Category: Politics

  • Alison Broinowski. Who decides when we go to war?

     Setbacks for democratic reform of war powers.

    Having taken one step forward, Australia’s major allies have now taken two steps back from reform of their war powers.

    In the UK, the Defence Minister has set aside years of bipartisan promises of legislation that would require British governments to consult the Parliament before committing forces to war, and has rejected what he now calls this ‘artificial’ constraint. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/18/ministers-abandon-plan-war-powers-law-mps-troops

    Prime Minister Gordon Brown sought legislation to bring to an end the exercise of the war powers by a prime minister under executive privilege. He hoped to transfer the decision for war to the Parliament, but abandoned the attempt in 2007. A bipartisan committee secured support of both houses in 2011 to enshrine in legislation the convention of executive consultation with MPs before committing armed force. Having asserted, in Opposition in 2006, that public trust depended upon MPs having the final say in troop deployments, David Cameron in government allowed the initiative to drift, but his plan to send RAF planes to Syria was defeated in the Commons in 2013. Cameron then secured a majority in favour of a similar deployment this year. Cameron has now reversed himself and rejected the prospect of legislation to change the war powers, even though the convention that governments should consult Parliament apparently remains in place.

    In the US, following several attempts to revise the 1973 War Powers Act, President Obama requested Congress in February 2015 (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/us/obama-war-authorization-congress.html?_r=0) to authorise him to dispatch forces against Islamic State, and to repeal the 2002 authorisation for President G.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He offered to limit the new deployment to three years, and to restrict ground combat to Special Forces. The measure was opposed by some Democrats and rejected. Obama subsequently sent US planes and troops to Iraq and Syria regardless, relying upon the authority granted by Congress in 2001 to his predecessor to fight Al Qaeda, which remains law. Then, in January 2016, in Obama’s final year as president, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican majority leader, introduced a Bill for the ‘Authorisation for Use of Military Force’, for which Obama had signed an executive order in September 2015. If it passes, the Act will take effect in August 2016. What the Bill appears to seek is virtually unlimited power for the President to deploy US ground forces anywhere in the world and for any length of time, including in the United States, without having to provide legal or strategic justifications to Congress.

    These US and UK developments set a dangerous example for Australia, where politicians have in recent years begun to see the risks of allowing ‘captain’s picks’ to decide the dispatch of Australian forces to war. When democratic processes are bypassed, the restraints of international and domestic legality are overridden. When accountability for war and its outcomes is not shared with the people’s representatives, the executive can do as it pleases, can withhold from the public the details of what is being done in their name, and can repeat its past errors with impunity.

    ‘Australian governments’, historian Henry Reynolds has recently written, ‘find it easy to go to war’ (Unnecessary Wars, 2016: 238). Reynolds calls Iraq an episode of military adventurism for which Australian leaders suffered no opprobrium nor inquiry; made no public expression of regret; and showed no sense of culpability or responsibility. ‘Calls for a formal investigation into the circumstances of Australia’s entry into the Iraq war,’ he adds, ‘have met with official silence’. We and many others live with the consequences of the Iraq disaster, and the prospect that our governments may repeat it.

    Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

  • Alison Broinowski. Losing ‘our’ Uruzgan.

    Most Australians live in cities where the only newspapers are owned by Murdoch. So unless they found Fairfax on line, they were spared the sorrowful report on 3 May that Afghan government troops have pulled out of more ‘strongholds’ in Uruzgan province. http://www.smh.com.au/world/australian-troops-fought-and-died-in-uruzgan-now-afghan-troops-are-pulling-back-20160302-gn7z1i.html To the surprise of no-one who read it, Taliban are back.

    The withdrawal, Reuters reported mournfully, followed ‘many years of work and much blood shed by Australian troops to maintain peace and stability in the province, before the last Australians left in 2014’. After Australians spent thirteen years in Tarin Kowt, 41 died, and many more were injured, the Afghan authorities have made ‘a tactical decision to deploy forces more effectively’. So many Afghan soldiers and police have deserted or been killed, they say, that the province is short of its ‘assigned strength’. (One thing they appear to have learnt from years of US/NATO training is Western management-speak).

    The sombre announcement stirred barely a ripple of interest in Australia, for three possible reasons.

    First, Australia is over Afghanistan. Only a fortnight ago those at Anzac day services swore not to forget our past wars, which include several egregious disasters, but we do forget them. Many of us forget, for example, that Australia has not declared or won a war since 1945, unless East Timor and Gulf War I count as victories. Since well before Federation, Australians have habitually and repeatedly gone to fight in distant countries, which are then forgotten as we prepare for the next one. As Henry Reynolds says in his new book Unnecessary Wars (2016), most Australians don’t ask why we fought or what resulted, only how we fought, as if war was a game of football.

    Second, Afghanistan can’t be occupied. The British learned this to their cost in the Afghan wars of 1839-42 (‘Auckland’s folly’), 1878-80, and 1919, after which the rulers in Kabul took control of their country. The USSR fell into the Afghan quagmire in 1979 and was forced to withdraw ten years later by the United States’ proxies, the Mujahideen and the Taliban. In 2001 America attacked Afghanistan in revenge for the 9/11 attacks (in which no Afghan took part). The invasion made even less sense after Osama bin Laden fled al-Qaeda’s Afghan headquarters and was allowed to escape to Pakistan. Iraq was top on Bush’s list of target countries: Afghanistan was merely low-hanging fruit on the way to the invasion. Starting as a counter-terrorist war, the conflict in Afghanistan became a counter-insurgency, in which the only local support the US/NATO could expect for their objectives was what money could buy, and only for as long as they kept paying.

    Third, Uruzgan is not Australia’s province. It can no more be claimed as uniquely Australian than Nui Dat or Kapyong, the Kokoda track or Gallipoli could. As the junior ally of Britain and the United States, our troops have always gone where they tell us to go, fought who they tell us to fight, and left when they leave (with the honourable exceptions of Curtin bringing Australian forces back to defend Australia in 1942 and Whitlam pulling them out of Vietnam in 1972). Uruzgan meant no more to Australia than it did to our Netherlands predecessors there, who gave it up as a bad job. Australia was stuck in Uruzgan at the United States’ pleasure, as a consequence of John Howard’s unilateral globalisation of the Anzus Treaty.

    If anything can be learned from the current collapse of ‘strongpoints’ in Uruzgan, it is that invasion rarely defeats insurgency, that neither invasion nor occupation can last forever, and that Western invasion of Islamic countries attracts Muslim hostility like a magnet. Australia, learning nothing from Vietnam, repeated its errors by invading Iraq in 2003 and again in 2015, and by bombing Syria in 2015-6. The sooner the decision to commit Australian forces to these futile wars is taken out of the hands of an ill-advised prime minister, the better.

    Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

  • Richard Broinowski. French submarines for RAN – Why?

     

    The 2016 Defence White paper asserts that Australia’s future acquisition of 12 French submarines costing around $50 billion is the largest defence procurement program in Australia’s history. The first vessel is to be delivered ‘in the early 2030s’, the twelfth in ‘the 2040s or 2050s’. They are said to be for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, not only in Australia’s maritime zones, but in our maritime approaches and further afield. They are to be ‘regionally superior, with a high degree of interoperability with the United States’.

    No doubt the boffins in Defence put much expert thought into submarine selection, but given their enormous cost at a time of financial stringency, we groundlings are entitled to candid and detailed explanations about the choice of these vessels and the uses to which they will be put.

    First, why French? Apart from its small fleet of nuclear-powered and armed ballistic missile submarines, France operates six attack submarines, currently being phased out and replaced by the Barracuda class boats also being chosen by Australia. But compared to the submarine industries in Japan and Germany, France’s is small and relatively inexperienced. Japan began its submarine industry in 1904 and its main factories at Mitsubishi and Kawasaki have designed and built a huge variety ever since. Both Japan and Germany made enormous technical strides in submarine design during World War Two when France was occupied by Germany. German submarine technology has an equally long history. Its Dolphin-class attack boats currently built by ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and used by the German and Israeli navies are just as sophisticated as the Sōryūs.

    One suspicion worth ventilating here: Direction des Construction Navales Services (DCNS) that makes Barracudas at Cherbourg, predominantly builds nuclear-propelled submarines. Is the Australian government, which favours an international spent fuel nuclear dump in South Australia, surreptitiously planning to widen Australia’s nuclear industry by dropping nuclear power plants into its Barracudas at some later stage of their development? How would Australian punters feel about that?

    Second question: precisely how will our French boats be ‘regionally superior’? Compared to which other fleets? A cursory look at Jane’s Fighting Ships shows that a dozen Royal Australian Navy Barracudas won’t hold a candle in numbers to 15 Korean, 18 Japanese, an unknown number of Russian and nearly 60 Chinese diesel electric boats currently operating in the Western Pacific, let alone new ones constantly being built and added to these nations’ fleets.

    What about local fleets? Indonesia has had a submarine force since 1960. Its current fleet comprises five attack submarines with five more being planned. Singapore has two Swedish Vastergotland boats with more on order. Malaysia has two French-built Scorpene class boats based at Kota Kinabalu. Thailand is planning to acquire two German boats. More potent than any of these, Vietnam plans to take delivery of six Russian Kilo-class submarines between 2013 and 2020. The Chinese have considerable experience with these boats, and will be very concerned if the Vietnamese manage to operate them competently.

    These acquisitions do not represent a flat-out arms race, but add a sudden and significant new maritime sea-denial capability to littoral states in the South China Sea. Inevitably, these states will also acquire anti-submarine warfare counter measures, such as surface ships equipped with helicoptors, drones, sonars, mines and depth charges. The area will suddenly becomes a very crowded space indeed.

    According to the 2016 Defence White Paper, the Australian government hopes to be able to operate its Barracudas in these contested waters ‘with a high degree of interoperability with the United States’. But, my third question: why should we be interoperable with the US alone? Our submarines won’t even be available for deployment for another decade and by then may not be regionally superior. And is interoperability what Washington wants? Radical thought though it may seem, wouldn’t it be more productive for us to operate our boats in cooperation with those of Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia? After all, their desire for a ‘rules based’ maritime environment is geographically more urgent than the perceived needs of a great power which is finding itself manoeuvred out of its customary position as top dog in the western Pacific.

    A footnote on Japan’s failed bid to sell us Sōryū submarines. On 16 April 2016, the Japanese Ambassador hosted a reception in Sydney for crews of three MSDF ships which had just engaged in exercises with RAN ships. One of them was Hakuryu, a Sōryū submarine. Amid speeches and toasts, Australian and Japanese guests were aglow with goodwill and the optimistic expectation that the imminent announcement of Australia’s next submarines would be for Sōryūs. In his short speech, Harukyu’s skipper said this was the first visit by a Japanese submarine to Sydney since 1942. There were quiet smiles at his unintended solecism. A photograph of Hakuryu heading home through Sydney Heads the next day coincided with newspaper headlines that France, not Japan, had secured the bid. The poignancy of the situation was palpable, and those of us who have had a long association with Japan felt it. The bilateral relationship is strong enough to withstand the decision, but the healing will take some time.

    Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico. He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW. 

  • John Menadue. Are Conservatives better economic managers?

    According to opinion polls the public clearly believe that Conservatives are better economic managers. Like other Conservative leaders, Malcolm Turnbull keeps asserting that this is so.  Tonight in the budget, Scott Morrison will probably tell us about the importance of growth and jobs and that the Coalition can deliver in this area but Labor cannot.

    But the evidence does not support the view that the Conservatives are better economic managers.

    In this blog on 20 April 2016, Ian McAuley discussed this issue in ‘Are Conservatives better economic managers?‘  Amongst other things, Ian McAuley pointed out that over the last 50 years we have had 17 Federal Treasurers and that only two have been awarded the coveted Euromoney ‘Finance Minister of the Year Award’.  They were both Labor Treasurers: Keating and Swan.  The former received this award for leading major economic reform in Australia in the 1980s and early 1990s. The latter received the award because of his handling of the global financial crisis.

    In The Guardian on 2 May 2016, economist Stephen Koukoulas asserts that ‘Labor’s economic record is better than the Coalition’s‘. Koukoulas points out that

    ‘in terms of jobs and growth, the ABS data show that average quarterly GDP growth and average monthly increases in employment are stronger when Labor has been in government compared with the Coalition. … GDP and employment growth both rise at a faster pace when Labor is in government.’

    I will be posting additional articles on this issue ‘are Conservatives better economic managers?’

  • Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War: from 1914 to 1916. Part 1

    A big centenary is approaching: the battle of Villers-Bretonneux, April 1918. Right now $93.2 million is being spent on the battle site to build the Sir John Monash Centre, ready for Anzac Day 2018.[1] Villers-Bretonneux is irresistible. It simplifies everything: German invaders, liberating Australians, grateful French. But it will provide a mere pinhole on the war, obscuring the big picture.

    No one at the opening ceremony is likely to ask: Why were millions of men, including Australians, still struggling on the Western Front in April 1918?

    The centre is likely to teach one lesson: the war was awful, but a dire necessity. Our political leaders frequently say so. On Anzac Day 2014 Prime Minister Abbott asked rhetorically, ‘But what was the alternative, in Britain’s time of need, and when Europe was at risk from Prussian militarism?’[2]

    The governing assumption clearly is that there was never an alternative to the carnage. In fact, there were many lost opportunities for a negotiated peace.[3] 

    1. Woodrow Wilson’s deathbed cable (4 August 1914)

    On 4 August 1914, US President Woodrow Wilson, from his wife’s deathbed, cabled all the major belligerents, offering to take the Balkan dispute to The Hague. All made excuses, protested their innocence, railed against the enemy, and pretended war was irrevocable.

    1. Danish initiatives 1914-15

    The Danes began shuttle diplomacy in late 1914 between Berlin and St Petersburg, seeking a compromise peace. Loyal to the Pact of London (September 1914), Tsar Nicholas slammed the door.

    1. Ambassadorial mediation, Washington (September-December 1914)

    In September 1914, prompted by German Ambassador von Bernstorff, William Jennings Bryan, US Secretary of State, launched British-French-German ambassadorial talks in Washington. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was negotiating to bring Italy, Greece, and Rumania into the war, and to give the Straits to Russia in order to keep her in the war, closed the talks down. 

    1. Christmas truce (December 1914)

    Inspired by Pope Benedict XV’s suggestion (supported in the US Senate), soldiers on the Western Front began a spontaneous truce on Christmas Eve. Horrified, the Entente was careful to include ‘Article 15’ in the Treaty of London (April 1915), agreeing to shut down all Vatican peace diplomacy. 

    1. The first Colonel House Mission (January-May 1915)

    House travelled to Europe as special US emissary. He found both sides coy on disclosing war aims. US proposals for a simultaneous end to both German submarine warfare and the British blockade of Germany were then derailed by the Lusitania crisis. 

    1. The International Congress of Women, The Hague (April-May 1915).

    Female suffragists met to promote the liberal internationalist alternative to the bloodshed: neutral mediation, a diplomatic settlement, and a new rules-based order with stronger international institutions. This boosted new like-minded pressure groups, the League of Nations Society in Britain, the Dutch-sponsored Central Organisation for a Durable Peace, the League for a New Fatherland in Germany, and the League to Enforce Peace in the USA. 

    1. The Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation (1915 to 1917)

    The American peace movement urged America to lead neutral mediation. Wilson was reluctant, preferring private diplomacy. US peace activists then set-up the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation in Stockholm in February 1916 and later at The Hague. There were successes: a delegation to Berlin persuaded German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to announce Germany’s acceptance of international arbitration and a League of Nations on 9 November 1916. 

    1. The second House Mission (January-February 1916)

    House encouraged both sides to moderate war aims and compromise. But London and Berlin preferred to gamble on coming battles (Verdun and the Somme). House and Grey did sign a memorandum: Grey agreed to invite US arbitration at a favourable moment; House agreed that, if Germany refused a reasonable settlement, the USA would ‘probably’ enter the war. Grey refused to initiate US mediation. 

    1. Wilson’s speech to the US League to Enforce Peace (27 May 1916)

    Wilson committed the USA to enter a League of Nations, based on collective security, thus offering the ‘guarantees of security’ all claimed to be fighting for. Responses were cool.

    1. Emily Hobhouse’s ‘peace mission’ (June 1916)

    Emily Hobhouse journeyed to Berlin from Switzerland, and obtained an interview with von Jagow, German Foreign Minister. He declared a readiness to respond to a peace offer from Britain. Grey refused to see Hobhouse on her return to Britain. 

    1. Asquith Cabinet discussions and Lansdowne Memoranda (November 1916)

    In September, British Prime Minister Asquith invited his Cabinet to reconsider war aims. Lloyd George told the US press there must be a fight to the finish, a ‘knock-out blow’. In November, Lord Lansdowne opted decisively for negotiations. With the support of the ‘super-patriotic’ press, Lloyd George then rolled Asquith. On 5 December, he headed a Tory-dominated government, shunning peace by negotiation. 

    1. German and American Peace Notes (December 1916)

    Bethmann-Hollweg offered a Peace Note on 12 December. However, the new High Command hobbled it by insisting that no terms be specified. The new Lloyd George government condemned the offer as a ruse of war. An American Peace Note followed (December 18), urging peace terms. This evoked an incomplete response from the Entente (10 January 1917). The Germans offered to enter talks, but were silent on terms. Wilson then lifted the pressure. In his ‘Peace without Victory’ speech (22 January 1917) he argued that a negotiated settlement would be more durable. Peace hovered. He had stopped loans and supplies to the Entente. But Wilson’s efforts were wrecked by the German elite’s decision to reinstate unrestricted submarine warfare (1 February 1917) – much to the relief of ‘knock-out blowers’ everywhere. Here, typically, the wild men on one side came to the rescue of those on the other. And peace was snuffed out.

