Category: Politics

  • Graham Freudenberg. Gough Whitlam Commemorative Oration.

     You will see below what I think is a remarkable speech by Graham Freudenberg about Gough Whitlam’s contemporary relevance.  This oration is much longer than I normally post on this blog, but it is an outstanding oration which I am sure you will enjoy.  The Whitlam Institute will also be publicising this oration.  John Menadue

    THE WHITLAM INSTITUTE

    GOUGH WHITLAM COMMEMORATIVE ORATION

    “Contemporary Relevance, comrade”:

    Gough Whitlam in the 21st century

    Graham Freudenberg

    St Kilda Town Hall, Melbourne, 4 March 2015

     

    Let me begin by doing what I did for the best part of my career, and re-cycle a speech by Gough Whitlam.  It was his first major speech in the House of Representatives on international affairs, in days when they actually debated foreign policy in the Australian Parliament – on 12 August 1954.  That was another world.  Yet this speech goes to the heart of my assertions about the contemporary relevance of Edward Gough Whitlam.  In style and substance, in his zest for the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate, for the sweep of its ideas, its challenge to prevailing orthodoxies – and for its optimism – it is quintessential Whitlam.  He made the speech soon after the Geneva Conference in 1954 had given the West a new chance for good sense over China and Vietnam; instead, alas, the lost opportunity of Geneva became a disastrous wrong turn for the United States and Australia. Whitlam had been a member of parliament for less than two years.  His star was just rising in the Labor Party, itself on the threshold of the Great Split.  I’ll quote just a few of his opening lines, to give the flavour:

    In the exciting and rapid movement of events during the last few months, the Minister for External Affairs [Mr Casey] has twice circumnavigated the globe in the steps of his model, Mr Eden, and his master, Mr Dulles [UK Foreign Secretary and US Secretary of State respectively].  Though the Minister saw fit to make statements to the newspapers in the United States of America and in other parts of the world, he did not say anything to the Australian press.  The only Minister who has seen fit to make any statement on international affairs has been, of all people, the Postmaster General (Mr Anthony)  [Doug Anthony’s father, that is], who three weeks ago addressed the annual conference of the Queensland branch of   the Australian Country Party.  In haranguing that rally of rustics, the Postmaster General declared that we Australians cannot live in peaceful co-existence with the Communists in this cold war.  That pronouncement, fortunately, was in direct contradiction of statements that had already been made by President Eisenhower, of the United States of America, and Sir Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister.  The declaration of the Postmaster General has been emphatically repudiated in this House by the Prime Minister [Mr Menzies] and the Leader of the Opposition [Dr Evatt].  As a consequence of that rash utterance, the Postmaster General, whose health in recent months was deemed to be rapidly qualifying him for a diplomatic post, has rendered himself persona non grata  to every head of State except President Syngman Rhee of the Republic of Korea, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Government [on Formosa].

    When, more than a decade later, I came to read all Whitlam’s early speeches with a professional eye, time and again I found myself thinking “I wish I could say things like that”.  So I did.

    But what could be the possible relevance of a speech made by a Labor backbencher more than 60 years ago, when Churchill was still Prime Minister of Britain and when Menzies still had more than eleven years to go as Prime Minister of Australia?  Well, this was the speech in which Whitlam first called for recognition of the People’s Republic of China, nineteen years before he achieved it.  In particular, he insisted that China’s sovereignty over Taiwan (Formosa) must never be allowed to become a cause for war with China, inevitably a third world war, inevitably a nuclear war.  Whitlam was daring to assert that the views and interests of Australia might not always be the same as those of the United States.  His propositions will be as relevant to our relations with China and the United States over the next 60 years as they were 60 years ago.  Further, he made an eloquent connection between hopes for democracy in our region, then in the throes of decolonisation, and the preservation and enhancement of parliamentary democracy in Australia – his life-long cause, from which all else flowed.  It was a speech marked by his special capacity to make connections between the wider world, the region around us, and Australia’s own standing and conduct.

    And this speech, not only in its content but in its approach, attitudes and insights, the breadth of vision enhanced by his attention to detail, provides a sub-theme for everything I say tonight:

    Gough Whitlam’s contemporary relevance lies not only, or even so much, in the actual policies and issues he placed on the Australian political and social agenda, but in the educative process, based on reason, relevance, knowledge and foresight, by which he reached them.  And perhaps most relevant of all to these times, for all of us as Australians, his challenge to conventional wisdom, the prejudices and fears of his times.

    And that included emphatically obsolences and obstructionism in Labor thinking.  I don’t pretend to be able to answer the question: “What would Whitlam do if he were the Labor leader today?”  I’m certainly not purporting to tell Bill Shorten and his colleagues: “This is how Gough would do it”.  But perhaps I can shed some light on what I believe would be his approach and attitudes to the very complex questions facing Australia and the Labor Party in today’s “rapid and exciting movement of events”.

    There is no place more fitting to do this than Melbourne.  I take the opportunity to make amends for an omission in my accounts of the life and times of Edward Gough Whitlam.  In my brief eulogy at the Sydney Town Hall on 5 November last year, for instance, I identified the central importance of his relationship with Werriwa, for 25 years his electorate in the outer Western suburbs of Sydney.  And he himself always acknowledged the impact of being a teenager in Canberra, as it struggled to grow into the national capital after the move from Melbourne in 1927.  But it should never be overlooked how much of Melbourne there was in Gough Whitlam.  It is not just the fact that he was born here – on 11 July 1916 – and spent the first five years of his life here.  The greatest single influence of his life was his father, Harry Ernest Frederick Whitlam, later Commonwealth Crown Solicitor; and Fred Whitlam was Melbourne through and through.  His influence on his son was steeped in the old Melbourne liberal/radical tradition.  Its strength, paradoxically, retarded the early growth of the Labor Party in Victoria. There was a remarkable revival of that tradition through the flourishing of the Fabian Society in the late fifties, sixties and beyond; and the Fabian relationship with the rise of Whitlam is an important part of the larger story.  “Among Australian Fabians, I am Fabius Maximus”, he said.  Though I myself believe the title properly belongs to Race Mathews.

    Gough returned to Melbourne, in thought, towards the very end.  When much in that mighty memory was fading, he would recall to his faithful visitors to his William Street, Sydney, office, like John Faulkner and John Menadue, that when he was 17 or 18 he took his grandmother to the new Shrine of Remembrance in St. Kilda Road and read out to her – she was nearly blind – the name of the battlefield in France where her son, his uncle, had died.

    Even at the time of Gough’s death, the comment was still being made that it was strange, with his background, he should have become a Labor leader.  There used to be Tories who regarded him as a class traitor.  The truth is, with his upbringing, with such a father and his values, Gough Whitlam could never have been any other than Labor, in the Australian context.

    In November 1973, in the glow of his first year in office, Whitlam delivered the Robert Garran Memorial Lecture in Canberra.  His father had delivered the inaugural Garran Lecture in 1959, one great public servant honouring another, who had been his Melbourne mentor.  Whitlam quoted his father, who was speaking of Australia’s role in the United Nations:

    The task before Australia is honourable, and its efficient discharge would make for a dynamic peace; to it, all the resources, skills and energy that Australia can command deserve to be committed.  The honourable task, however, could become majestic, and infinitely inspiring, and the peace could become creative, deep and rich, and enduring, if there be added what I have termed Excellence, Excellence in all its fullness.

    That is Gough Whitlam quoting his father.  But he might just as well have been quoting himself.  Perhaps, given the closeness of their relationship, he was.

    I acknowledge my own debt to Melbourne.  Melbourne made me.  I arrived here as a 20-year-old reporter for The Sun, via newspapers in Brisbane, Sydney and Mildura, in 1955 – the year of the Great Labor Split and the beginning of the Bolte era in Victoria.  Anyone who believes that the fifties were dull wasn’t there.  I missed the transformational event of the 1956 Olympic Games because I had taken myself off to London for a year.  It was a watershed year: Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech in Moscow denouncing Stalin; Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the Suez crisis; the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

    The Suez crisis was my political Road to Damascus.  Returning to Melbourne in 1957, I immediately joined the East Melbourne branch of the Australian Labor Party.  Arthur Calwell, then Deputy Leader of the Opposition under Evatt, was the member for Melbourne.  In 1961, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime when, by a wonderful combination of friends and flukes, I became Press Secretary to Arthur Calwell, by now the Leader of the Opposition,  and in 1967, to his successor Gough Whitlam.  When Whitlam made his famous or notorious “The impotent are pure” speech before the jeering delegates to the Victorian Labor Conference at the Melbourne Trades Hall in June 1967, Calwell watched the performance from the gallery and said to me in the vestibule afterwards: “You won’t be working for your new boss long now”.

    “Throughout my public life”, Whitlam said on the 30th anniversary of the It’s Time election, “I have tried to apply an over-arching principle and a unifying theme to all my work.  It can be stated in two words: contemporary relevance.  It was the fundamental test I applied, in particular to the development of Labor policy in the years before 2 December 1972.  There is a case to be argued that my government faltered whenever we lost sight of the principle or allowed the rush of events to subsume them.”

    Among the many fine and true things said at the Sydney Town Hall, I want to focus on a point made by Tony Whitlam.  He said that his father believed deeply in a strong two-party system.  The whole thrust of Whitlam’s career was to further his determination that the Labor Party should remain one of the two dominant forces within our parliament, either in government or able to form government, in its own right.  He saw strong, effective parties as the mainstay of parliamentary democracy.  The future of the two-party system and Labor’s role within it is now the big political question facing Australia today, not just the Labor Party.

    May I say here how much encouragement we draw throughout Australia from the victory of Daniel Andrews and the Labor Party in Victoria, so soon after Gough Whitlam’s death.  Like Neville Wran’s victory in New South Wales six months after the Dismissal, it had a galvanising effect and renewed our sense of what is possible.  As to the Queensland result, well, it shows that anything is possible.

    In his first statement on becoming Leader of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party on 8 February 1967, Whitlam said:

    For the Labor Party, what is clearly at stake is its future role within the Australian parliamentary system …. Our actions in the next few years must determine whether it continues to survive as a truly effective parliamentary force capable of governing and actually governing.

    Nearly nine years later, almost on the eve of the Dismissal, in the middle of his tremendous battle against the Senate, the ultimate challenge to the very legitimacy of a reforming Labor Government, Whitlam delivered the Curtin Memorial Lecture at the ANU in Canberra (29 October 1975).  Speaking of his work before 1972, he said:

    I addressed myself to three principal tasks: to develop a coherent program of relevant reform; to convince a majority of Australians that those reforms were relevant to their needs and their lives; and to convince the Labor Movement as a whole that the parliamentary institutions were relevant in achieving worthwhile reform.

    “The great organisational battles between 1967 and 1970, particularly in Victoria”, he said, were essentially about that third task:  “It was the toughest of all”.

    Keeping bright the Whitlam legend does not require manufacturing myths about him.  The stakes in Victoria were high; and while both sides invoked high principles, in the end the resolution of the conflict involved number-crunching of the roughest kind.  Whitlam was not particularly adept at that game, but accepted its necessity.  He largely left it to others – Lance Barnard in his rise to the leadership; Rex Connor in his self-imposed contest for the leadership with Jim Cairns in April 1968; Clyde Cameron in the reconstruction of Victoria in 1970.

    So I want to emphasise that electoral and political calculations figured as largely with Whitlam as any other political leader.  It was not all altruism and crashing through.  To gloss over Whitlam as a practising, party politician, working the system with the best of them, is the surest way to make him irrelevant.

    Whitlam set out, from the first, to combat the defeatism which had settled on much of the Labor Party, particularly in Victoria.  Political necessity drove his defiant speech to the Victorian ALP Conference in June 1967:

    We construct a philosophy of failure which finds in defeat a form of justification and a proof of the purity of our principles.  Certainly, the impotent are pure ….. Let us have none of this nonsense that defeat is in some way more moral than victory ….. I did not seek and do not want the leadership of Australia’s largest pressure group.  I propose to follow the traditions of those of our leaders who have seen the role of our party as striving to achieve, and achieving, the national government of Australia.

    Whitlam was especially infuriated by the self-serving claim that the bosses of the Victorian Central Executive were the principled guardians of Labor’s opposition to Australian involvement in the war in Vietnam.  In his landmark speech of 4 May 1965, Calwell had explicitly acknowledged the unpopularity of Labor’s position, to be met, in what seemed on the day a devastating reply by Menzies, with the sneer “If I might end on a horribly political note, it is a good thing occasionally to be in the majority”.  This was the same speech in which Menzies’ total justification for the war was that it was “part of the downward thrust by China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans”.  By such simplicities did Menzies reign supreme.  After the debacle of the 1966 election, ostensibly because of Vietnam, but more because of the dire state of the Labor Party itself, Melbourne became the heart and soul of the Moratorium Movement under the memorable leadership of Jim Cairns.

    Whitlam, by contrast, antagonised the Labor Left by his dismissive attitude towards the Moratorium Movement.  He told that Victorian Conference in June 1967 that protests “would not save a single Australian life or shorten the war by a single day.  Our consciences should not be so easily salved.  The present government opposes all moves which might bring about negotiations, and is the first to applaud and endorse escalation of the war.  Therefore our aim must be to replace that government.”

    But Vietnam was not really the divisive issue for Labor.  The most potent source of division was far older – over a century old in fact.  It was the issue of State Aid for non-government schools, meaning, in practice, the Catholic parish school system.

    It must be hard for any Australian under 60 to grasp fully the sectarian bitterness and the political explosiveness surrounding this issue.  Even the phrase itself – “State aid” – barely registers today.  The Bishops and the Church, even with so powerful an advocate as Archbishop Mannix, had failed utterly to dent the bipartisan intransigence against State Aid – the Liberal Party still essentially a Protestant  party; the Labor Party, its traditional Catholic support notwithstanding.  The unravelling came after the Split when the breakaway DLP put a pro-State aid plank in its platform.  From then on and for the next decade, the Labor Left made opposition to State Aid the test of Labor orthodoxy.  This was the issue which was to provide Whitlam with a platform to secure representation for the parliamentary leadership on the Labor Party’s Conference and Executive, ending the “36 faceless men” controversy.    It produced Whitlam’s outburst against “the 12 witless men” of the ALP Federal Executive, and his near-expulsion from the party in 1966.  It produced his triumph at the 1969 Federal Conference in Melbourne which adopted his ground-breaking proposal for the Schools Commission, granting aid to all schools – government and non-government alike – on the basis of needs.  It produced the last ditch defiance of the old VCE, sabotaging Labor’s 1970 State campaign, and perversely giving Whitlam unmistakable grounds for Federal intervention; which in turn paved the way for Victoria’s decisive role in electing the Whitlam Government in 1972 and saving it in 1974.

    What were the qualities that rewarded Whitlam with such success after these long years of turmoil and confrontation?  Perseverance, of course.  Stamina, of course.  But there was something else – a characteristic approach to political problems, and his way of arguing them out.  “Only connect”, E. M. Forster wrote, and Whitlam was the master of making connections – from the particular to the general, linking the local with the regional, the regional with the national and the national with the international.  Or reversing the process, as when debating standards for education, health, housing or transport, he would start from the carefully crafted formula: “Countries with which we would choose to compare ourselves”.  Sometimes, this left only Canada.  In the case of State Aid, he comprehensively connected the whole education issue with party reform, policy reform and electoral success – “the party, the policy, the people” in John Menadue’s 1967 formula.

    I see this making of connections as the essence of the Whitlam approach and the key to his contemporary relevance.  Remarkable, too, was his melding of personal experience with public policy.  In her truly great biography, Jenny Hocking describes his learning curve on aborigines when he witnessed their treatment in Queensland and the Northern Territory during his wartime years in the RAAF.  I have already mentioned the connection between Whitlam, the member for Werriwa, and Whitlam’s policies on “Schools, hospitals, cities”, to use his shorthand for his Program, his deep understanding that Australia is a nation of immigrants, and all the opportunities and obligations which flow from that central fact, his passion for electoral reform, one-vote, one-value, and even the national sewerage program.  He himself dated his determination to modernise the Constitution from the failure of the 1944 referendum, broadening and deepening with his service on the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reform.  This seminal experience led him to focus on the connection between the Constitution and the Labor Platform.  He was exasperated by the way the Labor Party had allowed the High Court rejection of bank nationalisation under Section 92 in 1948 to become an excuse for policy stagnation.   He later put his attitude in this way:

    I was concerned by the way in which the Labor Party’s failure to move on, to look ahead, to attempt to find new ways towards reform, was short-changing the Australian people and short-changing the Party itself.  The Party became obsessed with the idea that rather than being about revival for the future, its purpose was to return to a more comfortable past – not renovation but mere restoration.  As a result, both the achievements of the past and the hopes for the future receded equally.  The Party stagnated and the Platform was stultified.

    There, in its most striking form, is Whitlam’s continuing challenge – to modernise the Party, to modernise the Platform, to modernise the Party’s place in a modernised Australia.  He wanted, of course, to modernise the Australian Constitution, and no Australian leader worked harder to achieve change by referendum.  Right to the end, he never gave up on this, despite the overwhelming evidence that change by the direct referendum route is almost always foredoomed in Australia.  Yet despite this, he achieved real change in the spirit of the Australian Constitution, in its interpretation and in the application of the Constitution as it exists to the implementation of Labor policy.  He never succeeded in altering the Constitution by a single line or letter, but he enlarged the Constitution like no other leader.  As in so much else, Whitlam was the Great Enlarger.

    He did it in three ways.

    First, by pointing the Labor Party to the parts of the Constitution which were relevant and achievable.  As he said in 1961, in his first Curtin Memorial Lecture:

    In our obsession with Section 92, which is held up as the      bulwark of private enterprise, we forget Section 96, which is     the charter of public enterprise.

    In that speech, too, he derided the most sacred of Labor’s cows, the socialist objective, as “weak, defensive and apologetic”.  At the same time, he was not apologetic about calling himself a socialist and was, in fact, the last Labor leader to do so.

    Second, in government, he widened the Constitution and its interpretation whenever his legislation was tested in the High Court, starting with the Hamer Government challenge to the Australian Assistance Plan in 1974.  He was justly proud of the fact that no Whitlam Government laws were ever held to be unconstitutional.

    Thirdly, most relevant of all, he enlarged the Australian Constitution by the use of the external power, and by enshrining key laws within covenants of the United Nations and the International Labor Organisation.  The Racial Discrimination Act is an outstanding example.

    And here I make the claim that the connections Whitlam made between what we do here and our standing in the world represents his distinctive expression of Australian patriotism – rational, authentic and deep patriotism.

