Year: 2009

Buying Our Love With Our Money Is Just Not Sporting

The Sunday Age 27th December, 2009

Nothing excites state politicians more than having their government host major sporting events. Over the past decade, the Victorian Government has increased its self-imposed “cap” on subsidising major events from $35 million a year to more than $80 million. Why bother calling it a “cap” at all?

This mega event mania is not limited to the states: Australia’s bid for the 2018 or 2022 soccer World Cup is at $45.6 million. The bid now has its own special Commonwealth taskforce.

Roman politicians knew the most effective way to keep their citizens relaxed and quiet: lots of bread, lots of circuses. The Australian wheat industry has been almost completely deregulated over the past few years. So governments have doubled the circus money.

But politicians don’t like to admit they just buy our love. Instead they give lavish economic reasons why we need to subsidise mega events to the hilt: think of the tourism! The “eyes of the world”! The eleventy-thousand jobs!

The Victorian Events Industry Council believes our state’s mega events strategy is the key reason we have avoided the global recession. Just as helpfully, the Australian Grand Prix Corporation claims its event has singlehandedly provided the Victorian economy with $1.5 billion since 1996. (If so, one wonders why we do anything else at all.)

And federal Sports Minister Kate Ellis has argued that a World Cup in Australia would be an “important catalyst” for investment in needed infrastructure, such as roads, rail and ports” perhaps implicitly admitting that even governments need motivation to do their jobs.

Therefore, we are told, the Government must aggressively compete with other governments around the world to secure these guaranteed money-spinners.

Before it hosted the 2002 World Cup, the Government of South Korea claimed its economy would receive an $8.9 billion boost. It was being modest: its 2002 co-host, Japan, determined that the Japanese economy would be suddenly $24.8 billion richer.

As we know, Germany was the host in 2006. This explains why all Germans are trillionaries.

But here’s the shameful secret: the economic benefits of holding mega events are almost entirely fictitious. A broad survey of the economics literature published in Econ Journal Watch in September last year found an overwhelming consensus that these economic benefits are either insignificant or totally non-existent. In fact, there’s stronger agreement among economists about the uselessness of mega events and sports subsidies than there is about the benefits of free trade or the need to eliminate farm subsidies.

Certainly, the Victorian Government believes its mega events strategy has made this state $1 billion richer. They have studies! But these economic impact studies – machine-produced by pliant consulting firms and uncritically accepted by governments looking to justify their actions – rarely take into account the lost revenue from locals who leave when events come to town, or who avoid going out. Or that some money spent on tickets comes at the expense of other local entertainment. Or that there might be better, more productive ways to use the Government’s limited funds. After all, if one of the reasons we host mega events is to spur government investment in infrastructure, why can’t we just skip the events and build the infrastructure anyway? It would be a lot simpler. And much, much cheaper.

When the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, its supporters maintained the event would boost the US economy by $4 billion. But a 2004 study published in the economics journal Regional Studies found that the event actually cost the US economy between $5.5 billion and $9 billion.

And an analysis by the German Institute of Economic Research concluded that the country’s 2006 World Cup didn’t budge consumer spending at all.

Even the Sydney Olympics dismally failed to boost tourism, its ostensible purpose. We spent all this money “showcasing” Sydney to the world, yet tourism to NSW actually declined, relative to the rest of Australia.

Of course, there is a more obvious benefit we get from hosting mega events, albeit an intangible one. Having the World Cup played in Australia would be a lot of fun, particularly for people who are really into soccer.

So perhaps, after all the taxpayers’ money we spend on it and the burden it will place on our economy, it might still be worth doing. (Well, maybe: we could put it to a vote.) At the very least, we shouldn’t miss an opportunity to stick it to the Brits, who are also bidding for the next World Cup.

