John Menadue

  • Graeme Pearman. Managing climate change: in whose interest?  

    The role of greenhouse gases in determining the temperature of the Earth has been known since the first half of the 19th century and in recent decades observations have shown clearly that human activities are changing the levels of these gases in the atmosphere. The science community has articulated the broad consequences of this for more than three decades.

    Yet in Australia the period from the late 1980s to the present has been characterised by a trend from an internationally leading and proactive approach to an approach that puts Australia in danger of incurring political and economic sanctions reflecting our growing pariah status. Maria Taylor has suggested this trend reflects a shift in cultural values including, important in the context of this volume, the demise of the ‘public interest’. Environmental leadership by the Hawke government has been overtaken by a dominant commitment to the neo liberal economic ideology. Sections of the media also played a role in communicating the new narrative about the irreplaceability of fossil fuels and a general scepticism about the science of climate change.

    To some it is evident that climate-change policy was designed to promote action to support key industries. This cultural change has had enormous implications for Australian life: the sectoral balance of the economy; employment, working hours and conditions; family life; volunteerism; attention to domestic and international welfare and environmental issues; and so on. Many now question whether as a result of being ‘wealthier’ we are happier and more secure, and whether the benefits have been equitably shared in the public good. Yet rigorous examination of these wider consequences is missing.

    Humans, all of us, find it necessary to have personal views of the nature of the world in order to operate on a daily basis. To a large extent we can do little more than construct this view from what our parents told us, our culture, our religion, our education, advertisements and at times from what those whom we admire have told us. These are constructed views of the world.

    The problem is that these are largely based on myth and rarely formulated from rigorously determined information. President Kennedy said the ‘great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.’

    A greater reliance on ideological, often mythical, imperatives has lowered attention to evidence-based decision-making, a regression towards the times prior to the Age of Enlightenment. There has been a decline of investment in science and its representation in governments, and an expansion of the mindless view that science’s role in modern society is about product development and financial reward. This ignores the substantial value of building a deeper understanding of the world we live in, the natural environment, the operation of societies and limitations of our own humanity. It ignores investment in the power to anticipate and set goals for a future world that we consciously wish to achieve.

    Climate change is about modification of the global environment well beyond the strategic view of businesses. Concern for its potential impact on future generations and the natural ecosystems has limited power in the operation of the markets and market choice. Further, the impact of a changed climate may occur through largely explicable effects on agriculture, water resources and security, but also through disruption of the complex and dynamical nature of ecosystems in a way we cannot at this stage anticipate. The point is that the potential consequences have serious implications for the public good, now and into the future.

    Climate change is already impacting on concerns over energy futures and policy. There are many cases where this is poorly understood in the sense of its impact on the wider public good. For example, a recently announced discovery of a Cooper Basin gas reserve suggests its exploitation would ‘result in 60 to 120 trillion cubic feet of gas’. This is equivalent to 6.6 thousand million tonnes of CO2 or 11 times the current annual release of carbon dioxide from Australia. If exploited its release might occur over a decade or more and its spread may perhaps be international. But this one enterprise would represent about 83 per cent of the estimated Australian long-term ‘allocation’ of emissions as its part in the global effort to give a 75 per cent chance of keeping climate change near to 2oC into the future (8,400 Mt CO2 from 2013-50).

    Additionally, natural gas is methane that as a greenhouse gas is effectively about 34 times more powerful than CO2. Recent satellite imagery of North American tight geological formations suggests that leakage rates could be of order 10 per cent. The ‘greenhouse emissions’ advantage of gas over oil or coal is lost for any leakage of more than 3 per cent.

    The point here is who is to decide whether the exploitation of such gas resources, and many have been identified, is in the public interest? There would clearly be positive impacts on energy supplies, trade and employment. On the other hand there are potential negative impacts on our contribution to the reduction of global emissions and on alternative land-uses. There are risks related to the methane leakage issue and disruption to societies related to the transient nature of the businesses. Who will bear the cost of exposure to potentially stranded assets and the downside of biased or narrowly focused risk assessment? This is to say nothing of the questions about who really owns these resources in the first place and how benefits should accrue for all. Surely these are not questions for the energy companies or the energy sector alone.

    Governments have a responsibility to encourage entrepreneurialism and the economic benefits that may ensue from such resource exploitation. But we also expect governments to weigh these benefits in light of the public Interest. The federal government’s Energy Green Paper shows influences of ideological and sectoral views on energy futures that are perhaps understandable given the responsible department, but these may not be in the wider interests of the community. Thus a serious rethink is required to address how best to deal with complex, multi-factorial and strategic issues related to the public good given our modern, largely sectoralised, society.

    The view that economic imperatives should not dominate policy will be no more easily ‘sold’ than the need for action on climate change. It represents a challenge to prevalent ideologies and narrow corporate interests and a broad interpretation of what constitutes human wellbeing and welfare (in time and essence) that has fallen out of favour. As recently stated in an Age Editorial, ‘…. human society is built on the idea that the many are one. This is not socialism or communism, but humanism. Too often self interest and ideology, manifested in business and political, crash against this ideal.’

     

    Graeme Pearman AM retired from CSIRO in 2004 after 33 years of service including 10 years as Chief of the Division of Atmospheric Research. He pioneered studies of the global carbon cycle, fundamental to anticipating future climate change, and over-sighted the development of an Australian capacity in climate modelling and impact assessment. He operates a consultancy on climate science, energy futures, the impact of human and societal behaviour and sustainability. He is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Monash University.

    This article was published recently, with many others, by Australia 21. The subject of the series was ‘Who speaks for and protects the public interest in Australia?’  www.australia21.org.au 

     

  • Brian Johnstone. The execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

    The deaths of these two men now appear to be inevitable.  The key argument of President Joko Widodo is that this lethal means (death by firing squad) is justified for the purpose of saving his people from the addiction and death caused by drugs. The Indonesian government claims that, in that country, approximately 50 victims of drugs die every day.  The number of persons who die each year as a consequence of drugs in Australia is around 1,500.  The damage to lives from drugs is amply documented by the recent book by Dr. John Sherman and Tony Valenta, Drug Addiction in Australia (Melbourne, 2015). There can be no denying the harm caused by drug trafficking; the moral question is whether capital punishment is an effective and morally acceptable way of dealing with it.

    It seems that most Australians strongly oppose this execution. In the case of the Bali bombers of 2002, the then Prime Minister John Howard did not oppose their execution by Indonesia, nor did the then leader of the opposition Simon Crean.  As Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared the Bali bombers “deserve the justice that will be delivered to them.”  These statements open Australia to accusations of inconsistency.  The present Prime Minister Tony Abbott has been forthright in his opposition to the execution of Chan and Sukumaran.  But to counter the charge that we are only defending our own we need to base our arguments on principles that transcend individual and national interests and are universally applicable.

    The main line Christian churches have traditionally supported the right of the state to inflict the death penalty for serious crimes, but in recent times they have adopted much more restrictive positions.

    The present position of the Catholic Church was spelled out by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical letter, The Gospel of Life, par. 56.

    “[Legitimate defence] is the context in which to place the problem of the death penalty. On this matter there is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely. The problem must be viewed in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity and thus, in the end, with God’s plan for man and society. The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is “to redress the disorder caused by the offence”. Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfils the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people’s safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behaviour and be rehabilitated.”

    “It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not to go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”

    Pope Francis sought to narrow further the range of exceptions on this ground. In a meeting with representatives of the International Association of Penal Law on 23 October 2014,   the Pope said “It is impossible to imagine that states today cannot make use of another means than capital punishment to defend people’s lives from an unjust aggressor.”

    There are three arguments that can be applied to capital punishment: retribution, deterrence and defence.  The argument for retribution comes in two main versions. The first appeals to a notion of a moral order of justice in the world. According to this way of thinking a crime damages the order.  Justice requires the criminal to pay a penalty to repair the damage or, as is said, to “expiate” his crime.  Where the crime is serious the state has the right and duty to compel him to pay by imposing on him the penalty of death. Many now find it hard to understand how death that is inflicted on the criminal can serve this purpose.

    The second version appeals to feelings of satisfaction.  Relatives of the victim sometimes claim they cannot feel “closure” until the criminal has been executed.  Critics would argue that this is more like revenge than true justice.  Revenge means seeking the harm of another who has harmed one for one’s own individual satisfaction rather than for the sake of justice. As for deterrence, it is now generally accepted that capital punishment is not effective.

    The third argument is based on defence; there are two key points. The first point is the value to be defended; this is no longer an abstract moral order in the world, but the intrinsic dignity of human persons.  Intrinsic dignity refers to the capacity of the person to flourish.  The role of the state is effectively to defend and promote the dignity of the persons for whom it is responsible. The second point is the appropriate means of this defence.  There could be circumstances in which effective protection of persons requires force, and the application of force may cause the death of the aggressor.  In such a case the aggressor is responsible for his own death.  But in modern conditions there are adequate means of protecting persons against an aggressor, namely imprisonment.  Furthermore, respect for the intrinsic dignity of the person of the aggressor requires that he not be treated in such a way that he can no longer flourish as a person.

    The state ought to allow him to redeem himself by contributing to society, for example, by counselling others as Chan and Sukumaran have been doing.

    Brian Johnstone is a Catholic Priest who taught moral theology in Rome for nearly 20 years. Currently he teaches at the Catholic University in Washington. 

  • Helen Sykes and David Yencken. Leadership in the public interest.

      

    No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It’s because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up – demand – demand – demand change. (Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States)

    History shows that the public interest can vary over time and between societies. These are, nonetheless, ideals that every nation should have for the wellbeing of its citizens. For Australia they include the protection of core values of democracy and society and the proper care of its people. They require the protection and nurturing of the physical environment as the source of sustenance and life. They ask that we maintain decent standards of living for all citizens and thus a fair and efficiently operating economy. They mean that our artistic and cultural heritage and traditions are treated with respect, support and encouragement.

    Many of these ideals, core values and social needs are under serious threat. One forceful way of confronting this challenge would be to try to reach agreement across Australian society about the major issues facing the country and to focus attention sharply on them. How might that be done and who should take a leadership role? Government clearly has a major role to play but the deficiencies of the political system in dealing with critical issues facing Australia and the world are all too apparent. Business has its part but works to its own rules so while it is an important source of enterprise and wealth generation for the country, it is not principally focussed on the broader public interest and often works contrary to it. The university sector has a critical role in carrying out research, promoting research findings and making its undergraduates and postgraduates aware of societal issues, but it rarely takes the main initiative in promoting new policies to protect the public interest except through the views expressed by individuals in university communities. Neither old nor new media are likely to don this mantle.

    There is another major sector, the civil society sector (or not-for-profit or non-government sector), which could play a lead role in bringing about change that serves Australia’s public interest. The Australian Productivity Commission in its 2010 ‘Contribution of Not-For-Profit Sector Report’ points out that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) ‘identified 59,000 economically significant NFPs, contributing $43 billion to Australia’s GDP, and 8 per cent of employment in 2006-07’. In support of greater recognition for the sector, the Productivity Commission Report also notes that ‘the level of understanding among the wider community of the sector’s role and contribution is poor and deserves attention’.

    There are other reasons why this sector is ideally placed to take a leadership role. One is the rich array of skills covering the widest range of issues to be found within it. Another is the standing of the sector in the eyes of the public and the trust in which it is held. Edelman, the global public relations company, has just released the findings of its 2015 Trust Barometer. Once again the survey shows that non-government organisations (NGOs) enjoy the highest levels of public trust, ahead of government, business and the media, although disappointingly the level of public trust in all institutions has fallen this year. The drop in trust for NGOs has only been small, however, and still leaves this sector highest ranked and well-placed to take the lead in promoting the public interest.

    What stops the civil society sector acting more vigorously? Key problems are its fragmentation and lack of resources. Australia is a rich pluralistic society within which many different voices speak out freely for the causes about which they are concerned. But such diversity can blunt a sharp focus on the most important issues and thus the likelihood of the media or politicians paying serious attention.

    A challenge for the sector is how to make the most effective use of its diversity and skills to generate a list of critical issues and get wide agreement about them. This could, no doubt, be done in many different ways.  Since there is not space to explore alternatives in any depth, we focus here on two key principles that should inform the task and one proposal that might produce a powerful outcome.

    The principles are that the work undertaken should fully engage the civil society sector and that it should be intellectually rigorous. With these two principles in mind we suggest that a representative group of civil society organisations should take the first step by preparing a preliminary list of the most important issues facing Australia, inviting the widest possible inputs.

    The second step would be to submit this list to a consortium of academics from Australian universities for checking, review and further development. When the academic review is completed a series of ‘citizen parliaments’ would be an ideal way to test and promote the research findings with community members. All community consultations should have multiple aims: to gather further valuable inputs, to create a learning environment for all concerned, and to gain the greatest amount of media attention and reporting.

    The civil society sector would have the responsibility for promoting the findings of the research, individually and collectively, so that they become key issues regularly taken up in the media, leading in turn to pressure on all political parties to respond and incorporate into their policy commitments. Ideally the exercise should be repeated at regular intervals. The ongoing research team should be a dynamic group constantly kept alive with the injection of new voices, ideas and energy.

    Funding of the project would no doubt be a challenge. Every effort should be made to ensure that the funds needed come from the combined resources of civil society organisations, universities and philanthropy and not from business and government.

    Sir Gustav Nossal reminds us that: ‘Community leadership is the courage, creativity and capacity to inspire participation, development and sustainability for strong communities.’ Australia’s civil society sector is well placed in Biden’s words to rise up, demand change and show that leadership.

     Helen Sykes AM is the Director of Future Leaders, President of the Trust for Young Australians, Chair of The Australian Collaboration, Vice President of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Associate of Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, Member of the Future Justice Executive, Summit Governor of the Hillary Institute, and Board Member of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation. She has published and edited many books.

    David Yencken AO is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of Environmental Planning at the University of Melbourne. He is Patron of the Australian Conservation Foundation. He was the inaugural Chair of the Australian Heritage Commission and the former Secretary for Planning and Environment in the Victorian government. He was later the founding Chair of the Australian Collaboration. He has written, co-authored or edited eight books.

    This article is one of several published by Australia 21 on the subject ‘Who speaks for an protects the public interest in Australia?’  See website www.australia21.org.au 

     

     

  • Safdar Ahmed. A moving inside story about detainees in the Villawood Detention Centre.

    Safdar Ahmed has sent to me a very moving and powerful online comic book about life in the Villawood detention centre. The press release which he issued, follows.  John Menadue

    A new graphic novel depicts life inside the Villawood Detention Centre

    A documentary web-comic by Safdar Ahmed depicts the stories of asylum seekers and refugees inside Sydney’s Villawood detention centre. [Villawood: Notes From An Immigration Detention Centre LINK] depicts the testimony of people from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, including men, women and teenagers. Some of those included are long-term detainees who have been detained for up to five years.

    Ahmed has conducted art workshops inside Villawood for the last four years. ‘My web-comic draws upon the tradition of underground comics, which encourages a level of self-reflexivity’ he said. ‘It describes my impressions of first entering the centre and is subjective in the way it is drawn: in the line-work and choice of imagery.’

    The comic shows the disempowerment experienced by refugees in detention and the methods employed to survive and resist it. A chapter recounts the death of Ahmad Ali Jafari, a young Afghan refugee who suffered a heart attack within the centre in 2013. Forms of resistance depicted in the comic include acts of non-compliance, self-harm and one refugee’s participation in a rooftop protest.

    ‘Where it fits the narrative I’ve inserted some artwork by refugees, which was made in the workshops that I’ve facilitated’ said Ahmed. ‘It seemed like a good way to bring the direct self-expression of refugees into the comic, instead of having me speak exclusively on their behalf.’

    Safdar Ahmed is an artist and director of Refugee Art Project. Academic in Islamic studies, author of Reform and Modernity in Islam.

    Reporting on this story was made possible with an independently awarded grant from GetUp’s Shipping News project.

    To see comic book, click on link below.

     https://medium.com/@safdarahmed/villawood-9698183e114c

  • Max Corden. Bring Back the Carbon Tax? 

