Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Part 1. How we deliver health care is as important as the funding of health care. Medicare has degenerated into a payments system

    Part 1 of these articles will focus on the inefficient way we deliver health care, the many perverse incentives and the power of vested interests to resist reform in health care delivery.

    Part 2 will focus more particularly on examples of waste and inefficiency in health care delivery

    Part 1

    We have been told many times that our health system is unsustainable.

    To justify its case for an increase in the GST, the government was telling us that an increase was necessary because of rising costs in health and education. Now the GST is apparently off the table as Malcolm Turnbull retreats on yet another issue.

    Some premiers and commentators suggested that an increase in the Medicare levy was best because it was fairer than an increase in the GST. And we will hear a lot more from the premiers about health because the Abbott Government said it would cut $ 80 b from grants to the states for education and health over the next decade commencing in 2017

    But what is being avoided in all this confusion about budget repair and health costs is that there is no real discussion about the waste, inefficiency and low productivity in our health sector. We continue to focus on the funding of our health sector, but refuse to debate how the delivery of care – its cost and safety – can be improved. Medicare is overwhelmingly discussed in terms of funding only. It should also be about how those funds are spent to improve the delivery of health services. Basically Medicare funds an existing system of health care delivery. That needs to change.

    There are three main reasons for our failure to address the delivery problems in health care.

    The first is the power of the vested interests. These vested interests fight doggedly and selfishly to maintain their privileged position in health delivery. The principle vested interests in health are the AMA, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Medicines Australia and the private health insurance sector. In an earlier blog I said that the Health Ministers may be in office, but they are seldom in power. The vested interests –the providers- are really in power.

    A second reason for the failure to focus on delivery of health services is that politicians are afraid of the vested interests – doctors, pharmacists, pharmaceutical manufacturers and suppliers, and the private health insurance sector.

    The third reason is the failure of economists and other commentators to consider efficiency in the delivery of health services. These economists talk continuously about the need for appropriate incentives, but in the health sector many of the incentives are quite perverse – such as fee for service.

    As Ross Gittins put it in a recent SMH article, ‘Like so many of the interest groups, econocrats are obsessed with funding education and health rather than ensuring both systems are working in ways that have found a good trade-off between fairness and efficiency, and effectiveness.’ … See link to article.

    These economists that we hear and see so often in the media are mainly employed by the banks. They have little or no knowledge or interest in health economics. They tie themselves in knots over the need for IR reform and improvements in productivity in the workforce generally. But over the years I have never heard any of them address the appalling work practices and demarcations in our health sector which really go back to the 19th Century. Yet our health and welfare sectors employ 13% of our workforce, the largest sector by far. It is also the fastest growing. At its worst, our waterfront never had the appalling work practices and demarcations that still persist across our whole health sector. Clinicians justify our archaic work practices on the grounds of safety when it is really territory they are defending.

    Economists are yet to grasp that health consumers have little power over prices or quality of care. Power is with the providers-doctors, pharmacists, drug distributors and private hospitals. That is why a strong public insurer is essential to counter the power of providers. If there is not a strong public insurer we will follow the disastrous path of the US that has the most expensive and unfair health system in the world. But our economists who say they believe in markets will not recognise the failure of the health ‘market’.

    On 4 Corners several months back, Norman Swann suggested that waste in health expenditures could be as high as 30% of our total health expenditures. I think that estimate may be on the high side, but it is clear that there are excessive costs. – see link to article ‘Four Corners: No wonder we’re wasting money in health care – we got the incentives wrong’ by Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley and John Menadue.

    In a paper in July 2007 I estimated that there was at least $10 billion in possible savings and productivity improvements in health. That represented about 10% of our total health costs in that year. I think it would be nearer 20 % or $ 30 b per annum. I have spoken and written extensively on this matter.

    The lack of accountability in health

    Despite the rapid increases in costs and escalating demand in the healthcare industry, there is no accountability in any meaningful way for what the health industry delivers. Doctors are accountable for malpractice but not for their overall performance particularly in general practise. Accountability is patchy in many private hospitals. Taxpayers have a legitimate reason to ask – ‘Are we getting value for money particularly when we pay 80 % of doctor’s incomes.’ In a survey several years ago by the Health Council of Canada, 97% of over 1,800 senior respondents said that healthcare providers should be required by law to reach certain service benchmarks in such areas as patient outcomes , the use of preventive strategies like screening and waiting times. There is the same lack of accountability in Australia.

    The Council also asked the group ‘Do you believe healthcare in Canada will improve if the government spends more money on healthcare?’ 58% said ‘no’.

    Managing the demand for health services

    The demand for health services is increasing rapidly across all age groups and not just among the old. We are over-diagnosed and over-treated. In 1984-85, medical services per head were 7.1 per annum. In 2007-08 they were 13.1 per annum – about double. The trend continues.

    • We must accept that we cannot have all that we want in health and that governments, in consultation with the community, have to set priorities. Can we afford continuing existing levels of funding for IVF and end-of-life treatments at the expense of funding for mental health and indigenous health?
    • We need to rationalise our co-payments to make them efficient and equitable. We all should take more responsibility for the way we use health services, particularly as we are now much wealthier than we were 30 years ago when Medicare was introduced. A universal health scheme does not have to be free. But it must be fair and efficient. But co-payments are a dog’s breakfast! We pay about 18% of health costs out of our own pockets, but there is very little rhyme or reason in how this is done.
    • The best way to curb the long-term growth in health spending is through prevention in such areas as alcohol, smoking, junk food and obesity. Our sporting, alcohol and junk food sectors are in a joint enterprise to promote poor health. But the first action of the Abbott Government in its first budget was to abolish the Australian National Preventive Health Agency which was focussing on lifestyle risk factors.
    • We need to change the perverse incentives, such as fee-for-service, which is associated with bulk-billing. Clinicians are rewarded by the number of transactions rather than health outcomes. It promotes what is called ‘turn style medicine’ FFS is particularly inappropriate for chronic care, mental health and services with high fixed costs and low variable costs, such as imaging. The government should move away from fee for service and set budgets for general practitioners when they prescribe drugs, order pathology tests or imaging services. We need more doctors on salaries and capitation payments for caring for patients-not on a service by service basis. Hopefully, the Medicare review will grasp this nettle.
    • We need to tackle the wide variations in the incidence of clinical practice across the country, e.g. caesarean sections and cataracts. In the Australian Atlas of Health Care Variations the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care found ‘substantial variations in health care use in areas such as antibiotic prescribing, surgical, mental health and diagnostic services’ Medicare should be much more proactive in exposing and limiting very expensive and inexplicable variations in clinical practice. .It also needs to publish the enormous variations in doctors fees and particularly the fees of specialists. Better public data for greater transparency is essential.

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. The collapse of the Malaysian Arrangement has led to the depravity of Manus and Nauru.

    Having done its best in Opposition to wreck the Malaysian Arrangement in 2011, the Turnbull government is now seeking the help of Malaysia over detainees in Manus and Nauru. For political cynicism, this is hard to beat.

    In May 2011, the Australian and Malaysian governments announced an ‘in principle’ arrangement that up to 800 boat arrivals would be transferred from Australia to Malaysia for their asylum claims to be heard. In response Australia would be prepared to accept 4,000 refugees from Malaysia. The arrangement with Malaysia was signed on 25 July 2011. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees gave it qualified support. At that period, boat arrivals were running at four to six per month.

    The Gillard government introduced legislation to give effect to the arrangement with Malaysia which was necessary as a result of a High Court decision on the transfer of people. That legislation was bitterly opposed by the Coalition and others in an evenly divided House of Representatives. The legislation failed in September 2011 when boats were running at only four in the month.

    In this opposition to the Malaysian arrangement, the Coalition was actively supported by the Greens and some key NGOs.  The Greens and the NGOs wanted more than was on the table and finished with nothing – or something worse – Manus and Nauru. NGOs need to be politically astute and consider government’s responsibilities on security, economy and society. Or as Gough Whitlam put it pungently in another context. ‘Only the impotent are pure’.

    Failure to pass the legislation to implement the Malaysian Arrangement opened the door for people smugglers to really get to work. As a result of the failure of the Malaysian Arrangement, boat arrivals rose from about four or five a month to 48 in July 2013. Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison were not interested in stopping the boats. Their political objective was to stop Labor stopping the boats.

    Having helped defeat the legislation in the parliament, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison seized every opportunity to bash Malaysia’s human rights record and ‘canings’.

    But now we find that despite this history, the Turnbull government is now discussing with Malaysia ways to resolve the Manus/Nauru mess, a situation which no-one believes is sustainable. Consistent with what I have heard in the region, Laura Tingle in the AFR on February 4, 2016, said

    ‘Now it emerges that we are once again talking to Malaysia – the country with whom the Labor government was doing a deal … which was supposedly so abhorrent to the Coalition and the cause of human decency. ‘

    We have gone cap in hand to the Cambodian government and paid it over $50 million to resettle four refugees from Manus/Nauru. Our government has also been in discussions with the Philippines and Kyrgyzstan but without success. Now the government is talking again to Malaysia which Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison reviled in 2011.

    Tony Abbott helped to keep the door open for people smugglers by successfully but unscrupulously contributing to the defeat the Malaysian Arrangement.

    The Malaysian Arrangement was not ideal, but it would have significantly helped manage the flow of desperate people. It would also have been a building block for a regional framework which is necessary to manage displaced people in our region.

    I will be writing further about the importance of this regional framework.

    The result of the failure of the Malaysian Arrangement is the depravity of Manus and Nauru. Political cynicism has been exposed but at great cost to very vulnerable people.

    We have become a pariah in our treatment of asylum seekers.Even if we are stuck with Manus and Nauru for a while yet, there is no excuse for the Australian Government allowing detainees being treated so inhumanely.

    See link to earlier articles, Parts 1 and 2,  I wrote with Peter Hughes on this subject ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals. Part 1’. See also post ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals. Part 2’.

     

  • John Menadue. ‘We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem’.

    Treasurer Scott Morrison has been expounding the above philosophy of his for months. But he couldn’t be more wrong. Unfortunately the Secretary of Treasury has now followed up with nonsense that Australia should have a ceiling of 25% of GDP on government spending (I assume he is referring to Commonwealth Government spending).

    Michael Pascoe (Michael Pascoe on Page 21 of February 03, 2016 issue of Sydney Morning Herald) nailed the ideological clamour and suggestion that lower levels of government spending result in improved economic performance and that Australia has a high level of government spending that should be reduced.

    In the article, Pascoe says ‘What can be clearly shown is that there is no correlation between relatively low government spending and the very best possible credit rating.’ Pascoe produces the latest figures from the ‘right wing’ Heritage Foundations 2016 Economic Freedom Index, which compiles all government spending – federal, state and local. This article points out that Australian Government spending is running at 35.6% of GDP. He adds that almost all countries with AAA status from Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch, have higher government spending as a proportion of GDP than Australia: Australia 35.6%, Canada 40.7%, Denmark 57.1%, Germany 44.3%, Hong Kong 17.6%, Luxembourg 43.6%, Netherlands 46.8%, Norway 44%, Singapore 18.2%, Sweden 53.2%, Switzerland 33.5%.

    These figures make it clear that high levels of government spending do not necessarily result in poor economic performance. Pascoe concludes ‘It turns out that having markedly higher government spending isn’t so necessarily disastrous after all.’

    In a submission to the Senate Select Committee into the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit, Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley and I contend that the problem is not that government expenditures or that the public sector is large in Australia compared with other countries. We contend that the problem is a short-fall of revenue and that on international comparison, our tax revenues are low.

    In our summary to the Committee we say …

    The Commission of Audit’s brief is based on assumptions that Australia is burdened with “big government” and that taxes are an impediment to business investment and workforce participation.

    There is no evidence for either assumption. The trend in Commonwealth expenditure has been downwards since the mid 1980s, falling from a peak of around 28 percent of GDP to a range of 24 to 26 percent of GDP in recent years. In comparison with similar prosperous countries Australia has one of the smallest public sectors.

    The problem a body such as the Commission should address is our inadequate tax base, which is the main reason the Commonwealth has had a structural deficit for most of this century. We aren’t collecting enough revenue to fund the public services needed if the economy is to thrive.

    We should not shy away from raising taxes. Evidence from international comparisons and from surveys on competitiveness suggests that reasonable levels of tax do not impede countries’ economic performance. In fact, countries which compete on the basis of low taxes do so to compensate for competitive weaknesses, such as inadequate infrastructure and poor standards of education – in other words impoverished public sectors.

    Such evidence, however, seems hard to convey to those gripped by a zeal to cut spending and taxes. Even in a “small government”/low-tax country like Australia it is possible to find areas where private funding and provision of services can displace public funding and provision.

