John Menadue

  • Steve Hatfield-Dodds. Australians can be sustainable without sacrificing lifestyle or economy.

    A sustainable Australia is possible – but we have to choose it. That’s the finding of a paperpublished today in Nature.

    The paper is the result of a larger project to deliver the first Australian National Outlook report, more than two years in the making, which CSIRO is also releasing today.

    As part of this analysis we looked at whether achieving sustainability will require a shift in our values, such as rejecting consumerism. We also looked at the contributions of choices made by individuals (such as consuming less water or energy) and of choices made collectively by society (such as policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions).

    We found that collective policy choices are crucial, and that Australia could make great progress to sustainability without any changes in social values.

    Competing views

    Few topics generate more heat, and less light, than debates over economic growth and sustainability.

    At one end of the spectrum, “technological optimists” suggest that the marvellous invisible hand will take care of everything, with market-driven improvements in technology automatically protecting essential natural resources while also improving living standards.

    Unfortunately, there is no real evidence to back this, particularly in protecting unpriced natural resources such as ocean fisheries, or the services provided by a stable climate. Instead the evidence suggests we are already crossing important planetary boundaries.

    At the other end of the spectrum, people argue that achieving sustainability will require a rejection of economic growth, or a shift in values away from consumerism and towards a more ecologically attuned lifestyles. We refer to this group as advocating “communitarian limits”.

    A third “institutional reform” approach argues that policy reform can reconcile economic and ecological goals – and is attacked from one side as anti-business alarmism, and from the other as indulging in pro-growth greenwash.

    Income up, environmental pressures down

    My colleagues and I have spent much of the past two years developing a new framework to explore how Australia can decouple economic growth from multiple environmental pressures – including greenhouse emissions, water stress, and the loss of native habitat.

    We use nine linked models to assess interactions between energy, water and food (and links to ecosystem services) in the context of climate change.

    The National Outlook focuses on the intersection of water, energy and food. National Outlook Report, CSIRO

    The project provides projections for more than 20 scenarios, exploring different potential trends for consumption and working hours; energy and resource efficiency; agricultural productivity; new land-sector markets for energy feedstocks and ecosystem services; national and global abatement efforts, climate, and global economic growth.

    While our major focus is on Australia, at the national scale, we also model what might happen globally, and at more detailed state and local scales within Australia.

    We find economic growth and environmental impacts can be decoupled − in the right circumstances. National income per person increases by 12-15% per decade from now to 2050, while the value of economic activity almost triples.

    In stark contrast to income, which rises across all scenarios, environmental performance varies widely. Key environmental indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions, water stress, and native habitat and biodiversity are projected to more than double, stabilise, or fall across different scenarios to 2050.

    As shown in the chart below, we find that energy rises in all scenarios, but that greenhouse emissions can fall at the same time – with the right choices and technologies. Water use can also rise without increasing extractions from already stressed catchments. Food output (here indicated by protein) can increase, while native habitat is restored.

    Hatfield-Dodds et al (2015)

    Many of the 20 scenarios explored would represent substantial progress towards sustainable prosperity.

    Indeed, we find that Australia could begin to repair past damage: restoring significant areas of native habitat and achieving negative emissions (net sequestration) of greenhouse gasses.

    Growth of what?

    We use the normal definition of economic growth as measured by increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the value of goods and services produced in an economy – consistent with the national accounts framework.

    Some authors use a different definition, most notably Herman Daly a leading advocate for a steady state economy. Daly defines growth as an increase in physical economic scale, such as resource extraction, and goes on to argue that indefinite (material) economic growth is not possible.

    While this may be true, for his definition, it can be confusing for people that do not realise he is not referring to GDP growth. Indeed, Daly recently acknowledged that economic (GDP) growth is possible with finite resources and steady material throughput.

    These definitions matter: we project growth (GDP – measured in real dollars, adjusted for inflation) increases by more than 160% in scenarios where domestic material extractions and throughput (measured in tonnes) decreases by around 40%.

    Choosing a sustainable future

    But here is the real crunch: we find these substantial steps toward sustainability could build on policy approaches that are already in place in Australia or other countries. This implies Australia could make enormous progress towards a more sustainable future without a major change in what we value.

    We can be confident that a values shift is not required to achieve these outcomes – at least before 2050 – because none of the scenarios we modelled assume change in values or a new social or environmental ethic.

    Instead, we show that people will make choices to change their behaviour to make the best of particular policy settings. These choices shape production and consumption.

    For instance, we consider increasing Australia’s climate effort in line with other countries would be consistent with Australian public opinion and assessments of Australia’s national interest in limiting the rise in average global temperature to 2°C. So we do not interpret this as implying a change in values.

    But we find collective choices are crucial. For example, individual choices about whether to drive or catch a train to work are strongly shaped by prior collective choices about transport infrastructure. Collective choices are often, but not always implemented through changes in government policy, legislation, and programs.

    We find collective choices explain around 50-90% of differences in environmental performance and resource use across the scenarios we model. Consistent with the institutional reform approach, we find top-down collective choices are particularly important in shaping “public good” outcomes – accounting for at least 83% of the difference between scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions.

    Bottom-up individual choices play a greater role when private and public benefits are aligned. For instance individual choices account for up to half of the difference between scenarios for energy use (33–47%) and non-agricultural water consumption (16–53%).

    While individual choices are important, we find decisions we make as a society are likely to shape Australia’s future sustainability more than the decisions we make as businesses and households.

    Sustainable prosperity is possible, but not predestined. Australia is free to choose.

    Steve Hatfield-Dodds is Chief Scientist, Integration science and public policy, CSIRO. This article was first published in The Conversation on 5 November 2015.

  • John Menadue. The Dismissal. How John Kerr saved Malcolm Fraser forty years ago,

    In my post on 27 October 2015- ‘The Dismissal – Forty years on. A smoking gun’ I pointed out that Jenny Hocking in her recent book confirmed what I had always assumed that John Kerr had given Malcolm Fraser a clear indication of support.

    In her book ‘The Dismissal Dossiers; Everything You Were Never Meant to Know About November 1975’ MUP. Jenny Hocking points out quite clearly from material she has discovered that John Kerr was in regular and secret telephone contact with Malcolm Fraser in the week before the dismissal. That really is a smoking gun.

    In my post, I said that John Kerr’s intervention had saved Malcolm Fraser. I am convinced that that was the case. We didn’t fully understand at the time but in retrospect it is clear that John Kerr intervened prematurely in a political dispute which saved Malcolm Fraser.

    Let me set out what I think are important factors leading me to the conclusion that John Kerr acted prematurely and saved Malcolm Fraser. Most of these facts are included in my book ‘Things you learn along the way’ which was published in 1999.

    First, Gough Whitlam was dominating the parliamentary forum on the Opposition’s refusal  to pass the finance bills. In his speeches, Gough Whitlam was able to draw on the historic struggle between the Crown and the parliament in Britain. The outcome of that struggle was the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters. That was what was at stake in the Australian parliament in October and November 1975. Malcolm Fraser was no match for Gough Whitlam in the debate over these important constitutional and political issues.

    Second, public opinion had swung very clearly in support of the Whitlam Government that the finance bills should be passed. Opinion polls showed that well over 60% favoured passing the budget. I would not conclude from that that the Whitlam government would have survived a general election, but on the issue of passing the budget bills, the attitude of the Australian public became very clear. The momentum was with Gough Whitlam on this issue.

    Thirdly, as the parliamentary struggle continued, there were increasing doubts whether all coalition senators would continue to oppose the budget bills. It is now beyond doubt that some coalition senators would have broken and either abstained or passed the budget bills. In my book I quoted what Senator Reg Withers, the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate in 1975 told the The Australian newspaper on 6 November 1985. He said

    ‘For all I know, my blokes might have collapsed on the 12th. I don’t know. You just hope day after day you would get through until the adjournment. … There were two senators who told me that they were prepared to go. … I reckon we had another week. If I had got through that week, then you would look at the following week. I would have lost them some time about 20 November onwards. I know I would have lost them in the run-up to 30 November, but it wouldn’t have been two then, it would have been ten.’ 

    Fourthly, it was very clear that the coalition generally was very concerned about the course that it had embarked on. In my book I said

    ‘I recall speaking to Margo Anthony, Doug Anthony’s wife, in February 1976. She said that the Country Party had become so discouraged and disillusioned in the days before 11 November, that she had arranged a social get-together for the night of 11 November to try and boost morale and keep spirits up. As it turned out, it was a celebration rather than a wake.’ 

    These four factors convinced me that Malcolm Fraser would have lost the political contest and the budget bills would have been passed, but that he was saved by the premature intervention of John Kerr.

    (As a postscript to the above there is a recent comment by Tony Eggleton.the former Liberal Party Director in 1975. He said in The Australian on November 5,2015 ‘the view of senior Liberals that morning (of November 11  1975) was that unless Fraser prevailed that day then’it is all over…there had been quite a few people hanging in there who wouldn’t continue to support him’)

    In my book I drew attention to the view of Buckingham Palace that John Kerr had acted prematurely. This view was clearly conveyed in a conversation between Tim McDonald, the Official Secretary at Australia House London and its most senior Foreign Affairs officer and Sir Martin Charteris who was personal secretary and political adviser to the Queen at the time of the dismissal. Tim McDonald sent me a note of his discussions with Charteris. The note said

    ‘The Palace shared the view that Kerr acted prematurely. If faced with a constitutional crisis which appeared likely to involve the Head of State, my advice would have been that [the Queen] should only intervene when a clear sense of inevitability had developed in the public that she must act. This had been Kerr’s mistake.’ 

    Malcolm Fraser’s political life was saved by the premature intervention of John Kerr. In the process he destroyed Gough Whitlam. The reputation of Gough Whitlam is continually enhanced as more and more revelations keep piling up but a great injustice has been done to him.

     

  • John Menadue. The unfairness and waste in health. Private Health Insurance is the real culprit.

    Medibank Pte has been in dispute with the Calvary Hospital Group and now with UnitingCare over performance in their hospitals.

    At last our largest private health insurance company, MBP has come to understand that the private providers, hospitals and doctors, are really in control. These private providers determine the quality of care and its cost. The PHI companies like MBP are really powerless to control both the quality and cost of healthcare. They need to lift their game .But they are in a bind.

    The problem that the MBP faces is precisely the same problem as the US healthcare system faces. In the US hundreds of competing private health insurers do not have the power to control quality and price setting by providers. If a private insurance company is too tough the provider will take the business to a competitor. The worldwide lesson is that only a single insurer can have a real effect on costs and promote quality.

    The CEO of MBP has got into trouble by confronting the powerful providers, in this case Calvary and UnitingCare. He has resigned!  In his exit comments, the CEO of MBP, George Savvides said he was seeking to ‘reposition MBP from being a payer of bills, to a player in the health system’. He could not be more precise and correct. The private health insurance companies meekly accept the prices set by providers, both hospitals and doctors. I read Savvides’ comments to mean that the providers rebuffed him in his attempts to improve the quality and contain the cost of care. And his board did not support him. The providers have won again.

    Apparently Savvides was insisting on two things. The first was that MBP would refuse to pay when any of a list of 165 ‘highly preventable adverse events’ occurred, including preventable falls in hospital and presumably hospital-caused infections. Secondly he proposed that MBP would refuse to pay hospitals for unplanned patient readmissions that occur within 28 days of a procedure, compared with seven days previously.

    Good luck to PHI companies like MBP who refuse to be passive payers of bills and want to have a say in the cost and quality of care by private providers particularly in private hospitals.

    ‘Adverse events’ are a major cost in all health systems – mistakes, injury, infections and even death. Many are avoidable and many are not. Avoidable adverse events probably cost well over $ 5b p.a. in the Australian health sector. Good clinicians are caught up in a bad system. See link to my previous post ‘The personal, public and social costs of mistakes in health’.

    Other PHI companies like BUPA must similarly be concerned about the difficulty in controlling provider costs. That is the reason why PHI premiums rise significantly each year. Since John Howard introduced the rebate on PHI in 1999 the cost of PHI premiums has increased 150%.Overall prices have increased by less than 50%.Not surprisingly a reader panel in the Sydney Morning Herald has found that 64% of people don’t believe that PHI provides value for money. The Minister for Health describes many PHI policies as ‘junk’

    But PHI companies like MBP and Bupa contribute to high costs. Through GAP insurance that they provide they have underwritten an enormous increase in specialist fees in private hospitals. These specialists receive remuneration three to four times what is paid in public hospitals. And not to be out done on specialist fees the major private hospital; Ramsay Healthcare for example paid its CEO $31 m in 2014. No wonder MBP wants to get hospital costs down!

    In addition to the inability of PHI companies to put pressure on health costs, there is the problem of waste in the delivery of health care – excessive pathology and radiology tests, over-treatment and over-prescribing. In the recent Four Corners program we were told about a tsunami of over-diagnosis and treatment. We heard about

    • Care that is ineffective and sometimes unsafe;
    • That perhaps a half of MRIs, are unnecessary;
    • At least half arthroscopies are unnecessary;
    • At least 20% of knee replacements may be inappropriate;
    • The majority of MRI’s and CT’s for back pain are a complete waste;
    • The scientific evidence for spinal fusion is just not there;
    • As much as a third of money for stenting is potentially being wasted;
    • And up to 43% of invasive coronary angiograms are unnecessary.

    This waste is common across the health sector, both public and private, but I suggest that the problems are greater in the private sector and private hospitals in particular.

    The Four Corners program highlighted the particular problems in private hospitals.

    • ‘Stents are more likely to be given in the private sector than in the public’
    • ‘Most spinal fusion is done in private hospitals’
    • Angiograms are performed ‘more frequently in the private system’
    • ‘In the last ten years we have forked out nearly $486 m. for knee MRIs in the private sector alone.’
    • ‘It does seem that over-treatment is in the private sector’.

    Four Corners did not examine Work Cover and the cost of injuries in the workplace, particularly back injury when it is treated in private hospitals.

    Many clinicians and others in the Four Corners program pointed out that there is a great deal of data in all these areas but unfortunately it is invariably in silos and not readily accessible to the public so that we can effectively address the problems of ineffective, wasteful and sometimes harmful medical procedures. There are large variations in medical procedures between public and private hospitals and regions. We have a long way to go in rigorous evidence based care. Accreditation in itself does not tell us much about the quality of care.

    There are particular reasons why we should be concerned about what is happening in some private hospitals.

    • Fee for service in private hospitals and in the private sector generally provides a perverse incentive. Clinicians are rewarded for volume of work rather than the quality of care and patient outcomes. In the public sector, clinicians are more likely to be remunerated on a salaried or sessional basis without the financial incentives for over treatment.
    • In the public hospitals peer review is much more widely practiced with mistakes, adverse events and poor performance more readily corrected.
    • Dealing with less complicated cases, many private hospitals do not have the breadth and depth of experience and the skills that are found in public hospitals and particularly teaching hospitals. Some of the larger private hospitals are well run with peer review and strict accreditation. Some have training registrars and medical students. However the quality of care is patchy, particularly in smaller private hospitals.
    • I am also advised that private hospitals are much more likely to import minimally qualified nurses on temporary visas. This inevitably leads to more adverse events.
    • Private hospitals work much more on a cottage industry basis with visiting medical practitioners coming and going between the hospital and their private rooms. With hundreds of visiting specialists it is very difficult to develop professional collaboration and peer review and professional esprit des corps when they are coming and going on a part time basis.

    Australia is spending $10 b. to subsidise private health insurance. In 2014/15 this was made up as follows

    • $6.3 b for direct outlays as in Budget Paper 1
    • $1.5b tax free income rebate.
    • $1.0b benefit for exemption from Medicare levy surcharge.

    The total is $8.8 b for 2014/15. This year it would be higher and before we look at the inflation effects of PHI

    Most of the direct outlay of over $6b benefits higher income people accessing high cost private hospitals in the name of choice .In the process they jump the hospital queue.

    MBP’s attempt to address some of these problems in negotiations with Calvary Hospitals and UnitingCare is the first public sign that I have seen of PHI companies recognizing their serious problems. The ‘canary in the mine’ is warning us about the quality and cost of private hospital care that is   generously subsidised by the Australian taxpayer.

    PHI’s are financial intermediaries. They do not deliver healthcare. They are proving unable to effectively manage quality and contain costs in private hospitals. George Savvides has found out the hard way. But the government doesn’t care and diverts attention with nonsense about the unsustainability of our health system. Abolishing the $10b subsidy for PHI would greatly improve the quality of health care, reduce costs and make our health care system much more sustainable.

    But the lobbying power of PHI companies and private hospitals like Ramsay Healthcare frightens almost all politicians and particularly Commonwealth health ministers from both sides of politics.

    Taxpayer subsidised PHI will destroy our world class health system in the same way that PHI has caused disaster in the US.

  • John Menadue. Malcolm Turnbull and the NBN mess

    As Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull had two major responsibilities. They were the public broadcasters, ABC and SBS, and the NBN.

    As I pointed out in an earlier post, the ABC needs rebuilding after the harsh budget cuts and termination of the Australian Network contract while Malcolm Turnbull was the minister.

    The plight of the NBN is much more serious. Consider comments by people who have followed this issue very closely.

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

    ‘The Coalition sold the public a product that was supposed to be fast, one third the cost and arrive sooner than what Labor was offering us. Instead the Coalition’s NBN will be so slow it will be obsolete by the time it’s in place, it will cost about the same as Labor’s fibre to the premises NBN and it won’t arrive on our doorstep much sooner. By my reckoning we didn’t get a good deal’

    In The Conversation on 15 September 2015, Rod Tucker commented further:

    ‘Under Turnbull, the NBN budget has blown out as much as $A18 billion and on current projections is four years behind the original schedule. Worse still, additional funding to help cover the cost blow-out will need to be obtained from outside sources. This could be difficult given that the fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) technology to be rolled out will soon be obsolete and will not be attractive to an investor looking for a reasonable long-term return on investment. This problem is just one of many that the incoming Communications Minister is going to have to solve. … Broadband customers Atlanta, for example, now have the choice of between 1 Gbps connections with Google or 2 Gbps symmetrical (upstream and downstream) services with Comcast. The NBN’s FTTN service will be 20 to 40 times slowed than Comcast. … These are just some of the things that need to be done to help get the NBN back on track. Let’s hope that Turnbull picks a successor who is up to the task. It’s not too late to fix the NBN but time is running out.’ 

