John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Penalty rates and Liberal lobbyists.

    There is a campaign underway to cut weekend and holiday penalty rates particularly in the restaurant and hospitality industries. True to form the Australian Financial Review says that weekend penalty rates are a relic of times past.

    A report leaked to the ABC indicates that the government will ask the Productivity Commission to undertake a comprehensive review of workplace laws. This will include penalty rates, pay and conditions, unfair dismissal, enterprise bargaining flexibility and union activities. It is proposed that this review by the Productivity Commission will consider the performance of the Fair Work Act. The Commission is expected to report to Joe Hockey by April 2015. He is ministerially responsible for the Commission. He makes the references to the Commission.

    What is of concern is the political relationship between Joe Hockey and John Hart, the CEO of Restaurant and Catering Australia who is pressing for a review of penalty rates by the government. John Hart is also the Chair of Joe Hockey’s North Sydney Forum which has featured prominently in Fairfax media in recent days.

    According to the SMH of May 5, 2014, membership fees are paid to the North Sydney Forum, chaired by John Hart, as part of the North Sydney Federal Electorate Conference. Joe Hockey is the Member for North Sydney. A full member pays $5,500, a corporate business member $11,000 and a private patron $22,000. Depending on the package, there are membership benefits which include board room events, end-of-year receptions, private VIP board room functions and policy forums and receptions. There is also provision for memberships of “Friends of Joe”.

    John Hart is clearly a key man for Joe Hockey and John Hart wants action by the government on penalty rates.

    Most of us would agree that we would rather not work at weekends, but if there is a need for such work, people should be fairly compensated for loss of time away from friends, family, recreation or church. Even God rested on the seventh day. Having forced governments to extend shopping hours and arguing that penalty rates were necessary compensation we now see a campaign by the same vested interests to wind back penalty rates.

    Restaurants and catering businesses say that many are going out of business because of weekend penalty rates. But how much of the problem of those businesses is due to bad business decisions rather than penalty rates? John Hart, Joe Hockey’s fund raiser tells us that there is a 20% annual turnover of restaurant businesses.  I suspect that many of them close because they have made bad business decisions and not because of penalty rates. It is tempting to blame the “system” rather than admit a business mistake.

    With changes in lifestyle, higher incomes and with two working parents, we do eat out more. Statistics from the industry reveal that restaurant business income has grown at a rate of 5.6% annually over the last five years. The Bureau of Statistics has just told us that while total retail sales were up by only 0.1% in the March quarter, restaurant sales were up by 1.8% It is an industry that is growing rapidly despite the alarm about penalty rates. There seems to be a lot of special pleading when John Hart says that we should freeze minimum wages or restaurants will shut down.

    As Ross Gittins has pointed out, many of us see the benefits of living in a market economy, but we don’t want to live in a market society. There must be limits to anti-social intrusions by markets. We should reject any suggestion that market are supreme and can invade our private lives on a 24/7 basis. Do we really need to have so many businesses open all weekend? Clearly we need people like nurses to cover for illness seven days a week, but do we need the same access to restaurants and shops?  And if we do, employees should be properly compensated.

    If the last twenty years has taught us anything about industrial relations, it is that continual change is costly for all concerned.  In 1993 the Keating Government abandoned our centralised IR system. In 1996 Peter Reith downgraded the role of IR tribunals. In 2005 John Howard gave us Work Choices. Then in 2009 Julia Gillard gave us the Fair Work legislation. Now Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey and John Hart want more change. We need more stability in our industrial relations framework because in the end good relations at the work level depend on effective local management and employee participation.

    Industry leaders tell us that we need to lift productivity. And we need to do this. But a lot of the productivity slow-down is a statistical mirage reflecting the massive mining investment which is just now beginning to show results in increased mining production.

    The vested interests that want to cut penalty rates claim that we have an inflexible labour market which results in high wage costs. Yet at present, the annual pace of wages growth has slowed from about 4% p.a. three years ago to a record low of 2.6% in recent months. Our labour market is showing considerable flexibility.

    Clearly we need to review penalty rates and all industrial relations from time to time, but we seem fixated with the problem, mainly for ideological reasons. . We don’t want the market to intrude into all aspects of private life. Markets are to serve people and society, not the other way around.

  • A last hurrah from Graham Freudenberg on his 80th birthday

    May Day 2014 – fittingly the day of Neville Wran’s memorial service at Sydney Town Hall – may well turn out to be the day when the Labor Party began to see its way ahead.  Not because of the event itself, although it certainly was a marvellous celebration of a great Labor era.  But it was the day of the Shepherd Audit Report. It also happened to be the day when News Ltd bared its fangs and reminded the Abbott Government just who was calling the tune. I invite students of history to file away the Sydney Daily Telegraph on 1 May 2014 and its coverage of the Shepherd Audit next day. All its hatred of Labor was as feral as ever, but in page after page, the message to Abbott and Co was clear:

    “It was us wot done it last year and we can do for you too if you don’t toe the line.”

    But what is really important for Labor is that Abbott, Hockey and Murdoch, in fomenting this spurious crisis that is supposed to engulf Australia sometime in 2024 or 2034 have drawn up clear policy and political battle lines for the rest of the decade. They are surprisingly traditional lines along the distribution of wealth and the concentration of power, but they provide a basis for the restoration of a coherent two-party system, the mainstay of our parliamentary democracy.  After the first week of May 2014, let us have none of this nonsense that there is no real difference between the major parties.

    For the past eight months the whole operation has been designed to entrench three myths (1) that Labor wrecked the economy with a six-year spending spree, (2) that Australia is living wildly beyond its means because of outrageous extravagance in welfare, health and education, and (3) that the ‘productive’ sector is crippled by taxes and debt.  There is a fourth myth behind all this – that the ruinous reality was covered up until the election and kept secret from everybody, including the international agencies who praised Australia’s recovery from the GFC, and even the editorial writer of the Australian Financial Review who as recently as 4 May wrote sensibly about the tasks and challenges facing ‘one of the world’s strongest economies’.

    The Daily Telegraph on 1 May itself illustrates the hypocrisy in its page 3 story headed “Hey Joe, cut here instead of taxing us”. If any of the myths were true, why then did Abbott go into the campaign with his parental leave promise, when Labor’s fratricide had already guaranteed a huge coalition win? Since the election, the News Ltd commentators have portrayed the National Disability Scheme and Gonski on education as two glaring examples of Labor’s ‘mad’ excesses. In order to prevent these becoming election issues, Abbott signed up to them, while persisting with his parental leave proposal. Yet, the Daily Telegraph’s own list of cuts Joe should make costs NDIS at $1.563 billion in 2016-17 and Gonski at $1.120 billion in 2016-17. But the Abbott paid parental leave would cost, on the Daily Telegraph’s figures, $5.684 billion in 2016-17 – more than twice the NDIS and Gonski combined.

    Of course you can do anything with figures. All these supposedly horrific projections are being bandied about without any context.  What does it actually mean to predict that programs inherited from Labor would cost an extra $700 billion in 2050?  The Federal Budget reached an astronomical 100 million pounds ($200 million) in 1939.  Fighting the Second World War cost us a shocking one million pounds a day and today we are the children and grandchildren presumably burdened by Curtin and Chifley’s extravagance.  By 1961 Arthur Calwell nearly won the election by calling for a deficit of 100 million pounds to end the intolerable unemployment level of less than 3%. Menzies denounced it as ‘wildly inflationary’ and ‘grossly irresponsible’.  When he survived by one seat, Menzies promptly announced new spending measures costing 100 million pounds – the nominal figure for the entire Federal Budget barely thirty years previously!

    The timing, circumstances and political intentions of the Shepherd Audit are guaranteed to nullify any objective economic merits it may have. Instead of a serious examination of the role of government in modern economies, it will be seen as a more sophisticated and therefore more menacing Australian version of the American Tea Party agenda.  How far Hockey’s budget will follow News Ltd instructions and the Shepherd Audit Remains to be seen. But for years the Audit will stand as a blue-print for right wing aspirations for Australia – a kind of ‘black light on the hill’. If Labor can’t unite against this, around the development of new programs for growth and fair shares, and in defence of its fundamental achievements in health, welfare (including superannuation) and education, it won’t deserve to survive as the chief standard bearer of the progressive, liberal and egalitarian cause in Australia.

     

    Graham Freudenberg AM (born 1934) is an Australian author and political speechwriter who worked in the Australian Labor Party for over forty years. He has written over a thousand speeches for several leaders of the Australian Labor Party at the NSW state and the federal level. These have included Arthur Calwell, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Neville Wran, Barrie Unsworth, Bob Carr and Simon Crean.  In 1990 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his service to journalism, to parliament and to politics.  In 2005 he was inducted as a life member of the NSW ALP.

    He is the author of four books to date:  A Certain Grandeur – Gough Whitlam in Politics, Penguin 1977;  A Cause for Power – the Centenary History of the NSW Labor Party, Australian Labor Party, 1991;  A Figure of Speech (autobiography), John Wiley & Sons Australia, 2005; and Churchill and Australia, Pan Macmillan, 2008.  

  • John Menadue. The cost of abolishing the Mining Tax

    Just when the mining tax looks like raising some worthwhile revenue, the Coalition proposes to abolish the tax.

    The Rudd Government made a mess of the Resources Super Profits Tax (RSPT). We know from the Henry Tax Review and other commentators that such well-designed rent-based taxes are likely to be more efficient and even out the effects of volatile mineral prices. We also know that such taxes are superior to state government royalties.

    But the mining companies advertising and public relations campaign of $22 million scuttled the RSPT. For an expenditure of $22 million in lobbying and advertising the miners were saved about $60 billion in tax over the next ten years. Despite the fact that all surveys at the time showed that the majority of Australians supported the RSPT, the combination of the miners, the Coalition and the Murdoch media forced the government to give way.

    As Ross Gittins in the SMH of March 17 this year put it ‘A great opportunity was lost for our economy and our workers to benefit adequately from the exploitation of our natural endowments by mainly foreign companies [who own about 80% of the mining industry] our government has to ensure that it gets a fair wack of the economic rent these foreigners generate.’

    But having lost the critical battle over the RSPT, the government then introduced a watered-down mining tax called the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT). In its weakened political state, the Gillard government allowed the three big foreign miners, BHP (76% foreign owned), Rio Tinto (83% foreign owned) and Xstrata (100% foreign owned) to re-design the new mining tax – the MRRT – to suit their interests.

    And what happened? The miners were allowed to deduct the market value of existing assets instead of deducting the book value over five years. In this way the miners could maximise their deductions up front. That is why the mining tax has raised far less revenue than expected.

    As Ross Gittins has put it ‘Once these deductions are used up, the [mining] tax will become a big earner’. Gittins went on to say that abolishing the tax will be ‘An act of major fiscal vandalism’.

    According to the Greens, the Parliamentary Budget Office has advised. that a mining tax of 40%, as originally proposed ,on  all minerals with fixed state royalties and a change to depreciation will raise $35b over 4 years.

    It is also interesting to see the continuing strong hold which the miners have over the coalition, indeed over all major parties. There has been media speculation that the May 13 budget would abolish the diesel fuel rebate. The miners mounted strong on the government to drop any such proposal. In a letter to the government the miners said. ‘We have run the numbers on any substantial change to the rebate and the impact would be profound. Most likely far greater than any MRRT and probably a little less than the first mining tax”. So the miners win again. The fuel rebate will be unchanged. Persons with disability, pensioners, the unemployed and the sick will not have such luck.

    See below polling which shows strong public support for mining taxes.

    (See my blogs of October 17, 2013 ‘Short-sighted miners …’ and February 18, 2014 ‘The squandered mining boom’.)

     Public attitudes towards mining taxes from Essential Research

    Re RSPT

    • In May 2010, 52% approved higher taxes on the profits of large mining companies and 34% disapproved.
    • In the same month, 43% said they supported the RSPT and 36% opposed.

    Re MRRT

    • In November 2011, 50% approved the tax and 28% disapproved.
    • In April 2012, 56% approved the tax and 28% disapproved.

     

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Yasukuni Shrine and why it matters.

    Yasukuni–Japan’s Patriotic Lightning Rod

    The Shinto shrine known as Yasukuni sprawls over ten hectares in the centre of Tokyo near the northern edge of the Imperial Palace grounds. Here are enshrined 2.47 million ‘deities’––the spirits of Japanese military personnel and civilians on war service from conflicts going back to 1853, including around 1,000 convicted war criminals. To its critics, Yasukuni is a bastion of historical revisionism, which denies that Japan waged a war of aggression between 1937 and 1945. Visits to the shrine by senior members of the government are an ongoing source of friction with China and South Korea.

    Australia has the War Memorial in Canberra; the United States has Arlington National Cemetery. Indeed every country raises monuments to remember and honour their war dead. What’s different about Yasukuni Shrine? Why the controversy?

    Yasukuni is not a cemetery, nor is it a secular monument. It is a religious institution. Prior to 1945, the shrine was a special organ of the state under the jurisdiction of the Army, Navy and Home Ministries. As ‘ritualist-in-chief’ of the Shinto religion, the god-Emperor had the final say on who could or could not be enshrined at Yasukuni. Shintoism furnished the mythologies that underpinned Emperor-worship in totalitarian Japan, such that soldiers and sailors embarking for the front, and fully expecting to die for the Emperor, would pledge to ‘meet again at Yasukuni’.

    Between 1945 and 1952, the Allied Powers set about dismantling the apparatus of Japanese militarism. The nation’s top civilian and military leaders were put on trial in Tokyo by an international tribunal (the Australian judge Sir William Webb serving as president of the court) for war crimes, crimes against humanity and/or ‘crimes against peace’ (the so-called Class ‘A’ category), which was defined as the ‘planning, preparation, initiation or waging wars of aggression’, or conspiracy to do so. Seven of these high-profile defendants were executed, including wartime leader General Hideki Tojo. Two died during the proceedings; one was declared insane; sixteen were sentenced to life imprisonment; and two others were given shorter prison terms.

    Another forty-two accused Class ‘A’ war criminals, including Nobusuke Kishi, future prime minister and grandfather of Japan’s present leader Shinzo Abe, were arrested but released without trial. After recovering its sovereignty in 1952, Japan began to reverse certain reforms of the Allied Occupation, and by 1958 all war criminals had been released from jail and politically rehabilitated.