    But such displacement is usually at high economic cost, simply to achieve an arbitrary fiscal objective. There is no point in reducing taxes if the private costs are greater than the saving in taxes, with no improvement (and in many cases a deterioration) in the services provided. We illustrate this in the case of health care funding. This is an area of significant public outlay and where, because of ongoing growth in demand, there are voices – often the voices of self-interest – calling for a shift from public to private insurance. Such a shift would be costly on all economic criteria – technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and equity.

    The rushed and secretive processes of the Commission are not the path to good public policy. There may be areas where a change in the public/private mix is justified on economic grounds, but these are not one-way towards the private sector as implied in the Commission’s brief. Because we already have a small public sector it is likely that a proper process, with research and consultation, would find a need for a net expansion of Australia’s public sector. By shutting off that possibility those who drafted the Commission’s brief are imposing a constraint which may be contrary to the community’s wishes and sound economics.

    The full submission to the Senate Select Committee can be found by going to my website. Click on ‘John Menadue Web Site’ top left of this blog page.

     

     

  • John Menadue. What has happened to the 11,990 Syrian refugees?

    After telling us for months that Australia would not take additional Syrian refugees, Tony Abbott announced on September 9 last year that the government had ‘agreed to settle 12,000 Syrian refugees … one of the world’s largest (intakes) to date’. We were told that the first refugees would arrive by Christmas and the 12,000 by June 2016. State governments, community groups and churches then geared up to respond.

    But to date, after five months, only about ten Syrian refugees have arrived.

    We should contrast our performance with the generous and efficient response of the Canadians. The Canadian government website reveals that at the 31 January 2016, 15,157 Syrian refugees had landed in Canada since November 4. That number of arrivals was made up of 8,767 government-assisted refugees, 1,049 blended Visa-Office-Referred refugees and 5,341 privately sponsored refugees. By the end of January 165 Canadian communities had welcomed Syrian refugees. There had been 57 government organised flights.

    In Canada, at the 31st December 2015 there were 13,881 applications in progress, with 6,381 applications finalised but the refugees had not yet travelled to Canada.

    For this generous and efficient response the Canadians put us to shame. Why? I suggest there are several reasons.

    The first and most important reason is the political leadership and will of the new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What a contrast with Abbott, Morrison, Dutton and now Turnbull.

    The second is that our ‘Immigration’ Department has been changed dramatically and is no longer adequately equipped to handle a movement such as this with expedition and efficiency. Senior and experienced people with expertise in the area have left the department. The ‘settlement’ function which has been so critical for managing newcomers to Australia has been transferred out of the Department of Immigration to the Department of Social Services. Furthermore, just as our foreign policy has become securitized, so our refugee and immigration programs have been overwhelmed by border control and border protection. We even have a military style Operation Sovereign Borders. The Department is not really involved in nation-building any more. It is about border control and we saw an example of this in the Melbourne fiasco late last year. Once upon a time Australia had a well-managed ability to move people quickly who are in need of resettlement. Ministers Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton have participated in the crippling of that ability.

    The third and a more specific problem is the delay in the large backlog of cases that are waiting ASIO checking. This is despite the fact that ASIO in recent years has received a substantial increase in personnel and other resources. Checking is necessary but the fear of foreigners that has been promoted by ministers has effectively thrown the weight of effort into control rather than a humanitarian response. There are always risks in the speedy movement of large numbers of desperate people but in the past we have been able to manage that efficiently – and reasonably quickly. And the lesson of terrorism in France and elsewhere in recent months is that it is mostly young people born to earlier arrivals rather than new refugees that have turned to terrorism.

    Canada has shown us a better way to help Syrian people in great need. The Canadian Government web site puts it this way. ‘Resettling refugees is a proud and important part of Canada’s humanitarian tradition. It reflects our commitment to Canadians and demonstrates to the world that we have a shared responsibility to help people who are displaced and persecuted.’

    In Australia we also used to have that humanitarian tradition of shared responsibility to help people who are displaced and persecuted. The Coalition and the ALP are trashing our proud tradition.

    We should make amends by increasing our Syrian intake to 25 000 and really applying ourselves to the job. The Canadians have shown us the way.

     

  • John Menadue. Tax reform and vested interests.

    We are in the midst of a misleading campaign on tax and budget reform.

    Large corporations and high income groups are pressing the government to increase the GST in order to reduce company tax and taxes for high-income groups. I have seldom seen such a blatant and self-interested campaign by vested interests. And they seriously suggest that it is in the name of tax and presumably, necessary budget reform. Even Mike Baird has joined in this nonsense.

    We are told by these vested interests that the benefits of tax advantages for the powerful and wealthy will ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us, including the disadvantaged and the poor. These stories about trickle-down have been with us for years. It is claimed that the ‘trickle down’ from the wealth would encourage ‘growth’ and ‘jobs’. But there is no empirical evidence anywhere to back up this argument. Scott Morrison continues in the same vein, that if only there were more tax incentives, we would ‘work, save and invest’ more.

    See an excellent article on this issue by Ross Gittins in the SMH on February 1, entitled ‘Business-led tax “reform” won’t fly’.

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. ‘Balance’ and the ABC

    The ABC has a mistaken notion of media balance.

    It has become clear that Nick Ross, a Senior Technology Editor at the ABC, could not publish a story critical of Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN unless he also published an article critical of Labor’s NBN. To add to this bias by ABC management he was told that Labor’s plan was dead because Labor couldn’t win the next election. The ABC management was desperate to be onside with the new Coalition government.

    The ABC was making a political judgement and refused to allow a professional judgement of policies. The ABC continually ties itself in a knot over this issue.

    I recall that in the name of ‘balance’, Gough Whitlam was effectively denied access to the ABC in the 1960s. He was not allowed to appear on ABC current affairs programs unless there was a Minister to provide ‘balance’. By refusing to have a Minister appear, the ABC in effect allowed the government, to veto Gough Whitlam’s appearance. Fortunately Talbot Duckmanton, the General Manager of the ABC was persuaded that the government should not veto appearances of opposition leaders.

    We now have the ABC resuming its old veto policies, saying in effect that it will not have an article critical of Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN unless there is an article critical of Labor’s NBN.

    In the name of ‘balance’ professionalism and honesty is being forfeited.

    We have had a ludicrous so-called debate about climate change and the media’s attempt to provide balance. The media have given equal prominence to skeptics who are really a small and declining fringe. The nonsense from the skeptics has been given the same sort of coverage as the professional advice of thousands of eminent scientists around the world.

    The most grievous offender in this, of course, in Australia has been the News Ltd publications. The ABC should however re-examine what it means by ‘balance’ and the implications for its professionalism and duties to the whole Australian community.

    The ABC continues to give its former Minister and now Prime Minister an arm chair ride.

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Royal commissions – partisan politics or public interest.

    Australia has had a string of politically inspired and often useless royal commissions. The fiasco surrounding Dyson Heydon’s acceptance of an invitation to speak at a Liberal Party dinner made it even more likely that his enquiry into trade unions would be quickly discounted, except for those who wanted to pursue a political agenda against trade unions and by implication, their association with the ALP.

    In response to the Trade Union Royal Commission report, Malcolm Turnbull identified himself with business and the political ‘right’ rather than the public interest or the middle ground. He is consistently taking an ambivalent approach whether it is on climate change, coal mining, gay marriage the republic or the NBN. In response to Heydon’s report, he was not as hectoring as the Employment Minister Michaelia Cash. That is not his way with words, but in substance he followed along.. It was the same on his visit to the US. The tone was different but not the substance. We could do with ’more matter and less art’

    We have had a long list of royal commissions into trade unions. In 1976 the Fraser government had a Sweeney Royal Commission into the maritime unions. In 1982 the Fraser government received a report on bribery and corruption by the building unions. In 1984 the Costigan Royal Commission dealt with racketeering by the Ship Painters and Dockers Union. In 1989 Heydon and Meagher recommended that trade union officials should have the same fiduciary duties and responsibilities as company directors. In 2001 John Howard commissioned the Cole Royal Commission to investigate the conduct of industrial relations within the building industry.

    Despite this plethora of royal commissions, very little resulted.

    Perhaps aware of this record, Dyson Heydon in his final report decided that he had to call to his aid a former High Court Chief Justice, Sir Harry Gibbs. In his report, Heydon said

    ‘Sir Harry Gibbs was universally admired for probity. Near the end of his long life, much of which had been devoted to controversies about the meaning of the constitution, he concluded that it did not matter much for the health of the nation what the constitution meant, so long as one condition was satisfied. That was the inherent decency of the Australian people continued.’

    Mystified as anyone would be by this comment about Sir Harry Gibbs. Richard Ackland in the Australian Guardian commented

    ‘The relevance is mystifying as is the decision to propel Sir Harry (Bill) Gibbs onto the field of battle in this context. Gibbs, while a judge in Queensland, conducted a royal commission into allegations that the National Hotel in Brisbane was the centre of a call-girl operation sanctioned by the Queensland Police. After ruling heaps of available information as inadmissible and accepting an amount of perjured testimony, he could find no evidence of police corruption. This finding was so disastrous that it is credited with empowering the rotten apples in the Queensland police for another 23 years – until the Fitzgerald Royal Commission came along. Why on earth would Heydon launch his trade union report by citing a conservative judge whose name is the kiss of death in the pantheon of royal commissions?’

    Tony Abbott established a royal commission headed by Mr. Hanger on the Home Insulation Program, or pink batts as it was better known. In his report Hanger criticized the commonwealth government for having relied on the states to implement their own occupation and health laws, their own employment training programs and their own building regulations. He said

    ‘To rely on the states and territories to police their own respective workplace health and safety laws seems to have been misguided.’

    What a remarkable thing to say! As even the most ignorant would know, the states have clear responsibility in these areas which they jealously guard. To say nothing of the responsibility of employers. Yet Hanger decided to try and pin responsibility on the commonwealth government and let the states and employers go free. For a political beat-up that is hard to better. It is not surprising that we have heard little further about the first of Tony Abbott’s royal commissions into the previous Labor government’s administration. But it gave Tony Abbott and News Ltd an opportunity to attack.

    Then we had Dyson Heydon on Julia Gillard. In his interim report, Heydon said that Ms Gillard’s ‘intense degree of preparation, her familiarity with the materials, her acuteness [and] her powerful instinct for self preservation made it difficult to judge her credibility.’ In the same vein as Mr Hanger’s report on pink batts this was also an amazing thing to say. Was Heydon really saying that Julia Gillard was too smart for him? Would he have preferred her to be unprepared and ignorant about the material on which she was questioned?

    And despite the royal commission grilling over several days and the media frenzy, Bill Shorten got home free.

    The royal commission into trade unions and the Liberal Party favour corporate style regulation of the unions. They fail to acknowledge that corporations exist to advance the profits of shareholders and in this they get enormous advantages through ‘limited liability’. But trade unions are community organisations established to protect the rights of workers in a marketplace that is heavily biased against them. Union activity in Australia has been largely decriminalized since the 19th Century. Unionists should be penalized for taking action for personal gain but they should not be penalized for acting in the course of an industrial dispute to support their members.

    This royal commission into trade unions was designed to weaken trade unions. Yet trade unions have been a continuing feature of Australian political, economic and social life that protects vulnerable people in the workplace. When asked in 2014 what Australia had done right to defend the economy against chronic inequality that had occurred in the US, Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz said ‘unions’. Republican presidents and business interests have bitterly attacked the role of trade unions in the US. That is one reason why there is now so much alarming inequality in that country.

    It is not surprising that there are strong unions in our maritime, construction and mining industries. Dangerous workplaces will inevitably produce strong unions to ensure workplace safety. Tough work produces tough union leaders. Every ten days there is a workforce death in the construction industry. It is dangerous work. In his cossetted world does the royal commissioner really understand how dangerous construction work can be?

    The royal commissions on pink batts and trade unions have been politically partisan. There are other areas of major concern that would have been a more appropriate focus for royal commissions and transparency. Why did almost 600 of our major corporations pay no tax in 2013-14? That included such companies as Transfield, News Group and Exxon. People damaged by conflicted advice from financial planners in our banks were refused a royal commission. There has been systemic exploitation of workers by such companies as 7-Eleven and labor hire companies. But again, no royal commissions in these far more serious areas. And the one royal commission that we should have had above all others was a royal commission on the flimsy and manipulated information that led us into the Iraq War and tragedy for millions of people, a tragedy that is still unfolding.

    The HSU and the CFMEU are fair game, but the big end of town that funds the Liberal Party is left to run free.

    There is certainly no room in Australia for unionists that are ‘louts, thugs, bullies, thieves, perjurers …. ‘as the royal commissioner described some of them. Laws should be exercised or stronger laws introduced to address these problems. But why be so partisan and allow really big offenders to go scott free just because they are closely aligned to the Liberal Party.

    At the urging of the big end of town who want him to intervene on the side of capital to the detriment of labour, will Malcolm Turnbull over-reach on industrial relations as John Howard did on Work Choices?

  • John Menadue. Australia Day doing well, but could do better.

    The following repost is from Australia Day 2014.

