Category: Articles

New Republicans Swap Their Neo-Cons For Doves

Perhaps one of the most striking attributes of the current Republican field is their dovishness.

Last week’s forum for presidential candidates made clear scepticism about foreign interventionism isn’t limited to the libertarians Ron Paul and Gary Johnson.

On Afghanistan, frontrunner Mitt Romney said, “I also think we’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation”. On the Middle East, Newt Gingrich opined that, “we need to think fundamentally about reassessing our entire strategy in the region”.

Michele Bachmann cited the US defence secretary’s view that America had no vital national interest in Libya, and Jon Huntsman – not at the forum, but now a candidate – also said that boots on foreign soil was not a necessary part of America’s national security.

Mitt Romney has backed away from his position somewhat, presumably under the theory that a frontrunner must not hold unambiguous views.

And some of this newfound shyness in foreign policy is, obviously, based more on who is in the White House than the merits of military action. Partisans will be partisans.

But the shyness is not limited to Libya and Afghanistan, two conflicts which Barack Obama now owns. A forum at the Cato Institute last year revealed that the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress (“everyone”) now think invading Iraq in 2003 was a mistake. You cannot chalk that up to simple hostility about a Democrat president.

So on Sunday John McCain attacked what he saw as the “isolation strand” of the Republican Party which had taken centre stage at the forum.

It’s not fair to call this new attitude ‘isolationism’, but if it was, it’d be an isolationism driven by bitter experience rather than principle.

Nevertheless, isolationism is a cheap slight thrown at the Republicans who want simply to raise the minimum threshold for military intervention. After all, the biggest right-wing critics of America’s recent wars have been libertarians. And their support for expanding free trade and immigration is hardly ‘isolationist’.

It’s a peculiar mindset that characterises opposition to invading foreign countries as a complete withdrawal from the world – as if there was no middle ground between bombing nations on the one hand, and cancelling trade and diplomatic relations with everybody on the other.

The absurdity of this view is even more obvious when you consider that one of those who has been most tarnished with the ‘isolationist’ label is Jon Huntsman – who also happens to be a former ambassador to China. Not a homebody.

So as Washington Examiner columnist Timothy Carney wrote last week: “what can ‘isolationism’ mean here other than ‘opposition to war against Muslim nations’?”

At the very least, neo-conservatism – which has held sway over Republican thinking for the last decade in both its crude and intellectual forms – no longer has a clear champion.

Neo-conservatives reasonably argued that morality does not stop at the border. The United States could not pretend to be neutral on questions of tyranny and democracy even if favouring the former met a specific American geopolitical interest.

Nevertheless, nearly a decade of military involvement in Afghanistan and almost as long in Iraq has exposed the very real limits of neo-conservative thinking. One may be able to imagine a grand role for the United States exporting liberal democracy across the globe, but that role will hit the wall once the uncomfortable reality of protracted conflict is realised.

Many commentators have attributed the Republicans’ foreign policy shift as simply a response to the cost of war; implying that military adventurism is still desirable, but a luxury for when the economy is doing well.

Nevertheless the new Republican dovishness suits the times in other ways too.

More than two years after the global financial crisis began, the competence and capacity of government action is under serious examination. The program of bailouts and stimulus has been a dreary failure. The federal debt is crippling the recovery. America seems to be contemplating an era of decline, driven by a moribund economy and an ineffective government.

No surprise that anti-government sentiment has splashed over into foreign policy thinking. The Tea Party flirted with opposition to defence spending – an area of government which was supposed to be off-limits. In June 2011, the Tea Party may be in decline, but its scepticism about all government activity has penetrated the Republican mainstream. 56 per cent of registered Republicans now support reducing overseas military commitments, according to a Pew survey this year.

Across the political spectrum, support for the proposition that the United States should “mind its own business” has never been higher, and appears to be on a long term trend further upwards.

Yes, George W Bush came into office rejecting nation building. The new crop of Republicans urging modesty in international affairs could backflip just as spectacularly in office.

But the political environment in 2000 is vastly different to the political environment today. Ten years of continuous war has shaped Republican attitudes to conflict.

The Republican candidates are finally matching their desire for modesty in government with a desire for modesty in foreign affairs. Next time a president – of left or right – pushes for a new war, it would do them well to remember why.

Population And Misanthropy

“I have no doubt that the present uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have unsustainable population levels as their root cause,” wrote Labor backbencher Kelvin Thomson to his constituents earlier this year.
 
Not tyranny. For Thomson, the important thing to note about the crowds at Tahrir Square was not that people were angry, but that the square was very crowded.
 
Is there anything that so neatly encapsulates the misanthropy of much population scepticism?
 
His is an attitude which can marvel at nothing but the size of the teeming masses in the Arab world. No wonder at the historical nature of their revolt against dictatorship. Or speculation about the individual courage it must require. The Arab Spring is just another data point to support a belief that the world has too many people.
 
Thomson, with Dick Smith, is one of the few mainstream faces of the sustainable population movement. They blame an extraordinary array of problems on population growth – not just revolution against tyranny (which, Thomson perhaps unintentionally implied, is a bad thing) but war, famine, terrorism, over-consumption, climate change, price inflation, and the high cost of housing.
 
