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COVID-19 cost more in 2020 than the world’s combined natural disasters in any of the past 20 years

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Ilan Noy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Nguyen Doan, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of WellingtonWhat have we lost because of the pandemic? According to our calculations, a lot — and many of the worst hit countries and regions are far from world media attention.

Typically, damage from any disaster is measured in separate categories: the number of fatalities and injuries it caused, and the financial damage it led to (directly or indirectly).

Only by aggregating these various measures into a comprehensive total can we begin to formulate a fuller picture of the burden of disasters, including pandemics.

The usual approach has been to attach a price tag to death and illness. Many governments calculate this “value of statistical life”.

They do this based on surveys asking people how much they are willing to pay to reduce some risk (for example, improve a road they often use), or by calculating the additional compensation people demand when they take on high-risk occupations (for example, as a diver on an oil rig).

By observing the amount of money people associate with small changes in mortality risk, one can then calculate the overall price of a “statistical life” as valued by the average person.

By adding the dollar value of asset damage to the “priced” value of life lost (or injured), the overall cost of an adverse event (such as an earthquake or an epidemic) can be calculated.

Ship washed up on street after Japanese tsunami
The massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011 cost far less than COVID-19 in 2020.
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Calculating ‘lost life years’

But “value of life” prices can vary a lot between and even within countries. There is also an understandable public distaste for putting a price tag on human life. Governments typically don’t openly discuss these calculations, making it difficult to assess their legitimacy.

An alternative is a “life years lost index”. It is based on the World Health Organization (WHO) measure of “disability-adjusted life years” (DALY), calculated for a long list of diseases and published in a yearly account of the associated human costs.



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In conventional measurements of the impact of disaster risk, the unit used is dollars. For this alternative index, the unit of measurement is “lost life years” — the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health.

This is a sum of three key measures of the pandemic’s impact: lost life years because of death and sickness from the disease, and the equivalent lost years due to decline in economic activity. The map below presents these figures per person, in order to enable the relevant comparison across countries.

For example, in the map above we see Australia has a life-years-lost figure of 0.02. This means, on average, every person in Australia lost just over seven life days from the pandemic. In New Zealand, where fewer people died and there have been only a few thousand cases, the figure is 0.01, meaning each person lost fewer than four life days.

In India, by contrast, the average person lost nearly 15 days and in Peru the equivalent figure is 25 days. That loss is based on a combination of the precipitous recession and the death and sickness caused by the virus directly.

So, how do we put this in context? Is losing 25 days a catastrophic loss that justifies the kinds of public actions we have observed around the world? We can answer that question by comparing the impact of COVID-19 to other disasters.



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The price of a pandemic

When we compare the total aggregate costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with the average annual costs associated with all other disasters in the previous 20 years, we find the pandemic has indeed been extremely costly (in terms of lost life years).

This is despite those past two decades having seen many catastrophic events: horrific tsunamis in Indonesia (2004) and Japan (2011), very damaging hurricanes in the US (2005 and 2017), a high-mortality cyclone in Myanmar (2008), deadly earthquakes in India (2001), Pakistan (2005), China (2008), Haiti (2010) and Nepal (2015), and others.

The graph below shows the life years lost in 2020 by continent, per person, from COVID-19 compared to the average annual cost of all other disasters 2000-2019. As we can see, the costs of the pandemic are much higher — more than three times higher in Asia and more than 30 times higher in Europe.

The most vulnerable countries have been small, open economies such as Fiji, Maldives and Belize, which rely heavily on the export of services, especially tourism.

These are not necessarily countries that have experienced a high number of deaths from the pandemic, but their overall loss is staggering.

More generally, the per-capita loss associated with COVID-19 is particularly high in most of Latin America, southern Africa, southern Europe, India and some of the Pacific Islands. This is in stark contrast to where the global media’s attention has been directed (the US, UK and EU).

Costs will continue to rise

These measures are for 2020 only. Obviously, the pandemic is continuing to rage, and will most likely continue to have an impact on the global economy well into 2022. Many of the adverse economic impacts will still be felt years from now.

Worryingly, some of the countries that have already suffered the greatest economic impact have also been slow to secure enough vaccine doses for their populations. They may well see their economic slumps carry on into next year, especially with larger, richer countries having the resources to buy vaccines first.

Much public and media attention has focused on the death toll and immediate economic impact from COVID-19. But the human and social costs associated with that economic loss are potentially much greater, particularly in poorer countries.



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The heavy burden many small countries have borne has, to some extent, been overlooked. Countries such as Lebanon and the Maldives are experiencing dramatic and painful crises, largely under the radar of world attention.

However, our conclusion that the human cost of the economic loss is possibly much higher than the cost associated with health loss does not imply public policies such as lockdowns, border restrictions and quarantines have been unwarranted.

If anything, countries that experienced a deeper health crisis also experienced a deeper economic crisis. There has been no effective trade-off between saving lives and saving livelihoods.