     Mr Hockey has invited the Australian public to join in a conversation about the economy and budget issues. Here is my mildly radical contribution.

    There are two strong reasons for bringing back the carbon tax.

    Tony Abbott, when Leader of the Opposition, promised to repeal the carbon tax brought in by Prime Minister Julie Gillard.  And he has fulfilled his promise. Congratulations. Now circumstances have changed: the budget deficit and public debt have turned out to be important problems in the eyes of the Government because of the somewhat unexpected decline in export prices.  So Mr. Abbott or his successor as Prime Minister would be justified in re-imposing this tax. This is the first reason: the revenue from a carbon tax could make a significant contribution to dealing with the deficit problem. Of course, it would not be enough, and, as is well known, other measures or reforms to generate revenue for the government are available and are certainly needed.

    The second reason for restoring the carbon tax I shall discuss later. First, let us take a closer look at this tax, both as a burden and as a revenue raiser. 

    The Carbon Tax as a Burden

    Mr Abbott certainly convinced his fellow Australians that this tax would be a burden. So, I have taken a close look at his two key speeches, one in September 2011 when the bill to launch the tax was before Parliament and the other in July 2014 when the tax was repealed.

    In his view this was “just another big new tax.” But one could add that all taxes impose burdens or costs somewhere, whether on companies or individuals. One might reflect that, in current circumstances, because of the budget problem, a “big new tax,” and perhaps more than one, is just what doctor Hockey ordered.

    The carbon tax was paid by numerous businesses, but this did not mean that they carried the final “burden”. Mostly they would have passed it on to their customers, both households and businesses. Essentially it might be regarded as a fossil energy tax. When the tax was repealed Mr Abbott stated that households would benefit on average by $ 550 a year, with gas prices to fall by 7% and electricity prices by 9%.  His much-repeated and persuasive message was that the carbon tax raised the cost of living and this was “toxic” and “has been hurting ordinary people”. I suspect that his strong opposition to the tax was influenced more by the complaints of producers of emissions-intensive products – especially in the coal industry – than by complaints from average citizens. He also argued that a tax that raised energy prices would have led to job losses.

    All this seemed very persuasive. The persuasion was reinforced by the fact that earlier – essentially from 2007 to 2010 – electricity prices had risen sharply for other reasons, essentially to pay for the high costs of excessive investment in networks (poles and wires). In many minds those price rises were mixed up with the expected effect of the carbon tax. 

    Where did the Revenue go?

    Now, there is something very odd. In his two speeches Mr Abbott never refers to the government revenue that was raised because of the carbon tax. Did the tax not have any beneficial effects for households or businesses to compensate for the directly adverse effects of the higher prices of energy?  Where did this revenue go?

    In fact, some of it was used to compensate firms that competed in international markets while a substantial part compensated low income households through reductions in their income tax. The latter was an important element of the Gillard programme. What was taken out of the income stream by the carbon tax at one point was put back by the compensation at another point. If there were job losses at one end, there would be job gains at the other. Furthermore, reducing income tax, at least in the low income ranges, would increase the incentives to seek work, a highly desirable economic effect. Possibly some of the revenue led to greater government spending which benefited households. By ignoring all these offsetting revenue effects Mr Abbott was able to conclude that the carbon tax had a severely adverse effect on incomes and employment. Did he really believe this?

    At this point one might ask: what was the point of the whole exercise when funds are taken out of the economy at one end and put back at the other. The answer seems obvious. The carbon tax would produce market inducements that reduced harmful emissions of greenhouse gases. Of course, if one does not believe that climate change is a problem, or that Australia could make any difference, the whole business seems pointless. And if one assumes that nothing happens to the revenue, the tax would seem not just pointless but harmful.

    Use the Revenue to reduce the Deficit?

    Let me come back to my proposal that the carbon tax be reinstated. This time the whole of the gross revenue might be used to reduce the budget deficit. It would not finance increased government spending. How much money would be available? According to official estimates, in the first two years of operation the carbon tax raised $15.4 billion in gross revenue

    If the carbon tax revenue actually reduces the budget deficit without compensating tax or spending changes elsewhere the benefit would then be in the future (when debt is lower than otherwise) while the return of the “big new tax” would indeed impose a present cost. Mr Hockey would then get his deeply desired budget improvement and Mr Abbott could keep on complaining about the big new tax.

    But Mr Hockey would have to think about the current macroeconomic implications of improving the budget balance through higher taxes, possibly combined with reduced government spending. This would reduce total national spending (aggregate demand) and thus increase unemployment. In that case one would hope that the Reserve Bank of Australia would compensate by stimulating the economy through monetary policy, which in turn would induce depreciation of the exchange rate and thus make Australian industries more internationally competitive.

    Why Climate Change Matters

    Climate change is a world problem.  Those who believe that it is not really a problem are unlikely to be reading The Conversation, but if by strange chance they are among my readers, they should stop here. But, also, there are “realists” who do not deny climate change but who argue that Australia generates such a small proportion of the world’s harmful carbon emissions that we cannot make any difference anyway. So, why bother about a carbon tax? Here I wish to go beyond this view. We can make a difference, and, above all, it is in our interest that we do. The basic point is that we may not be able to directly affect world climate on our own, but it certainly will affect us, so we must try and affect the future world climate through influencing collective action among many countries.

    We would be affected adversely by climate change, and possibly are already. This effect could be severe. Therefore we should certainly try to make a difference.

    How would we be adversely affected?

    (a) First there is the direct effect on Australia, and especially its coastline. All the details can be obtained from CSIRO documents. Likely effects include reduced rainfall in southern Australia, more extreme fire weather, adverse effects on the Great Barrier Reef, on coastal populations, and so on. Particularly important for Australia are increasing heatwaves.  (Heatwaves have killed more Australians than all other natural hazards combined).

    Apparently we would be more adversely affected than any other developed country. In view of this, it is just amazing that our government has such a sceptical attitude to climate change compared to governments of many other countries.

    (b) Second, there is an important effect perhaps neglected by an inward-looking population. The rise of the sea level in association with severe weather events is likely to have a serious impact on islands and island countries. And there are many of these in our region, above all Indonesia with many of its population of 250 million people highly vulnerable, and, of course, the Pacific Islands. We may eventually have to cope with floods of climate refugees.

    What we must do in our Interest: the second Reason for returning to the Carbon Tax

    The moral is that for selfish reasons we need to use our maximum diplomatic influence to encourage other countries – and particularly the United States, but many others as well – to take the necessary measures to drastically moderate or avoid climate change. And we can only do this if we set an example ourselves. A restoration of the carbon tax would be the first step. Furthermore, our government should actively campaign for world-wide measures to mitigate or avoid climate change, and also finance appropriate research. In other words, in the national interest the government should completely reverse its current stance. Our current captain, no doubt well meaning, is steering the ship in the wrong direction.

    The simple immediate measure would be our return to the carbon tax. Of course, eventually this might evolve into an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). In both cases carbon emissions will be discouraged and the government will receive revenue.

     

    A very readable explanation of all the issues is in Ross Garnaut, The Garnaut Review 2011: Australia in the Global Response to Climate Change, Cambridge University Press 2011. See also John Quiggin et al, Carbon Pricing: Early Experience and Future Prospects, Edward Elgar, 2014, and John Freebairn, “ Carbon Price versus Subsidies to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Economic Papers, vol. 33, September 2014, pp 233-42.

    Max Corden is Professorial Fellow in the Department of Economics at University of Melbourne. This article was first published in The Conversation on 5 March 2015.

     

     

  • John Falzon  ‘Welfare reform’ but where are the jobs?

    If by “welfare” we mean giving assistance to those who don’t really need it and who are living off the public purse, then it is indeed time we had a comprehensive review of welfare.

    Sadly, but not surprisingly, the McClure Welfare Review was given the task of cutting social expenditure to those who actually do need it. If only we devoted as much effort to welfare reform for the corporates and the rich as we do for the people who struggle! If only we were able to admit that our irrational spending on those who need it least has to stop. It’s time for a review of corporate welfare.

    This, rather than blaming the unemployed for needing assistance, should be our focus. I suppose though that it depends on what you want to achieve. If, as a government, you are actually committed to ramping up inequality, then it will be no surprise that you cut social spending whilst leaving tax loopholes and concessions that benefit the rich largely untouched. If, on the other hand, with Oliver Wendell Holmes, you affirm that “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society”, then you will do all that is possible to put a civilised society for all ahead of profits just for some.

    While we are on the subject, it’s interesting how whenever, as a society, we ask large corporations to pay their fair share of tax we are accused of being ham-fisted and threatened with a capital strike but when we cut spending for the people who struggle, we are painted as being fiscally responsible. It is deeply unjust to rip $1 billion from social services. It is not unjust to make large multinational corporations pay their fair share of tax. There is no place in a progressive country for putting the boot into people who are low-paid or on income support, whilst protecting corporate privilege. Social security for people who are aged, young, unemployed, with caring responsibilities, or living with a disability, is something we should be proud of. Welfare for multinational corporations or high-wealth individuals, via revenue foregone, on the other hand, is something we need to stop.

    The McClure Review is not without some good ideas, but it was always predicated on two false assumptions: that we need to cut social expenditure and that unemployment is fundamentally a problem that is addressed at the individual, rather than the structural, level. By focusing, for example, on “encouraging” people to find work, there is an almost dogmatic assertion that people actually choose to be unemployed. By talking about making some of the requirements stricter or the compliance harder, we are merely emulating the US approach that unemployment is best addressed by threatening people with even deeper poverty.  Poverty is not a personal choice. Unemployment and underemployment are not personal choices. Forcing people off a social security benefit does not equate with employment: it equates with deeper poverty. You don’t help people into jobs by forcing them into deeper poverty.

    What we are looking for is a plan for jobs. What we are left with is a long-term attempt to reduce social spending. Government will not create jobs by cutting spending. The people who use the social security system in Australia are people we should be investing in and supporting. The people who are unemployed are not the problem. The problem is that there are not enough jobs. With only one job available for every thirteen jobseekers (based on ABS data on labour underutilisation) it is clear that the starting point should be a jobs plan, including economic development in areas of high unemployment combined with access to high quality education and training. It also means addressing the clear inadequacy of the Newstart payment, which sits at only 40 per cent of the minimum wage and is so low that it has become an obstacle to participation.  We repeat our call for an immediate $50 a week increase to the Newstart payment and the indexing of all payments to wages rather than CPI. A good social security system is meant to prevent poverty, not to humiliate people.

    The St Vincent de Paul Society supports an approach which actually invests in people and supports them so that they can participate in society and, where appropriate, in paid employment. We are concerned by the potential impact of the proposed tiered Working Age Payment. We are also alarmed by suggestions that support for people living in social housing could be undermined. As for the suggestion that people under the age of 22 should not receive independent income support, we are left wondering how they are meant to survive.

    Life has taught us that an injury to one is an injury to all. Solidarity is our secret weapon in the struggle against inequality. We will win in our struggle against inequality by defending and extending the gains we have made in the areas of universal health, free education, and a social security system that keeps people out of poverty and supports them to live with dignity. We are also desperately in need of a national plan for full employment (remember the 1945 White Paper on Full Employment in Australia?), including an economic development component and, very importantly, a plan to ensure that no one misses out on social and affordable housing. Sticks on the backs of the unemployed will not create jobs. Neither, for that matter, will the carrot of encouragement. It is the role of government to allow society to achieve collectively what we cannot achieve individually. Governments must do what markets cannot. Markets are a very useful mechanism for generating profit, but woeful at guaranteeing equity and fairness.

     

    Dr John Falzon is CEO, St Vincent de Paul Society, Australia.

     

     

     

    (For an excellent analysis of our current jobs crisis, especially in terms of youth unemployment, see the work of Professor William Mitchell:  http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=30165 )

  • Graham Freudenberg. Gough Whitlam Commemorative Oration.

     You will see below what I think is a remarkable speech by Graham Freudenberg about Gough Whitlam’s contemporary relevance.  This oration is much longer than I normally post on this blog, but it is an outstanding oration which I am sure you will enjoy.  The Whitlam Institute will also be publicising this oration.  John Menadue

    THE WHITLAM INSTITUTE

    GOUGH WHITLAM COMMEMORATIVE ORATION

    “Contemporary Relevance, comrade”:

    Gough Whitlam in the 21st century

    Graham Freudenberg

    St Kilda Town Hall, Melbourne, 4 March 2015

     

    Let me begin by doing what I did for the best part of my career, and re-cycle a speech by Gough Whitlam.  It was his first major speech in the House of Representatives on international affairs, in days when they actually debated foreign policy in the Australian Parliament – on 12 August 1954.  That was another world.  Yet this speech goes to the heart of my assertions about the contemporary relevance of Edward Gough Whitlam.  In style and substance, in his zest for the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate, for the sweep of its ideas, its challenge to prevailing orthodoxies – and for its optimism – it is quintessential Whitlam.  He made the speech soon after the Geneva Conference in 1954 had given the West a new chance for good sense over China and Vietnam; instead, alas, the lost opportunity of Geneva became a disastrous wrong turn for the United States and Australia. Whitlam had been a member of parliament for less than two years.  His star was just rising in the Labor Party, itself on the threshold of the Great Split.  I’ll quote just a few of his opening lines, to give the flavour:

    In the exciting and rapid movement of events during the last few months, the Minister for External Affairs [Mr Casey] has twice circumnavigated the globe in the steps of his model, Mr Eden, and his master, Mr Dulles [UK Foreign Secretary and US Secretary of State respectively].  Though the Minister saw fit to make statements to the newspapers in the United States of America and in other parts of the world, he did not say anything to the Australian press.  The only Minister who has seen fit to make any statement on international affairs has been, of all people, the Postmaster General (Mr Anthony)  [Doug Anthony’s father, that is], who three weeks ago addressed the annual conference of the Queensland branch of   the Australian Country Party.  In haranguing that rally of rustics, the Postmaster General declared that we Australians cannot live in peaceful co-existence with the Communists in this cold war.  That pronouncement, fortunately, was in direct contradiction of statements that had already been made by President Eisenhower, of the United States of America, and Sir Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister.  The declaration of the Postmaster General has been emphatically repudiated in this House by the Prime Minister [Mr Menzies] and the Leader of the Opposition [Dr Evatt].  As a consequence of that rash utterance, the Postmaster General, whose health in recent months was deemed to be rapidly qualifying him for a diplomatic post, has rendered himself persona non grata  to every head of State except President Syngman Rhee of the Republic of Korea, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Government [on Formosa].

    When, more than a decade later, I came to read all Whitlam’s early speeches with a professional eye, time and again I found myself thinking “I wish I could say things like that”.  So I did.

    But what could be the possible relevance of a speech made by a Labor backbencher more than 60 years ago, when Churchill was still Prime Minister of Britain and when Menzies still had more than eleven years to go as Prime Minister of Australia?  Well, this was the speech in which Whitlam first called for recognition of the People’s Republic of China, nineteen years before he achieved it.  In particular, he insisted that China’s sovereignty over Taiwan (Formosa) must never be allowed to become a cause for war with China, inevitably a third world war, inevitably a nuclear war.  Whitlam was daring to assert that the views and interests of Australia might not always be the same as those of the United States.  His propositions will be as relevant to our relations with China and the United States over the next 60 years as they were 60 years ago.  Further, he made an eloquent connection between hopes for democracy in our region, then in the throes of decolonisation, and the preservation and enhancement of parliamentary democracy in Australia – his life-long cause, from which all else flowed.  It was a speech marked by his special capacity to make connections between the wider world, the region around us, and Australia’s own standing and conduct.

    And this speech, not only in its content but in its approach, attitudes and insights, the breadth of vision enhanced by his attention to detail, provides a sub-theme for everything I say tonight:

    Gough Whitlam’s contemporary relevance lies not only, or even so much, in the actual policies and issues he placed on the Australian political and social agenda, but in the educative process, based on reason, relevance, knowledge and foresight, by which he reached them.  And perhaps most relevant of all to these times, for all of us as Australians, his challenge to conventional wisdom, the prejudices and fears of his times.

