John Menadue

  • Tony Doherty. Remaining balanced in times of tragedy and turmoil.

    Our ability to hang on to sanity and some sense of equilibrium this week has been sorely tested. In the face of scarcely imaginable acts of violence – right in the city’s heart, Martin Place, the balance of our emotional lives could be endangered. The press sifts through the many and various reactions – casual bystanders, politicians, radio commentators, the police. Everyone feels impelled to respond in their own way. A young woman on a suburban train declares her solidarity with Muslims (#illridewithyou) too scared to ride on public transport. Her twitter message goes viral.

    Recently when thinking about our personal responses to recent tragic events, such as the death of Philip Hughes. Martin Place, the Pakistan massacre, I came across a distinction which I found interesting and not a little helpful for a priest frequently called to face sudden tragedy. The distinction described three very different ways to sense another person’s feelings. Three kinds of empathy.  (Daniel Goleman. Dgadmin)

    The first is ‘cognitive empathy’ – imagining how another person feels and what they may be feeling. Trying to conjure up what it would be like going through a 17-hour hostage situation, held captive by a deranged man with a gun. Placing yourself in their shoes, in your mind, at least.  This is a fairly intellectual exercise of fellow-feeling. Crisis professionals, when faced with day-by-day trauma, sometimes, but not always, protect their balance in this way. They form a protective shell around their emotions simply to allow them to operate effectively.

    Then there is ‘emotional empathy’ – when you feel deeply along with the other person, as though such emotions were contagious. This form of empathy leaves a feeling of being drawn into another person’s inner emotional world, as a parent is in touch with their own child. One downside of such emotional empathy occurs when a person lacks the ability to manage their own emotional distress limiting the proper care that can be offered to the one suffering. It becomes a tightrope between appropriate detachment and excessively emotional involvement or, on the contrary, turning your back and searching for some form of mindless distraction.

    But there is another level of empathy – ‘compassionate empathy’, when we not only understand another’s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed. Simply speaking to do something. Genuine compassionate empathy occurs when one doesn’t allow emotional empathy to overwhelm and paralyse, but frees a person up to act and do something.

    The most homely example is what we face when someone dies.  We recognize quiet rationally the grief experienced by the death and loss. We can be drawn into that grief in a very personal way. But we can act to support the grieving person – say by bringing a casserole. The gift of food is traditionally a powerful expression of compassionate empathy. The Eucharist reminds us food is also a powerful symbol of hope – an anchor for our spirit.

    Finding the appropriate way to act in response to the Martin Place tragedy could be a vital step towards a saner and more balanced life and a more human future for us all.

    Is there any wonder that the simple act of accompanying a young frightened woman on a train struck a universal nerve?

     Tony Doherty is the Parish Priest at St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Rose Bay.  

  • Hazel Moir and Deborah Gleeson. Evergreening and how big pharma keeps drug prices high.

    Efforts by pharmaceutical companies to extend their patents cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year. In some cases they also mean people are subjected to unnecessary clinical trials.

    Big pharma makes big profits. Their useful new drugs are patented, protecting them from competition and allowing them to charge high prices. When the patent ends, other companies are allowed to supply the previously patented drug. These are known as generics. The prices of generic drugs are much lower than the prices of in-patent drugs – it has been suggested that for widely used drugs price falls can be as much as 95%.

    Pharmaceutical companies want to get their new products listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), because they will sell in much higher volumes. Taxpayers have an interest in ensuring that these drugs move from the high in-patent price to the much lower off-patent price as early as possible.

    On average, a patent provides effective protection from competition for about 14 years. But, of course, companies like monopolies and would like to extend the patent period. Over the past few decades they have used a process known as evergreening to keep generic companies out of the market for longer.

    How evergreening works

    Evergreening is achieved by seeking extra patents on variations of the original drug – new forms of release, new dosages, new combinations or variations, or new forms. Big pharma refers to this as “lifecycle management”. Even if the patent is dubious, the company can earn more from the higher prices than it pays in legal fees to keep the dubious patent alive.

    Evergreening is possible because in Australia the standard required to get a patent is very low. Different methods of delivering drugs (such as extended release, for example) have been known for decades. But when one of these known delivery methods is combined with a known drug, the patent office considers this sufficiently inventive to grant a new 20-year patent. Another favourite evergreening strategy is to patent a slight variation of the drug.

    Brand pharmaceutical companies argue that these “lifecycle management” patents provide improved health outcomes to the community. They meet the (very low) patentability thresholds of novelty and inventiveness. Critics argue that the claimed improved health outcomes are small or non-existent.

    An evergreening story: from Efexor to Efexor-XR to Pristiq

    An example is useful. In the case of the depression drug venlafaxine (marketed as Efexor), the original version had major side-effects. However, when provided in extended release form these side-effects were substantially reduced.

    Naturally the extended release form (Efexor-XR) became preferred. Although it might seem obvious to combine venlafaxine with an extended release form to overcome the side-effect problem, the patent office granted two new patents for extended release versions of venlafaxine.

    One of these was written in such a broad form that it delayed generic entry by two and a half years, while legal wrangling took place. Eventually the evergreening patent was declared invalid. But the cost to taxpayers of this delay is estimated at $209 million.

    Pfizer has a second evergreening strategy for venlafaxine. When venlafaxine is taken, the human body converts it to desvenlafaxine. In other words desvenlafaxine is a variant of the original active pharmaceutical ingredient venlafaxine. Clearly the two compounds are closely related. So it is astonishing that desvenlafaxine passed the tests for getting a patent.

    Desvenlafaxine is marketed as Pristiq. Pristiq entered the market early in the two-and-a-half-year period of legal wrangling over the extended release venlafaxine (Efexor-XR) patent. Pfizer’s marketing of Pristiq in February 2009 was so lavish that it attracted the attention of investigative journalists.

    Pristiq has no additional benefits for patients. Despite this, during the first six months of 2014 half of prescriptions were written for Pristiq rather than for the clinically identical Efexor-XR.

    But Pristiq costs between $A22.32 and $A26.50 more than Efexor-XR, depending on the dose. Based on reported prescription volumes in 2013-14, the cost to the taxpayer of doctors prescribing Pristiq rather than Efexor-XR exceeds $21 million a year.

    Unless generic companies challenge the desvenlafaxine patent, there will be no generic versions of Pristiq until after August 2023, when the patent expires.

    Would you like a placebo with that?

    When such minor variations in drugs are patented and marketed, there are also ethical considerations. Pfizer had to undertake clinical trials to obtain marketing approval for Pristiq. These involved blind comparisons with placebos. Thousands of seriously depressed patients involved in these trials received placebos for no good reason, since the chemical compound was identical with the action of venlafaxine in the body.

    Marketing of Pristiq clearly offers few benefits to the public. It does, however, offer Pfizer the benefit of extracting additional income whenever a doctor prescribes Pristiq. Many patients suffering severe depression were subjected to a placebo in order for Pfizer to undertake the clinical trials needed to obtain marketing approval for Pristiq. There seems to be no system for protecting patients from clinical trials undertaken only to support drugs based on evergreening patents.

    Evergreening entails large-scale economic and social costs for Australians. Reform of our patent laws to prevent evergreening is long overdue. This should be a priority for any government interested in reducing unnecessary costs to the health system.

    But instead, the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement talks expected to take place in Beijing this weekend could reinforce these problems and make reform of the patent system more difficult.

    Hazel Moir is Adjunct Associate Professor, economics of patents, copyright and other “IP” at Australian National University.  Deb orah Gleeson is Lecturer in Public Health at La Trobe University. This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 6 November 2014.

  • Hazel Moir, How trade agreements are locking in a broken patent system.

    Ten years on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is entering another round of negotiations towards the new and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this Free Trade Scorecard series, we review Australian trade policy over the years and where we stand today on the brink of a number of significant new trade deals.

    Australia has long had low requirements for obtaining patents. Some of these low standards were “locked in” in the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. This made reform to the system difficult but not impossible.

    The same cannot be said of the proposals in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement(TPPA). If implemented, they will ensure no future Australian government can improve the patent system without violating the TPPA obligations. They also reinforce the current problems within Australia’s patent system.

    It is so easy to get a patent

    Patents are no longer just for scientists and engineers doing leading-edge research. They are not limited to technology or science. They don’t even have to be inventive – at least in the ordinary meaning of the word.

    Australia’s patent standards are incredibly low. In 2003, we even granted a patent for a method of teaching children about finance by having them work for their pocket money. The “invention” had lots of different parts such as learning about credit cards by getting next week’s pocket money early. This is actually the best way to get a patent in Australia – combine two known things or processes and as long as no one has written them down together, you can get a patent on it. If it has been written down, all that is needed is a third known process!

    The gradual watering down of patent standards over recent decades has led to an explosion in the number of patents being granted in Australia. In 1984 the number awarded was 7,044, in 2013 this had grown to 17,112.

    This has significant implications for pharmaceuticals and it has led to higher costs for consumers and taxpayers. For example, if a known medicinal compound is combined with a known method of release (such as extended release) then an extra patent is granted. A patent for extended release venlafaxine (brand name Efexor®) kept generic competition off the market for two and a half years, costing taxpayers over A$200m.

    The TPPA also reinforces the current flawed approach to granting patents. Hidden in footnote 54 to draft article QQ.E.1, it says patents should be granted when “the claimed invention would have been obvious to a person skilled or having ordinary skill in the art having regard to the prior art”. This means that it is inventive enough for a patent unless it is obvious to an unimaginative person working in a very narrowly circumscribed field.

    However there is a big difference between being inventive and not being obvious – just like there is a big difference between being beautiful and not being ugly.

    What else does the TPPA do to our patent system?

    As well as cementing this extraordinarily low standard for granting patents, the TPPA plans to broaden the extensive privileges already granted to patent owners.

    Existing privileges prevent Australian-based companies from making and exporting a drug to a country where it is out-of-patent if the patent is still valid in Australia. This is silly and costs Australia significant export earnings.

    The TPPA plans to go further by limiting the grounds on which patents can be revoked or cancelled. Pharmaceutical patents will be longer in some countries. Data exclusivity provisions will be wider and stronger, and may reinforce the market exclusivity of some drugs.

    What are the penalties for getting the patent system wrong?

    There are very few for patent owners. If your patent is challenged and revoked, then only the profits made since the legal challenge need to be repaid.

    Yet those who infringe a patent may be fined and may have to exit a particular line of business or develop less efficient means of production.

    The TPPA will make it more difficult to challenge a patent. It proposes a presumption of patent validity (Article QQ.H.2.3), which directly contradicts Australia’s current laws. Many scholars in the United States consider this presumption as one of the worst features of the increasingly broken US patent system.

    Why should we care about the TPPA?

    First, it is undemocratic for one government to tie the hands of all future elected governments. The IP chapter of the TPPA is heavy-handed regulation. It specifies in detail many aspects of patent policy which are currently subject only to parliamentary control. It will make domestic reform hard if not impossible.

    Second, cementing low standards for patent requirements will mean we can do little to control the cost of health care. Australian taxpayers will continue to pay a lot more for pharmaceuticals.

    Third, there is some – albeit tenuous – link between patents and innovation. All court cases on patent infringement involve an innovating company being sued. So only our innovating companies pay for our broken patent system. As only 25% of Australian innovating firms take out patents, it is the other 75% who pay the price of a bad system. Innovation is too important for our future to get it wrong.

    And for what? Just how much extra milk or beef exports will we get in the TPPA? Adopting the TPPA is rather short-sighted when we consider the future economic strength of Australia lies in the knowledge industries.

    This article draws on research prepared for the 2014 Workshop “Ten Years since the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement: Where to for Australia’s Trade Policy?” Sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW Australia

    Hazel Moir is Adjunct Associate Professor, economics of patents, copyright and other “IP” at Australian National University. This article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 20 October 2014.

  • Antony Ting. Australia eyes missing billions with very own ‘Google tax’.

    Joe Hockey has hinted he may introduce a “Google tax” as a new weapon to tackle profit shifting by multinational enterprises. The Treasurer’s suggestion is not only political as a counter to aggressive tax avoidance by multinationals, but also suggests the government may not have full confidence in a successful outcome of the G20/OECD work on base erosion profit shifting (BEPS).

    The suggestion of a “Google tax” in Australia appears to be a coordinated action with the UK. Last week, the UK Treasury announced the introduction of a “Diverted Profits Tax” (commonly dubbed the Google tax). The tax will be imposed on profits artificially shifted from the UK at a rate of 25% from 1 April 2015. The tax is expected to generate more than £1 billion over the next five years.

    Details of the Australian tax are yet to be delivered, but it’s likely to work as follows, using Apple’s tax structure as an example. Apple has successfully sheltered US$44 billion in Ireland for four years, and that amount has never been taxed anywhere in the world. The US$44 billion represents the profits shifted from Apple’s sales in many countries, including Australia.

    If Australia had a Google tax, the ATO would impose 30% tax on a portion of the US$44 billion that represented the profits derived from sales in Australia.

    Will it work?

    The proposal, if properly designed, should be a powerful weapon for two reasons. First, it provides the much-needed legal basis for the ATO to impose tax on profits shifted from Australia to “taxpayer-friendly” countries such as Ireland. At present, even though the ATO is aware of the US$44 billion sitting in Ireland, the existing international tax regime does not empower the ATO to lay its hands on the profits.

    Second, a Google tax would be a unilateral action. Its introduction does not require international consensus and Australia does not have to wait for that to happen before taking action on profit shifting by multinationals.

    The G20 and OECD have been working very hard in an attempt to achieve consensus on measures to address the issues of BEPS. However, one major player may not support the project wholeheartedly. The US has been knowingly facilitating avoidance by its multinationals of foreign income taxes through its own tax system. To make matters worse, its participation in the G20/OECD BEPS Project has been described by a prominent US tax commentator as “a polite pretence of participation with quiet undermining”.

    International consensus is the ideal course of action to comprehensively resolve the issues of BEPS. However, without full support from the US, it is doubtful the project will be able to achieve meaningful measures to curb tax avoidance by multinationals. Therefore, unilateral actions may be the pragmatic response of other countries like Australia to protect their tax bases.

