Category: Articles

Capitalism Is Ruining The Planet, And Pigs Might Fly

The home insulation program has been scrapped. And the emissions trading scheme has been abandoned.

But try not to worry too much. We are all a lot more environmentally sustainable than you imagine. Just look what happens when a little piggy goes to the market.

In 2008, a Dutch conceptual artist, Christien Meindertsma, chose a single pig and followed what happened to every part of it as it was slaughtered, sold, distributed and processed around the world.

Pigs are not just made out of ham. Her pig – Pig 05049 – went into 185 separate products. Pig hair goes into paintbrushes. Protein from the hair is used to soften bread dough. Some pig skin is eaten (scratchings), and some sold to become practice canvas for tattoo artists. Pig leather becomes safety gloves. Collagen from the skin is sold to become glue, beauty masks, an ingredient in energy bars and a binding agent for liquorice.

Gelatine is derived from the collagen, which goes into pretty much every dessert – jelly, cupcakes, nougat, custard pastry, marshmallows, chocolate mousse, ice-cream and tiramisu. That’s just the outside of the pig.

The bladder becomes the skin of a tambourine. Haemoglobin goes into cigarette filters, and is added to ham to enhance its appearance. From pig’s bone fat we get antifreeze, floor wax, toothpaste, crayons, anti-wrinkle cream, make-up foundation, and hair conditioner.

And even bullets. Gelatine from pig bones helps move gunpowder into shell casings.

There are more than 150 other products. No pig bits are wasted.

But Meindertsma’s findings are extremely counterintuitive. We’ve been taught that we live lives of reckless, wasteful consumption. We’re told we have “affluenza” – an illness of consumerism with symptoms that include high credit card bills, environmental degradation and moral soullessness. Australia’s affluenza theorist, Clive Hamilton, has written that “consumer capitalism loves waste”.

By contrast, every school child learns that the Native Americans used “every part” of the buffalo they killed. Often they did – that’s subsistence living for you. But sometimes they herded them off cliffs (“buffalo jumps”) thousands at a time.

One 19th-century explorer, Meriwether Lewis, saw tribes killing “whole droves” of buffalo, salvaging only “the best parts of the meat” and leaving the rest to “rot in the field”.

Even at their most frugal, earlier societies could never match the resourcefulness of the global marketplace.

Pig 05049 shows how magnificently complex and refined global capitalism really is. Everything in a pig can be sold to someone, somewhere. Nobody wants to miss an opportunity to profit, even if it involves selling pig bones to be burnt into ashes which are then sold again, and again, and again, eventually helping produce German train brakes.

Or, to put it another way: waste is expensive. Time and energy are extremely valuable, and, as farmers know, so are pigs’ pancreases (to produce insulin).

After all, our entire economic system has developed on the idea that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. We sell things that other people can use better.

A competitive economy encourages businesses to be less wasteful. To reduce the amount of energy used in production, or to reduce packaging to its absolute minimum, is to save money.

Ikea “flat-packs” its furniture because it’s more economical to ship that way, and it burns fewer fossil fuels for their buck.

Walmart justified its packaging reduction program (a target of just 5 per cent less packaging by 2013) by pointing to the $3.4 billion the company would save. Corporations aren’t altruists. That’s why a 2008 survey found that 76 per cent of corporate sustainability efforts were aimed at reducing package waste.

Anybody who has travelled in the past few years will have seen that many hotels don’t wash linen any more, unless it is specifically requested. Good for the environment, perhaps, but definitely good for the bottom line.

Even the globalisation of food produce is an example of market forces pursuing sustainability.

“Food miles” advocates believe we should only eat food produced locally, that it’s environmentally obscene to be transporting food across the world.

But the biggest carbon contribution of food isn’t how far it has travelled. It’s how efficiently it was produced. And efficiency is caused by things like climate. So a British government report found that importing tomatoes from Spain was more sustainable than growing them locally. A study by three New Zealand academics found that the same was true for apples grown in New Zealand and sent to the United Kingdom.

Sure, that seems bizarre. But we live in a world where tiny bits of pig are used to produce the copper that makes up computer circuitboards, and other bits used to reduce moisture in newspaper. Globalisation is definitely weird. But it’s not as unsustainable as everybody says.

