Articles – Page 35

The Legacy And Abuse Of Ayn Rand

Paul Ryan told an audience in 2005 that “the reason I got into public service” was the novelist Ayn Rand.

That makes no sense at all.

Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate may be fond of Rand but Rand would not have been fond of him. She hated the idea of “public service”.

No, her ideal pursuits were industry and science and art. By Rand’s death in 1982, she had elaborated this view over two best-selling novels (Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead) and numerous essays and treatises.

Rand admired people who produced things; people who created value. The people opposed to producers are “looters” and “moochers”. They take that value and redistribute it to rent-seeking businesses and the welfare state. They are at home with the government and the tax system; they live in a world of subsidies and congressional hearings … and bailouts.

Paul Ryan supported the bank and automotive bailouts, among the most obscene examples of looting in American history. He now says he regrets those votes, and claims to oppose “corporate welfare” passionately.

His remorse would have done little for Rand. There was nothing she disliked more than inconsistency in the name of politics.

Bailouts and inconsistency are not the only differences between the novelist and the candidate. Ryan claimed his budget plan was based on his Catholic faith. Rand despised religion. Ryan is a fan of Ronald Reagan. Rand thought the Gipper was “trying to take us back to the Middle Ages”.

The war on drugs, civil liberties, abortion, take your pick: Rand and Ryan part more often than they converge. She described the modern conservative movement as the “God-family-country swamp”.
So it’s hard to understand the hyperventilating that has greeted the announcement that Ryan will join Romney on the presidential ticket. In the New Yorker, Jane Meyer suggested that by picking such a dedicated Ayn Rand fan, Romney had “added at least the imprint of an extra woman”.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews went further – Ryan actually “is Ayn Rand”, and he wants to “screw” the poor. One Huffington Post writer described him as a Rand “devotee”. Social media, of course, went bananas.

Ryan is a common type. He apparently insists interns read Atlas Shrugged when they join his staff. Politicians like to think they are in the business of ideas, but that’s nonsense. Politics is the business of power. Ideas are an optional extra, more useful for appealing to already committed supporters than formulating policy.

All those horrified progressives trying to draw a direct line from Rand to Ryan are playing his game, suggesting this senior politician is driven by ornate principle rather than base politics.

Ayn Rand’s books are abused in this way more than most. Her novels may not be great literary works, but are rich and readable (something you could not say about Friedrich Hayek’s dense prose, for instance). More than any other iconic free market writer, she creates a world with its own specific – that is, strict – moral code. And moral codes developed through fiction are seductive in a way that economic treatises are not.

We are so used to popular culture praising public service that the story of a heroic industrialist is highly subversive. If progressive thinkers want to hunt down the source of Rand’s peculiar appeal, it will be found there – radicalism is always appealing. Right now there are few more truly radical notions than private success as noble, or of capitalism as admirable.

Rand has a reputation. But she did not believe virtue was a reflection of wealth. She was careful to draw portraits not only of industrialists but of workers and artisans. One small passage in Atlas Shrugged is more suggestive of Rand’s world view than any of her later claims about altruism and Aristotle: she describes a train engineer as having “the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but [his] was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one’s task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute”.

Simply put, her novels are about human excellence, small and large. The plot of The Fountainhead pivots on an architect refusing to compromise his unique artistic vision. You can imagine the appeal. And, of course, opposed to such achievement are the predatory looters with powers to tax and regulate it all away.

Does it all seem a bit cartoonish? Surely no more cartoonish than those stories about evil industrialists and heartless capitalists defeated by noble truth seekers and crusaders for the underclass. Rand was working in a popular fiction genre full of heavy-handed socialist tracts like Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists or the novels of Upton Sinclair.

The difference is that most of those socialist works have been forgotten and Rand’s writing endures. The themes of Tressell and Sinclair have collapsed into cliché. Rand’s remain subversive.
Rand’s books have not penetrated Australia as they did the United States. She is not part of our national consciousness. Yes, she has her fans. Malcolm Fraser was one. But as John Singleton wrote, “Malcolm Fraser admires Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand admires Malcolm Fraser. All this shows is that neither knows what the other is talking about.”

Rand was part of a distinctly American tradition. The libertarian writer Charles Murray rightly notes Rand’s idea of freedom is particularly Jeffersonian. In her lifetime, she was supported by the anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal movement that died out with Robert Taft’s loss to Dwight D Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. That movement was reprised, in a very different form, by the presidential run a decade later by Barry Goldwater – one of the few politicians Rand liked.

Australia has none of that rich history. Our free market tradition owes more to nineteenth century British liberalism than the American Old Right. Rand is an import. When Singleton helped form the libertarian Workers Party in Australia in the 1970s, he admitted he’d given up on Atlas Shrugged 80 pages in.

There’s a reason one of the great histories of the American libertarian movement was titled It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. But it rarely ends there.

Confused NASA’s Role Lost In Space

The recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars was a great success. But it ought to be a bittersweet one, too. Rather than giving NASA a new lease on life, the landing underscores a big problem: the world’s premier space agency no longer has any idea why it exists.

This is not a controversial claim. At the same time Curiosity was landing on Mars, NASA was holding an independent investigation into the agency’s strategic direction. One former NASA chief put it this way: “I am utterly confused.”

Does NASA exist to put humans into space? The space shuttle program was cancelled last year and a replacement is probably a decade away – if there will be one at all. The shuttles were mothballed with no alternative in mind.

Is it to develop new technologies? Sending rovers millions of kilometres across space is a very roundabout way to subsidise innovation. Anyway, NASA deserves little credit for the inventions commonly attributed to it – Velcro was actually invented in Switzerland in 1948, Teflon by a New Jersey commercial chemist in 1938.

Is NASA’s job investigating basic science? This is certainly the most plausible purpose. But then why did NASA spend half a century symbolically placing people in capsules in the sky? And the agency’s public support, such as it has any, is based on a romantic notion of humanity touching the stars. Voters prefer astronauts – those demigods with the right stuff.

