July 2010 – Chris Berg

Greens’ population policy no better than the others

Bob Brown didn’t manage to get in the leaders’ debate, to the annoyance of his supporters. In a way, that’s a shame.

Sure, the Greens treat human society as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. But they do try to present clear policy where Labor and the Coalition just waffle.

They’re definitely against the internet filter (although admittedly they chose the person responsible for the filter, Clive Hamilton, to run as a candidate). They’re definitely for climate change policy (although admittedly they voted with the Coalition against the emissions trading scheme).

A fourth body on the stage could have made the debate a little less of a sixty minute slogan slog.

Nevertheless, on the big issue of the campaign so far – immigration and population growth – Bob Brown offers nothing but equivocation and confused messages.

First: equivocation.

In response to the intergenerational report last year which famously projected Australia would have nearly 15 million more people in 2050, Brown called for … wait for it … an inquiry. A review. Another report.

Speaking in March, Brown asked, “How they think we’re going to handle 35 million, I don’t know, but if they think we can, let’s see the plan. It’s just really saying let us have the knowledge base that responsible policy making should come out of.”

The Greens are obviously learning the politics of policy from the big kids. Kevin Rudd would be proud.

Then confusion. In her Twitter feed on Sunday night, Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens senator from South Australia, tried to claim “Compassion is key to any discussion of population growth”.

Certainly, the party’s approach to asylum seekers is clear cut.

The Greens want to increase Australia’s refugee intake, which is good. Their asylum seekers policy is one carefully refined after years of activism and involvement with refugee protests, and driven by dissatisfaction on the left with the major parties.

Yet the party is as rife with contradiction as any of the majors they despise: the Greens also want to cut back other immigration.

And they’re clearer than the ALP or Coalition about who the bad guys are in the population debate – skilled migrants.

Oh well, the Greens were never going to get much of the business vote.

Hanson-Young has argued the skilled migration program could have some “fat” trimmed from it. (Masterchef has made food metaphors cool.)

Indeed, the best comment this week came from a regular Masterchef guest, Neil Perry, responding on Twitter to the opposition’s similar promise to cut migration: “great can’t get enough people to work now!! Guess I should think about closing restaurants not opening them!”

Perry’s comment applies as readily to the Greens’ proposed immigration cut as it does to the Coalition’s.

Our current immigration program only partly alleviates business needs.

There is a genuine demand in the Australian economy for skilled and semi-skilled workers right now. No amount of high-handed rhetoric about the need to train local workers will change that fact.

And the lucky migrants who get into Australia benefit from our high living standards, stable rule of law, and liberal democracy.

So how is stopping people finding a new life in Australia, as the Greens would like to do, in any way compassionate?

Let’s be clear. If you are a refugee fleeing persecution, then a Green government will embrace you. But if you are fleeing something as banal and commonplace as poverty, economic hardship, low wages, a lack of opportunity or jobs, or if you’re just looking for a better life for you and your family – then the door to Australia is closed.

The Greens are torn. On the one side, they have supporters who value Australia’s role accepting more refugees and providing opportunity for migrants.

But on the other side, they have supporters who see people as the ultimate environmental problem. Each Australian has a relatively high carbon footprint. So, for some environmentalists, the goal should be to make sure there are as few Australians as possible.

That means keeping foreigners out. Poor people are better for the environment. They can’t afford gas guzzling cars, or always-on-standby plasma televisions, or gaudy McMansions with heating and cooling systems.

Anyway, that’s the theory. Many people holding this view say we should increase foreign aid, but they are convinced the effective path out of poverty – immigration – should be blocked.

Bob Brown has to negotiate the terrain between these two views. It’s clearly uncomfortable. (Refugees settling in Australia have growing carbon footprints as well, but that’s best not spoken about.)

Brown’s hedging means the Greens are no better on population than the Coalition and the ALP. No party wants to embrace the high immigration which has been the fuel of the Australian economy for two centuries.

Spending cuts in the obvious places

The government spends a lot of money on a lot of things.

Not all of it wisely. It’s easy to be careless when you’re spending other people’s cash.

So credit where credit’s due: in the unlikely event there is an Abbott government in Canberra at the end of next month, the Opposition has proposed some genuine cuts to the federal budget. Tuesday morning they released another list of “savings” – some $1.2 billion worth – which they claim would help get the budget back into surplus.

Some of them are so stultifyingly obvious it’s amazing nobody has committed to scrapping them yet.

