Author: Chris Berg

Abbott Deserves Only Praise For Embracing Free Trade

The economics of trade can be a little counter-intuitive.

This is no more so than for its central lesson, which is this: the benefits of tariff liberalisation primarily accrue to the countries that lower their own tariffs, not their trading partners.

Or, putting it another way, even if we lived in a world where every single country had high barriers to trade and refused to budge them, it would still be in our interest to lower our own.

So while the China-Australia free trade agreement (FTA) is a big deal, it’s not a big deal for the reasons most reports have suggested.

Take the provision in the FTA which phases out Chinese tariffs on Australian dairy for infant formula over a four-year period.

The Age is predicting that this formula market will be “enormously lucrative” for Australian businesses. The Australian Dairy Industry Council is chalking the agreement up as a win.

But the winners here are really Chinese consumers.

Access to quality infant formula is a serious problem in China. In 2008, there was aninternational scandal when it was discovered the largest budget infant formula firm had been adding industrial chemicals to fake protein content.

More than 50,000 children were reported to have become sick from the formula. Four died.

Now, understandably, Chinese parents don’t want to buy domestically produced formula. The demand for formula imports is so high that Hong Kong and Macau have placed limits on the amount of formula Chinese tourists can bring home with them.

So while it might be true that opening up the Chinese formula market will be lucrative for Australian firms, this seems to miss the point. The real winners are surely the Chinese people who have been genuinely suffering from their government’s dairy protectionism.

A lot of trade discussions are like this – focused on the benefits to firms and workers when it ought to look at how consumers fare.

Of course, most people are both workers and consumers, and are interested in both the supply and demand parts of the economic equation.

But as Adam Smith wrote, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”

Hopefully we all love our jobs, but no doubt what we most love about our jobs is the fact that we get paid to do them, and that money is available to spend on the things we want or need.

So a few happy Australian dairy firms is nothing compared to the millions of Chinese families who will benefit from the FTA.

It is this producers’ bias that has led us to a world where the cause of free trade is being driven by two-party trade agreements.

For while it might be easy to demonstrate that – on an academic level – a country will be better off if it lowered its own trade barriers unilaterally, few politicians have the sort of political nous and conceptual clarity to present such a case to the public.

Governments have worked out that the politics of trade liberalisation is easier if it is done on a piecemeal and bilateral level – emphasising what it has managed to get other countries.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Anything that makes beneficial change more politically palatable should be welcomed.

But the fact that trade liberalisation benefits the liberaliser first and foremost suggests that the economics of FTAs are very different from the way they are presented.

Have a look at the official Australian announcement of the deal. It is completely dominated by reforms China will have to make to allow market access to Australian firms. There is very little mention of what we have to do.

The deal involves Australia reducing tariffs on clothes, cars, components and electronics from China. We also will be relaxing our foreign investment guidelines. Tony Abbott said on Monday that some aspects of the deal would require legislation to be passed.

Politics being what it is, using self-interested producers eager to open up foreign markets to agitate for the reduction of protectionism at home isn’t a bad way to build a political coalition for change.

Earlier this year in The Drum, I argued that the bilateral trade negotiation process holds back the cause of domestic reform. It can perversely encourage countries to hold back unilateral changes as a bargaining chip.

But here’s the thing. The Abbott Government has been criticised for being too eager to sign these agreements. Bill Shorten says that Labor is pro-free trade but thinks the government is “more focused on booking a venue for the signing ceremony than examining the fine print or getting a better deal”.

Yet if we view FTAs as primarily a tool for shifting domestic policy, then what sort of deal are we holding out to get? Playing the tough negotiator would be counter-productive – harming ourselves by delaying our own reform program. It is in the interest of the Australian economy to conclude these agreements as quickly as practicable.

And that’s why it is in the realm of free trade agreements that the Coalition has been most clearly successful.

For all the Gillard government talked about the ‘Asian century’, it has been the Abbott Government that has given us free trade agreements with Korea, Japan, and China.

Victoria’s Transport Policies Ruled By The Heart, Not The Head

Possibly the most economically irrational and counterproductive policy of this state election was offered by Labor this week.

You won’t be surprised to learn it was a transport policy. On Tuesday Daniel Andrews’ team proposed a freeze on the Napthine government’s expansion of the number of new taxi licences.

Over the last few years, the release of new licences has seen the market price of a taxi plate plummet. Now there are more taxis on Melbourne’s streets (a win for consumers) and the drivers themselves are more able to afford them (a win for drivers). The only losers are investors who speculated on taxi plates hoping the government would keep them artificially scarce.

