Category: Politics

  • Jon Stanford. The government’s new naval shipbuilding policy

     

    I think this is an outstanding article on naval shipbuilding, industry policy and economic prospects in South Australia. Jon Staford suggests that in terms of industry policy, ‘continuing to prop up the car industry … would probably have been a much cheaper way of [creating jobs]’. In case you have missed it, I have decided to repost.  John Menadue

    The recent statement by the Prime Minister on the naval shipbuilding industry is highly problematic. By committing up to $89 billion to a continuous warship-building program in Adelaide, the government’s largesse knows no bounds. This policy seems irresponsible, not just financially but also in terms of both industry policy and defence requirements. Yet, in political terms, it may seem a masterstroke, not just in shoring up the Coalition vote in South Australia but because none of the other political parties will oppose it.

    1. National security argument for building warships locally

    In the current debate over naval shipbuilding it is taken for granted that there is a strong defence argument in favour of building naval platforms in Australia, almost regardless of cost. Not only do politicians and trade unions assert this, but it goes generally unchallenged in the media. Yet it is simply not correct.

    From a Defence policy perspective, the role of industry is to provide through life support for military assets, to upgrade them as required and, in any conflict, to repair combat damage and return the asset to the front line as expeditiously as possible. It is not necessary to have built a warship in the first place to be able to undertake these tasks. Local industry has always provided through life support to the RAN fleet, irrespective of whether the ships were built locally or procured offshore. In recent times, for example, the Oberon class submarines were built in the UK but were both sustained and upgraded to challenging RAN specifications in Australia.

    More recently, the US origin Perry class FFGs have been upgraded very substantially to a local design. But the contract went not to the Williamstown shipyard that built the two Australian sourced ships but to Thales/ADI in Sydney, which had played no part in constructing the ships. The current leading-edge upgrade to the Anzac class frigates is being undertaken not in the Williamstown yard that built them, but in Western Australia. Indeed, the Navy prefers to have maintenance and upgrades undertaken at the fleet bases in Sydney and Henderson (WA), while construction generally takes place elsewhere.

    In practical terms, when we consider Air Force and Army assets the national security argument for building naval platforms locally is soon shown to be false. The Mirage was the last RAAF fighter to be assembled locally in the 1960s and there was no argument from Defence that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter should be built here. The RAAF and defence industry have done a fine job in maintaining and upgrading the fleet of Hornets, which were bought off the shelf from the US. Although some helicopters are being assembled in Australia, it is not clear what the benefits are and there have been some significant costs. While the Army was keen to acquire the Abrams Main Battle Tank (to what end has never been entirely clear), there never seemed to be any suggestion that it was necessary to build the platforms in Australia.

    It is also notable that the Prime Minister appears to support the RAN’s next submarine being sourced from Japan. While he may compromise on this position, it does suggest that he does not accept that there is a national security argument for building naval platforms locally.

    From a Defence perspective, there can also be significant downside in building warships in Australia. First, they are likely to cost more (30-40 per cent more according to the RAND Corporation). Within a constrained defence budget, this reduces the ‘bang for the buck’ very significantly. For example, for the eventual cost of three locally built air warfare destroyers, we would probably have been able to buy off the shelf from the US five larger and more capable Arleigh Burke class destroyers or, more realistically, buy three and divert the savings into other defence priorities. Secondly, delays in delivering locally built ships can lead to significant problems and costs for the RAN where obsolescent ships that were due to be replaced have to be kept in service for longer.

    Continuous build: the tail wagging the dog?

    Establishing a local industry to build warships for a small navy leads to major problems in terms of maintaining a skilled workforce. If there is no new build program on the horizon to take over from another program that is nearing completion, there is no alternative but to discharge the shipyard’s workforce and put some of the capital on care and maintenance. This leads to a major loss of skills in the workforce that can pose substantial risks to a new build program and take years to rebuild.

    The Prime Minister’s solution to this problem is to establish a continuous build program for warships. Note that this will not commence in this decade; the Anzac ships with their current upgrade are among the most capable frigates in the world and do not need replacing yet. This means that most naval shipyards will need to pay off most of their current workforce. Some shipyards, such as Williamstown, may even close permanently as a result.

    Given that the sole purpose of a local naval shipbuilding industry is to service the requirements of Defence, what are the benefits to Defence of a continuous build program in the future? The answer, surely, is very few. The Navy needs to retain maximum flexibility in its future requirements. It may need a new class of vessel quickly that does not accord with continuous build. Given rapid changes in IT and systems as technology advances ever more quickly, it may be much more efficient to upgrade existing platforms rather than prematurely replace them with new ones. The RAN is not the US Navy; it may not require a new ship every two years. The only benefit is to the industry, which should be a servant of the Navy. This is truly a case of the tail wagging the dog.

    1. Industry policy perspective

    Apart from national security, the main argument for building warships locally is that it creates jobs for Australians rather than for foreigners if the same ships were built overseas. Given Australia’s commitment to free trade, it is curious to see this mercantilist argument, which takes no account of comparative advantage, proposed by a Coalition government that supposedly supports a market economy, as well as by an Opposition that surely retains in its veins some of the competitive blood from the Hawke/Keating years.

    It is also particularly odd to witness a government that virtually shooed the car industry out of the country on the basis of the subsidy it required as being so keen to pay enormous sums of money for locally built warships in order to create jobs. If job creation in South Australia’s engineering industries is the policy objective, continuing to prop up the car industry (particularly under a much lower exchange rate) would probably have been a much cheaper way of achieving it.

    The inconvenient truth is that, with two exceptions, Australia has never been very good at building warships. We have a long history of building copies of overseas designs in government-owned shipyards. Often these have taken twice as long to build as they should have done and have come at a significant cost premium compared with overseas acquisition. Notably, it was Gough (“I am a Rattigan man”[1]) Whitlam who brought the party to an end by rejecting a proposal for a locally designed and built frigate in favour of acquiring the cheap, off the shelf Perry FFG class from the US.

    Two successes: Anzacs and Littoral Combat Ships

    The one outstanding domestic shipbuilding success story is the Anzac frigate program. Eight ships of German design were built at Williamstown for the RAN (and two more for New Zealand) and delivered over ten years from 1996 on time and on budget. Although cost comparisons are difficult because of differences in specifications, it is generally agreed that the ships were procured for much the same cost as if they had been acquired from Germany. Even the German shipbuilder conceded that they could not have delivered the frigates for a lower cost.

    So what was the secret of this success and how did the government exploit it? The main reasons for the success were that:

    • The Williamstown shipyard had been privatised by the Hawke government and had developed its experience in both management and the workforce in building the last two FFGs immediately before the Anzac program commenced
    • The company had a visionary leader in John White, who was highly committed to the idea that Australia possessed the engineering and manufacturing skills to build warships competitively
    • The shipyard maintained highly productive industrial relations protocols
    • The ships were built on the basis of a fixed price contract, so that the company had extensive skin in the game and the risk to government was much reduced
    • The terms of the fixed price contract virtually precluded Defence from making costly and time consuming changes to the design during the build
    • The design of the Anzac class was both mature and simple – to justify an eight ship acquisition, the frigates were ‘built for but not with’ a number of weapons systems and associated sensors that were added later
    • A ten ship program allowed considerable economies of scale to be exploited as well as moving a long way down the learning curve – the last ship, HMAS Perth, cost far less to build than the first one.

    As to how government exploited this success, the short answer is extraordinarily badly. As the Anzac program reached completion, the three ship air warfare destroyer program was put to tender and was being pursued by both Victoria (at Williamstown) and Adelaide, where the government-owned ASC had largely paid off its workforce from the Collins class submarines and had never built a surface warship. With an experienced workforce available and at the peak of its game, it seemed obvious that Tenix at Williamstown should be awarded the contract.

    But this didn’t happen. Defence was not enamoured of Tenix, which tended to keep them at arm’s length, and it had developed its own plan to concentrate naval shipbuilding in Adelaide. The risks of not awarding the project to an experienced builder were ignored. The membership of the Cabinet committee that made the decision had a majority of South Australians, including the Ministers for Defence, Foreign Affairs and Finance (who also happened to be the shareholder for ASC). The shipbuilder itself inevitably had a conflict of interest, being both owned by the government and with the government as the client. The alliance-based contract was not based on a fixed price and the cost blew out significantly as design changes were brought in, while accountability was not always clear. Inexperience in the workforce, including at sub-contractors such as Williamstown where the Anzac workforce had been paid off, led to costly mistakes and blow-outs both to the budget and the delivery schedule.

    The other success story is Austal, an entrepreneurial Western Australian shipbuilder that was one of the pioneers of fast aluminium ferries in the global market.[2] Austal opened a shipyard in Alabama, which enabled it to get around the protective Jones Act in the US and compete to build ships for the US Navy. As well as other high speed aluminium warships, Austal is completing a contract to build ten Littoral Combat Ships for the US Navy, with an objective of upgrading future ships to frigates. According to the Western Australian government, Austal is currently building 15 per cent of the US fleet.

    Yet the Prime Minister could find no room for Austal in his announcement last week. While the RAN, with some justification, has reservations about aluminium warships (as do all navies since the Falklands War), it is worth considering whether Austal’s highly competitive offerings could meet some of its future needs. It is worthy of note that Austal also built the RAN’s current patrol boat fleet, the Armidale class.

    The PM also failed to mention BAE Systems at Williamstown, one of the world’s largest defence contractors with a very significant naval shipbuilding business.

    Current situation

    As of now, therefore, all the benefits of the Anzac program have been lost. Australia is left with a dominant government-owned shipbuilder and, according to the RAND Corporation a cost disability of 30-40 per cent vis-à-vis best practice overseas. Assuming a materials to output ratio of 50 per cent, the effective rate of protection (or assistance to value added), for naval shipbuilding comes out at around 70 per cent, a figure far higher than that for the car industry.[3]

    With no significant defence benefits from a local build, it is impossible for the government to justify providing massive contracts to an industry that requires an effective rate of protection of 70 per cent. To do so is totally contrary to the thrust of industry policy since the Whitlam government and implies a considerable misallocation of highly skilled labour resources that could be used much more productively elsewhere. Indeed, this government was not able to tolerate the car industry’s subsidy requirements, which would have equated to an effective rate of protection of around 10 per cent.

    Conclusion

    The government’s announcement appears to give an open-ended commitment continuously to build future warships in Australia, or more specifically in Adelaide. There is no mention of how great a cost disability the government is willing to tolerate, how it plans to make ASC more efficient or why the Navy needs a continuous build program. There is no explanation as to why a government-owned shipyard, which is yet to deliver a surface warship, is being preferred over privately-owned shipyards in Victoria and Western Australia that have a record of success. In particular, the government has not enlightened us as to why the naval shipbuilding industry should be accorded a much higher level of assistance than it was prepared to provide to the car industry, which generates many more jobs throughout the economy, particularly in South Australia and Victoria. The justification for the taxpaying community to support a massive entitlement to the naval shipbuilding industry has yet to be explained.

    However, there may well be a good case for reforming the naval shipbuilding industry. Such a program would involve:

    • Ensuring the industry is in a fit state to undertake its major Defence functions, ie the efficient provision of through life support of assets, upgrades and swift repair of combat damage
    • Privatising ASC in Adelaide in the context of a comprehensive rationalisation of the industry to reduce excess capacity
    • Making no commitments about building future warships locally unless cost competitiveness can be achieved
    • In future programs local procurement would only occur if competitive (within, say 5 per cent) with offshore acquisition
    • A continuous build program would be undertaken only on the basis of a rigorous cost/benefit assessment
    • All acquisitions would be on the basis of a fixed price contract, albeit with possible increases in the budget for new or unforeseen changes.

    Given that the government’s announcement appears to satisfy none of these criteria, there is an opportunity for the Opposition to propose a rational industry policy more in accord with its approach under the Hawke and Keating governments. Unfortunately there are no signs that this will happen. Indeed, Bill Shorten wants to outdo the government in pork barrelling by going totus porcus (as the British Admiral Jackie Fisher used to say) and committing, cost unseen, to building the submarines in Adelaide as well.

    The current ALP leadership might usefully pause to remember that they are walking in the shadows of giants in these critical areas of public finance and industry policy. The legacy of Peter Walsh and his helper and friend John Button should not lightly be cast aside.

    As a consultant, Jon Stanford has undertaken significant work on Australia’s naval shipbuilding industry, for both government and defence contractors. Previously he worked on industry policy in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

    [1] Alf Rattigan was the Chairman of the Tariff Board, which became the Industries Assistance Commission, under the Whitlam government, and took a strong position in favour of low industry protection.

    [2] Austal has often flown under the radar. When Prime Minister Thatcher commissioned the first Australian-built Austal fast ferry on the cross-Channel route in the 1980s, she called it “a triumph for British technology”.

    [3] Even if we assume a materials to output ratio of 30 per cent, an implausibly low figure given the cost of modern missiles, sensors and systems such as Aegis, on the basis of RAND Corporation figures the effective rate of protection comes out at 50 per cent.

     

  • A tribute to Hugh Stretton

    Hugh Stretton, one of the greatest social scientists and public intellectuals that Australia has produced, passed away in late July after a long illness. His legacy as a thinker, writer, activist, advisor, teacher, mentor and friend is vast. Those of us who have had the honour of his advice and support can only marvel at the way in which Hugh balanced his great mind and deep knowledge and engagement across a very wide intellectual terrain with human capacities to connect with others at all levels with an inner calm, wisdom, kindness, humility and self-deprecation.

    Hugh’s life was one of high achievement from the outset. After, as he put it, ‘a happy childhood down the bay from Melbourne’ and success at Melbourne University interrupted by war service, he won a Rhodes scholarship to study history at Oxford. His achievements there saw his appointment in his early 20s as a tutor in modern history at Balliol College before the award of his Oxford degree. He was then appointed Professor of History at the University of Adelaide in 1954 at the age of 30, the youngest professor in an Australian university at the time. Over the next 15 years, he presided over the establishment of a history department whose members would go onto play central roles in reshaping historical scholarship in Australia and beyond.

    In 1968, he stepped down from his professorship to a readership at the University of Adelaide to concentrate on research and writing. The high achievement continued. From the late 1960s to the mid 2000s, he published seminal books and essays, and delivered public lectures in what is perhaps the most impressive output of any Australian social scientist of his generation.

    The Political Sciences (1969) challenged the growth of positivism and abstraction in political, social and economic understanding. The book promoted a view of the social sciences as inherently valued-based, moral and practical in nature. It was widely influential both locally and internationally.

    His work on cities and housing is perhaps best known. His self-published Ideas for Australian Cities (1970) offered powerful histories of city planning in Australia while developing the idea that the good city is of human scale needing urban planning much more concerned with its social, distributional and equity impacts. His 1974 Boyer Lectures Housing and Government put the case for better recognising the productive economic and social activity enabled by good housing (the ‘domestic economy’ as Stretton put it) and the virtues of a mixed private and public housing system. He defended the need for national housing policy to address new market and public failures then on the horizon. Urban Planning in Rich and Poor Countries (1978) distilled insights from rival theories about cities and trends in urban planning across the world in what was described by one reviewer as ‘like one of those rare miniatures that reveal more sheer skill than many a famed old master’.

    The future of social democracy and the attack it has faced from economic rationalism and neoliberalism were other foci of Stretton’s work. Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (1976) deployed many of the ideas about values, choices and the ‘imagination of alternatives’ of his earlier work. The book offered a powerful analysis of the options and possibilities for democratic socialist reform in capitalist democracies taking heed of new problems of inflation, economic inequality, and environmental limits. Neal Blewett described the book as ‘a classic both of, and for, our times’. Political Essays (1987) brought together many of Stretton’s shorter writings on business and government, housing, public service and the nature of the social sciences assembled against the rising tide of economic rationalist change in Australian politics and public policy. Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Public Choice (1994 co-authored with Lionel Orchard) developed a critique of public choice theory, by then a very influential stream of neo-liberal, anti-government thinking. It reminded readers about the virtues of the mixed economy balancing private markets with public enterprise, and provided insight about the nature of politics and governing gleaned from other traditions of non-reductive political thought.

    What some saw as the product of a lifetime of reflection, Stretton’s magnum opus Economics: A New Introduction (1999) offered a comprehensive new curriculum for teaching economics based on his views about value-based social science, this time expressed through a comprehensive defence of an ‘institutional’ view of the modern mixed economy. His last book Australia Fair (2005) presented a social democratic manifesto taking heed of many new economic, social and environmental problems facing Australian society, and proposing ideas about how to manage them equitably and fairly. For him, better, more active government was and is central to that task.

    Alongside his academic work, Hugh Stretton was widely admired as an activist and advocate. He was also much sought after as an advisor across the political spectrum. Much of his engagement was focussed on where he lived much of his life – Adelaide and South Australia – but his voice was strong on the national stage. He served as Deputy Chairperson of the SA Housing Trust from 1973 to 1989 and on various planning bodies particularly in the City of Adelaide. Some of his most engaging writing on public issues appeared in a diverse range of media outlets, Christopher Pearson’s Adelaide Review perhaps most prominently. Reflecting his open and practical disposition, Stretton was involved in and often lead policy experiments and initiatives particularly in urban and housing policy. The Ramsay Trust, a venture to marshal savings into a new kind of capital-indexed structure for housing finance engaged him in the 1980s while he was proud of documents he wrote or contributed to in the 1970s leading to the establishment of the Noarlunga Centre in Adelaide’s southern suburbs and the preservation of old housing fabric in Hackney, an inner Adelaide suburb threatened with redevelopment.

    As an engaged public intellectual, Stretton took his role as critic seriously and responsibly when the need arose on many issues both local and national. Mainstream economists, and politicians in their thrall, took exception to Stretton’s thinking throughout his career – from those critical of his Boyer Lectures, to those critical of his views about positivism and the winding back of social democratic governing in Australia in the 1980s, to Paul Keating’s attack on his Political Essays in 1987. Stretton always engaged critics with respectful, reasoned responses.

