2009 – Page 3 – Chris Berg

Personal tragedies under Stalin

A review of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan Books, 2008, 740 pages)

It has taken historians in both Russia and the West a long time to get their minds around Stalinism. Anne Applebaum’s 2003 Gulag: A History went a long way to shedding some of the misconceptions about the Stalinist system of repression-most obviously on the left, where the history of the gulag has been shamefully minimised. In The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, Orlando Figes steps into the lives of individuals and families to expose the personal tragedies which are hidden behind the statistics behind Stalinist repression.

The tragedy of the individual under a dictatorship has been a common theme in the history of 20th century totalitarianism for more than fifty years. But as Figes points out in his introduction, our understanding of the individual in Stalin’s Russia has been shaped by the outpouring of memoirs by émigrés and intellectuals who have been eager to represent their deep yearning for liberty-and the resilience of individualism-under totalitarianism. Autobiographies like Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom contained many revelations but were extremely atypical of the average Russian. Yet, for lack of better alternatives, during the Cold War the West treated high-profile intellectuals like Kravchenko or Solzhenitsyn as ‘the authentic voice’ of repressed individuals under communism.

This has been compounded by a historiographical fashion to focus on resistance to authority, however isolated and atypical. Since the opening up of many Soviet archives post-1991, historians treating the era have enthusiastically depicted the Stalinist period as a continuous duel between repressors and dissenters, seizing upon the examples of defiance against Soviet rule or stubbornly brave individuals. Certainly this approach is an improvement on Cold War era historical investigation-when the academic focus was on either Politburo politicking or the broad sociological studies of the Soviet ‘masses’-but it has had the effect of understating the total-ness of Stalinist totalitarianism.

Resistance and dissent was not a viable option for individuals living in the early Soviet Union. Almost everybody faced the stark choice between arrest and collaboration. That choice, and the dual way of life it created-between the fear of arrest and mutual denunciation-is the source of The Whisperers’ title.

There are two words for ‘whisper’ in Russian. Shepchushchii means whispering out of fear of being heard. As many urban Russians lived in communal apartments-either buildings specially designed for collective living, or in large houses confiscated from their owners and subdivided into cramped living quarters-there was an ever-present fear of being overheard saying critical things about the Soviet regime. And the word sheptun refers to whispering or informing to the authorities. In the cramped communal apartment, which often housed dozens of residents, it was easy for petty grudges to escalate into letters to a local party chief.

To tell his stories of private life under Stalin, Figes has amassed an impressive amount of unpublished memoirs and archival evidence. But the true star of The Whisperers is the enormous amount of oral testimony he was able to accumulate-more than one thousand individuals who lived under Stalin were interviewed.

And it is all the more important because this is a generation rapidly disappearing. Figes notes that almost six per cent of the total sample died before the book was published.

In The Whisperers, the dominant unit is the family. Idealistic Bolshevik activists envisioned the 1917 seizure of power as a revolution in not just economic and political terms, but as a revolution in family relations as well. As Maxim Gorky wrote, ‘the new structure of political life demands from us a new structure of the soul’. While ideologists maintained that Soviet children were to be raised collectively, rather than in the now outdated family unit, the less appealing flip side of this was that it gave dedicated Bolshevik parents almost carte blanche to ignore their children. If it takes a village, then parents are almost redundant.

One of the most striking illustrations of Soviet life is the Figes’ discussion of the communal living arrangements and how they were so central to the communist experience. Our modern image of the Soviet Union may be those lifeless identical and symmetrical apartment complexes rising up out of the Russia flats. But in the Stalinist period, Russian accommodation was forged out of the existing, prerevolutionary housing stock. In the mid-1930s, three-quarters of the population of Leningrad and Moscow were living communally in former apartments-dozens of families squeezed into single dwellings, whole families living in single rooms.

One typical arrangement described by Figes consisted of an apartment revamped to consist of thirty-six rooms, each housing an extended family in a space of 12.5 square metres. In one of those rooms, a former inhabitant related,

There was a table in the room, on which my grandmother slept. My brother, who was six, slept in a cot underneath the table. My parents slept in the bed by the door. My other grandmother slept on the divan. My aunt slept on a feather mattress on the floor with her cousin on one side, while my sister (who was then aged sixteen), my cousin (ten), and I (eleven) somehow squeezed in between them-I don’t remember how. We children loved sleeping on the floor: we could slide our bodies underneath our parents’ bed and have a lot of fun. I don’t imagine that it was fun for the adults.

Kitchens, laundry facilities and bathrooms could be shared or allocated by individual families depending on the layout of the apartment but would always be utilised as more places to sleep. These communal living arrangements were originally just to resolve a housing crisis created by the rapid industrialisation of the soviet economy (and the rural refugees created by collectivisation) but they quickly embedded themselves in the Soviet surveillance apparatus.

With 30 or more families living virtually on top of each other and with often paper-thin walls, denunciations-justified or not-could be easily borne out of petty domestic disputes.

Work provided little relief. One factory manager, in a letter to the Soviet president, described the perverse outcome of the Soviet bureaucratic system:

The problem with Soviet power is the fact that it gives rise to the vilest type of official-one that scrupulously carries out the general designs of the supreme authority… This official never tells the truth, because he doesn’t want to distress the leadership. He gloats about famine and pestilence in the district or ward controlled by his rival. He won’t lift a finger to protect a neighbour… All I see around me is loathsome politicizing, dirty tricks and people being destroyed for slips of the tongue. There’s no end to the denunciations. You can’t spit without hitting some revolting denouncer or liar. What have we come to? It’s impossible to breathe. The less gifted a bastard, the meaner his slander. Of course, the purge of your party is none of my business, but I think that as a result of it, decent elements still remaining will be cleaned out.

The most harrowing sections of the book when Figes looks at what he describes as ‘the great break’, when the semi-liberal period of the New Economic Plan gave way to Stalinist five year plans, collectivisation and rapid coerced industrialisation.

The Whisperers reads at times like a catalogue of family tragedy, as the voluntary ideological family breakdown common in the first few years of the Soviet Union, quickly gives way into the now-familiar Stalinist pattern of arrest, imprisonment, release and rearrest.

While not for the most part an interpretative history, The Whisperers is not totally disengaged from contemporary historiographical debates. Figes disputes Robert Conquest’s characterisation of the famine of 1932-33 as a ‘deliberately inflicted… massacre of men, women and children.’ As Figes argues, while the policy of collectivisation was undoubtedly the culprit of rural Russian suffering in this period, the scale of the famine itself took the Moscow government by surprise, and it had no reserves of grain ready to account for the shortfall.

But whether famine was a weapon of terror or just its consequence is surely beside the point. If we cannot go so far to describe this period as a genocidal ‘terror-famine’ as some historians have done, we can still agree that genocide did occur against the ‘kulak’ population. It was a deliberate policy of genocide which brought about the famines of the 1930s, even if the linkage between famine and genocide was not as deliberate as Conquest makes out.

