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  • John Menadue-Refugees – the demographic dividend.

    As responsible members of the human family, we have a strong moral case to provide protection for the victims of persecution and violence.

    There is also a strong case in our own self-interest – that refugees almost by definition are risk-takers and entrepreneurial. It can be argued that they are amongst the most highly motivated and determined in the Australian community.

    Most importantly if we want to see economic growth and rising productivity we need young people. Even the hard headed economists know that it is people that matter and not how they have come here. We need to open our minds as well as our hearts.   Let’s look at asylum seekers and refugees from an economic perspective as well as a humanitarian perspective.

    Along with many other developed countries, Australia has a problem with its rapidly ageing population. Treasury and others have pointed out that in the future there will be many more old Australians than there are today. The number of Australians 65 and over is expected to increase rapidly from around 2.5 million in 2002 to 6.2 million in 2042. That is, from around 13% of the population to around 25%. For Australians aged 85 and over, the growth is even more rapid from around 300,000 in 2002 to 1.1 million in 2042. In 2002 there were more than 5 people of working age to support every person aged over 65. By 2042 there will only be 2.5 people of working age supporting each person aged over 65.

    Data published by Professor Graeme Hugo at the University of Adelaide has highlighted the much younger age structure of refugees. Refugees are not only younger than the Australian population, but also younger than migrants. Migrants and refugees will not be a silver bullet. We need to respond in many wages including lifting the retirement age, but refugees can make a significant contribution to slowing down the ageing of the Australian population. In his report published in May 2011, Professor Hugo pointed out the following:

    • ‘An important characteristic of the contemporary refugee/humanitarian intake … is that it is substantially younger than the national Australian population. … The medium age of the refugee/humanitarian intake over the 2003-09 period was 31.8 years compared with the medium age of 42.9 years in the population.’
    • ‘Not only is the refugee intake young when compared to the national resident population, it is very young when compared with the total immigration intake. … Dependent aged children and young adults aged 15-24(from a refugee background) are significantly over-represented compared with all migrants, while the middle and older working aged group (25-49) (of refugees) are significantly under-represented.’
    • ‘Refugee/humanitarian entrants… are disproportionately concentrated in the age groups which contribute towards a demographic dividend.’

    There has been recent comment about the increased number of Iranian asylum seekers. There is a debate whether they are really asylum seekers or economic migrants. There is no doubt however that they are young, well-educated and very determined. Most would make excellent settlers and are a very good example of how young migrants and refugees can lower our age profile. We need to open more migration pathways for young people who face discrimination within their own country but cannot be regarded as refugees as they have not fled their country.

    But an expanded refugee intake would not only deliver us a “demographic dividend”. Refugees make other important contributions as outlined by Professor Hugo

    • They are increasingly settling in regional Australia.
    • They place a high store on education for their children. 48% of second generation people who are Australian born have post-school qualifications. For the total refugee groups, the percentage is much high at 59%, with some refugee groups showing remarkably high levels of post-school qualifications, e.g. Estonia 65%, Latvia 65%, Slovakia 65%, Sri Lanka 61%.
    • Refugees are more likely to demonstrate entrepreneurial and risk-taking attributes than the Australian community as a whole. They have a higher incidence of owning their own businesses than other migrant groups.
    • The second generation of refugee settlers have a much higher level of labour force engagement than the first generation and in many cases, the level is higher than for second generation Australians.

    Their commitment to Australia is also shown in their uptake of citizenship.  A study prepared for OECD by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (October 2010) reveals that the naturalisation rate by birthplace for all foreign-born is 80%. For significant refugee groups it is much higher – Croatia 97%, Poland 96% and Vietnam 97%. For New Zealand it is 45%, for the United Kingdom 71% and the United States 70%.

    Not surprisingly, refugees in their early years are ‘takers’ of Australian generosity. But year by year they increasingly become great contributors. They pay back many times the generosity they initially receive. They contribute to Australia out of all proportion to their number. It is a great success story for all Australians.

    We can draw inspiration from the very successful refugee programs of the past. Australian business and society generally have been great beneficiaries. It is in our self-interest, as well as for sound moral reasons that we need to break with the stalemate and toxic debate that surrounds refugees. Doing the right thing really pays off.

    Refugees deliver many dividends including a “demographic dividend”. They are much younger than the Australian population and migrants.

  • Kieran Tapsell. Sexual abuse in the Church – the failure of the Vatican and Popes

    As with so many other things on the sex abuse issue, the Holy See’s response to the findings of the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child is conspicuous for its failure to acknowledge the central issue raised by that Committee: pontifical secrecy imposed on the Church’s investigations of child sexual abuse by clergy.

    The Vatican spokesman, Fr Lombardi complained that the Holy See provided ample written responses under the Convention, but the Committee did not take “adequate account of the responses, both written and oral”. Lombardi makes the gratuitous comment that the report suggests “that it was practically already written, or at least in large part blocked out before the hearing,” as if the Holy See’s responses were knock out blows to the matters raised by the Committee. He then claimed that the Committee did not understand “the Holy See’s responsibilities”. He said, “Are we dealing with an inability to understand, or an unwillingness to understand? In either case, one is entitled to amazement.”

