FeedsA rather peculiar definition of ’safe’ from the Mayor of Ipswich, who - after a rule was introduced to preventing new adult shops from being within 200 metres from churches or schools - said that, “I’m sure that the community now will be feeling a lot safer”, presumably concerned about a recent increase in dildo related crimes, or something like that.
My submission to the Preventative Health Taskforce’s Discussion Paper is available at the IPA website here.
This piece on the Rudd Government’s relationship with lobbyists and industry bodies says a lot about politics in Australia. As Katherine Murphy points out, Labor came to government with a desire to make lobbyists more transparent (which, presumably, would lead to their influence being less, or at least less pernicious).
But while they have made some moves in the direction of transparency (and will perhaps make further moves with the Faulkner Inquiry into electoral reform), by its policy actions and policy development processes, the new government has made lobbying vastly more important and more desirable than it was a year ago. As I wrote in a article early in December,
Big Australian companies will be quickly learning how important their Canberra lobbyists are under the Rudd Government: with a resurgent industry policy, an emissions trading scheme with more exceptions than consistencies, and a steady program of commercial bail-outs, it has been a long time since having the ear of a minister has been so important.
The Government can’t claim to be concerned about the influence of lobbyists in the halls of Parliament while making it impossible for companies to do business without them.
It isn’t the capacity to donate anonymously that encourages lobbying and money in politics. Corporations and special interest groups will only donate and lobby when they perceive a benefit from doing so. While such opportunities, money will flow into political parties by any means possible.
And by instituting the sort of policies above - the emissions trading scheme, elaborate industry policy, and corporate bailouts - the Rudd Government has only increased the opportunities firms have to gain from politics.
The end result is to make government more arbitrary. There is no consistent rule governing what sectors will be the recipients of government largess - “too big to fail” does not work with childcare organisations, and “too important to fail” surely does not apply to car dealers, no matter how elaborate their leasing arrangements might be. And the structure and exemptions of the ETS seems to be entirely without any rhyme or reason.
In the absence of such general rules, what benefits firms might be able to get from the government are governed instead by the particularities of the case - and it is lobbyists and donors who are there to argue those particularities.
Now, obviously, governance which is more particular than general is obviously not the invention of the Labor Party - there is absolutely no consistency that governs the regulation of the media sector, for example. But it is notable that the Howard Government often did decline to make “exceptions” - the Commonwealth never did bail out Ansett, for example, despite what was no doubt intense pressure to do so.
One wonders what the Rudd Government would have done when faced by the collapse of Australia’s second airline. (The Labor Party at the time was a bit confused.) It is that sort of wondering that makes lobbyists so important - the new government is arbitrary enough to make it worth opening a Canberra office and trying your luck.
No changes to the electoral act will be able to mitigate this incentive to donate and lobby political parties.
My Sunday Age column this week is on the difference between politics and the private sector: “Go on, mate, get out there and make a difference“.
The Victorian State Government’s Liquor Control Reform Amendment Bill 2008 wanted to excuse the Liquor Licensing director from the rules of natural justice. And the Liquor Control Reform Amendment (Enforcement) Bill 2008, which was introduced earlier this month, gives a new occupation of liquor compliance inspectors - whose qualifications are limited to a police check and being of “good repute” - the capacity to execute search warrants on liquor licence holders, unannounced, if they reckon that’s what’s best.
That, at least, is one of the many powers which the new position of liquor compliance inspector is granted under the bill. This role gives its civilian occupiers a fair few powers which should only be held by police - the ability to seize documents and equipment, apply for and serve search warrants, enter premises without warrants, and interrogate patrons. These tasks they will do with none of the training and subject to none of the administrative restraint of police officers. Delegating police powers to individuals who are not police is an invitation for abuse of those powers - and these are much more extensive powers than those held by public transport ticket inspectors.
But the basic problem with this new bill is the state government’s approach to late-night violence - treating it as a problem with liquor licencees rather than a policing problem. Spring Street seems to believe that violence is caused by soft licencing laws, rather than violent individuals. In this respect, the bill gets the response exactly wrong - we don’t need ‘liquor compliance inspectors’, we need more police, who, incidentally, already have the necessary legal authority to crack down on dodgy licence holders while they aren’t patrolling Melbourne’s streets.
