the caravan recalls the bedraggled humanity of the so-called Balkan route three years ago, when hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers arrived from life-disfiguring conflicts in the Middle East, notably Syria, and specifically the 20,000 who arrived at Central Station from Budapest on the first weekend of September, 2015.

The caravan also reminds one of the general exploitation of the migrant in European public policy debate currently — on the political extremes, yes, but more worryingly on the mainstream right. We’ve seen it in France, more recently in Austria and Italy, and in two German regional elections last month, though there with a glimmer of hope because the opportunism in Bavaria was so blatant — the Premier referring to “asylum-tourism” — that the reactionary conservative campaign came a cropper.

In the US, Trump’s response has been to defend the use of tear gas on women and children; deploy the language of warfare against people still a month’s footslog from the US, and have border troops erect “beautiful barbed wire” — to see little kids impaled upon? He’s flagged cutting financial aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, when it’s precisely aid that addresses the underlying causes of mass migration in the first place.

Such a hard-line on both development aid and border control does not stop mass migration — so much for the hoary old “deterrence” argument. But it does drive desperate asylum-seekers into the arms of people-smugglers. And it is they, of course, who are the true predatory wolves.

On the Oktoberfest

Among the big planetary parties, the annual Oktoberfest in Munich has perhaps the most impressive constellation of worldwide siblings, with mini-fests now established in places as far afield as Sydney, Mexico City and Santa Catarina in Brazil.

The proud parent event, which opened last weekend and runs until 7 October, is Europe’s biggest festival of any kind — organisers call it a “folk festival”. A staggering 6 million people attend in just over two weeks.

Of the 6 million, about 15% or 900,000 were foreign revellers in 2014 — the most recent figures available — some 7%, or 63,000, were Australian. That’s no small beer given that only 8% came from across the border in Austria, about an hour’s drive from here, and 4% from France, which of course also shares a border with Germany. Americans were the largest group of foreigners, at 10%, according to market research commissioned by the City of Munich.

“You meet people and the usual barriers just drop,” says Georg Veit, a theatre lighting designer who has worked at La Scala, Italy’s famous opera house, and with Spain’s La Fura dels Baus at the Sydney Opera House. “It’s great to come as a single. Or you might sit with some Bavarian couple who don’t say much at first and then open right up! There’s no (exchange of) telephone numbers or anything like that. It’s absolutely of the moment.”

Georg, 50 — Goxl to his friends — is at the Oktoberfest 13 days and nights some years, and has been quoted in the German media as a fine connoisseur of the event.

“Everybody lets their hair down,” he says, ensconced in the famous Hacker-Pschorr tent. Enough to be dancing on tables in their thousands when things reach full swing. Suddenly, the informality rivals what we think of as fairly habitual in Australia, Canada or the UK.

But among 600,000 visitors on the busiest days, between 30 beer tents — including 14 hangar-like “mega-tents” — the novice can feel quickly disoriented, especially if just arrived from abroad kitted out and chafing in traditional leather shorts (Lederhosen), or trussed-up in the traditional dress (Dirndl), with no local smarts or table booking.

And it’s not just the madding crowds. Everything about the Oktoberfest, or Wiesn as the locals call it (pronounced: VEE-zn), startles by its size, across 42 hectares with seating for 119,000. There are 151 fair ground attractions, and approximately one kilometre of urinals. In a recent sample year, 2016, Bavarian Labor Department figures said 6.6 million litres of beer were served, usually in the Bavarian litre-glass or “Mass” (Maß); 366,876 chickens consumed; 67, 227 pork knuckles and precisely 28, 377kg of roast almonds.

“The first week is much less crowded than the second,” Goxl advises. “On the Monday (through) Wednesday the tents are walk-through even in the evenings”. This is particularly true of the Hofbräu Tent — one of the biggest, with capacity for 10,000 including the outside beer garden, and where the proportion of international visitors is near to 25 or 30%.

The Augustiner Tent is more traditional, known for its Oompah music and Augustiner beer, perhaps the Munich lager, which is still brewed in wooden kegs. Founded in 1328, Augustiner-Bräu famously does not advertise — on television (brewers are not allowed to by law in Germany), or in the press, or even on public transport. Just via the brewery trucks dotted around Munich streets.

The Hacker-Pschorr Tent is the most-photographed, with a child-like blue sky and white cloud ceiling designed by Oscar-winning set designer, Rolf Zehetbauer, who did ‘The Neverending Story’, Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Serpent’s Egg’ — filmed in Munich — and Bob Fosse’s ‘Cabaret’, for which he won the Academy Award.

Among the other mega-tents, The Schottenhamel, founded in 1867, is the place of the festival opening, when the Mayor of Munich “taps” the first keg, to the boom of a dozen canons. Käfers, looking more like a ski-lodge than a tent, is for VIPs and the chic set — the stars of the Bayern Munich football team attend in Lederhosen with their wives and girlfriends. Entry can be difficult if you “don’t know someone”, Goxl says, but an “aftershow” outside til the wee hours is for everyone. The beer and the champagne flow.

