John Menadue

  • Tony Abbott’s debt to Rupert Murdoch. John Menadue

     

    Media Watch of 9 September gave us a snap shot of what Rupert Murdoch did for Tony Abbott. It said “the final tally of (the Daily Telegraph’s) coverage in the election campaign stacks up like this.Out of a total of 293 political stories we scored only six as pro Labor. While 43 were pro coalition. On the negative side there were just five articles that we judged to be anti coalition.While a remarkable 134 were anti Labor” That summary takes no account of the front page splashes that ridiculed Labor day after day. or the coverage by Murdoch’s other papers outside Sydney.

    It would be naïve to think that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t expect a lot in return for his bullying of the electorate in support of Tony Abbott. Rupert Murdoch will want a lot more than he asked for from Gough Whitlam after the 1972 election – an appointment as Australian High Commissioner to the UK.  I was the intermediary but Murdoch denies asking!!

    Not content with ownership of over 70% of metropolitan readership in Australia, he will expect much more from Tony Abbott and not just running to the telephone whenever he calls.

    Crikey and others have highlighted Murdoch’s likely calls .

    • Control of Foxtel. News Ltd now owns 50% of Foxtel and wants the other 50% owned by Telstra. Watch this play out.
    • News Ltd regards the ABC as a privileged competitor and a real pain in the neck. It doesn’t like public broadcasters and has made this clear in both the UK and Australia. News Ltd could pursue its campaign against the ABC by urging funding cuts to the ABC in the name of reducing unfair competition and providing value for money for the Australian taxpayer. This is despite the fact that the ABC happens to be the second most trusted institution in Australia, just behind the High Court, whilst the News Ltd outlets are the least trusted media in the country. This is not to say that the Canberra TV and Radio Bureau of the ABC are serving us well but that is another question.
    • Open up tendering to enable Sky News to compete with the ABC for the International Television Service.
    • New anti-syphoning laws to protect Foxtel and limit major sporting groups broadcasting their own content.
    • Reduction in television licensing fees for free-to-air TV companies to help Lachlan Murdoch’s bumbling Channel 10.
    • Federal government recruitment advertising to be shifted from online to print media to help assist The Australian.

    After John Major’s surprising victory in the 1992 UK general election, the London Sun boasted ‘It ‘s the Sun wot won it’.

    This time the Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail, Herald Sun, Adelaide Advertiser and The Australian won’t be as garrulous. But together with Rupert Murdoch they will expect from Tony Abbott big time.

    And what about the journalist code of conduct that hopefully Murdoch’s  employees signed on to..There is a deathly silence from them.

  • Julie Bishop fails Economics I. Guest blogger Ian McAuley

    ​In justifying the Coalition’s cuts in foreign aid, Julie Bishop said that borrowing from overseas only to hand it back overseas was unsustainable in light of our mounting debt.

    That statement has glib appeal, but it’s a serious misrepresentation.

    For a start the Government does not borrow from overseas. Rather, almost all the Commonwealth’s revenue is sourced from taxation and other charges. The balance, used to finance counter-cyclical deficit spending or to make funds available for capital projects, is funded by Commonwealth bonds issued on the domestic market.

    Second, much of what Australia spends on foreign aid is spent on domestically-produced goods and services, particularly consultancy services.  That part stays here.

    The Coalition may have a point in that while the Budget is in deficit, any cut which reduces the deficit reduces Commonwealth borrowing. It could also validly point out that while that borrowing is on the domestic market, many Government bonds will be taken up by foreigners, in recognition of Australia’s low sovereign risk, and some of those bonds taken up by financial institutions will ultimately be financed by borrowing from overseas. That’s the benefit of having a well-earned AAA credit rating, a point which the Coalition is reluctant to acknowledge because it does not align with their story about the situation they inherited from a fiscally irresponsible Labor Government.

    That is really a stretch. It can no more be called “borrowing from overseas” than my use of a credit card to buy a meal or an airline ticket. Let’s concede this to the Coalition, however, so we can take the money trail all the way through.

    Australian financial institutions are net borrowers from overseas. That’s been so for a long time, because we almost always run a deficit on our current account. That is the difference between our exports and imports, and as a mathematical reality that deficit has to be financed. (It’s the private deficit we don’t hear much about, but it’s many times bigger than our small government deficit.)

    When our financial institutions borrow from overseas they do so at very favourable interest rates – much more favourable than those at which governments and private investors in poor countries can borrow. Most aid-recipient countries are lucky if they get a BB credit rating. Their own borrowing has to be for projects with short-term returns, a constraint which does not hinder some commercial projects and government projects with a strong early revenue streams, but which is highly unfavourable for longer-term investments in areas such as health and education, where the benefits are slow to be realized and are diffused through the economy.

    And, of course, there is a financial market at work to ration our borrowing. When we borrow $100 000 to finance foreign aid, ultimately that is $100 000 that isn’t available to finance domestic purchases. It may mean a few Australians decide to downgrade from a BMW to a Volkswagen, or to make their next overseas trip in four star rather than five star accommodation.

     

    It all comes down to simple economics.  Whichever way we fund foreign aid, we’re putting aside a little of our consumption in order to finance investment for those who are far less fortunate.  Does Julie Bishop really not understand this?

     

  • What does Labor stand for? Principles to drive policies and programs. John Menadue

    Late last year I was approached by a friend who is very politically active about what I thought the ALP could do to renovate its policy platform.

    I discussed this request with an old friend, Ian McAuley.  Together we prepared a paper ‘Principles to drive policies and programs – or – What does Labor stand for?’ It is dated 18 December 2012. Quite deliberately, this paper was not widely distributed. It can now be found on my website .  It is on the home page and also in the folder ‘democratic renewal’. It is also reproduced at the end of this blog.

    The paper can also be found on Ian McAuley’s web site ianmcauley.com/academic/othpubs/laborprinciples.pdf.

    Ian and I believe that this paper is still relevant to the reform process that the ALP must undergo in light of the defeat on 7 September 2013.

    One concern expressed to me by many ALP voters was that the ALP campaign at the last election lacked an over-riding narrative or framework.

    In the political process, I think there is general agreement that political compromises have to be made but they should only be made against a framework of generally agreed values. We like to know what our party and our leaders stand for, even if a few corners have to be cut.

    We open our paper by drawing attention to the decline of the ALP primary vote from 45% to 50% fifty years ago to 35% to 40% today. In fact in the September 7 election, the ALP primary vote fell disastrously to 34%. In Queensland it was 30% and in WA 29%.  Tony Abbott on election night gloatingly described this primary vote for the ALP as the lowest for 100 years.

    The current debate on the carbon tax illustrates how an approach based on principles can overcome a political problem. It is important that Labor is firm on principles but not positions. Unfortunately, politicians keep getting sucked into positions. Tony Abbott’s position is to ‘scrap the tax’. Labor’s is either ‘keep the tax’ or ‘move now to a European emissions trading system’. It would be better for Labor to stand for a more general principle such as ‘a strong market-based mechanism to reduce emissions’. It gives Labor more room to move. It reveals a flexibility in contrast to Abbott’s ‘position’.

    In addition to the policy renewal, there must of course be major renovation of the ALP organisation and structure. Major issues in this area which need reform are.

    • Building a national party from the long established confederation of six state-based parties.
    • Widespread participation by ALP members from federal electorates in policy formation, selection of the parliamentary leader and selection of federal candidates.
    • A reduced but fraternal link between trade unions and the ALP.

    I hope you find the paper (below) ‘What does Labor stand for’ challenging.

     

    Principles to Drive Policies and Programs, or

    What does Labor stand for?

    1. Labor’s constituency

    The Labor primary vote has declined from about 45-50% fifty years ago to 35-40% today. The Coalition vote is virtually unchanged. Labor has lost its clear identity with the ‘working class’ and what it stands for. Its natural constituency and membership has declined. To contain the loss, Labor has increasingly committed itself to focus groups, marginal seat strategies and ‘whatever it takes’. Values, principles and ideas have given way to marketing of products .Money has replaced membership as the driving force of campaigns. The trade unions remain the most important institutional Labor supporter but trade union influence is out of proportion to its role in the community and the ‘Labor constituency’.

    1. Principles as the basis for policy
      If Labor is to differentiate itself from conservative parties, it needs to express that difference in a clear set of principles which accord with the best of Australians’ values. Otherwise the political contest is reduced to satisfying short-term materialist ‘aspirations’, appeasing vested interests and managing the media cycle. In such a contest, Labor is engaged in a futile struggle, for the Coalition is adept at conveying the misleading impression that it is the ‘natural party of government’, particularly because of its supposed competence in economic management.

      From community values a set of principles of public policy can be developed – principles which define Labor in contrast to other parties. Those principles can underpin a coherent set of policies and programs which implement those policies.
      Values > principles > policies > programs.

      Moving to the ‘right’ on issues such as refugee policy and health care simply legitimises the conservative position – a position from where exploitation of people’s fear is likely to drive out sensible and reasonable political debate. Selectively compromising – a little socialism here, a little free market there – as was the strategy of Britain’s New Labour – only confuses Labor supporters and the electorate because it presents inconsistent values.

      Social democrat parties, including Labor, were founded on an optimistic view of human nature and on recognition of the public sphere where people realise their full capabilities. These ideas can be expressed in consistent and coherent principles such as stewardship, the common wealth, including enhancement of social, environmental and institutional capital and protection of natural resources.

      In his emphasis on the ‘social question’, John Curtin gave effect to these principles, acknowledging that only a strong society, including a strong and respected government, can support a strong economy. And of course there is no point in an economy that does not serve social ends.

    2. Curtin’s vision – ‘the social question’
      Curtin’s social democratic vision contrasts sharply with the Liberal Party platform ‘that only businesses and individuals are the creators of wealth and employment’, a view that reduces government to a burden rather than a contributor to the common wealth. Curtin’s vision contrasts with the notion that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, which legitimises destructive social divisions, which encourages people to separate themselves from society in physical or metaphorical gated communities (private schools, private health insurance), which allows the connection between contribution and reward to be severed, which encourages rent-seeking, speculation and protection of privilege rather than productive investment and which compensates the ‘losers’ with social security handouts.
    3. Labor – the Party of strong leadership and values
      Just as Labor governments provided leadership to face greater challenges in the 1980s, so too today Australia faces even greater challenges – climate change, population ageing, dilapidated infrastructure, commodity based exports, deficits in human capital and a weak base for public revenue. The politics of ‘what’s in it for me’ discourages us from facing these challenges, for there will have to be trade-offs: some will have to pay more than others and some will have to forego benefits now for the sake of longer term benefits. Such transitions can be painful, but are more likely to gain support when people understand the principles underpinning public policy.

      When the Party is unified around a set of principles it can still have a robust debate about how to give effect to those principles. But it would be in  control of its message because its parliamentary representatives can engage with the electorate in a consistent and sincere voice, with less reliance on ‘talking points’ and spin and with less concern with the immediate reaction of focus groups. Labor supporters would be much more prepared to accept political compromise if they know that there is strong leadership and there is broad agreement on key values and principles. Labor leadership has to be patient and consistent around these values and principles – and never go backwards.  Authenticity and sincerity are then easily recognised.

    4. Democratic Renewal
      At the same time as addressing overarching ‘Labor’ principles that could guide Labor policies and programs, there are two immediate issues which must be given high priority.

      The first is democratic renewal in our public institutions, including the ALP. We are increasingly alienated from our institutions. This suits the conservatives who implicitly seek to protect private corporate interests from public intervention. Loss of faith in parliament inevitably leads on to denigration and a loss of faith in government. Those that Labor has traditionally represented and the wider community are the losers. The Coalition has deliberately set out to destroy faith in our public institutions, public policy and politics. The government is ‘corrupt’. It is ‘illegitimate’. Mayhem is promoted in the parliament. The signs of democratic decay and lack of respect for politicians are everywhere. For example:

      1. Through domination of parliament, executive governments monopolise information flows and policy advice. Policy advice is increasingly given by ministerial advisers while the public service is co-opted  into providing political support to government.
      2. Governments are overly-influenced by powerful lobby groups and donors, e.g. miners, developers, licensed clubs and hotels
      3. The health ‘debate’ is not with the public, but between insiders – the Minister and the AMA/pharmacists/private health insurance companies.
      4. Because Labor does not have a consistent principle-based set of policies – some would say a ‘narrative’ – it has little capacity for defence or explanation when its policies are misrepresented or misinterpreted in the media.
      5. Labor is no longer representative of those that vote for it or have empathy with it.

    The concentrated media does not properly expose abuse of power and directly skews the public debate towards personalities, the whims of proprietors, conflict and celebrities, rather than serious policies. We had an enquiry about the failure of our intelligence agencies over Iraq, but the greater failure was in the media.

    Democratic renewal is urgent – reform of the parliament, political parties, party factions, lobbyists, donors and the media.

    1. The economic role of government
      The second immediate issue is the economic role of government. Those who would benefit from weak and distrusted government have undermined the legitimacy of the public sector.
      Australians have been encouraged to forget that their prosperity is based on both public and private goods. To many people government has become ‘invisible’, except as a vehicle for distributive welfare. Australians have lost sight of the contribution of the mixed economy, not only in providing public goods, but also in ensuring that the forces of greed and short-sightedness don’t lead to economic and social collapse. It is noteworthy that despite the continued denigration of government and the public sector, the three most trusted institutions in Australia are public institutions – the High Court, the ABC and the Reserve Bank. In this survey by Essential Research (22.10.2012) there was not a private group in the top eight most trusted groups and institutions in Australia. The three least trusted groups were business, trade unions and political parties.

      Even conservatives acknowledge that only the public sector can provide some services such as national defence and management of the money supply. In addition, however there are economic functions where private funding or provision is possible but only at high economic cost, with distorted incentives and with serious consequences for equity. These include education, health insurance, energy and water utilities and communication and transport infrastructure. In these and other areas there are market failures for which prudent economic principles require a strong government role in funding or provision. Unless Labor articulates and defends the proper economic role of government – a pre-requisite to improving Australia’s weak taxation base – economic growth will be restrained by inadequate public spending and investment.

      Of these investments, the most important is human capital to ensure that people can develop their capabilities so that they can contribute to their full potential through employment, business or unpaid work. In the competitive global economy of this century, human capital is a nation’s only secure asset. Scandinavian countries demonstrate this. A population with skills and with incentives which match rewards to contribution will draw less on distributive welfare, preserving public revenue for needed social insurance and public goods. The best antidote to disadvantage and low self esteem is not welfare but well paid and meaningful employment.

      Labor will find it hard to make these investments if it allows itself to be depicted as the party of big welfare spending. In fact conservative governments, because of under-investment in human capital and physical infrastructure, and neglect of economic adjustment, have spent strongly on distributive welfare to compensate for inequalities rising from a weakened economic structure. Over the last 50 years, social security assistance has risen from 5% of Australians’ household disposable income to 12%. Examples of this expanded social security assistance are baby-bonuses, family allowances and superannuation concessions for the wealthy. The government is moving to wind back some middle class welfare – subsidies to private health insurance and the second baby bonus – but the justification is more about immediate budgetary management rather than an expression of principles. Rather, Labor should be the party which ensures that Australia becomes less reliant on distributive welfare. Instead of referring to ‘the education revolution’ in isolation, it should present its human capital policies in the context of a unified set of principles in infrastructure, education, health, environmental and protection, underpinned by principles of investing in capabilities, nurturing individual freedom and autonomy and supporting social inclusion.

      There is an opportunity to differentiate Labor from what has emerged as continuity between Howard and Abbott in that both are strong on distributive welfare while ready to sacrifice other aspects of government which would strengthen the economy’s capacity to provide well-paid and productive employment with less need for social transfers.

    A reframing of policy in terms of strengthening the economy in order to reduce the need for distributive welfare would not only neutralise the ‘right’s’ attack on Labor as the party of the welfare state but would also give a unifying theme to many policies. It would link policies in industry adjustment, infrastructure, education, health and social inclusion. It would overcome the false framing of a trade-off between equity and efficiency. It would give Labor parliamentarians an opportunity to engage more openly with the public without the need for spin and carefully prepared texts.

