Author: Chris Berg

2012: The Year In Political Outrage

You can still access the Facebook page for the Channel 10 talk show The Circle.

There’s a disclaimer on it now – the show was cancelled in August, and Channel 10 doesn’t want any responsibility for the page – but the page survives, its wall plastered with happy behind-the-scenes photos. It’s all a bit sad, in retrospect, but they seem like they’re having great fun.

Scroll down the Facebook timeline and that joy suddenly disappears. On February 29, a wall post titled “A message from Network Ten” officially apologised for the comments made by Yumi Stynes and George Negus about a Victoria Cross recipient, Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith on the show.

The disembodied corporate voice did not satisfy. There are 1,918 comments on that post and another 6,461 on a follow up.

“Words are cheap!” proclaimed one Facebook commenter.

“You are scum, spineless scum,” said another.

Stynes copped most of it. (The women usually do.)

“When you hear Yumi Stynes you think of stupid, gutless, low, meaningless, un Australian.”

One comment summed up the general mood:

“The nation was offended and it deserves an act of contrition from TEN that involves sacking.”

The nation got offended an awful lot in 2012. Ours was such a year of outrage that all these little episodes seem to have blurred into one: a swirling furiousness against Qantas, Alan Jones, Kyle Sandilands, in defence of Charlotte Dawson, against Charlotte Dawson, Alan Jones again, in defence of Robbie Farah, against Robbie Farah, “Twitter trolls”, Alan Jones again, and then finally, tragically, the two 2DayFM hosts.

By the time the 2DayFM hosts made their prank call, there was already a fixed outrage-on-commercial-broadcasting playbook: shut down advertising before advertisers can shut down themselves, bare your soul to the press.

But, 11 months on, can you even remember what was so outrageous about Yumi Stynes? Don’t Google. It was Negus, not Stynes, who speculated about Corporal Roberts-Smith’s sexual prowess: “what if they’re not up to it in the sack?” Hence the “dud root” comment. Stynes suggested the good soldier wasn’t that smart.

Was this a tasteless? Okay, if you want. But, really, “the nothing hosts of this second rate show MAKE ME SICK”?

The Yumi Stynes saga was a sign of things to come. As episodes of outrage accumulated over the year, they became more overwhelming.

Alan Jones’ infamous comment in September – that the Prime Minister’s father had “died of shame” – shut down political debate for weeks. The Alan Jones saga was like a centrifuge: it dragged in everything, eventually parliament itself.

We forget now that Peter Slipper was not the only “context” for Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. There was also Tony Abbott’s thoughtless repetition of Jones’ phrase moments earlier. To the extent that Labor’s modest recovery has come by painting Abbott as anti-woman, it was a recovery forged in the winds of the Alan Jones controversy.

Australia isn’t good at talking about more than one thing at once. Our population is too small, our newspapers are too skinny, and our broadcasters are too few.

As with everything else, we are hopelessly constrained by size. When these episodes of outrage occur they submerge our tiny media sector. The Alan Jones comments were first reported on September 29. It was only after Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech 10 days later that the public debate came up for air and was able to discuss something else.

It’s wrong to blame social media for our new propensity to outrage. Certainly (as I’ve argued in the past) Twitter shapes what the media and political class imagine the public thinks. Nobody would defend the proposition that Twitter is representative but, when you’re hit by hundreds of tweets in a row saying the same furious thing, it’s hard not to feel that “the public” is talking back.

Social media and the mainstream press are interdependent. The new and old media feed on each other. We mustn’t pretend that the hundreds of columns and news stories published on Jones or Stynes or Robbie Farah didn’t happen, or to minimise them by saying they’re just a symptom of online activism.

No, outrage suits the times. It’s no coincidence that episodes of outrage have dominated during the greatest contraction in the mainstream press in Australian history. They’re easy to comprehend, they’re easy to write about, and everybody has an opinion about them.

And they are entertaining. What Alan Jones said at a private Young Liberal function is a collective cultural experience in an era where collective cultural experiences are few and far between.
Sure, outrage can be confected. No-one was really offended by Peter Slipper’s text messages. Showy moralising anger is a new weapon in the political arsenal.

But if you want to see genuine anger, take a moment to scroll through The Circle’s defunct Facebook page.

“You have lost me FOREVER Chan 10…… and I will be telling everyone else to dump you guys too.”

“Disgraceful and un-Australian! How about u go over to the gan and fight for your country and then come back and think about flappin your lips!!”

Outrage is politics packaged up for the water cooler: it’s transient, meaningless, forgettable, and, for a brief moment, intensely all-consuming.

Losing Interest In Our Rate Obsession

As the 20th century opened there were 18 central banks around the world. One hundred years later there were 173.

But none of them have as tight a grip on the political culture as Australia’s Reserve Bank.

No other country grants so much mystical significance to their central bank’s interest rate decisions. We are obsessed.

Last Tuesday the bank lowered the cash rate to 3 per cent, releasing another torrent of claims and counterclaims. Wayne Swan declared it was testimony to his great management of the economy. Joe Hockey said the rates had been dropped to “emergency levels”. Retail banks were threatened. Peter Costello’s name was invoked.

