 to welcome you here today on behalf of the school and specifically the Department of Political and Social Change, one of the four units of our school, and the sponsor of this forum today. I know that we have a really star-studded cast of commentators here today on an extremely important topic. It's a fabulous collection of expertise and I dare say it's difficult to find such a collection anywhere else in the world. So it's fabulous to be able to turn this over at this point to Tyrell Haberkorn from the Department of Political and Social Change who will be moderating. And I would just say she will be doing the introductions, but I'll just say that one of the notable things about this forum is that it draws on expertise from right across the College of Asian Pacific, from Regulatory Institutions Network, from the Crawford School, from the School of Culture, History, and Language, as well as from our School of International Political and Strategic Studies. So welcome to all and pass it on to Tyrell. So welcome to Thailand on the verge. Thank you very much for coming and for joining the conversation. As many of you have closely followed, the contention which began in Thailand leading up to the 19th September 2006 coup has grown into a deep crisis with redshirt protesters and the Thai army facing off in the streets. On Saturday the 10th of April there were clashes which left 25 people dead and over 840 injured. With soldiers lining Silom in central Bangkok today, the ultimate outcome of the current crisis remains highly uncertain. What is clear is that Thailand is on the verge of transit possibly, of transition change of a future that may be more violent, more peaceful, more democratic, more authoritarian. And it's quite unclear. While it's impossible to predict the future in such a volatile environment, the panelists today seek to explore the social, historical, economic, cultural, and institutional dimensions surrounding this crisis. The speakers today, as Professor Hutchcroft noted, are drawn from across the four schools comprising the College of Asia and the Pacific. So without any further delay, I would like to introduce Mr. Nicholas Farrelly, who is a research fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security in the School of Regulation, Justice and Diplomacy. Good afternoon. It's wonderful to see you all here and I hope that my brief presentation can help to clarify at least some of the elements that I see as being relevant in Thailand's current crisis. Thailand is on the verge, but I'd like to suggest that almost nothing is inevitable. I've got two observations and the inevitability, the first observation. This is a yellow shirt rally in Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand, just before the coup of the 19th of September 2006. Yellow shirts, Thai flags, a happy occasion. Cheering, waving, laughing, joyous people. The first indication you might get that this isn't the kind of yellow shirt rally that we've come to know is the text on this sign here. It says. No matter how many times we vote, we will vote for the Thai Rakh Thai party, the party of former Prime Minister, Taksin Shinawat. This is a yellow shirt rally in support of the former Prime Minister. Back, of course, when he was Prime Minister. Back, of course, when yellow shirts meant something ever so slightly different. Taksin Shinawat in those days wore a yellow shirt. So my observation is that whether it's yellow, red, blue, white, multicolored, it is very likely that the supposedly inevitable factions that we see will implode, reconstitute and regenerate. Even in the last couple of years, there have been some really significant changes and we forget at our collective peril how quickly things can shift. We also forget, of course, that less than five years ago nobody would have anticipated that in 2010 there would be open street fighting in Bangkok where two opposing armies were faced off and firing at each other. My second observation. This is Google Trends information on search volume. The blue line is for Nailuang, the red line is for Taksin and the yellow line is for Apisit. The red line goes all the way back to 2004. The blue line starts right at the end of 2004 with a little peek in December. The yellow line doesn't kick off until towards the end of 2007 when Apisit came more formally onto the scene. You'll note that the red line has some ups and downs. People search for Taksin more often at some times than others. The yellow line, of course, stays quite low. But that blue line, look at that peak. June, July 2006. Everybody in Thailand is looking for information on the king. So to summarize, Google searches for the king tend to peak annually in December. We all understand that. That's when the king's birthday is. Google searches for Taksin get more attention at certain times and right now the Taksin numbers are going up, going up quickly. But Apisit stays low. It stayed very low even while he's been Prime Minister, even while his government has teetered. Of course, the most significant peak when you compare these search terms, when you really compare the interest among Thai citizens in their politics and in the people who run it, you see that there was a peak. In June, July 2006, around the time when Thais were celebrating the 60th anniversary of the coronation of the king. So I ask, when will the king peak again? And this is the inevitability. And you probably all assume that the inevitability that I want to highlight is the fact that at some stage the king of Thailand will die. No, that's not the inevitability. The