John Menadue

  • Brian Johnstone. Terrorism and torture – the Catholic tradition.

    In Australia today, we accept that a person who has expressed ideas that justify terrorism may be restrained from acting out those ideas.  But we would not justify torturing a person suspected of harbouring such notions to force him to reveal them or to reject such ideas.   However, surveys in the Western world find that torture to obtain information is sometimes justified. The Prime Minister’s acceptance of torture in the context of the Sri Lankan civil war was as follows: “Obviously the Australian Government deplores any use of torture. We deplore that, wherever it might take place, we deplore that. But we accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.”  (http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2013/s3893068.htm, retrieved 15 Jan 2014).

    The Catholic tradition does not have a good record on torture. Pope Nicholas I in 866 condemned both the practice and the judicial institution of torture.  However, later torture came to be accepted by Church authorities and theologians.  Under the influence of Roman law, torture was first permitted legally by Pope Innocent IV in 1253. This pope allowed the infliction of torture on heretics by the civil authorities and torture had a recognized role in the courts of the Inquisition. Torture was also adopted by secular courts.  Pope John Paul II in 1993 condemned physical and mental torture as intrinsically evil. This is a striking example of the development of doctrine; how can we explain it?   The failure of the tradition to consistently reject torture can be attributed, apart from human sin, to three factors: Roman Law; a theory of order in the world and the lack of an adequate notion of dignity.

    Ancient Roman law accepted torture.  When the “barbarians” invaded Europe and the Roman Empire fell, the practice of torture was abandoned.  Trial by ordeal was instituted in its place.  To prove his innocence an accused had to submit to an ordeal, for example he had to walk a set distance over red-hot ploughshares. If he survived and recovered this was taken as a sign from God that he was innocent. In the eleventh century, with the revival of Roman law, the practice of ordeal was abandoned and torture was reinstated.  Judges were instructed to obtain a confession from the accused and to obtain this they could use torture.

    Behind this we can discern a complex legal, philosophical and theological theory.  God’s judgment on the matter was now no longer sought by examining the results of an ordeal. Instead, ecclesiastical and legal officials sought to examine the contents of the mind of the accused.  They no longer looked for blisters on the accused’s feet as indicative of guilt, but for “blisters” or heresies in his mind.

    Drawing on Greek thinking, philosophers and theologians held that there was an order in the world.  This order expresses the wisdom of God. Human beings could participate in this order by knowledge and free will.  This order was called an “ontological” order. An ontological order expresses the way things are.  The order was also considered to be a moral order; that is, it expressed the way things ought to be.  A rational person could thus recognize the truth of things and also discern what ought to be done.  This order was considered to be a template for the social and political order of society.

    Deviant ideas and practices were like a virus attacking the order in the world; moreover, they threatened to corrode the social and political order.  Both the Church and the secular power had a vital interest in preserving this order.  Secular courts and the Church Inquisition sought to discover the deviant ideas or “heresies.”  If individuals who were accused of heresy refused to confess, it was considered legitimate to torture them to obtain a confession.  It was known of course that people will make false confessions to avoid pain.  But those who justified torture were terrified at the prospect of their world falling apart as a consequence of people’s wrong ideas. They ignored the problem of false confessions and continued to practice torture.  When the Inquisition found that persons had deviant ideas and would not change, the Church turned such persons over to the state.  The state would then execute them.

    What was missing in this theory was an adequate idea of the dignity of the person.  In the thinking of the period an individual had dignity on the basis of his being in the right place in the order in the world.   In the case of a person who held heretical thoughts, his intelligence was out of order and by accepting such ideas his free will was out of order. He was not in the right place and so did not have dignity.  Being in the appropriate place in the world was also equated with being in a set place in the social order. An egregious manifestation of this way of thinking was that it could justify the torture of slaves and the lower classes, but not of the nobility or the clergy.

    This confusion was corrected by the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council, especially in the document on religious liberty (1965).  Every person has dignity because every person is created in the image of God. To be created in the image of God means to have received the gifts of intelligence and free will.  Intelligence and free will are received as gifts and we employ these capacities in communicating with other persons who have received the same gifts.

    The notion of order in the world that fits with these notions is not that of a fixed “ontological” order. It is an order that is brought into being through free communication between persons; fundamentally between God and human persons, then between human persons. The most basic form of this communication is the exchange of gifts.  Dignity comes about through the mutual gift of the recognition of dignity.  A primary gift to another is the recognition of the other’s dignity.  It is in recognizing the dignity of another that a person acquires his own dignity.

    It does not follow that only persons with intelligence and freedom are to be recognized as endowed with dignity. Disabled persons, even the severely disabled, may not be denied dignity. One who refuses to recognize the dignity of the disabled fails to acknowledge what is required by his own dignity and so loses that dignity.  A person who tortures another denies the dignity of the other and so denies his own dignity. To allow torture as an exception in “the hard case” is to concede that society, in the final analysis, is founded not on free communication, but on violence.

    Brian Johnstone. is a Catholic Priest who taught moral theology in Rome for nearly 20 years. Currently he teaches at the Catholic University in Washington. 

  • Why Rupert Murdoch is forever in Twitter trouble.

    In the ‘New Daily’ of December 17, 2014, Bruce Guthrie, a former editor-in-chief of  ‘The Age’ and Murdoch’s ‘Herald Sun’ tells us what he thinks about Murdoch’s twittering ‘But here he was seemingly gloating over the outcome of the appalling Martin Place events as if the only thing that mattered was its news value and the profits that might bring. No wonder he was dubbed a “gleeful ghoul” for the tweet. 24 hours later, despite dozens of entreaties, he still hasn’t apologised for it.’

    See below for full article.   John Menadue

     

    http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2014/12/17/murdochs-twitter-trouble/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The+New+Daily+Thursday+181214&utm_content=The+New+Daily+Thursday+181214+CID_e0b29d13c4b7895f43354a244523cc86&utm_source=#.VJJJpU5bKqg.gmail

  • John Menadue. Capitalism and the fall of communism

    In this blog on 5 November I drew attention to an article by the Economics Editor of the Guardian Larry Elliott. In that article Elliott said “As the Berlin Wall fell, checks on capitalism crumbled.”  The principal thesis of that article was that with the end of communism capitalism became more aggressive and less inhibited. He said

    “The fear that workers would ‘go red’ meant that they had to be kept happy. The proceeds of growth were shared. Welfare benefits were generous. Investment in public infrastructure was high. But there was no need to be so generous once the Soviet Union was no more. What was known as neoliberal economics was born in the 1970s but it was not until the 1990s that market forces reigned supreme. The free market spread to poorer parts of the world where it has previously been off limits, expanding the global workforce. That meant cheaper goods, but it also put downward pressure on wages. What’s more, there was no longer any need to be inhibited. Those running companies could take a bigger slice of profits because there was nowhere else for workers to go. If its citizens did not like ‘reform’ of welfare states, they just had to lump it.”

    This is not a new thesis, but it is becoming more and more urgent as a result of growing inequality.

    And inequality is becoming more entrenched and apparent as we see the massive scale of tax avoidance by large multinational companies like Google, Westfields, Apple, Amazon, Ikea, News Corp, Glencore/Xstrada and hundreds of others. Taxes which we pay to maintain a civilised society are becoming optional for the wealthy and powerful.

    In the next week or so I will be posting articles by Ian McAuley on this issue – capitalism, society and morality.

    I think that there is widespread evidence that with the end of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, capitalism has become less restrained, and more aggressive. The neoliberal theorists told us that if the rich have more money through tax reductions and other benefits they will invest more and the poor would get the ‘trickle down’ benefits.  This has not happened.

    • There is growing concern across the world about the rise of inequality and the destructive social and economic consequences. Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century draws attention to the long term trend to greater inequality. This book is terrifying conservatives. Inequality has become a major issue in the US where the process began with Ronald Regan and his neoliberal supporters. Alan Kohler in the Business Spectator points out that “rising inequality began in the 1980s and was the direct result of Reganomics and its pursuit of tax breaks for the rich”. Regan also set about quite deliberately to cripple the trade unions. This crippling of the trade unions and the tax benefits for the rich in the US have bought enormous benefits for the wealthy and a major skewing of income with disastrous effects on the economy and political life where wealthy vested interests can, in effect, buy governments. Even Rupert Murdoch has shown his concern by hopping on the bandwagon about growing inequality. But his concern is not convincing when we know that in the last 16 years he has paid $US 600 million in salaries to himself, his children and a few senior executives.
    • Maggie Thatcher followed suit in the UK. She said there was no such thing as society, only individuals and markets. This has culminated in what the Governor of the Bank of England said in May this year that “capitalism is at risk of destroying itself and that bankers have an obligation to create a fairer society”. He added “the basic social contract at the heart of capitalism was breaking down with rising inequality.” He warned “my core point is just that as any revolution eats its children, unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential to the long term dynamism of capitalism itself…Capitalism loses its sense of moderation when the belief in the power of the market enters the realm of faith”.
    • The neoliberals present their case in terms of how they favour an open and competitive market when in practice a major objective is to favour capital against labour and reduced competition. In Australia, market based approaches to climate change through carbon taxes or an emissions trading scheme are rejected in favour of government handouts to polluters. Vested interests are able to bring influence or buy governments in a way not possible 25 years ago before communism collapsed.
    • We have seen rapacious banks with their obscene executive salaries bring the world economy to its knees in the global financial crisis.
    • In Australia we have a government that speaks about ending the age of entitlement but seems more determined to extend the benefits of the privileged. We have a Royal Commission that is allegedly about corruption but I suspect that the real agenda is to cripple the trade unions, the strongest countervailing force for justice in the Australian economy and society. The CFMEU and the HSU are fair game but not the much more culpable Commonwealth Bank.

    In my blog of 20 September this year, What does Labor stand for?” I emphasised that only a strong society, including a strong and respected government can support a strong economy. There is no point in an economy that does not serve social ends.

    There is a prevailing view by the present government, as the Liberal Party platform says “that only businesses and individuals are the creators of wealth and employment”.  As I said in that September blog this Liberal Party view sees government as a burden rather than a contributor to the common wealth. There is a danger that the increasingly unrestrained power of capital and big business legitimises destructive social divisions which encourages people to separate themselves from society in physical or metaphorical gated communities such as schools and hospitals. It allows the connection between contributions to be severed. It encourages rent-seeking, speculation and protection of privilege rather than productive investment. Increasingly, companies in Australia are paying large amounts out in dividends, buying back shares and sitting on idle cash rather than investing in the future of the Australian economy and Australian jobs. There are not many ’trickle down’ benefits in all of this.

    The fall of communism has emboldened the exponents of capitalism. There is a continual assertion of the importance of business over and against society and the community.

    Pope Francis is one clarion voice saying that business and the market must be underpinned by morality.  He has challenged market fundamentalists who hawk ‘trickle down’ theories as naive. He has denounced the new tyranny of unfettered capitalism and calls inequality ‘the root of social evil’. He is a lonely voice at the moment.

    Ian McAuley will be discussing these issues in a series of articles starting later this week in this blog.

    The fall of communism is proving to be a great boon for the powerful at the expense of the powerless. The restraints on the powerful are crumbling.

  • What will Israel become?

    In the International New York Times of December 20, Roger Cohen focuses on the future of Israel. He says ‘Every day … another European Government or parliament expresses support for recognition of a Palestinian state … In the space of a few weeks something has shifted. The Leader of the Labor Party, Isaac Herzog has been ushered from unelectable nerd to plausible patriot. Polls show him neck and neck with the incumbent [Benjamin Netanyahu].  For link to this article see below.  John Menadue

     

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/opinion/sunday/roger-cohen-what-will-israel-become.html?emc=edit_th_20141221&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=69612024&_r=0

  • Jesus and the modern man.

    James Carroll has been writing about religion for over 40 years. In this beautiful piece in the International New York Times of November 7 this year,  he describes how he still keeps going to Mass despite his many doubts. See link below.  John Menadue.

  • Pope Francis sharply criticises Vatican bureaucracy.

    In his pre-Christmas address to Cardinals, Pope Francis referred to a Curia that is outdated, sclerotic or indifferent to others. He said that the Curia, the administrative pinnacle of the Roman Catholic Church was suffering from fifteen ailments which he wanted cured in the new year. See link below for Pope Francis’ comments to the Curia.  John Menadue.

    http://www.news.va/en/news/francis-a-curia-that-is-outdated-sclerotic-or-indi

  • John Menadue. The accident prone Julie Bishop.

