Category: Articles

Last week we learned that Mark Dreyfus, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Australia, was recently involved in “an incident” on an airplane.

Dreyfus was travelling from Sydney to Brisbane in late April. He refused to turn off his phone as the aircraft prepared for take-off. Given that this is a clear breach of airline policy and air safety regulations, the captain called the Federal Police, and the police met him at the gate.

The Daily Telegraph reported the story here. It’s pretty embarrassing. But let’s set aside what this sequence of events reveals about his character and his attitude to the law.

There’s a more interesting story here.

It’s pretty likely the Attorney-General wasn’t the only person on that Sydney to Brisbane flight trying to furtively check their emails. Mobile phones are used on airplanes remarkably often.

Data on this is hard to come by. But surveys of frequent flyers always show mobile phone use is common. The best evidence we have is one study of 37 American flights in 2003. The study found there were between one and four surreptitious phone calls made on each flight. And that was 10 years ago. Our personal electronic devices are much more capable and indispensable now.

Does this chronic law-breaking make flying more risky? Almost definitely not.

Electronic devices are strictly regulated on aircraft not for technical reasons, but sociological ones. Their control says more about how humans cope with uncertainty than it does anything about technology.

On the face of it, the technical argument for the mobile phone ban looks strong. Electronic devices give off radio frequency emissions. Sometimes that’s intentional – like when we make a call or use the internet. Sometimes it isn’t. As long as an electronic device is on, it is probably emitting something.

Those radio frequency emissions can affect an aircraft’s electronics in two ways. First, they might interfere with the plane’s external antennas. This is particularly a concern for accidental emissions. Aircraft systems that are designed to receive flight-related transmissions could pick up noise from all those laptops and mobiles and iPads cluttering the cabin. Second, deliberate transmissions – phone calls, text messages, going online – could interfere with the avionic systems or poorly shielded cables running through the aircraft.

Compound this with the unpredictability of faulty consumer electronics – that iPhone you dropped in the bath but still kinda works – and the fact that there could be hundreds of devices running at the same time, and that’s the argument that regulators have made since the 1960s.

Nice in theory. Damn hard to prove. There is no conclusive real-world evidence that phones or tablets interfere with avionics.

And thank goodness, considering how many people actually surreptitiously use their devices in the air. Or how many people accidentally leave their devices on, whether out of forgetfulness or ignorance.

NASA has a reporting system where pilots and others can confidentially disclose any incidents concerning flight safety. (Australia has a similar system, REPCON.) You can read a sample of the NASA reports that mention personal electronic devices here. What’s striking is how few of those reported incidents even imply that a device affected flight systems.

An investigation of the complete NASA data by USA Today found that, between 2001 and 2011, there were just 32 incidents where electronic devices were suspected to have interfered with the aircraft. This is a tiny number. There are 70,000 flights in the United States every single day.

And the incidents are utterly speculative. Boeing tries to purchase the electronic devices that are suspected of interfering with aircraft systems. But they’ve never been able to replicate the effects.

In other words, neither regulators nor aircraft manufacturers have been able to demonstrate that mobile phones are dangerous.

Then again, nobody can prove they’re not.

Humans don’t like uncertainty. Regulators like uncertainty even less. This is understandable. With airplane safety the stakes are very high. But that uncertainty means they are stubbornly enforcing a law that has no evidentiary basis.

There are other reasons offered for mobile phone restrictions. Passengers might be annoyed by listening to other passengers’ phone calls. The requirement to turn devices off completely during take-off could act as crowd control, forcing passengers to watch the safety briefing. These arguments aren’t compelling. We could ban phone calls but allow text messaging. People ignore the safety briefing anyway.

The mobile phone restriction won’t last. All the theoretical problems with interference can be eliminated by improving aircraft systems. Cables can be shielded. Antenna sensitivities can be adjusted. Yes, doing so is expensive. But it would be extraordinarily reckless for an airline not to make their systems more resilient.

And if regulators are genuinely worried about the dangers of mobile phone interference, let’s hope they’re not relying on an ineffective ban. Ensuring aircraft resilience seems like the most prudent option.

Airlines are already rolling out services that satisfy our electronic addictions. Lots of carriers now offer in-flight wireless internet access. Others have even installed a full mobile network in the cabin. The industry has never been more competitive. Airlines are always looking for something extra to charge.