    Not so fast…

    The proposal will face a number of challenges. First, the tax would apply only if a multinational has shifted profits from Australia under a tax avoidance structure. This raises the question: what is a tax avoidance structure?

    Apple’s example is clear-cut. As the US$44 billion has never been taxed anywhere in the world, it will be difficult for Apple to argue it is not engaged in a tax avoidance structure.

    However, what about profits shifted to a country where the tax rate is 10%? This is one of the technical issues policymakers will have to address.

    Second, the ATO will have to find a way to determine the amount of profit shifted from Australia. Going back to the Apple example, how should the ATO estimate how much profit out of the US$44 billion booked in Ireland should be subject to the Google tax? This issue may be difficult and controversial, but should be manageable.

    The third and possibly most formidable obstacle to the introduction of a Google tax is that multinationals are likely to offer significant resistance to its introduction. They can be expected to apply intense political pressure, lobbying against this proposal.

    A common argument by multinationals is that unilateral action by a country will scare businesses away. This may or may not be a concern, depending on the types of businesses of multinationals.

    One important factor that policymakers should remember is that the location of customers is not mobile. Apple can generate A$600 sales income only if it sells an iPad to a customer in Australia. It is highly unlikely, and does not make any commercial sense, that Apple would give up the Australian market because it does not want to pay 30% tax on sales profits.

    Antony Ting is Senior Lecturer of Taxation Law at university of Sydney. This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’ on 9 December 2014.

  • Helena Britt. General Practice and value for money.

    Last year taxpayers spent A$6.3 billion on GP services through Medicare, about 6% of the total government health expenditure. This was a 50% increase (A$2.1 billion) in today’s dollars over the past decade and equates to about A$60 more per person in real terms.

    Health Minister Peter Dutton says this growth is “unsustainable”. He plans to introduce a GP co-payment in hope of reducing the number of times Australians visit a GP and to ensure users foot some of the bill.

    But targeting primary care for cost savings could backfire. Research we’re releasing todayshows that while the number of GP visits has increased, the services are cost-effective. If the same services were performed in other areas of the health system, they would cost considerably more.

    Under pressure

    Unsustainable or not, Australia’s health-care system faces a number of challenges, most notably from the rising prevalence of chronic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. This is due to three major factors.

    1. Australia has an ageing population as our world-class health system keeps us alive longer.
    2. In response to government encouragement through Medicare initiatives, GPs are diagnosing disease earlier and providing preventive interventions for health risk factors and diseases such as hypertension, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.
    3. An increasing proportion of Australians are overweight or obese, putting them at risk for chronic conditions.

    Earlier diagnosis means people are living longer with diagnosed disease. The result is exponential growth in required care over their lifetime.

    The search for more cost-effective health care for our population should be applauded. But reducing spending on GP services is not the answer.

    What do we get?

    Our team has been studying general practice activity for over 16 years through the Bettering the Evaluation and Care of Health (BEACH) program. This cross-sectional encounter-based study uses changing random samples of about 1,000 GPs per year, each of whom contribute details of 100 encounters with consenting patients. This provides a representative sample of about 100,000 encounters per year from across the country.

    Results from one of the BEACH books, released today, shed some light on what we got for the $2.1 billion of extra Medicare spending on general practice. In 2013-14 there were 35 million more GP services than ten years earlier, a 36% increase. This included 17 million more attendances by patients aged 65 years and over (a 67% increase).

    Length of GP consultations recorded through BEACH suggest that the average consultation now takes almost one minute more than a decade ago. The result is that GPs spend an extra ten million clinical hours with their patients, a 43% increase.

    The number of problems managed at these consultations has also significantly increased. GPs managed an additional 68 million health problems at these encounters (an increase of 48%), including 24 million more chronic problems.

    Management of these problems involved an additional ten million procedures (a 66% increase) and 12 million clinical treatments, such as counselling, advice and education, than a decade ago.

     

    Clearly, increases in the amount and complexity of GP clinical work are reflected in additional Medicare expenditure. If other medical specialists and/or emergency departments had provided these extra services, they would have cost far more.

    The average cost of a GP visit was A$47 from Medicare, plus a A$5 patient contribution. For a private specialist, the average visit costs Medicare A$82 plus a A$38 patient fee.

    A visit to the emergency department, which is paid by state and territory governments, costs far more. In Western Australia, for example, an emergency department visit in 2011-12 cost A$599 on average.

    More, not less primary care

    International research has repeatedly concluded that investment in primary care is the most cost-effective way to provide population health care. As GP services are far cheaper than other types of medical services, discouraging GP visits by introducing a standard co-payment for most patients would increase costs to governments, now and later.

    It may seem counter-intuitive, but one effective way to contain the cost of Australia’s health care would be to expand the use of GP services.

    One issue not acknowledged in the discussion about health costs is the increasing number of patients with multiple chronic conditions. These patients use more resources and are more likely to have fragmented care due to the number of health professionals involved. GPs play the central role in co-ordinating the management of patients with multiple chronic conditions, reducing costly hospitalisations.

    As the age of government-supported retirement increases, many Australians will have to work until they are 70. This highlights the importance of promoting good health across the lifespan, through a strong focus on primary and secondary prevention and co-ordinated management of chronic conditions.

    In any one year 85% of us visit a GP, but only about 15% of us are admitted to hospital, where a far greater proportion of health funds is spent. GPs supply the bulk of care to the population, so general practice is where our investment should be.

    If we want to strengthen our health-care system and ensure its sustainability into the future, it makes sense to encourage people to use its cheapest and most efficient arm: general practice.

     In addition to Helena Britt, other contributors to this article were:  Christopher Harrison, Clare Bayram, Graeme Miller, Joan Henderson and Julie Gordon. The Article first appeared in ‘The Conversation’ on 11 November 2014.

     

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Japanese election.

    Four more years of…

    Oh, by the way, Japan is having a national election on Sunday. Has anyone told the Japanese?

    Some are calling it the “Seinfeld election”––the election about nothing. Which probably suits Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who called it two years early, with no apparent justification. Others have cynically observed that some in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) reckon a disillusioned electorate is easier to govern.

    After 10 December, when Japan’s new Designated Secrets Law came into effect––locking up “sensitive” information for 60 years and threatening to lock up any leaking public servant for 10 years (and 5 years for any journalist who encourages a leak)––“disillusioned” took a giant backward step towards “uninformed”.

    Just for good measure, the LDP sent out letters to the country’s main media organisations, as the campaign got underway, demanding “fair” election coverage––by which it meant they should not give emphasis to any one person or any one issue. Yes, this was always meant to be an election about nothing.

    So is there nothing about which Japanese should be anxious, should be demanding answers? What about the fact that after two years of “Abenomics”, that wonder cure, the economy is now in recession? What about the moves to bring nuclear power reactors back on-line, when 70 percent of the population opposes the use of nuclear energy? What about the further planned increase in the defence budget, the third year in a row, at a time of massive budget deficits? What about the failure of the leadership to make significant progress in repairing Japan’s dire relations with China and South Korea? What about the corrosive effects of the widespread apathy eating up the Japanese electorate?

    Take one issue: nuclear power. A large stab of Japan, around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power plants, remains  uninhabitable because of the disaster nearly four years ago. Mothers across the land have to worry daily about sourcing food for their children, which they hope will not be contaminated. The enormous costs of the radiation clean up silently mount up for future generations to pay; and the piles of contaminated soil and rubbish fester away in a thousand forgotten corners. And yet, in 60 speeches during this election campaign, Prime Minister Abe has not once directly mentioned––nor been required to mention––the nuclear issue.

    The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (the ruling party when the Fukushima disaster occurred) has likewise passed over the issue because it relies on support from unions whose membership embraces the electric power industry.

    Many commentators believe that Shinzo Abe called the election now because conditions in Japan are likely to get worse next year. According to the latest data, real wages in the September quarter fell by 3% compared with a year ago. The gross domestic product (GDP) has contracted in the past two quarters––despite the biggest monetary and fiscal stimulus ever.

    So, how is the ruling party likely to fare in this unpromising climate? If opinion polls can be trusted, the LDP and its coalition partner, the New Komeito, will actually increase their hold on power by winning more than two-thirds of the lower house seats in the Diet. Come again? Yes, on the back of a depressingly low voter turnout, Mr Abe will convert the policy vacuum into a fresh, unassailable mandate.

    How will he use this mandate? On past performance, he will demand even greater loyalty and co-operation from his party and from Japan’s mass media; he will intimidate opponents, now armed with tough new laws, such as the Secrecy Act; he will press on with an economic program that so far has produced, even by the most generous measures, meagre results.

    The Prime Minister says he needed to call a fresh election to get the public’s approval for his economic policies, specifically a decision to postpone the next scheduled consumption tax increase. This always sounded like a lame excuse.

    Mr Abe has spoken often about the need for broad-ranging reform, including lowering the corporate tax rate, opening up the labour market to foreign workers, expanding childcare to encourage more women into the workforce and liberalizing the agricultural sector. Holding an election puts back any reform program by at least 6-12 months. He could have acted to address all these issues head on, without an election, and yet he dithered. Most Japanese still don’t know why they are going to the polls on Sunday. Half of them won’t even bother.

    The opposition parties, taken by surprise, have made no headway during the campaign. The DPJ may increase its number of seats to around 70 in the 475-seat chamber, but that will still be less than a quarter of what the LDP expects to win. Several other opposition parties––that are mainly creaky vehicles for the unfulfilled ambitions of washed-up ex-LDP politicians––will probably lose ground. On the other hand, in this strange scenario, the Japan Communist Party is expected to double its representation, off a small base, by virtue of standing for something when all else seems mere opportunism. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

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

  • The Wit of Whitlam – a great read.

    • ISBN: (Paperback)9780522868081
    • ISBN: (E-Book)9780522868098
    • PUBLISHED:03/Dec/2014
    • IMPRINT:Melbourne University Press
    • SUBJECT:Biography: general

    The Wit of Whitlam

    James Carleton

    Self-proclaimed international treasure Gough Whitlam never shied away from a pun, a put-down or a witticism.

    His wife Margaret was his ‘best appointment’, he called Malcolm Fraser ‘Kerr’s cur’ after the Dismissal and when Sir Winton Turnbull called out in parliament ‘I am a country member’, Gough interjected ‘I remember’.
    When it was suggested he was funny, Gough responded: ‘Funny! Funny? Witty, yes. Epigrammatic perhaps, but not funny. You make me sound like a clown.’
    James Carleton, Radio National presenter and founder of the university club ‘The Dewy-Eyed Whitlamites’, presents a keepsake of Goughisms that vindicates the Great Man’s self-assessment, ‘I never said I was immortal, merely eternal.’

    About the author

    James Carleton is a reporter and alternate presenter of Radio National’s Breakfast program. Specialising in national and international politics, especially the Middle East, he has reported for 7.30 and written for the Sydney Morning Herald.
    James is well experienced with conflict situations as the father of three young boys.
    In 1990 he founded the Sydney University club ‘The Dewy-Eyed Whitlamites’.

    – See more at: https://www.mup.com.au/items/154221

  • Graham Freudenberg. Gough being Gough.

    LAUNCH OF JAMES CARLETON’S ‘THE WIT OF WHITLAM’,BELLEVUE HOTEL, PADDINGTON, NSW, 8 DECEMBER 2014

    As Henry Kissinger discovered to his chagrin in Beijing in 1971, Gough made a habit of getting there first.  The Bellevue is no exception.  Most of us here probably associate the Bellevue with its glory days when Suzie Carleton was, as Gough always described her, its chatelaine.  And Gough and Margaret were very much part of that scene.

    But Gough and the Bellevue go back to 1951, before he even entered the Parliament.  That’s when, as junior to Bill Dovey, Margaret’s father, counsel assisting the Liquor Royal Commission, he exposed the Bellevue, along with the Captain Cook and the Edinburgh Castle, as one of the notorious sly-grog pubs of Sydney.

    You can’t get more ‘0ld Sydney’ than that – and Gough and the Bellevue were in the thick of it.

    It’s a reminder, too, that there was an Eastern Suburbs Whitlam before there was a Western Suburbs Whitlam, well before Werriwa.  And long after.

    He was appointed Minute Secretary of the Darlinghurst Branch of the ALP the very night he walked in to join the Party in 1945 – two days after he was demobbed from the Air Force.

    He was pre-selected for the Fitzroy ward in the Sydney City Council in 1947, but the Council was sacked before the election.  Later as you know, when he moved south and west, he failed in bids for the State seat of Cronulla and for the Sutherland Shire Council.  As he used to say:

    I might have been Lord Mayor of Sydney, Premier of NSW or even President of the Sutherland Shire.  But, alas, the fates were against me.

    The Fates brought him back to the Eastern Suburbs with a bang in 1975.  It was more or less a fluke that Gough and Margaret had bought their unit at Darling Point just before the Dismissal.  And Margaret immediately moved out of Kirribilli and into the flat the very next day.  They had never envisaged it as their home address for the next four decades.  But it became his Sydney headquarters for the campaign.

    It’s in Marathon Avenue.  So as not to alarm the bourgeoisie among the new neighbours, he didn’t put ‘E G Whitlam’ on the residents’ board in the lobby.  He identified the new tenants as ‘Miltiades’ – the victorious Greek general over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.    So began Gough’s second incarnation as Eastern Suburbs Man.

    This, of course, is the Gough that a bright-eyed curly-headed kid named James Carleton came to know – eyes wide open, ears wide open, taking it all in.

    But the special thing about young James is not only what he witnessed at first hand.  He was soaking up all the stories from some of the master story-tellers of the times – Mick and Eric and Ed and Brian, just to begin with.  It’s not adequate to say that they are keepers of the flame.  They lit it.  And indeed, they are part of the flame.

    So, as Gough might have said, James was destined to write this book whenever it was published.

    As shown by his ability to meet Louise’s deadlines.  A remarkable feat.  His big problem was that the stories just kept on coming.  From 21 October, right up to the Town Hall Memorial, and after.  In fact, it was the only wake I’ve ever been to where the only subject of conversation actually was the deceased.