    The really amazing thing is that Lombardi does not seem to have understood that the Holy See itself had shifted its position from what he had stated on 5 December 2014, that the Holy See was only responsible for the protection of children within the 44 hectares of the Vatican City – the children of the Swiss Guards.

    The Committee’s Report was blunt about that claim: “By ratifying the Convention, it (the Holy See) has committed itself to implementing the Convention not only on the territory of the Vatican City State but also as the supreme power of the Catholic Church through individuals and institutions placed under its authority.” That power comes through canon law, a subject that Lombardi avoids mentioning.

    On 16 January 2014, the Holy See’s delegates in Geneva, Archbishop Tomasi and Bishop Scicluna were prepared to answer questions about the Holy See’s worldwide responsibility. They were even prepared, reluctantly, to produce some figures on how many priests had been dismissed since 2005 for child sexual abuse out of the 4,400 the Holy See had been investigating since 2001. These priests were not abusing the children of the Swiss Guards.

    Lombardi then goes on to suggest that the United Nations paid more attention to “certain NGOs, the prejudices of which against the Catholic Church and the Holy See are well known.” He then criticizes the UN for “going beyond its powers” by attempting to interfere in the moral and doctrinal positions of the Catholic Church regarding contraception, abortion, and its vision of “human sexuality”.

    It is a pity that the Committee gave the Church this opportunity to avoid the central issue of the Catholic Church’s governance through canon law by referring to such Church teachings, because it allowed Fr. Lombardi to deflect attention away from the most important issue of pontifical secrecy.

    The Committee recommended that the Holy See review its canon law to make sure it complied with the Convention. It expressed concern that child sexual abuse was dealt with through confidential disciplinary proceedings that “have allowed the vast majority of abusers and almost all those who concealed child sexual abuse to escape judicial proceedings in States where abuses were committed.” It said that as a result of the code of silence imposed by canon law, there were very few cases of sex abuse by clergy reported to law enforcement authorities, and it pointed out that reporting to national law enforcement authorities has never been made compulsory.  It recommended the abolition of pontifical secrecy, and to establish clear rules for the reporting of all suspected cases of child sexual abuse.

    At the Committee hearing on 16 January 2014, Bishop Scicluna said that canon law required bishops to follow domestic law on mandatory disclosure, but when he was pressed as to why all complaints of sexual abuse were not reported, irrespective of whether or not there was a law requiring it, Scicluna replied in effect that it was really up to the victim to report. The victims, since Pope Benedict’s extension of pontifical secrecy in 2010 now include those who “habitually lack the use of reason”.

    Under canon law as it stands at the moment, pontifical secrecy still applies wherever there are no local laws requiring reporting. In Australia, only New South Wales has such a law to cover all cases of sexual abuse.  The only inference that can be drawn from the Holy See’s refusal to change canon law to allow reporting of all complaints of child sexual abuse is that it is determined to hide clerical sexual abuse wherever it can get away with it. It is only prepared to allow enough reporting to keep bishops out of jail.

    We know the result of that policy from the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry: of the 607 cases of child abuse, none of them were reported directly by the Church to the police. The reason: Victoria had abolished misprision of felony in 1981, and clergy were not included in the mandatory welfare reporting laws passed in the 1990s. There was no obligation to report and canon law stipulated that there should be no reporting of any information that the Church had gathered from its internal inquiries.

    At the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry, Cardinal George Pell said that on the issue of sexual abuse by clergy, the Congregation of the Clergy “did not get it”. It seems that the Holy See still does not. Nor does the Church in Australia. There is no suggestion in its submission to the Royal Commission that canon law is even a problem, let alone that it should be changed.

  • Mark Gregory. NBN – ageing copper network and structural separation.

    The Australian telecommunication industry is in crisis and centre stage is an ageing copper network that some would have you believe is good for another hundred years and others argue it is time to move to an all fibre access network.

    But the problems extend far beyond copper versus fibre and go to the heart of what an industry needs if it is to be a successful contributor to the Australian economy. As Australia struggles to find out how this sorry saga will end, questions should be asked of our politicians and telecommunication industry leaders why there is no plan for the future.

    To understand why criticism can be levelled at the development of one of Australia’s most important industries it is necessary to wind back the clock to 1982 when the Davidson Enquiry recommended the introduction of a competitive telecommunications industry.

    At the time Australia had three telecommunication organisations. The Australian Telecommunications Commission (ATC), trading as Telecom Australia, was responsible for the provision of terrestrial telecommunication services within Australia. Aussat Pty Ltd was responsible for satellite telecommunication and broadcasting services within Australia, and the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) was responsible for the provision of international telecommunication services. Aussat was established with a restrictive license that prevented competition with Telecom Australia, and to ensure this was adhered to, Aussat was effectively prevented from raising the capital it needed to flourish and two directors of Telecom were appointed to the Aussat Board.

    The Davidson Enquiry’s recommendation was timely and if it was implemented carefully the Australian telecommunications industry could have entered a period of expansion, competition and prosperity. So what went wrong? Everything.

    The first mistake, which has never been corrected, was a failure to map out the future of the fixed infrastructure, which at the time was largely copper in the access network and coaxial cable, microwave radio or copper pairs in the transit links.