It’s very meta – a thread that ties together almost every single problem, real or perceived, facing the world today. Dick Smith writes in his new book:
 
Surely it is obvious that just about every problem we have is made worse by more people.
 
Not poverty, for one. The world has never been richer, and never had more people. Nor life expectancy, which has also been increasing along with population. Yes, food prices have increased modestly in recent years, but there’s little reason to believe they won’t continue their historical downwards trajectory.
 
The picture painted by the population sceptics is of a world of unmitigated catastrophe. The reality is far from that. On nearly every metric the world is getting better.
 
Even war is on a long-term decline – both in the number of conflicts and their relative deadliness.
 
As for the claims that we’re running out of resources? Fewer resources, prices for those resources go up. And as prices go up, replacements are found. Of course there is a physical limit to coal or oil. But we’ll never reach it.
 
Fear of overpopulation is just as misplaced now as it was for Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich. Yet the fear sticks – the fear that this is somehow the end of the road for mankind, and the choice we now face is either to plateau or suffer.
 
So the question isn’t whether Smith and Thomson are wrong. It’s why they are.
 
Part of the explanation has to be just how deeply personal population scepticism is. Not for nothing is Smith’s book titled Dick Smith’s Population Crisis. It features photographs of his family, his childhood, and his favourite place in Australia – the tranquil, rarely-visited Coopers Creek.
 
Like his documentary Population Puzzle, the book is part argument, part lament for an Australia which has disappeared, or seems likely to. That Australia had big backyards and vegie patches and open spaces. The modern Australia, Smith claims, is at risk of becoming like Bangladesh – poor, overcrowded and environmentally degraded.
 
Of course there is no neat relationship between density and poverty. There are dense poor countries and dense rich ones. If Australia became as dense as Bangladesh we would remain rich. If Bangladesh somehow reduced its density it would likely remain poor.
 
But there is a clear relationship between population growth and the growth in living standards. Urban Bangladesh is busy because that’s where the employment opportunities are – people have left the sparse rural environment and deliberately chosen the intensity of city existence.
 
Why describe population scepticism as misanthropic?
 
Well, how else to describe those who agitate for millions of potential individuals not to exist at all – and regret the existence of millions of those who already do? Who see nothing but problems in future people?
 
The great economist Julian Simon once wrote: “What business do I have trying to help arrange it that fewer human beings will be born, each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein – or simply a joy to his or her family and community, and a person who will enjoy life?”
 
As it is 2011, the population debate is inevitably wrapped up in the debate about climate change policy.
 
It will take all of the intellectual and technological ingenuity of future generations to adapt to the consequences of climate change, regardless of whether that change is caused by human activity or otherwise. Trying to reduce or stabilise population in response to climate change would be entirely counterproductive. More people have more ideas. The Thomas Edison of climate change adaptation may not have been born yet. If the sustainable population crowd have their way, he may never be born.
 
In the New York Times last week, Thomas Friedman wondered how humanity will cope with crossing the “growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once”.
 
The same way we’ve always done – through human creativity.

Dig In, Don’t Wait. Our Slow Food Nostalgia Is Misplaced

We want food to be simple and honest, local and seasonal. We want it to be organic, ”natural”, free of preservatives and homemade. This, at least, is the message from food journalists and critics, celebrity cooks, recipe books and MasterChef.

It’s a vision of food-before-the-fall, when people had a relationship with what they ate. A lovely dream, but dream it in moderation.

For the most part, when it comes to food and agriculture, industrial is good. Corporate farming is good. Even processed is good. Natural food is an illusion. We wouldn’t want it if we had it. Our ancestors had natural food. It was awful.

The history of eating is the history of shaping, manipulating, preserving and trading our food into digestible shape. Only since the development of modern agriculture, reliable transportation and refrigeration – in other words, industrial society – has food been cheap, plentiful and safe.

In the 17th century, fruit was dismissed as ”unwholesome” and blamed for the plague. It was hard to grow and extremely susceptible to pests and the weather. Today, even the most organic, locally sourced, seasonal tomato is the result of hundreds of years of human manipulation.

And even the most dedicated foodie’s pantry is stuffed with items that are industrial.

Like soy sauce. Nobody makes it from scratch. One recipe warns: ”If you get bored easily … this project might not be the best for you. It can take up to six months to see the finished product.”

You can just buy half a litre for $2, shipped in great quantities from China and available from a corporate supermarket. Not local, not bought at a farmers market, but indispensable.

By far the biggest benefit of industrial food has been saved labour. The only groups who practice ”slow food” (regional cuisines cooked from scratch with local ingredients) are the extremely well-off with the luxury of time and the desperately poor who have no alternative. The rest of us can buy our way out of dreary kitchen work.

As the food historian Rachel Laudan has pointed out, Japanese women in the 20th century embraced white manufactured bread because serving that was a lot easier than getting up early to make rice. Prior to the 1950s, Mexican women spent up to five hours a day making tortillas. And when they became available, Italians eagerly bought dehydrated pasta and canned tomatoes. The potential for gender equality was immeasurably enhanced when women were freed from the kitchen.

Even much-maligned processed food is an advance on the past. The processing of bread has not only made bread safer and healthier but it stores longer and is more nutritious than much of the food eaten by our ancestors.