    The reason is that everybody who ever met him has a Gough story.  They remember them and want to tell them. So the stream is endless.

    One reason why they remember them is that Gough had the great comedic gift of the totally unexpected.  Tony Burke, on telling Gough his new daughter was named Helena, couldn’t possibly have expected a monologue on the history of the name, from Helen of Troy to Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, who discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem

    –              Gough, I didn’t know that

    –              Tony, if you talk to me for even a short time, you’ll always learn                                           something.

    The Labor candidate at Alice Springs could hardly have expected to be introduced to the Renaissance School …

    –              Comrade, I am to poster-sticking what Giotto was to the circle.

    Another characteristic that comes through all the stories is his disdain for platitudes and clichés – something of a handicap for a politician.  So his standing instruction in the drafting of speeches was, as Queen Gertrude said to Polonius, ‘More matter with less art”.  Or, as I would put it, ‘more facts, less bullshit’.

    Gough himself put it in another way.  About 1974, we were discussing our respective writing styles.

    –              ‘Your trouble, comrade, is that you are too dithyrambic.  Mine is that I’m                          too inspissated .’

    Well, who can argue with that?

    [Dithyrambic – a passionate choral hymn, in honour of Dionysus, wild, bacchanalian;]

    [Inspissated – dry, densely detailed.]

    He did have the grace to say that we complemented each other.

    There were other occasions we discussed speech-writing – at the opening of the Sydney Entertainment Centre on 1 May 1983, not long after the return of the Hawke Government.  At this stage, I was working with both Bob Hawke and Neville Wran.

    –              How are you coping, comrade, doing what Our Lord says is impossible?                           (Man cannot serve two masters).

    [Reading from Canberra Times 25 March 1990] –

    “There was one VIP whose absence from the official opening at the Australian National Gallery on Friday night of ‘Civilisation: Ancient Treasures from the British Museum’, created a minor sensation.  The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, was otherwise committed, so in his place stood the chairman of the ANG Council, Gough Whitlam, who read the following note from Mr Hawke:

    ‘My present preoccupation with the preservation of Australian civilisation prevents my joining you tonight…. Well, then, in the circumstances we’ve had to draw on an ancient treasure from the Australian National Gallery!”

    He acknowledged the brilliance of Mr Hawke’s message, and displayed his own considerable insight into the nature of political expediency by quipping: “Quite frankly, I couldn’t have done it better if I’d written it myself …. and I suspect it was written by the same person who would have written it for me!’ “

    Conclusion

    One of the pieces I wrote as valedictory I entitled “A Very Public Life’.  By this I meant, among other things, that there was a great unity – a one-ness – between the public and private Gough.  As he said of the Whitlam Government itself, ‘What you saw is what you got’ – and that really goes for the public figure and the private man.

    It wasn’t quite as Queen Victoria said of Gladstone: ‘He addresses me as if I were a public meeting’.

    But there was never much Gough said or did that was meant to be off-the–record.

    Indeed, the only time he took me to task, in all the hundreds of thousands of words between us, was when I wrote the Arthur Calwell entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and said that Gough had made a ‘calculated indiscretion’ in 1965 in telling a New Zealand reporter that Arthur was too old for the leadership.

    But indiscretions abounded, calculated or otherwise, and while those around him may have shuddered at the time, they are now all part of the legend.  And a great many of them are in this book.

    As Gough said: ‘I may be a legend but I am not a myth’.

    And I think that it is a mark of Gough’s true greatness that the legend grows, even as we recall things with love that in anybody else would be regarded as outrageous.

    It goes without saying that Gough would have enjoyed this book.

    It contains one of the keys to understanding Gough Whitlam.  And that is : he enjoyed being Gough immensely.

    And you can see how much enjoyed being himself, not least being the best caricaturist of himself, in every page of this book.

    In this book, we can enjoy Gough being Gough.

  • Max Corden. Australia needs higher taxes, not spending cuts.

    The federal budget balance is expected to deteriorate. The reasons are numerous but, in a lengthy statement, the government sums it up in terms of two key factors. These are: the softer economic outlook; and unresolved issues inherited from the former government.

    The economy is going through a transition. A decline in resources investment will be offset by a recovery in the non-resources sector. It seems the decline in resources investment may be sharper than previously forecast while the recovery in the non-resources sector may be more gradual.

    Thus, with real gross domestic product growing at a slower rate, hence “a softer economic outlook”, revenue from taxation will also be less. The result is a higher budget deficit.

    The previous Labor government can apparently be blamed for many “legacy” items, but one is rather curious. Our central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, has to receive A$8.8 billion to compensate it for losses incurred to its foreign currency reserves during the period when the Australian dollar appreciated.

    The choices faced by the government

    Given the deficit prospect, the government faces three choices:

    (1) Run a bigger deficit, (2) raise taxes, or (3) cut government spending.

    The government has already embraced choice (3) – cut spending. With regard to choice (2), it abolished the carbon tax and the minerals resource rent tax, and thus moved in the wrong direction.

    Perhaps the government will cut public spending further in areas it finds attractive. After cutting funding to the CSIRO, ABC and SBS, the staff of the federal public service, and funds available to the states for health, education and transport, not to speak of the universities, there are surely more possibilities.

    Incidentally, over 20 non-statutory bodies have been abolished or rationalised. The underlying (or even explicit) philosophy is to reduce the size and responsibilities of government. This is in tune with United States conservative attitudes.

    What the government should consider is raising taxes rather than further spending cuts. This is a very serious proposal. Yet, compared with the US approach, it may be more in tune with traditional Australian attitudes, which expect a great deal from governments.

    Why the federal government should raise taxes

    To understand the argument behind the need to raise taxes, it is important to understand what can be described as Howard’s Gift.

    Under the Howard government, beginning around 2003, there was a boom in the form of rising export prices of iron ore and coal. As a result, revenue from corporation tax increased sharply.

    This led the Howard government to cut personal income taxes on no less than five occasions. Also, superannuation concessions were extended. The details can be found in John Edwards’ Beyond the Boom.

    This was John Howard’s gift to the taxpaying middle and upper classes. It was clearly a response – perhaps understandable – to the export boom.

    The trouble was it had the effect of increasing budget deficits in later years when tax revenues declined. In particular, budget deficits in the Labor (Gillard) years were increased by Howard’s Gift. Even now it has an adverse effect on the government’s budget balance.

    However, as the mineral export boom in the Howard years turned out to be temporary, the income tax cuts that were motivated by the boom should also be temporary. In other words, they should now be reversed.

    Personal income tax rates should be increased to where they were before the boom. Usually opposition parties oppose tax increases. Prime Minister Tony Abbott ran a very effective campaign against the carbon tax when in opposition.

    So this proposed tax increase needs to have bipartisan support. If Labor gets into government later, they will be glad to have a decent revenue base for their budgets.

    Reform required for our tax system

    At the same time some other improvements should be made to the income tax system. These ideas all come from the famous Henry Report on the Australian tax system.

    The aim would be to simplify the system and, above all, to remove special concessions and deductions that principally benefit the better-off. These are the favourable concessions that affect the superannuation earnings of people on high incomes.

    All remuneration should be measured as wages. Capital gains tax rate concessions and various concessions available to primary producers should also be removed.

    In addition to increasing income tax rates to their earlier levels, more revenue needs to be obtained from the GST. This tax has to rise if sufficients funds are to be generated for the states’ vital functions.

    There is no doubt the GST is a relatively efficient tax, but it would be more efficient and easier to collect if goods and services of all kinds faced the same GST rate. Exemptions should be avoided and, probably, the rate increased closer to comparable international rates.

    However, the real problem with broadening the GST or raising the rate has to do with equity. This tax is a bigger burden for persons with low incomes than for the well-off. But equity within society is more effectively achieved with a progressive income tax and social security system than through exemptions from the GST. This means that some of the GST revenue gain should be returned to households in the form of increased social security payments and a more progressive personal income tax schedule.

    It is clear that Australia’s entire taxation system needs major improvements. This is clearly shown in the Henry Report, which is a valuable guide for reform.

    No doubt these matters will be discussed in the government’s prospective white paper on taxation. The government needs to raise more revenue while making limited improvements to income tax and the GST. The basic aim, above all, should be to avoid further damaging government spending cuts.

    And what about a recession?

    The government believes there is a “softer economic outlook”, which means we might face a recession. It is impossible to predict at this time whether this will happen. However, if there is any possibility of a recession, then it is not the time to cut government spending nor to raise taxes.

    However, the government does need to implement long-term structural reform of the tax system and expand its revenue base. In the face of a recession, the RBA will need to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy and also depreciate the Australian dollar. Such stimulus would, as a by-product, partly reduce the budget deficit.

  • Tilly Gunning. Children in detention.

    The ‘We’re Better Than This’ campaign was launched on the 26th of November 2014, it’s aim is to end the Australian Government’s indeterminate detention of over 700 refugee children. Lots of influential Australians have come together to support the cause by participating in a choir song, the proceeds will go to charity. To listen to the song and view the video of support, click here. Visit the We’re Better Than This website to discover figures regarding children in detention, and contribute to the organisation, and make a change.
    Tilly Gunning is John Menadue’s 14 year old grand-daughter.

  • Tim Colebatch. The Abbott budget is hard to sell.

    The Abbott government’s problems began long before the 2014–15 budget, but now the budget is at the heart of them. It has failed to win support from the voters, and failed to win support from the Senate.

    Why? I think there are two reasons. The first is that its measures, taken together, fail the test of fairness. That’s well known, and the opinion polls show the public’s reaction.

    The second is not well known, but it may have been grasped intuitively by many Australians, which is why the government’s appeals to national interest have fallen flat. In short, the sum of the government’s actions is not to reduce the budget deficit, but only to rearrange it.

    And now, as treasurer Joe Hockey will tell us on 16 December when he releases the heavily revised Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, or MYEFO, the plunge in mineral prices and the economy’s failure, yet again, to meet budget forecasts mean a return to surplus is now just a distant goal, and we will face big deficits all the way to the next election.

    But even back in May, if you looked at the budget numbers, the net impact of the Abbott government’s policy decisions would have cut the deficit by just $4 billion over its first four years in office. Add in a crucial cost the budget numbers left out, add in the extra spending approved since the budget, and the net impact of the government’s decisions has been to increase the budget deficit – not to reduce it.

    We’ll come back to that. The central issue in the public debate over the budget has been fairness. It is what has sustained the Senate’s opposition to the budget measures – even those that economists, including this one, would see as well-targeted.

    Much of this ground was well covered in an earlier Inside Story essay by the Australian National University’s Peter Whiteford. I will simply plagiarise some of its key points here. If the budget measures were adopted, Whiteford reports:

    • An unemployed twenty-three-year-old would lose $47 a week, or 18 per cent of his or her disposable income. An individual earning $250,000 a year would lose $24 a week, or less than 1 per cent of disposable income. Is that fairness?
    • Unemployed people aged under thirty, who receive less than 1 per cent of budget spending, would suffer almost 10 per cent of budget savings.
    • The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling calculates that the poorest 20 per cent of households, which earn 8 per cent of all household income, would shoulder 16 per cent of the budget cuts. The richest 20 per cent, which earn 40 per cent of all household income, would shoulder just 10 per cent of the cuts.

    If the government really wanted to close the budget deficit, why did it weight its cuts to fall so heavily on lower- and middle-income Australia, and so lightly on its own class of upper-income Australians? Did it not foresee the public reaction?

    If it was serious, why didn’t it come up with a comprehensive deficit-reduction strategy that tackled both sides of the ledger – increasing revenues, since that is where the real problem lies, as well as reducing spending? That would ensure that the pain was minimised by being shared by all, including those best able to pay. That would work to unite us, rather than divide us.

    The only unity Australians have gained from this budget is in opposing the lot – the good along with the bad. This week Essential Research published a new poll that found Australians oppose all six budget measures on its list, mostly overwhelmingly. Only 18 per cent support indexation of petrol tax, 20 per cent support cuts to university funding, 24 per cent support the $7 Medicare co-payment, and so on.

    Back in October, Essential found Australians supported only one measure on a different list of budget savings: sadly, cuts to foreign aid. Only 25 per cent supported the first lot of cuts to the ABC, only 28 per cent agreed with a higher pension age, and only 12 per cent supported the central measure intended to reduce the deficit: taking $80 billion from future school and hospital funding for the states.

    According to the old political wisdom, governments planning reforms should do them all at once, so that no one issue can get the airplay to stop it. That maxim now needs two qualifications: the government must start with strong public credibility and an ability to sell its message.

    This government had neither, and still hasn’t. Since the budget it’s gone quiet on the plan to shift schools and hospitals spending to the states, yet that is the cornerstone of the deficit-reduction strategy. Without it, there will be no deficit reduction. Presumably the government is waiting until after the NSW and Queensland elections, so as not to embarrass its state allies.

    Nor has it campaigned to explain why we should increase the pension age or index fuel taxes. The Australian’s Paul Kelly berates voters for not realising that the budget is in crisis, but the government’s actions suggest it doesn’t itself see it as serious. That much is clear from the detailed numbers in its two budget exercises so far – the 2013–14 MYEFO and the 2014–15 budget.

    The bottom line is this. Had the Abbott government’s spending cuts been implemented, they would have cut budget deficits by $70 billion over four years. Its tax cuts and new spending, meanwhile, would have added $67 billion. Net saving: $3 billion over four years.

    Some budget emergency!

    To put it another way, even in May, the plan was for 96 per cent of all the money saved by the Coalition’s spending cuts simply to be spent in other ways. Only 4 per cent was to be used to reduce the deficit.

    Under Labor’s policies, Treasury estimates, the cumulative deficit for the four years from mid 2013 to mid 2017 would have been $110 billion. Under the Coalition’s policies, it would be $107 billion.

    And that was in May: before the new commitment of troops to Iraq, before the free-trade deals, before the extension of the royal commission into the unions, etc., etc. Even if the Senate passed all the budget measures it has rejected, the new MYEFO will reveal that the net result of the Abbott government’s decisions has been to increase the deficit from what it would have been had Labor’s policies continued on autopilot.