Green Policies: Too Much Of Not Enough

It can’t be a coincidence: the worst examples of bad policy making and implementation in the last few years have been green policies.

The Federal Government has spent the last few months trying to neutralise the fallout from the home insulation scheme. And not totally successfully: last night’s Four Corners program uncovered even more prior warnings about the dangers of the Government’s policy. Kevin Rudd can’t fire Peter Garrett twice.

But don’t forget: the Government has also been embarrassed by problems with its solar panel subsidies. And its green loans scheme. And its National Green Jobs Corps.

There’s just something about the environment that leads politicians to abandon the basic principles of good policy making.

The Hawke Review of the Administration of the Home Insulation Program, released this month, found public policy essentials, like eligibility criteria, means testing and co-payments – that is, getting homeowners to put a little skin in the game by contributing some of their money – were conspicuously absent from the program.

Whether the program should have included co-payment was apparently raised in Cabinet. It was rejected.

And the Hawke Review found that advice to homeowners that they get at least two quotes for installation was abandoned before the program was fully launched. Recommending consumers follow basic market diligence was against the Government’s interests.

The Government still claims we had an insulation subsidy-led economic recovery. As Lindsay Tanner has argued: “I don’t think it’s right to say we should have sat back… dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s because we were in a crisis situation.”

There must have been a few more i’s left to dot. The cost of cleaning up the insulation scheme (around $1 billion) is nearly as much as the cost of implementing it in the first place ($1.5 billion was spent before the scheme was pulled).

By any standard, that makes the home insulation program an absolute debacle.

But the insulation program was perhaps not as much a debacle as the less-publicised green loans program. Under this program, homeowners could borrow up to $10,000 for four years to make sustainability improvements to their houses. The Government helpfully paid the interest on the loan.

Unsurprisingly, such generosity led to widespread rorting. The Government was forced to shut the whole thing down. Penny Wong announced last week that taxpayers are going to cough up another $4 million to audit the green loans.

Another policy fiasco: the solar panel subsidy scheme. That also had to be shut down early. It was supposed to cost $150 million. The final price tag is around $1 billion.

Then there is the Government’s National Green Jobs Corps. Apparently, when it announced it mid-2009, the Government didn’t actually mean to imply they would be green “jobs” – they’d be work experience for people getting Centrelink benefits.

I guess you shouldn’t judge a policy by its title.

Last year, Liberal MP Joanna Gash rightly described the green corps as “basically work for the dole with a green bent”.

But then in January Tony Abbott announced his own low-carbon copy – a 15,000-person green army.

Indeed, the Opposition’s direct action climate policy is swollen full of clever little green schemes. Twenty million trees will be planted. Grants will be provided for towns to convert to geothermal, tidal, and solar power. Rebates for home solar panels will be extended.

Abbott’s environmental centrepiece is an annual $1.2 billion emissions reduction fund. Companies which reduce their emissions below an individually determined baseline will be compensated. Those which exceed their baseline will be penalised.

The most important thing for a company will be getting a favourable baseline. Imagine how many opportunities there will be to game that system.

A report last week from the Commonwealth Auditor General found that state and federal governments are usually uninterested if their climate change policies are successful or not. The public accountability of individual environmental policies “has generally been poor.”

The Auditor General counted at least 550 separate climate change programs across the country, many of which were Howard government programs. We don’t really know which ones work. And if the ad hoc way bureaucrats report the results of their environmental programs is any indication, governments don’t seem to mind.

Obviously, it’s about green quantity, not green quality.

Could we expect anything else of policies which have ‘save the planet’ as their criteria for success? Public debate about the environment is characterised by emotion and ideology. Governments respond with the same.

The insulation program, the green corps, the solar panel subsidies, and the green loans program made stately headlines when they were first announced.

But the goodwill generated by those headlines doesn’t last when time reveals how poorly thought out the green policies actually are.

Taxation’s violent history

Any change in the tax system is a change in our relationship with the state.

But when the Henry tax review was released on Sunday, it was seen as a bit of an anticlimax.

The document has been sitting on Wayne Swan’s desk for more than four months. We’ve known about some of the big-ticket items for nearly as long: a simplified tax return system, and increased taxes on mining companies (presumably because Kevin Rudd hates Western Australia). We could have guessed some of the other ones: volumetric prices for alcohol. Since January, we’ve even known how thick the damn thing is: 10 centimetres of wonky glory.

