Category: Politics

  • John Menadue. Cutting back government spending – does it include middle-class and corporate welfare?

    Tony Abbott told his listeners recently at Davos that small government was the best form of government.

    The Minister for Health, Peter Dutton, has said that waste must be reduced in our health sector.

    The Minister for Social Services, Kevin Andrews, has told us that our welfare system is unsustainable and has appointed Patrick McClure to review welfare in Australia.

    And the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, has established a Commission of Audit to look at ways to reduce ‘big government’ with priority to reducing government outlays. He said that the age of entitlement had to end. But for whom! He said ‘it is .. essential that the Commonwealth government lives within its means and begins to pay down its debt’. We know of course that by any international measure we do not have a debt problem but let us pass on that for the moment.

    Before we look at fair and efficient ways to improve our public finances, there are a few broad issues to be considered.

    First, we do have a long term ‘structural deficit’ of about $60 billion p.a. The IMF has told us that the most recent culprits were the Howard/Costello governments that reduced tax rates year after year when we were flush with revenue from the mining boom. The Gillard and Rudd governments did face the GFC and sensibly increased government spending. They made some attempt to reduce middle class welfare, but they failed to grasp the major recommendations of the Henry Review to reform our tax system.

    Second, Australia does not have a growing public sector. As Ian McAuley, Jennifer Doggett and I have set out in our submission to the Senate Select Committee on the Commission of Audit, there is no evidence of any sustained increase in government spending (see my website by clicking on at top left of this blog). In fact, outlays have been trending downwards since the mid-1980s. Andrew Podger, who is Professor of Public Policy at the ANU and former Secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing, said on January 22 in the AFR, ‘The claim that Australia’s welfare system is unsustainable would surprise observers in most other OECD nations which spend a much higher percentage of their GDP on social security payments. Our emphasis on flat rate, means-tested payments rather than earnings-related social insurance has limited the burden on Australian taxpayers.”

    Third, our tax as a percentage of GDP has fallen steadily since 2002 from 30% to 28%, well below the OECD average of 34%.

    Fourth, our health expenditure runs at about 9% to 10% of GDP which is much the same as the OECD average, mainly because of the efficiency of our public insurer, Medicare. We could save substantial amounts in the health sector however if the government would confront the vested interests in health that force up government spending – the AMA, the Private Health Insurance firms, Medicines Australia and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia.

    The issue that stands out is that we need to improve our revenue base. This is where middle class and business welfare is a major problem – the tax-deductions or ‘tax expenditures’ that reduce the effective level of tax and provides disproportionate benefits to the well-off in the community. FlagPost, published by the Australian Parliamentary Library noted on January 29 2014 that Australia has the highest level of tax deductions in the OECD

    • Treasury estimate that the concessions for super contributions and tax-free payments of superannuation to persons over 60 years of age, like me, costs about $32 billion p.a. A phase-in of a 15% tax on superannuation draw-downs would quickly raise $5 billion p.a.
    • The Grattan Institute estimates that property investors get a benefit of about $7 billion p.a. through negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. These concessions help inflate property prices and push home ownership out of the reach of young people.
    • The Grattan Institute also estimate that the government provides about $36 billion p.a. in benefits to home owners through exempting the principal house of residence from capital gains tax and aged pension entitlements. The aged pension is asset-tested, but that test excludes the principal residence. The Minister for Social Services is not prepared to address this issue. The aged pension is excluded from his review. Yet the aged pension costs $36 billion p.a. and accounts for roughly half of the welfare budget. If the government was serious about winding back welfare it would not exclude the aged pension from any review.
    • The government has also excluded from the McClure Review Tony Abbott’s $5.5 billion pa parental leave scheme in which the baby’s primary carer would receive six months leave on full pay up to a maximum of $75,000 p.a. This is middle class welfare in neon lights.

    There are also large hand-outs to the corporate sector, particularly the finance sector

    • There is a subsidy of $6 billion to $7 billion p.a to the high cost Private Health Insurance companies who keep pushing up their premiums which are really private taxes.
    • If we had blinked just before Christmas, we would have missed the largesse that Assistant Treasurer Sinodinos handed out to the financial services industry. The previous government took action to stop superannuation advisers automatically collecting commissions year after year – trailing commissions. It was estimated by the Industry Super Network that this reform by the previous government in stopping these commissions would add $144 billion to private savings by 2027. But Arthur Sinodinos has announced that the Abbott Government will roll back this reform and give financial advisers a chance to plunder our superannuation savings again. The government has given the all clear to the financial advising industry to re impose a private tax on superannuation contributors. There is also no sign that the government is acting to stop the super funds owned by the big banks funnelling their cash exclusively into their parent banks for relatively low returns. It is a private tax on super contributors. That is surely abuse of power or worse but neither ACCC nor APRA seems concerned!
    • The Abbott Government has announced that it will retain the fringe benefits salary packaging for expensive, mainly foreign cars at a cost of almost $2 over four years.
    • The government shows no interest in saving $2 billion pa in drug costs by being as rigorous as New Zealand in negotiating drug prices with suppliers in Australia.
    • Large polluters will be subsidised by removing the market discipline of a price on the carbon that they emit.

    There are also other ways that the Commonwealth Government could address the structural deficit. It should expand the GST to include food, education, health and financial products. Most countries do not have the exclusions that we have. The extension of the GST would raise about $16 billion this year and $70 billion by 2016-17.

    In short, we need to lift taxation. Taxes in Australia are too low. It is the truth we refuse to name.

    In global terms we don’t have a government expenditure problem, although a great deal of middle class and business welfare should be rolled back.

    We also need to look urgently at areas of real need, particularly the disabled, those in need of special help in social housing, those who receive meagre benefits in Newstart (the dole) and refugees.

    We should all share the pain in getting our budget into shape, even though the problem is nowhere as severe as we were told in the election. My concern is that so-called “dole-bludgers “of talk back fame will be the target and the wealthy and politically powerful will be largely exempt. The government has already cut aid to the poor in developing countries.

    I live in hope but I am not expecting an end to the age of entitlement for the rich and powerful. Just think executive salaries, transfer pricing and tax havens! But maybe Joe Hockey has something up his sleeve!.

    Given the present weakness in the Australian economy it is also  important that the reduction in our structural budget deficit is done carefully and not in the drastic way that brought so many problems in Europe.

  • Jennifer Doggett. Cutting waste and costs in health.

    ​Cut expensive and low-value services: Health funding is not allocated to areas which deliver maximum output. We spend too much on expensive low-value services and not enough on preventive, high –value care.  Recent research shows that a number of routine tests performed in the Australian health system do not improve clinical outcomes. These include x-rays for lower back pain, liver function tests for people on statin therapy and routine glucose tolerance tests for pregnant women.

    Structural reform: There is significant duplication of functions, gaps and poor coordination across areas of Commonwealth and State/Territory responsibility.  There needs to be a single funder and/or single point of accountability for all health care (as recommended by the NHHRC)

    Reform the funding system:  Funding arrangements for health services often do not reflect their value. We need a funding system which ties subsidies to value and which steers consumers towards the more cost-effective treatment option. For example, where physiotherapy is a more efficient treatment for a soft tissue sporting injury than conventional medical treatment it should be subsidised at a higher rate.

    Remove interest groups: Powerful vested industry groups, such as the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession, influence policy and funding decisions resulting in anti-competitive and rent seeking practices that disadvantage consumers.

    Move away from fee-for-service: A (largely) fee-for-service payment system does not support doctors to provide comprehensive, preventive and multi-disciplinary care for people with complex and chronic health problems.  At least for these people we should investigate alternative payment systems, such as a capitation model.

    Workforce reform: Doctors in Australia undertake many tasks which in other countries are safely and efficiently done by nurses.  Breaking down professional barriers should allow for the lowest cost person to provide the care, where they can do so safely and effectively.

     

  • Ian Webster. Cutting waste and costs in health

    Waste in health care conjures up several pictures.

    One picture is of community nurses, psychologists and Aboriginal health workers in the community centre I visit anchored to their computer screens, endlessly it seems, trying to fulfil the demands of data entry. They are obviously frustrated by the lack of relevance this has for solving the problems of their patients. It takes time away and it is disempowering. About one third of each day is lost in this way.

    While not so apparent, there is a certain cynicism amongst the local hospital’s specialists about ‘gaming’ to preserve the local hospital’s funding and the administrative demands made on their time. The Garling Special Commission of Inquiry into Acute Care Services in NSW Public Hospitals in 2008 highlighted how non-clinical workload takes time away from clinicians who should be able to dedicate this time to clinical tasks. And the Greater Metropolitan Clinical Taskforce in 2004 reported on the conflicts between the information needed for clinical decisions and the data used by the administrators and funders. John Menadue, in his speeches on health care reform, has described the mismatch between vertical bureaucratic accountability and reporting and the horizontal and shared communication and working relationships of health professionals.

    There is much disillusionment in the current health care system where there should be enthusiasm and pride. Not only is time wasted in an atmosphere of excessive checking, rechecking and codification – to protect the Minister and the system – but good people and good-will are being wasted. Despite the demands and impediments on their time and commitment there are still front-line heroes who “go well beyond the call of duty” to pick up the pieces left undone by others. These people are the pivots around which the services revolve and they should be celebrated and encouraged.

    To prevent waste, data collection and information technology must be ‘practice-worthy’; they must help solve clinical problems and assess the progress of patients if they are to contribute to effective and efficient patient care.

    The second picture is of the waste of misdirected efforts.

    In the National Report Card on Mental Health and Suicide Prevention of 2012 the National Mental Health Commission, on behalf of the mental health community, expressed disquiet about the Activity Based Funding (ABF) being developed for the National Hospital Pricing Authority. The Commission said, “The new ABF system should be designed to meet the needs of people with mental health difficulties regardless of whether services are provided in hospitals, in the community or elsewhere. Alternatives to hospitals must be a priority.” The fear is that ABF will inevitably suck funding for mental health back to hospital activities rather than support and care in the community. If any part of ‘health’ demands a community-based approach, mental health does.

    The Commission’s view is that people should be supported to have contributing lives where they live and work and not be dependent on hospital-based services, necessary as this may be at critical times. Exactly the same can be said in the prevention and management of physical health generally – especially in the management of chronic disease and the intractable complexities of the increasingly prevalent multiple conditions. For people with these conditions hospital admissions are but punctuated interludes along pathways lived out in the community.

    Waste will mount inexorably so long as we neglect to invest in primary health care and community health.

    Professor Ian Webster is Emeritus Professor of Community Health at the University of New South Wales.

     

  • John Dwyer. Cutting waste and costs in health.

    ​

    Tactics and strategies for a six year journey to sustainable, equitable excellence

    (1) Move to a single funder for our national health scheme (The Commonwealth). The funder would contract with States and other potential providers to deliver integrated patient focused care. The health bureaucracy would be reduced by 80% with greater efficiency, better outcomes and less duplication saving at least $ 4 billion per year.
    (2) Remove Tax-payer support for Private Health insurance. Health Insurers are making large profits. Australians will retain their PHI as other sticks make that a certainty. The introduction of the subsidy saw PHI increase by only 2%.
    (3) Introduce peer and craft approved critical pathways to see more evidence based decision making re tests and procedures . Savings $20 billion per year.
    (4) Focus on reducing avoidable expensive hospital admissions ( more than 600,000 per year) through cheaper and better timely community interventions. Requires the introduction of Integrated Primary Care teams. Will need to broaden Medicare funding to cover health professionals other than doctors but net savings anticipated at least $7 billon per year.(5) Introduce slowly but steadily capitated funding for the management of”chronic and complex”diseases with mandatory reporting of health outcomes.

    Professor John Dwyer is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of New South Wales.

  • Ian McAuley. Cutting waste and costs in health.

    There are three areas of saving to be made in health care – real savings rather than movement of costs from public budgets to consumers.

    There can be savings in technical efficiency — savings any engineer or cost-conscious manager seeks in a workplace. A strong example is making better use of information technology.

    There can be savings in purchasing.  Australia used to negotiate some of the world’s lowest pharmaceutical prices.  We now pay high prices.

    My concern is the third area – improvements in allocative efficiency.  That is, ensuring scarce resources are allocated where they will result in greatest benefit.

    The priority should be to remove private health insurance as a source of funding.  Administratively, it does at high cost what the Australian Tax Office and Medicare do much better.

    Its big costs are in terms of allocative inefficiency, for it simply re-shuffles queues, allocating resources to those with subsidized insurance, pushing others to the back of the line.

    Getting rid of private health insurance would save around $1.5 billion a year in administrative costs alone. The Grattan Institute estimates net savings of $3.5 billion a year.

    Other savings in allocative efficiency can be found in making better use of nurses, more careful prescribing of pharmaceuticals, and rationalization of co-payments so that people are not directed to “free” services in preference to more effective and lower-cost services involving upfront fees.  And, of course, there are big savings in all-of-government initiatives to encourage good health.

    Ian McAuley is a teacher and researcher in the fields of  public sector management and public policy.

  • Chris Geraghty. The ABC and Scott Morrison

    The ABC has been much criticised, by our Prime Minister no less, and by the silly bullies on some commercial radio stations, for not being patriotic enough, for not barracking for the home team. Disloyal journalists published a story that some wounded, unwelcome refugees who had been intercepted on the high seas by our navy boys and girls were alleging that they had been tortured by them, forced to grasp and hold onto hot engine pipes and burnt. These dishonourable journalists broadcasted pictures of several dark-skinned men presenting their severely burnt hands to camera and complaining about the brave troops defending our borders.

    I don’t know whether the allegations are true or false. I wasn’t there at the time to witness what was happening. Some people were there if such an incident or anything like it occurred. Presumably the refugees themselves were there, but even that I do not know from my own knowledge, so I must suspend my judgment pending further information. However, they have said that they were there and that they were tortured, or at least treated in such a way as to sustain serious injuries.

