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  • A last hurrah from Graham Freudenberg on his 80th birthday

    May Day 2014 – fittingly the day of Neville Wran’s memorial service at Sydney Town Hall – may well turn out to be the day when the Labor Party began to see its way ahead.  Not because of the event itself, although it certainly was a marvellous celebration of a great Labor era.  But it was the day of the Shepherd Audit Report. It also happened to be the day when News Ltd bared its fangs and reminded the Abbott Government just who was calling the tune. I invite students of history to file away the Sydney Daily Telegraph on 1 May 2014 and its coverage of the Shepherd Audit next day. All its hatred of Labor was as feral as ever, but in page after page, the message to Abbott and Co was clear:

    “It was us wot done it last year and we can do for you too if you don’t toe the line.”

    But what is really important for Labor is that Abbott, Hockey and Murdoch, in fomenting this spurious crisis that is supposed to engulf Australia sometime in 2024 or 2034 have drawn up clear policy and political battle lines for the rest of the decade. They are surprisingly traditional lines along the distribution of wealth and the concentration of power, but they provide a basis for the restoration of a coherent two-party system, the mainstay of our parliamentary democracy.  After the first week of May 2014, let us have none of this nonsense that there is no real difference between the major parties.

    For the past eight months the whole operation has been designed to entrench three myths (1) that Labor wrecked the economy with a six-year spending spree, (2) that Australia is living wildly beyond its means because of outrageous extravagance in welfare, health and education, and (3) that the ‘productive’ sector is crippled by taxes and debt.  There is a fourth myth behind all this – that the ruinous reality was covered up until the election and kept secret from everybody, including the international agencies who praised Australia’s recovery from the GFC, and even the editorial writer of the Australian Financial Review who as recently as 4 May wrote sensibly about the tasks and challenges facing ‘one of the world’s strongest economies’.

    The Daily Telegraph on 1 May itself illustrates the hypocrisy in its page 3 story headed “Hey Joe, cut here instead of taxing us”. If any of the myths were true, why then did Abbott go into the campaign with his parental leave promise, when Labor’s fratricide had already guaranteed a huge coalition win? Since the election, the News Ltd commentators have portrayed the National Disability Scheme and Gonski on education as two glaring examples of Labor’s ‘mad’ excesses. In order to prevent these becoming election issues, Abbott signed up to them, while persisting with his parental leave proposal. Yet, the Daily Telegraph’s own list of cuts Joe should make costs NDIS at $1.563 billion in 2016-17 and Gonski at $1.120 billion in 2016-17. But the Abbott paid parental leave would cost, on the Daily Telegraph’s figures, $5.684 billion in 2016-17 – more than twice the NDIS and Gonski combined.

    Of course you can do anything with figures. All these supposedly horrific projections are being bandied about without any context.  What does it actually mean to predict that programs inherited from Labor would cost an extra $700 billion in 2050?  The Federal Budget reached an astronomical 100 million pounds ($200 million) in 1939.  Fighting the Second World War cost us a shocking one million pounds a day and today we are the children and grandchildren presumably burdened by Curtin and Chifley’s extravagance.  By 1961 Arthur Calwell nearly won the election by calling for a deficit of 100 million pounds to end the intolerable unemployment level of less than 3%. Menzies denounced it as ‘wildly inflationary’ and ‘grossly irresponsible’.  When he survived by one seat, Menzies promptly announced new spending measures costing 100 million pounds – the nominal figure for the entire Federal Budget barely thirty years previously!

    The timing, circumstances and political intentions of the Shepherd Audit are guaranteed to nullify any objective economic merits it may have. Instead of a serious examination of the role of government in modern economies, it will be seen as a more sophisticated and therefore more menacing Australian version of the American Tea Party agenda.  How far Hockey’s budget will follow News Ltd instructions and the Shepherd Audit Remains to be seen. But for years the Audit will stand as a blue-print for right wing aspirations for Australia – a kind of ‘black light on the hill’. If Labor can’t unite against this, around the development of new programs for growth and fair shares, and in defence of its fundamental achievements in health, welfare (including superannuation) and education, it won’t deserve to survive as the chief standard bearer of the progressive, liberal and egalitarian cause in Australia.

     

    Graham Freudenberg AM (born 1934) is an Australian author and political speechwriter who worked in the Australian Labor Party for over forty years. He has written over a thousand speeches for several leaders of the Australian Labor Party at the NSW state and the federal level. These have included Arthur Calwell, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Neville Wran, Barrie Unsworth, Bob Carr and Simon Crean.  In 1990 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his service to journalism, to parliament and to politics.  In 2005 he was inducted as a life member of the NSW ALP.

    He is the author of four books to date:  A Certain Grandeur – Gough Whitlam in Politics, Penguin 1977;  A Cause for Power – the Centenary History of the NSW Labor Party, Australian Labor Party, 1991;  A Figure of Speech (autobiography), John Wiley & Sons Australia, 2005; and Churchill and Australia, Pan Macmillan, 2008.  

  • Michael Kelly SJ. Why Protestants are more popular than Catholics in China

    Questions abound over the recent vicious actions of the Chinese government towards Christians in the prosperous Zhejiang Province just south of Shanghai. The actions of the government during the fortnight after Easter against both Protestants and Catholics are unprecedented in recent decades and, justifiably, have received world attention.

    As with all actions in a country as vast as China, whose government could never be accused of transparency, it is difficult to discover who is making the decisions and what they hope to achieve. But one issue that has surprised many people outside China is both the size of its Christian population and the ruthlessness, born only of fear, that the government’s violence displays.

    A recent claim by a US-based Chinese academic to London’s Telegraph newspaper – that China would have the largest Christian population in the world by 2030 – was not only exaggerated but also factually wrong. Will Brazil (200 million Christians) and Nigeria (85 million Christians), for example, simply stop producing Christians in the next 15 years?

    The reality is that no one knows how many Christians there are in China. In fact, there’s good reason why Christians do not declare their growth. Just look at what’s happened in Zhejiang in the last fortnight, where the growth of the Christian community has been declared “unsustainable” by the authorities who have command of assessments of the “sustainability” of faith communities.

    Put your head up as a Christian in China and it will be cut off. Catholics have maintained a standard figure for their own numbers for three decades. It was 12 million in 1980, 12 million in 1990, 12 million in 2000 and – surprise, surprise – it was 12 million in 2010. No one in any religion declares real figures in China. It only attracts government attention and then persecution.

    That there is a massive growth spurt among Christians in China is indisputable. What has not been addressed is what has made the exponential growth among Protestants possible, far outstripping the growth among Catholics.

    But it’s not something the officials know anything about because they have such a rudimentary and uninformed view of what Christianity is that they are the last to know what’s happening. For example, only the Chinese government thinks that Protestants and Catholics are separate religions.

    They are two of the five it recognizes along with Buddhism, Islam and its homegrown religion, Daoism. No one else in the world thinks Protestants and Catholics are anything but parts of Christianity.

    Whatever one is to make of the uninformed view that the Chinese authorities have, Protestant Christianity is growing far more quickly and extensively than Catholicism. Why?

    Maybe the Chinese authorities have something to tell us. After Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949, China was established along lines that the Communists learned about from their then friends, the Soviet Union, and the real maker of 20th Century Communism, Vladimir Lenin, the founder and first father of the Soviet Union.

    The Chinese Government manages religious groups through the Religious Affairs Bureau, a department of the Communist Party’s United Front organization for controlling the country’s disparate movements, groups and institutions such as Protestants and Catholics.

    The Catholic Church in China, divided as it remains, is caught: its strength is its weakness. Everywhere in the world and with local variations in China, its universality (with an accepted pattern of worldwide relationships), its institutions (parishes, seminaries, welfare services, publishing houses), its statuses (clergy and religious) and its ceremonies (the sacraments) are visible and remain the continuous and coherent identifications that draw or repel membership and participation.

    In a Communist country, they are an easy target for a Leninist administration intent on detailed control. And then, when some comply with government structures while other Catholics see those acting in such a way as cowardly and cooperating with the enemy, many form the view that rather than complicate their lives, they leave the established and regulated Church well alone.

    The same applied to Protestant denominations and was institutionalized through the three self- movements (self–government, self–financing and self-propagation; or no foreign missioners). This approach run through the United Front’s Religious Affairs Bureau captured the attention and controlled the practices of Protestant Christians throughout the People’s Republic.

    But the recent explosion in Protestant Christian numbers has happened outside this rubric. Most of the buildings, churches and Christian gathering points have been built on local initiative without government authorization. And most of the communities around the often triumphalist buildings that have been damaged or demolished in recent times in China began life as small communities of little more than a dozen people – gathering in friend’s homes outside the net of government supervision.

    Protestant Christianity, in contrast to the institution-based approach to community building familiar to Catholics, has thrived on its nimble, light-footed and adaptable response to local opportunities. In China, it has grown out of small communities sharing prayer, Bible study and videos at home or in a work place. At times, Christian businessmen and manufacturers have workplace Christian groups that form and meet for prayer and Bible study on their business premises.

    Meeting all over Eastern China in clusters of no more than 12, groups gather for what Catholics would call primary evangelization. Two-hour Bible study programs conducted over two to three months and often aided by a Chinese version of the Alpha Course provide a neat and compact way to introduce Christianity. The Alpha Course is a 12-part video series first created by an Anglican priest in London, Nicky Gumble, that has gone worldwide and has a Catholic version.

    These groups are unencumbered and unregulated by the Religious Affairs Bureau. Multiply the dozen members of these groups by thousands of such small groups in homes and work places and you reach hundreds of thousands pretty quickly. But when you get to that scale, as China has in the last 20 years, it’s not long until you need a larger, dedicated building – a church. That’s where these emergent communities have run into the brick wall of the Religious Affairs Bureau and the fear that the entire Chinese political leadership has had of any group, especially a religious one, that it can’t control.

    Fr Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com and is based in Bangkok.

  • John Menadue. The cost of abolishing the Mining Tax

    Just when the mining tax looks like raising some worthwhile revenue, the Coalition proposes to abolish the tax.

    The Rudd Government made a mess of the Resources Super Profits Tax (RSPT). We know from the Henry Tax Review and other commentators that such well-designed rent-based taxes are likely to be more efficient and even out the effects of volatile mineral prices. We also know that such taxes are superior to state government royalties.

    But the mining companies advertising and public relations campaign of $22 million scuttled the RSPT. For an expenditure of $22 million in lobbying and advertising the miners were saved about $60 billion in tax over the next ten years. Despite the fact that all surveys at the time showed that the majority of Australians supported the RSPT, the combination of the miners, the Coalition and the Murdoch media forced the government to give way.

    As Ross Gittins in the SMH of March 17 this year put it ‘A great opportunity was lost for our economy and our workers to benefit adequately from the exploitation of our natural endowments by mainly foreign companies [who own about 80% of the mining industry] our government has to ensure that it gets a fair wack of the economic rent these foreigners generate.’

    But having lost the critical battle over the RSPT, the government then introduced a watered-down mining tax called the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT). In its weakened political state, the Gillard government allowed the three big foreign miners, BHP (76% foreign owned), Rio Tinto (83% foreign owned) and Xstrata (100% foreign owned) to re-design the new mining tax – the MRRT – to suit their interests.

    And what happened? The miners were allowed to deduct the market value of existing assets instead of deducting the book value over five years. In this way the miners could maximise their deductions up front. That is why the mining tax has raised far less revenue than expected.

    As Ross Gittins has put it ‘Once these deductions are used up, the [mining] tax will become a big earner’. Gittins went on to say that abolishing the tax will be ‘An act of major fiscal vandalism’.

    According to the Greens, the Parliamentary Budget Office has advised. that a mining tax of 40%, as originally proposed ,on  all minerals with fixed state royalties and a change to depreciation will raise $35b over 4 years.

    It is also interesting to see the continuing strong hold which the miners have over the coalition, indeed over all major parties. There has been media speculation that the May 13 budget would abolish the diesel fuel rebate. The miners mounted strong on the government to drop any such proposal. In a letter to the government the miners said. ‘We have run the numbers on any substantial change to the rebate and the impact would be profound. Most likely far greater than any MRRT and probably a little less than the first mining tax”. So the miners win again. The fuel rebate will be unchanged. Persons with disability, pensioners, the unemployed and the sick will not have such luck.

    See below polling which shows strong public support for mining taxes.

    (See my blogs of October 17, 2013 ‘Short-sighted miners …’ and February 18, 2014 ‘The squandered mining boom’.)

     Public attitudes towards mining taxes from Essential Research

    Re RSPT

    • In May 2010, 52% approved higher taxes on the profits of large mining companies and 34% disapproved.
    • In the same month, 43% said they supported the RSPT and 36% opposed.

    Re MRRT

    • In November 2011, 50% approved the tax and 28% disapproved.
    • In April 2012, 56% approved the tax and 28% disapproved.

     

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Yasukuni Shrine and why it matters.

    Yasukuni–Japan’s Patriotic Lightning Rod

    The Shinto shrine known as Yasukuni sprawls over ten hectares in the centre of Tokyo near the northern edge of the Imperial Palace grounds. Here are enshrined 2.47 million ‘deities’––the spirits of Japanese military personnel and civilians on war service from conflicts going back to 1853, including around 1,000 convicted war criminals. To its critics, Yasukuni is a bastion of historical revisionism, which denies that Japan waged a war of aggression between 1937 and 1945. Visits to the shrine by senior members of the government are an ongoing source of friction with China and South Korea.

