John Menadue

  • Jock Collins. Australia’s shift from settler to temporary migration nation.

    Immigration is a political hot potato. On the day the OECD published its latest annual survey of global migration, Swiss voters rejected a referendum to reduce annual migration numbers.

    A few days earlier, yet another UN committee criticised Australia’s asylum seeker policies. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to reduce annual immigration from 260,000 to below 100,000 per year in response to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) securing its second parliamentary seat. And on November 20, US President Barack Obama announced his intention to permit millions of resident undocumented migrants’ access to permanent residence.

    The 2014 International Migration Outlook report reveals that there are 115 million first-generation migrants in OECD countries today, accounting for 10% of the OECD population. Another 5% of people in OECD countries are second-generation migrants.

    Both permanent and temporary migration numbers are down on the pre-global financial crisis record levels of 2007-08. This is in line with the trend of international migration to synchronise with the economic rhythms of globalisation.

    The report revealed that highly educated immigrants accounted for 45% of the increase in the foreign-born population of OECD countries in the last decade. Political conflict also drives international mobility: the report noted that flows of migrants seeking asylum increased by 20% in 2013.

    The OECD report presents data that confirms Australia’s place as one of the highest western immigration nations in per capita terms: 27.3% of all Australians today are born overseas. That is higher than countries in North America (Canada 19.8%, US 13%), Europe (UK 11.9%) or neighbour New Zealand (24.1%). Only Switzerland (27.7%) has more immigrants than Australia in relative terms among OECD countries.

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    There are a number of major drivers to international migration. One is economic. Globalisation has increased international labour migration as most countries seek to attract professional and highly skilled immigrants to fill labour shortages in areas such as health and informational technology, as well as other immigrants with trades in shortage in the labour market of the host country. In Australia, accountants, chefs, nurses, engineers and software developers top the skills-in-demand list for recent immigrants.

    Another major driver of international migration is global inequality. As scholars such as Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz have pointed out, globalisation has not delivered on its promise to reduce global inequality. Inequality drives international mobility for those who can turns dreams into reality.

    Another related driver of immigration is political. The expansion of the European Union, for example, enables people from the new member states (Romania joined in 2007 and Croatia in 2013) to move to other countries within the EU to seek employment.

    At the same time, political conflict such as that seen recently in countries in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe unleashes the movement of many millions of people within and beyond national borders to seek refuge and protection. Estimates put the number of refugees at 16.7 million, asylum seekers at 1.2 million and internally displaced people at 33.3 million for a total of 51.2 million people. As The Guardian recently put it:

    If displaced people had their own country it would be the 24th most populous in the world.

    Countries of settler immigration – who wanted immigrants and their families and subsequent generations to stay and become part of nation building – have been the exception and not the rule. Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand are most prominent in this regard.

    However, trends in Australian immigration in the past two decades strongly suggest that Australian can no longer be regarded as a settler immigration nation. 2012-13 immigration data shows that 190,000 arrived under the permanent immigration program (or 192,599 when Trans-Tasman migrants are included).

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    But in the same year, 725,043 – or 766,273 including Trans-Tasman migrants – migrants arrived on temporary immigration visas. This included 258,248 on working holiday visas, 259,278 on international student visas and 126,350 on temporary work (skilled) visas.

    This shift of Australia from a settler immigration nation to a temporary migrant nation has been the biggest change in nearly seven decades of post-war immigration history. Yet, remarkably, there has been virtually no debate about it other than understandable concerns about abuses of workers under the temporary 457 visa and of some working holiday makers by unscrupulous employers or agents.

    The available oxygen for Australian immigration debates today has been captured almost exclusively by the “boat people” debate. However, the 15,827 humanitarian entrants to Australia in 2012-13 comprised only 8.3% of entrants under the permanent immigration program and 1.9% of the total (permanent plus temporary) program in that year.

    The OECD report concluded that immigration had strong public support in Australia. It found:

    … a high level of support in 2012 for all immigration categories in Australia, with the public most favourable towards skilled migrants.

    Unfortunately, this flattering conclusion cannot be extended to humanitarian immigration and boat arrivals. It is an aspect of Australia’s remarkable immigration history that should bring shame to the country and its political leadership.

    Jock Collins is Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School at University of Technology, Sydney.

    This article was first published in The Conversation, 2 December 2014.

  • John Menadue. Tony Abbott did not stop the boats.

    The data just does not support the never-ending claims by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison that they stopped the boats. The under-resourced and uncritical media accepts the Coalition’s line.

    I will come to the recent data, but first the evidence is clear that action by the Coalition along with the Greens in the Senate to prevent amendments to the Migration Act greatly assisted people-smugglers and boat arrivals from 2011 onwards.

    The rejection of the arrangement with Malaysia by the High Court started the rot. The High Court decision may have been sound in law, but it had powerful consequences for boat arrivals. The arrangement with Malaysia needed improvement but it did provide guarantees that Malaysia had never provided before. The UNHCR was prepared to actively cooperate. When the High Court rejected the Malaysian arrangement in August 2011, irregular maritime arrivals were running at less than 300 per month. That number increased to 1200 by May 2012, and kept on rising.

    The Labor  Government  attempted to amend the Migration Act to address the problems identified by the High Court but the Coalition together with the Greens blocked the amending legislation. They bashed Malaysia at every opportunity. The failure of the Malaysian arrangement sent a very clear message to people smugglers that boat arrivals would succeed. Boat arrivals were running at over 4,000 per month in July 2013.

    The action by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison in association with the Greens triggered this dramatic increase in boat arrivals. Both Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison made it abundantly clear that they did not want to stop the boats with an arrangement such as that with Malaysia. They wanted to stop Labor stopping the boats. Their political intentions were revealed by WikiLeaks that reported that ‘a key Liberal Party strategist told the US embassy in 2009 that the more boats that come the better’. (SMH 10 December 2010). Scott Morrison became Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship in December 2009.

    Action by the Coalition in the Senate triggered a large increase in boat arrivals in 2012 and into 2013.

    But did Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison really stop the boats when they came to power?

    The data shows that the downward trend in boat arrivals occurred from July 2013, two months before the Coalition came to power. See data below.

    2013 Boat people arrivals(excluding crew) Boats
    January 2013 471 10
    February 925 16
    March 2455 37
    April 3396 47
    May 3315 47
    June 2715 41
    July 4145 47
    Aug 1591 25
    September 837 15
    October 339 5
    November 207 5
    December 355 7

    Source: Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and Australian Parliamentary Library.

    What largely stopped the boats, although not completely, was the announcement by Kevin Rudd on the 19th July 2013 that in future any persons coming by boat and found to be a  refugee would not be settled in Australia. We may argue about the wisdom of that policy, but it effectively crippled the business case of the people-smugglers.

    In the data above, there are undoubtedly some leads and lags and seasonal factors, but the data shows that the Rudd announcement of 19 July 2013 dramatically cut the number of boats and people arriving by boat. The major turnaround occurred between July and August, before the Coalition came to power.

    As the Abbott Government was not sworn in until 18 September 2013, its policy on boats would also have had only marginal effect on September arrivals.

    So between July and September, people arriving by boat fell from 4,145 to 837 and the number of boats fell from 47 to 15. The trend largely continued after that time.

    Peter Hughes a former deputy secretary in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship put it this way in an article in the Canberra Times in late 2013. ‘The arrival of 546 asylum seekers in October and November 2013 represents only 14% of the number of arrivals for the corresponding months in 2012. This is a dramatic reduction … The announcement of long-term resettlement of refugees in Papua New Guinea and Nauru by the previous government has likely been decisive in changing the decision to travel to Australia on the part of those asylum seekers who have not yet handed over their money to a smuggler. ‘

    The game-changer was Kevin Rudd’s announcement of 19 July 2013 on no resettlement in Australia for boat arrivals. It is also likely that tighter visa procedures on Indonesia’s part would have helped reduce the number of boat arrivals.  In effect the Rudd Government slammed the door although the boat turn a rounds pushed the final bolt home. In other words, if there was any doubt in the minds of people smugglers and asylum seekers trying to come by boat those doubts were removed.

    The Abbott Government capitalised on a trend which the Rudd Government clearly started in July 2013.

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have wrung every political advantage they could from boat arrivals. But the evidence is clear that they helped accelerate the numbers before they came to power and it was the action of the Rudd Government, before they came to power in September 2013 that put boat arrivals on a downward track

    Operation Sovereign Borders has really been quite marginal and would not have been ‘successful’ without the July 2013 decision. Navy and Customs were able to turn a few boats around. This would have been impossible if boats had continued to arrive at 47 a month as they were in July 2013. OSB has been very high profile and very expensive – and offensive to Indonesia. But OSB has not been the main game.

    The game-changer was Kevin Rudd’s announcement in July 2013.

  • John Menadue. Outsourcing and redundancy at the ABC.

    Mark Scott has expressed concern at the pain being felt by staff losing their jobs and careers. He announced that he and his senior team would take a pay freeze for a year.

    When it was pointed out that there would not be sufficient staff left to fill the program schedule, some senior manager apparently announced that the money achieved through some of the budget savings would be used to commission some individual programs and short series from some of those very people who are about to be made redundant. So, the ABC management is proposing to sack long serving and loyal staff with proper jobs, and use their salaries to bring them back on short term contracts and commissions with no security of employment.

    The cuts will fall most heavily in program making areas. Over the past several years the ABC has closed its television production centres in Perth, Hobart and now Adelaide which has so upset Christopher Pyne. At the same time it has radically cut internal production in Sydney, until virtually the only in-house TV programs left are Compass and Catalyst. Now they are moving the outsourcing philosophy into Radio. The cuts will fall most heavily on staff in programs requiring depth of production, research and analysis; in TV and Radio News and Current Affairs, and in radio documentaries and features.

    Mark Scott says the ABC needs to target younger audiences. The ABC has been talking about that for decades. And the same commercial formula for doing so is being trotted out again: Make it shorter, make it lighter, make it cheaper, and if possible make it funny.  What was that about dumbing down?

    The intent it seems is to transform the ABC from a production house, reflecting the geographic and cultural diversity of the nation, into a commissioning and transmission agency, serving a few big commercial co-production houses, such as Southern star and Endemol.

    The difficulty with this model is that commercial co-production partners may cover their costs plus a few percent doing a deal with the ABC, but their real mark-up comes from selling the product on the global market. This means productions skewed to their commercial sales potential rather than editorial merit for Australia.

    The second consequence of this model is that with journalists and producers on casual and short term contracts, staff are going to be very timid about offending the powerful. This form of short term, run of show, contract employment poses a significant threat to independent vigorous program making, and to a free media. It risks the public purpose of the ABC.

    The major industrial problem facing staff is that the ABC has told them that all redundancies will be individually targeted. This breaks a long standing expectation of staff. As the cuts have come in waves every decade or so and staff numbers have shrunk from around five and half thousand to around three thousand, staff have been allowed to volunteer for redundancy, and where possible to arrange for staff who wish to go to substitute for staff who wish to stay, so long as the targeted savings can be met. This was generally done as a way of cushioning the pain and gaining maximum staff co-operation in a difficult situation. This time round management have pre-emptively declared No Voluntary redundancies, and No Substitutions. Faced with industrial laws that make striking illegal, except during a once in 3 year wage bargaining period, staff are faced with the prospect of risking punitive legal retribution if they protest.

     

     

  • John Menadue. Our Environment Minister is not going to Lima

    Almost all countries will have their climate change or environment ministers at the UN Climate Change Conference which commences this week in Lima, Peru. This conference is in preparation for the crucial conference on climate change in Paris next year.

    But our Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, will not be there. Tony Abbott is sending his Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, but is also sending Andrew Robb, our Trade Minister to keep an eye on her. It is reported that Julie Bishop went ‘bananas’ over this insult to her.

    News reports suggest that Tony Abbott had no intention of sending  a minister to Lima. Julie Bishop asked for approval to go and was refused. When she asked a second time approval was given but only on the condition that Andrew Robb went with her. How very odd!

    But clearly Tony Abbott has major doubts about the reliability of Greg Hunt on climate change. As Michelle Grattan put it The Conversation on 3 December 2014, ‘In 2008 when the Coalition was committed to an emissions trading scheme, Shadow Treasurer Turnbull, Hunt, the environment spokesman and Bishop, the deputy Liberal leader, oppose Nelson’s desire to link an ETS to when the big emitters took action rather than to a specific date. In 2009 when Turnbull was leader, climate spokesman Robb … spectacularly repudiated Turnbull’s proposed compromise with the Rudd Government to get Labor’s ETS through parliament. Robb’s dramatic intervention, made during a long party room meeting on the highly contested issue, was a devastating blow to Turnbull’s leadership, which was under pressure over this stand on the ETS and his non-consultative style. Robb has documented the story in his book” Black Dog Days”. Turnbull quickly lost his job and Abbott became leader.’

    We have seen a consistent pattern by the Coalition in opposition and now in government to dismantle and defund almost attempts that have been made to address the threat which climate change presents to our planet.

    Even this week the NSW and ACT governments combined with researchers at the University of NSW’ Climate Change Research Centre, which predicted increasing hot days, longer dry spells, increased fire danger and fewer wet days.

    The science is trending overwhelmingly in one direction; that action on climate change is essential. But still the Abbott Government obfuscates and dissembles, even refusing to send the Environment Minister to the critical meeting in Lima.

  • Refugees – some middle ground is opening up.