    Yasukuni Shrine became a private religious institution in September 1946, in accordance with the principle of the separation of church and state, soon to be enshrined in Japan’s new constitution. Ten years later, however, contrary to this principle, the Ministry of Health and Welfare and Yasukuni Shrine began ‘administrative co-operation on enshrinement’, the process by which individuals were selected as kami or deities. A start was made in 1959 on the enshrinement of Class ‘B’ and ‘C’ war criminals (convicted of mistreatment of prisoners, murder of civilians, wanton destruction and atrocities). By now Prime Minister Kishi was in office. He and other conservative leaders supported the aims of such patriotic groups as the Japan War Bereaved Families Association.

    In 1966 the Ministry of Health and Welfare approved the first group of Class ‘A’ war criminals for enshrinement, but when the list went to the shrine’s head priest Fujimaro Tsukuba no action was taken. In light of subsequent events, it seems likely that the attitude of Emperor Hirohito was crucial. Tsukuba, a former marquis, was himself a member of the Imperial Family, and for as long as he remained in charge at Yasukuni no Class ‘A’ war criminals were enshrined there.

    Tsukuba died in 1978. He was succeeded by Nagayoshi Matsudaira, a former lieutenant commander in the Imperial Navy, whose father-in-law, a vice-admiral, was tried and executed by the Dutch for war crimes (and later enshrined at Yasukuni). Within three months of Matsudaira’s taking over, fourteen deceased, Class ‘A’ war criminals were secretly enshrined at Yasukuni. While its defenders may claim that Yasukuni Shrine serves no other purpose than to console the spirits of the dead and honour their sacrifices, this sequence of events shows how personal and political motives have driven its use as an instrument of national policy. ‘Even before I made up my mind [to become head priest at Yasukuni], I argued that so-called Class-A war criminals should also be venerated, as Japan’s spiritual rehabilitation would be impossible unless we rejected the Tokyo tribunal,’ Matsudaira told a magazine in 1989, as quoted by the Mainichi Shimbun.

    According to Professor Yoshinobu Higurashi of Teikyo University (whose writings on the subject have informed this blog: See http://www.nippon.com/en/authordata/higurashi-yoshinobu/) the enshrinement of the Class ‘A’ war criminals ‘cannot be attributed simply to religious or filial impulses’. It was ‘a blatantly ideological and political act driven by an urge to justify and legitimize a highly controversial chapter in Japan’s history’.

    Even though, as a signatory of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japan formally agreed to the outcome of the Tokyo Trials, the nation’s conservative elite––most notably these days, Prime Minister Abe––steadfastly refuse to accept the burden of war guilt. They have a personal and public stake, through ties of blood and marriage, in overturning the verdict of history. On its English-language website, Yasukuni Shrine sets the tone by referring to ‘people who were labeled war criminals and executed after having been tried by the Allies’: in other words, victims not perpetrators. The shrine’s museum continues the narrative of denial of Japan’s atrocious wartime behaviour and, instead, strikes a note of triumphalism in its displays of armaments and trophies of battle.

    The Defense Ministry similarly promotes the idea of ‘victor’s justice’. At its compound in Tokyo where the auditorium used for the Tokyo Trials is preserved, the only reference to the court’s verdict is a display devoted to the dissenting judgement of the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal, who would have acquitted all the accused on the basis that Japan was forced into war by hostile Western nations.

    The person best placed to know whether this dissenting view has any merit would be Emperor Hirohito. After the enshrinement of the fourteen Class ‘A’ war criminals, Emperor Hirohito made the decision never to visit Yasukuni Shrine again. No emperor has been there since. Not long before he died, according to a memorandum taken by an aide, Hirohito made clear that the two decisions were directly linked. ‘What’s on the mind of Matsudaira’s son, who is the current head priest?’ he is reported to have asked (the man’s father, Yoshitami Matsudaira, was well known to him as Imperial Household Minister during the war). ‘Matsudaira [senior] had a strong wish for peace, but the child didn’t know the parent’s heart. That’s why I have not visited the shrine since. This is my heart.’

    Having controversially escaped prosecution for his role in the war, Hirohito’s stand against the revisionists and deniers––albeit indirectly and by an act of omission––gives the lie to those, like Abe, who insist that Yasukuni can serve both as a symbol of peace and a shrine to warmongers. Could it be that Japan’s swing to the right is, as Hirohito feared, the blindness of the child who does not know the parent’s heart?

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years. He is the author of Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story (NewSouth Press).

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Taxes – public or private

    The Commission of Audit has recommended that a Medicare levy surcharge be applied to individuals earning more than $88,000 a year and $176,000 for families. This is designed to force high income earners to take out private health insurance. This is one of the most economically stupid and dangerous proposals that I have seen for a long time. The Commission of Audit foolishly thinks that this would reduce public taxes, but it would result in increased private taxes (premiums). Higher premiums are the inevitable result of increased reliance on private health insurance. This is what has brought disaster for healthcare in the US. Private healthcare premiums have gone through the roof and the US now has one of the worst and most expensive healthcare services in the world. 

    Furthermore, the Commission of Audit’s proposal would move us a long way towards a two-tier health system, with a high quality and very expensive healthcare service for the rich and a welfare type health service for the poor. It strikes at the heart of social solidarity and social cohesion which is essential in a good society. It would end Medicare as we know it, a high quality service available to all regardless of income.

    Below I have reposted an article of 1 February about the fallacy of assuming that public taxes are bad but private taxes (premiums) are good.

     

    It has become commonplace for opponents of government and the public sector to suggest that functions like health care and broadcasting should be moved from the public sector to the private sector in order to reduce taxes. They usually add in that the private sector is also much more efficient in performing such functions.

    There are good social and economic reasons why certain functions should remain in the public sector – defence, education and health. But there is also a great fallacy that somehow public taxes are bad and private taxes/premiums are fine.

    Let me give you two examples.

    The private health insurance industry claims that Medicare is unsustainable and that more people should take up private health insurance to reduce the demands on the public health system. The suggestion is that by doing so, governments will not have to keep increasing taxes to fund public health. But there is a fundamental error in this argument. Private health insurance (PHI) has been raising its premiums at an alarming rate and much faster than Medicare through taxation. The PHI premiums are really the same as taxes that finance Medicare, except that one is public and the other is private.

    Since 1999, when rebates for PHI were introduced, the average PHI premium (private tax) has increased 130% whilst overall prices have increased by less than 50%. These private taxes or premiums are rising dramatically for a whole range of reasons that I set out in my blog of December 26 – ‘Health insurance – here we go again’.

    The other important reason for these high private taxes/premiums by PHI is that their administrative costs, including profits, run at about 15% to 16% of total costs. For Medicare, including the cost of tax collection, administrative costs are about 6% of total costs. So with the administrative costs of PHI about three times those of Medicare it is not unreasonable to conclude that the public gets far better value for money in its taxes paid to finance Medicare than paying premiums/private taxes to PHI. Expanding the role of PHI would greatly increase the level of these private taxes. The fact that they are private taxes misses the point. They are taxes on the consumer just the same as public taxes.

    The experience of the US should also warn us about private health insurance premiums/taxes. In the US, healthcare expenditure is over 18% of GDP. It is the highest in the world. In Australia it is about 9% to 10% of GDP, as is the case for most comparable countries that have a single public insurer like Medicare. Of the 18% costs in the US( as a proportion of GDP), about 9% is due to private insurance. Private health insurance in the US has been unable to control price demands by private doctors and private hospitals. If in theory the US had a single public insurer and followed the example of other single public insurer countries like Australia, the US could reduce its health expenditure by 9% of GDP. In such a situation the 9% of GDP paid to private health insurance funds would be unnecessary. If those premiums to private insurance were then redirected into public revenue, the US budget deficit of 7% of GDP would be eliminated. I said this was theoretical and there are clearly enormous political difficulties for President Obama to wind back the mess that private health insurance has wrought. But the figures do illustrate that the US would be better off with a robust public insurer funded by taxes rather than by the grossly unfair and inefficient privatised taxes that private health insurance imposes on the community. The US experience shows quite conclusively that shifting insurance out of the government and into private health insurance would be a disaster for everyone. To finance health care through the private taxes or premiums of PHI would result in much higher imposts on the public, than paying for health care through public taxes.

    The other example of privatised taxes is illustrated in the case that is often made against the ABC and other public broadcasters that are funded by taxes or special licence fees. Yet the critics of public broadcasting like Murdoch impose their own taxes – what is in effect a sales tax on products that are advertised in the commercial media. In my blog of December 19 ‘Murdoch and Abbott and the ABC’, I drew attention to the argument by Ian McAuley about the high cost of these privatised taxes. He said ‘We are paying about $1,500 per year per household for advertising, of which $500 is for commercial TV and radio… By contrast we are paying about $120 per year for the ABC’. Commercial media collects “taxes”, but it is called ‘advertising revenue’. This revenue is a cost to the advertiser and is loaded into the costs of the products when we purchase a car or holiday travel.

    The private sector has its own forms of taxation. Just by shifting functions from the public to the private sector, does not necessarily reduce what we have to pay out of our own pockets. In many cases public taxes are much more efficient and serve a much more desirable social objective than privatized taxes

  • John Menadue. The Commission of Audit and facing the wrong way.

    Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have been leaking confusing stories in the lead-up to the budget. A consistent theme however is that they must take tough action because of all the problems left by the previous government. They also need to justify the exaggerated rhetoric they used during the election campaign. A lot of it is confected.

    The Commission of Audit will add to the confusion in focussing on expenditure when the main problem is declining revenue. The neglected Henry review of taxation will be a better guide for the future than an ideological and partisan Commission of Audit

    In all this media static, I think there are several key issues that we need to keep in mind.

    • We do have a long-term structural budget deficit of about $60 billion per annum in current prices. That needs fixing. A lot of this structural deficit can be attributed to the policies of the Howard and Costello governments. During their tenure, we frittered away the large government revenue gains from the mining boom. We had one tax reduction after another. We should have been repairing the budget rather than reducing taxes. The IMF is quite clear that the Howard Costello governments must bear the major responsibility for the structural deficit. The Rudd/Gillard governments took some action but clearly not enough to address this structural budget problem. During the global financial crisis, the Rudd government increased spending and was successful in helping steer our way through a threatening world recession. Unfortunately the Rudd/Gillard governments ignored the report of Ken Henry about the need to reform our taxation system.
    • The structural deficit is caused mainly by a shortfall in revenue rather than a surge in spending. Our tax as a percentage of GDP has fallen steadily since 2002 from 30% to 28%. This is well below the OECD average of 34%. We need to give priority to fixing our revenue base which was what the Henry Review was largely about. Reducing tax deductions for superannuation, which benefit mainly the wealthy would be a good way to start.
    • We do not have a growing public sector. Our budget outlays have been trending downwards since the mid-1980s. We do need to further means test our welfare spending but compared with other OECD countries we have a more efficient and equitable welfare system than most. The Commission of Audit will be focussing on spending when the real problem is we need to focus on revenue. The Commission  is likely to face us in the wrong direction
    • Our overseas debt is increasing but it is very low compared with most other countries. Our overseas debt as a proportion of GDP is one of the lowest in the OECD. Our government debt is around 20% of GDP. For Canada it is 89%,France 94%,Germany 78%,japan 227%,Norway 29%,Singapore 104%,ROK 34%,UK 91% and US 102% As the CEO of the National Bank, Cameron Clyne, put it several months ago “Australia does have a debt problem. We don’t have enough of it. We have a lazy balance sheet. We are a AAA economy. We are having a very immature debate about debt.”
    • We must avoid the drastic action taken in Europe to reduce budget deficits where the consequences were disastrous for many governments and a lot of people. The fetish and obsession with deficits tipped many European countries into recession. There was low growth and record unemployment particularly amongst the young. This drastic action in Europe on deficits helped spawn ultra-rightist and anti-immigration political parties. We must learn from the European experience and not over-react in getting our budget deficit back under control.
    • This month the IMF told us that we face a period of sustained and lower growth. The Australian economy is struggling to grow at a sufficient rate to avoid significant increases in unemployment. Youth unemployment is now over 20% and growing rapidly. Joe Hockey should not go too hard in his first budget to reduce spending, despite the exaggerated and windy rhetoric we have had from him for many months. It is damaging consumer and business confidence. Reform has to occur but calamity is not around the corner. The Australian economy is one of the best performing in the world. In the current confused debate which has been triggered by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey one would think that we faced dire problems. We don’t and we should be careful not to worsen the situation.

    The most worrying prospect is that the government looks like believing its exaggerated political rhetoric about debt and deficits.

    I have outlined in my blog of February 4 ’Do our governments spend too much or do they raise too little in taxation?’ further arguments to support the above case. This blog, which I have reposted below summarises the submission which Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley and I made to the Commission of Audit.

     

  • John Menadue. Do our governments spend too much or do they raise too little in taxation?

    This a repost and provides a summary of the submission that Ian McAuley, Jennifer Doggett and I made to the Commission of Audit.  John Menadue

    The Minister for Health, Peter Dutton, has said that we must reduce waste and cut costs in health. (I responded to this in my blog on 3 February “Cutting waste and costs in health”).

    The Minister for Social Services, Kevin Andrews, has said that our welfare system is ‘not sustainable’ and that we are headed down the high cost welfare path of European countries. (The ABC examined this assertion and found that it was incorrect. It found that ‘There is nothing to indicate that as the population ages, Australia is headed towards the big welfare spending of some European countries. Treasury projections to 2050 show welfare spending as a proportion of our GDP will remain steady over the next three decades. www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-03/kevin-andrews–makes-unfounded-welfare-claims.)

    The Treasurer, Joe Hockey has said that ‘The days of entitlement are over and the age of personal responsibility has begun’. This has been interpreted by some as suggesting that government welfare and other entitlements should be reduced.

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

    In our summary to the Committee we say …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Penne Mathew and Tristan Harley…Regional Cooperation on refugees

    In November last year Penne Mathew and Tristan Harley of the Australian National University undertook field work in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia to examine the treatment of refugees in those countries and to discuss the possibilities of improved regional cooperation amongst themselves and also with resettlement countries such as Australia. I am strongly of the view that shared responsibility and cooperation is essential

    The Indonesian Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa recently put the case succinctly. “For Indonesia, the message is crystal clear: the cross border and complex nature of irregular movements of persons defies national solutions…There is no other recourse but to take a comprehensive and coordinated approach…a sense of burden sharing and common responsibility should be the basis for our cooperation.