    These are the budget’s own figures. All I’ve done is to add them up – and add the $1.2 billion costs of servicing the increased debt resulting from its tax cuts and new spending.

    Between them, the 2013–14 MYEFO and the May budget handed out $45 billion of new spending over the four years to 2016–17, and $22 billion of tax cuts – all funded by taking on new debt. Three decisions accounted for half of them: scrapping the emissions trading scheme ($13.7 billion), the splurge on new roads ($12.1 billion, without any cost-benefit analysis) and the $8.8 billion grant to the Reserve Bank – a grant the RBA had not asked for, and which appears to have been designed to inflate the 2013–14 deficit and lay the blame on Labor.

    That was not the only fiscal fix. During the Victorian election campaign it emerged that Hockey prepaid the Victorian government $1 billion for the East-West Link in June – so that it could appear as spending in 2013–14 (blamed on Labor) rather than 2014–15 (for which he must answer). Victoria, of course, didn’t spend the money, just banked it. MYEFO 2014–15 will show if there were other fiscal fixes like that one.

    One caveat: in the longer term, if the government’s budget plans were all implemented, they would reduce the deficit significantly. Its strategy has been to load up the deficit in 2013–14, and reduce it in later years. By 2016–17, Treasury estimates, the net impact of the government’s policy changes would lower the budget deficit by $9 billion, including $6.4 billion saved that year alone by cutting social security payments.

    Eventually the budget would get back to surplus, primarily as a result of increased income tax revenue from bracket creep, and the savings from the government’s plan to cut $80 billion from grants to the states for schools and hospitals.

    But the Commonwealth could never win an argument with the states on those cuts; it would be seen as abandoning its responsibilities in two crucial areas of government. It could win only if the states collectively decide they would rather have a bigger GST to spend as they choose than have the Commonwealth share the cost of running schools and hospitals. And premiers get to be premiers because they’re good at politics.

    The Abbott government could try to keep fighting the same old issues, but the polls suggest the voters have stopped listening. It still has twenty-one months left before it has to meet its electoral fate. It could turn off the life support for the old budget plan and reboot with a new comprehensive strategy – closing tax loopholes as well as cutting spending – clearly designed to reduce the deficit rather than pay out on political enemies (including students and universities, the ABC, foreign aid and welfare groups, and public transport). It would have to unite the country behind a common purpose, rather than divide it.

    But Tony Abbott by nature is a cultural warrior, not a unifier: that’s just not him. If the Coalition is to adopt a budget strategy to win over the middle ground, its Cabinet reshuffle has to start with him. I can’t see that happening.

    Tim Colebatch is former economics editor of the Age and author of the recent biography, ‘Dick Hamer: the liberal Liberal’.

    This article was first published in Inside Story on 5 December 2014.

     

     

  • Australia is worst performing industrial country on climate change.

    For the Lima Conference on Climate Change that has just begun, a report by the think-tank Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe examined the 58 emitters of greenhouse gasses in the world, and about 90% of all energy-related emissions. The report named Australia as the worst performing industrial country in the world on climate change. We have now replaced Canada as the worst performing industrial country. The report author told The Guardian, which has published this story ‘It is interesting that the bottom six countries in the ranking – Russia, Iran, Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia and Saudi Arabia – all have a lot of fossil fuel resources. It is a curse.The fossil fuel lobbies in these countries are strong. In Australia they stopped what were some very good carbon laws.’

    For the report in The Guardian, see link below.

    http://gu.com/p/44xha/sbl

  • Jock Collins. Australia’s shift from settler to temporary migration nation.

    Immigration is a political hot potato. On the day the OECD published its latest annual survey of global migration, Swiss voters rejected a referendum to reduce annual migration numbers.

    A few days earlier, yet another UN committee criticised Australia’s asylum seeker policies. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to reduce annual immigration from 260,000 to below 100,000 per year in response to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) securing its second parliamentary seat. And on November 20, US President Barack Obama announced his intention to permit millions of resident undocumented migrants’ access to permanent residence.

    The 2014 International Migration Outlook report reveals that there are 115 million first-generation migrants in OECD countries today, accounting for 10% of the OECD population. Another 5% of people in OECD countries are second-generation migrants.

    Both permanent and temporary migration numbers are down on the pre-global financial crisis record levels of 2007-08. This is in line with the trend of international migration to synchronise with the economic rhythms of globalisation.

    The report revealed that highly educated immigrants accounted for 45% of the increase in the foreign-born population of OECD countries in the last decade. Political conflict also drives international mobility: the report noted that flows of migrants seeking asylum increased by 20% in 2013.

    The OECD report presents data that confirms Australia’s place as one of the highest western immigration nations in per capita terms: 27.3% of all Australians today are born overseas. That is higher than countries in North America (Canada 19.8%, US 13%), Europe (UK 11.9%) or neighbour New Zealand (24.1%). Only Switzerland (27.7%) has more immigrants than Australia in relative terms among OECD countries.

    Click to enlarge

    There are a number of major drivers to international migration. One is economic. Globalisation has increased international labour migration as most countries seek to attract professional and highly skilled immigrants to fill labour shortages in areas such as health and informational technology, as well as other immigrants with trades in shortage in the labour market of the host country. In Australia, accountants, chefs, nurses, engineers and software developers top the skills-in-demand list for recent immigrants.

    Another major driver of international migration is global inequality. As scholars such as Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz have pointed out, globalisation has not delivered on its promise to reduce global inequality. Inequality drives international mobility for those who can turns dreams into reality.

    Another related driver of immigration is political. The expansion of the European Union, for example, enables people from the new member states (Romania joined in 2007 and Croatia in 2013) to move to other countries within the EU to seek employment.

    At the same time, political conflict such as that seen recently in countries in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe unleashes the movement of many millions of people within and beyond national borders to seek refuge and protection. Estimates put the number of refugees at 16.7 million, asylum seekers at 1.2 million and internally displaced people at 33.3 million for a total of 51.2 million people. As The Guardian recently put it:

    If displaced people had their own country it would be the 24th most populous in the world.

    Countries of settler immigration – who wanted immigrants and their families and subsequent generations to stay and become part of nation building – have been the exception and not the rule. Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand are most prominent in this regard.

    However, trends in Australian immigration in the past two decades strongly suggest that Australian can no longer be regarded as a settler immigration nation. 2012-13 immigration data shows that 190,000 arrived under the permanent immigration program (or 192,599 when Trans-Tasman migrants are included).

    Click to enlarge

    But in the same year, 725,043 – or 766,273 including Trans-Tasman migrants – migrants arrived on temporary immigration visas. This included 258,248 on working holiday visas, 259,278 on international student visas and 126,350 on temporary work (skilled) visas.

    This shift of Australia from a settler immigration nation to a temporary migrant nation has been the biggest change in nearly seven decades of post-war immigration history. Yet, remarkably, there has been virtually no debate about it other than understandable concerns about abuses of workers under the temporary 457 visa and of some working holiday makers by unscrupulous employers or agents.

    The available oxygen for Australian immigration debates today has been captured almost exclusively by the “boat people” debate. However, the 15,827 humanitarian entrants to Australia in 2012-13 comprised only 8.3% of entrants under the permanent immigration program and 1.9% of the total (permanent plus temporary) program in that year.

    The OECD report concluded that immigration had strong public support in Australia. It found:

    … a high level of support in 2012 for all immigration categories in Australia, with the public most favourable towards skilled migrants.

    Unfortunately, this flattering conclusion cannot be extended to humanitarian immigration and boat arrivals. It is an aspect of Australia’s remarkable immigration history that should bring shame to the country and its political leadership.

    Jock Collins is Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School at University of Technology, Sydney.

    This article was first published in The Conversation, 2 December 2014.

  • Refugees – some middle ground is opening up.

    See below a speech made in the Senate on 4 December by Senator Xenophon. The Senator was one of six cross-bench senators who negotiated with the government for a compromise on the contentious Migration Bill.

    Senator XENOPHON (South Australia) (12:17): Australia’s migration policies have always had a long and vexed history. They have been, and rightfully so, open to significant scrutiny from international and domestic courts, independent experts, interest groups and the electorate. It has and will continue to be a passionate debate about a wicked and vexed issue. For me it is always important, always, to remember that we are dealing with legislation that relates to people, our fellow human beings. They are not numbers; they are not the myriad of labels that have been applied to them by all sides of the debate; and they are not political inconveniences, punching bags or props. They are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends, neighbours and acquaintances. They are, in short, people just like you and me who have found themselves in extraordinarily difficult circumstances—some, unimaginable circumstances. So I would like to approach this debate with respect, with compassion and with dignity.

    This has not been an easy process for me. On one side this bill does contain a number of measures that I am not comfortable with. But on the other side, if we do not act, the 30,000 people currently awaiting processing will continue to be left in limbo. If this bill does not pass there is also the real risk that the government will use a nonstatutory process instead, which will not result in any better outcomes for the people who are currently in Australia. This problem is a true Hobson’s choice: we are left to decide between two potentially negative outcomes.

    Back in 2012 the former government put up a number of proposals, the so-called Malaysia solution, which was rejected by the then opposition and the Australian Greens. I remember at the time—I remember well—I was in hospital and I asked for my vote to be recorded. There is a saying: ‘Not to have the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.’ As imperfect as the former government’s solution was, it was preferable to doing nothing. We saw more and more drownings, more and more people pass away, and more and more people fall victim to people smugglers and the awful consequences of that.

    What is being proposed by the government here is by no means perfect—in fact, it is quite imperfect—but the consequences of not supporting it will mean that asylum seekers will be in a worse position, in my view. It also has to be noted what the immigration minister said a few moments ago. He has agreed, as part of a process of constructive engagement with crossbenchers, to increase the humanitarian intake by 7,500 people—a significant increase. My view is that we should double the humanitarian intake or more. We are a big country with a big heart. But I am trying to deal with the actual political realities here. We have an opportunity to increase significantly the humanitarian and refugee intake by 7,500 people on top of the 13,750 per annum. We have an opportunity to have something like 25,000 people on bridging visas have work rights for the first time. We have an opportunity to significantly improve the lot of those individuals who have been left in limbo. The reality is that under the former government border control, immigration policy, was out of control, and that is something we need to take into account.

    I have met with many interest groups and representatives, including Amnesty International and also Paris Aristotle of Foundation House and the former government’s expert panel. My view on this issue changed when I saw what Angus Houston, what Paris Aristotle, and what Michael L’Estrange said in that expert panel. I congratulate former Prime Minister Gillard for having the foresight to set up that panel—to actually have a circuit breaker to try to look at this in a different way, because to me it meant that we needed to consider the awful moral dilemmas that we had to deal with. I thought the panel headed by Angus Houston came up with a number of sensible proposals.

    In that context, I have approached the government to request changes to the bill and to migration policy to improve the conditions for the men, women and children who are awaiting processing. That doesn’t mean that we cannot still advocate for a significant increase in the humanitarian intake. It does not mean that we stop being critical of the government’s policies, but if we do nothing, if we do not support this bill, then I believe fervently that what will happen is that asylum seekers will be worse off if this bill is not passed, as imperfect as this bill is.

    That is the moral dilemma; that is the wicked problem.

    I want to make it clear that my vote for this bill is conditional on these changes and those circulated by the Palmer United Party. The government has taken my concerns into account and, I understand, will be circulating amendments to that effect. As such, I will not speak to those amendments in detail, but I would like to take this opportunity to outline the changes that I have proposed. I also want to make it very clear that these proposals do not necessarily represent my ideal outcomes. They do not, but they do make important steps forward—and I do not believe they should be rejected because they are only ‘good’ rather than ‘perfect’.

    Firstly, I have proposed changes to allow people holding TPVs or SHEVs to travel outside Australia where the minister is satisfied there are compassionate or compelling circumstances and the minister has approved that travel. That has never occurred before, either under this government or under the previous government, and I think that is an important concession. This would cover circumstances where a TPV or SHEV holder wants to travel to visit family in circumstances such as significant family illness or death. While I would prefer to allow family reunification on these visas, I believe this is an important step in granting these visa holders rights that go some way towards acknowledging the importance of family.

    Secondly, I have proposed changes to ensure that, through the use of a disallowable instrument, the fast-track process only applies to the legacy caseload. This will make sure that the use of this fast-track process will be subject to the scrutiny of the Senate. Thirdly, I have proposed changes to the definition of ‘manifestly unfair’ in relation to the rejection of claims so that it more accurately reflects language used by the UNHCR—and that is important. I think that is a benchmark that we need to look at very carefully.

    Fourthly, I have proposed some changes to the fast-track review process to ensure that it is not only efficient and quick but must meet the natural justice provisions already included in the Migration Act. This will help to ensure that decisions take natural justice into account within the confines of the act and so are more balanced and fair. I have also proposed changes to the requirement for the review to take new information into account. My specific intention in this case is to ensure that information that was not provided for personal reasons, including mental health reasons, can be taken into account. One example that has been put to me are the many cases of sexual or other assault, where the victim may not volunteer that information in the first instance. I think all of us can appreciate the reasons behind not sharing that information—the shame and the trauma that may prevent someone from speaking out. My proposal to the government was that this type of information and these circumstances must be taken into account, and I believe these changes will improve the review process in that regard.

    Fifthly, I have raised concerns relating to the non-refoulement provisions and how we can be sure that a person being returned to a country is not facing persecution. In this case the government has agreed to use phrasing similar to that of the UNHCR to define both when a person is considered to be part of a particular social group and what effective protection measures should be taken into account when considering if that person should be returned. I believe these definitions will bring Australia more in line with UNHCR best practice in terms of defining and applying these clauses.

    Further, I have advocated, as have others, for an increase in Australia’s humanitarian intake and to extend work rights to people on bridging visas. I have always been a strong advocate of increasing our humanitarian intake. I believe the government could go further, but I do acknowledge the increase they have proposed will make a real difference—7½ thousand people. That is 7½ thousand people who can be taken in through that humanitarian and refugee intake and who can be part of our community. I do not want to throw that away. That does not mean that my colleagues in the Australian Greens or the opposition cannot say that we should double it—I think we should—or that we should have a much bigger humanitarian intake, a much bigger refugee intake. It could be an issue at the next election. I do not have an issue with that—it ought to be. But I do not want to throw away this opportunity to have 7½ thousand more people come in to this country through that humanitarian and refugee intake process.

