Year: 2009

Big Government: A Love Story

Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story “takes aim” at the capitalist system, as a few dozen supportive reviewers have mindlessly written. But that’s a tough metaphor to uphold. It’s easy to aim when you don’t care what you hit.

Moore is interested in Big-C Capitalism. So after a few stories of families having their homes foreclosed, Moore reveals his thesis.

“Capitalism is a sin”, he gets a series of priests to say darkly into the camera; it’s “obscene” and it’s “radically evil”. Capitalism is a secular “crime” and spiritually “immoral”.

Another priest reflects that he is “really in awe of (pro-capitalism) propaganda”, which is funny to hear from a minister of religion. And a bit rich: one sequence in Moore’s film describes the somewhat icky practice of firms taking out life insurance for their employees, which he tastefully illustrates with lingering shots of a grieving family, as if insurance policies cause cancer.

Moore has always been an awkwardly self-conscious working-class man. In this instalment, he is also God-fearing. And his NASCAR-chic populism is now littered with calls to “people power”, which, coming from a multimillionaire, are as authentic as the Spice Girls’ “girl power”. It’s all so laden that there’s a good chance he wants to run for office.

In a bizarrely misdirected appeal to authority, Moore quizzes the off-Broadway actor Wallace Shawn, who has “studied history and a bit of economics” about what he reckons is the problem with capitalism. (The audience Moore hopes will see his film know Shawn from The Princess Bride. But those who will actually see it know Shawn from My Dinner With Andre.) Shawn’s answer isn’t the point: what possible value could his view add?

But Moore’s argument is even more misdirected. He’s justifiably outraged at the bailouts and the way they were pushed through Congress. Who isn’t? He’s angry about the favour-trading relationship between Wall Street and Washington. Again, who isn’t?

But that’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism - a political system with a veneer of free enterprise but where a network of lobbyists, bureaucrats and politicians use the political system to achieve private goals. Moore would like to add a fourth movement to this symphony - the unions. But unless you think of unions as omniscient and beneficent guardians of the public good, doing so wouldn’t change the corporatist dynamic.

So when he describes a real outrage - like a corruption case in Pennsylvania where a corrupt judge funnelled innocent kids into a privately run juvenile detention centre - he doesn’t quite understand who the bad guy actually is: the politicians and administrators who let it happen. (After this case, two judges face charges of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, extortion, bribery, and federal tax violations. Corruption is, after all, against the law.)

And who to blame for the bailouts? The firms that ask for them, or the politicians that grant them?

For Moore, Barack Obama’s election is a spiritual catharsis, an explosion of people power, and a sudden break with the capitalist nightmare. But the outrages he spent 90 minutes detailing have, if anything, gotten worse under the Obama administration. The employment pipeline between Goldman Sachs and Treasury has is even busier. And Obama has graduated from bailing out banks to bailing out car companies. For Moore, when Bush did this sort of thing, it was capitalism. When Obama does, it’s democracy.

In Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore can’t quite get himself to the problem. If he did, he’d have to admit that the big activist government of his dreams is actually the cause of his nightmares.

Vegetarians’ Meat Tax Plan Just A Load Of Hot Air

This week British economist Lord Stern called for the world to get off beef and on to broccoli: go vegetarian for the planet. Methane – burped, belched and otherwise released by cows in impressive amounts – is around 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

So the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review into global warming told Britain’s Timesnewspaper that the climate change meeting in Copenhagen would only be a success if it led to skyrocketing meat prices. Otherwise, Stern predicts, climate change will turn southern Europe into a desert and there will be ”severe global conflict”.

Stern isn’t alone. Also this week, Peter Singer called for a 50 per cent tax on all meat. According to the Australian vegetarian philosopher, cows are pretty much like cigarettes: they’re bad for you and smelly. They should be taxed accordingly.

It may come as a surprise, but there are flaws in this plan. We could all go vegetarian tomorrow if we tried – good news for the vitamin supplements industry. But a world without meat would be a much sadder world. And at best we’d be making a marginal change to global emissions.

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 85 per cent of methane from cattle is produced by cows in the developing world, because they have poorer diets, which produces more methane. And many of those cows aren’t just hanging around in paddocks waiting to become tasty beef – they’re work cows. India’s 283 million cows aren’t being eaten.