    See below a speech made in the Senate on 4 December by Senator Xenophon. The Senator was one of six cross-bench senators who negotiated with the government for a compromise on the contentious Migration Bill.

    Senator XENOPHON (South Australia) (12:17): Australia’s migration policies have always had a long and vexed history. They have been, and rightfully so, open to significant scrutiny from international and domestic courts, independent experts, interest groups and the electorate. It has and will continue to be a passionate debate about a wicked and vexed issue. For me it is always important, always, to remember that we are dealing with legislation that relates to people, our fellow human beings. They are not numbers; they are not the myriad of labels that have been applied to them by all sides of the debate; and they are not political inconveniences, punching bags or props. They are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends, neighbours and acquaintances. They are, in short, people just like you and me who have found themselves in extraordinarily difficult circumstances—some, unimaginable circumstances. So I would like to approach this debate with respect, with compassion and with dignity.

    This has not been an easy process for me. On one side this bill does contain a number of measures that I am not comfortable with. But on the other side, if we do not act, the 30,000 people currently awaiting processing will continue to be left in limbo. If this bill does not pass there is also the real risk that the government will use a nonstatutory process instead, which will not result in any better outcomes for the people who are currently in Australia. This problem is a true Hobson’s choice: we are left to decide between two potentially negative outcomes.

    Back in 2012 the former government put up a number of proposals, the so-called Malaysia solution, which was rejected by the then opposition and the Australian Greens. I remember at the time—I remember well—I was in hospital and I asked for my vote to be recorded. There is a saying: ‘Not to have the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.’ As imperfect as the former government’s solution was, it was preferable to doing nothing. We saw more and more drownings, more and more people pass away, and more and more people fall victim to people smugglers and the awful consequences of that.

    What is being proposed by the government here is by no means perfect—in fact, it is quite imperfect—but the consequences of not supporting it will mean that asylum seekers will be in a worse position, in my view. It also has to be noted what the immigration minister said a few moments ago. He has agreed, as part of a process of constructive engagement with crossbenchers, to increase the humanitarian intake by 7,500 people—a significant increase. My view is that we should double the humanitarian intake or more. We are a big country with a big heart. But I am trying to deal with the actual political realities here. We have an opportunity to increase significantly the humanitarian and refugee intake by 7,500 people on top of the 13,750 per annum. We have an opportunity to have something like 25,000 people on bridging visas have work rights for the first time. We have an opportunity to significantly improve the lot of those individuals who have been left in limbo. The reality is that under the former government border control, immigration policy, was out of control, and that is something we need to take into account.

    I have met with many interest groups and representatives, including Amnesty International and also Paris Aristotle of Foundation House and the former government’s expert panel. My view on this issue changed when I saw what Angus Houston, what Paris Aristotle, and what Michael L’Estrange said in that expert panel. I congratulate former Prime Minister Gillard for having the foresight to set up that panel—to actually have a circuit breaker to try to look at this in a different way, because to me it meant that we needed to consider the awful moral dilemmas that we had to deal with. I thought the panel headed by Angus Houston came up with a number of sensible proposals.

    In that context, I have approached the government to request changes to the bill and to migration policy to improve the conditions for the men, women and children who are awaiting processing. That doesn’t mean that we cannot still advocate for a significant increase in the humanitarian intake. It does not mean that we stop being critical of the government’s policies, but if we do nothing, if we do not support this bill, then I believe fervently that what will happen is that asylum seekers will be worse off if this bill is not passed, as imperfect as this bill is.

    That is the moral dilemma; that is the wicked problem.

    I want to make it clear that my vote for this bill is conditional on these changes and those circulated by the Palmer United Party. The government has taken my concerns into account and, I understand, will be circulating amendments to that effect. As such, I will not speak to those amendments in detail, but I would like to take this opportunity to outline the changes that I have proposed. I also want to make it very clear that these proposals do not necessarily represent my ideal outcomes. They do not, but they do make important steps forward—and I do not believe they should be rejected because they are only ‘good’ rather than ‘perfect’.

    Firstly, I have proposed changes to allow people holding TPVs or SHEVs to travel outside Australia where the minister is satisfied there are compassionate or compelling circumstances and the minister has approved that travel. That has never occurred before, either under this government or under the previous government, and I think that is an important concession. This would cover circumstances where a TPV or SHEV holder wants to travel to visit family in circumstances such as significant family illness or death. While I would prefer to allow family reunification on these visas, I believe this is an important step in granting these visa holders rights that go some way towards acknowledging the importance of family.

    Secondly, I have proposed changes to ensure that, through the use of a disallowable instrument, the fast-track process only applies to the legacy caseload. This will make sure that the use of this fast-track process will be subject to the scrutiny of the Senate. Thirdly, I have proposed changes to the definition of ‘manifestly unfair’ in relation to the rejection of claims so that it more accurately reflects language used by the UNHCR—and that is important. I think that is a benchmark that we need to look at very carefully.

    Fourthly, I have proposed some changes to the fast-track review process to ensure that it is not only efficient and quick but must meet the natural justice provisions already included in the Migration Act. This will help to ensure that decisions take natural justice into account within the confines of the act and so are more balanced and fair. I have also proposed changes to the requirement for the review to take new information into account. My specific intention in this case is to ensure that information that was not provided for personal reasons, including mental health reasons, can be taken into account. One example that has been put to me are the many cases of sexual or other assault, where the victim may not volunteer that information in the first instance. I think all of us can appreciate the reasons behind not sharing that information—the shame and the trauma that may prevent someone from speaking out. My proposal to the government was that this type of information and these circumstances must be taken into account, and I believe these changes will improve the review process in that regard.

    Fifthly, I have raised concerns relating to the non-refoulement provisions and how we can be sure that a person being returned to a country is not facing persecution. In this case the government has agreed to use phrasing similar to that of the UNHCR to define both when a person is considered to be part of a particular social group and what effective protection measures should be taken into account when considering if that person should be returned. I believe these definitions will bring Australia more in line with UNHCR best practice in terms of defining and applying these clauses.

    Further, I have advocated, as have others, for an increase in Australia’s humanitarian intake and to extend work rights to people on bridging visas. I have always been a strong advocate of increasing our humanitarian intake. I believe the government could go further, but I do acknowledge the increase they have proposed will make a real difference—7½ thousand people. That is 7½ thousand people who can be taken in through that humanitarian and refugee intake and who can be part of our community. I do not want to throw that away. That does not mean that my colleagues in the Australian Greens or the opposition cannot say that we should double it—I think we should—or that we should have a much bigger humanitarian intake, a much bigger refugee intake. It could be an issue at the next election. I do not have an issue with that—it ought to be. But I do not want to throw away this opportunity to have 7½ thousand more people come in to this country through that humanitarian and refugee intake process.

    Extending work rights to those on bridging visas is also vitally important. Participating in the workforce, even in a small way, makes people a part of our community and society. It gives them, quite simply, a reason to get up in the morning—to feel valued and that they are making a contribution. I do not want to pretend that any of these measures is an ideal outcome or that they represent what I would see happen in the perfect world. But they will make a true difference to the people who are here right now, who are in detention right now, who are waiting to be processed right now. This may not be perfect, but it is good. It is also important to remember that this is not the end of the debate. These measures do not mean that I, as many others, will stop pushing for improvements. They are merely the next step, not the final one, and I would urge my colleagues to support this bill.

     

  • Tony Kevin.  Cuts to ABC Classic FM strike at Australia’s cultural heritage’

    Limelight, ABC Classic FM’s online magazine, reported on 24 November

    ‘The number of concerts recorded will be slashed by a massive 50%, with just 300 performances due to be recorded over the next two years verses the 600 concerts recorded during the previous two years. Broadcasts of live performances currently account for 17 hours of Classic FM’s weekly output.’

    http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/major-cuts-abc-classic-fm%E2%80%99s-programming-confirmed

    So listeners will lose around 50%, i.e., 8-9 hours of Australian-performed broadcast music each week.

    What will we lose?

    Events like the 30 November broadcast of the fine new Australian opera by Iain Grandage and Alison Croggan, The Riders (2014), inspired by Tim Winton’s great novel. Many thousands of people will have heard this ground-breaking new work on Classic FM radio (and it is still up on Listen Again).

    Or Max Richter’s new composition Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Recomposed (2012), which he played with the 22-piece Wordless Music Orchestra, an outstanding New York electro-acoustic group, in Melbourne on 24 November. Parts of this brilliant reworking of a familiar classic are already being broadcast on Classic FM: last week I heard Summer, and loved it.

    Or the brilliant Victorian Opera Wagner Ring Cycle performed late last year in Melbourne, all 17 hours of which was rebroadcast soon afterwards on ABC Classic FM. Or Pinchgut Opera Company productions in Sydney. Or the Sydney International Piano Competition.

    The 17 hours per week until now of broadcast live musical performances on Classic FM presumably reflected professional artistic judgements of how much of such music being played live each week around Australia was worthy of national broadcast.

    Arbitrarily to cut it in half is like telling the ABC it can only broadcast half the days of a cricket Test series, or half of a football season. It makes no artistic sense.

    Cost accountants like these cuts, because programmes of pre-recorded music CDs from overseas are cheaper than Australian live broadcasts. There are savings on broadcasting rights fees paid to creators and performers, and from not putting recording crews and announcers in place, sometimes in not-so-accessible locations in regional Australia.

    But at what artistic cost?  For example, if ABC FM has now to cease rebroadcasting the Huntington Music Festivals: there will be real losses in listener pleasure, and in the financial support around the nation that helps a unique festival like Huntington in remote Mudgee to attract sponsors and thus continue to thrive. Many such festivals depend on ABC broadcasting financial support to help keep them viable.

    How will FM program planners allocate their halved domestic live broadcast time between the Sydney Symphony Orchestra? The Adelaide or West Australian Symphony Orchestra? Huntington? Victorian Opera’s Wagner Ring Cycle? The Riders? A Peter Sculthorpe memorial tribute concert? An international piano or vocal competition in Australia?

    The national classical music live broadcaster should not be forced to make such egregious choices on any but artistic grounds. This is what ABC Classic FM was set up for, and extended across our vast land to reach 95% of Australian radio audiences; not mechanically and endlessly to play tapes from overseas. There must be a balance.

    I’m not sure how one gets across to people who do not much like or understand classical music the huge cultural treasure and living musical archive that the national Classic FM network, as it has evolved over the last 40 odd years, now represents in Australia. There is nothing else quite like it in the world.

    It allows listeners almost right across Australia to hear the best world music and Australian-created or performed music, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Some people might see this as catering to an elite minority ‘niche’ taste. Is listening on the radio to Test cricket or an AFL series a ‘niche’ taste? I don’t listen to these things, but I am happy for others to do so.

    The love of classical music has deep and broad roots in Australia. We would never have had a Joan Sutherland without our rich Australian classical music public culture, back to our early European settlement – all those church choirs, brass bands, eisteddfods, music and dance schools. And in the dark days of WW2, when visionary ABC executives like Bernard Heinze and Charles Moses, who both had a strong sense of cultural mission to the whole country while we battled Nazi  barbarism, sent ABC orchestras touring around Australia and playing Beethoven’s nine symphonies to packed houses of emotional audiences. And in the rich golden years of Australian classical music from the 1940s on, inspired by the contributions of Jewish and other refugee musicians from Europe.

    ABC Classic FM has inherited from ABC Radio National, and now has sole broadcasting responsibility, for nurturing this rich living musical heritage. Live concert-hall or opera house audiences are essential for music to thrive. But surely it is also a cultural good that retired people in Orange or Bendigo or Launceston or Bunbury can switch on their FM radios and hear the same wonderful music, played in our country.   Hearing a tape from Frankfurt or London is just not quite the same thrill.

    The national Classic FM network allows large numbers of listeners to share in hugely significant and inspiring live musical events in our country that many, because of where they live, or lack of money, or mobility issues, would never get to hear. It allows many Australians to feel a sense of belonging to a common music-loving national community, uniting young, middle-aged and older people.

    A symbiotic relationship exists between a thriving classical music national radio network, which builds and enriches audiences, and the stimulation and professional development of young musical talent in our country. If one is harshly cut back, the other inevitably will suffer. A holistic approach is surely needed.

    What will happen under halved live broadcasting hours to the broadcasting opportunities and performance fees of our smaller state symphony orchestras outside Sydney and Melbourne – in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Tasmania? How will they cope with loss of income and audience engagement in their states? Such national musical assets are hard to create, easy to destroy. Look at the USA now, a virtual classical music radio desert and with symphony orchestras in financial difficulties closing down around the country. Do we want this?

    Somebody must speak out now for Classic FM. It is not for elites, not for silvertails. It is for the 750,000 Australians listening to their FM radios, whose parents and teachers taught them to cherish classical music, whatever their location, means, ages, or mobility. Don’t taxpayers and citizens have a right to demand that this precious intangible national cultural heritage, built up by the hard work of so many people over so many years, not be cut off at the knees now?

     

     

  • Eric Walsh.  A ‘ragged’ year not a ‘ragged’ week.

    Nobody laughed – things must be different in the press gallery these days.

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott in one of his longest press conferences was trying desperately to erase the hangover from the setbacks which have dogged him and his government since his dismal performance at the G20 meeting which he had hoped – forlornly as it proved – would rescue the image of a very disordered and unimpressive government. He was trying to end the year on what at least might seem to be a high note.

