Category: Politics

  • JON STANFORD and JOHN MENADUE. The submarine confusion continues. Is the way being prepared for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines?

    REPOST

    In an interesting development relating to Australia’s new submarine acquisition, Peter Jennings, Executive Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), has written a piece in The Australian (7 June 2016) that is clearly at odds with the Institute’s previous public stance. Jennings says that while conventional power for Australia’s submarines has previously been an article of faith, “the capabilities required for our future submarine would in many ways be better performed by nuclear-powered boats”. (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. Democratic Renewal.

     

    In the series, Fairness, Opportunity and Security that Michael Keating and I edited there were several articles that are still particularly relevant. Several of them deal with the disappointment many of us feel about our institutions and the lack of trust in parliament and politicians. I will be reposting some of these articles over the next week. I still believe that democratic renewal is essential in Australia today. John Menadue

    Role of government. The importance of values. (Repost)

    Good government must be based on some broadly shared values that inspire and enthuse us.

    We can accept that our leaders must make some compromises from time to time, but we need to know ‘what they stand for’. We look for leaders who have conviction. (more…)

  • IAN McAULEY. Problems of Private Health Insurance.

    The PHI industry continues to make two invalid assumptions about private health care. 

    The first is that governments are intrinsically high cost and bureaucratic and that the private sector is unquestionably more efficient. This is patently not true. The least efficient health service in the world, the US, is based on private health insurance and the private sector. The most efficient health service in the world is the National Health Service in Britain which is based on a single public funder. In 2014 ,Ramsey Health,the principle beneficiary of subsidised PHI paid its CEO $31 m ,the highest remuneration in the country and much higher  even than the CEOs of the banks..Further ,Gap Insurance offered by PHI companies has underwritten record increases in specialist remuneration. PHI drives high health care costs.

    The second assumption is that the PHI industry assumes that public health services are for the poor. This is an implicit rejection of the principle that we need a quality and universal health system which is available for all. The PHI sector wants to push us into a two-tiered health system – one for the rich and the other for the poor. 

    Ian McAuley addressed many of these issues in a paper that he recently delivered to a health insurance summit.  The summary of his paper follows with a link to the full article at the end.  John Menadue. 

     

    Summary of paper to accompany presentation to the 2016 Health Insurance Summit, Sydney, 28 July 2016

    Private health insurance has generally been quarantined from the economic scrutiny that successive governments have applied to other sectors of the economy. Rather than being based on any firm economic model, financial support for private health insurance has been based on partisan preferences, with Coalition governments notably more enthusiastic than Labor governments to support it.

    So it stands as part of the complex mix that characterises our health care funding. There is no integrated health care “system” in Australia: rather we have a set of programs with different legacies, different loci of responsibility and different funding principles.

    Within that mix private health insurance has taken its place, and there is an assumption that the funding of private hospitals is inexorably linked to private insurance.

    Because governments have been becoming increasingly concerned about the budgetary costs of the private health insurance rebate, they are shifting towards the incentives in the Medicare Levy Surcharge as a way to support private insurance.

    This makes assistance to private insurance more opaque, particularly in a political environment where there is undue emphasis on fiscal outcomes (rather than economic management). Use of such hidden assistance is a retreat to the policies of the 1960s, before the cost of tariff and quota assistance for manufacturing was brought to account.

    In the absence of economic analysis of the costs and benefits of private insurance, governments, particularly Coalition governments, have argued to defend its privileged position – relieving pressure on public hospitals, providing choice, protecting the “private system” – and have suggested that publicly-funded health should be re-defined as distributive welfare for the needy rather than as a shared universal service.

    But as a means of sharing health care costs, private insurance is a high-cost and inequitable mechanism to achieve what the tax system and a single insurer can do far better. Its administrative overheads are high, and it lacks the incentives or capacity to control moral hazard and to contain health care costs.

    There is mounting evidence, revealed in the recent election campaign, that public opinion is coming to align with economists’ view that a single insurer such as Medicare is the most appropriate way to share health care costs. There is little point in saving the public $1.00 in taxes paid to the ATO if instead they are cajoled into paying $1.10 or $1.50 to private insurers – essentially privatised tax collectors.