Give Or Take A Million, There’s Nothing To Fear

The Australian population might reach 35 million in 2050, according to Treasury’s latest intergenerational report.
Seems like a lot? Relax. That would make us just slightly more populated than Canada. This horrible possibility (As many people as Canada. Canada! Can you imagine it?) has been greeted with some angst.
In a speech in October, the Treasury secretary, Ken Henry, asked what seems like an obvious question: where will these 13 million extra people live? Clearly we haven’t got around to building their houses yet.
Every time we talk about population growth, we seem to have this same fear: Australia doesn’t have the infrastructure. It doesn’t have enough roads, public transport, and council swimming pools to cope.
But from a historical perspective, these concerns are pretty silly. Infrastructure development doesn’t pre-empt population growth, it follows. People build stuff when they need it.
Sydney’s population jumped from about 40,000 in 1850 to having 482,000 inhabitants at Federation.
That’s a growth of more than 1000 per cent in 50 years. But you’d have looked pretty stupid raving about the desperate need to control Sydney’s growth back then.
By contrast, the Treasury secretary asked how Sydney will cope with just a 54 per cent increase in the next 40 years. And deeply serious commentators shook their heads and stroked their beards and pontificated on the “challenges” of the future. Where will the train networks go? What sort of jobs will these new folks want? (I suspect robot repair, flying car maintenance, singularity co-ordination; you know, things like that.)
It must seem hard to imagine how the human race will cope with the growth of the future. But anti-population activists have been preaching doom for two centuries. We’ve always done fine. If you think this time is different, you need to ask yourself one question: why has everybody in the past been wrong?
My point isn’t to play down the tasks which will have to be completed if Australia is going to service the needs of all these new people. Stuff will need to be built, and some of that stuff will need to be built by government.
So it’s good that there will be 13 million new taxpayers around.
But anti-development lobbyists and activists are a big problem. Urban growth boundaries have to be extended and restrictions on development in inner urban areas relaxed.
Population growth requires governments that are willing to build needed infrastructure – governments which are able to stand up to those who don’t want infrastructure built in their backyards, and to those who don’t want people to have backyards at all. Right now, it seems that state governments are leaning on population concerns to avoid taking the blame for failing to do their jobs.
Nevertheless, the anti-population crowd is a pretty diverse bunch. Maybe you shouldn’t be judged by the company you keep, but they’re not all very sensible.
A federal Labor backbencher, Kelvin Thomson, responded to the population projections by saying that growth would lead to “global warming, the food crisis, water shortages, housing [un]affordability, the fisheries collapse, species extinctions, increasing prices, waste and terrorism.”
But we’ve had war, inflation, busy cities and expensive houses for pretty much ever. Dare I say that, even if the global population “stabilises”, they won’t stop.
And Kevin Andrews took the opportunity to urge the Government to slash immigration for the sake of population. Still, Andrews also wants to raise Australia’s birthrate “back to replacement levels”, so his concerns may be less about sustainability, and more about foreigners.
Those who oppose population growth because of environmental concerns are the most radical. Earlier this year the head of Sustainable Population Australia said Australia should adopt a one-child policy – you know, one like they have in the People’s Republic of China.
Anti-population activists believe that we should get rid of things like the baby bonus, but also have the government actively discourage us – even force us – from making too many babies.
This view is anti-human in the most basic sense. One of our most basic instincts is breeding. Declaring you want to regulate this instinct away is declaring you are against the selfish gene: the basic foundation of life.
Should we have a “population policy” at all? The only people asking for one seem to be those who want to cut it back or slow it down. Those who believe that humanity should keep exploring, discovering, creating, inventing and expanding don’t really feel the need.
Kevin Rudd responded to the population projections by saying that he believes in a “big Australia”, and (of course) “makes no apology for that”. The Prime Minister is right. An Australia of 35 million people sounds like a lot. But it’s nothing to fear.

Debunking The Mummy Party Vs Daddy Party Theory Of Politics

It might not seem like it right now, but there’s more to Australian politics than emissions trading schemes and “climate action”.

On the day after Tony Abbott defeated Malcolm Turnbull, one newspaper reported a punter saying the new opposition leader would be “alright, provided he does something about education, health and more police”.

Problem is: none of these are federal government responsibilities.

A cliché of Australian politics is that the Liberal Party is supposed to do better at a federal level than the ALP, because federal policy areas play to its strengths – the economy, defense, and border security. And Labor is supposed to do better in the states, because that’s where the responsibility for social policy lies, most notably health and education.

This is the “Mummy Party, Daddy Party” theory of Australian politics.

But many of the most interesting and innovative potential policy ideas the Coalition could readily adopt aren’t federal issues. They’re state ones.

Education vouchers, for example, would be a genuine education revolution. Vouchers would completely decouple the public funding of education from the public provision of education, giving students and parents the inestimable benefits of choice, efficiency and quality improvement.