    .John Menadue

    The Executive Summary and Recommendations follow. This report is based on fieldwork that Professor Penelope Mathew and Mr Tristan Harley conducted in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia in October – November 2013. The authors gratefully acknowledge all of the participants in our research who graciously offered their time, expertise and hospitality. The purpose of the fieldwork was to examine the treatment of refugees in each of the three countries and discuss the issue of regional cooperation with respect to refugees in the Southeast Asia region. Some key findings of the fieldwork are:

     

    a)      Thailand and Malaysia remain reluctant to become party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol because they believe that it will lead to an increase in the number of refugees arriving in their territory and they believe that there are associated security threats. On the other hand, ratification is currently part of Indonesia’s national agenda. However, there are concerns that this process has been stalled and may not be realised.

    b)      States in the Southeast Asia region have indicated a desire to cooperate with one another in the area of refugee protection, particularly through the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime (the Bali Process) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). However, states continue to act unilaterally in ways that endanger refugees and cause friction among states. Current Australian policies undermine efforts at regional cooperation.

    c)      Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia recognise that regional cooperation is necessary in order to address the particular refugee situations that each country is facing individually and to tackle the initial causes of displacement in countries of origin. While ASEAN members adhere to the principle of non-interference in the sovereignty of other states, it was suggested that ASEAN could be an appropriate forum whereby states could assist countries of origin to minimise the need for persons to flee the country and seek asylum elsewhere.

    d)      Interviewees in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia suggested that resettlement programmes in the region should be increased and that states from outside the region should increase their efforts to help share the responsibility of hosting refugees.

    e)      Malaysia and Indonesia appear willing to consider granting refugees the right to work. However, there are strong concerns about how this policy would affect national migrant worker schemes and domestic labour supply. States are also concerned about the ‘pull factor’ that they perceive such a policy may produce.

    This report concludes by making recommendations for states to enhance the protection framework for refugees. These recommendations are divided into short, medium and long terms goals. Some key recommendations in this report include the following:

    a)      Skills training programmes should be established in countries of first asylum that prepare refugees for either resettlement to another country, voluntary return to their country of origin or local integration in the host county. These programmes can be funded by donor and resettlement countries;

    b)      Refugees should be granted the right to work in countries of first asylum and employment programmes for refugees should be established in areas and industries where there is high demand;

    c)      Refugees should be allowed to access health care at the same cost as nationals and refugee children should be allowed to access the public education system;

    d)      United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) offices in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, should be expanded and more funding allocated with the particular focus of improving both speed and fairness of refugee status determination (RSD) procedures;

    e)      Resettlement states should increase their annual intakes to provide protection to a greater number of refugees and share responsibility with countries of first asylum.

    f)       New projects and programmes should be established which simultaneously aim to support both refugee communities and local communities hosting refugees; and

    g)      The 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol should be ratified by states in the region.

    Penelope Mathew is Freilich Professor, ANU College of Arts and Sciences

    Tristan Harley is Freilich Foundation Research Assistant at ANU.

     

  • John Menadue. AMP excess and dud products.

    I have posted several blogs on how powerful insiders bend governments to their will. Just think of the power of the polluter lobby, the mining lobby, the health lobby, the gambling lobby and the hotel lobby.

    But the superannuation lobby is probably the most powerful and the most lucrative gravy-train of all. The superannuation industry receives over $32 billion subsidy each year through ‘tax expenditures’ or what we normally call ‘deductions’. In addition there is the tax-free superannuation income for those over 60, like me. In addition to these enormous subsidies to boost the superannuation industry, federal governments require that 9% of employee incomes must be put into superannuation. Not content with these enormous benefits the four banks and the AMP have been lobbying the government and particularly Senator Sinodinis to bury any attempts to outlaw conflicts on interests by financial advisers. Typically this conflict of interest occurs when the financial adviser also supplies the product, as is the case with the four banks and the AMP. But the superannuation industry, and particularly the retail funds, overplayed their hand and the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) “reforms” under the guise of reducing red tape have been deferred.

    But not the AMP. In the SMH on 26 April, Michael West tears the veil from the superannuation junkets which the AMP runs to promote its products. The AMP arranged a ‘professional development conference’ in the Bosporus last week. Michael West put it quite colourfully.

    ‘In the footsteps of the Romans and the Ottoman Turks centuries before them, the hordes of AMP descended on the jewel of the Bosporus last week. Some 400 of them; the crème de la crème of AMP’s financial planners, and a host of advisers from Hillross, too, also owned by AMP. In contrast to the Romans who decided to build their empire’s new capital Constantinople there in 330 and the Turks whose troops overran the city in 1453, the throng from 50 Bridge Street(AMP head office in Sydney) descended on the ancient metropolis in planes. In the company of their spouses they overran Istanbul in five star opulence. Unlike the Emperor Constantine and Sultan Mehmed II, AMP and its grand vizier of financial services, Steve Helmich, did not underwrite their Ottoman odyssey from the fruits of empire. It was bankrolled by the ransacking of a mandatory superannuation system. Our latter-day sultans of superannuation have breezily lavished a $20 million junket on their sales force and themselves to boot. Before this year’s Byzantium bash, the AMP held its ‘conference’ in Dublin, South Africa, Amsterdam, Colorado and Buenos Aires. … Surely financial planning should be about the adviser using best endeavours to maximise the wealth of the client.  … . If this was really about education, rather than reward for flogging AMP product, and an enticement to flog more, we solemnly promise to eat our fez. … Let superannuants ponder no more that a third of their life savings can vanish in poorly disclosed fees and commissions. Their advisers are swanning around the grand bazaar like Suleiman the Magnificent, sauntering through the Blue Mosque before a spot of shopping in the ritzy boutiques of Nisantasi.’

    The bottle of Grange Hermitage which Barry O’Farrell received from a financial and Liberal Party lobbyist was nothing compared with this orgy and excess by the AMP in the name of ‘professional development’. Or as Michael put it “the ransacking of the mandatory superannuation system”

    I must confess I have more than a public policy interest in this extravagance by the AMP. I have a personal interest as well.

    About ten years ago my adviser recommended I invest about $55,000 of my super funds in a product called ‘AMP Capital Enhanced Yield Fund’. It turned out to be a dud investment, although small scale dud compared with the cost of dud investments like in Opes Prime and West Point and financial planners like Storm Financial.

    In 2008/9, during the Global Financial Crisis the AMP Capital Enhanced Yield Fund decided to limit redemptions. For over five years since then I have been attempting to redeem this investment. Capital loss has been considerable and the income return has been minimal. Over five years I have received small redemptions in dribs and drabs.

    With this locked or suspended fund, I received regular advice that ‘managed funds [like AMP Capital Enhanced Yield Fund] are suspended …Please be aware that there is no guarantee that the suspended fund will start processing transactions in the future.’

    It is not as if the AMP has been struggling over the long period that my investment has been locked. In the years 2009 to 2013 AMP has made annual profits after tax of $739m, $775m, $759m, $689m and $672m. In 2009, when my investment was locked, Craig Dunn, the CEO of AMP had a 30% pay rise. His total remuneration in 2012 was $3.157 million. Craig Meller, Managing Director of AMP Financial Services had a salary package of $1.917 million per annum. Stephen Dunne, Managing Director of AMP Capital had a salary of $2.133 million p.a.

    I have no doubt that AMP acted legally in respect of my foolish investment in a dud product, but have they any shame in the way they continue to pay their executives, or any sense of moral culpability. The payment of these excessive salaries to senior executives is quite consistent with the behaviour of the AMP in splurging $20 million to indulge the sellers of their new products. It’s all about new products. Forget about the dud products they have sold in the past.

    But some might say that the government has now set up a Financial System Inquiry to sort all this out. But we should not hold our breath. There is no indication from what I have seen that the issue of vertical integration, which allows the four banks and AMP to rip off customers through their conflict of interest, is in the terms of reference of the FSI. Furthermore Craig Dunn, the former CEO of AMP who received that remuneration package of over $3 million per annum, is a member of the FSI panel. All the panel members are from the finance sector .The public or consumer interest is not to be found. The insiders are in charge.

    Can the victims of dud superannuation products look forward to all-expenses paid “professional development conference” next year in Constantinople or some other attractive luxury tourist destination?

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Anti-climax in Tokyo

    Three words for Shinzo Abe––and for history. Three words: ‘…including Senkaku islands’ (was Obama’s omission of the definite article ‘the’, one wonders, part of a subconscious hesitation?). Thus a US president for the first time explicitly committed his country to defend Japan if it should come to blows with China in their territorial dispute.

    Barack Obama affirmed that the islands were covered by Article V of the Japan-US Security Treaty which states: ‘Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.’

    While no different from the position enunciated previously by other members of his administration, in its language and setting––a joint news conference with Abe standing alongside him during a state visit to Japan––Obama’s endorsement of the status quo in the East China Sea was significant. It is exactly what Abe wanted to hear, after months of anguished commentary in the Japanese media suggesting the US might be turning into a fair weather ally. But the comparatively muted official response from China is also interesting: a sign that Beijing heard the president when he said he was not stating a new position. The words might be on the record, but was there is any greater will behind them?

    A visit by a US president to Japan as a state guest (the most elaborate form of diplomatic visitation) is uncommon. The last one was 16 years ago. Reportedly the Americans took some persuading to set aside the minimum three days required. Such occasions can serve to elevate a bilateral relationship to a new level, and they can draw attention to areas of disagreement as well as agreement. On the territorial dispute, for instance, the main focus was on the US commitment to fight alongside Japan. Obama, however, also stressed the importance of ‘dialogue’ to resolve the dispute, and avoiding ‘escalation’, which implicitly binds Japan to keep its power dry.

    As for the other big-ticket item on the agenda, trade liberalisation, Japan had hoped the impetus of a state visit would deliver an agreement. The strategy came up well short. Instead of sweetness and light, the impression gained in Tokyo was that the Americans were intent on extracting the highest price, in economic terms, for those three choice words on security. (Having said that, insiders already knew that Obama lacked the clearance from Congress to strike a deal with Japan, and nothing less than a trade coup would allow him to presume on Congress’s approval.)

    Abe took a gamble early in his second administration when he went against the protectionists in his governing Liberal Democratic Party and led Japan into the Trans-Pacific Partnership. While trade liberalisation is necessary for his program of economic revitalisation, the disruptive risks of increased import competition, particularly in the agricultural sector, are not inconsiderable. Japan’s farming communities are the most exposed to the effects of an aging society, and there are far fewer employment alternatives in regional and rural areas than in the big cities. Farmers are a well-organised lobby group in a country where all politics is local.

    In the TPP negotiations, the Americans are seeking a better deal on beef than was recently obtained by Australia, and they want a broader agreement to include various other farm goods, automobiles and intellectual property.

    Japan’s TPP Minister, Akira Amari, is showing signs of wear and tear, admitting publically that if he were ever asked to do the job again, he would refuse. Amari and his US counterpart Michael Froman have held 25 hours of face-to-face negotiations, continuing even as Abe and Obama were tucking into their Ginza sushi––but without result. At one point it seemed Obama’s visit would end with no joint communiqué, which certainly would have left a bad taste. Officials eventually managed to cobble together a communiqué that reiterated the president’s statement on the Senkaku dispute and supported Abe’s drive to reinterpret the Japanese constitution to embrace the right of collective self-defence (hardly surprising, since this is already assumed in the bilateral security treaty quoted above). But when it came to the TPP talks, the document turned to fairy floss: ‘Today we have identified a path forward on important bilateral TPP issues. This marks a key milestone in the TPP negotiations and will inject fresh momentum into the broader talks.’ It takes some cheek just to write that down. Japanese sources claim the Americans held the communiqué hostage, delaying its release in an effort to wring extra trade concessions from Japan––if so, all that resulted was sweet talk.

    Without a substantial trade deal soon the Obama administration risks a loss of domestic support for his much touted ‘rebalance’ to Asia. Likewise some of the gloss will come off Abe’s can-do image, particularly the credibility of his claim to want to break down structural rigidities in the Japanese economy. For all the pomp and ceremony, and three-star sushi, the two nations only managed to reaffirm the old––military––basis for their relationship rather than define the new.

    For the Japanese, an unwanted byproduct of the state visit has been to draw attention in the US and elsewhere, through media commentaries and analysis, to Abe’s pivot to the right since he returned to office in 2012. Some observers are discovering this issue for the first time, while others have looked for fresh evidence from Obama’s visit with which to refine their sense of where events might be headed.

    For the first group, it is always possible to overstate the situation––it is worth reiterating that Japan is not ‘rearming’, muzzling its news media or abandoning its democratic institutions. Nevertheless there are signs of a nationalistic revival, amid a period of heightened regional tensions. Against this background, the take out from Obama’s visit, I think, is disappointing. Having gone to Tokyo, he could not have said less than he did on the territorial issue––though he might have said more, for instance, on the mechanism by which the disputing parties might enter a dialogue. He came across more like a tourist than a statesman willing and able to engage Abe on fundamentals. If President Obama once seemed to represent a fresh, inclusive and future-oriented style of leader, he brought little or nothing of that to Tokyo. Which is more the pity, since he came at a time, without doubt, when Japanese are questioning whether what has served them well for almost 70 years can see them safe and strong into the future.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for 11 years.

     

  • John Menadue. Anzac and hiding behind the valour of our military.

    For those who may have missed this. I have reposted this earlier piece about Anzac and hiding behind our heroes.  John Menadue

    There is an unfortunate and continuing pattern in our history of going to war- that the more disastrous the war the more politicians and the media hide behind the valour of service men and women. We will see this displayed again on April 25.

    The Director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, drew attention to this well-honed way of distorting and excusing our strategic and political mistakes. In the SMH on October 5 last year, he said ‘The more obscene the war, the more inexplicable it seems for us today, the more many [young people] admire those men and women who went in our name’. (See my blog October 11, 2013, ‘The drumbeat grows louder’.)