    Australia has the War Memorial in Canberra; the United States has Arlington National Cemetery. Indeed every country raises monuments to remember and honour their war dead. What’s different about Yasukuni Shrine? Why the controversy?

    Yasukuni is not a cemetery, nor is it a secular monument. It is a religious institution. Prior to 1945, the shrine was a special organ of the state under the jurisdiction of the Army, Navy and Home Ministries. As ‘ritualist-in-chief’ of the Shinto religion, the god-Emperor had the final say on who could or could not be enshrined at Yasukuni. Shintoism furnished the mythologies that underpinned Emperor-worship in totalitarian Japan, such that soldiers and sailors embarking for the front, and fully expecting to die for the Emperor, would pledge to ‘meet again at Yasukuni’.

    Between 1945 and 1952, the Allied Powers set about dismantling the apparatus of Japanese militarism. The nation’s top civilian and military leaders were put on trial in Tokyo by an international tribunal (the Australian judge Sir William Webb serving as president of the court) for war crimes, crimes against humanity and/or ‘crimes against peace’ (the so-called Class ‘A’ category), which was defined as the ‘planning, preparation, initiation or waging wars of aggression’, or conspiracy to do so. Seven of these high-profile defendants were executed, including wartime leader General Hideki Tojo. Two died during the proceedings; one was declared insane; sixteen were sentenced to life imprisonment; and two others were given shorter prison terms.

    Another forty-two accused Class ‘A’ war criminals, including Nobusuke Kishi, future prime minister and grandfather of Japan’s present leader Shinzo Abe, were arrested but released without trial. After recovering its sovereignty in 1952, Japan began to reverse certain reforms of the Allied Occupation, and by 1958 all war criminals had been released from jail and politically rehabilitated.

    Yasukuni Shrine became a private religious institution in September 1946, in accordance with the principle of the separation of church and state, soon to be enshrined in Japan’s new constitution. Ten years later, however, contrary to this principle, the Ministry of Health and Welfare and Yasukuni Shrine began ‘administrative co-operation on enshrinement’, the process by which individuals were selected as kami or deities. A start was made in 1959 on the enshrinement of Class ‘B’ and ‘C’ war criminals (convicted of mistreatment of prisoners, murder of civilians, wanton destruction and atrocities). By now Prime Minister Kishi was in office. He and other conservative leaders supported the aims of such patriotic groups as the Japan War Bereaved Families Association.

    In 1966 the Ministry of Health and Welfare approved the first group of Class ‘A’ war criminals for enshrinement, but when the list went to the shrine’s head priest Fujimaro Tsukuba no action was taken. In light of subsequent events, it seems likely that the attitude of Emperor Hirohito was crucial. Tsukuba, a former marquis, was himself a member of the Imperial Family, and for as long as he remained in charge at Yasukuni no Class ‘A’ war criminals were enshrined there.

    Tsukuba died in 1978. He was succeeded by Nagayoshi Matsudaira, a former lieutenant commander in the Imperial Navy, whose father-in-law, a vice-admiral, was tried and executed by the Dutch for war crimes (and later enshrined at Yasukuni). Within three months of Matsudaira’s taking over, fourteen deceased, Class ‘A’ war criminals were secretly enshrined at Yasukuni. While its defenders may claim that Yasukuni Shrine serves no other purpose than to console the spirits of the dead and honour their sacrifices, this sequence of events shows how personal and political motives have driven its use as an instrument of national policy. ‘Even before I made up my mind [to become head priest at Yasukuni], I argued that so-called Class-A war criminals should also be venerated, as Japan’s spiritual rehabilitation would be impossible unless we rejected the Tokyo tribunal,’ Matsudaira told a magazine in 1989, as quoted by the Mainichi Shimbun.

    According to Professor Yoshinobu Higurashi of Teikyo University (whose writings on the subject have informed this blog: See http://www.nippon.com/en/authordata/higurashi-yoshinobu/) the enshrinement of the Class ‘A’ war criminals ‘cannot be attributed simply to religious or filial impulses’. It was ‘a blatantly ideological and political act driven by an urge to justify and legitimize a highly controversial chapter in Japan’s history’.

    Even though, as a signatory of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japan formally agreed to the outcome of the Tokyo Trials, the nation’s conservative elite––most notably these days, Prime Minister Abe––steadfastly refuse to accept the burden of war guilt. They have a personal and public stake, through ties of blood and marriage, in overturning the verdict of history. On its English-language website, Yasukuni Shrine sets the tone by referring to ‘people who were labeled war criminals and executed after having been tried by the Allies’: in other words, victims not perpetrators. The shrine’s museum continues the narrative of denial of Japan’s atrocious wartime behaviour and, instead, strikes a note of triumphalism in its displays of armaments and trophies of battle.

    The Defense Ministry similarly promotes the idea of ‘victor’s justice’. At its compound in Tokyo where the auditorium used for the Tokyo Trials is preserved, the only reference to the court’s verdict is a display devoted to the dissenting judgement of the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal, who would have acquitted all the accused on the basis that Japan was forced into war by hostile Western nations.

    The person best placed to know whether this dissenting view has any merit would be Emperor Hirohito. After the enshrinement of the fourteen Class ‘A’ war criminals, Emperor Hirohito made the decision never to visit Yasukuni Shrine again. No emperor has been there since. Not long before he died, according to a memorandum taken by an aide, Hirohito made clear that the two decisions were directly linked. ‘What’s on the mind of Matsudaira’s son, who is the current head priest?’ he is reported to have asked (the man’s father, Yoshitami Matsudaira, was well known to him as Imperial Household Minister during the war). ‘Matsudaira [senior] had a strong wish for peace, but the child didn’t know the parent’s heart. That’s why I have not visited the shrine since. This is my heart.’

    Having controversially escaped prosecution for his role in the war, Hirohito’s stand against the revisionists and deniers––albeit indirectly and by an act of omission––gives the lie to those, like Abe, who insist that Yasukuni can serve both as a symbol of peace and a shrine to warmongers. Could it be that Japan’s swing to the right is, as Hirohito feared, the blindness of the child who does not know the parent’s heart?

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC for eleven years. He is the author of Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story (NewSouth Press).

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Refugees to Cambodia

    ​The Australian government appears to have struck a deal with Cambodia to house 100 refugees in exchange for a massive increase in foreign aid. But Cambodia is far from a safe place to settle.

    (more…)

  • Michael Kelly SJ. Next item on the Catholic reform agenda

    This is a time of reform in the Church. Everyone who bothers to look, from average Catholics around the world to the cardinals who elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio to become Pope Francis, knows the Church is in strife and in need of a lot of work to render it an effective means to the end it serves: to proclaim the Gospel and serve God’s people.

    First steps are being taken to fix a dysfunctional Vatican. But some of the big-ticket items for the wider Church won’t be fixed as quickly. Many of them are pastoral and require cultural change as much as administrative amendments. And as anyone with experience in changing the culture of an organization will attest, that type of change is the slowest in coming.

    It will start in October with an issue that is perhaps the single most undeclared but neuralgic item in the Church’s life; also the one that frequently triggers the departure of otherwise observant Catholics from the Church: divorce and remarriage.

    But there is just as fundamental an issue, one that has needed, and failed, to be addressed for at least 40 years: the issue of ministry in the Church. Perhaps this will be the topic of the next Synod.

    There were two issues Pope Paul VI would not allow to be discussed at Vatican II – clerical celibacy and contraception. The latter was addressed directly in 1968 with such an unsuccessful outcome that Paul VI never wrote another encyclical in his pontificate. Clerical celibacy was to have been the subject of the Synod of Bishops in 1971, but it overlooked the topic to focus instead on social justice.

    It is now a subject whose consideration cannot be delayed any longer. That it is on Pope Francis’s mind is obvious from his statements about his readiness to consider ordaining married men – the so called viri probati.

    But that’s the tip of the iceberg. If all such a move does is to reinforce the existing structure of ministry – where power rests in the hands of ordained men – there will be little attention given to what is needed in a Church that has vastly changed in the last 50 years.

    And unless the issue is addressed in its full context, with full consideration given to what ministry in the Church is there to accomplish, such a change would also run the risk of enhancing something that bedevils the Church today and has contributed substantially to the syndrome of sex abuse.

    I speak, of course, of clericalism, that culture of self-interest which promotes and sustains the presumption of superiority among clergy and their practice of protective secrecy. It is something that priests share with all would-be elites, such as professional associations in law and medicine, bureaucrats and the military.

    If ordaining married men to priesthood inducts more people into a destructive culture that is the antithesis of anything Jesus hoped for among his followers, the move won’t reform but rather entrench the decadence. This is a constant theme of the present pope when he rails against careerism and narcissism among the clergy and the Church administration in Rome.

    The reality is that God seems to be on the side of reform because in most parts of the world, the supply of celibate males ordained as priests has been in serious decline for 40 years.

    This is a worldwide phenomenon. In the Philippines there is only one priest for 6,500 Catholics. And in many parts of Europe, North and Latin America, the Church’s capacity to provide the Eucharist – the source and summit of the Church’s life, according to Vatican II – has been compromised because of the lack of authorized celebrants.

    The reality is that, in many parts of the world, the small and ageing number of priests today are not the ones who are leading Catholic communities; many are led by lay people. Catechists, school principals, leaders of communion services and lay pastoral workers now frequently fill the place occupied by priests in recent centuries.

    It is lay people who communicate the faith in myriad ways – through teaching and catechetic instruction, biblical and theological research, in routine pastoral care in communities, in service delivery to the poor, sick and aged, by administering communities and institutions, by managing the Church’s assets and finances, in creating liturgies and training pastoral workers who are themselves lay people, in preparing people for the key sacramental moments of their lives in marriages and baptisms, even in performing funerals. The list could go on.

    The Church would simply stop happening without the ministries – in both paid and voluntary employment – that lay people provide, with perhaps a majority of them performed by women. But none of these is celebrated and confirmed with appropriate authorization as integral parts of the Church’s ministry.

    The style of priestly service – and the training of candidates to supply it – is not as old as many think. It owes its current shape and style to the reforms introduced at the 16th century Council of Trent. At that Council, disciplinary rather than doctrinal changes occurred that tightened up a loose and decadent situation where clergy were mostly untrained, unaccountable vendors of sacraments for a price.

    The next stage of reform has arrived and it needs to go deeper than a mere tightening of regulations.

    Jesuit Fr. Michael Kelly is the executive director of ucanews.com.

     

  • John Menadue. Taxes – public or private

    The Commission of Audit has recommended that a Medicare levy surcharge be applied to individuals earning more than $88,000 a year and $176,000 for families. This is designed to force high income earners to take out private health insurance. This is one of the most economically stupid and dangerous proposals that I have seen for a long time. The Commission of Audit foolishly thinks that this would reduce public taxes, but it would result in increased private taxes (premiums). Higher premiums are the inevitable result of increased reliance on private health insurance. This is what has brought disaster for healthcare in the US. Private healthcare premiums have gone through the roof and the US now has one of the worst and most expensive healthcare services in the world. 

    Furthermore, the Commission of Audit’s proposal would move us a long way towards a two-tier health system, with a high quality and very expensive healthcare service for the rich and a welfare type health service for the poor. It strikes at the heart of social solidarity and social cohesion which is essential in a good society. It would end Medicare as we know it, a high quality service available to all regardless of income.

    Below I have reposted an article of 1 February about the fallacy of assuming that public taxes are bad but private taxes (premiums) are good.

     

    It has become commonplace for opponents of government and the public sector to suggest that functions like health care and broadcasting should be moved from the public sector to the private sector in order to reduce taxes. They usually add in that the private sector is also much more efficient in performing such functions.

    There are good social and economic reasons why certain functions should remain in the public sector – defence, education and health. But there is also a great fallacy that somehow public taxes are bad and private taxes/premiums are fine.

    Let me give you two examples.

    The private health insurance industry claims that Medicare is unsustainable and that more people should take up private health insurance to reduce the demands on the public health system. The suggestion is that by doing so, governments will not have to keep increasing taxes to fund public health. But there is a fundamental error in this argument. Private health insurance (PHI) has been raising its premiums at an alarming rate and much faster than Medicare through taxation. The PHI premiums are really the same as taxes that finance Medicare, except that one is public and the other is private.

    Since 1999, when rebates for PHI were introduced, the average PHI premium (private tax) has increased 130% whilst overall prices have increased by less than 50%. These private taxes or premiums are rising dramatically for a whole range of reasons that I set out in my blog of December 26 – ‘Health insurance – here we go again’.

    The other important reason for these high private taxes/premiums by PHI is that their administrative costs, including profits, run at about 15% to 16% of total costs. For Medicare, including the cost of tax collection, administrative costs are about 6% of total costs. So with the administrative costs of PHI about three times those of Medicare it is not unreasonable to conclude that the public gets far better value for money in its taxes paid to finance Medicare than paying premiums/private taxes to PHI. Expanding the role of PHI would greatly increase the level of these private taxes. The fact that they are private taxes misses the point. They are taxes on the consumer just the same as public taxes.