    1. From values to principles
      The purpose and role of a Labor Government could be to give expression to the values set out below – to achieve as far as possible the ‘common good’.

      Values such as freedom, citizenship, ethical responsibility, fairness and stewardship would be generally accepted by most people. As the values are translated into practices Labor makes a choice that can be further defined as principles that then lead to policies, e.g. the value of fairness can be expressed in the principle of a stronger link between contribution and reward- a link which has become severed by hugely disproportionate executive pay, high returns to rent seekers and financial speculators and the long head-start of inherited wealth.

     

    The following is indicative of a set of values and their expressions in principles which could underpin a Labor platform/policy statement.

    Fairness/equity

    1. A ‘fair go’ is primarily about economic opportunity.
    2. People should be provided with a good education and those who put it to socially useful ends should be rewarded. Governor Lachlan Macquarie was no socialist but his ‘tickets of leave’ gave the outcasts and underprivileged of this country another chance. We built a nation from the underclass. We must give a chance for newcomers and all people to have another opportunity.
    3. Fairness promotes social mobility and limits division and resentment.
    4. Fairness should not be restricted to education.
    5. The path to prosperity with fairness is through productivity and well-paid employment rather than government handouts. The Scandinavians have demonstrated that education and incentives for participation do produce fairness and economic prosperity.
    6. Fairness implies that we are tough towards ‘bludgers’, whether they be tax-dodgers, the vulgarity and indulgence of  those with inherited wealth, protection from competition, government hand-outs and favouritism or cheating on social services.
    7. Fairness implies full employment as a macro-economic goal to ensure human capabilities are not wasted.

    Areas where we fall short in fairness include neglect of early childhood education, treatment of the needs of indigenous people and refugees, diversion of education funding to wealthy schools, neglect of public infrastructure and inadequate ODA.

    Stewardship

    1. We have inherited a stock of assets or capital; environmental (forests/water), public and private physical capital (roads/ports), human capital (education), family capital (family and friendship bonds), social capital (trust), cultural capital and institutional capital (government and non-government institutions). That stock of assets must be retained and where possible enhanced.
    2. We must use our resources as efficiently and productively as possible.

    Areas where we fall short in stewardship include placing a heavy strain on the planet which prejudices our future. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change we are still influenced by the sceptics who ignore the facts and cling instead to ideology.  Many super funds and fund managers ignore climate change risk. We waste water and degrade the land. We are not skilling ourselves for Asia.
    Freedom

    1. We all have rights to the extent that they do not lessen the rights of others.
    2. Except where the rights of the vulnerable are at stake, the government should not intrude into the private realm.
    3. The potential abuse of power should be minimized by the separation of powers and the separation of church and state.

    Areas where we fall short in freedom include the growing power of cabinet and executive which is not adequately balanced by parliament and the judiciary. We have an ‘elected monarchy’. We have no Human Rights Act. We have reduced freedom as a result of counter-terrorism legislation. The media increasingly fails to protect our freedoms and often facilitates abuse of power by lobbyists e.g. miners.

    Citizenship

    1. We are more than individuals linked by market transactions.
    2. Our life in the public sphere is no less necessary than our private lives. As citizens we enjoy and contribute to the public good. It is where we show and learn respect for others, particularly people who are different. It is where we abide by shared rules of civic conduct. It is where we build social capital – networks of trust. We need to behave in ways that make each of us trusted members of the community. ‘Do no harm’ is not sufficient.
    3. Citizenship brings responsibilities – political participation, vigilance against abuse of power and paying taxes.

    Areas where we fall short in citizenship include our withdrawal into the private realm –There are growing gated communities, private entertainment, private rather than public transport, disregard of neighbours, opting out of community through ‘vouchers’, government subsidies, private health insurance and private schools that discourage the coalescence of socially mixed communities around shared public schools.. The discussion about health is reduced to managing the system rather than the principles which should drive a health service. There is a lack of respect in the language of denigration – ‘bogans’ and ‘losers’.

    Ethical responsibility

    1. Those in prominent office should promote those qualities which draw on the best of our traditions and the noblest of our instincts.
    2. The duty of those with public influence is to encourage hope and redemption rather than despair and condemnation, confidence rather than fear. It is to promote the common good – to encourage us to use our talents. It is to respect truth and strengthen learning to withstand the powers of populism and vested or sectional interests. This would set a tone of public discourse which nurtures public institutions

    Areas where we fall short in ethical responsibility include leaders who appeal to our worst instincts, e.g. dog whistling on refugees, ‘media-drenched commercialism’, executive salaries, undue influence of vested interests and corporate lobbyists. Those in public office should help the community to deal with difficult problems which may require painful adaptive change, such as climate change, rather than provide the false comfort of ignoring or downplaying them.

     

    John Menadue (former Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet)

    Ian McAuley (Adjunct Lecturer, University of Canberra)

    December 18, 2012

  • Let’s hope Albo runs and wins. John Menadue

    The ALP needs a ballot for its parliamentary leadership even if it takes a month or so to do so. It will be time well spent. It needs to find the right leader and continue the process of democratisation that the ALP badly needs.

    Those who want to rush to a quick decision on the leadership are the faction heavies and union bosses that want to continue to control the ALP and for it to continue on its disastrous course. They want control rather than power on behalf of ordinary working people.

    Kevin Rudd set in motion a new arrangement whereby the parliamentary leader must be selected jointly by the ALP membership across the country and by the parliamentary caucus, with each given equal weighting. That change and many others are necessary to reform the organisation and structure of the ALP which is controlled by an elite which is unrepresentative of ALP members and supporters.

    After the 2010 election, the ALP commissioned Carr, Bracks and Fawkner to report on ALP reform. That reform was almost entirely ignored. It is important that the Rudd reforms don’t suffer a similar fate.

    If there is only one nominee for the leadership of the parliamentary party there will be no ballot for the leadership and no participation by the 50,000 plus ALP membership across the country. So Anthony Albanese please put up your hand. Labor supporters need your type of leadership as well as the process of rank and file participation that your nomination as leader would trigger.

    After the disaster last Saturday, the ALP needs to take a clear democratic path, starting with the election of the parliamentary leader. If there is no ballot for the leadership the back-room fixes and deals will continue. We have already seen this with the appointment of Sam Dastyari to the Senate. He was the General Secretary of the NSW Branch who said that he was committed to reform of that branch! But it didn’t last long.

    Now Paul Howes, the General Secretary of the AWU who did so much with Bill Shorten to tear down Kevin Rudd in 2010 and Julia Gillard in 2013 is now being touted as a likely replacement for Bob Carr in the Senate. Some people don’t ever seem to learn.

    The failed Canberra bureau of the ABC which became a participant in the political processes in the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd era is now pushing for the status quo and highlighting that the ALP could be without a parliamentary leader for a month or more. Senator Stephen Conroy, a right wing faction leader in Victoria, and who failed so dismally to put even modest restraints on the Murdoch media is now urging a quick outcome in choosing a leader which will exclude the rank and file of the ALP.

    Let’s hope that the ALP learnt something from the results last Saturday and stays on the path of reform which Kevin Rudd set out for the leadership of the parliamentary ALP. But that must be only the first step. A lot else remains to be done.

  • The aftermath of Saturday’s election. Guest Blogger: David Combe

    David Combe was ALP National Secretary from 1973 until 1981

    Just over a month ago, I received an email from an old friend – an ALP Life Member who belongs to the ‘my party right or wrong’ school of loyalists – asking my thoughts on the likely outcome of the election which Prime Minister Rudd had just called. In my reply to her, I said in part:

     “I have not been optimistic for some time…..  Unless the way things happen has changed dramatically, I still believe that once the electorate ‘takes out the baseball bats’, there is nothing which is going to change the outcome. And they took them out a long while ago.

    “I may of course be terribly wrong, but I have been expecting the polls to decline quite dramatically once the election was called. I shall never forget 1975, and the ephemeral lift we got during the constitutional crisis which disappeared as soon as there was a chance to vote the government out. We, of course, knew that the lift was only ephemeral, but the faithful did not and somehow expected a miracle. The electoral mood for the duration of Julia’s Government has been eerily reminiscent for me of 1974/75 in many ways. I am looking forward to reading Kerry-Anne Walsh’s book on the subject, but I must say that I found the events of June 26th. (and its aftermath) quite depressing. I would never buy shares in a company where a former CEO sacked by the Board for incompetence spent three years undermining both his successor and that Board until bringing the company to the edge of bankruptcy, only to be reappointed CEO as a last ditch measure to save the company! Why should Australia? And I expect that when the Libs start spending their money in earnest, that message will come across……the cause of the original problem cannot be sold as the solution. “

    I have now read “The Stalking of Julia Gillard’, and recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand how derelict many of Ms Walsh’s  journalistic colleagues became in not disclosing what they knew and telling us what  they saw. Instead, they themselves became ‘spear carriers’ for the ambitions of one of the great exponents of “rat-fucking” and “plausible deniability” – practices made famous by disgraced former US President, Richard Milhous Nixon.

    Since Saturday night, I have marvelled to read and hear so much analysis of the results which an untrusting simpleton such as myself suspects comes from a continuing symbiotic relationship between these lazy or incompetent Press Gallery journalists and the court of Australia’s very own Kardashian Klan – Kev, Kherese, Kjessica, Knickerless and so on – communicating to an insatiable public their every deed, thought, and selfie….. We have been reassured that fortunately, and like Bazza McKenzie, Kev and the Kardashians saved the world on Saturday. The result for Labor was much better than anyone expected; NSW’s Sussex Street faction from whom Kev gained so much support both times  he became Leader is proud of its campaign to save seats; in fact it seems one can take comfort that like Billie Snedden  in 1974, Labor didn’t actually lose at all….they just didn’t win!  Quite heroic, really…

    But consider this:

    • The ALP’s primary vote on Saturday was by a long way the lowest it has received since the Second World War (which is as far back as I have had time to check), and a massive 9% below that achieved in 2007.
    • Antony Green, the ABC’s latter-day Malcolm Mackerras tells us that the party’s primary vote in NSW was the lowest in a Federal election for 100 years.
    • He tells us ditto Victoria.
    • Ditto Queensland, except there it didn’t even reach 30%. However, some may take heart from the fact that it was slightly ahead of the 26% achieved in the 2012 State election debacle.
    • And in South Australia, Nick Xenophon tells us that in the Senate poll, on primaries; his group outpolled the ALP which will be reduced to one seat.

    The truth is that as Bob Hawke said on Saturday night, this was a disastrous result for the ALP, and no amount of spin about saving individual seats, or two-part preferred vote (2PP) can change that fact. Even in the dark days of the post-Dismissal election of 1975, after which it held only 29% of the seats in the House of Representatives, the ALP under Gough Whitlam received 42.8% of first preferences – or 9% more than at this election. It was in 1990 that the party opportunistically met the rising threat of a minor party (the Australian Democrats) by focussing on chasing preferences and the 2PP vote rather than primary votes, and its first preference vote performance has eroded ever since. As Paul Keating once observed, you cannot win government without a first preference vote percentage which starts with a 4! Saturday’s result leaves the party a long way short of that.

    But Labor’s task is not without hope….  When Bill Hayden took the leadership following the 1977 defeat,  and at a time when the ALP was wallowing in despair – but at least recognised the dimensions of its plight – he was able to bring it to the brink of victory again in just three years. However, as history will record, Hayden was an exceptional Leader of the ALP, and arguably its unluckiest in not reaping the fruits of his endeavours by becoming Prime Minister.

    In a future blog, I shall share my thoughts on what I believe the ALP must now do. In the meantime, I hope that it can find within its ranks a Bill Hayden to unite its Parliamentary Party and begin the process of rediscovering the values which once enabled it to set the national agenda – even from opposition.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Dodging a bullet. Guest blogger: John Young

    It was going to be as bad as 1996 (when Labor lost 31 seats), a sombre Stephen Smith gravely warned us at the beginning of the ABC election night coverage.

    Smith ignored that a few months earlier Labor was facing its worst election defeat, at least as bad as the 2011 NSW State election.

    How had this occurred when the Government was competent and economy was going well? The 2010 hung Parliament does not of itself provide the answer.   The answer lies in the elusive concept of trust.

    The 2010 coup against Rudd destroyed the public benefit Gillard should have enjoyed as the first female Prime Minister. In the 2010 negotiations to form Government, the breaking by Gillard of an explicit campaign promise not to introduce a carbon tax caused the electorate to feel it had been betrayed by Labor.  Gillard never regained that trust.

    Gillard and Swan lacked communications skills to sell Labor’s positive economic record. They exacerbated the trust deficit by absurd promises such as committing to an early return to surplus. This was as stupid as it was dishonest and the mining tax was redesigned in a way that raised miniscule revenue.

    Because Gillard lacked credibility, Abbott was able to perpetuate the lie that Labor was saddling future generations with massive debt.

    The position of minority Government was always less than ideal but the Bracks, Beattie and Rann governments had successfully managed the transition to majority government.

    Gillard deserves credit for her legislative achievements. That said, Abbott persuaded the public the Parliament was in chaos – the Thomson and Slipper imbroglios leant credence to these claims.

    The risk inherent in Rudd’s return to the leadership in June was that it exacerbated the perception the government was hopelessly divided and chaotic.   The fiasco in March when Rudd had refused to run and the impression that he was not a team player and everything was “always about Kevin” fuelled further public frustration and anger with Labor.

    The government had become a soap opera. The impression of instability and chaos was too embedded in the electorate’s mind for a restored Rudd to do more than save some furniture.

    Upon resuming the Prime Ministership, Rudd governed with a deft touch and the capacity to outflank his opponents.

    He neutralised issues such as refugee boat arrivals and Labor’s refusal to reform under Gillard.   The harshness of the asylum seeker policy likely cost Labor some primary support and possibly the seat of Melbourne.  However, “stopping the boats” was virtually unheard during the campaign. Rudd also neutralised the broken promise about the carbon tax.

    If Rudd the Prime Minister matched best expectations, Rudd the campaigner disappointed.

    In contrast to 2007, Rudd’s campaign was patchy. The Labor slogan “A New Way” was absurd for a Government in power for six years amid such acrimony.

    From day one of the campaign, Rudd faced vitriolic attack from the Murdoch media. The tabloids were simply offensive propaganda sheets openly campaigning against the Labor government and slanting coverage to that end.

    This made Rudd’s task of selling Labor’s complicated message that “we have done a great job even though we have been at war” all the more difficult. The most repeated and challenging question he was asked was why should voters support you when your own party sacked you?

    Rudd, who had showcased his campaigning cred for many grateful MPs, did not hit the ground running.

    He was damaged by media criticism that he cheated by taking notes in the first debate with Abbott.  It was a mistake that should not have happened in a professionally run campaign.

    Another mistake was Rudd’s poor judgement posting on social media a photo (selfie) of a shaving cut. This action struck the wrong note and fed into media accusations of narcissism.

    The Northern Territory taxation” thought bubble” damaged Rudd and there was not one vote in it. The criticism that he was making policy on the run for media grabs had validity.

    Critically in the second last week of the campaign Rudd was admonished by officials for over-reaching in his description of costings. The media treated this as a far more serious criticism than it was but with Labor trailing in the polls and struggling for traction, it could not afford setbacks.

    There are legitimate criticisms of Rudd’s campaign performance but he still had the capacity to connect and to inspire. He was unrelenting in his efforts to differentiate Labor from the ideological attacks which the LNP would make on services while they enacted their unaffordable PPL scheme and foolish policies including buying Indonesian fishing boats.

    On occasions, Rudd showed his magic.   Perhaps his finest performance was on QandA where he displayed vision and passionately spoke to the issue of marriage equality.

