Articles – Page 31

Forget Drugs – There’s Nothing Natural About Modern Athletes

When the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) brought down its report into performance enhancing drugs in Australian sport, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced she was “sickened” by the revelations. Justice Minister Jason Clare used the word “disgust”.

Sickened and disgusted. Visceral reactions. It’s easy to dismiss the Government’s extreme response to the ACC report as mere political expediency. But the reaction – not just the Government’s, but across the press and public – suggests something deeper. We have elevated the anti-doping crusade into a quasi-religious battle between good and evil. It’s ideological.

Spectators and publicists have always wrapped sport up with notions of purity. The people who revived the Olympics believed that nakedness of Ancient Greek athletics was an expression of that purity. In the early 20th century purity and sport took a creepy, racialised form.

Our modern ideals of purity are more benign. We extol natural fitness, health, and sportsmanship.

Doping feels like a direct attack on these ideals. It is artificial, seems dangerous and it is kept secret.

But that attitude is only recent. Until the 1960s, drug enhancement was integral to sport. It had been that way for nearly a century. The first experiments with doping – the use of coca in long distance walking – date from the 1870s. Early drug use was optimistic. Science had the potential to increase strength and stamina. Scientific progress and athletic achievement went hand in hand.

There’s a great story about an early effort at doping by the Arsenal football club. In 1925, Arsenal’s manager, Leslie Knighton, was visited by a “distinguished West End doctor” who offered “courage-pills” (probably amphetamines) for an upcoming game against West Ham United. Having been reassured the pills were safe, Knighton accepted.

Just before the match began, Knighton’s team took their pills. The problems began when the referee postponed the game due to thick fog.

Getting the boys back to Highbury that afternoon was like trying to drive a flock of lively young lions.

The entire team was violently restless and impossibly thirsty. The next week, the team dutifully swallowed the pills again. The match was again postponed. Once more came edginess and thirst. When they finally played West Ham, the energetic, drugged up team managed a nil-all draw. In the rematch, the poor old Arsenal players rebelled. No more drugs.

The only reason we know about the episode is because Knighton included it in his 1948 memoir, under the chapter title “I Dope Arsenal for a Cup Tie”. At no time did Knighton have any ethical qualms. Neither, it seems, did the team. They had no sense that this was cheating. But they wanted to keep it secret nonetheless.

Knighton saw the pills as a variation on normal practice. Doping was like any other psychological or medical inducement – another way to give his team “hearts as big as bullocks”.

Bertolt Brecht said that “Great sport begins where good health ends”. Athletes subject themselves to brutal fitness and exercise regimes. We isolate talented children from a very young age, direct their life towards training and competition, control what they eat and how they exercise, and send them to specialist academies where we deny them the usual pleasures of growing up. It is ludicrous to claim that the highly-engineered extremes of modern competition are in any way “natural”.

Indeed, one of the most pernicious myths in the anti-doping crusade is that drug use destroys the level playing field of competitive sport. In his book A History of Drug Use in Sport: 1876-1976 the sports academic Paul Dimeo pointed out the entire purpose of training and preparation is to make that playing field uneven.

When does a natural substance such as oxygen, altitude or even testosterone become cheating? How is taking a chemical substance that much different from using specialised equipment, psychological counselling or team tactics?

As Leslie Knighton understood, an advantage gained by doping is a question of degree, not kind. It’s just another way to get an edge.

The tide turned in the 1960s. “Doping is an evil,” proclaimed the anti-doper Sir Arthur Porritt, “it is morally wrong, physically dangerous, socially degenerate and legally indefensible”.

The campaign against drug use was a campaign to raise the status of sport to something impossibly noble and moral. Drugs weren’t the only thing these anti-dopers believed had corrupted the sporting ideal: commercialism, professionalism, and an obsession with personal glory were also undermining sport’s essential purity. The anti-dopers wanted sport to be a reflection of an ideal world of health, morality and virtue. One of the charges against female athletes using drugs was that doping denied their femininity.

Dimeo argues the anti-doping ideology is deeply hypocritical. On the one hand we want athletes to sacrifice their lives in the pursuit of victory and record-breaking. Elite competition is destructive, all-consuming. But then we demand they know exactly when to stop, that they know what risks they should not take with their body. The old fantasies about purity and sport have been turned into systems of control. The crusade against artificial stimulants has been imposed from above by sports bureaucrats who want to regulate the moral choices of athletes.

One legendary Belgian cyclist of the 1950s, Rik van Steenbergen, said after his career that “there are no such things as supermen. Doping is necessary in cycling.”

Throughout the 20th century many riders have argued that professional cycling is so punishing it would be virtually impossible without performance enhancement.

Any sport can make whatever rules it likes about drug use. But let’s get off the high horse. We insist that athletes stop at nothing for our entertainment. Why the horror when they do exactly that?

Lincoln Sheds Little Light On Some Of History’s Dark Deeds

Sometimes the reaction to a movie is more interesting than the movie itself. In Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow controversially suggests torture played a necessary role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Given that this suggestion is both untrue and politically provocative, Zero Dark Thirty has been widely condemned. Bigelow’s film seems to implicitly approve of human rights abuses in the name of the ‘War on Terror’.

Another recent film is similarly coy about civil liberties and human rights. Yet there has been no outcry about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, released in Australia last week.

Spielberg’s tale of the constitutional amendment to end slavery shrouds Abraham Lincoln’s legacy in myth. The Civil War is the ultimate “just” war. It was fought to end the vile institution of slavery. Hard to think of a more noble cause than that.