    I have written before about Julie Bishop’s mistakes as Foreign Minister despite the media spin that she has successfully generated. Those articles were: ‘Julie Bishop – Substance and Style’ on the 18th November; and ‘Julie Bishop -‘Undiplomatic, politically partisan and wrong’ on 22 November. Just recall her foolish attack on President Obama over the Great Barrier Reef.

    Since then Julie Bishop has continued on her merry way with a pliant media.

    In the recent budget cuts Julie Bishop volunteered a further cut in her foreign aid allocation of $3.7 billion. Together with the May budget cuts that she agreed to this represents a cut of over $12 billion in our aid program over four years.

    Julie Bishop has clearly decided that it is easiest to attack politically soft targets like the poor in our region. Australian foreign ministers do not have a domestic constituency to defend and so she attacks people who can’t vote or protest about her decisions.

    Michael Keating in this blog has noted that foreign aid has been the fastest growing item in the UK budget over the last four years, increasing by 25%, while expenditure on most other UK government functions has fallen. Indeed the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, is on record as saying that the increase in foreign aid is his proudest achievement in government. In Australia, however we are moving in the opposite direction with Julie Bishop cutting help for the powerless and the poor.

    As Caritas has pointed out, ‘The budget cuts mean that in terms of OECD rankings, Australia’s contributions to overseas aid are now at the lowest level ever since OECD records began in 1954. These cuts are severe and will put Australia near the bottom of OECD rankings as a contributor to international aid and development. … Australia is the third wealthiest country on a per capita basis in the world yet we will now slide to around 20th position as a contributor to international development.’

    Perhaps we have also forgotten that Julie Bishop led the charge against Julia Gillard over the so-called union ‘slush funds’. I recall the day when she was the sole opposition questioner and every question was directed at Julia Gillard’s association with Slater & Gordon and the AWU. Accusations of criminal conduct were made against Julia Gillard, but the Royal Commissioner Deyson Haydon has now found that there were no grounds for criminal action over Julia Gillard’s involvement in the so-called slush fund.

    Julia Gillard has called for her accusers to show decency and apologise. But Julie Bishop who led the charge has said nothing and the media continues to give her a free ride on this and on the litany of mistakes she has made.

    Julie Bishop was the loyal deputy to both Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. She sided with leaders who took diametrically different positions on climate change and the need to address carbon emissions. She shows great flexibility in all things.

  • Caroline Coggins, Pausing in Advent.

    I was on retreat recently in Hong Kong and there was a very small pool with eight turtles in it.  It took me some days to notice; you have to slow down to see them. Their water was muddy, there was certainly no vista here, just the close company they kept with each other, and the bonus of the big shell that they could pull their heads in and out of. I liked the turtles, I watched them lean on each other to get up, rest on top of each other, they had that shell, but mostly their heads were out, steady and still, looking at me, as I looked at them, curiously.  They seemed absorbed and present in their small world, except when I jumped up quickly one day, full of some internal noise, and they too fled from their rock, plopping back into the water.  I had disturbed their universe, and they disappeared for cover.  Having our known world disturbed is never easy.

    A retreat is a particular time, seems simple enough, go away from the normal routines, from the usual sense of place and keep the silence to find the inner quiet.  Then let surface what will.  But the bed is too short for my frame, and I am restless, I want to roam the Island. The thought of being cooped up like the turtles is not attractive, although I admire their quality of mind.

    Hong Kong is familiar, as a young woman I lived here in transit, restless and aching for another life.  Now it is many years later and the advent wreath is here with its candle lit, and I come to wait on God, to be like one of those turtles, still. Nice idea, thinking I may have some control in this relationship, thinking these pains may have gone.

    This year when I read the Annunciation what I notice are Mary’s pauses, her response to the angels’ avowal that she is favoured by God. But what she utters is that she is deeply perplexed. Imagine Mary, a young woman, now, suddenly, in God’s presence told she is favoured.   She pauses, perhaps for a moment, perhaps longer, as she goes inside like these turtles, to what she knows, her own world.

    Then she is told she will conceive, she will carry the Christ, the saviour. Again the pause, how can this be? There is no longer Mary and her desire for God, there is Mary and God and their relationship. She pauses, the world must feel very strange to her now, unimaginable, and then in the midst, God’s fingers reach out to her, to touch a ‘yes’ between both of them.

    In these moments when we have no protection, no status or wealth, nothing except what emerges out of us in this pause, we can get a real and sharp feel of ourselves, and it is different to what comes out of us when we feel the world is our domain. Now made vulnerable, at last vulnerable to God, our pretences empty, a hand reaches out to us, unexpectedly, and it is almost too much, scoured as we are, surviving on scraps, a hand that knows us and an unbearable, but so needed warmth, envelopes us.

    We are totally unprepared for this no matter how versed we are. And often in such situations and facing such challenges we can behave like the turtles, scatter and hide.

    These challenges of living on the edge are not ones we usually leap toward: to be aged, disdained, ill, poor and perhaps not even Mary’s experience of being chosen.  Yet this is where we are met, our wounds bathed.  Control is a fear soaked antidote to friendship and love.

    The pauses reveal us, ordinary and wounded, afraid, afraid of love, of being known, of being not much.

    I fear and know that the only way home to my creator is through my story, my life of yes’s and no’s, the hurts that have left me afraid, and the no’s that have made me inflexible.  It is in relationship where the wounds lie, and it is when we wait that we come to know how we have been waited for. The pains and fears that tear me are also where the balm lies.  I am not forced only made ready. Joy is an outcome, but this indwelling love, happens by becoming all that shames and mortifies me and all that I secrete from myself is where God’s hand touches.

    This is God’s time, and the most difficult thing to accept is that God is waiting on me even more than I am waiting on God.  God waits on Mary, waits on us, whatever we are up to, whatever stories and pains we carry, whatever the state of lapse, or homelessness.  That’s what I think Advent is really about.

    What we receive is a pathway to those who suffer, not as benefactors but as the same.  Learning how to love ourselves, others, as we are loved by Him.

    And the turtles, they only have each other in their little pond, and shells to crawl into when they need to turn their heads away, but then they will lean into each other again, help each other to climb to the rock in the sun, and sit there and look, just as they are.

    Christ is born to us all, surprising us in the midst our littleness, pausing, we find the “Yes!” between us.

     

     

  • John Menadue. What does it mean?

    We have all been moved by the outpouring of grief and emotion by the deaths in Martin Place, the school children killed in Peshawar and eight children murdered in Cairns. The flood of floral tributes has been remarkable. We saw it only a few days earlier with the untimely death of Phillip Hughes. There was an even more remarkable outpouring with the death of Princess Di in 1997.

    But what does our response mean? How do we interpret these events?

    Let me try.

    We all have brokenness, loss and grief in our lives that so often we suppress. The recent public tributes are a means to release some of this personal anxiety we all have. In a sense it is almost a public therapy for something we don’t really understand but need to express about our own lives. There is something deep within each us that breaks through,unbidden, to the surface.

    We need ceremonies and rituals to help us express our grief. Sometimes those ceremonies and rituals are formal memorial services in a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple or a shrine. But for many an informal ‘memorial service’ with massed flowers shows the same purpose. It is a way of expressing both our grief and our respect. Ceremonies to mark death, like other ceremonies in our life, are very important milestones.

    We particularly respond to untimely deaths, particularly of children. They are lives of great or unknown potential that are cut short. These untimely deaths remind us of the fragility of life. Though we try to manage and organise our lives to limit risk and the unknown, the fact remains that there is a fragility and mystery about human life that is beyond our understanding.

    Perhaps in such public memorial services we are determined to show that evil will not triumph. We are determined to show that goodness and generosity, despite our shortcomings, is part of each of us and is essential in any decent society.

    In these informal declarations of respect and support, we are also asserting that human relationships are more important than economic prosperity and success. In effect we are saying that there is a dimension to our lives that is more important than the material.

    Perhaps we are also saying that the human person is precious and valuable. Some would say that it is sacred, that we all have a touch of the divine and when we plumb our humanity we will find the divine.

    In our daily lives, dying has become different. In the extended family the death of grandparents and the viewing of the body were common place. Our parents wore mourning clothes. With our nuclear family, much of that has changed. Death is so often transferred to the hospital where doctors and nurses are in charge. We have removed death from the common place. Something is lost.

    In the memorial of dying we want to hang on to a place, a cemetery, a war memorial or a road-side cross that can be the focus of grief. That is why we are likely to see a memorial erected in Martin Place and perhaps in Cairns. Like ceremonies, markers are needed in our lives.

    The mystery of life and death will always be with us. That is what these floral tributes say to me.

  • Is religion the cause of war and violence in the Middle East and elsewhere?

    We are consistently seeing the ghastly side of Islam with public beheadings but we also need to keep in mind the ghastly side of Christianity which was so evidence during the Crusades.

    Many conclude that religion, now and in the past, is the cause of so much violence. Karen  Armstrong has just written ‘Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence’. This book has been reviewed by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian.  He says ‘We know that the slaughter of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Opium Wars, the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, Stalin’s Great Purge, the Second World War and the Holocaust, had little to do with religion. Indeed, much of us was explicitly anti-religious. So how on earth have we ended up with the idea – still in evidence in, for example, the comments readers leave on news websites – that religion above all is to blame for human violence.’

    See link to this review below:

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/08/fields-of-blood-religion-history-violence-karen-armstrong-review

  • Brian Johnstone. How to Respond to Terrorism? 

    How can we make sense of the contemporary situation of increasing violence?   Some groups engage in terrorism against other groups and these engage in torture as a means of defeating the terrorism of the others?  In liberal states torture is condemned as immoral; some seek to prohibit it by law, others defend it as a necessary and effective means to defend freedom.  Historical experience suggests that torture will continue.

    Paul W. Kahn, in Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty, (Ann Arbor, 2011) argues that secular, liberal philosophy and the theories of rights that it has developed, cannot deal with these issues.  The key is a religious notion that he calls “sovereignty.”  By this Kahn means a notion of ultimate reality.  Both sides of the contemporary war on terrorism appeal to an ultimate reality.  For the jihardist this may take the form of a distorted notion of “god.”  But western, liberal states have their own conceptions of a sacred reality.  We may call this “our freedom.”  To defend this, these states send their young women and men to kill terrorists and to be ready to sacrifice their own lives in the service of the sacred reality.  Once we begin to speak of “sacrifice” we move into the realm of religious experience and religious discourse.

    We can relate Kahn’s analysis to our Australian situation.  If we have any doubts about the importance of the religious dimension in Australian political imagination we need only think of the veneration attached to the sacrifices of Anzac.  In the conflict between the two sides, terrorists and their opponents, as interpreted by Kahn, each side seeks to “degrade” the other and ultimately to prove the other’s “god” is false.  This degradation is what is going on in the macabre beheadings carried out by ISIS; in the logic of such groups it is not enough to kill members of the other group. The killing must be done in such a way as to mock and debase the basic values of the other group.  The same dynamism drives the exhortations to kill as many “unbelievers” as possible.

    It is a requirement of justice to repel the violence of such groups.  But the response of the “West” has gone beyond this.  As example we can cite the degrading practices of torture as revealed in the recent U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report.  The twisted arguments invoked to justify these practices are not examples of good reason; they are the utterances of distorted, self-justification, more akin to pseudo-religion. Other nations have been no better.  For example, in 2013 the British government finally agreed to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.  Other cases of torture for the protection of the British Empire are coming to light.

    Torture is not the only issue.   According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, CIA drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 416-959 civilians, including 168-204 children and injured 1,133 – 1796.  It is reported that the CIA has now recognized that such “targeted killings” can strengthen extremist groups and be counter-productive.  Killing by drones, it is now recognized, may actually increase support for the insurgents, “. . . if these strikes enhance the insurgent leaders’ lore, if non-combatants are killed in the attacks, if legitimate or semi-legitimate politicians aligned with the insurgents are targeted, or if the government is already seen as overly repressive or violent.”(The Age, December 19th. 2014) We may note the logic of these reservations; they are not based on considerations of morality and virtue. Drone strikes are questioned because they have been found to be a counter-productive use of power.