    Extending work rights to those on bridging visas is also vitally important. Participating in the workforce, even in a small way, makes people a part of our community and society. It gives them, quite simply, a reason to get up in the morning—to feel valued and that they are making a contribution. I do not want to pretend that any of these measures is an ideal outcome or that they represent what I would see happen in the perfect world. But they will make a true difference to the people who are here right now, who are in detention right now, who are waiting to be processed right now. This may not be perfect, but it is good. It is also important to remember that this is not the end of the debate. These measures do not mean that I, as many others, will stop pushing for improvements. They are merely the next step, not the final one, and I would urge my colleagues to support this bill.

     

  • Tony Kevin.  Cuts to ABC Classic FM strike at Australia’s cultural heritage’

    Limelight, ABC Classic FM’s online magazine, reported on 24 November

    ‘The number of concerts recorded will be slashed by a massive 50%, with just 300 performances due to be recorded over the next two years verses the 600 concerts recorded during the previous two years. Broadcasts of live performances currently account for 17 hours of Classic FM’s weekly output.’

    http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/major-cuts-abc-classic-fm%E2%80%99s-programming-confirmed

    So listeners will lose around 50%, i.e., 8-9 hours of Australian-performed broadcast music each week.

    What will we lose?

    Events like the 30 November broadcast of the fine new Australian opera by Iain Grandage and Alison Croggan, The Riders (2014), inspired by Tim Winton’s great novel. Many thousands of people will have heard this ground-breaking new work on Classic FM radio (and it is still up on Listen Again).

    Or Max Richter’s new composition Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Recomposed (2012), which he played with the 22-piece Wordless Music Orchestra, an outstanding New York electro-acoustic group, in Melbourne on 24 November. Parts of this brilliant reworking of a familiar classic are already being broadcast on Classic FM: last week I heard Summer, and loved it.

    Or the brilliant Victorian Opera Wagner Ring Cycle performed late last year in Melbourne, all 17 hours of which was rebroadcast soon afterwards on ABC Classic FM. Or Pinchgut Opera Company productions in Sydney. Or the Sydney International Piano Competition.

    The 17 hours per week until now of broadcast live musical performances on Classic FM presumably reflected professional artistic judgements of how much of such music being played live each week around Australia was worthy of national broadcast.

    Arbitrarily to cut it in half is like telling the ABC it can only broadcast half the days of a cricket Test series, or half of a football season. It makes no artistic sense.

    Cost accountants like these cuts, because programmes of pre-recorded music CDs from overseas are cheaper than Australian live broadcasts. There are savings on broadcasting rights fees paid to creators and performers, and from not putting recording crews and announcers in place, sometimes in not-so-accessible locations in regional Australia.

    But at what artistic cost?  For example, if ABC FM has now to cease rebroadcasting the Huntington Music Festivals: there will be real losses in listener pleasure, and in the financial support around the nation that helps a unique festival like Huntington in remote Mudgee to attract sponsors and thus continue to thrive. Many such festivals depend on ABC broadcasting financial support to help keep them viable.

    How will FM program planners allocate their halved domestic live broadcast time between the Sydney Symphony Orchestra? The Adelaide or West Australian Symphony Orchestra? Huntington? Victorian Opera’s Wagner Ring Cycle? The Riders? A Peter Sculthorpe memorial tribute concert? An international piano or vocal competition in Australia?

    The national classical music live broadcaster should not be forced to make such egregious choices on any but artistic grounds. This is what ABC Classic FM was set up for, and extended across our vast land to reach 95% of Australian radio audiences; not mechanically and endlessly to play tapes from overseas. There must be a balance.

    I’m not sure how one gets across to people who do not much like or understand classical music the huge cultural treasure and living musical archive that the national Classic FM network, as it has evolved over the last 40 odd years, now represents in Australia. There is nothing else quite like it in the world.

    It allows listeners almost right across Australia to hear the best world music and Australian-created or performed music, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Some people might see this as catering to an elite minority ‘niche’ taste. Is listening on the radio to Test cricket or an AFL series a ‘niche’ taste? I don’t listen to these things, but I am happy for others to do so.

    The love of classical music has deep and broad roots in Australia. We would never have had a Joan Sutherland without our rich Australian classical music public culture, back to our early European settlement – all those church choirs, brass bands, eisteddfods, music and dance schools. And in the dark days of WW2, when visionary ABC executives like Bernard Heinze and Charles Moses, who both had a strong sense of cultural mission to the whole country while we battled Nazi  barbarism, sent ABC orchestras touring around Australia and playing Beethoven’s nine symphonies to packed houses of emotional audiences. And in the rich golden years of Australian classical music from the 1940s on, inspired by the contributions of Jewish and other refugee musicians from Europe.

    ABC Classic FM has inherited from ABC Radio National, and now has sole broadcasting responsibility, for nurturing this rich living musical heritage. Live concert-hall or opera house audiences are essential for music to thrive. But surely it is also a cultural good that retired people in Orange or Bendigo or Launceston or Bunbury can switch on their FM radios and hear the same wonderful music, played in our country.   Hearing a tape from Frankfurt or London is just not quite the same thrill.

    The national Classic FM network allows large numbers of listeners to share in hugely significant and inspiring live musical events in our country that many, because of where they live, or lack of money, or mobility issues, would never get to hear. It allows many Australians to feel a sense of belonging to a common music-loving national community, uniting young, middle-aged and older people.

    A symbiotic relationship exists between a thriving classical music national radio network, which builds and enriches audiences, and the stimulation and professional development of young musical talent in our country. If one is harshly cut back, the other inevitably will suffer. A holistic approach is surely needed.

    What will happen under halved live broadcasting hours to the broadcasting opportunities and performance fees of our smaller state symphony orchestras outside Sydney and Melbourne – in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Tasmania? How will they cope with loss of income and audience engagement in their states? Such national musical assets are hard to create, easy to destroy. Look at the USA now, a virtual classical music radio desert and with symphony orchestras in financial difficulties closing down around the country. Do we want this?

    Somebody must speak out now for Classic FM. It is not for elites, not for silvertails. It is for the 750,000 Australians listening to their FM radios, whose parents and teachers taught them to cherish classical music, whatever their location, means, ages, or mobility. Don’t taxpayers and citizens have a right to demand that this precious intangible national cultural heritage, built up by the hard work of so many people over so many years, not be cut off at the knees now?

     

     

  • Eric Walsh.  A ‘ragged’ year not a ‘ragged’ week.

    Nobody laughed – things must be different in the press gallery these days.

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott in one of his longest press conferences was trying desperately to erase the hangover from the setbacks which have dogged him and his government since his dismal performance at the G20 meeting which he had hoped – forlornly as it proved – would rescue the image of a very disordered and unimpressive government. He was trying to end the year on what at least might seem to be a high note.

    He had just told the assembled media that despite the ‘dire’ state of the economy which had been his theme for more than 12 months, he could not abandon his universally unpopular $5 million paid parental leave scheme which will benefit only very rich women. This would, he said, be seen as breaking a promise. This, while he was being peppered with questions on his Kristallnacht of promises on health, education, pensions, tax,  petrol pricing, the ABC and SBS and even on his water buy-back policy from the Murray Darling system.

    Such a brazen failure to read the mood of the meeting might in other days of the press gallery cause at least some audible amused incredulity. Billy McMahon, exhibiting similar ill-based self-assurance, could certainly not have got away without a snigger.

    This press conference was supposed to set the scene for a high-note ending to his government’s first full year in office. Like many of Tony’s recent endeavours, it failed. Tony has developed a new principle by which he evaluates his government’s performance. ‘Things aren’t what they are – they are what Tony says they are’. It’s catching on with some of his ministers – a very quick adaptee is Treasurer Joe Hockey.

    In his last week of a pretty dismal year, guided by this principle, Tony tried to convince his questioners that the government had a single ‘ragged’ week – not a ‘ragged’ fifteen months as demonstrated by the authoritative Newspoll the next day. The government was still in a heavily losing position as it has been in Newspoll and every other poll since November last year, and worst, stuck at the new low it hit with the production of its first budget back in May.

    The principle is holding good too in reviewing presentation of his government’s controversial policies. Crippling moves on education, health, pensions, etc., are not broken promises taken from Tony’s innovative viewpoint. Unsurprisingly others, like electors, might and currently seem to see them in a different light. Tony using his same self-created prism assures us the Barrier Reef is not endangered by climate change; consumers, not bankers, will benefit from the removal of safeguards involving financial advice; students will somehow be better off paying up to $100,000 to earn a degree and pensioners won’t be worse-off having their payments calculated in the new way this budget proposes. There are a host of other propositions on which the voter seems determined to see things as they are rather than what Tony says they are.  Look at the polls.

    And there is another major promise on which Tony has not yet been called by either the Opposition or the media. Robustly confident of an election win Tony declared that in government he would not be dealing with minor parties or Independents to win passage for policies which at the time voters were assured were not happening. In recent weeks our major political coverage has involved the very negotiations – only occasionally successful – that Tony assured us would not happen. And he went further. He would, he promised, not hesitate to take parliament to a double dissolution in order to tame the Opposition and get his program implemented.

    A mere glance at the opinion polls tells us why this remains another broken promise. But it does not explain why he has so far been unchallenged by either Opposition or press on the question. Highly unfavourable opinion polls are not the only deterrent for Abbott here. Have a look at the election manifesto for which Tony will be seeking national support.

    Higher university fees, lower pensions, more costly healthcare, dearer petrol, total disregard for climate change and a total shutdown of any government bodies likely to advise him otherwise. And there are a host of other electoral nasties Tony has unveiled as he has stumbled through his first 15 months in office but which remained well hidden in the lead up to his election win.

    After his promise-shattering budget this year, Tony would indeed prove himself a gambler if he thought he could retain electoral support by promising these things were no longer part of his program.

    Once bitten …..

     

     

  • Kerry Brown. Australia’s vanishing China policy.

    One of the side effects of the visit by Chinese president Xi Jinping to Australia, New Zealand and the region in mid November was to raise questions about whether each of these countries has what might be called a strategic vision of their relationship with a country that has quickly become their largest trading ally. Xi’s suspicion that they don’t may lie behind his observation, addressing the Australian parliament on 17 November, that there needs to be more imagination and ambition in the bilateral relationship.

    At a time when many in the rest of the world are asking China to be more active and take a greater role as a stakeholder, albeit on Western terms, it seems ironic that its current leader should make this point in Canberra. Australia is a fellow member of the UN Security Council and a major player in the G20, the World Bank and other global forums, and yet it seems not to have impressed Xi with any strong vision of its relations with the country he leads.

    There is certainly a constituency in Australia that would be antagonistic to the very notion of having a strategy. To them, you shouldn’t hedge yourself in with self-imposed limits. You leave yourself maximum room for manoeuvre and, in the words of the great economist John Maynard Keynes, change your mind when the facts change. The most that many in this camp would accept is that a country needs a sense of its national interests, and goes out to defend these. At the moment, that means sticking by the United States, no matter what, and building up complementary alliances wherever else you can.

    Xi’s words should at least begin a process of considering whether this approach is sustainable. At times, Australia’s stance comes dangerously close to outsourcing all the deeper thinking about strategic interests and global roles to the United States. If Washington says something should happen, it happens. If Washington vetoes it, then Australia follows suit. (Witness Tony Abbott’s quick reversal of his initial interest in being part of the Chinese-instigated infrastructure bank.) Ironically, this seems to work in every policy area barring the one in which Australia might well argue it really should follow in the slipstream of the United States – action on climate change. The embarrassment of holding a climate-light G20 a few days after the United States and China announced a major deal on carbon emissions only served to underline, at least to Chinese officials, that Australia is kept in step by the United States when it matters to it, and then simply kept in the dark when it doesn’t.

    Like the United States, Australia welcomes a strong, peaceful, cooperative China. No surprises there. And yes, it wants a China mostly in our own political image – just like America does. It has a common conceptual language with China on many economic issues, and like the United States it has trouble when the dialogue gets to values and rights. Australian companies love the Chinese market, and Australians on the whole see value in getting benefits from the Chinese economy and its links with their country. But these things simply add up to a framework for pragmatic engagement. Even the free-trade agreement, which was levelled off when Xi was in Canberra, doesn’t go much further towards answering the question of what Australian policy towards China really is.

    It isn’t as though the question hasn’t been exhaustively considered by policy-makers and their political masters across Australia. And in many ways, it might be more accurate to talk about a multi-strand policy, involving individual states and the federal government, rather than a unified position. This is not unusual: the European Union could be accused of having not one policy towards the People’s Republic but twenty-eight, reflecting the number of member states. What is odd is that Australia sounds like it has a policy, and does the things that a country with a policy might do – but when the going gets tough (under pressure from America or from domestic interests) the policy vanishes. The cause célèbre is the Australia in the Asian Century white paper, issued to great fanfare in 2012 as the herald of a new era of regional engagement, with China at the centre. Those seeking this report now have to rummage around in the online archive of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Britain did a similar thing, specifically about China, in 2009, and that paper too has more or less vanished from cyberspace.

    Does this mean that, in its heart, Australia doesn’t want a policy? The signs are that it wants to look like it has a China policy, but that thinking about what the world will look like in a decade’s time, when China will be a bigger, stronger, more prominent global force, is really too demanding. Australia’s policy is therefore to make as much for itself materially as it can, and leave to others the heavy lifting of working with China to integrate it more closely into the global system. That means sticking predominantly by the United States, no matter what, tactically defending specific national interests from time to time (including perverse obstruction on climate change) and leaving it at that. In essence, work with the United States.