    Abbott’s campaign was disciplined but far from brilliant.  He made a number of foolish comments which could have derailed his campaign if the media wasn’t pre-disposed to his perceived inevitable victory. Abbott prevailed because of the damage which Labor had inflicted on itself and the leg-up of the Murdoch press.

    Despite the difficulties in selling his message, Rudd was indefatigable defending Labor economic credentials and attacking the fitness of Abbott and the LNP to govern.  The result of the election is proof that he was effective doing this and the dire predictions of a Labor wipe out were wrong.

    In June before the return of Rudd to the leadership, Labor was looking at about an 8% swing and a devastating loss of 40 or even more seats.   It is no exaggeration to say that such electoral decimation would have imperilled Labor’s very survival

    Labor will lose around 15 seats on a swing of about 3%. Importantly every Labor Minister has held their seat. This result confirms Labor made entirely the right decision to return to Rudd. On this occasion, saving some furniture was enough. It can now face the future confident of its history and determined not to repeat the faults of its recent past.

     

     

  • Deconstructing the election result. Guest Blogger: Walter Hamilton

    1. Labor lost the election before the Coalition won it.

    2. There was a narrowing in the state-by-state differences in the two-party preferred voting ratios of Labor and the Coalition, which partly accounts for the bigger swings against the ALP in Victoria, SA and Tasmania. That is, where Labor did well in 2010 to hold ground it was more vulnerable this time around.

    3. The ALP’s primary vote has fallen to the low 30s, its worst result in a century. In the past six years it has hopped from one side to the opposite on key issues such as climate change and border protection. It has failed to respond effectively to the further hollowing out of manufacturing jobs on which its traditional union base relies. It has talked about itself in the third person, with a regal presumption to rule, and talked down to the electorate. It has talked too much altogether. It has treated policies like play things – to be spruiked one day and cast off the next.

    4. Victoria is the only state that will return a (small) plurality of Labor MHRs.

    5. In SA and Tasmania, that have Labor state governments, the swings against Labor were greater than the national swing, whereas in Victoria and NSW, with incumbent Coalition state governments, the swing to the federal Coalition exceeded the national swing. This suggests that Labor’s attempt to link an Abbott government to a backlash against state conservative governments did not succeed.

    6. The Palmer United Party, with around 10% of the vote in Queensland, exceeded expectations, although it is worth remembering that when One Nation first came on the scene its Queensland result was much better than had showed up in pre-election polls. The PUP result must be set against the fact that there was little or no scope for a rise in the Coalition’s primary vote in Queensland. The 3.4% fall in the ALP vote, down to 30.2%, means Labor will return just 7 seats to the LNP’s 22 in that state. (Labor’s vote in the 2012 state election was as low as 26.7%, but the last time Queenslanders were voting on Kevin Rudd for prime minister, in 2007, the ALP received more than 50% of votes in his state. How the mighty have fallen.)

    7. Tasmania recorded a huge swing to the Coalition. This is being attributed to economic conditions in the state and the failure of the Labor-Greens state alliance. The Greens vote is down more than 3% nationally, but in Tasmania it has halved (down by 8.7%).

    8. In standing down as Labor leader on Saturday night Kevin Rudd advanced the narrative that he had sacrificed himself to stem a Labor rout and that he had achieved his aim of preserving Labor. Nobody will know whether Labor would have done worse under Julia Gillard, just as nobody will know whether, without the events of 2010, Rudd might have been a three-term prime minister. But any objective observer would not consider Labor well positioned to bounce back into government after a 4.1% swing against it in this election and the legacy of division left behind by Mr. Rudd.

    9. The electorate has been more discerning than some pundits gave it credit for. A poor Liberal candidate in Greenway (western Sydney) failed to unseat a Labor member on a very slim majority. In the seat of Banks, on the other hand, the sitting Labor member, Daryl Melham, who had listed among his ‘top priorities’ improving commuter parking (state or local government responsibilities), lost to the Liberal candidate – the first time since the seat’s creation in 1949 that it has gone away from the ALP.

    10. The total national vote for ‘Others’ (Katter’s Australia, Palmer United, Family First and various minor parties and independents) in the House of Representatives exceeded 12%. This suggests many disaffected voters were unwilling to side with an Abbott government. Labor’s American-style scare campaign against Abbott probably trimmed the Coalition’s vote below what it might have been in NSW in particular. For its part, the ALP was battling against a hostile Murdoch press. In assessing the impact of the Murdoch factor on the overall result, however, we should remember that Clive Palmer also claimed Murdoch’s ex-wife was a Chinese spy and that seems to have done his cause no harm. The public these days have much more to go on than newspaper headlines.

    11. The Senate from July next year will be less predictable than ever, with the arrival of Palmer’s people and whoever else emerges from the metre-long ballot paper fiasco. The size of the vote for the Liberal Democratic Party, for instance, suggests that some electors struggled to fill in the ballot along the lines they intended. Electoral reform in this area (such as a move to optional preferential voting) is overdue. Similarly, the Australian Electoral Commission might need to take a look at the rules governing acceptable conduct in and around polling booths following the noisy demonstrations against both Rudd and Abbott on Saturday. Let these be places for marking ballots, not barking and mallets.

    Walter Hamilton is a journalist of 40 years’ experience. This analysis is based on returns as of midnight Saturday.

     

  • The election – punishing bad behaviour. John Menadue

    One thing the election did was to explode the perceived wisdom that if the economy was doing well, governments are seldom voted out. But the Rudd Government was.

    As I have written in earlier blogs.

    • The Australian economy, by almost any measure is one of the best performing and managed in the world.
    • Our material stand of living is continuing to rise at a rate of about 2.5% p.a.
    • Only two days ago, The Herald – Lateral Economics Wellbeing Index showed that our ‘wellbeing’ rose by 7% last financial year. The index measures not only changes in income but also knowhow, environment, health, inequality and job-satisfaction.

    But there were other factors at work in the election.

    • The public clearly chose to punish bad political and personal behaviour by the ALP – the ousting of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard, his undermining of her and then her overthrow. Division is political death.
    • There were obviously concerns about the flakiness of Kevin Rudd.
    • The ALP campaign was ad hoc and chaotic. There was one thought bubble after another. It lacked a consistent theme based on the values and principles that most people thought the ALP stood for – like fairness, decency and equal opportunity.
    • Kevin Rudd and Chris Bowen were no more successful than Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan in persuading the public of the government’s good record on the economy. Chris Bowen now has two consecutive ministerial failures in his c.v. – Immigration and Treasury.
    • The swing against the ALP in NSW showed that the public did not accept that the ALP in that state had been cleaned up. It could only have been achieved by sacking the whole branch.
    • The easy-ride by the media of Tony Abbott’s policies and the bullying campaign by Murdoch seems to have had an effect. The ALP mistakes, and there were many, were highlighted particularly by the Murdoch media and the coalition was given an easy ride.

    The coalition waged a very successful political campaign with very little substantial policy. Tony Abbott’s campaign over four years has been attack dog style- brutal, dishonest, but effective.

    • We were told that we had a debt crisis and a budget emergency, but it now turns out that that was all phoney talk. Tony Abbott has pledged instead a reduction in taxes, e.g. carbon tax, and increases in spending, e.g. parental leave. There is a fundamental inconsistency in what Tony Abbott has been telling us for years and in what he now proposes to do.
    • Tony Abbott offers us stability after the apparent chaos of the hung parliament. But in terms of legislation and participation by independents, the last parliament was probably one of the most successful for a long time. In the last few days of the campaign Tony Abbott has told us that if his carbon tax legislation repeal is not passed by the Senate, there will be another election. That doesn’t sound like stability!
    • Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have quite deliberately whipped up xenophobic, racist and anti-Muslim sentiment.

    My concern is that on two key issues, climate change and asylum seekers, the election has taken us backwards.

    In his first term, Kevin Rudd said that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our generation. He was correct. He introduced the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme but it was defeated in the Senate by the coalition and the sanctimonious Greens. Then Kevin Rudd dropped the ball and Tony Abbott has kicked it into touch ever since.

    In the hung parliament, a deal with the Greens and other independents was necessary. The carbon tax was the result. That tax has delivered valuable results, despite the pain inflicted on Julia Gillard. In his brief second period as Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd announced that a future Labor government would move to a market-based carbon emissions scheme – the same type of scheme that was proposed by John Howard many years ago.

    Tony Abbott has opposed any meaningful program to reduce global warming. In an off-guard moment he said that global warming is ‘crap’. He then adopted his absurd ‘Direct Action’ scheme to reduce carbon pollution. This was a smoke-screen to divert attention whilst he relentlessly attacked the carbon tax. Malcolm Turnbull has described Direct Action as nonsense, a fig-leaf to provide cover when you don’t have a credible policy. But now it seems that Tony Abbot is even retreating from Direct Action.  He said that the coalition would be spending ‘no more and no less’ than it has committed to Direct Action, even if it doesn’t achieve the 5% emission reduction target by 2020 as promised. Almost every expert says that direct action will not work and it will be extremely expensive.

    Our grandchildren are going to pay a heavy price for our generation’s failure to address the issue of climate change. Month by month the scientific evidence is overwhelming that global warming is occurring and that humans are the cause. The experience of almost all of us, whether in record August temperatures, storms, droughts or cyclones  points in the same direction as the scientific evidence. Climate change is occurring. This is a great moral and environment challenge for which our generation is avoiding its stewardship responsibilities.

    We have also now reached the nadir on boat arrivals. Our slippery slide on this issue started in 2001 with Tampa and children-overboard. Since then the Liberals have been unscrupulously but successfully setting traps for the ALP. The Liberal Party in Opposition did not want boats to stop. The more boats that came the better the politics for them. That is why the Liberals sided with the Greens to block the amending of the Migration Act in the Senate which would have enabled implementation of the agreement with Malaysia. Boat arrivals have increased dramatically since that time. In world terms the numbers are not large, but it became a political plaything for the Liberal party.

    It won’t be easy and it will take time, but we must find a way to change the conversation on asylum seekers and refugees. It is not just an Australian problem. It is a major and serious global problem. Unfortunately John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have successfully drawn the ALP into the quagmire they have created.

    Lord Acton said that power corrupts. Power also reveals. It revealed a lot about Kevin Rudd. What will it reveal about Tony Abbott?

  • Asylum seekers are blocking the M4 freeway and clogging up our hospitals! John Menadue

    On Monday night on 4 Corners, the Liberal candidate for Lindsay, Fiona Scott, said that asylum seekers’ cars were blocking the M4 highway. For readers outside Sydney, the M4 is a 40 km expressway connecting Concord and Penrith.

    I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that such ignorance could be expressed by a candidate who could very well be a member of parliament after next Saturday, if the opinion polls are correct.

    The M4 carries over 50,000 cars in the morning peak per day in both directions. I have met many asylum seekers but I cannot recall ever meeting one who has a car.

    Fiona Scott went on to say that asylum seekers were worsening hospital waiting times. It was another beat up. Asylum seekers can access Emergency Departments but very few have Medicare. However the Refugee Council says that the area surrounding the Nepean Hospital-Blacktown.the Hawkesbury, Penrith and the Blue Mountains-took in only 161 asylum seekers in the last year. The total population is 618, 000. My experience is that almost all asylum seekers have to rely on generous doctors and nurses who give their time freely as volunteers.

    Her outburst is the most manipulative and appalling I have seen for a long time. Traffic congestion and hospital waiting times are two sensitive issues in Western Sydney. Fiona Scott chooses ignorantly and deliberately to target and scapegoat asylum seekers for both problems.

    In other circumstances one would expect the leader of the Liberal Party to intervene to sack Fiona Scott, but that is unlikely because Tony Abbott has been the cheer leader in the demonization of asylum seekers for years.  Even in the press reports of Fiona Scott’s comments, Tony Abbott continued to talk, as he has done for years, about ‘illegal’ asylum seekers. They are not illegal. From the time that Robert Menzies ratified the Refugee Convention in 1954, asylum seekers are entitled to our legal protection. They may be ‘irregular’ entrants but they are not ‘illegal’. Tony Abbott’s dog-whistling is designed to convey the impression that somehow these ‘other’ people are not entitled to our protection and are akin to criminals. It is disgraceful the way he behaves. “Caring for the stranger” is not part of his lexicon.

    Fiona Scott is showing all the signs of being a soul mate of Scott Morrison who demonises asylum seekers for “bringing disease” and ‘wads of cash’.

    Lebanon with a population of just over 4 m people has taken in almost one million Syrian refugees. Sweden has just announced that the 8,000 Syrian asylum seekers in its country will all get permanent residence. Pakistan is host to 2 million refugees.

    What a selfish and sorry country we have become.

    History is full of the stories of unscrupulous people who scapegoat the foreigner and the outsider. The Liberal Party is making the demonization of outsiders an art form. And the problem starts at the top.

  • Chemical warfare and Syria. Guest blogger: Marcus Einfeld

    I never thought I would ever agree with Glenn Beck, the US shock jock from the extreme right of the political spectrum. I think he is right about the US not intervening in the Middle East again. Difficult as it is to say, President Putin is also right even if his reasons are not pure.

    The Americans [Administrations, not the very many brilliant and informed Americans who know better] never seem to understand the “enemy”, invariably miscalculate the consequences of their actions and never have an exit strategy. This time they do not even have an entry strategy. The US military top brass do not have the best record in assessing outcomes of their escapades. The jingoisms that punctuated the evidence given this week to the Senate Foreign Relations and Defence Committee by the Secretaries of State and Defence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must have horrified US thinkers and intelligentsia, not to mention the public at large.

    Imagine arguing, as the Obama Administration seems to be doing, that North Korea and Iran will be dissuaded from using chemical weapons if we punish the Syrian regime by bombing the hell out of its country. It is arrogant to believe that these countries, including the Syrians themselves, will just accept western scolding and decide to behave themselves as we dictate. The Iranians will just be emboldened to do the job better than the Syrians. For its part, the North Korean leadership will hardly know where Syria is and will care even less.

    Bombing, indeed any type of aerial or missile intervention will inevitably hit innocent people and not destroy the regime, or even its chemical weaponry. Even if the regime does fall, who on earth will replace it? Vide Egypt and Libya. Israel is in real danger from this proposed attack on Syria, possibly from the same chemical weapons. And if Israel is threatened, fighting as it would be for its very survival, its response can be expected to be deadly and devastating. With Russia and China actively resisting in the wings, the real possibility of a World War or at least a major conflagration will be at hand from the proposed intervention. It has already been proved over and over that despite its powerful armoury and presumably best intentions, the US is simply unable to contain the effects of what it is pleased to call “limited” intervention.

    The hypocrisy of western horror at the Syrian use of chemical weapons is nothing short of breath-taking. In principle, this wickedness must of course be resisted if possible. But horrendous as the Syrians have been, they at least are using them on their own people, as did the notorious Saddam Hussein who killed and maimed thousands of Iraqi Kurds and other citizens with chemical weapons while the international community simply looked on silently. Moreover, the Americans, with Australia and others at their side, used endless chemical weapons on thousands of innocent foreigners in Vietnam and Cambodia.

    The dilemma is awful and I am glad it is not me who has to resolve it, but it seems to me that if the choice has to be made, it is better to let the Syrians carry on as they have been doing unhindered by the international community for the last two years [with disastrous effects on their population] rather than we western democrats do it for them. I am afraid that the British Parliament and the governments of the other refusing countries like Canada are right.

  • Boat arrivals are down. John Menadue

    You would hardly know it if you read the Murdoch papers or listened to the Canberra bureau of the ABC but boat arrivals are dramatically down in recent weeks.

    How ironic it would be if even before Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister, that asylum seekers arriving by boat have been reduced to a trickle. It is early days, but the figures point to a significant decline.

    A Department of Immigration official has been reported in one newspaper that I saw yesterday as advising that ‘After 4236 asylum seekers arrived on 48 boats in July, the number for August dropped to 1585 on 25 boats. The number of arrivals in the last week of August was 71, the lowest weekly figure since February.’