    Through all of this high level intellectual and policy work, Hugh was also widely admired as a gifted teacher and mentor. I speak with first hand experience of his skill and generosity on these fronts. As with many others, Hugh went out of his way as supervisor of my PhD research to guide and support me both intellectually and personally in his unobtrusive but firm way. In these respects, I was very fortunate.

    No man is an island and this is true for Hugh Stretton too. The wide group of intellectuals he had as friends and advisors is testament to that. In the Australian context, he was an original but he belongs in the company of other giants on the international stage. Some suggested after the publication of his early books that he was the ‘nearest thing to an Australian JK Galbraith’. Indeed, like Galbraith, his work echoes and connects with the work of social scientists and philosophers – Albert Hirschman, Martha Nussbaum and Charles Taylor among others – struggling to maintain and hold to a liberal, social democratic, pluralist centre in the face of the limits of the positivist mainstream, relentless economic and social change, and post-modern pressure to abandon any such ambition. The task we face is to draw on Hugh Stretton’s legacy in this spirit.

    Lionel Orchard taught public policy in Flinders University’s Graduate Program in Public Administration from 1989-2015. In the 1980s, he wrote a PhD on urban and regional policy with Hugh Stretton’s supervision and, in the early 1990s, jointly researched and wrote the book Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Public Choice (Macmillan, 1994) with him.

  • Michael Keating. Is there a trade-off between equality and efficiency?

    A critical policy issue has always been whether greater equality inevitably comes at a cost to the economic growth. For example, historically economists have typically believed that there is a trade-off between increased equality and efficiency. Even those economists who favour policies to improve equality have generally acknowledged that the transfers involved could reduce incentives and result in some loss of national income – with the critical question being by how much? Thus those economists who favour redistribution to lower inequality think that such action comes at little or at least an acceptable cost to economic output. While the counter-argument from conservative economists is that inequality is a necessary evil if we want higher incomes all round.

    Recent research published by the traditionally conservative International Monetary Fund (IMF) has however questioned this conclusion that increased equality comes at a cost to growth. Instead the IMF research has found that higher inequality is associated with lower output growth over the medium term. More specifically the IMF found that ‘If the income share of the top 20 percent increases by 1 percentage point, GDP growth is actually 0.8 percentage points lower in the following five years, … [while] a similar increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent is associated with 0.38 percentage points higher growth’ (emphasis in the original).[1]

    Somewhat surprisingly these important conclusions from this widely respected international organisation have received almost no media attention in Australia, while the barrage of comment in favour of so-called ‘industrial relations reform’ and lower taxes continues unabated, notwithstanding the risks they represent for future income equality. Accordingly what follows is a summary explanation of the reasoning that has led the IMF to conclude that ‘Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time’, and how best to reduce this inequality and what are the benefits.

    The increase in inequality

    The IMF found that ‘Measures of inequality …. of both gross and net incomes have increased substantially since 1990 in most of the developed world’. The principal drivers of this increased inequality have been an increase in the share of the top 10 percent, and even more so the top 1 percent. Much of this increase at the top reflects the appropriation of increased economic rents, and as such they are totally unnecessary to economic growth.

    In addition, technological progress has probably been biased in favour of increasing skills, thus increasing the wage premium for skills, and the substitution of new capital investment for unskilled labour. Consequently technological progress has also improved the income share of people with skills and/or capital, both of which tend to be concentrated among the top income people. Most importantly technological progress has impacted on middle level jobs in the goods sector of the economy (the traditional blue collar jobs) and that hollowing out of the middle has almost certainly been the biggest driver of increased inequality in Australia as conventionally measured[2].

    Some readers may be surprised to learn that shifting jobs offshore in response to increasing globalisation has been a much less important driver of inequality, and of course that “off-shoring” is itself dependent on improved transport and communications technology.

    How can reducing inequality improve economic growth

    The main reason for the IMF finding that inequality can damage economic growth is because higher inequality can deprive the ability of lower-income households to stay healthy and accumulate physical and human capital. Furthermore, ‘countries with higher income inequality tend to have lower levels of mobility between generations, with parent’s earnings being a more important determinant of children’s earnings’. In effect, inequality can perpetuate itself, and reduce the potential growth of human capital which is vital for future economic growth.

    In addition, the IMF notes that:

    • A prolonged period of higher inequality in advanced economies was associated with the global financial crisis by intensifying leverage, overextension of credit, and a relaxation of mortgage underwriting standards.
    • Higher top income shares coupled with financial liberalisation, which itself could be a policy response to rising income inequality, are associated with substantially larger external deficits, which can be challenging for macroeconomic and/or financial stability, and thus growth.
    • In addition to affecting growth drivers, inequality can result in poor public policy choices if it leads to a backlash that fuels protectionist pressures against growth enhancing economic reforms.

     

    Policies to reduce income inequality and improve economic growth

    The IMF finds that ‘Redistribution through the tax and transfer system is … positively related to growth for most countries, and is negatively related to growth only for the most strongly redistributive countries’. For that reason alone it is important to maintain the taxable capacity of the government so that it can afford these transfers.

    In addition, the IMF found that ‘In a world in which technological change is increasing productivity and simultaneously mechanising jobs, raising skill levels is critical for reducing the dispersion of earnings. Improving education quality, eliminating financial barriers to higher education, and providing support for apprenticeship programs are all key to boosting skill levels in both tradable and non-tradable sectors.’ These educated individuals will then be better able to cope with technological and other changes that directly influence productivity levels.

    Active labour market policies that support job search and skill matching can also be important. Moreover, policies that reduce labour market dualism, such as gaps in employment protection between permanent and temporary workers, and appropriately set minimum wages, can help to reduce inequality, while fostering greater labour market flexibility.

    Conclusion

    The IMF concludes that ‘The key to minimising the downside of globalisation and technological change in advanced economies is a policy agenda of a race to the top, instead of a race to the bottom’.

    Unfortunately too often the so-called ‘reform agenda’ proposed by business and its supporters in the media seems to be closer to a race to the bottom with its focus on cost-cutting rather than more innovation and increasing productivity. Instead we need to improve the skills of our workforce and how those skills are actually used. And in the government’s case it is important that it retains its capacity to intervene successfully, including its fiscal capacity to support the income transfers and investment in human capital that are required if we are to achieve improved equality and economic growth. 

    [1] This analysis was based on a sample of 159 advanced, emerging and developing economies for the period 1980-2012. It is reported in IMF Staff Discussion Note, Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective by Era Dabla-Norris, Kalpana Kochhar, Nujin Suphapiphat, Frantisek Ricka, Evridiki Tsounta.

    [2] If middle-level jobs disappear that means that the shares of jobs at the top and the bottom increase relative to the jobs in the middle, and mathematically that means that the top decile is re-defined upwards in terms of incomes and the bottom decile is re-defined downwards in terms of incomes. Consequently the income distribution can then appear more unequal even though there may have been no change in any individual’s income or relative rate of pay for those people who continue in their jobs.

  • David Holmes. Australia’s climate politics on a high wire.

    (or – Murdoch and Abbott in climate dial duet)

    While the politicisation of climate change has transformed climate reporting into something of a circus, the Coalition’s announcement of a 26% emissions reduction target on 2005 levels for Australia by 2030 has surely placed its climate policy on a dangerous high wire.

    The high wire is not that the target has been set too high. It is that trying to balance this “defeatist” target is going to lead to the collapse of Direct Action, and will impair the ability of the Coalition-News Corp publicity machine to defend fossil fuels.

    Already, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is resorting to increasingly desperate and absurd arguments, such as his comments on the ABC’s AMon Wednesday morning about exporting coal to India and China:

    The great thing about the Australian coal industry is that it’s actually helping countries like China to reduce their emissions intensity, if not their overall emissions, because our coal is better quality coal than the Chinese and Indian coal.

    Never mind that the floor price for coal is set to continue diving worldwide. Here is an unfathomable argument that Australia’s increasingly worthless coal is better than everyone else’s unworthy coal, and is helping fight climate change.

    With coal, as with its new target announcement, the Coalition’s honesty about its climate policy in the past will be unveiled. The ruse of a long and sustained campaign of impression management is about to be exposed by the high wire act.

    In the context of every anti-renewable, pro-coal and denialist utterance from Coalition ministers over the past two years, the revised targets are a complete stunt that have little to do with decarbonisation.

    Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday, Peter Hartcherargued that the Coalition doesn’t make any of its:

    … big decisions based on science, economics, markets, or any value other than politics. So let’s set aside the pretence that this is really about climate change.

    The Coalition is continuing to play out a strategy that has worked for them in the past. This is to mount a defence against any charge that it is doing nothing about climate change, and then turn attention away from itself, by attacking Labor and the Greens as having scary policies that will hurt the economy, jobs and electricity prices.

    This is why the Abbott government was sure to mention that while 26% is guaranteed, it might think about 28% if it is not going to hurt the economy. Never mind that the only target 26% meets is to keep Australia at the bottom of the league of nations that can actually afford to do something about climate, while having a per capita carbon footprint four times the world average.

    The Australian revealed that while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Environment Minister Greg Hunt lobbied for a more ambitious target of 30% at the cabinet meeting prior to the announcement, it was Abbott who pushed for the lower target.

    So while this all-too-risky high wire act is wanting to draw attention to “the economy”, it does so only as a means of attacking policies that actually do address decarbonisation.

    Abbott is banking on a number of things here: that a “toxic carbon tax” scare campaign can be recycled for the next election, and that News Corp will do the heavy lifting for him by continuing to heavily editorialise against Labor.

    And, right on cue, the day before the government announced its 2030 emissions target, the Daily Telegraph produced another of its signature attacks on Labor’s climate policy. Its front page prepared the way for a “responsible”-looking policy from the Coalition, citing rising power bills, job losses and a collapsing economy.

    The News Corp tabloids are capable of ferociously nationalising their editorial stance toward a Labor emissions trading scheme and caricaturing it as a toxic carbon tax at a moment’s notice. But, such a stunt is looking rather worn-out. What both Abbott and the Daily Telegraph have ignored is that the electorate has noticed that power bills have spiked substantially under Direct Action, and that carbon emissions have dramatically increased.

    Curiously, however, while two of The Australian’s columnists professed their love for coal and the Adani mine in the Galilee Basin, reporters David Crowe and Sid Maher ran an article that floated the inadequacy of the announced targets.

    The Climate Council’s Tim Flannery, so often pilloried by The Australian, had the story lead with the quote:

    Over the next few days, there will be a lot of spin to try and confuse Australians into thinking that we are doing more than we actually are. But no amount of smoke and mirrors will cover up the fact that an emissions reduction target of 40 per cent on 2000 levels by 2030 is the bare minimum and this target is far below that.

    Crowe and Maher then go on to quote independent senator Nick Xenophon and Shadow Environment Minister Mark Butler’s dismissal of the target, before going on to conclude:

    The Australian target would be below Canada’s ambition of 30% by 2030 and would not keep up with the US target of 26-28% by 2025 or the EU promise of a 40% cut from 1990 levels by 2030.

    However, more significant is that the government is ignoring advice from its own Climate Change Authority, which has consistently recommended cuts of between 40 and 60% by 2030. With the Climate Change Authority providing a benchmark target, in a rational world you would think this would create a bidding war between the parties for the highest targets – especially given the level of public anxiety over global warming.

    Climate change is set to be the main battleground of the next election campaign. Labor has declared it so. And newspaper polls, think-tank polls and even the major parties’ own internal polling show climate change to be front and centre of voter concern.

    What is needed is a budget approach to framing policy that the Climate Change Authority itself uses. Globally, carbon emissions should not exceed 1700 billion tonnes between 2000 and 2050 if we are to give ourselves a reasonable chance of staying below two degrees warming. Australia’s share of this, adjusted for relativities with poorer nations and per capita carbon footprint, is calculated by the Climate Change Authority to be approximately ten billion tonnes of C02 between now and 2050.

    However, unless the major parties listen to the Climate Change Authority’s advice, what risks getting lost is the comparability of effective action. By being pre-occupied with abstract targets rather than carbon budgets, parties will continue to compare their policies to other nations, and other timeframes, which end up becoming meaningless – for climate policymakers, economists and the public at large.

    David Holmes is Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies at Monash University. This article was first published in The Conversation on August 12, 2015.

  • Walter Hamilton. It’s not the apology, stupid!

    We must not let our children, grandchildren, and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize.

    This comes from the statement issued during the week by Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific. It is perhaps unfair to highlight one sentence from a longish document, but, in my reading of it, this accurately summarizes its abiding sentiment.

    Abe wants to draw a line under the past. He wants to end the culture of contrition that, he believes, has crimped nationalist sentiment in his own country for a generation and prevented Japan acting to its full and sovereign potential.

    Personally, I do not believe anyone can ‘apologize’ for the mistakes of others. To apologize means to take responsibility before the public for one’s own error; it is expected that a correction or an act of restitution will follow. Real apologies exist in the present, when something can be done about the mistake, as opposed to retrospective compensation. The rest is an ex-post facto judgement: approval or regret, disgust or admiration. We may feel our forefathers, former governments, dead Popes or whomever have made mistakes we would not have committed, and wish they had not acted as they did. But we are not they; we are actors operating only within our particular circumstances, milieu and knowledge, not theirs. Apologizing on their behalf, therefore, is mere cant and nonsense.

    I say this because for too long Japan, its neighbouring countries, and others who suffered at the hands of the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s have been fixated on the quality of the apologies post-war leaders have been obliged to utter for the deeds of the past. Every statement, especially on the anniversary of the war’s end, is scrutinized for its ‘grief’, ‘remorse’, ‘regret’, ‘apology’ words, in a fruitless game of semantics, as if this changed anything.

    (In his own, much briefer, commemorative speech on the weekend, Emperor Akihito for the first time used the phrase ‘deep remorse’ to express his feelings––well and good, as far as it goes. This liberal-minded emperor is perceived by some to be a counterweight to the bellicose Abe. On such a formal occasion there was never much scope for him to articulate an alternative narrative, but the fact that he broke new ground––when Abe merely re-hoed old ground––is worth mentioning.)

    The past rules a line under itself. What matters, the only thing that matters, is the quality of our understanding of history and our ability to admit and learn from the mistakes of the past. On this score, Abe’s statement fails miserably. It provides an apologia for Japan’s actions rather than a nuanced and forthright account of the policies and actions that brought disaster upon Japan and inflicted suffering on millions of others.

    The statement was drafted by a committee of ‘experts’ whom Abe appointed, in characteristic manner, to shift from him the responsibility for its particular contents. And yet it is pure Abe in its thesis.

    Time and again, the Japanese Prime Minister recounts events leading up to the war in terms of Japan being forced into a corner: threatened with loss of sovereignty by the American/European imperial powers in the 1850s and threatened again with economic ruin by their trade protectionist policies in the 1930s. Japan always acted out of a sense of ‘crisis’, a need for survival. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole truth.

    What this thesis fails to acknowledge is the agency of Japan’s own leaders in planning and executing an imperialist policy from the very start of the nation’s modernization in the second half of the 19th century and the many steps taken to suppress democratic movements inside Japan in the first half of the 20th century. Japan’s ‘manifest destiny’ of imperial aggression in Asia (thence extended to the broader Pacific) was not something it had to invent because the nation was excluded from the benefits of international affairs and commerce––it was an exercise in hegemony intended to ‘perfect’ the colonial empire of the ‘White’ powers.

    Abe states: ‘The Japan-Russia War gave encouragement to many people under colonial rule from Asia to Africa.’ I have heard this sort of comment from all sorts of right-wingers in Japan. It is laughable, in the sense that one colonial power, Russia, was simply replaced by another, Japan. Abe cannot talk about the ‘encouragement’ of 1906 unless he is willing, in the same breath, to admit the disillusionment of 1910 (the year Japan annexed Korea) and beyond. The feelings of ‘profound grief’ and ‘eternal, sincere condolences’ expressed on several occasions are empty without an acceptable historical accounting for the events one is ‘grieving’ about.

    Abe is forthright when he chooses to be and evasive when it suits him. For instance, we have this about Japan’s sufferings: ‘The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the air raids on Tokyo and other cities, and the ground battles in Okinawa, among others, took a heavy toll among ordinary citizens without mercy.’ The ‘without mercy’ here, the only use of the phrase in the speech, is applied exclusively to the Allies. But when it comes to acknowledging the so-called comfort women, the many mainly Korean women organized into brothels to service the Japanese military, this is his oblique way of addressing the issue: ‘We must never forget that there were women behind the battlefields whose honour and dignity were severely injured.’ The ‘we’––and not ‘I’––of this statement is particularly greasy; Abe requires others to ‘never forget’ what he himself has previously denied ever happened.

    In describing the postwar setting in which Japan re-emerged as a great power, Abe makes no acknowledgement of the reforms undertaken during the Allied Occupation––he doesn’t even mention that there was an Occupation (just as he fails to mention Pearl Harbor). He talks about never again resorting to the threat or use of force to resolve conflicts, but omits to say that this principle only came into existence through the 1947 Constitution adopted by Japan under the watchful eye of the Americans. Since Abe considers this document does not represent the will and culture of the Japanese people, and wants it changed, he commits a double hypocrisy by paraphrasing its Article 9.

    Australia is referred to several times in the statement, generally in the context of the POW issue. There is acknowledgement of the POWs’ mistreatment, though the main reason they are mentioned is to stress how Japan has been so graciously forgiven by its former enemies. The whole second half of Abe’s statement is about receiving forgiveness and moving on from a position of apology. For every mistake, whether by Japan or its opponents, he offers ways in which Japan has learnt and will act differently in the future. Sounds fine, except, as itemized in this blog, promises built on a shoddy foundation of historical distortions and wishful thinking do not carry much weight.

    Forget the ‘apology’ trimmings, feel the cloth.

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

     

     

  • Peter Day. “Sally’s worth it.”