The nostalgia for a lost world of pure food is nostalgia for a world of nutritional poverty. Laudan describes it as ”culinary Luddism”. And increasingly it has policy implications.

The recent debate over cheap milk was at its heart a debate over how we think about food. Should governments protect family farms? Or accept that in most cases the cheapest and most reliable way to feed the nation is industrial agriculture?

Yes, agribusiness is less romantic than the small farm that’s been worked by a single family for generations. But it’s economically viable. The Senate inquiry into dairy pricing heard stories of independent farmers toiling 12 hours, seven days a week, earning less than they could get from unemployment benefits. That’s no pastoral ideal.

Specialisation and economies of scale are just as necessary in agriculture as any other industry. No wonder most organic food sold in Australia is grown by large agribusiness rather than small family farms.

Throughout history, and for all but the rich, the production of slow, natural food has been an arduous necessity. Making food from scratch was the marker of a life of subsistence. Eating local was a requirement. The family farm was no Arcadian idyll. It’s long been a site of hard labour.

So let’s embrace the higher standards of living offered by commercial, industrial food.

‘Red Toryism’ Holds Little But Giggles For Local Liberals

If the Liberal Party is looking for philosophical guidance which is both coherent and electorally appealing, they won’t find it in the “Red Toryism” of Phillip Blond.
 
Blond is the founder of the UK think tank ResPublica and has been visiting Australia. He spoke to a Menzies Research Institute conference (the Liberal party’s in-house think tank) last Friday.
 
The conference is no obscure academic exercise – Blond had the ear of Tony Abbott, Andrew Robb, and Julie Bishop while he spoke.
 
A taste of Blond’s Red Tory thought was published on The Drum on last week. It’s a sort of Third Way for conservatives. Blond spends a lot of time talking about “small” – big business versus small business, big, centralised government versus small, decentralised, community-focused government. There’s a strong emphasis on social capital – the benefits of community relationships – and voluntary associations. Blond calls for a new “social capitalism”.
 
There’s much to admire about Blond’s ideas.
 
The “Big Society” – David Cameron’s grand program for the revitalization of broken Britain – was inspired by Blond’s ideas. Like Red Toryism, the Big Society was a recognition the British government had crowded out civil society organisations and undermined social capital. And that the country’s apparent social breakdown was as much caused by parliament as it was by consumer capitalism.
 
The regulatory barriers to, say, holding a street party or school fete in Britain are pernicious. Escalating health and safety requirements and council approvals have become such a burden that these essential community events are now rare.
 
The focus of Red Toryism and the Big Society on decentralisation and localism is also admirable.
 
But it’s one thing to define terms and state principles – what soars in a campaign addresses can flounder when translated to concrete public policy. Headland speeches are popular with the commentariat but have a habit of obscuring rather than illuminating. When asked how well they understand Cameron’s Big Society, two thirds of the British public say “not well”.
 
And Blond’s Red Tory philosophy is, unfortunately, a built on a pile of straw men.
 
Take, for instance, his belief that neo-liberalism, far from rejecting government regulation, necessitates it. In The Drum he argued that “if the economic actor is conceived as purely self-interested, as obeying no external codes, as living only by the internal dictate of his/her will and volition, then this actor needs regulation and tight external control.”
 
Of course, no actually-existing model of regulation conceives of individuals as “purely self-interested” who have “no external codes”. This is pure caricature.
 
Rather, the dominant model of regulation which has evolved in the 20th century seeks to manage the risk that individual actions will create undesired consequences. Free choice is not guaranteed to cause problems. But, just in case those problems arise, there’s regulation ready.
 
Governments don’t impose stringent food handling regulations because the “economic actor is conceived as purely self-interested”. They impose those regulations because politicians have determined individuals must be protected against their own lack of knowledge or ineptitude, and how those failures will impact others.
 
By attributing regulatory ideology to the “Chicago school” and neo-liberalism, Blond is blaming Britain’s over-regulation on a small government philosophy which opposes over-regulation. It’s a clever sleight of hand.
 
And it allows him to claim he wants a free market capitalism “based on trust”. This “civic economy” would apparently require almost no government, bureaucratic, or regulatory support. While his is an appealing vision – low in regulation and high in social capital – it’s based on an idiosyncratic view of why over-regulation has occurred in the first place.
 
Blond also has a cartoonish interpretation of market economics and other political ideologies. Like his belief that “In order to reclaim a civilised society, market and state should not be regarded as the ultimate goal or expression of humanity”. No-one holds those views. No-one.
 
In the end, Blond’s Red Toryism is less a revolution in political philosophy than the sort of vapid “thought-leadership” CEOs love.
 
And no surprise the public is struggling to grasp the good bits of the Big Society when its biggest philosophical backer is so confused.
 
Australian conservative politics has long taken cues from the United Kingdom. Many Liberal Party thinkers admire the progressive Tory vanguard.
 
It was a visit to Britain in 2009 which inspired Malcolm Turnbull to double down on the emissions trading scheme – Cameron’s apparently successful remaking of the Tories into environmentalists convinced the former opposition leader that was a replicable strategy in Australia.
 
Now some Liberal intellectuals are looking seriously at Blond’s Red Toryism.
 