    The Minister for Immigration, Tony Burke, said ‘I have absolutely no doubt now that the policy is having the effect that we hoped’.

    Perhaps the new figures might take some heat out of the absurd political debate, but I am not that confident. The decline in numbers should reduce significantly those asylum seekers who could be transferred to PNG or held in detention on Christmas Island and elsewhere.

    If the new policy is working as the Minister suggests, could the government please consider an increase in the humanitarian intake to 27,000 as Kevin Rudd earlier suggested could occur if the policies to curb boat arrivals worked. This would reassure many people, although only in a small way, who have watched with horror the race to the bottom on asylum seekers.

    Maybe there is a glimmer of hope in all this darkness!

  • From one Catholic to another. Guest blogger: Bishop Hurley, Darwin.

    ​The Catholic Bishop of Darwin has expressed concern to Tony Abbott about the Coalition’s policies towards asylum-seekers and people in detention.  His letter to Tony Abbott follows:

     

    Bishop Hurley letter to Tony Abbott

    The Leader of the Opposition
    The Hon. Tony Abbott MHR
    Parliament House
    RG109
    CANBERRA ACT 2600
    16 August 2013

    Dear Mr. Abbott,

    I have just returned to my office from the Wickham Point and the Blaydin detention centres here in Darwin.

    Sadly, I have been involved with detention centres since the creation of the Woomera centre, followed by Baxter and now, over the last six years, with the various and expanding centres here in Darwin.

    I experienced once again today, the suffocating frustration of the unnecessary pain we inflict on one another. I celebrated Holy Mass with a large number of Vietnamese families, made up of men, women, children and women waiting to give birth. The celebration was prayerful and wonderful, until the moment of parting.

    I was reminded of something a young man said to me during one of my visits to Woomera, all those years ago. I was saying something about freedom.

    He replied, “Father, if freedom is all you have known, then you have never known freedom.”

    I sensed the horrible truth of that statement again today.

    I was also conscious of that beautiful speech made when the UNHCR accepted the Nobel Prize in 1981. In part it states,

    “Throughout the history of mankind people have been uprooted against their will. Time and time again, lives and values built from generation to generation have been shattered without warning. But throughout history mankind has also reacted to such upheavals and brought succour to the uprooted. Be it through individual gestures or concerted action and solidarity, those people have been offered help and shelter and a chance to become dignified, free citizens again. Through the ages, the giving of sanctuary had become one of the noblest traditions of human nature.

    Communities, institutions, cities and nations have generously opened their doors to refugees.”

    I sit here at my desk with a heavy heart and a deep and abiding sadness, that the leaders of the nation that my father, as an immigrant, taught me to love with a passion, have adopted such a brutal, uncompassionate and immoral stance towards refugees.

    I imagine he would be embarrassed and saddened by what has occurred.

    It occurred to me today that neither the Prime Minister or yourself know the story of any one of these people.

    Neither do the great Australian community.

    I find that it is quite impossible to dismiss these people with all the mindless, well-crafted slogans, when you actually look into their eyes, hold their babies and feel their grief.

    There has been a concerted campaign to demonise these people and keep them isolated from the great Australian public. It has been successful in appealing to the less noble aspects of our nation’s soul and that saddens me. I feel no pride in this attitude that leads to such reprehensible policies, on both sides of our political spectrum.

    I cringe when people draw my attention to elements of our history like The White Australia Policy and the fact that we didn’t even count our Indigenous sisters and brothers until the mid 1900’s. I cringe and wish those things were not true. It is hard to imagine that we as a nation could have done those things.

    I judge the attitude of our political leaders to refugees and asylum seekers to be in the same shameful category as the above mentioned. In years to come, Australians who love this country will be in disbelief that we as a nation could have been so uncharacteristically cruel for short term political advantage.

    It seems that nothing will influence your policy in this matter, other than the political imperative, but I could not sit idly by without feeling complicit in a sad and shameful chapter of this country which I have always believed to be better than that.

    Sometime I would love to share with you some of the stories I have had the privilege of being part of over the years. I am sure you would be greatly moved. Sadly, for so many, such a moment will be all too late.

    Yours Sincerely,

    Bishop E. Hurley.

    Most Rev Daniel Eugene Hurley DD
    The Chancery of the Diocese

     

  • Excluding the ABC. John Menadue

    It is disappointing, at least to me that the ABC has not been the host of the election debates between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

    Instead it is has been left to Fox News, 50% owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is keen to buy the other 50% from Telstra. When will the Murdoch monopoly end?

    The ABC is the most trusted media organisation in the country. It used to be the logical host for major political events. It has been out manoeuvred by the Liberal Party.

    In a survey by Essential Media late last year, the ABC was ranked second in the country as our most trusted institution. It was trusted by 59% of Australians. It was only bettered by the High Court which was trusted by 63 % of Australians. The Reserve Bank ranked third and was trusted by 53% of Australians. Interestingly, all are public institutions.

    Other media groups were well down the list in terms of public trust – newspapers 31%, online news media e.g. Fox at 28%, and TV news media at 26%. If we further break out Murdoch’s media we find that his publications are the least trusted in the country, particularly the Herald Sun, the Courier Mail and least of all, the Daily Telegraph. This lack of trust was even before the recent Murdoch bullying and abuse of power in this election.

    How has the ABC, the most trusted media organisation by far in the country, been out-manoeuvred in favour of Fox! I can only assume that the Liberal Party refused to participate in debates hosted by the ABC. Faced with this veto of the ABC, the ALP agreed to the alternative of Fox News and with all superficial floss that followed.

    I recall many years ago when I worked for Gough Whitlam that the ABC always insisted that for the sake of ‘balance’ it would not interview him unless there was a Liberal minister who agreed to participate. Not many ministers were keen to debate Gough Whitlam so the proposed interview was inevitably dropped by the ABC. The Liberal Party veto had worked.

    Fortunately Gough Whitlam persuaded the reluctant ABC management that the Liberal Party should not be allowed to have its programing determined by a Liberal Party veto. The ABC agreed that if a Liberal Party participant could not be found, the interview, although with a different format would proceed.

    Consistent with its role as the pre-eminent and most trusted media organisation in the country, the ABC should insist that if either major party will not participate in a properly structured debate then an alternative with only one political leader will proceed. The ABC must stop being bluffed. It must assert its leadership role.

    The ABC is the last, perhaps the only hope, to stem the downward spiral of media abuse in this country.

  • We have never had it so good. John Menadue

    The election campaign by the Murdoch media and the Coalition suggests that the Australian economy is in a mess. But almost all the facts suggest that we have one of the best performing economies in the world whether we measure it by economic growth, debt, inflation or employment.

    Now a survey just released by the University of Canberra’s highly regarded National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) tells us that Australian households have never been better off. The NATSEM report tells us:

    • Australian households are 15% better off since 2008 when the Rudd Government was elected.
    • ‘The gain in the last five years is a remarkable outcome, given the weakness of the global economy through the global financial crisis.’
    • ‘The strongest contributor to the cost of living increases in the last year were utilities (+14%), health (+6.2%) and education (+5.5%) whilst costs were eased by mortgage interest (-14.5%) and audio-visual (-5.1%).
    • The standard of living (disposable income less cost of living) has risen by 2.6% p.a. under both the Rudd and Gillard Governments, the same as under the Howard Government.

    Whilst the ‘average’ household has been a lot better off, economic prosperity has favoured high income households. NATSEM said ‘The strong gains in the standard of living have not been equally spread across income levels.’ A particular reason for this is that the cost of living changes for the lowest quintile level over five years was 2.4% because of relatively high expenditures on rent and utilities. The highest quintile income group had cost of living increases of only 1.5% because it was particularly assisted by low mortgage payments.

    This story of quite ‘remarkable’ increases in the standard of living of Australian households over the last five years is in stark contrast to the campaign of the Murdoch media, the Coalition and business interests.

    Our economy is very strong. Our standard of living is rising steadily. But the government seems unable to make the case about its performance.

    Its failure is overwhelmingly political.

     

  • Japan’s war memory. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

    Japan’s struggle with the issue of war memory has been brought into sharp relief again amid a controversy over what children should be taught about the past. Last week the Matsue city board of education confirmed a ban placed on a famous comic book (manga) series called Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen). The board’s decision allegedly was based on the fact the series contains scenes considered too violent for school children. Behind this explanation, however, lies a different story. 

    Barefoot Gen was first serialised in 1973-1976. Set in and around Hiroshima, it tells the story of a six-year-old boy during the final months of the war and is loosely based on the experiences of the serial’s creator, the late Keiji Nakazawa. Barefoot Gen has been translated into several languages and spawned action films and anime adaptations. Wikipedia describes the story’s underlying themes: 

    Gen’s family suffers as all families do in war. They must conduct themselves as proper members of society, as all Japanese are instructed in paying tribute  to the Emperor. But because of a belief that their involvement in the war is due to the greed of the rich ruling class, Gen’s father rejects the military propaganda and the family comes to be treated as traitors. Gen’s family struggles with their bond of loyalty to each other and to a government that is willing to send teenagers on suicide missions in battle. This push and pull   relationship is seen many times as Gen is ridiculed in school, mimicking his            father’s [critical] views on Japan’s role in the war, and then is subsequently               punished by his father for spouting [patriotic] things he learned through rote    brainwashing in school. 

    Many of these themes are put into a much harsher perspective when portrayed             alongside themes of the struggle between war and peace.

    As suggested here, Barefoot Gencriticises the Japanese blind loyalty to the emperor and the Japanese flag, hinomaru, during the war. These aspects of the story – not its violence – formed the basis for the original citizen’s complaint to the Matsue board of education last year. Though the complaint was not upheld, in considering the matter the board’s secretariat conveniently found another, less blatantly political, reason for taking action. In December it instructed the 49 public schools in the city to remove the manga from the open shelves of their libraries and restrict access to teacher-supervised usage.

    I say the reason for the decision was ‘convenient’ not because of any public explanation offered by the secretariat at the time ­– there was none – but because of certain suggestive aspects of the case. The violent content singled out for mention was, on closer inspection, hardly apolitical. One consisted of a scene of the beheading of a Chinese prisoner by a Japanese soldier; another showed a naked woman being sexually assaulted and bayoneted. There is a great deal of horror depicted in the manga, mainly to do with the effects and aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and including a reference to American researchers harvesting the internal organs of bomb victims. No objection apparently was raised to these elements. In other words, the sole aim was to keep away from young eyes the depiction of wartime atrocities committed by Japanese. Another telling aspect is that when the board members met last week and decided to ratify the ban, they acted without consulting school principals or taking professional advice whether reading the manga series would cause children psychological harm.

    Educational authorities at several other places in Japan followed Matsue’s lead and also had Barefoot Gen removed from their school library shelves.

    This week, in response to adverse publicity and feedback from the affected schools – many of which opposed the ban – Matsue reversed its stand. At an ad-hoc meeting on Monday, board members agreed that the manga ‘conveys the tragedy of war very well and has educational value in teaching about peace’. The board, however, did not instruct schools to return the books to the open shelves; it left the matter at the discretion of each school. Although, according to media reports, only 10% of principals supported the ban, other information suggests a higher proportion of primary and junior high schools could ultimately place a limit on free access to the manga series.

    The episode illustrates a change in the Japanese approach to war memory that has occurred since Barefoot Gen first appeared. In the 1970s the generation born during or immediately after the Pacific War ­– with actual memories of the devastation and cruelty of war – engaged in a comparatively vigorous public discussion of Japanese misdeeds, particularly those committed in China. A period of introspection occurred at the time Japan and China normalised diplomatic relations. Sadly, in recent decades, conservative forces have gained the ascendancy in the ‘history wars’ – not only in Japan but also in South Korea and China. Separate, highly selective and incompatible accounts of the same events are being taught in schools of these neighbouring countries, poisoning people-to-people relations.

    Barefoot Gen is not perfect history, but what surely recommends it to a new generation of young Japanese – who I can confirm from personal experience know almost nothing about what their country did between 1931 and 1945 – are the very qualities which led, albeit briefly, to its removal from library shelves: its unflinching depictions of what war really involves and its preparedness to record some of the worst excesses of Japanese militarism.

     

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for 11 years and recently published ‘Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story’ (New South Books).

  • The phoney war over deficits and debt. John Menadue

    For almost five years, Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Andrew Robb and Barnaby Joyce, have been giving us dire warnings about deficits and debt. You would think the Australian economy was a smoking ruin.

    But the politicking over deficits and debt has changed remarkably in the last few weeks. Early this year Tony Abbott told us that he would provide a budget surplus in ‘year 1’ of an Abbott Government. Earlier this month, he said that his government would return the budget to surplus within his first three year term. Then he said that he would return the budget to surplus ‘some time over the next four years’.

    He has now pushed it back even further by telling us at the Liberal Party launch in Brisbane on Sunday  that ‘we will deliver a surplus as soon as soon as we humanly can’ but he refused to give a  guarantee. But there is even more. .Joe Hockey has now told us that he will not commit to any deadline on delivering a surplus.

    All the signs are that a Coalition Government will not deliver a budget surplus any earlier than the Labor Government promised for 2016-17. If anything, it is likely, on the basis of Tony Abbott’s and Joe Hockey’s comments, that the coalition would return the budget to surplus later than the Labor Government has promised. That is because we must take into account the increased expenditures that he has recently announced.

    • A $5.5 billion a year parental leave scheme to be introduced in July 2015.
    • An increase in defence spending from $24 billion p.a. currently, to $50 billion p.a. within ten years.
    • Abolish the means test on private health insurance which would cost about $1 billion p.a.
    • Additional funding for self-funded retirees via the Commonwealth Senior Health Card and more and more on roads on bridges for the National Party.

    The consequences of all this is that he will not only be pushing back the time to realise his budget surplus pledge but he will be increasing public debt in the meantime which he told us was ruining the country.

    The Coalition has been telling us for years that there is a deficit and debt crisis. The attacks never stopped. The language was reckless, inflammatory and fraudulent There was a budget “emergency” that had to be urgently addressed. Barnaby Joyce, who may be our next Deputy Prime Minister, suggested that the gnomes of Zurich would soon be arriving in Australia to take over our financial management because of the debt that we could not repay. The Coalition effectively frightened the community about the state of the economy. If we listened to the Coalition and the Murdoch media, one would think that the Australian economy was a basket case. Yet it is one of the best performing economies in the world and admired by well-informed commentators across the globe, including the International Monetary Fund. We have had steady growth even through the global financial crisis, low unemployment, low inflation, rising productivity, very low debt and an AAA credit rating.

    Yet despite the quite remarkable performance by the Australian economy, the coalition has succeeded in persuading many that the economy is in a mess. The reverse is true.

    The government facilitated this absurd focus on deficit and debt.  The government has been unable to successfully make the case that the economy is sound.

    The Government has performed well on the economy. But it has two glaring problems .The first is its failure to project a compelling narrative grounded in values such as equity and fairness, freedom, citizenship and stewardship. Second it has shown political incompetence and division

    All this about the phoney war on deficits and debts is not to say that we don’t need to address our long-term structural t problems. This should be addressed by taking action on middle-class welfare like the subsidies to the wealthy in superannuation and private health insurance and increasing some taxes.

    But it is very clear that the coalition’s phoney war over deficits and debts was political nonsense. It is now asking us to forget that nonsense. By pushing back resolution of the deficit/ debt problem the Coalition is telling us that it was never regarded as a serious problem in the first place.

  • Japanese amnesia and the contrast with Germany. Guest blogger: Susan Menadue Chun

    Our four Australian/Korean children were educated in Japanese primary schools.