    Let me give a specific example.  In two visits to Papua New Guinea in 1970 and 1971, as Opposition leader, he proclaimed independence for PNG by 1976.  In Government, he advanced the time-table by a year.  The independence ceremony in Port Moresby in September 1975 was the last time Sir John Kerr and Whitlam appeared in public together.  During the 1970 visit, his meetings with Michael Somare were tracked by ASIO.  After he addressed 10,000 Tolai at Rabaul, Prime Minister Gorton said he would have “blood on his hands” if there were any violence on the Gazelle Peninsula.  The Minister for Territories, CEB Barnes, thought PNG might be ready for independence in 25 to 100 years.  This was probably majority opinion in Australia.  Seven Australian Prime Ministers attended Whitlam’s Memorial on 4 November 2014 – with five Prime Ministers from PNG, including Michael Somare.

    How did Whitlam turn around Australia’s stance so completely, so quickly?  I remember vividly the day in Port Moresby in January 1971 when he dictated the thoughts which we worked up as the definitive statement on PNG independence:

    All Australians must now realize how damaging and    dangerous a reputation Australia’s present policies produce.  What the world sees about Australia is that we have an aboriginal population with the highest infant mortality on earth, that we have eagerly supported the most unpopular war    in modern times on the ground that Asia should be a      battleground for our freedom, that we support the sale of arms to South Africa, that the whole world believes that our immigration policy is based on colour and that we run one of the world’s last colonies.  We may profess our good intentions      and feel that we are victims of special circumstances but the combination of such policies leans heavily indeed on the world’s goodwill and on Australia’s credibility.

    The true patriot therefore will not seek to justify and   prolong these policies but will seek to change them.

    It is upon his determination to protect and advance Australia’s reputation and standing in the world that I stake my strongest claim for Whitlam’s contemporary relevance.  I deeply believe that if the Labor leadership had taken its stand clearly on Australia’s international reputation and international obligations on refugees from the beginning, in 2001, we would not have had fourteen years of this malignancy, eating away at our national self-respect.  Of course, Australians care about “who comes here and the circumstances in which they come”.  But, given leadership, they do care for Australia’s good name in the world.  How else were Whitlam and Don Dunstan, together with quite small public interest groups in the universities, churches and unions, able to persuade the Labor Party in 1965 to abandon its most cherished tradition and Australia’s deepest fears embodied in the White Australia Policy?

    So I stress the importance of making connections in Whitlam’s approach to policy.  But I am bound to acknowledge that there were disconnections when it came to implementing policy in government.  The connections were Whitlam at his most constructive; the disconnections the most damaging.  No appraisal of his contemporary relevance can omit the failures, and the lessons to be learned from them.

    In his book The Whitlam Government, Whitlam himself makes a significant admission.  The matter-of-fact way he puts it masks the pain it cost him to make it.  He wrote (p.195):  “The chief economic failure of my Government resulted from the wage explosion of 1974.  In part, our failure was a failure of communication, our failure to persuade the trade union movement to accept the central concept of Labor’s program.”

    He then spelt his definition of the meaning of equality in modern Australia: “That central concept was this: in modern communities, even the wealthiest family cannot provide its members with the best education, with the best medical treatment, the best environment, unaided by the community.  Increasingly, the basic services and opportunities which determine the real standard of life of a family or an individual can only be provided by the community and only to the extent to which the community is willing to provide them.  Either the community provides them or they will not be provided at all.  In the Australian context, this means that the community, through the national Government, must finance them or they     will not be financed at all.”

    That is the bed-rock of the Whitlam Program, with its over-arching theme of a more equal Australia.  Then comes his painful admission: “I have to acknowledge that this philosophy was never really accepted by the Labor movement of Australia at any time after the election of its own Labor Government.”

    In a generous review in The Age, Sir Paul Hasluck described the book as “the longest trumpet voluntary in political literature”. But it seems to have escaped Sir Paul that there could hardly be a more mortifying admission than that the very core of Labor support had not accepted the relevance of the Whitlam Program to its immediate concerns.  By contrast, the Hawke and Keating Governments succeeded in persuading the unions to accept the concept of a social wage, and, through the Accords, made it the basis of their transformation of the Australian economy.

    Whitlam notoriously said: “I don’t mind how many prima donnas there are in my Cabinet, as long as I’m prima donna assoluta”.  It was a throwaway line that actually highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of the Whitlam style of government: individual brilliance against collegial disarray.  There was a serious gap between the primacy he gave to Parliament, to parliamentary government on one hand, and the operation of its most distinctive feature, the Cabinet, the great engine of parliamentary government.  Cabinet embodies the two principles that make parliamentary democracy work effectively – Cabinet solidarity, and answerability to Parliament.  Cabinet is the grand committee of the nation.  Bob Hawke’s superb chairmanship skills made his Cabinet the most successful in our history.  A properly-run Cabinet would not have enmeshed the Whitlam Government in the toils of the loans affair.

    Nevertheless, while the orchestration was sometimes discordant, the Whitlam Government was not a one-man band, although Gough himself scarcely discouraged the notion.  “What would happen if you were run over by the proverbial bus”, Mike Willesee asked him in 1974.  “In the light of my government’s public transport reforms, that is highly improbable”.  But the free rein Whitlam gave his Ministers did become the basis for its record of achievement.  The one thing he expected was that they would act in the spirit of the Program, especially as set out in the It’s Time Policy Speech.  As Kim Beazley Snr said: “The Platform is the Old Testament; the policy speech is the New Testament”.  He was only half-joking.

    There will never be another Policy Speech like it.  At least I devoutly hope so, because I hope that the conditions which produced it will never be repeated.  That is, I hope fervently for the sake of Australian parliamentary democracy that the Australian Labor Party will never again be out for 23 years, or anything like 23 years.  We cannot fully understand the nature, content and purpose of the It’s Time  Policy Speech, unless we place it firmly in the context of those 23 years.  Nor, for that matter, can we fully understand the conduct and fate of the Whitlam Government without understanding the sense of urgency and expectation those lost 23 years produced.

    There were outstanding Ministers.  Think of Bill Hayden, who built Medibank – with its vital principle of universal access to health care – so strong that it defied seven attempts by the Fraser Government to dismantle it and enabled the Hawke Government to restore it as Medicare.  The attacks on its basic principles by the present Federal government are, of course, part of its current turmoil.  Contemporary relevance indeed!

    Again, Hayden had progressed far towards establishing a national superannuation scheme.  Keating accomplished it, and Labor’s role as the custodian of superannuation, and its true principles, remains, or should be, one of its greatest electoral assets.

    Think of Lionel Murphy, whose transformational law reforms constitute almost a parallel program.  His concerns about the accountability of the national security apparatus remain a question of fundamental relevance to Australian democracy.

    Or think of Al Grassby.  For dismantling White Australia (“Give me a shovel and I will bury it”, he said to a sceptical reporter in Manila); for establishing multicultural Australia, he paid a high political price.  He lost his seat in what Whitlam called Australia’s first overtly racist campaign in 1974.  We may think we have come a long way since 1974.  On the other hand, we may think that the story has deep contemporary relevance, certainly in terms of the need for unremitting vigilance in the work of building a more inclusive and tolerant Australia.

    I think, in particular, of Tom Uren, who breathed life into the most original and wide-ranging of all the Whitlam concepts, really the heart of the Whitlam project – national involvement in cities and regional centres.  The restoration of his Department of Urban Affairs is again urgent and relevant to the Australian people in almost every aspect of their daily lives.

    These examples remind us of a largely neglected, if not forgotten, aspect of the Whitlam project – how much, both in development and implementation, the Whitlam Program was a collective effort, how much he sought and welcomed the ideas and advice of others, inside and beyond the Labor Party.  Many years later, I suggested that he should acknowledge that “the Program did not spring, like Minerva, fully armed from Zeus’ brow”.  He agreed entirely, but insisted that he was not going down to posterity confusing the Greek and Roman gods.  Gough thought Zeus more appropriate than Jupiter, so Minerva had to give way to Athena.

    This aspect of the Whitlam project, as a cooperative and collaborative effort, will, I believe, become increasingly relevant to Labor’s mission, as Australia moves into a more complex era, with its communities more dissociated, its voters more volatile, its competing interests more vocal, its public discourse more discordant, if not debauched, its media ever more pervasive.

    More than a century ago, Alfred Deakin complained about the impossibility of governing “with a reporter at one’s elbow”.  We may speculate how Gough would have coped, in a world of instant response, endless spin, the ten second grab and the cacophony of self-appointed pundits.  I think I know the answer.  Brilliantly.  Three reasons: He was the master of the one-liner before the term was invented.  He would have dominated the mainstream media by open, long and frequent press conferences.  And, above all, he would have refused to relegate Parliament to its present humiliating role as an almost incidental channel of political communication.

    Almost our last collaboration, stretching across more than 40 years, was the Foreword to Troy Bramston’s splendid collection, The Whitlam Legacy.  Gough knew it would be his last serious word on Australian politics:

    May I make one valedictory point: never forget the primacy of Parliament as the great forum for developing, presenting and explaining policy.  This seems to me the best response we can make to the unprecedented demands now made on our leaders and representatives by the relentless news cycle, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  If we develop, define and defend our policies thoroughly before their implementation, we will be much less likely to be blown off course by the accidents and aberrations inseparable from modern political life.  And Parliament is by far the best place to achieve it.

    This was the precept and practice of a life time.

    Parliament is, or should be, a marvellous resource, and it has been the anchor of our national life longer than almost any country in the world and, by the standard of the suffrage – the right to vote – more democratic longer than any.  But if the Labor Party is to survive as the prime mover in the development and implementation of the public polity – the party of new ideas – its policy makers will need to draw on all the available resources, reaching out beyond its own resources and ranks.  This points to a future role for independent but dedicated resources like the Whitlam Institute itself.  This was Gough’s own deep hope as he watched the Institute grow during his rich and mellow autumnal years.

    Partly because of his long and active public life, there is a timelessness about Gough Whitlam’s legacy, extraordinary for a working politician who reached the heights of his achievement forty years ago and whose Prime Ministership lasted only three years.  But I always emphasise that Gough Whitlam was also very much a man of his time.  His vision of a more equal Australia, a more independent Australia, a more inclusive, generous and tolerant Australia, a more forward-looking and outward looking Australia, belongs to all time.  But the means by which he sought to advance Australia towards that vision reflected his own times, the influences, pre-occupations and demands of his time, the political, constitutional, social and economic opportunities and constraints of his time.  Hence his insistence on contemporary relevance.  Here in St. Kilda Town Hall, closing his great campaign in 1972, he invoked Ben Chifley’s “light on the hill”.  His program was not the light on the hill; but he shone a bright light along the path.

    Far be it from me to presume to put words into Gough Whitlam’s mouth, at least now that he cannot speak for himself.  But I do believe that his first advice to his successors – the Labor leadership, the members, supporters and well-wishers – as they pursue their tasks of shaping and re-shaping Labor policies, Australian policies, for the 21st century, in times and circumstances every bit as daunting and challenging as those he faced in his time – I believe that his watchword would be for them, as his instruction was so often to me:

    “Contemporary relevance, comrade”.

     

  • John Menadue. Here we go again – more mission creep in Iraq.

    We seem unable to learn from the history of past centuries and decades as we plan to send another 300 Australian troops to Iraq to train forces fighting IS.

    To show his patriotic fervour Tony Abbott needed eight Australian flags as a backdrop for his announcement yesterday. I don’t recall seeing a Prime Minister wrapped in so many flags!

    For centuries foreigners like the Greeks, Romans and British, thought that they could subdue Iraq to their wishes. In the process, the fragile country of Iraq has been subject to imperialism, resource exploitation, despotism and religious rivalry. The most recent calamity inflicted on the long-suffering Iraqi people was at the hands of George W Bush, supported by Tony Blair and John Howard. We were told that the invasion of Iraq was to expand freedom and democracy in Iraq and free that poor country from Saddam Hussein. Not so frequently mentioned was access to the fifth largest oil deposit in the world as Rupert Murdoch told us.

    The result has been catastrophe for the Iraqi people and almost everyone except the US companies who gorged themselves on military contracts.

    In opposing IS we chose to forget that the Saudi government and wealthy Saudis, along with the wealthy in the Emirates, have been funding IS.  They did the same for Al Qaeda.

    The result of all the most recent foreign intervention has been seen most recently in Mosul where the brutal advance of IS has ended 1,600 years of Christian worship in the province.  Saddam Hussein was a monster but at least he kept the IS ‘death cult’ caged. Do George Bush and John Howard and Tony Abbott feel responsible for the consequences of earlier actions in invading Iraq?

    Have we forgotten Vietnam and all the other disastrous wars that we have got involved in at the request of the US?  Invariably these wars start with humanitarian aid, then advisers, then logistic support and all the way from there to full-scale military involvement in causes we don’t understand. In Vietnam and later in Iraq and Afghanistan our role steadily expanded with disastrous consequences for everyone concerned.

    Having withdrawn from Iraq, we are now back again. First it was humanitarian air drops. Then it was arms to elements of the Kurdish Workers’ Party in Northern Iraq, which is a proscribed terrorist organisation. Our mission creep then moved to sending 200 Special Forces to help train the Iraqi army. Then we sent 600 RAAF personnel and aircraft to operate out of the Gulf. Now we are planning to send another 300 Australian trainers. And there is probably more to come.  Prime Minister Abbott refused yesterday to rule out further military commitments. ‘I’m not going to be too prescriptive’ he said. If all that is not mission creep, I don’t know what is.

    The recent attempts to save Iraq by sending more trainers go back to 2003. Since then there have been enormous contributions of blood and money from many countries – the US, Iran, Israel, Rumania, NATO, Japan, Jordan, New Zealand, and many others including ourselves. In all, the US alone has spent between $US20 billion and $US28 billion to train the Iraqi army. But last year the Iraqi army which we thought we had trained threw its arms away and surrendered to the IS in northern Iraq. Our training of the Iraqi army has been an abject failure every step of the way. This is despite the fact that we were told ad nauseam about the enormous progress that was being made in training the army. In fact it was a failure on such a scale that it is very difficult to admit.

    At its most basic level this is a sectarian war between Shia and Sunnis. Foreign fighters make it worse.

    Foreign interests have brought disaster to the Iraqi people for centuries. The history lesson is quite clear that foreigners and particularly westerners cannot solve Iraq’s problems. We invariably make them worse. Only the Iraqis and their neighbours can solve the problem of IS.

    Our intervention over the last decade in Iraq has also made us more prone to domestic terrorism. Once again Tony Abbott won’t acknowledge the obvious that our foreign intervention is counterproductive not only in Iraq but it increases the risk of more terrorism in Australia.

    Sadly the ALP, once again allows itself to be wedged

    In The Guardian yesterday Tom Switzer a long-time supporter of Tony Abbott said ‘It pains me to say it but Abbott has learned nothing about Iraq. He’s taken the Islamic State’s bait.

    See link to article below.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/03/it-pains-me-to-say-it-but-abbott-has-learned-nothing-about-iraq-hes-taken-the-islamic-states-bait

     

  • Walter Hamilton. The Nationalist Siren of Destruction

    Virulent, fanatical nationalism is not the answer.

    It’s not the answer in Russia, where an opponent of Putin’s war on Ukraine was murdered on the streets of Moscow in broad daylight. It’s not the answer in China where the ruling Communist Party needs a new raison d’etre after embracing capitalism without liberalism. It is not the answer in Japan, where a conservative government needs a cover for its inability to end a decades-long economic malaise. It is not the answer in South Korea, where the government wants to show its Japan-bashing credentials are just as good as those of the rabid propagandists of North Korea.

    Let’s take the last case, Korea, where the anniversary of the 1919 nationalistic uprising against Japan’s colonial rule was marked last Sunday.

    I took the opportunity to spend some time watching a South Korean cable news service that day and witnessed a cavalcade of commentary portraying the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula between 1910 and 1945 as one unrelieved series of atrocities. Apart from it being an historical distortion (though Japan could be a brutal colonial power, considerable economic development accompanied its rule), one has to ask what is the use of stoking public animosity in 2015 over events that ended 70 years ago?

    The next item in the station’s news bulletin continued along the same lines. It proudly described the work of the government’s Investigative Commission on Pro-Japanese Collaborators’ Property. Perhaps you have never heard about this entity. Anyone who considers South Korea an advanced democracy should, I suggest, know about it. In 2005, the South Korean parliament passed a law enabling this “collaborators’” commission to seize the property of the descendants of those deemed to have assisted the long-since-ended Japanese occupation. That’s right, the sins of the grandfathers and great grandfathers, it was decided, shall be visited on the present generation!

    A police officer, for instance, who carried out a search order in 1915 for his Japanese overlords, under this extraordinary law, can be retrospectively condemned and his distant descendants hauled into court, branded as a “collaborator’s family”, and stripped of their property. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been seized already, and the commission has its eyes on another $100 million this year, according to the news report. The money is paid over to the descendants of approved former “freedom fighters”.

    South Africa, under Nelson Mandela, gave the world a superior model for dealing with the errors and evils of the past: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mandela, to his credit, recognized it was better to heal wounds rather than rub salt into them––in the pursuit of social cohesion and, just as importantly, in the service of a genuine desire to reveal the truth of past misdeeds. South Korea advances the pursuit of a truthful accounting for the past not one inch by a policy of retribution, by whipping up public feeling with propaganda parading as history. It is the sort of thing one might expect from North Korea, which has little else going for it, and not from a modern, outward-looking state.

    President Park Geun-hye inherited a situation when she took office two years in which relations between South Korea and Japan were as bad as they’ve ever been since the end of World War Two. Whether or not she wanted to steer a different course, her hands were tied by inflamed domestic sentiment and the provocative noises coming from Japanese nationalists, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In her March First anniversary remarks this week, President Park repeated calls for Japan to show proper contrition for such past episodes as the coercive use of women for prostitution––the so-called “comfort women”­­––organized by the Japanese military.

    I have written about this in previous blogs, taking issue with nationalist revisionism in Japan; but the debasement of history is not a one-sided affair by any stretch of the imagination. Koreans, for instance, find it difficult to face up to the fact that the Korean War was a fratricidal conflict. Sure, the scene was set by decades of colonial rule and a ham-fisted U.S. occupation after 1945, but what ensued was Koreans killing Koreans, in one of the most vicious conflicts of modern times. This is not a perspective you’ll get, unalloyed, from either Seoul or Pyongyang.

    Instead of Truth and Reconciliation, the nations of East Asia are hung up on Un-Truth and Recrimination. The concept of reconciliation in exchange for truth is desperately in short supply, and yet it is the only way forward from what is a bitter, corrosive and dangerous flirtation with populism and prejudice––in South Korea, Japan and China alike. President Park, in her recent remarks, at least acknowledged that a natural flow of mutual exchange with Japan­­­––through tourism, investment and trade––was worth protecting. It seems to this observer she wants to move towards a more constructive bilateral relationship. Indeed, preparations are underway for an important trilateral meeting soon of the foreign ministers of Japan, China and South Korea. It should be a staging post on the way to a long-overdue trilateral leaders’ summit, though no timetable has been made public.

