Articles – Page 39

The Decriminalisation (Or Even Legalisation) Of Drugs

It doesn’t take more than a moment of thought to recognise that the rulings on which drugs are legal or illegal are governed by no particular logic.

No theory from medicine or philosophy or psychology demands alcohol, tobacco and caffeine must be legal while marijuana, cocaine, and heroin must be prohibited.

We cannot rely on distinctions about relative harm. Many experts have pointed out that marijuana is on balance less dangerous than alcohol. But this legal discord isn’t unusual. One British police chief controversially stated a few years ago that ecstasy is safer than aspirin.

Nor is the distinction between recreational or medicinal use any help. There are legal and illegal drugs that fall on both sides of that artificial line.

The generally accepted definition of the word “drug” offers no guide to legality either: “any substance other than food which by its chemical nature affects the structure or function of the living organism”.

Whether a drug is illegal is nothing more than an accident of history. Drug laws were not written dispassionately by a panel of the best medical and ethical minds in the world. The laws bear no relation to the damage those drugs could cause or their danger to society – they were not written to minimise harm or protect health.

Quite the opposite: the current schedule of drugs in the Western world has been driven by politics, expediency, prejudice, and sometimes outright racism.

Take, for instance, the prohibition that kicked it all off – the prohibition on opium.

In 19th century Britain, opium was so common as to be part of everyday life. It was an essential ingredient in tonics and pick-me-ups. One writer claimed in the 1870s that opium use “may indeed be said to have reached the height of Fashion”.

Few British conceived of a drug “problem”. Certainly, there were dramatic, gothic tales of addiction and vice. Thomas de Quincey’s novel Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is the most well-known. And there were some distressing, but not representative stories of overdose. But, culturally, moderate drug use was normal.

And the medical establishment largely accepted this. When reporting on the Royal Commission on Opium in 1893, the iconic journal Lancet described it as a “crushing blow to the anti-opium faddists”.

There was however, an “opium problem” in Australia and the United States. The difference was race. In both countries there was a significant Chinese minority who had brought their country’s opium smoking habit with them. The first war on drugs was a proxy for racial politics, not public health.

“Who has not seen the slave of opium?,” the Victorian minister of health asked parliament at the end of the 19th century: “a creature tottering down the street, with sunken yellow eyes, closely contracted pupils, and his skin hanging over his bones like dirty yellow paper.”

The issue here, clearly, was not opium but the Chinese.

Unsurprisingly this attitude towards opium was hard to separate from the belief Chinese migrants were undercutting Australians in the employment market. The visceral hatred of opium-smoking was the manifestation of resentment about labour competition.

It was the same in the United States. As the British writer Christopher Snowdon points out in his excellent new book The Art of Suppression, “if the government could not get rid of opium-smoking, it would get rid of opium-smokers”.

The 1862 Californian law Protect Free White Labor Against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor and Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into California Act is self-explanatory.

One of the most prominent American anti-opium campaigners, Dr Harry Hubbell Kane, openly argued that those concerned about job competition should focus their animosity on Chinese drug use.

It is easy to tell a parallel history of marijuana prohibition, which was overwhelmingly used by Hispanics and African-Americans.

And in his book, Snowdon details the tabloid hysteria of recent times which has led to laws against “designer” drugs – synthetic concoctions which are better described as second-rate substitutes for safer, purer, and already prohibited drugs.

Do the political origins of drug laws matter? Absolutely.

The first international treaty on drug control was signed in January 1912. The war on drugs is 100 years old this year.

This century-long war has definitively and undeniably failed. There is widespread belief in expert circles that the world needs to move towards decriminalisation (or even legalisation) if we want to minimise the harm of drug abuse.

But the biggest cultural barrier to such reform is the current status illegal drugs have. In the sort of circular reasoning that only popular discourse can manage, the prohibition of drugs is mostly justified by their pre-existing legal status. Why are certain drugs prohibited? Because they are illicit drugs.

But that status has been set by politics and moral panics, not dispassionate evidence-based risk assessments. Drug prohibition carries the legacy of the ugly politics of the past. Once we realise that, we may start to rethink the justice of a war that is, in truth, not against drugs, but against drug users.

O’Farrell’s Campaign Finance Reforms Are Abominable

As a general rule, any government that changes the rules of elections and political campaigns should be looked upon sceptically.

It’s too easy to dress up a base attack on your opponents in democratic frills.

But even with those cynical expectations, the changes to campaign finance laws in New South Wales are abominable.

The Election Funding, Expenditure and Disclosures Amendment Bill 2011, which passed the NSW parliament last week, is transparently designed to defang the union movement and defund the Labor Party. The bill bans donations to political parties from any organisation, allowing only those from individuals, and maintains the cap on donations from any individual at $5,000 a year.

In one fell swoop, there goes the Labor Party’s reliance on union affiliations.

The Government might argue that if Labor is hurt by this reform, so is the Coalition. Corporations are no longer able to donate either. In Premier Barry O’Farrell’s words, the reform will create an “equal and level playing field for all”.