Politicians have deified the Reserve Bank. It’s unusual for a politician to publicly second guess the board’s encyclicals. Happily, commentators do not share their faith. So last week, as always, columns were written and talking heads talked. Is the bank’s board being bold, prudent, reckless, negligent? Take your pick.

We’re so used to these theatrics that we don’t realise how unusually Australian it all is.

But compare how foreign politicians and parties view their interest rate movements.

For the British Conservative Party, low interest rates are merely a feature of a healthy economy – and not a particularly central one. Here’s a Google search of the Conservative Party website. The most concrete claim they make is that their hard-won fiscal credibility keeps interest rates low.

The Australian Liberal Party’s website shows a completely different picture. Here, low interest rates are themselves the goal. Interest rates will be lower under the Coalition. They’re higher under Labor. Gillard finally admits she has forced up interest rates. And on and on and on.

We can play the same game with the labour parties, although to be fair the difference is not as stark. Here’s the ALP, and here are their British cousins.

And the Americans? Well, in the 32,000 word, 55 page Republican Party platform (PDF), interest rates are mentioned … once. Even though it’s pretty plausible that extremely low Federal Reserve rates were a major cause of the financial crisis.

So yes, Australians are a bit different. Interest rates are the bread and butter of the political contest – as Australian as asylum seekers. The federal Liberal campaign in 2004 was almost entirely structured around interest rates.

In April this year Bill Shorten even suggested that knowledge of Reserve Bank meetings was central to political leadership in this country. Yes, we smugly all laughed as Shorten tried to correct Tony Abbott’s factual error with his own factual error (the bank meets the firstTuesday of every month, not the second). But more important was why Shorten thought Abbott’s mistake was a big deal: “when you want to be the alternative Prime Minister of Australia, interest rates is just such an important issue”.

And all this rhetoric for something governments have almost no control over.

The Reserve Bank is independent; it makes its decisions in private, pretending to know nothing of the busy political world outside its boardroom. When parties take credit for rate cuts or damn their opponents for rate rises, they are simply bluffing. They have no direct control over the rates. They have little indirect either. Of all the sources of inflation in a modern, open, liberal economy, national governments can only really influence one or two.

In other words, our politicians are playing a game with pieces they don’t control, but it’s worse than that. If rates go up, mortgage holders will hate it. If they go down, then the economy may be going down as well, but the Mum and Dad homeowner will be delighted. Throw into this mix the typical contrarian lines: the economy is “over-heating”; what about retirees? Nobody can win this game, but everybody is desperate to play.

A more interesting issue has arisen in recent years: we’re learning that even the Reserve Bank has only so much power over economy-wide interest rates.

Australia grew accustomed to the big four banks dancing to the tune of the Reserve Bank’s decisions. During the Howard years rate cuts were dutifully passed on to consumers. But history may record that as an anomaly – a short decade where retail banks and the central bank were aligned.

We tend to imagine anything that lasts a few years is natural and permanent. But Australia’s banking sector is still evolving since the financial liberalisation of the 1980s. So too is the Reserve Bank itself; it only achieved full independence in 1996.

When the Global Financial Crisis came, the close relationship between banks and the central bank broke. Few regretted this breakup more than the Labor Government. Now we have the embarrassing spectacle of a Government trying to bully mortgage rates down, and an Opposition pretending they possess a magic hammer that would set the banking system straight again.

Nothing frustrates politicians like powerlessness. For much of the 20th century, governments were able to control prices across the economy. They had many levers to do so – tariffs and taxes and quotas and so forth – and the public expected governments to pull those levers.

But the 20th century was a long time ago. The Reserve Bank cash rate is one of the few centrally planned prices left, and even then it set by a body independent of the government of the day.
When the Reserve Bank cut rates last week, Wayne Swan proclaimed this was the early Christmas present Australia’s hard-working families deserved.

But if rate cuts are gifts, does that mean rate rises are punishments? Of course not. Sometimes prices go up and sometimes prices go down. Our political culture needs to stop being so futilely obsessed with the Reserve Bank.

It’s About More Than Just Phone Hacking … Unfortunately

If you want to know what actually happened in the British phone hacking scandal, you won’t find it in the Leveson inquiry report released last Thursday.

The report comprises almost 2,000 pages; it’s spread across four volumes and has 59 separate chapters. It has a lot of stuff about media history and ethics and philosophy; a lot of hand-wringing about press “culture” and personal friendships between Fleet Street and Westminster.

But not a lot about who committed what crime and when.

For instance, the fact that Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson (both ex-News of the World editors) are in court this week facing charges of corrupt payments to public officials does not inform the report.

Nor the fact that at least three public officials have been arrested for misconduct in a public office – that is, corruption.

Lord Justice Leveson is recommending statutory regulation of the press before his inquiry has gotten to the bottom of the phone hacking scandal.

Even by the woolly standards of judge-led policy advocacy, this is pretty stark. Especially considering his proposals would be a reversal of the four-century-old victory of free press over state power.