    It is time for East Asia’s powerhouse nations to embrace Truth and Reconciliation––and abandon Un-Truth and Recrimination­­––in their handling of grievances over past misdeeds. Whether the leaders of the three nations have the vision and guts to break from their recent pandering to nationalist cheer-squads is the great imponderable. They could all use a hefty dose of humility and, by taking a history lesson from a much wiser and greater leader than any of them, the late Nelson Mandela, start building bridges for this and future generations.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan and South Korea for 11 years for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

     

     

     

     

  • Michael Breen.  Home Sour Home

    Fourteen women have died this year as a result of domestic violence. Australians killed by terrorists in the same period, zero. 

    The ABC Q&A programme February 23rd on Domestic Violence had an enormous response from the viewer and studio audiences. Many thanked the ABC for broaching the matter. Many tragic first hand experiences were aired. For some this was cathartic but the unanswered questions and the visible and obscured statistics leave no doubt that this is a critical national issue. 

    Q&A Tweet.The conversation Australia needed to have . 

    No one from the programme nor beyond it suggests this is a simple matter with simple remedies waiting to be applied. It is vastly complex and its elements are at various depths of awareness, responsibility and are the preserve of several disciplines, services and agencies. Police, social workers, mental health workers, refuge staffs, psychologists, religious leaders, lawyers, courts and victims, perpetrators all hold chips of the ugly mosaic. 

    There are some areas, some aspects which are part of the complexity that get more attention than others less obvious and more contentious. I would like to consider some of the latter, especially with regard to men.

    Q&A Tweet. Oh the irony. just a day after #Qanda doing a show on domestic violence, the fed gov’t display the characteristics that promote it. 

    Public violence usually draws a crowd. Violence in private especially inside a house has few attendees. Cops by and large hate going to “domestics” where often there is little they can do and where they can become the recipients of the free flowing aggression. This raises the question of how well they are trained for this event common in their work lives and what support they get to manage the effect it has on them individually.

    For a victim to bring a criminal charge requires enormous courage and support. Often the victim wishes that they had never commenced the process. So the hiddenness of domestic violence adds to its stuckness. Then again victims have the first hand experiences but cannot provide solutions. They know what happens but not how it happens. We need to know how to stop what happens. Often victims’ personal adjustments to live a peaceful life or avoid aggression are lost to current memory as they stretch back over the years. They become like the frog placed in a pot of water on the stove adjusting to the incremental rises in temperature so efficiently that the frog eventually boils to death. 

    The other most knowledgeable participant is the perpetrator and we need to know much more of the processes in the minds and hearts of these people, many of whom have been raised in violent family systems.

     

    Q&A Tweet.I will NOT have my son indoctrinated at school that he is innately created a violent abuser. 

    Further, apportioning blame is in a different order from knowing what actually happened and how to avoid it.  Investigation into the mechanics of the disorder is a separate process from participants finding their treatment in therapy. 

    When we consider violence it is important not to skip parts of the picture no matter how unpleasant or minute. We know that people who experienced violent parenting are more likely to parent or relate violently; unless they have dealt with their experiences in therapy. Tony Cooke, social worker and the son of a Western Australian serial murderer, said, “If you have been touched by violence you have to deal with it”. 

    But do we know how violently a violent person operates inside their own psyche? Do they manage themselves with harshness or violence or are they moral imbeciles who have no criteria or categories of morality or ethics? My guess is that each person is a mixture of all of these factors.  Many more adolescents than we imagine are self harming in our community.  Do we know why? Is it violence turned inward? 

    We know that our society likes violence, when it happens to someone else. Stories and images our media select must sell papers or attract viewers; otherwise why put the stuff out there? 

    Sporting games are often very violent in themselves as is the language of their commentators.  And the spectacle more attractive than the game itself is a players’ or spectators’ brawl. Youths, mostly male become the expendable gladiators  fighting on behalf of their fans and financial promoters. Is it any wonder that these public contestants involved in on-field and off-field fighting? But as soon as the violence of sport is mentioned or criticised the intimidating voices defending the sacred taboos threaten consequences like “developing softies, milksops, pansies” as the alternatives.

    Parliamentary behaviour so often involves viciously attacking the person that it is far from edifying example, for the rest of the community.  Our society tolerates the degrading institution of women’s wages being 18% lower than males doing the same work. 

    Capitalism needs tough guys, winners not cooperators, we are told.  Courses and written stuff offered as training for managers use the language of warfare. Do we ever ask what are the societal costs for men to be acculturated in this way?  What are the consequences of learning to behave as if control is everything? What happens to the person’s desire for softness, gentleness, compassion, mercy? 

    Or what are a man’s fears if he is seen to be sentimental or tearful? 

    The Australian man’s upbringing and schooling are likely to have involved corporal punishment, verbal abuse, belittling and sledging.  “Counselling” has become a weasel white wash for a ticking off.

    The first woman most men meet is their mother. If she is dominant and critical, controlling and manipulative that inevitably affects a man’s attitudes to all women.  This is especially critical if the father figure is inexpressive, weak or withdrawing. When his wife is critical many a man hears his mother’s voice anew.  Is it possible that an attack on the external female critical person is an attempt to silence the man’s internal critical voice? Could violence be an inappropriate response to being taunted, shamed or belittled? He may have been little and inadequate when he was first treated this way, but now he is big and has more response options. In such circumstances is the man hearing that he is not a real man? An ex-student of mine was murdered by a hitchhiker to whom he gave a lift. The hiker went home and announced to his partner, “Now I am a real man”.  These are aberrant, inappropriate and immoral responses. Nor are they defensible. However if we are to understand violent behaviour we need to know its aetiology. 

    Q&A Tweet:if some of us gals seemed a bit peeved with men at times try to gain some understanding as to why – failure to protect. 

    I must restate that I am not seeking to blame or excuse but to ask questions, however unpalatable, about why men, particularly, act out in the ways which we often do. 

    In the 1970s and 1980s in response to feminism a lot of men felt threatened. Men were often impugned as “the problem”. Some feminists said it was ok to blame men for everything because women had had such a bad deal for so long. One response was the development of courses, workshops and groups for men. Unfortunately many of these were inexpertly led but they were spaces to share common material. Most courses I was involved in with had men lamenting or craving better relationships with their fathers and deeper relationships with other men. The Australian cultural conserves impeded both. There were lots of cathartic tears and ept and inept tenderness from male peers. Robert Bly’s article “Iron John” about finding the primitive slimy man in all of us is supposed to have been the most photocopied article of the decade. In hindsight it was not such a good item, but it was all that there was at the time though it treated man isolated from family and children. The “Mens Movement” in Australia was largely a boys movement. 

    Q&A Tweet:‘why doesn’t she leave?’ – great title for a powerful movie to educate community how hard it can be & how attitudes need to change. 

    Finally if leadership is finding a procession to get in front of, the current government could resource all kinds of successful programmes such as the one sent in by the Q&A viewer, a violent perpetrator reformed and his football team in the Northern Territory. Giving grants for research is probably not as effective as  setting up competitions with prizes for interventions which can be demonstrated to  achieve results.

    Michael  Breen is a ‘Humanistic Psychologist’

  • We should expect more.

    In this article in The Guardian, Richard Flanagan, the Booker Prize winner, refers to the increasing ugliness in Australian public life.  He says ‘Writing my novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943. They began decades before with politicians, public figures and journalists promoting the idea of some people being less than people’.  He makes the case that the brutality and cruelty we now see has been developing for years. I think it really began with the Howard Government in 1996. To read this article, see the link below.  John Menadue

    http://gu.com/p/4663q/sbl

  • Andrew Leigh. The remarkable persistence of power and privilege.

    If you want to know who made up Australia’s elite in the nineteenth century, a useful place to look is the Australian Dictionary of Biography. In its many volumes, you’ll find business leaders, scientists, media barons and politicians who have featured among the upper echelons of Australian society.

    Now, suppose we take the first cohort of significant Australians – those who died before 1880 – and identify those with unusual surnames like Ebden orMaconochie. People with those names were overrepresented among the elite in the nineteenth century. Are they still at the top of society, or are they mixed through?

    The answer to this question will depend on the level of social mobility we have in Australia. In a very mobile society, privilege dissipates quickly. Children of doctors become labourers, and children of cleaners become lawyers. “Class-jumping” is the norm. Conversely, in an immobile society, we should expect to see privilege perpetuated across generations. If wealth can easily be passed down to one’s children, if education is costly, and if jobs are based on old school ties rather than ability, then the same surnames will stay at the top across generations.

    For Australia, it turns out that if we look at the register of modern-day medical practitioners, we find the privileged names of the nineteenth century overrepresented by a factor of nearly three. In other words, if your ancestor was at the top of Australian society six generations ago, you are three times more likely than the average Australian to be a doctor today.

    In The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, economist Gregory Clark uses rare surnames to learn more about the extent to which societies are fluid or static. Take the case of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), the famous diarist who was secretary of the English Admiralty. Pepys has been a rare name since it entered the ranks of the elite in the late 1400s. And yet in the past 500 years, Pepyses have attended Oxford or Cambridge universities at a rate at least twenty times that of the general population. On average, those of them who’ve died over the past decade left wealth of at least five times the British average. Four of the eighteen living Pepyses are medical doctors. Only in a society with extremely low levels of social mobility would we expect a name to persist among the elites in this way.

    Analysing mobility in medieval England, Clark finds that people with names derived from jobs (Cook, Butler, Thatcher and so on) were more likely to move upwards, while those with names that derive from towns (including Baskerville, Pakenham and Walton) tended to move downwards. And not much changed after the industrial revolution. Surnames of Oxbridge graduates in the early 1800s, for instance, are three times as common among British MPs in the late 1900s.

    In the United States, tax return data for the top taxpayers was publicly reported in 1923–24. Nearly a century later, people with the same surnames as those who featured on the list are three to four times as likely to be doctors or lawyers, while those with lower-status names are underrepresented. People with the high-status surname Katz are twelve times as likely to be doctors and lawyers as those with the low-status surname Washington.

    In Japan, samurai surnames date back to before the 1868 Meiji restoration. Even today, they are overrepresented at least fourfold among doctors, lawyers, professors and writers. In China, Qing surnames overrepresented among the nineteenth-century elite are overrepresented among today’s corporate board chairs and government officials. In Chile, surnames overrepresented among landowners in the 1850s are still overrepresented among high-earning occupations.

    Strikingly, Clark finds persistence even in Sweden, one of the world’s most egalitarian societies. The 1600s and 1700s saw the creation of a set of “noble surnames,” which today have twice their expected share of doctors, five times their expected share of lawyers, and three times their share of members of the top 1 per cent of income earners. This degree of persistence of status across ten generations demonstrates the power of inherited privilege.

    GREGORY CLARK’s analysis of intergenerational mobility signals a marked shift in the way economists think about social mobility. In his 1988 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Gary Becker argued that “earnings are not strongly transmitted from fathers to sons.” Four years later, Gary Solon showed that prior researchers had been overestimating the degree of social mobility because they were using just a single year of data.

    To see how this happens, imagine a high-earning barrister who happens to take six months off work in the year of the survey. Now suppose his son becomes a high-earning barrister too. A study that used just one year of data might wrongly assume that this was a case of someone moving from rags to riches. But a study that used several years of data would see that both father and son were well-off.

    At this point, I need to introduce a few numbers. The standard measure of mobility across generations is the “elasticity” of children’s earnings with respect to their parents’ earnings – in other words, how closely the former reflects the latter. Because women have tended to have much lower rates of paid work, researchers have focused on the father–son earnings elasticity. An elasticity of zero means there was no relationship between the earnings of fathers and sons, while an elasticity of one would mean that a 10 per cent rise in fathers’ earnings was associated with a 10 per cent rise in sons’ earnings. The closer the elasticity gets to one, the less mobile the society.

    Elasticity measures aren’t confined to income. The elasticity of height, for example, is about 0.5, which means that if a father is ten centimetres taller than average then we expect his sons to be five centimetres taller than average. Sure, there are tall fathers with short sons (and vice versa), but basketball dads are generally taller than gymnast dads.

    In the case of earnings, economists’ best estimate of intergenerational elasticity went from 0.2 when they used a single year of earnings (as did the studies Gary Becker was relying on) to 0.4 when they used a few years of earnings (Gary Solon’s approach). Over the next decade, US researchers threw better and better data at the problem, and each time they found less and less mobility. Using more than a decade of earnings data, Bhashkar Mazumder estimated in 2005 that the intergenerational earnings elasticity for the United States was 0.6. That would put it higher than the father–son height elasticity. Among American sons, fathers had a larger impact on their earnings than on their stature.

    Using similar techniques, researchers began estimating father–son earnings elasticities for other countries. As one survey showed, Scandinavian nations tended to be extremely mobile, with elasticities below 0.2. In Latin America, there was much less class-jumping, with elasticities over 0.5. Compared with other nations, the United States is extremely immobile, a fact that Barack Obama has thankfully switched from denying (“In no other country on earth is my story even possible”) to decrying (“It is harder today for a child born here in America to improve her station in life than it is for children in most of our wealthy allies”).

    In 2006, while I was working as an economist at the Australian National University, I produced the first (and so far, only) estimates of the father–son earnings elasticity in Australia, putting the intergenerational elasticity at around 0.25. This means that a 10 per cent increase in a father’s earnings translates to a 2.5 per cent increase in his son’s earnings. My estimate implied that we are more socially mobile than the United States but not as mobile as Scandinavia. Looking back through the twentieth century, I found no evidence that we had become markedly more or less mobile.

    So what does the surname approach add to our understanding of mobility? Simply put, there are two reasons for using surnames. The first is that we only have good data on earnings (from surveys or administrative records) for the relatively recent past. If we want to understand mobility in centuries gone by, surnames may be the best torch for seeing into an otherwise dark statistical corner.

    The second, and more important, reason for using surnames is that they may help to take out some of the transitory fluctuations. Recall how we got more precise estimates of the intergenerational earnings elasticity when we used data that smoothed out the fluctuations in an individual’s earnings over a career? Call it the “odd year” problem. Now let’s think about a different problem: a family where the social status dips down for one generation, before reverting to the long-run average. You might call this the “black sheep” problem. By looking at surnames, we are able to look not just at single father–son pairs, but also at patterns for entire lineages.

    So once we take out the odd years and black sheep, how easy is it to jump between classes? Several assumptions need to be made in order to estimate an intergenerational elasticity from surnames. But if we accept Gregory Clark’s methodology, his results imply a very static society. For Britain, the United States, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Chile and even Sweden, he concludes that the intergenerational elasticity is between 0.7 and 0.9. This would mean that social status is at least as hereditable as height. It suggests that while the ruling class and the underclass are not permanent, they are extremely long-lasting. Erasing privilege takes not two or three generations, but ten to fifteen generations. If you cherish the notion of a society where anyone can make it, these results are disturbing.

    How do we break the pattern? Part of the answer must lie in a fair tax system, a targeted social welfare system, effective early childhood programs, and getting great teachers in front of disadvantaged classrooms. We need banks willing to take a chance on funding an outsider, and it doesn’t hurt to maintain a healthy Aussie scepticism about inherited privilege.

    Yet Gregory Clark’s results also remind policy-makers that this is no easy nut to crack. Part of the transmission of social status occurs through genes. On top of this, people tend to marry those with similar levels of education; and researchers have also documented significant differences in parenting approaches among different social groups. Making the system a bit fairer is within our reach – but a complete transformation may prove elusive.

    Andrew Leigh is the Federal Member for Fraser and the Shadow Assistant Treasurer.  This article was published in Inside Story.

  • John Menadue. Health Insurance – here we go again!

    The Health Minister, Sussan Ley has just announced a 6.2% increase in private health insurance premiums.  Increases of this order happen almost every year.

    Since the Howard government introduced the rebate on private health insurance in 1999, the cost of private health insurance has increased over 150%. Overall prices have increased by less than 50% in this period.

    Because private health insurance has not got the will or ability to control prices, it is a ‘price taker’ as economists say, it underwrites large increases in health costs particularly by private specialists. That is why we are all paying more in out-of-pocket expenses. But it is even much worse than that. Private health insurance makes it more difficult for Medicare to control fees.

    The private health insurance industry receives a $7 billion p.a. subsidy from taxpayers. This subsidy is far more than the car industry ever received. This is real corporate and middle class welfare. Abolition of the subsidy and at the same time funding a Medicare dental scheme would greatly improve equity and quality of care at no extra cost to the budget.

    Abolition of the subsidy would also remove the Damocles sword that hangs over Medicare. Private health insurance has proven disastrous in the US. We must stop sleep-walking down a similar path in Australia.

    Private Healthcare Australia runs a quite dishonest campaign. Private health insurance has not taken pressure off public hospitals. By funding excessive private specialist fees, private health insurance has attracted many specialists away from public hospitals. Comparing like with like, private and public hospital costs are about the same. The administrative costs of private health insurance are three times those of Medicare.

    But subsidised private health insurance has one particular attraction. It enables wealthy people to avoid the queue for public hospital beds.

    A major beneficiary of private health insurance has been private hospitals and one hospital group in particular. That group is Ramsay Healthcare which operates 120 odd hospital and day-care surgeries in Australia and offshore. Like other supporters of private health insurance, Ramsay Healthcare seldom argues its case publicly. It knows that its case will not stand up to public scrutiny.

    Instead, Ramsay Healthcare relies on lobbying and political influence like so many other wealthy companies and people in Australia. In the last 14 years, Ramsay Healthcare and Paul Ramsay Holdings gave more than $1.8 million to the Liberal Party. Not a cent was given to the Labor Party. Paul Ramsay left an estate of over $3.4 billion recently. Before his death, he was Australia’s eleventh richest person.

    The private health insurance industry relies on lobbying and political influence and not on a publicly defensible case.

    The interests of Australian taxpayers and the Australian community would be better served if the $7 billion taxpayer subsidy was abolished and the money transferred to a Medicare dental scheme.

    The response of the ALP to the latest round of PHI premium increases shows that it has little idea of what is at stake…. Medicare

    See earlier post that I have made on this subject below:

    Two days before Christmas and to avoid scrutiny, the hard-to-notice Federal Minister for Health, Peter Dutton, announced a 6.2% increase in health insurance premiums for next year.

    We have seen the same pattern year after year with health insurance premiums increasing at well ahead of the CPI.

    The Howard Government introduced the Private Health Insurance (PHI) rebate in 1999. Since then the average health insurance premium has risen by 130% while overall prices have risen by less than 50%.

    The Chief Executive of NIB put the reason for the latest increase very bluntly. He said ‘the rise was necessary to meet the rising cost of providing health care’. But PHI is a key part of the problem of rising health care costs because PHI funds have little or no power in the market to contain costs. They are price-takers. The power to set prices in the health market is with the providers – doctors and hospitals – and only a single payer or national insurer, as in the UK or Scandinavian countries with national insurers, can and do exercise market power.