As the Bavarians say, “Nur ein Schwein trinkt allein” — only a pig drinks alone. And at the Oktoberfest, it seems, nobody ever does.

On Catherine Deneuve and #MeToo

Smiling, her eyes alive, French actress Catherine Deneuve stepped down graciously from a dark car on the Champs-Elysées. Already of a certain age, as the French elegantly describe it, her heart seemed to leap with the riotous white of a bouquet of roses offered by a suitor in the crowd. This was the official film of the 2012 Paris Olympic Games bid, and when Paris eventually lost to London, the film was blamed for being Old Hat.

Yet for an Anglo-Saxon, it mirrored both the romance of Arthurian poetry (la femme on a pedestal), and the Romantic period itself (love more heart than head), with a touch of 16th century French poétesse, Louise Labé, thrown in: “Kiss me; kiss; kiss me again the first line and title of her most famous sonnet.

Catherine Deneuve, the mysterious — the transgressive — whose controversial letter signed with 99 French women this week, criticised the #MeToo movement for “puritanism”. Well, she long ago entered my catalogue of extraordinary Gallic women, joining Simone de Beauvoir of the “The Second Sex” — the title politically incorrect today —  Françoise Giroud, co-founder of newsweekly L’Express, and Elisabeth Badinter, alongside Julia Kristeva, Simone Veil and more recently, Juliette Binoche.

Badinter’s book “XY: On Masculine Identity”, explored the possibility of non Rambo-type role models for men, which seemed to me far more relevant than the so-called Men’s Movement around US poet Robert Bly, urging that males paint themselves and run through the scrub, or sit nude and screaming on the couch, to reconnect with their animal side.

De Beauvoir’s opus felt like a line from John Irving, “If life is a forest, women are the trees”, because it put the words of a highly articulate humanist woman, on subjects like women and “The Mother”; women “In Love”; women and “Sexual Initiation”; “The Married Woman” and “Prostitutes and hetaeras”, in a way that educated men, too. And Françoise Giroud? Well, she trounced the achetypal tousled French intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy, in a best-selling series of dialogues called simply, “Men and Women”. In an interview to promote the book with the Paris correspondent of The Times of London, clearly in thrall to her, she cautioned against harbouring illusions. “Women can be as cold as ice,” she told him, “with barbed wire in their hearts”.

The French adjective for this all would be romanesque — novel-like or novelistic — but the common thread is the way women and men interact, a very French subject and pastime.

Anyone who has lived in Paris can vouch for la différence; or at least, this difference, in everyday life. It’s evident in the sense of public display and preening in the streets, a long, meandering promenade through which, must rank as one of the peak experiences of modern urban life, to borrow from Australian art critic Robert Hughes.

As well, the French are just generally more relaxed about the human body than Anglo-Americans — about its discrete veiling, or unveiling, depending on how you look at it. This is why the windows of chemist shops in Paris can, well, set the ordinary male pulse to racing.

How to keep a lid on the rage one feels at the physical abuse of women? Which after all was the first preoccupation of the #MeToo movement. As the father of a girl still blissfully free of adult problems but showing the first signs of adolescence, one thinks of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Virgin Spring where the father, in a blind fury, shatters the bones of his daughter’s assailants like chickens against cave rocks. Better to say: those who commit rape or sexual assault should face judicial proceedings, as the former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar did this week and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein surely must.

But it remains true that women in France are à priori less suspicious of men, French men more broadly interested in women. In the Anglo cultures, and especially in the litigious US, mutual resentment has reached such levels that a solitary man, we’re told, can be scared to share a lift with a woman and vice-versa — her because of sexual harassment, him because of a possible sexual harassment case. This is an awful situation for any society to be in, non?

Ms Deneuve ultimately symbolises the view that something of our better selves continues to reside in contact with the opposite sex. For seeing her letter in these terms, I’m sure I would have her respect. I hope that I would also have that of her opponents.

On Munich heavy rock and metal

Heavy metal? In conservative Munich? Yes, a relatively small but veritable, varicoloured scene. And it’s no surprise, says Randy M. Salo, a Munich-based documentary-maker pointing at a thick book on a desk in front of him. Looks like a government report, I remark. Well, it’s conference papers about heavy metal, he says, drawn from a recent gathering in Helsinki that explored the link between the rich world and the “counter-proposition of metal”.

Born into a Baptist family in South Carolina, Randy moved to wealthy Munich in 2011, not long out of film school in New York and something of a progressive metal bass-player himself. I know my Jaco Pastorius, I think of telling him. But instead say I’m a Miles-Trane freak — Miles Davis 1969-75 (adjudging it judicious to quantify) — then to Hendrix; James Brown; Sly Stone; Karlheinz Stockhausen and his trumpet-playing son Markus, by the way, whose god-gifted sound gives me goose bumps … And John Coltrane? Well, there was something ‘thrash’ in the animism of his music after 1965 — like waves breaking on a glorious shore. Here we reach the limits of our shared musical ground, but it’s been a nice contact. He promises to email a list of Munich bands.