So the US Congress does not have much desire to fund a never-ending procession of robo-jeeps on Mars taking photos and doing chemistry – no matter how impressive that is. Support for a future rover program, a joint venture with Europe and Russia, disappeared when the US Congress realised it wouldn’t even be delivering samples of Martian soil back to Earth for a decade. Barack Obama’s budget dropped any American support of this ExoMars program in February this year.

America’s thrift is understandable. The US federal budget deficit is likely to be more than $US1 trillion ($954 billion) this year for the fourth consecutive year. Nobody has any real idea of how to pull the deficit back. And parachuting cars onto other planets is the ultimate discretionary spend.

NASA’s lot was not always so dire. In the beginning, the agency and its supporters knew exactly what it was all for: to demonstrate American capitalism was superior to Soviet communism. The space race and the arms race were two sides of the same coin. From Sputnik to Apollo 11, the space program was less about extraterrestrial exploration and more about terrestrial geopolitics.
It has been decades since NASA had that sort of clarity. Every other justification has been added later; awkwardly and uncomfortably welded on to rationalise NASA’s budget requests.

The firmest congressional backers of the future Mars program happen to represent districts with space-related industries. Entire programs – such as the space shuttle – have been the result of dubious claims about protecting manufacturing jobs and supporting local industry.

The space program exists to perpetuate NASA and the politically connected corporations that feed off it, not the other way around.

Hence the claims that NASA’s mission is ”to open human hearts to the Martian frontier” (as one planetary scientist wrote recently) or to “rethink our place in the universe” (in the words of a current NASA manager). No one doubts the impressive achievements of all those space missions. But basing major government programs on “feelings” just isn’t a good use of scarce resources.
Australians might be OK with all this. We get to enjoy the wasteful fruits of a dying superpower without having to pay for it.

Economist Robin Hanson, himself a former NASA researcher, has described the space program as “mostly like the pyramids”. That is, it offers prestige but is showy and expensive and pointless.
But it certainly is a monument. The moon landing will be forever tied to John F. Kennedy. Both Obama and George W. Bush tried to replicate JFK’s legacy by promising to put humans on Mars, and soon. Surely they knew this was fantasy. There is no taste for an exotic and expensive space program in our austere century.

There once was a political reason to be in space. Now, there is not. Politicians need political reasons if they are going to pay for things. That’s how democracy functions and that’s why NASA is lost.

But the private space industry is growing, rapidly. Commercial uses of space flight will be more sustainable than the goodwill of the US Congress.

And robotic missions are much cheaper than manned missions. Putting Curiosity on Mars cost little more than Victoria’s myki ticketing system. The global research and philanthropic community should easily be able to raise that sort of money. (Sound far-fetched? Then perhaps our imagination needs to start on the ground before it can dance among the stars.) They would probably be able to do it cheaper than the bloated, politicised and hopelessly confused NASA anyway.

Sent To Prison For Making An Ebook

In 2003, a man made an ebook. It was not a complex task.

Belal Khazaal downloaded some articles from the internet, excerpted his favourite bits, threw them all together, and wrote a 155 word introduction. In those brief comments, he prayed the ebook “would be of benefit to everyone working to support” Islam.

Khazaal called the book Provision in the Rules of Jihad. He uploaded it to a website that is either (depending on whose expert witnesses you prefer) a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy, or a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy including some written by terrorists.

For his efforts, Australian courts sentenced Khazaal to 12 years in prison. Late last week, the High Court affirmed Khazaal’s conviction.

Described like that, Khazaal’s actions are comically banal and his punishment bizarrely disproportionate.

Does that comic banality disappear if we add that according to the Australian law his ebook had “an obvious and direct connection with assistance” for terrorism? This form of written work was made illegal in 2002.

Or that one chapter was titled “Reasons for assassination”? It included recommended targets (“diplomats, ambassadors” and “holders of key positions” in “atheistic countries” like Australia) and recommended techniques (“wireless detonation, letter bombing, booby trapping”, “cake throwing” and “hitting with a hammer”).

Yes, “hitting with a hammer”.

Even with these extra details, Khazaal’s editing job doesn’t come across as a great threat to the Commonwealth. He took things he found on the internet and packaged them up as his own.
Khazaal complains and apologises throughout his short introduction, saying the ebook would be better if he had more time, if he was fully settled in his residence (sure it would be, Belal). No question, his professed beliefs about violent jihad are distasteful and hateful. But more than anything, he comes across as a bit pathetic.

The courts may have been correct to say that compiling this ebook constituted an offence under the Commonwealth’s Criminal Code. That does not mean these offences are good law.

Between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2011 the federal government passed 54 new pieces of anti-terror law. The legislative output was extraordinary.

As George Williams notes, during the Howard years, the government was passing one new anti-terror law every 6.7 weeks. As soon as one bill was through the Parliament, it was onto the next.
Another commentator has called this “hyper-legislation”. By volume and impact, the new Australian anti-terror laws greatly exceeded those passed in the United Kingdom, Canada and even the United States.

The 2002 changes to the Criminal Code are, in fact, some of the more benign changes made in that decade of frenzied activity. More aggressive reforms in 2005 even reintroduced the long-dormant concept of sedition. (To its credit, the Rudd government relaxed those sedition laws in 2010.)

Yet that decade of hyper-activity has damaged our legal system. The boundaries between legal and illegal activity have dangerously faded.

And with all that new law, it has still taken nine years of police work, anti-terror intelligence, and legal argument to get to the Khazaal High Court decision last week. Are we safer? Khazaal’s source material is still online.

In a long and important paper from 2005, the American constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh asked whether “crime-facilitating” speech should be considered free speech. That category includes everything from the Anarchist Cookbook, which describes in detail how to make drugs and bombs, to a lookout yelling “run!” when police arrive to arrest his criminal friend.

Volokh concluded that much crime-facilitating speech is “dual-use”. Speech which can facilitate crime can also inform non-criminals about risks, about issues of public importance (such as the vulnerability of key Australians to hammers), or even just entertain.

A government should not ban speech that has a lawful and valuable use simply because it may also be used by criminals. Volokh argued that to the extent crime-facilitating speech has such value, it should be considered to be within the bounds of free speech.