    Renai LeMay in delimiter.com.au on 14 November 2015 pulled no punches

    ‘I was present at Turnbull’s very first press conference after Abbott appointed him as the new Shadow Communications Minister five years ago in 2010. And today, I was in parliament house in Canberra as Turnbull announced his challenge. I have borne witness to every step Turnbull has made along the way in the portfolio over the last five years. So let me be the first to say it. And I’ll say it loud and clear. Malcolm Turnbull has been an absolutely terrible Communications Minister. … The strength of the [ALP] policy was always that it would have laid the foundation for the next century of world-class telecommunications infrastructure in this country, fuelling the development of a massive digital economy and better health, education, business and social outcomes. Along the way it would also have completely broken Telstra’s stranglehold on market competition. Turnbull’s appalling multi-technology mix approach to the NBN, will in sharp contrast, set Australia significantly back. The policy will result in massive cash windfalls to the likes of Telstra and Optus, allowing Australia’s two major telcos to offload their outdated copper and HFC cable infrastructure at a premium cost to the taxpayer. Meanwhile, that same taxpayer will face a legacy of decades of technical failures stemming from Turnbull’s insistence that copper cables and 25 Mbps speeds are good enough for Australia’s broadband needs.’ 

    On 29 September 2015, Paul Budde in BuddeBlog said

    ‘As we predicted when the government changed its plans for the NBN, this would take, not the six months indicated by the minister, but at least two-three years. So in all we have lost at least another two years. During that time the OPEX costs of the company continued, as well as significant extra costs in political reviews, consultancy reports, new designs, pilots and so on – all of these costs eating into a limited budget that, in the case of government funds, will start to run out in 18 months time. On top of that NBN Co also faces a skill shortage, so it has plenty of headaches ahead. … 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 the 42nd position. … With the rest of the world now clearly moving towards FTTH Australia is set to linger on the bottom of the international ladder for many years to come, … if we want to be competitive in our Asian and globalised market we will need to lift our digital profile among our trading partners, and the NBN is key in that. We shouldn’t stop at the already out of date multi-mix technologies. These should be extended as soon as possible to a fully blown FTTH network in line with what other developed nations are building.’ 

    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 malaise that the telecommunications industry finds itself in has been exacerbated by the efforts of the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull who, as the Minister for Communications, spent two years doing very little whilst telling everyone that he was on the cusp of finding solutions for a variety of problems besetting the industry. … 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. … In what is likely to be the greatest con in Australian history, the government promised that the NBN would be completed at the end of 2016 and it would be built for $29.5 b. The latest projections from NBN Co indicate the NBN should be completed in 2020 or possibly later and the cost for Turnbull’s MTM approach will now be at least $56 b. … [The NBN] is likely to be the most expensive lemon in Australian history that was to be built with an impossible deadline as was widely pointed out by industry and academia at the time.’ 

    Can the new Minister for Communications, Mitch Fifield, get us back on track? It is going to be very hard. A major problem will be to unscramble the fibre-to-the-node contracts that have been let.

    Malcolm Turnbull has left us with an awful mess. It would almost seem that the NBN was set up to fail.

     

  • John Menadue. Abbott lectures London on how to ‘stop the boats’.

    Tony Abbott has been at it again, this time in London, claiming that he stopped the boats and that Europeans should follow suit. It is an oft repeated untruth that he stopped the boats. His one-liners are not supported by the facts. But the lie is deeply imbedded.

    Last month, Peter Hughes and I posted two articles on ‘Slogans vs Facts on boat arrivals’. Part 1 was entitled ‘How Tony Abbott helped to keep the door open for people-smugglers. Part 2 was entitled ‘Tony Abbott did not stop the boats’

    Let me briefly summarise a few facts from these two posts.

    First, the Coalition decision to oppose legislation in September 2011 to implement the Malaysian Arrangement gave the green light for people-smugglers to expand their business. People arriving by boat increased from 319 in September 2011 to 4,230 in July 2013. By opposing the implementation of the Malaysian Arrangement the Coalition showed that it did not want to stop the boats, but for political reasons wanted to stop Labor stopping the boats.

    Secondly, the rapid decline in people arriving by boat began in July 2013 when Kevin Rudd announced that in future no people arriving by boat would ever be settled in Australia. As a result people arriving on 47 boats fell from 4,230 in July 2013 to 355 on 7 boats in December 2013 when Tony Abbott’s Operation Sovereign Borders and boat turn-backs commenced. By the time OSB came into effect, boat arrivals had turned into a trickle. The game was almost over. Tony Abbott made a quite marginal contribution to stopping the boats. With boat arrivals down to 7 in December 2013, turn-backs were possible. They would not have been possible if they had been running at 47 a month as they were in July 2013.

    I often ponder why the untruths about boat arrivals have become so embedded and accepted in public discourse. I suggest there are three main reasons.

    First, Tony Abbott was able to effectively exploit xenophobia. He was very successful with his one liners in many areas. He did not bother to look at the facts, but successfully prosecuted a successful public relations and political campaign. Perceptions counted more than facts.

    Second, the ALP has been reluctant to argue that its hard-line policies had in effect stopped the boats. It was fearful of offending many of its traditional supporters who favoured a more generous approach to asylum seekers.

    Thirdly, under-resourced journalists didn’t bother to check the facts and they locked themselves in to uncritical acceptance of government propaganda. They now find it hard to accept that they were conned.

    The facts are clear. In September 2011 Tony Abbott’s policies gave a green light to people smugglers. The dramatic fall in boat arrivals commenced many months before Abbott’s Operation Sovereign Borders came into effect.

  • Mark Gregory. The new PM and the NBN. ‘An expensive lemon’

    The National Broadband Network (NBN) is now delayed by between five and ten years and will cost significantly more over a 20 year lifetime due to the government’s decision to shift from a Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) fixed access network to the Multi-Technology Mix (MTM) approach that includes Fibre to the Node (FTTN) and Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC).

    The malaise that the telecommunications industry finds itself in has been exacerbated by the efforts of the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull who, as the Minister for Communications, spent two years doing very little whilst telling everyone that he was on the cusp of finding solutions for a variety of problems besetting the industry.

    In his time as Communications Minister Turnbull was responsible or involved with a remarkably small number of bills before Parliament, no doubt because the Senate would not support a large majority of the Coalition’s unsubstantiated justifications and rationale for legislative and regulatory change to the NBN and the broader telecommunications market.

    In a nation that appears to have an endless supply of state and federal funding for roads and hand-outs to multi-nationals that pay little or no tax, 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 to be economic madness.

    Any belief that Turnbull would, on becoming Prime Minister, take action to remedy the mistakes made with the NBN rollout over the past five years has now been shown to be nothing more than a pipe dream.

    Turnbull has clearly demonstrated that he is quite prepared to adopt the age old ploy of commissioning an endless number of reviews and audits that have been carefully stage managed to provide the answers that support his position on a range of topics. And he is quite prepared to direct government departments to take actions that appear to defy international standards and definitions if this is necessary to support his position.

    So it is unsurprising that Turnbull squelched a range of protests by prominent Australian engineering experts and Academics by resorting to name calling and failing to respond to the valid points raised.

    In what is likely to be the “greatest con in Australian history” the government promised that the NBN would be completed by the end of 2016 and it would be built for $29.5 billion. The latest projections from NBN Co indicate the NBN should be completed sometime in 2020 or possibly later and the cost for Turnbull’s MTM approach will now be at least $56 billion.

    In the lead-up to the last election the former Prime Minister Tony Abbott stated “we will deliver a new business plan for the NBN so that we can deliver faster broadband sooner and at less cost. I want our NBN rolled out within three years and Malcolm Turnbull is the right person to make this happen.”

    Turnbull was well aware that the NBN would not be completed by the end of 2016, yet he was prepared to be an active participant in what is likely to be the most expensive lemon in Australian history that was to be built with an impossible deadline as was widely pointed out by industry and academia at the time.

    There can be no doubt that Australia needs the NBN if there is to be active participation in the global digital economy, but to be more specific, Australia needs national telecommunications infrastructure that is based on an all-fiber access network in areas where a fixed access network is appropriate to ensure that the nation can compete and become a global digital economy leader.

    It is unremarkable that the success of New Zealand’s version of the NBN has not been addressed by Turnbull, the adoption of NG-PON2 FTTP in many markets around the world and it is likely that he will continue to harp on about the aging and underperforming FTTN networks operated by BT and Deutsche Telekom.

    Recently the total number of fibre broadband subscribers passed the total number of copper broadband subscribers and what this means is that as Australia rolls out the copper based FTTN or G.Fast we will fall further behind our competitors in related measures of broadband access capability.

    The recent launch of NBN Co’s Sky Muster satellite that will provide a much needed broadband access improvement to regional and remote Australia is likely to have been cancelled by Turnbull in late 2013 if it was not for the iron clad contracts put in place by the former government. Turnbull’s failure to comprehend the need for the two Ka band satellites led to his ridiculous remark in 2012 that the satellites were a “Rolls-Royce” solution that were not needed.

    Unfortunately, as Prime Minister Turnbull is in a position to turn his attention to removing monopoly infrastructure regulation from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in what can only be considered to be an effort to placate Telstra and if this decision goes ahead the telecommunications industry is set to enter a period not unlike the dark-ages.

    Turnbull’s recent support of Telstra by writing to the ACCC and arguing that the ACCC should not reduce fixed-line charges by 9.4 per cent clearly demonstrates what the priorities of the Turnbull government are and these certainly do not appear to include working for improved customer focused outcomes and lower costs, so it is likely that Turnbull will renew efforts to marginalize the ACCC.

    Telstra has had major financial boons from the two agreements with NBN Co and the associated multi-billion dollar sweeteners thrown Telstra’s way by the current and former government, but there is no doubt that if Turnbull has an opportunity to sell off the NBN then it is likely that the lions share will fall into Telstra’s hands due to the nearly $100 billion that it will be paid or save over time under the current agreement with NBN Co.

    A review of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) was announced by the former Parliamentary Secretary to the Communications Minister Paul Fletcher and it was apparent that he was taking a positive leadership role within the Coalition government for this important keystone of the nation’s social equality oriented telecommunications policy. Why Turnbull’s attention was not focused on the USO in his time as the Communications Minister is a mystery, but could provide some guidance as to his priorities.

    Turnbull appears to be in denial of his failure as a Communications Minister, and simply brushed aside demands for reasoned and justified telecommunications market reforms. Having made a mess of the NBN and brushed off the wide-spread criticism, we should not hold out hope that Turnbull will change direction.

    And now that the Coalition government believes that Turnbull’s popularity will make the next election nothing but a formality the telecommunications portfolio is likely to remain in the background as the Coalition government seeks to broaden and increase the goods and services tax to 15 per cent. Another Turnbull gem?.

    Mark Gregory is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT University.  His blog is here.

  • John Menadue. Malcolm Turnbull and rebuilding the ABC

    Our new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull has a chance to repair the damage that was done to the ABC when he was the minister in charge. Malcolm Turnbull was unable to stop Tony Abbott’s cultural war on the ABC which was aided and abetted by Rupert Murdoch.

    Today, Friends of the ABC published an advertisement in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald calling on the public to ‘support the rebuilding of the ABC (and protect SBS)’. This advertisement highlights the recent damage that has been done to the ABC

    • Severe cuts to the budget.
    • Terminating the ten year contract between the ABC’s Australian Network and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to run the Asia Pacific Television Service. As a result Australia’s voice in the region has been muted and our engagement set back.
    • Over 500 staff have been retrenched. There will be less in-depth programs and more reliance on overseas news services, reduced rural coverage and centralisation of programs in Sydney.

    Rebuilding is necessary because the ABC plays a vital role in this country. What a barren media landscape we would have without the ABC and SBS. Our public broadcasters are unique and important, even if Murdoch would like to get rid of them and give his organisation even more media dominance.

    Australians trust the ABC.

    Essential Research in January this year asked Australians what trust they had in some key institutions. The research showed that the ABC and the High Court topped the list of the most trusted institutions with 53%, followed by the Reserve Bank at 48%. Newspapers well down the list at 30% and the ‘news media’ at 25%.

    Looking specifically at the media. Essential Research found ’a lot or some trust in the media’ as follows:

    ABC TV news and current affairs                               70%
    ABC radio news and current affairs                           63%
    ABC talk-back programs                                              46%
    Commercial news and current affairs                       38%
    News and opinion in daily newspapers                    48%
    Commercial TV news and current affairs                 41%
    Commercial radio talk-back                                        31%

    For ‘a lot or some trust’ in particular newspapers rankings were as follows:

    Melbourne Age (Victoria only)                                    68%
    The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW only)                 64%
    The Australian                                                                64%
    Courier Mail (Queensland only)                                  59%
    Herald Sun (Victoria only)                                            48%
    The Daily Telegraph (NSW only)                                 41%

    One unfortunate feature of Australian media with it’s under resourced journalists is its heavy reliance on information and propaganda put out by vested interests. The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS Sydney found in a survey of major metropolitan newspapers published in Australia in 2010 that 55% of content was driven by public relations handouts from lobbyists and their associated public relations arms and 24% of the content of those metropolitan newspapers had no significant journalistic input whatsoever … relying heavily on public relations handouts.

    Rebuilding the ABC and repairing recent damage is urgent. No media does it better than the ABC but it is under increasing pressure and attack.

     

  • Erica Feller. Good democracy is challenged by mass migration.

    Mass migration in a globalised world might well turn out to become, not least from the perspective of democracy, one of the overarching and defining challenges of our time. Syria and the exodus of millions of Syrians to neighbouring states and beyond is currently bringing this home in the starkest of ways.

    The autonomous sovereign nation state is still the central feature of current political architecture, regardless of ethnicity, creed, religion or political philosophy. Borders classically mark it out. Political systems built around autonomy and sovereignty are increasingly becoming out of kilter with the changes wrought by globalisation.

    Where a state fails, is deeply fragile or is run by a government unable or unwilling to ensure to its citizens the basic necessities for a safe and secure future, what flows from this can no longer be contained within the borders of that state.

    Tens of millions of displaced-people in desperate situations.

    Statistics can be difficult to grasp, but the recent image of the drowned Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi, was an emotional reminder that behind every number is an individual.

    When it comes to safety, security, dignity, self-worth, realized potential and decent lives, divergences between people, within states and between countries are huge.   There are some 60 million persons in displacement situations at the moment, over 17 million of them refugees. Eighty-five per cent live in developing countries, most of which suffer human rights and governance issues of their own.

    Less than one in 40 refugee situations are resolved within three years and many continue for 10 or more, with donor funds progressively drying up and millions of people left in sub-standard living conditions with no foreseeable future prospects. There are currently some 630,000 refugees in Jordan, 84% of whom live outside refugee camps. Two thirds subsist below the national poverty line, with one in six refugees living on less than $40 per person per month. Coping strategies include children dropping out of school to work or to beg, and women selling sex for survival.

    Facilitated solutions are not on the horizon for most, with local integration not available, (with some exceptions) and with resettlement to third countries a possibility for no more than one per cent of the global refugee population. Flight has to be understood as people taking control of their own futures in the face of  grave danger or the impossibility of staying where they are.

    Not all the displaced are refugees. Many leave for reasons linked to desperation and not to persecution or grave security risks. The forces fuelling departure are various. Insecurity and desperation are driving an increasing number of refugees to flee. Opportunity is enticing others to join the mass flows, with quality services, education and work possibilities in developed countries a strong incentive.

    The prognosis on the horizon for future mass movements is not good. There is a high probability that patterns of displacement will be increasingly impacted by environmental factors such as population growth, declining resources and inequality of access to them, ecological damage and climate change. Conflict looks to be a constant, increasingly acting in combination with extreme deprivation and resource issues. Many refugees come from or find themselves in countries falling into the highest risk category for civil conflict, which also happen to be ranked amongst the world’s poorest nations and where endemic and cyclical ethnic and civil strife is compounded by low cropland and fresh water availability.

    Ten Crisis Hotspots

    In January this year the International Crisis Group released an analysis of the conflicts and crises likely to beset the world in 2015, identifying in particular ten to watch. Top of the list is the situation in Syria and Iraq.

    The rise of the Islamic State was described as a “symptom of deeper problems that are not amenable to military solutions, including sectarian governments in Syria and Iraq {and} military strategies dependent on militias that radicalize local populations…” Then there is the Ukraine, which he said “may not be the world’s deadliest crisis, but it has transformed relations between Russia and the West for the worse”.   The “top 10” list also includes South Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, the DRC, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and even Venezuela which, while no war zone, is presented as a country in crisis due to falling oil prices, an unpopular Government and weakened institutions.

    What this means, among many other things, is that refugee and migrant exoduses are not solely a concern for the humanitarians. They can prove a huge burden on the economy, infrastructure, security and society of affected countries and a destabilising force for regions, and globally.

    They can also be a positive force for social change and economic advancement. It is also increasingly clear that, in our globalised, tech-savvy and interconnected world, the ability of States to forestall or halt them is seriously diminished.   Germany is confronting the probability – to its credit as a management challenge, not a disaster – of over one million people seeking sanctuary or a better life over the next twelve months.

    Democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

    One significant litmus test of the strength and resilience of the democratic system as we know it – meaning open and responsible government founded on tolerance, respect for human rights and the rule of law – is how global people movement will be managed.

    Recent developments in Australia have brought home just how much the values and processes traditionally underpinning democracy in this country are being impacted by the growing capacity of people to take their fate into their own hands and move, sometimes long distances, in large numbers and mostly irregularly, across state borders.

    Compassion and justice, international obligations and national due process requirements should frame the response in democratic societies to those who make a claim to their protection. The policies of recent Australian Governments designed to deter asylum seekers, refugees and migrants from coming by boat to lodge their protection claims are not built on such a foundation. The country whose accession brought the 1951 UN Refugee Convention into force has migration control provisions bearing directly on the treatment of refugees from which all reference to Convention arrangements has been removed.