But the key dynamic threatened is not between Labor and the unions, or between the Coalition and the corporate sector, but that between opposition and government.

Restrictions on donations hurt the party out of power. It is expensive to compete with the soapbox of incumbency. Stemming the flow of money favours the government.

Compounding this, donors like to back winners. And Labor, reeling after a historic loss, is bound to be a loser for the foreseeable future.

Yet that sort of crude political calculation is par for the course when it comes to donations reform. The truly obnoxious part of the NSW Government’s bill is how it restricts third party organisations from conducting political campaigns.

Any third party involved in “promoting or opposing, directly or indirectly, a party or the election of a candidate or candidates, or for the purpose of influencing, directly or indirectly, the voting at an election” falls under the restrictions and can now only be funded by individuals.

In a way you can understand why the bill does this. Donations reform in the United States has demonstrated when you cut off funding to political parties, money will flow into other campaigning bodies to compensate.

But the NSW Government’s solution to this problem is to restrict the ability for organisations to participate in public debate (of course, this would really hurt the unions).

The Premier has repeatedly said these laws will not affect “genuine issues based campaigns” and “genuinely independent” third parties. That’s not very comforting. People are free to advocate policy as long as they do not hint at support for a political party to implement that policy?

And the distinction between genuine and political is not very clear. Indeed, as Andrew Norton of the Grattan Institute pointed out in his submission to a parliamentary inquiry into the bill, NSW election law now draws some awfully fine and complicated distinctions between what political expression is free, and what is regulated.

The reforms intend to restrict participation in political activism solely to individuals, rather than corporations, unions, and peak bodies. Is our right to freedom of speech and participation rescinded when we form groups? Surely not. But that is the basic assumption behind the NSW reforms.

Yet there is a deeper philosophical disagreement here, and it concerns how we understand “democratic” political debate. Broadly, there are two models.

The first imagines democratic debate as a free-for-all. People and organisations should be allowed to say and advocate whatever they want, support whoever they want through words or donations, and argue their case as publically as they can. The rough and tumble of such a debate is natural – the sign of a healthy liberal democracy sustained by a broad freedom of speech.

The second model argues that governments should “manage” the debate. The parliamentary inquiry said the reforms sought to “promote fairness and equality”. As Kristina Keneally said back in 2010, “those with the most money have the loudest voice and can simply drown out the voices of all others”. In the name of democracy, loud voices need to be quietened.

But this second model is puzzling. Free debate informs the decisions made by voters to elect representatives and change governments. Free debate is at the heart of democracy. So what right does a government have to manipulate that debate? How can it legitimately suppress and restrain participants that it has determined are excessively loud, or decide what constitutes a “genuine” – rather than political – campaign?

A government’s legitimacy requires voters to make a free choice about their vote. That choice is not free if the government is managing how those decisions are made – preventing some third parties from endorsing and supporting candidates. Andrew Norton has noted that the losers from these reforms are community non-profits. Corporations don’t rely on donations to run political campaigns.

It’s an appealing idea to “get money out of politics”. But legislative attempts to do so have invariably punished oppositions, entrenched incumbents, and limited political participation. The O’Farrell Government’s reforms are just an egregiously bad example.

Behavioural Economics: An Excuse To Tax And Regulate

Few areas of study are as fashionable as behavioural economics – the integration of psychological factors into economic analysis.

No wonder. Behavioural economics seems tailor-made for public policy. If people do not act rationally and do not pursue their own best interests, then perhaps markets aren’t that good. From there, the case for government intervention seems pretty obvious.

Two of Australia’s left-wing think tanks, the Centre for Policy Development and Per Capita, have released reports specifically on the implications of behavioural economics. And it is a rare paper from the Australia Institute which doesn’t discuss how market actors are riddled with biases, psychological flaws, and irrationalities. Therefore, they all conclude, governments need more power. There’s hardly a regulation or tax that hasn’t been justified by reference to the behavioural economics literature.

But the public policy implications of behavioural economics are more interesting than that.

The study of behavioural economics has largely focused on the irrationality of participants in the market. Yet there are two sides to policymaking. Regulators, bureaucrats, and politicians are just as affected by psychological ticks as consumers and businesses.

A newly published paper in the Journal of Regulatory Studies, “Behavioural economics: implications for regulatory behaviour” makes the obvious point: if the claims made by this field are right, then it should make us think just as sceptically about government action as consumer action.

After all, it would be no good to destroy the myth of Homo Economicus just to replace it with an equally pernicious myth of Homo Bureaucratus – a clearheaded and efficient policy designer.

There is no reason to believe that someone moving from the private sector to the public sector suddenly becomes more rational and unbiased. The dispassionate, rational economic actor might be a convenient fiction dreamt up by modellers and theoreticians, but then so is the dispassionate, rational, unbiased policymaker.