But Spielberg whitewashes some of the great stains on the Lincoln presidency. The film obscures, even ridicules, any suggestion Lincoln reduced American liberties during the Civil War.
Take one memorable scene. In Congress, a fiery New York Democrat, Fernando Wood, accuses the president of being a tyrant. Lincoln, Wood shouts, is a “violator of habeas corpus and freedom of the press, abuser of states’ rights, radical republican autocrat ruling by fiat and martial law”.

The film skates quickly over the accusation. Wood seems ridiculous. He describes the president as “our Great Usurping Caesar”. He supports slavery, a much greater tyranny. But many of his claims were correct.

The Lincoln administration declared martial law. It suspended the writ of habeas corpus, allowing the government to detain civilians without charge and without trial. And Lincoln didn’t ask permission from Congress first – a major increase in the power of the executive branch of government.

At first the administration simply wanted to enforce military conscription. But very quickly people were being jailed for doing perfectly legal things. Many civilians were locked up for selling alcohol to soldiers, even though there was no law against it. Others were locked up for “disloyalty” or using “treasonable language”. Local authorities found that incarceration without charge was convenient. They could arrest first and ask questions later.

At least 14,000 people were locked up as political prisoners during the war, according to the historian Mark E. Neely, jnr. The real figure could be twice that.

The suspension of habeas corpus was controversial. The Republican Party was supposed to be the party of individual liberty. Many Republicans were uncomfortable with Lincoln’s heavy hand. Democrats filled the gap and restyled themselves as the ”habeas-corpus party” – obvious hypocrisy from supporters of slavery.

For a long time historians believed there was a militant underground within the North that justified a clampdown on civil liberties. It is now clear that there was no such mass resistance. There is no reason to believe the elimination of legal rights helped win the war.

Lincoln’s administration suppressed at least 300 newspapers. Most of the suppressed papers were Democrat ones. Nineteenth-century journalism was proudly partisan.

Lincoln authorised torture, too. The technique, also used against civilians, is eerily familiar. It is described in historical record as a “violent cold water shower bath”. Essentially, a high-powered hose was sprayed against a person’s body until skin broke. This “shower” could last for hours. There was no attempt to cover up this torture. The president didn’t seem fazed by it at all. We only know it happened because of formal protests made by the British ambassador when British citizens were victims.

Certainly, in the American Civil War the North were the good guys. There can be no question about that. The country had been torn apart. Many of those whose liberties were eliminated supported the slave trade. They’re not sympathetic characters.

But that’s the thing about legal rights. Even bad people deserve the protection of the law. There’s no question that modern Islamic terrorists are bad. But their sheer badness doesn’t make indefinite detention or torture justified. The justice of a war says nothing about whether rights should be protected.

Lincoln’s choices during the Civil War had long-term consequences. Memory of Lincoln helped justify Woodrow Wilson’s even more considerable rights abuses during the First World War. And Lincoln’s legacy has been regularly used to defend depravities in the War on Terror – if the greatest president did it, then surely so can George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Lincoln’s memory should be a sensitive issue.

Both Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln are up for best picture Oscars in a few weeks. The storm over torture makes Bigelow’s chances small. Lincoln is just the sort of film the academy likes. It is pure Americana, at times cloyingly so. Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis deserves every Oscar he can get. But Spielberg grants little room for moral ambiguity in his hero-president.

Some people have seen the Zero Dark Thirty debate as America starting to deal with the civil liberties incidents of the last decade. The silence on Lincoln suggests there is a long way to go.

If It Looks And Smells Like A Campaign, Then It’s A Campaign

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard told the National Press Club that she did not want to start “the nation’s longest election campaign”, the whole room laughed.

Because that’s what she had just done. She knew it, the press gallery knew it, and the public knows it.

The announcement only happened on Wednesday but the intervening six days have been an eternity. One MP has been arrested, two senior ministers have resigned, we have a new Attorney-General and a new Minister for Immigration (the Commonwealth’s two most contentious jobs) and now the Prime Minister is reprimanding Labor MPs for leaking against her Government.

But let’s stick with the election announcement for a bit. It exposed pretty much everything that’s wrong with Australian politics today. The obsession with minor media idiosyncrasies. Our parliamentarians’ ridiculously self-important attitude. Most of all, the drifting aimlessness of the parties. Julie Gillard didn’t just reveal a date – September 14. She opened a little window into our current malaise.

There are three public explanations for why Gillard announced the election now.

The first two are briefly plausible. In her speech, the Prime Minister said it would give the business community “certainty”, and spike the inevitable press speculations about the date.

The former claim inflates the importance of politics. It’s easy for the political class to imagine the whole country lives on their every word. It flatters the politicians, who want desperately to believe when the government changes the country changes. It flatters the pundits, who imagine their interpretation of the momentous events of Canberra are of great significance. It patronises everybody else.

The latter claim ridiculously, hilariously exaggerates the importance of opinion columns. Are we really so obsessed with the media we think the occasional, harmless speculation about an election date hurts our democracy? That spiking the future column ideas of press gallery reporters is somehow a brilliant political manoeuvre?

If Julia Gillard’s office genuinely believes so, Labor is in more trouble than even the polls suggest. For the last few years anti-media hysteria has grown out of control. Now all that marginal bleating about the “MSM” is starting to subsume the functions of government itself.

Gillard’s third and final explanation for announcing the election date isn’t even coherent, let alone convincing. Why would announcing an upcoming election date make it “clear to all which are the days of governing and which are the days of campaigning”? It does exactly the opposite. It blurs the boundaries.