Figes quotes one Komsomol activist describing the kulaks as ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘parasites’: ‘We were trained to see the Kulaks, not as human beings, but as vermin, lice, which had to be destroyed’. Ten million kulaks were expelled from their home between 1929 and 1932. And this figure obscures the countless individual horrors which accompanied collectivisation.

The Whisperers is not a book of macro-level statistics, but of intimate family and personal histories. And at that level, terror and collectivisation were nearly indistinguishable from thuggery and murder. One focus of Figes’ narrative is the Golovin family from Obukhovo, a small town about 400 kilometers east of Leningrad. The local Komsomol were little more than a dozen violent teenagers armed with pistols, and the Golovins, having been branded as kulaks, were at their mercy. Ivan Golovin, visiting the family from a neighbouring town, was shot in the head when obviously drunk Komsomol activists started firing at the Golovin house during dinner. In a later confrontation on the family doorstep, the Komsomol ring leader yelled at Nikolai Golovin, ‘I shall shoot you, just as I murdered your brother, and no one shall punish me’. Nikolai escaped from that heated exchange without being but he was soon after denounced by the young activists, arrested, and sent to a White Sea Gulag.

The farms of Obukhovo were collectivised a few weeks later.

One important conclusion of The Whisperers is just how large the Second World War looms in the Russian memory. As Figes writes, for all the excesses, hardships and moral atrocities of the Stalinist years, for a certain generation the war was the defining event of their lives.

It was a time of comradeship, of shared responsibilities and suffering, when ‘people became better human beings’ because they had to help and trust one another; a time when their lives had greater purpose and meaning because, it seemed to them, their individual contributions to the war campaign had made a difference to the destiny of the nation. These veterans recalled the war as a period of great collective achievement, when people like themselves made enormous sacrifices for victory…

But for the regime, the memory of the war years was a double edged sword-on the one hand, Figes writes, ‘the commemoration of the Great Patriotic War served as a reminder of the success of the Soviet system’, but on the other hand, the war was a period of de facto de-Stalinisation, as the instruments of repression took a secondary role compared to the war effort.

By the 1960s, Victory Day was a tightly controlled state celebration of the war effort, carefully integrated in the government’s propaganda narrative. But to a large extent the memory of the Soviet war effort defined the attitude of many Russians towards their Stalinist past. This attitude was complemented by a tacit silence about what Vladimir Putin has coyly described as ‘some problematic pages’ of Russian history.

Figes is one of the strongest historians of the Soviet Union and the Russian psyche. His book on the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy anticipated his Whisperers methodology by telling the story of the revolution through a series of tightly examined interconnected individual narratives. Both A People’s Tragedy and his cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance won Figes a truckload of awards, and it is easy to understand why-Figes presents his often highly specific and interwoven material in a uniquely engaging fashion. While his earlier books are powerful and compelling, The Whisperers is undoubtly his largest achievement. Bringing together so many personal narratives, Figes is able to illuminate aspects of life under the Soviet regime which other historians, relying on more scattered testimony and the inherent biases of official archives, have not.

In the final pages of The Whisperers, Figes quotes a former prison guard who through a mixture of half-baked ideology and hard-learnt realism justified his own position in the Stalinist system:

What is Soviet power, I ask you? It is an organ of coercion! Understand? Say, for example, we are sitting here and talking, and two policemen knock at the door: ‘Come with us!’ they say. And that’s it! That’s Soviet power! They can take you away and put you in prison-for nothing. And whether you’re an enemy or not, you won’t persuade anybody of your innocence. That’s how it is. I get orders to guard prisoners. Should I believe these orders or should I believe you? When you kill a pig you don’t feel sorry for it when it squeals. And even if I did feel sorry for somebody, how could I help them?… In the camp I guarded mothers with sick children. They cried and cried. But what could I do? They were being punished for their husbands. But that was not my business. I had my work to do.

The tragedy of Stalinism was that these sorts of justifications were common. We might describe it as ‘Stalin’s’ Russia, but the totalitarianism of the early Soviet Union came from below, as individuals were forced to slot themselves into the system: to whisper, or be whispered about.

10 Worst Nanny State Policies

10: Plain packet cigarettes

The argument for plain cigarette packaging is one of the most stark examples of how Nanny State regulations treat individuals as childish automatons. Plain packaging involves the complete removal of any brand logos, special colours or fonts, pictures or any other unique packaging design, to be replaced by only the brand name in a mandatory font, complemented by health warnings.

But would it work? Supporters of plain packaging cite studies which suggest that consumers would find plain packaging boring and dull, and marginally reduce the positive connotations of smoking. This certainly makes sense. But cigarette packages are already plastered with images of rotten lungs and cancer-ridden body parts. How removing brand logos could significantly make these already extraordinarily distasteful packages less appealing is hard to imagine.

Mandatory plain packaging seems to be predicated on the belief that attractive packaging is enough to convince non-smokers to become smokers, or that for smokers trying to quit, a good-looking logo is just too much to bear. Undermining brand identity would no doubt change the attitude that smokers have towards cigarette brands-the public health research has convincingly demonstrated that-but, as to how this would effect the desirability of smoking itself, the evidence just isn’t there.

The National Preventative Health Taskforce’s discussion paper on tobacco was titled ‘Making Smoking History’. This is surely a new stage in the public health movement’s war against smoking-an open affirmation that the goal of the government should not be to reduce risk, or to inform consumers of risks they should be aware of, but to eliminate an otherwise totally legal product.

9: ‘Clarity in Pricing’

Believing that consumers are being duped into paying too much for goods and services because the market doesn’t provide them enough information, the Rudd government altered the Trade Practices Act in 2008 to compel retailers to display the total price of goods. That is, the law forces firms to add up those pesky ‘fees and charges’ and show a single, total price of products.

In the words of Consumer Affairs Minister Chris Bowen, the amendment was intended to ‘empower consumers to make the best decisions about what they buy.’

But this was easier imagined than implemented. In fact, in the case of car companies, it was nearly impossible to implement. The fees and charges added on the price of a new car include things like stamp duty, registration, luxury car taxes, and dealer delivery fees, all of which can vary depended on jurisdiction, dealer or purchaser.

As a consequence, many major car companies-Ford and Holden, for example-have concluded that they can not display any prices on their national websites at all.

Increasing the amount of information consumers can access seems like a no-brainer for many economists and policy-makers seeking to improve the market. But it is policies with these sorts of justifications that have led to financial product disclaimers which are so long and complex that almost no consumers read them-again, the totally counterproductive result of mandatory information disclosure is that consumers are less informed, rather than more informed.