But it’s definitely worth paying attention to.

In the relative luxury of twenty-first century Australia, it’s easy to believe government can never fail too badly – what could possibly go wrong with a few tax increases here and there?

But excessive taxation has been one of the great driving forces of history. Bad tax policy has destroyed industries, governments, nations, and empires.

Heavy taxes imposed by the Stuart monarchy led to the English Civil War. Dissatisfaction with Spanish taxes led to the Dutch revolt. Iniquitous taxation led to the French Revolution. And, of course, the cry of ‘no taxation without representation’ echoed throughout the American colonies as they rebelled against England.

High taxes can even be blamed for the fall of Rome. The economic deterioration in the third century AD which left the empire susceptible to external threat was to a large degree caused by skyrocketing taxes. Taxation was so heavy some free citizens renounced their liberty to become slaves, and therefore tax exempt. This was common enough for the Emperor Valens to declare doing so illegal.

In the early Middle Ages, taxes levied on infidels helped spread the Islamic faith – Muslim conquerors made it cheaper for conquered peoples to become Muslim than remain Christian.

Australia has its own violent tax history.

After all, it was excessive taxation which caused the Ballarat miners to rebel. They believed the increase in the price of a miner’s licence was tantamount to tyranny. This was particularly bitter for those who had left the Old World to find liberty in Australia. The Italian Raffaello Carboni wrote that he had travelled “16,000 miles in vain to get away from the law of the sword”.

So those anti-tax strikers at the Eureka Stockade had more in common with modern free marketeers than modern social democrats.

Even some of the great social movements were tax inspired.

In the United States, suffragettes in the 1870s formed women’s taxpayer’s associations and anti-tax leagues. In Australia, the women’s rights activist Mary Lee asked why “Should not those who had their property taxed have a voice in the representation of the taxpayers?”

Excessive taxation shows up in popular culture. The extremely high taxes of 1960s and 1970s Britain gave us The Beatles’ ‘Taxman’. In the Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’, the songwriters complain “The taxman’s taken all my dough”.

No wonder: the Labour Government in the 1960s imposed a massive 95 per cent “supertax” on high income earners. And the rich did more than just complain. Many, like the Rolling Stones, just packed up and left the United Kingdom altogether.

The proposed mining supertax will only be 40 per cent. But, like British rock stars, mining companies keeping a close eye on their bottom lines will leave Australia as soon as it is no longer profitable to stay.

Tax has an ignoble history.

But many people seem to view our tax system as a series of levers by which Australian society can be directed, and the choices of individuals can be manipulated. Increased taxes could shrink waistlines, eliminate traffic congestion, end lung cancer, and reduce drunken inner city violence.

In this view, taxation is not a necessary evil, but an end in itself.

Sure, the revenue from taxation can be used for good things. That money pays for public schools, the court system, police, national defence, maintaining roads, hospitals, and the welfare safety net.

But, don’t let the worthiness of some spending conceal the fact that the art of taxation is the art of plunder. To tax is to confiscate money which individuals and businesses have legally earned.

And, of course, the government wastes a hell of money too: the government ignored the overwhelming majority of the Henry tax recommendations, but the review still cost taxpayers $10 million.

The government’s new taxes won’t inspire revolution. And, luckily, they won’t leave us open to Visigothic invasion. But take the proposed tax on mining. It threatens one of our most valuable industries; one of the sources of Australian prosperity.

That should be more than enough to worry about. New taxes are a big deal.

Immigration and growth: 200 years of success

There’s a Rowan Atkinson sketch about a (pre-David Cameron) Conservative Party speech. In character, Atkinson starts talking about Indian immigrants: “I like curry,” he says. “But, now that we’ve got the recipe… is there really any need for them to stay?”

That combination of populism and affected naivety about immigration and population suddenly dominates our political sphere.

In Tony Burke, we now have Australia’s first dedicated Minister for Population. Under Tony Abbott, the Coalition is looking to make population growth from immigration into an election issue. The shadow immigration minister has called for a dramatic reduction in migrants. There’s now an opposition sub-committee dedicated to population.