The Leveson inquiry’s terms of reference are split in two. Part 1 looks at the “culture, practices, and ethics of the press”. Part 2 investigates the specific allegations of unlawful conduct and corrupt payments between press and police.

This is the real issue, as I argued in July last year. Criminal acts are a bad thing and should be punished. But criminal acts with the assistance of police are much, much more disconcerting. Thursday’s report is Part 1. Part 2 hasn’t even started yet.

Operation Elveden – the Metropolitan Police Department’s investigation into corruption in the police force – is ongoing. Leveson writes that he doesn’t want to step on its toes. Repeatedly throughout the report, witnesses suggest serious things. For instance, unnamed senior officers are “rumoured to be corrupt”, but the story ends there, “for fear of undermining what could be an ongoing investigation”.

Still, the first report reveals a litany of errors, misjudgements and bureaucratic backside-covering that allowed the scandal to build before it exploded in 2011.

Between 2001 and 2003, the Devon and Cornwall Police discovered a ring of retired and serving police officers selling information from police databases to private investigators. The investigators were then selling that information to various clients, some of whom were journalists.

Such privacy breaches are not unusual. Over the last decade, more than 200 Metropolitan police officers and civilian administrators have been disciplined for wrongfully accessing the Police National Database. The current commissioner described this to the Leveson inquiry as a “chronic problem”.

But when the Devon and Cornwall Police cases went to court, the judges let the accused go with conditional discharges. They didn’t even get fined.

When the story surfaced again in 2006 (this time the Royal family was claiming its private phone messages were being listened to) memory of the pathetic sentences given to the earlier cases meant the London police were reluctant to aggressively push their investigations. It just wasn’t worth the effort. That, and Britain was at the height of the anti-terrorism campaign. In the wake of the London bombings, chasing privacy prosecutions was less a priority than hunting violent Islamists.

Still, one reporter – News of the World’s “one rogue reporter” – was prosecuted. As part of its investigations, the police found a huge list of potential victims, but it failed to notify them.
Three years later, the Guardian and the New York Times published allegations of widespread phone hacking. This time, the police stonewalled. The issue had already been dealt with. To admit that there was more to the case was to admit that they were wrong to draw a line under the rogue reporter in 2006.

The Milly Dowler story erupted in July 2011. The police had been in possession of seized documents with her name – and Hugh Grant’s name – since the first investigations in 2003.

I’ve dwelled on this timeline because it is the closest the Leveson report gets to an exploration of the specific failures that led to the phone hacking scandal.

It’s all well and good to wax lyrical about ethics and press culture. But if we want to link problem to solution – a basic requirement in the development of good public policy – we have to know what actually caused the events we’re concerned about.

And too much of the Leveson report is divorced from the phone hacking itself. You can understand why David Cameron offered Leveson such a wide brief – he was embarrassed about his relationship to the now disgraced Andy Coulson. But the distance between scandal detail and regulatory proposals undermines the point of the whole inquiry.

To be fair, Leveson’s effort is far better than Australia’s Finkelstein inquiry. Here, Justice Ray Finkelstein wasn’t even given a scandal to work with – he had to construct a justification for press regulation out of thin air. Where Britain had the Milly Dowler case, Australia had the vibe of the thing.

So it is not insignificant that the Finkelstein and Leveson recommendations were so similar: statutory regulation of the press disguised as “self-regulation”. In the UK this is apparently the solution to widespread criminality. In Australia it is apparently a solution to … well, what exactly? The strongest case Finkelstein could come up with was that newspapers gave an unbalanced presentation of climate science.

But there’s a vocal group of people who want a new regulator backed by government, so that’s what gets recommended. Is there anybody who didn’t think Leveson or Finkelstein would call for new regulation? The only suspense has been for the details.

Last week David Cameron rejected those details – he would not cross the Rubicon into press regulation. Hopefully, Julia Gillard and Stephen Conroy will do the same.

Addicted: The Medicalisation Of Bad Behaviour

Our ancestors used religion to ward off the things that scared them. We use medicine. There are few better illustrations of the perverse “medicalisation” of society than the claim that “video game craving is as bad as alcohol”.

We’re taking the human condition (passion, obsession, desire, pleasure) and trying to turn it into a medical condition.

The story is as follows: a PhD candidate at the Australian National University recruited 38 gamers who played an average of 10 to 15 hours of video games a week. Those who reported feelings of withdrawal or cravings to keep playing their favourite game were classed as addicts.

All participants then did a simple test: they were shown a series of differently coloured words and asked to name the colour, not the word, as quickly as they could. Some of the words were related to video games, and with those words the ”addicts” took longer to name the colour than the casual gamers.

The conclusion? Gaming addicts are as consumed by games as alcoholics are consumed by drinking. This is apparently ‘”some of the first scientific evidence that video gaming can be addictive”.

But let’s back up a bit. Ten to 15 hours of gaming a week isn’t very much. The Australian Communications and Media Authority says Australians watch about 20 hours of television a week.

Sometimes we might even suffer negative consequences from this indulgence. (“One more episode of Homeland? It’s already 10.30, but …”) We may get emotionally involved in a show. We might even crave it.