This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the stories here.The Conversation

Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Nguyen Doan, Doctoral student in economics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Vital Signs: the cost of lockdowns is nowhere near as big as we have been told

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Richard Holden, UNSW

As a second COVID-19 lockdown looms in New South Wales, there is much discussion about the economic costs of doing so.

But since the start of this pandemic there has been profound confusion in many quarters about the economic cost of the virus compared to the economic cost of lockdowns.

It should come as no surprise that having a highly contagious virus with a significant fatality rate running through the community is bad for the economy.

People are afraid to congregate in public or catch public transport or taxis. People don’t want to spend much money when they have debts to pay and their job might be at risk.

This leads to what I have called a “self-lockdown”. No matter what the government mandates, people cut back on economic activity.

Of course, government-coordinated lockdowns entail an extra short-term cost to the economy. Closing pubs and restaurants means those businesses, for a time, have zero revenue.



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But how much of the reduction in economic activity is due to the virus, and how much to government lockdowns?

It is crucial to understand this. Because it is the incremental cost of the lockdowns that represents the investment we make in the economy of the future by getting the virus under control. If we think the cost of lockdowns is higher than it really is, we won’t enact them in cases where on balance we should.

Evidence from the United States

The best evidence to date on this matter comes from a remarkable paper circulated in June by University of Chicago economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson.

To analyse the causal effect of government policy on the US economy during the initial spread of COVID-19, they used mobile phone data to measure foot traffic at 2.25 million individual businesses across 110 industries in the US.

To estimate what proportion of lower foot traffic was due to self-lockdown rather than government-imposed lockdown, they looked at differences between businesses with customer “commuting zones” spanning state or county jurisdictions with different legal restrictions. As they put it:

This leverages two related types of variation: businesses in border-spanning commuting zones where jurisdictions impose shelter-in-place orders at different times (e.g., northern Illinois when Illinois placed a sheltering order on March 20th while Wisconsin waited until the following week), and businesses in commuting zones where a jurisdiction never imposed an order (e.g., the Quad Cities area, where the Illinois towns of Moline and Rock Island faced stay-at-home orders but bordering Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, did not).

Goolsbee and Syverson found total consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, but legal restrictions accounted for just 7 percentage points of this. That is, it caused less than 12% of the total effect.

Breaking down the data further, they show fear of infection largely drove individual decisions to reduce activity.

In fact, foot traffic “started dropping before the legal orders were in place; was highly influenced by the number of COVID deaths reported in the county; and showed a clear shift by consumers away from busier, more crowded stores toward smaller, less busy stores in the same industry”.

Strikingly, US states that decided to repeal shutdown orders witnessed recoveries of a similar, symmetric size. This is further evidence of the modest incremental impact of lockdowns relative to the larger impact of the virus itself.

Lessons for Australia

We need to stop thinking about lockdowns as representing the total economic hit we take from COVID-19. The virus itself is hugely damaging. Lockdowns add to that, but come with an important benefit – getting the virus under control.

Early in the pandemic, the Australian Treasury estimated Australia’s GDP would fall 10-12% in the June quarter.

Since Treasurer Josh Frydenberg cited this estimate in his National Press Club address on May 5, many have used it to calculate the the cost of a national lockdown at A$4 billion a week.

That is, Australia’s GDP is about A$2 trillion annually, so a 10% contraction is $200 billion a year, or about $4 billion a week.

But is this really the cost of the lockdown? How much of the estimated 10% drop in GDP for the June quarter is due to the virus and self-lockdown, not government lockdowns?



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If the Goolsbee-Syverson numbers translate to Australia, then the lockdown cost is closer to A$450 million a week.

That’s still a lot, but a six-week nationwide investment of $2.7 billion to get the virus under control and boost consumer and business confidence was money well spent.

Berejiklian’s dilemma

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said she doesn’t want to enact a second lockdown because of the hit to economy.

If the current outbreak can be dealt with through rapid contract tracing, testing and isolation, this may be wise.



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But if the number of daily cases gets beyond a manageable point, a lockdown might be the only way to stop the spread of the virus.

The best evidence to date shows we cannot have a well-functioning economy with COVID-19 running rampant. That leads to a very costly self-lockdown, regardless of what the government does.The Conversation

Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The calculus of death shows the COVID lock-down is clearly worth the cost

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Neil Bailey, Monash University

Will the number of lives saved as a result of the COVID-19 restrictions be outweighed by the deaths from an economic recession?

This is a vital question to answer for governments responding to the current global tragedy.

Without numbers, there’s no obvious way of working out whether the economic impacts of the lock-down could be more harmful than the virus.

With health economics consultant Daniel West, I have attempted to estimate the numbers involved in Australia.

In order to provide a strong challenge to the status quo of lock-down the estimates we have used for increased deaths from a lockdown-induced recession are at the high end of the likely scale. The estimates we have used for deaths from COVID19 if the lockdown ends are at the low end.

Our analysis suggests that continuing strict restrictions in order to eradicate COVID-19 is likely to lead to eight times fewer total deaths than an immediate return to life as normal.