Similarly, local community control of hospitals would really mix things up, but again, like education, health is supposed to be a state responsibility.

All this makes it more egregious that the Coalition’s state counterparts are struggling to differentiate themselves from the governments they are trying to oppose.

Federally, the choice for Liberal policymakers is therefore to either abandon one of their fundamental principles – federalism and the respect for Australia’s constitutional system – or leave these policy innovations to the states.

The Howard Government chose the former, culminating in the Commonwealth takeover of Mersey Hospital in 2007. The government’s aim for Mersey was laudable. Once Canberra took control, the hospital would actually be run by a local community trust.

Tony Abbott was of course the Minister who oversaw this, and in his book Battlelines he provides a defense of centralisation while proclaiming he’d like to do a hell of a lot more of it.

But the biggest problem with the Howard/Abbott approach to federalism is that it can backfire, and backfire badly. You might institute the most freedom-focused, liberal policy reform imaginable, but the next mob might have different ideas.

Take WorkChoices. It ended up being a dog of a piece of legislation, but the original intent of WorkChoices was to liberalise Australian workplaces. The only way the federal government could achieve that goal was by having Canberra assume responsibility for industrial relations.

All well and good – until you lose an election. Then you have to the pass the reins of government over to those who have sworn to reregulate the labour market, and now have the power to do so on a national level, all thanks to you.

Few voters know or care about which policy areas are the responsibility of which level of government. Local campaigns for federal seats often deal with comically petty issues.

In the recent federal by-election in Higgins, the Liberal candidate argued that the Ashburton police station was undermanned, and that Chapel Street should have more CCTV cameras.

It’s not their fault. Everyone in the federal parliament has, at one time, campaigned on issues which they have absolutely no control over. Voters seem to demand it – a young politician might want to talk about foreign policy and ballooning government debt, but a lot of people just want to hear about graffiti and street signs.

Nevertheless, the widespread lack of interest in Australian Constitution’s divisions of power does create a problem for the Coalition. At the federal level, it has to decide whether to trade away its commitment to federalism for the opportunity to push liberal reform.

Tony Abbott made this deal with the devil a long time ago.

But, in a strange way, the disregard Abbott has for the niceties of Australian federalism is the fault of his state colleagues. The centre-right has genuinely innovative policy prescriptions ready for advocacy and implementation.

But state Liberal oppositions have been extremely risk averse. State politicians wouldn’t propose a policy anywhere near as radical as Abbott’s local control of hospitals.

Right now, the “small target” strategy adopted by many state oppositions seems a lot better than the “colossal flashing neon target” strategy of the federal opposition.

Election after election has shown that just because a state government is demonstrably incompetent, that’s no guarantee voters will turn to the opposition for relief.

State oppositions are going to have to embrace innovative reform in health and education, at least if they want to present an alternative to ALP governments.

Australia has experienced two decades of federal reform and policy innovation. If the Liberal Party is going to lead the next reform movement, it will probably have to do so in the states.

Human Rights? Sorry, We’d Rather Strip-Search Children

What’s the point of having a charter of human rights if it just gets ignored?

The Summary Offences and Control of Weapons Acts Amendment 2009 is burrowing its way through State Parliament at the moment. Designed to tackle “knife violence”, this bill will give police an extraordinary new array of powers, including the power to fine people for being disorderly, for being drunk and disorderly, and for being just plain drunk. And police will be able to kick people out of any area if they think they might become disorderly.

Most disturbingly, the bill will give police the power to search anyone without needing to show any sort of reasonable suspicion they might be doing or carrying anything illegal. Searches can be done completely at random.

Oh, and children and the disabled can be strip-searched.

Sound a bit draconian? It is. In fact, the Government even says it’s a human rights violation – these police powers are contrary to its own 2006 human rights charter. Police Minister Bob Cameron told State Parliament the new bill “is incompatible with the charter to the extent that it limits rights”, but, well, too bad for rights, because “the government intends to proceed with the legislation in its current form”.

Cameron told The Sunday Age recently “people have a right to privacy, but they also have a right not to be stabbed”. That’s certainly true. But there’s no escalating knife violence in Melbourne. Police statistics show that in the past two years, assaults where a knife was brandished or used declined by 2.9 per cent. But even if they were increasing, would giving police the power to search anybody be the best solution?