The paper’s authors, James C Cooper and William E Kovacic, look specifically at anti-trust law, where behavioural economics is commonly used to study business decisions to enter or exit markets, to merge with other firms, or split. Cooper and Kovacic argue that the bureaucrats who regulate those decisions are likely to have biases that undermine the effectiveness of government intervention.

Regulators are like the rest of us. They are over-confident, thinking they can understand complex behaviour. Hindsight bias leads them to believe events are more predictable than they are. And, unsurprisingly, they are driven by action bias – a tendency to favour interventionist solutions when faced with a problem.

In fact, regulatory biases could be worse than market ones. Behavioural economics tells us that irrationality is everywhere. But the marketplace provides firms and consumers with instant or near-instant feedback. In a competitive market, psychological bias can lead to failure or loss of market-share. With such feedback, market participants will change their actions. Make a mistake, lose money… do better next time.

By contrast, regulators receive little feedback at all. They operate in a political world, not an economic one. Regulatory or bureaucratic error is hard to pin down. It’s harder to allocate blame for errors. It’s even harder to quantify the costs of those errors.

Market participants learn from their mistakes. But regulators are completely isolated from the consequences of their decisions, so it’s much harder for them to learn.

Compounding that, confirmation bias – where the introduction of new, ambiguous information leads to the unjustified hardening of previous conclusions – may steer regulators and their political masters to believing a policy has been a triumph when it has not.

Indeed, even what constitutes success or failure in the public sector is debatable. Few policies have defined criteria whereby we can determine if they have succeeded or not.

In the Centre for Policy Development’s 2008 paper, You Can See a Lot by Just Looking: Understanding human judgement in financial decision-making, Ian McAuley rightly points out that humans are susceptible to the fallacy of sunk costs.

“We find it very difficult,” McAuley writes, “to make decisions solely on the basis of future costs and benefits, particularly if it means implicitly admitting that we have made poor decisions in the past”.

This is true for private actors, but is especially true for governments. Old bureaucracies never die – they just get renamed. Subsidies survive long past their use-by date. And taxes are stubborn things.

So far, the policy debate around behavioural economics has led with ideological conclusions – apparently offering those who believe governments should tax and regulate more a cutting-edge reason for doing so.

But if we want to fully understand the implications of behavioural economics, we’ll have to recognise that the field offers an even harsher critique of government than it does of markets. And the safe money says policy makers and bureaucrats will not enjoy the spotlight on them.

Internet Laws A Sledgehammer Approach To Privacy

Legislators with little knowledge of internet privacy will do more harm than good.

The protest against the American Stop Online Piracy Act recently, where Wikipedia and 7000 other websites went dark for 24 hours, made two things plain.

First, online activism can be effective. Before the protest, 31 members of Congress opposed the act. After the protest, that number swelled to 122. The bill died overnight.

More importantly, the protest emphasised that the internet is not the Wild West. Domestic laws and international treaties pervade everything we do online. And bad laws can cause profound damage.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is an example of legislative over-reach. SOPA would have given the US government broad powers to shut down access to foreign sites that were suspected of hosting material that breached copyright. This would have given governments the power to interfere with the internal workings of the internet. Such a power would have been an unconscionable threat to free speech.

Yet SOPA is not alone. The internet is surprisingly vulnerable to laws that, with good intentions or bad, have the potential to stifle online liberties. Take for instance, the European Union’s proposed ”right to be forgotten”. Changes to data protection laws now being considered by the European Parliament would give internet users the power to force websites to delete information about them.

There would be privacy benefits from this law. No question it would be lovely if we could make websites remove embarrassing photos or uncomfortable facts years after we uploaded them.

And yes, we need to keep pressure on social networks to protect our privacy. Too many companies are reckless with user data. Yet the EU’s plan goes way too far. A legislated ”right to be forgotten” would be, like SOPA, a threat to freedom of speech. These new rules would, according to the American legal scholar Jane Yakowitz, ”give EU residents an unprecedented inalienable right to control and delete facts that were once voluntarily communicated”.

In the age of social media we all happily put information about ourselves in the public domain. A right to be forgotten is actually an obligation for others to forget things they’ve been told.

Apart from being unworkable (erasing stuff from the internet is a lot more complicated than politicians seem to believe), this new obligation would envelop the internet in a legal quagmire.

The law would turn every internet user into a potential censor, with a veto over everything they’ve ever revealed about themselves. Every time media organisations referred to freely obtained information, they would have to be sure they could prove they did so for a ”legitimate” news purpose. This would create enormous difficulties for journalism. Censorship to protect privacy is just as dangerous as censorship to prevent piracy.

But unlike SOPA, there has been no outcry about these new rules. No blackout of popular websites, no mass petitions.

SOPA was driven by American politicians in the thrall of an unpopular copyright lobby. The European data protection rules are being driven by social democrats claiming to protect people’s privacy. And, in 2012, privacy is a value that many people claim to rate above all others.