Retooling for Climate Change was announced by a fresh looking Rudd government all the way back in 2008. The government pays selected small businesses to upgrade to more environmentally friendly machinery.

In the two years the program has run, it has been taken up by just 65 businesses.

So it probably hasn’t made a substantial impact on global carbon emissions levels.

The Green Building Fund, a program to upgrade buildings in a green-ish manner, is even more expensive, and just as futile. The Opposition says scrapping it will save $400 million over the next few years.

The United Nations Security Council bid was another of Kevin Rudd’s attempts to aggrandise himself on the world stage. Dropping the bid, and keeping the $5.7 million the Coalition claims it would have cost, should be a no-brainer.

Every budget cut is controversial. Even this one. After Abbott announced his hostility to the UN bid, the Australian foreign policy establishment was decrying that doing abandoning this would undermine our “prestige”.

We’ve spent a lot of money in the past trying to enhance our “prestige” in the world. Remember the Sydney Olympics?

Indeed, if Tony Abbott is in the mood to kill some sacred cows he might consider abandoning Australia’s bid for the World Cup. We’ve given $45.6 million to Football Federation Australia to manage the bid so far. The cost to the Australian economy will be extraordinary if we win: PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated hosting the Cup will cost at least $2.9 billion.

Supporters of the World Cup claim we’ll recoup the money through tourism and other miscellaneous sources. But a mega event which pays back is an extraordinarily rare one, despite the fevered dreams of their advocates. Let’s cut our losses while we still can.

Community cabinets, which Abbott also wants to eliminate, were always bit of a joke.

Sure, they flattered those communities which had a turn meeting senior politicians and complaining to their face. But if the Labor Party wants to run focus groups, it should pay for them itself.

And Rudd’s community cabinets were absurd when you realise that his actual cabinet was being marginalised. Senior ministers couldn’t get a few minutes of Rudd’s time to discuss major policy – so spending an hour with the PM at a community cabinet meeting was probably as exciting for his colleagues as it was for the dutiful citizenry.

The Opposition claims that, when added to the savings already announced before and after the May budget this year, it adds up to $23.8 billion of cuts. The federal government spends around $350 billion per year, but you have to start somewhere, I guess.

Nevertheless, we should dwell on the net effect of these savings. Both the Government and the Coalition believe that they will bring the budget to surplus by the 2012-13 financial year.

And projections of what the budget will look like in 2013 are, well, projections. Economic circumstances change. (After all, recall that as the global financial crisis was beginning to hit, the Rudd-Swan-Gillard-Tanner team were still saying our economy was doing too well, and pushing up interest rates.) And political circumstances change; governments decide they have new spending priorities.

So there is reason to be optimistic about these proposed cuts.

The Opposition could go a hell of a lot further. Here’s another idea for them to mull over: if a program appears on the AusIndustry website – as Retooling for Climate Change does – that should qualify it for immediately abolition. The site lists 53 separate government programs: all of which funnel money to favoured industries and lucky applicants who have mastered the art of filling out paperwork.

Of course, when the Opposition claims that it is dedicated to reducing “Labor waste” they are being too disingenuous by half. The Howard government was no stranger to waste. Their Regional Partnerships Program defined for a generation what pork-barrelling looks like in Australia. When Abbott claims “this reckless spending must stop” he is just redeploying Kevin Rudd’s powerful critique of Howard.

And Abbott is putting new pressure on the budget too: yesterday he announced more tax rebates on education.

No party has a good record on cutting spending. But every promise to do so counts.

Rudd is gone, but he’s still the focus

Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard agree: Kevin Rudd must not be allowed to win this election.

The former prime minister will not be a big participant in the campaign, but it seems he will be its primary focus.

Labor candidates across the country have photoshopped him out of their campaign photos. We can now see the results: in the western Sydney electorate of Macquarie an ALP flyer is being distributed that features Gillard rejecting a ”big Australia”. The bogyman on that flyer is not Abbott, but Rudd.

So far, all Gillard’s policy announcements have been Rudd-centric. She’s backed down on Rudd’s mining tax, she’s toughening up the refugee policy she inherited from Rudd, she’s fudging climate change as much as she can.

The statement to the Canberra press gallery this week that her campaign would be frugal sounds responsible. But it has to be frugal. She, and Rudd, and the rest of the kitchen cabinet have used up all the government’s money already.

One thing wasn’t about Rudd. Last week she announced, with the sort of pomp and ceremony befitting a declaration of war, that school uniforms would be eligible for the education tax refund. Whether that’s a good policy or not is immaterial; it’s not much policy at all.