Khazaal’s ebook would fall easily within those bounds. Does Islamic theology demand violent jihad, and against whom? Khazaal has published his view. Know your enemy.

And it’s hard to say there has been any great, compelling harm caused by his compilation. Words are cheap. The Anarchist Cookbook provides more technical detail than Khazaal offered, and is free to read across the internet.

Belal Khazaal may be a bad guy. He may deserve to be in prison. Australian courts decided he could not be regarded as “a person of good character” at sentencing because of convictions in Lebanon for donating to alleged terrorist organisations.

But if he deserves to be in prison in Australia, he deserves to be there for a greater crime than making an ebook.

A Proud Nation Should Not Be Bashful Of Its Past

Our Foreign Minister can be very emphatic. Bob Carr told an audience last month it was “too risky” for Australia “even to glance in the direction of talk of an Anglosphere”.

That is, to even think about talking about the deep relationship we have with the English-speaking world would be international relations suicide – like using the wrong fork at a dinner party. We would offend our neighbours and lose our friends.

It was clear who Carr was criticising. His speech didn’t mention the Opposition Leader, but Tony Abbott is a big fan of the Anglosphere. Earlier this year, Carr’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd, was explicit: Abbott’s belief in the Anglosphere is one of the reasons he must be kept out of government.

But Abbott is right. It is obvious and important that we are part of the English-speaking world. Our heritage is not something to be ashamed of. It is not a coincidence the oldest surviving democracies are in the Anglosphere. Or that the Anglosphere harbours the wealthiest countries. Or that a tradition of liberty, stretching back to the Magna Carta, has given English-speaking nations a greater protection of human rights and private property than anywhere else. We ought to be proud, not bashful.

Sure, it’s more fashionable to talk about the Asian Century; the rise of China is fodder for white papers and airport non-fiction. But, for Australia, the Anglosphere will still shape our social, cultural and political views over the next 100 years. It’s a shame only conservatives feel comfortable talking about it.

To accept that old relationships should endure isn’t to close us off from the Asian Century. Instead, the acceptance will allow us to engage that future more confidently.

The Anglosphere is not about the English language. It is about a collection of values – individual liberty, the common law, parliamentary democracy, and open markets – we share with Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the US. It recognises that different nations are joined by a common political culture. Carr and Rudd can protest all they want: the existence of that common culture is beyond question, and we are part of it.

Yet in his recent speech, Carr threw every barb he could against the Anglosphere, even dragging up the spectre of Pauline Hanson. This is a standard trope when anybody raises our English-speaking heritage – a suggestion, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, that conservatives are not so much interested in the Anglosphere, per se, but the Anglo-Saxon race.

That charge is total nonsense. The English-speaking world includes the most successful multicultural nations on the planet. All but Britain and Ireland are built almost entirely on immigration. And their success is entirely due to their institutional heritage – a liberalism which says all people, regardless of background, can peacefully coexist under a legal system that treats them neutrally. It is thanks to our Anglosphere inheritance that Australia’s multiculturalism functions as well as it does. We must not forget the former while we pursue the latter.

And spruikers of the Asian Century ought to be cautious. Forecasting the geopolitical future is tough. A highly praised book was published in 2005 titled Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. That didn’t work out. Likewise, the Asian Century may turn out very different from what our best and brightest predict.

For instance, if China’s economy takes a dive, the region may well be led instead by India – a country almost as big, certainly more free, more closely integrated with Australia, and a former British colony to boot. India may now have the largest number of English speakers in the world. Even in the Asian Century, the Anglosphere is expanding.

Geography is less important than ever. And regions are less important than ever. Australia no longer suffers under the yoke of the tyranny of distance. Globalisation, technology, and near-zero shipping costs have taken care of that. The 21st century will be about relationships and ideas, not proximity.

So there’s an irony here. When Australia was an outpost of the British Empire, we were isolated. It took months to deliver a letter to the mother country. Now, as an independent nation, Australia is closer to other English-speaking nations than ever before. Global interconnection makes shared cultures and institutions more significant. We can communicate with the rest of the Anglosphere in a second, and travel there within a day.

The Labor Party’s intellectuals have been saying for decades Australia must assert its independence. You know the drill. We must not play deputy sheriff for the US. We ought to pursue a strong and self-sufficient foreign policy. We must be confident in our identity.

So it’s bizarre to hear our Foreign Minister claim that Australia should downplay its historical relationship with the English-speaking world – not because that relationship doesn’t exist, but because simply stating it might offend our neighbours.

You would think that was the opposite of what a confident nation should do.

Critics’ Silence Adds To Walsh’s Cabinet Of Curiosities

David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art is an extraordinary achievement.

The art, distributed through an artificial cavern in a Hobart hillside, is surreal and otherworldly. We’ll get to it in a moment. But adding to MONA’s surrealism is the fact that the museum exists entirely outside Australia’s cultural bureaucracy.

MONA does not haggle for support from government budgets, and it is not curated by committee. Cabinet ministers cannot put their friends on the museum’s board.

Private museums are common globally but rare here. Australians expect their major cultural institutions to be wards of state and federal governments.

So the strangeness of the art is amplified when visitors realise they are not in a public building, but are instead guests on the private property of an eccentric billionaire. Before visitors even get to the artwork, they have already been treated to a vision of a different world – one where state and culture are not so perversely intertwined.

Hopefully Walsh’s dispute with the Australian Taxation Office does not put it all at an end. (As an aside, it has been great theatre to see Bob Brown stand up for an accused tax evader.)

All that said – MONA’s very existence being a triumph of private sector culture and free markets and capitalist patronage and so on – we ought to give Walsh the respect of taking his museum seriously. And MONA has some deep problems.

The clue is in the title. There is a broad range of new art in the Museum of Old and New Art. But the curators have a very particular idea of what constitutes “old” art. And their choices betray a strange sort of anti-intellectualism – as if modern art has nothing to do with history, or even its own heritage.

All curation decisions make implicit arguments. And most surveys of modern art are arranged chronologically and thematically. This has the advantage of showing those with only a casual interest the rough logic of modernism and post-modernism: how Paul Cézanne’s landscapes could have led to Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings, or how Dadist surrealism could have led to Tracey Emin’s soiled bed.