    Australia needs exposure of the cost of support for PHI, and, an open debate about health care funding – not the emotive “private” vs “public” rhetoric that often takes place, but rather the basic question about how much we should take personal responsibility for paying for our own health care, without insurance, and how much we should share through Medicare. If the options are explained clearly Australians may accept a reasonable regime of co-payments, so long as they are not seen as a wedge to allow private insurance to destroy Medicare.

    Ian McAuley, Fellow, Centre for Policy Development

    For a link to Ian McAuley’s full paper, see http://www.ianmcauley.com/academic/confs/phijul2016.pdf

    (more…)

  • RICHARD WOOLCOTT. The South China Sea, China, Philippines, Australia and the US.

    I was surprised the Opposition did not differentiate itself from the Australian
    Coalition Government’s strong  support for the US and the Philippine position on the South China Sea issue.

    It can be argued that it was misleading to state in public that the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) judgment in favour of the Philippines was “binding”. This was a matter between the Philippines and China only. China had declared at the outset that the Court had no jurisdiction over the dispute, a position also taken by one of the other claimants, Taiwan, which argued that any such dispute should be settled peacefully through multilateral negotiations. (more…)

  • MUNGO MacCALLUM. So much for Team Australia!

    The term was always a bit suss – indeed, when Tony Abbott coined it to claim solidarity against the war against terror, it quickly became obvious that membership of his side was to be strictly limited. Team Australia meant, in effect, Team Abbott: its participants were to be Captain’s picks, loyal not to the country but to the right wing causes he himself would select.

    And it was perhaps prescient that one of his immediate s decisions was to barrack for team New Zealand – he enthusiastically endorsed the former Kiwi prime minister Helen Clark as his choice for secretary-general of the United Nations over the former Oz prime minister Kevin Rudd. The precedent was set: the national interest would be disposable where party politics were concerned. (more…)

  • DALLY MESSENGER. A letter to Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten concerning refugees.

     

     

    There is some talk of cooperation so, living in hope, I am emboldened to write to both of you. Only by you both working together can this criminal behaviour cease. There are far better ways to stop people smuggling than imprisoning people in third world jails without charge or trial.  (more…)

  • ALISON BROINOWSKI. What Chilcot doesn’t say.

     

    Comprehensive though the Chilcot report is, and 12 volumes long, its promised revelations about how Britain went to war in Iraq and the lessons to be learnt are incomplete. What’s missing is particularly important for Australia, which has yet to hold such an inquiry, and where public pressure for one is mounting. (more…)

  • PETER YOUNG. Speaking of Freedom: Human rights and mental health in detention.

    Peter Young is a member of Doctors for Refugees who have launched a High Court challenge against the Secrecy Provisions in the Border Force Act which states that an ‘entrusted person’ who discloses protected information can face up to two years in prison. I am reposting below an earlier article that Peter Young contributed to this blog. This article was based on a speech he gave at a public meeting organised by the Asylum Seekers Centre.  John Menadue

    In 2011, after many years working in public hospitals and community mental health services I came to work for the Commonwealth Government’s privately contracted immigration detention health provider.

    This was a time when there had been much public and professional criticism of immigration detention. The harms to mental health of prolonged arbitrary detention were already being documented through the Palmer Inquiry; in reviews by the Australian Human Rights Commission; the Commonwealth Ombudsman and; in Coronial Inquiries relating to a number of deaths in detention. (more…)

  • JIM COOMBS. “Circle” Incarceration

     

    After the revelations this week, it is trite to say that the criminal justice system is failing the Aboriginal people of Australia. One significant reason for this is the exclusion of the Aboriginal community from the process. One “reform” in the process over the last decade or so is “circle sentencing” which allows a small panel of community elders to assist magistrates in the process of sentencing, after the offender has pleaded guilty.

    Given that the incarceration of Aboriginals is 23 times the rate for white offenders (compared with 5-7 times for African-Americans in the USA), it is clear that we have failed quite badly. (more…)

  • DEAN ASHENDEN. State aide, the ALP and the ‘needs policy’.