The ALP seems to be asking for three more years to retract the last three. ”Moving forward” is, well, a little backward looking. And it’s not a lot to hang a campaign on.

Gillard has no lack of issues she could pick up. The former prime minister’s irritable policy-making style ensured that.

If there’s a slow news day, she could jump aboard any of the few hundred recommendations from the Henry tax review, the Preventative Health Taskforce, and the 2020 Summit, or the health reform, or the Asia union. She could even take up the entirely futile and entirely noble campaign for nuclear disarmament.

At the very least, Gillard will have to decide which of Rudd’s proclamations she wants to support or discard.

Spare a thought for Tony Abbott.

The Coalition wanted to run against Kevin10. Their policies on refugees, population, the mining tax and climate change are concentrated to capitalise maximally on his weaknesses.

Rudd was the Coalition’s best asset. Soldiering on, Abbott has started referring to the ”Rudd-Gillard government”.

But with no Rudd, the Opposition Leader appears to be just hoping Gillard will break something.

With the failure to lock in a refugee processing centre in East Timor, Gillard may have.

Yet surely what’s more memorable about the Dili solution is that the new PM is – again – repudiating her predecessor’s approach.

Rudd is skulking around, pretending to be the political powerhouse he isn’t.

But now the election is on, both Gillard and Abbott are going to have to face each other directly. Doing so will take serious policy creativity.

Climate change: healthy debate not a health debate

Want the earth to be cooler? Unleash the psychologists.

At least, that’s the argument presented by one of the keynote speakers at the 2010 International Congress of Applied Psychology, being held in Melbourne this week.

According to Robert Gifford, a Professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, the profession needs to help scientists and policymakers overcome the psychological barriers to action on climate change – things like the public’s limited understanding of the dangers of global warming, ideological reluctance, and mistrust of government.

He’s not alone: it’s a developing area of study. The American Psychological Association has a Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change. In a report last year, it too found psychologists should try to overcome our psychological barriers to saving the planet.

Of course, all this assumes that having governments take aggressive action on climate change as soon as possible is inherently desirable.

And if you don’t think so, well, you have psychological problems. Or, at least, we as a society do.

In other words, if we think the costs of climate change policies could be greater than the benefits, if we think there are better uses for the money governments want to spend on the environment, if some of us don’t want to make the lifestyle changes necessary to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent, then we need psychological treatment.

Case closed.

But there is serious debate to be had about climate change. Debate about the best response to the changing climate and the degree to which we are responsible for that change. Debate about how we can adapt to a warmer or colder environment. Debate about whether Australia should bother trying to “lead the world” if the world isn’t interested in following.

Instead of tackling those questions, many climate activists would prefer to treat the existence of public uncertainty about the origin, costs and consequences of climate change as not just wrong, but corrupt, immoral, and, now, unhealthy.

This attitude has the stale whiff of authoritarianism. Not to the degree that dictatorships have used psychology as a tool of political power, jailing dissidents in mental institutions, sure. But it is distinctly authoritarian to respond to a political disagreement with a medical diagnosis.

The Australian Psychological Society claims the profession has a “special responsibility to be proactively involved in fostering more ecologically sensitive and sustainable behaviours and lifestyles”. This seems a little outside its brief.

Yet it accords with the trendy view that lawmakers should team up with psychologists to manipulate our decisions. People apparently need a little help from social engineers to ensure they make the “best” choices about their personal diet, finances, and lifestyle.

Thus the huge range of personal values and opinions held by individuals can be treated as if they are deviant in some way, and need professional and legal treatment.

No-one is disputing the electorate has misguided views about many public policy questions.

In his 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Bryan Caplan documented the four big economic biases – views held by the general public but rejected by economists who have spent years or decades studying them.

People tend to underestimate the value of labour-saving practices. They overlook the benefits of free trade. They believe the economy is always in decline, and they undervalue the social benefits of the voluntary interaction in the marketplace.

These beliefs account for much of the harmful demagoguery which surrounds economic debate.

Yet neither the Australian Psychological Society nor the American Psychological Association has a section on their website dedicated to the psychological barriers to sound economic policy making, as they do with climate change. Nor do their conferences focus on diagnosing the impediments to international support for lower tariffs.

Instead we all rightly treat economic policy as a legitimate area for discussion and disagreement. Climate change policy needs to be approached with the same open attitude.

The way the debate over climate change has developed has encouraged this sort of public policy dogmatism.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been promoted as the last word on climate.