Eventually, very important people (Mark Dreyfus) and less important people (everybody else) will be able to check their emails whenever they want. We just have to wait for regulators to catch up.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard informed us yesterday that the budget deficit will be much worse than predicted. Her speech has been greeted with the usual debate about whether it even matters if we go into deficit.

But this time is different. Thanks to a recent academic controversy, it seems like the anti-austerity, pro-deficit spending crowd has won a major victory.

Here’s the story. In January 2010, two prominent American economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, released a working paper, ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’.

The paper took data spanning 200 years from 44 countries and analysed the relationship between public debt and economic growth.

The findings were striking. Once debt hits 90 per cent of GDP – that is, when a government owes almost as much money as the entire economy produces each year – then the rate of economic growth dramatically slows. (Obviously Australian debt is nowhere near this high.)

But fast forward to April 2013 and three economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst published a critique after looking at the original data sources. They found that Reinhart and Rogoff a) made a coding error in Excel, b) excluded some data, and c) made some methodological choices which they describe as “unconventional”.

Then came the wall of commentary. It was hard to avoid. Here’s one interesting take on the controversy. Here’s another. And another here. Here’s one, another here, here, here, and here. My Institute of Public Affairs colleague Julie Novak weighs in here. Reinhart and Rogoff respond here, and here, and here.

And here, the Nobel-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asks: “Did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?”

Well, obviously not.

This whole spat has nothing to do with the economics of public debt. It has everything to do with the politics of austerity.

Strip away the rhetoric and the actual argument about the paper is actually pretty modest. Is the 90 per cent ratio a tipping point – a line countries must not cross? Or does economic growth just decline slowly while public debt rises? The tipping point argument was interesting, but not particularly compelling. It’s all well and good to crunch some numbers that throw up an interesting result. But you have to explain why it has done so. What’s so special about 90 per cent?

Yet after all this fire and brimstone, nobody seriously disputes that high debt and low growth are correlated.

More important is figuring out whether debt hurts growth. Or is it that low growth leads to increased debt? In other words, is debt to blame for economic problems or is it merely a symptom of those problems? Have a flick through the links above. The answer is probably a bit of both.

The problem with public debt is today as it always has been – politicians have few incentives to balance their budgets, and every incentive to grow debt unsustainably. Just look at the United States to see how this plays out in practice. But eventually bills have to be paid.

Reinhart and Rogoff did not invent the problems of unsustainable deficits. Ever since Adam Smith, economists have been talking about the need to balance budgets. And Smith didn’t rely on Excel to make his case. Two and half centuries later, there is a huge literature on public finance.

Nor did Reinhart and Rogoff invent the current austerity movement. The timeline doesn’t work. In the UK, David Cameron was talking about an austerity budget early in 2009. Spain had an “austerity plan” that December, a month before the Reinhart-Rogoff paper was released. As did Greece, Ireland, Romania, and Latvia.

Anyway, for all their rhetoric, it isn’t clear many countries have really pursued “austerity”, as I argued in the Drum last year.

So let’s not overestimate the political power of academic research.

In his most famous book, the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes wrote, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Obviously economists love this little quote.

The irony was governments were following Keynesian-esque policies well before the General Theory was released in 1936. They were already trying to spend their way out of the Great Depression. Keynes’ theoretical arguments suited the times.

It’s the same story with austerity. No surprise that some politicians who had already committed to cutting spending embraced Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper. Paul Ryan cited their 90 per cent tipping in his Path to Prosperity budget plan. Surely nobody thinks these two academic economists gave Ryan the idea to cut government spending? Politicians will take any evidence they can find to support their existing views.

And those who are certain austerity is the wrong path – that it has led the world into a deeper crisis than Keynesian spending might have – have embraced the Reinhart-Rogoff saga as a sort of intellectual triumph. But they’re being even more opportunistic.

One of the Massachusetts economists believes their critique demonstrates that “under particular circumstances, public debt can play a key role in overcoming a recession”. This is a huge overreach. As Greg Mankiw has written, “just because someone in Team A makes an inadvertent excel error does not mean that everything Team B believes is true.”

If nothing else, this saga should remind us that excessive government spending is first and foremost a political problem, not an economic one.

Terry Moran wants senior public servants to be liberated to “talk sensibly” in public about “long-term and self-evident truths” without being seen as betraying their political masters.