One environmentalist gripe is that cattle raised for human consumption themselves consume vast amounts of food that could go instead to humans. But grain-feeding produces less methane than feeding on wild grass. Purpose-grown feed is, at least in some respects, more environmentally friendly.

So: cow farts are a surprisingly complex issue.

It’s easy for Stern and Singer to urge the developed world to change its ways. But it would be much harder – and would get them invited to far fewer cocktail parties – if they decided a good use of their time was haranguing poor Indians into giving up their livestock. Stern and Singer are proposing little more than a green indulgence for the wealthy.

Anyway, practical problems aside, there’s something obscene about the idea that governments should deliberately make basic staples of life more expensive.

After all, Stern and Singer’s meat tax is hardly the only tax on food being proposed. Public health activists are adamant that the only way to get people to shed their ugly kilos is by making sweets more expensive.

Taxes on food have been among the most punitive in history. Dissatisfaction with taxes on salt was one of the causes of the French Revolution. Gandhi marched against the British salt tax.

We forget just how far we’ve come. A few centuries ago, getting hold of affordable and edible meat was like playing roulette – if the roulette wheel was made of parasites and salmonella.

Early cookbooks spent almost as much time teaching household chefs how to identify spoiled meat as they did describing recipes. The Compleat Housewife, published in 1727, told readers to prod carefully at beef in a marketplace. If the meat sprang back, it was fresh.

Admittedly, there is a positive spin you could put on the proposals to tax our food consumption: finally, the human race is so rich, so comfortable, that we can start making it a bit harder to get our basic needs. But food taxes will disproportionately affect the poor. If meat was as expensive as environmentalists would like, the rich wouldn’t significantly reduce their wagyu steak intake, but families on a tight budget would certainly eat less three-star mince.

And (need it be said?) hunger caused by inadequate or low-quality food supplies is still a major problem in the developing world. Just this year, in the Central African Republic, malnutrition caused by limited meat has created a humanitarian disaster.

These contemporary crises should remind us that humanity’s greatest struggle has been against malnutrition and starvation. Not for nothing did the Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel title his groundbreaking study of recent global history The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.

Since 1950, the global population has increased more than 150 per cent. But, in real terms, the price of food has sharply declined in that period. Basic commodities such as grain and vegetables are 75 per cent cheaper than they were 60 years ago. And it’s the potent combination of rapidly expanding economic growth and technological change that did it.

But we shouldn’t forget how hard it was to get where we are today. Cheap food is our inheritance as human beings.

Being Tough On Refugees Is Pretty Weak

We’re all just like Pavlov’s dogs. Last week, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave the Pacific Solution a quick polish, rebranded it the Indonesian Solution, and immediately everybody started yelling at Philip Ruddock.

Yep, if it wasn’t clear by now, ideological and partisan divisions over asylum seekers and boat people are deeply entrenched. But here’s the problem. Even from a liberal, libertarian or even conservative perspective, the case for being tough on border control just isn’t that strong.

Immigration is a good thing, for migrants and for the places migrants go. Aren’t people who are willing to risk their lives on boats propelled by motorbike engines to get to a society with social and economic freedom exactly the sort of people we want in Australia? (I can think of a lot of Australians I’d rather kick out.)

The sanest case for strict borders is a paternalistic argument that refugees need to be deterred from making the dangerous journey by boat to Australia. But it’s not convincing. Isn’t the danger of the journey a pretty significant deterrent itself? Refugees risk their lives and permanent separation from their families – a decision normally made under pain of imminent death.

So exactly what are we trying to deter? Refugees aren’t just going to quit being refugees.

It’s not clear whether deterrence even works. Australian refugee volumes correspond to global and regional refugee trends. That this recent surge of refugees is mostly Sri Lankan is because of the war there, not because of the Migration Amendment Bill 2009 (which hasn’t even been passed in Parliament).

But most damningly, deterrence leads to some atrociously illiberal, inhumane policies. Taking deterrence to its absurdly logical conclusion, in 1992 the federal Labor government decided to bill refugees the cost of their detention. Nobody in a liberal democracy should be locked up and charged for the privilege. To its enduring credit, the Rudd Government eliminated this punitive measure in September.

Still, Rudd seems eager to depict his Government as tough on refugees. The idea that we should punish those who do make it to Australia alive, to dissuade others from trying, quickly descends into outright cruelty.