    He had just told the assembled media that despite the ‘dire’ state of the economy which had been his theme for more than 12 months, he could not abandon his universally unpopular $5 million paid parental leave scheme which will benefit only very rich women. This would, he said, be seen as breaking a promise. This, while he was being peppered with questions on his Kristallnacht of promises on health, education, pensions, tax,  petrol pricing, the ABC and SBS and even on his water buy-back policy from the Murray Darling system.

    Such a brazen failure to read the mood of the meeting might in other days of the press gallery cause at least some audible amused incredulity. Billy McMahon, exhibiting similar ill-based self-assurance, could certainly not have got away without a snigger.

    This press conference was supposed to set the scene for a high-note ending to his government’s first full year in office. Like many of Tony’s recent endeavours, it failed. Tony has developed a new principle by which he evaluates his government’s performance. ‘Things aren’t what they are – they are what Tony says they are’. It’s catching on with some of his ministers – a very quick adaptee is Treasurer Joe Hockey.

    In his last week of a pretty dismal year, guided by this principle, Tony tried to convince his questioners that the government had a single ‘ragged’ week – not a ‘ragged’ fifteen months as demonstrated by the authoritative Newspoll the next day. The government was still in a heavily losing position as it has been in Newspoll and every other poll since November last year, and worst, stuck at the new low it hit with the production of its first budget back in May.

    The principle is holding good too in reviewing presentation of his government’s controversial policies. Crippling moves on education, health, pensions, etc., are not broken promises taken from Tony’s innovative viewpoint. Unsurprisingly others, like electors, might and currently seem to see them in a different light. Tony using his same self-created prism assures us the Barrier Reef is not endangered by climate change; consumers, not bankers, will benefit from the removal of safeguards involving financial advice; students will somehow be better off paying up to $100,000 to earn a degree and pensioners won’t be worse-off having their payments calculated in the new way this budget proposes. There are a host of other propositions on which the voter seems determined to see things as they are rather than what Tony says they are.  Look at the polls.

    And there is another major promise on which Tony has not yet been called by either the Opposition or the media. Robustly confident of an election win Tony declared that in government he would not be dealing with minor parties or Independents to win passage for policies which at the time voters were assured were not happening. In recent weeks our major political coverage has involved the very negotiations – only occasionally successful – that Tony assured us would not happen. And he went further. He would, he promised, not hesitate to take parliament to a double dissolution in order to tame the Opposition and get his program implemented.

    A mere glance at the opinion polls tells us why this remains another broken promise. But it does not explain why he has so far been unchallenged by either Opposition or press on the question. Highly unfavourable opinion polls are not the only deterrent for Abbott here. Have a look at the election manifesto for which Tony will be seeking national support.

    Higher university fees, lower pensions, more costly healthcare, dearer petrol, total disregard for climate change and a total shutdown of any government bodies likely to advise him otherwise. And there are a host of other electoral nasties Tony has unveiled as he has stumbled through his first 15 months in office but which remained well hidden in the lead up to his election win.

    After his promise-shattering budget this year, Tony would indeed prove himself a gambler if he thought he could retain electoral support by promising these things were no longer part of his program.

    Once bitten …..

     

     

  • John Menadue. Why the ABC is unique and important.

    The BBC is the most successful public broadcaster in the world. It is a good model, not to copy but to adapt to our own needs and circumstances.

    Lord Reith who was Director General of the BBC 1927-38 pithily described the BBC’s purpose in three words…educate, inform and entertain. He was famously determined that the BBC would provide its audiences with something rather better than they thought they wanted. He said,  ‘He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious  demand for lower standards which he himself will then satisfy,’

    Sir Ian Jacob who was DG  1952-59 defined public broadcasting as ‘ …a compound of a system of control, an attitude of mind, and an aim, which if successfully achieved results in a service which cannot be given by any other means. The system of control is full independence, or the maximum degree of independence that parliament will accord. The attitude of mind is an intelligent one capable of attracting to the service the highest quality of character and intellect. The aim is to give the best and the most comprehensive service of broadcasting to the public that is possible. The motive that underlies the whole operation is a vital factor; it must not be vitiated by political   or commercial consideration.’ 

    So much of our media including the ABC is a long way from the approach of Lord Reith or Sir Ian Jacob. Rupert Murdoch justifies what he offers by saying that if viewers or readers don’t like what he offers then they can switch the dial or read something else. This is what Lord Reith would have described as ‘creating a fictitious demand for lower standards which he himself will then satisfy’. When critics say that Murdoch dumbs down the media like this he describes his critics as elitist or snobs.

    One field in which the ABC should be unique and way ahead of the field is in its coverage of our own Asian region. The ABC should be the leader in helping to break us free of our dependence on the news, current affairs and entertainment media houses of New York and London. The ABC is the only media organisation that can help us live with and learn from our own region. When the ABC should be putting Asian coverage as its highest priority it is scaling back dramatically. It is in retreat in this critical area.

    Another important feature of the ABC must be is that it is national. It can help bind and unite the country, free us from state and local parochialism and help form and project our national identity. The only two other major national media organisations are the Australian Financial Review and The Australian.  The former is a specialist service. An important strength of The Australian is that it is national although it is increasingly failing as a serious, independent and professional newspaper.

    Unfortunately the ABC’s coverage out of Canberra, our national capital, falls well short. It should give us less politics and gladiatorial sport and more in depth analysis of policies. God save us from the increasingly bland and glib generalists who know a little about many things but are expert on nothing. The ABC needs to lift its national coverage.

    In its geographic coverage, the ABC cannot be everything to all people. Most of Australian media is focused on state capitals, so I wonder why the ABC needs to be so committed to Sydney and Melbourne where at least there are established and competitive media players. It is different in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth which are one-newspaper cities with the ABC the only substantial alternative

    The ABC is obviously a very important player in regional Australia. The lack of strong local media in regional cities and towns makes the ABC so valuable for country people in Australia.

    The role of the ABC must be to’educate,inform and entertain’ and to provide a ‘service which cannot be given by any other means’ It does this much better than other media but its own shortcomings and the collapse of other media models requires it  to lift its game.

    The ABC will always be under pressure from governments, both Labor and non Labor. Its independence may be better safeguarded by considering again licence fees which were abolished by the Whitlam Government and replaced by direct funding from the budget.

     

     

  • John Menadue. The smoko continues.

    In April 2012 Greg Dodds and I posted an article on this blog ‘The Australian Century and the Australian smoko’. We argued that while we responded well to the opportunities in Asia for over a decade in the 1980s, we went on ‘smoko’ from the mid-1990s. There was widespread complacency and fear of Asia was promoted. The result has been two decades of failure by business, universities, schools and the media in equipping ourselves for the region. That complacency is still with us and the fear of Asia is promoted by ministers like Scott Morrison.

    Another report has just been recently published which highlights our complacency…

    A recent survey prepared by PwC and reported yesterday by the Financial Review has given us more bad news. PwC undertook a survey of 1,000 Australian businesses. It found

    • Two thirds of Australian companies have no plans to change their approach to doing business in Asia despite the urging by the government and others.
    • Only 9% of Australian businesses have any sort of operation in Asia and only 12% have had any experience in Asia at all.
    • Whilst about a half of large companies are doing business in Asia, only 23% have staff on the ground ‘in market’ and for those companies with an Asian strategy, the total contribution of it to their bottom line was only 12%.
    • Australian companies last year invested more in New Zealand than in all of the ten countries of our South East Asian Region.

    PwC partner, Andrew Parker, said ‘If Australian businesses want a place in future global supply chains and to participate in the growth of intra-Asian trade, we will have to dramatically lift our engagement and investment in the region. Unfortunately Australia is way behind. Asia is passing us by and we need to act now. This may well be our last chance’.

    Australian business profits are booming. Dividends are at record levels. Some major Australian companies are spending their cash in buying back shares. Most Australian companies are awash with cash. But the clear evidence is that they are not prepared to take risks and invest and trade in the fast growing economies of our region.

    In earlier blogs, I have drawn attention to the same disquieting facts.

    • I have yet to learn of a single Chairperson or CEO of any of our major companies who can fluently speak any of the key Asian languages. There are now tens of thousands of Australian born citizens of Asian descent in our universities. But they are unlikely to break into the ‘white men’s clubs’ of our company boards.
    • In late 2013 the Business Alliance for Asian Literacy, which represents 400,000 businesses in Australia, found that ‘more than half of Australian businesses operating in Asia had little board and senior management experience of Asia and/or Asian skills or languages’.
    • Tourism has been booming, but we don’t get much repeat business. We skip from one new market to another, first Japan, then Korea and now China. If we are not getting repeat business it suggests there is something wrong with our product.
    • Many young Australians I knew studied Asian languages in the 1980’s but could not find work with Australian companies. They drifted off to Hong Kong and other Asian cities where their skills were valued.

    The clear failures in our business sector to equip itself for Asia are even more obvious in our media which is still chained to our century old links to media houses in the North Atlantic.

    We talk endlessly about the business and other opportunities in our region, but we sit on our hands when it comes to do anything serious on the subject.

    The government takes pride in trade and investment partnerships that it has finalised with Japan, ROK and China but where are the business people to take full advantage of these new arrangements?

     

  • Kerry Brown. Australia’s vanishing China policy.

    One of the side effects of the visit by Chinese president Xi Jinping to Australia, New Zealand and the region in mid November was to raise questions about whether each of these countries has what might be called a strategic vision of their relationship with a country that has quickly become their largest trading ally. Xi’s suspicion that they don’t may lie behind his observation, addressing the Australian parliament on 17 November, that there needs to be more imagination and ambition in the bilateral relationship.

    At a time when many in the rest of the world are asking China to be more active and take a greater role as a stakeholder, albeit on Western terms, it seems ironic that its current leader should make this point in Canberra. Australia is a fellow member of the UN Security Council and a major player in the G20, the World Bank and other global forums, and yet it seems not to have impressed Xi with any strong vision of its relations with the country he leads.

    There is certainly a constituency in Australia that would be antagonistic to the very notion of having a strategy. To them, you shouldn’t hedge yourself in with self-imposed limits. You leave yourself maximum room for manoeuvre and, in the words of the great economist John Maynard Keynes, change your mind when the facts change. The most that many in this camp would accept is that a country needs a sense of its national interests, and goes out to defend these. At the moment, that means sticking by the United States, no matter what, and building up complementary alliances wherever else you can.

    Xi’s words should at least begin a process of considering whether this approach is sustainable. At times, Australia’s stance comes dangerously close to outsourcing all the deeper thinking about strategic interests and global roles to the United States. If Washington says something should happen, it happens. If Washington vetoes it, then Australia follows suit. (Witness Tony Abbott’s quick reversal of his initial interest in being part of the Chinese-instigated infrastructure bank.) Ironically, this seems to work in every policy area barring the one in which Australia might well argue it really should follow in the slipstream of the United States – action on climate change. The embarrassment of holding a climate-light G20 a few days after the United States and China announced a major deal on carbon emissions only served to underline, at least to Chinese officials, that Australia is kept in step by the United States when it matters to it, and then simply kept in the dark when it doesn’t.

    Like the United States, Australia welcomes a strong, peaceful, cooperative China. No surprises there. And yes, it wants a China mostly in our own political image – just like America does. It has a common conceptual language with China on many economic issues, and like the United States it has trouble when the dialogue gets to values and rights. Australian companies love the Chinese market, and Australians on the whole see value in getting benefits from the Chinese economy and its links with their country. But these things simply add up to a framework for pragmatic engagement. Even the free-trade agreement, which was levelled off when Xi was in Canberra, doesn’t go much further towards answering the question of what Australian policy towards China really is.

    It isn’t as though the question hasn’t been exhaustively considered by policy-makers and their political masters across Australia. And in many ways, it might be more accurate to talk about a multi-strand policy, involving individual states and the federal government, rather than a unified position. This is not unusual: the European Union could be accused of having not one policy towards the People’s Republic but twenty-eight, reflecting the number of member states. What is odd is that Australia sounds like it has a policy, and does the things that a country with a policy might do – but when the going gets tough (under pressure from America or from domestic interests) the policy vanishes. The cause célèbre is the Australia in the Asian Century white paper, issued to great fanfare in 2012 as the herald of a new era of regional engagement, with China at the centre. Those seeking this report now have to rummage around in the online archive of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Britain did a similar thing, specifically about China, in 2009, and that paper too has more or less vanished from cyberspace.

    Does this mean that, in its heart, Australia doesn’t want a policy? The signs are that it wants to look like it has a China policy, but that thinking about what the world will look like in a decade’s time, when China will be a bigger, stronger, more prominent global force, is really too demanding. Australia’s policy is therefore to make as much for itself materially as it can, and leave to others the heavy lifting of working with China to integrate it more closely into the global system. That means sticking predominantly by the United States, no matter what, tactically defending specific national interests from time to time (including perverse obstruction on climate change) and leaving it at that. In essence, work with the United States.

    Were China a more predictable partner, this make-hay-while-the-sun-shines approach might do the job. But in a number of key areas, all of which affect Australia, that isn’t the case. The vulnerability of China’s growth is something Chinese leaders past and present have all drawn attention to. China’s unity is also much more fragile than outsiders might believe. (Chinese leaders certainly aren’t complacent about the issues on their vast western borders.) Its political model is undergoing very real reform, not towards what many in the outside world might want but certainly towards something more law-based and accommodating of the needs of the emerging urban middle class. Its environmental problems are simply vast.

