John Menadue

  • ARJA KESKI-NUMMI. Peter Dutton should know better – rather than demonise refugees we should stand tall and proud of what we have achieved over the past 70 years.

    The problem with refugees and asylum seekers is that they are not us – so it is OK to demonise them. Dutton is not dog whistling when he puts people into boxes describing them as “these people”, asserts that they are barely literate or numerate in their own languages, can’t speak English and at the same time says they would take Australian jobs and at the same time assert that they will languish on the dole and Medicare! You can’t have it both ways Mr. Dutton. (more…)

  • CAROLINE RYAN. Women deacons or women cardinals?

    While I welcome anything authentic that promotes the capacity of women to be truly influential in the church, I am not really keen on the diaconate idea of female deacons. Essentially this is because I think it is unnecessary. That is to say, if the theology of the laity was allowed to mature, the diaconal ministry could be effectively offered by lay people – men and women. (more…)

  • Brexit and possible consequences.

    In the London Review of Books, Ferdinand Mount, describes the gaggle of opponents of the EU and the possible consequences if the UK votes to brexit (exit from the EU).

    He highlights some of the risks:  a risk of recession or at worst a slump; capital flight; impact on employment; a rumpus in Scotland and knock-on effect on the morale of the rump EU.

    For full article, see link:

    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n10/ferdinand-mount/nigels-against-the-world

  • IAN MARSH. Our political system is in gridlock.

    Longer term policy making in Australia.

    Longer term policy making in Australia is in a parlous state. The scale and significance of this problem is totally unrecognised. For example, since 1996 almost no contested measure that required legislative approval has past the Australian parliament. Change to the Senate voting system was one – but it is hardly likely to weaken the influence of minor parties. The GST was another. As a result John Howard nearly lost the 1998 election. (more…)

  • TONY DOHERTY. Women deacons.

    Three feet of ice, the Chinese say, are not frozen in one day.
    Nor does it thaw in one year.

    Large institutions are famous for sometimes moving with all of the speed of an inert glacier. The ancient institution of the Vatican is no exception to this rule. (more…)

  • JAMES MORLEY. The idea that conservatives are better economic managers simply does not stand up.

    Conventional wisdom holds that conservative politicians are more prudent stewards of the economy. These politicians are often happy to reinforce this view by citing their business acumen and denigrating the experience – or lack thereof – of their opponents.

    Think of Mitt Romney as multi-millionaire businessman versus Barack Obama, former community leader. Donald Trump also highlights his business “experience”, although his track record suggests he’s done far worse at managing his father’s wealth than a monkey throwing darts at The Wall Street Journal.

    In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has positioned himself as a successful manager of economic transition in advance of the next election.

    But what if we were to take the business metaphor seriously and hold politicians to account with a performance review in terms of “measurable outcomes”? Would there actually be any evidence for the view that conservatives are better managers of the economy?

    KPIs for politicians

    The key performance indicators (KPIs) in this context are economic growth and, possibly, inflation. And you might think it obvious that conservatives outperform their progressive counterparts given their penchant for deregulation and tax cuts. Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” after Jimmy Carter’s era of “stagflation” would seem to settle the case.

    Or perhaps the Reagan/Carter example is too carefully selected and the actual role of politicians in guiding the fortunes of the economy is far less significant than they tend to claim. That would have been my guess before looking at the data.

    However, in a new paper, Princeton professors Alan Blinder and Mark Watson have actually looked at the data and they find a striking difference in the performance of the US economy under Democratic and Republican presidents. And the Democrats perform much better than their conservative counterparts.

    Since the second world war, average annualised growth of US real GDP has been 4.33% for Democratic presidents and only 2.54% for Republican presidents. The difference is statistically significant and robust. Inflation has also been lower under Democrats, although the difference is not significant.

    Now, you are probably thinking of a lot of possible explanations for this finding that don’t necessarily imply conservatives are worse managers of the economy. But Blinder and Watson have probably thought of even more possibilities and have addressed them thoroughly in their paper.

    In terms of the KPI analogy, the first objection might be that the executive powers of the US president are more constrained by legislative checks and balances of Congress than a CEO is by a board of directors or shareholders, let alone a prime minister at the head of a loyal party. This is certainly plausible.

    But it turns out that there is no relationship between congressional control and economic growth. Average growth was highest when Democrats controlled both houses at 3.47%, but the difference with growth when Republicans controlled both houses at 3.35% is small and insignificant.

    So, perhaps, US presidents can be held accountable for what happened under their watch.

    Measuring success

    Now you might ask, who really cares about the real GDP? Probably only a few macroeconomists like myself, right?

    But real GDP growth turns out to be correlated with a lot of other stuff that people do care about.

    For example, and probably not surprisingly, the unemployment rate fell under Democrats and rose under Republicans.

    Perhaps more surprisingly, labour productivity and real wages grew faster under Democrats than Republicans, although the statistical significance is mixed.

    Definitely more surprisingly, fiscal conditions in terms of structural budget deficits were worse under Republicans than Democrats, although not significantly so.

    Completely surprisingly, corporate profits (as a share of total income) were significantly higher under Democrats than Republicans. In the words of Blinder and Watson, “Though business votes Republican, it prospers more under Democrats.”

    So, however one sets the KPIs, the Democratic presidents come out on top.

    The secret of failure?

    Why did conservatives do worse? This is the tricky question that Blinder and Watson only partially answer.

    Republicans were in the White House for 41 of the 49 quarters since the second world war in which the US economy was classified as being in recession by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

    So maybe Republican presidents just had to deal with the hangover from the profligate Keynesian policies of their Democratic predecessors.

    But, again, there is no support for this in terms of any indicators of fiscal (or monetary) policy. Meanwhile, Republican presidents actually tended to benefit from more momentum in the economy at the start of their terms.

    Blinder and Watson find that Democratic presidents mostly had the benefit of more benign oil shocks and international economic conditions, which were arguably beyond their direct control.

    In fact, the only Keynesian story that has traction in the data is the fact that consumer confidence was higher when Democrats were elected (perhaps “Happy Days Are Here Again” after all). But, as Blinder and Watson acknowledge, sorting out causality from correlation is particularly difficult with measures of confidence.

    It’s also the politician, stupid

    It has long been thought that economic conditions have a major influence on electoral outcomes. Yet it seems the electoral outcomes can also influence economic conditions, at least with US presidents.

    Looking at the Australian context, the difference in average real GDP growth across Liberal and Labor governments is not statistically significant, although the Liberals’ average has been somewhat higher at 3.58% compared to 3.18% for Labor since 1959 when quarterly data became available.

    But a lack of significance means this could reflect just a few outliers rather than a systematic pattern. Notably, the comparison is even closer since 2008, with 2.43% for Labor in the face of the Global Financial Crisis versus 2.60% for the Liberals at the end of the mining boom.

    No matter how one cuts the data, conservative politicians simply don’t perform so much better than their opponents as they would have us believe. At the same time, the reasons for their left-wing counterparts’ economic successes cannot be easily tied to better policies. Instead, it could simply be a “feelgood factor” that, alas, few of the current US presidential contenders seem to engender.

    As for Turnbull, he might do best to focus less on his economic management skills and more on promoting confidence – or perhaps even chasing rainbows (coincidentally the name of the musical that first featured “Happy Days Are Here Again”).

    (more…)

  • EVAN WILLIAMS. Who do you trust to speak plain English?

    “Who do you trust to keep the economy strong and protect family living standards?   Who do you trust to keep interest rates low? Who do you trust in the fight against international terrorism?”

    Familiar words? Malcolm Turnbull’s opening pitch for the July 2 election? Actually, no. These were John Howard’s words, launching his campaign against the hapless Mark Latham in 2004. By my count, Howard used the mantra “Who do you trust?” more than a dozen times. (An old-fashioned pedant like me might have asked: Whom do you trust to use good English grammar? But let’s not quibble over trifles.) (more…)

  • National Foundation for Australian Women. Budget 2016-17: A gender lens.

    The National Foundation for Australian Women has prepared an analysis of the Budget 2016-17 with what it calls a ‘gender lens’. An executive summary of this analysis follows. A link to the full document can be found on ‘the budget’ button: www.nfaw.org.  

    Budget 2016-17 fails to bring Australian women into the centre of the economy and pushes many further into poverty. Cuts to overseas aid hurt vulnerable women in our region.

    The budget is far from fair, with just a touch of the white picket fence. It provides tax breaks for the wealthy, while low to middle income families are hit by ‘zombie’ savings from the Abbott-Hockey horror budgets. It is lacking in investments in education and training reforms which might drive innovation and jobs. (more…)

  • Bruce Wearne. Political questions that can’t be answered by our publicly funded public relations firms.

    Last week, four days before the election was called, I received a “pre-election” letter from my “Parliamentary representative”. It began with the following disclaimer:

    Dear Fellow Corangamite Resident: Soon there will be another election and I write to apologise for the fact that your letter boxes will be swamped with election material. However, it will be an opportunity for you to choose your representative – and yes, I will  be standing and asking for your vote.

    The sitting member obviously thinks we know what electioneering is all about. For the past two elections she, or rather her campaign “team”, have swamped the electorate’s letter-boxes with what they say is “election material”. Her advisors may recall that two elections ago, when she narrowly lost, the reigning opinion across the electorate was that had she not swamped our letter-boxes she would have probably got across the line.

    We might now hope, having used the one-age letter to briefly tell us what she has done for us, and what she plans to do, that this modest communication is the summation of her letter boxing campaign. We will wait and see. We may not be “on the same page” politically, but we certainly are part of the same political environment in which she seeks to have her views heard, and her seat retained in Parliament, in the midst of a welter of publicly-funded election material. She, like the rest of us, knows that most of this printed material is wasteful and headed for the WPB. She tells us that…

    This election is about voting for a local person who works hard all year round, not just at election time. This election is about voting for a local person who is not afraid to speak out to fix local problems…. During an election campaign it is easy to criticise and put down your opponents. I will vigorously challenge bad policy, but will not play dirty. My aim is to serve you well and honestly.

    Here let me encourage readers to do as I have tried to do: spend at least some time in careful examination of the more readable “election material” that comes through the letter box or email in-tray. Cross-examine it. Think about its logic. Try to identify the questions it is suggesting that we, as voters, are already asking. In so doing, clarify which questions are being avoided. Such a strategy may well confirm the hypothesis I have been developing (see various posts at Nurturing Justice) for some time: our system of parliamentary democracy has shifted from “political debate” to “public relations”.

    The shift to “public relations” can certainly be inferred from the above letter; it is devoid of any mention of the Candidate’s party or the party’s platform. The fact that this local member may be “Liberal” is almost incidental. In this letter of personal assurance the candidate announces her willingness to help residents and their families, being thoroughly committed to fixing local problems. Good. But there’s no indication from what she writes that this “help” is available from a Federal parliamentary representative, rather than one from the State or Local Government. Is this “help” also about helping us understand the kinds of political problems our country faces? Indeed, we get no sense of how she sees the different levels of government apart from her being here in a Federal electorate telling us she is always ready to “help”, and not just at election time. Are voter’s only responsible in a political sense at election time? Are not voter’s citizens with ongoing political responsibility for the justice (or otherwise) of our system of public governance?

    So I’m left to imagine a raft of rather inconvenient questions I could ask at the “meet the candidates” meeting convened by our local Civic Association. Let me present these here with some evaluation of their relevance and/or impertinence.

    1. What are you going to do about the Real Estate firm that has stolen our local community’s name for its own website advertising its real estate development adjacent to our Borough? Yes, this is a likely question to test all candidates. It is very local and very important. But be warned: it is very political. After more than two years of repeated effort, my attempts to have the issue raised in letters to the editor columns in local newspapers have still not appeared. And after all: is it valid to ask a Federal member about something to do with State managed real estate issues?
    2. Given that over the last decade the governing of our country has been destabilised by party disputes about leadership, with the successive dumping of Prime Ministers, what is the [candidate’s] party policy with respect to how political parties should be operating in our parliamentary system of representative democracy? This is to query the dominance of public relations over political debate. You may raise a laugh. Is it not likely that candidates of the two major parties will give the floor to the Greens candidate and the independents? It might even get into a “republican” sidetrack!
    3. What is your party’s policy concerning the future of a Westminster style of government and ministerial responsibility that we are repeatedly told by elected members is implicit to our Constitution? Given that this election, your own local focus notwithstanding, is presenting us with a nation-wide competition between two rival aspirants for “The Lodge”, what is your party doing to challenge this basic misrepresentation of what our political responsibility requires of us? In other words, how does your party envisage the future of our parliamentary democracy? Good question, but keep in mind that most people simply accept the problems of successive PMs acting as if they are presidentially elected. Does not this anomaly simply sink into the swamp of realpolitik complacency? And as well this election must also compete for media time with the “election material” of a real presidential circus across the NE Pacific; how can Australia’s look-alike circus compete with that for ratings? Candidates may recognise this question’s pertinence but it will put them on the defensive so you can expect instead that discussion will turn to the need for (their leader’s) “leadership” at this time of “great complexity” and/or “great opportunity”.