There’s a deeper issue at stake about asylum seekers than just migration levels. Boat people force us to confront the classic opposition between the nation state and the universal rights of the individual.

John Howard’s line – that his government would choose who came to the country and the circumstances in which they came – has become the ultimate expression of state sovereignty and the supremacy of executive government. His doctrine has been implicitly shared by Australian governments for a century.

Governments have treated immigration as a kind of fruit and veg shop, where they can rifle through the available human produce to pick only the ”best” foreign stock. Fifty years ago, it was white migrants. Now it’s skilled migrants – the unskilled are left for other countries.

Obviously we’re a long way from the liberal ideal of global free movement of people to complement global free trade.

Paul Kelly’s book, The March of Patriots, quotes a Howard government official, reflecting on the navy’s policy of taking stranded people to the nearest port, saying ”the maritime industry in Australia [has] essentially a Left attitude” – as if the moral mandate to protect lives above all else was just some silly leftie thing, like peace studies.

But individual liberty stands implacably opposed to the sort of nationalistic state sovereignty which has been the foundation of our immigration and refugee policies. Those who place liberty at the front of their politics should be against harsh border measures, not for them.

According to some, there are 10,000 refugees massing on foreign shores, just waiting for the right moment to sneak across the ocean. Putting aside the dubious evidence for that figure, yes: 10,000 people would be a lot to squeeze into a living room. But the Australian continent is quite large. The settler arrival figures increased by nearly that amount just this year – from 149,000 in 2007-08 to 158,000 in 2008-09 – and we hardly heard a peep from anybody.

So if 10,000 refugees is the worst-case scenario, it’s not that worst a case. With 15.2 million refugees worldwide, the few thousand who make it to Australia are pretty insignificant. No one has a moral obligation to remain in the country of their birth. And no country has a moral right to deny anyone the chance to improve their living standards, or save their own lives.

Meet The Nanny Spider: It Wants To Wrap You Up In Little Rules And Eat Your Life

Ignorance of the law is no excuse. So here’s a bunch of things you can’t do without council approval.

You can’t sit in a chair on your nature strip. (The council will impound your chair.) Nor can you play with toy cars on your nature strip, according to the City of Maroondah’s Proposed Local Law No. 8.

You can’t set up a lemonade stand. (The stand will be confiscated.) Nor can you put lemonade on a tray and offer to sell it.

Well, you could; but you’d have to provide proof to the council that you possess public liability insurance of at least $10 million. You’d also need to submit a Temporary Food Event Application and Footpath Trading Permit to the council, as well as an Events Food Safety Program to the Department of Human Services – having familiarised yourself with a 40-page document detailing the protocols for cleaning, producing, acquiring the ingredients for and properly labelling your lemonade. (This is no doubt why we don’t have a vibrant street food culture like America.)

You can’t hold a street party. You can’t take a half-empty bottle of wine or spirits home from a dinner party, unless your journey home avoids footpaths, parks or travelling on roads. (Drink it all at the party. That’ll learn ’em.) You can’t busk without approval. If you have approval, you have to stay mobile. You can only play Billie Jean on your keytar for an hour at a time in any one spot.

That’s a lot of rules and paperwork for what most people would consider basic community interaction. So is it any wonder we don’t know our neighbours?

Australians have talked a lot about the nanny state since the Rudd Government came to power. And not entirely fairly. Many proposals to tax and regulate fatty food, booze and smokes were considered during the Howard years. (An endearing quality of the Howard government was they didn’t actually do much.)

But when we look at all the petty regulations that increasingly govern every aspect of our social and community life, it becomes obvious the nanny state is about more than just taxing alcopops.

The nanny state is a vast array of rules and regulations that filter our social lives though rough bureaucratic webs, and patronisingly hold our hands through the most basic of tasks.

Government advertising campaigns are morphing from information dissemination to schoolmarmish mollycoddling – just look at those WorkCover posters telling us to get health checks, or those “championship” violence ads that seem to believe the best way to communicate with young adults is through condescension.

There is no facet of life the Government doesn’t want a stake in. Our communications regulator has been trying to figure out why some people don’t use the internet or mobile phones much. The answer was revealed in a report released on Thursday: they don’t want to. The report says these people are missing out on the benefits of technology, but come on. If people don’t want to download iPhone apps, why on earth should anybody, let alone the Government, care?