8: The internet filter

Few Nanny State initiatives have had such bipartisan opposition as internet filtering. Both the Coalition and the Greens Party oppose the Federal Government’s scheme, and the Institute of Public Affairs is joined by organisations such as Electronic Frontiers Australia and Get Up! in arguing that the filter will be costly, ineffective, and a breach of basic principles of free speech.

The primary justification for the internet filter, like so many Nanny State measures, is the protection of children-protecting children from ‘inappropriate’ internet content, like legal pornography or violent websites, as well as the policing of child pornography. But these are two totally separate issues, demanding two separate approaches. Protecting children against inappropriate content is the sort of task parents can easily perform-apart from basic supervision of what children look at online, there is an extremely wide variety of filtering software that can be installed on computers which children may access. Child pornography is however an issue for police. Because child pornography is not generally trafficked on openly accessible websites, a filter will do nothing to disrupt child pornography networks.

Nevertheless, the government has deliberately fudged the distinction between the two issues. Indeed, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy argues that ‘if people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.’

The dangers of the internet have long been an electorally potent issue-the 2007 election saw the Coalition rest a lot of their electoral hopes on a campaign for internet safety. But while many parents may be concerned about what their children come across online, the capacity for those parents to monitor and control internet access has never been greater.

7: Banning junk food ads

There are literally dozens of proposals to deal with Australia’s love of junk food. The National Preventative Health Taskforce has recommended everything from subsidies for gym memberships to subsidising fresh fruit. But the most prominent proposal-and one which has had the longest running support from the public health community-is a ban on junk food ads targeting children, or a ban on junk food ads broadcast during childrens’ programming.

Would this materially shrink our children? The lead editorial of a 2004 edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine argued ‘there is no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children’s food consumption and, consequently, no reason to believe that a complete ban on advertising would have any useful impact on childhood obesity rates.’ It continued: ‘the claim that food advertising is a major contributor to children’s food choices and the rising tide of childhood obesity has obvious appeal, but as an argument it does not stand up to scrutiny.’

But inevitably, public health criticisms of junk food ads eventually reduce to vague claims about ‘pester-power’, which perhaps says more about parenting than it does about advertising.

6: GroceryChoice

When the plug was finally pulled on GroceryChoice in June, it was the end of one of the biggest Nanny State failures in recent years. GroceryChoice purported to better inform shoppers about the relative price of their supermarket shops.

That was, at least, the theory. In practice, the website was grossly deficient. Totally unable to effectively monitor the price of individual goods, or even individual outlets, the GroceyChoice instead offered up ‘typical’ baskets of goods in a region.

Furthermore, it was never clear that there was a demand for the service. GroceryChoice revealed a supermarket industry that was actually highly competitive. And the information the website was able to provide was totally dwarfed by the information supermarkets provided as part of their advertising campaigns, and their individual websites.

While the concerns that led to the GroceryChoice project involved the apparent ‘duopoly’ of Coles and Woolworths over the supermarket industry, the results of GroceryChoice actually further encouraged shoppers to favour the big two. In any given region, either Coles or Woolworths may be cheapest option, but the nationally consistent result of GroceryChoice was that independent supermarkets such as Franklins or IGA were always significantly more expensive.

GroceryChoice may have been well-intentioned-who doesn’t want a market with better-informed customers?-but like so many Nanny State proposals, completely fell apart in its implementation.

5: Street parties

Nanny State regulations don’t just have negative economic consequences or erode personal liberty. The stock of regulations from federal, state and local governments that affect all aspects of public gatherings are critically eroding our capacity to form communities.

Take local street parties. Local government regulations are making it near impossible to hold a community gathering, and making it certainly impossible to hold an impromptu one. As the IPA Review pointed out last year, navigating the complex bureaucratic hurdles to hold a party takes a lot of work. Party organisers have to fill out safety plans-a typical one, from Stonnington Council in Victoria, is 25 pages long.

The safety plan makes event co-ordinators safety wardens, responsible for abiding by the safety plan and controlling the safety organisation, which comprises the safety warden and any additional wardens.

As a safety warden in Stonnington, you will have to complete a complicated seven-step risk-assessment process in accordance with joint Australian/New Zealand risk management standards. Fortunately, you will have five response guides to follow, ranging from vehicle accidents to electrical failures, and several prewritten emergency announcements to memorise.

The safety plan is just the beginning. In some councils, event co-ordinators need to undergo a police background check. Sound levels need to be monitored by qualified acoustic engineers. Lemonade stands need regulatory approval, as well as the payment of appropriate fees to the council.

Food handling regulations are particularly pernicious, especially for rural communities, which rely on volunteers to support the also-voluntary Country Fire Authority. The IPA’s Louise Staley found this out for herself when she tried to help the Red Cross feed firefighters during the 2006 bushfires.

She wrote in The Age:

When I was helping the local Red Cross make lunches for the firefighters, it all had to be done in a registered kitchen and a person who had done the food-handling supervisor’s course had to be there at all times. What that means in practice is nobody is allowed to make a slice or biscuits at home.

Governments are increasingly talking about the importance of social capital to alleviate the causes of poverty and isolation and strengthen civil society. Unfortunately, it is too often government regulations that act to undermine social capital-making it increasingly hard to connect with neighbours and build communities.

4: Kogarah’s fat planning

State and federal governments are not the only levels of government imposing the Nanny State. Local governments are using what little powers they have over urban planning to impose a disparate array of regulations. The most absurd example of local government Nanny Statism is the manner by which a number of councils in NSW are trying to manipulate individual food choice.

Three councils, Waverley, Gosford and Kogorah, are using their control over planning applications and development controls to introduce a ban on trans fats-fats artificially made by introducing hydrogen to vegetable oils. Trans fats are used in some foods to lengthen shelf life, enhance consistency and add flavour. The three councils have placed conditions on new commercial developments that they avoid using these sorts of fats.

Food regulation is hardly core business for councils, who are usually limited to hard rubbish collection and approving property developments. The trans fats ban is only the most extreme version of an tendancy for local governments to expand their purview into social issues. Local governments seem eager to become regional Nanny State fiefdoms.

Many councils have also weighed heavily into the debate over alcohol and public health, trying to use their surprisingly adaptable planning powers to enact social change. This, of course, has been encouraged by the historically ambitious nature of the urban planning community to cast their role as less about nominating places to put shopping centres, and more about manipulating society. When the bizarrely political urban planning activists and the strange collection of political trainees and community do-gooders that comprise local councils get together, the result is Australia’s lowest level of the Nanny State.

3: Moreland’s gaming rates

More than any other Nanny State issue, the attack on gambling exposes the long history of class antagonism that supports much paternalistic policy. As Richard Allsop writes in this issue of the IPA Review, the forms of gambling that attract the most adverse attention from the Nanny State’s great and good are those which appeal to lower socio-economic groups-the pokies and the races.

