Category: Politics

  • JOHN TULLOH. Malaysia – the wolf of Kuala Lumpur.

     

    There was much mirth in Malaysia the other day when the US Justice Department filed civil lawsuits alleging a $3.5bn embezzlement of a Kuala Lumpur fund and diplomatically referred to one of the alleged villains as ‘Malaysia Official 1’. Everyone knew who that was – their prime minister, Najib Razak. It concerns the long-running scandal of the state investment fund known as 1MDB which Najib himself set up. He denies any misappropriation of funds, resorting to the traditional defence of sweating political leaders that it’s nothing more than a smear campaign. (more…)

  • GEOFF HISCOCK. Long-awaited tax change raises tantalising prospect for Indian economy

     

    The tantalising prospect of a 10% growth rate is on India’s economic horizon in the next few years, now that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won legislative backing for the long-awaited goods and services tax.

    On August 3, India’s upper house approved a bill to bring in a nationwide GST, creating a much simpler tax regime that will help create a unified market of 1.3 billion consumers. In theory, interstate trade barriers will come down, enabling the faster and cheaper delivery of goods across the country.

    But – and it is a massive but – there are numerous obstacles to the introduction next year of what most economists agree is the most important Indian tax reform for decades. Modi still needs more than half the states to approve a constitutional amendment, parliament will need to pass at least one more bill and a special GST council needs to be set up. (more…)

  • LUKE FRASER. Infrastructure – a partner in our labours.

     

    The Senate must be permitted to help avoid major infrastructure debacles. 

    Many recent posts in Pearls and Irritations have focussed on democratic renewal. Some have decried a lack of trust and competence in our political class. At the same time our retiring Reserve Bank governor advises government should spend more on productive infrastructure.

    Given that the Australian Senate looks harder and harder to deal with for any government and public faith in major infrastructure projects is at a low ebb, how do we proceed? (more…)

  • PETER HUGHES. Manus and Nauru – time for the government to be creative

     

    This is a repost of an earlier article by Peter Hughes on 28 April 2016.

    The Papua New Guinea (PNG) Supreme Court decision and the announcement by the PNG Prime Minister that Manus will be closed only bring forward the inevitable – the Australian government has to find a way to get the current caseload of refugees and asylum seekers out of PNG and Nauru.

    Realistically, the only option is Australia and New Zealand.

    Think for a moment about the other possibilities. (more…)

  • JOHN DWYER. A shared vision for restructuring primary care in Australia.

     

    At last the clouds are dispersing, the sun is shining through and one can see a splendid vision of a restructured primary health system that meets the needs of contemporary Australia. For the first time that I can remember, there is a consensus among informed consumers and health professionals that enthusiastically supports the introduction of “Patient-Centred Healthcare Homes” as the primary care model we need to deliver cost effective and equitable integrated primary care. The model has been or is being implemented in eleven OECD countries and the results are most encouraging. Just published is a position paper from a “roundtable” exercise involving The Consumers Health Forum, the George Institute, the Royal Australian College of General Practice, the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, Sydney University and the Australian National University. Their support for the model echoes that of the AMA and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. I am providing this impressive list of supporters, as consensus on healthcare reform in Australia has been held captive by vested interests for so long. (more…)

  • JEFF WATERS. ABC journalists and business.

     

    Yeah, sure, let’s ’embed’ ABC journalists in businesses, but don’t forget the unions, or Nauru.

    The recent review of ABC business coverage may have come down in favour of the National Broadcaster, but, as has been suggested in the media, any move to “job swap” or “embed” ABC journalists within private corporations is nonsensical. (more…)

  • CAMERON DOUGLAS. The new Thai Constitution!

     

    Thais will vote in their first post-coup election towards the end of next year, after approving in a referendum a new constitution that will usher in an era of paternalistic democracy.

    The referendum was held on Sunday, August 7, but even before the official results were declared one of the supporters of the country’s 2014 coup announced plans to set up a political party that would nominate coup leader and current Prime Minister, General Prayut Chan-o-cha, as the post-election prime minister. (more…)

  • ARJA KESKI-NUMMI. Our Devil’s Island

     

    The Guardian recently ran a story regarding its Freedom Of Information request on boat turn backs, the subsequent denial of material, and its appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) to review the FOI decision. At some point during the AAT hearing the Guardian found itself locked out of part of the hearing on putative “national security grounds”. This week the Guardian reported on some 200 incident reports from the Nauru offshore processing centre, many regarding the 49 children and the abuse of them by those who are supposed to be their “protectors”. (more…)

  • ROBERT MANNE, FRANK BRENNAN, TIM COSTELLO & JOHN MENADUE. A solution to our refugee crisis

     

    This article was posted in today’s The Age.

