Current Affairs. UK election

On Thursday, May 7 2015, the Conservative Party won the national election in the United Kingdom – despite the fact that nearly two-thirds of ballots were cast for other candidates. With only 36.9% of the vote – some 3% more than opinion polls predicted – the Conservative Party won a 50.9% absolute majority of seats, 331 out of 650, in the House of Commons.

The 61.1% of voters who supported other candidates will thus be represented by a minority in the Commons. There have been public protests at an outcome that some feel was not a democratic expression of voters’ will.

Labor made bigger vote gains, but lost seats

Here are a few facts about the election results that may surprise readers:

• The Conservative Party increased its vote by 0.8%, but increased its number of seats by 28 seats.
• The Labour Party increased its vote by a greater percentage than the Conservatives did, 1.5%, but its number of seats decreased by 24.
• Most voters cast their votes for defeated candidates, so most are “represented” by an MP they did not support.
• Some parties are over-represented in the House of Commons relative to their support among voters. So the governing Conservatives, with 36.9% support, have 50.9% of the seats, and the Scottish Nationalists, with 4.7% support, have 8.6% of the seats.
• Other parties are grossly under-represented, most notably the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) with just one seat, yet 12.6% support.
• The percentage swing to UKIP was the biggest for any party in the UK for at least a generation, but the 3,881,129 people who voted for them – the third-biggest vote after the Conservative and Labour parties – are almost all unrepresented in the House of Commons now.
• Both the Labour and UKIP leaders resigned following their parties’ disappointing number of seats won, even though the votes for their parties significantly increased.

‘First past the post’ distorts multi-party contests

Why is this so? The problem with UK elections, highlighted previously in The Conversation, is that single-member electoral districts, combined with the lack of preferential voting, means that election results usually strongly distort the voters’ wishes.

Here’s how it happens.

Consider the county of Cornwall. With six electoral constituencies, the overall vote was as follows:

43.1% Conservative

22.4% Liberal Democrat

13.8% UKIP

12.3% Labour

5.8% Green

2.5% Others

Although 57% of voters in Cornwall voted for parties other than the Conservatives, the Conservatives won every seat. This is because, under the first-past-the-post system, each winner needs to be just a nose in front of each of the other candidates, even if most of the voters didn’t vote for him or her. In fact, only one Conservative candidate exceeded 50% support in Cornwall.

The full details of what happened are given in the table below:

Breakdown of voting in six seats of Cornwall

Click to enlarge

The only voters whose ballots count for the election of an MP are those who support the candidate who gets the biggest share. This biggest share is usually well under 50%, because there are five or sometimes six parties getting significant support in the UK. There is no preference voting, so if – for example – you vote for a Greens candidate, as 3.8% of voters across the UK did, your vote is effectively discarded (in all but one seat) because at least one other candidate gets more votes.

The Conservatives were able to win a clear majority of seats because their candidates got ahead of others in more than half of the 650 seats, even though they received several million votes short of a majority of votes. Across the south-east and west of England the same picture we see in Cornwall was repeated in many places – with overall votes of less than 50% the Conservatives won all, or almost all, the seats.

But in the rest of the UK the story is different. In the north-east of England, for example, around Durham and Newcastle, out of 28 seats, Labour won 25 and the Conservatives only 3. But, again, Labour’s vote was well under a majority, being just 45.1% of the vote.

What happened in Scotland? Well, the Scottish Nationalists (SNP) are celebrating a huge win, but actually a majority of voters, albeit a very slim majority, voted for other candidates. Final figures show that the Scottish Nationalists won 49.97% of the vote, but 94.9% of the 59 seats in Scotland (56 seats).

Some have said this result in Scotland presages a vote for independence in any future referendum, but the SNP did not win a majority of votes in Scotland last week, nor a majority in the 2014 referendum. A win in any further referendum doesn’t seem likely soon.