    The experience of the US should also warn us about private health insurance premiums/taxes. In the US, healthcare expenditure is over 18% of GDP. It is the highest in the world. In Australia it is about 9% to 10% of GDP, as is the case for most comparable countries that have a single public insurer like Medicare. Of the 18% costs in the US( as a proportion of GDP), about 9% is due to private insurance. Private health insurance in the US has been unable to control price demands by private doctors and private hospitals. If in theory the US had a single public insurer and followed the example of other single public insurer countries like Australia, the US could reduce its health expenditure by 9% of GDP. In such a situation the 9% of GDP paid to private health insurance funds would be unnecessary. If those premiums to private insurance were then redirected into public revenue, the US budget deficit of 7% of GDP would be eliminated. I said this was theoretical and there are clearly enormous political difficulties for President Obama to wind back the mess that private health insurance has wrought. But the figures do illustrate that the US would be better off with a robust public insurer funded by taxes rather than by the grossly unfair and inefficient privatised taxes that private health insurance imposes on the community. The US experience shows quite conclusively that shifting insurance out of the government and into private health insurance would be a disaster for everyone. To finance health care through the private taxes or premiums of PHI would result in much higher imposts on the public, than paying for health care through public taxes.

    The other example of privatised taxes is illustrated in the case that is often made against the ABC and other public broadcasters that are funded by taxes or special licence fees. Yet the critics of public broadcasting like Murdoch impose their own taxes – what is in effect a sales tax on products that are advertised in the commercial media. In my blog of December 19 ‘Murdoch and Abbott and the ABC’, I drew attention to the argument by Ian McAuley about the high cost of these privatised taxes. He said ‘We are paying about $1,500 per year per household for advertising, of which $500 is for commercial TV and radio… By contrast we are paying about $120 per year for the ABC’. Commercial media collects “taxes”, but it is called ‘advertising revenue’. This revenue is a cost to the advertiser and is loaded into the costs of the products when we purchase a car or holiday travel.

    The private sector has its own forms of taxation. Just by shifting functions from the public to the private sector, does not necessarily reduce what we have to pay out of our own pockets. In many cases public taxes are much more efficient and serve a much more desirable social objective than privatized taxes

  • John Menadue. The Commission of Audit and facing the wrong way.

    Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have been leaking confusing stories in the lead-up to the budget. A consistent theme however is that they must take tough action because of all the problems left by the previous government. They also need to justify the exaggerated rhetoric they used during the election campaign. A lot of it is confected.

    The Commission of Audit will add to the confusion in focussing on expenditure when the main problem is declining revenue. The neglected Henry review of taxation will be a better guide for the future than an ideological and partisan Commission of Audit

    In all this media static, I think there are several key issues that we need to keep in mind.

    • We do have a long-term structural budget deficit of about $60 billion per annum in current prices. That needs fixing. A lot of this structural deficit can be attributed to the policies of the Howard and Costello governments. During their tenure, we frittered away the large government revenue gains from the mining boom. We had one tax reduction after another. We should have been repairing the budget rather than reducing taxes. The IMF is quite clear that the Howard Costello governments must bear the major responsibility for the structural deficit. The Rudd/Gillard governments took some action but clearly not enough to address this structural budget problem. During the global financial crisis, the Rudd government increased spending and was successful in helping steer our way through a threatening world recession. Unfortunately the Rudd/Gillard governments ignored the report of Ken Henry about the need to reform our taxation system.
    • The structural deficit is caused mainly by a shortfall in revenue rather than a surge in spending. Our tax as a percentage of GDP has fallen steadily since 2002 from 30% to 28%. This is well below the OECD average of 34%. We need to give priority to fixing our revenue base which was what the Henry Review was largely about. Reducing tax deductions for superannuation, which benefit mainly the wealthy would be a good way to start.
    • We do not have a growing public sector. Our budget outlays have been trending downwards since the mid-1980s. We do need to further means test our welfare spending but compared with other OECD countries we have a more efficient and equitable welfare system than most. The Commission of Audit will be focussing on spending when the real problem is we need to focus on revenue. The Commission  is likely to face us in the wrong direction
    • Our overseas debt is increasing but it is very low compared with most other countries. Our overseas debt as a proportion of GDP is one of the lowest in the OECD. Our government debt is around 20% of GDP. For Canada it is 89%,France 94%,Germany 78%,japan 227%,Norway 29%,Singapore 104%,ROK 34%,UK 91% and US 102% As the CEO of the National Bank, Cameron Clyne, put it several months ago “Australia does have a debt problem. We don’t have enough of it. We have a lazy balance sheet. We are a AAA economy. We are having a very immature debate about debt.”
    • We must avoid the drastic action taken in Europe to reduce budget deficits where the consequences were disastrous for many governments and a lot of people. The fetish and obsession with deficits tipped many European countries into recession. There was low growth and record unemployment particularly amongst the young. This drastic action in Europe on deficits helped spawn ultra-rightist and anti-immigration political parties. We must learn from the European experience and not over-react in getting our budget deficit back under control.
    • This month the IMF told us that we face a period of sustained and lower growth. The Australian economy is struggling to grow at a sufficient rate to avoid significant increases in unemployment. Youth unemployment is now over 20% and growing rapidly. Joe Hockey should not go too hard in his first budget to reduce spending, despite the exaggerated and windy rhetoric we have had from him for many months. It is damaging consumer and business confidence. Reform has to occur but calamity is not around the corner. The Australian economy is one of the best performing in the world. In the current confused debate which has been triggered by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey one would think that we faced dire problems. We don’t and we should be careful not to worsen the situation.

    The most worrying prospect is that the government looks like believing its exaggerated political rhetoric about debt and deficits.

    I have outlined in my blog of February 4 ’Do our governments spend too much or do they raise too little in taxation?’ further arguments to support the above case. This blog, which I have reposted below summarises the submission which Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley and I made to the Commission of Audit.

     

  • John Menadue. Do our governments spend too much or do they raise too little in taxation?

    This a repost and provides a summary of the submission that Ian McAuley, Jennifer Doggett and I made to the Commission of Audit.  John Menadue

    The Minister for Health, Peter Dutton, has said that we must reduce waste and cut costs in health. (I responded to this in my blog on 3 February “Cutting waste and costs in health”).

    The Minister for Social Services, Kevin Andrews, has said that our welfare system is ‘not sustainable’ and that we are headed down the high cost welfare path of European countries. (The ABC examined this assertion and found that it was incorrect. It found that ‘There is nothing to indicate that as the population ages, Australia is headed towards the big welfare spending of some European countries. Treasury projections to 2050 show welfare spending as a proportion of our GDP will remain steady over the next three decades. www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-03/kevin-andrews–makes-unfounded-welfare-claims.)

    The Treasurer, Joe Hockey has said that ‘The days of entitlement are over and the age of personal responsibility has begun’. This has been interpreted by some as suggesting that government welfare and other entitlements should be reduced.

    In a submission to the Senate Select Committee into the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit, Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley and I contend that the problem is not that government expenditures or that the public sector is large in Australia compared with other countries. We contend that the problem is a short-fall of revenue and that on international comparison, our tax revenues are low.

    In our summary to the Committee we say …

    The Commission of Audit’s brief is based on assumptions that Australia is burdened with “big government” and that taxes are an impediment to business investment and workforce participation.

    There is no evidence for either assumption. The trend in Commonwealth expenditure has been downwards since the mid 1980s, falling from a peak of around 28 percent of GDP to a range of 24 to 26 percent of GDP in recent years. In comparison with similar prosperous countries Australia has one of the smallest public sectors.

    The problem a body such as the Commission should address is our inadequate tax base, which is the main reason the Commonwealth has had a structural deficit for most of this century. We aren’t collecting enough revenue to fund the public services needed if the economy is to thrive.

    We should not shy away from raising taxes. Evidence from international comparisons and from surveys on competitiveness suggests that reasonable levels of tax do not impede countries’ economic performance. In fact, countries which compete on the basis of low taxes do so to compensate for competitive weaknesses, such as inadequate infrastructure and poor standards of education – in other words impoverished public sectors.

    Such evidence, however, seems hard to convey to those gripped by a zeal to cut spending and taxes. Even in a “small government”/low-tax country like Australia it is possible to find areas where private funding and provision of services can displace public funding and provision.

    But such displacement is usually at high economic cost, simply to achieve an arbitrary fiscal objective. There is no point in reducing taxes if the private costs are greater than the saving in taxes, with no improvement (and in many cases a deterioration) in the services provided. We illustrate this in the case of health care funding. This is an area of significant public outlay and where, because of ongoing growth in demand, there are voices – often the voices of self-interest – calling for a shift from public to private insurance. Such a shift would be costly on all economic criteria – technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and equity.

    The rushed and secretive processes of the Commission are not the path to good public policy. There may be areas where a change in the public/private mix is justified on economic grounds, but these are not one-way towards the private sector as implied in the Commission’s brief. Because we already have a small public sector it is likely that a proper process, with research and consultation, would find a need for a net expansion of Australia’s public sector. By shutting off that possibility those who drafted the Commission’s brief are imposing a constraint which may be contrary to the community’s wishes and sound economics.

    The full submission to the Senate Select Committee can be found by going to my website. Click on ‘John Menadue Web Site’ top left of this blog page.

  • Ian McAuley- Picketty and the gap between rich and poor. Inequality of wealth is the problem rather than the inequality of income.

    The Observer/Guardian carried a recent story/review about Thomas Picketty’s address to the Institute of New Economic Thinking in Toronto. The story was headed “Capitalism simply isn’t working and here are the reasons why” The story draws also  on a recently published book by the French economist Picketty  “Capital in the 21st Century” The newspaper story  asserted “You have to go back to the 1970’s and Milton Friedman for a single economist to have such an impact (as Picketty)”

    The Financial Times labelled Picketty a “rock star economist”. Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books described Picketty’s book as “awesome” and that it was transforming economic discourse. “We will never talk about wealth and inequality the same way we used to” he said.

    In this blog Ian McAuley outlines Picketty’s thesis that an apparent small gap between the return on capital and the rate of growth can in the long run have powerful and destabilising effects on the structure and dynamics of social inequality.   John Menadue

    Like Marx, Picketty recognizes the consequences of an excessive concentration of wealth – loss of markets, eventual diminution of profit, and social conflict leading to revolution.  His prescriptions, however, for a progressive tax on wealth, are within the field of orthodox capitalist economics.

    He presents convincing evidence that the compression in incomes in the mid-20th century was a unique event. The natural tendency of market capitalism is for concentration of wealth, particularly when there is low economic growth and a high return on capital.  (High growth reduces the relative power of established wealth.)  A tax on wealth has immediate and minor redistributive benefits, but that’s not its purpose, which is to dampen the positive feedback loop of concentration of capital, because a tax on capital reduces its effective return and therefore weakens the positive (self-reinforcing) feedback of an exponential concentration of wealth.

    Picketty puts the unique compression in the mid-20th century down to the events of 1914 to 1950 – an intermittent but destructive war, a depression, and post-war inflation, which combined to wipe out a lot of physical and financial wealth in both the victorious and defeated countries.  The expanding inequalities we are now seeing is simply a return to the natural dynamics of market capitalism.

    His fundamental thesis, I think, does a lot to explain Australia’s history.  We hardly get a mention, but he does point out how the rapid economic growth of the New World (mainly the USA in his examples) made for egalitarianism.  I would like to see his thought on why the same high growth did not make for egalitarianism in Argentina in 100 years ago, or in the Middle East 40 years ago.

    While I find his analysis convincing, I think he attributes too much to war, depression and inflation wiping out wealth as the sole causes of the compression of incomes.  I had the good fortune to be at Harvard when the last of Roosevelt’s liberals were still around – Ray Vernon, Tom Schelling, and JK Galbraith – and they saw the post-war liberalism as a result of deliberate policy, played out domestically in the New Deal and internationally in the Bretton Woods arrangements.  Another strong view, certainly influential to the Hawke and Keating Governments, was that the post-war rise of Germany and Japan, while helped by US anti-Soviet policy, was also helped by the war’s destruction of “distributive coalitions” – groups of rent-seekers blocking economic modernization.

    Picketty is dismissive of human capital theory.  He doesn’t deny its existence (as Marx and Ricardo did), but he thinks its role is overstated.  While he celebrates mass education, he does point out that it has not done much to help distribution – we have simply all moved up a notch or two, and there is something of an arms race at the top.  But he does present strong evidence that high university fees (particularly in the USA) work against intergenerational mobility.

    I find his single prescription somewhat limiting. War, depression and inflation do wipe out wealth, but so too do other disruptions re-allocate wealth.  Galbraith, for example, saw the Australian gold rush as a great social re-distributor (not a leveller, however). New technologies do the same.  In this regard I find the policies of the current Australian Government, in opposing the disruptive technologies of the NBN and renewable energy, as an attempt to freeze an industrial structure to preserve and strengthen the privileges of existing wealth-holders.  Also their policies on superannuation and tax are highly regressive at the top end, and we have a migration program which gives almost free entry to anyone with enough money, regardless of the means by which it was accumulated.  Whether this policy is crony capitalism or a misguided application of Reagan’s “supply-side” economics, the consequences are the same – there is a concentration of wealth and an erosion of meritocracy.

    Picketty’s greatest contribution is in looking beyond income distribution as an indicator of inequality.  (I, for one, have been very critical of the Australian “left” for its narrow focus on income while overlooking wealth.) He looks at the sources of income, and distinguishes between income from labour (which can go up to very high levels of course) and income from wealth.  On the way through he looks at the salaries of “supermanagers”, and points out (as many other researchers do) that their salaries have nothing to do with contribution and that they essentially set their own salaries in a self-referential process.

