Category: Politics

  • John Menadue. The new squatters on public land.

    More alienation of public space.

    In my blog yesterday, I referred to the alienation of public space in Barangaroo and proposed for the Sydney Botanic Gardens.  Today there are reports that Wentworth Park, which is Crown Land, will be developed as a billion dollar residential complex. In a letter to the SMH we are told how Wentworth Park was originally described as ‘the second most beautiful park in Sydney after the Botanic Gardens’. It had lakes, beautiful gardens and a cricket pitch. Unfortunately, it was then converted to a greyhound race track, but elements of the park were still preserved for community use. Even that limited community use is now threatened. It is another example of how our ‘public commons’ is alienated and eroded step by step.  John Menadue.

    Repost of yesterday’s blog

    In my blog of March 11, 2013, reposted below, I outlined the historic encroachment of private interests on our ‘public commons’ – the land and facilities we share as public citizens.

    This encroachment is continuing apace, and not just by the shooters in national parks.

    In Sydney, at present there are two glaring examples of how the new squatters are moving onto public land.

    The first is Barangaroo. Without due process and with political influence writ large, the public commons at Barangaroo has been dramatically reduced in favour of commercial interests. The original plan was to keep about half of the site, including the whole 1.4 km waterfront, as inalienable public land. That has been junked in favour of James Packer’s six-star casino to bring in ‘high rollers’. James Packer is all about gambling. What a tawdry business he offers us. He says he wants to bring in wealthy gamblers from Asia and elsewhere. Paul Keating supported James Packer in this enclosure of our commons. Out has gone the park at the southern end of the site and in its place we have 180,000 square metres of commercial space.

    The original architect of Barangaroo, Philip Thalis, put this invasion of our commons in the following way ‘The vibrant public space envisaged seven years ago has shrunk to become basically an enclave of privilege and exclusion’.

    The other Sydney example of squatter encroachment on public land involves the Sydney Botanic Gardens. For many years part of the gardens has been alienated for four months each year for opera and cinema. Wealthy patrons and wealthy sponsors have been the main beneficiaries. But this isn’t enough for the new squatters. The Botanic Gardens and the Domain Trust have released a master plan for the parks to be developed with cafes, an $80 million hotel and year-round concerts. Paul Keating has rightly called it a desecration of the hallowed grounds bequeathed by Governors Phillip and Macquarie.

    In both Barangaroo and the Botanic gardens, private greed is taking over our public commons and weak politicians are letting it happen. The Murdoch press once again remains mute when the public interest is at stake.

    Steadily and step by step our public commons is being eroded. It won’t be the last time the new squatters want to take over more of our public commons.

    Repost of ‘Shooters – the new squatters on public land’, March 13, 2013.

    In the 18th and 19th Century, wealthy and privileged landowners in England passed Enclosure Acts forcing serfs and the poor off common land which they had used  for centuries to supplement their meagre incomes. About 20% of land in England was enclosed, forcing the poor into squalor in the new industrial cities.

    We followed suit in Australia in the 19th Century with ‘squatters’, mainly from the upper echelons of colonial society, occupying large tracks of crown land to graze livestock. Over time, this pastoral occupation of the ‘commons’ and the dispossession of indigenous people was enshrined in law and enforced by the police. Many indigenous people were murdered while trying to protect their ‘commons’. Few squatters were prosecuted.

    History tells us that we need to be very careful about the powerful who want to take possession and erode our public ‘commons’. It happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, often without our knowledge or understanding of what is at stake.  And it is not just about getting shooters out of national parks or protecting waterfront land without public tender. Councils often carelessly allow commercial interests to encroach on public parks, botanic gardens and beaches. Clean air and water are also important parts of our public “commons” and must be protected against polluters.

    We owe a great debt to foresighted citizens and governments who in the past established public ‘commons’, like national parks, for the enjoyment of all. We need to be careful about the new squatters who want to erode our public ‘commons’.

    John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Using the military for political purposes

    In my blog of March 26 (below) ‘Using the military for political purposes’, I drew attention to three instances in which the Australian Defence Forces have been used, apparently willingly, to support the party-political aims of the government.

    That political support has now been stepped up several notches by the comments of the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders, Angus Campbell, on a government television advertisement.

    In a series of government advertisements on U-Tube, Angus Campbell, standing next to a sign ‘No way’ says ‘The message is simply, if you come to Australia illegally by boat there is no way you will ever make Australia home.’  Angus Campbell then adds ‘The Australian Government has introduced the toughest border protection measures ever … it is the policy and practice of the Australian Government to intercept any vessel that is seeking to illegally enter Australia and safely remove it beyond our waters.’

    In this government advertisement General Campbell goes far beyond operational responsibility for government policy. He has allowed himself, apparently willingly, to become an arm and an advocate for the government’s political policies.  John Menadue

    Repost follows.

    On March 20 guest blogger Susie Carleton drew attention to the blanket acceptance of accounts by our service people in treatment of asylum seekers despite the record, according to former Defence Minister Stephan Smith of 2000 incidents of mis- treatment within the military itself including sexual abuse.

    Last night’s 7.30 ABC program lent more credibility in my mind to the allegations against our service personnel in their treatment of asylum seekers.

    We need to examine carefully what our military is doing.

    In my blog of March 5 ‘The war on asylum seekers’, I drew attention to the misuse of the Australian military in Operation Sovereign Borders. That military style operation gives the impression that we are really being threatened and invaded and that our response to asylum seekers must be regarded as a military challenge. Operation Sovereign Borders also gives the government a threadbare excuse that the public is not entitled to be told what is really happening. ‘On water’ issues will not be discussed. The language is also about war. Tony Abbott told us that we are being invaded by boat people. Scott Morrison said that the government is ‘Using the full arsenal of measures’ to stop the boats. What should be a humanitarian issues backed by action by Customs and Immigration has become a war. Governments have used ‘the war on terrorism’ as an excuse for limiting our freedoms, ignoring our rights to information and exciting xenophobia. The same approach is now being made with the war on asylum seekers.

    Unfortunately, the Australian Defence Force is allowing itself to be drawn into this abuse of their real responsibility. They have allowed themselves to become part of a political cover-up in their involvement in Operation Sovereign Borders.

    But this misuse of the military by the government and the complicity of the military is not restricted to Operation Sovereign Borders. As reported in the Hobart Mercury of March 14, the Defence Chief David Hurley rebuked the Palmer United Party Senator-elect Jacqui Lambie. Jacqui Lambie, a ten-year military veteran, said ‘It’s clear from information that’s become public, and information received privately, that abuse, including sexual abuse in Australia’s Defence forces is an intractable problem’. She added that there was a ‘high level and poisonous culture of cover-up within Defence that has stopped abuse victims speaking out’. She was publicly rebuked by General Hurley in a letter in which he said that he was ‘alarmed’ by Ms Lambie’s use of emotive language to make accusations against senior military officers. He added ‘I encourage you in future to provide me an opportunity to address any matters of concern you may have rather than becoming aware of them through a media release. Ms Lambie reacted and accused General Hurley of using ‘patronising and condescending’ language. She said ‘For the head of Australia’s military, uninvited, to interfere with the public work of a democratically elected representative, attacks the very foundation of our system of democratic government’. General Hurley obviously thinks that ex-military people, particularly women, are fair game. The Minister for Defence has said nothing.

    Not to be outdone by this bullying and abuse by General Hurley, Tony Abbott decided that he would join in during the South Australian election campaign. A Liberal Party banner was displayed at a Liberal campaign event at an RAAF base at Edinburgh. When this politically partisan act occurred on a military base, with the inappropriate use of the military, Tony Abbott’s office said there was no problem and the Defence minister avoided the issue by saying that he was away.

    If the ADF continues to allow itself to be drawn into political partisanship as in Operation Sovereign Borders, the Tasmanian election and the South Australian election, Australia and the ADF will pay a heavy price. The ADF is a creation of the Australian government. It must act honourably and miscreants brought to account. It must never be part of a party-political operation. The ADF must never identify itself with the Liberal Party or any other party.

     

  • John Menadue. Tony Abbott in Japan

    Tony Abbott has just completed his visit to Japan. The media has been full of  stories about the improvement particularly in agricultural exports from Australia to Japan. It should all be taken with a grain of salt. There have been some improvements particularly for our beef exports but the hype and spin does not obscure the fact that the so-called deal in Japan is only of marginal benefit.It is a third rate result. The best result would be a multilateral result. The second best result would be unilateral tariff reductions. Bilateral  Free Trade Agreements are third rate.

    In my blog of March 29, I pointed out that the proposed FTA with Japan was more about hype than substance. I pointed out how FTAs are regarded as sub-optimal; they divert trade from one partner to another rather than create new trade; FTAs invariably benefit the larger and stronger partner in any negotiation, e.g. USA, Japan and China; they increase the cost of doing business because of complex ‘rules of origin’; most importantly they divert time and energy of governments, ministers and officials, from the more important issues of multilateral negotiations which, for us, as a small to medium size country is more likely to serve our interest.

    The best way for Australia to secure freer trade is through multilateral negotiations rather than through hyped-up bilateral FTAs that are held up as political trophies when in fact they don’t achieve much of substance.

    It is significant that the Abbott Government has now called this new arrangement with Japan an ‘Economic Partnership Agreement’ (EPA) and not an FTA. This suggests that there is now at least some understanding by the government that this agreement is not very much about free trade.

    The business editor of the AFR, Alan Mitchell, yesterday put the problem of bilateral arrangements succinctly. ‘Both nations [Japan and Australia] deny their economies the bulk of the benefits of genuine trade reform whilst they spoon out market access to one trading partner after another in stupid, long drawn out negotiations.’

    In the short term we will get some advantages over other food exporters to Japan, but there is no doubt that other food exporters to Japan, and particularly the US, will seek similar or greater concessions from Japan. As a result our short-term benefits will be largely eroded.This will happen in two to three years when the Trans Pacific Partnership promoted by the US is expected to take effect. We have a  brief window of opportunity.

    The TPP negotiating group includesUS, Japan, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico and Vietnam.

    The President of the National Farmers’ Federation of Australia, Brent Finlay, said that the EPA had fallen short in several respects. At best it only marginally improves for dairying, sugar, grains, pork and rice.

    The Cattle Council President of Australia, Andrew Ogilvie, expressed disappointment ‘that substantial tariffs will still exist on Australian beef’. The tariff reductions on beef are useful but they will not be fully implemented for up to 18 yeas.

    There will be a 5% tariff reduction in Japanese autos exported to Australia, which should result in some reduction in the price of Japanese cars in Australia. But with the end of our own car manufacturing industry, it was only a matter of time before this 5% tariff was abolished on all car imports and not just from Japan.. We could do it unilaterally. It really is not a significant concession to Japan.

    The Abbott Government has criticised the Gillard and Rudd Governments for the delay in completing an FTA/EPA with Japan. That is not surprising in lieu of the fairly meagre benefits from the present negotiations. Shinzo Abe was probably anxious to collaborate with his conservative colleague, Tony Abbott, but our Prime Minister severely weakened Australia’s stand by flagging in advance how desperate he was to conclude an FTA.That is a strange way to conduct negotiations.

    The broad outline of the agreement with Japan will now need to be ‘lawyered’. There may yet be important details that will be revealed.

    Apart from the trading and economic discussions, Tony Abbott referred to a shared commitment by the two countries to ‘democracy, freedom and the rule of law’. He also said that the relationship was about ‘respect, it’s about values’. Tony Abbott indicated approval for Japanese Government’s plans to reinterpret the pacifist constitution of Japan. At least in the media reports there was also no mention of the issues that Shinzo Abe has been promoting which have inflamed attitudes in the Republic of Korea and China. There is no indication that Tony Abbott raised Shinzo Abe’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine, ‘comfort women’ and acknowledgement of the massacre of Chinese by the Japanese army.

    Time will tell whether this FTA/EPA with Japan is as unhelpful as the 2004 bilateral Trade Agreement that John Howard negotiated with the US and concluded despite the advice of officials that he should not sign. It turned out to be a dud.

    Tony Abbott is the Chair of the G20. He could use that position and influence to restart the DOHA round of multilateral trade negotiations that have been stalled for years. It is in multilateral trade negotiations where Australia’s interests are best served – not in a string of bilateral FTAs that have more hype than substance. They will not “turbo charge” our trade with Japan as out Trade Minister has suggested.

  • Kieran Tapsell. Two empires.

    Antonio Caballero, Semana, Colombia, 30 March 2014  http://www.semana.com/opinion/articulo/antonio-caballero-dos-imperios/381891-3

    Barack Obama is normally very careful in his rhetoric, but some days ago, he said something a little unfortunate. When criticizing Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, he said to the press: “We (the United States) have considerable influence on our neighbours. But generally, we do not need to invade them to enforce their cooperation.”

    Generally? In its brief history of a little more than two centuries, the United States has invaded its neighbours on the American continent twenty nine times, beginning with its defeat in attempting to annexe Canada in 1812 (although even before that it had been casting its eye on Mexico and Haiti after its slave revolution).  It was distracted for a period while it exterminated its internal enemy, the Indian tribes. Then it was full bore ahead.

    After the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, the divine right of the United States to govern the whole hemisphere, its first big invasion was of Mexico in 1846, adding another fifty percent to its territory (now Texas and California). In 1855, it occupied Nicaragua to re-establish slavery there as well as in the territory of its neighbours, Salvador and Honduras. Then there was Cuba in 1898, and then the conquest of Puerto Rico and the far away Philippines in the Spanish American war. Then Panama in 1903 and the Dominican Republic in 1904. Then in 1906, Cuba once again, Panama again in 1908, and in 1910, back into Nicaragua.

    The United States invaded another country almost every year from 1911 to 1927, occupying permanently or temporarily parts of Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Honduras and Nicaragua. Then they had a breather until 1954 when they invaded Guatemala. Then there were fleeting invasions through the agency of other people, like the anti-Castro Cubans in 1961, financed by the CIA or the military coups in Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala, Bolivia and the very bloody one in Chile in 1973, organized by the Secretary of State, Kissinger, and then there was the support for the Argentinean generals, the invasion of the little island of Granada in 1983, and the bombing of Panama City in 1989.

    None of this takes into account the invasions of other countries in other continents, in Europe, Asia and Africa, and, as President Obama says, to “enforce the cooperation” of the people they invaded. And that is not taking into account their hundreds of military bases, just as Russia has in Sebastopol, in the recently annexed or rather re-annexed Ukrainian peninsula of the Crimea.

    President Obama, so well educated in the best Universities, does not know his own country’s history.  Or, it is not so much that he is ignorant, but he does not want to acknowledge it. It is not only part of his indispensable presidential function to tell lies, but it also comes from his puritanical education in hypocrisy.