So this is why many people in the UK are upset by the election result. Most voters didn’t vote for the outcome they got, and most voters are not represented in the House of Commons – which is the only elected House – by the candidate they voted for.

Is this distortion really the best that democracy can offer? I would say a definite no.

Stephen Morey is Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Linguistics at Latrobe University. This article first appeared in The Conversation on 11 May 2015.

Fairness, Opportunity, Security.
Policy series edited by Michael Keating and John Menadue.

In Part 1, I pointed out that the Westminster style two-party system is in trouble.

Part 2. Implications for Policy Making Practice.

At least four implications would seem to follow from the above analysis.

The first concerns the need to create systemic capacities to address single issues. As Bernard Crick observed many years ago, the present forms and processes of parliament under the Westminster system are tantamount to a continuing election campaign. This suits majoritarian or winner-takes-all government. This mise-en-scene was designed for an era in which the major parties championed different ideologies and different medium-term agendas. It assumed that these parties enjoyed support from more or less half the community. It also assumed that their approach to particular domestic issues as they arose could be derived from their distinctive overarching programmes.

Neither of these conditions now holds. There is no party platform or canonical document from which to infer attitudes to gay marriage, euthanasia, the financial crisis, live cattle exports, refugees or Gonski: to nominate just a few recent matters. Each of these issues is associated with distinctive alignments, distinctive agendas, distinctive coalitions and distinctive narratives. Thus there is no longer any natural nor enduring majority on many if not most of the issues that are on the current political agenda.

Furthermore, the present system has almost no capacity to create a political conversation around single issues that is at least partially separate from the struggle for office between the major parties. It lacks any capacity for what might be termed a ‘contemplative’ phase in the unfolding of contested policy issues.

Second (really a corollary of the preceding point), coalition-building needs to be made routine within the structure of the policy making system. As a large literature attests, where the community is fragmented and pluralised, a coalition symbolises wide support. Coalitions add important public cues to the political equation – cues that, in the majoritarian era, were largely delivered by major party brands.

Third, to the extent possible, bi(multi)partisanship opportunities need to be explored. As noted above, on many issues there is now substantial overlap between one or other of the parties. Yet you would never know from the present political conversation. A critical moment in the public policy process occurs at the point of time at which an issue first enters the political agenda. For recent examples, think of McClure, Gonski, Higher Education funding, the debate over the deficit. If the agenda entry phase in the policy process could be made more transparent, the opportunity to explore the scope for at least partial cross-party alliances would be greatly extended.

In a strategic phase, the political conversation might focus on: Why is this issue significant? What establishes its claim to a place in the national conversation? What are some of the options for dealing with it? If the scope for agreement around such matters could be made at least partially transparent, the public conversation might thereafter better focus on real areas of contention. This would need to occur before the executive makes more immediate policy choices.

And finally, opportunities for ad hoc public engagement need to be considerably extended. Digital media provide a variety of opportunities for ad hoc groups of citizens to come together around particular issues and to advance policy proposals. There are already examples of this occurring beyond the formal system. But the latter has no or very limited capacities to connect to this activity.

Recall the way citizens proposed a motion at a local branch and then followed its advance to regional and later national party conferences. This suggests how such processes now need to be orchestrated around single issues. Engagement needs to be serial and reciprocal, not sporadic or one-off. If groups of citizens propose something and it is rejected, the reasons need to be stated. More importantly, the proponents need the chance to return to their cause by augmenting their argument and by meeting a higher support hurdle. How these matters might be operationalised needs much more thought. But the principle that engagement should be serial and reciprocal is fundamental.

In sum, in a different era the major party organisations provided much of the tissue that connected the formal system to its publics. They still have important roles. But they can no longer deliver the necessary linkages. So how can connections be rebuilt?

System Adaptation.