    Were China a more predictable partner, this make-hay-while-the-sun-shines approach might do the job. But in a number of key areas, all of which affect Australia, that isn’t the case. The vulnerability of China’s growth is something Chinese leaders past and present have all drawn attention to. China’s unity is also much more fragile than outsiders might believe. (Chinese leaders certainly aren’t complacent about the issues on their vast western borders.) Its political model is undergoing very real reform, not towards what many in the outside world might want but certainly towards something more law-based and accommodating of the needs of the emerging urban middle class. Its environmental problems are simply vast.

    In any of these areas, China could all too easily receive a killer blow. And a killer blow to its stability and prosperity would in many ways be a killer blow for Australia. To daydream about the shifting interests of India or another market is, in the short to medium term, simply to indulge in fantasy. Like it or not, it is China or nothing for Australia’s future growth and prosperity.

    The point of a policy is to try to deal, at least, with scenarios that involve some future influence and dynamic interaction. An Australian policy towards China would therefore need to look at China’s domestic challenges, admit they are directly linked to Australia’s own interests, and then work out where it might have influence. In some areas – such as technology and ideas transfer or deeper intellectual engagement – this would be to focus on the clear positives. In others, it would mean dealing with more challenging topics – how to mitigate partial pandemics or an environmental collapse in China, if they were to happen, for instance. A policy also has to think the unthinkable. If China did implode or collapse, what would Australia do? One of the merits of thinking through doomsday scenarios is that it sharpens minds and makes everyone intent on avoiding them, however unpleasant the process of thinking them through might be.

    A policy is not simply a risk strategy. Australia has proved quite good at thinking through the risks of China’s rise regionally. But a fundamental part of its thinking should now be about what sort of China might exist in ten to twenty years, and in what ways that country is important and influential for Australia, and Australia for it. This is a positive part of policy formation.

    Those who remain sceptical about the need for a strategic vision like this should remember that even if Australia doesn’t have a vision about China, China certainly has one about it. That vision was outlined by Xi Jinping last week, when he talked about an Australia that would increasingly be part of the economic, and therefore the geopolitical, realm of a China-influenced world in which the luxurious isolation of the past is over. After all, China has had a culture of strategic thinking for thousands of years. Look at the words of Confucius in the Analects: “To lead into battle a people that has not first been instructed is to betray them.” And in terms of future economic and security challenges, that is precisely the mistake that the Australian government has been making. Xi’s visit offered the chance to change that. Let’s hope it is taken.

    This article first appeared in Inside Story on 25 November 2014. 

    Kerry Brown is Director of the China Research Centre at the University of Sydney.

  • Rethinking the cost of Western intervention in Ukraine.

    In the Washington Post on November 25, Katrina vanden Heuvel had a very interesting article on the mistakes that Europe, NATO, and the US have made in their approach to Russia over the Ukraine and Crimea. She quotes Henry Kissinger as saying ‘Nobody in the West has offered a concrete program to restore Crimea. Nobody is willing to fight over Eastern Ukraine. That’s a fact of life.’  Kissinger has said that the West might weigh its real security concerns before posturing and escalation over Ukraine.

    Even far away Australia has been posturing over Ukraine. In one of his more bellicose moments, and as a way of shirt-fronting Vladimir Putin, Tony Abbott suggested that Australia might send 1,000 Australian  troops to secure the crash site in Eastern Ukraine!  The link to this article is below.  John Menadue

    http://wapo.st/11sAUyu

  • Stephen King. The ABC’s “me too” strategy puts it on track for redundancy.

    Is the ABC trying to make itself redundant? Because that appears to be its strategy. Here’s why.

    The ABC is expensive. In 2013 it was allocated more than A$1 billion of taxpayer funds. The ABC claims, however, that its real funding since 1985-86 has dropped by about one quarter. And the current federal government has cut further – A$120 million in the May budget and a further A$207 million over four years.

    The ABC has responded with cutbacks in “niche” areas such as women’s sport and rural services and a renewed focus on internet-based services.

    But with much traditional media “doing it tough”, should we care about the ABC? Or is it simply redundant?

    Why do we have the ABC?

    How is the ABC different from the commercial free-to-air broadcasters?

    Under its Charter, the ABC focuses on the “Australian story”. It shows:

    … programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community.

    But the commercial networks have similar obligations. The three primary commercial channels are each required to broadcast an annual minimum of 55% Australian content between the hours of 6am and midnight. In practice they exceed this requirement.

    Arguably the commercial networks tell the Australian story better than the ABC. In 2013, all of the top 20 programs on commercial television were Australian reality TV, sport or drama. Australian drama occupied five of the top 10 most-watched series.

    The problem with the ABC is not that it is unique. Its problem is that it is not unique enough.

    Is digital media the way forward for the ABC?

    The ABC’s managing director, Mark Scott, suggests the ABC’s future is digital internet-based communication.

    Competition in the media space is intensifying and audiences are asserting their power. The ABC needs to meet the surging audience demand for online and mobile services while, at the same time, securing and strengthening our grip in the traditional content areas. We must be the home of the Australian story and content across all platforms.

    This strategy is both misinformed and misguided.

    It is misinformed because, for most Australians, free-to-air television is still the dominant source of news and entertainment. Australians are spending less time in front of the television and more time in front of other screens, such as laptops and mobiles. But the shift is slow. In 2013, Australians watched an average of 96 hours of broadcast television each month, compared to just over five hours per month viewing video on a PC or laptop and a little over two hours on their mobiles and tablets.

    The strategy is misguided because any unique role of the ABC is eliminated on the internet. The ABC cannot uniquely tell the Australian story because thousands of Australians tell their story online every day, using blogs and social media. The ABC cannot differentiate itself as a source of quality news when it has thousands of internet competitors, including The New York Times and the BBC.

    If the ABC wants to make itself irrelevant and have increased pressure on its funding then it should concentrate on its digital strategy.

    Using the BBC as a model

    What is the alternative?

    The UK provides a good example of how to make public broadcasting work. The BBC is one of the world’s most respected broadcasters. And it is government-owned. It thrives because the UK television industry has been reformed.

    The BBC might appear to have a lot more competition than the ABC. In Australia, the government-owned ABC and SBS face off against three commercial broadcasters. In contrast, the UK, has around 60 channels, ranging from full-service commercial networks to highly specialised niche channels.

    However, the BBC has a unique position. Competitive reform in the UK allowed new entry and innovation in free-to-air television. It also focused the public service obligations, such as content requirements, on the BBC. Rather than being a “me too” network, the BBC has a mandate that is distinct from the commercial broadcasters.

    In contrast, free-to-air television in Australia has a commercial oligopoly that, with government assistance, prevents new competition despite there being plenty of spectrum available. The commercial networks claim that they need “protection” so they can meet their public service obligations, like Australian content.

    Fine! Remove most of the obligations and open up free-to-air television for new entry. Focus the obligations on the ABC and make the ABC truly unique. This would benefit viewers through increased choice and provide an ongoing rationale for the ABC.

    Funding

    Sensible reform of free-to-air television will help the ABC. But its funding will remain directly tied to government budgets.

    In contrast, the BBC’s funding is largely independent of government budget decisions. The UK has a “television licence” system with the majority of the licence revenue dedicated to funding the public broadcaster. While the government formally sets the fee, it does so after discussions with the BBC. And the BBC collects the licence revenue.

    Australia used to have a similar system. Between 1956 and 1974, the ABC was largely funded by television licences. The Whitlam government abolished the licence in 1974, leaving the ABC exposed to the whims of government funding.

    It is not clear that a dedicated ABC tax, whether applied as a television licence or funded in some other way, would be politically acceptable in Australia. But without independent funding, the ABC will face more cuts from all sides of politics in the future.

    The future of the ABC

    To have a future, the ABC needs to abandon its “me too” strategy. It needs to be unique. If it focuses on the internet, then it guarantees it will lose its uniqueness and its rationale.

    Rather than cutting back its unique services, the ABC needs to emphasise its uniqueness.

    The ABC needs to push for competitive reform of Australia’s free-to-air television broadcasting system so it can differentiate itself and its obligations.

    The commercial broadcasters will oppose reform. These broadcasters do not like sharing various public service obligations with the ABC. But they like competition even less. Real reform of free-to-air broadcasting will open up the spectrum to competition and create a lasting role for the ABC.

    Stephen King is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Monash University. This article was first published in The Conversation on 26 November 2014.

  • Lifters and leaners in tax.

    In the SMH today (27 November 2014), Michael West has a very interesting story about the leaners and lifters in the business community and the unfairness of tax avoidance by some companies. It clearly works to the disadvantage of many Australian companies who are paying fair rates of taxation. For the link to this story, see below.  John Menadue

     

    http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/leadership-needed-on-tax-fairness-in-australia-20141126-11ukw2.html

  • Walter Hamilton. The ABC and its competitors

    When the British conducted atomic tests at Maralinga in South Australia in the 1950s Australia’s newspaper proprietors tried to prevent the ABC bringing along its recording equipment to capture the event. They wanted the ABC locked out of the story because it would steal their thunder: how could a printed article about an atomic explosion compete with sound and vision? The national broadcaster appealed for help to Prime Minister Menzies who ruled that the ABC had the right to be there.

    There was a time, of course, in the 1930s, when the ABC news consisted of a radio presenter reading extracts from newspapers; an independent national news service was still a thing of the future. Observing today’s multifaceted and well-resourced ABC it’s easy to take the status quo for granted. We should, however, never underestimate the historical resentment felt by commercial media owners toward the ABC’s power to erode their market share.

    I should state up front that I do not believe the announced 4.6% cut in the ABC’s budget heralds its demise as an effective public broadcaster. A proportionally bigger cut by the Howard Government had to be absorbed in 1996-98, when the ABC’s revenues from government were around $575 million per annum compared with $1.04 billion today (after the latest cut). Since the budget low-point in 1998, revenues have risen by almost 30%, after taking inflation into account––though services have also expanded*. So, while the cut will hurt, if well managed it should not threaten core activities. The corporation has expanded into many new areas in recent years, during which time its budget has increased significantly. In the period ahead it will need to consolidate and re-examine priorities.

    Having said this, I have no doubt that, along with the stated fiscal imperative, ideological factors influenced the government’s decision. Over the past year, the Abbott Government has on several occasions publicly condemned the ABC for its coverage of asylum seekers and relations with Indonesia, for instance. There is a discreet way for a government, through the relevant minister, to make its views known on the corporation’s performance; by reaching for the bullhorn, the prime minister and others knew that while they were unlikely to change the ABC they would surely isolate it and damage its credibility. The decision by Foreign Affairs in June to drop its contract with the ABC’s Australia Network international television service followed years of lobbying by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, backed by relentless attacks from News Corp’s in-house commentators. If the present government had a firm ideological commitment to public broadcasting it would not have conducted itself in the way it has nor applied the cuts it has.

    At the heart of this debate, however, is not a broken election promise, as egregious as that is, or even the political colour of the parties in power. Heaven knows, past Labor Governments have not held back from savaging the ABC when it got under their skin. Since 1998, funding of public broadcasting in Australia (SBS and ABC) has fallen as a percentage of GDP from 0.162% to 0.102%, during a period in which conservative federal governments held office for 10 years and Labor for six. No, for me, at the heart of the debate is marketplace competition. It was the case in 1956, when the newspapers tried to stop the ABC covering a major news event; it remains the case today.

    The former media writer at the Australian newspaper, Amanda Meade, stated in the Guardian online two years ago: “Attacks from News Corp papers, in particular from the Australian, are now so frequent that there can be no pretence the paper is running anything but a campaign. Where anti-ABC material once might have been found on the comment pages, now it seems to be reported as news, despite some stories having little news value.” In my opinion, the same thing could have been said at least 10 years ago. Back then News Corp journalists would privately joke that it was permanent “open season” on the ABC; during editorial meetings it was always good for a bashing. This could only mean the reporters knew they would never be pulled up by the boss no matter how hard they put the boot into Auntie.

    Rupert Murdoch has made his views clear: why should commercial operators, who must raise their own funds and answer to shareholders, have to compete head-to-head with a publicly funded entity that does not need to turn a profit? It goes against his grain––and he is far from being alone in this within corporate and political circles. When the media market was reasonably stable, from the 1960s to the early 1990s, when newspaper sales were strong and before television and radio audiences began drifting off to the Internet, this represented mainly a philosophical objection. Now, as the entire media landscape is shifting, and the ABC has moved inexorably into the new digital markets where Murdoch and the other proprietors are scrambling to establish a presence, the commercial stakes are higher than ever before.

    When television was king, viewers did not have to pay to switch to a commercial network; the advertising revenues were enough. For their online news sites, however, Murdoch and the others need Internet users to pay up front. Will consumers do so in sufficient numbers when they can access the ABC’s (or BBC’s) site for free, and get all the other digital add-ons (podcasting, streaming, etc.) for free? You only have to commute by train in a big city to observe how many travellers are reading the free newspaper versus those reading one they paid for.

    As much as I want the ABC to survive and thrive, we need to concern ourselves too with the collapse of the business model for commercial news media organisations. If the ABC exists, in part, to preserve media diversity and provide services that others neglect, it follows that we should desire healthy and fair competition. Of course, one might ask, why should the ABC care if the competition is hurting? The answer I believe is, “always study your opponent”.

    The advent of new digital platforms has changed the competitive relationship between the ABC and its commercial rivals. Some foresee a battle to the death in which big players like Rupert Murdoch will use friendly governments to emasculate the competition. I am not among the pessimists. I know, from experience, how much politicians of all stripes like appearing on the ABC and how important the public broadcaster is to a lively cross-section of Australian voters. But something will have to give in the media fairground, where some of the attractions are apparently free and some are not. I say “apparently” because the ABC does come at a cost, even if the sums are generally buried away in the national accounts. It survives, in a sense, through a compulsory levy on the taxpayer.

    I wonder whether the time has come to reopen the debate about the funding method for maintaining the ABC and whether all its services, regardless of the cost, should be available without any “user-pays” restrictions. Whatever side of the fence one sits, it could only help to focus the arguments and nourish the public debate.

    *These and other figures were taken from ABC and SBS annual reports and Bureau of Statistics releases and used the Reserve Bank inflation calculator. By way of comparison, government revenues to the Defence Department rose by 45% above inflation between 1998-99 and 2013-14, according to the department’s annual reports. The defence budget represented 1.9% of GDP in 1998 compared with the current 1.8% (where it’s projected to remain through 2017).