    And that included emphatically obsolences and obstructionism in Labor thinking.  I don’t pretend to be able to answer the question: “What would Whitlam do if he were the Labor leader today?”  I’m certainly not purporting to tell Bill Shorten and his colleagues: “This is how Gough would do it”.  But perhaps I can shed some light on what I believe would be his approach and attitudes to the very complex questions facing Australia and the Labor Party in today’s “rapid and exciting movement of events”.

    There is no place more fitting to do this than Melbourne.  I take the opportunity to make amends for an omission in my accounts of the life and times of Edward Gough Whitlam.  In my brief eulogy at the Sydney Town Hall on 5 November last year, for instance, I identified the central importance of his relationship with Werriwa, for 25 years his electorate in the outer Western suburbs of Sydney.  And he himself always acknowledged the impact of being a teenager in Canberra, as it struggled to grow into the national capital after the move from Melbourne in 1927.  But it should never be overlooked how much of Melbourne there was in Gough Whitlam.  It is not just the fact that he was born here – on 11 July 1916 – and spent the first five years of his life here.  The greatest single influence of his life was his father, Harry Ernest Frederick Whitlam, later Commonwealth Crown Solicitor; and Fred Whitlam was Melbourne through and through.  His influence on his son was steeped in the old Melbourne liberal/radical tradition.  Its strength, paradoxically, retarded the early growth of the Labor Party in Victoria. There was a remarkable revival of that tradition through the flourishing of the Fabian Society in the late fifties, sixties and beyond; and the Fabian relationship with the rise of Whitlam is an important part of the larger story.  “Among Australian Fabians, I am Fabius Maximus”, he said.  Though I myself believe the title properly belongs to Race Mathews.

    Gough returned to Melbourne, in thought, towards the very end.  When much in that mighty memory was fading, he would recall to his faithful visitors to his William Street, Sydney, office, like John Faulkner and John Menadue, that when he was 17 or 18 he took his grandmother to the new Shrine of Remembrance in St. Kilda Road and read out to her – she was nearly blind – the name of the battlefield in France where her son, his uncle, had died.

    Even at the time of Gough’s death, the comment was still being made that it was strange, with his background, he should have become a Labor leader.  There used to be Tories who regarded him as a class traitor.  The truth is, with his upbringing, with such a father and his values, Gough Whitlam could never have been any other than Labor, in the Australian context.

    In November 1973, in the glow of his first year in office, Whitlam delivered the Robert Garran Memorial Lecture in Canberra.  His father had delivered the inaugural Garran Lecture in 1959, one great public servant honouring another, who had been his Melbourne mentor.  Whitlam quoted his father, who was speaking of Australia’s role in the United Nations:

    The task before Australia is honourable, and its efficient discharge would make for a dynamic peace; to it, all the resources, skills and energy that Australia can command deserve to be committed.  The honourable task, however, could become majestic, and infinitely inspiring, and the peace could become creative, deep and rich, and enduring, if there be added what I have termed Excellence, Excellence in all its fullness.

    That is Gough Whitlam quoting his father.  But he might just as well have been quoting himself.  Perhaps, given the closeness of their relationship, he was.

    I acknowledge my own debt to Melbourne.  Melbourne made me.  I arrived here as a 20-year-old reporter for The Sun, via newspapers in Brisbane, Sydney and Mildura, in 1955 – the year of the Great Labor Split and the beginning of the Bolte era in Victoria.  Anyone who believes that the fifties were dull wasn’t there.  I missed the transformational event of the 1956 Olympic Games because I had taken myself off to London for a year.  It was a watershed year: Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech in Moscow denouncing Stalin; Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the Suez crisis; the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

    The Suez crisis was my political Road to Damascus.  Returning to Melbourne in 1957, I immediately joined the East Melbourne branch of the Australian Labor Party.  Arthur Calwell, then Deputy Leader of the Opposition under Evatt, was the member for Melbourne.  In 1961, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime when, by a wonderful combination of friends and flukes, I became Press Secretary to Arthur Calwell, by now the Leader of the Opposition,  and in 1967, to his successor Gough Whitlam.  When Whitlam made his famous or notorious “The impotent are pure” speech before the jeering delegates to the Victorian Labor Conference at the Melbourne Trades Hall in June 1967, Calwell watched the performance from the gallery and said to me in the vestibule afterwards: “You won’t be working for your new boss long now”.

    “Throughout my public life”, Whitlam said on the 30th anniversary of the It’s Time election, “I have tried to apply an over-arching principle and a unifying theme to all my work.  It can be stated in two words: contemporary relevance.  It was the fundamental test I applied, in particular to the development of Labor policy in the years before 2 December 1972.  There is a case to be argued that my government faltered whenever we lost sight of the principle or allowed the rush of events to subsume them.”

    Among the many fine and true things said at the Sydney Town Hall, I want to focus on a point made by Tony Whitlam.  He said that his father believed deeply in a strong two-party system.  The whole thrust of Whitlam’s career was to further his determination that the Labor Party should remain one of the two dominant forces within our parliament, either in government or able to form government, in its own right.  He saw strong, effective parties as the mainstay of parliamentary democracy.  The future of the two-party system and Labor’s role within it is now the big political question facing Australia today, not just the Labor Party.

    May I say here how much encouragement we draw throughout Australia from the victory of Daniel Andrews and the Labor Party in Victoria, so soon after Gough Whitlam’s death.  Like Neville Wran’s victory in New South Wales six months after the Dismissal, it had a galvanising effect and renewed our sense of what is possible.  As to the Queensland result, well, it shows that anything is possible.

    In his first statement on becoming Leader of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party on 8 February 1967, Whitlam said:

    For the Labor Party, what is clearly at stake is its future role within the Australian parliamentary system …. Our actions in the next few years must determine whether it continues to survive as a truly effective parliamentary force capable of governing and actually governing.

    Nearly nine years later, almost on the eve of the Dismissal, in the middle of his tremendous battle against the Senate, the ultimate challenge to the very legitimacy of a reforming Labor Government, Whitlam delivered the Curtin Memorial Lecture at the ANU in Canberra (29 October 1975).  Speaking of his work before 1972, he said:

    I addressed myself to three principal tasks: to develop a coherent program of relevant reform; to convince a majority of Australians that those reforms were relevant to their needs and their lives; and to convince the Labor Movement as a whole that the parliamentary institutions were relevant in achieving worthwhile reform.

    “The great organisational battles between 1967 and 1970, particularly in Victoria”, he said, were essentially about that third task:  “It was the toughest of all”.

    Keeping bright the Whitlam legend does not require manufacturing myths about him.  The stakes in Victoria were high; and while both sides invoked high principles, in the end the resolution of the conflict involved number-crunching of the roughest kind.  Whitlam was not particularly adept at that game, but accepted its necessity.  He largely left it to others – Lance Barnard in his rise to the leadership; Rex Connor in his self-imposed contest for the leadership with Jim Cairns in April 1968; Clyde Cameron in the reconstruction of Victoria in 1970.

    So I want to emphasise that electoral and political calculations figured as largely with Whitlam as any other political leader.  It was not all altruism and crashing through.  To gloss over Whitlam as a practising, party politician, working the system with the best of them, is the surest way to make him irrelevant.

    Whitlam set out, from the first, to combat the defeatism which had settled on much of the Labor Party, particularly in Victoria.  Political necessity drove his defiant speech to the Victorian ALP Conference in June 1967:

    We construct a philosophy of failure which finds in defeat a form of justification and a proof of the purity of our principles.  Certainly, the impotent are pure ….. Let us have none of this nonsense that defeat is in some way more moral than victory ….. I did not seek and do not want the leadership of Australia’s largest pressure group.  I propose to follow the traditions of those of our leaders who have seen the role of our party as striving to achieve, and achieving, the national government of Australia.

    Whitlam was especially infuriated by the self-serving claim that the bosses of the Victorian Central Executive were the principled guardians of Labor’s opposition to Australian involvement in the war in Vietnam.  In his landmark speech of 4 May 1965, Calwell had explicitly acknowledged the unpopularity of Labor’s position, to be met, in what seemed on the day a devastating reply by Menzies, with the sneer “If I might end on a horribly political note, it is a good thing occasionally to be in the majority”.  This was the same speech in which Menzies’ total justification for the war was that it was “part of the downward thrust by China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans”.  By such simplicities did Menzies reign supreme.  After the debacle of the 1966 election, ostensibly because of Vietnam, but more because of the dire state of the Labor Party itself, Melbourne became the heart and soul of the Moratorium Movement under the memorable leadership of Jim Cairns.

    Whitlam, by contrast, antagonised the Labor Left by his dismissive attitude towards the Moratorium Movement.  He told that Victorian Conference in June 1967 that protests “would not save a single Australian life or shorten the war by a single day.  Our consciences should not be so easily salved.  The present government opposes all moves which might bring about negotiations, and is the first to applaud and endorse escalation of the war.  Therefore our aim must be to replace that government.”

    But Vietnam was not really the divisive issue for Labor.  The most potent source of division was far older – over a century old in fact.  It was the issue of State Aid for non-government schools, meaning, in practice, the Catholic parish school system.

    It must be hard for any Australian under 60 to grasp fully the sectarian bitterness and the political explosiveness surrounding this issue.  Even the phrase itself – “State aid” – barely registers today.  The Bishops and the Church, even with so powerful an advocate as Archbishop Mannix, had failed utterly to dent the bipartisan intransigence against State Aid – the Liberal Party still essentially a Protestant  party; the Labor Party, its traditional Catholic support notwithstanding.  The unravelling came after the Split when the breakaway DLP put a pro-State aid plank in its platform.  From then on and for the next decade, the Labor Left made opposition to State Aid the test of Labor orthodoxy.  This was the issue which was to provide Whitlam with a platform to secure representation for the parliamentary leadership on the Labor Party’s Conference and Executive, ending the “36 faceless men” controversy.    It produced Whitlam’s outburst against “the 12 witless men” of the ALP Federal Executive, and his near-expulsion from the party in 1966.  It produced his triumph at the 1969 Federal Conference in Melbourne which adopted his ground-breaking proposal for the Schools Commission, granting aid to all schools – government and non-government alike – on the basis of needs.  It produced the last ditch defiance of the old VCE, sabotaging Labor’s 1970 State campaign, and perversely giving Whitlam unmistakable grounds for Federal intervention; which in turn paved the way for Victoria’s decisive role in electing the Whitlam Government in 1972 and saving it in 1974.

    What were the qualities that rewarded Whitlam with such success after these long years of turmoil and confrontation?  Perseverance, of course.  Stamina, of course.  But there was something else – a characteristic approach to political problems, and his way of arguing them out.  “Only connect”, E. M. Forster wrote, and Whitlam was the master of making connections – from the particular to the general, linking the local with the regional, the regional with the national and the national with the international.  Or reversing the process, as when debating standards for education, health, housing or transport, he would start from the carefully crafted formula: “Countries with which we would choose to compare ourselves”.  Sometimes, this left only Canada.  In the case of State Aid, he comprehensively connected the whole education issue with party reform, policy reform and electoral success – “the party, the policy, the people” in John Menadue’s 1967 formula.

    I see this making of connections as the essence of the Whitlam approach and the key to his contemporary relevance.  Remarkable, too, was his melding of personal experience with public policy.  In her truly great biography, Jenny Hocking describes his learning curve on aborigines when he witnessed their treatment in Queensland and the Northern Territory during his wartime years in the RAAF.  I have already mentioned the connection between Whitlam, the member for Werriwa, and Whitlam’s policies on “Schools, hospitals, cities”, to use his shorthand for his Program, his deep understanding that Australia is a nation of immigrants, and all the opportunities and obligations which flow from that central fact, his passion for electoral reform, one-vote, one-value, and even the national sewerage program.  He himself dated his determination to modernise the Constitution from the failure of the 1944 referendum, broadening and deepening with his service on the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reform.  This seminal experience led him to focus on the connection between the Constitution and the Labor Platform.  He was exasperated by the way the Labor Party had allowed the High Court rejection of bank nationalisation under Section 92 in 1948 to become an excuse for policy stagnation.   He later put his attitude in this way:

    I was concerned by the way in which the Labor Party’s failure to move on, to look ahead, to attempt to find new ways towards reform, was short-changing the Australian people and short-changing the Party itself.  The Party became obsessed with the idea that rather than being about revival for the future, its purpose was to return to a more comfortable past – not renovation but mere restoration.  As a result, both the achievements of the past and the hopes for the future receded equally.  The Party stagnated and the Platform was stultified.

    There, in its most striking form, is Whitlam’s continuing challenge – to modernise the Party, to modernise the Platform, to modernise the Party’s place in a modernised Australia.  He wanted, of course, to modernise the Australian Constitution, and no Australian leader worked harder to achieve change by referendum.  Right to the end, he never gave up on this, despite the overwhelming evidence that change by the direct referendum route is almost always foredoomed in Australia.  Yet despite this, he achieved real change in the spirit of the Australian Constitution, in its interpretation and in the application of the Constitution as it exists to the implementation of Labor policy.  He never succeeded in altering the Constitution by a single line or letter, but he enlarged the Constitution like no other leader.  As in so much else, Whitlam was the Great Enlarger.

    He did it in three ways.

    First, by pointing the Labor Party to the parts of the Constitution which were relevant and achievable.  As he said in 1961, in his first Curtin Memorial Lecture:

    In our obsession with Section 92, which is held up as the      bulwark of private enterprise, we forget Section 96, which is     the charter of public enterprise.

    In that speech, too, he derided the most sacred of Labor’s cows, the socialist objective, as “weak, defensive and apologetic”.  At the same time, he was not apologetic about calling himself a socialist and was, in fact, the last Labor leader to do so.

    Second, in government, he widened the Constitution and its interpretation whenever his legislation was tested in the High Court, starting with the Hamer Government challenge to the Australian Assistance Plan in 1974.  He was justly proud of the fact that no Whitlam Government laws were ever held to be unconstitutional.

    Thirdly, most relevant of all, he enlarged the Australian Constitution by the use of the external power, and by enshrining key laws within covenants of the United Nations and the International Labor Organisation.  The Racial Discrimination Act is an outstanding example.

    And here I make the claim that the connections Whitlam made between what we do here and our standing in the world represents his distinctive expression of Australian patriotism – rational, authentic and deep patriotism.

    Let me give a specific example.  In two visits to Papua New Guinea in 1970 and 1971, as Opposition leader, he proclaimed independence for PNG by 1976.  In Government, he advanced the time-table by a year.  The independence ceremony in Port Moresby in September 1975 was the last time Sir John Kerr and Whitlam appeared in public together.  During the 1970 visit, his meetings with Michael Somare were tracked by ASIO.  After he addressed 10,000 Tolai at Rabaul, Prime Minister Gorton said he would have “blood on his hands” if there were any violence on the Gazelle Peninsula.  The Minister for Territories, CEB Barnes, thought PNG might be ready for independence in 25 to 100 years.  This was probably majority opinion in Australia.  Seven Australian Prime Ministers attended Whitlam’s Memorial on 4 November 2014 – with five Prime Ministers from PNG, including Michael Somare.

    How did Whitlam turn around Australia’s stance so completely, so quickly?  I remember vividly the day in Port Moresby in January 1971 when he dictated the thoughts which we worked up as the definitive statement on PNG independence:

    All Australians must now realize how damaging and    dangerous a reputation Australia’s present policies produce.  What the world sees about Australia is that we have an aboriginal population with the highest infant mortality on earth, that we have eagerly supported the most unpopular war    in modern times on the ground that Asia should be a      battleground for our freedom, that we support the sale of arms to South Africa, that the whole world believes that our immigration policy is based on colour and that we run one of the world’s last colonies.  We may profess our good intentions      and feel that we are victims of special circumstances but the combination of such policies leans heavily indeed on the world’s goodwill and on Australia’s credibility.

    The true patriot therefore will not seek to justify and   prolong these policies but will seek to change them.