The Federal Government has announced an expansive “Golden Guru” program, which seems to be a sort of real-life social networking for seniors. And every Victorian council puts out a brochure or has a spot on their website encouraging us to be good neighbours – some even recommend topics for small talk.

But at the same time these governments seem to be trying their darndest to stop communities forming. In 2009, the winners of the Premier’s Community Volunteering Award have to be more than just civic-minded; they also have to be really good at filling out paperwork.

This stifling of social interaction is a worldwide phenomenon. In the UK, more than a decade of Labour government has left a moribund nation struggling under the weight of bureaucracy.

It was brought into stark relief this week when the British Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills accused two best friends who babysat each other’s children of running an “illegal child minding business”. They determined that taking turns constituted virtual payment for services. Then they told the mothers surveillance teams would be monitoring the families to ensure this regulatory breach did not occur again.

Pretty much the same thing happened in Michigan: a woman was fined and threatened with jail for minding children waiting for the bus in front of her house.

Australian community hasn’t been totally regulated away yet. But it’s disappearing. Unless governments drop their nanny-first attitude, we’ll lose it.

Climate Trumping Needs Of The Poor

At one of those weird, celebrity-laden events they have every few months in New York, Hugh Jackman announced last week “climate change and poverty are inextricably linked”. World leaders furiously nodded their heads in stern agreement.

In a basic sense Jackman is right. Rich societies can cope with changes to climate. Poor ones cannot. Subsistence farmers will struggle more with any global warming than accountants in suburban Australia. But for all the talk of climate aid and sustainable self-sufficiency, the developing world needs to do just one thing to successfully adapt to climate changes: get on with developing.

But the political demands in developed nations for inspiring, grand, historic, operatic action on global warming are putting those stodgy old targets of economic growth in developing countries on the backburner.

Jackman inadvertently gave an illustration of why. Admitting his wolverine claws and mutant powers would be ineffective against climate change, he told of an Ethiopian coffee farmer converting methane from his cows into gas for electric lighting.

It’s a great story. It’s wonderful to hear of anyone using their resources more productively, particularly where those resources are at such a premium. But it misses the point. A greater thing to celebrate would be the coffee farmer being connected to the power grid, or wealthy enough to get decent medical care or education. Or when he is wealthy enough to pay others to generate electricity for him.

Industrialisation and economic growth in Africa and Asia no longer seem a universally agreed goal. Instead, some see it as a potential threat, if not carefully supervised by the West. If growth is to occur, aid agencies believe it must follow a strictly delineated path of sustainability and low emissions.

This new attitude has some dire consequences. According to a new study by World Growth, a non-government organisation, the share of aid directed to economic growth has fallen from 28 per cent 10 years ago to just 12 per cent today. Instead, aid is being focused on social and environmental aims.

The more priorities, the less likely anything will be done. It’s not thrilling to hear the United Nations, the European Union and many national governments repackaging foreign aid as “climate aid”. The EU plans to offer the developing world €15 billion ($25.4 billion) of climate aid as a sweetener to play ball at Copenhagen. This builds on the host of new programs and agencies distributing “climate-specific aid” such as the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism and Global Environment Facility, or the World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit and Carbon Investment Funds.

With sufficient economic growth, the developing world can cope with the stresses of a changing climate and any number of the other stresses: chronic malnutrition, infant mortality, illiteracy and many diseases we believe to be “tropical” today, such as malaria, but are the consequences of extreme poverty. These problems could be exacerbated by climate changes, but they are problems right now. Only wealth can alleviate them.

From an environmental perspective, we should push for rapid economic growth in the developing world. Wealthy societies are cleaner; the technology to reduce pollution is as much a product of economic growth as the pollution is in the first place. First World factories are cleaner, more efficient, and healthier for their workers than Third World factories. Local industrial pollution in the developing world can be devastating.

Poverty is a dog of a problem. And foreign aid has always been an imperfect way to fixing it. Aid has congealed bureaucracies at the expense of the poor and funded the lavish lifestyles of oppressive dictators.

Nevertheless, a few years ago the theory and practice of overseas aid was getting somewhere. Encouraging development was not as simple as funnelling money from treasuries in the First World to treasuries in the Third World.

More important is allowing nations to build the institutions and legal frameworks that organically grow a productive economy. And we know trade liberalisation, deregulation and open markets are extraordinarily powerful drivers of growth.