    I wonder what indigenous people thought when they saw Captain Phillip with his ships come uninvited and sail up Sydney Harbour in January 1788. There does not seem any doubt that despite their concerns they were less hostile than we are to boat people 226 years later.

    Succeeding generations came by boat in their millions, including my ancestors who came from agriculturally depressed Cornwall in SS Northumberland to desolate Port Willunga in SA in 1847. Migration has never stopped. It has dramatically changed Australia, mainly for the better.  I don’t think any country has done it as well. It has brought vibrancy and greater openness If I could be more precise, I think Australia has benefited most from refugees.  Whilst the first generation of refugees may often lack skills and education, they more than make up for it in enterprise, courage and risk-taking.  That enterprise and high aspirations are often expressed through their children who often outperform others in education.  Refugees are by definition risk-takers who will abandon all for a new life.  They select themselves much better than a migration officer can ever select them.

    We have seen the benefits of migration refugees and multiculturalism, but seem hesitant about new people.  But this hesitancy and sometimes hostility to newcomers, in time gives way to acceptance and pride in our common achievements.  This has been our experience with waves of newcomers.  Irish Catholics were initially depicted as different and perhaps disloyal.  We were prejudiced against Jewish newcomers.  German migrants, particularly in the Barossa Valley, were harassed for decades. We were sceptical of balts, reffos and dagos We were initially wary about the Indo-Chinese and what damage they might cause to the Australian way of life.  But over time, it changed.  Even the early Afghans who built the transport links in Central Australia now have a train, the Ghan, named in their honour.

    Whilst Australians are invariably hesitant about newcomers, what gives me confidence is our pragmatic acceptance.  That seeming contradictory response is shown consistently in opinion polling and over long periods.  We are favourably impressed with the personal experience we have of the neighbour or shopkeeper who is Italian, Chinese or Vietnamese.  Is there something in the casualness and our easy-going acceptance that overcomes ideological and philosophical opposition?  We eschew the extremes and don’t get too excited by ideologies at either end of the spectrum.  If November 11, 1975, couldn’t even provoke a general strike, what could?  Insurrection is rare.  There isn’t much blood on the wattle.  We bump into each other, but we don’t cause a great deal of hurt

    One important reason for our successful integration of newcomers has been our settlement programs, particularly English language training. Unfortunately the Abbott Government has now taken these settlement services out of the Department of Immigration which is now focussed on border protection rather than settlement and nation building.

    As the host, Australia has particular responsibility to provide opportunities for newcomers. But it is not a one way street. The leadership of the new communities also carries responsibilities. Most have provided that leadership. Some have obviously failed both their own communities but also the wider Australian community. There is a lesson to be learned here.

    I believe that we do not place sufficient emphasis on citizenship, not in the jingoistic way of the United States but as a symbol of our unity. There must be strong commitment to Australia and new comers must place that ahead of loyalties to former homelands. Australian residents or citizens who go to fight in wars in their former homelands must be dealt with very firmly.

    We welcome diversity but not for its own sake. Diversity must be of benefit to the common good. For example we fought too long and hard for the separation of church and state to be prepared to give way to sharia law. We have built a superstructure of enriching diversity. But that diversity has been built on a strong substructure of shared institutions and values…our constitution, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and religion, English as the national language and tolerance and equal opportunity.

    In addition to time healing differences, we have also had leaders who have inspired the best in each of us or ‘touched the better angels of our nature’ (Abraham Lincoln).  Ben Chifley overcame public opposition in allowing Jewish refugees after World War II.  Robert Menzies, on coming to office, continued the acceptance of the displaced people of Europe.  Harold Holt skilfully, but in defiance of public opinion, commenced the dismantling of White Australia.  John Gorton and Gough Whitlam continued the process.  When Malcolm Fraser responded to the anguish of the Indo-Chinese people, he knew that he was acting contrary to public opinion.  Bill Hayden and then Bob Hawke supported him.  Yet no-one today would argue that these leaders got it wrong.  We applaud their courage and leadership. John Howard and Tony Abbott were the first post war leaders to break from that bi partisan tradition and engender fear of newcomers.

    Border protection is clearly necessary to maintain public confidence in migration and refugee intakes.  But it is possible to do that, as Malcolm Fraser showed without dividing the country and punishing the most vulnerable people on earth.

    What gives me confidence, is the Australian people.  I know of a Jewish refugee boy who went to school in inner Melbourne after World War II.  He told me his story.  His sister and he were called before the headmaster. As they were leaving his office, the headmaster asked them whose photo it was on the wall.  They didn’t know, but surmised that it might be head of the police or the head of the military.  The headmaster told them who it was, but the name meant nothing to them.  They then asked their schoolmates and were told it was Don Bradman.  That Jewish man said to me recently ‘I knew then that we were safe’.  If the most important public figure for the headmaster was a famous sportsman, there was little to fear and a lot to be looked forward to in Australia.

    Our nation will always be dynamic .It will be work in progress. The Australia of today is vastly different to the Australia of my childhood with its widespread racism and sectarianism. It was socially suffocating. For those changes I am very grateful. There is a lot that we can be proud of.  No country has integrated newcomers as well as we have. But there have been failures and remedial action yet to be taken. We are yet to be reconciled to our indigenous brothers and sisters who watched the European boat arrivals in 1788. We are yet to take our share of responsibility for the displaced and persecuted people of the world.

    Fear holds us back from expressing the generosity we all possess.

  • The Frontier Wars

    The following extract ‘The Frontier War’ was part of an address I gave in September 2013 for the launch of the Catholic Social Justice Statement. It was carried on this blog at the time. It was one of many blogs I have posted concerning the Frontier War and also the Maori Wars. Our military association with New Zealand did not begin in 1915 at Gallipoli. It began when we sent ships and troops to fight against the Maori people in New Zealand in the mid 19th Century.

    The Frontier War

    We have still not properly acknowledged the great damage we have done to our indigenous people. Along with the Australian War Memorial, we still blot out the Frontier War that settlers and the settler parliaments conducted right across our country from 1790 to early last century to dispossess indigenous people. There are no monuments to this long war but even the AWM concedes that 2500 settlers and police died in the war alongside 20,000 aborigines who were “believed to have been killed chiefly by mounted police.”  Informed and engaged scholars like Henry Reynolds in The Forgotten War now believe that the number of indigenous men, women and children killed was probably over 30,000. This was an epic war. Its purpose was the occupation and sovereignty over one of the great land masses of the world. It was to wrest control from a people who had lived here for 40,000 years. This was a war which was much more central to our future than any other war in which we fought. In proportion to our population in the 19th Century which was about 2 to 2.5 million people, this Frontier War was the most destructive of human life in our history. The A W M applauds indigenous people when they fought for the empire, but refuses to suitably acknowledge the 30,000 indigenous people that were killed resisting the empire that was taking their land. The AWM remembers the Sudan War of 1885 in which no Australians were killed in combat but ignores the Frontier War. We easily call to mind “Lest we forget” but it is really “best we forget” the 30,000 Australians who were killed in our Frontier War.

    The “whispering in our hearts” will continue until we are honest about our history, both its glory and its shame. Political slogans about a “black armband view of our history” are designed to avoid the truth and encourage us to forget.

  • John Menadue. Supporting Adam Goodes.

    This blog is a repost from 1 August 2015.

    Adam Goodes has been bullied and vilified because he has reminded us of our dark history and the discrimination that continues against him and many others in Australia today. We don’t like being reminded of the dispossession, killing, poisoning and discrimination against our own indigenous people. We want to forget that 30,000 indigenous people were killed in the Frontier Wars by police and white settlers. Yet we have scarcely a memorial to the 30,000 who died defending their land. The Australian War Memorial turns its back on the Frontier Wars yet with the Australian Government is spending $700 million on the centenary of WW1.

    Why can’t indigenous people behave with respect and go quietly? Why don’t they appreciate what has been done for them? Why can’t they ‘behave well like white persons’ as the CEO of Collingwood Football club said some years ago?

    Adam Goodes is proud of his history and so he should be. But that confronts many people. Their power and prejudice is being challenged.

    He said “If you say nothing or do nothing, nothing changes”. That statement makes Adam Goodes different and the focus of attacks. So many of us don’t want to change and acknowledge our own history. Adam Goodes has clearly shown that he will not “cop shit”.

    He is criticised for what is seen as a war dance, although not carrying any weapons. But we almost all enjoy and respect the Haka and what it means for all New Zealanders, Maoris and non-Maoris. In the struggle between indigenous and non-indigenous people it was Captains Cook and Phillip who introduced guns. Our own society is becoming increasingly militarised and at numerous public occasions, including Anzac, weapons are always on display.

    Adam Goodes is confronting us all and it is good that he does so, even though he is paying a heavy price. In a 2008 essay, he spoke of “being the object of racism so many times that you lose count”. .

    We are all nervous to some degree about the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different, whether it be on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or even gender. It is foolish to deny that there is racism in Australia – and indeed in each one of us. It is part of our DNA. But a part of us is also generous, open and tolerant. Theologian call it the struggle between good and evil.

    Differences can be unsettling but we can come to value them as they challenge us to think again about the way we are thinking and acting. Adam Goodes is challenging us to be more generous and accepting of difference in the human family.

    In the struggle between the darker and better angels of our nature as Abraham Lincoln called it, leadership is essential. Community and political leadership is critical to keep our prejudices under control and to encourage our better spirits of tolerance and generosity. The statement by over 150 community groups in the last couple of days focuses on just this issue. It calls on us all “to stop empowering the worst elements of human nature”. It features in the SMH poster for this weekend. We do respond to good ethical and moral leadership. And we have seen that in the last week from leaders such as Mike Baird and Jay Weatherill. That leadership has come from state capitals but not from Canberra.

    We badly need more leadership from our sporting leaders and fortunately we are seeing encouraging signs of it to push aside the comments of people like Shane Warne and Eddie McGuire. It is an old tactic to blame the victim.

    Many years ago, our footballers were working Monday to Friday in ‘other jobs’ with football on Saturday. Now many of them are well-paid professionals, like celebrities. They could stop the booing if they decided to stop work and stop playing like good unionists until the booing stops. That would show the solidarity we need from sports people today. The booers must be confronted and not allowed to hide in the crowd.

    I think that former Sydney Swans player Michael O’Loughlin, explained it all very well in the last week. ‘We won’t sit in silence, we will continue to fight for our mob. We will continue to be proud of who we are, what we stand for and what we are fighting for. We live in a great country and we want it to thrive and get better and better. In doing so you have to recognise what has happened in the past to indigenous people and what they continue to go through. For us to move forward as a great country those are the things we need to keep fighting for.’ I don’t think it could have been said better.

    Out of this current orgy of bullying, racism and prejudice we will hopefully become more honest with ourselves and build a more co-operative and tolerant society. The days look black at the moment but we may find in the years ahead that Adam Goodes has done this country another service, even at great cost to himself.

  • John Menadue. Media censorship and the NBN

    The ABC’s outgoing editor of its Technology and Games subsite, Nick Ross, has claimed that he has been ‘gagged’ by ABC management from publishing further articles about the NBN. He has now left the ABC.

    For link to an article on this latest gag on NBN coverage, see link at bottom to article by Renai LeMay of 14 January, in delimiter.com.

    There is a continuing pattern of failure by the mainstream media to expose the mess that Malcolm Turnbull has left us in the NBN. It has been almost entirely social media, including this blog, that has carried stories about Malcolm Turnbull’s failure in his administration of the NBN.

    There has been an unfortunate habit of successive governments blaming a previous government for its failures on the NBN. But Malcolm Turnbull cannot avoid his responsibility for his decision on the multi-technology mix (MTM) model which incorporates Telstra’s copper network and also for his failure to continue with fibre to the home/premises. The MTM and FTTN are his and only his to own.  The ALP got one important thing right – and that was the importance of rolling out fibre to the end-user.

    In September 2010 Abbott ordered Turnbull to ‘demolish the NBN’. Malcolm Turnbull seems to be doing his best to do just that..

    The same media failure to research and analyse what has been happening on the NBN has been apparent on many other issues. In particular there was a failure to report and analyse government spin on boat arrivals. The ABC, and Radio National in Canberra was one of the west offenders.

    We now know that boat arrivals had been reduced from 48 in July 2013 to 5 in October 2013 when Tony Abbott’s Operation Sovereign Borders came into effect.

    Just as with boats, the media, including the ABC, has failed to properly research and analyse where the NBN is now headed.

    The NBN failure is a major set-back. That is a major story in itself. But the failure of the media to professionally report on the issue is also a major story in itself. A compliant media pulled out all the stops concerning  pink batts and the school building program under the Labor Governments. But the problems with those programs were minor compared with the NBN mess which is now upon us.   The media prefers to turn a blind eye to what is happening with our most important infrastructure project.

    https://delimiter.com.au/2016/01/14/journo-claims-abc-gagged-his-nbn-coverage/

  • The policy scandal of a $11b taxpayer subsidy to private health insurance.