The announcement has left everybody confused. Her parliamentary colleagues seem to have gone into a strange, half-hearted campaign mode, not sure where they are in the political cycle. Wayne Swan went on 7.30 the night of Gillard’s Press Club speech for no obvious reason except to demonstrate he exists. If the Treasurer had something to announce, some new question to answer, it never came out in the interview. Was Swan campaigning or governing? Did he even know?

A “campaign” is not a strictly defined thing. It exists in the mind of the beholder. It’s an attitude. That some state parliaments have fixed terms is irrelevant. In federal politics the campaign starts when the Prime Minister reveals the polling day. If something looks like a campaign, smells like a campaign, then it’s a campaign.

Indeed, the launch of a campaign is the only way Gillard’s Press Club speech makes sense. Labor has long hoped voters would eventually be so revolted by Tony Abbott they would turn against the Coalition. The Press Club address was one final ploy to up the stakes; a last attempt to try to shift the burden of proof onto the Opposition.

The Government needs the election to seem imminent enough that voters start really questioning Abbott’s preparedness for government. But electoral attitudes don’t change overnight, so there needs to be time to turn the public around.

Certainly, Gillard didn’t just announce the election date at the Press Club. She gave a 3,500 word speech. The rest of it was a serious discussion with a few important arguments about the state of the Australian economy. Unsurprisingly people have criticised the media for ignoring all that heavy stuff.

But whose fault is that? Julia Gillard didn’t come down with the last shower. She must have known people would focus more on the surprise election date reveal than her thoughts about long-term trends in superannuation returns. The Prime Minister couldn’t have diverted more attention from the body of her speech if she tried.

Yes, we’ve got to the stage that people are blaming the press for what politicians do.

Labor people want Tony Abbott’s Coalition to be subjected to more scrutiny. That’s fair enough. The Coalition has been calling for an early election for years, and we’ve a right to see more of what they’ll do in government, not just how much they think Julia Gillard is a bad prime minister.

So for all its flaws Gillard’s early announcement gambit could work. Even if it doesn’t, what has the Government got to lose?

But let’s not pretend it isn’t an explicitly political gesture, only made possible by our sickly and dissatisfied national political culture.

The Orwell Cult Is Way Out Of Hand

Last Monday the left-wing magazine New Statesman declared it was “Orwell Week”.

How utterly shameless.

George Orwell is no longer a journalist. He is an all-purpose, all-terrain vehicle for the vanities of other writers.

This is particularly obvious in the case of the New Statesman. In 1937, the magazine’s editor, Kingsley Martin, rejected two of George Orwell’s pieces on the Spanish Civil War for being excessively critical of communism. His articles would “cause trouble”, Martin claimed, because Orwell had described fascism and communism as two sides of the same totalitarian coin.
The New Statesman was a bastion of sympathy for the Soviet Union. Orwell later said its typical reader “worships Stalin”.

Now the New Statesman wants to wear George Orwell as a political badge.

Orwell has an outsized reputation. It goes something like this: he brilliantly captured the essence of socialist totalitarianism, and did so against the political fashion of the time. Other intellectuals had been seduced by the Soviet experiment. He was a lonely apostate. This required great moral courage.

There is less to these claims than the Orwell idolisers will admit. He was a good writer – and a great journalist – but the Orwell cult has gotten way out of hand.

People imagine if they talk about their heroes they will imbibe their qualities. Politicians make speeches about Winston Churchill hoping his reputation for leadership and grit will rub off on them. Journalists use Orwell for independence and integrity. Christopher Hitchens – usually such an iconoclast – did more to inflate the Orwell cult than anybody in recent decades, and did so transparently to make himself Orwell’s political heir.

But Orwell got one big thing wrong, and it goes to the heart of his political thought. He misunderstood the basic nature of totalitarianism. He rightly believed the all-powerful state was terrifying. He wrongly thought it could function.

The state in Nineteen Eighty-Four has complete control over society. The Thought Police sees all. The four great ministries of government (Peace, Plenty, Truth, and Love) command all. It was totalitarian in the most fundamental sense – state power was total.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was nothing like this. Konstantin Simis’ great book USSR: The Corrupt Society makes clear how broken the Soviet system was. It was held up by networks of patronage and bribery and an underground economy and interpersonal politics. The USSR didn’t have high-tech telescreens feeding a central authority. Soviet control came from informants and petty betrayals. Totalitarianism was anything but complete.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s protagonist fantasises that the state might be rotten under the surface.

Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.

It’s a telling difference, that between Orwellian fantasy and crooked reality. In 1944 Orwell wrote a downbeat review of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. He accepted Hayek’s political critique of socialism. A state that tried to control an economy would eventually control a society.

But Orwell does not seem to have taken in Hayek’s more crucial message: communism did not function as well as communists imagined.

No matter how unconstrained and all-powerful a central planner was, they would never be able to marshal enough information about the economy to plan it effectively. Big Brother could never see everything. Orwell did not accept this. He remained a socialist, albeit a democratic one.

That, ultimately, is what makes Orwell interesting. He succeeded where so many of the pre-war left failed. Rather than wilfully defending and promoting the Soviet dictatorship, he attacked it. His fame is tied to their infamy. This is why the New Statesman’s appropriation of his name so obscene. It was the moral bankruptcy of Kingsley Martin that makes Orwell important.