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Report 6/2015, Referrals made May and June 2015.

    [2] Prime Minister Tony Abbott, ‘Address to the Anzac Day National Ceremony, Canberra’, 25 April 2014, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23446

    [3] For sources on the search for a negotiated peace, see Kent Forster, The Failures of Peace: The Search for a Negotiated Peace During the First World War (Washington, 1941), Laurence W. Martin, Peace Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the British Liberals (New Haven, 1958), Z. A. B. Zeman, A Diplomatic History of the First World War (London, 1971), David S. Patterson, The Search for a Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York, 2008), Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (New York, 2011), Neil Hollander, Elusive Dove: The Search for Peace During World War I (Jefferson, 2014).

  • Douglas Newton. What we fought for: from Bullecourt to the Armistice, 1917-1918

    From 1916 to 1918 on the Western Front, the Australian divisions suffered 181,000 casualties, including 46,000 dead.[1] Some 10,892 of these dead have no known grave.[2] They died mostly from shrapnel and high explosive shells designed to tear people to pieces, or bury them alive. Pulverised, or ploughed under, their remains were unidentifiable.

    So, more terrible centenaries loom from 1917-18. Bullecourt, Passchendaele, Villers-Bretonneux, the Hindenburg Line. For what did Australians die?

    To repel the German invader? It is simplistic to see in the German enemy a singular evil, a complete explanation for the protracted war, or a vindication of all that was done to resist German aggression. In this imperial bloodbath, all sides clung to territory conquered, all planned more conquest, all became more authoritarian, and all had their wide-mouthed politicians and generals insisting on more war.[3] The plague was on all houses – and they reinfected each other.

    For democracy’s sake? Enthusiasm for war and enthusiasm for democracy were at opposite ends of the political spectrum in every belligerent nation.

    What then were the Entente’s war aims for which the war was prolonged?[4]

    The Entente Reply to President Wilson’s Peace Note, 10 January 1917 (PUBLIC)

    In January 1917, while Australian soldiers on the Western Front endured a severe winter, Britain and her Entente partners, after 29 months of warfare, at last published war aims. They issued a formal reply to the German and American Peace Notes of December 1916. It ruled out a negotiated peace. It promised the Entente was ‘not fighting for selfish interests.’ It proclaimed moderate aims: ‘reparation, restitution’ and ‘guarantees’ against aggression. The war was to liberate Belgium, France, and Serbia, and get ‘indemnities’ for them. Grand aims followed: ‘the reorganisation of Europe’ along lines of nationality, the liberation of the oppressed inside Austria-Hungary, and the ‘expulsion’ of the Turks from Europe. The insincerity was stunning. There was to be self-determination, but only for enemy empires. There was silence on the secret treaties of 1915-16, and silence on plans for economic war.

    The Franco-Russian ‘Left Bank of the Rhine’ Agreement (or the ‘Doumergue Agreement’), 14 February and 8 March 1917 (SECRET) 

    Oblivious to imminent revolution, Tsarist Russia and France still played grab. Russia agreed to support France’s claim to the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, and the seizure of the Rhineland. In return, France gave Russia ‘complete liberty’ to fix her borders with Germany and Austria. In short, France winked at Russian grab in the east, and Russia winked at French grab in the west.

    Agreements on German colonies and other territories, 1914 to March 1917: (SECRET) 

    The German colonial empire was carved up in a dozen agreements from 1914. Britain and France split German Togoland and the Cameroons (while Britain confirmed her annexations of Turkish territories, Egypt and Cyprus). In July 1916 Japan and Russia agreed upon their claims in China. By March 1917 the Balfour-Motono agreements were confirmed: Britain, France, and Russia granted Japan the German North Pacific Islands, and the German lease on the Shantung Peninsula, in China (Qingdao).

    The Imperial War Cabinet Committees, April-May 1917. (SECRET)

    While Australians endured hell at Bullecourt in April 1917, various Imperial War Cabinet sub-committees redrew maps of the colonial world. Louis Mallet’s ‘Committee on Territorial Changes’ recommended colonial seizures and swaps. Two imperial nabobs, both reactionaries, headed more powerful committees. Lord Curzon’s ‘Territorial Desiderata Committee’ insisted on Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) for Britain, Germany’s elimination as a colonial power, and British territory running Cape to Cairo. Lord Milner’s ‘Committee on Economic Terms’ wanted more protection: ‘imperial preference’, ‘Control of Imperial Resources’, and indemnities to pay for the war. A League of Nations was ‘impracticable’.

    St-Jean-de-Maurienne Agreements, 19 April 1917 (SECRET)

    At the St Jean de Maurienne conference, France, Britain and Italy agreed to more annexations in Turkey, adding to Sykes-Picot. Italy was to gain a vast share, the ‘green’ area, that is the southern third of Anatolia (now Turkey) including Smyrna, and an area of indirect control to its north, on the Aegean coast and hinterland.

    The Caxton Hall speech, 5 January 1918 (PUBLIC)

    After the disaster of Passchendaele (38,000 Australian casualties), and facing pressure from both revolutionary Russia and President Wilson, Lloyd George shifted ground. At the Caxton Hall in London he espoused moderate aims. He disavowed annexations. Britain was fighting above all for Belgium and France. There was ‘no demand for war indemnity.’ Germany’s colonies were ‘held at the disposal of a conference’. Alsace-Lorraine deserved ‘a reconsideration’. Soaring ideals prevailed: the ‘sanctity of treaties’, ‘self-determination’ for all, and ‘some international organisation’. So, after 41 months of terrible war, Britain’s Empire at last had moderate war aims. But Lloyd George’s rhetorical slithers were everywhere.

    True respect for Anzac 

    Thus, from Bullecourt, through the quagmire of Passchendaele, and on to the armistice, Australians continued to die on the Western Front – for all these war aims, known and unknown, sincere and insincere.

    Contemporary speakers on Anzac often indulge in sacrificial fantasies – young blood spilled to bring our nation to birth. They shower praise on the dead, imagining this is respect. It is not respectful of the dead to shun knowledge of the dubious causes smuggled into their heavy kits. It is not respectful of their generous instincts to gloss over what comes of empire. Catastrophes – such as the mechanised slaughter on the Western Front – demand the most searching inquiries.

    To what war aims were the diggers sacrificed in 1917-18? Did the Australian government carefully weigh costs and objectives? Did it try to prevent the steady enlargement of war aims? Sadly, the truth is stark: our inexhaustible loyalty to our great and powerful friend saw our government marginalised and our soldiers left fighting largely in the dark.[5]

    Therefore, was this horrific war truly a national awakening for Australia, or was it the high point of our imperial subservience?

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] ‘WWI The Western Front’: http://www.army.gov.au/our-history/history-in-focus/wwi-the-western-front

    [2] Peter Pedersen, The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front (Camberwell, 2007), 411.

    [3] John Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007), see Ch. 4 and 158: ‘It would be quite incorrect to speak of a German singularity of destructiveness…’ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985), 194: ‘Wilhelmine Germany was not the only country to possess this sort of lunatic fringe.’ David Welch, Germany and Propaganda in World War I: Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London, 2014) p. xii: ‘This work reaffirms that German Society was a highly complex hybrid of competing groups and interests and that to compare the Kaiser’s war aims in 1914 with those of Hitler in 1939 (as some British military historians have attempted to do) is far too simplistic.’ Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, 2011), 50: ‘Yet Imperial Germany was not Nazi Germany. Despite the horror of the German wars in Africa, the Imperial German suppression of colonial revolts did not differ significantly from the violent campaigns of other colonizing powers during the nineteenth century….’

    [4] In addition to sources listed in an earlier post, ‘What we fought for: from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916’ (https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=6275), works with a special focus on Britain, the Entente, and US war aims include Paul Guinn, British Strategy and Politics 1914 to 1918 (Oxford, 1965), Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913-1923 (Oxford, 1987), John Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict (Yale, 1992), David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918 (Oxford, 1995), Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, 1992), Brock Millman, Pessimism and British War Policy 1916-1918 (London, 2001), and Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge, 2013).

    [5] Neville Meaney, one of the most prominent historians of Australia’s Great War, has written that regarding Gallipoli Australia was ‘neither consulted nor informed about the British plans’; that on Japanese entry into the war London ‘was not disposed to consult Australia’; that in the formulation of war aims during 1917-18, Prime Minister Hughes ‘had had no part in making British policy’; and that Lloyd George simply ‘took the Dominions’ assent for granted.’ See Neville Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923 (Sydney, 2009), 44, 59, and 247-8.

  • Richard Woolcott. Australia/China and Barracuda submarines.

    It seems that one of the important roles for the new Barracuda submarines that we are to purchase from the French is for the submarines to be able to operate at long-range in the South China Sea. Quite apart from the cost of the submarine purchase, is this a wise strategy for Australia to pursue. I have reposted extracts below from an earlier article by Richard Woolcott in which he warns of an adversarial attitude towards China based mainly on Japanese policies and US support. John Menadue.

    Extract from earlier article by Richard Woolcott ‘The Burning question – should Australia do more on the South China Sea‘ 9 March 2016.

    Australia must develop a more balanced approach to its relationships with the United States and a rising China.

    There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China, based mainly on Japanese policies and US support, could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony.  This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former Ambassadors to China, as well as a number of well informed academics, including Hugh White at the ANU. While China can be expected to resist American hegemony in the Asian region, it does accept a continuing and constructive US role in Asia.

    Australia should not take sides on China/Japan or Vietnamese, Malaysian and Philippine disputes within ASEAN, on rival territorial claims in the South China Sea, as the United States has done. Australia’s focus should be on the unimpeded passage to the mainland of China through international waters in the South China Sea, as the United States insists on in respect of its access to its ports. There is no reason why China cannot rise peacefully if it is not provoked.

    China maintains it is simply protecting its regional interests from the US “pivot to Asia “, or “rebalancing “as it is now called. Although President Obama has not defined this policy in any detail, two senior US Admirals have recently said, in public, that it is directed at restricting China’s influence in the South China Sea.12

    Richard Woolcott was previously President of the United Nations Assembly, Head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and many other countries.

  • Richard Broinowski. Australia’s maritime espionage

    According to The Australian’s defence editor Brendan Nicholson, an Australian submarine twice penetrated the Cam Ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam in 1985. Nicholson’s claim appeared in an article in the newspaper on 27 April 2016 analysing Canberra’s decision to build French Barracuda submarines in Adelaide. HMAS Orion’s first intrusion resulted in ‘brilliantly clear’ footage of sonar and other hull fittings on a Soviet Charlie-class nuclear submarine. On the second, it shadowed a Soviet Kirov-class nuclear-powered cruiser and monitored its communications.

    In 1985 I was Australia’s Ambassador to Vietnam, resident in Hanoi. I knew nothing of Orion’s activities. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden had instructed me to repair relations with the country, damaged by the war and by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s over-reaction to Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia in December 1978. I was to encourage bilateral trade, re-start an aid program halted by Fraser, formally hand back to the Vietnamese our extensive embassy properties in Saigon, initiate a missing-in-action mission for Australian soldiers, facilitate a Royal Commission into Agent Orange, and generally re-build trust with Hanoi. I was to engage the Vietnamese in a dialogue on Cambodia and find out specifically if and when they intended to leave.

    At the time, the Cold War was at its height and Vietnam was commonly and quite mistakenly regarded in the West as a Soviet colony. Mr Hayden’s initiatives were strongly criticised by China, and five of the then six members of ASEAN (Indonesia, distrustful of China, and wanting a strong Vietnam to stand up to China to its north, was the exception). The Thais were particularly incensed, certain that the Vietnamese army would soon invade across the Cambodian border. Still smarting from their pull-out from Vietnam in June 1975, the Americans thought Hayden naive and foolish. Trenchant critics of Hayden’s initiative towards Hanoi also existed in Canberra, particularly in the Office of National Assessments and parts of Foreign Affairs.

    Despite the static, I was getting on with my job. We began an aid program and hosted a trade mission from Australia. I handed back our embassy properties in Saigon. With Vietnamese cooperation, we conducted the first MIA mission by any participating country in the Vietnam War and gathered evidence for the Royal Commission into Agent Orange.

    And I was also getting somewhere with Vietnamese officials on Cambodia. During meetings over several months, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach became increasingly frank with me. Since reunifying the country in 1975, Hanoi had been doggedly trying to pull the place together. By 1978, China, which had been unhappy with unification, was making threatening noises from the north. And that ‘madman’ Pol Pot persisted in attacking Vietnamese villages across the border from the south west. Vietnam had insufficient military strength to challenge China, but could certainly put a spoke in Pol Pot’s wheel. So on Christmas Day 1978, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh. Vietnamese forces would leave when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had been neutralised. Thach ridiculed the suggestion that Vietnam would stay in Cambodia or had territorial designs on Thailand.

    I reported our conversations to Canberra, along with my view that Thach and his colleagues were telling the truth.

    Meanwhile, if Nicholson and The Australian are to be believed, Orion was busy in Cam Ranh Bay. At the least, its activities were contrary to customary international law and the newly promulgated 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention. If detected in Vietnam’s internal waters, the consequences would have been horrific. Orion could have been depth-charged or captured, its complement of 63 crew interned, its armaments including its Mark 48 US torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles stripped. Bilateral relations could have come to a grinding halt. I could have been recalled or expelled from Hanoi. The increasing goodwill and understanding created through Hayden’s initiative and my activities would have been lost, and our sceptical western and ASEAN allies would have glowed with schadenfreude.

    In spite of its appalling baggage, this spying hubris appears not to have given either the Australian government or opposition cause to reflect. Indeed, it resonates in at least two respects with Australia’s recent decision to build at enormous expense a dozen French Barracuda submarines. First is range. The government says it wants long-range subs, a capacity the German and Japanese boats lack. This is presumably to enable us to spy on Chinese assets in the South China Sea. But 1960 British-designed Oberon-class boats costing a mere $10 million a copy (triple that in 2016 terms) had the capacity to reach the same neighbourhood in Vietnam. What is so special about the range of the vastly more expensive French Barracudas?

    Second, why is the Australian government so fixated on submarine espionage outside our immediate maritime neighbourhood? The consequences of discovery by China are more appalling than by Vietnam or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It’s one thing to sail on the surface through waters claimed by China in the interests of reinforcing ‘rules-based’ freedom of navigation, but quite another to penetrate coastal waters by submarine and conduct maritime espionage. If that’s not the purpose, why spend such colossal amounts on new submarines? To sustain the South Australian economy, keep Christopher Pyne in parliament, catch up with our neighbours? All of the above? I will explore motives and consequences in a following article.

    Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico.He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW.

  • Jon Stanford and Michael Keating. the mistaken decision on submarines.

    The government has made a bad decision on acquiring the future submarines (FSMs). It’s bad for the Navy, bad for the taxpayer and it represents a major regression in terms of industry policy.

    It’s bad for the Navy because in terms of capability the decision fails to deliver on the objectives set out in the latest Defence White Paper. DCNS’ conventional Barracuda class boats will not be ‘regionally superior’ submarines in terms of their technology. By the 2030s, if operating in the South China Sea, they will be confronted by nuclear attack submarines (SSNs), of greatly improved performance compared to current models. The FSMs will not be, as the Prime Minister said, “the most sophisticated naval vessels being built in the world”. But on a ‘bang for the buck’ basis, they may well be by far the most expensive with the longest delivery timeline.

    An advanced, nuclear powered Barracuda class submarine, with underwater endurance limited to 100 days only by crew resilience and a submerged speed of 30 knots, could claim regional technological superiority. But no conventional submarine (SSK), however advanced, will be technologically superior in the South China Sea in the 2030s, nor will it be safe to send RAN submariners on offensive operations there on such a platform.

    The irony is that if the government’s power projection ambitions were to be pursued, the nuclear powered version of the advanced Barracuda class would be the ideal platform for the RAN. Yet Defence’s requirements have led DCNS to remove the single element in the Barracuda class that provides its overwhelming technological advantage, namely the nuclear reactor, and replace it with an updated version of the diesel electric propulsion that powered Australia’s first submarines over a century ago. It’s the naval equivalent of removing the engine from a Ferrari and replacing it with a motor from a Citroen 2CV.

    The ridiculous corollary of this is that it will cost Australia a lot more to procure the dumbed down version of the Barracuda submarine than it would have done to buy far more capable nuclear powered Barracudas as a military off-the-shelf (MOTS) purchase from France. If the Navy had acquired, say, four nuclear boats supplemented by six conventional submarines of an existing design to undertake the other roles required of the FSM, the overall cost could have been around $20 billion, as against over $36 billion plus at 2016 prices (the oft-quoted $50 billion represents future inflated costs). The Navy would also have been much better off in terms of capability.

    Another benefit of a MOTS purchase is that the new submarines would have been available a decade earlier, thereby avoiding some significant risks. There would be no need to attempt, at high cost, to upgrade the obsolescent Collins class, with a high risk of failure that would leave the Navy without an effective submarine capability for a decade or more. There are also major design risks in a new submarine, particularly in integrating American systems with the French platform and transferring power hungry systems from a nuclear design with a high availability of electricity. This could delay delivery of the new submarine beyond the current unacceptable timeline and increase the already unacceptable cost.

    The implications for industry policy constitute a particularly egregious element in the procurement decision. In this context, we need to remember that the Abbott government showed the door to the car industry. The end of the age of entitlement meant that around $500 million a year, not high by international standards, was too much to pay to support a high technology industry that, directly and indirectly, employed around 200,000 people.

    Now the government is keen to support an industry with a cost disability, according to the RAND Corporation, of up to 40 per cent. Given the likely moderate local value added in an industry where all the sophisticated hardware is imported, the effective rate of protection (assistance to value added) will be much higher than this. Indeed a leaked paper from Defence last week suggested an effective rate of protection of 500 per cent would be required to build the submarines in Adelaide. Even at the height of the Fraser government’s protectionist excesses in the early 1980s, the effective rate reached ‘only’ 143 per cent for the car industry.