    Medicare would have more market power to control prices if it was the only single payer. But its power is eroded by the PHI companies. A clear example of this is gap insurance which the PHI funds offer. This gap insurance has underwritten the largest increase in specialist fees in Australia in the last quarter of a century.

    If Australians want to waste their money on expensive PHI that is their choice. But I see no reason for taxpayers providing an annual subsidy of $7 billion for PHI that enables the wealthy to jump the hospital queue.

    In February 10, 2013 year, I wrote about the rising cost of PHI. See repost below. I have also reposted ‘Health care and the budget deficit in the US’ which shows the enormous damage that PHI has wrought in the US.

    Repost (from February 10, 2013)

    Last week Health Minister Plibersek approved an average increase of 5.6% in private health insurance premiums from April this year. It is the same story year after year with health insurance premiums increasing at 2% to 3% ahead of the rate of inflation.

    There are two main reasons for these increases.

    The first and least important reason is that the administrative costs of private health insurance companies run at about 15% to 16% of premiums. Medicare, including the cost of tax collection, costs about 6% per year. Broadly speaking private health insurance administrative costs, including profit margin, run at about three times the administration costs of Medicare.

    The second and most important reason for the steady increases in premiums is that private health insurance funds are largely unable to control the price, quality and utilisation of services provided by doctors and hospitals. This is a problem for all insurers, both private and public, when services are provided free at the point of delivery. There is little incentive or opportunity for consumers to exercise power either over  the cost of the service or whether the service is  necessary. The power is with the provider, not the consumer. Economists call this ‘moral hazard’.

    But when a country has a single payer or a single national insurer, as in the UK or Scandinavian countries, the national insurers can and do exercise market power. That is why health services in those countries is invariably delivered efficiently and at low cost. . Private health insurance has practically no power to control prices and demand for health services. What is worse, private health insurance in Australia undermines the ability of Medicare to exercise market power.

    Evidence on the failure of private health insurance is clear. First, the standard example of private health insurance failure is the high cost and inequity of the US health service. That service provides the worst value for money of any health ‘system’ in the world. Secondly, The Economist, in an article on February 18, 2010, said ‘The biggest factor behind the cost conundrum is that insurers lack market power. Health care providers hold all the cards.’  Thirdly, our Productivity Commission said in 2005 ‘increased levels of private health insurance membership have been associated with a marked increase in the number of services performed and reimbursement for those services”.  Fourthly, in a review in 2003 of private health insurance in Australia, the OECD commented ‘Private (insurance) funds have not effectively engaged in cost controls. They seem to have limited tools and few incentives to promote cost efficient care … Private health insurance appears to have led to an overall increase in health utilisation in Australia …’

    Increases in private health insurance premiums ahead of the inflation rate are not surprising. Private health insurance is badly serving Australians and undermines the power of Medicare as a single payer.

    This is not to say that Medicare should not be improved. It is a very efficient payments vehicle. But it is much too passive. It was launched and still carries in its name, the ‘Health Insurance Commission’. If it were a proactive public health insurer, it could significantly reduce the malign influence of private health insurance in Australia.

    See also article by John Menadue and Ian McAuley ‘Private Health Insurance: high in cost and low in equity’ – reposted today below.

     

  • John Menadue. How vested interests are subverting the public interest.

    There are many key public issues that we must address. They include climate change, growing inequality, tax avoidance, budget repair, an ageing population, lifting our productivity and our treatment of asylum seekers.

    But our capacity to address these hard issues is becoming very difficult because of the ability of vested interests with their lobbying power to influence governments in a quite dis- proportionate way.

    Lobbying has grown dramatically in recent years, particularly in Canberra. It now represents a growing and serious corruption of good governance and the development of sound public policy. In referring to the so called ‘public debate’ on climate change, Professor Ross Garnaut highlighted the ‘diabolical problem’ that vested interests brought to bear on public discussion on climate change.

    These problems include:

    • There are over 900 full time independent lobbyists working in Canberra, more than 30 lobbyists for every Cabinet minister. On top of these ‘third party’ lobbyists, there are the special interests who conduct their own lobbying, such as the Australian Pharmacy Guild.
    • These lobbyists encompass a range of interests including mining, clubs, hospitals, private health funds, business and hotels that have all successfully challenged government policy and the public interest. Just think what the Minerals Council of Australia did to subvert public discussion on the Super Profits Tax and the activities of Clubs Australia to thwart gambling reform, or the polluters over an Emissions Trading Scheme and the Carbon Tax. With its lobbying power over the major parties, the hotel lobby at the State level effectively determines hotel operating hours. Violence and crime are a result.
    • With journalism under-resourced, the media depends increasingly on the propaganda and promotion put into the public arena by these vested interests The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS found in a survey of major metropolitan newspapers published in Australia in 2010 that 55 per cent of content was driven by public relations handouts from lobbyists and their associated public relations arms, and 24 per cent of the content of those metropolitan newspapers had no significant journalistic input whatsoever., relying heavily on public relations handouts.
    • The Media Council of Australia has drawn attention to how media independence is increasingly compromised by ‘advertorials’, a deliberate confusing of advertising and editorial content. The Council also drew attention to trips financed by large corporations and organisations that were not disclosed. It’s not just travel companies that do this.
    • With over 60 per cent of metropolitan newspaper circulations in Australia, News Ltd is a major obstacle to informed debate on key public issues like climate change.
    • The health ‘debate’ is really between the Minister and the Australian Medical Association, the Australian Pharmacy Guild, Medicines Australia and the Private Health Insurance companies. The debate is not with the public about health policy and strategy, it is about how the Minister and the department manage the vested interests.
    • The wealthy private schools are obstacles to needs based funding which is necessary for both equity and efficiency reasons
    • Much of the policy skills in Canberra departments has been downgraded and much of the policy work is now in the hands of young staff in ministers’ offices that are much more inclined to listen to vested interests.
    • Policy work within the government is now undertaken more in specialist organisations such as the Productivity Commission rather than in the departments. Departmental policy capability has been seriously denuded.

    What can be done?

    • Federal lobbyists have to be registered with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, but this is inadequate. They should also be obliged to promptly, publicly and accurately disclose the discussions and meetings they have had with ministers, shadow ministers and senior public servants.
    • All proposals by special interest groups should be accompanied by a public interest impact statement prepared by an independent and professional body. This public impact statement would be attached to representations from the vested interest group. Many of the major private consulting firms should be excluded from this process as many of them have shown themselves to be compromised in the interests of their clients.
    • Refuse tax benefits for ‘think tanks’ like Institute of Public Affairs which are secretly funded and act as fronts for vested interests.
    • Departments such as Health which are so influenced by special interests should have different governance arrangements. The traditional minister/departmental model in Health is a happy hunting ground for vested interests that significantly influence outcomes in health. The Reserve Bank, composed of independent and professional persons, has shown the benefit of such governance arrangements in keeping vested interests at bay and promoting an informed public debate. We need such an arrangement in the health field particularly.
    • No minister or senior official should work with a vested interest group that they have been associated with for at least five years after retirement or resignation.
    • There should be increased funding to the Parliament to provide alternate public advice in key policy areas. The Parliamentary Budget Office is a good start. The current policy vacuum must be filled by independent and professional advisers. At the moment the policy vacuum is filled by special interests assisted in many cases by a compliant and under-resourced media.
    • Adequate funding of the Australian Broadcasting Commission to assert the public interest and develop good public policy is now more important than ever.
    • Major reform of election funding to stop powerful groups buying political favours.
    • A federal Independent Commission Against Corruption and in each State to examine allegations of corruption.
    • Citizen Assemblies of randomly selected people who are fully informed on key public issues to advise governments.

    Action to assert the public interest in the face of powerful vested interests is necessary on many fronts. The problem is urgent.

    This article is part of a series ‘Who speaks for and protects the public interest in Australia? published by Australia 21. Other articles in this series can be accessed by clicking on my website at the top of this page.

  • Denis Muller. The stitch-up by The Australian.

    It is an ugly spectacle when a newspaper aligns itself with the executive government in an attempt to hound from office someone who can otherwise be removed only by the Governor-General. This is what The Australian is doing, in concert with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Attorney-General George Brandis, to Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs.

    It is the latest in a series of campaigns the newspaper has waged against those in public life with whom it disagrees or against whom it has a grievance.

    However, these campaigns have usually had the advancement of The Australian’s own self-interest or the settling of personal scores as their originating motivation.

    For example, it was aggrieved by its treatment at the hands of former Victoria Police chief commissioner Simon Overland. To settle the score, The Australian waged a sustained campaign for his removal. In the end, Overland resigned in messy political circumstances to which The Australian made a contribution by giving the then-Victorian Coalition government the strength of the newspaper’s convictions.

    More recently, The Australian waged a similar campaign against the then-chair of the Australian Press Council, Julian Disney, whose reforms to stiffen the effectiveness of the council the newspaper opposed. Disney served out his full term, which came to an end this month, but the campaign diverted energy and resources from the reform effort.

    However, in Triggs’ case, the originating motivation looks different. This time the motive appears to be purely ideological. The campaign is clearly designed to play into the political process in a way that is closely aligned with the political interests and strategy of the executive government.

    The contours of this strategy can be discerned from a statement by Brandis, reported in The Australian on Wednesday. Brandis is reported as saying that:

    … anger within the government intensified amid “very savage attacks” on Professor Triggs from MPs including the Prime Minister and “strongly expressed” criticism in the media, including in The Australian.

    It might well have read “principally The Australian”.

    Neat, isn’t it? Your media allies lend their platforms to help you advance your political objectives, and their coverage is then cited as a ground for legitimising those objectives.

    In our democracy, the media are meant to act as the “fourth estate” – the institution that holds to account the other three. It is a betrayal of this function to become enmeshed with the executive’s political strategy, as The Australian has done in the Triggs case.

    It is, of course, a matter of degrees. Clearly, the Coalition government and The Australian have a shared conservative ideology. It is well within their rights to share it. They are both affronted by what they say is anti-government partisanship on Triggs’ part, as they are obviously entitled to be.

    However, the point where shared ideology, shared political interests and shared opinions shade into betrayal of fourth-estate independence is difficult to define with precision. Some markers might be these:

    • To what extent and with what prominence does the newspaper publish material that is contrary to the shared political interest? For instance, what attention was paid, and with what prominence, to the offer of an alternative job said by Triggs to have been made to her in circumstances that suggested to her that it was an attempt to procure her resignation? This is a serious matter and it has been referred by shadow attorney-general Mark Drefyus to the Australian Federal Police for investigation.
    • What spectrum of opinion has been represented in the newspaper’s opinion pages on this matter?
    • What has been the tone of the news reportage?
    • To what extent is there evidence of interplay between government MPs and the newspaper in the way the story has developed? For instance, how much of the coverage is based on government backgrounding of the newspaper?

    So far, there is scant evidence of this last factor. But on the remaining three we can make some observations. The issue of a possible inducement received a very low level of attention; the spectrum of opinion has been all against Triggs; and the tone of reporting has been unmistakably hostile to her, as have the headlines.

    If it was just a one-off case, The Australian’s conduct would perhaps not merit such attention, but it is part of a pattern that ill-serves the public interest. There is a due process for removing statutory office-holders. The grounds for removing a member of the Human Rights Commission are confined to misbehaviour or physical or mental incapacity. Nothing Triggs has done has triggered that process.

    Triggs may have lost the confidence of Abbott and Brandis, but that is not a ground for removing her. As The Australian itself has said, she is on political trial and Abbott has delivered his verdict. In doing so, he spoke of a “stitch-up”.

    But if there is a stitch-up going on here, it is what the government and The Australian are joined in doing to Triggs.

    Denis Muller is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism at University of Melbourne. This article first appeared in The Conversation on 25 February 2015.

  • John Menadue. Mother Merkel and 800,000 refugees

    In September last year I posted an article about the Heroism of Angela Merkel in her generous response to asylum seekers arriving in Germany.

    She is holding to her course but the difficulties are increasing. The attacks on women in Cologne by men who were reported to be of Arab or North African decent on New Year’s Eve coloured attitudes. This unfortunate event and growing concern has resulted in Angela Merkel’s approval rating dropping from a high of 75% almost a year ago to 46% now.

    It was always going to be difficult and leadership in this area will always be politically fraught. It is so easy for the unscrupulous to appeal to the fear of foreigners, the outsider and the person who is different.

    The arrival of newcomers in any country is probably the greatest test of leadership.

    Ben Chifley made a courageous decision that Australia should accept large numbers of Jewish people following the disastrous events of WWII in Europe. He didn’t do any public polling or focus groups. If he had and was influenced by it, we would not have accepted Jewish refugees.

    In the 1970s, Malcolm Fraser didn’t wait for political polling to decide if we should accept refugees from Indochina. I am sure that if he had commissioned any polling, it would have told him to be careful.

    In Australia every group of new arrivals, whether migrants or refugees, has encountered opposition. but we have got through these difficulties and as a community we now look back with pride with what we have done in accepting people from Germany, the Baltic countries, Italy, Turkey, and Indochina.

    The opposition to Angela Merkel is nothing new. It will need courage and skill to see off those who resent her country helping vulnerable people.  Perhaps like Australians in receiving newcomers, the Germans will also get satisfaction out of knowing that they responded well and that not only the newcomers, but the German people were beneficiaries.

    Repost from September 2015

    With its sometimes dark history, Germany is facing a great test with the unprecedented arrival of asylum seekers .There are conflicting signs of great generosity, disappointment, anger, hope, mistrust and honesty. A great drama is being played out.

    With the support of her political opponents in the Social Democratic Party, Angela Merkel of the Conservative Christian Democratic Union is grappling with courage and determination a trial for the heart of Germany. She warned ‘If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed’. 

    In an article in Spiegel Online on 31 August, staff correspondents wrote of the ‘Dark Germany and the Bright Germany.  Which side will prevail under the strain of refugees.’

    They said

    How long will the alliance of reason hold up? … As many as 800,000 refugees and migrants may arrive in Germany this year. … and even if we don’t really know how things will develop in coming years, one thing is certain;  the numbers aren’t likely to drop appreciably … it is also certain that the newcomers will change our country. Germans have only recently become used to the idea that they live in a country of immigration and now, the next illusion is being destroyed;  that there is such a thing as controlled immigration. It isn’t just the best minds that are coming to us; it is people fleeing Assad’s barrel bombs and Islamic State brutality. They are running for their lives, whether they are illustrious or illiterate.

    The good news is that most Germans don’t have a problem with this. Sixty percent are of the opinion that the country can absorb the huge numbers of refugees currently arriving. And a new form of civility is developing, one that isn’t just being driven by pricks of conscience and the weight of the past. Rather, it is fuelled by the joy of doing good. But how long will it last?

    Mother Merkel as many refugees now call her, is showing courage and leadership, something we lack in Australia. She is finding the road rocky and hilly, but she offers great hope. She is appealing to the better angels of the German people        John Menadue

    For a full account of the Spiegel article, see link below:  http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spiegel-cover-story-the-new-germany-a-1050406.html

  • Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Tony Abbott, What have you done for peace?

    On 23 February, Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a major national security speech, chided Muslim leaders for showing insufficiently sincere commitment to peace. “I’ve often heard western leaders describe Islam as a ‘religion of peace’. I wish more Muslim leaders would say that more often, and mean it”, he said. Abbott also called on immigrants to Australia to “be as tolerant of others as we are of them”.

    The vast majority of Australians are appalled by the cruel and ultimately self-destructive violence of groups like ISIS, and by the crimes of the clearly deranged Martin Place gunman. They rightly applaud when leading Muslim figures speak up for peace, as the Grand Mufti of Australia and the Australian National Imam’s Council did in unequivocally condemning the Martin Place violence, and as the head of the Paris Mosque and other French Muslim leaders did in denouncing the “odious crimes” of the Charlie Hebdo attackers.

    But let us turn the question around: Tony Abbott, what have you done to bring peace to our community? At a time of rising Islamophobia and widespread ignorance in the Australian community about the history and teachings of Islam, better education promoting ethnic and religious harmony and mutual understanding is desperately needed. Where is the Abbott government’s leadership on this? Peace cannot be imposed simply by tightening security laws. It requires long-term sustained and serious commitment to building the foundations for social harmony. What plans or policies have Abbott or his ministers put in place to create a more tolerant and harmonious Australian society?

    Last September, in a speech to the National Press Club, Abbott said ‘I’ve shifted from being a critic to a supporter of multiculturalism, because it eventually dawned on me that migrants were coming to Australia not to change us but to join us.’ But multicultural harmony does not just happen by itself. It requires hard work to sustain it. Where are the signs of the Abbott government’s hard work? Where is the evidence that our prime minister means it when he speaks of multiculturalism?

    I live in Canberra, a city with the highest standard of living and the highest education levels in the Australia, and I supervise a substantial number of Asian postgraduate students who come to this country to study, and some of whom go on be become Australian citizens. Many Asian students I have supervised has spoken to me of encountering racist abuse on the streets of our capital city. Incidents (including being insulted and spat at by complete strangers) have left some of them shocked and deeply shaken. Is this what Abbott means when he asks immigrants to Australia to “be as tolerant of others as we are of them”?

    The fact that this sort of abuse still occurs unchecked in our national capital is an alarming indication of the failure of government, educators and media to show leadership in creating a peaceful multicultural society. By ignoring these profound issues, while making ignorant and ill-conceived public criticisms of “immigrants” and “Muslims” for their lack of commitment to tolerance and peace, the Abbott government is damaging the social cohesion of our society and contributing to social problems that are likely to haunt Australia for decades to come.

    Australia needs leaders who mean it when they speak of peace, harmony and multiculturalism. If our current leaders cannot do this, then they are unfit to lead, and it is time for others to step forward and show that they can fill the political and moral vacuum.

    Tessa Morris-Suzuki is an ANU College of Asia and the Pacific Japanese history professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow.

     

  • Intergenerational Report and Australia’s future.

    In The Age on February 23, Sam Hurley from the Centre for Policy Development highlighted the importance of long-term policy priorities that will support people across all generations. He refers to the crucial issues that we must face that go beyond the one-liners about debt and deficit. See link to article below.  John Menadue.

    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-intergenerational-report-should-be-the-time-for-a-conversation-about-australias-future-20150223-13m59i.html

  • The economic potential of older people.

    In the SMH on February 22, Susan Ryan, the Age Discrimination Commissioner, described how many older workers are being ignored , yet they could be making a more significant contribution to the economy and society. For article, see link below. John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-economic-potential-of-older-people-is-being-ignored-20150222-13lfgt.html

  • The frontier wars – best we forget.