    It is not only young people who have been drawn into this distortion of history. Governments and the media have encouraged us to ignore the disastrous wars that we have been engaged in and learn from our mistakes. Rather than face the consequences of acknowledging those disasters, governments and the media then change the subject to the valour of our heroes. We refuse to face the fact that these heroes have often died in vain

    By any measure our involvement in the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been disastrous. So what do our governments, the Australian War Memorial and the media do? They avoid examining how we got into such disastrous wars. They do this by dwelling on the heroism of our service people. VC winners are an ideal way to change the subject from a disastrous war to an Australian hero.

    There is no doubt that they are heroic, but the wars they fought in were anything but heroic. These three wars were disastrous but we refuse to acknowledge that fact. The consequence will be that in the future we will continue to make foolish decisions about getting into war. That could occur over the dispute between Japan and China over the islands in the East-China Sea.

    In this cover up of failed policies, prime ministers, ministers, opposition leaders and the media have attended almost every ship taking Australian service personnel to or from war zones in the Middle East. I don’t think the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition have missed any funeral of a veteran of those wars. There was even a fly-over in Gippsland for an Australian soldier who had accidentally shot himself.

    Our involvement in WWI was disastrous in every way. We acted like a colony at the behest of England But we didn’t spend time dwelling on the catastrophe as a result of our strategic and political mistakes. That hopefully would discourage us from repeating them in the future. Instead we deluged ourselves and continue to do so in the valour of those who served and died in WWI.

    WWII was much more a war we had to fight in our own national interest and for the freedom of our region. But the recall of that war and the sacrifices of our military personnel is quite small at the Australian War Memorial compared with the coverage of WWI. We had a strong case for involvement in WWII but not WWI. Yet the coverage at the Australian War Memorial does exactly the reverse. Strategically Kokoda was more important to Australia than Gallipoli.

    In his excellent new book ‘Rupert Murdoch’ – a re-assessment” Professor  Rod Tiffen draws attention to the way that News Ltd in the UK covered its mistaken  support for  the appalling  wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . It just changed the subject. News Ltd never attempted to seriously  examine the fiction and mistaken policies which it supported and which led the UK into those wars. It changed the subject by attacking PM Gordon Brown for not looking after the veterans. Rod Tiffen put it this way.

    ‘In one of the last issues of The Sun edited by Rebekah Brooks, the front page consisted of the faces of the 207 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, with a large headline across the middle, reading “Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on”. The strap at the top said “Message to politicians failing our heroes” … The multipage splash was accompanied by a cartoon of a wounded soldier with the caption “abandoned”.’

    Tiffen added ‘Responsible newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times reflected publicly on their journalistic failings during the period [of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars]’.  

    But not News Ltd and Rupert Murdoch.

    What the Murdoch papers did in the UK is common amongst governments and media generally. They refuse to acknowledge their complicity in disastrous wars. To cover their tracks they focus on the heroism of service people.

    It is unpatriotic and cowardly to refuse to examine and publicly acknowledge decisions about going to war. That is surely the most momentous decision that any government can make. But by focusing on the story and the valour of service people, like successive Australian Prime Ministers, Rupert Murdoch and the Australian War Memorial, we are discouraged from looking honestly at our history.

    If we don’t learn from our mistakes we will keep repeating them. We must stop hiding behind our heroes.

     

  • We were warned about lobbying.

    In my blog of April 19 2014, ‘This is about more than a bottle of wine’ I referred to the need for major reforms in lobbying. 

    Three and a half years ago the ICAC in NSW brought forward proposals to better manage lobbying and avoid corruption. The Recommendations of the ICAC are still relevant today. If action had been taken at the end of 2010 we could have avoided many of the problems that have arisen in NSW. The ICAC report follows.

    John Menadue

    (more…)

  • Brian Howe – Raising the Retirement Age

    The Labor Government planned to lift age of eligibility for the aged pension from 65 to 67 between 2017 and 2023 and now the conservatives are considering raising it to 70 by 2029. Unless there are very big changes in the demand for older workers these changes must increase numbers on other payments such as Newstart or the Disability Pension. In the case of case of Newstart it would add to the hundreds of thousands of people living at least twenty percent below the poverty line.

    Several years ago a panel (Advisory Panel on the Economic Potential of Senior Australians) chaired by Everald Compton, and established by the Gillard government reported to that government on the potential of older Australians to make a larger contribution to the economy given the fact that people for various reasons (higher living standards, medical breakthroughs) were on average living longer. (2011)

    Successive federal Treasury reports had tended to emphasize coming pressures on budgets generated by an ageing population, but there is a more positive story that might be told.

    ‘Australia’s ageing population brings real opportunity-opportunity for the nation, for industry and for individuals. Not only are Australians living longer. Australians born in 1950 will live on average almost ten years longer than those born in 1910 but changes in society are creating unprecedented opportunity. Advances in health, education and technology provide an enormous scope for the nation and individuals to make better and more informed choices about the contribution of seniors in the workplace and the broader Australian community’

    The Advisory Panel saw extended lives, especially extended middle years, as being especially significant for the active aged. It also recognized that in Australia there were formidable constraints/barriers that would need to be overcome if that potential was to be full realized.

    • the persistence of outdated stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes towards older people
    • the lack of vision and understanding on the part of individuals, organisations, industry and governments about how to capture the potential of older Australians through creating more flexible and responsive workplaces
    • the constraints of the built environment that limit older Australians living the most fulfilling and creative lives, (very limited housing and transport choices)
    • the potential of poor lifestyle and health choices, including those that increase chronic health problems such as obesity and diabetes that threaten to undermine the health advances of previous generations. (G Hugo)

    The consequence of this analysis is that simplistic approaches to ageing by increasing retirement ages whether to 67 or 70 may impacts on future trend in social security expenditure but do not address any of the key issues that the Panel considered

    Discrimination

    For example, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HEROC) has identified a significant problem in the discriminatory attitude of many employers who discriminate in favour of the young and educated, especially where they have some work experience, when putting on new employees. They may also encourage older workers to ‘take the package’ often another way of terminating workers whose skills may be getting rusty rather than offering redeployment or retraining. It is very unusual for older workers in a modern economy to be kept on if they are seen to be unproductive or be offered a transition plan that will enable that person to gradually phase from paid work into retirement. Similarly older women who have caring responsibilities outside of their paid workplace may have great difficulty in nominating the hours in which they work or having the flexibility to leave work when there are special demands at home. This may be especially the case when women are working casually and have very little protections in the form of an award. Discrimination tends to affect most acutely people doing physical work e.g., cleaners, and construction workers.

    A Different Labour Market

    It is very important that there be public recognition of the very different labour market we have today to that which existed a generation ago. Along which the shift from an industrial to knowledge/service economy (80% of jobs today are in the service economy) there has been created a very different and much more dynamic and diverse labour market. This has resulted in a comprehensive movement way from standard employment contracts. There have been increasing variation in working times, working lives of working contracts.  Also there is a shift away from large employers with life time commitment to an employee to the increasing fragmentation of employment and labour markets where people are much more reliant on maintaining their personal skills to survive in today’s labour market. The rapid pace of change implies high rate of ‘technological obsolescence’ along with a redefinition of work with for many their ‘skill set ’ no longer relevant. These changes place special pressures on older people who if they do choose to remain in paid work may have to learn new skills set or create a new business or job. It is for this reason that life long learning is so important but of course that requires time and space well in advance of so called ‘retirement ages’. For most people working longer will often mean creating a new career either in the paid workforce or in the voluntary sector. The delayed retirement age suggests that there is an employer to keep an employee on. Security of employment is no longer a part of the work contract.

    Changing Cities

    Of course the changes in the economy have spatial implications in that the new economy is now focused increasingly in those places where there is the most concentrated investment taking place in the new economy and where there are maximum opportunities for creative communication. Older people are increasingly rejecting ‘sea change’ and ‘tree change’ and seeking to ‘hold’ their places in cities but with the flexibility sought by younger childless households.  The higher costs of energy are turning cities inside out and thus the importance of holding position. But for many older people there will be the demand for new housing choices whereas the market has been slow to realize the opportunity and scale of the aged housing market.  Furthermore governments have tax and social security rules that reflect a period in which older people either did not need or were not encouraged to participate in the more cosmopolitan city. Governments are still giving the highest priority to new freeways whereas for older people wanting to be active the key will increasingly be public transport. For older people the 20-minute city makes sense as they are less mobile but want to be engaged.

    Wellbeing

    Perhaps there has been a too easy assumption that aging baby boomers are all fit and well whereas they may be much less fit than we imagine perhaps for reasons that have to do with a too comfortable life style. On the other hand they will not be served well by ageist assumptions that consign older people to a retreat from life. The good news associated with ageing is certainly that maintaining activity and involvement is consistent with good health. On the other hand there are constraints that need to be addressed. Exercise does need organization and an enabling environment.

    Conclusion

    The most important message is that advancing the age at which people are able to access income support may have a limited impact on social security expenditures. However it will do very little to increase employment for older people often facing discrimination and exclusion from a labour market increasingly favouring the well and more recently educated.  The most likely impact on the aged of deferring the pension will be increasing the numbers on Disability support pensions and on Newstart, thus creating a cohort of aged people living well below the poverty line while minimizing savings to budgets.

     

    Brian Howe AO is a former Deputy Prime Minister. More recently he was a member of the Gillard Government’s Advisory Panel on positive ageing. This panel has been disbanded by the Coalition Government.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. The media, our region and the PM’s visit.

    The Prime Minister’s visit to Japan, the Republic of Korea and China, highlighted for me the problems of media reporting and understanding our region.

    I have posted blogs on our media. See April 17, 2013, ‘Media failure: the tale of two bombings in two cities’; May 17, 2013, ‘Truth, trust and the media’ and January 31, 2014, ‘Murdoch and Abbott versus the ABC’. I posted a blog on April 10 this year, specifically on Tony Abbott’s visit to Japan and the political shortcomings of Free Trade Agreements which usually have more hype than substance. That continues to be the case.

    Our international media coverage is dominated by news out of London, Washington and New York. As I posted before, ‘An outsider and independent observer would conclude that Australia is an island parked off New York or London’. Our media coverage continues to be dominated by North Atlantic sources.

    Although it is inadequate, the ABC is far ahead of other media in Australia in coverage of our region. It has fully-fledged correspondents based in Jakarta, New Delhi, Port Moresby, Tokyo, Bangkok, Auckland and Beijing.

    None of our commercial TV or radio networks have full time correspondents based in Asia.

    The SMH/Age have correspondents in China, Indonesia, New Delhi and Bangkok.

    The Australian and other News Corporation publications obviously tap into the company’s foreign reporting assets such as the London Sun. The Australian has a correspondent in Tokyo. But News Ltd can hardly claim to be a serious and professional news organisation. It is the largest and least trusted media organisation in the Western world.

    As mainstream media is squeezed the trend will be to reduce regional coverage. Closures are ongoing.

    Tony Abbott’s Asian visit was principally covered by journalists from the Canberra press gallery. The gallery is increasingly fixated on politics, with very little interest in policy, let along policies in the foreign affairs, trade or defence areas. Embedded in the Abbott touring party, it is not surprising that they gave us an unprofessional coverage of the Abbott Asian visits, and particularly any understanding of Free Trade Agreements.

    The embedded gallery journalists obviously had not read the November 2010 Productivity Report on Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements. (This is a different name for Free Trade Agreements.)

    The Productivity Commission Report concluded ’Businesses have provided little evidence that Australia’s Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements (have to date) generated significant commercial benefits … net benefits are likely to be small … the direct economic impacts from services and investment provisions in Australia’s BRTAs … have been modest …’.

    Following the Productivity Commission Report, the Minister for Trade, Dr Emerson, told the Lowy Institute in December 2010 that he was not interested ‘in collecting trophies for the mantelpiece, empty vessels engraved with the words “FTA” if they are nothing of the sort and of only token value to our country.’

    In my blog of April 10, I drew attention to the exaggerated benefits that our embedded journalists attached to the FTAs with Japan and the ROK. The former Trade Minister said the same thing two and a half years ago.

    The conclusion of the FTAs with Japan and the ROK with their exaggerated benefits did not occur with the stroke of Tony Abbott’s pen. Ian McAuley in New Matilda pointed out those negotiations had been ongoing for many years under previous governments. If anything, Tony Abbott’s public eagerness in advance to sign the agreements weakened our bargaining position. The Australian journalists with Tony Abbott didn’t make this point.

    Further, the journalists paid little attention to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that the US is discussing with Japan and ten other countries, including Australia. The US Trade Representative, Michael Froman, in commenting on the FTA between Australia and Japan said ‘Clearly, we are looking for a level of ambition in the TPP which is significantly higher than [what Australia achieved] in access to Japan’s farm sector, notably for beef’. If President Obama achieves this concession under TPP, the short-term benefits we have achieved in beef access will be quickly overtaken by our major competitor in beef, the US. But did the journalists with Tony Abbott understand this about the TPP?

    I was in Japan immediately following Tony Abbott’s visit. The issue which struck me was not that the Japanese were so concerned about relations with China and the ROK. Their concern was the effect of the ultra-nationalist policies of Japan’s PM, Shizuo Abe, on relations with the US. I have not yet seen anything about this by the journalists who travelled with Tony Abbott to Japan. Did they speak to anyone but the public relations people working for the Australian and Japanese governments?

    In the last day or two we have seen odd comments from a media commentator, Harold Mitchell, about the agreement between Australia and China for the Australian Network of the ABC to be made available to the entire Chinese population. This is something which only the BBC and CNN have been able to achieve. Not surprisingly, after twenty years of trying, News Ltd failed to get such access. Harold Mitchell said that ‘This agreement [with China] is one of the greatest ways we can continue on the PM’s very successful visit to China last week.’

    The Abbott Government is threatening to cut ABC funding. Tony Abbott has accused the ABC of being unpatriotic. Julie Bishop has said that the government is assessing whether the $223 million contract with Australian Network in promoting Australia’s interest in the region is of value. The government has made it clear that it is seriously considering changing the contract with Australian Network and the ABC and giving a leg-up to News Ltd as an alternative to the Australian Network.

