Category: Politics

  • Fukushima – the trouble when regulators and operators are too close. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

    Speaking in support of Tokyo’s bid for the 2020 Olympics, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on 7 September that the situation at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power station was ‘under control’. Recent disclosures, however, about leaks of radioactive water from storage tanks at the site and the contamination of ground water flowing into the ocean make his claim appear brave at best and dishonest at worst. The ‘everything is fine’ stance means the government is still relying primarily on the operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., to see through the clean up and decommissioning process. Though TEPCO might be expected to know more than anyone else about the situation at Fukushima, its performance so far does not inspire confidence.

     

    The problems associated with making safe a large and severely damaged nuclear power station, containing six reactors, are obviously highly technical in nature as well as being unprecedented in scale. I am no expert on the nuclear physics or the engineering involved, but given what has happened so far it seems prudent to pay attention to warnings that are emanating from those who prudently opposed ever allowing a nuclear power industry in such an earthquake-prone country. I do have some knowledge of the way regulators and corporations interact in Japan ­– often so cozily it is hard to tell them apart – and this is another reason for listening to critics who say TEPCO must not be left to its own devices.

     

    When the earthquake and giant tsunami struck two years ago, three of Fukushima’s six nuclear reactors were on line. The fuel rods in all three subsequently melted down releasing high-level radiation that contaminated a vast area of land around the plant. Two other reactors, units 5 and 6, were in cold shutdown for maintenance. That left unit 4, which was offline, with all its fuel rods transferred to the spent fuel pool. The building housing this unit was badly damaged and still lacks a roof. In order to make it safe the fuel rods inside must be removed – an operation that itself poses serious risks.

     

    TEPCO all along has maintained a sanguine commentary about the situation at unit 4. On 14 February it reported that the temperature of the spent fuel pool was stable at 25-30 degrees Celsius and that the fuel rods were ‘secured inside the rack’ and well covered by water. The building, it said, was standing upright and not on a lean. On 26 April TEPCO reported that a structural analysis had confirmed that the building, including the spent fuel pool, which is raised above the ground, would not collapse even if struck by another earthquake of seismic intensity 6. It restated this opinion on 29 June.

     

    But if TEPCO is the government’s main source of information, there is evidence that even members of the government are struggling to achieve an understanding of the real situation. Doubts about Abe’s grasp of the facts have been aired in various quarters, including in the Asahi Shimbun of 20 September. It noted that, after a visit to the Fukushima plant, Abe told reporters: ‘The effects of contaminated water have been completely blocked within a range of 0.3 square kilometres within the harbor’. The newspaper commented that ‘although Abe used the term “blocked”, the silt fences in the harbour cannot prevent all water from flowing out into the ocean. Radioactive materials pass through the silt fences and mix with the ocean, becoming so diluted that they are difficult to detect. Even Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the top government spokesman, said the measures at the Fukushima site were not stopping all of the water within the harbour.’ Experts also criticized the outdated sampling methods being used, which can result in a tenfold variation in measures of radiation.

     

    So who really knows and who is telling the truth?

     

    Various anti-nuclear blog sites are sounding the alarm. Harvey Wasserman, a journalist-activist writing at www.globalresearch.ca claims the world is ‘within two months of what could be human kind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis’. He goes on: ‘Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own. Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima’. Wasserman’s claims, as we have seen, directly contradict TEPCO’S public statements, but he is not the only voice questioning the operator’s credibility. The website www.fukuleaks.org cites concerns about the rods having shifted out of alignment, and thus being difficult to grasp and remove, and corrosion of their protective casings. The greatest danger would arise if the fuel rods came into contact with each other or were exposed to the air. Some activists are calling for an international task force of experts to take over control, though there are no concrete moves in that direction. In the latest English-language update on the status of the power station provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency by Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority none of these specific concerns are addressed. It mere states that the removal of spent fuel from unit 4 will start in November and concentrates instead on the leaking water issue – in a sense, yesterday’s problem.

    (The update is at www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2013/fukushimaupdate160913.pdf)

     

    With so much conflicting information and so many compromising factors involved (the Japanese government now locked in to Abe’s ‘under control’ mantra and TEPCO keen to deflect further criticism and keep a lid on the spiraling costs of decommissioning) it would be foolhardy not to consider the situation at Fukushima both serious and unresolved. Insufficient progress has not been made towards building trust to justify any other conclusion.

     

    Walter Hamilton, a former ABC Tokyo correspondent, is the author of Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story (NewSouth Books).

     

     

     

     

  • How the Australian media frames North Korea and impedes constructive relations. Guest blogger: Dr Bronwen Dalton

     

    An analysis of the last three years of coverage of North Korea in the Australian media shows a tendency in Australian coverage to uncritically reproduce certain metaphors that linguistically frame North Korea in ways that imply North Korea is dangerous and provocative; irrational; secretive; impoverished and totalitarian. This frame acts to delegitimize, marginalise and demonise North Korea and close off possibilities for more constructive engagement. In the event of tensions, such a widespread group think around North Korea could mean such tensions could quickly and dramatically escalate.

    This analysis of media coverage about North Korea appearing in three major Australian media outlets, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) and transcripts of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) over the 3-year period from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2012 shows that North Korea is rarely referred to as a country or its rulers as a government.. The analysis also reveals a number of dominant metaphors: ‘North Korea as a military threat’ (conflict metaphor); ‘North Korea as unpredictable, irrational and ruthless’ (psychopathology metaphor); ‘North Korea as isolated and secretive’ (pariah metaphor); ‘North Korea as a cruel dystopia’ (Orwellian metaphor); ‘North Korea as impoverished’ (basket case metaphor).

    Such metaphors play an influential role in shaping public perceptions. In their largely uncritical reproduction of metaphors that linguistically frame North Korea, the Australian media reinforces a negative, often adversarial orientation towards North Korea. Without a change to the North Korean frame, resourced and evidence-based intervention is more likely to fail due to donor disengagement. We also run the risk of dehumanising the North Korean people and, in the event of conflict, humanitarian imperatives are more easily pushed aside in favour of the option to send in the drones with civilian deaths recast as collateral damage.

    Metaphors

    Conflict metaphor: By far, the most common conflict metaphor across the three news outlets used was ‘nuclear’, which appeared more than any other conflict metaphor

    Psychology metaphor: A common theme in the media is that North Korea suffers from some sort of pathological narcissistic disorder, with portrayals of North Korea as seeking attention or as exploiting the threat of nuclear retaliation to extricate more aid. While the extent of North Korea’s nuclear capability is not categorically known, its nuclear capacity is consistently assumed, with references to a possible ‘nuclear holocaust’ with some reports making the claim (which is highly unlikely) that a North Korean nuclear warhead carrying a rocket could reach Australia.

    Pariah metaphor: Numerous references to the pariah metaphor were found in the sample. The word secret or secretive was the most common, other common words included hermit, dark and closed.

    Economic basket case metaphor: The sample also contained a number of root metaphors relating to ‘North Korea as a basket case’. Food—or lack of—was most commonly discussed.

    Orwellian metaphor: A common theme was that North Korea is some kind of dystopia. The most commonly found term was ‘dictator.

    So North Korea is depicted as an isolated and backward country run by a tyrant with comically eccentric, excessive tastes. His regime consistently lies and cheats and is driven by a childish narcissism that North Korea suffers from some sort of pathological narcissistic disorder, with portrayals of North Korea as seeking attention or as exploiting the threat of nuclear retaliation to extricate more aid. This is not a balanced consideration of North Korean motives and instead serves to make us more oblivious to that country’s point of view.  A failure to understand North Korea’s interests has serious implications for how Australia (and her allies) responds to North Korea.

    The theoretical and empirical evidence is that interest-based approaches to international conflict management are the most effective.  The ample body of international relations literature on conflict resolution also supports the propition that integrative or collaborative approaches to conflict management have better outcomes than competitive approaches. The literature proposes that the key to long-term conflict transformation is recognizing others’ interests and concerns as valid. But by reinforcing a negative, often adversarial orientation towards North Korea, the media effectively demonises all of North Korea’s interests, closes off the possibility of engagement- It effectively obscures our ability to see more creative, positive conflict management possibilities.

    Despite the importance of presenting informed coverage, due to a widespread lack of knowledge on North Korea, the Australian news media continues to offer fragments of (mis)understanding to the general public. It is from discourse in the media that the wider public picks up vital cues about how their individual interests and the groups they are concerned with might be affected by North Korea, and what the national interest might be.  The text and images on North Korea emphasize the Otherness of the enemy which is fundamental to wartime discourses because it can create the preconditions necessary for military action. The effect is to lock North Korea and the civilised West into a mutually antagonistic relationship that precludes any solution other than the enemy being eliminated either through conversion or destruction

    The Australian media would be substantially enlivened by more stories illustrating actual individual and community life to give a human face to North Korea and offer the Australian public a less singular, monotonous depiction of a country so often written about, with such a limited lexicon. Such journalism would alter the way we view North Korea and ameliorate the tendency to see it as an adversarial, irrational, rogue state populated by brainwashed citizens devoted to the cult of the Kims.It also should seek to better capture some of the complexities, and differences of opinion that make the North Korean problem so difficult to resolve, rather than making it still harder to solve by demonising coverage which effectively rules North Korea out as a legitimate negotiating partner.

    Without a timely change to the North Korean frame, resourced and evidence-based intervention is more likely to fail due to donor disengagement. We also run the risk of dehumanising the North Korean people and, in the event of conflict, human shields could easily be recast as collateral damage. In such a scenario, humanitarian imperatives are more easily cast aside in favour of the option to send in the drones.

    Dr Bronwen Dalton is the Coordinator of the Not-For Profit and Community Management Program at the University of Technology, Sydney

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  • Frontier War and asylum seekers. John Menadue

    Launch of the 2013-14 Catholic Social Justice Statement by John Menadue 11 September 2013

    This statement follows the proud tradition of the Catholic Church in Australia since 1940 of calling Catholics and all Australians to act for social justice. The 65  statements  issued over the years cover a great range of social justice issues – poverty, violence, peace, environment, indigenous people, ageing and inequality. Many years ago GK Chesterton referred with admiration to the practice of Australian Catholics in their Justice Sundays and annual statements.

    This year is no exception with the call to fight global poverty. The famous parable of Lazarus and the rich man calls all Christians to a commitment to work for the poor and the marginalised. As the statement says, whilst progress against world poverty has been made, major problems still remain.

    • By 2015 almost a billion people will be living on an income of less than $1.25 per day.
    • Over a quarter of a million women in our time die in child birth.
    • Eight million children die every year from malnutrition and preventable disease.

    As the statement so eloquently puts it, with 20% of the world’s poor living in our region ‘Australia is the rich man and Lazarus is at our gate”. Unfortunately our politicians keep slashing our ODA budget.

    It is an honour for me to launch this statement. Let me congratulate the authors and designers who have drafted this excellent and timely statement. We are in your debt.

    The Catholic Church remains for me the greatest influence for good in the world.

    That influence is part of what Cardinal John Henry Newman described as the great beauty of the Catholic Church and not just in the lives of its saints or in its art.

    No single institution in the world is doing more than the Catholic Church about poverty, social and economic self-enhancement of deprived people, especially through education and particularly for women, in societies where they have little place. It is also shown in the care of refugees, people with AIDS, lepers and outcasts of many kinds, and carrying out what is a fully developed understanding of total human development.

    But unfortunately that wonderful story is often  lost and as we are ashamed of the revelations out of the Melbourne parliamentary enquiry and the Newcastle royal commission about grievously failed leadership of our church on sexual abuse. The way the Church sees itself is not the same as that perceived by many in the public square.

    But despite that, I think we are getting a spring back in our steps and the reason is Pope Francis as he speaks of the poor, refugees, prisoners, the oppression of women, the marginalised and people of different faiths.

    There is a lot we can do to build on the church’s remarkable record in works of justice, mercy and charity. I suggest that we can do two things now – clear up our amnesia about our past treatment of indigenous people and lead the way on refugees.

    The Frontier War

    We have still not properly acknowledged the great damage we have done to our indigenous people. Along with the Australian War Memorial, we still blot out the Frontier War that settlers and the settler parliaments conducted right across our country from 1790 to early last century to dispossess indigenous people. There are no monuments to this long war but even the AWM concedes that 2500 settlers and police died in the war alongside 20,000 aborigines who were “believed to have been killed chiefly by mounted police.”  Informed and engaged scholars like Henry Reynolds in The Forgotten War now believe that the number of indigenous men, women and children killed was probably over 30,000. This was an epic war. Its purpose was the occupation and sovereignty over one of the great land masses of the world. It was to wrest control from a people who had lived here for 40,000 years. This was a war which was much more central to our future than any other war in which we fought. In proportion to our population in the 19th Century which was about 2 to 2.5 million people, this Frontier War was the most destructive of human life in our history. The A W M applauds indigenous people when they fought for the empire, but refuses to suitably acknowledge the 30,000 indigenous people that were killed resisting the empire that was taking their land. The AWM remembers the Sudan War of 1885 in which no Australians were killed in combat but ignores the Frontier War. We easily call to mind “Lest we forget” but it is really “best we forget” the 30,000 Australians who were killed in our Frontier War.

    The “whispering in our hearts” will continue until we are honest about our history, both its glory and its shame. Political slogans about a “black armband view of our history” are designed to avoid the truth and encourage us to forget.

    Refugees

    A major world problem we all face is what Pope Francis called the ‘globalisation of indifference’ to refugees. There are 45 million refugees and displaced people in the world. And the number is increasing daily. Just think of Syria. So often refugees and boat people are seen as an Australian problem when it is a major global problem.

    The Torah which is a key part of our Jewish/Christian tradition, places great store on welcoming the stranger. The Torah repeats its exhortation more than 36 times ‘remember the stranger for you were strangers in Egypt’. This caring for the stranger is repeated more than any of the other biblical laws, including observance of the Sabbath and dietary requirements. As Leviticus 19 puts it ‘When an alien resides with you in your land, do not molest him. You should treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the native-born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself, for you too were aliens in the land of Egypt.’ The gospel of Luke asks ‘Who is my neighbour?’ and tells us the story of the Good Samaritan. Matthew’s Gospel tells us what may be an apocryphal story about the holy family’s flight from the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ to safety in Egypt. Perhaps flight by donkey is OK but not by boat!

    Australia has a proud record of accepting 750,000 refugees since WWII. They have been marvellous settlers. But today in our political debate we have plumbed to a depth most of us would have thought impossible. This poisoning of our generous and humanitarian instincts has not happened overnight. It started with Tampa in 2001 and “children overboard”. We have been on a slippery slide ever since. There has been a failure of moral leadership, and not just by politicians.