Lives the lock-down could cost

The most obvious deaths likely to follow from a lock-down-induced recession are suicides.

Studies in 26 European countries over four decades suggest that increases in unemployment of more than 3% are associated with increases in suicides by 4.45%.

A similar relationship was found in Australia during the global financial crisis.

The projections for increases in unemployment if the lock-down continues are grim, some pointing to an unemployment rate of up to 15% which might not return to normal for up to a decade.



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To account for the prospect that the coming recession will be more severe than most, we have used double the highest European estimate of the relationship between increased unemployment and suicide.

This estimate suggests that an increase in the unemployment rate to 15% followed by a gradual decline over ten years would produce a distressing 2,761 extra deaths due to suicide.

Loneliness takes lives too

Continued restrictions could also significantly increase loneliness, which, for those who are lonely, can increase deaths from all-causes by between 15% and 29%.

Research suggests that quarantine can increase the number of people showing psychological distress by about 20%, an estimate we have used as a proxy for the effect of loneliness, even though the lock-down restrictions are less severe than quarantine.

This points to an additional 4,015 deaths associated with loneliness from a lock-down of six months.



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Although it would be reasonable to assume that a recession would increase the number of deaths from other causes, studies show this isn’t the case. Research into “all-cause mortality” consistently shows declines in deaths during recessions, due in part to a reduced number of heart attacks.

The current lock-down might also increase deaths in specific ways, such as deaths from alcohol abuse.

On the other hand, if hospitals are overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, deaths from non-COVID-19 injuries and illnesses will increase as people cannot access health care.

Because we have no data on these offsetting possibilities, we have assumed they are roughly matched in size.

It is also worth noting that although we assume lock-down restrictions will hurt our economy more severely, cities that implemented more severe restrictions during the 1918 Spanish flu had economies that bounced back faster after the pandemic.

Lives the lock-down might save

We have estimated the number of deaths from COVID-19, suicide and loneliness under three different scenarios

  • an immediate return to life as normal, while still quarantining suspected cases

  • an easing of restrictions that allows the virus to slowly spread in order to achieve so-called herd immunity

  • the maintenance of restrictions until the virus is contained, followed by extensive tracking and tracing aimed at eliminating the virus

Scenario 1. Return to normal

With no lock-down measures other than the quarantine of suspected cases, the government believes 68% of people would contract the virus. Our estimates suggest this would result in more than 287,000 deaths from COVID-19 as the health system could not cope with the volume.

We assume this would produce a recession lasting five years instead of ten, with 10% initial unemployment and an associated 753 extra deaths from suicide.

Scenario 2. Herd immunity

The government says that to achieve herd immunity, about 60% of people would need to eventually contract the virus. If it is done slowly, intensive care units will not be overwhelmed, keeping the death rate per infection low.

Our estimates suggest the strategy would lead to 141,000 deaths from COVID-19.

We assume this would result in a deep recession of ten years with 15% initial unemployment and an associated 4,015 deaths from loneliness and 2,761 deaths from suicide.

Scenario 3. Eradication

Under the eradication scenario, 11.6% of people would be expected to contract the virus, resulting in 27,000 deaths from COVID-19.

As with the herd immunity strategy, we have assumed a deep recession over ten years with 15% initial unemployment and an associated 4,015 deaths from loneliness and 2,761 from suicide.

Note that given Australia’s current success, it is very possible that with continued prudent restrictions, the number of deaths due to COVID19 will be well below 27,000.

The calculus of death

Regardless of the strategy, the estimated number of deaths from COVID-19 far exceeds the estimated number of deaths from suicide and loneliness.

Despite assuming that an immediate return to life as normal would prevent all further deaths from loneliness and 70% of deaths from the increased suicide rate associated with high unemployment, the life as normal scenario is predicted to result in by far the highest overall number of deaths: 288,000.

This is almost twice the number of deaths predicted for the herd immunity scenario (148,000) and more than eight times as many as eradication (34,000).

The Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney has reported larger estimates for suicides from increased unemployment: an extra 750 to 1,500 suicides per year for five years. The top end of this range projects an extra 7,500 suicides, almost three times our estimate.

Even using this higher estimate, the number of lives that would be lost from COVID-19 without lock-down measures would dwarf the number of extra suicides.



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People are understandably concerned about what the lock-down will do to their jobs, businesses and investments. That damage extends beyond lives lost.

The lives that will be lost are important. The implementation of preventative measures will be vital to reduce the risk of suicide.

Yet our calculations clearly suggest that, when it comes to human lives, far fewer will be lost by continuing restrictions than would be lost by ending them now.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

This article was produced in collaboration with Daniel West. An extended version can be found here.The Conversation

Neil Bailey, Research Fellow at the Epworth Centre for Innovation in Mental Health, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With costs approaching $100 billion, the fires are Australia’s costliest natural disaster

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Paul Read, Monash University and Richard Denniss, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

It’s hard to estimate the eventual economic cost of Australia’s 2019-20 megafires, partly because they are still underway, and partly because it is hard to know the cost to attribute to deaths and the decimation of species and habitats, but it is easy to get an idea of its significance – the cost will be unprecedented.