There are many proposals for system development. Deliberative democrats propose much wider use of citizen juries and similar choice mechanism. Others see a redefined role for major parties, with requirements for community engagement and policy activism expanded (e.g. Latham, Reith, Faulkner). Voting reform is another possibility although there has hitherto been no mobilisation around this issue, as for example occurred in New Zealand. Social media is just emerging – but it has no connection to the formal system. Indeed to be effective all these initiatives need to be anchored in a formal structure within the representational system. Access and engagement, which is broadened and deepened and sited at the epicentre of the representational system, is fundamental.

It is hard to see any alternative to a much expanded and deepened role for the parliamentary committee system. Furthermore, Australia’s political system is almost purpose-built for such an outcome. The Senate was modelled on its US counterpart. In fact, the procedures that would be associated with a democratic transformation are evident in our own historic experience. Between 1901 and 1909, the electorate returned three parties – the Free Traders, Protectionists and Labor.

Governing required at least two of these 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) at the strategic end of the parliamentary issue cycle, but 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 extended 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 breached 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 the executive determining a course of action would give the executive more flexibility in response. Following this debate, it would be up to the government to decide what to do. But such a change in the policy determining sequence would also represent a major change in the structure of political power.

Conclusion

The present adversarial system was born in 1909. It was based on two powerful party organisations that each appealed to roughly half of the Australian community. These days are long gone. The challenge in the twenty-first century is to develop a political system more aligned to Australia’s pluralised society.

Thus, while most of the contributions to this series of policy discussion papers focus on the nature and content of future policy choices, it is argued here that actually achieving future policy reform may well depend equally on reforms to our political system and decision making processes. Furthermore, it might be noted that this is not entirely a new situation. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the outstanding economic problem of the day was ‘stagflation’, and a significant factor in the election of the Hawke Government in 1983 was its promise to seek a new approach to dealing with this problem built around a search for consensus, based on equality of sacrifice. Indeed it is arguable that at the time of the election the incoming Labor Government was more strongly identified in the public mind with its promise of “consensus” than with the actual content of its policies. Whatever the case, however, it is indisputable that that Government was able to achieve a great deal of policy reform that set Australia up to meet the challenge of globalisation.

Now we are facing similar challenges of political and policy failure, and again we need to address the political challenge of the how to reform the decision-making system as well as the policy content. Essentially this political challenge is to change the system so that it is more conducive to producing a majority in favour of sensible reforms.

But unfortunately to date, the potential of the parliamentary committee system to meet this need is hardly recognised. The procedural and other changes that would be required to enhance its standing and influence in the broader political and policy making system would be tantamount to a democratic transformation. Such institutional developments would align the formal system much more constructively with its publics.

The incentive structure in parliament which presently favours an adversarial approach is a fundamental issue. Present parliamentary incentives dictate that what one declares black the other must almost invariably proclaim to be white. Until we face up to the mismatch between the formal structure of Australian politics and the society which it nominally serves, dysfunction and gridlock must be expected to continue.

Can any of the major parties (or any of the minority blocs in the Senate) summon the resolve, the tactical guile and the political imagination that is necessary to transit to a post-majoritarian political order?

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.

Fairness, Opportunity and Security
Policy series edited by Michael Keating and John Menadue.

Whoever wins the next election, the challenge of dealing with a hung Senate will almost certainly loom large. Perhaps also a hung House of Representatives. Malcolm Turnbull tells us that the appropriate response is a compelling narrative delivered with conviction and resolve by a sufficiently competent leader.

Is this enough? In this short note I will argue that the problems in present political arrangements are much deeper – they are systemic and structural. The present political and policy system is largely gridlocked. This is the result not of incompetent leaders or deficient narratives, important though both certainly are, but rather of a slow-burn legitimacy crisis that has been many years in gestation.

Put another way – recent decades have witnessed not one but two seismic shifts: economic globalisation and social pluralisation. The former has been more or less addressed by the major parties. The latter has yet to be assimilated.