Police can only do these arbitrary searches within “designated areas”. But the police commissioner designates the areas. He only needs to suspect there might be some disorder in that area, or has been in the past. I’m fairly sure some sort of “disorder” has happened in even the most bourgeois suburbs in the past year.

When you give police extra powers, you increase the chance that power will be abused. And the victims of police abuse will, more often than not, be minorities and youths. “Random” searches are never statistically random; they’re arbitrary. Police will be able to target whoever they want, without the restraint of having to suspect their targets are doing anything wrong.

But most importantly, if our human rights charter doesn’t prevent governments giving police the power to randomly search children, it can’t be much of a charter.

Politicians like to talk big about how they can protect human rights. The National Human Rights Consultation told Federal Parliament in September that an awareness of basic human rights should be enshrined in our education system and culture. And the debate over a federal bill of rights has covered such lofty issues as parliamentary sovereignty and the role of the judiciary in our constitutional system.

It’s a great debate. But if our experience of the Victorian charter is any indication, all those weighty arguments are moot. Victoria’s knife control bill shows that governments only respect human rights charters when they want to.

And this bill is hardly the only example. The Victorian charter claims “people have the right to hold opinions without interference” but this is hard to reconcile with the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, which makes “severe ridicule” of religious people unlawful. And how do we square Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls’ threat to shut down private men’s clubs with the charter’s claim we ‘have the right to assemble peacefully”? The entrepreneur who tried to set up a women-only travel company, just to be told it would breach the Equal Opportunity Act, might be sceptical she holds “the right to freely associate with others”.

The Victorian Government’s doublethink about human rights might be understandable if it was ignoring a pesky restriction on its powers imposed by a previous government. But Hulls was the one who pushed the charter through in the first place.

It seems human rights and governments are a marriage of convenience. If politicians find a more attractive political aim to pursue, our basic human rights are cuckolded and abandoned.

Small Government Does Not Mean Cheap

If you ever want to feel generous, have a flick through the recent press releases of the Commonwealth’s Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

You may not realise it but you recently purchased a low thermal mass kiln and waste heat dryer, and you kindly gave it to a company called Lincoln Brickworks in Wingham. It cost just over $300,000.

You also purchased an anaerobic digester, a new distillation column, a reverse osmosis plant and heat pump heating system, and a transcritical refrigeration system. These were wrapped up and shipped off to a few more lucky companies. You also helped a firm called Norvic Food automate its meat-processing line, which is probably much more violent than it sounds.

That’s how the Commonwealth Government handed out $3 million for the fourth round of a program called Re-tooling for Climate Change. Sounds like a worthy cause? Maybe. But there are 100,000 manufacturing companies in Australia. And less than 0.04 per cent of those will get any benefit from these grants. The Re-tooling for Climate Change program is not going to make much of a dent in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

One might even say the program is an extraordinary waste of money.

We all like to imagine the tax we pay only goes towards nice things. You know, things like teachers, judges, doctors and the maintenance of public parks. But let’s face the harsh truth. The Commonwealth Government spends one quarter of our total gross domestic product. And it fritters away a hell of a lot of it.

Take the $20 million we’re handing to a public relations firm to rebrand the entire country. Launching Building Brand Australia, the Trade Minister, Simon Crean, said: “We must find a better way to define our identity.”

No doubt the specifics will be nutted out over a series of long lunches, with many scoping documents and research papers exchanged. And if we’re lucky, it’ll end up being another government ad campaign. Sometimes it seems as if politicians only spend taxpayers’ money to see what colour it makes when it burns.

Both sides of politics are to blame for our massively bloated government. In his first few years as prime minister, John Howard made a valiant attempt to cut back some of the excessive spending of the Keating years.

But by the early 2000s, his government was accumulating policies, initiatives, programs, and, of course, public servants, with the gleeful enthusiasm you expect from conservatives who have made their peace with taxing and spending. In his speech launching his 2004 election campaign, Howard reportedly made spending promises at a rate of $94 million a minute.

But Kevin Rudd was elected vowing to reverse the extravagance of the Howard years, and, endearingly, to “take a meat axe” to the public sector.

Since 2007, the Rudd Government has hired another 7000 bureaucrats.

Kevin Rudd wants his 19 cabinet ministers to fix obesity, deliver broadband, halt climate change, spark innovation, hide internet porn, end cigarette smoking, abolish nuclear weapons and make petrol cheaper.