Incredibly, Labor also wants to establish a compensation fund for licence holders. (And to think Labor used to be opposed to “rentiers”.)

The Napthine government was only doing what scores of economists have recommended over decades: break the taxi-licence cartel.

But, then, transport policy is ruled by the heart, not the head.

The taxi announcement got little press. It’s not what the parties want us thinking about. It’s just another micro-policy for a micro-constituency.

The Napthine government is pinning its transport vision on one great big project to rule them all: East West Link. Andrews is going with everything but East West Link: most distinctively removing 50 level crossings.

It is fundamentally absurd that the connection between the Eastern freeway and Citylink involves a one-lane crawl through a park, past a zoo, and over a tram crossing. If we can’t fix these sorts of problems Victoria is going to stagnate.

Labor figures giant infrastructure projects are a little abstract, whereas every voter can think of a level crossing between home and their kid’s creche they’d like removed.

But that sort of retail politics cleverness is undermined by Labor calling its transport plan Project 10,000 – after the 10,000 construction jobs it will create. This is weird. You’d hope infrastructure plans were more about what was being constructed than how many people will do the constructing. And the label doesn’t do much to dispel the impression that Labor is doing the bidding of a militant construction union.

There are a near infinite number of infrastructure projects governments could build. Figuring out which is the “best” project is a non-trivial problem. Market-based pricing systems like tolls would offer some guidance to policymakers but these mechanisms are politically unpopular.

The two parties have competing metro rail projects, and competing plans for new ports. On Friday they both committed to overhaul of the Frankston transport hub.

We’re at that end of the campaign.

The parties are honing in on just two or three marginal electorates.

So whose projects appeal most to you? With the exception of Labor’s surrender to taxi rent-seekers, there are few great matters of principle at stake here.

But this is transport. We’re used to that by now.

Big Government, Big Opportunity For Rent-Seekers

In the 2012-13 financial year, the Australian Labor Party received $55 million in donations. The Liberals received $73 million. The Greens and the Nationals attracted around $8 million each.

Name a large corporate in Australia and their name is almost certainly somewhere on the Australian Electoral Commission’s donations register. Lots of firms even donate to both sides. And of course the Labor Party has a healthy union donor base as well.

But that’s only a fraction of the total amount of money spent on trying to influence government. Federally, Australia has 590 registered individual lobbyists representing 1,708 corporate and non-profit clients.

Then there’s all the money firms spend lobbying with their in-house government affairs staff (who don’t show up on the lobbyists register).

Sounds like a lot? But consider this: the Abbott Government says it plans to reduce the regulatory burden by $1 billion every single year.

Never mind how accurate that figure is. $1 billion is an enormous amount. It makes the amount of money spent on lobbying and rent-seeking in Australia seem tiny by comparison.

Whole industries live and die on the regulations and taxation laws imposed upon them. A new regulation, or a tiny alteration of an existing one, might destroy an enterprise or create a monopoly.

So the real question is, why isn’t there more lobbying? Why don’t firms spend much more money trying to influence the political process than they do?

This is called the Tullock Paradox, named after Gordon Tullock, the great American political economist who died last week at the age of 92.

The puzzle is even deeper because we have lots of evidence that suggests the return on investment from lobbying is enormous.

One American lobby group brags that for the $11 million it charged its clients in fees, it has delivered $1.2 billion in regulatory advantage. An academic study found that $1 of lobbying resulted in $220 in benefits – an incredible 22,000 per cent return on investment.

There are a few possible ways to resolve the Tullock paradox.

Tullock titled the 1972 article where he outlined this paradox “The Purchase of Politicians”. But perhaps politicians aren’t available for purchase, and the examples we have of large returns for small amounts of money lobbying are, in truth, just coincidences – the government was likely to make that decision anyway.

Alternatively, perhaps the returns to rent-seeking are so unpredictable that firms see it as a gamble. If so, then the big lobbying windfalls are extreme outliers. Most experiences with lobbying aren’t as incredibly successful.

Or businesses might not be aware of the opportunities that lobbying presents – they might be irrationally avoiding easy opportunities for profit, or wrongly believe it’s not worth their time to learn their way around the complicated world of rent-seeking.

Perhaps corporate donations are given with no expectation of benefit. Individuals donate to political parties as a form of expression. Maybe corporations do as well. Perhaps, by donating, or even by lobbying, they seek to signal to regulators and consumers than they’re in the tent, rather than outside it. They’re cooperating.

Or perhaps corporate executives just enjoy the access to celebrity politicians that being a big donor can assure. We shouldn’t assume that executives, who decide whether to donate and how much, are always acting in the best interest of their shareholders.