    It is upon his determination to protect and advance Australia’s reputation and standing in the world that I stake my strongest claim for Whitlam’s contemporary relevance.  I deeply believe that if the Labor leadership had taken its stand clearly on Australia’s international reputation and international obligations on refugees from the beginning, in 2001, we would not have had fourteen years of this malignancy, eating away at our national self-respect.  Of course, Australians care about “who comes here and the circumstances in which they come”.  But, given leadership, they do care for Australia’s good name in the world.  How else were Whitlam and Don Dunstan, together with quite small public interest groups in the universities, churches and unions, able to persuade the Labor Party in 1965 to abandon its most cherished tradition and Australia’s deepest fears embodied in the White Australia Policy?

    So I stress the importance of making connections in Whitlam’s approach to policy.  But I am bound to acknowledge that there were disconnections when it came to implementing policy in government.  The connections were Whitlam at his most constructive; the disconnections the most damaging.  No appraisal of his contemporary relevance can omit the failures, and the lessons to be learned from them.

    In his book The Whitlam Government, Whitlam himself makes a significant admission.  The matter-of-fact way he puts it masks the pain it cost him to make it.  He wrote (p.195):  “The chief economic failure of my Government resulted from the wage explosion of 1974.  In part, our failure was a failure of communication, our failure to persuade the trade union movement to accept the central concept of Labor’s program.”

    He then spelt his definition of the meaning of equality in modern Australia: “That central concept was this: in modern communities, even the wealthiest family cannot provide its members with the best education, with the best medical treatment, the best environment, unaided by the community.  Increasingly, the basic services and opportunities which determine the real standard of life of a family or an individual can only be provided by the community and only to the extent to which the community is willing to provide them.  Either the community provides them or they will not be provided at all.  In the Australian context, this means that the community, through the national Government, must finance them or they     will not be financed at all.”

    That is the bed-rock of the Whitlam Program, with its over-arching theme of a more equal Australia.  Then comes his painful admission: “I have to acknowledge that this philosophy was never really accepted by the Labor movement of Australia at any time after the election of its own Labor Government.”

    In a generous review in The Age, Sir Paul Hasluck described the book as “the longest trumpet voluntary in political literature”. But it seems to have escaped Sir Paul that there could hardly be a more mortifying admission than that the very core of Labor support had not accepted the relevance of the Whitlam Program to its immediate concerns.  By contrast, the Hawke and Keating Governments succeeded in persuading the unions to accept the concept of a social wage, and, through the Accords, made it the basis of their transformation of the Australian economy.

    Whitlam notoriously said: “I don’t mind how many prima donnas there are in my Cabinet, as long as I’m prima donna assoluta”.  It was a throwaway line that actually highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of the Whitlam style of government: individual brilliance against collegial disarray.  There was a serious gap between the primacy he gave to Parliament, to parliamentary government on one hand, and the operation of its most distinctive feature, the Cabinet, the great engine of parliamentary government.  Cabinet embodies the two principles that make parliamentary democracy work effectively – Cabinet solidarity, and answerability to Parliament.  Cabinet is the grand committee of the nation.  Bob Hawke’s superb chairmanship skills made his Cabinet the most successful in our history.  A properly-run Cabinet would not have enmeshed the Whitlam Government in the toils of the loans affair.

    Nevertheless, while the orchestration was sometimes discordant, the Whitlam Government was not a one-man band, although Gough himself scarcely discouraged the notion.  “What would happen if you were run over by the proverbial bus”, Mike Willesee asked him in 1974.  “In the light of my government’s public transport reforms, that is highly improbable”.  But the free rein Whitlam gave his Ministers did become the basis for its record of achievement.  The one thing he expected was that they would act in the spirit of the Program, especially as set out in the It’s Time Policy Speech.  As Kim Beazley Snr said: “The Platform is the Old Testament; the policy speech is the New Testament”.  He was only half-joking.

    There will never be another Policy Speech like it.  At least I devoutly hope so, because I hope that the conditions which produced it will never be repeated.  That is, I hope fervently for the sake of Australian parliamentary democracy that the Australian Labor Party will never again be out for 23 years, or anything like 23 years.  We cannot fully understand the nature, content and purpose of the It’s Time  Policy Speech, unless we place it firmly in the context of those 23 years.  Nor, for that matter, can we fully understand the conduct and fate of the Whitlam Government without understanding the sense of urgency and expectation those lost 23 years produced.

    There were outstanding Ministers.  Think of Bill Hayden, who built Medibank – with its vital principle of universal access to health care – so strong that it defied seven attempts by the Fraser Government to dismantle it and enabled the Hawke Government to restore it as Medicare.  The attacks on its basic principles by the present Federal government are, of course, part of its current turmoil.  Contemporary relevance indeed!

    Again, Hayden had progressed far towards establishing a national superannuation scheme.  Keating accomplished it, and Labor’s role as the custodian of superannuation, and its true principles, remains, or should be, one of its greatest electoral assets.

    Think of Lionel Murphy, whose transformational law reforms constitute almost a parallel program.  His concerns about the accountability of the national security apparatus remain a question of fundamental relevance to Australian democracy.

    Or think of Al Grassby.  For dismantling White Australia (“Give me a shovel and I will bury it”, he said to a sceptical reporter in Manila); for establishing multicultural Australia, he paid a high political price.  He lost his seat in what Whitlam called Australia’s first overtly racist campaign in 1974.  We may think we have come a long way since 1974.  On the other hand, we may think that the story has deep contemporary relevance, certainly in terms of the need for unremitting vigilance in the work of building a more inclusive and tolerant Australia.

    I think, in particular, of Tom Uren, who breathed life into the most original and wide-ranging of all the Whitlam concepts, really the heart of the Whitlam project – national involvement in cities and regional centres.  The restoration of his Department of Urban Affairs is again urgent and relevant to the Australian people in almost every aspect of their daily lives.

    These examples remind us of a largely neglected, if not forgotten, aspect of the Whitlam project – how much, both in development and implementation, the Whitlam Program was a collective effort, how much he sought and welcomed the ideas and advice of others, inside and beyond the Labor Party.  Many years later, I suggested that he should acknowledge that “the Program did not spring, like Minerva, fully armed from Zeus’ brow”.  He agreed entirely, but insisted that he was not going down to posterity confusing the Greek and Roman gods.  Gough thought Zeus more appropriate than Jupiter, so Minerva had to give way to Athena.

    This aspect of the Whitlam project, as a cooperative and collaborative effort, will, I believe, become increasingly relevant to Labor’s mission, as Australia moves into a more complex era, with its communities more dissociated, its voters more volatile, its competing interests more vocal, its public discourse more discordant, if not debauched, its media ever more pervasive.

    More than a century ago, Alfred Deakin complained about the impossibility of governing “with a reporter at one’s elbow”.  We may speculate how Gough would have coped, in a world of instant response, endless spin, the ten second grab and the cacophony of self-appointed pundits.  I think I know the answer.  Brilliantly.  Three reasons: He was the master of the one-liner before the term was invented.  He would have dominated the mainstream media by open, long and frequent press conferences.  And, above all, he would have refused to relegate Parliament to its present humiliating role as an almost incidental channel of political communication.

    Almost our last collaboration, stretching across more than 40 years, was the Foreword to Troy Bramston’s splendid collection, The Whitlam Legacy.  Gough knew it would be his last serious word on Australian politics:

    May I make one valedictory point: never forget the primacy of Parliament as the great forum for developing, presenting and explaining policy.  This seems to me the best response we can make to the unprecedented demands now made on our leaders and representatives by the relentless news cycle, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  If we develop, define and defend our policies thoroughly before their implementation, we will be much less likely to be blown off course by the accidents and aberrations inseparable from modern political life.  And Parliament is by far the best place to achieve it.

    This was the precept and practice of a life time.

    Parliament is, or should be, a marvellous resource, and it has been the anchor of our national life longer than almost any country in the world and, by the standard of the suffrage – the right to vote – more democratic longer than any.  But if the Labor Party is to survive as the prime mover in the development and implementation of the public polity – the party of new ideas – its policy makers will need to draw on all the available resources, reaching out beyond its own resources and ranks.  This points to a future role for independent but dedicated resources like the Whitlam Institute itself.  This was Gough’s own deep hope as he watched the Institute grow during his rich and mellow autumnal years.

    Partly because of his long and active public life, there is a timelessness about Gough Whitlam’s legacy, extraordinary for a working politician who reached the heights of his achievement forty years ago and whose Prime Ministership lasted only three years.  But I always emphasise that Gough Whitlam was also very much a man of his time.  His vision of a more equal Australia, a more independent Australia, a more inclusive, generous and tolerant Australia, a more forward-looking and outward looking Australia, belongs to all time.  But the means by which he sought to advance Australia towards that vision reflected his own times, the influences, pre-occupations and demands of his time, the political, constitutional, social and economic opportunities and constraints of his time.  Hence his insistence on contemporary relevance.  Here in St. Kilda Town Hall, closing his great campaign in 1972, he invoked Ben Chifley’s “light on the hill”.  His program was not the light on the hill; but he shone a bright light along the path.

    Far be it from me to presume to put words into Gough Whitlam’s mouth, at least now that he cannot speak for himself.  But I do believe that his first advice to his successors – the Labor leadership, the members, supporters and well-wishers – as they pursue their tasks of shaping and re-shaping Labor policies, Australian policies, for the 21st century, in times and circumstances every bit as daunting and challenging as those he faced in his time – I believe that his watchword would be for them, as his instruction was so often to me:

    “Contemporary relevance, comrade”.

     

  • Walter Hamilton. The Nationalist Siren of Destruction

    Virulent, fanatical nationalism is not the answer.

    It’s not the answer in Russia, where an opponent of Putin’s war on Ukraine was murdered on the streets of Moscow in broad daylight. It’s not the answer in China where the ruling Communist Party needs a new raison d’etre after embracing capitalism without liberalism. It is not the answer in Japan, where a conservative government needs a cover for its inability to end a decades-long economic malaise. It is not the answer in South Korea, where the government wants to show its Japan-bashing credentials are just as good as those of the rabid propagandists of North Korea.

    Let’s take the last case, Korea, where the anniversary of the 1919 nationalistic uprising against Japan’s colonial rule was marked last Sunday.

    I took the opportunity to spend some time watching a South Korean cable news service that day and witnessed a cavalcade of commentary portraying the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula between 1910 and 1945 as one unrelieved series of atrocities. Apart from it being an historical distortion (though Japan could be a brutal colonial power, considerable economic development accompanied its rule), one has to ask what is the use of stoking public animosity in 2015 over events that ended 70 years ago?

    The next item in the station’s news bulletin continued along the same lines. It proudly described the work of the government’s Investigative Commission on Pro-Japanese Collaborators’ Property. Perhaps you have never heard about this entity. Anyone who considers South Korea an advanced democracy should, I suggest, know about it. In 2005, the South Korean parliament passed a law enabling this “collaborators’” commission to seize the property of the descendants of those deemed to have assisted the long-since-ended Japanese occupation. That’s right, the sins of the grandfathers and great grandfathers, it was decided, shall be visited on the present generation!

    A police officer, for instance, who carried out a search order in 1915 for his Japanese overlords, under this extraordinary law, can be retrospectively condemned and his distant descendants hauled into court, branded as a “collaborator’s family”, and stripped of their property. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been seized already, and the commission has its eyes on another $100 million this year, according to the news report. The money is paid over to the descendants of approved former “freedom fighters”.

    South Africa, under Nelson Mandela, gave the world a superior model for dealing with the errors and evils of the past: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mandela, to his credit, recognized it was better to heal wounds rather than rub salt into them––in the pursuit of social cohesion and, just as importantly, in the service of a genuine desire to reveal the truth of past misdeeds. South Korea advances the pursuit of a truthful accounting for the past not one inch by a policy of retribution, by whipping up public feeling with propaganda parading as history. It is the sort of thing one might expect from North Korea, which has little else going for it, and not from a modern, outward-looking state.

    President Park Geun-hye inherited a situation when she took office two years in which relations between South Korea and Japan were as bad as they’ve ever been since the end of World War Two. Whether or not she wanted to steer a different course, her hands were tied by inflamed domestic sentiment and the provocative noises coming from Japanese nationalists, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In her March First anniversary remarks this week, President Park repeated calls for Japan to show proper contrition for such past episodes as the coercive use of women for prostitution––the so-called “comfort women”­­––organized by the Japanese military.

    I have written about this in previous blogs, taking issue with nationalist revisionism in Japan; but the debasement of history is not a one-sided affair by any stretch of the imagination. Koreans, for instance, find it difficult to face up to the fact that the Korean War was a fratricidal conflict. Sure, the scene was set by decades of colonial rule and a ham-fisted U.S. occupation after 1945, but what ensued was Koreans killing Koreans, in one of the most vicious conflicts of modern times. This is not a perspective you’ll get, unalloyed, from either Seoul or Pyongyang.

    Instead of Truth and Reconciliation, the nations of East Asia are hung up on Un-Truth and Recrimination. The concept of reconciliation in exchange for truth is desperately in short supply, and yet it is the only way forward from what is a bitter, corrosive and dangerous flirtation with populism and prejudice––in South Korea, Japan and China alike. President Park, in her recent remarks, at least acknowledged that a natural flow of mutual exchange with Japan­­­––through tourism, investment and trade––was worth protecting. It seems to this observer she wants to move towards a more constructive bilateral relationship. Indeed, preparations are underway for an important trilateral meeting soon of the foreign ministers of Japan, China and South Korea. It should be a staging post on the way to a long-overdue trilateral leaders’ summit, though no timetable has been made public.

    It is time for East Asia’s powerhouse nations to embrace Truth and Reconciliation––and abandon Un-Truth and Recrimination­­––in their handling of grievances over past misdeeds. Whether the leaders of the three nations have the vision and guts to break from their recent pandering to nationalist cheer-squads is the great imponderable. They could all use a hefty dose of humility and, by taking a history lesson from a much wiser and greater leader than any of them, the late Nelson Mandela, start building bridges for this and future generations.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan and South Korea for 11 years for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

     

     

     

     

  • Michael Breen.  Home Sour Home

    Fourteen women have died this year as a result of domestic violence. Australians killed by terrorists in the same period, zero. 

    The ABC Q&A programme February 23rd on Domestic Violence had an enormous response from the viewer and studio audiences. Many thanked the ABC for broaching the matter. Many tragic first hand experiences were aired. For some this was cathartic but the unanswered questions and the visible and obscured statistics leave no doubt that this is a critical national issue. 

    Q&A Tweet.The conversation Australia needed to have . 

    No one from the programme nor beyond it suggests this is a simple matter with simple remedies waiting to be applied. It is vastly complex and its elements are at various depths of awareness, responsibility and are the preserve of several disciplines, services and agencies. Police, social workers, mental health workers, refuge staffs, psychologists, religious leaders, lawyers, courts and victims, perpetrators all hold chips of the ugly mosaic. 

    There are some areas, some aspects which are part of the complexity that get more attention than others less obvious and more contentious. I would like to consider some of the latter, especially with regard to men.

    Q&A Tweet. Oh the irony. just a day after #Qanda doing a show on domestic violence, the fed gov’t display the characteristics that promote it. 

    Public violence usually draws a crowd. Violence in private especially inside a house has few attendees. Cops by and large hate going to “domestics” where often there is little they can do and where they can become the recipients of the free flowing aggression. This raises the question of how well they are trained for this event common in their work lives and what support they get to manage the effect it has on them individually.

    For a victim to bring a criminal charge requires enormous courage and support. Often the victim wishes that they had never commenced the process. So the hiddenness of domestic violence adds to its stuckness. Then again victims have the first hand experiences but cannot provide solutions. They know what happens but not how it happens. We need to know how to stop what happens. Often victims’ personal adjustments to live a peaceful life or avoid aggression are lost to current memory as they stretch back over the years. They become like the frog placed in a pot of water on the stove adjusting to the incremental rises in temperature so efficiently that the frog eventually boils to death. 

    The other most knowledgeable participant is the perpetrator and we need to know much more of the processes in the minds and hearts of these people, many of whom have been raised in violent family systems.

     

    Q&A Tweet.I will NOT have my son indoctrinated at school that he is innately created a violent abuser. 

    Further, apportioning blame is in a different order from knowing what actually happened and how to avoid it.  Investigation into the mechanics of the disorder is a separate process from participants finding their treatment in therapy. 