    The United States has never seen itself as an empire, and for that reason it allows itself the luxury of condemning the imperialism of other empires in the name of liberty. Russia, on the other hand, brutally boasts about having been an empire for centuries, and it aspires to continue being so. For that reason, its president, Vladimir Putin says that “the courage of the Russian soldiers has brought the Crimea into the Russian empire.” And he is referring back to the wars of Catherine the Great, who has that name because of her wars.

    Russia and the United States are two empires, which, during the Cold War ended up enjoying hegemony over their respective halves of the world. But the collapse of communism has removed their masks to show them up as nakedly imperial. Russia cannot pretend that it is promoting a socialist revolution anymore, and the United States cannot pretend that it is the defender of liberty. Each of them is reduced to promoting and defending their respective interests.

    How? Through what Obama calls “cooperation”. That is to say, through the use of force, the same thing for which he criticizes Putin.

    Guest blogger, Kieran Tapsell, drew my attention to some good writing from Colombia on issues of international importance. Kieran is a Spanish translator. I hope you enjoy something a little different.  John Menadue

  • Michael Sainsbury. Tables have turned on China’s ex-security chief

    The imminent purge of Zhou Yongkang, China’s security chief from 2007 to 2012, brings to mind that wonderful Chinese expression: “The fish rots from the head down”.

    Since the major clearout after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Zhou is now the most senior Communist Party official to be fingered by its internal affairs division, the Central Discipline Committee. He is the first former member of the elite Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) to be cast out by the Party. His case has implicated a reported 300 allies and relatives with total assets of US$14.5 billion.

    Zhou is the star victim of Chinese leader’s Xi Jinping’s showy, constantly publicized anti-corruption campaign. Zhou’s trial will be all about money and corruption, designed to showcase that Xi Jinping the reformer – who has promised to catch ”tigers” like Zhou as well as “flies”(lesser officials) is cleaning house in a ruthless and spectacular way – and at least officially – for all the right reasons. His campaign is the biggest in China’s history, yet it is destined to head precisely nowhere without political reform.

    China must start at the very beginning with the establishment of rule of law, independent institutions such as the judiciary and financial regulators, as well as de-politicizing the police force and armed services. But Xi has already very clearly ruled that out.

    Really, this is all about politics. In one way Zhou, the stony faced veteran of the oil and gas industry – his power base – was unlucky to be on the wrong side of the ledger when Bo Xilai, the former Politburo chief, went down in a mess of lurid tales of infidelity, poisoning and – yes – more corruption. Zhou wanted to back Bo into his old job but Xi cut it from the PBSC, which he trimmed from nine under Hu Jintao to just seven.

    Yet Zhou’s fall has, more than many who have simply fallen to internal politics, been apposite. He was the prime mover behind the overriding policy of the Hu regime’s “stability maintenance”, a euphemism for crushing protest and dissent by any means possible.

    Simply put, Zhou is a mass murderer. On his watch, thousands of people were executed by China’s pretence of a legal system, where judge, jury, prosecutors and police are presided over by the Communist Party’s Legal and Political Bureau, which he chaired during Hu’s regime.

    We will never have any clue as to how many more Chinese citizens were knocked off by the country’s terrifying State Security Bureau, the country’s feared secret police who operate in a government-sanctioned zone of extralegal kidnapping, torture, evidence fabrication and murder.

    Zhou has fallen victim to the same due process-free sham. He was last seen in public on October 12, after which Xi is reported to have ordered an investigation of him and his cronies. Under Zhou’s leadership, countless people were jailed without fair trial, and on the basis of flimsy or doctored evidence and with pre-ordained results. Let’s see how he likes it once he is on the other side of the fence, handcuffed and manacled – guilty until you are found guilty.

    It’s interesting that Jiang Zemin, who backed Xi as leader and was the man at the nation’s helm for 13 years (1989-2002) as China’s crony capitalism flourished, was reported in the Financial Times this week to have urged Xi to tamp down his anti-corruption drive. No surprises there. After all, no one wants the other old blokes in their weekly card game in some swanky state-owned palace locked up.

    Another of Zhou’s notable achievements in his reign of terror was presiding over the oppression of minorities and government critics. Together with Hu Jintao, Zhou was chiefly responsible for the post-July 2009 campaign of terror and oppression (and cultural destruction) waged against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. It continues today – as does the ongoing oppression and cultural destruction of Tibet.

    Zhou persecuted without fear or favor campaigners for all manner of basic human rights. Just to take a couple of examples, religious practitioners – in particular, “underground” evangelical Christians – and people living with HIV caused by government officials knowingly buying infected blood and supplying it to hospitals.

    Zhao locked up Chen Guangcheng, a blind advocate for the ending of state-sanctioned forced abortions and sterilizations. As soon as he came out in protest, he and his family were put under particularly oppressive house arrest until his miraculous escape to the US embassy in Beijing and later his emigration to the US.

    More generally, Zhou presided over a system that persecuted any advocates for peaceful and gradual change of a system that allows all of the above (such as incarcerated Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo). Anyone operating in that dangerous grey zone could get that knock on the door from one of Zhou’s boys any time, any day. It was not just these people that Zhou set out to destroy but their partners, children and parents.

    Thousands of hard working business people who had the misfortune to cross the financial interests of a Party member suffered helplessly as years – sometimes decades – of hard work was destroyed or confiscated, all on Zhou’s say-so.

    On Zhou’s watch the size of China’s domestic security surpassed at least officially that of the People’s Liberation Army. That in itself speaks volumes about both the repression in Communist China and how long the Party can hold on.

    By pulling off this long expected but as yet not officially announced removal of a Party member previously considered untouchable, Xi has stamped himself as China’s most powerful leader since at least Deng Xiaoping. He’s made some progress (The destruction of Zhou is not progress; in fact, quite the opposite. It is reminiscent of Mao’s own purges.) but the jury is still very much out on whether he will wield power wisely.

    For all of Xi’s boasting about the campaign against corruption, as long as the Party remains in control it will continue on its paranoid, willful and violent way. Zhou in many ways is the ultimate product of a system whose biggest threat is the very system it created.

    The vilification of Zhou will be directed by the Propaganda Department in China’s state-run press, which once lavished Zhou with gushing praise. Now when you read eye-popping tales of 30-car garages, bulging Swiss bank accounts, villas worthy of America’s antebellum South and the endless stream of perfumed mistresses decked out in designer Versace, remember that Zhou, like others who were singled out for destruction before, was hoisted on his own petard.

    Then spare some time to think about his victims – casualties of a rotting Party that encourages and sanctions evil people like Zhou Yongkang in order to continue to serve more of the same. Don’t for a moment think that this has anything to do with the people.

    Michael Sainsbury is a Bangkok-based journalist and commentator who writes for www.ucanews.com

     

  • Ben Saul. Australia’s Guantanamo problem.

    Ben Saul has written an article for the New York Times about the imprisonment of 52 people in Australia for up to nearly five years without trial. Secret evidence has been presented against them. They have no prospect of release. 

    Read the full article from the New York Times by following the link below.

    Ben Saul is Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney.

    John Menadue

     

    http://sydney.edu.au/news/law/436.html?newscategoryid=64&newsstoryid=13274

  • Ian McAuley. Inequality in Australia.

    A Financial Review article on March 24 claimed “Inequality in Australia has not deteriorated over the last 25 years, according to Reserve Bank of Australia research that undermines claims the gap between rich and poor has worsened”

    The essence of the argument is that while, between 1993-94 and 2009-10, the distribution of income has become more unequal, we have all increased our consumption – what we spend on food, transport, housing health care, recreation etc – by the same amount. Therefore we aren’t becoming more unequal.

    The argument is superficially credible, but it’s a sloppy piece of journalism.

    For a start, the relevant Reserve Bank article, “The Distribution of Household Spending in Australia” in the latest Bulletin, is a carefully qualified study, and in relation to the change in consumption over the 16 years (not 25 years) to 2009-10 it concludes:

    “The top 10 per cent of spenders have experienced slightly faster growth in real consumption than other households over recent decades, though the difference in growth is less pronounced than in the case of income.”

    That is, even when consumption is used as a measure of wellbeing, there has been a rise in inequality. That is easily confirmed by comparing the 1993-94 and 2009-10 ABS Household Expenditure Surveys, which shows, in real (CPI-adjusted) terms, that the highest income fifth of households increased their consumption by 41 per cent, the middle fifth increased theirs by 32 percent, and the lowest fifth by only 19 per cent.

    Second, as the RBA article points out, “consumption is not a complete measure of wellbeing”. One reason is that household expenditure statistics cover only what we spend from our own pockets, and do not include our enjoyment of publicly-provided services such as health care and education. If we spend more on these services because we believe, rightly or wrongly, that the quality or scope of publicly-provided services has deteriorated, then we can hardly be said to be better-off.

    For example, between 1994 and 2010, the proportion of Australians with private health insurance rose from  36 per cent to 45 per cent, and between 1996 and 2010 the proportion of students in non-government schools increased from 29 per cent to 34 per cent. Household expenditure data shows that for the households in the middle income band 14 percent of their increase in expenditure was for education and health care, but for the highest income households health and education took only 11 per cent of their increased expenditure. The well-off already had private health insurance and children in private schools.

    Third, while most economists agree that over the long term consumption is a reasonably good measure of material wellbeing, the compelling reality is that it has to be financed. Therefore if consumption and spending diverge for a period, it must be financed by borrowing or running down saving.

    Robert Reich and other American economists point out that in the USA, while real incomes for all but the rich have stagnated or fallen for many years, people have maintained or improved their living standards by going further into debt. Australia’s situation is  similar but a little more complex. Around 2002 we stopped running down our savings and started saving again.  Our officially-measured savings rates in 1994 and 2010 were much the same, at around 10 percent of income. But those figures do not show the increasing tendency over that period to draw on increasing equity in our houses through financial innovations such as mortgage re-draw facilities. Our house price boom allowed us to use our houses as ATMs, a phenomenon eloquently described by a young man caught by a roving microphone on the evening of Howard’s 2004 election victory, who said.  “Of course I voted for Johnny Howard. When he was elected my house was worth only $200 000; it’s now worth $500 000.  Why wouldn’t I vote for someone who’s made me $300 000 richer?”

    That debt, financed by illusory wealth, eventually catches up with us. Indeed, in recent years (since 2009-10) it has been manifest in widespread complaints about the cost-of-living.  Work by Tim Soutphommasane of Per-Capita and research I have done for The Centre for Policy Development shows that although incomes have been rising faster than prices, Australians generally believe it is getting harder to make ends meet.  The most compelling explanation for this apparently contradictory finding is that we are at last finding that we have been living beyond our means.

     

  • John Menadue. Citizenship and shared experience.

    The recent decision by the NSW Government to evict pensioners and low-income tenants from the Rocks in Sydney highlighted for me the importance of mixed communities and shared experiences.

    We all benefit in society when we have shared experiences. We can then get to know other people’s aspirations and their problems. We invariably find that we have much more in common than we think. We benefit both as individuals and as a society.

    Why should only one part of society, the wealthy, enjoy harbour views? Why should a mixed community that has lived for so long in one area be destroyed with low-income tenants forced out whilst the wealthy join other wealthy to enjoy harbour views and the attractive lifestyle that goes with the Rocks.

    In shared experiences we are drawn in two ways. One inclination is to live in pleasant and attractive areas that are often composed of people like ourselves with the same incomes and even the same ethnic backgrounds. But we also know that we benefit from shared experiences with people who are different. Our most important shared and common experiences are in times of natural disaster – bushfires and floods which tear away social class. We are in the emergency together and we find great satisfaction in banding together. Many older Australians recall the common hardship of the Depression, the War and rationing. For Britishers, the bombings and air raid shelters brought people to a ‘common experience’. Despite the hardships and the danger, there was satisfaction in those common experiences. The fabric of society and trust in each other was strengthened.

    As Ian McAuley in ‘Dissent’, November 2012, has pointed out, the British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall wrote in 1949 about ‘common experience’ as an essential ingredient for good citizenship. This common experience is a richer notion than social inclusion. Unfortunately social exclusion by the wealthy is becoming as serious a problem as social exclusion of the poor.

    It is not just the Sydney Rocks that is being pulled apart. Our health and education institutions discourage the mixing of social groups and denying common experience.

    Ian McAuley points out that government subsidies to private health insurance discourages the well-off in the use of public hospitals. Because PHI, particularly for people on the high tables, is used almost entirely to fund treatment in private hospitals, government policy subsidises a form of social exclusion and discourages common experience. It also encourages many articulate people to opt out of support for public hospitals knowing that when they need hospitalisation, they can turn to private hospitals.

    The trend in the denial of common experience is even more obvious in education. In the 1950s, 75% of Australian children attended public schools. Most of the other 25% went to Catholic schools which had a similar social, if not religious, mix as public schools. Now only 65% of students attend public schools. This trend is even more pronounced in secondary schools where just over 60% of secondary school students are in public schools. This proportion is even lower in early grades of secondary school. And this trend away from common experience in public schools is accelerating despite the fact that there is no evidence that private education secures better outcomes. It will take many decades of Gonski to reverse the unfortunate and divisive trends that are occurring. Common experience in schools is being eroded.

    As more and more middle class and articulate parents opt out of public education, a tipping point will arise where it will be hard to ensure public support for public schools. That tipping point is approaching

    Just as the government subsidies to PHI has driven social exclusion in hospital use, so in education government funding is being skewed in favour of the privileged in private schools. The concept of common experience is being steadily eroded.

    We are also seeing this denial of common experience in our built environment. In my blog of November 28, 2013 “there goes the neighbourhood” I drew attention to the way that some communities are being sundered by the wealthy excluding themselves from common experience. They have private pools within minutes of superb public beaches, private entertainment systems, high walls,roller doors and CCT to keep themselves from a common experience with neighbours. Even when public transport is reasonably available, children get driven to school in private cars.

    It is claimed that these developments in our health and educational institutions and in our built environment is justified on the grounds of choice. But choice is often a one-way street available only to those with high incomes. What choice do the low income tenants in the Rocks have about where they are going to live?

    We all know that common experience in national disasters and volunteering brings a sense of togetherness, community and shared humanity. We must nurture institutions that promote sharing and common experience. The most critical is shared experience in schools and education.

    We need institutions and a built environment that cut through social class. That is the path to shared experiences.

    The more we turn our back on common experiences the more our citizenship and society is impoverished.

  • Kerry Murphy. To Kill a Mockingbird and 2014.

    Mark Twain is quoted as saying that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.  I was reminded of this when seeing the excellent production of To Kill a Mockingbird at the New Theatre in Newtown, Sydney last week.  Good literature manages to make us reflect on our own times, and challenges us to think about how we might act in difficult times.

