World Bank looks at inequality

BBC NEWS | Business | World Bank rediscovers inequality

This story (linked above) is interesting and important, but (as far as I can see from Google news search,) it hasn't appeared in the Australian media yet. (It gets a story in the Jakarta Post today too.)

Meanwhile at The Age, today they run what looks like an opinion piece that they have been holding for a slow news day. It is an attempted rebuttal by the writer of Aussie movie "Three Dollars" against conservative writers' criticism of the movie:

'The burden of their criticism seems to be that the socio-economic conditions in present Australia portrayed, with parabolic licence, in the film and in the novel by the same name, are "utterly unreal"'

"Parabolic licence" means what exactly. Wildly exaggerated?

The writer then goes on to explain how bad things really are in Australia, all due to free trade, of course:

"It is an article of faith for proponents of free trade that the industries that have or that are disappearing will be replaced by much higher-tech industries.

We'll make the clever stuff, they'd have us believe. We'll switch over by the hundreds of thousands, nay the millions, into molecular biological innovation, into the genetic manipulation of new vaccines, into making better MRI machines. Let the hapless Chinese make all the stuff we used to make, we're told. We'll make the stuff they're not clever enough to make. And as for the millions of us not clever enough either, we'll get - you'd better believe it - high status, high salaried permanent full-time jobs making sandwiches and serving coffee in the cafes and bistros being opened up by the recently-out-of-work with large enough termination payments. We'll work in hotels and tourism tending the flood of tourists attracted by the low cost of holidaying in a geographically interesting country rapidly descending into a banana monarchy."

Just what we need in Australian script writers - a rabid anti globalisation protester who, despite all evidence to the contrary, thinks he is in a country that is in economic crisis. (Not to mention one who would apparently ignore the benefits of globalisation for poverty reduction in places like China. This unrecognized immorality of the anti globalisation crowd is what really irritates me.)