    In any of these areas, China could all too easily receive a killer blow. And a killer blow to its stability and prosperity would in many ways be a killer blow for Australia. To daydream about the shifting interests of India or another market is, in the short to medium term, simply to indulge in fantasy. Like it or not, it is China or nothing for Australia’s future growth and prosperity.

    The point of a policy is to try to deal, at least, with scenarios that involve some future influence and dynamic interaction. An Australian policy towards China would therefore need to look at China’s domestic challenges, admit they are directly linked to Australia’s own interests, and then work out where it might have influence. In some areas – such as technology and ideas transfer or deeper intellectual engagement – this would be to focus on the clear positives. In others, it would mean dealing with more challenging topics – how to mitigate partial pandemics or an environmental collapse in China, if they were to happen, for instance. A policy also has to think the unthinkable. If China did implode or collapse, what would Australia do? One of the merits of thinking through doomsday scenarios is that it sharpens minds and makes everyone intent on avoiding them, however unpleasant the process of thinking them through might be.

    A policy is not simply a risk strategy. Australia has proved quite good at thinking through the risks of China’s rise regionally. But a fundamental part of its thinking should now be about what sort of China might exist in ten to twenty years, and in what ways that country is important and influential for Australia, and Australia for it. This is a positive part of policy formation.

    Those who remain sceptical about the need for a strategic vision like this should remember that even if Australia doesn’t have a vision about China, China certainly has one about it. That vision was outlined by Xi Jinping last week, when he talked about an Australia that would increasingly be part of the economic, and therefore the geopolitical, realm of a China-influenced world in which the luxurious isolation of the past is over. After all, China has had a culture of strategic thinking for thousands of years. Look at the words of Confucius in the Analects: “To lead into battle a people that has not first been instructed is to betray them.” And in terms of future economic and security challenges, that is precisely the mistake that the Australian government has been making. Xi’s visit offered the chance to change that. Let’s hope it is taken.

    This article first appeared in Inside Story on 25 November 2014. 

    Kerry Brown is Director of the China Research Centre at the University of Sydney.

  • John Menadue. The scholarship is the real issue.

    Freya Newman has been placed on a two year good behaviour bond  with no conviction recorded  for  accessing the computer system of the Whitehouse Institute of Design concerning a ‘scholarship’ awarded to Francis Abbott.

    Overwhelmingly the media coverage has been about Freya Newman and very little about the substantial issue, the ‘scholarship’.

    The substantial issues seem quite clear. They have not been publicly disputed.

    • The Whitehouse Institute is a private tertiary body.
    • It awarded Francis Abbott, the then Opposition Leader’s daughter, a scholarship which saved her family more than $60,000 in fees.
    • The scholarship was not advertised.
    • Its existence was never made public.
    • The Institute insists it was offered on the basis of academic merit, but has offered nothing to substantiate this claim.
    • The Institute’s chairman was a substantial donor to the Liberal Party and has confirmed that he ‘probably’ recommended Ms Abbott for the scholarship.
    • Tony Abbott did not disclose this benefit as part of his parliamentary obligations.

    Just imagine if the daughter of Kevin Rudd or Bill Shorten had been awarded a $60,000 scholarship in such circumstances. The English language would not have been adequate to describe the criticism they would have received from Tony Abbott and Julia Bishop. The Murdoch media would have gone almost into meltdown over such a scholarship. The Australian would have called for either a judicial enquiry or a royal commission. It would have been as relentless as it was on Julia Gillard’s union connections.

    It is remarkable that a young woman, who chose at very considerable risk to be a whistle blower, has been the focus of public attention, including from Christopher Pyne, while the substantial issue, the ‘scholarship’ has been sidelined.

    It should not have been left to a young whistle blower to bring this issue to public attention. If Tony Abbott had been a member of the Parliament of NSW, Freya Newman and other whistle blowers could bring their concerns to the attention of the NSW ICAC. But there is no national ICAC.

    The real issue is not Freya Newman. It is the ‘scholarship’ and the circumstances under which it was granted. An injustice has been done to Freya Newman. At least Magistrate O’Sullivan got the point about how trivial the case was.  The magistrate said that Freya Newman was not motivated by personal gain or a sense of animosity to Francis Abbott. ‘I accept that Freya Newman was motivated by a sense of injustice rather than a desire for personal notoriety or any desire to embarrass the student (Francis Abbott)’.

    An injustice has been done, but the central issue surrounding the ‘scholarship’ has not been properly examined.

    The issue is certainly not Frances Abbott. There is no suggestion she has done anything wrong.

    New Matilda deserves credit for pursuing this issue whilst almost all other media avoided it or focussed on the whistle blower rather than on the ‘scholarship’.

  • Rethinking the cost of Western intervention in Ukraine.

    In the Washington Post on November 25, Katrina vanden Heuvel had a very interesting article on the mistakes that Europe, NATO, and the US have made in their approach to Russia over the Ukraine and Crimea. She quotes Henry Kissinger as saying ‘Nobody in the West has offered a concrete program to restore Crimea. Nobody is willing to fight over Eastern Ukraine. That’s a fact of life.’  Kissinger has said that the West might weigh its real security concerns before posturing and escalation over Ukraine.

    Even far away Australia has been posturing over Ukraine. In one of his more bellicose moments, and as a way of shirt-fronting Vladimir Putin, Tony Abbott suggested that Australia might send 1,000 Australian  troops to secure the crash site in Eastern Ukraine!  The link to this article is below.  John Menadue

    http://wapo.st/11sAUyu

  • John Menadue. The ABC should stop kicking own goals.

    There is not much doubt in my mind that the budget cuts to the ABC are part of a vendetta against the ABC and to oblige Rupert Murdoch who intensely dislikes quality competition. The ABC is the most trusted media organisation in the country and News Corp is the least trusted.

    But the ABC looks to be kicking some own goals.

    Walter Hamilton, John Tulloh and I have pointed to the very disquieting cut backs in the ABC regional coverage when it should be dramatically increased given the rapidly increasing importance of our region. We still have a ‘white man’s media that clings to the North Atlantic.

    Another own goal is the retreat from specialisation and in-depth analysis of important public issues. In the SMH and the Age recently Quentin Dempster said that a ‘senior manager (at the ABC) had commented on the need to get rid of the stranglehold of specialisation’.

    If anyone is looking for reasons why public broadcasting exists and why we need specialists more than ever, just take a look at Q&A on 29 September this year. Laura Tingle, Christopher Pyne, and Wayne Swan, agreed that there is a problem with current media in Australia: it lacks specialist depth. They all commented on the negative impact of the collapse of current media models, and specifically, the consequent loss of specialist journalism skills in the commercial media arena.

    Tony Jones referred to the point raised by Wayne Swan about journalists ‘not being properly mentored and not being able to do proper analyses’.

    Laura Tingle from the AFR said that media organizations are collapsing from within. She added ‘When I joined the Canberra Press Gallery the various bureaus I was in would have specialist writers who could write and know what was going on in health (or other fields). The AFR is now probably one of the few bureaus that has that sort of specialization. …  Now what does that mean? It means that when a story comes up, whether it’s Gonski, education funding or health funding, you have a whole heap of generalists who go in and say “What does this mean for Labor and the Coalition?” They look at it as a political story.’

    Christopher Pyne said ‘There are very few specialists in the gallery today who actually talk about education policy. But six years ago there were actually quite a lot of journalists in the gallery who were education specialists. … I think Wayne has hit it on the head. It actually takes accountability away from governments and oppositions if you can get away with skating over policy because the questions are not going deeply into what governments are trying to do. … But we then see what the media does. It reports politics as a football game … rather than policy that’s trying to improve the lives of Australians. …’

    They all made the point that as journalists have lost jobs, media outlets are falling back on generalist journalists to turn their hand to whatever story was needed, and this often resulted in a shallow approach to issues. With no real depth of knowledge of the topic the journalist falls back on the Us v Them, gladiatorial, party contest view.

    They all made the point that this loss of specialist journalism was damaging the whole fabric of political and social debate in Australia. Yet, we have ABC management, according to media reports, actively considering taking the ABC down this same shallow generalist path that most of the commercials are well and truly on. What do they think the ABC exists for?

    If politicians as disparate as Pyne and Swan can see this, and argue for it, why can’t ABC management?

    I closely follow the public ‘debate’ about refugees. Many factors have contributed to the cruel position we have adopted. But one important contributor is that the media has few specialist experts who are able to sort the daily politics about boats from major policy issues underlying enormous refugee flows around the world.  The same is also true of health policy that I follow closely. The debate is invariably about short term politics and not policy. Politics is so much easier to report. Health is a complex issue but because there are so few well informed health journalists we get carried away with the immediate political issues like a shortage of hospital beds (when in fact we have too many) and delays in emergency departments. They ignore the more serious and deeper problems in general practice and health prevention. Because many journalists lack in-depth understanding of health issues they are dependent on the handouts and briefings of vested interests that abound in the health field. .

    The public broadcaster, not constrained by the need for ratings to generate income, was designed to have the capacity to provide breadth of coverage, and depth of analysis which the commercial market could not. So why are we ditching it for a model that pushes the ABC  towards formulaic, presenter-driven lifestyle, interspersed with short news breaks, soft current affairs, and personality-based infotainment?

    The model ABC management is working towards in both TV and radio would tie the corporation closer to a ratings and market driven model, just when that model is collapsing. This is particularly the case with Radio National, described by ABC managing directors from David Hill to Mark Scott as ‘the jewel in the crown’. The hollowness of that statement should now ring loudly around the ABC board room. The programs targeted for the chop seem to be those that are most content-rich and deeply researched. Where else in the Australian broadcasting landscape is such material available? What sort of Radio National would we have without the depth of content?

    In Australia the ABC desperately needs specialist units in key areas such as climate change, health, education, refugees and economic management. We need experienced journalists in those fields to help us get beyond the special interests that dominate the debate in these fields…

    It is around such specialist editorial units that the future of media will be determined, yet the current decision making process in the ABC reinforces the dated commercial models and old network structures.

    Only the ABC is likely to save us from the stranglehold of glib generalists who invariably avoid the in depth analysis required and give us instead a diet of conflict, politics and personality.

     

  • Stephen King. The ABC’s “me too” strategy puts it on track for redundancy.

    Is the ABC trying to make itself redundant? Because that appears to be its strategy. Here’s why.

    The ABC is expensive. In 2013 it was allocated more than A$1 billion of taxpayer funds. The ABC claims, however, that its real funding since 1985-86 has dropped by about one quarter. And the current federal government has cut further – A$120 million in the May budget and a further A$207 million over four years.

    The ABC has responded with cutbacks in “niche” areas such as women’s sport and rural services and a renewed focus on internet-based services.

    But with much traditional media “doing it tough”, should we care about the ABC? Or is it simply redundant?

    Why do we have the ABC?

    How is the ABC different from the commercial free-to-air broadcasters?

    Under its Charter, the ABC focuses on the “Australian story”. It shows:

    … programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community.

    But the commercial networks have similar obligations. The three primary commercial channels are each required to broadcast an annual minimum of 55% Australian content between the hours of 6am and midnight. In practice they exceed this requirement.

    Arguably the commercial networks tell the Australian story better than the ABC. In 2013, all of the top 20 programs on commercial television were Australian reality TV, sport or drama. Australian drama occupied five of the top 10 most-watched series.

    The problem with the ABC is not that it is unique. Its problem is that it is not unique enough.

    Is digital media the way forward for the ABC?

    The ABC’s managing director, Mark Scott, suggests the ABC’s future is digital internet-based communication.

    Competition in the media space is intensifying and audiences are asserting their power. The ABC needs to meet the surging audience demand for online and mobile services while, at the same time, securing and strengthening our grip in the traditional content areas. We must be the home of the Australian story and content across all platforms.

    This strategy is both misinformed and misguided.

    It is misinformed because, for most Australians, free-to-air television is still the dominant source of news and entertainment. Australians are spending less time in front of the television and more time in front of other screens, such as laptops and mobiles. But the shift is slow. In 2013, Australians watched an average of 96 hours of broadcast television each month, compared to just over five hours per month viewing video on a PC or laptop and a little over two hours on their mobiles and tablets.

    The strategy is misguided because any unique role of the ABC is eliminated on the internet. The ABC cannot uniquely tell the Australian story because thousands of Australians tell their story online every day, using blogs and social media. The ABC cannot differentiate itself as a source of quality news when it has thousands of internet competitors, including The New York Times and the BBC.

    If the ABC wants to make itself irrelevant and have increased pressure on its funding then it should concentrate on its digital strategy.

    Using the BBC as a model

    What is the alternative?

    The UK provides a good example of how to make public broadcasting work. The BBC is one of the world’s most respected broadcasters. And it is government-owned. It thrives because the UK television industry has been reformed.

    The BBC might appear to have a lot more competition than the ABC. In Australia, the government-owned ABC and SBS face off against three commercial broadcasters. In contrast, the UK, has around 60 channels, ranging from full-service commercial networks to highly specialised niche channels.

    However, the BBC has a unique position. Competitive reform in the UK allowed new entry and innovation in free-to-air television. It also focused the public service obligations, such as content requirements, on the BBC. Rather than being a “me too” network, the BBC has a mandate that is distinct from the commercial broadcasters.

    In contrast, free-to-air television in Australia has a commercial oligopoly that, with government assistance, prevents new competition despite there being plenty of spectrum available. The commercial networks claim that they need “protection” so they can meet their public service obligations, like Australian content.