    We must change the present conversation. We cannot indulge our parochial stupor when we face a world where people are being killed and persecuted.  This critical issue of how public opinion can become more generous and thoughtful will take time and a lot of effort. But it must be done. The Catholic Church and others must play a vital role. Our political leaders keep appealing to our darker angels. But we all have better angels that Abraham Lincoln referred to which will respond to strong and generous leadership.

    Pablo Casals puts that appeal in different words.

    ‘Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness.

    If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most.

    It is not complicated, but it takes courage.

    It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.

    In the present toxic environment, governments are determined to curb boat arrivals. But I suggest there are still many things that we could do with strong leadership, courage and with good management.

    • Negotiate orderly departure arrangements with refugee source countries like Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to provide alternate pathways.
    • Negotiate upstream processing in cooperation with UNHCR with Malaysia and Indonesia.
    • Increase our refugee intake to over 30,000 p.a. which would still be short of the Indochina intake of the early 1980s when adjusted for our population increase.
    • Abolish mandatory detention which is cruel, expensive and does not deter.
    • Permit asylum seekers on bridging visas to work in the community.

    Our supposed land of the fair go and the second chance is punishing some of the most vulnerable people on this earth. With good leadership across the community, including the churches, we must change the conversation. Pope Francis is showing us that leadership.

    Lebanon with a population of just over 4 million people is providing protection for one million Syrians. Pakistan, one of the poorest countries in the world has 2 million refugees within its borders. Their generosity shames us.

    Importantly we need to do and show that the Church is not preoccupied with sex and gender and concerned to protect its own name at the expense of those that we have harmed.

    Also we need to remind ourselves that despite our concern about current social and political trends, we do have a record of improvement in many areas. In my youth sectarianism and racism was rife. We have broken the back of those two vices although not completely free of them.

    This social justice statement can be part of a process to change the narrative and our own behaviour, and highlight again what John Henry Newman called the beauty of the Catholic Church in the fields as justice, mercy and charity.

    The Catholic Church, although wounded, remains for me the greatest influence for good in the world. I see and learn of it every day.  We must never take that record for granted. It is always work in progress.

    It is my honour to launch this statement

     

     

     

  • Commodifying and dehumanising asylum seekers. Guest blogger Michael Kelly SJ

    The rejection by the Indonesian foreign minister of Tony Abbott’s suggested ways of “stopping the boats” is only the latest assertion of how the Coalition’s policy on asylum seekers was never going to work. It might have made political sense at election time, allegedly in marginal seats though the results in western Sydney throw some doubt on that.

    But now a factious Senate that will be difficult for a Coalition government to woo, a High Court to appeal to about the implementation of a policy that has all to many features similar to the one struck down when the “Malaysian Solution” failed and the unparalleled damage done by the policy to Australia’s standing in the region all indicate that, however loudly proclaimed and possibly significant at the polls, it was never a goer.

    Its absurdity as policy is now clear to anyone wanting to look at how unworkable it is. And Labor didn’t help. Already, despite promises during the campaign from such people as Penny Wong that Labor would never send children, especially unaccompanied ones, to Nauru, it’s happened. And as PM, Kevin Rudd’s dealings with PNG and Nauru only intensified the issue with which the Coalition joined the ALP with glee.

    But there’s something deeper at work in what is, in the medium and long term, just bad policy. It surfaces in people wondering how committed Christians like Rudd, Abbott and Morrison can so politically exploit and instrumentalise vulnerable people and see any coherence with the faith they profess.

    Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in his moralizing pseudoscientific economics. But one thing he did get right was the way capitalist economies can commodify and dehumanize people as “units” in a production process. He called it “reification” which, for those not familiar with Latin, means making “things” of people.

    And that’s what happens when an absence of proper legal process, attentive listening to actual personal stories and a readiness to accept a civilized approach worked out over the last 70 years to dealing with asylum seeker claims are replaced by punishing the claimant before the case has been heard.

    We are all familiar, or should be, with what a relatively insignificant share, by international comparisons with the numbers of asylum seekers in the world, those coming to our country are. But a national category mistake seems to be the order of the day in Australia: we hear politicians waxing ferocious about an “emergency” whose context they don’t get or refuse to acknowledge.

    And in that context, people can be dehumanized and “reified”. Don’t ask me how those doing it can square such an attitude and approach with their claimed “deepest beliefs”. I thought central to being a Christian was what’s celebrated at Christmas through which believers mark that every human is dignified as a carrier of God’s presence.

    As with so many people who propose or enact inhuman solutions to apparent problems and challenges, Tony Abbott is also widely discovered to be not the demon alleged but a very approachable, sensitive and humane individual. Ask some Aborigines in northern Australia.

    Those who know him attest to his gracious and compassionate warmth as a person. His use of site visits and shopping center walk throughs have always been a winner for him because he is an engaging person who is the antithesis of the cartoon ideologue his enemies paint him to be.

    Characterizations of him as a misogynist and a blue tie wearing cardboard cut out are how Labor sought to dehumanize hi

    But characterizing asylum seekers as “illegals” and targeted as people whose story is never to be heard – dehumanizing them – is what he’s done. And why has this happened with someone whose Christian faith is sincere and whose human qualities are well attested to?

    The simple answer given by many is it’s all about politics. And if that’s so, what well deserved reputations politicians have.

    But perhaps it’s also because, for the last 500 years, Christians have so trivialized their understanding of sin – reducing it to the commission of acts that violate a rulebook someone has made – that the fundamental sin of human beings is missed. That sin is the depersonalization of human beings, allowing them to be reduced to figures on a page.

    Marx reviled the process; Jesus decried it; and we all do it. Any time we advance an argument against an actual or perceived enemy and neglect to acknowledge the humanity of our opponent, we are into reification. Any time we propose a process that neglects engagement with the people affected, we are into reification.

    Marx was in the great tradition of Jewish Prophets who decried injustice as not only destructive of human community but an ultimate offence against humanity. He didn’t believe in God. But he got the consequences that his Jewish heritage specified for the way we live for or off each other.

    And now that the black comedy of the election campaign is over, and no matter how many worthy warriors Tony Abbott can muster from the ranks of the retired military to manage “stopping the boats”, there’s a real problem: it won’t work.

    One way or another, Australia is going to have to return to finding a regional solution to the challenge, engage with the real people in the mix of both our regional neighbors and the asylum seekers wanting to come our way or face even greater failures in foreign affairs and the health and quality of Australia’s public culture.

  • Julie Bishop fails Economics I. Guest blogger Ian McAuley

    ​In justifying the Coalition’s cuts in foreign aid, Julie Bishop said that borrowing from overseas only to hand it back overseas was unsustainable in light of our mounting debt.

    That statement has glib appeal, but it’s a serious misrepresentation.

    For a start the Government does not borrow from overseas. Rather, almost all the Commonwealth’s revenue is sourced from taxation and other charges. The balance, used to finance counter-cyclical deficit spending or to make funds available for capital projects, is funded by Commonwealth bonds issued on the domestic market.

    Second, much of what Australia spends on foreign aid is spent on domestically-produced goods and services, particularly consultancy services.  That part stays here.

    The Coalition may have a point in that while the Budget is in deficit, any cut which reduces the deficit reduces Commonwealth borrowing. It could also validly point out that while that borrowing is on the domestic market, many Government bonds will be taken up by foreigners, in recognition of Australia’s low sovereign risk, and some of those bonds taken up by financial institutions will ultimately be financed by borrowing from overseas. That’s the benefit of having a well-earned AAA credit rating, a point which the Coalition is reluctant to acknowledge because it does not align with their story about the situation they inherited from a fiscally irresponsible Labor Government.

    That is really a stretch. It can no more be called “borrowing from overseas” than my use of a credit card to buy a meal or an airline ticket. Let’s concede this to the Coalition, however, so we can take the money trail all the way through.

    Australian financial institutions are net borrowers from overseas. That’s been so for a long time, because we almost always run a deficit on our current account. That is the difference between our exports and imports, and as a mathematical reality that deficit has to be financed. (It’s the private deficit we don’t hear much about, but it’s many times bigger than our small government deficit.)

    When our financial institutions borrow from overseas they do so at very favourable interest rates – much more favourable than those at which governments and private investors in poor countries can borrow. Most aid-recipient countries are lucky if they get a BB credit rating. Their own borrowing has to be for projects with short-term returns, a constraint which does not hinder some commercial projects and government projects with a strong early revenue streams, but which is highly unfavourable for longer-term investments in areas such as health and education, where the benefits are slow to be realized and are diffused through the economy.

    And, of course, there is a financial market at work to ration our borrowing. When we borrow $100 000 to finance foreign aid, ultimately that is $100 000 that isn’t available to finance domestic purchases. It may mean a few Australians decide to downgrade from a BMW to a Volkswagen, or to make their next overseas trip in four star rather than five star accommodation.

     

    It all comes down to simple economics.  Whichever way we fund foreign aid, we’re putting aside a little of our consumption in order to finance investment for those who are far less fortunate.  Does Julie Bishop really not understand this?

     

  • What does Labor stand for? Principles to drive policies and programs. John Menadue

    Late last year I was approached by a friend who is very politically active about what I thought the ALP could do to renovate its policy platform.

    I discussed this request with an old friend, Ian McAuley.  Together we prepared a paper ‘Principles to drive policies and programs – or – What does Labor stand for?’ It is dated 18 December 2012. Quite deliberately, this paper was not widely distributed. It can now be found on my website .  It is on the home page and also in the folder ‘democratic renewal’. It is also reproduced at the end of this blog.

    The paper can also be found on Ian McAuley’s web site ianmcauley.com/academic/othpubs/laborprinciples.pdf.

    Ian and I believe that this paper is still relevant to the reform process that the ALP must undergo in light of the defeat on 7 September 2013.

    One concern expressed to me by many ALP voters was that the ALP campaign at the last election lacked an over-riding narrative or framework.

    In the political process, I think there is general agreement that political compromises have to be made but they should only be made against a framework of generally agreed values. We like to know what our party and our leaders stand for, even if a few corners have to be cut.

    We open our paper by drawing attention to the decline of the ALP primary vote from 45% to 50% fifty years ago to 35% to 40% today. In fact in the September 7 election, the ALP primary vote fell disastrously to 34%. In Queensland it was 30% and in WA 29%.  Tony Abbott on election night gloatingly described this primary vote for the ALP as the lowest for 100 years.

    The current debate on the carbon tax illustrates how an approach based on principles can overcome a political problem. It is important that Labor is firm on principles but not positions. Unfortunately, politicians keep getting sucked into positions. Tony Abbott’s position is to ‘scrap the tax’. Labor’s is either ‘keep the tax’ or ‘move now to a European emissions trading system’. It would be better for Labor to stand for a more general principle such as ‘a strong market-based mechanism to reduce emissions’. It gives Labor more room to move. It reveals a flexibility in contrast to Abbott’s ‘position’.

    In addition to the policy renewal, there must of course be major renovation of the ALP organisation and structure. Major issues in this area which need reform are.

    • Building a national party from the long established confederation of six state-based parties.
    • Widespread participation by ALP members from federal electorates in policy formation, selection of the parliamentary leader and selection of federal candidates.
    • A reduced but fraternal link between trade unions and the ALP.

    I hope you find the paper (below) ‘What does Labor stand for’ challenging.

     

    Principles to Drive Policies and Programs, or

    What does Labor stand for?

    1. Labor’s constituency

    The Labor primary vote has declined from about 45-50% fifty years ago to 35-40% today. The Coalition vote is virtually unchanged. Labor has lost its clear identity with the ‘working class’ and what it stands for. Its natural constituency and membership has declined. To contain the loss, Labor has increasingly committed itself to focus groups, marginal seat strategies and ‘whatever it takes’. Values, principles and ideas have given way to marketing of products .Money has replaced membership as the driving force of campaigns. The trade unions remain the most important institutional Labor supporter but trade union influence is out of proportion to its role in the community and the ‘Labor constituency’.

    1. Principles as the basis for policy
      If Labor is to differentiate itself from conservative parties, it needs to express that difference in a clear set of principles which accord with the best of Australians’ values. Otherwise the political contest is reduced to satisfying short-term materialist ‘aspirations’, appeasing vested interests and managing the media cycle. In such a contest, Labor is engaged in a futile struggle, for the Coalition is adept at conveying the misleading impression that it is the ‘natural party of government’, particularly because of its supposed competence in economic management.

      From community values a set of principles of public policy can be developed – principles which define Labor in contrast to other parties. Those principles can underpin a coherent set of policies and programs which implement those policies.
      Values > principles > policies > programs.

      Moving to the ‘right’ on issues such as refugee policy and health care simply legitimises the conservative position – a position from where exploitation of people’s fear is likely to drive out sensible and reasonable political debate. Selectively compromising – a little socialism here, a little free market there – as was the strategy of Britain’s New Labour – only confuses Labor supporters and the electorate because it presents inconsistent values.

      Social democrat parties, including Labor, were founded on an optimistic view of human nature and on recognition of the public sphere where people realise their full capabilities. These ideas can be expressed in consistent and coherent principles such as stewardship, the common wealth, including enhancement of social, environmental and institutional capital and protection of natural resources.

      In his emphasis on the ‘social question’, John Curtin gave effect to these principles, acknowledging that only a strong society, including a strong and respected government, can support a strong economy. And of course there is no point in an economy that does not serve social ends.

    2. Curtin’s vision – ‘the social question’
      Curtin’s social democratic vision contrasts sharply with the Liberal Party platform ‘that only businesses and individuals are the creators of wealth and employment’, a view that reduces government to a burden rather than a contributor to the common wealth. Curtin’s vision contrasts with the notion that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’, which legitimises destructive social divisions, which encourages people to separate themselves from society in physical or metaphorical gated communities (private schools, private health insurance), which allows the connection between contribution and reward to be severed, which encourages rent-seeking, speculation and protection of privilege rather than productive investment and which compensates the ‘losers’ with social security handouts.
    3. Labor – the Party of strong leadership and values
      Just as Labor governments provided leadership to face greater challenges in the 1980s, so too today Australia faces even greater challenges – climate change, population ageing, dilapidated infrastructure, commodity based exports, deficits in human capital and a weak base for public revenue. The politics of ‘what’s in it for me’ discourages us from facing these challenges, for there will have to be trade-offs: some will have to pay more than others and some will have to forego benefits now for the sake of longer term benefits. Such transitions can be painful, but are more likely to gain support when people understand the principles underpinning public policy.

