John Menadue

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

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

    Catholics for Renewal.

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

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

     

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

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

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

    Some days later (11 October), Coleridge blogged:

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

  • Nicholas Reece. Falling behind in the innovation stakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Good Samaritans in Greece

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

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

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

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

    8 October 2015.

    Dear Ms Bishop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    International education and visa policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

  • Nauru and the Philippines

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

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

    John Menadue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

  • Sean Gorman. Goodes is gone but the confronting truth remains.

    For many AFL fans, the last week in September is the time of the year where we reflect on a season that could have been and dream of next year.

    One thing we can be sure of is that we won’t see Sydney Swans champion Adam Goodes on a football field again. This saddens me. I think the reason for this is the sense of unfinished business. What should have been the rounding out of a great career or even the saddling up for one last crack in 2016 now has a full stop on it. But even in retirement, questions about Goodes’ legacy and actions remain.

    How the debate evolved

    It has been a long and arduous journey since that fateful night in May 2013. Late in a game between Sydney and Collingwood, Goodes requested the removal of a girl from the stands for calling him an ape. A few days later, AFL powerbroker and Collingwood president Eddie McGuiure made gags about Goodes and King Kong. McGuire later admitted this amounted to racial vilification.

    These incidents polarised people. They were forced to pick sides, as opposed to participating in a more sophisticated unpacking of an issue about societal vagaries regarding race politics in Australia as seen through the prism of sport.

    But the heat really came on Goodes when he talked about race and prejudice in his 2014 Australian of the Year acceptance speech, and then again when he spoke of racism and invited Australians to see John Pilger’s film Utopia.

    Australians did not like hearing this. Goodes began to be loudly booed at some games. Talkback and tabloid news fed on it and the white noise became amplified. Outrage grew.

    Indigenous war cries became a “threat” as misinformation swirled. People were beyond angered. They were sick of the sight of Goodes. He played on.

    Even the AFL’s commissioners were reportedly divided over Goodes. This perplexed me. Whenever race issues surfaced in the past, former CEO Andrew Demetriou was not just strident in denouncing them – his message was clear.

    Goodes remained stoic as debate around him grew. Then came Round 17, 2015, and a game against West Coast at Subiaco. The booing was as loud as it has been. For Goodes it was too much. He retreated to family and friends. But not once did he complain.

    Goodes returned and treated us to some great football. And in his last game against North Melbourne he made his teammate Rhyce Shaw the story as he too retired. Shaw was chaired off, but despite Goodes having made his mind up to retire he kept it quiet. He did not need the fuss made.

    What now?

    Goodes resisted overtures to attend Monday night’s Brownlow Medal ceremony and to have one last lap on the MCG on Grand Final day.

    Some may have been happy that this uppity blackfella had left through the gift shop. Maybe some felt ripped off that they would not be able to give him one more razz as he went around the MCG in an open-top car. Maybe some felt saddened that they could not show their gratitude for all he gave to the game. Maybe some just felt indifference, believing that the bloke was just a whinger and a cheat and that they would not dignify that with anything.

    But what cannot be in dispute is Goodes’ dignified resistance. What he would do and when he would do it goes to the heart of his agency as a player, and his retirement would not be influenced by a team edict that he had adhered to for 16 seasons. Despite all the barbs and the bon mots, the decision to decline an invitation to the Brownlow – an award he won twice – was his and his alone.

    If we can do anything that is remotely respectful it is to see Goodes’ class not just as an Aboriginal or a man, but as an Australian. Don’t think so? Just as Goodes allowed Shaw’s retirement to take place by sacrificing his own, can you imagine for a moment what it would be like if, as he was being chaired off, the booing was as loud as at Subiaco?

    People in sports bars around the world would have turned to their Australian friends and said, “Why are they doing that?” The discussion would have to start again about the girl, about McGuire, about King Kong, about the war cry.

    But the subtext and reality would be that Australians can’t handle Goodes or his message because that message is too real for many of us. As a consequence we would prefer to simply look away or tell the TV image of Goodes to “piss off”, as the stories we know align more with Bradman, Bondi and Beersheba.

    Disagree? Then ask yourself this: how many of you took up Goodes’ invitation to see the Pilger documentary?

    We should be thankful that Goodes played and that we were able to watch him. The question now is: who will step in to fill his shoes? And will we boo that person when their message contains something that we don’t want to hear?

    Sean Gorman is Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Aboriginal Studies, Curtin University. This article first appeared in The Conversation on 30 September 2015.

     

  • Wasteful costs in health.

    Following the ABC Four Corners program on health costs in Australia, there have been a number of very good follow up articles.

    The first, in The Conversation on 29 September is by Ray Moynihan ‘Costly and harmful: we need to tame the tsunami of too much medicine’.

    https://theconversation.com/costly-and-harmful-we-need-to-tame-the-tsunami-of-too-much-medicine-48239

    The second, in the AFR on 5 October, is by Neil Soderlund, Sam Stewart and Jan Willem Kuenen is entitled ‘Why overtreatment is costing Aussies $30 billion per year and how to fix it’.

    http://www.afr.com/opinion/why-overtreatment-is-costing-aussies-30-billion-per-year-and-how-to-fix-it-20151005-gk1ktn

  • Ranald Macdonald. The ABC and a Call to Arms.

    A CALL TO ARMS –Why this Country needs you to act. That is the title to my talk today and my exhortation to you all.

    The latest figures show over 400 ABC staff already “removed” from the ABC, as we edge towards its 500 target.

    The recent change in Prime Minister-ship has NOT changed expectations at the ABC or at SBS. The situation continues to be dire. I will try and explain why.

    It is terrific to see so many of you here to this Annual General Meeting of Friends of our ABC.

    It is a good word ‘friends’ because it means that in times of need – and let me emphasize that is NOW – by definition we are there for the ABC, to defend it against the naysayers, to support it in every way we can and if necessary to go to the barricades for it.

    And, can I suggest, we may well need to go to the barricades to ensure our public broadcaster can do its job.

    If you read the papers, all is happiness and light with the new PM, who just happens to be the former Communications Minister who announced the $270 million cuts, played the heavy with both board and staff of the ABC – and was part of Cabinet which approved the capricious decision of Julie Bishop to terminate the DFAT contract with the Australia Network.

    In the words of outstanding journalist and commentator Quentin Dempster, that decision “vandalized the ABC’s international reporting capacity” and has decimated Radio Australia.

    Which leads us to the positive role, we as Friends, can claim – and that is the right to demand that the ABC does better. We try to ensure that it fulfills its charter for all of Australia and provides us with the quality and range of programing we expect of it.

    As the wonderful John Clarke advised me, do not let the Friends be portrayed as WMDs – that is, Well Meaning Dills who just say everything the ABC does is great.

    I am sure everyone in this room has felt like

    throwing his or her shoes at the TV set or have actually turned off the radio when irritated by crass or rude questioning, or by the lack of quality of a program.

    The ABC is by no means perfect; it has become too Sydney-centric and lacking in depth and interpretation of overseas news stories. Some of its most popular productions have been truncated – though there are financial reasons for all this.

    Yet, this country needs our ABC, we need a strong and independent Australian voice – and decision makers need to be held to account by a properly sourced broadcaster.

    The ABC is under charter to provide quality programs across the full range of the news local and (let me emphasize) INTERNATIONAL, to cover the arts, provide original Australian productions promoting Australian talent, documentaries, children’s programming and sport. Rural and regional communities need the ABC’s involvement desperately – and they cannot be directed from Sydney or Melbourne without local involvement.

    Forget the annoyances, though, and think of the quality and range of what the ABC still offers us all – and at 13/14 cents a day.

    Further, imagine the impact on our democracy – of the quality of public debate – if Murdoch further rules the waves through a weakened and uncompetitive ABC and a truncated SBS.

    When I asked Ron Tandberg to draw us a cartoon, he came up with the concept front-paged on your excellent UPDATE and on the ABC Friends web sites around Australia, which I called The Forces of Evil.

    Those forces he drew breaking into an ABC viewer’s home (and which seek to destroy our public broadcaster) come from many directions.

    From inside the ABC tent (why would the Managing Director have to have foisted on him as a board member looking over his shoulder the person who did the government’s work in identifying “efficiency” dividends i.e. cuts to funds to satisfy the demands of the Abbot Government?), or from some formerly inside the tent (i.e. Chairman Maurice Newman, who now berates the ABC through the welcoming columns of The Australian), and from those who ideologically or for commercial and competitive reasons want to weaken, or achieve death by a thousand cuts, of both the ABC and SBS.

    These forces – and it is not just Mr. Murdoch and his Rottweilers – though he and they lead the anti-public broadcasting pack both here and in the UK and in the United States.….These forces try to persuade the communities they do NOT need public broadcasting – private enterprise and the web and new media will do the job.

    Let me read an excellent OPEN LETTER from the Friends to our new PM.

    “We ask that some of the decisions about ABC matters made at Cabinet over the last year and more be reviewed. They do not sit well with the views expressed by yourself in previous years when you made clear how much you value our National Broadcaster.

    They do not sit well with the Malcolm Turnbull who launched the Parliamentary Friends of the ABC.

    The do not sit well with your previously expressed high praise for the ABC.

    We would ask that the following specific proposals be considered.

    1. Appoint a more balanced Nominations Committee to recommend appointments to the ABC and SBS Boards – recent appointees suggest the Government is preparing for privatization.
    2. Ensure that Managing Director Mark Scott’s replacement, and the appointment process is absolutely apolitical and wholly transparent.
    3. Restore ABC funding to pre-Abbot Government levels and lock in the next triennial funding cycle at least to those levels.
    4. Restore the DFAT/ABC contract to run the Australia Network Television – the ABC’s overseas service.
    5. Take particular steps to restore the ABC’s rural and regional network – we note the importance of this for the National Party, for rural MPs and for our communities.”

    Incidentally the advertisement for Mark Scott’s replacement as CEO of the ABC is now out and incorporates the following:

    “Operating under Government Charter the corporation has a unique role in informing, educating and connecting all Australians.”

    Also – “Will have responsibility for ensuring ABC’s success in augmenting and reinforcing a sense of Australian culture and identity.”

    (It does not refer to international news coverage, perhaps because the loss of its Australia Network early into its 10-year contract has been so devastating)

    The Conservative Party Culture Secretary in Britain stated that the BBC should be “narrower and more focused”.

    News Corp Australian CEO Julian Clarke echoed his boss’s views here with an ‘exclusive’ interview in The Australian in which he asked, “Why should the ABC push into new media spaces?”

    Murdoch loyalist and columnist and ABC hater, Chris Kenny, wrote recently; “The ABC needs to allocate its resources more effectively, in keeping with its charter obligations, to the regions, and with less emphasis on Scott’s passion to expend into every available digital platform”.

    Comment – it is hard to fulfill the charter requirements if the resources given it are inadequate. Further, to opt out of digital and other technologies available to the broadcaster to properly compete will ensure slow and lingering death,

    The conservative newspaper, the UK’s Daily Telegraph, in a recent editorial criticizing the BBC Director General’s speech said that “The simple and better answer, for the BBC to reduce its activities in areas where the private sector can provide, was apparently not even considered by the corporation’s numerous and well paid executives….”

    Both Murdoch’s senior and junior – Rupert and James – in their recent MacTaggart Media lectures in Edinburgh have made their positions very clear about leaving the new media outlets to private enterprise and opining that public broadcasting sticks to its traditional television and radio operations.

    They use weasel words.

    They mean, just leave the new media to us and we can make more money and have greater power – that is their clear agenda. Weakening public broadcasting or even sentencing it to a slow death by not allowing it to compete effectively would make life easier for the competitors.

    At least – though James Murdoch went close – they don’t publicly echo the Institute of Public Affairs position put to the Abbott government that we do not need public broadcasting in Australia.

    THAT the ABC should be privatized.

    So why do Australians need a strong ABC and SBS?

    To quote the excellent Quentin Dempster again:

    “The ABC and SBS contribute to local content production under their respective Charters but always within the constraints of funding allocated by the federal cabinet’s expenditure review committee.

    The most recent down-sizings of the ABC and SBS have seen the loss of programming and mass sacking of content creators as both were forced to reshape their operations. The ABC lost local current affairs specialization in Radio National, live broadcasts on Classic FM and regional TV production. With Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s unilateral termination of the DFAT Australia Network contract the ABC’s network of in situ correspondents, which had helped to make ABC international coverage so distinctive, were decimated. Radio Australia was reduced to ‘rip and read’.

    To secure the sustainable survival of the ABC and SBS, their raison d’etre needs to be restated. Public broadcasters view their audiences as citizens in a robust democracy and not as consumers to be delivered up to advertisers. Creative independence through a critical mass of program makers with a capacity to commission and make the full genre of programs based on the clash of ideas is vital for the AABC’s continued relevance. Although the digital revolution has enabled the ABC to cost-effectively extend its reach of younger audiences, its other Charter purposes (localism, international coverage, regional production, specialization) are being willfully neglected.