The deadliest bushfires in the past 200 years took place in 1851, then 1939, then 1983, 2009, now 2019-20. The years between them are shrinking rapidly. Only a remote grassfire in central Australia in 1974-75 rivalled them in terms of size, although not in biomass burnt or loss of life.

The term “megafire” is a new one, defined in the early 2000s to help describe disturbing new wildfires emerging in the United States – massive blazes, usually above 400,000 hectares, often joining up, that create more than usual destruction to life and property.



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Australia’s current fires dwarf the US fires that inspired the term.

They are 25 times the size of Australia’s deadliest bushfires, the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria that directly killed 173 people, and so large and intense that they create their own weather in which winds throw embers 30 kilometres or more ahead of the front and pyro-cumulus clouds produce dry lightning that ignites new fires.

The Black Saturday fires burnt 430,000 hectares. The current fires have killed fewer people but have so far burnt 10.7 million hectares – an area the size of South Korea, or Scotland and Wales combined.

There are easy to measure costs…

The federal government has promised to put at least A$2 billion into a National Bushfire Recovery Fund, which is roughly the size of the first estimate of the cost of the fires calculated by Terry Rawnsley of SGS Economics and Planning.

He put the cost at somewhere between A$1.5 and $2.5 billion, using his firm’s modelling of the cost of the NSW Tathra fires in March 2018 as a base.

It’s the total of the lost income from farm production, tourism and the like.

It is possible to get an idea of wider costs using the findings of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission.


Final Report, 2019 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission

It came up with an estimate for tangible costs of A$4.369 billion, which after inflation would be about $5 billion in today’s dollars.

…and harder-to-measure costs

Tangible costs are hose easily measured including the cost of replacing things such as destroyed homes, contents and vehicles.

They also include the human lives lost, which were valued at A$3.7 million per life (2009 dollars) in accordance with a Commonwealth standard.

The measure didn’t include the effect of injuries and shortened lives due to smoke-related stroke and cardiovascular and lung diseases, or damage to species and habitats, the loss of livestock, grain and feed, crops, orchards and national and local parks.

Also excluded were “inangibles”, among them the social costs of mental health problems and unemployment and increases in suicide, substance abuse, relationship breakdowns and domestic violence.



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The cost of inangibles can peak years after a disaster and continue to take tolls for decades, if not generations.

One attempt to estimate the cost of intangibles was made by Deloitte Access Economics, in work for the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience & Safer Communities.

Deloitte put the tangible costs of the Black Saturday fires at A$3.1 billion in 2015 dollars and the intangible costs at more than that again: A$3.9 billion, producing a total of A$7 billion, which would be A$7.6 billion in today’s dollars.

Black Saturday is a staring point

2009 Victoria Black Saturday bushfires.
ANDREW BROWNBILL/AAP

This season’s megafires are, so far, less costly than the 2009 Victorian fires in terms of human life, roughly on par in terms of lost homes, and less costly for other structures.

But given that considerably more land has been burnt we can expect other costs to eclipse those of Black Saturday.

As of today, 25 times as much land has been burnt.

Scaling up the royal commission’s Black Saturday figures for the size of the fire and scaling them down for the fewer deaths and other things that shouldn’t be scaled up produces an estimate of tangible costs of A$103 billion in today’s dollars.

The Deloitte Access Economics ratio of intangible to tangible costs suggests a total for both types of costs of A$230 billion.

As it happens the tangible costs estimate is close to an estimate of A$100 billion prepared using methods by University of Queensland economist John Quiggin.



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The reality won’t be clear for some time.

There are several weeks of fire season remaining, and we are yet to reach the usual peak season for Victoria, which is in the first week of February.

What we can safely say, with weeks left to go, is that these fires are by far Australia’s costliest natural disaster.The Conversation

Paul Read, Climate Criminologist & Senior Instructor/Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, Monash University and Richard Denniss, Adjunct Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We need more than a website to stop Australians paying exorbitant out-of-pocket health costs

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For some people, high out-of-pocket costs makes it difficult to see a doctor or fill a prescription.
From shutterstock.com

Anthony Scott, University of Melbourne and Peter Brooks, University of Melbourne

In an attempt to crack down on specialists charging exorbitant fees, the Morrison government has pledged to create a website listing individual specialists’ fees.

The website is voluntary and doctors will post their own fees. Patients will be able to compare doctors whose fees are listed, and the searchable website will have a special focus on the high fees in gynaecology, obstetrics and cancer services.

The announcement, made on Saturday, follows the release of a ministerial advisory committee’s report on out-of-pocket costs, which the government has had since November.

But while the website is a good first step, transparency alone is unlikely to be enough to ensure Australians aren’t forgoing care because of high costs.



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What’s the problem?

A central problem is the lack of transparency around out-of-pocket costs. Patients are typically unaware of the full out-of-pocket costs they might incur at the time of referral and admission.