Evidence of social pluralisation and the consequent political gridlock is clear in the recent political record. John Howard passed the GST but at the following election lost the popular vote. Hardly auspicious. After much delay and much cash, he also privatised Telstra. Otherwise, despite ten years of office, tough reforms were conspicuous by their absence. Moreover, he governed with a windfall revenue gain of $283 billion. Despite this, in the ten months prior to defeat, the Howard government u-turned on not one or two but seven measures. These were not minor matters: they were issues at the heart of its programme – Work Choices, climate change, broadband, the Murray-Darling, education funding and so forth.

Things hardly improved thereafter. The only significant policy matters to survive the Rudd and Gillard governments were based on bipartisanship – plain cigarette packaging, the NDIS and perhaps the Abbott-Morrison-led race to the gutter on refugees. Climate change is on-going.

Short of bipartisanship, we have no recent examples of successful policy change on a major contested issue. Not one.

If further confirmation is needed, look no further than the rise and decline of Tony Abbott. As an uncompromising and negative Opposition leader, he was lauded by some for his ruthless pursuit of office, reflected in wholly populist negative campaigns. But in government he faced the reality of office. Nemesis intervened. His slogans created expectations that even his most ardent supporters must now recognise to be contrary to Australia’s national interests. At one level, his fate is testament to combative hubris. At another, to a dysfunctional political incentive structure.

Underlying political gridlock is a crisis of democratic legitimacy. This will afflict any government. It derives from a disconnect between the formal political and policy making system and its publics. This is a fundamental systemic problem. It has not sprung up overnight or over one government. It has been driven by a variety of structural changes. The following sections explore first, the nature of these structural shifts; second, the requirements for renewing citizen engagement; and third, the systemic changes that might be required to make this wider engagement a reality.

Three Structural Changes

Why has democratic legitimacy so eroded? This outcome has been driven by three structural changes: first, the decline of major party organisations; second, a convergence of major party (particularly economic) agendas; and third, and most importantly, a pluralisation and differentiation of citizen identities. Let’s look briefly at each.

First, the story of major party organisational decline is well known. From a membership of some 8% of the entire adult voting population in 1966, the major parties now attract only some 0.8%. Moreover, whereas only 2% of citizens did not identify with either major party in 1967 the number rose to 28% in the early 2000s and has since hovered around this level. Hence, around 50% of the electorate now have weak or no identification with either major party. Further, about 20% of us vote for minor parties and independents and about another 20% of those eligible do not vote or do not enrol or vote informal. An astonishing number!

But decline extends well beyond public support. Party organisations used to be important sites engaging activists and aggregating interests. Party branches were widespread and embedded in local communities. Party conferences were important policy making forums. Citizens could advance motions at local and regional party meetings and thus experience political efficacy. These capacities are long gone. Conferences now only occur infrequently and are largely stage managed. A small coterie of parliamentary elites substantially influence manifesto design. Member influence is marginal. The dense tissue that once connected the major parties to their publics has gone.

A second reason for citizen disaffection arises from convergence of major party agendas. The days when they stood for significantly different directions for national social and/or economic development have long gone. The Hawke-Keating government led a national response to economic globalisation. The illusion of effective government continues to be sustained by memory of this era. But crisis-induced bipartisanship was its essential condition. The end of a shared sense of economic crisis around 1996, or even earlier, was also the end of that era.

Remember the political incentive structure rewards differentiation. Hence the amount of illusion and make-believe in the political world that we now experience. This is reflected in the short termism, populism and often opportunistic, fabricated or manufactured difference which characterises contemporary politics Moreover, responses are framed with an eye to media impact rather than any underlying values or ideology. Leaders who do not play these games have been given short shrift by their supporters.