There is, no question, a big distance between the Mona Lisa and Damien Hirst’s shark, but it is a distance Western art has travelled, and the journey was intelligible.

MONA rejects such stodgy determinism, and tosses together art from all eras. The “Theatre of the World” exhibition, which opened in June, is the essence of MONA’s eclecticism. The pieces in this large show span 4,000 years of history. The curators jumble up everything from Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman to the vertebrae of a snake. The most striking room has its walls covered in Pacific Island bark-cloths, and features in the centre an Egyptian sarcophagus and one of the stretched human figures of the mid-century sculptor Alberto Giacometti. That is, ancient North Africa, the 19th century Pacific, and 20th century modernism, all in one hall.

But notably absent throughout the exhibition is any significant showing of Western art before 1850. The old art in the Theatre of the World is almost uniformly non-Western.

That observation may seem churlish (there are many outlets for European paintings, Walsh need not provide another one) but this curatorial decision suggests contemporary art arose from nothing; as if modernism and post-modernism exist entirely outside the Western tradition. Yet modern art is the direct heir of classical art.

Yes, many modern artists have been inspired by non-Western art. Picasso spent a lot of time looking at African tribal craft – a point the exhibition makes. But he also used to brag he was the best classically trained draughtsmen of the 20th century. Bluster or not, he and his contemporaries drew upon the artistic heritage of centuries.

When MONA pairs a modern work – more often than not from an artist living and working within the “West” – with a metal mask of a boar from India, the sole point is to disorientate. And the desired reaction is not much more than: art is weird. With this approach, MONA struggles to be more than a cabinet of curiosities.

That’s fine. Walsh does not have to make modern art comprehensible. He is under no statutory obligation to teach. He can alienate his visitors because he, not they, paid for the gallery in the first place.

But, still. One of the arguments made by radical critics of Western art is that it looks at the rest of the world with a patronising eye. In his famous book Orientalism, Edward Said claimed the West “colonised” the East through art before it did so with muskets. Said’s book was highly flawed but highly influential. It launched a thousand PhDs. Said argued European artists infantilised the Orient by imposing on it a sense of weirdness; that everything outside Europe was alien and inscrutable.

That critique has a strange parallel at MONA. The Theatre of the World typically shows a classic modern work – such as the video of an artist who cut a house in half – and contrasts it with, say, a collection of Fijian weapons. Cultural Studies majors would call those weapons representative of “the Other”. They conjure up archaic and condescending ideas about the Noble Savage. And the comparison suggests modern artists are discovering the sort of raw, violent purity that exists only in foreign lands.

So it’s curious to see our cultural critics unwilling to deploy their poison pens against Walsh’s museum. They’re usually proud to be iconoclasts.

But then, since MONA suggests modern art has little to do with the inheritance of Western Civilisation, perhaps it is not that curious.

Be like Gough: 75 Radical Ideas To Transform Australia

With James Paterson and John Roskam

If Tony Abbott wants to leave a lasting impact – and secure his place in history – he needs to take his inspiration from Australia’s most left-wing prime minister.

No prime minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam. The key is that he did it in less than three years. In a flurry of frantic activity, Whitlam established universal healthcare, effectively nationalised higher education with free tuition, and massively increased public sector salaries. He more than doubled the size of cabinet from 12 ministers to 27.

He enacted an ambitious cultural agenda that continues to shape Australia to this day. In just three years, Australia was given a new national anthem, ditched the British honours system, and abolished the death penalty and national service. He was the first Australian prime minister to visit communist China and he granted independence to Papua New Guinea. Whitlam also passed the Racial Discrimination Act. He introduced no-fault divorce.

Perhaps his most lasting legacy has been the increase in the size of government he bequeathed to Australia. When Whitlam took office in 1972, government spending as a percentage of GDP was just 19 per cent. When he left office it had soared to almost 24 per cent.

Virtually none of Whitlam’s signature reforms were repealed by the Fraser government. The size of the federal government never fell back to what it was before Whitlam. Medicare remains. TheRacial Discrimination Act – rightly described by the Liberal Senator Ivor Greenwood in 1975 as ‘repugnant to the rule of law and to freedom of speech’ – remains.

It wasn’t as if this was because they were uncontroversial. The Liberal opposition bitterly fought many of Whitlam’s proposals. And it wasn’t as if the Fraser government lacked a mandate or a majority to repeal them. After the 1975 election, in which he earned a 7.4 per cent two-party preferred swing, Fraser held 91 seats out of 127 in the House of Representatives and a Senate majority.

When Mark Steyn visited Australia recently he described political culture as a pendulum. Left-wing governments swing the pendulum to the left. Right of centre governments swing the pendulum to the right. But left-wing governments do so with greater force. The pendulum always pushes further left.

And the public’s bias towards the status quo has a habit of making even the most radical policy (like Medicare, or restrictions on freedom of speech) seem normal over time. Despite the many obvious problems of socialised health care, no government now would challenge the foundations of Medicare as the Coalition did before it was implemented.

Every single opinion poll says that Tony Abbott will be Australia’s next prime minister. He might not even have to wait until the current term of parliament expires in late 2013. The Gillard government threatens to collapse at any moment. Abbott could well be in the Lodge before Christmas this year.

Abbott could also have a Fraser-esque majority after the next election. Even if he doesn’t control the Senate, the new prime minister is likely to have an intimidating mandate from the Australian people. The conditions will suit a reformer: although Australia’s economy has proven remarkably resilient, global events demonstrate how fragile it is. The global financial crisis, far from proving to be a crisis of capitalism, has instead demonstrated the limits of the state. Europe’s bloated and debt-ridden governments provide ample evidence of the dangers of big government.

Australia’s ageing population means the generous welfare safety net provided to current generations will be simply unsustainable in the future. As the Intergenerational Report produced by the federal Treasury shows, there were 7.5 workers in the economy for every non-worker aged over 65 in 1970. In 2010 that figure was 5. In 2050 it will be 2.7. Government spending that might have made sense in 1970 would cripple the economy in 2050. Change is inevitable.