    Fine! Remove most of the obligations and open up free-to-air television for new entry. Focus the obligations on the ABC and make the ABC truly unique. This would benefit viewers through increased choice and provide an ongoing rationale for the ABC.

    Funding

    Sensible reform of free-to-air television will help the ABC. But its funding will remain directly tied to government budgets.

    In contrast, the BBC’s funding is largely independent of government budget decisions. The UK has a “television licence” system with the majority of the licence revenue dedicated to funding the public broadcaster. While the government formally sets the fee, it does so after discussions with the BBC. And the BBC collects the licence revenue.

    Australia used to have a similar system. Between 1956 and 1974, the ABC was largely funded by television licences. The Whitlam government abolished the licence in 1974, leaving the ABC exposed to the whims of government funding.

    It is not clear that a dedicated ABC tax, whether applied as a television licence or funded in some other way, would be politically acceptable in Australia. But without independent funding, the ABC will face more cuts from all sides of politics in the future.

    The future of the ABC

    To have a future, the ABC needs to abandon its “me too” strategy. It needs to be unique. If it focuses on the internet, then it guarantees it will lose its uniqueness and its rationale.

    Rather than cutting back its unique services, the ABC needs to emphasise its uniqueness.

    The ABC needs to push for competitive reform of Australia’s free-to-air television broadcasting system so it can differentiate itself and its obligations.

    The commercial broadcasters will oppose reform. These broadcasters do not like sharing various public service obligations with the ABC. But they like competition even less. Real reform of free-to-air broadcasting will open up the spectrum to competition and create a lasting role for the ABC.

    Stephen King is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Monash University. This article was first published in The Conversation on 26 November 2014.

  • John Menadue. Our ‘best friend’ in Asia is in trouble.

    Japan now faces its fourth recession since 2008. The Japanese economy has contracted in 13 of the last 27 quarters. In effect, there has been no growth for six years. The Japanese economy has been moribund for two decade.

    So far Abenomics is not delivering as Prime Minister Abe had hoped. His attempt at money-creation on a vast scale to monetise Japan’s enormous public debt is not working.

    Facing failure of his economic policies, Prime Minister Abe has done what many politicians do when they are not sure of their position. He has called an election for next month. He will probably win that election despite the drubbing he received in a bi election a few days ago in Okinawa over US military bases on the island. He will win the December election, not because of any policy success he has had but because of the abject failure of the major opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan.

    Abenomics had three arrows.

    The first was printing of money on an enormous scale by the Bank of Japan. It was designed to stimulate the economy, particularly consumption and promote inflation which would help monetise the debt and encourage consumers to spend now rather than wait for prices to fall. But the economy has stalled again and prices are not rising.

    The second arrow was budget reform to repair Japan’s enormous government debt. Japan’s gross government debt as a percentage of GDP stands at 238%, the highest in the world. By contrast the Australian figure is 27%, although when we listen to Tony Abbott or Joe Hockey we would think that we face an emergency.

    Prime Minister Abe attempted to address the government debt problem by increasing the GST from 5% to 8% in April, but it stopped consumption in its tracks. Prime Minister Abe has now said he will delay the next increase in the GST from 8% to 10% which was scheduled for October 2015. So budget reform has been put on the back burner. The second arrow has also missed its mark.

    The third arrow involved structural reform which necessarily takes longer to achieve. This third arrow had several features. It is not having much effect.

    • Boosting the role of women in the workforce, but there is no sign yet of any upward trend in participation by women in such a male dominated society.
    • Reform of industries including, importantly, agriculture. But farmers are solid supporters of Prime Minister Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and he is reluctant to upset them.
    • Immigration to address Japan’s pending democratic disaster. Japan’s population is currently about 127 million. It is projected to fall to about 100 million by 2050. By then the population will have aged dramatically. For decades Japan has talked about migration, but little is done because Japan is culturally apprehensive about foreigners, ‘gaijin’. There are over 500,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan, the descendants of people who were brought to Japan as workers when Korea was part of the Japanese empire (1910-1945). Those Koreans are still ‘outsiders’ in Japan and presently subject to a hate campaign by right-wing nationalists who are attracted to Prime Minister Abe’s policies in such areas as visits to Yasukuni Shrine, denial on comfort women and the Tianjin massacre. There have been a few Asian women who have migrated to Japan to marry farmers who have found it difficult to find a partner. With a culturally exclusive attitude to all foreigners and with Japanese women reticent about marriage and families, Japan is unlikely to break free of its population decline.

    Our ‘best friend in our region’ is in serious trouble.

    In July last year, we signed a much hyped Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan which Andrew Robb said would ‘turbo-charge’ our trade with Japan by reducing tariffs and other restrictions on our goods and services into Japan.

    But twelve months later it is clear that two factors will slow down the alleged benefits of the EPA. The first is clearly Japan’s sluggish economy which is again in recession.

    The second is the depreciation of the Japanese yen which is the direct and intended result of Japanese policy-makers. Since we signed the EPA with Japan in July, the Japanese yen has depreciated over 7% against the Australian dollar, making imports into Japan more expensive. This will reduce the benefits of the tariff reductions that we have negotiated. And Japanese policy-makers are determined to depreciate the Japanese yen even further. The Yen has depreciated 20% in recent months against the US dollar.

    By 2050 China will have a population of about 1.4 billion and Indian 1.6 billion compared with Japan of 100 million. A large population does not necessarily result in economic success and influence. But we are seeing amazing growth in China. Watch this space for India.

    China and India are likely to be increasingly important to Australia’s economic future. Tony Abbott should be more careful about the language he uses about ‘our best friend in Asia’. By 2050 we may have a very different view about who is most important to us in our region.

  • Lifters and leaners in tax.

    In the SMH today (27 November 2014), Michael West has a very interesting story about the leaners and lifters in the business community and the unfairness of tax avoidance by some companies. It clearly works to the disadvantage of many Australian companies who are paying fair rates of taxation. For the link to this story, see below.  John Menadue

     

    http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/leadership-needed-on-tax-fairness-in-australia-20141126-11ukw2.html

  • John Menadue. Move over Joe Hockey

    The Julie Bishop media blitz continues. But will it flame out like the media blitz of her namesake, Bronwyn Bishop who was also touted by the media as a possible Liberal leader over a decade ago. Like Julie Bishop now and Bronwyn Bishop then, they had amazing free runs in the media. But in the end substance and not style wins out.

    And on substantial issues as I have mentioned in my earlier blogs, there is little of real achievement… There have been record cuts in overseas development aid, Ebola delays, needlessly provoking China over its island dispute with Japan, failure to achieve real outcomes on MH17 and of course, most recently, playing party politics with the President of the US over climate change.

    Since Joe Hockey hit the hurdle with his first budget, Julie Bishop has obviously seen an opening. The media posturing is so obvious – a range of interviews from Harpers, Vanity Fair and Peter Hartcher in the SMH. There was a round of media interviews in New York which was ideal to project her role as Chair of the Security Council. And of course there was media interest in her jogging in Beijing and elsewhere. She has clearly been impressed by the media which John Howard attracted with his early morning walks and Tony Abbott’s bike riding. But there is not much substance in jogging. She probably decided that shirt-fronting the President of the US would bring her brownie points with her increasingly nervous colleagues and with the electorate.

    Her attack on Tanya Plibersek in yesterday’s SMH also reflects this media drive. It hard to understand how she thinks that flirting with Kevin Rudd adds to her foreign policy credentials. If anything she might consider retracting what she said about Kevin Rudd’s campaign for an Australian seat on the Security Council.  ‘There really has been no justification for the benefits that will accrue to Australia for pursuing a seat [on the Security Council] at this time.’ How ironic that she now projects herself as the Chair of the Security Council that she was so critical of a short time ago. How Julie Bishop also thinks that Tanya Plibersek would benefit by a briefing from her is hard to grasp. Most people would think that a briefing from foreign policy and intelligence specialists, which she received, would be much more useful.

    But what Julie Bishop will be most remembered for is her attack on President Obama to burnish her tough person image as the logical successor to Tony Abbott if opinion polls keep trending down against the Coalition.

    The Coalition was not expecting President Obama’s speech in Brisbane or the deal that President Obama made with President Xi. The Coalition clearly feels badly hurt by the position the US has taken.

    Our Foreign Minister and the government however should not have been surprised. The signs were everywhere that the Obama administration was tiring of the Australian Government’s position on climate change.

    Tony Abbott was due to meet President Obama for their first meeting at the APEC Summit in Bali only a month after Tony Abbott was elected. But President Obama could not attend and was represented by his Secretary of State, John Kerry. On good advice, I understand that John Kerry was not impressed with Tony Abbott on climate change. He asked officials ‘Where does Prime Minister Abbott get this stuff from on climate change?’

    In the AFR yesterday, John Kehoe, its correspondent in Washington spells out very clearly that the Australian Government had been warned about what was coming up in the lift on climate change. Kehoe referred to a speech that John Podesta, President Obama’s climate change policy architect had made. Podesta had been pivotal in President Obama’s landmark deal with China. Kehoe reported that in July this year in a speech ‘to senior Americans and Australians including Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, Podesta bemoaned Australia’s lack of climate policy. After the abolition of a carbon price, attendees say Podesta told the audience the Australian Government did not have a credible climate policy in place, adding he felt he should be honest with Australian friends.’

    According to Kehoe the issue was also spelled out plainly by Caroline Atkinson who was President Obama’s ‘G20 sherpa’ and national security adviser for international economics. Kehoe reported ‘Not once but twice in the lead up to the G20, Atkinson publicly told Washington audiences full of Australian government officials that the US expected to have a proper discussion on climate at the G20. She even suggested that other countries would team up against Abbott to make it happen. For those in Canberra blindsided by Obama damaging Abbott on climate change, they overlooked signals the White House had been sending for months.’

    There is clearly no excuse for Julie Bishop’s ignorance or surprise in what was in train. A minister who was on the ball would not be blindsided like this.

    In recent days we have had The Australian carrying stories designed to help the government in its predicament on climate change. Could we think of it doing anything else! The Australian suggested that Tony Abbott led the pack in standing up against President Obama on climate change in and around the G20. This is patently nonsense and special pleading. The reverse was the case with not only President Obama but Prime Ministers Cameron and Merkel, and President Hollande, and maybe others ringing the carbon change bell on our Prime Minister.

    The relentless media campaign by Julie Bishop tells us a lot about the problems unfolding in the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop’s personal aspirations and how the under resourced Australian media can be so easily manipulated and distracted by personality and celebrity at the expense of examination of policy.

    It is also becoming clear that the government has nowhere to go on climate change, except in reverse.

  • John Menadue. Capitalism, inequality and taxation.

    In his challenging series last week on ‘Is capitalism redeemable’ Ian McAuley drew attention to how growing inequality is the cause not only of serious social concerns, but it is also presenting us with some quite serious economic problems.

    There is not much doubt that in the US, the growing tax concessions for the wealthy and the obstacles placed in the path of low income and poor people to organise themselves through trade unions, has had serious economic as well as social consequences. With companies like Walmart paying poverty wages, low income people don’t have the money to buy goods and services that businesses would like to sell. And despite US companies and the wealthy being awash with money, particularly as reflected in the buoyant US stock market, business is not investing in new businesses and jobs for the chief reason that the demand is just not there. Inequality is a major economic problem.

    The IMF has highlighted the economic damage that inequality is doing. A staff policy paper 2014 found that ‘our work built on the tentative consensus in the literature that inequality can undermine progress in health and education, cause investment-reducing political and economic instability, and undercut the social consensus required to adjust in the face of shocks and that it tends to reduce the pace and durability of [economic] growth.’

    The managing director of the IMF has been even more explicit. She recently noted that the 85 richest people in the world control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population – 3.5 billion people. She commented ‘With facts like these, it is no wonder that rising inequality has risen to the top of the agenda – not only among groups normally focused on social justice but also increasingly among politicians, central bankers and business leaders. … It is therefore not surprising that IMF research – which looked at 173 countries over the past 50 years – found that more unequal countries tended to have lower and less durable economic growth.’

    The Governor of the Bank of England warned us only a few months ago that unless action was taken on inequality ‘capitalism would devour its children’.

    The OECD in its June 2014 report said that ‘OECD data shows that well into the recovery from the global economic crisis, the distribution of pre-tax and transfer income remains significantly more unequal than it was before.’ In particular the OECD expressed concern about ‘anchored poverty’ particularly amongst the young.

    Ian McAuley has pointed out that because of growing inequality and the unwillingness of corporations and individuals to fund new growth and new jobs, more and more people have to rely on government benefits to tide them over. That in turn results in increased budget problems. We all instinctively know that well-paid jobs in a strong economy are better for everyone than government benefits. We need to address this downward spiral by the poor who become increasingly dependent on welfare with severe personal and social consequences but also serious public finance problems.

    One feature of modern capitalism particularly by global companies is tax avoidance. We are reading about it almost every day. It is not only unfair but has serious economic consequences. As Ian McAuley put it ‘The economist Joseph Stiglitz points out that well-crafted taxes can actually improve a country’s economic performance. Tax regimes which give a leg up to new ventures, which encourage retraining, or which shape depreciation provisions to encourage the uptake of new technologies, can all help improve a country’s economic adaptability. A carbon tax is an example not only of the payment for harm done to others, (negative externalities in the language of economists) but also of an incentive for industries to adjust and modernise their productive methods.’