    It is facile to present the current conflict as between unmitigated evil on one side, and absolute good on the other.   We are told by politicians that, “They hate us for what we are,” as if “they” hated the virtue that “we” represent.  In an interview in Le Monde, 26 November 2001, René Girard explained the social and cultural mechanisms that are involved.  The terrorist groups do not hate the virtue that “we” represent: they envy the power that we have and desire intensely to acquire similar power.

    The contemporary terrorist is in fact caught up in a relationship of mimesis or competitive imitation with the “Great Satan,” as he calls the U.S.A. and its allies. The terrorist desires to have what the opponent has, namely great, overwhelming power.   The more violently “the great Satan” exercises that power the more attractive that becomes to the terrorist and the more violence the terrorist will use in an endeavor to acquire that power. The more “productive” the power of the terrorist, the more he is convinced that his “god” is true.

    We cannot counter terrorism and defend our values by the use of violent power that is contrary to those values.  Torture and targeted killing are not only counter-productive they are a denial of what we claim to stand for.  They are irreconcilable with faith in the ultimate reality or God that we hold to be true.

     

    Brian Johnstone, is a Catholic Priest who taught moral theology in Rome for nearly 20 years. Currently he teaches at the Catholic University in Washington.

     

  • Kerry Murphy. Intra-religious conflict.

    Most violent deaths of Muslims in the world are due to others claiming to be Muslims.  The conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are all predominantly conflicts within the Islamic community.  This is strongly felt within the communities but not usually reported in the mainstream media.

    This week in Peshawar in north western Pakistan, more than 140 mainly Muslim children are killed by men who claim to follow a version of Islam that requires them to chant ‘God is Great’ whilst they execute unarmed school children.  They claim this is because the military in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has attacked yet another group of people where other civilians are killed.  “We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani.  “We want them to feel our pain.”

    Attacks on school children are only too common in Pakistan.  Only a short time before, Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and she continues her campaign to support the education of children.  She has her own experience of violence against women seeking education. Her response was not to give up, but to continue her work and support for education to build a better Pakistan.

    Our own Christmas preparations are confronted in Sydney by an angry, disturbed man with a gun.  He has a history of violence, possibly also mental health issues, but he has a gun.   He was claiming a link to a murderous sect committing war crimes in Syria and Iraq and takes hostages in a Sydney café the week before Christmas.  He has been rejected by his own community for abandoning Shia Islam for the extremist Sunni Salafists of ISIS. Three people are killed; two families will have a very sad Christmas.  Christmas is normally a time when gifts are given, families congregate and a birth is celebrated, not usually a time for reflecting on death.

    How do we respond to this violence and death, confronting us in the week before Christmas?  Do we respond with violence and vengeance, as is likely in Pakistan?  Or is there a lesson in the outpouring of support and reflection that can be seen in Martin Place, Sydney.  Possibly thousands have walked along to offer condolences to people they never knew, and leave flowers which are now filling up parts of the usually busy mall.  Australians and visitors from many diverse backgrounds can be seen looking and reflecting on the violent outburst in our busy commercial centre.

    It lead me to reflect more on how we respond to death, and how different communities commemorate their families and friends. Recently my wife and I, not being Muslims, were invited to attend the memorial ceremony for the death of a respected elder in the Hazara community in Sydney.  Hazaras are ethnically and religiously distinctive in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  We did not see anyone in the large group who was not Hazara, and there were many people there.  We attended the Shia Mosque in Sydney and were welcomed by the Hazara community as we paid our respects during the recitation of the Fatihe – the initial verses of the Quran, commonly recited when someone dies.

    Outside, we met up with many Hazara friends, who we first met in detention and are now Australians with their families helping to contribute to our multicultural society.  I saw a man who was my first Hazara client, back in 1998.  We met in Port Hedland detention centre and have maintained irregular contact since then.  We reflected on the recent changes for new Hazara refugees coming to Australia and how their community is at risk in both Afghanistan and Pakistan by those claiming adherence to the Taliban and their Wahhabist supporters simply because they are Shia. Reports of attacks on Hazaras are all too common.

    We can feel the pain of others, even those we never met, but unlike the Taliban or ISIS, we do not need to respond by inflicting more pain in revenge or retaliation.  Destroying is easy. Building up takes a long time and maybe reflecting on creating, not destroying will be a more uplifting mindset for the Christmas and New Year period.  Is it too much to hope that in 2015 more people will work towards building and creating rather than destroying?  We can but hope for without hope what do we have?

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in refugee law.

     

  • John Menadue. Normalising Crime.

    I was astounded when I read what Archbishop Antony Fisher told The Australian last week. The report said ‘Australia’s most senior Catholic cleric has proclaimed that families are more likely than priests to abuse children and rejected a church report that linked celibacy to sexual abuse. Archbishop of Sydney Antony Fisher said that celibacy could not be to blame for abuse, which occurred in every church, regardless of whether it was celibate. The thing about child abuse is most of it happens in families. It is an awful thing we hate to even touch on it, but it can’t be about celibacy because you look around society at the moment, it’s in every church, celibacy or not. It’s in many families and their not celibate, generally speaking.’

    The Archbishop is falling into a tendency we all have to normalize crime in our own group, church or community by saying that the rate of crime in our own group is no worse than in other groups.

    Cardinal Ratzinger who as Pope failed the Church so badly on sexual abuse of children used this argument at a conference in Spain in 2002 ”…the percentage of these (sexual) offences among priests is not higher than in other categories and perhaps it is even lower…less than 1%of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information or to the statistical objectivity of the facts”.

    Professor Patrick Parkinson of the Faculty Law at the University of Sydney   released last year a sobering Paper “Suffer the Teenage Children. Child Sexual Abuse in Church Communities”. Twice he reviewed the Catholic Churches protocol “Towards Healing”. He was a key adviser to the Catholic Church on sexual abuse issues. He is a remarkably well informed commentator. He has seen the problems close at hand and over several years.

    As he says in his Paper he terminated his work with the Catholic Church over the failure of the Salesians in Australia to address sexual abuse issues. He then called for a Royal Commission.

    In his Paper he acknowledges the patchy data on sexual abuse but the information pointed in one direction. The Catholic Church has a special problem which is outside the “normal”.

    He noted that at “a particular (Catholic) seminary in Melbourne 4.75 % of priests ordained between 1940 and 1966 sexually abused children”. Drawing on US data he concluded that “the rate of conviction (of these priests) is much higher than in the general population”.

    In comparing the Catholic Church with other churches in Australia he concluded, “When all explanations have been offered the rate of conviction of Catholic personnel does seem to be strikingly out of proportion with the size of this faith community compared with other faith communities”. Go to ssrn.com/abstract=2216264 for the Parkinson paper

    It is no help to try to distract attention from the problems that the Catholic Church faces  by saying that the Catholic Church is no different to others. As Parkinson points out ‘the conviction of Catholic personnel does seem to be strikingly out of proportion’

    To say nothing about the abuse of trust.

    This is not an encouraging start for the new Catholic Archbishop of Sydney

     

     

  • Luigi Palombi. It’s time to fix the free trade bungle on the cost of medicines.

    Ten years on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is entering another round of negotiations towards the new and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this Free Trade Scorecard series, we review Australian trade policy over the years and where we stand today on the brink of a number of significant new trade deals.

    Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership present an opportunity to correct a mistake made a decade in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, which led to Australia paying higher prices for pharmaceuticals.

    In July 2004, Tony Abbott, then health minister in the Howard government, issued this statement:

    The price of pharmaceuticals will not rise as a result of the AUSFTA…

    Contrast this to what the Abbott government’s first budget, in May this year, told Australians:

    Over the past decade the cost of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (PBS) has increased by 80%.

    To be sure, the “price of pharmaceuticals” is not the same thing as “the cost of the PBS”. But since the PBS is responsible for providing medicines to the vast majority of Australians, it is reasonable to infer that a contributing factor has been a rise in the price of pharmaceuticals. It is also reasonable to infer that the AUSFTA is partially to blame for that rise.

    The legislative instrument through which the AUSFTA was implemented is the US Free Trade Agreement Act 2004. The Therapeutics Goods Act 1984 was also amended to require companies seeking marketing approval for a pharmaceutical to provide a patent certificate as part of the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) regulatory assessment process.

    The patent certificate must say if the sponsored medicine will “infringe a valid claim of a patent that has been granted in relation to the therapeutic good (being the patented medicine)” in question. It must also notify the patent holder.

    Otherwise known as “patent linkage”, the application for regulatory approval creates a link between a patented medicine and a possible generic substitute.

    The patented medicines are categorised as F1 formulary medicines, which means there is no approved substitute.

    When a generic medicine comes onto the market, these drugs are contained in the F2 formulary. Generic medicines contain the same active ingredient or have the method of production to the patented drug, or they may be similar in terms of its administration, dosage, method of treatment or indication.

    How does ‘patent linkage’ play out in Australia?

    “Patent linkage” provides advance warning to a patent owner, usually the manufacturer of a patented medicine, that a generic medicines’ manufacturer is about to enter the market with a competing and cheaper substitute medicine.

    With the knowledge that a generic medicine will trigger an automatic 16% price drop for the patented medicine – and result in its transfer from the F1 formulary to the F2 formulary – the patent owner applies to the Federal Court of Australia for a preliminary injunction.

    The injunction is normally granted and as a result, the marketing of the generic medicine is delayed by an average of three years.

    This means that the patented medicine stays in the F1 formulary. This affects the pricing of that medicine not only because the price is higher, but also because medicines in the F2 formulary are subject to mandatory price disclosure. This tends to exert downward price pressure on all medicines within the F2 formulary.

    For a generic manufacturer to defeat the injunction, it must mount a challenge to the validity of the allegedly infringed patent. The average cost of patent litigation is about A$5 million and requires a team of specialist patent lawyers, patent attorneys and highly skilled experts.

    In addition to the legal cost, the generic manufacturer is, by effect of the injunction, denied sales revenue for the duration of the injunction – not to mention the opportunity cost it incurs as its workforce diverts attention to the patent litigation.

    Patent linkage refers to the link that regulatory approval creates between a patented medicine and a possible generic substitute.Sarahbean/Shutterstock

    In Australia, legal costs follow the event, meaning that should the generic manufacturer lose, it will also be required to pay a significant percentage of the legal costs incurred by the patent owner in defending its patent.

    So, it is critical that a generic company carefully assess any patent that puts at risk a proposed generic medicine launch. This assessment costs money. And unfortunately, because of differences in patent law around the world, it is impossible for a generic manufacturer to extrapolate the results of a patent challenge in one country to that in another.

    How does it affect medicine prices?

    The longer a medicine remains in the F1 formulary, the higher the cost of that medicine to the PBS. This, combined with the consequences on price once that medicine moves into the F2 formulary, creates a significant incentive for patent owners to stop generic competition.

    Patent owners encircle a valuable patented medicine with a series of “evergreening” patents. These usually apply after the patent (for the active ingredient) has or is about to expire. This can extend patent protection beyond the normal 20 to 25 year period to a period closer to 40 to 50 years.

    Unfortunately, the profit margin for generic manufacturers has fallen significantly due to the price disclosure mechanism, while the cost of patent litigation has risen significantly. Consequently, the capacity of generic manufacturers to assume the risks involved in risky and expensive patent litigation has fallen dramatically.

    In the absence of any serious intervention by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, it is likely that fewer “evergreening” patents will be challenged in the future. This means that more medicines will remain in the F1 formulary and for a longer period and the costs of medicines will rise.

    A consequence of price rises, particularly at a time of economic austerity, is that newer medicines are not being listing on the PBS. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, which decides which drugs will be subsidised through the PBS, for instance, recently rejected the costly drug Sovaldi, despite effectively treating hepatitis C virus infection.

    If the Abbott government wishes to limit the annual cost increase of the PBS to 4%, it is critical that only medicines that are truly innovative and deserving of patent protection remain in the F1 formulary. If room in the PBS is to be made for medicines such as Solvadi, then it is essential for more of the older F1 medicines be moved into the F2 formulary more quickly.

    The cost of the PBS has risen by 80% in the past ten years. It’s likely that without the AUSFTA, the cost of the PBS, and by inference the cost of medicines, would have risen by much less.

