Articles – Page 36

Freedom Of Association Lost In The Moral Panic

“You are the sort of man this act aims at,” Magistrate Laidlaw told a 30-year-old Sydney man, George Harris, as he sentenced him to six months’ hard labour.

The Vagrancy (Amendment) Act 1929 had been passed by the New South Wales Parliament just a year before. Laidlaw thought the act was fantastic – a “very desirable piece of legislation”, he said in a separate case.

George Harris had violated the act by “habitually consorting with reputed criminals”. He’d consorted with them at Central Station, and he’d consorted with them at Randwick racecourse. Not only had Harris consorted all over Sydney, Laidlaw hastened to point out, but he had been observed consorting “at various times of the night”.

So what sort of man was George Harris? He had a police record more than a decade old, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. That record was spread across Australia and New Zealand.

Yet his offences were relatively minor – theft, vagrancy, and “being a suspected person”. Harris may have been a bad sort, and may have hung around with other bad sorts. But in February 1930, the state of New South Wales imposed six months’ hard labour upon him for mere association. No need to prove that he had stolen anything or assaulted anyone. His relationships were crime enough.

Consorting with convicted criminals was made unlawful in the midst of Sydney’s moral panic over the ‘razor gangs’ – that era of crime luridly but forgettably depicted in Underbelly.

The tabloid newspapers had aggressively called for a crackdown on consorting in order to tackle the gangs. Introducing the anti-consorting laws, the colonial secretary claimed it was a necessary tool to deal with the many people “from other parts of the world” who were “engaged in an orgy of crime in this city”.

But the crime of consorting was, in reality, a catch-all crime that gave police discretionary powers to pull up whoever they liked. The police had to give one warning and then that was it. As the University of New South Wales’ Alex Steel has written, “once the police decided that a person was a criminal, they might proceed to arrest him or her for consorting on any convenient ground.”

This unjust law gave police the power to criminalise what should be protected under freedom of association. It remained with its original strength for half a century, until the New South Wales government tightened up some of its excesses in 1979.

But consorting laws are back. The O’Farrell Government amended them earlier this year to give them more bite. They did so ostensibly to deal with bikie gangs and the recent drive-by shootings. Now even regular email with someone who was once found guilty of an indictable offence is now considered consorting.

Certainly, the amended law offers a few defences against a charge of consorting. For instance, it is legal to consort with someone if you are their lawyer or doctor. But that’s not much consolation. The defences are extremely narrow, and the circumstances in which you could be found to have illegally consorted are extremely broad.

The NSW Young Lawyers society has pointed out consorting would even include football clubs where some members of the team have been convicted of assault. Police could disband a club with one warning. Any players that continued to fraternise with their team mates would face jail. Even if you assume police are at all times noble and dutiful, such powers are obviously – ludicrously – excessive.

The first person was convicted under the amended laws last week. Yet he was not a bikie, but a 21-year-old man the NSW police admits has no link with motorcycle gangs.

It was the same in the 1930s. The police found consorting laws useful to clear the streets of prostitution, but not so useful in clamping down on razor crime. Consorting laws are good for smoothing the wheels of prosecution – if you think the goal of a legal system is to maximise prosecutions. But its ability to prevent or punish serious criminal activity is limited.

Consorting laws are clearly unjust for those accused of consorting. But they are cruel for those who have been convicted and punished for a crime. A malicious police officer could eliminate a released criminal’s freedom of association simply by issuing his friends with a warning.

When governments face law and order problems, the urge to “do something” must be overwhelming. The newspapers call for action. Talkback radio calls for crackdowns. Police call for more police power.

But police and prosecutors already have a long list of offences they can charge, and they have ample powers to do so. Nobody seriously believes motorcycle gangs are an unprecedented threat that a modern legal system is powerless against, yet for some reason everybody acts as if they are.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Freedom of association – a freedom that extends even to those who have in the past been convicted of a crime – is one of those essential liberties.

Schools Might As Well Tell Students Who To Vote For

The draft shape of the National Curriculum’s ”civics and citizenship” subject was released last month. It is blatantly ideological. It displays its progressive, left-of-centre politics like a billboard.

The National Curriculum was announced by Julia Gillard in 2008 and is forecast to be implemented in Victoria and New South Wales sometime after next year. The curriculum authority is rolling out one subject at a time.

But from the start, the curriculum’s politics were obvious. In its own words, the National Curriculum will create “a more ecologically and socially just world”. The phrase “ecological justice” is rarely seen outside environmental protests. Social justice is a more mainstream concept, but it’s also solidly of the left – it usually refers to “fixing” inequality by redistributing wealth.

