Ilf and Petrov’s excellent adventure

A review of Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip.

In 1931, some 10,000 American tourists travelled to the Soviet Union in order to see what the great Soviet Experiment could offer their depression ravaged country.

But the tourist traffic heading the other direction was much lighter. Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip is the travelogue of two Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, as they crossed the United States, scribbling reports for Pravda readers back home. Like the American fellow-travellers who were merrily shuttled from Potemkin village to Potemkin village, the report of their journey reveals more about their home country and culture than the country they ostensibly went to investigate.

The resulting photoessay, which was originally published in the Russian magazine Ogonek, (roughly equivalent to Life) reproduced the snapshots taken by Ilya Ilf on their journey with their satirical impressions of their trip. American Road Trip is a delightfully naïve interpretation of American society in the depression era.

In this book edited by Erika Wolf, a historian of Soviet art, Ilf’s photographs are affectionately reproduced for the first time in an English language publication. Ilf’s photographs are more happy-snaps than Ansell Adams. Many photos appear to have been taken by sticking the camera out of the windows of their car. The book is full of slightly askew pictures of things the two Russians found interesting, or at least notable – some ‘handsome and unusually elaborate’ species of cactus, the childhood home of Mark Twain, an advertisement for whiskey that incorporated a statue of a horse, and a sign that notified visitors they were entering the little town of Moscow, Ohio.

There are some photographs of more political importance. A swaying sign in the street with the lettering ‘REVOLUTION IS A FORM OF GOVERNMENT ABROAD’ is, to Ilf and Petrov, bourgeois intimidation of the working class. (As Erika Wolf notes, the joke was on the Russians-the sign was instead an advertisement for a popular humour anthology illustrated by Dr Seuss. Ilf and Petrov were the foremost satirists of the Soviet Union, but they were unable to recognise the work of their American colleagues.)

For the most part, Ilf’s camera is non-political. Indeed, American Road Trip generally avoids direct political criticism. Ilf and Petrov are obviously fond of the country they are studying. They are fascinated by the advertising they see plastered across their trip, and direct much of their satirical energy towards Coca-Cola and cigarette advertising:

The fiery writing burns all night long above America and all day long the garish billboards hurt your eyes: ‘The Best in the World! Toasted Cigarettes! They Bring You Success! The Best in the Solar System!’

When we read how foreign the most basic and innocuous advertising seems to the two Russians-they are surprised that that towns advertise themselves on billboards beside the highway-we don’t gain a better picture of the United States in the 1930s, but of the Soviet Union. They are highly sympathetic to the Native Americans living on reservations, predictably seeing them as remnants of a social structure in opposition to the dynamic capitalism of the east and west coasts. (Although as Erika Wolf notes, Ilf and Petrov are once again tricked, as a Native American who pretends to be unaware of civilisation was actually a famous photographer and clown dancer on tour.) Similarly, a trip through North Carolina confirms their Soviet views about American race relations – deep in the Jim Crow era, it is fair to say they had a point.

What does surprise the modern reader is the unfocused rage they direct towards American filmmaking. ‘We watched at least a hundred picture shows and were simply depressed by the amount of vulgarity, stupidity and lies’. Certainly, it would be hard to defend the vast piles of films which were produced to fulfil contractual obligations in the studio system during Hollywood’s Golden Age, but cheaply written and produced movies are hardly a unique feature of American cinema. The cookie-cutter productions of Soviet cinema during the ideologically rigid Stalin era are, on average, of a far lower quality than comparable American films, and have certainly held up worse over time. Ilf and Petrov may have been outraged more by the ideological content of Hollywood films than their quality.

American Road Trip is certainly at the margins of Soviet culture in the 1930s, but it is more than a historical curiosity. Satire was a major part of Russian culture before and after the October Revolution. The lives of Illya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov illustrate how mixed the bureaucratic approach to political satire could be. Their 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs flirts with political criticism, but they remained in favour-other well-known satirists, such as those in OBERIU literary collective, were killed in Stalin’s purges for sedition.