Climate aid is just another illustration of what the economist William Easterly calls development paternalism: a belief well-paid international experts, equipped with enough power and resources, should take the third world’s destiny under their benevolent wings.

When those experts shift their priorities from economic growth to sustainability, they make it less likely they will achieve either. Unfortunately, as the Copenhagen looms, it seems the “right to develop” is no longer absolute.

Alcohol Is Good – So Let’s Drink To That

Australia’s relationship with alcohol is ”calculated hedonism”, according to the latest of many reports into drinking commissioned by the federal Health Department. This presumably is a Bad Thing.

The report, released last week, argues the intentional pursuit of pleasure is getting in the way of productivity, which is a shame. But what if alcohol is, on balance, good? Alcohol, and the social practices that have developed around it, is a key part of human society, and even human civilisation.

My point isn’t to downplay the very real negative consequences regular excessive drinking can have. Or to ignore the damage some drunk idiots can do, like drink-driving or street-fighting.

But Australian public health activists and the Health Department have decided the small minority of chronic alcoholics or our inadequate late-night policing isn’t the problem – it’s our drinking culture in general.

Traditional Australian mateship rituals like shouting a round of drinks are now seen as a form of peer pressure, and allowing staff to go out for after-work beers is seen as employer negligence.

So the Preventative Health Taskforce and the report leaked out of the Health Department argue workplaces are potential ”alcohol harm-intervention settings”, key battlegrounds for the Government to change our drinking culture. They recommend enacting workplace alcohol education, introducing health checks for employees, and making alcohol prevention strategies a part of industrial relations awards.

What’s interesting about these proposals is what they reveal of the health community’s beliefs about the sort of lives Australians should be leading.

A philosophical watershed was reached in February this year when the Health Department updated the Australian alcohol guidelines to describe the consumption of more than two standard drinks on any given day as risky drinking.

A bottle of wine contains more than seven standard drinks. So if you are one of those couples who like to spend their Saturday evenings with a serve of fettuccine marinara, a DVD box set of SeaChange, and a bottle of Clare Valley Riesling, you are now part of Australia’s booze problem.

Sure, the harmful drinking guidelines are just that – guidelines – but they fly so dramatically in the face of normal human behaviour they are almost completely meaningless. All they reflect is the steady ratcheting-up of claims about how we’re drinking, eating and smoking towards our demise. Never mind the fact that on practically every measure we are much healthier than our ancestors.

The vast majority of people have an overwhelmingly positive relationship with alcohol. Drinking is an important social lubricant. All this discussion about the harmful impact of drinking seems to forget alcohol is a key part of almost every adult social engagement held after 5pm. And for good reason. We enjoy alcohol’s effects and how it helps us relate to others. In almost every situation where alcohol is consumed – even consumed above what the health department has declared as risky – the effects of drinking are benign and, well, pretty enjoyable.

People very quickly learn how to manage their own drinking. Health officials might not always agree with our choices about alcohol consumption – bureaucrats will be bureaucrats! – but they should start to recognise these choices are nevertheless deliberate and informed.

After all, alcohol has played a fundamental role in the history of human civilisation – drinking has been tightly enmeshed with religion, nutrition, medicine and, above all, pleasure.

Compared to coffee and tobacco – regional delicacies that only achieved their global popularity a few hundred years ago – brewing, distilling and fermenting has been a major part of almost every culture for thousands of years.

In their new history of drinking in Australia, Under the Influence, Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordon note Australians are nowhere near the booziest people on the planet, contrary to our self-image. Perhaps we deserve governments that treat us with the same relative moderation we treat alcohol.

Higher, Faster, Costlier: The Price Of Olympic Gold Is Too Great

Malcolm Fraser opened the Australian Institute of Sport in 1981 by saying we were “no longer going to let the world pass us by”.

Since then the performance of Australian sportspeople on the world stage has been not just a matter of pride, but an essential matter of government policy.

Just this week the Rudd Government announced plans to allow foreign athletes to fast-track (I daren’t say “queue-jump”) our laborious citizenship process so we can claim them as our own as quickly as possible. For all the Government’s lyricism about the romance of becoming a citizen of this great, wide, red-brown land, it is happy to toss aside its sacred citizenship rites so we can clock up one or two more medals at the next Olympics.