    In short, the arrangement between the ABC and China would have been achieved in spite of and not because of the Abbott Government or the PM’s visit to China. But the members of the press gallery who travelled with Tony Abbott to the region have said nothing about this quite significant breakthrough by the ABC.

    Apart from the ABC, we are not well served by the media in its coverage of our own region. That has shown up in the coverage of Tony Abbott’s visits to Japan, the ROK and China.

  • This is about more than a bottle of wine

    To mix my metaphors, the bottle of red wine that Barry O’Farrell received is only the tip of an iceberg – a sleezy world of lobbying, influence-peddling and corruption.

    (more…)

  • Patty Fawkner. An Easter story

    If we think about it, each of us has an Easter story. Mine goes back to the death of my father.

    Dad died when I was a young nun. It was my first experience of the death of someone I deeply loved. Where once the word “loss” seemed a somewhat evasive euphemism, it was now acutely apt. I felt empty and fell into an abyss of grief, a grief that had begun eighteen months earlier, the day Dad was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He was 57.

    People were kind; sympathy and support were generous and heartfelt. Yet when people spoke to me of God, faith and heaven I felt affronted. Many ‘holy’ words seemed vacuous and trite to me given that I felt nothing of the presence, let alone the comfort, of God. God was nowhere to be found.

    The ‘unfairness’ of this bewildered me. Wasn’t I a nun and a person of faith? Hadn’t I given my life to God, for God’s sake?    Shouldn’t I at least expect a modicum of divine comfort?

    Months later I decided to make a weekend retreat at a monastery under the wise guidance of an elderly Benedictine monk. He listened to my grief and wasn’t embarrassed by my tears. He simply invited me to reflect on the story in John’s gospel of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene on the first Easter morning.

    Mary comes to remember and honour a loved one and, like me, she encounters emptiness. She weeps. Mary turns from the empty tomb and wanders in turmoil and anguish until Jesus, initially mistaken for a gardener, calls her by name.

    As I read the words from this familiar Gospel scene, I had an inchoate sense of myself being called by name. I had a sense of some kind of presence within my confusion and emptiness. It wasn’t a warm, fuzzy experience, and even then I didn’t really have a strong sense of the presence of God. But there was a knowing, as real as it was delicate and deep, that somehow God was with me, calling me, loving me within my emptiness. And I was greatly comforted.

    Not surprisingly, Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene has become my favourite Easter story and like any classic text it continues to contain a surfeit of meaning for me in new times and new situations.

    Years later when studying John’s gospel as part of a theology degree I chose to do my scriptural exegesis on this passage for my major assessment.

    The words “noli me tangere” “do not cling to me” came to the fore.  Mary had wanted to cling to the idea of who Jesus was for her before his resurrection. When Dad died I had wanted to cling to him and naïvely to a God who would shield me from human grief.

    Theological giant, Karl Rahner is unapologetically forthright:

    The God of earthly security, the God of salvation from life’s disappointments, the God of life insurance, the God who takes care so that children never cry and that justice marches upon the earth, the God who transforms earth’s laments, the God who doesn’t let human love end up in disappointment – that God doesn’t exist.

    Sobering but true. God never demeans our humanity by circumventing it.

    I had to let go of my ‘lesser’ God. I had to grow up a little in my faith and, in the words of Rahner’s fellow Jesuit, Anthony de Mello, I had to “empty out [my] teacup God.” Instead of concentrating on loss and emptiness, I had to search for a sense of the presence of my father’s spirit with and within me. With the help of the post-Easter Jesus and Mary Magdalene I began to experience the truth of John Chrysostom’s words written sixteen centuries earlier: “He whom we love and lose is no longer where he was. He is now wherever we are.”

    Mary Magdalene has become a companion and a hero. But history has not been kind to her and it is hard for the real Mary to shine through. She is often portrayed as the “good time girl” come good. Yet there is no scriptural justification whatsoever for asserting that Mary was a reformed prostitute. Nor is there any evidence to support the claim of Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame, that Mary and Jesus were lovers, married, had a child, and for a time lived, not in Memphis (!) but somewhere in the Middle East.

    If we accept the orthodox definition of an apostle as one who encounters the risen Jesus and announces this Good News to the community, what we have in John’s Easter gospel of Mary Magdalene is the story of the first Apostle. She is truly, as Hippolytus second century Bishop of Rome names her, the Apostle to the Apostles.       

    This Easter, with Mary Magdalene as guide and mentor, I pray that I may once again hear a voice offering love and life in the empty tombs of my life. I pray that this may be so for you.

     

    Good Samaritan Sister Patty Fawkner is a writer, adult educator and facilitator. She describes herself as “a fairly Good Samaritan”.

  • Simon Rice. Racial vilification, social values and humility

    I have spent a professional lifetime trying to get people to know about (let alone respect) anti-discrimination law, and suddenly everyone knows about ‘section 18C’.  For all the wrong reasons.

    A right reason for knowing about 18C would be because it is offers guidance on what can fairly be said and done on the basis of race.  A wrong reason would be because it is characterised as an unwarranted limit on ‘free speech’.

    For close to 20 years, the limits imposed by 18C have been unremarkable. The Australian Human Rights Commission receives and resolves complaints about conduct that exceeds the limits, and the federal courts decide cases when the complaints cannot be resolved.

    As with any legal regulation, awareness of 18C, and understanding about how it works, has grown over time. But most importantly, 18C, as with any legal regulation, stands as a statement of public values, a declaration by the government, on our behalf, of what is and is not acceptable in society.

    For close to 20 years we have told ourselves and the world that an Australia value is to not tolerate race-based words that cause harm.  Brandis has declared that not only we will tolerate such words, but we will encourage them.  So the 18C debate is about much more than the unremarkable exercise of setting limits on free speech.  It is, as well, about the role of our representatives in articulating public values and, relatedly, about the place of legislation in expressing those values.

    Public values change, and law needs to change with them, though it often lags behind. When there is sufficient public momentum a government acts to reflect popular will by making, amending or repealing a law.  In the current racial vilification debate, ‘free speech’ has been promoted as an Australian public value that is overly-limited by 18C, and that should now be given greater prominence.

    Has the time come to resile from the values that are expressed in 18C? It is hard to see anything that suggests that Australian values have reverted to a time when racial abuse was permissible.  Despite the Attorney-General’s notorious defence of our right to be bigots, there is no evidence that a large number of us actually want to express bigotry any more than 18C allows.

    The ‘free speech’ rhetoric is, in fact, a claim to ‘free racist speech’, and the Racial Discrimination Act allows a great deal of free racist speech; persistent reference to 18C overlooks the wide exceptions available in 18D.  We are very free to engage in race-based speech in Australia; as Richard Ackland asked ‘what is it that these people really want to say about race, colour, etc, that they are currently chilled from saying by the anti-free-speech RDA?’.

    The one celebrated case when someone wanted to say something about race, but failed to do so within the exceptions in section 18D, was Andrew Bolt’s.  If it was not for that case, and News Limited’s determined attack on 18C as a result, we would not be having this debate, and our racial vilification law would have continued doing its work.

    Senator Brandis invites us all to engage in racist speech.  When your child comes home from school dismissing ‘boongs’ as lazy and ‘towel-heads’ as terrorists, she can say that Senator Brandis told her that she has the right to be a bigot.  This type of ‘leadership’ is unworthy of an elected official, let alone Australia’s first law officer.

    Specifically, Brandis’s amendments to 18C invite anyone to say anything about anyone, under the guise of ‘public discussion’.  Perhaps it is the contemporaneous announcement of the reintroduction of knights and dames that makes me wonder whether Brandis’s idea of public discussion is still in the 19th century: a town hall meeting or a Hyde Park soap box.  These days, very little is not ‘public discussion’.  Media such as websites, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and tweets enable the public promotion of ideas and opinions as never before.

    The contemporary unregulated, unbounded world of public discussion gives the lie to those who disdain government regulation and would rely instead on the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a way of regulating speech.  The brave new world of public discussion is undiscerning in the relative prominence it gives to speech: in the absence of any guiding principles, vicious and hateful opinion is as ‘valid’ as that which is respectful and affirming.

    There is, therefore, no ‘exchange’ as there might be in a market, no mechanism for evaluating opinion; online, everything has a claim to credibility.  There is no ordered exchange of opinion.  Opportunities for debate are limited, most of what ‘said’ remains untested and unchallenged, and it is implausible to claim that opinions will thrive or fail on merit. 

    This unregulated space suits those with the capacity to exploit it, to make the loudest noise, and to dominate.  Politicians and news media corporations have that capacity, and 18C stands in their way.  They attack it because they can, and they (wilfully?) fail to see and respect the power they have. Without the quality of self-restraint, they are able to say that something should be done simply because it can be done. Without the quality of empathy, they are able to say that causing offence doesn’t matter. And without the quality of humility, they are able to decide what level of racial abuse people should live with.

    While politicians and news media corporations have the power to dominate public discussion, racial minorities do not.  Although the backlash against Brandis’s proposed amendment of 18C has been substantial, it comes largely from those who receive 18C’s protection – that is, from those who are on the receiving end of race-based conduct, particularly migrants and indigenous peoples.

    Our social minorities, who look to the government for protection in a majoritarian ethos, now find that their government promotes a right to oppress them.  In this perverse situation, it is vital that members of the majority stand against their colleagues, and stand by the state’s obligation to protect the vulnerable who are under its care.

    Simon Rice teaches law at the ANU. He is the Professor of Law, Director, Law Reform and Social Justice, ANU College of Law. He is also Chair of the ACT Law Reform Advisory Council. 

  • John Menadue. The new squatters on public land.

    More alienation of public space.

    In my blog yesterday, I referred to the alienation of public space in Barangaroo and proposed for the Sydney Botanic Gardens.  Today there are reports that Wentworth Park, which is Crown Land, will be developed as a billion dollar residential complex. In a letter to the SMH we are told how Wentworth Park was originally described as ‘the second most beautiful park in Sydney after the Botanic Gardens’. It had lakes, beautiful gardens and a cricket pitch. Unfortunately, it was then converted to a greyhound race track, but elements of the park were still preserved for community use. Even that limited community use is now threatened. It is another example of how our ‘public commons’ is alienated and eroded step by step.  John Menadue.

    Repost of yesterday’s blog

    In my blog of March 11, 2013, reposted below, I outlined the historic encroachment of private interests on our ‘public commons’ – the land and facilities we share as public citizens.

    This encroachment is continuing apace, and not just by the shooters in national parks.

    In Sydney, at present there are two glaring examples of how the new squatters are moving onto public land.

    The first is Barangaroo. Without due process and with political influence writ large, the public commons at Barangaroo has been dramatically reduced in favour of commercial interests. The original plan was to keep about half of the site, including the whole 1.4 km waterfront, as inalienable public land. That has been junked in favour of James Packer’s six-star casino to bring in ‘high rollers’. James Packer is all about gambling. What a tawdry business he offers us. He says he wants to bring in wealthy gamblers from Asia and elsewhere. Paul Keating supported James Packer in this enclosure of our commons. Out has gone the park at the southern end of the site and in its place we have 180,000 square metres of commercial space.

    The original architect of Barangaroo, Philip Thalis, put this invasion of our commons in the following way ‘The vibrant public space envisaged seven years ago has shrunk to become basically an enclave of privilege and exclusion’.

    The other Sydney example of squatter encroachment on public land involves the Sydney Botanic Gardens. For many years part of the gardens has been alienated for four months each year for opera and cinema. Wealthy patrons and wealthy sponsors have been the main beneficiaries. But this isn’t enough for the new squatters. The Botanic Gardens and the Domain Trust have released a master plan for the parks to be developed with cafes, an $80 million hotel and year-round concerts. Paul Keating has rightly called it a desecration of the hallowed grounds bequeathed by Governors Phillip and Macquarie.

    In both Barangaroo and the Botanic gardens, private greed is taking over our public commons and weak politicians are letting it happen. The Murdoch press once again remains mute when the public interest is at stake.

    Steadily and step by step our public commons is being eroded. It won’t be the last time the new squatters want to take over more of our public commons.

    Repost of ‘Shooters – the new squatters on public land’, March 13, 2013.

    In the 18th and 19th Century, wealthy and privileged landowners in England passed Enclosure Acts forcing serfs and the poor off common land which they had used  for centuries to supplement their meagre incomes. About 20% of land in England was enclosed, forcing the poor into squalor in the new industrial cities.

    We followed suit in Australia in the 19th Century with ‘squatters’, mainly from the upper echelons of colonial society, occupying large tracks of crown land to graze livestock. Over time, this pastoral occupation of the ‘commons’ and the dispossession of indigenous people was enshrined in law and enforced by the police. Many indigenous people were murdered while trying to protect their ‘commons’. Few squatters were prosecuted.

    History tells us that we need to be very careful about the powerful who want to take possession and erode our public ‘commons’. It happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, often without our knowledge or understanding of what is at stake.  And it is not just about getting shooters out of national parks or protecting waterfront land without public tender. Councils often carelessly allow commercial interests to encroach on public parks, botanic gardens and beaches. Clean air and water are also important parts of our public “commons” and must be protected against polluters.

    We owe a great debt to foresighted citizens and governments who in the past established public ‘commons’, like national parks, for the enjoyment of all. We need to be careful about the new squatters who want to erode our public ‘commons’.

    John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Using the military for political purposes

    In my blog of March 26 (below) ‘Using the military for political purposes’, I drew attention to three instances in which the Australian Defence Forces have been used, apparently willingly, to support the party-political aims of the government.

    That political support has now been stepped up several notches by the comments of the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders, Angus Campbell, on a government television advertisement.

    In a series of government advertisements on U-Tube, Angus Campbell, standing next to a sign ‘No way’ says ‘The message is simply, if you come to Australia illegally by boat there is no way you will ever make Australia home.’  Angus Campbell then adds ‘The Australian Government has introduced the toughest border protection measures ever … it is the policy and practice of the Australian Government to intercept any vessel that is seeking to illegally enter Australia and safely remove it beyond our waters.’

    In this government advertisement General Campbell goes far beyond operational responsibility for government policy. He has allowed himself, apparently willingly, to become an arm and an advocate for the government’s political policies.  John Menadue

    Repost follows.