inevitability, of course, for all humans is that our lifetimes are limited. But there's another inevitability of, I'd suggest, far more immediate relevance. And this is one that gets far, far, far less attention. And this is the inevitability that millions of Thais from all walks of life will use the internet in an effort to get better informed about what's happening in their country. This is inevitable. People may try and restrict that information. People may try and censor the internet in Thailand. But why? Why will people seek out answers, seek out new questions? The reason, of course, is the same reason that brings all of you here today. It's a reason that I could clarify in the following terms. There is a hunger. I'd suggest a deep-seated hunger in Thailand for uncensored analysis, better information, critical innuendo, radical perspectives and challenging arguments. And at the end of the current king's reign, there is, of course, also what might be described as a nascent digital insurgency. But, and here I'd suggest this is far more important, there is a wide-ranging campaign of self and societal education which is going on in Thailand as I speak. Judging the speed and the extent of that education is difficult. It's impossible to quantify. But in the internet age, political education is unpredictable and impossible to fully restrict. It is the result, and here I think we should bear in mind the democratic character of this, of personal initiative and curiosity. And just to give you a sense of how this plays out, this is a screen grab from the Prachatai Web Board, a website which is regularly blocked or restricted in Thailand, which has a number of people all coming online, all asking for information. They all want to know what's going on. They all want to see the best reports. They all want to see, in this case, the report that the ABC's Eric Campbell recently put together which was broadcast on Australian TV. This is a big long list of people all putting up their hands and asking to be better informed. So my point is that the real inevitability here is that ties will become better informed. They will, of course, because the internet allows it to be so. But they will probably still choose to disagree on very many important points. And I'd suggest, finally, that that isn't in fact always a bad thing. Thank you very much. I'm going to do a little bit of a show and tell. I'm not a student of Thai politics directly. My interests are a modern Thai cultural history, but I just happened to be doing fieldwork research in Thailand in the first week of April, which coincided with the shutdown of the main shopping district of Bangkok at Rappersong intersection. I went to Bangkok to actually do research on commodification of religion in Thailand. But that just happened. It was very, it was impossible to avoid the issues and the physical presence of the red shirts. And on the evening of Wednesday, the 7th of April, I went to the demonstration at Rappersong intersection and as a cultural historian bought lots of the little realia things that were for sale. What I just want to talk about briefly, and it's just very off the cuff, is the political slogan earring or the political slogans, the languaging of the red shirt protests as they appear on the items that they physically wear. People wear little headbands and bandanas. And there were little street stalls in the Rappersong intersection, selling the headbands for 10 baht and the bandanas for 20 baht. I had no trouble entering the area. It's a major intersection. There were barricades at each of the four intersections, about 500 meters from the main intersection itself. The barricades were staffed or manned actually by guards of the red shirts. I only went in the evening. I didn't go during the day. It was just too hot at 40 degrees. I went about 7pm and left about 9.30pm. I had no problem on that. This was three days before the Saturday evening shooting, which was at the Democracy Monument, which is some two or three kilometre from this site. But what I was noticing was that each of the barricades that anybody entering was basically searched. And they also searched every vehicle and motorbike that was entering, presumably for guns or whatever. So the red shirts were quite well organised in terms of the barricades, in terms of the staffing, the guards. There were mobile or toilet facilities. There were people selling little noodles, etc. Both pickup trucks loaded with food and little packages was arriving quite regularly to hand out to people. People were sleeping out on mats all over the place. In general, it was sort of a semi-festival atmosphere. There was a major stage where the major red shirt leaders were speaking at that particular time with big screens projecting things. Travelling around the city on other days, I happened to be at Sapan Kwa, which is in the north of the city. Actually, there was a philatelic museum. I was visiting up there as part of my research. It just happened to be the time that the red shirts were moving on mass from the downtown area to the office of Tycom, which is the broadcast site for their TV station, which had been shut down by the government at this point. And it's in the north, in Bhattontani, north of the old airport of Don Muang. But I just happened to be on this major street as the red shirts were moving on mass in pickup trucks, taxis, whatever they could carry people about midday on that Friday, the 9th of April. And it was an amazing festival atmosphere. What was very noticeable was the people along the streets, mainly the small stall