    The government justifies a local build on the basis of job creation, developing an innovative industry and the ability to undertake through life sustainment of the submarines in Australia.

    On the Prime Minister’s figures, 2,800 jobs will be created directly and indirectly, a far cry from the 200,000 jobs that are related to the car industry. Some early estimates suggest we are looking at a cost of around $4 million for every job created.

    There is only value in building an innovative industry if it is internationally competitive. Little thought appears to have been given to developing an industry plan directed towards this objective. If this was an issue, the government would have given much greater attention to the German bid, which offered a substantially lower price ($20 billion), much earlier delivery, no cost penalty for a local build and the transfer of substantial digital technology to Australia.

    The defence argument for local acquisitions can be the last refuge of a scoundrel; in the past it was even applied to protecting the clothing industry. We already know that we do not need to build military assets, including missiles and systems, in order to maintain and upgrade them. We do not build RAAF fixed wing assets or missiles in Australia yet we deliver high quality through life support. Australian industry was perfectly well able to maintain the British-built Oberon class submarines and, indeed, to upgrade them.

    It’s not too late to amend the decision and deliver a better outcome. The submarines have not yet been designed, commercial terms have not been agreed and contracts have not yet been signed. A much improved approach could maintain DCNS as the preferred supplier, while providing the Navy with the capability it needs much sooner, at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer and with positive industry benefits in South Australia.

    The first step would be to negotiate with the French government (and the US) to acquire four nuclear powered Barracuda class submarines as a MOTS purchase. If agreed, the Navy could also acquire six conventional Scorpene class SSKs from DCNS, to be built in Adelaide on a fixed price contract if the cost penalty is acceptable. All these submarines would be delivered in the early 2020s with no need to upgrade Collins.

    If the acquisition of the four SSNs is ruled out, the capability requirement should be amended to exclude offensive operations in contested waters far from home. This would mean focussing on operations that are well within the capacity of a SSK, namely sea denial in Australia’s littoral and reconnaissance and intelligence gathering in neighbouring waters and archipelagos. This would require acquiring between six and nine SSKs of an existing design, to be built in Adelaide if the price is right.

    Of course, there would be political difficulties in making these changes. This would require strong leadership by the Prime Minister. Better this, however, than taking significant risks with Australia’s defence, imposing a large and unnecessary burden on taxpayers and going down in history as modern Australia’s most protectionist Prime Minister.

     

    Jon Stanford and Michael Keating are Directors of Insight Economics. Previously they worked together in the Prime Minister’s Department, where Dr Keating was Secretary.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Arja Keski-Nummi. Manus – “The Worst Angels of Our Nature” 

    The PNG Supreme Court decision has again thrown into stark relief the bankrupt nature of Australia’s asylum policy and the disingenuous way that both sides use trite slogans such as “ saving lives” and not “starting up the people smuggling business” as justification for their cynical and inhumane policies.

    People working with asylum seekers and who have processed and resettled refuges from within and outside of Australia have all urged Australian political parties to find a way to return to a bipartisan policy based on treating all people with dignity and common human decency, even if in the end they are not found to be refugees. But this has fallen on deaf ears.

    Despite many experienced commentators in the past day offering reasonable policy advice and approach it is clear from the statements of both parties that they will not take such advice.

    The scene has been set. Cynical political calculations ahead of a July election trump good policy or treating people humanely. Indeed, one could argue that there is a de facto bipartisan policy – one based on cruelty and selfishly inward looking in its intent.

    Asylum policy does not change many votes, handling the economy, education, health and industrial relations does. However the Government knows it does them little harm to raise the spectre of uncontrolled boats. Equally the Opposition is stuck in its defence of its decision to reopen offshore processing centres and then, in the heat of an election campaign in 2013, to extend that to no resettlement in Australia.

    This seismic shift in Australia’s asylum policies and its abrogation of any moral responsibility towards people who have reached its territory is deeply troubling. It is not clear that this genie can easily be put back into the lamp.

    This unseemly debate sits uncomfortably with anyone who actually looks outward – we live in a interconnected world, more than ever people are on the move because of diminishing economic opportunities, civil war and other conflicts, environmental degradation and exploitation and a combination of all of these factors in any one cohort.

    We should not be squabbling over 800 men stuck on Manus, shifting the responsibility to PNG and offering to throw money in their direction to make the problem go away. There are perfectly reasonable and common sense approaches to resolving the status of all those on Manus. The Howard government did just this with the remaining Nauru population in 2005-6.

    There are over 50 million displaced people globally, Australia’s issues with asylum seekers does not amount to a hill of beans – so focused are we on Manus and Nauru that we have not yet honoured our small commitment to resettling Syrian refugees from the Middle East.

    Both parties could make a difference by agreeing to take a reasonable bipartisan approach by working to resettle people found to be refugees and building a stronger regional cooperation framework – taking the politics out of an issue that demeans us all.

    But this will not happen, because both major parties are focused on narrow, immediate political gain.

    Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Her primary responsibility was in the field of humanitarian and refugee programs.

     

  • Douglas Newton. What we fought for: from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916

    Formal speeches about Australia’s Great War normally follow simple rules. The focus is upon military achievement, and defining national values – service, sacrifice, and mateship. Hardship and horror are added, giving lustre to military achievement. National awakening is emphasised: the diggers were ‘the founding heroes of modern Australia.’[1] Audiences are flattered: the Anzacs were ‘our mighty forebears.’[2]

    But the objects of that war – the ‘war aims’ for which so many Australian lives were lost – are seldom mentioned. Ignorance of purposes is assumed. ‘Few of us can recall the detail,’ Tony Abbott told the Gallipoli Dawn Service in 2015, ‘but we have imbibed what matters most: that a generation of young Australians rallied to serve our country, when our country called.’ And fought for what? Generalities suffice. ‘It was for country, Empire, King, and the ideal that people and countries should be free.’ The diggers fought ‘for duty, loyalty, honour and mates: the virtues that outshine any cause.’[3]

    But what cause? Many speechmakers simply confuse 1914-18 with 1939-45. They retrospectively democratise Britain’s Great War. Thus, our diggers fought for ‘freedom under the law, representative democracy and the universal decencies of mankind.’[4]

    This draws a veil over everything difficult: the expansion of war aims, the Great Powers’ jostling to redivide the colonial world, the private corporate interests masquerading as national interests, and the blundering ‘old diplomacy’ – all the systemic evils that prolonged the slaughter of Australians.

    Why did Australians die by the thousands at Gallipoli in 1915? At Fromelles in 1916? It is not enough to point to the wickedness of the German enemy.[5] We must explain the prolongation of the war. We must dig deep into our ‘war aims’.[6]

    As a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, but without control of her own foreign policy, Australia was bound by Britain’s diplomatic deals. These included:

    The Pact of London, 4 September 1914 (PUBLIC)

    Britain, France and Russia became ‘Allies’ and promised not to conclude peace separately. Russia pressed for this. Britain and France truckled to Russia, to keep her loyal. Tsarist Russia – Europe’s most reactionary power – was already eyeing annexations in Eastern Europe, Turkey, and beyond, the so-called ‘Thirteen Points’. Tsar Nicholas II and his ministers dreamt of stifling democratisation in Russia with victory. In signing up, Britain and France accepted the risk that the war would go on – until Russian war aims were achieved.

    The Straits Agreements, 8 and 12 March 1915 (SECRET)

    After great pressure from Russia, Britain and France agreed to plans for Russian annexations in Turkey. These included control of the Straits (Gallipoli and the Dardanelles), and Constantinople (Istanbul) – Russia’s great prize. As compensation, Britain gained the oil-rich ‘neutral zone’ in Persia (Iran). France won Russian backing ‘for the realization of plans which they [France] may frame with reference to other regions of the Ottoman Empire or elsewhere’, such as Syria. The agreements were secret. Thus, Australians died at Gallipoli so that Russia might rule in Constantinople. Truly, a Gallipoli ceremony should be held every year in London – outside Chesham House, Belgravia, the old Russian embassy.

    Cabinet Document ‘The Spoils’, 25 March 1915, CAB 63/3/104-7. (SECRET)

    On Gallipoli’s eve, Lewis Harcourt, Britain’s Colonial Secretary, drew up ‘The Spoils’. It outlined a repartition of the colonial world. Britain must ‘dictate any terms’. If Russia gained Constantinople, Britain had a long shopping list: annexations in Mesopotamia ‘from the Persian Gulf to Baghdad’, and a brace of colonial seizures and swaps among the victors, in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Africa and the Pacific. Britain, her Dominions, and Japan would take all German Pacific colonies – anticipating ‘great trouble’ with Australia. To counter ‘Australian prejudices’, Britain aimed at ‘sweetening the pill’, giving Australia in addition Bougainville and the British Solomons.[7]

    The Treaty of London, 26 April 1915 (SECRET)

    During March 1915, Italian negotiators in London bargained on the price of Italy joining the war. The landing at Gallipoli closed the deal. It opened up the prospect of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. So, the day after Anzac, the Italian elite signed the Treaty, agreeing to bounce Italy into war. In return, Italy would gain swags of Austro-Hungarian territory, in the north and along the Adriatic. Italy was offered a slice of the Ottoman Empire, a war indemnity, and a £50 million loan. Under Article 15, the Entente agreed to support Italy in ‘not allowing the representatives of the Holy See [the Pope] to undertake any diplomatic steps having for their object the conclusion of peace or the settlement of questions connected with the present war.’ Catholic Anzacs, perhaps 25% of the AIF, had no inkling of this. The treaty was secret.

    The Sykes-Picot agreements, January-May 1916. (SECRET)

    British and French diplomatic negotiators struck a deal in May 1916. The victors planned to gobble up the great bulk of the Ottoman Empire. Later Britain and France also agreed to Russian and Italian gains. Again, secrecy prevailed. Australians would fight on in the Middle East from 1916 for all these objectives – and 1,400 died – knowing nothing about them.

    The Inter-allied Paris Economic Conference, 14-17 June 1916 (the ‘Paris Resolutions’) (PUBLIC)

    Britain, France and Russia agreed to form a trade bloc after the war. The ‘Paris Resolutions’ proclaimed a post-war economic boycott of the enemy. German commerce would be shut out. This would hobble the defeated, as the victorious empires became exclusive economic zones. Protectionism would triumph across the British Empire. This public deal strengthened the hands of the German militarists: they argued that Germany’s war was now indispensable. Sadly, Australia’s Prime Minister Hughes loudly promoted the ‘Paris Resolutions’.

    For such ‘war aims’, mostly secret, Australian troops endured their 5,533 casualties in one night at Fromelles on 19 July 1916. One hundred years later, the dead deserve better than to be washed into their graves afresh with a cascade of clichés and hyperbole. To honour them truly, we should ask ‘Why?’

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017

    [1] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Anzac Cove Address’, 25 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24397

    [2] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Address to Legacy Clubs of Australia’ 18 Oct. 2013, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23045 and ‘Address to the Anzac Day National Ceremony, Canberra’, 25 April 2014, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23446

    [3] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Lone Pine Address, Gallipoli’, 25 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24398

    [4] Prime Minister Abbott, ‘Remarks at unveiling of the Sir John Monash Centre winning design, Villers-Brettonneux’, 26 April 2015, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-24400

    [5] As Fritz Fischer has argued, ‘There is no question but that the conflict of military and political interests, of resentment and ideas, which found expression in the July crisis, left no government of any of the European powers quite free of some measure of responsibility – greater or smaller – for the outbreak of war in one respect or another.’ Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London, 1967), 87.

    [6] For surveys of ‘war aims’ on the Entente side, see David Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2005), David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1988), David Stevenson, French War Aims Against Germany 1914-1919 (Oxford, 1982), Christopher Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax of French Imperial Expansion (London, 1981), V. H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914-1918 (Oxford, 1971), William A. Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance into the Great War (New York, 1987), Jukka Nevakivi, Britain, France and the Arab Middle East, 1914-1920 (London, 1969), Ronald P. Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (London, 2006), Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Harvard, 2013), Wm. Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 1914-1919 (Oxford, 1967).

    [7] Lewis Harcourt, ‘The Spoils’, Secret. Cabinet Paper. Printed for the use of the Cabinet, dated 25 March 1915, in CAB 63: War Cabinet and Cabinet Office: Lord Hankey: Papers. ‘Magnum Opus files’, CAB 63/3, 104-107 (The National Archives, London).

  • Richard Eckersley. Wellbeing and sustainability: irreconcilable differences?

    Better concepts and measures of quality of life and wellbeing make sustainable development more achievable. 

    The debate about progress and development is converging and merging with that about sustainable development. My analysis of the flaws in equating progress with modernisation, discussed in my previous article, contributes to this debate because it shows the equation counts modernity’s benefits to wellbeing but not all its costs.

    Modernity’s dominant narrative of material progress gives priority to economic growth and a rising standard of living. It is being increasingly challenged by the alternative narrative of sustainability, which seeks to balance social, environmental and economic priorities and goals to achieve a high, equitable and lasting quality of life. Material progress represents an outdated, industrial model of development: pump more wealth into one end of the pipeline of progress and more welfare flows out the other.

    Sustainable development reflects an ecological model, based on our understanding of complex systems, in which wellbeing results from many entities or factors interacting in often multiple, diffuse and non-linear ways. (Its implications include paying more attention to the quality of economic activity, not just its quantity; and trading off some growth to achieve other, social and environmental benefits.)

    One approach to measuring sustainable development is to divide quality-of-life or wellbeing measures by energy use or environmental impacts. The New Economic Foundation’s Happy Planet Index does this, multiplying national life satisfaction by life expectancy and dividing the resulting ‘happy life years’ by a country’s per capita Ecological Footprint. My aim here, however, is to assess the wellbeing side of the equation. Wellbeing measures tend to reinforce the conventional view of progress by suggesting wellbeing is continuing to increase; even indices which include environmental impacts show Western nations performing best on the social and economic measures.

    There is often an assumption, explicit or implicit, that there will be a cost to current quality of life in shifting to a sustainable path, as reflected in the title of a recent paper on the topic: ‘Untangling the environmentalist’s paradox: Why is human well-being increasing as ecosystem services degrade?’. The Happy Planet Index notes the ‘undeniable tension’ between its numerator of happy life years and the denominator of the Ecological Footprint. The Sustainable Society Index no longer aggregates beyond the three dimensions of human, economic and environmental wellbeing because of the negative correlation between human and environmental wellbeing, which it says seem to be on a ‘collision course’.

    A 2008 study comparing countries’ Human Development Index scores with their per capita Ecological Footprints shows environmental impacts rise steeply with high development. Only one country (Cuba) of the 93 surveyed met the requirements for both high development (an HDI score of 0.8 or more) and global sustainability (a footprint of less than 1.8 global hectares). Among high-income countries over the previous 25 years, improvements in index scores came with disproportionately larger increases in their footprints, showing a movement away from sustainability. Some lower-income countries, in contrast, achieved higher levels of development without a corresponding increase in their footprints.

    My wider perspective on wellbeing helps to resolve this dilemma by highlighting how Western high-consumption lifestyles and the type of economy and culture they reflect and require are not only increasing resource consumption and environmental damage, they are also hostile to health and wellbeing (especially in countries that are already rich). The importance of ‘correcting’, or at least questioning more deeply, the conventional picture of progress and development is underscored by environmental analyses which demonstrate the extent of the environmental costs, the limits they impose on orthodox development, and their potentially catastrophic impact on human health. That most measures of progress, including newer indices, do not reflect this reality – and show, in effect, that we are enjoying a high or improving quality of life even as we move ever closer and faster to an ecological abyss – demonstrates how far we have to go.

    This perspective reinforces the message which is becoming clearer from global threats to humanity such as climate change, food, water and energy security, economic collapse, and technological anarchy. This message is that we need to change the myths, worldviews and values by which we define ourselves, our lives, and our goals. The necessary transformation can be compared to that in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment: from the medieval mind, dominated by religion and the afterlife, to the modern mind, focused on material life here on earth.

    Without this deeper change, we will not close the gulf between the magnitude of the challenges and the scale of our responses. A cultural transformation of this depth is very different from the policy reforms on which our public discussions and political debates focus and which, by and large, our indicators of development track. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, hailed politically to be an outstanding success, but judged scientifically to be a failure, exemplifies well this ‘reality gap’

     

    Richard Eckersley is a director of Australia21, a public-interest, strategic research company. This article draws on a longer paper published this month in the leading international development journal, Oxford Development Studies. For those with subscription access, it is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2016.1166197. An author version is available at: www.richardeckersley.com.au

     

  • Frank Brennan SJ. Manus Island proposal.

    Asylum seekers on Manus Island should be brought to Australia and processed.  Those who are refugees should be permitted to stay in Australia.

    Neither the Liberal Party nor the Labor Party agree. The race to the bottom and the race against time is now on as the country prepares to go into election mode on or about 12 May 2016.  The Labor Party is adamant that the Rudd government’s MOU with PNG was posited on the firm understanding that the processing and resettlement of the asylum seekers would be done and dusted within 12 months.

    So here is my proposal for consideration by the major political parties.

    Before the Turnbull government goes into caretaker mode, it should move the asylum seekers to Christmas Island for processing.  To move more than 850 single men to Nauru would be highly irresponsible behaviour, no matter how much money we were prepared to offer Nauru.

    The government should guarantee that all refugee claims for this cohort would then be determined within 12 months, ie by 12 May 2017.  The government should also guarantee that all those proved to be refugees will be resettled within 18 months, ie 12 November 2017.  For many of these people, that will have meant a five year delay between initial detention and resettlement.