     

    I have posted many blogs about our refusal to acknowledge the frontier wars,  when we suffered the largest death toll in war in our history in relation to our population at the time. In the SMH on February 12, see link below, Tim Flannery draws our attention to the valour of 52 indigenous people who were killed near Casterton, Victoria, in the 1840s. The victors write history! These heroes have been largely expunged from our history. There were no rewards for those who were defending their homelands in the battle known as ‘Fighting Hills’. John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/we-shouldn8217t-forget-the-sacrifice-of-our-aboriginal-warriors-20150212-13bzib.html

  • Mark Triffitt and Travers McLeod. Don’t blame micro-parties or the Senate.

    Paul Keating famously labelled the Senate “unrepresentative swill”. Similar sentiments – while not as colourful – are being voiced by those frustrated with the blocking power of the Senate’s micro-parties.

    In a recent Australian Financial Review survey, leading corporate CEOs called for major reform to the Senate.

    At one level it is not hard to understand why. The Senate in general, and the minor and micro-parties that hold the balance of power in particular, were instrumental in gutting the Abbott government’s budget at a time when reform is pressing.

    Criticism of their power over policy will likely grow as the Senate casts a critical eye this year over the government’s attempts to reshape the budget and fix Australia’s tax system.

    But behind the singular criticisms of the Senate is a bigger picture of deeper dysfunction. It’s a picture that suggests the Senate is not a root cause, but part of a long list of symptoms that indicate our political system is increasingly unfit for purpose in the 21st century.

    Excluding micro-parties is not reform

    A clue to understanding these deeper problems lies in the complaints these business figures make. In essence, they lament how micro-parties are an increasingly powerful phenomenon, gaining outsized power compared to their meagre vote in elections.

    Many of the CEOs surveyed proposed that, in response, the Senate’s proportional voting system should be abolished. Or, at least, the system of preferential voting should be changed to stamp out the micro-party phenomenon.

    This would allow major parties to pass legislation with greater certainty and reduce the range of political parties able to hold the balance of power. It would also restore “representativeness” to our democratic system by ridding it of what one CEO described as “a disparate bunch of single-issue politicians”.

    On a superficial level, these and other proposals aimed at restoring the primacy of major parties seem to have merit. But these complaints overlook what is occurring within our political system, and the political arena more generally.

    On the face of it, democratic systems like Australia’s look the same as 20 or 30 years ago. Major parties dominate the day-to-day political process, presenting their policy programs at general elections as they vie to form government and represent the general public.

    But beneath the surface the relationship between citizens and these parties has been fundamentally and irreversibly weakened. This is reflected in membership and support for major political parties, which have fallen across the Western world.

    In contrast, support for smaller parties has risen sharply, albeit from low bases.

    Why?

    Because voter preferences are no longer shaped predominantly by class, ideology, ethnicity and geography. And it is to these catch-all attributes that major political parties traditionally appealed.

    19th-century model is showing its age

    In a 21st-century internet-driven, globalised world, the array of political choices and identities available to voters are increasing and fragmenting.

    This reflects broader changes in a society in which choices – political, social or economic – are influenced by a widening collection of complex factors.

    Major parties are finding it increasingly difficult to develop a coherent overarching narrative for what they seek in government and why it benefits the community as well as the individual over the long term.

    In contrast, voter fragmentation suits micro and minor parties. With their single or limited issues campaigns they can cut through the political noise with more succinct appeals and arguments. They offer retail politics in a wholesale world.

    Informal groupings and alliances of micro-parties likewise can respond more nimbly to the flux of 21st-century voter sentiment.

    In addition to the splintering of traditional voter blocs, voter choices are rarely static. Our democratic system is now characterised by larger and unpredictable cohorts of “swinging” voters. Their political preferences and voting intentions constantly change, often heavily influenced by a single issue or narrower policy platform.

    The major parties, as a result, become less flexible and responsive. Their feedback mechanisms are often stilted. They can be held up by procedural delays, adherence to party rules or structures, and even the “need” for cabinet solidarity.

    All this suggests micro-parties may not be some kind of unwelcome or unrepresentative intrusion into our democratic system, as conventional views would have it. Whether by accident or design, they have allied themselves with the way the 21st-century political world is being restructured.

    In short, all this should signal that new political configurations like micro-parties need to be accommodated, not curtailed.

    However, advocating more collaborative attitudes to politics and policy-making can only get us so far, particularly if major parties won’t work together on long-term reform.

    Our democracy needs new organising principles

    Ultimately the micro-party issue should begin to highlight how our political system is predicated on many organising principles that no longer apply.

    The system requires functional majorities – built on major parties achieving stable blocs of voter support – to get anything major done. This is a system where the languid decision-making processes of parliament are increasingly left behind by a super-speed 21st century.

    This is a system that seems unable to acknowledge what many citizens already know: that so much going on in our globalised and interdependent world escapes the control of territorially based parties and parliaments.

    Broader, progressive reforms to our democratic institutions are urgently needed to reflect the realities of a new political and policy world.

    We need to have a conversation about managing this world more effectively with more inclusive structures of policy-making and more innovative systems of voter input. The conversation needs to tackle some weighty issues, namely:

    • What is the role of political parties, both large and small, in this system and what processes might encourage more effective political and policy collaboration?
    • What sort of voting and electoral systems best capture and reflect the kaleidoscopic nature of today’s citizenry?
    • What reforms do our democratic institutions require so they can develop the policies Australia needs to thrive over the long term, beyond short-term political cycles that can turn in days?

    It is this path – not attempts to restore a world that no longer exists through piecemeal changes to a single part of the system – that will give our democracy the new lease of life it sorely needs.

    Mark Triffitt is Lecturer, Public Policy at University of Melbourne.

    Travers McLeod is Honorary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at University of Melbourne.

    This article was first published in The Conversation on 23 February 2015.

     

     

  • John Menadue. Is there intergenerational theft?

    Yes – there certainly is, but not in the ways that Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey suggest.

    In his National Press Club speech on February 2, Tony Abbott said ‘Reducing the deficit is the fair thing to do because it ends the intergenerational theft against our children and grand-children.’

    Joe Hockey has also been talking up issues of intergenerational theft in preparation for the release of the fourth Intergenerational Report (IGR).  He says we will ‘fall off our chairs’ when we see the numbers in the report. Apparently the government plans an advertising campaign to tell us how serious the problem is of our ageing population and the economic consequences.

    Joe Hockey’s rhetoric is designed to resurrect his failed sound bite about debt and deficits. Unfortunately for him, the public is not listening to his message that the budget needs to be brought into balance. We have turned off because of his and Tony Abbott’s wild exaggeration on debt and deficits, and the obvious unfairness of his 2014 budget.

    But we do have an intergenerational problem. There are several contributing factors.

    The first and by far the most important is climate change. My generation is failing to take this problem seriously. Our failures will bring major problems, even calamity for our grand-children. Global warming has major impacts – rising temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns, drier and hotter summers, more bushfires, fewer but more destructive cyclones, rising sea levels, and destruction of icons like the Great Barrier Reef. This is an intergenerational threat on an enormous scale. The Abbott government has done less than almost any government in the developed world to address the Damocles sword of climate change that is hanging over our grand-children’s future. The Abbott government has dismantled almost every program to tackle climate change.

    On the economic front the Abbott government has refused to tackle the issues that give privileges to older generations like mine.

    Superannuation tax concessions cost the taxpayer about $32 billion p.a. and rising rapidly to almost $50 billion by 2017-18. This generous middle-class welfare benefits older generations. We don’t even have to pay tax on superannuation income once we turn 60. This is intergenerational theft. The Abbott government like its predecessors is dodging the issue. Vested interests in the superannuation sector and particularly the four major banks with their large superannuation subsidiaries are doing their best to protect the wealthy and the aged.  The unfair privileges for older Australians like me are being protected.

    Older and wealthy people are putting their money into investor housing to get a tax advantage through negative gearing. The estimated tax loss of this is $7 billion p.a. Over 60% of bank loans for housing is for investor loans. Is it any surprise that first-home buyers – my grandchildren’s generation – are finding it extremely difficult to buy a house; something that my generation took for granted. A student asked the Reserve Bank Governor, Glen Stevens, at Club Central, Hurstville, ‘How am I ever going to afford a house?’.  We are engaging in intergenerational theft.

    The discount on the Capital Gains Tax is largely at the expense of younger generations

    Then there is the Abbott government’s proposal that we hear about so much from Christopher Pyne that will load up students with enormous debt in the future. Intergenerational theft!

    The Abbott government proposes to penalise the unemployed, mainly young people, by denying them unemployment benefits for a period.

    Now we learn that the government and the opposition are refusing to entertain any idea of including the home in the means test for the aged pension. Once again, the older generation like mine, will benefit, with many senior taxpayers with large and expensive mansions drawing the aged pension or aged pension concessions.

    We do have a problem with the privileges that my generation enjoys. The scales are being steadily loaded against my grand-children’s generation.

    Climate change is the most critical way in which we are refusing to acknowledge the rights of younger generations. We look like handing on to them a planet that is under serious threat.

  • Quentin Dempster. Attacks on the ABC’s international broadcasting service.

    Australian insularity and the strident xenophobia it generates is, I reckon, a significant drawback to our development as a responsive and engaged country in the Asia Pacific region.

    In this context it was immensely distressing to see the recent vandalising of this country’s international broadcasting services through Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s unilateral decision to terminate DFAT’s contract with the ABC.

    While Minister Bishop can be expected to reject any suggestion that she has exercised her discretion to terminate the Australia Network contract at the insistence and persistence of a lobbying campaign by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, she has exposed the shallowness of her thinking through her stated reasons for such termination.  In a speech to Chatham House in London (12th March 2014) she said:

    It’s not about the ABC promoting its news programmes or whatever into the region.  It’s actually meant to be fulfilling the Australian Government’s foreign policy objectives.   My question is whether or not there is an inherent conflict in having the ABC contracted to deliver Australian government messages into the region.   We’ve had the conflict writ large when it comes to the issue of asylum seekers and the issue of the Snowden allegations.   The ABC is a news organisation and perfectly entitled to report how it wishes into the region on those two contentious issues.   But under a soft‐power diplomacy contract, it’s meant to be delivering a positive image of Australia into the region.

    Obviously the Minister wanted Australia Network to be a propaganda arm of government in spite of the long standing protocol that the ABC would adhere to its editorial Code of Practice in its international reporting.   DFAT had contractually agreed that it would not have veto or censorship control of material to be broadcast.   Of course the ABC would expose contentious issues concerning domestic Australian politics and foreign policy and the politics and human rights abuses occurring anywhere in the region.   The ABC would be bound by its editorial practices, constrained by defamation, contempt and discrimination laws domestically and by protocols covering cultural and ethnic sensitivities.   The two contentious issues the Foreign Minister seemed to be referring to at Chatham House were the “burnt hands” claims of asylum seekers under Australian Navy operations and the ABC’s joint reporting with Guardian Australia of the Edward Snowden drop of “five eyes” intelligence surveillance showing that the Australian Signals Directorate had tapped the mobile phones of the Indonesian president and his wife and senior Indonesian ministers and officials.   For sure both were embarrassing, but journalism’s role is to inform the public.  In spite of Minister Bishop’s claims in a recent Insiders interview with Barrie Cassidy that the Australia Network service was contractually under‐performing, DFAT at no time raised any concerns that the ABC’s operation of Australia Network was not meeting its contracted performance standards.   I understand DFAT did not counsel the Minister against termination of the contract.  As the department was already facing funding reductions as part of whole‐of‐government deficit reduction, my informants tell me DFAT seized the opportunity to claw back some revenue.  In the process the national interest has been vandalised.

    Let me illustrate that this description is not hyperbole.

    Radio Australia has been decimated. GONE ARE:‐

    • Phil Kafcaloudes and Mornings (two hours of live programming to the Pacific weekdays)
    • Asia Pacific weekdays
    • Asia Review weekends
    • Reduced daily news bulletins
    • Loss of network entirely in western Pacific island nations including the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Marianas, Kiribas and the Cook Islands.
    • RA short wave service to Myanmar (via Singapore) shut down at the end of December
    • Language services cut to one person per service resulting in no continuous multi‐lingual news service
    • Loss of dedicated language programs to Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Myanmar, Vietnam and PNG.

     

    Australia Network/Australia Plus

    GONE ARE:‐  .

    *No longer a 24 hour channel. Built around a six hour block of programming repeated across the day

    • One hour nightly new program ‘The World’ reduced to 30 minutes
    • Business Today weekdays with Whitney Fitzsimmons
    • Pacific Sports 360 ‐ dedicated sports review program for the Pacific
    • Fashion Asia
    • Around 650 rebroadcasters for the Australia Network service reduced to about 50 rebroadcasters in India, Asia and the Pacific, mostly delivered through a limited and encrypted satellite service
    • Loss of untold direct‐to‐home viewers across Asia, particularly in Thailand, who can no longer access our signal straight off the satellite due to encryption.

    Asia Pacific News Centre

    GONE ARE:‐  Loss of APNC correspondents in Delhi, Jakarta, Beijing, the Pacific and Parliament House, Canberra. total journalists and production staff made redundant as a direct result of the termination of the ABC/DFAT contract: 73

    Foreign Correspondent

    Reduced to 22 x 30 minute episodes starting in mid‐April. Catalyst, the ABC’s television science show will be severely cut. Catalyst will fill the 8 pm Tuesday slot for 10 weeks from February, March and early April, and then, with Foreign Correspondent finishes its run Catalyst will come back for 11 more shows.  Result:  Destroyed production momentum for both programs and audience confusion.

    Lateline

    This program with its analysis and investigative capacity and live studio/satellite interviews with international geo‐political and economic experts has been gutted. Its field reporting capacity has been stripped out.  While we are expecting it to return in 2015 it will run initially on News 24. In its 25 years history Lateline has been instrumental in holding executive government to account, its investigative journalists have delivered impactful exposure of immigration blunders, indigenous and institutional child sexual abuse.

    ABC’s International Bureaux:

    ▪  London – a rare bright spot. The third reporter there (currently on local hire) will be upgraded to a full A‐based position. And there should be more camera capacity.  Currently the long time editor there also shoots PTC’s (pieces to camera) and overlay. But management wants to transform that into a full camera/editor position. That may mean the current editor will be terminated and a new locally hired person brought in.

    ▪  Moscow – Bureau officially closed more than a year ago. Long time fixer/translator should have been kept on.  Awaiting confirmation of this.

    ▪  Middle East – ABC has realised belatedly that having all reporting resources in Jerusalem is not wise. New Arab world office will be established in Beirut – reporter, camera and locally hired fixer/Arabic translator. The second Middle East reporter will stay in Jerusalem and become a VJ (video journalist) with one local producer to help. Expecting office administrator and driver to be sacked.

    ▪  Nairobi – Has been VJ correspondent and will remain so. Hopefully the reporter has an office, a fixer and some admin support. ▪  New Delhi – To become a home based VJ with local fixer/translator. The ABC has had a functioning office in Delhi for decades but now apparently the lucky correspondent is expected to cover the entirety of South Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal etc (1.2billion people) from a back bedroom.

    ▪  Bangkok – similar to Delhi. Good functioning office will be scrapped. Home based VJ plus local.  Excellent camera man will be offered fewer days per year.

    ▪  Jakarta – Meant to be a bigger ‘hub’ with second correspondent and second camera but with regional ‘fire reporter’ – immediate despatch to breaking stories thought by staff to be better coordinated from Bangkok than Jakarta.

    ▪  Beijing – also slated as bigger ‘hub’ two correspondents and two cameras but to cover Japan and Korea and region as required. This is not really an enhancement but more a replacement of the resources which existed when Australia Network was operating.

    ▪  Tokyo – A big loser. Close down the office in the main government broadcaster NHK – where ABC currently gets access to news bulletins and feeds, although rent is ‘cheap’.  BBC apparently has spent 15 years trying to get back into the building.  New arrangements: home based VJ plus local fixer/translator.  Under Japanese law it will be very expensive to have locals including excellent local hire camera operator made redundant.   The process of closing down is expected to take most of 2015.  Tokyo decision is viewed by ABC staff and international correspondents as short sighted.

    ▪  Port Moresby – Already VJ. Has separate office from home in one compound, plus local fixer. Correspondent often has to waste several days a week doing admin because ABC News will not hire someone to help.

    ▪  Auckland – Closed and with it a lot of good South Pacific coverage as well as NZ material. ABC has had a visible TVNZ office for many years of great value to Australia’s engagement with the Kiwis: a single correspondent with VJ capacity but access to professional TV NZ crews. Highly productive and comparatively inexpensive:

    ▪  Washington – Staff do not believe claim by News managers that they are creating ‘major multi‐platform hubs’ in London and Washington by July 2015. The truth is Washington DC is being down sized with one fewer reporter and likely to lose its long time editor (who occasionally shoots footage and interviews). One of two camera operators (an Australian on local hire conditions) has reportedly been told that his current contract is too generous and to stay he will have to take a pay cut.

    In response to the Abbott Government cuts to operational base funding and the termination of the Australia Network contract the ABC Board has determined to continue international broadcasting as the Charter under the ABC Act requires it.  But there can be no pretence that what we can offer through what is now being branded as Australia Plus TV is in any way effective engagement through in situ correspondents and specially designed programs for countries in the satellite footprints.

    Australia Plus TV was launched immediately on the closure of Australia Network on September the 29th 2014, mainly I understand to ensure the broadcast of the AFL grand final on September 28th.

    This network continues to reach audiences across India, Asia and the Pacific through its established arrangements with re‐broadcasters.  While the number of re‐broadcasters has dropped significantly ‐ the remaining partnerships contain all the region’s largest subscription television operators in all the key Asia/Pacific territories.  The actual potential reach (which is assessed through the quantum of individual rebroadcaster subscriber numbers) seems to have actually increased slightly due to a small number of new re‐broadcasters coming on board late last year.  Our potential reach is more than 170 million people in the region.  Australia Network was under 150 million.

    We have retransmission agreements with subscription TV companies in India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Papua New Guinea and with many of the Pacific Island nations.  The main change to distribution is that we are no longer available unencrypted in Asia, which, as I indicated, means we have lost untold direct to home viewers who had their own satellite dishes and an unknown number of hotels similarly equipped.

    The new schedule is based on a repeating six hour block of mixed genre programming and is heavy on rebroadcast of ABC News 24 domestic programs (Breakfast and Mornings).  There is just one 30minute international news program, presented by Bev O’Connor, broadcast each evening on both Australia Plus and News 24.

    What we have lost most is the range of lifestyle, educational and news programs produced specifically for the region and, in many cases, in the languages of the regions.

    The Australia Plus brand has had a longer life on digital platforms, having launched at the end of 2013.  We syndicate news content to more than 30 third party sites in Indonesia and China.