    I don’t think that I can recall a domestic policy that is so outrageous as the $11 b. annual cost to the taxpayer of the subsidy to private health insurance (PHI) companies. The subsidy is paid to policy holders, but it really means that PHI companies receive the benefit of the subsidy. For further explanation of the $11b figure see link to submission below. Repost from 08/12/2013

    (more…)

  • John Menadue. Preferential trade deals – gigantic foundation stones or pebbles?

    Malcolm Turnbull has described the TPP as a ‘gigantic foundation stone’ that will deliver ‘more jobs, absolutely’.

    The World Bank now tells us that the TPP will be more like a pebble than a foundation stone.  See following article by Peter Martin in SMH on January 12, 2016.

    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/transpacific-partnership-will-barely-benefit-australia-says-world-bank-report-20160111-gm3g9w.html

    The following is a repost on the same subject, originally posted on 13/10/2015.

    John Menadue

    Repost from 13/10/2015. 

    After two wasted years in government, it is perhaps not surprising that Malcolm Turnbull would try and gild the lily by telling us that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) ‘was of enormous benefit to us. It is a gigantic foundation stone for our future prosperity.’ What in the world has he been digesting to talk like this? Perhaps he is really extending an olive branch to the Abbott supporters he has vanquished by crediting the Abbott Government with the TPP!

    I have posted many blogs on the exaggerated claims for preferential trade deals pointing out those corporate benefits have invariably been put ahead of the public interest. Informed commentators are also almost unanimous that the TPP, like earlier FTAs with Japan, Korea and China, have been over-hyped.

    Alan Mitchell, the Australian Financial Review Economics Editor describes the TPP as ‘more of a pebble than a gigantic foundation stone’.

    Ross Gittins the Economics Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, says that the TPP ‘is no big deal’.

    Leon Berkelmans, the Director of the Lowy Institute, says of the TPP ‘don’t believe the hype; TPP is stifling rather than sustaining … Don’t get sucked into the lofty rhetoric, it’s wrong’.

    Ian Verrender the ABC Business Editor said that the ‘TPP isn’t about trade and certainly not about free trade. It is about entrenching the interests of major corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens’.

    Joanna Howe, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Adelaide warned that the TPP and the China FTA could prejudice our ‘valuable labour standards’.

    Michael West in the SMH warns that the TPP is a ‘leg-up for vested interests’. Tongue-in-cheek he concludes ‘signing up to the TPP is a bit like buying a used car over the phone with no details as to the state of the vehicle or the clicks on the odometer, but with glowing assurances from the dealer that “she’s a beauty mate, really”.’

    Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics and Professor at Colombia University tells us with Adam Hersh, that the TPF ‘is an agreement to manage its member’s trade and investment and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake. It is not about … free-trade.’

    The Pew East-West Centre estimates that Australia will increase its GDP by 0.5% by 2025 as a result of the TPP. Yes, 0.5% by 2025!

    Our Productivity Commission is skeptical about the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) outcomes. It says in its 2015 report ‘That it is not clear ISDS provisions respond to a demonstrable market failure or has been associated with the fostering of foreign investment flows.’ These ISDS provisions in my view are a direct attack on national sovereignty in favor of multinational companies represented by organizations such as Big Pharma and Big Tobacco. Many of these multinational companies thumb their noses at democratically governments by finding legal devices to avoid paying tax.

    In this blog on 10 September this year, I reported that Professors Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer at Victoria University found that the Centre for International Economics estimated that the gain in economic welfare from the three FTAs with Japan, China and Korea, will be only 0.4% of GDP. The CIE study also found that as a result of the three FTAs, Australian jobs would increase by 5,434 by 2035. Yet Minister Robb said that they would increase by 178,000!

    In its 2010 report, the Productivity Commission said ‘The increase in national income from preferential agreements is likely to be modest.’

    We know for instance that the FTA signed with the US ten years ago actually resulted in a reduction of our total trade with the rest of the world by $US53 b. because of trade diversion with the US. It was because of such outcomes that the Productivity Commission has warned us many times that the benefits of FTAs are often exaggerated and the downsides are minimized. It commented ‘Preferential trading arrangements add to the complexity of international trade and investment, are costly and time-consuming to negotiate, and add to the compliance costs of firms and administrative costs of governments.’

    The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is like a babe in the woods in this area and focuses on relatively minor benefits for our farmers and ignores the wider and serious problems of preferential trade agreements. What sovereign rights has DFAT negotiated away under the veil of secrecy? Yet behind this veil of secrecy a host of US vested interests were consulted extensively. The Obama administration was keen to give them a leg up.

    The government has little to show after two years of confusion and lost opportunities.

    • The budget deficit and net government debt are in worse shape than when the Abbott Government took office.
    • Despite the rhetoric, the government did not stop the boats. Boat arrivals fell dramatically from July to Dec 2013, before the turn backs commenced.
    • Company tax was not reduced because our large companies in the Business Council of Australia threw their lot in with the multinational companies to torpedo a sensible resources rent tax package which included company tax reduction.
    • Taxes on middle income earners are increasing through ‘bracket creep’
    • The Abbott government abolished the carbon tax, but we know that a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme will have to be introduced in some form to address carbon pollution.
    • Domestic terrorism has increased, spurred in part by our foolish military incursions into Iraq, Afghanistan and now, Syria. The last Essential Report found that 45 percent of Australians felt less safe as a result of our joining the military campaign against ISIS in Syria. Only 13 percent felt safer.

    With the cupboard bare after two years, the government hypes up the success of trade deals. They attack their opponents as xenophobic and anti-Chinese.

    The government has got itself into a corner with these deals. It should concede its mistakes and negotiate sensible compromises in the national interest. I wonder if Andrew Robb really appreciates the predicament that he has got himself and Australia into.

    The position of the US on preferential trade deals, as on so many other issues, is problematic. The US effectively sabotaged the World Trade Organization’s attempt at Cancun in 2003 to promote multi-lateral free trade. The WTO process was sabotaged by wealthy countries such as the US which refused to reduce agricultural protection. US farmers won the day. So in response to agricultural protection and the power of US business lobbies, President Obama launched the TPP to protect and advance those US interests and in the process isolate China.

    As in so many other fields we are paying a very heavy price for our unthinking support for the US.

  • Commercialisation and the casualness of going to war

    Repost from 23/04/2015.

    If we feel overwhelmed by the crass commercialism of Gallipoli and Anzac, take a deep breath because there are three years to go.

    Target has sponsored ‘Camp Gallipoli’, Woolworths has asked us to ‘Keep Fresh in our Memories’ the losses of Gallipoli ; VB depicted for us actors on the steps of the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance who  tell us to bow our heads and raise a glass of VB in memory of the first Australians who charged and died at Gallipoli. There have been endless advertising and sales of Gallipoli kitsch. Even our Governor General a few years ago fronted at the hotel bar for VB to raise a glass and  money for veterans.

    But the slipping TV ratings suggest we are getting tired of the saturation media coverage and the $400 m spent by the Australian Government on a whole range of Anzac ‘educational’ programs.

    When the myth making all started in 1915 Charles Bean, the official military historian carefully burnished the Anzac myth. Soldiers were strong, adaptable, cheerful, laid-back, but faithfully serving the empire. Not for Bean the harsh realities of war unless they were laced with humour. He didn’t tell us much about the fear, desertion or boredom of soldiers far from home or the horror of it all. He was gilding the lily about the terrible nature of the war in which young Australians were killing and being killed.

    We are told endlessly about how Australians fought in WW!. We are never really asked the very important question of why we fought… in the interests of Britain’s colonial and economic interests,including access to oil in the Middle East for Britain’s navy.

    The last surviving Anzac, Alec Campbell said in 2002 ‘For God’s sake don’t glorify Gallipoli..it was a terrible fiasco, a total failure and best forgotten’. But the Anzac obsession continues.

    To burnish the conservative interpretation of our military history we, and particularly the Australian War Memorial, are very selective about the story we tell. We have selective amnesia. We ignore the Frontier Wars, a race war by white landowners in which over 30,000 indigenous people were killed defending their homeland. In proportion to our population it was the largest loss of life in war in our history. But there is scarcely a grave or a memorial to remember the people who died in the Frontier Wars. Our first military alliance with New Zealand was not at Gallipoli but in the Maori race wars in the 1850s and 1860s.

    Best we forget the Frontier and Maori Wars.

    We choose to make WWII almost a footnote to our military history, but it was far more important to our survival than any other foreign war.

    Old soldiers will scarcely ever tell us about their experiences. They were haunted for years with the horror of it all. But today we don’t seem able to stop talking about Anzac and Gallipoli. We have seen so often on TV a long-lost cousin or a great uncle that has been forgotten. It seems more like sentimentality than grief.

    The careful selection of people and events by Bean diverted attention from the enormous political, strategic and personal tragedy of Gallipoli. We do the same today. We are encouraged to forget the blunders we made as a nation, involving ourselves in wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Bean, we divert attention by focusing on the sacrifice and losses by ordinary servicemen and women. We seem to turn ourselves into a knot to avoid facing the history of our military blunders. The same process is now under way with our expanded commitment to Iraq. What we will not acknowledge is that there was no national interest in sending Australian troops to Gallipoli just as there is no national interest in sending troops again to Iraq.

    On Anzac Cove Tony Abbott has told us that our involvement at Gallipoli was ‘right and just’. Others talk of ‘defending freedom’. In my view none of these claims stand up to serious scrutiny.. We were there for the empire.

    The Bean myth-making was essential for conservatives to divert attention from the military, political and personal tragedies; the division at home over conscription; the sectarianism of Billy Hughes and the poverty and unemployment in the great depression. It was not a land fit for heroes. WWI sundered our nation and it wasn’t until 1945 that we really started to put it together again..

    There are two bookends in our celebration of our military history. They are out dependence on the UK and the USA. We try to invent reasons why we fought at Gallipoli, but I have yet to hear a believable account of what we fought for there, except serving the empire. At Gallipoli Australian soldiers flew the Union Jack.  Today we also try to invent reasons why we are fighting in Iraq, but the real reason is the call of the latter-day imperial power, the USA.

    How can we possibly believe that Gallipoli and Iraq is about nationhood? Our involvement in both was for quite opposite reasons – serving the empire. Unfortunately some people believe that nationhood, like manhood can only only be proven in war and violence.

    My main concern about the Gallipoli myth-making and our military history is because it is pushing us steadily further and further down the military path. Our foreign policy has become overwhelmingly militarised. Combatting asylum seekers in Operation Sovereign Borders is an example of how civil policies and programs are being turned over to the military. We are again appointing military generals as governors and governor generals.

    This militarisation of Australia has contributed to making our involvement in wars a quite casual event. The latest addition of 300 Australian service people to Iraq scarcely raised any attention at all.

    Taking a country to war used to be considered the most serious step that any government could ever take. But no more. The parliament doesn’t even debate a new overseas commitment. In an almost unthinking way we decide to go to war again. We commit to war after war and then refuse properly support returning service people.

    As Henry Reynolds put it

    ‘The threshold Australian governments need to cross in order to send forces overseas is perilously low. Because there has never been an assessment of why Australia has so often been involved in war, young people must get the impression that war is a natural and inescapable part of national life. It is what we do and we are good at it. We “punch above our weight”. War is treated as though it provides the venue and the occasion for Australian heroism and martial virtuosity. While there is much talk of dying, or more commonly of sacrifice, there is little mention of killing and never any assessment of the carnage visited on distant countries in our name.’

    In Australia today it is becoming much easier to go to war. War is becoming commonplace and the celebrations surrounding Gallipoli make it more so. Step by step we are moving into very dangerous territory, something that the diggers of Gallipoli or the Western Front would have warned us about. It was so horrible; they didn’t want to talk about it. But we talk about it endlessly.

    We should behave with restraint and put some of the drums and bugles away. Let’s pause and think what we are doing.

    The lesson of Gallipoli must surely be to avoid making the same mistake again…whether it be in Vietnam,Afghanistan or Iraq.

     

  • John Menadue. Australians who fight in overseas wars.

    Repost from 02/03/2015

    The government has been concerned, as many of us are, about Australians fighting for IS in Syria and Iraq. The government is threatening to revoke the Australian citizenship of dual nationals who involve themselves in this war.

    Whether this will be successful is a very moot point. It is asserted by many that prosecution under our existing laws would be much more effective. But a government in trouble about its own security has to be seen to be ‘doing something’, e.g. revoking citizenship.

    There are an estimated 100 or so Australian citizens fighting with the IS in Syria and Iraq. That number looks to be increasing.

    Estimates suggest also that at least a similar number of dual Australian citizens are fighting with the Israeli Defence Forces. Australians have fought in all of Israel’s wars since 1948.