    Harry Anslinger’s dream to rid the world of drugs was given legs in 1930 when he was appointed the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department‘s Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

    He was a brilliant bureaucrat with a grand vision underpinned by prohibition; a man who single-handedly turned a marginalised, underfunded Bureau into an uncompromising and powerful war machine.

    But, as Johann Hari reveals in his compelling book “Chasing the Scream – the first and last days of the war on drugs,” Anslinger was also a zealot and racist:

    “The most frightening aspect of marijuana, [Anslinger] warned, was on blacks. It made them forget the appropriate racial barriers – and unleashed their lust for white women.”

    Harry’s dream has become a global nightmare.

    A story:

    I’m not sure of the exact date, but I’ll never forget the encounter.

    I first met ‘Sally’ (not her real name) in late 1997 at St Canice’s parish, Kings Cross.

    She was homeless. She was an addict. She was paid for sex.

    Sally was exhausted – her life was exhausting.

    She needed some respite – just a couple of nights in a safe place, please.

    At that time, St Canice’s was providing temporary shelter for working girls just like Sally. The accommodation was very basic: a small room with a single bed and a sink overlooking the church’s carpark.

    For a brief period, it was my responsibility to help clean the room and welcome its guests. It was a simple process: strip the bed, put on clean sheets, wash the floor and sink, and empty the bedside bin which was a popular hang-out for used syringes.

    This is how I came to meet Sally. She arrived one afternoon set for a couple of night’s accommodation and we had a chat:

    Cuppa, Sally?

    Yeh, that’d be good, thanks. 

    How’d you sleep?

    Not bad; it’s nice to be safe, which ain’t too common given me lifestyle. 

    It must be awful feeling so unsettled …

    Yeh, not much fun; not much of a life, neither. 

    If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been using … and living on the streets?

    God, I’ve been usin’ since I was a teenager … almost 20 years now! 

    Sorry, excuse me; the kettle’s boiled; any sugars?

    Yeh, three, please … make it four. 

    Biscuit?

    Ta; that’d be nice. 

    There you go, hope it’s not too strong.

    Perfect, ta.

    Yeh, I had me first shot when I was fourteen. Mum used to entertain a lot, if you know what I mean; not nice blokes, neither. They used to rough me up quite a bit; had a pretty terrible childhood, really. Mum was a user too. That’s how I got into the gear … and prostitution. 

    Hope you don’t mind me asking; but do you think you’ll ever escape all this; the drugs, the …?

    Look, gettin’ off the gear’s the easy bit; but what for? What am I goin’ to do when I get off it? I’ve been a prostitute and user since I was fourteen; haven’t worked for nearly 20 years; not much of a CV. Not much of a story for a future employer, is it? The thing people don’t understand is that all me friends are users, too. This is my world. This is all I know. So, if I stop usin’, it means I’ve gotta give up me friends as well. I’d have to find another world. It’d be like startin’ all over. I’m not sure I can do that. I’m not sure I’d know where to start … it’s not just a physical thing, drug addiction …

    _________________

    When one listens to stories like Sally’s, two things become apparent: firstly, how traumatised and sick she is, and secondly, how much her drug induced chaos makes sense, as terrible as that may sound. After all, why wouldn’t she pursue relief from such unbearable psychological pain – ever had a knee replacement or a tooth pulled and refused pain-killers?

    As many addicts will tell you, addiction is really a disease of loneliness and self-worthlessness – much of it stemming from abuse.

    Indeed, “it’s not just a physical thing, drug addiction.”

    And here-in lies the problem with the war on drugs: it is a war that predominately targets the sick and the weak and the poor.

    It is a war against the Sallys of the world who, thanks to prohibition, are forced to hunt for their pain relief amidst wicked and brutal people in wicked and brutal places.

    One might even say we have criminalised pain relief.

    Yet still, after almost a century, most of the generals and policy boffins prosecuting this war continue to pursue Mr Anslinger’s ideology of prohibition and criminalisation: if you get rid of the chemicals and swat away the users and sellers, all will be well.

    But all is not well wherever this ideology abounds.

    Indeed, prohibition has inadvertently created another war: the war FOR drugs: a murderous, multi-billion dollar free-for-all overseen by transnational cartels, gangs, and assorted opportunists.

    The global misery and damage is incalculable.

    This tsunami of crime has also spawned a brutal and unjust judicial system; one which powerfully prosecutes the weak and weakly prosecutes the powerful. Look who is filling our gaols: in the U.S. and Australia it is those who are poor and black and addicted – Mr Anslinger would be pleased.

    The nature of this racist backdrop is encapsulated in the following exchange between decorated American police officer, Matthew Fogg, and one of his superiors. Once again, we turn to Hari’s “Chasing the Scream”:

    “Fogg was bewildered as to why his force only ever went to black neighbourhoods to chase drug users. He suggested to his boss they start raiding white neighbourhoods as well.

    “‘Fogg,’ his boss said, ‘you know you’re right they are using drugs there but you know what? If we go out and we start targeting those individuals, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians, they know all the big folks in government. If we start targeting them … you know what’s going to happen? We’re going to get a phone call and they’re going to shut us down … There goes your overtime. There goes the money that you’re making. So let’s just go after the weakest link. Let’s go after those who can’t afford the attorneys, those who we can lock up.’”

    The war on drugs has encouraged governments, police, the law, and us to look upon the Sallys of our world with a dismissive contempt. Thus, Sally and her ilk are swatted off to the streets and into humiliating prison settings which are far more adept at re-traumatising the traumatised than rehabilitation.

    When asked how Australia might most effectively respond to the drug problem, Dr Alex Wodak AM, President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, had this to say:

    “We should be making primarily a health and social response. I say ‘primarily’ because there should always be some law enforcement; if there was a tanker full of heroin coming to our ports I like to think something would be done about that.

    “But this is also about gross inequalities in our communities. Australia is a much more unequal county compared to countries in Scandinavia, or Japan that have lower levels of drug use. Generally the more unequal the country the higher the levels of drug use.

    “From a social perspective, we should do everything we can to keep people who use illicit drugs integrated in the community, and if they fall out then we should help them reintegrate. One of the most helpful things we can do is encourage them to get a decent education and some training and help them gain meaningful employment that will maintain their self-respect. 

    “From a health perspective, let’s say it was your sister with the drug problem and she really wanted to stop. Every relative would want her to go to a counselor or health professional rather than be picked up by the police. The criminal justice system is stigmatizing, if your sister was to go to jail the stigma will always hang over her… when finding a boyfriend, getting a job, renting a place. Making sure people are not irretrievably damaged is very important.”

    Hear, hear. Sally’s worth it.

    Peter Day is a Catholic Priest in Canberra.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Ian Dunlop and Rob Sturrock. As the tide comes in, Australia chooses to remain the climate laggard

    Amidst growing pressure and heightening expectations, on Tuesday Australia announced its intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) target to take to the Conference of Parties in Paris in December. It reinforces the notion of Australia as climate laggard going against the tide of science, action and opinion.

    Tuesday’s announcement provides a meek objective of 26% emissions reduction by 2030 based on 2005 levels. The Government’s INDC is extremely inadequate for several reasons. Primarily it does not contribute to keeping temperature increases to 2⁰C above preindustrial levels. It does not aid Australia’s decarbonisation of the economy over the longer term. By comparison, the Climate Change Authority called for a minimum reduction of 45% on 2005 levels. Overall Australia will remain the highest per capita emitter commensurate with its role as a major contributor to the global fossil fuel industry. It reaffirms that Australia will be a fringe player at COP 21 in Paris, seen as marginal at best and obstructionist at worst in achieving genuine progress. Our commitment is less than Canada, another mining-centric climate-sceptic nation. The Australian Financial Review called the announcement ‘policy rubbish’.

    In remaining a climate laggard, Australia continues to go against the global trend. What has become increasingly obvious recently is that the tide is coming back in on climate change action at home and abroad. A growing international community consensus for action is noticeable. Recent research by the Pew Center showed that climate change was seen globally as the biggest international challenge. New momentum on climate leadership has been provided by the United States and China. The two great powers made a bilateral agreement in November 2014 to substantially reduce emissions by 2030. China reaffirmed its commitment to peak emissions by this date in its INDC target released in June. On 4 August President Obama announced the Clean Power Plan mandating American power plants to reduce carbon emissions by 32% by 2030. One of the most conservative institutions in the United States, the Department of Defence, has been addressing climate change for years, even releasing a new report in early August showing how it is working with international allies on adapting to a changing climate. With these two great powers providing strong leadership, the prospect of substantive progress with the rest of the international community in Paris is high.

    The pressure from business, civil society and the public on the Australian Government to follow suit is intensifying, and the demands will only persist after this latest announcement. In late June a roundtable comprising divergent stakeholders such as the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry Group, the Climate Institute, the Australian Council on Social Service, the Investor Group on Climate Change, and the ACTU demanded the end of the politicking and uncertainty over climate policy and demanded Australia catch up with the rest of the world. Australians want climate change taken much more seriously. A total of 59 per cent of respondents to a recent Climate Institute survey agreed that the Government is under-estimating the seriousness of climate change, and agree that Australia should be a world leader in finding solutions. The Australian community also understands the impact climate change has on other areas of life. In a poll recently done for CPD, 68 per cent of respondents agree that damage to our food supply chain and our agriculture due to increases in extreme weather is a national security threat.

    The Government framed the INDC announcement around being economically responsible when it is in fact reckless for both the short and long term given the acceleration of climate impacts. The business and investment community are increasingly anxious over the future cost to the economy of inaction. Australia is poised to miss out on the trade and employment opportunities climate action presents through the development of renewable energy and other climate based industries, technologies and services. Large scale renewable energy investment in Australia has fallen a staggering 90 per cent in 12 months prior to the announcement of the RET review. Whilst the Government talks of protecting the ordinary household, it ignores the economic pain already being brought by climate change. The Assistant Treasurer even admitted that skyrocketing insurance premiums in North Queensland (over 80 percent between 2005 and 2013) are due to frequent extreme weather over recent years. Climate change will directly affect our primary industries, our food supply as well as place enormous strain on economic and social infrastructure. Yet Direct Action has been labeled a ‘holding policy’ that fills the vacuum of not having a genuine policy. The economic costs of inaction are mounting whilst the Government makes the hollow case that climate action means a weaker economy.

    The Abbott Government seems determined to ignore the climate science, dispute the emerging solutions, downplay international agreements, stymie renewable energy proposals and refuse to accept our responsibility to lead. Tuesday’s announcement is another symptom of our broader policy failure. Despite the fact that we are one of the most vulnerable developed nations to climate change, we will remain unwilling to find adequate solutions in our own interests. As a concert of nations go to Paris to capitalise on international momentum, Australia will sit on its own on the shoreline, trying desperately to push back the incoming tide.

    Ian Dunlop is a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development and was formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is a Member of the Club of Rome, and a Director of Australia21. 

    Rob Sturrock is a CPD Analyst and author of ‘The Longest Conflict: Australia’s Climate Security Challenge’.

    This article for appeared in The Age on August 14, 2015.

  • Alison Broinowski. . Borderless war

    (or – when you get in a hole, stop digging)

    To the sound of approaching drumbeats, first the ever-reliable Jim Molan, then Peter Jennings, and after them Liberal MP Dan Tehan have been wheeled out to tell us in recent days that the RAAF should start bombing in Syria. Right on cue, on 13 August Kevin Andrews said Australians would soon direct drone attacks into Syria, and Tony Abbott said expanded RAAF raids across the border had –wait for it – ‘been discussed’. Always briefed, Greg Sheridan informed us on 14 August that Australia was in discussions with the US, Iraq and other ‘coalition allies’, which he did not name, but some of whom had ‘already joined the US in attacks inside Syria.’ (Sheridan, ‘RAAF Syrian bomb missions loom’, Australian 14 August 2015, 1,2. David Wroe, ‘Australia in talks to bomb IS in Syria’, 14 August 2015, 3)

    Australians with long enough memories will be smiling grimly as the band strikes up again for the old song-and-dance routine, Mission Creep, nicely orchestrated to distract from noises offstage about travel rorts, captain’s picks, and climate change. This latest re-run stars Abbott in Iraq III, reviving Howard’s 2003 role in Iraq II, which he understudied when Menzies starred in Vietnam. All Australia’s undeclared wars since the 1960s have had the same plot, and all of them have been disastrous flops, yet our leaders expect the punters to rock up to the box office every time.

    Here’s what always happens. First, conservative governments press the US to ‘do more’, offering Australian support in return. They then make a surreptitious preliminary contribution, while the major deployment is organised. When that’s ready, they dribble out the ad campaign, denying we’re at war or even thinking of it because it may be illegal. Still they point to atrocities and dangers, real or fabricated, claiming the enemy (Communists, Terrorists, Death Cult, whoever) can reach Australia, so we’re all under threat. Then off the troops go, and patriotic support kicks in, particularly if anyone is killed, right in time for the next election.

    There are a lot of problems with putting the Mission Creep show on yet again. Everyone knows we have not won a war with the Americans since 1945. We also know – even though the government refuses to hold an inquiry into the invasion of Iraq – that it was illegal and disastrous. We know too – even though we are told very little about what our troops are now doing in Iraq – that the Baghdad government won’t let them out of the bases where they train soldiers who are conspicuously underperforming against IS. Since late last year, Australians have been refuelling US aircraft flying missions into Syria, and many US drone strikes are coordinated from bases in Australia. What we don’t know is what would change if we sent more of them, or managed to get a Status of Forces Agreement that would let them do more. We also don’t know what effect the RAAF bombing has had, or what would be gained by expanding it into Syria. Even the loyal Sheridan admits that any difference it could make is ‘very marginal’.

    We remember from Vietnam and Iraq II that local movements can metastesize across borders, particularly artificial ones. Even if IS is ‘defeated,’ the tumultuous reshaping of Iraq and Syria will continue. IS must right now be planning new publicisable atrocities, hoping that Shorten will be forced to share Abbott’s righteous outrage, and Australia and other US allies will be drawn into a wider war. This, surely, is the last chance for Shorten and Plibersek to restate Labor’s opposition to any Australian mission creep into Syria. They should ask the government to explain what we want from such a civil war, how we propose to win it, and how Syria is to be governed and reconstructed. If the Opposition stood up now and denounced Mission Creep as a time-worn farce, Australia could avoid responsibility for another disaster.

    Instead, the shadow Foreign Minister put out a statement on 15 August http://gu.com/p/4bg9v/sbl

    echoing Tony Abbott’s line about ‘Daesh’ as an evil cult, and calling it ‘a shockingly brutal force that is destroying the lives of many innocent people.’ The fact that Australia has sent one solider to Iraq for every 24 000 of our citizens has clearly not made much impression on IS. Plibersek didn’t say why we should fight them, and not other nasty groups like Boko Haram. Nor did she mention that when President Assad was the enemy of choice, the US subsidised IS in the first place http://universalfreepress.com/former-dia-director-gen-flynn-says-obama-created-isis-supposedly-to-overthrow-syrian-government/ )

    Most significantly, she didn’t repeat Shorten’s condition of Labor support for the Iraq mission last year: that it now overflowing into Syria. ‘If the government has a case to make about a potential change to Australia’s existing mission in Iraq,’ she said obligingly, ‘the Opposition is ready to hear it.’

    Alison Broinowski was formerly a senior officer in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Director of the Australia Japan Foundation. She is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU. She recently edited a book ‘How does Australia go to War’. The book carried a foreword by the late Rt.Hon. Malcolm Fraser.

     

     

  • Mark Triffitt and Travers McLeod. Entitlements scandal is a sign of political rot.

    When does a political system become corrupt? When is the line crossed from garden variety rorting by a few members of parliament to institutionalised abuse of taxpayers’ money by the system?

    The latest scandal over politicians’ entitlements has been like lifting the proverbial rock to discover a deeply, ethically challenged netherworld. One flagrant folly scuttled out, only to be followed by a horde of others.

    Individual politicians have responded by pointing the finger at everyone and everything except themselves. This includes blaming their transgressions on a “system” of entitlements they created.

    The public has reacted with disgust. And rightly so. This is our money being used for gratuitous chopper rides and flying the family business class to outback resorts.

    It’s also compounded a growing view that our democratic system has become largely unaccountable and insensitive to citizens and, as a result, is reaching breaking point.

    In this hothouse environment of outraged public opinion, it can be easy to exaggerate current events into claims of a full-blown crisis. After all, politicians have been up to these sorts of shenanigans since forever.

    So how do we run a ruler over recent transgressions to see if they represent a superficial problem, or something more deeply embedded? Fortunately we have guidelines in the form of an article by American philosopher Amelie Rorty on how and why corruption begins and spreads.

    Rorty is concerned with “the gradual corruption of an individual”. But her observations have important implications for the institutions and systems that individuals inhabit.
    Her article, “How to Harden Your Heart: Six Easy Ways to Become Corrupt”, says the slippery slide to corruption is rarely obvious or defined by a single event. Instead, it happens by nuance and degrees.

    It usually starts as the result of small errors of judgment. Individuals might rationalise their behaviour as minor infractions and even admit wrongdoing. But no real steps are taken to stamp out these behaviours. As acceptance of small errors compounds, hardens and spreads, self-deception leads to denial. The occasional individual ethical lapse becomes habitual corruption.

    Applying Rorty’s thinking to our national political system provides a disturbing insight into where it is, and where it might be heading. The conclusion is unthinkable in a country that prides itself and its democratic system as being largely “clean”.

    Rorty points to six warning signs that indicate if an individual is moving into the danger zone. The cues are eerily similar to what many in the community now consider to be broader weaknesses of our political system.

    The first danger signal is what Rorty calls “attention to the present”. In the context of our political system it’s the overweening obsession with the short term and is potentially dangerous in fostering corruption because it allows wrongdoers to disconnect their present actions from future consequences. Obsessive reliance by MPs on fortnightly opinion polls is but one example of this corrosive impact.