    Radio Australia, as I indicated, has been decimated.  Shortwave into Asia has stopped completely. It now produces a two hour morning program that goes live into the Pacific weekdays (Pacific Beat) and some short news updates throughout the day.  The rest of the network streams NewsRadio, LocalRadio, some tripleJ and some Radio National content.  RA is still rebroadcast on a network of FM transmitters in Myanmar.

    The stated objectives of ABC international broadcasting services are described as:

    To share Australia stories that engage our neighbours in Asia and the Pacific and provide insights into Australia life.

    To promote regional dialogue and understanding of Australia’s multicultural society and Australia’s role in the region.

    To deliver quality, independent and pluralistic content in relevant ways on relevant platforms.

    To foster partnerships that promote exchange of ideas and support business development.

    With the termination of the DFAT contract we saw the demise of our ‘public diplomacy’ responsibilities as part of that contract.  I think it is understood by the board acting to fulfil the obligations under the ABC Act that international broadcasting implies that sensibility.  The ABC remains highly recognised and valued in the region for one distinctive thing ‐ its independent news coverage.  Yet Minister Bishop does not seem to recognise that value in projecting Australia throughout the region as a robust liberal democracy.  The ABC will still have a place in the region but these vastly diminished services and the decimation of Radio Australia is indicating that we do not want to engage.

    Sky News, the domestic subscription service on Foxtel, is now marketing Australia Channel ‐ five channels of news, business, sport, top stories and A‐PAC ‐ public affairs.  Australia Channel can be viewed on desktop tablet and mobile phone with a WiFi or internet connection ‐ $9.99 per month.

    It’s what’s called OTT ‐ Over the Top service.  As a fellow journalist and content producer I wish Australia Channel every success.

    But I warn there are forces at work at the ABC out to commercialise its international broadcasting services perhaps through a similar subscription model.  I am opposed to this as it would be a breach of the ABC’s Charter purpose.  Such a user pays/subscriber model or one made dependant on advertising and advertorial type sponsorship of programs or content would only reach English speakers and expatriates in the region.  The whole purpose of international broadcasting through any distribution systems is to engage with the entirety of the region’s populations.  To destroy short wave radio, still a valuable and universal distribution system particularly to the remotest and most impoverished islands (well out of mobile phone range) is distressing. I urged the ABC Board to re‐ agitate for untied funding for international broadcasting from any future government to repair the damage now being inflicted by the Abbott Government.

    The ABC is currently thinking about applying user pays charges to its successful iView replay services for domestic programming.  Again I am opposed to this as it represents the thin edge of the wedge to the full commercialisation of ABC content.  Taxpayers have already paid for the content the ABC produces and should not be asked to pay again.   The objective of international broadcasting is one of engagement with our region, not to formulate business plans by which profit can be earned.   Public service broadcasters operate on one simple principle.  We treat our audiences as citizens in a democracy, not as consumers to be delivered up to advertisers.   If the Abbott Government, the Liberal and National parties (or any political party for that matter), the Institute of Public Affairs (or any other so called think tank)  want to abolish the ABC (and SBS) in Australia please say so.

    We need a debate about the role and sustainable future of the taxpayer funded public broadcasting system in this country particularly as the digital revolution is enabling aggressive global players to have smart TV access potentially and eventually to every Australian household through WiFi video streaming.  Many of these players do not pay full tax on the revenues they currently earn from Australians through download charges and/or advertising.  Many use tax havens.

    The ABC by survey is now the most trusted institution in Australia ‐ up there with the Reserve Bank and the High Court.  I believe it is trusted because in our now polyglot Australia people can see the ABC and its programs on occasions have the capacity to call government to account.   It is this democratic check and balance, particularly in a media dominated by the dogmatic simplicities and partisan propaganda of the Murdoch Press, which justifies its continued existence.

    What has just happened to our international broadcasting effort is a tragedy. There are an estimated 3.3 billion mobile phone users in the Asia Pacific.  The ABC was developing a momentum to wire this country into the region as never before with targeted, quality and ethical content.  That momentum has been undermined, mindlessly.

    In coming months public broadcasting supporters will be calling on all political parties to renew their commitment to our unique broadcasters ‐ the ABC and SBS  ‐ and non‐commercial international broadcasting, next time preferably without a DFAT contract.

    Quentin Dempster, a public broadcasting advocate, is a journalist based in Sydney.  He delivered this paper to the Australian Institute of International Affairs on February 3, 2015.

  • Tony Kevin, Tony Abbott’s crassness could cost the Bali duo their lives.

     

    Let me first declare my biases. I believe that I honour and respect Indonesia’s values and culture. I oppose the death penalty in general. In this case, I would welcome an outcome that saved the lives of the last two members of the Bali Nine who now face execution In Indonesia, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, for the offence of smuggling drugs out of Indonesia in 2005. I believe every life saved from deliberate violent death affirms and enriches our collective humanity; and that the quest for consistency of action is the enemy of mercy. I also believe the murky AFP role in the history of the Bali Nine’s arrest as they were leaving Indonesia imposes a special moral obligation on Australia to do everything possible to try to save these two men’s’ lives now.

    Now let me comment on the Australian diplomacy surrounding this, as neutrally as I can. Over the years, Australian representations have had much success in securing commutation of sentences of many Australians accused of serious drug offences in Indonesia: most famously Schiapelle Corby, but also (in a very complex legal history – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bali_Nine) the other seven members of the Bali Nine. Andrew and Myuran are the last two, and it is their tragedy that their sentences could not be commuted in time under the former President Yudhoyono.

    Under President Jokowi, lines have been drawn in the sand. Indonesia’s national honour is now strongly engaged. And Tony Abbott’s ill-judged recent public diplomacy, if it can be called that, has made matters far worse. Abbott has possibly doomed the two men, though I still hope not.

    For an informed current Indonesian elite perspective, I turned to Yohanes Sulaiman’s piece in The Conversation yesterday   https://theconversation.com/why-indonesia-is-likely-to-ignore-protests-and-execute-bali-nine-duo-37645. Sulaiman expects Indonesia to ignore protests and execute the two men, because the domestic political costs for Jokowi of granting pardon is too great;   because there is strong elite Indonesian support for the death penalty in major drug cases; and because of a strong nationalist backlash against foreign pressure. Tellingly, Sulaiman cites an Indonesian Professor of International Law’s critique of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s appeal in this case: where, he asks, was Ban when Indonesian migrant workers were executed in Saudi Arabia?

    The separate but coordinated appeals on 17 February by all six living former Australian prime ministers might of themselves have had some positive impact on President Jokowi, in light of the drama of the gesture and of Indonesian values of respect for age, wisdom and political seniority. The delay in taking the men to the execution island may have been a guarded initial response to those powerful appeals, from which I recall key words here:

    Kevin Rudd – “As a deep, long-standing friend of Indonesia, I would respectfully request an act of clemency.”

    Julia Gillard –   “I would find it heartbreaking if such extraordinary efforts to become of good character were not met with an act of mercy.”

    John Howard – “Mercy being shown in such circumstances would not weaken the deterrent effect of Indonesia’s strong anti-drug laws.”

    Paul Keating – “In this case, the penalty is out of all proportion to the crime.”

    Bob Hawke – “I call on the Indonesian government to show mercy and clemency … Justice should be based on human understanding… ”

    Malcolm Fraser – “We are very much opposed to the death penalty in Australia.”

    Unfortunately, Abbott may have the very next day, 18 February, destroyed this glimmer of hope by his crass and over-the-top linking of past Australian generous disaster relief aid to Indonesia to the fate of the two men. As in the presidential eavesdropping episode, well remembered by Indonesians, he compounded the error by his defiant refusal to admit afterwards that his linkage had been a threat: “No, I was just stating facts”.

    Abbott has now left Jokowi in the unpalatable position that any act of clemency could be seen as succumbing to Abbott’s thinly veiled blackmail.

    And where does this leave Abbott if Indonesia does execute the men? If Indonesia then experiences a major natural disaster while Abbott is still our PM, will he really announce: ‘No, we won’t help you, because you executed Chan and Sukamaran.”? I don’t think so: Abbott’s veiled threat is actually hollow. But it will nevertheless be long remembered in Jakarta as another notorious example of Australian arrogance and lack of manners. It may have spoiled whatever good the intervention of the six former prime ministers might have done.

    Chan and Sukamaran’s best hope now is for Abbott and his ministers – indeed, for any Australian politician – to say nothing more in public on the matter. Let Jakarta try if it can to find a way over coming weeks to deal with this further damaging episode in Australian –Indonesian relations: hopefully, in a way that spares these two last Bali Nine members’ lives.

     

  • John Menadue. Cover-up in the health system.

    There is an unacceptable refusal by many in the health sector to publish data and information about how services are delivered. There is a cover-up by powerful providers who don’t want transparency and exposure about the way they work.

    At the Bundaberg Hospital some years ago it was clear that surgeons had little confidence in surgeon, Jayant Patel. But they sat on their hands and did little to protect the public. It was left to nurses to blow the whistle and risk their careers.

    Judge Geoffrey Davies AO spoke of this problem in an address last October to 1,200 orthopaedic surgeons in Brisbane. The speech was reported earlier in this blog (7/12/15). It is very blunt about the performance of many orthopaedic surgeons.

    Extracts from the transcript of his speech follow:

     

    Why won’t you do something about incompetent surgeons?

    The Hon Geoffrey Davies AO

    You all know that, in your midst, there are incompetent surgeons; surgeons whom you would never recommend to your friends or family. They may have varying degrees of incompetence and for different reasons. But all are a danger. All can cause injury.

    Together you know who many of them are. But for various reasons you have done little individually and nothing collectively, to expose them or even to identify them confidentially for the purpose of retraining or limitation of practice.

    Patients are entitled to know, before they choose you for their surgery, rather than one of your competitors, not only how your fees compare with those of your competitors, but also how your success rate compares with that of your competitors; and that that latter information, in the case of much orthopaedic surgery, is recorded in your National Joint Replacement Registry.

    Why would surgeons who are otherwise honest and decent men and women and who are themselves competent, fail to speak out against what was plainly gross incompetence causing harm? The author of the Bristol Inquiry report described it as an “old boys’ culture”. But that is simply a euphemism. The true reason must surely be either a view that the reputation of your profession is more important than the health and safety of patients; or a view that the incompetence of your colleagues is none of your business. It can’t surely be a misplaced loyalty to your incompetent colleagues. It wasn’t in Bundaberg because none of the other doctors there really liked Dr Patel.

    If, individually, you don’t speak out, patients may be injured, possibly seriously.

    As you are aware, following my Inquiry, there is now a mandatory requirement that you notify the Health Ombudsman if you have a reasonable belief that another health professional has behaved in a way which constitutes a significant departure from accepted professional standards; and that such behaviour has placed the public at risk of harm. You do not appear to have responded to this obligation notwithstanding the freedom which it confers from any legal or administrative action. And the legislation invites you to notify in respect of less serious incompetence and, if you do, also offers you full protection against legal or administrative action provided your notification is made honestly.

    If, in those circumstances, you as individual surgeons will not act to protect the public from your incompetent colleagues, I have come to wonder how likely it is that your association or any other specialist association is ever likely to do so. However, as I shall point out, there are a number of ways in which it can and should do so.

    Surgeons who are the subject of multiple complaints Studies in 2006 in New Zealand and the United Kingdom both show a close correlation between complaints and preventable adverse events :

    -Two thirds of complainants had experienced adverse events; and
    -75% of those adverse events were preventable.

    And a study in 2012 of nearly 19,000 formal health care complaints against doctors, including surgeons, in Australia between 2000 and 2011 showed that two prior complaints over eleven years was a strong predictor of short term further complaints. It found that:

    – compared with doctors with one prior complaint over that period, those with two complaints had nearly double the risk of recurrence;
    – that risk increased substantially with each additional complaint.
    – and these, in turn, showed that complaint prone doctors could be identified early in their complaints trajectory.

    Together these studies show, in my view, a strong likelihood that those surgeons who have had, for example, two or more complaints within an eleven year period are incompetent.

    Evidence (also) show that incompetent surgeons are much more likely to be found among older surgeons than among surgeons in early or mid-career.

    There are three conclusions that can be reached from this evidence. The first is that the proportion of incompetent surgeons is likely to be greater in the older age group than in the mid-career group. The second is that this conclusion is not generally recognised or, at least, admitted within your profession. And the third is that there needs to be much greater scrutiny, than there is at present, of the performance of older surgeons, partly for these reasons, but partly also because there is likely to be much greater resistance, in your profession, to complaining about a once competent surgeon who is no longer so than there is about a younger incompetent surgeon.

    Individual notifications under the Legislation, like complaints by patients, can never uncover more than a small percentage of the total number of incompetent surgeons. That is why the primary responsibility for uncovering and dealing with incompetent surgeons must be upon those who can establish a system for such objective assessment.

    The view that the best way of determining competence is by assessment of actual operations appears to be rejected by you in a number of ways.

    First, you appear to ignore the fact that multiple complaints against a surgeon probably prove a pattern of incompetence.

    Secondly, you will not make participation in morbidity audits compulsory notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of the benefit of such participation.

    Thirdly, you will not permit audits of either kind to identify and record the name of a surgeon the subject of adverse events notwithstanding the evidence that this would enable determination of a pattern of incompetence.

    And fourthly, you will not permit the NJRR to be used for this purpose notwithstanding that, as I believe, it can do so. If I am correct in that belief, I think that you have been acting improperly in failing to use it for that purpose. In saying that I appreciate that surgeons have been contributing data to the NJRR on the promise of anonymity. But that could and should have been changed before now.

    I cannot see how the imposition of a fine or suspension from practice for a period can, alone, be an appropriate remedy for incompetence. The surgeon should be retrained if that is possible. But in many cases, especially those of older surgeons, that will not be possible. In that case he must have his practice limited to exclude operations of the kind which he cannot safely perform or he must be prevented from practising. Suspension from practice, in whole or in part, is appropriate only while decisions are pending about retraining or limitation or ceasing practice.

    Why you won’t do something about incompetent surgeons?

    I regret to say that my answer to this question is not one which you will like. Yet all of the evidence that I have seen convinces me that I am right.

    What then is the answer to my question? I think that there are two.

    The first involves how you think and act individually.

    Many of you are concerned that disclosure of your own success rate or, more accurately, your failure rate might increase your risk of being sued. But realistically that is a risk for only a small minority whom you should want to see dealt with, for the health and safety of future patients.

    Many of you are also concerned that reporting another surgeon whom you believe is incompetent may rebound on you. I have said that I understand that. But that concern does not excuse you, particularly given the protection which the law now gives you.

    The second involves how you think and act collectively, as the AOA.

    Collectively you are, it seems to me, still primarily a trade union having the primary purpose of looking after the wellbeing of orthopaedic surgeons. And sadly you appear, so far, to have put that before the health and safety of patients.

    To change that you must make participation in morbidity audits compulsory for your members. You must require the recording of the names of surgeons involved in adverse events. You must use the results of these, and the results of complaints records to identify incompetent surgeons.

    And you must use the NJRR for this purpose.

    When I spoke at your annual conference in Adelaide four years ago I was still optimistic that you might, individually and collectively, do something about this serious problem. Despite your inaction since then, I remain optimistic. But time and public confidence are running out.

     

    Geoffrey Davies was a judge of the Queensland Supreme Court of Appeal for 14 years. He headed the 2005 inquiry into the Bundaberg surgeon Jayant Patel. 

    This speech was reported in The Australian on October 17, 2015.

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Privatisation – a worn-out ideology.

    Voters are making it plain that they are not keen on privatisation. Economic research also tells us that the evidence in favour of privatisation is not conclusive.

    Conservatives claim that privately owned businesses are better managed than public ones, but I suggest that the main reason for increased productivity of businesses that are sold is not privatisation but the deregulation of the market, offered at the same time or in anticipation of privatisation.

    Essential Report in early February this year asked interviewees about their attitude to privatisation. Their responses to questions were as follows.

    • Selling off public utilities to private companies will help the economy. 25% agreed and 53% disagreed.
    • Selling government assets frees up money to reallocate to other services and infrastructure. 38% agreed and 44% disagreed.
    • Privatisation mainly benefits the corporate sector. 70% agreed and 13% disagreed.
    • Utilities like water and power supply is too important to be sold off. 72% agreed and 13% disagreed.

    As I mentioned in my blog on 4 February ‘Recent polling by Reach Tel for Stop the Selloff Campaign  reveals that 67% of people in Victoria and 74% of people in South Australia believe that they were worse off with privatised electricity networks.’

    The Swinburne Business School has studied closely the data on the effects of privatisation. It concludes that the evidence is ‘far from conclusive’ one way or another. This study was recently published in the Australian Economic Review.

    Overall I suggest that there is little evidence that privatisation has delivered improvements in living standards, but Conservatives and particularly financial advisers and underwriters who benefit from privatisation, keep spruiking about its merits.

    If we look at the big ticket privations in Australia, the story is mixed.

    Telstra was the largest privatisation but the improvements have come through increased competition and deregulation in the retail sector. If the wholesale arm of Telstra (exchanges, cables, etc.) had not been privatised – structural separation – we would be well on the way to a world class NBN. The privatisation of Telstra’s wholesale arm was an enormous mistake. We are paying dearly for it.

    Have we benefitted from the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank? With the strong market power of the four banks today, there is little to distinguish the public contribution of the Commonwealth Bank.

    Has the privatisation of Qantas worked? The main public benefits have occurred because of market deregulation, the end of the two-airline domestic policy and increased international competition by allowing in more foreign operators. To make a political success of privatising British Airways, Maggie Thatcher fattened up BA before the sale by helping to get rid of some of BA’s competitors and by entrenching BA’s position on Atlantic routes and at Heathrow airport.

    Are we better off with the privatisation of our airports? Capital city airports are really natural monopolies with very little competition. They are able to exploit their market power by gouging consumers. Sydney Airport has been given a privileged position which will enable it to veto any effective competitor for a second Sydney airport.

    We had a clear message on privatisation from voters in both the Victorian and Queensland elections and asset sales will be a key issue in the pending NSW election.

    The NSW government is telling us that the only way to build infrastructure is to sell electricity assets. But with interest rates at record low levels it has never been cheaper than today to borrow. We don’t have a debt problem despite the shrill propaganda. Furthermore, Australian governments can borrow much more cheaply than private operators.

    The NSW government is warning that a plan by the Australian Energy Regulator to force NSW electricity networks to cut their share of household electricity prices by 30% from July 1 this year could threaten the safety and reliability of the state’s power network. What nonsense! The NSW government is opposed to this cut in prices because if it did so the profitability of the networks would be reduced and the return from the planned 49% privatisation would be significantly downgraded. The NSW government wants to fatten up the electricity utilities by denying price reductions to consumers.

    Privatisation is not a magic bullet as we have seen in so many instances. It is looking more and more like an ideological hangover. Voters are clearly not convinced.

  • Michael Gracey. Why is closing the aboriginal health gap failing so badly?