Anyway, lots of possibilities. Some are more plausible than others.

But the Tullock paradox isn’t just a little intellectual conundrum, and it isn’t just about clarifying how much money is spent on politics.

Rather, it’s a window into one of the central dilemmas of government – how can we ensure that government works in the interest of the people who elect it?

Gordon Tullock is most famous for inventing the economic concept of rent-seeking, where private interests influence the government to deliver private benefits. (He didn’t invent the name. That was Anne Krueger.)

The lesson from the vast literature on rent-seeking that has sprung up since is simple: where there is political power, special interests will try to capture that power.

It’s easy to think of ideas for new laws or regulations or government programs that might, on paper, make us better off.

But these laws, regulations and programs won’t be introduced by benevolent and omnipotent dictators. They’ll be introduced by politicians and bureaucrats – plain old humans, swimming in a pool of competing interests.

The more a government does, the more opportunities are presented for rent-seeking. Rent-seekers thrive in the minutiae of policy detail. Corporations know much more about how regulations affect their business interests than regulators or politicians do. It’s not hard for lobbyists to take advantage of that knowledge gap.

Resolving the rent-seeking problem isn’t as easy as banning or restricting donations, putting barriers in front of lobbying firms, or any of those other solutions we regularly hear.

The Tullock paradox emphasises how enormous the gains from rent-seeking are.

With such great windfalls available, money is going to flow into the system no matter how we try to prevent it.

Labor Party Reluctant To Ditch Union Ties In Victoria

On Friday, Labor’s planning spokesman, Brian Tee, insisted he would not resign his membership of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union if he became planning minister.

This is rather incredible.

Federally, the Labor Party is slowly, emotionally, wrenching itself through reform to separate the party from the unions. It’s long overdue. The relationship hurts both sides.

Yet Daniel Andrews, the man who might be Victorian premier, is against this reform program. Not only that, but he wants to install a CFMEU member in the very portfolio where they could be most damaging – planning.

Nowhere in the country is the relationship between the Labor Party and the union movement as clearly dysfunctional as in Victoria.

Much more than Steve Bracks or John Brumby, Andrews is a creature of the Labor-union nexus; a party man close to the union interests that financially back Labor.

Last week submissions to the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption alleged the Victorian CFMEU has committed criminal blackmail, breached Supreme Court injunctions and violated the Fair Work Act, Commonwealth Competition and Consumer Act and the Victorian Competition Policy Reform Act.

John Setka, the Victorian CFMEU boss, has a long history of criminal charges, including for assaulting police.

It’s all very salacious. Yet Andrews’ Socialist Left faction invited the CFMEU back into its power-sharing agreement. He relies on their support. Now the CFMEU gets a say in preselections and what the party’s polices will be.

The Coalition has been trying to put the CFMEU-Andrews connection at the front of voters’ minds. Oppositions are usually risk-averse. You can imagine how much Andrews would like to distance himself from union militancy. It’s revealing that he can’t.

Sure, the Labor-CFMEU friendship is fodder for that most off-putting sort of politics – the politics of talking points and condemnations and press releases. But it does raise serious issues.

So much state government policy has been taken over by Canberra. This gives what is left a disproportionate significance. When we vote for state politicians we’re really only voting on a few issues.

Spring Street can’t set the corporate tax rate. It has almost no control over industrial relations and a minor influence on the level of economic regulation. The quality of our health and education – the centre of Labor’s message this week – is heavily dependent on how much federal funding Victoria receives.

But Spring Street does decide how open the state is to new building projects. So giving militant CFMEU interests a lever over development could have long-lasting effects on the shape of Melbourne, and even the Victorian economy.

Earlier this week it was revealed that two Liberal candidates have been interviewed by the Victorian Ombudsman’s office relating to corrupt donations and planning decisions. Labor is understandably excited. It all sounds very New South Wales.

But Victoria has its own native problems. What will it mean for business when this old union state gets an old union government?

The Jig Is Up On Data Retention Plans

Last week was the second time the Government announced its mandatory data retention policy, and the second time it gave the game away while doing so.

Data retention keeps spinning out of the Government’s control.

First, in August, Tony Abbott admitted in a television interview that requiring internet service providers to retain data on their customers’ activity was not just about anti-terrorism and national security but could be used to fight “general crime”.

This time the mistake was made not by politicians but by the Australian Federal Police commissioner Andrew Colvin.

Asked whether data retention could be used to police copyright infringement, Colvin responded:

Absolutely, I mean any interface, any connection somebody has over the internet, we need to be able to identify the parties to that connection … So illegal downloads, piracy … cyber-crimes, cyber-security, all these matters and our ability to investigate them is absolutely pinned to our ability to retrieve and use metadata.