    The Muslim community in Australia has been very critical of Australians who go and fight under the IS flag but rightly asks why Australian citizens are able to fight with the IDF but not with IS. I would have thought that the policy on this matter would be quite clear – that no Australian citizen should be allowed to fight overseas without the approval of the Australian government and if they do they will be prosecuted and if found guilty severely punished.

    There are several reasons that our Prime Minister and ASIO have given for the apparent double-standard in treatment of Australian citizens fighting for IS and for IDF. The first is that IS has been described as a terrorist organisation, whereas the IDF has not. Second, fighting with an overseas army of a recognised national state is different. Thirdly, the Israeli’s are not under sanctions so the IDF is a ‘free port for Australian volunteers’ according to the former Director General of ASIO.

    If it is maintained that Israel has not been designated as a terrorist state or is under sanctions, it cannot be said that the IDF is not a lethal organisation. In its savage attack on Gaza last year, the IDF made over 5,000 air strikes in which 2,104 people were killed. According to the UN estimates, 69% of persons killed in Gaza were civilians. The Israeli’s lost 67 soldiers and six civilians.

    Where is the balance and logic in the way successive Australian governments have favoured Israel in so many ways? One thing stands out very much; the power of the Israeli lobby in so many countries including our own.

  • Vale Malcolm Fraser

    Repost from 21/03/2015

    I am sure that Malcolm Fraser’s concerns for human rights were always there. But as he grew and matured, that concern flourished and became obvious to all. He became our moral compass on human rights.

    I was first conscious of Malcolm’s concern for human rights when I listened to his speech in September 1975 at a luncheon in Parliament House Canberra to honour Helen Suzman. She was an anti-apartheid campaigner who for 13 years was the sole opponent of the apartheid regime in South Africa’s parliament. For the first time that I can recall, Malcolm Fraser spelled out his opposition to apartheid and white rule in Africa. It surprised me. But, I found it very encouraging. It was the beginning of my better understanding of Malcolm Fraser.

    Later he became a firm opponent of white rule, in Africa. Despite Maggie Thatcher he was determined to do what he could to end white rule in Southern Rhodesia.

    I next became aware of Malcolm Fraser’s concern for human rights in Africa in the first cabinet meeting of the Fraser government after the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

    There had been a lot of media reports in Australia that money raised by the World Council of Churches for humanitarian aid in Southern Rhodesia was being diverted to assist the underground political and military opposition to Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia. In Cabinet the issue was raised by a senior NSW minister. I was really taken by surprise by Malcolm Fraser’s pungent response. He said that Ian Smith was not only politically culpable for racism in Southern Rhodesia, but that he was ‘mad’. To my knowledge this matter was never raised again in Cabinet, or at least while I was there. No Minister dared!

    In government from 1975 to 1983, Malcolm Fraser took up many of the human rights issues that Gough Whitlam had put on the agenda. Gough Whitlam started the process to establish land rights for indigenous Australians, but it was Malcolm Fraser who had the first legislation enacted.

    From his western Sydney electorate of Werriwa, with migrants from so many countries, Gough Whitlam laid the groundwork  for multiculturalism. The fundamental principle of multiculturalism was that all people deserve dignity and respect regardless of their background. In our white Anglo-Celtic community, that was something quite new. But it was Malcolm Fraser who expanded and entrenched multiculturalism. SBS was established and settlement programs for migrants and refugees were co-ordinated and then well-funded following the Galbally Report.

    Following piecemeal reform by Holt, Gorton and McMahon, Gough Whitlam ended White Australia by legislation. But under the Whitlam Government the abolition of White Australia was never put to the test in the community. Migrant and refugee intakes in the Whitlam period were the lowest since the Great Depression.

    Malcolm Fraser put the abolition of White Australia to the test by accepting tens of thousands of Indochinese refugees.  Through the policies and programs initiated by the Fraser Government, including later family reunion, we now have 250,000 persons of Indochinese background living in Australia. What a great credit they have been to Australia, to themselves and to Malcolm Fraser’s vision.

    He broke the back of White Australia and as an anti-White Australia activist since my university days in the 1950s it was wonderful to see what Malcolm Fraser had achieved. Racism and opposition to foreigners is often a dormant but potent factor in public life, but Malcolm Fraser determined that we had a humanitarian obligation to the people who had fled Indochina.

    He didn’t wait for opinion polling or focus groups to decide what we should do. He gave us leadership. It wasn’t easy given our history of White Australia and the knowledge that fear of the foreigner could be so easily exploited. But with leadership, Malcolm Fraser showed that we all have generous instincts and with his leadership we responded because we knew in our heart of hearts that he was right. If only we had that leadership today!.

    I am certain that my appointment as Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs in 1980 stemmed from Malcolm Fraser’s lively concern about racism. In my posting in Japan, I spoke to scores of community groups about Australia. On almost every occasion I would be asked about White Australia. It irritated me, particularly given Japan’s exclusivist policies on race and migration. As I came to the end of my posting Malcolm Fraser was visiting Japan and he asked me what I wanted to do when I returned.  I mentioned to him how White Australia had followed me all round Japan, so I told him I would like on return to Australia to do what I could to help bury White Australia. His response was instantaneous and to the point – ‘You’re on’!.  Within three months I was back in Canberra as Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs.

    In that role I was able to continue to help expand the Indochina program. But In the department I encountered programs, staff attitudes and a culture  that reflected the old days of White Australia. I set about changing it and was quite public in what I was doing. I know that Liberal Party backbenchers were concerned about my activities. But never did Ian Macphee, my minister, or Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, criticise or ask me to desist. We were all on the same page.

    Almost to the day of his death, Malcolm Fraser was in the front line to support asylum seekers and those whose human rights were being attacked. One of his latest projects was  how the community could be galvanised to support Gillian Triggs the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission who had been so unfairly attacked by our Prime Minister and the Attorney General.

    He took to twitter with enthusiasm to shed light on dark places in our public life.

    It turned out that he and Gough Whitlam had more in common than they knew in those turbulent days of 1975. They were both badly bruised but their personal relations mellowed and healed. The two political titans of our era came to terms.

    Gough Whitlam often said that he hadn’t disagreed with Malcolm Fraser for 20 years! Malcolm Fraser delivered the Whitlam Oration in 2012. He opened the oration with ‘Men and Women of Australia’.

    At the Sorry Day in Parliament House in 2008, most former Prime Ministers were photographed. together. With a walking stick, or ‘cane’ as Gough would have called it, in one hand – he put his other hand on Malcolm Fraser’s shoulder for support. It was quite moving to see the old combatants so close.

    About three months before Gough Whitlam died, Malcolm Fraser called to see him in his Sydney office. He presented Gough  with his latest book ‘Dangerous Allies’. He had inscribed in the book –

    “Dear Gough, with great respect and great affection, Malcolm.”

    It had been a long and colourful journey for both of them, but there was clear respect and affection at the end.

    We will miss Malcolm Fraser’s steadfastness on human rights.

    A light has gone out.

  • John Menadue. Radicalism and terrorism.

    Repost from 15/10/2015

    Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is talking a lot about his government’s commitment to counter radicalisation in the Muslim community. The NSW Premier and Police Commissioner also keep talking about countering radicalisation. At least this is preferable to the endless talk we had before about a ‘death cult’ and ‘team Australia’.

    But radicalism and terrorism are not the same thing. Radical politics and radical religion are surely acceptable and widespread. But what is not acceptable is to commit acts of violence and terrorism. Making this distinction between radicalism and terrorism is not some semantic play with language. We had better understand the essential difference between the two or we will never stop terrorism.

    Radicalism is about going to the core of a subject or issue. Radical surgery for example is attempting to address the core of the ailment. As a university teenager I was probably a radical student. I am still probably radical on many things. But that radicalism has never been about violence. It was quite the opposite.

    I am not surprised that many young Muslim teenagers are offended, indeed radicalised by the violence that the West, including Australia, has inflicted on the Muslim people of the Middle East. I think I understand how the humiliation and violence we have inflicted would radicalise young Muslims.

    Malcolm Turnbull says that John Howard was ‘our greatest prime minister with the possible exception of Robert Menzies … I learnt so much from John Howard. Every day I am PM, I’ll be benchmarking everything I do against how John Howard would have handled these challenges’. But does Malcolm Turnbull seriously believe that he should benchmark himself by justifying John Howard’s involvement in the Iraq War which is a root cause of conflict and terrorism in the world today.

    There is not much doubt that it was John Howard’s cooperation with George Bush in the invasion of Iraq that unleashed the violence and terrorism that we face today. John Howard helped open the Pandora’s Box of tribal, ethnic and sectarian violence in the Middle East and made us less secure. Most Australian people know that that is true. As I pointed out in an earlier blog, 45% of Australians feel less secure from terrorism because of our continued military meddling in the Middle East and most recently in Syria. Only 13% of Australians feel safer.

    We are reaping violence at home for what we have sown abroad. But Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t mention this and wants to benchmark himself against the person who helped trigger so much to the violence and terrorism we face today.

    Last night on the 7.30 program the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Andrew Colvin said that terrorism in Australia was getting worse but he didn’t know why. He was not asked the obvious follow up question, what is the link between our military involvement in Muslim countries in the Middle East and terrorism at home.

    In 2004 a former Commissioner of the AFP Mick Kelty was very clear that ‘our involvement in Iraq made us a greater target for terrorism’. In 2010 the head of UK’ MI 5 Baroness Manningham-Buller told the Chilcott Inquiry ‘that our involvement in Iraq…radicalised a whole generation of young people…who (in addition) saw our involvement in Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam’

    The facts are clear but our leaders will not admit their mistakes. Instead they deliberately avoid an honest discussion.

    Combatting violence and terrorism will require responses on many fronts.

    The first is early intervention and active cooperation with the Muslim community to calm the hot-heads and misfits that exist in every community. Muslim leaders who can’t speak English are not going to be effective bridges between the Muslim and wider Australian communities. They will just not cut it. There may be important role models for young people in the Muslim community, but it is not clear to me.

    Secondly, we need to publicise the Jihadists who return and admit their mistake. We then need to help rehabilitate them into the Australian community.

    Thirdly, we will need to rely increasingly on the competence of our security and police forces. They are much better resourced and have more power than ever before. Yet they are invariably asking for more money and more powers. And Prime Ministers and Premiers, wanting to be seen to be doing something usually agree

    But are our security agencies and police up to the job? There is no doubt that the Man Haron Monis case was seriously mishandled by both our security services and the police, including the botched rescue attempt. We have had very few convictions of alleged terrorists. The evidence presented in many cases has just not stood up. Why?

    Organisations that operate in secret and with a lot of untested information need close and effective supervision.  The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security is under resourced to do the job.

    My experience is that our security services attract more ‘odd bods’ than I have found in any other organization. That experience was some time ago, but I doubt that much has changed. Ministers are easily seduced into the twilight world of fact, fiction, gossip and speculation. I have seen it many times. I have even fallen for it myself.

    In a recent article, ‘Narrow focus on radicalisation won’t stop terrorism’ Greg Austin, Visiting Professor at UNSW put the issue in the following way. ‘Radicalisation and terrorism are two different phenomena – legally, politically, psychologically and morally. While a terrorist is by definition radicalised, the mere fact of being radicalised does not explain the transition to terrorism – a choice for violence. In most scenarios, there are many “radicals” in any cause for each person who becomes a terrorist. A policy that screens radicals for terrorists is not workable or reliable, nor scientifically defensible. It will always record significant failures.’

    We won’t get on top of our current problems with terrorism whilst Malcolm Turnbull and others conflate radicalism and terrorism and pursue policies in the Middle East that foment terrorism at home.

  • John Menadue. Repost: NBN; the rot set in with John Howard.

    The current NBN mess started with the decision of the Howard Government to privatise the whole of Telstra and not just its retail arm. If the wholesale arm of Telstra had remained in public hands we would have been well on our way to a successful NBN. 

    Unfortunately, at Tony Abbott’s urging, Malcolm Turnbull also let ideology take over with the resulting problems of an NBN that is slow, obsolete and expensive. See below, a repost of an article on John Howard’s responsibility beginning the problem.  John Menadue.

    The confusion and the delay that we have got ourselves into with the NBN can be traced back very directly to John Howard and Senator Minchin when they decided to privatise the whole of Telstra and not just its retail arm. That privatisation was in three stages; 1997, 1999 and 2006.

    If there had been ‘structural separation’ with the wholesale arm being kept in public ownership, we would now be well on the way to completing the NBN. But with the wholesale arm of Telstra sold off with the rest of the business, the Labor government had to start again.

    Malcolm Turnbull clearly didn’t want good advice on the NBN which would have run counter to his ideological leanings and that of his coalition colleagues. He got rid of all the board directors including sacking Brad Orgill, a director of NBN. Malcolm Turnbull didn’t even consult the board before he acted so rashly. Surely the NBN directors had a lot to offer. Institutional memory doesn’t come cheaply or easily in any organisation.