Civics is a small subject in the curriculum, but a crucial one. The National Curriculum wants to sculpt future citizens out of today’s students. So the emphasis civics places on certain political ideas will echo through Australian life for decades.

And when a group of education academics try to summarise the essential values of our liberal democracy, we should pay attention. After all, they hope to drill them into every child.
So what are our nation’s values? According to the civics draft, they are “democracy, active citizenship, the rule of law, social justice and equality, respect for diversity, difference and lawful dissent, respect for human rights, stewardship of the environment, support for the common good, and acceptance of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship”.

It’s quite a list. Some of the values, such as democracy and the rule of law, we all should agree on. But most are skewed sharply to the left.

Where, for instance, is individual liberty? The curriculum describes Australia as a liberal democracy but doesn’t seem comfortable with what that means: a limited government protecting the freedom for individuals to pursue their own lives.

Conservatives should be troubled that ”tradition” is absent from the civics draft. Our democratic and liberal institutions are the inheritance of centuries of experiment and conflict. To respect tradition is to value those institutions. Yet tradition only pops up when the civics draft talks about multiculturalism. It’s part of “intercultural understanding”. In other words, we are merely to tolerate the traditions of others, not value our own traditions.

And liberals should be appalled at the emphasis on ”civic duty”. The curriculum could have said that individuals and families living their own lives in their own way is virtuous in itself. After all, people who do things for others in a market economy contribute to society as much as the most passionate political activist.

But instead the civics subject will pound into children that they should work for international non-profit groups in order to pursue “the common good”.

This may be uncontroversial to the left, but it is political dynamite. Liberals are sceptical of the common good because throughout history it has been used to justify nationalism, oppression, militarism, intolerance and privilege. It’s one of the reasons liberals support small government. But the common good has been tossed absent-mindedly into the civics draft, alongside that other vague and loaded concept, social justice.

It gets worse. The suggestion we have a duty to be “stewards” of the environment comes straight from green political philosophy. It reduces humans to mere trustees of nature. This directly conflicts with the liberal belief that the Earth’s bounty can be used for the benefit of humanity.

Politics drenches the entire curriculum. Three “cross-curriculum priorities” infuse everything from history to maths. They are: sustainability, engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures.

Perhaps on first glance the priorities don’t seem too political. But the history curriculum will offer perspectives on “the overuse of natural resources” and “the global energy crisis”. The English curriculum will teach students how to “advocate … actions for sustainable futures”. The ideology here is so flagrant teachers might as well just tell the kids who to vote for.

And imagine the priorities were, instead, material progress, the Australia-US alliance and British culture. There would be an uproar. Progressives would line up to condemn the curriculum’s reactionary politics. Remember the outrage over conservative bias in John Howard’s citizenship test? And that was just for migrants. The curriculum is for every Australian child.

The irony is that this iteration of the National Curriculum wasn’t Labor’s idea. The Howard government set the ball rolling. The Coalition was unhappy about how terribly left-wing state curriculums were.

So people who are pleased with the curriculum as it stands should think how it could be when an Abbott government takes over. We may hear again the same dark warnings about ideologues taking over the education system that we heard during the Howard years.

In theory, teaching all students the virtues of liberal democracy is a good idea. But if educationalists can’t do so without imposing their own political values, we may be no better off than when we started.

Abbott Should Focus On His Second Day As PM

On his first day of government, Tony Abbott will phone the president of Nauru to reintroduce the Pacific solution and will start repealing the carbon tax.

The obvious question is what he would do on his second day.

Not what he plans to do. (If he runs the campaign anything like he did in 2010, the new prime minister will need a long sleep.) But what he would do. How would Abbott react to the unexpected?

The Labor Party and its supporters have been demanding the Coalition release a full suite of election policies immediately. Their motives are transparent. They are looking for something – anything – to tie a WorkChoices-style campaign to. You can just see Hawker Britton itching feverishly to roll one out. No surprise there. Labor’s friends are nostalgic for a time when their party wasn’t despised.

But the art of governing is not simply implementing previously determined policies and then waiting until the next election. George W Bush rightly described himself as The Decider. When we vote, we are not voting for a dot-point list of new laws and taxes, but for a team we trust to make future decisions that we will have no chance to vote upon individually.

Labor should understand this. The public’s current disillusion is not solely because the government broke a promise, but because it turned out to be a very different beast to what was first offered.

Recall that Kevin Rudd’s team promised in 2007 to be even more fiscally conservative than John Howard’s team. Rudd’s attack on Howard-era economic management was “this reckless spending must stop”. Yet when the Global Financial Crisis struck, Rudd flipped, declared the end of neo-liberalism, and instituted one of the biggest stimulus packages in the developed world.