    Another warning sign is what Rorty calls “groupie attraction” or “gravitating to the company of like-minded” – a succinct way of describing the Canberra political bubble.
    This is dangerous because the groupthink it creates provides both protection and support for wrongdoing (what is upheld as the “standard” in Canberra won’t often pass the pub test in Castlemaine).

    Another red flag, “imitating the leader”, is self-explanatory in a political world where parties and Parliaments are increasingly organised around the dictates of their leaders.
    “Captain’s calls” are increasingly the norm. The result is political subordinates who struggle to think for themselves. Rorty describes this warning sign as when “newcomers and initiates gravitate to powerful figures. Without realising it, novices emulate the behaviour of those who model ‘how things are done’.”

    One final sign is “papering over the cracks”, which Rorty highlights as an attempt to distance the problem from the cause. We have seen this in Canberra via claims the problem lies with the “system” and not the ethical lapses of individuals.

    In short, Rorty requires us to face up to the cause, not the symptom.

    The entitlements scandal is a sign of alarming and unprecedented corrosion of Australia’s political culture. It has emerged from a succession of suspect individual moral judgments contributing to what is becoming a debased political system. That’s why far-reaching measures are needed to stamp out the rot before more damaging behaviours take hold.
    Measures offered by politicians that are likely to tinker with the present expenses system will be insufficient. As Rorty warns, “when corruption is widespread, home-grown prevention can at best provide only some resistance”.

    Full, immediate and independent transparency on entitlement use is but the first step on the long road to democratic renewal.

    Dr Mark Triffitt is a lecturer in public policy at the University of Melbourne. Dr Travers McLeod is the chief executive officer of the Centre for Policy Development.
    This article first appeared in the Melbourne Age on August 13, 2015.

  • John Menadue. Liberal Party misuse of Royal Commissions.

    Dyson Heydon is in the news again. 

    Several weeks ago he appeared to question the credibility of Bill Shorten as a witness before the Trade Union Royal Commission. He also had unusual things to say about the credibility of Julia Gillard when she appeared before the Commission. 

    See below a repost of an article on the Liberal Party and royal commissions.

    John Menadue

     

    REPOST

    With the Abbott Government there is a pattern of using Royal Commissions to attack former and current ALP leaders. See the links below to two earlier posts on the subject.

    What we really need is a Royal Commission into billions of dollars of tax avoidance by major companies operating in Australia. They are avoiding proper scrutiny.

    John Menadue.

    The Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program – a ‘dog’s breakfast’.

    What a remarkable thing to say!

  • Trans Pacific Partnership and consumer rights.

    The consumer magazine Choice has recently carried articles by Sarah Agar about the TPP and what might be traded away in terms of cheaper medicines, public interest laws and food labelling. This report was updated on 29 July, about a fortnight before Trade Minister Andrew Robb decided that he would walk away from the TPP negotiations. This article in Choice is a useful background on many of the key issues that were at stake. Fortunately the government has decided that the TPP was balanced too much in favour of corporate interests and at the expense of consumer interests.  John Menadue.

    See link to article below.

    https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advice/your-rights/articles/where-are-consumer-interests-in-international-treaties-like-tpp

    https://www.choice.com.au

  • John Menadue. The Senate saves the day on the Trans Pacific Partnership.

    The Senate saves the day on the Trans Pacific Partnership.

    Often the Senate is seen as obstructive or worse. But it has performed a very useful purpose in helping to derail the Trans Pacific Partnership. Hopefully the TPP will not be put back on track.

    According to the New York Times, our Trade Minister Andrew Robb told the TPP negotiating ministers in Hawaii that the Australian Parliament – read Senate – would not accept the further restrictions on trade in pharmaceuticals which the US was proposing. He was apparently concerned that to accede to the US demands would result in substantial increases in Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and penalise Australian pharmaceutical users. As a result of this breakdown on pharmaceuticals, the Australian government ‘walked away from the negotiations’.

    Perhaps I missed it, but I was surprised that I read this report from the New York Times and not from the Australian media. With a few exceptions, the Australian media has consistently failed to report and analyse the minor benefits that we will obtain from successive ‘Free Trade Agreements’ that Andrew Robb has finalised with Japan, China and the Republic of Korea. The so-called benefits have been grossly exaggerated but the Australian media has largely accepted the government’s version of events. And so we saw little serious examination in the Australian media of the TPP.  https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=3226

    There are many reasons why the proposed TPP was not in our interest.

    The first of course was the US proposal to increase protection from five to eight years for US pharmaceutical companies and their biologic products. It would have added to the high costs of pharmaceuticals in Australia as a result of Big Pharma’s influence on Australian governments in the Australian market.

    Very frustrating was also the fact that it was only late in the day that we were able to have some understanding of what Big Pharma and other powerful US multinationals were attempting with the TPP. This secrecy made it difficult to access the real agenda of corporate America. But with the benefit of some hindsight it is clear now that the US corporate agenda was not to free up trade but to increase protection.

    From the beginning TPP should have been suspect in terms of our national interests. The TPP was designed deliberately to exclude China. The US has been trying to build a trade bulwark against China, our main trading partner. Surely our objective and that of the US should not be to confront and contain China, but to accommodate wherever possible its involvement in the world economy and in world politics. Furthermore TPP did not include Indonesia which by 2050 is projected to be the world’s fourth largest economy. 70% of Australia’s merchandise trade passes through Indonesian waters every year. Indonesia is our most important strategic partner.

    How could the TPP serve our interests by excluding both China and Indonesia that are so important for us? Only two years ago we released a White Paper ‘Australia and the Asian Century’. That White Paper which highlighted the importance of the Pacific region for our future, has been taken off the government website and was clearly ignored in the TPP negotiations.

    Another major concern over TPP was the provision for settlement disputes between investors and countries whereby investors could sue governments in compliant pro-business fora for losses incurred when governments legislate in the public interest. Why this presents such a problem can be seen by what has happened in Hong Kong. Having lost its case in the High Court over plain packaging of tobacco, Phillip Morris is now suing Australia in Hong Kong because of an earlier trade agreement that Australia signed with Hong Kong. What an awful abuse of corporate power in defiance of our national interests.

    There were also other problems. At the end it seems that the US was not prepared to provide reasonable access for dairy products and sugar. This was a re-run of the US attitude ten years ago in the negotiation of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. That agreement not only denied proper access for Australian sugar and dairy products it also turned out to be a real dud in helping to promote Australia-US trade. Shiro Armstrong of the ANU has reported that both Australia and the US are ‘worse off than they would have been without the agreement’.At the time John Howard told us what a wonderful outcome it was for Australia

    In retrospect it is clear that almost everything was wrong about TPP – both its objectives and its processes.

    The collapse of negotiations is a welcome outcome but our media hardly noticed. So often it is obsessed with adversarial politics and personalities and has little interest in policy. In the TPP negotiations we had major national issues at stake, but our mainstream media was asleep at the wheel – again.

  • John Menadue. Parliamentary reform and the new Speaker.

    In my post of 12 May this year ‘Democratic renewal and our loss of trust in institutions’, I wrote about our loss of trust in so many institutions including our parliament and political parties. If Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten want to improve public debate and restore some faith in our public institutions the election of new speaker Tony Smith provides an opportunity to change course.

    The most trusted of our institutions are all public institutions; the ABC, the High Court and the Reserve Bank. The least trusted are political parties and the expenses mess triggered by Bronwyn Bishop will add to that lack of trust.

    Trade Unions and business groups rank about equally in trust but they are well down the list of trusted institutions. The Federal Parliament is trusted about as much as our media and not surprisingly with News Corp the least trusted of all of our media.

    The abuse of public trust by Bronwyn Bishop and others must be addressed but there is an unfortunate and consistent clamour by the powerful to undermine parliament and governments. The powerful, the wealthy, large businesses and the media don’t want their powers checked. That is why they target the parliament and political parties for criticism. This is not really surprising as the parliament in particular and our general political processes are the best means to redress power in favour of the powerless.

    Consider the furore over Bronwyn Bishop and the minimal attention to other rorts. Last week the media reported that the privileged and poorly performing sons of Rupert Murdoch would each get $US 27 million a year for four years in remuneration. There is little comment about the widespread and enormous tax avoidance by the powerful.

    Politics is the means to rebalance power in favour of the poor and needy. That is why democratic renewal is so important.

    The main concern I have about Bronwyn Bishop is her abuse of power and using her powers in the parliament in the interests of Tony Abbott and his government. She also had the unpleasant knack of looking down on those that she considered of less merit than herself. Unfortunately neither Tony Abbott nor Bronwyn Bishop has shown any real appreciation of the parliament and its proper role. How galling it was to hear from her on her resignation that she had done it ‘because of my love and respect for the institution of parliament and the Australian people’.

    There are few signs that government leaders appreciate the damage that Bronwyn Bishop has done to the standing of the Parliament. Christopher Pyne said that Bronwyn Bishop ‘had been felled in the most unfair circumstances by politics today’. Tony Abbott added ‘Despite some admitted errors of judgement she has served this parliament, our country, her party, with dedication and distinction over 30 years. She has been a warrior for the causes she believed in.’ But clearly she was not a warrior in the interests and integrity of our parliament.

    Hopefully the new speaker will provide an opportunity for parliamentary and democratic renewal. He has said that he will not attend party meetings. That is important but he needs to go much further. He should consider the practice of the House of Commons in the UK that speakers in future must be nominated at least by a minimum number of members of the Opposition. This ensures a less partisan speaker.

    With the new speaker’s leadership, the parliament should take responsibility and in a quite transparent way for the control of members’ of parliament’s expenses and entitlements. These matters should be the responsibility of the Department of Parliament and not the Department of Finance.

    As I mentioned in my earlier post on democratic renewal, I outlined other important ways to reform and improve the parliament.

    To assist members of parliament to counter the power of the cabinet and the public service the last parliament established a Parliamentary Budget Office. It provides independent and nonpartisan analysis of the budget cycle. It was a good start. But its work is restricted to budgets. Similar offices should be established in such areas as health, defence and foreign affairs.

    The research resources of the Parliamentary Library should also be enhanced. In the development of Gough Whitlam’s policy program the Parliamentary Library was a critical enabler. 

    We need an improved parliamentary committee system where hopefully we can begin to see again the art of negation and compromise. The Senate has shown that improvements are possible. A good start in our next parliament would be an all-party committee to consider ways in which the performance of the parliament could be improved and the power of the executive contained. 

    We need a broad agenda for parliamentary reform. The major party that is credible on parliamentary reform will reap a large electoral dividend. The best way for Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten to prove their bona fides as parliamentarians is to demonstrate by actions how they value the Parliament and use it as their forum and not television grabs, and talk back radio. What a pleasure it would be to see the parliament as a lively forum for debating policy and asking genuine questions to elicit information rather than a means to score political\l points. If only our politicians would seriously endeavour to find common ground by starting on such issues as senate electoral reform, political donations and ending the abuse of power by lobbyists. Leadership by Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten in these areas is the best way to restore confidence in parliament and politics. Don’t talk about it. Do it.

    There is a lack of trust in most of our major institutions. With the help of Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten the new speaker does provide an opportunity for the reform of Parliament and the restoration of confidence in our political processes. Those processes are essential for good policy and governance in Australia and supporting the most vulnerable and powerless in our community.

  • John Menadue. Don’t tamper with citizenship.

    The Australian Government has presented new legislation that would enable the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to revoke Australian citizenship for dual nationals who might have been involved in terrorism activities. There would be no judicial review.

    As a result of an apparent disagreement in Cabinet, the government has deferred a decision on how to deal with sole Australian nationals who might be linked to terrorism.

    This is a massive overreaction for largely party-political purposes – promoting fear of terrorism and feeding anti-Muslim sentiment in the community. Determined not to be wedged on the issue the ALP is yet again in ‘me too’ mode.

    There are good reasons why we should not tamper with citizenship. Citizenship is a critical and unifying national symbol and should not be used to address alleged short-term problems. Acts committed by Australians should be punished under criminal law and if the law is not effective for the job it should be strengthened.

    Some four million Australians are dual citizens. They are a national asset. We are a country built on migration and citizenship is the culmination of that migration process. Citizenship is a key part of nation building and should never be discounted or discouraged. It should basically only be revoked on the basis of false claims in the application for citizenship. We should not be diverted from the centrality of citizenship.

    A key principle of all citizenship is that people of many different backgrounds can become good and loyal Australian citizens. In the present situation that means that Muslims, like others, can become good Australian citizens. It is belief in that principle that holds this country together. If we debase that principle we should not be surprised that many people, particularly young people with origins in the Middle East might decide that they have no future in this country.

    Australians citizens commit many crimes – murder, drug trafficking and child abuse. Should we revoke their citizenship? Why only IS supporters? Each year our police forces are called to intervene in over 200,000 cases of domestic violence. Surely that is a much greater problem than IS. All offences including supporting IS must be addressed with rigour but we must ensure that citizenship is open to all people who have met our criteria.

    Some ministers have sought to strengthen their case for denial of citizenship to dual-citizen holders by pointing out the citizenship revocation legislation in the UK. But the UK is not a country built on migration. We are.

    The government estimates that revocation of the status of Australian citizens who have dual citizenship would affect less than half of those allegedly assisting IS. The numbers would be small but the consequence would be that the legislation would probably prevent these people returning from overseas. This would leave a few of our jihadists overseas to continue their damage. How perverse this would be. It would be much better if they return to Australia and we prosecute them under our laws.

    The government legislation proposes that the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection should have the power to revoke citizenship based primarily I would expect on information from ASIO or other security services. There would be no judicial review. The rule of law would be trashed. What a worry it would be relying on ASIO and Minister Dutton!

    In addition to strengthening our criminal law there are other ways that we can protect ourselves against terrorism or discourage possible recruits. We can withdraw passports to prohibit travel. We can also suspend legal entitlements such as Medicare and social security payments which attach to permanent residence, and not to citizenship.

    As Malcolm Turnbull has said, citizenship revocation should not be a ‘bravado’ issue and used to weaken our rule of law. Government bravado and promotion of fear is making us less safe. It is undermining citizenship.

     

  • Focus on tax avoidance, not GST hike.

    Michael West, in the SMH continues his many articles on tax avoidance by major international companies who operate in Australia. He mentions many of them, including Big Pharma, Google, Paypal, Newscorp. He comments ‘How long can [these companies] continue to treat Australians as fools. While multinational tax avoidance remains so rife, how can governments possibly claim a democratic licence to his ordinary Australians with a hike in the GST.’  See link to article below:

     

    http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/focus-on-tax-avoidance-not-gst-hikes-20150802-gipm9k.html

  • Race Mathews. The ALP’s not so secret ballots.

    The ALP is leading in the federal polls, but internally it is a different story.

    The party continues to incur significant reputational damage from the irresponsible and damaging conduct of its factions, and the disgraced appointees on whom in some instances they have conferred advancement.

    Hopes that this year would prove to be the most important in the history of ALP reform and renewal since the intervention spearheaded by Gough Whitlam in 1970 that cleared the way for the election of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments have so far largely been disappointed.

    Many of the party’s problems and the solutions to them have been identified in the reports of successive post-election reviews. Bill Shorten has committed to specific reforms in the course of the leadership contest and subsequent statements, but the outcome remains in doubt.

    In the aftermath of the party’s recent Federal conference, stark choices have still to be faced.

    The party may choose to fulfil the hopes and aspirations of members and supporters committed to party democratisation and renewal. Or it may acquiesce in the continued control of its affairs by tiny coteries of self-serving factional bosses, who owe their power to a blatant and shameless disregard for the secret ballot provisions of the party rules that enables them to predetermine the results.

    Rampant trashing and subversion of the requirement for secret ballots has become a cancer, rotting the foundations of the party’s democracy and entrenching in its place a resurgent ‘democratic centralism’ reminiscent of that which rendered the party unelectable from the middle 1950s until 1972 federally and until 1982 in Victoria.

    A familiar sight at the party’s state and federal conferences is factional operatives requiring delegates to show one another their completed ballot papers in order to ensure that they have voted in accordance with factional instructions.

    Alternatively, delegates are required to hand over their blank ballot papers to be completed by the operatives on their behalf.

    Also to be seen at the early stages of conferences is queuing up by nominal delegates who attend for the sole purpose of receiving ballot papers, which they then turn over for completion by the operatives before leaving the venue and taking no further part in the proceedings. A common complaint by delegates is that they have been coerced by factions into voting for candidates other than those of their choice.

    Behaviours of so abusive a character are compounded by the use of mobile phones, which enable factional bosses absent from voting places to convey instructions to the operatives, and directly constrain members in the exercise of their secret ballot entitlement.

    The surrender of ballot papers in circumstances where plainly it is not voluntary defeats the whole point and purpose of a secret ballot, which is to make sure that the person entitled to vote can do so without fear of consequences if they vote in a way which is not agreeable to another person.

    Such interference would not be tolerated in the conduct of any parliamentary election. Any parliamentary election Returning Officer shown to have failed to intervene would be sacked.  Likewise it is a flagrant breech of both the letter and intention of requirements such as of the Victorian Branch’s Rule 4.3, which reads: “Election’ means election by secret ballot using the optional preferential system of proportional representation provided in Schedule D”.

    No ‘ifs’. No ‘buts’. No ambiguity.

    Factions are entitled to seek compliance by their members with their directives through their internal processes. There is no right on their part to do so at the expense of the party’s integrity and adherence to the secrecy requirements to which its balloting rules so plainly give expression.

    The party would be ill-advised to sit on its hands collectively, in the hope or expectation that it will be delivered from its present predicament by a new Whitlam, as occurred with the intervention by the Federal Executive in 1970, that paved the way for the election of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments.

    The secret ballot is a hard-won right and crowning achievement, secured through untiring and frequently embittered struggle by successive generations of Labour Movement activists. Its adoption in Australia ahead of all but a handful of other countries has caused it to be known widely as ‘the Australian ballot’. It remains for the current generation of ALP members to secure its reinstatement within the party and ensure that it is passed on unimpaired to those who come after us.