The Consumers Health Forum’s recent report found Australian consumers face higher than average out-of-pocket costs compared to most countries. This translates into people often avoiding visiting a GP or specialist and failing to fill scripts due to cost.

A report from the Grattan Institute using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows many people already miss out on health care because of cost: 5% skip GP visits, 8% don’t go to a specialist, 8% don’t fill their prescription and 18% don’t go to the dentist. This will happen more if fees go up.

Those who avoid care because of cost are often those most in need, leading to concerns about equity of access. Delaying or foregoing care means when people do visit their doctor, their condition may be much worse than if they had presented earlier. This can affect long-term health outcomes and lead to higher costs over time.



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“Value” is also about providing information on the various options for care, including the evidence base of the treatments offered, waiting times for various providers, and how the quality of care might vary between the options.

Consumers, with the help of GPs where necessary, should be able to assess these trade-offs to arrive at a decision that works best for them.

But patients know little about the quality of care provided when they are offered treatment or even whether they will really get better as a result.

Significant numbers of procedures and treatments performed on patients in Australia are considered “low value care” – when treatments have little effect on health outcomes, and may even cause harm. Recent estimates for New South Wales public hospitals suggest that between 11% and 20% of treatments involve low-value care.

These issues are being tackled through the Choosing Wisely campaign which is increasing awareness of tests and treatments that are of low value and may cause harm.

The Medicare Benefits Schedule Review Taskforce is also reviewing how these procedures are funded through Medicare.

This website will make specialist fees publicly available to consumers – but only if the specialists choose to list their fees.
From shutterstock.com

Your right to know the costs of care

What are your rights as a patient in relation to the costs of medical treatment?
At present, it seems consumers have very few.

There are no consistent enforceable guidelines on health-care providers to provide information on costs. Voluntary codes of practice are in place to encourage fee transparency but cannot be enforced.

The Commonwealth Ombudsman’s website provides guidelines on informed financial consent in health care. Unfortunately these place the onus to gather the relevant information on the costs of care on consumers:

You should ask your doctor, your health fund, and your hospital about any extra money you may have to pay out of your own pocket, commonly known as a “gap” payment.

Health professionals should be required to provide information that will assist consumers make informed decisions.

Why we need more than a website

Gathering information on specialists’ fees and making sense of it is an enormous burden to place on vulnerable patients. This is especially the case for the elderly and those with little education who are reluctant to appear to question their trusted doctor.

We don’t know how effective a website of usually charged fees will be and who will use it. It’s possible it will advantage the rich by increasing their access to information, while not increasing access for poorer consumers.

Published fees may also be used by other doctors to set fees, and could potentially increase fees, if they see their prices are lower than others.

The onus should be on clinicians, and the system, to give patients easily accessible and digestible information as part of the service they provide.



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If health professionals cannot provide and interpret these costs to patients, we need to consider other trained workers – health “cost navigators” – who could advise patients as to how to decide on the best treatment for the best price.

The issues of out-of-pocket expenses are serious. They threaten the sustainability of our health system and adversely influence health. We need to ensure patients don’t face prohibitive costs that discourage them from treatment or force them into debilitating financial straits.The Conversation

Anthony Scott, Professor, University of Melbourne and Peter Brooks, Professor, Centre for Health Policy, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Huawei or the highway? The rising costs of New Zealand’s relationship with China

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File 20190219 129545 fuc4q0.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern meeting with the Premier of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China Li Keqiang during last year’s ASEAN summit.
AAP Image/Mick Tsikas, CC BY-ND

David Belgrave, Massey University

Until recently, New Zealand’s relationship with China has been easy and at little cost to Wellington. But those days are probably over. New Zealand’s decision to block Huawei from its 5G cellular networks due to security concerns is the first in what could be many hard choices New Zealand will need to make that challenge Wellington’s relationship with Beijing.

For over a decade New Zealand has reaped the benefits of a free-trade agreement with China and seen a boom of Chinese tourists. China is New Zealand’s largest export destination and, apart from concerns about the influence of Chinese capital on the housing market, there have been few negatives for New Zealand.

Long-held fears that New Zealand would eventually have to “choose” between Chinese economic opportunities and American military security had not eventuated.



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But now New Zealand business people in China have warned of souring relations and the tourism industry is worried about a downturn due to backlash following the Huawei controversy.

China’s growing might

During Labour’s government under Helen Clark (1999-2008) and under the National government with John Key as prime minister (2008-2016), New Zealand could be all things to all people, building closer relationships with China while finally calming the last of the lingering American resentment over New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policies. But now, there are difficult decisions to be made.

As China becomes more assertive on the world stage, it is becoming increasingly difficult for New Zealand to keep up this balancing act. Two forces are pushing a more demanding line from Beijing. One is China’s move to assert more control over waters well off its coast.

For decades, Beijing was happy to let the US Navy maintain order over the Western Pacific to facilitate global trade with China. As China’s own economic and military abilities have grown, it has begun to show that it is willing to protect what it sees as its own patch. Its mammoth island building in the South China Sea is a testament to its new-found desire to push its territorial claims after decades of patience.