But you could say the same thing about any hobby. And nobody is suggesting the average Australian is addicted to television or fishing or woodwork. At least, not in any meaningful, medical sense.

Addiction is a notoriously slippery concept. In a 2000 study published in the journal Addiction Research, 20 senior addiction experts in the American Psychological Association were asked to define what they meant by the word “addiction”. The answers differed wildly.

Only half the experts could get on board a definition that included “physical dependence”. And that was the closest they came to consensus – except for a general dissatisfaction with the way addiction has come to mean more than dependence on chemical substances.

Yet this is the muddy, vague, uncertain, ill-defined concept that we seem desperate to stamp on every sort of abnormal behaviour. Without any firm foundation, the popular use of the word addiction is creeping into the scientific world.

Excessive shopping? Addiction. Excessive internet use? Addiction.

Yes, people can make a lot of money treating the choices as pathology. There’s always a pill available, or a specialist spruiking their professional services. But we’re as guilty as the medical profession here. The medicalisation of everything is comforting.

First, there’s nothing more appealing than a scientific veneer. If someone has a few too many boozy nights in a row, they don’t go easy for a while, no – they ”detoxify”. All those cultish detox diets offer little more than clean living. But they’re dressed up in pseudo-medical jargon.

Second, if something has a medical cause, it has a medical cure. This is an era of expertise and technological fixes. There is no problem that money and experts cannot fix. In January, a British MP called for the government to pay for the treatment of “those who suffer from internet or gaming addictions”. (But that’s not remotely silly compared with the Swedish heavy metal fan who is on disability support because of his heavy metal addiction.)

Medicalisation comforts because it suggests that our bad decisions are not our fault. Describing self-destructive behaviours as addictions is the ultimate way to shirk individual responsibility. Rather than agents of our own choices, we become passive recipients, preyed on by our surroundings. This is utterly dehumanising. One could ask why we’re so eager to dehumanise ourselves.

Sure, video game addiction looks a lot like a bog-standard moral panic. When someone dies from playing a game 40 hours straight – as a teenager did in Taiwan this year – commentators pontificate about video games, not, say, depression. Every pleasure has to have its dark side.

But society’s fear of addiction – our desperation to turn everything into a medical condition – goes to something deeper. We no longer burn witches; we diagnose them. Either way, we’re still chasing witches.

Submission to Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee Exposure Draft of Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill 2012

With Simon Breheny

Executive Summary: The exposure draft of the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill 2012 represents a dramatic and radical attack on Australians’ fundamental freedoms under the guise of reforming antidiscrimination law.

The draft Bill makes government the arbiter of behaviour within a substantial range of private political and personal activities. The draft Bill would politicise and regulate private interpersonal relationships in a way they never have been in Australia.

In a very real sense, these laws are not anti-discrimination laws. They are laws designed to give the government authority over our lives in completely new and unjustifiable arenas. This is an excessive and indefensible increase in state power.

The proposed laws give the government explicit power to interfere in almost all facets of human interaction including eighteen areas of public and private life, such as political opinion, religion and social origin. The government is also required to decide what falls into these categories, making the state the total and final arbiter on our most fundamental liberties.

By redefining discrimination to be anything which “offends, insults or humiliates” the proposed law will extend the infamous provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act that led to the Andrew Bolt case to almost every area of public and private life. By expanding the grounds on which people can claim to be discriminated against to include areas such as “political opinion” the law will stifle genuine discussion on almost every topic for fear of legal consequences.

This draft Bill has deservedly been criticised from across the political spectrum as a massive overreach and an unjustified curtailment of individual freedoms.

Democratic governments rely on the free exchange of opinion for their legitimacy. This draft Bill, if enacted, would dramatically limit freedom of speech in Australia.

This submission also raises other concerning elements of the draft Bill. The draft Bill substantially reverses the burden of proof onto the defendant. It introduces a large amount of uncertainty and ambiguity into anti-discrimination law.

The draft Bill introduces a subjective test for decisions about whether the law has been breached. Subjective tests are impossible to comply with and should never be used by the courts.

There is no justification for such a dramatic overhaul of anti-discrimination law, and no place for such extraordinary limits on freedom of speech.

Available in PDF here.

Liberals’ Legacy Of Mass Migration Is At Stake

If Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister next year, he is going to have to make a decision: what to do about immigration?

Not asylum seekers: immigration.

After all, the size and composition of the total immigration intake is certain to shape our nation much more than the few thousand people who arrive by boat.

While the parties shout themselves hoarse over refugees, we’re at a unique juncture in immigration politics.

For the past 70 years, the party that has most embraced permanent migration in government has been the Liberal Party, not Labor.

Permanent and long-term arrival numbers vary every year; and not all of those variations are driven by Commonwealth government policy. But most are.

(For those interested in playing along, the Immigration Department offers a spreadsheet of historical migration numbers since 1945 here.)

The largest declines in our migration intake have occurred under Labor governments.

When Gough Whitlam, that darling of the progressive movement, came into power, immigration plummeted. In 1970, the Liberal government of John Gorton had admitted 185,000 migrants. The Whitlam government shrunk that to just over 50,000.