    When we consider violence it is important not to skip parts of the picture no matter how unpleasant or minute. We know that people who experienced violent parenting are more likely to parent or relate violently; unless they have dealt with their experiences in therapy. Tony Cooke, social worker and the son of a Western Australian serial murderer, said, “If you have been touched by violence you have to deal with it”. 

    But do we know how violently a violent person operates inside their own psyche? Do they manage themselves with harshness or violence or are they moral imbeciles who have no criteria or categories of morality or ethics? My guess is that each person is a mixture of all of these factors.  Many more adolescents than we imagine are self harming in our community.  Do we know why? Is it violence turned inward? 

    We know that our society likes violence, when it happens to someone else. Stories and images our media select must sell papers or attract viewers; otherwise why put the stuff out there? 

    Sporting games are often very violent in themselves as is the language of their commentators.  And the spectacle more attractive than the game itself is a players’ or spectators’ brawl. Youths, mostly male become the expendable gladiators  fighting on behalf of their fans and financial promoters. Is it any wonder that these public contestants involved in on-field and off-field fighting? But as soon as the violence of sport is mentioned or criticised the intimidating voices defending the sacred taboos threaten consequences like “developing softies, milksops, pansies” as the alternatives.

    Parliamentary behaviour so often involves viciously attacking the person that it is far from edifying example, for the rest of the community.  Our society tolerates the degrading institution of women’s wages being 18% lower than males doing the same work. 

    Capitalism needs tough guys, winners not cooperators, we are told.  Courses and written stuff offered as training for managers use the language of warfare. Do we ever ask what are the societal costs for men to be acculturated in this way?  What are the consequences of learning to behave as if control is everything? What happens to the person’s desire for softness, gentleness, compassion, mercy? 

    Or what are a man’s fears if he is seen to be sentimental or tearful? 

    The Australian man’s upbringing and schooling are likely to have involved corporal punishment, verbal abuse, belittling and sledging.  “Counselling” has become a weasel white wash for a ticking off.

    The first woman most men meet is their mother. If she is dominant and critical, controlling and manipulative that inevitably affects a man’s attitudes to all women.  This is especially critical if the father figure is inexpressive, weak or withdrawing. When his wife is critical many a man hears his mother’s voice anew.  Is it possible that an attack on the external female critical person is an attempt to silence the man’s internal critical voice? Could violence be an inappropriate response to being taunted, shamed or belittled? He may have been little and inadequate when he was first treated this way, but now he is big and has more response options. In such circumstances is the man hearing that he is not a real man? An ex-student of mine was murdered by a hitchhiker to whom he gave a lift. The hiker went home and announced to his partner, “Now I am a real man”.  These are aberrant, inappropriate and immoral responses. Nor are they defensible. However if we are to understand violent behaviour we need to know its aetiology. 

    Q&A Tweet:if some of us gals seemed a bit peeved with men at times try to gain some understanding as to why – failure to protect. 

    I must restate that I am not seeking to blame or excuse but to ask questions, however unpalatable, about why men, particularly, act out in the ways which we often do. 

    In the 1970s and 1980s in response to feminism a lot of men felt threatened. Men were often impugned as “the problem”. Some feminists said it was ok to blame men for everything because women had had such a bad deal for so long. One response was the development of courses, workshops and groups for men. Unfortunately many of these were inexpertly led but they were spaces to share common material. Most courses I was involved in with had men lamenting or craving better relationships with their fathers and deeper relationships with other men. The Australian cultural conserves impeded both. There were lots of cathartic tears and ept and inept tenderness from male peers. Robert Bly’s article “Iron John” about finding the primitive slimy man in all of us is supposed to have been the most photocopied article of the decade. In hindsight it was not such a good item, but it was all that there was at the time though it treated man isolated from family and children. The “Mens Movement” in Australia was largely a boys movement. 

    Q&A Tweet:‘why doesn’t she leave?’ – great title for a powerful movie to educate community how hard it can be & how attitudes need to change. 

    Finally if leadership is finding a procession to get in front of, the current government could resource all kinds of successful programmes such as the one sent in by the Q&A viewer, a violent perpetrator reformed and his football team in the Northern Territory. Giving grants for research is probably not as effective as  setting up competitions with prizes for interventions which can be demonstrated to  achieve results.

    Michael  Breen is a ‘Humanistic Psychologist’

  • We should expect more.

    In this article in The Guardian, Richard Flanagan, the Booker Prize winner, refers to the increasing ugliness in Australian public life.  He says ‘Writing my novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943. They began decades before with politicians, public figures and journalists promoting the idea of some people being less than people’.  He makes the case that the brutality and cruelty we now see has been developing for years. I think it really began with the Howard Government in 1996. To read this article, see the link below.  John Menadue

    http://gu.com/p/4663q/sbl

  • Andrew Leigh. The remarkable persistence of power and privilege.

    If you want to know who made up Australia’s elite in the nineteenth century, a useful place to look is the Australian Dictionary of Biography. In its many volumes, you’ll find business leaders, scientists, media barons and politicians who have featured among the upper echelons of Australian society.

    Now, suppose we take the first cohort of significant Australians – those who died before 1880 – and identify those with unusual surnames like Ebden orMaconochie. People with those names were overrepresented among the elite in the nineteenth century. Are they still at the top of society, or are they mixed through?

    The answer to this question will depend on the level of social mobility we have in Australia. In a very mobile society, privilege dissipates quickly. Children of doctors become labourers, and children of cleaners become lawyers. “Class-jumping” is the norm. Conversely, in an immobile society, we should expect to see privilege perpetuated across generations. If wealth can easily be passed down to one’s children, if education is costly, and if jobs are based on old school ties rather than ability, then the same surnames will stay at the top across generations.

    For Australia, it turns out that if we look at the register of modern-day medical practitioners, we find the privileged names of the nineteenth century overrepresented by a factor of nearly three. In other words, if your ancestor was at the top of Australian society six generations ago, you are three times more likely than the average Australian to be a doctor today.

    In The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, economist Gregory Clark uses rare surnames to learn more about the extent to which societies are fluid or static. Take the case of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), the famous diarist who was secretary of the English Admiralty. Pepys has been a rare name since it entered the ranks of the elite in the late 1400s. And yet in the past 500 years, Pepyses have attended Oxford or Cambridge universities at a rate at least twenty times that of the general population. On average, those of them who’ve died over the past decade left wealth of at least five times the British average. Four of the eighteen living Pepyses are medical doctors. Only in a society with extremely low levels of social mobility would we expect a name to persist among the elites in this way.

    Analysing mobility in medieval England, Clark finds that people with names derived from jobs (Cook, Butler, Thatcher and so on) were more likely to move upwards, while those with names that derive from towns (including Baskerville, Pakenham and Walton) tended to move downwards. And not much changed after the industrial revolution. Surnames of Oxbridge graduates in the early 1800s, for instance, are three times as common among British MPs in the late 1900s.

    In the United States, tax return data for the top taxpayers was publicly reported in 1923–24. Nearly a century later, people with the same surnames as those who featured on the list are three to four times as likely to be doctors or lawyers, while those with lower-status names are underrepresented. People with the high-status surname Katz are twelve times as likely to be doctors and lawyers as those with the low-status surname Washington.

    In Japan, samurai surnames date back to before the 1868 Meiji restoration. Even today, they are overrepresented at least fourfold among doctors, lawyers, professors and writers. In China, Qing surnames overrepresented among the nineteenth-century elite are overrepresented among today’s corporate board chairs and government officials. In Chile, surnames overrepresented among landowners in the 1850s are still overrepresented among high-earning occupations.

    Strikingly, Clark finds persistence even in Sweden, one of the world’s most egalitarian societies. The 1600s and 1700s saw the creation of a set of “noble surnames,” which today have twice their expected share of doctors, five times their expected share of lawyers, and three times their share of members of the top 1 per cent of income earners. This degree of persistence of status across ten generations demonstrates the power of inherited privilege.

    GREGORY CLARK’s analysis of intergenerational mobility signals a marked shift in the way economists think about social mobility. In his 1988 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Gary Becker argued that “earnings are not strongly transmitted from fathers to sons.” Four years later, Gary Solon showed that prior researchers had been overestimating the degree of social mobility because they were using just a single year of data.

    To see how this happens, imagine a high-earning barrister who happens to take six months off work in the year of the survey. Now suppose his son becomes a high-earning barrister too. A study that used just one year of data might wrongly assume that this was a case of someone moving from rags to riches. But a study that used several years of data would see that both father and son were well-off.

    At this point, I need to introduce a few numbers. The standard measure of mobility across generations is the “elasticity” of children’s earnings with respect to their parents’ earnings – in other words, how closely the former reflects the latter. Because women have tended to have much lower rates of paid work, researchers have focused on the father–son earnings elasticity. An elasticity of zero means there was no relationship between the earnings of fathers and sons, while an elasticity of one would mean that a 10 per cent rise in fathers’ earnings was associated with a 10 per cent rise in sons’ earnings. The closer the elasticity gets to one, the less mobile the society.

    Elasticity measures aren’t confined to income. The elasticity of height, for example, is about 0.5, which means that if a father is ten centimetres taller than average then we expect his sons to be five centimetres taller than average. Sure, there are tall fathers with short sons (and vice versa), but basketball dads are generally taller than gymnast dads.

    In the case of earnings, economists’ best estimate of intergenerational elasticity went from 0.2 when they used a single year of earnings (as did the studies Gary Becker was relying on) to 0.4 when they used a few years of earnings (Gary Solon’s approach). Over the next decade, US researchers threw better and better data at the problem, and each time they found less and less mobility. Using more than a decade of earnings data, Bhashkar Mazumder estimated in 2005 that the intergenerational earnings elasticity for the United States was 0.6. That would put it higher than the father–son height elasticity. Among American sons, fathers had a larger impact on their earnings than on their stature.

    Using similar techniques, researchers began estimating father–son earnings elasticities for other countries. As one survey showed, Scandinavian nations tended to be extremely mobile, with elasticities below 0.2. In Latin America, there was much less class-jumping, with elasticities over 0.5. Compared with other nations, the United States is extremely immobile, a fact that Barack Obama has thankfully switched from denying (“In no other country on earth is my story even possible”) to decrying (“It is harder today for a child born here in America to improve her station in life than it is for children in most of our wealthy allies”).

    In 2006, while I was working as an economist at the Australian National University, I produced the first (and so far, only) estimates of the father–son earnings elasticity in Australia, putting the intergenerational elasticity at around 0.25. This means that a 10 per cent increase in a father’s earnings translates to a 2.5 per cent increase in his son’s earnings. My estimate implied that we are more socially mobile than the United States but not as mobile as Scandinavia. Looking back through the twentieth century, I found no evidence that we had become markedly more or less mobile.

    So what does the surname approach add to our understanding of mobility? Simply put, there are two reasons for using surnames. The first is that we only have good data on earnings (from surveys or administrative records) for the relatively recent past. If we want to understand mobility in centuries gone by, surnames may be the best torch for seeing into an otherwise dark statistical corner.

    The second, and more important, reason for using surnames is that they may help to take out some of the transitory fluctuations. Recall how we got more precise estimates of the intergenerational earnings elasticity when we used data that smoothed out the fluctuations in an individual’s earnings over a career? Call it the “odd year” problem. Now let’s think about a different problem: a family where the social status dips down for one generation, before reverting to the long-run average. You might call this the “black sheep” problem. By looking at surnames, we are able to look not just at single father–son pairs, but also at patterns for entire lineages.

    So once we take out the odd years and black sheep, how easy is it to jump between classes? Several assumptions need to be made in order to estimate an intergenerational elasticity from surnames. But if we accept Gregory Clark’s methodology, his results imply a very static society. For Britain, the United States, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Chile and even Sweden, he concludes that the intergenerational elasticity is between 0.7 and 0.9. This would mean that social status is at least as hereditable as height. It suggests that while the ruling class and the underclass are not permanent, they are extremely long-lasting. Erasing privilege takes not two or three generations, but ten to fifteen generations. If you cherish the notion of a society where anyone can make it, these results are disturbing.

    How do we break the pattern? Part of the answer must lie in a fair tax system, a targeted social welfare system, effective early childhood programs, and getting great teachers in front of disadvantaged classrooms. We need banks willing to take a chance on funding an outsider, and it doesn’t hurt to maintain a healthy Aussie scepticism about inherited privilege.

    Yet Gregory Clark’s results also remind policy-makers that this is no easy nut to crack. Part of the transmission of social status occurs through genes. On top of this, people tend to marry those with similar levels of education; and researchers have also documented significant differences in parenting approaches among different social groups. Making the system a bit fairer is within our reach – but a complete transformation may prove elusive.

    Andrew Leigh is the Federal Member for Fraser and the Shadow Assistant Treasurer.  This article was published in Inside Story.

  • Stuart Harris. China is not seeking to break the rules of global order.

    Australia’s foreign policy, and notably its relations with the US and China, has been a mix of positives and negatives under the Coalition government, as was true of the previous Labor government.

    This reflects the lack of a broad strategic vision of Australia’s geographic realities and the evolving relationships involved.

    Former prime ministers, Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke recognised the need for Australia to think strategically about future regional developments, and John Howard‘s thinking gradually moved in that direction. Such long term strategic thinking is more urgently needed today.

    The Asian region is changing, as are its regional dynamics. While the US is a Pacific power, it comes to Asia from outside. To complicate the picture, this is a region not only featuring China, but a China which is the largest trading partner with all Asian nations, including Australia. Our future relations with the region, in Northeast Asia and with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) particularly, will depend upon our relations with China as well as with the US.

    A coherent strategy needs to reflect the reality that we are linked to Asia from within the region. It needs to reflect the growing importance of China globally and to Australia, and to develop a political depth with that country similar to that with the US. And it will be increasingly difficult to continue separating economic and strategic issues (paralleling, as we do, the divide between engagers and confronters in US policy). Consequently, adapting historian Michael Howard’s injunction, we need greater understanding of China’s environment, history, and culture, including its political system; that understanding does not imply that we like that system, but that we are able to work effectively with it.

    The dominant and often one-sided Western perspective is not always helpful when judging whether China will be aggressive and expansionist, or whether it will live more or less peaceably with the rest of the world. We assume that terms like ‘international rules’, ‘global order’ and what constitutes ‘responsible behaviour’ are understood and accepted by all others. Yet for China, these terms have emerged from a different culture and historical experience. These differences in vision affect China’s foreign policy. Even so, despite obvious exceptions, such as human rights, in practice China is well integrated into the international system as we know it and largely complies with international rules – probably at least as well as other major powers. Despite criticism of China’s reluctance to lead internationally, that approach might suggest not just free-riding, but reluctance to challenge the existing global order.

    When China opened up under Deng Xiao-ping, it joined an international order that reflected a pluralistic view of the international community, that acknowledged differences in political and domestic value systems, and that pursued mutually acceptable global rules and geopolitical equilibrium. Then the common vision shifted and the membership bar was raised.

    Ultimately, a US led international system emerged that involved an agenda of good governance, ‘free’ markets and ‘democracy’ (usually just elections). These aimed to advance US security and its other interests. The objective of regime change under this agenda in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and perhaps Ukraine suggests we should be cautious about what we wish for. For China, in any case, it implies regime change, social instability, and the end of the Party/state.

    Of course, China has regional and global ambitions and China’s relative military and other capacities will grow, probably substantially. China wants a role that commands attention and respect from its neighbours, particularly in its ‘near abroad’, and we may not always like what it or others do. So a continued US presence in the region is critical; it needs, however, to manage relations between states rather than just pursue political change or impose views of complex issues that then become part of the problem.

    China feels internationally vulnerable and, as with the US, domestic nationalism influences its policies. Internally, China’s leaders fear fragmentation, instability and, after Bo Xilai, competition for power. China has major problems: corruption, inequalities, pollution, resource shortages, an aging population, and an economy that needs structural reform. Consequently, with domestic issues as its main priority, its foreign policies will remain largely defensive and reactive to external influences, rather than offensive and expansive. Moreover, it knows it needs stable relations with the US and its neighbours in order to sustain its development. It will seek changes to the rules by basically working within the existing framework.

