Blog

  • Facing the future. Guest blogger: Prof. Stephen Leeder

    Facing the future in a world where black swan events change everything.

    When considering what we may be facing with a new federal government in Australia, a wise starting point would be a conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he of the Black Swan theory.

    Taleb has written extensively, using the discovery of black swans in a world that did not believe they existed as his metaphor, about the impact of unpredictable game-changing events. Such events (9/11, the tsunami that led to the Fukushima catastrophe, the internet) change the course of history but we do not see them coming.

    According to Wikipedia, Black Swan events have the following characteristics:

    1. The event is a surprise (to the observer).
    2. The event has a major effect.
    3. After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected; that is, the relevant data were available but [not processed in a way that enabled us to prevent it].

    So perhaps the best that we can do in thinking about what we are facing is to acknowledge that the big things that will shape our history over the next 3-6 years are not predictable.  An epidemic, an earthquake, a nuclear war, a tipping point in climate change that kills all the fish, a crazy person on a rampage with a gun, the discovery of a cure for cancer or dementia – no-one can say.

    In the meantime of course there is a high measure of predictability about our daily lives.  Tony Abbott will continue to conduct his business with intelligence, discipline, an ascetic athleticism, a trenchant debater’s criticism of opponents and a demand for loyalty in his ranks.  He may well manifest a religious concern for the plight of the poor. Think three years in a seminary and then think three years as prime minister.  The differences are unlikely to be profound.  None of us really change much over time.

    Tony Abbott is on record as having little sympathy for those with mental illness, questioning whether what is commonly called mental illness is not a cute name for weakness of character.  He may have moved beyond this caricature: we shall see.

    Stopping the boats and abolishing the carbon tax are core promises.  The first will only be achieved by a more sophisticated and nuanced approach than having the Australian navy intervene.  Settling the xenophobic paranoia whipped up over this matter will take time.  Carbon has a bad history in Australia.  Maybe a Black Swan event is necessary for our nation to address climate change seriously.

    In relation to health care, little has been said to indicate what the new national policies will be.  The challenges – older people, more chronic disease, more technology, more need for national prevention programs, and more resources for general practice – are mainly managerial and only secondarily political, though of course the capacity for faulty politics to stuff things up in health care is substantial.

    The previous government embarked upon a program of change to the health care system as described recently in a blog by John Dwyer.  As he argued, however, much remains to be done to better align the provision of care with the health needs of Australians.  This is especially so in relation to the care of those who have serious and continuing illness who require care from hospitals, general practitioners, community health staff, specialists in the community and home care.  The joining up of these care modalities is best done from a community base and while progress has been made, we lag far behind international best practice.

    The preventive agenda, never enthusiastically endorsed by the conservative side of politics, has much work to do with the disastrous epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  To address this effectively will require the engagement of the food industry, curbs on our alcohol consumption, revised plans for urban design and much more.  A retreat into assigning responsibility entirely to the individual for lifestyle behaviour and food and beverage choices is unacceptable and silly.  We have done well with a long struggle over tobacco, especially during the past six years, and much more needs to be done across portfolios to address the huge health problems associated with over- and inappropriate consumption of processed foods. Tony, are you listening please?

    We can only wait and see what Mr. Abbott et al. have in mind.  Black Swan events can change everything in a trice.

    In summary, the predictable aspects of the future can be discerned in the character of the principal players and the political context in which they are operating.  But it is the big, unpredictable events that will shape our history. Let’s hope they are good ones that create new opportunities!

     

  • Deconstructing the election result. Guest Blogger: Walter Hamilton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • The election – punishing bad behaviour. John Menadue

    One thing the election did was to explode the perceived wisdom that if the economy was doing well, governments are seldom voted out. But the Rudd Government was.

    As I have written in earlier blogs.

    • The Australian economy, by almost any measure is one of the best performing and managed in the world.
    • Our material stand of living is continuing to rise at a rate of about 2.5% p.a.
    • Only two days ago, The Herald – Lateral Economics Wellbeing Index showed that our ‘wellbeing’ rose by 7% last financial year. The index measures not only changes in income but also knowhow, environment, health, inequality and job-satisfaction.

    But there were other factors at work in the election.

    • The public clearly chose to punish bad political and personal behaviour by the ALP – the ousting of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard, his undermining of her and then her overthrow. Division is political death.
    • There were obviously concerns about the flakiness of Kevin Rudd.
    • The ALP campaign was ad hoc and chaotic. There was one thought bubble after another. It lacked a consistent theme based on the values and principles that most people thought the ALP stood for – like fairness, decency and equal opportunity.
    • Kevin Rudd and Chris Bowen were no more successful than Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan in persuading the public of the government’s good record on the economy. Chris Bowen now has two consecutive ministerial failures in his c.v. – Immigration and Treasury.
    • The swing against the ALP in NSW showed that the public did not accept that the ALP in that state had been cleaned up. It could only have been achieved by sacking the whole branch.
    • The easy-ride by the media of Tony Abbott’s policies and the bullying campaign by Murdoch seems to have had an effect. The ALP mistakes, and there were many, were highlighted particularly by the Murdoch media and the coalition was given an easy ride.

    The coalition waged a very successful political campaign with very little substantial policy. Tony Abbott’s campaign over four years has been attack dog style- brutal, dishonest, but effective.

    • We were told that we had a debt crisis and a budget emergency, but it now turns out that that was all phoney talk. Tony Abbott has pledged instead a reduction in taxes, e.g. carbon tax, and increases in spending, e.g. parental leave. There is a fundamental inconsistency in what Tony Abbott has been telling us for years and in what he now proposes to do.
    • Tony Abbott offers us stability after the apparent chaos of the hung parliament. But in terms of legislation and participation by independents, the last parliament was probably one of the most successful for a long time. In the last few days of the campaign Tony Abbott has told us that if his carbon tax legislation repeal is not passed by the Senate, there will be another election. That doesn’t sound like stability!
    • Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have quite deliberately whipped up xenophobic, racist and anti-Muslim sentiment.

    My concern is that on two key issues, climate change and asylum seekers, the election has taken us backwards.

    In his first term, Kevin Rudd said that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our generation. He was correct. He introduced the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme but it was defeated in the Senate by the coalition and the sanctimonious Greens. Then Kevin Rudd dropped the ball and Tony Abbott has kicked it into touch ever since.

    In the hung parliament, a deal with the Greens and other independents was necessary. The carbon tax was the result. That tax has delivered valuable results, despite the pain inflicted on Julia Gillard. In his brief second period as Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd announced that a future Labor government would move to a market-based carbon emissions scheme – the same type of scheme that was proposed by John Howard many years ago.

    Tony Abbott has opposed any meaningful program to reduce global warming. In an off-guard moment he said that global warming is ‘crap’. He then adopted his absurd ‘Direct Action’ scheme to reduce carbon pollution. This was a smoke-screen to divert attention whilst he relentlessly attacked the carbon tax. Malcolm Turnbull has described Direct Action as nonsense, a fig-leaf to provide cover when you don’t have a credible policy. But now it seems that Tony Abbot is even retreating from Direct Action.  He said that the coalition would be spending ‘no more and no less’ than it has committed to Direct Action, even if it doesn’t achieve the 5% emission reduction target by 2020 as promised. Almost every expert says that direct action will not work and it will be extremely expensive.

    Our grandchildren are going to pay a heavy price for our generation’s failure to address the issue of climate change. Month by month the scientific evidence is overwhelming that global warming is occurring and that humans are the cause. The experience of almost all of us, whether in record August temperatures, storms, droughts or cyclones  points in the same direction as the scientific evidence. Climate change is occurring. This is a great moral and environment challenge for which our generation is avoiding its stewardship responsibilities.