    When we view the Liberal-National coalition and Labor in terms of what they have become – “public relations firms” – we may give ourselves much needed “elbow room” for local “Meet the Candidates” meeting. Such questions as I have posed need further elaboration in order to suggest a comprehensive diagnosis of why politics has become so problematic. Such discussion will simply be too complex for most voters who attend such meetings expecting “relevance”, or guidance as to who they will “tick”. To be critical of the underlying political trends proves just too much.

    My local member says she is not afraid to speak out in order to fix local problems. But her party, along with the parties of her political opponents, now compete in a media-ted environment tone-deaf to the structural problems for public governance that have been created by these parties-cum-public-relations-firms in cahoots with the mass media. Citizenship has thus been severely de-politicised, problematised, and effectively reduced to casting a “choice” for candidates propped up by dodgy operators. We might even say that the dominant neo-liberal ideology has been too successful in its “privatising” of citizenship.

    What would be the response, I wonder, were the candidates to be asked to tell us more about the real problems they have faced within their own parties? These associations have for decades styled themselves in terms “winning the next election” – apparently that’s the problem they exist to solve. And so they have become dominated by their own public relations “drivers”. They have lost themselves as genuine political parties. So do not we, as voters, not need to know how the brave candidates have fared within these tightly managed elite-generating firms? Would not such stories now, before the election, tell us more of what we need to know in order to cast a responsible vote?

    Could local “Meet the Candidates” meetings induce Candidates to tell their electors their political stories, more about the “inside” machinations of their compromised parties, and how they managed to engineer their own nomination? To ask the question is to already hear the echoes of dismissive ridicule. How unrealistic would that be? But that psychic echo is telling us why political life in Australia (as elsewhere) urgently needs to rediscover political parties as genuine, transparent associations of like-minded, like-committed, citizens, that are giving ongoing positive support, also parliamentary support, to just public governance. And without genuine political parties, the dominance of the public relations “firms” that fill our political vacuum will simply undermine public respect for public governance, for state-crafting, for our task as citizens to promote public justice, as well as for political parties themselves.

     

    Bruce C Wearne is a former University lecturer who lives at the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. He continues to read and write in social theory and biblical studies.

  • Richard Farmer. Controlling the Senate.

    There a couple of reasons to take little notice of what Labor, Liberals, Nationals, Greens and other assorted politicians say between now and 2 July.

    The first is that election politics is rarely about telling the truth. Normally it is about telling people things that they think people want to hear. The skilful politician monitors public opinion, determines what people believe, packages the public’s best lines and sells them back to them. It will always be thus as the primary concern of a politician is winning.

    The second reason is that even a political leader clearly winning the House of Representatives can guarantee nothing. The Australian bicameral system of government means that an elected Prime Minister is subject to the whims of a Senate his party almost certainly will not control. The best Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten can promise us in 2016 are the things they they will do if the Greens, Nick Xenophon and whoever else gets a Senate guernsey, will allow it.

    Already in this campaign Messrs Turnbull and Shorten are asserting that they will not be entering into any form of coalition with the Greens should the parliament be hung. That’s a meaningless statement if ever I’ve heard one. Whether there’s a formal agreement or not, deals will be done in the unlikely event of no one having a House of Representatives majority. In the case of the Senate, the government can either make an arrangement with a selection of crossbenchers, as Julia Gillard did with the Greens, or suffer the frustrations of defeated legislation as was chosen by Tony Abbott and Turnbull.

    The shape of legislation over the next three years will depend on the exact composition of the Senate crossbench. Until that result is known election promises should be regarded as nothing more than a broad statement of possible intentions. Neither the Liberal-Nationals nor Labor can guarantee anything. And that’s before all those bold assumptions in the economic forecasts that supposedly underpin those promises meet the reality of an uncertain world.

    The retiring Senate had 33 Coalition senators, 25 Labor, 10 Greens and eight others – three independents and one each representing the Xenophon Group, the Palmer United Party, the Liberal Democrat Party, Family First and the Australian Motorist Enthusiast Party. The rationale behind changes to the Senate voting system sponsored by the Coalition and supported by the Greens and Xenophon, was to cull most of those minor parties and independents.

    At an  election for half the Senate that theory probably works but this ballot is for the lot with only half the normal quota required in the six states. The final position in each state will go to someone with five per cent of the vote or less. Some of the odds and sods will disappear but some will not and new ones might yet appear.

    Nick Xenophon looks certain to drag at least one colleague in behind him in South Australia. Tasmania has a long history of liking Senate mavericks from Reg “Spot” Turnbull elected in 1961 to Brian Harradine who was in the Senate for 30 years from 1975. Jacqui Lambi would fit in nicely with that duo for unconventionality. If name recognition counts for anything – and in politics it probably does – then Glenn Lazarus must be in with a chance in Queensland even if he did once play State of Origin for New South Wales.

    It really is something of a lottery but on my ticket I’ll buy 31 Liberals (2 less than now), Labor 30 (an increase of 5), the Greens down one on 9, with the Xenophon group and others making up the balance with 6 (a couple less than the number retiring). Any result close to that and predictions about what a government will achieve become difficult indeed.

    Little wonder that the political pundits pontificate more about who will win the election horse race than analysing options about unknowable policy outcomes. Depressing it might be but inevitable when the two major runners feel obliged to belittle almost all of their opponent’s proposals and the minor starters refuse to accept the idea of a winner having a mandate.

    How much better it would be if Don Chipp’s Democrats were still the holders of the balance of power with their mantra of “keeping the bastards honest” and a commitment to ensuring that an elected government kept its promises. Or that there was a major party leader with the daring of a Paul Keating who warned voters before an election that Labor would not vote in the Senate to defeat a Coalition’s proposals for a GST.

    Alas the likelihood of those in opposition accepting again any view of there being a mandate disappeared when the Democrats actually did what their founding father Chipp promised when founding them. Voting for another version of a GST promised by a John Howard led government was the prelude to the Democrats fading away.

    Richard Farmer is a journalist and businessman.

  • Warwick Elsche. If words were deeds.

    If words were deeds – or even credible policies – Malcolm Turnbull might already have joined the company of Australia’s pre-eminent Prime Ministers.

    All three of Malcolm’s pre-politics callings, journalism, law and banking, have involved the extensive used of the words medium. But none of these also involved the commitment, the enduring exposure, or the threat of damaging public refutation as mere words do, coming at a critical political time, from the country’s most senior political figure.

    However, in the short journey Turnbull’s eight-week election campaign has travelled so far, it seems that, from his side at least, words only will provide his and his Government’s principal armament. Perhaps this is because his Government has little else, either in terms of political stability, or actual political accomplishment to serve the purpose.

    While Labor has been noticeably slow in picking apart Turnbull’s maiden campaign efforts in early days, Malcolm would be optimistic indeed to expect this neglect by the opposition to last for the near-record 56 days of the current campaign.

    In the writer’s experience, long electoral campaigns have not been kind to incumbent Prime Ministers who initiate them.

    In 1969, for example, a super-confident John Gorton, sitting on a then record parliamentary majority, set a 60+ day campaign which he hoped would see the end of the up-and-coming new-style Labor leader, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam whittled away the record majority to within 5,000 votes in critical seats, of an improbable victory. Ministers’ seats were among 18 lost across the country.

    Again in 1984 another over-confident Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, deliberately chose a long campaign during which, he assured colleagues, the longer it went the further ahead of this opponent, Andrew Peacock, he would be. Hawke’s soporific campaign speeches over the long period again saw significant reversals – and again not for his opponent.

    Malcolm therefore seems to be taking a considerable risk seeking to see out successfully an eight-week campaign armed principally only with his eloquence.

    During his return trip to the top of the Liberal Party, Turnbull was critical of Tony Abbott’s seeming attempts to govern in slogans. “Kill the taxes”, “Stop the boats”, “Lifters and Leaners”, “Team Australia”, “Death Cult” and a handful of others did not serve Tony well. Remember the polls and his ultimate fate.

    Malcolm has chosen to start his campaign with a flurry of loud self-laudatory promises and assessments – and a slogan. And the slogan it seems has already been forced on most of his team. So far those exposed in the infant campaign like Malcolm himself, Mathias Cormann, Julie Bishop and others are peppering their electoral offerings with the boring repeated chants of “Jobs and Growth’.

    Noble objectives unquestionably. But it would be remarkable if, over the eight weeks it is not pointed out that nothing in his recent budget – virtually his election manifesto – is likely to guarantee either – nothing other than something to talk about.

    In his war of words Turnbull has already found it convenient, even attractive, to refer to the economic problems he says were created by the preceding Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Governments. Indeed, the shouts of “Debt and Deficit Emergency” from his side of politics helped propel him and his colleagues into Government.

    By election day , July 2, Turnbull’s Liberals will have been in office nearly half as long as Labor, 2007-13.

    In that time his government has increased debt beyond $150 billion. The deficit has trebled. His party has not had to grapple with the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression that plagued more then three of Labor’s six years in office. Strangely, with these inflated problems, there is now no longer an emergency. Given the performance so far, there is, however, surely some risk in doing, as Malcolm urged addressing the media to announce the election last Sunday, “Keep your commitment to our economic plan”. Can this exhortation, given his Government’s performance so far, possibly last eight weeks with both Opposition and media on the job.

    There are several other areas where it would take a rather profound optimism to believe there will not be, at least, further intense scrutiny.

    Malcolm refers repeatedly to previous Labor Governments, particularly the last three, comparing them unfavourably with his own. If he is really upset by the internal disruption, which helped destroy that show, he does not need to go back even that far. Tony Abbott lasted as Prime Minister a shorter period than either Rudd or Gillard whose sackings Turnbull continually derides. And supposed Liberal stability in the first term has been additionally racked by ministerial scandals involving Ministers Robert, Brough, Sinodinis, Briggs, and speaker Bronwyn Bishop. Labor never matched that. Again Turnbull is surely limited in talking much more about this, one of his favourite topics, over another 50+ days.

    In one of the few areas of positive thinking – rather than merely reflecting on Labor’s inadequacies – Turnbull urges support for his party on the grounds of national security as if there was some historic backing for the claim. His party committed Australia to involvement in the Vietnam War and in 1967 double the commitment with a loss of more than 500 young Australian lives. No one anywhere now argues the wisdom of those decisions.

    Far more recently John Howard blindly followed Dick Cheney and George W. Bush in a futile bid to “sow seeds of democracy” in the Middle East. The picture throughout the whole region attests the error of that judgment. A similar decision to outsource Australia’s defence and foreign policy to one of the universally acknowledged worst-ever presidents, George Bush, in entering Afghanistan is yet to be evaluated as anything but a failure (not yet the disaster of Iraq) – but a failure nonetheless. Again, if words are your only weapon a focus on his party’s security record would hardly seem to be a winning campaign topic.

    Malcolm, speaking to the press in his electoral announcement last Sunday, spoke of the excellence and importance of Australian science. As a senior Cabinet Minister he sat in mute support as Tony Abbott ripped $120 million from Australia’s world-class scientific organisation, the CSIRO – most of it coming from the climate research section. Despite his claims, Malcolm has done little to repair the damage. Eminent scientists, locally and around the world, have condemned and lamented the wanton destruction of this organisation. The propositions on which Malcolm seems anxious to build his marathon election campaign are beginning to look flimsy.

    On an earlier day Malcolm, as opposition leader in 2009 declared that he did not want to lead a party, that did not want action on the world’s No1 problem, climate change. He again watched silently as Tony Abbott tried to damage or destroy every single government agency with any direct involvement in climate science. And, he produced a budget (election manifesto) without a single reference to climate change – another issue best avoided over a long coming eight weeks.

    To the media on Sunday he described his proposed tax arrangements as ‘the best in the world’. Unless he’s at the Australia Club or the Melbourne Club, he might be wise to keep this also off his electoral agenda.

    And on another popular Liberal line against Labor leader Shorten regarding his alleged role in the downfall of both Rudd and Gillard, Malcolm might also be more than somewhat restricted. Whatever Shorten’s involvement in either or both, immediate benefit to himself was nil. Malcolm’s own role in plotting the destruction of his leader, Tony Abbott, for his own considerable benefit has now been well documented and uncontested not only in the popular media but in several books.

    Having chosen (or been compelled) to fight this election campaign largely on words rather than performance, Turnbull faces a long and hopefully not too inquisitorial media and more importantly Labor Opposition.

    If he wanted a guide as to how it might play out, last Sunday’s meeting with the media at Parliament House after his visit to the Governor General at Yarralumla was hardly encouraging.

    Questions largely ignored the issues Malcolm sought to promote. The first four questions were inquisitive – Malcolm might have deemed them hostile – they were certainly disregarding his hopeful message.

    Malcolm – not his press officer called a halt to the conference.

    He faces another eight weeks of this. While current figures in national polls indicate a win for his Liberals, Malcolm does not have the comfortable poll margins that Gorton and Bob Hawke enjoyed when they last sought to demolish opponents with a long election campaign.