    Obviously, maritime disputes are worrying but hardly central to Australia’s strategic interests. Sovereignty claims by all parties in the South China and East China Seas are unhelpful and pose serious risks of miscalculation. Outcomes that reflect resolution of sovereignty claims are unlikely. Our attention is understandably focused on China, but the historical context needs to be understood including China’s ‘missing out’ on territory in the 1960s/1970s regional ‘island grab’. Provocations and efforts to change the status quo are not limited to China or unconnected to the US pivot and the regionally divisive Trans Pacific Partnership.

    A US regional presence remains strategically important; our values, however, are often different, as at times are our vital interests, and we need to re-examine our concepts of regional order. There are considerable risks in Australia’s growing enmeshment in the US regional security system to where our security policy is increasingly a function of that of the US, and an independent Australian position difficult to maintain.

    These issues will become important in the future, possibly with long term potential dangers in adverse regional developments, notably potentially over Taiwan. US diplomatic management of such problems will remain critical, but history will treat unkindly any Australian political leader who, consciously or inadvertently, commits Australia to military conflict involving China without clear public support and a full parliamentary debate for which an explicit strategic assessment of Australia’s long term vital interests would be a prerequisite.

    Stuard Harris is emeritus professor in the Department O International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. 

    This article was also published by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific website: http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/

    – See more at: http://www.policyforum.net/playing-by-rules/#sthash.ad9r7c6b.dpuf

  • Denis Muller. The stitch-up by The Australian.

    It is an ugly spectacle when a newspaper aligns itself with the executive government in an attempt to hound from office someone who can otherwise be removed only by the Governor-General. This is what The Australian is doing, in concert with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Attorney-General George Brandis, to Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs.

    It is the latest in a series of campaigns the newspaper has waged against those in public life with whom it disagrees or against whom it has a grievance.

    However, these campaigns have usually had the advancement of The Australian’s own self-interest or the settling of personal scores as their originating motivation.

    For example, it was aggrieved by its treatment at the hands of former Victoria Police chief commissioner Simon Overland. To settle the score, The Australian waged a sustained campaign for his removal. In the end, Overland resigned in messy political circumstances to which The Australian made a contribution by giving the then-Victorian Coalition government the strength of the newspaper’s convictions.

    More recently, The Australian waged a similar campaign against the then-chair of the Australian Press Council, Julian Disney, whose reforms to stiffen the effectiveness of the council the newspaper opposed. Disney served out his full term, which came to an end this month, but the campaign diverted energy and resources from the reform effort.

    However, in Triggs’ case, the originating motivation looks different. This time the motive appears to be purely ideological. The campaign is clearly designed to play into the political process in a way that is closely aligned with the political interests and strategy of the executive government.

    The contours of this strategy can be discerned from a statement by Brandis, reported in The Australian on Wednesday. Brandis is reported as saying that:

    … anger within the government intensified amid “very savage attacks” on Professor Triggs from MPs including the Prime Minister and “strongly expressed” criticism in the media, including in The Australian.

    It might well have read “principally The Australian”.

    Neat, isn’t it? Your media allies lend their platforms to help you advance your political objectives, and their coverage is then cited as a ground for legitimising those objectives.

    In our democracy, the media are meant to act as the “fourth estate” – the institution that holds to account the other three. It is a betrayal of this function to become enmeshed with the executive’s political strategy, as The Australian has done in the Triggs case.

    It is, of course, a matter of degrees. Clearly, the Coalition government and The Australian have a shared conservative ideology. It is well within their rights to share it. They are both affronted by what they say is anti-government partisanship on Triggs’ part, as they are obviously entitled to be.

    However, the point where shared ideology, shared political interests and shared opinions shade into betrayal of fourth-estate independence is difficult to define with precision. Some markers might be these:

    • To what extent and with what prominence does the newspaper publish material that is contrary to the shared political interest? For instance, what attention was paid, and with what prominence, to the offer of an alternative job said by Triggs to have been made to her in circumstances that suggested to her that it was an attempt to procure her resignation? This is a serious matter and it has been referred by shadow attorney-general Mark Drefyus to the Australian Federal Police for investigation.
    • What spectrum of opinion has been represented in the newspaper’s opinion pages on this matter?
    • What has been the tone of the news reportage?
    • To what extent is there evidence of interplay between government MPs and the newspaper in the way the story has developed? For instance, how much of the coverage is based on government backgrounding of the newspaper?

    So far, there is scant evidence of this last factor. But on the remaining three we can make some observations. The issue of a possible inducement received a very low level of attention; the spectrum of opinion has been all against Triggs; and the tone of reporting has been unmistakably hostile to her, as have the headlines.

    If it was just a one-off case, The Australian’s conduct would perhaps not merit such attention, but it is part of a pattern that ill-serves the public interest. There is a due process for removing statutory office-holders. The grounds for removing a member of the Human Rights Commission are confined to misbehaviour or physical or mental incapacity. Nothing Triggs has done has triggered that process.

    Triggs may have lost the confidence of Abbott and Brandis, but that is not a ground for removing her. As The Australian itself has said, she is on political trial and Abbott has delivered his verdict. In doing so, he spoke of a “stitch-up”.

    But if there is a stitch-up going on here, it is what the government and The Australian are joined in doing to Triggs.

    Denis Muller is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism at University of Melbourne. This article first appeared in The Conversation on 25 February 2015.

  • Intergenerational Report and Australia’s future.

    In The Age on February 23, Sam Hurley from the Centre for Policy Development highlighted the importance of long-term policy priorities that will support people across all generations. He refers to the crucial issues that we must face that go beyond the one-liners about debt and deficit. See link to article below.  John Menadue.

    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-intergenerational-report-should-be-the-time-for-a-conversation-about-australias-future-20150223-13m59i.html

  • The economic potential of older people.

    In the SMH on February 22, Susan Ryan, the Age Discrimination Commissioner, described how many older workers are being ignored , yet they could be making a more significant contribution to the economy and society. For article, see link below. John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-economic-potential-of-older-people-is-being-ignored-20150222-13lfgt.html

  • The frontier wars – best we forget.

     

    I have posted many blogs about our refusal to acknowledge the frontier wars,  when we suffered the largest death toll in war in our history in relation to our population at the time. In the SMH on February 12, see link below, Tim Flannery draws our attention to the valour of 52 indigenous people who were killed near Casterton, Victoria, in the 1840s. The victors write history! These heroes have been largely expunged from our history. There were no rewards for those who were defending their homelands in the battle known as ‘Fighting Hills’. John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/we-shouldn8217t-forget-the-sacrifice-of-our-aboriginal-warriors-20150212-13bzib.html

  • Mark Triffitt and Travers McLeod. Don’t blame micro-parties or the Senate.

    Paul Keating famously labelled the Senate “unrepresentative swill”. Similar sentiments – while not as colourful – are being voiced by those frustrated with the blocking power of the Senate’s micro-parties.

    In a recent Australian Financial Review survey, leading corporate CEOs called for major reform to the Senate.

    At one level it is not hard to understand why. The Senate in general, and the minor and micro-parties that hold the balance of power in particular, were instrumental in gutting the Abbott government’s budget at a time when reform is pressing.

    Criticism of their power over policy will likely grow as the Senate casts a critical eye this year over the government’s attempts to reshape the budget and fix Australia’s tax system.

    But behind the singular criticisms of the Senate is a bigger picture of deeper dysfunction. It’s a picture that suggests the Senate is not a root cause, but part of a long list of symptoms that indicate our political system is increasingly unfit for purpose in the 21st century.

    Excluding micro-parties is not reform

    A clue to understanding these deeper problems lies in the complaints these business figures make. In essence, they lament how micro-parties are an increasingly powerful phenomenon, gaining outsized power compared to their meagre vote in elections.

    Many of the CEOs surveyed proposed that, in response, the Senate’s proportional voting system should be abolished. Or, at least, the system of preferential voting should be changed to stamp out the micro-party phenomenon.

    This would allow major parties to pass legislation with greater certainty and reduce the range of political parties able to hold the balance of power. It would also restore “representativeness” to our democratic system by ridding it of what one CEO described as “a disparate bunch of single-issue politicians”.

    On a superficial level, these and other proposals aimed at restoring the primacy of major parties seem to have merit. But these complaints overlook what is occurring within our political system, and the political arena more generally.

    On the face of it, democratic systems like Australia’s look the same as 20 or 30 years ago. Major parties dominate the day-to-day political process, presenting their policy programs at general elections as they vie to form government and represent the general public.

    But beneath the surface the relationship between citizens and these parties has been fundamentally and irreversibly weakened. This is reflected in membership and support for major political parties, which have fallen across the Western world.

    In contrast, support for smaller parties has risen sharply, albeit from low bases.

    Why?

    Because voter preferences are no longer shaped predominantly by class, ideology, ethnicity and geography. And it is to these catch-all attributes that major political parties traditionally appealed.

    19th-century model is showing its age

    In a 21st-century internet-driven, globalised world, the array of political choices and identities available to voters are increasing and fragmenting.

    This reflects broader changes in a society in which choices – political, social or economic – are influenced by a widening collection of complex factors.

    Major parties are finding it increasingly difficult to develop a coherent overarching narrative for what they seek in government and why it benefits the community as well as the individual over the long term.

    In contrast, voter fragmentation suits micro and minor parties. With their single or limited issues campaigns they can cut through the political noise with more succinct appeals and arguments. They offer retail politics in a wholesale world.

    Informal groupings and alliances of micro-parties likewise can respond more nimbly to the flux of 21st-century voter sentiment.

    In addition to the splintering of traditional voter blocs, voter choices are rarely static. Our democratic system is now characterised by larger and unpredictable cohorts of “swinging” voters. Their political preferences and voting intentions constantly change, often heavily influenced by a single issue or narrower policy platform.

    The major parties, as a result, become less flexible and responsive. Their feedback mechanisms are often stilted. They can be held up by procedural delays, adherence to party rules or structures, and even the “need” for cabinet solidarity.

    All this suggests micro-parties may not be some kind of unwelcome or unrepresentative intrusion into our democratic system, as conventional views would have it. Whether by accident or design, they have allied themselves with the way the 21st-century political world is being restructured.

    In short, all this should signal that new political configurations like micro-parties need to be accommodated, not curtailed.

    However, advocating more collaborative attitudes to politics and policy-making can only get us so far, particularly if major parties won’t work together on long-term reform.

    Our democracy needs new organising principles

    Ultimately the micro-party issue should begin to highlight how our political system is predicated on many organising principles that no longer apply.

    The system requires functional majorities – built on major parties achieving stable blocs of voter support – to get anything major done. This is a system where the languid decision-making processes of parliament are increasingly left behind by a super-speed 21st century.

    This is a system that seems unable to acknowledge what many citizens already know: that so much going on in our globalised and interdependent world escapes the control of territorially based parties and parliaments.

    Broader, progressive reforms to our democratic institutions are urgently needed to reflect the realities of a new political and policy world.

    We need to have a conversation about managing this world more effectively with more inclusive structures of policy-making and more innovative systems of voter input. The conversation needs to tackle some weighty issues, namely:

    • What is the role of political parties, both large and small, in this system and what processes might encourage more effective political and policy collaboration?
    • What sort of voting and electoral systems best capture and reflect the kaleidoscopic nature of today’s citizenry?
    • What reforms do our democratic institutions require so they can develop the policies Australia needs to thrive over the long term, beyond short-term political cycles that can turn in days?

    It is this path – not attempts to restore a world that no longer exists through piecemeal changes to a single part of the system – that will give our democracy the new lease of life it sorely needs.

    Mark Triffitt is Lecturer, Public Policy at University of Melbourne.

    Travers McLeod is Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at University of Melbourne.

    This article was first published in The Conversation on 23 February 2015.

     

     

  • Brian Johnstone. The forgotten children. The ethical dimension.

    Professor Gillian Triggs, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, has found that by reason of its policy of the continued retention of children of asylum seekers, Australia has been and remains in breach of its international obligations. This applies to both major political parties. The legal argument is clear and has not been refuted. The best the Prime Minister could offer was bluster, condemning the report as a “transparent stitch-up.” Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson conceded that retaining children in detention was not in anyone’s interest, but provided no justification for continuing the detention.

    The Report of the Commission argues that asylum seeker families and children have been left “. . . [i]n a legal black hole in which their rights and dignity have been denied.” This ethical claim needs supporting argument.

    Contemporary philosophers and lawyers have been working to clarify the notion of dignity. A leading exponent is Charles Foster, Fellow of Green Templeton College, and University of Oxford in Human Dignity in Bioethics and Law (2011).

    Foster cites Christopher McCrudden’s summary of the basic, minimal agreed content of the notion of dignity drawn from international human rights texts; there are three points. The first is that “Every human being possesses an intrinsic worth merely by being human.” The second is that “This intrinsic worth should be recognised and respected by others;” it follows that some ways of treating others are inconsistent with this dignity or required by this dignity. The third is that the state exists for the sake of the individual person and not vice versa.   The first point is ‘ontological;’ it refers to the being of the person. The second is relational; it concerns ways in which persons connect with each other. The third is political; it expresses the basic priorities that should govern political judgments and activities.

    Foster begins his account with a question: “What makes humans thrive?” This was expressed in traditional philosophy drawing on Aristotle as “flourishing.” We can clarify what dignity requires and what violates dignity by asking what enables people to thrive. It is important for Foster’s argument that we can meaningfully ask this question not only of mature individuals, who we may presume are fully rational and free, but of the youngest children and of the most disabled. Foster argues that to make sound ethical and legal decisions we have to inquire empirically what is good for us.

    We can connect Foster’s arguments with the present debates in Australia. As cited by Kim Oates in his recent contribution, the Australian Government’s own Early Years Learning Framework describes three foundations as the basis for healthy childhood growth and progress for pre-schoolers: “Belonging, being and becoming.” We can adopt the same three points to develop an account of dignity that is more specifically related to the present Australian situation.

    To thrive, a human person needs to belong, that is to be part of a human community; this is the relational aspect of dignity. This community will normally be a family, but it could also be, of course, another group that takes over the role of the family. A family gives to its members and in particular to children what they need to thrive; food, clothing, affection, education. Children need to form relationships so as to establish a secure sense of themselves. Children characteristically achieve this by play-based behaviour. Learning to be themselves corresponds to the ‘ontological’ element of dignity.

    They are enabled to become more fully themselves by engaging their capacities to learn and develop. Becoming is another word for thriving. The adults who are responsible for the children themselves thrive by engaging in these processes on behalf of children.

    Thriving is the basis of dignity. But dignity entails more than this; it requires recognition. A parent or responsible adult recognizes the child as one who has inherent worth and enables a child to thrive. But the parent or adult who acts in such a way receives recognition also, recognition as a person of dignity.

    Dignity is always a two-way notion; when one person recognises the dignity of another, the other accepts that recognition and in so doing recognises the dignity of the first. When the first receives that recognition she can then recognise her own dignity.   I cannot recognise dignity in myself while I act in such a way as to refuse to recognise the dignity of the other.

    Dignity in one important aspect entails recognition of self, of one’s own inherent worth. But the individual cannot recognise her or his own worth, without recognising the worth of those others with whom they are engaged. An adult who denies to a child for whom she or he is responsible what the child needs to thrive is denying to himself what that adult needs to thrive, namely recognition of his own inherent worth. A community of persons who recognize their own inherent worth or dignity will want to protect others whose dignity they recognize, especially when that dignity is being violated. Such protection is a requirement of justice which is the basis of rights.

    Finally, the third element of the generally accepted notion of dignity also applies: the state exists for the sake of persons; persons may not be used as means for the benefit of the state and much less for keeping a political party in power.

    We can now return to the empirical investigation that Charles Foster requires. The report of the Australian Human Rights Commission on Children in Detention, “The Forgotten Children” clearly provides ample empirical evidence that the children in detention are not being adequately provided with the support that would enable them to thrive. Rather, the contrary is the case: they are being treated in ways that seriously damage their thriving.