A decade ago, many in the Labor Party were entranced by the Third Way of Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens. But as the journalist Andrew Rawnsley has said, “The Third Way was debated at earnest summits abroad and giggled to death at home.”
 
The Liberal Party should think hard before it adopts a political philosophy destined to travel the same path.

Free speech in the climate debate

You’d think that climate sceptics deserve free speech as much as everybody else.

That, however, isn’t the view of the ABC’s media criticism program, Media Watch. In an episode this March, Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes called for the government to use a practically defunct regulation to restrict the free speech of climate sceptics because he disagreed with the content of that speech.

Two days later, GetUp! — the ‘progressive’ membership based lobby group — responded to this call to action, launching proceedings with the government regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

GetUp! are being predictably self-aggrandising. What’s much more concerning is that Media Watch called for this attack on free speech in the first place. Broadcast weekly for just fifteen minutes at a time, Media Watch is one of the ABC’s flagship programs — a self-appointed press watchdog, dedicated to exposing media perfidy, ethics breaches and bias.

To do so, it is handsomely supported. According to a report, this quarter of an hour show received $1.4 million in funding to broadcast in 2003. Media Watch may be a short program, but (squeezed in between the national broadcaster’s other mass-market political fare of Australian Story, Four Corners, and Q&A on Monday nights) it is at the heart of the ABC’s self-identity as a countervailing force against the commercial media. In short: Media Watch is the ABC’s official arbiter of press ethics.

So it was quite a big deal when Media Watch conclusively demonstrated that, on the right to free speech, it’s one of the bad guys — asking for the legal system to step in and manage the vigorous public debate about climate change.

The program opened with an extended discussion about the number of climate change sceptics hosting AM radio shows, their take on climate science, and the fact that they interview more sceptical scientists than non-sceptical ones.

Of course, it’s hardly news some radio commentators prefer to interview certain guests more than others. ‘Opinion maker has strong opinion’ would not stop even the smallest press. And this is not the first time Holmes has been concerned about sceptic success. On The Drum in February 2010, he bemoaned that climate sceptics are winning because they’re the ones with ‘the passion, and the commitment.’ It’s an old tune, and clearly one which he is personally passionate about. That’s fine.

Yet on this particular Media Watch episode, Holmes went one step further. He argued the radio hosts are in breach of the Code of Practice governing commercial broadcasters which mandates ‘reasonable efforts are made … to present significant viewpoints when dealing with controversial issues of public importance’.

And the reason the regulator hasn’t enforced the code against Alan Jones and his fellow sceptics? ACMA ‘won’t or can’t enforce the Code unless someone complains it’s being flouted.’ Nudge nudge, wink wink.

When I raised Media Watch’s seeming hostility to freedom of speech on The Drum , Holmes was indignant, writing:

So Media Watch suggested they should do what the Code requires, and ensure that ‘reasonable efforts are made … to present significant viewpoints when dealing with controversial issues of public importance’. Such as, just occasionally, interviewing scientists who maintain that the evidence points to dangerous, man-made global warming — scientists who represent by far the majority scientific view — as well as (not instead of) scientists who disagree. And I said that it shouldn’t need complaints to the ACMA to make that happen. How ‘chilling’! How restrictive! What an enemy of free speech I must be!

Well, yes.Genuine supporters of free speech reject the idea that speech which is in any way objectionable — as climate scepticism clearly is for Holmes — has a regulatory solution.Someone who combs regulations (and the Codes of Practice are regulations, even if they are developed in consultation with the broadcasters) looking for ways to alter another’s speech cannot ever be described as a friend of freedom of expression.

On Twitter a week later, he dug himself deeper, arguing that ‘Chris Berg reckons requiring tv radio to be fair = assault on freedom’. In his eagerness to have the government’s regulator step in to manage the speech of climate sceptics, Holmes has completely failed to think deeply about the free speech implications of what he suggests.

The right to freedom of speech is meaningless without the right to choose that speech. No-one should be forced to say something they do not believe as a condition of saying something they do.

In the United States between 1949 and 1987, the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ obliged broadcasters to do exactly that. The regulation compelled contrasting views to be presented whenever an issue was raised on the air.

And certainly, the doctrine resulted in balanced and civil broadcasting environment. But it did so by exclusion. It was easier to avoid controversial topics than risk a regulatory penalty for being perceived unfair.

Testifying in 1984, the broadcaster Dan Rather argued that ‘Once a newsperson has to stop and consider what a Government agency will think of something he or she wants to put on the air, an invaluable element of freedom has been lost.’

The Fairness Doctrine quickly became a political weapon. During the Kennedy Administration, the Democratic National Committee produced activist kits teaching party members ‘how to demand time under the Fairness Doctrine’.

The Nixon administration also used the Fairness Doctrine to threaten the licenses of hostile broadcasters. Angered by The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage, Richard Nixon is on record saying that ‘the Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems … They have a television station … and they’re going to have to get it renewed.’ The Fairness Doctrine is now widely recognised as having had a ‘chilling effect’ on speech.