      When the Party is unified around a set of principles it can still have a robust debate about how to give effect to those principles. But it would be in  control of its message because its parliamentary representatives can engage with the electorate in a consistent and sincere voice, with less reliance on ‘talking points’ and spin and with less concern with the immediate reaction of focus groups. Labor supporters would be much more prepared to accept political compromise if they know that there is strong leadership and there is broad agreement on key values and principles. Labor leadership has to be patient and consistent around these values and principles – and never go backwards.  Authenticity and sincerity are then easily recognised.

    4. Democratic Renewal
      At the same time as addressing overarching ‘Labor’ principles that could guide Labor policies and programs, there are two immediate issues which must be given high priority.

      The first is democratic renewal in our public institutions, including the ALP. We are increasingly alienated from our institutions. This suits the conservatives who implicitly seek to protect private corporate interests from public intervention. Loss of faith in parliament inevitably leads on to denigration and a loss of faith in government. Those that Labor has traditionally represented and the wider community are the losers. The Coalition has deliberately set out to destroy faith in our public institutions, public policy and politics. The government is ‘corrupt’. It is ‘illegitimate’. Mayhem is promoted in the parliament. The signs of democratic decay and lack of respect for politicians are everywhere. For example:

      1. Through domination of parliament, executive governments monopolise information flows and policy advice. Policy advice is increasingly given by ministerial advisers while the public service is co-opted  into providing political support to government.
      2. Governments are overly-influenced by powerful lobby groups and donors, e.g. miners, developers, licensed clubs and hotels
      3. The health ‘debate’ is not with the public, but between insiders – the Minister and the AMA/pharmacists/private health insurance companies.
      4. Because Labor does not have a consistent principle-based set of policies – some would say a ‘narrative’ – it has little capacity for defence or explanation when its policies are misrepresented or misinterpreted in the media.
      5. Labor is no longer representative of those that vote for it or have empathy with it.

    The concentrated media does not properly expose abuse of power and directly skews the public debate towards personalities, the whims of proprietors, conflict and celebrities, rather than serious policies. We had an enquiry about the failure of our intelligence agencies over Iraq, but the greater failure was in the media.

    Democratic renewal is urgent – reform of the parliament, political parties, party factions, lobbyists, donors and the media.

    1. The economic role of government
      The second immediate issue is the economic role of government. Those who would benefit from weak and distrusted government have undermined the legitimacy of the public sector.
      Australians have been encouraged to forget that their prosperity is based on both public and private goods. To many people government has become ‘invisible’, except as a vehicle for distributive welfare. Australians have lost sight of the contribution of the mixed economy, not only in providing public goods, but also in ensuring that the forces of greed and short-sightedness don’t lead to economic and social collapse. It is noteworthy that despite the continued denigration of government and the public sector, the three most trusted institutions in Australia are public institutions – the High Court, the ABC and the Reserve Bank. In this survey by Essential Research (22.10.2012) there was not a private group in the top eight most trusted groups and institutions in Australia. The three least trusted groups were business, trade unions and political parties.

      Even conservatives acknowledge that only the public sector can provide some services such as national defence and management of the money supply. In addition, however there are economic functions where private funding or provision is possible but only at high economic cost, with distorted incentives and with serious consequences for equity. These include education, health insurance, energy and water utilities and communication and transport infrastructure. In these and other areas there are market failures for which prudent economic principles require a strong government role in funding or provision. Unless Labor articulates and defends the proper economic role of government – a pre-requisite to improving Australia’s weak taxation base – economic growth will be restrained by inadequate public spending and investment.

      Of these investments, the most important is human capital to ensure that people can develop their capabilities so that they can contribute to their full potential through employment, business or unpaid work. In the competitive global economy of this century, human capital is a nation’s only secure asset. Scandinavian countries demonstrate this. A population with skills and with incentives which match rewards to contribution will draw less on distributive welfare, preserving public revenue for needed social insurance and public goods. The best antidote to disadvantage and low self esteem is not welfare but well paid and meaningful employment.

      Labor will find it hard to make these investments if it allows itself to be depicted as the party of big welfare spending. In fact conservative governments, because of under-investment in human capital and physical infrastructure, and neglect of economic adjustment, have spent strongly on distributive welfare to compensate for inequalities rising from a weakened economic structure. Over the last 50 years, social security assistance has risen from 5% of Australians’ household disposable income to 12%. Examples of this expanded social security assistance are baby-bonuses, family allowances and superannuation concessions for the wealthy. The government is moving to wind back some middle class welfare – subsidies to private health insurance and the second baby bonus – but the justification is more about immediate budgetary management rather than an expression of principles. Rather, Labor should be the party which ensures that Australia becomes less reliant on distributive welfare. Instead of referring to ‘the education revolution’ in isolation, it should present its human capital policies in the context of a unified set of principles in infrastructure, education, health, environmental and protection, underpinned by principles of investing in capabilities, nurturing individual freedom and autonomy and supporting social inclusion.

      There is an opportunity to differentiate Labor from what has emerged as continuity between Howard and Abbott in that both are strong on distributive welfare while ready to sacrifice other aspects of government which would strengthen the economy’s capacity to provide well-paid and productive employment with less need for social transfers.

    A reframing of policy in terms of strengthening the economy in order to reduce the need for distributive welfare would not only neutralise the ‘right’s’ attack on Labor as the party of the welfare state but would also give a unifying theme to many policies. It would link policies in industry adjustment, infrastructure, education, health and social inclusion. It would overcome the false framing of a trade-off between equity and efficiency. It would give Labor parliamentarians an opportunity to engage more openly with the public without the need for spin and carefully prepared texts.

    1. From values to principles
      The purpose and role of a Labor Government could be to give expression to the values set out below – to achieve as far as possible the ‘common good’.

      Values such as freedom, citizenship, ethical responsibility, fairness and stewardship would be generally accepted by most people. As the values are translated into practices Labor makes a choice that can be further defined as principles that then lead to policies, e.g. the value of fairness can be expressed in the principle of a stronger link between contribution and reward- a link which has become severed by hugely disproportionate executive pay, high returns to rent seekers and financial speculators and the long head-start of inherited wealth.

     

    The following is indicative of a set of values and their expressions in principles which could underpin a Labor platform/policy statement.

    Fairness/equity

    1. A ‘fair go’ is primarily about economic opportunity.
    2. People should be provided with a good education and those who put it to socially useful ends should be rewarded. Governor Lachlan Macquarie was no socialist but his ‘tickets of leave’ gave the outcasts and underprivileged of this country another chance. We built a nation from the underclass. We must give a chance for newcomers and all people to have another opportunity.
    3. Fairness promotes social mobility and limits division and resentment.
    4. Fairness should not be restricted to education.
    5. The path to prosperity with fairness is through productivity and well-paid employment rather than government handouts. The Scandinavians have demonstrated that education and incentives for participation do produce fairness and economic prosperity.
    6. Fairness implies that we are tough towards ‘bludgers’, whether they be tax-dodgers, the vulgarity and indulgence of  those with inherited wealth, protection from competition, government hand-outs and favouritism or cheating on social services.
    7. Fairness implies full employment as a macro-economic goal to ensure human capabilities are not wasted.

    Areas where we fall short in fairness include neglect of early childhood education, treatment of the needs of indigenous people and refugees, diversion of education funding to wealthy schools, neglect of public infrastructure and inadequate ODA.

    Stewardship

    1. We have inherited a stock of assets or capital; environmental (forests/water), public and private physical capital (roads/ports), human capital (education), family capital (family and friendship bonds), social capital (trust), cultural capital and institutional capital (government and non-government institutions). That stock of assets must be retained and where possible enhanced.
    2. We must use our resources as efficiently and productively as possible.

    Areas where we fall short in stewardship include placing a heavy strain on the planet which prejudices our future. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change we are still influenced by the sceptics who ignore the facts and cling instead to ideology.  Many super funds and fund managers ignore climate change risk. We waste water and degrade the land. We are not skilling ourselves for Asia.
    Freedom

    1. We all have rights to the extent that they do not lessen the rights of others.
    2. Except where the rights of the vulnerable are at stake, the government should not intrude into the private realm.
    3. The potential abuse of power should be minimized by the separation of powers and the separation of church and state.

    Areas where we fall short in freedom include the growing power of cabinet and executive which is not adequately balanced by parliament and the judiciary. We have an ‘elected monarchy’. We have no Human Rights Act. We have reduced freedom as a result of counter-terrorism legislation. The media increasingly fails to protect our freedoms and often facilitates abuse of power by lobbyists e.g. miners.

    Citizenship

    1. We are more than individuals linked by market transactions.
    2. Our life in the public sphere is no less necessary than our private lives. As citizens we enjoy and contribute to the public good. It is where we show and learn respect for others, particularly people who are different. It is where we abide by shared rules of civic conduct. It is where we build social capital – networks of trust. We need to behave in ways that make each of us trusted members of the community. ‘Do no harm’ is not sufficient.
    3. Citizenship brings responsibilities – political participation, vigilance against abuse of power and paying taxes.

    Areas where we fall short in citizenship include our withdrawal into the private realm –There are growing gated communities, private entertainment, private rather than public transport, disregard of neighbours, opting out of community through ‘vouchers’, government subsidies, private health insurance and private schools that discourage the coalescence of socially mixed communities around shared public schools.. The discussion about health is reduced to managing the system rather than the principles which should drive a health service. There is a lack of respect in the language of denigration – ‘bogans’ and ‘losers’.

    Ethical responsibility

    1. Those in prominent office should promote those qualities which draw on the best of our traditions and the noblest of our instincts.
    2. The duty of those with public influence is to encourage hope and redemption rather than despair and condemnation, confidence rather than fear. It is to promote the common good – to encourage us to use our talents. It is to respect truth and strengthen learning to withstand the powers of populism and vested or sectional interests. This would set a tone of public discourse which nurtures public institutions

    Areas where we fall short in ethical responsibility include leaders who appeal to our worst instincts, e.g. dog whistling on refugees, ‘media-drenched commercialism’, executive salaries, undue influence of vested interests and corporate lobbyists. Those in public office should help the community to deal with difficult problems which may require painful adaptive change, such as climate change, rather than provide the false comfort of ignoring or downplaying them.

     

    John Menadue (former Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet)

    Ian McAuley (Adjunct Lecturer, University of Canberra)

    December 18, 2012

  • Let’s hope Albo runs and wins. John Menadue

    The ALP needs a ballot for its parliamentary leadership even if it takes a month or so to do so. It will be time well spent. It needs to find the right leader and continue the process of democratisation that the ALP badly needs.

    Those who want to rush to a quick decision on the leadership are the faction heavies and union bosses that want to continue to control the ALP and for it to continue on its disastrous course. They want control rather than power on behalf of ordinary working people.

    Kevin Rudd set in motion a new arrangement whereby the parliamentary leader must be selected jointly by the ALP membership across the country and by the parliamentary caucus, with each given equal weighting. That change and many others are necessary to reform the organisation and structure of the ALP which is controlled by an elite which is unrepresentative of ALP members and supporters.

    After the 2010 election, the ALP commissioned Carr, Bracks and Fawkner to report on ALP reform. That reform was almost entirely ignored. It is important that the Rudd reforms don’t suffer a similar fate.

    If there is only one nominee for the leadership of the parliamentary party there will be no ballot for the leadership and no participation by the 50,000 plus ALP membership across the country. So Anthony Albanese please put up your hand. Labor supporters need your type of leadership as well as the process of rank and file participation that your nomination as leader would trigger.

    After the disaster last Saturday, the ALP needs to take a clear democratic path, starting with the election of the parliamentary leader. If there is no ballot for the leadership the back-room fixes and deals will continue. We have already seen this with the appointment of Sam Dastyari to the Senate. He was the General Secretary of the NSW Branch who said that he was committed to reform of that branch! But it didn’t last long.

    Now Paul Howes, the General Secretary of the AWU who did so much with Bill Shorten to tear down Kevin Rudd in 2010 and Julia Gillard in 2013 is now being touted as a likely replacement for Bob Carr in the Senate. Some people don’t ever seem to learn.

    The failed Canberra bureau of the ABC which became a participant in the political processes in the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd era is now pushing for the status quo and highlighting that the ALP could be without a parliamentary leader for a month or more. Senator Stephen Conroy, a right wing faction leader in Victoria, and who failed so dismally to put even modest restraints on the Murdoch media is now urging a quick outcome in choosing a leader which will exclude the rank and file of the ALP.

    Let’s hope that the ALP learnt something from the results last Saturday and stays on the path of reform which Kevin Rudd set out for the leadership of the parliamentary ALP. But that must be only the first step. A lot else remains to be done.

  • US complicity in chemical weapons. Guest blogger; Richard Broinowski

    In recent days, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have made much of their moral repugnance at alleged chemical warfare attacks by the Syrian regime against rebel groups. Their retaliatory  missile strikes, if made, would demonstrate that the use of chemical weapons by any force against any foe, is completely unacceptable to the world’s community. It was a moral line that, if crossed, would bring condign punishment to the perpetrators.

    These US threats lose their moral authority in three respects.

    The first is that it is not at all clear (despite claims to the contrary) that the weapons were used by the Syrian armed forces. Persuasive evidence, with photographic back-up, suggests the strikes were made by one rebel group against another.

    Second, it is entirely unclear whether a limited US missile strike would punish or deter any of those responsible. But it would surely result in more civilian loss of life, exacerbate the already confusing military situation and lead to a widening of the conflict through threatened retaliatory attacks by Syria against Israel and other neighbouring states.

    Third, it starkly exposes United States’ double standards. The United States used chemical weapons in the form of mutagenic and carcinogenic defoliants in at least one war – Vietnam. It also supplied chemical weapons for use by others, notably Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. To retrace the rather murky history of US involvement in that war, one has to go back to the Pentagon’s master plan of 1984-88, which ranked defence of the Middle East as second only to the defence of North America and Western Europe. In pursuit of this priority, President Reagan inserted the United States into the Iran–Iraq War, first on the side of Iran, then on the side of Iraq. In November 1982, a senior Department of State official, Jonathan Howe, informed Secretary of State Schultz that Iraq was resorting to almost daily use of chemical weapons against Iran. In December 1983, US special envoy Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad to inform Saddam Hussein that the United States was doing all it could to cut off arms sales to Iran. In March 1984, Rumsfeld again visited Baghdad to tell Saddam that the United States priority was to defeat Iran, not to punish Iraq for using chemical weapons. Meanwhile, Washington was sending Baghdad military intelligence and advice, and US, German and British companies were supplying Iraq with a wide range of munitions, including cluster bombs. With the full knowledge of officials in Washington, US companies were also sending to Iraq several strains of anthrax for Iraqi biological weapons and insecticides for germ warfare.