    But his greatest concern is with the top one percent with incomes greater than $350,000 and whose income comes from wealth.  It is at this level, particularly in the USA, where the bulk of inequality arises – they are taking a huge proportion of the proceeds of economic growth, and damaging any sense of legitimacy in the economic system.  In fact, he points out, the very rich enjoy a certain economy of scale – their return on investment is much higher than is available to lesser mortals with only five or six figure amounts to invest.  Hence their positive feedback cycle is strengthened.  He also points out that the moderately well-off, “petite rentiers”, do very well, while a large proportion of the population has no wealth or negligible wealth.  We, the petite rentiers, should pay more tax – in fact redistribution from the top 20 percentile will be more effective in terms of immediate redistribution than simply taxing the very rich – but it’s hard to convince us when we see the very rich getting off so lightly.

    His main concern is with the very rich, who are on the way to establish an economic and social order, an oligarchy with inherited privilege, similar to that which existed in Europe in the early nineteenth century – an order which Marx correctly saw as unsustainable.  He does not speculate much on our political reaction – perhaps, rather than a revolution, it will be a retreat to protectionism and dirigiste politics.

    Reading his book I have come to ask, in relation to the 2008 crisis, “what would Keating have done?”  Keating, the fellow who talked about the recession “we had to have”.  Perhaps we have been too generous with counter-cyclical levers, thereby accumulating moral hazard in economic systems, while spending a lot of our fiscal ammunition.  To reconstruct a right wing metaphor, a hurricane damages all boats, but the damage to a 4 meter tinnie is easier to rectify than the damage to a 30 meter cabin cruiser.  Can we achieve a destructive re-distribution without the sort of damage that occurred in the 1930s?  My view, taken in part from my time working for the Hawke-Keating Government, and in part from the teaching of Ron Heifetz, is that a task of government is to manage disruption – to steer a policy path between complacency where rent-seekers throttle economic progress as seems likely under Abbott and distress, where the pace of change leads to backlash as occurred under Whitlam..

    It’s a rich work of 700 pages.  If you do buy or borrow it, I suggest you read the first two chapters and the four chapters in part 4.   But be patient. The book is sold out almost everywhere.

     

     

     

  • Penne Mathew and Tristan Harley…Regional Cooperation on refugees

    In November last year Penne Mathew and Tristan Harley of the Australian National University undertook field work in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia to examine the treatment of refugees in those countries and to discuss the possibilities of improved regional cooperation amongst themselves and also with resettlement countries such as Australia. I am strongly of the view that shared responsibility and cooperation is essential

    The Indonesian Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa recently put the case succinctly. “For Indonesia, the message is crystal clear: the cross border and complex nature of irregular movements of persons defies national solutions…There is no other recourse but to take a comprehensive and coordinated approach…a sense of burden sharing and common responsibility should be the basis for our cooperation.

    .John Menadue

    The Executive Summary and Recommendations follow. This report is based on fieldwork that Professor Penelope Mathew and Mr Tristan Harley conducted in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia in October – November 2013. The authors gratefully acknowledge all of the participants in our research who graciously offered their time, expertise and hospitality. The purpose of the fieldwork was to examine the treatment of refugees in each of the three countries and discuss the issue of regional cooperation with respect to refugees in the Southeast Asia region. Some key findings of the fieldwork are:

     

    a)      Thailand and Malaysia remain reluctant to become party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol because they believe that it will lead to an increase in the number of refugees arriving in their territory and they believe that there are associated security threats. On the other hand, ratification is currently part of Indonesia’s national agenda. However, there are concerns that this process has been stalled and may not be realised.

    b)      States in the Southeast Asia region have indicated a desire to cooperate with one another in the area of refugee protection, particularly through the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime (the Bali Process) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). However, states continue to act unilaterally in ways that endanger refugees and cause friction among states. Current Australian policies undermine efforts at regional cooperation.

    c)      Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia recognise that regional cooperation is necessary in order to address the particular refugee situations that each country is facing individually and to tackle the initial causes of displacement in countries of origin. While ASEAN members adhere to the principle of non-interference in the sovereignty of other states, it was suggested that ASEAN could be an appropriate forum whereby states could assist countries of origin to minimise the need for persons to flee the country and seek asylum elsewhere.

    d)      Interviewees in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia suggested that resettlement programmes in the region should be increased and that states from outside the region should increase their efforts to help share the responsibility of hosting refugees.

    e)      Malaysia and Indonesia appear willing to consider granting refugees the right to work. However, there are strong concerns about how this policy would affect national migrant worker schemes and domestic labour supply. States are also concerned about the ‘pull factor’ that they perceive such a policy may produce.

    This report concludes by making recommendations for states to enhance the protection framework for refugees. These recommendations are divided into short, medium and long terms goals. Some key recommendations in this report include the following:

    a)      Skills training programmes should be established in countries of first asylum that prepare refugees for either resettlement to another country, voluntary return to their country of origin or local integration in the host county. These programmes can be funded by donor and resettlement countries;

    b)      Refugees should be granted the right to work in countries of first asylum and employment programmes for refugees should be established in areas and industries where there is high demand;

    c)      Refugees should be allowed to access health care at the same cost as nationals and refugee children should be allowed to access the public education system;

    d)      United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) offices in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, should be expanded and more funding allocated with the particular focus of improving both speed and fairness of refugee status determination (RSD) procedures;

    e)      Resettlement states should increase their annual intakes to provide protection to a greater number of refugees and share responsibility with countries of first asylum.

    f)       New projects and programmes should be established which simultaneously aim to support both refugee communities and local communities hosting refugees; and

    g)      The 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol should be ratified by states in the region.

    Penelope Mathew is Freilich Professor, ANU College of Arts and Sciences

    Tristan Harley is Freilich Foundation Research Assistant at ANU.

     

  • John Menadue. AMP excess and dud products.

    I have posted several blogs on how powerful insiders bend governments to their will. Just think of the power of the polluter lobby, the mining lobby, the health lobby, the gambling lobby and the hotel lobby.

    But the superannuation lobby is probably the most powerful and the most lucrative gravy-train of all. The superannuation industry receives over $32 billion subsidy each year through ‘tax expenditures’ or what we normally call ‘deductions’. In addition there is the tax-free superannuation income for those over 60, like me. In addition to these enormous subsidies to boost the superannuation industry, federal governments require that 9% of employee incomes must be put into superannuation. Not content with these enormous benefits the four banks and the AMP have been lobbying the government and particularly Senator Sinodinis to bury any attempts to outlaw conflicts on interests by financial advisers. Typically this conflict of interest occurs when the financial adviser also supplies the product, as is the case with the four banks and the AMP. But the superannuation industry, and particularly the retail funds, overplayed their hand and the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) “reforms” under the guise of reducing red tape have been deferred.

    But not the AMP. In the SMH on 26 April, Michael West tears the veil from the superannuation junkets which the AMP runs to promote its products. The AMP arranged a ‘professional development conference’ in the Bosporus last week. Michael West put it quite colourfully.

    ‘In the footsteps of the Romans and the Ottoman Turks centuries before them, the hordes of AMP descended on the jewel of the Bosporus last week. Some 400 of them; the crème de la crème of AMP’s financial planners, and a host of advisers from Hillross, too, also owned by AMP. In contrast to the Romans who decided to build their empire’s new capital Constantinople there in 330 and the Turks whose troops overran the city in 1453, the throng from 50 Bridge Street(AMP head office in Sydney) descended on the ancient metropolis in planes. In the company of their spouses they overran Istanbul in five star opulence. Unlike the Emperor Constantine and Sultan Mehmed II, AMP and its grand vizier of financial services, Steve Helmich, did not underwrite their Ottoman odyssey from the fruits of empire. It was bankrolled by the ransacking of a mandatory superannuation system. Our latter-day sultans of superannuation have breezily lavished a $20 million junket on their sales force and themselves to boot. Before this year’s Byzantium bash, the AMP held its ‘conference’ in Dublin, South Africa, Amsterdam, Colorado and Buenos Aires. … Surely financial planning should be about the adviser using best endeavours to maximise the wealth of the client.  … . If this was really about education, rather than reward for flogging AMP product, and an enticement to flog more, we solemnly promise to eat our fez. … Let superannuants ponder no more that a third of their life savings can vanish in poorly disclosed fees and commissions. Their advisers are swanning around the grand bazaar like Suleiman the Magnificent, sauntering through the Blue Mosque before a spot of shopping in the ritzy boutiques of Nisantasi.’

    The bottle of Grange Hermitage which Barry O’Farrell received from a financial and Liberal Party lobbyist was nothing compared with this orgy and excess by the AMP in the name of ‘professional development’. Or as Michael put it “the ransacking of the mandatory superannuation system”

    I must confess I have more than a public policy interest in this extravagance by the AMP. I have a personal interest as well.

    About ten years ago my adviser recommended I invest about $55,000 of my super funds in a product called ‘AMP Capital Enhanced Yield Fund’. It turned out to be a dud investment, although small scale dud compared with the cost of dud investments like in Opes Prime and West Point and financial planners like Storm Financial.

    In 2008/9, during the Global Financial Crisis the AMP Capital Enhanced Yield Fund decided to limit redemptions. For over five years since then I have been attempting to redeem this investment. Capital loss has been considerable and the income return has been minimal. Over five years I have received small redemptions in dribs and drabs.

    With this locked or suspended fund, I received regular advice that ‘managed funds [like AMP Capital Enhanced Yield Fund] are suspended …Please be aware that there is no guarantee that the suspended fund will start processing transactions in the future.’

    It is not as if the AMP has been struggling over the long period that my investment has been locked. In the years 2009 to 2013 AMP has made annual profits after tax of $739m, $775m, $759m, $689m and $672m. In 2009, when my investment was locked, Craig Dunn, the CEO of AMP had a 30% pay rise. His total remuneration in 2012 was $3.157 million. Craig Meller, Managing Director of AMP Financial Services had a salary package of $1.917 million per annum. Stephen Dunne, Managing Director of AMP Capital had a salary of $2.133 million p.a.

    I have no doubt that AMP acted legally in respect of my foolish investment in a dud product, but have they any shame in the way they continue to pay their executives, or any sense of moral culpability. The payment of these excessive salaries to senior executives is quite consistent with the behaviour of the AMP in splurging $20 million to indulge the sellers of their new products. It’s all about new products. Forget about the dud products they have sold in the past.

    But some might say that the government has now set up a Financial System Inquiry to sort all this out. But we should not hold our breath. There is no indication from what I have seen that the issue of vertical integration, which allows the four banks and AMP to rip off customers through their conflict of interest, is in the terms of reference of the FSI. Furthermore Craig Dunn, the former CEO of AMP who received that remuneration package of over $3 million per annum, is a member of the FSI panel. All the panel members are from the finance sector .The public or consumer interest is not to be found. The insiders are in charge.

    Can the victims of dud superannuation products look forward to all-expenses paid “professional development conference” next year in Constantinople or some other attractive luxury tourist destination?

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Anti-climax in Tokyo

    Three words for Shinzo Abe––and for history. Three words: ‘…including Senkaku islands’ (was Obama’s omission of the definite article ‘the’, one wonders, part of a subconscious hesitation?). Thus a US president for the first time explicitly committed his country to defend Japan if it should come to blows with China in their territorial dispute.

    Barack Obama affirmed that the islands were covered by Article V of the Japan-US Security Treaty which states: ‘Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.’

    While no different from the position enunciated previously by other members of his administration, in its language and setting––a joint news conference with Abe standing alongside him during a state visit to Japan––Obama’s endorsement of the status quo in the East China Sea was significant. It is exactly what Abe wanted to hear, after months of anguished commentary in the Japanese media suggesting the US might be turning into a fair weather ally. But the comparatively muted official response from China is also interesting: a sign that Beijing heard the president when he said he was not stating a new position. The words might be on the record, but was there is any greater will behind them?

    A visit by a US president to Japan as a state guest (the most elaborate form of diplomatic visitation) is uncommon. The last one was 16 years ago. Reportedly the Americans took some persuading to set aside the minimum three days required. Such occasions can serve to elevate a bilateral relationship to a new level, and they can draw attention to areas of disagreement as well as agreement. On the territorial dispute, for instance, the main focus was on the US commitment to fight alongside Japan. Obama, however, also stressed the importance of ‘dialogue’ to resolve the dispute, and avoiding ‘escalation’, which implicitly binds Japan to keep its power dry.

    As for the other big-ticket item on the agenda, trade liberalisation, Japan had hoped the impetus of a state visit would deliver an agreement. The strategy came up well short. Instead of sweetness and light, the impression gained in Tokyo was that the Americans were intent on extracting the highest price, in economic terms, for those three choice words on security. (Having said that, insiders already knew that Obama lacked the clearance from Congress to strike a deal with Japan, and nothing less than a trade coup would allow him to presume on Congress’s approval.)

    Abe took a gamble early in his second administration when he went against the protectionists in his governing Liberal Democratic Party and led Japan into the Trans-Pacific Partnership. While trade liberalisation is necessary for his program of economic revitalisation, the disruptive risks of increased import competition, particularly in the agricultural sector, are not inconsiderable. Japan’s farming communities are the most exposed to the effects of an aging society, and there are far fewer employment alternatives in regional and rural areas than in the big cities. Farmers are a well-organised lobby group in a country where all politics is local.