    For SBS the raison d’etre is clear. In an era of geo political tension, drone, jihadi and lone wolf terror, a new polyglot Australia needs a broadcaster committed to build understanding, break down insularity, xenophobia and bigotry. The taxpayer investment in SBS’s multi-lingual radio, GTV and online services should be seen as a counter to both terrorism and ethnic isolation. The prize: a more informed, inclusive and cohesive polity.

    These are the intangible benefits of Australia’s unique mainstream public broadcasting system.” 

    To return to the Friends’ letter to our new PM, the challenges for public broadcasting – for its survival – are out there for all to see.

    So, please continue to support the Friends Nationally in its work to ensure a better, more independent, and more competitive ABC.

    We are not WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction) – as like each of you, we retain the right to criticize as and when needed, BUT as committed Friends and supporters of public broadcasting.

    We are in the process of building membership nationally, of introducing a new category of ABC Supporters (who give but do not wish to be members as such) and we are developing a Fighting Fund to pay for getting the message across that we Must Not let the ABC be weakened or compromised.

    The Forces of Evil will not go away – and the change in PM where the Communications Minister is now PM will be unlikely to see a significant change in policy. Active protest, pressure and debate can achieve remarkable things in a democracy – so please all do what you can as groups and individually.

    We hope for the best and will see what happens to repair the damage, but it is hard to see a reversal by this Government of the Australia Network decision, nor of the cuts, nor of the imbalance of the nomination committee for the board, and we await with concern who Prime Minister Turnbull gets as the new CEO of the ABC.

    Also, despite the soothing words of the new Communications Minister, who in a ”frisky” moment (but in a prepared speech) said there was merit in the idea of privatizing the ABC, the Government will be judged by what he and the former Communications Minister actually do to allow the ABC and SBS to compete and serve Australians to the best of their abilities.

    While the jury ruminates – let us work to all build the strength of ABC Friends by inviting new members and Supporters (a fresh category for those who back us but do not want to join) and by Donating to our National Fighting Fund.

    Sadly, I can confidently predict that we will be drawing on the Fighting fund to protect our national broadcasters. And we need to persuade the Labor Party to really commit to supporting both the ABC and SBS. (Its draft platform encouragingly says it will “increase funding” but we need cast iron guarantees.)

    So, we as Friends seek – Australia needs – your continual backing and active recruitment to the cause.

      This is a speech delivered by Ranald Macdonald to Friends of the ABC on 27 September 2015. Ranald Macdonald was formerly Managing Director of David Syme, the publisher of The Age. 

     

  • Mark Carney and climate change – an historic speech

    The following are extracts from a speech given by Mark Carney, The Governor of the Bank of England at a Lloyd’s of London dinner on 29 September 2015

    He outlines how climate change is a huge financial risk, particularly for investments in unburnable fossil fuel assets. He points out that  the vast majority of these assets could be ‘stranded ‘and that the window of opportunity to address climate change is ‘finite and shrinking’

    The media has described this as a ‘milestone speech’   See link  to full speech and references.

    Extracts follow   John Menadue

    The tragedy on the horizon

    There is a growing international consensus that climate change is unequivocal. 2

    Many of the changes in our world since the 1950s are without precedent: not merely over decades but over millennia.

    Research tells us with a high degree of confidence that:

    • In the Northern Hemisphere the last 30 years have been the warmest since Anglo-Saxon times; indeed, eight of the ten warmest years on record in the UK have occurred since 2002; 3
    • Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are at levels not seen in 800,000 years; and
    • The rate of sea level rise is quicker now than at any time over the last 2 millennia. 4

    Evidence is mounting of man’s role in climate change. Human drivers are judged extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of global warming since the mid-20th century. 5  While natural fluctuations may mask it temporarily, the underlying human-induced warming trend of two-tenths of a degree per decade has continued unabated since the 1970s. 6

    While there is always room for scientific disagreement about climate change (as there is with any scientific issue) I have found that insurers are amongst the most determined advocates for tackling it sooner rather than later.  And little wonder.  While others have been debating the theory, you have been dealing with the reality:

    Since the 1980s the number of registered weather-related loss events has tripled; and inflation-adjusted insurance losses from these events have increased from an annual average of around $10bn in the 1980s to around $50bn over the past decade. 7

    The challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come.  The far-sighted amongst you are anticipating broader global impacts on property, migration and political stability, as well as food and water security.

    We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix.

    That means beyond:

    • the business cycle; 9
    • the political cycle; and
    • the horizon of technocratic authorities, like central banks, who are bound by their mandates.

    The horizon for monetary policy extends out to 2-3 years. For financial stability it is a bit longer, but typically only to the outer boundaries of the credit cycle – about a decade. 10

    In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.

    This paradox is deeper, as Lord Stern and others have amply demonstrated. As risks are a function of cumulative emissions, earlier action will mean less costly adjustment. 11

    The desirability of restricting climate change to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels 12 leads to the notion of a carbon ‘budget’, an assessment of the amount of emissions the world can ‘afford’.

    Such a budget – like the one produced by the IPCC 13  – highlights the consequences of inaction today for the scale of reaction required tomorrow.

    These actions will be influenced by policy choices that are rightly the responsibility of elected governments, advised by scientific experts.  In ten weeks representatives of 196 countries will gather in Paris at the COP21 summit to consider the world’s response to climate change. It is governments who must choose whether, and how, to pursue that 2 degree world.

    Climate change and financial stability

    There are three broad channels through which climate change can affect financial stability:

    – First, physical risks: the impacts today on insurance liabilities and the value of financial assets that arise from climate- and weather-related events, such as floods and storms that damage property or disrupt trade;

    – Second, liability risks: the impacts that could arise tomorrow if parties who have suffered loss or damage from the effects of climate change seek compensation from those they hold responsible.  Such claims could come decades in the future, but have the potential to hit carbon extractors and emitters – and, if they have liability cover, their insurers – the hardest;

    – Finally, transition risks: the financial risks which could result from the process of adjustment towards a lower-carbon economy.  Changes in policy, technology and physical risks could prompt a reassessment of the value of a large range of assets as costs and opportunities become apparent.

    The speed at which such re-pricing occurs is uncertain and could be decisive for financial stability.  There have already been a few high profile examples of jump-to-distress pricing because of shifts in environmental policy or performance.

    Risks to financial stability will be minimised if the transition begins early and follows a predictable path, thereby helping the market anticipate the transition to a 2 degree world.

    Transition risks

    The UK insurance sector manages almost £2tn in assets to match liabilities that often span decades. While a given physical manifestation of climate change – a flood or storm – may not directly affect a corporate bond’s value, policy action to promote the transition towards a low-carbon economy could spark a fundamental reassessment.

    Take, for example, the IPCC’s estimate of a carbon budget that would likely limit global temperature rises to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

    That budget amounts to between 1/5th and 1/3rd world’s proven reserves of oil, gas and coal. 24

    If that estimate is even approximately correct it would render the vast majority of reserves “stranded” – oil, gas and coal that will be literally unburnable without expensive carbon capture technology, which itself alters fossil fuel economics. 25

    The exposure of UK investors, including insurance companies, to these shifts is potentially huge.

    Conclusion

    Our societies face a series of profound environmental and social challenges.

    The combination of the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that, in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten financial resilience and longer-term prosperity.

    While there is still time to act, the window of opportunity is finite and shrinking. 31

    Others will need to learn from Lloyd’s example in combining data, technology and expert judgment to measure and manage risks.

    The December meetings in Paris will work towards plans to curb carbon emissions and encourage the funding of new technologies.

    We will need the market to work alongside in order to maximise their impact.

    With better information as a foundation, we can build a virtuous circle of better understanding of tomorrow’s risks, better pricing for investors, better decisions by policymakers, and a smoother transition to a lower-carbon economy.

    By managing what gets measured, we can break the Tragedy of the Horizon.

  • Libby Lloyd. Coming to grips with our domestic war

    For many reasons there is currently a much greater interest in the issue of domestic and family violence. This derives from increased media attention, the significant increase in intimate partner homicides (64 so far this year), the vastly improved police and legal response, constant revision and improvement of state and federal laws, as well as the appointment of Rosie Batty as Australian of the year. There has been a recent enquiry in Queensland and there is currently a Royal Commission in Victoria. We’ve had plenty of enquiries. How much more discussion on the topic do we need? We can already be quite confident we know enough about the causes of this violence and we also know what needs to be done. We just need to get on and do it.

    Roughly speaking one in three Australian women report having experienced physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. One in four children has witnessed domestic or family violence and one in five women report sexual assault (frequently within their relationship).

    Violence against women costs the Australian economy $13.6b a year! KPMG was commissioned in 2008 to cost violence against women and their calculations include: pain, suffering and premature mortality; costs for health (treating effects); protection related costs (eg absence from work); consumption related costs (damaged property, moving etc); second generation costs (ongoing costs related to the children); administrative costs (police, incarceration, courts, counselling, violence prevention); and transfer costs (payment of government benefits).

    For many reasons it is a challenge to quantify domestic and family violence and sexual assault – mainly because we can never be certain of the number of non-reports and different jurisdictions record the data differently. But we do know that women are becoming increasingly confident to report and this may explain the increased number of reports – or perhaps the prevalence is increasing – or both.

    The legal definition of domestic violence varies slightly within jurisdictions but by and large covers physical, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse. The term violence covers excessively controlling behaviours, such as stalking, refusing to allow external contacts, friendships or access to family, limiting access to money, denying liberty as well as physical violence. And we also know that women and children are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic violence, and men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violence. We must also take account of the facts that men can be more physically violent and generally they are physically stronger.

    Many factors contribute to domestic and family violence and sexual assault such as the abuse of alcohol, use of drugs, mental health issues, pregnancy and separation may all increase the risk of domestic violence. Financial stress, personal stress and lack of social support are also strong correlates of violence against women. We are yet to fully understand whether these factors are primarily causes or consequences of violence against women.

    Many women in abusive relationships return to the perpetrator of the violence and try to reconcile, they just want the violence to stop. It is a major step for many women to extricate themselves from violent relationships – their children are linked to their local schools and community, there are emotional, financial and other inter-dependencies.

     

    Australia has increasingly developed better responses to domestic violence much of it built on the work and advocacy of feminists in the 1970s. The first women’s refuge in Australia (Elsie) opened in NSW in 1974 with funding support from the Whitlam government in 1975. Successive governments have built on this response with increasingly effective preventive programs, support for victims/survivors and their families and law enforcement. Each jurisdiction in Australia has in place a variety of laws, programs and policies responding to, and attempting to prevent domestic violence.  Each jurisdiction funds its own programs and systems, and there are also some Australian Government funded programs operating in the states and territories, particularly supported accommodation and safe houses.

    What is new and is a really important initiative is the 12 year National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children (2010-2022). The National Plan demonstrates that violence against women is a complex issue and needs a wide range of targeted and properly funded responses.

    There has been a National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children (2010-2022) in place already for 5 years. This Plan is based on the 2009 report ‘Time for Action’ presented by the National Council to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children which was established by Prime Minister Rudd in 2008. The National Action Plan clearly outlines a very broad range of actions that need to be undertaken. All States and territories have signed on to the Commonwealth’s National Action Plan and each has developed its own Action Plan that joins up with the Commonwealth’s Plan. This is landmark moment as now all States and Territories and the Commonwealth are working together in a coordinated long-term effort to address violence against women. Now we can keep building and improving on the initiatives that prove successful.

    It is a long-term Plan (4 sub-plans each of 3 years) each building on the previous plan(s). It is bi-partisan and was agreed by COAG in 2009 by the Prime-Minister and all First Ministers and it has continued strong support despite changes of governments. It has a strong focus on prevention. For the first time sexual assault is joined up with domestic and family violence. It aligns and joins up with other initiatives among which are: the National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children (2009-2020); the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness; the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing; the National Disability Strategy and more.

    What is different about this Plan is that it contemplates and identifies a wide range of interventions that need to be addressed

    1. Communities are safe
    2. Relationships are respectful
    3. indigenous communities are strengthened
    4. Services meet the needs
    5. Justice responses are effective
    6. Perpetrators stop their violence and are held to account

    The National Council also featured a major outcome to be ‘systems must work effectively together’. This remains one of the greatest challenges and one that is constantly mentioned.

    The Rudd Government response In 2009 was to immediately allocate funding to a number of Council recommended initiatives: establish a national helpline (1800 RESPECT); establish ‘Respectful Relationships’ programs in schools; set up ‘The Line’ social marketing campaign targeted at young people and parents; fund research into perpetrator treatment; establish an Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS); allocate Community Action Grants; fund a new National Community Attitudes Survey and continue funding the Personal Safety Survey; provide additional support for front-line workers and services and establish a national AVO register. Additionally the Foundation for Prevention of Violence against Women and their Children has been established (Our WATCh) by the Commonwealth and the Victorian, NT and South Australian governments. Its role is to drive nation-wide change in the culture, behaviours and attitudes that lead to violence against women and children.

