Sunday 26 February 2012

Australia's Gillard Wins Party Challenge

Australia—Prime Minister Julia Gillard held off a leadership challenge from rival Kevin Rudd on Monday, setting the stage for a bid to reunite her divided party and win back disenchanted voters.

"I can assure you that this political drama is over," said Ms. Gillard in a news conference following the poll, in which she garnered 71 of 102 votes. "I absolutely believe that united we can win the next election."

Ms. Gillard has come under attack from Tony Abbott, the leader of the Liberal party and Liberal-National coalition, who has picked up on Mr. Rudd's campaign pitch that Ms. Gillard isn't capable of defeating him in a general election.

Mr. Rudd, a 54-year-old former diplomat, triggered the political crisis when he resigned as foreign minister last week and openly challenged Ms. Gillard's leadership. He fought his campaign on the view that he is the best person to reverse the commanding lead Mr. Abbott's party enjoys in opinion polls.

Mr. Rudd's continued presence in Canberra will be a further destabilizing force within the Labor party, although he stressed following his defeat that he will back Ms. Gillard in a future election.

In a campaign that will began in earnest on Monday, Mr. Abbott, 54, targeted independent lawmakers who support Ms. Gillard's administration in an effort to force a no-confidence vote in Parliament and an early general election ahead of the next scheduled ballot in late 2013.

Ms. Gillard's government is held hostage by its necessary but volatile alliance with a few independent lawmakers and the increasingly influential Greens party, which has given its support in exchange for policies like a tax on carbon emissions and profit of mining companies.

"I have no confidence in this prime minister" said Mr. Abbott after the results of the Labor vote. "I formally request the independents to state their position on whether they have confidence in this prime minister, given the devastating critique of this prime minister that we've seen from her own colleagues."

A government led by Mr. Abbott would attempt to reverse much of Ms. Gillard's legislation, such as the emissions and mining taxes, along with a plan to build a high-speed broadband network at a cost of about US$36 billion.

"The markets already have a very dim view of this government," said Tim Hannon, chief investment officer at Sydney-based hedge fund Evergreen Capital. "This just adds to the view of sovereign risk in Australia."

Mr. Hannon said Labor's legislation on taxing carbon emissions and mining profits are among the most onerous for business. Australia's economy has done better than most under Ms. Gillard, with growth last year of about 3% and near full employment, but her government has failed to capitalize.

Mr. Rudd has said he will withdraw from front-line politics and not challenge Ms. Gillard again, but he could reignite his bitter feud with the prime minister if she fails to reverse a steep decline in the ruling Labor party's popularity. Monday's vote is unlikely to quell the tension within the party or sate Mr. Rudd's ambition to regain the leadership he lost in June 2010.

"There is a possibility he could have another shot," said Michael Wesley, executive director of the Lowy Institute, an independent political think tank based in Sydney. "Rudd has claimed the moral high ground out of this and you can't rule him out because he is popular with the public."

Ms. Gillard, a 50-year-old former industrial-relations attorney, and her senior supporters fought an acrimonious campaign to discredit their rival. A leading ally, Treasurer Wayne Swan, criticized Mr. Rudd for "dysfunctional decision making."

Mr. Rudd pitched his leadership challenge on his popularity with voters, spending the weekend campaigning at shopping malls in his native Queensland state and calling on voters to pressure their members of Parliament to support him.

Ms. Gillard gained power in mid-2010 following Labor's ouster of Mr. Rudd. Her supporters have used his challenge to criticize his leadership and management style. But political experts warn that the nature of Mr. Rudd's campaign, which gained the support of five senior ministers, including Labor tactician Anthony Albanese, means Ms. Gillard will struggle to heal the wounds within her office.

Attention will now turn to the shape of Ms. Gillard's new cabinet and whether Mr. Rudd will keep his commitment to not challenge her leadership again.

"She will want the right ministers in the right portfolio and people who can get out and sell the government," said John Wanna, a professor of political science at Australian National University in Canberra.

John McTernan, Ms. Gillard's communications director and former strategist for Tony Blair, didn't return messages seeking comment.

Mr. Wanna warned that she could face another leadership challenge within six months unless she significantly improves Labor's popularity in the polls.