    Australia has long and rightly prided itself on promoting and respecting internationally agreed human rights instruments. But it has put in place an arbitrary detention regime for boat people, doing some of them immeasurable physical and psychological damage. The country which has taken a strong stand internationally on fundamental civic rights like freedom of expression has put a cloak of secrecy over its contested boat policies and has even threatened legal retribution for release of information by health workers concerned about conditions in immigration detention centres.

    New thought about how democracy and government needs to be recast in Australia and beyond, to deal with the displacement in the context of globalisation is urgently called for. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts it well when she says: “We live in a world in which the destinies of nations are closely intertwined with respect to goods and survival itself…..any intelligent deliberation about ecology –as also about food supply and population – requires global planning, global knowledge and the recognition of a shared future”.

    Erika Feller, former Assistant High Commissioner, UNHCR; Melbourne School of Government

    This article was co-published with DemocracyRenewal

    Mass migration, conflict and democracy will be under discussion at the ‘Democracy in Transition’ conference, Melbourne, December 6-8

  • Marie Coleman. The FTB cuts have been softened, but they’re still a con

    The Turnbull Government might be trying to scale back the size of its planned Family Tax Benefit cuts, but the fact is they still hit the poor hardest and ask them to foot the budget repair bill, writes Marie Coleman.

    After a year of the Senate blocking its radical changes to parental benefits, the Government has tried another tack this week.

    On Tuesday the Turnbull Government introduced revised welfare legislation to Parliament that scales back some of the tougher Family Tax Benefit cuts first flagged in the 2014 budget.

    Under the new plan, the Family Tax Benefit (FTB) Part B payments to families would end when their youngest child turned 13 (rather than the original plan of six), and there will be a boost for those receiving FTB Part A payments.

    But the proposal still includes a number of cuts to payments that are expected to save the Government $4.8 billion over the forward estimates and leave thousands of families worse off.

    The welfare changes have always been tied (hypothecated) to overall budget savings and to funding new approaches to expand child care, and despite this new approach it is still something we need to reject.

    It still relies on punishing low income and sole parent families. It asks the poor to fund the need to bring outlays under control. And it doesn’t approach the expenditures outside the Social Security portfolio where the major inequitable expenditures exist.

    More than 130,000 single parents stand to lose family benefits under the Turnbull Government’s new family payments plan.

    Department of Social Services officials this week told a Senate committee that 136,000 single parents would see a reduction in FTB part B once their youngest child turned 13. Furthermore, single parents of teenagers would have their payments reduced from more than $3,000 a year to $1,000 and grandparent carers would also have their payments cut when their grandchild reached 13.

    According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in June 2012, there were 961,000 one-parent families, making up 15 per cent of all families. About two-thirds of these one-parent families (67 per cent) had dependants living with them.

    There were 780,000 single-mother families in June 2012, making up the vast majority of one-parent families (81 per cent).

    Single-parent families come into being for many reasons – death of a partner, divorce, separation, and births to unwed mothers. Many women leaving domestic violence become the heads of single-parent families.

    Not all these families live in poverty. But those reliant on our tightly targeted Australian social security system are indeed close to the poverty line. Australia has fewer children living in poverty than many comparable economies because of our system of providing benefits to all families to assist with the costs of child rearing, although there are some worrying trends.

    Many, but not all, single-parent families are reliant on financial support from the taxpayer to some degree. Some, not all, receive Sole Parent Payments. Many receive further support through the system of Family Tax Benefits (FTB).

    FTB has two key elements.

    First, the FTBB is available to all families, both two-parent and single-parent. Second, the FTBA is means tested, and available to the very poorest of families – some two-parent, some single-parent.

    The Senate estimates session heard 3,900 grandparents who are carers would be affected by the measure and that a further 76,000 couple families would lose their FTBB completely when their youngest child turned 13.

    The Government argues that the new approach will mean that parents will be encouraged to enter the workforce, and that the proposed new child care arrangements will mean that those who do will in fact be better off.

    This assumes that there is work for these adults – notwithstanding continuing strong trends in unemployment in many regions. It also assumes that the as yet announced child care details will indeed lead to beneficial outcomes. But child care policy experts Professor Deborah Brennan and Dr Elizabeth Adamson found that the draft proposal will “reduce access and increase complexity“. Many organisations commenting on the Regulation Impact Statement supported the Brennan-Adamson findings.

    Then there are the regional and national employment data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

    Unemployment and underemployment remain an issue. There are strong regional issues. Where are the retraining programs? Social Services Minister Christian Porter has no real answers. He suggests grandparents need to get a job. Really?

    Get real. Where are the jobs for these grandparent and sole parents and low income families?

    Senators need to look at the facts in their own areas – can sole parents or grandparents find work? This is a disgraceful con.

    Marie Coleman is the chair of the National Foundation for Australian Women Social Policy Committee. This article was first published in The Drum on 23 October 2015.

  • Next week’s launch of the Blog’s book ‘Fairness, Opportunity and Security’

    You are invited to the launch of Fairness, Opportunity and Security: Filling the Policy Vacuum, edited by John Menadue and Michael Keating, and published by ATF Press. The book is a collection of the special policy series of blogs that was published earlier this year.

    cover

    Topics include Democratic Renewal, the Role of Government, Foreign Policy, the Economy, Retirement Incomes, Population/migration/refugees, Communications and the Arts, Security – internal and Human Rights, Security, Health, Development of Human Capital, Environment, Indigenous affairs, Welfare and Inequality.

    Among the authors are Ken Henry, Ian Marsh, Stephen FitzGerald, Cavan Hogue, Richard Butler, Stuart Harris, John McCarthy, Andrew Podger, Julianne Schultz, Kim Williams, Susan Ryan, Michael Wesley, Jennifer Doggett, Glen Withers, Chris Bonnor and Ian McAuley.

    The launcher is Fairfax columnist Ross Gittins, economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. His books include Gittins’ Gospel, Gittinomics and The Happy Economist.

    The event takes place from 3:30 pm – for a 4:00 pm start – on Thursday 5 November, at Corrs Chambers Westgarth, Level 17, 8-12 Chifley Square, Sydney. No bookings necessary.

    CLICK HERE to download the flyer and order form. For a limited time, the book is available for $45 (paperback) and $65 (hardback).

  • Robert Brown Two concerns about the government’s response to the financial system inquiry.

    It’s been a big week for the Australian financial services industry. Firstly, there was the unusual decision by the big banks to raise mortgage interest rates in an economic environment which would normally result in no change or even a drop in rates, claiming with some justification that new capital adequacy requirements ‘forced’ them to do it. Secondly, there was the government’s generally positive response to the recommendations of Financial System Inquiry chaired by former CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, David Murray.

    While I am supportive of most of the government’s responses, there are at least two that concern me.

    The first is the decision to not support the recommendation of the FSI to ban gearing (borrowing) in Self-Managed Superannuation Funds (SMSFs). Typically, this is in the form of limited recourse borrowing to purchase real estate. This is not a marginal issue. The sector accounts for over 99% of all superannuation fund entities (of which, at June 2015, there were over 560,000). SMSFs are also the biggest single sector of the market, controlling over 30% of the $2 trillion in Australian superannuation savings.

    Gearing introduces significant risk into the system and in some cases, high risk. While the level of gearing in SMSFs is not large at this stage, the trend is clear. Eventually, there will be individual financial tragedies, if not large scale public scandals. It’s only a matter of time which is why public policy action should be taken before the inevitable financial and political pain demands intervention to clean up the mess.

    I respectfully suggest that decision makers have lost sight of why the SMSF sector was allowed to exist as a unique and relatively unregulated category in the first place. SMSFs (then called section 23F or ‘exempt funds’) were originally allowed by government in the 1980s as a simple ungeared safe harbour for Mum and Dad investors to place their retirement funds, in return for which they were promised limited regulatory intervention (in contrast to the heavily regulated APRA funds).

    So if we are going to continue to allow gearing in SMSFs (which readers may recall was an unintended consequence of poorly drafted legislation designed to allow the Howard government to sell Telstra to SMSFs via warrants), we must consider whether:

    1. a) The people of Australia should be subsiding this form of gearing (often negative gearing) through the superannuation system; and
    1. b) Whether the amount of intervention and regulation by government should be increased to ensure the system isn’t compromised or rorted.

    Having lived through 30 years of SMSF reforms, particularly in the early days when they were quite simply tax rorts with the ability to borrow and lend through all manner of direct and obscure techniques, I regret to say that increased regulation of SMSFs is inevitable. Of course, the response from supporters of gearing is simply that the regulator should get rid of the ‘rorters’, the ‘spruikers’ and the ‘bad apples’. That’s an easy thing to say, but as we’ve seen in the financial planning industry in recent years, doing so is never easy and always involves much cost which taxpayers will have to cover.

    I suppose we can be at least thankful that the government has announced that it will monitor and formally review SMSF gearing within three years. Of course, we can be sure that changing anything at that time will be much harder, unless by then the industry has come in for a very hard landing (which legislative action in 2015 would avoid). Regrettably, we rarely seem to learn the lessons of the past.

    On a more positive note, I was pleased to see the government’s agreement to the FSI’s recommendation to mandate higher education, an industry exam, a professional year and an approved code of ethics for financial planners/advisers. All of these initiatives are worthy courses of action which should be supported. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that ethics is the key to success for the new reforms. A university degree is a good idea because it makes a person more competent (I hope); but it certainly doesn’t make a person ethical and trustworthy. Adoption of (and adherence to) a set of ethical and professional standards does that.

    This brings me to my second concern. What will the approved code/s of ethics contain? If they accept the continuity of %-based asset fees (aka commissions paid by clients), life insurance commissions and other product sales incentives allowed in the Future of Financial Advice legislation (2013/14), remuneration conflicts will continue and only a limited amount will be achieved for consumers of financial advice which, after all, is supposed to be the ultimate purpose of these reforms.

    I’m reminded of the ‘agri-business’/’tree’ saga of recent sad memory. Many of the offending unethical advisers were members of my profession. That is, they were experienced chartered accountants or CPAs with relevant university degrees. All of them had done an exam (many exams actually), had undertaken a professional year (two years in some cases) and had signed up to a ‘stringent’ (but inadequate and mostly unenforced) code of ethics. So why did it all go so wrong? As always, the answer is the corrupting influence of conflicted remuneration. So this week’s announcement, whilst most welcome, is yet another case of “the devil will be in the detail”.

    Good progress has been made. However, I remain concerned that gearing of SMSFs is an accident waiting to happen and that failure to comprehensively remove conflicted remuneration will cause the proposed reforms to fall far short of consumers’ expectations. 

    Robert M C Brown AM BEc (Syd), FCA

    Robert Brown is a Sydney-based chartered accountant with over 30 years of experience in public practice. He is a member of the Australian government’s Financial Literacy Board and a director of Financial Literacy Australia Ltd, a not-for-profit company which provides grants for the development of community-based financial literacy programs. He was awarded membership of the Order of Australia for his work in the superannuation industry.  

     

  • Ranald Macdonald. The ABC and SBS are under attack.

    Now is the time to support the ABC and SBS and the reasons are clear for all to see.

    Our new Prime Minister has the chance of reversing decisions made during the Abbott leadership – but with him as the Communications Minister.

    Public broadcasting is under attack in many countries. The BBC has been particularly targeted by the Murdoch media in the UK to devastating effect by a grateful Conservative Government. In the USA support has been cut by Republican State leaderships and here in Australia – surprise, surprise – the ‘Murdoch factor’ has resulted in the ABC and SBS pondering a lean and restricted future.

    The Friends of the ABC has launched a National Campaign to ensure it has the funds to both defend the ABC and to lobby for an ABC which serves all Australians as required under its Charter.

    Already, by capricious decision of Foreign Minister Bishop who broke the Australia Network contract, the ABC has lost its ability to both report Asia and the Pacific and also to project an Australian voice to our Northern neighbours.

    The result – less of our outstanding foreign correspondents, a dismembered Radio Australia and 500 jobs lost, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

    Australians deserve better – and we are calling on both the new PM and the Labor Opposition to right the wrongs – though Malcolm Turnbull introduced the cuts and arm-twisting of the ABC  took place.

    NO CUTS, Abbott trumpeted before the election – and our new PM now has the opportunity to rectify the situation.

    The BBC is a fascinating case study for us here in Australia . PM David Cameron rewarded the Murdoch Empire (which just happens to dominate BSkyB and wants total control of it)  with a first raft of cuts immediately he reached Number 10. With his Murdoch-supported re-election, further cuts introduced of some 20% (with more in the wings) will ensure a lesser competitive corporation. (I have just returned from the UK and the pressure on the BBC is palpable).

    The parallels with Australia are obvious. In both countries, the international reporting and penetration has been heavily affected, with the suggestion from Government Ministers that the new media should be left to ‘Private Enterprise’. In other words, slow down public broadcasting with a view to its demise, while News Limited flourishes.

    Yet Russia, China and Al Jazeera are upping their television budgets – and our neighbors in New Zealand are rushing to fill the broadcasting gap left in South East Asia and the Pacific by the forced retreat of the ABC.

    That is why the National Campaign by the ABC Friends – explained in half page ads in the SMH and The Melbourne Age on next Saturday, October 31 – is crucial for democracy and for all Australians who want independent, properly resourced national broadcasting producing quality programs for everyone– children, rural and provincial, those interested in the arts, drama, sport, documentaries and who seek in-depth and authoritative news coverage and analysis.

    Once we weaken or lose our independent public broadcasters and the economic rationalists take control, we will mourn the passing of a vital part of democratic Australia. Both the ABC and SBS serve Australia’s interests.

    The battle is ideological, political and also very much driven by those who would benefit from less competition.

    Ranald Macdonald is a Friend of the ABC. He was formerly Managing Director of David Syme, the publisher of The Age.   .

     

    For those who miss the Friends ad. On Saturday – Join the Friends State organisations, Donate to the National Fighting Fund and become Supporters of the ABC NOW – through the website www.abcfriends.org.au, or by calling any hour on 0498 111 258, 0498 111 259 or 0498 111 261 and talk to friendly volunteers.

     

  • Derk Swieringa. Ka-ching – The interest of the Labor Party in poker machines in the ACT.

     

    This article is prompted by the recent ABC program ‘Ka-Ching’ which details the subtle mechanisms that are programmed into poker machines to make them addictive. It reminded me of the clever engineers at VW who were able to program software into their cars to cheat pollution testing.

    Let me also declare my personal experience of the havoc caused to families by poker machine addiction. My late mother in law blew her last $60,000 of retirement savings on mainly poker machine gambling. A close friend’s sister in law committed suicide after she gambled away her own daughters’ savings. Sadly, there are few families that have not been adversely affected by the curse of gambling addiction.

    Roughly 80% of all gambling in Australia is via poker machines. Any analysis of the problem of gambling addiction concludes that poker machines are the main problem. Many, many poker machines are located in community clubs such as the Canberra Labor Club where they are often patronised by the poor, the elderly and the lonely. The Ka-Ching program showed how these machines are cleverly programmed to turn these people into poker machine addicts. It is estimated that over 50% of all revenue from poker machines comes from people with an addiction problem.

    The Gillard government tried to address this problem but were beaten by a relentless campaign conducted by Clubs Australia. As a measure of this campaign I recall going into the Tomakin Social Club and seeing a life size poster of Mike Kelly, the local Labor member and minister at the time, with the caption underneath “this man wants to destroy our club”. An outrageous claim.

    Yet the Canberra Labor Club claims on its website to be ‘proud members’ of Clubs ACT, an affiliate of Clubs Australia.

    In the 1970’s members and friends of the Labor Party formed a community club. This Labor Club has now grown into a four venue corporation with assets over $60 million and a turnover more than $30 million per year. The bulk of this turnover coming from members’ losses on poker machines. Under the constitution of the Canberra Labor Club its profits go to the ACT Branch of the Labor Party. As a result the Party has received millions every year.

    A previous Labor Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, who disliked the link between the Party and poker machines, tried to sell the Labor Club but he was blocked at the Party’s federal level. No doubt because it is the Party’s most lucrative source of revenue.

    Poker machines, brothels and tobacconists are all legal industries in the ACT but their operation requires sensitive policy settings and administration. It is therefore inappropriate for a political party in government to derive funds from any of these sources if it wants to avoid a perceived conflict of interest. Nor is it now necessary for the Labor Party to derive its money from gambling. Recent amendments in the ACT to donation rules, plus government grants to political parties, now provide ample funds for political parties to run elections fair and square.

    The Labor Club has 9 directors,6 of whom are are nominated by ACT Labor. In effect, therefore, the 50,000 plus members of the Labor Club have no say in the running of the Club. Furthermore, unlike other community clubs that publicise their constitution, annual report, financials etc on their web site, the Labor Club on its web site provides no such information and therefore keeps its members in the dark. When I recently asked for a copy of the 2014/15 annual report I was told that, under the constitution, I would have to apply in writing to the Company Secretary who would decide if I would be given a copy. This is treating members as if they belonged to the mushroom club.

    The Canberra Times, which is not known for being anti-Labor, has written numerous articles critical of this link between the party and gambling money but invariably the Club responds with a ‘no comment’. I am sure that the Liberal Party will not leave this matter alone at the territorial elections next year.

    In many respects the ACT Branch of the Labor Party is very well run. For example, pre-selections for the House of Representatives, Senate and Local Assembly are determined by members ballots and not by Party bosses as in other states. However, as a Party member, I wish we could rid ourselves of a reliance on gambling money. It is also regretted that powerful lobbying forces were able to beat a Labor Government which was proposing to implement the Productivity Commission’s recommendations. These recommendations were aimed at harm minimisation by limiting the size and speed of bets on poker machines.

    Derk Swieringa has been a member of the ACT Labor Club for some years and joined the ACT Branch of the Labor Party in 2014. He is also a strong supporter of Open Labor. Derk believes that the Labor Party must be fit for government not only in the polices it presents to the electorate but also in the integrity of its internal administration.

     

     

     

  • Sam Bateman. US muddle in South China Sea.