    On March 20 guest blogger Susie Carleton drew attention to the blanket acceptance of accounts by our service people in treatment of asylum seekers despite the record, according to former Defence Minister Stephan Smith of 2000 incidents of mis- treatment within the military itself including sexual abuse.

    Last night’s 7.30 ABC program lent more credibility in my mind to the allegations against our service personnel in their treatment of asylum seekers.

    We need to examine carefully what our military is doing.

    In my blog of March 5 ‘The war on asylum seekers’, I drew attention to the misuse of the Australian military in Operation Sovereign Borders. That military style operation gives the impression that we are really being threatened and invaded and that our response to asylum seekers must be regarded as a military challenge. Operation Sovereign Borders also gives the government a threadbare excuse that the public is not entitled to be told what is really happening. ‘On water’ issues will not be discussed. The language is also about war. Tony Abbott told us that we are being invaded by boat people. Scott Morrison said that the government is ‘Using the full arsenal of measures’ to stop the boats. What should be a humanitarian issues backed by action by Customs and Immigration has become a war. Governments have used ‘the war on terrorism’ as an excuse for limiting our freedoms, ignoring our rights to information and exciting xenophobia. The same approach is now being made with the war on asylum seekers.

    Unfortunately, the Australian Defence Force is allowing itself to be drawn into this abuse of their real responsibility. They have allowed themselves to become part of a political cover-up in their involvement in Operation Sovereign Borders.

    But this misuse of the military by the government and the complicity of the military is not restricted to Operation Sovereign Borders. As reported in the Hobart Mercury of March 14, the Defence Chief David Hurley rebuked the Palmer United Party Senator-elect Jacqui Lambie. Jacqui Lambie, a ten-year military veteran, said ‘It’s clear from information that’s become public, and information received privately, that abuse, including sexual abuse in Australia’s Defence forces is an intractable problem’. She added that there was a ‘high level and poisonous culture of cover-up within Defence that has stopped abuse victims speaking out’. She was publicly rebuked by General Hurley in a letter in which he said that he was ‘alarmed’ by Ms Lambie’s use of emotive language to make accusations against senior military officers. He added ‘I encourage you in future to provide me an opportunity to address any matters of concern you may have rather than becoming aware of them through a media release. Ms Lambie reacted and accused General Hurley of using ‘patronising and condescending’ language. She said ‘For the head of Australia’s military, uninvited, to interfere with the public work of a democratically elected representative, attacks the very foundation of our system of democratic government’. General Hurley obviously thinks that ex-military people, particularly women, are fair game. The Minister for Defence has said nothing.

    Not to be outdone by this bullying and abuse by General Hurley, Tony Abbott decided that he would join in during the South Australian election campaign. A Liberal Party banner was displayed at a Liberal campaign event at an RAAF base at Edinburgh. When this politically partisan act occurred on a military base, with the inappropriate use of the military, Tony Abbott’s office said there was no problem and the Defence minister avoided the issue by saying that he was away.

    If the ADF continues to allow itself to be drawn into political partisanship as in Operation Sovereign Borders, the Tasmanian election and the South Australian election, Australia and the ADF will pay a heavy price. The ADF is a creation of the Australian government. It must act honourably and miscreants brought to account. It must never be part of a party-political operation. The ADF must never identify itself with the Liberal Party or any other party.

     

  • Caroline Coggins. The story of Easter: the love template.

    How often do we fall in love, the sort that turns us around, strips us and re-orientates us, shakes the foundations of what it is to relate and be with another?  Not very often, mostly we are too guarded.  But at times it happens, and I have come to take this as a call, our feelings leap forward and say follow me.

    A person I loved died this week.  He was an old man, though he did not feel old to me. I just loved him. He had been a training supervisor when I was becoming a psychotherapist, so I came to know him in that particular way.  This man stretched me.  He was shy and very private, but he knew the way the human heart worked, and what it needed to grow. Mostly he worked with children, and they are great teachers, open, and available to their needs.  This man taught me about my ‘duty of care’.   Sounds clinical, but it was far from that, it was his relationship with me that showed me what this means.  He mentored me into the depths of what another really needed of me, and then what I needed to do/grow within myself to get there.  This man knew how to keep an opening for the other.

    What does love, mentoring and passion have to do with the story of Jesus and Easter? Could they be the template for relationship, how love shapes us if we let it?   We are many things.  Parts of us do not move toward love, they resist and fear, but there is a part of us that leans toward the light.  We desire love and it is in love that we are again ‘little ones’, vulnerable and in the moment. In the story of Jesus we are shown how.

    Today, mostly, we are concerned with ourselves, interested in our psychology, health, security, and what will become of us.  We feel safe with certainty, and threatened by the unknown, by mystery, unsure of the idea of giving over to another.  Yet paradoxically we thirst to feel that we are known and loved by another.

    The story of Jesus walks in through the door that the thirst opens, touches us where we condemn ourselves, inviting our needy, desiring hearts into a passionate love response, which will shape us entirely.  Our needs and our stories are particular to us, and it is mostly how we understand others, but not only so, we also need to walk in the shoes of others, being stretched out of ourselves into the bigger family.

    God longs for us, and Jesus stirs us to an intimacy, a closeness, which cracks our self-absorbed protective shells and gentles us to pay attention.  The light can shine in.  We can be many things, shy, resistant, stunted in love, and this is what we learn, and these wounds he will carry for us. This, our smaller self, and often  the only picture we can form for ourselves, is transformed by love, the falling in love, being loved.  The possibilities expand.  He calls us and we are awakened, our heart quickens, he draws us, stirs our senses, excites our interest, and we find our desiring selves, our deepest desires.  The Sufi poet Rumi says ‘Your longing for me was my messenger’.

    Desire then is what St Ignatius uses in his spiritual exercises to invite the pilgrim into the discovery of God’s love.  It is our own story, but we walk beside this man Jesus, discovering ourselves in this relationship, finding what moves our heart, breaks our heart. It is a human story, nestled in the divine, and our story with our God.

    The power of the exercises is that rather than sealing off from what is happening inside of us, we use our feelings to grope forward, toward the light, walking with him, through the gospels, and inside our own imagining being, the being that is loved and desired by God.  In the weeks of the exercises we walk his entire life, being shaped and becoming aware of ourselves in this relationship. But here too, this is the small thing, the big thing, is what we will do, desire to do, for this great love we feel and which we are given.  There is a longing to get out of our own way.  We are given ‘duty of care’, such abundance of love it must be  shared.

    How blessed we are each year to have the ritual of Easter. From ashes we proceed to ashes, loved into life and loved into death that brings life, stretched into the mystery of all of this with Him, His way.

    Caroline Coggins works as a Psychotherapist.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Tony Abbott in Japan

    Tony Abbott has just completed his visit to Japan. The media has been full of  stories about the improvement particularly in agricultural exports from Australia to Japan. It should all be taken with a grain of salt. There have been some improvements particularly for our beef exports but the hype and spin does not obscure the fact that the so-called deal in Japan is only of marginal benefit.It is a third rate result. The best result would be a multilateral result. The second best result would be unilateral tariff reductions. Bilateral  Free Trade Agreements are third rate.

    In my blog of March 29, I pointed out that the proposed FTA with Japan was more about hype than substance. I pointed out how FTAs are regarded as sub-optimal; they divert trade from one partner to another rather than create new trade; FTAs invariably benefit the larger and stronger partner in any negotiation, e.g. USA, Japan and China; they increase the cost of doing business because of complex ‘rules of origin’; most importantly they divert time and energy of governments, ministers and officials, from the more important issues of multilateral negotiations which, for us, as a small to medium size country is more likely to serve our interest.

    The best way for Australia to secure freer trade is through multilateral negotiations rather than through hyped-up bilateral FTAs that are held up as political trophies when in fact they don’t achieve much of substance.

    It is significant that the Abbott Government has now called this new arrangement with Japan an ‘Economic Partnership Agreement’ (EPA) and not an FTA. This suggests that there is now at least some understanding by the government that this agreement is not very much about free trade.

    The business editor of the AFR, Alan Mitchell, yesterday put the problem of bilateral arrangements succinctly. ‘Both nations [Japan and Australia] deny their economies the bulk of the benefits of genuine trade reform whilst they spoon out market access to one trading partner after another in stupid, long drawn out negotiations.’

    In the short term we will get some advantages over other food exporters to Japan, but there is no doubt that other food exporters to Japan, and particularly the US, will seek similar or greater concessions from Japan. As a result our short-term benefits will be largely eroded.This will happen in two to three years when the Trans Pacific Partnership promoted by the US is expected to take effect. We have a  brief window of opportunity.

    The TPP negotiating group includesUS, Japan, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico and Vietnam.

    The President of the National Farmers’ Federation of Australia, Brent Finlay, said that the EPA had fallen short in several respects. At best it only marginally improves for dairying, sugar, grains, pork and rice.

    The Cattle Council President of Australia, Andrew Ogilvie, expressed disappointment ‘that substantial tariffs will still exist on Australian beef’. The tariff reductions on beef are useful but they will not be fully implemented for up to 18 yeas.

    There will be a 5% tariff reduction in Japanese autos exported to Australia, which should result in some reduction in the price of Japanese cars in Australia. But with the end of our own car manufacturing industry, it was only a matter of time before this 5% tariff was abolished on all car imports and not just from Japan.. We could do it unilaterally. It really is not a significant concession to Japan.

    The Abbott Government has criticised the Gillard and Rudd Governments for the delay in completing an FTA/EPA with Japan. That is not surprising in lieu of the fairly meagre benefits from the present negotiations. Shinzo Abe was probably anxious to collaborate with his conservative colleague, Tony Abbott, but our Prime Minister severely weakened Australia’s stand by flagging in advance how desperate he was to conclude an FTA.That is a strange way to conduct negotiations.

    The broad outline of the agreement with Japan will now need to be ‘lawyered’. There may yet be important details that will be revealed.

    Apart from the trading and economic discussions, Tony Abbott referred to a shared commitment by the two countries to ‘democracy, freedom and the rule of law’. He also said that the relationship was about ‘respect, it’s about values’. Tony Abbott indicated approval for Japanese Government’s plans to reinterpret the pacifist constitution of Japan. At least in the media reports there was also no mention of the issues that Shinzo Abe has been promoting which have inflamed attitudes in the Republic of Korea and China. There is no indication that Tony Abbott raised Shinzo Abe’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine, ‘comfort women’ and acknowledgement of the massacre of Chinese by the Japanese army.

    Time will tell whether this FTA/EPA with Japan is as unhelpful as the 2004 bilateral Trade Agreement that John Howard negotiated with the US and concluded despite the advice of officials that he should not sign. It turned out to be a dud.

    Tony Abbott is the Chair of the G20. He could use that position and influence to restart the DOHA round of multilateral trade negotiations that have been stalled for years. It is in multilateral trade negotiations where Australia’s interests are best served – not in a string of bilateral FTAs that have more hype than substance. They will not “turbo charge” our trade with Japan as out Trade Minister has suggested.

  • Ben Saul. Australia’s Guantanamo problem.

    Ben Saul has written an article for the New York Times about the imprisonment of 52 people in Australia for up to nearly five years without trial. Secret evidence has been presented against them. They have no prospect of release. 

    Read the full article from the New York Times by following the link below.

    Ben Saul is Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney.

    John Menadue

     

    http://sydney.edu.au/news/law/436.html?newscategoryid=64&newsstoryid=13274

  • John Menadue. Citizenship and shared experience.

    The recent decision by the NSW Government to evict pensioners and low-income tenants from the Rocks in Sydney highlighted for me the importance of mixed communities and shared experiences.

    We all benefit in society when we have shared experiences. We can then get to know other people’s aspirations and their problems. We invariably find that we have much more in common than we think. We benefit both as individuals and as a society.

    Why should only one part of society, the wealthy, enjoy harbour views? Why should a mixed community that has lived for so long in one area be destroyed with low-income tenants forced out whilst the wealthy join other wealthy to enjoy harbour views and the attractive lifestyle that goes with the Rocks.

    In shared experiences we are drawn in two ways. One inclination is to live in pleasant and attractive areas that are often composed of people like ourselves with the same incomes and even the same ethnic backgrounds. But we also know that we benefit from shared experiences with people who are different. Our most important shared and common experiences are in times of natural disaster – bushfires and floods which tear away social class. We are in the emergency together and we find great satisfaction in banding together. Many older Australians recall the common hardship of the Depression, the War and rationing. For Britishers, the bombings and air raid shelters brought people to a ‘common experience’. Despite the hardships and the danger, there was satisfaction in those common experiences. The fabric of society and trust in each other was strengthened.

    As Ian McAuley in ‘Dissent’, November 2012, has pointed out, the British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall wrote in 1949 about ‘common experience’ as an essential ingredient for good citizenship. This common experience is a richer notion than social inclusion. Unfortunately social exclusion by the wealthy is becoming as serious a problem as social exclusion of the poor.

    It is not just the Sydney Rocks that is being pulled apart. Our health and education institutions discourage the mixing of social groups and denying common experience.

    Ian McAuley points out that government subsidies to private health insurance discourages the well-off in the use of public hospitals. Because PHI, particularly for people on the high tables, is used almost entirely to fund treatment in private hospitals, government policy subsidises a form of social exclusion and discourages common experience. It also encourages many articulate people to opt out of support for public hospitals knowing that when they need hospitalisation, they can turn to private hospitals.

    The trend in the denial of common experience is even more obvious in education. In the 1950s, 75% of Australian children attended public schools. Most of the other 25% went to Catholic schools which had a similar social, if not religious, mix as public schools. Now only 65% of students attend public schools. This trend is even more pronounced in secondary schools where just over 60% of secondary school students are in public schools. This proportion is even lower in early grades of secondary school. And this trend away from common experience in public schools is accelerating despite the fact that there is no evidence that private education secures better outcomes. It will take many decades of Gonski to reverse the unfortunate and divisive trends that are occurring. Common experience in schools is being eroded.

    As more and more middle class and articulate parents opt out of public education, a tipping point will arise where it will be hard to ensure public support for public schools. That tipping point is approaching

    Just as the government subsidies to PHI has driven social exclusion in hospital use, so in education government funding is being skewed in favour of the privileged in private schools. The concept of common experience is being steadily eroded.