    In 1984, Iran asked the UN Security Council to investigate the trade. Washington remained silent on the issue for several months, before finally, and reluctantly, criticising Iraq for using chemical weapons. Nevertheless, United States companies, notably Dow Chemicals, continued to supply Iraq with components for chemical weapons right through until the end of the war in 1988. One of Dow’s last shipments was a shipment of insecticides worth $1.5 million in December 1988.

    Source: Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s 2012 book The Untold Story of the United States, Ebury Press, 2012.

    Richard Broinowski

  • The aftermath of Saturday’s election. Guest Blogger: David Combe

    David Combe was ALP National Secretary from 1973 until 1981

    Just over a month ago, I received an email from an old friend – an ALP Life Member who belongs to the ‘my party right or wrong’ school of loyalists – asking my thoughts on the likely outcome of the election which Prime Minister Rudd had just called. In my reply to her, I said in part:

     “I have not been optimistic for some time…..  Unless the way things happen has changed dramatically, I still believe that once the electorate ‘takes out the baseball bats’, there is nothing which is going to change the outcome. And they took them out a long while ago.

    “I may of course be terribly wrong, but I have been expecting the polls to decline quite dramatically once the election was called. I shall never forget 1975, and the ephemeral lift we got during the constitutional crisis which disappeared as soon as there was a chance to vote the government out. We, of course, knew that the lift was only ephemeral, but the faithful did not and somehow expected a miracle. The electoral mood for the duration of Julia’s Government has been eerily reminiscent for me of 1974/75 in many ways. I am looking forward to reading Kerry-Anne Walsh’s book on the subject, but I must say that I found the events of June 26th. (and its aftermath) quite depressing. I would never buy shares in a company where a former CEO sacked by the Board for incompetence spent three years undermining both his successor and that Board until bringing the company to the edge of bankruptcy, only to be reappointed CEO as a last ditch measure to save the company! Why should Australia? And I expect that when the Libs start spending their money in earnest, that message will come across……the cause of the original problem cannot be sold as the solution. “

    I have now read “The Stalking of Julia Gillard’, and recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand how derelict many of Ms Walsh’s  journalistic colleagues became in not disclosing what they knew and telling us what  they saw. Instead, they themselves became ‘spear carriers’ for the ambitions of one of the great exponents of “rat-fucking” and “plausible deniability” – practices made famous by disgraced former US President, Richard Milhous Nixon.

    Since Saturday night, I have marvelled to read and hear so much analysis of the results which an untrusting simpleton such as myself suspects comes from a continuing symbiotic relationship between these lazy or incompetent Press Gallery journalists and the court of Australia’s very own Kardashian Klan – Kev, Kherese, Kjessica, Knickerless and so on – communicating to an insatiable public their every deed, thought, and selfie….. We have been reassured that fortunately, and like Bazza McKenzie, Kev and the Kardashians saved the world on Saturday. The result for Labor was much better than anyone expected; NSW’s Sussex Street faction from whom Kev gained so much support both times  he became Leader is proud of its campaign to save seats; in fact it seems one can take comfort that like Billie Snedden  in 1974, Labor didn’t actually lose at all….they just didn’t win!  Quite heroic, really…

    But consider this:

    • The ALP’s primary vote on Saturday was by a long way the lowest it has received since the Second World War (which is as far back as I have had time to check), and a massive 9% below that achieved in 2007.
    • Antony Green, the ABC’s latter-day Malcolm Mackerras tells us that the party’s primary vote in NSW was the lowest in a Federal election for 100 years.
    • He tells us ditto Victoria.
    • Ditto Queensland, except there it didn’t even reach 30%. However, some may take heart from the fact that it was slightly ahead of the 26% achieved in the 2012 State election debacle.
    • And in South Australia, Nick Xenophon tells us that in the Senate poll, on primaries; his group outpolled the ALP which will be reduced to one seat.

    The truth is that as Bob Hawke said on Saturday night, this was a disastrous result for the ALP, and no amount of spin about saving individual seats, or two-part preferred vote (2PP) can change that fact. Even in the dark days of the post-Dismissal election of 1975, after which it held only 29% of the seats in the House of Representatives, the ALP under Gough Whitlam received 42.8% of first preferences – or 9% more than at this election. It was in 1990 that the party opportunistically met the rising threat of a minor party (the Australian Democrats) by focussing on chasing preferences and the 2PP vote rather than primary votes, and its first preference vote performance has eroded ever since. As Paul Keating once observed, you cannot win government without a first preference vote percentage which starts with a 4! Saturday’s result leaves the party a long way short of that.

    But Labor’s task is not without hope….  When Bill Hayden took the leadership following the 1977 defeat,  and at a time when the ALP was wallowing in despair – but at least recognised the dimensions of its plight – he was able to bring it to the brink of victory again in just three years. However, as history will record, Hayden was an exceptional Leader of the ALP, and arguably its unluckiest in not reaping the fruits of his endeavours by becoming Prime Minister.

    In a future blog, I shall share my thoughts on what I believe the ALP must now do. In the meantime, I hope that it can find within its ranks a Bill Hayden to unite its Parliamentary Party and begin the process of rediscovering the values which once enabled it to set the national agenda – even from opposition.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Dodging a bullet. Guest blogger: John Young

    It was going to be as bad as 1996 (when Labor lost 31 seats), a sombre Stephen Smith gravely warned us at the beginning of the ABC election night coverage.

    Smith ignored that a few months earlier Labor was facing its worst election defeat, at least as bad as the 2011 NSW State election.

    How had this occurred when the Government was competent and economy was going well? The 2010 hung Parliament does not of itself provide the answer.   The answer lies in the elusive concept of trust.

    The 2010 coup against Rudd destroyed the public benefit Gillard should have enjoyed as the first female Prime Minister. In the 2010 negotiations to form Government, the breaking by Gillard of an explicit campaign promise not to introduce a carbon tax caused the electorate to feel it had been betrayed by Labor.  Gillard never regained that trust.

    Gillard and Swan lacked communications skills to sell Labor’s positive economic record. They exacerbated the trust deficit by absurd promises such as committing to an early return to surplus. This was as stupid as it was dishonest and the mining tax was redesigned in a way that raised miniscule revenue.

    Because Gillard lacked credibility, Abbott was able to perpetuate the lie that Labor was saddling future generations with massive debt.

    The position of minority Government was always less than ideal but the Bracks, Beattie and Rann governments had successfully managed the transition to majority government.

    Gillard deserves credit for her legislative achievements. That said, Abbott persuaded the public the Parliament was in chaos – the Thomson and Slipper imbroglios leant credence to these claims.

    The risk inherent in Rudd’s return to the leadership in June was that it exacerbated the perception the government was hopelessly divided and chaotic.   The fiasco in March when Rudd had refused to run and the impression that he was not a team player and everything was “always about Kevin” fuelled further public frustration and anger with Labor.

    The government had become a soap opera. The impression of instability and chaos was too embedded in the electorate’s mind for a restored Rudd to do more than save some furniture.

    Upon resuming the Prime Ministership, Rudd governed with a deft touch and the capacity to outflank his opponents.

    He neutralised issues such as refugee boat arrivals and Labor’s refusal to reform under Gillard.   The harshness of the asylum seeker policy likely cost Labor some primary support and possibly the seat of Melbourne.  However, “stopping the boats” was virtually unheard during the campaign. Rudd also neutralised the broken promise about the carbon tax.

    If Rudd the Prime Minister matched best expectations, Rudd the campaigner disappointed.

    In contrast to 2007, Rudd’s campaign was patchy. The Labor slogan “A New Way” was absurd for a Government in power for six years amid such acrimony.

    From day one of the campaign, Rudd faced vitriolic attack from the Murdoch media. The tabloids were simply offensive propaganda sheets openly campaigning against the Labor government and slanting coverage to that end.

    This made Rudd’s task of selling Labor’s complicated message that “we have done a great job even though we have been at war” all the more difficult. The most repeated and challenging question he was asked was why should voters support you when your own party sacked you?

    Rudd, who had showcased his campaigning cred for many grateful MPs, did not hit the ground running.

    He was damaged by media criticism that he cheated by taking notes in the first debate with Abbott.  It was a mistake that should not have happened in a professionally run campaign.

    Another mistake was Rudd’s poor judgement posting on social media a photo (selfie) of a shaving cut. This action struck the wrong note and fed into media accusations of narcissism.

    The Northern Territory taxation” thought bubble” damaged Rudd and there was not one vote in it. The criticism that he was making policy on the run for media grabs had validity.

    Critically in the second last week of the campaign Rudd was admonished by officials for over-reaching in his description of costings. The media treated this as a far more serious criticism than it was but with Labor trailing in the polls and struggling for traction, it could not afford setbacks.

    There are legitimate criticisms of Rudd’s campaign performance but he still had the capacity to connect and to inspire. He was unrelenting in his efforts to differentiate Labor from the ideological attacks which the LNP would make on services while they enacted their unaffordable PPL scheme and foolish policies including buying Indonesian fishing boats.

    On occasions, Rudd showed his magic.   Perhaps his finest performance was on QandA where he displayed vision and passionately spoke to the issue of marriage equality.

    Abbott’s campaign was disciplined but far from brilliant.  He made a number of foolish comments which could have derailed his campaign if the media wasn’t pre-disposed to his perceived inevitable victory. Abbott prevailed because of the damage which Labor had inflicted on itself and the leg-up of the Murdoch press.

    Despite the difficulties in selling his message, Rudd was indefatigable defending Labor economic credentials and attacking the fitness of Abbott and the LNP to govern.  The result of the election is proof that he was effective doing this and the dire predictions of a Labor wipe out were wrong.

    In June before the return of Rudd to the leadership, Labor was looking at about an 8% swing and a devastating loss of 40 or even more seats.   It is no exaggeration to say that such electoral decimation would have imperilled Labor’s very survival

    Labor will lose around 15 seats on a swing of about 3%. Importantly every Labor Minister has held their seat. This result confirms Labor made entirely the right decision to return to Rudd. On this occasion, saving some furniture was enough. It can now face the future confident of its history and determined not to repeat the faults of its recent past.

     

     

  • Deconstructing the election result. Guest Blogger: Walter Hamilton

    1. Labor lost the election before the Coalition won it.

    2. There was a narrowing in the state-by-state differences in the two-party preferred voting ratios of Labor and the Coalition, which partly accounts for the bigger swings against the ALP in Victoria, SA and Tasmania. That is, where Labor did well in 2010 to hold ground it was more vulnerable this time around.

    3. The ALP’s primary vote has fallen to the low 30s, its worst result in a century. In the past six years it has hopped from one side to the opposite on key issues such as climate change and border protection. It has failed to respond effectively to the further hollowing out of manufacturing jobs on which its traditional union base relies. It has talked about itself in the third person, with a regal presumption to rule, and talked down to the electorate. It has talked too much altogether. It has treated policies like play things – to be spruiked one day and cast off the next.

    4. Victoria is the only state that will return a (small) plurality of Labor MHRs.

    5. In SA and Tasmania, that have Labor state governments, the swings against Labor were greater than the national swing, whereas in Victoria and NSW, with incumbent Coalition state governments, the swing to the federal Coalition exceeded the national swing. This suggests that Labor’s attempt to link an Abbott government to a backlash against state conservative governments did not succeed.

    6. The Palmer United Party, with around 10% of the vote in Queensland, exceeded expectations, although it is worth remembering that when One Nation first came on the scene its Queensland result was much better than had showed up in pre-election polls. The PUP result must be set against the fact that there was little or no scope for a rise in the Coalition’s primary vote in Queensland. The 3.4% fall in the ALP vote, down to 30.2%, means Labor will return just 7 seats to the LNP’s 22 in that state. (Labor’s vote in the 2012 state election was as low as 26.7%, but the last time Queenslanders were voting on Kevin Rudd for prime minister, in 2007, the ALP received more than 50% of votes in his state. How the mighty have fallen.)

    7. Tasmania recorded a huge swing to the Coalition. This is being attributed to economic conditions in the state and the failure of the Labor-Greens state alliance. The Greens vote is down more than 3% nationally, but in Tasmania it has halved (down by 8.7%).

    8. In standing down as Labor leader on Saturday night Kevin Rudd advanced the narrative that he had sacrificed himself to stem a Labor rout and that he had achieved his aim of preserving Labor. Nobody will know whether Labor would have done worse under Julia Gillard, just as nobody will know whether, without the events of 2010, Rudd might have been a three-term prime minister. But any objective observer would not consider Labor well positioned to bounce back into government after a 4.1% swing against it in this election and the legacy of division left behind by Mr. Rudd.

    9. The electorate has been more discerning than some pundits gave it credit for. A poor Liberal candidate in Greenway (western Sydney) failed to unseat a Labor member on a very slim majority. In the seat of Banks, on the other hand, the sitting Labor member, Daryl Melham, who had listed among his ‘top priorities’ improving commuter parking (state or local government responsibilities), lost to the Liberal candidate – the first time since the seat’s creation in 1949 that it has gone away from the ALP.

    10. The total national vote for ‘Others’ (Katter’s Australia, Palmer United, Family First and various minor parties and independents) in the House of Representatives exceeded 12%. This suggests many disaffected voters were unwilling to side with an Abbott government. Labor’s American-style scare campaign against Abbott probably trimmed the Coalition’s vote below what it might have been in NSW in particular. For its part, the ALP was battling against a hostile Murdoch press. In assessing the impact of the Murdoch factor on the overall result, however, we should remember that Clive Palmer also claimed Murdoch’s ex-wife was a Chinese spy and that seems to have done his cause no harm. The public these days have much more to go on than newspaper headlines.

    11. The Senate from July next year will be less predictable than ever, with the arrival of Palmer’s people and whoever else emerges from the metre-long ballot paper fiasco. The size of the vote for the Liberal Democratic Party, for instance, suggests that some electors struggled to fill in the ballot along the lines they intended. Electoral reform in this area (such as a move to optional preferential voting) is overdue. Similarly, the Australian Electoral Commission might need to take a look at the rules governing acceptable conduct in and around polling booths following the noisy demonstrations against both Rudd and Abbott on Saturday. Let these be places for marking ballots, not barking and mallets.

    Walter Hamilton is a journalist of 40 years’ experience. This analysis is based on returns as of midnight Saturday.

     

  • Asylum seekers are blocking the M4 freeway and clogging up our hospitals! John Menadue

    On Monday night on 4 Corners, the Liberal candidate for Lindsay, Fiona Scott, said that asylum seekers’ cars were blocking the M4 highway. For readers outside Sydney, the M4 is a 40 km expressway connecting Concord and Penrith.

    I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that such ignorance could be expressed by a candidate who could very well be a member of parliament after next Saturday, if the opinion polls are correct.