Indeed, Australia’s relatively weak performance in Beijing – Australian passport holders came a dismal sixth place on the gold medal tally – has panicked senior sports apparatchiks. The $220 million the Federal Government gives each year to the Australian Sports Commission is an embarrassingly small amount of money, according to athletics officials, and risks Australian athletes being trounced by better-resourced foreigners.

So maybe it is better we import athletes rather than hand the Australian Institute of Sport the extra few hundred million bellowed for after Beijing.

Australia is a sports-obsessed country, according to Lonely Planet. That’s fine. But all this political energy, tax money and policy directed towards the four-yearly achievement of a few medals by Australian athletes has to make you wonder – why bother?

It’s anachronistic, for one thing. When Fraser directed the government to mine Olympic gold, he was responding to a Cold War fear that free countries could not compete with socialist ones. Having watched the success of Russia and East Germany at the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Games, Australia’s athletics bodies were convinced they needed state central planning if they were ever going to win medals again. (Not a bad theory, perhaps, if you believe the superiority of your political system can be demonstrated only in a water polo pool. Of course, we now know that a key part of the Eastern Bloc’s sporting plan was performance drug binges.)

It’s been 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. Now might be a good time to abandon the state-subsidised jingoism embodied in elite sports funding.

Perhaps we could start thinking of sport like we think of any other industry. Competitive sport is like a competitive market. We import things which are uneconomical to produce in Australia. So too we could appreciate the skill of – and morally support – athletes from around the globe. The political insistence that our national honour is tied up in our domination of sporting contests is quite similar to the belief that we must have a home-grown Silicon Valley or green manufacturing industry if we’re going to have a self-respecting economy.

After all, globalisation has changed irrevocably our sporting allegiances. Many Australian soccer fans are just as likely to be interested in the fortunes of Real Madrid as they are in the Socceroos. Cricket fans might be more eager to watch the Rajasthan Royals compete in the highly competitive Indian Premier League than watch the Victorian Bushrangers. The traditional Australian constellation of swimming and tennis on the world stage, and football and cricket at home, is being undermined – in a good way – by our increasingly diverse ethnic make-up, as well as the accessibility of international sport on pay television and online.

These multicultural sports surely hold more appeal than the millions of dollars we spend on highly subsidised, niche elite sports such as volleyball. Most people care about volleyball for only 10 minutes every four years – and even then only if the sport rises above the din of other Olympic events. (Can anybody name an Australian volleyball player?)

Popular sports can afford to support themselves, and sports that are unpopular do not necessarily deserve to be propped up by taxpayers’ money. Australian athletes will continue to dominate many international competitions. As consumers of sport, we will be drawn to their success. Let’s leave it there. Why subsidise Cold War-style nationalism?

Consumerist Kiddies? Come On, Give Them A Little Credit

There’s a lot of rage directed at the advertising industry. The comedian Bill Hicks famously told his audience: “If anyone here is in marketing or advertising, kill yourself… you are Satan’s little helpers.”

And Hicks was just talking about companies that advertise to adults. In a documentary aired on the ABC last week, one talking head described advertisers who specialise in children’s products as “very similar to pedophiles”. This is an apparently widespread view, if the reactions to the doco on ABC message boards and Twitter are anything to go by.

In The Age, author Sharon Beder argued there is “a generation of children who have been manipulated, shaped and exploited” by the advertising industry. Corporations are, apparently, turning kids into mindless consumer drones.

But hold on a moment: children can’t afford to be consumers at all. Kids aren’t allowed to earn money – child labour laws are pretty explicit about that. Anything children consume is directly or indirectly controlled by their parents, whether by giving children pocket money, or buying them stuff. Kids aren’t the consumers here. Their parents are.

Often complaints about the commercialisation of childhood seem more like complaints about parenting than marketing. We keep hearing about the insidious development of “pester power”, as if kids are only annoying because a Bob the Builder (a division of HiT Entertainment, owned by Apax Partners) corporate planning session decided that nagging would be the firm’s third-quarter marketing strategy.

If there are parents who think their child will shut up when the advertising industry shuts down, they obviously don’t remember harassing their own parents about a new cricket set, or having their hair braided like other kids.

Take a child to the zoo, and all they want to do is talk about zebras. Watch a movie about cars, and all they want to do is play with cars. If the vast amount of culture modern children are enjoying on the internet, in video games and on DVDs makes them want to wear Elmo pyjamas or eat Transformers-branded cereal, it’s hardly a sign of the apocalypse – unless, of course, you have a philosophical objection to capitalism and brands in the first place.