    When Labor decided to support public funding of non-government schools fifty years ago, it created a legacy that is still misunderstood. (more…)

  • ANN TULLOH. Terrorism in France and a sense of hopelessness by many young people.

    I was brought up on the ABC news coming from the sitting room loud enough to cover the house as Dad got himself going every morning. This was in the 50s and any terrible overseas news was so far away that I didn’t feel concerned. (I much preferred a programme around 8am when songs were played at our request and Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” was sometimes heard. A nearby town, Salon, has a cultural centre named after him. A coincidence or part of a master plan?!) (more…)

  • JOHN AUSTEN. Is there a simple way of dealing with national infrastructure issues? Yes, but it is not a simple matter of adopting Infrastructure Australia’s ‘project list’.

    The argument

    Recent pieces offered a seemingly simple way forward to deal with national infrastructure issues.

    It should be simple. All parties should commit to (Infrastructure Australia’s) “project” list – in part or in full – and then stop spending. These “projects” have been properly assessed and found to be worth doing, and specifically worth doing by the federal government because they have some national significance. [1]

     

    Indeed, governments should limit project spending to proposals that have been properly and publicly assessed. We are entitled to know what is being done in our name and why. (more…)

  • LESLEY BARCLAY. Diagnosing rural health gaps in the election.

    The Coalition represents most rural electorates in Australia. But we seldom hear of much concern about their constituents who have poor health and poor health services. this is a repost of an earlier article by Lesley Barclay about the problems of rural health. John Menadue.

    It is timely as the federal election approaches to consider whether all Australians are getting the healthcare they need. Approximately 30 per cent of Australians live in rural and remote areas.

    Arguably they do not get a ‘fair go’ in relation to their healthcare compared to the rest of us.

    Rural and remote Australians are disadvantaged by social circumstances that influence their health status and ripen them for avoidable chronic disease when compared to counterparts in Australia’s major cities. (more…)

  • JOHN AUSTEN. The High Court – The Williams case and transport

    This article expands on previous comments that the Williams (No. 2) case is reason to reconsider Commonwealth engagement in land transport. [1]

    The challenge to Government spending programs

    Williams (No. 2) was the third recent challenge in the High Court to Commonwealth Government spending.

    Before these three cases it was widely assumed the Government could spend as it sees fit. Governments worked on that assumption using the equivalent of Jack Sparrow’s compass to guide them; Conservative administrations set course towards rural roads, Labor steered to cities.

    The three High Court cases should consign the assumption, the compass and lack of proper Commonwealth direction to the deep. [2] (more…)

  • JOHN DWYER. Medicare and the 45th Parliament.

     

    Clearly the future of Medicare was the election issue of greatest importance for most Australians. Community concern was focussed on the possibility that the primary care they receive from their general practitioner might be privatised such that a superior service would be available to those who paid more, either directly or though the extension of private hospital insurance to allow for coverage of GP services. This was never going to happen but its important to understand what it was that had stimulated discussion of the possibility. Private health insurers, who are not permitted to cover services provided with Medicare dollars, are frustrated as community health services are not reducing the number of their insured who need hospital care. Many insurers see 60-70% of their costs generated by 5-10% of their insured who need frequent stays in hospital. As there is much evidence that primary care systems elsewhere are better than us at reducing the incidence of hospital care, they would like to provide these superior services to those they insure. To do so would cost a fraction of the expense needed for hospital care. (more…)

  • GREG WOOD. “Only a fool…” Australia, Iraq, and other such wars.