    Brad Orgill who would not have been welcome by the Coalition and the News Group for his investigations into the Rudd Government’s Building the Education Revolution said in an article in the Australian Financial Review last Friday (October 4, 2013)

    “Would NBN even exist if earlier governments had not made the grave error of privatising Telstra as a vertically integrated business? No. And for me this is the most galling. The privatisation of Telstra’s wholesale business was clearly a mistake. If its wholesale business had continued as government-owned there would be no need for NBN and replacement of copper with fibre would have been progressively undertaken, as has happened in the rest of the world by an established incumbent operator with substantial advantages in resourcing, access and intellectual property. NBN illustrates the risks of privatising natural monopolies.’

    Natural monopolies should remain in public hands. We accept that case for example in respect of water and sewerage. We don’t need competitors laying competing and parallel water and sewerage pipes. Competition is best left to the retail level. So it is with telecommunications where exchanges, cables, wires, poles and the pits of the natural monopoly should remain in public hands to serve the whole of Australia regardless of location or class. Opportunist businesses should not be allowed to “cherry pick” the most profitable parts…

    The new chair of NBN, Dr Switkowski has been parachuted in by the Liberal party. He has little experience in roll out of construction projects which must dominate the future of NBN. I wonder what he now makes of the Liberal party nonsense of copper connection from the node to the premises when in a 2009 interview he said:

    ‘The NBN was an important project and that an all fibre networks is a desirable end point. I think the government strategy of investing in a high speed fibre optic base broadband network is a good one. I think it will make a difference to us as a nation and it will ensure more equity in access to relevant services for all Australians.’(AFR 4 October 2013)

    Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal party have described the NBN as a ‘white elephant on a massive scale”. Initially the Coalition described the NBN as “a dangerous delusion”’ and given us quite exaggerated estimates of cost blow-outs. Whilst the NBN has failed badly to achieve its planned roll-out, it is still on budget at $43 billion according to the retiring CEO of the company.

    Yet Rio Tinto has had to write-off over $US35 billion in bad investments over the last five years. More write-offs are likely from its coal investments in Africa. BHP has also written off billions. In the clamour to decry public investment in the NBN, the ideologues, including the politicians and business commentators, chose to scarcely mention the appalling business decisions of Rio Tinto and BHP.

    The Labor government was criticised because it has not presented a cost-benefit study of the NBN. But I suggest that this criticism has been a quite conscious device to discredit and hopefully delay and then destroy the NBN. A cost-benefit study may be appropriate for private investments with a life of 10 to 15 years. But the NBN will have a public life of perhaps 50 years or more. How useful is a cost-benefit study in those circumstances?

    Brad Orgill has commented that a cost-benefit study would not have been required if the Howard government had not sold Telstra as a vertically integrated telco.

    Cost-benefit studies of NBNs have been carried out all around the world and the results have been overwhelmingly favourable There has been almost unanimous agreement that fibre to the premises is the best option. McKinsey reported that the financial case for a NBN was strong. Access Economics and IBM have also reported positively on the productivity benefits to the nation of the NBN.

    On balance a cost-benefit study would have been useful if for no other purpose than to silence the politically driven critics. In the Howard years there were 25 enquires into telecoms without any serious progress on structural issues.

    John Howard left Australia with a major structural deficit in our budget which many commentators, including the IMF, have highlighted. In the same way, the Howard government’s ideological blinkers about privatisation have put us back ten years in developing a world-class NBN. Malcolm Turnbull has told us that he hopes to get politics out of the issue. But it was John Howard’s ideology and politics above everything else, through the privatisation of a vertically-integrated Telstra that has got us into this predicament. Malcolm Turnbull will be hard-pressed to free himself of the political baggage which he and the coalition carry on this vital project.

  • John Menadue. ‘The Big Short’

    Paul Krugman reviews ‘The Big Short’, a film that the enemies of financial regulation hope you won’t see or believe.  See link below.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/opinion/the-big-short-housing-bubbles-and-retold-lies.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

  • John Menadue. High Court judges.

    Former High Court judges have been in the news recently and not just Dyson Heydon

    In the 40th anniversary of the Whitlam Dismissal, two High Court judges at the time of the dismissal have been very much in the news. We were reminded again of the role of Sir Garfield Garwick in briefing and encouraging the Governor General to dismiss the Whitlam government. We also learnt more about the role of Sir Anthony Mason who not only coached the Governor General on what he might do but on the afternoon of the Dismissal advised the Governor General he need not see the Speaker of the House of Representatives who was kept waiting at the gate of the Governor General’s residence for an hour. The Speaker of the House of Representatives wished to inform the Governor General that Malcolm Fraser did not have the confidence of the House of Representatives and that he should recall Gough Whitlam and recommission him as Prime Minister. Sir Anthony Mason told Sir John Kerr that the speaker was irrelevant and should be disregarded. How extraordinary that a High Court judge, and later Chief Justice, could so easily put aside any concern about the separation of powers and the role of the Speaker in the Westminster system.

    I had an acquaintance with another Chief Justice of the High Court when I was on the Council of the Order of Australia. In my book, ‘Things you learn along the way’ published in 1999 I said

    ‘As Secretary of the Department of Special Minister of State I was a member of the Council of the Order of Australia for about 12 months in 1983/84. The Chairman of the Council was Sir Harry Gibbs, the Chief Justice. I proposed that Lionel Murphy receive an AC, the senior award in the Order of Australia. Gibbs asked that the matter be deferred as he would like to consider it further. At the next meeting, Gibbs said that he had spoken to Murphy and Murphy was not interested in such an award. I was very surprised. My proposal lapsed.’ 

    But that was only half the story. Several years later when I was on the board of Qantas from 1986/89, I had a discussion with Ray Gietzelt who was also a member of the board. We privately discussed the Order of Australia. Knowing that Ray Gietzelt had been a very close friend of the late Lionel Murphy, I expressed surprise that Murphy had declined any interest in an award in the Order of Australia. Ray Gietzelt said that he also would be very surprised if Murphy had declined. He said however that he would speak to Ingrid, Murphy’s wife. At the next Qantas board meeting, Ray Gietzelt went out of his way to tell me that he had spoken to Ingrid Murphy who was also confident that an offer of an award in the Order of Australia had never been made to Lionel Murphy.

    All the key people in this matter are now deceased, so it is unlikely that we will get any further clarification.

  • John Menadue. The Dismissal – Forty years on. A smoking gun

    Repost from 27/10/2015

    The evidence continues to mount against those who collaborated in the dismissal of the Whitlam government. To obfuscate and cover their tracks, those who collaborated in the dismissal and their establishment friends spare no effort to criticize the performance of the Whitlam government. Those attacks are becoming quite threadbare. It is amazing what people with guilty consciences do to try and justify outrageous behavior or avoid responsibility or change the subject!

    The fact is that they collaborated in the dismissal of a democratically elected government.

    In contrast Gough Whitlam, after forty years, is more and more vindicated.

    Those who collaborated in the dismissal of the Whitlam government were our ‘betters’ – a governor-general, two high court judges, parliamentary leaders, a media magnate and the business elite.

    I have written in my book ‘Things you learn along the way’ (pages 148-167) about the deceit of many of the collaborators. In a post in this blog on 21 October last year ‘Farewell to Gough Whitlam’, I drew attention to the words of the late Senator Reg Withers, the leader of the coalition in the senate, that he could not have held the numbers much longer in the senate. My strong view is that John Kerr’s premature intervention saved Malcolm Fraser.

    Now Professor Jenny Hocking, in her new book ‘The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know about November 1975’ adds to the revelations of not only Sir Garfield Barwick and Sir Anthony Mason. She tells us that John Kerr was in direct and secret telephone contact with Malcolm Fraser in the critical period before the dismissal. In her research Jenny Hocking has found a posthumous record of the late Senator Reg. Withers. This record, quoted below highlights conversations between John Kerr and Malcolm Fraser.

    “Withers reveals that not only had Kerr decided to act against Whitlam in the week before 11 November 1975, but that both he and Fraser knew this. Withers confirms that the Governor-General and the Leader of the Opposition were in secret telephone contact, using their secure private numbers. Withers recounts that he was in Fraser’s office in early November when Kerr contacted Fraser using the private number for the Leader of the Opposition’s parliamentary office. Nobody knew what his private number was except Tamie, Withers said. Fraser told the caller that he could be contacted on that number at any time … Fraser then asked the called for their number, repeating as he wrote it down, ‘I can also ring you on this number?’ … As Fraser hung up he said to Withers ‘You never heard this conversation’. “

    This really is a smoking gun.

    It confirms what I said in 1999 in my book.

    “ … Fraser believed that Kerr was in fear of dismissal. Further confirmation that Kerr had revealed to Fraser his insecurity was given to me by Fraser in a discussion on 28 January 1976. My file note reads ‘Governor-General encouragement to the Opposition. On 28 January this year – 1976 – Mr Fraser said – on the street outside West Block that on his first meeting with the Governor General during the supply crisis -21 October – the Governor-General had said that he could not give Whitlam any inkling of what he had in mind or Whitlam would be immediately on the telephone to London seeking the Governor-General’s dismissal.’

    “Malcolm Fraser has denied saying this to me as reported by Paul Kelly in November 1975. Kelly reported ‘When I asked Fraser about Menadue’s account of his note, he insisted that he (Menadue) was wrong. Fraser said that during the crisis he was aware that Kerr felt his position was at risk from Whitlam but Fraser is adamant that Kerr did not act improperly by saying this to him during their talks’. I stand by my account.” End of quote from book.

    In light of Jenny Hocking’s revelations, I stand even more in support of my account that John Kerr conveyed to Malcolm Fraser that he had in mind to dismiss the Whitlam Government.

    That is an outrageous thing for a Governor-General to do. It was quite contrary to convention developed over centuries that the Head of State acts on the advice of his or her Prime Minister. It also highlights personal deceit by the Governor- General.

    I am also certain that Rupert Murdoch knew that a dismissal was in prospect. In my book in 1999, I recorded a discussion with Rupert Murdoch.

    “I did have lunch with (Rupert Murdoch) and Ken Cowley on 7 November 1975, in Canberra at a Kingston restaurant. … In my record of 11 December about that lunch with Murdoch five weeks earlier I wrote

    ‘Rupert Murdoch told many of his friends that Mr Fraser had informed him that the Governor-General had given him (Fraser) an assurance that if he held on long enough there would be a general election before Christmas … although I have no direct information. He did tell me however on 7 November that he was quite certain that there would be an election before Christmas and an election specifically for the House of Representatives. I suggested to him that a half-Senate election was the only possibility. He rejected this view and said that he believed that there would certainly be a House of Representatives election before Christmas and that he would be staying in Australia until this occurred. He was very confident of the outcome of any election and even mentioned to me the position to which I might be appointed in the event of the Liberal victory – Ambassador to Japan. ‘

    “Murdoch denies my account of our lunch. I stand by it. Murdoch was intimately involved with Fraser in the dismissal.” End of quote from book.

    Eighteen months later I was on my way to Japan.

    I have found on other occasions that Rupert Murdoch has very convenient memory lapses, like his request to become the Australian High Commissioner to London.

    Once again, the Jenny Hocking revelations add strong support to the view that Malcolm Fraser knew what John Kerr was going to do. It also explains why Rupert Murdoch threw his newspapers into a frontal attack on the Whitlam Government in October and November 1975. He also applied direct public pressure on John Kerr to ‘do his duty’ and dismiss Gough Whitlam.

    What do the collaborators now say in light of these new revelations about the propriety of a Governor-General dismissing an elected government that had a majority in the House of Representatives? In that process he collaborated with judges, senior members of parliament and the media.

    We used to think that our ‘betters’ believed in tradition, conventions, parliament and the independence of the judiciary. People of power and privilege find it hard to keep their head and accept that they must play by the rules that they expect others to observe.

    How naïve we were to trust them then and even now!

    Yet our society depends on trusting other people. So for me that betrayal of trust is the most wounding of all.

    Many of these collaborators have left or been purged from public life. Rupert Murdoch  seems to spend much of his time twittering. He now has to be content with the head of a National Rugby League chief.

    I will be writing separately about Jenny Hocking’s revelations on the role of the Queen and Buckingham Palace in the dismissal.

  • John Menadue. What has the government done for us?

    Repost from 25/02/2015

    Many will recall in the Monty Python film, the Life of Brian, an anti-Roman revolutionary played by John Cleese, but who reminds me of Joe Hockey, asks rhetorically about the Romans, ‘What have they ever given us?’  Expecting the answer ‘Nothing’, he is irritated when he is told that they provided aqueducts. Cleese’s character slowly concedes further points, until he asks ‘Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water system and public health – what have the Romans ever done for us?’  And still someone chips in with another suggestion of what the Romans have done.

    Clearly the Liberal Party holds a similar view to the anti-Roman revolutionary. Its platform says ‘That only businesses and individuals are the creators of wealth and employment’.

    The Commission of Audit in its highly ideological report assumes also that government and ‘red tape’ must be cut back.