    We are also seeing this denial of common experience in our built environment. In my blog of November 28, 2013 “there goes the neighbourhood” I drew attention to the way that some communities are being sundered by the wealthy excluding themselves from common experience. They have private pools within minutes of superb public beaches, private entertainment systems, high walls,roller doors and CCT to keep themselves from a common experience with neighbours. Even when public transport is reasonably available, children get driven to school in private cars.

    It is claimed that these developments in our health and educational institutions and in our built environment is justified on the grounds of choice. But choice is often a one-way street available only to those with high incomes. What choice do the low income tenants in the Rocks have about where they are going to live?

    We all know that common experience in national disasters and volunteering brings a sense of togetherness, community and shared humanity. We must nurture institutions that promote sharing and common experience. The most critical is shared experience in schools and education.

    We need institutions and a built environment that cut through social class. That is the path to shared experiences.

    The more we turn our back on common experiences the more our citizenship and society is impoverished.

  • Kerry Murphy. To Kill a Mockingbird and 2014.

    Mark Twain is quoted as saying that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.  I was reminded of this when seeing the excellent production of To Kill a Mockingbird at the New Theatre in Newtown, Sydney last week.  Good literature manages to make us reflect on our own times, and challenges us to think about how we might act in difficult times.

    Harper Lee’s 1960 novel is well known and is a modern classic.  The seemingly simple story of young Scout and her brother Jem, and their widower lawyer father in 1935 Alabama still resonates with an Australian audience in 2014.

    The community attitudes on race we would think are unacceptable in 2014, however it was only a week ago that the Attorney-General told the Senate that there was a ‘right to be a bigot’.   A ‘rhyming Twanian’ theme would be the vilification of those arriving by boat and the increasingly harsh way they are treated, under both Labor and the Coalition.  In To Kill a Mockingbird we can feel for Scout’s father Atticus, the lawyer defending a black man on a charge of rape of a white woman.  Like young Jem, we ask how could the jury possibly find him guilty on that evidence.

    In the New Theatre production, the jury is the audience and we are challenged to face and reflect on our own fears and prejudices in 2014 Australia, just as Atticus challenged the jury in the 1935 story.  How do we come out of this challenge?

    Atticus tells Jem and Scout to ‘spend time in the skin or shoes of the other’ so they can understand that person. This is a challenge for us in 2014.  What if we spent time in the shoes of an Aboriginal who was discriminated against because of their race or colour, or an asylum seeker who was vilified because of how they arrived in Australia fleeing the feared persecution.   Would we so easily say there was a ‘right to be a bigot’ or that ‘illegals’ should be locked away in Pacific penal colonies?

    Lee’s 1960 story of a small town trial in 1935 Alabama resonated as much with the 1960s in the US as it does with Australia in 2014.  The play was well produced and a simple and effective set added to, rather than distracted from the story.  9 year old Teagan Croft stole the show in her confident and credible Scout.  Ably supported by 14 year old Hudson Musty as Jem and 12 year old  Kal Lewins as Dill.  Lynden Jones ably portrayed the genuinely good character of Atticus the lawyer, who had to explain to his children the bigotry of the town against his client just because of his colour.  As good as Lynden was, I still think of Gregory Peck in the 1962 film.

    Revisiting this timeless tale gives a chance to reflect on whose shoes we should stand in to understand them better.  It is easy to preach or pontificate about the inflationary vilification and appalling treatment of asylum seekers in Australia, but like Scout and Jem, I need to stand in the shoes of the others.   What makes people so prejudiced against asylum seekers?  Why does the Attorney-General think there is a right to be a bigot?  Understanding their position will help me better explain my position and views.  I just wish they were able to stand in the shoes of the other as well, and maybe their bigotry and fear would diminish.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in Immigration and Refugee Law.

    The play is at New Theatre until 19 April http://newtheatre.org.au/whats-on/season-2014/to-kill-a-mockingbird/

  • Walter Hamilton. The guts of a Free Trade Agreement with Japan.

    Dolphin-culling and free trade agreements represent opposite sides of the coin of the relationship between Australia and Japan. Both are currently in the news, with Sea Shepherd activists hounding the fishermen of Taiji (where the documentary ‘The Cove’ was filmed) and Australian cattle producers in Tokyo trying to break down the last obstacle to a bilateral FTA. More than that, the two issues encapsulate the divided response among many in the West to Japan as a backward and insular nation, on the one hand, and a modern, global partner on the other.

    Years ago I visited the island of Iki, off the coast from Nagasaki in western Japan, to report on the practice of ‘drive hunting’ of dolphins, the same culling method used by fishermen at Taiji to reduce the natural competition for a diminishing fish stock. The founder of Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson, had been in town a fortnight before and got himself deported for cutting nets strung across a cove in Iki, releasing scores of dolphins. The irony was that in the very act of sabotage Watson was caught in a storm and became stranded on an islet from where he had to be rescued by local fishermen (a fact omitted from the fanciful account of this episode posted on the organisation’s website.)

    Interested to find out how others living on the island regarded the dolphin killing, I visited a farmer working his small holding a few kilometres from the coast. ‘Oh, those fishermen down there,’ he told me, ‘they’re an uncouth lot. They give the place a bad name.’

    I was taken aback to find such a sharp divergence of interest, on this tiny island, between fisherman and farmer. I then realized the true importance of factionalism, based on occupation and geography, particularly in rural Japan. Australia’s FTA negotiators, the latest in a long line of officials who have tried for half a century to eliminate tariffs on beef and dairy imports, will be aware of these fissures in the Japanese bargaining position; the fissure, for instance, between the farm lobby and the consumer lobby, or the one separating domestic from international economic priorities.

    The ‘enlightened’ farmer I met proudly showed me his chief productive asset: one Wagyu steer penned in his front yard, being pampered and premium-fed in readiness for the abattoir. Yes, you read that correctly, a herd of one. This and a few other odds and ends, plus a huge government subsidy, kept him in reasonable comfort. He was (and I think he sensed it to a degree) a parody of modern farming. It reminds me of another occasion accompanying an Australian delegation, led by the then Primary Industries Minister John Kerin, in the mid-1980s. Australia at the time was in the grip of a terrible drought, graziers were at their wits end, and yet they could not sell into the Japanese market at fair prices. I remember going with them to a farm near Nagoya and trudging past a veritable showroom of brand-new farm machinery bought with cheap loans from a highly protected rural bank. The Australians could only shake their heads in bitter disbelief.

    So the Japanese farmer and fisherman, for all their differences in lifestyle, share one vital, historic conviction: that, whatever it takes, whatever the international pressure and criticism, their survival is paramount to the national interest. Anyone covering Japanese affairs will tell you that the Ministry of Agriculture has always outranked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs around the Cabinet table. While some progress has been made as a result of the decades of lobbying to gain improved access to the Japanese market for farm goods, every yard conceded has been hard fought. Cracks in the façade often seem to open up at moments during negotiations only to close again as a result of sectional pressure. I’ve heard Japanese Agriculture Ministers explain, in all earnestness, that their countrymen, even if they were given the choice, could not eat more imported beef––because, wait for it, Japanese intestines were different from Westerners’ intestines. Try arguing against that!

    Without major concessions on agricultural imports, no FTA with Japan would be worth its name. Political conditions, however, are as favourable now as they’ve ever been for a genuine agreement, mainly because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, riding a large parliamentary majority, does not need the farm vote as much as it did 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Global trade liberalisation is also an important lever in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s declared policy of economic deregulation (the last ‘arrow’ of ‘Abenomics’). Perhaps the time has come. But as the Sea Shepherd boys and girls will tell you, still prowling the headlands of Taiji looking for blood in the water, rugged self-reliance and a sense of entitlement to a traditional way of life remain formidable obstacles to change in Japan. And the Sea Shepherd crew should know all about that frame of mind.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC between 1979 and 1996 for a total of eleven years.

  • Walter Hamilton. Credulity and formalism: Abbott’s twin challenges in Japan.

    A prominent Japanese historian once likened the psychology of wartime Japan to a ‘madhouse’ in which the public became capable of believing anything. Another who lived through those years noted how formalism––keeping up appearances long after a cause has ceased to have any meaning––suited a nation unable to change with the times. Credulity and formalism remain powerful elements in Japanese culture, regardless of the fact that the population is highly educated and, these days, formal barriers to the free flow of information are low. Recently we have witnessed extraordinary examples of this phenomenon. As Tony Abbott prepares for his first official visit to that country as prime minister next month, it is worth reflecting on the Japanese state of mind.

    The instinct driving an elderly mother to hand over her life savings on the strength of a telephone call might appear to have little to do with international affairs, and yet her credulity fits within the larger picture. Japanese call them ‘ore, ore’ (‘it’s me, it’s me’) scams, in which a con artist pretending over the phone to be a relative of the elderly victim pleads distress and solicits money. Despite public warnings and police campaigns, this and similar forms of extortion netted criminals an estimated 12.8 billion yen ($140 million) in 2012. Though it might be hard to prove the Japanese are the most credulous people on earth, evidence points to a strong predisposition to believe what they are told.

    Take, for example, the supposedly deaf composer described as Japan’s ‘new Beethoven’ and given the imprimatur of the national broadcaster, NHK, in a documentary broadcast last year entitled Melody of the Soul. The man was neither deaf nor did he compose the works for which he was feted (they were written by somebody else). The journalists and many others who dealt with him had grounds aplenty to doubt his story, but nobody dared challenge the myth. It wasn’t until the real composer, fed up with his paltry reward, threatened to blow the whistle that the truth was revealed last month.

    This episode was followed soon after by another––in the field of science. The story initially presented to the public again proved irresistible: an attractive, 30-year-old female biologist had led a team of researchers to discover a way to create stem cells, opening a simple and ethical way to the cure of all sorts of ailments. Her youth, her sex, and the fact that she worked at a comparatively unknown (to the lay observer) institution added glamour to what was hailed as a far-reaching discovery. National pride oozed from the saturation media coverage. When it became known that, during her experiments, the superstar scientist wore a Japanese cooking apron, or kappogi, in preference to a lab coat, sales of the traditional garment skyrocketed. She might be a modern girl, but her heart was in the right place.

    The stem-cell heroine is now in virtual hiding. The research papers she co-authored have been called into question on several grounds, prompting an inquiry. Though the mistakes uncovered so far have not been branded deliberate deceptions, clearly the public had been too ready to believe in miracles. As the backlash builds, there is a tendency to vilify (‘immature, sloppy’ research, her boss now calls it) what was previously adored.

    Where Tony Abbott comes into the discussion is not, of course, in relation to the specifics of these episodes, but rather what they might indicate about the psychology of present-day Japan. There seems to be a strong, pent-up craving for miracles: redemption miracles, artistic miracles, medical miracles and, in the shape of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, economic and political miracles. It would be dangerous for Abbott, and Australia, to indulge in similar wishful thinking about the bilateral relationship. Japan is not out of the woods, economically, and relations with its nearest neighbours, currently as bad as they have ever been since the war, show little sign of improving. To ignore, play down or set aside these major conditioning factors in our two-way relationship would pander to the Japanese weakness for credulity and formalism.

    What Japan needs right now is a cold shower: a reality check, a return to earth. Tokyo’s recent decision not to review the 1993 government apology on wartime ‘comfort women’ might, at first glance, appear to be the start of a healthy sobering up. But Abe’s explanation, that ‘we must be humble regarding history’, is not necessarily what it seems. Given the government’s direct hand in textbook screening, just one example of its current ideological offensive, his further comment that ‘issues regarding history should not be politicised or made diplomatic issues’ is hardly ingenuous or helpful. If Abbott ever intended broaching the issue that lies at the heart of Japan’s poisonous relations with China and South Korea (and recent media reports suggest he does not), he has been warned off even before he gets to Tokyo.

    History and diplomacy cannot be separated on a whim, no matter how much certain politicians might find it convenient to do so. The formalism of humility without candour and sincerity, the credulity of a diplomacy built upon a refusal to fully face up to the past: these are manifestations of the same blind spot exploited by conmen, ‘deaf geniuses’ and headline-grabbing scientists. Tony Abbott needs to go to Japan with his eyes wide open and not take the line of least resistance to Abe’s unsustainable worldview.

     

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for eleven years.

  • John Menadue. Pity our diplomats.

    It is not often that our diplomats in foreign posts receive or need our sympathy in the work they do. But just think of their present plight in defending the Australian Government’s behaviour in foreign policy. What we are seeing across so many countries is alarming. With many key countries, we are skating on very thin ice – and the ice will probably crack fairly soon.

    Just consider what is happening.

    In our region for decades, opinion leaders and almost anyone else who knew anything about Australia scratched their heads when they realised that we had a foreign head of state. Invariably they asked themselves and others, how can this be in a country like Australia that sees its future as an independent nation in the Asian region? This cultural cringe has worsened in the last few days. We are going to have knights and dames.  How do our diplomats in the region explain this colonial nostalgia which is taking us back down a time-warp to Menzies of the 1950s? We are really making a laughing stock of ourselves. We give lip-service to the Asian Century. But knights and dames belong to the 19th Century.

    The Abbott Government has cut overseas development aid by over $100 million this year and with further cuts to come. The poor of our region will be punished so that the government can fund parental leave for the wealthy. How do our diplomats explain this?

    We ask Cambodia, one of the poorest countries in the world, to take asylum seekers that we have a duty to protect and support. Cambodia is a member of ASEAN. The other members of ASEAN must be nonplussed.

    We have offended the President of Indonesia in the clumsy handling of telephone tapping of his office. We add to this insult by breaching Indonesian sovereignty almost at will with our naval vessels and turn backs of asylum seekers. Scott Morrison tramples not only over the rights of asylum seekers, but also has been extremely damaging in his visits to Indonesia. On very reliable advice, I know that in Jakarta he is regarded as quite garrulous and aggressive. He shoes the same approach in Australia.  He is causing great damage. He is determined to stop the boats at any cost, including our relations with Indonesia.

    The Australian Government tapped the telephones of East Timorese ministers and officials who were engaged in delicate negotiations with the Australian Government on the gas field between Australia and East Timor. The Director of ASIO, who sanctioned the tapping of the telephones in the first place when he was head of ASIS, then persuaded George Brandis to issue orders for raids on the premises of a witness and the Counsel for the East Timorese Government before the International Court. I am glad I am not a diplomat in Dili to try to explain this.