Pokies in particular have been targeted by every level of government with discriminator taxes and regulations-from the vitriol of South Australian Independent Senator Nick Xenaphon who told a gambling industry conference that he looks forward to a future were ‘common sense prevails and you are shut down for good’, to the discriminatory rate rises which many local governments are trying to place on gaming venues. Victoria’s Moreland Council is trying to double the rates of local pokies clubs, while leaving all other businesses in the area alone.

And Xenophon has expressed hope that the government’s proposed internet filter would target online gambling as well.

This is a lot of hate for a leisure activity which only creates a problem for 2 per cent of those who participate. And there are an extraordinary number of well-endowed and accessible resources to support those who have problems with their gambling. In Victoria alone, the Community Support Fund-which draws its revenue from a portion of the state tax on gaming machines alone-has an annual fund of more than $110 million. Every state has a wide variety of 24-hour hotlines, counselling services and support networks. But for those 98 per cent of individuals who have no problem with their gaming continue to be targeted by anti-gaming politicians and lobbyists who cannot bring themselves to admit that gaming can be enjoyable-and manageable-just like any other leisure activity.

2: Drinking in Sydney

Policymakers often have contradictory goals. Nowhere is this clearer than the regulatory back-and-forth surrounding Sydney’s liquor licences. In 2007, the NSW government announced changes to the existing licensing laws that favoured large licenced venues over smaller ones. This was explicitly an attempt to develop a ‘small bar’ and laneway culture which many Sydneysiders felt the city lacked in comparison to Melbourne. These changes lowered the price of licences to $500 for small venues, and allowed restaurants to serve alcohol without meals.

But the intention to develop the small bar culture was dramatically curtailed by a competing Nanny State philosophy-to reduce the amount of liquor consumed and alcohol related violence. In common with many other cities, Sydney has seen an array of early morning liquor lockouts (policies which restrict the entry of patrons into a licenced venue after a certain hour) and freezes on licence applications. These anti-alcohol policies are stopping the much-heralded 2007 changes from having any significant effect on Sydney’s drinking culture.

But these aren’t the only regulations holding back Sydney’s prospective laneway culture. One new bar in Darlinghurst was shut down after just two weeks because the local council decided it shouldn’t open onto a laneway at all, serving the owners with a $3000 fine and an instruction to open onto a main road.

1: Stay out of the playground

Many ‘public health’ problems which lead to Nanny State policies could actually be mitigated, at least in part, by the elimination of other Nanny State policies. One clear illustration of this is the burgeoning limits on what children can do at schools during their lunchbreak. As Christopher Murn pointed out in the November 2008 IPA Review, risk-averse education department bureaucrats are slowly but surely banning all the forms of physical exercise that previous generations enjoyed during their lunchbreaks. In NSW and Victoria, swings, see-saws, flying foxes and roundabouts have been banned. Monkey bars have been removed from many schools-when they were removed from a Townsville school recently, it made national headlines. Various schools across the country have banned competitive sport, games that are ‘too rough’ and cartwheels.

Those activities that haven’t been banned are being regulated out of existence. The NSW Department of Education and Training’s ‘Guidelines for Safe Conduct of Sport and Physical Activity in Schools’ reaches 284 pages, and describes elaborate restrictions for all physical activity. Finishing tape is banned from running races. Curve balls are banned in baseball until the children reach Year 9.

Like so many other Nanny State restrictions, the cost of these sort of restrictions is impossible to quantify. But the social costs are significant-what will happen to a generation of children who cannot compete in sport, or who have been taught to be so risk-averse to totally eliminate any possiblity of injury, no matter how unlikely? Nanny State paternalism will have profound effects on Australia’s social makeup unless there is a dramatic reversal in our attitude to health and risk.

Let’s Bin The Overcooked Moralising

When MasterChef announces its winner tonight, it will have done more than inspire a few home chefs to cook half a pig’s head, as third-place winner Chris famously did.

MasterChef takes an overwhelmingly positive perspective on modern food and home cooking. This is actually pretty rare. A lot of the discussion about modern food is highly political and deeply pessimistic. Even popular shows that try to celebrate food can’t quite welcome the base pleasure of good cooking. Gordon Ramsay won’t stop mumbling about “local produce” and the evils of imported ingredients, and Jamie Oliver seems just as desperate that we grow our own vegies for the good of the planet as he is that we make our own pasta sauce from scratch.

Cultural critics have spent the past decade trying to convert our dinner into an ideological statement. We’re told we face a future torn between a diet of instantaneously prepared frankenfood made primarily of transfats, or a diet that is richer in politics than flavour – with a functional, expensive and bland mixture of local, organic, slow, GM-free and fair-trade food.

So it’s refreshing to watch a food show that doesn’t even pay lip service to all the over-cooked moralising about the “ethics” of food. You get the impression that even if a MasterChef contestant used ingredients that were artificially grown in a chemical factory by robot arms, the only thing the judges would be interested in would be taste, texture and presentation. You know, the reasons why we enjoy eating.

And MasterChef recipes almost always involve some nutritionally mischievous ingredients – sugar, butter and the ubiquitous salt. This, too, has upset some people. One nutritionist, Catherine Saxelby, was particularly concerned that the show has “no regard for health or nutrition”, arguing that MasterChef makes “the basic chop, potato and two veg look boring when there’s actually nothing wrong with it from a nutrition point of view”.

That makes sense: a dish consisting of a chop, a potato and two vegies is extremely boring. If nothing else, MasterChef will have encouraged a few more people to think carefully about food preparation and variety. After all, it is often out of boredom with home-cooking that we go for takeaway alternatives or just defrost frozen food.

The variety of food cooked by the MasterChef contestants – and the high standards they are able to achieve with easily sourced ingredients – also reflects the powerful consumer revolution in food that is changing what and how we eat. It’s no secret that the food we eat is different from the food our parents and grandparents ate. Sushi and home-cooked burritos would have been completely alien to most Australians just a few decades ago. The way foods have migrated because of globalisation is a story of long-term developments in food culture. But it’s not hard to find examples of how our tastes are rapidly expanding right now.

In my local Brunswick supermarket in the past month, the chorizo sausage has gone from being a niche delicacy, offered only as single, vacuum-packed sausages tucked away near the freezers, to being offered in large, fresh multipacks proudly displayed with the other meat. They’re now just opposite the mince. And you can’t get more mainstream than mince.

Incidentally, this new location also puts the chorizo within a sausage-throw of the okra – a weird, slimy fruit used primarily for gumbo, a Cajun and Creole stew. Many Australian-born generations before us would have had no idea of what okra was, let alone what to do with it. Yet it sits comfortably in suburban supermarkets, where space is at a premium.