    Like the John Cleese character, conservatives choose to ignore the great pioneering and continuing role of governments in our community and mixed economy – roads and railways, power, water and sewerage, law and public order, security, education, hospitals, galleries, museums and national parks.  I could go on!

    In world terms, we have a small public sector in Australia. Including all levels of government, our public sector is less than 35% of GDP. The OECD average size of government is over 40% of GDP. In the successful northern Europeans countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordics, the public sector exceeds 43% of GDP. And they have taxes to pay for their successful public sectors.

    Just think of what Norway has done in establishing its public Pension Fund. This fund now has $1 trillion in investment. The fund was established by the Norwegian government in the 1970s when Norway began to develop its oil and gas resources. If only we had done something similar to tax the super profits of mining companies in the recent mining boom. We would now have a stronger and more diversified economy. Instead we have companies like Rio Tinto returning $7.8 b to shareholders in a share buyback.

    The successful economies of the world have all invested heavily in the public sector to enhance human capital in areas such as education, science, research and development, and innovation. But in the name of economy and reducing waste, we are reducing government funding in these areas. We don’t even have a Minister for Science.

    No country has ever achieved greatness by cutting back on key government activities. This is not to say that the government sector should be large. But it should be effective and efficient.

    Just look at some of the false economies that are part of the current political environment in Australia that would damage the public sector and the public interest.

    • The government is considering cutting back the Australian Bureau of Statistics and possibly the five year census. But so much of ABS data is essential for good decision-making in both the public and private sectors.
    • We have cut back on policy and administrative skills in commonwealth departments and more and more we contract it out to so-called independent and professional management companies that have little or no corporate memory. One consequence of the scaling back of government expertise was the pink-batts mess.
    • The economists we see and hear so much of on TV are usually in the pay of big corporations and the banks. They are unlikely to give us an independent assessment in such areas as privatisation and superannuation. Cut backs in university funds have resulted in fewer intellectuals working in the public square.
    • Late last year the former Assistant Commissioner of the Australian Tax Office warned in a letter to the Australian Financial Review that repeated efficiency dividends had seriously hurt the ATO’s ability to collect tax. In the recent budget, the ATO had its funding slashed by $189 million with more than 3,000 jobs to go. With corporate tax avoidance almost endemic what a strange time to be cutting back ATO staff.  My mother would have said it was ‘penny wise and pound foolish’. Economists would call it a false economy.
    • The public sector is often more efficient than its private counterparts. For example, private health insurance firms have operating costs, including profit that are three times higher than Medicare.
    • Comparing ‘apples with apples’ public hospitals are as efficient as private hospitals. Schools in the public and private sectors that enrol similar students turn out much the same results
    • The derided ‘red tape’ is often the means to protect the public interest. No wonder private ideologues don’t like it.
    • Governments can borrow much more cheaply than private corporations, but it is seldom mentioned.

    We have been encouraged to forget that our prosperity is based on both public and private goods. To many people government has become ‘invisible’, except as a vehicle for welfare. Australians have lost sight of the contribution of the mixed economy, not only providing public goods, but also in ensuring that the forces of greed and short-sightedness don’t lead to economic collapse.

    It is noteworthy that despite the continued denigration of government and the public sector, the three most trusted institutions in Australia are public institutions – the High Court, the ABC and the Reserve Bank. In the survey by Essential Research, there was not a private group in the top eight most-trusted groups and institutions in Australia. The three least trusted groups were business, trade unions and political parties.

    There is a major and important role for governments to play. We need to assert the importance of the economic role of government in our mixed economy. We should stop apologising for government.

  • John Menadue. Cricket and the sound of summer.

    For me, the most memorable comment of the cricket season so far has been by Steve Smith, the Australian captain, explaining that the VB logo on their jackets wasn’t really advertising alcohol. It was only ‘branding’.

    I notice that he is now promoting Kentucky Fried Chicken.  I am waiting for his explanation of how that helps combat obesity.

    A sad feature of the current season was the untimely death of Phillip Hughes. There was much public sympathy from the players. It was surprising that they did not fund a memorial foundation. They could afford to. In 2014 out top five players had salaries of over $20 m between them.

    But the best cricket writing of the year was Geoff Lemon in his piece ‘Just not cricket – how Channel 9 is destroying a legacy’.  for his story about Slats, Heals, Tubby, Binga eta al, see link below.

    http://gu.com/p/45d92/sbl

  • John Menadue and Peter Hughes. Slogans vs Facts on Boat Arrivals, Part 2

    Reposted from 23/09/2015

    Tony Abbott did not stop the boats

    In this blog yesterday (22 September 2015) we pointed out that Tony Abbott kept the door open for tens of thousands of boat arrivals by opposing legislation that would have enabled implementation of the Malaysia Arrangement in September 2011. By this action, he helped turn on the green light for people smugglers.

    Moreover, the data just does not support the claim that, after coming to power in September 2013, Tony Abbott “stopped the boats”. The media uncritically accepted the Coalition’s line in the confused period of the changeover of governments and in the context of drama and secrecy surrounding a small number of boat turn-backs.

    The data shows that the downward trend in boat arrivals began in August 2013. By October and November 2013 maritime asylum seeker arrivals had dropped by 90% compared to the corresponding two months in 2012 (547 arrivals versus 5115 arrivals). These reductions occurred well before the first boat turnaround by the Coalition Government on 19 December 2013. See table below:

    Number of illegal maritime arrivals who arrived in Australia by month            (1 January 2011 to 31 December 2014), by port arrival date.

     

    SIEVS/BOATS IMAs
    2011 January 3 223
    February 3 149
    March 7 419
    April 6 318
    May 6 333
    June 4 235
    July 4 228
    August 5 335
    September 4 319
    September Abbott failure to support Malaysian Arrangement
    October 5 259
    November 10 734
    December 13 1,070
    TOTAL 70 4,622
    2012 January 5 301
    February 9 849
    March 3 110
    April 11 837
    May 16 1,286
    June 24 1,642
    July 31 1,756
    August 37 2,078
    September 31 2,062
    October 47 2,452
    November 44 2,663
    December 18 1,017
    TOTAL 276 17,053
    2013 January 11 541
    February 17 973
    March 35 2,320
    April 47 3,329
    May 47 3,252
    June 40 2,750
    July 48 4,230
    19 July 2013 Rudd announcement not to settle IMAs in Australia
    August 25 1,585
    September 15 829
    October 5 339
    November 5 208
    December 7 355
    19 Dec 2013 First Abbott turn-backs
    TOTAL 302 20,711
    2014 January 0 3
    February 0 1
    March 0 0
    April 0 0
    May 0 0
    June 0 0
    July 1 157
    August 0 0
    September 0 3
    October 0 0
    November 0 0
    December 0 4
    TOTAL 1 168

    The source of this data is the Senate Select Committee on the Recent Allegations relating to Conditions and Circumstances at the Regional Processing Centre in Nauru: Submission 31 from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP). Crew are excluded. 

    Note that the table refers to the number of ‘Illegal’ Maritime Arrivals (IMAs). ‘Illegals’ is not a term that we think is appropriate, but the term is used in the material from DIBP.

    Three measures put in place by the Labor Government before the election caused the dramatic fall in the number arrivals, (allowing for a short time lag).

    The first was “enhanced screening” of Sri Lankans and quick return of non-refugees to Sri Lanka.

    The second was a decision by Indonesia, at Australia’s urging, that Iranians could not enter Indonesia without visas.

    The third and most important was the announcement by Kevin Rudd on the 19 July 2013 that in future any persons coming by boat, who were found to be refugees, would not be settled in Australia. We may argue about the wisdom of that policy, but it effectively crippled the people-smugglers.

    Fortuitously for the Abbott Government when it was sworn in on 18 September 2013, the flow of maritime arrivals was well on its way to being finished as a result of measures already taken.

    By the time Operation Sovereign Borders geared up for its first boat turn-back on 19 December 2013, the number of boats was down from 48 in July to 7 in December.

    Operation Sovereign Borders was applied to the “tail end” of a phenomenon that had largely been stopped. The game-changer was Kevin Rudd’s announcement in July 2013.

    Arguably, boat turn backs would not have been ‘successful’ at all without the July 2013 decision. For example, the Navy and Customs were able to turn back three boats in December 2013. It’s hard to believe that it would have been physically possible to turn back 48 boats if they had continued to arrive at the monthly rate that occurred in July 2013 and that Indonesia would have quietly acquiesced.

    Tony Abbott’s role in “stopping the boats” was at the margins and vastly overrated.

    John Menadue was Secretary, Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs 1980-83. Peter Hughes was a senior officer in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship for 30 years until he retired as Deputy Secretary in 2011.

     

  • John Menadue and Peter Hughes. Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals. Part 1

    Reposted from 22/09/2015

    How Tony Abbott helped to keep the door open for people smugglers.

    The ABC provided us with excellent coverage of the Turnbull-Abbott shoot out, but the various commentators still swallowed the myth that Tony Abbott stopped the boats. That is a great piece of spin, but the reality is different.

    This blog on 26 July 2015 argued that Tony Abbott did not stop the boats. The game changer was the announcement by Kevin Rudd on 19 July 2013, two months before the election, that any persons arriving irregularly by boat would not be settled in Australia. Boat arrivals fell quickly and dramatically as a result of this announcement, coming on top of other measures the Labor government had already taken. We will update that blog in the next day or so in Part 2.

    For the present, however, our argument is that Tony Abbott kept the door open for tens of thousands of boat arrivals in the first place. His failure to support the Malaysia Arrangement in September 2011 resulted in the surge of boat arrivals over the next two years.

    Consider key dates. In May 2011 the Australian and Malaysian governments announced an ‘in principle’ arrangement that up to 800boat arrivals would be transferred from Australia to Malaysia for their asylum claims to be heard and, in response, Australia would be prepared to accept 4,000 refugees from Malaysia. The arrangement with Malaysia was signed on 25 July 2011. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) gave it qualified support.

    At that stage, people arriving irregularly by boat were running at about 2-300 per month. The table below shows the numbers at that time and what followed in the following 28 months.

    Number of illegal maritime arrivals who arrived in Australia by month            (1 January 2011 to 31 December 2014), by port arrival date. 

    SIEVS/BOATS IMAs
    2011 January 3 223
    February 3 149
    March 7 419
    April 6 318
    May 6 333
    June 4 235
    July 4 228
    August 5 335
    September 4 319
    September Abbott failure to support Malaysian Arrangement
    October 5 259
    November 10 734
    December 13 1,070
    TOTAL 70 4,622
    2012 January 5 301
    February 9 849
    March 3 110
    April 11 837
    May 16 1,286
    June 24 1,642
    July 31 1,756
    August 37 2,078
    September 31 2,062
    October 47 2,452
    November 44 2,663
    December 18 1,017
    TOTAL 276 17,053
    2013 January 11 541
    February 17 973
    March 35 2,320
    April 47 3,329
    May 47 3,252
    June 40 2,750
    July 48 4,230
    19 July 2013 Rudd announcement not to settle IMAs in Australia
    August 25 1,585
    September 15 829
    October 5 339
    November 5 208
    December 7 355
    19 Dec 2013 First Abbott turn-backs
    TOTAL 302 20,711
    2014 January 0 3
    February 0 1
    March 0 0
    April 0 0
    May 0 0
    June 0 0
    July 1 157
    August 0 0
    September 0 3
    October 0 0
    November 0 0
    December 0 4
    TOTAL 1 168

    The source of this data is the Senate Select Committee on the Recent Allegations relating to Conditions and Circumstances at the Regional Processing Centre in Nauru: Submission 31 from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP). Crew are excluded. 

    Note that the table refers to the number of ‘Illegal’ Maritime Arrivals (IMAs). ‘Illegals’ is not a term that we think is appropriate, but the term is used in the material from DIBP.

    On 31 August 2011 the High Court found against the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship’s powers to transfer people to Malaysia under the Arrangement. In response, on 21 September 2011, the Gillard government introduced legislation – the Migration Amendment (Offshore Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2011 – which was designed to modify those parts of the Migration Act which caused the problem in the High Court. There was strong opposition to the Bill in the House of Representatives by the Coalition led by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison who were bitterly critical of Malaysia. Bandt (Greens), Katter and Wilkie also opposed the Bill. Oakeshott said he would also oppose the Bill if there were not specific amendments. As the Bill was doomed, the government decided not to proceed with the legislation. (It was subsequently passed by the parliament in August 2012 after the Houston Report).

    There were some lags in the response of asylum seekers and people smugglers to gear up to the opportunities the Coalition and others had left open for them. The timing of boat arrivals were also affected by bad weather and heavy seas, typically in the period December-March.. Surges of people  of different ethnic background can also change the dynamics of people flow. But it is clear that after the legislation stalled, there was a substantial increase in boat arrivals, particularly from Sri Lanka and Iran. People smugglers saw the High Court decision and the failure of the Australian Parliament to amend the Migration Act as a clear signal that their business could proceed.