Ilf and Petrov do little more than reflect dominant Soviet thinking about their ideological opponent, but they are never heavy handed or propagandistic. American Road Trip purports to be a study of the United States, but instead fascinatingly reveals the strength of Soviet ideology and the Russian mindset.

20 years reveals gigantic strides in international trade

The politics of trade policy often obscures what should be an unambiguously positive story about the globalisation of the world economy. Goods which were previously produced on a single site are now produced in a virtual international factory-each element assembled in different countries, even continents, and linked by the international shipping network.

In his 2006 history of the shipping container The Box, Marc Levinson illustrated this by detailing the convoluted production process of a Barbie doll – Chinese workers produce the figure using moulds from the United States, machinery from Japan and Europe, and plastic from Taiwan; her hair is produced in Japan, the pigments from the United States, and the clothing from China.

Just how rapidly the world’s economies are becoming interdependent is clear when we look at the shipping container. The US-based Progressive Policy Institute has recently noted that the container capacity of an average container ship has massively increased over the last two decades. The average ship can now carry the 2,348 twenty-foot equivalent units (the size of a standard shipping container). The international container ship fleet has itself grown four-fold since 1987.

And this is only set to increase. The world’s longest container ship, the Danish-owned Emma Maersk can carry 11,000 units.

This rapid and dramatic increase in international economic integration has been just as significant for our economic well-being as have any changes in public policy. The entrepreneur who popularised the shipping container – Malcolm McLean – should be just as well remembered as the politicians who cut tariffs. And when we look at the low cost and high variety of goods available in our stores, we should remember that it was entrepreneurs who brought them there, not well-crafted public policy.

One For The Country

Anybody who remembers that photograph of Peter Costello gleefully surrounded by newborn infants knows one thing: it isn’t only aspiring parents who can go a bit baby crazy. Few areas are as familiar with poorly designed government policy as childhood and parenthood.

So when the Federal Government this week announced an inquiry into the possibility of paid parental leave, it was tough to remain optimistic. You need only to look at the baby bonus to see that the black hole of bad policy is deep. Costly, blunt and poorly designed policy instruments have just as many unintended negative consequences as benefits.

The exact details of Labor’s parental leave scheme won’t be known until after the inquiry reports back next year, but most proposals for paid parental leave would require the Government to pay a nominated parent roughly the minimum wage for a dozen or so weeks.

Certainly, this is far better than simply requiring businesses to pay the cost of the leave out of their own pockets. The biggest risk that government-mandated workplace entitlements pose is that they make it more costly to hire workers – and the unintended consequence is that employers are reluctant to hire in the first place.

Nevertheless, for a government that proclaims itself eager to cut spending, the addition of what will probably be at least a half-billion dollar expenditure into the federal budget is not going to help the Labor Party nurture a small government image.

Paid parental leave could also break a fundamental principle of good welfare policy – the most effective policies are means-tested policies. There is no good reason for taxpayers to give the $5000 baby bonus to a family that is already comfortable enough to look after its newborn. At least the issue of parental leave has been referred to the Productivity Commission – the government’s independent research department that can claim much of the credit for advancing the cause of economic reform since its inception. This contrasts with the worrying reluctance of Labor to trust the commission with anything else important.

Inquiries into climate change, car manufacturing and international trade have all been established separately – Kevin Rudd may not trust the government’s experts to give him the answers he wants.

But the biggest problem with a paid parental leave scheme is how it encourages the redefinition of our relationship with government. The baby bonus has already established in the mind of Australians that having children is more than just a personal decision – it is part of a long-running negotiation between parents, the Federal Government and the tax office. The former Liberal government shamelessly encouraged this idea, but if what appears to be the instinct of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard is followed through, soon no one will start a family without lengthy consultations with the Australian Taxation Office and Prime Minister’s Department.