    There are two powerful arguments about the plight of the refugees dying a slow death in the offshore processing centres Australia has established and which it maintains on Nauru and Manus Island.

    The supporters of the present policy argue that we cannot bring these refugees to Australia because to do so would act as a signal to people smugglers, allowing their trade to begin again. (more…)

  • MICHAEL KEATING. Taxation Reform

     

    Taxation reform is a continuing and topical issue. With a new government and the need for budget repair I am reposting below an earlier article in the policy series by Michael Keating.  John Menadue

    Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great American jurist, is reputed to have said, ‘I like to pay taxes. In this way I buy civilisation.’ However, in contrast to Holmes’ noble ideal, too often today we hear people railing about the burden of taxation, as though it is in some way an unfortunate even illegitimate imposition upon ourselves, our economy, and our way of life.

    Lower taxation has been embraced by all political parties without any evidence that, given our already low starting point, less taxation will in fact lead to higher economic growth, let alone pay for itself. Indeed there is no evidence that the advanced economies with high growth rates of per capita income have lower levels of taxation. Nor have past cuts in our income tax led to faster growth, such as when the top income tax rate was reduced from 60 per cent to 45 per cent. (more…)

  • SPENCER ZIFCAK. Counter-terrorism and human rights.

    I am presently in Paris. Along with many other countries, France faces a terrorism threat. France is grappling with the problem of how democracies can best handle threats of terrorism. In light of that I am reposting an earlier article from the Policy Series, by Spencer Zifcak, on human rights and combatting terrorism. John Menadue

    Do Human Rights Fit or Should We Just Forget About Them?

    Hard upon the ascent of violent terrorism in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, and Australia’s first experience of terrorist crime in Martin Place, the Australian Government has been active in bringing forward new legislation designed to prevent and punish terrorist crime. There can be no quarrel with that. Nevertheless, the draconian nature of the new laws has caused alarm amongst many concerned with the protection of individual rights and freedoms. (more…)

  • MUNGO MacCALLUM. Campaign against the Australian Census.

     

    My first encounter with the Australian census was in 1971, and even then there were worries about its privacy.

    Gordon Barton, the proprietor of Nation Review, the paper for which I then worked, ran a fierce campaign against what he thought was a dangerous tendency for the government to collect people’s personal details.

    I spoke at length to the responsible minister, a somewhat bemused Billy Snedden; neither of us could see what the fuss was about, and 45 years later I still can’t. The census is a necessary and desirable tool of government, a snapshot of the nation to allow administrators to analyse and, it is to be hoped, improve the condition of the citizenry. (more…)

  • IAN McAULEY. Health care and Labor.

     

    In the recent election Labor had fine words on health care – “Labor will ensure that access to health care is determined by your Medicare card, and not your credit card” – but in reality its policy proposals, if implemented, would have been even more destructive of Medicare than the Coalition’s.

    The Coalition, true to form, proposed to entice more people into holding private health insurance, but Labor’s enticements to hold PHI were even stronger.   (more…)

  • JEFF KEHOE. Can capitalism be redeemed?

    In this article in the Harvard Business Review, Jeff Kehoe poses the future of capitalism. He says

    Although it may be necessary to treat inequality as an economic problem, it is not sufficient. The US as a country needs to ask and answer some basic questions. Who gets to set the rules? What value should they reflect? What’s fair? What do we owe to one another?

    See link for full article: https://hbr.org/2016/07/can-capitalism-be-redeemed

  • MICHAEL KEATING. Improving employment participation.

    This is a repost of an article by Michael Keating last year which was part of the Fairness, Opportunity and Security policy series.  John Menadue

    The rate of employment participation and the productivity of those employees together determine the average per capita incomes of Australians, and therefore our living standards. In addition, being employed creates many of the social contacts and sense of self-esteem that are vital to our individual well-being. While arguably the best way to reduce inequality is to create the conditions where those disadvantaged people who are presently on the margin of the workforce get work, or in other cases get more work.