    Harper Lee’s 1960 novel is well known and is a modern classic.  The seemingly simple story of young Scout and her brother Jem, and their widower lawyer father in 1935 Alabama still resonates with an Australian audience in 2014.

    The community attitudes on race we would think are unacceptable in 2014, however it was only a week ago that the Attorney-General told the Senate that there was a ‘right to be a bigot’.   A ‘rhyming Twanian’ theme would be the vilification of those arriving by boat and the increasingly harsh way they are treated, under both Labor and the Coalition.  In To Kill a Mockingbird we can feel for Scout’s father Atticus, the lawyer defending a black man on a charge of rape of a white woman.  Like young Jem, we ask how could the jury possibly find him guilty on that evidence.

    In the New Theatre production, the jury is the audience and we are challenged to face and reflect on our own fears and prejudices in 2014 Australia, just as Atticus challenged the jury in the 1935 story.  How do we come out of this challenge?

    Atticus tells Jem and Scout to ‘spend time in the skin or shoes of the other’ so they can understand that person. This is a challenge for us in 2014.  What if we spent time in the shoes of an Aboriginal who was discriminated against because of their race or colour, or an asylum seeker who was vilified because of how they arrived in Australia fleeing the feared persecution.   Would we so easily say there was a ‘right to be a bigot’ or that ‘illegals’ should be locked away in Pacific penal colonies?

    Lee’s 1960 story of a small town trial in 1935 Alabama resonated as much with the 1960s in the US as it does with Australia in 2014.  The play was well produced and a simple and effective set added to, rather than distracted from the story.  9 year old Teagan Croft stole the show in her confident and credible Scout.  Ably supported by 14 year old Hudson Musty as Jem and 12 year old  Kal Lewins as Dill.  Lynden Jones ably portrayed the genuinely good character of Atticus the lawyer, who had to explain to his children the bigotry of the town against his client just because of his colour.  As good as Lynden was, I still think of Gregory Peck in the 1962 film.

    Revisiting this timeless tale gives a chance to reflect on whose shoes we should stand in to understand them better.  It is easy to preach or pontificate about the inflationary vilification and appalling treatment of asylum seekers in Australia, but like Scout and Jem, I need to stand in the shoes of the others.   What makes people so prejudiced against asylum seekers?  Why does the Attorney-General think there is a right to be a bigot?  Understanding their position will help me better explain my position and views.  I just wish they were able to stand in the shoes of the other as well, and maybe their bigotry and fear would diminish.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in Immigration and Refugee Law.

    The play is at New Theatre until 19 April http://newtheatre.org.au/whats-on/season-2014/to-kill-a-mockingbird/

  • Mack Williams. Abbot’s visit to Korea not all about trade!

    As Tony Abbott’s first time to South Korea (ROK) as Prime Minister this visit carries much more importance than the mercantilist hype in which it  has been cloaked. It will certainly will be seen through a much larger prism by his hosts – and their brothers across the border. The Korean peninsular is of fundamental strategic importance to Australia as the only place in the world where the national interests of the all major powers intersect and the potential for conflict remains so high. The mozaic  of all these interests is extremely complex,  demanding close and continuing interest of the highest order and very sensitive management on our part –  as the Prime Minister and his team should have learned from the instant and robust reaction not only from China but also the ROK to his incautious remarks about Japan being Australia’s best friend in the region. This visit offers him the opportunity to appreciate this kaleidoscope of challenges at first hand.

    Both Japan and the ROK are alliance partners of the US but they often sing from very different hymn sheets – usually to the chagrin of the US as witnessed by President Obama’s very public efforts at the recent summit in The Netherlands to initiate and chair the first face to face meeting between Prime Minister Abe and President Park. Likewise, on many issues the ROK is more comfortable with China than it is with Japan. As their country has been a battlefield for centuries between China and Japan, Koreans have learned more about managing relations with both than any other country and have much wisdom to offer at a time when the rest of the world is beginning to focus on the looming strategic shifts in the region

    North Korea , of course, remains a constant threat not only to the ROK but to the region and the world more widely. ROK views on and policies towards the DPRK are naturally far more complex than media headlines would suggest – and often more sophisticated. This links directly into the ROK relationship with the US which is often quite sensitive. Australia would do well to understand much better these shades of difference and bear them in mind in forming our own policy towards the DPRK.

    There have been some notable occasions when Australia and the ROK have worked very closely together on regional and international initiatives :for example,  Hawke and his Korean counterpart with the foundation of APEC, Rudd and his counterpart with the development of the G20. But the Middle Power vision of the two countries in the region , along with Indonesia and others, has often been mooted but never taken off. It could be timely to revisit the concept in discussions with President Park.

    Given the welcome progress on the FTA after so many years in the making and  the extraordinary size of the travelling business retinue some of the hoopla is understandable. But there is still some way to go before its outcomes can be reasonably quantified. It will make little if any impact on the big hitters of Australian exports to the ROK whose business is well established and working well on a market basis with what is a remarkably globalised Korean economy. Last year we enjoyed a $ 10 billion trade surplus with our exports to the ROK twice the value of their exports to us. In any event Korean business culture is such that touring spectaculars seldom lead to instant match-making. Sustained engagement through personal networking remains essential. Even door opening for groups of this size becomes very problematic.

    Our agricultural exports should gain benefit from the FTA but the floodgates are unlikely to open wide – especially in beef which has been so contentious for decades. The services sector should also benefit. The most obvious Korean gain will be the removal of the 5% tariff on cars which has disadvantaged Korean manufacturers to cars from Thailand.

    In his recent Asia Society promo of the North Asia tour Abbott is “hoping” that the FTA will be signed while he is Korea. The uncertainty is generated by the lengthy translation of the volumes of paperwork involved. The Korea US FTA several years ago failed so badly in translation – sparking over 300 cases in Korean courts and real tensions between Seoul and Washington.

    After signature the formal approval of the FTA by both parliaments will be needed before implementation. On the Korean side this will be no cake-walk especially in the very sensitive agricultural area. Democracy is very much alive and well in Korea and they have a higher proportion of rural electorates than Australia. Given the outstanding success of cooperatives in the ROK, rural voters are largely small and ageing farmers not rapacious landlords or agribusiness. The Korean government may wait for the signature of FTA’s currently in negotiation with Canada and New Zealand to present all three as a package to the National Assembly.

    Mack Williams is a former Australian Ambassador to the Republic of Korea.

  • Walter Hamilton. The guts of a Free Trade Agreement with Japan.

    Dolphin-culling and free trade agreements represent opposite sides of the coin of the relationship between Australia and Japan. Both are currently in the news, with Sea Shepherd activists hounding the fishermen of Taiji (where the documentary ‘The Cove’ was filmed) and Australian cattle producers in Tokyo trying to break down the last obstacle to a bilateral FTA. More than that, the two issues encapsulate the divided response among many in the West to Japan as a backward and insular nation, on the one hand, and a modern, global partner on the other.

    Years ago I visited the island of Iki, off the coast from Nagasaki in western Japan, to report on the practice of ‘drive hunting’ of dolphins, the same culling method used by fishermen at Taiji to reduce the natural competition for a diminishing fish stock. The founder of Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson, had been in town a fortnight before and got himself deported for cutting nets strung across a cove in Iki, releasing scores of dolphins. The irony was that in the very act of sabotage Watson was caught in a storm and became stranded on an islet from where he had to be rescued by local fishermen (a fact omitted from the fanciful account of this episode posted on the organisation’s website.)

    Interested to find out how others living on the island regarded the dolphin killing, I visited a farmer working his small holding a few kilometres from the coast. ‘Oh, those fishermen down there,’ he told me, ‘they’re an uncouth lot. They give the place a bad name.’

    I was taken aback to find such a sharp divergence of interest, on this tiny island, between fisherman and farmer. I then realized the true importance of factionalism, based on occupation and geography, particularly in rural Japan. Australia’s FTA negotiators, the latest in a long line of officials who have tried for half a century to eliminate tariffs on beef and dairy imports, will be aware of these fissures in the Japanese bargaining position; the fissure, for instance, between the farm lobby and the consumer lobby, or the one separating domestic from international economic priorities.

    The ‘enlightened’ farmer I met proudly showed me his chief productive asset: one Wagyu steer penned in his front yard, being pampered and premium-fed in readiness for the abattoir. Yes, you read that correctly, a herd of one. This and a few other odds and ends, plus a huge government subsidy, kept him in reasonable comfort. He was (and I think he sensed it to a degree) a parody of modern farming. It reminds me of another occasion accompanying an Australian delegation, led by the then Primary Industries Minister John Kerin, in the mid-1980s. Australia at the time was in the grip of a terrible drought, graziers were at their wits end, and yet they could not sell into the Japanese market at fair prices. I remember going with them to a farm near Nagoya and trudging past a veritable showroom of brand-new farm machinery bought with cheap loans from a highly protected rural bank. The Australians could only shake their heads in bitter disbelief.

    So the Japanese farmer and fisherman, for all their differences in lifestyle, share one vital, historic conviction: that, whatever it takes, whatever the international pressure and criticism, their survival is paramount to the national interest. Anyone covering Japanese affairs will tell you that the Ministry of Agriculture has always outranked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs around the Cabinet table. While some progress has been made as a result of the decades of lobbying to gain improved access to the Japanese market for farm goods, every yard conceded has been hard fought. Cracks in the façade often seem to open up at moments during negotiations only to close again as a result of sectional pressure. I’ve heard Japanese Agriculture Ministers explain, in all earnestness, that their countrymen, even if they were given the choice, could not eat more imported beef––because, wait for it, Japanese intestines were different from Westerners’ intestines. Try arguing against that!

    Without major concessions on agricultural imports, no FTA with Japan would be worth its name. Political conditions, however, are as favourable now as they’ve ever been for a genuine agreement, mainly because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, riding a large parliamentary majority, does not need the farm vote as much as it did 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Global trade liberalisation is also an important lever in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s declared policy of economic deregulation (the last ‘arrow’ of ‘Abenomics’). Perhaps the time has come. But as the Sea Shepherd boys and girls will tell you, still prowling the headlands of Taiji looking for blood in the water, rugged self-reliance and a sense of entitlement to a traditional way of life remain formidable obstacles to change in Japan. And the Sea Shepherd crew should know all about that frame of mind.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC between 1979 and 1996 for a total of eleven years.

  • Walter Hamilton. Credulity and formalism: Abbott’s twin challenges in Japan.

    A prominent Japanese historian once likened the psychology of wartime Japan to a ‘madhouse’ in which the public became capable of believing anything. Another who lived through those years noted how formalism––keeping up appearances long after a cause has ceased to have any meaning––suited a nation unable to change with the times. Credulity and formalism remain powerful elements in Japanese culture, regardless of the fact that the population is highly educated and, these days, formal barriers to the free flow of information are low. Recently we have witnessed extraordinary examples of this phenomenon. As Tony Abbott prepares for his first official visit to that country as prime minister next month, it is worth reflecting on the Japanese state of mind.

    The instinct driving an elderly mother to hand over her life savings on the strength of a telephone call might appear to have little to do with international affairs, and yet her credulity fits within the larger picture. Japanese call them ‘ore, ore’ (‘it’s me, it’s me’) scams, in which a con artist pretending over the phone to be a relative of the elderly victim pleads distress and solicits money. Despite public warnings and police campaigns, this and similar forms of extortion netted criminals an estimated 12.8 billion yen ($140 million) in 2012. Though it might be hard to prove the Japanese are the most credulous people on earth, evidence points to a strong predisposition to believe what they are told.

    Take, for example, the supposedly deaf composer described as Japan’s ‘new Beethoven’ and given the imprimatur of the national broadcaster, NHK, in a documentary broadcast last year entitled Melody of the Soul. The man was neither deaf nor did he compose the works for which he was feted (they were written by somebody else). The journalists and many others who dealt with him had grounds aplenty to doubt his story, but nobody dared challenge the myth. It wasn’t until the real composer, fed up with his paltry reward, threatened to blow the whistle that the truth was revealed last month.

    This episode was followed soon after by another––in the field of science. The story initially presented to the public again proved irresistible: an attractive, 30-year-old female biologist had led a team of researchers to discover a way to create stem cells, opening a simple and ethical way to the cure of all sorts of ailments. Her youth, her sex, and the fact that she worked at a comparatively unknown (to the lay observer) institution added glamour to what was hailed as a far-reaching discovery. National pride oozed from the saturation media coverage. When it became known that, during her experiments, the superstar scientist wore a Japanese cooking apron, or kappogi, in preference to a lab coat, sales of the traditional garment skyrocketed. She might be a modern girl, but her heart was in the right place.

    The stem-cell heroine is now in virtual hiding. The research papers she co-authored have been called into question on several grounds, prompting an inquiry. Though the mistakes uncovered so far have not been branded deliberate deceptions, clearly the public had been too ready to believe in miracles. As the backlash builds, there is a tendency to vilify (‘immature, sloppy’ research, her boss now calls it) what was previously adored.

    Where Tony Abbott comes into the discussion is not, of course, in relation to the specifics of these episodes, but rather what they might indicate about the psychology of present-day Japan. There seems to be a strong, pent-up craving for miracles: redemption miracles, artistic miracles, medical miracles and, in the shape of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, economic and political miracles. It would be dangerous for Abbott, and Australia, to indulge in similar wishful thinking about the bilateral relationship. Japan is not out of the woods, economically, and relations with its nearest neighbours, currently as bad as they have ever been since the war, show little sign of improving. To ignore, play down or set aside these major conditioning factors in our two-way relationship would pander to the Japanese weakness for credulity and formalism.

    What Japan needs right now is a cold shower: a reality check, a return to earth. Tokyo’s recent decision not to review the 1993 government apology on wartime ‘comfort women’ might, at first glance, appear to be the start of a healthy sobering up. But Abe’s explanation, that ‘we must be humble regarding history’, is not necessarily what it seems. Given the government’s direct hand in textbook screening, just one example of its current ideological offensive, his further comment that ‘issues regarding history should not be politicised or made diplomatic issues’ is hardly ingenuous or helpful. If Abbott ever intended broaching the issue that lies at the heart of Japan’s poisonous relations with China and South Korea (and recent media reports suggest he does not), he has been warned off even before he gets to Tokyo.

    History and diplomacy cannot be separated on a whim, no matter how much certain politicians might find it convenient to do so. The formalism of humility without candour and sincerity, the credulity of a diplomacy built upon a refusal to fully face up to the past: these are manifestations of the same blind spot exploited by conmen, ‘deaf geniuses’ and headline-grabbing scientists. Tony Abbott needs to go to Japan with his eyes wide open and not take the line of least resistance to Abe’s unsustainable worldview.