    The Labor Party should then endorse the plan so that there is bipartisan commitment to the plan before the election commences.  Both parties need to accept that they were in government when their ministers knew or ought to have known that the initial MOU was posited on illegal, unconstitutional activity by the Government of PNG.  If resettlement places cannot be provided for any proven refugees in this cohort by 12 November 2017, there will be no option but to resettle them in Australia.

    Fr Frank Brennan SJ
    Professor of Law
    Australian Catholic University

  • Frank Brennan. Cheque book solution on asylum is unconstitutional

    A bench of five justices of the Supreme Court of Justice, the highest court in Papua New Guinea, has unanimously ruled that the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island is unconstitutional.

    The successful applicant in the case was Belden Norman Namah, the PNG Leader of the Opposition. Unlike the Australian Constitution, the PNG Constitution contains a list of basic human rights including section 42 which deals with ‘liberty of the person‘. That provision states that ‘No person will be deprived of his personal liberty‘ except in specific circumstances.

    Back in 2001 when John Howard’s government instituted the first Pacific solution, there was only one exception which came even close to dealing with the deprivation of liberty of asylum seekers being brought to PNG and detained there. That was section 42(1)(g) which permitted deprivation of liberty ‘for the purpose of preventing unlawful entry’ into PNG.

    But it was a long stretch of the bow to argue that this provision could cover the entry into PNG of persons brought there with the PNG government’s agreement on receipt of a cheque from Australia.

    The Australian government and its lawyers have been on notice about this illegality for 14 years.

    When the now grandfather of the House of Representatives Philip Ruddock was Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, he made a habit of criticising Australian judges whom he thought too soft on asylum seekers wanting to vindicate their legal rights in court.

    At the same time, he had gone ahead instituting Australia’s first edition of the ‘Pacific Strategy’ for warehousing asylum seekers offshore. I wrote to him on 9 June 2002 saying:

    ‘Despite your recent adverse comments about the Australian judiciary, I note that you have not refuted my concerns about the legality of the Pacific Solution preferring simply to observe that no court proceedings have been instituted in Nauru and that the action in PNG was struck out for non-appearance of counsel on 6 May 2002.

    ‘I concede that the PNG government may well have issued conditional visas to the detainees on Manus Island but any visa with a condition amounting to detention would still be unconstitutional.’

    Mr Ruddock replied on 22 August 2002:

    ‘I note your continuing concerns about the legality of the government’s Pacific Strategy. The constitutionality of the arrangements for accommodation of asylum seekers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea is a matter for the governments of the countries concerned.

    ‘It is relevant to note, however, that to the extent that the asylum seekers in those countries are subject to restrictions on their freedom of movement, those restrictions were imposed by the legislation of Nauru and Papua New Guinea respectively.’

    Needless to say, the constitutionality of arrangements was not the province of the governments of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. The thing about constitutions is that they bind governments and even parliaments, and they are definitively interpreted not by governments but by courts. Legislative restrictions have to comply with constitutional constraints.

    In 2003, I published the first edition of my book Tampering With Asylum. I wrote:

    ‘The detention of asylum seekers is contrary to the constitutions of Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Imagine if every first-world country decided to engage in this sort of unlawful people trading.’

    After Kevin Rudd revived the Pacific Solution on 19 July 2013 and once Tony Abbott perfected it on his election as prime minister, the PNG government decided to amend its Constitution to try and legalise the detention second time around.

    In 2014, the PNG parliament purported to amend the Constitution by adding a further exception to section 42, thereby permitting deprivation of liberty ‘for the purpose of holding a foreign national under arrangements made by Papua New Guinea with another country’.

    “Just because Australia does not have a constitutional bill of rights, that is no excuse for our governments exporting their cavalier disregard for human rights to our mendicant neighbours.”

    Unlike the Australian Constitution, the PNG Constitution permits the parliament to amend the Constitution without the need for a referendum of the people. But the PNG Constitution does specify that amendments to the Constitution paring back constitutional rights can only be made subject to strict conditions in relation both to the content and form of the new law.

    In relation to the content, a new restriction on an existing constitutional right can be legislated only if it is necessary to advance defence, public safety, public order, public welfare or public health, or if it is necessary to protect the rights of others, or if it is necessary to resolve a conflict of rights.

    In all these cases, there is a need to establish that the proposed law ‘is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society having a proper respect for the rights and dignity of mankind’. The proposed law legalising detention of asylum seekers sent from Australia did not get to first base according to the judges.

    The judges, having quoted UNHCR’s adverse report on the Manus Island Processing Centre, agreed with the Leader of the Opposition’s contention

    ‘that treating those required to remain in the relocation centre as prisoners irrespective of their circumstances or their status save only as asylum seekers, is to offend against their rights and freedoms as guaranteed by the various conventions on human rights at international law and under the PNG Constitution’.

    In relation to the form of the new law, it needed to state the purpose for which it was made and to ‘specify the right or freedom that it regulates or restricts‘. The court ruled that the new law ‘did not specify the purpose of the amendment or the right which it purported to limit. On that ground alone the amendment is invalid and should be declared so.’

    So the law aimed at legalising long term detention of the asylum seekers being held in the Manus Island Processing Centre was struck down. It’s unconstitutional.

    Yet again, Australia has been complicit in its Pacific neighbours (PNG and Nauru) prostituting their Constitutions and undermining the rule of law in exchange for a fistful of dollars, with hapless asylum seekers, most of whom are ultimately proved to be refugees, being left to languish.

    Just because Australia does not have a constitutional bill of rights, that is no excuse for our governments exporting their cavalier disregard for human rights to our mendicant neighbours. The PNG judges thought their legal reasoning would be even more compelling ‘if the conditions of detention are such as to damage the rights and dignity of the detainees or, worse, cause physical or mental suffering’.

    “So the spiral of abuse continues until ultimately Australia convenes a royal commission to get to the bottom of our complicity in the abuse of asylum seekers and trashing of the rule of law in our region.”

    These asylum seekers now have a claim for damages for wrongful detention. The PNG court has ordered that ‘both the Australian and Papua New Guinea governments shall forthwith take all steps necessary to cease and prevent the continued unconstitutional and illegal detention of the asylum seekers’.

    No doubt we will hear unctuous pleas from Australian ministers that Australia was not even a party to the court proceedings. Our government was no more involved in the unconstitutional detention of these asylum seekers than was Channel 9 in the attempted abduction of the children in Lebanon last fortnight. So the spiral of abuse continues until ultimately Australia convenes a royal commission to get to the bottom of our complicity in the abuse of asylum seekers and trashing of the rule of law in our region.

    Of course, Peter Dutton, the Australian Immigration Minister says these asylum seekers and proven refugees being detained on Manus Island ‘won’t be coming to Australia’. For months now he has been insisting that the 263 asylum seekers here in Australia awaiting return to Nauru after medical treatment must be sent for fear that their remaining in Australia might send a message to people smugglers.

    That cry is starting to ring hollow. The boats have stopped, and they will stay stopped. And those 263 are still here.

    Not only should those 263 be allowed to remain; those 850 held in detention on Manus Island should be brought to Australia under an agreement whereby they receive prompt processing and resettlement in exchange for their agreeing to drop their substantial damages claims for unlawful, unconstitutional detention in unconscionable conditions on Manus Island.

    It’s time to close the Manus Island Processing Centre and to allow PNG to return to the rule of law. It’s better that Australia cut its losses now, rather than waiting for the inevitable royal commission which will lay bare the long term cost of what has been done in our name.

    And have no fear, the boats will stay stopped provided only that our defence and intelligence services do their job in cooperation with Indonesian authorities.

     

     

    Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at Australian Catholic University and Adjunct Professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. This article was first published in Eureka Street on 27 April 2016.

    Footnote:  Incidentally, it’s worth noting that one of the main two judgements in the case was written by Justice Higgins, one time Chief Justice of the ACT.  The ACT has its own Human Rights Act, so His Honour is well familiar with the jurisprudence required to interpret the human rights provision in the PNG constitution.  John Menadue.

     

  • John Menadue. Slogans or advocacy.

    At the last election, Tony Abbott gave us a long list of slogans.

    One of them was to ‘axe the tax’. And he did axe the carbon tax. But it was a serious mistake. With the continuing strong evidence of global warming, we badly need a carbon tax or an ETS to reduce carbon pollution. In addition to reducing our capacity to reduce carbon emissions, axing the tax meant that the Commonwealth Budget lost $7.6 b. p.a. in revenue. The slogan won the day. The losers were the planet and the budget.

    Tony Abbott said that he would ‘cut the budget deficit’. But we now know that under his leadership and that of Joe Hockey, the budget deficit has doubled over the forward estimates. Budget repair is still essential if we are to reduce annual interest payments and be in better shape to face possible global economic recession or collapse. The simplified slogan of cutting the deficit has not been delivered.

    Tony Abbott said that he would ‘eliminate the debt’ but net government debt has increased by almost $100b in the last two years. Yet Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull tell us that they are superior economic managers.

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison said that they would ‘stop the boats’. They didn’t. And it seems likely that Malcolm Turnbull in his commitment to ‘continuity and change’ will continue to make the claim that the Coalition stopped the boats.

    The facts tell us something quite different about how the Coalition triggered an increase in boat arrivals in the first place and then did not stop the boats. But the slogan ‘stop the boats’ served its political purpose and an uncritical media accepted then and continues to accept the Coalition’s spin that it ‘stopped the boats’.

    Forgive me for stating the facts again, as Peter Hughes and I set out in two posts in December 2015, ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals Part 1’ and ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals Part 2’.

    There are two important issues relating to boats.

    The first is that the action of Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, together with the Greens, in opposing the Malaysian Arrangement, opened the door for a dramatic increase in boat arrivals from about four boats per month at the time the Malaysian Arrangement was rejected in September 2011, to 48 boats in July 2013.

    The second is that the decision of the Rudd government in July 2013 to refuse settlement in Australia of anyone who came by boat resulted in boat arrivals falling from 48 in July 2013 to 7 per month in December 2013 when the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders commenced.

    By December 2013, boat arrivals had fallen dramatically.

    The Abbott government was only involved in the end-game and in a very marginal way. It was the Rudd government’s decision of July 2013 that was the game-changer and not Tony Abbott’s Operation Sovereign Borders and a few turnbacks to Indonesia. Yet Tony Abbot and now Malcolm Turnbull contend that they stopped the boats. The facts just do not show that at all.

    When he became Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull promised us ‘advocacy rather than slogans’. He told us that there would be a ‘more mature and adult conversation’ about important issues.

    Whether it is on boats or negative gearing, we are seeing a continuation of slogans and very little mature conversation.

    Disappointments continue to mount.

  • John Menadue. Defence White Paper. US, China and Barracuda – class submarines.

    Rather than acquiring military off-the-shelf (MOTS) submarines, the Australian government has committed us to the French submarine that will be built to Australian specifications. It will be a ‘unique’ build, non-nuclear and very expensive

    The Defence Minister says that the Barracuda submarine will meet Australian Government ‘requirements for a submarine with considerable range and the capacity to remain undisturbed and undetected for extended periods’.

    The government hopes that this submarine will be able to operate in the South China Sea without running unacceptable risks for the crews lives,

    Notwithstanding that by the time these submarines are actually delivered these already ‘contested waters’ in the South China Sea will be much more dangerous for a conventional submarine..

    In this way the government believes it will be helping the US resist China.

    We are apparently going to do this as a US ally at a large additional cost whether or not the US needs or wants our support.

    But is it in our interest to get involved militarily against China in the South China Sea?

    Hugh White, in this blog on 9 March 2016, (Australia’s Defence White Paper and the China threat), says. 

    ‘The White paper promotes a vision of the “rules-based global order” as a seamless and indivisible whole that must be either preserved unaltered or surrendered in its entirety and it sends a clear message that Australia should be willing to join a war against China to preserve it unaltered. This is plainly wrong. … So what are the implications of the White Paper’s view of regional order for the Defence policy it presents? The blithe assumption at the White Paper’s heart is that we can preserve the current rules-based order without serious military confrontation, because China will back down in the face of our threats. … This may prove a big mistake. Over the next few decades Australia will face a new order in Asia in which the US will play a lesser role and may even play no substantial strategic role at all.’ (Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies and the Strategic Studies Centre at the ANU and formerly Deputy Secretary, Department of Defence) 

    On the clash between China and the US in the Pacific, Geoff Miller in this blog on 31 March 2016 said:

    ‘We don’t know how the clash between these two great powers will be resolved. But I believe we can conclude that it is not a matter for or against freedom of trade, but rather a struggle for position between a superpower and its regional challenger, taking place near the challenger’s homeland. It’s not in our interest to become involved in such a clash, particularly militarily, and particularly when our relations with both contenders are both very good and very important.’ (Geoff Miller was formerly Australian Ambassador to Japan and Korea and Director-General of the Office of National Assessments.)

    In this blog of 18 April 2016, Richard Woolcott said:

    ‘Western “rules” of world order are no longer accepted by the major countries as the basis of world order. … There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China based on mainly Japanese policies could become a self-fulfilling policy. The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony. This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former ambassadors to China as well as a number of academics.’ (Richard Woolcott was Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and the Philippines and Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia, Ghana and Singapore. He was Australian Ambassador to the UN and President of the UN Security Council. He was Secretary of DFAT from 1988 to 1992.)

    It is clearly an assumption of the Defence White Paper that we need a ‘unique’ naval capability that can operate in ‘contested waters’ in the South China Sea and close to China. I don’t think there is much doubt that that is a mistaken and risky strategy as Hugh White, Geoff Miller and Richard Woolcott outline.

    The Defence White Paper and Government also assume that the US would like our naval cooperation in the South China Sea. But that is far from clear.

    In September 2014, a conference was organised by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). entitled ‘Strategy -The Submarine Choice.’ The ASPI describes itself as ’an independent, non-partisan think tank that produces expert and timely advice for Australian strategic and defence leaders’. At that conference Benjamin Schreer a Senior Adviser for Defence Strategy at ASPI raised serious doubts about whether the Americans wanted us involved in the South China Sea. He said

    ‘Operationally, it is hard to see Australian submarines contributing to any critical Coalition objectives in the South China and East China seas. The underlying assumption for such a function is that the US would want Australian submarines to operate in this space, but it’s questionable that the US has ever had enough confidence in Australian submarines performing such high-risk operations. And it’s even more difficult to see any future utility in having Australian submarines hiding off Hainan to threaten Chinese vessels as they leave port or hunting down PLAN submarines in open water. Given the enormous stakes in a future crisis involving the US and China, it’d be prudent to assume that the US would want to preserve this critical role for its own undersea force in order to maintain a single line of command and control, especially escalation control. In other words, the US would be likely to regard Australian submarines as an operational liability, particularly since their small numbers would mean that they wouldn’t make a significant difference to the outcome of the conflict.’ (See link to this Conference and Schreer’s piece on pages 45-48. https://www.aspi.org.au/publications/the-submarine-choice-perspectives-on-australias-most-complex-defence-project/Strategy_submarine_choice.pdf .Benjamin Schreer is presently Head of the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University.)

    This assessment by Schreer is consistent with the advice I have received that the US will not cooperate in Australia acquiring nuclear powered submarines.

    In their article in this blog on 16 April 2016 ‘A more efficient submarine solution’ Jon Stanford and Mike Keating said

    ‘If the government is determined to operate submarines in the South China Sea in support of the Americans, we should make it clear that Australia’s participation is contingent on the US allowing Australia to acquire nuclear submarines. On the other hand, if Australia cannot or will not acquire nuclear submarines, then it should abandon the ambition of projecting offensive power against a major adversary in far off contested waters. As ASPI has pointed out, there is no evidence that the US expects the ADF to undertake this role, which in reality is a great power role. Abandoning this force projection mission makes the capability requirement much more straightforward. Other roles include sea denial in the approaches to Australia, together with intelligence gathering and surveillance in our region. Indeed a smaller SSK (conventional submarine) readily available off the shelf is better suited than a large boat for these tasks.’ See link https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=6169. 

    The Defence White Paper and a future role for Australian submarines seem based on two very dubious assumptions.

    The first is that we should if necessary involve ourselves militarily in the contest between China and the US in the seas adjacent to China.

    The second is that the US needs or wants us to operate submarines alongside it in the South China Sea.

    We are likely to foolishly waste a lot of money on ‘unique’ submarines whose capacity to operate successfully in the South China Sea twelve years or more from now is also very questionable.

    Footnote:   The media release on the submarines says that the decision is subject to commercial terms being agreed later. This is ominous. I would have thought the commercial terms were key matters that should be resolved up front. We have had too many examples of escalating defence costs.

  • John Tulloh. The odd couple – the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and their uneasy relationship.

    As enduring international couples go, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia must rank among the oddest. They have been kind of firm friends since 1933 when oil was discovered in the kingdom. Yet their societies are so different as President Obama might have seen for himself when his limousine drove through the streets of Riyadh last week. For starters, he would not have found a woman driver anywhere or one buckled up lest the bodily contours the seatbelt creates excite the male driver. America is a wide open democracy with rights for one and all whereas Saudi Arabia is like a feudal fiefdom where rights are limited – especially if you are a woman or non-Moslem – and it is an offence to question or challenge the king’s word. America has no restriction on religious establishments, but in Saudi Arabia only mosques are permitted. Apostasy is punishable by death.

    It is money, oil, security, arms, influence, investment and even more money which keep them together. But the strains are showing. The Saudis cannot wait to see President Obama leave the White House. They feel he has let them down. No doubt, he must feel fed up with them as well. A lot of his time has been spent dealing with Islamic global terrorism, much of it inspired and even subsidised by Saudi Arabia’s Wahabism, the kingdom’s austere interpretation of the religion. A recent report in The Times said Saudi Arabia has contributed more fighters to Daesh than any other country.