    This article draws on research prepared for the 2014 Workshop “Ten Years since the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement: Where to for Australia’s Trade Policy?”, sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW Australia.

    Luigi Palombi is Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University. This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’ on 21 October 2014.

  • Truth, Justice and Healing Council’s challenge of celibacy falls on deaf ears.

    In an article on December 16 in the SMH online, former NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally said that the report of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council offered Catholics a wake-up call. She said that many in the Vatican are still asleep. She added ‘I can’t decide whether to scream or cry when I hear a bishop or cardinal deny that the Catholic Church has a particular and serious problem with child sexual abuse by pointing out that such abuse happens outside the church as well.’

    For the text of Kristina Keneally’s article, see link below.  John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/truth-justice-and-healing-councils-challenge-of-celibacy-falls-on-deaf-ears-20141215-1276nv.html

  • Tony Doherty. Remaining balanced in times of tragedy and turmoil.

    Our ability to hang on to sanity and some sense of equilibrium this week has been sorely tested. In the face of scarcely imaginable acts of violence – right in the city’s heart, Martin Place, the balance of our emotional lives could be endangered. The press sifts through the many and various reactions – casual bystanders, politicians, radio commentators, the police. Everyone feels impelled to respond in their own way. A young woman on a suburban train declares her solidarity with Muslims (#illridewithyou) too scared to ride on public transport. Her twitter message goes viral.

    Recently when thinking about our personal responses to recent tragic events, such as the death of Philip Hughes. Martin Place, the Pakistan massacre, I came across a distinction which I found interesting and not a little helpful for a priest frequently called to face sudden tragedy. The distinction described three very different ways to sense another person’s feelings. Three kinds of empathy.  (Daniel Goleman. Dgadmin)

    The first is ‘cognitive empathy’ – imagining how another person feels and what they may be feeling. Trying to conjure up what it would be like going through a 17-hour hostage situation, held captive by a deranged man with a gun. Placing yourself in their shoes, in your mind, at least.  This is a fairly intellectual exercise of fellow-feeling. Crisis professionals, when faced with day-by-day trauma, sometimes, but not always, protect their balance in this way. They form a protective shell around their emotions simply to allow them to operate effectively.

    Then there is ‘emotional empathy’ – when you feel deeply along with the other person, as though such emotions were contagious. This form of empathy leaves a feeling of being drawn into another person’s inner emotional world, as a parent is in touch with their own child. One downside of such emotional empathy occurs when a person lacks the ability to manage their own emotional distress limiting the proper care that can be offered to the one suffering. It becomes a tightrope between appropriate detachment and excessively emotional involvement or, on the contrary, turning your back and searching for some form of mindless distraction.

    But there is another level of empathy – ‘compassionate empathy’, when we not only understand another’s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed. Simply speaking to do something. Genuine compassionate empathy occurs when one doesn’t allow emotional empathy to overwhelm and paralyse, but frees a person up to act and do something.

    The most homely example is what we face when someone dies.  We recognize quiet rationally the grief experienced by the death and loss. We can be drawn into that grief in a very personal way. But we can act to support the grieving person – say by bringing a casserole. The gift of food is traditionally a powerful expression of compassionate empathy. The Eucharist reminds us food is also a powerful symbol of hope – an anchor for our spirit.

    Finding the appropriate way to act in response to the Martin Place tragedy could be a vital step towards a saner and more balanced life and a more human future for us all.

    Is there any wonder that the simple act of accompanying a young frightened woman on a train struck a universal nerve?

     Tony Doherty is the Parish Priest at St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Rose Bay.  

  • Hazel Moir and Deborah Gleeson. Evergreening and how big pharma keeps drug prices high.

    Efforts by pharmaceutical companies to extend their patents cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year. In some cases they also mean people are subjected to unnecessary clinical trials.

    Big pharma makes big profits. Their useful new drugs are patented, protecting them from competition and allowing them to charge high prices. When the patent ends, other companies are allowed to supply the previously patented drug. These are known as generics. The prices of generic drugs are much lower than the prices of in-patent drugs – it has been suggested that for widely used drugs price falls can be as much as 95%.

    Pharmaceutical companies want to get their new products listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), because they will sell in much higher volumes. Taxpayers have an interest in ensuring that these drugs move from the high in-patent price to the much lower off-patent price as early as possible.

    On average, a patent provides effective protection from competition for about 14 years. But, of course, companies like monopolies and would like to extend the patent period. Over the past few decades they have used a process known as evergreening to keep generic companies out of the market for longer.

    How evergreening works

    Evergreening is achieved by seeking extra patents on variations of the original drug – new forms of release, new dosages, new combinations or variations, or new forms. Big pharma refers to this as “lifecycle management”. Even if the patent is dubious, the company can earn more from the higher prices than it pays in legal fees to keep the dubious patent alive.

    Evergreening is possible because in Australia the standard required to get a patent is very low. Different methods of delivering drugs (such as extended release, for example) have been known for decades. But when one of these known delivery methods is combined with a known drug, the patent office considers this sufficiently inventive to grant a new 20-year patent. Another favourite evergreening strategy is to patent a slight variation of the drug.

    Brand pharmaceutical companies argue that these “lifecycle management” patents provide improved health outcomes to the community. They meet the (very low) patentability thresholds of novelty and inventiveness. Critics argue that the claimed improved health outcomes are small or non-existent.

    An evergreening story: from Efexor to Efexor-XR to Pristiq

    An example is useful. In the case of the depression drug venlafaxine (marketed as Efexor), the original version had major side-effects. However, when provided in extended release form these side-effects were substantially reduced.

    Naturally the extended release form (Efexor-XR) became preferred. Although it might seem obvious to combine venlafaxine with an extended release form to overcome the side-effect problem, the patent office granted two new patents for extended release versions of venlafaxine.

    One of these was written in such a broad form that it delayed generic entry by two and a half years, while legal wrangling took place. Eventually the evergreening patent was declared invalid. But the cost to taxpayers of this delay is estimated at $209 million.

    Pfizer has a second evergreening strategy for venlafaxine. When venlafaxine is taken, the human body converts it to desvenlafaxine. In other words desvenlafaxine is a variant of the original active pharmaceutical ingredient venlafaxine. Clearly the two compounds are closely related. So it is astonishing that desvenlafaxine passed the tests for getting a patent.

    Desvenlafaxine is marketed as Pristiq. Pristiq entered the market early in the two-and-a-half-year period of legal wrangling over the extended release venlafaxine (Efexor-XR) patent. Pfizer’s marketing of Pristiq in February 2009 was so lavish that it attracted the attention of investigative journalists.

    Pristiq has no additional benefits for patients. Despite this, during the first six months of 2014 half of prescriptions were written for Pristiq rather than for the clinically identical Efexor-XR.

    But Pristiq costs between $A22.32 and $A26.50 more than Efexor-XR, depending on the dose. Based on reported prescription volumes in 2013-14, the cost to the taxpayer of doctors prescribing Pristiq rather than Efexor-XR exceeds $21 million a year.

    Unless generic companies challenge the desvenlafaxine patent, there will be no generic versions of Pristiq until after August 2023, when the patent expires.

    Would you like a placebo with that?

    When such minor variations in drugs are patented and marketed, there are also ethical considerations. Pfizer had to undertake clinical trials to obtain marketing approval for Pristiq. These involved blind comparisons with placebos. Thousands of seriously depressed patients involved in these trials received placebos for no good reason, since the chemical compound was identical with the action of venlafaxine in the body.

    Marketing of Pristiq clearly offers few benefits to the public. It does, however, offer Pfizer the benefit of extracting additional income whenever a doctor prescribes Pristiq. Many patients suffering severe depression were subjected to a placebo in order for Pfizer to undertake the clinical trials needed to obtain marketing approval for Pristiq. There seems to be no system for protecting patients from clinical trials undertaken only to support drugs based on evergreening patents.

    Evergreening entails large-scale economic and social costs for Australians. Reform of our patent laws to prevent evergreening is long overdue. This should be a priority for any government interested in reducing unnecessary costs to the health system.

    But instead, the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement talks expected to take place in Beijing this weekend could reinforce these problems and make reform of the patent system more difficult.

    Hazel Moir is Adjunct Associate Professor, economics of patents, copyright and other “IP” at Australian National University.  Deb orah Gleeson is Lecturer in Public Health at La Trobe University. This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 6 November 2014.

  • Hazel Moir, How trade agreements are locking in a broken patent system.

    Ten years on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is entering another round of negotiations towards the new and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this Free Trade Scorecard series, we review Australian trade policy over the years and where we stand today on the brink of a number of significant new trade deals.

    Australia has long had low requirements for obtaining patents. Some of these low standards were “locked in” in the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. This made reform to the system difficult but not impossible.

    The same cannot be said of the proposals in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement(TPPA). If implemented, they will ensure no future Australian government can improve the patent system without violating the TPPA obligations. They also reinforce the current problems within Australia’s patent system.

    It is so easy to get a patent

    Patents are no longer just for scientists and engineers doing leading-edge research. They are not limited to technology or science. They don’t even have to be inventive – at least in the ordinary meaning of the word.

    Australia’s patent standards are incredibly low. In 2003, we even granted a patent for a method of teaching children about finance by having them work for their pocket money. The “invention” had lots of different parts such as learning about credit cards by getting next week’s pocket money early. This is actually the best way to get a patent in Australia – combine two known things or processes and as long as no one has written them down together, you can get a patent on it. If it has been written down, all that is needed is a third known process!

    The gradual watering down of patent standards over recent decades has led to an explosion in the number of patents being granted in Australia. In 1984 the number awarded was 7,044, in 2013 this had grown to 17,112.

    This has significant implications for pharmaceuticals and it has led to higher costs for consumers and taxpayers. For example, if a known medicinal compound is combined with a known method of release (such as extended release) then an extra patent is granted. A patent for extended release venlafaxine (brand name Efexor®) kept generic competition off the market for two and a half years, costing taxpayers over A$200m.

    The TPPA also reinforces the current flawed approach to granting patents. Hidden in footnote 54 to draft article QQ.E.1, it says patents should be granted when “the claimed invention would have been obvious to a person skilled or having ordinary skill in the art having regard to the prior art”. This means that it is inventive enough for a patent unless it is obvious to an unimaginative person working in a very narrowly circumscribed field.

    However there is a big difference between being inventive and not being obvious – just like there is a big difference between being beautiful and not being ugly.

    What else does the TPPA do to our patent system?

    As well as cementing this extraordinarily low standard for granting patents, the TPPA plans to broaden the extensive privileges already granted to patent owners.

    Existing privileges prevent Australian-based companies from making and exporting a drug to a country where it is out-of-patent if the patent is still valid in Australia. This is silly and costs Australia significant export earnings.

    The TPPA plans to go further by limiting the grounds on which patents can be revoked or cancelled. Pharmaceutical patents will be longer in some countries. Data exclusivity provisions will be wider and stronger, and may reinforce the market exclusivity of some drugs.

    What are the penalties for getting the patent system wrong?

    There are very few for patent owners. If your patent is challenged and revoked, then only the profits made since the legal challenge need to be repaid.

    Yet those who infringe a patent may be fined and may have to exit a particular line of business or develop less efficient means of production.

    The TPPA will make it more difficult to challenge a patent. It proposes a presumption of patent validity (Article QQ.H.2.3), which directly contradicts Australia’s current laws. Many scholars in the United States consider this presumption as one of the worst features of the increasingly broken US patent system.

    Why should we care about the TPPA?

    First, it is undemocratic for one government to tie the hands of all future elected governments. The IP chapter of the TPPA is heavy-handed regulation. It specifies in detail many aspects of patent policy which are currently subject only to parliamentary control. It will make domestic reform hard if not impossible.

    Second, cementing low standards for patent requirements will mean we can do little to control the cost of health care. Australian taxpayers will continue to pay a lot more for pharmaceuticals.

    Third, there is some – albeit tenuous – link between patents and innovation. All court cases on patent infringement involve an innovating company being sued. So only our innovating companies pay for our broken patent system. As only 25% of Australian innovating firms take out patents, it is the other 75% who pay the price of a bad system. Innovation is too important for our future to get it wrong.