In October, it even released a Proposed National Strategy on Body Image. Such national strategies don’t write themselves of course, so the government instituted a National Advisory Group on Body Image.

We have government-funded industry innovation councils because politicians presume that industry wouldn’t be able to innovate without their help. We have the politicians handing out “community leadership awards” because, as we all know, people won’t help their communities if there aren’t prizes.

The report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, released this week, wondered why “none of the major public goods of Web 2.0 have been built by governments”. The founders of Twitter and Facebook didn’t rely on government funding. The task force’s confusion is apparent: don’t all good things require tax dollars?

But when you try to do everything, it’s hard to do anything well. In October, we gave $40 million to Australia’s space program. Did you even know Australia had a space program?

In a speech in late November, the Secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry, argued that Australia will probably never have a smaller government than it does now.

It’s important to realise that a small government doesn’t necessarily mean a cheap government.

We want to pay top dollar for the best public school teachers, the best doctors and nurses, the best courts, and the best law enforcement.

We’re failing this basic test. Our governments do a lot of things and do them as cheaply as they can get away with.

Still, Henry is right. Maybe Australia’s government will never be smaller. But could we at least try to make a little more focused?

Climategate: What we’ve learned so far

With Sinclair Davidson

The exposure of thousands of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is one of the biggest developments in the climate change debate for the last ten years.

The emails-now dubbed ‘Climategate’-reveal a pattern of behaviour. These emails describe attempts to subvert the peer-review process, refusal to make data available to journals, attempts to manipulate the editorial stance of journals, attempts to avoid releasing data following freedom of information requests, rejoicing at the deaths of opponents, and manipulation of results.

But more than anything this illustrates how politicised, manipulated and ultimately uncertain much of the global warming science is.

Statements suggesting ‘the science is settled’ can no longer be sustained. In an email from Mick Kelly (a reader with the CRU) to Phil Jones (director of the CRU) dated October 26, 2008, we find this gem, ‘I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.’ While on July 5, 2005, Phil Jones wrote: ‘The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.’ Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (and a lead author of the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Change), writes on 12 October 2009 that ‘we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.’ Trenberth went on to argue in a 2009 paper in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability that it is not enough to claim that natural variability accounts for the lack of warming in recent years – something specific must cause the decline.

Much has been made of an email by Jones where he says: ‘I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.’ (emphasis added) The word ‘trick’ doesn’t suggest anything untoward, rather being somewhat clever about some technique. But ‘hide’ is a problem.

Similarly concerning is the apparent destruction of data. The CRU has argued that a lot of their early raw data was destroyed because they couldn’t store it. That explanation is, unfortunately, all too plausible. We live in a world where as recently as 20 years ago, data would have been thrown away for want of storage space. But why then find a 2005 email from Phil Jones, which states: ‘If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone’?

The latest development is that the CRU have promised to make their data available-but we know that a lot of the historical raw data has been thrown away. This makes reconstruction and audit of the CRU research much more difficult. It is going to be impossible to reconstruct an unbiased temperature record based on instrumental observations.

There are numerous emails trying to alter the editorial line of peer-reviewed climate journals. This would be trivial, if it weren’t for the fact that peer-review is treated by the IPCC as the gold standard for academic neutrality. Attempts to subvert the peer-review process show the politicisation of the supposedly unbiased IPCC.

But the most concerning revelations aren’t contained in the emails. They’re in the files detailing the complexity and uncertainty of climate modelling. The contortions which CRU programmers have had to make to force their data into what appears to be a predetermined conclusion underlines just how little we actually know about past and present global climate.

Some of the comments made by programmers contained within the released files (see accompanying box) reveal how unstable the CRU model actually is. It is clear that the data underpinning the CRU’s model has been manipulated, manually altered and patched together. The data is incomplete, inconsistent, and-too often-contradicts observed temperatures.

This is not a trivial problem. It goes to the heart of the international debate about climate change. The CRU model is one of the foundations of the IPCC’s entire climate framework. If the IPCC is no longer able to rely on the CRU, it will be substantially less assured.

With what we have so far learnt from the CRU emails and documents, we can no longer be as confident in the IPCC-or, indeed, the popular view that there is a ‘consensus’ on climate change.

But these are just the early revelations from Climategate. What we will learn once the CRU releases its raw data-or at least, what data hasn’t already been destroyed-may completely reshape the global debate.