    Meanwhile, rules changes seeking to target on a case-by-case basis the infringements through which the secrecy of party ballots is rorted and subverted were submitted for debate at the Victorian ALP’s Special Rules Conference on 28 March.

    That the item was not reached is a sad commentary on the cynical and self-serving factional ploy of limiting of the conference proceedings to a single day, when at least two and ideally three days were necessary to properly complete the agenda. Half the single day’s proceedings were devoted to matters other than the proposed changes, and the rules debate was cut short prematurely on the grounds that the statutory majority required for the adoption of them was no longer present.

    Factions have a legitimate role to play in the Party – so long as they remain ‘on tap but not on top’.

    Race Mathews joined the ALP in 1956 and is a life member of fifty-nine years standing, former Chief of Staff to Labor Leaders including Gough Whitlam, municipal councillor, Federal MP, State MP and Minister and academic,

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Arja Keski-Nummi. “Half a Step Forward” – ALP Policy on Refugees and Asylum

     

    There is more to the ALP policy on refugees and asylum than what we heard from the media, focused as it is on factional battles and the language of “back- flips” on contestable pieces of public policy such as boat turn backs.

    As always in such a highly charged area of public policy the “devil is in the detail”. Labor however gets it about right in focusing on the priority for international engagement and the development of regional and bilateral responses to population displacement. But this policy also hardens the shift in asylum and refugee policy begun when Labor was last in office by maintaining the Offshore Processing Centres (OPCs) , regional resettlement and adopting a policy of boat turn backs.

    It will be several weeks before we see the final endorsed platform but putting together the draft platform and the amendments voted during the conference Labor appears to have crafted a policy strong on border protection but mixed on responses regarding asylum seekers.

    For instance, detention will be as a last resort, community processing will be the norm, the refugee status determination will be improved, the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) reestablished and there will be better oversight of the offshore processing centres. These are all welcome policy aspirations. The track record with implementation has not been as good so if Labor wants to avoid another policy mess it would be smart to start working on such implementation plans now.

    On the most controversial pieces of policy, the maintenance of the Offshore Processing Centres, regional resettlement and boat turnbacks Labor has lost an opportunity to articulate why these are important planks of their platform – beyond the deaths at sea argument and having an independent oversight of OPCs.

    For this reason parts of the platform read more like a tactical and political response than a comprehensive policy on asylum and refugees. This policy is tactical because it gives a little to those people opposed to OPCs and boat turnbacks – an increase in the program, removal of Temporary Protection Visas, reinstatement of the RRT , insertion of critical Convention obligations into domestic law and more funding to UNHCR – in exchange for a reluctant acceptance of the offshore processing arrangements and boat turn backs.

    The fact is that turning back boats is an ethically contentious policy. While the argument of deaths at sea is compelling – the reality is any on water operation, including transfers to lifeboats or navy vessels is risky. Moreover such a policy is not a sustainable long-term approach – cost wise or through the deployment of additional vessels. It is a last resort policy, reflecting the failure of our regional engagement strategies.

    Australia’s approach in the region has been selfish – it is all about our domestic problems and us – we do not hear what the regional issues are or how we could help. The most recent example of this is Australia’s refusal to assist in search and rescue of boats carrying displaced Rohingya from Burma in the Andaman Sea, when even the USA deployed flights to search for vessels.

    What Labor needs to now do is strengthen its policies on regional and international engagement. It needs to set in context these controversial pieces of policy. It needs to say they are there only for so long as we get the regional architecture right and we have an agreed regional approach to displacement and asylum – where burden sharing is genuine and people are treated with dignity and humanity.

    For instance, a regional response needs to be more than increased funding to UNHCR or a statement that they will work on a regional cooperation framework. It should clearly articulate the regional partnerships and bilateral arrangements that are needed to support displaced people.

    It could for example articulate a regional response strategy that highlights:

    • Partnerships with regional governments and international agencies and NGOs to put in place alternative protection arrangements which could include – access to a fair and transparent assessment of claims, security of stay  and access to education and work as well as health services and shelter.
    • Development of agreements that allow for transfer of asylum seekers to regional processing centres,
    • The place of readmission agreements in certain circumstances,
    • Explore alternative migration pathways such as orderly departure arrangements  that ease the pressures on regional asylum systems
    • Work with regional governments and international agencies in the development of a complementary regional protection system that would support early resolution of peoples claims and a system of burden sharing in finding durable solutions for refugees as well as other displaced people.
    • Develop a new displaced person program (axed in this years budget by the government) that would support the ability of displaced people to stay in a country of displacement in safety and security. Such arrangements are more than increased funding to UNHCR but building partnerships across government and non government sectors that mean people do not need to use people smugglers because they are in a place of safety.
    • Respond to the regions concerns about trafficking .

    It is in this context then that an increased humanitarian resettlement program makes sense, as well as the maintenance of hard-nosed policies such as turn backs and the OPCs.

    But if such cooperation is to be sustainable it needs to be a long-term project not easily achieved in electoral cycle and in reality should be bipartisan in approach. If Labor is serious about regional engagement then it needs to be working now on its implementation strategies.

    As with any policy response to a complex issue and one involving desperate and vulnerable people displaced from their homes and countries this is a curate’s egg of a policy. There are good elements to the policy and some that will challenge our sense of fairness and well-being. Labor has a chance to articulate that this is a humane response by moving away from the language of military operations, singularly inappropriate for dealing with asylum issues, and acknowledging that as a package it does make us confront very difficult policy choices concerning our fellow human beings.

    Arja Keski-Nummi is a former First Assistant Secretary in the Refugee Division of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. She is a fellow of the Centre for Policy Development.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Wilful blindness over climate change.

    The former head of NAB, Cameron Clyne, has published an opinion piece in the SMH about the failure of political and business leaders to address the issue of climate change. He said that business leaders overwhelmingly support the need for a market based carbon trading system. In respect of Maurice Newman, he said that he had never encountered such thinking in the Australian business community. For a full report of Cameron Clyne’s article, see link below:

     

    http://www.smh.com.au/environment/cameron-clyne-former-head-of-nab-criticises-canberras-wilful-blindness-over-climate-change-20150802-gion1o.html

  • Warwick Elsche. Bronwyn, the captain’s pick.

    The loss of Bronwyn Bishop from the role of Speaker in the Federal Parliament is a blow to the Abbott Government.

    Bishop was not the least talented in a Government which – despite the supposed neutrality of the office – she seemed never to cease to be a part.

    In her chaotic 22 month reign as Speaker of the House of Representatives she was, in the eyes of long-time parliamentary watchers, the least competent, least impartial and most disruptive person ever to hold that office.

    Yet, given the ministerial performance of some from Tony Abbott’s front line, Abbetz, Brandis, Dutton, Andrews, Hockey and the PM himself come to mind, Bishop’s inadequacies hardly made her singular. Some actually made her performance look normal. Tony at least seemed to think so.

    Bishop’s departure is a personal loss for the PM whose judgement on her future was once again letting himself and his Government down.

    It was in fact a double failure in the political judgement of the PM who had already attracted notice for his seeming lack of familiarity with even the most basic tenets of Australian politics.

    Bishop’s appointment in the first place was an Abbott’s Captain’s pick – there was no chance she could ever be elected to the post – and when, what was widely foreseen from the start eventually happened, it took him nearly three weeks to appreciate what was apparent to most of his backbench in a matter of days – to the Australian public Bishop and her outrageous excesses were electoral poison.

    Abbott has a deep personal commitment to Bishop whom he once described as his political mother. This supposed relationship perhaps explains his own repeated hopeless lapses in political judgement – lapses which almost cost his job back in February.

    Like a real Mum Bishop returned the favour of her ‘off the wall’ appointment, day after day in parliament setting out to protect her boy from the buffeting of awkward questions and criticisms, often at the cost of abandoning any semblance of independence or impartiality. Isn’t that what good mums do?

    Anyway, the loss of an independent or impartial facade hardly mattered. Statistics alone demonstrate that these qualities, the hallmarks of competent occupancy of the Speaker’s Chair, had long since been abandoned. 400 dismissals – a   record for barely half a term with more than 390 Opposition victims and barely a half dozen from her own side quite adequately told that story.

    Way back, Labor’s then Senate Leader Gareth Evans remarked of Bishop, then a relatively new Liberal Senator, that the reason people often took an instant dislike to her was that it saved them time.

    The Australian Electorate was only slightly more tardy than the prescient Evans.

    However, they needed only minimal exposure to the egregious manner to which she approached an exalted office to make Gareth look prophetic.

    But Tony’s latest misjudgement was that together they could successfully ride out the crisis, keeping his protector in the Chair.

    Even as the rising heat forced him out of the public eye, where, to his considerable discomfort, there was only one question his interrogators wanted answered, he judged that time would provide a cure. Repeated statements from him and the Speaker herself that she had done nothing wrong, hardly surprisingly, did not assist in making what was a major scandal vanish.

    In fact, the passage of time only revealed more serious lapses by the beleaguered speaker.

    Finally, backbench protests and warnings, threats from his own side to abstain in any no confidence vote and the refusal of a succession of senior Ministers – some of them Abbott supporters – to defend her publicly led to what from the outside had seemed an inevitable end. Tony alone had not seen this.

    In her very last act as Speaker, her resignation, she continued to demonstrate her appalling lack of independence.

    Most Speakers are aware that they are Officers of, and therefore responsible to, the Federal Parliament – not to the political party from which they come. Bishop failed here too. As an Officer of the Federal Parliament the resignation should have been made to the Parliament not through the Party of which she was supposedly independent. But it was in fact made not by Bishop to the Parliament as would have been proper but by Abbott as Leader of the political party which she had never ceased to serve.

    Bishop came to the office of Speaker promising to be exceptional – she was – not in the way she foreshadowed. She would, she said, on taking office,” restore dignity and order to the Parliament”.

    She has in fact left behind some benchmarks.

    Inside the Parliament she is widely seen as the most obviously biassed and disruptive occupant of the Chair in memory. Outside the Parliament her arrogant extravagances are also on a scale not seen before.

    In two theatres therefore her activities have registered extremely poorly. For pure paucity of performance in both areas she has indeed set a very high bar.

    Half a mile from Parliament House senior officers of the Foreign Affairs Department are nervously waiting on what they believe – probably correctly – an instruction to find a diplomatic post for this political failure. They fear – again correctly – that with her girlish charm and coquettish smile she might have the same effect diplomatically as she has had on the Australia electorate – in three dramatic weeks becoming the single biggest issue in her nation’s politics.

    Tony who has once again demonstrated that he is at best a meagre politician has said that no plum job is planned for Bishop post-resignation.

    But Tony also said there would be no cuts to Health or Education – there were. He said there would be no cuts to the ABC or SBS – there were. He said a referendum recognizing Aborigines in the Constitution would take place in the first twelve months of his Government – it did not.

    Foreign Affairs, therefore, remains on red alert.

  • Richard Butler. The Cost of Having no Independent Foreign Policy

    How is it possible that the Australian people: citizens, elected representatives, media staff, academics, to name just some relevant categories, allow the Abbott government to spend $1 billion this year on Australian participation in war in the Middle East, and accept that there is no need for this to be discussed? *

    Prime Minister Abbott considered it enough to announce the commitment of 1000 ADF personnel and 8 military aircraft, immediately before they departed, saying that they were going to take part in the US defined and led fight against ISIS. The full majesty of his understanding of the ISIS phenomenon, the situation in the Middle East, and his assessment of the intellect of the Australian voter, has been displayed in his mantra that ISIS is a “death cult, a death cult”, which we must fight.

    Abbott is simply continuing what John Howard started 12 years ago with his decision to take part in the US invasion of Iraq. That action violated international law and was based on US claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were false, fabricated by the Bush Administration and endorsed by Tony Blair. Even John Howard has recently admitted that the WMD data was “wrong”.

    Then and now, it seems to be sufficient for us to commit Australian lives and money to war, simply in order to support the US’ actions. And, lamentably, the ALP opposition has acquiesced in, indeed now supports this source of policy determination.

    Today, apart from being self evidently manipulative of the politically much favoured notion that we are under dire terrorist threat, the Abbott government’s analysis that there is simply one good side to the conflict in the Middle East, the one we are on, is pathetic: “Team Australia”, as if its all a bit like a footy match.

    The situation in that region is the consequence of repeated western interventions for the last 100 years. 2015 has seen the Centenary of Gallipoli, but also of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which the British and French divided up the Ottoman Empire.

    Among other deeply flawed dispositions, this created Syria and Iraq without respect to precisely the kinds of ethno-confessional conflicts that are now being played out.

    The US/UK/Australian/Spain invasion of Iraq in 2003 was seen across the region as consistent with this interventionist history. It is now widely regarded as having provided the impetus for the growth in Al Qaida and the emergence of ISIS.

    The purported cure for all of this, as currently envisaged in the US, NATO, and by the Australian Government, is more military intervention. Fix the problem by increasing the dose of what caused the problem.

    But, it’s all become much more complicated since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, that is, the decision by Assad to crush protest against his hold on power. His group represents the Alawite minority in Syria, the group patronized by the UK in the Sykes-Picot disposition.

    That war has endured for almost 5 years, has killed some quarter of a million people, and driven 11 million into external and internal displacement. The UN has declared it to be the worst refugee crisis since WWII.

    The destruction of Syria and the impact of the 2003 intervention in Iraq has seen the entry into a region wide contest by Iran, Saudi Arabia, some other Gulf States, Russia, Jordan, and, Turkey. The non-State groups, in addition to ISIS; Al Qaida, AL Nusra Front etc. have proliferated This is to say nothing of what has obviously been the deep clandestine involvement of Israeli, US, British, French, Russian, and other intelligence services.

    The decision, last week, by Turkey to commence direct military action in Northern Iraq and Syria and to allow the US to do the same from Turkey, is a significant development. Its origins are dubious.

    The Turkish government did not gain a parliamentary majority in the elections held on June 7th. It was prevented from achieving this by the substantial support given to the Kurdish based party. It is therefore engaged in negotiations to form a coalition with other parties. But, it has terminated peace negotiations with the Kurdish group in Northern Syria and in its bombing campaign against “terrorist” groups in Iraq and Syria, it is targeting both ISIS and Kurdish groups. NATO has endorsed Turkey’s actions.

    It appears that Turkish President Erdogan’s aim is to destroy the influence of Kurdish groups within Turkey so that in a re-run election his Peace and Justice Party (AKP) will win a majority. Within Turkey the AKP caretaker government is contemplating banning the Kurdish party and arresting at least its leader and possibly other members as well, on the ground that they are connected to terrorists.

    Consistent with this mess of mixed motives, within the overall region of conflict, there are areas, such as Yemen, where Saudis and Iranians are on the same side and others where they are deeply antagonistic. Similarly, there are areas where, incredible though it may seem, the US is enlisting the support of Al Qaida sympathetic groups. These are merely two examples of a diabolical patchwork. As John Stewart sometimes remarks, “ you can’t make this stuff up”.

    On Australia’s role; we have not been told, without propaganda, what interests or values our commitment to war in the Middle East purports to advance, how our effort will contribute, what is its limits, important given the ubiquitous phenomenon of mission creep, when might it end, who’s in charge – us or the US command.

    It is a terrible lapse that the ALP opposition has not demanded such explanations and has agreed that a debate in Parliament is not needed. These are distant days from those in which the ALP opposition demanded that the Menzies Government table the invitation it claimed to have received from the Government of South Vietnam to join it in war there. ALP action revealed that there had, in fact, been no such invitation. Menzies had misled the Parliament. Menzies had asked the South Vietnamese Government to invite us, because he believed that this was what the US wanted.

    So, here we are again. This time in the Middle East because Abbott and friends believe this is what the US wants. This is the same US that is currently seeking to impose a Pacific Trade Treaty on us, which inter alia, would make pharmaceuticals more expensive in Australia and enable US corporations to sue Australia on the basis that our national policies might be impeding their right to operate without regulatory restraint.

    There will be no externally induced solution, military or otherwise to the political and ethno-confessional conflicts in the Middle East. For the US to think otherwise is folly, but that’s perhaps understandable because there remains in the US a widespread reluctance to accept that they did not win the war in Vietnam.

    Our participation with the US in this folly will bring us nothing but affirmation in the minds of others that we are a mere clone of the US and, thus possible heightened exposure to external terrorist attack. Above all, it will further retard the urgent need for us to craft an independent Australian foreign policy that serves our national values and interests.

    As a first step, the ALP opposition should demand that the Government allow a debate in Parliament on our commitment in the Middle East.

    Richard Butler AC is former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations and Head of the UN Special Commission to disarm Iraq.

    * For more detail on the $1 billion, see, Anthony Ricketts article, Canberra Times, July 26th.

     

  • Mack Madahar. Nurse Practitioners: Challenges and Opportunities.

    Nurse Practitioners were provided access to the MBS in November 2010. Besides limited access to pathology/radiology, nurse practitioners were provided with four time-tiered MBS item numbers for professional attendances. While most nurse practitioners have established themselves in public hospitals, primarily because of the relative financial certainty it provides, there are a handful of NPs trying to establish a niche in primary care.

    There is tremendous amount of debate in primary care about burgeoning Medicare costs and the ability to offer fully subsidised primary care. Whilst GPs are well placed in primary care, primary health care nurse practitioners have demonstrated to be an excellent resource in providing care that is safe, effective and affordable. Besides improving patient satisfaction, primary health care nurse practitioners facilitate a focus on complex and chronic care needs, which may increase patient throughput and productivity. Such services provide excellent examples of nurse practitioners offering value-added service at little cost. Nevertheless, primary health care nurse practitioners face daily challenges, some of which are worth mentioning. This in order to gain better understanding of these problem/s and convert such challenges into possibilities for change into the future.