The spirituality in the material he signals (check out the cover art of Heretoirs “The Circle”), has clearly sprung from fields of sound to which Coltrane’s animism, let alone Markus Stockhausen’s clean-line trumpet, would never take me (nor for that matter would his sometime record company, Munich-based ECM). But there is, man, a mothering white guitar player, as Miles might have said, in Randy’s film of a skate punk group called Straightline, that stands my ear on end. A priori, it’s not my thing, but so what? The guitarist-singer, called just Bart, plays lines that motor — forceful, intense, mordantly inventive. He tells Randy’s camera he started out playing jazz.

I take this Straightline to the stoner rock cum groove metal of GodsgroundSmoke the Sky (its fans known as “sky-suckers”) and fuzz box three-piece Swan Valley Heights; to the catchy experimentalism of Majmoon (pronounced: My-moon); Mr Serious and the Groove Monkeys — by now we’re a long way from metal — and the ambient post-rock of Pictures From Nadira, whose appealing self-titled debut album, released end-2016, plays as a continuous set. Miles’ “Panagea” flashes to mind — it must be that alliterating “a” — because these pictures have more in common with Tortoise’s “Millions Now Living Will Never Die” (especially the second track, Glass Museum). This I first heard in Adelaide, Australia’s protestant, God-fearing city. It was 1996 and I’d bought “Millions now living”, with its low-cost cover of stencilled fish (to feed the millions?), because listed among the year’s best by clued-up British music magazine, The Wire.

At Munich’s hardtack end, Hailstone sound to me like Real McCoy traditional metal, though proudly bill themselves as “melodic death metal”. To the uninitiated, the word ‘melodic’ — taken from the way certain Gothenburg Swedes inflected “death metal” in the ’90s — stretches the term, given the unrelenting bass drum “blast beats” and growling, Cookie Monster vocals. Heretoir, of the startling cover-art — what is it about Germanic culture and the forest? — typically combine translucent guitar and layered harmonies, with a devouring, ear-shredding vocal. But I’ll admit to a weakness for the last album’s most consonant track, “Golden Dust”, where vocalist David Conrad switches to vocals chant-like and clean.

The Munich metal scene undergoes the usual ups-and-downs, like any minority music, but is active, collegial and pretty well-organised, with numerous venues, two decent-sized festivals and a dizzying array of sub-genres. Randy tells me a “retro” brand of stoner metal, “doom, very analogue”, is currently popular. We’ve met again, this time for lunch in the retro “Baader Café”, a vast rectilinear stockpile of cassette tapes behind the counter to the right as you enter. As in other places where Metal is strong, like much of Scandinavia, the genre’s vehement ferocity equals rebellion against the nice life normalcy of a city with full employment and good wages, so plenty of spending money for gigs, recordings and all that archly boy’s club “merch” beloved of metal heads: caps, “zippers” (actually just tops with zippers), exploding head t-shirts and the like.

I look for Straightline’s album “Vanishing Values” around the corner from my apartment in a tiny record shop called Public Possession, access from the adjacent skateboard retailer is literally through a hole in the wall. Here an outsized black and white sign plonked in the middle of the floor reads: “Reasons for joining? None.” An earlier sign had read: “We went out of business years ago”. Occasionally, I’ve seen groups of people hanging out drinking in the street in the evenings or on Saturday afternoon, apparently connected to both the skateboards and the vinyl.

I moved to Munich almost three years ago, after 17 in Paris, and have come to see the Bavarian capital as a series of counter-propositions: seven state-subsidised orchestras and a metal scene; FC Bayern, the silver-tail football team, and Munich 1860, purportedly the working man’s club. Rich, yes, but largely without ostentation, Munich took 20,000 asylum-seekers in a single weekend at the top of the EU refugee crisis in September 2015, that’s the number then-British PM David Cameron pledged to take over five years. Sleek, Munich-made BMWs glide noiselessly down city streets that smell of cow shit — or can do, as my Franco-German wife had warned me. I was open-mouthed at hearing this, until one breezy, blue sky morning, the rarified effluvium actually touched my nostrils, and the back of my throat (well, my mouth was open). For the record, it was at the corner of Baaderstraße and Buttermelcherstraße in the trendy Glockenbach quarter. Pre-high tech, pre-big finance, Munich travelled the rural road to Bavaria’s first-stage post-war wealth, atop the cow, and particularly, the pig.

“Vanishing Values”, when I finally get it home, leaps from the speakers and takes a hold of my throat. Full-on, the best of it — a track called “Holy Wars” — features Bart’s guitar furiously soloing on an arpeggio played very fast. But it’s there and it’s gone. I reckon Miles would have had him play longer.

“The Munich metal scene is bigger than I thought it would be when I first arrived,” Randy tells me. His production company plans to keep the Munich Unsigned tag, but is branching out into non-Munich bands under the FreqsTV moniker. Both are on You Tube. Randy wants to grow the firm, he says, take it global, while staying, like so many of us now in the Bavarian capital, resolutely international local.

Getting rocked & metalled in Munich

Selections from the more poetic end of local bands above

Pictures from Nadira

Album: Nadira
Track: Rijl Al Awa

Heretoir

Album: The Circle
Track: Golden Dust

Swan Valley Heights

Album: Swan Valley Heights
Track: Alaska