    The Abbott/Turnbull governments have continued with strong support for the National Plan and are working closely with all states and territories. The Turnbull government this week announced $100m additional funding for innovative technology including phones to keep women safe: increased support for the Safe at Home program where the perpetrator moves out and the victim and her children stay in the family home; increased funding for the national helpline 1800 RESPECT; increased support for police in indigenous communities; improved support and services for women including increased training for frontline staff and trials of integrated service models. They also provided funding for longer-term measure to change the attitudes of young people to violence. It is exciting that the national curriculum will now include Respectful Relationships education for all children.

    Work to establish the most effective responses to change men’s violent behaviour is well underway. Services are gaining a stronger voice and strong efforts are underway to join up services (wrap around services). Courts are constantly improving their responses. The media is becoming more interested to work to assist a solution. Schools are becoming more active and more engaged. Civil society is becoming involved and taking a role and responsibility to find solutions. Our responses and responsibilities to violence against women are increasingly widening.

    Until recently violence against women has been considered a ‘women’s issue. Excitingly this recent announcement by Prime Minister Turnbull was signed off by the Ministers for Women and Minister for Employment, the Attorney General, the Minister for Health, the Minister for Social Services, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the Minister for Communications and the Minister for Education. This is a remarkable shift to recognise that all these ministries (and more) have a major part to play in combating and preventing violence against women.

    Now an increasingly wider response and significant support is being given to the issue of prevention of violence (and sexual assault) by sporting organisations (AFL and NRL as leading examples), faith-based organisations and by community based men-led organisations such as the White Ribbon Foundation. Schools and business, the private sector and the broad community understand that we all must play a part in stopping this violence. Violence against women is everyone’s issue; it is no longer ‘a private matter’ nor ‘just a domestic’. It can not be just a headline of horror in a newspaper, or 2 extreme minutes on the TV news.

    We must all come to understand that this is a complex issue that can not be solved quickly or easily. We know that we have made a good start in tackling it, but it will be a long slow road. We must raise our children to understand the importance of their relationships – they must be respectful – boys to girls, girls to boys and all to each other. We must parent our children carefully and responsibly. We must call out violence when we see it. We need to respond to violence as individuals as a family and as a community. It can’t be solved just by governments – we all have a part to play. It will take great effort but most of all it will take all of us to play a part to resolve it.

     

    Libby Lloyd AM was chair of the National Council to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, Chair of the Violence against Women Advisory Group and a co-founder of the White Ribbon Foundation.

  • Why the Rich are so much Richer in the US

    Nobel Prizewinner Joseph E. Stiglitz has been at the forefront of the debate in the US and elsewhere about growing inequality. In a recent review in the New York Review of Books, James Surowiecki comments on three recent books by Stiglitz. He says:

    “The numbers are, at this point, woefully familiar: the top 1% of earners take home more than 20% of the income and their share has more than doubled in the last 35 years. The gains for people in the top 0.1%, meanwhile, have been even greater. Yet over that same period, average wages and household incomes in the US have risen only slightly, and a number of demographic groups (like men with only a high school education) have actually seen their average wages decline.”

    See link to article below.       John Menadue

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/sep/24/stiglitz-why-rich-are-so-much-richer/?utm_medium=email

  • Why fighters are quitting ISIS.

    The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at Kings College London points to the ways that many thousands of recruits who journeyed to Iraq and Syria may now be regretting their decisions. The more defectors speak out, the more the ISIS cause will suffer. The ICSR Report Executive Summary follows.  John Menadue.

    Executive Summary

    • Defectors from the so-called Islamic State (IS) are a new and growing phenomenon. Since January 2014, at least 58 individuals have left the group and publicly spoken about their defection. They represent a small fraction of the many disillusioned fighters who have turned against IS.

    • The defectors provide unique insight into life in the Islamic State. But their stories can also be used as a potentially powerful tool in the fight against it. The defectors’ very existence shatters the image of unity and determination that IS seeks to convey. Their narratives highlight the group’s contradictions and hypocrisies. Their example encourages members to leave the group. And their experience and credibility can help deter others from joining.

    • The defectors’ reasons for leaving may be as complex as the reasons they joined. Not everyone has become a fervent supporter of liberal democracy. Some may have committed crimes. They joined the most violent and totalitarian organization of our age, yet they are now its worst enemies.

    • Among the stories of the 58 defectors, we identified four key narratives:
    1) ‘IS is more interested in fighting fellow (Sunni) Muslims than the Assad government
    2) ‘IS is involved in brutality and atrocities against (Sunni) Muslims.’
    3) ‘IS is corrupt and un-Islamic.’ 4) ‘Life under IS is harsh and disappointing.’

    • Defecting from IS is complex and dangerous. Wannabe defectors are faced with numerous obstacles. Their first challenge is to separate from IS and make their way into non-IS held territory. But even those who succeed are not necessarily safe. What prevents them from speaking out is the fear of reprisals and the worry that prosecutors may use their openness against them.

    • Our recommendations are for governments and activists to recognize the value and credibility of defector narratives; provide defectors with opportunities to speak out; assist them in resettlement and ensure their safety; and remove legal disincentives that prevent them from going public.

  • Climate Change and Refugees.

    We have had a wake-up call about how Western and particularly US policies have destabilised the Middle East with the resulting exodus of refugees. Half of the Syrian population has either fled or been displaced within their own country.

    Climate change in the Middle East is adding to the problem. This is examined in a report by Jaime de Melo for the Brookings Institute on August 24, 2015. He comments:

    The disintegration of states resulting from political, ethnic and religious conflicts are the proximate causes of this migration surge (from the Middle East), but evidence from the new climate-economy literature suggests that weather has also played a role and will certainly play a growing role as our planet warms. … While the ongoing Syrian civil war has many contributing factors … the exceptionally long five-year drought linked to rising mean temperatures in the Middle East has contributed to civil unrest. … Had the misguided agricultural policies been avoided, the supply of ground water would have provided a cushion during this exceptionally long drought and, according to accumulating evidence of the new climate-economy literature, social tensions would have been less. … Dealing with increasing migratory pressures from economic factors and rising temperatures will require countries to delegate national sovereignty and accommodate far greater migration flows than in recent history or face widespread conflicts.

    See link below.        John Menadue

    http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/planetpolicy/posts/2015/08/24-climate-change-migration-challenges-de-melo?utm_campaign=Brookings+Brief&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=21546201&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-86GsrZ85KCP18SnH76p0QsbRPDAQ5bQPK3r1FlgIRf90ooVMG-4ZJGIR0Z3LuV9ZcVYHZU2521rlC90eQ3r-DpDUKULg&_hsmi=21546201

  • Saudi Arabia doesn’t ‘do’ refugees.

    Saudi Arabia has shown that it is possible to accommodate three million people for the Haj. See link below. But it is unwilling to provide any sanctuary for refugees from Syria. Syrians must apply for a visa or work permit to enter Saudi Arabia. Under this visa/permit system many Syrians have entered Saudi Arabia, but it is overwhelming for the benefit of obtaining cheap labour. None of the Gulf States have a domestic policy on refugees and none are signatories to the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees.

    The experience of almost all refugees is that if they have to flee, they prefer to stay in a neighbouring country. They do this in the hope that when the political or military situation improves they can return home.

    John Menadue.

    http://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/08/mina-city-of-tents.html

  • David Charles. Innovation, Disruption, Growth and Jobs of the Future

    What a difference a day makes to so many things including innovation. Immediately prior to the replacement of Tony Abbott by Malcolm Turnbull the Commonwealth Government barely had innovation, to say nothing of digital disruption and start ups, on its radar. Its major achievements in the area of funding for innovation were mostly notable for cutting and rebranding existing programs.

    To be sure they had responded to worthy ideas from the Business Council of Australia to identify and support five industry growth centres but the level of support – $188.5 million over 4 years – is modest and expectations about their impact, outside government, is limited.

    The Labor Party had gradually been building up a series of initiatives aimed at strengthening Australia’s innovation capacity but these were gaining very limited traction in the broader economic debate.

    In one giant bound the new Prime Minister has put innovation, start ups and the great opportunities for both growth and jobs offered by technology disruption and the digital revolution in particular centre stage.

    He has matched his rhetoric by placing Christopher Pyne in the Ministry of Industry, Innovation and Science and making Wyatt Roy, who was not even born when the internet was let loose, Associate Minister for Innovation.

    The amazing thing about the change in the priority of innovation is not that it has happened at all but that it has happened so relatively late compared to other developed and emerging economies. We had better hope that there are advantages in being a fast-ish follower.

    There is rather a lot to digest in the brave new world that has been opened up. My purpose is to attempt to throw some light on the now fashionable term of disruption, whether digital, technological or innovative and the most important disruptive technologies. To briefly review what earlier adopters, including China, have been doing and to point to areas where Australia might focus in a bipartisan way.

    Disruptive Technology/Innovation

    The literature on innovation tends to identify three different kinds of innovation, all of which have somewhat different implications for competition, creative destruction and supporting policy instruments.

    The first two kinds which have until relatively recent times dominated discussion of innovation tend to be those which do not radically alter existing markets and value networks. The simplest kind might be considered to be evolutionary/continuous innovation which improves existing products and markets in broadly expected ways. They add value to customers and companies but don’t alter the nature of things.

    The next step up the innovation food chain is radical/discontinuous innovation which tends to come in unexpected ways and have a large impact on the value proposition for customers and companies. The introduction of the first automobiles can be seen as an example of such innovation, but initially the impact of the new technology was not large and far reaching.

    The third step in innovation is disruptive innovation, popularized by the management writer Clayton M Christensen, which creates a new market and value networks by replacing an existing market and value networks. The mass production system associated with Henry Ford is a powerful example. While new technology was involved in mass production as opposed to craft production, the radical change was the new business model introduced by Ford and the thoroughgoing change it made to transportation.

    An example of disruptive innovation which is in the news at the moment is that associated with the name of Uber. If the Uber model is allowed by regulators to proceed, it will radically alter the on demand transport market and force wide ranging and painful change in the traditional taxi business.

    Disruptive innovation will change both markets and value networks. For a country which is only a marginal player in some important manufacturing and services markets, it offers the opportunity to carve out serious positions in newly emerging value networks and create the jobs of the future. Perhaps it is this characteristic which has captured the imagination of policy makers.

    Where is technology disruption taking place?

    Three directors of the McKinsey Global Institute have recently published an important book on this subject with the title “No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All The Trends “ by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika and Jonathon Woetzel. The four disruptive forces are:

    The age of urbanization.

    Accelerating technological change.

    Responding to the challenges of an ageing world.

    Greater global connections.

    The 12 disruptive technologies they identify which will drive acceleration technological change are:

    Changing the building blocks of everything (Next generation genomics and Advanced materials;

    Rethinking of energy comes of age (Energy storage, Advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery and Renewable energy);

    Machines working for us (Advanced robotics, Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles and 3-D printing); and

    IT and how we use it (Mobile internet, Internet of things, Cloud technology and Automation of knowledge work).

    All these areas are likely to be important and offer opportunities for agile and capable Australian companies. At various times these technology disrupters have all received some attention in the media.

    But the reality is that in the field of start-ups a lot of the attention has been given to IT and how we use it. Seek is an often quoted example of Australian success and Uber is pointed to as a harbinger of the sharing economy. There is no doubt that IT in its various forms is important but it is not the only game in town and in developing policy responses to build Australia’s innovation system it is important a broad view is taken rather than putting all our eggs in one basket.

    Britain in its 8 great technologies program announced a couple of years ago has committed 600 million pounds to big data, space, robotics and autonomous systems, synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, agri-science , advanced materials and energy.

    The China Challenge

    China has already been a major source of disruption in global markets with its command of manufacturing production in a range of industries. Optimists in the west see the Chinese challenge stopping at the stage of labour intensive products and me-too products. However, the emergence of companies such as Haier in white goods, Geely Motors in automotive, Huawei in telecommunications and Hengan International in consumer products strongly suggest a different and more challenging reality. These companies are disrupting global markets and building new value networks.

    The Chinese government realizes that the future for China lies in innovation and in 2006 launched a 15 year plan to raise the share of R&D in GDP to 2.5 per cent.

    Reflecting the importance of STEM skills Edward Tse in his recent book China’s Disruptors makes the point that of 200,000 doctorates awarded around the world in science and engineering in 2010 China was second in the world with 31,000 compared to 33,000 in the USA.

    In IT and e-commerce a number of Chinese companies have already come on to the global radar and have the potential to rival the big name US companies. Companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi are ultra entrepreneurial, large and growing quickly. They all have global aspirations and in time will look like and act like US and European multinationals with their own global value networks. Some of these companies are already significant investors in start-ups offshore in places like Israel and have R&D centres offshore.