    But unfortunately Australia is going in the opposite direction with widespread tax avoidance. Companies such as Westfield paid an effective tax of only 8% over the last decade. News Corp tops the list with 146 subsidiaries in tax havens.

    Companies like this are the real ‘leaners’ and not the welfare bludgers that Alan Jones and the Daily Telegraph talk about. But not content to avoid company tax on an enormous scale they have their corporations fund their private travel, private entertainment, and their private boats

    In 2011-12 according to Peter Martin in the SMH on 13 May ’75 ultra-high earners had a taxable income of $1.10 each’.

    Almost every day we have more and more information about tax avoidance and tax havens. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the benefits to the rich are damaging both our society and our economy.  Our four major international tax advisory firms are facilitating this large scale tax avoidance. They call it ‘aggressive tax planning’ or the means to overcome ‘unfair tax competition’, presumably by other tax avoiders in Australia and elsewhere.

    The government is not making it easier to crack down on major tax avoidance by cutting back experienced and professional staff in the Australian Tax Office. The government and the ATO also need information on where profits are being made and taxes incurred by jurisdiction. The ATO needs new legislation to address profit shifting through transfer pricing, thin capitalisation and debt loadings. We hoped that the G20 in Brisbane would address this issue but it seems to have been overwhelmed by other matters.

    The most consistent critic of inequality and concern for the poor is Pope Francis. A year ago he seemed a voice in the wilderness.  But he is now being joined by such people as the managing director of the IMF, the Bank of England and senior politicians.

    We are finding that inequality breeds not only social problems but has serious economic consequences for the future of capitalism.

  • John Menadue. Murdoch and Abbott vs ABC.

    This is a repost of a blog which I initially posted on December 19 last year.

    Tony Abbott has a debt to repay to Rupert Murdoch for the extremely biased support he received in the last election.

    With the help of Senator Cory Bernadi, Tony Abbott is now following the Murdoch Media line in attacking the ABC. He is also following in the steps of the Howard Government that attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the ABC to heel. During the Howard Government, Minister Richard Alston and Senator Santo Santoro led a concerted campaign against the ABC to force political compliance.

    Last week Tony Abbott joined in the attack on the ABC in the Coalition party room. He particularly took a swipe at the ABC for revealing government spying around the world that has been brought to attention by Edward Snowden. But the ABC was in good company in carrying these stories. The Snowden revelations were carried by The Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel. Even if the ABC had declined to participate in the Snowden revelations it could not have avoided subsequent coverage of one of the major news stories of the year and possibly the decade. The ABC would have been forced into catch-up for weeks.

    The Chairman of the ABC has announced a ‘bias audit’ of the ABC to counter the campaign by the Coalition and the Murdoch media. I can understand this defensive reaction, but it is all so one-sided. Who is to audit the Murdoch media and the scurrilous campaign that it conducted during the last election? Murdoch even sent one of his New York heavies, Col Allan, to do a hatchet job on the Rudd Government. It was an appalling abuse of power.

    The Murdoch media is critical of the performance of the ABC but is silent on the performance of the Lachlan Murdoch – James Packer performance at Channel 10, to say nothing of the free ride it has given to James Packer for Sydney’s second casino for high rollers.

    The Murdoch media which consistently points the figure at others has been charged with phone hacking and bribery of police in the UK. Rupert Murdoch abandoned his Australian citizenship to take advantage of business opportunities in the US.

    The Murdoch campaign against public broadcasting is not new. James Murdoch, who has been pushed aside because of the hacking scandal that occurred under his watch in the UK, took every possible opportunity to attack the BBC. He alleged that the taxpayer-funded BBC was providing unfair competition to the Murdoch media.

    It is nonsense to suggest that it is only public broadcasters like the ABC that are publicly funded. Ian McAuley in New Matilda on 9 December this year put it this way

    “Commercial media are funded by what is to all intents and purposes, a sales tax. For example, if you buy a new car, around $500 of what you outlay is for advertising. Last year, $13.1 billion was spent on advertising, of which $4.9 billion was for commercial TV and radio, and $2.6 billion was for newspapers. To put these figures into a digestible form, we are paying about $1,500 per year per household for advertising, of which $500 is for commercial TV and radio, and $300 is for newspapers (not including the cover price). By contrast we are paying about $120 a year for the ABC. It is as asymmetric deal: those who use only the ABC pay $500 a year for commercial TV and radio, while those who use only commercial media pay $120 for the ABC. … Perhaps it’s part of our civic contract that those who pay for the commercial media they never use don’t complain, but the commercial media, particularly the Murdoch media when they attack ABC funding, don’t seem bound by such rules of decency.’

    But who does the public really trust in the media? The overwhelming evidence is that the ABC is the most trusted media in Australia and the Murdoch media is the least trusted.

    A recent poll on ABC funding in the Fairfax media drew over 21,000 respondents. 77% agreed that the ABC was an excellent and essential service that deserved more money. Another 12% said that the ABC did good work but the funding was about right.

    Essential Research has just reported about ‘trust in the media’. Once again, the ABC is at the top of the list. Rankings for “a “lot of, or some trust, in the media” were as follows:

    ABC TV news and current affairs                                70%

    ABC radio news and current affairs                           63%

    ABC talk-back programs                                              46%

    Commercial news and current affairs                       38%

    News and opinion in daily newspapers                     48%

    Commercial TV news and current affairs                 41%

    Commercial radio talk-back                                        31%

     

    For particular newspapers, respondents ranked the newspapers in which they had “a lot of or some trust”. The rankings were as follows:

     

    Melbourne Age (Victoria only)                                    68%

    The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW only)                   64%

    The Australian                                                                64%

    Courier Mail (Queensland only)                                  59%

    Herald Sun (Victoria only)                                            48%

    The Daily Telegraph (NSW only)                                 41%

    Trust in the Daily Telegraph has fallen dramatically over the last 12 months with its particularly biased campaign during the last election.

    The Australian Press Council has also noted the performance of some Murdoch publications. The APC publishes guidelines to aid journalists and editors an investigates complaints. One subject which I follow closely has been asylum seekers. The APC reported on a Daily Telegraph story of 26 November 2011 headed ‘Open the floodgates – exclusive: thousands of boat people to invade NSW’. The APC found that this story was ‘grossly inaccurate, unfair and offensive’. It upheld a complaint about a similar story in the Herald Sun on the same day. The APC also found against three articles by Greg Sheridan on ‘illegals’ that appeared in the Australian on 23 and 28 October 2010 and 5 March 2011.

    The ABC does not always get it right. It has had a very ordinary coverage of news on both TV and radio from Canberra for many years. Its Canberra correspondents show little interest or knowledge of policy. I wonder if they can spell the word! I am also amazed that the ABC continues to use ‘experts’ from so-called independent think-tanks like IPA, that refuse to disclose their funding sources. I suspect that those “think thanks” are often fronts for special interests. Cash for comment takes many forms.Unfortunately the ABC also still sees itself as a branch office of the BBC and CNN rather than an independent and involved media organisation in our own region.

    But for all of its shortcomings, what an awful and barren media landscape we would have without the ABC.

    The last people who should be lecturing the ABC about performance and bias are Tony Abbott and the Murdoch media.

  • Walter Hamilton. The ABC and its competitors

    When the British conducted atomic tests at Maralinga in South Australia in the 1950s Australia’s newspaper proprietors tried to prevent the ABC bringing along its recording equipment to capture the event. They wanted the ABC locked out of the story because it would steal their thunder: how could a printed article about an atomic explosion compete with sound and vision? The national broadcaster appealed for help to Prime Minister Menzies who ruled that the ABC had the right to be there.

    There was a time, of course, in the 1930s, when the ABC news consisted of a radio presenter reading extracts from newspapers; an independent national news service was still a thing of the future. Observing today’s multifaceted and well-resourced ABC it’s easy to take the status quo for granted. We should, however, never underestimate the historical resentment felt by commercial media owners toward the ABC’s power to erode their market share.

    I should state up front that I do not believe the announced 4.6% cut in the ABC’s budget heralds its demise as an effective public broadcaster. A proportionally bigger cut by the Howard Government had to be absorbed in 1996-98, when the ABC’s revenues from government were around $575 million per annum compared with $1.04 billion today (after the latest cut). Since the budget low-point in 1998, revenues have risen by almost 30%, after taking inflation into account––though services have also expanded*. So, while the cut will hurt, if well managed it should not threaten core activities. The corporation has expanded into many new areas in recent years, during which time its budget has increased significantly. In the period ahead it will need to consolidate and re-examine priorities.

    Having said this, I have no doubt that, along with the stated fiscal imperative, ideological factors influenced the government’s decision. Over the past year, the Abbott Government has on several occasions publicly condemned the ABC for its coverage of asylum seekers and relations with Indonesia, for instance. There is a discreet way for a government, through the relevant minister, to make its views known on the corporation’s performance; by reaching for the bullhorn, the prime minister and others knew that while they were unlikely to change the ABC they would surely isolate it and damage its credibility. The decision by Foreign Affairs in June to drop its contract with the ABC’s Australia Network international television service followed years of lobbying by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, backed by relentless attacks from News Corp’s in-house commentators. If the present government had a firm ideological commitment to public broadcasting it would not have conducted itself in the way it has nor applied the cuts it has.

    At the heart of this debate, however, is not a broken election promise, as egregious as that is, or even the political colour of the parties in power. Heaven knows, past Labor Governments have not held back from savaging the ABC when it got under their skin. Since 1998, funding of public broadcasting in Australia (SBS and ABC) has fallen as a percentage of GDP from 0.162% to 0.102%, during a period in which conservative federal governments held office for 10 years and Labor for six. No, for me, at the heart of the debate is marketplace competition. It was the case in 1956, when the newspapers tried to stop the ABC covering a major news event; it remains the case today.

    The former media writer at the Australian newspaper, Amanda Meade, stated in the Guardian online two years ago: “Attacks from News Corp papers, in particular from the Australian, are now so frequent that there can be no pretence the paper is running anything but a campaign. Where anti-ABC material once might have been found on the comment pages, now it seems to be reported as news, despite some stories having little news value.” In my opinion, the same thing could have been said at least 10 years ago. Back then News Corp journalists would privately joke that it was permanent “open season” on the ABC; during editorial meetings it was always good for a bashing. This could only mean the reporters knew they would never be pulled up by the boss no matter how hard they put the boot into Auntie.

    Rupert Murdoch has made his views clear: why should commercial operators, who must raise their own funds and answer to shareholders, have to compete head-to-head with a publicly funded entity that does not need to turn a profit? It goes against his grain––and he is far from being alone in this within corporate and political circles. When the media market was reasonably stable, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, when newspaper sales were strong and before television and radio audiences began drifting off to the Internet, this represented mainly a philosophical objection. Now, as the entire media landscape is shifting, and the ABC has moved inexorably into the new digital markets where Murdoch and the other proprietors are scrambling to establish a presence, the commercial stakes are higher than ever before.

    When television was king, viewers did not have to pay to switch to a commercial network; the advertising revenues were enough. For their online news sites, however, Murdoch and the others need Internet users to pay up front. Will consumers do so in sufficient numbers when they can access the ABC’s (or BBC’s) site for free, and get all the other digital add-ons (podcasting, streaming, etc.) for free? You only have to commute by train in a big city to observe how many travellers are reading the free newspaper versus those reading one they paid for.

    As much as I want the ABC to survive and thrive, we need to concern ourselves too with the collapse of the business model for commercial news media organisations. If the ABC exists, in part, to preserve media diversity and provide services that others neglect, it follows that we should desire healthy and fair competition. Of course, one might ask, why should the ABC care if the competition is hurting? The answer I believe is, “always study your opponent”.

    The advent of new digital platforms has changed the competitive relationship between the ABC and its commercial rivals. Some foresee a battle to the death in which big players like Rupert Murdoch will use friendly governments to emasculate the competition. I am not among the pessimists. I know, from experience, how much politicians of all stripes like appearing on the ABC and how important the public broadcaster is to a lively cross-section of Australian voters. But something will have to give in the media fairground, where some of the attractions are apparently free and some are not. I say “apparently” because the ABC does come at a cost, even if the sums are generally buried away in the national accounts. It survives, in a sense, through a compulsory levy on the taxpayer.

    I wonder whether the time has come to reopen the debate about the funding method for maintaining the ABC and whether all its services, regardless of the cost, should be available without any “user-pays” restrictions. Whatever side of the fence one sits, it could only help to focus the arguments and nourish the public debate.

    *These and other figures were taken from ABC and SBS annual reports and Bureau of Statistics releases and used the Reserve Bank inflation calculator. By way of comparison, government revenues to the Defence Department rose by 45% above inflation between 1998-99 and 2013-14, according to the department’s annual reports. The defence budget represented 1.9% of GDP in 1998 compared with the current 1.8% (where it’s projected to remain through 2017).

    Walter Hamilton worked at the ABC for 33 years.

     

     

  •  John Menadue. Undiplomatic, politically partisan – and wrong!

    Julie Bishop has decided to take on the President of the United States over his comments to an audience at the University of Queensland on the state of the Great Barrier Reef.

    It shows immaturity to jump in so quickly to defend what I think is the indefensible by attacking others without any real basis.

    It is also an example of how the Liberal Party sees the alliance between us and the US, not as an alliance between our two countries, but as a special relationship between the Liberal Party of Australia and the Right Wing of the Republican Party in the US.  Such behaviour does great damage to Australia’s long term relationship with the US

    In attempting to rebut President Obama, Julia Bishop said ‘Of course the Great Barrier Reef will be conserved for generations to come. And we do not believe that it is in danger.’ Yet Australian experts on the subject tell us quite clearly that the reef is in real danger.

    • Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, the Director of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, said that President Obama was ‘right on the money. … He is stating the facts … the reef has already shrunk by half in 30 years, with climate change a factor in the retreat.’
    • Charlie Veron, the former Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, said ‘In the long term, that is the whole of this century, we are going to have the Great Barrier Reef slaughtered … if carbon dioxide emissions keep trending as they are.’
    • Dr Jon Brodie, the Chief Research Scientist at James Cook University said ‘Julie Bishop’s comments contradicted the government’s own report on the state of the reef. … The report found the reef to be in poor condition and the outlook is for continuing deterioration … it’s obviously in danger. … Under the government’s 2050 action plan, the reef will continue to decline.’

    The clear error by Julie Bishop on the Great Barrier Reef follows a pattern of climate change denial by Tony Abbott and the government.

    This undiplomatic response by our Foreign Minister and poor action on policy is becoming part of a pattern as I set out in my blog of 18 November ‘Julie Bishop-substance and style’.

    • In the last Coalition budget she was responsible for the largest reduction in overseas development aid by this country. It was the largest cut in the budget.
    • She unnecessarily sided with Japan against China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.
    • She sided with Israel against overwhelming world opinion over the continuing expansion of settlements by the Israeli Government.
    • Her megaphone diplomacy over MH17 achieved very little. It was the Malaysian Government that negotiated with the rebels in the Ukraine and secured access to the crash site, the return of most of the bodies and the recovery and return of the black boxes.
    • Despite the posturing in the Security Council on Ebola, we have been very slow,selfish and restrictive in our response.

    And now we are seeing the most diplomatic and gauche mistake of all with the attack on the President of the US.

    I would be confident that this extraordinary  attack  on President Obama would be against the advice of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It  very likely came directly from the private offices of Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop.  The PM would probably not want to do the job himself, so the media obsessed Foreign Minister  obliged.

    Despite misstep after misstep the media has given Julie Bishop a very free run. Perhaps the media is giving her this free run because it feels guilty about the unfair treatment that it dealt out to Julia Gillard!.

  • Geoff Hiscock. Cleaning up the coal energy pillar a central task for Modi and Abbott

    Narendra Modi and Tony Abbott explicitly defined energy as a “central pillar” of the India-Australia economic relationship in their joint statement this week.

    That’s a good sign, but if they want to make a truly significant contribution to the long-term economic and social benefit of India and Australia, then they need to deliver forcefully and quickly on the commitment they made to work together on clean coal technology.

    An emphasis on utility-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in India would be a good place to start. With 1.93 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions last year (5.5 per cent of the global total), India does not yet match China’s massive 9.52 billion tonnes (27.1 per cent), but it is headed in the same direction and by 2025 could be the world’s biggest coal importer.  Much of that coal will come from Australia.

    India has a large domestic coal industry, but it relies heavily on imported coal for its energy needs from Indonesia, Australia, South Africa and Kazakhstan. If the Modi-Abbott embrace holds true, then Australia is going to be an increasingly important energy supplier for India, both in thermal coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

    Modi told his Australian audience that he wanted all Indians to have access to electricity generated in a way that “does not cause our glaciers to melt.”  While the opponents of coal see that as the go sign for renewables, the reality is that coal is not going to disappear from India’s energy equation any time soon. It now generates 60 per cent of Indian electricity, and while that share may fall to 50 per cent between 2025 and 2030, the actual volume of coal consumed will not decline, because most of India suffers from a power supply shortage.  Modi’s home state of Gujarat is one of the few parts of India with a power surplus – a result of Modi’s pro-business policies and his encouragement of groups such as Adani and Tata to build large coal-fired power stations there. He has also given strong backing to the solar power industry

    But even with a substantial investment in domestic oil and gas, LNG imports, nuclear, hydro, solar and wind power, Modi knows that India will have to rely on coal-fired power stations for its electricity and industrial needs for years to come. It simply lacks the infrastructure, the smart technology, the time and the money to move too far from coal too soon.  To say that coal globally is in structural decline ignores the development aspirations of a multitude of nations.  India, for example, is still way behind China on the development path, and as many as 300 million of its 1.3 billion people lack access to the affordable, reliable power that coal can deliver.

    The world has known for decades that coal carries a heavy environmental price – Europe and the US in the 1950s, Japan in the 1970s and China in the 2010s all bear the scars of coal-fired air pollution. But just as suphur dioxide has been cleaned from smoke stack emissions, so too can carbon dioxide be removed if the political will exists and the price to pay is deemed palatable. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) typically reduces a power plant’s efficiency by 8 to 10 per cent, according to the International Energy Agency. For India, just as it is for China, the big challenge is to maximise the efficiency of new coal-fired power stations to offset the losses that go with CCS.  The latest ultra-supercritical power stations have efficiency ratings of 44 per cent or better. Unfortunately, too many of the power plants built in Asia in the last two decades have still been in the subcritical range, with efficiency ratings of 28-38 per cent. The factors that determine a plant’s efficiency (apart from the quality of the coal and water) are pressure and temperature, and the ability of components such as boilers and turbine blades to withstand higher pressures and temperatures,

    This is where Australian expertise in metallurgy, in power plant design, and in scrubbing carbon out of coal could be of great benefit to India, both economically and environmentally.  Increased washing of coal to improve efficiency, de-watering, steam-cleaning of flue gases and the use of a range of CCS options covering combustion, pulverisation and gas conversion are being tested around the world in demonstration plants and pilot projects. There is an urgent need to apply these carbon-cleaning measures to full-sized coal-fired power stations. That is starting to happen in North America through utility-scale CCS projects such as Boundary Dam in Canada and Petra Nova in the US, and will most probably happen in China from about 2016 onwards.

    Early last year, New Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) published a scoping study on the potential for CCS to mitigate India’s greenhouse gas emissions.  It pointed to a number of Indian CCS research projects in energy, petrochemicals and metals, in cooperation with countries such as Norway and the United States.  It said the barriers to CCS in India included the lack of accurate geological storage site data, the extra cost involved in using CCS, the “demonstration stage” nature of the technology and a lack of knowledge and capability among policy makers and regulators.  Other factors were financial risk for investors, lack of skilled labour and infrastructure, legal issues over land use, water contamination, CO2 leakage, and the cost- efficiency trade-off in retrofitting power plants with CCS measures.

    It concluded that India’s top development priority was to provide electricity to all at affordable prices. Nonetheless, it said CCS work should continue with “sustained efforts … required towards capacity development of different stakeholders.”

    The TERI report identifies the sort of work that needs to be done in India before CCS gets moving. Modi and Abbott should ensure the momentum generated by this week’s energy embrace does not get wasted.

    Geoff Hiscock writes on international business and is the author of “Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources,” published by Wiley.

  • Walter Hamilton. Japan: when in doubt, call an election

    Japan, Australia’s second biggest export market, has fallen back into recession. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has reacted by calling a snap election for mid-December, a year ahead of schedule, claiming he needs a new mandate to tackle the nation’s economic problems. Trade deals or talk of trade deals between Australia and both China and India should not distract us from the fact that one of the region’s great powers is sick and we are not immune.

    Japan buys 16% of Australia’s exports: not as much as a few decades ago but still substantial.

    Since 2008, the Japanese economy has contracted in 13 out of 27 quarters. In net terms, this adds up to no growth for six years. In the most recent September quarter, gross domestic product fell by 1.6% in annualized terms, following a revised 7.3% contraction in the previous quarter. Two consecutive quarters of decline defines a recession.

    As I wrote in an earlier blog, Japanese domestic consumption remains extremely weak. The adverse effect of the lift in the nation’s consumption tax (GST) from a rate of 5% to 8% in April was greater than the government and most market analysts predicted. Ahead of the tax hike consumers front-loaded their purchasing so that after the rise spending collapsed and has remained depressed.

    The consumption tax rise was always seen as risky but necessary in order to start repairing the deficit-ridden national budget. While the legislation to gradually raise the tax passed during the previous administration, the strategy was endorsed by Abe and implemented by his Liberal Democratic Party-led government. Now the Prime Minister has decided to abandon the present course of budget reform.

    On Tuesday night he announced that the Diet would be dissolved on 21 November ahead of a Lower House election expected on 14 December and that he would go to the polls pledging to delay by 18 months the next consumption tax increase, from 8% to 10%, originally scheduled for October 2015.

    Abe quoted the rallying cry of the American Revolution ‘no taxation without representation’ to justify his decision to call an election on this policy issue, though it seemed an odd analogy since what he is proposing is a ‘no taxation’ platform. At the same time, Abe said the government’s commitment to balance the national budget by 2020 remained solid. His credibility on this point hangs in the balance, since many commentators were predicting Japan would miss the target even with the next scheduled consumption tax rise. Looking less confident than usual, Abe did not attempt to explain how the budget target could be achieved if the tax increase were delayed. ‘I hear voices saying Abenomics has failed,’ he told a nationally televised news conference, ‘but I have yet to see any alternative policy put forward.’ In other words, you’re stuck with me––sink or swim.

    In recent weeks, Japan’s central bank has reacted to the renewed weakness in the economy by greatly expanding its fiscal stimulus, the main plank of the administration’s revival strategy over the past 18 months. By printing money to buy government bonds, the bank has been pumping inflation into a chronically deflated economy, so far with little lasting effect. The most conspicuous consequence has been a fall of about 20% in the yen-to-US dollar exchange rate. This has helped exporters back into profits and fed through into modest wage rises for employees in big export-oriented firms. But the weaker yen has also pushed up import prices, discouraging consumers and increasing the raw materials costs of many businesses, large and small. It has all the appearances of a vicious cycle in which the cure seems just as likely as the disease to kill the patient.

    Abenomics, the catchy term coined two years ago to describe Shinzo Abe’s program of economic reform, is rapidly acquiring a hollow sound. The program consists of ‘three arrows’ (Abe’s words): fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reform. The first two arrows, fired as soon as he took office, have failed to hit the target. Abe insists there are signs of improvement––the best labour market conditions in 20 years; strong job recruitment of high school graduates––and asks for more time to bring off the fundamental improvement electors were promised. It could also be conceded that structural reform, the ‘third arrow’, necessarily takes more time to deliver, but in this policy area too his government’s performance has been stronger on rhetoric than performance. Abe’s much-touted campaign to boost the role of women in society and the economy fell flat when two of his female cabinet ministers had to quit their posts because of old-fashioned money scandal and election law violations.

    Japanese voters will soon have a chance to pass judgement on the past two years. The disorganized and ineffectual state of the nation’s political opposition makes it likely the LDP will be returned to office, despite the poor state of the economy. That, however, is an early assessment. Much can happen in unpredictable times, given an electorate worn-out from hearing unfulfilled promises and as cynical about their leaders as they have ever been since the war. Japan is in trouble, and trouble there means trouble for Australia.

     

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

     

  • John Menadue.   Julie Bishop – substance and style

    According to opinion polls, Julie Bishop’s standing has climbed. In Harper’s Bazaar she has been described as the Woman of the Year. It is suggested that she could be a leadership contender…

    But how much substance and how much achievement has there really been. How has Australia’s foreign policy interests been advanced?

    Before looking at the performance, it is worth recalling that no Australian Foreign Minister could be said to have failed in recent decades, from Gareth Evans to Bill Hayden to Alexander Downer, Stephen Smith, Kevin Rudd and Bob Car. One advantage that Foreign Ministers have is that there is really no domestic constituency that they are likely to upset. At the same time there are numerous media and photo opportunities to do newsworthy things like running around Beijing. The media which is so often about politics and spin rarely looks beyond style and presentation.

    In passing I think there were more real achievements by Gareth Evans than any others.eg peace in Cambodia.

    In terms of the first twelve months of the Abbott Government and Julia Bishop’s performance in foreign policy, what can we deduce?

    The largest cut in the May 2014 Budget was in Julia Bishop’s portfolio. Overseas development aid was cut by 21%. What a failure!

    Julia Bishop unnecessarily involved us in the dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. She said “China doesn’t respect weakness” and that “Australia will stand up to China to defend peace, liberal values and the rule of law”. Perhaps that was just an inexperienced Foreign Minister but hopefully she now reflects that we should stay out of that dispute.

    Julie Bishop has announced a “signature initiative” to promote understanding of our region by supporting Australian undergraduates with internships in the region. She has called it a Colombo Plan in reverse. But there is a problem with this. What she has not explained is how those undergraduates will get jobs in Australia using their regional education and experience. We had a boom in Asian language training in Australia a couple of decades ago, but it fizzled because Australian companies would not employ Australians with Asian skills. As a result these young and Asian skilled Australians drifted away to take jobs in places like Hong Kong. Has Julie Bishop examined this serious problem of Australian companies and their unwillingness to employ people with Asian skills?

    There is no indication that Julie Bishop discouraged Scott Morrison in proceeding with his grotesque proposal to send refugees to Cambodia.

    The Rudd and Gillard Governments opposed the policy of the Israeli Government in expanding settlements in occupied Palestine. Last year Julie Bishop reversed that policy at the UN. 158 countries supported the UN’s call for an end to these settlements. Australia joined with eight other countries in abstaining from a vote.