    The case against the present policy of the Australian government regarding the detention of children can be summed up as follows:

    • The government is in violation of its international treaty obligations.
    • It is using the children as means to support its policies on refugees so as to remain in power, thus violating the due relationships between the state and individual persons.
    • Finally, those who support and implement these policies are violating the dignity of the children. In so doing they are denying their own dignity.   They make it impossible for themselves to recognise their own dignity. They also make it impossible for us, the citizens of Australia, to recognise their dignity.

  • Tony Kevin, Tony Abbott’s crassness could cost the Bali duo their lives.

     

    Let me first declare my biases. I believe that I honour and respect Indonesia’s values and culture. I oppose the death penalty in general. In this case, I would welcome an outcome that saved the lives of the last two members of the Bali Nine who now face execution In Indonesia, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, for the offence of smuggling drugs out of Indonesia in 2005. I believe every life saved from deliberate violent death affirms and enriches our collective humanity; and that the quest for consistency of action is the enemy of mercy. I also believe the murky AFP role in the history of the Bali Nine’s arrest as they were leaving Indonesia imposes a special moral obligation on Australia to do everything possible to try to save these two men’s’ lives now.

    Now let me comment on the Australian diplomacy surrounding this, as neutrally as I can. Over the years, Australian representations have had much success in securing commutation of sentences of many Australians accused of serious drug offences in Indonesia: most famously Schiapelle Corby, but also (in a very complex legal history – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bali_Nine) the other seven members of the Bali Nine. Andrew and Myuran are the last two, and it is their tragedy that their sentences could not be commuted in time under the former President Yudhoyono.

    Under President Jokowi, lines have been drawn in the sand. Indonesia’s national honour is now strongly engaged. And Tony Abbott’s ill-judged recent public diplomacy, if it can be called that, has made matters far worse. Abbott has possibly doomed the two men, though I still hope not.

    For an informed current Indonesian elite perspective, I turned to Yohanes Sulaiman’s piece in The Conversation yesterday   https://theconversation.com/why-indonesia-is-likely-to-ignore-protests-and-execute-bali-nine-duo-37645. Sulaiman expects Indonesia to ignore protests and execute the two men, because the domestic political costs for Jokowi of granting pardon is too great;   because there is strong elite Indonesian support for the death penalty in major drug cases; and because of a strong nationalist backlash against foreign pressure. Tellingly, Sulaiman cites an Indonesian Professor of International Law’s critique of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s appeal in this case: where, he asks, was Ban when Indonesian migrant workers were executed in Saudi Arabia?

    The separate but coordinated appeals on 17 February by all six living former Australian prime ministers might of themselves have had some positive impact on President Jokowi, in light of the drama of the gesture and of Indonesian values of respect for age, wisdom and political seniority. The delay in taking the men to the execution island may have been a guarded initial response to those powerful appeals, from which I recall key words here:

    Kevin Rudd – “As a deep, long-standing friend of Indonesia, I would respectfully request an act of clemency.”

    Julia Gillard –   “I would find it heartbreaking if such extraordinary efforts to become of good character were not met with an act of mercy.”

    John Howard – “Mercy being shown in such circumstances would not weaken the deterrent effect of Indonesia’s strong anti-drug laws.”

    Paul Keating – “In this case, the penalty is out of all proportion to the crime.”

    Bob Hawke – “I call on the Indonesian government to show mercy and clemency … Justice should be based on human understanding… ”

    Malcolm Fraser – “We are very much opposed to the death penalty in Australia.”

    Unfortunately, Abbott may have the very next day, 18 February, destroyed this glimmer of hope by his crass and over-the-top linking of past Australian generous disaster relief aid to Indonesia to the fate of the two men. As in the presidential eavesdropping episode, well remembered by Indonesians, he compounded the error by his defiant refusal to admit afterwards that his linkage had been a threat: “No, I was just stating facts”.

    Abbott has now left Jokowi in the unpalatable position that any act of clemency could be seen as succumbing to Abbott’s thinly veiled blackmail.

    And where does this leave Abbott if Indonesia does execute the men? If Indonesia then experiences a major natural disaster while Abbott is still our PM, will he really announce: ‘No, we won’t help you, because you executed Chan and Sukamaran.”? I don’t think so: Abbott’s veiled threat is actually hollow. But it will nevertheless be long remembered in Jakarta as another notorious example of Australian arrogance and lack of manners. It may have spoiled whatever good the intervention of the six former prime ministers might have done.

    Chan and Sukamaran’s best hope now is for Abbott and his ministers – indeed, for any Australian politician – to say nothing more in public on the matter. Let Jakarta try if it can to find a way over coming weeks to deal with this further damaging episode in Australian –Indonesian relations: hopefully, in a way that spares these two last Bali Nine members’ lives.

     

  • Peter Day. Life is sacred, but ….

    The “other” is no longer a brother or sister to be loved, but simply someone who disturbs my life and my comfort … In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference.  We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!      (Pope Francis)

    I had the misfortune recently of watching the Four Corners investigation into live-baiting in the greyhound industry – trainers were filmed using live rabbits, piglets and possums to instil the blood lust in dogs in order to improve their chasing/racing skills.

    I imagine there will be – it’s already started – an almighty avalanche of anger directed towards those who pursue cruelty in order to benefit financially – and justifiably so.

    Life is sacred – even the lives of rabbits, possums, and piglets.

    Similarly, there is an almighty howl of protest concerning the pending executions of drug traffickers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran – and justifiably so.

    Life is sacred – even the lives of drug traffickers.

    And, what of those forgotten children in Australian immigration detention centres: again, much angst and chest beating – and justifiably so.

    Life is sacred – even the lives of ‘illegals’ and strangers and ‘queue jumpers’.

    Perhaps one day the mainstream media and the public might dare to pursue, also with moral courage, the plight of the unborn; tens of thousands of whom disappear without trace each year – I’m especially concerned for those victims of late-term abortions (i.e. 16 weeks and beyond).

    Life is sacred – even the lives of the tiny and ‘unseen’.

    In regards to the latter, a notoriously emotive and neuralgic issue, it is vital that we do not allow the bullying of religious nutters and moralists to justify a “we cannot afford to go there” approach – to justify shutting down debate.

    Indeed, is it not the case that in order to counter this rigid and unattractive polemic, and to ensure I am not seen to be in their camp; we have, as a collective, tended to gravitate towards the more comfortable and acceptable narrative of the so called ‘social progressives’; the one that espouses tolerance and individual freedom; the one that encourages a polite acquiescence – but at what price and at whose expense?

    Surely, in a world where whales and rabbits and old trees and heritage buildings are treated as precious, as of significant value – and rightly so, there is room for a mainstream and adult conversation about those other forgotten children.

    I am not in any way suggesting yet another unseemly finger-pointing exercise, nor am I advocating criminalisation. Indeed, compassion compels one to want to walk alongside a woman confronting such a choice, even to cry with her.

    Further, this issue cannot be reduced to simplistic labelling – i.e.  you’re either pro-abortion or anti-abortion, pro-life or pro-choice – left v right etc. It’s far more complex and layered than that.

    What I am advocating is a robust and reasoned, if sometimes heated, public conversation like those we have around those other conservation issues alluded to above.

    Perhaps such a conversation might begin with a question: “What does it mean to be human?”

    For now, at least, we seem to be mired in more of that globalised indifference which insists upon silence.

    Peter Day is a Catholic parish priest in Canberra.

     

     

  • Mary Chiarella. Luke Foley – Nurse-led clinics and primary health care.

    In 2011 I gave the last Oration for what was originally the NSW College of Nursing in the Great Hall of Sydney University. In it I advocated for nurses to be able to work to full scope of practice, particularly in the area of primary and preventive health care, in order to alleviate demands on our overstretched hospital systems. Given we currently have a significant oversupply of nurses in this country, especially in our new graduate population, this seems like an excellent time to deploy nurses into some of these roles, long overdue in Australia but commonplace in other parts of the world. . The first ever NSW College of Nursing Oration was given on the 15th September 1953 by M.I. Lambie, who was not only the first Orator for the College, but the first woman to give an Oration in the Great Hall of Australia’s oldest university. Miss Lambie was the New Zealand Nursing Adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Chair of the Expert Nursing Committee of WHO. Let me read to you her introductory words as she talks of the problems in health care in the developed world:

    These facts have caused increasing demands on hospitals; the rapid turnover in surgical beds together with the larger numbers of elderly and chronic patients has forced consideration to be given to the whole problem of hospitalisation by many authorities. The increased use of hospitals means automatically more staff or the better use of existing staff”[1]. 

    Plus ca change, plus la meme chose. She goes on to advocate for the growth in primary health care that is occurring in developing countries “putting more emphasis on the preventive aspect, which in turn will set an example to many of the older countries”. Well sadly not much yet, Miss Lambie, not much yet. I’m afraid the people you were advising didn’t take your excellent advice. Lots of us have been there.

    She goes on to say

    These are examples whereby preventive means, home education and treatment have reduced the demands for hospital beds. In fact it would not have been possible to treat in this mass way in an institution. The education of the home for this kind of treatment means, however, the preparation of a worker to carry out the program. Funnily we speak of this NEW approach to medicine, and yet in her Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale speaks of “the need to nurse the home as well as the family[2]. 

    So we come full circle in what is needed for health care in Australia, advocated by Florence Nightingale in the 19th century, advocated by the first NSW College of Nursing Orator, Miss Lambie in the 20th century, and advocated in the 21st century by the (then) Australian Nursing Federation[3]. Let us hope, in the promises of Luke Foley to introduce four nurse-led clinics in NSW should Labor win the next election, that the wise words of our nursing forebears do not have to wait another 62 years before somebody decides to act on them. This is so obvious a solution that one wonders why it is not commonplace, rather than tentative.

    Mary Chiarella is Professor of Nursing, Sydney Nursing School, University of Sydney.

    [1] Lambie IM (1953) First Annual Oration The changing scene in health work throughout the world in The 50th Anniversary Annual Orations Vol I NSW College of Nursing: Sydney, p.9

    [2]  Ibid, p.10

    [3] Australian Nursing Federation (2009) Primary health care in Australia: a nursing and midwifery consensus view ANF: Canberra

  • Warwick Elsche. Abbott and Credlin.

    It was on again – all last week. Apart from the uncertain future of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, all political talk was of Peta Credlin his Chief of Staff and unquestionably the most talked of, written about, high profile staffer in living memory – maybe ever.

    Over more than five years in Opposition and Government, the Prime Minister himself has lauded her importance in his office and the influence she wields on him and his decision making. Apart from normal duties she has been rewarded with the role of vetting Cabinet Papers from all Ministers, unheard of in previous administrations. Equally unprecedented is the place she has taken at the Cabinet table, where she reportedly feels free to speak if so moved.

    She had the power to vet and reject staff appointments by even the most senior Ministers and to determine what staff may travel overseas with Ministers.

    Such was her profile that Australia’s Security Organisation, ASIO, – not famous for its assessments – warned her to be more cautious with her own travel arrangements because of the vital role she played in Government. No shrinking violet, Credlin seems to share this view, having reportedly described herself as the girl who nearly won the 2010 election and did win in 2013.

    She is, say some, the brains behind the PM; others that she is merely a major influence on him. And “no” say more, who seem to share her assessment of herself. She is, to them, a key figure across the entire operations of the Government. Abbott, whose political judgement is currently under heavy questioning from both colleagues and the electorate, has added to the legend with paeans of praise both in public and private.

    The current hubbub over Credlin however is somewhat on a different note. Far from currently being seen as an ongoing Liberal celebrity, a significant majority of her former admirers are now viewing her in a different light. To them she is now viewed as a villain, a liability and a scapegoat for the Government’s current failings. At a time when her supposed talents for both boss and government are most in demand, she seems, despite the lofty reputation, to be coming up seriously short. And if Tony’s political instincts are so blunted as to leave him unaware of this, those of his colleagues do not appear to be. They now want her gone – a desire being expressed embarrassingly openly – NOW.

    Abbott’s own performance and fortunes from the time he took the Liberal leadership have been, on his own admission, linked almost totally with Credlin. Now, for the first time, the lofty reputation associated with Credlin is being questioned where it most matters – in the ranks of the Government itself. Her real worth to the Prime Minister is under close examination. After all, despite her vaulted influence, Abbott was left for more than four years pushing his universally unpopular Paid Parental Leave scheme. It was finally dumped when rejected by business, the electorate and his own Party. She argued with, not against, her boss against senior Ministers on the introduction of a six month initial ban on dole payments to the unemployed – a policy virtually guaranteed to get negative votes from every under -25 in the country and many others closer to the problem than are the comfortable Northern Sydney home environs of Abbott and his Treasurer Joe Hockey.

    Her reputed sharp political instincts failed to prevent his ludicrous decision to bestow a knighthood on Prince Phillip. In 18 months of Government she seems to have been unable to move the Prime Minister from his pathetic claims of achievement for his Government based on killing the Carbon Tax and the Mining Tax and stopping the boats. The last two of these accomplishments make no difference whatever to the everyday lives of any Australians.  On the Carbon Tax a more lively Opposition might pressure the PM to produce a single Australian family which has benefitted from Abbott’s promise of $11.00 a week once the tax was gone. This promised benefit is a theme Credlin allows him to continue although power bills nationwide show the $11.00 a week to be another Abbott fiction.

    Credlin, it seems, has also failed to appreciate that continued criticism of the previous Labor Government is neither some form of Government action – nor an excuse for inaction. At a time when polls are showing critical lows for both Abbott and his Government it is obvious this line is not working. Abbott badly needs something newer, something better. The electorate demands it and his parliamentary colleagues are joining in the push. But, between them, Abbott and his supposedly gifted lieutenant have been unable to produce anything to replace the whinge against Labor that he adopted from day one of his prime ministry. That theme, boringly overworked as it is, no longer works – look again at the polls.

    Given the dire poll position of both Abbott and Government and the growing threats to his leadership we would perhaps have expected to see Credlin at her best in the last couple of weeks. Tony and everybody else saw last week’s Press Club Address as an opportunity to suppress the growing dissatisfaction with his leadership and to reassure the country that he knew how to secure its future. But Abbott was provided with no inspiring message, no vision for the future, which might calm those now anxious about his leadership. Several times he told us Australia needed “a strong economy”. There was talk of “more jobs” but there was no outline whatever of how either of these might be achieved. There was much ”where to go” but no idea how to get there. Otherwise there was a jot of xenophobia and much more of the by now predictable overdose of criticism of his Labor predecessors.

    Is Credlin slow or is it Tony? Following his “near death experience” and promise to change and to listen, having refused requests (demands) for Peta’s dismissal, he must surely have employed his best resources on his road to recovery. But what have we seen? A continuation of his series of stumbles headed by a very unimpressive speech informing us of his narrow victory in which he included the very dubious assertion that there was no future threat to his leadership. This was followed by a stuff-up – bordering on deception – about the process to be followed in procuring Australia’s next submarine fleet when it is highly likely that in a matter of days it will be revealed that a Japanese submarine deal was a condition of the final signing of the Free Trade Agreement. Then he further isolated himself in his Party with the sacking of the insignificant but respected Philip Ruddock as the Chief Government Whip. Abbott claimed Ruddock had failed to inform him of the strength of back bench feeling about his leadership. No one wanted him removed. Credlin similarly failed to assess for Abbott the extent of the threat (doesn’t anyone in the PM’s supposedly efficient office read newspapers or watch TV)? Unlike with Ruddock there was a clamour for her removal. In what may prove another error of judgement, Ruddock went and Credlin stays. Then there was his inept disclosure in Parliament of evidence which would almost certainly be used in an upcoming terrorist trial. Then he put his popularity further at risk with an extraordinary attack on the internationally respected Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs.

    NOT A GREAT FIRST WEEK OF A REVITALISED PRIME MINISTER AND THE START OF “GOOD GOVERNMENT”.

    Under pressure, where is the evidence of the genius we have been told is running his office and where has this guidance taken the Prime Minister and his troubled Government in its first 18 months. We have a Prime Minister who, according to Newspoll, the poll most respected by both major parties, with a near record low approval rating of 24% and a record high disapproval rating of 68%. And what about the Government that Credlin and others have claimed she influences. The same respected poll has it trailing a rather colourless Opposition 57% to 43% – landslide territory – with a Primary vote at a Rudd-like level of 35%.