    There are risks involved – BE CAREFUL MALCOLM. Slogans and questionable assertions can be made to appear dangerously fragile to the electorate over a full-on eight week political stoush.

    Warwick Elsche, Canberra correspondent.

  • Julianne Schultz. Australia must act now to preserve its culture in the face of global tech giants. Brian Johns Annual Lecture

     

    At the first Brian Johns Annual Lecture, Julianne Schultz spoke of the challenge to Australian culture by the global tech giants. In the summary of ‘what can be done’ she said:

    So what can be done to join the dots in the Age of Fang?

    We need to become better advocates of the value of cultural investment. We need to find new ways to put the case so we can win political and bureaucratic supporters with hard headed and sustainable arguments.

    We need to find ways to embrace the particularity of being Australian in a global context and find new ways to express that.

    We need to be willing to challenge the market if it is not delivering – adding our voices to those demanding that the Fangs pay their taxes, and not allowing them to unfairly distort the market.

    We need to be prepared to use the legal and other means at our disposal to demand that laws are not broken.

    We need to use the leverage we have as the generators of 2% of global GDP to get returns and opportunities to participate that are our due – a digital news initiative here for instance, or a major contribution to the digitisation of cultural assets without giving up the copyright.

    We need to leverage 50 years of cultural investment to ensure our stories are told not only to ourselves, but the world.

    If, as the scholars have identified, the dominant companies in the Age of Fang have the power to command attention, communicate news, give voice, enable collective action, hold power to account and influence votes, we need that to be done on our terms.

    This power needs to be institutionalised so that it is civically accountable. The smartest Fangs understand that playing a civic role brings extra kudos and wealth, but there is a need for vigilance to sustain this.

    Getting the settings of this institutionalisation will be challenge of the next decade. It will require a carrot and a stick.

    Some Americans are suggesting a royalty should be paid on data mining of personal information, as is done with the mining of minerals, and returned to the country of origin.

    Europeans are challenging antitrust and privacy. G20 is renewing attention on tax to examine ways to ensure that the wealth generated is spread appropriately, and not left to a few rich dudes to distribute to suit personal philanthropic ambitions.

    The market alone won’t do this. We know from the process of creating cultural institutions that there is a role for the state – a place where in the words of Robert Menzies, the future and past can connect in the present.

    Even in this rapidly globalising age, the nation state remains the best organising principle we have. I am not alone in feeling uneasy about the proposition we should give it over to a new oligopoly that is present every moment of our lives.

    The purpose of cultural investment in the Age of Fang needs to be reiterated and maintained. As a nation, we need to take this seriously now if we are not to become an asterisk. The purpose of cultural investment in the Age of Fang needs to be restated, funding maintained and opportunities to innovate and export enhanced.

    Otherwise we will become invisible at best and tribal at worst. If that happens we will be reduced as citizens and countries to passive consumers in a digital marketplace that values us only for our ability to pay.

    The Brian Johns lecture was presented by the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University and the Copyright Agency.

    A fuller version of Julianne Schultz’ address can be found at:

    https://theconversation.com/australia-must-act-now-to-preserve-its-culture-in-the-face-of-global-tech-giants-58724

    Julianne Schultz is Editor and Professor, Griffith Review.

  • Our better angels.

    Wasim Buka was sentenced recently on two charges of people-smuggling.  He came to Australia as a boat person and has settled in Australia.  Unfortunately, two of his brothers were executed in Iraq and one sister, following in his footsteps to Australia, drowned along with her husband and five children in the waters between Australia and Indonesia.

    Her Honour Judge Hampel decided to release him upon a recognizance release order to be of good behaviour for a period of two years. He was released on a $1,000 bond.

    See the link below for the full transcript of Judge Hampel’s decision. It is a succinct and moving judgement.  John Menadue.

    http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/vic/VCC/2016/75.html

  • ‘Refugees don’t self-harm because of me, Peter Dutton, they self-harm because of you.’

    One of the many disappointments of Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership is that he reappointed Peter Dutton as Minister for Immigration and Border Protection. This disappointment is reinforced by his attempt to blame refugee advocates rather than his own policies for the self-harm of asylum seekers.  Sarah Smith, a supporter of refugees, tells of the heartbreak she feels at the pain inflicted by Peter Dutton.  But he blames others.

    See link to article by Sarah Smith in The Guardian of 5 May 2016. John Menadue.

    http://gu.com/p/4tqv5/sbl

  • Evan Williams. Will the real Malcolm Turnbull please stand up?

    My friend Evan Hughes, art historian and former law student is standing for Parliament at the next election. And in many ways he’s the model of a modern Labor candidate – clean-cut good looks, easy charm, natural speaking skills and a first-rate mind vouchsafed by a Cambridge University degree. At a fund-raising dinner in Sydney the other night he was doing the rounds of the room with his baby son cradled in his arms. Great photo ops for the local paper. In any marginal seat you’d have to say Evan was a shoo-in. But there’s a problem: his opponent in the blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Wentworth is none other than Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. And as we all know from experience, Malcolm’s no slouch himself when it comes to intelligence and charm.

    Even so, the fund-raiser at the Rose Bay RSL Club was a cheerful occasion. A solid turnout, a happy crowd, and an underlying mood of quiet optimism – if not exactly confidence. There were some good lapel buttons (“Let’s Make Point Piper Great Again”), and Chris Bowen, the shadow treasurer, made a powerful speech in which he described Malcolm Turnbull as a Marxist. No, not your dreaded Karl Marx, the father of communism, but the much more likable Groucho, who is credited with the line: “I have my principles, and if you don’t like them I’ve got some others.” Next day I happened to be reading Pamela Hansford Johnson’s 1970 novel The Honours Board, in which a character has this to say: “The whole point of having principles is that they can be changed. A man who never learns enough to change his principles is a silly clot” (p. 189 in Scribner’s New York edition, if you’re interested).

    The idea that principles are expendable, or at least replaceable, would appeal to Malcolm Turnbull. The question is not so much what his principles are, but whether he has any. With most prime ministers, we know pretty well what they stand for when they take office. Curtin for the war effort, Hawke for consensus, Keating for the republic, Menzies for free enterprise after all those Chifley years of welfare-state-building and nationalisation. When John Gorton took office in 1968, he made no secret of his centralist tendencies from the outset, and it took a couple of old-style Liberal premiers (Askin and Bolte) to pull him into line for the greater good of the party. With Malcolm it’s a different story. We all thought we knew what he stood for – action on climate change, affordable housing, marriage equality, the republic, generous foreign aid, and an end to Tony Abbott’s three-word slogans. What we’ve got now are two-word slogans – hard-working Australians, battling families, innovation and creativity, jobs and growth – and precious little action on any of them.

    How do we account for Turnbull’s inactivity, his government’s timidity and inertia? There’s a widespread belief, especially among his supporters, that Malcolm is playing a shrewd political game. As a pragmatist and realist, he can’t afford to alienate the right-wing zealots in his party. But wait for it: as soon as he wins an election in his own right, the real Malcolm will emerge in all his messianic glory – bold, agile, innovative, a true reforming spirit. Malcolm’s big mistake – so the theory goes – was not to call an election last year and claim a mandate (just as Kevin Rudd missed his chance by squibbing a double-dissolution after the defeat of his emissions trading scheme).

    Well, I don’t believe it. For one thing, I don’t think Turnbull had any policies he wanted to implement – apart from getting himself into the top job. And if he did have genuine ambitions, and convictions he didn’t need another election before he could proceed with them. In September 2015 he was riding a wave of public goodwill, and the malcontents in his party room wouldn’t have dared bring on another leadership challenge so soon after the last one. It’s a myth, too, that he needed their support in the first place. He had the numbers in the party to win, and there nothing the Abbott loyalists could do about it.

    Instead of action, we’ve had a string of thought-bubbles, trial balloons, and things that go on and off the table (if I may mix metaphors for the moment). A rise in the GST was mooted and quickly knocked on the head. Tax-dodging multi-nationals were targeted, but we’ve heard no more about them (except from Bill Shorten). Small businesses were given a boost in the budget by the simple device of redefining big businesses as small ones. And out of a clear blue sky at a suburban sports field one April afternoon came the biggest Big Idea of all – transfer taxing powers to the States to pay for health and education. Predicably this got nowhere with the premiers, and I don’t think Turnbull was in the least surprised. If he was really an old-fashioned Malcolm Fraser-style states-righter we’d have known about it already. There’s a simple explanation: stung by accusations that he led a dithering, indecisive government bereft of ideas, he needed at least one big, flashy gesture to prove his critics wrong. Any big gesture would do – but preferably one that was doomed to fail.

    There are few more powerful emotions in political life than disappointment. Most people can forgive governments for mistakes and incompetence – but disappointment is something else. They feel betrayed. Gough Whitlam stuffed a few things up, but we were ready to forgive him. Paul Hasluck, in his memoir The Chance of Politics (1997), was charitable to Whitlam, though he still considered him a smarty-pants: “When he became prime minister I welcomed the change and predicted he would be one of our great prime ministers and certainly the first leader of distinction and capacity since Menzies.” Many felt the same about Malcolm. Many saw in him the makings of a great prime minister – a man with presence, style, courage, a way with words. To quote Hasluck again (on Gough), foreign leaders saw him at his best – “a large, urbane and well-posed leader who was interested in ideas and could understand what other people said to him.”

    I’ve never met Turnbull or talked to him, and I don’t like making sweeping judgments about people I hardly know. But rightly or wrongly, politicians are fair game. It’s the nature of the sport. I’ve no doubt that Malcolm can be a lovely bloke when he tries. But I keep hearing disparaging stories about him. Read Paddy Manning’s “unauthorised” biography of Malcolm, Born to Rule, published last year, and the picture emerges of a devious and calculating money-trader for whom financial wheeling and dealing was second-nature (and indeed his only skill). My contacts in the business world (admittedly few) speak of a guy who could only be trusted to look after himself. John Menadue recalls a conversation with a very senior figure in the Liberal Party, whose advice he sought on whether Malcolm Turnbull might assist on refugee issues. He replied, “John, Malcolm is never there when you need him.”

    Whether he’s here when Australia need him is a question still to be answered. Will he bring his formidable talents to bear on the issues that matter – issues unmentioned or downplayed in the recent Budget – climate change, housing, social inequity, the republic, the status of women – or will he settle for the prestige and perks and comforts of office? How long before the electorate tires of the glib phrases, the practised charm, the phony displays of emotion? On the 30th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, there was Malcolm in Tasmania laying a wreath on the tomb of the victims – a duty more properly left to John Howard, who was relegated to background status at the ceremony. At the same time Malcolm was telling us we shouldn’t be “misty-eyed” about the plight of asylum-seekers. A tear for the Port Arthur victims is okay, but misty eyes for homeless and desperate refugees aren’t called for.

    Preparing this piece, I was trying to think of the last time we had a prime minister in the Turnbull mould. Which of his predecessors in the modern era does he most resemble? Not, of course, in manner or appearance, but in the expectations people had of him and the outcomes he left behind. Not Menzies, not Whitlam, not Gorton, not Fraser. Then it came to me. A rich, well-connected Eastern suburbs socialite with a prominent wife, skilled in financial affairs and economic management, and hailed by his party as a pillar of stability after a rocky ride with a discredited predecessor. Of course, Billy McMahon! Perhaps, like Billy McMahon, Malcolm Turnbull will lead his party to a well-deserved defeat. Perhaps he will earn the epitaph that he bestowed on John Howard: “The prime minister that broke Australia’s heart.” I wish Malcolm well, but somehow I’m hoping history will repeat itself.

    Evan Williams is a former newspaper editor and Walkley Award-winning journalist. He wrote speeches for Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and a succession of NSW premiers. He headed the NSW Government’s cultural sector from 1977 to 2001, and for 33 years wrote regular film reviews for The Australian. He is a Member of the Order of Australia.

     

  • Kerry Murphy. Blaming refugees.

    Blaming instances of self-harm by refugees and asylum seekers on ‘refugee advocates’ or the undeserving asylum seekers is not a new political tactic. Back in 2001 then Minister Ruddock was interviewed by Four Corners about the problems of self-harm by asylum seekers in detention, especially in Curtain, Woomera and Port Hedland detention centres. Journalist Debbie Whitmont asked the Minister Philip Ruddock how he explained the number of cases of self-mutilation in Australian detention centres.

    PHILIP RUDDOCK: I think there are a variety of explanations, and I think the principle explanation is that there are some people who do not accept the umpire’s decision, and believe that inappropriate behaviour will influence people like you and me, who have certain values, who have certain views about human rights, who do believe in the sanctity of life, and are concerned when people say, “If you don’t give me what I want, I’m going to cut my wrists.”

    DEBBIE WHITMONT: Are you saying they’re doing it to attract attention?

    PHILIP RUDDOCK: I’m saying that there are some people who believe that they will influence decisions by behaving that way.   …the difficult question for me is, “How do I respond?”