Compared to the Fairness Doctrine, the Commercial Broadcasters’ Code of Practice is a model of restraint. But, as Media Watch helpfully demonstrated, that is because it is largely defunct — it has been interpreted benignly, and wielded rarely. Media Watch advocated that this free speech status quo be overturned, and the Code of Practice be used as a political weapon. After all, I doubt Media Watch would argue that gay broadcasters should be compelled to air the views of homophobes, or Christian broadcasters to air the view of anti-theists. Instead he called for the Code to be used solely against those discussing Australia’s biggest, most controversial, political issue — the carbon price.

Some claim a Code of Practice is the price broadcasters pay for using public spectrum; that the rest of the media is free to do what it likes but there must be special rules for those using the airwaves. The history of the Fairness Doctrine, and the egregious actions of GetUp and Media Watch, show just how slippery a slope that view is. ‘Public interest’ rationales easily become political interest rationales.

Considering how central the climate change debate is to contemporary Australia politics, it is striking how fast and loose Holmes is willing to play with the principles of free speech.

In column after column, speech after speech, proponents of climate change action argue that science has a communications problem. The government has now hired a climate communicator, Tim Flannery, who is profiled elsewhere in this issue of the IPA Review. As Media Watch demonstrates, that ‘communications problem’ is starting to become a cause for regulatory action itself.

Holmes’s regret in February 2010 that sceptics are winning the debate has become Holmes’ declaration in March 2011 that the government should step in to forcibly ‘balance’ it.

Referring to George Bush’s 2003 declaration to the Australian parliament that he loved free speech, Holmes’ predecessor David Marr lamented to the Media Watch audience ‘If only more Australian commentators shared his view.’ Indeed. And if only Media Watch did as well.

Abbott Chases Working Votes Even Menzies Forgot

There’s a certain irony when Tony Abbott conjures up the ghost of Robert Menzies for his “forgotten families”.
 
Menzies’ forgotten people were the middle class. Where the Labor Party was sectarian – the unpretentious political arm of the union movement – Menzies’ non-Labor politics would represent everybody else. (The rich and powerful, Menzies reasonably suggested, could look after themselves.)
 
But it’s obvious in 2011 Abbott has shifted his focus to the traditionally working class segments of the population – not just Howard’s aspirational battlers, but dyed-in-the-wool union members. In other words, those whose political power Menzies sought to counter.
 
Addressing the state council of the Victorian Liberal Party over the weekend, the Opposition Leader stated “Let the message go out to our country from here in Melbourne, the manufacturing heart of our country, that we must be a country that continues to make things.”
 
This of course recalls the claim by Kevin Rudd during the 2007 election campaign he didn’t want to be “Prime Minister of a country that doesn’t make things anymore.”
 
With that line, Rudd offered a sop to Labor’s union base. His Industry Minister Kim Carr spoke of thumping tables in Detroit and Beijing to get better deals for Australian manufacturers, and abandoning the doctrine of “market fundamentalism” to arrest job losses in Australian factories.
 
The desire for Australia to “make things” is evocative. Abbott obviously knows who said it first, and who the phrase is intended to appeal to.
 
The Opposition Leader claimed in his speech “there can be no first world economy without a manufacturing industry”.
 
Sure, the context was carbon pricing, which the Coalition maintains will hollow out Australian industry. Defending an industry against a tax increase is not the same as advocating it be propped up with subsidies. When the slogan “Helping Families, Protecting Jobs” – displayed prominently at state council – the Coalition is referring, in part, to the possible consequences of an emissions trading scheme on employment.
 
Australian Workers’ Union boss Paul Howes has made it abundantly clear some unions are willing to help the Coalition to stop, or at least defang, the carbon tax.
 
But there’s more going on than just the building of an anti-carbon tax alliance.
 
After all, opposition to the Government’s carbon scheme does not explain the peculiar pride in Abbott’s budget reply speech of his support for stronger anti-dumping measures which, the Opposition Leader claimed, would “protect Australian industries from way-below-cost imports”.
 
Anti-dumping laws are pure protectionism. Boosting anti-dumping laws has no economic justification. Their only rationale is psychological – so manufacturers feel like they have a legal defence against cheap foreign products.
 
The Productivity Commission has found anti-dumping laws benefit a small number of industrial firms at the expense of all consumers.
 
And the only other major group which supports the extension of anti-dumping laws is the Australian Workers’ Union. The union’s ‘Don’t Dump on Australia’ campaign makes them unlikely allies with the Coalition. The AWU is being consistent. The Coalition is being opportunistic.
 
Nobody imagines Tony Abbott is a doctrinaire free marketeer.
 
The Coalition’s ‘Action Contract’, released in June last year, was in many ways typically Liberal – full of Menziesian references to small businesses and schools.
 
But the Action Contract was produced at a time when the Labor government was not so hopeless. It still seemed possible in 2010 the ALP might retain many of those who gave it victory in 2007. A year later it’s clear the ALP has lost the progressive vote to the Greens, and (with the carbon price) its industrial support looks shaky.
 
Hence Abbott sees opportunity for the Coalition. His regime of factory tours and shift in rhetoric suggest that if an election was held today, the Action Contract could have a substantially different hue. The Opposition Leader appears to believe the Coalition could win the hearts of Labor’s industrial left in the very near future.
 
But you can’t be everything to everyone.
 