Of course, from the Government’s perspective, this is a perfectly rational approach. All those newborns that surrounded Peter Costello are future taxpayers. And business lobbyists keep urging the government to do something about the skills shortage and ageing workforce. So the government wants us to breed.

But the people whose decision could be influenced if they are given a few grand by the government may not actually be the best parents.

And the problems of ageing populations and skills shortages don’t have to be resolved by funnelling subsidies to young families. It would instead be better for children if individuals were allowed to come to their own decisions about parenthood uninfluenced by politicians desperate to pay their way out of the latest political crisis.

Perhaps if the government really thinks that we have a population problem, it could be looking carefully at increasing immigration – skilled and non-skilled – and relaxing the high costs of work visas.

Nevertheless, introducing subsidies to new parents conveniently supports Rudd’s working families narrative. It’s politically savvy to pay off your supporters.

The fundamental question that the Labor Government’s proposal for parental leave raises is whether parents should have children for themselves, or for society. But that answer is fairly clear. After all, what parent spends time thinking about how starting a family could help Australia’s OECD rankings? Hopefully none.

Rudd’s Super Summit Puts The Con Into Consensus

There is a strange fantasy held by many serious people in politics that if you get enough experts in a room, some sort of magical consensus will emerge and everything will be wonderful.

But suppose we could get a consensus about the future of this country. Would that even be good?

This fantasy appears to be the idea behind the 2020 summit that Kevin Rudd announced last week. For two days, 1000 of Australia’s best, and best-connected, individuals will convene in Canberra to nut out some solutions to our social and economic problems.

Given that it is unlikely the Rudd Government will adopt any of the summit’s proposals – at least, none they weren’t already familiar with – the 2020 talkfest is unlikely to do too much harm.

No doubt the proposals from 2020 will be as pedestrian as those produced by the half-dozen “future-oriented” conferences around the country each year. That is, we should do more on climate change, spend more on education, infrastructure and innovation, engage more with Asia, the republic is the most important issue facing Australia today, children are our future, and on and on and on.

The Government will surely be familiar with these ideas – many of them formed Labor’s campaign platform. So if the only big idea behind Rudd’s education revolution was to set up an education committee at a gigantic conference, it’s hard to avoid wondering why we bother having revolutions at all.

After all, what great idea ever came from a committee? Committees usually end up choosing the worst idea that at least two people agree on. It was a committee that chose the hideous London Olympics logo, which looks like Lisa Simpson doing something she shouldn’t.

The old adage that “a camel is a horse designed by committee” will be doubly true for public policy designed by a committee that consists of 1000 “leaders” – hardly the sort of people who are known as team players.

Nevertheless, at the end of two days, the 2020 summit will have bought off Australia’s public intellectual class. There is nothing more flattering for a self-styled opinion maker than to be approached by the federal government for ideas. With an invite list of 1000, this summit is flattery on an industrial scale.

There is a serious point to be made about the 2020 summit, and it doesn’t bode well for future policy. The summit appears to make good on one of Labor’s key election promises: a new style of consensus-based politics. Under Kevin Rudd, the party said, the states and the Commonwealth would work together and businesses and governments would work together. Even Labor’s factions might tone down their mutual hatred and start going to the same parties.

It would be easy to run a country on consensus if everybody shared the same views. But not only do people disagree on means, they also disagree on ends. For some, the aim of public policy should be liberty and the maximisation of personal choice; for others, economic and social equality. With such disparate and often strongly held views, the idea that we can all eventually agree is a fiction. But the problem with the 2020 summit is more than the impossibility of getting everybody into a group hug. The dirty secret of Australian politics is that conflict makes good government.

For instance, state and federal governments aren’t supposed to co-operate. The idea behind Federation was that the states would compete to develop the best public policy and that the Commonwealth would do the things that the states didn’t. If they start working closely together, as Rudd has assured us will now happen, it will only further erode our critically weakened federal system. We may not actually want to “end the blame game”.