    The next Chinese challenge is well and truly on the radar of governments and industry in the US, Asia and Europe. Innovation policies are being developed partly with an eye to the challenge.

    What are other countries doing to support innovation?

    Most developed countries have innovation policies of one kind or another but two small countries which have received a good deal of attention are Israel and Singapore.

    Israel which spends 4.5 per cent of its GDP on R&D has through its Office of the Chief Scientist pursued a range of policies aimed at boosting innovation. Special emphasis has been placed on creating a very positive environment for start ups. Notable in this regard is the Israeli Incubator Program which supports 20 incubators throughout Israel. Special early stage funding has been provided to support the development and growth of start ups. This can involve the provision of $7 for every $1 invested by private sector entities.

    In 2014 start up exists are estimated to have been valued at $15 billion. While a lot of venture capital has come from US sources, in recent years Chinese investors have become important.

    Singapore through its National Framework for Research, Innovation and Enterprise has learnt from the Israeli approach and amongst other things has put in place a Technology Incubation Scheme. Under this scheme the government co-invests up to 85 per cent of the costs of a start up.

    Special attention is being given to the digital economy. The Infocomm Development Authority which has a mission to support the development of the IT and telecommunications sector provides Sing$ 200 million to support start ups. They plan to support 500 start ups over the next five years.

    Apart from funding start ups, both Israel and Singapore are also focusing on building up their talent pools to support the digital economy.

    The Conservative Government in the UK and its immediate coalition predecessor have placed a high priority on policies to support innovation. A key agency is the Technology Strategy Board, now renamed Innovate UK, which has a portfolio of programs including Smart Grants, Catapult Centres and the Small Business Research Institute. The Catapult Centres launched in 2013 are designed to convert good ideas into commercial results. So far 9 have been established.

    The UK Treasurer in his 2015 Budget Speech argued that one of the aims of the British Government was to improve economic growth by making Britain:

    “The best place in the world to start, invest in and grow a business, including through a package of measures t help unlock the potential of the sharing economy.”

    As noted earlier, the UK government has identified 8 great technologies. These go well beyond the digital economy.

    Some pointers for Australia

    We now have a great opportunity to develop an effective and hopefully bipartisan innovation policy worthy of the name in comparison to what other developed countries are doing and Australia’s special needs and potential.

    We are not starting from ground zero. Some of the key elements of such a policy are in place:

    The importance of STEM skills has been recognized notably by the Chief Scientist and action aimed at building the talent pool has started. The Opposition has promised a series of STEM initiatives.

    Five industry innovation growth centres are being established and some funding has been provided albeit modest in comparison with the UK Catapult program which seems to have been the model for the centres.

    The CRC Program following the Miles Review is being continued.

    But a strong case can be made that given the challenge and the size of the opportunities available that a much more strategic and rather better funded set of integrated instruments are urgently needed.

    As we have seen, Israel, Singapore and the UK innovation policies are seen as playing a very significant role in future growth, business development and jobs. These policies all place a heavy emphasis on building the STEM talent pool. As well, they devote very substantial resources to the incubation of start ups and the financing of early stage businesses. Australia by comparison has hardly begun to move the needle. The Opposition’s promised $500 million Smart Investment Fund to co-invest in early stage companies is one way forward.

    Innovation and the incentives to create and build businesses ought to be essential elements of tax reform. Perhaps using the UK aim of being the best place in the world to start, invest in and grow a business as a starting point for Australia.

    In terms of scope, while the opportunities associated with digital disruption are no doubt large and perceived to be so in other jurisdictions putting great weight on innovation, innovation policy should not ignore the also large opportunities that will come from the technological disruptions identified by the McKinsey study noted earlier.

    A global perspective is needed to fit Australian companies into emerging global value networks. Given our location in Asia Pacific the opportunities offered by building connections to the leading Chinese IT and manufacturing companies are likely to be considerable. The Australia China Free Trade Agreement ought to be part of creating the right environment for these connections to be built.

    Finally, a community effort is required involving not just the Commonwealth and State Governments but also business, universities and the research entities such as the CSIRO and the medical research institutes. The conversation about innovation has just received a major injection of energy, the will is now needed to take advantage of this in a comprehensive, bipartisan and durable way.

    David Charles was the Chair of the Advanced Manufacturing CRC and will be a Director of the recently-announced Innovative Manufacturing CRC. He is a Director of Insight Economics Pty Ltd. From 1985-1990 he was Secretary of the Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce. He was a Founding Director of the Allen Consulting Group.

    See link below to an article by David Charles in the Policy Series which was published on 25 June 2015.

    https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=4143

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Refugee Diary.

    It is one thing to endure the terror of barrel-bombing by the Assad regime and the barbarism of ISIS in Syria. But this is only the beginning of a harrowing trek by Syrians in their journey to safety and freedom in Germany and elsewhere. Verica Jokic, an ABC  journalist gave a compelling account on Radio National on Thursday 24 September 2015,  of the trek from Syria to safety. Her eye for the small detail brings home the plight of asylum seekers much more effectively than all the statistics. John Menadue.

    See her story on the link below:

    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drive/on-the-ground-following-syrian-refugee-crisis/6798898

  • Dean Ashenden. Could Turnbull give a Gonski?

    Until last week, Gonski’s last hope – and an increasingly promising one – was a Labor victory in 2016. Now, that hope has dimmed, but another has appeared. It would make political, ideological and policy sense for the Turnbull government and its new education minister, Simon Birmingham, to go back to Gonski.

    The story so far. Gonski’s inquiry was commissioned in 2010 and reported in 2012. It tackled three major problems in schooling: the dysfunctional arrangements for funding three sectors in three different ways by two levels of government; the consequently chronic antagonism between sectors and interest groups; and the failure of funding policies to address growingproblems in schooling, including social and cultural segregation, a widening gap between the best and worst schools, a “long tail” of students leaving school without even the bare minimum of skills, and stalled performance.

    Gonski’s plan was elegant in its simplicity: state and federal governments would agree on how much each would contribute to the cost of schools, and on how the total would be distributed to school systems and thence to schools. Each school would be guaranteed a minimum per student amount (the “schooling resource standard,” or SRS), plus loadings reflecting the school’s size, location and demographics. The same formula would apply across all schools and sectors on the advice of a “national schools resourcing body.” The new scheme would be national, sector-blind and, above all, needs-based.

    Gonski’s proposals were widely applauded as an educational, political and policy breakthrough. But there were problems in the plan too, most of them exacerbated by the bungled, drawn-out implementation process initiated by Julia Gillard and conducted by schools minister Peter Garrett.

    The national school resourcing body was dropped early in the process. That meant that there was no agency to carry the extensive research needed (as Gonski foresaw) to settle key questions such as the level of the SRS, ways of measuring each of five categories of “need” (socioeconomic status, language background, indigeneity, disability and school size/location), the proportion of total funds to go to basic resourcing as against the loadings, how many schools should receive loadings, and how extra resources could be most cost-effectively used. Nor was there an accountability mechanism.

    Critics on the right (and in cabinet, apparently) claimed that school funding increases over the decades had done little or nothing to improve outcomes, which meant that Gonski’s $6.5 billion increase on an annual spend of around $40 billion was a case of throwing good money after bad.

    Since most needy schools were government-run, that sector was Gonski’s main beneficiary. Some supporters of non-government schools were suspicious or hostile, and Gonski became identified in many minds with public schools and the teacher organisations that did so much to bring the review into being. As well, Gonski was often seen as a kind of consolation for schools doing the hardest educational yards rather than, as intended, the price paid for schools to deliver improved performance.

    All this was in addition to the handicap given to Gonski at the outset, the requirement that “no school will be worse off,” which greatly complicated the calculation of school entitlements and pushed up costs (accounting for up to half of the $6.5 billion by some estimates).

    But the resistance that really mattered came from Coalition-governed states, which stood on their constitutional dignity and refused to enter an agreement that would tell them how much to spend on schools and how to spend it. They were aided and abetted by the Abbott opposition, which attacked the scheme at every opportunity right up to the eve of the 2013 election, when it abruptly switched to a Gonski “unity ticket.” That, in turn, was abandoned as soon as the new government took office.

    The upshot was that some states had signed up before the election for Gonski and its conditions through to 2017, others were told by the incoming government that they could have the money without any strings attached, and all were informed that from then on things would revert to the unfair, educationally counter-productive and administratively chaotic arrangements that confronted Gonski back in 2010.

    Meanwhile, other arms of the Abbott government commissioned reviews – the Commission of Audit, the Competition Policy Review, and the Reform of the Federation process – that either directly tackled school funding or made recommendations bearing on it. None had Gonski’s breadth, and none linked resource distribution and use with national goals for schooling such as social cohesion and equality of opportunity.

    Ironically enough, though, they might be just the thing that would allow Turnbull to give a Gonski. Together, they suggest that the Gonski approach should rely less on a single, prescriptive formula and more on an agreed framework for local implementation. It would thus be made more workable, and more acceptable to Coalition governments at both state and federal levels.

    What might such an agreed framework for schools funding look like? It would need to include at least four components:

    • A statement of purposes, making clear (as Gonski put it) that differences in educational outcomes must not be the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possession
    • A statement of principles, specifying that funding should be, among other things, nationally consistent, sector-blind and needs-based
    • A provision that all school jurisdictions, government and non-government, will report allocations made to each of its schools, and the methods and data used to determine them, publicly, promptly and in detail, using a common reporting template
    • A provision that all jurisdictions should participate in an ongoing, national research effort to understand how best to allocate and use resources to achieve stated purposes.

    A framework along those lines would address most of the problems in the original plan, and those arising from its stormy, aborted implementation.

    No response to complex political and policy problems will be perfect, of course. In this case, there seems little prospect of removing the “no school worse off” provisions, for example. And there would be much devil in the detail of a devolved approach, including how much variation between jurisdictions should be permitted, and by whom. But that is detail. And after all, there’s not much to beat.

    That’s the first reason why Turnbull should consider Gonski. The second is that – Abbott and Pyne rhetoric notwithstanding – there is nothing intrinsically Labor in Gonski. Indeed, its first and still most enthusiastic supporter is NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli, a National Party member in a government led by Liberal premiers. Piccoli is by no means a lone Coalition voice for Gonski, and has promised to lobby the new government in support.

    The third reason might seem trivial to the point of irrelevance, but history sometimes turns on small things. Malcolm Turnbull and David Gonski are old friends. They went to school together (Sydney Grammar) and Turnbull recently launched Gonski’s book, I Gave a Gonski. They belong to very similar ideological and social worlds. What Gonski proposes is consistent with – and perhaps even essential to – the kind of forward-looking Australia Turnbull says he wants. It would be surprising if Gonski did not use his undoubted access to Turnbull to make out the case.

    There are two further reasons why Turnbull might listen, both of them political.

    Among the many areas in which the Abbott administration was gratuitously adversarial, and blatantly deceitful, was schools funding. It opposed Gonski, then supported it, then ditched it, the stance on each occasion dictated by party-political advantage seen in the shortest of terms. What better way for the new minister to distance himself from his predecessor, or for the new government to demonstrate that it is not the old one in drag, than to reverse the ill-judged and petty decision to dump Gonski?

    Last, and perhaps the best reason of all from a Turnbull point of view: why go to the next election, less than a year away, with the electorally popular Gonski in Labor’s hands?

    Labor still owns the Gonski brand, and despite its bungling of the implementation process, it deserves to. Gonski is, as shadow treasurer Chris Bowen has put it, “in our DNA.” But if Labor tries to run again on Plan A, vulnerable both states’ opposition and to sharp criticisms of design, it could find that it has handed one of its biggest political assets to its new opponent. •

  • Tom and Rosie support the Syrian Refugees.

    Two young students from “Prouille” Dominican School at Wahroonga have raised nearly $4,500 for Syrian refugees. It started as a street stall in front of their house. It led to community support. It is a lovely story – worth reading.  See link below.  John Menadue

    https://unhcrpersonalchallenge.everydayhero.com/au/help-the-syrian-refugees-with-tom-and-rosie

  • Bob Kinnaird. China FTA and a diplomatic appointment.

    As the government’s exaggerated claims of economic benefit and job creation from ChAFTA are increasingly exposed, the lead DFAT negotiator on the China FTA is set to be appointed the next Australian Ambassador to China.

    According to reports in the Australian Financial Review and Crikey, Ms Jan Adams DFAT Deputy Secretary was nominated before the ousting of Mr Abbott to take up the Beijing position this December. The reports say the new Prime Minister Mr Turnbull is likely to endorse the appointment of Ms Adams, who apparently has the backing of Foreign Minister Bishop and Trade Minister Robb.

    Ms Adams, who was also lead Australian negotiator on the FTAs with Korea and Japan as well as China, recently appeared before the Treaties Committee on ChAFTA. In her evidence, she lamented the ‘circulation of misinformation about particular aspects of the Agreement’ including the contentious labour mobility provisions.