    Strong calls continue to be made in Washington for the US Navy to increase its freedom of navigation (FON) activities in the South China Sea. This is despite apparent differences of view between the Pentagon and the White House about the wisdom of such action. The US has done little in 2015 to ease concerns about whether it knows what it’s doing in the South China Sea. If anything, the rhetoric coming out of the Pentagon, and the US Navy in particular, has become stronger.While extensive land reclamations in the South China Sea have not helped China’s image, none of its current actions justify deliberate provocations by the United States. It’s not clear just what Washington is protesting in the South China Sea. There are three possibilities, some or all of which may apply.

    One explanation may be that the United States is protesting against China’s claim to sovereignty over disputed features. But Washington has repeatedly said that it doesn’t take sides in the island disputes. An authoritative report last year from the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington concluded that ‘[t]he absence of an unambiguous legal case in any of these disputes reinforces the wisdom of the US policy of not taking a position regarding which country’s sovereignty claim is superior’.

    But FON operations against only China’s claims suggest that the United States has taken sides. Washington hotly denies this, but it is how people in the streets of Beijing, Hanoi and Manila see US actions. Resulting surges in nationalism in these capitals are not helpful for resolving the disputes.

    A second possibility is that the United States is protesting China’s claim to a territorial sea around built-up, low-tide features in the South China Sea. But only three features fall within this category (Subi, Hughes and Mischief Reefs) and China has not actually made formal claims to any territorial sea from these features. It would be preferable to wait until such claims were made before responding with diplomatic protests rather than ‘rocking the boat’ now. In any case, it’s a fairly trifling issue on which to risk a dangerous incident between Chinese and American forces.

    Finally the United States may be protesting a general threat by China to FON in the South China Sea. But China has repeatedly denied it poses such a threat. And with so much of China’s own trade passing through the sea it’s nonsensical to suggest that it would. American commentators invariably overstate the value of US trade passing through the South China Sea. They fail to recognise that the vast majority of US trade with East Asia does not go through the area. For their part, Australian politicians also often grossly inflate the amount of foreign trade going through the South China Sea. In the event of some crisis, the trade of other Northeast Asian countries could readily be re-routed away from the South China Sea albeit at some cost in time and distance.

    At the heart of the US protests are peculiarly American concerns about FON that relatively few regional countries share. In particular, these include the freedoms to conduct so-called ‘military surveys’ in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of another country. Another is the right of a warship to transit a territorial sea without giving prior notification to the coastal state.

    It looks as though the United States is trying to turn back the clock on the carefully balanced EEZ regime in United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. American commentaries regularly fail to acknowledge that navigational freedoms are not absolute in another country’s EEZ. Military activities in the EEZ should only be conducted with ‘due regard’ to the rights and duties of the coastal state. Much of what the United States calls military surveys really constitutes marine scientific research, which is under the jurisdiction of the coastal state.

    A group of Chinese warships recently transited through the US territorial sea around the Aleutian Islands. This led to claims from the United States that China, by not seeking permission to do so, had gone against its own policies of area denial. But China’s conception of FON is different to what the United States is contemplating in the South China Sea. Whereas sending ships patrolling into another country’s territorial sea specifically to demonstrate a right of passage could be a breach of innocent passage, the Chinese ships were on a direct passage.

    US commentators also express concerns that China intends to use various facilities it has built in the South China Sea, such as airstrips, for military purposes. But this is another myth. These features have no real utility as military ‘bases’ in view of their vulnerability and the difficulties of their re-supply.

    The United States frequently condemns China for ‘militarising’ the South China Sea. But increased American naval activity in the region and the threatened FON operations constitute greater militarisation. The United States is in conflict with China on all fronts – economic, political, strategic and military.

    As a middle-power and US ally with close ties to the region, Australia needs to be cautious in getting too involved in these bilateral tensions. Its best response at this time is to maintain the established pattern of Operation Gateway surveillance flights in the area. And it should be prepared to make a diplomatic protest should China make some formal claim with which Australia does not agree.

    Sam Bateman is an adviser to the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. This article first appeared in the East Asia Forum on October 20, 2015.

  • Richard Woolcott. Foreign policy priorities for Malcolm Turnbull – focus on the region, get out of the Middle East, and other ..

    This can be an exciting time for Australia in that there is a coincidence of the need for long overdue foreign policy adjustments and the appointment of Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister. He has said he intends to be a forward-looking Prime Minister for the 21st Century. This is indeed encouraging but success will call for skilful negotiation in Cabinet and strong leadership over time. Mr Turnbull will have much more in common with Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, than he would have had with defeated PM Harper. They will meet later this year at the G20 and at CHOGM.

    Understandably the pressures on the new Prime Minister will be mainly domestic and on the economy. Foreign and security policies are naturally less immediate (although evolving situations e.g. Syria, ISIS, Russia, and an overhyped TPP, which has yet to be adopted by the U S and which does not include such major economies as China, India and Indonesia, call for prompt reactions and it would be unfortunate for Mr Turnbull to lock himself into positions now which he might find uncomfortable in two or three months).

    I consider there are eight policy issues which Prime Minister Turnbull could review and update later this year, or early in 2016.

    They are: –

    1. We need to refocus on the important interests in our own region – South East Asia, North Asia and the South West Pacific in what is now generally called the Asian Century. Former Indonesian Ambassador to Australia Sabam Siagian and editor-in-chief of the Jakarta Post wrote earlier this year the blunt commentary that “Australia is still stuck in the 20th Century mode. It is a monarchy, with a Head of State in London, and its security arrangements are largely Cold War relics… Australia is out of sync with the emerging geopolitical environment of Asia today”.

    2. We do need to establish an updated and more balanced approach to the vital relationship between the US and China. There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China could become a selffulfilling prophecy. The present debate on China mainly assumes that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against a perceived rising Chinese hegemony. This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, Fraser, most former ambassadors to China and a numbers of academics. While China can be expected to resist American ‘hegemony’ in the Asian region, it accepts a constructive and cooperative US role in Asia.

    Australia should not take sides on China/Japan disputes, or on rival territorial water claims. Our focus should be on unimpeded passage through International waters and trade routes.

    3. We should withdraw our forces from Iraq and Syria. Our presence in the Middle East will not contribute seriously to defeating ISIS, or securing stable, democratic, uncorrupt governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our involvement was in support of the American Alliance, although US policies are demonstrably failing. The reality is our participation is essentially peripheral and symbolic. We should move out of this very complex changing kaleidoscope of numerous factions fighting each  other and cease pretending to ourselves and overseas that we can influence the outcomes. The considerable financial savings could be much better utilised in shaping the next budget.

    There were reasons for joining the US led Afghanistan invasion in 2002 but 14 years later, with 40 Australians killed, over $500 billion spent and more than 13,000 Afghan civilians dead, objectives once deemed to be indispensable such as nation-building and effective counter-insurgency, have been downgraded or abandoned because there are no longer adequate resources, time, or the US will to achieve them. The US public is now opposed to US ground forces becoming involved in further conflicts.

    4. We should look to consult diplomatically all of the main and influential countries of the Asia/Pacific region – the US, China, Japan, Indonesia, India, Russia, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and New Zealand – on all regional and international issues before the UN. Terrorism must be dealt with essentially within each country, although discussions on dealing with it internationally can be useful. While cooperation between our AFP and the Indonesian Police has been good, it is strange that we have been consulting the US and the UK about dealing with Islamic extremism and the ISIS but not until very recently with Indonesia, the largest and most moderate Muslim country in the world. Nor have we consulted closely regional countries like Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines which have substantial Muslim communities.

    Australia need a fundamental change of our national psyche focused more on Asia than on our traditional links with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand ( the “Anglosphere”), and Europe. We need a much more sustained conversation with our neighbouring countries in Asia and the South West Pacific.

    We should work discretely towards the evolution of an Asia/Pacific community, of which ASEAN would be a major part. Meanwhile we should use existing organisations that meet at Head of Government level, such as the G20, APEC (although it does not include India), the East Asian Summit (which does now include both the US and Russia), the UN Leader’s Week in New York, and the Commonwealth HoG meeting (a relic of British colonialism, but some Asian leaders attend and can discuss regional issues), which will meet in Malta on 28/29 November.

    5. In the long term no bilateral relationship will be more important to Australia than that with Indonesia. The stability, unity and economic growth of a predominantly (81%) moderate Muslim peaceful nation of 250 million, stretching across our North, a distance similar from Broome to Christchurch in NZ, is vital to Australia. Despite Government ‘spin’ to the contrary, the overall relationship is not good and needs nurturing, especially at the Head of Government level. The empathy towards Australia, evident in the 1980s and early 90s, has gone and needs to be rebuilt,

    Malcolm Turnbull as a new Prime Minister will have a number of opportunities to develop a personal relationship with the relatively new Indonesian president (Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi) at Head of Government meetings later this year. This will be an important step forward for Mr Turnbull and Australia if he can establish close personal contact.

    6. Mr Turnbull has already emphasised in Parliament on the 19th of October the major importance he attaches to strengthening the relationship with New Zealand following his visit. He suggested that we should in future work even more closely with New Zealand on a range of regional issues.

    7. In the years ahead Mr Turnbull will have an important opportunity to address, through a number of decisions, the international standing of Australia as a more independent nation with a foreign and  security policy based not largely on compliance with American policy or fear of China, but on its own genuine national interests. In this context, he will have the opportunity to adopt a more balanced position on Israel / Palestine issues. He will also be able to develop a sound position on the major global issue of Climate Change for the high level international conference to be held in Paris in December, which he intends to attend.

    Continuing foreign perceptions of Australia as a constitutional monarchy whose Head of State is the Queen of England (quaintly called here the Queen of Australia) and whose flag is dominated by the Union Jack, are sad anachronisms in the 21st. century. The establishment of the Republic of Australia will be, like Federation, a defining moment in the history of our country. This is not only a symbolic issue. It lies at the core of our national and international identity.

    Another prospect in the longer term would be to reconsider joining ASEAN, although we would need ASEAN to welcome this. Mr Turnbull could consider private consultations at the Head of Government, Foreign Minister, Defence and Trade ministerial levels regarding possible membership of ASEAN. If New Zealand did likewise it would be mutually reinforcing.

    This will not be easy now. 41 years ago Australia became ASEAN’s first dialogue partner and I hosted the first meeting overseas of the then five ASEAN Secretaries General at my home in Canberra. One course might be to start with seeking observer status as Indonesia’s other close neighbours, PNG and Timor Leste, have already had since 1976 and 2002 respectively. This would be a logical evolution of Australia’s long-standing engagement with Asia. As early as 1970 I considered this and, as Secretary of DFAT, discussed it with then-Foreign Minister Gareth Evans in 1990. Paul Keating had also suggested we should seek to join ASAEN. Unfortunately, it lapsed, partly because of other issues and following my retirement in 1992.

    8. Another positive change which Prime Minister Turnbull could make as soon as possible would be to sign up to the Open Government Partnership (OPG). Nearly 70 countries, including Indonesia, New Zealand, the Philippines, the US and the UK have already done so. Mr Turnbull has already said he wants to have a more transparent and open government. Joining would reinforce his comments.

    Finally, if Australia is to progress its involvement with the Asian region the Turnbull Government needs to give more thought to our style. We need to demonstrate a greater degree of cultural sensitivity. We should also show we are prepared to listen more and lecture less. This is essentially a question of presentation and diplomacy. Richard Woolcott 21 October 2015

    Richard Woolcott AC was Australia’s Ambassador to Indonesia and the Philippines as well as High Commissioner to Malaysia, Ghana and Singapore. He was the Australian Ambassador to the United Nations and President of the United Nations Security Council. He was Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 1988 to 1992.

  • David Combe. Tony Abbott’s soul-mate has gone.

    After the second longest campaign in Canadian history – 11 weeks – finally Federal Election Day for Canadians had arrived on Monday, October 19.

    When I was moving to Canada 30 years ago, Gough Whitlam said to me that “There are no two peoples in the world who are so similar, have so much in common, and get on better than Australians and Canadians”. For some months, I could not see it, but after 4 years I knew it to be so true……except that the Scottish heritage of Anglophone Canadians makes them more reserved in expressing what they really think. Get to know them well enough and they will tell you, for example, what they really think of their southern neighbours! Their humour, like ours, has a large dose of self-deprecation at its base.

    But there are, of course, many differences. The dominant of those is its French history which impacts on everything – including (and especially) its politics. The Canadian Senate is appointed, so it has none of the idiosyncrasies of ours. However, with population overwhelmingly concentrated in two provinces – Ontario and Quebec – and its smaller provinces from Newfoundland to British Columbia spanning many different time zones, the House of Commons is very large. For Monday’s poll, it was enlarged by 30 to 338 Ridings (electorates in our terminology). So 170 was the ‘magic number’ for majority government – something not often achieved in its multi-party system. As in the UK, voting is voluntary and ‘first past the post’

    When the long campaign kicked off, Tony Abbott’s ‘soul mate’, Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had been in office for 9 years and was defending a strong majority won in 2011. At that election, the Liberal Party (the small ‘l’ liberal, or centre-left, Party of Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien) had collapsed winning only 34 seats. The role of official Opposition had been taken by ALP ‘sister’ New Democratic Party (NDP) in what was by far the their best Federal performance ever. The NDP’s triumph had been based on winning 50 seats in Quebec, once Liberal Party heartland.

    The first polling analysed by Eric Grenier (a sort of Malcolm Mackerras/Antony Green combination) on his splendid website ThreeHundredEight.com showed voting intention at 33.2% for the NDP, 30.9% for the Conservatives, and the Liberals trailing with 25.9%. His projections on the numbers were for the NDP and the Conservatives to win 127 seats each with the Liberals trailing well behind, but likely to determine who would form minority government (presumably the NDP) as coalitions are not part of Canada’s political history. Day after day, week after week, Grenier analysed and published an aggregation of latest polling macro, by province and by Riding – no mean feat given the uncertainties of voluntary voting and lack of a preferential system. Yet one ‘preference’ became very clear very early……Canadians wanted rid of a Prime Minister whom friends of mine had long dubbed ‘Richard Milhous Harper’.

    Then the race tightened up, as polling showed support for each of the three major parties at about 30% with small (and statistically insignificant) movements between the three week after week. Was Canada going to re-elect a Prime Minister whom at least two thirds of voters despised?

    After a major campaign of attack ads against their opponents, Harper chose to play wedge politics at its worst. An Islamic Canadian woman had taken to the Federal Court her right to wear a niquab in public at her citizenship ceremony while agreeing to remove it in private. The Court found in her favour, but in an attempt to exploit anti-Islamic sentiment in Quebec in particular, Harper’s Government appealed the matter to the Supreme Court of Canada. Harper now made this a major part of his campaign. ABC journalist Norman Hermant has quoted reports that he was advised to do so by brilliant Australian conservative strategist, Lynton Crosby, but I doubt this. However, the Leaders of neither the NDP nor the Liberal Party backed away from supporting Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and for a time it looked as though the Conservatives had broken clear….that the politics of hate were working for them, as there was a decent kick up in their numbers.

    At about that time, a very good friend of mine in Toronto sent me the following under the heading On VISION:

    ‘I made a visit recently to the “I Want to Lead Canada” cafe. Three servers approached my table at the same time – they were all guys of course, although I did notice a woman server relegated to a corner section. Anyway, each of the three asked me at the same time what I would like. I replied rather emphatically that I hand a hankering for a meal-sized portion of VISION! 

    The weary-looking server with the playdough-mould hair and angry demeanour said that VISION wa…s too expensive and that I should opt for something within the budget. 

    The bearded server said that the fellow he replaced used to offer an appetizer-sized plate of VISION, but it was replaced with something more appealing to the masses when his predecessor died. 

    The younger-looking of the three, who had really nice hair, told me he used to know a CHEF who specialised in VISION, and he brought me this: 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLR5aToS2Zg

    The ‘waiters’ in this metaphor are first, Harper; secondly NDP Leader Tom Mulcair who gained his position following the greatly mourned sudden death of Jack Layton who had led his party to its triumph in 2011; and the third, Liberal Leader, Justin Trudeau. The woman in the background is a reference to the Greens Leader.

    Then in the final weeks of the campaign, something special happened….bit by bit, the NDP vote intention eroded, and that of the Liberals increased. By late last week, the possibility of a minority Liberal Government increased, and by last weekend, that seemed certain with just the outside possibility of a majority for Trudeau in the House of Commons.

    On Tuesday, I settled down to watch the vote count on CBC. First, the Liberals made a clean sweep of all Ridings in the Atlantic Provinces starting with Newfoundland. But read little into that, we were told. Polls were just closing in Quebec, and Mr. Trudeau’s party would need to win at least 35 there to be sure of governing – even though we knew Ontario would strongly favour it.

    Suddenly, it was all over….short of a disaster in the Prairies and BC where the Polls were some way off closing, Justin Trudeau would be leading a majority government.

    That disaster did not occur. The Liberals won 40 Ridings in Quebec, took pretty much everything in Greater Toronto, and won more than any other party in all provinces except Prime Minister Harper’s Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

    The new government has 184 Members in the new House of Commons – 150 more than in 2011. Voter turnout was 68.5% – the highest since 1993, the last time a Conservative Government was executed. The new House includes 88 (or 26%) women; 10 indigenous MPs; 6 openly LGBT Members.

    And the vote by Party? Liberals 39.5%, Conservatives 30.9% and NDP 19.7%. So what happened between that first opinion poll assessment and election day? Do so many people REALLY change their minds in such a short timeframe?

    No, they do not. Combining NDP and Liberal voting intention from that first opinion poll, 59.1% intended to vote for one of the two major parties challenging the Harper Government. The combined vote of those two parties on election day was 59.2%! Canadians wanted one thing – to be rid of Stephen Harper – and they voted strategically to achieve that end. As the campaign evolved, in the Liberal Party, they saw a better prospect of doing so.

    What of the role of Justin Trudeau? Yes, he is handsome, he is charming, he is the eldest son of one of Canada’s most beloved Prime Ministers, and he DID withstand everything that his Conservative opponents threw at him during a deliberately long campaign intended to undermine confidence in him and to expose his alleged ‘L’ plates.

    But make no mistake….this was not a destiny ordained for him many years ago and for which he was always preparing. He has worked in real jobs (I had a work colleague 15 or so years ago in Vancouver whose children were being taught by him and who enjoyed a friendship with him. Then he was much more concerned about helping to prevent others dying on the ski slopes as his younger brother had done). When he did put himself forward for Liberal Party endorsement, it was for a Riding in Quebec held by the Bloc Quebecois, not the safe Liberal one he had been offered. And twice he declined pressure to submit himself for the arduous process of a Liberal Party Leadership Convention.