But if Abbott is going to lead that change he only has a tiny window of opportunity to do so. If he hasn’t changed Australia in his first year as prime minister, he probably never will.

Why just one year? Whitlam’s vigour in government came as a shock to Australian politics. The Coalition was adjusting to the opposition benches. Outside of parliament, the potential opponents of Whitlam reforms had yet to get organised. The general goodwill voters offer new governments gives more than enough cover for radical action. But that cover is only temporary. The support of voters drains. Oppositions organise. Scandals accumulate. The clear air for major reform becomes smoggy.

Worse, governments acclimatise to being in government. A government is full of energy in its first year. By the second year, even very promising ministers can get lazy. The business of government overtakes. MPs start thinking of the next election. But for the Coalition, the purpose of winning office cannot be merely to attain the status of being ‘in government’. It must be to make Australians freer and more prosperous. From his social democratic perspective, Whitlam understood this point well. Labor in the 1970s knew that it wanted to reshape the country and it began doing so immediately.

The time pressure on a new government – if it is to successfully implant its vision – is immense. The vast Commonwealth bureaucracies and the polished and politically-savvy senior public servants have their own agendas, their own list of priorities, and the skill to ensure those priorities become their ministers’ priorities. The recent experience of the state Coalition governments is instructive. Fresh-faced ministers who do not have a fixed idea of what they want to do with their new power are invariably captured by their departments.

Take, for instance, the Gillard government’s National Curriculum. Opposing this policy ought to be a matter of faith for state Liberals. The National Curriculum centralises education power in Canberra, and will push a distinctly left-wing view of the world onto all Australian students. But it has been met with acceptance – even support – by the Coalition’s state education ministers. This is because a single National Curriculum has been an article of faith within the education bureaucracy for decades; an obsession of education unions and academics, who want education to ‘shape’ Australia’s future. (No prize for guessing what that shape might look like.) A small-target election strategy has the unfortunate side-effect of allowing ministerial aspirants to avoid thinking too deeply about major areas in their portfolio. So when, in the first week as minister, they are presented with a list of policy priorities by their department, it is easier to accept what the bureaucracy considers important, rather than what is right. The only way to avoid such departmental capture is to have a clear idea of what to do with government once you have it.

Only radical change that shifts the entire political spectrum, like Gough Whitlam did, has any chance of effecting lasting change. Of course, you don’t have to be from the left of politics to leave lasting change on the political spectrum.

Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan proved conservatives can leave a paradigm-shifting legacy. Though Thatcher’s own party strayed from her strongly free-market philosophy, one of the major reasons the British Labour Party finally removed socialism from their party platform under Tony Blair was because of Margaret Thatcher.

Ronald Reagan not only presided over pro-market deregulation and tax cuts during eight years in the White House, but also provided the ideological fuel for the 1994 Republican revolution in the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, which enacted far-reaching welfare reform.

Here we provide a list of 75 policies that would make Australia richer and more free. It’s a deliberately radical list. There’s no way Tony Abbott could implement all of them, or even a majority. But he doesn’t have to implement them all to dramatically change Australia. If he was able to implement just a handful of these recommendations, Abbott would be a transformative figure in Australian political history. He would do more to shift the political spectrum than any prime minister since Whitlam.

We do not mean for this list to be exhaustive, and in many ways no list could do justice to the challenges the Abbott government would face. Whitlam changed the political culture. We are still feeling the consequences of that change today. So the policies we suggest adopting, the bureaucracies we suggest abolishing, the laws we suggest revoking should be seen as symptoms, rather than the source, of the problem.

Conservative governments have a very narrow idea of what the ‘culture wars’ consists of. The culture of government that threatens our liberty is not just ensconced in the ABC studios, or among a group of well-connected and publicly funded academics. ABC bias is not the only problem. It is the spiralling expansion of bureaucracies and regulators that is the real problem.

We should be more concerned about the Australian National Preventive Health Agency – a new Commonwealth bureaucracy dedicated to lobbying other arms of government to introduce Nanny State measures – than about bias at the ABC. We should be more concerned about the cottage industry of consultancies and grants handed out by the public service to environmental groups. We should be more concerned that senior public servants shape policy more than elected politicians do. And conservative governments should be more concerned than they are at the growth of the state’s interest in every aspect of society.

If he wins government, Abbott faces a clear choice. He could simply overturn one or two symbolic Gillard-era policies like the carbon tax, and govern moderately. He would not offend any interest groups. In doing so, he’d probably secure a couple of terms in office for himself and the Liberal Party. But would this be a successful government? We don’t believe so. The remorseless drift to bigger government and less freedom would not halt, and it would resume with vigour when the Coalition eventually loses office. We hope he grasps the opportunity to fundamentally reshape the political culture and stem the assault on individual liberty.