Julia Gillard suggested in 2010 she would slow Rudd’s frenetic activity. Among other things, she would shunt the carbon tax out of sight, out of mind to a citizens’ assembly. But her government has spiralled further out of control.

Voters can forgive a change in priorities. They cannot forgive a change in character.

This is what Tony Abbott needs to be thinking about.

We’ve got a very good idea of what policies Abbott wants to implement. He has spent the last two years in opposition doubling down on his 2010 election promises. The Coalition will stop the boats, axe the tax – you know the rest. But as for Abbott’s philosophy, his image of Australia’s future … that’s less clear.

If Abbott wants his government to be stable and successful – to avoid the trap which Rudd and Gillard fell into – he needs to spend the next year not talking about what he plans to do on his first day, but articulating what he thinks a good government looks like. The opposition leader needs to give voters a vision of an Abbott government five years down the track, not one day in. We need some hint of how the prospective prime minister will react to unforeseen events.

After John Howard’s 2007 defeat, there was a belief in liberal and conservative circles that centre-right politics needed intellectual renewal.

A few dreary terms in opposition offered just that opportunity. But events intervened. Labor became disorganised and vulnerable. Discussion about the future of liberalism was postponed indefinitely.

It’s easy to proclaim the times suit a second coming of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. But the world those leaders faced is very different from ours. Reagan and Thatcher had to dismantle the nationalised behemoths that had built up over the past half century, to close down the government industry cartels, and reintroduce competition into the biggest sectors of the economy.

Our modern world is the fruit of that labour. Yet the great nationalised industries were not replaced with free markets but with a dense web of regulation and supervision. Governments no longer run railways but instead prepare seven-step risk-assessment processes for street parties in accordance with joint Australian/New Zealand risk-management standards. How a centre-right party navigates this new reality is something that requires serious thinking.

Abbott’s book Battlelines seemed to suggest that he had done some of that thinking. It wasn’t a manifesto of small government libertarianism – quite the opposite – but it was, nonetheless, a sketch of what a modern, updated, yet distinctly conservative party might look like.

But Battlelines was written well before he became opposition leader. In his current role, there has been little of the characteristic thought of his book.

Since the last election, Abbott has offered up a series of “Headland” speeches. They have been disappointing. He has just repeated his well-worn, itemised critique of Labor. It’s worth reading John Howard’s original 1995 Headland speech again – it’s about philosophy, not policy. Howard talked about what he stood for, not what he was going to do.

Abbott’s Headland speeches reveal little of what sort of prime minister he will be on his second day. But there is still time for him to reveal that necessary vision of what a “good government” looks like.

Another year, another failed climate summit

The 49-page agreement produced at the Rio+20 Earth Summit is unmitigated junk. I’m not going out on a limb here. It’s one of those rare universally agreed upon truths.

Greenpeace called the summit a “failure of epic proportions”. The organisers of the original 1992 Rio Summit said the document was a weak collection of “pious generalities”. Friends of the Earth described it as “hollow”. George Monbiot wrote it was “meaningless platitudes”. Richard Branson used the phrase “mealy-mouthed”.

They are all correct. The document, “The Future We Want”, is stuffed full of trite acknowledgments, reaffirmations, recognitions, and renewals. It’s like a greatest-hits album. There’s no new material.

“The need to further mainstream sustainable development” gets acknowledged, of course. The “natural and cultural diversity of the world” has its due recognition. The “importance of freedom, peace and security [and] respect for all human rights” gets reaffirmed. Also reaffirmed is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which dates back to 1948. Indeed, the word reaffirm is used 59 times throughout.

Virtually every goal of every lobby gets its due. The unions even managed to get “decent jobs” thrown into the priority list. Hell, why not? Coordinated global action on decent jobs is no more or less likely than coordinated global action on emissions reduction.

One paragraph even proudly says the signatories recognise that “Mother Earth is a common expression in a number of countries and regions”. And they say satire is dead.

Rio+20 was supposed to be the revitalisation of the global climate movement. The first Rio summit set in train everything from the Kyoto Protocol to Copenhagen. After the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen conference, and the water-treading at Cancun and Durban in 2010 and 2011, Rio was to be the spark that got climate action going again.

But now Kyoto expires at the end of this year, and the cycle of yearly climate meetings are a wash. It’s been obvious for years there would be no coherent or significant international action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Yes, there was an outbreak of optimism before the Copenhagen summit. Recall the “Hopenhagen” campaign, the sort of silliness only an alliance of the United Nations and high-price advertising agencies could produce.