holders. And Sapan Kwa is basically a lower, it's a working class residential working area. Many of the stall holders were basically out on the streets in red shirts, cheering as the red shirt demonstrations passed. And it was quite a festival atmosphere. Those of you who've been following the news later that afternoon on the Friday, there was some confrontation with the army, I believe, at the Tycom site. The army relented. The red shirts, one at that particular moment, and their TV station was temporarily reopened. The Prime Minister intervened and re-closed that it's that TV station at 10pm that night. Anyway, just quickly in the brief time I've got, I find the language of the red shirts particularly interesting as an historian, because it has a whole range of historical resonances. But just the first point, this particular bandana basically translates as Yut Song Ratatan, stop double standards. One of the key demands of the red shirts is a critique of what they call double standards. That in a sense they believe that the yellow shirts get better treatment than they do by the Thai state. For example, the yellow, no one's been charged with the close down of Bangkok airport over a year ago by the yellow shirt demonstrations. Yellow shirt leaders seem to be, and this is talking to people at the demonstration at Rat Brapa Song, the yellow shirt leaders seem to be just as corrupt a tuxin and they admit the tuxin was taking money, but the yellow shirts get away with it whereas tuxin is in charge with it. Red shirt radio and TV stations are blocked, but yellow shirt ASTV broadcasts with impunity. And I just happened to be having dinner one night in Bangkok that week. It happened to be a yellow shirt owned restaurant very clearly marked on the door as one entered. The ASTV was being shown very loudly in a huge Samsung screen on the wall of the station. It was about 8pm at night and it was lambasting tuxin non-stop on this station with periodic cartoons of tuxin dressed as a mock king, dressed as a mock king with a mock crown. Basically the idea is that tuxin is trying to become king and a lot of the yellow shirts are attempting to in a sense lambast tuxin as a would-be head. I noticed reading the websites late last night on the Bangkok Post that stickers have been appearing yesterday on phone booths in Silom Road claiming to be red shirt stickers, claiming that tuxin will be the head of a new Thai state. The word for head I noticed in Thai was pramuk, which is a word which has traditionally been used to refer to the king as head of state. So it's interesting whether this was actually a red shirt sticker, the red shirt leaders claimed it was not, whether it was the yellow shirts trying to in a sense get back at the red shirts by trying to say that tuxin is trying to overtake the role of the pramuk, the king who knows, it's very hard to work out. But just one of the other interesting what we're talking about double standards critiques, this headband says mung tamarai kothuk, gu tamarai kopit. Basically it's saying whatever you yellow shirts do is correct or you get away with it, whatever I do red shirts is wrong. So in a sense it's again a critique of a sense of double standards that the state is seen to be aligning itself with one side of the factions. Just as a cultural historian it was interesting to note that there was a major critique of giving away of 300 million baht of money to support New Thai film quite recently. Half of that budget of 300 million baht went to one movie, part three I think of the nut the king naraisu and trilogy by a Muratua Wong Chakri, I forgot the name of the director, but somebody with a royal title director got half of the 300 million baht money for one movie on a royal title and there was major complaints in the press by independent Thai cinematographers who got piddling money to do other sorts of items. I've only got a couple of minutes left but just to give you an idea of of the other sorts of languages, I suppose just quickly to cut to the to the final point and I there's many many other slogans. As somebody who follows kai cultural history what I noticed about the imaging of this demonstration is the absence of images of the monarchy, that every major Thai demonstration basically since 1973 or the early 70s when there's been a quite a series of number of demonstrations against dictatorship in the 70s, in the 1990s early 1990s again against military intervention, every major what we might call popular or student led uprising has typically used images of the king and queen at the head of demonstrations as a sign of allegiance to the Thai state. What's interesting about the current red shirt demonstration is the absence of any images of the monarchy. In its place we find you might have seen these little things on TV. These are the little things that people rattle whenever whenever somebody's on the stage and they say something that people like this is a sense of approval. It's a little heart. It says in Thai, I love democracy. What's particularly interesting in the context of the yellow shirt demonstration that Nick showed us back from 2006. The slogan of recent years in Thailand as the king ages is that we love the king. In that slogan has been on stickers, it's been on t-shirts, it's been a sense of a popular slogan around the country often in a heart shape like this, but in yellow with I love the king. What's interesting about this is that not so much a direct critique of the monarchy, one doesn't hear that because Les Magistral laws does not allow that in Thailand, but rather one could say that