    Challenges:

    • Access to only four MBS item numbers out of 5,500 items is limiting growth of nurse practitioners in primary care at a time when there is an increase in ageing, chronic disease and mental health populations. Limited ability to earn a living is turning nurse practitioners away from collaborating with GPs in the provision of primary care.
    • Primary health care nurse practitioners are unable to make MBS-reimbursable referrals to allied health professionals and have limited access to MBS diagnostic imaging items. This contributes to duplication of care and practice inefficiencies.
    • There are no after-hour MBS item numbers for nurse practitioners working in primary care. This means that running such services from an administrative standpoint make it financially unviable.
    • Lack of incentive payments for bulk-billing children, elderly and health care cardholders prevents primary health care nurse practitioners from focusing on the marginalized populations they were designed to serve.
    • Primary health care nurse practitioners can independently perform simple procedures such as insertion of contraceptive implants, as well as spirometry and ECG interpretation. Unlike GPs, primary health care nurse practitioners have no access to procedural MBS item numbers. This means the full costs of performing such procedures are passed on to patients and/or GP practices, which provides a financial barrier to essential screening and diagnostic services. This also means that GPs have to foot the bill for consumables when nurse practitioners have performed such services. The cost must not be passed on to practices as part of a collaborative system.
    • There is a lack of knowledge of the primary health care nurse practitioner role. The AMA has done an excellent job in muddying the waters by confusing the nurse practitioner role with that of the practice nurse. Nurse practitioners are independent practitioners who work beyond the contemporary registered nurse scope of practice. They are able to prescribe medicines, order and interpret diagnostic tests, and make referrals to medical specialists. They perform their functions above and beyond the practice nurse role.

    Opportunities:

    Minister of Health Hon Sussan Ley recently announced a new payment model that encourages General Practices to provide after-hours services. Though specific eligibility has not been announced, it is hoped that nurse practitioners working in collaboration with GPs are included in this arrangement.

    At the same time an MBS Review Task Force has been announced. This taskforce will examine the relevancy of 5500 MBS item numbers and align them with clinical evidence. While this is encouraging there are no nurse practitioners on the review panel. This presents a missed opportunity to provide informed financial consideration of the nurse practitioner role in general practice.

    The Primary Health Care Advisory Group (PHCAG) is another excellent announcement and shows the Minister’s commitment to support patients with chronic and complex health conditions. Except for the inclusion of the chair from the Australian Practice Nurse’s Association, nurse practitioners are missing from the advisory group. Perhaps it is time for a change of heart.

    Nurse practitioners are underutilized in primary care due to financial constraints. This missed opportunity places added burden on GPs, and contributes to strain on the public health system. Small increases in government spending to improve access to existing MBS item numbers (at a reduced rate, e.g. 85%) will encourage nurse practitioner numbers in primary care and provide an impetus for practice nurses to enroll in nurse practitioner programs. While practice nurses work tirelessly, nurse practitioners provide an advanced level of expertise that can support general practices in a greater cost-effective manner.

    Conclusion:

    The current government is committed to cost savings in health and primary care is proving to be one of their toughest challenges. Primary health care nurse practitioners working together with GPs offer real support to all aspects of chronic and complex health problems, with the potential to contribute to real health systems savings. New payment initiatives and advisory committees demonstrate the government’s commitment to cost savings and evidenced-based care. Greater consideration of the primary health care nurse practitioners role can help support this Government’s aspirations. This valuable resource should be allowed to work to its full potential to demonstrate the potential of a cost saving alternative in the long term.

    Mack Madahar is a PHC and MH nurse practitioner. He acknowledges the valuable input of Chris Helms, RN, NP, MSN, ANP-BC, FACNP, in writing this paper.

  • Tim Soutphommasane. Adam Goodes has made some people feel uncomfortable.

    Racism comes in many forms: overt and covert, crude and subtle. The harms of racism also come in many forms. We know from a large body of research that racism can lead to stress, negative emotions, psychological damage, even physiological effects.

    We don’t always focus, however, on racism’s impact on our civic health. What I mean by this is the impact racism can have on the civility and cohesion of our society. Because when someone is subjected to racism, it can have the effect of undermining their standing as a fellow member of our community, and can have a fundamental impact on their freedom.

    Racism can make people feel that they are not able to speak out in a way that they otherwise might. It can inhibit their ability to go out, or feel safe in public places.

    In other words, the experience of racism undermines the assurance of security to which every member of a good society is entitled; the sense of confidence that everyone will be treated fairly and justly; that everyone can walk down the street and conduct their business without fear of abuse or assault, or without feeling that they have to keep their heads down.

    This dimension of racism should remind us of its connection to power. Racism is something that is used to reduce, diminish and humiliate its victims. And when it does exist, some people benefit from it. The beneficiaries of racism may be direct: often, the perpetrators of racism do what they do because it can make them feel more powerful.

    Then there are those who are the passive or indirect beneficiaries of racial power. Some may benefit from the status quo without even realizing it. Some may enjoy the benefits of a social privilege bound up in race.

    There is more than one way, of course, that power manifests in conversations about race. Often, race can be brought to the fore when people seek to challenge power.

    We have seen this through the example of footballer Adam Goodes, who for much of this year has been subjected to constant booing from opposition supporters at AFL matches. The booing has been a recent phenomenon. It appears only to have begun after Goodes took exception to being called an ape by a young spectator at the MCG in 2013 – and to have grown after Goodes was named Australian of the Year for 2014. The booing has further intensified since May, after Goodes performed an Aboriginal war dance during a match in the AFL’s Indigenous Round.

    The booing of Adam Goodes has involved an element of racism, even if some say it occurs because spectators disapprove of Goodes’s playing style. Clearly, the booing has coincided with the public stand that he has taken on matters of racism and Indigenous affairs. If the booing was to do with Goodes’s playing style, why was there not booing for the first decade or so of his career? If Goodes has such an objectionable style, how is that he won the AFL’s Brownlow Medal – the decoration for the league’s best player – on two occasions? How is it that such a champion and statesman of the game is being treated like a pantomime villain?

    It is strange, too, that the denial of racism has been typically accompanied by such intense feeling. Some have expressed deep hostility to any accusation that race and racial prejudice could be at play.

    Let me be clear. There is no question that the booing is of an ugly and unedifying nature. It has everything to do with Goodes standing up against racism and speaking out about Indigenous issues. Goodes has been a public figure not afraid of challenging prejudice; not afraid of asking questions about Australian history and society. He has done it in ways that have made some people feel uncomfortable.

    And it beggars belief to think that those booing somehow don’t know what they are doing. Not when there has been so much debate about it being tied to racial malice (last weekend, for instance, the booing in Perth was accompanied by some spectators being ejected for racial abuse aimed at Goodes). As others have noted, many may be joining in with the booing because they are seeking to put a proud Aboriginal man ‘in his place’ – because he has dared to speak out on issues touching on race.

    Whatever the motivations, the booing has gone too far. The vilification has got to stop. Because it is doing damage – not just to the game of AFL but also to our society. With each match, each week, that this booing is tolerated, more and more people are being given licence to degrade, humiliate and intimidate; to believe that they can hound someone who speaks out about racism into silence. It is an unfortunate sign of the times that this has been allowed to go on for too long, to the point where there is now even the prospect that one of the greats of the sport may be booed into retirement.

    It was welcome that the AFL has issued a statement making clear that racism had no place in the game, and that the league’s 18 club captains have taken a united stand in calling for an end to the bullying. If things do not improve (and assuming Goodes plays on), it may result in the players having to take matters into their own hands. In Europe, there have been occasions in football when teams have walked off the pitch in protest against racist abuse. What an indictment on our society it would be were things to reach such a point.

    We should not forget as well the toll all this is having on the man in question. During the past two years I have had the opportunity to do some work with Adam Goodes. We are proud to have him as an ambassador of our ‘Racism. It Stops with Me’ campaign. His impact has been significant. In taking a stand against racism, he has inspired many, empowering others to do the same. And, partly because of that, he is now the target of despicable behaviour.

    Adam Goodes is a champion of football, an advocate for human rights and a man of integrity. He deserves our respect. It is not him, but those targeting him, who deserve our contempt.

    Tim Soutphommasane is Race Discrimination Commissioner. This is an edited extract from a speech delivered at the ANU on 29 July.

     

  • Cathy Alexander. On climate change, the states may yet save the day.

    Climate campaigner Al Gore has been in Australia again – but this time he didn’t share a stage with a beaming Clive Palmer. He didn’t go anywhere near Canberra. And he had good reason.

    Gore, the former US vice-president who travels the world spruiking action on climate change, wanted to meet with state governments and city councils instead. He has jumped on an emerging trend: a broadening of responsibility for addressing climate change.

    Under the United Nations system it is national governments that are supposed to make emissions pledges and enact policies. Some are doing so.

    But the reality is it’s often provincial governments or city councils who are the most ambitious, especially where national governments leave a policy void.

    From the ground up

    A global patchwork of thousands of provinces and councils enacting separate climate policies may sound messy, and it’s very much Plan B for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But this bottom-up mish-mash might just prove efficient at reducing greenhouse gas emissions – while some national politicians grandstand and dither on the sidelines.

    Gore, a Nobel laureate who gave his trademark slideshow to 1,000 staff and students at the University of Melbourne on Monday, talked about states that are “moving” on climate change: California, Washington and Oregon in the United States, and Canada’s British Columbia.

    “I have a feeling that some parts of Australia are thinking of moving,” he added in his breezy Tennessee accent. “I’m stoked about that.”

    Earlier in the day Gore met with ministers from the Labor states of Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, plus senior public servants from New South Wales and the ACT.

    Later he told the university event, organised by the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, that those state governments “understand this crisis and the nature of the opportunity” (such as renewable energy).

    It’s a different approach to Gore’s memorable joint press conference with federal MP Clive Palmer in Parliament House a year ago. The pair announced that Palmer would vote to scrap the carbon price, while saving the furniture (the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation etc).

    This time around, Gore didn’t target federal politicians – he could hardly show his slide of a Hawaiian wind farm surrounded by flowers to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who finds them “ugly”. (Gore did have a quick lunch with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.)

    Instead, Gore looked to the states to ginger up Australians ahead of the major UN climate summit in Paris in December.

    Top of his mind was California, the example he cited frequently on this trip. Former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger got an emissions trading scheme through state parliament and it started under the Democrats in 2012. (The design is fairly similar to Australia’s first emissions trading scheme under Kevin Rudd.)

    California now has bills on the table to cut transport emissions and increase renewable energy, as well as a legislated emissions target. The Victorian government is particularly interested in the Californian example.

    Gore also name-checked the Canadian province of British Columbia, which has had a carbon tax since 2008, introduced by the centre-Right Liberal Party. Petrol pumps in Vancouver now show the carbon tax ticking over.

    British Columbia has relatively strict energy-efficiency regulations on buildings and their contents, a requirement that 93% of new electricity supply be renewable, and all government agencies offset emissions.

    Gore didn’t mention Chinese provinces but there are seven state or city-based carbon trading schemes in China; the Beijing ETS covers everyone from Microsoft to news agency Xinhua.

    The climate see-saw

    So can Australian states follow suit? They already have. NSW had an ETS, which was scrapped in 2012 to avoid duplication with the (now defunct) federal carbon tax.

    Victoria’s Labor government passed a bill in 2009 to cut emissions by 20% by 2020 and had a plan for the staged closure of the Hazelwood coal-fired power plant. The Liberals won government in 2010 and reversed those plans.

    So there’s an Australian policy pattern best described as messy, regardless of one’s view on climate change. Sometimes the states act, sometimes the federal government does, but governments keep changing. Climate change has been caught in a federal-state see-saw which has left little policy intact.

    That’s why Gore’s list of frontrunner states doesn’t include any Australian examples.

    That’s also perhaps why no premiers met Gore on Monday. They face a tough choice – are they really ready to ramp up climate ambition, and cope with the risks of a hostile media campaign and a possible voter backlash?

    Climate policy has helped see off three Australian prime ministers and two opposition leaders since 2007. The temptation to back away quietly is real.

    South Australia and Queensland are talking up their climate ambition, while Victoria is formally reviewing its climate options, including an energy efficiency campaign, new emissions targets, and more renewable energy. (They’re all Labor states.)

    Meanwhile, insiders are closely watching the Liberal NSW government, which is a different beast ideologically to the federal Abbott government. Watch to see if ministers from any state go to the UN Paris summit.

    So it was perhaps the state premiers, and not the Melbourne University students present, that Gore had in mind when he called for “moral courage” on climate change, as he stood in front of a huge slide of the planet.

    Cathy Alexander is Research Fellow. Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at University of Melbourne. This article was first published in The Conversation on 28 July 2015.

  • Jon Stanford. Climate Change Policy: a wedging opportunity for the ALP?

    For those who believe that Australian elections should be based on a contest of ideas about public policy, developments at the national conference of the ALP in July 2015 will provide some basis for optimism. In contrast to some previous Opposition leaders who have been content to maintain a small target strategy, Bill Shorten is starting to make himself quite a large target in policy areas such as the republic, gender equality and climate change.

    Why has Shorten taken this risk? It certainly helps to be opposed by a prime minister who is a high conviction politician, driven by a conservative ideology that many on the progressive side of politics would characterise as swimming hopelessly against the tide of history. Yet Tony Abbott’s ideological self-indulgence only goes so far. There is a warning signal for the opposition in the long list of issues, mainly economic, where the Prime Minister appears to have no particular conviction and is ruthless in his willingness to play politics with those who do. The corollary is that the few issues where his ideology does dominate may not be that significant. To be sure, they make for lively debate around the barbecue and may even give Tony Abbott the look of a ‘mad uncle’, but they do not threaten the punter’s hip pocket. They are not, therefore, likely to be issues where elections are won or lost.

    But one of Abbott’s high conviction issues may be different. Climate change is at the forefront of global policy concerns and is highly challenging for national governments encompassing, as it does, complex problems around science, diplomacy, technology and economics. Notably, the Prime Minister has managed to place himself on the wrong side of the debate, not just in one or two of these areas, but in all four. He has lampooned climate science as “absolute crap”, identifying instead a conspiracy to attack the fossil fuel industry. In diplomatic terms, since 2013 Australia has run dead on climate change in international forums, with Abbott not allowing Ministerial representation at UN conferences and thereby eliminating any chance of Australia securing a better deal in the upcoming negotiations. His attitude to new energy technologies is that of a Neo-Luddite; he eulogises coal as “king” while deriding renewable energy and cutting funding for the development of low emissions energy solutions. His economic policy response to climate change has been to move as far as possible away from an efficient, least cost approach to reducing emissions and instead, extraordinarily for a conservative, draws on taxpayers’ money to pay polluters not to pollute.

    Little wonder then that the ALP would place climate change at the Schwerpunkt of their political assault on the Coalition leading up to next year’s election. The strategic attractiveness of the issue is also strengthened by the fact that Abbott is not in a position to downplay its significance or remove it from the front pages. With the key Conference of the Parties (COP21) on post-2020 emissions reductions to be held in Paris in December this year, it has developed a transparency and momentum that is all its own.

    In the lead up to COP21, nations are required to propose emissions reduction commitments beyond 2020 that are consistent with the agreed international objective of containing global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius. These commitments were formally due by end-March 2015. Every other developed country has now published its proposed commitment, but Australia is again playing the laggard. Australia’s commitment, we were originally told, would be published in June this year. Then the date slipped again, first to July and now to August.

    These delays might lead one to speculate that the Cabinet is having difficulties in reaching an agreed position on an acceptable commitment. This would not be surprising, because the split in the Coalition on climate change extends beyond the idiosyncratic views of the Prime Minister. On the one hand there is a strong element in the Ministry that is progressive on the issue – and reflective of the attitudes of most conservative parties around the world. On the other hand, there is also a vocal rump of climate change deniers and strong supporters of Australia’s coal industry who, encouraged by the overthrow of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership on this issue, are waiting to claim their pound of flesh.

    Nevertheless, as a nation that has acceded to the two degree target, in practical terms Australia cannot put forward a weak abatement target that is seriously out of kilter with the ambitions of other countries. Responsible Ministers such as Julie Bishop and Greg Hunt would be particularly strong on this issue and would point to the ambitious approach of other conservative governments such as those headed by David Cameron and Angela Merkel. Not only would the government be pilloried by other countries, including its allies and friends, but it also seems likely that the domestic reaction would be highly unfavourable.

    Pledges by other developed countries to date include:

    • The US, with a commitment to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2025
    • The European Union, committing to reduce emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 relative to 1990 levels
    • Canada, proposing a 30 per cent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels by 2030
    • New Zealand, with a similar commitment to Canada.

    In this context it seems unlikely that Australia would be able to get away with a commitment below those of Canada and New Zealand, particularly since emissions reductions of this magnitude, while substantial, still fall well short in aggregate of the abatement required to limit global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius. As Ross Garnaut has suggested, a 30 per cent reduction by 2030 from 2005 levels would be at the bottom end of what Australia could “get away with”. Nevertheless, it may well be a reasonable initial position while providing some comfort to the Prime Minister that he can march bras en bras with his Canadian friend and fellow climate sceptic Stephen Harper. Also, in the context of insufficient ambition overall and the consequent pressure that will be applied to all parties to up the ante in Paris, from a diplomatic perspective it may not be a bad initial negotiating position.

    But the big problem for Tony Abbott will be in delineating the policies he will employ in meeting the target. Even a 30 per cent reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 would require significant policy intervention. Abbott has been very successful in the past in demonising almost every approach to emissions abatement by characterising it as a carbon tax or some other sneaky impost that will increase electricity prices and thereby destroy the world as we know it. For example, he was quick this week to attack Shorten’s suggestion that the renewable energy target could be increased (“we’ve got quite enough renewables”) by pointing to the significant increase in electricity prices that would be required.

    So what is left? Direct Action may have been acceptable in achieving a minor reduction in emissions at a time when electricity prices were increasing, and thus driving down demand, and energy efficiency was increasing rapidly mainly thanks to LED lighting. But it could never bring about a reduction in emissions on the scale being discussed here without a substantial increase in tax revenue to fund higher subsidies. It would be very difficult to argue that increasing income tax or the GST to pay polluters to reduce emissions would provide a better outcome for the average punter than taxing polluters’ emissions directly.