    The Minister for Immigration, Scott Morrison, would have us believe that the incident never happened, that the allegations are unsubstantiated, and therefore false. He might be right. I don’t know. And neither does he. He wasn’t there either. So he is clearly relying on what he’s been told, though we don’t know what he was told, or by whom. We don’t know whether the person he spoke to (if he in fact spoken to anyone) was present at the time or where he got his information from. As far as the Minister’s denial of the truth of the allegations is concerned, we are still all in the dark.

    Now, as to the allegations themselves, Scott Morrison invited us to accept that they are false, for two reasons.

    Firstly, this alleged incident was not something our brave, professional, respected, trustworthy navy men and women would ever be part of. It’s offensive to contemplate the possibility.

    Secondly, there is no evidence to substantiate these serious allegations.

    As to the first basis offered for rejecting the allegations, like all other patriotic Australians, I’d like to think it is true that our service personnel would not engage in such cruel and criminal treatment of vulnerable human beings. But this was the very same reason offered for years by naive Catholics to refute the vile allegations that members of the clergy were sexually abusing children. Professional people don’t always act professionally. Sometimes, some professional people, even Australian professional people, commit crimes. It’s hard to believe, but unfortunately it’s true. American troops in Vietnam engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians, and participated in horrible torture of the enemy in Iraq. We even saw pictures on television of unprofessional, criminal behavior of service men and women. It’s not new, and it’s not confined to the enemy. And closer to home, we have had to accept that unwanted sexual activity, criminal sexual behavior has been engaged in on naval vessels by our brave, professional service-men. I wish it wasn’t true, but we have to accept that sometimes good men can do terrible things, especially to people they have learnt to classify as “illegals”, as “invaders”. If these allegations eventually prove to be true, the shock jocks and our Prime Minister will have a lot to answer for.

    As to the second reason proffered by the minister, it might surprise him to know that there is evidence to substantiate the allegations, and no admissible evidence to undermine them – only the merest hearsay of the minister. The evidence might be thin. We might wish to have more evidence – evidence of an independent witness, for example. There might be grounds for some suspicion. As the evidence stands, it only amounts to a prima facie case, but in the absence of any admissible evidence to the contrary, it substantiates and establishes the allegations.

    What is the evidence? It consists of three important items. Firstly, several people, more than one, make a similar allegation. Secondly, each alleges that he was tortured or treated harshly by members of the Australian navy, and suffered injuries to their hands. And thirdly, there are pictures (presumably genuine pictures) of the burns sustained to the palm area of their hands.

    Now, that’s the evidence. It’s easy to say that it’s a slur, that it’s false and that the ABC should not have given succor to the enemy, but neither the navy nor the Government has taken any steps to demonstrate in any way that the allegations are groundless. And they claim to have the proof. It’s just that no one else is allowed to see or hear it. We have to trust the word of the minister. He assures us that the claims are scurrilous and groundless.

    Let’s hear from someone who was there, other than the refugees. Someone from the poop-deck or the engine-room. The captain or one of the petty officers. The person recording the events on video as they were unfolding. Let’s see the film. We didn’t see the poor mother throwing her baby overboard. Maybe we won’t see sailors mistreating refugees on the high seas.

    It’s not the traitorous behaviour of the ABC journalists that worries me. It’s the fact that smug, secretive ministers and their shock jocks treat the public like drongos.

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Sharks and asylum seekers

    Over the weekend we have seen thousands of people crowding onto our beaches on both sides of the country to protest against the culling of sharks in Western Australia.  I happen to think that the protesters are right, that people who swim in dangerous seas know the risks but are prepared to take them. Compared with the carnage on our roads, the number who die from shark attacks is quite minor.

    But the protests made me ask why we do not see the same protests supporting asylum seekers, fellow human beings fleeing terror of a different sort.

    Why are we so exhausted in defending the rights of asylum seekers? Maybe it is because the problem is so large, it’s long-term and seems to be intractable. What can we do to make a difference?

    I think our willingness to “pass by on the other side” is because for over a long period deliberate and successful attempts have been made to anaesthatise our consciences to the plight of asylum seekers and refugees. We have become numb to the tragedy that we have allowed to happen in our name.

    I suggest that there are a string of events and actions that have made us less sensitive.

    • John Howard was the first Prime Minister in Australia since the war to show us the great political benefit in appealing to our fear and our worst instincts. Tony Abbott has followed in the same path.
    • We were told at the time of the ‘children overboard’ event that asylum seekers were so inhuman and degraded that they would even throw their children overboard.
    • Tony Abbott continues to call boat people ‘illegals’, akin to criminals, when they are not. As a colleague of Tony Abbott’s at a Jesuit college put it ‘They are not illegals, they are our brothers and sisters’.
    • Scott Morrison told the Coalition Caucus that most people believe that asylum seekers are Muslims and that that should be exploited.
    • He later told us that asylum seekers bring disease and wads of money.
    • The new Member for Lindsay at the last election told us that asylum seekers are blocking the M4 in Sydney.
    • Eric Abetz in Opposition told us that asylum seekers in the community who offended, even in a trivial way, should be treated like paedophiles.

    The demonization of asylum seekers and refugees continues almost daily. The media is largely silent. Its major interest is the politics of boat arrivals, not the plight of the persecuted. The leadership of our churches, synagogues and mosques is scarcely heard. The Vietnamese community that was given a haven in Australia more than 30 years ago is silent. The Labor Party is largely silent as are many members of the Coalition who I know are privately very concerned about what is happening.

    What is it that sharks have that seems to make their plight more important than that of asylum seekers and refugees? Our consciences have become numb. The demonization of asylum seekers is proving to be a political winner.

    It seems to be worth making the effort to save sharks but not human beings also fleeing terror.

     

  • Walter Hamilton. The ABC and its Japanese Cousin.

    If the board and management of the ABC need to firm up their ideas about the proper relationship between a public broadcaster and the government of the day they might consider what is happening in Japan.

    NHK, that nation’s public broadcaster, is a $7bn enterprise largely funded from television licence fees, with a board of governors appointed by the prime minister. It exerts enormous influence through its highly rating news and information programs, but the situation in which it now finds itself––criticised for being a mouthpiece for the conservative national government––is in sharp contrast to the ABC’s predicament. In thinking about how to respond to the attacks of Tony Abbott and others, managing director Mark Scott and chairman Jim Spigelman might reflect on their Japanese cousin.

    There are direct parallels. The ABC has an international service that must report on controversial issues such as the Navy’s involvement in forcing back boats of asylum seekers from Indonesia. NHK has an international service that must report on issues just as touchy, including the territorial disputes Japan has with China and South Korea.

    On 25 January, at his first news conference after being appointed NHK president, Katsuto Momii (a former business executive with no background in broadcasting) was asked how the organisation should approach the subject of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) islands. He replied: ‘International broadcasting will be different from domestic programs. Regarding the territorial issue, it will only be natural to clearly present Japan’s position. It would not do for us to say “left” when the government is saying “right”’. In responses to other questions, he effectively endorsed the Abe government’s position on visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the use of ‘comfort women’ during the war and the necessity of a new state secrets law.

    Though clearly embarrassed by this kowtowing performance, the government’s chief spokesman later excused Momii’s remarks on the basis that he was expressing his ‘personal views’––as if that made them irrelevant. (Former ABC chairman, Donald McDonald, while still in that position, continued his fund-raising activities for the Liberal Party according to the same logic, so there is an Australian precedent.) On Friday, summoned before a parliamentary committee, a nervous Momii heard an opposition member express the concern of some that NHK was becoming ‘the public relations department of the government’. Also last week, an economics professor quit an NHK radio program, on which he’d been a commentator for 20 years, after being told to refrain from criticising the nuclear power industry during the current Tokyo gubernatorial election. Keeping silent on the election issue, he was advised, was NHK’s way of maintaining balance.

    By some accounts, the man that Momii replaced at the top of NHK, Masayuki Matsumoto, decided not to seek a second term because of complaints from within Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party that NHK gave too much prominence to critics of nuclear power and the American military bases in Japan. It must be said, however, Matsumoto’s presidency was marked by other scandals and for most of his three years the now-opposition DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan) was in office.

    Nevertheless, for someone who watches NHK daily (via satellite) a change in tone and content of its news and current affairs programs has become more apparent since the Abe government returned to power. Conspicuous has been the switch from prominent coverage of anti-bases activities in Okinawa to muted and irregular coverage of this issue. For such a thing to be apparent is significant because, for as long as I can remember, NHK’s news product has been predictably middle-of-the-road. Never flamboyant or opinionated, its programs could be boring through avoidance of controversy, and thus culturally conservative, but rarely did they carry political bias on their sleeve. Now, according to Momii, the policy is: what’s right for the LDP government is right for NHK.

    How this will play out with the Japanese public remains to be seen. Already one in four television owners is refusing to pay the NHK licence fee, for whatever reason. In this respect, NHK is more exposed to the public mood than the ABC, which is funded directly by parliament. It is easier for the Abbott government to punish the ABC by, for instance, taking away the Australia Network (which is funded separately through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade).

    There are some within the ABC who would welcome this step. They have always felt the international service sapped resources from the corporation’s primary, domestic functions and would rather have the battle-lines with the Coalition drawn along the issue of how the ABC serves its Australian audience.

    But this would be risky and shortsighted. Australia Network, if it is to project the nation’s values to the world, must be able to report without fear or favour, a core value in a society that embraces free speech. Here and now is the place to stand up and be heard. Secondly, the ABC’s critics obviously believe it is easier to make the case that the corporation has grown ‘too big’ than it is to win the ‘bias’ argument. (Donald McDonald himself took this line during a recent appearance on the ABC, though when asked for examples to prove the ABC was overstretched only mentioned seeing errors in Supers, the text that appears on screen identifying people during news items.) Chopping off the Australia Network, if achieved without great political cost, could embolden more and deeper cuts aimed at specific domestic services.

    In making a defence for the role of a vigorous public broadcaster the ABC’s bosses might look down the path NHK is sliding and take heart from the alarm being raised in Japan. The ABC’s journalists and other program-makers, meanwhile, though understandably eager to rush to the barricades to counter the apparent threat from the conservative side of politics should think again. It would be much better for them and for their organisation not to treat this as a partisan cause (Labor, when in power, also wants a co-operative ABC) and avoid openly siding with critics on the left (including on Facebook). The principles of free speech and openness that form part of the fabric of our democracy are, and must remain, above party politics. If the ABC, in upholding the highest standards of professional journalism, must sometimes say ‘right’ when the government says ‘left’, then the Australian public can be relied upon to know and respect the difference.

    Walter Hamilton, a former Tokyo correspondent, worked at the ABC for 33 years.

     

  • Insults in our region continue

    Sometime late last year, the Australian government made the seemingly innocuous decision to revert, after 18 months, to calling the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar by its British name Burma. One of Tony Abbott’s growing list of regional insults.

    (more…)

  • Walter Hamilton. A Strategy Less Than Grand: Where the ‘New Japan’ Goes Wrong.

    In a commentary published by the Lowy Institute entitled “Japan is Back: Unbundling Abe’s Grand Strategy*, Dr. Michael Green (Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic International Studies in Washington, DC) analyses the political and economic policies of Japan’s conservative government under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and concludes that “the overall strategy could be quite effective” in enhancing Japan’s prestige and forcing the cooperation of China.

    The article is detailed, wide-ranging and informed by high-level contacts within Japan. The credentials of the author and the forum in which his views were aired suggest they are likely to be consonant with advice that Prime Minister Tony Abbott is receiving from his foreign affairs advisers. The article deserves a close reading because Green’s attempt to give Abe’s policies the status of a “grand strategy” unintentionally exposes their underlying contradictions.

    The author begins by arguing that Abe’s strategy does not represent a break with the past: “[His] national security agenda is not, in fact, a departure from the general trajectory established by his predecessors in the post-Cold War era.” Elsewhere, he asserts, “While scholars have emphasised the debate among different strategic schools in Japan, the real debates now are mostly about the timing and scope of change – not its direction.” Green wants to counter any suggestion that Abe is an extremist or maverick politician acting out of step with popular opinion. Later in the article, however, he states: “The policy and legal obstacles that Abe is now busy removing as part of his internal balancing strategy were erected by previous Japanese governments eager to build a buffer against involvement in US military plans in the Pacific.” There is an obvious contradiction. Is Abe building on existing policy frameworks or dismantling them?

    Green’s case that Abe’s policies are continuous with the past, on closer examination, is based mainly on the claim that “[his immediate predecessor, Prime Minister] Yoshihiko Noda…began the push for most of the key elements of Abe’s security agenda.” In other words, by “predecessors” he means principally Noda. While it is true the Noda government sought to shore up Japan’s alliance with the United States, this represented a swing of the pendulum back from the failed attempt of a former leader of his ruling Democratic Party of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama, to put a distance between Tokyo and Washington. Noda gave expression to one side of the historical “bi-polar” complex that has characterised Japan’s postwar relationship with the US. Furthermore, the Noda government––deeply unpopular because of its perceived incompetence––took strategic decisions (notably the purchase of the three Senkaku/Diaoyu islands that so enraged China) reactively, under duress and without a clearly articulated policy agenda. To posit a continuum between Abe and the panicked previous administration is curious, to say the least.

    Green refers to a former “left-leaning” Prime Minister Takeo Miki’s opposition to arms exports, without identifying him as a leader of the same Liberal Democratic Party Abe now heads. The LDP, like the DJP, has always contained competing views on whether rearmament or disarmament best serves Japan’s national interest, whether a look-to Beijing or a look-to-Washington posture is preferable. The current ascendency of the pro-Washington hawks within the LDP is just that: a phase in a cyclical power play. To suggest, as Green does, that a single continuity of views has existed within Japan’s leadership since the breakup of the Soviet Union is unsupportable. (The recent about-face by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, coming out against nuclear power and backing a rival to the LDP’s candidate in Tokyo’s gubernatorial election, is a further example of the volatility of Japan’s conservative mainstream.) While it is true that Abe enjoys a high level of support within the electorate––anything over 50% is extraordinary by recent standards––there is little evidence that the so-called “grand strategy” (which Green invests with a spurious coherence) goes more than slogan-deep in terms of public understanding. Indeed it is incapable of being comprehended, I submit, because of its internal contradictions.