    The disparity between the health of Aboriginal people and other Australians first drew wide public attention In the 1960s; it became known as “The Aboriginal Health Problem”. This awareness came from reports of widespread and severe malnutrition in Aboriginal infants and young children, high rates of infections and gut parasites, high infant mortality, and reduced life expectancy.

    This wasn’t good enough for a wealthy nation like Australia, the “Lucky Country” if you like, where the luck seemed to not extend to the First Australians. There was a public outcry at the time, followed by almost predictable political reactions aimed at correcting the inequity.

    Strategies were devised, programs planned, health professionals were employed, and huge sums of taxpayers’ dollars were allocated and spent over the next half century. So we are entitled to ask “what happened?”

    There were some gains. Aboriginal infant mortality rates fell, their average birth weights increased, rates of malnutrition dropped, vaccine-preventable infections receded, rates of severe child infections declined and deaths from childhood gastroenteritis plummeted. These encouraging improvements were mostly due to conventional public health measures including childhood vaccination, better hygiene, and earlier referral for treatment of illnesses, greatly improved treatment for childhood diarrhoea and dehydration, and employment of skilled clinical personnel. But over the past thirty or so years many aspects of the health of Indigenous people have deteriorated. Why?

    Since the 1970s there have been substantial changes in the living patterns of Aboriginal Australians, particularly in rural and remote areas. Political, legal and administrative changes occurred from the late 1960s that had profound effects on Aboriginal people and communities. Examples include the introduction of equal pay for equal work, the granting of drinking rights to Indigenous persons, various systems of welfare support and payments, increased reliance on the welfare system, and a rapid shift from traditional lifestyles to that of a typical Westernised contemporary society. This all occurred on an entrenched system where Indigenous people were disadvantaged in almost all aspects of their lives from the rest of the wider Australian society.

    Indigenous people went through a swift lifestyle shift and became less physically active, more sedentary, and consumed modern foods and drinks that were more calorie-dense, contained much more fat and salt and less fibre than in previous times. The stage was being prepared for a tidal wave of chronic so-called “lifestyle” diseases which threatened their survival. The Tsunami of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, chronic kidney disease and renal failure descended on them with a vengeance. Not only that, the stresses associated with maladjustment to these changes, socio-political disadvantage, under-education, unemployment and racial prejudice combined to make them a sub-group that was vulnerable to a heavy burden of disease, disability and excessively high mortality.

    However, increasing numbers of Indigenous Australians are not trapped in this unfavourable vortex of negative factors. Many are being well-educated, achieving high levels of competence and success in their daily lives, in business, the professions, and academia, and are becoming leaders in Australian society. These people provide encouragement towards future successes and recognition of Indigenous people as exemplars.

    But the negative impacts of various factors on the health statistics of Indigenous people over the past 30 years are a cause for serious concern.

    The persisting, yawning divide between the health statistics of Aboriginal people and other Australians has become known as “The Aboriginal Health Gap” which is one of this country’s worst embarrassments. In 2008 the then Labor government committed to “close the gap”, a phrase which in my view has been overstated. That commitment was to make the health, disease and death statistics, as well as other markers of Aboriginal well-being, match those of other Australians by the year 2030. This is not achievable. Apart from the vast discrepancies that are so entrenched in the lives of most Indigenous Australians, such as poor educational standards, high unemployment, lower per capita incomes, and unsatisfactory housing and access to services, there are many biological factors that contribute to ill-health that have strong components that persist for more than one generation. This means that issues that affect future generations, such as the health and nutrition of pregnant Aboriginal women and breast-feeding mothers, must be corrected before improvements can occur for the following generation or more. This simply cannot be done within 20 or 30 years. Similarly, the heavy chronic disease burden of, for example, diabetes and its long-term complications, chronic kidney disease and kidney failure that are so prevalent in young Aboriginal people, cannot be fully eliminated within one generation.

    Reviewing the official annual reports about progress over the past seven years is a disheartening exercise. Many of the stated targets have not been reached and, in some areas, things have deteriorated despite the immense amounts of public funds which have been used in “close the gap” programs. This was admitted in February 2015 by the Prime Minister when commenting on the seventh annual report; senior Indigenous spokespersons agreed that the findings were very disappointing. What’s gone wrong?

    Looking objectively at the situation it must be admitted that the federal government commitment in 2008 was: (a) well-intentioned; (b) ill-informed; (c) not adequately thought through; (d) bureaucratically top-heavy and clumsy; (e) naïvely optimistic; (f) culturally insensitive; (g) rhetorical rather than realistic; and (h) ignored the biological restrictions imposed by previous generations on altering health outcomes in subsequent generations of children.

    Why shouldn’t the government admit that the commitment made in 2008 was not feasible and start again? A serious problem with a failing program is that many people feel let down, disheartened and frustrated because the expectations are not being realised. This is particularly so for those who have the most to gain or lose – the Indigenous people. This won’t change until a more realistic strategy and timetable are devised, perhaps with a new name.

    Government must accept that approaches used over the past 30 years or so have, with few exceptions, like those already mentioned, not worked. This applies to different levels of service delivery; government, the private sector, and Aboriginal-controlled medical services.

    A fresh approach is needed. To date governments have given little encouragement to Indigenous people to become agents of change for their own health. Community engagement, commitment, and acceptance of responsibility must occur at the local level if real change is to be achieved. This will provide opportunities, previously denied to Indigenous communities and their members, to learn at first-hand: (1) the determinants of health; (2) what causes illness; (3) how diseases can be prevented; and (4) how health service systems operate and can be modified as required. Community involvement in these matters will provide, perhaps for the first time, a new deal with local people being real partners in programs to improve their own health. This will require collaborative teams with long experience in health and health services, community development, cross-cultural knowledge, empathy, patience, and inter-personal skills to work in small groups around Australia. This strategy uses a previously untapped resource, local Indigenous people and communities, to help “close the gap”. Governments will have to commit to radical changes in order to achieve this.

    Meanwhile, all the other social, economic and environmental factors that affect health outcomes will need to be addressed vigorously. Without such changes, for example in education and employment opportunities, the failures of the past will continue.

    Michael Gracey AO MD PhD FRACP FAAP

    Professor Gracey is a paediatrician who has worked with Aboriginal people, families, communities and organisations for more than 40 years. He was Principal Medical Adviser on Aboriginal Health in the West Australian Department of Health and was Australia’s first Professor of Aboriginal Health. He has also served as President of the International Paediatric Association.

  • Ian McAuley. The speech that Tony Abbott almost delivered to the National Press Club.

    Was this a spoof?

    There are ‘claims’ that the following speech appeared on the websites of the Liberal Party and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet on the day that Tony Abbott gave his speech to the National Press Club, but it was taken down as soon as it was found that the Prime Minister was delivering a different speech – presumably one prepared entirely in his own office.

    For delivery National Press Club – 2 February 2015

    Let me start with a “thank you” to the people of Queensland.

    My gratitude may surprise some. As leader of the Federal Coalition I am naturally disappointed to see one of our own lose office. But last weekend the people of Queensland sent us a loud wake-up call.

    It wasn’t our first wake-up call. We have had many since we were elected 16 months ago, but each time we have lazily reached for the “snooze” button.

    We have been too cocksure, too ready to believe our own propaganda, too ready to read the columns of sycophantic journalists, too ready to take plaudits from people of our own tribe.

    Each political setback – failures of Coalition parties in elections in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland, the Senate’s rejection of our education and health bills, a string of poor opinion polls – we have put down to an inability to get our message across.

    It didn’t occur to us that the electors may have heard and understood our message all too clearly, and that they have rejected it.

    It didn’t occur to us that they could see through the accounting tricks of “asset recycling” and “leasing”.

    It didn’t occur to us that they rejected the idea that everything that’s good for the private sector is necessarily good for Australia.

    In short, we have been saying, paternalistically, “we know what’s good for you”.  Our side of politics has often accused parties of the “left” of paternalism, but we have been blind to our own transgressions.

    Paternalism, I need to remind myself, and my Parliamentary colleagues, has no place in the Liberal Party.

    I take the brunt of responsibility for these failures. I have made too many “captain’s calls”.  When I have consulted it has been with my hand-picked colleagues, particularly a cabinet which, I now realise, is not even representative of the views of the members of the Coalition parties.

    I have ignored those who spend time in their electorates listening to the views, ideas and aspirations of the Australian people.

    I have been too ready to listen to those who agree with me, and to disregard my critics – to assume that those who disagree with us are our enemies rather than people of good will offering sound advice.

    My appointment of a Commission of Audit, bypassing the established policy processes of government, I now acknowledge was a grave mistake.

    When people criticised our budget we accused them of short-sightedness, of a failure to understand the need for fiscal responsibility. We didn’t realise that people may be ready to make sacrifices for the public good, provided the pain and effort are shared fairly.

    I have been too ready to blame the previous Government for the nation’s problems. They did a reasonable job in reacting to the financial crisis and its aftermath. I do criticise them, however, for failing to attend to our weakened public revenue base. The last years of the Labor Government saw many promises – including excellent initiatives in education and disability services – but there was no plan to raise the revenue to fund them.

    We made the mistake of dealing with this fiscal gap through cutting expenditure rather than raising revenue.

    We listened only to those who stood to benefit from privatisation, forgetting that people legitimately expect their governments to do what the private sector cannot do, or cannot do so well, and are willing to pay for public goods and services.

    We made the fiscal task harder for ourselves by repealing and reversing plans to raise taxes, most significantly the tax on carbon emissions. We failed to appreciate that these taxes, besides contributing fiscally, were designed to help Australian industry adjust.

    I now realise that we have let down many of Australia’s most energetic and creative entrepreneurs, who, in times past, would have been strong supporters of the Liberal Party.

    Those who had plans for renewable energy investments.

    Those who had intended to build businesses around high speed broadband.

    Those who had drawn on publicly funded research in universities and the CSIRO to develop new products and processes.

    We didn’t listen to them.  Rather, we were too ready to give an ear to established businesses, the big donors to our party.

    It would be tempting to use an occasion like this to announce a few populist sweeteners – tax breaks for small business or handouts for families.  But that’s the very policy on the run that has characterised Australian politics for far too long.

    Rather, I want to announce the general policy directions we will be taking.

    First, we are taking proposals for health and education back to the drawing boards to be subjected to full community consultation, with more considered proposals ready for next year’s election. In the meantime we will restore funding to ensure these sectors, particularly the universities, are not disadvantaged.

    Second, we will review all funding cuts made since we came to office and in Labor’s last year in office. Most of these were made with too little consideration or appreciation of the economic benefits of public services.

    Third, we will do this in a fiscally and economically responsible way.

    That means repairing our revenue base.

    To this end I call on those Australians who have benefited so much from public spending – defence, infrastructure, education, health care – to contribute more. Our budget to be handed down in May will have measures to close holes left by successive governments’ tax concessions for superannuation, short-term capital gains, investor housing, family trusts and corporate perks.

    That means the task of fiscal repair will not fall on those who have most rather than least capacity to pay. We are also mindful of the risk to consumer confidence and demand when the purchasing power of the least well-off is diminished.

    Once we have completed our Cabinet re-shuffle, our to-be-appointed Treasurer will announce more details.

    One certainty is that we will restore a carbon pricing mechanism. It will be more comprehensive that Labor’s half-hearted scheme, covering transport fuels and exported coal. And, in keeping with the principles of our Party, it will be market-based.

    Also in keeping with the principles of the Liberal Party to provide business with stable policy, I announce that there will be no change to the Renewable Energy Target.

    Our infrastructure plan remains intact; in fact we will expand it, but I am pleased to announce that “asset recycling” is now dead, cremated and buried. We will consider privatisation only when there is no longer a benefit in public ownership.

    It would be economically irresponsible not to take advantage of our credit rating to borrow at the low rates available to us to invest in rail, road, public transport, research, environmental repair and other public goods, so badly neglected by past governments. Handing these to the private sector, whose cost of capital is so much higher than the government’s, is simply wasteful, and can result in higher national debt than if the government is to fund these projects.

    That means there will be an increase in our already low public debt, but we will raise the taxes to service that debt.

    Our focus from here on will be on the public balance sheet, compensating for years of neglect of our public assets. I bear some personal responsibility for allowing fiscal policy to crowd out all other aspects of economic policy, but I also ask journalists here today to lift the quality of economic debate beyond “gotcha” attacks on failures in budget projections.

    That is our economic agenda, but I have several other announcements relating to political donations, Australian honours, refugees and ……..

     

  • Mary Chiarella. Luke Foley – Nurse-led clinics and primary health care.

    In 2011 I gave the last Oration for what was originally the NSW College of Nursing in the Great Hall of Sydney University. In it I advocated for nurses to be able to work to full scope of practice, particularly in the area of primary and preventive health care, in order to alleviate demands on our overstretched hospital systems. Given we currently have a significant oversupply of nurses in this country, especially in our new graduate population, this seems like an excellent time to deploy nurses into some of these roles, long overdue in Australia but commonplace in other parts of the world. . The first ever NSW College of Nursing Oration was given on the 15th September 1953 by M.I. Lambie, who was not only the first Orator for the College, but the first woman to give an Oration in the Great Hall of Australia’s oldest university. Miss Lambie was the New Zealand Nursing Adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Chair of the Expert Nursing Committee of WHO. Let me read to you her introductory words as she talks of the problems in health care in the developed world:

    These facts have caused increasing demands on hospitals; the rapid turnover in surgical beds together with the larger numbers of elderly and chronic patients has forced consideration to be given to the whole problem of hospitalisation by many authorities. The increased use of hospitals means automatically more staff or the better use of existing staff”[1]. 

    Plus ca change, plus la meme chose. She goes on to advocate for the growth in primary health care that is occurring in developing countries “putting more emphasis on the preventive aspect, which in turn will set an example to many of the older countries”. Well sadly not much yet, Miss Lambie, not much yet. I’m afraid the people you were advising didn’t take your excellent advice. Lots of us have been there.

    She goes on to say

    These are examples whereby preventive means, home education and treatment have reduced the demands for hospital beds. In fact it would not have been possible to treat in this mass way in an institution. The education of the home for this kind of treatment means, however, the preparation of a worker to carry out the program. Funnily we speak of this NEW approach to medicine, and yet in her Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale speaks of “the need to nurse the home as well as the family[2]. 

    So we come full circle in what is needed for health care in Australia, advocated by Florence Nightingale in the 19th century, advocated by the first NSW College of Nursing Orator, Miss Lambie in the 20th century, and advocated in the 21st century by the (then) Australian Nursing Federation[3]. Let us hope, in the promises of Luke Foley to introduce four nurse-led clinics in NSW should Labor win the next election, that the wise words of our nursing forebears do not have to wait another 62 years before somebody decides to act on them. This is so obvious a solution that one wonders why it is not commonplace, rather than tentative.

    Mary Chiarella is Professor of Nursing, Sydney Nursing School, University of Sydney.

    [1] Lambie IM (1953) First Annual Oration The changing scene in health work throughout the world in The 50th Anniversary Annual Orations Vol I NSW College of Nursing: Sydney, p.9

    [2]  Ibid, p.10

    [3] Australian Nursing Federation (2009) Primary health care in Australia: a nursing and midwifery consensus view ANF: Canberra

  • Warwick Elsche. Abbott and Credlin.

    It was on again – all last week. Apart from the uncertain future of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, all political talk was of Peta Credlin his Chief of Staff and unquestionably the most talked of, written about, high profile staffer in living memory – maybe ever.

    Over more than five years in Opposition and Government, the Prime Minister himself has lauded her importance in his office and the influence she wields on him and his decision making. Apart from normal duties she has been rewarded with the role of vetting Cabinet Papers from all Ministers, unheard of in previous administrations. Equally unprecedented is the place she has taken at the Cabinet table, where she reportedly feels free to speak if so moved.

    She had the power to vet and reject staff appointments by even the most senior Ministers and to determine what staff may travel overseas with Ministers.

    Such was her profile that Australia’s Security Organisation, ASIO, – not famous for its assessments – warned her to be more cautious with her own travel arrangements because of the vital role she played in Government. No shrinking violet, Credlin seems to share this view, having reportedly described herself as the girl who nearly won the 2010 election and did win in 2013.

    She is, say some, the brains behind the PM; others that she is merely a major influence on him. And “no” say more, who seem to share her assessment of herself. She is, to them, a key figure across the entire operations of the Government. Abbott, whose political judgement is currently under heavy questioning from both colleagues and the electorate, has added to the legend with paeans of praise both in public and private.

    The current hubbub over Credlin however is somewhat on a different note. Far from currently being seen as an ongoing Liberal celebrity, a significant majority of her former admirers are now viewing her in a different light. To them she is now viewed as a villain, a liability and a scapegoat for the Government’s current failings. At a time when her supposed talents for both boss and government are most in demand, she seems, despite the lofty reputation, to be coming up seriously short. And if Tony’s political instincts are so blunted as to leave him unaware of this, those of his colleagues do not appear to be. They now want her gone – a desire being expressed embarrassingly openly – NOW.

    Abbott’s own performance and fortunes from the time he took the Liberal leadership have been, on his own admission, linked almost totally with Credlin. Now, for the first time, the lofty reputation associated with Credlin is being questioned where it most matters – in the ranks of the Government itself. Her real worth to the Prime Minister is under close examination. After all, despite her vaulted influence, Abbott was left for more than four years pushing his universally unpopular Paid Parental Leave scheme. It was finally dumped when rejected by business, the electorate and his own Party. She argued with, not against, her boss against senior Ministers on the introduction of a six month initial ban on dole payments to the unemployed – a policy virtually guaranteed to get negative votes from every under -25 in the country and many others closer to the problem than are the comfortable Northern Sydney home environs of Abbott and his Treasurer Joe Hockey.

    Her reputed sharp political instincts failed to prevent his ludicrous decision to bestow a knighthood on Prince Phillip. In 18 months of Government she seems to have been unable to move the Prime Minister from his pathetic claims of achievement for his Government based on killing the Carbon Tax and the Mining Tax and stopping the boats. The last two of these accomplishments make no difference whatever to the everyday lives of any Australians.  On the Carbon Tax a more lively Opposition might pressure the PM to produce a single Australian family which has benefitted from Abbott’s promise of $11.00 a week once the tax was gone. This promised benefit is a theme Credlin allows him to continue although power bills nationwide show the $11.00 a week to be another Abbott fiction.

    Credlin, it seems, has also failed to appreciate that continued criticism of the previous Labor Government is neither some form of Government action – nor an excuse for inaction. At a time when polls are showing critical lows for both Abbott and his Government it is obvious this line is not working. Abbott badly needs something newer, something better. The electorate demands it and his parliamentary colleagues are joining in the push. But, between them, Abbott and his supposedly gifted lieutenant have been unable to produce anything to replace the whinge against Labor that he adopted from day one of his prime ministry. That theme, boringly overworked as it is, no longer works – look again at the polls.