    We have also now reached the nadir on boat arrivals. Our slippery slide on this issue started in 2001 with Tampa and children-overboard. Since then the Liberals have been unscrupulously but successfully setting traps for the ALP. The Liberal Party in Opposition did not want boats to stop. The more boats that came the better the politics for them. That is why the Liberals sided with the Greens to block the amending of the Migration Act in the Senate which would have enabled implementation of the agreement with Malaysia. Boat arrivals have increased dramatically since that time. In world terms the numbers are not large, but it became a political plaything for the Liberal party.

    It won’t be easy and it will take time, but we must find a way to change the conversation on asylum seekers and refugees. It is not just an Australian problem. It is a major and serious global problem. Unfortunately John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have successfully drawn the ALP into the quagmire they have created.

    Lord Acton said that power corrupts. Power also reveals. It revealed a lot about Kevin Rudd. What will it reveal about Tony Abbott?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What a selfish and sorry country we have become.

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

  • Chemical warfare and Syria. Guest blogger: Marcus Einfeld

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Back to August 2013.

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

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

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

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

     

  • Boat arrivals are down. John Menadue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • From one Catholic to another. Guest blogger: Bishop Hurley, Darwin.

    ​The Catholic Bishop of Darwin has expressed concern to Tony Abbott about the Coalition’s policies towards asylum-seekers and people in detention.  His letter to Tony Abbott follows:

     

    Bishop Hurley letter to Tony Abbott

    The Leader of the Opposition
    The Hon. Tony Abbott MHR
    Parliament House
    RG109
    CANBERRA ACT 2600
    16 August 2013

    Dear Mr. Abbott,

    I have just returned to my office from the Wickham Point and the Blaydin detention centres here in Darwin.

    Sadly, I have been involved with detention centres since the creation of the Woomera centre, followed by Baxter and now, over the last six years, with the various and expanding centres here in Darwin.

    I experienced once again today, the suffocating frustration of the unnecessary pain we inflict on one another. I celebrated Holy Mass with a large number of Vietnamese families, made up of men, women, children and women waiting to give birth. The celebration was prayerful and wonderful, until the moment of parting.

    I was reminded of something a young man said to me during one of my visits to Woomera, all those years ago. I was saying something about freedom.

    He replied, “Father, if freedom is all you have known, then you have never known freedom.”

    I sensed the horrible truth of that statement again today.

    I was also conscious of that beautiful speech made when the UNHCR accepted the Nobel Prize in 1981. In part it states,

    “Throughout the history of mankind people have been uprooted against their will. Time and time again, lives and values built from generation to generation have been shattered without warning. But throughout history mankind has also reacted to such upheavals and brought succour to the uprooted. Be it through individual gestures or concerted action and solidarity, those people have been offered help and shelter and a chance to become dignified, free citizens again. Through the ages, the giving of sanctuary had become one of the noblest traditions of human nature.

    Communities, institutions, cities and nations have generously opened their doors to refugees.”

    I sit here at my desk with a heavy heart and a deep and abiding sadness, that the leaders of the nation that my father, as an immigrant, taught me to love with a passion, have adopted such a brutal, uncompassionate and immoral stance towards refugees.

    I imagine he would be embarrassed and saddened by what has occurred.

    It occurred to me today that neither the Prime Minister or yourself know the story of any one of these people.

    Neither do the great Australian community.

    I find that it is quite impossible to dismiss these people with all the mindless, well-crafted slogans, when you actually look into their eyes, hold their babies and feel their grief.

    There has been a concerted campaign to demonise these people and keep them isolated from the great Australian public. It has been successful in appealing to the less noble aspects of our nation’s soul and that saddens me. I feel no pride in this attitude that leads to such reprehensible policies, on both sides of our political spectrum.

    I cringe when people draw my attention to elements of our history like The White Australia Policy and the fact that we didn’t even count our Indigenous sisters and brothers until the mid 1900’s. I cringe and wish those things were not true. It is hard to imagine that we as a nation could have done those things.

    I judge the attitude of our political leaders to refugees and asylum seekers to be in the same shameful category as the above mentioned. In years to come, Australians who love this country will be in disbelief that we as a nation could have been so uncharacteristically cruel for short term political advantage.

    It seems that nothing will influence your policy in this matter, other than the political imperative, but I could not sit idly by without feeling complicit in a sad and shameful chapter of this country which I have always believed to be better than that.

    Sometime I would love to share with you some of the stories I have had the privilege of being part of over the years. I am sure you would be greatly moved. Sadly, for so many, such a moment will be all too late.

    Yours Sincerely,

    Bishop E. Hurley.

    Most Rev Daniel Eugene Hurley DD
    The Chancery of the Diocese

     

  • Excluding the ABC. John Menadue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • We have never had it so good. John Menadue

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Its failure is overwhelmingly political.

     

  • Japan’s war memory. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

    Japan’s struggle with the issue of war memory has been brought into sharp relief again amid a controversy over what children should be taught about the past. Last week the Matsue city board of education confirmed a ban placed on a famous comic book (manga) series called Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen). The board’s decision allegedly was based on the fact the series contains scenes considered too violent for school children. Behind this explanation, however, lies a different story. 

    Barefoot Gen was first serialised in 1973-1976. Set in and around Hiroshima, it tells the story of a six-year-old boy during the final months of the war and is loosely based on the experiences of the serial’s creator, the late Keiji Nakazawa. Barefoot Gen has been translated into several languages and spawned action films and anime adaptations. Wikipedia describes the story’s underlying themes: 

    Gen’s family suffers as all families do in war. They must conduct themselves as proper members of society, as all Japanese are instructed in paying tribute  to the Emperor. But because of a belief that their involvement in the war is due to the greed of the rich ruling class, Gen’s father rejects the military propaganda and the family comes to be treated as traitors. Gen’s family struggles with their bond of loyalty to each other and to a government that is willing to send teenagers on suicide missions in battle. This push and pull   relationship is seen many times as Gen is ridiculed in school, mimicking his            father’s [critical] views on Japan’s role in the war, and then is subsequently               punished by his father for spouting [patriotic] things he learned through rote    brainwashing in school. 

    Many of these themes are put into a much harsher perspective when portrayed             alongside themes of the struggle between war and peace.

    As suggested here, Barefoot Gencriticises the Japanese blind loyalty to the emperor and the Japanese flag, hinomaru, during the war. These aspects of the story – not its violence – formed the basis for the original citizen’s complaint to the Matsue board of education last year. Though the complaint was not upheld, in considering the matter the board’s secretariat conveniently found another, less blatantly political, reason for taking action. In December it instructed the 49 public schools in the city to remove the manga from the open shelves of their libraries and restrict access to teacher-supervised usage.

    I say the reason for the decision was ‘convenient’ not because of any public explanation offered by the secretariat at the time ­– there was none – but because of certain suggestive aspects of the case. The violent content singled out for mention was, on closer inspection, hardly apolitical. One consisted of a scene of the beheading of a Chinese prisoner by a Japanese soldier; another showed a naked woman being sexually assaulted and bayoneted. There is a great deal of horror depicted in the manga, mainly to do with the effects and aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and including a reference to American researchers harvesting the internal organs of bomb victims. No objection apparently was raised to these elements. In other words, the sole aim was to keep away from young eyes the depiction of wartime atrocities committed by Japanese. Another telling aspect is that when the board members met last week and decided to ratify the ban, they acted without consulting school principals or taking professional advice whether reading the manga series would cause children psychological harm.

    Educational authorities at several other places in Japan followed Matsue’s lead and also had Barefoot Gen removed from their school library shelves.

    This week, in response to adverse publicity and feedback from the affected schools – many of which opposed the ban – Matsue reversed its stand. At an ad-hoc meeting on Monday, board members agreed that the manga ‘conveys the tragedy of war very well and has educational value in teaching about peace’. The board, however, did not instruct schools to return the books to the open shelves; it left the matter at the discretion of each school. Although, according to media reports, only 10% of principals supported the ban, other information suggests a higher proportion of primary and junior high schools could ultimately place a limit on free access to the manga series.