    The M4 carries over 50,000 cars in the morning peak per day in both directions. I have met many asylum seekers but I cannot recall ever meeting one who has a car.

    Fiona Scott went on to say that asylum seekers were worsening hospital waiting times. It was another beat up. Asylum seekers can access Emergency Departments but very few have Medicare. However the Refugee Council says that the area surrounding the Nepean Hospital-Blacktown.the Hawkesbury, Penrith and the Blue Mountains-took in only 161 asylum seekers in the last year. The total population is 618, 000. My experience is that almost all asylum seekers have to rely on generous doctors and nurses who give their time freely as volunteers.

    Her outburst is the most manipulative and appalling I have seen for a long time. Traffic congestion and hospital waiting times are two sensitive issues in Western Sydney. Fiona Scott chooses ignorantly and deliberately to target and scapegoat asylum seekers for both problems.

    In other circumstances one would expect the leader of the Liberal Party to intervene to sack Fiona Scott, but that is unlikely because Tony Abbott has been the cheer leader in the demonization of asylum seekers for years.  Even in the press reports of Fiona Scott’s comments, Tony Abbott continued to talk, as he has done for years, about ‘illegal’ asylum seekers. They are not illegal. From the time that Robert Menzies ratified the Refugee Convention in 1954, asylum seekers are entitled to our legal protection. They may be ‘irregular’ entrants but they are not ‘illegal’. Tony Abbott’s dog-whistling is designed to convey the impression that somehow these ‘other’ people are not entitled to our protection and are akin to criminals. It is disgraceful the way he behaves. “Caring for the stranger” is not part of his lexicon.

    Fiona Scott is showing all the signs of being a soul mate of Scott Morrison who demonises asylum seekers for “bringing disease” and ‘wads of cash’.

    Lebanon with a population of just over 4 m people has taken in almost one million Syrian refugees. Sweden has just announced that the 8,000 Syrian asylum seekers in its country will all get permanent residence. Pakistan is host to 2 million refugees.

    What a selfish and sorry country we have become.

    History is full of the stories of unscrupulous people who scapegoat the foreigner and the outsider. The Liberal Party is making the demonization of outsiders an art form. And the problem starts at the top.

  • Chemical warfare and Syria. Guest blogger: Marcus Einfeld

    I never thought I would ever agree with Glenn Beck, the US shock jock from the extreme right of the political spectrum. I think he is right about the US not intervening in the Middle East again. Difficult as it is to say, President Putin is also right even if his reasons are not pure.

    The Americans [Administrations, not the very many brilliant and informed Americans who know better] never seem to understand the “enemy”, invariably miscalculate the consequences of their actions and never have an exit strategy. This time they do not even have an entry strategy. The US military top brass do not have the best record in assessing outcomes of their escapades. The jingoisms that punctuated the evidence given this week to the Senate Foreign Relations and Defence Committee by the Secretaries of State and Defence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must have horrified US thinkers and intelligentsia, not to mention the public at large.

    Imagine arguing, as the Obama Administration seems to be doing, that North Korea and Iran will be dissuaded from using chemical weapons if we punish the Syrian regime by bombing the hell out of its country. It is arrogant to believe that these countries, including the Syrians themselves, will just accept western scolding and decide to behave themselves as we dictate. The Iranians will just be emboldened to do the job better than the Syrians. For its part, the North Korean leadership will hardly know where Syria is and will care even less.

    Bombing, indeed any type of aerial or missile intervention will inevitably hit innocent people and not destroy the regime, or even its chemical weaponry. Even if the regime does fall, who on earth will replace it? Vide Egypt and Libya. Israel is in real danger from this proposed attack on Syria, possibly from the same chemical weapons. And if Israel is threatened, fighting as it would be for its very survival, its response can be expected to be deadly and devastating. With Russia and China actively resisting in the wings, the real possibility of a World War or at least a major conflagration will be at hand from the proposed intervention. It has already been proved over and over that despite its powerful armoury and presumably best intentions, the US is simply unable to contain the effects of what it is pleased to call “limited” intervention.

    The hypocrisy of western horror at the Syrian use of chemical weapons is nothing short of breath-taking. In principle, this wickedness must of course be resisted if possible. But horrendous as the Syrians have been, they at least are using them on their own people, as did the notorious Saddam Hussein who killed and maimed thousands of Iraqi Kurds and other citizens with chemical weapons while the international community simply looked on silently. Moreover, the Americans, with Australia and others at their side, used endless chemical weapons on thousands of innocent foreigners in Vietnam and Cambodia.

    The dilemma is awful and I am glad it is not me who has to resolve it, but it seems to me that if the choice has to be made, it is better to let the Syrians carry on as they have been doing unhindered by the international community for the last two years [with disastrous effects on their population] rather than we western democrats do it for them. I am afraid that the British Parliament and the governments of the other refusing countries like Canada are right.

  • No vision for the health system we need. Guest blogger Prof. John Dwyer

    In this election the Coalition has provided dollar promises for worthy projects but no new health policy initiatives while only two of note have been forthcoming from the government; a long-term investment in stem cell research and the threat to remove family tax benefits from parents who put their children and the community at risk by not immunising them. Both are laudable but of greater interest to Australians would be our politician’s plans for solving the many problems that compromise the delivery of sustainable quality health care in our country. In a   recent survey “Research Australia” found that funding for health and medical research is a higher priority for Australians than immigration policy and border control.

    The current government has not focused on health system reform but rather reform of hospital financial arrangements with the States reinforcing the inappropriate hospital centric priorities of our health system. In reality financially sustainable quality hospital services are dependent on policies that will reduce the demand for those services. This will require real system reform. The National Press Club debate with Tanya Plibersek and Peter Dutton found them in furious agreement on most issues such as hospital funding, the importance of medical research and the need to emphasise prevention.  One was left with the impression that whoever wins the election it will be “business as usual” for our health system. That’s disappointing.

    Healthcare in Australia is beset with structural inefficiencies, inappropriate models of care for our times and cost increases that are producing major inequities that deny many the care they need and are promised by Medicare. This is particularly obvious in rural communities. Their problems did not get a mention in the debate. The major barriers to real change remain the opposition from those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo and the lack of political leadership to take us on a necessarily long (ten years or more) reform journey that doesn’t sit comfortably within current short election cycles.  If we take that journey its important to have a clear vision of what an appropriately reformed healthcare system should look like?

    Australia 2023. The Commonwealth has become the single funder of our public health system. An independent statutory authority has been established to fund a number of “Regional Health Authorities” (RHAs) charged with delivering the model of care the Commonwealth (Australian people) have embraced. It is described thus; Our health care system should be characterised by its resourcing of strategies to prevent avoidable illness and provide in a timely manner to those who are ill, cost effective quality care based on an individuals need not personal financial well being.

    These RHAs are funded on a per capita and local needs basis. No longer are state boarders a barrier to efficient health care. RHAs contract with a series of providers in their region to supply patient focused integrated hospital, community and primary care services. Quality and safety data are collected and published.

    A new model of primary care has been established with a strong focus on disease prevention. Australians are encouraged to enrol in a primary health care practice. Enrolment is significant in that it signals the creation of a partnership and shared responsibilities between patient and the practice’s health professionals.

    In the new model, primary care practices work under the umbrella of Primary Health Care Organisations (PHO). These support local GP led services wherein teams of RHA funded health professionals from a variety of disciplines work collaboratively to deliver a range of services to enrolled patients. (“Integrated Primary Care”) No longer do people only visit a medical practice when they are ill, they attend to work with appropriate health professionals to help themselves and their families stay well.  There is no more efficient use of health care dollars that ensuring that children get a healthy start to life. An obese 4-year-old child is very likely to be an obese adult. Continuity of care provides us with the best chance to detect early signs of mental illness when serious problems can still be avoided. Such team-based practices are not doctor centric. Nurses and allied health professionals deliver much of the prevention program. Most doctors dissatisfied with the “turnstile medicine” approach fostered by “fee for service” payments have accepted the opportunity for payment by contract with an RHA. GPs who, after all, are highly trained specialists but were not previously paid as such, are financially much better rewarded in this system. This, plus the attractiveness of working in the team environment, is attracting more medical graduates to primary care, in 2013 very few medical graduates were interested in such careers.

    Unlike the “old fashioned” Medicare Locals of 2013, PHO’s act as central service providers for linked, local and clinically autonomous practices. They themselves offer clinical services including acute services that do not require the facilities of a hospital sparing local emergency departments from inappropriate attendances and provide associated practices with business skills, bulk purchasing, continuing education, the collection of outcome data (now a mandatory requirement), and IT services including help with the further development of now popular patient controlled electronic health records. Primary, community and hospital care provided to an individual is seamlessly integrated.

    Also important has been the major revision of clinical training in the nation’s universities. “Inter-professional learning” wherein students of Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry and the Allied Health professions spend time learning together has produced a mutual appreciation of the specific skills of each group and how combining these skills in the “Team Medicine” approach can be so much more satisfying for professionals and patients alike. How different from the professional “silo” mentality of a decade ago. Medical schools in rural based universities with programs focussed on educating students with a strong rural affiliation and a desire for a rural based career are seeing significant numbers of graduates helping rural Australians. We are, at last, becoming less dependent on overseas trained doctors, many of whom are badly needed “back home”. Medical education has been shortened without any damage to required learning and is much less focussed on hospital-based rotations with more student time spent in community settings. The old mandatory Internship program has been abandoned in favour of immediate post graduation entry into vocational training programs.

    State governments are no longer receiving Commonwealth funds to run their hospitals but they do continue to own and operate them.  Funding required is supplied through a contract with a Regional Health Authority. The services to be offered by a particular hospital will be negotiated with emphasis on the quality rather than the number of services on offer. “Role delineation” for all hospitals within a given region will avoid duplication and avoid the old system where individual hospitals tended to be islands in an ocean of health care doing there own thing. Many private hospitals offer services to RHAs

    Back to August 2013.

    Given health care is one of the top three issues of concern for Australian voters, it’s disappointing that health system reform has so far received so little attention in the election campaign.

    We could reasonably expect our politicians in the last week of the election campaign to be seriously challenged to provide a detailed and clear vision of the health reforms they would pursue to create a more equitable and cost-effective health system that will met our future needs.

    But we will almost certainly not get this. And perhaps that says as much about the demise of decent journalism as it does about our politicians.

    This article was first published in The Conversation on August 30, 2013.

     

  • Boat arrivals are down. John Menadue

    You would hardly know it if you read the Murdoch papers or listened to the Canberra bureau of the ABC but boat arrivals are dramatically down in recent weeks.

    How ironic it would be if even before Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister, that asylum seekers arriving by boat have been reduced to a trickle. It is early days, but the figures point to a significant decline.

    A Department of Immigration official has been reported in one newspaper that I saw yesterday as advising that ‘After 4236 asylum seekers arrived on 48 boats in July, the number for August dropped to 1585 on 25 boats. The number of arrivals in the last week of August was 71, the lowest weekly figure since February.’

    The Minister for Immigration, Tony Burke, said ‘I have absolutely no doubt now that the policy is having the effect that we hoped’.

    Perhaps the new figures might take some heat out of the absurd political debate, but I am not that confident. The decline in numbers should reduce significantly those asylum seekers who could be transferred to PNG or held in detention on Christmas Island and elsewhere.

    If the new policy is working as the Minister suggests, could the government please consider an increase in the humanitarian intake to 27,000 as Kevin Rudd earlier suggested could occur if the policies to curb boat arrivals worked. This would reassure many people, although only in a small way, who have watched with horror the race to the bottom on asylum seekers.

    Maybe there is a glimmer of hope in all this darkness!

  • Excluding the ABC. John Menadue

    It is disappointing, at least to me that the ABC has not been the host of the election debates between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

    Instead it is has been left to Fox News, 50% owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is keen to buy the other 50% from Telstra. When will the Murdoch monopoly end?

    The ABC is the most trusted media organisation in the country. It used to be the logical host for major political events. It has been out manoeuvred by the Liberal Party.

    In a survey by Essential Media late last year, the ABC was ranked second in the country as our most trusted institution. It was trusted by 59% of Australians. It was only bettered by the High Court which was trusted by 63 % of Australians. The Reserve Bank ranked third and was trusted by 53% of Australians. Interestingly, all are public institutions.

    Other media groups were well down the list in terms of public trust – newspapers 31%, online news media e.g. Fox at 28%, and TV news media at 26%. If we further break out Murdoch’s media we find that his publications are the least trusted in the country, particularly the Herald Sun, the Courier Mail and least of all, the Daily Telegraph. This lack of trust was even before the recent Murdoch bullying and abuse of power in this election.

    How has the ABC, the most trusted media organisation by far in the country, been out-manoeuvred in favour of Fox! I can only assume that the Liberal Party refused to participate in debates hosted by the ABC. Faced with this veto of the ABC, the ALP agreed to the alternative of Fox News and with all superficial floss that followed.

    I recall many years ago when I worked for Gough Whitlam that the ABC always insisted that for the sake of ‘balance’ it would not interview him unless there was a Liberal minister who agreed to participate. Not many ministers were keen to debate Gough Whitlam so the proposed interview was inevitably dropped by the ABC. The Liberal Party veto had worked.

    Fortunately Gough Whitlam persuaded the reluctant ABC management that the Liberal Party should not be allowed to have its programing determined by a Liberal Party veto. The ABC agreed that if a Liberal Party participant could not be found, the interview, although with a different format would proceed.

    Consistent with its role as the pre-eminent and most trusted media organisation in the country, the ABC should insist that if either major party will not participate in a properly structured debate then an alternative with only one political leader will proceed. The ABC must stop being bluffed. It must assert its leadership role.

    The ABC is the last, perhaps the only hope, to stem the downward spiral of media abuse in this country.

  • We have never had it so good. John Menadue

    The election campaign by the Murdoch media and the Coalition suggests that the Australian economy is in a mess. But almost all the facts suggest that we have one of the best performing economies in the world whether we measure it by economic growth, debt, inflation or employment.

    Now a survey just released by the University of Canberra’s highly regarded National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) tells us that Australian households have never been better off. The NATSEM report tells us:

    • Australian households are 15% better off since 2008 when the Rudd Government was elected.
    • ‘The gain in the last five years is a remarkable outcome, given the weakness of the global economy through the global financial crisis.’
    • ‘The strongest contributor to the cost of living increases in the last year were utilities (+14%), health (+6.2%) and education (+5.5%) whilst costs were eased by mortgage interest (-14.5%) and audio-visual (-5.1%).
    • The standard of living (disposable income less cost of living) has risen by 2.6% p.a. under both the Rudd and Gillard Governments, the same as under the Howard Government.