Monday 20 February 2012

China's urban migrants hold key to domestic demand

Liu Tao knows he will never be rich enough to own one of the luxury apartments in Beijing that he has been paid to decorate for more than a decade, but he's saving hard so that in another 10 years he'll have enough for a home with indoor plumbing.

Like many of the 158 million rural migrant workers whose annual pilgrimages to city factories have fuelled China's economic ascent, Liu has seen his pay and living standards rise steadily, but he still isn't the free-spending consumer the country's leaders urgently want him to be.

"I need to save up to take care of the kids and I've got the old people to look after," the 37-year-old father of three told Reuters, standing in the unheated, sparsely furnished main room of his house in Zhoulou village, about an hour's drive from Shangqiu in Henan province, southwest of Beijing.

Liu's main spending constraint is not earning power.

His 3,000-4,000 yuan ($75-635) per month is well above the average migrant pay of 2,049 yuan charted by statistics -- but a permit system (hukou) that denies millions of officially rural residents access to social services in cities where they work.

"If you go to the big cities and you see all the tower blocks and tall buildings, they've been built by migrant labourers, but we don't see any of the benefits. The government needs to make sure more of that wealth is shared with migrant labourers," Liu said.

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For a graphic on migrant workers in China, see: link.reuters.com/mav66s

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It's a vital message for a Chinese leadership anxious to turn a nation of savers into spenders and rebalance the world's second biggest economy towards its huge domestic market. That would cut dependence on external demand jolted by financial crises twice in three years, with current trends pointing to the slowest year of economic expansion in a decade.

Stability and steady growth are core to the Communist Party's justification for more than 60 years of one-party rule, making it acutely sensitive to anything that could dislodge it. But the leadership has yet to show the will to grasp a reform that some of its own economic advisers say is crucial.

The 600 million people China has lifted out of rural poverty by 30 years of development remain far from urban affluence. Inequality soars beside skyscrapers and dollar billionaires and IMF data show that consumption as a share of disposable income has plunged 20 percentage points in the last decade.

With city dwellers topping 50 percent of the population for the first time last year, it signals that Beijing cannot unlock the potential of urbanisation unless it reforms the hukou system to turn migration into permanent city settlement.

Access to schools, hospitals and other services is allocated by hukou, keeping them out of reach of migrant workers.

"The hukou system is preventing the arrival of the Lewis turning point," said Yukon Huang, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former student of Nobel-prize winning economist, Arthur Lewis, whose theory of economic development is a focus for investors and policymakers.

It postulates that once all excess labour in a developing economy has been absorbed into the workforce, further capital accumulation delivers self-sustaining wage and economic growth.

ELUSIVE SWEET SPOT

It's a sweet spot eluding Beijing, despite having turned its top companies into global leaders in terms of market share and profits, and amassing the largest store of foreign wealth on the planet at $3.18 trillion -- much of it the last 10 years.

Migrants have barely had a sniff of the riches, although they produce most of the economy's value added growth in the 200 million jobs they fill in the externally-focused factory sector.

The 95 million people of Henan province -- roughly the population of G7 members Canada and Britain combined -- generated per capita GDP of $3,600 in 2010 as some of China's most active migrant workers. It was barely a tenth of those G7 counterparts.

Wages have risen -- in double digits for years and by 21.2 percent in 2011, government statistics show. But so has saving.

Savings rates of between 30 and 70 percent were the outer ranges of a straw poll of workers in villages near Shangqiu and outside train and bus stations as people queued to get back to the factories after annual trips home for the Lunar New Year.

China officially has 80 trillion yuan on deposit at banks, with analysts estimating roughly the same amount exists under mattresses, confounding economic orthodoxy that says higher wages in the hands of the poor translate smoothly into spending.

"That's not the way we think," said Zhu Sheng, wrestling with the decision of whether to leave her young son with her parents in the Henan countryside and return to the Beijing telecommunications factory where she has worked for five years. She is reluctant to take much lower paid work locally.

"Migrant workers save a lot, that's true. We have to keep saving because we have to take of the kids and the old folks. I can't say how much I'd need to earn not to have to worry about saving," Zhu said.

"In the countryside we have televisions and washing machines already. I wouldn't want to buy another or just replace them unless I had to."