By contrast, free speech seems daggy and unpopular. Even our self-styled civil liberties groups have downgraded their support for freedom of speech. Now other rights – privacy is one, the right not to be offended is another – are seen as more important. So these new laws could slip through with disastrous consequences.

Should Australians care what the European Parliament does? Absolutely. The big internet firms are global. If a legislature in one country or continent changes the rules of the game, those firms have to comply. The easiest way to comply is by making global policy changes, not regional ones.

And regulations introduced overseas have a habit of eventually being introduced in Australia. Already our privacy activists are talking up the EU scheme.

Whatever the EU decides about a right to be forgotten, it will have significant effects on the online services we use in Victoria.

Free speech isn’t the only problem with the EU’s proposed privacy laws. As Jane Yakowitz points out, people trade information with corporations all the time – for discounts or access to free services. No one compels us to share stuff on the internet. We share because we think we’ll get something out of it. The new right to be forgotten would make such trades virtually impossible. It could cripple the information economy overnight.

Governments have always struggled to legislate for the online world. Not only do politicians have little understanding of the technological issues, but the internet doesn’t take very well to regulation: according to one old tech saying, ”the net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it”. So legislators over-compensate.

The internet is complex, borderless and dynamic. Laws are inflexible and heavy-handed. Too many attempts to protect privacy or combat copyright infringement take a brickbat to freedom of expression and internet liberties.

Farmers Feeling The Squeeze Of Marketplace Realities

We are a pessimistic bunch. Apparently no-one will win out of the supermarket price wars.

The farmers will lose: Nick Xenophon claimed that “short-term gain will be followed by long-term pain for farmers – and, ultimately, consumers.” Bob Katter said the price of cheap food will be “the broken backs of our farmers.”

Consumers will lose: Supermarkets are “businesses, not benevolent institutions,” warned the self-styled consumer group Choice last week, “we may see longer-term impacts that work against consumers’ interests.” A writer in the Courier Mail claimed that “we should not be delighting in the promise of lower prices”, in a column titled “We’ll pay for this price war”.

Even the supermarkets will lose: market analysts were sternly telling the business pages that “‘persistent acute food deflation posed a risk to this financial year’s margins.”

One news story even initially reported “supermarket giants have been given the green light to continue with aggressive discounting, with worse to come”. Yes, that’s right: “worse to come”.

If you ever needed a demonstration that producers have a lock on the public debate, look no further.

Declining prices and aggressive competition is an absolute, unbridled, unvarnished good for consumers, yet we only seem to hear how much discounting could hurt.

Sure, supermarkets should be able to defend themselves.

But our apparent sympathy for producer interests over consumer interests has – and has had – some terribly unfortunate consequences.

One analyst described to RN’s PM program what he imagined was the consequences of price competition:

The very consumers that they’re selling their products at lower prices to are employees of the companies that are going broke because they’re not making enough money selling to Coles and Woolies.

In other words, a vicious cycle of cheap goods where we all end in poverty.

That is a complete fantasy. If buying more for less led to economic collapse, we’d have no economy to speak of anymore.

An alternative theory is that consumers are bringing enormous competitive pressure on supermarkets to reduce the price of grocery staples, which the supermarkets respond to by trimming administrative fat, reducing margins, and getting better deals out of suppliers.

You know, a competitive market working in exactly the way a competitive market should.

It’s exactly the sort of aggressive pricing dynamism that we want from the marketplace.

But producers don’t like that sort of dynamism and competition. Satisfying consumers is stressful – it’s a never-ending process of innovation, refinement and creative destruction. Markets are uncomfortable and uncertain. And competition is destabilising for established firms.

No wonder farmers don’t like the pressure being applied from the retail end.

But why should we give their complaints such credence?

Adam Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations,

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.

We work so we can eat. We labour so we can relax. We don’t consume in order to produce, we produce in order to consume.

Smith continued to say that this “maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it.” Apparently it is not.

Protectionism is based on the belief that producer interests are more important than consumer interests. Australia was the richest country in the world at Federation. Ninety years of protectionism later, we had dropped to 15th.

When Australia embarked on economic liberalisation, it was a reorientation of the economy towards consumption.

But we did not similarly reorientate our political culture. The howling of rent-seekers after such an unambiguously pro-consumer price cut has been deafening, and reported uncritically.

There’s an important reason why producer interests dominate the public and legislative debate. Only producers have enough incentive to lobby in their interests.

The benefits of producer-favouring regulations are concentrated. Producers who believe they can get a commercial advantage out of regulatory protection have an enormous incentive to lobby for new laws. Farmers feeling squeezed by the demands of the supermarkets email their local MP and call sympathetic journalists.

There is no equivalent dynamic on the consumer end. Who would spend days, or weeks, or months, of their life defending ever-so-slightly lower prices? The benefits of cheap goods are dispersed across all consumers.

When Adam Smith was writing in the 1770s, his targets were the mercantilist states of his day. In the 18th century, governments had created cartels and monopolies in order to dampen “troublesome competition” and deliver political favours.