    If Peta Credlin, with her reputed influence and control of both PM and Government generally, has contributed in any way to the dire position in which both PM and Party find themselves, calls for her replacement can hardly be seen as unreasonable. If, on the other hand, she, is advising otherwise and being ignored, one can only wonder at the lofty reputation of control and influence and there would appear to be little reason for the PM not to appease his critical backbench by allowing her to go.

    But Abbott, in the old schoolboy marbles term, has chosen to “stick fats” with Credlin. Are we seeing yet another example of the Prime Minister’s poor political judgement?

    Warwick Elsche is Pearls and Irritations’ Canberra correspondent.

  • The Forgotten Children.

     

  • Jill White. Nurse Led Clinics for NSW.

    Luke Foley – great!

    Congratulations on committing to nurse led clinics as part of to a primary health care strategy to increase access to community based health care. The four nurse led clinics promised last week are a welcome adjunct to the current but often overstretched GP services.

    The ACT has led the way in nurse led clinics with the first, based in an emergency department, being evaluated as providing high quality safe and appropriate care; however where there was also easy access to medical care there was the risk of over-servicing lessening the cost effectiveness.  So with lesson learned the two new ACT services are in underserviced areas and are providing high quality care to a population which otherwise would have had difficulty in quick and affordable access to health care. Information on these services is available through ACT Health. It is a success story, ask the people of Belconnen and Tuggeranong.

    Our current NSW Minister for Health, Jillian Skinner, also has a public track record of commitment to improving community based services. So come on Jillian, match this promise and let’s not let party politics and election posturing get in the way of a really good idea for the health of the public.

    The past few weeks has clearly demonstrated that we are heartily sick of party based oppositional politics and if NSW does not want to risk going down the same path as Queensland or suffering the public disenchantment experienced by the Prime Minister this is the moment and this is the issue to demonstrate that the health of the public is a genuine bipartisan concern and that this is an excellent strategy. Let’s make these clinics a reality irrespective of any election and have a public commitment from both sides of politics NOW.

    I can’t let this topic go however without addressing Saxon Smith’s comment on behalf of the AMA in the SMH yesterday. He is quoted as saying “There is actually evidence suggesting nurse-led clinics can make the quality of the care worse”. What research? Conducted how and where and published in what peer reviewed journal? It is a glib and easy thing to say but where is the evidence? How does it stack up against the 20 years of rigorous, published, Australian based research which clearly demonstrates the safety and quality of the work of Nurse Practitioners?

    It’s always worth reminding ourselves  that the AMA is not only a professional body but it is also the doctor’s union and protecting income and turf is its job. We have 25 years of documented AMA opposition and scare tactics about nurses being able to work to their full scope of practice and making a broader contribution to community health.

    The vast majority of doctors in practice with whom I speak fully support an extension of the role of nurses in primary health care/ community care. They particularly understand the need to provide better access to underserved communities. This is work nurses want to do, are educated to do, and have the skills to do. Luke and Jillian please bring it on, make the commitment and don’t let better healthcare become a political football.

    Jill White was formerly the Dean of the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at Sydney University. 

  • Marie Coleman. Human Rights Commission and the forgotten children.

    In February 2015 the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse found that Cardinal George Pell, the former Archbishop of Sydney, had placed the church’s financial interests above his obligation to a victim of childhood sexual abuse.

    In February 2015 the Prime Minister of Australia, supported by his Ministers, has launched a blistering attack on a distinguished legal scholar and President of the independent statutory Australian Rights Commission, for a report which has found that both the Labor and Coalition Governments have failed to protect children in mandatory detention from abuse and mental and physical harm.

    Professor Gillian Triggs has found that Australia has been and remains in breach of its international obligations- under both parties. Among other straightforward and completely nonpartisan recommendations she has recommended that “An independent guardian be appointed for unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Australia” rather than the current position of the Minister for Immigration being both the guardian of such children, and the Minister responsible for their mandatory detention.

    The Royal Commission has been investigating historic instances of abuse, exploring the approaches which institutions responsible for such abuse have responded to reports of individual cases, as well as options for reparations.

    The thrust of the AHRC Report, The Forgotten Children, is to explore and document what have been the outcomes for children placed in mandatory detention, and to develop future policies and legislation which will prevent such dreadful outcomes ever again being visited on children.

    The Minister for Immigration, Peter Dutton MP, has asserted that the AHRC Report is irrelevant because any instances of maltreatment of children have been historical. The second leg of the Government’s response to the AHRC report seems to be that because Labor did it, then the Coalition’s actions, if harm has been done, are justifiable.

    The Opposition has essentially mumbled.

    The unpalatable situation is that neither Labor nor the Coalition has any way to escape from the fact that one outcome of their policies on immigration and refugees (stopping the boats) has been to put children through hell, and put Australia in breach of its obligations under international law.

    No equivocations about whether for an adolescent girl to go mad and cut herself on Nauru is better than drowning at sea, no claiming that this wouldn’t have happened if the Coalition had allowed Labor to send refugees to Malaysia, will alter the fact that neither Labor nor the Coalition has been able to articulate an acceptable , transparent and  legal method of dealing with the inevitable pressures from populations moving from political anarchy, oppression, assassinations and starvation in home countries.

    The cost of current off shore detention of refugees in 2014-15 was estimated by an Immigration Department official as $1 billion. Running the detention centre on Manus Island has cost taxpayers $632.3 million, and the operational cost of Nauru was $582.4 million, a Senate estimates hearing was told. That’s a billion dollars a year for the foreseeable future…without giving thought to the ultimate health costs for the treatment of health and psychological damages to the refugees. It doesn’t include other costs such as the role of the Australian Navy and Customs in ‘on water’ activities.

    Surely it isn’t beyond the capacity of this nation’s leaders to develop alternative strategies?

    Former NSW Premier Nick Greiner described as “awful” the fact that Australia was the only nation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that indefinitely detained children in mandatory detention.

    “The principle that Australia … finds it necessary to be virtually the only civilised nation that does this, I think is just abhorrent,” he said….”we now ought to look at the humanity of what we do”, he said.

    Last month NSW Premier Baird called on Mr Abbott, a close friend, to do more to accept refugees. Asked if children should be released from immigration detention, Mr Baird said “that’s something I’ve supported for a long time”.

    In an interview with 3AW, Mr Abbott said the commission should be ashamed of itself and that its report was a “blatantly partisan” and political exercise.

    He said the commission should acknowledge the government for stopping the flow of asylum seeker boats and dramatically reducing the number of children in detention.

    “I reckon the human rights commission ought to be sending a note of congratulations to Scott Morrison saying well done, mate,” Mr Abbott said, referring to the former immigration minister.

    Asked if he felt any guilt about the remaining 200 children still in detention, Mr Abbott was blunt: “None whatsoever.”

    “The most compassionate thing you can do is stop the boats,” he said.

    He said the only way to ensure there were no children in detention was to ensure there were no boats arriving.

    Numbers of children in immigration detention peaked at nearly 2000 in mid-2013 under Labor. There are now only about 200 children still detained.

    The Australian Human Rights Commission report wants actions taken to prevent such a situation ever developing again.

    “The human rights commission ought to be ashamed of itself,” Mr Abbott said, when asked about the report.

    So that’s all right. The Prime Minister thinks his policy is tops. A great policy in fact.

    As the distinguished PUP Senator for Queensland, Glenn Lazarus might put it ‘you can polish a turd, but it’s still a turd’.

    Marie Coleman AO PSM is a former senior Commonwealth Public Servant with a background in social policy.

  • Climate change – If only!

    Last Saturday David Cameron, the British PM, Nick Clegg, the Deputy PM and Leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Ed Milliband, Leader of the British Labour Party, signed a joint pledge on climate change.

    The three leaders agreed on three particular pledges

    • ‘To seek a fair, strong, legally binding, global climate deal which limits temperature rises to below 2 degrees centigrade.’
    • ‘To work together, across party lines to agree carbon budgets’
    • ‘To accelerate the transition to a competitive, energy efficient low carbon economy and to end the use of unabated coal for power generation.’

    If only Tony Abbott, Bill Shorten, Christine Milne and Clive Palmer could come to a similar deal!

    I have not seen this reported in any Australian mainstream media.

    For more information on this encouraging deal in the UK see link to the Guardian below.

    http://gu.com/p/45ng5/sbl

  • Don’t arm Ukraine.

    In July last year, Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop were eager to commit Australian police and Australian troops to Ukraine in the aftermath of the shooting down of MH17 by Russian separatists. Their plan didn’t work out as they hoped.

    I have carried blogs by Richard Butler and Cavan Hogue about the geopolitical risks of NATO and the West expanding to the border of Russia.

    As the war in Ukraine is now escalating, there have been increasing calls within the US for the arming of the Ukraine. John Mearsheimer in the New York Times of February 8 presents a compelling case for not arming Ukraine. He urges that the best outcome would be a neutral Ukraine. For NY Times article see link below.  John Menadue

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/dont-arm-ukraine.html?_r=0

  • Peter Day. The Lucky Country

    Beneath our radiant Southern Cross,

     We’ll toil with hearts and hands
    To make this Commonwealth of ours
    Renowned of all the lands.
    For those who’ve come across the seas,
    We’ve boundless plains to share.

    With courage let us all combine
    To advance Australia fair.     

                  (Our National Anthem, Verse 2)

    The nature of politics these past few years, especially that practiced by the two main parties, reminds one of a bitter marriage struggle – one destined for the courts. So consumed have ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ been by their anger, by their need for revenge, and by their need to win at all costs, they’ve forgotten the ‘children’.

    This toxic process, and breakdown of civility, leaves little room for those who cannot compete. So the children get pushed aside as the bickering gets louder, as pettiness replaces depth, and as power and fear leave love and compassion in their wake.

    This appears particularly pertinent in regard to those seeking asylum – especially children. Too often their voices are drowned-out by the self-centered tantrums and fear-mongering of our political parents.

    Such leadership is disappointing because it undermines sensible and reasoned public discourse. We become wedged by emotive opposites: It’s left versus right, bleeding hearts v cold hearts, queue-jumpers versus the desperate, “stop the boats” v ”let them come”.

    Beneath this canopy of emotion and fear, people tend to become more tribal than usual – more susceptible to propaganda as well. Thus, when we are told that our borders and lifestyle are threatened; our natural response is to build a wall to keep the ‘enemy’ out. Before we know it, we find ourselves living in a sort of gated community: one that covets security, prosperity and the status quo.  And anyone who threatens this way of life, “this tribe of mine”, is either refused entry or banished. 

    A Parable

        There was a Lucky Country that enjoyed freedom and prosperity, and lived in luxury every day.  At its doorstep arrived a fearful beggar; hungry and frightened after a long journey; covered with sores, and longing to eat what fell from the Lucky Country’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

        The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The Lucky Country also lost its life and was buried.

        In its torment, it looked up and saw Abraham far away with the beggar by his side. The Lucky Country called out to Abraham, ‘Father, have pity on me and send the beggar to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this torment.’

        But Abraham replied, ‘Remember, in your lifetime you received many good things: freedom, prosperity, comfort; while this poor beggar received bad things: political oppression, poverty, abandonment. Now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 

        ‘And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

        The Lucky Country answered, ‘Then I beg you, Abraham, send the beggar to my family, for I have 22 million brothers and sisters. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

        Abraham replied, ‘They hear the stories, they hear the cries, they even hear the Word; let them listen to these.’

        ‘No, father Abraham,’ said the Lucky Country, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will change their minds and hearts.’

        Abraham said to the Lucky Country, ‘If they do not listen to all that is before them, they will not be convinced even if their Christ, who has Risen from the dead, speaks to them.’

    (Adapted from Luke 16:19-31)

    Of course, as a nation, we cannot simply say, “Everyone welcome, no matter what.” We do need an orderly migration process. We do have a moral responsibility to bankrupt the people-smuggling trade. We do need to make some tough calls. But we also need to ensure that the response to the ‘Lazaruses’ at our feet is not shaped by silly slogans and a kind of small-minded nationalism.

    And, while some have tried, none of us is in a position to take the moral high ground either. This is too complex an issue to be hijacked by the self-righteous.

    We are mostly a generous nation. We are mostly a fair nation. We are a Lucky nation. It behoves us, then, to reflect deeply, and humbly, about our obligations to the ‘beggars’ at our feet.

    It prompts the question: Can I forgo a little personal comfort in order to comfort someone else?

    Fr Peter Day is the Parish Priest, Corpus Christi, Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn.

     

  • Mercy, judgement, confession and reconciliation.

    In the Australian Parliament debate concerning possible executions in Bali, Shadow Foreign Minister, Tanya Plibersek, spoke about the second chance that her husband had received. Her husband, Michael Coutts-Trotter, is now a senior NSW public servant. He had been a drug dealer in the early 1980s. Tany Plibersek commented ‘I imagine what would have happened if he had been caught in Thailand instead of Australia where the crime was committeed.  … What would the world have missed out on? They would have missed out on the three most beautiful children we had together. They would have missed out on a man that spent the rest of his life making amends for the crime that he committed. ‘  Her husband commented, ‘I was afforded a second chance by our Australian justice system. I remain grateful for that every day.’

    In the US there has also been discussion about mistakes and recovery. The NBC News anchor Brian Williams stepped down from his post after he admitted that he had exaggerated a story from his coverage of the Iraq invasion.

    David Brooks, in the NY Times – see link below – has written what I sense is one of the most insightful articles about mercy, judgement, confession and reconciliation. Christians and particularly Catholics speak a lot about confession and reconciliation. But David Brooks in his article The Act of Rigorous Forgiving gives the best account that I can remember on this delicate but critical subject. David Brooks is not a Christian. He is Jewish.  John Menadue

    http://nyti.ms/1IJuwHo

  • Melanie Noden. The Forgotten Children.

    Earlier this week, a damning report by the Australian Human Rights Commission into children in detention was tabled, alleging extensive human rights violations. The Report clearly spells out the negative physical and psychological impact that policies of indefinite detention have on children and brings to light the concerns that many people already have about the treatment of asylum seeker children in Australia’s care.

    The Report recommends that a royal commission needs to be established to  examine the breach of the Commonwealth’s duty of care, focussing in particular on the use of force against children in detention, and allegations of sexual assault.

    Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission said,“It is troubling that members of the Government and Parliament and Departmental officials are either uninformed, or choose to ignore, the human rights treaties to which Australia is a party”.  

    The Report was issued after 1,129 children in detention were interviewed. It shows there were 233 recorded assaults involving children and 33 incidents of reported sexual assaults.

    The Report alleges human rights violations and says that children being detained indefinitely on Nauru are “suffering from extreme levels of physical, emotional, psychological and developmental distress“.

    Recommendations of the report are as follows:

    • all children to be released from Australian mainland detention and from detention centres on Nauru
    • laws be introduced to make sure children are not detained beyond health, identity and security checks
    • laws be introduced to give effect to the Convention on the Rights of the Child
    • No child to be sent offshore for processing unless it is clear that their human rights will be respected
    • An independent guardian be appointed for unaccompanied children on Christmas Island

    It is Gillian Triggs’ hope that the Report will, “…prompt fair-minded Australians, Members of Parliament and the Federal Government to reconsider our asylum seeker policies and to release all children and their families immediately”

    She also stated that, “It is imperative that Australian governments never again use the lives of children to achieve political or strategic advantage. The aims of stopping people smugglers and deaths at sea do not justify the cruel and illegal means adopted. Australia is better than this.”

    I and my colleagues in the sector welcome the recommendation to establish a royal commission to investigate what has been happening behind the closed gates of the detention centres to ensure clear parameters are established for future policy.

    To this effect, The Asylum Seekers Centre has joined the Refugee Council of Australia and other agencies in signing a joint statement calling for legislative change to ensure that children are not subject to immigration detention in the future.

    Melanie Noden is the CEO of the Asylum Seekers Centre, Sydney.

    The report can be found here:https://humanrights.gov.au/publications/forgotten-children-national-inquiry-children-immigration-detention-2014