    Optical fibre was new in 1982 and the Telecom Research Labs had started the process of introducing optical links into the Australian telecommunications network. Enough was known about the potential future capabilities of optical fibre for forward network planning to incorporate it into all major trunk routes by year 2000 and access networks thereafter.

    During the 1950s the then Postmaster General’s Department expanded the copper network beyond urban areas and commenced an ongoing maintenance and upgrade program. A key reason the copper network expanded beyond the urban areas was the recently adopted universal service principal by government that resulted after a robust campaign by regional and remote Australians for telephone services.

    The modern Australian copper network was progressively rolled out in the 1950s, first in urban areas and then to regional areas, with an anticipated lifetime of 50 years. In some areas the copper network is now more than 10 years beyond the anticipated lifetime. Copper networks do degrade over time, due to the effects of water leakage, the environment and mechanical damage. Over the decades the cost of maintaining the copper network has been steadily climbing.

    In the period 1982 to 1992 the fate of the three monopoly telecommunications providers was debated within the federal government, and initially the focus appeared to be on how to ensure each organisation remained viable rather than how to promote competition. For example, proposals for Aussat and OTC to merge were rejected in favour of OTC being merged with the ATC which was renamed AOTC in 1991 and finally became Telstra Corporation in 1993. Aussat was sold to a new entrant, Optus, as part of a deal enabling it to share a duopoly with Telstra in 1991-97 as a first step towards national infrastructure competition.

    Guidance on how the fixed infrastructure network could be expected to change over the next 50 years was not provided and was put into the hands of the telecommunications market to best determine, within the constraints of an amended Trade Practices Act (1997). But the reality was and remains that the future of the fixed infrastructure remained largely in Telstra’s hands until the advent of the 2009 National Broadband Network (NBN) policy, though this policy was flawed and Telstra retained ownership of exchanges, pits, ducts, traps and other infrastructure to be utilized by the NBN.

    In 1997 the government made extensions to the Trade Practices Act 1974 that guaranteed access to Telecom (Telstra) infrastructure on terms that were to be negotiated and ultimately regulated by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). In 1997 the Australian telecommunications market was formally opened to full competition in accordance with the Telecommunications Act 1997.

    Or so the government would have us believe, because by carefully restructuring the existing incumbents the government created two monopolies that remain today: Telstra (national copper access network) and Aussat (later Optus – satellite broadcasting).

    Whilst other companies have launched satellites, installed undersea cables, installed fibre networks and built mobile cellular networks, Telstra and Optus remain dominant because each was provided with public infrastructure and in Telstra’s case the public infrastructure included the thousands of telephone exchanges and tens of thousands of kilometres of pits, ducts and traps that house the copper network.

    So Australia slipped into a regime where “competitors” would pay Telstra and Optus to utilise their infrastructure at rates negotiated or set by the ACCC, which ultimately include a profit component that ensures Telstra and Optus remain viable. The degree to which Optus retains an anti-competitive advantage has diminished more than Telstra’s anti-competitive advantage.

    Telstra in particular has taken every opportunity to leverage its infrastructure to optimise profit, often arguably at the expense of competition. As mobile telephone networks became more prevalent Telstra was able to convince the government that the mobile network should be used to provide aspects of black spot remediation, provision of emergency information and services that might be considered to be better provided under the universal service for which Telstra was most recently awarded another contract for 20 years in 2012.

    What this means is that Telstra has been able to draw on local, state and federal government funds to assist in the build out of the Telstra mobile cellular network. The extent of public funding received by Telstra for mobile network expansion has been difficult to quantify.

    At the last election the government announced that $100 million would be provided to assist with mobile cellular network expansion and black spot remediation. Telstra will argue that its network is best placed to facilitate the government’s aims, but only if all the money or the greater proportion goes its way.

    By the early 2000s Telstra found itself with two infrastructure competitors in the mobile cellular market and about 10 infrastructure competitors in the provision of DSL over the copper network. Prior to 2008 Telstra charged DSL providers for fixed telephone connection line rental in conjunction with a line rental cost for the provision of DSL. Effectively for every DSL provider customer Telstra would benefit through the provision of a fixed telephone service ensuring Telstra’s profit related to the copper network remained high.

    The decision by the ACCC, which Telstra fought all the way to the High Court in 2008, to introduce unconditioned local loop provisions effectively ended Telstra’s ability to force DSL providers to include fixed telephone connections with DSL.

    The loss of this income and the ACCC’s ongoing review of the charges that Telstra could levy DSL providers for DSL only connections meant that Telstra put the fixed network infrastructure into a holding pattern whilst Telstra focused its investment on expanding and upgrading its mobile cellular network.

    In the Howard government years between 1996 and 2007 questions were asked of Telstra about upgrading the copper network to FTTN for broadband delivery, and as time progressed the FTTP option was also discussed. The Rudd government asked the same questions and received the same answers, which amounted to Telstra asking for a government handout to upgrade to FTTN or overbuild to FTTP.

    By the 2000s there was a dawning realisation that effective competition would only flourish if there was a way to do what should have been done in the mid-1980s and that was to split Telstra into retail and wholesale organisations, so that future privatisation would facilitate effective retail growth whilst ensuring the wholesale organisation could go to the market when demand dictated to upgrade or overbuild infrastructure.