    Another of the contradictions emerges when Green discusses regional responses to Abe’s policies. He states that the Abe Government “is pursuing foreign and security policies that are welcomed…by most governments in the region.” Yet he also says, correctly, that “the most striking thing about his diplomacy is that it has been focused on the near and far abroad rather than the immediate neighbours South Korea and China.” Given that the other key players in Japan’s region are, of course, China and South Korea, how does Green’s first statement stack up? He seems to believe that Australia, the US and other like-minded nations should support Japan in a diplomacy conducted over the heads of its nearest neighbours: “Abe’s preference for diplomacy with the states around China’s periphery also reflects his view that Japan’s natural partners are the democratic maritime states.” For Australia to automatically support Japan against its neighbours, rather than urge Tokyo to seek an accommodation with nations of vital interest to us, would be foolhardy.

    Green identifies within Abe’s diplomacy (correctly, as far as it goes) an attempt to present Japan as a bastion of freedom, rule of law and transparency, and thus a defender of “Western” values, as opposed to the alternative “Pan-Asian” version that defines Japan by cultural and ethnic affinities. Japan, however, has been down a similar path before, in the period 1900-1925, and that, as we know, proved unsustainable. Green concedes that “tensions between Seoul and Tokyo are indirectly hurting broader Japanese influence in Asia and even in Washington” but does not explain how, by facilitating a diplomacy that overlooks South Korea, the US or Australia would benefit. Green treats the disagreements over historical accountability, so damaging to regional relations, as “complications.” This happens to be the prevailing Japanese attitude, based on the calculation that since China and South Korea have not always been as strident about such matters in the past, they can be waited out. The danger of inaction, however, was underlined again recently when the new president of NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, made light of the “comfort women” issue during a news conference. Every time the Japanese Establishment’s complacency and recalcitrance are exposed, the gulf widens. If Abe wishes to lead a credible world power he must embrace a credible and candid accounting for the nation’s past. More than a complication, right now it is the spanner in the works.

    In his discussion of Japan’s defence needs, Greens starts from the proposition that “China’s coercive pressure in the East China Sea…is most likely to spark a larger confrontation.” No evidence is offered for this one-sided view. He considers an increased Japanese military capability, including counterstrike deterrence, the sine qua non of a strategy to prevent Chinese coercion. Green’s account of why the country has lived for so long with a limited military capability is pure revisionism: “Japan’s deterrent capabilities are significantly less efficient and credible because of the numerous legal and bureaucratic constraints that have accumulated in the post-war period.” The language suggests that red tape, rather than a popular aversion to military adventures, has been the main constraint on Japan since 1945. The opposite is true. Japan’s war-renouncing constitution has been the central pillar of the nation’s postwar prosperity, and to dismiss it as a “bureaucratic” encumbrance is quite perverse. Certainly, various governments over the years have reinterpreted the basic law to enable Japan to maintain a modern military establishment but each step on that journey has kept intact a credible commitment to the principle of non-belligerence (though critics of Japan’s support for American military engagements in Asia and elsewhere would, of course, disagree). This is a whole-of-state issue, not a matter for backroom tinkering.

    Green reports a “growing interest in Tokyo in the concept that Japan might use the development of counterstrike capability as a source of leverage vis-à-vis the United States.” He argues that as a result of Japan embracing a broader definition of its right to collective self-defense “the SDF will be seen by allies, partners, and potential adversaries as a more effective fighting force within the confines of Japan’s renunciation of war as a means to settle international disputes.” A more effective fighting force, I suggest, is not necessarily the best advertisement for the renunciation of war. For the two to be possibly compatible would require a style of leadership––inclusive, disposed to listen rather than dictate, and sensitive to the concerns of neighbours––that Abe so far has not displayed.

    Green describes a view taking shape within the LDP that the government need not move immediately to revise Article 9 of the constitution in order to achieve its military-strategic objectives; it can do so through an administrative measure. But a change to Japan’s military posture to include a significant counterstrike capability, without a full airing of the issues that a debate on the constitution would enable, is not a development Australia should welcome. It runs counter to the very democratic values Abe insists link his nation to “natural partners” like Australia. The centralisation of power under Abe that Green identifies (and approves of), including the creation of supra-parliamentary organs, such as the new National Security Council and National Security Bureau, and the enactment of a wide-ranging state secrets law, might, to some, make Japan a “normal” country, but they seem unlikely to cast more light on the murky process of Japanese policy formation––quite the reverse.

    A final contradiction arises in Green’s discussion of the support he says the US, Australia and others should lend Japan in its confrontation with China: “The United States, Australia, and all maritime nations have a stake in Japan not backing down under Chinese military pressure. Ultimately, a modus vivendi might be reached in which Japan finds a way to acknowledge officially that there is a de jure dispute [over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands].” For Japan to acknowledge that a de jure territorial dispute exists, as Green surely knows, would to Abe and his supporters constitute a back down. Such a concession might be desirable; but to argue against backing down to China and, in the same breath, to advocate it is peculiar. Green gets into this pickle by failing to adequately acknowledge that Japan’s actions have contributed to the impasse with China. Japan’s friends would do better to denounce the hardliners on both sides and propose solutions that get beyond fixed positions implied by the term “back down.” Green’s proposal would lead to an untenable situation in which anything Japan says or does must be approved, or else. He writes: “Resisting Japanese requests for joint contingency planning or pressuring Tokyo to compromise in the face of Chinese coercion would do fundamental damage to the credibility of the [US-Japan] alliance and lead to more pronounced hedging by Japan. The result would be less US control over escalation in a crisis in the East China Sea and weakened dissuasion and deterrence all along the offshore island chain.” You can’t have it both ways. Either Japan is a partner who can be resisted and corrected, as well as supported, or it is a liability. The same goes for China.

    Green performs a valuable service by articulating issues that Australians should be considering as a matter of urgency. Without a doubt, Abe (who has compared current relations between China and Japan to those between Germany and Britain in 1914) is the strongest, most belligerent Japanese leader to emerge for decades. There are, however, flaws in his “grand strategy.” Diplomacy conducted over the heads of China and South Korea to engage supposedly like-minded democratic maritime partners such as Australia should make any modern Bismarck quaver. Resolving the historical grievances between Japan and its former colonial underlings is essential to future regional security. They will not fix themselves. To demonstrate its commitment to democratic values Japan needs a full-blown debate about the role of its defence forces within the constitution rather than increasingly centralised and elitist decision-making. Australia’s interest in a vibrant and peaceful Japan requires our leaders to oppose all measures that heighten regional tensions and undermine longer-term stability.

    * http://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/japan-back-unbundling-abes-grand-strategy

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years. He is the author of “Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story”.

     

  • John Menadue. Alcohol and violence on the streets — the tip of the iceberg.

    In recent weeks public attention has been focused on alcohol fuelled violence in Sydney streets and the very slow response of the NSW government. But the response when it did come really only addressed the ugly tip of the iceberg. the violence on the streets. The government response was superficial – minimum mandatory sentencing, greater powers for the police, special licence conditions and lockouts and closures.

    Very little attention was given to prevention and remedial action – the widespread social and economic cost of alcohol misuse across Australia as revealed in our workplaces, roads, and criminal justice and health systems.

    We focus on cannabis, but compared with alcohol, it is a much less potent and dangerous drug. Only a week or so ago, President Obama said ‘I don’t think that cannabis is more dangerous than alcohol’. He was right.

    The long-term effects of alcohol are well-known as outlined by the University of NSW Drug and Alcohol Research Centre– cancer of the mouth, brain injury, high blood pressure, weakness and loss of muscle tissue, inflamed stomach lining, increased risk of lung infections, severe swelling of the liver, inflamed pancreas, and other dangerous consequences. Street violence in Kings Cross is really only a small part of a much larger problem.

    The Australian Institute of Criminology, in April 2013, set out the cost of alcohol misuse in 2010.  The costs were estimated at $14.4 billion which is about double the revenue the Commonwealth government receives from alcohol taxes. That estimated $14.4 billion cost four years ago was made up as follows:

    • Criminal justice system- $3 billion, police, courts, prisons, child-protection, etc.
    • Health system – $1.7 billion in hospital, nursing home, ambulance and other areas.
    • Productivity – $6 billion, mainly losses of production through impaired work and imprisonment of large numbers of people.
    • Traffic accidents – $3.7 billion.

    This study commented that its finding of about $14.4 billion of alcohol costs in 2010 was conservative. Furthermore the figure does not include the negative effects of alcohol on others, estimated to be $6.8 billion in 2010.

    There is clearly an enormous problem just below the surface of street violence. We are concentrating our attention on the streets when there are other major problems below the surface.

    The study of the Australian Institute of Criminology points to the need for prevention and diversion strategies. That really means breaking the booze culture.

    I suggest a major diversion strategy should be the review alcohol advertising in association with sport. It is surely an obvious contradiction to be promoting a healthy life style through sport and promoting alcohol at the same time. In my blog of January 4 ‘Cricket – junk food and alcohol’, I drew attention to the saturation advertising of alcohol during the Ashes Tests. It now continues in the One Day Series. It is unremitting. The alcohol advertising is on the scoreboard, the ground, the shirt fronts, the sleeves the caps, boundary fences, stumps and sight-boards. So far the ‘baggy green’ cap does not carry alcohol advertising but surely it won’t be long before it is carrying a beer logo!. With almost all points covered with alcohol advertising how about Carlton Mid tattoos!  The victorious Australian team poured Victorian Bitter all over each other in the dressing room after the series win. The Australian coach and captain, with one arm around each other and holding beers aloft meandered around the Sydney Cricket Ground. It was tacky. It sent a poor message to young people.

    To protect children, the advertising of alcohol on television is banned before 8.30 pm. But because of the power of the alcohol lobby, advertising is on full display almost all day at most of our major sporting events.  To start winding back the enormous cost of alcohol abuse, we should start by prohibiting alcohol advertising on television and radio at all sporting events, just as we did years ago with tobacco advertising. For the sake of young sports fans our major sporting bodies need to break free from the grip of the alcohol lobby.  Our sporting heroes, the role models for the young should also think carefully about filling their pockets with money from the promotion of alcohol. Who will be the first to make a stand? Australian young people would be particularly well served by such leadership.

    Violence in Kings Cross after midnight is just the tip of the iceberg.

  • John Menadue. Our lack of business and political skills in Asia.

    The Business Council of Australia and business executives keep reminding us of the need to increase our productivity by up-skilling and better use of our labour resources. Unfortunately the business sector is spectacularly lagging in equipping itself for opportunities in Asia.

    Last week The Australian Financial Review surveyed the schools and educational backgrounds of the CEOs of our top ASX100 firms. It found that one third of these CEOs went to secondary schools outside Australia. But not one of them had spent their formative schooling years in Asia.

    This confirms the dismal record of Australian business in Asia.

    • I have yet to learn of a single chairperson or CEO of any of our major companies who can fluently speak any of the key Asian languages.
    • A recent survey by the Business Alliance for Asian Literacy, which represents 400,000 businesses in Australia, found that ‘More than half of Australian businesses operating in Asia had little board and senior management experience of Asia and/or Asian skills or languages’.
    • Because of the lack of integration of human resources and business strategy in Australian firms, many executives who are posted to Asia leave within a few years of their return.  They find the culture in the Australian head office quite unsympathetic to Asia and the experience that they have gained.
    • Australian firms do recruit Australian-born citizens of Asian descent, but they are more likely to be recruited for their good grades and work ethic than future leadership potential. It is hard to break into the Anglo clubs that dominate so many of our large companies.

    Equipping ourselves for Asia has been on and off our agenda for many years. In 1989 the Garnaut Report pointed the way that Australia should respond to the North East Asian Ascendancy.  Through the Hawke/Keating Government periods we responded. We opened up our economy. More skilled people began working in the region. The media became more interested in Asia and exchange programs were established.

    And then in the Howard years we went on smoko. We were encouraged to be relaxed and comfortable and not get too excited about equipping ourselves for Asia.

    The Rudd and Gillard Governments slowly tried to get us back on track. Ken Henry reported in 2012 on Australia and the Asian Century, and how we should respond. A few targets were suggested, but little was really done before the September 2013 elections. The Rudd/Gillard Governments were distracted by other issues.

    The Abbott Government shows signs of pushing us off track again with its clumsy handling of our relations with China and Indonesia. Tony Abbott talks about his belief in the “Anglosphere”. It is not clear what he really means but most observers would conclude that it excludes Asia

    Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop is now telling us that ‘our single most important economic partner is in fact the United States’. The blinding and obvious fact is that the two-way trade between Australia and China is $130 billion p.a. compared with $60 billion p.a. between Australia and the US. To bolster her amazing assertion, Julie Bishop adds in US investment in Australia. Where is she getting this US-centric nonsense from?  It is trade flows that traditionally determine economic relationships, not investment. To top it off Julie Bishop then added that the US is our ‘best friend in economic terms’ when clearly it isn’t.  For the second time in three weeks we have gone out of our way to offend China.

    At least the Gillard/Rudd Governments pointed to the direction we had to head – Asia. Now the Abbott Government seems to be suggesting that Asia could be the wrong direction.

    Our business sector seems to be in agreement with the Abbott Government that Asia is not as important to our future as we all thought

  • Stephen FitzGerald. Abbott’s relations with China.