    Because I think if I respond by saying, “All you’ve got to do is slit your wrist, “even if it’s a safety razor — ” — which is what happens in most cases — “..you’ll get what you want.”

    DEBBIE WHITMONT: Do you accept that these people are showing a certain desperation?

    PHILIP RUDDOCK: Well, I mean, you say it’s desperation, I say that in many parts of the world, people believe that they get outcomes by behaving in that way.” (http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s344246.htm)

    More recently in 2014 then Minister Morrison was quick to blame the Save the Children workers for self-harm incidents in Nauru:

    “They are employed to do a job, not to be political activists. Making false claims, and worse allegedly coaching self-harm and using children in protests is unacceptable, whatever their political views or agendas,”

    “The public don’t want to be played for mugs with allegations being used as some sort of political tactic in all of this.” (http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/scott-morrison-rejects-call-for-apology-to-save-the-children-staff-deported-from-nauru-20150323-1m5eao.html)

    After the Moss report cleared the Save the Children workers in 2015, the Minister refused to apologise to workers who were forced to leave Nauru because of allegations, which he broadcast, but were later found to be without merit.

    Then we have the self-immolation of two refugees from Nauru, and the response of the Minister:

    “I have previously expressed my frustration and anger at advocates and others who are in contact with those in regional processing centres and who are encouraging some of these people to behave in a certain way, believing that that pressure exerted on the Australian government will see a change in our policy,” (http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/scott-morrison-rejects-call-for-apology-to-save-the-children-staff-deported-from-nauru-20150323-1m5eao.html)

    Many reports of psychiatrists and psychologists have confirmed that mandatory detention and temporary protection visas acerbate and may even be causative of post traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). In a 2006 report, Dr Steel and Dr Silove and others noted in the British Journal of Psychiatry:

    The present study suggests that both prolonged detention and temporary protection contribute substantially to the risk of ongoing depression, PTSD and mental health-related disability in refugees. The independent influence of these two risk factors remained robust after controlling for other variables previously identified as risk factors , including female gender, greater age, extent of past traumas, length of residency and family separation. (BRITISH JOURNAL OF P SYCHIATRY ( 2 0 0 6 ) , 1 8 8 , 5 8 – 6 4)

    After the self-immolation of a refugee in Manus in April 2016, UNHCR was also been critical of such policies:

    “There is no doubt that the current policy of offshore processing and prolonged detention is immensely harmful. There are approximately 2000 very vulnerable refugees and asylum-seekers on Manus Island and Nauru. These people have already been through a great deal, many have fled war and persecution, some have already suffered trauma. Despite efforts by the Governments of Papua New Guinea and Nauru, arrangements in both countries have proved completely untenable.

    The situation of these people has deteriorated progressively over time, as UNHCR has witnessed firsthand over numerous visits since the opening of the centres. The consensus among medical experts is that conditions of detention and offshore processing do immense damage to physical and mental health. UNHCR’s principal concern today is that these refugees and asylum-seekers are immediately moved to humane conditions with adequate support and services. (http://unhcr.org.au/news/unhcr-calls-immediate-movement-refugees-asylum-seekers-humane-conditions/)

    How does the Government respond to such reports and criticism? It is ignored because to do otherwise means the people smugglers are back in business and people die at sea. This is the default mantra that is repeated, as if that trumps all sensible analysis and debate.

    Maybe we should listen more to the health and international experts, and also to the refugees themselves. Our policies are stuck in the ‘Stop the Boats’ slogan and fail to look at the consequences of harsh and punitive policies. These policies are punishing people who are not just awaiting a decision on their case, but are found to be refugees and therefore legally entitled to international protection.

    Before he set himself alight, the Iranian refugee Omid Masoumali reportedly said to those nearby:

    “This is how tired we are,” “This action will prove how exhausted we are. I cannot take it any more.”

    Kerry Murphy is solicitor specialising in immigration and refugee cases.

     

  • John Zaw. No end in sight to Rohingya suppression in Myanmar.

    The hardline Buddhist Arakan National Party (ANP) that holds a majority of seats in Myanmar’s religiously divided Rakhine State has promised to fight any attempts to grant up to 1 million stateless ethic Rohingya citizenship.

    For the new National League for Democracy (NLD) government in Myanmar, the first civilian administration in the country in more than five decades, the issue of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine poses one of its most formidable challenge.

    While the NLD’s landslide win in the November 2015 election has brought optimism to the Rohingya community, its leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been silent on the issue.

    International rights groups have criticized her for failing to speak out for the Rohingya, even as local NLD lawmakers have admitted they must tread carefully.

    Yanghee Lee, United Nation’s special rapporteur on Myanmar, in her annual report submitted to the UN in March, has given the NLD-led government 100 days to improve conditions for Rohingya Muslims.

    But the government, which officially took office in April, is yet to reveal its policy on the Rakhine state issue publicly.

    Pe Than, a lower house parliament member from ANP in Rakhine, said that they will cooperate with the NLD-led government for the state’s development but will stand for the people’s desire on nationalism and on Bengalis — the name given to the Rohingya by many people in Myanmar including government lawmakers.

    “We have much concern that ethnic Rakhine people would be overwhelmed by rapid population growth of Bengalis,” Pe Than told ucanews.com.

    “The NLD-led government doesn’t need to bow down to international pressure on prevailing human rights in Rakhine as we have lived with our own sovereignty for decades,” Pe Than who has been twice elected from Rakhine State told ucanews.com on April 28.

    Awaiting ‘right timing’

    The recent boat tragedy, where at least 21 people died, shows a restriction on the freedom of movement by Rohingya despite the state of emergency issued by the previous government in 2012 being lifted on March 29.

    Win Naing, an NLD lawmaker in Rakhine State parliament said that that the central government will eventually decide on how to tackle the Rakhine crisis.

    “It is a very delicate and sensitive issue for the new government and especially a big challenge for Rakhine’s chief minister,” Win Naing said.

    “If we move on right now, unexpected problems may occur and engender further opposition as nationalism is growing,” he said adding that the ANP is “closely monitoring” the steps the NLD is taking in this regard.

    Still, Win Naing said he understands that confining more than 150,00 people to refugee camps for almost five years is not appropriate nor good for the development of Rakhine State — besides tarnishing the image of the state and country.

    “It is the legacy of the previous governments that failed to solve the issue but the new civilian government can’t neglect and delay this,” Win Naing added.

    Nationalism versus human rights

    The Rohingyas remain in often squalid internal displacement camps –with little access to healthcare, education and employment since deadly violence between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in 2012.

    Aung Win, a Muslim elder from Bume village near the camps, was hopeful that the government had considered the Rohingya issue and drawn up a plan already.

    “But they are waiting for the right time to move on their plan as they might face strong opposition from nationalist groups and the Buddhist hardline party,” he said.

    “I think the view of Rakhine people would also need to be considered, so the new government, military and Rakhine people need to discuss tackling the issue together,” he told ucanews.com.

    Win Naing, the NLD lawmaker, pointed out that “if we emphasis on nationalism too much, the development of our Rakhine State may be delayed.”

    Hatred and bigotry toward the minority Rohingya have been deeply rooted in Rakhine.

    In recent years there has been growing nationalism spearheaded by hardline groups such as the Ma Ba Tha that is led by senior Buddhist monks.

    Hundreds of Buddhist nationalists, including monks protested at the US embassy in Yangon on April 28 denouncing the word “Rohingya” which was used by the embassy’s statement of condolences for those who died in the recent boat tragedy.

    By not recognizing ‘Rohingya’ and referring to them as “Bengalis,” Myanmar’s governments have implied that they are illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh, despite vast numbers of them having lived in Myanmar for decades.

    The controversial 1982 citizenship law denies citizenship for Rohingya and so rights groups have repeatedly called for amending the law.

    Pe Than said that Rohingya would need to be scrutinized by the 1982 law and those deemed to be citizens get the right to move freely in the country.

    For those who are not deemed as citizens, it is the responsibility of the government on where they were to be lodged. “We would strongly oppose and fight against any NLD plan to amend the citizenship law,” Pe Than said.

    This article was first published in UCANews.com

  • John Thompson. Surgeon’s report shows the ineffectiveness of private health insurers to control health costs

    Private health insurer Medibank has worked with the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons to produce a report that shows enormous variation in fees charged by surgeons for similar procedures.

    The Surgical Variance Report for General Surgery reviewed thousands of procedures performed on Medibank members in eight common operations – gallbladder removal, gastric band procedures, bowel resection procedures, hernia procedures, gastroscopy and colonoscopy.

    The data shows that some surgeons working in private hospitals are charging 15 times the amount charged by their peers for the same procedure. For example, surgeons performing gastric sleeve operations for weight loss charged average private fees (in addition to what the insurer and Medicare covered) ranging from $231 in South Australia to $3593 in Queensland. The average fee in NSW was $3160 and in Victoria it was $1874. For gall bladder removals, fees charged ranged from $369 in Tasmania to $1166 in NSW. In Victoria, the average fee was $387.

    It is important to emphasise that fees in the Medibank/College report are those charged privately to patients after Medicare and Medibank have made their contribution to the cost of the patient’s treatment.

    The report also provided information on complication rates for these operations. These rates also varied very substantially. For example, complication rates for bowel resection procedures varied from 0 per 1,000 procedures for some surgeons, to 571 per 1,000 for others.

    President of the College, Professor David Watters said, “These reports will provide surgeons with information that may help them gain a better understanding of, and learn from, variations, for the benefit of the service they provide to their patients and the community,” he said.

    There are two important conclusions that arise from this work. First, it emphasises the lack of financial control on health costs when there is a reliance on private health insurance. In Australia, there are 33 private health insurers registered under the Private Health Insurance (Prudential Supervision) Act 2015. While Medibank’s initiative is to be welcomed, it illustrates the problem of a crowded and fragmented market where the numerous competing insurers are unable to act collectively to influence the suppliers of health services. A single insurer provides the opportunity to develop the necessary financial control on ever increasing costs of health services. As a national insurer, Medicare, is also a far more efficient and equitable operation than the 33 disparate insurers competing with each other, all with their substantial administrative and marketing costs. As Ian McAuley (University of Canberra) wrote in 2014, “Norway and Sweden remind us of a vision we have lost: the economic benefit of a strong, single national health insurer.

    The second conclusion from the report is derived from Professor Waters’ comment above. This report, Professor Waters states, is aimed at providing information to the supplier of the service, not the purchaser. For more effective financial control of these important services, the client should have the information on costs and performance of surgeons so that he/she can make a rational consumer’s decision on price and quality. As Medibank’s Chief Medical Officer Dr Linda Swan said at the release of the report: “Information sharing is key to improving the delivery of healthcare, and ultimately to improving patient outcomes.” Agreed, but it is important that the patient also shares the information. A single insurer could also perform this function more efficiently.

    John Thompson is an economist with experience in primary health.

     

     

     

     

  • Greg Wilesmith. Guantanomo Bay: Obama’s big failure.

    Good news on Gitmo. There are just 80 prisoners left in their cramped, high security cells in a small, far off, scrubby peninsula on Cuba.

    That’s about 160 fewer than when Barack Obama became president in early 2009 promising to close Guantanomo within a year.

    So not exactly Mission Accomplished! as President Bush trumpeted after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Obama’s presidential promise won’t be fulfilled and amounts to another big political failure.

    Having filmed at Guantanomo two years ago, under strict military censorship, for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program, reported by Lisa Millar, www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2014/s3991385.htm I’ve been keen to see what would happen to the prisoners, many of whom having been interrogated numerous times, were cleared for “transfer” (Pentagon code for release) years ago.

    The Yemenis have been dispatched to Saudi Arabia, where all have family connections. None were charged with any crime let alone attacking New York or Washington. All have called Guantanomo home since 2002.

    You’ll remember the shackled, shambling orange-suited inmates of Camp X-ray which proved such a US public relations disaster; bent over, sometimes hooded, being frog-marched along the wire.

    We were assured by Vice President Dick Cheney they were the “worst in the world”. Some were but the truth was that many just happened to be the wrong place at the wrong time.

    One of the more notorious of the men and boys swept up in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the post 9/11 period – like many he says he was “sold” to the Americans by Pakistani police – and labelled an “enemy combatant” is Tariq Ba Odah. He was 23.

    Ba Odah, now 37, is notorious not for any alleged crime but for his extraordinary persistence as a Guantanomo hunger striker.

    He’s been refusing solid foods since 2007. Being strapped down twice a day and force fed by a tube up his nose seemingly failed to quench his spirit even when by last year he had lost close to half his normal body weight and was down to 36 kg.

    His lawyer Omar Farah quoted Ba Odah in an essay for Rolling Stone, saying, “My method of delivering my message is through hunger strike. You can cut me to pieces, but I will not break it. I will stop on one of two conditions: I die, or I am freed and allowed to return to my family.”

    One can only imagine Ba Odah’s feelings, now aged 36 and having been incarcerated for more than a third of his life.