    In the Australian context this means upgrading or overbuilding the entire network, no piecemeal approach, no urban cherry picking of high value areas, because the universal service legislation effectively enshrines the right of every Australian to fair and equal access to a standard telephone service (it does not dictate fair and equal access to broadband or mobile services, which are left to the market). The 2012 government review and update of the universal service obligation did not include the provision of data services in the legislation and for this reason the outcome was flawed. Any thought that regional and remote Australia would accept anything less than a socially acceptable national outcome would return us to the robust campaign days of the early 1950s that led to the universal service in the first place.

    Whilst not discussing the national broadband network at this point, but staying focused on the reasons why the Australian telecommunications industry is not truly open and competitive, it needs to be pointed out that by “leasing” access to Telstra’s infrastructure for the national broadband network the government has effectively ensured that Telstra will retain its market dominance, because it can undercut any provider using the national broadband network knowing that it can make up the income shortfall through the profit it receives through the infrastructure lease agreement and maintenance arrangements.

    So where to from here? Australia is long overdue for a non-political rethink of how to facilitate an open and competitive telecommunications industry that results in effective structural change that includes Telstra’s separation into retail and wholesale organisations and also provides forward looking guidance on what the industry’s infrastructures needs will be over the next millennium.

     

    Mark Gregory is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT University. His blog can be found here.

     

  • John Menadue. Pink batts and the Royal Commission – a bridge too far.

    There are good grounds for Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard to refuse to provide documents to the Royal Commission on Pink Batts. The Royal Commission is a very vindictive act by the Abbott Government. And the government looks like continuing to use other Royal Commissions for political purposes!

    In separate blogs by Michael Keating on January 8, 2014 and by me on July 11, 2013, we have pointed out the following.

    • 1.1 million installations were completed under the Home Insulation Scheme (HIS) – a considerable achievement.
    • The rate of fires during this scheme was three times less than prior to the HIS.
    • The regulation of programs such as this, including safety, is clearly in the hands of state governments, not the Commonwealth.
    • Only 7% of installations had to be rectified – a quite low figure.
    • One fatality was caused by a pre-existing fault; another was caused when an electrical installer was employed by another electrician, and a third death occurred when a contractor elected to work in oppressive heat.

    But beyond these issues which the media and The Australian in particular, ignored, there is an important issue of whether the Royal Commission should have access to Cabinet documents. Media reports suggest that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard may refuse to provide Cabinet documents.

    There is an important principle in the Westminster parliamentary tradition that new governments do not rifle through the documents of a previous government. This is set out very clearly in the Cabinet Handbook issued by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in the name of the Australian Government. (7th edition, 2012). Paragraphs 17 to 19 say the following:

    • Cabinet records (files) are held on behalf of a government in the care and control of the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM & C) and are issued to ministers and departments on a need-to-know basis. Once a minister or department no longer has any immediate need of them, and, in any event, when the minister vacates office or a change of government occurs, any copies of Cabinet documents must be returned to the Cabinet Secretariat or destroyed.
    • The convention is that Cabinet documents are confidential to the government that created them and not the property of the sponsoring minister or department. Access to them by succeeding governments is not granted without the approval of the current parliamentary leader of the appropriate political party.
    • Cabinet records and cabinet notebooks are accessible to the public through the National Archives of Australia after the expiration of the statutory closed period. The closed period, which for Cabinet documents currently varies between 20 to 30 years, seeks to provide the best balance between the competing priorities of, on the one hand, the need to safeguard privacy, security and confidentiality of the Cabinet, and to use available resources to best effect, on the other hand, maximising public access to records.

    I would expect that the Secretary of PM & C would now be advising the Abbott Government that the Cabinet documents relating to the Home Insulation Scheme (pink batts) should not be released.

    When Malcolm Fraser became Prime Minister at the end of 1975 he was being urged by party colleagues to release documents of the Whitlam Government relating to the ‘loans affair’ – a matter of far greater moment than pink batts. Some members or supporters of the Liberal Party had commenced legal action in the court in Queanbeyan against the former PM and and former senior ministers. Despite the opportunity to make more political mischief, Malcolm Fraser refused to have the documents released.  In my autobiography ‘Things you learn along the way’, page 173, I wrote ‘[Malcolm Fraser] was … persuaded that it was unwise for one government to be raking through the documents of another government and that if the matter came to court the Commonwealth Government should refuse to release them’. I was Secretary of PM & C at the time.

    It is one thing for parties to make political mischief in Opposition. In Government, they need to act more responsibly and with due regard to the established government and parliamentary conventions that have stood the test of time.

    Where there was a good case for a Royal Commission would have been for the Rudd and Gillard Governments to initiate a Royal Commission into how Australia became involved in the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Fortunately, neither Kevin Rudd nor Julia Gillard chose a Royal Commission to settle a political score.

     

     

  • Kieran Tapsell. The United Nations and the ‘Warts-and-all’ history.

    On 15 October 2013, Francis Sullivan, the CEO of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, the body that speaks on behalf of the Australian Catholic Church at the Royal Commission, wrote an opinion piece for the ABC’s Religion and Ethics page. He claimed that the submission the Council had presented to the Royal Commission on the Towards Healing protocol for dealing with clergy sex abuse was “the most comprehensive document ever produced by the Church dealing with child sexual abuse” and a “warts-and-all history, going back many decades”.