the current demonstration is marked by an elision of references to the monarchy and a replacement of references to the monarchy with the word democracy. So that's quite, so that while an earlier slogan of we love the king in yellow, the red shirt demonstration is as we love democracy in red, which uses the same grammatical text but replaces the word for monarchy with the word for democracy. So just one final throwaway comment is that the languages is very much back with in terms of a feudal language. We find that the red shirts are identifying themselves with a very old word for feudal surf, prai. They are calling them and they're talking about the uprising of the serfs, the uprising of the slaves. And there's a very interesting discourse of a popular uprising in terms of referring to feudal technology, feudal discourses, basically from the period of the absolute monarchy in a current period with a whole range of historical resonances with a very contemporary element. I have to leave it there. Thank you very much, Terrell. Mine follows on nicely from Craig's because I want to talk about why King Baduralongkorn will be good for Thai democracy. And I want to start this discussion in a village where I work in Northern Thailand where there's a carpenter who became a fan of the September 2006 coup. In the wake of the coup, numerous photos of the king were distributed in the village. And this carpenter became a fan of the coup, not because of any royalist sentiment, but from the windfall income he earned from making wooden frames for the royal portraits. Once they were framed, the pictures were hung in village living rooms, along with other images of the king and his family, fading photos of long deceased grandparents, posters of famous Buddhist monks, out-of-date calendars featuring Tuxin and other local politicians, images of Chulalongkorn, the Buddha and other deities, university degrees, and elaborate clocks mounted on posters of waterfalls and flower gardens. So these mini-gurries of power and auspiciousness I think are very revealing of a common political worldview in Thailand. This is a worldview in which power comes in many forms. The king has one source of power and sacred potency, but he doesn't necessarily occupy a preeminent position. The popular Thai cosmos is full of all sorts of power and influence, and Thais are adept at hedging their bets in maintaining a diverse network of relationships with potential sources of prosperity and protection. This is not a zero-sum game. Thailand's masses readily accept that two or more styles of leadership and charity can exist side by side. But some members of Thailand's elite have a much more rigid view about power, and they are much less adept in grasping the nuances of Thai culture. Whereas the villagers in Northern Thailand pursue human security through cultivating connections with power in many different forms, the official Thai position is that the king's symbolic potency lies at the centre of national security. This selective and elite narrative of security asserts that the king is the preeminent sight of virtuous and disinterested power, rather than accepting that he just represents one of many ways in which leadership in Thailand can be expressed. As the Thai Embassy in Canberra wrote in their recent protest to the Australian government about ABC's foreign correspondent report, to quote, we consider this an issue of national security because the royal family, the monarchy, in our constitution is above politics. In other words, the monarchy is not located in the crowded sphere of popular power, but floats above it, defined as sacred by constitutional fiat backed by draconian laws. Now, of course, it's not always been like that, as we've seen, and when Boom upon first came to the throne, there were figures in the government that welcomed his weakness and malleability. Hardline princes fumed about the impotence of a young, inexperienced, and in many respects, quite untie king. It was an inauspicious start to a long reign, but powerful military men and politicians found it useful to cultivate the royal charisma. The current assertions of Boom upon central role in national security are the product of a 60 year process of political manipulation. But attempts to maintain the position of the king at the symbolic apex of Thailand's power have become badly unstuck in recent years. When soldiers staging the 2006 coup tied royal yellow ribbons around the barrels of their guns, they were very publicly drawing the king back into a very messy political realm. Now, of course, their actions were no different to those of many other Thais who adorned themselves with all sorts of supernatural protection before undertaking hazardous enterprises, such as driving a car. But the soldiers' public performance of this aspect of Thai popular culture highlighted that far from being a neutral force for stability, the king was a source of quite specific power that could be called upon to support partial and pragmatic political objectives. This became all the more evident in the months and years that followed the coup, climaxing when the yellow shirts campaigned under the king's banner and with the queen's explicit support for the overthrow of the elected post-coup government. Nobody knows how the king himself felt about this squandering of his carefully cultivated symbolic capital, but it is clear that neither he nor his advisers did anything about it, seemingly willing to stake all on a high risk and zero sum campaign to destroy Tuxin's political influence. Now, for a robust monarchy, these might