Similarly, trying to get business and government working together is fraught with difficulty. Usually, the only things business want from government are money or protection from competitors. The only thing governments want from business is help achieving political goals.

And when the government works with the “community”, it inevitably ends up consulting special-interest groups who harbour ideological views not shared by the community as a whole. It is us, as citizens and consumers, who get the raw deal.

The 2020 summit is more than just a happy-clappy approach to governing. Rudd has to be careful that his eagerness to build “consensus” doesn’t leave the Government open to interest groups and poor policy.

Isn’t All This Talk Of An Apocalypse Getting A Bit Boring?

This year is the 40th anniversary of Paul Ehrlich’s influential The Population Bomb, a book that predicted an apocalyptic overpopulation crisis in the 1970s and ’80s.

Ehrlich’s book provides a lesson we still haven’t learnt. His prophecy that the starvation of millions of people in the developed world was imminent was spectacularly wrong – humanity survived without any of the forced sterilisation that Ehrlich believed was necessary.

It’s easy to predict environmental collapse, but it never actually seems to happen.

The anniversary of The Population Bomb should put contemporary apocalyptic predictions in their proper context. If anything, our world – and the environment – just keeps getting better.

Ehrlich was at the forefront of a wave of pessimistic doomsayers in the late 1960s and early ’70s. And these doomsayers weren’t just cranks – or, if they were cranks, they were cranks with university tenure.

Despite what should be a humiliating failure for his theory of overpopulation, Ehrlich is still employed as a professor of population studies by Stanford University. Similarly, when George Wald predicted in a 1970 speech that civilisation was likely to end within 15 or 30 years, his audience was reminded that he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist.

These predictions were picked up by people eager to push their own agendas. And a subgenre of films arose to deal with the “inevitable” environment and population crisis. Soylent Green(1973) depicted a world where all food was chemically produced, and other films imagined dystopias where amoral bureaucrats strictly controlled the population – just the sort of things advocated in The Population Bomb.

In retrospect, these fears seem a little bit silly. The green revolution that was brought about by advances in agricultural biotechnology came pretty close to eliminating the problem of food scarcity. Nor did the alarmists expect the large changes in demography and fertility rates that have occurred during the past few decades.

Nevertheless, for people in the 1970s, predictions of apocalypse through overpopulation and famine were just as real as the predictions of an apocalypse caused by climate change are today. And, just like today, environmental activists and their friends in politics were lining up to propose dramatic changes to avert the crisis.

For instance, the vice-president of the Australian Conservation Foundation wrote just last week in The Age that we needed to imagine global suffering before we can tackle climate change through “nation-building” – whatever that is.

But there are substantial grounds for optimism – on almost every measure, the state of the world is improving.

Pollution is no longer the threat it was seen to be in the 1970s, at least in the developed world. Changes in technology, combined with our greater demand for a clean environment, have virtually eliminated concerns about pungent waterways and dirty forests. Legislation played some role in this, but as Indur Goklany points out in his recent study, The Improving State of the World, the environment started getting better long before such laws were passed.

Goklany reveals that strong economies, not environment ministers, are the most effective enforcers of cleanliness in our air and water. Indeed, the world’s 10 most polluted places are in countries where strong economic growth has historically been absent – Russia, China, India and Kyrgyzstan have not really been known for their thriving consumer capitalism.

Other indices, too, show that humanity’s future is likely to be bright. Infant mortality has dramatically declined, as has malnutrition, illiteracy, and even global poverty.

And there are good grounds for hope that we can adapt to changing climates as well. History has shown just how capable we are of inventing and adapting our way out of any sticky situation – and how we can do it without crippling our economies or imposing brutal social controls.

Environmental alarmists have become more and more like those apocalyptic preachers common in the 19th century – always expecting the Rapture on this date and, when it doesn’t come, quickly revising their calculations.

Optimism is in too short supply in discussions about the environment. But four decades afterThe Population Bomb, if we remember just how wrong visions of the apocalypse have been in the past, perhaps we will look to the future more cheerfully.