I wrote about the relationship between violence and alcohol in Melbourne in The Age in September: “Get off the turps: idiots are the problem, not alcohol“, and this blog’s Nanny State category has much more on the State Government’s response to late night violence and alcohol.
Just the design of the government’s “Digital Economy Future Directions blog” indicates that there is a fair bit about blogging that the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digitial Economy don’t get. It’s almost impossible to navigate. One post has 50 pages of comments that you have to individually click on to read - there’s no option to view as single page for the comments, or, indeed, for the blog as a whole. In fact, the blog itself has a splash page - all text of course - which managed to confuse a few potential readers when the blog was first launched.
Ineptness is everywhere. Why, for instance, does the permalink for the splash page appear below the heading “Current blog topics”? And is there anything more amusingly bureaucratic than having your blog buried in a hierarchy that reads: “Communications and technology for business > Industry development > Digital economy > Digital Economy blog”? This blog is not just unfriendly to users, it’s aggressively hostile.
Sure, usability is an easy target. But the idea of the government having a blog is deeply silly too.
My Sunday Age column this week was a celebration of gluttony and individualist values: “Ignore meaningless public health studies? I’ll drink to that“
The article below was written last week but did not go to print due to circumstances beyond my control. So rather than leaving it to rot and eventually disappear into rarely visited regions of my hard drive, I might as well put it up here instead.
Cartoons aren’t people. It seems weird to have to say this, but that simple fact seems to have eluded Australia’s legal system.
Last week, a man was convicted in NSW of seeking out and possessing child pornography simply for the fact that he was found to have a set of satirical cartoons featuring of Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson having sex. The characters are, at least for the purposes of the Crimes Act, minors. After all, Bart is ten - as he has been since the TV series began in 1987. He also has just four fingers, he has gigantic, freakishly bulbous eyes, and he has hair that appears to be made out of skin. Oh, and he’s bright yellow.
In fact, last week was a week notably absent of legal common sense. Read the rest of this entry »
There are many theoretical justifications for a congestion tax - I go through a few of them here, and there are others - but it is not theory that makes policy, it is political and fiscal reality. The New South Wales government needs money, so it imposes a tax.
The Federal Government’s grand $6.2 billion industry plan for the automotive sector, A New Car Plan For A Greener Future, is full of important implications for policy and political economy (and quite a few ironies).
But I was more struck by this remarkable example of historical blindness in the Prime Minister’s introduction:
Our first car took to the road as early as 1897, when David Shearer demonstrated his steam-driven horseless carriage in South Australia. Yet it would be two generations before the first 48-215 Holden came off the line in 1948, and motor vehicle production began in earnest.
That’s a measure of how hard it is to establish an automotive industry, and a reminder of why Australian governments have dedicated themselves to ensuring that we remain a car-making country.
This is weird argument because at no time in automotive history was car-making more accessible to entrepreneurs than it was in those first few decades. In the period before the Great Depression, the industry was nothing like it is today. It was characterized instead by many small scale manufacturers, dozens upon dozens of models in countries that are no longer considered car builders. This collection of car catalogues from 1909 gives just a taste of the diversity of firms involved in the industry at that time in the United States alone - Atlas, America, Babcock, Baker, Benz, Buick, C.G.V., Cameron, Corbin, Courier etc etc etc.
It was only in the time of economic downturn that the industry was consolidated and the industry adopted the structure which we are familiar with in the mid-twentieth century. But in the first half of the twentieth century, entry into the automobile industry was easy, not hard. Australia’s lack of a automobile industry in those early decades was more likely because Australia just wasn’t suited - for whatever reason, economic, social, geographic - to be a major car manufacturer.
Of course, this is picking on an extremely minor point. But, in 2008, if it is going to take $6.2 billion before the Australian car industry can be ’self-sufficient’, then we still might not be destined to have a major automotive sector.