    The Saudis blame Obama for many things, starting with not supporting President Hosni Mubarak when Egyptians rebelled against his rule and forced him from office. Then he had second thoughts about confronting a Saudi nemesis, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, after he crossed the line in the sand regarding chemical weapons. Next he turned his main foreign attention away from the Middle East to Asia only to return and do a deal with Saudi Arabia’s arch rival in the region, Iran. The Saudis showed their displeasure when Obama arrived in Riyadh to attend a Gulf summit last week. King Salman, having personally welcomed Gulf leaders arriving earlier in the day, pointedly sent the local governor to greet Obama. State television, unusually, ignored the president’s arrival altogether.

    Back in Washington, relations are fragile. Congress is considering a bill which could hold the kingdom responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001, attacks. The Saudis have threatened to sell up to $975 billion in securities and other assets in the U.S. lest they be frozen by American courts. President Obama has lobbied Congress to block the bill and, if necessary, promised to veto it. But a group of families of the 9/11 victims blame Saudi Arabia and want justice.

    (The majority of the 9/11 airborne terrorists were Saudis. But the commission which investigated the attacks found ‘no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials individually funded the organisation’. However, suspicions to the contrary linger. There is now a move to release the suppressed 28 pages of the commission’s report which might answer that scepticism once and for all).

    ‘We’ve seen a long deterioration in the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and it started well before the Obama Administration,’ a former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, Charles W. Freeman Jr., told the Los Angeles Times. ‘The U.S.-Saudi relationship is based entirely on interests, not values. It’s been an impossible relationship in value terms from the beginning’.

    ‘U.S.-Saudi relations have never been in complete harmony’, observed the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. One of its senior analysts, Ray Takeyh, goes further. ‘Saudi Arabia is no longer tethered to the American alliance’, he writes. ‘The House of Saud is beginning to rely on its own resources. It is hard to see what role, if any, the United States has in this evolving foreign policy’.

    Saudi Arabia arouses savage passions in the U.S., especially because of the 9/11 culprits and the country’s adherence to sharia law under which primitive punishments, such as beheadings and stonings to death, are still valid. 

         ‘The tragedy for the Arabs, especially, has been who got the oil wealth. It wasn’t the sophisticates of Beirut or even the religious scholars of Cairo, but Bedouins with a bitter view of faith. The Saudis and their fellow fanatics in the oil-rich Gulf states have used those riches to drag Muslims backward into the past and to spread violent jihad’.

    So wrote Ralph Peters, a Fox News strategic analyst, in the New York Post on the eve of Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia.

    While Saudi Arabia in its huff has been trying to go its own way, most U.S. commentators say there will be no fracture in the relationship. ‘Despite all the differences, Saudi Arabia and America are not getting divorced – we need each other’, said former White House adviser and CIA analyst Bruce Riedel, as quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald. They share intelligence, the Saudis rely on America for their security, their investments in each other’s country are too big to endanger and for American arms manufacturers there is no better customer.

    ‘As unpalatable as cooperation with the kingdom might be for some, cutting it adrift is worse,’ wrote Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. ‘Whatever the resentments, neither side has a realistic alternative to the other — something President Obama has clearly had difficulty reconciling himself to’.

    The Los Angeles Times noted that even when the two countries were closer, Saudi Arabia was never an ally. It was a partner. ‘Both countries still need each other, but less than before’, it said. ‘They’re still partners – but colder, more distant partners now’.

    FOOTNOTE. One aspect of the relationship which is booming is the PR industry. The Washington Post says the Saudis are spending millions on PR companies and lobbyists to help burnish their image and protect their interests in the U.S. ‘Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington’, said Josh Stewart, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money and influence in politics. ‘That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying’.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.    

  • Mungo MacCallum. So that was the week that wasn’t.

     

    We were promised drama and suspense, the start of a massive showdown in the senate over the Building and Construction Commission bill, a clash of egos leaving us wondering how and when it would end.

    And we were hoping for some action in the House of Representatives, too – the session might be rudely truncated, but both government and opposition would set the pre-election scene by belting each other with hyperbole over the atrocities of the unions and the banks respectively – and there might also have been some discussion of Arthur Sinodinos and his role in Liberal Party funding.

    But in fact the parliament collapsed with barely a whimper. The ABCC bill, so critical that the entire parliament had to be recalled to debate it, was rejected, done and dusted in just nine hours.

    The Australian’s indefatigable Editor at Large Paul Kelly, tried to make yet another comparison with the events of 1975: a recalcitrant senate determined to frustrate the government’s agenda. But of course 1975 was much more than that: it was an opposition, bolstered through the replacement of a dead Labor senator by an utterly unscrupulous state premier to secure the numbers to block supply and it succeeded by an unprecedented act of a pliant Governor-General, who dismissed the elected government.

    Last week’s anti-climax left the Prime Minister, after some dithering, in Opposition to announce that he had the grounds for a double dissolution. There was no political or constitutional crisis; all parties except perhaps the mindless Senator Steve Conroy whose comparison to the punctilious viceroy, Peter Cosgrove, to John Kerr completely misses the point: Cosgrove acted on the advice of his Prime Minister and Kerr defied it. It is hardly surprising that one of Conroy’s erstwhile colleagues, Simon Crean, once remarked: “Steve’s really not so bad – until you get to know him.”

    But on with the story, or rather the non-story. The government, in a panicky reaction to Bill Shorten’s widely welcomed call for a Royal Commission on the banks, replied with what it claimed was a ramping up of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which it said would allow it to undertake proactive investigations.

    It turned out that the money, which was to come from the banks themselves rather than funds that the government would previously cut, was not nearly as much as it looked: more than half of it was for capital grants to replace new equipment and the remainder, spread over three years, was woefully inadequate for what was needed for staff numbers and their foraging.

    But even before its money had been cut by the Abbott government, ASIC had proved itself to be a toothless tiger, especially where the banks were concerned; so it was entirely predictable that the banks applauded the decision, and that some of them defied the Treasurer, Scott Morrison, by refusing to rule out passing their additional costs on to the long-suffering customers. Somewhat belatedly, there was also a promise of more money for the Federal Police, who have so far been equally ineffective in the area.

    If we are going to have an election about whether the voters hate the unions or the banks worse, there is really no contest. However Malcolm Turnbull soldiered on, and announced that there would be more emphasis on cyber-security because some body had hacked the site of the Bureau of Meteorology – a move which Shorten immediately endorsed and which the public neither knew nor cared about. Then there was the dental scheme, which looked like a hastily contrived fix which the opposition branded a hoax. And the week ended with Turnbull confirming what we already knew: negative gearing is off the table. Turnbull said it would protect the value of the homes of mums and dads; but while there may, perhaps, be some mums and dads eager to sell off overpriced houses in order to purchase new overpriced houses, there are almost certainly more mums and dads who are keen to see prices fall so that their children can get into the market. At best, a dubious ploy at the start of an election.

    The impression was that the government, having embarked on the crash or crash through course to take the plunge for an election, was scrabbling for a convincing story for proroguing one parliament with unseemly haste, setting up a new one without an explanation for doing so (after all, it already had a double dissolution trigger – why all the fuss?) and then playing catch up to the opposition while it waits, in desperate hope, for a budget which will make it all plausible.

    And there is still a week to go. In the meantime the senate has done its work with the ABCC, but has planted a time bomb or two; an inquiry into electoral funding in NSW and the forced inquisition of Senator Arthur Sinodinos as part of the process – he may have escaped Mark Dreyfus but he will not be able to avoid Sam Dastyari.

    And some fairly elementary numerological research makes it clear that after all the angst over the electoral reform process, the new senate is likely to be as least as diverse as the old one, with the consequent bafflement of Malcolm Turnbull in his search for a mandate anyone will acknowledge.

    And as for the election itself –it is not looking the picnic it was looking a few months ago. On the current polls, even if the government sneaks back, it may not be able to gather the numbers to pass its cherished ABCC bill through a joint sitting of parliament. There will be independent candidates to deal with – the last thing Turnbull wants is a collection of the disenchanted heckling from a gaggle cross benchers, but he is likely to have to put up with a few of them and even to accommodate some.

    Turnbull may still have a master plan, but at the moment it is looking like a confusion turning into a cock-up. The budget just might be the game changer; but given the recent performances of both Turnbull and Morrison, you wouldn’t want to put your overpriced house on it.

    Mungo MacCallam is a political commentator and former senior correspondent in the Canberra Press Gallery.

     

  • Duncan MacLaren. Does Brexit mean a second independence referendum for Scotland?

    The algebra goes something like this: EU ref: Brexit – Scotland = indyref2? In other words, if England overwhelmingly votes to leave the European Union while Scotland votes to remain in and the overall result from England, Northern Ireland and Wales, (known since the debate on independence in Scotland as rUK – rest of the UK) is to leave, will this automatically mean a second referendum on Scottish independence? The answer is maybe.

    Certainly, the Scots are the most pro-European of the four nations of the UK. The Scots have consistently shown over a number of polls that they favour remaining in the EU. There are economic reasons for staying in such as the £2 billion benefit to the Scottish economy. There are social reasons such as the protection of human rights through legislation which the Westminster Parliament wishes to change but which the Scottish Government champions. Above all, there are strong historic reasons for the Scots feeling European.

    Scottish monks helped Christianise the continent of Europe in early medieval times, hence the proliferation of Schottenklöster (Scottish Monasteries) in Germany and Austria. Scots traders, soldiers and philosophers, even before the reluctant 1707 Union with England, had access to markets, armies and academe all over Europe. At one time, it was a toss-up whether French or English should be the language of the Scottish court after the decline of Gaelic and we still celebrate the Vieille Alliance (Auld Alliance in Scots) between France and an independent Scotland, called by de Gaulle in 1942, “the oldest alliance in the world”.

    By anecdotal contrast, English TV celebrity and ‘University Challenge’ host, Jeremy Paxton, recently called French “a useless language” and maintained French achievements were all in the past. Nigel Farage, the leader of the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party (UKIP) commented furiously that on a train from the suburbs to central London, he was surrounded by people not speaking English. Welcome to the mentality of the Little Englander who believes in a (Great) Britain (or England – the two are often interchangeable in such a mindset) comprising a feudal Royal Family, an unelected Second Chamber (the House of Lords), warm beer, cricket pitches, chauvinism and exceptionalism.

    The just published manifesto of the Scottish Government led by the Scottish National Party (SNP) for the Scottish Parliamentary elections in May this year opts for campaigning to keep Scotland and the UK in the EU. It further states that there would be a second independence referendum only “if there is clear and sustained evidence that independence has become the preferred option of a majority of the Scottish people – or if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will”.

    Many journalists in Scotland who have an “SNP bad” obsession speculate that the very popular First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, “secretly” wants Scotland to vote to stay in and England to vote to leave. This would mean taking Scotland out of the EU against the will of the Scottish people. If this does happen, there will certainly be a constitutional crisis, but I doubt if there will be a referendum because the first part of the manifesto statement quoted above may not pertain, i.e. that independence has not necessarily become the preferred option of the majority of Scots. To hold a referendum on Scottish independence when the polls hover around the 50% mark for and then lose would scupper Scottish independence for a generation or maybe for ever. Nicola would not want that.

    In addition, the right to hold a referendum on the constitution is in the hands of Westminster as it is not a devolved matter and Cameron and other Conservatives have already ruled out another referendum. The Scottish Government could hold its own referendum but Westminster could ignore it as the Spanish government has done with the Catalan independence referendum.

    On the other hand, the brouhaha created by such a vote and the ensuing British jingoism with figures such as Boris Johnston, Tory leader contender and Brexit campaigner, and Nigel Farage possibly at the helm of government would so appal the Scottish people that they may clamour for another referendum. There is the added thought that being dragged out of the EU would consign Scotland to another 20 years of rule from Westminster by the Conservative Party which the Scots haven’t voted for in any numbers since 1955. The Tories have currently one MP in Scotland, a lightweight who had to be appointed the Scottish Secretary of State not because of talent but because he was their only MP!

    The Tories are taking forward austerity cuts, the semi-privatisation of the National Health Service and schooling, the £800 billion renewal of Trident nuclear subs, conveniently placed within 25 miles of Glasgow, and a bellicose foreign policy to maintain a vestige of imperial grandeur, all of which is anathema to most Scottish voters. They are also in a mood to cut the budget of the Scottish Parliament.

    Interestingly enough, ‘ Yes’ and ‘No’ voters in the Scottish independence referendum were asked if the Brexit scenario came about with the Scots voting to stay in, would they vote for another Scottish referendum? The answer was 70% of the Yes voters in favour and 62% of the No voters also in favour. If such a poll were to show such figures after 23rd June (voting day), the Scottish Government would certainly propose another Scottish independence referendum which, this time, would probably gain a majority ‘Yes’ vote.

    The post-EU UK jingoistic reaction to a successful independence referendum would be, to say the least, interesting. Having read some of the blogs of English Brexit enthusiasts, some of them might welcome the departure of “the moaning Scots”. Little England searching for a greatness that is delusional in the current world of alliances will have been born.

    Duncan MacLaren is an Adjunct Professor of Australian Catholic University and a PhD candidate in theology at the University of Glasgow.

  • Cavan Hogue. Saudi Arabia involvement in 9/11 attack!

    The United States has long supported one of the most repressive regimes in the world. It invaded Iraq where women were able to do anything men could (which wasn’t much admittedly) but not Saudi Arabia where women are kept in subjection. It also ignored the fact that Saudi Arabia is home of the Wahabi brand of puritanical Islam that is the ideological inspiration for the Taliban and other extremist groups. Australia has trotted faithfully behind.

    The New York Times and the US Congress now claim that at least some parts of the Saudi ruling clique were involved in the 9/11 attacks on the USA and the US Government has begun to criticise some aspects of Saudi domestic policies. This has led to Saudi Arabia threatening to withdraw funds in the US but this may not be a serious threat since it could do as much damage to theSaudis as to the Americans.

    The Saudis are of course players in the kaleidescopic imbroglio in Syria and Iraq, a major oil producer and a strategic ally of the US. All of this poses a dilemma for countries that wish to export their version of human rights to countries like Saudi Arabia which are not interested in receiving it. It is perhaps one example of a wider phenomenon. Western countries do not always practice what they preach and then wonder why they are not trusted.

  • Evan Williams. What Bill Shorten should say – but won’t

    With Australia’s longest-ever election campaign now underway, politicians face a problem. How long can they go on repeating the same promises and slogans? According to usually reliable sources, Bill Shorten drafted a speech for his campaign launch which was immediately shredded by his close advisers. Leaked extracts are reproduced here by Evan Williams, who accepts no responsibility for their accuracy.

    Men and women of Australia!

    We all remember the words of my great predecessor Gough Whitlam when he launched his election campaign in 1972. Tonight, as we approach the centenary of his birth, I hope to draw some inspiration from his record and achievement. In the best Whitlam tradition, I’m presenting an ambitious program for reform and renewal.

    I won’t give you platitudes and slogans. I won’t go on about the momentous choice we face on July 2 because you know that already. I won’t say that the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us, because I don’t believe it. Politics is all about the things that divide us. It will be a sad day for democracy when politicians agree on everything.

    Tonight I’ll say what I really mean, and I begin with this firm pledge. The first priority of an incoming Labor government will be to increase taxes. Why? Because we need the money. I’m not talking about tobacco taxes or excise duties or tinkering with the capital gains tax. I’m talking about an increase in personal income-tax, sufficient to strengthen the budget bottom-line and pay for the things we need.

    That’s why I favour a rise in income-tax over a hike in the GST. Under a progressive tax system everyone will pay a share and everyone will pay their fair share. Of course we’ll be clamping down on tax loopholes, superannuation concessions, negative gearing and other rorts that benefit the wealthy. But that won’t be enough. We have a revenue problem and a spending problem, and my Government will tackle both.

    The Liberals have only one solution to budget problems: sack more public servants and slash more public services. That’s not Labor’s way. Of course we’ll face a relentless scare campaign from our opponents and the media. But I believe that if the case for a tax increase is honestly presented and clearly explained, Australians will accept it in the right spirit.

    Will this make us another high-taxing, big-spending Labor government, as our opponent will claim? It probably will. But it will put us in distinguished company. The Scandinavian countries have much higher taxes than we do, including a thumping GST, but are among the most stable, most prosperous and fairest societies in the world. Let’s join them.

    It’s time! It’s time we put paid to the myth that Coalition governments are better economic managers than Labor. Of course Labor governments have made mistakes – Gough, let’s face it, did a fair bit to wreck the economy in 1974 – but look at the history. It was a conservative government that took Australia into the Great Depression. It was a Labor government that the people turned to for deliverance. It was the Hawke and Keating governments that transformed a moribund and congested Australian economy in the 1980s with a series of reforms that are now universally applauded. It was the Howard government that squandered the windfall benefits of the commodities boom by handing out needless tax cuts when we should have been investing in infrastructure and development. It was the Rudd government that led Australia successfully through the Global Financial Crisis and averted a crippling recession. Australia emerged from that crisis as one of the strongest economies in the developed world. So who are better economic managers?

    Tonight I applaud the record of the Rudd and Gillard governments – on economic management, on national disability insurance, on great infrastructure projects like the national broadband network, on our overdue apology to the stolen generations. So you may well ask: if they were such good governments, why did I help tear down their leaders? I’ll give an honest answer. I supported and encouraged the Labor caucus in changing the leadership because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Kevin was demoralised after the defeat of the emissions trading scheme he negotiated with Malcolm Turnbull, and, rightly or wrongly, was deeply disliked by many of his Cabinet colleagues. Julia did some great things but she ran a dysfunctional government and suffered from the same problem as Tony Abbott – too many bad Newspolls. We dumped Julia for the same reason Malcolm Turnbull knifed Tony Abbott – a settled conviction that without a change of leadership the election would be lost. Politics can be a brutal game.