    The episode illustrates a change in the Japanese approach to war memory that has occurred since Barefoot Gen first appeared. In the 1970s the generation born during or immediately after the Pacific War ­– with actual memories of the devastation and cruelty of war – engaged in a comparatively vigorous public discussion of Japanese misdeeds, particularly those committed in China. A period of introspection occurred at the time Japan and China normalised diplomatic relations. Sadly, in recent decades, conservative forces have gained the ascendancy in the ‘history wars’ – not only in Japan but also in South Korea and China. Separate, highly selective and incompatible accounts of the same events are being taught in schools of these neighbouring countries, poisoning people-to-people relations.

    Barefoot Gen is not perfect history, but what surely recommends it to a new generation of young Japanese – who I can confirm from personal experience know almost nothing about what their country did between 1931 and 1945 – are the very qualities which led, albeit briefly, to its removal from library shelves: its unflinching depictions of what war really involves and its preparedness to record some of the worst excesses of Japanese militarism.

     

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for 11 years and recently published ‘Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story’ (New South Books).

  • The phoney war over deficits and debt. John Menadue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Returning home can be the hard part. John Menadue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    John Menadue

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

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

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

    In our view the key failures have been as follows.

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

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

    This article was published in Croakey on 19 August 2013.

    Ian McAuley

    John Menadue

  • Hitting rock-bottom! John Menadue

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

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

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

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison propose:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Malcolm Fraser we need you now.

  • Minimizing PNG and Nauru. John Menadue

    Before I outline what I suggest we should do after the federal election let me first raise a few important background issues.

    The Indo China program

    In working with Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee I was actively involved in the Indochina refugee program under which Australia took 240,000 people, including family reunion. It was a successful humanitarian program which most Australians now look back on with pride. It also broke the back of White Australia but did not fully banish it. It still shows up to today in a de facto form, in hostility and demonization of asylum seekers.

    There were several keys to that successful program.

    • Regional processing in which regional countries held 1.4 million people for processing.
    • Settlement countries such as US and Australia providing funding and speedily accepting those found to be refugees.
    • Boat arrivals in Australia were minimal. In the period 1976-77 to 1982-83, an average of 10 boats and 340 people arrived by boat each year.  The peak year was in 1977-78 when 43 boats and 1,423 people came
    • That program would not have been possible if we had the 50,000 boat arrivals that are projected presently next year in Australia.
    • There was bipartisan support
    • From that experience I have been a firm supporter of compliance/border protection. The Australian community will support a generous humanitarian/refugee intake provided it is orderly. The same approach is being taken by President Obama…an amnesty for 11 million Latinos in return for stepped up border protection
    • The present strident refugee advocates are not helping the cause. They weaken the case for an expanded refugee intake.   They prejudice multiculturalism and  send a message along with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison that the Australian Government will and must give way

    Agreement with Malaysia.

    The rejection of the agreement with Malaysia by the High Court started the rot that we have today. That High Court decision may have been sound in law but it has had awful consequences for good policy. The agreement with Malaysia needed improvement but it did provide guarantees that Malaysia had never provided before. UNHCR was prepared to actively cooperate.. It would have restarted regional arrangements.  When the High Court rejected the Malaysian agreement in August 2011, Irregular maritime arrivals were then running at less than 300 per month.  The number of boat arrivals increased to 1,200 by May 2012. ’ They have been on a rising trend ever since. The Malaysian failure sent a very clear message. Boat arrivals would succeed. People arriving by boat have increased since the failure of the Malaysia agreement to an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people next year. (In March/June quarters 2012, boat arrivals totalled 4486.In March/June quarters 2013 they had risen to an estimated 14,000 and rising fast). The Government attempted to amend the Migration Act to correct the problems identified by the High Court but the Greens colluded with the Coalition to block the amending legislation. They bashed Malaysia at every opportunity over such issues as judicial canings but ignored for the moment the moat in our own eye, mandatory detention with suicides, self-harm, mental trauma, riots and burnings. The Greens must bear a heavy responsibility for the parlous situation we now find ourselves in. Their moral superiority has helped give us PNG/Nauru. Their conspicuous compassion is damaging the possibility of any sensible humanitarian and political outcome

    Boat and air arrivals

    For years there has been media and political preoccupation with boat arrivals with very little interest or attention to air arrivals who seek asylum. Air arrivals are presently running at about 8,000 p.a. They are mainly persons who arrive in Australia on visitor, working holiday or student visas and then seek refugee status. It is planned in advance. The biggest source for air arrivals seeking asylum is Southern China. About 40% of air arrivals receive refugee protection. They live in the community and can work. Boat arrivals are placed immediately in detention although an increasing number are now released into the community on bridging visas. About 90% of boat arrivals are found to be refugees. We have a remarkable fear about boat arrivals but apparently no concern about asylum seekers who come by air or the 50,000 illegals in the country who have overstayed their visas and disappeared into the woodwork with UK and US citizens high on the list.

    The Pacific “solution”

    The Howard Government’s Pacific/Nauru “solution” did work for a period. In the confusion after Tampa, people smugglers and asylum seekers did not know what might happen to them. The boats stopped. But that changed in the latter part of the Howard Gov. and in the early years of the Rudd Govt.  Of the 1637 on Nauru/Manus who were found to be refugees 96% finished up in Australia or NZ. The Gillard Government was warned that Nauru/Manus would not work a second time. It was reasonable to anticipate, on the basis of previous experience that even if asylum seekers were sent to Nauru after August 2012 they would end up in Australia.And this is what happened. Boat arrivals did not slow down or stop. That is why the Rudd Gov. decided that any person arriving in Aust without a visa in future would never be settled in Aust.

    Another element of the Pacific solution was Temporary Protection Visas. But they failed with more boat arrivals coming after TPV’s were introduced. Unable to sponsor family, many women and children took to the boats. That is why when SIEVX sunk in 2002 with a loss of 363 lives, 288 were women and children

    What can be done after September 7, particularly to minimise PNG and Nauru. 

    • Change the political narrative with a positive message about persons facing persecution and their contribution to Australia rather than the demonization and fear that has been engendered since John Howard’s days. It comes down to leadership across our community and not just politicians. Polls suggest that boat arrivals do not rate highly against such issues as health and education but is a hot button issue on its own that produces a very strong response
    • Bipartisanship between the major parties. Is it too much to hope for! It is so easy for unscrupulous people to promote fear of the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different
    • Second-track dialogue – involve government officials, civil society, NGOs and refugee advocates in the dialogue process. A more constructive role by refugee advocates is essential
    • Processing of asylum seekers in Malaysia and Indonesia in cooperation with UNHCR. Hopefully the regional meeting organised by President Yudhoyono/PM Rudd for Aug.20 will advance this issue.  Progress has been made to restrict visa free entry into Indonesia and Malaysia. The key issue in any arrangement must be effective protection. This encompasses (a) people given a legal status while they are in a transit country, (b) the principle of non-refoulement (c) people have access to refugee determination process either within the legal jurisdiction of the state or by UNHCR and (d) treated with dignity. Unfortunately our performance on refugees in the region is that we are fair-weather friends, walking away when our interests are served
    • Alternative migration pathways.
      • Orderly departure arrangements with “source countries” such as we had with Vietnam from 1983 .We must pursue ODA’s with Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In both Iraq and Afghanistan we will have to bear particular responsibilities for our involvement in the wars in those countries. The arrangements for orderly departure from Pakistan will probably have to be managed by UNHCR  Importantly.DIAC must anticipate future refugee flows.eg Syria and Egypt
      • Permanent or temporary migration, e.g. Iranians on 457 visas. Recent Iranian boat arrivals are mainly single males, well-educated and resourceful. With a population explosion in Iran and the sanctions biting hard many want to leave. In the last 12 months the proportion boat arrivals from Iran has doubled from 16% to 33%.
      • Work rights for all bridging visa holders and a review of the ad hoc and confusing support arrangements for asylum seekers living in the community.
      • Progressively abolish mandatory detention. There are still 6,000 people in detention including 1000 children. There is no evidence whatsoever that mandatory detention deters
      • Progressively Increase refugee and humanitarian intake to 30,000 plus p.a. and cease deducting irregular arrivals from the total intake.
      • On PNG and Nauru, hopefully the deterrent works and boat arrivals will dramatically slow. If they don’t our overall refugee program will continue under a cloud. For those that do go to PNG and Nauru we will need to provide amongst other things, special skills and technical training for resettlement out of the region. If there is a legal challenge to the PNG/Nauru agreements the people smugglers will be given another lease of life
      • Children cannot be exempted or the boats will fill up with boys under 18 years of age. They are called “anchors” to bring out the rest of the family. Children need special guardianship arrangements but the Minister cannot be both guardian and gaoler.
      • There is no ‘solution’.  Desperate people will still try to cut corners. But we can better manage it. If the government is successful in substantially reducing the boat arrivals, more will attempt to come by air.