Orwell was not the only intellectual to identify the totalitarian impulse in Marxism, and certainly not the first. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1948. Eugene Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future was published nearly 60 years earlier, in 1891. Richters’ book is also a dystopian imagining of a communist state. But Richter was a German liberal, and was as interested in discrediting how socialism worked as exposing its dictatorial tendencies.

Another “Orwellian” vision, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, was published in 1921. We is on the other side of the spectrum – it is even more fantastical than Nineteen Eighty-Four, and even more extreme. Zamyatin had personal experience of Soviet communism. (His book was the first to be censored by the Soviet literary board.) The totalitarian state in We has even stripped citizens of their names. Zamyatin’s protagonist is referred to as D-503. Where Orwell explored how a state used language for control, Zamyatin’s state used mathematics, giving the book a surreal feeling that Nineteen Eighty-Four lacks.

Jack London also wrote a dystopian novel in 1908, The Iron Heel, which Orwell is known to have admired.

Neither was Orwell uniquely clear-headed about the nature of the Soviet Union. From 1917 onwards there were credible reports from émigrés, Christian missionaries and even the occasional tourist revealing all was not well in the USSR.

Details were sketchy but as this newspaper search demonstrates Soviet persecution was no secret. Western Marxists who discounted these reports were being wilfully ignorant. Those that ignored them are morally culpable.

Orwell did neither. But surely this is the bare minimum we ask of an intellectual – to not completely sell out, to not outright lie, to not distort known truths in service of an ideology. Once again the idea of Orwell as a truth-seeking hero only makes sense when we account for the intellectual depravities of his comrades.

A writer does not have to be ground-breaking to be valuable and insightful. And it isn’t fair to heap the egos of half a century of jealous polemicists on to Orwell.

One of the charms of Orwell’s journalism is his modesty. And a person cannot be held responsible for what others do with their reputation. But, no doubt, George Orwell would be amazed at what his has become.

This Doomsday Endgame Could Last A Long Time

Earlier this month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists counselled the leader of the free world about the apocalypse.

“Dear President Obama,” the journal’s science and security board wrote in an open letter, “2012 was a year in which the problems of the world pressed forward, but too many of its citizens stood back.” They darkly warned of nuclear proliferation, bioterrorism, climate change, and “cyber technologies” which “could trigger a new kind of self-inflicted Doomsday”.

Yes, doomsday. The bulletin scientists are the keepers of the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic clock face that shows how close the world is to global catastrophe. The clock is now at five to midnight. Their letter announced it is unchanged since last year – the scientists are not budging. According to this well-credentialled hive mind, we’re still teetering on the edge of annihilation. Indeed, we have been for 65 years.

But perhaps the scientists would be better described as the clock’s guardians, a word which has a more mystical, Star Trek quality. That’s the thing about prophets of the apocalypse. They’re always so confident; so impressed by their own insight.

When the clock was first set in 1947, it was seven minutes to midnight. The furthest it has ever gone back is 17 minutes, at the end of the Cold War. The bulletin first threw climate change into the mix in 2007; a transparent bid for relevancy, just as using the word “cyber” is now.

The clock has some particular political views. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office they pushed it closer to midnight. When Obama became president they eased the clock back. Reagan had said that to end the Cold War, the free world would have to win it. This was a lot more prescient than Obama’s Nobel peace prize.

Of course, we’re nowhere near five to midnight. It’s sometime in the afternoon. The world is safer and more free than ever in history. We got through the entire Soviet-American contest without a nuclear shot fired. And even the most extreme models of global warming don’t predict catastrophic destruction but gradual change.

To paraphrase Adam Smith, there is a great deal of ruin in a civilisation. But to believe that problems threaten the civilisation itself is a triumph of fear over experience. We should not be complacent. But we should be sober. Judgment Day keeps being postponed.

The Doomsday scientists are a secular variation on an old type – apocalyptic preachers in modern garb. They’re not talking about science, they’re preying on anxiety. Why would anybody really believe “cyber technology” would bring us closer to Armageddon? No reason, unless they were convinced mankind is inherently suicidal. The bulletin’s open letter to Obama must be the first time software has been described as an omen of the end of days.

Still, a prophet who prophesied modest challenges to be overcome in the fullness of time would be ignored. The end needs to be nigh.

An American preacher Harold Camping predicted the rapture would occur in May 2011. He’d only made this prediction a few years earlier. Just as he predicted in 1992 the world would end in 1994. In other words, he gave enough time to persuade sympathisers it was going to happen, and not too long for them to lose interest.

Once again, poor old Camping had to explain why his prophecy didn’t occur. Secular millennialists don’t embarrass so easily.

This was a lesson environmental fearmongers learnt early. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) is a famous book in the green tradition but few care to remember Ehrlich included specific scenarios of starvation and nuclear winter set in the 1970s. The most fretful now simply say we’ve reached the climate ”endgame”. Here’s a prediction – that endgame will last for a very long time.

Armageddon sells. We like drama, and nothing is more dramatic than global catastrophe. The human brain isn’t very good at dealing with risk. We overestimate the likelihood of major, conspicuous events like nuclear war and terrorism, and underestimate more pedestrian dangers, like drowning in a bathtub.

And doomsday flatters those who fear it. It’s an in-group thing. While the rest of the population naively goes about their business, insiders are worrying about events to come. This is as true for the Christian kids who devoured the Left Behind books about the rapture – they are the saved ones who understand the secrets of the world – as it is for the Whitehaven hoaxer Jonathan Moylan. Defrauding the sharemarket only seems ethical if you believe coal is an existential threat to civilisation. And if you do, well, securities law is for mere mortals.