    In his victory speech on Election Night, he said: “We beat fear with hope. We beat cynicism with hard work, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together”.

    Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will not be that man of vision in the youtube clip my friend sent me, but he has made a promising start. Already he has advised President Obama of the ‘good’ news that Canada will be an aggressive player in the fight on climate change, and the ‘bad’ news that Canada will be withdrawing its combat troops from the ISIS conflict. Will he restore Canada’s reputation as an important middle power which had the courage to stand up against pressure to join its southern neighbour in Vietnam and in Iraq? Let us hope so.

    David Combe was National Secretary of the Australian Labor Party 1973-81.

  • Ian Richards. The Submarine Menace

    Way back in the 1980s, then Defence Minister Kim Beasley gave birth to the greatest industrial White Elephant in the history of our nation  –  the establishment of the submarine construction facility in Adelaide,South Australia.   So much has been written and said about the Collins Class submarine construction  project that I do not need to elaborate upon it.  Suffice it to say that it was succinctly described in the media  as a “disaster”. It would be hard  to find many who would disagree.

    Politicians of both persuasions have since that time  prostituted their principles in pursuit of their holy grail – VOTES.  In this case, votes in South Australia. . The beauty of these kinds of long-term projects from a Minister’s perspective is that while they get the kudos from announcing the project and cutting a ribbon, they will be safely drawing their superannuation when the full horror of a disastrous acquisition begins to unfold.

    As a result we are now embarked upon the second saga in this sorry tale.  We are building three orphan Destroyers  unique to Australia.  As an alternative, we could have purchased three US built ARLEIGH BURKE class  destroyers – considerably more capable ships – plus a hundred fully equipped regional hospitals for the same total project  cost.  The media reports that the  first ship is way over budget and three years late.  This augurs badly for the future of these ships – if construction delays resulted from unmanageable complexity – and why else??  – the lifetime logistic support will be a nightmare. .  As Australian orphans we will have to provide a costly  inventory of lifetime spares – rather than tap into the US stockpile if we had purchased the ARLEIGH BURKEs. The initial and annual  costs of the Destroyer dedicated bureaucrats in the Defence Materiel Organisation  will amount to a staggering figure.

    A passing comment by an industry rep at a Sydney Trade Fair  some years back perhaps says it all  – “The propeller shafts were designed in Finland, manufactured in Holland and will be powered by what is known in the trade as ‘the bastard Caterpillar’, a US Caterpillar diesel modified by the Spaniards”.  I cannot vouch for his accuracy, but I suspect the principle in his comment is correct. The first of class is already effectively three years old  –  the second and third will be five? six? years out of date on commissioning. Ten years after commissioning, how many of the companies providing installed equipment will still be manufacturing suitable spares?

    The Government is now faced with a decision on the procurement of new submarines.  For a moment, leave aside manufacturing or employment considerations and look only at the requirements for the defence of Australia.

    A fundamental consideration must be – “Conventionally armed conventionally powered submarines have made no significant contribution to strategic imperatives or military operations in the past 70 years”.

    At a Naval seminar some two or three years ago the Chief of Navy laid emphasis on the transition of the Navy to an amphibious capability greatly enhanced by the new CANBERRA class helicopter carriers. An overbalance of submarine capability does not fit into this theme.

    Submarines are a major all-out- war weapon against a major foe.  When our projected  new submarines  are torpedoing  Indonesian, Chinese, Indian,Russian merchant ships and warships or our very expensive very advanced projected  new submarines are firing missiles into Shanghai, or Djakarta or Delhi or Vladivostok  our new submarines could be usefully employed. Short of such a scenario, our new submarines will be of little consequence.

    That said, a case can be made for a small number of modest capability submarines in a balanced Australian Defence Force. A force of 12 submarines for Australia as proposed by the previous Government is nothing short of absurd.

    Looking now at the manufacturing and employment considerations, surely we have demonstrated with the Collins Class and now the Air Warfare Destroyers that it is not possible for a small nation with limited requirements and limited high tech industrial infrastructure to build very advanced warships or submarines in tiny numbers other than at prohibitive cost and with production delays and lifetime logistic problems.  Argentina, a country not too dissimilar to Australia, demonstrated abundantly in their disastrous  submarine building programme why not to go there. “Building submarines” is of course a misnomer  –  we are not “building” submarines, but building a metal box . At least  95% of the contents will be  made overseas – all the weapons and most of the systems and sub-systems will be foreign made. Bought in penny packets, the cost of “making” a motor car in this fashion would be huge  –  for a submarine, even more so. It is almost certainly less costly to buy a submarine complete off the shelf than to buy all the components to assemble it in Australia. The Australian “building” thus adds no value but huge cost to the equation.

    If we were determined to build high tech high risk submarines in Australia, surely we would have chosen one of our industrially developed areas rather than a charming rural backwater that has a demonstrated incapacity to build merchant ships or even motor cars competitively.

    There are so many arguments against this project.  But the White Elephant is trumpeting to be fed, spurred on by its clamourous mahout, the South Australian Parliament.

    The submarine Project is a serious menace to the wellbeing  of Australia’s future taxpayers. It is for the Government to show its wisdom in deciding whether or not  to continue with a project that will extract  $20,000,000,000 or $30,000,000,000 from them  with little improvement in the Nation’s defence. There are many other projects that would be more valuable, create more employment  and justify such expenditure.

    Ian Richards, AO, retired as Rear Admiral, Royal Australian Navy, in 1984. He variously commanded HMAS Perth, Stuart and Third Destroyer Squadron. He was Director of Naval Plans and Chief of Joint Operations, Defence. He was Deputy Chief, Naval Staff, when he retired as Rear Admiral.

  • John Menadue. Coal is good for humanity! The Tony Abbott story continues.

    The messenger may have changed, but apparently not the message. Only this week our new Prime Minister said ‘Can I simply say, the government’s policies are unchanged’

    An obvious example of this unchanged policy is that Malcolm Turnbull has agreed to the go-ahead of the $16 b. Carmichael Coal Project in central Queensland. This is despite the stand he used to make that burning fossil fuels was a major contributor to carbon pollution and climate change.

    To reinforce that ‘policies are unchanged’ and picking up where Tony Abbott left off Malcolm Turnbull’s new Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, tells us that the mine would ‘help lift millions of people out of energy poverty’. He pointed out that over a billion people around the world don’t have access to electricity. He is telling us in another way what Tony Abbott kept telling us that ‘coal is good for humanity’.

    Only three months ago Oxfam Australia reported that coal is ‘not good for humanity’. It said

    Four out of five people without electricity live in rural areas that are often not connected to a centralized energy grid so local, renewable energy solutions offer a much more affordable, practical and healthy solution than coal. The Australian coal industry faced with the rapid decline in the value of its assets and an accelerating global transition to renewable energy has been falsely promoting coal as the main solution for increasing energy access and reducing poverty around the world. But as well as failing to improve energy access for the world’s poorest people, burning coal contributes to hundreds of thousands of preventative deaths each year due to air pollution and is the single biggest contributor to climate change, pushing people around the world deeper into poverty. … the world’s poorest people are made even more vulnerable through the increasing risk of droughts, floods, hunger and disease due to climate change. Australia must rapidly phase out coal from its own energy supply and as a wealthy developed country, do far more to support developing countries with their own renewable energy plans. 

    Recently the Lancet, the UK medical journal, said

    ‘Climate change fuelled by the burning of coal as well as other fossil fuels, presents a potentially catastrophic risk to human health through heat stress, floods, droughts, extreme weather events, air pollution and the spread of disease.’ 

    In the face of an abundance of expert opinion, Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg keep approving new coal mines. They accept the spin of the coal mining industry that ‘coal is good for humanity’.

    If they really want to help the poor and the planet, they would facilitate the wind-back of thermal coal production and re-double efforts to extend wind and solar power that doesn’t need a centralized distribution grid and can be deployed much more quickly and cheaply. Malcolm Turnbull talks about technology disruption. That would be a good way to help the planet through battery storage for solar power.

    Far from helping humanity to wind back the fossil fuel industry, the government is doing the reverse. A test of Malcolm Turnbull’s commitment to the environment is whether he will wind back the $6 b. annual subsidy that taxpayers pay to fossil fuel companies that have devastating environmental records and lobby incessantly and successfully to keep their hands in the taxpayers’ pocket.

    This $6 b. annual fossil fuel subsidy includes two really big hand-outs. The first is the fuel tax credit scheme costing about $2 b. which favours the big miners. Secondly, the oil and gas industry also get a massive tax break through accelerated depreciation that is approaching $2 b. p.a.

    The OECD only recently reported that ‘The time is right for countries to demonstrate that they are serious about combatting climate change and reforming harmful fossil fuel support is a good place to start.’ The OECD identified that its member countries had fossil fuel subsidies of $US 200 b. p.a.

    The Abbott government cut our foreign aid funding from $5.6 b. in 2012-13 to $4 b. in 2015-16. These are the largest ever multiple-year and single-year cuts in ODA in our history. Julie Bishop accepted these cuts. The wealthy miners with their lobbyists speak up all the time. But there are few to speak for the poor who need ODA.That is why foreign ministers have such an easy time. They have no domestic constituency. The don’t need to listen to the poor in Myanmar or Bangladesh.

    These cuts in ODA say a lot about the priorities of the Australian government. It cuts our aid to some of the poorest countries in the world but continues subsidies to those companies causing devastating climate change. By abolishing the carbon tax the polluters can continue to pollute without any penalty. It is time to reject the spin of the miners and stopped pretending that ‘coal is good for humanity’.

  • Dean Ashenden. What is to be done about Australian schooling?

    Dealing with high and rising social and cultural segregation is the real challenge of school reform.

    Over the past two or three months alone, no fewer than five prominent individuals and organisations have tried to answer an increasingly vexing question: what is to be done about Australian schooling?

    Australia, these various commentators agree, is among the school reform dunces of the Western world. While other countries forge ahead (the argument goes) we are stuck. Some schools and school systems – government, independent or Catholic ­– and some curriculum areas have done better than others, but since around the turn of the century none has done much more than flatline, despite strenuous reform efforts by state and federal governments.

    It is on this stubborn ground that the battle of the reform agendas is being fought. Some of the reformers want to press on in the current direction. Some want a quite different agenda. And some want a different system.

    To press on is to persist in the view that if schools are exposed to the right combination of pressures and given the right capacity to respond, they will lift their “performance,” and this will be reflected in better student results in standardised tests. Since Julia Gillard become federal minister for education in 2007, this has been the dominant Australian reform agenda, prosecuted through NAPLAN, the MySchool website, and a flurry of other measures aimed at encouraging parental choice, making schools more accountable for student attainment, and taking us to “top five by ’25.” Gillard’s Coalition successor in the education portfolio, Christopher Pyne, bought the line and packaged it up as the “four pillars” of reform.

    Two of the five recent reports ­– one by prominent academic and consultant Brian Caldwell, the other by the Centre for Independent Studies, or CIS – belong to this agenda. Their concern is not with the “pressure” side of the equation, but with the amount and kind of elbow room schools need if pressure is to turn into “performance.”

    Caldwell has been the leading Australian proponent of school autonomy since the publication of his seminal The Self-Managing School (written with Tasmanian principal Jim Spinks) in 1988. He was among the first to argue that autonomy should serve educational as well as professional and organisational ends, and was therefore among the first to realise that a causal chain with ill-defined “autonomy” at one end and closely specified “outcomes” at the other end is a long and tangled one.

    The most recent of Caldwell’s many investigations of the connection, based on the experience of four government schools in Victoria, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory, finds that, yes, “autonomy” does improve “performance,” or it can anyway, sort of. The analysis “tends to confirm,” Caldwell concludes, “that higher levels of school autonomy are associated with higher levels of student achievement providing there is a balance of autonomy and accountability” (emphases added). In other words: in the universe of schooling, where everything is related to everything else, it all depends.

    Such inconvenient caveats, qualifications and distinctions eluded the sponsor of Professor Caldwell’s study, then education minister Pyne. “Great schools have leaders and teachers who have the independence to make decisions and deliver the education that best suits the needs of their students,” he enthused in launching the report. “And the research, including the findings by Professor Caldwell, tells us this is the right approach.”

    It doesn’t, and it didn’t, of course. The concept of “autonomy,” along with the Commonwealth’s $70 million Independent Public Schools Initiative and Caldwell himself, has been roped into a highly politicised and dubious campaign that is not interested in whether, how and to what end relationships between schools and systems need reform. It is interested, instead, in making public schools more like private ones.

    The CIS is also a supporter of autonomy and of independent public schools, but wants to go several steps further. It wants Australia to follow the example of the United States, Britain, Sweden, Chile and, most recently, New Zealand in introducing “charter” schools. Models vary, but the general idea is that charters are public schools privately operated (by for-profits as well as not-for-profits) within the terms of a contract or “charter.”

    In the CIS proposal, charters could set or choose their own curriculum and make their own industrial arrangements. They could be either “conversions,” which take over failing public schools, or “startups” going into competition with existing schools. One objective is, of course, to lift “performance,” but the CIS also argues that charters could encourage innovation and bring choice to families currently deprived of it for reasons of income and/or a preference for non-religion-based schooling.

    Considered in its own terms the case is plausible, attractive even. The charter mechanism (unlike the “autonomy” approach) recognises that the whole web of relationships of which “the school” is part needs to be rejigged. Schools working with “the disadvantaged” – the clientele the CIS has in mind – do need better ways of organising teaching and learning, hence different staffing profiles and deployment, and hence different industrial arrangements. They certainly need school-based or school-shaped curriculum. And even if the evidence about the “performance” of charters is mixed, as the CIS concedes, well, there’s still the claimed benefit of extending “choice” to those who don’t already have it.

    It is not until we step outside this advocacy that the real problems appear. Wanting to introduce charters into the US system in 1991 (when the first charters were established) is a very different thing from wanting to introduce them into Australia in 2015. In the United States the charters were designed to tackle the public school monopoly in the interests of variety, choice and innovation. Australia already has plenty of all of these features, and they have not served us well, not least because the ground rules are so different.

    In the United States, neither mainstream public schools nor charters are permitted to charge fees or to select on academic, racial, income or other grounds. Without seeming to notice the implications, the CIS suggests a level playing field for Australian charters and mainstream public schools: they should be funded to the same level, should not be permitted to charge fees, and should be non-selective.

    This raises an obvious question. If a level playing field is a good way to run the public system, why not the system as a whole? It might be assumed that a think tank committed to free and open competition, and to its educational correlative, equal opportunity, would be the first to ask the question, and to pursue the questions that then arise. It could ask, for instance, whether the lack of levelness in the playing field contributes to “educational disadvantage” and whether more levelness might reduce it. But the question is not posed.

    How is it that the CIS wants to import the charter idea, but not its regulatory framework, from the United States? How come the CIS has public schools for the “disadvantaged” in its sights but does not even mention arrangements for the “advantaged” or what has produced such a yawning chasm between the two? Why doesn’t it mention the possibility that a “failing” Catholic school might become a “conversion” charter? Why no consideration of the pros and cons of converting at least some independent schools to charters? Or of the pros and cons of more cooperation between schools in disadvantaged areas as against more competition between them?

    My purpose is not to question the sincerity of the CIS and its authors in wanting to do something about a serious educational and social problem. It is to point to a downward gaze that has trumped the CIS’s own first principles. Disadvantage is being addressed on the strict proviso that certain interests and arrangements remain not just untouched, but unmentioned. It is a question to which we will return.

    Geoff Masters is the long-time CEO of Australia’s preeminent education research organisation, an international authority on the complex interactions of assessment, teaching and learning, and a prominent critic of the all-too-familiar lockstep curriculum. To these research and educational credentials Masters has added a concern with how reform should proceed. In this he draws on arguments advanced by Canadian guru Michael Fullan and others, and particularly on Fullan’s critique of the Gillard agenda (title:Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform).

    Masters argues that, contra Caldwell and the CIS, choice, competition and school autonomy are best understood as elements of an agenda that doesn’t work. That agenda (Masters says) is based on the mistaken belief that “improvement will occur if schools are given incentives to improve,” including rewards, sanctions and the need to compete for students.

    Countries pursuing these strategies, Masters says – referring to but not naming Britain and the United States – “tend to be the countries that have experienced the worst declines in student performance.” Research is now casting doubt both on the “theoretical underpinnings” of the incentives agenda and on associated assumptions about what motivates people to give of their best. Rather than persist with an agenda based on rewards, sanctions and competition, Masters wants Australia to build the “capacity” of teachers and school leaders, and to ensure “high quality practice across the system.”

    Masters offers an outline of just such an agenda: a higher-status and more academically capable teaching profession; a “twenty-first-century curriculum”; more “flexible learning arrangements focused on growth”; early and extra attention for children “at risk of being locked into trajectories of low achievement”; and a narrower gap between the best- and worst-performing schools.

    Another to depart from the dominant agenda is the most recent in the Grattan Institute’s impressive series of reports on schooling. Like Masters, Grattan urges “more flexible learning arrangements focused on growth.” Where Masters points the general direction, Grattan gets down and dirty, reporting in detail on the work of schools that are putting the learning-based-on-growth approach into daily practice by collecting detailed information about each student’s progress and using it to inform curriculum choices and teaching strategies.

    It is at least possible that Masters and Grattan share something else: a loss of faith in or hope of large-scale reform. Until recently Grattan was a leading importer of ideas about how systems could and should be reorganised, but it has moved steadily from telescope to microscope, from reform of the system to reform of practice and to the school as “the unit of reform.” Masters, meanwhile, is straight-out despondent.

    There is (he says) “little evidence” that the status and academic capability of teachers is about to change, while “many features of the school curriculum have been unchanged for decades.” It is not obvious that “we have policies in place to reform mathematics and science curriculum in ways that might reverse the trend in subject enrolments and performance.” The counterproductive age-based organisation of teaching and learning “is deeply entrenched and reinforced by legislation” and “there is little evidence that… we are doing a better job of reducing the number of students on long-term trajectories of low achievement.”