    From November 2011 monthly asylum seeker arrivals began to trend up again. In the month of May 2012 they reached 1286 and, allowing for seasonal variations, kept rising inexorably to a monthly peak of 4230 in July 2013.

    The Coalition had made clear its opposition in every possible way to the Malaysia Arrangement. That left the way open for a dramatic increase in boat arrivals.

    The Coalition under Tony Abbott was not interested in stopping the boats at that time. Its primary interest was to stop Labor stopping the boats – and they succeeded. Wikileaks revealed that a key Liberal Party strategist in 2009 told the US Embassy that ‘the more boats that come the better’.

    Political objectives drove Tony Abbott’s actions with little regard for the national interest and or the government’s attempts, in cooperation with Malaysia, to start building a regional cooperation framework to manage boat arrivals.

    There can be no doubt that the implementation of the Malaysia Arrangement, in the context of the numbers at the time, would have stopped the flow of maritime arrivals. It simply removed all incentive to make the last leg of the journey. It is unlikely that all of the 800 places would have been used. Coalition turn-backs have amounted to less than 700 people over a period of two years according to a recent announcement by the Minister Dutton.

    Tony Abbott must bear some responsibility for the more than 32,000 people who arrived irregularly by sea between September 2011 when he frustrated the Malaysia Arrangement and mid-2013 when harsher measures were reluctantly taken by the Labor government.

    As we mentioned above, we will also be updating an earlier blog that shows that Tony Abbott’s actions after the 2013 election were not the key to stopping the boats. The new Abbott Government dealt with the tail end of a dramatically reduced flow of people, but the real game changer was the announcement by Kevin Rudd on 19 July 2013 that any further boat arrivals would not be settled in Australia.

    The secrecy and drama surrounding a small number of boat turn-backs created the impression that they were the decisive factor, but, it’s time for a cooler assessment of the facts.

    John Menadue was Secretary Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs 1980-83. Peter Hughes was a senior officer in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship for 30 years until he retired as Deputy Secretary in 2011.

     

  • John Menadue. Drownings at sea.

    Repost from 22/04/2015

    The recent tragic loss of 800 Libyans in the Mediterranean has given once again an opportunity for the Government to infer that Australia’s refugee policies are designed particularly to stop people drowning at sea.

    It is self-deception or worse for the Government to suggest that its policies towards refugees have been motivated by humanitarian concerns and not political advantage. Perhaps with guilty consciences self-deception is necessary.

    In Opposition the Coalition was not interested in stopping the boats to save people drowning at sea. Its political objective was to stop the Labor Government stopping the boats. That is why the Coalition with cooperation from the populist Greens voted in the Senate against amendments to the Migration Act which would have allowed the Malaysian Arrangement to proceed and curb boat arrivals, in cooperation with UNHCR. By frustrating the government, the Coalition showed no interest in stopping drownings at sea.

    On 10 December 2010 the SMH reported from Wikileaks that ‘A key Liberal Party strategist’ had told a US diplomat in Canberra in November 2009 that the issue of asylum seekers was ‘fantastic’ for the Coalition and ‘that the more boats that come the better’. With such a cynical approach, it’s hard to see much concern for innocent asylum seekers who might drown at sea.

    Scott Morrison told us on many occasions that asylum seekers bring disease, everything from TB to Hepatitis C, to Chlamydia and Syphilis. He told talk-back radio that he had seen asylum seekers bring wads of cash and large displays of jewellery. He urged the Coalition to ramp up its questioning … to capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment. Does that sound like genuine concern for the lives of asylum seekers?

    Scott Morrison and Senator Abetz both called for the registration of asylum seekers moving into residential areas on bridging visas, just like paedophiles. Does that sound like genuine concern for asylum seekers?

    To provoke hostility to asylum seekers, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison both continue to call asylum seekers ‘illegals’. They hope that we would think that asylum seekers were akin to criminals. That didn’t show much concern for the rights of asylum seekers.

    The Coalition’s campaign to demonise asylum seekers was overwhelmingly for political reasons. They succeeded.

    But please spare us the propaganda of suggesting that the Coalition’ policy on refugees was to stop drownings at sea.  It was not. It was crass and cruel politics.

  • John Menadue. Our innovation-averse business culture

    Malcolm Turnbull’s Innovation statement sounded new, but was it? So much of what he said used to be called industry policy-technology parks, offsets, defense technology, support for inventors, and quality assurance. But Malcolm Turnbull dwelt particularly on the need for cultural change in business.

    I think that was new. He said that Australian businesses should be more willing to take risks and less fearful of failure. Many times he said that cultural change in business is essential. He is right.

    We do have a risk-averse business culture. And our society is much the same. We want to be comfortable. After all that is what John Howard urged us to become.

    In 2008, Dr Terry Cutler produced a Green Paper ‘Adventurous Australia’ for the Rudd Government. Following his disappointment with the Rudd government’s response on innovatio he said

    ‘Too many of our business owners or manager have what we might describe as a life-style approach to business. Even many of our so-called business success stories look like under-performers when bench-marked globally. This lifestyle model of business strategy imposes a false ceiling on ambition. Success is having the designer car in the garage and a holiday home or two. … At a recent forum, I actually heard people saying they didn’t need to expand or export because they were doing it quite comfortably as things are.’ 

    In 2012, David Gruen, Deputy Secretary of Treasury said

    ‘Management practices in Australia are mid-range. … We are well below top performers like the US, Germany, Sweden, Japan and Canada, but more similar to France, Italy and the UK. … Australia, like some other countries has a somewhat larger tail of companies with relatively poor management performance.’ 

    In August last year the Governor of the Reserve Bank told a Parliamentary committee that Australian companies were “too risk averse’ in focusing on sustaining a flow of dividends and returning capital rather than investing in future growth.

    We have been told many times about our risk averse business culture. Research and analysis confirm this.

    For example, in association with The Conversation, Roy Green, the Dean of UTS Business School and drawing mainly on OECD data, points to the following problems.

    • Australia still has a long way to go to catch up to its regional and global counter-parts in innovation. We trail well behind China, ROK and Singapore.
    • Australia’s pivot to a digital economy has stalled.
    • Venture capital investment has turned around in countries like the US, South Africa and Hungary, but in Australia it fell significantly between 2009 and 2014.
    • Australia has done little in the past ten years to lower barriers to entrepreneurship.
    • Australian businesses lack a high performance innovation culture.
    • Australia performs poorly on collaboration between the business and research sectors.

    These problems are highlighted in failure of regional linkages. Despite our heavy economic dependence on our region, our business sector has been very slow to respond. It gives lip service to building Asian expertise. But I have yet to learn or meet a board member or a senior executive of any of our top ASX 200 companies who can fluently speak a language of our region. How can we really cooperate well on innovation or indeed many other business areas with such an impediment! Those 200 companies would have over 3,000 senior executives and board members, but no Asian language expertise. That is quite extraordinary. It tells me a lot about business complacency The white male directors’ club keeps appointing people like themselves. They are comfortable as they are in their Anglo comfort zone. But comfortable people are unlikely to be good at innovation

    What is most indicative of the lack of innovation, risk-taking and entrepreneurial flair is the way our Business Council of Australia and other employer groups are invariably pressing governments to change economic policy and industrial relations in their favour. Now they are pressing for reduced company and individual tax and changes in penalty rates. Why don’t they concentrate on managing their own business instead of lobbying governments to fix their problems? They should stick to their knitting.

    So much business energy was spent lobbying against a carbon tax or an ETS that we have missed a decade in developing a new economy based on renewable energy. Many of our entrepreneurs in this field have gone overseas.

    It is not as if our business executives are poorly paid. They are extremely well paid but too often the salary packages are geared to short-term results rather than medium or long term results. Innovation takes time.

    Too often we all become complacent. We acknowledge a problem, take some remedial steps and then go on ‘smoko’ again.

  • John Menadue. The ‘claytons’ NBN

    In his statement on innovation, Malcolm Turnbull said ‘the internet and the technology it enables means we are now part of the truly global market place. It means there are few barriers to entry for Australian businesses, no matter where they are located, right across Australia and they can sell their products and services to just about every corner of the globe.’ 

    The internet is the bedrock for innovation today. But unfortunately, Malcolm Turnbull, as our former Minister for Commerce, damaged the internet. He introduced an internet censorship scheme at the instigation of the copyright cartel. He presided over a pervasive data retention scheme that has imposed a heavy burden on the whole communications sector.

    But the biggest problem is the ‘claytons’ NBN.

    In this blog on 10 September 2015, Rod Tucker, Laureate Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne, commented ‘The NBN; why it’s slow, expensive and obsolete’.

    In The Conversation five days later Rod Tucker commented further ‘Under Turnbull the NBN budget has blown out as much as $A18 b. and on current projections is four years behind the original schedule.’ 

    Paul Budde in his blog BuddeBlog on 29 September 2015 said ‘When the NBN was launched in 2009 one of the goals was to get the country into the top ten of the international ladder. Now in 2015 we have dropped to 42nd position.’

    In this blog on 2 November 2015, Mark Gregory, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT University said ‘The decision by the Coalition government that was implemented by Turnbull in 2013 to adopt the obsolete FTTN technology for a significant percentage of the NBN will, in future years, be seen as economic madness. … The NBN is likely to be the most expensive lemon in Australian history. … ‘

    For further elaboration of these comments, see ‘Malcolm Turnbull and the NBN mess’ in this blog on 3 November 2015.

    And the criticism of Malcolm Turnbull’s stewardship of the NBN is gathering pace.

    In the SMH on 11 December 2015, under the heading ‘Malcolm’s mess: how the Coalition’s NBN came unstuck’, Hannah Francis describes the mess that we now have with the NBN.

    Malcolm Turnbull is right that the internet is the key technology that enables us to be part of the global market. But the high cost, slow and second-rate NBN which is now being rolled out is going to be a major handicap.

    But there may be more to come. In the AFR on 4 December 2015, Andrew Clark said ‘the Turnbull government is in discussions with large telecommunications companies about selling large chunks of the government-owned NBN, including its huge hybrid fibre cable, copper and fixed line networks. A combination of the government’s dire fiscal position and criticism of the progress of NBN is fuelling the decision to engage in what would in effect be the biggest privatisation since the Howard government offloaded Telstra.’

    Could this be an attempt to bury the NBN debacle before the final bills come in?

    Godwin Gretch was an error of judgement without serious national consequences But the errors of judgement on the NBN have profound national consequences.

    In all this sorry mess Jason Clare has gone missing in action.

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. More on second-hand car rent-seekers.

    In my recent blog ‘Rent-seekers in the motor industry‘ I drew attention to the successful lobbying by the motor industry to retain the $12,000 excise duty on used-car imports into Australia and the restriction that imports must be limited to a single second-hand vehicle.

    To defend its position, the Chief Executive of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries has said that there have been instances in New Zealand where used-car imports were linked to the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza, and instances where radioactive cars from the Fukushima nuclear disaster found their way to Russia.

    This type of scare-mongering really exposes the weakness of the case which is designed to protect business interests rather than give consumers lower prices and more choice in second-hand vehicles. The case espoused by the motor industry has descended into farce,

  • John Menadue. Malcolm Turnbull on climate change.

    Since he became Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull has committed himself to Tony Abbott’s policies on climate change. He supports Direct Action. He supports the Abbott government’s carbon reduction targets. At the Paris Conference, the Turnbull government reaffirmed its commitment to the fuel rebate subsidy for miners. It plans to double coal exports.

    In his blog on 7 December 2009, after he was dumped as Leader of the Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull said:

    ‘So, as a humble back-bencher I am sure he [Tony Abbott] won’t complain if I tell a few home truths about the farce that the Coalition’s policy, or lack of policy, on climate change has descended into. 

    To replace dirty coal-fired power stations with cleaner gas-fired ones, or renewables like wind, let alone nuclear power or even coal-fired power with carbon capture and storage is all going to cost money. 

    To get farmers to change the way they manage their land, or plant trees and vegetation all costs money. Somebody has to pay. 

    So any suggestion that you can dramatically cut emissions without cost is, to use a favourite term of Mr Abbott “bullshit”. Moreover he knows it. 

    It is not possible to criticise the new Coalition policy on climate change because it does not exist. 

    As we are being blunt, the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job, do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human-caused global warning. 

    As Tony observed on one occasion “Climate change is crap”, or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, it’s cooling, and the climate change issue is part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the world. 

    The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is “crap” and you don’t need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental fig leave to cover a determination to do nothing. 

    Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the Emissions Trading System, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS, and if the amendments were satisfactory, passing it, and now the blocking of it. … 

    We have given our opponents the irrefutable, undeniable evidence that we cannot be trusted. ‘ 

    Malcolm Turnbull is now taking to the Paris Conference, a policy on climate change that a few years ago he described as ‘crap’ and ‘a fraud’!