In a speech in 1903, an optimistic H. G. Wells conceded: “One must admit that it is impossible to show why certain things should not utterly destroy and end the entire human race and story.” Hypothetical catastrophe has sustained apocalyptic preachers for thousands of years.

Wells is right: we can’t absolutely guarantee the worst won’t happen. But we should ignore the people desperate to assume it will.

Anti-Discrimination Laws: An Act Of Confusion

Even when discussing complex pieces of legislation, it’s worth trying to get basic concepts right.

The Gillard Government’s proposed anti-discrimination changes fail this test. They artlessly try to blend two concepts together – discrimination and harassment.

But to harass someone and to discriminate against someone are different things.

If a person misses out on a job in favour of a less-qualified person because of their skin colour, then that’s discrimination. Harassment is different. You harass someone when you intentionally disturb or upset another person.

They’re both bad, certainly. But they’re conceptually distinct, and have been that way since the first federal anti-discrimination law was passed in Australia in 1975.

The Government wants to “consolidate” a whole bunch of bills concerning discrimination – including the Racial Discrimination Act and the Sex Discrimination Act – into a grand Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill.

Simplifying law is a usually good idea. Yet what comes out is an incoherent mess. And it’s hard for citizens to obey an incoherent mess.

For example, if the bill goes through the Parliament, it will be unlawful to treat someone unfavourably by offending or insulting them because of their political opinions, industrial history, or social origin in any work-related area.

The concepts of “offend or insult” come from existing harassment law. Unfavourable treatment is the mainstay of discrimination law. Fusing the two together may superficially seem like a good idea, but read the previous paragraph again. What wouldn’t be captured by this new omnibus bill?

All political opinions are offensive in some fashion – politics is about controversy. Almost everywhere is “work-related” for someone. Offence is in the eye of the receiver, not the giver. And what on earth is “social origin”?

These anti-discrimination changes have a long and sad history.

Way back in 2008, Kevin Rudd and his Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced a broad inquiry into Australian human rights protection.

They put Father Frank Brennan in charge of this National Human Rights Consultation. That year was the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a document which Labor’s HV Evatt helped draft. McClelland used the Evatt Foundation as his platform to kick it all off. There was a big song and dance about the whole thing. The committee received tens of thousands of submissions.

But the ambitions of 2008 disappeared. Kevin Rudd’s hyperactivity became nervousness and uncertainty. In 2010 the government rejected the committee’s major proposal – to implement a national charter of rights.

Rudd was dumped. McClelland was jettisoned from the Attorney-General position in 2011.

But one minor government response to the consultation was a promise to consolidate all existing anti-discrimination laws to reduce “uncertainty”. And once started bureaucratic process does not stop.

This is one reason the anti-discrimination bill has “human rights” in the title. It’s a grand phrase for something that is purportedly only designed to merge a few acts together. It’s good public relations as well. Who could oppose human rights?

Yet the consolidation of anti-discrimination law was barely mentioned in the final report of the Rudd-era consultation. And the report did not explain why it was necessary. Last year, a discussion paper about the potential consolidation took the need for legislative consolidation as a given. We seem to have skipped a step. Why is this all so urgent?

In The Australian earlier this month Roxon suggested we need consolidation because “the community at large, including lawyers, is unsure or confused about what might already be discriminatory”.

No doubt many people are confused. That’s what happens when governments pass a lot of laws.

But rather than clarifying existing prohibitions, Roxon’s department have chosen a brute-force approach – they plan to make everything discrimination. They haven’t just consolidated existing law. By mixing harassment and hurt feelings with discrimination they’ve dramatically expanded it, opening up vast new opportunities for litigation. The draft bill eliminates confusion, sure, but replaces it with chaos.

Lost in all this is any recognition of the importance of freedom of association.

Free association is one of our least defended liberties. It is just as much a human right as any protection against discrimination. It appears in both the American Bill of Rights and HV Evatt’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But anti-discrimination law – a passion of the human rights lobby – has steadily eroded it.

Now organisations have freedom of association only if they meet one of the exemptions specified in law. It is the responsibility of religious organisations to justify why they should be allowed to choose employees according to religious doctrine, rather than the government to justify why those organisations should be prevented from doing so.

We have had anti-discrimination laws for nearly 40 years. They’ve taken on a life of their own. The Government is now putting more effort into specifying what is permitted, rather than what is prohibited.

It’s hard to think of anything more contrary to the principle of human rights than that.

Tax exiles vote with their feet

In 1979 Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim, wrote to a friend, the poet Philip Larkin. Amis’s son Martin had just published his third novel.

Kingsley was a conservative who hated feminism, welfare and the Labour Party. Martin was a young radical who hated nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War. Martin had just left Britain.
“Did I tell you Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE?”, the elder Amis wrote, obviously annoyed.

“Last year he earned 38,000 pounds. Little sh*t. 29, he is. Little sh*t.”

So that’s a conservative father angry at his left-wing son for avoiding taxes. Imagine how Kingsley felt when Martin published his most famous novel a few years later: Money, a satire on eighties greed.

Yes, people have strong feelings about tax exile.

Gerard Depardieu left France in December because he didn’t want to pay president Francois Hollande’s 75 per cent top rate – the so-called “millionaire tax”.

The Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Michael Caine, Noël Coward, David Bowie, Sean Connery, and the journalist David Frost have all at one time in their careers left home to find a cheaper tax rate.