For all that enthusiasm, there was never a clear explanation about why developing nations would suddenly jettison their long-term economic development goals. At the time, we were told the Copenhagen negotiations were thwarted at the last minute by India and China. This influential report in Der Speigel of the final moments of Copenhagen reads very different in retrospect – it’s plain now the negotiations weren’t scuttled by personal offence, but were doomed from the start.

That of course has been what free marketeers have been saying about global action all along. And now a sense of hopelessness is starting to seep through the green movement.

The Australian Conservation Foundation’s Don Henry told Radio National on Thursday last week that he was “very disappointed” with the Rio declaration. In his view, Rio revealed an “unusual confluence of caution”, as rich countries tended to their wounded economies, and poor countries focused on reducing poverty.

Striking the same baffled note, Martin Khor, one of the members of the UN Committee on Development Policy, said last week, “We’ve sunk so low in our expectations that reaffirming what we did 20 years ago is now considered a success.”

But the reluctance to curtail economic growth for uncertain environmental ends has always been predictable.

Certainly, these climate conferences have coincided with one of the greatest economic down turns in the past century. It is possible to blame their failure on the great recession.

But regardless of the global economy, it is in no single nation’s interest to substantially reduce emissions unless everybody else is also doing so in unison. Ross Garnaut described this as a true prisoner’s dilemma: international cooperation, he wrote, “is essential for a solution to a global problem”.

So another interpretation is that climate negotiations have plateaued because such cooperation has a natural, hitherto undiscovered, limit. It can only go so far. The failure of coordinated emissions reduction is a natural experiment political scientists will study for decades.

I argued in The Drum last month adaptation is now the main game. For green groups, this ought to be the take-home message from Rio. And if they focus on adaptation, they might find surprising allies.

But to get there, they would have to drop their utopian fantasy of the planet coming together to achieve a shared goal. And that realisation may be much more disappointing than their discovery the Rio agreement is nonsense.

Just Be Grateful Airlines Can Feed You At All

Nobody, it seems, is happy with the food served on planes. But it may surprise you to learn that it’s our own fault. The customer is to blame. Biologically, humans just aren’t designed to fully appreciate flavours while travelling 800 kilometres an hour, 36,000 feet in the air, enclosed in a pressurised cabin, partly dehydrated and breathing in less oxygen. (Flying, never forget, is bloody awful.)

But just as importantly, we don’t appreciate just how amazing it is we get food on planes at all.

Flight catering is one of the most complex businesses in the world – it is 90 per cent logistics and just 10 per cent catering.

In an episode of MasterChef last week, the contestants were overwhelmed by the task of feeding 450 guests at an Indian wedding. Poor them. A single Boeing 747 can carry more than 500 people and all the food is heated and served from a tiny galley by flight attendants who double as passenger safety co-ordinators.

An airline catering firm has to supply dozens of those flights. The typical industrial airline kitchen produces more than 40,000 meals a day. The world’s biggest, Emirates Flight Catering Centre in Dubai, does 115,000 a day. Inflight food is a huge task, and one which we pay no attention to – unless we’re complaining about it.

This is capitalism’s big public relations problem. If it is working properly (if products are exactly where we want them, when we want them, at a price we are happy to pay), we don’t notice how much human effort and ingenuity goes into even the smallest things.

Inflight service wasn’t always this complex. The first meals were sandwiches, made on the ground and served in the air with tea and coffee. In the 1920s Imperial Airways (an ancestor of British Airways) had 14-year-old cabin boys in monkey jackets serve passengers. The boys had to weigh less than 40 kilograms. The planes were small and underpowered. Forty kilograms was all the extra load they could carry.

The first proper flight attendants were hired in 1930 by a predecessor of United Airlines. They were all qualified nurses. The flights were bumpy and there was no pressurised cabin. It’s been estimated one in four passengers were physically sick on each journey. The nurses took the food out, then cared for the diners when it was brought back up again.

But it was not until the wave of airline deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s that serious attention was paid to the great problem of inflight food: we can’t really taste it. The low humidity and high altitude make taste buds 30 per cent less effective. So all meals served in the air are what we’d describe on the ground as heavy and rich – cream, pasta, stews and lots of sauce. The wines are full bodied. There’s no prize for subtlety inflight.

Cooking in such volume, airlines can certainly save large amounts of money by skimping on ingredients. And in an effort to wrestle prices down further, many airlines now charge for food. Still, it’s not heartless neoliberal bean-counting that makes the food so unappealing. It’s our frail human palate.

The dishes are better in first class and business, but even in economy plane food isn’t anywhere as bad as we imagine.