    The 206 page submission, dated 11 October 2013, conceded that some in positions of authority covered up clergy sex abuse, and that this behaviour was indefensible. There was no mention that canon law underpinned this behaviour. There was no mention of the secret of the Holy Office under Crimen Sollicitationis or pontifical secrecy imposed by Secreta Continere of 1974 or by Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela of 2001 and again in its revision in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI that prevented bishops from taking the information they obtained in their investigations of child sex abuse by clergy to the police. There was no mention of the findings of the Murphy Commission that the structure and rules of the Catholic Church “facilitated the cover up” in the Archdiocese of Dublin.

    On 16 January 2014, the Holy See’s representative appearing before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Bishop Scicluna, said that canon law required bishops to follow domestic law on mandatory disclosure.  That dispensation was given to the United States in 2002 and to the rest of the world by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. Two of the UN Committee members asked Scicluna why the Church did not require the disclosure of all allegations. Scicluna said that “education is the key to empowerment. Every local church has a moral duty to instruct people about their rights.” In other words, it is up to the victim to report the abuse, not the Church, a position that was insisted on by Cardinal Castrillón, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy in a letter to the Irish bishops through the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Storero in January 1997 and in a further letter in November 1998.  Bishops’ reporting paedophile priests to the police, Castrillón insisted, not only conflicted with canon law, but it was in some ways ‘immoral’.

    The absurdity of canon law on this issue is obvious from Benedict XVI’s revision of the 2001 Motu Proprio Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela in 2010. He extended pontifical secrecy to cases of priests having sex with “those who habitually lack the use of reason”. It seems that the Vatican requires bishops to take on the mammoth task of educating intellectually disabled people about their rights so that they can be “empowered” to report their abuse by clergy to the police. A quick phone call by the bishop or his staff to the local police station would be easier, but canon law makes that impossible unless there happens to be a local law requiring reporting. In Australia, at the moment, only New South Wales has such a law – and very few other countries do for the vast majority of complaints about clergy sex abuse.

    On 31 January 2014, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child handed down its Concluding Observations on the Second Periodic Report of the Holy See. The Committee noted that some of the rules of canon law are not in conformity with the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and it recommended a comprehensive review of canon law to ensure compliance.

    It accused the Vatican of adopting “policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators.” It noted the practice of covering up known sex abusers and transferring them to other institutions under Church control. It said that despite the fact that the Church has full control of these personnel under canon law, it had declined to provide the UN Committee with information about the outcome of the canonical procedures against them. It accused the Vatican of allowing the vast majority of abusers to escape criminal prosecution by its use of its confidential disciplinary proceedings, and that:

    “Due to a code of silence imposed on all members of the clergy under penalty of excommunication, cases of child sexual abuse have hardly ever been reported to the law enforcement authorities in the countries where such crimes occurred. On the contrary, cases of nuns and priests ostracized, demoted and fired for not having respected the obligation of silence have been reported to the Committee as well as cases of priests who have been congratulated for refusing to denounce child abusers, as shown in the letter addressed by Cardinal Castrillon Hojos to Bishop Pierre Pican in 2001.”

    The Committee also noted that reporting to national law enforcement authorities has never been made compulsory, and was expressly rejected by the Storero letter of 1997. It also noted that in many cases, the Holy See has refused to cooperate with judicial inquiries.

    The Church’s submission to the Royal Commission through the Truth, Justice and Healing Council on Towards Healing failed to mention pontifical secrecy and the restrictions it imposes on reporting clergy sex crimes to the police. The claim by the Church that it provided the Royal Commission with a “warts-and-all” history is simply untrue.

    One does not have to be particularly astute to detect in the questioning of Bishop Jarrett and Brother Crowe at the Royal Commission that canon law is right within the cross hairs of the Commission. Now with this United Nations report that has honed right into the real crux of the problem, it will be interesting to see how long it is going to take the Australian Church to pull its head out of the sand and remove the make-up it has placed on the biggest wart of all: the cover up ordered, expanded and confirmed through canon law by six Popes from 1922: Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

    Kieran Tapsell is a retired lawyer with degrees in theology and law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Jennifer Doggett. Cutting waste and costs in health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • Ian Webster. Cutting waste and costs in health

    Waste in health care conjures up several pictures.

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

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

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

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

    The second picture is of the waste of misdirected efforts.

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

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

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

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

     

  • John Dwyer. Cutting waste and costs in health.

    ​

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

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

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

  • Ian McAuley. Cutting waste and costs in health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Chris Geraghty. The ABC and Scott Morrison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Sharks and asylum seekers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • Walter Hamilton. The ABC and its Japanese Cousin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • Insults in our region continue

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

    (more…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This confirms the dismal record of Australian business in Asia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Stephen FitzGerald. Abbott’s relations with China.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Dr.Stephen Fitzgerald was former Australian Ambassador to China

  • Michael Kelly SJ: Chaos reigns in Bangkok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Kieran Tapsell: The Inquisition of the Catholic Church at the United Nations.