But their actions are rarely welcomed by taxpayers who remain behind. When Depardieu joined the tax exile ranks, the French press was furious.

Take this piece in Libération by another actor, Philippe Torreton:

You are leaving the French boat in the middle of a storm?

Scroll through the whole thing. Even muddled by Google Translate it’s extraordinary. Angry, deeply nationalist, and betrayed. Torreton pretty much accuses Depardieu of treason.

To be fair, Depardieu is no freedom fighter. He has gone to Russia, a country now famous for locking up musicians. And he’s not just running away from taxes. Depardieu didn’t appear at a drink driving hearing in France last week. But, then again, those aren’t the reasons Torreton is angry.

Why do tax exiles spark so much resentment? Our views on immigration-as-tax-avoidance expose deep political differences.

But these differences are implicit rather than explicit. We’re used to sterile, utilitarian debates about the size of government or economic regulations. The Amis family would have split on these issues along standard left and right lines. Tax exile raises deeper, thornier questions about the relationship between nation and individual; between democratic obligation and liberty.

In many ways, it’s like the debate about compulsory voting. We’re not sure what the social contract actually says.

Democracy is a mechanism for making collective choices. Universal suffrage gives those choices legitimacy. That’s all good. But what happens to those who object to a democratic decision? Depardieu obviously disagreed that his tax rate should be 75 per cent. So he left. Is this legitimate? Is he being fair to France?

Let me give the classical liberal answer. When faced with something we dislike we have two choices. We can use our voice to get things changed – we can vote or protest or complain. Or we can exit. Depardieu took his business elsewhere.
But voice and exit are not mutually exclusive. The threat of exit adds strength to the voice. The fear people will send their money offshore is a powerful limitation on how much governments can tax.
So French taxpayers owe tax exiles like Depardieu some thanks. The actor’s highly-publicised flight demonstrates emigration is not an idle threat.

Reflecting in his memoir about when the Rolling Stones left England, Keith Richards wrote that:

The last thing I think the powers that be expected when we they hit us with super-super tax is that we’d say fine, we’ll leave… They just didn’t factor that in.

Governments don’t always remember their power is not absolute. Allowing citizens to leave is as powerful a check on state power as a constitution or a bill of rights.

And of course if we care about liberty, then the freedom for an individual to choose where they live has to be respected.

One major source of resentment about tax exile is that it is a luxury of the rich. A French dock worker, no matter how heavily he feels the tax burden, will not be personally welcomed into Russia by Vladimir Putin.

This is a reasonable objection. But it’s directed at the wrong culprit. Around the world, immigration policies favour high-skilled, high net-worth individuals. They specifically and intentionally keep out the poor and unskilled. This is obviously unjust, but immigration policies are to blame, not tax exiles.

Depardieu is not unique. France is experiencing a wave of tax exile much like Britain before the Thatcher years. Musicians and actors fled Britain’s high tax rates in endemic numbers. There’s a great story about Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin, dragging himself out of hospital after a car accident and rushing to the airport in order to maintain his British non-resident status for tax purposes.

There was such interplay between culture and taxation in Britain that musical genres could be defined by where the artists stood on the tax ladder. In 1976 Mick Jones of The Clash summarised the difference between new punk and old rock by saying:

We’re all down [on] the dole anyway, coppin’ our money off Rod Stewart’s taxes.

Jones was teasing. Stewart had left Britain the year before.

Many British tax exiles went to France. Today many French exiles live in Britain.

If Francois Hollande persists with his supertax on high income earners (not a sure thing, as the 75 per cent rate was recently ruled unconstitutional) then tax flight will shape French culture this decade as sure as it shaped British culture before Margaret Thatcher.

America Fell Off The Fiscal Cliff A Long Time Ago. Now It’s All About The Landing

Karl Marx famously said history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.

After avoiding the “fiscal cliff” a fortnight ago, the US faces yet another budget crisis in two months’ time. Yes, another one. Another round of brinkmanship, another round of negotiations.

So, Karl, what comes after farce?

The deal struck between Republicans and Democrats on New Year’s Day merely postponed what has been termed ”sequestration”: a provision in a 2011 bill that automatically cuts government spending across the board if Congress won’t reduce spending itself. But this is all more a political crisis than an economic one. The US budget drove off the fiscal cliff a long time ago. This is the fifth year in a row the budget deficit will be above $US1 trillion – that is, there is a trillion dollar difference between what the government spends and what it taxes. Out of a $3.6 trillion budget, this is an enormous shortfall. A trillion dollars is nearly the size of the entire Australian economy.

The responses are predictable. Democrats think taxes are too low, and want to raise them. Republicans think spending is too high. Yet for some reason it’s fashionable in Australia to chalk the madness of the US budget crisis solely up to nut jobs in the Republican Party. Wayne Swan called them “cranks and crazies”.

According to received wisdom, Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are pragmatic and reasonable while trying to negotiate with gun-wielding Tea Party fanatics across the aisle. This is nonsense. The Democrats are being just as stubborn as the Republicans, just as political, and, if anything, are more delusional about what has to be done to keep the country solvent.

In the middle of the negotiations, Obama reportedly told the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, that “we don’t have a spending problem”. Really? Spending in the US budget has doubled since Bill Clinton left office. It’s grown far quicker than inflation or population growth. What on earth would a spending problem look like?