And for what it’s worth, the Greens are instinctively hostile to anything that increases consumption within our territorial borders. More immigrants, economic growth, new products, cashed up bogans buying plasma televisions, anyone buying anything – whatever it is, they’re against it.

There is no force in parliament willing to embrace the benefits of population growth and immigration – historically, the two key drivers of Australia’s success.

It’s Kevin Rudd’s fault. In October he admitted publically what most Australian governments have believed for the last century – he believes in a “big Australia” and he “makes no apologies for that”. Since then, we’ve had six months of apologies.

Certainly, immigration itself presents policy challenges. But not that many. Australia isn’t a target for welfare-shopping: migrants can’t get the dole for their first two years.

And I’d be more concerned about the cultural challenges of immigration if we hadn’t had two hundred years of successful pot melting. Each migrant cohort is always more “different” than the last. And each cohort has successfully integrated into Australian society.

But when a politician expresses concern about population pressure, it is typically nothing more than a cover for government failure.

Take infrastructure. Will governments be able to supply enough roads and railways and community services for an expanding population? Well, that’s their job. To abrogate that responsibility is to admit that they are inept. They’ll have the money: more people means more taxpayers.

Or our high house prices, which are now being blamed on migrants and foreign investors. According to opposition housing spokesman Kevin Andrews, speaking to The Australian last week, his constituents are “saying their kids can’t get into the market because they go to auctions and are outbid every time by foreigners”.

Andrews was a former immigration minister (you might remember that) so clearly he’s playing to his favoured side. Nevertheless, Assistant Treasurer Nick Sherry has announced a “new enforcement crackdown” on non-residents buying houses.

House prices are inflated for a very simple reason: governments are choking land supply by restricting housing development at the edges of our cities. When demand increases but supply is limited, prices go up.

That’s the fault of those politicians now so concerned about population. Bob Carr is one of the most passionate advocates of population restraint. And his government was deeply reluctant to release land for housing.

So the idea that we don’t know where all these extra Australians will live is very peculiar. We’ve been expanding for two hundred years, and we haven’t run out of space to build houses.

Critics of immigration and population expansion present their views as brave contrarianism – they are the only ones willing to talk about the elephant in the room.

For such “straight talkers”, their case against population growth requires some awkward moral contortions.

Take the claim made by Bob Brown earlier this month: “skilled migrants, by the way, if left in their own countries, would help raise standards of living there”. This is the “brain-drain” thesis – that when the most educated poor people leave their home countries, they further impoverish the developing world.

But it should go without saying the major problem in the developing world isn’t they don’t have enough skills. It’s that they are underdeveloped. They’re poor.

Brown is telling people in poor countries they cannot seek to improve their lives, and the lives of their family.

That’s cruelty dressed up as kindness.

Well, it’s actually worse. Migrant workers send money to their relatives back home. These remittances add up to more than the world’s foreign aid budgets combined. And, unlike foreign aid, rather being funneled to governments, or distributed according to the preferences of first world donors, remittances go straight to the people who can use the money best.

So limiting skilled migration and chocking off remittances would add to third world poverty.

Migrants to Australia seek better lives than the rest of the world can provide. That should be flattering. They should not be used as scapegoats for the policy failures of our own governments.

The Blame Game Is All Canberra’s Fault

Kevin Rudd will take over the hospital system and everything will be dandy.

That’s the election pitch to voters in New South Wales, South Australia, and Queensland, who are desperate to have the Prime Minister wrestle hospital control out of the hands of the state governments those voters elected.

Rudd’s proposal displeases John Brumby, who believes that comparing Victoria’s health system with that of New South Wales is defamatory, if not outright seditious. If both leaders hold their ground, we have the edifying prospect of a state premier defending his state against a prime minister of his own party, while they both head to an election.

It’s probably some kooky factional thing. No doubt a few Labor heavyweights know the ‘real story’ behind it all.

But Brumby is right to fight. It is very altruistic of the Prime Minister to “end the blame game” by granting himself more power.

After all, this “blame game” is entirely Canberra’s fault. Over the past one hundred years, the Commonwealth just hasn’t been able to stop itself interfering more and more with areas that are state responsibilities. Well, according to the constitution.

It’s understandable the states are so unpopular – the New South Wales government has become little more than a succession of coups d’état. Queensland looks to be heading that way too.