    Masters doesn’t investigate why all this is so, why the “wrong drivers” have been chosen, or why his preferred agenda has not been pursued. Lyndsay Connors and Jim McMorrow do, and what they find justifies both a gloomy prognosis and a different approach to reform.

    Lyndsay Connors is, among other things, former chair of the Schools Commission, while Jim McMorrow was the Commission’s money man and remains the authority on where “resources” come from, where they go, and what they do. As might be expected of an experienced journalist and a de facto forensic accountant, Connors and McMorrow come at the problem in a quite different way from Caldwell and the CIS, and from Masters and Grattan. They look at the workings of the system as a whole rather than those of individual schools. They start not with an agenda but an analysis of the problem, and look at the specifics of the Australian system rather than at reform efforts elsewhere. And, unsurprisingly, they reach different conclusions about what is to be done. In this they are in debt to a reportprepared for the Gonski review by a Nous consortium and that, in turn, was informed by the work of a handful of mostly Melbourne-based researchers. What follows is a free translation of this substantial body of work.

    Any school in any school system anywhere (the argument goes) will reflect the demographics of its location, but Australia’s set-up compounds unavoidable differences in the social composition of schools. Its most distinctive feature is the sector system: three types of school, all receiving funding from two levels of government but in three different mixes and in three different ways. Two of the three, the non-government sectors, charge fees and are mostly religion-based. The third is nominally free, and secular.

    It is often thought that these arrangements permit non-government schools to select on financial and/or religious and/or academic grounds while the government schools do not. In fact, some non-government schools behave for most practical purposes as mainstream public schools and, more to the point, some government schools select all of their students on academic and therefore social grounds, and many select some of their students, both overtly and covertly.

    These structural arrangements mean that an unusually high proportion of Australian parents have an unusually great capacity to choose from an unusually wide range of schools. They typically choose schools where their children will find others just like themselves. And the more parents who do that, the more other parents will conclude that they’d better do likewise. In the doing, they make a choice for those who can’t choose, for reasons of income and/or location, or because their child doesn’t have what the choosy schools are looking for. Thus the non-choosers, like the choosers, find themselves increasingly among their own kind.

    To point this out is not to blame parents who can and do choose, either for choosing or for the choices they make. It is to criticise a system of pressures and opportunities to which parents respond as best they can and which, in the upshot, gives Australia an exceptionally high and rising “stratification” of schooling by class and culture, now approaching the stage at which it should probably be called “segregation,” or segmentation at the very least.

    More than a third of government school students are from the lowest quarter of students according to socioeconomic status, or SES, almost three times the proportion in the independent sector, and these ratios are more or less reversed for the top quartile. There are much higher concentrations in particular schools at either end of the spectrum. The concentration of disadvantaged students in disadvantaged schools is, Nous reports, “substantially higher than for any comparable OECD country,” while the proportion of all students in mixed or average SES schools is well below the OECD average. Research conducted since Nous and Gonski reported suggeststhat the concentration of low SES students in government schools continues.

    Cultural divisions are, in at least some parts of the country, even more pronounced. Taking the cases of Sydney and New South Wales, researcher Christina Ho found sectoral differences in LBOTE (language background other than English) and non-LBOTE enrolments similar to SES differences, but with staggering concentrations in top-end schools. There, LBOTE families have opted for the government schools that select and exclude on academic grounds, while non-LBOTEs have headed for the independents that select and exclude mainly on financial grounds. Thus only one of the top ten NSW government selective schools (by HSC rank) has less than 80 per cent LBOTE enrolments, but Ho can list sixteen high-fee schools with less than 20 per cent LBOTE. In between these extremes Ho finds a less dramatic but still pronounced segmentation going on.

    The sifting and sorting of students and families into particular schools feeds a sifting and sorting of the schools themselves, a process often referred to as “residualisation.” The term was popularised by public school advocates to describe a vicious circle. Schools with high proportions of kids from poor families find it increasingly difficult to attract and keep experienced and capable teachers, principals and other key educational resources, which makes them less attractive to those who can choose to go elsewhere, which increases the proportion of “disadvantaged” students, which makes the school less attractive, and so on, and on, around and around the circle.

    There is also a flip side, not so often noted, a process of aggrandisement that produces schools of almost preposterous grandeur, with five-star resort buildings and grounds, parents paying in fees twice what is spent on the common ruck of students (and that’s before various endowments, public subsidies, accounting lurks and tax breaks), and executive salary packages three times those offered elsewhere. In the course of his review, David Gonski, who came from the world of Sydney Grammar, visited some of the schools at the other end of the spectrum, and was shocked. Australia has constructed a system not just of sectors but of gated communities and educational slums.

    This process is often seen – and objected to – as the product of “marketisation.” It is true that schools parade their wares, and parents shop around. Indeed, more of both sides do the market-like thing in Australia than in any comparable country. But to think that Australian schooling is a marketplace and to argue that the problem lies therein is to make a fundamental mistake. The problem is in the way the market interacts with the funding and regulatory regime to produce massive distortions in what is offered and to whom it is available.

    Thus we have both free and publicly subsidised fee-charging schools; religious and secular schools; schools lavishly funded and schools relatively impoverished; schools permitted to select on grounds of capacity to pay and/or religious affiliation and/or academic performance and schools prohibited from doing any of those things; parents who are required to pay when often they can’t afford it and parents who aren’t and can; and parents who are offered the full menu and others who must take whatever is put on their plate.

    The most obvious educational consequence of all this, or obvious in the psychometrics relied on by all of the authors discussed here anyway, is “inequality” of “outcomes.”

    The argument is that a student’s attainment is determined less by his or her school’s educational program than by the school’s student body. Thus a low SES student going to a high SES school, for example, will do better than his or her peers because of the company he or she keeps. The complex redistribution of students across schools, Connors and McMorrow argue, has therefore also been a redistribution of educational achievement. It has led to a gap between Australia’s highest and lowest performing students (as Gonski observed) “far greater” than in many other OECD countries. And it means that Australia was the only OECD country to see an increase in the performance gap between high and low SES schools between 2000 and 2009.

    Most striking is an increase in “between-school variance,” a measure of the extent to which schools differ from each other. An Australian Council for Educational Research study of results from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment found an increase in variance from 18 to 24 per cent between 2000 and 2009. Over the same period variance in Finland’s schools rose from 8 to 9 per cent. As noted above, recent research suggests that the overall trend in both social redistribution and the redistribution of attainment rolls on.

    But do standardised tests, which these various comparisons rely on, focus on too narrow a subset of the learning that goes on in three areas of the formal curriculum (literacy, science, maths)? This is an important objection, but there is another, at least as important. Standardised tests say nothing at all about what is learned in school via the so-called “informal” curriculum.

    Christina Ho points to the moral as it applies to “multicultural” learning. “Scholars of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ argue that the success of Australian multiculturalism has much to do with ordinary encounters between people of different cultural background that happen every day, in neighbourhoods, workplaces, parks – and schools,” she says. “Monocultural schools, regardless of the brilliance of their teaching programs, cannot socialise students for the realities of a cosmopolitan Australian society and a globalised world.” The same can be said of learning about social difference. The general point is that students who do not learn about others do not learn about themselves either. They are being miseducated.

    Then there are the social consequences. Australian schools are increasingly active in constituting an elite that knows only itself, and an underclass that is being dudded and knows it. More diffuse but no less material is the erosion of “equal opportunity” through schooling as both a fact and as an important source of legitimation for the social order as a whole.

    A first conclusion: to say that we’re not getting anywhere is not quite right. Nor is it quite right to say that the problem with schooling is a problem of agendas. A big part of the problem is that we have the wrong system, and that most agenda-setters are looking elsewhere. We could go further and surmise that all that effort in reforming practice and schools isworking, not particularly well or widely, but well enough to stop us going backwards as a result of the workings of the system. The schools, in this perspective, are galley slaves, badly trained and fed, not very well coordinated, but stuck with rowing against a systemic tide.

    A second conclusion: are “outcomes” the thing to focus on, or the only one? All sides of the battle accept that lifting outcomes is the main game. But shouldn’t segregation itself be front and centre, by reason of its role in generating unequal attainments as well as other educational and social consequences? Why shouldn’t any school or school system that wants to select some or all of its students be held just as responsible for the resulting social mix as it is for “outcomes”? Segregation should be seen not just as an explanation of the problem, but also as a big, direct, closely reported and well-documented target of policy.

    A third conclusion: the tools of thinking about reform are not fit for purpose.

    The reform debate is dominated by the “effectiveness” paradigm, and that is a very mixed blessing. Thanks to its origins in psychology and psychometrics it is much better at understanding teaching and learning and, at a stretch, how a school works, than at understanding how school systems work. It is much more interested in what makes an effective teacher or school than in what makes an effective system. It has encouraged the assumption that “reform” consists of the viral spread of “good practice” and the accumulation of micro-gains.

    It has another problem, noted a moment ago. The effectiveness paradigm can see only the learning that goes on in the formal curriculum. It has blurred the vision of those who do see a segmentation problem, including Masters, Connors and McMorrow (and Nous and Gonski), but then relegate it to the status of an explanatory variable. The effectiveness approach makes them less than alert to learning in the so-called “informal curriculum,” the learning that comes from spending five or six hours, day after day, in a segregated school. They pass too quickly over the fact that high and rising segregation in schools is incompatible with a multicultural society, and with a democratic one.

    The language and interests of “effectiveness” have pushed out of view the system itself, and much of what goes on in schools. And it has pushed history, politics, sociology, philosophy and economics to the margins of thinking about reform. The exception, as employed and elaborated by Connors and McMorrow, illustrates the rule.

    A final thought: what is it about the system that does the damage? To one way of thinking, the problem is in regulation, and the solution is “deregulation.” In other minds, including those of the Nous researchers, the problem stems from (as Nous puts it) a “robust” and “highly competitive” market. In fact, this is less a problem of too much regulation than a matter of bad regulation. The market is not robust, but wildly distorted. Maldistributed liberty has eroded equality and discounted fraternity. The problem is not the market or regulation but their currently dysfunctional combination.

    And so, inevitably, to Gonski, the proposal for systemic reform, the great offset on the Gillard balance sheet, and the hope of the side. If Gonski is lost then so is any chance of arresting and reversing the segregationist logic of the system. If Gonski survives, then it must be remembered that he was sent into the fight with one arm tied behind his back. He was permitted to examine only one aspect of funding (the fee/free distinction, for example, was off limits), and the regulatory regime, including selection and exclusion, not at all.

    Connors and McMorrow argue that Gonski plus some regulatory tightening in a “hybrid” system is the best that can be hoped for. That is certainly the outer limit of what government can achieve at the moment. But is it the limit of thought, argument, proposal?

    My own view is that if Gonski does survive then it should be regarded not as the systemic reform job done, but as a crucial step on a long road. At the end of that road, as the CIS inadvertently suggests, is a level playing field. Between here and there is a lot of hard thinking about policy and politics, compromise and principle, which could be approached in good faith from left, right or centre. The objective is not to restore the status quo of 1960, or to defend this sector against that, or to keep adding more choice to a hopelessly rigged market, but to combine funding and regulation so that no school gets too far behind or too far ahead in the conditions needed to attract a diverse clientele and to offer an educationally engaging program. Schools are, after all, for kids. They are meant to be a bridge to the wider world, not a mere reflection of the circumstances into which a child happens to have been born.

    Dean Ashenden is a co-author of Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division (1982). He is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. This article was first published in Inside Story on 16 October 2015.

  • Peter Gibilisco and assisted by Bruce Wearne. A Special Minister for Disability.

    Disability support and policy is currently undergoing much needed reform. Such reforms highlight the attenuated life chances of people with disabilities and how these can be mitigated by policies that emphasize the inclusion of people with disabilities into the social life of us all. There is much public money being spent on getting things right, and indeed many lives are at stake.

    The National Disability Insurance Scheme is a wide sweeping reform that seems to be trying its utmost to significantly improve the lives of all people with disabilities however severe or profound these may be. There is a constant need for significant government financial support for people with disabilities to promote their health and wellbeing.

    All this has led me in times past to ask: should there be a specific Government ministry for people with disabilities?

    But now I am wondering: how does this proposal relate to the recent change in Prime Minister and the Ministerial reshuffle? Should I be pleased?

    An article in the Sydney Morning Herald (21 September) discusses the new arrangement of Ministers with special attention to disability. The article’s headline suggests that the Turnbull Government’s reshuffle of portfolios amounts to a loss for disability. But it concludes with the statement of the new minister, Christian Porter (who has replaced Mitch Fifield), that “people can be absolutely assured that disabilities is going to have front and centre care inside portfolios.”

    The word “care” is interesting; it refers here to policies. In his portfolio statement it refers to people. This is a subtle reminder that policies need to be framed with care in order to care for people. But the statement on its own is ambiguous. My question is this: How can any one issue coming under Porter’s many-sided portfolio be “front and centre” when all the other issues to be dealt with under this “Social Welfare” portfolio also need to be addressed? I am not wanting to debate here. This is no quibble. The ambiguity confirms the suspicion that disability as a “front and centre” political issue may have lost ground in the ministerial reshuffle.

    And so to my point. I suggest that disability should be covered by one federal ministerial portfolio with one minister just as there is one Ministry for Indigenous Affairs.

    Of course the new Minister’s sincerity is not in doubt. I realise such an innovation would be difficult to implement. I also welcome his emphasis upon putting disability “front and centre”. That indeed affirms a principle of good ministerial oversight and what he has said should encourage people with disability to fight on for better outcomes. But as “disability minister” he is not simply the Minister for Disability Affairs; he is Minister for Social Services overseeing “Australian government social services, including Mental health, families and children’s policy, and support for carers and people with disabilities, and seniors.” (From the Minister’s web-site). And so the situation that confronts this minister is indeed complex with many issues “front and centre”.

    My point is that the social structural complexity confronting those with disability has to be the “front and centre” focus of a specially designated minister (and department). How else can he, or she, deal with all the other issues that have to be “front and centre” to other ministers and other departments?

    The people we are talking about are our fellow citizens who suffer from an infinite number of complex disabilities. It would make sense to have a Government minister who can articulate and define disability in human and medical discourse. It makes sense for a Government minister to be a political figurehead in overseeing impacts from legislation from other portfolios and ensuring appropriate adjustments. Such a ministry would be innovative with a massive work load. There are innumerable social issues to be addressed; the demographic features of disability across the country have to be regularly monitored.

    Australia has a diverse population, with approximately 20 per cent living with disability.

    There is also the shocking statistic that identifies that at least 45 per cent of these welfare recipients are living in poverty. This is  further suggesting that there is an appalling ignorance toward people with disabilities. Christian Porter has much work to do on this front. Australia, along with other OECD countries, should be developing a perspective on economic and social development that puts this fact “front and centre”.

    A Government ministerial innovation that I propose here will help to upgrade the professional and analytical skills of our public service to find a new path to reach out and include all of our society. This is something that a disability minister would seek to implement.

    Further: does the absence of such a specifically designated ministry already create an unfortunate stigma when it comes to the funding of disability services? Of course, this is a cultural problem even if many voices say there is a community-wide failure to acknowledge the problems confronting services to those with disabilities. How is this ignorance to be addressed without a Federal minister to give political clout to such a change in the general attitude?

    We note that many voices are suggesting that proposed funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme will be inadequate. And indeed the appointment of a Minister for Disability Affairs, as I am proposing, would require wise guidance from those in public life (as well as parliamentarians) who are well versed about life and its struggles. This is but one step to support a move beyond mere coping with life’s struggles to embrace a national generosity that reckons with the pleasures of freedom for all.

    Peter Gibilisco was diagnosed with the progressive neurological condition called Friedreich’s Ataxia, at age 14. The disability has made his life painful and challenging. He rocks the boat substantially in the formation of needed attributes to succeed in life. For example, he successfully completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne, this was achieved late into the disability’s progression. However, he still performs research with the university, as an honorary fellow. Please read about his new book The Politics of Disability.

    Bruce Wearne was awarded a Ph.D. from LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, in 1987, for a thesis examining the 20th–century history of American sociology. Having left university employment, he serves on the Editorial Board of The American Sociologist. He develops a perspective on South West Pacific politics at his blog: https://nurturingjustice.wordpress.com

     

     

  • John Menadue. Is Malcolm Turnbull sacrificing his principles?

    The polls show most Australian voters have welcomed Malcolm Turnbull’s election as Prime Minister. I did.

    It is very early days, but I am concerned by signs that he is bowing very much to the right wing of his own party and former Abbott supporters rather than spelling out clearly his own policies that we heard about for years. He told the Parliament today ‘Can I simply say the government’s policies are unchanged’

    A strong leader imposes his views on the organization he leads and not the other way around. In the longer term, Malcolm Turnbull can’t please those who welcomed his election as a sign of change and improvement, and those who stuck stoically to Tony Abbott.

    For years in opposition and then in government Malcolm Turnbull gave us a contemporary, appealing and relevant outline about what we should be doing in our national interest. Is it still there?

    Despite early signs of a more humane approach to asylum seekers and refugees, he has re-appointed the hardline ex-policeman, Peter Dutton, as his Minister for Immigration and Border Protection. It was a ‘captain’s pick’ that he didn’t need to make. I was looking for signs of change in this area, or at least a signal that change was in prospect. It did not happen. Only last week, Peter Dutton told us that he would not be blackmailed by pregnant asylum seekers on Nauru. What courage! I don’t think that is what many in the Australian public, or even Malcolm Turnbull himself, hoped for in his Minister for Immigration and Border Protection.

    Adam Bandt asked Malcolm Turnbull in the parliament about releasing children in detention. What we got was a justification from Malcolm Turnbull on Coalition refugee policies that were ‘tough’ and even ‘harsh’.

    Climate policy has been the defining issue of Malcolm Turnbull’s political career. He lost the leadership of the Liberal Party on just this issue. He once described the Coalition’s policy of Direct Action to reduce carbon emissions as ‘fiscal recklessness on a grand scale’. He also described Direct Action as a ‘fig leaf’ when you haven’t got a policy. Now Malcolm Turnbull describes Direct Action as a ‘resounding success’.