Climatologist (and target of many of the CRU’s most vociferous internal emails) Pat Michaels has said that ‘This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud.’ We haven’t yet seen how far the fallout from that cloud will reach.

IPA Review Editorial, December 2009

You don’t need an opinion about climate science – nor any opinion about the ‘need’ for action on carbon dioxide emissions – to observe that political action on a national or global scale will be totally futile to achieve the ambitious decarbonisation goals that activists claim are necessary to stop the world from boiling over.

Australian greenhouse gas emissions are 1.5 per cent of the global total. Our carbon dioxide emissions less again. The distorted, costly, lumbering emissions trading scheme which the government has failed to get through the parliament twice, could only reduce emissions at an extraordinary cost. The success of an emissions trading scheme relies on governments ramping up the price of carbon incrementally, and doing so for the next half century. But are future governments going to be eager to do so once the cost of emissions reductions becomes obvious?

A serious global deal is just as unlikely. Compare the international negotiations over carbon emissions to the international negotiations over free trade. Free trade is unquestionably in each individual country’s national interest, yet negotiations have dragged on for fifty years. Emissions reduction is manifestly not in any individual country’s interest, at least in the absence of a consistent, globally applied and enforceable agreement.

Air pollution is either a massive or a trivial failure to allocate property rights, depending on whether you are a climate change believer or a climate change sceptic; it is a failure regardless. But-taking for a moment the worst case climate scenarios endlessly publicised by Greenpeace, Tim Flannery, and the Climate Institute-even when action is necessary, effective action is not necessarily possible.

The idea that we could get anything resembling coherent action on climate change out of self-interested horse-trading that characterises the typical treaty negotiation is as naive as Ross Garnaut’s recent disappointment that the Rudd government didn’t adopt the ideal emissions trading scheme he recommended in 2008.

But there are great reasons for optimism. Free market environmentalists have long urged adaptation to climate change to be prioritised over attempts at mitigating or resisting climate change. The practical impossibility of global decarbonisation makes mitigation a white elephant. It’s just not going to happen.

Hence adaptation. We know that the biggest costs of climate change fall disproportionately on the poor. So the solution to climate change-or at least the problems caused by climate change-is economic growth. At the Institute of Public Affairs climate change conference in November, Richard Tol and the IPA’s Alan Moran examined the economic costs of a warmer globe against projected economic growth. It should come as no surprise that the latter dwarfs the former. In this IPA Review, Louise Staley looks at some of the technologies by which the developing world could rapidly grow.

Science can only be one input into policy-making. When formulating policy, there is much more to consider-politics, economics, and morality, to name just a few. We are retrospectively horrified by the progressive eugenics movement not because their science was incorrect, although it was, but by the values of those who adapted it into a political program. Climate change is not eugenics, but the idea that democracy has failed because it has not immediately enacted the policy recommendation of scientists should be treated with the disrespect it deserves. And, as Henry Ergas argues in this issue, this vulgar-authoritarianism isn’t just limited to climate change – it has sadly become a regular feature of policy debate in Australia.

Here’s What Isn’t Happening

There’s a lot going on in the Liberal Party at the moment, and, indeed, on the Australian right. But here’s what isn’t happening. There isn’t a burgeoning ideological split between conservatives and liberals. Climate change is not a stalking horse for social conservatism. And this isn’t the old guard rebelling against the new guard. In both camps there are conservatives and liberals, seasoned parliamentarians, time-servers and first-termers.

Neither is this any sort of “Howard’s revenge”. It’s a long bow to blame a schism within a party on the one leader who kept it together for a decade.

For the Liberal Party, the emissions trading scheme is a special case.

After the 2007 election, there was much discussion about the future of liberalism and the Liberal Party. And the debate largely framed in British terms. Should the post-Howard party saunter down David Cameron’s path of moderate economics and moderate greenism, or talk about high tax rates and inflation? (For the questions that debate raised, read James Campbell in the IPA Review in March 2008.)

Anyway, it turns out that there are a few problems implementing an Antipodean interpretation of Cameronism. There appears to have been an assumption that choosing to follow the UK model was a simple as flicking a switch – just a quick rejig of the Liberal Party’s press release template and bang, the Liberals are now greener than the ALP. Hence Turnbull’s recent use of “progressive” – a word that resonates among Cameron’s strategists, but is alien to the Liberal parliamentary party and its supporters.