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China’s stronger foreign policy is testing what is known as the “rules-based order”, essentially a set of agreed rules that facilitate diplomacy, global trade, and resolve disputes between nations. This is very concerning for New Zealand as it needs stable rules to allow it to trade with the world. New Zealand doesn’t have the size to bully other countries into getting what we want.

Trump-style posturing would get New Zealand nowhere. A more powerful China doesn’t need to threaten the rules-based system, but the transition could create uncertainty for business and higher risks of trade disruption. It is vital for New Zealand that an Asia-Pacific dominated by China is as orderly as one dominated by the US.

Tech made in China

The other force challenging the relationship is China’s emergence as a source of technology rather than simply a manufacturer of other countries’ goods. Many Chinese firms like Huawei are now direct competitors of Western tech companies. Huawei’s success makes it strategically important for Beijing and a point of pride for ordinary Chinese citizens.

Yet, unlike Western countries, China actively monitors its population through a wide variety of mass surveillance technology. Therefore, there is a trust problem when Chinese firms claim that their devices are secure from Beijing’s spies. New Zealand’s decision to effectively ban Huawei components from 5G cellular networks could be the first in many decisions needed to ensure national security.

Chinese designed goods are becoming more common and issues around privacy and national security will get stronger as everyday household goods become connected to the internet. Restrictions on Chinese-made goods will further frustrate Beijing and will invite greater retaliation to New Zealand exporters and tourist operators.

In more extreme cases, foreign nationals have been detained in China in response to overseas arrests of prominent Chinese individuals. As many as 13 Canadians were detained recently in China following the arrest of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the request of US prosecutors.



Read more:
Australian-Chinese author’s detention raises important questions about China’s motivations

Declaring the limits of the relationship

If New Zealand is to maintain a healthy relationship with China, it needs to be clear on what it is not willing to accept. It is easy to say individual privacy, national security and freedom of speech are vital interests of New Zealand, but Wellington needs to be clear to its citizens and to China what exactly those concepts mean in detail. All relationships require compromise, so Wellington needs to be direct about what it won’t compromise.

New Zealand spent decades during the Cold War debating how much public criticism of the US the government could allow itself before it risked its alliance with the Americans. New Zealanders wondered if they really had an independent foreign policy if they couldn’t stand up to their friends. Eventually nationalist sentiment spilled over in the form of the anti-nuclear policy.

New Zealand is now heading for the same debate as Kiwis worry about how much they can push back against Beijing’s interests before it starts to hurt the economy. Now that the relationship with China is beginning to have significant costs as well as benefits, it’s probably time New Zealanders figured out how much they are prepared to pay for an easy trading relationship with China.The Conversation

David Belgrave, Lecturer in Politics and Citizenship, Massey University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Malaysian Christians Seek to End Restrictions on Malay Bibles

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Federation calls for removal of ‘every impediment’ to importing and printing Scripture.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, April 6 (CDN) — Christian importers of Bibles that Malaysian officials detained are balking at conditions the government has imposed for their release, such as defacement of the sacred books with official stamps.

The Home Ministry stamped the words, “This Good News [Malay] Bible is for use by Christians only” on 5,100 Bibles without consulting the importer, the Bible Society of Malaysia (BSM), which initially refused to collect them as it had neither accepted nor agreed to the conditions. The Home Ministry applied the stamp a day after the government on March 15 issued a release order for the Bibles, which had been detained in Port Klang, 38 kilometers (24 miles) southwest of Kuala Lumpur, since March 20, 2009.

Another 30,000 Bibles detained since Jan. 12 on the island of Borneo remain in port after the Sarawak state Home Ministry told the local chapter of Gideons International that it could collect them if the organization would put the stamp on them. Gideons has thus far declined to do so, and a spokesman said yesterday (April 5) that officials had already defaced the books with the stamp.

The government issued letters of release to both organizations on March 15 under the condition that the books bear the stamp, “Reminder: This Good News [Malay] Bible is for use by Christians only. By order of the Home Minister,” and that the covers must carry a serial number, the official seal of the department and a date.

The Home Ministry’s stamping of the BSM Bibles without the organization’s permission came under fire from the Christian community. In a statement issued on March 17, Bishop Ng Moon Hing, chairman of the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM), described the Home Ministry’s action as desecration.

“[The] new conditions imposed on the release of the impounded Bibles … is wholly unacceptable to us,” he added.

Ng described the conditions imposed by the Home Ministry as tantamount to treating the Malay Bible as a “restricted item” and subjecting the word of God to the control of man. In response, Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein has said the act of stamping and serialization was standard protocol.

 

Government Overtures

In the weeks following the March 15 release order, the government made several attempts to try to appease the Christian community through Idris Jala, a Christian from Sarawak state and a minister in the Prime Minister’s Department.

Idris issued the government’s first statement on March 22, explaining that officials had reduced earlier conditions imposed by the Home Ministry to require only the words, “For Christianity” to be stamped on the covers of the Bible in font type Arial, size 16, in bold.