But put aside any notion of states’ rights, of the virtues of a federal structure of government, of having the government closest to the people to be the one that makes the decisions. Or of the danger of concentrating power in just one level of government.

Right now, the biggest delusion in Australian public debate is that the federal government is inherently better at running policy.

There are calls to have Canberra take over: occupational health and safety laws, more workplace laws, disabled parking permits, taxi drivers’ training standards, the timing of daylight saving, the date for ANZAC day, travel concessions for seniors, safety standards for poultry, taxes on racing and wagering, the rules governing firearms management, inheritance laws, public transport, building standards, childcare standards, pokies licensing, bikie gang laws, carbon emissions plans, and on and on and on.

That’s only about half the list I have in front of me – every man, his dog, and his dog’s government relations officer seems to wants Canberra to assume responsibility for some state policy or another.

Last October Kevin Rudd even argued urban planning should be subject to a federal takeover. Urban planning is about as far from a Commonwealth responsibility as you could get.

Dissenting against the Howard Government’s Workchoices industrial relations takeover, Michael Kirby, called this “opportunistic federalism”. There’s no political theory, no policy consistency, or coherent direction governing what policy areas Canberra chooses to suck into its vortex. Just whatever federal politicians reckon will be most popular.

And there’s no doubt the health takeover is popular. Eight out of 10 Australians want a federal takeover of health.

But this isn’t that. The states will continue to fund 40 per cent, the Commonwealth the remaining 60.

Hospital workforce planning will be jointly managed by the federal and state governments, which will make workplace relations for nurses and doctors a hell of a lot more complicated. Specialised services will also be jointly managed, as will the mix of medical services. Procuring equipment will be negotiated between states and local hospital networks. The federal government will set performance targets, state governments will measure targets, and local hospital networks will try to achieve those targets.

This plan won’t cull bureaucracy. It’ll add it. The federal government will have a stake about what happens in the hospitals. The states will have a stake, and the local hospital networks will have a stake. And regulators get a stake. A bit like the current system, except in triplicate.

More: if you believe a federal government takeover of funding will allow local communities to run hospitals, recall the insulation industry debacle. The government that coughs up the money is ultimately held responsible when it all falls apart. The next person to die in a waiting room will be seen as Kevin Rudd’s personal responsibility. And then there’ll be more direct federal intervention into hospital management.

Brumby’s stand against this plan is great. But he doesn’t focus on the real problem.

The states cannot avoid being the lapdog of the federal government while they’re almost entirely reliant on the federal government for their money.

Rudd’s health plan takes a third of the revenue from the GST back from the states.

If Brumby wants to assert Victoria’s position as a health innovator, he’d push for something really radical: to get Canberra out of the income tax business and return the power to levy income taxes to the states.

Ask a nearby teenager. Earning your own money is the key to independence. Only with fiscal sovereignty will the states be able to reassert their policy autonomy.

Brumby’s confrontation with Rudd will be hollow unless he tackles the states’ master-servant relationship with the Commonwealth.

Let Society Shape Itself

It’s hard not to be cynical. Especially when a developer lobby claims giving the government power to force people to sell their homes – to developers – is for “community benefit”, as the chief of the Urban Development Institute did last month.

It’s universally agreed that developers have nothing but the interests of the community at heart.

Anyway, that’s the proposal of the state government: to set up a government planning authority with the power to compulsorily acquire property and hand it to private developers.

The developers will then build higher-density housing – one house replaced with nine – and flog them off at a profit. It’s an ingenious business model. Unless it’s your house they have their eye on. The government believes some houses will just have to be demolished if it is to realise its grand Metropolitan Strategy and relax the pressure on house prices.

I guess you can’t make an omelet without first passing legislation that forces poultry farmers to sell their eggs to an omelet factory.

Traditionally, governments have had the power to compulsorily acquire property for new freeways or rail lines: obviously public things.

But in recent years, that power has become a lot more extensive, allowing private companies to benefit. NSW isn’t the only jurisdiction taking one person’s property and giving it to another.

In 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled that the local authority in a town called New London, in Connecticut, could force people to sell their property to other private property owners – in that case, to the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which would inhabit a new corporate facility on the land.