    Julie Bishop made a name for herself in the recovery of bodies from MH17. She showed us her toughness although she didn’t quite use the rhetoric of “shirt-fronting”. But the real achievement in the recovery of bodies from MH17 was made by the Prime Minister of Malaysia whose government, without fanfare, negotiated directly with the Russian backed rebels in the Ukraine. As a result the rebels agreed to a train with refrigerated carriages carrying most of the bodies out of the crash area. The Malaysian Government also secured access to the crash site and the recovery of the black boxes. In the UN and elsewhere Julie Bishop, in association with the Dutch Foreign Minister, continued to attack the Russians but refused to deal with the rebels. It was good domestic politics in Australia but not helpful in assisting recovery from the crash site. The Malaysians really delivered when it mattered. Julie Bishop,despite the rhetoric,was really only a bit player.

    Julie Bishop and Tony Abbott were completely blind sided by the agreement on carbon pollution between the US and Chinese Presidents.. On this most critical issue,involving  the US, our most important ally and friend,we knew nothing. On such a matter of great substance Julie Bishop was asleep at the wheel. It tells us a lot!

    It is important to distinguish between style and substance.

  • Renewable energy investment.

    A key feature of the President Obama/President Xi communique is their commitment to substantially reduce carbon pollution. There was little mention of an emissions trading scheme or putting a price on carbon. The emphasis was on developing renewable energy as an alternative source of energy to fossil fuels.  Emphasis was given to development of solar, wind and nuclear power. But in Australia, our government in attacking the established renewable energy targets has caused great confusion and damage in investment plans. As a result, renewable energy investment in Australia dropped 70% in the past year.  See the link below to the  report from the Climate Council which was published in The Conversation on 10 November.  John Menadue.

    http://gu.com/p/436ym/sbl

  • Is capitalism redeemable? Part 6: Inequality – it ain’t fair

    We get a laugh out of the Monty Python sketch of four Yorkshiremen competing with one another to tell stories of the hardship they endured when they were children, 30 years earlier – “you think you had it tough …”.

    Without going into Pythonesque exaggeration, four older Australians could easily recount similar stories. If they grew up in a Brisbane middle-class suburb, their house probably had no indoor toilet: there would have been a bucket toilet in the backyard emptied by the “dunnyman” (the “sanitary collector” to use one common euphemism) . If they grew up any distance from a city they probably didn’t have electricity, and the idea of turning on a tap to get hot water was almost beyond imagination.

    Like the Python characters, who all claimed they “were ‘appier back then”, they wouldn’t consider they had led deprived childhoods, because those were the standards of the time.

    Those material standards now, however, would be considered deprivation. Even if our own material conditions don’t deteriorate, if everyone else’s conditions improve, we feel hard done by.

    We have a natural concern for fairness, a concern not to be confused with envy. In our concern for fairness we want to see our own and others’ conditions brought up: envy is about wanting to see others brought down.

    This may all seem to be no more than commonsense, but there is a strong economic philosophy captured in the slogan “a rising tide lifts all boats”, essentially saying that any outcome is a good outcome so long as no-one is made any worse off. Inequality doesn’t count in other words. This philosophy, based on the work of the Italian Fascist Vilfredo Pareto, made its way into schools of economics and into public policy in the latter part of last century and is a mainstream of economic thinking.

    It was influential not because academics and public servants had any attraction to fascism, but rather because it came in a neat “value free” mathematical package, absolving the academic or public servant from having to worry about fuzzy things necessitating moral judgements, such as equity.  And it provided an easy rationalisation for the economic philosophies of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the early 1980s, later to be taken up across the political spectrum.

    Since the 1980s Australia has become more prosperous, but the benefits of that prosperity have gone disproportionately to those who are already most privileged. Research by Andrew Leigh and others shows that over the twentieth century Australia’s income distribution became more equal up to around 1980, but then started diverging once more. By now those gains have been lost: our income distribution is now roughly similar to what it was in 1900. Thomas Picketty’s research, which also takes in wealth, has similar findings for other ‘developed’ countries.

    If that widening inequality were a result of choice it should not necessarily be a policy concern. There are people who choose to work hard and to take risks, while there are others who choose to join religious orders with vows of poverty or to seek low-paid but safe employment. Australians show no appetite for enforced social levelling.

    But when inequality results from entrenched privilege, inheritance, “old boy” networks, exercise of political influence, denial of access to quality education and corruption, we are properly indignant. As a general point, we are less concerned with inequality in itself, than with the fairness or otherwise of the processes that lead to inequality. An almost uncontested political value in a country like Australia, transcending traditional “left’/”right” divisions, is a belief in equality of opportunity – a “fair go” in the vernacular.

    While the fair go may be an aspiration, Australians don’t believe it holds in reality. In a recent survey by Essential Media respondents were asked “which has more to do with why a person is rich” – “because he or she has worked harder than others” or “because he or she had other advantages”. Hard work scored only 28 per cent while “other advantages” scored 56 per cent.

    The capitalist economic system works when there is a strong connection between contribution and reward. That’s the very theoretical and practical basis of market economics.  That connection will never be perfect: even in the fairest system there is an element of luck. But when the connection between contribution and reward is badly severed the economic system itself loses its legitimacy. When legitimacy is lost people are inclined to reject the whole capitalist model, turning to superficially attractive but destructive alternatives. The plutocrats who show off their riches so vulgarly and the politicians who dismiss our concern with fairness don’t seem to realize that they’re threatening the very viability of the system that has supported them.

    Even before reaching that self-destructive outcome, an economic system that results in inequality is one that is wasting many opportunities.  That’s the subject of the next article.

  • Today’s World – Democracy, capitalism and Islam.

    Mauricio García Villegas, El Espectador, Colombia, http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/elmundo-actual-columna-526496

    The anniversary of two events that have marked out the course of our world has just been commemorated.

    The first is the taking of the United States embassy in Teheran on 4 November 1979. Iran at the time was governed by the Shah, a monarch who wanted to turn the ancient Persian people into a Western nation, hell or high water. It set off a reaction from Islamic leaders, amongst them the Ayatollah Khomeini, who, from his exile in London, organized a revolution to overthrow the Shah, and to establish an Islamic theocracy. The taking of the embassy and the capture of 52 American hostages for 444 days is one of the culminating moments of that revolution.

    The second event is the fall of the Berlin Wall that occurred on 9 November 1989, which started the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and put an end to the Cold War. The fall of the Soviet Union changed history so much that Eric Hobsbawm, the great English historian, said that the 20th century was a very short one, lasting only 75 years between the First World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    These two events changed the course of the 20th century. The Iranian revolution was proof that despite all the colonial attempts to assimilate the Middle East culturally and economically, the old yearning for a theocratic government continued intact for many Muslims. The colonial sins of Europe and the United States in the Middle East (starting from events in Palestine) not only gave rise to the Islamic revolution in Iran, but also saw the birth of the increasingly furious forms of Islamic fundamentalism that we see today.

    On the other hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent defeat of the Communist model, gave way to a kind of bold and lazy capitalism that ceased to feel guilty about increasing social injustice. Not only that, the lack of a competing system divorced capitalism from its democratic ideal, which was the flag that Western nations hoisted in opposition to its great 20th century enemies, first the Nazi regime and then the Soviet model.

    Many academic studies published in the last decade have raised the alarm about the way capitalism has been devouring democracy. I only site two recent and influential examples. The first, Thomas Piketty’s book (Capital in the Twenty First Century) demonstrates that we live in a system of hereditary capitalism where the level of accumulation of capital increases faster than the economy, and this leads inevitably to an increase in inequality.

    The second text is an article by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens) which uses quantitative information never used before to show that the American political system is dominated by the most powerful economic elites, and that there is very little that ordinary citizens can do to prevent it. The authors demonstrate that the majority do not rule in the United States. The rich do.

    In short, the direction that the world of today has taken has been determined in good part by the fall of Communism and the political defeat of the West in the Middle East. We have inherited terrible evils from this: the increasing acceleration of economic inequality and the rebirth of the wars of religion; they are two evils that in the middle of the 20th century, appeared to be on the way to extinction.

    Mauricio is a lawyer, sociologist and currently professor of law at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota, Colombia and also Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • Tony Abbott and the G20

    In the media in the past few days we have been overwhelmed by stories and photo opportunities from the G20 in Brisbane. It will take some time to sort out fact from spin. I have set out below some comments and opinions from observers. It provides a useful but only partial account by observers of the G20. I have not included any comments from News Corp publications. News Corp’s support of the government is entirely predictable.

    (more…)

  • Steve FitzGerald on Gough Whitlam, Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou

    Of the many things I admired and loved about Gough, one of the most delicious, next to our shared liking for food, was that he was the best person I’ve ever been privileged to brief. It wasn’t just that he soaked it up like blotting paper and asked for more and never forgot. It was that each piece of information was absorbed into its appointed niche and found a place in his political and historical cosmology, and emerged as knowledge, fully fashioned, and in context. One imagined the Graeco-Roman or later Christian ‘art of memory’, but of course Whitlamesque in its Enlightenment commitment to science and reason and the art of enquiry.

    When I went with Gough to meet Chairman Mao in 1973, at one point the discussion got into history and Sino-Soviet relations, and Gough says, from his reading it seems the Soviet Union wasn’t always helpful to the Chinese and at times directed them to actions which proved disastrous, ‘like the Nanchang Uprising. I understand Premier Zhou (Zhou Enlai, who was also at the meeting), you were the leader of that uprising’. I looked at him in astonishment. This generally little known event in Chinese history took place in 1927, after the Chinese Nationalists broke a united front with the Communists and staged a bloody attempt to wipe them out. Two and a half years before, on that famous 1971 visit that laid the fear of China, I’d given Gough background reading on a huge range of things and somewhere in there was a small piece on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party. And now, this obscure detail comes out, in context, accurate, appropriate. And Premier Zhou Enlai caps the moment with a self-criticism about his responsibility for the failure of that uprising.

    But the one time when in my experience Gough’s memory failed him was also in that meeting. They were winding up, with some comments from Gough about the roles of Mao and Zhou in the Chinese revolution, and Mao decided to launch back into the discussion, and asked ‘Would your Party dare to make revolution’ and Gough said ‘we believe in evolution,’ and the meeting was re-ignited, and there was an exchange on the theories of Charles Darwin (which Mao said he accepted but they didn’t apply to historical changes in human society). Mao asked if the city of Darwin was named after Charles Darwin and did Darwin ever visit that city in the Beagle, and Gough had a rarest of moments when a detail escaped his prodigious memory. Zhou Enlai looked at his watch, and with some banter about Mao’s age and infirmities, we stood to leave.

    A few days after Gough’s departure from China, I received the following telegram. It was vintage Gough.

    ‘Apropos my conversation with Chairman Mao, you should know that in 1836 Charles Darwin visited Australia as official naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle, landed at Sydney on 12 January and visited Bathurst. On next voyage in 1839 Beagle without Darwin visited Darwin harbour which captain named after him.

    Please make full confession of error to Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai and say that with Chairman’s help I shall now follow correct line.’

    The ‘big ideas’ about which so much has been said and written in the last few weeks,  came from the big learning, the foundation of Gough’s weltanschauung. And the big target. Not for Gough the small target. No temporising, no pussy-footing politics or ducking and weaving to dodge negative opinion polls, no fudging principle to make oneself look more like one’s opponents. You could brief him. You could contribute ideas. But it was the courage and fortitude of the big target that turned the big ideas into the big public policy reform.

  • John Menadue.  We pass by on the other side.

    We are one of the richest and most privileged people in the world but our recent performance on Ebola, foreign aid and refugees tells the world a quite different story.

    On Ebola, our response has been grudging and slow. We tendered one excuse after another. We moved quickly however to commit our military to combat again in Iraq and Syria. Our Medical Assistance Teams which we have deployed in humanitarian disasters like the typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines were ready to go to West Africa. They had volunteered and had vaccinations. The AMA urged us to get cracking. After a very lengthy delay the government decided to outsource our assistance. Our tardiness was in stark contrast to the response of countries such as the UK and the US. All the advice from experts was that the best way to address the Ebola outbreak was at its source. We knew that the medical and health facilities and hospitals in Liberia and other countries in the region were closing because the qualified staff were contacting Ebola and dying. Several hospitals were bereft of any staff. Healthcare in West Africa was near collapse but we delayed. Liberia has an income per head of $US454 p.a.; ours is over $US68,000. It is hard to recall a situation where our response has been so miserable.

    The UNHCR told us a few days ago that there were 13.6 million refugees displaced by the wars in Syria and Iraq. That is more than the combined populations of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, our four largest cities. By our involvement in the war in Iraq we have contributed to this humanitarian disaster. But our refugee intake has remained unchanged at 13,750 p.a. Kevin Rudd had promised to increase it to 20,000 and Tony Abbott agreed before the last election. He then changed his mind and kept the quota at 13,750. If we adjusted our intake according to our population increase since the time of the Indochina refugee program, we would now be taking over 35,000 refugees p.a. which would still be quite small in relation to our migrant intake. Whilst the humanitarian tragedy in the Middle East escalates, we continue to turn our back.

    We are also ignoring our responsibilities as a wealthy country in overseas development assistance. In the last budget, the biggest cut in government spending was in overseas development assistance. We spend more on our cats and dogs than we do on ODA. At the same time that it cut funding for the poor of the world, the government kept in place a whole range of programs that advantaged the wealthy, such as superannuation concessions and subsidies to the mining industry.

    Surely we can do a lot better than this.