Idris informed BSM that the Bibles could be collected in their present state or arrangements could be made to have stickers with the words “For Christianity” pasted over the imprint of the stamps made by the Home Ministry officials. In the event that this was not acceptable, the minister pointed out that BSM had the option of having the whole consignment replaced, since the government had received an offer from Christian donors who were prepared to bear the full cost of purchasing new Bibles.

In response, the CFM issued a statement on March 30 saying, “The offer made does address the substantive issues,” and called on the government “to remove every impediment, whether legal or administrative, to the importation, publication, distribution and use of the [Malay Bible] and indeed to protect and defend our right to use the [Malay Bible].”

Bishop Ng, however, left it to the two importers to decide whether to collect the Bibles based on their specific circumstances.

On March 31, BSM collected the mishandled Bibles “to prevent the possibility of further acts of desecration or disrespect.” In a press statement, BSM officials explained that the copies cannot be sold but “will be respectfully preserved as museum pieces and as a heritage for the Christian Church in Malaysia.” The organization also made it clear that it will only accept compensation from the Home Ministry and not from “Christian donors,” a term it viewed suspiciously.

On Saturday (April 2), Idris issued a 10-point statement to try to resolve the impasse. Significantly, this latest overture by the government included the lifting of present restrictions to allow for the local printing and importation of Malay and other indigenous-language Bibles into the country.

In Sarawak and Sabah, there would be no conditions attached to Bibles printed locally or imported. There also would be no prohibitions and restrictions on residents of these two states carrying such Bibles to other states. A significant 64 percent of Malaysian Christians are indigenous people from Sabah and Sarawak states who use the Malay language in their daily life, and having the Bible in the Malay language is considered critical to the practice of their Christian faith.

In the case of West Malaysia, however, in view of its larger Muslim population, the government imposed the condition that the Bibles must have the words “Christian publication” and the sign of the cross printed on the front covers.

 

Christian Response

Most Christians responded to this latest overture with caution. Many remained skeptical, seeing it as a politically motivated move in view of Sarawak state elections on April 16. Nearly half of Sarawak’s population is Christian.

Bolly Lapok, an Anglican priest, told the online news agency Malaysian Insider, “It’s an assurance, but we have been given such assurances before.” BSM General-Secretary the Rev. Simon Wong reportedly expressed the same sentiments, saying the Home Ministry already has a record of breaking its word.

The Rev. Thomas Phillips of the Mar Thoma Church, who is also president of the Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Taoism, questioned the timing of the proposal: “Why, after all these years?”

The youth wing of the Council of Churches rejected the proposal outright, expressing fears that the government was trying to “buy them over” for the Sarawak election, and that it would go back on its word after that.

Bishop Paul Tan, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Malaysia, called the proposal an “insidious tactic of ‘divide and rule,’” referring to its different requirements imposed on Malaysians separated by the South China Sea. Dr. Ng Kam Weng, research director at Kairos Research Centre, stressed that the proposal “does not address the root problem of the present crisis, i.e. the Allah issue.”

 

Muslim Reactions

The 10-point proposal has also drawn the ire of Muslim groups, who view it as the government caving in to Christian pressure.

Perak Mufti Harussani Zakaria expressed his disappointment, reportedly saying, “If the government does this, just cancel the law,” in reference to various state Islamic enactments that prohibit the use of the word “Allah” and other so-called Islamic terms that led to the banning of the Malay Bible. Malay Bibles have not been allowed to be printed locally for fear that they will utilize “prohibited” words.

The Muslim Organizations in Defense of Islam (Pembela) threatened to challenge the 10-point proposal in court if it was not reviewed in consultation with Muslim representatives.

On the same day Pembela issued its statement, the government seemed to have retracted its earlier commitment. The Home Minister reportedly said talks on the Malay Bibles were still ongoing despite Idris’ 10-point proposal, which purportedly represents the Cabinet’s decision.

As a result, James Redas Noel of the Gideons said yesterday (April 5) that he was confused by the mixed messages coming from the government and will not make a decision on whether to collect the Bibles until he had consulted church leaders on the matter, according to the Malaysian Insider.

The issue with the Malay Bibles is closely tied to the dispute over use of the word “Allah” by non-Muslims.

In a controversial court ruling on Dec. 31, 2009, judge Lau Bee Lan had allowed The Herald, a Catholic newspaper, to use “Allah” for God in the Malay section of its multilingual newspaper.

The Home Ministry filed an appeal against this decision on Jan. 4, 2010. To date, there is no indication as to when the case will be heard.

Christians make up more than 9 percent of Malaysia’s nearly 28 million people, according to Operation World.

Report from Compass Direct News
http://www.compassdirect.org

Sterilize the unfit says British professor David Marsland

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The mentally and morally “unfit” should be sterilized, Professor David Marsland, a sociologist and health expert, said this weekend. The professor made the remarks on the BBC radio program Iconoclasts, which advertises itself as the place to “think the unthinkable,” reports Hilary White, LifeSiteNews.com.