Seemingly inconsequential technological developments are providing us with fresher produce at the humble supermarket. Lettuce and baby spinach is now most commonly available in pre-packaged, sealed plastic bags, rather than exposed for consumers to grab at. This began in Europe in the 1980s but has only recently had a big impact here. A seemingly minor change, sure, but it’s the little things that count. According to Packaging magazine Australia (it’s “Australia’s premier packaging news”!), most of the innovation in packaging is developed for the food industry – like “oxygen scavengers”, those weird little sachets that come with pre-made tortillas.

These changes in technology and taste have made it possible to narrow the distance between elite restaurants and home cooking, changes without which MasterChef would not be as engaging and relevant to the nearly 2.5 million Australians who watched the show’s final week. We are served a lot of ideological pessimism about contemporary home cooking. But MasterChef shows that the proof is in the eating.

Silly Recommendations Are Very Bad For Our Health

Should the Government give tax breaks for gym memberships? Sponsor therapy sessions for smokers? Limit the number of bottleshops in each suburb?

The Federal Government’s Preventative Health Taskforce has spent the past year coming up with creative little ideas to help Australians kick their alcohol, tobacco and fatty food habits. On Tuesday, the taskforce delivered its recommendations to Canberra. But they’ve been dripping out their proposals to the media for a few weeks.

Indeed, the taskforce seems to have adopted a tactic new to policy debate: if you propose enough bad ideas in a short enough space of time, it’s impossible to rebut them all.

One of the least convincing ideas is the one that has got the most attention: subsidised gym membership and fitness equipment to tackle obesity.

Yes, gyms can be expensive. But come the raw prawn, National Preventative Health Taskforce. Gwyneth Paltrow may spend $900 a month to go to a “workout studio”, according to the British Telegraph, but most gym memberships are the cost of an average mobile phone plan.

Maybe we are all craven, stingy fatties, but if we are, then it’d be a good bet that we’re lazy too. A few small tax breaks or a small government-sponsored reduction in the price of a gym membership is not exactly a compelling motivator to cast aside the pizza boxes and pump weights.

One of the more prominent anti-smoking proposals of the taskforce is to scrub cigarette packs of all brand identification – logos, colours, everything – as if stencilled gold foil pasted onto a cardboard box is all it takes to eliminate an individual’s willpower. Are there really that many people who want to quit smoking, but keep being drawn back by the shiny wrapping, like a nicotine-addled magpie?

No doubt the taskforce hopes to replace the labels with “YOU MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD ALREADY” in a nice bold typeface on one side of the pack, and on the other side a picture of a confused and sad Bruce Willis. And you get a mandatory slap on the face with each packet purchased.

We’re a lot further down the nanny state’s slippery slope than anybody could have predicted a few decades ago. When restrictions on tobacco were first seriously implemented, those who opposed the measures asked whether fatty food could be the next target. That concern was, of course, dismissed as silly and a little bit shrill. Well, it’s government policy now.

There’s a big chasm between the medical world and the world of public policy.

Public health activists demonstrate their odd detachment from the mainstream world of politics when they start talking about our “obesogenic” environment – a term used by reputable groups such as VicHealth and the Australian Heart Foundation to describe a society which apparently makes obesity nearly inevitable.

Like those post-Marxist philosophers who study the “essential violence” of peaceful capitalism, these public health academics now seek to expose the essential fatness of 21st century Australia. Indeed, many health scholars have moved so far out of the realm of medicine that they seem to be developing a branch of sociology based solely on trans fats.

They may have good intentions. Nobody wants Australia to be needlessly unhealthy. But these medicos with ambitious regulatory proposals rarely consider some critical questions. Will there be unintended consequences? (Such as drinkers changing from alcopops to hard spirits since the tax was increased.) And where is the evidence that it’ll even work – will the specific policy being recommended actually fix the problem?

There is an almost unanimous agreement among public health lobbyists and the commentariat that the Government should ban junk food advertising to children. But theRoyal Journal of Medicine argues there is “no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children’s food consumption”.

Our peak communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which has repeatedly looked at the issue over the past decade, agrees. Nevertheless, we still get vacuous claims about “pester-power” – claims which seem to be driven by the belief that only the government can stop kids nagging their parents.

Mark Twain was concerned that giving the government the power to “meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens” risked people losing their “independence of thought and action”. Today, it seems that for many in the public health establishment, this loss of independent thought and action is not so much a warning as an assumption.

Crisis? What Crisis?

By now, we’ve all read the story, dozens of times. It goes like this: the financial crisis has brought down the Potemkin village of consumerism. The recession has exposed the internal contradictions and long-term impossibility of the neo-liberal order.

In a thousand community centres across Australia, in homes and kitchens and op shops, people are changing how they live their lives. People are cooking at home instead of eating out. Restaurants are responding by replacing gourmet with “home-inspired” meals. Friends are sharing clothes. Op shops are in fashion, a claim shown by talking to the fashion designer who picked up a pair of leather pants for (just!) $120 from the Salvos. Indeed, the Salvos have rebranded their stores as “Fashion with a Conscience”, making the leap from evangelical Christians with a focus on charity, to “urban recyclers” with celebrity endorsements describing the shops as a “new shopping hot spot”.

Sewing is back – here two youngish mothers are sewing pants for their children and have started a home-made homewares club that plans to meet every fortnight in a Brunswick community hall. Fashionistas are now recessionistas; “recession chic” has replaced all-my-pants-are made-out-of-Peruvian-diamonds chic. You get the idea.

But is consumerism really on its deathbed? I mean, we’re not even technically in a recession yet.

This narrative about the consequences of the economic crisis is just a little too cute to be true – it’s like prudence and thrift as seen through the glossy eyes of an upmarket women’s magazine. These are the kind of savings found by people whose share portfolio has dipped, not the financial savings that people who have been suddenly kicked out of work have to find.

If conspicuous consumption has really gone, perhaps we’ve replaced it with conspicuous frugality. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. Are expensive ripped jeans, popular long before credit began to crunch, meant to symbolise poverty or wealth? The developed world’s press – tabloids and broadsheets alike – have managed an apparently seamless transition from stories about “why the economy is growing but we’re all really sad” to stories about “starving in style”.

An unemployment rate of 4 per cent apparently makes us concerned about working too hard, and economic growth makes us depressed. But an unemployment rate just over 5 per cent evidently encourages people to discover their inner artisan and make their own hats out of felt.

Certainly, the retail sector has sputtered in the past few months. In February, retail sales fell 2 per cent. In March, sales increased more than 2 per cent, and April’s figures show a barely discernible increase of just 0.3 per cent. But, despite the ups and downs of the retail sector since the downturn began, RMIT economists Sinclair Davidson and Ashton de Silva found, in a study released this month, that retail sales figures were sticking closely to their long-term trend – and that trend is, even in these dark economic times, moving inexorably upwards.