The very bill that held back the crisis on January 1 shows how ludicrous Obama’s claim is. Buried in the 157-page bill are taxpayer subsidies for all sorts of weird and wonderful things: two and three-wheeled electric vehicles, car racing, and even asparagus farming. Reckless spending is pathological. They can’t help themselves. Couldn’t the government simply ramp up taxes on the rich? The rich are always good for money. As the Cato Institute’s Michael D. Tanner has written, even if the government confiscated every dollar of income the rich of America earned in one year, there still wouldn’t be enough.

Millionaires and billionaires earned $840 billion in 2010. That money wouldn’t cover the trillion dollar budget shortfall. And even if the government confiscated everything they owned it wouldn’t pay off accumulated US debt. There’s too much.

So it has to be spending. And the only way spending is going to be reduced is if Congress insists. Thank god for multiparty democracy. But we can’t exonerate the Republicans. The Iraq war and the bank bailouts happened under George W. Bush. And the reason Republicans are desperate to avoid the automatic spending cuts is because those cuts disproportionately target the military.
As they should. A massive 48 per cent of all military spending on the planet is spent by the US. The defence budget has nearly doubled since the Cold War. There are still 75,000 US troops in Europe defending against a non-existent Soviet threat. But sophisticated Republican thinking on foreign policy has disappeared to such a degree that military spending is sacred. They won’t touch it.

So sequestration may not be too bad. Having your government cuts done automatically isn’t the best way to go about things, but at least it’s something. American taxpayers might hope the next round of budget negotiations fail.

The Nobel-winning economist James M. Buchanan died last week. Buchanan made his name by developing a theory of how public spending spirals out of control.

It’s in the interest of taxpayers to keep taxes low, and in the interest of politicians and bureaucrats and special interests to keep spending high. The only solution, Buchanan argued, was to write rules which prevented politicians from being reckless with taxpayer money.

In a way, that’s what the fiscal cliff issue is all about: constraining politicians. Same with the “debt ceiling” – a legal limit on how much the government can borrow. The current proposal to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin is just a tricksy way to get around the limit.

But Congress will increase the debt ceiling. It always has. Buchanan would say a rule about government debt is a good idea. But you have to enforce the rule somehow.

In March, Congress will kick the can down the road again. Politicians first and foremost want to get to the next election. But the US has already gone off the fiscal cliff. We don’t know what will happen when it hits the ground.

Les Mis: A Revolution For Our Times

What do the revolutionaries in Les Misérables actually want?

This is not a pedantic question. Victor Hugo’s 1862 Les Misérables – or, at least, its 1980s musical adaptation – is now deeply embedded in the West’s popular consciousness.

Its popularity extends far past those who know anything of 19th century French history. Indeed, for many people the musical is a stand-in for the entire French Revolution, although it depicts events that occurred many decades later.

Popular culture profoundly shapes our political beliefs, and the idea of rebellion against injustice still resonates even in the democratic era. See, for instance, Occupy.

Even those who haven’t seen the musical would know its broad strokes. A former convict who has broken parole tries to build a virtuous life while on the run. The culmination of his personal struggle coincides with a doomed Paris uprising led by idealistic students.

But that uprising seems to be against… what? The monarchy? A general sense of inequality? It’s not called Les Misérables – the victims, the wretched ones – for nothing. The musical’s logo incorporates an engraving of a young girl in rags. The 2012 film has an energetic makeup artist who gives the poor of France gratuitously broken teeth and cholera.

But it’s never clear why any of the students believe economic injustice will be resolved by barricading off a few city streets. The student revolutionaries are hopelessly vague about their goals. They’re going to “cut the fat ones down to size”. There’s some suggestion of a utopian “tomorrow”.

The uprising depicted in Les Misérables was a real uprising that happened in June 1832. It was an aftershock of a bigger political upheaval just two years earlier, which had replaced the royal restoration under the House of Bourbon with a new constitutional monarchy under the House of Orléans.

Those who really fought on the 5th and 6th of June 1832 were opposed to the new Orléanist monarchy, but for many different reasons. There were radical Republicans, who wanted parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage. There were also ultra-Royalists, who wanted the reversal of all the gains of 1789, and Bonepartists, who wanted to restore French imperial glory as it was under Napoleon. With such a bizarre coalition, no wonder the people of Paris slept in their beds that night.

And France was hardly the stagnant, rotting, unchanging regime the musical suggests. Between 1796 (when our hero Jean Valjean was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread) and 1832, France was governed by no less than five political systems, from the revolutionary Directory to the monarchy after 1830.

All this politics is missing in the musical, replaced by a vague sense of injustice and a group of students with a serious martyr complex.

Sure, the musical is a musical. You can’t ask for too much political exposition in songs. It’s easier to find a rhyme for “love” than a rhyme for “chronic wealth disparity” or “post-revolutionary dynastic confusion”.

But Victor Hugo’s original novel is not a whole lot clearer. In his 2007 book The Temptation of the Impossible, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa argues that Hugo, too, is hopelessly vague on the purpose of the revolt. One student forecasts if they succeed “monsters will have given way to the angels”. But that’s about as specific as it gets.

One way to join the dots between the poor on the streets and the students’ bloodshed is to depict the latter as proto communists. The students might be Bolsheviks dedicated to a redistributive paradise.

But the narrator of Les Misérables was hostile to communism, writing that “equal sharing abolishes competition and, in consequence, labour”.

And the cruellest oppression in the story isn’t economic. Hugo reserves his biggest criticism for the legal system. Hugo himself was a political drifter, starting as a conservative royalist and ending life, loosely, as a liberal or a social democrat. Virtually his only constant belief was opposition to the death penalty.