Next Time You Sip A Latte, Look Beyond The Feel-Good Choice

Just how fair is fair trade? Mass market retailers from Safeway to Starbucks now sell us coffee that is supposed to quench our thirst and appease our conscience, but there is more to fair trade than feel-good marketing and social justice.

Coffee has long been highly politicised. In 17th-century England, coffee became allied with the cause of free speech when Charles II shut down the coffee houses that he thought were brewing criticism of his government.

And in the eyes of modern activists, coffee is symbolic of the unfairness of international trade. Their story of coffee is of the developing world exploited by globalisation and wicked multinational corporations. And their solution is fair trade – marketing coffee under a brand that guarantees growers more bang for their beans, sustainable agricultural practices and so on.

But there is more to fair trade than meets the eye. It comes at a high price. The program carries a great deal of ideological baggage and fair trade certification is full of requirements that can limit economic development rather than encourage it. For example, to achieve certification, coffee producers are required to structure their organisations not as the small businesses that have been so successful in capitalist economies but as democratic worker co-operatives.

For fair trade advocates, the only way the developing world can compete in a global coffee market is by adopting the quasi-socialist communal structures that have constantly failed to compete in other industries.

Individual farms are unable to achieve certification by themselves – the fair trade organisation will only approve co-operatives that can contain hundreds of farms. This practice reduces entrepreneurship and competition between producers, eliminating the benefits of innovative farming techniques. And in some regions, the fair trade system encourages farmers to grow in less climatically favourable areas, depressing the quality of the coffee beans.

Nevertheless, the fair trade marketing machine is extraordinarily powerful, and the brand has revealed an eager base of socially aware consumers.

The politicisation of the coffee industry has happened in conjunction with another major change: the awakening of the Australian palate. Coffee, like many other foods and drinks, has benefited from an expansion of taste that has added, for instance, sushi and specialty cheeses to our diet. It’s worth remembering just how recently it was that mass market stores like Gloria Jean’s were seen as gourmet retailers pushing the radical idea that the flavour of our flat whites actually mattered outside niche cafes.

In the middle of this gourmet revolution, whether we buy fair trade or just good old free trade coffee is merely another one of the thousands of choices we face in our overloaded supermarket. And Australians are wealthy enough to spend extra on products we feel are more ethical.

Indeed, symbolism has become an important part of the way we dine. Similar campaigns against genetic modification and for organic and sustainable agriculture are just as much about image as reality – too often they are based on flimsy evidence and have negative consequences for producers and the environment.

The fair trade system is more than our preferences in the supermarket. At best, fair trade has an ambiguous effect on the economic wellbeing of coffee growers in the developing world; at worst, it may actually be holding them back.

Tackling Obesity – Should The Public Pay?

The demand by AMA Victoria that the State Government fund bariatric surgery for the chronically obese is no doubt motivated by compassion, but illustrates some of the ways the debate about obesity has become severely distorted. Obesity is not a public health problem and should not be treated as one.

Until relatively recently, the phrase “public health” indicated health problems that were actually public problems – sanitation, the control of epidemics, water quality, airborne pollution and so forth. But increased obesity is not a public health crisis like an outbreak of bird flu would be. Obesity is not contagious – when one person overindulges on fast food, their colleagues and neighbours aren’t put at risk. And, in 2008, nobody orders pizza without being fully aware that cheesy crusts can lead to weight gain.

For these reasons, obesity is too often tragic, but it is first and foremost a private problem. Medical campaigners who seek to redefine the parameters of public health are eliminating the crucial policy distinction between public and private health concerns. When every health problem becomes a national crisis, no medical treatment is ineligible for government funding. Bariatric surgery may be an important, even necessary, tool to treat obesity, but it does not automatically follow that it should be paid for directly by the taxpayer.