Sure, this could be due to the $900 gifts that most people received a month or two back, although the economists pointed out that a mostly steady trend suggests this is unlikely. Nonetheless, if consumerism is really sinking, then the seawater hasn’t shown up in the retail sector quite yet.

Obviously, rejecting consumer capitalism for political reasons isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in 2006 The Australia Institute, a left-wing think tank, claimed that dumpster-diving was gaining in popularity. Skip-dippers are conscientious objectors to consumerism who aren’t forced by adverse circumstances to dig through other people’s rubbish, but do so as a political statement about sustainability and capitalism. And, according to the Australia Institute, skip-dippers aren’t just people who enjoy reupholstering furniture, but more affluent hobbyists shoving their hands in supermarket dumpsters until they touch the coagulating bin-juice at the bottom.

And people were sewing clothes as a hobby well before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Indeed, in 2001, the satirists at The Onion wrote a piece titled “Gruelling Household Tasks of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman”, pointing out that churning butter and making candles by hand are very strange ways to spend your free time.

Nevertheless, one somewhat more serious article in the British industry magazine Marketing Week claimed that the financial crisis comes at a moment in history when we are shifting away from consumerism anyway – the magazine described the future as a “premodern age”. According to this view, we’re seeing a new emphasis on social, rather than individual, production and we’re buying things less for instant gratification, and with social goals in mind. We’re thinking of the environmental impact of our purchases and the ethical questions they raise, and so on.

There is something to this. In 2009, there’s scarcely a product imported from the Third World that doesn’t have a fair trade equivalent. And environmental sustainability is now held as a goal not just for committed greenies, but for otherwise non-political types. After all, skip-dipping student communes can’t afford to install solar panels on their sharehouses, these basic but expensive home improvements are being taken up by largely middle-class buyers.

Rightly so. Psychologists and economists refer to a “hierarchy of needs” – once individuals have sorted out basic things like food and shelter, safety, and love, they start concerning themselves with ethical or moral questions. If you’re rich enough to afford imported cheese, you’ve also got more energy to think about where your food comes from, or what impact you might be making on the wider world.

But how seriously should we take the idea that the financial crisis is the final straw that will suddenly push us into glorious premodernity? Marketing Week pointed to the popularity of Lily Allen, whose pop music has an anti-consumerist tinge. Indeed, in the lead single of Allen’s latest album she mockingly sings: “I am a weapon of massive consumption, and it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.” Do you like her message? Have you already bought her CD? You might also want to buy the video from iTunes for $3.39. And ringtones of her songs are available from the Lily Allen Mobile Store, ensuring you can continue to collect Lily Allen memorabilia on the go. She does appreciate your support – The New York Timesreported that Allen spent $143,000 on clothes and jewellery just last year. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. It would be a stupid pop singer who didn’t offer her fans every kind of merchandising possible. And for a musician, multiple revenue streams are essential in an age of widespread music piracy.

But a celebrity’s failure to practise the ascetic lifestyle they preach does nothing to assuage that nagging suspicion that political views about conspicuous consumption can be as much a fashion as any brand-name T-shirt.

Even the popular anti-advertising culture-jamming outfit Adbusters puts out an overproduced magazine designed more for the coffee table than the barricades. Yet, the publisher of Adbusters decries our lazy consumerism: “We watch nature shows instead of venturing into nature. We laugh at sitcom jokes but not at our spouse’s. We spend more evenings enjoying video sex than making love ourselves.”

Does that description hold true for anyone you know personally? We speak of other people seeking out “status goods” – things purchased primarily to signal to others that they could afford them – and “conspicuous consumption”, but we are apparently never guilty of such irrationality ourselves. Soulless consumerism is easy to identify in others, not so easy to identify at home.

Just a few years ago, social critics were claiming that people bought iPods in part to show off their distinctive white earbuds. But as Apple reduced its prices and introduced new, cheaper models, it undermined the “status” value of its products by making them available to even more people. The presumed exclusivity of the iPod range was totally shattered. Yet since then, sales of iPods have increased exponentially.

I don’t know about you, but I buy things because I think they might make my life better in some way. Sometimes we all get it wrong – a book isn’t as good as we hoped, a piece of technology doesn’t integrate into our lives as smoothly as we would like, or we bought too many mushrooms to put in the risotto. Most of the time, we get it right.

So what is so “consumerist” about that? Is it really conspicuous consumption if the enjoyment we derive from stuff comes from when we use them, not just simply from purchasing them? And if it is, then what’s the problem? I suspect that the vast literature on consumerism and consumption can be reduced to one banal observation: life is getting better. We have more ways to raise our living standards, and some of those ways involve buying stuff.

There’s a funny thing about recessions: if – a pretty important “if” – you don’t lose your job, recessions aren’t really that bad a time to be alive. Interest rates tend to go down and panicky retailers aggressively discount their goods to try to draw customers back and clear stock. If you like your designer fashion or just no-brand accessories, they will be going on sale earlier and at prices lower than when the economy was booming. So, except for shrinking superannuation savings, there really isn’t too much to panic about. For better or worse, a recession needn’t precipitate any major changes to the way we live our lives. If you haven’t done anything stupid, like max out your credit card, or taken out a mortgage you couldn’t even pay off in a booming economy, then everything should be fine.

Of course, for the minority that lose their jobs, recessions can be very traumatic. Sure, the unemployed may be spared the consequences of “affluenza” – the crippling emotional emptiness of consumerism – but losing a job is widely considered a big risk factor for mental illness, poorer physical health and relationship problems.

As always, our historical linchpin for economic downturns is the Great Depression. We all know of parents or grandparents who acquired a distinct frugality during the 1930s. But it’s not like consumerism took a holiday during the Great Depression. The 1930s was a formative period in the development of the advertising industry, when marketers started to focus on marketing directly to the vanity of individuals.

Beauty products are famously counter-cyclical – that is, as the economy goes down, sales of lipstick and foundation go up – as people spend money on cheaper forms of self-improvement and satisfaction. This held just as true for the 1930s as it has for the recessions that followed. Yet this focus on the individual during an economic downturn doesn’t quite fit our idea of the communal, co-operative and fundamentally anti-consumerist culture in the period.

And, of course, we have to remember that, whatever cultural changes did occur during the Depression, that period was followed by a long postwar boom. The golden age of advertising built on the foundations developed during the 1930s and 1940s – two decades of apparent selflessness.

Economic downturns always end. Broad shifts in culture aren’t just brought about from an economic crisis. They take time. Maybe there are big changes afoot in society. But the activists and trend-spotters who treat the financial crisis as the harbinger of a global anti-consumer sustainability revolution are reading just a little too much into a few anecdotes about sewing and vegie patches.