Most great innovations in the modern world are completely out of sight. They concern not the products we buy or the services we use, but how we get them.

When politicians try to describe progress they talk of tangible things such as iPhones and synchrotrons – things that can be manufactured and photographed. But they ought to talk of supply chains, digital inventories and logistics.

Complex supply chains are behind the success of Amazon.com and Walmart. One of the greatest inventions of the 20th century was the humble shipping container, which allowed the rise of just-in-time production. Now even modern manufacturing should be seen less as a “good” and more as a “service” – products are the end result of taut lines of supply.

What we eat in the air is a perfect example of our modern logistical genius. Dishes such as “Italian-style braised beef with pumpkin” are refined to within an inch of their life. They are made not so much according to recipes as blueprints.

The marvel of inflight dining is not its taste, but how it got there. Airline food is a sliver of modern capitalism we consume quickly and, just as quickly, forget about.

Should Governments Protect Independent Journalism?

We already subsidise journalism heavily. The ABC’s budget for 2011-12 was $995 million. SBS got $223 million in the same period. And Parliament has specifically nominated the vast bulk of this money to “inform, educate and entertain audiences”.

So it’s peculiar that when media theorists devise clever schemes to subsidise journalism in order to protect democracy – such as publicly funded newspapers, or tax-deductibility for the print media – they rarely mention the money we give SBS and the ABC for that purpose.

Perhaps some people believe we should increase those broadcasters’ budgets. That’s a legitimate debate. Let’s all draw lines and argue it out. But pretending we do not already spend an enormous amount of the public’s money to inform the public is simply dishonest.

Our media debate is very provincial. Fairfax is at a crossroads. News Ltd is too, although that company is reluctant to admit it. Here, the US is about two to three years ahead of us. Their experience suggests the print media will shrink dramatically in the next few years. But it also tells us good journalism is good journalism, whether produced on paper or online.

I hope our two print giants develop new business models that suit the times. Certainly many others will. The online media in the US is vibrant and plentiful. Australian readers and writers have good reason to be optimistic, at least about the medium-term future.

If they want to be taken seriously, advocates of subsidies have to answer some basic questions. How many media outlets does healthy democracy require? We might assume more is better than fewer. But as the past year has demonstrated, many people believe some newspapers and radio stations should be run out of town. Several media critics suggest tabloids and talkback radio are hurting democracy . So just calling for “more journalism” is not much of a guide for policy-making.

Maybe the government should subsidise only “worthy” journalism, if there was a way to define such a thing. The business of the press has always been intimately connected with delivering something people want to read or watch. Right now, the case for even more journalism subsidies is little more than a thought bubble.

The Farce That Is The Leveson Inquiry

On October 7, 2009, News International chief Rebekah Brooks sent opposition leader David Cameron a text message:

I am so rooting for you tomorrow not just as a proud friend but because professionally we’re definitely in this together!

The “tomorrow” in question was the final day of that year’s Conservative Party conference. Cameron would not have been surprised by Brooks’s words. James Murdoch had told him the Sun newspaper would abandon Labour because the Conservatives would be better economic managers. During the Labour conference a week earlier the paper declared “Labour’s lost it”. So while Brooks put it in an unsophisticated way, she was right: professionally they were now “in this together”.

The uncovering of this bare little text message was the fruit of Cameron’s five hours of testimony to the Leveson inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal last week.

The message has been reported in headlines around the world, from the Huffington Post to the Calcutta Telegraph. It is, according to the Daily Mail, “explosive”, “cringe worthy”, “astonishing” and “incredibly embarrassing”.

But embarrassing for who, exactly? Cameron was the one giving testimony, not Brooks. It’s hard to see why an opposition leader securing the support of a media proprietor for an upcoming election should be cringe worthy. That is his job – to gather support where he can.

The Leveson inquiry started in November with Hugh Grant and the parents of the murdered school girl Milly Dowler. Back then, its themes were criminality and police corruption. It was surrounded by arrests and resignations and Scotland Yard. All serious stuff.

But six months later, what was a serious inquiry has devolved into a strange sort of puritanism. Participants are being judged against ethical rules unheard of before Leveson convened. For a newspaper to back a political party is apparently a breach of these novel rules. And friendship between politician and proprietor is outrageous.

The phone-hacking affair no longer has anything to do with phone-hacking. It’s trying to make scandals out of the basic practices of representative democracy.

Politicians cultivate relationships with journalists. They have to, if they want to achieve their political and policy goals. That might seem distasteful. We all share a romantic ideal about the fourth estate being implacably at odds with the first estate. But let’s not be too delicate. Democracy is about coalition-building. Journalists and editors are stakeholders. A politician that does not make friends in the media will not be a very successful politician.