    However, at the committee hearing on 7 September it was not Ms Adams but an Immigration official who cleared up one of the key pieces of ‘misinformation’ about ChAFTA that DFAT and the government have been happy to let run.

    After persistent questioning from Labor MP Kelvin Thomson, DIBP’s Mr David Wilden conceded that at present labour market testing (LMT) applies to 457 sponsors nominating all Chinese nationals in Skill level 3 (mainly trades), engineering and nursing occupations; and that once ChAFTA enters into force, they will not be subject to LMT in these occupations.

    The officials should have added (but did not) that once ChAFTA enters into force, the Australian government will permanently give up the right to apply labour market testing to Chinese nationals in all other occupations in the standard 457 visa program as well.

    Currently these other 457 occupations are LMT-exempt simply by Coalition government policy written into a legislative instrument providing LMT exemptions on occupational grounds. Before ChAFTA, these ‘occupational’ LMT exemptions could be changed by any Australian government at any time. But after ChAFTA, the 457 LMT exemptions for Chinese nationals become exemptions due to Australia’s ‘international trade obligations’ and are effectively irreversible.

    The Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade will shortly have a second opportunity to question officials including Ms Adams on ChAFTA when it examines the China FTA after the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties reports.

    Hopefully that exercise can shed even more light on how Australia’s immigration policy is being made subordinate to trade policy and binding trade agreements, and Australia’s capacity to make migration laws is being eroded and ultimately surrendered.

     

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

     

  • Harold Levien. Solving our Housing Problem.

    The new Turnbull Coalition has the opportunity to rewrite the economic policy, or lack of it, of the previous Abbott-Hockey Government. This greatly exacerbated Australia’s housing problem and was pushing Australia into recession. The Reserve Bank’s Governor Stevens recently explained that repeated interest rate reductions were attempting to stimulate the depressed economy. He suggested the Government could take advantage of record low interest rates to borrow for infrastructure spending to provide the much needed economic stimulus without further interest rate cuts. (Statistics show infrastructure spending had dramatically fallen since the Abbott Government came to Office.) There was no response.

    These low interest rates concerned the new Head of Treasury who feared they were setting the stage for a housing bubble. Presumably he had memories of the 2008 US housing collapse following an immense “bubble” funded by irresponsible lending—albeit much worse than Australia’s possible situation. Surprisingly his concern over interest rates dismayed Abbott who expressed his support for rising house prices. Ironically it was Abbott, against all precedents, who appointed the new Treasury Head from outside the public service.

    The low interest rates attracted a multitude of housing investors, from both within Australia and overseas, seeking capital gain from purchasing housing primarily in Sydney and Melbourne. The inevitable escalation in housing prices made housing increasingly unaffordable for first home buyers in those cities.

    Incongruously, despite the almost continuous increases in productivity and per capita income over the past 70 years, housing in these cities is now less affordable than in the 1950’s! Since 1985 the ratio of median housing price to median income has increased from 3.4 to 11.4; and with virtually static wages and rising house prices this ratio will worsen. Since housing is the largest and most important material component in the living standards of the vast majority of Australians its affordability for first-home buyers should surely be a high priority for Government.

    There are three obvious steps to solving the housing problem. Firstly, to reduce housing demand from local and foreign investors seeking capital gain (resulting from the demand-supply discrepancy) and from local investors also seeking to reduce their taxable income. Secondly, to reduce the rate of population increase which at 330,000 last year–of which net migration was 184,000—this was close to adding the population of another Canberra. The third step is to increase the annual addition to housing supply.

    Examining these steps

    The Government could readily block the sale of housing to overseas residents, now accounting for over 20% of purchases in Sydney and Melbourne, to protect the interests of Australia’s first-home buyers over non-residents seeking capital gain. Hockey’s recent concern with overseas housing investors was confined to their limited purchase of established housing rather than with their much greater investment in new housing.

    The Government could also phase-out tax advantages given to local investors through both negative gearing (permitting interest on housing investment as a tax deduction from total taxable income), and discounted tax on capital gains. These tax perks, going primarily to higher income earners, not only increase housing demand and therefore housing prices but substantially cut Commonwealth revenue. The Australia Institute estimates this year’s negative gearing will cost revenue $4.2 billion. This could fund around 17,000 homes for low income earners—enough to house the current estimated 100,000 homeless in six years. Despite Hockey’s past claims that negative gearing increases housing supply, statistics show the great majority of such investment is in established housing.

    The previous Government therefore not only permitted, but played a crucial role in the manipulation of a market which made housing increasingly less affordable for first-home buyers and at their time of greatest need.

    On the supply side the Australian Government could, at no expense to the budget, establish a National Housing Corporation (NHC) to construct additional housing for sale and rent to overcome the market’s shortage of affordable housing. The National Housing Supply Council, within the Department of Treasury until abolished by the Abbott Government shortly after coming to Office, estimated the shortage of affordable housing was 599,000 in 2010-11. Considering the steep rise in housing prices and the very small increase in average earnings over recent years this figure would now be much larger.

    The proposed NHC could borrow at current record low interest rates. Since Government can borrow significantly below the rate to the private sector and because the Corporation could be established as a community service, rather than as a profit-making enterprise, it could sell or rent housing well below current market prices. Moreover, the increased supply would significantly reduce market prices. Because interest and administrative costs could be built into both sale prices and rental charges the NHC could operate without cost to the budget. Of course the Government could use the budget to subsidise a proportion of these houses to assist low income earners and those dependent on social services.

    These policies would lead to a considerable reduction in current housing stress– defined as mortgage repayment or rental cost exceeding 30% of gross household income–which has been steadily increasing over recent decades. With unchanged policies this will further increase.

    As a major social bonus the NHC could be subject to statutory requirements for quality architecture and town planning. Furthermore, it could be required to take account of location concerning both public transport and employment opportunities usually ignored by private developers. Such policy, perhaps complemented with the establishment of an Urban Development Authority, could eventually help save State Governments many billions of dollars in transport costs for both new roads and expanded public transport designed primarily to move workers from their housing to place of work!

    The NHC could make the single largest contribution to reducing poverty since mortgage repayments and rent represent by far the largest item in the vast majority of low to middle income family budgets.

    Harold Levien is a freelance writer on political and economic issues. After graduating in economics he founded and edited a monthly review of current affairs, Voice, The Australian Independent Monthly. It lasted five years. After its demise he lectured in economics. He has written many articles on current political and economic issues for a variety of journals. He is now retired.

     

     

     

  • Lynne Strong. Climate change and farming.

    Farming in partnership with nature.

    I live in a very special part of the world. The view from my front verandah has rolling green hills to the left, the ocean to the right and in front of me – the ocean. You can understand why I call it paradise. Our family has been farming in this region for over 180 years.  Our family dairy farm is located in steep rainforest country at Jamberoo in NSW.

    Every three weeks for 6 hours of the day – the view gets even more special when these magnificent cows graze in the front paddock. These cows are part of our family – and perhaps they are part of yours – they supply up to 50,000 Australians with milk for their breakfast every day.

    I see my role as a food and fibre producer and custodian of the land is to ensure the people I employ, the people I feed and Mother Nature and the cows have a voice.

    Australia is the hottest and driest continent. No-one can deny our farmers have done phenomenal things over the last 60 years. Even I am amazed that in 1950 one Australian farmer fed 20 people and today one Australian farmer feeds 700 people. This is becoming more challenging everyday with increasing extreme weather events.

    Our family business and our cows are in the frontline of climate change. Equally there is no denying that all food production has an environmental impact.

    I am very proud that our cows and our business are both part of the solution with our commitment being to produce nature’s perfect nutrient cocktail whilst lowering our carbon footprint on this beautiful planet.

    We are adapting to our highly variable climate and the challenging farming landscape we are finding ourselves in by using the latest research and development and tools as well as accessing the scientists and bright minds who can mentor us and support our journey.

    Our farm is in a very high rainfall pocket and our average rainfall is 2000mm or 80 inches.  Over the past thirty years we have noticed a significant increase in extreme weather events.  These days it is not unusual to get an extreme rainfall event that brings 10 inches of rain in 10 hours.

    Each drought is hotter and drier than the last. In December 2012 – the hottest year on record in Australia – we had five days where the temperature was over 40 degrees. Dairy cows are like me. They like a temperate climate with averages around 25 degree. Cows hate the heat and humidity and they hate mud.

    On our farm it’s all about the cows and reducing our impact on the landscape to allow us to continue to deliver the high quality product we are so proud of to Australian families.

    A number of ways we are doing this include managing heat stress effect both on our cows and our pastures.

    Often during extreme heat events cows start absorbing more heat from the environment than they can emit and they start to pant.

    When it gets really out of balance they effectively start to melt and we have to ensure they have access to plenty of shade and water.

    They love the sprinklers in the dairy. We also watch them as they exit the dairy. If they are still panting we will take them aside and hose them down until they stop panting.

    In the paddocks it’s about balancing the needs of the productive landscape and the native landscape. We do this by making wise choices like growing water and fertiliser efficient grasses.

    As I mentioned earlier we lay claim to living in paradise and our farm is 50% pristine rainforest.

    Part of our team is a cohort of professional bush regenerators.  We have planted thousands of trees, created native vegetation buffer zones between the pasture and the rainforest.

    We have built what we call cow super highways to ensure the cows go backwards and forwards to the dairy as efficiently as they can.  This means the manure is deposited on the paddock where is can do good and not on the laneways where it can wash into Mother Nature’s streams.

    All of this comes at a cost – thousands of dollars in fact. We do this because we know our actions will determine the future. Humanity can walk hand in hand with Mother Nature. We have to support her and she will support us.

    The farm is now in the excellent hands of the next generation and I am focusing my energy on taking the conversation beyond the farm gate. Conversations that I hope it will create an impetus for the community and farmers to work together to map out a brighter future.

    Because I believe, right now, there’s not enough recognition of the challenges modern farmers face. Farmers have traditionally been quiet achievers. More than ever we need to share our journey with the community.

    We need to get out there and grow our support networks and forge powerful partnerships.

    I am involved in a number of exciting watershed initiatives that are providing opportunities for the broader community to meet some of our wonderful Australian farmers, share their stories and start thinking about food and how they value it in a different way.

    Programs like the Climate Champions program which is both a former Eureka Prize and Banksia Award finalists.

    The Climate Champion program aims to help farmers manage climate risk by giving farmers

    • the best climate tools and an understanding of how we might use these in our farm business
    • and climate researchers access to each other so we can ensure the research they are doing is relevant and help them get the research out of the lab and onto the farm.

    Along with 48 other Australian farmers I teamed up with Earth Hour Australia as an ambassador and shared my story as part of the Planet to Plate Earth Hour Cook book.

    This beautiful compilation of recipes from 50 of the nation’s top celebrity chefs using the best of Aussie produce, showcased alongside the real climate stories of Aussie farmers.

    I am also one 4 farmers in the Earth Hour Documentary that screened on Channel Ten and Google live-stream on March 28, broadcasting stories of the farmers on the front-line of climate change straight into the homes of all Australians.

    I also founded Picture You in Agriculture. This is the initiative that really lights my fire. We roll out the Art4Agrciutlure suite of programs including The Archibull Prize and the Young Farming Champions.This program sees primary and secondary school students transforming the life-size fibreglass cows into agriculture themed artworks.

    The students are paired with our exciting young champions who have careers in the food and fibre sector and complete a variety of activities that give them fun hands-on experiences exploring food and fibre and farming.

    This year’s Archibull Prize theme ‘Agriculture – an endangered species’.

    Students and teachers will have the courageous conversations we all need to have and investigate the greatest challenges to Australian agriculture: Climate change, declining natural resources (our land, our water, and our non-renewable energy resources), food waste and biosecurity.

    We want students to be part of the solution, sharing their ideas on how to tackle these challenges as individuals, as a community, and as the future mums and dads of the next generation,”

    If we are going to ensure a healthy and vibrant future for Australian families and Mother Nature – agriculture must be a partnership between government, farmers and the whole community.

    I look forward to you all helping me start the courageous conversations we all need to have about food and natural fibres and how we value them.

    I look forward to hearing your ideas and solutions on how we can work together to create a healthy and a vibrant and a happy future.

     

    Lynne Strong Founder Picture You in Agriculture

    Lynne Strong, National Program Director, Art4Agriculture

     

  • Ian Marsh. Revolving Prime Ministers.

    As has been widely noted, Malcolm Turnbull is our fifth prime minister in as many years. You have to go back to the 1901-1909 pre two-party period for a roughly similar record. Then it was six leaders in seven years. But the analogy is only superficial. The protagonists – Barton (briefly), Watson (briefly), Deakin, Reid (briefly) and finally Fisher – rose and fell based on their ability to create parliamentary majorities for particular measures. The parties – Free Traders, Protectionists and Labor – differed fiercely. They represented the two variants of nineteenth century liberalism and twentieth century collectivism – fault-lines that persist to this day.