Repeal the carbon tax, and don’t replace it. It will be one thing to remove the burden of the carbon tax from the Australian economy. But if it is just replaced by another costly scheme, most of the benefits will be undone.
Abolish the Department of Climate Change
Abolish the Clean Energy Fund
Repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act
Abandon Australia’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council
Repeal the renewable energy target
Return income taxing powers to the states
Abolish the Commonwealth Grants Commission
Abolish the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission
Withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol
Introduce fee competition to Australian universities
Repeal the National Curriculum
Introduce competing private secondary school curriculums
Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)
Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be ‘balanced’
Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law
End local content requirements for Australian television stations
Eliminate family tax benefits
Abandon the paid parental leave scheme
Means-test Medicare
End all corporate welfare and subsidies by closing the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education
Introduce voluntary voting
End mandatory disclosures on political donations
End media blackout in final days of election campaigns
End public funding to political parties
Remove anti-dumping laws
Eliminate media ownership restrictions
Abolish the Foreign Investment Review Board
Eliminate the National Preventative Health Agency
Cease subsidising the car industry
Formalise a one-in, one-out approach to regulatory reduction
Rule out federal funding for 2018 Commonwealth Games
Deregulate the parallel importation of books
End preferences for Industry Super Funds in workplace relations laws
Legislate a cap on government spending and tax as a percentage of GDP
Legislate a balanced budget amendment which strictly limits the size of budget deficits and the period the federal government can be in deficit
Force government agencies to put all of their spending online in a searchable database
Repeal plain packaging for cigarettes and rule it out for all other products, including alcohol and fast food
Reintroduce voluntary student unionism at universities
Introduce a voucher scheme for secondary schools
Repeal the alcopops tax
Introduce a special economic zone in the north of Australia including:
a) Lower personal income tax for residents
b) Significantly expanded 457 Visa programs for workers
c) Encourage the construction of dams
Repeal the mining tax
Devolve environmental approvals for major projects to the states
Introduce a single rate of income tax with a generous tax-free threshold
Cut company tax to an internationally competitive rate of 25 per cent
Cease funding the Australia Network
Privatise Australia Post
Privatise Medibank
Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function
Privatise SBS
Reduce the size of the public service from current levels of more than 260,000 to at least the 2001 low of 212,784
Repeal the Fair Work Act
Allow individuals and employers to negotiate directly terms of employment that suit them
Encourage independent contracting by overturning new regulations designed to punish contractors
Abolish the Baby Bonus
Abolish the First Home Owners’ Grant
Allow the Northern Territory to become a state
Halve the size of the Coalition front bench from 32 to 16
Remove all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade
Slash top public servant salaries to much lower international standards, like in the United States
End all public subsidies to sport and the arts
Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport
End all hidden protectionist measures, such as preferences for local manufacturers in government tendering
Abolish the Office for Film and Literature Classification
Rule out any government-supported or mandated internet censorship
Means test tertiary student loans
Allow people to opt out of superannuation in exchange for promising to forgo any government income support in retirement
Immediately halt construction of the National Broadband Network and privatise any sections that have already been built
End all government funded Nanny State advertising
Reject proposals for compulsory food and alcohol labelling
Privatise the CSIRO
Defund Harmony Day
Close the Office for Youth
Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme

Media Diversity Fears Are Absurd And Obsolete

The twin themes of the media debate – new regulation and creative destruction – coexist awkwardly.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy told Channel Ten’s Meet the Press recently that his government’s proposed public interest test for media acquisitions was not aimed at Gina Rinehart’s investment in Fairfax. In fact, the mining magnate would pass the new test.

This revelation will disappoint many of his colleagues. But thank goodness. The Gillard Government is, happily, not so brazen as to write a new law to stop one particular critic from investing in the media. Doing so would be the essence of arbitrary government, and would be clearly in response to Gina Rinehart’s political views.

Not all media reform is a threat to free speech. But motives do matter. The Government’s hostility to News Limited damned the Finkelstein inquiry. Any new ownership regulation inspired by one specific proprietor would also be dodgy. Some in the government have suggested media purchases could be conditional on signing up to a charter of journalistic independence – which just happens to be the matter of dispute between Gina Rinehart and the Fairfax board. A coincidence, I’m sure.

So if the Labor government is backing away from such obviously political media laws, that’s good.

Yet Conroy’s defence on Meet the Press still struck a weird note. He argued that any suggestion the test was aimed at a specific person was false because the ALP has been campaigning for a public interest test for a long time.

That’s true. When the Howard government directed the Productivity Commission to look into media regulation in 1999, the Beazley opposition talked at length about public interest guidelines for ownership.

But that was a long time ago. Compare then and now. We had a very, very different media market in 1999. Google had only eight employees. Its news aggregation service was still three years away. And in the compressed history of the internet, Google is relatively old. MySpace didn’t launch until 2003. Most of what we think of as ‘new media’ didn’t exist. Facebook didn’t exist. YouTube didn’t exist. It wasn’t until mid-2000 that Apple starting thinking about music. The first iPod arrived in late 2001.

And when the Beazley-led opposition was first promoting a public interest test, Fairfax shares were trading at a price nearly 10 times greater than today. Indeed, the turn of the millennium seemed like a great time to get into newspapers.

In politics, consistency is usually admirable. Yet there is consistency and there is stubbornness. It’s bizarre hearing Conroy strike the exact same notes as Beazley did a dozen years ago. Everything has changed. Apparently the ideal policy has not.

For both Conroy and Beazley, the goal of extra media ownership restrictions would be to protect a diverse range of opinions and voices. But it is exactly the enormous choice of opinions and voices on the internet which is uprooting the media landscape.

Put it this way: budding moguls would not be able to buy press assets so easily if the newspaper business hadn’t been undercut by the very diversity Conroy claims is at risk. This is a weird recursive loop. Surely we do not believe the extraordinary growth of voices online is reducing the diversity of voices overall.

Yet that seems to be the logic behind the current push for a public interest test.

Policy proposals have use-by dates. Something that is arguable in one decade can be silly in the next. Press proprietors have never been less powerful than they are today. Newspapers and broadcasters do not have the monopoly on information they enjoyed in the past.

That Conroy’s views on this are about 10 years out of date shouldn’t be a surprise. Australia’s communications ministers are notorious for fighting the last war. They have a track record of either accidentally delaying or actively resisting the implications of technology. With motives good and bad, our ministers have held back the introduction of new radio stations, new television stations, pay television, and FM radio.

The Gillard Government’s Convergence Review was supposed to be a break with the past. Yet even it got caught up trying to impose anachronistic laws on new technologies. Local content requirements are one example of regulations which do not make sense in the internet age; ownership limits are another.

So the major policy outcome of the apparently forward-thinking Convergence and Finkelstein inquiries could be tackling obsolete fears of media moguls.

It is absurd to think that just as the newspaper industry is going through a once-in-a-century upheaval, the Government is devising ways to limit investment in the press. But in media regulation, absurd is not unusual.

The Terrifyingly Inscrutable Minds Behind Mass Murders

We still don’t have a good grasp of what drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to massacre 12 of their fellow students and a teacher in 1999.

The Columbine High School killing was one of the most significant domestic acts of violence in the United States in recent decades. It remains an icon of savagery. It has been studied continuously.

Every second of their killing spree has been recreated; every biographical and cultural motive canvassed. Yet as one book, Comprehending Columbine, points out, a decade later there remains “no comprehensive understanding as to why it happened and why it happened where it did.”