But we also shouldn’t pretend Cameron’s fortunes were solely in the capricious hands of media moguls. Yes, only Brooks’s side of the SMS conversation has been released. But its clear impression is of a proprietor sucking up to an opposition leader – not, as those who imagine Rupert Murdoch has an iron-grip on politics expect, an opposition leader coming cap in hand to a proprietor.

So an ambitious Cameron convinced the Sun to editorialise in favour of his party in 2009. It’s questionable how big a coup this really was. Does anyone genuinely think Gordon Brown could have held on if he’d only had the Sun’s support? Labour had been in power for 12 years. Brown was astonishingly unpopular. And the British economy had collapsed. Tabloids have always chased popular sentiment more than they’ve led it.

In Australia, the Finkelstein Inquiry into media regulation flirted with deeper questions about the functioning of democracy. But, ultimately, Ray Finkelstein had a limited brief. His final report charged towards a single, digestible proposal for a new regulatory body. He steered clear of uncomfortable philosophical questions.

By contrast, the Leveson Inquiry lacks Finkelstein’s modesty. Lord Justice Leveson’s team has now grilled four Prime Ministers and nearly 20 cabinet ministers. They’ve interrogated them about press strategy and public relations, the use of anonymity and favouritism, leaks and friendships.

It’s Cameron’s fault. The phone-hacking was the scandal. But Cameron was embarrassed by having hired Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor. So he gave Leveson virtually unlimited terms of reference. One of his tasks is to make recommendations concerning “the future conduct of relations between politicians and the press”, which would seem to encompass every aspect of political and government communication.

Future historians will no doubt appreciate Leveson’s forensic accounting of who had lunch with who. But it seems more designed to appeal to the coterie of media critics sure that democracy is on the slide.

There’s an absurdity that the Finkelstein and Leveson inquiries share. They both held court on the nature of democratic politics, and they were both conducted by a senior judge whose touted virtue is that they are independent and unaccountable – that is, completely undemocratic.

That Brooks’s artless text message is now seen as a scandal illustrates how farcical the Leveson circus has become.

Happy Birthday To Free Market Liberalism

This year what we think of as modern free market liberalism turns 50.

We can thank the 1962 book by the American economists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, for laying the intellectual foundation of the philosophy of limited government.

Call it economic rationalism or “neoliberalism” if you like.

This is not to suggest that all free marketeers have read deeply in the academic field – public choice – that this book spawned. Or that the philosophy of freedom isn’t a lot older. Supporters and opponents are more likely to focus on the more famous names of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. No surprise there. Calculus of Consent is dense and mathematical.

Smith and Hayek studied the market. They were looking at the way human society was spontaneously and efficiently ordered by price system. Buchanan and Tullock shifted the focus; grounding free market thought not in how markets work, but how politics doesn’t.

Half a century later, that is still where the debate is.

Buchanan and Tullock start with a simple, seemingly obvious assumption: people are people. Whether they work in the private sector or in public service, all people respond to incentives. Everybody pursues their own goals and interests. Everybody has their own preferences about what they would like to do. Economists sometimes describe people as “profit-maximising” but this isn’t quite right. People can be salary-maximising, or enjoyment-maximising, or compassion-maximising, or leisure-maximising. Anyway, we’re all trying to maximise something.

The first half of the 20th century saw economists explore the implications of self-interest as it existed in the marketplace. They derived theories of monopoly, public goods, information problems, externalities, and predatory pricing. And they argued that when markets break, government must clean up.

Buchanan and Tullock just extended those theories to government itself. They argued that the public policy question isn’t whether markets have flaws. It is what happens when you try to resolve those flaws through collective action. The Calculus of Consent applied economic analysis to non-market decision making. The book explores the incentives faced by individuals acting in a political environment. After all, people don’t stop being people when they enter a voting booth or sit down at their computer in the Department of Agriculture. Everybody is still motivated by their own personal goals.

This was a necessary corrective to political economy, and a radical one. It is easy to imagine solutions to social and economic problems – the optimal solution is simple to design on paper. But designing and implementing those solutions in the real world is not a trivial matter. Getting self-interested individuals to work towards collective goals is hard. Special interests seek advantage. People use the public apparatus for private gain. Politicians drop good policy and embrace good politics. In a democracy the majority tend to support what is good for the majority, not what is theoretically ideal. What was optimal easily becomes corrupted.

The public choice school is relentlessly realist. It offers a vision of politics without the romance. Public choice counsels caution – if not outright scepticism – about government activity. It underpins the popular claims like Ronald Reagan’s “government is the problem”.