     

    We need to think again about the assumption by so many that all asylum seekers entering Australia must be processed in Australia .What is important is not so much where the processing occurs but whether it is fair, humane and efficient.

    In 1998 UNHCR at an Exxon meeting envisaged the possibility of transferring people between states for processing. It concluded…”as regards the return to a third country of an asylum seeker whose claim has yet to be determined from the territory of the country where the claim has been submitted ,including pursuant to bilateral or multilateral readmission agreements, it should be established that the third country will treat the asylum seeker(s) in accordance with international standards, will ensure effective protection against refoulement and  will provide the asylum seeker(s) with the possibility to seek and enjoy asylum”.

    The keys are effective protection, consistent with the Refugee Convention, the treatment of people with dignity and efficiency in implementation. We are still a long way short of that with PNG/Nauru

    Importantly we cannot manage these problems on our own.  Regional cooperation is essential, not to shift the burden but to share it.

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

     

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

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

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

    Why the change in temper?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • One Minus One Equals Nothing – Also True in Journalism. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

     

    As an executive journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation I was concerned on a daily basis with balance and fairness in news and current affairs coverage. I often heard it said, ‘if both sides of politics are criticising us, we’re probably doing a good job’, though I never embraced this mantra. In journalism, as in diplomacy, one does not ensure neutrality by being equally offensive to everyone. Similarly the counting of lines of copy and broadcast minutes, which is standard practice at the ABC during election campaigns to give ‘equal time’ to the opposing political parties, to me smacked of tokenism.

    The tone, language and angle of a story, together with its running order within a bulletin or positioning on a web page, are more important factors in determining fairness and balance. The quality of the editorial conversation that accompanies a story’s preparation – its relative freedom from preconceived ideas – and what might be termed the ‘ideological culture’ of the newsroom are also crucial. Indeed, since both these aspects elude easy measurement and sit out of sight of the final audience, it may be they have the greatest significance.

    I do not intend to offer an opinion here on how well the ABC discharges its responsibility to achieve fairness and balance, though I know for a fact there exists a corporate consciousness of the need to do so and surveys suggest most consumers of ABC programs believe it is being achieved. I withhold my opinion not because I am complacent about the current state of affairs but because the subject deserves more than a few hundred words.  

    What I wish to do is to highlight some aspects of the media environment in which the current election is being fought. Prime Minister Rudd has made it an agenda item by accusing News Corporation outlets of running a campaign to unseat Labor. Rudd has implied that News’ critical reporting of over-runs in spending and under-performance in delivery of the NBN is motivated by a desire to protect its investment in Foxtel. Under the previous Labor administration, Julia Gillard effectively boycotted certain commercial radio presenters because of their hostility to her and her government. On the other hand, in my opinion, the Fairfax press has generally tended to portray Tony Abbott in a negative light.

    Partisanship is nothing new in the media business. Those who remember opinions being confined to the editorial pages of newspapers ‘once upon a time’ are kidding themselves. I refer back to what I said earlier about the less obvious determinants of fairness and balance in news presentation. What seems to have changed lately is the intensity and relentlessness of news ‘campaigns’ – by which I mean one-sided criticism of a policy or action or personality with the predetermined aim of having it (or him or her) overturned. A corollary of this is the recourse to more extreme partisanship in opinion pieces.

    ABC managing director Mark Scott has described the corporation’s role as filling gaps, in programming terms, which result from ‘market failure’. In one sense he is restating the obvious: the ABC has always offered a place for high culture, in-depth analysis and coverage of non-mainstream Australia. A newer manifestation of this role, however, is the appearance of opinion forums, such as The Drum, which seem to operate on the principle that two extreme and opposite views equal balance and fairness. Even if this were the case – and I contend that it isn’t – encouraging a form of debate whose medium is half-truths is not a sound way of informing the public or cultivating an intellectual climate of tolerance and fair-mindedness. Take a look at the online feedback to this and similar forums elsewhere and you may understand what I mean.

    On ABC News 24, as well, lobbyists are filling the airwaves with so-called informed comment that in currency trading rooms and racetrack betting rings – poor company for news programs to keep – is commonly referred to as ‘talking your book’.

    Another worrying aspect of Mark Scott’s ‘market failure’ concept is that it might signal to staff that their journalism should seek to counteract some perceived bias in the commercial media. In other words, if the ABC is to compete in an increasingly shrill and partisan news environment then absolute balance and fairness could represent a ‘market failure’, i.e. a failure to ‘balance’ the market.

    The Insiders program is an earlier ABC venture into what some in the television industry call the ‘Sabbatical rant’. Each Sunday morning a panel of journalists discusses the week’s political affairs. In the interests of a good argument, journalists of known opposing political persuasions are pitted against each other. (As such, it might be argued, they cannot be much use as journalists – but, for the moment, let’s put this consideration to one side). In my last ABC role I had direct management responsibility for Insiders, even though I admit I was never completely comfortable with the program concept. I worried that by relying on the same ‘proven performers’ it did not tap into a sufficiently wide range of opinion. I have never thought journalists should put themselves in the position of articulating political party lines, and, as already stated, I do not accept that journalistic balance is equivalent to a zero-sum game.

    The ABC is a vital institution for our democracy, and yet it has powerful enemies. Rupert Murdoch, for one, sees no place for a public broadcaster in a free market economy. It is forever open season on the ABC at The Australian newspaper. Election campaigns are a challenging time for the corporation, needing to deliver quality journalism and be seen to be doing so. There is no better time, therefore, to contemplate the true meaning of balance and fairness. They are the professional values that will sustain the ABC, while other media players rush to mount the barricades of partisanship.

               

    Walter Hamilton worked at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for 32 years.

     

     

     

     

  • Encouraging words from Pope Francis at World Youth Day in Rio. John Menadue

    On Copacabana beach in Rio, Pope Francis celebrated Mass with three million people, more than the Rolling Stones or Carnivale could ever attract. With his obvious modesty he showed himself a great communicator with the young and the poor. He appealed for the rich to share with the poor and solidarity between all people. He called the bishops to accountability rather than autocracy, to walk humbly with struggling people and to meet them on their journey. (John Menadue)

    The following, with a minor edit is what he said to the bishops.

     

    “Before all else, we must not yield to the fear once expressed by (Cardinal) John Henry Newman: “… the Christian world is gradually becoming barren and effete, as land which has been worked out and is become sand”. We must not yield to disillusionment, discouragement and complaint. We have laboured greatly and, at times, we see what appear to be failures. We feel like those who must tally up a losing season as we consider those who have left us or no longer consider us credible or relevant.