    The results constituted some of the most creative in Australian political history. The measures then introduced, mainly under Deakin’s leadership, guided Australian socio-economic development to 1983. By the time of the Hawke-Keating government, the world had moved on. Change was overdue.

    But over the previous 75 years, the basic framework was maintained by all governments. Save for White Australia, policy developments took place within it. By such means, Australia’s distinctive version of the welfare state and managed economy was created.

    Malcolm Turnbull promises to advance economic reform by taking the public into his confidence. Frank speeches not slogans. Constructive argument not hollow rhetoric. He cited New Zealand’s very successful Prime Minister John Key as an example of what can be accomplished.

    True as far as it goes. But this glosses over the structural foundations of Key’s success. These parallel Australia’s 1901-1909 experience. Since 1996, New Zealand has had a multi-party political system. Opportunistic adversarialism has been muted. Key’s Government lacks a majority in the single chamber parliament. It survives very successfully thanks not to coalition but to confidence and supply agreements with three minor parties. But particular measures still need to be negotiated.

    Key has adopted the same approach as his Labor predecessor Helen Clark. On social issues, he typically gains support from the left. On economic issues he looks to the right. The whole New Zealand political system has taken a consensual turn.

    This accords with contemporary circumstances. As in Australia, the main parties no longer differ on the basic direction of development. The market system has won. But they do differ on the detail of particular measures. Contemporary publics are also more pluralised and differentiated. The political structure in New Zealand aligns its more pluralised society with the formal political system. Australia in contrast remains stuck in the adversarial mould, the residue of a two-class era.

    Yet Australia’s political system is almost purpose-built for a more consensual turn. The procedures that would be associated with such a transformation are evident in our own historic experience. Look again at the 1901 to 1909 period.

    Governing required at least two of the three parties to reach an accommodation with each other on particular measures. Deakin, the leading political architect of the period, led minority governments. To create sufficient parliamentary support to enact contested measures, he needed to initiate a parliamentary (and hence public) conversation before the government’s own approach was determined.

    To achieve this outcome, he turned to the tried and tested vehicle, committees of the legislature. Indeed the Australian constitution provided him with an ideal structure. The Senate had been conceived as an independent House on the American model. In its initial years most members acted in this spirit.

    More recently, the (late) Liberal Senator, David Hamer, recommended converting the Senate to a Committee House. Ministers would cease to be drawn from this Chamber. Committee chairs would enjoy enhanced standing (as is occurring now in the UK). Senate committees could then become important agenda entry points for new and emerging issues. The adversarial culture, which is now often overcome in committee enquiries, could be equally qualified in broader Senate proceedings.

    With an especial focus on emerging and strategic issues, committees could be agents of the legislature rather than the executive. They could recommend action – and the legislature would debate their recommendations. Ideally this would be free of the whips. But even with whipped or partially whipped votes, majority, cross-party support in the Senate would provide important guidance for the executive.

    A more diverse expression of views in the legislature prior to executive decisions would give it more flexibility. Following debate, it would be up to the government to decide what to do.

    Malcolm Turnbull believes speeches alone can carry the day. But his reference to John Key should give pause. The leadership that Key exercises so effectively is the product of a political system that is more closely aligned with its publics. The New Zealand parliament focuses on the desirability and detail of individual measures. Media reporting is less poll and personality driven. Of course it’s still robust. But the public experiences a wholly different political debate.

    Circumstances are unpredictable. Malcolm Turnbull may outclass his opponent. Through craft and guile and compromise he may manage internal Liberal and National schisms. He may win the next election. But he will almost surely not win the Senate.

    That outcome is one expression of the contemporary diversity of Australian society. Internal party tensions are another. Constructive speech making by party leaders can go so far. It is the primary battle line. But like this military analogy, the front line can only carry the day if its support systems are aligned.

    In his citation of John Key, Malcolm Turnbull illustrates his own potential weakness and vulnerability. John Key deploys the persuasive power of effective speech in a wholly different conversational context. Would Turnbull be willing to change the way issues enter the public conversation here? Challenging though it may be to adversarial ways, it is also within his power.

    Ian Marsh is a Visiting Professor at the UTS Management School. His study Democratic Decline and Democratic Renewal: Political Change in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (with Raymond Miller) was published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press.

  • Kenneth Roth. The European refugee crisis is on of politics not capacity.

    European leaders may differ about how to respond to the asylum-seekers and migrants surging their way, but they seem to agree they face a crisis of enormous proportions. Germany’s Angela Merkel has called it “the biggest challenge I have seen in European affairs in my time as chancellor.” Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni has warned that the migrant crisis could pose a major threat to the “soul” of Europe. But before we get carried away by such apocalyptic rhetoric, we should recognize that if there is a crisis, it is one of politics, not capacity.

    There is no shortage of drama in thousands of desperate people risking life and limb to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean in rickety boats or enduring the hazards of land journeys through the Balkans. The available numbers suggest that most of these people are refugees from deadly conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. Eritreans — another large group — fled a brutally repressive government. The largest group — the Syrians — fled the dreadful combination of their government’s indiscriminate attacks, including by barrel bombs and suffocating sieges, and atrocities by ISIS and other extremist groups. Only a minority of migrants arriving in Europe, these numbers suggest, were motivated solely by economic betterment.

    This “wave of people” is more like a trickle when considered against the pool that must absorb it. The European Union’s population is roughly 500 million. The latest estimate of the numbers of people using irregular means to enter Europe this year via the Mediterranean or the Balkans is approximately 340,000. In other words, the influx this year is only 0.068 percent of the EU’s population. Considering the EU’s wealth and advanced economy, it is hard to argue that Europe lacks the means to absorb these newcomers.

    This ‘wave of people’ is more like a trickle when considered against the pool that must absorb it…. The influx this year is only 0.068 percent of the EU’s population.

    To put this in perspective, the U.S., with a population of 320 million, has some 11 million undocumented immigrants. They make up about 3.5 percent of the U.S. population. The EU, by contrast, had between 1.9 and 3.8 million undocumented immigrants in 2008 (the latest available figures), or less than one percent of its population, according to a study sponsored by the European Commission. Put another way, nearly 13 percent of the U.S. population (some 41 million residents) are foreign-born — twice the proportion of non-EU foreign-born people living in Europe.

    The U.S. government is hardly exemplary in its treatment of asylum seekers, and the country has had its share of Donald Trumps who float wild ideas about expelling America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, but polls show nearly three quarters of Americans think that undocumented immigrants who reside in the U.S. should be given a way to stay legally. Indeed, the U.S. has arguably built its economy around these migrants doing work that most Americans won’t.

    So why the European panic? As in the U.S., an influx of foreigners provides plenty of material for demagogues. Some contend the new arrivals will steal jobs or lower wages. With rapidly diminishing unemployment in the U.S., that doesn’t seem to have been true, but European unemployment remains stubbornly high. Yet many European countries also face a worsening demographic problem, with too few young workers increasingly asked to support too many pensioners. An influx of people with the proven perseverance and wit to escape war and repression back home and navigate the deadly hazards along the route to Europe would seem to provide an injection of energy and drive that Europe arguably needs.

    There are concerns about terrorism. Many of the refugees are fleeing the likes of ISIS in Syria or al-Shabab in Somalia, but no one can preclude the possibility that terrorists have secreted themselves in the flow of humanity. Yet terrorist groups have already shown themselves quite capable of sending agents to Europe — or recruiting them there — through more conventional means. Just as no refugee would brave crossing the Mediterranean or negotiating the land route through the Balkans if easier options were available, so these routes would hardly seem to be major avenues for well-financed terrorist groups. There is no evidence that any has used it.

    The biggest concern among the hawkers of crisis seems to be fears about culture. The U.S. has always been a nation of immigrants. The U.S. has many more undocumented immigrants than the EU. America’s vitality is in large part due to the energy and ideas that waves of immigrants have brought to its shores. While anti-immigrant policies occasionally flare up in the U.S. — including Chinese exclusion in the 1880s, Japanese-American internment in the 1940s, Haitian interdiction in the 1990s and detention of mothers and small children fleeing harm in Central America today — many Americans recognize that their life is enriched by diversity.

    But most European countries do not think of themselves as immigrant nations. Many Europeans fear that an influx of foreigners will undermine their comfortable cultures.Research suggests this concern is a major factor in support for populist extremist parties in many EU countries. That fear is accentuated in largely Christian Europe by the Muslim religion of most of the new arrivals. Some governments — Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia — have expressed a strong preference for only Christian refugees.

    This disquiet has been building for decades as Europe’s population has slowly changed. Predictably, some politicians such as Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Matteo Salvini of Italy, Milos Zeman in the Czech Republic, or the UKIP party in Britain, are now using the refugee surge to accentuate these fears.

    This is a political challenge, requiring political leadership in response — not a question of capacity to absorb the recent immigrants. Some politicians have risen to the occasion. Merkel, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, among others, have spoken out against the demagogues and affirmed the European values that they jeopardize. Yet there is more to be said, and more leaders who need to say it.

    Europeans leaders should publicly recall how others responded generously during World War II, when Europeans were the ones facing persecution and even becoming refugees. After the war, European nations embraced international law requiring them to welcome any asylum-seekers who could demonstrate they fled persecution. True to that principle, Germany and Sweden have already said they would accept all Syrian refugees who arrive within their borders and not send them back to the first EU country they entered under the bloc’s problematic “Dublin” asylum rules. Other European nations should follow suit, and the EU should recognize a larger list of refugee-producing countries and revise the Dublin rules, which can trap asylum seekers in EU countries that lack capacity to protect them and compel asylum-seekers to pay smugglers to escape those countries.

    As for those not yet in Europe, it is unconscionable to use the risk of drowning at sea or mistreatment by a smuggler as a mechanism to deter further asylum-seekers. Not providing safe and legal routes empowers illegal smugglers who are making money as children drown fleeing conflict. Asylum-seekers who arrive in Greece — an EU member — should be given organized transportation to northern parts of the EU that are more capable of processing their claims under humane conditions rather than be forced to endure the risks of smuggling networks just to cross the Balkans.

    Europeans leaders should publicly recall how others responded generously during World War II, when Europeans were the ones facing persecution and even becoming refugees.

    More needs to be done to address the causes of refugee flows at the source. European and other leaders need to exert more pressure to stop the Syrian military’s barrel bombing of civilians. Because barrel bombs are used to target civilians throughout opposition-held territory, they render ineffective the usual survival strategy of moving away from the front lines and thus encourage more Syrians to flee the country altogether. These leaders need to do more for Syria’s neighbors, such as Lebanon, whose population is now a whopping 20 percent Syrian refugees — vastly greater than in any European country.

    Political leaders should not let the demagogues change the subject by fear mongering about asylum-seekers and migrants. Those moving toward Europe, though numerous, are manageable. The real question confronting Europe’s political leadership is what Europe stands for. What are the values that will guide Europe in a world whose people are not standing still? The more European leaders who answer this question by reaffirming European values — such as those enshrined in the treaty protecting refugees, the safer European culture will be, even in this period of migration and turmoil.

    Kenneth Roth is Executive Director, Human Rights Watch. The article was first published by Human Rights Watch in early September.

  • Arja Keski-Nummi and Libby Lloyd. Resettling Syrian and Iraqi Refugees: A Program for Government-Community Action

    Australia has one of the best refugee resettlement systems in the world. So said United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres some years back. We have achieved this reputation not by good luck but because successive Australian governments have understood that early intervention and support in the settlement process are fundamental to long term successful integration.

    Australians have welcomed the announcement from our government that Australia will accept 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees with a focus on resettling women, children and families who have sought refuge and are in camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. This means that this coming year Australia will resettle 25,750 refugees, including these 12,000 additional refugees from Iraq and Syria.

    This is a good start and similar to the figures during the height of the Indo Chinese resettlement programs in the 1980s. We have done it before we can do it again.

    Now, the hard work begins.

    As well as the extensive good will that has been extended we must put extensive thought and expertise into making this movement of people a success.

    We know that a well structured and inclusive resettlement service must harnesses the expertise of professional service providers and the goodwill of the community – this is vital to the future well being of new arrivals. It has always been so. The building blocks are the immediate support available to people on arrival – access to housing, health services particularly for people traumatised by war, access to emergency assistance for the basic needs of food, clothing and medical supplies.

    While the world is different and the way we organise settlement services for new arrivals has changed significantly since the 1980s some things never change – every person’s basic human needs for shelter, food, good health, education for their children and a better life for all, whether we are Australians or people fleeing a brutal civil war.

    The reality is that for most refugees arriving in Australia the first few years will be tough. While our settlement services are equipped to respond to those immediate needs, after the euphoria of being in a place of safety wears off, the hard rebuilding of interrupted lives begin.