    In 2010, Malcolm Turnbull told us that ‘to effectively combat climate change’, the nation ‘must move … to a situation where almost all or most of our energy needs to come from zero or near zero emissions sources’. Now he tells the parliament that ‘[Opposition leader, Bill Shorten] is highlighting one of the most reckless proposals the Labor Party has made. Fancy proposing without any idea of the cost of abatement, the cost of proposing that 50% of energy had to come from renewables! What if that reduction in emissions you needed could come more cost-effectively from carbon storage, by planting trees, by soil carbon, by using gas, by using clean coal, by energy efficiency.’ That is dramatic turn-round in policy by Malcolm Turnbull. Was it just political rhetoric or has he changed his mind on renewable energy?

    Barnaby Joyce maintains that in the deal with the National Party, Malcolm Turnbull agreed that water policy would be transferred to his agricultural portfolio. That suggests that the interests of farmers will be placed ahead of the ecological health of the Murray-Darling Basin. That again raises serious doubts about Malcolm Turnbull’s environmental credentials. Even that resolute climate sceptic, Tony Abbott, never put Barnaby Joyce in charge of water in the Murray Darling Basin.

    The Turnbull government has now approved the $16 b. Adani Carmichael Coal Project in Queensland. In doing this, Malcolm Turnbull told the parliament that ‘clean coal’ and ‘carbon capture’ were viable responses to fossil fuel pollution. But he told us in 2010 that ‘despite all the money put into carbon capture and storage there is still, as of today, no industrial scale coal fired power station using carbon capture and storage ‘. As far as I can understand carbon capture and storage is still a pipe dream, as it has been for decades.

    The tide of informed opinion is turning very strongly against new investments in thermal coal projects like Carmichael. The governor of the Bank of England only recently warned about the risks of investing in fossil fuel and that such investments would likely become ‘stranded assets’. In 2010 Malcolm Turnbull told us that building a future that is not reliant on fossil fuels for energy is ‘absolutely essential if we are to leave a safe planet to our children and the generations that come after them.’ Yet he has now approved the Carmichael coal mine that will be one of the largest in the world and the largest in Australia. It will increase carbon pollution dramatically and put at risk the Great Barrier Reef. We are paying a heavy price for another Malcolm Turnbull somersault.

    In his own electorate of Wentworth, Malcolm Turnbull had a strong reputation and record in support of marriage equality. But that is also changing. He has now endorsed the position held by Tony Abbott. As prime minister, he has told the parliament ‘the Coalition, our government, has decided that the resolution of this matter [marriage equality] will be determined by a vote of the people by a plebiscite to be held after the next election’. Tony Abbott must be pleased. No wonder Tony Abbott said, perhaps a little mischievously that the Turnbull Government had not changed any policies of his own government.

    In Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull described data retention laws as ‘expensive, invasive and useless’. He is now over-seeing a huge expansion in the amount of information the government can access from the public. There is no sign yet that he is likely to rescue us from the ‘digital dungeon’ he warned us about.

    Tony Abbott was determined to destroy the National Broadband Network. Malcolm Turnbull, it could be argued, helped to rescue it. But the political compromise between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull has given us a much inferior NBN. Almost all informed advice tells us that we are spending massive sums on a project which will result in this country having inadequate internet speeds. This will stifle the sort of innovative businesses which Malcolm Turnbull says the country needs. Yet he has shown no signs of building an NBN which, instead of relying upon slow and antiquated Telstra copper, connects most Australian premises to fibre. All we have had is waffle from the new minister about the government being technologically “agnostic”, whatever that means.

    It is early days yet for the Turnbull government, but the events of the last month are cause for concern. Tony Abbott and the old guard are winning consistently on policies.

    Gough Whitlam indelibly stamped his policies on the ALP long before he became Prime Minister. The reverse now looks to be in play with the Coalition stamping its policies and prejudices on Malcolm Turnbull after he became Prime Minister.

    In the end we didn’t expect much from Tony Abbott, but with Malcolm Turnbull we have much higher expectations. He has set the bar much higher for himself and our country. We were encouraged by this. But he is showing a tendency to keep running under the bar he set.

    He has given the Liberal party a lift in its political capital of about 3/4%. But has the Liberal party learned a lesson about the need for genuine change along the lines formerly advocated by Malcolm Turnbull or will the Liberal party head back to its old agenda?

    Will Malcolm Turnbull be there when we need him and help realise the high expectations we have of him. I hope so. But political compromise in the grab for power has been obviously on show in the first few weeks.

     

     

  • The Synod on the Family – What’s really happening?

    Editorial (No.10, October 2015, updated 16/10/2015)  

    Catholics for Renewal.

    The 14th General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops
    Rome, 4-25 October 2015
    “The vocation and mission of the family in the Church “

    The Synod on the Family – What’s really happening?

    The Synod on the Family has completed two of its three weeks. The final week will be critical, but already there are some positive signs of the Spirit at work. Will the College of Bishops recognise its isolation from the people of God and the need to ensure that the Church’s teachings and governance are properly informed by thesensus fidelium, the faithful’s sense of the faith, as taught by Vatican II? Such recognition is implicit in the pastoral approach sought by Pope Francis. As late as Friday 16/10/2015,  the full synod was hearing many 3-minute contributions on such controversial issues as cohabitation, the possibility of communion for the divorced and remarried, and the Church’s approach to homosexuality,

     

    During these first two weeks, it might seem that little has been achieved at the current assembly of the Synod of Bishops in Rome, described as the Synod on the Family. Perhaps that’s to be expected given the public attempts by some bishops to sabotage any move to a more pastoral Church and the limited evidence of bishops having listened to the people of the Church. It’s also due, more positively, to new processes introduced by Pope Francis to ensure more discussion amongst the bishops and greater transparency. Let’s pray that the Holy Spirit inspires the bishops during the remaining week as those discussions are aggregated.

     

    To date, and a significant week remains, the tentative optimism of our last newsletter has not been dashed. We observed then that the Synod on the Family is a very real opportunity for the Church to renew and to focus on its God-given mission in the world. We noted that the test for this synod would be whether the institutional Church is ready to listen to the people of the Church, a questionable proposition given the general inadequacy of the consultation process throughout the world.

     

    This synod is about improving the Church’s pastoral response to issues surrounding the family and marriage, issues that need the experience of the people of the Church living in communities throughout the world. In the first week of the synod, Pope Francis used Jesus’ analogy of making the disciples ‘fishers of men’ to say that “a new kind of net is needed . . . (and) families are the most important net for the mission of Peter and the church.”

     

    It would be presumptuous of men who govern the Church without the executive involvement of women, men who have never married nor had the responsibility of parenting children, and are mostly elderly, to attempt to reach informed views on family matters without reaching out to the people of the Church – a big ask given such limited pre-synod consultation and the presence of only 30 women at the synod out of 315 attendees, with none of them allowed a vote. There are non-ordained religious brothers with the vote but no vote for religious sisters, or for any non-ordained members of the laity. As Vatican II stated (Lumen Gentium – the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church):

    “The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief.”

     

    Australia’s Cardinal Pell has been active in arguing for no change and resistance to a pastoral approach in areas such as communion for the divorced and remarried, an argument that defines many rigid Church teachings as ‘doctrine’, yet there is clearly disagreement as to what constitutes doctrine and how teachings that fail to reflect Jesus’ fundamental teaching of love can be construed as doctrine. Cardinal Pell has been identified by Cardinal Dolan of New York as the instigator of a letter to the Pope from thirteen cardinals at the start of the synod complaining of bias in favour of change in the synod process.
    That letter caused an early rare intervention by the Pope, before the entire general assembly, telling the bishops to stop using the “hermeneutics of conspiracy” which he described as “sociologically weak and spiritually unhelpful” (Robert Mickens in US National Catholic Reporter 13 October 2015), a welcome indication that Pope Francis is prepared to be assertive in dealing with ill-informed resistance to change.
    Francis instructed the bishops: “the sole method in the synod is to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit.” He seems to be using this assembly of the Synod of Bishops as a start in fixing the Church’s dysfunctional governance with some good processes. These include making episcopal collegiality real, ensuring that the Synod of Bishops recognises its accountability for good governance of Christ’s Church and for ensuring that their decisions reflect the mind of Christ.

     

    The divergence of views reported from the Synod has concerned a number of people. On the other hand, that divergence with some strong support for Christlike pastoral changes in the teaching of the Church is itself a promising indication that many of the bishops understand and recognise the desperate need for that sort of change; they are laying the foundation for change.

     

    In a meaningful and decisive act immediately before this Assembly on the Family, Pope Francis exercised his authority to simplify and shorten marriage nullity processes and to empower local bishops in the process. This change to canon law, by motu proprio (“on his own impulse”) without any change to doctrine, is arguably the most substantial change to the Church’s marriage laws in centuries. The changes also serve as an illustration of Francis’ commitment to more pastoral approaches and to the accountability and pastoral role of bishops, and implicitly challenged the synod to follow this lead on matters of more moment affecting families in the Church.

     

    Whilst there has been a good deal of opposition to renewal expressed in the synod, there have also been many positive reports, including:

    • A very pastoral observation from British Cardinal Vincent Nicholls on the need to support couples in a ‘second union’
    • Canadian Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher asking the synod to reflect on the possibility of allowing female deacons and, more importantly, giving women higher positions and decision-making authority within Church structures, noting that the synod should “clearly state that you cannot justify the domination of men over women”
    • Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckley of Ghana, where there is considerable homophobia, agreeing that “people who are different from us are sons and daughters of God and we have to open the doors to them.”
    •  Archbishop Heiner Koch, appointed by Francis as Archbishop of Berlin a few months ago, using his address to the synod to question the exclusion of remarried divorcees from the Eucharist. Koch is also known for his sympathies toward homosexual couples; he was earlier quoted as saying, “Any bond that strengthens and holds people is in my eyes good; that applies also to same-sex relationships.”
    • Synod Italian B Group proposed that the Synod Final Document should have the church take “a positive look at sexuality.”

     

    Disappointingly, there has been little direct acknowledgement of the worldwide scandal of clerical child sexual abuse and the institutional Church’s complicity in the protection of paedophiles and the consequent further abuse of children – the most damning evidence of the need for fundamental reform of the Church’s governance. This failure to even acknowledge the complicity of the institutional Church is itself further evidence of the dysfunctional clericalist culture.

    Perhaps some positive indication of change, and of the Holy Spirit at work, might be derived from a shift in sentiment by Archbishop Coleridge (Australian delegate to the synod with Bishop Hurley) who said to Vatican journalist John Allen early in the Synod:

    “What’s clear even now is that trying to make universal pronouncements about the issues concerning marriage and the family is so tough as to be almost doomed.”

    Some days later (11 October), Coleridge blogged:

    “The task of this Synod and the real challenge to our corporate apostolic imagination (is): neither to abandon Church teaching or to leave things untouched . . . We have to speak differently and act differently, but staying within the wide parameters of Church teaching which has its roots in Jesus. At the end of the first week, I have a stronger sense of that that’s possible than I did earlier in the week.”

     

    The final week of the synod will clearly be the most important as the process of many dialogues is brought together. A special commission has been appointed by the Pope to draft the synod’s final document in light of its deliberations. Ultimately, the pope receives the recommendations of the synod and makes decisions. It appears however that this pope recognises the need to change attitudes rather than attempt to decree radical change unilaterally. As respected Vatican watcher Massimo Faggioli has commented after observing the initial stages of the synod dialogues, it is possible that this synod will be followed by more frequent sessions of the Synod of Bishops with greater input from the people of God, and possibly more local synods as the process of renewal matures, a need espoused by Catholics for Renewal since our inception. Vatican III remains a possibility!

     

    The test of this synod remains as the extent to which the College of Bishops recognises their isolation from the people of God and the need to ensure that the Church’s teachings and governance are properly informed by the sensus fidelium, the faithful’s sense of the faith, as taught by Vatican II. Such recognition must be reflected in the pastoral approach sought by Pope Francis.

     

    It is still possible that the synod will achieve that outcome informed by an expedited reform of the Church’s governance with proper recognition of the role of the people of God and the removal of discrimination against women in the Church.

  • John Menadue. The new compradors and the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement

    Compradors are sometimes described as those who help a foreign country exploit their own. I was reminded of this when I read that the ALP Caucus had compromised its concerns over jobs for Australians and was prepared to waive the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement through the parliament with only a ‘diluted’ list of demands as the AFR put it.

    If this agreement proceeds, Australian workers are likely to be much more vulnerable. Not surprisingly the President of the ACTU, Ged Kearney said that ‘this is about Australian jobs so we will keep fighting for those jobs’. No wonder the unions are unhappy about the attitude of Labor parliamentarians.

    There is a problem; a large Labor elite with fellow travellers whose careers outside parliament as consultants and lobbyists depend on Chinese connections and largesse. They are cultivated with money, travel and entertainment. They cling like limpets to the relationship with China. They have a lot to lose if they upset China. And it shows.

    As Upton Sinclair put it so succinctly ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it’.

     

     

  • Nicholas Reece. Falling behind in the innovation stakes

    Malcolm Turnbull has promised a new innovation policy for Australia by Christmas. Bill Shorten has pledged to be a “jobs prime minister for the new economy”. For the first time in a long while, the political rhetoric matches a genuinely huge national policy challenge.

    In the past 15 years, there have been more than 60 reports on Australia’s national innovation system. They all broadly reach the same finding: Australia suffers from a failure to turn public research into commercial outcomes, to generate higher levels of business research and development, to adapt new technologies and skills, and to participate effectively in global value chains.

    Despite all the reports, there has been precious little action and an embarrassing lack of coherence in Australia’s policy settings. As a result, Australia finds itself languishing near the bottom of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development when it comes to the commercialisation of research and in the middle of the pack when it comes to investment in higher education, research and innovation. This is a very dangerous portent for future prosperity.

    If there is a silver lining in Australia being so far behind world leaders in innovation – such as the Nordic states, Israel, Singapore, Britain, South Korea and United States – it is the existence of strong evidence about what works. Now we just need our leaders to make the bold policy interventions that will drive Australia’s economic transformation.

    These advanced economies all approach innovation systematically, with agile development agencies that foster collaboration and plug gaps in the innovation ecosystem.

    According to chief scientist Ian Chubb​, Australia is the only country in the OECD without a national research and innovation plan. China has the explicit goal of being the greatest investor in research and development in the world within a decade. Japan wants to be the No. 1 global innovator by 2018. Australia?

    We need a clear plan with an inspirational vision and goals – all backed up by our political leaders as proselytisers-in-chief.

    One useful intervention would be to set up a national innovation body like NESTA in Britain, to provide strategic leadership of the nation’s innovation and research effort, and stimulate debate and entrepreneurial activity. If the Productivity Commission is like Australia’s personal trainer, keeping the economy lean and fit, then an Australian NESTA could be the coach, driving the relentless pursuit of innovation and building entrepreneurial skills and culture.

    Instead, we have a Canberra-based bureaucracy that thinks its only purpose is to find and destroy “rent seeking”, like a heat-seeking missile. The result is that high-potential industries do not get the support they need, and globalisation has left us with a national economy that resembles a twisted reflection in a circus hall of mirrors: a gutted manufacturing sector; a dominant mining industry with its cycle of boom and bust; and domestically focused oligopolies of banks, insurers and retailers.

    Australia needs to make a game-changing investment in wealth-generating research, innovation and commercialisation.

    The Australian government allocates about 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product to research and innovation – about the same as it did in 1984. By comparison, South Korea has a target of 5 per cent.

    But the problem is much deeper than just the quantum. The priorities and incentives embodied in the allocation of funds are also problematic. More than half is allocated to public research agencies, medical research institutes and universities. A further 30 per cent goes to business through R and D tax measures. Comparatively little funding is available to support research engagement between business, universities and research organisations.

    For example, the Co-operative Research Centres program, which builds links between researchers and business, makes up just 1.5 per cent of total support for science, research and innovation, and the recently revamped Entrepreneurs’ Program accounts for 0.4 per cent.

    Britain has allocated $3 billion over five years to its Catapult Centres, promoting industry/university collaboration, compared with $190 million over the same period for the Growth Centre equivalents in Australia.

    The US government invests nearly 10 times more than we do as a percentage of GDP in business feasibility studies intended to convert research into proven technologies. The lack of an equivalent to the widely lauded US Small Business Innovation Research scheme here represents a major hole in our innovation ecosystem. That scheme is credited with triggering a fundamental shift in attitudes in US universities towards research being converted into a product or service.

    Australia also needs to plug gaps in the innovation pipeline that funds research and technology breakthroughs into commercial applications. The “valley of death” for businesses that have received venture capital is well known, but other gaps exist at the pre-seed, proof-of-concept,  and angel investor stages. The problem can be fixed with improved funding programs run by sector experts, and new taxation arrangements.

    Finland, with a quarter of the population of Australia, invests about $200 million a year in young growth companies. In Australia, the closest equivalent program is investing $350 million over 14 years.

    Finally, our government could do something really bold with our immigration program. Immigrant-led entrepreneurism is a key ingredient in the economic success of countries like Australia and the US. Immigrants make up 17 per cent of the US economy, yet 50 per cent of business start-ups in Silicon Valley have at least one immigrant as a founder. Nearly all of them are graduates of the US university system.

    The evidence in Australia tells a similar story. The University of Melbourne runs the Melbourne Accelerator Program, ranked 13th in the world among university business accelerators. Over the past three years, 46 per cent of the new businesses that have come through the program have had at least one immigrant founder.

    The Obama administration has moved to offer overseas graduate students six-year working visas. Australia should match it with something equally brave.

    Nicholas Reece is a principal fellow at Melbourne University and a former policy adviser to Julia Gillard, Steve Bracks and John Brumby.

  • Good Samaritans in Greece

    We have been told in Australia that asylum-seekers are so inhuman, that they would even throw their children overboard; that they are all ‘illegals’ and akin to criminals; and that they bring disease and wads of cash.

    Fortunately, helpers in Greece have taken no notice of this characterisation of asylum seekers. See the link below of Samaritan’s Purse helping asylum seekers arriving by boat in Greece.  John Menadue

    http://video.samaritanspurse.org/the-rising-tide/

  • John Menadue. The infrastructure mess and wasteful road spending.