As Phillip Coorey pointed out in Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald, the Coalition’s approach has also meant industrial relations – one of the few areas where Abbott personally supports serious market-orientated reform – has been put even further back on the shelf.
 
It would not do to alienate the AWU by recalling the ghost of WorkChoices when you’re working so well together.
 
This seems to be what Nick Minchin was getting at when he distinguished last week between populism and policy principle.
 
Much has been made of the rootlessness of the contemporary Labor Party. And the Coalition is reshaping its image in response to problems in the federal ALP.
 
But by chasing the votes of the industrial left, the Coalition risks abandoning its own base, and the affinity to economic liberalism which makes it distinctive.

Free Economies Will Choose Money Over The Gun

We live in an age of world peace. To be more specific: a ”neoliberal” age of world peace. Certainly it doesn’t seem like it. The 21st century opened with a terror attack that sparked wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter seems to be getting more violent.

But the data is unambiguous. The world is fighting fewer wars. And the wars that are being fought are less deadly than at any time in living memory.

A Canadian non-profit, the Human Security Report Project, has been tracking the number and intensity of conflicts in the past 50 years. Between 1950 and 1959, there was an average of 6½ international conflicts per year – the vast bulk of them fought between states. In our decade, the average has been less than one, almost all civil wars.

Sure, after the fall of communism, internal conflicts sharply spiked, as a decaying Russia and disengaging United States withdrew support for many petty tyrannies in the Third World. But the number of conflicts has since resumed its long-term decline.

War is also becoming less deadly. In the 1950s, the average international conflict killed 20,000 people per year. The average conflict in the 2000s killed a 10th of that. You’d think this would be widely recognised and celebrated. But it’s entirely at odds with the impression of escalating global violence we get from the nightly news.

So, war is now rare. Take a moment to celebrate. Then think of the simple ideological narratives these observations upset.

Anti-capitalist intellectuals from Lenin to Naomi Klein have associated competition in the marketplace with competition on the battlefield. Yet while the world is more commercial and more globalised than at any time in history, it’s more peaceful too.

Foreign policy realists long claimed the post-Cold War world – without two superpowers holding the globe together under a threat of mutual nuclear destruction – could be unstable. But if anything conflict has declined faster in the past two decades.

So what accounts for all this world peace? If we want war to be even less common, we’d better figure out what’s causing its demise. Many people would credit democracy – if citizens are given a chance to vote, they’ll elect pacifists. But as American political scientist Patrick J. McDonald pointed out in his 2009 book The Invisible Hand of Peace, democracy is not immune to war mania.

McDonald finds that during the 19th century democratic states were more likely to go to war than autocratic ones.

This is not an academic question. If we want Middle East peace, focusing on democracy at the expense of everything else won’t succeed. And we shouldn’t pin our hopes for the peaceful rise of China solely on elections.

The other big theory on the causes of peace focuses on commerce. Nations that trade with each other don’t fight. War is bad for business. But this theory doesn’t quite work either. What about World War I? European commerce was booming early in the 20th century, but 37 million people still died.

McDonald argues it isn’t the volume of commerce or the extent of globalisation that creates peace. It’s the domestic institutions that promote commerce – that is, the ”neoliberal” policies of low trade barriers, limited government ownership, and private property – which eliminate the incentives for war.

By studying hundreds of interstate conflicts over the past two centuries, McDonald finds that only economic freedom is closely correlated with peace.

That’s because regulatory barriers to trade spark international political conflict, not co-operation. And businesses that enjoy trade protection like military conquests. It’s how they expand their markets.

These are general rules and it’s a messy world. America’s free markets and democracy did not stop it invading Iraq.

Yet a 2005 study by the Cato Institute, an American think tank, found ”economic freedom is about 50 times more effective than democracy in diminishing violent conflict”. If we want the age of world peace to last, that’s what we need to focus on.

Backwoods Policy Making

Released on the Friday after the federal budget, the Government’s Sustainable Population Strategy is for the most part just 88 pages of promotional guff and colour photos.

But it isn’t entirely meaningless.

Seemingly minor policies in the population strategy suggest a larger plan by federal and state governments to shift population growth and employment away from cities and to the regions.

You’ve probably heard about the migration changes already. As Julia Gillard said, “I don’t want the first port of call for migrants to our country to always be the growing suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne”. That’s the payoff of the 2010 election’s small Australia rhetoric. Skilled immigrants will be directed towards regions rather than urban areas.

But it’s not only about migrants – governments want existing urban residents to move to the regions too. The Promoting Regional Living Program funds rural areas to promote themselves to city dwellers.

And on top of these federal initiatives are the existing state incentives for people to move away from the big smoke. A number of states – Victoria and Queensland, for example – boost their first home owners grant if purchasers buy away from urban areas.

You can understand why governments want to take pressure off city growth. Trains and trams seem packed. Infrastructure has not kept up with demand – or, if it has, no voters seem to believe it.

Yet policy makers shouldn’t forget the basic reasons many people want to live and work in dense urban areas when they haven’t been induced to do otherwise.

The Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has described the city as humanity’s “greatest invention”. Policies which try to divert growth away from cities – shift activity and population away from where they would otherwise prefer to go – could create more problems than they solve.