But troublesome competition is what has made us in the 21st century wealthier than at any other time in history.

Yes, consumers always demand that producers make things better and cheaper. And not all firms can meet those demands. This is exactly how the system should work.

The True Origins Of Anti-Paternalism

Opposition to government paternalism wasn’t always a conservative or libertarian thing. Indeed, the use of the word “nanny” to describe state interference in individual choices originally came from the left.

In a 1960 article in the New Statesman, the magazine set up by members of the Fabian Society, nanny was deployed to attack the British Board of Film Censors. “Novels and the Press get along, not too calamitously, without this Nanny; why shouldn’t films?” asked a New Statesman columnist William Whitebait. Nanny “exercises a crippling drag on the growth of a serious and healthy British cinema.”

Eight years earlier, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson (and one time wife of Sinclair Lewis, the Nobel-winning socialist writer) was using nanny to describe British imperialism in the Middle East.

Western empires, Thompson wrote in her syndicated column, have “filled the role of headmaster, or Nanny-governess”. The West does not treat the inhabitants of its colonies as equals. She continued:

It is an amusing notion that comes to me that, with the retreat of empire, Britons are turning Britain itself into a Nanny-state, perhaps out of a long habit in persuading or coercing natives to do what is good for them.

Anti-censorship and anti-empire. These are not typical conservative positions. But both were drawn from the same anti-paternalism that drives the modern resistance to public health regulation – a belief that a powerful class should not impose their own values on the rest of society.

Colonial masters instructed their subjects in the best way to live their lives – lessons given force by military domination. And 20th century censors claimed to be protecting the less refined from the crude excesses of popular culture – judgements only moral superiors could make. Whitebait made much of the fact the British censors were aging aristocrats. Sir Sidney Harris, 83, was being replaced by Lord Morrison of Lambeth, 72. Who were they to tell Britons what they could or could not watch?

Of course, this is not how public health activists record the history of anti-paternalism. I gullibly took their claims at face value in May last year when I wrote in The Drum that “nanny state” is first found in the Spectator in 1965. This is more than a decade after Thompson used it.

According to this story – told by the Australian public health luminary Mike Daube in a 2008 paper in Tobacco Control – it was coined by the former Conservative minister of health Iain Macleod, who later died of a heart attack. (Macleod was a deeply ill man, suffering from an inherited weakness for gout, a war wound, and a chronic inflammatory disease. But Daube and his co-authors imply it was just smoking that did him in.)

Does nanny’s origin matter? Yes, insofar as it demonstrates that anti-paternalism is not – or at least was not – the exclusive preserve of the right.

How would the readers of those words in the New Statesman have responded to the claim by the British Labour leader Ed Miliband last week that the Tories had failed to stop the sale of discount chocolate oranges to the masses? Yes, Cameron complained about the same thing when he was in opposition. But, as our New Statesman readers might say, Cameron is a Tory. You’d expect a bit of Tory paternalism from him.

Or how would those who nodded along with Dorothy Thompson’s distaste of imperial paternalism feel about the recent Australian complaints that Aldi is selling cheap alcohol?

Rejecting eight out of Aldi’s 20 liquor license applications in New South Wales, the chairman of the state liquor regulator said last week that “I don’t know if there are areas that have too many bottle shops but certainly there are areas that have enough”. Are there? That seems a call best made by Aldi and its customers.

One could even go so far as to say that cheap is a good thing. Recall that it was Aldi which consistently won the Rudd government’s Grocery Choice competition. Aldi is at once hero for selling consumers goods they want cheaply (food), and pariah for selling consumers goods they want cheaply (alcohol). This doesn’t have just a whiff of paternalism. It has a stench.

And somehow such paternalism is even more obnoxious when it is petty, as it is with the Aldi licence rejection. Sure, reports suggest Aldi’s cheapest wines are rubbish. This is no surprise at $2.49 a bottle (By contrast, a critic in The Australian suggests that the 83c beer is “gluggable”). But so what? Cut-price bottom-shelf alcohol is already available at other stores. Geographic limits on bottle shop numbers are designed to do nothing more than frustrate purchasers. “All this of course for our good,” as Whitebait sarcastically told his New Statesman readers.

Those who seek to limit our choices usually have good intentions.

The film censors who banned Battleship Potemkin for three decades believed they did so in the British people’s best interests. The colonialists believed the same about the third world. And those who would limit bottleshops in New South Wales also believe they are doing the right thing.

But the underlying philosophy is the same: a deep paternalist belief that people must not be trusted to look after themselves.

Lost In Translation

As school returns for 2012, there are now more students learning Latin than Chinese. Once we take out Chinese-born students and those who speak Mandarin at home, there are just 300 students learning Mandarin in year 12 in Australia, according to accounting body CPA Australia. That is not how it was supposed to be.