In his 1963 review of the Calculus of Consent, the British economist James Meade criticised his colleagues for being “much too ready to call in the State as a deus ex machina to remove the imperfections of the laissez-faire market”. It was an uncomfortable critique. Meade was a former Labour Party advisor and a firm advocate of government intervention.

The lesson Buchanan and Tullock drew from their research was that rules matter. Buchanan spent his career looking at the structures which could constrain government action and therefore keep the actions of the public service as close to the desires of the public as possible. He won an economics Nobel Prize in 1986 for this work.

So far, so good. A full recognition of the problems of collective action in government should lead to a general reluctance to trust government to act on our behalf. Not to no government, but to modest government, constitutionally restrained. The British political philosopher Mark Pennington says the goal is a “robust” political order. That is, one which is designed to face political as well as market failures – and to limit the damage caused by either.

Certainly, public choice hasn’t penetrated mainstream policy thinking. Conservative politicians (at least those of the free market variety) should be sympathetic but are as embedded in the system as anybody else. The public may be sceptical about bureaucrats and politics but they still, instinctively, want government to fix things. There always ought to be a law. And clever people pushing policy ideas tend to assume their ideas will be implemented wholesale and uncorrupted.

But we shouldn’t underestimate how much Buchanan and Tullock’s book influenced the political contest.

Even the most populist supporter of small government uses language and insights gained from public choice – the understanding, implicit or explicit, that the question isn’t whether society has problems, but whether we can really rely on the strange institution of government to solve them.

Politics Of Contradiction Mean Democracy For Me, But Not For Thee

Only 60 per cent of Australians think democracy is preferable to any other form of government, according to a Lowy Institute poll published last week. It gets worse. Just 39 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds favour democracy.

This anti-democratic scepticism seems to have taken everybody by surprise. But it shouldn’t, because we live in a profoundly undemocratic age.

The key is a follow-up question which asked whether the right to vote is important to the poll respondents – 98 per cent believe we personally deserve the vote. There’s no contradiction here. Many Australians think they should have a say on how the country is run but other Australians shouldn’t. We could dismiss this as the famed arrogance of Generation Y, but it’s more troubling than that.

Democracy requires a belief that all Australians have an inherent right to decide the future of the country. Every person can help choose the government, regardless of their background, wealth, intellect, or knowledge about public policy and current events.

Democracy won’t inevitably result in the best decisions. That’s not why it’s valuable – it’s valuable because it says we all have an equal right to participate in collective decisions.
The results of the Lowy poll show a rejection of that value. This is the fruit of a long process. We’ve been undermining political egalitarianism for decades. We no longer have any faith in the capabilities of other Australians.

Critics of the modern world claim Australians act contrary to their own best interests. We’ve apparently been brainwashed into buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have. We work too long and too hard for wealth that doesn’t make us happy, but we’re too miserable to stop.

Naturally, these criticisms are never self-applied. They’re faults found exclusively in other people.

If we’re all hopeless in our private affairs, no wonder we are second-guessing voting about public affairs.

There’s a psychological bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after its authors, which says that incompetent people don’t know they’re incompetent. In February, David Dunning told the science website Life’s Little Mysteries that this has consequences for democracy: “most people don’t have the sophistication to recognise how good an idea is”. His comments were reported around the world as meaning science has proven democracy “doesn’t work”.

So this is a great time to be an expert. Elected politicians cannot possibly steer the ship of state by themselves. As Laura Tingle shows in her new Quarterly Essay, Great Expectations, Australians want government to solve almost every problem. Governments likewise want to be in control. And fulfilling our limitless demands requires technocrats, not democrats.

Policymakers often talk about regulations being administered “at arm’s length” from government. This is to ensure they are not subject to political interference. If we’re going to regulate, that’s probably a good thing. But we should be clear about exactly what “arm’s length” means: outside the control of the democratically elected representatives of the people.

Nothing illustrated our technocratic age better than Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit, where the ”best and brightest” were assembled in Canberra to set policy agenda. The new PM said he was “throwing open the windows of our democracy”. But Rudd had just won a landslide election and had all the democratic approval he could need. The symbolic purpose of 2020 was not democratic at all. It was to hand the reins over to experts.

The cohort most sceptical of democracy is also the cohort that most votes Green. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. The sympathetic author of the textbook Green Political Thought, Andrew Dobson, writes of the “palpable tension between radical green objectives and the democratic process”. The public opposes much environmental action. Anybody with radical politics will be just a little bit disappointed by democracy’s results.