This was a deliberate policy decision. Whitlam even shut down the Department of Immigration, placing migration under the Department of Labour and Immigration.

That might seem a minor institutional change but it wasn’t: when merged with labour, immigration policy came under the influence of a traditionally pro-union bureaucracy. And unions don’t like it when the government imports foreign workers.

There’s long been a debate about whether it was Whitlam who ended the White Australia Policy or Harold Holt. Both did their part. But even though Whitlam proclaimed the end to the infamous policy, the sharp decline of total immigration on his watch meant that few non-European migrants could come to Australia regardless.

In March 1974 The Age pondered whether Gough Whitlam was doing as every government had done: “preaching tolerance while still practicing discrimination”.

Bob Hawke described himself as a “high immigration man”. But when he took government in 1983, the immigration intake dropped by more than a third. To Hawke’s credit, migration crept up over the next decade. But when Paul Keating took over, it plummeted again.

The Liberals have a much more impressive record.

Post-war immigration was at its peak under John Gorton. And Malcolm Fraser reversed the Whitlam backslide.

Under John Howard – that bête noire of pro-migration progressives – immigration jumped up well above the Gorton heights. In 2007, the number of permanent migrants arriving on our shores hit 191,000 – the largest cohort since the Second World War.

As George Megalogenis wrote in The Howard Factor, the real story was how “the former Hansonite belt … think Howard is keeping out all the foreigners, when he is bringing them here at a rate Paul Keating never contemplated”.

Yet Howard’s record-breaking immigration intake is apparently an awkward truth. In the standard text on this subject, From White Australia to Woomera: the Story of Australian Immigration, the academic James Jupp briefly acknowledges the Howard record – in one sentence. But the real issue for Jupp is that Howard was considering a temporary guest worker scheme, and such a scheme would hurt unions already battered by WorkChoices.

But then came the Rudd government, and the partisan pattern broke. Rather than immediately shrinking the intake, Rudd continued the trend upwards – hugely. More than 224,000 migrants entered Australia in 2010. And that terrifying guest worker scheme? A pilot program was eventually introduced not by the union-hating Liberal Party, but by the ALP.

Even Julia Gillard’s government – she of small Australia fame – has not appreciably reduced the number of migrants we take.

Given the showy anti-population rhetoric of the 2010 election, it is remarkable that we’re taking nearly twice as many foreigners than we did under the government of Bob “high immigration” Hawke.

There’s one obvious lesson here. Don’t trust what politicians say about immigration.

But when Rudd broke the pattern, he also broke the Liberal Party’s cover. After Labor prime ministers had lowered the intake, Liberal prime ministers were free to raise it; they gained no political benefit from doing otherwise. The Coalition could bang on about multiculturalism and refugees, but it would still bring in many more people than Labor.

Thanks to Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott faces different incentives to his predecessors. And the 2010 election demonstrated the Coalition’s willingness to play the anti-population card.

So there is perhaps an added significance to the Abbott’s announcement last week that he would reduce the Gillard government’s refugee intake by 6,000 places.

It’s one thing to call for temporary protection visas and off-shore processing. It’s another thing to actually reduce the refugee intake. His announcement was reported through the standard stop-the-boats prism but it hints at something deeper: the Coalition may sense an opportunity to rehash the 2010 themes in 2013.

Abbott has previously said that he would like to make skilled migration – that is, 457 working visas – the mainstay of a Coalition’s immigration program. But he has framed it in a peculiar way. Businesses should be able to bring in workers, “provided there aren’t Australians who could readily fill particular jobs”.

This sees immigration as a mechanism to solve problems, not way of building Australian economic strength in and of itself. And remember, 457 visas are temporary visas – not permanent ones.
Admittedly, this is like reading tea leaves. History cautions us to not take anything politicians say too seriously. The real story of immigration is only ever found in statistical appendices.
But should Abbott win government next year, immigration will be a major question for his new government.

Does he want to continue the Liberal legacy – a legacy of mass migration and population growth? Or, as he has at times unfortunately suggested, does he want to repudiate it?

The Politics Of Consensus Has A Dark Side

Memory is a funny thing. “In the days of the Accord,” Business Council head Tony Shepherd told an audience last week, “different sectors were able to agree on a common purpose and a plan to foster productivity, competitiveness and growth … there is no reason we cannot do this again.”

Shepherd is not alone. Hardly a week goes by without another CEO recalling the ambitions of past governments, and lamenting the timidity of current ones.

Their story has been repeated so often it’s become a banal cliché: in the days of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, businesses, government and unions put down their swords, held hands, and made beautiful microeconomic reform together. We need to rediscover the politics of consensus and conciliation. It’s time for an end to partisanship and to get on with … anyway. It’s boring to write, let alone read. Imagine hearing it in a speech.

But let’s be clear about what that cooperation would be in practice: institutionalised collusion between big business and big government.

This is the unacknowledged truth behind the business lobby’s complaints that Australia has left its reform era behind, or that politics is too divided to make the big historical changes.

Getting business and government around a board table isn’t necessarily a good thing. In politics, cooperation can be dangerous.