Anyway, a green economy will require a little more than “reduce, reuse and recycle” – going green takes greenbacks. Energy produced by wind power costs much more than energy produced by brown coal; the cheapest electric car is far more expensive than the cheapest gas-guzzler. Whatever consumer preferences are shifting towards green products is only possible because of our historically unprecedented wealth. We’ll all need to buy our way into a cleaner future – energy-saving devices don’t buy themselves. The same is true for almost all other social and ethical causes. Concerned about global poverty? Producers in the Third World would appreciate our continued demand for their goods.

If before the crisis hit you were a reckless spender and debt-accumulator, then I’m glad a recession could come along to shock you out of your idiotic ways. And if you refused to share your clothes with your friends, but now that your investments have tanked you’ve been able to find just that little bit of residual neighbourliness deep within you, then that’s marvellous.

Nevertheless, for the vast majority of Australians, life will continue as before, largely unaffected by the economic downturn. The global financial crisis is a big deal. But it’s not that big a deal.

Stimulus (N): A Huge Sum Of Money Spent On Any Old Crap

What doesn’t count as economic stimulus? Or, if we are to use the more formal term, is there any spending Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wouldn’t consider to be Nation Building for Recovery?

The Commonwealth Government is planning to spend $1.4 million helping a recreation hall in the ACT install iPod docking stations, among other things. Children these days apparently won’t go anywhere if they can’t plug in their MP3 players. And the global economy needs – really, really desperately needs – a couple more iPod docks.

Just like it really, really needs the renovation of the Guildford community hall’s interior linings, the upgrade of the Harry Trott reserve car park in Kennington, and the new BMX track in Gardiner Reserve, Gisborne. And the credit crunch really needs the old tourist welcome sign in Tenterfield, NSW, to be replaced. (That one will cost us $30,000, but I’m sure Tenterfield deserves only the best in welcome sign technology.)

All of these recession-busters are contained in the Federal Government’s community infrastructure program as part of the stimulus package. There’s a quarter of a billion dollars being spent on these sorts of “community” projects, which apparently differ from normal infrastructure because of the occurrence of group hugs or Kumbaya singalongs.

Don’t get me wrong. Community is lovely and heart-warming and sharing-tastic. But reading the list of community projects makes it seem as though the Rudd Government is giving the whole country a full body massage, except the ending will only be happy if you’re into eucalyptus distillery museums and really big budget deficits.

It would be interesting to find out what proposals the Government thought were bad value for money, if any. If the iPod docking stations got through, what wouldn’t have?

Admittedly, if you are going to try to flood the economy with borrowed cash, you have to buy something – you might as well build a shed for Warrnambool’s Holiday Actors theatre group or give a Glenroy toilet block a once-over.

The purpose behind the stimulus plan seems to be just getting people to do stuff. But why this particular stuff? Why not build a super-fast underground railway from Perth to Hobart? At least that’d be exciting. Or what about investing in a giant computer to figure out the meaning of life? We’ve always wanted to be a knowledge nation; that would finally clinch it.

It’s hard to believe the future of the Australian economy depends on the mass upgrade of toilet facilities. In fact, it’s hard to believe that the Government can do anything about the world economic downturn that got us into this mess.

The old rule about government is that everything it builds costs at least twice as much. In the past few days, a Queensland school has received $250,000 for a shed that is only worth $29,000. So when we see the Commonwealth paying $38,000 for chain-wire fencing around a junior oval in Carisbrook, it seems a bit steep – unless the fence is made out of titanium and hand-chained by vestal virgins with PhDs.

I’m no expert, obviously, but Tumby Bay on the Eyre Peninsula is managing to fence a full-sized oval, and rehydrate some drought-stricken trees, for just $25,000.

If the Government called you and insisted it pay for you to build an extra wing on your modest home, you’d be an idiot not to budget generously.

At the 2007 election, the Liberal Party handed out maps of its electorates pointing out all the cool stuff it was able to scrounge from the Government: a traffic light upgrade, a new carpet for the local school, a microwave for a CFA station in Kooweerup. These maps helped inculcate the belief that the sole task of federal politicians is to snatch as much money out of the common pool of taxation as they can. Every electorate for itself until the next budget.

The community infrastructure program reproduces this principle on an industrial scale. Government MPs will dine out for years on the photographs of them wearing safety hats while observing the construction of sheds and toilets in every corner of their electorate. And that may be the whole point.

Hurling Invective At CEOs Over Salaries Is A Bit Rich

Why the anger about executive salaries? Sure, that question might seem just a little naive. (“Multimillionaires, the long-term unemployed – why can’t we all just get along?”)

After all, even as companies are moulting employees like dog hair, the upwards pressure doesn’t seem to have gone off exorbitant executive pay, at least from the perspective of Joe Mortgage-Stressed. The economy isn’t technically in a recession, but it’s quite ill – perhaps the oligarchs could ease off the foie gras and Dom Perignon?

So ACTU head Sharan Burrow proclaimed last Tuesday that now is the time to crack down on CEO remuneration, and proposed a salary cap for chief executives of 10 times the wage of their average employee. Normally such a proposal would be easy to dismiss as the embarrassing post-mortem spasm of a union movement that is cooling in the morgue. A financial crisis is as good a time as any to whip up a little anger about dastardly bosses; a bit of traditional class conflict.

But Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been threatening to curb CEO remuneration since early this year, asking the Productivity Commission to inquire into the best approach to take. The inquiry has spent the past few months hearing a wide range of people who are fairly sure they know how to run Australia’s biggest companies better than they are being run now.

I’m somewhat cynical about handing authority over corporate salaries to politicians who have, in recent times, had temper tantrums about inflight food, got into fisticuffs in party-room meetings and resigned over conflicts of interest. The corporate world might be cut-throat, but Parliament is full of people who hate each other. Their moral authority is less than absolute. And their knowledge of how large companies operate is less than comprehensive.

Shareholders – who directly own Australia’s biggest companies – should perhaps turn a more sceptical eye to the salaries of the executives. After all, they have just as big an interest in the future of their company as its employees.

While the market is climbing, as it has for a decade, executive salaries climb. And when the market falls, many executive salaries fall. The Australian Institute of Company Directors has reported that the directors of big financial firms like Commonwealth Bank, AMP, ANZ and AXA Asia Pacific have had their salaries frozen, restructured, or cut in response to the downturn. Average bonus payouts on Wall Street fell by 40 per cent in 2008. Perhaps they could have fallen more.

Future corporate remuneration committees will be rethinking the salary packages that have led to some executives getting huge bonuses even as their company collapses around them.

But, still, the best people to deal with these issues are the owners of firms, not politicians.

Anyway, who seriously believes that the level of CEO pay in Australia had anything to do with the subprime crisis that set off this whole mess? It is really easy and popular to throw abuse at CEOs.

I’m not trying to suggest that executives pulling in $30 million a year are in any way underdogs. But you’d hardly call it courageous when politicians and union leaders blame the three or four Australian executives who could be considered uber-rich for the problems the world economy faces.