The court made the same argument as the NSW government: compulsory acquisition powers can be used if there is a public benefit from doing so. In the New London case it was claimed that bulldozing homes to make way for Pfizer would bring taxes and jobs. To the New London authority and the US Supreme Court, the property rights of the homeowners were just a trivial obstacle on the road to the town’s bright future.

The court’s decision was widely condemned. Especially because Pfizer left the new site a couple of years later, taking the best hopes of the New London planning establishment with them.

Those people whose homes were forcibly purchased to make way for the Sydney Metro, before it went embarrassingly defunct, have had a similar experience.

These new powers would eliminate something that has dogged urban planners since their profession began: property rights.

Urban planning has always been about more than nominating where streets should go. Planners imagine that if only they could impose their ideal configuration of roads, apartment complexes, and “community spaces”, they could save the environment, improve quality of life, fix the obesity crisis, restore social capital, encourage historical awareness, and boost a city’s self-esteem.

I’d trust them more if their plans weren’t always thrown away well before their use-by date.

The first major plan for Sydney, the 1948 County of Cumberland Plan, was supposed to be in place up to 1980. It was supplanted by a new plan in 1968, supposed to last until 2000. Then came one in 1988, another in 1994, in 1997, in 1998 and in 1999. That last plan should have lasted until 2016. It didn’t.

The planners imagine that the next one will last till 2036. It won’t.

But not discouraged by this seemingly endless cycle of bluster and disappointment, the government’s plans are always extremely ambitious. They’re full of watercolour drawings and accompanied by expensive dioramas.

For modern planners the challenge is how to impose their vision of paradise on existing urban environments. These environments are already full of roads and parks and businesses and various-density housing – remnants of older, forgotten plans, or just a reflection of where people want to live.

The complication is property rights. People own the houses governments want to bulldoze. And the government that tramples property rights tramples the foundation of economic growth, of personal savings, and of economic security. Because, fundamentally, property rights are human rights.

So compulsory acquisition to expedite the government’s planning strategy should be seen for what it is: a cartel of developers and legislators offering a blank cheque to urban planners to undermine the fundamental right of property ownership.

But there is something Sydney can do to ease the pressure on house prices. Governments could just let society and the urban environment shape themselves. It would take the fun out of urban planning, but it’d be a lot more successful.

Some people like living in inner-city shoeboxes. But not everyone does – should their preferences be forfeited? Instead of trying to force as many people into as small a space as possible, the government could release more land for new houses to be built.

There’s enough land on the Cumberland Plain to expand Sydney 50 per cent. And infrastructure spending could follow where people want to live. (That really shouldn’t be beyond the capability of a competent government.)

That would ease the pressure on house prices. Certainly more than giving urban planners the power to eliminate property rights would.

Green Tea Party

Call it Tea Party derangement syndrome.

For the ABC’s Kim Landers, writing on The Drum a fortnight ago, the Tea Party Movement inspired thoughts “about the rise of One Nation and Pauline Hanson in Australia.”

And in the National Times in February, Bella Counihan speculated about the possibility of Hanson running as a Tea Party sponsored candidate.

The Tea Party Movement has been a force in US politics for more than a year now, arising in February 2009 to oppose George Bush’s extraordinary bailouts of the banking system.

But what seems to really perplex Australian commentators is the idea that an American grassroots movement could be against Barack Obama’s health care reform. Many Australians seem to imagine that being anti-Obama’s plan is same as being pro-death – how could people be protesting it?

But the Obama plan is less about ensuring free health care than making it illegal for individuals not to buy health insurance. And the plan eliminates many low-cost insurance options, compelling nearly a third of the country to switch to more expensive insurance.

So putting aside the occasional Tea Party hyperbole – Barack Obama is not literally a member of the Communist Party – being opposed to the health care legislation isn’t a priori evidence of craziness.

Pauline Hanson’s supporters had a scattershot animosity towards immigrants, aborigines, and greenies. The Tea Party Movement is concerned about a much more prosaic thing: the reckless spending of the federal government.

Certainly, George Bush was a massive spender. Of all the presidents since the Second World War, only Lyndon Johnson increased federal spending more than Bush did.

But Barack Obama makes Bush administration look cheap. His proposed budget for this year increases taxes by $3 trillion over the next decade. And his policies will increase the national debt will by $9.7 trillion.