Over the next few days George Brandis, Malcolm Turnbull and Colvin tried to roll this back. Copyright is a civil wrong, not a criminal one, they said. Copyright holders are responsible for bringing legal action against pirates. The AFP isn’t interested in civil cases. (This is only partly true. Commercial scale copyright infringement is a criminal offence.)

But here’s why Colvin’s misstep matters.

Mandatory data retention would create massive new databases of internet users’ activity in every internet service provider across the country.

A lot of opponents of data retention have pointed out that this creates a very real risk of unauthorised access. It’s hard to keep data secure.

Yet just as concerning is authorised access. Once these databases have been created they will be one subpoena away from access in any and every private lawsuit.

Many people have some residual faith that police and security services are benevolent. After all, their mission is absolutely essential – to protect us. But do Australians have the same faith in movie studios? Their neighbours? Their employers?

After all, it’s been undeniable that data retention could help copyright infringement cases ever since the Government included “download volumes” in the list of data it wanted ISPs to retain.

But this is just getting started. Think about how useful mandatory data retention might be in other civil cases.

It would be easy to trace where somebody has been based on the source IP addresses of their mobile phone, as the phone moves from cell tower to cell tower, connecting and reconnecting to the network and internet every time.

In other words, under mandatory data retention ISPs will have to keep records of your movements for two years.

Imagine how this sort of information might be used, for instance, in a workplace relations lawsuit.

Likewise, online defamation cases will be strengthened by records that match IP address to account holder. Do you sometimes comment anonymously on blogs and news websites? Under data retention lawyers could track down who you are months after the fact.

We could go on.

Remember the Government wants this data stored solely for the purpose of future law enforcement investigations. It would be deleted otherwise. It has no business purpose.

Yet not everything about the policy the Government announced last week is terrible.

It was long assumed that data retention would be shoehorned into the existing telecommunications access regime – the regime that allows agencies and authorities from ASIO to the RSPCA to access your phone records without needing a warrant.

Instead, the Government has decided to change that regime.

The proposed bill limits warrantless access to the both the existing set of data, and any future data retained under the new policy, to “criminal law enforcement agencies”. Those agencies are the AFP, Customs, state police, and the state anti-corruption commissions. (You can see the list in the explanatory memorandum here, paragraph 197.)

The upshot is that the RSPCA will no longer have warrantless access to phone records. Nor will the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, or any of the dozens of bodies that have enjoyed such access for years.

They, like movie studios and your neighbours, would have to ask a judge for permission.

I’d guess there was a fair bit of jaw-dropping in bureaucracies across the country when Brandis and Turnbull announced that new rule.

Now, the legislation allows the Government to authorise more agencies at will, so the list could easily expand.

Still it is a striking admission that there has been too much access to too much data by too many bureaucrats for too long.

And that’s why the new limits on agency access to telecommunications data doesn’t compensate for the threat to civil liberties that is mandatory data retention. Fewer agencies, sure, but with access to a much more complete record of our lives.

One of the clichés of the internet era is that “information wants to be free”. But information doesn’t want anything, of course. People want information.

Data retention will create vast archives of data about what we have done and where we have been. People will definitely want that.

Gimmick Items Dominate Victorian Campaigns

Is this all there is?

The Victorian election this week started with a Monday announcement that the Napthine government would give every government secondary school a 3D printer. There are lots of problems with education. Lack of 3D printers is not one of those problems. Right now 3D printing is just an interesting toy.

On Wednesday Denis Napthine’s team offered $12 million for an “Almond Centre of Excellence” to conduct research into almonds. Yes. It did.

Then came a government promise of free Wi-Fi across Melbourne, Ballarat and Bendigo. Talk about a solution to a problem we don’t have. Citywide Wi-Fi projects were popular about 10 years ago. But now we’ve all got phones with internet access. (“Whatever happened to municipal Wi-Fi?” asked an Economist article last year.)

There are serious things happening in the election. Labor offered $1.3 billion worth of education promises at their launch last weekend. The Coalition wants to boost police powers to search homes in secret. Both are big deals.

But these things get crushed in the conga line of fatuous and unnecessary policies, whose only purpose is to fill campaign days and spend money.

Voters have only so much attention to dedicate to state politics. 3D printers and Wi-Fi cut through. Yet they make state politics look trivial, and the parties which contest it even more so.

For instance, the $2.2 million for 3D printers was announced the same day as a much less silly extra $5.4 million for community language schools. Guess which announcement the Premier led? Guess which got the media focus.