    In the TPP negotiations, the Americans are seeking a better deal on beef than was recently obtained by Australia, and they want a broader agreement to include various other farm goods, automobiles and intellectual property.

    Japan’s TPP Minister, Akira Amari, is showing signs of wear and tear, admitting publically that if he were ever asked to do the job again, he would refuse. Amari and his US counterpart Michael Froman have held 25 hours of face-to-face negotiations, continuing even as Abe and Obama were tucking into their Ginza sushi––but without result. At one point it seemed Obama’s visit would end with no joint communiqué, which certainly would have left a bad taste. Officials eventually managed to cobble together a communiqué that reiterated the president’s statement on the Senkaku dispute and supported Abe’s drive to reinterpret the Japanese constitution to embrace the right of collective self-defence (hardly surprising, since this is already assumed in the bilateral security treaty quoted above). But when it came to the TPP talks, the document turned to fairy floss: ‘Today we have identified a path forward on important bilateral TPP issues. This marks a key milestone in the TPP negotiations and will inject fresh momentum into the broader talks.’ It takes some cheek just to write that down. Japanese sources claim the Americans held the communiqué hostage, delaying its release in an effort to wring extra trade concessions from Japan––if so, all that resulted was sweet talk.

    Without a substantial trade deal soon the Obama administration risks a loss of domestic support for his much touted ‘rebalance’ to Asia. Likewise some of the gloss will come off Abe’s can-do image, particularly the credibility of his claim to want to break down structural rigidities in the Japanese economy. For all the pomp and ceremony, and three-star sushi, the two nations only managed to reaffirm the old––military––basis for their relationship rather than define the new.

    For the Japanese, an unwanted byproduct of the state visit has been to draw attention in the US and elsewhere, through media commentaries and analysis, to Abe’s pivot to the right since he returned to office in 2012. Some observers are discovering this issue for the first time, while others have looked for fresh evidence from Obama’s visit with which to refine their sense of where events might be headed.

    For the first group, it is always possible to overstate the situation––it is worth reiterating that Japan is not ‘rearming’, muzzling its news media or abandoning its democratic institutions. Nevertheless there are signs of a nationalistic revival, amid a period of heightened regional tensions. Against this background, the take out from Obama’s visit, I think, is disappointing. Having gone to Tokyo, he could not have said less than he did on the territorial issue––though he might have said more, for instance, on the mechanism by which the disputing parties might enter a dialogue. He came across more like a tourist than a statesman willing and able to engage Abe on fundamentals. If President Obama once seemed to represent a fresh, inclusive and future-oriented style of leader, he brought little or nothing of that to Tokyo. Which is more the pity, since he came at a time, without doubt, when Japanese are questioning whether what has served them well for almost 70 years can see them safe and strong into the future.

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

     

  • John Menadue. Anzac and hiding behind the valour of our military.

    For those who may have missed this. I have reposted this earlier piece about Anzac and hiding behind our heroes.  John Menadue

    There is an unfortunate and continuing pattern in our history of going to war- that the more disastrous the war the more politicians and the media hide behind the valour of service men and women. We will see this displayed again on April 25.

    The Director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, drew attention to this well-honed way of distorting and excusing our strategic and political mistakes. In the SMH on October 5 last year, he said ‘The more obscene the war, the more inexplicable it seems for us today, the more many [young people] admire those men and women who went in our name’. (See my blog October 11, 2013, ‘The drumbeat grows louder’.)

    It is not only young people who have been drawn into this distortion of history. Governments and the media have encouraged us to ignore the disastrous wars that we have been engaged in and learn from our mistakes. Rather than face the consequences of acknowledging those disasters, governments and the media then change the subject to the valour of our heroes. We refuse to face the fact that these heroes have often died in vain

    By any measure our involvement in the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been disastrous. So what do our governments, the Australian War Memorial and the media do? They avoid examining how we got into such disastrous wars. They do this by dwelling on the heroism of our service people. VC winners are an ideal way to change the subject from a disastrous war to an Australian hero.

    There is no doubt that they are heroic, but the wars they fought in were anything but heroic. These three wars were disastrous but we refuse to acknowledge that fact. The consequence will be that in the future we will continue to make foolish decisions about getting into war. That could occur over the dispute between Japan and China over the islands in the East-China Sea.

    In this cover up of failed policies, prime ministers, ministers, opposition leaders and the media have attended almost every ship taking Australian service personnel to or from war zones in the Middle East. I don’t think the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition have missed any funeral of a veteran of those wars. There was even a fly-over in Gippsland for an Australian soldier who had accidentally shot himself.

    Our involvement in WWI was disastrous in every way. We acted like a colony at the behest of England But we didn’t spend time dwelling on the catastrophe as a result of our strategic and political mistakes. That hopefully would discourage us from repeating them in the future. Instead we deluged ourselves and continue to do so in the valour of those who served and died in WWI.

    WWII was much more a war we had to fight in our own national interest and for the freedom of our region. But the recall of that war and the sacrifices of our military personnel is quite small at the Australian War Memorial compared with the coverage of WWI. We had a strong case for involvement in WWII but not WWI. Yet the coverage at the Australian War Memorial does exactly the reverse. Strategically Kokoda was more important to Australia than Gallipoli.

    In his excellent new book ‘Rupert Murdoch’ – a re-assessment” Professor  Rod Tiffen draws attention to the way that News Ltd in the UK covered its mistaken  support for  the appalling  wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . It just changed the subject. News Ltd never attempted to seriously  examine the fiction and mistaken policies which it supported and which led the UK into those wars. It changed the subject by attacking PM Gordon Brown for not looking after the veterans. Rod Tiffen put it this way.

    ‘In one of the last issues of The Sun edited by Rebekah Brooks, the front page consisted of the faces of the 207 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, with a large headline across the middle, reading “Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on”. The strap at the top said “Message to politicians failing our heroes” … The multipage splash was accompanied by a cartoon of a wounded soldier with the caption “abandoned”.’

    Tiffen added ‘Responsible newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times reflected publicly on their journalistic failings during the period [of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars]’.  

    But not News Ltd and Rupert Murdoch.

    What the Murdoch papers did in the UK is common amongst governments and media generally. They refuse to acknowledge their complicity in disastrous wars. To cover their tracks they focus on the heroism of service people.

    It is unpatriotic and cowardly to refuse to examine and publicly acknowledge decisions about going to war. That is surely the most momentous decision that any government can make. But by focusing on the story and the valour of service people, like successive Australian Prime Ministers, Rupert Murdoch and the Australian War Memorial, we are discouraged from looking honestly at our history.

    If we don’t learn from our mistakes we will keep repeating them. We must stop hiding behind our heroes.

     

  • David Stephens. Parochial commemoration of war.

    Australians are not alone in the world in being parochial but we are very good at it, especially in the way we commemorate our men and women who die in war. The Australian War Memorial is missing many opportunities to expand our commemorative horizons and put our war deaths in context.

    Under its legislation, the Memorial is ‘a national memorial of Australians who have died on or as a result of active service or as a result of any war or warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service’. The Memorial is also required to research and publicise ‘Australian military history’, defined as ‘the history of (a) wars and warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service, including the events leading up to, and the aftermath of, such wars and warlike operations, and (b) the Defence Force’.

    The Act is not, however, the last word on how the Memorial does its work. The Memorial has given itself a ‘purpose’ clause which puts a gloss on the Act by using the debatable word ‘sacrifice’ to describe deaths in war. Then, there is a ‘mission’ clause in which the ambit is not ‘Australian military history’ as defined in the Act but the narrower field of ‘the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society ’. (The history of wars in which Australians have been involved on one ‘side’ is clearly a broader canvass than the Australian experience of those wars.)

    This narrowed focus allows the Memorial to target ‘Australian experience’ down to the most trivial level while ignoring events that did not involve Australians. The Memorial’s #OnThisDay ‘tweets’ are a microcosm of this phenomenon. On 19 March this year, the Memorial tweeted that on that day in 1916 one British general, Sir Archibald Murray, replaced another British general, Sir John Maxwell, in charge of the King’s armies (including Australians) in Egypt. Yet, on the same day, 19 March, in 1945, 800 US sailors were killed when the USS Franklin was attacked by the Japanese. The latter event was ignored by the Memorial’s ‘tweeters’.

    Not all of the Memorial’s tweets display such clanging incongruity. Nevertheless, the ‘rules of engagement’ at the Memorial mean that any ‘Australian experience’ trumps any ‘non-Australian experience’, even where the latter occurs within a war ‘in which Australians have been on active service’ or where there are many allied deaths, as with the bombing of the Franklin. The Memorial’s exhibitions are a credit to their curators but they have a relentlessly parochial focus. Currently or recently there have been [Australian] ANZAC Voices, Australia Under Attack 1942-1943, Remember Me: The Lost [Australian] Diggers of Vignancourt, [Australian] Rats of Tobruk, 1941, Afghanistan: The Australian Story, and so on.

    The Memorial website’s search function provides a crude measure of the Memorial’s areas of interest. ‘Gallipoli’ throws up 885 references to articles, 1064 to books, and 12 713 to collections, including 7639 photographs. ‘Holocaust’, on the other hand, scores 20 articles, 78 books and 23 items in collections. No-one outside Australia would have any doubt as to which of those two events – both part of the history of wars ‘in which Australians have been on active service’ – says more about the experience of war and of the human condition but the Memorial’s ‘Made in Australia’ lens forces these bizarre results.

    On a smaller scale than the Holocaust, ‘Breslau’ (40 000 ethnic German civilians dead in the first four months of 1945 while the Russian Red Army besieged the city) provides one article (about ‘the Red Baron’, who was born there), nine books and 39 items in collections. Okinawa (100 000 civilians died there in 1945) tallies five, 18 and 123. Neither event was part of ‘the Australian experience’ so both are virtually ignored.

    The wars and conflicts of the twentieth century killed an estimated 231 million people, perhaps 80 per cent of them civilians. By contrast, the wars recognised by the Australian War Memorial took around 100 000 Australian lives during that century, all but a handful of them enlisted servicemen and women. Every single one of those 100 000 deaths was a tragedy but are there in the world any 100 000 deaths so much commemorated as these?

    Moreover, are there any deaths in war anywhere which are commemorated with so little regard for the context in which these men and women died? The ‘history of wars’ should involve looking at both sides in each conflict and the full range of effects. Wars have despoiled the lands and the lives of hundreds of millions of people, few of whom – apart from the dead of the Australian Frontier Wars, which the Australian War Memorial refuses to recognise – lived in Australia.

    The causes of wars are complex, their progress, aftermath and ramifications traumatic for individuals, families and nations. Yet, in pursuit of ‘the Australian experience of war’, the Australian War Memorial steers away from these aspects while it endlessly mines the stories of our 100 000 uniformed victims, a mere 0.04 per cent of that 231 million.

    The Memorial’s Act says, ‘The Memorial shall use every endeavour to make the most advantageous use of the memorial collection in the national interest’. It is surely in the national interest that we understand more of the reasons for wars and the impact of war beyond our own kith and kin. That understanding would do something positive towards advancing the ‘abhorrence of war’ (which all of us ritually claim to feel) and reducing the possibility of future wars.

    The Memorial could play an important role in this task and it could do so within the terms of its own Act; it is foregoing that role at present in favour of sentimental and nostalgic commemoration. Picking at ancient scabs has been preferred to making a positive contribution to Australia’s tomorrows.

     

    David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au). Honest History is a broad coalition of historians and others, committed to frank debate and expressing a diversity of opinions on specific issues. Views in this article are the author’s own.

     

  • We were warned about lobbying.

    In my blog of April 19 2014, ‘This is about more than a bottle of wine’ I referred to the need for major reforms in lobbying. 

    Three and a half years ago the ICAC in NSW brought forward proposals to better manage lobbying and avoid corruption. The Recommendations of the ICAC are still relevant today. If action had been taken at the end of 2010 we could have avoided many of the problems that have arisen in NSW. The ICAC report follows.

    John Menadue

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  • Brian Howe – Raising the Retirement Age

    The Labor Government planned to lift age of eligibility for the aged pension from 65 to 67 between 2017 and 2023 and now the conservatives are considering raising it to 70 by 2029. Unless there are very big changes in the demand for older workers these changes must increase numbers on other payments such as Newstart or the Disability Pension. In the case of case of Newstart it would add to the hundreds of thousands of people living at least twenty percent below the poverty line.

    Several years ago a panel (Advisory Panel on the Economic Potential of Senior Australians) chaired by Everald Compton, and established by the Gillard government reported to that government on the potential of older Australians to make a larger contribution to the economy given the fact that people for various reasons (higher living standards, medical breakthroughs) were on average living longer. (2011)

    Successive federal Treasury reports had tended to emphasize coming pressures on budgets generated by an ageing population, but there is a more positive story that might be told.

    ‘Australia’s ageing population brings real opportunity-opportunity for the nation, for industry and for individuals. Not only are Australians living longer. Australians born in 1950 will live on average almost ten years longer than those born in 1910 but changes in society are creating unprecedented opportunity. Advances in health, education and technology provide an enormous scope for the nation and individuals to make better and more informed choices about the contribution of seniors in the workplace and the broader Australian community’

    The Advisory Panel saw extended lives, especially extended middle years, as being especially significant for the active aged. It also recognized that in Australia there were formidable constraints/barriers that would need to be overcome if that potential was to be full realized.