    The Vatican’s former Chief Prosecutor, Bishop Charles Scicluna, found himself before the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child in Geneva on 16 January 2014. He joked that in the past his predecessors may have been on the other side of the table as the “Grand Inquisitor”.

    The Church signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, but had failed to provide reports under the Convention until 2012, arguing that its only responsibility for child abuse was within the 44 hectares of the Vatican City. It was a Jesuitical response that it continued to press as recently as 5 December 2013: see https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=1089   However, it seems that over Christmas, the Vatican had a change of heart, and was prepared to front the UN Committee to answer questions about its role in child abuse matters as a result of the Church’s canon law.

    Scicluna stated that when allegations of sexual abuse of children are made, bishops have to carry out an investigation and refer it on to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – he was referring to Canon 1717 and Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (2001). He said that this procedure does not override the “legitimate rights of the sovereign State”. He referred to guidelines issued in 2010 and again in 2011 which required the local church to “follow domestic law on mandatory disclosure”. What he did not tell them was that until 2010, pontifical secrecy imposed by canon law did require bishops to break domestic laws on disclosure, and that canon law was the most significant factor in the world wide cover up of child sex abuse by the Church since Pope Pius XI issued his decree, Crimen Sollicitationis in 1922.

    What he also did not tell them was that most complaints about sexual abuse are made after the victim has reached adulthood – children take a long time to come to terms with it. If the figures given at the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry for “historic abuse” are any indication generally, that represents more than 99% of all cases. What Scicluna also did not tell the Committee was that very few countries have mandatory disclosure laws for historic abuse – only New South Wales amongst the Australian States has it. And in many jurisdictions (for example, Victoria) the mandatory welfare reporting laws about children “at risk” do not apply to clergy. What he also did not tell them was that pontifical secrecy still applies to internal Church investigations where there are no domestic disclosure laws.

    Two of the UN Committee members were a wake up to this, and repeatedly asked Scicluna why the guidelines did not provide that in “all cases these crimes should be reported.” His response was that “Education is the key to empowerment. Every local church has a moral duty to instruct people about their rights.” In other words, it is up to the victim to report the abuse, not the Church. This was a parroted response of what the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Castrillon, had written to the Irish bishops in January 1997 and November 1998. Cardinal Castrillon was not the only senior Church official to insist on this: see https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=1089

    In Australia, Francis Sullivan, the CEO of the Truth Justice and Healing Council that represents the Church at the Royal Commission said much the same. On 3 April 2013, on the Australian ABC’s “7.30 Report” he was asked what steps the Church should take if one of its teachers reported to Church authorities that he suspected that a priest was sexually abusing children at their school. He said it was up to the teacher to report it, and not the Church authorities.  This is also the answer that is enshrined in the Melbourne Response: it is not up to the Church to report; it is up to the victim – and the most likely reason that the Melbourne Response had Vatican support and Towards Healing did not.

    The absurdity of the Vatican policy is illustrated by the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy who abused as many as 200 deaf mute boys in the care of a church school for the deaf. Does the Church really expect deaf mute boys to be running off to the police station with sign language to report such abuse?

    It is even more absurd when you consider that one of the “reforms” of Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 was to extend pontifical secrecy to cases of priests having sex with “those who habitually lack the use of reason”. Are they going to be educated by Bishop Scicluna and his fellow bishops about their rights so that they can be “empowered” to go off to the police?

    The State of Victoria is a very good example of the practical outcome of the Church’s canon law as stated by Bishop Scicluna. Between 1996 and 2012, there were 611 complaints of sexual abuse involving clergy and religious. The Victorian Parliamentary Committee’s report, “Betrayal of Trust” found: “No representatives of the Catholic Church directly reported the criminal conduct of its members to the police. The Committee found that there is simply no justification for this position.” There was no justification, but there was a reason – Victoria had no such reporting laws: misprision of felony had been abolished in 1981; the mandatory welfare reporting laws did not apply to clergy, and canon law prohibited disclosure of such allegations to the police.

    The same thing will continue to happen all over the world where there are no such domestic laws: England, Germany and Austria, most parts of Canada and the United States, New Zealand, and many other countries – and every State of Australia other than NSW.

    Pope Francis had an opportunity to announce at the UN the end of pontifical secrecy for clergy sex crimes. It did not happen. The cover up of clergy sex abuse of children will continue wherever the Church can get away with it.

    As Thomas C. Fox, the publisher of the National Catholic Reporter wrote on 21 January 2014, “Despite Pope Francis’ heartfelt expressions of lament over priest sex abuse last week, the Geneva hearing suggests to date he does not understand the full magnitude of the related sex abuse issues, or, if he does, is yet unwilling or incapable of responding to it.”

    The Church is still insisting on pontifical secrecy where there are no legal obligations to report, and pontifical secrecy is the cornerstone of the cover up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Pope Francis – Message on Migrants and Refugees. January 2014

    ‘Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity.

    They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their

    homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having,

    but above all for being more.

    Contemporary movements of migration represent the largest movement of

    Individuals, if not of peoples, in history.

    As the Church accompanies migrants and refugees on their journey,

    she seeks to understand the causes of migration,

    but she also works to overcome its negative effects,

    and to maximize its positive influence on the communities of origin, transit and

    destination.
    While encouraging the development of a better world,

    we cannot remain silent about the scandal of poverty in its various forms.