It’s not like the Napthine government lacks a good story. It has a healthy budget – something which cannot be said by its federal colleagues – and has managed to govern reasonably well despite a thin and unstable parliamentary majority.

If Daniel Andrews is premier at the end of the year it won’t be because Napthine has done anything particularly wrong. Nor, indeed, because Andrews has done anything particularly right. He has a taste for gimmick too. (Take Labor’s policy of half-price rego for apprentices, also announced this week. Why not just give apprentices the

money directly?) Andrews could be catapulted into power on ennui alone.

State politics is a pale shadow of what it once was. The federal government has taken control of so many areas of policy that state governments have little room to move, and less in which to innovate. This control has almost always been voluntarily surrendered.

As a result state politics is frivolous and hollow. Everybody involved knows Canberra is where the action is.

Napthine had two wins this week though. First, he lashed out when the Abbott government said it was going to raise the fuel excise. Second, he stood beside the Prime Minister at the announcement of a joint police taskforce into union corruption.

Victorian politics at its best piggybacking on the Commonwealth. That says a lot.

No Wonder MPs Are Confused About Security Laws

I have a fair amount of sympathy for Anthony Albanese.

Sure, his intervention in the national security debate came nearly a fortnight late.

When Albanese told Sky News he was concerned about section 35P of the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014, it had been 11 days since he and his party voted that restriction on free speech into law.

But this is exactly why the bill was rushed through in the first place. To prevent opposition to the measures from coalescing. To prevent analysts and those affected by the provisions from delving into the detail. To prevent information about the bill’s practical consequences from spreading until it was too late.

In The Drum earlier this month Michael Bradley showed how little senior politicians on both sides understood of the national security legislation they voted for.

But let’s not be too harsh. Academics with expertise in national security legislation have told me that even for people who live and breathe this stuff, the legislation was incredibly opaque and the significance of some of the big concepts within it entirely unclear.

If this sort of law is hard for the experts, imagine how hard it is for the politicians who have to vote on it.

As of Tuesday morning there are 130 separate bills being considered in federal parliament. Just reading them all is an incredible amount of work.

Some bills are brief, just a couple of pages. Others are like a short book. The Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill, which re-establishes the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, runs to 21,000 words. It isn’t the longest.

The bills under consideration total 594,032 words. At an average reading speed (say 200 words per minute) it would take 49 hours just to read all that legislation.

Add the explanatory memoranda for the bills (the essential first step if we’re interested not just in reading but understanding) and their 1,271,218 words would constitute another 106 hours of reading.

If somebody made that their full time job (8 hours a day, 5 days a week) that’s four weeks – the better part of a month – of dedicated reading.

But reading legislation isn’t enough to understand policy. It isn’t really possible to comprehend, for instance, the latest national security proposals without having read the reports of the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor. The INSLM’s 2014 report, which goes into detail about the legislative framework governing foreign fighters, is another 6 hours or so of reading.

So Australia’s politicians have a mammoth amount of reading and learning if they want to become even minimally informed about what they’re voting about.

No surprise that they are not minimally informed.

In the system of direct democracy in Ancient Athens, citizens would personally vote on each public policy measure themselves.

But direct democracy is incredibly time consuming. Most people have to work for a living. We can’t all sit around all day considering legislation. So instead we elect representatives to act on our behalf. They do it so we don’t have to.

Yet nobody who has been involved in any public policy debate can avoid noticing the incredible ignorance that legislators often have of their own proposals, or of the misinformation they accidentally peddle.

Sure, some misinformation is intentionally peddled. But most of it is accidental, and most of it comes from this extraordinary information overload.

Your average backbencher spends their life dashing from one meeting to the next branch meeting to the next community fete. They don’t have the time to get across all the material. That’s no excuse of course. But that’s just how it is.

As a result, so much of our public policy debate falls back on a feeling about whether one ought to support the purpose of a bill, rather than the specifics of the proposals.

Politics isn’t really about policy, after all – it’s about signalling to voters what your values are.

Do you support greater national security powers, in general? Then vote for the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014. The detail is just detail.

But that detail included a new and dangerous restriction on free speech, as Labor slowly realised after they waved the bill through.

One proposal in the United States is the Read the Bills Act, which, among other things, would require legislators to sign an affidavit that they’ve actually read the bills they vote for. (You can read about it, and read the bill itself, here.)

The Read the Bills Act would also require amending legislation to quote the words it intends to replace. The idea is to make legislation not just available, but comprehensible.

This matters because laws are imposed on everybody but only a narrow group of dedicated lawyers and analysts are able to decode them.

Legal complexity and parliament’s heavy workload empowers the bureaucracy and the government at the expense of legislature. This isn’t good for responsible democracy.