    • the persistence of outdated stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes towards older people
    • the lack of vision and understanding on the part of individuals, organisations, industry and governments about how to capture the potential of older Australians through creating more flexible and responsive workplaces
    • the constraints of the built environment that limit older Australians living the most fulfilling and creative lives, (very limited housing and transport choices)
    • the potential of poor lifestyle and health choices, including those that increase chronic health problems such as obesity and diabetes that threaten to undermine the health advances of previous generations. (G Hugo)

    The consequence of this analysis is that simplistic approaches to ageing by increasing retirement ages whether to 67 or 70 may impacts on future trend in social security expenditure but do not address any of the key issues that the Panel considered

    Discrimination

    For example, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HEROC) has identified a significant problem in the discriminatory attitude of many employers who discriminate in favour of the young and educated, especially where they have some work experience, when putting on new employees. They may also encourage older workers to ‘take the package’ often another way of terminating workers whose skills may be getting rusty rather than offering redeployment or retraining. It is very unusual for older workers in a modern economy to be kept on if they are seen to be unproductive or be offered a transition plan that will enable that person to gradually phase from paid work into retirement. Similarly older women who have caring responsibilities outside of their paid workplace may have great difficulty in nominating the hours in which they work or having the flexibility to leave work when there are special demands at home. This may be especially the case when women are working casually and have very little protections in the form of an award. Discrimination tends to affect most acutely people doing physical work e.g., cleaners, and construction workers.

    A Different Labour Market

    It is very important that there be public recognition of the very different labour market we have today to that which existed a generation ago. Along which the shift from an industrial to knowledge/service economy (80% of jobs today are in the service economy) there has been created a very different and much more dynamic and diverse labour market. This has resulted in a comprehensive movement way from standard employment contracts. There have been increasing variation in working times, working lives of working contracts.  Also there is a shift away from large employers with life time commitment to an employee to the increasing fragmentation of employment and labour markets where people are much more reliant on maintaining their personal skills to survive in today’s labour market. The rapid pace of change implies high rate of ‘technological obsolescence’ along with a redefinition of work with for many their ‘skill set ’ no longer relevant. These changes place special pressures on older people who if they do choose to remain in paid work may have to learn new skills set or create a new business or job. It is for this reason that life long learning is so important but of course that requires time and space well in advance of so called ‘retirement ages’. For most people working longer will often mean creating a new career either in the paid workforce or in the voluntary sector. The delayed retirement age suggests that there is an employer to keep an employee on. Security of employment is no longer a part of the work contract.

    Changing Cities

    Of course the changes in the economy have spatial implications in that the new economy is now focused increasingly in those places where there is the most concentrated investment taking place in the new economy and where there are maximum opportunities for creative communication. Older people are increasingly rejecting ‘sea change’ and ‘tree change’ and seeking to ‘hold’ their places in cities but with the flexibility sought by younger childless households.  The higher costs of energy are turning cities inside out and thus the importance of holding position. But for many older people there will be the demand for new housing choices whereas the market has been slow to realize the opportunity and scale of the aged housing market.  Furthermore governments have tax and social security rules that reflect a period in which older people either did not need or were not encouraged to participate in the more cosmopolitan city. Governments are still giving the highest priority to new freeways whereas for older people wanting to be active the key will increasingly be public transport. For older people the 20-minute city makes sense as they are less mobile but want to be engaged.

    Wellbeing

    Perhaps there has been a too easy assumption that aging baby boomers are all fit and well whereas they may be much less fit than we imagine perhaps for reasons that have to do with a too comfortable life style. On the other hand they will not be served well by ageist assumptions that consign older people to a retreat from life. The good news associated with ageing is certainly that maintaining activity and involvement is consistent with good health. On the other hand there are constraints that need to be addressed. Exercise does need organization and an enabling environment.

    Conclusion

    The most important message is that advancing the age at which people are able to access income support may have a limited impact on social security expenditures. However it will do very little to increase employment for older people often facing discrimination and exclusion from a labour market increasingly favouring the well and more recently educated.  The most likely impact on the aged of deferring the pension will be increasing the numbers on Disability support pensions and on Newstart, thus creating a cohort of aged people living well below the poverty line while minimizing savings to budgets.

     

    Brian Howe AO is a former Deputy Prime Minister. More recently he was a member of the Gillard Government’s Advisory Panel on positive ageing. This panel has been disbanded by the Coalition Government.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Kieran Tapsell. The war on drugs.

    Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El Espectador, Colombia, 20 December 2013, http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/esta-babilonia-nuestra-columna-465199

    Summary: The so called “War on Drugs” is an American invention from the time of Nixon. It has been a spectacular and costly failure. But the Puritans in the Americas do not want to even discuss the subject.

    A year and a half ago, President Santos of Colombia said to Obama that the 40 year war on drugs had failed, and that perhaps it was time to look for alternatives.

    Obama, for his part, recognized the necessity for debate, and that simple concession was seen by various Latin American representatives as a victory. It isn’t, but the mirage is tangible proof of an unhealthy dependent relationship: that which exists between the coca producing countries – the main ones are Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, which together have 150,000 hectares of illegal cultivation – and the principal consumer, the United States that takes up 27% of the world’s consumption.

    Things being as they are, it is evident that any real change in drug politics has to have the United States as a party to it. It is also evident that Latin America cannot avoid taking the initiative. Now Uruguay is proposing to sell marihuana at a dollar a gram, and, “to defeat the drug trafficking business”, the Guatemalan President is looking at the possibility of selling opium poppies. Meanwhile, Michael Botticelli, the head of the Office of Control of Drug Policies of the United States, came to Bogota to say what we already know: Washington will not change.

    The War on Drugs is a United States invention: the first person to use those words was Nixon, at a time when drugs were starting to be consumed massively, but in the producer countries, there were no cartels, no mafia, violence or corruption.

    Forty years later, that same prohibition has converted the drug business into the most lucrative in the world. It has put into the hands of the mafias, an economic power strong enough to destabilize whole democracies, and above all, it has left dead people behind its trail. In Mexico alone in the last decade there were 70,000 murdered. Colombia’s deaths, from the years of Pablo Escobar to the war being waged today (whose principle fuel is the drug business) are equally astounding.

    Drugs have a twofold problem: on the one hand, there is the public health problem that has always been there; on the other, there is the problem of public order, aligned to violence and the economic power of the mafias. Legalizing drugs is the only viable way of eliminating the second problem, and then only the first remains. The money wasted on this artificial war can be invested in education, prevention and treatment.

    The Puritans, of course, in all parts of the Americas are opposed to this. In Colombia, during Uribe’s disastrous years, the slogan of a government campaign was the product of infantile stupidity: marijuana is “the stuff that kills”. But it isn’t: what kills is not the stuff, but the violence with which the mafias defend an illegal business.

    Santos has created that Advisory Commission for Drugs Policy to think seriously about legalization, but it has received a hostile reception from the Puritans in Colombia, made up of Uribe’s heirs and the acolytes of the Procurator, a Lefebrvist Catholic, who has published pamphlets – from the Procurator’s office itself – against legalization whose title page has one of Durer’s paintings: “Scene from the Apocalypse, the Whore of Babylon”.

    This, on the other hand, cannot be taken seriously. We are right behind the eight ball in allowing any debate on the subject.

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

  • John Menadue. The media, our region and the PM’s visit.

    The Prime Minister’s visit to Japan, the Republic of Korea and China, highlighted for me the problems of media reporting and understanding our region.

    I have posted blogs on our media. See April 17, 2013, ‘Media failure: the tale of two bombings in two cities’; May 17, 2013, ‘Truth, trust and the media’ and January 31, 2014, ‘Murdoch and Abbott versus the ABC’. I posted a blog on April 10 this year, specifically on Tony Abbott’s visit to Japan and the political shortcomings of Free Trade Agreements which usually have more hype than substance. That continues to be the case.

    Our international media coverage is dominated by news out of London, Washington and New York. As I posted before, ‘An outsider and independent observer would conclude that Australia is an island parked off New York or London’. Our media coverage continues to be dominated by North Atlantic sources.

    Although it is inadequate, the ABC is far ahead of other media in Australia in coverage of our region. It has fully-fledged correspondents based in Jakarta, New Delhi, Port Moresby, Tokyo, Bangkok, Auckland and Beijing.

    None of our commercial TV or radio networks have full time correspondents based in Asia.

    The SMH/Age have correspondents in China, Indonesia, New Delhi and Bangkok.

    The Australian and other News Corporation publications obviously tap into the company’s foreign reporting assets such as the London Sun. The Australian has a correspondent in Tokyo. But News Ltd can hardly claim to be a serious and professional news organisation. It is the largest and least trusted media organisation in the Western world.

    As mainstream media is squeezed the trend will be to reduce regional coverage. Closures are ongoing.

    Tony Abbott’s Asian visit was principally covered by journalists from the Canberra press gallery. The gallery is increasingly fixated on politics, with very little interest in policy, let along policies in the foreign affairs, trade or defence areas. Embedded in the Abbott touring party, it is not surprising that they gave us an unprofessional coverage of the Abbott Asian visits, and particularly any understanding of Free Trade Agreements.

    The embedded gallery journalists obviously had not read the November 2010 Productivity Report on Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements. (This is a different name for Free Trade Agreements.)

    The Productivity Commission Report concluded ’Businesses have provided little evidence that Australia’s Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements (have to date) generated significant commercial benefits … net benefits are likely to be small … the direct economic impacts from services and investment provisions in Australia’s BRTAs … have been modest …’.

    Following the Productivity Commission Report, the Minister for Trade, Dr Emerson, told the Lowy Institute in December 2010 that he was not interested ‘in collecting trophies for the mantelpiece, empty vessels engraved with the words “FTA” if they are nothing of the sort and of only token value to our country.’

    In my blog of April 10, I drew attention to the exaggerated benefits that our embedded journalists attached to the FTAs with Japan and the ROK. The former Trade Minister said the same thing two and a half years ago.

    The conclusion of the FTAs with Japan and the ROK with their exaggerated benefits did not occur with the stroke of Tony Abbott’s pen. Ian McAuley in New Matilda pointed out those negotiations had been ongoing for many years under previous governments. If anything, Tony Abbott’s public eagerness in advance to sign the agreements weakened our bargaining position. The Australian journalists with Tony Abbott didn’t make this point.

    Further, the journalists paid little attention to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that the US is discussing with Japan and ten other countries, including Australia. The US Trade Representative, Michael Froman, in commenting on the FTA between Australia and Japan said ‘Clearly, we are looking for a level of ambition in the TPP which is significantly higher than [what Australia achieved] in access to Japan’s farm sector, notably for beef’. If President Obama achieves this concession under TPP, the short-term benefits we have achieved in beef access will be quickly overtaken by our major competitor in beef, the US. But did the journalists with Tony Abbott understand this about the TPP?

    I was in Japan immediately following Tony Abbott’s visit. The issue which struck me was not that the Japanese were so concerned about relations with China and the ROK. Their concern was the effect of the ultra-nationalist policies of Japan’s PM, Shizuo Abe, on relations with the US. I have not yet seen anything about this by the journalists who travelled with Tony Abbott to Japan. Did they speak to anyone but the public relations people working for the Australian and Japanese governments?

    In the last day or two we have seen odd comments from a media commentator, Harold Mitchell, about the agreement between Australia and China for the Australian Network of the ABC to be made available to the entire Chinese population. This is something which only the BBC and CNN have been able to achieve. Not surprisingly, after twenty years of trying, News Ltd failed to get such access. Harold Mitchell said that ‘This agreement [with China] is one of the greatest ways we can continue on the PM’s very successful visit to China last week.’

    The Abbott Government is threatening to cut ABC funding. Tony Abbott has accused the ABC of being unpatriotic. Julie Bishop has said that the government is assessing whether the $223 million contract with Australian Network in promoting Australia’s interest in the region is of value. The government has made it clear that it is seriously considering changing the contract with Australian Network and the ABC and giving a leg-up to News Ltd as an alternative to the Australian Network.

    In short, the arrangement between the ABC and China would have been achieved in spite of and not because of the Abbott Government or the PM’s visit to China. But the members of the press gallery who travelled with Tony Abbott to the region have said nothing about this quite significant breakthrough by the ABC.

    Apart from the ABC, we are not well served by the media in its coverage of our own region. That has shown up in the coverage of Tony Abbott’s visits to Japan, the ROK and China.

  • This is about more than a bottle of wine

    To mix my metaphors, the bottle of red wine that Barry O’Farrell received is only the tip of an iceberg – a sleezy world of lobbying, influence-peddling and corruption.

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  • Kieran Tapsell. Things are improving.

    Héctor Abad Faciolince, El Espectador, Colombia, 29 December 2013, http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/el-espantoso-mundo-vivimos-columna-466312

    Summary: The world we live in is frightening, but it is less frightening than it used to be.

    One of the best definitions of the word, “intellectual” that I have read is: “a person who has studied beyond his own capacities”.

    There are those incapable of comparing the world of today with that of yesterday, of weighing up the gains and losses; their obsession consists in outraged criticism, arrogant moralising, scorn for any progress, enjoyment or happiness, in the conviction that there is no creature more repugnant that the human being, nor a place more inhospitable than the Earth.