In 2008, Kevin Rudd said he wanted 12 per cent of Australian students to be fluent in an Asian language by 2020. An earlier program, launched in 1994, was supposed to have 60 per cent of all students conversant in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian or Korean by 2006.

There has been a general decline in language education, but a catastrophic decline in Asian languages. Korean is now virtually a dead language in the Australian school system, Indonesian is likely to disappear soon, and Japanese is sliding backwards. Chinese survives – even thrives – but only because it is taught to Chinese students.

Never dissuaded, Julia Gillard commissioned a report in November into the ”Asian century”. It is likely to recommend further investment in languages. Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop believes she can trump that and make Asian language studies mandatory for all Australian students – no exceptions.

But the idea that government should prioritise Asian languages is an unexamined faith. Champions of Asian languages cite cultural benefits (increased understanding of our northern neighbours), economic benefits (ability to deal with trading partners in their language) and educational benefits (learning a second language helps with English literacy).

None of these is particularly convincing. There’s a reason Asian languages aren’t as successful as advocates would like. And it isn’t only because the government hasn’t spent enough money. It’s that not enough students want to study them.

Australian students aren’t being irrational. Language study responds to demand, and the rest of the world is learning English. Ours is the global language, the lingua franca.

Language standardisation has come by necessity, not design. Put Japanese, American, German and Saudi executives in a boardroom and the common tongue will be English – the language of business and treaties and translation.

We all know this. So why does no one blink when policymakers imply otherwise? One advocate of Asian language learning said on the ABC’s 7.30 last week that expecting to rely on English in business negotiations with an Asian counterpart is daft. Really?

If you think Australians negotiating with Chinese producers are at a disadvantage if they don’t know Chinese, then imagine how much of a disadvantage Chinese producers have if they don’t know English – the first or second language for virtually all their international customers.

Anyway, how many students today can we seriously expect to be business negotiators in Asia – and using the exact language they learned as school kids? Trade is central to our lives, sure, but few of us personally negotiate trade deals.

That advocates use only extremely narrow cases where these languages would be useful does not inspire confidence.

English’s dominance is something to be celebrated, not regretted. The rest of the world is playing catch-up. And the education curriculum is already stuffed full. Choices have to be made. If governments want to give every student an advantage in business, perhaps basic statistics and accountancy would be more helpful.

When people need languages, they learn them. And the data shows most of our students are not choosing Chinese. The language lobbyists may need to revisit their assumptions.

But they won’t, because their goal has less to do with the economic and practical benefits of language education, and more to do with an ideological vision of the future of Australia. It’s about politics, not learning.

For those who argue that Australia must become an Asian nation, squeezing Asian languages into the curriculum is an easy way to turn that vague idea into something concrete.

Without a languages policy, the Asian nation philosophy would be revealed for the empty vessel that it is. A policy to ”deepen engagement with Asia” only makes sense in the context of international diplomacy. The rest of us non-diplomats engage personally and commercially with Asia whenever we want through business, consumption and tourism. No need for a government white paper to tell us to import Chinese goods or visit Angkor Wat. If we want to appreciate Asia better, our expansive immigration program is already far more effective at building cross-cultural understanding than the memory of a few broken words of Mandarin learned at school.

Anyway, why should the education system be a plaything for the geopolitical and cultural imaginations of our politicians? We shouldn’t pretend that shoehorning this complex, ideological vision of Australian society in the 21st century into the secondary school curriculum is going to make good education policy.

One final justification for Asian language learning is that it taxes the mind and therefore promotes general literacy – it is a worthy educational priority for its own sake. This may be true. But why Asian languages? Why not Arabic, or Greek, or Russian, or Cherokee? And what’s wrong with Latin?

Foreign languages are also a remarkably indirect way to encourage English literacy. Again, the school day is short, and languages are hard. Chinese is uniquely hard – for instance, about four times as hard as French.

Second languages should be a personal choice, not a tool for geopolitical realignment. A recent book by Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs argues that English so dominates the globe that non-English speakers should be compensated. English speakers have an advantage; therefore the world needs a ”language tax”.

This is obviously absurd, but Parijs has a point: policymakers need to understand the historically unprecedented dominance of English. Perhaps, by resisting the 20-year push for them to choose Asian languages above all others, Australian students already do.

The Dramatic Collapse Of Trust In Government

The real story of the financial crisis isn’t bank bonuses, the impending collapse of the Eurozone, or the Occupy movement.

It is how, in every Western country, trust in government has suddenly, dramatically collapsed in the crisis’ aftermath.

Gallup polls have found that a massive 81 per cent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way their nation is being governed. This is the record. Vietnam and Watergate did not induce such broad cynicism. Dissatisfaction only peaked at 66 per cent in 1974.

Americans believe more than ever that the government wastes their money and that congress doesn’t work in their best interests. Even the poor old Supreme Court is taking a beating.

It is just as bad in Europe. A Guardian survey of five countries in March 2011 found that 78 per cent of people did not trust their governments to deal with the problems facing the country. Eighty-nine per cent of people did not trust national politicians to act with honesty and integrity.