Last week the Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm released a tongue-in-cheek quiz -How well do you know the Foreign Fighters Bill?

That quiz was addressed to journalists. It could have just as easily been addressed to his fellow politicians.

The WHO Has Failed The Ebola Disaster

What is the point of elaborate and expensive international bureaucracies if they are unable to deal with cross-border crises?

The United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) has completely botched the Ebola disaster sweeping West Africa.

That’s not my assessment, but the assessment of the WHO itself.

Ebola has now killed more than 4500 people, mostly in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. It’s the largest outbreak of the virus in history.

Over the weekend the Associated Press published details of an internal WHO report outlining the organisation’s mistakes, information failures, staff incompetence, and governance problems tackling the crisis.

“Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall,” the document apparently says.

The report isn’t public – it’s a draft – and WHO doesn’t want to talk about it until it has been “fact-checked”. But WHO’s failures have been publically and tragically evident long before now.

Months before WHO declared Ebola a global health emergency in August, aid agencies in West Africa were saying the disease was out of control.

In March, Médecins Sans Frontières was talking about “an unprecedented epidemic regarding the distribution of cases” in Guinea. WHO spokespeople actively rejected that characterisation.

Even as late as July 30 WHO leadership said it was “pessimistic” to suggest that the Ebola outbreak was an international health emergency, as this Washington Post article reports.

It wasn’t until August 8 that WHO finally relented and announced that the Ebola outbreak was “an extraordinary event” demanding an extraordinary response.

This is exactly the sort of crisis WHO was created to prevent. But it delayed, denied, and obfuscated for months.

WHO was formed at the end of WWII, but its roots stretch back to the mid-19th century.

It’s hard to think of a better candidate for international collaboration than infectious disease. Outbreaks of cholera in Western Europe in 1832 and 1849 led to the first international efforts on health. The reasoning was simple. Cholera, and other diseases like the plague and yellow fever, paid no heed to national borders. Controlling them would require cooperation.

This policy need remains. The Ebola crisis demands an international solution. Individual countries need assistance. Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world. Ebola is one of the hardest diseases to manage. And cooperation is needed to prevent it from spreading. Ebola’s long incubation period – up to 21 days – means it can travel far from the place of infection.

So this is exactly the sort of crisis where international organisations should be proactive.

But WHO is directed by the World Health Assembly – an assembly of the health ministers and delegations of its 194 member states.

And that assembly is more interested in nanny state paternalism and sociology-masquerading-as-medicine than infectious disease.

The May meeting of the assembly opened with a speech by the Director General that WHO would “end childhood obesity” and focus on the health consequences of climate change and inequality.

The assembly spent its time talking about non-communicable diseases (cancer, diabetes and so forth), nutrition, and gender-based violence.

As the Ebola crisis has been developing WHO leadership has been hard at work hosting an anti-tobacco conference and pushing for increased cigarette taxes.

You may think these are all important topics. Yet they’re far away from what international health cooperation ought to be best at: the management of cross-border pandemics.

Non-communicable diseases demand national solutions. Pandemics demand international solutions. Resources are scarce, and WHO increasingly spends them on the former rather than the latter.

Nor is WHO’s distance from its core mission justified by any reputation for bureaucratic excellence.

The organisation has been criticised for decades for being heavy politicised, for its cronyism, for its excessive bureaucracy, and for its unwieldy structure. (So it’s a pretty typical United Nations body in that sense.)

One former WHO assistant director general wrote after the 2010 Haiti cholera outbreak that WHO was dysfunctional and coming “closer and closer to irrelevancy”. Global health academics write about WHO’s “crisis of leadership”.

Recent funding problems caused by the global financial crisis have led it to focus even more on non-communicable diseases. As for pandemics, WHO’s plan has been to promulgate health regulations and let individual countries sort themselves out. But this isn’t much help for poor countries like Liberia.

Now, as the New York Times reports, the entire pandemic and epidemic scientific team at WHO has just 52 permanent employees. Until this year it had just one Ebola expert.

WHO can complain about budget troubles all it likes but in a $4 billion organisation this is pathetic.

Thank God for civil society organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières.

Perhaps nothing WHO could have done would have prevented the crisis taking the course it has so far. Tackling infectious disease is hardest where institutions and infrastructure are worst, as they are in Liberia.

But that’s a hypothetical. The fact is, by its own assessment, WHO failed badly.

The Ebola crisis has exposed a dangerous weakness in the international security framework – a weakness caused by caused by bureaucratic incompetence and a deliberate decision to emphasise non-communicable diseases.