    Let us read once again, in this light, the story of Emmaus (cf. Lk 24:13-15). The two disciples have left Jerusalem. .. They are scandalized by the failure of the Messiah in whom they had hoped and who now appeared utterly vanquished, humiliated, even after the third day (vv. 17-21). Here we have to face the difficult mystery of those people who leave the Church, who, under the illusion of alternative ideas, now think that the Church – their Jerusalem – can no longer offer them anything meaningful and important. So they set off on the road alone, with their disappointment. Perhaps the Church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas, perhaps the world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions; perhaps the Church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age. It is a fact that nowadays there are many people like the two disciples of Emmaus; not only those looking for answers in the new religious groups that are sprouting up, but also those who already seem godless, both in theory and in practice.

    Faced with this situation, what are we to do?

    We need a Church unafraid of going forth into their night. We need a Church capable of meeting them on their way. We need a Church capable of entering into their conversation. We need a Church able to dialogue with those disciples who, having left Jerusalem behind, are wandering aimlessly, alone, with their own disappointment, disillusioned by a Christianity now considered barren, fruitless soil, incapable of generating meaning.

    A relentless process of globalization, an often uncontrolled process of intense urbanization, has promised great things. Many people have been captivated by their potential, which of course contains positive elements as, for example, the shortening of distance, the drawing closer of peoples and cultures, the diffusion of information and of services. On the other hand, however, many are living the negative effects of these realities without realizing how they affect a proper vision of humanity and of the world. This generates enormous confusion and an emptiness which people are unable to explain, regarding the purpose of life, personal disintegration, the loss of the experience of belonging to a “home” and the absence of personal space and strong personal ties.

    And since there is no one to accompany them or to show them with his or her own life the true way, many have sought shortcuts, because the standards set by Mother Church seem to be asking too much. There are also those who recognize the ideal of humanity and of life as proposed by the Church, but they do not have the audacity to embrace it. They think that this ideal is too lofty for them, that it is beyond their abilities, and that the goal the Church sets is unattainable. Nonetheless they cannot live without having at least something, even a poor imitation of what seems too grand and distant. With disappointed hearts, they then go off in search of something which will lead them even further astray, or which brings them to a partial belonging that, ultimately, does not fulfill their lives.

    The great sense of abandonment and solitude, of not even belonging to oneself, which often results from this situation, is too painful to hide. Some kind of release is necessary. There is always the option of complaining. But even complaint acts like a boomerang; it comes back and ends up increasing one’s unhappiness. Few people are still capable of hearing the voice of pain; the best we can do is to anaesthetize it.

    From this point of view, we need a Church capable of walking at people’s side, of doing more than simply listening to them; a Church which accompanies them on their journey; a Church able to make sense of the “night” contained in the flight of so many of our brothers and sisters from Jerusalem; a Church which realizes that the reasons why people leave also contain reasons why they can eventually return. But we need to know how to interpret, with courage, the larger picture. Jesus warmed the hearts of the disciples of Emmaus.

    I would like all of us to ask ourselves today: are we still a Church capable of warming hearts? A Church capable of leading people back to Jerusalem? Of bringing them home? Jerusalem is where our roots are: Scripture, catechesis, sacraments, community, friendship with the Lord, Mary and the apostles… Are we still able to speak of these roots in a way that will revive a sense of wonder at their beauty?

    Many people have left because they were promised something more lofty, more powerful, and faster.

    But what is more lofty than the love revealed in Jerusalem? Nothing is more lofty than the abasement of the Cross, since there we truly approach the height of love! Are we still capable of demonstrating this truth to those who think that the apex of life is to be found elsewhere?

    Do we know anything more powerful than the strength hidden within the weakness of love, goodness, truth and beauty?

    People today are attracted by things that are faster and faster: rapid Internet connections, speedy cars and planes, instant relationships. But at the same time we see a desperate need for calmness, I would even say slowness. Is the Church still able to move slowly: to take the time to listen, to have the patience to mend and reassemble? Or is the Church herself caught up in the frantic pursuit of efficiency? Dear brothers, let us recover the calm to be able to walk at the same pace as our pilgrims, keeping alongside them, remaining close to them, enabling them to speak of the disappointments present in their hearts and to let us address them. They want to forget Jerusalem, where they have their sources, but eventually they will experience thirst. We need a Church capable of accompanying them on the road back to Jerusalem! A Church capable of helping them to rediscover the glorious and joyful things that are spoken of Jerusalem, and to understand that she is my Mother, our Mother, and that we are not orphans! We were born in her. Where is our Jerusalem, where were we born? In Baptism, in the first encounter of love, in our calling, in vocation. We need a Church that kindles hearts and warms them.

    We need a Church capable of restoring citizenship to her many children who are journeying, as it were, in an exodus”.

  • The election: economy and deficits. John Menadue

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

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

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

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

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

    Have we got a debt and deficit problem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     He then turned to the subject at hand.

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

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

    Oops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Our business failure in Asia. John Menadue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    There is a lot of depressing reading from this survey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • A regional refugee instrument. John Menadue

    Forgive me for repeating myself, but you might be interested in a presentation I gave on this subject in February 2012 (see below).

    We have talked a lot about the need for regional arrangements, but progress has been extremely slow. Our political system based on ministerial and departmental responsibility has failed us badly on refugee issues. A new approach  involving civil society – NGOs, academics and others is necessary to help us break out of the awful situation into which we have spiralled.

    A Regional Cooperation Framework

    International Association of Refugee Law Judges

    Melbourne 3 February 2012

     

    There are 33 million persons of concern to the UNHCR throughout the world. There are about 15 million refugees. With instability and failed states, numbers are likely to increase, including in transit countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

    For our neighbourhood there will be no satisfactory arrangement concerning refugees and asylum seekers and particularly boat people without regional cooperation. It is so obvious, except for those who want to play politics with the lives of boat people.

    I have chosen my words carefully in saying that there will be no ‘satisfactory arrangement’ rather than talking about ‘solutions’. For whatever we can accomplish together with our neighbours, asylum flows will remain chaotic and unpredictable. Desperate and vulnerable people will never abide by the ‘rules’ we seek to impose. But together with our neighbours we can do a lot better.

    The successful resettlement of over 240,000 Indochinese in Australia, initiated by our acceptance of over 100,000 refugees followed by orderly departures and family reunion, could never have occurred without regional cooperation. The same is true today. Regional cooperation in the late seventies and eighties was not pretty at times, but it worked. Regional countries provided temporary protection for 1.4 million people who fled after the fall of Saigon. Resettlement countries were able to catch their breath and then generously respond. Just imagine if 50,000 of that 1.4 million had arrived by boat in northern Australia. The successful programs of the Fraser Government could not have succeeded in those circumstances.

    But in dealing with our region we are often fair-weather friends, turning to them when we have a problem and then walking away. We also seem to have an unfortunate ability to project an air of superiority. Consider our record.