    And for what? Just how much extra milk or beef exports will we get in the TPPA? Adopting the TPPA is rather short-sighted when we consider the future economic strength of Australia lies in the knowledge industries.

    This article draws on research prepared for the 2014 Workshop “Ten Years since the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement: Where to for Australia’s Trade Policy?” Sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW Australia

    Hazel Moir is Adjunct Associate Professor, economics of patents, copyright and other “IP” at Australian National University. This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 20 October 2014.

  • Antony Ting. Australia eyes missing billions with very own ‘Google tax’.

    Joe Hockey has hinted he may introduce a “Google tax” as a new weapon to tackle profit shifting by multinational enterprises. The Treasurer’s suggestion is not only political as a counter to aggressive tax avoidance by multinationals, but also suggests the government may not have full confidence in a successful outcome of the G20/OECD work on base erosion profit shifting (BEPS).

    The suggestion of a “Google tax” in Australia appears to be a coordinated action with the UK. Last week, the UK Treasury announced the introduction of a “Diverted Profits Tax” (commonly dubbed the Google tax). The tax will be imposed on profits artificially shifted from the UK at a rate of 25% from 1 April 2015. The tax is expected to generate more than £1 billion over the next five years.

    Details of the Australian tax are yet to be delivered, but it’s likely to work as follows, using Apple’s tax structure as an example. Apple has successfully sheltered US$44 billion in Ireland for four years, and that amount has never been taxed anywhere in the world. The US$44 billion represents the profits shifted from Apple’s sales in many countries, including Australia.

    If Australia had a Google tax, the ATO would impose 30% tax on a portion of the US$44 billion that represented the profits derived from sales in Australia.

    Will it work?

    The proposal, if properly designed, should be a powerful weapon for two reasons. First, it provides the much-needed legal basis for the ATO to impose tax on profits shifted from Australia to “taxpayer-friendly” countries such as Ireland. At present, even though the ATO is aware of the US$44 billion sitting in Ireland, the existing international tax regime does not empower the ATO to lay its hands on the profits.

    Second, a Google tax would be a unilateral action. Its introduction does not require international consensus and Australia does not have to wait for that to happen before taking action on profit shifting by multinationals.

    The G20 and OECD have been working very hard in an attempt to achieve consensus on measures to address the issues of BEPS. However, one major player may not support the project wholeheartedly. The US has been knowingly facilitating avoidance by its multinationals of foreign income taxes through its own tax system. To make matters worse, its participation in the G20/OECD BEPS Project has been described by a prominent US tax commentator as “a polite pretence of participation with quiet undermining”.

    International consensus is the ideal course of action to comprehensively resolve the issues of BEPS. However, without full support from the US, it is doubtful the project will be able to achieve meaningful measures to curb tax avoidance by multinationals. Therefore, unilateral actions may be the pragmatic response of other countries like Australia to protect their tax bases.

    Not so fast…

    The proposal will face a number of challenges. First, the tax would apply only if a multinational has shifted profits from Australia under a tax avoidance structure. This raises the question: what is a tax avoidance structure?

    Apple’s example is clear-cut. As the US$44 billion has never been taxed anywhere in the world, it will be difficult for Apple to argue it is not engaged in a tax avoidance structure.

    However, what about profits shifted to a country where the tax rate is 10%? This is one of the technical issues policymakers will have to address.

    Second, the ATO will have to find a way to determine the amount of profit shifted from Australia. Going back to the Apple example, how should the ATO estimate how much profit out of the US$44 billion booked in Ireland should be subject to the Google tax? This issue may be difficult and controversial, but should be manageable.

    The third and possibly most formidable obstacle to the introduction of a Google tax is that multinationals are likely to offer significant resistance to its introduction. They can be expected to apply intense political pressure, lobbying against this proposal.

    A common argument by multinationals is that unilateral action by a country will scare businesses away. This may or may not be a concern, depending on the types of businesses of multinationals.

    One important factor that policymakers should remember is that the location of customers is not mobile. Apple can generate A$600 sales income only if it sells an iPad to a customer in Australia. It is highly unlikely, and does not make any commercial sense, that Apple would give up the Australian market because it does not want to pay 30% tax on sales profits.

    Antony Ting is Senior Lecturer of Taxation Law at university of Sydney. This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’ on 9 December 2014.

  • John Menadue. The Sydney seige and social misfits. Will we ever learn?

    I posted the following blog ‘Will we ever learn?’ on 27 October this year. Amongst other things it highlighted the domestic risks that would result from the Abbott Government’s decision to join the war in Iraq and Syria.

    Keysar Trad from the Islamic Friendship Association has today  described the hostage taker and killer as a ‘nutter’.It is also clear that there were numerous warning signs in the previous  behaviour of the attacker,

    John Menadue.

    The Coalition and conservative commentators have told us for years that international action by Australia in taking the lead on climate change would only be symbolic and would not really have any effect.

    But the Abbott Government has stood this argument on its head by urging and agreeing to join the war in Iraq and Syria. Our participation in this war will be militarily insignificant and symbolic– eight fighter jets, four support aircraft and 200 Special Forces. Our involvement won’t have any strategic effect. But the government wants to be seen to be ‘doing something’ .Whilst it may pay short term political dividends, it will not work in the longer term.

    With our symbolic act of joining in the war against IS we are making Australia less secure despite what Tony Abbott says. It is clear from opinion polling that Australians believe that our involvement in Iraq and Syria will make us more prone to attacks at home. The Canadians are experiencing that right now with social misfits and publicity seekers trying to make heroes of themselves. We are being bated into the use of more and more force against IS

    When intelligence officials and police are allowed to tell us openly what they believe, they tell us that we will be more vulnerable. The Chilcott Enquiry in the UK was told by the Head of MI5 that UK participation in the Iraq War substantially increased the threat of terrorism in the UK. A former head of the AFP in Australia told us several years ago that we faced the same risk because of our involvement in Iraq.

    We have been told many times that our security and economic future is in cooperation with our region. We have endorsed the US ‘pivot to Asia’, but now we are pivoting back to the Middle East again. Two of our key associates in regional cooperation and security are Indonesia and Malaysia. Neither of them or indeed any other significant countries in our region are committing their military against IS.

    Julie Bishop has now announced that we are to deploy 200 Special Forces to advise and assist the Iraqi military. She chooses to disregard the fact that the US spent billions of dollars to train the Iraqi army, but because of the sectarianism of the Iraqi Government, the Iraqi military collapsed and ran away from ISIS, abandoning its US supplied equipment? How absurd is it to think that our 200 Special Forces will make any difference.  But some people feel good, by ‘doing something’.

    The government is hoping, as Hugh White has said, that there will be a good, cheap and successful war against ISIS. But all the evidence is against that hope.

    • The US and other air forces will soon run out of targets. After three weeks of the air war in Afghanistan, former Secretary Rumsfeld said that the US air force had run out of targets. The RAAF may already be finding this out.
    • As Malcolm Fraser has pointed out, without a ground force and an end point, the war against IS will be a farce.
    • Allied forces in Iraq and Syria will only be there for the short term, but IS, in whatever form, will always be there.
    • In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, together with our allies, we started the escalation with military advisers, then bombing, and then limited ground forces and then large-scale ground forces. It will be the same again as our intervention flounders.
    • Foreign involvement in civil and sectarian wars never works. In the end ‘success’ depends on the motivation of the participants in the conflict.
    • The countries and groupings in the Middle East are a maelstrom of religion, ideology and tribal groups. We are taking sides in a constantly changing and complex political, sectarian and ethnic struggle. Hezbollah, the Kurds and the Assad regime were believed to be the ‘baddies’. Now it seems that they are the ‘goodies’ in opposing IS. Iran may yet turn out to be on the side of the ‘goodies’.
    • Tony Abbott has said that IS is an ‘existential threat to Australia’. Does he seriously think that IS represents a threat to our survival? If such a threat exists, why don’t nearby countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and the Emirates join in a united front to oppose IS? Yet night after night we see Turkish tanks sitting on the hill side outside Kobari and refusing to intervene against IS.
    • We are appalled when we see public executions by IS fighters, but we  turn a blind eye when US drones directed from CIA headquarters in Langley direct hellfire missiles and kill scores of citizens at wedding celebrations in Yemen and Afghanistan. We ignore our own ferocious violence.

    Conservative governments have led us to our three most recent debacles in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – and they still keep repeating their mistakes. Will we ever learn?

    Until the leaders and the people of the Middle East address their own domestic and regional problems our intervention will only make things worse.

    There has been a history of Western intervention in the Middle East – colonisation, supporting authoritarian rulers, military occupation and exploitation of Middle Eastern land and resources such as oil. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Mosaddegh government of Iran in 1953, for the benefit of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, now BP.

    When will we ever learn?

    From what we are feeling

    Will we ever learn?

    As sorrows deepen.

  • Helena Britt. General Practice and value for money.

    Last year taxpayers spent A$6.3 billion on GP services through Medicare, about 6% of the total government health expenditure. This was a 50% increase (A$2.1 billion) in today’s dollars over the past decade and equates to about A$60 more per person in real terms.

    Health Minister Peter Dutton says this growth is “unsustainable”. He plans to introduce a GP co-payment in hope of reducing the number of times Australians visit a GP and to ensure users foot some of the bill.

    But targeting primary care for cost savings could backfire. Research we’re releasing todayshows that while the number of GP visits has increased, the services are cost-effective. If the same services were performed in other areas of the health system, they would cost considerably more.

    Under pressure

    Unsustainable or not, Australia’s health-care system faces a number of challenges, most notably from the rising prevalence of chronic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. This is due to three major factors.

    1. Australia has an ageing population as our world-class health system keeps us alive longer.
    2. In response to government encouragement through Medicare initiatives, GPs are diagnosing disease earlier and providing preventive interventions for health risk factors and diseases such as hypertension, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.
    3. An increasing proportion of Australians are overweight or obese, putting them at risk for chronic conditions.

    Earlier diagnosis means people are living longer with diagnosed disease. The result is exponential growth in required care over their lifetime.

    The search for more cost-effective health care for our population should be applauded. But reducing spending on GP services is not the answer.

    What do we get?

    Our team has been studying general practice activity for over 16 years through the Bettering the Evaluation and Care of Health (BEACH) program. This cross-sectional encounter-based study uses changing random samples of about 1,000 GPs per year, each of whom contribute details of 100 encounters with consenting patients. This provides a representative sample of about 100,000 encounters per year from across the country.

    Results from one of the BEACH books, released today, shed some light on what we got for the $2.1 billion of extra Medicare spending on general practice. In 2013-14 there were 35 million more GP services than ten years earlier, a 36% increase. This included 17 million more attendances by patients aged 65 years and over (a 67% increase).

    Length of GP consultations recorded through BEACH suggest that the average consultation now takes almost one minute more than a decade ago. The result is that GPs spend an extra ten million clinical hours with their patients, a 43% increase.

    The number of problems managed at these consultations has also significantly increased. GPs managed an additional 68 million health problems at these encounters (an increase of 48%), including 24 million more chronic problems.

    Management of these problems involved an additional ten million procedures (a 66% increase) and 12 million clinical treatments, such as counselling, advice and education, than a decade ago.

     

    Clearly, increases in the amount and complexity of GP clinical work are reflected in additional Medicare expenditure. If other medical specialists and/or emergency departments had provided these extra services, they would have cost far more.

    The average cost of a GP visit was A$47 from Medicare, plus a A$5 patient contribution. For a private specialist, the average visit costs Medicare A$82 plus a A$38 patient fee.

    A visit to the emergency department, which is paid by state and territory governments, costs far more. In Western Australia, for example, an emergency department visit in 2011-12 cost A$599 on average.

    More, not less primary care

    International research has repeatedly concluded that investment in primary care is the most cost-effective way to provide population health care. As GP services are far cheaper than other types of medical services, discouraging GP visits by introducing a standard co-payment for most patients would increase costs to governments, now and later.

    It may seem counter-intuitive, but one effective way to contain the cost of Australia’s health care would be to expand the use of GP services.

    One issue not acknowledged in the discussion about health costs is the increasing number of patients with multiple chronic conditions. These patients use more resources and are more likely to have fragmented care due to the number of health professionals involved. GPs play the central role in co-ordinating the management of patients with multiple chronic conditions, reducing costly hospitalisations.