    Can you believe the Abbott government has any idea where it’s headed on relations with China? Whatever you think of China’s politics, you can’t just take sides against China or meddle in the tense and volatile issue of China-Japan relations without there being some consequence for our bilateral relations. But the government doesn’t seem to care. From what you can divine from the little it says publicly, it thinks the Chinese will back down under Australia’s glare, and “get over it”. Like the Indonesians will get over it. But the Indonesians, whose thinking we know more clearly, aren’t going to get over it. Abbott and Morrison are so untutored in foreign relations and diplomacy, or so deaf, or both, that they don’t understand something has snapped in Jakarta. It’s not about our policies it’s about the language the Abbott government uses and the lecturing, patronising and racist attitudes they convey. A strong, independent, democratic and regionally influential Indonesia is not going to put up with that any longer and relations are never going back to the way they were before.

    And the risk is that at the same time relations with China will be pushed back to at least where they were before Julia Gillard secured agreement for a regular high-level strategic dialogue with Beijing in April last year. This is not only harmful to our bilateral relations and restricting in our scope for managing them in our own interests. It will limit Australia’s capacity to be an effective player in regional affairs and a useful voice in the balancing of US China relations.

    The fact is the government doesn’t have a China policy, in any coherent, strategic, long-term sense, and it has laid out no narrative in any speech or document that would give the lie to this assertion. Its handling of the issues with China over the last few months has been in the service more of a neoconservative confrontationist US view of China than an Australian view or Australian interests.

    At the US-Japan-Australia Trilateral Strategic Dialogue in the wings of the APEC ministerial summit in Bali in October 2013, Australia put its signature to a communique which “opposed any coercive or unilateral actions that could change the status quo in the East China Sea”. The problem is, it’s the very status quo itself which is in dispute between Japan and China, and by some interpretations the Chinese case is by no means weaker than Japan’s. Whatever the rights, Australia needlessly and recklessly took sides in a complex dispute in which we have no part, and Beijing of course reacted.

    And there’s a bit more. The final wording agreed in Bali was reportedly different from the draft prepared by DFAT, bearing the stamp particularly of the two drafting officials from Tony Abbott’s Australia and Shinjo Abe’s Japan (Tony Abbott’s ‘best friend’ in Asia). The Australian official was Abbott’s Senior Advisor on National Security, Andrew Shearer, allegedly in Bali to ride herd on the neophyte Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and an advocate of bludgeon diplomacy and hairy-chested confrontation of China.

    In November, China declared an Air Defence Identification Zone, ADIZ, in the East China Sea. This may be a matter of concern to Australia, but it’s not immediately proximate for us, and it’s one for us that demands skilful diplomacy not confrontation. Australia had a range of possible responses, but Julie Bishop went straight for a public slap down, carpeting the Chinese Ambassador to Australia Ma Zhaoxu to denounce Beijing’s move, and rubbing the Chinese nose in it by talking it up in language that suggested ‘Look what I’ve done!’ The concerning thing about this is that it was bound to achieve nothing other than provoke a tougher, uncompromising position from the Chinese, and so it did. “Irresponsible”, said Beijing. But worse for us, it put diplomacy out of play, again to the detriment of our relations and any role in whatever diplomatic potential there might be for amelioration of the tensions surrounding the issue.

    Julie Bishop then made a scheduled visit to Beijing, and we saw on television the famous prelude to her meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. It’s the first time I’ve seen a senior Chinese, during the photo opportunity that precedes such bilateral meetings, vent a disagreement in this way with any country, even with the Japanese at difficult times in their relations. Wang Yi’s body language alone would have been a fairly blunt signal, but his sharp words in front of the media amounted to an official Chinese declaration that relations with Australia were in bad shape. In the history of our diplomatic relations, apart from the Tiananmen massacre we’ve not had such a stand-off. This, at a time when what we need most is to get closely alongside the Chinese and do whatever we can diplomatically to help defuse regional tensions and work on the development of a new order in the Pacific that peacefully accommodates Chinese as well as US power.

    Yet in December, when Prime Minister Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine and other countries in the region with an interest in Japan’s wartime record immediately objected and even the US cautioned Japan, Australia said nothing. This is a deeply emotional issue for both China and Korea, who interpret a prime ministerial visit to this shrine as an intentional denial of Japan’s wartime atrocities. And whereas on the two earlier issues the Australian government spoke out when it might to greater effect have chosen a diplomatic response and a public reticence, on this issue it didn’t even refer to it till a month later, and then only en passant in a Bishop interview with the Financial Review, when the incident was well out of the way.

    With China, as with Indonesia, disagreements and policy differences can be managed, but it’s the way we’ve gone about it, and the language, and the idea from colonial times that if you speak English to these people loudly and clearly enough they will understand and do what they’re told. And for Beijing, there’s the unmistakable message that on matters it regards as vitally affecting its sovereignty, we stand with a particular US view that doesn’t want to accommodate Chinese power.

    Beijing has not got over it. But what will it do in response? So long as it sees benefit for China, it’s unlikely to want to disturb economic relations or derail the FTA negotiations. What’s more likely is downgrading the importance it gives to political and strategic dialogue. But political and strategic dialogue is the one element of our relations we can least afford to lose. It took years to persuade an Australian government to understand this, and when finally it was taken up by Julia Gillard it took a huge effort to get the Chinese government to come to the party.

    This is serious. It’s not a case of being pro-China or seeing Asia through a Chinese prism, which is what the proponents of the US policy of denial pretend. To lose that dialogue or have the Chinese not take it seriously would be a major setback for us. And make more difficult the management of our economic relations. And deny us opportunities to resolve through diplomacy and dialogue the many challenging issues we’re going to face directly with China as a Great Power in our external habitat and a force in our domestic politics.

    What will happen, if the Indonesian government turns to China to supply or even directly assist its navy in the protection of Indonesia’s sovereign borders? And China obliges? And they turn to Abbott, Bishop and Morrison and say: “you, of all people, ought to understand”?

    If you meddle in someone else’s issues by taking sides when you’re not a party principal, can you really believe they might not meddle in yours?

     

    Dr.Stephen Fitzgerald was former Australian Ambassador to China

  • Michael Kelly SJ: Chaos reigns in Bangkok

    The fear of many Thais is that the country will end up like the Philippines – so laid back that nothing gets done, so corrupt that everyone stops trying, so mismanaged that there is misery for many just around the corner.

    While things may not have reached the depths of Marcos era chaos, there are worry signs. Why? There seems now no way out of the circumstances the country finds itself in:

    • The protests are led by a former deputy prime minister facing murder charges over his part in 2010 when there was the bloody suppression of just the sort of protest movement he leads;
    • The Government, whose performance has been below par on the economy and whose legitimacy as an elected majority is doubted because of the financial supplements offered to those who voted for them, is paralysed;
    • The King who usually provided the circuit breaker in Thai politics is too ill to take part;
    • The military are shy about participating because of the very negative reaction they got in 2010 for their bloody intervention then;
    • The police are not trusted and are believed by many to be still loyal to Thaksin Shinawatra who was once a leader among them.

    The slide into chaos is gentle and few would venture to suggest what might unfold when leadership is absent and the forces at work are so weak, contradictory and ineffective.

    Take this week: a State of Emergency was declared but absolutely nothing has changed – the demonstrators are still clogging up the city by holding rallies at intersections where it appears the same crowd processes from one point to another to listen to speeches and applaud musical performer. There is hardly a police officer to be seen.

    And now, with the country a week off an election which the Government says it is legally bound to hold within 60 days of the dissolution of Parliament, the country’s Constitutional Court declared there’s nothing to prevent a delay in the holding of the election.

    Something has got to give. But it would be a brave person who could say with confidence what will. After two weeks, it’s hard to see the Bangkok protestors who are fed up with the Shinawatra family, quietly going home. Being fed up, anger is not resolved by meekly agreeing to disband.

    There is a reported 35,000 people who have come from the south (the Opposition’s stronghold) and are financially supported by those managing the protests. Why would they go home if they are in paid employment?

    The Shinawatra supporters will concede that Thaksin and his sister aren’t angels but the alternative is a collapse back into a pre-democratic form of government by a Council of the good and the great. Who appoints them? For how long? With what mandate delivered by whom?

    And then there’s the military – the army and the police. Who’s giving them their riding instructions and how long will they follow them?

    Mention of a racing metaphor – “riding instructions” which are given to a jockey by the trainer – suggests to me the appropriate way to look at what’s happening in Bangkok.

    As an adolescent and keenly interested in horse racing, I used to listen to a discussion between various tipsters broadcast every Saturday morning. Sometimes, when the glorious uncertainty of picking a winner led to complete confusion among the panel discussing prospects, the panel moderator, Bert Bryant would sum up and conclude with a single sentence: “And the answer is….a pineapple!”

    In Thailand, the answer is…..an orchid!

  • Andrew Podger – Health reform, co-payments, fee for service and doctor contracts.

    The recent suggestion of a modest user charge on patients of bulk-billing doctors, and the immediate reaction in the media, suggests the need for a more careful study of the appropriate role of co-payments in our health insurance system, and of other measures to contain costs while delivering an effective insurance product.

    Ensuring everyone has affordable access to effective health services, while keeping total costs manageable, is the central challenge for any health insurance system. The very existence of an insurer raises the risk of moral hazard whereby consumers and service providers take advantage of the third party payer. This is exacerbated in the health system by the reliance patients have on the expertise of doctors and the extent to which doctors, understandably, wish to draw on the latest technologies to help their patients.

    A fee-for-service system, as we have in Australia, adds to these problems, as doctors (and other health service providers) are rewarded financially by the number of services they provide, a variable they can influence particularly if the insurer meets all of the costs.

    There are several ways of addressing this issue, all of which involve insurers acting more as purchasers of services on behalf of their members, rather than simply reimbursing costs. A number are already used in the Australian health system.

    • Copayments send a message to consumers that services are not entirely free. They currently apply to pharmaceuticals up to a cap, even for concessional groups, and to non bulkbilling doctors particularly specialists. Private insurers typically leave substantial copayments for private hospital and related specialist services.
    • Gate-keeping may constrain the use of high cost services. This applies to specialist services which require GP referrals, and to elective surgery which requires specialist referral as well.
    • Hard or soft budget caps can constrain over-servicing. Hard caps used to be applied by the Commonwealth to its funding of public hospital services through the Commonwealth Health Services Agreement, and the States then applied as best they could soft caps. Soft caps also apply through Commonwealth agreements on MBS costs for pathology and radiology and, on occasion, to newly listed medicines through price-volume deals with pharmaceutical companies.
    • ‘Blended payments’, where fee-for-service is complemented by some ‘capitation’ funding based on patient populations, is a variant of the soft budget cap approach. This has become part of the regime for primary care through the provision of practice grants and rewards for certain preventive health outcomes such as high child immunisation rates, cancer screening levels and coordinated care plans for chronically ill patients.

    What is obvious is that our current approach is messy and not focussed on a system-wide strategy relevant to today’s challenges affected so much by chronic illnesses and the needs of the frail aged. There is the likelihood of continued over-servicing by bulk-billing GPs in particular, but also under-protection (and hence obstacles to access) for those unable to find a bulk-billing GP and for those referred frequently to specialists. The limited role of blended payments also means insufficient reward for preventive health services and high quality continuing care. There are also distortions such as people turning to (free) emergency departments for primary care services. Some international studies also suggest Australia relies too heavily on co-payments on pharmaceuticals (though Australians also pay large amounts voluntarily for ‘complementary medicines’ of dubious effectiveness).

    The suggestion of a modest charge on non-concessional patients of bulk-billing GPs would not go very far to address these problems. A better approach with the potential to achieve greater long-term savings to taxpayers would be:

    • To impose higher user charges on non-concessional patients of bulk-billing doctors, with a modest charge also for concessional patients (possibly akin to the current PBS co-payments);
    • To allow the States to apply similar charges for emergency department patients (and perhaps outpatients);
    • To tie these to firm caps on total eligible health service charges in any one year, thus ensuring a genuine and effective overall health insurance product;
    • To negotiate with GPs and specialists (or their corporate organisations) the mix of MBS fees and capitation funds required to ensure compliance with the standard fee regime and to promote improved preventive services and continuing support for at risk patient groups. These agreements, or contracts, could vary by region reflecting variations in the supply of doctors and the costs of service delivery.

    Private health insurers similarly should be encouraged to set total annual co-payment caps for their members’ hospital-related services.

    An early dialogue with the AMA and other doctor associations (including the Colleges which focus on professional standards rather than just doctors’ financial interests) could develop a manageable reform agenda. Regional variations would need to be negotiated, with the new Regional Primary Healthcare Organisations perhaps playing a role so long as conflicts of interest can be managed.

    This approach could be complemented by a more transparent system-wide budgetary control arrangement which helps to promote the optimal allocation of resources across programs to address health risks in the community. In the short to medium term, some notional health budget for the population in each region, with a soft cap, would assist allowing regions to negotiate agreements/contracts with doctors and other service providers within their notional budget cap to supplement or vary national fee-for-service prices, focusing in particular on the most appropriate support for the chronically ill and those at risk of chronic illness. (In time, private health insurers might play a greater role for their members including for Medicare services, by being offered their members’ Medicare ‘premiums’ otherwise managed through the regions’ budgets along the lines of the Bennett Report’s Medicare Select option).

    The Abbott Government will not want to ignite public doubts about its commitment to Medicare and so is likely to move cautiously. A balanced strategy that clearly improves Medicare’s overall insurance product while introducing a more coherent system-wide approach to co-payments might be attractive politically as well as economically.

    Andrew Podger was former Director General of the Department of Health and Ageing. He is currently Professor of Public Policy, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University.

  • Arja Keski-Nummi. They are us … and the language of war!

    Why are we using the language and methods of war against civilians fleeing war and persecution?  Asylum seekers are not our enemies. Our real enemies are our complacency and a willingness to turn a blind eye to the spin we are getting. This reflects the Abbott government’s ability to drill deep into our collective psyche of fear with our settler past. What if we lose it all?

    It conflicts so dramatically with our other self-image of an open, caring and welcoming society.

    This debate is about much more than people arriving by boat, it is about reshaping an Australian narrative that excludes and rejects difference. “In our image or no image” is the message. The High Court action against the ACT legislation on same sex marriages and Christopher Pyne’s curriculum review are part of that same agenda.