    My next pledge tonight is in the great tradition of all Labor governments: we’ll deliver a new deal for education. I’ve already promised that Labor will implement the full scope of the Gonski education reforms. No ifs, no buts, no qualifications. But we’ll go further. Coalition governments have grievously undermined vocational training and dismantled our TAFE colleges. They’ve slashed grants to the States for public education and cut funding for universities. Yet by every international yardstick our academic standards are in serious decline. This has to stop.

    Malcolm Turnbull keeps telling us that we must become an innovative and creative nation to deal with changing economic times. But the way to stimulate innovation and creativity is not to give more tax breaks to big corporations. The best way is to raise educational standards, to encourage our brightest students to take up careers in science and technology. The Liberals have cut funding to the CSIRO, our leading scientific research organisation. My government will increase it. We will appoint a royal commission – yes, another royal commission – into the entire education sector: schools funding, teacher training, curriculum development, standards and outcomes at every level. We will ensure that every Australian child receives the best possible education with the best-trained teachers in the best-equipped schools, regardless of income or postcode. Comrades, it’s time!

    I promise that a Labor government will welcome refugees and free all children from detention. We’ll close the hellish prisons on Nauru and Manus Island. Boat people will be processed in Australia and given decent accommodation on the Australian mainland before being resettled in the community. We’ll launch our Let Them Stay program, inviting Australian families to make room in their homes for refuges in need. And while we’re about it we’ll ban live animal exports. We’ll be the first government in Australia to establish a Ministry for Animal Welfare to protect defenceless creatures from needless suffering. I know this won’t please our friends in the cattle trade or the racing industry. But they don’t vote for us anyway. New Zealand gets along without live animal exports, so why can’t we?

    And we’ll take a good, hard look at the defence budget. Do we really need all these new submarines and frigates and surveillance vessels, with a big boost in the overall defence budget? That’s another myth – that the Liberals are better than Labor at defence and national security. Are they really? Again, let’s look at the record. It was a Labor government that led Australia through her years of gravest peril and mobilised our defences in World War II. It was a Liberal government that got us into the Vietnam war and it was the Whitlam government that got us out. It was the Hawke government that helped liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1991 and It was a Liberal government that got us into the disastrous, unwinnable war in Iraq. What sort of national security are the Liberals talking about?

    Finally, and most important of all, we’ll tackle the threat of global warming. And we’ll tackle it seriously. I’ve already promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030 – it was my first major policy announcement as leader – but if Australia is to meet her international obligations, flouted and disregarded by successive Coalition governments, we may have to go further.

    Climate change is an existential threat to our way of life, possibly to our very survival on this planet. We see the evidence every day. Last month brought the hottest global temperature readings for any month in recorded history. The Arctic ice sheet is disappearing, glaciers are melting, sea levels and ocean temperatures are rising. Already we are seeing the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and a decline in fish stocks around the world. The science is in – and Labor accepts the science. We’ll make Australia a leader, not a laggard, in the international effort to protect our planet. It’s time!

    Our measures will be costly. Many businesses and householders will need compensation to support them through the crisis. For this, and for the other commitments I’ve outlined in Labor’s policy tonight, we will need to make sacrifices. I make no apology for that. Under Labor there’ll be no more delay, no more dithering, no more smooth double-talk. Labor will be the party of action on the things that matter. I say again, that will mean some pain for all of us. But as another Malcolm once said, life isn’t meant to be easy. And I’m sure Gough would agree.

     

    _______

    Evan Williams is a former newspaper editor and Walkley Award-winning journalist. He wrote speeches for Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and a succession of NSW premiers. He headed the NSW Government’s cultural sector from 1977 to 2001, and for 33 years wrote regular film reviews for The Australian. He is a Member of the Order of Australia.

     

     

     

  • Rob Nicholls. NBN – election issue or fizzer?

    Cable competition

    NBN Co has let a contract worth $1.6 billion for Telstra to construct the hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) network in the mainland state capital cities. The deal has the ACCC on edge with Rod Sims expressing concern that Telstra will get a retail edge. As he said in a media release: “It is important that Telstra doesn’t get a head-start selling retail services over the NBN just because its technical expertise is being used in the construction and maintenance of the NBN”.

    Although the ACCC is signalling a potential concern, other than Telstra’s current ring-fencing, it’s difficult to see what can be done. Malcolm Turnbull and Mathias Cormann wrote the Statement of Expectations for NBN Co calling for the multi technology mix. The Statement of Expectations did not amend vast range of of documentation such as Telstra’s Structural Separation Undertaking and Migration Plans given to the ACCC, that were based on a fibre to the premises network. The ACCC continues to accept variations that reflect practical network rollout experience. However, Telstra, acting reasonably and in the interests of its shareholders, did not give new commitments in respect of HFC construction.

    The effect is that NBN Co’s fastest deployment option is to get Telstra to build the required HFC. Telstra will do that effectively. It will try to avoid using the information gained in the construction phase to give itself a retail advantage. It is quite difficult to think of any contracting party that would be in a position to do this work.

    It is not clear where these competition issues lie in the context of the Competition and Consumer Act. The industry structural changes that arose out of Telstra’s Structural Separation Undertaking create a policy issue here. In addition, there is the wealth transfer from NBN Co, a government business entity, to Telstra, a public company. More specifically, the double handling that arises when Telstra could have been contracted directly by the Commonwealth and thereby avoided a level of bureaucracy. If the contract management is expressed as a fraction of a percent of the contract value, then it’s useful to remember that 1% of $1.6 billion is $16 million!

    More acronyms

    At the same time, Internet Australia has called for a focus on the technology called “fibre to the distribution point” or FttDP. The main reason for the call is not that it’s the best technology. Instead, it is a technology that lends itself well to upgrade to fibre to the premises. That is, Internet Australia sees it more as a least worse technology. It certainly offers a good pathway as the “distribution point” is close to the premises. NBN Co is already considering the technology as part of the fibre to the node project. However, NBN Co has a focus of using FttDP for premises that are a long way from a potential node (at least a kilometre). This makes sense in terms of ensuring that the best range of bit rates is available to end users. However, FttDP has a significant operations and maintenance advantage over fibre to the node. The copper (which is the part of the network that goes wrong) is short in FttDP – it’s from the street to the premises. The second issue is that one of the premises provides the power. This means that the electricity costs (and the metering of that electricity) are no longer NBN Co’s problem. Another driver for Internet Australia is that there is a prospect that there could be bipartisan support for FttDP, on the basis that it is consistent with the multi technology mix.

    Election issues

    Heading into the election we are not likely to see the wide gap on NBN issues that was apparent in 2010 and to a lesser extent in 2013. There have been hints that Labor’s Jason Clare will spruik FttDP, but the LNP response is likely to be that “we’re doing that”. There will be reasonable criticisms that the Lib’s NBN will be neither quicker nor cheaper.

    The more difficult challenges do not lend themselves to three word slogans. These are derived from NBN Co’s charging model which has a use charge with no directly associated cost (referred to as the Connectivity Virtual Circuit or CVC charge). This was set at a time before Presto, Netflix and Stand and without a comprehension of the massive increase in data consumption that Australians have engaged in. The solution to part of this problem is actually simple. These large deliverers along with Facebook and Google could connect to the NBN at each of the points of interconnection, but downstream of the CVC. Netflix even provides the precise hardware (at no charge to high traffic use internet service providers) required to implement the solution. However, these commercial issues and the associated policy viewpoints are not easily digestible in retail politics. The fear is that this may mean that workable solutions without associated slogans will be directed towards the “too hard” basket.

    Dr Rob Nicholls, Lecturer, School of Taxation and Business Law, UNSW.

     

  • Richard Eckersley. The mismeasure of progress: Is the West really the best?

    Western liberal democracies dominate the top rankings of progress indices. But are they the best models of development when their quality of life is, arguably, declining and unsustainable.

    The measures of human progress and development that we employ matter. Good measures are a prerequisite for good governance because they are how we judge its success. They also influence how we evaluate our own lives because they affect our values, perceptions and goals. Measures both reflect and reinforce what we understand development to be: if we believe the wrong thing, we will measure the wrong thing, and if we measure the wrong thing, we will not do the right thing.

    Scientific and political interest in indicators of progress and development has surged in the past two decades. The central concern has been the adequacy of (per capita) Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the dominant measure of a nation’s performance, relative to other countries and the past. The result has been the development of new indicator sets or composite indices that include a wide range of measures – social, economic and environmental.

    Subjective wellbeing (commonly measured as self-reported life satisfaction or happiness) has attracted particular enthusiasm, with many researchers advocating its use as a stand-alone measure or a component of indicator sets and indices. Life satisfaction and happiness are believed to capture important subjective elements of wellbeing that other, objective indicators do not. A 2014 paper states that ‘there appears to be an emerging consensus in the policy community that subjective wellbeing ought to be the key criterion of policy success’.

    The idea behind this work is that better indicators of the progress of nations will lead to better choices, especially in public policy, and so to higher quality of life and wellbeing for their citizens. The United Nations Development Programme says development is about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests; it is about expanding the choices people have to lead lives they value. Fundamental to this goal is building human capabilities: to lead long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable, to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living, and to be able to participate in the life of the community. ‘Philosophers, economists and political leaders have long emphasised human wellbeing as the purpose, the end, of development,’ it says.

    Generally speaking, indicators place Western liberal democracies at the leading edge of progress, and present them as models of development for less developed nations. Typically, with indices such as the Human Development Index , the Social Progress Index and the Legatum Prosperity Index, Western nations occupy most of the top 20 places, with higher- income Asian nations filling most of the rest. Only when environmental impacts are given significant weight, as in the Happy Planet Index and the Sustainable Society Index, does this ranking change substantially.

    Conceptually, the dominant indicators of progress, including GDP, subjective wellbeing and the newer composite indices, equate progress with modernisation. The United Nations Development Programme notes that past decades have seen substantial progress in many aspects of human development. Most people today are healthier, live longer, are more educated and have more access to goods and services, it says; they also have more power to select leaders, influence public decisions and share knowledge. Thus, indicators focus on those qualities that characterise modernisation and which we celebrate as success or improvement, such as material wealth, high life expectancy, education, democratic governance, and individual freedom.

    However valuable these gains are, they do not represent the sum total of what constitutes optimal wellbeing and quality of life. Nor do they integrate or reconcile adequately the requirements of sustainability. Modernisation’s benefits are counted, but its costs to wellbeing are underestimated and downplayed. At best, the qualities being measured under orthodox approaches may be desirable and even necessary, but are not sufficient. At worst, the measures are promoting a lower quality of life and leading us to towards an uncertain and problematic future.

    Put another way, the dominant model of progress and development reflects one particular worldview: modernity. Modernisation is a pervasive, complex, multidimensional process that characterises our era. It includes: industrialisation, globalisation, urbanisation, democratisation, scientific and technological advance, capitalism, secularism, rationalism, individualism and consumerism. Many of these features are part of the processes of cultural Westernisation and material progress (measured as economic growth).

    Recent advances in thinking have dispelled the idea that per capita GDP is an accurate or adequate measure of progress (although GDP growth remains firmly entrenched as a political priority), and broadened the measures accordingly. For example, the Genuine Progress Indicator, which adjusts the personal consumption component of GDP for a range of factors that GDP ignores or treats inappropriately, tracks GDP from 1950 to the 1970s, then diverges as social and environmental costs increase. However, the alternative indices have not yet gone far enough in allowing, even encouraging, the scrutiny and critical evaluation of modernity itself.

    To the extent that new concepts of development permit more diverse, or more broadly based, forms of development, they still do not capture the depths and complexities of being human and human wellbeing. A fuller accounting demands wholly new models of progress and development. For all the new interest and effort, the work remains constrained by arbitrary disciplinary boundaries; it still falls short of explaining and resolving the inconsistencies and ambiguities that emerge from research, especially when evidence from other scientific disciplines and fields outside indicators research is taken into account. We may be making progress in measuring progress, but we still have a long way to go.

    A critical flaw in equating progress with modernisation is an insufficient acknowledgement of the ‘psychosocial dynamics’ of human societies: the complex interactions and relationships between the subjective and objective worlds that determine qualities such as identity, belonging, purpose and meaning in life, which are so crucial to our wellbeing. Existing measures reflect or capture some aspects of these dynamics, but not enough. This is as true of subjective-wellbeing indicators as it is of other measures.

    Measuring life satisfaction or happiness does not fundamentally alter the dominant view of progress. For example, the correlation between the Human Development Index and the World Happiness Report’s scores is a high 0.77. On the face of it, such associations seem persuasive, but like other indicators, subjective-wellbeing indicators fail to capture fully the psychosocial dynamics of our ways of living. Aspects of subjective wellbeing that remain unresolved or contested in the research literature include: adaptation and homeostatic control, which buffer subjective wellbeing against external circumstances and help to maintain a relatively stable and positive life evaluation; the influence of personal situations compared to social conditions; the ambiguous role of individual freedom in wellbeing; and a cultural bias towards Western societies.

    There are several streams of evidence that expose the limitations of subjective wellbeing, and cast doubt on how we currently conceptualise and measure progress and development. These are: research using wider or more diverse measures of personal health and wellbeing; what people think, not about their own lives, but about the overall quality of life and society as a whole; and people’s views of the future of society and humanity. For example:

    • The great majority of adolescents and young adults in the developed world say they are happy, healthy and satisfied with their lives, and their life expectancy continues to rise. Yet other research indicates their wellbeing has declined because of increased rates of chronic physical and mental illness. A 2010 US study by Jean Twenge and her colleagues compared the results of a widely used psychological test over a period of 70 years, and found a steady decline in the mental health of college students: compared to 1938, five times as many college students in 2007 scored high enough on the test to indicate psychological problems.
    • Australia ranks high in progress indices, including life satisfaction, yet in a 2015 survey, conducted by Omnipoll on my behalf, when asked about quality of life in Australia, taking into account social, economic and environmental conditions and trends, only 16 per cent of Australians thought life was getting better; 35 per cent thought it was staying about the same; and 49 per cent thought it was getting worse.
    • In a 2015 study of ‘societal unease’, Netherlands researcher Eefje Steenvoorden argues that it is ‘a latent concern among citizens in contemporary western countries about the precarious state of society’. This concern arises from the ‘perceived unmanageable deterioration’ of five fundamental aspects of society: distrust in human capability (to make improvements and overcome problems), loss of ideology, decline of political power, decline of community, and socioeconomic vulnerability. Societal unease is only weakly related to happiness, proving, the author says, that personal happiness is clearly distinct from societal unease, and that ‘high levels of private contentment are not to be mistaken for public contentment’.
    • A recent study that I co-authored with Melanie Randle at the University of Wollongong, investigated the perceived probability of threats to humanity in four Western nations: the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Overall, across the four countries, 54 per cent of people rated the risk of ‘our way of life ending’ within the next 100 years at 50 per cent or greater, while 24 per cent rated the risk of ‘humans being wiped out’ at 50 per cent or greater. Three-quarters (78 per cent) agreed ‘we need to transform our worldview and way of life if we are to create a better future for the world’.

    These examples all illustrate the importance of the psychosocial dynamics of progress. Unless we pay more attention to them, we will continue to miss too much of what matters, limiting our options and prospects. We will not be able to devise and implement solutions that match the scale of the problems we face.

    At the deepest level, we need to change the myths, beliefs and values by which we define ourselves, our lives, and our goals. The necessary transformation can be compared to that in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment: from the medieval mind, dominated by religion and the afterlife, to the modern mind, focused on material life here on earth. Research into human development and progress needs to allow, even encourage, the conceptual space for a cultural transformation as profound as that which gave rise to modernity in the first place.

    Richard Eckersley is a director of Australia21, a public-interest, strategic research company. This article draws on a longer paper published this month in the leading international development journal, Oxford Development Studies. For those with subscription access, it is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2016.1166197. An author version is available at: www.richardeckersley.com.au

     

  • Adrian Bauman & William Bellew. Does a spoonful of sugar help the medicine go down?

    “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”, according to Mary Poppins. Many more spoonfuls of sugar currently pervade our lifestyles and unconscious food choices. The recent media focus on sugar has been remarkable, but the media frenzy has sought a single solution, a quick fix, to what is in reality a complex problem: childhood and adult obesity. Rapid increases in obesity rates have occurred since the late 1980s in Australia and in many other countries, and even if starting to plateau, still leaves 63% of adult Australians overweight or obese.

    Sugar is pervasive, not only (as we might expect) in fizzy drinks and sport drinks, but also added to a surprisingly wide range of foods. These include tomato or chilli sauces, muesli bars, as well as many “low fat” marketed foods (some yoghurts for example) which are high in added sugar. But is sugar the culprit? or is it just a marker of a trend towards increased processed food, increased consumption of convenience foods, and acculturation of our taste towards increased salt, increased sugar and increased fat ? All of these contribute to the “wicked problem” of weight gain, exacerbated by decreased physical activity at work and play, and through increased car use to get to or from places.

    But how does all this relate to sugar? A recent commentary in the Sydney Morning Herald (Peter Martin, April 2) called for soft drink taxes to be introduced [i]. The idea is that we all have to eat something, but some foods contain almost exclusively sugar, and soft drinks and so-called sport drinks contain almost nothing else (what nutritionists call “empty calories” as they lack any of the nutrients, vitamins or fibre that other high sugar foods, such as fruit may offer). High levels of consumption of empty calories from sugar sweetened beverages is a clear and independent contributor to weight gain in many epidemiological studies[ii].