    Along with the other former prisoners his confinement is not yet over. Saudi Arabia, waging a largely hidden but bloody insurrection, has a “rehabilitation” program for alleged jihadis and the Guantanomo 9 will have to enter it. A few months, maybe longer, but ultimately most will be free.

    The Saudis have taken their time; they were first approached close to a decade ago to take Yemeni prisoners, some who had been born in the Saudi kingdom or had been long term residents.

    Obama’s rhetoric on Guantanomo is familiar. And so again in February, this year, Obama launched a new effort to persuade Congress to close Guantanamo saying, “It’s counterproductive to our fight against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit…Guantanamo harms our partnerships with allies and other countries whose cooperation we need against terrorists.

    “Americans, we pride ourselves on being a beacon to other nations, a model of the rule of law.  But 15 years after 9/11 – 15 years after the worst terrorist attack in American history – we’re still having to defend the existence of a facility and a process where not a single verdict has been reached in those attacks – not a single one.” *

    Congress wasn’t convinced. For many Republicans and some Democrats, the political downside to allowing non-convicted “terrorists” to be relocated to mainland American prisons is too high.

    Or put it another way there’s more political kudos in proclaiming the dangers of bringing “terrorists” to maximum security prisons on the mainland than worrying about whether some innocent men languishing at Guantanomo will remain there indefinitely without trial – until they die.

    Of the 80 men left at Guantanomo the bulk are from Yemen. The US maintains that the civil war raging there, in which Saudi Arabia is an active participant, using US supplied weapons, makes it impossible to return them, particularly given the growing power base of AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula).

    And yet it’s vital to remember that of the remaining 80, 26 were cleared for release years ago. In any conventional US judicial system they would have been enjoyed years of freedom by now.

    Of the rest 49 are categorized as “forever” prisoners – labelled so dangerous they can’t be freed – and 10 are on trial before the stop/start military commissions held at the military base; which as Obama noted acerbically haven’t yet handed down a single verdict.

    These figures were compiled by the remarkable Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald who has been reporting Guantanomo intensively since January 11, 2002 when she watched the first 20 prisoners arriving.

    Without her constant probing over the past 14 years – and an outstanding commitment to the story by her newspaper – the military censorship cloaking Gitmo would have been much more effective.

    Rosenberg’s editor in 2002 asked her to cover the Guantanomo beat until it was over. It isn’t over.

    Greg Wilesmith is a freelance journalist and was an ABC foreign correspondent and producer.

     

  • Kim Williams. Fair use does not mean free: Copyright recommendations would crush Australian content

    As someone who has spent my life running organisations that take risks, invest billions and innovate to provide the best of local and international content to Australian consumers, reading the Productivity Commission’s draft report into our intellectual property arrangements was profoundly dispiriting.

    I cannot think of another recent report that so seriously misses the main drivers of its area of inquiry – namely innovation and the incentives to produce new work. At the same time, the report treats Australian creative content and its production with a disdain bordering on contempt, and that is surprising for any economic statement.

    The commission makes recommendations which would have such a deeply detrimental impact on the ability of film and TV makers, writers, artists and journalists to tell Australian yarns, and make a living doing so, as to be worthy only of rejection.

    Take the commission’s conclusions on what drives innovation. The draft report claims our intellectual property and copyright settings inhibit investment and innovation. Really? Most people who run businesses and invest money know that what really drives innovation is a clear operating framework which enables companies and entrepreneurs to manage their risk appetite and capital investment, as well as access to highly skilled people.

    In the creative landscape, the bedrock of production is copyright – the Copyright Act provides the critical framework for ensuring returns from investment.

    The Prime Minister recognised the drivers of innovation in a statement last year. He committed over $1 billion to ensure the right incentives to innovation were in place; to encourage risk-taking; and to promote science, maths and computing in schools. There was no mention of intellectual property in his statement, given there is already a clear protection framework in place.

    So, having spent considerable amounts of time answering the wrong question, the commission then demonstrates what can only be described as a breathtaking disregard for the creativity of Australians. It dismisses concerns that its recommendations would lead to less Australian content, with this response: “most new works consumed in Australia are sourced from overseas and their creation is unlikely to be responsive to the changes in Australia’s copyright (laws).” So, that encapsulates the commission’s thinking – American and British material will suffice and Australian original work doesn’t really count for zip.

    But make no mistake, if the commission’s recommendations to implement “fair use”, for instance, were implemented, there would be less Australian content on our screens, on our bookshelves (real and virtual), and in our schools and universities.

    “Fair use” is an American legal principle which would allow large enterprises to use copyright material for free, which, under Australian law, they currently have to pay for. PwC recently estimated that introducing “fair use” in Australia could result in a loss of GDP of more than $1 billion.

    PwC’s report (provided to the commission) outlined three reasons for this collapse. First, “fair use” would strip millions away from Australian storytellers and content creators because governments, companies and large education institutions who now pay to use content, would stop paying as much or stop paying at all.

    PwC examined what happened in Canada when similar changes were made in 2012. Universities and schools refused to pay for the educational content they used. This led to a 98 per cent reduction in licensing revenue,  the closure of many publishers and a loss of jobs. Oxford University Press stopped producing Canadian textbooks for schools.

    The Canadian Writers Union’s John Degan described the effect this way: “We are headed back to the bad old days of 40 or 50 years ago, when everything you read in Canadian schools was produced in the US or Britain.”

    Second, “fair use” would permanently lift legal costs in Australia. US copyright cases are almost five times the volume of cases in the UK, whose law is comparable to ours. Good for lawyers, bad for creators and consumers.

    Third, fair use would undermine the effective and fit-for-purpose licensing system that has evolved here allowing Australian teachers to share and copy almost every book, magazine, image or journal published in the world, with their students, for less than the cost of a single book each year. This fee is paid by school departments, not students.

    None of this means that we shouldn’t continue to update our Copyright Act. Industry-led reforms to the Copyright Act are already well advanced in an unprecedented collaboration between rights holders, libraries and education institutions. They deliver on a promise by the Attorney-General George Brandis to review the Act in the government’s first period in office.

    So let’s aim for sensible reform which balances the incentives and protections for creators with the rights of consumers to access wide ranging material on fair terms.

    But remember, fair does not equal free, and no one needs a manufactured revolution driven by armchair economists who want to blow up Australia’s content sector – as this disappointing report proposes.

    Kim Williams is chair of the Copyright Agency and Viscopy. He is a former CEO of NewsCorp Australia, FOXTEL, Fox Studios Australia, the Australian Film Commission, Southern Star Entertainment and Musica Viva Australia.

  • Peter Gibilisco. A Synergistic Approach to Disability

    Here is my proposal for a Dictionary definition of Synergy:

    the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

    “the synergy between artist and record company” or disability support workers and people with disabilities with high support needs.

    In some of my writings I have referred to what I call the “synergistic” outcomes that result from the interaction of people with disabilities and their support workers. These effective working relationships should be given the respect that is their due since they make an indispensable contribution to ongoing efforts to devise effective models of leadership in such workplaces.

    But then I ask: Why are these highly successful working relationships so often below the radar when it comes to forming social welfare policies for the disabled? Could it be that these highly efficient working relationships are simply out of sight and out of mind? Is that why they seem to be ignored when it comes to the discussion of how to make improvements in the disability workforce? Maybe we need to look again at the manuals that are written for workers and develop a distinctively new theory of management. And why not? The synergistic approach I advocate might best be seen as an “inside out” approach to the management and organisation of the disability workforce. It will demonstrate public confidence in the abilities of the people who are served to exercise control over their own lives. Let me try and explain this “synergistic” model of work-place leadership in more detail. In order to make sure that this kind of model is flexible enough to allow change, even if complete change does not take place, the aim is to avoid an approach which sees the disabled person as a problem and instead reckon with such a person as a “problem-solver”, just like anyone else, and just like the support worker as well. In this a “synergistic” model develops a distinctive understanding of societal inclusion.

    In this context, an emphasis upon synergy for the disability workforce aims to provide a corrective to the guidance that is often put to people with these “different abilities” and their support workers. To have an “inside out” approach is about reckoning with life chances and the creation of opportunities. Therefore, by initiating such an approach we confront the support worker who sometimes sees him/herself as a person languishing at the lowest, grass roots level who then needs the disability sector for employment. We need to turn this around. In my view a synergistic approach to the disability sector is not just about better help for the disabled person – it is about raising the status of all involved, and ascribing due respect.

    It may be highly contentious to say outright that disabled people are second-rate citizens but if so much of our social value is measured by income then maybe “2nd rate citizen” is exactly what the income disparity tells us.

    In the disability field, does love conquer all?

    The best form of care is, of course, supplied by family members or close friends. These are those whose support is supplied by love. They are living testimony that love conquers all. Love is mighty and powerful and particularly when administered with compassion, empathy and patience.

    Wherever we may be located by the flow-charts of such organisations, we are all human with our own individual pursuits of happiness. When it comes to high support needs for people with disabilities, love is something that is beyond the control of the “medical model’s” contribution to meeting the needs of disability. But hopefully it will be there as the indispensable motor of any positive medical contribution. A person with a disability at times will require more than just physical support in medical, dietary and psychological terms. That is, we need to promote communities of people who consciously function in ways that humanise the clinical methodology of the medical model, and this can be done by giving greater attention to what I would thereby call “the social model”. Society is a network of coinciding and interdependent responsibilities. An emphasis upon a “social model” of disability support will find it is necessary to emphasize this again and again.

    Let me give an example that has stuck in my mind. Some time ago, around 1987, a friend of mine with Friedreich’s Ataxia (the same disease I have) was to be married to the guy of her dreams (an able-bodied individual). But as she signed the register, she became so excited that she suffered a heart attack and died. In hindsight, the wedding was a beautiful moment, and the embodiment of the social model. But now I am wondering: what should have been done to prevent the heart attack? Perhaps those enthused by the prospects of her wedding had under-estimated the impact of their own advice upon those with “medical model” responsibilities. In other words, we need to find the wisdom to enhance the interaction, the synergy, between the medical and social models of disability. That synergy is important. It is so important. 

    I have come, much to my own surprise, to another related conundrum: how can the medical model be modified to avoid a standardised approach to disability care that simply confirms mythic stereotypes about seriously disabled people. I struggle daily with the way the facility where I live in shared support accommodation is managed. I am therefore wondering whether at a deep, cultural level its modus operandi presupposes the medical model. I’m wondering: is the organisation somehow stuck in a rut assuming that we residents are actually “sick”, that our lives are basically structured by illness?

    I’m not saying that the residents are free of physiological problems that require special care. I am not even thinking here primarily about physiology; I am thinking about the way in which our “roles” are understood by the prevailing management. Are we, in effect, occupying the role bundle of the person who is sick, who is subject to medical care?

    It is perhaps somewhat dangerous (it might seem that I am tooting my own trumpet) but consider my own case. Before coming to live in this place, I lived for 21 years(1990-2011), on my own and during those 21 years I completed a double degree in Arts and Accounting at Monash University, a Master of Arts at Monash University and finally a PhD at the University of Melbourne. This is not to say those years were easy; of course I had added pressure upon me in my studying because of the physiological complexities that had to be addressed by medical means since the onset of Friedreich’s Ataxia at 14(1976). University started when I lived on my own at 28, and graduating with my PhD at 43(1991-2006)). Over the 21 years of living on my own I had two long stays in hospital, but all in all my educational conquests far outweigh any medical complications. This all has me thinking: I’m living as part of a situation in which I have been confronted by nothing less than the reality of what I have referred to above as “the social model”. This is a situation that will be endorsed by most people who have physical disabilities without any intellectual impairment.

    To conclude this reflection about synergy – love and the management of the disability sector, leads me to encourage us all, particularly public policy researchers, senior management in “not for profit” organisations and elsewhere, to think carefully about the “who?” question when dealing with the severely disabled people they are committed to serving. This certainly means that an ethos of equity is needed along with the legislated provision of further assistance. It will require political courage to ensure that an ethical culture is developed in which people with disabilities who have high support needs are cared for individually and effectively.

    I prefer the term “resident” to the current lingo that wants to view me as a “customer”, which can be used in stereotypical ways to standardise care and thus give rise to stereotyped opinions in public discourse.

    My desire to rise above the privations of this shared support accommodation fuels my motivation for this and also many of my previous articles. Thanks for reading.

    A special thank you to Bruce Wearne for his editing and helping to tweak this piece and Christina Irugalbandara for her excellence and academic support work.

    Dr Peter Gibilisco is an Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne. He has published a book ‘The Politics of Disability’. 

     

     

  • Richard Woolcott. Australia/China and Barracuda submarines.

    It seems that one of the important roles for the new Barracuda submarines that we are to purchase from the French is for the submarines to be able to operate at long-range in the South China Sea. Quite apart from the cost of the submarine purchase, is this a wise strategy for Australia to pursue. I have reposted extracts below from an earlier article by Richard Woolcott in which he warns of an adversarial attitude towards China based mainly on Japanese policies and US support. John Menadue.

    Extract from earlier article by Richard Woolcott ‘The Burning question – should Australia do more on the South China Sea‘ 9 March 2016.