Surveillance and Privacy

In August 2014, the Australian government announced it intended to require internet service providers to retain “metadata” on every customer for two years for the use of law enforcement.

A first pass at this policy, offered by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Attorney-General George Brandis, suggested the government wanted ISPs to collect the internet browsing history of all users. A second, evidently revised version of the policy was announced a few days later by the Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The new version was much narrower.

Neither variation of the proposal is an Antipodean invention. In 2006 the European Union’s 2006 Data Retention Directive required EU member states to introduce similar sorts of mandatory data retention laws.

These proposals come on top of the revelations about the United States’ National Security Agency’s vast global surveillance apparatus.

Democratic countries are now faced with fundamental questions. Can the right to privacy survive the expansion of the surveillance state? Or more fundamentally, is privacy a value worth protecting?

There’s a claim you often hear in discussions about privacy: someone who has done nothing wrong has nothing to hide. In other words, privacy is only a concern for those who are avoiding the law.

To the extent it is a serious argument, this claim has some serious practical problems. First, it presumes that we can trust government agents to uphold their duties fairly. That is not a trust which has been especially earned. Second, it ignores the fact that the expanding reach of public law, the over-criminalisation of minor rule-breaking and the expanding scope of the regulatory state has bought more and more activity into the realm of the justice system. Finally, law enforcement agencies and regulators operate as much by discretion as they do by commandment. Not every law or regulation is just, or justly enforced. It is not always obvious when you are doing wrong.

But more significantly, privacy is necessary for more than just the evasion of legitimate or illegitimate government action.

There is no consensus on how privacy ought to be defined, what its central attributes are and how it ought to be balanced with other principles such as the right to freedom of speech. Privacy is a condition; and a highly subjective and context dependent one at that.

But we all require privacy to function and thrive. Let’s start with the mundane. Obviously we desire to keep personal details safe – credit card details, internet passwords – to protect ourselves against identity theft. On top of this, we seek to protect ourselves against the judgment or observation of others. We close the door to the bathroom. We act differently with intimates than we do with colleagues. We often protect our thoughts, the details of our relationships, our preferences, from prevailing social norms. We compartmentalise. How many people would be uncomfortable with a colleague flipping through their mobile phone – with the window into a life that such access would provide?

Public life is one in which we all play roles, heavily mediated by social norms, assessments or assumptions about the values of our peers. Private life is a respite from that mediated world – a place we can drop our masks, abandon the petty deceptions that are necessary for smooth social interaction.

This desire for privacy applies to communications as well. Eroding privacy undermines our liberty to speak our minds. Thus, government surveillance interferes with the free-ness of speech. The feeling – real or imagined – that we are being watched, or that our actions are being recorded, affects the way we express ourselves. One 1975 study examined how the knowledge of surveillance changed stated attitudes on moral and legal questions. The study concluded that “the threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech”.

The legal scholar Louis B Schwartz illustrated how entangled free speech and privacy are by describing the characteristics of communication in private: “Free conversation is often characterized by exaggeration, obscenity, agreeable falsehoods, and the expression of anti-social desires or views not intended to be taken seriously. The unedited quality of conversation is essential if it is to preserve its intimate, personal and informal character.”

The belief that a speaker might have to answer for, or justify, their speech, especially their speech to those with whom they have an intimate or close relationship, is a constraint on that speech. We all understand how easy it is for others to misinterpret our words, and how speech can be willingly misconstrued. As Cardinal Richelieu put it in his famous (and possibly apocryphal) words, “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

What does this mean for the debate over surveillance? As the recent debate over mandatory data retention has shown, the law governing telecommunications interception is complex, and the technologies it applies to even more so. On top of these technical and legal complexities, the nature of the national security threat is unclear. National security is a highly opaque area of public policy.

That opacity means the surveillance state is hard to control by democratic means. In their book Privacy on the Line, Whitfield Diffie and Susan Eva Landau argued that the “very invisibility on which electronic surveillance depends for its effectiveness makes it evasive of oversight and readily adaptable to malign uses.” The Princeton academic Rahul Sagar has concluded that the challenge of democratic control is so great that we mostly have to rely on whistleblowers to learn what the surveillance state is doing in our name.

In April 2014 the European Court of Justice ruled that Europe’s Data Retention Directive was unconstitutional. In the court’s view, the directive “interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data” and did so in a manner that was disproportionate to its stated objective of fighting serious crime.

Mandatory data retention has been wound back in many of the states that implemented it, in part because of the civil liberties issues raised by the European Court of Justice, and in part because the policy has not been a particularly effective law enforcement tool.

For Australia, that record, and the importance of privacy to individual flourishing, ought to create a presumption against the expansion of the surveillance state.