    As the age of government-supported retirement increases, many Australians will have to work until they are 70. This highlights the importance of promoting good health across the lifespan, through a strong focus on primary and secondary prevention and co-ordinated management of chronic conditions.

    In any one year 85% of us visit a GP, but only about 15% of us are admitted to hospital, where a far greater proportion of health funds is spent. GPs supply the bulk of care to the population, so general practice is where our investment should be.

    If we want to strengthen our health-care system and ensure its sustainability into the future, it makes sense to encourage people to use its cheapest and most efficient arm: general practice.

     In addition to Helena Britt, other contributors to this article were:  Christopher Harrison, Clare Bayram, Graeme Miller, Joan Henderson and Julie Gordon. The Article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 11 November 2014.

     

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Japanese election.

    Four more years of…

    Oh, by the way, Japan is having a national election on Sunday. Has anyone told the Japanese?

    Some are calling it the “Seinfeld election”––the election about nothing. Which probably suits Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who called it two years early, with no apparent justification. Others have cynically observed that some in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) reckon a disillusioned electorate is easier to govern.

    After 10 December, when Japan’s new Designated Secrets Law came into effect––locking up “sensitive” information for 60 years and threatening to lock up any leaking public servant for 10 years (and 5 years for any journalist who encourages a leak)––“disillusioned” took a giant backward step towards “uninformed”.

    Just for good measure, the LDP sent out letters to the country’s main media organisations, as the campaign got underway, demanding “fair” election coverage––by which it meant they should not give emphasis to any one person or any one issue. Yes, this was always meant to be an election about nothing.

    So is there nothing about which Japanese should be anxious, should be demanding answers? What about the fact that after two years of “Abenomics”, that wonder cure, the economy is now in recession? What about the moves to bring nuclear power reactors back on-line, when 70 percent of the population opposes the use of nuclear energy? What about the further planned increase in the defence budget, the third year in a row, at a time of massive budget deficits? What about the failure of the leadership to make significant progress in repairing Japan’s dire relations with China and South Korea? What about the corrosive effects of the widespread apathy eating up the Japanese electorate?

    Take one issue: nuclear power. A large stab of Japan, around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power plants, remains  uninhabitable because of the disaster nearly four years ago. Mothers across the land have to worry daily about sourcing food for their children, which they hope will not be contaminated. The enormous costs of the radiation clean up silently mount up for future generations to pay; and the piles of contaminated soil and rubbish fester away in a thousand forgotten corners. And yet, in 60 speeches during this election campaign, Prime Minister Abe has not once directly mentioned––nor been required to mention––the nuclear issue.

    The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (the ruling party when the Fukushima disaster occurred) has likewise passed over the issue because it relies on support from unions whose membership embraces the electric power industry.

    Many commentators believe that Shinzo Abe called the election now because conditions in Japan are likely to get worse next year. According to the latest data, real wages in the September quarter fell by 3% compared with a year ago. The gross domestic product (GDP) has contracted in the past two quarters––despite the biggest monetary and fiscal stimulus ever.

    So, how is the ruling party likely to fare in this unpromising climate? If opinion polls can be trusted, the LDP and its coalition partner, the New Komeito, will actually increase their hold on power by winning more than two-thirds of the lower house seats in the Diet. Come again? Yes, on the back of a depressingly low voter turnout, Mr Abe will convert the policy vacuum into a fresh, unassailable mandate.

    How will he use this mandate? On past performance, he will demand even greater loyalty and co-operation from his party and from Japan’s mass media; he will intimidate opponents, now armed with tough new laws, such as the Secrecy Act; he will press on with an economic program that so far has produced, even by the most generous measures, meagre results.

    The Prime Minister says he needed to call a fresh election to get the public’s approval for his economic policies, specifically a decision to postpone the next scheduled consumption tax increase. This always sounded like a lame excuse.

    Mr Abe has spoken often about the need for broad-ranging reform, including lowering the corporate tax rate, opening up the labour market to foreign workers, expanding childcare to encourage more women into the workforce and liberalizing the agricultural sector. Holding an election puts back any reform program by at least 6-12 months. He could have acted to address all these issues head on, without an election, and yet he dithered. Most Japanese still don’t know why they are going to the polls on Sunday. Half of them won’t even bother.

    The opposition parties, taken by surprise, have made no headway during the campaign. The DPJ may increase its number of seats to around 70 in the 475-seat chamber, but that will still be less than a quarter of what the LDP expects to win. Several other opposition parties––that are mainly creaky vehicles for the unfulfilled ambitions of washed-up ex-LDP politicians––will probably lose ground. On the other hand, in this strange scenario, the Japan Communist Party is expected to double its representation, off a small base, by virtue of standing for something when all else seems mere opportunism. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years.

  • The Wit of Whitlam – a great read.

    • ISBN: (Paperback)9780522868081
    • ISBN: (E-Book)9780522868098
    • PUBLISHED:03/Dec/2014
    • IMPRINT:Melbourne University Press
    • SUBJECT:Biography: general

    The Wit of Whitlam

    James Carleton

    Self-proclaimed international treasure Gough Whitlam never shied away from a pun, a put-down or a witticism.

    His wife Margaret was his ‘best appointment’, he called Malcolm Fraser ‘Kerr’s cur’ after the Dismissal and when Sir Winton Turnbull called out in parliament ‘I am a country member’, Gough interjected ‘I remember’.
    When it was suggested he was funny, Gough responded: ‘Funny! Funny? Witty, yes. Epigrammatic perhaps, but not funny. You make me sound like a clown.’
    James Carleton, Radio National presenter and founder of the university club ‘The Dewy-Eyed Whitlamites’, presents a keepsake of Goughisms that vindicates the Great Man’s self-assessment, ‘I never said I was immortal, merely eternal.’

    About the author

    James Carleton is a reporter and alternate presenter of Radio National’s Breakfast program. Specialising in national and international politics, especially the Middle East, he has reported for 7.30 and written for the Sydney Morning Herald.
    James is well experienced with conflict situations as the father of three young boys.
    In 1990 he founded the Sydney University club ‘The Dewy-Eyed Whitlamites’.

    – See more at: https://www.mup.com.au/items/154221

  • Graham Freudenberg. Gough being Gough.

    LAUNCH OF JAMES CARLETON’S ‘THE WIT OF WHITLAM’,BELLEVUE HOTEL, PADDINGTON, NSW, 8 DECEMBER 2014

    As Henry Kissinger discovered to his chagrin in Beijing in 1971, Gough made a habit of getting there first.  The Bellevue is no exception.  Most of us here probably associate the Bellevue with its glory days when Suzie Carleton was, as Gough always described her, its chatelaine.  And Gough and Margaret were very much part of that scene.

    But Gough and the Bellevue go back to 1951, before he even entered the Parliament.  That’s when, as junior to Bill Dovey, Margaret’s father, counsel assisting the Liquor Royal Commission, he exposed the Bellevue, along with the Captain Cook and the Edinburgh Castle, as one of the notorious sly-grog pubs of Sydney.

    You can’t get more ‘0ld Sydney’ than that – and Gough and the Bellevue were in the thick of it.

    It’s a reminder, too, that there was an Eastern Suburbs Whitlam before there was a Western Suburbs Whitlam, well before Werriwa.  And long after.

    He was appointed Minute Secretary of the Darlinghurst Branch of the ALP the very night he walked in to join the Party in 1945 – two days after he was demobbed from the Air Force.

    He was pre-selected for the Fitzroy ward in the Sydney City Council in 1947, but the Council was sacked before the election.  Later as you know, when he moved south and west, he failed in bids for the State seat of Cronulla and for the Sutherland Shire Council.  As he used to say:

    I might have been Lord Mayor of Sydney, Premier of NSW or even President of the Sutherland Shire.  But, alas, the fates were against me.

    The Fates brought him back to the Eastern Suburbs with a bang in 1975.  It was more or less a fluke that Gough and Margaret had bought their unit at Darling Point just before the Dismissal.  And Margaret immediately moved out of Kirribilli and into the flat the very next day.  They had never envisaged it as their home address for the next four decades.  But it became his Sydney headquarters for the campaign.

    It’s in Marathon Avenue.  So as not to alarm the bourgeoisie among the new neighbours, he didn’t put ‘E G Whitlam’ on the residents’ board in the lobby.  He identified the new tenants as ‘Miltiades’ – the victorious Greek general over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.    So began Gough’s second incarnation as Eastern Suburbs Man.

    This, of course, is the Gough that a bright-eyed curly-headed kid named James Carleton came to know – eyes wide open, ears wide open, taking it all in.

    But the special thing about young James is not only what he witnessed at first hand.  He was soaking up all the stories from some of the master story-tellers of the times – Mick and Eric and Ed and Brian, just to begin with.  It’s not adequate to say that they are keepers of the flame.  They lit it.  And indeed, they are part of the flame.

    So, as Gough might have said, James was destined to write this book whenever it was published.

    As shown by his ability to meet Louise’s deadlines.  A remarkable feat.  His big problem was that the stories just kept on coming.  From 21 October, right up to the Town Hall Memorial, and after.  In fact, it was the only wake I’ve ever been to where the only subject of conversation actually was the deceased.

    The reason is that everybody who ever met him has a Gough story.  They remember them and want to tell them. So the stream is endless.

    One reason why they remember them is that Gough had the great comedic gift of the totally unexpected.  Tony Burke, on telling Gough his new daughter was named Helena, couldn’t possibly have expected a monologue on the history of the name, from Helen of Troy to Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, who discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem

    –              Gough, I didn’t know that

    –              Tony, if you talk to me for even a short time, you’ll always learn                                           something.

    The Labor candidate at Alice Springs could hardly have expected to be introduced to the Renaissance School …

    –              Comrade, I am to poster-sticking what Giotto was to the circle.

    Another characteristic that comes through all the stories is his disdain for platitudes and clichés – something of a handicap for a politician.  So his standing instruction in the drafting of speeches was, as Queen Gertrude said to Polonius, ‘More matter with less art”.  Or, as I would put it, ‘more facts, less bullshit’.

    Gough himself put it in another way.  About 1974, we were discussing our respective writing styles.

    –              ‘Your trouble, comrade, is that you are too dithyrambic.  Mine is that I’m                          too inspissated .’

    Well, who can argue with that?

    [Dithyrambic – a passionate choral hymn, in honour of Dionysus, wild, bacchanalian;]

    [Inspissated – dry, densely detailed.]

    He did have the grace to say that we complemented each other.

    There were other occasions we discussed speech-writing – at the opening of the Sydney Entertainment Centre on 1 May 1983, not long after the return of the Hawke Government.  At this stage, I was working with both Bob Hawke and Neville Wran.

    –              How are you coping, comrade, doing what Our Lord says is impossible?                           (Man cannot serve two masters).

    [Reading from Canberra Times 25 March 1990] –

    “There was one VIP whose absence from the official opening at the Australian National Gallery on Friday night of ‘Civilisation: Ancient Treasures from the British Museum’, created a minor sensation.  The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, was otherwise committed, so in his place stood the chairman of the ANG Council, Gough Whitlam, who read the following note from Mr Hawke:

    ‘My present preoccupation with the preservation of Australian civilisation prevents my joining you tonight…. Well, then, in the circumstances we’ve had to draw on an ancient treasure from the Australian National Gallery!”

    He acknowledged the brilliance of Mr Hawke’s message, and displayed his own considerable insight into the nature of political expediency by quipping: “Quite frankly, I couldn’t have done it better if I’d written it myself …. and I suspect it was written by the same person who would have written it for me!’ “

    Conclusion

    One of the pieces I wrote as valedictory I entitled “A Very Public Life’.  By this I meant, among other things, that there was a great unity – a one-ness – between the public and private Gough.  As he said of the Whitlam Government itself, ‘What you saw is what you got’ – and that really goes for the public figure and the private man.

    It wasn’t quite as Queen Victoria said of Gladstone: ‘He addresses me as if I were a public meeting’.

    But there was never much Gough said or did that was meant to be off-the–record.

    Indeed, the only time he took me to task, in all the hundreds of thousands of words between us, was when I wrote the Arthur Calwell entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and said that Gough had made a ‘calculated indiscretion’ in 1965 in telling a New Zealand reporter that Arthur was too old for the leadership.