    Every summer holiday we struggled through the prescribed homework text- Natsu no Tomo (Summer’s friend). In the early August segment, there were assignments regarding WWII. They stated, “talk to your parents about WWII and write a composition about the importance of peace”. So, we talked to our children about their Korean grandfather, how he was conscripted from Korea into the Japanese army, how he fought in the savage battles on the Truk Island, was injured and was badly treated because he was not Japanese. In retrospect, writing about a Korean grandfather was probably off-limits as all Japanese children were expected to write the customary composition regarding how the Japanese had suffered as a result of the nuclear bomb and the importance of peace. Every following year in the Natsu no Tomo　the topic never progressed past the nuclear bomb and a peace discussion. There was no mention of Japan’s hostile war of aggression. Because the nuclear bomb transformed Japan into a victim, education played the key role in creating what many Japan critics call collective amnesia.

    Our homework chronicle was 25 years ago. Not a great deal has changed, Japanese textbooks still barely mention Japan’s war of aggression and the ultra-right nationalists have been successful in making war crimes such as the Comfort Women and the Rape of Nanking a taboo topic.

    I have just returned from Germany. In comparison to, Japan, where the insensitive gaffes of Japanese politicians are relentless denial and whitewashing of history, Germany is coming to terms with its horrific past. All over Germany I found monuments displaying remorse for the carnage and the terror Germany caused. As I looked out over the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, (that covers the area equivalent of a housing estate) I couldn’t help thinking about the Japanese diplomatic outrage triggered by the monuments erected for Comfort Women outside of Japan in places such as Seoul, New Jersey and Los Angles.  The stepping stones, in Berlin with real names, memorializing the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, made me think about the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and the massacre of thousands of Koreans that followed. However, collective amnesia again conveniently helps the Japanese public pretend the massacre never happened.

    Public monuments help to reinforce historical facts. But most importantly, monuments can demonstrate contrition. In the 37 years I have lived in Japan, on occasion I have stumbled across privately erected monuments for Japan’s WWII victims- particularly the Koreans and the Chinese. But sadly they have invariably been desecrated by Japanese ultra-nationalists.

    If Germany can come to terms with its horrific past, so can Japan, Collective amnesia denigrates victims and is extremely unfair to Japan’s next generation.

    Nothing you can do can change the past, but everything we can do changes the future (Ashleigh Brilliant).

  • Returning home can be the hard part. John Menadue

    In my August 1 blog I referred to the failure of many Australian companies to integrate their business and human resource strategies. Too many send executives overseas on an ad hoc basis without planning how that experience gained overseas can be used when they return as a catalyst to change the business culture of the Australian organisation.

    Every individual has personality. Every organisation has a culture. The grip of that culture – the way we do things without thinking – is remarkably powerful. It entrenches status, power, attitudes and values. It is hard to change.

    My experience is that overseas experience is the best way to challenge and change individuals and organisational culture. Cultural difference needs to be experienced rather than learned. It is visceral rather than cerebral. That is why overseas experience, living and working in a different culture, can be the best catalyst for change in individuals and organisations. It can’t really be learned in a classroom.

    Yet few Australian organisations are really serious about overseas experience being the catalyst for changing the organisational culture at home. The Business Alliance for Asian Literacy, representing over 400,000 businesses in Australia, recently found that ‘More than half of Australian businesses operating in Asia had little board and senior management experience of Asia and/or Asian skills or languages’. It is proving very hard to changes insular cultures. Asia is an ad hoc add on and little more.

    My contention is that sending promising staff to overseas appointments is the best way to drive cultural change provided the process is well organised, including the return home. That wise planning also involves support for spouse/partner and children. If they are unsuited or unhappy it will greatly impair the success of the overseas posting.

    But too often those executives returning from overseas are not supported and they often leave the organisation. They have changed their outlook and world view but on return, they find the organisation is still as insular as ever.

    I have seen figures from the US suggesting   that 70% of executives returning from overseas assignments leave their organisations within 3 years. The Ernst & Young survey of 2012 that I mentioned in my earlier blog of August 1 pointed to the very high cost to organisations of executives sent overseas and then leaving soon after return to the organisation at home.

    It is eight years old, but the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Reform Committee report, ‘Enquiry into Australian Expatriates’ said

    ‘The committee is surprised at the level of disappointment of many repatriates concerning the job opportunities available to them on their return to Australia. Many of them left Australia precisely because of the greater employment opportunities on the world stage, the higher incomes, the greater job satisfaction or the enhanced career opportunities. Even if they have returned to Australia, as many undoubtedly have, with more experience, enhanced skills, better contacts and greater cross-cultural understanding, this does not necessarily mean that openings will have developed in Australia in their absence.’

    That Senate report, and my own reading and experience, confirms in my mind the difficulties of expatriates returning from an overseas assignment. Many have told me that they feel unwelcome and their organisation quite unsympathetic. There was often resentment that they had had the benefit of an overseas trip whilst executives at home really kept the business going and did the hard work!.

    So many Australian companies do not understand that if they want to change their organisational culture to make it more sensitive and understanding of the countries in our region, they must take greater care on the returning home process. It is just as important as the selection of executives to go overseas and supports them when they are overseas.

    If we want to adapt and change organisational culture in Australia to fit better with our Asian geography, we need to effectively integrate business and human resource strategy at every stage. So often we waste the opportunity .Business strategy and human resource management so often work in parallel and not together.

    Overseas experience in Asia can be the catalyst for organisational change in Australia provided it is done carefully and over a long period. If developed well, overseas experience can progressively build a change team. At the moment we are just not building those change teams.

  • Jesuit students rebuke Tony Abbott and other old boys. John Menadue

    For many years, I have been concerned that the Jesuits at St Ignatius College Sydney seem to be producing mainly conservative politicians and merchant bankers. I don’t think St Ignatius would have expected that.

    My confidence in the Jesuits at St Ignatius has been at least partially restored by action by senior students at St Ignatius to rebuke Tony Abbott and others for ‘betraying moral values on asylum seekers’. See the report of their action from the SMH below.

    ​http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/tony-abbotts-old-school-hits-out-at-asylum-seeker-stance-as-betraying-moral-values-20130821-2savt.html

    John Menadue

  • Government failure in health care. John Menadue and guest blogger Ian McAuley

    We have little to see for six years of “reform” under the Rudd/Gillard Governments. What was that about ending the blame game in health? It has been mainly muddling through with hopes dashed for significant reform in many key areas

    Health costs are rising rapidly, through lack of coordination and waste. Doctors provide too many services. Vested interests are rampant Mental and Indigenous health are in a serious position. Services are being delivered less equitably. Progress has been made in prevention. However, the high expectation raised by the first Rudd Government has not been realised.

    In our view the key failures have been as follows.

    1. Primary care Australia has an obsession with hospitals. They should be the last resort rather than the first. Countries such as the UK and NZ have high quality care in part because of the philosophy underlying their healthcare arrangements, but also because they are grounded in primary care which is the most efficient and equitable way to deliver health services. It is where care is best integrated. Fee for service has encouraged ‘turnstile medicine’, excessive treatment and increasingly the corporatisation of general practice. FFS is a major barrier to reform in primary care.  FFS may be appropriate for episodic or occasional care for walk-in patients but it is not appropriate for chronic and long term care. The government should pursue contractual arrangements with general practice as an alternative to fee-for-service.  NZ pays episodic care by doctors on a FFS basis but chronic care is paid on an annualized basis. The Australian Government has failed in this key area. It is frightened of the AMA. The misnamed Medicare Locals offer considerable reform opportunity, but we are not clear if this will be realised. Are they really only re-named Divisions of General Practice? The Super Clinics also offer considerable potential, but again we are not sure about how they are performing.
    2. Workforce reform. Health is the largest and fastest growing sector of the Australian economy. Its structure and workforce are riddled with 19th Century demarcations and restrictive work practices, e.g. there are several hundred nurse practitioners in Australia when there should be thousands. We must also train assistant physicians. About 10% of normal births in Australia are delivered by midwives. In NZ it is over 90%. We don’t have a shortage of doctors so much as a misallocation of doctors. Nurses, allied health workers and ambulance staff are denied opportunities to upgrade and realise their professional potential.  Pharmacies, rather than being primarily retail enterprises, should be better integrated with primary care.  Our historical demarcation between GPs and pharmacies is seeing valuable skills going to waste. There will never be adequate delivery of service to people, particularly the aged, without radical workforce reform, mainly within primary care.
    3. Structure of health services. Health services are structured and funded around providers – medical services by doctors, pharmaceuticals through big Pharma and the Pharmacy Guild, and hospitals through State governments and private agencies. The structure of the Department of Health and Ageing reflects this provider focus rather than a focus on consumers. The Consumers Health Forum of Australia funded by the Commonwealth seems more like a marketing arm of the Department of Health and Ageing. We need to progressively change the focus to serve the community rather than providers. One possible structure would be around types of users – acute, chronic and occasional. It would help reduce the competition between different provider areas for limited resources. DOHA shows no serious interest in consumers but together with the Minister always seems to have an open door for the rent seekers like the Pharmacy Guild.
    4. Governance. The current traditional Minister/departmental model allows vested interests to dominate the debate and the allocation of resources. The public ‘conversation’ is not about health policy, but rather is about how the minister and the department respond to vested interests that set the agenda. The public is excluded. The media is heavily dependent on special interests for stories. The Reserve Bank provides a useful model of the direction in which we need to move – an independent and professional commission with economic expertise that funds and directs health services subject to government policies and guidelines. The Reserve Bank has proven to be immune from special interests and their pleading. It is respected for being professional and serving the public interest. It effectively informs the public on key issues. This does not happen in the health field. The government shows little interest in combatting the special interests.
    5. Private health insurance. The Commonwealth Government subsidy of about $7 b p.a. ($5.6b in direct subsidies and $i.4b in in income tax foregone) should be progressively eliminated and the funds used to directly fund other health services, e.g. private hospitals and dental care.  While the government, through means testing the rebates  has removed some inequities, its decision to increase the Medicare Levy Surcharge and to strengthen the “lifetime rating” incentives are weakening social inclusion, as those who are well off are corralled into their own facilities, leaving public hospitals  at risk of becoming residual services for the “indigent”. It penalises country people because there are few private hospitals in the bush. PHI is inefficient with administrative costs about three times higher than Medicare. The subsidy has not taken pressure off public hospitals. Private gap insurance has facilitated enormous increases in specialist fees. Most importantly, the expansion of PHI progressively weakens the ability of Medicare to control costs. The evidence world-wide is clear that countries with significant PHI have high costs. The stand-out example is the US.  President Obama may have substantially achieved universal coverage, but private health insurance in the US with its lack of cost control will ultimately cripple and finally destroy his reforms. Warren Buffett has described private health insurance companies as the “tape worm” in the US health sector. The Commonwealth already has a sound model of a single payer operated through the Department of Veterans Affairs – a model which retains the strong control of a single payer accountable to the community whilst allowing private practise involvement in service delivery. The Commonwealth has failed to understand the damage that PHI is already doing in Australia.
    6.  Medicare. This great ALP monument needs a review. Medicare has become a passive but efficient funding mechanism rather than the public insurer it was intended to be. After all, it is called the ‘health insurance commission’. It is now nothing of the sort. It is not even within the health portfolio. Why can’t Medicare offer policy options beyond a default available to all? Medicare has a remarkable database which should be used to highlight and inform policy concerning over and underutilisation of services across the country. Medical services should be subject to the same rigorous cost-benefit examination as pharmaceutical services. Medicare is not doing it. And the Government shows little interest
    7. Co-payments. They are a mess, with the level of government subsidies varying enormously. Medical and pharmaceutical co-payments have little in common. The safety nets are unfair and lead to abuse. We believe that people with high incomes should pay more for health services through efficient and defensible co-payments. A ‘universal service’ does not necessarily mean it should be free. Subject to a means test, there needs to be more discipline by consumers in their use of health services. Jennifer Doggett at CPD has proposed workable means-tested reforms in this area. There is no sign the Commonwealth is concerned about the problem.
    8. The Blame Game. Attempts to resolve the Commonwealth/State blame game have been largely unsuccessful and certainly expensive. We believe that the Commonwealth should offer to set up a Joint Commonwealth/State Health Commission in any state that will agree.  That Commission would be jointly funded by the Commonwealth and the State; it would also plan the delivery of health services in the State and so provide more cohesive hospital and non-hospital health services. It would be a small planning and funding commission with little or no net increase in bureaucratic overheads. Delivery of health services would continue through existing health agencies, Commonwealth, State and local government. The new Commission would be jointly appointed by the two governments and with agreed dispute resolution arrangements. In the event of a disagreement, the Commonwealth position should prevail as it would be the chief funder. Tasmania should be an obvious starter given its precarious financial position. Hopefully success in one State would then encourage other states to swallow their pride and improve their health services by cooperating with the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth dolls out more and more money to the states without fixing the blame game as Kevin Rudd said he would.
    9. The Productivity Commission should be commissioned to report on the need for long-term and meaningful reform. That was the main recommendation in the 1997 Industry Commission Report on Private Health Insurance. Enquires by ‘insiders’ such as the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission tend to be timid and designed to appease sectional interests. Just think of the audacity of that Commission proposing Medicare Select to a Labor Government We need an enquiry by professional and impartial ‘outsiders’ who are detached from present systems and structures.  The Department of Health and Ageing is incapable of doing it.

    Apart from plain packaging and increased excise on tobacco products is there any really memorable heath reform from six years of Labor governments What a disappointing story this all is for the party which created Medicare!

    This article was published in Croakey on 19 August 2013.

    Ian McAuley

    John Menadue

  • Hitting rock-bottom! John Menadue

    Today Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have announced draconian measures that will inflict enormous punishment on over 30,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in Australia over recent years by boat.  These draconian policies will apply not just to future boat arrivals but will be applied retrospectively to over 30,000 asylum seekers who are already legally here.

    We can imagine the widespread protests if any Australian government announced retrospective changes in taxation or other important policies, but some of the most vulnerable in the world are fair game in Australian politics.

    What a shameful country we have become. The poisoning of public opinion against asylum seekers which began with Tampa in 2001 is getting worse by the day.

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison propose:

    • None of these 30.000 asylum seekers will ever be granted permanent residence even if they are found to be refugees.
    • They will be denied access to any appeal processes. Clerks in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship will exercise control over their lives.
    • Persons found to be refugees will get a temporary protection visa which will deny them the right to sponsor family. The only way that they can re-join their family will be to return to the country from which they fled because of danger.

    Amongst these 30,000 asylum seekers in Australia are many whose lives have been put at risk because of the actions of Australian Governments to intervene in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only has our involvement in those two wars been futile and cost many Australian lives, it has put at risk many Iraqis and Afghans who will now pay a huge price as the civil war in Iraq extends and the withdrawal of Western forces from Afghanistan leaves more and more Afghans exposed to danger. But we show no concern that some of these people now in Australia cannot call on the Australian government or people for protection or decency.

    This announcement today continues the demonization of asylum seekers that has been going on for years. Scott Morrison, who would be the Minister for Immigration in an Abbott Government, said in his maiden speech in 2008 ‘From my faith I derive the values of loving kindness, justice and righteousness”. Yet he has told us on many occasions

    • That asylum seekers bring “disease, everything from tuberculosis and Hepatitis C to Chlamydia and syphilis”.
    • He told 2GB talk-back radio that he had seen asylum seekers bringing in “wads of cash and large displays of jewellery”.
    • According to Jane Cadzow, in the Sun Herald he told the Coalition to ‘ramp up its questioning to … capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment’.
    • In early 2002, he complained about the cost of holding funerals in Sydney for asylum seekers who had died in a shipwreck off Christmas Island.  He referred to funding for an 8 year old boy whose parents had been drowned as a ‘government funded junket’.

    Senator Abetz, a migrant himself and apparently a devout Lutheran said that asylum seekers in the community should be registered in the same way as paedophiles.

    Tony Abbott, the seminary-trained and student of the Jesuits, continually calls asylum seekers ‘illegals’ when they are not. He wants us to believe that they are criminals. He has never called Scott Morrison into line.

    Who will call a stop to our inhumanity? In world terms, with 45 million refugees and displaced persons, the number of asylum seekers coming to Australia is miniscule. When will we get out of our parochial stupor and appreciate the real world beyond our shores? But history shows that it is so easy for unscrupulous politicians to exploit fear of the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different.