     

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for eleven years.

  • John Menadue. Pity our diplomats.

    It is not often that our diplomats in foreign posts receive or need our sympathy in the work they do. But just think of their present plight in defending the Australian Government’s behaviour in foreign policy. What we are seeing across so many countries is alarming. With many key countries, we are skating on very thin ice – and the ice will probably crack fairly soon.

    Just consider what is happening.

    In our region for decades, opinion leaders and almost anyone else who knew anything about Australia scratched their heads when they realised that we had a foreign head of state. Invariably they asked themselves and others, how can this be in a country like Australia that sees its future as an independent nation in the Asian region? This cultural cringe has worsened in the last few days. We are going to have knights and dames.  How do our diplomats in the region explain this colonial nostalgia which is taking us back down a time-warp to Menzies of the 1950s? We are really making a laughing stock of ourselves. We give lip-service to the Asian Century. But knights and dames belong to the 19th Century.

    The Abbott Government has cut overseas development aid by over $100 million this year and with further cuts to come. The poor of our region will be punished so that the government can fund parental leave for the wealthy. How do our diplomats explain this?

    We ask Cambodia, one of the poorest countries in the world, to take asylum seekers that we have a duty to protect and support. Cambodia is a member of ASEAN. The other members of ASEAN must be nonplussed.

    We have offended the President of Indonesia in the clumsy handling of telephone tapping of his office. We add to this insult by breaching Indonesian sovereignty almost at will with our naval vessels and turn backs of asylum seekers. Scott Morrison tramples not only over the rights of asylum seekers, but also has been extremely damaging in his visits to Indonesia. On very reliable advice, I know that in Jakarta he is regarded as quite garrulous and aggressive. He shoes the same approach in Australia.  He is causing great damage. He is determined to stop the boats at any cost, including our relations with Indonesia.

    The Australian Government tapped the telephones of East Timorese ministers and officials who were engaged in delicate negotiations with the Australian Government on the gas field between Australia and East Timor. The Director of ASIO, who sanctioned the tapping of the telephones in the first place when he was head of ASIS, then persuaded George Brandis to issue orders for raids on the premises of a witness and the Counsel for the East Timorese Government before the International Court. I am glad I am not a diplomat in Dili to try to explain this.

    In Opposition, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison attacked the human rights record of Malaysia, and particularly ‘caning’. It caused serious damage in our relations with Malaysia.  It was wilfully and deliberately done because the Coalition did not want the Labor Government to be successful in stopping the boats. Under the rubric of concern for human rights, the Coalition sided with the Greens in bashing Malaysia.

    Our relations with China have been pungently described by a frequent visitor to China as ‘f… ed’. Tony Abbott started the damage by describing Japan as Australia’s best friend in Asia. Given the long-term hostility between Japan and China it was not surprising that China was offended. Julie Bishop then added to the insult by her comments in Washington. Quite unnecessarily we sided with the Japanese against China over the disputed islands in the East China Sea. When Julie Bishop visited Beijing in December last year she was publicly chided by her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. He accused Australia of ‘jeopardising bilateral mutual trust’. He added ‘the entire Chinese society and the general public are deeply dissatisfied’. Peter Rowe, our top diplomat for North Asia, told a Senate Committee a few weeks ago that ‘I have never in 30 years encountered such rudeness’. The Chinese are clearly very angry. Our diplomats in Beijing would be wise to keep their heads down. Not surprisingly they are having difficulty arranging Tony Abbott’s visit

    But wait, there is more. Last month in an exclusive in the SMH on February 24, Bianca Hall and David Wroe reported that ‘Diplomats preparing for the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva have expressed concern that Australia is working to actively undermine a push for an international enquiry into human rights abuses in Sri Lanka because of the [Australian] Government’s eagerness to cooperate with that country’s leaders on asylum seekers’. It was reported that the US and UK officials had ‘a deep concern’ about Australia’s position.

    If this serial blundering continues, we will suffer real pain. It is likely that China and Indonesia could be the ones to inflict that pain.

    Spare a thought for the diplomats who have to try and repair the damage.

     

  • John Tulloh. The way to the future through annexation.

    Annexation, as in the latest example of Russia with Crimea, usually refers to a smaller entity being swallowed up by a bigger one. It has a long history with both violent and peaceful outcomes. A recent example is East Jerusalem which Israel took over after the Six-Day War in 1967, resulting in enmity ever since. Before that was the Anschluss in 1938 when Hitler declared Austria to be part of Nazi Germany. Not long afterwards he annexed Sudetenland, a German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia, precipitating the road to World War Two. In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and announced it had annexed it, much to the disquiet of its residents.

    It may surprise some that Hawaii and Texas became part of the U.S. as a result of annexation in the 19th century. Texas had been a northern state of Mexico until a majority of its people favoured joining the U.S and got the blessing of Congress to do so. Hawaiians had little say in the matter. The Americans overthrew their Queen and made Hawaii part of the U.S. for strategic and trade reasons.  In 1910, Japan annexed Korea. In 1914, Britain added Cyprus and Egypt to its Empire, taking both from the Ottomans with whom it was at war.

    In 1961, Goa, the Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, was forcibly absorbed into the newly-independent country. In formal terms, it was annexed, but India has always insisted it was ‘liberated’. It has similarities with with Crimea. Both are small specks in the overall geography of their regions. Crimea has a Russian-speaking majority who voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia. In 1961, nearly two-thirds of Goa’s population was Hindu just as they were the overwhelming majority in India. Goa had been in Portuguese hands since 1510. Crimea became part of Russia in 1783 when Catherine the Great actually annexed it until the Soviet Union ceded it to one of its states, Ukraine, in 1954.

    The reasons for both takeovers were mainly strategic. In its latest move, Russia clearly wants to protect its naval access to the Black Sea and to the Mediterranean. In the case of Goa, India was worried by the likely consequences of the 1955 CENTO pact (Central Eastern Treaty Organisation) consisting of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and Britain with the U.S. taking a keen interest on the sidelines.

    The distinguished Indian newsman, Prem Prakash, who covered the Goa takeover, recalls:

    ‘With the prospect of Goa, the only natural harbour along the vast western coast of India, possibly becoming a military base of the U.S.-led CENTO which could bring Pakistan forces there, India became alarmed. India’s hawks and anti-U.S. lobbyists led by Krishna Menon, the then Defence Minister, started pressurising (Prime Minister Jawaharlal) Nehru to take pre-emptive action’.

     Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, wanted to see if the matter could be resolved peacefully. But the Portuguese Prime Minister and dictator, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, said Goa was non-negotiable because it was part of metropolitan Portugal.

    India began building up its forces around Goa. Portugal tried to rush warships there, but President Nasser of Egypt refused them access to the Suez Canal. That was because India and Egypt had just become founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement. Portugal then tried to provide reinforcements through its air force only for its planes to be denied overflying or refuelling rights. A civilian charter did get through. Portuguese soldiers, expecting to find hand grenades, instead found sausages for their consumption.

    Salazar demanded his hopelessly-outnumbered  troops in Goa fight until the last man. They ignored him. The result was that India took control of Goa within a day with minimal casualties. Later the Portuguese governor was tried for treason.

    Just as happened with the Crimea takeover, the U.S. rushed to the UN Security Council to protest, while the Soviet Union applauded the action. China, though a vociferous opponent of colonialism and its running dogs, neither condemned nor supported the invasion.

    Prakash says the Indian action was justified in much the same way as the Russian one was. Why, he asks, would India allow the threat of a foreign takeover of a prime naval base just as Russia reasoned much the same about its Black Sea presence after the elected leader of the Ukraine had been overthrown by mob rule tacitly supported by the West?

    Goa became part of India with little trouble and has developed into a prosperous and peaceful international tourist destination. Lisbon still offers Goans Portuguese nationality if they can prove they or their ancestors were born during colonial rule. For Crimea, separation may not be so easy when it depends on the Ukraine for its water and power supplies and has no contiguous border with Mother Russia.

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Dwyer. Primary healthcare in Australia reaches the crossroads.

     When I graduated some 50 years ago more than 50% of my class pursued careers as General Practitioners. In the last available survey of the career intentions of graduating medical students only 13% said they were interested in Primary Care and only 13% of those who would consider a career in rural Australia. Currently more than 45% of the General Practitioners available to rural based Australians are overseas trained doctors most of whom are working there as provider numbers were not available for metropolitan practice. The average age of working General Practitioners is 55 years.

    Young doctors considering vocational training cite positive and negative reasons for their disinterest in Primary Care. Many other career opportunities seem more attractive as they provide much higher average incomes and part time employment provides funds sufficient for many. General Practice training is equally as vigorous as that required for other specialities but “GPs” are not paid as specialists and often feel their vital and increasingly unique skills are underappreciated. Tales from GP land tell young graduates of practice subjected to stifling bureaucracy, the need to “bulk bill” and thus to practice “turnstile medicine” with short consultation times being unsatisfactory to both patient and physician. These and many other impediments place us in real danger of having far too few GPs to provide us with quality Primary Care in the near future.

    All this reality is addressed by rhetoric from government reassuring GPs that they are the “heart and soul” of the nation’s health care system. The fact that the Federal government is freezing cost of living adjustments to Medicare rebates for four years and considering strategies to reduce our 18 billion dollar annual Medicare expenditure should not be taken personally. As I have commented here previously, we should be spending more not less on Primary Care but Primary Care that is restructured to better meet contemporary needs. This would include reducing the seven million bed days utilised in public hospitals by avoidable admissions. Hospital expenditure dwarfs Medicare spending.

    Is it possible that the introduction of a new model of Primary Care could produce better, more cost effective health outcomes for Australians and at the same time attract a new generation of doctors to Primary Care? International experience would say the answer to both questions is a definite yes. We know what that new model should provide; infrastructure to support preventative strategies, early diagnosis of problems that, left untreated, could become chronic, team management of established chronic and complex diseases and care in the community for many who are currently being sent to hospital. The model described is usually referred to as “Integrated Primary Care”  (IPC) which, to use American parlance, provides individuals with a “Medical Home”.

    IPC is structured around teams of health professionals working in the one practice. It is not doctor centric and provides individuals who enrolled in the IPC program with access to doctors, nurses and a range of allied health professionals including dental hygienists. Doctors cannot provide all the services described above but here can concentrate on those things only doctors can do. Well run IPC programs in the UK, the US, New Zealand and many other countries have demonstrated their cost effectiveness, better health outcomes and fewer admissions to hospitals for the patients of such medical homes. Perhaps most importantly in our context, they attract and hold GPs who enjoy better job satisfaction in this form of practice. An international trend has IPC practices offering their doctors flexible arrangements for remuneration. Rapidly payments based on a “fee for service” (FFS) are giving way to “blended payment” options. What is this all about?

    Many Australian GPs want to move away from the FFS model with very significant numbers joining large corporation owned practices where they are salaried or paid on contract. FFS at bulk billing rates does not work well for patients with chronic diseases and complex needs. A number of countries are offering their GPs fixed annual payments for their care of complex patients while those seeking a “one off” service are still charged a fee. In New Zealand more than 85% of the GPs work in such a system with about 80% of their income fixed with the remaining 20% coming from traditional FFS payments. Such arrangements are in the medical news here in Australia as Minister Dutton has publically expressed cautious interest in seeing how this could work in Oz. In the US 60%of GPs are paid in this way and this is increasingly so in the UK. There is an abundance of data showing that blended payments within the IPC model produces better health outcomes with fewer hospital admissions.

    Overseas experience with this radical reform tells us that its implementation must be a “bottom up” one available to willing participants and never forced on the medical profession. Space doesn’t permit detailed discussion of the mechanisms involved in establishing this system but if we were to follow say the NZ model it would look something like this. Our Medical Locals would become Primary Health Care organisations and holders and distributors of a primary care budget provided after careful analysis of local needs. GPs or IPC practices would negotiate for a fixed payment for their care of their patients with chronic diseases and in return would provide quality/outcome data associated with the use of that money. Financial incentives are built into the contract to encourage “best practice” management.

    Our medical profession, government and citizenry, should not be concerned by the exploration of these changes. The evidence is strong that, done properly, the results are very positive and the model attractive to clinicians and patients alike.

    John Dwyer is the Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of NSW.

  • Ian McAuley, Jennifer Doggett and John Menadue. The case for government funding of healthcare.

    In our joint submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit, we drew attention to the fact that by international comparison, Australia is a low-taxed country. Furthermore, the trend in Commonwealth expenditures has been downwards since the mid-1980s. Our full submission can be found on my website (click above).

    In that submission we made the case for government funding of healthcare as a superior option. Extracts from this submission on healthcare follow.

    The flaw in the “unaffordable” argument (made by the Abbott Government in respect of health care) is that even if the government withdraws from funding, we still have to pay for health care, and all the evidence from other countries’ experience shows that if the government abandons responsibility for funding health care, we will end up spending a greater amount for the same or a lower quality of care.

    In all probability Australians want to share the bulk of our health costs with one another. Across all OECD countries people pay only about 20 percent of health costs from their own pockets – that is through payments at time of service delivery and in amounts not covered by insurance. In Australia, at 19 percent, we are just below that average. In developed countries most health care costs are paid through insurance – either a government insurer or competing private insurers.

    Even if, as is likely, we accept a need to pay more from our own pockets, we will continue to seek insurance cover for large outlays. We may be willing to take our chances in many aspects of life, but when it comes to health care we have little to guide us about our future needs.

    Policies which shift funding responsibility from government programs, such as Australia’s Medicare, on to private health insurance (PHI) have a short-term attraction to a government concerned with containing fiscal outlays. But even the best designed policies to entice or force people into PHI are costly and inequitable.

    For a start PHI involves high administrative costs. In Australia only 84 cents in every dollar paid to PHI is returned in terms of payment for services. The rest goes to administrative costs and corporate profits. By contrast, Medicare has administrative costs of about 5 percent, and another 1 percent in Tax Office collection costs. That means that Medicare returns 94 cents in the dollar as health services – a ten cent difference in comparison with PHI.35 The USA, highly dependent on PHI, provides the standout example of administrative overheads. Only 69 cents in every dollar Americans spend on health care comes back in terms of services.36

    Second, and more important, when there are competing private health insurers they have little ability to control the prices demanded by service providers. If one insurer tries to bargain hard with hospitals to keep prices down, the hospitals will simply choose to do business with another insurer. The insurers have about the same power in the market as consumers do when they are dealing with powerful oligopolies such as banks. By contrast a single national insurer, usually a government agency, has the market power to put some discipline into prices and utilization.