The IPCC process is a bold attempt by a small number of experts to distil an enormous amount of scholarship into a single document, with enough coherence for politicians to act upon.

So the IPCC’s reports are not just dispassionate reviews of the scientific literature. They are riddled with economic assumptions, political judgements, and ethical and moral assessments.

That the general public is sceptical the IPCC has reached scholarly perfection – to question some of its judgments – is not an indication we all have psychological issues. It’s healthy debate.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review. You can follow Chris Berg on Twitter.

Strange bedfellows make for better government

Something strange is happening in Britain. When the Conservative Party failed to get an outright majority in the May general election, it was forced into coalition with Britain’s (distinctly left-leaning) third party, the Liberal Democrats, to take government. But here’s the strange part: the coalition seems to be working.

The Liberal Party in Australia should be watching this embryonic alliance closely. David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat Deputy PM Nick Clegg are getting along like a parliament house on fire. The two men are even proposing to address each other’s national conferences this year.

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It’s more than just a personal relationship. Surprisingly, the coalition seems a lot stronger than you’d expect from a marriage of convenience.

If it holds, the UK could see a dramatic ideological realignment. After all, David Cameron’s project to soften the Tory image was about more than just looking green and modern.

No party calling itself ”conservative” will ever be a fully libertarian one. Social conservatives who’ve voted Tory forever would not look kindly upon mixing social liberalism (gay marriage, for example) with its Margaret Thatcher-style economics (lower taxes, smaller government).

But while the Tories are in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the government could get close to that philosophical union. At their best, the Liberal Democrats are socially liberal and civil liberty-minded.

The dynamics of coalition with the Liberal Democrats gives influence to social liberals in the Conservative Party. It also gives power to those Liberal Democrats who want to cut down the size of government and deregulate.

So the coalition could be a generally centrist, modest and mainstream government, but one that cares about individual liberty – a new ”liberal conservative” government. That’s what seems to be happening.

Clegg is working on the Great Repeal Bill, a suite of legislation to clear away some of the restrictions on civil liberties, government intrusions on privacy, creepy government databases, and nutty nanny state laws that built up in the Labour government’s decade in power.

The government is eliminating the compulsory national identification card scheme. They’ve promised to stop detaining asylum seeker children. They’re talking about devolution, giving more power to local councils and communities, expanding school choice and pushing public sector reform.

Sure, there are big things the two parties disagree on. On immigration there is tension. But Labour has evidently decided disaffection with foreigners was the reason it lost government. So while Labour is going after British National Party types, the Liberal Conservative coalition can temper its own position.

It is early days for the Cameron-Clegg partnership. But it looks good so far. So if the Liberal Party isn’t paying attention, it should be.

When Malcolm Turnbull was rolled last year as Liberal leader, there was a minor sub-genre urging him to start his own party – a party for social liberals and economic dries. Sounds delightful. But not many of the people who proposed this new party would vote for it, let alone join.

Turnbull may be all loveable and cuddly on climate change and Bill Henson, but such a party would also have to be economically pretty dry. Imagine a party with an industrial relations policy to actually deregulate Australia’s workplaces, rather than, as with WorkChoices, just smack around trade unions a bit. Or one that wanted to do more horrifying things: privatise Australia Post, cut taxes, abolish the Australian Institute of Sport.

Of course, the chances of a breakaway party are pretty slim. But it is a central tenet of the Australian Liberal Party that it’s the party of individual freedom, small government and personal responsibility.

The Cameron-Clegg alliance is a real-world test of the marketability of a government that cares about individual liberty in both economic and social spheres. It’s a style of government with promise. The Australian population is becoming more liberal on social issues every year. Gender and sexual equality are no longer debatable. Even multiculturalism, so controversial in recent decades, is widely accepted.

Yet many on the Australian right believe the reason David Cameron didn’t win big enough against Gordon Brown to hold government on his own was because he was insufficiently conservative. He could have talked more about immigration, for instance. The lesson from Britain, they argue, is that Tony Abbott needs to tack right, and tack right hard, to be credible.

But the new British coalition could offer a very different example for the Australian Liberal Party. If Cameron and Clegg can make it work, the combination of social and economic freedom may not be such electoral poison after all.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review.

Month: July 2010

Greens’ population policy no better than the others

Spending cuts in the obvious places

Rudd is gone, but he’s still the focus

Climate change: healthy debate not a health debate

Strange bedfellows make for better government

The Great Disappointment