These changes in the formal political system have marched in step with another more fundamental change. This is the transformation of Australian society. The social movements of the 1970s were the proximate cause. Think of the women’s, gay, environment, Indigenous rights, multicultural, animal rights, consumer etc movements, and the more conservative counter-mobilisations that they stimulated. These attitudinal changes have effected a fundamental transformation in the political orientations of Australians. The days when you could think about politics exclusively in binary or class terms are long gone

This change in Australian political identities is absolutely fundamental. The Australian community is now pluralised and differentiated and, in some contexts, increasingly regionalised. The best image is a kaleidoscope. This reflects not only the diverse values that are held by Australians, but also the challenge in framing persuasive political narratives. The assumption that basic partisan values are widely shared no longer holds. Rather leaders need to craft appeals that can reach out to majority coalitions.

In sum, the slow-burn crisis of legitimacy, which the three foregoing structural changes have occasioned, is perhaps only now fully apparent.

In Part 2 I will be examining the implications for policy-making practice.

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.

The Observer newspaper in the UK has an interesting background piece on the issues facing people in the UK. It raises many of the questions that concern Australians about the disfunction and the loss of trust in our political institutions. See link to article below.  John Menadue

http://gu.com/p/48435/sbl

Fairness, Opportunity and Security
A Policy Series to fill the policy vacuum.
Edited by Michael Keating and John Menadue.

On May 11 in this blog- Pearls and Irritations– we will begin a series of articles on important policy issues. There will be over forty articles on sixteen policy areas from over thirty contributors. The series will run for four to five weeks.

Each of the policy articles will be about 2000 words. They will be realistic, given our political and financial constraints.

Ken Henry will be introducing the series.  

In the week commencing 11 May we will post articles on

Democratic Renewal (John Menadue and Ian Marsh)
The role of government (Michael Keating, Ian McAuley and John Menadue)
Foreign Policy (Stephen Fitzgerald, Cavan Hogue, Richard Butler, Stuart Harris and John McCarthy)

In the week commencing 18 May we will post articles on

Fixing the budget (Michael Keating)
Taxation Reform (Michael Keating)
Federalism (Michael Keating and John Menadue)
Job Creation (Michael Keating)
Productivity (Michael Keating)
Transport and Infrastructure (Michael Keating)
Welfare priorities (Andrew Podger and Peter Whiteford)

Then will follow

Health (John Menadue, Jim McGinty {workforce})
Development of our human capital in the fields of education, science, innovation, research and development (Glenn Withers, Chris Bonnor {schools}, Glenn Withers {Universities})
Population/migration/refugees (John Menadue, Peter Hughes, Arja Keski-Nummi)
Retirement incomes (Michael Keating, Andrew Podger)
Indigenous affairs (Fred Chaney, Michael Gracey)
Communications and the Arts (Kim Williams {Arts}, Terry Flew {media regulation in internet world}, Julianne Shultz {cultural identity}, Rob Nicholls {NBN})
Environment and climate change (Ross Garnaut, Peter Cosier, Brendan Mackay)
Inequality (Peter Whiteford, Michael Keating, Ian McAuley)
Security, both military and soft power (Michael Wesley)
Internal security and freedom (Spencer Zifcak {Human Rights Act/Charter})

Media enquiries. Please contact johnmenadue@staging-johnmenadue.kinsta.cloud.

Australian civil society is again facing attacks from government and conservative think tanks seeking to silence and weaken community voices.   The Labor years of 2007-2013 saw a break from the attempted silencing of the Howard decade, but there is now a new push, that aims to detract from the legitimacy of NGOs and to deny the valuable role their advocacy plays in our democracy. The detail of the new push has been documented recently. It is not a coincidence that at the same time there are new younger voices in an energised environment movement. Many new groups of younger activists are fighting for their future by challenging coal and gas corporations as climate change looms.

Government actions that are concerning and distracting civil society at present include:

• Almost 600 environmental groups that hold tax-deductibility status in Australia are being scrutinised by a House of Representatives Inquiry. Government MPs have apparently identified up to 150 groups they wish to strike off the list. Other community groups having the same tax deductibility have not been included. There have been suggestions that those most directly challenging the fossil fuel industry are being targeted by this Inquiry.
• The federal government White Paper on tax called, Re:Think, has a chapter on the NGO sector. It poses questions for discussion that ignore the advocacy role of developing good policy from community input. Instead, it posits NGOs as competing with the for-profit sector and asks if they have a ‘competitive advantage’.
• Various state governments have proposed, or are proposing, legislation that would restrict the ability of groups to use public forms of non-violent protest.