We think of Les Misérables as a primarily a story about revolution and social oppression. The musical does not disabuse us of this idea. But it is wrong. Hugo is more preoccupied by God than politics.

The revolutionary students do not believe their uprising will succeed. As Vargas Llosa writes, the students “know and accept that they will be annihilated because this is the role that they must play”. What comes across as a martyr complex in the musical is more for Hugo an acceptance of fate and the will of God. The entire story is a grand morality tale of fate and redemption.
Contemporary versions of Les Misérables struggle to communicate Hugo’s essentially religious message. We live in a secular age. Faith is a niche topic not a mass one.

Yet a modern reader can’t help be struck that the first 70 or so pages of the novel are a detailed profile of someone marginal to the plot – Bishop Myriel, the good priest who forgives Jean Valjean for stealing his silver. If the opening of a story sets its tone, then this is totally different from the vision of penal hardship set by the musical.

Hugo stripped the politics out of the 1832 uprising to tell a religious story. Then the musical adaptation stripped most of the religion away.

There’s not much left, except a vague exhortation to violently, pointlessly die on behalf of the poor. The students are engaged in a vanity revolution. This is insurrection as a lifestyle choice.

There’s something very modern about that. Our mature democracies are boringly practical. For us, revolution is a romantic gesture which belongs in the past.

But real, historical revolutions have been about something: tyranny or taxation or arcane theories of economic class.

In the Les Misérables musical – and our popular culture – revolution is little more than an honourable, nihilistic death-wish.

Policy Without Politics Is Pointless

John McTernan is Julia Gillard’s director of communications, a Scottish import, and, by all accounts, the man who convinced our Prime Minister to go hard on Tony Abbott’s woman problem.

In a profile in the Monthly, Nick Bryant wrote that McTernan is “renowned for his ruthlessness, and for being a hater”. He has an “all-out attack” political style. He’s usually compared to Malcolm Tucker, the iconic Scottish bruiser in The Thick of It.

But he came to Australia in a very different guise – as an “Adelaide Thinker-in-Residence”, the intellectual patronage program of former premier Mike Rann.

McTernan’s final report was belatedly released after Christmas: Are You Being Served? Toward More Responsive Public Services.

This report has to be read to be believed. It is superficial and scattershot and padded out with anecdotes. Poor old South Australians apparently paid handsomely for this collection of folksy wisdom masquerading as serious thinking about public service reform. In some parts it is actually quite funny. McTernan uses the word “synergies” not once, but twice.

Yet the report has one virtue: it exposes how barren thinking about public service delivery can be.

McTernan’s “challenge” was to revolutionise the relationship between public services and public service users.

To this he proposes the government “state and celebrate the purpose of public service overall”, seek to “foster a culture that empowers citizens and government to jointly own the problems that need to be solved”, and “establish a comprehensive state-wide approach to the development of 21st Century public service leadership”.

Those are the first three recommendations, word for word.

Only slightly more concrete is his call for “e-government”. Sure, e-government is a tantalising idea. In theory, it could link public services together, reduce administrative costs, increase government responsiveness and transparency, and make dealing with bureaucracies simple – even convenient.

In practice… well, you only need to see what the Australian Taxation Office’s eTax software looks like to see why massive government departments don’t do well in the online space.

E-government initiatives are, at their best, plodding and ineffective. At their worst they can be dangerous: government-run databases already have notorious privacy problems, and such problems multiply when those databases are linked together.

If e-government lends itself to fantastical thinking, even more indulgent is the claims made for the “open data” movement, where government releases wads of raw data for citizens to analyse and repurpose. For McTernan, open data could “increase transparency, accountability and collaboration”.

That all sounds great, but in reality, the most momentous open data success in Australia has been the National Public Toilet Map. Cute, modestly helpful, but hardly a revitalisation of democracy.

The limits of open data are obvious. The only data that is going to be released under an open data scheme is bland; anything which is controversial, potentially embarrassing, or even mildly off-message is going to be cleansed or suppressed.

Indeed, controlling the release of embarrassingly information is exactly the sort of thing that a communications director to a prime minister might be expected to do.

Public sector utopianism is always dashed upon the rocks of political expediency. That’s a worldly truth which makes most thinking about public service reform hopelessly naïve.

But in John McTernan’s report, this truth is elevated into a great irony. This supremely political person (the Monthly profile says McTernan can’t resist involving himself in internal ALP factional fights) appears not to have factored politics into his thinking.

For instance, McTernan proposes a checklist of sound policy development and implementation. (“Ask what is the problem?”, “What are the facts and do we have them all?”, “What are the solutions and do we have them all?” and so on.) That’s nice, and reminiscent of the “policy cycle” described in first year public policy textbooks.

But the policy cycle is an ideal model. It is deliberately simplified to the point of ridiculousness.

McTernan of all people knows that public policy is not developed by a steady, step-by-step process.

No, in a democracy, public policy is a compromise between interest groups brokered by politicians whose major interest is re-election. It is constrained by a lack of information and confounded by real-world complexity. It is implemented by bureaucracies driven by self-interest and it is evaluated by those who have a stake in its success.

All the problems McTernan implicitly identifies in the public service – excessive internal red tape, a lack of leadership, poor policy development – are not isolated problems to be surmounted but are innate features of the public sector. They are the natural result of the political incentives faced by all whose job it is to develop, choose, and implement policy.

Until thinking on public sector reform comes to terms with the political constraints of government action, it will always be pointlessly utopian.