    Whilst the ‘average’ household has been a lot better off, economic prosperity has favoured high income households. NATSEM said ‘The strong gains in the standard of living have not been equally spread across income levels.’ A particular reason for this is that the cost of living changes for the lowest quintile level over five years was 2.4% because of relatively high expenditures on rent and utilities. The highest quintile income group had cost of living increases of only 1.5% because it was particularly assisted by low mortgage payments.

    This story of quite ‘remarkable’ increases in the standard of living of Australian households over the last five years is in stark contrast to the campaign of the Murdoch media, the Coalition and business interests.

    Our economy is very strong. Our standard of living is rising steadily. But the government seems unable to make the case about its performance.

    Its failure is overwhelmingly political.

     

  • The phoney war over deficits and debt. John Menadue

    For almost five years, Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Andrew Robb and Barnaby Joyce, have been giving us dire warnings about deficits and debt. You would think the Australian economy was a smoking ruin.

    But the politicking over deficits and debt has changed remarkably in the last few weeks. Early this year Tony Abbott told us that he would provide a budget surplus in ‘year 1’ of an Abbott Government. Earlier this month, he said that his government would return the budget to surplus within his first three year term. Then he said that he would return the budget to surplus ‘some time over the next four years’.

    He has now pushed it back even further by telling us at the Liberal Party launch in Brisbane on Sunday  that ‘we will deliver a surplus as soon as soon as we humanly can’ but he refused to give a  guarantee. But there is even more. .Joe Hockey has now told us that he will not commit to any deadline on delivering a surplus.

    All the signs are that a Coalition Government will not deliver a budget surplus any earlier than the Labor Government promised for 2016-17. If anything, it is likely, on the basis of Tony Abbott’s and Joe Hockey’s comments, that the coalition would return the budget to surplus later than the Labor Government has promised. That is because we must take into account the increased expenditures that he has recently announced.

    • A $5.5 billion a year parental leave scheme to be introduced in July 2015.
    • An increase in defence spending from $24 billion p.a. currently, to $50 billion p.a. within ten years.
    • Abolish the means test on private health insurance which would cost about $1 billion p.a.
    • Additional funding for self-funded retirees via the Commonwealth Senior Health Card and more and more on roads on bridges for the National Party.

    The consequences of all this is that he will not only be pushing back the time to realise his budget surplus pledge but he will be increasing public debt in the meantime which he told us was ruining the country.

    The Coalition has been telling us for years that there is a deficit and debt crisis. The attacks never stopped. The language was reckless, inflammatory and fraudulent There was a budget “emergency” that had to be urgently addressed. Barnaby Joyce, who may be our next Deputy Prime Minister, suggested that the gnomes of Zurich would soon be arriving in Australia to take over our financial management because of the debt that we could not repay. The Coalition effectively frightened the community about the state of the economy. If we listened to the Coalition and the Murdoch media, one would think that the Australian economy was a basket case. Yet it is one of the best performing economies in the world and admired by well-informed commentators across the globe, including the International Monetary Fund. We have had steady growth even through the global financial crisis, low unemployment, low inflation, rising productivity, very low debt and an AAA credit rating.

    Yet despite the quite remarkable performance by the Australian economy, the coalition has succeeded in persuading many that the economy is in a mess. The reverse is true.

    The government facilitated this absurd focus on deficit and debt.  The government has been unable to successfully make the case that the economy is sound.

    The Government has performed well on the economy. But it has two glaring problems .The first is its failure to project a compelling narrative grounded in values such as equity and fairness, freedom, citizenship and stewardship. Second it has shown political incompetence and division

    All this about the phoney war on deficits and debts is not to say that we don’t need to address our long-term structural t problems. This should be addressed by taking action on middle-class welfare like the subsidies to the wealthy in superannuation and private health insurance and increasing some taxes.

    But it is very clear that the coalition’s phoney war over deficits and debts was political nonsense. It is now asking us to forget that nonsense. By pushing back resolution of the deficit/ debt problem the Coalition is telling us that it was never regarded as a serious problem in the first place.

  • Japanese amnesia and the contrast with Germany. Guest blogger: Susan Menadue Chun

    Our four Australian/Korean children were educated in Japanese primary schools.

    Every summer holiday we struggled through the prescribed homework text- Natsu no Tomo (Summer’s friend). In the early August segment, there were assignments regarding WWII. They stated, “talk to your parents about WWII and write a composition about the importance of peace”. So, we talked to our children about their Korean grandfather, how he was conscripted from Korea into the Japanese army, how he fought in the savage battles on the Truk Island, was injured and was badly treated because he was not Japanese. In retrospect, writing about a Korean grandfather was probably off-limits as all Japanese children were expected to write the customary composition regarding how the Japanese had suffered as a result of the nuclear bomb and the importance of peace. Every following year in the Natsu no Tomo　the topic never progressed past the nuclear bomb and a peace discussion. There was no mention of Japan’s hostile war of aggression. Because the nuclear bomb transformed Japan into a victim, education played the key role in creating what many Japan critics call collective amnesia.

    Our homework chronicle was 25 years ago. Not a great deal has changed, Japanese textbooks still barely mention Japan’s war of aggression and the ultra-right nationalists have been successful in making war crimes such as the Comfort Women and the Rape of Nanking a taboo topic.

    I have just returned from Germany. In comparison to, Japan, where the insensitive gaffes of Japanese politicians are relentless denial and whitewashing of history, Germany is coming to terms with its horrific past. All over Germany I found monuments displaying remorse for the carnage and the terror Germany caused. As I looked out over the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, (that covers the area equivalent of a housing estate) I couldn’t help thinking about the Japanese diplomatic outrage triggered by the monuments erected for Comfort Women outside of Japan in places such as Seoul, New Jersey and Los Angles.  The stepping stones, in Berlin with real names, memorializing the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, made me think about the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and the massacre of thousands of Koreans that followed. However, collective amnesia again conveniently helps the Japanese public pretend the massacre never happened.

    Public monuments help to reinforce historical facts. But most importantly, monuments can demonstrate contrition. In the 37 years I have lived in Japan, on occasion I have stumbled across privately erected monuments for Japan’s WWII victims- particularly the Koreans and the Chinese. But sadly they have invariably been desecrated by Japanese ultra-nationalists.

    If Germany can come to terms with its horrific past, so can Japan, Collective amnesia denigrates victims and is extremely unfair to Japan’s next generation.

    Nothing you can do can change the past, but everything we can do changes the future (Ashleigh Brilliant).

  • Returning home can be the hard part. John Menadue

    In my August 1 blog I referred to the failure of many Australian companies to integrate their business and human resource strategies. Too many send executives overseas on an ad hoc basis without planning how that experience gained overseas can be used when they return as a catalyst to change the business culture of the Australian organisation.

    Every individual has personality. Every organisation has a culture. The grip of that culture – the way we do things without thinking – is remarkably powerful. It entrenches status, power, attitudes and values. It is hard to change.

    My experience is that overseas experience is the best way to challenge and change individuals and organisational culture. Cultural difference needs to be experienced rather than learned. It is visceral rather than cerebral. That is why overseas experience, living and working in a different culture, can be the best catalyst for change in individuals and organisations. It can’t really be learned in a classroom.

    Yet few Australian organisations are really serious about overseas experience being the catalyst for changing the organisational culture at home. The Business Alliance for Asian Literacy, representing over 400,000 businesses in Australia, recently found that ‘More than half of Australian businesses operating in Asia had little board and senior management experience of Asia and/or Asian skills or languages’. It is proving very hard to changes insular cultures. Asia is an ad hoc add on and little more.

    My contention is that sending promising staff to overseas appointments is the best way to drive cultural change provided the process is well organised, including the return home. That wise planning also involves support for spouse/partner and children. If they are unsuited or unhappy it will greatly impair the success of the overseas posting.

    But too often those executives returning from overseas are not supported and they often leave the organisation. They have changed their outlook and world view but on return, they find the organisation is still as insular as ever.

    I have seen figures from the US suggesting   that 70% of executives returning from overseas assignments leave their organisations within 3 years. The Ernst & Young survey of 2012 that I mentioned in my earlier blog of August 1 pointed to the very high cost to organisations of executives sent overseas and then leaving soon after return to the organisation at home.

    It is eight years old, but the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Reform Committee report, ‘Enquiry into Australian Expatriates’ said

    ‘The committee is surprised at the level of disappointment of many repatriates concerning the job opportunities available to them on their return to Australia. Many of them left Australia precisely because of the greater employment opportunities on the world stage, the higher incomes, the greater job satisfaction or the enhanced career opportunities. Even if they have returned to Australia, as many undoubtedly have, with more experience, enhanced skills, better contacts and greater cross-cultural understanding, this does not necessarily mean that openings will have developed in Australia in their absence.’

    That Senate report, and my own reading and experience, confirms in my mind the difficulties of expatriates returning from an overseas assignment. Many have told me that they feel unwelcome and their organisation quite unsympathetic. There was often resentment that they had had the benefit of an overseas trip whilst executives at home really kept the business going and did the hard work!.

    So many Australian companies do not understand that if they want to change their organisational culture to make it more sensitive and understanding of the countries in our region, they must take greater care on the returning home process. It is just as important as the selection of executives to go overseas and supports them when they are overseas.

    If we want to adapt and change organisational culture in Australia to fit better with our Asian geography, we need to effectively integrate business and human resource strategy at every stage. So often we waste the opportunity .Business strategy and human resource management so often work in parallel and not together.

    Overseas experience in Asia can be the catalyst for organisational change in Australia provided it is done carefully and over a long period. If developed well, overseas experience can progressively build a change team. At the moment we are just not building those change teams.

  • Jesuit students rebuke Tony Abbott and other old boys. John Menadue

    For many years, I have been concerned that the Jesuits at St Ignatius College Sydney seem to be producing mainly conservative politicians and merchant bankers. I don’t think St Ignatius would have expected that.

    My confidence in the Jesuits at St Ignatius has been at least partially restored by action by senior students at St Ignatius to rebuke Tony Abbott and others for ‘betraying moral values on asylum seekers’. See the report of their action from the SMH below.

    ​http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/tony-abbotts-old-school-hits-out-at-asylum-seeker-stance-as-betraying-moral-values-20130821-2savt.html

    John Menadue

  • Government failure in health care. John Menadue and guest blogger Ian McAuley

    We have little to see for six years of “reform” under the Rudd/Gillard Governments. What was that about ending the blame game in health? It has been mainly muddling through with hopes dashed for significant reform in many key areas

    Health costs are rising rapidly, through lack of coordination and waste. Doctors provide too many services. Vested interests are rampant Mental and Indigenous health are in a serious position. Services are being delivered less equitably. Progress has been made in prevention. However, the high expectation raised by the first Rudd Government has not been realised.

    In our view the key failures have been as follows.

    1. Primary care Australia has an obsession with hospitals. They should be the last resort rather than the first. Countries such as the UK and NZ have high quality care in part because of the philosophy underlying their healthcare arrangements, but also because they are grounded in primary care which is the most efficient and equitable way to deliver health services. It is where care is best integrated. Fee for service has encouraged ‘turnstile medicine’, excessive treatment and increasingly the corporatisation of general practice. FFS is a major barrier to reform in primary care.  FFS may be appropriate for episodic or occasional care for walk-in patients but it is not appropriate for chronic and long term care. The government should pursue contractual arrangements with general practice as an alternative to fee-for-service.  NZ pays episodic care by doctors on a FFS basis but chronic care is paid on an annualized basis. The Australian Government has failed in this key area. It is frightened of the AMA. The misnamed Medicare Locals offer considerable reform opportunity, but we are not clear if this will be realised. Are they really only re-named Divisions of General Practice? The Super Clinics also offer considerable potential, but again we are not sure about how they are performing.
    2. Workforce reform. Health is the largest and fastest growing sector of the Australian economy. Its structure and workforce are riddled with 19th Century demarcations and restrictive work practices, e.g. there are several hundred nurse practitioners in Australia when there should be thousands. We must also train assistant physicians. About 10% of normal births in Australia are delivered by midwives. In NZ it is over 90%. We don’t have a shortage of doctors so much as a misallocation of doctors. Nurses, allied health workers and ambulance staff are denied opportunities to upgrade and realise their professional potential.  Pharmacies, rather than being primarily retail enterprises, should be better integrated with primary care.  Our historical demarcation between GPs and pharmacies is seeing valuable skills going to waste. There will never be adequate delivery of service to people, particularly the aged, without radical workforce reform, mainly within primary care.
    3. Structure of health services. Health services are structured and funded around providers – medical services by doctors, pharmaceuticals through big Pharma and the Pharmacy Guild, and hospitals through State governments and private agencies. The structure of the Department of Health and Ageing reflects this provider focus rather than a focus on consumers. The Consumers Health Forum of Australia funded by the Commonwealth seems more like a marketing arm of the Department of Health and Ageing. We need to progressively change the focus to serve the community rather than providers. One possible structure would be around types of users – acute, chronic and occasional. It would help reduce the competition between different provider areas for limited resources. DOHA shows no serious interest in consumers but together with the Minister always seems to have an open door for the rent seekers like the Pharmacy Guild.
    4. Governance. The current traditional Minister/departmental model allows vested interests to dominate the debate and the allocation of resources. The public ‘conversation’ is not about health policy, but rather is about how the minister and the department respond to vested interests that set the agenda. The public is excluded. The media is heavily dependent on special interests for stories. The Reserve Bank provides a useful model of the direction in which we need to move – an independent and professional commission with economic expertise that funds and directs health services subject to government policies and guidelines. The Reserve Bank has proven to be immune from special interests and their pleading. It is respected for being professional and serving the public interest. It effectively informs the public on key issues. This does not happen in the health field. The government shows little interest in combatting the special interests.
    5. Private health insurance. The Commonwealth Government subsidy of about $7 b p.a. ($5.6b in direct subsidies and $i.4b in in income tax foregone) should be progressively eliminated and the funds used to directly fund other health services, e.g. private hospitals and dental care.  While the government, through means testing the rebates  has removed some inequities, its decision to increase the Medicare Levy Surcharge and to strengthen the “lifetime rating” incentives are weakening social inclusion, as those who are well off are corralled into their own facilities, leaving public hospitals  at risk of becoming residual services for the “indigent”. It penalises country people because there are few private hospitals in the bush. PHI is inefficient with administrative costs about three times higher than Medicare. The subsidy has not taken pressure off public hospitals. Private gap insurance has facilitated enormous increases in specialist fees. Most importantly, the expansion of PHI progressively weakens the ability of Medicare to control costs. The evidence world-wide is clear that countries with significant PHI have high costs. The stand-out example is the US.  President Obama may have substantially achieved universal coverage, but private health insurance in the US with its lack of cost control will ultimately cripple and finally destroy his reforms. Warren Buffett has described private health insurance companies as the “tape worm” in the US health sector. The Commonwealth already has a sound model of a single payer operated through the Department of Veterans Affairs – a model which retains the strong control of a single payer accountable to the community whilst allowing private practise involvement in service delivery. The Commonwealth has failed to understand the damage that PHI is already doing in Australia.
    6.  Medicare. This great ALP monument needs a review. Medicare has become a passive but efficient funding mechanism rather than the public insurer it was intended to be. After all, it is called the ‘health insurance commission’. It is now nothing of the sort. It is not even within the health portfolio. Why can’t Medicare offer policy options beyond a default available to all? Medicare has a remarkable database which should be used to highlight and inform policy concerning over and underutilisation of services across the country. Medical services should be subject to the same rigorous cost-benefit examination as pharmaceutical services. Medicare is not doing it. And the Government shows little interest
    7. Co-payments. They are a mess, with the level of government subsidies varying enormously. Medical and pharmaceutical co-payments have little in common. The safety nets are unfair and lead to abuse. We believe that people with high incomes should pay more for health services through efficient and defensible co-payments. A ‘universal service’ does not necessarily mean it should be free. Subject to a means test, there needs to be more discipline by consumers in their use of health services. Jennifer Doggett at CPD has proposed workable means-tested reforms in this area. There is no sign the Commonwealth is concerned about the problem.
    8. The Blame Game. Attempts to resolve the Commonwealth/State blame game have been largely unsuccessful and certainly expensive. We believe that the Commonwealth should offer to set up a Joint Commonwealth/State Health Commission in any state that will agree.  That Commission would be jointly funded by the Commonwealth and the State; it would also plan the delivery of health services in the State and so provide more cohesive hospital and non-hospital health services. It would be a small planning and funding commission with little or no net increase in bureaucratic overheads. Delivery of health services would continue through existing health agencies, Commonwealth, State and local government. The new Commission would be jointly appointed by the two governments and with agreed dispute resolution arrangements. In the event of a disagreement, the Commonwealth position should prevail as it would be the chief funder. Tasmania should be an obvious starter given its precarious financial position. Hopefully success in one State would then encourage other states to swallow their pride and improve their health services by cooperating with the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth dolls out more and more money to the states without fixing the blame game as Kevin Rudd said he would.
    9. The Productivity Commission should be commissioned to report on the need for long-term and meaningful reform. That was the main recommendation in the 1997 Industry Commission Report on Private Health Insurance. Enquires by ‘insiders’ such as the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission tend to be timid and designed to appease sectional interests. Just think of the audacity of that Commission proposing Medicare Select to a Labor Government We need an enquiry by professional and impartial ‘outsiders’ who are detached from present systems and structures.  The Department of Health and Ageing is incapable of doing it.