    Evidence from international experience bears out these points. When countries rely on PHI to fund health care they pay more for it, without necessarily getting any better health outcomes. To quote at length from the OECD:

    Private health insurance markets have resulted in increased overall health costs in several OECD countries. First, by bringing more financial resources into the health care system, it raises total health expenditure. Second, cost-control measures – such as global budgets, price regulation and capacity controls – have been applied to the public sector in virtually all OECD countries. Conversely, the private financing sector in virtually all OECD countries, except the Netherlands, has not been subject to such centralised, governmental cost controls. This has resulted in less tight control over activities and prices in the private sector. Third, private insurers in most OECD countries do not have the same bargaining powers over the price and quantity of care provided to insurees as public systems do, although within concentrated PHI markets insurers can exert stronger pressure, as in the case of Ireland. Payment options such as global budgets that have helped public systems to contain costs in several countries are hard for private insurers to negotiate – or may not be options at all. PHI carriers have generally exerted little leverage over costs – as they might if they engaged in more selective contracting.

    In the United States, private insurance has been less effective than the public Medicare programme in controlling costs. Growth in per enrolee payments for a comparable set of services in private health insurance outweighed Medicare over the period 1970-2000, reflecting the higher payment rates to providers paid by private insurers. While “managed care” delivered some cost control in the 1990s, PHI premiums have resumed double-digit growth since 2001.

    Cost control is also more problematic to achieve in systems with multiple competing payers, including most PHI markets. Not only their purchasing position relative to providers is weaker, but also shifting cost onto other purchasers, whether public systems or other private insurers, is a more attractive strategy for insurers than restraining cost.

    PHI also risks increasing public expenditure on health. This is because, while PHI may serve as an independent source of health funding, its effects are rarely entirely disconnected from the publicly funded system.

    Subsidies to private health cover, as in Ireland, Australia and the United States, increase public sector expenditure and have an opportunity cost, sometimes increasing overall utilisation levels as well. Even in the absence of direct or indirect subsidies, PHI has given rise to higher public cost in several countries with a significant PHI market because of the way it interacts with the public system.37

    This is borne out empirically by data from the OECD….. The message is clear: the more governments rely on PHI to fund health care the more is the total cost of health care….

    As with administrative costs, the stand-out case is the USA, where health care costs are now almost 18 percent of GDP. (Even when the USA is excluded there is a positive relationship, and it is too big to be considered a statistical aberration.) As a consequence of America’s longstanding dependence on PHI – a dependence which could intensify with Obamacare – its government programs, Medicare and Medicaid, now cost around 8.5 percent of GDP. This is more than the governments of Sweden, Norway and Iceland pay for their comprehensive public insurance programs, and more than the governments of UK and Canada pay for their near-universal public programs.

    In an attempt to avoid universal public funding, the USA has developed a system which now incurs higher fiscal costs than they would have incurred had they pursued a single insurer option. That is because the government Medicare and Medicaid programs have become passive price-takers in a market where prices are set by powerful service providers. Even here in Australia, because of the generous way we subsidize PHI, those subsidies are costing more than they are saving government outlays. Reducing subsidies for PHI would result in some reduction in membership and therefore more government expenditure on health care, but there would be significant net public savings.38 The Grattan Institute, for example, estimates that even with offsetting compensation to public hospitals removing the PHI rebate could save public budgets $3.5 billion a year.39 …

    Simply ending subsidies for PHI is only part of necessary funding reform. The whole way health care is funded needs to be reviewed – a task well beyond a body such as the Commission of Audit. As a case in point, there needs to be rationalization of co-payments, so that they can serve to bring the benefits of market discipline into health care, rather than encouraging patients to seek “free” services to avoid co-payments. Our present division between “free” services, covered by Medicare or PHI, and paid service, is haphazard.40 Examples abound: public hospitals are “free” while pharmaceuticals incur co-payments; it can be cheaper for a consumer to leave tooth decay until it needs treatment in hospital than to seek paid preventative dental care early on; PHI and Medicare often cap the number of paid services in areas such as physiotherapy, leaving the patient with open-ended risk. Besides savings from scrapping the PHI rebate, the Grattan Institute estimates there are additional savings of around $6 billion a year to be found without comprising the quality of care.41

    The national insurer, of course, needs to use its purchasing power to contain costs. In this regard the Commonwealth, once highly effective in negotiating low pharmaceutical prices, as a result of a series of concessions to pharmaceutical firms is now paying more than many other countries for pharmaceuticals. Government purchasing and price negotiation are areas with potential savings.

    Replacing PHI with a strong, single national insurer removes incentives for over-servicing and over-pricing, but there are savings in private and public costs if there is less need for health care in the first place, through investing in preventive services.42 Preventive health measures, such as anti-smoking initiatives, deliver high returns, in terms of long-term health outcomes. However, Australia currently allocates less than two percent of the total health budget to preventive health.43 Investing in early childhood health and education is also a proven and cost-effective strategy to prevent the development of a range of lifelong social and health problems, but Australia also falls short in this area:  almost one-quarter of children are developmentally vulnerable at school entry with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and children in socioeconomic disadvantaged areas most likely to fare worse across a broad range of health and social indicators.44 Failure to fund preventive, public health and early childhood programs adequately represents a wasted opportunity to direct resources to achieve maximum benefit. These are functions which, if abandoned by government, will not be performed by the private sector.

    (Our basic case is that by shifting health expenditures from the public to the private sector will cost more. It will increase total costs)

     


    35.          Figures taken from John Menadue and Ian McAuley Private Health Insurance: High in cost and low in equity. Centre for Policy Development 2012.

    36.          Henry Minzberg “Managing the myths of health care” World Hospitals and Health Services Vol 48 # 3, 2012.

    37.          Francesca Colombo and Nicole Tapay “Private health insurance in OECD countries: the benefits and costs for Individuals and health systems” OECD Health Working Papers No. 15, 2006.

    38.          Terence Cheng Does reducing rebates for private health insurance generate cost savings  Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, July 2013.

    39.          John Daley Balancing Budgets: Tough choices we need Grattan Institute 2013.

    40.          See, for example Jennifer Doggett “Out of Pocket: rethinking health copayments” Centre for Policy Development Occasional Paper 2009.

    41.          John Daley, Grattan Institute op. cit.

    42.          World Health Organisation. Key components of a well-functioning health system. May 2010.

    43.          Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Health Expenditure Australia 2011-2012.

    44.          Australian Institute of Health and Welfare A picture of Australia’s Children 2012.

  • Martin Laverty. Poverty and poor health go together.

    In 2008, the World Health Organisation provided an action plan to Australia and other countries to tackle the health disparity between rich and poor which sees an Australian in the lowest group of wealth-holders live with up to three times the amount of chronic illness of a person in the highest wealth-holding group.

    One year ago last week, Catholic Health Australia and the members of the Social Determinants of Health Alliance applauded a co-authored report of a Coalition, Labor and Greens Senate Inquiry that recommended the Parliament endorse the 2008 World Health Organisation’s recommendations on how to address health equity – that we had argued must be the first important step towards meaningful action on social determinants.

    But last week, on the one-year anniversary of the release of this rare tri-partisan report, there was nothing to celebrate. There was nothing to welcome. There was just a moment to bemoan the fact that yet another year had passed since the Senate Inquiry reported and the Federal Parliament has not pushed ahead with the Inquiry’s recommendations or any plan to address unacceptable disparities in the health of Australians.

    Reports seem to emerge every couple of weeks pointing to those unacceptable variances based on people’s socioeconomic status or their ethnicity or where they live or their education level. These reports – like last year’s Senate report – are not prompting action from federal politicians.

    While we have been advocating for change at the political level and in the public domain, CHA has also been presenting compelling evidence as to why action on the social determinants is crucial. One of those contributions is The Cost of Inaction on the Social Determinants of Health; a report commissioned by CHA and prepared by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM).

    That report found that $2.3 billion in savings could be found annually through avoidable hospital admissions if Australian Governments were to implement the findings of the World Health Organisation’s Closing the Gap in a Generation report. Those are the same recommendations that the Senate Committee said the Parliament should endorse.

    The NATSEM report also found implementing the WHO recommendations could see:

    • 500,000 Australians avoid suffering a chronic illness;
    • 170,000 extra Australians enter the workforce, generating $8 billion in extra earnings;
    • $4 billion in welfare support payments saved each year;
    • 5.5 million fewer Medicare services utilised each year, resulting in annual savings of $273 million;
    • 5.3 million fewer Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme scripts being filled each year, resulting in annual savings of $184.5 million.

    These staggering opportunities are what new approaches to health policy could achieve, yet counter-intuitively they do not require change to the way our health system operates.

     

    The opportunity to reduce chronic illness and save on hospital and pharmaceutical expenditure requires action outside of the formal health system. Doing so would improve the lives of half a million Australians. It would also help the Federal Government achieve savings it is very keen to find.

     

    Australia suffers the effects of a major differential in the prevalence of long-term health conditions. Those who are most socio-economically disadvantaged are twice as likely to have a long-term health condition as those who are the least disadvantaged.

     

    Put another way, the poorest are twice as likely to suffer chronic illness and will die on average three years earlier than the most affluent. Poor health of low-income Australians can be avoided, allowing Government to spend less money on treating health conditions that should never have occurred in the first place.

    Drug-, alcohol-, tobacco- and crisis-free pregnancies are understood to be fundamental to a child’s lifelong development. So, too, is early learning that occurs in a child’s first three years of life.

     

    School completion, successful transition to work, secure housing and access to resources necessary for effective social interaction are all determinants of a person’s lifelong health. These are factors mostly dealt with outside of the health system, yet they are so important to the health of the nation.

    We can’t afford – in dollar terms, but more importantly in human terms – for this to be a political can that is kicked down the road. Action on social determinants will save lives, and deliver both government and community an extraordinary financial and social surplus.

    A resolution passed in the House of Representatives in 2010 compelled the sitting Government to respond to a Senate committee’s report with six months.

    Labor can point to the federal election – held within six months of the report being tabled – and the Coalition can point to the fact the report was tabled during the last Parliament, but we are becoming increasingly impatient with politicians who aren’t addressing the causes of poor health.

    Isn’t 12 months of increasing inequity more than enough? It’s time for action.

    Martin Laverty is the CEO of Catholic Health Australia. CHA represents the largest single grouping of non-government health, aged and community care services in Australia.

  • Graham Freudenberg on ‘The Making of Australia – A Concise History’ by Robert Murray

    When I was a teenage Tory in Brisbane in the early Fifties, Bob Murray, a bright young spark from the Melbourne Argus was the most persuasive of my newspaper contemporaries who led me gently towards the light.  In Sydney a couple of years later, at the end of 1954, in midnight to dawn sessions at the old Phillip Street Journalists’ Club, we debated the coming of the Labor Split, unwittingly laying the foundations for his classic account The Split – Australian Labor in the Fifties (1970).

    In the halcyon early Seventies, as one of the few people I knew who had actually been behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, he helped me keep Ostpolitik and  Détente in the perspective of the continuing awfulness of regimes like the East German. This clarity of views, sharpness of insights, balance and common sense abound in his octogenarian opus The Making of Australia – A Concise History (Rosenberg Publishing).

    This is the first single-volume general history of Australia since the ‘history wars’. To some extent it complements from a more conservative perspective the monumental Cambridge History of Australia edited by Stuart Macintyre, at less than a tenth of the price. Both works show how the ‘history wars’ have transformed our approach, especially about the relations between the Aborigines and the occupiers after 1788.

    For the first time, the relations between the aborigines and settlers form an integral part of the whole narrative. In the index, there are 196 entries, with substantial references, by my count, on 103 pages – one third of the book. The aboriginal story is woven into the ongoing narrative. This inclusiveness is unprecedented in Australian general histories.  We have come a long way from the great flowering of Australian historiography in the 1950s and 1960s, when Manning Clark subsequently apologised for his comparative neglect of Aborigine studies and Gordon Greenwood, in the first post-war general history Australia, ignored them altogether.

    In dealing with Australia’s military history, Bob Murray has taken a very different approach, and I think less successfully. He has chosen to lump the First and Second World Wars together in a single chapter entitled ‘The Call of Khaki’. This approach may emphasise the continuity of the two wars, at least in their European and imperial context. But, besides wrenching the chronology of the narrative somewhat, this treatment understates what I believe to be the centrality of the wars to our political, social and economic development.

    There are signs that the Anzac Centenary is going to spark another round of ‘history wars’ in much the way that the Bicentenary set in train the debate that led to the ‘history wars’ about Aboriginal Australia. Perhaps John Menadue’s blog last year about the political manipulation of the Anzac tradition was a first shot.

    This time around, I hope we are mature enough to avoid some of the nastiness that accompanied the last round. In his book on the Split, Bob Murray memorably noted ‘the absence of goodwill’ as a major factor in Labor’s self-destruction. There was a notable absence of goodwill in the waging of the first ‘history wars’.

    It would be ironic if the renewed debate on Australia’s military history came down to competing slogans of ‘best we forget’ versus ‘lest we forget’. After all, ‘best we forget’ was a sentiment often used to discourage the quest for truth about the Aborigines.

    When it comes to Anzac (as shorthand for all our wars) I uphold ‘lest we forget’ in the sense that the author of the phrase, Rudyard Kipling, used it in his poem Recessional, written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. Kipling meant it as a warning against the pride and arrogance of imperial power and that even the mighty British Empire would one day be ‘as Nineveh and Tyre’.

    Bob Murray and I belong to the last Australian generation for which the British Empire was still a going concern. This fine book can stand as the testimony of our generation and our understanding of what it means to be Australian.

    We were the depression babies, formed politically in the Chifley-Menzies era, with our adulthood dominated by the Cold War in all its manifestations. Despite this tumultuous and often menacing background, we have been an exceptionally lucky generation of Australians. Perhaps because the low birth rate in the Depression made our path to education and employment so easy, we were optimists. Fittingly, Bob Murray ends his book on a high note, quoting the ‘other half of Malcolm Fraser’s (and George Bernard Shaw’s) ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy.’ – ‘But take courage, it can be delightful.’ Both halves of the quotation apply to the writing of books about Australian history. And in this case, the second half certainly applies to the reading of it.

  • John Menadue. Privatising Medibank Pte – who cares?

     

    This is a repost from 28 November 2013. My own view is that all the private health insurance companies, including Medibank Pte are parasitical and undermine Medicare. The only important political issue in my mind is whether the policy holders who have contributed over decades to Medibank Pte should receive appropriate recompense rather than the government taking the money for itself.  John Menadue

    I won’t lose any sleep if the Abbott Government proceeds to privatise Medibank Pte. It is anticipated that the sale could realise $4 billion. That will go almost half way towards the $8.8 billion that Treasurer Joe Hockey is providing as a reserve fund for the Reserve Bank, even if the Bank didn’t ask for it.