     

    The Chilcot report in the UK has renewed calls for an examination of Australia’s intelligence system in the lead up to the Iraq war. Far less subject to scrutiny, but arguably more important still than the accuracy of the intelligence, was the nature of the advice provided to the Howard government by policy departments on the implications and long term consequences of military action. Even if weapons of mass destruction had been there, it’s not an ipso facto case justifying invasion. However, without question, Iraq was in Paul Kelly’s word, “a leadership driven war”. It’s the statements, judgements and actions of Australia’s leaders, and those of the other countries who chose to be in (or out) of the “coalition of the willing”, that warrant serious analysis, even now. (more…)

  • CHRISTINE DUFFIELD & MARY CHIARELLA. The predicted nursing shortage: strategies and solutions

     

    The nursing workforce

    • The nursing workforce comprises 3 regulated groups: Nurse Practitioners (NPs), Registered Nurses (RNs) and Enrolled Nurses (ENs). Nurses recognise that other unregulated groups of healthcare workers (for example Assistants in Nursing (AINs)) perform nursing care, and the research is clear that they require support from registered nurses (Duffield et al, 2014). Other regulated health professions, including general practitioners (GPs) have also regularly performed various aspects of nursing care. In General Practice over the past twenty years, practice nurses have been increasingly employed to perform those nursing aspects of care (Merrick et al, 2011).
    • The scope of practice for nurses is not defined by the tasks nurses perform, but by the acuity of the people they are caring for and the concomitant range of skills that they will require for their practice. For example, assisting a person who is acutely ill and haemodynamically unstable with their personal hygiene may well require the assessment and clinical management skills of an RN, but the same personal hygiene skills may be performed by an AIN if the person is convalescent.
    • Nurses will perform their skills across a continuum from novice to expert (Benner, 1984) at different stages of their career development and according to the different levels of registration: NPs perform all of their skill-sets at a highly complex level (NMBA, 2014), whereas ENs may perform only some of their skill sets and to a less complex level (NMBA, 2016).

    (more…)

  • MICHAEL WESLEY. The dangerous politics of national security. (Repost from Policy Series)

    In January 2013, as she launched her government’s National Security Strategy, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard proclaimed that Australia’s decade of terrorism was over. Her argument was that al Qaeda had failed to regenerate after being degraded in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and that there were other more conventional security issues, such as the rise of new Asian great powers, that would dominate the forward security agenda.  (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. What our next Prime Minister should do on asylum seekers.

    The following is a repost from 22 June 2016 – before the recent election.

    After the election, our new Prime Minister should arrange an urgent meeting with the leaders of the three other major parties to negotiate a sensible and humanitarian response on asylum issues that have been avoided in the election campaign. At that meeting the new Prime Minister should make it clear that compromise will be required and that at least metaphorically, no-one should leave the meeting until there is an agreed response. (more…)

  • LYNDON MEGARRITY. Rex Patterson and the Whitlam Government

     

    Dr Rex Patterson entered politics in 1966 by winning a by-election for the seat of Dawson as an ALP candidate on the platform of Northern Development. During Whitlam’s time as Opposition leader (1967-72), Patterson and Whitlam worked closely together on Northern Australia policies; Patterson also developed a media and parliamentary profile as Labor’s spokesman for rural affairs and Northern Development. As a federal public servant in the 1950s and 1960s, Patterson had developed expertise in sugar, pastoralism and other primary industries and was therefore well qualified to be Labor’s spokesman for these issues. (more…)

  • The American alliance and Vice President Biden’s recent visit

    Vice President Biden’s speech at the Paddington Town Hall on 20 July was by invitation only. I had met Vice President Biden three years ago in Washington when I was on the Board of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue.  He was friendly and somewhat more impressive than I had expected and certainly had very competent staff around him. (more…)

  • DAVID STEPHENS. Is this the most sycophantic speech by an Australian prime minister? Julia Gillard’s address to the United States Congress, March 2011

    ‘All the way with LBJ’ has become the cliche that associates Conservative dependence on the US alliance.  But Julia Gillard’s address to the US Congress is hard to beat!  John Menadue. (more…)

  • STEPHEN FITZGERALD. Security in the region. (Repost from Policy Series)

    Paul Keating and Gareth Evans used to claim, with justification, that by the mid-1990s Australia had become ‘the odd man in’ in Asia. This was in significant part because of the headway they’d made in Southeast Asia, with ASEAN countries, in gaining acceptance of Australia as ‘one of them’. This was no slogan. Behind it lay a geostrategic idea of Southeast Asian countries as natural partners into the long term future, in a world dominated by competing great powers, and offering the entree to what Keating called ‘finding our security in not from Asia’. Keating and President Suharto’s Agreement on Maintaining Security was a first stage in that direction, flanked by the initiative for a Ministerial Forum with Indonesia. Evans, encouraged by the response of Southeast Asian colleagues, floated a geopolitical definition of Asia that included Australia as a logical component of what he called the East Asian Hemisphere. (more…)

  • WALTER HAMILTON. Abdication in Japan?