Australia fares much better, but here the decline has been steepest. Eighteen per cent of Australians now think that the most important problem facing the country today is “better government”, according to an Australian National University poll in October last year. In March 2010, that figure was just 5 per cent.

We’re coming into an era of post-trust politics – where voters no longer offer politicians and governments an assumption of good faith. Instead, voters now assume political promises will not be kept, that governments are hopeless unless proved otherwise, and, no matter how honest and charming they appear, all politicians are in it for themselves.

Those are, to be fair, reasonable hypotheses.

But we’ll miss trust when it’s gone. The father of liberalism, John Locke, wrote that voters hand governments power with “express or tacit Trust, that it shall be employed for their good, and the preservation of their property”. Government relies on trust to justify its most basic legitimacy – a trust that it will at least try to govern according to the wishes of the voters who put it there.

Certainly, there’s been a decline in trust across the board – no institution is immune.

But for the first time since they started asking the question, Gallup has found that in the United States satisfaction with the size and influence of the federal government is lower than satisfaction with the size and influence of big corporations. Americans now think those faceless, amoral, profit-seeking corporations are slightly more sympathetic than the governments they vote for and who claim to act on their behalf.

And polls consistently show that, as loathed as business leaders are, they’re not as loathed as politicians. The Edelman Trust Barometer is a survey of educated people in 25 countries which this week recorded the biggest decline in its history. It also found that while 27 per cent of people did not trust business leaders to tell the truth, 46 per cent did not trust government leaders.

Nor can we blame the financial crisis. In the United States, trust was at record lows even before the economy tanked.

Anyway, in times of crisis people are usually drawn to government, not away from it. After September 11, American faith in government surged – doubled, in fact, despite the obvious failure of the federal government to stop the attacks. It is not simple enough to say that failure breeds contempt (even casual observers of politics know that failure sometimes brings support).

Governments are the biggest organisations in society. In Western countries they consume between one-third and half of the nation’s economic production.

They have their fingers in every pie. They are relentlessly expansionary: politicians and bureaucrats are always looking for more areas to intervene in. Some people may feel this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that governments easily overstretch themselves; they promise too much and deliver too little. Politicians try to take responsibility for everything: from interest rates to waist sizes to the price of milk, petrol and Apple products.

Sure, a government which promises to fix everything is briefly appealing. But it is always, inevitably, a disappointment. We saw this, in a micro way, with the Rudd government – where too much was promised too quickly and it all fell in a heap. We’re now seeing the same phenomenon play out in a macro way with the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. Too much social support was promised for too long to too many people.

For a long time politicians have argued that they “create” jobs and “manage” the economy. Paul Keating was speaking for all candidates and incumbents when he claimed that to change a government is to change a country.

Now, having taken responsibility for everything good, they suddenly have to take responsibility for everything bad.

The result is a massive decline in trust, and a challenge to the foundations of democratic legitimacy.

Distrust has its upside though. Future politicians promising the world will be met with the cynicism they deserve. Perhaps – perhaps – governments might focus on doing a few things well, rather than a lot of things poorly.

Need To Keep Fingers Off The Panic Button

Public health advocates describe Australia’s binge drinking as an “epidemic” for a reason. Real epidemics have a frightening unpredictability. They are completely out of human control. An epidemic – think the 1918 influenza epidemic or the Black Death – inspires base, primal terror.

So when someone describes a lifestyle choice (a non-contagious lifestyle choice, at that) using such evocative language, it’s pretty obvious they’re trying to manipulate us.

In his new book, Panic, David Marr argues that Australia’s political culture is dangerously susceptible to outbreaks of hysterical fear.

This is absolutely right. We’re scared of Facebook predators and cybercrime, GM food and Chinese investors buying farms. The Occupy crowd harbours a bundle of conspiracies and neuroses about capitalism and Wall Street.

Remember when, in 2006, climate change activist Tim Flannery told us to “picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof”? If that wasn’t hyperbole designed to inspire fear, what would be?

Marr focuses on what he sees as a few key panics: those over boat people, multiculturalism, suspected domestic terrorists, radical imams, offensive speech, Bill Henson and recreational drugs.

We can all play this game: like it or not, panic is bipartisan.

Panic is overreaction. We panic when the likelihood of an extremely adverse event seems greater than it really is. It’s extremely unlikely that a new global war will erupt or Chinese farm investors will immediately poison our food supply, but people still worry about it.

The policy consequences of panic are significant. In a society of panic, we no longer believe individuals can judge the riskiness of their own choices by themselves. Instead: there ought to be a law. The government should manage our risk for us. Virtually the whole regulatory apparatus is founded on the idea of panic.

It is panic that gives us the nanny state and helicopter parenting. It is panic which inspires the more than 6000 new pages of legislation that the federal Parliament passes every year. It is panic that has removed swings and monkey bars from school playgrounds across the country.