    In trying to turn the page back to an Australia that no longer exists and never in reality existed the Abbott government is using the asylum debate to send a message of “them and us”.  At best it is elitist. At worst it is narrow minded, bigoted and opportunistic. The problem is that the “them” eventually become “us” as over 200 years of migration – illegal and legal – has proven.

    Governments and politicians carry an enormous burden of responsibility in helping shape how we react and welcome the stranger.  We are the community and society we are because by and large governments understood that most people did not feel comfortable with immigration but if we were to grow and develop and be prosperous we needed people. Nothing has changed.

    The language used about asylum seekers by both the previous government and the current one however has sought to divide our communities. Little compassion is shown or expressed to the plight of people displaced by war and human rights abuses. Rather the language is about people cheating a system and a vow to not “let them get their way”. Disturbingly in the last few months the language of war has started to be used with greater frequency.

    While this may be playing out well in the polling of today, we will pay a price for such demonization. A cornerstone of our success in settling millions of people in Australia over the past 70 years, irrespective of how they may have arrived in this country has been that we have genuinely subscribed to the ethos of a “a fair go”, helping create the opportunities for people to establish new lives and participate in the broader Australian community while at the same time valuing and cherishing their cultural heritage and giving some of it to our own uniquely Australian society. We don’t have an underclass at risk of exploitation nor do we have ethnic ghettoes. Our settlement programs have helped avoid that.

    We do have vibrant culturally diverse suburbs that reflect our cultural make up. It is true that for some the process of settlement is difficult and not trouble free and will be so for a long time but a generation on the children of those arrivals are politicians and in professions creating new wealth and opportunities for all Australians. They are us. That is the time when we need to measure how successful we have been in welcoming the stranger, and by any measure we have been truly successful.

    The previous government’s decisions to lock asylum seekers out of work and the continuation of this policy by the current government will have consequences. We are creating a new underclass. People will have to survive and it is disturbing to contemplate where this may lead and not just into a thriving black economy. It is an own goal we could well avoid if we just recognized and capitalized on the resilience, toughness and determination to succeed that asylum seekers bring with them.   It is on these qualities that Australia’s wealth has been built.  Rather than spending billions of dollars on detention centres and offshore processing centres (where is the budget emergency now?) a little helping hand will in the long run be rewarded a hundred times over. We have two hundred years of evidence to prove that.

    Our problem today therefore has been of our own making. Currently there are no formulated political structures to counter the governments’ opportunistic and increasingly militaristic approach. The Opposition is caught in its own appalling policy paradigm, one which cleared the way for the Abbott government when they reopened Nauru and Manus Island and went still further to announce that no people detained in those centres would be resettled in Australia.   They seem to have forgotten what they stand for!

    Likewise the Greens show no great policy nous in this area having a simplistic, emotive response that ignores the reality of multiple issues colliding with each other including the very difficult issues of how to manage mixed migration flows, return of non refugees, countering people smuggling and support for refugees. Their starting off point is that everyone is a refugee. It leaves no space to contemplate the harder elements of a refugee and asylum policy.

    Emotionalism is not a substitute for a good political strategy.  We cannot turn back the clock and bemoan missed opportunities but nor should we simply accept the mantra of war. It is disrespectful to survivors of wars and betrays the shallowness of politicians who have turned civilians, seeking sanctuary, into enemies.

    What we need is an approach that engages our international partners and regional governments in finding genuine regional solutions and not the Orwellian ones of Manus Island and Nauru). We need to recognize the humanity of people seeking asylum but we also need to have a process that quickly identifies who is and  who is not a refugee and be able to resolve the immigration status of a person who is not a refugee quickly and with dignity even if this means return to their country of origin. To do anything less undermines our obligations under the Refugee Convention, a protection tool that has withstood the test of time. We must compromise the system of international protection that we as a country have worked so hard to shape.

    We have done it before. We can do it again and we can be true to our own self image of a caring and open society.

    Arja Keski-Nummi was First Assistant Secretary of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2007-2010.

  • Could we do more to offend the Indonesians? John Menadue

    Could we do more to offend the Indonesians? Yes, I think we could by appointing, as has been suggested, Peter Cosgrove as our next Governor General. He was the military Commander who led the INTERFET forces against the Indonesian military in East Timor in 1999.  This was much more than just a military defeat for the Indonesians. It resulted in Indonesia’s political humiliation in the eyes of the world. Indonesia had to withdraw from East Timor with loss of face.  I don’t think that Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison, in their reading of the Lonely Planet Guide to international relations would be aware of this. Stopping the boats is everything regardless of the human beings involved or our relations with Indonesia.

    I believe the Australian-led intervention in East Timor was justified and in normal times the appointment of a former military opponent of the Indonesians would largely go unnoticed. But because of the Abbott Government we are not in normal times in our present dealings with Indonesia; the country that is more important to us strategically than any other.

    The Abbott Government has trod clumsily and provocatively in our relations with Indonesia. It should not add to the problem.

    The phone-tapping of the Indonesian President, his wife and senior colleagues by an Australian security agency occurred before the Abbott Government came to power. But the insensitivity and amateurish response by the Abbott Government really caused annoyance in Indonesia.

    More unfortunately there has been our provocative policy of turn back of asylum boats to Indonesia. There is no doubt that the Indonesian Government feels quite strongly that this action has breached and continues to breach its sovereignty. In the ‘war’ on boat arrivals, the Abbott Government has ignored the collateral damage it has done to our relations with Indonesia.

    The Abbott Government has portrayed the humanitarian issue of asylum seekers and refugees almost entirely in the vocabulary of war. It has established Operation Sovereign Borders, a military operation led by the military.  To justify secrecy Tony Abbott says “if we were at war we wouldn’t be giving out information that is of use to the enemy” Scott Morrison says “this battle (against boat arrivals) is being fought using the full arsenal of messages..” With this sort of terminology it is not surprising that the Indonesians are alert to crossings of their borders by Australian warships. This unfortunate militarisation and vocabulary of war would also be exacerbated by appointing a former senior Australian General as our next Governor General.

    Discretion is important particularly when diplomatic relations become fragile. Discretion suggests that the Abbott Government should not worsen the situation by appointing a former military opponent of Indonesia as our next Governor General. In the Javanese way, the Indonesian Government may be polite on the subject. But it would be wise to avoid more potential damage particularly as the anti-Australian drum is likely to beat louder in this Indonesian Presidential election year.

    It should be recalled that in his military career, Peter Cosgrove in 2001 was the Chief of the Army when the Howard Government put SAS troops on board the Tampa to stop asylum seekers coming to Australia. I thought at the time that this was a highly political and partisan act to use the military in this way and that when matters had cooled General Cosgrove would stand down. But not so.

  • The power of vested interests and why drugs cost so much in Australia. John Menadue

    Why does the widely used cholesterol reducing drug Atorvastatin cost $A19 in Australia and $A2 for the same package in NZ? Why does the widely used cancer drug Anastrozole cost $A92 in Australia when the equivalent drug in the UK costs $A3.30. The answer is the political power of Medicines Australia and how it twists the arm of governments.

    In a blog on January 7, I drew attention to the political power of vested interests to undermine the public interest and good policy development in Australia. I referred  particularly to the miners and their role in destroying the super profits tax, the polluters’ opposition to the carbon tax, the hotel and liquor industry which is responsible for violence on our streets and poor health in the community, and the gambling industry particularly Clubs Australia, that successfully opposed proposals to shield problem gamblers. Just consider how James Packer has been able, so easily, to use his political power to avoid any public process in obtaining a licence for his “high-rollers” casino in Sydney.

    What makes these vested interests so dangerous is their power to persuade or threaten politicians. The media is ill-equipped to contest their power. In some cases, The Australian and the Australian Financial Review newspapers become outlets for these vested interests.

    Medicines Australia (MA) is a classic case. It represents the pharmaceutical industry in Australia. Its members supply 86% of the medicines that are available in Australia under the Pharmaceuticals Benefits Scheme. (PBS)

    The Grattan Institute has pointed out how, with the cooperation of pliant governments, MA has been able to exploit Australian consumers and taxpayers. The facts are quite clear. For March last year, the Grattan Institute reported as follows:

    • For Atorvastatin, the cholesterol reducing drug, the PBS in Australia paid more than $51 for a box of 30 tablets. NZ paid $A5.80 for a box of 90 tablets.
    • Grattan also looked at the ‘top 73 doses that are prescribed most often in Australia’. It found that Australian wholesale prices were eight times higher than NZ’s. For identical drugs, NZ prices were six times cheaper than in Australia.
    • Grattan also compared prices in some public hospitals in Australia who buy drugs outside the PBS. It found that on average these hospitals obtained drugs eight times lower than the prices under the PBS.

    Those comparisons where for March last year. In December last year, under what is called ‘price disclosure’ arrangements, prices were reduced.  However, the Grattan Institute found that even with these reductions, Australia was still paying sixteen times more than the UK and NZ for seven key drugs. For example the cost of Atorvastatin dropped from $A30 to $A19 for a pack in Australia. The same pack sold for the equivalent of $A2.84 in UK and $A2.01 in NZ. For Anastrozole, the cancer drug, the wholesale price in Australia is $A92 and in the UK $A3.30.

    How can these outrageous differences occur?

    Before a drug can be registered on the PBS it has to be cleared by the Therapeutic Goods Administration for safety and efficacy. Then it is assessed by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee for cost effectiveness and clinical benefit. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Pricing Authority (the Pricing Authority) then determines the maximum price that can be charged and how much the Government will pay manufactures or importers under the PBS.

    The Pricing Authority, a non statutory body is set up by the Minister and is within the Department of Health and Aging. The Authority includes, amongst its six members, two representatives of drug companies. That is extraordinary-building vested interests into the price setting process. They should be excluded completely.  The whole process is opaque, and political. It is ready made for manipulation by vested interests.

    In NZ, politicians decide how much is spent by the government on drugs and an independent and professional expert panel sets prices. In Australia we have the process the other way round. Our politicians should determine the budget for drugs at the beginning of the process and then get out of the way and let market competition work and leave final price decisions to independent experts.

    The vested interests get their fingers all over the price of drugs on the PBS. In NZ they are excluded from the process.

    Grattan Institute estimates that Australia’s wholesale prices for identical drugs are now six times the prices paid in NZ. In some cases they are as much as twenty times higher. Grattan Institute estimates a saving of almost $A2 billion p.a. if we paid the same price as in other relevant jurisdictions.

    The Chief Executive of MA is Brendan Shaw. He was formerly a staffer for Dr Craig Emmerson. It is typical of the pedigree of vested-interests and their political lobby that they choose persons well-known and influential in the political corridors of power in Canberra. .

    In response to Grattan’s findings, Brendan Shaw in the Australian Financial Review made an irrelevant point that because of budget restraints in NZ, fewer new medicines were available in that country. He avoided completely the issue of price comparisons. I would rather rely on the professional advice of independent experts on what drugs should be on the PBS and the prices we pay.

    When will we seriously tackle the exploitation of the public that Medicines Australia inflicts upon us?

    The Department of Health and Ageing should be spending its time developing and implementing improved health policies. Instead it spends its energy and time placating the powerful rent-seeking vested interests in our health services – Medicines Australia, the AMA, the Pharmaceutical Guild of Australia and the Private Health Insurance companies.

    The Rudd and Gillard Governments did little to curb the abuse of political power by these groups in the health field. In fact they made the situation worse. The Rudd Government appointed a senior executive of BUPA, the second largest private health insurance firm in Australia, to head the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission enquiry.

    Ross Garnaut described the power of vested interests in Australia as a ‘diabolical problem’.  He is right. If the Commission of Audit wants to save some real money and curb rent seeking it could start with vested interests like Medicines Australia.

    Governments and particularly conservative ones extol the virtues of markets. But all too often this is a diversion, designed to advantage corporations, like the members of Medicines Australia, rather than letting markets work and promote competition and lower prices.

  • Violence is on the decline. John Menadue

    If you watch the tabloid television and the Murdoch press, you would certainly believe that violence is increasing. It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that we are moving away from violence.

    Over the holidays I have been reading ‘The Better Angels of our Nature – the Decline of Violence in History and its Causes’. It focuses particularly on the West. The book was written by Steven Pinker (Penguin 2011). Pinker is an experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist. He is a Harvard College professor

    It is a long read, but I found it encouraging.

    He examines violence in its worst manifestations in war, murder, rape and domestic violence, racism and hate speech. He argues that we are more aware of violence because of modern communications. That is why we aren’t so aware of the global decline in violence.

    In his preface, Pinker states his thesis

    This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakeable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.

    The book’s essential message is that over thousands of years, despite the setbacks of  eg WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, tribalism has given way to expanded and inclusive relationships and that we have developed more appropriate and effective institutions to contain violence, despite their shortcomings.

    Pinker gives us a glimpse into the viciousness of the cultures and customs from 8000 BCE to the 1970s.

    In human pre-history we find graves and prehistoric remains that reveal people ‘strangled, bludgeoned, stabbed or tortured’. In this period he says that a person had a high chance of coming to bodily harm.

    In Homeric Greece, war was waged against the entire population. For the heroes of the Illiad, female flesh was a legitimate spoil of war. Achilles ‘spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women’.

    Pinker describes the Hebrew Bible as ‘one long elaboration of violence’. Cain slew Abel. Noah’s ark saved only a select few. The Israelites were enslaved in Egypt and the Egyptian army was drowned in the Red Sea. Samson became a hero in slaughtering 1,000 Philistines and killed over 1,000 with the jawbone of an ass. Captured, his eyes were burnt out and in revenge he crushes a building and kills 3,000 men and women. The warrior Saul’s Court sings that ‘Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands’. Fortunately a lot of this never happened, but it offers a window into the lives and values of the civilisation in the first millennium BCE.

    An architectural symbol of the Roman Empire was the Colosseum. Gladiators fought others to death for public amusement. Animals tore flesh from humans. The most frequent means of Roman execution was crucifixion. It was an orgy of sadism. Saints were put to death by barbaric means.