Big businesses are no fans of the free market. They only like competition in the abstract. In the real world, competition is traumatic. So when they are given the opportunity to set the rules of the game, they always try to fix it in their favour.

That’s why we talk so much about lobbyists. That’s why we talk about crony capitalism. And that’s why we talk about regulatory capture – when a business promotes regulation to shut down its competition. The politics of consensus has a dark side.

One of Adam Smith’s most famous quotes comes from his Wealth of Nations: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

Most people citing Smith’s warning leave it there. You can see the appeal. Business cartels are bad, said the neoliberals’ favourite economist.

But he went on: “Though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.” That is, cartels are bad – so the government should be careful not to create them.

On Monday, Julia Gillard announced that she wanted to do just that. Writing to the Business Council and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, she proposed a National Economic Reform Panel. This new body would encourage Australia’s biggest businesses, largest unions, and most well-connected community groups to build a national consensus on reform.

Happily, it won’t go anywhere. Remember Kevin Rudd’s relationship with Sir Rod Eddington, announced in a flurry of publicity in the 2007 election? It’s not clear that Eddington gave any advice, or that Rudd took any. The post-election Business Advisory Group didn’t seem to go anywhere, either. Similarly, it is doubtful historians will mark Julia Gillard’s tax summit in June this year as a key moment in Australian economic history.

We are haunted by memory of the Accord. When Hawke and Keating convinced the ACTU to restrain wages in return for social reforms in 1983, they created one of the few hero moments in Australian history. In our national mythology, the Accord was a necessary first step for the liberalisations of the next decade.

But the Accord was explicitly corporatist. It was a way to buy off the unions and (although they did not formally sign the Accord) a fair chunk of the business sector. It may have brought these bodies inside the tent, but it also gave them new influence and power over government.

Yes, many special interests gained from the Accord. But it does not follow that the Accord was in the general interest.

For instance, given Keating’s later efforts liberalising the labour market, we forget that the Accord constituted one of the most significant increases in industrial relations control in Australian history. To their credit, some unions recognised this. Not all unions signed up.

By the end of 1980s, advocates of liberalisation were arguing that, by locking the biggest unions within the policy system, the Accord was actually holding back reform. Privatisation, tax changes and tariff reduction were made harder, not easier, by the government’s newfound special relationship with labour. As Des Moore wrote in 1988, the Accord had granted unions a “privileged position … to defend their own narrow, short-term interest at the expense of the Australian community and of their own members”.

The politics of consensus is really the politics of privilege. It’s easy to understand why special interests want control over the levers of power, but it’s hard to see why we would give it to them.

The Coalition’s Impressionist Platform Paints The Wrong Picture

The Queensland state election was only held in March. But it feels like such a long time ago. Nobody would feel the distance between then and now more keenly than Tony Abbott.

After Campbell Newman’s extraordinary landslide, Abbott and the federal Coalition were being told by polls and commentators that they, too, were looking at a record win. Julia Gillard would lose Queensland-style.

It made sense. Labor was crippled by leadership questions, multiple scandals, and the imminent introduction of the carbon tax. The polls even suggested the Coalition could win the Senate. If not, then a quick, comfortable double dissolution would sort that out.

Eight months later, the polls are back roughly where they were at the last election – the one the Coalition didn’t win.

Tony Abbott is increasingly unpopular. Colleagues are telling the press he should cut down media appearances. His disapproval rating is the highest of any opposition leader since Alexander Downer.

Is this comparison unfair? Of course. Abbott has had Labor on the back foot almost continuously since 2009. Under Malcolm Turnbull, the Coalition would have been on the receiving end of a Queensland-style wipeout. But it’s not true to say Abbott is the most effective opposition leader in history. The only mark of success in opposition is becoming the government. And Tony Abbott is going to have to change tack if the Coalition wants to remain competitive at the next election.

Sure, if an election were held today, the opposition might win it. But an election is probably a year away. Victory requires more than optimism. Ask Mitt Romney. The Coalition has long believed it can win government on an impressionist platform: a few bold, strong strokes (stop the boats, axe the tax, pay back the debt) that, if voters step back and squint, offer a picture of what an Abbott government might look like. Those strokes are looking worn and colourless.

Asylum seeker policy has been so fudged that it’s not clear which party is promising to be toughest any more. More boats are arriving than ever. But in retrospect Julia Gillard irretrievably confused the whole issue with the Malaysia solution back in 2011.

The carbon tax no longer resonates as it once did. It will do nothing to halt climate change. It is designed to get more costly every year. But people are already forgetting about it. Voters tend to tolerate policies – even intensely hated ones – once they’ve been introduced. It still should be repealed, but it’s hard to see the Coalitionwinning on that alone.

And certainly, it seems unlikely the government will soon bring the budget into surplus. But few people care about the deficit, per se, they care about a government being so reckless with the public purse that it goes into deficit. So, until the opposition offers an alternative plan, the government just has to pretend it is sweating blood to fix the problem.

Yes, offer an alternative plan. Impressionism isn’t working.