    Apart from plain packaging and increased excise on tobacco products is there any really memorable heath reform from six years of Labor governments What a disappointing story this all is for the party which created Medicare!

    This article was published in Croakey on 19 August 2013.

    Ian McAuley

    John Menadue

  • Hitting rock-bottom! John Menadue

    Today Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have announced draconian measures that will inflict enormous punishment on over 30,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in Australia over recent years by boat.  These draconian policies will apply not just to future boat arrivals but will be applied retrospectively to over 30,000 asylum seekers who are already legally here.

    We can imagine the widespread protests if any Australian government announced retrospective changes in taxation or other important policies, but some of the most vulnerable in the world are fair game in Australian politics.

    What a shameful country we have become. The poisoning of public opinion against asylum seekers which began with Tampa in 2001 is getting worse by the day.

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison propose:

    • None of these 30.000 asylum seekers will ever be granted permanent residence even if they are found to be refugees.
    • They will be denied access to any appeal processes. Clerks in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship will exercise control over their lives.
    • Persons found to be refugees will get a temporary protection visa which will deny them the right to sponsor family. The only way that they can re-join their family will be to return to the country from which they fled because of danger.

    Amongst these 30,000 asylum seekers in Australia are many whose lives have been put at risk because of the actions of Australian Governments to intervene in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only has our involvement in those two wars been futile and cost many Australian lives, it has put at risk many Iraqis and Afghans who will now pay a huge price as the civil war in Iraq extends and the withdrawal of Western forces from Afghanistan leaves more and more Afghans exposed to danger. But we show no concern that some of these people now in Australia cannot call on the Australian government or people for protection or decency.

    This announcement today continues the demonization of asylum seekers that has been going on for years. Scott Morrison, who would be the Minister for Immigration in an Abbott Government, said in his maiden speech in 2008 ‘From my faith I derive the values of loving kindness, justice and righteousness”. Yet he has told us on many occasions

    • That asylum seekers bring “disease, everything from tuberculosis and Hepatitis C to Chlamydia and syphilis”.
    • He told 2GB talk-back radio that he had seen asylum seekers bringing in “wads of cash and large displays of jewellery”.
    • According to Jane Cadzow, in the Sun Herald he told the Coalition to ‘ramp up its questioning to … capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment’.
    • In early 2002, he complained about the cost of holding funerals in Sydney for asylum seekers who had died in a shipwreck off Christmas Island.  He referred to funding for an 8 year old boy whose parents had been drowned as a ‘government funded junket’.

    Senator Abetz, a migrant himself and apparently a devout Lutheran said that asylum seekers in the community should be registered in the same way as paedophiles.

    Tony Abbott, the seminary-trained and student of the Jesuits, continually calls asylum seekers ‘illegals’ when they are not. He wants us to believe that they are criminals. He has never called Scott Morrison into line.

    Who will call a stop to our inhumanity? In world terms, with 45 million refugees and displaced persons, the number of asylum seekers coming to Australia is miniscule. When will we get out of our parochial stupor and appreciate the real world beyond our shores? But history shows that it is so easy for unscrupulous politicians to exploit fear of the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different.

    Malcolm Fraser we need you now.

  • Foxing with the News, Japan style. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

     

    On Wednesday 7 August 2013, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged that the clean up of the devastated Fukushima nuclear power reactors was beyond the capacity of the operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). It followed the revelation that heavily contaminated groundwater is flowing into the Pacific Ocean at an estimated rate of 300 tonnes a day because of the failure of a perimeter barrier installed by TEPCO. By any measure this was a major news story. So where did it run in that night’s one hour, mid-evening news on the national broadcaster NHK? Buried 40 minutes down in the program as a brief RVO (reader voiceover). Had the story broken a year ago, during the tenure of the former government, I have no doubt it would have led the program – accompanied by complaints of incompetence. If there had been any doubt that Abe was receiving a dream run from Japan’s mainstream media, this episode laid it to rest.

    For six months or more the government ignored calls for it to take over management of the nuclear crisis from a secretive and bumbling TEPCO. Abe did nothing, unwilling to infringe on the prerogatives of a private enterprise. The delay deserved to be marked down as a failure of leadership, and yet NHK’s story offered no such analysis. Nor did it contain the information – available on the New York Times and BBC websites – that taxpayers will pick up the estimated US$400 million dollar tab for a new containment strategy. Reportedly the plan envisages freezing the ground around the crippled reactors to a depth of 30 metres. Some commentators suggest the government has been reluctant to take over control for fear of being blamed should the unproven strategy fail to hold back the radioactive groundwater. (One assumes some of these details were aired in other NHK news broadcasts; my focus is on how this story was presented in its prestigious News Watch 9 program on the day in question.)

    The uncritical coverage NHK and others are giving to decisions by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party government contrasts with the media’s hostile treatment of the former centre-left administration led by the Democratic Party of Japan. The nuclear issue is just one example. Another is the issue of the controversial deployment of Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft by the US Marines on Okinawa. When the deployment began in July last year Japanese media outlets, including NHK, suggested that public safety and national sovereignty were being sacrificed to the US-Japan alliance. Night after night, NHK television bulletins devoted extensive coverage to anti-government protests. In recent weeks the number of Ospreys deployed on Okinawa was doubled, while on Monday the crash of a helicopter from the Kadena Air Base further underlined the safety concerns of residents of the heavily militarized islands. And yet NHK’s coverage of both developments was subdued and matter-of-fact, particularly in comparison with its coverage of the same issue during the time of the Noda government.

    Why the change in temper?

    When the DPJ came to power in 2009 one of its first acts was to end the LDP’s preferred method of governing through background briefings to a coterie of captive journalists. This attack on the kisha club system – under which media outlets attach journalists to ministries in return for exclusive access to information – threatened the drip feed media organisations relied upon. Once-privileged journalists now had to take their chances in the open forum of televised news conferences. They hated it – and seemed bent on revenge. Some proved incapable of adjusting to the fact there had been a change of government and continued to treat the LDP as if it were the ruling party.

    As time went by, particularly after the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku, simmering resentment built to a wave of criticism against Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his successor Yoshihiko Noda. While the DPJ government undoubtedly contributed to its loss of popular support, the media played a big hand in it. Conspicuous in this campaign was the mass circulation Yomiuri newspaper (one of the main backers of Abe’s plans for constitutional change). Journalists conveniently overlooked that the nuclear crisis was due, in large part, to a flawed safety and regulatory regime put in place by the LDP. The commercial television networks clamored to outdo each other in pillorying the government. During a March 2011 news conference by Prime Minister Kan, audiences of Fuji-TV’s broadcast heard background voices mocking the proceedings: ‘The nuclear story again, you’ve got to be kidding’, ‘Now I can start laughing’. (This insight into the mentality of some in the profession is no longer viewable on YouTube: Fuji-TV has had it removed ‘for copyright reasons’.)

    Back at NHK, if Fukushima wasn’t the big story last Wednesday night, what was? A summer heat wave and the price of petrol led News Watch 9. The story immediately preceding the brief mention of Fukushima was a long item about the recovery of Japanese flags and other military paraphernalia taken from Pacific battlefields by American soldiers during the Second World War. Honoring the country’s war dead and comforting bereaved families are worthy causes, but they hardly rank above a current and out-of-control nuclear accident.

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

  • Is something significant happening in our alignment to our region? John Menadue

    It may be early days, but I sense that some significant change might be afoot. So much of our political dialogue historically has been about Australia’s relationship with the UK and then the US. John Howard spoke of Australia being the deputy sheriff for the Americans in our region. Tony Abbott talks about an Anglo sphere – presumably linkages to English-speaking countries.

    But so much of the discussion in recent weeks about asylum seekers has involved relationships with our own region. In a few short weeks we have seen some quite significant developments.

    PM Rudd met President Yudhoyono and arranged a ministerial meeting on regional cooperation on asylum seekers for August 20.

    • President Yudhoyono rebuked talk about unilateral action by Australian politicians to turn back boats at sea.
    • Indonesia has now agreed that Iranians will no longer get visa-free entry into Indonesia.
    • Malaysia has agreed to limit to 14 days visas issued to persons believed to be in transit through Malaysia to Indonesia for a boat journey to Australia.
    • A regional settlement arrangement has been concluded with PNG. PM O’Neill indicated warm cooperation – although a great deal still remains to be sorted out.
    • PM O’Neill rebuked Shadow Foreign Minister Julie Bishop for suggesting that Australia was handing over to PNG decisions on the spending of ODA money in PNG.

    The language was frank and brusque but that is surely     much better than the platitudes that so much feature in diplomatic discourse.

    Almost without catching his breath, PM Rudd was in Taren Kowt, Afghanistan, thanking Australian soldiers for their service and saying that it was time they came home. The exit from Afghanistan was announced some time ago, but I thought what was remarkable was that Kevin Rudd’s statement was received without any comment or query. Twelve months ago we were still following the US and its pivoting to Asia.

    In the lead up to the general election we would normally expect our political leaders to be tugging their forelocks to the US President rather than being actively engaged with our regional neighbours.

    It is early days yet, but it seems that some significant realignment to our region is under way. I wonder if some of our political class and the media are following.

    The US will continue to be an important ally but with declining US power and influence it is inevitable that we must develop more effective and close relations with our neighbours. The issue of asylum seekers may prove to be an important catalyst in this process.

    Regional cooperation will grow out of dealing with specific issues rather than grand statements of cooperation.

  • The election: economy and deficits. John Menadue

    In the run-up to the September 7 elections, we will hear a lot of misleading stories about the economy and deficits.

    My contention is that with the good luck of the China boom, the government has managed the Australian economy well. Our economic performance is amongst the best in the world. But the public debate has been side-tracked by nonsense about debt and deficits.

    Despite the political rhetoric and the flak from News Limited, the evidence on the economy is very clear.

    • Australia has had six years of uninterrupted growth even through the global financial crisis. Few countries achieved that.
    • Inflation is low, unemployment is low and economic growth has been above world levels.
    • In May this year John Howard said ‘when the Australian Prime Minister and Treasurer and others tell you that the Australian economy is doing better than most, they are right.’
    • The three major credit rating agencies have all retained Australia at a AAA rating.
    • In April this year the IMF said that ‘Australia has the strongest economy in the developed world … we expect the Australian economy will outstrip growth over all other advanced economies over the next two years’.

    But the government has allowed itself to be side-tracked over the populist nonsense that debt and deficit are the important measures on the economy. The previous Treasurer, Wayne Swann, contributed to these misleading stories by continually making pledges to get the budget back into surplus when it was neither possible nor desirable. In fact, debt and deficits, whilst not unimportant, are secondary issues. Sometimes debt and deficits are appropriate, as in a recession. Sometimes they are not, as in an economic boom.

    Have we got a debt and deficit problem?

    • In world terms our debt problem is very small. Total net government debt as a percentage of GDP has remained very low at 12%. This compares with such countries as Japan 134%, US 88%, France 84%, UK 83%, Euro area 72%, Germany 57% and Canada 35%.
    • The CEO of the National Australia Bank told us only last week that we do have a debt problem but that the problem is that we don’t have enough debt. He contended that a country such as Australia needed to borrow more for infrastructure.
    • With a mistaken mindset about debt, Europe has embarked on savage budget cuts that have caused great hardship particularly for young people and encouraged nascent right-wing, anti-immigration and racist parties. Europe is rightly now regretting its obsession with debt at the expense of other important issues.

    There is a long-term and structural debt issue for Australia, even if it is a minor one. That problem was largely inherited by the government from the Howard and Costello years. The Howard government locked in tax cuts over eight years from 2004. The IMF in January this year reported that Australia’s most wasteful spending came in the Howard era. Without those tax reductions in the Howard era, budget revenue would now be about $26 billion p.a. higher after adjusting for inflation.