Campbell’s piece shows that Cameron’s strategy was more than just adding a tree to the Conservatives logo. For one thing, he took his party with him, over a period of many years. And whatever success Cameron is enjoying cannot be isolated from a few pertinent facts: the Tories have been out of power for a decade, Labour has driven the UK basically into the ground, and the ideological ghost of John Howard is not as strong as the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.

But most importantly: It’s easy for a nominally small government party to be clean and green if all you’re talking is about bicycles. By contrast, the ETS is no small thing. The ETS Green Paper bragged that the government’s scheme would “change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy”. The scheme is arguably the largest economic change in Australian history — an emissions trading scheme is like plopping a entire second economy on top of the first one.

Malcolm Turnbull’s camp wants to follow the Cameron model. Nick Minchin’s camp is more diverse. Not all of the Minchin sceptics are sceptics of the science. Weirdly, Kevin Rudd got this one right. Sceptics include those who believe the science but think the scheme is irrevocably flawed (does anyone disagree with that?). And then there are those in the Minchin camp who even believe the world should take action on climate change, but feel that Rudd’s diplomatic strategy of legislating before Copenhagen is a little bit silly. You might not agree with it, but this is an entirely defensible position. The entire economy isn’t just a bargaining chip to be handed to our diplomats to go off and play with.

Most in the Minchin camp have little interest in climate science, but believe a Liberal Party cannot claim to be liberal if it supports one of the biggest government interventions ever considered by the parliament. And with its extraordinary concessions, the ETS doesn’t even have the redeeming quality of being able to achieve its purported goal: substantially reducing emissions. It doesn’t even work as an insurance policy. It has negligible coverage and a massive premium. The ETS is, simply, a massive tax/corporate-welfare churn. Its economic cost will inevitably be substantial – doubly so in the absence of a global deal – and the Minchinites are betting that cost will be a significant political issue in future elections.

So before a global deal, for many in the parliamentary Liberal Party, opposing the ETS seems like a no-brainer.

Hey Mr Garrett! Time To Get Off Our Arts And Do Nothing

If everything goes to plan, soon Australia will have its very own national cultural policy.

This is great news if you have been concerned that Australian literature, TV, music, film, theatre, painting and performance art is a bit, well, aimless. Sure, cultural products inform and reflect our views of ourselves – but so what? What’s the end game? Think of what our culture could achieve if it had a policy!

Announced recently by Peter Garrett, what the national cultural policy lacks in ambition, it more than makes up for in discussion points.

Right now it’s just a website, described pompously as a “national conversation”. But the publicly funded arts community has wanted some sort of grandiose policy for a long time. They have always assumed that “national policy” is code for “buckets of cash”. They’re probably right.

According to the Arts Minister, culture does pretty much everything – it creates jobs, attracts tourists, harnesses “understandings” (yeah, I’m not sure what that is either) and lifts our fragile economy. So in Garrett’s opinion, it should be co-ordinated by him.

But when government mates with culture, it breeds bureaucracy. Unless there is a big change in direction, a national cultural policy could easily make this worse; filtering Australia’s artistic output through yet another mesh of subsidy and red tape.

The Commonwealth Arts Council talks about culture as if it can be reduced to key performance indicators – “strategic priorities”, “aims”, “outcomes” and “outputs”. Let’s say you want a few grand for your interpretative dance version of An Inconvenient Truth. I suspect the government would quite like that idea. And once you slog through the 11-stage grant application, provide the dozens of pages of supporting material, CVs and letters of support, you’ll find out if they do. After you successful defend your idea at an assessment panel meeting, of course.

Certainly if we’re going to give money to artists, we might want to run a background check on who we are giving it away to. But government policy seems be aimed at taming our wild culture, burying it in a pile of red tape, and keeping it alive with taxpayers’ money fed through a tube.

After all, it isn’t just bad luck that Australian movies are routinely commercial failures. Filmmakers have realised it’s more important to please funding bodies with depictions of the hollowness of contemporary society than it is trying to please audiences. (I mean, come on, not every movie has to expose the “dark undercurrents of suburbia”.)

But there is an alternative. If Peter Garrett really wants his national cultural policy to make a difference, he should adopt just one principle: Australia’s culture can look after itself.