These attacks have been documented a number of times and in fact have been written about extensively. However, it is worth pausing and setting out the importance of this public advocacy to our society.

The value of NGOs to our public sphere is multi-faceted.

• NGOs respond to policy and they develop alternative proposals. This input is vital to good policy-making by both government and business.  Community people on the ground can see and predict the effect of policies in a practical and effective way, making improved outcomes possible for all.
• NGOs are uniquely placed to support policy that looks to long term goals or that affects the future.  In contrast, governments react to the short electoral cycle, asking ‘how will it affect our chance of re-election?’, and businesses have a legal responsibility to ask ‘how will it affect our bottom line’?, but it is a special quality of the NGO sector that it has the flexibility to include the long-term in its policy interests and in its desired outcomes. Responding to the crisis of climate change is the most obvious example where a response relevant to the future is competing with party electoral aims and the business bottom line of fossil fuel companies.
• Another most important role is to provide a balance to the views of powerful, organised, economic interests.  There is a large imbalance between the power of vested interests and that of the community.  On the occasions when government and business work together, the power imbalance is even greater, and NGOs are vital.
• NGOs have an accountability function. They inform the community on the behaviour of governments and businesses and call them to account. NGOs can claim legitimacy for this role if their roots are in the community and they are informed by the practical impact of policy on themselves or their members. When this is the case, NGOs are uniquely placed to respond to (a) the impact of government and business policies, (b) the impact of lack of policy, (c) failure to implement promises, (d) the unintended consequences of policy and (e) the existence of unethical or corrupt behaviour.
• NGOs can show the amount of public support or opposition there is for any policy. It is a creative challenge for NGOs to find new ways to demonstrate this. Rallies, public meetings, letterwriting, petitions etc. are traditional means and the internet has thrown up many new methods.
• NGOs are better than individuals trying to act on issues alone, because by pooling financial and intellectual resources they improve the quality of their contribution to public debate.  ‘Two heads are better than one’ and ‘many hands make light work’.
• NGOs can improve equity in our society by providing a ‘voice’ for marginalised and disadvantaged individuals and groups.
• Regional and country NGOs are important for providing information to make policy specifically relevant to different geographical areas.  The same is true for special interest groups, such as the disabled, women, etc. Policy affecting any regional or special interest group is improved with their input, making it better policy for all.
• Unlike the public service or government or large businesses, the flexibility of the NGO sector means it can respond quickly to new political situations.  New organisations frequently spring up in response to need or policy proposals. NGO flexibility can be seen as part of the variety, dynamism and vitality of the community from which NGOs come. The flexibility can also reflect different political and cultural ways of talking about the same issue and can tap into different parts of society.

Conclusion

It is exactly 20 years since John Howard first spoke of NGOs as part of the economic market, rather than as part of our democratic structure and our public sphere. The Howard years were a confusing period for NGOs. Practical actions of feeding the homeless or planting trees were commended in the name of smaller government, but advocacy on behalf of the homeless or the environment were discouraged by a number of means. Now neoliberal warriors in the Abbott government are opening up new fronts.

The Australian community has heard two decades of economic language measuring the worth of NGOs as economic entities. This has resulted in a devaluing of NGO contributions and the devaluing of a healthy contest of ideas. It is time to reassert the positives of an engagement with the community.

 COMING SOON.   11 May 2015

Fairness, Opportunity, Security.

A Policy Series to fill the policy vacuum.
Edited by Michael Keating and John Menadue

There is growing public disquiet. The government and the opposition keep playing the political and personal game at the expense of informed public discussion of important policy issues.