Of course, the most common objection to this line of reasoning is the simple calculation that the cost of treating obesity now is far less than the cost of treating the consequences in the future – resolving heart disease and diabetes may be more expensive than bariatric surgery.

All public policy should be subject to economic assessment. But this is a slippery slope. Britain’s National Health Service shows what can happen when the government makes all health problems its business – those calculations rapidly lose their compassion and become cruel assessments of moral, rather than medical, questions. Last week British PM Gordon Brown hinted that individuals whose lifestyle choices had created their health problems – obesity is the classic example – may be refused treatment in order to cut costs.

The only way to avoid this trap is to drop the conceit that all medical problems are public problems, and to reintroduce the idea that individuals should be responsible for their own health.

What next? Liberalism after the Howard government

‘When you change the government’, argued John Howard in the last few days before the election, ‘you do change the direction of the country’.

Paul Keating’s clarion call proved to be just as ineffectual the second time round. That could perhaps be because it obviously isn’t true. Despite the high level of state economic and social intervention in Australia, the nation isn’t steered by Captain Government.

As Tim Wilson writes in this special section on liberalism after the Howard government, part of the problem that the Coalition faced in its final years was the unwillingness of the government to grapple with key demographic and social changes. Similarily, as Ken Phillip notes, in industrial relations the rise of independent contracting has been meteoric—to the extent that there are now far more self-employed people than there are members of a union — but the cause of this change was economic, not legislative.

Between 1996 and 2007 a lot of things happened, and very few of them were the consequence of Commonwealth legislation.

The ‘change the country’ line was doubly inappropriate because of the status quo strategy of the Rudd opposition. Federal Labor’s big ticket items may have been climate change and broadband, but fibre optic networks and carbon trading don’t win elections. Rather, it was Labor’s mantra of ‘economic conservatism’ that was specifically designed to repudiate Howard’s argument. To try to emphasise their credentials, Rudd and Gillard’s repeatedly affirmed the independence of the Reserve Bank — as if that was ever up for grabs.

The message was simple: vote for the ALP, and they won’t change the country. But if you vote for the Coalition, they will embark on another round of industrial relations reform, and the country certainly will change. The Howard government became alienated from its own record of conservative governance.

The 2007 election re-established the status quo brand in the minds of political strategists. It will likely go down as one of John Howard’s major legacies, and it is largely a positive legacy. With the government’s extraordinarily flattering economic record, it is no wonder that voters prefer more of the same.

Unfortunately, brand status quo has applied to areas which advocates of liberal philosophy — that is, the ideological combination of limited government and the open society — would prefer it did not. As Des Moore shows in his piece on the Howard government’s spending and taxing record, despite their professed sympathy with small government principles, the Coalition delivered no reduction in discretionary spending and its election promises foreshadowed no future reduction.

Along a wide range of public policy areas, the Howard government could have done more. Industrial relations reform was used as a federal power grab, rather than as a push towards common law contracts. Taxation reform drove yet another stake into the already terminal federal compact.

Other reforms were barely reforms at all—the 2006 changes to media law did little to free up a stifled commercial media sector. It is hard to avoid concluding that the government’s approach to reform was about quantity, not quality. Economic reform packages may have started out well-intentioned, but when they emerged from the meat-grinder of parliament, they too often represented steps backward.

This mixed record — the Howard government was extremely successful at managing the economy, but disappointing at reforming it—is reflected in this IPA Review issue by the conflicting, but not irreconcilable, accounts by Tom Switzer and Christian Kerr.

Liberalism’s dilemma

Nevertheless, elections are not won or lost on the size of government, weak media regulations, or eroding federalism. Elections are won on appeals to the status quo, issues such as immigration, or security fears. Federal seats are won on vacuous — and, as Richard Allsop points out, for federalists deeply concerning — issues such as graffiti, hoons and train lines. It isn’t just that voters are not interested in liberal policies. In many cases it has proven far easier to win votes with an illiberal platform.