    Infidels were put to death in the Spanish inquisition by burning at the stake and drawing and quartering.

    The medieval Christian knights may have treated the ladies well, but their intervention in the Crusades resulted in probably 1.5 million deaths, particularly of the Saracens. Jerusalem was allegedly left “knee deep in blood.”

    In early modern Europe Henry VIII had two wives beheaded. Bloody Mary had 300 religious dissenters burnt at the stake. Elizabeth I had 123 priests drawn and quartered.

    Despite the awful events in recent centuries, Pinker commented that the declines in violence unfolded over vastly different scales of time.

    ‘The taming of chronic raiding and feuding, the reduction of vicious interpersonal violence, such as cutting off noses, the elimination of cruel practices like human sacrifice, torture-executions and flogging, the abolition of institutions such as slavery and debt-bondage, the falling out of fashion of blood sports and duelling, the eroding of political murder and despotism, the recent decline of wars, pogroms and genocides, the reduction of violence against women… the protection of children …’  all point to a reduction in endemic violence.

    Pinker describes the factors that have not helped the decline in violence. These include technology and weaponry, the quest for power and resources, affluence and religion.

    In a chapter entitled ‘On Angels’ Wings’, Pinker describes the pacifying process. He says ‘Declines of violence are a product of social, cultural and material conditions’. He describes certain broad forces that have pushed violence down. These include the civilising process with the consolidation of law enforcement; the humanitarian revolution with improved literacy, urbanisation and access to mass media; the ‘rights revolution’ away from tribalism to national authority and freedom of speech; the benefits of international commerce and feminisation.

    Pinker concludes:

    Yet while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, the [human] species has also found ways to bring the numbers and incidence of violence] down and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savour and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilisation and enlightenment that made it possible’.

    I found the book encouraging- to think that our struggle against violence, war and denial of human dignity is worth the effort, despite the doomsayers and what our 24/7 media keep telling us.

  • Mission accomplished? Be careful which war you wish for. Travers McLeod

    “We are going to hold the line, we are going to protect the borders”, Scott Morrison, Federal Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, told the 44th Federal Parliament in its first sitting week. “This battle is being fought using the full arsenal of measures”, he wrote elsewhere. Last week, the Prime Minister defended the secrecy of the ‘battle’, saying, “if we were at war we wouldn’t be giving out information that is of use to the enemy just because we might have an idle curiosity about it ourselves”.

    Whatever the wisdom of Operation Sovereign Borders, Australia’s “military-led, border security operation”, if it is going be described as a military campaign we should assess it like one. When we examine military campaigns we often reflect on two interrelated questions: what is the strategy, and are the tactics appropriate and adapted to achieve that strategy? Strategy is important because it declares the intent and links ends and means. Tactics are also important. As the military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, explained, “only great tactical successes can lead to strategic ones”.

    On strategy, Operation Sovereign Borders has been explicit: “We are going to stop the boats.” In the first of the now discontinued weekly briefings, the Minister said “those seeking to come on boats” would be “met by a broad chain of measures end to end that are designed to deter, to disrupt, to prevent their entry” and “to ensure that they are not settled in Australia”.

    The tactical waters have been muddied. One tactic offered but discarded was to buy the boats. Another tactic, begun by the former Government, is to ensure certain persons arriving by boat cannot be settled in Australia. A new tactic – gifting patrol boats to Sri Lanka – was announced last year. The tactic most discussed has been to turn or tow back the boats.

    Determination not to comment on “on water” matters has marked the campaign. This approach, too, can be evaluated from the perspective of a military campaign. The Australian Defence Force (“ADF”) has defined information operations (“IO”) as “the coordination of information effects to influence the decision making and actions of a target audience and to protect and enhance our decision making and actions in support of national interests”.

    Can this campaign be won in part through an absence of information? In 2007, Lieutenant Commander Chris Watson wrote “the key for IO is choosing to release information to the media on one’s own terms, for example as regards the timing and quantity of material released”. He described IO and “Shaping and Influencing” as “potent but underutilised tools available to government” during peacetime. The Minister appears to share this view.

    One difficulty for Operation Sovereign Borders is multiple target audiences: Australians, regional governments (not least Indonesia’s), asylum seekers and people smugglers. A lack of footage from the High Seas and detention facilities also makes it problematic for actions to articulate a message in and of themselves. Those in charge would prefer no boats, and therefore no actions. No information means no boats. No boats means mission accomplished.

    It is worth recalling debates in the United States during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In 2006, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded the U.S. deserved a “D” or “D+” for its job in the “battle of ideas”. What became apparent was the moral dimension of the information battlespace. The need for accurate, regular information became paramount, informing the directive given to commanders not to put “lipstick on pigs”.

    Taking stock, one might observe Australia has a strategy supported by at least one tactic, and that its information operations are under siege. This observation is made without considering whether the current strategy is the ‘correct’ one. The Jakarta Declaration on Addressing Irregular Movement of Persons, signed by Australia and 12 other countries from the region last August, and endorsed by the UN Refugee Agency, offers other approaches.

    Tellingly, new members of Parliament have cautioned against ‘Fortress Australia’ in their maiden speeches, making the case for new arrivals and new markets. Clare O’Neil, Labor Member for Hotham, described how immigration has “brought more than 150 cultures” to Australia peacefully. Angus Taylor, Liberal Member for Hume, said Australia “must boldly expound and stay true to a narrative that explains the benefits of openness”, which includes a “generous humanitarian program”.

    Clearly, ‘Fortress Australia’ bears multiple meanings, whether we think about trade, immigration, or border protection. But they are all related. Militarising some of the issues and some of the discourse may not be a constructive development. It may not help Australia’s diplomatic and civil-military relations. It may not help Australia’s openness to trade and immigration, which is vital to continued competitive advantage in the global economy. But as long as any government continues to treat Operation Sovereign Borders as a military campaign, we should continue to assess its strengths and failures as such.

    One would hope militarisation has not been pursued in order to control the flow of information. At the end of the day there are human beings on these boats. Their “on water” stories will emerge. It just might be that many have fled countries undeniably at war to join the long list of migrants who have helped build and shape Australia for the long term.

    Travers McLeod is the Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for Policy Development. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford.

    An edited version of this article was published in the Melbourne Age on January 14, 2014.

     

     

  • Repost. Refugee advocates and offshore processing. John Menadue

    This is a repost from 23 September, 2013. 

    The insistence on onshore processing for all asylum seekers is damaging the case for humane and sensible refugee policies.

    The blanket opposition to any offshore processing is understandable but it is just not working. Just look at the election result on September 7. The important issue is not where processing occurs but whether it is just, fair and efficient. Many of the asylum seekers who claim protection in Australia are not in direct flight from persecution. Most transit Malaysia and Indonesia. Some are asylum shopping.

    The major political parties  now compete with each other to deter and punish boat arrivals. In the public debate the preoccupation with boat arrivals by both politicians and the media has dramatically reduced support for an increased humanitarian intake and the end of mandatory detention.

    For many years I was a strong supporter of all asylum seekers coming to Australia  being processed in Australia. But I have changed my mind as the facts have changed, with over 17,000 boat arrivals in the six months to June this year. In world terms the numbers are small but the political mood has gone very sour which is threating the humanitarian case for generosity. Before the High Court decision on the Malaysian Agreement boat arrivals were about 300 people per month. They quickly quadrupled after the High Court decision and have continued to increase ever since. The High Court decision striking down the Malaysia Agreement undoubtedly gave oxygen to people-smugglers and many desperate people who were prepared to risk dangerous sea voyages. We cannot ignore their human rights.

    We need to urgently think again about transfers and regional processing.

    The UNHCR in a statement to the Australian Parliament on 30 September 2011 welcomed the transfer and regional arrangements with Malaysia. The Greens and refugee advocates cooperated with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison to reject amendments to the Migration Act to allow the Malaysian Agreement to proceed. Asylum seekers are paying a heavy price for this unity ticket between the coalition, refugee advocates and the Greens

    There is a long history of UNHCR support for transfer of asylum seekers in appropriate circumstances. In 1998, the executive committee of UNHCR recognised that irregular migration, people smuggling and asylum flows are complex matters but concluded that a return to a transit country like Malaysia may occur provided there are appropriate safeguards, accepted international standards and effective protection against refoulement. Whilst such conclusions are not binding in law they do guide the work of the UNHCR and governments in what are acceptable international standards of behaviour towards asylum seekers.

    The UNHCR in Australia has just issued a ‘Guidance Note on bilateral and/or multilateral transfer arrangements of asylum-seekers’. It can be found on its website.

    Paragraphs 1 and 2,  say ‘It is UNHCR’s position that asylum seekers and refugees should ordinarily be processed in the territory of the state where they arrive or which otherwise has jurisdiction over them. This is also in line with general state practice. The primary responsibility to provide protection rests with the state where asylum is sought. Nevertheless there are an increasing number of initiatives in various regions involving the transfer of asylum seekers from one country to another for the purpose of processing their asylum claims. Such arrangements have typically involved the transfer of asylum seekers either (a) to the state where they first sought (or could have sought) asylum; or (b) to other countries with which the asylum seeker has no previous links. They have also involved both bilateral and/or multilateral (regional) arrangements.’

    The Guidance Note then went on to outline the principles against which any transfer arrangements should be assessed.

    In a joint article with Arja Keski- Nummi, published in the Melbourne Age on 13 December last year, we outlined a system of ‘practical protection’ that should apply to any transfer arrangements in our region. We set down several steps.

    • All countries should commit to the principle of non-refoulement.
    • Provide people with a legal status and access to work and education.
    • Work to help not only displaced people but also host communities.
    • Increase our refugee intake from our region.
    • Work with partners in the region in association with UNHCR to create an atmosphere of safety and trust.
    • Amend the Migration Act to assert the principle of ‘effective protection’ as outlined above.

    We badly need a political compromise based on effective processing whether onshore or offshore. This is necessary if we are to put an end to the political poisoning of the well of public support for asylum seekers and refugees, and to discourage desperate people making dangerous and fatal sea voyages.

    We need to rethink our blanket opposition to offshore processing. It is not helping the people most in need of our help. It has played into the hands of those, who for political reasons want the boats to keep coming as thick and fast as possible and in the process encourage us to fear and even hate asylum seekers.

    We need to fight harder and more astutely to help those in need of our protection. This is not the time to throw in the towel.

     

  • Asylum seekers – Tony Abbott and I share a Jesuit education. John O’Mara

    Like many Australians, I look on the way the Abbott government is handling the matter of asylum seekers with ever increasing dismay. Tony Abbott’s mantra “stop the boats”, is unprincipled, contrary to signed UN agreements and impractical. It is hard to erase the pre-election memory of the Western Sydney interviewee..”I’m going to vote for Abbott, because he’ll stop the boats “.

    What dismays me most is that Tony and I shared an educational experience at the hands of the Jesuits and then a friendship that reaches back almost 40 years.

    Like Tony, I’m very grateful for my time at a Jesuit school. In our day a substantial number of our teachers were Jesuits and we had the benefit of their highly trained minds, sharp moral sensitivities and educational method that always emphasized evidence over rhetoric. Even though the Jesuits were strong on presentation skills in argument, the argument had to have substance.

    Their clarity of thought and pursuit of learning for its own sake sets them apart from all other educators especially those I encountered at Sydney University. Their ability to look at all sides of an argument prior to coming to a conclusion was both stunningly simple, and at the same time extremely thought provoking.

    Surprisingly, our religious education in latter years included a look at many religions…Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Protestantism and others. We were shown the merits of these religions and taught an all encompassing view of life and peoples.

    We were taught quite simply that the major requisites of Catholicism were: love, inclusion, and protecting or looking after those more needy…of any denomination. Fr Gerald Drumm went further, stating that as we were boys starting life from a privileged position in a Jesuit School, we owed it to our God, the Jesuits and ourselves to put our teachings in to practical effect if we were ever in a position to do so. It was as black and white as that!

    Tony and I were, from our earliest days taught people had an inherent dignity and to use them as a means to an end is the antithesis of anything the Jesuits taught us.

    Tony and I were both members of the SRC and had many battles with “the lefties”, both verbal and physical. We both enjoyed playing Rugby for Sydney Uni, if not for Australia. It was a time of great frivolity and for forging life-long friendships. But those playful undergraduate days are long gone. And now in government, the play is for real.

    Instrumentalizing desperate human beings for political advantage is absolutely unacceptable. As I said to Tony a couple of years ago over dinner…”Mate, you and I would be the first in a boat with our families were we to encounter the atrocities they have had to face“.

    The solution is again very simple. We must embrace these poor desperate souls, get them in to our communities and enrich our lives, and theirs. Give them the dignity to live without fear, give them the dignity to work and pay tax. Let us take the lead in a regional resettlement program to accommodate these people. No more detention centres, political bottom feeding, refugee camps or queues. Let’s get the Australian psyche back to where it should be.

    As Tony should know, playing to the xenophobes in Australia just flies in the face of well known facts about people movement and its cause in our region.

    Asylum seekers ARE NOT ‘ILLEGALS” they are our brothers and sisters.

    Tony’s and my Jesuit teachers are turning in the graves for the lack of logic, human sympathy and compassion let alone any reflection of what Jesus had to say about welcoming the stranger and going the extra mile. Bad luck for the Good Samaritan. He was a mug and would never get endorsement as a Coalition candidate.

    John O’Mara is Managing Director of Big Image Sydney Pty Ltd

  • Is Pope Francis a Marxist?

    On 16 December last year, Eureka Street carried an article by Neil Ormerod about Pope Francis and his economic, social and political message. That article can be found on the link below.  John Menadue

    ​

    http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=38645#.Us8a9j0XBt8.email

  • A 100 billion dollar tale of piracy in the Timor Sea. Michael Sainsbury

    Although it sits on a vast undersea gas reserve, Timor-Leste remains deeply impoverished.