    Former prime minister Tony Abbott said that he planned to be the infrastructure prime minister. There was little to show for it apart from wasteful spending on roads. He said that the Commonwealth should ‘stick to its knitting’ and not get involved in funding public infrastructure. His focus was on roads.

    Our new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull has spoken at the weekend of exploring radical road and rail funding, and has announced Commonwealth funding for a light rail project on the Gold Coast.

    Last week Bill Shorten announced a $10 b. infrastructure plan which even suggested giving Infrastructure Australia a trading licence!

    There is a lot of rhetoric and a lot of talk about infrastructure. Before it all gets out of hand we should stop and consider the present mess. And a mess it is. The motoring, road construction and political lobbies are promoting waste and confusion.

    In July last year Infrastructure Australia put out a draft report to canvas public comment. This is quite usual practice. The report was hastily withdrawn and the Co-ordinator General sent on ‘extended leave’. It seems that the government didn’t want a rigorous and transparent discussion on infrastructure.

    There were two particular media reports at the time that are worth re-reading. Extracts from an article by Alan Kohler give a flavour of his concern. “The whole problem with road funding in Australia is too much government involvement and not enough private rigour … Here’s the arresting heading of one of the chapters [in Information Australia’s draft report] … Australia’s nearly $20 b. annual road spend can only be described as hideously inefficient. … Australia has a true gamblers’ addiction to roads: the money spent is not a rational investment.”  See link to Kohler article below.

    www.ycat.org.au/?news=why-dont-they-do-it-in-the-road

    Josh Gordon in The Age said ‘“The Infrastructure Australia report … has delivered a scathing critique of monopoly state run road entities such as VicRoads, claiming a culture of resisting reform that has led to a situation in which political leaders are held captive to demands for more funding. … More than $20 b. a year of national road funding is being spent in a hideously inefficient manner. … The current Australian system assumes that roads are an answer to most transport problems and seeks more and more funding to that end with little consideration of alternatives that most other parts of the world enjoy, such as significant heavy intercontinental rail networks and dominant heavy mass transit systems. … The report is also critical of the federal government’s efforts to predict increases in road traffic, claiming urban congestion has consistently been overstated as a result.  See link to article below:

    http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/billions-spent-on-roads-in-8220hideously-inefficient8221-way-20140722-zvqcg.html

  • Misha Coleman. Open Letter to Julie Bishop on Sri Lankan war crimes.

    8 October 2015.

    Dear Ms Bishop

    Thank you for co-sponsoring the UN Human Rights Committee resolution negotiated by the Sri Lankan Government, which will hopefully provide some answers and finality to the mothers of 146,679 missing people, through the establishment of a domestic war crimes panel.  You’ll know that these Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Christian mothers are still looking for their children, their husbands, and they still long to re-inhabit their houses and their land.  (The resolution is essentially the response to the investigation which was undertaken by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights into atrocities committed in the final decade of a 26-year civil war, and was passed unanimously last Thursday).

    SRI LANKAN GOVERNMENT OFF THE HOOK
    Given the plethora of horror contained in the 272 page OHCHR report, the ultimate wording of resolution is understated to say the least. The Sri Lankan administration is reported to be ecstatic with the final wording: Colombo newspapers reporting last week that “Sri Lanka is happy that it is off the noose”, and the Prime Minister being quoted last week as saying that his successful negotiation of the final wording (much watered-down from the original) means that “I have kept (the former President) Rajapaksa out of the electric chair.”

    Given the closeness of the relationship between Australia and Sri Lanka, we ask you to support the ‘new’ Sirisena/ Wickremesinghe Government to move swiftly on a number of reforms, without further postponements and delays, in return for the ongoing diplomatic and financial support that Australia continues to bestow upon the Sri Lankan leadership. Immediate reforms are also crucial since the resolution adopted today has no timeframe for implementation.

    URGENT REFORMS
    Key and urgent reforms include the review and repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act which provides, amongst other things, legal ‘cover’ for torture and random detention. Another problematic piece of legislation is the Strategic Development Act, which appears to facilitate the confiscation and occupation by the Army of private land, for ”strategic’ developments such as coal-fired power stations, tourism projects and golf courses. It’s also difficult to understand the necessity and wisdom of the recently expanded Public Security Ordinance – which gives military the powers to act in a policing role, noting that there are an estimated 160 000 soldiers in the north and east now (with not much to do), representing about one soldier to every six civilians.

    DECIDING TO RETURN
    You’ll also know that a huge factor in people’s decision to return to Sri Lanka and to the north is their ability to reclaim the land they owned and inhabited – but it’s estimated that of the 67 000 acres of land occupied by the Sri Lankan military in the north, only 1000 acres has been released/returned to date.

    EXPECTATIONS?
    So what do you expect from the resolution? There is certainly an expectation by many Sri Lankans that those who are responsible for deliberate murders of civilians, deliberate bombing of hospitals and no-fire zones, and even genocide if proven, must be punished. This is an expectation that applies to LTTE cadres, the military and the political machinery. It should be noted though that around 18 000 members of the LTTE have already been punished and ‘rehabilitated’.

    And the victor’s wrath continues: frequent reports are still made that former LTTE cadre are being picked up off the streets and taken to the dreaded Terrorism Investigation Division for example. Only last week, a man who claims to have left the LTTE in 1997 was arrested by the Terrorism Investigation Division and allegedly transferred to the notorious 4th floor ‘torture department’.

    WHAT NEXT?
    If you expect Sri Lanka to move on, and recognise that the days of the LTTE are over, surely Australia can also finally release those asylum seekers from our detention centres who arrived towards the end of the civil war (2008/2009) many of whom have been in detention in Australia for more than five years, based on adverse ASIO assessments which were often largely based on information provided by the former and highly corrupt Rajapaksan Government.

    JULIE BISHOP: WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?
    Hundreds of Sri Lankan asylum seekers still languish in legal limbo in Australia, awaiting their claims for asylum to be processed, while ongoing harassment continues towards their family members who remained behind in Sri Lanka.

    The expedient narrative that those who have fled Sri Lanka since the end of the civil war are “economic migrants”, includes those who have lost their children, lost their spouses, lost their jobs, their homes and their land-is this the definition of an economic migrant that you use during the on-water, enhanced screening process that was especially designed by the Department of Immigration for Sri Lankan asylum seekers?

    Australia has rewarded the new Sri Lankan Government with political and diplomatic support, which has resulted in the foreshadowed economic and travel sanctions against the political leadership being taken off the table, and which has helped the new Government to regain international credibility.

    Will you now reward the Sri Lankan people with your support for some genuine reform, and will you please process – fairly – the hundreds of Sri Lankans who have sought protection from you and your Government in Australia?

    Misha Coleman is the Executive Officer of the Australian Churches’ Refugee Taskforce and wrote this letter from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

    This letter was distributed to members of the Australian Churches Refugee Taskforce.

     

  • Bob Kinnaird. 750,000 temporary residents with work rights.

    The recent Fairfax/ABC Four Corners reports exposing widespread exploitation and wage abuse of overseas students and other visa workers in 7-11 stores, horticulture and other sectors have been justly applauded as outstanding examples of investigative journalism.

    Their impact has been immediate, forcing 7-11 to set up an independent investigation panel chaired by Alan Fels and 7-11 chairman Mr Russ Withers to resign.

    The latest Fairfax report was titled ‘The Precariat’ (SMH, 3 October 2015). The term combines ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’ and was coined by British economist Guy Standing. It means broadly workers reliant on transitory and insecure work, though not necessarily low-skill.

    The government’s response to the scandal so far has been underwhelming. This is strange, since Trade Minister Robb says that two ‘super-growth’ industries for Australia’s economic and jobs future are international education and tourism. Both are indirectly implicated in the exploitation scandals in 7-11 and elsewhere. A prudent government would do more to secure their long-term future.

    Senator Cash In her new capacity as Employment Minister in the Turnbull government declared there was no need for government regulation of the labour hire industry, one of the central players in this sordid scene: industry self-regulation was her preferred way.

    As Assistant Immigration Minister she had earlier announced that three months ‘volunteer’ (i.e. unpaid) work by working holiday 417 visa-holders would no longer qualify them for a second-year 417 visa. That long-overdue correction was a reaction to an earlier ABC Four Corners program on mainly Asian working holiday makers being exploited in the fruit and vegetable sector.

    The Fairfax ‘Precariat’ report points out that the end of last year, Australia was host to 750,000 foreigners on temporary visas with some work rights, mostly on student, working holiday and 457 skilled visas. Another 470,000 people were here on visitor visas, largely for tourism. Technically they have no work rights but many do work unlawfully.

    This 750,000 figure actually understates the size of the temporary visa workforce because it is a snapshot at 31 December when many temporary visa-holders go home for the work shutdown or summer break and are outside Australia at this time. In June 2014, the figure was 840,000.

    Alongside the foreign worker exploitation issue, two related issues need attention. The first is the impact on Australian workers especially young people who bear the brunt of cut-throat job competition from the burgeoning temporary visa-holder work force. Between June 2007 and 2014, the number of overseas students and working holiday visa holders in Australia grew by 50 per cent, from 324,800 to 490,960.

    Expressed as a proportion of the 15-24 year old labour force (June 2007 vs 2014, latest available), the stock of WHMs and overseas students has grown from 16 per cent to 24 per cent of the total youth labour force in Australia.

    Most of these temporary visa-holders are young people and compete in the entry-level job market. Not all work, but most do.

    The impact on young Australians is clear in many indicators: declining labour force participation rates among young people, rising youth unemployment and underemployment, increasing unemployment rates among new graduates and many others.

    Competition from the growing temporary visa work force is not the only factor responsible. Increased participation rates in higher education and some welfare disincentives to work also contribute, among other things. Successive governments have failed to commission any serious study of the labour market impacts of this recent explosive growth in this temporary visa workforce. But this level of growth in labour supply is bound to have major impacts especially in times of sluggish employment growth, even before considering the characteristics of the additional labour.

    The second issue is the role of government international education and visa policies that are feeding the growth in Australia of a vast underclass of temporary visa holders desperate for work and ripe for exploitation.

    These policies need to change or the already large underclass of temporary visa workers will grow even larger, if international education and tourism do become Australia’s super-growth’ industries.

    International education and visa policies

    The two most serious examples are international education and visa policies for overseas students and graduates. Working holiday visas are also another serious area, not dealt with here.

    When Australia’s international education industry started in the mid-1980s under Labor, overseas students had no work rights in Australia. The target market was foreign students whose families were wealthy enough that their fee-paying sons and daughters didn’t need to work in Australia to survive. They were also in university study only, not low-rent private vocational colleges.

    Over time the government’s international education policies have changed dramatically. They now increasingly target overseas students from families with far less wealth and resources especially in the vocational education (VET) sector. Many go into debt to fund their Australian study and hope for a long-term employer-sponsored 457 visa or permanent residence (PR) visa. Many of these students need to work for much of their time here just to survive or send money back home, and are prepared to work for $6/hour or less. Some even pay their employer for the job, to secure 457 employer sponsorship or employer certification of ‘work experience’ needed for some visas, as reported in a Monash study I co-authored with Bob Birrell and others (‘Cooks galore and hairdressers aplenty’, People and Place, 2007).

    Over time the government has also expanded work rights for overseas students and graduates to give Australian international education providers a marketing advantage over other competitor destinations. What is being sold here is not the quality of the education offering but the right to work in Australia.

    The work rights on student visas now are 40 hours a fortnight during term and unrestricted hours the rest of the year.

    The most important recent development is the post-study work visa (485 visa) introduced by the former Labor government. This visa now gives overseas student graduates from higher education degree courses, in any field of study, unrestricted work rights in Australia for 2 to 4 years, depending on the qualification level. The vocational education (VET) sector is lobbying hard for the same post-study work visa. It is probably just a matter of time before they succeed. At present overseas student VET graduates can only get a more restricted 485 visa, limited to courses in occupations on the government’s skill shortages list and only for 18 months.

    The Immigration department says it expects 70 per cent of eligible overseas student graduates to take up the post-study work visa – a massive 200,000 by 2017-18, regardless of unemployment among Australian graduates whose numbers are set to grow rapidly at exactly this time, a result of policy-driven increased enrolments in the last five years or so.

    All overseas students and the graduates on 485 post-study work visas compete in the labour market with no legal obligation on employers to give preference to young Australians or to undertake labour market testing. Many overseas student graduates on 485 post-study work visas will end up competing in the lower-end of the job market, if UK experience with a similar program is any guide. That means even more pressure on young Australians with low skills looking for entry-level jobs.

    Incredibly, none of these extensions of work rights to overseas students or graduates including the post-study work visa has ever been based on any serious assessment of the impact on Australian residents in the job market. The Knight review, which recommended introducing the post-study work visa, completely ignored its potential labour market impact on local graduates and non-graduates.

    The main policy driver, as always, is to grow the international education sector and increase overseas student numbers and revenue. Governments like this, because it takes pressure off their education budgets. Business likes this, because it means a larger domestic market for their products and services, increased labour supply and downward pressure on wages.

    The policy changes needed are clear but unlikely, given the institutional resistance and vested interests.

    First, Australia’s international education policies should not be targeting relatively poor overseas students for onshore course delivery in Australia. Onshore provision should be targeted more to high-yield/high fee courses and well-funded students, not at overseas students so poor they have to work 40 hours/fortnight just to stay alive. If this segment is to be targeted, more emphasis should be given to providing courses offshore.

    Second, the overseas student graduate post-study 485 work visa needs a complete rethink. The timing is bad enough, coming into operation just as the Australian economy faces several years of below-trend growth, with no visa mechanism for protecting Australian graduates and job seekers. The number of 485 visas is not limited in any way and will be determined simply by graduate demand for them.

    At the very least, the visa should be restricted to graduates in occupations on the skill shortage list.

    Bob Kinnaird is Research Associate with The Australian Population Research Institute and was National Research Director CFMEU National Office 2009-14.

     

     

  • Nauru and the Philippines

    Three days ago, on 6 October, I posted a story ‘Nauru and the Philippines‘. That story carried an unconfirmed report that the Australian government was negotiating with the Philippines government for the transfer of 600 asylum seekers in Nauru to the Philippines.

    Since then there have been several reports confirming the thrust of this story, even though there has been no confirmation from the Philippine or the Australian government. These reports indicate that the discussions are proceeding, but are not yet concluded. The detail of the arrangement will be very important, particularly the residential status of any asylum seekers transferred to the Philippines. See below the links to the reports in The Guardian (Daniel Hurst and Ben Doherty) and UCAnews (Michael Sainsbury). The reports have also been covered in several News Ltd publications.

    John Menadue

    http://www.ucanews.com/news/philippines-latest-asian-nation-to-stand-in-for-australia-on-refugees/74403

    http://gu.com/p/4d64j/sbl

  • Nicholas Rowley. Cleaning up the mess on climate policy.

    It is one of the rarely considered consequences of the sad story of Australia’s national policy response to climate change, that many of our finest public servants have sadly wasted years of analysis and effort to dutifully serve the demands of their political masters.

    More than ten years ago analysis by Ken Henry under then Treasurer Peter Costello recommended a national emissions trading scheme. The advice was ignored. In 2006 John Howard asked Peter Shergold, then Head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to examine the most effective ways to achieve the emissions reductions required. He too concluded an emissions trading scheme was necessary. Wanting to adopt his own approach, the advice was ignored by incoming Prime Minister Rudd.

    Then in 2010 Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme hit the buffers of the Copenhagen outcome and Prime Ministerial hubris; Malcolm Turnbull, then Leader of the Opposition, lost his job over his climate policy stance and the political debate declined to resemble the name calling so prevalent at second rate Polytechnics in North London circa 1970: all dominated by toxic gesture.

    Despite Prime Minister Gillard’s noble efforts to achieve some modicum of policy stability and continuity, her government’s initially fixed carbon pricing system was swiftly dismantled by Prime Minister Abbott, together with attempts to either abolish or thwart the work of new organizations doing important, tangible work and investment such as the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

    It is a sad and sorry story. Much like looking into the teenager’s bedroom, the temptation is take a brief look and walk away from the mess.

    But we can’t. Largely because the issue won’t go away: the dynamics behind the problem are fixed, and the decisions taken by Australia’s major allies and trading partners will come to effect our economy whether we like it not. As the current Governor of the Bank of England said so succinctly last week in a speech at Lloyds in London “with climate change, the more businesses invest and change with foresight, the less they will regret in hindsight.” It is a speech that is well worth reading in full, and would no doubt be of great interest to Turnbull, formerly an investment banker.

    And what is true for businesses is also being recognized by China, India, the European Union and the United States. No longer is climate change a niche concern: it has increasingly become part of the policy and business mainstream.

    Malcolm Turnbull’s ascendancy to the Prime Ministership is potentially a vital circuit breaker. From the moment his predecessor came to office “climate” and “change” were two words that could not be used together in the Commonwealth bureaucracy. Simply with Abbott’s removal those working in the central agencies, the CEFC and ARENA can breath a collective sigh of relief.

    Clearly the Prime Minister has (understandably) gained power on a number of promises including that the existing ‘direct action’ policy will remain untouched. But this is not a great problem for Turnbull. He knows that effective climate policy must send clear, stable and continuous messages across the economy about the important and economically rational imperative of reducing emissions.

    Direct action doesn’t do this. It is relevant only to the businesses who receive public money to do things that otherwise they wouldn’t. It is wasteful, and most likely so costly to be unsustainable beyond a few years.

    And with the government committed to the reductions stated in its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) submitted to the United Nations to reduce greenhouse emissions by 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, Turnbull is going to need new policies to achieve it.

    If he manages an election victory next year, then my sense is that there will be a renewed sense of creativity and urgency amongst our leading public servants to finally achieve a sensible national approach to reducing the risks of climate change. At the risk of stretching a concluding metaphor, Prime Minister Turnbull might just be the adult Prime Minister who will walk into that bedroom and clean up the climate policy mess left by his teenage predecessors.

     

    Nick Rowley is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney and represents Robertsbridge in Australia and southeast Asia. Previously he advised Prime Minister Tony Blair on climate change and sustainability and helped initiate the seminal Review into the Economics of Climate Change undertaken by Lord Nicholas Stern of Brentford.