    Whether all of that $4 billion should go to the Treasury from the sale of Medibank Pte is a moot point. Don’t the policy-holders, some with as many as 37 years membership, have an entitlement to some of that accumulated value? I declare a personal interest as I became a contributor to Medibank Pte when it was established by the Fraser Government in 1976.

    Medibank Pte was established then because of the Fraser Government’s hope that it could be an alternative to the universal health insurance scheme which the Whitlam Government introduced and which later became known as Medicare under the Hawke Government.

    I am quite indifferent to whether Medibank Pte is publicly or privately owned. As Ian McAuley and I set out in an article for the Centre for Policy Development in January 2012, private health insurance is ‘high in cost and low in equity’.  See this article on my web by clicking on ‘website’ at top left hand of home page, then ‘health’ and then article of January 2012.

    Whilst Medibank Pte. Is publicly owned, it acts just like all the other health insurance firms that are privately owned.  I t serves no special social role. It is the largest health insurance fund out of the total of 40 funds. It has a market share of about 30% followed by BUPA with about 27%.

    I won’t repeat all of my objections to government subsidies for health insurance firms which cost about $7 billion p.a. for the taxpayer. But my objections remain strong.

    • The administrative costs, including profit, of health insurance funds including Medibank Pte are three times those of Medicare. Just look at the money they waste on television advertising.
    • With government approval, health insurance premiums have increased every year at well ahead of the CPI. The increase in Medibank Pte premiums are close to the industry average.
    • Private health insurance benefits high income earners at the expense of low income earners.  The more wealthy Australians use health insurance to jump the hospital queue
    • Gap insurance by health insurance funds has underwritten the largest increase in specialist fees in 25 years.
    • These health insurance firms limit the ability of Medicare to put a cap on cost increases, particularly by private hospitals and private specialists who are paid multiples of the salaries paid to equally competent specialists in public hospitals.
    • The US is the stand-out example of the havoc which high cost private health insurance (PHI) can cause. As I pointed out in my blog of March 4, 2013, ‘If the US had a health service like those in countries without heavy reliance on PHI, such as Australia, it could solve its budget deficit problem.’ Health services in the US scream out ‘Beware of private health insurance’.

    I have been a member of Medibank Pte for 37 years. It has been a waste of money. All it provided was some irrational ‘peace of mind’. I have found it hard to admit to myself that all those tens of thousands of dollars in premiums I paid over 37 years have been largely wasted. In the same way health bureaucrats in Canberra, under pressure from very powerful vested interests find it difficult to face the fact that their policy advice to governments on the subsidies to high cost  health insurance companies has resulted in appalling public policy.

    My forlorn hope is that an Australian Government will one day eliminate the $7 billion corporate welfare which the Australian taxpayer presently provides to PHI. There would be a bonus in money saved by the government, but more importantly it would shore up Medicare’s position as a single payer that could better control costs. Until that happy day occurs, I don’t really care whether Medibank Pte is public or privately owned. It makes no difference.  It is part of a high cost parasitical industry. All private health insurance is undermining the universal, efficient and equitable public health insurance system called Medicare.

  • Rod Tiffen. Abbott contempt of court.

    After the 2013 election, the ABC satirical program The Hamster Decides responded to an election night comment by the columnist for the Australian Chris Kenny that the ABC’s funding should be cut with an animated version of Kenny having intercourse with a dog.  Kenny demanded an apology and then sued for defamation.

    It is unusual for satirical programs or cartoons to be the subject of defamation actions, and such cases carry dangers for both sides in any litigation.  A jury’s reaction to something that in ordinary discourse would be bad taste or disproportionate is unpredictable.

    On March 6, Justice Beech-Jones ruled that the case could proceed to trial by jury because it carried the defamatory imputation that Kenny was a low, contemptible and disgusting person, although he rejected the imputation that the skit implied Kenny literally had sex with dogs.

    Following this partial victory by Kenny, there was a short publicity blitz by all those usual suspects who seize any opportunity to criticize the ABC.  In the short-term, Kenny and his allies seemed to be winning the propaganda war.  On the ABC panel show, Q and A (March 10), not one panelist took the program’s side.

    There were several claims that all Kenny had wanted was an apology, but this is in some doubt.  Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton said that he had it on strong authority that Kenny had demanded a considerable sum of money, an on-air apology to be telecast after Media Watch, plus the statement that he was a fair and impartial journalist.  Presumably if the ABC holds its nerve and the case goes to trial, the truth of these early interactions will be revealed.

    Perhaps the most notable intervention was by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who said in a TV interview: ‘Well the point I make is that government money should be spent sensibly.  And defending the indefensible is not a very good way to spend government money and, next time the ABC comes to the government looking for more money, this is the kind of thing that we would want to ask them questions about.’

    It is hard to remember any other prime minister making such an intervention into a civil case in progress.  It takes its place alongside other Abbott precedents, such as handing over his predecessors’ cabinet documents to the Royal Commission on the home insulation scheme, or using international fora such as the World Economic Forum in Davos to make domestic partisan criticisms.

    So far Abbott has had a Teflon run since becoming Liberal leader.  Partly this reflects the double standards at work in Australian politics.  If a Labor leader had made a comment like Abbott’s say about a News Corp columnist, there would have been a huge outcry.  Those media which have dutifully reported Abbott’s comments as sensible observations would instead have been filled with outrage.

    We have a novel situation in Australia at the moment, where substantial sections of the media (News Corp newspapers and commercial radio talk shows, at least in Sydney) see themselves primarily in tribal terms, that they are on side with the government.  In the process, those who seek to report politics impartially (the Fairfax press and in particular the ABC) are constantly attacked.

    Prima facie, Abbott’s statement seems to not only have decided what the outcome of the case should be, but also to threaten one side financially for continuing.  A naïve reading would consider that in a case which is sub judice and to go to a jury, this would constitute contempt of court.  But it is another Abbott precedent that is unlikely to cause him any damage.

    Rod Tiffen is Emeritus Professor in Government and International Relations, University of Sydney.

     

     

  • Susie Carleton. The ABC is at it again.

    Don’t we all now know from the upright Hon Scott Morrison that decent members of the Australian Armed Services would never – and did not – cause the burning of the hands of asylum seekers under their control. Nor was there any further ill-treatment of a later batch of unfortunates as claimed in ABC 7.30- Report of March 17. Servicemen told Scott – and he told us.

    Australian servicemen, according to Scott, are above such conduct and it is an insult to our nation’s Armed Services to think otherwise. Of this he is convinced because there are “Regulations” and a “Code of Conduct” which rules out the sort of behavior widely claimed by the victims.

    Isn’t there also not only a code of conduct but a criminal law to provide protection within the services against the gross ill-treatment and sexual violation of young men in the services’ playful initiation ceremonies or the sexual harassment, mistreatment, even rape of their female colleagues in the services.

    Recent years have seen, according to former Minister Steven Smith, more than 2,000 such incidents perpetrated by Mr Morrison’s upright servicemen. Almost without exception these have taken place on military establishments or vessels at sea with very senior military personnel close at hand. These offences have been committed against workmates and colleagues in the services.

    It ‘s surprising then that the same people become White Knights when operating among “enemies”, “Illegals” and “undesirables” virtually unsupervised on the high seas. Morrison said he had not bothered to question the alleged victims as they had “vested interests” in making their claims.

    In view of his “Code of Conduct” mightn’t the servicemen in question also have a vested interest in denial?

     

     

  • John Menadue. An enormous financial heist is underway.

    We saw the enormous power of the mining sector when the foreign-owned mining companies forced the Rudd government to ignominiously back down on its super profits tax. For less than $20 million in an advertising and public relations campaign the miners secured for themselves tax savings of over $60 billion. The public interest was surrendered to the mining lobby. Now the banking lobby is well on the way to pushing aside the public interest again.

    After a lengthy public enquiry and public discussion, the Gillard Government passed the Future of Financial Advice legislation (FOFA). That legislation was designed to legislate against the conflict of interest in the financial advising sector. The Coalition Government is now well down the track to restoring the privileged position that the financial advising sector held before FOFA. As Peter Martin in the SMH on 18 March put it ‘The government is removing the catch all requirement for financial advisers to act in the client’s best interest.’ The watering down of FOFA ‘will also re-allow sales commissions and other forms of conflicted remuneration where advice is general in nature.’

    This is a dramatic wind-back of FOFA. It is done in the name of ‘reducing red tape’ but it will ensure a bonanza for the financial advising industry which the previous government set out to curb. The so called “red tape” is often where the public interest is expressed.

    The growth of the Australian superannuation industry has become a honey pot which can now be more easily plundered. Last year the financial advisory industry pulled in funds of $21 billion from the super pool. With compulsory superannuation the super pool is growing rapidly. Last year it grew by $300 billion. Now Arthur Sinodinos, Assistant Treasurer and a former banker, is setting up the financial advising sector and the banks in particular to do even better in future.

    Under FOFA the Gillard Government made substantial changes.

    • Future commissions and other ‘conflicted’ payments were banned. (The Coalition will now allow commissions and allow conflicted payments on most products).
    • A legal obligation was placed on financial planners to act in the client’s best interest. (The Coalition will allow this legal obligation to be narrowed.)
    • A financial adviser who charges a continuing fee must obtain permission of the client every two years for the arrangement to continue. (The Coalition will remove this need for the client’s permission every two years.)
    • The client must receive an annual disclosure of fees. (The Coalition will limit this to new clients only.)

    The banks will be the major beneficiaries to these changes. They are finding the industry funds with their lower fees too competitive and bank profits and executive salaries clearly need boosting! Not surprisingly the bank public relations machines have been telling us every day in the media about the need to wind back FOFA and reduce red tape.

    As Daniel Brammall pointed out in this blog on February 25, there are 18,000 financial planners in Australia and four out of five of these are owned by a bank or an insurance company. He said ‘The big end of town … has influenced the new government to the extent that the issue of conflicts has been quietly brushed under the carpet. Last week the Assistant Treasurer said “The current ban on conflicted remuneration captures a far wider range of circumstances than was originally intended and has resulted in significant compliance costs for industry. Here’s the point … many thousands of Australians collectively lost hundreds of millions of dollars – some of them their life savings – in collapses like Westpoint. Conflicts of interest were primarily behind it and the intention of FOFA was to avoid this ever happening again. However, the new government is dismantling the reforms because industry has convinced it that they cost too much. In doing so, industry has successfully transferred the cost to the consumer because without reforms that squarely address conflicts of interest, Westpoint will most certainly happen again.’

    FOFA was designed to legislate against conflicts of interest in an industry riddled with conflict. FOFA is now being unwound.

    It is reported that the government is planning to unwind FOFA by regulation rather than by legislation. It is suggested that the new regulations will be put to the Governor General and Executive Council on March 28, the day after parliament rises for a six weeks break. This means that parliament would not be able to disallow the regulations for at least six weeks.

    This is a deplorable story of rent-seeking by lazy, but powerful vested interests. What a shoddy performance it has become. This heist may turn out to be even bigger than the miners’ heist a few years ago.

    Public life and the public interest are being corrupted by the power of vested interests with their lobbying power. As Ross Garnaut puts it, this power has become a “diabolical problem”. One after another these powerful interests are corrupting public debate and putting their snouts deeply into the public trough… the gaming industry, the alcohol and hotel industries the polluters and the miners. The finance lobby now looks likely to become the most powerful and dangerous of all

  • Azita Bokan. The tragedy on Manus – an eye-witness account.

    Azita Bokan was on Manus Island as an official Iranian interpreter during the recent violent clashes. What follows is an edited version of her interview by Richard Glover on ABC Radio Sydney on 21 February 2014.

    I came to Australia some 27 years ago and am a proud Australian.  My father was a writer and had a newspaper of his own. He was imprisoned in Iran as a political prisoner for his anti-government views. I escaped Iran and was forced to wait three and a half years in Turkey for my turn to migrate to Australia. At the time Turkey was unsafe and dangerous, rife with smugglers, drug dealers and organised prostitution but I had to wait there alone as a little child without a family. I was very grateful to Australia for rescuing me as a refugee which was why I recently enlisted to assist the Department of Immigration in its efforts to protect Australia’s borders.

    I was previously in Nauru and it is bad, but the situation on Manus is simply horrendous – the heat, the physical conditions, the malnutrition [mostly raw red meat without any vegetables] leading to diseases of many different kinds, and so much more. Oral hygiene is almost completely absent and what dental treatment is available results not in remedial attention but in the detainees having their teeth pulled out without anaesthetic. Most upsetting of all is the absence of anything for the inmates to do day after day and the fact that they mostly sit in dirt looking out to the surrounding fences, which have resulted in personal suffering with deep mental conditions which I can only describe as psychological numbness. When I became aware of this situation, my immediate reaction was that I would prefer to be dead than to live in a camp like this for a day.

    Until the recent troubles, I saw and heard no unruliness or misbehaviour still less violence on the part of the detainees. In fact I could not believe their calm patience, waiting seemingly for better days to come. They told me that they had been warned by departmental officials that if they misbehaved in any way or that something goes on their files suggesting that they were or might be troublemakers, their cases would not be processed and they would not be allowed access to lawyers.

    Then on the Sunday morning, with all of them holding onto the hope that they would one day get out of that hell, they were told by departmental officials that they will never see Australia, that no third country was volunteering to take them, and that because if its awful economic situation PNG would never be able to assist them.

    Despite the fact that most of the Iranians were well educated and their leader was a PhD who was against any protest or uprising, that news became a catalyst for the first real reaction among the inmates. Two guys climbed a fence even though there are many fences, each one further away than the others, and absolutely no chance of escape. The men had no weapons so they threw fruit at the guards, mostly peaches. The response of the guards was to use rocks and metal legs of dismantled tables destined for junking to attack the detainees. Some of the detainees may have thrown back the same rocks at the guards.

    On the Monday morning, we interpreters were told that there was no work for us as no lawyers were being allowed to enter and only the medical team was being admitted. After some delay, some of us were in fact allowed in to assist the medical team and from a distance of 6 or 7 metres, I saw one detainee pushing another guy in a wheelchair. The wheelchair guy was “brain dead” – his mouth was distorted, one arm was hanging down and he could not pull it back up. One of the guards called out to the man pushing the wheelchair – “Get out, get out!!!” The guy pushing the wheelchair held tight to the wheelchair and refused to let go. In very broken English, which I did my best to translate, he said that the guards had killed his mate the previous night and he did not trust them with the wheelchair man. He said he was going to stay with him in the medical room to wait for his turn with the doctor.