Few areas of the federal spending are as out of control as health care. Obama’s plan will do nothing to keep down costs.

And the US government now pretty much owns General Motors.

Is being opposed to a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to bailout private banks and car companies, or being opposed to massive tax hikes and huge budget deficits, really the same as claiming that we’re being swamped by Asians?

The Tea Party was sparked by the extraordinary bailouts at the start of the financial crisis, but there has been distress within American conservative circles about uncontrolled government spending for some time.

Porkbusters was a campaign started in 2005, dedicated to exposing examples of government waste. Things like $1.8 million for swine odor and manure management research, and $50 million for an indoor rain forest for Iowa, slipped innocuously into an unrelated energy bill.

It was Porkbusters which exposed plans for the infamous “bridge to nowhere” – a federally funded, $398 million bridge to an island in Alaska that has fifty inhabitants and an airport. The island was already serviced by a ferry every half an hour. Sarah Palin campaigned on a “build the bridge” platform when she was running for Alaskan governor in 2006.

The bridge was cancelled. Palin now claims to be a born-again Tea Partier, dedicated to opposing pork in all its forms.

Clearly the movement has a quality control problem.

There is a belief that if Obama tackles immigration reform, the Tea Party movement will reveal itself as nativist and anti-immigration. But a recent survey of Tea Party members found their views on immigration roughly corresponded with those of the general US population.

That’s not to say there aren’t members who want to crack down on illegal immigrants. Tom Tancredo, a prominent anti-immigration Republican, addressed the Tea Party national convention in February this year.

Dick Armey (chair of the conservative group FreedomWorks and as close to a “leader” as the Tea Party movement has) is trying to keep voices like Tancredo out.

But worse again: the convention also controversially invited a ‘birther’ to speak, who wanted to ensure “signs saying ‘Where’s the Birth Certificate'” followed Obama everywhere in the 2012 campaign.

These distasteful elements are a direct result of the Tea Party’s lack of structure and leadership. On the one hand, the Tea Party is being courted by mainstream Republicans looking for endorsement. But on the other hand, fringe groups like the Larouchites, birthers, 9/11 truthers, and the John Birch crowd see the Tea Party Movement as a possible vehicle for their own message.

It’s messy. But it’s no more messy than the writhing mass of ideologies and agitators who comprised the Vietnam-era New Left.

There is one parallel between One Nation and the Tea Party Movement. Their members feel ignored and disenfranchised by politicians and political elites.

Both want governments to justify their decisions to the people.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Who Should Run The Biggest Business In The Country?

Peter Garrett displayed “monumental incompetence” when it came to managing the government’s insulation scheme, claimed Tony Abbott in February.

Put aside for a moment whether Abbott is right.

The federal government spends nearly 28 per cent of our GDP. It’s the biggest business in the country. So imagine being Prime Minister. Imagine choosing who makes up your cabinet – who should be in charge of all that?

They’ve all got to be politicians with a spot in federal parliament. That’s the first major hurdle.

Skills that make someone an effective politician are not necessarily skills that make someone an effective manager of a national, multi-billion dollar enterprise.

It’s a rare preselection which takes into account a candidate’s capacity to run a large enterprise. The art of politics is the art of accumulating rank and power at the expense of others – not the first priority when looking for a capable manager.

Sure, everyone claims to have “leadership qualities” (parliament is full of future Prime Ministers) but few claim to be future executives.

Nevertheless, out of this less-than-inspiring crop of 226, you can only pick from your team. Labor has 115 MPs and Senators. And there are nearly 50 cabinet, ministerial, and parliamentary secretary positions to fill.

You have to take into account seniority and potential, youthfulness and senility. Then factions – you don’t want your controversial pick for the Parliamentary Secretary for Social Inclusion and the Voluntary Sector to be the reason you are rolled two years down the track.

And you’ve got to get the gender and geographic balance right.

All that is before you start considering who would actually be good at managing a government department. Or who is interested in the department you’d like for them. A parliamentary secretary for ageing in the Howard government reportedly once let it slip that he was less interested in his portfolio than his real “passion” – foreign affairs.

You have to hope that the best people are in the safe seats.

It’s a bad look for your government if at the next election you hold power but lose your three most important ministers in one per cent swing.