Zhu used a government rebate scheme to buy a new twin tub washing machine last year, spending about 600 yuan.

Her 2-1/2-year old boy was playing in the machine, watched over by his grandmother, in the courtyard outside the entrance to the open, unheated room in which Zhu was seated -- framed portrait of Mao Zedong, founder of Communist China, on the table beside her, with posters of reformist leader Deng Xiaoping and other leaders since then on the facing wall.

Zhu and many others like her save for housing, education and medical bills in the hope of a brighter future.

TOO WORRIED TO SPEND

Signs of those hopes are on display in the brown wheat and corn fields speckled with grave mounts. The most recent ones are festooned with coloured paper models of new homes, cars and household goods -- symbols of the prosperity older farmers can only dream of for their afterlife and that of their children.

Research by the OECD Development Centre concludes that urbanisation China-style confers only half the benefits it should -- improving income, but constraining consumption.

Factors like inflation also erode willingness to spend.

While most will readily agree that living standards are higher than they were a decade ago, they are far from well-off and feel the pinch of price rises acutely.

The annual rate of inflation hit a three-year high of 6.5 percent last July, exceeded the government's 4 percent target in every month of last year and was still above it in January 2012.

But that still understates the pain felt by rural residents who spend about 40 percent of household income on food, the average price of which rose by 11.8 percent in 2011.

Lorry driver Chen Qingguo estimates that it costs about 10,000 yuan a year to keep his 10-year old daughter fed, clothed, housed and schooled in the village where she and her two-year-old brother are left in the care of grandparents.

Employment contracts providing accommodation and food also inhibit spending. Living in dormitories offers few incentives to acquire goods or spend beyond occasional trips to nearby towns.

"My life's in the factory," said Li Jie, 30, who was heading to a Qingdao tyre factory on the east coast to earn 6,000 yuan a month at production line piece rates and up to 8,000 yuan if he works fast and hard.

Residency rights, or at least access in cities to medical benefits, would be a big help in unlocking migrant savings.

It would magnify the impact of urbanisation unfolding across

interior provinces. Analysts at HSBC believe this process will turn China's 31 provinces from the equivalent of poor, Third World countries into places generating wealth like a union of second-tier developed and top-tier developing nations by 2020.

"For sustained growth, the most important source is continuous technological innovation and structural transformation," said World Bank chief economist Justin Lin, who believes China can follow an unprecedented 30 years of 9 percent-plus average growth with another 20 years at 8 percent.

Failure to pursue further fundamental economic restructuring could see it unravel. Get it right and China could grow and create jobs almost regardless of the external environment.

Foreign-funded firms employ about 40 million directly, while economists reckon that China creates about 10,500 jobs for every $100 million of goods it exports.

Total exports of $1.9 trillion in 2011 imply 200 million workers owed their livelihoods to foreign demand, about a quarter of all the people employed in China.

Without reform, that dependence will remain unbroken and the

rate of development will merely absorb the influx from the countryside. In 2011, some 21 million people -- roughly the population of Australia -- become urban wage-earners.

ECONOMIC WILDCARD

But that dynamic is the wildcard that some investors believe will keep growth ticking. It is already creating shortages of workers and raising wages outside major manufacturing towns.

As China accelerates development inland, closer to the homes of many migrants, it may be possible for them to find jobs in districts where they are officially registered.

In Shangqiu -- capital of China's Shang Dynasty in the second millennium BC -- recruitment agency worker Chen Xiaowei has seen no sign of a slowdown in demand for experienced staff.

"There's going to be a shortage of workers here again this year. People still prefer to work elsewhere for better pay, but the government is still attracting businesses here too. So the shortfall of workers is going to grow and that means the pay gap is going to have to close," he said.

"Things have already changed in recent years. We're catching up with the more prosperous parts of Henan, but we're not there yet."

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Australian Visa Application Centre now operational in Ghana

The Australian government has opened its Visa Application Centre in Accra to provide Ghanaian applicants a convenient, fast and accessible way to apply for Australian visas.

The new visa services, which had been operational since February 8, 2012, was in response to the increasing visa service demands by Ghanaians who want to travel to Australia for work, study, visit and for holidays.