    • In 1996 Australia, together with other resettlement countries terminated the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese which had been a model of regional burden sharing. We left regional countries with thousands of difficult cases.
    • In Bali in 2002 we sought regional help over boat people. But when boat arrivals fell away, although the problem of asylum seekers who came by air remained, we lost interest. We revived the Bali process again in 2009 when the boat arrivals resumed.
    • The countries of our region are often criticised for their toughness towards refugees. But our regional neighbours carry a much heavier burden than we do. The number of refugees in Australia is minimal – 22,000 in 2010. But the countries of our region who have not signed the Convention put our performance to shame. Pakistan has 1.9 million refugees, Malaysia has 82,000 refugees with another 130,000 people of concern to UNHCR, India has 185,000 refugees, Nepal 90,000. In Bangladesh there are 229,000 people of concern to the UNHCR. Thailand has 97,000 refugees and another 550,000 people of concern to the UNHCR.
    • The High Court and others declare that we should not cooperate in processing in a country that has not adopted certain legal obligations, either under international or domestic law. This narrow view makes sensible policy extremely difficult considering that there is not a signatory country to the Refugee Convention in the arc from Yemen to Australia – the route used by almost all asylum seekers fleeing to Australia.
    • But the High Court’s legalistic view becomes more difficult to understand when we consider the performance of countries that have signed the Convention. China has signed the Convention, but regularly refouls North Koreans back across the Tumen River. PNG, a signatory, regularly refouls Irian Jayans back into Indonesia. Nauru obviously signed the convention in June 2011 for financial benefit. Japan, a signatory, collaborated with North Korea and the Japanese Red Cross to ‘repatriate’ about 90,000 Korean residents in Japan back to North Korea between 1959 and 1984. Most of them disappeared or escaped back to Japan.
    • We point to the plank in other people’s eyes, but ignore the brutality of our treatment of asylum seekers in detention centres in this country. By any reasonable interpretation our punishment and cruelty towards boat people in detention is a breach of the Refugee Convention. As the regional representative, UNHCR in Australia, put it before a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Australia’s Immigration Detention Network in August 2011, ‘Australia’s mandatory detention policy, that denies the right to lawful stay and any opportunities for self-reliance in community-based settings, and is punitive on the basis of the method of entry to Australia, is arguably in contravention of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention and would fall well short of these criteria. UNHCR’s concerns about the legal and severe and negative implications of long-term mandatory detention in Australia are long-standing and well-known.’ Australians seem much more vexed over what happens in Malaysia than how we punish and brutalise vulnerable and defenceless people in our detention centres.
    • Malaysia has made considerable progress on human rights which we choose to ignore. Together with ASEAN, Malaysia has embarked on the development of a human rights instrument, something that we have refused to do. In noting the decision to develop a Political and Human Security Blueprint in 2009, ASEAN ministers declared “Many kinds of human rights violations take place in South East Asia and a regional mechanism can help address this problem. First, the mechanism will ensure that ASEAN member states all adhere to international human rights standards. Second, the mechanism provides a common platform where ASEAN member states, being socio-politically different from each other, can articulate their human rights-related concerns. Lastly, with a human rights mechanism, the region can cooperate to address violations and collectively show its stand on human rights-related issues.’
      The much criticised Australia/Malaysian agreement was described by the Regional Director of UNHCR in Australia to the Legal and Constitutional Committee of the Australian Parliament on 30 September 2011 in the following terms. ‘Many persons of concern to UNHCR stand to benefit from this Program by having their status regularised. It would mean all refugees in Malaysia would, in addition to their registration and ID documents from UNHCR, be registered within the government’s immigration data base and thus protected from arbitrary arrest and detention. It would also mean that all refugees in Malaysia would have the right to work on a par with legal migrants in the country. This would also entitle them to the same insurance and health schemes as documented for legal migrant workers.’ Importantly, Malaysia does not punish boat people in mandatory detention as we do. For Malaysia the Agreement was quite remarkable progress. This is in a country that has the burden of a large number of refugees, is much poorer than we are and has a history of communal tensions. But the arrangement is not enshrined in law and so is discounted. This Agreement is also consistent with a decision of the Executive Committee of UNHCR in 1998 that recognised that irregular migration, people-smuggling and asylum flows are complex matters but concluded that return to a transit country like Malaysia may occur provided there are appropriate safeguards, accepted international standards and effective protection against refoulement. While such conclusions are not binding in law, they do guide the work of the UNHCR and governments in what are acceptable international standards of behaviour towards asylum seekers.

    With so few convention signatories in our region, any regional cooperation framework will have to be constructed with non-signatory countries. A regional framework cannot be conjured out of thin air. It must be built from materials available. In that regard, there is an instructive precedent in the 1984 Cartagena (Colombia) Declaration on Refugees. At that time, 150,000 central American refugees were being assisted in the region. There were another 1.8 million people who had fled across a border or were displaced in their own country by conflict.

    The Cartagena Declaration was adopted by a group of ‘government experts and eminent jurists’ from Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela.  Three of these countries were not signatories to the Refugee Convention in 1984 when the Declaration was agreed. The Declaration was a modest start, but it contained a number of important recommendations. Significantly the Declaration broadened the definition of a ‘refugee’ set out in the 1951 Convention to include those ‘who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalised violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order’.

    The Cartagena Declaration was further enhanced by the 1989 International Conference on Central American Refugees and the Mexican Declaration of 2004. Argentina (a non-signatory to the Refugee Convention) and Chile (a signatory) subsequently became parties.

    Not surprisingly, these developments have not been straight-forward. There have been restrictive interpretations of the Declaration and exclusion of some clauses by some countries. But the progress has been clear.

    There are also some lessons that we can learn about a regional cooperation framework in Africa where the numbers and the problems have been much greater than in Central America. In 2009, the African Union Convention for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons in Africa was signed. This African Union Convention was the first legally binding instrument on internal displacement on a continent-wide basis. It provides a comprehensive regional framework setting out provisions for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons.  

    In our region we must work actively with Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia if we are ever to find an enduring arrangement. If the Malaysian agreement offered anything, it offered the chance of accelerating the process of developing sensible, practical and robust asylum policies in the region. We need to strengthen the Bali process. It could lead to common asylum policies and practices in the region and ultimately to a regional protection instrument. Bali was initially focused on enforcement and criminalisation of people-smuggling, but has progressively shifted to humanitarian issues and population flows.

    Both UNHCR in its ‘10 Point Plan of Action for Refugee Protection and Mixed Migration (2007)’ and OXFAM in its ‘Asylum Seekers; The Way Forward’ have outlined the key elements of a regional framework, including effective screening systems, protection-sensitive reception arrangements, durable solutions including resettlement, alternative migration pathways and repatriation, together with targeted development assistance. A critical element in any regional protection framework is that countries who commit to action are not left to carry the burden of managing and maintaining irregular migrants for prolonged periods.

    There will be important roles for international agencies, jurists, local and international NGOs, regional governments and the Australian Government. Our government would assist by supporting the establishment of a well-resourced policy unit within the Bali Process Secretariat. That secretariat is a collaborative effort of more than 50 countries and international agencies. More strategically, Australia should target its humanitarian development assistance programs to benefit asylum populations in areas such as housing, health, jobs and education.

    If the Malaysian Agreement is viewed through a regional lens, it can become the catalyst together with Bali to start the process of building a durable protection system and delivering protection dividends for all asylum seekers as well as nationals in the transit countries and Australia.

    Second-track Dialogue and the Role of Jurists

    It is noteworthy that the Cartagena Declaration was adopted by a group of ‘government experts and eminent jurists’ from ten countries. The UNHCR described the inaugural meeting in 1984 as a ‘colloquium of experts’.

    Whilst the Declaration was not a treaty, its provisions became respected across the region. In particular the new refugee definition was incorporated in the legislation of most of the countries of the Americas.

    Could the International Association of Refugee Law Judges initiate a similar regional ‘colloquium’ of experts? I notice that your website states that your Chapter is keen to encourage judges and decision-makers from our region to join in biennial regional deliberations. You comment that it might be possible for your Chapter to develop into an Asian-Pacific Chapter. I could only encourage you to explore that as soon as possible. A regional colloquium could help break the log-jamb on regional cooperation and related refugee issues. I think it is clear that the current ministerial/departmental model, together with the politicisation of refugee issues has brought us to the present sorry position, where good policy outcomes are very difficult to achieve. We need to break out of the party-political prison.

    We need a more broadly based ‘track 2 dialogue’ in our region that can promote confidence and resolution of seemingly intractable issues. Such a dialogue would bring together a broad cross section of key players outside government with policy-makers, in their personal capacity as experts, to start the process of building a new dialogue and approach to both regional and domestic refugee issues. My comments here of course refer only to the regional issues.