    One option would be for Australia to participate in an international emissions trading system (ETS) that would allow the purchase of emissions permits from overseas, often from developing countries. This option was taken to the 2007 election by the Howard government, of which Tony Abbott was a member. It also consistently featured in the modelling by Treasury of the Rudd and Gillard governments’ carbon reduction policies, which demonstrated that the economic cost of emissions reduction to the Australian community would be substantially reduced by this approach. By purchasing cheaper carbon abatement from overseas, this option would also enable some coal plant to be retained in Australia’s power generation network out almost to 2050 while at the same time we met challenging emissions reduction targets. All this would be balm, one might think, to Tony Abbott’s ears. But no; the Prime Minister has already ruled this option out on the grounds that an ETS is the equivalent of a carbon tax and hence a proscribed instrument under his ideology.

    There are, therefore, significant problems, largely of their own making, for the government both in putting forward a commitment for COP21 and then in designing the policies to deliver it. The opportunity for the ALP is clear. But now that Bill Shorten has initiated the debate about climate change policy and invited the Prime Minister to “bring it on”, where should he go from here?

    First of all, although he may reasonably criticise the government for a lack of ambition in its commitment and a failure in diplomacy in the process leading up to COP21, Shorten does not need to propose any abatement targets at this point in time. These are subject to negotiation at COP21 and it would be premature for an Opposition to intervene at this stage. Should Australia be regarded by the international community to be a “leaner” rather than a “lifter” during the Paris negotiations it may be appropriate for Shorten to indicate that he would consider a more testing target were the ALP to win government. He may also remind Abbott that a sustained and clever diplomatic effort in the lead up to Kyoto enabled the Howard government to obtain for Australia by far the most generous abatement targets for any significant developed country under that protocol. Australia’s minimalist, if not surly, diplomatic engagement in the lead up to COP21 may well make a repeat performance impossible.

    In this context it also needs to be remembered, however, that while it is in Australia’s interests for the world to agree to significant action to counter climate change and even for our delegation to punch above its weight in that discussion, there are no prizes for Australia in exceeding the commitments made by other countries. The impact on climate change from an excess of zeal on Australia’s part would be negligible while the costs to our industry in terms of carbon leakage could be significant.

    Secondly, Shorten should propose a policy framework for achieving substantial emissions reductions at least cost to the Australian economy. He has already taken a major step in that direction by endorsing an emissions trading system with the capacity to gain access to international abatement opportunities. But almost immediately Shorten then proposed a policy, fortunately at this stage only as an aspirational goal, in direct contradiction to his ETS, namely a 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030. Such a target would override the least cost approach of the ETS, negate many of the benefits of buying emission permits on the international market and, according to Danny Price of Frontier Economics, have a major impact on electricity prices by requiring a carbon price of up to $200/tonne.

    Finally, this illustrates that one lesson Shorten can learn from Abbott is that relying on ideology is unlikely to be effective in determining the most efficient policy solutions. For example, in pursuing carbon abatement, what we need is the most economic lower emissions energy solutions that can be made available. These may be renewable, they may be lower emissions fossil fuel technologies or may even be nuclear. There is no need for religion here. Only the Greens believe that there is anything particularly wonderful about renewable energy and this belief is based not on science but ideology. Managing a grid with half of its generation being provided by interruptible sources would be extremely difficult. Of course it could be managed – but only by simultaneously investing in open cycle gas turbines (OCGT) to provide instant reliable power to the grid when the wind is not blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Overall, by virtually doubling the cost, this can be a very expensive solution and the emissions footprint of OCGT is not far short of coal.

    While the punters like renewable energy in the abstract, they clearly don’t like higher electricity prices. Rather than succumbing to simple populism, it would be worthwhile for the ALP to do the hard yards here, such as in working out ways to increase gas supplies so as to bring the price down and thinking about how to respond down the track to the South Australian Royal Commission into nuclear energy. In the latter case, a finding in favour of small modular reactors (think plug-in nuclear submarine power plants) would merit a more considered response than the knee jerk reaction that ideology is likely to dictate.

    Jon Stanford headed climate change policy while with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in the 1990s and was chair of the CoAG taskforce that delivered national gas industry reform.

  • Gareth Evans. Time for the middle powers to step up.

                                                                                                                                     

    Leadership is one of those things about which it’s sometimes wise to be careful what you wish for. In the context of Asia Pacific security, there has been far too much preoccupation with who is—and will be in the future—the top dog on the block, and far too little with building the kind of cooperative and collaborative arrangements that will make the region safe and comfortable for all its inhabitants—no matter who has, and for how long, the biggest GDP, the strongest military, the most allies and partners or the most evidently effective soft power.

    The unwillingness of US leaders and presidential aspirants to speak publicly in any other terms than the need to maintain ‘dominance’, ‘leadership’, ‘primacy’ or ‘pre-eminence’, both globally and in the region, has its own self-fulfilling momentum, and inevitably generates the kind of chest-beating pushback we are now seeing from Beijing in the South China Sea. Neither side is remotely attracted to settling the issue of who is number one by armed conflict, but one does not have to accept the inevitability of what some US scholars are now breathlessly calling the ‘Thucydides Trap’ to acknowledge that events can all too easily career out of control when nationalist emotion starts overriding rational calculation.

    These considerations have long motivated those regional policymakers who have wanted to shift the focus away from bilateral competition to cooperative security through multilateral institution building. All those efforts so far have been disappointing or incomplete, but the arguments for pursuing them remain compelling. And the most useful kind of leadership we can hope for in the years ahead will be from those states—perhaps more likely to be the region’s middle powers than its great ones—who have the vision, energy and stamina to realise the dream of common security: finding our security with others rather than against them.

    From the late 1980s on we have seen the evolution of a number of regional mechanisms of varying degrees of formality and effectiveness. APEC, initiated in 1989 with annual leaders’ meetings institutionalised from 1993, remains a largely economic dialogue and policy organisation. But security issues have regularly been discussed in its margins, nowhere more importantly than at the New Zealand meeting in 1999, which mobilised a response to the explosive situation in East Timor.

    The ASEAN Regional Forum—meeting since 1994 at foreign minister level, and now with 27 members—was intended to evolve through three phases over time, starting with confidence building measures, moving from there to more explicit conflict prevention roles and ultimately conflict management and resolution. It has done some useful work on initiating discussion on a code of conduct for the South China Sea and developing cooperative disaster relief capability, and there has been some useful regular dialogue on issues like counter-terrorism and transnational crime, maritime security and non-proliferation and disarmament. Nonetheless, it would be fair to say that ARF is still largely stuck in the first groove—dialogue about confidence building—rather than living up to the hopes that by now it would be doing something more substantial.

    The East Asian Summit was initiated in 2005, involving leaders level meetings. It grew out of the ASEAN+3 grouping, added another 3 (India, Australia and New Zealand), and now, since last year, embracing the US and Russia as well. Although nothing very substantive has yet emerged from the EAS, it has the potential to be the the most significant grouping, not only because it has all the key regional players around the table, but because (unlike ARF)  it  meets at the highest level, and (unlike APEC) it can address both geopolitical and economic issues.

    The impulse for all these institutions and processes has been recognition to some extent that multilateral approaches are necessary in addressing security and related issues. There are certainly a number of good reasons for that approach.

    Many contemporary problems in Asia and elsewhere are simply beyond the capacity of single countries, however powerful, to resolve unilaterally. These include terrorism, maritime security, arms control, drug and people trafficking, climate change, health pandemics, refugee management, and some major trade and financial imbalances—and all need cooperative and collective action. Global responses may be optimal, but problems that are primarily regional in scope and character are likely to be better dealt with at that level, given limitations of time, attention, commitment and resources at the global level.

    Collective action beats unilateral action almost every time. Unilaterally volunteered actions can make an important contribution to problem solving, but unilaterally imposed solutions, even if possible, generate resentment and stress, are inherently more fragile than cooperatively agreed ones, and very susceptible to changes in underlying power balances.

    And multilateral action beats bilateral action most of the time. Some problems may appear capable of bilateral resolution but are much better resolved in more multilateral frameworks: for example, free trade agreements, and arms control and disarmament agreements.

    Finally, regular meetings between regional leaders, in group as well as bilateral settings, help build close and confident personal relationships, which makes shocks less likely, peaceful accommodation to new power realities more manageable, and stability more sustainable.

    Of course, in all of this there is a need to be less preoccupied in the future with issues of form (who sits around what table when) and much more focused on issues of substance: what exactly will the leaders and their ministers talk about, and what practical outcomes can emerge from their discussions that are capable of real-world delivery. We need real dialogue and real policy cooperation, not just another expensive series of photo-opportunities with set-piece speeches endorsing pre-cooked lowest-common denominator communiqués. Improved regional architecture is not an end in itself—all the effort will only be worthwhile if it actually enhances stability, prosperity, state security and human security.

    It remains my firm belief, based on my own experience as Australia’s Foreign Minister from 1988 to 1996, working closely with Indonesia in the development of the UN peace plan for Cambodia—as complex a conflict resolution issue as the region is ever likely to face—and with ASEAN and other colleagues in building the initial APEC and ASEAN Regional Forum architecture, that the more energetic and creative of the region’s middle powers may be the most productive players in generating the new generation of cooperative mechanisms required.

    The characteristic method of middle power diplomacy is coalition building with like-minded countries, and its characteristic motivation is what I have long described as ‘good international citizenship’. This is a belief in the utility and necessity of acting cooperatively with others in solving international problems, particularly those that by their nature cannot be solved by any country acting alone, however big and powerful., Recognising that being—and being seen to be—a good international citizen is at least as central a component of any country’s national interests as the traditional duo of geostrategic security and economic prosperity.

    There is plenty of scope for middle power diplomacy in the Asia Pacific to advance regional security objectives. The biggest dogs on the block won’t always be receptive to the smaller ones nipping at their heels. But—remembering the way the Permanent Five were roped into engagement on Cambodia by the Australia–Indonesia initiative, and how the initially reluctant US, Russia and China were persuaded to endorse and join the APEC, ARF and EAS initiatives—there is good reason to hope that the region’s security leadership will be shared, and its destiny not forever hostage only to great power rivalry.

    Gareth Evans is Chancellor of the Australian National University, Co-Chair of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, was President of the International Crisis Group from 2000-2009,  and served as Australia’s Foreign Minister from 1988–1996.

    This article appeared in the most recent edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Leadership in the region‘.

  • John Tulloh. Goodbye Syria.

     THE DEAD-END ROADS TO AND FROM DAMASCUS

    Fifteen years ago this month, Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father to become president of Syria. Having spent some years studying and living in France and England, he had hopes of a Western-style liberalisation and development and turning his country into the Switzerland of the Middle East. Those ambitions proved naively fanciful and now he finds himself inextricably wedged, the country under his control shrinking and the outlook hopeless.

    Assad’s report card is a shocking one. A four-year-old civil war. More than 200,000 people killed. A total of 7.6 million Syrians displaced inside their own country, according to the UNHCR. Another 3.9 million driven into exile or living as refugees outside their country. In other words, half the country’s population either dead or driven from their homes.

    Two international terrorist groups – ISIS and al-Nusra (an arm of al-Qaeda) – now control much of northern Syria. More than half the country is no longer in government hands. Syria’s armed forces are demoralised. The army is only half the strength it was four years ago due to death and desertion. Syria, which once prided itself on its secularism, is now racked by sectarianism. Christians have fled for their lives. The economy is in a shambles and unemployment is at record levels. Much of the once vibrant Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, is in ruins. Its main allies are only Russia and the leper of most of the Arab world, Iran.

    If all this were not bad enough for a country’s ruler, there is more. Assad is said to have locked up 200,000 opponents. He has been implicated by the UN in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The U.S., E.U., Canada and Australia among others have imposed sanctions. Syrian assets in those countries have been frozen.

    Despite all this, Assad carries on almost as if it’s business as usual. The U.S., some Arab states and now finally neighbouring Turkey have got involved. But that has been only from the air and their targets have been just ISIS and al-Qaeda and for Ankara the Kurdish PKK militants exploiting the turmoil. President Obama once threatened to intervene when Assad was accused of using chemical weapons, but later thought better of it and still does. The CIA has been training and arming the Free Syrian Army and other anti-Assad rebels, but they are in disarray.

         Last year, a European Council on Foreign Relations report found that: 

       ‘The Syrian economy lies in ruins. Assets and infrastructure have been destroyed, half of the population lives below the poverty line, and the human development index has fallen back to where it stood 37 years ago. It is estimated that even with average annual growth rate of 5 percent it would take nearly 30 years to recover Syria’s 2010 GDP value’. 

         How did it come to this? Bashar Assad was never meant to be president. His father, Hafez al-Assad, from the minority Alawite sect, ruled Syria for 30 years with the help of patronage, a strong army, the Mukhabarat secret police, smart politics and protecting all religions. His successor was supposed to be his eldest son, Bassel. He was killed in a car crash in 1994.

    ‘His name (Bassel) summoned images of a vocal, shrewd, dynamic man who was a parachutist, a ladies’ man, an accomplished athlete and an outgoing statesman’, wrote Syrian journalist Majid Rafizadeh in The Atlantic. But ‘Bashar did not seek out recognition or popularity. He had no interest in being in the middle of politics. The people of Syria viewed Bashar as a nerd, not someone with the instincts or drive to lead a country’.

    When Bassel died, his father summoned home the next son in line to prepare to replace him. That was Bashar, who had been studying in Paris and London. He wanted to be an ophthalmologist and it was said all he aspired to was to have a family and a comfortable life, probably in Europe. His early introduction to the levers of power was being despatched to Lebanon as an unlikely gauleiter to keep an eye on the Syrian security presence there.

    His father died in 2000. Bashar Assad, with his lugubrious looks, diffident manner and beanpole figure, was now in charge. He introduced some of his ideas in what was known as the Damascus Spring. But he tried to run politically before he could walk and within a year those good intentions were scuttled. The Damascus regime settled back into its old ways.

    The turning point came in 2011 when Syrians became infected by the Arab Spring demonstrations which began in Tunisia and spread to Libya and Egypt. Enough of that, decided Assad. Egged on by his widowed mother, he cracked down on it in the same way as his father had crushed a Moslem Brotherhood uprising in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 with the loss of thousands of lives. Little did he realise he had sowed the seeds of a real revolution and now the disintegration of his country as hostile forces surged in to fill the vacuums created in the north.

    Assad emerged from the twilight shadows only this week to make his first public speech in a year. He admitted to what most Syrians already knew about the state of their country and the armed forces. ‘The word defeat does not exist in the Syrian army’s dictionary’, he said disingenuously. ‘We will resist and we will win’.

    Too late, said Amos Gilad, a senior official at neighbouring Israel’s Defence Ministry. ‘Syria is gone. Syria is dying’, he said as quoted by the Jerusalem Post. ‘The funeral will be declared in due time. This Bashar Assad, he will be remembered in history textbooks as the one who lost Syria’.

    Assad’s best hope may be a rump state carved out of his shrinking territory and dominated by his minority Alawites. After all, Syria was an artificial state in the first place, part of the spoils Britain and France cynically divided up as the Ottoman empire crumbled a century ago. Who will run the rest of the country is anyone’s guess as so many fractious parties fight for possession, power and influence.

    ISIS with its grandiose caliphate already controls the north-east area along the Iraqi border. It will not want to surrender any influence or territory. The Nusra Front has the backing of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the usual source of support for undesirables in the region. Its intentions are not clear yet. Although it has been involved in suicide bombings, news reports suggest it is trying to ‘rebrand’ itself as a respectable anti-ISIS/Assad Syrian organisation with no links to al-Qaeda.

    Then there is Iran. It sees Syria as a conduit to arm its fellow-Shiites, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Charles Lister, a Syria expert at the Brookings Doha Centre in Qatar, said Iran with the help of Hezbollah and other militias is building ‘a state within a state in Syria, an insurance policy to protect itself against any future Assad demise’.

    Then there is Turkey, which shares the longest border of all with Syria. It has exploited the ISIS presence to break its truce with the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) which it – along with the West, including Australia – regards as a terrorist organisation. However, the Kurds, with their own sovereign state ambitions, have been doing as much as anyone in resisting ISIS.

    As for the U.S., the New York Times editorialised: ‘Having failed to reach a consensus over the scope and nature of an authorisation of war that would have set parameters for Washington’s involvement in Iraq and Syria, lawmakers appear resigned to allow the Obama administration to slide even more deeply into a complex war’. 

         In short, it is a fine old mess. None of this will soothe the nerves of Bashar Assad and his family as they view the increasing uncertainty of their future. Even their Alawite stronghold, Syria’s main port of Latakia, is under threat from dissident forces. His father, the Assad patriarch, would have been aghast.

    A century later, Syria’s borders can expect to be redrawn no matter what happens, though not as cynically as before.

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

     

     

        

  • John Menadue. Our health system is sustainable.

    To justify an increase in the GST, Premier Baird has joined the long list of conservatives who keep telling us that our health system is unsustainable. Earlier the Treasurer, Ministers for Health and the Commission of Audit warned us in one way or another that the Australian health service is unsustainable, particularly with an ageing population.

    The fact is that it is sustainable. .

    We need to keep modernising Medicare but by almost any international comparison we have one of the best and most sustainable health services in the world. We need to keep our problems in perspective.

    The Commonwealth Fund publishes a regular research report on health systems in major countries. The Commonwealth Fund is a highly regarded private US foundation that compares major systems around the world to stimulate innovative policies and practices in the US and elsewhere.

    In its 2014 report ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’ it compares the performance of healthcare systems in eleven major countries. The comparisons cover quality of care, access, efficiency, equity,‘healthy lives’ and health expenditures per capita.