Part of this gulf between the policy preferences of voters and liberal policy preferences has been explained well by Bryan Caplan in his 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. In it, Caplan nominates four biases held by the average voter that are not empirically justifiable. The ‘make-work bias’ is a tendency to equate economic growth with jobs, rather than productivity; the ‘anti-foreign’ bias ignores the importance of foreign trade; the ‘pessimistic bias’ overplays contemporary economic problems; and the ‘anti-market’ bias underestimates the benefits of market exchange.

Caplan’s four biases go most of the way to explaining the distance between liberal philosophy and Liberal Party policy. As a consequence, the Coalition’s loss of government illuminates sharply a debilitating problem that liberalism faces in 2007.

What role can liberal philosophy have if it can’t be successfully marketed to voters? Certainly, ideology cannot be the sole guide to policy. This is the classic dilemma for libertarians seeking public office. As one American libertarian noted, ‘There is no mass constituency for seven-year-old heroin dealers to be able to buy tanks with their profits from prostitution.’

Liberal political parties are unlikely to win future government on a platform of radical change, except in times of crisis. The four biases of the irrational voter mean that dramatic increases in immigration or a reduction in the minimum wage are hardly tickets to electoral success. In an era of status quo politics, it appears that ideology is, on net, an electoral negative rather than a positive.

But conversely, the final years of the Howard government demonstrated what can result when a political party has no philosophical base, lacks the fiscal restraint imposed by ideology, and simply purchases the votes it needs. Sooner or later, voters — or in the case of the 2007 election, the opposition — punish them for their directionless expedience.

Perhaps one reason why liberalism seems impossible to market to voters is because it hasn’t yet been tried. No major party has gone to an election — from opposition or from government — with a full programme of social liberalism and economic liberalism.

In her piece, Louise Staley starts to examine what an array of liberal social policies might look like. Importantly, she argues that ‘liberal’ in this context is not merely a synonym of ‘left’, but neither is it ‘conservative’. Instead, liberalism needs to develop its own approach if it is to break through the social policy impasse. But this is an area where modern liberal thought is conspicuously lacking, and filling that hole will need to be a part of any liberal revival.

There is the possibility, too, to develop an economically liberal message that may resonate with voters. The Howard government suffered from its abstract message — ‘economic growth’ is far less concrete than fibre-to-the-node and the Kyoto Protocol. Voters may instead respond to campaigns targeting over-bureaucracy and regulation, particularly as they affect business and community life. The record levels of regulatory and legislative activity during the Howard government provide ample scope to do so. It is fair to say that such a campaign would be a direct repudiation of the Howard record.

Ronald Reagan campaigned along these lines, although it should be noted that Australia lacks the anti-statist political culture of the United States. But if the Rudd Labor government turns out to be anything like the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, this regulation is likely to increase exponentially — presenting possible policy targets such as privacy and bureaucratisation.

Nevertheless, again we reach a strategic bottleneck — campaigns against the Nanny State may swing voters towards liberal parties at the margins, but probably not deliver two dozen seats. Arguing that a consistently liberal message could win an election would be convenient, but doesn’t seem to be true.

In this IPA Review, we have assembled a range of approaches to this challenge. What is not under question however is the need for liberalism in Australia, and the challenges which liberals face — limited government and the open society remain ‘simple and obvious’ goals regardless of their electoral popularity.

The Growth Of Australia’s Regulatory State: Ideology, Accountability And The Mega-Regulators

Institute of Public Affairs, 2008

Regulation is a political activity. It sets the framework for the market economy by defining the boundaries between private action and government action. Yet those boundaries are not fixed. Australian governments are growing the body of regulation — and the resources dedicated to regulating — at an ever increasing pace.

As Chris Berg argues, this growth in regulation has more than just economic consequences. It has significant political implications, as regulatory agencies are increasing their power and influence. Furthermore, those agencies are animated by a new regulatory ideology which favours interventionism and ‘arm-twisting’, adding to the powers of regulatory agencies.

Available in PDF here.