    Walter Hamilton worked at the ABC for 33 years.

     

     

  • Geoff Hiscock. Cleaning up the coal energy pillar a central task for Modi and Abbott

    Narendra Modi and Tony Abbott explicitly defined energy as a “central pillar” of the India-Australia economic relationship in their joint statement this week.

    That’s a good sign, but if they want to make a truly significant contribution to the long-term economic and social benefit of India and Australia, then they need to deliver forcefully and quickly on the commitment they made to work together on clean coal technology.

    An emphasis on utility-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in India would be a good place to start. With 1.93 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions last year (5.5 per cent of the global total), India does not yet match China’s massive 9.52 billion tonnes (27.1 per cent), but it is headed in the same direction and by 2025 could be the world’s biggest coal importer.  Much of that coal will come from Australia.

    India has a large domestic coal industry, but it relies heavily on imported coal for its energy needs from Indonesia, Australia, South Africa and Kazakhstan. If the Modi-Abbott embrace holds true, then Australia is going to be an increasingly important energy supplier for India, both in thermal coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

    Modi told his Australian audience that he wanted all Indians to have access to electricity generated in a way that “does not cause our glaciers to melt.”  While the opponents of coal see that as the go sign for renewables, the reality is that coal is not going to disappear from India’s energy equation any time soon. It now generates 60 per cent of Indian electricity, and while that share may fall to 50 per cent between 2025 and 2030, the actual volume of coal consumed will not decline, because most of India suffers from a power supply shortage.  Modi’s home state of Gujarat is one of the few parts of India with a power surplus – a result of Modi’s pro-business policies and his encouragement of groups such as Adani and Tata to build large coal-fired power stations there. He has also given strong backing to the solar power industry

    But even with a substantial investment in domestic oil and gas, LNG imports, nuclear, hydro, solar and wind power, Modi knows that India will have to rely on coal-fired power stations for its electricity and industrial needs for years to come. It simply lacks the infrastructure, the smart technology, the time and the money to move too far from coal too soon.  To say that coal globally is in structural decline ignores the development aspirations of a multitude of nations.  India, for example, is still way behind China on the development path, and as many as 300 million of its 1.3 billion people lack access to the affordable, reliable power that coal can deliver.

    The world has known for decades that coal carries a heavy environmental price – Europe and the US in the 1950s, Japan in the 1970s and China in the 2010s all bear the scars of coal-fired air pollution. But just as suphur dioxide has been cleaned from smoke stack emissions, so too can carbon dioxide be removed if the political will exists and the price to pay is deemed palatable. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) typically reduces a power plant’s efficiency by 8 to 10 per cent, according to the International Energy Agency. For India, just as it is for China, the big challenge is to maximise the efficiency of new coal-fired power stations to offset the losses that go with CCS.  The latest ultra-supercritical power stations have efficiency ratings of 44 per cent or better. Unfortunately, too many of the power plants built in Asia in the last two decades have still been in the subcritical range, with efficiency ratings of 28-38 per cent. The factors that determine a plant’s efficiency (apart from the quality of the coal and water) are pressure and temperature, and the ability of components such as boilers and turbine blades to withstand higher pressures and temperatures,

    This is where Australian expertise in metallurgy, in power plant design, and in scrubbing carbon out of coal could be of great benefit to India, both economically and environmentally.  Increased washing of coal to improve efficiency, de-watering, steam-cleaning of flue gases and the use of a range of CCS options covering combustion, pulverisation and gas conversion are being tested around the world in demonstration plants and pilot projects. There is an urgent need to apply these carbon-cleaning measures to full-sized coal-fired power stations. That is starting to happen in North America through utility-scale CCS projects such as Boundary Dam in Canada and Petra Nova in the US, and will most probably happen in China from about 2016 onwards.

    Early last year, New Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) published a scoping study on the potential for CCS to mitigate India’s greenhouse gas emissions.  It pointed to a number of Indian CCS research projects in energy, petrochemicals and metals, in cooperation with countries such as Norway and the United States.  It said the barriers to CCS in India included the lack of accurate geological storage site data, the extra cost involved in using CCS, the “demonstration stage” nature of the technology and a lack of knowledge and capability among policy makers and regulators.  Other factors were financial risk for investors, lack of skilled labour and infrastructure, legal issues over land use, water contamination, CO2 leakage, and the cost- efficiency trade-off in retrofitting power plants with CCS measures.

    It concluded that India’s top development priority was to provide electricity to all at affordable prices. Nonetheless, it said CCS work should continue with “sustained efforts … required towards capacity development of different stakeholders.”

    The TERI report identifies the sort of work that needs to be done in India before CCS gets moving. Modi and Abbott should ensure the momentum generated by this week’s energy embrace does not get wasted.

    Geoff Hiscock writes on international business and is the author of “Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources,” published by Wiley.

  • Walter Hamilton. Japan: when in doubt, call an election

    Japan, Australia’s second biggest export market, has fallen back into recession. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has reacted by calling a snap election for mid-December, a year ahead of schedule, claiming he needs a new mandate to tackle the nation’s economic problems. Trade deals or talk of trade deals between Australia and both China and India should not distract us from the fact that one of the region’s great powers is sick and we are not immune.

    Japan buys 16% of Australia’s exports: not as much as a few decades ago but still substantial.

    Since 2008, the Japanese economy has contracted in 13 out of 27 quarters. In net terms, this adds up to no growth for six years. In the most recent September quarter, gross domestic product fell by 1.6% in annualized terms, following a revised 7.3% contraction in the previous quarter. Two consecutive quarters of decline defines a recession.

    As I wrote in an earlier blog, Japanese domestic consumption remains extremely weak. The adverse effect of the lift in the nation’s consumption tax (GST) from a rate of 5% to 8% in April was greater than the government and most market analysts predicted. Ahead of the tax hike consumers front-loaded their purchasing so that after the rise spending collapsed and has remained depressed.

    The consumption tax rise was always seen as risky but necessary in order to start repairing the deficit-ridden national budget. While the legislation to gradually raise the tax passed during the previous administration, the strategy was endorsed by Abe and implemented by his Liberal Democratic Party-led government. Now the Prime Minister has decided to abandon the present course of budget reform.

    On Tuesday night he announced that the Diet would be dissolved on 21 November ahead of a Lower House election expected on 14 December and that he would go to the polls pledging to delay by 18 months the next consumption tax increase, from 8% to 10%, originally scheduled for October 2015.

    Abe quoted the rallying cry of the American Revolution ‘no taxation without representation’ to justify his decision to call an election on this policy issue, though it seemed an odd analogy since what he is proposing is a ‘no taxation’ platform. At the same time, Abe said the government’s commitment to balance the national budget by 2020 remained solid. His credibility on this point hangs in the balance, since many commentators were predicting Japan would miss the target even with the next scheduled consumption tax rise. Looking less confident than usual, Abe did not attempt to explain how the budget target could be achieved if the tax increase were delayed. ‘I hear voices saying Abenomics has failed,’ he told a nationally televised news conference, ‘but I have yet to see any alternative policy put forward.’ In other words, you’re stuck with me––sink or swim.

    In recent weeks, Japan’s central bank has reacted to the renewed weakness in the economy by greatly expanding its fiscal stimulus, the main plank of the administration’s revival strategy over the past 18 months. By printing money to buy government bonds, the bank has been pumping inflation into a chronically deflated economy, so far with little lasting effect. The most conspicuous consequence has been a fall of about 20% in the yen-to-US dollar exchange rate. This has helped exporters back into profits and fed through into modest wage rises for employees in big export-oriented firms. But the weaker yen has also pushed up import prices, discouraging consumers and increasing the raw materials costs of many businesses, large and small. It has all the appearances of a vicious cycle in which the cure seems just as likely as the disease to kill the patient.

    Abenomics, the catchy term coined two years ago to describe Shinzo Abe’s program of economic reform, is rapidly acquiring a hollow sound. The program consists of ‘three arrows’ (Abe’s words): fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reform. The first two arrows, fired as soon as he took office, have failed to hit the target. Abe insists there are signs of improvement––the best labour market conditions in 20 years; strong job recruitment of high school graduates––and asks for more time to bring off the fundamental improvement electors were promised. It could also be conceded that structural reform, the ‘third arrow’, necessarily takes more time to deliver, but in this policy area too his government’s performance has been stronger on rhetoric than performance. Abe’s much-touted campaign to boost the role of women in society and the economy fell flat when two of his female cabinet ministers had to quit their posts because of old-fashioned money scandal and election law violations.

    Japanese voters will soon have a chance to pass judgement on the past two years. The disorganized and ineffectual state of the nation’s political opposition makes it likely the LDP will be returned to office, despite the poor state of the economy. That, however, is an early assessment. Much can happen in unpredictable times, given an electorate worn-out from hearing unfulfilled promises and as cynical about their leaders as they have ever been since the war. Japan is in trouble, and trouble there means trouble for Australia.

     

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

     

  • Renewable energy investment.

    A key feature of the President Obama/President Xi communique is their commitment to substantially reduce carbon pollution. There was little mention of an emissions trading scheme or putting a price on carbon. The emphasis was on developing renewable energy as an alternative source of energy to fossil fuels.  Emphasis was given to development of solar, wind and nuclear power. But in Australia, our government in attacking the established renewable energy targets has caused great confusion and damage in investment plans. As a result, renewable energy investment in Australia dropped 70% in the past year.  See the link below to the  report from the Climate Council which was published in The Conversation on 10 November.  John Menadue.

    http://gu.com/p/436ym/sbl

  • Is capitalism redeemable? Part 6: Inequality – it ain’t fair

    We get a laugh out of the Monty Python sketch of four Yorkshiremen competing with one another to tell stories of the hardship they endured when they were children, 30 years earlier – “you think you had it tough …”.

    Without going into Pythonesque exaggeration, four older Australians could easily recount similar stories. If they grew up in a Brisbane middle-class suburb, their house probably had no indoor toilet: there would have been a bucket toilet in the backyard emptied by the “dunnyman” (the “sanitary collector” to use one common euphemism) . If they grew up any distance from a city they probably didn’t have electricity, and the idea of turning on a tap to get hot water was almost beyond imagination.

    Like the Python characters, who all claimed they “were ‘appier back then”, they wouldn’t consider they had led deprived childhoods, because those were the standards of the time.

    Those material standards now, however, would be considered deprivation. Even if our own material conditions don’t deteriorate, if everyone else’s conditions improve, we feel hard done by.

    We have a natural concern for fairness, a concern not to be confused with envy. In our concern for fairness we want to see our own and others’ conditions brought up: envy is about wanting to see others brought down.

    This may all seem to be no more than commonsense, but there is a strong economic philosophy captured in the slogan “a rising tide lifts all boats”, essentially saying that any outcome is a good outcome so long as no-one is made any worse off. Inequality doesn’t count in other words. This philosophy, based on the work of the Italian Fascist Vilfredo Pareto, made its way into schools of economics and into public policy in the latter part of last century and is a mainstream of economic thinking.

    It was influential not because academics and public servants had any attraction to fascism, but rather because it came in a neat “value free” mathematical package, absolving the academic or public servant from having to worry about fuzzy things necessitating moral judgements, such as equity.  And it provided an easy rationalisation for the economic philosophies of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the early 1980s, later to be taken up across the political spectrum.

    Since the 1980s Australia has become more prosperous, but the benefits of that prosperity have gone disproportionately to those who are already most privileged. Research by Andrew Leigh and others shows that over the twentieth century Australia’s income distribution became more equal up to around 1980, but then started diverging once more. By now those gains have been lost: our income distribution is now roughly similar to what it was in 1900. Thomas Picketty’s research, which also takes in wealth, has similar findings for other ‘developed’ countries.

    If that widening inequality were a result of choice it should not necessarily be a policy concern. There are people who choose to work hard and to take risks, while there are others who choose to join religious orders with vows of poverty or to seek low-paid but safe employment. Australians show no appetite for enforced social levelling.

    But when inequality results from entrenched privilege, inheritance, “old boy” networks, exercise of political influence, denial of access to quality education and corruption, we are properly indignant. As a general point, we are less concerned with inequality in itself, than with the fairness or otherwise of the processes that lead to inequality. An almost uncontested political value in a country like Australia, transcending traditional “left’/”right” divisions, is a belief in equality of opportunity – a “fair go” in the vernacular.

    While the fair go may be an aspiration, Australians don’t believe it holds in reality. In a recent survey by Essential Media respondents were asked “which has more to do with why a person is rich” – “because he or she has worked harder than others” or “because he or she had other advantages”. Hard work scored only 28 per cent while “other advantages” scored 56 per cent.

    The capitalist economic system works when there is a strong connection between contribution and reward. That’s the very theoretical and practical basis of market economics.  That connection will never be perfect: even in the fairest system there is an element of luck. But when the connection between contribution and reward is badly severed the economic system itself loses its legitimacy. When legitimacy is lost people are inclined to reject the whole capitalist model, turning to superficially attractive but destructive alternatives. The plutocrats who show off their riches so vulgarly and the politicians who dismiss our concern with fairness don’t seem to realize that they’re threatening the very viability of the system that has supported them.

    Even before reaching that self-destructive outcome, an economic system that results in inequality is one that is wasting many opportunities.  That’s the subject of the next article.

  • Today’s World – Democracy, capitalism and Islam.

    Mauricio García Villegas, El Espectador, Colombia, http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/elmundo-actual-columna-526496

    The anniversary of two events that have marked out the course of our world has just been commemorated.

    The first is the taking of the United States embassy in Teheran on 4 November 1979. Iran at the time was governed by the Shah, a monarch who wanted to turn the ancient Persian people into a Western nation, hell or high water. It set off a reaction from Islamic leaders, amongst them the Ayatollah Khomeini, who, from his exile in London, organized a revolution to overthrow the Shah, and to establish an Islamic theocracy. The taking of the embassy and the capture of 52 American hostages for 444 days is one of the culminating moments of that revolution.