Which culture would you consider more vibrant: one in which artists are entrepreneurs – testing their work against an audience and in a competitive marketplace, or one that shepherds them into a departmental grant application process?

The entrepreneurial spirit should be as central to the art world as it is to the economy.

It’s not like the marketplace can’t produce culture. Even high culture can be popular. Nearly 40,000 people came to see Andre Rieu’s Docklands show last year. The National Gallery of Victoria puts on exhibitions all Melbourne lines up to see. And while the largest share of Arts Council funding is spent on expensive things such as orchestras, there are privately funded orchestras around the world. Profit-making culture just takes an entrepreneurial passion.

Anyway, there has never been a more futile time to try to define and direct a national culture. The very the idea of an “Australian” culture seems outdated. The internet has put the globalisation of culture into hyperdrive. Most importantly, it has allowed us to choose cultural products that are important to us as individuals, not as a “nation”.

Culture comes from the meanings that individuals derive from art, dance, theatre or film, not from a departmental funding matrix that allocates money to politically favoured art forms. So let’s scrap the idea of a national cultural policy, and embrace our 21 million individual cultural policies. A vibrant culture will come from what people want, not what the Commonwealth funds.

The Meter’s Running As Canberra Eyes States’ Powers

Reorganisation, wrote journalist Charlton Ogburn, is a wonderful way of creating the illusion of progress.

So last week the Federal Government decided that we need “nationally consistent” taxi standards. It is concerned that the geography and language tests given to taxi drivers are slightly different in Victoria and, say, Queensland.

For 108 years our federal system has been trying to divvy up tasks between the Commonwealth and the states. In Canberra’s view, it’s time to give a little bit more of that up: those states can no longer be trusted with taxis.

It’s trivial, but hardly the only trivial issue the Federal Government wants to take over. Disability parking permits is another. Not only does the Commonwealth want every state to have the same eligibility rules, but even the design of parking permits needs to be indistinguishable from Broome to Launceston.

But why? It’s hard to think of a less national issue. Permits from one state are completely and unambiguously recognised in other states. So couldn’t Canberra just leave that one for them to sort out? But no, the Federal Government wants to make sure every permit includes a Southern Cross logo and map of Australia, just in case someone wants to take their disabled parking permit overseas.

Perhaps it would be best if we just cut out the middleman and let the United Nations handle it.

Not everything the Federal Government wants to take over is so petty. In July, the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission argued that the Commonwealth should be responsible for large swathes of the health system.

We could go on. Kevin Rudd wants Canberra to be in charge of urban planning. The Preventive Health Taskforce wants Canberra to set bottleshop opening hours. The Greens want Canberra to be in charge of pokies licensing.

But where on earth does everybody get this faith in the Federal Government? Why does everybody assume Canberra will succeed where states have failed? The Commonwealth Government has, after all, racked up its fair share of failures.

There’s hardly a more obvious example than the Education Revolution. The Government’s election pledge to give every school one computer per child has, after two years, delivered just 154,933 of the 820,000 promised. At this rate, it will be a promise for the next election too.

Failure abounds in Canberra. It was the Immigration Department that lost Cornelia Rau, and kicked Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon out of the country. And remember GroceryChoice?

Nevertheless, most Federal Government absurdities come out of the Defence Department. Recall the Collins-class submarines. Or the joint strike fighter program, now two years behind schedule. Defence is not even sure it wants it any more.

Oh, and each plane is now twice the price. Don’t dwell on it too much, but in 2005 the army apparently ran out of ammunition.

Nevertheless, dragging policy away from the states – let’s call it Canberra-isation – seems to have become for many federal ministers the whole purpose of going into politics in the first place.

In a way, it’s our fault.

Young politicians might run for Federal Parliament because they have ideas for foreign relations, or a grand scheme for economic policy. But local campaigns always come down to local issues. Aspiring foreign affairs ministers will quickly find themselves campaigning on issues such as graffiti vandals, or lights at a local intersection.

Terry Moran, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, threatened last week that if the states did not do more of what Canberra wants, “the future direction of the federation will change” – the Commonwealth will seize even more stuff.

State and territory ministers are now preparing for the meeting of the Council of Australian Governments on December 7.

If Moran’s comments are anything to go by, they should expect a haranguing about how their states are insufficiently obedient to Rudd. But as they sit down opposite their Commonwealth counterparts next month, the states need to ask themselves one simple question: why should we listen to these clowns?