One alternative would be to roll out a series of clear, detailed, and memorable policies that will stand alone long after Julia Gillard has left the stage. Nothing makes an opposition look more like a potential government than policy debate. Drafting policy is risky without the bureaucracy backing you up. It is a necessary risk. Or the Coalition could embrace abstraction, and present a fresh, philosophically driven vision of government. Even today, politics is still about ideas.

Abbott is better placed than most politicians for this latter approach. His 2009 book Battlelines is a manifesto of a modern, activist, big-government conservative philosophy.

Joe Hockey offered a different direction in his ”End of the Age of Entitlement” speech in April – a wholesale rethink of how government relates to its taxpayers.

But Abbott steers clear of the philosophy of Battlelines. And nobody grasped Hockey’s nettle. This lack of story about what would drive an Abbott government is why Coalition supporters are wrong to blame character assassination for their troubles. The polls were heading down long before Julia Gillard made the misogyny speech.

Every government says the opposition is being negative. Negativity is only a problem if it looks opportunistic. A cohesive philosophical vision is a shield against such charges.

And claims that Abbott is unpopular because he is too effective a critic of the government … well, that’s like saying in a job interview that your biggest weakness is you care too much about your work.

Personal unpopularity is not a barrier to success. Australians don’t want to be seduced by their politicians. We are not romantic about the prime ministership. Quirks are appealing. Gaffes are easy to forgive.

But right now, the Coalition has to start looking like a government, not a pressure group.

The Art Of Telling The Truth

Getting political journalism to focus on fact checking is appealing in principle. It is disappointing – even futile – in practice.

You can understand why people find fact checking seductive. Our politicians pander to prejudices, fudge policy details, vilify their opponents, and exaggerate their own virtues for votes.

But as good democrats we put the winners of this squalid electoral contest in charge of the levers of government. So it would be nice to know which politician lies least.

And there’s clearly frustration with journalism as it is practiced today: why not make its new duty to judge political untruths?

Fact checking was a feature of the 2012 Presidential campaign. One frustrated Mitt Romney advisor said he wouldn’t “let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers”.

But, in a column over the weekend, Australia’s Laurie Oakes unintentionally demonstrated how faddish and illusory the fact checking idea really is.

Writing that he expected fact checking to become a central part of Australian journalism, Oakes identified two recent falsehoods: Julia Gillard’s “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”, and Tony Abbott’s claims about the future economic cost of that tax.

If only it were so clear.

Did Julia Gillard lie about the carbon tax on 16 August 2010? Well, yes. And no.

She probably thought she wouldn’t introduce a “carbon tax” in the next term of government. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t introduce an emissions trading scheme. And what we call a carbon tax in 2012 is actually the latter with an initial fixed price.

Yet free market economists have long insisted that, contrary to popular wisdom, there’s not a big conceptual difference between a tax and a trading scheme. They both price carbon. A tax could be described as a “market mechanism” too.

The point is these are terms of art, not science.

The idea that a journalist – or scientist, or economist, or philosopher – would be able to provide anything near a definitive statement of whether Julia Gillard was being factually accurate is nonsense.

Anyway, how on earth could the press gallery fact check a prediction? Tony Abbott’s claims about the carbon tax’s economic impact are almost entirely rhetorical. Yes, he understates how much of recent electricity price rises have been due to the changes in the energy industry – an understatement which is regularly pointed out in parliament and the press. But as to the carbon tax’s real cost?

Models of future economic costs merely reflect the assumptions they’re built upon. We don’t know how much a policy hurts until long afterwards. Even then it’s still quite hard to tell. Fact checking of such predictions is just arguing the toss.

This problem is clearly illustrated in the latest piece on The Washington Post’s Fact Checkerblog. Run by a veteran correspondent, Glenn Kessler, Fact Checker is apparently the gold standard in the field.

The story goes like this. Republicans have been citing an Ernst & Young study saying tax increases on the rich would “destroy nearly 700,000 jobs”.

Kessler notes that a) the jobs are lost over a decade or more, b) 700,000 jobs is only a tiny fraction of total employment, c) the study ignores the benefits of reducing the deficit, and d) there’s a different study that says otherwise.

For their “misleading” analysis, he awarded the Republicans three out of four Pinocchios.

But who is being misleading here? The Republicans aren’t wrong. At best they are guilty of an ungenerous presentation of the evidence. The Ernst & Young study says 700,000 jobs will be lost – just not immediately. You can’t refute rhetorical excess.

What Kessler isn’t doing isn’t fact checking, really. It’s just more argument. Which is fine, but let’s not pretend that more argument is a journalism revolution. And it’s definitely not new.
Even apparently clear falsehoods – for instance, Mitt Romney’s ad saying Barack Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China” – are more subtle than they’ve been presented. In a confusingly worded Bloomberg article, Chrysler was reported to be considering exactly that.

Kessler gave Romney four Pinnochios for his Chrysler ad, but his actual conclusion was more modest.

The ad was “a series of statements that individually might be factually defensible, but the overall impression is misleading”.

In the hands of partisans this has become a classic Romney ‘lie’.