No doubt each boy acted for separate reasons. Harris and Klebold had markedly different personalities and different family backgrounds. But despite the enormous amount of written material the killers left for investigators, what turned them from students to mass murderers is still somewhat of a mystery.

School shooters aren’t all as enigmatic as Harris and Klebold. When Evan Ramsey killed two of his fellow Alaskan students in 1997, his motives and pathology were clearer: he had been bullied at school and abused at home.

Yet in the ranks of young killers, there are both bullies and the bullied (Harris of Columbine was in the former camp). Some have been leaders, others followers. Some shooters claim to hear voices in their head. Others are desperate to prove they committed their crimes in perfect, clear sanity.

One recent survey of school shootings concluded that “the particular circumstances of each shooter, each distinct from the last, contribute to a sense of disequilibrium”. There is no clear thread which ties these acts together. And this for a distinct phenomenon, united by a shared location (schools) and shared targets (fellow students and teachers).

Humans want to understand why things happen. We think in terms of cause and effect. But mass murders usually confound explanation.

It is unlikely we will ever fully uncover the “causes” of the massacre committed at the Dark Knight Rises premiere in Aurora, Colorado on Friday. The attempts to derive meaning from atrocities like this are understandable but futile.

It’s a 30-minute drive between Aurora and Columbine High School. The suspected killer, James Holmes, would have been 11 at the time of Harris and Klebold’s rampage.

Yet it was only his victims who lived in the shadow of Columbine. Holmes was raised in California and moved to Colorado to enrol in a PhD. He could not have felt the region’s history as keenly as those he targeted late last week.

But wouldn’t it be more comfortable to understand his actions in that frame? To believe he was the product of a traumatised community, and therefore the shooting had a discernable explanation?
Just as it would be easier to understand Columbine if the killers had been inspired by the music of Marilyn Manson, or given political purpose by an underground neo-Nazi trench coat gang, or were the products of broken homes or bullying.

None of these common explanations hold up to scrutiny. But even if any were true, there would still be Comprehending Columbine’s question of why it happened and why it happened there.

Take one popular account. Yes, Harris and Klebold were passionate fans of the video game Doom, where players shoot monsters from a first-person perspective. And Harris said their upcoming massacre would be “like playing Doom”.

But that’s not much of an explanation for their actions. An estimated 10 million people played Doom at one time in the 1990s. Why did those two boys from Colorado feel compelled to re-enact it?

These little tidbits – we will no doubt hear many about James Holmes – are superficially damning but rarely have any explanatory power.

Yet immediately after word of the Aurora shooting dripped out, there was a long list of candidates for explanations. Hurriedly cobbled together experts blamed bullying. An American ABC News reporter blamed the Tea Party. The Daily Mail blamed Occupy Wall Street. One politician blamed the opponents of Judeo-Christianity. An MSNBC talking head blamed Star Trek.

Those inanities have now ceded to a slightly more considered debate about gun control, but that too seems like an attempt to fill the gap with meaning – to draw a lesson, to impose a narrative.

Our cause-and-effect thinking flatters us that atrocities are problems to be solved. Every shocking event must be followed by a debate. Could tighter gun laws avoid such violence? Surely the best case scenario is it could reduce the number of victims.

The desire to cause horrific violence is likely much stronger than the legislative strength of Washington DC. The uncomfortable reality is these tragedies do not pivot on public policy, but rather on an insane choice, made by an individual, to kill strangers.

Mass murders are a global phenomenon (Wikipedia has a revealing list here). Compared to the United States, gun laws are strict in Norway. So Anders Breivik’s spree killing a few months later did not spark a passionate debate about gun control, despite his shared use of semi-automatic weapons.

There, the story has been about Islamophobia – as Breivik intended it. This is a narrative, imposed by the killer himself, to try to give the event a concrete meaning, and distract us from looking at Breivik’s specific, unique, individual mental world. James Holmes too may try to impose his own justification for his actions.

For some reason we do not seek to “understand” serial killers – who commit their crimes in private over time. Yet like rampage killers, they too can be drawn to their actions by the thrill, or the notoriety, or power over others.

Evil is too easy a word. Nevertheless, if there is an explanation for acts of violence like those in Aurora or Columbine, they will be found not in culture, law, or politics, but in the terrifyingly inscrutable minds of those who choose to murder others indiscriminately.

Let The Cult Begin

The Olympic Games are creepy. Sure, their creepiness isn’t immediately apparent. We have grown familiar with the pageantry that surrounds this sporting carnival. But there’s more to the Olympics than swimming, shot put and badminton.

The Games are steeped in ritual, all of which is designed to promote an unsettling ideology. They are unlike any other international sporting event. Games officials talk of an Olympic movement, an Olympic spirit, and an Olympic ideal. Its five-ring logo is imbued with a quasi-mystical significance. It even has its own ceremonial calendar: an Olympiad is a period of four years. It’s hard not to conclude that the Olympic Games are a religion, and a bizarre religion at that.

The opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics is this Friday. The official protocols dictate it will feature a sacred torch, which will carry a sacred flame, which will light a sacred cauldron. The flame is supposed to represent purity – flames come from the sun and are untainted by our material world. When the Olympic torch was lit in a Greek temple in May, there was a ceremony of dancing priestesses and men dressed as heralds performing feats of strength.

The flame ritual will be preceded by a symbolic release of pigeons. An Olympic flag will be raised. A hymn will be sung. There will be oath-taking. These rites are all very purposeful. The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, said its basic idea was to convert athletics into “a religion, a cult [and] an impassioned soaring”.

So the entertainments and frills of the opening ceremony obscure just how odd all the Olympic rituals are.

It is really only when totalitarian states host the Games (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980, and Beijing 2008) that the cultish elements of the Olympics are fully assimilated into the opening ceremony.

For instance, what we call the ”parade” of athletes around the ceremony would really be better described as a march. Coubertin was explicit about the militaristic elitism of the Games. He wanted to showcase ”an army of sportsmen”. Olympic athletes are the peak physical specimens of all the world’s nations. They are young, fit and virile. In Coubertin’s view, physical perfection was a sign of moral purity. He wanted athletes to devote themselves to sacrifice and an “ideal of a superior life”.