    Malcolm Fraser we need you now.

  • Minimizing PNG and Nauru. John Menadue

    Before I outline what I suggest we should do after the federal election let me first raise a few important background issues.

    The Indo China program

    In working with Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee I was actively involved in the Indochina refugee program under which Australia took 240,000 people, including family reunion. It was a successful humanitarian program which most Australians now look back on with pride. It also broke the back of White Australia but did not fully banish it. It still shows up to today in a de facto form, in hostility and demonization of asylum seekers.

    There were several keys to that successful program.

    • Regional processing in which regional countries held 1.4 million people for processing.
    • Settlement countries such as US and Australia providing funding and speedily accepting those found to be refugees.
    • Boat arrivals in Australia were minimal. In the period 1976-77 to 1982-83, an average of 10 boats and 340 people arrived by boat each year.  The peak year was in 1977-78 when 43 boats and 1,423 people came
    • That program would not have been possible if we had the 50,000 boat arrivals that are projected presently next year in Australia.
    • There was bipartisan support
    • From that experience I have been a firm supporter of compliance/border protection. The Australian community will support a generous humanitarian/refugee intake provided it is orderly. The same approach is being taken by President Obama…an amnesty for 11 million Latinos in return for stepped up border protection
    • The present strident refugee advocates are not helping the cause. They weaken the case for an expanded refugee intake.   They prejudice multiculturalism and  send a message along with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison that the Australian Government will and must give way

    Agreement with Malaysia.

    The rejection of the agreement with Malaysia by the High Court started the rot that we have today. That High Court decision may have been sound in law but it has had awful consequences for good policy. The agreement with Malaysia needed improvement but it did provide guarantees that Malaysia had never provided before. UNHCR was prepared to actively cooperate.. It would have restarted regional arrangements.  When the High Court rejected the Malaysian agreement in August 2011, Irregular maritime arrivals were then running at less than 300 per month.  The number of boat arrivals increased to 1,200 by May 2012. ’ They have been on a rising trend ever since. The Malaysian failure sent a very clear message. Boat arrivals would succeed. People arriving by boat have increased since the failure of the Malaysia agreement to an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people next year. (In March/June quarters 2012, boat arrivals totalled 4486.In March/June quarters 2013 they had risen to an estimated 14,000 and rising fast). The Government attempted to amend the Migration Act to correct the problems identified by the High Court but the Greens colluded with the Coalition to block the amending legislation. They bashed Malaysia at every opportunity over such issues as judicial canings but ignored for the moment the moat in our own eye, mandatory detention with suicides, self-harm, mental trauma, riots and burnings. The Greens must bear a heavy responsibility for the parlous situation we now find ourselves in. Their moral superiority has helped give us PNG/Nauru. Their conspicuous compassion is damaging the possibility of any sensible humanitarian and political outcome

    Boat and air arrivals

    For years there has been media and political preoccupation with boat arrivals with very little interest or attention to air arrivals who seek asylum. Air arrivals are presently running at about 8,000 p.a. They are mainly persons who arrive in Australia on visitor, working holiday or student visas and then seek refugee status. It is planned in advance. The biggest source for air arrivals seeking asylum is Southern China. About 40% of air arrivals receive refugee protection. They live in the community and can work. Boat arrivals are placed immediately in detention although an increasing number are now released into the community on bridging visas. About 90% of boat arrivals are found to be refugees. We have a remarkable fear about boat arrivals but apparently no concern about asylum seekers who come by air or the 50,000 illegals in the country who have overstayed their visas and disappeared into the woodwork with UK and US citizens high on the list.

    The Pacific “solution”

    The Howard Government’s Pacific/Nauru “solution” did work for a period. In the confusion after Tampa, people smugglers and asylum seekers did not know what might happen to them. The boats stopped. But that changed in the latter part of the Howard Gov. and in the early years of the Rudd Govt.  Of the 1637 on Nauru/Manus who were found to be refugees 96% finished up in Australia or NZ. The Gillard Government was warned that Nauru/Manus would not work a second time. It was reasonable to anticipate, on the basis of previous experience that even if asylum seekers were sent to Nauru after August 2012 they would end up in Australia.And this is what happened. Boat arrivals did not slow down or stop. That is why the Rudd Gov. decided that any person arriving in Aust without a visa in future would never be settled in Aust.

    Another element of the Pacific solution was Temporary Protection Visas. But they failed with more boat arrivals coming after TPV’s were introduced. Unable to sponsor family, many women and children took to the boats. That is why when SIEVX sunk in 2002 with a loss of 363 lives, 288 were women and children

    What can be done after September 7, particularly to minimise PNG and Nauru. 

    • Change the political narrative with a positive message about persons facing persecution and their contribution to Australia rather than the demonization and fear that has been engendered since John Howard’s days. It comes down to leadership across our community and not just politicians. Polls suggest that boat arrivals do not rate highly against such issues as health and education but is a hot button issue on its own that produces a very strong response
    • Bipartisanship between the major parties. Is it too much to hope for! It is so easy for unscrupulous people to promote fear of the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different
    • Second-track dialogue – involve government officials, civil society, NGOs and refugee advocates in the dialogue process. A more constructive role by refugee advocates is essential
    • Processing of asylum seekers in Malaysia and Indonesia in cooperation with UNHCR. Hopefully the regional meeting organised by President Yudhoyono/PM Rudd for Aug.20 will advance this issue.  Progress has been made to restrict visa free entry into Indonesia and Malaysia. The key issue in any arrangement must be effective protection. This encompasses (a) people given a legal status while they are in a transit country, (b) the principle of non-refoulement (c) people have access to refugee determination process either within the legal jurisdiction of the state or by UNHCR and (d) treated with dignity. Unfortunately our performance on refugees in the region is that we are fair-weather friends, walking away when our interests are served
    • Alternative migration pathways.
      • Orderly departure arrangements with “source countries” such as we had with Vietnam from 1983 .We must pursue ODA’s with Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In both Iraq and Afghanistan we will have to bear particular responsibilities for our involvement in the wars in those countries. The arrangements for orderly departure from Pakistan will probably have to be managed by UNHCR  Importantly.DIAC must anticipate future refugee flows.eg Syria and Egypt
      • Permanent or temporary migration, e.g. Iranians on 457 visas. Recent Iranian boat arrivals are mainly single males, well-educated and resourceful. With a population explosion in Iran and the sanctions biting hard many want to leave. In the last 12 months the proportion boat arrivals from Iran has doubled from 16% to 33%.
      • Work rights for all bridging visa holders and a review of the ad hoc and confusing support arrangements for asylum seekers living in the community.
      • Progressively abolish mandatory detention. There are still 6,000 people in detention including 1000 children. There is no evidence whatsoever that mandatory detention deters
      • Progressively Increase refugee and humanitarian intake to 30,000 plus p.a. and cease deducting irregular arrivals from the total intake.
      • On PNG and Nauru, hopefully the deterrent works and boat arrivals will dramatically slow. If they don’t our overall refugee program will continue under a cloud. For those that do go to PNG and Nauru we will need to provide amongst other things, special skills and technical training for resettlement out of the region. If there is a legal challenge to the PNG/Nauru agreements the people smugglers will be given another lease of life
      • Children cannot be exempted or the boats will fill up with boys under 18 years of age. They are called “anchors” to bring out the rest of the family. Children need special guardianship arrangements but the Minister cannot be both guardian and gaoler.
      • There is no ‘solution’.  Desperate people will still try to cut corners. But we can better manage it. If the government is successful in substantially reducing the boat arrivals, more will attempt to come by air.

     

    We need to think again about the assumption by so many that all asylum seekers entering Australia must be processed in Australia .What is important is not so much where the processing occurs but whether it is fair, humane and efficient.

    In 1998 UNHCR at an Exxon meeting envisaged the possibility of transferring people between states for processing. It concluded…”as regards the return to a third country of an asylum seeker whose claim has yet to be determined from the territory of the country where the claim has been submitted ,including pursuant to bilateral or multilateral readmission agreements, it should be established that the third country will treat the asylum seeker(s) in accordance with international standards, will ensure effective protection against refoulement and  will provide the asylum seeker(s) with the possibility to seek and enjoy asylum”.

    The keys are effective protection, consistent with the Refugee Convention, the treatment of people with dignity and efficiency in implementation. We are still a long way short of that with PNG/Nauru

    Importantly we cannot manage these problems on our own.  Regional cooperation is essential, not to shift the burden but to share it.

  • Foxing with the News, Japan style. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

     

    On Wednesday 7 August 2013, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged that the clean up of the devastated Fukushima nuclear power reactors was beyond the capacity of the operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). It followed the revelation that heavily contaminated groundwater is flowing into the Pacific Ocean at an estimated rate of 300 tonnes a day because of the failure of a perimeter barrier installed by TEPCO. By any measure this was a major news story. So where did it run in that night’s one hour, mid-evening news on the national broadcaster NHK? Buried 40 minutes down in the program as a brief RVO (reader voiceover). Had the story broken a year ago, during the tenure of the former government, I have no doubt it would have led the program – accompanied by complaints of incompetence. If there had been any doubt that Abe was receiving a dream run from Japan’s mainstream media, this episode laid it to rest.

    For six months or more the government ignored calls for it to take over management of the nuclear crisis from a secretive and bumbling TEPCO. Abe did nothing, unwilling to infringe on the prerogatives of a private enterprise. The delay deserved to be marked down as a failure of leadership, and yet NHK’s story offered no such analysis. Nor did it contain the information – available on the New York Times and BBC websites – that taxpayers will pick up the estimated US$400 million dollar tab for a new containment strategy. Reportedly the plan envisages freezing the ground around the crippled reactors to a depth of 30 metres. Some commentators suggest the government has been reluctant to take over control for fear of being blamed should the unproven strategy fail to hold back the radioactive groundwater. (One assumes some of these details were aired in other NHK news broadcasts; my focus is on how this story was presented in its prestigious News Watch 9 program on the day in question.)

    The uncritical coverage NHK and others are giving to decisions by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party government contrasts with the media’s hostile treatment of the former centre-left administration led by the Democratic Party of Japan. The nuclear issue is just one example. Another is the issue of the controversial deployment of Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft by the US Marines on Okinawa. When the deployment began in July last year Japanese media outlets, including NHK, suggested that public safety and national sovereignty were being sacrificed to the US-Japan alliance. Night after night, NHK television bulletins devoted extensive coverage to anti-government protests. In recent weeks the number of Ospreys deployed on Okinawa was doubled, while on Monday the crash of a helicopter from the Kadena Air Base further underlined the safety concerns of residents of the heavily militarized islands. And yet NHK’s coverage of both developments was subdued and matter-of-fact, particularly in comparison with its coverage of the same issue during the time of the Noda government.

    Why the change in temper?

    When the DPJ came to power in 2009 one of its first acts was to end the LDP’s preferred method of governing through background briefings to a coterie of captive journalists. This attack on the kisha club system – under which media outlets attach journalists to ministries in return for exclusive access to information – threatened the drip feed media organisations relied upon. Once-privileged journalists now had to take their chances in the open forum of televised news conferences. They hated it – and seemed bent on revenge. Some proved incapable of adjusting to the fact there had been a change of government and continued to treat the LDP as if it were the ruling party.

    As time went by, particularly after the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku, simmering resentment built to a wave of criticism against Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his successor Yoshihiko Noda. While the DPJ government undoubtedly contributed to its loss of popular support, the media played a big hand in it. Conspicuous in this campaign was the mass circulation Yomiuri newspaper (one of the main backers of Abe’s plans for constitutional change). Journalists conveniently overlooked that the nuclear crisis was due, in large part, to a flawed safety and regulatory regime put in place by the LDP. The commercial television networks clamored to outdo each other in pillorying the government. During a March 2011 news conference by Prime Minister Kan, audiences of Fuji-TV’s broadcast heard background voices mocking the proceedings: ‘The nuclear story again, you’ve got to be kidding’, ‘Now I can start laughing’. (This insight into the mentality of some in the profession is no longer viewable on YouTube: Fuji-TV has had it removed ‘for copyright reasons’.)

    Back at NHK, if Fukushima wasn’t the big story last Wednesday night, what was? A summer heat wave and the price of petrol led News Watch 9. The story immediately preceding the brief mention of Fukushima was a long item about the recovery of Japanese flags and other military paraphernalia taken from Pacific battlefields by American soldiers during the Second World War. Honoring the country’s war dead and comforting bereaved families are worthy causes, but they hardly rank above a current and out-of-control nuclear accident.

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

  • Is something significant happening in our alignment to our region? John Menadue

    It may be early days, but I sense that some significant change might be afoot. So much of our political dialogue historically has been about Australia’s relationship with the UK and then the US. John Howard spoke of Australia being the deputy sheriff for the Americans in our region. Tony Abbott talks about an Anglo sphere – presumably linkages to English-speaking countries.

    But so much of the discussion in recent weeks about asylum seekers has involved relationships with our own region. In a few short weeks we have seen some quite significant developments.

    PM Rudd met President Yudhoyono and arranged a ministerial meeting on regional cooperation on asylum seekers for August 20.

    • President Yudhoyono rebuked talk about unilateral action by Australian politicians to turn back boats at sea.
    • Indonesia has now agreed that Iranians will no longer get visa-free entry into Indonesia.
    • Malaysia has agreed to limit to 14 days visas issued to persons believed to be in transit through Malaysia to Indonesia for a boat journey to Australia.
    • A regional settlement arrangement has been concluded with PNG. PM O’Neill indicated warm cooperation – although a great deal still remains to be sorted out.
    • PM O’Neill rebuked Shadow Foreign Minister Julie Bishop for suggesting that Australia was handing over to PNG decisions on the spending of ODA money in PNG.

    The language was frank and brusque but that is surely     much better than the platitudes that so much feature in diplomatic discourse.

    Almost without catching his breath, PM Rudd was in Taren Kowt, Afghanistan, thanking Australian soldiers for their service and saying that it was time they came home. The exit from Afghanistan was announced some time ago, but I thought what was remarkable was that Kevin Rudd’s statement was received without any comment or query. Twelve months ago we were still following the US and its pivoting to Asia.

    In the lead up to the general election we would normally expect our political leaders to be tugging their forelocks to the US President rather than being actively engaged with our regional neighbours.

    It is early days yet, but it seems that some significant realignment to our region is under way. I wonder if some of our political class and the media are following.

    The US will continue to be an important ally but with declining US power and influence it is inevitable that we must develop more effective and close relations with our neighbours. The issue of asylum seekers may prove to be an important catalyst in this process.

    Regional cooperation will grow out of dealing with specific issues rather than grand statements of cooperation.

  • One Minus One Equals Nothing – Also True in Journalism. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

     

    As an executive journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation I was concerned on a daily basis with balance and fairness in news and current affairs coverage. I often heard it said, ‘if both sides of politics are criticising us, we’re probably doing a good job’, though I never embraced this mantra. In journalism, as in diplomacy, one does not ensure neutrality by being equally offensive to everyone. Similarly the counting of lines of copy and broadcast minutes, which is standard practice at the ABC during election campaigns to give ‘equal time’ to the opposing political parties, to me smacked of tokenism.

    The tone, language and angle of a story, together with its running order within a bulletin or positioning on a web page, are more important factors in determining fairness and balance. The quality of the editorial conversation that accompanies a story’s preparation – its relative freedom from preconceived ideas – and what might be termed the ‘ideological culture’ of the newsroom are also crucial. Indeed, since both these aspects elude easy measurement and sit out of sight of the final audience, it may be they have the greatest significance.

    I do not intend to offer an opinion here on how well the ABC discharges its responsibility to achieve fairness and balance, though I know for a fact there exists a corporate consciousness of the need to do so and surveys suggest most consumers of ABC programs believe it is being achieved. I withhold my opinion not because I am complacent about the current state of affairs but because the subject deserves more than a few hundred words.  