    On July 13, just three days after Japan’s ruling coalition secured a critical two-thirds majority in parliament, a news report emerged that the country’s long-serving Emperor wishes to abdicate ‘within the next few years’. (According to some news media, the abdication story was held over until after the election at the government’s insistence.) On the surface, the two events might appear unrelated; however, various intriguing possibilities are worth exploring. (more…)

  • JOHN McCARTHY. Foreign Policy. Australia, the United States and Asia. (Repost from Policy Series)

    In a conversation in October last year with two British foreign correspondents and a former Japanese Prime Ministerial foreign policy adviser, the subject turned to the United States. All three interlocutors argued that in recent years Australia had superseded both Japan and the United Kingdom as the United States’ closest ally.

    This view should not have come as a surprise. (more…)

  • JOHN TULLOH. Shrugging off the effects of the Iraq invasion.

        

     ‘His decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president’.

    Professor Jean Edward Smith, eminent US presidential biographer, on George W. Bush.

    The other day the Sydney Morning Herald had a cartoon showing John Howard in a military uniform and holding a pop gun. Behind him were the symbolic tombstones of the tens of thousands of Iraqis, mainly ‘innocents’, who’ve died since the 2003 invasion. Howard is depicted a shrugging and saying ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time…’ That, crudely, summed up the rationale for the invasion. (more…)

  • JOHN CARMODY. More on Brexit

    Dr John Carmody reflects on the historical journey of the European Union.

    (more…)

  • ALLAN PATIENCE. Why the debates about Islam have gone off the rails

     

    One of the persistent conceits of modern history has been the growing conviction that rational scientific enquiry will completely remove religious thinking from human consciousness for all time. Positivist fundamentalists like Stephen Hawking or so-called “New Atheists” like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have triumphantly echoed the Nietzschean declaration “God is dead” without understanding that this was Nietzsche’s anguished cry in response to modernity’s mindless stampede into what he believed was a ghastly post-mythic abyss. A similar despair engulfed one of the very greatest sociological theorists of modernity, Max Weber, who accused its protagonists of “disenchanting” the human experience by locking it up in an “iron cage of rationality.” (more…)

  • JOHN AUSTEN. High speed rail – here we go again.

    Another proposal involving high speed rail Sydney-Melbourne recently surfaced; from CLARA (Consolidated Land and Rail Australia).

    Extensive media reports noted an advisory board including former Trade Minister the Hon. Andrew Robb, ex Premiers the Hon. Barry O’Farrell and the Hon. Steve Bracks , and former US Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood. A figure of $200billion was mentioned, with a claim it will not rely on government funding.

    So far the outline is sketchy.There are four website pages and a sub three minute video. The idea seems to be to create a series of new cities in inland NSW and Victoria linked to the state capitals by high speed rail. It is a decentralisation plan of which high speed rail is one aspect. Decades would pass before such a plan came to fruition, if ever. (more…)

  • TONY KEVIN. South China Sea dispute: a furious China challenges the high priests of international law

     

    One privilege of being retired that one can watch ABC News24 daytime television while others are hard at work. On Wednesday 13 July around midday, I was treated to a dramatic spectacle: a Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister in an hour-long international media conference in Beijing fiercely denouncing, as a ‘scrap of waste-paper fit only for the rubbish bin’, a Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) Award (ruling) made by the South China Sea Arbitration Tribunal the day before, 12 July.[1] I watched fascinated as the Minister criticised the ruling with great force, even challenging the legitimacy of the Tribunal’s selection and membership. A Chinese White Paper was issued on the same day detailing why China rejected the ruling.[2]   (more…)