That is, Moran wants to revive the public service mandarin, updated for the media-centric demands of the 21st century.

Moran was recently the head of the Prime Minister’s Department. You can read his argument in the Australian Journal of Public Administration here.

It’s an important piece. It reveals, subtly but distinctly, what Australia’s bureaucracy wants, and what it fears.

Our ideas of the public service waver uncomfortably between two largely incompatible doctrines.

The first is the strict Westminster doctrine of ministerial responsibility. According to this doctrine, the bureaucracy is accountable to the minister – it acts solely according to the wishes of its elected master. It is non-partisan and neutral. It provides advice, of course, but does so privately. It is nothing more than “an extension of the minister’s capacity”.

The second doctrine is more nebulous and romantic: that of an autonomous, technocratic and permanent bureaucracy, which has its own mandate to advocate and act in the best wishes of the nation. We could call this doctrine Hegelian – drawn from the 19th century philosopher Georg Hegel, who believed the bureaucracy had a moral mission to pursue what was in society’s general interest.

Taken far enough, the Hegelian bureaucracy is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Senior bureaucrats already can, and do, speak in public about their areas of responsibility. Here are recent speeches given by public servants at the Department of Climate Change, and those given by the Department of Health and Ageing.

This is a good thing. Information provision is a vital part of the bureaucracy’s job. When politicians come up with grand schemes it is necessary for bureaucrats to translate those schemes into reality and to clarify for a confused public what on earth they actually mean.

But on top of this, Moran would like public servants to be free to talk about “long-term strategy”. He is proud that many of the reforms of the 1980s were “conceived and championed by the public service”, and hopes the public service can lead again – but this time as much through high-profile speeches on “self-evident truths” as through internal advocacy.

Don’t let the fact that the liberalisations of the 1980s were an unambiguous success obscure how undemocratic this idea is. The bureaucracy has neither the authority nor the legitimacy to publicly call for what it thinks a government should do.

Moran also wants ministerial advisors – or, more crudely, political advisors – to be subject to the same rigid accountability structures as the public service. This would include being given bureaucratically defined roles and having to answer to parliamentary committees.

The biggest threat to the influence of the public service has been the rise of political advisors. These advisors are a competing source of counsel. Public servants no longer have the unencumbered access to the ministers they once had.

It’s common to read complaints (particularly from the Rudd era) about how arrogant and young advisors swan around Canberra apparently unchecked by any person or sense of propriety. You can understand why advisors get the public service so riled up.

But these advisors exist for a reason. Newly appointed ministers are easily brow-beaten by experienced public servants. The relationships depicted in Yes, Minister are not fictional. If you want to read how some agencies and departments used to treat their minister as just a rubber stamp, read Neil Brown’s great and amusing memoir On the other hand.

Faced with a self-interested, confident, and experienced bureaucracy, it helps to have an advisor or two who is unambiguously on the minister’s side.

So whenever you hear public servants complain about political advisors, think: power-play.

(And, contrary to Moran’s claim, the original spark for the 1980s reforms didn’t come from the public service, but from advisors: for instance, John Rose in Malcolm Fraser’s office and John Hewson in Treasurer John Howard’s office.)

I quoted a basic definition of the Westminster concept of the public service above. One of Australia’s greatest mandarins, Sir Henry Bland put the case more forcefully:

[T]he Minister is the department. Without a Minister there cannot be a department … The Permanent Head is the Minister’s adviser and the manager of the department’s staff … And remember, Parliaments do not provide funds for Permanent Heads.

It is ministers who have power and authority in our democratic system. Ministers are the ones elected. Ministers are the ones who are ultimately accountable.

Senior bureaucrats might like recognition and intellectual prominence – to be seen by the public as visionaries and “thought-leaders”. But that, simply, is not what they are there for.

Ten years after the invasion of Iraq and you’d think the only issue was whether John Howard “lied”.

Howard, you might recall, happened to be prime minister of Australia (in Canberra) when the president of the United States (in Washington DC) decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

The idea that Howard had any control over George Bush’s decision is ludicrous – almost as ludicrous as the idea his government would decline to support Australia’s closest ally 18 months after September 11.

So this interminable debate – which intelligence officer said what to who about weapons of mass destruction – is an indulgent smokescreen. It’s being used to obscure the significance of the Iraq War.