Pro-life advocates and disability rights campaigners have responded by saying that Marsland’s proposed system is a straightforward throwback to the coercive eugenics practices of the past.

Marsland, Emeritus Scholar of Sociology and Health Sciences at Brunel University, London and Professorial Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Buckingham, told the BBC that “permanent sterilization” is the solution to child neglect and abuse.

“Children are abused or grossly neglected by a very small minority of inadequate parents.” Such parents, he said, are not distinguished by “disadvantage, poverty or exploitation,” he said, but by “a number or moral and mental inadequacies” caused by “serious mental defect,” “chronic mental illness” and drug addiction and alcoholism.

“Short of lifetime incarceration,” he said, the solution is “permanent sterilization.”

The debate, chaired by the BBC’s Edward Stourton, was held in response to a request by a local council in the West Midlands that wanted to force contraception on a 29-year-old woman who members of the council judged was mentally incapable of making decisions about childrearing. The judge in the case refused to permit it, saying such a decision would “raise profound questions about state intervention in private and family life.”

Children whose parents are alcoholics or drug addicts can be rescued from abusive situations, but, Marlsand said, “Why should we allow further predictable victims to be harmed by the same perpetrators? Here too, sterilization provides a dependable answer.”

He dismissed possible objections based on human rights, saying that “Rights is a grossly overused and fundamentally incoherent concept … Neither philosophers nor political activists can agree on the nature of human rights or on their extent.”

Complaints that court-ordered sterilization could be abused “should be ignored,” he added. “This argument would inhibit any and every action of social defense.”

Brian Clowes, director of research for Human Life International (HLI), told LifeSiteNews (LSN) that in his view Professor Marsland is just one more in a long line of eugenicists who want to solve human problems by erasing the humans who have them. Clowes compared Marsland to Lothrop Stoddard and Margaret Sanger, prominent early 20th century eugenicists who promoted contraception and sterilization for blacks, Catholics, the poor and the mentally ill and disabled whom they classified as “human weeds.”

He told LSN, “It does not seem to occur to Marsland that most severe child abuse is committed by people he might consider ‘perfectly normal,’ people like his elitist friends and neighbors.”

“Most frightening of all,” he said, “is Marsland’s dismissal of human rights. In essence, he is saying people have no rights whatsoever, because there is no universal agreement on what those rights actually are.”

The program, which aired on Saturday, August 28, also featured a professor of ethics and philosophy at Oxford, who expressed concern about Marland’s proposal, saying, “There are serious problems about who makes the decisions, and abuses.” Janet Radcliffe Richards, a Professor of Practical Philosophy at Oxford, continued, “I would dispute the argument that this is for the sake of the children.

“It’s curious case that if the child doesn’t exist, it can’t be harmed. And to say that it would be better for the child not to exist, you need to be able to say that its life is worse than nothing. Now I think that’s a difficult thing to do because most people are glad they exist.”

But Radcliffe Richards refused to reject categorically the notion of forced sterilization as a solution to social problems. She said there “is a really serious argument” about the “cost to the rest of society of allowing people to have children when you can pretty strongly predict that those children are going to be a nuisance.”

Marsland’s remarks also drew a response from Alison Davis, head of the campaign group No Less Human, who rejected his entire argument, saying that compulsory sterilization would itself be “an abuse of some of the most vulnerable people in society.”

Marsland’s closing comments, Davis said, were indicative of his anti-human perspective. In those remarks he said that nothing in the discussion had changed his mind, and that the reduction of births would be desirable since “there are too many people anyway.”

Davis commented, “As a disabled person myself I find his comments offensive, degrading and eugenic in content.

“The BBC is supposed to stand against prejudicial comments against any minority group. As such it is against it’s own code of conduct, as well as a breach of basic human decency, to broadcast such inflammatory and ableist views.”

Report from the Christian Telegraph

Time to Reassess Afghan Policy

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There is no doubt in my mind as to the complete separation of the state and the Christian church. The United States government, the Australian government and all other governments involved in the war against terror are not acting as Christian Crusaders, but as responsible modern nations seeking to bring freedom from terror to oppressed peoples around the world. Having said that, in light of such articles as that previous in this Blog, perhaps it is time that the allies in the war on terror, reassess their policy on Afghanistan (and the same would be true of Iraq and Pakistan). Clearly, should the allies withdraw from the country, it seems relatively clear that it would only be a matter of time before the country moves towards an oppressive Islamic regime.

Why should western nations promoting human rights, democracy, freedom from terror and other worthwhile goals, continue to pour resources (human, financial, etc) into a country where overall, its citizens continue to espouse the rhetoric and policies of the enemy?  Already it seems clear that the principles of our freedoms are despised by the vast majority of the Afghan nation. Without a long-term commitment to police the country and keep the policies being promoted by the western allies, there is no point continuing the current mission in Afghanistan (or Iraq, Pakistan, etc). Do we have the capacity and the stomach to pay the price for such a continuing mission, when the undoubted price in human lives, finances and other resources, will continue to mount and become such that our own people will be unable to bear the dearness of the cost?