Speaking at the ceremony on Tuesday, Mr William Billy Williams, Australian High Commissioner to Ghana, said the visa centre would enable Ghanaian clients to lodge visa applications in Ghana.

“Previously, Ghanaians visa applicants were required to send their applications directly to the Australian High Commission in Kenya.”

He noted that the establishment of the Centre would further help strengthen the relationship between the two countries.

He noted that under the new visa application arrangements, clients were required to submit their applications in persons at the Australian Visa Application Centre (AVAC), where they would also be made to provide a fingerprint and facial scan as part of their biometric data collection.

“Biometric data is an important tool in identity management globally, helping countries to facilitate the arrival of travellers and to combat fraud.”

Prospective applicants could visit www.ghana.embassy.gov.au for more information on the Australian Visa Application Centre.

The Centre shares the premises of the United Kingdom Visa Application Centre located at Lenshie Crescent at the Labone Estate would provide services to prospective travellers to Australia from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.

Mr Nino Sekyere-Boakye, Chief Executive Officer of All world Migration Services, which provides services to prospective migrants to Australia, appealed to travellers to Australia to seek professional advice on migration to that country to increase their chances of getting visas.

“The right knowledge would also stop them from falling prey to the works and tricks of fake travelling agents”.

Tuesday 7 February 2012

Coalition defends costings on Nauru

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison has defended his use of an international catering and logistics company to provide costings for an asylum seeker centre on Nauru.

Eurest Support Services, known as ESS, was once the largest supplier of food to the United Nations peacekeeping force, but was barred as a vendor in 2005 after a bribery scandal involving the allocation of UN contracts in Africa. ESS parent company Compass Group referred to the incident as ''an unfortunate episode'' and was forced to settle legal action for £40 million with competitors.

A Compass Group Australia executive director confirmed to The Age that ESS had provided the $95 million costing for the Coalition to build accommodation on Nauru.
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The quote was a third of the cost estimated by the immigration department to reopen a full-service detention centre on Nauru, but the Compass executive said ESS's costing only covered accommodation, and the firm had no expertise in immigration processing.

Mr Morrison sought to distance the Coalition from ESS, saying it was another division of Compass, DeltaFM, that supplied the written quote.

However, Mr Morrison said that DeltaFM and ESS were ''all part of the family of companies''.

Company officials flew to Nauru at Compass' expense to provide the Coalition's quote. Mr Morrison said this did not mean Compass would automatically be granted the contract if the Coalition took government.

''The Coalition has no commercial arrangements with the organisation that provided these costings,'' he said.

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Nurses and allied health workers wanted for survey

Nurses, midwives and allied health workers across Australia are wanted to take part in a study exploring the international migration of health and social care workers.

Nurses and allied health professionals who have migrated here along with non-migrant workers are wanted to take part in the Public Services International study.

The New South Wales Nurses’Association and Queensland Nurses Union are taking part in the research project, surveying nurses and midwives to collate evidence about migration experiences and to find out why people migrate and how the experience of migration can be improved.

With a global shortage of more than four million health care workers and an exodus of workers leaving the sector, with many migrating in search of better pay and conditions in other countries, PSI wants to map migration services and forge a global report on the issue, which will be presented at its international conference in South Africa later this year.

NSW Nurses’ Association acting assistant general secretary Lisa Kremmer said the survey hoped to provide a snapshot of health worker migration to Australia.

“There’s been a recent report released of research in South Africa and Australia is one of their more population destinations,” she said.

“Australia is one of the first countries of destination to be participating (in the study) so it’s very exciting.”

Ms Kremmer said the two separate surveys, one for migration and the other for non-migration, would discover migrating nurses and midwives’ country of origin, their job position, reasons for migration, when they migrated, their experiences and whether their experience or skills had been recognised here and what can be done to improve the process.

The non-migration survey explores what value overseas nurses play in Australia, any issues, and what can be done to improve the transition, she said.

“It explores a whole range of things around an overseas nurse working in the Australian context,” she said.

“I think there’s lots of areas that we can learn from with this project to try and improve on in the future.”

Ms Kremmer said while the union was targeting nurses and midwives, the survey was open for all health care workers to complete.

For more information contact Lisa Kremmer on (02) 8595 1234 or lkremmer@nswnurses.asn.au.