be short-term symbolic setbacks that could be addressed by a sustained public relations campaign, but this is no longer possible for the current king, the succession looms large. Thailand is now faced with the prospect of king Vajralongkorn. Now, he hasn't had a good press. In the Thai media, it seems to be a matter of the less said the better. The international press, which is widely translated and read in Thailand, has been less restrained. Issues came to a head recently with the economist writing about and the ABC actually broadcasting the notorious birthday party video in which the prince appears with his favourite poodle and his virtually naked wife. Now, I'm sure that some observers of Thailand are concerned about the extent to which some public discussion of the Thai monarchy has descended into what they see as childish irreverence, but I think there's something much more significant going on. Irreverence has a place in the contestation and evaluation of sacred power. Gossip about the royal family is ubiquitous in Thailand and it is part of a popular political culture that is fundamentally personalised and profane. There is a rich tradition of gossip, rumour and slander about the crown prince himself, complete with irreverent nicknames and unlikely tales of underworld connections. The birthday party video and other even more provocative images fell on fertile cultural ground. Internet discussion boards show little restraint in speculating about the crown prince. This cultural preoccupation with salaciousness is part of an ongoing cultural discussion about power and sacred authority. In a cosmos where there are numerous sources of power it's not necessary to place one particular source on a pedestal and stick with it through thick and thin. In the absence of open public debate about the role of the monarchy, rumour, gossip and irreverence become a central resource in popular evaluations of power. Now some of you may recall that there was a flurry of outrage when Tuxin spoke favourably about the crown prince's shining royal future in an interview last year. Now as I noted at the time on New Mandala, Tuxin was breaching one of Thailand's most delicate taboos. Everyone knows that it is culturally inappropriate and extremely insensitive to discuss the crown prince in favourable terms. Tuxin's comments highlighted anxiety that a symbolically weak king will open up spaces in Thai political life where alternative forms of political authority can be asserted. So it's for this reason that I think King Vajralongkorn will be good for Thai democracy. Given his very limited stock of symbolic power he will be incapable of occupying a dominant position at the centre of the Thai polity. If he was younger there may be potential for another long round of royal myth-making but there are real questions about his physical, intellectual or political capacity for that enterprise. This weakness is a national virtue. Under Vajralongkorn there is the prospect of a more culturally open orientation to power in Thailand. As the Thai Embassy in Canberra has rightly argued this is a matter of national security because the current vulnerability of the monarchy raises the prospect of a nation in which security is defined in more diverse and inclusive terms. The defence of the monarchy nevertheless as a pre-eminent national institution is going through its death throws in Thailand. I fear that these may be very violent death throws indeed but whatever happens the royal institution has been fundamentally changed not by red republicanism but by the royalists undermining their own carefully constructed imagery. With Vajralongkorn as king their chances of rebuilding it are very slim. Thank you. Thank you Andrew. I'd like to welcome our final speaker Dr Peter War who is the John Crawford Professor of Agricultural Economics in the Arndt Corden Division of Economics. I think that the crisis that we're all witnessing in Thailand at the moment is driven by the perception of economic and political injustice. I think the economic component of that is important and it provides the context in which the politics is being fought out. So I'm going to focus on the economics underlying the present situation in Thailand and I want to make three points. First there's been a long-term increase in economic inequality in Thailand and in the process of that rural unskilled and semi-skilled people have lost relative to everyone else emphasis on the word relatives. Second Taksin Shinawat ruled during a period of economic recovery 2001 to 2006 recovery from the Asian financial crisis of 97 98. It was a period of relative prosperity as it was elsewhere in Southeast Asia. We shouldn't necessarily look to Thai specific explanations for that period of prosperity. Whereas Apisit Vejajiva has ruled during a period in which Thailand has been buffeted by the global financial crisis really isn't over yet. So the economic circumstance of these two governments has been very different and it's very tempting for the populace to blame the economic outcomes on the governments. Final point is that the global financial crisis has had negative economic effects which have been focused in particular on rural families from the north and northeast who are the central support base for the red shirts. These people really have been hurt by the current global financial crisis. It's not really over yet but certainly we seem to be recovering. Okay the first of those three points long-term increase in inequality. Some of you may have been here last November when we had our Thailand update and at that