    Many arguments are raised against efforts to curb sugar consumption. Firstly beverage manufacturers assure us it is part of a healthy and “balanced” diet. It seems un-balanced if it’s just adding to our total energy intake, and yet corporate marketing portray empty calories as contributors to a glowing lifestyle image and as a metaphor of well-being. One must be cautious of the motivations of the food industry according to Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation. At the 8th Global Cnference of Health Promotion in Helsinki (2013)[iii] she said “it is not just Big Tobacco anymore. Public health must also contend with Big Food, Big Soda, and Big Alcohol. All of these industries fear regulation, and protect themselves by using the same tactics (of) lobbies, promises of self-regulation, lawsuits, and industry-funded research that confuses the evidence and keeps the public in doubt”. They also contribute to the polarised argument between individual choice to consume unhealthy foods, compared to structural, societal and cultural factors that contribute to us doing so. If we accept that we are mired in advertising and cultural depictions promoting unhealthy foods, in sponsorships of major sporting events and of the Olympics, then our cultural milieu is defined by these products. Governments that choose to address the problem this way are accused of “nanny state interventionism”, but it does require complex counter marketing against unhealthy products, facilitating access to affordable healthy choices, and mandating external industry regulation (as the food industry does not self-regulate well, as demonstrated when self-regulation was tried in restricting advertising of unhealthy foods to young children).

    One strategy, suggested by Peter Martin is the introduction of a sugar tax. This will be a differential tax, with the greatest impost on food items with the most sugar, and lesser taxation imposed on foods with less added sugar. This approach has been implemented in Mexico where a 10% tax has resulted in a 12% decline in the consumption of sugar[iv] sweetened beverages. Such taxes have community support and are evidence based[v]. Free-market advocates claim this is unfairly “taxing the poor”, but from a public health perspective targeting those at social disadvantage and targeting children and adolescents are exactly the groups who consume the most sugar sweetened beverages. An even stronger rationale for a sugar tax is that it will generate revenue, just as tobacco taxation has done for several decades. This can fund the substantial government investment required for comprehensive obesity prevention, extending well beyond simply reducing sugar. This could be used to support comprehensive obesity prevention efforts, and are supported by the majority in the community. This is our only chance to build the infrastructure for a healthier community and a healthier food environment in Australia. Thus preventing obesity just won’t happen with any single strategy, and a sugar tax is but one financial mechanism for funding the complex solutions required.

    Finally the problem is not only sugar. The Hippocratic maxim of exercise and diet in moderation still holds, and while the media in faddist fashions present us with new single solutions and quick fixes, a prudent approach would be to eat less overall, eat less fat and less sugar, consume mainly fresh produce and mostly plant-based foods. Diets like the Mediterranean diet show such balance, and combined with more active daily lifestyles (and non-smoking) are the only way to make real improvements to population health.

    Adrian Bauman, School of Public Health and Charles Perkins Centre, Sydney University

    William Bellew is Adjunct Professor, School of Public Health, Sydney University.

    [i] http://www.smh.com.au/comment/obesity-its-time-to-tax-soft-drinks-20160330-gnum4b.html

    [ii] Malik VS et al. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2013;1;98(4):1084-102

    [iii] http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2013/health_promotion_20130610/en/

    [iv] Colchero MA et al British Medical Journal 2016 Jan 6;352:h6704.

    [v] Escobar MA et al. BMC Public Health. 2013 Nov 13;13(1):1.

     

  • John Austen. Grattan Institute on transport projects: a better mousetrap?

    In ‘Road to riches: better transport investment’ the respected Grattan Institute joined commentators, independent authorities and lobby groups in advancing ideas on transport ‘investment’. Like others it proposed publication of assessments for public spending; a better mousetrap to ensnare politically motivated proposals.

    The report proposed a three stage process for government transport ‘investment’:

    1. Spending only after publication, by tabling in parliament, of a benefit-cost assessment;
    2. Spending on all proposals that pass such an assessment;
    3. Independence of spending from Grants Commission processes.

    There is merit in the ideas. There also are pitfalls.

    1. Spending only after publication

    This has already been proposed by various organisations.

    Sensible transport spending choices can be made for many reasons, including ‘political’ ones. At times the electorate might want decisions for reasons other than ‘economic’ criteria set out in assessment manuals. Still, in a democracy it is important for the electorate to know what is done in its name and why.

    The case for parliamentary tabling of assessments is compelling for the Commonwealth after the High Court’s decision in Williams (No. 2). It is less important and more questionable for the states.

    1. Spending on all project proposals that pass such an assessment

    According to assessment manuals an ‘economic’ transport project need not increase GDP, because benefits are often dominated by travel time savings. Investing in all ‘economic’ transport projects would bankrupt Australia.

    Instead of just reducing travel time, transport should increase the ability of communities, particularly those with ingrained disadvantage, to participate in activities enjoyed by the more privileged. Such an accessibility agenda has better prospects for economic growth, fairness and community support than the current travel time paradigm that dominates transport ‘investment’ thinking.

    1. Independence of spending from Grants Commission processes

    The concern is that a state’s gain from Commonwealth transport gifts can be offset by reduced Commonwealth general grants.

    The concern arises when the Commonwealth spends outside the national transport network, hence the issue is network definition. That the current network does not match its description is well known, easily fixed and a national disgrace.

    The ‘problem’ would disappear if the network reflected the Commonwealth’s proper role. In fact, the problem would become a strength; providing Commonwealth and state governments with an incentive to focus on their respective responsibilities.

    Fundamentals

    Behind these specifics are fundamental questions. I become concerned when transport commentary blames politicians but ignores problems that contribute to ‘political’ decisions like:

    • Some published work being embarrassingly wrong;
    • Poor attitudes and discontinuity in transport policy;
    • The wide gap between transport and broader public policy.

    Harsh? Consider a few recent public examples relevant to major investments:

    • The Productivity Commission claimed the national access regime is not intended to apply to roads. The relevant legislation gave roads as one of the two examples of infrastructure covered by the regime;
    • Infrastructure Australia overlooked it’s (offices) own 2013 suggestion that all urban transport projects be tested ‘as if’ there was road pricing;
    • In consecutive years Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics revisions to road data have been nothing less than radical;
    • The High Speed Rail study purported to demonstrate a ludicrous proposition, that demand in the NSW southern highlands would be of the same magnitude as for Newcastle or the Central Coast;
    • Sydney metro apparently forgot the (extraordinary) independent and expert review by Mr Ron Christie AM which warned about the ‘breaks of gauge’ it appears to making.

    Other examples exist, such as reluctance to talk about true national objectives like defence or railway standardisation.

    Given this it would be foolhardy to fund all transport proposals with a published positive economic assessment or that pass other tests administered by bureaucracies.

    That more than just published assessments are needed is the reason for the infrastructure audit recently conducted by Infrastructure Australia. The real problem today lies in identification rather than assessment of investments.

    Stability in political and commercial systems is essential for good investments. In Australia the bedrock for such stability is the Constitution.

    A root cause of problems in Australian governments’ transport investment is a drift away from Constitutional concepts of federalism and separation of powers and instability in the Commonwealth’s ‘role’. That the drift continued under numerous governments suggests it is not the sole fault of politicians. The drift should have stopped with the decision in Williams (No. 2) but continues, unremarked.

    The real need is to improve governance of transport by:

    • Constitutionally faithful roles of: the Commonwealth in transport; the executive and Parliament within the Commonwealth. Professor Saunder’s principles warrant consideration;
    • Publishing (proposed) infrastructure contracts, including those which restrain competition to established or new infrastructure;
    • Applying Government Trading Enterprise reforms and the National Competition Policy to roads;
    • Greater conformance with precepts such as: alignment of responsibility with power; independence of decision making from beneficiaries; public sector as protector of the public interest;
    • Scrutiny of the practices of advisory institutions and departments.

    A discussion on these will not be universally welcomed. However, the Grattan Institute would be helping the community and those in the transport sector by pursuing these deeper questions rather than, like so many others, just refining a mousetrap.

     

    John Austen is a happily retired former official. He was Director of Economic Policy for Infrastructure Australia from its inception in 2008 to his retirement in 2014. Further background is at: thejadebeagle.com.

    References

    Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics, Infrastructure Statistics Yearbooks 2014, 2015.

    Department of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Development, High Speed Rail Study, Phase 2 Report, 2013.

    Independent Public Inquiry into a Long Term Transport Plan for Sydney (Chair Ron Christie AM) Final Report, May 2010.

    Infrastructure Australia, Urban Transport Strategy, 2013.

    Productivity Commission; National Access Regime Final Report, 2013.

    Productivity Commission; Financial performance of government trading enterprises (various).

    Saunders, Cheryl and Crommelin, Michael, Reforming Australian Federal Democracy, University of Melbourne Law School Legal Studies Research paper 711, 2015.

    Terrill, Marion, Roads to riches: Better transport investment, Grattan Institute, April 2016.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Ian McAuley. Are Conservatives better economic managers?

    Here’s a short quiz.

    Over the last fifty years Australia has had 17 federal treasurers. Which two have won the coveted Euromoney “Finance Minister of the Year” award?

    As a memory jogger, below is a list of treasurers in chronological order.

    William McMahon (Lib)
    Leslie Bury (Lib)
    Billy Snedden (Lib)
    Frank Crean (Lab)
    Jim Cairns (Lab)
    Bill Hayden (Lab)
    Phillip Lynch (Lib)
    John Howard (Lib)
    Paul Keating (Lab)
    John Kerin (Lab)
    Ralph Willis (Lab)
    John Dawkins (Lab)
    Peter Costello (Lib)
    Wayne Swan (Lab)
    Chris Bowen (Lab)
    Joe Hockey (Lib)
    Scott Morrison (Lib)

    Keating won it in 1984, in recognition of the government’s role in structural reform, and Swan won it in 2011 in recognition of the government’s deft response to the global financial crisis.

    It would be arrogant (and a violation of the principles of statistical inference) for any partisan commentator to suggest this means Labor outshines the Coalition on economic management. But it is certainly inconsistent with the popular view that the Coalition is more capable of handling the economy than Labor.

    Opinion polls consistently reveal that belief. In early April, even after Treasurer Morrison had paraded his ineptitude on taxation policy, when an Essential poll put the question “Who would you trust most to handle Australia’s economy – the Treasurer Scott Morrison or the Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen?”, Morrison at 26 percent came out ahead of Bowen at 22 per cent. Even more extraordinary was a similarEssential poll in August 2014, just three months after the Coalition’s disastrous 2014 budget, that gave Hockey a score of 34 per cent compared with Bowen’s score of 23 per cent.

    If there were to-and-fro movement in such polls that would be understandable, but that pro-Coalition bias has endured for a long time, and all the major polls give the same ranking on similar questions: the Coalition is consistently seen as better at economic management than Labor.

    There are three possible explanations for such a divergence between popular and expert opinion.

    First, Labor has been in office at the wrong time.

    Labor has a knack of winning government at the wrong time. In 1929 the Scullin Government won office just as the Great Depression was unfolding. In 1972 the Whitlam Government was met with a trifecta of the greatest economic shocks of the postwar era – the 1973 middle east oil embargo, the end of the Bretton Woods exchange rate arrangements, and the severe contraction of the US economy as its military spending (on the Vietnam War) was cut back. And in 2007 the Rudd Government was in office for the other major postwar shock, the global financial crisis. All these three administrations were short-lived.

    By contrast, the Coalition has had extraordinary luck, holding office during the long booms from 1949 to 1972 and from 1996 to 2007. The only time Labor had a similar good run was from 1983 to 2006, but these were not easy times for those whose lives were disrupted by Labor’s reforms, and most of the economic dividends of those reforms were realised during the time of the Howard-Costello Government.

    It’s not surprising therefore that such timing may have led to negative associations with Labor governments and positive associations with Coalition governments.

    We’re now seeing for the first time in many years the Coalition in office in difficult times, and it is telling that it is encountering many of the same problems that bugged the Whitlam, Rudd and Gillard governments.

    Second, many people have a simplistic view of economics.

    Over the last ten years, particularly during the years Abbot was Opposition Leader, the budget balance and public debt have become the almost sole indicators of economic management, as if there is something good about a “surplus” and something bad about a “deficit”. All other economic issues, such as economic structure, and the notion of a government balance sheet with assets as well as liabilities, have been cast aside.

    This narrow construction of economic management results in part from the pervasive doctrines of neoliberalism and “public choice”, which have tended to dominate since 1980.  Their messages are simple: all government expenditure is wasteful, government is just a big bureaucratic overhead, and governments are intrinsically inefficient. If public spending rises for any reason that’s a clear sign of profligacy.

    It is revealing to look at another recent Essential poll that asked the question “Do you think the following groups of people would be better off under a Liberal Government or a Labor Government?” and went on to list 15 groups. Respondents were in no doubt that “large corporations” and “people and families on high incomes” would be better off under a Liberal Government. But “people and families on middle incomes”, “average working people”, “pensioners” and “single parents” would all be better off under a Labor Government.

    These responses reflect a strange understanding of what “economic management” means, as if economics is antagonistic to social objectives of inclusive prosperity, as if what happens in people’s lives doesn’t matter, just so long as indicators such as GDP growth are showing positive values.

    Other polls consistently show people believe Labor governments do better on health and education, but these positive findings don’t change people’s negative perceptions of Labor’s economic management. It’s as if health and education have no economic value.

    Any economic system that does not contribute to human well-being is meaningless, and, indeed, there is no serious economic philosophy, “left” or “right”, that does not see widespread prosperity as a desirable economic objective. (Disagreement is mainly about means.)  To suggest that there has to be some tradeoff between “economic” and “social” objectives makes no more sense than the (probably apocryphal) story from the Vietnam War “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”.

    The Murdoch media, with its partisan bias, hasn’t helped. But neither have economically ignorant and gullible journalists in other media, who too readily accept propositions that there is some tradeoff between “economic” policy and “social” policy, and who look to a few simple fiscal aggregates, such as the budget deficit, as indicators of governments’ economic competence.

    The “left” itself must accept some of the blame for this situation, because so many of its more strident voices have been contemptuous of economics. People like Chris Bowen must come close to despair when he hears some people on the left parade their economic ignorance.

    Third, we think rich people are clever.

    On ABC Radio National Barnaby Joyce, commenting on the upcoming election, quite clearly played to this belief when he said:

    People are going to have a clear choice between someone who has actually made a quid in their life, made a success in their life, which is Malcolm Turnbull, or the nation being run by Bill Shorten.

    That’s it. The rich are rich because they’re clever. In fact, as some followers of John Calvin may assert, their prosperity is testament to moral virtue. They’re respectable people, who know how to run the show. They’re well-spoken and so reasonable, not like the rough and uncouth unionists who turned up at the “’royal” commission into trade unions.

    Like the fool in Shakespeare’s plays, Joyce has said what others prefer to leave below the surface.

    It would be patronising to readers to point out the fallacy in this belief. But it’s important that we recognise its appeal.

    Economic management is difficult. Just as no administration gets everything right, no administration makes a complete mess of it. Some governments enjoy fair weather, some take over the helm in times of tempest. All are seeking much the same ends.  We should be wary of any partisan generalisations about economic competence.

  • Geoffrey Harcourt and Peter Kriesler . The case for taxation.

    We were happy to sign the Australian Institute letter on taxation cuts in the Sydney Morning Herald (12/04/2016).We now would like to set out the general philosophy that lay behind our support.

    We have always argued that taxes have two main functions: first, the relative structure of taxation types and rates should reflect philosophical views on equity as between different groups in society. Secondly, the total tax take should impact on the need to achieve high levels of employment and activity, after taking into account the other main sources of overall demand at any moment of time — expected expenditures on consumption and investment, current and capital government expenditures, and net exports. Meeting these two criteria implies that sometimes the government will be in deficit, sometimes in surplus, so that neither achieving a deficit or a surplus or a balance at a moment in time or over time should be the criterion of fiscal policy, but the residual outcome of attempting to achieve these other fundamental aims.

    The corollaries of this view are, first, that hypothecation — matching particular expenditures with particular sources of finance — is a fallacy. Secondly, that achieving high levels of activity also usually implies agreeable rates of growth over time. This in turn means that even if sustained deficits result in rising debt-to-income ratios, these will not blow out for ever but will usually approach liveable-with debt-to-income ratios. That the budget be required to balance ‘over the cycle’ implies that the economy is a stationary state, i.e., on average the economy neither grows nor declines.

    Thirdly, implicit in this approach is that the total amount of capital expenditure by the government should reflect the longer-term needs of the society, especially the creation of green-friendly infrastructure, and that only in very special circumstances should government capital formation be used to achieve high levels of activity — usually it should be the second function of taxation noted above that should do this. May we add that government expenditure on the disabled, schools and teaching generally, and hospitals and medical care may be viewed as investments which result both in a more agreeable society and a more productive one?

    Finally, a distinction should be made between domestic debt raised in our economy, and overseas debt. Domestic debt requires a transfer between bond holders and taxpayers (of course, they can be overlapping sets) so that the impact on the economy is a secondary one, depending on whether there are great differences at the margin between the saving and consumption behaviour of interest recipients and taxpayers.

    There is a real burden associated with overseas debt — exports will have to be that much higher than they otherwise would have been in order to allow interest and loan repayments to be met. Nevertheless, if the borrowed funds are used wisely to finance productivity-enhancing expenditures, the level of activity would be higher than otherwise would have been the case, so that even after meeting the real burden, society will be better off than it would have been otherwise.

    All these important considerations have been forgotten in the political and other debates over taxation and spending in the last decades.

     

  • Douglas Newton. The hard questions we should face on Anzac Day 2016.

    On Anzac Day 2016, the centenaries of 1916 should loom large. In April 1916, the Australian divisions that had been mauled at Gallipoli were being despatched to the Western Front. The industrialised kill-chain at the Somme awaited them. Other centenary moments from 1916 are coming: of diplomatic deals that escalated the war, and of lost opportunities to end the war.