    Because of my efforts to interpret, the guards turned on me and accused me of interference and of sticking up for the detainee. This was nonsense as all I was doing was interpreting what he was trying to say. The man said to me that he feared the guards would kill the wheelchair guy if he left him. I offered to the guards that I would push the wheelchair or that they could get someone from the medical team to do so. There were many guards there at the time and one or more of them pushed me away and jumped on the guy pushing the chair. He was strong and would not let go of the wheelchair until 7 of the guards threw him to the ground and held him down. I pleaded with the guards to stop the violence but they and others in the pay of the Government turned against me.

    When my attention was again drawn to the guy in the wheelchair, I could see there was blood all over him. There was a needle in his arm as if for a drip but his arm was bleeding and there was no drip attached to it. No nurse would have done something like that. His head was injured, he had no eye movement and his mouth was hanging to one side. He was just hanging like a piece of meat. Any human being would want to help a person in that state.

    I remonstrated with the guards. I said that you cannot do this to people to whom you owe a duty of care. These people paid everything they had to a people smuggler, they put their lives on the line coming through a difficult journey. Many of them lost loved ones on the way yet they somehow got to Australia. Now you shift them to the most dangerous place in the world away from the media and from the eyes of good hearted Australians. I cannot believe that Australians support what you are doing to these people. You are killing them.

    This outburst had me escorted out and treated worse than a criminal. I knew I would lose my job but I refused to let them do such awful things in silence in the name of Australia so that people elsewhere can think of Australians as a violent people intent on killing innocents.

    While I was sitting in the interpreters’ room waiting to be deported myself, I heard the sound of shooting and a lot of noise and disturbance. So I went up on the roof where I saw some horrendous things. There were many people badly injured. I saw one man who had no brain, and nothing on his neck. His skull was crushed. Another man had his throat cut and a doctor was trying to push a tube through the hole in his neck but there was too much blood coming out. He could not find the man’s lung to get the fluid out while telling someone else to pump air in. I actually heard the doctor say that he was very tired after three days of constant work. I come from a country that went through a violent revolution. I have been through a war. But I have never seen anything like this. It was barbaric.

    I am for stopping the boats and the people trafficking but I want Manus and Nauru closed and the people treated properly. Australian taxpayers are paying a fortune to the Governments of Nauru and PNG to have these terrible camps in their countries. People who cannot pay their mortgages are funding these other Governments for this sinful activity. Bring them to Darwin or other places on the Australian mainland where we have ample facilities to house them. Those who are found not to be refugees should be sent back to their homes. But those who are genuine refugees should be introduced gently to the Australian way of life and culture and then into the community.

    The politicians do not like to admit they are wrong but they have made the wrong decisions here. I appeal to them – please be honest with yourselves. You have children and families. What would you do if your brother’s throat was cut? What if your children were starving, without water or showers, and standing in 50 degree heat? What if they are dehydrated, have diarrhoea vomit every day? Where are your consciences?

     

     

  • Alex Mitchell, reporting from Hobart. The Tasmanian Chainsaw Massacre.

    On the eve of any election it is the practice of tabloid editors to reach into battered folders containing tried and trusted headlines capable of exciting readers on polling day – PHOTO FINISH or TOO CLOSE TO CALL or sometimes IT’S A CLIFFHANGER.

    With Tasmanians going to the polls this Saturday none of the above are suitable. That’s because the result is a foregone conclusion: a landslide for Will Hodgman’s Liberal Party. Perhaps we’ll see WILLSLIDE or TASSIE GOES BLUE.

    As well as a Liberal victory in Tasmania, South Australia is likely to fall to the Liberals as well. This would leave the ACT as the only speck of ALP rule in the whole of the Commonwealth.

    Because the Tasmanian result is a foregone conclusion, why is the campaign worth covering and what is its interest to voters-at-large?

    Of engrossing interest is the Tasmanian Labor Party – which has ruled for the past 16 years – and why it is facing a bloodbath on Saturday.

    It is not simply that the party is a victim of its own longevity. Like large sections of the ALP in the mainland states, the Tassie branch has lost touch with voters and stopped offering practical, meaningful and affordable policies in key areas such as health, education, jobs and housing.

    Inexplicably, Premier Lara Giddings has placed the long-delayed pulp mill at the top of her campaign pitch. This is despite the fact that the project is the most divisive issue in the island’s political life and it has destroyed at least three Labor premierships.

    In the final week of the campaign she gave the go-ahead for a campaign of “robocalls”, unsolicited phone calls to voters telling them: “The Greens want to destroy your jobs”.

    Until January, Ms Giddings was in coalition with the Greens and there were Green MPs in her Cabinet. She unceremoniously kicked the Greens out of the government in January in an attempt to reassert the ALP’s independence in the minds of voters.

    “Robocalling” 80,000 homes across the State has angered as many Labor voters as Green supporters. State ALP secretary John Dowling attempted to justify the tactic saying: “The extremists in the Greens party are taking over.” (It was almost as if he was channelling Anthony Albanese).

    At the 2010 state election, Labor employed the same tactic using “robocalling” to tell voters that the Greens wanted to legalise heroin – a mischievous lie.

    When the result was a hung parliament (Labor and Liberal both with 10 seats each) the ALP went into negotiations to form a coalition with the (heroin-friendly!) Greens.

    Labor’s other tactical fiasco was to spend the final days of this campaign demanding criminal action against Clive Palmer, the Member for Fairfax, and Senator-elect Jacqui Lambie over the use of photographs of the main party leaders – Ms Giddings, Will Hodgman and Nick McKim (Greens) – in Palmer United Party advertisements in local newspapers.

    For four days, the issue became Palmer and PUP. It was the sort of publicity that the mining tsar could only have dreamt of.

    Murdoch newspapers weighed in demanding the prosecution of Palmer and Ms Lambie. If convicted they would face a maximum fine of $39,000 and/or 12 months’ jail. The sentence would be enough to destroy their parliamentary careers.

    In a flying visit to Hobart, Palmer was showered with free publicity and declared: “I’m happy to go to jail. I’m happy to be like Gandhi.”

    The mental image of the behemoth Clive in the slammer with the scarecrow Mahatma brought gales of laughter across Tasmania. But Palmer was milking his “martyrdom” and collecting some votes for PUP as well.

    Ms Giddings put out a brief press notice the other day saying she would not attend the main tally room in Hobart on Saturday night. This breaks a decades-long tradition of the Premier being on hand to claim victory, accept defeat or set the scene for power-sharing negotiations.

    She can be forgiven for wanting to excuse herself from the bloodbath. Her first public announcement will be made on Sunday when she resigns the Labor leadership and suggests a wider poll by MPs and party members to elect her successor i.e. the way Bill Shorten was chosen over Anthony Albanese.

    The MP who picks up the fragments of what was once the Tasmanian ALP will face an awesome task in reconstruction. With perhaps six ALP MPs in the 25-member parliament, Labor will finish about the same size as the Greens.

    The lessons of Labor’s electoral demise federally, in NSW, Queensland, NT, Tasmania, and probably South Australia, are starkly obvious: a dimwitted professional political class has usurped control of the ALP and it seems incapable of grasping the simple truth that treating the membership with contempt and insulting supporters with policy vacuity and media gimmicks will doom the party.

    Alex Mitchell is a former state political editor of The Sun-Herald and author of Come The Revolution: A Memoir, NewSouth Books 2010

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Gina Rinehart and the age of entitlement.

    It is a bit rich for Gina Rinehart, with the enormous privileges she has inherited, to be telling us that we all need to work harder, cut taxes and curb wasteful government spending. Born on third base, as baseball enthusiasts would understand, does give a very jaundiced view of yourself and others.

    There is a quite dishonest campaign being run about the need to cut spending and reduce taxes. It looks as if we are being softened up to help the “deserving rich”.

    The facts are clear however that Australian taxes are very low by world standards. At 28% of GDP our taxes are well below the OECD average of 34% of GDP and much lower than the taxes in some northern European countries that have very successful economies and where taxes reach about 45% of GDP.

    It is our tax system that needs attention as Ken Henry keeps reminding us, including could I suggest a stiff inheritance tax that would bring some people back at least to second base!

    One of the reasons why we have such lower tax revenue is because of ‘tax expenditures’ as economists call them. These “tax expenditures” cost our tax revenue $115 billion in 2012-13. “Tax expenditures” are government revenue foregone as the result of differential or preferential deductions and treatment of particular sectors and taxpayers. Deductions for superannuation are the most blatant of these rip offs. Ross Gittins calls those that benefit so much the “super fat cats.”

    In a working paper in January this year the IMF showed that Australia has one of the highest “tax expenditures” in the world. . We topped the list of 16 countries with “tax expenditures” as a percentage of GDP at 8.5%. For big spenders like Italy, it was 8%; for the US  7.5%; UK 6%; France 4%; Canada 2%; Germany 1% and South Korea 1%.

    The Australian Parliamentary Library in its report on January 28 this year was headed “Australia tops the charts in tax deductions”

    In Australia the “tax expenditures” that put us at the top of world ranking are in key areas  that benefit high income earners — superannuation, retirement incomes, health insurance, capital gains on short-term investment, housing (both owner occupied and investment), family trusts and the absence of inheritance taxes. These generous concessions have been designed to preserve the incomes of the wealthy and the middle class which both political parties have tried to keep onside. Such concessions have also favoured older Australians, to the disadvantage of the young, who have faced increases in university fees and more expensive housing and have been cajoled into private health insurance to pay for the healthcare of the aged.

    The IMF Working Paper highlighted the problems that high levels of “tax expenditures” cause.

    • They compromise fairness. The report says ‘Tax expenditures can be a poor way of pursuing equity objectives in a progressive tax system. For instance any policy that reduces taxable income will benefit most those in the highest marginal tax bracket and convey no benefit to those out of the tax system.’ It is surely unfair and unsustainable that if we are over 60 and regardless of the level of our income, we do not have to pay any tax on our superannuation income.
    • They can be inefficient and poorly targeted. ‘ … the current deduction of mortgage interest for instance may encourage leveraged housing finance’.
    • They are vulnerable to lobbying. ‘Special interest groups may find it easier to argue for tax breaks than for explicit spending support. Tax expenditures often bypass the scrutiny according to spending in the regular budget. … This lack of transparency may explain some of the appeal they hold … ‘

    In short, “tax expenditures” are unfair, inefficient and provide wonderful opportunities for rent seekers like the superannuation and the private health insurance industries in Australia to secretly lobby for concessions.

    If we reduced these tax expenditures by 50% we would be well on the way to meeting the $60 billion long-term structural budget deficit that we face.

    The problem is not in our spending or support for persons with handicaps or low incomes. The problem is in our taxes and particularly the system of “tax expenditures” that benefits the wealthy. But we don’t want to know about it. We complain about electricity prices and the carbon tax but they are small beer compared with the enormous rip offs by the wealthy in superannuation and aged pensions.

    The previous government made a few changes like means-testing the private health insurance rebate but it ignored the general thrust of the Henry Report for tax reform.

    Gina Rinehart and the deserving rich want to defend and expand middle-class concessions like “tax expenditures”. It is galling that people born on third base think that everyone else is wasteful and lazy.

     

     

  • Race Mathews. Victorian Labor’s new crisis.

    ALP members and supporters in Victoria have cause for alarm about the party’s wellbeing and perhaps long-term survival. While federal leader Bill Shorten has committed to far-reaching party reforms, and other states such as Queensland are already adopting them, the Victorian ALP is lurching back into a troubled past, which threatens its effectiveness and future.

    Faced with a comparable crisis in the party’s internal affairs in the mid-1960s, a party body – the ”Scoresby State Electorate Council committee of inquiry into representation and decision making in the ALP” – wrote to local branches, expressing its concern about the dire straits into which the party had fallen.

    Issues raised in the ”Scoresby letter” included the ALP’s chronic under-representation in the state and federal parliaments; the dominance of its affairs by an external body, the so-called Trade Unionists Defence Committee; the withdrawal of recently secured rank-and-file representation on the party’s state executive; and a historic low of party membership and involvement. The letter sought membership, governance and finance information, on which a case for change might be developed.

    Alerted to the Scoresby initiative, the state ALP president, Bill Brown, and the state secretary, Bill Hartley, instructed branch secretaries that the letter should be returned unopened to the state office. Some may have complied with their directive. Many did not.

    Sharing the Scoresby concerns, and frustrated by so arbitrary an assault on the right of members to communicate freely with one another, John Cain and others formed the ”Participants” group, to champion party renewal and reform.

    Backed by Gough Whitlam, the Participants paved the way for the 1970 reconstruction and democratisation of the party, and thereby the election of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments.

    Fifty years on from the Scoresby letter, new challenges for the Victorian party stem from endemic misconduct by its Right and Left factions, both separately and in collusion with one another. Their monopolisation of the party’s governance and decision-making bodies locks out the majority of members who neither belong to nor support a faction.

    The facts speak for themselves. General meetings are used by the factions to lock in their members to decisions arrived at by inner circles behind closed doors. Union delegates to the party’s state conference mostly aren’t elected, but appointed by factionally aligned union officials or management committees, subject to their acceptance of factional direction.

    Abuses are exemplified by Victoria’s recent round of preselections for state seats, where a ”stability pact” between the factions enabled them to divide up the winnable seats to their mutual advantage, irrespective of the party’s best interests or the wishes of its local members.

    The ALP’s powerful Victorian Administrative Committee – an all but wholly factionally dominated body – pledged initially that, consistent with the party rules, the preselection of upper house candidates would include plebiscites of local members. Subsequently, the plebiscites were cancelled and the allocation of the upper house seats referred to the factionally more amenable ALP national executive on the pretext of ”administrative necessity”.

    The executive’s acceptance of the referral was moved by the Left faction’s Kim Carr and seconded by the Right’s Don Farrell, with all but three of the members present voting for the motion despite others being known to have disagreed with it.

    The refusal by the party’s national returning officer to announce the outcome of the subsequent ballot for the seats on the grounds of its non-compliance with the ALP’s affirmative action rule was overturned by the executive, and the candidates as specified in the ”stability pact” were declared to have been preselected.

    Thus the local members were effectively disenfranchised and denied the say in the process to which the party rules entitle them.

    State lower house seats were divided between the factions before the legitimate preselection process, with the Macedon electorate being only the most blatant of instances of disregard for local sentiment or the intentions of the party rules. Despite a highly qualified Macedon resident having received more than 80 per cent of the votes in the local ballot, an external candidate with 19 per cent of the local vote was preselected.

    In other electorates, well-qualified preselection candidates reportedly were bullied by factional operatives into withdrawing their nominations, or did so on the promise of factional support at a later date.

    So extensive an exercise of irresponsible power for sectional advantage results from a wider subverting of the ALP’s democratic norms and procedures, and in particular of rules requiring all internal elections and preselections to be by secret ballot. State conferences and public office selection committee meetings don’t provide booths to properly protect voter privacy. Delegates are routinely required to disclose their completed ballot papers to factional operatives or surrender them for completion by others on their behalf.