    The second event is the fall of the Berlin Wall that occurred on 9 November 1989, which started the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and put an end to the Cold War. The fall of the Soviet Union changed history so much that Eric Hobsbawm, the great English historian, said that the 20th century was a very short one, lasting only 75 years between the First World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    These two events changed the course of the 20th century. The Iranian revolution was proof that despite all the colonial attempts to assimilate the Middle East culturally and economically, the old yearning for a theocratic government continued intact for many Muslims. The colonial sins of Europe and the United States in the Middle East (starting from events in Palestine) not only gave rise to the Islamic revolution in Iran, but also saw the birth of the increasingly furious forms of Islamic fundamentalism that we see today.

    On the other hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent defeat of the Communist model, gave way to a kind of bold and lazy capitalism that ceased to feel guilty about increasing social injustice. Not only that, the lack of a competing system divorced capitalism from its democratic ideal, which was the flag that Western nations hoisted in opposition to its great 20th century enemies, first the Nazi regime and then the Soviet model.

    Many academic studies published in the last decade have raised the alarm about the way capitalism has been devouring democracy. I only site two recent and influential examples. The first, Thomas Piketty’s book (Capital in the Twenty First Century) demonstrates that we live in a system of hereditary capitalism where the level of accumulation of capital increases faster than the economy, and this leads inevitably to an increase in inequality.

    The second text is an article by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens) which uses quantitative information never used before to show that the American political system is dominated by the most powerful economic elites, and that there is very little that ordinary citizens can do to prevent it. The authors demonstrate that the majority do not rule in the United States. The rich do.

    In short, the direction that the world of today has taken has been determined in good part by the fall of Communism and the political defeat of the West in the Middle East. We have inherited terrible evils from this: the increasing acceleration of economic inequality and the rebirth of the wars of religion; they are two evils that in the middle of the 20th century, appeared to be on the way to extinction.

    Mauricio is a lawyer, sociologist and currently professor of law at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota, Colombia and also Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • Steve FitzGerald on Gough Whitlam, Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou

    Of the many things I admired and loved about Gough, one of the most delicious, next to our shared liking for food, was that he was the best person I’ve ever been privileged to brief. It wasn’t just that he soaked it up like blotting paper and asked for more and never forgot. It was that each piece of information was absorbed into its appointed niche and found a place in his political and historical cosmology, and emerged as knowledge, fully fashioned, and in context. One imagined the Graeco-Roman or later Christian ‘art of memory’, but of course Whitlamesque in its Enlightenment commitment to science and reason and the art of enquiry.

    When I went with Gough to meet Chairman Mao in 1973, at one point the discussion got into history and Sino-Soviet relations, and Gough says, from his reading it seems the Soviet Union wasn’t always helpful to the Chinese and at times directed them to actions which proved disastrous, ‘like the Nanchang Uprising. I understand Premier Zhou (Zhou Enlai, who was also at the meeting), you were the leader of that uprising’. I looked at him in astonishment. This generally little known event in Chinese history took place in 1927, after the Chinese Nationalists broke a united front with the Communists and staged a bloody attempt to wipe them out. Two and a half years before, on that famous 1971 visit that laid the fear of China, I’d given Gough background reading on a huge range of things and somewhere in there was a small piece on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party. And now, this obscure detail comes out, in context, accurate, appropriate. And Premier Zhou Enlai caps the moment with a self-criticism about his responsibility for the failure of that uprising.

    But the one time when in my experience Gough’s memory failed him was also in that meeting. They were winding up, with some comments from Gough about the roles of Mao and Zhou in the Chinese revolution, and Mao decided to launch back into the discussion, and asked ‘Would your Party dare to make revolution’ and Gough said ‘we believe in evolution,’ and the meeting was re-ignited, and there was an exchange on the theories of Charles Darwin (which Mao said he accepted but they didn’t apply to historical changes in human society). Mao asked if the city of Darwin was named after Charles Darwin and did Darwin ever visit that city in the Beagle, and Gough had a rarest of moments when a detail escaped his prodigious memory. Zhou Enlai looked at his watch, and with some banter about Mao’s age and infirmities, we stood to leave.

    A few days after Gough’s departure from China, I received the following telegram. It was vintage Gough.

    ‘Apropos my conversation with Chairman Mao, you should know that in 1836 Charles Darwin visited Australia as official naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle, landed at Sydney on 12 January and visited Bathurst. On next voyage in 1839 Beagle without Darwin visited Darwin harbour which captain named after him.

    Please make full confession of error to Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai and say that with Chairman’s help I shall now follow correct line.’

    The ‘big ideas’ about which so much has been said and written in the last few weeks,  came from the big learning, the foundation of Gough’s weltanschauung. And the big target. Not for Gough the small target. No temporising, no pussy-footing politics or ducking and weaving to dodge negative opinion polls, no fudging principle to make oneself look more like one’s opponents. You could brief him. You could contribute ideas. But it was the courage and fortitude of the big target that turned the big ideas into the big public policy reform.

  • The G20 economies.

    The link to The Conversation below, provides a useful summary of the G20 and its member economies, e.g.

    The G20 economies represent 65% of the world’s population, 79% of world trade, 84% of the world economy and 77% of world carbon emissions.

    Australia rates number 3 in GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity.

    As a percentage of GDP, Australia has a relatively low level of debt compared to other G20 economies.

    Along with Canada,UK and Germany, we are the only G20 economies with a AAA credit rating.

    Australia and Canada have the lowest corruption rating amongst the G20 countries.

    John Menadue.

     

    http://theconversation.com/the-g20-economies-explained-in-12-charts-33887

  • Global Pulse Magazine

    You can now subscribe to Global Pulse Magazine.

    Global Pulse Magazine which you can view at www.globalpulsemagazine.com  was launched on September 29 and for the last month has been free to visit.

    We invite you to subscribe at and receive daily newsletter. Just go to the homepage of www.globalpulsemagazine.com and at the top right hand corner you can click the SUBSCRIBE button and follow the prompts.

    Global Pulse Magazine combines the resources of five leading Catholic publishers – Commonweal in New York, La Croix in Paris, UCAN based in Bangkok, Eureka Street in Australia and eRenlai from China though edited in Taiwan.

    Everyday, news, features and opinions of international interest and significance will appear on the site.

    As a special introductory offer, you can subscribe to Global Pulse Magazine for a modest US$22 that lasts for a year. A pay wall operates on the site.

  • The ABC: soft targets and collateral damage

    In 1963, the ABC’s then Controller of News reported to his superiors on the results of a wide-ranging visit to Asia. He recommended that the ABC undertake a major expansion of its overseas operations, driven by the belief that the journalists and camera operators of the national broadcaster were best equipped to keep Australians informed of the events, trends and decision-makers directly affecting them. This was seen as a core part of the ABC’s charter; few doubted it. Today, sadly, more and more of the ABC’s independent foreign newsgathering operations are being dismantled and the good work of decades squandered.

    Here’s what the News boss wrote after his swing through Indonesia, Singapore, Borneo, Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines: “I have been continually surprised in the past six weeks at the growth of the interest in and the consciousness of our country… Every thinking Australian knows that our destiny is linked with Asia. Now the Asians know it.”

    Before long, the ABC would base correspondents in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, New Delhi, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Hanoi and Beijing. It would, at various times, also staff bureaus in Port Moresby, New York, Washington, Brussels, London, Moscow, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Saigon and Wellington. The foreign correspondents were allowed to travel to seek out original stories, meet newsmakers in person, and live within the social and cultural milieu they were supposed to interpret for Australians; they were given time to reflect and make informed assessments of what was going on; and they were assisted by locally-engaged staff who provided language skills and research support.

    The correspondents and camera operators, in short, were able to be creative, well informed and abreast of events. The ABC competed alongside the BBC, NBC, CBS, Visnews and others: a necessary competition because each of these broadcasters––American, British, Australian, etc.––took a different perspective and served the interests of a particular audience/client.

    Today, to a terrifying extent, the thinning ranks of the ABC’s foreign correspondents are forced to become recyclers: desk-bound, “top of the head” commentators on a passing parade of events and issues they have little time or opportunity to inform themselves about, let alone reflect upon. The advent of so-called “instant” news (which is an oxymoron, since something does not become news until it is reported, and then everything depends on the quality of the reporting) has bled the purpose out of the foreign bureaus, laying them open to the slash-and-burn merchants who never really accepted the rationale for their existence in the first place.

    Yes, we’ve heard about the Federal Government’s cuts to the ABC budget and how this is the sole reason why the ABC has to reduce its foreign newsgathering. I don’t buy it, because I have seen and heard it all before. The ABC receives a large budget and in recent years has invested in many new “broadcast” platforms (online, digital television, etc). During this time it has failed to face up to the fact that its wages bill is grossly over-represented as a proportion of its total spend. In certain program areas, so much of the budget is committed to wages a ridiculously small amount is available for discretionary spending on new content. News and Current Affairs is especially vulnerable since it is impossible to predict when and where a major news event will occur and how much it will cost to mount the special coverage Australian audiences expect.

    ABC on-air personalities are not necessarily the highest paid in the industry, but the average salary and add-on costs of ABC journalists (to take one professional group as an example) are well above the industry average. The bell-curve of wage rates across the corporation swells above the median line. Now I’m talking like an accountant. Time, then, for a bit more history of the ABC’s international operations––because history, as well as budget expediency, lies behind the current push against the foreign bureaus.

    The ABC, a big organization, has its fair share of professional and personal jealousy. Some of it goes back to the old craft divides (journalist versus broadcaster, reporter versus camera operator, etc.) Some is related to inter-divisional rivalries. The expansion in the number of ABC divisions has only intensified the conflict over policy priorities and budget allocations. The ABC’s shift of emphasis away from the traditional media of radio and television has opened the way for new, ambitious empire-builders who have very different agendas from the old content providers.

    The ABC’s overseas bureaus were, to a large extent, established and maintained by the News division. I can say, from experience, that some senior executives of other divisions deeply resented this arrangement. What was in it for them? Calls for the disestablishment of the ABC’s overseas operation have arisen within the corporation on numerous occasions and certainly pre-date the current budget crisis. “Why not just take the news we want from the BBC or CNN?” I’ve heard asked. Better still get it free-of-charge from Al Jazeera. The supposedly swanky lifestyle of the privileged correspondent irritated those accountants and others who, as I say, never bought into the idea the ABC needed an independent newsgathering operation abroad. Their day has come.

    Assignment editors and news executives have become defensive: pulling a correspondent out of the Middle East just as the lid was about to blow off the place; shutting the Moscow bureau just as Vladimir Putin was about to reconstitute the USSR; cutting local staff from the Tokyo bureau, so the non-Japanese-speaking correspondent is left to pull together his reports from the Internet at Starbucks maybe.

    OK, the ABC can’t be everywhere and can’t spend recklessly. But that’s not the issue here. The simple fact is the foreign bureaus offer ABC management a soft target, a quick fix. The collateral damage will be the diminishing of the Australian public’s right to be informed by journalism that is relevant and trustworthy.

    Once a bureau is closed––local staff laid off, leases cancelled, contacts lost and trusted relationships foregone––often there is no way back. In a day the planning and work of a generation is forfeited. What will move in to fill the vacuum? Internet polls? Quizzes? Reader rants responding to blog sites? Interviews by remote control with untested and unchallenged “experts”? Agency coverage provided by any Johnny-come-lately? Or just silence? (Once upon a time the ABC had a bureau in Hanoi. How much news about Vietnam do Australians now receive, following its closure?)

    The ABC’s new foreign newsgathering model, according to reports, will rely on correspondents travelling out of a few selective hubs to report. This, of course, is not a new idea. The corporation once went through the expensive exercise of building up a large presence in Singapore, as a regional news hub. Now it has nothing in Singapore at all. Put all your eggs in one basket and you can find the basket is constantly in the wrong place and the costs of keeping it there––and moving reporters and camera operators in and out––grow way out of proportion to the alternatives.

    But the major argument against the “hubs” model is that correspondents become fly-in, fly-out “instant experts” who lose credibility with audiences. Before long, managers are thinking: “Why not keep them all at home in Australia, and only send them away to the fire once it has broken out?” Heard that one before too.

    Turning foreign correspondents into “firemen” (I use the term in the journalistic sense) can mean only one thing: they end up covering just “fires” (i.e. wars, riots and disasters). We all know, surely, that these are the exceptions, the tiniest part of the daily lives of most people in the world. Do we imagine we can really know what an Indonesian thinks or what a German believes––and therefore how they might vote, invest, travel, plot, reform or whatever––by concentrating on the exceptional moments in their lives, never knowing them, except as hapless victims or incomprehensible zealots?

    Fashions and technology change. Newsgathering is done very differently, in a technical sense, today compared with the 1960s: no more teleprinters and trunk-line calls, thank goodness. But news is not all, or even mostly, about the means of reporting; it is about the commitment to report accurately, fairly and responsibly. It’s about the calibre of the professionals charged with the responsibility, where they are deployed and how they are directed and supported. A former senior executive at the ABC, who thought deeply about these matters, once wrote:

    It is irrelevant in the philosophic sense how the truth is

    communicated. It is relevant only as to the practical but it

    does not mean and has never meant that smoke signals

    must take a particular form and ballad singers must only

    use a particular tune and that words to be printed on paper

    must never undergo change or even that the paper must

    always remain the same.

    What is important and what must be properly understood

    is that news demands good smoke signals and good ballads.

    It demands the smoke signals and the ballads that are

    appropriate to the time and are best understood by the people

    of that time because the communication of news is important

    in no esoteric sense. It is important primarily to make certain

    that truth is communicated and understood.

    In these times, when foreign news events seem more complex than ever and Australia’s direct stake in regional and international affairs is more diverse than ever (through military engagements, trade deals, emergency responses and security and diplomatic entanglements), the ABC needs to be focused on the quality of the smoke signals, and not sacrifice its foreign newsgathering tradition to the budget quick-fix. It should look harder at its structural budget problem and consider whether too much money, time and effort is going into propping up personal empires in Ultimo and elsewhere.

     

    The writer is a former ABC correspondent.