    Moving to a new country is a complex and many layered process. One of the reasons Australia has been so good at immigration and delivered such good outcomes for many refugees is that we have always recognized that the migration experience does not end with a visa or entry to Australia. Its success has been in how we assist in the difficult first months and years of resettlement. Refugees need the opportunity and space to learn English early and to be assisted in understanding how to negotiate a different and sometimes culturally incomprehensible system.

    Equally important is the desire of people to have their dignity restored. Learning English, getting a job, having qualifications recognised and their children able to go to school and resume a childhood in safety are the start of that journey.

    But it is a journey with many obstacles: not recognising or understanding the linguistic and cultural cues; missteps that can be humiliating to a sense of self esteem; bad news from home; guilt at being safe; the loss of a job, or illness are just some of the many challenges to be faced and overcome.

    Almost certainly some of the people who will arrive over the coming months are professionals – doctors, lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs, engineers, skilled tradesmen. However like generations of arrivals before them they will face a lengthy and uphill battle for recognition of previous qualifications and skills. Many will never be able to return to their chosen occupations.

    We need to learn from the past to do better in the present and into the future.

    The groundswell of community sentiment for Australia to do more has been heartening.   Many people in the Australian community have not only asked the Government to do more, they have also shown that they want to be part of the solution.

    There are currently government and community sponsored programs that we should be bringing together to look systemically at how, as a community, we can collaboratively assist and get the most effective programs running across the whole gamut of needs .

    For example, the current Community Proposal Pilot (CPP), already oversubscribed with only 500 places set aside for this program year should be expanded and made into a permanent program. While it will not be available for all and the costs are prohibitive for many it needs to be part of the mix of options available.

    The government could for example reconsider the use of the Special Assistance Category as a visa option to quickly identify people in need of resettlement. The reality is that with the chaos of war and displacement many people with strong links to Australia may not be in UNHCR camps or registered with them. For many even the ability to get to where UNHCR may be operating is an impossibility. This could be one way of identifying people and if linked for example to the current CPP as the authorised processing organisation could ensure integrity and transparency in the nomination process. Allocating a proportion of the 12,000 places to this visa category would be a start.

    Without a doubt the Humanitarian Settlement Services Providers are gearing up to expect a greater number of people to utilise their services over the coming few years. This will place added demands on already overstretched arrangements particularly for accommodation and early entry into ESL programs as well as their volunteer support programs.

    We could for example examine how underlying principles of the previous Community Refugee Settlement Scheme (CRSS) that operated so well for over 20 years could be adapted to this new inflow of refugees. When first put into place for Indo-Chinese refugees it arose precisely because communities, like today, wished to be part of the solution – to welcome refugees into our communities and assist them with the path to integration. CRSS provided direct links between families – a host family or groups of families attached to an agency and a refugee family or individual. Many of these links remain in place 30 and more years after the initial arrival of a refugee family.

    We can also learn from the way organisations have come together in the past few years to support people being released from detention. This required a large effort in finding accommodation, creating community based ESL programs for people not eligible to attend funded ESL classes, linking volunteers to assist with orientation into new communities after, in some cases, years in detention, dealing mostly with men, who had left their families behind, and who had become disoriented and damaged by the detention experience.

    These arrangements were a catalyst for imaginative and new approaches, for example harnessing the enthusiasm of retired ESL teachers in the delivery of community based ESL classes, working strategically with different housing providers for emergency and medium term housing arrangements, encouraging training providers to provide free of charge places for some to undertake basic entry level training such as in the cleaning and construction industries.

    While the circumstances may be different the needs still remain universal.

    Now is the time for government and communities to come together in a unique way to make sure that we do the best we can in assisting people to resettle away from the ravages of war. In reality governments and communities are in a symbiotic relationship – no amount of professional services funded by government can provide the span of services and support that are needed and no community based organisation can do it alone. But now we can perhaps look for increased opportunities for new groups and individuals to become more directly engaged in close assistance to these new arrivals.

    We could for example encourage businesses and unions, not traditionally active in this area to come together with service delivery agencies to be part of a strategic response. We could examine how the use of Social Investment Bonds could support a more holistic approach. Governments with business, unions and peak welfare bodies could for example agree to the creation of a Refugee Resettlement Fund – with a dollar for dollar matching scheme.

    Such a fund could for instance assist with:

    • emergency housing on arrival,
    • support for regional resettlement initiatives by funding access to programs such as ESL classes, community orientation and other services which are harder to get in regional Australia (housing in regional Australia can be more available and cheaper),
    • encourage regional communities and support groups in the resettleement of greater numbers of refugees in regional centres where housing availability and employment opportunities exist such as in centres with abbatoirs and agricultural industries
    • support trades and skills recognition (currently a prohibitively expensive process for many),
    • develop a skills matching database that would assist people in their search for jobs and matching jobseekers to employers,
    • support access to workplace training programs that assist people to become job ready quickly,
    • create small business hubs that facilitate the pathway for the creation of new enterprises. (What is most evident from previous refugee intakes is that many who will arrive in Australia were small business owners and what is clear for Australia is we need to harness that new talent pool).

    This could for example be done by the creation of a multipartite resettlement council comprising state and commonwealth government agencies together with key business, union, and advocacy and welfare/resettlement bodies. Such a body could for instance work with regional and local service providers in assisting in the design, delivery and funding of local services for people resettling in their communities.

    The challenge that now faces us is to make the path to resettlement as smooth as possible, that means building new partnerships with new players, looking more broadly at opportunities for resettlement away from the big cities and building the capacities of regional and rural communities in supporting refugees integration into their communities.

    By involving and linking new arrivals with direct assistance from their local community we additionally harness direct and positive goodwill to people who can in some cases become isolated and detached from our broader multicultural society that at this moment is teeming with good will.

    What is certain is that a one size model does not fit all. What is needed are flexible and imaginative approaches that are responsive to the unique needs of individuals and families while operating within an overall framework that seeks to assist people as quickly as possible renew their independence. That way lies success for both people coming to Australia and for Australia.

     

    Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2007-2010.

    Libby has worked with refugees for more than 30 years – with UNHCR in Indonesia and Iraq, with the Department of Immigration in Canberra, in the community with NGOs and on ministerial advisory councils.   Libby was made a Member of the Order of Australia through her work in international relations and with refugees in Iraq.

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Japanese Sleepwalking

    Defying public protests and opinion polls that show most Japanese oppose the move, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and Shin-Komeito ruling coalition are pressing ahead with legislation to nullify the nation’s constitutional ban on overseas military action.

    The so-called ‘right of collective defense’ law is being voted out of the committee stage of the Diet––thus ending formal debate––and will soon go to the full parliament where Abe has the numbers to push it through. There have been rowdy scenes in the corridors and chambers of parliament as angry Opposition members have tried to prevent the gag being applied.

    Outside, in the streets of central Tokyo, thousands of demonstrators, defying cyclonic rain, have kept up a protest vigil. In Yokoyama, protestors clashed with police. There is a mood of crisis not seen probably since the anti-U.S.-Japan Treaty demonstrations of the 1960s, although that earlier protest movement was far bigger and more determined.

    There is every indication that Japan will take the historic step to free up its military options in a way not seen since the end of the Second World War. The Abe Government will have spent a considerable amount of political capital, but even so its approval rating in the latest survey by NHK (the public broadcaster) showed an improvement to above 40%, which is comparatively good for a Cabinet this far into its term of office.

    On what will the new Japanese posture be built? In terms of historical memory, I would suggest that the foundations are dangerously weak. Unlike Germany––as has often been observed­­­­­­­––Japan has never adequately faced up to its past. In a real sense, Abe’s conservatives are starting again where his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi (a high official in the wartime state and the postwar Prime Minister who forced through the unpopular treaty with the U.S.) left off. In their world-view, Japan was not the aggressor in the 1930s but the victim (of the European powers) and its mission in China and Korea was noble.

    I remember visiting Berlin a few years ago and taking a tram to the Philharmonie. In the tram shelter there I noticed a sign bearing a photograph and some bilingual text. It turned out to be one of a series of historical markers related to the Second World War. To my great surprise, it named and described a German Nazi who had perpetrated crimes against humanity: it was a very public and unalloyed reminder of Germany’s dark past. Places like the Holocaust Monument in Berlin and the museum erected at the site where the Nuremberg Rallies were held are further examples of the clear-sighted German approach to their historical legacy.

    Contrast this with Japan, where places like the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo perpetuate the nationalists’ apologia for decades of aggression in China and Korea and the brutal military occupation of Southeast Asia.

    Whether on a large scale or small, the Japanese are unprepared emotionally and intellectually for a remilitarized future.

    I give as a small example of the unreconstructed attitude to the past one encounters almost every day. I happen, at present, to be doing some translation work connected with art history. In a Japanese commentary I am working on, concerning an artist who painted in Manchukuo (the puppet state set up by Japan) and occupied China, the writer persists in using anachronistic place names dating from the time when the Japanese were master. Instead of describing Japan as attacking China in 1937, she refers to the Sino-Japanese Incident. The involvement of the particular artist in wartime propaganda is also silently passed over. Nothing like this would be tolerated in a German publication of any status.

    I do not for a moment suggest that the writer of this commentary is a right-wing zealot or even politically aware. Indeed, her approach and language are typical of the way these events are written about in Japan. It runs right through the so-called educated classes. Either people do not know or do not care to know what really happened in the past. The education system has failed to prepare the present generation to deal in a different, safer way with the pressures emerging from the Right for a renewal of national pride and self-assertiveness.

    Television coverage of the anti-security legislation protests suggests that a majority of those demonstrating are middle to older-aged Japanese. Perhaps the news programs may be distorting the truth (friends of mine who have attended say around a third are younger people), but what is different about these protests, compared with those in the 1960s, is that they are not being led or joined by mainly student-age Japanese. This is a worrying aspect: the rising generation is either complacent or so badly informed about their nation’s past, the inherent dangers of a society that hides or obfuscates what it should, like Germany, confront every day––whether at a tram-stop or in the classroom or in an art book––are just not appreciated.

    Japan does not seem to know how unready it is.

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Bruce Kaye. Refugees in Australia and the Good Samaritan.

     

    When I was a teenager a famous preacher of the day, Dr Gordon Powell, was the minister at St Stephens Presbyterian Church Macquarie Street Sydney. I recall hearing some of his sermons and in particular a sermon from a series of sermons he preached on the “Hard Sayings of Jesus”. He remarked at the beginning of the series that the really hard sayings of Jesus were not those that were complex or oblique. Rather the hardest sayings of Jesus were those whose meaning was all too clear. The difficulty was in how to work out those sayings in everyday life.

    Similarly the Prime Minister’s statement on Thursday (10 September) that Australia will take in 12,000 extra refugees who are fleeing the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Christians in this country should warmly applaud this surprising but very welcome change of policy by the government.

    There are many complexities and concerns in the implications of the Prime Minister’s statement. Already there are questions about priorities in selection of refugees and whether Christians should be given some priority.   It is abundantly clear that Christians in eastern Mediterranean countries have been severely persecuted for several decades. There used to be a large Palestinian Christian community but it has been practically obliterated in the last 40 years.

    This language about the selection of refugees brought immediate reactions in the media and some declared that if this was to be the pattern then that would be the end of social unity in Australia. This kind of reaction is understandable but the government in its policy statements has not endorsed this kind of selection. Indeed the source of refugees is quite specific. They will come from those fleeing the conflict in Syria and Iraq. ‘Our focus will be on those most in need – the women, children and families of persecuted minorities who have sought refuge from the conflict in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey’.

    But the war in Syria is complicated   Ross Burns Australian Ambassador to Syria (1984-87) points out that the

    ‘Syrian conflict is an increasingly multi-layered scene where violence on all sides has risen to catastrophic proportions. It began as a citizens’ revolt against a brutally repressive government but has since become a multilayered civil war in which a bewildering range of Islamist forces have competed to lead the fight against an oppressive regime. All parties to the conflict have their backers outside Syria with some contributing military resupply, others turning a blind eye to movements into Syria of fighters and arms.’

    The first few years of the conflict saw fighting extend principally into Muslim majority areas of the country while many minority groups (among them Christians, Druze and Alawis) found shelter in areas under government control. Many Christians, in particular, became apologists for the regime in its efforts to project abroad its case that it was fighting the threat of ‘Islamic extremists’—a threat which was largely awakened as a result of the regime’s appetite right from the start for violence and repression as the answer to any form of dissent.

    However the most important complications in this matter are likely to arise here in Australia in the reception and settling of these refugees. This is not a straightforward matter.

    1. Not all in Australia support it or will not like some aspect of the way it works out.
    2. for good practical reasons not all can directly help.
    3. Some simply don’t want to be involved because they don’t approve of the government decision
    4. Some are fearful of the effects on their local community. The member for parliament for the seat of Dawson in Queensland, George Christensen, has expressed strong concern on the affect such an influx would have on his electorate where there is already significant unemployment.
    5. Some point to the many disadvantaged in our community already – will they be neglected? Tony Abbot said these issues will be dealt with in the way the project is handled. That will not be easy.
    6. There will be some prejudice against Muslim people and opposition to more coming – no doubt we will see religious and ethnic stereotyping as this programme goes forward.