Certainly, Romney had confused the Chrysler issue in an earlier speech in Ohio. But senior politicians are usually very clever with their words. They don’t lie. They dissemble.
Kessler to his credit is relatively even-handed. He goes after both left and right.

Such non-discrimination is unusual. Fact checking is more common as a political attack than journalistic technique. Hacks of all sides push their own fact checkers. It’s just another weapon in the partisan’s armoury. Smugly purporting to be on the side of ‘reality’ is a fashionable way to hit your opponent.

There’s a more critical problem with the fact checking fad. Political journalism is a business of generalists not experts. The best reporters know a little about a lot, not a lot about a little.

That, indeed, is why the ‘he-said, she-said’ model of journalism was developed. He-said, she-said has a bad reputation these days – it is often used unthinkingly – but it exists for a reason. It reflects a modesty that generalists cannot rule definitively on all issues. Sometimes you need to call a specialist. If something is controversial, you may need to call two.

Political rhetoric is rarely true or false. When an issue is simple, politicians will fudge it. When an issue is complicated, it requires experts to unpack.

Either way, self-conscious and self-satisfied ‘fact checking’ is no magic bullet.

Grandstanding about mobiles won’t reduce the road toll

It’s an old principle of policing – if you can’t enforce the laws on the books, demand more laws.

More than 55,000 people in Victoria were booked for using their mobile phones while driving last year. That’s around 150 people a day.

So on Monday, the front page of the Herald Sun reported that Victoria’s chief highway patrol cop wanted the government to force drivers to switch their phone off in cars.
Never mind that a ban on phones in cars would be completely unenforceable.

Victorian road rules are clear. The Road Safety Act bans mobile phone use while a car is running. The only exception is receiving calls or using navigation functions with a commercially fitted holder. Even then, the driver cannot touch the phone at any time. The fine is $300 and three demerit points. New South Wales enacted similar laws last week.

Yet one survey suggests around 60 per cent of Victorians still use their phone while driving. That 55,000 people booked isn’t a lot, considering more than two million of the state’s 3.7 million licensed drivers are breaking the rules.

The Herald Sun article said “thousands of rogue motorists flout the law”. No – millions do.

First things first: it is incredibly stupid to use a mobile phone while travelling at speed. Driving is a complex task. Sending a text message on a phone increases the risk of accident up to 23 times. That much is easy to demonstrate in simulations and in-car experiments.

But things get less certain from there.

The “while driving” data is a bit misleading. They include a lot of circumstances we wouldn’t usually call driving – like checking your phone while stopped at a traffic light. But if the engine is running, it counts.

The NSW government commissioned a study into the extent of the problem earlier this year as part of a parliamentary inquiry. The results were striking and counterintuitive.

Seven per cent of accidents in NSW in the last decade involved driver distraction. And within that 7 per cent, only 1 per cent involved a handheld phone.

Don’t get too hung up on the specific numbers. There are many complicated definitional issues. There’s a large body of academic research on driver distraction but it’s not all comparable. And, obviously, the ideal number of accidents is zero, whether related to phones or anything else.

Yet it still remains that mobile phones are extremely small proportion of the causes of distracted driving involved in accidents. The majority of distractions come from outside the car. Then there are those within the car – like fellow passengers, grooming, or eating and drinking.

There are even three times as many accidents involving police pursuit as mobile phones.

The overwhelming majority of accidents involve exactly what you’d expect: speed, fatigue, and drink. Mobile phones hardly rate.

But you wouldn’t know that from the press. Phones dominate the popular discussion of car accidents. Using a phone while driving seems to be the ultimate in recklessness. It is terrifying to imagine there are people speeding down the freeway while tapping out text messages.

Smart phones are a novelty, and novelty makes news. Stories about how mobile phones cause accidents has all the characteristics of a moral panic – a disproportionate reaction to a small problem. Drivers face worse distractions. There are more disconcerting risks on the road.

For instance, one 2005 study found in-car entertainment systems are a far bigger real-world distraction than phones. You have to take your eyes off the road to change a CD or radio station. Handheld phones are problematic not because they impair drivers physically, but because talking while driving takes extra mental effort. It’s the conversation which is dangerous, not the phone. (This explains why some studies have found hands-free phone systems are no safer than hand-held ones.)

These are uncomfortable findings. No politician wants to challenge the right of drivers to chat with passengers or listen to the radio. Anyway, that’s why we have careless driving laws, and take recklessness and negligence into account in criminal accident proceedings.

Nevertheless, there has been a remarkable decline in car fatalities over the past few decades. The Commonwealth government has been tracking road deaths since 1925. Deaths have reduced from 30 per 100,000 population in 1970, to seven in 2008. If anything, that understates the decline: we’re driving twice as much as we did 40 years ago. And the death toll is still going down, even as more people buy more complicated phones.

A society should try not to have too many unenforceable laws. They breed contempt for the law as an institution. If people get used to disobeying one law, they may become comfortable with disobeying others.

As the American writer Radley Balko has argued, calls to increase restrictions on mobile phones in cars aren’t about safety; they’re about symbolism.

It’s already illegal to use phones in the car. Lots of people do it anyway. But political grandstanding about mobiles is not the same as reducing the road toll.