No surprise when the Nazis hosted the Games in 1936, Coubertin embraced them. Berlin was the culmination of his life’s work. It was the ultimate display of ceremony and strength. Olympic ceremonies still combine a sort of fascist symbolism with Cirque du Soleil-style choreography.

Yet the International Olympic Committee is proud of Coubertin. Our Australian committee even has an award in his honour, handed to the secondary school students who best epitomise the values of the Olympic movement.

No doubt the students don’t understand how strange those values are. Presumably they believe the Olympics are focused on peace and global harmony. Because if there is one thing Olympic officials do well, it is soaring speeches about all the good they are doing for the world.

Jacques Rogge, the current Olympic president, told the United Nations in 2007 that “in a world too often torn apart by war, environmental degradation, poverty and disease, we see sport as a calling to serve humanity”. An earlier president, Avery Brundage, pronounced in 1968 that “the essence of the Olympic ideal maintains its purity as an oasis where correct human relations and the concepts of moral order still prevail”.

Their words are cheap and self-serving. Brundage made his lofty claim just five days after the Tlatelolco massacre, where the Mexican government killed dozens of students protesting the Mexico City Games. Rogge gave his speech in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, described recently by the dissident Ai Weiwei as nothing more than propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party.

Their words are so cheap that in 1995 the Olympic committee even tossed “sustainability” into their charter. Not content with saving humanity, they wish to save the planet. It’s not clear how flying 10,000 athletes around the world every four years will achieve that goal. The sustainability platform is almost like a deliberate joke. And it reveals just how vacuous the Olympic ideal really is.

The Olympics do nothing to achieve global harmony. They arguably work against it. If harmony was the goal, athletes would compete as individuals, not on behalf of nations.

Do the Olympic ideologists honestly believe the nonsense they spout? The Games are a taxpayer-funded cash cow for all involved, and that’s probably motive enough for many. Yet Olympism offers a sense of mission. It’s not like the World Cup or the Commonwealth Games. The Olympics is a cause. It is a full-blown belief system.

Rogge said in his UN speech he wanted to place “sport at the service of mankind”. Maybe he does. But right now, sport is serving the weird ideology of the Olympics much more than humanity.

Be Sceptical Of Vague New ‘National Security’ Powers

Any proposal by the government to increase its own power should be treated with scepticism.

Double that scepticism when the government is vague about why it needs that extra power. Double again when those powers are in the area of law and order. And double again every time the words “national security” are used.

So scepticism – aggressive, hostile scepticism, bordering on kneejerk reaction – should be our default position when evaluating the long list of new security powers the Federal Government would like to deal with “emerging and evolving threats”.

The Attorney-General’s Department released a discussion paper last week detailing security reform it wants Parliament to consider.

The major proposal – although explored little in the department’s paper – is the Gillard Government’s proposed data retention laws. These laws would require all internet service providers to store data about their users’ online activity for two years. They have been on the table for some time.

But there are many other proposals. The department wants the power to unilaterally change telecommunications intercept warrants. It wants the threshold for those warrants to be significantly lowered. It wants the ability for security agencies to force us to hand over information like passwords to be expanded. There’s much more.

These reforms add up to a radical revamping of security power. They raise troubling questions about our right to privacy, our freedom of speech, and the overreach of regulatory agencies. And they suggest one of the most substantial attacks on civil liberties since John Howard’s post-September 11 anti-terror law reform.

Public policy is like comedy – timing is everything. The lack of timing here is revealing.

These proposals come nearly a decade after the first flurry of anti-terror activity, and long after most analysts have concluded that the serious threat of terrorism – keenly and rashly felt at the turn of the century – has subsided.

The government claims that a new environment of cybercrime and cyber-espionage necessitate wholesale reform of the law. These claims are massively overstated. Cybercrime exists more in the advertising of security companies than it does in reality, as I argued in the Sunday Age earlier this year.

Cyber-espionage too is worse in theory than reality. In their recent paper Loving the Cyber Bomb?, two American scholars, Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins, point out that these claims have all the hallmarks of threat inflation driven by self-interested security agencies.

As they write in the American context, “The rhetoric of ‘cyber doom’ employed by proponents of increased federal intervention, however, lacks clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public.”

Certainly, our Attorney-General’s Department offers no such clear evidence. Perhaps there is evidence. But most of the Government’s case is presented as innuendo and hypotheticals.

Brito and Watkins suggest this hyperbole has a parallel with the sort of threat inflation that led up to the Iraq War. The conclusion – more power – leads directly from the premise – an evolving threat. But we’re a long way from the realm of evidence-based policy here.

Yet even if we took the government at its word about the dark and dangerous online environment, there would still be much to be concerned with.

Fairfax papers reported in April that ASIO now privately believes environmentalist groups are more dangerous than terrorists. This surely says more about the diminished status of terrorism than the rise of green activism. But it also underlines the often political nature of national security enforcement.

The line between lawful and unlawful political dissent is less clear at the margins than we like to admit. Enthusiastic agencies and thin-skinned governments can easily forget there is any difference at all. (During the Second World War, John Curtin’s Labor government even directed ASIO’s predecessor agency to investigate the Institute of Public Affairs – its ideological opponent, and an organisation that was urging the formation of a non-left political party.)

ASIO isn’t the only agency we have to worry about. There are at least 16 Commonwealth and state bodies approved to intercept telecommunications right now. Even the scandal-ridden Office of Police Integrity in Victoria would benefit from these new powers.

Ministers in the Gillard Government have jumped to defend the Attorney-General’s proposals. And the Coalition is “examining the issues carefully”.

Yet given the bipartisan submission to the previous government’s expansion of the security state, it would not pay to be too optimistic.

This is largely because governments are usually passive recipients of the phenomenon of threat inflation, not the drivers of it. Security agencies are easily able to convince politicians they need more support and power, and that any scepticism about pressing national security matters is reckless, even negligent.

The scepticism, unfortunately, has to be left to the public whose civil liberties are at stake.