When governments try to manage risk, our ability to cope with future unknowns diminish. The more governments protect us, the more susceptible to panic we become.

Governments and political partisans have a vested interest in panic. Obviously, politicians push legislative agendas for lots of reasons. But they require public support to get them through. And few emotions spur us into action better than fear.

So every side of politics massively overstates the negative consequences of not supporting their preferred policies.

The apocalyptic tones of many climate activists are only the most obvious.

Oppositions pretend law and order problems are much worse than they are by claiming the government has lost control of our streets. This is an easy one: fear of crime has little relationship to the crime rate.

Most ludicrously, sports lobbyists say if we don’t keep funding the Australian Institute of Sport, then we won’t win Olympic medals and our national pride will plummet.

We were once told to panic about witchcraft. Now we’re told to panic about obesity and drinking. But how much attention we give the professional panic-mongers is up to us.

Car Makers Cling To Subsidies Of Old

Seeing a Commonwealth minister beg on behalf of a special interest is embarrassing.

The Manufacturing Minister Kim Carr wrote in The Australian over the weekend that automobile manufacturing is “an industry at the core of the society we want to be”.

Less than half of one per cent of the labour force works for the car industry. Yet it is, according to the Minister, absolutely central to our national identity.

Perhaps he’s right; insofar as our national identity is tied up with handing taxpayer money over to a few politically well-connected and otherwise uncompetitive businesses.

It’s all well and good to believe that Australian industry should be encouraged to “make things”. But in practise it leads to the complete subordination of an entire industry to politics, backroom dealing, and electoral calculations.

Few other industries get such hands-on cabinet attention. Every investment, every new product announcement, every decision to open or close a factory is met with a media release and ministerial statement.

In the lead up to the 2007 election, Carr spoke about how he would “thump the tables in the boardrooms of Detroit, in Tokyo, in Beijing” if Labor won government.

The promise was apparently kept. The car industry appears to have their own Minister of the Crown deputised to help with business negotiations, and their own pool of taxpayers’ money on hand to sweeten deals.

This naked corporatism is surely no person’s idea of the “society we want to be”.

The first federal tariffs in 1907 covered vehicle components, as part of “protection all round”. Since then, state support for other industries has fallen away. The car manufacturers’ stubborn hold on their subsidy is only thanks to close political friendships.

Carr’s demotion in the reshuffle late last year was widely noted. But his new roles are important too. Carr is not only the Minister of Manufacturing; he is also the Minister for Defence Materiel – that is, minister in charge of the wasteful sink-hole of military equipment acquisition.

The two roles have a perverse synergy.

Carr has long argued that that a domestic manufacturing industry is needed for national defence. He told ABC radio back in 2008 that “You can’t make a jet fighter without having a strong car industry”.

This is obviously ridiculous. Holden needs $100 million just in case World War Three starts and the international arms market no longer sells Joint Strike Fighters? Australians will need to beat their ploughshares back into swords? If the Government truly believes this scenario is anything other than fantasy, well, aircraft production is the least of our problems.

Carr firmly believes that taxpayers’ money should artificially prop up domestic manufacturing. Now that he is also in charge of defence acquisitions, it is easy to see how Australian-made military equipment will be favoured even when there is better, cheaper, foreign equipment available.

On The Drum last week, Annabel Crabb pointed out almost every other country pours cash into their automobile industry.

But that doesn’t mean that we need to keep supporting ours. Right now, the rest of the world supports the car industry for the same reason we do – because during the second half of the 20th century, manufacturing unions built extremely close relationships with political parties. Those relationships have paid off handsomely in subsidy, protection, and parliamentary representation.

There’s nothing special about automobiles that demands government support. They’re not particularly challenging to make. They’re not particularly central to the economic structure. They’re not particularly hard to buy from overseas. Their manufacturing is not particularly high-tech, at least compared to any other industry. Yet they are particularly well connected. And that’s it. That’s why we support them.

Happily, this week has demonstrated how increasingly hard it is for the automobile industry to justify their claim on our money.

But what on earth is the Coalition thinking?

A big part of Joe Hockey’s plan to reduce government spending is a $500 million cut to car industry subsidies. That would be great.

Yet last week there were suggestions the cut may be abandoned.

Shadow ministers now talk about how critical the automotive industry is. How “savagely” the Government abandoned the Cash for Clunkers scheme. How cruelly the Green Car Innovation Fund was decimated.

The Coalition was rightly scathing about these boondoggles when they were announced.

Hockey and Andrew Robb – both described by their colleagues as “economic rationalists”, in a neat throwback to the 1990s – are apparently holding firm on the cuts.

That the Coalition is going wobbly on spending reductions is no surprise, given Tony Abbott’s deliberate attempt to take Labor’s industrial base, and his embrace of economic nationalism to do so.

Still – car subsidies? If the Coalition can’t even bring itself reduce this irrational, wasteful, pointless, politicised corporate welfare program, they’re going to struggle to cut anything at all.