    Given the dire poll position of both Abbott and Government and the growing threats to his leadership we would perhaps have expected to see Credlin at her best in the last couple of weeks. Tony and everybody else saw last week’s Press Club Address as an opportunity to suppress the growing dissatisfaction with his leadership and to reassure the country that he knew how to secure its future. But Abbott was provided with no inspiring message, no vision for the future, which might calm those now anxious about his leadership. Several times he told us Australia needed “a strong economy”. There was talk of “more jobs” but there was no outline whatever of how either of these might be achieved. There was much ”where to go” but no idea how to get there. Otherwise there was a jot of xenophobia and much more of the by now predictable overdose of criticism of his Labor predecessors.

    Is Credlin slow or is it Tony? Following his “near death experience” and promise to change and to listen, having refused requests (demands) for Peta’s dismissal, he must surely have employed his best resources on his road to recovery. But what have we seen? A continuation of his series of stumbles headed by a very unimpressive speech informing us of his narrow victory in which he included the very dubious assertion that there was no future threat to his leadership. This was followed by a stuff-up – bordering on deception – about the process to be followed in procuring Australia’s next submarine fleet when it is highly likely that in a matter of days it will be revealed that a Japanese submarine deal was a condition of the final signing of the Free Trade Agreement. Then he further isolated himself in his Party with the sacking of the insignificant but respected Philip Ruddock as the Chief Government Whip. Abbott claimed Ruddock had failed to inform him of the strength of back bench feeling about his leadership. No one wanted him removed. Credlin similarly failed to assess for Abbott the extent of the threat (doesn’t anyone in the PM’s supposedly efficient office read newspapers or watch TV)? Unlike with Ruddock there was a clamour for her removal. In what may prove another error of judgement, Ruddock went and Credlin stays. Then there was his inept disclosure in Parliament of evidence which would almost certainly be used in an upcoming terrorist trial. Then he put his popularity further at risk with an extraordinary attack on the internationally respected Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs.

    NOT A GREAT FIRST WEEK OF A REVITALISED PRIME MINISTER AND THE START OF “GOOD GOVERNMENT”.

    Under pressure, where is the evidence of the genius we have been told is running his office and where has this guidance taken the Prime Minister and his troubled Government in its first 18 months. We have a Prime Minister who, according to Newspoll, the poll most respected by both major parties, with a near record low approval rating of 24% and a record high disapproval rating of 68%. And what about the Government that Credlin and others have claimed she influences. The same respected poll has it trailing a rather colourless Opposition 57% to 43% – landslide territory – with a Primary vote at a Rudd-like level of 35%.

    If Peta Credlin, with her reputed influence and control of both PM and Government generally, has contributed in any way to the dire position in which both PM and Party find themselves, calls for her replacement can hardly be seen as unreasonable. If, on the other hand, she, is advising otherwise and being ignored, one can only wonder at the lofty reputation of control and influence and there would appear to be little reason for the PM not to appease his critical backbench by allowing her to go.

    But Abbott, in the old schoolboy marbles term, has chosen to “stick fats” with Credlin. Are we seeing yet another example of the Prime Minister’s poor political judgement?

    Warwick Elsche is Pearls and Irritations’ Canberra correspondent.

  • The Forgotten Children.

     

  • Jill White. Nurse Led Clinics for NSW.

    Luke Foley – great!

    Congratulations on committing to nurse led clinics as part of to a primary health care strategy to increase access to community based health care. The four nurse led clinics promised last week are a welcome adjunct to the current but often overstretched GP services.

    The ACT has led the way in nurse led clinics with the first, based in an emergency department, being evaluated as providing high quality safe and appropriate care; however where there was also easy access to medical care there was the risk of over-servicing lessening the cost effectiveness.  So with lesson learned the two new ACT services are in underserviced areas and are providing high quality care to a population which otherwise would have had difficulty in quick and affordable access to health care. Information on these services is available through ACT Health. It is a success story, ask the people of Belconnen and Tuggeranong.

    Our current NSW Minister for Health, Jillian Skinner, also has a public track record of commitment to improving community based services. So come on Jillian, match this promise and let’s not let party politics and election posturing get in the way of a really good idea for the health of the public.

    The past few weeks has clearly demonstrated that we are heartily sick of party based oppositional politics and if NSW does not want to risk going down the same path as Queensland or suffering the public disenchantment experienced by the Prime Minister this is the moment and this is the issue to demonstrate that the health of the public is a genuine bipartisan concern and that this is an excellent strategy. Let’s make these clinics a reality irrespective of any election and have a public commitment from both sides of politics NOW.

    I can’t let this topic go however without addressing Saxon Smith’s comment on behalf of the AMA in the SMH yesterday. He is quoted as saying “There is actually evidence suggesting nurse-led clinics can make the quality of the care worse”. What research? Conducted how and where and published in what peer reviewed journal? It is a glib and easy thing to say but where is the evidence? How does it stack up against the 20 years of rigorous, published, Australian based research which clearly demonstrates the safety and quality of the work of Nurse Practitioners?

    It’s always worth reminding ourselves  that the AMA is not only a professional body but it is also the doctor’s union and protecting income and turf is its job. We have 25 years of documented AMA opposition and scare tactics about nurses being able to work to their full scope of practice and making a broader contribution to community health.

    The vast majority of doctors in practice with whom I speak fully support an extension of the role of nurses in primary health care/ community care. They particularly understand the need to provide better access to underserved communities. This is work nurses want to do, are educated to do, and have the skills to do. Luke and Jillian please bring it on, make the commitment and don’t let better healthcare become a political football.

    Jill White was formerly the Dean of the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at Sydney University. 

  • Kim Oates.  The Forgotten Children

    I have just read the report of the Australian Human Rights Commission on Children in Detention “The Forgotten Children”.

    It is clear, factual and unemotional.  It is supported by evidence and is non-partisan. It is not on the side of any political party. It is on the side of children.

    It made me ashamed about what is being done to these children. It made me sad that our nation can be so cruel. It made me angry about the way the two main political parties responded on the release of the report. The Labour Party was largely silent, although much of what is documented in the report occurred on their watch. The Liberal/National party was belligerent, ignoring the seriousness of the message, blaming others while simultaneously congratulating themselves and trying to shoot the highly respected messenger, Professor Gillian Triggs.

    I have not visited a detention centre.  But I am a paediatrician and have wide experience in child protection and with disadvantaged children. I know the devastating effects of abuse and deprivation in childhood, effects which often continue throughout life.

    I know the paediatricians who gave evidence to the inquiry. They are highly regarded in the medical community. They are not political people, they don’t exaggerate. They care about children.

    The inquiry was established to investigate how life in immigration detention may affect the health and development of children. It interviewed 112 children and their families about the health impacts of detention, using a standardised questionnaire. It held five public hearings and received 239 submissions.

    One of its aims was to see if Australia met its international human rights obligations, such as:  appropriateness of facilities where children are detained; measures to ensure their safety and provision of education, recreation and health services.

    Having pointed out that mandatory immigration detention, especially of children, is contrary to Australia’s international obligations, the report states “It is troubling that members of the Government and Parliament and Departmental officials are either uninformed, or choose to ignore, the human rights treaties to which Australia is a party”.

    The report noted that our leaders, while talking about the value of detention as a deterrent, do not believe this themselves: “As the medical evidence has mounted over the last eight months of the Inquiry, it has become increasingly difficult to understand the policy of both Labor and Coalition Governments. Both the Hon Chris Bowen MP, as a former Minister for Immigration, and the Hon Scott Morrison MP, the current Minister for Immigration, agreed on oath before the Inquiry that holding children in detention does not deter either asylum seekers or people smugglers. No satisfactory rationale for the prolonged detention of children seeking asylum in Australia has been offered”

    The Australian Government’s own Early Years Learning Framework describes three foundations as the basis for healthy childhood growth and progress for pre-schoolers: ‘Belonging, Being and Becoming.’

    The first foundation, “Belonging” points out that pre-schoolers need to belong to a family and a community if they are to establish secure relationships and a healthy sense of self.

    However the report says “All evidence to this Inquiry indicates that the institutionalised structure and routine of detention disrupts family functioning and the relationships between parents and children. Children do not have access to a private family home where it would be expected families would spend time away from other people sharing meals, engaging in shared activities, and having rest-time on their own.”

    The second foundation, “Being” emphasises  play-based learning because play provides the most appropriate stimulus for brain development,  that childhood is a special time in life where children need time to play, try new things and have fun.

    There was little evidence of this need being met for children in detention. 

    “My youngest child has no toys. He only pushes a chair around” said one mother.

    The third foundation ‘Becoming’, is about the learning and development that young children experience. But the most common concern of parents was that their children had little opportunity to learn socialisation skills. Many reported that their pre-schooler was unable to get along with other children.

    These three foundations, established by our government for healthy child development are denied children in detention, children who are under the guardianship of the Minister.

    The inquiry clearly showed that detention was bad for the mental health and wellbeing of children. Almost all children and their parents spoke about their worry, restlessness, anxiety and difficulties eating and sleeping. Thirty four percent of children had mental health disorders that, if they were not in detention with limited health services, would require referral to a specialist child mental health service for psychiatric treatment.  This compares with less than two percent of children in the Australian population.

    Children were reported to experience tearfulness, anxiety, delayed or absent speech, regression in behaviour and nightmares. Observers noted tantrums, sleep disturbance, poor concentration, frustration and agitation. One mother told the enquiry:

    “My daughter is 2 years old. Five months ago she started behaving abnormally. She wakes up screaming and crying in the middle of the night. She always hits us; she pulls my hair and scratches our faces. She has tantrums every day. She broke my glasses. She gets upset without any reason”. 

    The Royal Australasian College of Physicians submitted their concern about ‘the long-term impact of detention on children, noting that the ‘psychological distress resulting from detention can persist for years after release’.

    The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists stated  “… detention of children is detrimental to children’s development and mental health and has the potential to cause long-term damage to social and emotional functioning.”

    This report needs to be taken seriously. It should not be used as an opportunity to blame.  It is an opportunity to right a wrong. It is about protecting children.

    Kim Oates is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the Sydney University Medical School. He was formerly Chief Executive of the Sydney Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

     

     

     

  • Marie Coleman. Human Rights Commission and the forgotten children.

    In February 2015 the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse found that Cardinal George Pell, the former Archbishop of Sydney, had placed the church’s financial interests above his obligation to a victim of childhood sexual abuse.

    In February 2015 the Prime Minister of Australia, supported by his Ministers, has launched a blistering attack on a distinguished legal scholar and President of the independent statutory Australian Rights Commission, for a report which has found that both the Labor and Coalition Governments have failed to protect children in mandatory detention from abuse and mental and physical harm.

    Professor Gillian Triggs has found that Australia has been and remains in breach of its international obligations- under both parties. Among other straightforward and completely nonpartisan recommendations she has recommended that “An independent guardian be appointed for unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Australia” rather than the current position of the Minister for Immigration being both the guardian of such children, and the Minister responsible for their mandatory detention.

    The Royal Commission has been investigating historic instances of abuse, exploring the approaches which institutions responsible for such abuse have responded to reports of individual cases, as well as options for reparations.

    The thrust of the AHRC Report, The Forgotten Children, is to explore and document what have been the outcomes for children placed in mandatory detention, and to develop future policies and legislation which will prevent such dreadful outcomes ever again being visited on children.

    The Minister for Immigration, Peter Dutton MP, has asserted that the AHRC Report is irrelevant because any instances of maltreatment of children have been historical. The second leg of the Government’s response to the AHRC report seems to be that because Labor did it, then the Coalition’s actions, if harm has been done, are justifiable.

    The Opposition has essentially mumbled.

    The unpalatable situation is that neither Labor nor the Coalition has any way to escape from the fact that one outcome of their policies on immigration and refugees (stopping the boats) has been to put children through hell, and put Australia in breach of its obligations under international law.

    No equivocations about whether for an adolescent girl to go mad and cut herself on Nauru is better than drowning at sea, no claiming that this wouldn’t have happened if the Coalition had allowed Labor to send refugees to Malaysia, will alter the fact that neither Labor nor the Coalition has been able to articulate an acceptable , transparent and  legal method of dealing with the inevitable pressures from populations moving from political anarchy, oppression, assassinations and starvation in home countries.

    The cost of current off shore detention of refugees in 2014-15 was estimated by an Immigration Department official as $1 billion. Running the detention centre on Manus Island has cost taxpayers $632.3 million, and the operational cost of Nauru was $582.4 million, a Senate estimates hearing was told. That’s a billion dollars a year for the foreseeable future…without giving thought to the ultimate health costs for the treatment of health and psychological damages to the refugees. It doesn’t include other costs such as the role of the Australian Navy and Customs in ‘on water’ activities.

    Surely it isn’t beyond the capacity of this nation’s leaders to develop alternative strategies?

    Former NSW Premier Nick Greiner described as “awful” the fact that Australia was the only nation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that indefinitely detained children in mandatory detention.

    “The principle that Australia … finds it necessary to be virtually the only civilised nation that does this, I think is just abhorrent,” he said….”we now ought to look at the humanity of what we do”, he said.

    Last month NSW Premier Baird called on Mr Abbott, a close friend, to do more to accept refugees. Asked if children should be released from immigration detention, Mr Baird said “that’s something I’ve supported for a long time”.

    In an interview with 3AW, Mr Abbott said the commission should be ashamed of itself and that its report was a “blatantly partisan” and political exercise.

    He said the commission should acknowledge the government for stopping the flow of asylum seeker boats and dramatically reducing the number of children in detention.

    “I reckon the human rights commission ought to be sending a note of congratulations to Scott Morrison saying well done, mate,” Mr Abbott said, referring to the former immigration minister.

    Asked if he felt any guilt about the remaining 200 children still in detention, Mr Abbott was blunt: “None whatsoever.”

    “The most compassionate thing you can do is stop the boats,” he said.

    He said the only way to ensure there were no children in detention was to ensure there were no boats arriving.

    Numbers of children in immigration detention peaked at nearly 2000 in mid-2013 under Labor. There are now only about 200 children still detained.

    The Australian Human Rights Commission report wants actions taken to prevent such a situation ever developing again.

    “The human rights commission ought to be ashamed of itself,” Mr Abbott said, when asked about the report.

    So that’s all right. The Prime Minister thinks his policy is tops. A great policy in fact.

    As the distinguished PUP Senator for Queensland, Glenn Lazarus might put it ‘you can polish a turd, but it’s still a turd’.

    Marie Coleman AO PSM is a former senior Commonwealth Public Servant with a background in social policy.

  • Climate change – If only!

    Last Saturday David Cameron, the British PM, Nick Clegg, the Deputy PM and Leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Ed Milliband, Leader of the British Labour Party, signed a joint pledge on climate change.

    The three leaders agreed on three particular pledges

    • ‘To seek a fair, strong, legally binding, global climate deal which limits temperature rises to below 2 degrees centigrade.’
    • ‘To work together, across party lines to agree carbon budgets’
    • ‘To accelerate the transition to a competitive, energy efficient low carbon economy and to end the use of unabated coal for power generation.’

    If only Tony Abbott, Bill Shorten, Christine Milne and Clive Palmer could come to a similar deal!

    I have not seen this reported in any Australian mainstream media.

    For more information on this encouraging deal in the UK see link to the Guardian below.

    http://gu.com/p/45ng5/sbl

  • John Menadue.  Climate change and the rise and demise of Tony Abbott.

    Opposition to climate change was the vehicle for Tony Abbott to rise to the leadership of the Liberal Party. It is now making a major factor in his demise as Prime Minister.

    Tony Abbott regarded climate change as ‘absolute crap’ and in December 2009 he rallied the support of the  right wing of the Liberal Party led my Nick Minchin to overthrow Malcolm Turnbull as the leader. His victory margin was one vote. Malcolm Turnbull had been negotiating with Kevin Rudd for a bipartisan commitment on an emissions trading scheme.

    But with the leadership in his grasp and with the media and climate sceptics supporting him, Tony Abbott seized on the carbon tax and did what he does best, attack.

    We have never seen such a wrecking ball campaign on such an important issue as climate change and the associated carbon tax. He was joined in his exaggerated campaign against the carbon tax and climate change by News Corp and numerous right-wing ideologues posing as serious business people.

    This campaign was highly successful and in government he attacked every arm of government associated with climate change. But the ground was slowly moving around the world as one scientific report after another confirmed the growing threat of climate change induced particularly by coal-fired electricity generation. Even though the ground was moving, Tony Abbott continued to talk about ‘king coal’ and how the world would have to rely on coal for the rest of this century.

    Then came President Obama to the G20 meeting in Brisbane in November last year. This meeting of the twenty most powerful economies in the world was hoped to be a crowning success for its Chair, Tony Abbott. But it was not to be.

    Before arrival in Brisbane, Barack Obama had announced in Beijing an historic climate change agreement with the Chinese President. But there was more to come. Barack Obama took the platform at the University of Queensland and told the world that Tony Abbott was failing on climate change. Politely and clearly President Obama affirmed the science on climate change that Tony Abbott was denying.  He said that Australia faced longer droughts and more bushfires. He added that the incredible national glory of the Great Barrier Reef was threatened. He spoke of the increased production of carbon emissions and demanded that all countries step up and do more both nationally and internationally on climate change.

    Tony Abbott had tried to keep climate change off the G20 agenda. He failed. His PR people, including Julie Bishop, did what Tony Abbott does best – attack. They attacked our principal ally the US for daring to say these things in Australia about climate change.

    Lenore Taylor in The Guardian of 13 February 2015 put it this way. ‘An authoritarian leader’s need to attack, even annihilate critics can also be devastatingly self-defeating. Tony Abbott and senior ministers were deeply angry at Barack Obama’s show-stealing climate change speech during the G20 and in true authoritarian style launched an extraordinary onslaught on an ally. They briefed multiple News Ltd columnists to that effect, including graphic accounts of how they rang up afterwards and yelled at State Department officials for failing to give a “heads up” that the president was going to “dump on” the Prime Minister. Julie Bishop said the President clearly hadn’t read a briefing on all the excellent things Australia is doing to protect the Great Barrier Reef. Andrew Robb said the President had been misinformed.’

    The denial of climate change and the campaign against a carbon tax to reduce carbon emissions was a central factor in projecting Tony Abbott into the Lodge. But now our principal ally was telling him that he was wrong. President Obama catalysed for all that Tony Abbot was not only denying the science on climate change but that he was out of step with the world.

    In the opinion polls Tony Abbott had some minor recovery in the lead up to the G20 in November last year. From then on his personal and his party’s standing have slumped dramatically.

    Many factors, including personality, have played a part in Tony Abbott’s demise, but there is no doubt that climate change which facilitated his rise is the most substantial influence in his demise.

    Climate change will be written on his epitaph.