    The cataclysm of that war for Australians ought to prompt hard questions – beyond the nationalist obsession over whether ‘the mettle of the men’ shone bright on the battlefield.

    Why were Australians so exposed in this protracted catastrophe?

    Because we plunged in, so recklessly.

    From the outset, Australian politicians boasted of their absolute loyalty to the Empire. They offered men without qualification – anywhere, for any objective, under British command. George Reid, Australia’s High Commissioner in London, gushed that Britain and Australia were united, like ‘enraptured lovers’ – ‘Two hearts that beat as one.’[1]

    Prime Minister Fisher told the British Colonial Secretary, in February 1915, that ‘when the King’s business will not fit in with our ideas, we do not press them.’[2] In October 1915, Prime Minister Hughes told parliament: ‘I do not pretend to understand the situation in the Dardanelles, but I know what the duty of this government is; and that is – to mind its own business, to provide that quota of men which the Imperial Government think necessary.’[3] In this spirit of imperial subservience were the men despatched to unimaginable horrors.

    For what purposes were Australian lives committed?

    For noble – and for dubious purposes. The noble were largely window-dressing.

    War aims escalated on every side during 1916. The imperial leaders compiled shopping lists of annexations. In May 1916, Britain and France struck the Sykes-Picot Agreement, planning a carve-up of the entire Middle East. In June 1916, the Inter-allied Economic Conference in Paris confirmed plans to crush Germany, with a post-war economic boycott. In August 1916, Rumania was bribed into entering the war, with the promise of a great slice of Transylvania. These added to the fatal territorial deals struck in 1915, the Straits Agreement with Russia and the Treaty of London with Italy. All such bargains prolonged the war.[4]

    One shell-shocked Anzac from the ‘Abattoirs’ at the Somme, Private E. J. Ryan, captured the soldiers’ disillusionment. In October 1916, he wrote to British Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, urging him to resist the wide-mouthed ‘bitter enders’ and press for negotiations. ‘Has England still got her old ideal, that of Conquer & not the supposed new ideal, one of Peace? … Every man I have spoken to is absolutely sick of the whole business,’ he wrote.[5]

    Why was peace not achieved in 1916?

    Because promising opportunities to end the war by negotiation were stifled.

    In February 1916, Colonel House, US President Wilson’s special emissary, concluded the ‘House-Grey Memorandum’. Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, agreed to invite American mediation at a moment of Britain’s choosing. But Britain never jumped. The ‘bitter enders’ preferred to speculate on more war. Armed with emergency powers, governments everywhere spooked and coerced their populations. Victory, they argued, was indispensable. In truth, reactionaries demanded it, to save as much of the old order as possible.

    But there were always alternatives. Internationalists, radical Liberals, and socialists in every belligerent nation, pressed for negotiations and a new rules-based order. Even Tories tried. In November 1916 Lord Lansdowne challenged British Prime Minister Henry Asquith’s Cabinet: ‘Can we afford to go on paying the same sort of price for the same sort of gain?’ He argued that ‘the responsibility of those who needlessly prolong such a war is not less than that of those who needlessly provoke it.’[6]

    Then, in late 1916 came a chink of light. On 12 December, the Germans offered round-table negotiations; a week later President Wilson issued a ‘Peace Note’, urging all sides to specify war aims, as a prelude to American mediation. The Entente Powers stamped upon the opportunity.

    This year, we should remember all these telling centenaries – not just the bloodbaths at Pozières and Fromelles.

    But what was ‘the Anzac spirit’? 

    The posters proclaim ‘Their Spirit – Our History’. Countless sources testify that the original Anzacs were fiercely democratic and ferociously egalitarian. They hated privilege, defied hierarchy, and mocked inherited advantage. They believed in pooling resources against common dangers. Their spirit was collective – for above all else, they supported each other.

    Do we have a right to invoke ‘the Anzac Spirit’ in contemporary Australia? If we tolerate widening inequality, monstrous private wealth amid public squalor, intensifying social stratification, and weakening social mobility, dare we speak of ‘Their Spirit’? If we pursue a neo-liberal agenda, that preaches an acquisitive individualism, hollows out the public sector, privileges the private provider, relentlessly privatises our pooled resources, and lauds lower taxes as the one true household god – is ‘the Anzac spirit’ alive?

    And the hardest question: if egalitarianism is lost in Australia, what is the point of Anzac?

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, ‘The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014).

    [1] George Reid, ‘Empire Trade’, The Times, 7 Oct. 1914. Reproduced in George Reid, ‘Fifth Annual Report of the High Commissioner of the Commonwealth in the United Kingdom (printed 21 July 1915)’, dated 5 April 1915, in Papers Presented to Parliament, Vol. V, Session 1914-17, p. 247.

    [2] Harcourt cited the letter from Fisher, dated 15 Feb. 1915, in Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th series, vol. 71, 16 (14 Apr. 1915).

    [3] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 29 Oct. 1915, p. 7022.

    [4] Of course, Germany also planned annexations. As Fritz Fischer wrote, ‘all great powers had “annexationist” policies in the age of imperialism.’ Fritz Fischer, ‘Foreword’ to his Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London, 1967), p. x.

    [5] Private E. J. Ryan (Service Number 4635) to Ramsay MacDonald, 16 Oct. 1916, Ramsay MacDonald Papers, PRO/30/69/1160 f. 108 (The National Archives, London). I am very grateful to Duncan Marlor for generously providing a copy.

    [6] Memorandum from Lord Lansdowne, 13 November 1916, Lansdowne Papers, LANS (5) 85/9 (The National Archives, London).

  • David Stephens. How did Canberra get its memorial to Kemal Atatürk?

    The Atatürk Memorial in Anzac Parade, Canberra, was unveiled on Anzac Day 1985. Over the signature ‘Kemal Atatürk’, the memorial bears an inscription which commences like this:

    Those heroes that shed their blood
    And lost their lives …
    You are now lying in the soil of a friendly Country.
    Therefore rest in peace.
    There is no difference between the Johnnies
    And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side
    Here in this country of ours …

    Research by Honest History and its associates shows there is no strong evidence that Atatürk, an Ottoman commander at Gallipoli and the founder of modern Turkey, ever said or wrote these words. This article looks at how Canberra got a memorial including them. It draws upon the files of the then National Capital Development Commission (NCDC).

    In September 1984, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) advised NCDC of a proposal for a commemorative plaque referring to the Australians at Gallipoli. At the same time, discussions were underway about how Australia could reciprocate the Turkish gesture of officially renaming part of the Gallipoli area ‘Anzac Cove’. Calling a stretch of Limestone Avenue outside the Australian War Memorial ‘Gallipoli Avenue’, or perhaps even ‘Atatürk Avenue’, had been suggested but seemed unlikely to satisfy the Turks – or the Memorial, which objected to ‘Atatürk Avenue’.

    After the federal election on 1 December and the Christmas break, things began to move. At the end of January, Prime Minister Hawke’s office (PMO) advised the Turkish Ambassador that Australia was attracted to a proposal that Turkey would provide a brass plaque bearing a depiction of Atatürk’s head and the text in English of his famous saying.

    Soon after, PM&C advised that the prime minister wanted the plaque in place by Anzac Day, NCDC was told that the prime minister’s ‘personal interest’ dictated haste, and the prime minister himself wrote to the responsible minister, Gordon Scholes, asking him to take ‘personal responsibility’ for the project. The Australian War Memorial vetoed putting a plaque next to the Lone Pine in the grounds of the Memorial. (This was because Atatürk was not Australian.) Somehow – NCDC files are unclear on the details – the decision was made to place a plaque – and a memorial – in Anzac Parade.

    The PMO’s January advice hinted at the strong involvement from the Turkish government: it wanted to supply both the likeness of Atatürk for the memorial and the accompanying text. A few days later the Australian Embassy in Ankara advised PM&C that it had seen the Turks’ proposed words and thought they were satisfactory.

    The files do not disclose whether anyone knew the translation they were getting from the Turks had been worked up seven years earlier in an exchange between the Turkish Historical Society and Alan J. Campbell of the Gallipoli Fountains of Honour Committee in Brisbane. They reveal, however, the gradual dropping of the word ‘attributed’, as in ‘words attributed to Atatürk’. When Minister Scholes unveiled the memorial he simply referred to ‘Atatürk’s own moving tribute’. Reciprocity apparently eschewed caveats like this.

    Strike action during March delayed the work and the files include suggestions that the Anzac Day deadline would not be met. Senior NCDC officials speculated that an Anzac Day ceremony might be avoided anyway to avoid upsetting Armenians commemorating the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on 24 April.

    Relying on Ankara added further uncertainty. The Turkish Ambassador was, said PM&C, ‘adamant that his Government provide the plaque(s) for this Memorial’. Atatürk’s bas relief head had still not arrived from Ankara but PM&C were disinclined to press the Ambassador. In early April the head was still absent.

    As it turned out, the memorial was unveiled on schedule on Anzac Day. Questions remain about why the Turks pushed so hard for the project. A partial answer may lie in the Turkish Constitution of 1982, which set up the Atatürk High Institution of Culture, Language and History, incorporating the Turkish Historical Society, ‘to disseminate information on the thought, principles and reforms of Atatürk, Turkish culture, Turkish history and the Turkish language’.

    At a time when Turkish relations with ‘Western’ countries were patchy, there may well have been attractions in using the ‘Atatürk words’ in cultural diplomacy with an American and British ally in the Southern Hemisphere. With Prime Minister Hawke’s strong support a new memorial appeared in Anzac Parade.

    David Stephens is secretary of the Honest History coalition and editor of its website (www.honesthistory.net.au). The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History. A longer version of this article, with links, will appear on the Honest History site.

     

  • Brian Lawrence. Bracket creep and income tax priorities in the May 2016 Budget

    The May 2016 Budget will frame a political narrative about rising average incomes over recent years and the budgetary measures that will ensure that the trend will continue in the next year and beyond. This will occur despite the impact of cuts in Government expenditure over a range of services and cash benefits.

    There are two past Budget documents that summarise this kind of narrative in average living standards over the past two decades:

    • The last Budget of the previous Coalition Government in May 2007 provided a summary of the actual and projected improvements in real disposable incomes over the period 1996-97 to 2007-08, which was the period of Coalition Government. For the single person on Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings (AWOTE), the figure was 25.6%; see 2007-08 Budget Overview, Appendix A, Higher household incomes. In effect, this was the claim for the Coalition years.
    • The last Labor Budget in May 2013 provided a summary of the actual and projected increase in real disposable incomes over the period 2007-08 to 2013-14. For the single person on AWOTE, the figure was 11.8%; see 2013-14 Commonwealth Budget Overview, Appendix C, Helping households with the cost of living. In effect, this was the claim for the Labor years.

    What these figures hide, and the 2016 Budget narrative will also most likely hide, are the respective contributions that wages and the tax system have made to the improvement in the living standards of middle income earners; and the position of those who have fallen behind in these periods of national economic growth. They also hide substantial increases in income inequality affecting large pockets of the population; and they fail to disclose the impact that the tax system is having on income inequality after tax rates are taken into account.

    In the fifteen years since the commencement of the new tax scales which accompanied the introduction of the GST in 2000, AWOTE increased from $798.80 to $1,499.30 per week (November 2000 to November 2015), a very healthy 87.7%; and a figure well in advance of the CPI increase of 48.3% (December 2000 to December 2015).

    That figure of 87.7% is a key figure for the understanding of the current debate about bracket creep.

    Bracket creep has happened when you find that you are paying a higher proportion of your income in income tax, even when your income has moved by the same percentage as other taxpayers. Bracket creep helps the Federal Budget when the percentage collected from income tax on wages rises faster than average wages.

    The period January 2001 to January 2016 has seen some major changes in the income tax system. A comparison between the two dates allows us to compare the impacts of those changes on different income groups; and to consider who has benefited most from a period which has produced claims of structural imbalances in our tax system.

    We must be careful, however, to exclude the effect of the increase in the Medicare Levy on 1 July 2014, from 1.5% to 2.0%, to fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The following figures exclude the Medicare Levy.

    Over the past 15 years the net income from the AWOTE wage has fallen from 78.7% to 78.3% as a result of changes in tax rates and thresholds. This represents a loss of $5.92 per week.

    How have higher income groups fared under the successive tax changes of the last 15 years?

    Consider the position of the taxpayer now on $150,000 per year (almost double AWOTE) who has also received the same 87.7% increase received by the AWOTE employee.   This taxpayer is now paying 30.0% of his or her income in income tax, down from 31.2% in 2001. This represents a tax cut of $64.26 per week.

    For the taxpayer on $300,000 per year who has had the same increases as AWOTE over the past 15 years, the percentage of tax paid has fallen from 39.1% in 2001 to 38.3% in 2016, even after the imposition of the Budget Repair Levy of 2.0% of taxable income in excess of $180,000 per year. This is a tax cut of $46.82 per week.

    The Budget Repair Levy is a temporary measure introduced by the Tax Laws Amendment (Temporary Budget Repair Levy) Act 2014 and associated legislation, and applies in the financial years 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17.

    Without the Budget Repair Levy (of $6,000 per year) the taxpayer on $300,000 per year has had a tax cut of $161.81 per week.

    These high income earners, who have been paying the top marginal rate right through the last 15 years, have benefited from tax threshold changes and tax rate changes for lower incomes, but they have also had the benefit of a fall in the top marginal rate from 47% to 45% during these 15 years. Once the Budget Repair Levy is removed, from 2017-18, the tax cuts for the taxpayer on $300,000 per year will return to $161.81 per week. For every $100,000 above that figure, the tax cut will be $2000 per year or $38.33 per week.

    Higher income earners have done rather better than the average increase in AWOTE. For example, the Fair Work Commission has estimated that, over the decade 2004-14, the real earnings of full time adult non-managerial workers at the 90th percentile increased by more than 10 percentage points over the real increase in the mean earnings of full time adult non-managerial workers; see Chart 8.2, Statistical Report, 18 March 2014.

    At the other end of the income scale is the worker who depends on the National Minimum Wage (NMW) of $656.90 per week. Over the past 15 years the successive wage tribunals have increased the NMW by 64.1%, well short of AWOTE.  Tax cuts at the lower income levels have offset some of this loss. For the NMW worker, the percentage of income tax paid has fallen from 12.7% to 8.9%, which is amounts to a tax cut of $24.89 per week.

    There is an economic case in support of the reduction in income tax on NMW workers: income tax on the NMW effectively raises the costs of employment and, to the extent that wage levels impact on employment, amounts to a tax on employment. There is good reason for the progressive reduction of income tax to zero at the NMW level. Australia has moved in the right direction, but more is needed.

    Even with this tax cut, the NMW worker is still a long way behind the average worker. The NMW and other minimum wage rates have failed to keep up with average wage increases. In 2001 the net wage of the NMW worker was 56.3 % of the net wage of the AWOTE worker. In 2016 the net wage of the NMW worker had fallen to 51.0% of the AWOTE worker, illustrating the increasing inequality of the Australian workforce over the past 15 years. The position is worse for a worker on the base minimum rate set for a trade-qualified worker. That rate (commonly referred to as the C10 rate) has fallen from 65.9% to 58.6%. The Fair Work Commission needs to address the gap between award wages and community wages.

    Since the tax scales were last adjusted for the 2012-13 year, the proportion of tax paid by NMW workers has increased from 8.1% to 8.9%. To eliminate this bracket creep, a tax cut of $5.33 per week is needed.

    The May 2016 Budget should give priority to relieving the bracket creep which has been suffered by low and middle income workers. Compensation for bracket creep is not a real tax cut. There will be no real tax cuts unless bracket creep is removed and the failure to do so will amount to a tax increase. In bringing about a fair outcome, it is clear that the very advantageous position of high income earners, even with the Budget Repair Levy, should be taken into account in the May 2016 Budget and, furthermore, unless and until the bracket creep suffered by low and middle income earners is remedied, there is a case for continuing the Budget Repair Levy on higher income earners beyond 2016-17.

    Wage increases and changing taxation rates

    January 2001 – January 2016

    Lawrence_bracket

    Notes: The Medicare Levy is not included. The figures are calculated on 52.18 weeks per year.

    Tax rates 2000–01

    Taxable income Tax on this income
    $1–$6,000 Nil
    $6,001–$20,000 17 cents for each $1 over $6,000
    $20,001–$50,000 $2,380 plus 30 cents for each $1 over $20,000
    $50,001–$60,000 $11,380 plus 42 cents for each $1 over $50,000
    $60,001 and over $15,580 plus 47 cents for each $1 over $60,000

    Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings, $41,681 per year: tax, $8884.30

    $79,914 per year: tax, $24,939.58

    $159,829 per year: tax, $62,499.63

    Federal Minimum Wage (now the National Minimum Wage) $20,893 per year: tax, $2,647.90

     

    Tax rates 2015–16

    Taxable income Tax on this income
    0 – $18,200 Nil
    $18,201 – $37,000 19c for each $1 over $18,200
    $37,001 – $80,000 $3,572 plus 32.5c for each $1 over $37,000
    $80,001 – $180,000 $17,547 plus 37c for each $1 over $80,000
    $180,001 and over $54,547 plus 45c for each $1 over $180,000

    Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings, $78,233 per year: tax, $16,972.72

    $150,000 per year: tax, $43,447

    $300,000 per year: tax, $108,547.00, plus Budget Repair Levy, $6,000.00

    National Minimum Wage, $34,277 per year: tax, $3,054.63

    Since 2003, Brian Lawrence has been drafting submissions for the National Wage Reviews on behalf of an agency of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, the Australian Catholic Council for Employment Relations. He is an editor of an e-book, Working Australia, 2016;  Wages, Families and Poverty.