    In short increasing employment participation is most important if governments want to improve living standards, individual well-being, and equality. (more…)

  • TONY KEVIN. Kevin Rudd and the UN

    An exceptionally difficult UN Secretary-General selection process is set to continue

    On 29 July, Malcolm Turnbull controversially announced that the Australian Government will not nominate Kevin Rudd for the UN Secretary-General position. Here in Australia, the focus of discussion on the Rudd candidacy has been on domestic political issues of precedent and loyalty to Team Australia.

    Only Carl Ungerer and Geoff Raby, both strong Rudd supporters (see Farmer and Ungerer references below), touch on more basic questions of what outcome might now be best for the UN system, in an increasingly multipolar world that is impatient to break out of old power structures and private deals among the UN Security Council (UNSC) Permanent Members. This note seeks to further inform that discussion. (more…)

  • MUNGO MacCALLUM. Malcolm Turnbull and indigenous affairs.

     

    If Malcolm Turnbull did not know it before, he certainly should now: before you stomp your way into Aboriginal politics, it is wise to first don the emu-feather sandals of a trained Kadaitcha man.

    The area is fraught with uncertainty and sensitivities which are not always apparent to the outsider; whitefella politics are relatively straightforward compared to the Indigenous version.  (more…)

  • CIA Briefing for Donald Trump

    In the New York Times of 4 August, 2016, Nicholas Kristof gives a make-believe account of a security briefing of Donald Trump by a CIA officer. It is quite funny – but at the same time, quite worrying.  John Menadue

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/opinion/donald-trump-and-a-cia-officer-walk-into-a-room.html?ref=international&_r=0

  • MERVYN KING. Which Europe Now?

     

    In this article ‘Which Europe now?’ in the New York Review of Books, Mervyn King says

    Our political class would do well to recall the words of Confucius:

    Three things are necessary for government: weapons, food and trust. If a ruler cannot hold on to all three, he should give up weapons first and food next. Trust should be guarded to the end: without trust we cannot stand.

    Not just in Britain, but around the industrialized world, the divide between the political class and a large number of disillusioned and disaffected voters threatens trust. At times it seems that the governing class has lost faith in the people and that the people have lost faith in the government. And the two sides seem incapable of understanding each other, as we see today in the United States. But the continent on which the challenge is greatest is Europe. If any good comes out of the British referendum, it will be a renewed determination, not just in Britain but around Europe, to eliminate that divide.

    In several recent posts on democratic renewal, I have drawn attention to the breakdown of trust in institutions and leaders of those institutions.  John Menadue.

    Mervyn King is the former Governor of the Bank of England.

  • LINDA SIMON. Australian VET in crisis! Are there lessons to be learned from the UK?

     

    For some the crisis in vocational education and training (VET) and the fate of TAFE was a critical issue in the recent Australian Federal elections. For others it hardly made the radar. Unfortunately a number of those others included members of the re-elected Federal Government. Karen Andrews is now the fifth Minister or Assistant Minister responsible for VET since September 2013, bringing another new face to the sector. (more…)

  • WALTER HAMILTON. Japan’s Diminishing Returns.

     

    Japan, in my nearly forty years of observing and reporting on that country, has never been so delicately and dangerously poised. Australians, who have long relied on it as an economic powerhouse and ‘common interest’ partner, need to be paying close attention. (more…)

  • FRANK BRENNAN SJ. Refugees – John Howard could do it. Why not Malcolm Turnbull?

     

    My quandary remains: if John Howard was able to keep the boats stopped while closing Nauru and Manus Island, why can’t Malcolm Turnbull? If John Howard was able to accept New Zealand’s offer to resettle some of the caseload why can’t Malcolm Turnbull?

    I just don’t buy the line that the people smugglers have become more clever than our intelligence services and that the Indonesians have become less co-operative with our military. If Operation Sovereign Borders depends on protracted, ongoing indecent treatment of proven refugees on Manus Island and Nauru then it doesn’t pass the test of basic Australian decency.

    It’s time Malcolm Turnbull, Bill Shorten and Richard Di Natale got together and agreed on the best way forward. It’s time our military and intelligence services did their work spared the indecent pall of the ongoing appalling treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru. It’s absurd to suggest that these people have to be kept on Nauru and Manus Island in order to send a message. Remember, the ALP claims that it was all to be done and dusted on Nauru and Manus within a year. If that had occurred, there’d have been no people left there awaiting processing to send a message. And here we are, more than three years on with nothing happening, just waiting for the inevitable powder keg in those two places to explode.