    The intellectuals I am talking about are the ones wallowing in the culture of complaint, for whom contemporaneous society (especially the West) is a kind of invention of the devil: the most vulgar, unwieldy and hellish thing that has ever existed in the history of the world.

    The modern world, for them, is the most violent, aggressive, exploitative and unjust place: a society that we will have to destroy to start another on its ruins. The worst thing about this nauseating whine, this permanent moral indignation, is that this supposed “elite of the intelligentsia” has managed to convince millions of young people – as Karl Popper deplored years ago – that we are living in the worst world that has ever existed.

    Increasingly I come across young people who are convinced that having children is an awful thing to do, because they will be bringing into the world new human beings whose only fate is to suffer.  And most of these willingly sterile are young people who have studied the most, that is to say, those who have been most exposed to this evil influence of that “intelligentsia” for whom the achievements of humanity are one big lie.

    These “intelligentsia” are immune to all criticism and logic, and it makes no difference to point out the undeniable: comparing the world of today with the world without anaesthetics, without antibiotics, and without pain killers (they believe that in the “natural” world, where there were no illnesses and where humans would have lived 600 years, like the biblical patriarchs).

    It’s pointless telling them that there has been moral progress since the times of slavery (they say that the slave of yesterday was a pampered child compared to the worker of today; as if they were being branded with red hot irons).  Demonstrating with figures that life expectancy has increased exponentially in the last century only creates scorn because the only thing that we have achieved now is more people.

    Nor does it seem to them important that a poor person today – in Colombia – receives much better medical attention than a Renaissance king, nor that we have better transport, better clothing and shoes. That infant mortality – even amongst the poor – was much higher than amongst the poor in the countryside today.

    You can’t say to these intellectuals, without causing outrage, that things have been improving for decades in almost the whole world. That sexual or racial discrimination was much worse 50 years ago; that never before could homosexuals better defend their right to be free. That never in history have there been so many women studying and working in important ositions – thanks to, amongst other things – the existence of contraceptive methods, and that they themselves have managed to make sure that they are respected.

    Poverty also – even in Colombia – has been dropping in absolute and relative terms in recent decades. Violence itself, as Pinker has demonstrated, to the disgust of the pessimist intellectuals, is today one of the lowest in the whole history of humanity.

    When you are an optimist, the intellectuals of indignation and complaint look on you like an idiot. Of course, we are confronting very serious problems (global warming is the worst of them), but perhaps never before in the history of humanity have we been better prepared to confront them. Because of those convictions, we can wish and even hope that the year 2014 will be a little less bad than the 2013 that is just finishing. The world in which we live is frightening, but it is less frightening than it used to be.

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

  • Cavan Hogue. Russia and the West.

    The USA and NATO seem to see their relationship with Russia as one of goodies and baddies. This is naïve and their hairy chested approach is not helpful. This paper looks at the realities of Russian attitudes to the outside world.

    Many foreigners write off Vladimir Putin as a “fascist”, a communist throwback, a brutal dictator and so on. There can be no doubt that he is strongly authoritarian and doesn’t suffer opponents gladly but he is not Stalin. He was elected and there are opposition parties. Many Russians dislike him and oppose what he stands for but his appeal to Russian nationalism does not fall on deaf ears. Russians are a proud people who are glad to be rid of many aspects of Communism but feel some nostalgia for the glory days of the USSR which was strong and respected as a great power.  They believe that Russia will always be a “Great Power” and are suspicious of Western attempts to play down Russia’s importance in the world. These attitudes go back way before theSoviet Union and reflect the longstanding Slavophile/Westerniser debate.

    While there were obvious differences in ideology and rhetoric there were also many similarities between theUSSR and the Russian Empire, especially in their policy towards the neighbours. The Soviets kept the conquests of the Tsars and added some. This does affect the attitudes of many today. Putin is above all a nationalist who wants to restore Russian greatness and is willing to stomp on anyone who gets in the way. However, he is neither mad nor stupid and understands the difference between a kind of Russian Monroe Doctrine and conquest.

    Any action by NATO needs to take account of how Russia views things even if it is only following the time tested principle of know your enemy. Russians see the West as hypocritical and are suspicious of what they see as a US desire to dominate the world – and more importantly Russia. The US has a long track record of interference and aggression against other countries – Mexico 1847, the Philippine Republic 1898, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Grenada, Vietnam, Iraq and so on. The Russians also have no illusions about the peaceful record of European nations. Therefore, Western rhetoric about freedom and non-interference is not seen as the righteous wrath of the just but as the hypocrisy of aggressors. Russians would ask that if it was wrong for theUSSR to have missiles in Cuba is it not equally wrong for NATO to have missiles and troops on Russian borders? We may debate the rights and wrongs of these arguments but it is how Putin and most Russians see things. Even the pro-democracy anti=Putin people are not immune from this view.

    Putin knows that the US is not going to use military force against Russia and the Europeans are even less inclined to do so. Sanctions will only have the effect of reinforcing anti-Western views and perhaps persuading people who don’t really like Putin to back him against the foreigners. If they were to bite economically that would resentment would be even greater. They may also encourage counter-sanctions.

    So what next?  Crimea is a special case. It is historically Russian, has a Russian majority and should never have become part of Ukraine. It will be absorbed into theRussian Federation but it does not follow that Russia is bent on a conquest of Ukraine or even less on the rest of the former Soviet Union. Admittedly, the Eastern Russian speaking part of Ukraine is a problem as are some other Russian enclaves from the former Soviet Union. Putin has said he will protect the interests of Russian minorities but also that he has no claims on other territory. His actions in the case of Georgia and theCaucasus are not encouraging but fear of the West did not stop him.

    If the West is seriously interested in a solution, more carrot and less stick would seem to be the answer. Most Ukrainians do not want to be part of Russia – and other neighbours even less so – but Ukraine is a corrupt and inefficient basket case which must give the Europeans pause for thought about how far they go in absorbing Ukraine as opposed to simply talking about its right to freedom of choice. NATO needs to be more sensitive to Russian feelings of encirclement by an organisation which was set up to contain theSoviet Union. They ask that if the Cold War is over, what is the role of NATO? This does not mean accepting Russian bluster or aggression but attempts to force Russia to kow tow publicly to the West are doomed. Quiet diplomacy has a much better chance of getting results.

    Threats by Australia to ban Russia from the G20 meeting in Brisbane miss the point. This is not Australia’s decision to take but the G20 organisation’s. Australia is not a player in this game and if the Russians notice us at all they will see us as simply following the big kids of the anglosphere as we always do. Nobody is lying awake in the Kremlin worrying about what Australia will do. We would be well advised to keep a low profile.

    Cavan Hogue was Australia’s last Ambassador to the USSR and the first to the Russian Federation and to Ukraine.

     

     

  • Michael Kelly S.J. What makes this week Holy.

    The recent casual remark of a friend got me to thinking about just how people experience Easter differently. My friend and I were talking about something Christians are constantly encouraged to consider especially in Lent and which gets its highest profile in the Christian calendar on Good Friday: humility.

    The way I have come to discover what humility might be is through being humiliated. In the tradition of spirituality I have learnt to love – that coming from St. Ignatius Loyola – humility and humiliation are related experiences.

    And I’ve found my own and others’ most common reaction to real humiliation is not the anger, rage and indignation that is frequently the prelude to rebellion. I have found at the base of humiliation is actually dismay and confusion – about the hurts inflicted or the reversals and disappointments suffered. And, if I’ve brought the humiliation on myself, the experience of shame at what I’ve said or done is not slow in arriving.

    My friend, a woman with a lot of experience as a psychotherapist, brought me up short. She told me my take on humility and humiliation was the account of a very male way of meeting the experience. Women experience humility and humiliation very differently, my friend told me. And a little thought will tell us males why.

    Too often women are the subjects of humiliation. They are humiliated by the beliefs, practices and convictions that are so common among men of all nations and cultures. They come down to judgments on externals – their looks and attractive features that “sexualize” male perceptions; the often unacknowledged assumption that women are simply not able to measure up to the performance standards of men, whether or not those making the judgment recognize that too many males fail to meet much absurd performance criteria but get away with their mediocrity.

    Such humiliation is rarely directly inflicted or in spoken words. It comes in looks, gestures and movements or simply in the way a conversation flows. Women are only good for a few things and one of them is satisfying an urge in men.

    It is humiliating in a completely different way to the manner in which humiliation is mostly experienced by men. And it is intensified in Asian societies where caste, ethnic origins, birth parents, tribal membership and even the geographic location of home also play a part.

    In Asia, of course, such bases for negative judgments apply across genders. And they generally lead to that feeling of resigned powerlessness that becomes self-fulfilling.

    In many parts of Asia, such undeclared humiliations frequently register among the humiliated as a “loss of face”, the feeling of embarrassment at the diminishment inflicted, consciously or unconsciously, on someone whose status, achievements or dignity have been slighted.

    Reactions to humiliation vary from fatalistic endurance to rebellion. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet put the choice starkly – to endure “the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune or, by opposing, end them” The choices are knuckle down to this: take the blow on chin, offer no resistance and say “ there’s nothing I can do about ii”; or get serious about settling the score, rebel and dissent, eliminate the offending enemy.

    Or there is another way. In good faith, a person can recognize a great injustice has been done and there is little that can be done to undo it. In good faith, a person can say something is stupid, wrong and reasonable about which every effort to alter the situation has been made. But those efforts have failed.

    Failure can congeal in bitterness or it can be the prelude to discovering new life. For that to happen the humiliated person has to be freed from the hurt, shame and demoralizing he or she experiences.

    That’s what is holy about Holy Week. It takes us to the heart of unmerited, abusive humiliation and how to make it a triumph. No good deed may go unpunished as the old saying has it. But that’s not the end of the story

    Too many Catholics associate “holiness” with places like Churches and shrines, even though Jesus said quite plainly, and was killed for repeating it, that true holiness was displayed in service and real worship is in “spirit and truth”, not in events that occur in “sacred” places.

    Too many Catholics associate “holiness” with ecclesiastical or religious status when it was Jesus’ own protests about the abuse of their decision making status by the chief Priests and Elders of his time that saw him executed. That’s what we celebrate this Friday.

    Holiness is discovered neither in the security of places nor the comfort of statuses but in an active engagement with the living God, to be found in our hearts and in our world, especially in those humiliated and disregarded. It’s what makes this week holy.

     

     

  • Patty Fawkner. An Easter story

    If we think about it, each of us has an Easter story. Mine goes back to the death of my father.

    Dad died when I was a young nun. It was my first experience of the death of someone I deeply loved. Where once the word “loss” seemed a somewhat evasive euphemism, it was now acutely apt. I felt empty and fell into an abyss of grief, a grief that had begun eighteen months earlier, the day Dad was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He was 57.

    People were kind; sympathy and support were generous and heartfelt. Yet when people spoke to me of God, faith and heaven I felt affronted. Many ‘holy’ words seemed vacuous and trite to me given that I felt nothing of the presence, let alone the comfort, of God. God was nowhere to be found.

    The ‘unfairness’ of this bewildered me. Wasn’t I a nun and a person of faith? Hadn’t I given my life to God, for God’s sake?    Shouldn’t I at least expect a modicum of divine comfort?

    Months later I decided to make a weekend retreat at a monastery under the wise guidance of an elderly Benedictine monk. He listened to my grief and wasn’t embarrassed by my tears. He simply invited me to reflect on the story in John’s gospel of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene on the first Easter morning.

    Mary comes to remember and honour a loved one and, like me, she encounters emptiness. She weeps. Mary turns from the empty tomb and wanders in turmoil and anguish until Jesus, initially mistaken for a gardener, calls her by name.

    As I read the words from this familiar Gospel scene, I had an inchoate sense of myself being called by name. I had a sense of some kind of presence within my confusion and emptiness. It wasn’t a warm, fuzzy experience, and even then I didn’t really have a strong sense of the presence of God. But there was a knowing, as real as it was delicate and deep, that somehow God was with me, calling me, loving me within my emptiness. And I was greatly comforted.

    Not surprisingly, Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene has become my favourite Easter story and like any classic text it continues to contain a surfeit of meaning for me in new times and new situations.

    Years later when studying John’s gospel as part of a theology degree I chose to do my scriptural exegesis on this passage for my major assessment.

    The words “noli me tangere” “do not cling to me” came to the fore.  Mary had wanted to cling to the idea of who Jesus was for her before his resurrection. When Dad died I had wanted to cling to him and naïvely to a God who would shield me from human grief.

    Theological giant, Karl Rahner is unapologetically forthright:

    The God of earthly security, the God of salvation from life’s disappointments, the God of life insurance, the God who takes care so that children never cry and that justice marches upon the earth, the God who transforms earth’s laments, the God who doesn’t let human love end up in disappointment – that God doesn’t exist.

    Sobering but true. God never demeans our humanity by circumventing it.

    I had to let go of my ‘lesser’ God. I had to grow up a little in my faith and, in the words of Rahner’s fellow Jesuit, Anthony de Mello, I had to “empty out [my] teacup God.” Instead of concentrating on loss and emptiness, I had to search for a sense of the presence of my father’s spirit with and within me. With the help of the post-Easter Jesus and Mary Magdalene I began to experience the truth of John Chrysostom’s words written sixteen centuries earlier: “He whom we love and lose is no longer where he was. He is now wherever we are.”