    Australia must develop a more balanced approach to its relationships with the United States and a rising China.

    There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China, based mainly on Japanese policies and US support, could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony.  This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former Ambassadors to China, as well as a number of well informed academics, including Hugh White at the ANU. While China can be expected to resist American hegemony in the Asian region, it does accept a continuing and constructive US role in Asia.

    Australia should not take sides on China/Japan or Vietnamese, Malaysian and Philippine disputes within ASEAN, on rival territorial claims in the South China Sea, as the United States has done. Australia’s focus should be on the unimpeded passage to the mainland of China through international waters in the South China Sea, as the United States insists on in respect of its access to its ports. There is no reason why China cannot rise peacefully if it is not provoked.

    China maintains it is simply protecting its regional interests from the US “pivot to Asia “, or “rebalancing “as it is now called. Although President Obama has not defined this policy in any detail, two senior US Admirals have recently said, in public, that it is directed at restricting China’s influence in the South China Sea.12

    Richard Woolcott was previously President of the United Nations Assembly, Head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and many other countries.

  • Evan Williams. ‘A Month of Sundays’. Film Review

    I went to see A Month of Sundays, Mathew Saville’s new Australian film, expecting a comedy about real-estate agents. It was the impression I’d gained from a careless reading of publicity handouts and other usually unreliable sources. And sure enough, the film has some witty lines and one or two moments of gentle satire at the expense of the real-estate profession. But Saville’s film isn’t really a comedy – unless you get your laughs watching lonely old widows coping on their own, grieving teenage boys pining for parental love, divorced husbands pining for lost wives, and other unhappy souls. (more…)

  • Jon Stanford and Michael Keating. the mistaken decision on submarines.

    The government has made a bad decision on acquiring the future submarines (FSMs). It’s bad for the Navy, bad for the taxpayer and it represents a major regression in terms of industry policy.

    It’s bad for the Navy because in terms of capability the decision fails to deliver on the objectives set out in the latest Defence White Paper. DCNS’ conventional Barracuda class boats will not be ‘regionally superior’ submarines in terms of their technology. By the 2030s, if operating in the South China Sea, they will be confronted by nuclear attack submarines (SSNs), of greatly improved performance compared to current models. The FSMs will not be, as the Prime Minister said, “the most sophisticated naval vessels being built in the world”. But on a ‘bang for the buck’ basis, they may well be by far the most expensive with the longest delivery timeline.

    An advanced, nuclear powered Barracuda class submarine, with underwater endurance limited to 100 days only by crew resilience and a submerged speed of 30 knots, could claim regional technological superiority. But no conventional submarine (SSK), however advanced, will be technologically superior in the South China Sea in the 2030s, nor will it be safe to send RAN submariners on offensive operations there on such a platform.

    The irony is that if the government’s power projection ambitions were to be pursued, the nuclear powered version of the advanced Barracuda class would be the ideal platform for the RAN. Yet Defence’s requirements have led DCNS to remove the single element in the Barracuda class that provides its overwhelming technological advantage, namely the nuclear reactor, and replace it with an updated version of the diesel electric propulsion that powered Australia’s first submarines over a century ago. It’s the naval equivalent of removing the engine from a Ferrari and replacing it with a motor from a Citroen 2CV.

    The ridiculous corollary of this is that it will cost Australia a lot more to procure the dumbed down version of the Barracuda submarine than it would have done to buy far more capable nuclear powered Barracudas as a military off-the-shelf (MOTS) purchase from France. If the Navy had acquired, say, four nuclear boats supplemented by six conventional submarines of an existing design to undertake the other roles required of the FSM, the overall cost could have been around $20 billion, as against over $36 billion plus at 2016 prices (the oft-quoted $50 billion represents future inflated costs). The Navy would also have been much better off in terms of capability.

    Another benefit of a MOTS purchase is that the new submarines would have been available a decade earlier, thereby avoiding some significant risks. There would be no need to attempt, at high cost, to upgrade the obsolescent Collins class, with a high risk of failure that would leave the Navy without an effective submarine capability for a decade or more. There are also major design risks in a new submarine, particularly in integrating American systems with the French platform and transferring power hungry systems from a nuclear design with a high availability of electricity. This could delay delivery of the new submarine beyond the current unacceptable timeline and increase the already unacceptable cost.

    The implications for industry policy constitute a particularly egregious element in the procurement decision. In this context, we need to remember that the Abbott government showed the door to the car industry. The end of the age of entitlement meant that around $500 million a year, not high by international standards, was too much to pay to support a high technology industry that, directly and indirectly, employed around 200,000 people.

    Now the government is keen to support an industry with a cost disability, according to the RAND Corporation, of up to 40 per cent. Given the likely moderate local value added in an industry where all the sophisticated hardware is imported, the effective rate of protection (assistance to value added) will be much higher than this. Indeed a leaked paper from Defence last week suggested an effective rate of protection of 500 per cent would be required to build the submarines in Adelaide. Even at the height of the Fraser government’s protectionist excesses in the early 1980s, the effective rate reached ‘only’ 143 per cent for the car industry.

    The government justifies a local build on the basis of job creation, developing an innovative industry and the ability to undertake through life sustainment of the submarines in Australia.

    On the Prime Minister’s figures, 2,800 jobs will be created directly and indirectly, a far cry from the 200,000 jobs that are related to the car industry. Some early estimates suggest we are looking at a cost of around $4 million for every job created.

    There is only value in building an innovative industry if it is internationally competitive. Little thought appears to have been given to developing an industry plan directed towards this objective. If this was an issue, the government would have given much greater attention to the German bid, which offered a substantially lower price ($20 billion), much earlier delivery, no cost penalty for a local build and the transfer of substantial digital technology to Australia.

    The defence argument for local acquisitions can be the last refuge of a scoundrel; in the past it was even applied to protecting the clothing industry. We already know that we do not need to build military assets, including missiles and systems, in order to maintain and upgrade them. We do not build RAAF fixed wing assets or missiles in Australia yet we deliver high quality through life support. Australian industry was perfectly well able to maintain the British-built Oberon class submarines and, indeed, to upgrade them.

    It’s not too late to amend the decision and deliver a better outcome. The submarines have not yet been designed, commercial terms have not been agreed and contracts have not yet been signed. A much improved approach could maintain DCNS as the preferred supplier, while providing the Navy with the capability it needs much sooner, at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer and with positive industry benefits in South Australia.

    The first step would be to negotiate with the French government (and the US) to acquire four nuclear powered Barracuda class submarines as a MOTS purchase. If agreed, the Navy could also acquire six conventional Scorpene class SSKs from DCNS, to be built in Adelaide on a fixed price contract if the cost penalty is acceptable. All these submarines would be delivered in the early 2020s with no need to upgrade Collins.

    If the acquisition of the four SSNs is ruled out, the capability requirement should be amended to exclude offensive operations in contested waters far from home. This would mean focussing on operations that are well within the capacity of a SSK, namely sea denial in Australia’s littoral and reconnaissance and intelligence gathering in neighbouring waters and archipelagos. This would require acquiring between six and nine SSKs of an existing design, to be built in Adelaide if the price is right.

    Of course, there would be political difficulties in making these changes. This would require strong leadership by the Prime Minister. Better this, however, than taking significant risks with Australia’s defence, imposing a large and unnecessary burden on taxpayers and going down in history as modern Australia’s most protectionist Prime Minister.

     

    Jon Stanford and Michael Keating are Directors of Insight Economics. Previously they worked together in the Prime Minister’s Department, where Dr Keating was Secretary.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Arja Keski-Nummi. Manus – “The Worst Angels of Our Nature” 

    The PNG Supreme Court decision has again thrown into stark relief the bankrupt nature of Australia’s asylum policy and the disingenuous way that both sides use trite slogans such as “ saving lives” and not “starting up the people smuggling business” as justification for their cynical and inhumane policies.

    People working with asylum seekers and who have processed and resettled refuges from within and outside of Australia have all urged Australian political parties to find a way to return to a bipartisan policy based on treating all people with dignity and common human decency, even if in the end they are not found to be refugees. But this has fallen on deaf ears.

    Despite many experienced commentators in the past day offering reasonable policy advice and approach it is clear from the statements of both parties that they will not take such advice.

    The scene has been set. Cynical political calculations ahead of a July election trump good policy or treating people humanely. Indeed, one could argue that there is a de facto bipartisan policy – one based on cruelty and selfishly inward looking in its intent.

    Asylum policy does not change many votes, handling the economy, education, health and industrial relations does. However the Government knows it does them little harm to raise the spectre of uncontrolled boats. Equally the Opposition is stuck in its defence of its decision to reopen offshore processing centres and then, in the heat of an election campaign in 2013, to extend that to no resettlement in Australia.

    This seismic shift in Australia’s asylum policies and its abrogation of any moral responsibility towards people who have reached its territory is deeply troubling. It is not clear that this genie can easily be put back into the lamp.

    This unseemly debate sits uncomfortably with anyone who actually looks outward – we live in a interconnected world, more than ever people are on the move because of diminishing economic opportunities, civil war and other conflicts, environmental degradation and exploitation and a combination of all of these factors in any one cohort.

    We should not be squabbling over 800 men stuck on Manus, shifting the responsibility to PNG and offering to throw money in their direction to make the problem go away. There are perfectly reasonable and common sense approaches to resolving the status of all those on Manus. The Howard government did just this with the remaining Nauru population in 2005-6.

    There are over 50 million displaced people globally, Australia’s issues with asylum seekers does not amount to a hill of beans – so focused are we on Manus and Nauru that we have not yet honoured our small commitment to resettling Syrian refugees from the Middle East.

    Both parties could make a difference by agreeing to take a reasonable bipartisan approach by working to resettle people found to be refugees and building a stronger regional cooperation framework – taking the politics out of an issue that demeans us all.

    But this will not happen, because both major parties are focused on narrow, immediate political gain.

    Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Her primary responsibility was in the field of humanitarian and refugee programs.

     

  • Richard Eckersley. Wellbeing and sustainability: irreconcilable differences?

    Better concepts and measures of quality of life and wellbeing make sustainable development more achievable. 

    The debate about progress and development is converging and merging with that about sustainable development. My analysis of the flaws in equating progress with modernisation, discussed in my previous article, contributes to this debate because it shows the equation counts modernity’s benefits to wellbeing but not all its costs.

    Modernity’s dominant narrative of material progress gives priority to economic growth and a rising standard of living. It is being increasingly challenged by the alternative narrative of sustainability, which seeks to balance social, environmental and economic priorities and goals to achieve a high, equitable and lasting quality of life. Material progress represents an outdated, industrial model of development: pump more wealth into one end of the pipeline of progress and more welfare flows out the other.

    Sustainable development reflects an ecological model, based on our understanding of complex systems, in which wellbeing results from many entities or factors interacting in often multiple, diffuse and non-linear ways. (Its implications include paying more attention to the quality of economic activity, not just its quantity; and trading off some growth to achieve other, social and environmental benefits.)

    One approach to measuring sustainable development is to divide quality-of-life or wellbeing measures by energy use or environmental impacts. The New Economic Foundation’s Happy Planet Index does this, multiplying national life satisfaction by life expectancy and dividing the resulting ‘happy life years’ by a country’s per capita Ecological Footprint. My aim here, however, is to assess the wellbeing side of the equation. Wellbeing measures tend to reinforce the conventional view of progress by suggesting wellbeing is continuing to increase; even indices which include environmental impacts show Western nations performing best on the social and economic measures.

    There is often an assumption, explicit or implicit, that there will be a cost to current quality of life in shifting to a sustainable path, as reflected in the title of a recent paper on the topic: ‘Untangling the environmentalist’s paradox: Why is human well-being increasing as ecosystem services degrade?’. The Happy Planet Index notes the ‘undeniable tension’ between its numerator of happy life years and the denominator of the Ecological Footprint. The Sustainable Society Index no longer aggregates beyond the three dimensions of human, economic and environmental wellbeing because of the negative correlation between human and environmental wellbeing, which it says seem to be on a ‘collision course’.

    A 2008 study comparing countries’ Human Development Index scores with their per capita Ecological Footprints shows environmental impacts rise steeply with high development. Only one country (Cuba) of the 93 surveyed met the requirements for both high development (an HDI score of 0.8 or more) and global sustainability (a footprint of less than 1.8 global hectares). Among high-income countries over the previous 25 years, improvements in index scores came with disproportionately larger increases in their footprints, showing a movement away from sustainability. Some lower-income countries, in contrast, achieved higher levels of development without a corresponding increase in their footprints.

    My wider perspective on wellbeing helps to resolve this dilemma by highlighting how Western high-consumption lifestyles and the type of economy and culture they reflect and require are not only increasing resource consumption and environmental damage, they are also hostile to health and wellbeing (especially in countries that are already rich). The importance of ‘correcting’, or at least questioning more deeply, the conventional picture of progress and development is underscored by environmental analyses which demonstrate the extent of the environmental costs, the limits they impose on orthodox development, and their potentially catastrophic impact on human health. That most measures of progress, including newer indices, do not reflect this reality – and show, in effect, that we are enjoying a high or improving quality of life even as we move ever closer and faster to an ecological abyss – demonstrates how far we have to go.