    Violence, exploitation, discrimination, marginalization, restrictive approaches to

    fundamental freedoms,

    whether of individuals or of groups:

    these are some of the chief elements of poverty which need to be overcome.

    Often these are precisely the elements which mark migratory movements,

    thus linking migration to poverty.

    Fleeing from situations of extreme poverty or persecution in the hope of a better

    future, or simply to save their own lives,

    millions of persons choose to migrate.
    A change of attitude towards migrants and refugees

    is needed on the part of everyone, moving away from attitudes

    of defensiveness and fear,

    indifference and marginalization – all typical of a throwaway culture —

    towards attitudes based on a culture of encounter,

    the only culture capable of building a better, more just and fraternal world.

     

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Pearls and Irritations – one year on. John Menadue

    I launched this blog in January last year. To date there have been 285 posts, just over 5 a week.

    I hope you have found some ‘pearls’ and been ‘irritated’ from time to time. Thank you for your support.

    I have enjoyed putting together stories that I believe are important for Australia’s future.

    I now prefer blogging to speeches and interviews.

    A feature of the blog has been the support of guest bloggers. This has introduced a range of people with interesting ideas and views. As a result, the blog is becoming more like an e-magazine.

    I am a beginner in blogging, as you will have noticed, but Susie has been a great help. We have made changes, including a better weekly summary with lists of posts. Much remains to be done.

    We have appointed a blog manager which will leave me with more time to work on content.

    The traffic is increasing steadily. In February last year, the first full month of the blog,  the number of ‘visits’ (not hits) to the blog was 7063  In December last year “visits” had increased to 33,539. In February last year 14,132 ‘pages’ were read. This has increased to 84,873 in December. The increase has been steady with almost 1,200 readers of the blog each day this month despite the holidays. Many of the readers are friends and contacts but include a considerable number in the media, churches and NGO communities.

    I hope we can be more influential in the years ahead. Your help in suggestions and passing posts and emails to friends is much appreciated.

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How can these outrageous differences occur?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Violence is on the decline. John Menadue

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

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

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

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

    In his preface, Pinker states his thesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Pinker concludes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

  • Sex abuse: the de facto privilege of clergy. Kieran Tapsell

    On 29 December 1170, four armed knights from the Court of King Henry II of England entered Canterbury Cathedral. They had previously heard the King complain about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a’Becket, who was in dispute with Henry over “privilege of clergy”, the right of clergy to be tried exclusively in Church or canonical courts for any kind of crime. “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry is reported to have said.  Four knights of his Court took the hint, went to Canterbury Cathedral, and sliced the top off a’Becket’s head.

    Privilege of clergy was whittled away over the years, and was finally abolished by the English parliament in 1827, but the Catholic Church has always hankered back to the 12th century when it had the exclusive right to try clergy for every kind of crime. Priests were special people, ontologically changed by God on ordination, and therefore deserving of special treatment. A secret canonical trial avoided “scandal”, which has a special meaning in Catholicism: the loss of faith when adherents realise that those who represent Christ are misbehaving badly.

    In those countries where the Church exerted some influence, it has written some form of the privilege into the civil laws. The Vatican’s treaties with Latvia (1922), Poland (1925), Italy (1929) and the Dominican Republic (1954) provided that convicted clergy would serve their sentences separated from “lay people” or in a monastery. In Spain, Franco’s 1953 Concordat with the Vatican provided that a bishop could only be tried in a civil court with the consent of the Vatican, and clergy with the consent of the bishop. Any deprivation of liberty was to be spent in a religious house, not in jail, and the trial was not to be publicised.

    Colombia’s 1973 Concordat with the Vatican provides that bishops cannot be tried by the State Courts, but only by Church Courts. Priests can be tried in State Courts, but the proceedings are not to be publicised. In 1993, the Colombian Constitutional Court declared the Concordat inconsistent with the 1991 Constitution, but the Vatican, as recently as 2007, insisted that the Concordat be honoured, that bishops should be above the law, and that trials of priests be held in secret.

    In 1994 the Colombian Attorney General, Gustavo de Grieff started criminal proceedings against certain bishops, including Archbishop Castrillón for complicity with the drug trafficking FARC guerrillas. But he had to abandon the proceedings because of the immunity under the Concordat. Two years later Castrillón was called to Rome and appointed to head the Congregation for the Clergy, and was made a Cardinal in 1998. He remained in that post until 2006, playing a pivotal role in the strange modern re-run of the struggle between Church and State over which one was to try priests for sexually assaulting children.

    While the Church could retain some elements of the privilege through the use of treaties with sympathetic governments, very few governments were sympathetic, believing that everyone should be treated equally under the law. But the Church could create a de facto form of privilege everywhere by the use of secrecy in its own canonical investigations. If the State did not know about the clergy’s sex assaults on children, there would be no State prosecutions, and the crimes could be treated as purely canonical ones to be tried and punished in the Church tribunals.