    Mary Magdalene has become a companion and a hero. But history has not been kind to her and it is hard for the real Mary to shine through. She is often portrayed as the “good time girl” come good. Yet there is no scriptural justification whatsoever for asserting that Mary was a reformed prostitute. Nor is there any evidence to support the claim of Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame, that Mary and Jesus were lovers, married, had a child, and for a time lived, not in Memphis (!) but somewhere in the Middle East.

    If we accept the orthodox definition of an apostle as one who encounters the risen Jesus and announces this Good News to the community, what we have in John’s Easter gospel of Mary Magdalene is the story of the first Apostle. She is truly, as Hippolytus second century Bishop of Rome names her, the Apostle to the Apostles.       

    This Easter, with Mary Magdalene as guide and mentor, I pray that I may once again hear a voice offering love and life in the empty tombs of my life. I pray that this may be so for you.

     

    Good Samaritan Sister Patty Fawkner is a writer, adult educator and facilitator. She describes herself as “a fairly Good Samaritan”.

  • Michael Sainsbury. Australia and Cambodia’s shady asylum seeker deal.

    Australia’s history of dealing with asylum seekers continues to spin into a dizzying spiral of contempt. Already under fire for shutting its doors to some of the world’s most vulnerable people, the Canberra government is now in talks with Cambodia, the latest in a rollcall of poor, dysfunctional neighbors to whom it will “outsource” its so-called asylum seeker problem.

    Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, who counts as a ‘success’ every asylum seeker he can banish, last week became the second member of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Cabinet to visit Cambodia this year, following Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s whistle-stop trip to Phnom Penh in February. Seemingly peripheral to the talks was any discussion of Cambodia’s own woeful rights record, and how that may impact on the refugees Australia is unwilling to shelter.

    Abbott’s aggressive but election-winning asylum seeker policy is a marked departure from Australia’s once proud record of handling those forced to flee their homelands. In the 1970s, the Liberal/National Party government under Malcolm Fraser threw the doors open to over 70,000 Vietnamese escaping the communist invasion from the North. That era is now confined to history – unlike most other western democracies, Australia wants to shirk its moral and ethical obligations to help the ever increasing numbers displaced by war, political oppression and persecution.

    The request for help from Cambodia, which relies on foreign aid for nearly half its annual budget, also coincides with Australia slashing billions of dollars in aid to the Southeast Asia region. Cambodia will receive money from Canberra if it does agree to take asylum seekers, but Prime Minister Hun Sen’s own record of embezzling large chunks of the state budget does little to boost confidence that the money will be spent on the welfare of those whom Australia deports to Cambodia.

    But back to Australia. The citizenry’s own fears of an asylum seeker “crisis” are grossly inflated, but have been used as a cynical ploy by politicians, notably Abbott, who campaigned on an anti-asylum seeker platform, to win votes. Australia has a per capita GDP that now ranks only behind oil-rich Norway and Singapore, and has to date been relatively sheltered from the global burden of accommodating refugees.

    According to figures from the UN Human Rights Commission, Australia had 10,900 asylum seekers in 2012. That year, Belgium had more than 14,000, as did Ecuador, still a developing country. France, where politicians and citizens alike fear imminent collapse due to the heavy refugee traffic, muddled along with almost 50,000 in 2012. Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, had 85,000.

    Pledges from the Abbott administration that the policy will alleviate pressure on the taxpayer to fund the wellbeing of asylum seekers runs into problems, given estimates that the outsourcing program will cost some US$2.85 billion. Papua New Guinea was reported to have received an initial US$25 million in “aid” in exchange for allowing Canberra to send human cargo to a now-notorious holding facility on Manu Island.

    So turning to Cambodia will do nothing to boost Australia’s global standing. Hun Sen, who has been in power for 36 years, has a less than stellar record with asylum seekers, having returned to possible incarceration people trying to escape to Cambodia from China and Vietnam upon request of the two governments who have helped to prop him up.

    His treatment of political opponents, lawyers, rights campaigners, thousands of whom have been either murdered, tortured or locked up in dark holes, should give further pause to Australia. Even the Australian Trade Department says: “A key disincentive to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been the lack of an effective judicial and legal system and a poor corporate governance environment.”

    Apparently this hasn’t registered, and rights groups have accused Abbott of neglecting his obligations to international rights protocols.

    “It’s quite clear that Cambodia does not have any sort of appreciable service for refugees,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “They have a shoddy record of protecting refugees despite having ratified the refugee convention and there’s very little political commitment from the Cambodian government to ensure the ongoing support or safety of refugees.

    “One wonders how Australia thinks the Cambodian government would be in a better position to provide support and protection than Australia would be.”

    Tony Abbott and his lieutenants rail against the grubby human traffickers who take the money of people desperate to escape oppression by any means, shifting them across borders and across oceans on rickety boats. Yet they consciously move the very same human traffic, handing out cash for others to take the problem off their hands. All told, Australia’s prime minister wants to send people desperate to escape from oppressive regimes right back into the arms of another.

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

     

  • Simon Rice. Racial vilification, social values and humility

    I have spent a professional lifetime trying to get people to know about (let alone respect) anti-discrimination law, and suddenly everyone knows about ‘section 18C’.  For all the wrong reasons.

    A right reason for knowing about 18C would be because it is offers guidance on what can fairly be said and done on the basis of race.  A wrong reason would be because it is characterised as an unwarranted limit on ‘free speech’.

    For close to 20 years, the limits imposed by 18C have been unremarkable. The Australian Human Rights Commission receives and resolves complaints about conduct that exceeds the limits, and the federal courts decide cases when the complaints cannot be resolved.

    As with any legal regulation, awareness of 18C, and understanding about how it works, has grown over time. But most importantly, 18C, as with any legal regulation, stands as a statement of public values, a declaration by the government, on our behalf, of what is and is not acceptable in society.

    For close to 20 years we have told ourselves and the world that an Australia value is to not tolerate race-based words that cause harm.  Brandis has declared that not only we will tolerate such words, but we will encourage them.  So the 18C debate is about much more than the unremarkable exercise of setting limits on free speech.  It is, as well, about the role of our representatives in articulating public values and, relatedly, about the place of legislation in expressing those values.

    Public values change, and law needs to change with them, though it often lags behind. When there is sufficient public momentum a government acts to reflect popular will by making, amending or repealing a law.  In the current racial vilification debate, ‘free speech’ has been promoted as an Australian public value that is overly-limited by 18C, and that should now be given greater prominence.

    Has the time come to resile from the values that are expressed in 18C? It is hard to see anything that suggests that Australian values have reverted to a time when racial abuse was permissible.  Despite the Attorney-General’s notorious defence of our right to be bigots, there is no evidence that a large number of us actually want to express bigotry any more than 18C allows.

    The ‘free speech’ rhetoric is, in fact, a claim to ‘free racist speech’, and the Racial Discrimination Act allows a great deal of free racist speech; persistent reference to 18C overlooks the wide exceptions available in 18D.  We are very free to engage in race-based speech in Australia; as Richard Ackland asked ‘what is it that these people really want to say about race, colour, etc, that they are currently chilled from saying by the anti-free-speech RDA?’.

    The one celebrated case when someone wanted to say something about race, but failed to do so within the exceptions in section 18D, was Andrew Bolt’s.  If it was not for that case, and News Limited’s determined attack on 18C as a result, we would not be having this debate, and our racial vilification law would have continued doing its work.

    Senator Brandis invites us all to engage in racist speech.  When your child comes home from school dismissing ‘boongs’ as lazy and ‘towel-heads’ as terrorists, she can say that Senator Brandis told her that she has the right to be a bigot.  This type of ‘leadership’ is unworthy of an elected official, let alone Australia’s first law officer.

    Specifically, Brandis’s amendments to 18C invite anyone to say anything about anyone, under the guise of ‘public discussion’.  Perhaps it is the contemporaneous announcement of the reintroduction of knights and dames that makes me wonder whether Brandis’s idea of public discussion is still in the 19th century: a town hall meeting or a Hyde Park soap box.  These days, very little is not ‘public discussion’.  Media such as websites, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and tweets enable the public promotion of ideas and opinions as never before.

    The contemporary unregulated, unbounded world of public discussion gives the lie to those who disdain government regulation and would rely instead on the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a way of regulating speech.  The brave new world of public discussion is undiscerning in the relative prominence it gives to speech: in the absence of any guiding principles, vicious and hateful opinion is as ‘valid’ as that which is respectful and affirming.

    There is, therefore, no ‘exchange’ as there might be in a market, no mechanism for evaluating opinion; online, everything has a claim to credibility.  There is no ordered exchange of opinion.  Opportunities for debate are limited, most of what ‘said’ remains untested and unchallenged, and it is implausible to claim that opinions will thrive or fail on merit. 

    This unregulated space suits those with the capacity to exploit it, to make the loudest noise, and to dominate.  Politicians and news media corporations have that capacity, and 18C stands in their way.  They attack it because they can, and they (wilfully?) fail to see and respect the power they have. Without the quality of self-restraint, they are able to say that something should be done simply because it can be done. Without the quality of empathy, they are able to say that causing offence doesn’t matter. And without the quality of humility, they are able to decide what level of racial abuse people should live with.

    While politicians and news media corporations have the power to dominate public discussion, racial minorities do not.  Although the backlash against Brandis’s proposed amendment of 18C has been substantial, it comes largely from those who receive 18C’s protection – that is, from those who are on the receiving end of race-based conduct, particularly migrants and indigenous peoples.

    Our social minorities, who look to the government for protection in a majoritarian ethos, now find that their government promotes a right to oppress them.  In this perverse situation, it is vital that members of the majority stand against their colleagues, and stand by the state’s obligation to protect the vulnerable who are under its care.

    Simon Rice teaches law at the ANU. He is the Professor of Law, Director, Law Reform and Social Justice, ANU College of Law. He is also Chair of the ACT Law Reform Advisory Council. 

  • John Menadue. The new squatters on public land.

    More alienation of public space.

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

    Repost of yesterday’s blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Using the military for political purposes

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

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

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

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

    Repost follows.

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

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

    We need to examine carefully what our military is doing.

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • Caroline Coggins. The story of Easter: the love template.

    How often do we fall in love, the sort that turns us around, strips us and re-orientates us, shakes the foundations of what it is to relate and be with another?  Not very often, mostly we are too guarded.  But at times it happens, and I have come to take this as a call, our feelings leap forward and say follow me.

    A person I loved died this week.  He was an old man, though he did not feel old to me. I just loved him. He had been a training supervisor when I was becoming a psychotherapist, so I came to know him in that particular way.  This man stretched me.  He was shy and very private, but he knew the way the human heart worked, and what it needed to grow. Mostly he worked with children, and they are great teachers, open, and available to their needs.  This man taught me about my ‘duty of care’.   Sounds clinical, but it was far from that, it was his relationship with me that showed me what this means.  He mentored me into the depths of what another really needed of me, and then what I needed to do/grow within myself to get there.  This man knew how to keep an opening for the other.

    What does love, mentoring and passion have to do with the story of Jesus and Easter? Could they be the template for relationship, how love shapes us if we let it?   We are many things.  Parts of us do not move toward love, they resist and fear, but there is a part of us that leans toward the light.  We desire love and it is in love that we are again ‘little ones’, vulnerable and in the moment. In the story of Jesus we are shown how.

    Today, mostly, we are concerned with ourselves, interested in our psychology, health, security, and what will become of us.  We feel safe with certainty, and threatened by the unknown, by mystery, unsure of the idea of giving over to another.  Yet paradoxically we thirst to feel that we are known and loved by another.

    The story of Jesus walks in through the door that the thirst opens, touches us where we condemn ourselves, inviting our needy, desiring hearts into a passionate love response, which will shape us entirely.  Our needs and our stories are particular to us, and it is mostly how we understand others, but not only so, we also need to walk in the shoes of others, being stretched out of ourselves into the bigger family.

    God longs for us, and Jesus stirs us to an intimacy, a closeness, which cracks our self-absorbed protective shells and gentles us to pay attention.  The light can shine in.  We can be many things, shy, resistant, stunted in love, and this is what we learn, and these wounds he will carry for us. This, our smaller self, and often  the only picture we can form for ourselves, is transformed by love, the falling in love, being loved.  The possibilities expand.  He calls us and we are awakened, our heart quickens, he draws us, stirs our senses, excites our interest, and we find our desiring selves, our deepest desires.  The Sufi poet Rumi says ‘Your longing for me was my messenger’.

    Desire then is what St Ignatius uses in his spiritual exercises to invite the pilgrim into the discovery of God’s love.  It is our own story, but we walk beside this man Jesus, discovering ourselves in this relationship, finding what moves our heart, breaks our heart. It is a human story, nestled in the divine, and our story with our God.

    The power of the exercises is that rather than sealing off from what is happening inside of us, we use our feelings to grope forward, toward the light, walking with him, through the gospels, and inside our own imagining being, the being that is loved and desired by God.  In the weeks of the exercises we walk his entire life, being shaped and becoming aware of ourselves in this relationship. But here too, this is the small thing, the big thing, is what we will do, desire to do, for this great love we feel and which we are given.  There is a longing to get out of our own way.  We are given ‘duty of care’, such abundance of love it must be  shared.

    How blessed we are each year to have the ritual of Easter. From ashes we proceed to ashes, loved into life and loved into death that brings life, stretched into the mystery of all of this with Him, His way.

    Caroline Coggins works as a Psychotherapist.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Tony Abbott in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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