Iraq was an intellectual crisis for both left and right. In 2002, the academic Samantha Power influentially described foreign genocide as a “problem from hell” – surely we are morally obliged to prevent it, but how? Her answer was liberal interventionism: a call from the left to use the US military to protect human rights around the globe.

This was not an obscure doctrine. Liberal interventionism was intellectually prominent when the Clinton administration was trying to deal with Kosovo and Rwanda. Power has become an adviser to Barack Obama and urged him to act on Libya.

Bush’s plans for Iraq were a dilemma for liberal interventionists. Power opposed the war, but reluctantly: in her view the ideas were sound, but the Bush administration had squandered too much international political capital to make it work. Others on the left were supportive – Tony Blair, for one. This interesting 2008 piece by Blair’s former chief of staff tries to keep the liberal interventionist case alive.

Neoconservatism was liberal interventionism’s right-wing relative. It was more messianic and more ambitious. Rather than merely stopping genocide as it occurred, neoconservatives thought America could prevent such crimes; the US could actively create liberty abroad. Think of Christopher Hitchens as a crossover between these two camps.

Both these philosophies of foreign policy rejected the amoral calculations of national interest that had led America to tolerate, even support, dictatorships.

There was even an open debate among libertarians at the time about the justness of military intervention to expand individual liberty and human rights. In retrospect that seems bizarre. Government small enough to drown in a bathtub but big enough to invade, liberate and rebuild faraway countries? For what it’s worth, I supported the war at the time. This was a mistake, but we’ve forgotten how live those debates were.

The claim that Bush – or Howard – went to war in Iraq simply because of weapons of mass destruction is complete historical revision. Rightly or wrongly, they saw it as a moral cause. Ba’athist Iraq was one of the worst tyrannies on the planet, and the Iraqi people some of the least free. In 2003, it seemed like something could be done about that.

The great cause collapsed for two reasons. The first was money. American house prices peaked two years after the invasion of Iraq. It was all downhill from there. The richest country in the world discovered that moral causes were out of its price range.

The second was more critical. The United States simply does not have the intellectual or administrative capacity to construct free and prosperous democracies out of ruins of tyranny and war. Nobody does.

“The curious task of economics,” said Friedrich Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Hayek was talking about how hard it is to regulate an economy. Rebuilding a free country from ruins is much, much harder again. There is no evidence to suggest that the Coalition of the Willing, or the Department of Defense, or the White House, had thought in any great detail about the institutions that make a free and stable country.

Confusion set in from the start. The Coalition Provisional Authority took over the government of Iraq one month after American tanks entered Baghdad. But what actually was the CPA? Who was it responsible to? It wasn’t a sovereign nation. Was it a federal agency of the United States? Or a body of the United Nations? Was the CPA part of the US military’s chain of command or a civilian agency reporting to the Department of Defence? This damning 2005paper by the Congressional Research Service could come up with no clear answer.

That confusion wasn’t academic. Administrative arrangements matter, even in a war-zone. The worst decision made in the wake of the invasion was the disbanding of the Iraqi army, which threw hundreds of thousands of frustrated armed men out of work. That decision was made unilaterally by CPA chief Paul Bremer. It was apparently contrary to the pre-war planning. Yet if there was an authority that could have overrode Bremer, nobody was clear who it was.

So blaming all problems after the invasion onto a failure to adequately plan for reconstruction doesn’t really capture the problem. Rehabilitating entire countries is not just a question of careful planning. There is no check-box list or OECD best-practice guidelines.

Supporters of the Iraq war said the successful reconstitution of Japan and Germany show this formidable task can be done. But Japan and Germany are just two data-points in a long history of failed and unfree states. Why the confidence those successes could be easily replicated?

It was easy for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists to imagine great moral causes for the American military power. To lots of people, government looks like a perfect tool for problem-solving.

But in 2013, Iraq has some of the most endemic corruption on the planet: the Corruption Perception Index ranks it 169 out of 174. It has one of the lowest levels of economic freedom; it is one of the least free Arab nations, which also makes it one of the least free in the world. It’s 150 out of 179 on Reporters without Borders’ index of Press Freedom.

And 50 Iraqis were killed overnight in dozens of bombings and attacks. Iraq goes to the polls on Saturday. Fourteen election candidates have already been murdered.

Freedom House’s omnibus Freedom in the World index categorises Iraq simply as Not Free.

Saddam Hussein is dead, and that’s great. But Iraqis were promised more.