As a community we have become concerned about the trustworthiness of our political, business and media institutions. Insiders and vested interests are undermining the public interest. Money is unduly influencing political decisions. There is gridlock on important issues like climate change and taxation. We are not satisfied with ‘small target ‘politics.

After a near death experience Tony Abbott says he is open to new thinking and ways of governing. Time will tell. Bill Shorten says 2015 will be the year of ideas. Let’s see.

On May 11 in this blog- Pearls and Irritations– we will begin a series of articles on important policy issues. There will be over forty articles on sixteen policy areas from over thirty contributors. The series will run for four to five weeks.

Each of the policy articles will be about 2000 words. They will be realistic, given our political and financial constraints.

Ken Henry will be introducing the series.

ATF Press plan to publish these policy articles in book form later this year  

Policy Series.  Areas to be canvassed

Economic policy
Fixing the budget  (Michael Keating)
Federalism (Michael Keating, John Menadue)
Productivity (Michael Keating)
Job creating and participation (Michael Keating)
Foreign policy  (Stephen Fitzgerald, Richard Butler, Cavan Hogue, Stuart Harris, John McCarthy)
Security, both military and soft power  (Michael Wesley)
Health  (John Menadue, Jennifer Doggett {co-payments}, James McGinty {workforce})
Development of our human capital in the fields of education, science, innovation, research and development (Glenn Withers, Chris Bonnor {schools}, Glenn Withers {Universities})
Transport and infrastructure (Michael Keating)
Population/migration/refugees (John Menadue, Peter Hughes, Arja Keski-Nummi)
Welfare priorities (Andrew Podger, Peter Whiteford)
Retirement incomes (Michael Keating, Andrew Podger)
Indigenous affairs (Fred Chaney , Michael Gracey)
Communications and the Arts (Kim Williams {Arts}, Terry Flew {media regulation in internet world}, Julianne Shultz {cultural identity}, Rob Nicholls {NBN})
Environment and climate change (Ross Garnaut, Lesley Hughes, Brendan Mackay)
Inequality (Peter Whiteford, Michael Keating, Ian McAuley)
The role of government (Michael Keating, John Menadue, Ian McAuley)
Democratic renewal – the lack of trust in government and the hollowing out of our  political parties (Ian Marsh, John Menadue, Barry Jones)
Internal security and freedom (Stephen Zifcak {Human Rights Act/Charter}, Peter Timmins)

Media enquiries. Please contact johnmenadue@staging-johnmenadue.kinsta.cloud.

Mike Keating and John Menadue (joint editors)
Fairness, Opportunity and Security -filling the policy vacuum

There is a growing public disquiet that both the government and the opposition keep playing the political and personal game at the expense of informed public discussion of important policy issues.

As a community we have become concerned about the trustworthiness of our political, business and media elite. Insiders and vested interests are undermining the public interest. Money is unduly influencing political decisions. There is gridlock on important issues like climate change and taxation.

After a near death experience Tony Abbott has said the he is open to new thinking and ways of governing. Time will tell. Bill Shorten has said that 2015 will be the year of ideas. We hope so.

From early May in this blog we will be posting a series of articles on important policy issues. Mike Keating and I will be joint editors.

 There will be over 40 policy articles .Each of the articles will be about 2000 words.

They will be   realistic, given our political and financial constraints.

It is planned that these policy articles will be published in a book by ATF Press in October/November this year  

Policy areas to be canvassed

Economic policy
Fixing the budget
Taxation
Federalism
Productivity
Job creation and participation
Foreign policy
Security, both military and soft power
Health.
Development of our human capital in the fields of education, science,  research and development and innovation.
Transport and infrastructure
Population/migration/refugees
Welfare priorities.
Retirement incomes
Indigenous affairs
Communications, the arts, media and culture.
Environment and climate change
Inequality
Role and responsibilities of government
Democratic renewal – the lack of trust in government and the hollowing out  of our political  parties.
Internal security and freedom.