update Professor Pasuk Pong Paichit gave a presentation on inequality in Thailand and she had many illus many facets of economic inequality that she could point to. I'm going to focus here on the fact that absolute poverty incidents has declined in Thailand over time. Can you read that? It's 1962 and the last year of my data on this diagram is 2007 takes a while for these data to be published. The central line there is poverty incidents at the national level. The top one is poverty incidents in rural areas. That means absolute poverty incidents. It's not about inequality it's about the absolute incomes of rural households. It's declined the top one rural poverty incidents. It's declined dramatically as has poverty incidents in urban areas. But at the same time that absolute poverty incidents has declined throughout the country and that includes the north northeast the south central everywhere. At the same time relative inequality has increased and that's what's depicted by this line it's the genie coefficient of inequality. The scale understates the degree to which that measured index has increased but in any case the measured increase understates the true increase in economic inequality that has actually occurred because I'm assured by my colleagues at the National Statistical Office that it's getting increasingly hard to get the rich Bangkok households to fill in the questionnaires that are needed to collect the data on the richest Thai households. These people live in guarded walls and closures. They live in forts. Here's another way of looking at economic inequality. It looks at the share of GDP that is attributable to unskilled labour. That line is what the share of GDP going to workers would be if all workers were paid the unskilled wage. The difference between that and GDP is the payment to skill and the payment to physical capital including land. And you see that the share of raw labour in GDP has declined dramatically from almost 40% in 1980 to just over 20% 2007. A really big redistribution of income. This is what economists call the functional distribution of income. Another way of looking at the same thing, this is a stylised depiction of what the Thai data say, is to look at it in rural versus non-rural terms. The top line is agriculture's share of GDP. In all growing economies that declines. The red line beneath it is agriculture's share of the bottom line is agriculture's share of GDP, the red line. The blue line is agriculture's share of total employment. It declines too, but more slowly. That means that agricultural incomes decline relative, the incomes of agricultural workers decline relative to everybody else over time. People are leaving agriculture and going to other sectors of the economy, but too slowly to maintain their relative economic position. Increasing inequality over time. The result is that people who depend for their incomes on raw labour see themselves losing out, relative to everybody else. They see themselves as not participating fully in the process of economic development. They see injustice. They don't know what causes it, but they experience a sense of injustice. Now my second point. Taksin's government ruled from 2001 to 2006. Here's what happened during that period. This is quarterly GDP. The red bars are the level of GDP and the blue dots are the growth rate. Let's focus on the growth rate. 2001, I can barely see this myself. That's that period there. Lucky Taksin Shinawat, he was running the country during that period. Thank you very much. Things were doing quite nicely. He was able to portray himself as the source of the prosperity that Thai people were experiencing. And Taksin Shinawat is a brilliant businessman. He's good at that. He's good at selling things. He sold himself politically as the source of the prosperity that people were experiencing. And now, dear old Apisit, his government has experienced that. Apisit came to power in December 2008. So there's his growth rate. The global financial crisis was not caused by Apisit's government. It impacted on Thailand, not through the financial system, as was the case of the Asian financial crisis 10 years before, not through the financial system, but through a contraction in export demand. It was Thailand's exports that suffered. That was the source of slowdown and economic growth. And I think that fact is very important for today's discussion that hasn't been brought out in the journalism that I've seen on the current crisis. Because who are the people who work in Thailand's export-oriented industries? These are labor-intensive manufacturing industries, the ones that have been hurt the most. Labor-intensive manufacturing, garments, textiles, automobiles, parts, electronics, that sort of stuff. Not so much agriculture. Who are the people who work in those industries and who've been laid off? Here's the magnitude of the contraction in exports. Just look at these numbers. These are quarterly year-on-year growth rates from December 2008 up until September 2009. Huge contraction in export demand. The people who work in those industries are the unskilled and semi-skilled people from the north and northeast. They're very people who are the support base for the red shirts. They experience that during this government they've lost out and they're right. They don't know why, but it's very easy to portray their deteriorating economic circumstance now as being caused by this government. So I think that's background to the current crisis that's very relevant for understanding why it's so severe right now. Okay, I'll stop there. Thank you.