Claims about the insidious nature of advertising are massively overblown.

Sure, children’s movies may often feature subtle product placements. Last year’s WALL-E did feature numerous references to expensive Apple products. But the plot of the movie was a satire of overconsumption and environmental degradation. Not many children would have left the cinema exhorting the virtues of consumerism.

Kiddie entertainment is usually pretty good like that – greedy characters get their comeuppance; the value of friendship is affirmed.

Similarly overblown are fears of the corporate takeover of schools. Companies that have been told to be “good corporate citizens” and sponsor community and school events are now being accused of brainwashing children.

In her book This Little Kiddy Went to Market: The Corporate Capture of Childhood Sharon Beder even speculated that “it is as if underfunding of schools is part of a corporate strategy to enable advertisers better access” – which only makes sense if you believe that government budgets are determined solely by a cabal of industrial tycoons.

Nevertheless, critics of consumerism argue that advertising is making kids depressed and unsettled because they can’t get everything they want. It’s certainly true that more children are being diagnosed with disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hypertension and depression than in the past. But we’ve only seriously started to diagnose mental illness in children within the past few decades. And there is good evidence to suggest that, particularly in the US, some schools are mischaracterising unruly childhood behaviour as a symptom of mental illness: 82 per cent of American teachers believe that ADHD is overdiagnosed, according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Attention Disorders.

Mental illness in children is not trivial. But to try to blame it on product placement in Pixar movies is just a little tenuous.

Going Green Is Just Another Rinse In Government Washer

There’s no better way to dress up your drab, colourless economic plan than calling it ”green”.

The Victorian Government has been trying to create a ”green economy” where business innovation is guided in a greenish direction by the gentle hand of subsidies, taxes and government purchasing decisions.

Last year’s Green Car Innovation Fund gave a nice, fresh, enviro-trendy spin to the traditional Australian pastime of taking money from successful, productive industries and giving it to car companies. For a short time, we all seemed convinced that dumping money in the deep black hole that is the Australian automotive sector was the best thing we could do for the environment.

Ten years ago, it wasn’t green jobs but technology start-ups that were going to be the future of our economy.

Remember the great tech hub in the Docklands that was supposed to make Melbourne the Silicon Valley of the southern hemisphere? The Victorian and federal governments spent millions on ”ComTechPort”, a network of buildings to host innovative tech start-ups. But the jewels in ComTechPort’s crown now have as their tenants such innovative, nimble start-ups as the Australia Customs Service, the Bureau of Meteorology, VicTrack and the Telstra Corporation.

Unfortunately, it looks as if we’re seeing that same cycle of wishful thinking and half-baked policymaking when governments talk about all the new cool green stuff they’re doing.

The Federal Government’s recent announcement of 50,000 new green jobs hit a quick snag when Participation Minister Mark Arbib, and then Kevin Rudd himself, admitted they weren’t ”new”, they weren’t really ”jobs” (most of them were more like work experience and training positions) and there probably wasn’t going to be 50,000 of them.

But they are still green. We will be getting a new Green Jobs Corps, educating, oh, a dozen-thousand or so unemployed youth in the finer points of tree planting and walking track construction. We’ll get a few more thousand ”local green jobs”, which also involve tree planting. And we’ll get 30,000 green apprentices. That last program will involve, among other things, ”training mechanics in green car engines”. There have been only about 10,000 hybrid cars sold in Australia. If all goes to plan, they’ll be very well maintained.

Government-created green jobs don’t tend to make a lot of economic sense. We might have great ambitions for a green, sustainable economy, but other countries have tried it already. In Spain, a recent study has found that each of the green jobs created in that country has cost nearly $1 million, and each job cannibalises more than two jobs from another sector.

Of course, some things are more important than money or the economy. But governments can’t simultaneously claim their green jobs schemes will drag us out of the economic doldrums, and argue green jobs are too important to dismiss with crude, heartless, economic analysis.

Nevertheless, a lot of people seem to view the financial crisis as a time to pursue other goals – we mustn’t just have one of those standard, boring economic recoveries, we have to have an exciting, innovative and forward-looking green economic recovery! But Australia’s unemployed would no doubt be a lot happier to get back into work as soon as possible, rather than waiting to be funnelled into a hypothetical green job according to the Government’s policy priorities.