    Its overall health ratings for these eleven countries were as follows:

    1. UK
    2. Switzerland
    3. Sweden
    4. Australia
    5. Germany and Netherlands (equal)
    6. .
    7. New Zealand and Norway(equal)
    8. .
    9. France
    10. Canada
    11. US

    On almost all the measures the UK with its National Health Service is a stand-out performer. . Grounded in primary care and with a single payer it has well and truly stood the test of time. The regular laggard in almost all these rankings is the US. It tells us a great deal about the failure of a health service based on multiple private insurance payers. Our private health insurance lobby is trying to take us down this disastrous US path.

    When one looks at the break-down of these rankings, the UK ranks at the top in quality of care, access, efficiency and equity. US ranks last in access, efficiency and equity. What is more, the UK system is the cheapest at $US3,405 per capita in 2011 compared with the US, the most expensive at $US8,508 per capita in that same year.

    As indicated, Australia stands at number four in overall rankings amongst the eleven countries. In particular areas we ranked as follows

    • In quality of care we ranked number 2.
    • In access, we are well down the list at number 8. This reflects in part our high level of co-payments or out of pocket costs. The Abbott Government plans will make this worse.
    • In efficiency, we rank number 4.
    • In equity we rank number 5, which reflects in part our failures in mental health, indigenous health and in remote healthcare.
    • In ‘healthy lives’ we rank number 4.
    • In health expenditure per capita in 2011 at $US3,800 we were the third lowest amongst the 11 countries.

    Another measure of our success of course is our high life expectancy.

    It is quite clear that by world standards we rank quite well. We are behind the UK, but far ahead of the US. . Medicare has served us well but is 40 years old without major review.

    But there are ways that we could improve our health services.

    • Mental health, indigenous health and remote healthcare are major shortcomings.
    • Our co-payments are confused and inequitable.
    • Subsidised private health insurance makes it harder for Medicare to control costs.

    There are many ways in which the efficiency of our system could be improved and costs better managed.

    • Can we afford the funding we commit to IVF and end of life services at the expense say of indigenous and mental health?
    • The split of commonwealth and state responsibilities adds to costs and hinders integration of hospital and non hospital care. We have in reality two stand-alone health systems, primary care and hospital care. There is little incentive for the Commonwealth to improve primary (GP) care in order to reduce pressure on expensive state run public hospitals. We need joint funding and planning of all health care that I have proposed for many years.
    • The remuneration of doctors, pathologists and radiologist through fee-for-service is a perverse incentive which encourages over-servicing and over-prescribing. It also hinders the treatment of long-term chronic sufferers.
    • The government subsidy to private health insurance adds $10 billion per annum to government costs benefits the wealthy and weakens Medicare.
    • Australian drugs cost at least $2b. Per annum more than similar drugs in NZ because of the clout of Medicines Australia in negotiating prices with the Australian government.
    • With its lobbying power, the Australian Pharmacy Guild protects pharmacists from competition.
    • Our health workforce is riddled with demarcations and restrictive work practices. Nurses are not properly encouraged and employed. Yet they hold the system together.
    • The Productivity Commission has drawn attention to great variations in productivity between public hospitals and between private hospitals.
    • There is no accountability in any meaningful way for what the health industry produces particularly in general practise. There is little effective peer review in private hospitals. Where are the service bench marks in patient outcomes, the use of preventive strategies, and integration of care or even waiting times?

    There is clearly a lot we can do to improve healthcare in Australia and better manage costs. But overall, we have a very good and sustainable health service which ranks well against comparable countries.

    Sorry if I keep repeating myself on health care but the myths about our unsustainable health care are recycled time and time again and seldom contested.

  • David Holmes. Tony Abbott, Rupert Murdoch and coal.

    As the latest State of the Climate report reaffirms 2014 to be “the hottest on record”, the NSW Liberal Party is pressing ahead with plans for a “Carnival of Coal” in August. The party’s upper house whip, Peter Phelps, has appealed to members to download a sticker for MP office doors in support of the upcoming carbon love-in. It says:

    I loved carbon before it was coal.

    The Liberal paleo-love for coal, which Tony Abbott has declared “good for humanity”, is at least a point of differentiation with Labor. Labor does not promote such slogans at all – even if, in Victoria, the Andrews Labor government is still issuing coal exploration licences.

    Both parties are capable of romancing the coal industry. But Liberal parties around the country have had much more success in convincing voters that either coal is more important than climate, or have decided that – with a population drip-fed on attention-deficit-consumerism and its reality television advertorials – their connection can be comfortably sublimated.

    Whatever its form, the love for coal in Australia is going to end badly, like all relationships based on fantasy. To slightly misquote a 19th-century philosopher: the demand to give up the illusion that coal is good for humanity is the demand to give up a condition which needs such an illusion.

    The condition I am referring to is the way our half-formed social democracy has become so captive to the ugliest form of corporate-servicing statism. It is not that the state has completely merged with corporate interests. Australia still has incredibly strong and progressive civic institutions such as its public broadcaster, its schools, universities, bureaus, museums and aspects of the legal system that do not serve capital’s interests.

    It is that our governments have become servile – not to voters, but to a conjunction of multinational mining, energy and media interests, who have as their dating agencies the far-right silos of the capitalist class, such as the Institute for Public Affairs, which do not disclose their corporate donors.

    Many believe, including perhaps Abbott himself, that he retains his power base at the pleasure of an ageing octogenarian who is well known for obtaining amusement from playing the Freudian Fort-Da game with entire democracies – the power to give and take away power – as long as he has also received something in return.

    The same newspaper group that managed to squeeze a “toxic” “carbon tax” through the consciousness of millions of tabloid readers by means of slogan and cartoon did so when it was threatened by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) with having to repay almost A$900 million it had received on the eve of the last federal election.

    The infamous “Kick this Mob Out” election blitzkrieg on Labor that started on August 5, 2013, was launched precisely at decision time for the ATO to appeal the Federal Court ruling on the windfall payout News Corp reportedly received by titanic-scale profit-shifting.

    Global profit-shifting activities are routine for multinational empires such as Murdoch’s. But, not all have the ability to pressure governments at election times. And it is clear that at least the two major political parties believe they need a media mogul to gain office.

    But political parties also need big donors. The largest to the Coalition are the energy and mining companies, who receive the greatest benefits in corporate welfare.

    The examples are quite grotesque. Fuel rebate subsidies that mining companies receive run at A$2.2 billion per year. Meanwhile, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) is asked to cancel its A$2.1 billion in subsidies directed exclusively to windfarms – which have the ability to hurt coal.

    Before it moved to neuter the CEFC, the Coalition has proposed what has been dubbed the ”Dirty Energy Finance Corporation” for Northern Australia. It will bewilderingly make up to A$5 billion available to subsidise infrastructure projects in northern Australia and Queensland in particular.

    A source has suggested to me that the fund is actually an elaborate financial smokescreen to helping out the coal mines in the Galilee basin – particularly the Adani Enterprises mine, but also the GVK Alpha Coalmine. GVK Alpha, the largest coal mine in Australia, was approved 2 months after the Coalition assumed power, is part-owned by Gina Rinehart – and also stands to benefit from billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies. Ms Rhinehart attracted satire in 2011 for flying liberal MPs to India to attend the wedding of the granddaughter of mine co-owner GV Krishna.

    With the coal price diving worldwide, the mines – are unlikely to be economically viable without a huge subsidy. They might also surpass the viability threshold if they were able to sell the coal to a nearby newly proposed coal-fired power station that has been endorsed by Abbott personally.

    However, competition from renewable energy company Windlab for an adjacent 1.2 gigawatt combined solar and wind farm would be an enormous threat to Alpha and Adani. It is pledging to undercut the price of the coal station by $30 per megawatt hour.

    Time for my readers to draw a diagram to figure out which proposal will get funded. A diagram might picture the coincidence that the CEFC was directed to cease subsidising windfarms – for which it actually returns a profit to Australian taxpayers – just as it was realised the Windlab proposal posed a threat to the coal-fired power station.

    It is worth considering that, according to Bill McKibben from 350.org, the Galilee basin alone has so much coal that if it is all burnt, it would take the world 30% of the way to getting to 2 degrees. You couldn’t invent a more tragic case study on how destructive the Abbott government is on climate.

    But then there is Direct Action. This is a government marketing exercise that disguises a further A$2.5 billion giveaway to corporate Australia that works with targets so small as to guarantee Australia’s status as having fallen off the climate action map.

    Detailed analysis shows that Direct Action won’t even meet its miniscule targets. It has led to a demonstrable increase in Australias Co2 emissions since the carbon tax was repealed, according to the government’s own figures.

    Given the Abbott government’s ongoing love affair with coal, it is little wonder that Australia was publicly scrutinised at climate talks held in Bonn last month about the impact of its domestic policies. The UN talks, attended by representatives of 190 countries, were an important stepping stone to the much-anticipated Paris summit to be held in December.

    While the Coalition’s reckless disregard for addressing climate change may not get scrutiny by the tabloid media in Australia, it certainly will in Paris.

    David Holmes is Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies at Monash University.  This article was first published in The Conversation on 18 July 2015.

  • Shiro Armstrong. A risky Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.

    The largest hurdle for the 12-member Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement — the US president’s ability to get Trade Promotion Authority, or fast track — has been cleared. Many people think that the TPP can be wrapped up in a few months.

    There are still difficult issues to resolve, but they are trivial compared to the ability to get a straight up-or-down vote in the US Congress, without which the deal would be a non-starter. The remaining issues can easily be horse-traded at the political level and compromises can be made in order to complete the deal.

    The temptation will be strong to rush across the finish line for what will be a major political trophy — but the risk is that the TPP will be an agreement that does more harm than good for economic and political relations in the Asia Pacific.

    A completed TPP will be accompanied by grandiose statements about the deal covering 60 per cent of global GDP and half the world’s trade. This sounds much less impressive when you compare it to groupings like APEC, which includes China and Indonesia, that have even higher global GDP and trade coverage. But the numbers like these don’t tell us anything about what kind of deal it will be or what gains and costs it will bring. The most optimistic estimates suggest trivial increases in GDP.

    The TPP aims to write rules for international commerce in the 21st century and includes a large number of chapters that go beyond 20th century trade issues.

    There are three major flaws, though, that will likely overwhelm any positives the deal may deliver.

    The first is that the core of the new rules involves aspects that further private interests (read: large multinationals) at the expense of general welfare in member countries. The most egregious of these is stronger intellectual property (IP) rights protections, which are anti-development and simply transfer wealth to US pharmaceutical companies and Hollywood. Stronger intellectual property protections stymy innovation. This means a net reduction in trade and a loss in global welfare. If ! countries like Australia think stronger IP protections are in their national interest, they do not need an international treaty to introduce them.

    The second flaw is who the TPP leaves out. China, India and Indonesia, among others, are not party to the TPP nor will they be able to join anytime soon. The hurdles to membership are unreasonably high for non-advanced countries, who will pay a cost from being left out with strict rules designed to divert trade from them.

    The third major flaw is that even in the win-win trade enhancing areas, the TPP will either entrench protection in some areas — chiefly agriculture — or, where it succeeds in liberalising, will do so at the expense of non-members. Inefficient and unproductive sectors are a drag on economies, and liberalising them would produce real gains. But many countries in the TPP are bringing an overly defensive stance — think Japan and its rice and other ‘sacred’ produce — or are starting with that sector off the negotiating table altogether, as is the case with US sugar.

    More egregiously, the TPP will complicate trade and impose serious costs on non-members.

    Vietnam is a case in point. The country is paying a high price for entry by adopting standards and rules inappropriate to its stage of development, but it will benefit from increased market access in the United States for its garments exports. Yet Vietnamese exporters will only enjoy that preferential treatment if it procures raw materials from another TPP member instead of from cheaper, more efficient suppliers like China. These and similar provisions that derive from the way TPP has been negotiated bilaterally make it a particularly complex and costly agreement. The trade diversion that will result imposes economic costs on members and non-members alike — and some of the latter are even poorer than Vietnam.

    To make matters worse, the trade- and welfare-reducing IP rights provisions are being traded off against and bundled with market access provisions. And some provisions could be disruptive and costly when onerous standards, institutions and reforms — to state-owned enterprises, for example — are imposed and countries are expected to leapfrog stages of development.

    As TPP members sprint towards the finish line, they will need to introduce measures to enhance the positives of the agreement — the genuine trade and investment liberalisation that occurs — and over time minimise the negatives. A first step is to limit the scope and reach of the welfare reducing IP protections.

    The agreement needs to be expansionary on the win-win trade and investment liberalisation aspects. That involves limiting the complicated preferential deals within the TPP and making it easy to expand membership. That is no easy task given the design of the agreement is to punish non-members into compliance on terms set by the advanced economies. A more productive way forward would be to help build capacity in lower income countries so that they can reach those standards. That is how to further productive economic interdependence and win friends.

    If progress can be made in reform and liberalisation unilaterally or through the help of other regional initiatives — and if the WTO and multilateral system can be strengthened — then the benefits of the TPP can be accentuated and some of its more pernicious costs averted.

    Shiro Armstrong is co-director of the Australia-Japan Research Centre and co-Editor of East Asia Forum at the Australian National University.

    This article was first posted on the East Asia Forum website on 26 July 2015.

     

  • John Menadue. Militarisation, the new norm.

    I was surprised recently on arriving at Sydney Airport to see the new Australian Border Force (ABF) decked out in their new military-style uniforms. The personnel looked like part of the Australian Defence Force instead of Customs and Immigration officers. There was clearly a new message being conveyed.

    But perhaps I should not have been so surprised as I had seen online only a few days earlier the launch of ABF in Canberra with the mandatory 10 Australian flags backing our Prime Minister, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and the new bedecked Head of ABF.

    Militarisation has become increasingly the norm in Australia eroding more and more of our civic domain.

    Tony Abbott has been running scare campaigns on many fronts particularly against ‘illegal’ asylum seekers and terrorists. The language is clear, we are at war with asylum seekers in their rickety boats. Scott Morrison described Operation Sovereign Borders as a ‘military-led border security operation’. He added that the battle against people-smugglers ‘is being fought using the full arsenal of measures’. Tony Abbott speaks of the continuing war against illegals. Operation Sovereign Border is run by the Navy. The Minister for Immigration and Border Protection refuses to tell the Australian people about asylum seeker boats because the matter is ‘operational’, i.e. we are in a military operation on the high seas..

    Many of us had hoped that at last we were putting to an end the appointment of the Australian military as vice-regal representatives in Australia. But we are now back-tracking on that with General Cosgrove our new Governor General and General Hurley our new Governor in NSW. The military is the norm.

    Our aid programs have been progressively militarised. AIDWATCH has recently reported that our ‘military forces manipulate humanitarian aid in order to achieve tactical and political objectives. While the military can play an important role in the immediate aftermath of a humanitarian crisis, particularly through the provision of transport and creating a secure environment, researchers have found that militarised aid is not effective and can cause harm to local communities and aid workers. It added ‘All Australian government activities in Afghanistan that are related to Operation Slipper – whether delivered by the ADF, AFP or Ausaid – are not aid. At a Senate Inquiry into Australia’s aid program to Afghanistan in December 2012 it revealed almost $200 million in military spending being reported as “aid”. The acknowledgement raises serious concerns about the close relationship between aid and Australian military and police forces in Afghanistan.’

    The militarisation of Australia and our conditioning to it has been most evident in the extravagant celebration of the Centenary of Gallipoli and WWI. The Australian War Memorial has orchestrated an extremely well-funded campaign across the country, including schools, to depict WWI as the starting point of our history, our coming of age. We are encouraged to celebrate this disaster and forget our great civilian and peace time achievements in the decades just before 1900 and in the subsequent decade. There were remarkable civilian achievements; federation, the national parliament, a living wage, rights for women and an Australian ballot. We were world leaders in these and other civilian achievements but we are encouraged to forget them so we can focus on our military history and valour.

    David Stephens, the Secretary of Honest History, wrote in this blog on 20 June this year that we will probably spend up to $A700 million on the Centenary of WW1. He said ‘The Australian spend per death [in WWI] is between five and nineteen times the average spend per death of the next five major combatant countries – NZ, Canada, UK, France and Germany.’ That tells us a lot about how militarisation has become the norm.

    Our foreign policy has become subjected to our military dependence on the US. We are at the beck and call of the US military, usually regardless of our own interests. We do it time and time again – Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iraq again. Malcolm Fraser has warned us that the US is a ‘dangerous ally’. The US has many attractive features but war seems to be in its DNA. As I wrote in this blog on 15 June this year, since its independence in 1776, the US has been at war 93% of that time. It has never had a decade without war. It has launched 201 out of 248 armed conflicts since the end of WWII and maintains over 700 military bases around the world in more than 100 countries. Former President Eisenhower warned Americans about the industrial and military complex in the US. The warning should be for us as well as for the Americans about the militarisation of civilian institutions and values. Our foreign policy has been eclipsed by our mistaken military adventures and dependence on the US.

    There is great danger that the militarisation of Australian history and our ready acceptance of military as the accepted norm will lead us to more and more tragedy. We used to believe that committing our country to war was the most serious thing that any government could ever do. That is no more. We go to war without even the Australian parliament being consulted. Tony Abbott could hardly contain himself at the prospect of sending 1000 ADF troops to far away Ukraine after the downing of MH 17. The military threat of ISIS is grossly exaggerated as Malcolm Turnbull has told us.

    Henry Reynolds in this blog on 18 April this year. ‘Militarism marches on’, warned us ‘The threshold Australian governments need to cross in order to send forces overseas is perilously low. Because there has never been an assessment of why Australia has been so often involved in war, young people must get the impression that war is a natural and inescapable part of national life. It is what we do and we are good at it. We ‘punch above our weight’. War is treated as though it provides the venue and the occasion for Australian heroism and martial virtuosity. While there is much talk of dying, or more commonly of sacrifice, there is little mention of killing and never any assessment of the carnage visited on distant countries in our name.’

    Militarisation is becoming more and more pervasive. We are sleep-walking in dangerous territory.