    This perspective reinforces the message which is becoming clearer from global threats to humanity such as climate change, food, water and energy security, economic collapse, and technological anarchy. This message is that we need to change the myths, worldviews and values by which we define ourselves, our lives, and our goals. The necessary transformation can be compared to that in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment: from the medieval mind, dominated by religion and the afterlife, to the modern mind, focused on material life here on earth.

    Without this deeper change, we will not close the gulf between the magnitude of the challenges and the scale of our responses. A cultural transformation of this depth is very different from the policy reforms on which our public discussions and political debates focus and which, by and large, our indicators of development track. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, hailed politically to be an outstanding success, but judged scientifically to be a failure, exemplifies well this ‘reality gap’

     

    Richard Eckersley is a director of Australia21, a public-interest, strategic research company. This article draws on a longer paper published this month in the leading international development journal, Oxford Development Studies. For those with subscription access, it is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2016.1166197. An author version is available at: www.richardeckersley.com.au

     

  • Ray Cassin. No moral mystery to 60 Minutes child snatch disaster.

    The mystery of the 60 Minutes child snatch that went so disastrously wrong is that there is no mystery, although some people want to contrive one.

    Ethically there are no shades of grey here. We know what happened, and we know that what 60 Minutes and TCN Nine agreed to do by helping Sally Faulkner abduct her children in Beirut violated a fundamental tenet of journalism.

    That tenet can be simply expressed: don’t make yourself a player in the story, especially not by paying other players in the story. Because if you do, your audience has no reason to trust your account of what the story is.

    That’s it. It’s as basic as that, and it is what 60 Minutes did. No amount of obfuscation and special pleading will change that.

    But the obfuscators are emerging nonetheless, unctuously intent on mystifying the story after all.

    Not least among them is Tara Brown, the reporter 60 Minutes sent to Beirut.

    After Brown, her producer Stephen Rice, camera operator Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment had returned to Australia from their two-week stint in a Beirut jail, she insisted that they ‘were just journalists doing their job’.

    Apparently this is why Brown felt confident that she and her colleagues would quickly be released.

    “The ‘mistakes and failings’ narrative evades the truth, too. It is another attempt to mystify what is not mysterious, because it replaces a moral evaluation of the events with a technical one.”

    ‘I really thought, we’re journalists, we’re doing our job, they will see reason, they’ll understand that,’ she said. ‘That we are here just to do a story on a very desperate mother.’

    Except that 60 Minutes‘ involvement in the story went way beyond following Sally Faulkner to Beirut to see whether she could reclaim her children Lahela, five, and Noah, three, from their father, her former partner Ali Elamine.

    Lawyers acting for Adam Whittington and his euphemistically named ‘child recovery team’, who are all still in custody in Beirut, have tendered in court a document indicating that Nine paid Whittington nearly $70,000 for his work.

    Nine has not officially admitted funding the abductors, but in the circumstances the network’s refusal to comment comes about as close to exemplifying the maxim that silence gives consent as can be imagined.

    The reason for the disclosure of the payment to Whittington’s company, Child Abduction Recovery International, is obvious enough.

    Whittington’s lawyer, Joe Karam, said that he wished his client and the three contractors who worked with him had been included in the settlement that allowed Faulkner and the 60 Minutes team to be released from jail.

    Nothing brings out the truth like pique at being left behind.

    Nine is reported to have paid Ali Elamine $US500,000 to drop abduction charges against Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew. In return, Faulkner waived her right to custody of the children, which had been granted by the Family Court in Australia.

    She might never see them again, unless their father, who was given custody by a Shia court in Lebanon, allows her to visit them in Beirut — in which case she could still be at risk of criminal charges.

    So ‘doing a story on a very desperate mother’ involved paying a team of international kidnappers to abduct the children, then paying their father an eye-poppingly large amount of money to allow their mother and the journalists to walk free.

    The release of the 60 Minutes team had nothing to do with them being ‘just journalists doing their job’, and after this grubby set of payments the very desperate mother is worse off than she was before.

    All of this amounts to what Brown’s 60 Minutes colleague Michael Usher has described as ‘mistakes and failings’ in the handling of the story, which is now subject to an internal review at Nine.

    Mistakes there certainly were. The Lebanese police were able to find the children, their abductors, Faulkner and the 60 Minutes team because Ben Williamson asked Faulkner if he could film her calling Elamine to tell him she had the children.

    When she rang off, Elamine reported the call to the police. They checked the number and found that the phone Faulkner used belonged to Whittington, who astonishingly had registered under his own name in a Beirut hotel. His arrest led to the arrest of everyone else involved.

    Yep, it was massive bungle piled upon gross ineptitude. But the ‘mistakes and failings’ narrative evades the truth, too. It is another attempt to mystify what is not mysterious, because it replaces a moral evaluation of the events with a technical one.

    “Whatever 60 Minutes might say in their defence now, it is almost inconceivable that they would have acted as they did in Australia or any other Western country.”

    There have been attempts by some in the media to mount a moral justification of 60 Minutes‘ actions. The usual defence is that at least they were trying to do the right thing, by helping a mother who would not have been denied custody in Australia.

    But that opens another, distinctly slimy, can of worms. Do we think 60 Minutes would have funded a child abduction in Australia, however much the parent they were purporting to help might seem to have been denied custody unfairly?

    Almost certainly not. But it’s different, of course, if the children have been taken to another country, especially a Muslim country with religious courts, the very mention of which can be guaranteed to raise the hackles of 60 Minutes viewers.

    Whatever 60 Minutes might say in their defence now, it is almost inconceivable that they would have acted as they did in Australia or any other Western country.

    What will be the ultimate consequence of their actions? It is not clear, although Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said that the $500,000 payment to Ali Elamine could be investigated by the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Exchange Commission (ASIC): ‘Nobody is above the law, and if you break the law in other parts of the world you may well be breaking Australian law as well.’

    Maybe. ASIC might investigate, and Nine might even be prosecuted. But I’m betting that if this saga deters news organisations from following 60 Minutes‘ example, it will only be because shareholders and corporate boards don’t want to pay the cost.

    The gap between principle and practice in journalism won’t close anytime soon.

     

    Ray Cassin is former Age journalist and a longstanding contributor to Eureka Street. This article was first published by Eureka Street on 26 April 2016.

     

  • Evan Williams. What Bill Shorten should say – but won’t

    With Australia’s longest-ever election campaign now underway, politicians face a problem. How long can they go on repeating the same promises and slogans? According to usually reliable sources, Bill Shorten drafted a speech for his campaign launch which was immediately shredded by his close advisers. Leaked extracts are reproduced here by Evan Williams, who accepts no responsibility for their accuracy.

    Men and women of Australia!

    We all remember the words of my great predecessor Gough Whitlam when he launched his election campaign in 1972. Tonight, as we approach the centenary of his birth, I hope to draw some inspiration from his record and achievement. In the best Whitlam tradition, I’m presenting an ambitious program for reform and renewal.

    I won’t give you platitudes and slogans. I won’t go on about the momentous choice we face on July 2 because you know that already. I won’t say that the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us, because I don’t believe it. Politics is all about the things that divide us. It will be a sad day for democracy when politicians agree on everything.

    Tonight I’ll say what I really mean, and I begin with this firm pledge. The first priority of an incoming Labor government will be to increase taxes. Why? Because we need the money. I’m not talking about tobacco taxes or excise duties or tinkering with the capital gains tax. I’m talking about an increase in personal income-tax, sufficient to strengthen the budget bottom-line and pay for the things we need.

    That’s why I favour a rise in income-tax over a hike in the GST. Under a progressive tax system everyone will pay a share and everyone will pay their fair share. Of course we’ll be clamping down on tax loopholes, superannuation concessions, negative gearing and other rorts that benefit the wealthy. But that won’t be enough. We have a revenue problem and a spending problem, and my Government will tackle both.

    The Liberals have only one solution to budget problems: sack more public servants and slash more public services. That’s not Labor’s way. Of course we’ll face a relentless scare campaign from our opponents and the media. But I believe that if the case for a tax increase is honestly presented and clearly explained, Australians will accept it in the right spirit.

    Will this make us another high-taxing, big-spending Labor government, as our opponent will claim? It probably will. But it will put us in distinguished company. The Scandinavian countries have much higher taxes than we do, including a thumping GST, but are among the most stable, most prosperous and fairest societies in the world. Let’s join them.

    It’s time! It’s time we put paid to the myth that Coalition governments are better economic managers than Labor. Of course Labor governments have made mistakes – Gough, let’s face it, did a fair bit to wreck the economy in 1974 – but look at the history. It was a conservative government that took Australia into the Great Depression. It was a Labor government that the people turned to for deliverance. It was the Hawke and Keating governments that transformed a moribund and congested Australian economy in the 1980s with a series of reforms that are now universally applauded. It was the Howard government that squandered the windfall benefits of the commodities boom by handing out needless tax cuts when we should have been investing in infrastructure and development. It was the Rudd government that led Australia successfully through the Global Financial Crisis and averted a crippling recession. Australia emerged from that crisis as one of the strongest economies in the developed world. So who are better economic managers?

    Tonight I applaud the record of the Rudd and Gillard governments – on economic management, on national disability insurance, on great infrastructure projects like the national broadband network, on our overdue apology to the stolen generations. So you may well ask: if they were such good governments, why did I help tear down their leaders? I’ll give an honest answer. I supported and encouraged the Labor caucus in changing the leadership because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Kevin was demoralised after the defeat of the emissions trading scheme he negotiated with Malcolm Turnbull, and, rightly or wrongly, was deeply disliked by many of his Cabinet colleagues. Julia did some great things but she ran a dysfunctional government and suffered from the same problem as Tony Abbott – too many bad Newspolls. We dumped Julia for the same reason Malcolm Turnbull knifed Tony Abbott – a settled conviction that without a change of leadership the election would be lost. Politics can be a brutal game.

    My next pledge tonight is in the great tradition of all Labor governments: we’ll deliver a new deal for education. I’ve already promised that Labor will implement the full scope of the Gonski education reforms. No ifs, no buts, no qualifications. But we’ll go further. Coalition governments have grievously undermined vocational training and dismantled our TAFE colleges. They’ve slashed grants to the States for public education and cut funding for universities. Yet by every international yardstick our academic standards are in serious decline. This has to stop.

    Malcolm Turnbull keeps telling us that we must become an innovative and creative nation to deal with changing economic times. But the way to stimulate innovation and creativity is not to give more tax breaks to big corporations. The best way is to raise educational standards, to encourage our brightest students to take up careers in science and technology. The Liberals have cut funding to the CSIRO, our leading scientific research organisation. My government will increase it. We will appoint a royal commission – yes, another royal commission – into the entire education sector: schools funding, teacher training, curriculum development, standards and outcomes at every level. We will ensure that every Australian child receives the best possible education with the best-trained teachers in the best-equipped schools, regardless of income or postcode. Comrades, it’s time!

    I promise that a Labor government will welcome refugees and free all children from detention. We’ll close the hellish prisons on Nauru and Manus Island. Boat people will be processed in Australia and given decent accommodation on the Australian mainland before being resettled in the community. We’ll launch our Let Them Stay program, inviting Australian families to make room in their homes for refuges in need. And while we’re about it we’ll ban live animal exports. We’ll be the first government in Australia to establish a Ministry for Animal Welfare to protect defenceless creatures from needless suffering. I know this won’t please our friends in the cattle trade or the racing industry. But they don’t vote for us anyway. New Zealand gets along without live animal exports, so why can’t we?

    And we’ll take a good, hard look at the defence budget. Do we really need all these new submarines and frigates and surveillance vessels, with a big boost in the overall defence budget? That’s another myth – that the Liberals are better than Labor at defence and national security. Are they really? Again, let’s look at the record. It was a Labor government that led Australia through her years of gravest peril and mobilised our defences in World War II. It was a Liberal government that got us into the Vietnam war and it was the Whitlam government that got us out. It was the Hawke government that helped liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1991 and It was a Liberal government that got us into the disastrous, unwinnable war in Iraq. What sort of national security are the Liberals talking about?

    Finally, and most important of all, we’ll tackle the threat of global warming. And we’ll tackle it seriously. I’ve already promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030 – it was my first major policy announcement as leader – but if Australia is to meet her international obligations, flouted and disregarded by successive Coalition governments, we may have to go further.

    Climate change is an existential threat to our way of life, possibly to our very survival on this planet. We see the evidence every day. Last month brought the hottest global temperature readings for any month in recorded history. The Arctic ice sheet is disappearing, glaciers are melting, sea levels and ocean temperatures are rising. Already we are seeing the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and a decline in fish stocks around the world. The science is in – and Labor accepts the science. We’ll make Australia a leader, not a laggard, in the international effort to protect our planet. It’s time!