    What I wish to do is to highlight some aspects of the media environment in which the current election is being fought. Prime Minister Rudd has made it an agenda item by accusing News Corporation outlets of running a campaign to unseat Labor. Rudd has implied that News’ critical reporting of over-runs in spending and under-performance in delivery of the NBN is motivated by a desire to protect its investment in Foxtel. Under the previous Labor administration, Julia Gillard effectively boycotted certain commercial radio presenters because of their hostility to her and her government. On the other hand, in my opinion, the Fairfax press has generally tended to portray Tony Abbott in a negative light.

    Partisanship is nothing new in the media business. Those who remember opinions being confined to the editorial pages of newspapers ‘once upon a time’ are kidding themselves. I refer back to what I said earlier about the less obvious determinants of fairness and balance in news presentation. What seems to have changed lately is the intensity and relentlessness of news ‘campaigns’ – by which I mean one-sided criticism of a policy or action or personality with the predetermined aim of having it (or him or her) overturned. A corollary of this is the recourse to more extreme partisanship in opinion pieces.

    ABC managing director Mark Scott has described the corporation’s role as filling gaps, in programming terms, which result from ‘market failure’. In one sense he is restating the obvious: the ABC has always offered a place for high culture, in-depth analysis and coverage of non-mainstream Australia. A newer manifestation of this role, however, is the appearance of opinion forums, such as The Drum, which seem to operate on the principle that two extreme and opposite views equal balance and fairness. Even if this were the case – and I contend that it isn’t – encouraging a form of debate whose medium is half-truths is not a sound way of informing the public or cultivating an intellectual climate of tolerance and fair-mindedness. Take a look at the online feedback to this and similar forums elsewhere and you may understand what I mean.

    On ABC News 24, as well, lobbyists are filling the airwaves with so-called informed comment that in currency trading rooms and racetrack betting rings – poor company for news programs to keep – is commonly referred to as ‘talking your book’.

    Another worrying aspect of Mark Scott’s ‘market failure’ concept is that it might signal to staff that their journalism should seek to counteract some perceived bias in the commercial media. In other words, if the ABC is to compete in an increasingly shrill and partisan news environment then absolute balance and fairness could represent a ‘market failure’, i.e. a failure to ‘balance’ the market.

    The Insiders program is an earlier ABC venture into what some in the television industry call the ‘Sabbatical rant’. Each Sunday morning a panel of journalists discusses the week’s political affairs. In the interests of a good argument, journalists of known opposing political persuasions are pitted against each other. (As such, it might be argued, they cannot be much use as journalists – but, for the moment, let’s put this consideration to one side). In my last ABC role I had direct management responsibility for Insiders, even though I admit I was never completely comfortable with the program concept. I worried that by relying on the same ‘proven performers’ it did not tap into a sufficiently wide range of opinion. I have never thought journalists should put themselves in the position of articulating political party lines, and, as already stated, I do not accept that journalistic balance is equivalent to a zero-sum game.

    The ABC is a vital institution for our democracy, and yet it has powerful enemies. Rupert Murdoch, for one, sees no place for a public broadcaster in a free market economy. It is forever open season on the ABC at The Australian newspaper. Election campaigns are a challenging time for the corporation, needing to deliver quality journalism and be seen to be doing so. There is no better time, therefore, to contemplate the true meaning of balance and fairness. They are the professional values that will sustain the ABC, while other media players rush to mount the barricades of partisanship.

               

    Walter Hamilton worked at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for 32 years.

     

     

     

     

  • Encouraging words from Pope Francis at World Youth Day in Rio. John Menadue

    On Copacabana beach in Rio, Pope Francis celebrated Mass with three million people, more than the Rolling Stones or Carnivale could ever attract. With his obvious modesty he showed himself a great communicator with the young and the poor. He appealed for the rich to share with the poor and solidarity between all people. He called the bishops to accountability rather than autocracy, to walk humbly with struggling people and to meet them on their journey. (John Menadue)

    The following, with a minor edit is what he said to the bishops.

     

    “Before all else, we must not yield to the fear once expressed by (Cardinal) John Henry Newman: “… the Christian world is gradually becoming barren and effete, as land which has been worked out and is become sand”. We must not yield to disillusionment, discouragement and complaint. We have laboured greatly and, at times, we see what appear to be failures. We feel like those who must tally up a losing season as we consider those who have left us or no longer consider us credible or relevant.

    Let us read once again, in this light, the story of Emmaus (cf. Lk 24:13-15). The two disciples have left Jerusalem. .. They are scandalized by the failure of the Messiah in whom they had hoped and who now appeared utterly vanquished, humiliated, even after the third day (vv. 17-21). Here we have to face the difficult mystery of those people who leave the Church, who, under the illusion of alternative ideas, now think that the Church – their Jerusalem – can no longer offer them anything meaningful and important. So they set off on the road alone, with their disappointment. Perhaps the Church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas, perhaps the world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions; perhaps the Church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age. It is a fact that nowadays there are many people like the two disciples of Emmaus; not only those looking for answers in the new religious groups that are sprouting up, but also those who already seem godless, both in theory and in practice.

    Faced with this situation, what are we to do?

    We need a Church unafraid of going forth into their night. We need a Church capable of meeting them on their way. We need a Church capable of entering into their conversation. We need a Church able to dialogue with those disciples who, having left Jerusalem behind, are wandering aimlessly, alone, with their own disappointment, disillusioned by a Christianity now considered barren, fruitless soil, incapable of generating meaning.

    A relentless process of globalization, an often uncontrolled process of intense urbanization, has promised great things. Many people have been captivated by their potential, which of course contains positive elements as, for example, the shortening of distance, the drawing closer of peoples and cultures, the diffusion of information and of services. On the other hand, however, many are living the negative effects of these realities without realizing how they affect a proper vision of humanity and of the world. This generates enormous confusion and an emptiness which people are unable to explain, regarding the purpose of life, personal disintegration, the loss of the experience of belonging to a “home” and the absence of personal space and strong personal ties.

    And since there is no one to accompany them or to show them with his or her own life the true way, many have sought shortcuts, because the standards set by Mother Church seem to be asking too much. There are also those who recognize the ideal of humanity and of life as proposed by the Church, but they do not have the audacity to embrace it. They think that this ideal is too lofty for them, that it is beyond their abilities, and that the goal the Church sets is unattainable. Nonetheless they cannot live without having at least something, even a poor imitation of what seems too grand and distant. With disappointed hearts, they then go off in search of something which will lead them even further astray, or which brings them to a partial belonging that, ultimately, does not fulfill their lives.

    The great sense of abandonment and solitude, of not even belonging to oneself, which often results from this situation, is too painful to hide. Some kind of release is necessary. There is always the option of complaining. But even complaint acts like a boomerang; it comes back and ends up increasing one’s unhappiness. Few people are still capable of hearing the voice of pain; the best we can do is to anaesthetize it.

    From this point of view, we need a Church capable of walking at people’s side, of doing more than simply listening to them; a Church which accompanies them on their journey; a Church able to make sense of the “night” contained in the flight of so many of our brothers and sisters from Jerusalem; a Church which realizes that the reasons why people leave also contain reasons why they can eventually return. But we need to know how to interpret, with courage, the larger picture. Jesus warmed the hearts of the disciples of Emmaus.

    I would like all of us to ask ourselves today: are we still a Church capable of warming hearts? A Church capable of leading people back to Jerusalem? Of bringing them home? Jerusalem is where our roots are: Scripture, catechesis, sacraments, community, friendship with the Lord, Mary and the apostles… Are we still able to speak of these roots in a way that will revive a sense of wonder at their beauty?

    Many people have left because they were promised something more lofty, more powerful, and faster.

    But what is more lofty than the love revealed in Jerusalem? Nothing is more lofty than the abasement of the Cross, since there we truly approach the height of love! Are we still capable of demonstrating this truth to those who think that the apex of life is to be found elsewhere?

    Do we know anything more powerful than the strength hidden within the weakness of love, goodness, truth and beauty?

    People today are attracted by things that are faster and faster: rapid Internet connections, speedy cars and planes, instant relationships. But at the same time we see a desperate need for calmness, I would even say slowness. Is the Church still able to move slowly: to take the time to listen, to have the patience to mend and reassemble? Or is the Church herself caught up in the frantic pursuit of efficiency? Dear brothers, let us recover the calm to be able to walk at the same pace as our pilgrims, keeping alongside them, remaining close to them, enabling them to speak of the disappointments present in their hearts and to let us address them. They want to forget Jerusalem, where they have their sources, but eventually they will experience thirst. We need a Church capable of accompanying them on the road back to Jerusalem! A Church capable of helping them to rediscover the glorious and joyful things that are spoken of Jerusalem, and to understand that she is my Mother, our Mother, and that we are not orphans! We were born in her. Where is our Jerusalem, where were we born? In Baptism, in the first encounter of love, in our calling, in vocation. We need a Church that kindles hearts and warms them.

    We need a Church capable of restoring citizenship to her many children who are journeying, as it were, in an exodus”.

  • The election: economy and deficits. John Menadue

    In the run-up to the September 7 elections, we will hear a lot of misleading stories about the economy and deficits.

    My contention is that with the good luck of the China boom, the government has managed the Australian economy well. Our economic performance is amongst the best in the world. But the public debate has been side-tracked by nonsense about debt and deficits.

    Despite the political rhetoric and the flak from News Limited, the evidence on the economy is very clear.

    • Australia has had six years of uninterrupted growth even through the global financial crisis. Few countries achieved that.
    • Inflation is low, unemployment is low and economic growth has been above world levels.
    • In May this year John Howard said ‘when the Australian Prime Minister and Treasurer and others tell you that the Australian economy is doing better than most, they are right.’
    • The three major credit rating agencies have all retained Australia at a AAA rating.
    • In April this year the IMF said that ‘Australia has the strongest economy in the developed world … we expect the Australian economy will outstrip growth over all other advanced economies over the next two years’.

    But the government has allowed itself to be side-tracked over the populist nonsense that debt and deficit are the important measures on the economy. The previous Treasurer, Wayne Swann, contributed to these misleading stories by continually making pledges to get the budget back into surplus when it was neither possible nor desirable. In fact, debt and deficits, whilst not unimportant, are secondary issues. Sometimes debt and deficits are appropriate, as in a recession. Sometimes they are not, as in an economic boom.

    Have we got a debt and deficit problem?

    • In world terms our debt problem is very small. Total net government debt as a percentage of GDP has remained very low at 12%. This compares with such countries as Japan 134%, US 88%, France 84%, UK 83%, Euro area 72%, Germany 57% and Canada 35%.
    • The CEO of the National Australia Bank told us only last week that we do have a debt problem but that the problem is that we don’t have enough debt. He contended that a country such as Australia needed to borrow more for infrastructure.
    • With a mistaken mindset about debt, Europe has embarked on savage budget cuts that have caused great hardship particularly for young people and encouraged nascent right-wing, anti-immigration and racist parties. Europe is rightly now regretting its obsession with debt at the expense of other important issues.

    There is a long-term and structural debt issue for Australia, even if it is a minor one. That problem was largely inherited by the government from the Howard and Costello years. The Howard government locked in tax cuts over eight years from 2004. The IMF in January this year reported that Australia’s most wasteful spending came in the Howard era. Without those tax reductions in the Howard era, budget revenue would now be about $26 billion p.a. higher after adjusting for inflation.

    The Rudd and Gillard  governments should have done more to reduce the relatively small structural deficits. It did not address some key areas of wasteful and inequitable spending – negative gearing on property, tax-free superannuation income for those over 60 (like me!) and the subsidy to the private health insurance industry. Taken together, reform in these areas would quickly fix the small structural deficit we have.

    In short, the economy is performing well. We do not have an unmanageable deft and deficit problem.

    Unfortunately the Treasurer Chris Bowen has now confused the issue by promising a wafer-thin budget surplus of $4 billion in 2016-17. Revenues are too volatile for a promise like that in three years’ time to have any credibility. That promise will play into the hands of the economically illiterate in the media who have persuaded themselves and others that the budget is the same as the economy. It is not.

  • Japan’s Deputy PM: ‘Let’s learn from the Nazis’. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

    Taro Aso, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Japan, has a clumsy tongue; it’s always getting him into trouble. He’s so malapropic (remember the one about people becoming so affluent ‘even the homeless are getting diabetes’), we can only shake our heads and say, ‘Japan’s a funny place,’ before changing the channel on our Sonys.

     But wait a moment. Did he really say this latest thing?

     On Monday Aso addressed a forum on constitutional change organised by a right-wing lobby group, the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals (more on it later). He spoke extempore, as usual, with an eye to creating controversy that, if necessary, might be explained away later. The rubric ‘I was misunderstood’ or ‘I failed to explain myself properly’ or ‘I didn’t say what I meant’ is familiar with politicians of Aso’s type, who habitually linger between not meaning what they say and not saying what they mean.

     The Deputy Prime Minister reminded his audience that the National Socialist Party in Germany came to power by democratic means under the Weimar Constitution. ‘They did not seize power by force of arms. It’s easy to forget they were chosen by the German people.’

     He then turned to the subject at hand.

    Inside Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, he said, discussion of constitutional change went on calmly, without raised voices, and that was the best way to proceed. Politicians need not stir up passions by, for instance, visiting Yasukuni Shrine on the anniversary of Japan’s defeat. (Yasukuni enshrines the country’s war dead, including a number of convicted war criminals.) China and South Korea were sure to complain. Why not go, quietly, on another day? It was always better to avoid a fuss (though he conceded, mischievously, that when he once suggested the anniversary of Japan’s 1905 victory over Russia as a better day it had caused one.)

     Mr Aso again took up the example of Germany to illustrate his argument: ‘One day, before anyone was aware, the Weimar Constitution was changed into the Nazi Constitution. It was changed without anyone noticing. Why don’t we learn from that technique.’

    Oops.

    Presumably the particular audience he was addressing found it instructive to learn from the Nazis, since it was not until his comments were reported in the media, and condemned in the United States, Germany, China and South Korea, that a retraction became necessary. Reading from a prepared statement on Friday he conceded that it was inappropriate to offer the Nazis as a model for any undertaking. He had been ‘misunderstood’.

     In reporting Aso’s original comments, some Japanese media outlets suggested he was being  sarcastic, or at least ambiguous, and should not be taken seriously. The Japan Times – well known  for its pro-LDP leanings – was one of them. But having gone over Aso’s entire speech with the assistance of a Japanese native speaker, I believe there can be no doubt he was extolling the virtues of constitutional change by stealth.

    Aso is not a minor member of the government. He served – without distinction – as Prime Minister in 2008-2009 and remains close to the current leader Shinzo Abe. Both men are descendants of Japan’s conservative old guard. Taro Aso is a grandson of Shigeru Yoshida, who led Japan in the 1940s and 1950s, and his wife is a daughter of another former LDP chief Zenko Suzuki. His views on history reflect an intimate connection with past historical misdeeds. A family business, Aso Mining Company, in Fukuoka (Aso’s electorate) exploited Korean conscript labour and Allied prisoners, including nearly 200 Australian POWs.

     The organisation that provided Aso a platform for his ‘Nazi’ remarks, the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals, formed in 2007, has a mission to ‘reconstruct’ a ‘malfunctioning’ Japan. Its president is Yoshiko Sakurai, 67, whose career in journalism began with the foreign media in Tokyo in the 1970s. She attracted a following as the host of a nightly television current affairs program in the 1980s and 1990s, taking up progressive social issues. More recently, however, she has become a glamorous proponent of extreme right-wing views.