    Castrillón had a colourful ecclesiastical career in Colombia before being called to Rome. He once boasted that he disguised himself as a milkman to hear the confession of the notorious Colombian drug lord, Pablo Escobar. It must have been a long one, because Escobar is reputed to have ordered the murder of 10,000 people. Most Colombian bishops refused to accept money from drug traffickers, seeing it as nothing more than money laundering. But in 1984 Castrillón admitted accepting money from Escobar, saying it was for “charitable purposes”, and to prevent it being used for “prostitution”.

    In January 1997, Castrillon sent a letter through the Papal Nuncio to the Irish bishops telling them that their proposal for mandatory reporting of clergy sex crimes to the police “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and a canonical nature”. The canonical reservations were clear enough – pontifical secrecy applied to any such allegations. He explained the “moral” reservations in his September 2001 letter to the convicted French Bishop Pican, congratulating him for covering up a priest who had sexually assaulted a number of boys: the relationship between a bishop and a priest is a “sacramental” one, like a father and son, and that a bishop should prefer to go to jail than report a paedophile priest to the police.

    On 2 June 2011, Castrillón gave an interview on Colombian CNN, in which he denied that there was any such thing as paedophilia, saying that priests who sexually assaulted children had just made mistakes, and all of them had been properly punished under canon law by being suspended, and if they “showed correction” they were shifted to another parish. It is little wonder that Cardinal Pell at the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry said that Castrillón’s Congregation of the Clergy “did not get it”.

    In 1170, the outcome of the attempt by Thomas a’Becket to preserve the de iure privilege of clergy was his murder in the Cathedral. The outcome of the Holy See’s attempt since 1922 to preserve a de facto privilege by the use of secrecy under canon law was much worse than the murder of one Archbishop. It involved the suicide of many hundreds of people who had been sexually abused as children by clergy whom the Church protected and hid from the civil authorities for no other reason than that they were clergy.

    Canon law still imposes pontifical secrecy on allegations of clergy sexually assaulting children wherever there is no civil law requiring reporting, and in Australia, that means in the vast majority of cases.

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

  • Health workforce reform. Prof Peter Brooks

    As we draw to the end of the holiday period and contemplate the challenges for us in 2014 we might take a moment to think about the big questions in health. We are continually reminded by politicians,  media and other  (self)  interested groups  about the cost of health care, the need for more doctors and  nurses, more  beds, more money -all of which will blow out the health budget even more . We are told that patients will have to pay more (the proposed $6 fee for GP visits) but rarely do we look at what are the real ‘drivers‘ in the costs of health care. Doctors have a very privileged position in society but we are responsible for generating the bulk of costs of healthcare – every time we order a test, prescribe a medication, recommend a procedure, and admit a patient to hospital costs are generated, so surely we need to look at this side of the equation.  This is particularly so in the context of the Australian health system which is based on fee for service – every time there is an interaction with the medical profession the cash register tinkles!

    So overall doctor numbers are important – because we –the doctors – generate the bulk of these costs. The ‘system’ is set up so that many things that doctors do which could be done by someone else at less cost – pharmacist/nurse practitioners writing repeat prescriptions, doing vaccinations  and other minor procedures are not well  supported. The most recent data from Health Workforce Australia present a number of scenarios on doctor numbers from having 2,700 too few in 2025 if we make no change in how we deliver health services (we couldn’t be that silly) to having 2,800 too many if we make a modest improvement in doctor ‘productivity’. This could be  easily achieved  by transferring some tasks to other members of the health care team and  better utilising  telehealth and other communication technologies. If we really got serious about health promotion and disease prevention (now that is a novel thought) and reduced demand by just 2% (which is really not very much) we would have a surplus of over 18,000 doctors in 2025- what a waste of talent.

    Now proponents for having more doctors say – “but it is so hard to see a GP when I need one” and rural general practice is still undersupplied – true – but there may be other ways of incentivising doctors to work in rural areas or using different models of care – linking local nurse practitioners or physician assistants with GPs /Specialists in regional centres to provide appropriate geographical coverage across this wide brown land.   Health care is very complex – we don’t think about it till we need care and then it is often too late to even think about choice. With the ageing population all of whom will have chronic disease we have a great opportunity to plan better than we have up until now – to think about a health system that is fair and  equable not just for those who can afford it but for all.

    We also (and the medical profession needs to be at the for front of this particular issue ) need to clearly evaluate what should  be provided for an individual patient – not just because the procedure or intervention is available – but ask if it will really improve that patients health – and ensure that the patient can be involved in that decision.

    But fundamental to the future of the health system in Australia is how we pay for health services – fee for service needs to be reviewed since it is not sustainable in the medium to long term. There are many other systems we might consider – salaried (and interestingly America now has more salaried doctors than non-salaried), a variety of insurance schemes including health savings accounts, capping fees in some form – so why don’t we talk about this in a serious way?

    Tinkering around the edges in the form of a $6 payment for GP visits which is estimated to save around $700 million over a 4 year period out of a $130 million annual health budget and creating real pain for many less well-off Australians is a bad idea – but it does provide an opportunity to start a real community debate on what the other alternatives are – and there are many. This should be about real change in the health system – to ensure one of the better health systems in the world remains accessible to ALL Australians and that patients are fully informed of their health options and are engaged in those individual health decisions.

    Peter Brooks MD FRACP – Professorial Fellow, School of Population and Global Health University of Melbourne