    Hand in hand with the rorting of the requirement for secret ballots has gone an all but complete breakdown in accountability by the party’s ruling bodies. Administrative committee agendas are not made available in advance to the branches and members who may wish to have input into them. The committee’s minutes are not released or its decisions otherwise reported. Elected administrative committee members are frequently represented by unaccountable proxies. Their identities, frequency of attendance and relevant qualifications and experience are not disclosed.

    Key recommendations for party reform from reviews such as by Mark Dreyfus (1998), Bob Hawke/Neville Wran (2002), John Faulkner/Steve Bracks/Bob Carr (2010) and Alan Griffin (2011) are pigeonholed or swept under carpets in state and national party offices, without explanation or apology.

    The ALP deserves better. Factions properly should be ”on tap but not on top”. At Victorian state conference delegate elections to be held shortly, their stranglehold on the party will be challenged. Candidates are being recruited who pledge to back reform and reject factional direction. ALP members should vote for them – a first step towards re-democratisation and the restoration of member rights.

    This article was published in The Age on March 3, 2014

    Race Mathews is a life member of the ALP and a former federal MP, Victorian minister, and chief of staff to Gough Whitlam and Labor leaders in the Victorian Parliament.

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Calling a spade a spade in Ukraine.

    Ukraine, the U.N., the European Union and the U.S. have nine days in which to influence the tide of events in Crimea or witness the second (after the excision from Georgia of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008) expansion of Russia’s military and political control beyond its post-Soviet borders. Nine days. That’s how long the Sochi Paralympics will run – during which the prestige-conscious Vladimir Putin is unlikely to declare ‘Full Ahead’.

    Everything about the Russian takeover in Crimea suggests a carefully planned, long-term strategy. The concoction of excuses being offered by the Kremlin, the disinformation about ‘fascist threats’ to Russian-speakers and Jews, comes straight from the old KGB playbook. It is utter nonsense to suggest the special forces being used in Crimea were briefed, equipped and deployed in response to an appeal for help from ousted Ukrainian president Yanukovych contained in that piece of paper produced days after the troops were on the ground. An operation like this, requiring the coordination of many external and internal elements, had to have been in the making for weeks, if not months. The reason Russia refused last month to sign the negotiated political settlement in Kiev becomes apparent: Putin had another solution in mind.

    Sitting in Sydney, thousands of kilometres from Simferopol, never having visited that part of the world, I am little qualified to comment on the events unfolding there, I admit. But I have read enough history and heard enough of Putin lamenting the ‘disastrous’ break up of the old Soviet Union to sense that Crimea satisfies more than a passing ambition for the Russian leader. Some more knowledgeable observers believe he is acting out of a need to distract attention from weaknesses in his own country’s economy and social cohesion; that what we are witnessing is opportunistic adventurism. While adventurists are not necessarily less dangerous than methodical imperialists, the implication of their analysis, that Putin is riding the tiger’s tail, smacks to me of wishful thinking. And, anyway, successful adventurism often proves habit forming, and domestic problems, and the opposition movements that in normal circumstances coalesce around them, tend to melt away when the cause of ‘national survival’ is invoked.

    The Internet offers us a bewildering array of information, commentary and analysis on the crisis. What I did not know about the history of Ukraine, up until a few days ago, was a lot; for many people, I imagine, it has been a quick swot. Yes, Ukraine has been an independent country for only a short time. Yes, it is divided along religious, ethnic and linguistic lines. Yes, Crimea occupies a special place in the survival story of the Russian people. Yes, Nikita Khrushchev may have been tipsy when he ceded Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. But, so what? An invasion is an invasion, and no hastily organised referendum conducted under the guns of an occupying power can be considered a legitimate act of self-determination (first run a Russian flag above the parliament building, then ask the people whether they want to be part of Russia––an order of events reminiscent of the Nazi’s Lebensraum program). The use of thugs and militias to intimidate and threaten opponents––a further tool in the Kremlin’s kitbag, as we are seeing––is the present reality, and no amount of gesturing to former historical realities can cancel out what is happening on the ground today.

    Very few Europeans would welcome a return to the Cold War. Fewer still want a ‘hot’ war over Crimea. I suspect most governments would be satisfied if Putin stops there and does not extend his annexation to include eastern Ukraine. If so, there will be a touch of ‘Munich’ about the collective sigh of relief. (A Mark Twain quote is being used a lot lately: ‘History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’) The planned economic and political sanctions are unlikely to have a deep or lasting effect. They’re already being be cited by the Kremlin as evidence of Western hypocrisy and anti-Russian animus; any chinks in the solidarity of the sanctioning states will be ruthlessly exploited.

    All nations bordering Russia, meanwhile, have been put on notice, especially those with significant Russian-speaking populations. Over the past 25 years, efforts have been made to draw Russia into the European sphere––under Putin now the tide is ebbing. The ancient contested ground of Central Europe faces increasing pressure to re-align national interests with Russian interests. The levers for this pressure from the east will include the threatened withdrawal of energy supplies, ‘nationalist’ agitation from within the Russian diaspora and blatant military power. There will be sweeteners, too, such as soft loans and trade privileges. All will be played out amid a geopolitical conversation about growing American irrelevance and impotency (see: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam). Such is the worst-case scenario.

    A best-case scenario might be something like this: the withholding of international recognition for a Russian-annexed Crimea (the example of Burma-Myanmar is instructive about what can be achieved through a lasting international resolve); a policy of engagement with Russia based on strict reciprocity (starting with strategic trade goods) that stays Putin’s hand from turning off the gas pipelines running west; immediate material support for open and fair elections in Ukraine, with sufficient independent observers on the ground to validate the process; and encouragement for a more inclusive political culture, which might assuage Russian concerns about creeping NATO-ism. A failed and bankrupt state in Ukraine would, after all, be a more immediate threat to Russia than any member of the European Union. It could be smarter for Russia to let the E.U. and its partners pick up the tab. Now that could be the starting point for a real conversation with the Kremlin.

    Walter Hamilton reported on international affairs for the ABC for 13 years.

  • Cavan Hogue. Russia, Ukraine and Crimea.

    Western rhetoric about the situation in Ukraine shows little understanding of the realities of Russia and Ukraine. If Western countries want a new cold war they are going the right way about it. It is a complex problem which cannot be solved by superficial noises about democracy and territorial integrity. Crimea is a special case which should be separated from the more general conflict.

    Crimea was always Russian until Khrushchev put it into the Ukrainian SSR which didn’t matter because everything at that time was controlled from Moscow anyway. However, after the break-up, a whole lot of people who spoke Russian and thought of themselves as Russians found themselves in a country they didn’t want to be part of and felt no loyalty towards. That is why they are an autonomous region and that is why they want to be part of Russia instead of Ukraine.

    Many Russians do not see Ukrainians as being different. The beginnings of what we now know as Russia were in Kiev when Prince Vladimir adopted Orthodox Christianity. Kievan Rus, as it was known, then spread north to Moscow and is seen by Russians as the origin of their civilisation. Those who think of themselves as Ukrainian would not deny history but presumably would argue that things have changed in the last 500 years and they prefer to look towards Europe.

    Ukraine is divided between Russians and Ukrainians. The non-Russian Ukrainians have an understandable distrust of Russia. In places like Lvov people who have never moved from the one house have been Polish, Soviet Russians and now Ukrainian. There is also a religious divide between Russian Orthodox and Uniates who have their own rites but accept the authority of the Pope. The current split within Ukraine is between those who look to Russia and those who look to Europe.

    If a free and fair referendum is held in Crimea there is likely to be a majority for joining Russia. Forcing these people back into Ukraine is not going to solve anything. They will remain a discontented group who will continue to make trouble for the central government. They believe they have the right to self-determination and Ukraine might be a stronger and more stable country without them.

    Russians are a proud people who have been humiliated by their lessened influence in the world but who still firmly believe Russia is a Great Power. Putin has this view in spades and attempts by the West, especially the USA, to pressure him will be resisted. It is certainly true that he is authoritarian – to put it mildly – but this should not lead us to ignore the fact that in the case of Crimea he does have a point. Quite apart from Crimea, Putin does have a vision of a Russia which plays a major role in the world and is not pushed around. He does not seem to accept that Ukrainians don’t like to be pushed around either.

    Sanctions are dangerous in that they will tend to create a gap instead of bringing Russia into closer ties with Europe. Even if they were to succeed, they would leave a resentment that will not go away in a hurry. Megaphone diplomacy is not helpful.

    The pious comments from the Coalition of the Willing about not interfering in other countries are a bit rich! While there is plenty of chest pounding from Putin, Russians will not be impressed by pressure from people they see as not being in a position to cast the first stone. Western countries may claim the moral high ground but Russians will not agree.

    Australia can have no significant influence in this dispute and we would be well advised to keep a low profile. However, I understand that domestic pressure from Ukrainians here who have more votes than Russians is a factor which politicians will take into account in their public rhetoric. I suspect the community here, many of whom left Ukraine while it was still part of the USSR, have unreal expectations of what Australia could and should do in Ukraine. Most of them belong to the Ukrainian speaking and anti Russian part of the country. They have a legitimate point of view but so perhaps do the people who do not want to be part of Ukraine.

    Cavan Hogue was the last Australian Ambassador to the USSR and the first to the Russian Federation and to Ukraine. He was also Ambassador to Mexico, Malaysia and Thailand.

  • John Menadue. The lesser royals are on the move again.

    Prince William, his wife Kate and son George are to visit Australia next month. What joy awaits us. The weather should be good for a holiday and adulation from Tony Abbott and his monarchist friends.

    Seeing such a visit, the leaders in our region will again scratch their heads. In this ‘Asian Century’ why is Australia inviting a British royal to a country that says that its future is in Asia. The visit may give a short-term lift to tourism, but it will again put us on the wrong side of history.

    The royal entourage will visit Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra plus Uluru and the Blue Mountains. The all-up cost, based on previous royal tours, will be about $2 million, another dent in Joe Hockey’s plans to reduce our budget deficit.

    A visit by a lesser royal reminds me of Gough Whitlam’s comments to Queen Elizabeth at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Jamaica in 1974. He had been concerned for some time about the lesser royals ingratiating themselves with state premiers to have an expenses free trip to Australia. Inevitably Gough Whitlam would receive a letter from Sir Jo Bjelke-Peterson or Sir Charles Court that it would be nice if a member of the extended royal family could visit Australia. Gough Whitlam was faced with the political problem of being seen publicly to be unfriendly to the royals. So he was cornered and the visit by the lesser royals went ahead.

    But at CHOGM in 1974, Gough Whitlam told the Queen that she and Prince Phillip were welcome – but could she please discourage other members of the family ingratiating themselves with state premiers to get a visit to Australia.

    So I was not surprised when the Queen told Australian officials on board Britannia at a reception ‘Your Prime Minister was very kind to Phillip and me. But he was a bit rude to the rest of my family.’  Importantly the message had been conveyed and she understood. She is a smart person. If only her children and grandchildren were half as smart.

    In Japan in 1979 I had the privilege of calling on Shigeo Nagano to tell him that the Fraser Government wanted to confer on him an honorary award of Companion in the Order of Australia. Shigeo Nagano had been a major contributor to the development of trade and particularly minerals trade between Australia and Japan. He had been Chairman of Nippon Steel and in 1979 was Chair of Japan’s Chamber of Commerce. He was a very nice man.

    After I described the award and its significance, the first question Nagano san asked me was ‘When can I go to London to receive the award from the Queen’. I had to let him down gently and explain that it was an Australian award and it could be presented to him either in Japan by me or he could go to Australia and receive it from the Governor General. He chose the former and a reception was held later in Tokyo for the investiture together with many of his business colleagues.

    It was just another illustration of the confusion in our region that comes from our quaint association with the British royal family.

    When will we mature and become an independent country with our own Head of State. We can do with fewer visits from lesser royals or any royals for that matter.

  • John Menadue. Conservatives, conventions and traditions.

    Conservatives extoll the importance of conventions, traditions, and respect for established institutions. But it seems to be only when it suits them.

    They lecture us and others about democracy, free elections, the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary. Colloquially they sum it up ‘If it is not broken, don’t try to fix it’.

    There is an important convention on Cabinet papers. But the Abbott Government has decided breach that convention and hand over Cabinet papers concerning pink batts to a Royal Commission examining that issue. This is despite the clear Westminster convention as set out in my blog of February 10. The Cabinet Handbook is quite explicit.

    ‘The convention is that Cabinet documents are confidential to the government that created them and not the property of the sponsoring minister or department. Access to them by succeeding governments is not granted without the approval of the current parliamentary leader of the appropriate political party.’ (PM & C website – Cabinet Handbook, paras 17 to 19).

    It is clear that the Abbott Government has wilfully breached this long-held convention. The Prime Minister presumably instructed the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet who has official responsibility in this matter, to hand over the Cabinet documents relating to pink batts to the Attorney General’s Department. This department then handed them to the Australian Government Solicitor. A PM&C official told the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Senate on Monday February 24 “Documents were provided by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to Attorney General’s Department, who is co-ordinating compliance, in conjunction with the Australian Government Solicitor on the 31st [of January].’  PM & C cannot absolve itself of its responsibilities in this matter by passing the buck to the Attorney General’s Department or the Australian Government Solicitor.

    I have not seen any suggestion that Bill Shorten has agreed  to this handover as the Convention requires.

    Vilification of the ALP has not been enough for the Abbott Government in pursuing the pink batts issue. It has torn up a long-standing Westminster convention that Cabinet documents are the property of the government of the time.

    There are sound reasons for this Cabinet convention. Cabinet ministers should in confidence be able without fear or favour to discuss and decide important public issues. That is why the Cabinet convention stipulates that Cabinet documents are not to be released for 20 or 30 years.. Well-tried and valuable conventions should not be set aside for political point-scoring. Only in exceptional circumstances should conventions be set aside. This is not an exceptional circumstance.

    Our Westminster conventions are being breached by Conservatives who give lip service to our institutions, conventions and traditions but act quite differently.

    Malcolm Fraser broke the Westminster convention that was fought over for centuries in England that governments are made and broken only in the lower house, the people’s house.

    During the loans crisis, Sir Garfield Barwick, our Chief Justice, broke the convention of the separation of powers by briefing and politically fortifying John Kerr.

    We have also now recently learnt that High Court Judge Mason had clandestine meetings with John Kerr to support him in the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. He trashed the convention of the independence of the judiciary.

    Now Tony Abbott has trashed the convention of the confidentiality of Cabinet documents. This is no trivial matter.

    I hope the ALP can avoid the temptation of pay-back when it is next in government. There is a lot at stake.