    Deep under the Timor Sea, there is a huge reserve of gas. Geologists now believe it is worth upwards of US$100 billion; a figure more than twice the amount estimated by Australia as recently as 2006. It is perhaps ironic that the nation with the strongest claim to ownership of that gas, by dint of proximity to it, is Timor-Leste, which is also among the world’s poorest nations.

    But will it ever get the benefit of it?

    There have been numerous treaties over the last 42 years between Australia, Indonesia and Timor-Leste, regarding the fate of the gas. All of them have heavily favored Australia. None of them have been in accordance with international maritime boundaries and laws. Australia has sought to protect these favorable borders using means that have been illegal and unethical at times – not to mention mighty un-neighborly.

    The last treaty signed with Timor-Leste in 2006, known as CMATS, is now under dispute at the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration, the PCA.

    CMATS was based on two earlier treaties. These were inked with Indonesia’s Suharto dictatorship in 1972 and 1989, and since dismissed by many lawyers as illegal. The treaties carved up the seabed between the two countries at a time when Indonesia was illegally occupying Timor-Leste, an occupation that only Australia among its international peers recognized.

    There is much at stake. Impoverished Timor-Leste, which is 95 percent Catholic, would obviously welcome a massive boost in assets and income, as would any country, including Australia.

    But Australia has even more to worry about. Its greatest fear is that if its 2006 treaty with Timor-Leste comes unstitched, then Indonesia, its vast northern neighbor, now far wealthier and more powerful than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, may want to renegotiate its own maritime borders with Australia – and that has far reaching strategic and economic implications.

    “Well, they didn’t have to sign the treaty, no one forced them to,” Alexander Downer, Australia’s Foreign Minister from 1996-2007, now says of Timor-Leste.

    It was Downer who made the key decision, only two months before Timor-Leste’s independence in 2002, to “withdraw” Australia from the maritime jurisdiction of the PCA.

    Now that some gas revenues are coming in, and under pressure from UN negotiators, Australia has agreed to hand over a larger share of them to Timor-Leste. But it has refused to budge on a 50-year clause that prevents Timor-Leste from challenging the boundaries established with Indonesia; boundaries that one former Indonesian foreign minister described as “taking Indonesia to the cleaners”.

    Timor-Leste has long been unhappy with CMATS. But then last year, the dispute stepped up several gears when it went public with allegations of spying by Australia during the treaty negotiations.

    Timor-Leste claims that Downer authorized the installation of wiretapping equipment in the walls of the new cabinet room in the capital, Dili. The building was being constructed, ostensibly as part of an “aid project,” in 2004 as the treaty negotiations were commencing. The allegations originated from an intelligence officer who worked for Australia’s overseas spy agency, now known in the PCA case as Witness K, to his government-approved lawyer Bernard Collaery in 2008.

    Timor-Leste took the case to the PCA last April. Then on December 3, more than a dozen officials from Australia’s domestic spy agency raided Collaery’s office and removed many high-level, evidential documents relating to the case. They also raided Witness K’s home, canceling his passport.

    The government claims this was done for national security reasons. The following day, Australia’s attorney-general George Brandis, under parliamentary privilege, stated the raid had nothing to do with CMATS. But Collaery, an approved lawyer for both domestic and overseas intelligence officers, told ucanews.com this claim is rubbish; there were no national security grounds for the search. He added that Witness K “was simply fulfilling his obligation as a Commonwealth officer to report illegal acts”.

    At the time, Australian and Timor-Leste officials were debating how Witness K would be handled, including a possible witness protection program, so the December raid does look extremely pre-emptive.

    It was hardly surprising that later in December, Timor-Leste’s Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao sent both an official letter and his foreign minister, Jose Guterres, to Canberra, demanding a re-negotiation of CMATS and an explanation for the alleged spying.

    In a piece of especially inept statesmanship the incumbent prime minister, Julia Gillard, sent diplomat Margaret Twomey as her envoy for a three-hour meeting in Dili. Twomey pleaded for the East Timorese to cease their legal actions but it fell on deaf ears. The fact that Twomey was the Australian ambassador in Dili when the alleged spying took place, and the Timor-Leste government nursed its own suspicions about her role, would hardly have helped.

    Looming over all this is the cozy relationship between Canberra and Woodside, Australia’s biggest home-grown oil and gas company. Woodside controls Great Sunrise, the largest gas field opened so far in the disputed territory. Woodside has been “saved” once before, by government fiat, from a takeover by rival Royal Dutch Shell in 2001. More recently it has also enjoyed consultancy services from Downer’s company, Bespoke Approach.

    There can be little doubt that the well-connected, armor-protected Woodside will have strongly lobbied the Australian government for the best deal in the Timor Sea; even less doubt that its requests would have been favorably heard.

    This furore is just the latest sign of the Australian government’s current struggle to understand or deal effectively with its Asian neighbors. In recent months it has fallen out with Indonesia on the question of illegal immigrants. More damagingly, it has emerged that Australia spied on Indonesian President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono, his wife and others.

    Australia’s new conservative government, led by Tony Abbott, has also decided to slash its aid budget by a cumulative A$4.5 billion in coming years, the vast majority of which goes to its nearby Asian neighbors.

    And in Timor-Leste, Minister for Energy and Petroleum Alfredo Pires has said that the episode is turning hearts and minds against Australia, even though Australia’s defense forces came to its rescue in its desperate battle for independence in 1999.

    Referring to the spying allegations, Pires said: “It was all done under the cover of an Australian aid project. Now we are even suspicious of Australian aid. Many people, particularly young people, have become very disillusioned with Australia over this.”

    The bottom line is that once again the people of Timor-Leste, who have been through so much for so long, are just collateral damage.

    Michael Sainsbury is an Australian journalist based in Bangkok.

    This article was published by CathNews   on 8 January 2014.  See link below. 

  • More on pink batts. Guest blogger: Dr Michael Keating

    I would like to add a further comment to your post on 3 January on the Pink Batts.

    First, I would further contest the evidence that this scheme was poorly conceived and badly implemented. On this point it should be noted that the Auditor General’s finding that 29 per cent of 13808 completed jobs had minor or serious problems was based on a departmental survey, which suggests that the government was following up. Furthermore the survey was not wholly random and as the Auditor General noted this particular finding constituted only weak evidence. Later evidence showed that of  44,300 inspections, again not randomly chosen, only 3215 led to rectifications being required – a rate of around 7 per cent, which does not seem to me to be particularly high for the building industry.

    The other major concern arose out of the death of four installers. Leaving aside the fact that regulation of health and safety is a responsibility of the States and employers it should be noted that one fatality was caused by a pre-existing electrical fault; another electrocuted installer was employed by an electrician; and a third death occurred when a contractor elected to work in oppressive heat. In addition, the Commonwealth required more of contractors than most States as it required installers to agree to employees holding a nationally recognised occupational health and safety certificate demonstrating that “the holder is competent to work safely in the construction industry”.  To the extent that there was a failure of health and safety it would seem to reflect a general failure of health and safety regulation in the building industry and not a failure of this particular program.

    Second, the other important aspect that I would like to raise is why did the Rudd and Gillard Governments decide to throw in the towel and not defend the program? I suggest that it was their decision to stay silent and not respond to the criticisms that has now given the HIS program such a bad reputation, and has come at a considerable cost to their own reputations. I think that it was this decision to stay silent, when a substantial defence was possible, that is deserving of further exploration by those who are interested in how our political system is working these days.

    Dr Michael Keating AC was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet 1991-96. 

     

  • People like us: personal reflections. Guest blogger Trevor Boucher

    One of my great-great grandfathers on my mother’s side was transported to Australia in the early 1840’s for stealing lead from a chapel roof. The lash and Van Dieman’s Land didn’t reform him, although marriage in Geelong to an Irish orphan helped- even though a couple of manslaughter convictions followed.

    Not that I knew about this as a child born in 1936 in remote eastern Victoria. My family historian brother later extracted the information from a reluctant Mum (a crusading Salvationist’s daughter). Her opinion was, “We don’t need to talk about that sort of thing.” With hardworking and upright Dad being a Methodist local preacher, the numerous local Catholics (of Irish origin) were to be treated with some reserve –not really people like us. For their part, they probably saw us as “wowsers”. The hundreds of Chinese alluvial gold miners who once dug up the place had long gone. They didn’t meet “White Australia” prescriptions anyway.

    During the Second World War years Dad returned from a visit to relatives in the Western District with stories of how a companionable Italian POW assigned to them sat at the family dinner table.

    A few years later Dad employed on our farm one of the “Balt” refugees then coming into the country. Although he spoke funny, he seemed to be a decent person to have around.

    Both my parents had limited educational opportunities. In Dad’s case it was through family and financial circumstances, in Mum’s because she was a girl. They wanted their kids to have a better chance.

    So they sent me off to boarding school in Melbourne in 1949. Boarders included Chinese “boys” sent by the Missions from Rabaul, people whose wartime internment by the Japanese had delayed and interrupted their schooling. They were great fella’s; impromptu and illicit after hours Chinese tucker in the boarding quarters provided a great introduction to different food. Another student was the daughter of a Jewish refugee doctor from central Europe.

    Then came teenage hitchhiking around north-east Victoria. I was a bit of a problem for my mates. Being blonde and blue eyed, I looked too much like a “reffo” from the Bonegilla migrant camp. The word was out that they, not being “people like us”, were a problem if you let them into your car. So I was hidden away from the edge of the road while the mates did the hitching.

    Back at the school I was elevated to dormitory master. There were different faces in the streets as the mass immigration recruiting ground of Arthur Calwell (he of “two Wongs” fame) was moved from northern European climes to the warmer Mediterranean, bringing in “wogs” and “dagoes”. A Greek kid arrived at the school with not a word of English, and was fluent within weeks.

    By then the melting pot of the Snowy scheme was a great demonstration of how Australia could manage the welding together of many diverse cultures. The term “New Australian” was coined in an attempt to get away from derogatory references to newcomers. It worked for a while.

    Like others, I was caught by National Service Training requirements. I spent my twenty-first birthday with the Melbourne University Regiment in the bush at Puckapunyal, helping set up a jungle training shooting alley as part of national preparations against the “coming hordes from the North”.

    In late 1972, another brother escaped being Vietnam fodder. Malcolm Fraser later let in Vietnamese boat people; something I remember each time I visit my highly competent Vietnamese dentist.

    Through most of my early life, people of aboriginal descent were in the shadows around my old country market town, Bairnsdale, having come from nearby Lake Tyers Mission settlement. The lawyer in me found the Mabo decision when handed down by the High Court a road to Damascus, yet despite formal constitutional and judicial recognition, attitudes of other Australians generally remain apathetic towards dealing effectively with the continuing profound disadvantage that stands in the way of First Australians being “people like us”.

    My elder daughter Katherine has married Colin, an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia. They have three gorgeous and talented children – Nicholas, Hannah and Julia. What a gift!

    A few years back I took Bryce, the elder son of my younger daughter, Nicole, from Canberra to the cricket in Sydney. Going up the afternoon before, we walked down a Sydney suburban shopping street. I was struck by the fact that nearly all shop signs were in Chinese or another non-English language. There was scarcely a Caucasian face. I said to Bryce, “Do you notice anything different around here?” He said he didn’t and we walked on. A few minutes later he said he had spotted the difference. “What is it?” Bryce’s answer: “They’ve all got I-pads.”

    Some days on after- school pickup of his young blonde brother Trent,  I meet the latter’s best mate, a refugee kid from deep in the Sudan- someone with the best smile and the brightest dark eyes, the best rugby player in the team.

    Waiting in the schoolyard each day are parents from all over the globe. Among them are modestly dressed mothers who I take from their dress to be Muslims. Happy kids mix with each other. At a well attended school concert, kids dance as they sing a song in Arabic.

    As I chat about these things on the way home Paige, sister of Bryce and Trent, chimes in from the back seat to say matter-of-factly that her school friend (from Indonesia) has been fasting all day because of Ramadan and will be away, at prayers, the next day. This leads me to reflect on how religious observance and practice were a major part of my upbringing, my Protestant Mum going to great lengths to ensure that we ate fish on Good Friday.

    Travelling interstate, I can’t remember the last time that the taxi driver from and to the airport was someone who once would have been described as “dinki-di”. Someone has to do that tough and not greatly rewarding job, just as other immigrant people work hard at jobs that are not appealing to the “mainstream”.

    Names in today’s telephone book, like names of players in sporting teams, strongly demonstrate a world-wide spread of family origins of Australians.  On the other hand, when I indulge my pastime of attending country clearing- sale auctions I don’t see the faces of a typical urban Australian street, just faces reflecting the time of my childhood.

    Last weekend a couple, friends of over 50 years, visited. We got talking about the latest drownings of boat people – this time of people trying to get into Europe from the African continent and the Middle East. Leaders overseas have called for broad solutions. Our friends tell us that they are both offspring of boat people. Both sets of parents came by ship as “10 Pound Poms”.

    It strikes me that ten quid is not much compared with the amounts desperate boat people are reported to be paying to “people smugglers” or (dare I say) as air fares for a “legal” arrival followed by a visa overstay.

    The old Protestant/Catholic divide has gone but religious prejudice stays around. It seems funny that proposals for a Muslim school, a mosque and even recently a Muslim cemetery in the country still meet with NIMBY- type objections (for example, adverse traffic effects). Sadder still to me (now an agnostic) is that if one follows the claimed lineage of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths, they all lead back to the same “big fella”. Were I to choose to be buried, which denominational section would I be put in? Would it matter?

    While my great-great grandfather came involuntarily to a continent then little changed from the way it had been managed by indigenous people for centuries, succeeding waves of boat people –people seeking a better life-  and their descendants have created a diverse society that is rightly envied elsewhere. People once feared as being “different” have not only fitted in, widening the sense of “us”, but greatly enriched Australian life.