    The Rudd and Gillard  governments should have done more to reduce the relatively small structural deficits. It did not address some key areas of wasteful and inequitable spending – negative gearing on property, tax-free superannuation income for those over 60 (like me!) and the subsidy to the private health insurance industry. Taken together, reform in these areas would quickly fix the small structural deficit we have.

    In short, the economy is performing well. We do not have an unmanageable deft and deficit problem.

    Unfortunately the Treasurer Chris Bowen has now confused the issue by promising a wafer-thin budget surplus of $4 billion in 2016-17. Revenues are too volatile for a promise like that in three years’ time to have any credibility. That promise will play into the hands of the economically illiterate in the media who have persuaded themselves and others that the budget is the same as the economy. It is not.

  • Japan’s Deputy PM: ‘Let’s learn from the Nazis’. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

    Taro Aso, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Japan, has a clumsy tongue; it’s always getting him into trouble. He’s so malapropic (remember the one about people becoming so affluent ‘even the homeless are getting diabetes’), we can only shake our heads and say, ‘Japan’s a funny place,’ before changing the channel on our Sonys.

     But wait a moment. Did he really say this latest thing?

     On Monday Aso addressed a forum on constitutional change organised by a right-wing lobby group, the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals (more on it later). He spoke extempore, as usual, with an eye to creating controversy that, if necessary, might be explained away later. The rubric ‘I was misunderstood’ or ‘I failed to explain myself properly’ or ‘I didn’t say what I meant’ is familiar with politicians of Aso’s type, who habitually linger between not meaning what they say and not saying what they mean.

     The Deputy Prime Minister reminded his audience that the National Socialist Party in Germany came to power by democratic means under the Weimar Constitution. ‘They did not seize power by force of arms. It’s easy to forget they were chosen by the German people.’

     He then turned to the subject at hand.

    Inside Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, he said, discussion of constitutional change went on calmly, without raised voices, and that was the best way to proceed. Politicians need not stir up passions by, for instance, visiting Yasukuni Shrine on the anniversary of Japan’s defeat. (Yasukuni enshrines the country’s war dead, including a number of convicted war criminals.) China and South Korea were sure to complain. Why not go, quietly, on another day? It was always better to avoid a fuss (though he conceded, mischievously, that when he once suggested the anniversary of Japan’s 1905 victory over Russia as a better day it had caused one.)

     Mr Aso again took up the example of Germany to illustrate his argument: ‘One day, before anyone was aware, the Weimar Constitution was changed into the Nazi Constitution. It was changed without anyone noticing. Why don’t we learn from that technique.’

    Oops.

    Presumably the particular audience he was addressing found it instructive to learn from the Nazis, since it was not until his comments were reported in the media, and condemned in the United States, Germany, China and South Korea, that a retraction became necessary. Reading from a prepared statement on Friday he conceded that it was inappropriate to offer the Nazis as a model for any undertaking. He had been ‘misunderstood’.

     In reporting Aso’s original comments, some Japanese media outlets suggested he was being  sarcastic, or at least ambiguous, and should not be taken seriously. The Japan Times – well known  for its pro-LDP leanings – was one of them. But having gone over Aso’s entire speech with the assistance of a Japanese native speaker, I believe there can be no doubt he was extolling the virtues of constitutional change by stealth.

    Aso is not a minor member of the government. He served – without distinction – as Prime Minister in 2008-2009 and remains close to the current leader Shinzo Abe. Both men are descendants of Japan’s conservative old guard. Taro Aso is a grandson of Shigeru Yoshida, who led Japan in the 1940s and 1950s, and his wife is a daughter of another former LDP chief Zenko Suzuki. His views on history reflect an intimate connection with past historical misdeeds. A family business, Aso Mining Company, in Fukuoka (Aso’s electorate) exploited Korean conscript labour and Allied prisoners, including nearly 200 Australian POWs.

     The organisation that provided Aso a platform for his ‘Nazi’ remarks, the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals, formed in 2007, has a mission to ‘reconstruct’ a ‘malfunctioning’ Japan. Its president is Yoshiko Sakurai, 67, whose career in journalism began with the foreign media in Tokyo in the 1970s. She attracted a following as the host of a nightly television current affairs program in the 1980s and 1990s, taking up progressive social issues. More recently, however, she has become a glamorous proponent of extreme right-wing views.

    Her institute can be judged by its string of recent policy pronouncements: ‘All Japanese must be resolved to reject foreign interference in our own affairs’; ‘Japan should lead international rule-setting to pursue national interest’; ‘Japan should not abandon nuclear power generation’. Sakurai advocates a tough line against China and South Korea, abandonment of Japan’s pacifist constitution, and all-out pursuit of the LDP’s economic and cultural agenda. Born in Hanoi just a month after the surrender, she is the archetypal ‘child’ of the postwar peace and prosperity Japan has enjoyed under its current constitution. As a political insider and media darling, however, she appeals to younger Japanese ripe to be recruited to the argument that Japan has become a ‘malfunctioning state’ (a phrase the Nazis would have approved of) due to a lack of vigour and self-assertiveness.

    The accident-prone Mr Aso will have done his country and the world a service if only, by knocking over the furniture, he has managed to awaken the household to the presence of intruders stepping softly towards the family jewels.

  • Our business failure in Asia. John Menadue

    In my blog of March 14 on Productivity and Skills I drew attention to the failure of Australian business to equip itself for Asia. PM Rudd in his address to the National Press Club on 16 July this year put it very clearly.

    ‘I am concerned that if you went through our business elites, you would not find a lot of the top 25 executives in each of our top 100 firms who have spent any of their career time serving in Asia – the engine driver of the global economy through until mid-century. Remember this is the Asian Century. The truth is Australia is much underdone in Asia.’

    There are many reasons for our business failure in Asia. One is the continuing habit of company boards appointing people like themselves – Anglo-Celtic males, often from the same schools and with little knowledge or experience in Asia. Talk about the unions running a closed shop!

    One other major obstacle in Australia and elsewhere to developing Asian skills in our major companies is their failure to align business and human resource strategies. Cross-cultural experience that are learned by appointing staff overseas are too often ad hoc and operational. Overseas appointments are not used as the catalyst to drive change in the organisation at home.

    The most extreme example that I know of business failure to integrate business and HR strategy is Rio Tinto. It staffed its Shanghai office with local Chinese. Unfortunately some of them finished in goal. But the major failure was that Rio Tinto apparently had no plan to use postings in China to develop executives who would come back to Australia and use the experience gained in China to drive cultural and organisational change in Australia.

    This failure is not just an Australian problem. A recent Global Mobility Effectiveness Survey, 2012, by Ernst & Young entitled ‘Driving Business Success’ highlighted the problem of so many firms sending staff overseas in a quite ad hoc manner and not using that experience learned overseas to enrich the talent pool of the organisation. (This survey covered 520 international countries including some from Australia.)

    The survey said that business should take several crucial steps to improve its performance in overseas markets. It said that companies needed to ‘better align mobility strategy with business strategy … crucially talent-management and global mobility must be integrated.’

    There is a lot of depressing reading from this survey.

    • Only 51% of companies surveyed have a global talent management agenda.
    • Less than a quarter of senior management have been on (overseas) assignment.
    • More than one in twelve countries had at least 11% of international assignees return before the end of their contracts – at huge cost.

    I will write later about the disappointment of many executives who on return from overseas postings quickly leave their organisations. They often feel that the cultural experience overseas has changed them and their outlook on the world but the culture of the company back in Australia has not changed. It remained a closed shop. So they leave and the money invested in them is lost, at least to the company.

    If there is any consolation in the Ernst & Young survey it is that Australia is not alone in failure to equip itself for Asia and new markets. But with our geographic position, we have probably more to lose by not properly equipping ourselves for our own region.

    A key is clearly the integration of a business strategy for Asia and the human resources strategy – to steadily build on the experience of executives living and working in Asia, and when they return to Australia to use that experience to drive organisational change at home. We have a long way to go.

    There is a lot of lip service by Australian companies about the Asian Century. They seem unable to grasp what is involved to change organisational culture and in the process drive productivity improvements and their long-term business prospects in our region.

    The business and other opportunities in Asia is not something new. The spectacular economic rise of Japan started 50 years ago. It was followed by Korea. Now it is China. Where has our business sector been in the last 50 years? It has profited opportunistically but has not built the skill base we need for the long term.

  • Japan: Where to now? Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

     Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a resounding victory in last weekend’s Upper House election. It now has sufficient seats in both houses of parliament to dominate the important Diet committees and ensure passage of key legislation. The LDP, however, has fallen short of obtaining enough votes to push through constitutional change on its own.

     Amendments require the support of two-thirds of both houses of the Diet, before being put to a referendum. The LDP still does not command a two-thirds majority, even with the support of right-wing opposition parties that favour ditching the pacifist clauses that were inserted in the constitution by the Americans during the postwar occupation. The LDP would also need the backing of its coalition partner, the New Komeito, the political arm of the lay Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai. The New Komeito has traditionally supported Japan’s pacifist stance, and during the election campaign Prime Minister Shinzo Abe trod carefully so as not to overstrain the coalition relationship.

     Mr Abe undoubtedly has enhanced his power by the election win. The LDP’s position is as strong now as it was when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi led the party to a stunning electoral victory in 2005. Ironically, as Koizumi’s immediate successor, Abe was a conspicuous failure in the top job first time around. Since returning to office last December, however, a reinvigorated and self-assured Abe has swept all before him. The Democratic Party of Japan, which held power for three years, has been reduced to a rump, and its future existence is in doubt. The experiment in two-party politics Japan embarked upon two decades ago is over.

     But behind the appearance of LDP invincibility is a more complex reality.

     The first thing to note is that voter turnout for the Upper House election was a miserable 53 per cent – the lowest in 20 years. The party’s big win was built on a shaky basis of voter apathy or disillusionment. Secondly, Abe’s popularity is due largely to recent signs of economic revival: stock prices are up, industrial output is growing and consumer confidence has rebounded. But ‘Abenomics’ must start delivering higher wages and greater job security if it is to outlast the electoral cycle. The problem for the government is that, in order to retain the confidence of the money markets, it must attend to reform of state finances by pushing through an increase in the consumption tax next year. There is a risk that the tax hike could snuff out the flame of economic revival before tangible benefits reach the pay packets of Middle Japan. Navigating this unpopular reform will consume a significant portion of Abe’s political capital.

     Then there is the issue of Japan’s strained relations with China. The dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands hangs over the relationship like a monsoon front. The first time he was the head of government Abe showed an unexpected capacity for rebuilding Sino-Japanese relations after a stormy period (under Koizumi). This time, however, he has a direct stake in the issue at the heart of the problem. Again, in venturing forward, he must risk political capital. There is a pressing need – and feelers have already gone out – for a leaders’ summit between Abe and the Chinese President Xi Jinping. But can there be a summit without some form of compromise, or at least an understanding, on the territorial issue? Will Abe lose favour with the right wing of his party if, in order to gain a summit, he, for instance, foregoes a visit to Yasukuni Shrine next month on or around the anniversary of the end of the war? There is little prospect of an early rapprochement with Beijing should he make such a visit, and the absence of progress on that front could start to spook the financial markets.

     All of this suggests that constitutional change may have to take a back seat. If, however, Abe decides to concentrate his effort on this potent agenda item, by trying to persuade the New Komeito to lend support for amendments (starting perhaps with an amendment to make it easier to change the constitution), the government’s economic and foreign policy objectives could end up being sacrificed to an ideological battle of uncertain outcome. It is a delicate political judgment. Constitutional change has been a plank of LDP policy since the party was formed in 1955, and many in its ranks are keen to seize the opportunity to cast off the last vestige of Japan’s wartime defeat. The prize is just out of reach of a simple ‘grab and run’. In reaching out for the holy grail of his conservative forebears Abe’s real mettle as a politician and a leader may be tested to the limit.

     Walter Hamilton is a former ABC Tokyo correspondent and author of “Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story”.

  • Zimmerman – race or gender? Guest blogger: Marcus Einfeld

    Following their counterparts in the US, the attention of the international media has been attracted by the acquittal last Saturday by a Miami jury of 6 women of neighbourhood watch monitor George Zimmerman for shooting dead a young black teenager Trayvon Martin. My knowledge of the matter comes only from media reports but I have taken the trouble to seek out some of the more responsible outlets for these observations.

    There was no dispute that Zimmerman shot and killed Martin who was unarmed at the time. Zimmerman claimed that Martin attacked him and that he fired in self-defence. Even Trayvon’s mother, although unquestioningly loving of him, has not suggested that her son was an angel.

    Understandably having regard to the long repression of African Americans by the predominant white population, there has been an outcry of racism as the sole or main explanation for the jury’s unwillingness to convict Zimmerman of either murder or manslaughter. Black celebrities like Beyonce have appeared at demonstrations to attack the verdict. President Obama spoke of the possibility that he might once have been Trayvon. Unlike Australia and many other places including other states of the US, a conviction for manslaughter in Florida would apparently have brought a sentence of life imprisonment.

    It is well known that America has had serious problems of racism throughout its history, and there is no reason to believe that either Zimmerman or his jury was unaffected by this scourge, one way or the other. However, there was apparently no evidence at the trial that Zimmerman had any history of racist attitudes or views.

    Moreover, before this jury was selected, each of the original panel was allowed to be interrogated about their possible biases and other motivations. This process, not generally followed in Australia or the UK, is designed to and often does throw up serious prejudices on the part of potential jurors that might affect the fair judgment of the case. Nothing apparently emerged to suggest that any of the eventual six jurors had any views that militated against an unbiased verdict in this case.

    So allow me to put an entirely different possible explanation of his acquittal. In my long experience as an advocate and a Judge, there was one thread of consistency. Assuming he is not a thug with an actual or presumed history of criminality, or the central allegation is of violence against a woman whose account is credible, a young man is significantly less likely to be convicted by female jurors than by males. This phenomenon may arise because women, especially mothers, have an acute understanding of how young men and boys get into trouble, perhaps born of their experiences with their own sons. They are also very quick to defend their sons of allegations of miscreances. Men tend to be much less patient and tolerant of young men, perhaps knowing what they did as young men themselves.

    In an interview with CNN after the trial, one woman juror spoke of the evidence given at the trial by a young female friend of the victim, called by the prosecution, as being unhelpful and unconvincing, for which read untrue. My second piece of relevant experience, then, is that women are infinitely more judgmental of other women than men. Women can tell that another woman is lying much more perceptively than men who tend to be protective and understanding, even forgiving.

    Taking all this into account, it is certainly worth considering that the combination of these two peculiarly female factors is just as likely to have affected the verdict as racism.