    All of these concerns have to be confronted and dealt with both sympathetically and constructively. These concerns cannot be simply brushed aside. They must be recognised and addressed.

    How we as a society do this will be vital for the good of those who come and also for those who are the existing Australians.

    There is an underlying moral question in all this. Why should we be doing all this anyway? Ought we to not be protecting our way of life as a model to other nations?

    For us as Christians and as a Christian community there is however a simple and unavoidable challenge.

    Our Archbishop put his finger on it in his excellent article in the SMH last Thursday.

    The parable of the Good Samaritan is an incendiary critique of discrimination based on race, ethnicity and religion. Listening to the story for the first time, many would have been incensed that Jesus had used the word “good” to describe a despised Samaritan. Yet it never crosses the Samaritan’s mind in the story to ask about the religion or background of the man he finds beaten and dying on the side of the road. His response is immediate, generous and unquestioning.

    Our ability to show love and mercy and provide a warm welcome to anyone in distress, regardless of their faith, must serve as a counterpoint to the brutality of IS. Our response needs to be immediate, generous and unquestioning regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.

    Three elements collide in the story.

    1. The context of complacent religion of the lawyer. He keeps the form but lacks the moral substance.
    1. The ordered complacency of the Levite and the Priest who place observance of religious practices before the moral challenge of their faith.
    1. The indiscriminate compassion of the despised ethnically offensive half foreigner was indeed the true neighbour:
      1. Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

    Extending mercy and compassion to the stranger is clearly central to Jesus’ understanding of how to conduct our lives.

    SO WHAT TO DO IN THE PESENT CHALLENGE

    Don’t panic – this is going to be a long haul both in Syria and Iraq and in Australia

    1. We have a record in Australia of adaptation and continuity in our basic values
    2. Those values are clearly embedded in our constitution, laws, institutions and habits – but we need to be constantly strengthening them, especially when we are confronted with a challenge such as this.
    3. The meeting with faith community leaders and settlements service providers with the Prime Minister is a good start in coordinating appropriate systems for settlement.
    4. Our Anglican Church has been on the front foot in this crisis .We should run with our fellow Christians
    5. The Primate, Archbishop Freier and service organisations of our church have declared their support
    6. The Archbishop of Sydney, Glenn Davies, has made public comment and in a letter sent to all parishes given an unprecedented challenge to parishes and organisations in the diocese to be actively involved.

    So what about us and our parish?

    For the parish as a whole

    I believe the Parish Council should lead the way in developing a strategy we can all be involved in according to our circumstances.

    For each of us as a base line we could

    1. Keep informed
    2. Pray – keep our response to this consciously before God
    3. Think what you can offer directly or indirectly e.g. help someone else, or some organisation like Anglicare
    4. Support the Parish Council to keep up to the challenge for the parish as a whole
    5. Speak up for generosity with your friends. It may well be that generosity will be at a discount in public and private conversation in the months ahead.
    6. Support our political representatives so that this task stays at the forefront of their attention.

    This challenge lies clearly before us. Millions of people are refugees. Our government has laid it open for us as citizens to be involved in a national contribution. Whatever we do we cannot avoid the challenge of compassion that lies before us. We can discuss and debate the means and the details, but as Christian people we have a clear choice in this matter.

    We must choose whether we will be complacent religious or Samaritans,

    A Sermon preached at St Michael’s Anglican Church, Vaucluse. 13 September 2015 by The Revd. Dr Bruce Kaye AM. He is Adjunct Research Professor, Centre for Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University.

     

     

     

     

    [1] Media Statement by Prime Minister 14 September 2015 http://www.pm.gov.au/media/2015-09-09/syrian-and-iraqi-humanitarian-crisis

     

    [2] John Menadue – Pearls and Irritations. publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog. Posted on 11/09/2015 by John Menadue

     

    [3] Article in Sydney Morning Herald, September 9, 2015. http://www.smh.com.au/comment/open-the-door-widely-to-syrian-refugees-20150909-gjij0h.html

  • The Exaggeration over Free Trade Agreements.

    I have posted many blogs in the last couple of years concerning the Free Trade Agreements with the Republic of Korea, Japan and China. I have pointed out that the years of negotiation of these agreements occurred under the Rudd and Gillard governments. The Abbott government gave the agreements the final touch. The other issues that I have raised is that the Abbott government has seriously exaggerated the benefits of the FTAs. Andrew Robb has referred to them as ‘turbo-charging’ the Australian economy.  That is nonsense but unfortunately the exaggerated nonsense continues even with the new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. The FTAs are useful but we need to keep them in proportion.

    Over a decade ago, we had a great deal of exaggeration about the FTA that John Howard negotiated with President Bush. It turns out that there was a negative effect on Australia of this FTA.

    In this blog on 10 September 2015 I drew attention to an article by Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer ‘What’s really at stake if the China FTA falls through’. Dixon and Rimmer wrote that ‘Economic modelling for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade by the Centre for International Economics (CIE) demonstrates the gains of the agreement (with China) will be modest. The CIE estimates the gain in economic welfare from the three North Asian FTAs … will be 0.4%.’

    In the SMH on September 15, the Economic Editor of the Age, Peter Martin, wrote about the impact of the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. The article was headed ‘How many jobs? The China-Australia Free Trade Agreement will create hardly any’. Peter Martin commented ‘[the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement] will create only a few thousand jobs, according to the government’s own modelling, conducted by the Canberra-based Centre for International Economics. But you wouldn’t know it from the way the modelling has been mangled and butchered by the government.’  For Peter Martin’s article, see link below.  The government’s exaggerations about FTAs have become a scandal. John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/how-many-jobs-the-chinaaustralia-free-trade-agreement-will-create-hardly-any-20150914-gjlv06.html

  • Rod Tiffen Lord Leveson, your country needs you, again.

    Two events in the past week show the importance of the Leveson Inquiry reconvening to complete its second report. The Leveson inquiry was set up by British Prime Minister David Cameron in July 2011 at the height of the phone hacking scandal centered on Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper.

    Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry became, as he said in his report, ‘the most public and the most concentrated look at the press that this country has seen’. The proceedings provided many riveting moments as in nine months of oral hearings 337 witnesses gave evidence, including victims of phone hacking. Four prime ministers and a variety of politicians and media figures, including Rupert and James Murdoch also testified and were cross-examined.

    In November 2012, Leveson published a four volume, almost 2000 page report. It recommended a system of press accountability with a statutory basis. Cameron, having earlier promised to implement the reforms, immediately surrendered to the press proprietors’ lobbying and there have been only very partial moves since towards reform.

    Leveson’s report was part one. The second part – looking in detail at News and its web of contacts – was indefinitely delayed because of the necessity to refrain from any publication which would prejudice criminal proceedings. It has been widely assumed that the second part would never be done.

    Now, however, almost three years later, all the major criminal prosecutions are completed, and there is still a need for an authoritative and comprehensive report.

    The legal record over the last few years has yielded some convictions and some important revelations, but also a series of unanswered questions. The most famous trial, the longest completed criminal trial in British history, involved eight defendants, including Rebekah Brooks, on a total of 15 charges. It was also the best funded defence in British history, with some estimates that Murdoch spent more than £30 million pounds, so that the defence was much more lavishly resourced than the prosecution. This eight month trial produced only one guilty verdict, with former News of the World editor and staff member for Prime Minister Cameron, Andy Coulson, sent to jail. It is important to recall however that after those proceedings, there were eight guilty verdicts or guilty pleas to do with phone hacking, and two acquittals (Rebekah Brooks and Stuart Kuttner).

    On charges to do with newspapers bribing officials, codenamed Operation Elveden by the police, dozens of journalists were arrested, but as of now, I think, only one has been convicted – two others were convicted but those convictions were overturned on appeal. The toll among public servants has been greater, and they are subject to much greater legal hazard than journalists. The case of Bettina Jordan-Barber illustrates the difference.

    Jordan-Barber, a Ministry of Defence official, received around £100,000 over nine years from the Sun newspaper. She was sentenced to 12 months jail. Rebekah Brooks, when she was editor of the Sun from 2003 to 2006, authorized eleven payments totaling £38,000. Brooks testified that it never occurred to her that the person, whom her reporter referred to in his emails as my ‘number one military contact’ and ‘ace military source’ might actually be a public official. She was found not guilty.

    Later, that reporter, John Kay, 71, and two of his editors were also found not guilty. Kay had arranged 35 payments to Jordan-Barber for tips linked to 69 stories. The jury members were convinced that the leaks were in the public interest. It is not clear whether the jury looked at all 69 stories, but it seems they must have taken a very broad view of what constitutes public interest.

    One of the two events of the past week which indicate that the Leveson inquiry should be reconvened is the dropping of charges against former News of the World executive Alex Marunchak and private detective Jonathan Rees for hacking into computers between 2005 and 2007. The charges had to be dropped because they were brought later than the three year limit on computer hacking crimes. So, again because of a legal restriction, the substance of the charges will not be resolved.

    There are other remarkable aspects of the relationship between Rees and the paper, which paid him up to £150,000 a year for his services. These included using his extensive contacts among corrupt police to buy information for the paper. He was jailed once for planting cocaine on the wife of a client in a divorce case. The day he was released from jail, the paper’s editor Andy Coulson immediately re-hired him. Rees was also charged in 2002 with murdering his former partner Daniel Morgan, who was killed in 1987 allegedly when he was threatening to reveal corruption among Rees and some police. Some of those police were initially in charge of the investigation. When charges were brought 15 years later, obviously many questions surrounded the evidence presented in court.

    In 2002 the BBC’s Crimewatch program had presenter Jacqui Hames and her husband police officer David Cook appealing for information about the crime. An associate of Rees contacted News International editors who agreed to ‘sort Cook out’, and placed surveillance vans outside the couple’s house. Out of all the misdeeds revealed by Murdoch’s News staff in London, this – seeking to inhibit police investigation of a murder – is, in my view, one of the most revealing about the corporation’s misuse of power and its immorality. As of this week, Rees’s involvement in computer hacking for the company will not be legally punished.

    The other major event of this week, one that has attracted much more attention, is the reinstatement of Rebekah Brooks as head of News UK. In July 2011, at the height of the scandal, she resigned as head of Murdoch’s UK operations with a severance payout of £10.8 million. In addition, she received full payment of her legal fees plus some ongoing support for office expenses. She remained a Murdoch favourite, sometimes holidaying with the family and for some months now being a consultant in the US.

    Now that the British election is safely over, Murdoch has brought her back to her old job, with a rumoured salary of £3 million a year. When Murdoch appeared before a House of Commons committee about the scandal, he called it the most humble day of my life. As Margaret Simons aptly commented, perhaps the reappointment of Brooks is the most arrogant day of his life – although there are many more days competing for this title than for most humble. Murdoch appears to be taking the criminal not guilty verdict as a much more open-ended view that Brooks did nothing wrong.

    Labour’s shadow culture secretary Chris Bryant, who was one of the phone tapping victims, colourfully and courageously called the move ‘two fingers up to the British public’. He said that Brooks’s defence in her criminal trial was ‘that she was incompetent and had no idea what was going on and the end results was that company lost £300 million. It mystifies me that Rupert Murdoch would want to reappoint her’.

    It is also though two fingers up to two other groups. One is Murdoch’s shareholders, who watch on helpless to stop this commercially perverse move, which shows yet again how feeble are the mechanisms of corporate governance to tame the octogenarian’s power, and must wonder how Brooks’s reinstatement will add to shareholder value.

    The second group is more interesting. There is a ghost army of former Murdoch employees whose careers have been ruined by the scandals. The two leading company executives who oversaw the company during its misdeeds and then its defence, are now sitting pretty: James Murdoch has been promoted to head of Twenty First Century Fox and now Rebekah Brooks has come out of her lucrative retirement into a lucrative executive position.

    Most of the others involved in the scandal are not doing so well. For example the former head of security for the company, Mark Hanna, who was found not guilty at the same trial in which Brooks was a defendant, is complaining that he is damaged goods and cannot since the end of the trial find suitable employment. Soon afterwards the company made him redundant with a payout of £45,000. He is now suggesting that he might participate in a project that would reveal the company’s ‘underhand’ activity which will ‘shock everybody’. Similarly many of the journalists charged are now unemployed, and there are reports of health and marriage problems. Indeed their plight might make good fodder for a tabloid exposé. Like Hanna, the one saleable commodity many of them have is to sell revelations of their previous nefarious activities.

    No-one can guess whether this will happen, and if so their stories may give more salacious details but would not comprise a comprehensive and authoritative account.

    Lord Leveson, your country needs you, again.

    Rod Tiffen is Emeritus Professor of political Science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of ‘Rupert Murdoch: A Reassessment’ (NewSouth 2014).