The response to the Lowy poll was telling. Some said it showed how badly we teach civics. Others flocked to social media to complain darkly about how intelligent the poll respondents were (“these people vote!”).

But ironically, the complaints show why Australians have come to be sceptical about democracy in the first place. Do we really want people who are too uninformed or too stupid to trust democracy to vote? Talk about reaping what you sow.

Remittances Dominate Aid Yet Remain Unspoken

The underappreciated thread that ties the global economy together is remittances – the money sent by migrants back to their home countries.

Remittances are the silent player in the immigration debate. They’re almost never referred to in our domestic politics or press.

The news monitoring site Factiva records just two mentions of remittances in Australian newspapers over the past two years.

Compare that to the reams of copy filed about foreign aid – 706 newspaper articles in the same period. Then add all the vox pops, chat shows, and talkback calls. Recall the hand-wringing which greeted Wayne Swan’s announcement that foreign aid growth would be modest in this budget. Yes, both left and right positively obsess about the cash the government gives to the third world.
But, even though we’re also constantly yabbering about immigrants, the vast sums of money foreign workers privately send home themselves goes entirely unnoticed.

So a new World Bank report, Migration and Remittances during the Global Financial Crisis and Beyond, released last week is all but guaranteed to be ignored. This is a shame.

The report underlines that the amount of money migrants send home far, far exceeds the amount of money the West spends on foreign aid. Remittances are a big deal.

And they’re an increasingly big deal. Total remittances used to be double the total amount of aid, which was impressive enough. But now, after the financial crisis, they are more than triple.
This is not because foreign aid has declined – official development assistance has continued to grow during the economic downturn. It’s because remittances have shot up further. While the developed world spends roughly $US100 billion on aid every year, migrants now send more than $300 billion home. And as remittances are extremely hard to measure (not all of it is sent through formal channels) it is likely to be much more.

This is a good thing. The financial crisis demonstrated that remittance income is stable income. Foreign direct investment in the developing world has wildly fluctuated since 2008 and has not yet returned to pre-crisis levels. By contrast, remittance flows have remained relatively steady. They dipped slightly in 2009 but quickly popped up again; in two years, the World Bank believes global remittances will be close to $600 billion a year.

We’re all familiar with the long-running “trade versus aid” debate. Which is the most effective development policy? There’s an increasing consensus that the actual winner is remittances.
So the significance of the global remittance economy ought to dominate the immigration debate.

But it doesn’t. Understandably, Australians look at immigration through Australian eyes. The emphasis is on us: how will migration programs affect domestic employment? How will migrants culturally integrate?

Barely do the fortunes of the migrants themselves figure. Working in the rich world, whether temporarily or permanently, is extraordinarily beneficial for people born in poor countries. The opportunities are much greater, and the prevailing salary for equivalent work much higher.

This simple and obvious fact is virtually absent from discussions about immigration. Perhaps it is an unstated assumption shared by all participants. But as the development economist Michael Clemens has pointed out, the benefits which are conferred on the migrants and their countries of origin are almost uniformly neglected by all sides of the debate.

No more so than with remittances. The flow of money from migrants helps fund investment and grow capital in the world’s poorest countries. It keeps families above the poverty line. It goes directly to households.

And as a form of third world development, remittances put no pressure on taxpayers in the first world. They are not planned by clever development economists or policymakers. They have not been coordinated by an international bureaucracy. Indeed, remittances are nothing but the result of the hard work of migrants.

That might sound hard-hearted but it helps keep the flow of money stable and targeted – certainly more stable and targeted than foreign aid, which is highly influenced by political decisions, and subject to the budget planning of treasurers for whom third world development is not an urgent priority.

But there’s also a political reason that remittances don’t get talked about. It’s in nobody’s interest to do so.

They don’t fit the left’s vision of economic development. Foreign aid is grand and interventionist and state-driven. Remittances are earned by individuals and spent in ways the migrants and their families choose. One small, pathetic, but indicative criticism of remittances from the left says they encourage “conspicuous consumption” in the developing world. It’s a common complaint and a bizarre one. Is the third world’s problem really not poverty but consumerism?

And it’s clear that many calls for foreign aid are driven by a belief in distributive justice – that foreign aid should be a penance for first world wealth. Certainly this is the message broadcast by the fashionable anti-poverty causes marketed to young people.

Nor do remittances appeal to conservative populists. Remittances offer one of the most compelling utilitarian arguments for importing foreign workers from the developing world – not only is immigration good for our economy and the migrants themselves, it’s also good for the countries the migrants come from. This is not a story that those sceptical of immigration want to tell.

But it is one we’ll have to start recognising if we want to understand our place in the global age of migration.