    Such an approach as this is not something that Australian Governments have traditionally engaged in except at the periphery through ‘consultation’ or commissioning one-off enquiries into certain matters. However, if done well, this type of approach could be transformational in breaking down the misunderstandings and suspicions of different countries and groups. The lack of such an approach serves only to perpetuate and reinforce the current stalemate.

    The objective of this type of dialogue is to develop a shared understanding and a shared knowledge of the role of various countries and players on refugee issues. It can break down barriers and facilitate the development of a common understanding and knowledge of each other’s issues and concerns. This approach requires a long-term and sustained commitment by all parties.

    Ideally this approach should start modestly and then progressively bring together actors from a broad spectrum of regional interests including jurists and the UNHCR. It would include social policy and refugee and asylum experts as well as persons familiar with intelligence and border security issues. Such a wide span of interests can help create a less hostile environment and open the door to mutually beneficial policies without the suspicion that pervades the present approach. It would enable players outside government to influence new policy thinking and create the space for government officials to ‘think aloud’.

    Such an approach would need to have the implicit backing of government to allow officials to participate in their personal capacities.

    Would your Chapter be prepared to sponsor a regional ‘colloquium of experts’ in Kuala Lumpur?

    As I said at the beginning, no satisfactory arrangement is possible without active regional cooperation. We cannot do this on our own and neither can our neighbours. We need a Regional Refugee Instrument which whilst based on the 1951/67 Convention, recognises the particular problems of our region, one of which is that few regional countries are signatories to the Refugee Convention.

    Governments are strengthened when they work collaboratively with each other and with civil society organisations.  We must build trust in the region. Importantly it will mean working with countries, who almost without exception are not signatories to the Refugee Convention.

     

  • Least-worst option and minimising PNG. John Menadue

    In my blog of July 20, I referred to the Regional Settlement Agreement with PNG. With some reservations I described it as the least-worst option. Some were surprised at my comments. I wish it were otherwise, but in the toxic and poisonous political debate over refugees since John Howard’s time, we have had to face up to many unpalatable facts.

    The coalition has been the principal cause of this toxic situation. It broke with bipartisanship on refugees because it felt it was to its political advantage to focus our fears on the foreigner. I don’t think the coalition has genuinely wanted the boats to stop whilst ever it was in opposition. It was political manna from heaven to have the boat arrivals continue.

    The Greens have taken a “holier-than-thou” political position and have sided with Tony Abbott in the Senate on the key issue of the agreement with Malaysia. The Greens and many NGOs have wanted the government to undertake a political ‘mission impossible’.

    The government has failed to provide political leadership or rebutted the crude politics of the coalition. So paralysed by boat arrivals it has failed to develop effective ‘upstream’ policies to reduce boat arrivals on our doorstep. These upstream policies offer the best prospect of success. I will refer to them below.

    What triggered the RSA with PNG was that the government was told that on present trends, boat arrivals could top 40,000 to 50,000 persons a year. That projected figure of up to 50,000 would invite a tough response from any Australian government. Rightly or wrongly, the Australian community would just not cop it. That is a fact of political life. From time to time I wonder what planet some refugee advocates live on.

    I understand that all wings of the Cabinet and the ALP caucus – left, right and centre – agreed that boat arrivals at these projected levels could not continue. That doesn’t imply that the position taken on PNG is necessarily “correct”. But it does say a lot about the political situation when all factions agree.

    I have always been of the view that firm compliance/border protection is essential if we are to have public support for a substantial and growing humanitarian/refugee program. For example if we had today the same scale of intake that we had during the Indochina outflow, adjusted for our population increase, the program today would be about 35,000 p.a. rather than the present program of only 20,000. I was involved with Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee in what is now regarded as the most successful refugee settlement program in our history. My view is that it could not have been sustained if we had then had boat arrivals at the present or projected levels we now have. In the years when the Indochina program was at its peak, there were an average of ten boats a year and an average of 340 boat people a year. The high point was in 1977-78 when there were 43 boats and 1423 boat people. Today it is infinitely greater than that. Even with the small number of boat arrivals during the Fraser period we were very anxious to minimise publicity about the threat of boat arrivals. Furthermore Malcolm Fraser had Gough Whitlam and Bill Hayden broadly in support. It is very different today with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.

    But before I discuss ways to minimise the PNG arrangement, let me say something further about the PNG arrangement.

    • When Kevin Rudd announced the arrangement he said ‘many other steps lie ahead’. He was dead right, particularly now in light of the UNHCR response. The PNG arrangement must be improved and detailed in many respects. It must be regarded as work in progress. There will be no quick fix.
    • I said in my earlier blog that there were two key issues concerning the arrangement with PNG – they were effective protection and implementation. They remain the key issues to be addressed today and in the days ahead.
    • The PNG government obviously sees a financial and economic benefit in the arrangement
    • The bashing we had of Malaysia earlier over its human rights record and judicial canings is now being repeated in the bashing of PNG for its shortcomings.
    • Our sense of superiority in these matters is not very convincing when we consider the mote that is in our own eye; mandatory detention in Australia with suicides, self-harm, mental trauma, riots and burnings.

    How best to minimise PNG

    Together with others, I have been urging for over a decade two particular actions ‘upstream’ to reduce boat arrivals. Malcolm Fraser referred to these in his guest blog of July 15.

    The first is that we must share the burden of asylum seekers with regional countries. In cooperation with UNHCR we need to work urgently with Indonesia and Malaysia to establish regional processing centres in those countries. This would need to be on the understanding that those countries will safely hold asylum seekers for processing and that resettlement countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, will largely finance these processing centres and promptly agree to resettle those found to be refugees. These were the key features in the management of the Indochina refugee program.

    We have been far too slow in focusing on doing this through the Bali Process. Unfortunately regional countries often regard us as fair-weather friends, running to them when we have a problem and not working to share the burdens in a long-term relationship. We have spent a lot of our political capital in Indonesia on drug smugglers. This regional processing is urgent. Hopefully the meeting that PM Rudd and President Yudhoyono have agreed on can give regional processing a major boost.

    The second key to ‘upstream’ processing is to negotiate Orderly Departure Agreements with key source countries – Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. We did it with Vietnam in 1983 and brought 100,000 Vietnamese to Australia in safety over many years. ODAs provide a means for persons facing discrimination or worse within their own country to find an orderly way to come to Australia particularly if family members are in Australia. As the civil war in Iraq worsens and the end of Western occupation of Afghanistan draws near, we are likely to see many more people in those two countries facing a grim prospect. We have contributed to the breaking of society in both Iraq and Afghanistan with our own counter-productive military occupation. We will be obliged to help mend what we have helped break.

    The government has been paralysed like a rabbit in a search-light over boat arrivals when it should have been energetically pursuing through diplomatic means upstream processing to minimise pressure on our borders. It is essential now to minimise what we face with the arrangement with PNG.

    The RSA with PNG has been described as a ‘solution’. But it is not a solution. The best we can hope for is to manage the situation better in the future. Dealing with human beings facing a desperate situation will always be messy. They will not necessarily play by the rules that we determine.

  • Iranians – refugees or migrants? John Menadue

    In my blog of July 5, I compared the March quarter 2013 primary refugee protection visa rate for various nationalities and the finally determined grant rate.

    In the case of Iranian nationals the grant rate rose from 55% at the primary stage to 86% on appeal. That is 86% of Iranian boat arrivals were finally found to be genuine refugees in the March quarter 2013. Because of this I queried Foreign Minister Carr’s comments about Iranian boat people being mainly economic migrants.

    I have had to rely on the March quarter 2013 figures as they are the latest available from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. However it should be acknowledged that this March quarter Iranian cohort would be in respect of Iranians who had arrived six or twelve months before. The refugee determination process would normally take six to twelve months or more.