After all, an urban population is a richer population. In his new book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, Glaeser describes the “near-perfect correlation” between urbanisation and prosperity.

City dwellers aren’t only richer – they’re happier too. The more urban a nation, the higher that nation’s reported happiness, even after you factor in the happiness-boosting effect of income and education.

Successful cities, Glaeser uncontroversially says, are those which attract smart and creative people, and allow those people to interact in close proximity to each other.

That interaction sparks aggregate economic growth and individual economic opportunity for creative and non-creative alike.

And, of course, cities have amenities. It’s easier to provide services to dense communities, and provide a greater array of those services.

None of these benefits of city living are novel to anyone, of course. They’re why cities exist in the first place.

Tree and sea changes may be appealing, but regional and remote areas offer fewer ways to earn money – and fewer ways to spend it. A report in the Sunday Age in 2009 found a substantial proportion of people moving to quieter parts of the country regretted it – 90 per cent planned to leave within the next five years.

As one academic said at the time, “People bought the dream about the idealistic country life, then they moved there and were confronted by the reality: poor health care, poor road quality, fewer work opportunities, expensive food, lack of entertainment, obesity, lack of ethnic diversity, difficulty making friends, conservatism and narrow-mindedness. They expected to find an enjoyable life with less work and less traffic. But they found a lack of stability, lower pay and longer commutes.”

We’re all familiar with the cliché that small towns have a sense of community. But cities have networks of communities. Not only are there are more people in a city with whom relationships can be formed, but the greater diversity of interests allows niche communities to develop.

Each to their own, obviously.

But the well-known advantages of urban living should make you wonder about the wisdom of deliberately encouraging people to move away.

Do we really want migrants to settle outside the capital cities, where formal and informal support networks are smaller or absent? Migrants choose cities for the same reason everybody else does – services, employment, and social opportunity.

And do we really want to be subsidising first home buyers – people early in their career and family life – to move to areas with more limited prospects for personal and job development?

Sure, if people choose to move away from cities and to regional areas, that’s their business. But it’s a problem if government policy deliberately induces people to do so – to buy houses and find their feet in areas which, all else being equal, have fewer opportunities, fewer essential services and offer a potentially lower standard of living.

Public policy should not favour cities, certainly. But neither should it encourage people to leave them.

Middle Class Welfare: Not Happy Julia

Perhaps families earning $150,000 a year are “rich”. Perhaps they’re not.
 
But it’s intuitively obvious they shouldn’t receive welfare.
 
That’s because, deep down, we’re all small-l liberals. Welfare should be a safety net, not a web in which everybody is tangled.
 
The Gillard government’s reductions in family payments announced as part of last week’s federal budget are modest but welcome.
 
The income test on some payments will be frozen until 2014, as will the size of payments. Inflation will slowly erode eligibility and value. The teacup storm about cost of living pressures and what constitutes rich was inevitable.
 
But the thing is, direct welfare going to middle income earners in Australia is actually quite low, at least compared to the rest of the world. Our benefits are relatively well means-tested. The Rudd and Gillard governments have made them even more so – a much needed corrective to the Howard years.
 
Commentators rightly condemn the non-means tested benefits which remain. The tax-welfare churn is extremely inefficient.
 
But subsidising the middle class isn’t a strange perversion of the welfare state. It’s a key characteristic.
 
For decades we’ve been told we should emulate the big social democratic welfare states – it’d be the only progressive thing to do. Yet their full cradle-to-grave social support offers far more for middle earners than Australia does.
 
The prototypical Scandinavian welfare models were built on the concept of universalism. Everybody gets something. Their political support relies on that universalism. Middle income earners approve of those welfare states because they’re the beneficiaries.
 
Indeed, the Swedish economist Andreas Bergh has argued that redistribution of income from rich to poor is a relatively minor feature of the Scandinavian model – the whole system is structured to service the comfortable middle.
 
So if it is intuitively obvious to Australians that the middle class shouldn’t receive income support, that’s because we find the social democratic model of the welfare state objectionable.
 
The Australian conception of the proper role of welfare is a liberal one. Income support should be only given to those who need it – to those whose only alternative to Centrelink is poverty. Not to those who, facing money pressures, could reduce consumption or live in a smaller house or trade in a new car.
 
Even mainstream Australian social democrats argue against the social democratic model of the welfare state.
 
In the Weekend Australian, Tim Soutphommasane (of the progressive think tank Per Capita) said “Any fair and efficient system of welfare … should be guided by a principle of need.”
 
The past decade and a half has seen government extend its generosity to middle income earners, breaking the liberal compact.
 
Unfortunately the Gillard government hasn’t pitched its temporary freeze on family payments as a principled shift in welfare policy. In fact, quite the opposite: it has stubbornly insisted families deserve whatever they can get.
 
As Wayne Swan said late last month: “Australians who work hard, who get up every day, send their kids to school, come home, cook the tea, get up and do it again, whether they’re running a small business or working for wages, are deserving of some support for their children when they’re performing that vital role of bringing up the next generation of young Australians.”
 
This makes welfare less about need, and more like a reward given by the government for being responsible and virtuous. So it’s no surprise that there’s outcry when the government reduces that reward. After all, families haven’t stopped working hard – why is the government suddenly being so miserly?
 