National Curriculum: Written, But Not Designed

Does the national curriculum even exist?

Much press coverage of the Abbott Government’s review of the national curriculum has focused on the “culture wars” bits.

The report, written by Kevin Donnelly and Kenneth Wiltshire, identifies a stark absence of Australia’s Judeo-Christian and Western Civilisation heritage in the curriculum.

But the most important findings concern the national curriculum as a piece of public policy.

For the most part Donnelly and Wiltshire support a national curriculum. But they write, almost casually, that, “If the definition of a national curriculum includes that it must be implemented comprehensively, with certainty, and consistently, then Australia does not currently have a national school curriculum”.

There is widespread confusion about how tightly teaching should cohere to the curriculum. Is the national curriculum a strict syllabus, or a “guideline”, or just “a bit of a framework”? Is it compulsory or optional? How much can the curriculum be adapted to suit teachers and student bodies?

And, most importantly, who decides?

While in theory adopting the curriculum is a requirement for states and sectors to receive national school funding, in practice there’s no way to ensure compliance.

While Donnelly and Wiltshire conclude that most stakeholders like, or have come to accept, the idea of a national curriculum in the abstract, they also find that this acceptance is based on the curriculum’s vagaries. The national curriculum is in the eye of the beholder.

For all the hundreds of pages of text that has been produced by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), in practice the curriculum is a surprisingly blank slate onto which various education players can impose their own ideas about what ought to be taught and how. It’s “all things to all people”.

That is, the national curriculum is not really a national curriculum at all.

I argued on The Drum in January that the national curriculum ought to be abolished. But what we have now is the worst of both worlds – a curriculum whose implementation is deeply uncertain and confused.

The national curriculum is a classic case study of how political imperatives churn out undercooked and poorly thought out policy programs – even when the process is handed over to a cadre of experts.

In 2008 Commonwealth education minister Julia Gillard managed to get all Australian education ministers to agree to the “Melbourne Declaration” – a statement of intent about the way forward for the national curriculum. You can read it here.

The development of the curriculum itself was then handed over to ACARA, and ACARA got to work writing up the subjects.

But the Melbourne Declaration was a statement of broad principles whose big takeout was an overall agreement to develop a national curriculum in the first place.

The Melbourne Declaration was not an investigation into the philosophy that a national curriculum should adopt. It was not a discussion about the educational foundation of the new curriculum. It was not an argument for a national curriculum – it was just instructions to get one written and introduced.

Donnelly and Wiltshire call this the “missing step” problem. There was a lot of discussion and consultation about what should go into each individual subject. But at no time was there a detailed, rigorous investigation of what we actually wanted out of the curriculum overall, what values should underpin it (beyond motherhood statements like the “curriculum will include a strong focus on literacy and numeracy skills”) and how students’ time should be divided and balanced.

Hence the overcrowded subjects. ACARA dumped more and more material in the curriculum to appease various education lobbies, untethered by any ideas of what the curriculum, as a whole, should look like.

In other words, the national curriculum was written, but never designed.

The worst example of the missing step problem is also the most controversial part of the curriculum – the so-called “cross curriculum priorities”. In the words of ACARA, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability are “embedded in all learning areas”.

These priorities have always been Exhibit A in the case that the curriculum is deeply infused with ideological bias – one might that ideology has been embedded in all learning areas.

But why are the priorities there at all?

Donnelly and Wiltshire find that “not a lot of thought has been given to the actual concept of cross-curriculum priorities” – they seem to have been conceived by education ministers and shoehorned into the process. It appears we’re the only country that has such a thing. “No attempt seems to have been made … to conceptualise the cross-curriculum priorities in educational terms.”

In her just published memoirs Julia Gillard says she was “adamant” that experts, not politicians, needed to design the curriculum: “There was absolutely no political interference in the content.”

But that just isn’t true. It was education ministers – professional politicians – that came up with the cross-curriculum priorities, not experts. And the much-praised experts didn’t second-guess their orders.

So much for a non-political national curriculum.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne has said the Abbott Government will take on board the findings of the Donnelly-Wiltshire review, reduce overcrowding, and bring the curriculum “back to basics”.

Funnily enough that’s exactly what Gillard said when she became education minister in 2007 and kicked off this national curriculum project in the first place.

An enormous amount of political capital has been vested in the national curriculum process. For decades educationalists have treated the national curriculum as the great unpursued reform, akin to floating the dollar and lowering tariffs, and essential for our “maturing” as a nation.

That, when given the opportunity, they stuffed it up so comprehensively is a major indictment on Australia’s education establishment.