    In Opposition, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison attacked the human rights record of Malaysia, and particularly ‘caning’. It caused serious damage in our relations with Malaysia.  It was wilfully and deliberately done because the Coalition did not want the Labor Government to be successful in stopping the boats. Under the rubric of concern for human rights, the Coalition sided with the Greens in bashing Malaysia.

    Our relations with China have been pungently described by a frequent visitor to China as ‘f… ed’. Tony Abbott started the damage by describing Japan as Australia’s best friend in Asia. Given the long-term hostility between Japan and China it was not surprising that China was offended. Julie Bishop then added to the insult by her comments in Washington. Quite unnecessarily we sided with the Japanese against China over the disputed islands in the East China Sea. When Julie Bishop visited Beijing in December last year she was publicly chided by her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. He accused Australia of ‘jeopardising bilateral mutual trust’. He added ‘the entire Chinese society and the general public are deeply dissatisfied’. Peter Rowe, our top diplomat for North Asia, told a Senate Committee a few weeks ago that ‘I have never in 30 years encountered such rudeness’. The Chinese are clearly very angry. Our diplomats in Beijing would be wise to keep their heads down. Not surprisingly they are having difficulty arranging Tony Abbott’s visit

    But wait, there is more. Last month in an exclusive in the SMH on February 24, Bianca Hall and David Wroe reported that ‘Diplomats preparing for the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva have expressed concern that Australia is working to actively undermine a push for an international enquiry into human rights abuses in Sri Lanka because of the [Australian] Government’s eagerness to cooperate with that country’s leaders on asylum seekers’. It was reported that the US and UK officials had ‘a deep concern’ about Australia’s position.

    If this serial blundering continues, we will suffer real pain. It is likely that China and Indonesia could be the ones to inflict that pain.

    Spare a thought for the diplomats who have to try and repair the damage.

     

  • Louise Newman. Detention of children seeking asylum in Australia.

    Australia has a unique approach to the ‘problem‘of asylum seekers arriving by boat in an ‘unauthorised’ fashion – exportation. Under current policy all unauthorised arrivals are processed as rapidly as possible on Christmas Island and then transferred to Nauru or Manus who are supported by Australia to assess refugee claims, house and ultimately resettle those found to be refugees. Or so the story goes. Much recent discussion, particularly since the attacks on asylum seekers on Manus allegedly by those in protective roles, has pointed to the breakdown of this system with increasing numbers remaining on Christmas Island and lack of any processing of claims or moves to resettlement. There is even discussion about the commitment of PNG to the resettlement process and they themselves have recently stated that it will not be possible to resettle in PNG those already there. The politics is complex and with a certain air of separation on the side of the Australian Government which is wedded to the concept of off shore processing as part of a framework of deterrence. The focus on deterrence of any arrivals on the mainland has led to extreme measures such as towing or pushing boats away and setting asylum seekers in the opposite direction in life boats where they become someone else’s problem on landing. The consequence or outcome is seen as the sole factor driving policy and little account is taken of the means. It is in this context that vulnerable groups such as children and unaccompanied minors and the mentally ill are caught in a particularly unpleasant political drama.

    As this is played out on the high seas we hear little discussion of Australia’s position as a voluntary signatory to the UN Convention on refugees and our responsibilities. We do not hear much discussing of the regional issues and need to support neighbours who bear most of the burden of supporting asylum seekers with minimal support. We do not provide leadership in the construction of a regional protective frame work despite this being raised by the Government appointed expert group looking at a system of response to the needs of asylum seekers and displaced persons. The ‘problem ‘ of displaced persons continues to grow as Australia’s response shrinks  – to the point where we now accept no asylum seekers coming by boat and will never resettle these arrivals on the mainland.

    In the middle of this debate the plight of the asylum seekers is often forgotten or trivialised. Many find stories of persecution and trauma ‘distasteful ‘and Government prefers to dismiss many as ‘economic refugees’ with the implicit judgment that they are unworthy. The system does not value seeking a safe life for children or fleeing ongoing persecution as worthwhile goals. The notion of threat from asylum seekers continues to be used as a political tool. The community has been caught in this escalating series of political moves aimed at limiting discussion of the broader issues and escalating fear and xenophobia. The language of “sovereign borders” and approaches veiled in secrecy as we wage a war on people smugglers does little to help us think in a rational way about Australasia role in supporting the worlds dispossessed or being a leader in our region. Both major political parties brought in reductionist approaches and prided themselves on harshness and firmness in the name of a greater good.

    The current situation emerges from a history of harsh approaches including arbitrary and mandatory detention of all unauthorised arrivals including infants, children and the mentally ill. In the days of Baxter and Woomera detention centres in remote locations a considerable amount of research and clinical evaluation documented the damage of indefinite detention on mental health and the deterioration of asylum seekers capacity to tolerate the situation. Helplessness, depression and despair took their toll as the community witnessed mass despair, self harm and protest. Children witnessed violence and behavioural breakdown and saw the deterioration of their parents. The damage was significant and well described in the HREOC report of 2005 which recommended that children should only ever be detained as a matter of last resort. Following this and with the support of all major medical and health groups, children and families were moved in to community settings with seemingly greater awareness of their needs.

    The past 5 or so years has seen a reversal of that position as successive Governments saw the need to maintain a politics of exclusion and to appeal to those sections of the community with deep seated anxiety about Australian security in a changing world. Detention of the vulnerable has continued and no exceptions are made on the grounds of trauma exposure, age, mental disorder or physical condition. Government has exported the most vulnerable to situation where health and mental health services are  minimal and with no certainly about the future has essentially recreated the conditions of over a decade ago where the detention centres became the breeding ground of mental disorders and breakdown. Recent protest, violence and self-harm are entirely predictable in these circumstances and should therefore be preventable.

    The detention of children and other vulnerable groups in these circumstances is a great shame and belittles us all. Those of us in the mental health sector need to speak out about any policy which damages the mental health and development of children and others and help to develop a higher level of discussion across the community about these important issues, Whilst Government may prefer to remain silent on its actions and their morality, we cannot.

     

    Louise Newman is the Professor of Developmental Psychiatry and Director of the Monash University Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Phycology.

  • David Isaacs. Impacts of detention on children.

    I am a paediatrician. I specialise in paediatric infectious diseases but also work as a general paediatrician. For the last 10 years, I and my colleagues have run a Refugee Clinic at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, where we assess child asylum seekers and refugees. The initial aim of this clinic was to screen children for treatable infectious diseases like tuberculosis and malaria and for other non-infectious conditions like rickets. However, the whole nature of the assessment has changed of late.

    Over the ten years, we have seen a very large number of children who have been in detention centres. It has become increasingly apparent that many of the children we see are suffering from post-traumatic stress and this number has risen steadily so that currently more than half of all the asylum seeker children we see are suffering from post-traumatic stress. This may be because we are increasingly aware of post-traumatic stress and ask more searching questions, but often a history of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress is easy to obtain. Young children have nightmares and sleep disturbance including sleep-walking. They are fearful and cling to their parents. They may start wetting their beds or pooing their pants. They may have problem behaviours, such as being defiant, angry or irritable. They may have somatic symptoms such as head-aches or abdominal pain. Older children may self-harm.

    Many of these children were exposed to traumas in their countries of origin and undertook perilous journeys, which clearly contribute to their stress. However, the trauma of being in detention centres without knowledge of when they will be released clearly adds to the stress and compounds the problem. Children are particularly vulnerable if their parents are struggling to cope with the trauma.

    We are able to refer our most severely affected children to a dedicated psychologist working in the Department of Psychological Medicine in our hospital. The NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and

    Trauma Survivors STARTTS is a useful resource for adults and children with post-traumatic stress.

    Impact of length of detention on children

    Unequivocally, we find that the longer a family is in detention, the greater the stress on the child and on their parents. Mounting parental stress in turn increases the stress on children.

    Measures to ensure the safety of children

    Although traumatised children in detention are referred to specialist mental health staff occasionally, this is the exception rather than the rule. Children in detention who are suffering from post-traumatic stress need to be seen by a paediatrician to see if they need specialist mental health assessment.

    Education, recreation, maternal and infant health services

    Australia is a co-signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which states that all children have the right to be provided with a safe environment and with adequate health-care and education. We have an obligation to provide these to children under our care, whether they are citizens, permanent residents, refugees or asylum seekers. This includes asylum seeker children on Manus Island or Nauru. Australia cannot abdicate its responsibility to asylum seeker children by preventing them reaching the mainland.

    The separation of families across detention facilities in Australia

    Separation of families is fortunately uncommon, but when it does occur it can have a disastrous effect on children’s mental health.

    The guardianship of unaccompanied children in detention in Australia

    Unaccompanied minors have often left their entire family behind and are in urgent need of being able to contact them and to stay in contact. Closed detention is particularly inappropriate for these highly vulnerable children.  There is a clear conflict of interest in having the same person who is detaining the child as the person who is legally responsible for their welfare (i.e. the Minister).  The role of advocate for the child has to be independent of judicial decisions about the child’s fate.

    Assessments conducted prior to transferring children to be detained in ‘regional processing countries’

    Children in offshore detention should have appropriate screening tests and catch-up vaccinations and be adequately protected against malaria.

    Progress made during the last 10 years

    There has been only minor progress in the last 10 years. It was acknowledged by the previous Government that children should not be in detention at all. The number of children in community detention has grown slowly but steadily. According to DIAC, however, in September 2013 there were still over 1000 children in immigration detention facilities and alternative places of detention (not community detention). There are no current figures available on the number of children in immigration detention or their whereabouts. This is disturbing. We need more transparency. No child should be detained unnecessarily in a detention centre.

    Conclusions

    Australia has a duty of care to asylum seekers under International Law, which includes protecting them. Delaying decisions about their fate and imprisoning asylum seekers and their children in detention centres is a dereliction of that duty of care. Whether or not the asylum seekers are eventually accepted as refugees, it is counter-productive and cruel to increase their mental health problems by inappropriately draconian measures such as detention.

    Professor David Isaacs is a Consultant pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead and Clinical Professor in Paediatric Infectious Disease, University of Sydney

     

     

  • Mark Isaacs. Deterring boat arrivals!

    Over the past decades of asylum seeker policy in Australia we have heard many justifications for a strict deterrence policy. Border protection, save lives at sea, ‘no advantage’ for queue jumpers, smash the people smugglers’ business model, and, of course, ‘we decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

    At the same time, public debate fostered by mainstream media and by Australian politicians continually refers to asylum seekers by terms such as ‘illegals’ and ‘queue jumpers’, terms that we must continually reject as they have no legitimacy in Australian or international law and aren’t representative of the global view of asylum seekers. Those who control the public discourse have created a confused and purposefully misleading national discussion that shadows the truth and promotes anti-asylum seeker sentiment.

    This was recently made clear to me with the recent publication of my novel, The Undesirables, and the subsequent media space I have had the privilege to occupy. I was faced with a multitude of different arguments that rarely aligned but all came from a similar source, propaganda. The main issue most journalists wanted me to address was the idea that a deterrence policy does stop asylum seekers getting on boats to come to Australia, and hence, the government is saving lives. It seems that when a person speaks out on humanitarian grounds, with the knowledge and conviction to say that these people aren’t illegals, terrorists, threats to our security, the debate focuses on ‘saving lives at sea’.

    First and foremost, I don’t believe that this policy is about saving lives. If this policy is about saving lives at sea, and not the border protection threats Scott Morrison cites in his press releases, why aren’t we championing this policy to the world as a humanitarian achievement? Why is the policy so heavily criticised by international organisations such as UNHCR and Amnesty International? Why has the Australian government banned Australian media from entering the camps? Why are we not allowed to know how many boats the government has turned back to Indonesia?

    Let’s say that this policy does stop asylum seekers taking boats to Australia. This doesn’t necessarily save lives and doesn’t solve any global issues with asylum seekers; it merely shifts our responsibility for protecting asylum seekers, a responsibility assumed by signing the United Nations Refugee Convention, to another part of the world. It means those asylum seekers originally facing persecution now face a very bleak situation in Indonesia, a country that has no such obligations to processing refugees. Asylum seekers will still need to flee persecution and will still need the help of people smugglers to facilitate their escape because there are few ‘correct channels’ of migration, if any, available to them. I asked the men I worked with in Nauru why they didn’t come to Australia by the ‘correct channels’. Such a question was an insult in the camp.

    ‘You show me the Australian embassy in Afghanistan. You see if a Hazara man can go there without being shot. If you go to the Australian embassy they ask you why you want to leave. If you say you have a problem, they say it is not enough. Many people have tried. We cannot go to our government and ask for visas. We are not even allowed to study in Afghanistan. How do I apply for a visa to Australia when my government wants to kill me? If you want to go to the United Nations office in Quetta, Pakistan, it is in a dangerous area. People recognise Hazara faces and they target them easily. If you go there, you have to stay for a long time and it is dangerous. Maybe you will be targeted. You think we would leave our homes if we didn’t have to? You think I’d leave my family if I didn’t have to?’

    The reality of deterrence is indefinite detention: incarcerated for unlimited time periods with no idea of when you can leave. Every day feels the same, no progress, no change; just waiting. The reality of deterrence is an illogical processing system that purposefully avoids giving people answers because judging by statistics 90% of these people will be approved as refugees. In my time in Nauru I witnessed self-harm, hunger strikes, thirst strikes, psychosis, and the ultimate loss of hope, suicide attempts. Saving lives at sea by ruining lives. Countless times I heard Nauru described by asylum seekers of all ethnicities as hell. If these people could return to their home countries, they would.

    I wrote ‘The Undesirables’ for many reasons, one of which was to show the Australian people what the reality of offshore detention centres is. If the Australian people are okay with placing people in such conditions in an attempt to shift our responsibilities for protecting the world’s most vulnerable then so be it, but better they make an informed decision than hide behind the falsities and mistruths peddled by both sides of politics and claim ignorance due to this veil of secrecy that has been placed over both Manus Island and Nauru.

    Mark Isaacs

    Author of The Undesirables

    http://www.bookworld.com.au/book/the-undesirables-inside-nauru/47134434/

    https://www.facebook.com/isaacsmark1

    http://markjisaacs.com/