The Howard government wrapped its middle income support in different rhetoric. For John Howard, middle class welfare was a deliberate program to achieve a specific social goal. Each side favours income support for “working families”, it’s just that they put the emphasis on different words.
 
Speaking to the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute after he left office, the former Prime Minister argued that:
 
“We should maintain a cultural bias in favour of traditional families … The taxation system should generously recognise the cost of raising children. This is not middle class welfare. It is merely a taxation system with some semblance of social vision.”
 
For Labor, middle class welfare is a reward. For the Coalition, it’s an incentive.
 
Howard was a conservative social democrat. Sure, sometimes he looked like a proponent of small government. More often (much more often) he did not.
 
The Liberal Prime Minister had a distinct pro-family, pro-procreation philosophy which, in his view, supported the expansion of family payments. For Howard, income testing those payments would be contrary to the purpose of the policy, and at odds with the philosophy. You might not agree with that philosophy of government – free marketeers shouldn’t, and didn’t – but it was a coherent one, and one which he often articulated.
 
By contrast, Labor appears to share Howard’s policy preferences, yet it cannot explain why.
 
Nevertheless, the end result of both approaches has been the development of a middle class entitlement culture – a culture that’s long been endemic in larger universal welfare states, and now seems to be growing in Australia.

Charade Must End, And Both Sides Of Politics Know It

Perhaps now Labor and the Coalition could come clean with voters. Both sides of politics intend to grow Australia with immigration – to continue the 200-year project of population expansion. This project is as important today as it was during the Victorian gold rush. They just don’t want to admit it.
 
Treasurer Wayne Swan announced in last week’s budget an increase in immigration of 16,000 people; three-quarters of those will be skilled migrants sent to regional areas.
 
That’s on top of the government’s new Enterprise Migration Agreements. The agreements allow large mining and infrastructure firms to negotiate tailored guest worker schemes for foreign labour, as long as they implement training programs for local workers too.
 
Sure, in the scheme of things, these changes will only modestly increase immigration levels.
 
But they’ve been announced by a government that spent the 2010 election talking about how they planned to slow population growth, blamed skilled migrants for undercutting wages, and promised to “take a breather” on immigration.
 
The increases have been embraced by an opposition that ran even harder against population during the campaign. Supporting the government’s migration increase last week, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey said it was necessary if we were to avoid inflation.
 
Last year Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott fell over each other trying to appeal to voters convinced that traffic jams and refugee boats were two sides of the same problem.
 
Labor announced an inquiry into sustainable population, plainly hoping it would calm those who hated Kevin Rudd’s ”Big Australia”.
 
The “stable population” types welcomed the opportunity to present their misanthropic views on closed borders and reduced birth rates. Green groups proposed population limits too, prioritising the Australian environment above the well-being of potential migrants.
 
But the government must have known that business lobbyists would call for higher migration during the inquiry. The likely final result would be an expansion, not a reduction, of foreign skilled migration.
 
The government released the inquiry’s report on Friday. It simply says that skilled migrants should be sent to targeted industries and regions, and that governments should plan better.
 
The ”small Australia” rhetoric of the 2010 election was just for show. So let’s give up the charade. Australia needs more migrants; our economy is begging for them.
 
The enormous mineral projects in Western Australia and the North need mass labour if we’re going to continue to rely on the resources boom to underpin growth. The Chinese demand, which Treasury hopes will save the federal budget, will only be met with new workers.
 
The National Farmers Federation reckons agriculture needs at least 100,000 more workers now that the drought has lifted.
 
Booming global demand for resources, and booming global demand for food – a government that did not make policy changes to meet those demands would be negligent.
 
Could we try to fill all these positions with existing Australian residents? Well, the unemployment rate is in the fours. There aren’t many Australians available.
 
But the more troubling answer to that question comes from another proposal in this budget – the $1700 bonus for apprentices if they complete their training. That seems perverse. Do we really have to bribe people to qualify for jobs that offer high wages?
 
There is, of course, a powerful moral argument for accepting more immigrants. Migrants do more than just help our economy. They travel here for work to support themselves and their families. That’s the moral dimension – people should be free to build a better life, as long as they don’t harm others in the process.
 
Migrants do not steal jobs from locals who want to work. The economic literature on that question is unambiguous.
 
Nor is infrastructure the problem immigration sceptics claim. Migrants pay taxes. Competent governments should be able to deploy those taxes for transport and services. When incompetent ones – read New South Wales – do not, that’s not immigrants’ fault.
 
All these points are as true for unskilled migrants as much as skilled ones. A far-sighted government would look at expand-ing the unskilled cohort. The economy could easily use them.
 
Immigration is overwhelmingly more effective than foreign aid at boosting development in the Third World. Migrants send money back home. Globally, the amount of cash remitted to the developing countries is more than total global spending on foreign aid. And it goes directly to those who need it.
 
So for Bob Brown to describe economic migrants this week as “queue jumpers” is obscene. The Greens’ support for humanitarian programs is laudable; their opposition to immigration in general is not.
 
Throughout Australian history, the “population problem” has been about how we will people the continent, not whether we should. And despite the aberration that was the 2010 election, it still is.