    But indiscretions abounded, calculated or otherwise, and while those around him may have shuddered at the time, they are now all part of the legend.  And a great many of them are in this book.

    As Gough said: ‘I may be a legend but I am not a myth’.

    And I think that it is a mark of Gough’s true greatness that the legend grows, even as we recall things with love that in anybody else would be regarded as outrageous.

    It goes without saying that Gough would have enjoyed this book.

    It contains one of the keys to understanding Gough Whitlam.  And that is : he enjoyed being Gough immensely.

    And you can see how much enjoyed being himself, not least being the best caricaturist of himself, in every page of this book.

    In this book, we can enjoy Gough being Gough.

  • Max Corden. Australia needs higher taxes, not spending cuts.

    The federal budget balance is expected to deteriorate. The reasons are numerous but, in a lengthy statement, the government sums it up in terms of two key factors. These are: the softer economic outlook; and unresolved issues inherited from the former government.

    The economy is going through a transition. A decline in resources investment will be offset by a recovery in the non-resources sector. It seems the decline in resources investment may be sharper than previously forecast while the recovery in the non-resources sector may be more gradual.

    Thus, with real gross domestic product growing at a slower rate, hence “a softer economic outlook”, revenue from taxation will also be less. The result is a higher budget deficit.

    The previous Labor government can apparently be blamed for many “legacy” items, but one is rather curious. Our central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, has to receive A$8.8 billion to compensate it for losses incurred to its foreign currency reserves during the period when the Australian dollar appreciated.

    The choices faced by the government

    Given the deficit prospect, the government faces three choices:

    (1) Run a bigger deficit, (2) raise taxes, or (3) cut government spending.

    The government has already embraced choice (3) – cut spending. With regard to choice (2), it abolished the carbon tax and the minerals resource rent tax, and thus moved in the wrong direction.

    Perhaps the government will cut public spending further in areas it finds attractive. After cutting funding to the CSIRO, ABC and SBS, the staff of the federal public service, and funds available to the states for health, education and transport, not to speak of the universities, there are surely more possibilities.

    Incidentally, over 20 non-statutory bodies have been abolished or rationalised. The underlying (or even explicit) philosophy is to reduce the size and responsibilities of government. This is in tune with United States conservative attitudes.

    What the government should consider is raising taxes rather than further spending cuts. This is a very serious proposal. Yet, compared with the US approach, it may be more in tune with traditional Australian attitudes, which expect a great deal from governments.

    Why the federal government should raise taxes

    To understand the argument behind the need to raise taxes, it is important to understand what can be described as Howard’s Gift.

    Under the Howard government, beginning around 2003, there was a boom in the form of rising export prices of iron ore and coal. As a result, revenue from corporation tax increased sharply.

    This led the Howard government to cut personal income taxes on no less than five occasions. Also, superannuation concessions were extended. The details can be found in John Edwards’ Beyond the Boom.

    This was John Howard’s gift to the taxpaying middle and upper classes. It was clearly a response – perhaps understandable – to the export boom.

    The trouble was it had the effect of increasing budget deficits in later years when tax revenues declined. In particular, budget deficits in the Labor (Gillard) years were increased by Howard’s Gift. Even now it has an adverse effect on the government’s budget balance.

    However, as the mineral export boom in the Howard years turned out to be temporary, the income tax cuts that were motivated by the boom should also be temporary. In other words, they should now be reversed.

    Personal income tax rates should be increased to where they were before the boom. Usually opposition parties oppose tax increases. Prime Minister Tony Abbott ran a very effective campaign against the carbon tax when in opposition.

    So this proposed tax increase needs to have bipartisan support. If Labor gets into government later, they will be glad to have a decent revenue base for their budgets.

    Reform required for our tax system

    At the same time some other improvements should be made to the income tax system. These ideas all come from the famous Henry Report on the Australian tax system.

    The aim would be to simplify the system and, above all, to remove special concessions and deductions that principally benefit the better-off. These are the favourable concessions that affect the superannuation earnings of people on high incomes.

    All remuneration should be measured as wages. Capital gains tax rate concessions and various concessions available to primary producers should also be removed.

    In addition to increasing income tax rates to their earlier levels, more revenue needs to be obtained from the GST. This tax has to rise if sufficients funds are to be generated for the states’ vital functions.

    There is no doubt the GST is a relatively efficient tax, but it would be more efficient and easier to collect if goods and services of all kinds faced the same GST rate. Exemptions should be avoided and, probably, the rate increased closer to comparable international rates.

    However, the real problem with broadening the GST or raising the rate has to do with equity. This tax is a bigger burden for persons with low incomes than for the well-off. But equity within society is more effectively achieved with a progressive income tax and social security system than through exemptions from the GST. This means that some of the GST revenue gain should be returned to households in the form of increased social security payments and a more progressive personal income tax schedule.

    It is clear that Australia’s entire taxation system needs major improvements. This is clearly shown in the Henry Report, which is a valuable guide for reform.

    No doubt these matters will be discussed in the government’s prospective white paper on taxation. The government needs to raise more revenue while making limited improvements to income tax and the GST. The basic aim, above all, should be to avoid further damaging government spending cuts.

    And what about a recession?

    The government believes there is a “softer economic outlook”, which means we might face a recession. It is impossible to predict at this time whether this will happen. However, if there is any possibility of a recession, then it is not the time to cut government spending nor to raise taxes.

    However, the government does need to implement long-term structural reform of the tax system and expand its revenue base. In the face of a recession, the RBA will need to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy and also depreciate the Australian dollar. Such stimulus would, as a by-product, partly reduce the budget deficit.

  • John Menadue. The dog’s breakfast in co-payments has got worse.

    The government is trying to dump its co-payment mess on to doctors. If doctors decide not to absorb the reductions in the Medicare rebate, many will pass it on to patients and dramatically reduce bulk billing. What a mess!

    In justification for their ill-considered GP co-payment in the budget, the Minister for Health Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Tony Abbott kept parroting that we need some improved price signal in health in order to make our health system sustainable. But this argument is not valid. We have one of the best and most sustainable health services in the world. The Commonwealth Fund ranks Australia fourth in the world for the quality and efficiency of its health service after UK, Switzerland and Sweden. That is due to Medicare.

    That does not mean however that we don’t need to address some major problems in our health system.

    The main reason for our rising health costs is the ability of powerful health providers to extract monopoly rents from taxpayers and the community. These powerful providers exploit their market position in many ways.

    • The private health insurance industry receives a government subsidy of over $6 billion p.a. and through its actions weakens Medicare’s ability to control costs. Gap insurance has underwritten an enormous increase in specialist fees.Just look also at what has happened to health costs in the US as a result of private health insurance.
    • The AMA insists on fee-for-service for treatment of patients and resists any significant workforce reform, particularly for nurses.
    • The Australian Pharmacy Guild uses its political power to restrict competition.
    • Medicines Australia extracts high wholesale prices for its products.
    • The fragmentation of services between the commonwealth and the states increases costs and misallocates resources in favour of hospitals.

    So far all governments have not been prepared to challenge these vested interests. Instead the present government focuses on ill-considered co-payments  which would disadvantage low income people and discourage people from seeing their GP which results in higher specialist and hospital costs.

    In Australia co-payments contribute over $A24 billion p.a. to our health sector. These co-payments are the third highest as a source of health funding – after Federal and State funding.

    This amount of $24 billion p.a. or 17% of our total health funding is high by world standards. Australians pay a higher proportion of their healthcare costs through co-payments than citizens of most other OECD countries. The Commonwealth Fund has found that when healthcare spending is adjusted for the cost of living in Australia, we pay more in direct co-payments than all other counties surveyed apart from Switzerland and the US. Our annual health co-payments per capita are about $US750 compared with Germany $US600, New Zealand $US330 and the UK $US 310.

    The problem with our co-payments is not that they are low. It is that this whole area of co-payments lacks any rhyme or reason. It is a dog’s breakfast.

    Consider how the percentage of total funding from consumer co-payments varies.

    • Public hospitals 2.5%
    • Private hospitals 11%
    • Medical services 12%
    • PBS medicines 16%
    • Dental services 56%
    • Aids and appliances 69%
    • Non-PBS medicines 92%

    There is a wide variation in the impact of co-payments on people with different illnesses and disabilities. For example  people with conditions that can be largely treated by GPs or within the public hospital system, generally incur lower co-payments than those with conditions that require allied healthcare and over-the-counter medicines. This is the case independently of the length or severity of the illness/disability and its impact on both individuals and society. In fact, people with ongoing chronic conditions often end up receiving lower levels of subsidy for their healthcare than those with one-off or self-limiting conditions. Another result of this ad hoc and uncoordinated approach to co-payments is that some people receive almost all their healthcare free at the point of service, and others, with conditions which may be more serious or longer term, face crippling costs for their treatment. For example, someone receiving emergency surgery for, say, the removal of an appendix in a public hospital, can incur no out-of-pocket costs for their treatment, whereas someone with a long-term genetic condition such as Cystic Fibrosis can incur high ongoing costs. The result is a very inequitable allocation of healthcare resources which has a particularly negative impact on people with chronic conditions.

    This chaotic mess in co-payments is not surprising. These co-payments have been introduced without any coherence and therefore inequities and perverse incentives abound. Some services such as public hospital services are free. Some such as pharmaceutical benefits are capped by the government. Some, such as the co-payment for medical services below the safety net thresholds are open-ended; the public subsidy is fixed, leaving the user to bear an open-ended risk. Some such as the medical safety net provisions are proportional to the price of the service. Some safety nets are set on a family basis, others on an individual basis. Some are on a calendar year basis and others on a financial year basis.

    I addition to sorting out the dog’s breakfast of co-payments to ensure greater fairness and efficiency, it is important that we move away from the fee-for-service system by which doctors are remunerated. This type of remuneration promotes turnstile medicine or what is sometimes called ‘six minute medicine’.  FFS may be appropriate for occasional and episodic care but it is not appropriate for long-term and chronic care. We need a major review of remuneration practices in primary care with more emphasis on capitation and bulk charges for chronic care, to keep people well at minimum cost. The British single-payer system has many advantages. One advantage is as the Economist of May 31 this year put it ‘Doctors in the UK are paid to keep people well, not for every extra thing they do so they don’t make money performing unnecessary tasks and tests’.

    The way we remunerate GP’s is far more important for quality of care and efficiency than fiddling with co-payments.

    Even more important is costly specialist care, not the cost of  GP’s in primary care.

    The whole structure of co-payments needs to be reformed.

    And tackling the power of providers is the most important of all to ensure a sustainable health system. As an example just look at the present ‘debate’ over co-payments. It is dominated by the Government and the health provider, the AMA. The voice of the community is scarcely heard in the land!

     

  • Tilly Gunning. Children in detention.

    The ‘We’re Better Than This’ campaign was launched on the 26th of November 2014, it’s aim is to end the Australian Government’s indeterminate detention of over 700 refugee children. Lots of influential Australians have come together to support the cause by participating in a choir song, the proceeds will go to charity. To listen to the song and view the video of support, click here. Visit the We’re Better Than This website to discover figures regarding children in detention, and contribute to the organisation, and make a change.
    Tilly Gunning is John Menadue’s 14 year old grand-daughter.

  • John Menadue. Temporary Protection Visas and the Senate cross-bench.

    I wish that the Rudd, Gillard and Abbott Governments had done things very differently on refugee policies. But faced with the impasse at the present time, I welcome the compromise arrangement which the government has negotiated with the senate cross benches – two senators from the Palmer Group, Nick Xenophon, Ricky Muir, Bob Day and David Leyonhjelm. But like the curate’s egg it is good and bad in parts.

    As a result a negotiated package has been achieved that will enable the government to get the refugee processing system moving again to assess the claims of over 30,000 asylum seekers who are in detention or in the community with very restricted rights. The package includes

    • The introduction of Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) which will grant three year residency for those found to have a legitimate refugee claim. At the end of that period they will not be guaranteed a permanent visa, but may re apply.
    • The introduction of Safe Haven Enterprise Visas (SHEVs) for five years if the asylum seeker spends that time either working or studying in a designated regional area whilst their claim is being processed.
    • There will be an increase in the humanitarian intake of 7,500 places over several years.
    • Asylum seekers on bridging visas will have the right to work.
    • All children in detention, except those on Nauru, will be released into the community.
    • Medicare will be made more readily available.