    Her institute can be judged by its string of recent policy pronouncements: ‘All Japanese must be resolved to reject foreign interference in our own affairs’; ‘Japan should lead international rule-setting to pursue national interest’; ‘Japan should not abandon nuclear power generation’. Sakurai advocates a tough line against China and South Korea, abandonment of Japan’s pacifist constitution, and all-out pursuit of the LDP’s economic and cultural agenda. Born in Hanoi just a month after the surrender, she is the archetypal ‘child’ of the postwar peace and prosperity Japan has enjoyed under its current constitution. As a political insider and media darling, however, she appeals to younger Japanese ripe to be recruited to the argument that Japan has become a ‘malfunctioning state’ (a phrase the Nazis would have approved of) due to a lack of vigour and self-assertiveness.

    The accident-prone Mr Aso will have done his country and the world a service if only, by knocking over the furniture, he has managed to awaken the household to the presence of intruders stepping softly towards the family jewels.

  • Our business failure in Asia. John Menadue

    In my blog of March 14 on Productivity and Skills I drew attention to the failure of Australian business to equip itself for Asia. PM Rudd in his address to the National Press Club on 16 July this year put it very clearly.

    ‘I am concerned that if you went through our business elites, you would not find a lot of the top 25 executives in each of our top 100 firms who have spent any of their career time serving in Asia – the engine driver of the global economy through until mid-century. Remember this is the Asian Century. The truth is Australia is much underdone in Asia.’

    There are many reasons for our business failure in Asia. One is the continuing habit of company boards appointing people like themselves – Anglo-Celtic males, often from the same schools and with little knowledge or experience in Asia. Talk about the unions running a closed shop!

    One other major obstacle in Australia and elsewhere to developing Asian skills in our major companies is their failure to align business and human resource strategies. Cross-cultural experience that are learned by appointing staff overseas are too often ad hoc and operational. Overseas appointments are not used as the catalyst to drive change in the organisation at home.

    The most extreme example that I know of business failure to integrate business and HR strategy is Rio Tinto. It staffed its Shanghai office with local Chinese. Unfortunately some of them finished in goal. But the major failure was that Rio Tinto apparently had no plan to use postings in China to develop executives who would come back to Australia and use the experience gained in China to drive cultural and organisational change in Australia.

    This failure is not just an Australian problem. A recent Global Mobility Effectiveness Survey, 2012, by Ernst & Young entitled ‘Driving Business Success’ highlighted the problem of so many firms sending staff overseas in a quite ad hoc manner and not using that experience learned overseas to enrich the talent pool of the organisation. (This survey covered 520 international countries including some from Australia.)

    The survey said that business should take several crucial steps to improve its performance in overseas markets. It said that companies needed to ‘better align mobility strategy with business strategy … crucially talent-management and global mobility must be integrated.’

    There is a lot of depressing reading from this survey.

    • Only 51% of companies surveyed have a global talent management agenda.
    • Less than a quarter of senior management have been on (overseas) assignment.
    • More than one in twelve countries had at least 11% of international assignees return before the end of their contracts – at huge cost.

    I will write later about the disappointment of many executives who on return from overseas postings quickly leave their organisations. They often feel that the cultural experience overseas has changed them and their outlook on the world but the culture of the company back in Australia has not changed. It remained a closed shop. So they leave and the money invested in them is lost, at least to the company.

    If there is any consolation in the Ernst & Young survey it is that Australia is not alone in failure to equip itself for Asia and new markets. But with our geographic position, we have probably more to lose by not properly equipping ourselves for our own region.

    A key is clearly the integration of a business strategy for Asia and the human resources strategy – to steadily build on the experience of executives living and working in Asia, and when they return to Australia to use that experience to drive organisational change at home. We have a long way to go.

    There is a lot of lip service by Australian companies about the Asian Century. They seem unable to grasp what is involved to change organisational culture and in the process drive productivity improvements and their long-term business prospects in our region.

    The business and other opportunities in Asia is not something new. The spectacular economic rise of Japan started 50 years ago. It was followed by Korea. Now it is China. Where has our business sector been in the last 50 years? It has profited opportunistically but has not built the skill base we need for the long term.

  • A regional refugee instrument. John Menadue

    Forgive me for repeating myself, but you might be interested in a presentation I gave on this subject in February 2012 (see below).

    We have talked a lot about the need for regional arrangements, but progress has been extremely slow. Our political system based on ministerial and departmental responsibility has failed us badly on refugee issues. A new approach  involving civil society – NGOs, academics and others is necessary to help us break out of the awful situation into which we have spiralled.

    A Regional Cooperation Framework

    International Association of Refugee Law Judges

    Melbourne 3 February 2012

     

    There are 33 million persons of concern to the UNHCR throughout the world. There are about 15 million refugees. With instability and failed states, numbers are likely to increase, including in transit countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

    For our neighbourhood there will be no satisfactory arrangement concerning refugees and asylum seekers and particularly boat people without regional cooperation. It is so obvious, except for those who want to play politics with the lives of boat people.

    I have chosen my words carefully in saying that there will be no ‘satisfactory arrangement’ rather than talking about ‘solutions’. For whatever we can accomplish together with our neighbours, asylum flows will remain chaotic and unpredictable. Desperate and vulnerable people will never abide by the ‘rules’ we seek to impose. But together with our neighbours we can do a lot better.

    The successful resettlement of over 240,000 Indochinese in Australia, initiated by our acceptance of over 100,000 refugees followed by orderly departures and family reunion, could never have occurred without regional cooperation. The same is true today. Regional cooperation in the late seventies and eighties was not pretty at times, but it worked. Regional countries provided temporary protection for 1.4 million people who fled after the fall of Saigon. Resettlement countries were able to catch their breath and then generously respond. Just imagine if 50,000 of that 1.4 million had arrived by boat in northern Australia. The successful programs of the Fraser Government could not have succeeded in those circumstances.

    But in dealing with our region we are often fair-weather friends, turning to them when we have a problem and then walking away. We also seem to have an unfortunate ability to project an air of superiority. Consider our record.

    • In 1996 Australia, together with other resettlement countries terminated the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese which had been a model of regional burden sharing. We left regional countries with thousands of difficult cases.
    • In Bali in 2002 we sought regional help over boat people. But when boat arrivals fell away, although the problem of asylum seekers who came by air remained, we lost interest. We revived the Bali process again in 2009 when the boat arrivals resumed.
    • The countries of our region are often criticised for their toughness towards refugees. But our regional neighbours carry a much heavier burden than we do. The number of refugees in Australia is minimal – 22,000 in 2010. But the countries of our region who have not signed the Convention put our performance to shame. Pakistan has 1.9 million refugees, Malaysia has 82,000 refugees with another 130,000 people of concern to UNHCR, India has 185,000 refugees, Nepal 90,000. In Bangladesh there are 229,000 people of concern to the UNHCR. Thailand has 97,000 refugees and another 550,000 people of concern to the UNHCR.
    • The High Court and others declare that we should not cooperate in processing in a country that has not adopted certain legal obligations, either under international or domestic law. This narrow view makes sensible policy extremely difficult considering that there is not a signatory country to the Refugee Convention in the arc from Yemen to Australia – the route used by almost all asylum seekers fleeing to Australia.
    • But the High Court’s legalistic view becomes more difficult to understand when we consider the performance of countries that have signed the Convention. China has signed the Convention, but regularly refouls North Koreans back across the Tumen River. PNG, a signatory, regularly refouls Irian Jayans back into Indonesia. Nauru obviously signed the convention in June 2011 for financial benefit. Japan, a signatory, collaborated with North Korea and the Japanese Red Cross to ‘repatriate’ about 90,000 Korean residents in Japan back to North Korea between 1959 and 1984. Most of them disappeared or escaped back to Japan.
    • We point to the plank in other people’s eyes, but ignore the brutality of our treatment of asylum seekers in detention centres in this country. By any reasonable interpretation our punishment and cruelty towards boat people in detention is a breach of the Refugee Convention. As the regional representative, UNHCR in Australia, put it before a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Australia’s Immigration Detention Network in August 2011, ‘Australia’s mandatory detention policy, that denies the right to lawful stay and any opportunities for self-reliance in community-based settings, and is punitive on the basis of the method of entry to Australia, is arguably in contravention of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention and would fall well short of these criteria. UNHCR’s concerns about the legal and severe and negative implications of long-term mandatory detention in Australia are long-standing and well-known.’ Australians seem much more vexed over what happens in Malaysia than how we punish and brutalise vulnerable and defenceless people in our detention centres.
    • Malaysia has made considerable progress on human rights which we choose to ignore. Together with ASEAN, Malaysia has embarked on the development of a human rights instrument, something that we have refused to do. In noting the decision to develop a Political and Human Security Blueprint in 2009, ASEAN ministers declared “Many kinds of human rights violations take place in South East Asia and a regional mechanism can help address this problem. First, the mechanism will ensure that ASEAN member states all adhere to international human rights standards. Second, the mechanism provides a common platform where ASEAN member states, being socio-politically different from each other, can articulate their human rights-related concerns. Lastly, with a human rights mechanism, the region can cooperate to address violations and collectively show its stand on human rights-related issues.’
      The much criticised Australia/Malaysian agreement was described by the Regional Director of UNHCR in Australia to the Legal and Constitutional Committee of the Australian Parliament on 30 September 2011 in the following terms. ‘Many persons of concern to UNHCR stand to benefit from this Program by having their status regularised. It would mean all refugees in Malaysia would, in addition to their registration and ID documents from UNHCR, be registered within the government’s immigration data base and thus protected from arbitrary arrest and detention. It would also mean that all refugees in Malaysia would have the right to work on a par with legal migrants in the country. This would also entitle them to the same insurance and health schemes as documented for legal migrant workers.’ Importantly, Malaysia does not punish boat people in mandatory detention as we do. For Malaysia the Agreement was quite remarkable progress. This is in a country that has the burden of a large number of refugees, is much poorer than we are and has a history of communal tensions. But the arrangement is not enshrined in law and so is discounted. This Agreement is also consistent with a decision of the Executive Committee of UNHCR in 1998 that recognised that irregular migration, people-smuggling and asylum flows are complex matters but concluded that return to a transit country like Malaysia may occur provided there are appropriate safeguards, accepted international standards and effective protection against refoulement. While such conclusions are not binding in law, they do guide the work of the UNHCR and governments in what are acceptable international standards of behaviour towards asylum seekers.

    With so few convention signatories in our region, any regional cooperation framework will have to be constructed with non-signatory countries. A regional framework cannot be conjured out of thin air. It must be built from materials available. In that regard, there is an instructive precedent in the 1984 Cartagena (Colombia) Declaration on Refugees. At that time, 150,000 central American refugees were being assisted in the region. There were another 1.8 million people who had fled across a border or were displaced in their own country by conflict.

    The Cartagena Declaration was adopted by a group of ‘government experts and eminent jurists’ from Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela.  Three of these countries were not signatories to the Refugee Convention in 1984 when the Declaration was agreed. The Declaration was a modest start, but it contained a number of important recommendations. Significantly the Declaration broadened the definition of a ‘refugee’ set out in the 1951 Convention to include those ‘who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalised violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order’.

    The Cartagena Declaration was further enhanced by the 1989 International Conference on Central American Refugees and the Mexican Declaration of 2004. Argentina (a non-signatory to the Refugee Convention) and Chile (a signatory) subsequently became parties.

    Not surprisingly, these developments have not been straight-forward. There have been restrictive interpretations of the Declaration and exclusion of some clauses by some countries. But the progress has been clear.

    There are also some lessons that we can learn about a regional cooperation framework in Africa where the numbers and the problems have been much greater than in Central America. In 2009, the African Union Convention for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons in Africa was signed. This African Union Convention was the first legally binding instrument on internal displacement on a continent-wide basis. It provides a comprehensive regional framework setting out provisions for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons.  

    In our region we must work actively with Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia if we are ever to find an enduring arrangement. If the Malaysian agreement offered anything, it offered the chance of accelerating the process of developing sensible, practical and robust asylum policies in the region. We need to strengthen the Bali process. It could lead to common asylum policies and practices in the region and ultimately to a regional protection instrument. Bali was initially focused on enforcement and criminalisation of people-smuggling, but has progressively shifted to humanitarian issues and population flows.

    Both UNHCR in its ‘10 Point Plan of Action for Refugee Protection and Mixed Migration (2007)’ and OXFAM in its ‘Asylum Seekers; The Way Forward’ have outlined the key elements of a regional framework, including effective screening systems, protection-sensitive reception arrangements, durable solutions including resettlement, alternative migration pathways and repatriation, together with targeted development assistance. A critical element in any regional protection framework is that countries who commit to action are not left to carry the burden of managing and maintaining irregular migrants for prolonged periods.

    There will be important roles for international agencies, jurists, local and international NGOs, regional governments and the Australian Government. Our government would assist by supporting the establishment of a well-resourced policy unit within the Bali Process Secretariat. That secretariat is a collaborative effort of more than 50 countries and international agencies. More strategically, Australia should target its humanitarian development assistance programs to benefit asylum populations in areas such as housing, health, jobs and education.

    If the Malaysian Agreement is viewed through a regional lens, it can become the catalyst together with Bali to start the process of building a durable protection system and delivering protection dividends for all asylum seekers as well as nationals in the transit countries and Australia.

    Second-track Dialogue and the Role of Jurists

    It is noteworthy that the Cartagena Declaration was adopted by a group of ‘government experts and eminent jurists’ from ten countries. The UNHCR described the inaugural meeting in 1984 as a ‘colloquium of experts’.

    Whilst the Declaration was not a treaty, its provisions became respected across the region. In particular the new refugee definition was incorporated in the legislation of most of the countries of the Americas.

    Could the International Association of Refugee Law Judges initiate a similar regional ‘colloquium’ of experts? I notice that your website states that your Chapter is keen to encourage judges and decision-makers from our region to join in biennial regional deliberations. You comment that it might be possible for your Chapter to develop into an Asian-Pacific Chapter. I could only encourage you to explore that as soon as possible. A regional colloquium could help break the log-jamb on regional cooperation and related refugee issues. I think it is clear that the current ministerial/departmental model, together with the politicisation of refugee issues has brought us to the present sorry position, where good policy outcomes are very difficult to achieve. We need to break out of the party-political prison.

    We need a more broadly based ‘track 2 dialogue’ in our region that can promote confidence and resolution of seemingly intractable issues. Such a dialogue would bring together a broad cross section of key players outside government with policy-makers, in their personal capacity as experts, to start the process of building a new dialogue and approach to both regional and domestic refugee issues. My comments here of course refer only to the regional issues.

    Such an approach as this is not something that Australian Governments have traditionally engaged in except at the periphery through ‘consultation’ or commissioning one-off enquiries into certain matters. However, if done well, this type of approach could be transformational in breaking down the misunderstandings and suspicions of different countries and groups. The lack of such an approach serves only to perpetuate and reinforce the current stalemate.

    The objective of this type of dialogue is to develop a shared understanding and a shared knowledge of the role of various countries and players on refugee issues. It can break down barriers and facilitate the development of a common understanding and knowledge of each other’s issues and concerns. This approach requires a long-term and sustained commitment by all parties.

    Ideally this approach should start modestly and then progressively bring together actors from a broad spectrum of regional interests including jurists and the UNHCR. It would include social policy and refugee and asylum experts as well as persons familiar with intelligence and border security issues. Such a wide span of interests can help create a less hostile environment and open the door to mutually beneficial policies without the suspicion that pervades the present approach. It would enable players outside government to influence new policy thinking and create the space for government officials to ‘think aloud’.

    Such an approach would need to have the implicit backing of government to allow officials to participate in their personal capacities.

    Would your Chapter be prepared to sponsor a regional ‘colloquium of experts’ in Kuala Lumpur?

    As I said at the beginning, no satisfactory arrangement is possible without active regional cooperation. We cannot do this on our own and neither can our neighbours. We need a Regional Refugee Instrument which whilst based on the 1951/67 Convention, recognises the particular problems of our region, one of which is that few regional countries are signatories to the Refugee Convention.

    Governments are strengthened when they work collaboratively with each other and with civil society organisations.  We must build trust in the region. Importantly it will mean working with countries, who almost without exception are not signatories to the Refugee Convention.