Green is fashionable, sure. Consumers are demanding more environmentally aware products, and businesses are supplying that demand. Indeed, right now the private sector is doing a hell of a lot better than the Government when it comes to innovative green products and services.

But governments that slavishly follow fashions might just find themselves with a wardrobe full of old, worthless policies that don’t fit and cost the taxpayer way too much.

PM’s National Broadband Plan Really Is No Net Gain

Has there ever been a major Commonwealth program more hastily conceived than the national broadband network?

After it was clear their previous $4.7 billion broadband plan was a dismal failure, it was reported Kevin Rudd and the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, dreamt up this $43 billion plan while on two flights between Sydney and Canberra in April.

That’s not just policy on the run. That’s policy desperately sprinting from a horde of angry zombies while trying to pretend that the bite mark on its arm is nothing to worry about.

This latest iteration of the great broadband plan is three months old and already behind schedule. The Tasmanian leg – supposed to be available to consumers from this month – has been pushed back until mid-2010.

The project’s conception is still at an embarrassingly early stage. The Government’s financiers haven’t yet been consulted about exactly how the funds for the project will be raised, as a Senate committee heard last month. It’s veiled in secrecy. The Government has told the Opposition they’ll have to cough up $24,000 to see the documents which were supposed to have recommended the Government build the network.

And, unsurprisingly for a project entirely developed by two career politicians in the brief time while the seatbelt sign was off, the broadband network’s business case is supremely flawed.

The economist Henry Ergas has calculated it would have to cost individual subscribers at least $215 a month for the network to pay off its investment, and only if almost every broadband customer in Australia – 80 per cent – signs up.

Furthermore, the Government is discovering to its surprise that it can’t untangle the telecommunications industry’s dense knot of competitive rivalries and regulatory quagmires just by waving around a giant novelty cheque.

Yet to argue that the great broadband plan is perhaps just a tad undercooked is to invite accusations of Luddism. This seems to be because a lot of people view the broadband network as less an infrastructure project, and more the first tranche of broad social and economic revolution – the opening set-piece for the utopian-sounding “digital economy”.

So we’re repeatedly told it is a tragedy that Australia’s broadband take-up rates are somewhat lower than in other developed countries like Korea, because … well … think of all the cool things you can do online!

For these supporters, the technicalities of the national broadband network are just technicalities – what really matters is the internet’s sheer awesomeness.

So, fittingly, the Communications Minister’s pronouncements about broadband are rarely little more than a checklist comprising of a few key terms: “smart infrastructure”, “digital education revolution†and the more mundane “œmobile banking”.

Those are all wonderful, of course. Who isn’t looking forward to “e-Government”? But most e-Gov ideas are usually either stunningly obvious (such as more government information being provided online) or fashionable but pointless (the vapid, machine-written “blogs” of Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd).

Another commonly cited benefit from the Government’s broadband plan is its potential to revolutionise Australian hospitals with “telemedicine”.

But hospitals have been the recipients of a decade’s worth of special government programs to deliver them the best internet available. It seems silly to have to point this out, but Australia’s hospitals aren’t on the same ADSL plan the rest of us are.

Sure, your internet connection might have frustratingly capped just before you finished downloading that handicam copy of Transformers. But that doesn’t mean surgeons at St Vincent’s have to wait for another doctor to finish downloading x-rays before they can start the next heart bypass.

The most common argument for government-sponsored broadband is productivity. But the national broadband network isn’t going to be a magical productivity switch. There just aren’t many potential Australian entrepreneurs having their innovative business plans stymied because their broadband isn’t fast enough. Some businesses might find a faster internet connection useful, but few people seriously think our present internet speeds are what’s holding the economy back.

Anyway, our hunger for ever-greater productivity might be better satisfied by allowing the private sector to build the network. (As much as four years ago Telstra was begging the government for a regulatory reprieve so it could build a new broadband network by itself.)

Hell, if it’s productivity we want, perhaps the Federal Government could just reduce a few taxes. That’d give the economy a bit of a kick-along.

Of course, faster broadband for everybody would be delightful. But so would government subsidies for sunshine, flowers and walks on the beach.

Just because everybody loves the internet doesn’t mean that this $43 billion government-owned national broadband project is good public policy.