    My granddaughters, Gracye, Ellanor and Maddison, sing the National Anthem at morning line-up at their little country school at Numeralla. They are too young to catch the irony in the words that “for those who come across the seas” we have “bounteous plains to share”.

    Australian society and its composition have changed and pressures for further change will not go away. Sitting on our island we would be both foolish and inhumane not to recognize that there are many more at-risk human beings beyond our shores who are desperate for somewhere to go and who, on any analysis, are simply people like us.

    The great thing is that kids of today don’t see the differences between people that my generation did.

    The Australia of my childhood has changed. It is still changing. But is it better and does it hold more promise?

    You bet!

    PS  The daughter of the great-great grandfather referred to earlier married a man (my great grandfather) who had changed his name on arrival in Australia. He was a Swedish seaman who jumped ship in Melbourne. That means that I am a descendant of someone who today would be classed as an “illegal maritime arrival”.

    Trevor Boucher was Commissioner of Taxation for eight years. This was followed by two years as Australia’s Ambassador to the OECD.

    This article by Trevor Boucher was published before Christmas in ‘Australia 21’. For further information see www.australia21.org.au.

  • The Revival of Misprision of Felony. Guest blogger: Kieran Tapsell

    In the days before police forces, the State in the English speaking world relied on citizens to report serious crimes, called “felonies”. The posse in the Western movies is a reflection of the “hue and cry” that citizens were expected to raise. Failing to report a felony was itself a crime, called “misprision of felony”. The crime, according to Lord Denning in the 1962 House of Lords case, Sykes v The Director of Public Prosecutions, was more than 700 years old. It is so old that the word “misprision”, meaning “concealment” has disappeared from everyday use.

    In the 1960s, Law Reform Commissions recommended its abolition, because of the establishment of police forces, because the distinction between a “felony” and a “misdemeanour” was causing problems in the administration of the law, and because most citizens felt a moral obligation to report serious crimes anyway.

    Misprision of felony was abolished in the United Kingdom in 1967, and all Australian States followed suit. New South Wales abolished it in 1990, and replaced it with a statutory form in S.316 of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), making it an offence not to report a “serious” crime (one with a penalty of 5 years or more in prison) unless there was a reasonable excuse. The other States replaced it with a provision that made the concealment of a crime an offence only if the concealment was in return for some gain.

    All States have mandatory welfare reporting laws regarding “children at risk”, but they only apply while the victims are under age. Some States, such as Victoria, do not include clergy amongst those required to report. The mandatory reporting laws in all States do not apply to “historic abuse”, that is, where the victim is now an adult. Figures produced by the Archdiocese of Melbourne indicate that historic abuse represents more than 99% of all complaints.

    In 1999, the New South Wales Law Reform Commission recommended that S.316 of the NSW Crimes Act be abolished for a number of reasons, but one of the most significant was: “The Commission disapproves of substituting a legal duty which is enforced by a criminal sanction for a moral one unless there are overall substantial benefits to society in doing so.” It must come as a surprise to the Law Reform Commissioners that the Vatican did not think that the Church had any such moral duty when it came to Catholic priests sexually assaulting children. Its imposition of “pontifical secrecy” on any allegations and investigations under canon law effectively prevented any such reporting to the police. The effectiveness of that prohibition can be seen from the evidence given at the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry that not one of the 611 cases of sexual assault between 1996 and 2012 by priests in Victoria was reported by the Church to the police. Pontifical secrecy did not prevent the victims reporting the matter, but so far as the Church was concerned, it had no moral duty to do so. Indeed statements by five senior Cardinals from 1997 to 2002, Castrillón, Bertone, Billé, Rodriguez and Herranz, stated unequivocally that it was immoral or wrong for a bishop to report a paedophile priest to the police, two of them saying that bishops should be prepared to go to jail rather than do that. According to Church teaching, priests were special people because they had been “ontologically” changed by God at ordination, and the relationship between a bishop and a priest was like that of a father and son.

    The Irish Parliament abolished misprision of felony in July 1997, but after the Murphy Commission reports into the cover up of child sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin and the Diocese of Cloyne, it was revived in 2012, in a form similar to S.316 of the New South Wales Crimes Act 1900 so far as children and “vulnerable” people were concerned. It had to include the latter because in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI had extended pontifical secrecy to apply to allegations about priests sexually assaulting those who “habitually lack the use of reason”. The Victorian Parliamentary Report, “Betrayal of Trust” recommended similar changes to the Victorian Crimes Act 1958, a move that was also supported by the Victorian Church.

    Such a change to the civil law will assist the Catholic Church with a peculiar problem arising from canon law. In 1996 and 2002, the Irish and American bishops approached the Vatican for permission to be able to report clergy child sex crimes to the police, irrespective of whether or not the civil law required it. The Vatican refused. It was only willing to agree to such a dispensation where there was a civil law requiring reporting. In other words, it would allow just enough reporting to keep bishops out of jail. In 2002, this dispensation was granted to the United States, but it was only in 2010 that it was extended to the rest of the world. Pontifical secrecy still applies where there is no duty to report under the civil law. Such civil legislation will allow bishops to report to the police without coming into conflict with canon law.

    Pope Francis is the absolute monarch of the Catholic Church. He can issue a decree at any time outlawing pontifical secrecy for any canonical crimes that are also crimes under civil law. Indeed, such a decree would be in line with some 1400 years of Church tradition, requiring such priests to be handed over to the civil authorities, a tradition which ended with the cover up being ordered by the Pope Pius XI with Crimen Sollicitationis in 1922: see Flogging a Dead Horse at the Royal Commission on Child Abuse: https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=980  If Pope Francis fails to do that, the only inference will be that the Catholic Church still wants to hide clergy sex crimes against children wherever it can get away with it.

    Kieran Tapsell is a retired solicitor and barrister. He has degrees in law and theology.

     

  • Repost: The scourge of special interests. John Menadue

    A REPOST FOR HOLIDAY READING.

    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 special interests brought to bear on public discussion on that critical issue.

    ‘What is in it for me’ is not just a problem of self-interest by voters and consumers. That self-centredness has been taken to a high art form by powerful vested interests that extract monopoly rents at the expense of the national interest. The media and particularly News Ltd and the Australian Financial Review are part of this growing corporate influence and the propaganda that they bring to bear.

    Look at some facts.

    • There are over 900 full time independent lobbyists working in Canberra. That is over 30 for every Cabinet minister. On top of these ‘third party’ lobbyists, there are the special interests who conduct their own lobbying, e.g. Australian Pharmacy Guild.
    • These lobbyists encompass a whole range of interests eg 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? With its lobbying power over the major parties the hotel lobby effectively determines hotel operating hours in the states. Violence and crime are a clear result.
    • With journalism under-resourced, the media depends increasingly on the propaganda and promotion put into the public arena by these special interests The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS found in a survey of major metropolitan newspapers published in Australia in2010 that 55% of content was driven by public relations handouts from lobbyists and their associated public relations arms. 24% of the content of those metropolitan newspapers had no significant journalistic input whatsoever. It relied heavily on PR handouts.
    • The Media Council of Australia has just 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. Even the People’s Liberation Army of China provides trips for senior financial journalists to attend business conferences in China.
    • 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 her department manage the special interests.
    • Much of the policy skills in Canberra departments have 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 special 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?

    • 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 that they have had with ministers, shadow ministers and senior public servants.
    • There should be a filtering mechanism such as the Economic Planning Advisory Committee which many years ago was an effective filter whereby special interests were forced to contend with wider community interests before advice went to ministers and departments.
    • All proposals by special interest groups must 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 special 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.
    • 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 special interests that significantly influence outcomes in health. The Reserve Bank, composed of independent and professional persons has shown the benefit of such governance arrangements that keep special interests at bay and promote an informed public debate. We need such an arrangement in the health field particularly.
    • No minister or senior official should work with a special 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 policy vacuum that we presently have 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.

    These proposals may seem draconian. But I strongly believe that we face a very serious problem – the diabolical problem that Ross Garnaut has mentioned. Special interests are handsomely winning the day at the expense of the public interest. A push-back against special interests is urgent.

  • Bangkok is bubbling. Will it blow? It’s looking increasingly like it will. Guest blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

    In recent months, most independent observers have admitted to complete uncertainty about the outcome of the demonstrations and disturbances that for months have plagued Bangkok with its metropolitan area population of some 15 million.

    But now there is a date with fate. Organizers of the demonstrations and their leader, Suthep Thaugsuban, have set Jan 13 as the day to shut down Bangkok as they try to prevent a planned national election in February.

    As expressed in the Thai Constitution, when an election is called, it is the King who allows the parliament to be dissolved for the election.

    So, legally, it is the King’s will that the election take place, but that is just what the protestors and demonstrators want to thwart. Such an abandonment of loyalty to the king is an unprecedented development in Thailand, though the protesters claim to be more loyal to the king than the government is.

    The protestors, sometimes referred to as “Yellow Shirts”, have set deadlines and given ultimatums many times before. But this time they appear determined to bring the capital to a grinding halt. There is talk of clogging the city with trucks and busses rammed into each other to prevent movement. What follows from that will be chaos and could be violence.

    The police and the army were notably absent from demonstrations in November and December, allowing crowds of up to 150,000 protesters to process and blow their whistles unsupervised and even at times enter government buildings.

    However, in the last two weeks, military leaders have become more outspoken, signaling a new interest in events and their part.

    Recurrent issues keep the crisis alive:

     

    • The demonstrators reflect the view of the Bangkok middle class and elite – the political old guard, who claim to be most loyal to the King;
    • Their party has not won an election since 1992;
    • The party of Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister deposed in 2006, and his sister Yingluck who is caretaker prime minister has won the last five elections;
    • The Bangkok elite believe that the Shinawatra governments are illegitimate and run by remote control from Dubai by Thaksin;
    • Thaksin is loathed by the Bangkok elite for alleged competitiveness with the King for leadership in Thailand and generally for being a grubby and corrupt ex-policeman whose political power has been bought with bribes from the immense wealth he generated for himself before and while in power;
    • The fact is that the country has changed and Thaksin is more appealing to most than the Bangkok-focused policies of those behind the protests can deliver.

     

    The problem – and Suthep and his “Yellow Shirt” supporters know it – is that Thaksin’s party will win a sixth successive election if it goes ahead in February. They have to avoid a further popular vote.

    The last time they held power was in the Government led by the Oxford educated Abhisit Vejjajiva (2008 – 2011) Mr Abhisit was lucky enough not to have to be voted in. The then opposition managed to get the country’s courts to disqualify Thaksin’s parliamentarians and, with most of the government expelled from parliament, conveniently found the numbers to form a government without going to the polls.

    What the “Yellow Shirts” propose as their solution to the problem that they seem never to be able to win elections is to install a sort of aristocratic government of the good and the worthy.  How they are to be selected and by whom and for how long is not absolutely clear.

    While Bangkok is a booming city with a strengthening stock market and a robust set of industries to build prosperity, rural Thailand has also seen a significant increase in prosperity, educational opportunities, health services, industries and benefits from tourism.

    More than 80% of the Thai population is in rural areas and it is there that the power of the Thaksin family and their political allies has been overwhelming.

    For example, rice, the country’s staple and one its leading exports, is bought by the government at a fixed price, irrespective of the international price the product can be sold at. Happy farmers vote for governments like Thaksin’s and his sister’s that bring rewards and subsidies like this.

    What has emerged in rural Thailand is a new and educated middle class for whom the allegiances, policies and prejudices of the old Bangkok elite have little appeal.

    One possibility in the current crisis – much precedented in Thai politics – is military intervention to remove the incumbent elected government. That may well occur in the next ten days.

    If that sort of chaos doesn’t happen, another will. The disturbances and protests sponsored by the Bangkok elite will continue until Thaksin and his family are seen to suffer and be driven out.

    Either way, in spite of this being the cool season in Thailand, it will be a hot time in Bangkok for a while.

  • Cricket – junk food and alcohol. John Menadue

    Over the holidays I have very much enjoyed watching on television Australia winning at last. The visual TV coverage is outstanding. The camera crews do a great job. I enhance my enjoyment by minimising the audio content. Except for the opening and closing of each session, and at the fall of each wicket, I keep my TV console on mute.

    But that is the good news. Unfortunately I can’t get away from the almost saturation picture coverage of junk food (KFC) and alcohol (Victorian Bitter and Bear-Wine-and-Spirits or BWS).

    Last year, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency (ANPHA) identified curbing alcohol use, tobacco use and obesity as the top three priority areas in preventive health. ANPHA considered that these three health risks accounted for 40% of potentially preventable hospitalisations.

    In addition to saturated fats, KFC gives saturated television advertising – KFC classic catches; Australian burgers vs English burgers; KFC trivia; Bucket-heads and a lot more. Yet only this week the National Health Reporting Authority for the Council of Australian Governments reported that our obesity rate had ballooned to 28% – with almost 11 million Australians classified as overweight or obese. Obesity is growing at an alarming rate and fast-food is one of the contributing factors.

    It is also hard to miss the seeming unending coverage of alcohol advertisements or promotion – on the sight-screens and on the scoreboards. We had BWS lunch and tea breaks. Yet only about a kilometre away from the Sydney Cricket Ground innocent people, police and hospital workers are battling alcohol-fuelled violence. The alcohol and hotel industry has enormous political clout and not just among politicians. Australian Cricket willingly plays their game.

    The Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice does not allow alcohol advertising before 8.30pm in order to protect children. But by some sleight of hand the alcohol industry is able to advertise any time of the day provided it is part of a live sporting event.

    In the 1980s the tobacco industry through Rothmans, Winfield and others fought a rear-guard action to continue advertising in association with sporting events. They used the hoary argument that if a product was legal it should also be possible to advertise it. In the end they had to withdraw from all advertising associated with sporting events. The same should happen to the junk food and alcohol industries. But who will challenge their enormous political and business power.

    In the meantime, Channel 9, Cricket Australia and players fill their pockets with the revenue derived from the advertising and promotion of dangerous products. That sounds to me like living off immoral earnings.