So when Sharan Burrow stood up last week to proclaim that “the shameful reality is that not only have there been no apologies and no jail sentences but outrageous multimillion bonuses”, she was actually telling the rest of Australia two things: 1. We should all work really hard to keep the union movement from being in any position to alter the Crimes Act; and 2. the nation’s most senior union official doesn’t know how to respond to the economic downturn with anything other than angry finger-pointing.

And when Rudd decided that this was the time to crack down on corporate compensation, he revealed his crude populism – the Government seems just as eager to blame “greed” or executive salaries or “neo-liberals” for the crisis as it is to actually tackle the causes. You’d expect that from the unions, but you’d hope for better from the Prime Minister.

Where Is The Evidence That Junk Food Ads Make Kids Fat?

Australia’s public health establishment doesn’t lack ideas. Another official report into preventative health brings another few dozen recommended regulations, subsidies, cries for greater ‘public awareness’ and demands for further (commissioned) research.

This latest edition is the result of the Senate Inquiry into Obesity in Australia put out yesterday in order to avoid being completely overshadowed by the release of a National Preventative Health Strategy that should come out sometime this month.

The committee’s proposals are predictable. Limiting – with a view to banning – advertising of junk food to children. Subsidising gym memberships. Even more food labelling. Regulating stupid diet programs. Encouraging urban planners to deliberately design cities that are inconvenient to drive in. We’ve been hearing these ideas for years.

Unfortunately, while public health advocates may talk big on ‘evidence-based’ policy, their recommendations almost always fall well below that standard.

Take the popular claim that junk food advertising is causing fat kids. The evidence just isn’t there. The federal government’s peak communications research body, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, has concluded that it is near impossible to parse out the relationship between advertising and childhood obesity. At best, advertising could account for 2 per cent of food choice.

And the fuzziness of the relationship is clearly reflected in the academic literature: “Despite media claims to the contrary, there is no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children’s food consumption and, consequently, no reason to believe that a complete ban on advertising would have any useful impact on childhood obesity rates.”

Yet despite this almost complete lack of evidence – which was acknowledged in the committee’s public hearings – the committee’s report just recommends more stringent regulations on advertising, and, of course, more research. And the Senate was actually quite conservative compared to the waves of doctors and public health activists who participated in the inquiry, agitating for every sort of ban and regulation on marketing to children they could think of.

So why such a casual approach to the use of evidence in developing effective public policy, from an industry that prides itself on the close scrutiny of evidence as it affects medical outcomes? Regulation might not be a science, but does nevertheless require careful attention to cost-benefit analysis, and some analysis of efficacy and efficiency. And then governments need to consider the philosophical implications of many regulations – how it relates to responsibility and choice, and who will bear the brunt of the costs.

But as we wait for the Preventative Health Taskforce to lodge its report, we’re still seeing no signs that these issues are really being considered.

Over-ruled: How excessive regulation and legislation is holding back Western Australia

With Christopher Murn

Executive Summary: The global financial crisis and economic downturn makes a review of Western Australia’s regulatory burden urgent. Over the past decade, the amount of new legislation has increased by an average of 158 pages per year. This increase is substantially faster in Western Australia than in any other state, even after controlling for economic growth and population. Western Australia has developed an international reputation as the most over-regulated Australian state. Over-regulation has significance financial, social and indirect costs to Western Australians. There are also substantial hidden costs.

Available in PDF here.

New Sheriff Needed To Ride Shotgun On Heritage Suburbs

It’s a bit of a rhetorical leap to compare Melbourne’s gentrified suburbs with the Wild West.

But after a Port Melbourne man knocked down his own home in order to build a double townhouse, that was apparently what came to mind for the mayor of Port Phillip.

“Saddle up your horse and ride out of town now if you think you can get away with it,” the mayor wrote in an official statement released last week, obviously confusing his role as the chief political representative of a wealthy inner-city suburb with a gun-slinging saloon manager in Deadwood.

When demolishing houses is outlawed, only outlaws will demolish their houses. The property’s owner, Hodo Zeqaj, was fined more than $52,000 for the demolition because his rather ordinary-looking brick duplex had been subject to a “heritage overlay” – that is, it’s located in an area of Port Melbourne the proud and self-satisfied local government has decided is historically significant.

A team of three men managed to demolish the house in less than 15minutes using a couple of chainsaws, which, no matter what you think of heritage laws, sounds like it would have been a lot of fun.

Certainly, Mr Zeqaj shouldn’t have demolished his house without getting a permit to do so. (And he definitely should have consulted his neighbour, with whom he shared a wall.) Even so, the council has publicly stated that had Mr Zeqaj applied for a demolition permit, it would have refused him one.

Once your home has been “heritaged”, well, you don’t really own it any more, no matter how much money you’ve paid off your mortgage. The council effectively does. Almost every petty little alteration has to be approved by local government functionaries.

Want to paint your door? In Port Phillip, there are 27 approved colours. But don’t get too excited – you can’t choose from the whole range. You will need to carefully maintain historic consistency.

Want to install an air-conditioner? There are planning permits to fill out, of course, and you need to make sure the unit is as hidden from the street as possible. After all, we wouldn’t want to ruin the seductive milieu of a suburban road by revealing that people actually live in those houses.

But don’t we as a society need to protect historically significant properties from the ravages of the marketplace? Perhaps. But what is historically significant? For the past half century, social history – the history of ordinary people, as opposed to the history of priests, politicians and warriors – has dominated the way we look at the past. That’s all great. But the rise of social history does make it a bit harder to assess what is uniquely important.

For a social historian, almost everything can be counted as “historically significant”. Everything reflects in some fashion the social circumstances of the past. So we get a barely interesting piece of trivia – the properties around Mr Zeqaj’s house are apparently early examples of low-cost homes built by the Housing Commission after World War II – transformed into a harsh legal edict. It isn’t quite Captain Cook’s cottage we’re talking about here. Does an entire neighbourhood need to be frozen in time so we can display cheaply and quickly built government housing in its full glory? For those people who care about the history of public housing, wouldn’t, perhaps, a few photographs suffice?

Anyway, if councils really want to protect important buildings, they should just buy them – or at minimum compensate the owners for their loss of control over their own property. If councils had to pay for the rights they steal, then they would perhaps be a little more cautious about doing so. Right now, it’s far too easy for local government to casually brand whole suburbs as critically important heritage areas while bearing none of the substantial costs.

It might seem glib to point out that we can’t stop all development. But it appears some councils are trying to do so. Vast swathes of Melbourne’s suburbs are being locked up by heritage regulation.

Unless we want Melbourne and its suburbs to become nothing but museum pieces, we’re going to have to accept that the flip-side of having a dynamic, modern city is having to occasionally watch that dynamism sweep aside physical remnants of the past.