    Our measures will be costly. Many businesses and householders will need compensation to support them through the crisis. For this, and for the other commitments I’ve outlined in Labor’s policy tonight, we will need to make sacrifices. I make no apology for that. Under Labor there’ll be no more delay, no more dithering, no more smooth double-talk. Labor will be the party of action on the things that matter. I say again, that will mean some pain for all of us. But as another Malcolm once said, life isn’t meant to be easy. And I’m sure Gough would agree.

     

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    Evan Williams is a former newspaper editor and Walkley Award-winning journalist. He wrote speeches for Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and a succession of NSW premiers. He headed the NSW Government’s cultural sector from 1977 to 2001, and for 33 years wrote regular film reviews for The Australian. He is a Member of the Order of Australia.

     

     

     

  • Rob Nicholls. NBN – election issue or fizzer?

    Cable competition

    NBN Co has let a contract worth $1.6 billion for Telstra to construct the hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) network in the mainland state capital cities. The deal has the ACCC on edge with Rod Sims expressing concern that Telstra will get a retail edge. As he said in a media release: “It is important that Telstra doesn’t get a head-start selling retail services over the NBN just because its technical expertise is being used in the construction and maintenance of the NBN”.

    Although the ACCC is signalling a potential concern, other than Telstra’s current ring-fencing, it’s difficult to see what can be done. Malcolm Turnbull and Mathias Cormann wrote the Statement of Expectations for NBN Co calling for the multi technology mix. The Statement of Expectations did not amend vast range of of documentation such as Telstra’s Structural Separation Undertaking and Migration Plans given to the ACCC, that were based on a fibre to the premises network. The ACCC continues to accept variations that reflect practical network rollout experience. However, Telstra, acting reasonably and in the interests of its shareholders, did not give new commitments in respect of HFC construction.

    The effect is that NBN Co’s fastest deployment option is to get Telstra to build the required HFC. Telstra will do that effectively. It will try to avoid using the information gained in the construction phase to give itself a retail advantage. It is quite difficult to think of any contracting party that would be in a position to do this work.

    It is not clear where these competition issues lie in the context of the Competition and Consumer Act. The industry structural changes that arose out of Telstra’s Structural Separation Undertaking create a policy issue here. In addition, there is the wealth transfer from NBN Co, a government business entity, to Telstra, a public company. More specifically, the double handling that arises when Telstra could have been contracted directly by the Commonwealth and thereby avoided a level of bureaucracy. If the contract management is expressed as a fraction of a percent of the contract value, then it’s useful to remember that 1% of $1.6 billion is $16 million!

    More acronyms

    At the same time, Internet Australia has called for a focus on the technology called “fibre to the distribution point” or FttDP. The main reason for the call is not that it’s the best technology. Instead, it is a technology that lends itself well to upgrade to fibre to the premises. That is, Internet Australia sees it more as a least worse technology. It certainly offers a good pathway as the “distribution point” is close to the premises. NBN Co is already considering the technology as part of the fibre to the node project. However, NBN Co has a focus of using FttDP for premises that are a long way from a potential node (at least a kilometre). This makes sense in terms of ensuring that the best range of bit rates is available to end users. However, FttDP has a significant operations and maintenance advantage over fibre to the node. The copper (which is the part of the network that goes wrong) is short in FttDP – it’s from the street to the premises. The second issue is that one of the premises provides the power. This means that the electricity costs (and the metering of that electricity) are no longer NBN Co’s problem. Another driver for Internet Australia is that there is a prospect that there could be bipartisan support for FttDP, on the basis that it is consistent with the multi technology mix.

    Election issues

    Heading into the election we are not likely to see the wide gap on NBN issues that was apparent in 2010 and to a lesser extent in 2013. There have been hints that Labor’s Jason Clare will spruik FttDP, but the LNP response is likely to be that “we’re doing that”. There will be reasonable criticisms that the Lib’s NBN will be neither quicker nor cheaper.

    The more difficult challenges do not lend themselves to three word slogans. These are derived from NBN Co’s charging model which has a use charge with no directly associated cost (referred to as the Connectivity Virtual Circuit or CVC charge). This was set at a time before Presto, Netflix and Stand and without a comprehension of the massive increase in data consumption that Australians have engaged in. The solution to part of this problem is actually simple. These large deliverers along with Facebook and Google could connect to the NBN at each of the points of interconnection, but downstream of the CVC. Netflix even provides the precise hardware (at no charge to high traffic use internet service providers) required to implement the solution. However, these commercial issues and the associated policy viewpoints are not easily digestible in retail politics. The fear is that this may mean that workable solutions without associated slogans will be directed towards the “too hard” basket.

    Dr Rob Nicholls, Lecturer, School of Taxation and Business Law, UNSW.

     

  • Richard Eckersley. The mismeasure of progress: Is the West really the best?

    Western liberal democracies dominate the top rankings of progress indices. But are they the best models of development when their quality of life is, arguably, declining and unsustainable.

    The measures of human progress and development that we employ matter. Good measures are a prerequisite for good governance because they are how we judge its success. They also influence how we evaluate our own lives because they affect our values, perceptions and goals. Measures both reflect and reinforce what we understand development to be: if we believe the wrong thing, we will measure the wrong thing, and if we measure the wrong thing, we will not do the right thing.

    Scientific and political interest in indicators of progress and development has surged in the past two decades. The central concern has been the adequacy of (per capita) Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the dominant measure of a nation’s performance, relative to other countries and the past. The result has been the development of new indicator sets or composite indices that include a wide range of measures – social, economic and environmental.

    Subjective wellbeing (commonly measured as self-reported life satisfaction or happiness) has attracted particular enthusiasm, with many researchers advocating its use as a stand-alone measure or a component of indicator sets and indices. Life satisfaction and happiness are believed to capture important subjective elements of wellbeing that other, objective indicators do not. A 2014 paper states that ‘there appears to be an emerging consensus in the policy community that subjective wellbeing ought to be the key criterion of policy success’.

    The idea behind this work is that better indicators of the progress of nations will lead to better choices, especially in public policy, and so to higher quality of life and wellbeing for their citizens. The United Nations Development Programme says development is about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests; it is about expanding the choices people have to lead lives they value. Fundamental to this goal is building human capabilities: to lead long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable, to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living, and to be able to participate in the life of the community. ‘Philosophers, economists and political leaders have long emphasised human wellbeing as the purpose, the end, of development,’ it says.

    Generally speaking, indicators place Western liberal democracies at the leading edge of progress, and present them as models of development for less developed nations. Typically, with indices such as the Human Development Index , the Social Progress Index and the Legatum Prosperity Index, Western nations occupy most of the top 20 places, with higher- income Asian nations filling most of the rest. Only when environmental impacts are given significant weight, as in the Happy Planet Index and the Sustainable Society Index, does this ranking change substantially.

    Conceptually, the dominant indicators of progress, including GDP, subjective wellbeing and the newer composite indices, equate progress with modernisation. The United Nations Development Programme notes that past decades have seen substantial progress in many aspects of human development. Most people today are healthier, live longer, are more educated and have more access to goods and services, it says; they also have more power to select leaders, influence public decisions and share knowledge. Thus, indicators focus on those qualities that characterise modernisation and which we celebrate as success or improvement, such as material wealth, high life expectancy, education, democratic governance, and individual freedom.

    However valuable these gains are, they do not represent the sum total of what constitutes optimal wellbeing and quality of life. Nor do they integrate or reconcile adequately the requirements of sustainability. Modernisation’s benefits are counted, but its costs to wellbeing are underestimated and downplayed. At best, the qualities being measured under orthodox approaches may be desirable and even necessary, but are not sufficient. At worst, the measures are promoting a lower quality of life and leading us to towards an uncertain and problematic future.

    Put another way, the dominant model of progress and development reflects one particular worldview: modernity. Modernisation is a pervasive, complex, multidimensional process that characterises our era. It includes: industrialisation, globalisation, urbanisation, democratisation, scientific and technological advance, capitalism, secularism, rationalism, individualism and consumerism. Many of these features are part of the processes of cultural Westernisation and material progress (measured as economic growth).

    Recent advances in thinking have dispelled the idea that per capita GDP is an accurate or adequate measure of progress (although GDP growth remains firmly entrenched as a political priority), and broadened the measures accordingly. For example, the Genuine Progress Indicator, which adjusts the personal consumption component of GDP for a range of factors that GDP ignores or treats inappropriately, tracks GDP from 1950 to the 1970s, then diverges as social and environmental costs increase. However, the alternative indices have not yet gone far enough in allowing, even encouraging, the scrutiny and critical evaluation of modernity itself.

    To the extent that new concepts of development permit more diverse, or more broadly based, forms of development, they still do not capture the depths and complexities of being human and human wellbeing. A fuller accounting demands wholly new models of progress and development. For all the new interest and effort, the work remains constrained by arbitrary disciplinary boundaries; it still falls short of explaining and resolving the inconsistencies and ambiguities that emerge from research, especially when evidence from other scientific disciplines and fields outside indicators research is taken into account. We may be making progress in measuring progress, but we still have a long way to go.

    A critical flaw in equating progress with modernisation is an insufficient acknowledgement of the ‘psychosocial dynamics’ of human societies: the complex interactions and relationships between the subjective and objective worlds that determine qualities such as identity, belonging, purpose and meaning in life, which are so crucial to our wellbeing. Existing measures reflect or capture some aspects of these dynamics, but not enough. This is as true of subjective-wellbeing indicators as it is of other measures.

    Measuring life satisfaction or happiness does not fundamentally alter the dominant view of progress. For example, the correlation between the Human Development Index and the World Happiness Report’s scores is a high 0.77. On the face of it, such associations seem persuasive, but like other indicators, subjective-wellbeing indicators fail to capture fully the psychosocial dynamics of our ways of living. Aspects of subjective wellbeing that remain unresolved or contested in the research literature include: adaptation and homeostatic control, which buffer subjective wellbeing against external circumstances and help to maintain a relatively stable and positive life evaluation; the influence of personal situations compared to social conditions; the ambiguous role of individual freedom in wellbeing; and a cultural bias towards Western societies.

    There are several streams of evidence that expose the limitations of subjective wellbeing, and cast doubt on how we currently conceptualise and measure progress and development. These are: research using wider or more diverse measures of personal health and wellbeing; what people think, not about their own lives, but about the overall quality of life and society as a whole; and people’s views of the future of society and humanity. For example:

    • The great majority of adolescents and young adults in the developed world say they are happy, healthy and satisfied with their lives, and their life expectancy continues to rise. Yet other research indicates their wellbeing has declined because of increased rates of chronic physical and mental illness. A 2010 US study by Jean Twenge and her colleagues compared the results of a widely used psychological test over a period of 70 years, and found a steady decline in the mental health of college students: compared to 1938, five times as many college students in 2007 scored high enough on the test to indicate psychological problems.
    • Australia ranks high in progress indices, including life satisfaction, yet in a 2015 survey, conducted by Omnipoll on my behalf, when asked about quality of life in Australia, taking into account social, economic and environmental conditions and trends, only 16 per cent of Australians thought life was getting better; 35 per cent thought it was staying about the same; and 49 per cent thought it was getting worse.
    • In a 2015 study of ‘societal unease’, Netherlands researcher Eefje Steenvoorden argues that it is ‘a latent concern among citizens in contemporary western countries about the precarious state of society’. This concern arises from the ‘perceived unmanageable deterioration’ of five fundamental aspects of society: distrust in human capability (to make improvements and overcome problems), loss of ideology, decline of political power, decline of community, and socioeconomic vulnerability. Societal unease is only weakly related to happiness, proving, the author says, that personal happiness is clearly distinct from societal unease, and that ‘high levels of private contentment are not to be mistaken for public contentment’.
    • A recent study that I co-authored with Melanie Randle at the University of Wollongong, investigated the perceived probability of threats to humanity in four Western nations: the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Overall, across the four countries, 54 per cent of people rated the risk of ‘our way of life ending’ within the next 100 years at 50 per cent or greater, while 24 per cent rated the risk of ‘humans being wiped out’ at 50 per cent or greater. Three-quarters (78 per cent) agreed ‘we need to transform our worldview and way of life if we are to create a better future for the world’.

    These examples all illustrate the importance of the psychosocial dynamics of progress. Unless we pay more attention to them, we will continue to miss too much of what matters, limiting our options and prospects. We will not be able to devise and implement solutions that match the scale of the problems we face.

    At the deepest level, we need to change the myths, beliefs and values by which we define ourselves, our lives, and our goals. The necessary transformation can be compared to that in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment: from the medieval mind, dominated by religion and the afterlife, to the modern mind, focused on material life here on earth. Research into human development and progress needs to allow, even encourage, the conceptual space for a cultural transformation as profound as that which gave rise to modernity in the first place.

    Richard Eckersley is a director of Australia21, a public-interest, strategic research company. This article draws on a longer paper published this month in the leading international development journal, Oxford Development Studies. For those with subscription access, it is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2016.1166197. An author version is available at: www.richardeckersley.com.au