    The election is over. It’s time for the three key parties to come to the table and fix the issue promptly, agreeing that the boats will stay stopped, but that they will be stopped without ongoing punishment of others, the majority of whom are now proven refugees.

    Fr Frank Brennan SJ, Professor of Law, Australian Catholic University 

     

  • MICHAEL KEATING. The role and responsibilities of government.

     

    With the election of the new government, I have decided to repost several articles from our policy series that are still relevant.  One of these is by Michael Keating (below) on the role and responsibilities of government.  John Menadue

    Different possible conceptions of the responsibilities and roles of government are an important backdrop to the policies that will be examined later in this series of articles. The purpose of the present article is to show that despite the ideological debate between the extremes on the Right and the Left of the political spectrum, in practice:

    • The responsibilities of governments have changed little in the last thirty years
    • The roles have changed, but changes in regulatory regimes and the ‘marketisation’ of some services has enabled governments to better fulfil their continuing responsibilities. 

    (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. Democratic renewal.

    Vested interests and the subversion of the public interest.

    There are many key public issues that we must address such as climate change, growing inequality, tax avoidance, budget repair, an ageing population, lifting our productivity and our treatment of asylum seekers.

    But our capacity to address these and other important issues is becoming very difficult because of the power of vested interests with their lobbying power to influence governments in a quite disproportionate way. (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. Democratic Renewal.

     

    Our loss of trust in institutions.

    We speak often about the need for new ideas and policies to fill the void in the public debate.

    We will be examining these issues in this series Fairness, Opportunity and Security.

    But I think there is a prior problem.  We need political reform to restore trust in our political system and our polity. (more…)

  • CHRIS BONNOR & BERNIE SHEPHERD. It’s NAPLAN time again!

     

    August is when the NAPLAN test results come out to schools and parents. It isn’t as exciting as the annual release of Year 12 results, but it is developing a life of its own. We are bombarded with media releases, claims and counter claims about schools and results. Cheer squads or jeer squads form up, the occasional moral panic revived, along with the usual exhortations to do better next year. (more…)

  • WALTER HAMILTON. Corruption by Prediction

     

    It is a modern-day impatience: we want to eat dessert first. In election campaigns, therefore, we seek to ‘taste’ the result through opinion polls, vox pops, electoral maps (with winners already allocated), predictive analogies or psephological cephalopods. So it was during the recent Australian elections; so it is again as Americans wait (redundantly?) for the real polls to open in November. (more…)

  • TONY SMITH. Hopes End: the cynics must not prevail

     

    Dear Prime Minister Turnbull

    Congratulations on your election success. Two years ago very few observers believed the Coalition Government deserved another term so you have a personal achievement of which you can be proud.

    While you were busy campaigning, I distracted myself by reading Coral Lansbury’s Sweet Alice. * What an enjoyable read that is! Critics are correct to compare the book with Tom Sharpe’s farces about life, manners and politics. The novel explores the fortunes of the central character Alice and her son Alaric. With her home in England being demolished around her, Alice learns that she has inherited a property called Mockery Bend near Hopes End in north-west New South Wales. The problem is that the will has been made in spite and Alice cannot claim her inheritance while several cousins have claims. Alaric sets out to contact the cousins because Alice believes that reasonable women would be happy to have a sharing arrangement. (more…)

  • CAMERON DOUGLAS. The military coup and the Constitution in Thailand.

     

    Thais will vote in a referendum on Sunday (August 7) to approve, or reject, a new constitution. This will be the post-coup government’s second attempt to implement a new national charter.

    The constitution would usher in a form of parliamentary government but the military would retain the power of veto: the system could not be regarded as democratic as the word is understood elsewhere.

    For Thais voting on Sunday, the effective choice is between more military rule and more military rule. (more…)

  • WALTER HAMILTON. Tokyo’s First Female Governor, and the disturbing state of Japanese politics.

     

    The victory of 64-year-old Yuriko Koike in last weekend’s Tokyo gubernatorial election tells us a lot about the disturbing state of Japanese politics.

    Hailing from the right wing of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Koike holds views on constitutional change, school textbook revision and other contentious issues that line up with those of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. How, then, did she manage to present herself to the electorate as a maverick, non-mainstream candidate and, despite claiming to be ‘fighting alone’, run the slickest campaign of all?

    Seeking an answer, we need to recap events of recent years. (more…)