    There could have been a significant change in the profile of Iranian asylum seekers over the last six to twelve months or so.  The first indication of this is that the Indonesian Government has apparently been persuaded of the changing profile of the Iranian boat people by the Australian Government and has now refused to grant visas on arrival to Iranians entering Indonesia. Iranian nationals wanting entry to Indonesia will now have to apply for a visa in Iran or in a third country.

    The second factor is that Foreign Minister Carr has now been much more explicit about Iranian boat arrivals. He recently said ‘The advice I have got is that overwhelmingly the Iranians coming here are middle-class Iranians. They are from the majority ethnic and religious group in the country. And they are coming here as economic refugees. They are coming as economic migrants, not as refugees.’ He added later ‘The profile [of Iranian boat people] has changed’.

    The third factor is that undoubtedly the proportion of Iranian boat arrivals has increase significantly. In the June quarter 2012 they represented about 10% of boat arrivals.  According to media reports they now represent close to 40 % of boat arrivals. The actual numbers tell the same story, up from 352 in the June quarter 2012 to an estimated 3600 in the June quarter this year

    We will have to wait for further information on the refugee determination rates for Iranians and others. But I would not now dismiss completely, the comments by Foreign Minister Carr.

    But there is another way to address this issue if the profile of Iranian asylum seekers is changing.

    The population of Iran is increasing very rapidly. It has been referred to as a “population time bomb” The population is young. The middle class is also growing rapidly. It is well educated.

    Iranians have a lot of “get up and go”. My observation is they make very good migrants. They are determined people and perhaps for that reason they get up the nose of Immigration officials.

    They are repressed by the mullahs but probably more importantly the sanctions imposed by the west are biting hard. Not surprisingly with population and economic pressures at home many want to leave Iran.

    It must be possible to open a different migration pathway for eligible Iranians through some type of skilled migration program, perhaps a 457 visa or sponsored migration. Surely we have Australian companies that would be supportive. Iran is an important market for Australian wheat

    Perhaps the Government is considering this option if, as seems likely, the profile of Iranian boat arrivals is changing. Unfortunately the Government is so paralysed by boat arrivals it seems unable to focus on more creative and workable programs that would address an ever changing situation.

  • Asylum seeker saga continues. Guest Blogger: Marcus Einfeld

    The saga proceeds in relation to people seeking refugee asylum in our country. The latest contribution in these last few days is that we should seek changes in the UN Refugee Convention because circumstances have changed since it was introduced after WWII. The label “economic migrants” is being resurrected as a reason for refusing refugee asylum to thousands of people protected by the Convention.

    The idea that this situation can be dealt with by negotiating amendments to the Refugee Convention is fatuous. The chances of serious changes being achieved in the lifetimes of the currently displaced asylum seekers and their children, if ever, are non-existent. So is a new Convention. Many years of discussions in Geneva and elsewhere about the possible need to review the Convention in certain respects, in which I played a small part, actually produced proposals for its strengthening, not its weakening to relieve countries like Australia from its humanitarian obligations to provide rescue and relief of people fleeing terror and persecution, and yes, the consequent economic hardship that physical displacement always causes.

    Have circumstances changed in fact since WW2? Once again people are being compelled to flee their homes by brutal, indiscriminate, often racially based armed force.  Because of the immense dangers of not fleeing, they have to leave behind virtually everything they own thus placing them of course at economic peril.

    In western societies, people forced out of their homes by natural or even manmade disasters suffer danger and economic hardship but are supported by governments and public subscription until they can safely return and rebuild. Why should people in other countries fearing death or torture at the hands of armed gangs be any less worthy of support?

    In many decades of assisting refugees and displaced people in some truly awful camps in Malawi, Bosnia, Palestine, Bangladesh and other places, I have hardly met one whose first choice was not returning to their own countries. Home is what they know and love. The request they invariably make is not transportation to Australia or Canada but for help to go home, and support in the meantime so they can keep their kids alive and safe. Many sit and wait for years in terrible conditions. Some cannot wait any longer, as is entirely understandable. In the same situation, would we not move to save our kids from persecution and penury, even death on unseaworthy boats over vast expanses of dangerous oceans?  Demonise them if you must but some people smugglers in history have been heroes, like Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and the European priests and nuns and other ordinary citizens who hid Jews from the Nazis.

    Our recent and current leaders know this story very well. Historically we have a proud record in refugee rescue and relief. They, like we, know that refugees have made towering contributions to Australia’s progress and achievements in many fields. Unfortunately too few are cricketers or footballers or this discussion might not even be necessary. But in recent years our leaders have consistently failed us, and those who suffer, by failing to explain publicly why we as a decent people must help people in need. As a wealthy country of 25 million people, we are simply not going to be adversely affected by taking 25,000 [0.1%] more people over 5 years or more [a tiny number in world terms] who have nowhere to go back to and will, as did their predecessors, make eminently successful migrants and contribute to the growth and success of our country.

    No tidal wave is approaching, merely drips that can seamlessly be woven into our proud cultural tapestry. While ever the world is beset by violence, we cannot stop the boats, still less turn them around. Other solutions can and must be found. But that is another article.

  • Galahs and princes. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

    What was that about Australia and the Asian Century? The umbilical cords still tie us to the past. John Menadue

     From Walter Hamilton:

    I had a choice today on the ABC Online News website of reading a story about a galah plague in a Queensland outback town or viewing the ‘first pictures’ (breathless pause) of a certain baby born in London the other night. I chose the galahs. Earlier in the day, sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery, I kept my head down and read my Kindle book as Channel Seven’s breakfast show replayed a clip of London crowd noise at least three times. Shamefully, the television station ignored the galahs – though no less melodious and far more relevant to an Australian audience.

     Am I the grouch who stole Christmas for considering Australian media coverage of the so-called ‘royal birth’ (I thought we all came into this world naked of any pretentions) excessive, fawning and puerile? My irritation turned to annoyance – in cockatoo-terms, my yellow crest shot up – when I heard the ABC leading a radio news bulletin the other evening with a story about a certain young lady in London going into labour (I don’t mean Labor – that might be more in keeping). News? The most important news? Escapism as news? No wonder the galahs are massing Hitchcock-like. The noble profession of journalism – so finely represented by reporters embedded at a private hospital and gushing out ‘live crosses’ – has become the playground exercise frame on which the birds are perching. Galahs all.

    Now I am told I must join the guessing game about the likely name for this London infant: George or Philip or Bruce or whatever. As if it makes the slightest difference, except to tabloid magazine editors (joined now, it seems, by every other news organisation that, once upon a time, would have shown more editorial discrimination and balance) who glory in selling this cheap pap. I can already imagine the ‘Boom in George [fill in alternative] Baby Name’ stories being prepared for trotting out three months hence.

     Yes, I am a republican. I don’t wish Queen Elizabeth and her progeny anything but health and happiness, but they mean nothing to me and I wish they meant much less than they apparently do to my fellow Australians (though our Anglo-Saxon-dominated media may have seriously miscalculated the interest of the majority of Australians who aren’t). But I do not despair. The fact that the Windsors (the ‘royals’) are fodder for the celebrity circuit underscores their irrelevance for the serious business of defining Australian sovereignty and polity. Yes, the goings-on of the rich and would-be famous are a handy place to escape from the complex and trying issues that really command our attention and really shape our lives. No great harm in that. The mistake would be to think that any of this ‘Will he be George’ stuff carries any weight for Australia or its future. Let the British have their monarchy; but, please, let’s not humiliate ourselves by pressing our noses against the shop window, moon-eyed, because it is a closed shop ­– as anyone who has lived in the UK knows – and we long ago forfeited the price of entry.

     Listen to the galahs. They are screaming for us to wake up.

     

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