    This cannot be the end of the process, but I have no doubt that worthwhile progress has been made. The blockage in the system has been removed and processing will start. This is very important.

    It will be important to hold the government to account for this increase in the humanitarian intake to ensure ‘changed circumstances ‘does not result in a failure to implement the increase.

    In the past I have opposed TPVs for maritime arrivals because they leave the claimants in limbo about their future, they denied family reunion and did not deter asylum seekers as successive governments have suggested. But with 30,000 people already in limbo, some progress through TPVs would materially help their position. In a different political landscape, both in Australia and in countries from which asylum seekers have fled, it is not unreasonable to expect that over 80% of asylum seekers issued with TPVs will become permanent residents or citizens within the next ten years.

    Even with rights to work and some Medicare support, the large number of asylum seekers who will be moving into the community will present a major challenge for NGOs, churches and asylum seeker centres who generously support asylum seekers in their need. The government will need to urgently address this financial burden.

    There are other significant problems which will have to be addressed; the increased powers for defence and customs personnel; refoulment; compatibility with the Refugee Convention and judicial oversight.

    To cover its own failure, the ALP has said that the government was using children in detention as pawns in the negotiations. I understand that view and it is true that the government could have released these children at any time as also the last ALP government could have but didn’t.  But as part of a package the release of children is an excellent outcome, whatever the antecedents or background.

    The purists will not like this package. As a friend of mine said, he would not want to have these purists advocating on his behalf. ‘If I were starving, I expect I would die because these purists would deny me access to bread and water while fighting for my entitlement to a three-course meal’.

    I am surprised that the ALP didn’t take the opportunity to negotiate hard over the package. Instead it ceded asylum policy negotiations to the senate cross benches. What a sad abrogation of responsibility by the ALP to leave the outcome to Ricky Muir and others.

    I have written before about the abject failure of the Greens on both climate policy and refugees. On climate policy the Greens voted with the coalition in the Senate in 2009 to vote down Kevin Rudd’s Climate Pollution Reduction Scheme. Always the purists, the Greens wanted more than was on the table. Legislation was defeated in the Senate and we have gone backwards on climate policy ever since. The policy purity of the Greens and their incessant posturing has caused great damage to Australia on climate change.

    And the same is true on asylum seekers and refugees. Here again the Greens sided with the coalition in theSenate over two years ago to vote down theArrangement with Malaysia which the UNHCR said it could work with. The failure of the Senate to pass the enabling legislation after the High Court decision in 2011 meant that the Malaysian Arrangement failed. That triggered the enormous increase in boat arrivals in 2013. This led to Manus and Nauru. For this the Greens must bear a heavy responsibility. But they still continue to wash their hands of responsibility and parade their policy purity. Their posturing has delivered awful consequences for asylum seekers and refugees.

    It is also time both the ALP and the Greens showed some tactical nous. For the present, they have dealt themselves out of effective participation and negotiation on a very difficult but critical issue – the plight of 30,000 asylum seekers whose claims are waiting assessment.

    These amendments to the Migration Act must be seen as work in progress. There are many important issues that will hopefully be corrected with a change of government. There many important things that need to be done

    • Increase the humanitarian intake to at least 25 000 pa
    • Abolish mandatory detention which is cruel, expensive and does not deter.
    • Establish Orderly Departure Arrangements with Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan
    • Open more migration pathways, like 457 visas for persons who may be borderline refugees
    • De militarise our refugee policies and programs.

    A lot more must be done. But breaking the deadlock on the 30,000 forgotten people in detention or on bridging visas is an important step.

    As refugee advocates we have some hard thinking ahead.  To date we have failed comprehensively   to win improvements for people in great need. The perfect has become the enemy of the good. Needy asylum seekers are the losers.

    Sometimes harm minimisation is the best course, a course that the ALP and the Greens chose not to take on the Migration Act amendments.

    Aren’t 30,000 strangers in our land in need of help today, not in one or two years’ time!

  • Tim Colebatch. The Abbott budget is hard to sell.

    The Abbott government’s problems began long before the 2014–15 budget, but now the budget is at the heart of them. It has failed to win support from the voters, and failed to win support from the Senate.

    Why? I think there are two reasons. The first is that its measures, taken together, fail the test of fairness. That’s well known, and the opinion polls show the public’s reaction.

    The second is not well known, but it may have been grasped intuitively by many Australians, which is why the government’s appeals to national interest have fallen flat. In short, the sum of the government’s actions is not to reduce the budget deficit, but only to rearrange it.

    And now, as treasurer Joe Hockey will tell us on 16 December when he releases the heavily revised Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, or MYEFO, the plunge in mineral prices and the economy’s failure, yet again, to meet budget forecasts mean a return to surplus is now just a distant goal, and we will face big deficits all the way to the next election.

    But even back in May, if you looked at the budget numbers, the net impact of the Abbott government’s policy decisions would have cut the deficit by just $4 billion over its first four years in office. Add in a crucial cost the budget numbers left out, add in the extra spending approved since the budget, and the net impact of the government’s decisions has been to increase the budget deficit – not to reduce it.

    We’ll come back to that. The central issue in the public debate over the budget has been fairness. It is what has sustained the Senate’s opposition to the budget measures – even those that economists, including this one, would see as well-targeted.

    Much of this ground was well covered in an earlier Inside Story essay by the Australian National University’s Peter Whiteford. I will simply plagiarise some of its key points here. If the budget measures were adopted, Whiteford reports:

    • An unemployed twenty-three-year-old would lose $47 a week, or 18 per cent of his or her disposable income. An individual earning $250,000 a year would lose $24 a week, or less than 1 per cent of disposable income. Is that fairness?
    • Unemployed people aged under thirty, who receive less than 1 per cent of budget spending, would suffer almost 10 per cent of budget savings.
    • The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling calculates that the poorest 20 per cent of households, which earn 8 per cent of all household income, would shoulder 16 per cent of the budget cuts. The richest 20 per cent, which earn 40 per cent of all household income, would shoulder just 10 per cent of the cuts.

    If the government really wanted to close the budget deficit, why did it weight its cuts to fall so heavily on lower- and middle-income Australia, and so lightly on its own class of upper-income Australians? Did it not foresee the public reaction?

    If it was serious, why didn’t it come up with a comprehensive deficit-reduction strategy that tackled both sides of the ledger – increasing revenues, since that is where the real problem lies, as well as reducing spending? That would ensure that the pain was minimised by being shared by all, including those best able to pay. That would work to unite us, rather than divide us.

    The only unity Australians have gained from this budget is in opposing the lot – the good along with the bad. This week Essential Research published a new poll that found Australians oppose all six budget measures on its list, mostly overwhelmingly. Only 18 per cent support indexation of petrol tax, 20 per cent support cuts to university funding, 24 per cent support the $7 Medicare co-payment, and so on.

    Back in October, Essential found Australians supported only one measure on a different list of budget savings: sadly, cuts to foreign aid. Only 25 per cent supported the first lot of cuts to the ABC, only 28 per cent agreed with a higher pension age, and only 12 per cent supported the central measure intended to reduce the deficit: taking $80 billion from future school and hospital funding for the states.

    According to the old political wisdom, governments planning reforms should do them all at once, so that no one issue can get the airplay to stop it. That maxim now needs two qualifications: the government must start with strong public credibility and an ability to sell its message.

    This government had neither, and still hasn’t. Since the budget it’s gone quiet on the plan to shift schools and hospitals spending to the states, yet that is the cornerstone of the deficit-reduction strategy. Without it, there will be no deficit reduction. Presumably the government is waiting until after the NSW and Queensland elections, so as not to embarrass its state allies.

    Nor has it campaigned to explain why we should increase the pension age or index fuel taxes. The Australian’s Paul Kelly berates voters for not realising that the budget is in crisis, but the government’s actions suggest it doesn’t itself see it as serious. That much is clear from the detailed numbers in its two budget exercises so far – the 2013–14 MYEFO and the 2014–15 budget.

    The bottom line is this. Had the Abbott government’s spending cuts been implemented, they would have cut budget deficits by $70 billion over four years. Its tax cuts and new spending, meanwhile, would have added $67 billion. Net saving: $3 billion over four years.

    Some budget emergency!

    To put it another way, even in May, the plan was for 96 per cent of all the money saved by the Coalition’s spending cuts simply to be spent in other ways. Only 4 per cent was to be used to reduce the deficit.

    Under Labor’s policies, Treasury estimates, the cumulative deficit for the four years from mid 2013 to mid 2017 would have been $110 billion. Under the Coalition’s policies, it would be $107 billion.

    And that was in May: before the new commitment of troops to Iraq, before the free-trade deals, before the extension of the royal commission into the unions, etc., etc. Even if the Senate passed all the budget measures it has rejected, the new MYEFO will reveal that the net result of the Abbott government’s decisions has been to increase the deficit from what it would have been had Labor’s policies continued on autopilot.

    These are the budget’s own figures. All I’ve done is to add them up – and add the $1.2 billion costs of servicing the increased debt resulting from its tax cuts and new spending.

    Between them, the 2013–14 MYEFO and the May budget handed out $45 billion of new spending over the four years to 2016–17, and $22 billion of tax cuts – all funded by taking on new debt. Three decisions accounted for half of them: scrapping the emissions trading scheme ($13.7 billion), the splurge on new roads ($12.1 billion, without any cost-benefit analysis) and the $8.8 billion grant to the Reserve Bank – a grant the RBA had not asked for, and which appears to have been designed to inflate the 2013–14 deficit and lay the blame on Labor.

    That was not the only fiscal fix. During the Victorian election campaign it emerged that Hockey prepaid the Victorian government $1 billion for the East-West Link in June – so that it could appear as spending in 2013–14 (blamed on Labor) rather than 2014–15 (for which he must answer). Victoria, of course, didn’t spend the money, just banked it. MYEFO 2014–15 will show if there were other fiscal fixes like that one.

    One caveat: in the longer term, if the government’s budget plans were all implemented, they would reduce the deficit significantly. Its strategy has been to load up the deficit in 2013–14, and reduce it in later years. By 2016–17, Treasury estimates, the net impact of the government’s policy changes would lower the budget deficit by $9 billion, including $6.4 billion saved that year alone by cutting social security payments.

    Eventually the budget would get back to surplus, primarily as a result of increased income tax revenue from bracket creep, and the savings from the government’s plan to cut $80 billion from grants to the states for schools and hospitals.

    But the Commonwealth could never win an argument with the states on those cuts; it would be seen as abandoning its responsibilities in two crucial areas of government. It could win only if the states collectively decide they would rather have a bigger GST to spend as they choose than have the Commonwealth share the cost of running schools and hospitals. And premiers get to be premiers because they’re good at politics.

    The Abbott government could try to keep fighting the same old issues, but the polls suggest the voters have stopped listening. It still has twenty-one months left before it has to meet its electoral fate. It could turn off the life support for the old budget plan and reboot with a new comprehensive strategy – closing tax loopholes as well as cutting spending – clearly designed to reduce the deficit rather than pay out on political enemies (including students and universities, the ABC, foreign aid and welfare groups, and public transport). It would have to unite the country behind a common purpose, rather than divide it.

    But Tony Abbott by nature is a cultural warrior, not a unifier: that’s just not him. If the Coalition is to adopt a budget strategy to win over the middle ground, its Cabinet reshuffle has to start with him. I can’t see that happening.

    Tim Colebatch is former economics editor of the Age and author of the recent biography, ‘Dick Hamer: the liberal Liberal’.

    This article was first published in Inside Story on 5 December 2014.

     

     

  • Australia is worst performing industrial country on climate change.

    For the Lima Conference on Climate Change that has just begun, a report by the think-tank Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe examined the 58 emitters of greenhouse gasses in the world, and about 90% of all energy-related emissions. The report named Australia as the worst performing industrial country in the world on climate change. We have now replaced Canada as the worst performing industrial country. The report author told The Guardian, which has published this story ‘It is interesting that the bottom six countries in the ranking – Russia, Iran, Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia and Saudi Arabia – all have a lot of fossil fuel resources. It is a curse.The fossil fuel lobbies in these countries are strong. In Australia they stopped what were some very good carbon laws.’

    For the report in The Guardian, see link below.

    http://gu.com/p/44xha/sbl