Choosing from such a limited pool, the question isn’t why ministers fail. It’s how they ever succeed.

So one of the weakest attacks you can make on a government is that it is incompetent – could you expect anything else? Oppositions like claiming the other side is incompetent because it implies they would do better even if they had the exact same policies.

That way, when the opposition identifies widespread failures, it need not undermine all the grand plans they have for their turn in power.

The Labor Party in opposition was no exception. They were fairly certain the Howard government was the most incapable, inept,and (lest-we-forget) most “out-of-touch” in Australia’s history.

But the Rudd government’s problem isn’t incompetence. It’s ambition.

In early 2009, the insulation scheme seemed like a small element of the Rudd government’s stimulus package, but, in retrospect, it was actually a pretty big deal. It is hard to imagine any government minister, no matter how skilled at policy implementation, could dump $2.7 billion into an industry and not have it flooded with dodgy operators out to make a quick buck.

Yet this was the whole point – funneling (presumably unemployed) workers into an industry which required little skill. In one stroke of a multi-billion dollar pen, the Prime Minister could save the economy and save the environment.

Over-ambition, not incompetence, explains why the government is still struggling to deliver its election promises. The school laptop program has still barely started, and the GP super clinics, and the childcare drop off centres. FuelWatch and Grocery Choice have been abandoned.

But it’s only by chance we’ve been able to peek behind the curtain to see other government policies which have been badly undercooked.

Yourhealth.gov.au was supposed to be a major health initiative – a forum for consultation where Australians can go with their ideas about the health system. But according to a whistleblower writing in The Sunday Age, it was done in a weekend; conceived on a Friday, released on a Monday afternoon.

And, as we learnt from the Godwin Grech affair last year, Ozcar – the “vital” bailout package of the automotive sector – was entrusted to a solitary, sickly bureaucrat, clearly in way above his head. Grech was the only one the Treasury Department put to work on it. So every time he took time off work, progress on the apparently essential bailout simply stopped.

These make the insulation scheme look like an exemplary model of policy implementation.

Dealing with policy failures is not a matter of shuffling around ministers, or even voting out governments. The surest way to avoid policy failures is to have fewer policies.

Face Facts And Adapt To Warmer World

It might not seem like it, but climate sceptics and climate alarmists agree on a fair bit. One of the biggest flaws with both Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme and Tony Abbott’s direct action plan isn’t that they are great big taxes or climate con jobs. It’s that they are futile.

Any Australian cut in carbon dioxide emissions is worthless if not part of a global effort. And right now it looks like the chances of a global agreement on serious emissions cuts are effectively nil. You don’t have to be a sceptic or alarmist to understand a policy that can’t achieve its goal is a failure before it starts.

The Copenhagen meeting reminded the world the domestic politics and pressures of emerging economies like China and India cannot easily be submerged by a global flood of environmental goodwill. And without including those two polluters, a global agreement will be meaningless.

Worse, it will look meaningless. That is a bigger problem for leaders like Kevin Rudd who wanted success in Copenhagen to endorse their leadership at home. Foreign policy is domestic politics with translators.

There will be another United Nations climate meeting in Mexico City later this year. Don’t get your hopes up. Yvo de Boer, the UN climate chief who retired in February, told the Financial Times he did not expect an emissions treaty in 2010 either. And public support for emissions reduction is dwindling. If you, like our Prime Minister, believe climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time, you’re probably pretty glum.

But we haven’t had the genuine debate about climate policy.

We could keep trying to stop global warming with taxes, industry plans, corporate welfare, solar panel and insulation subsidies, and fruitless diplomacy. Or we could try to adapt to it. After all, the problem with global warming isn’t the warming per se, it’s the consequences of warming.

Climate change has a disproportionate impact on the poor. The developing world has neither the resources nor the infrastructure to cope with changes in climate. Bangladesh is more at risk from climate change than Holland, even though both are susceptible to flooding.

Bangladesh doesn’t need global carbon dioxide emissions to stabilise. Bangladesh needs to become like Holland. The poor need to get rich. They need economic growth. It also makes countries resilient against disasters not caused by climate change, like the earthquake in Haiti.

Growth produces increasing living standards, jobs, innovation, and individual wellbeing. Because growth is strongest in countries with liberalised markets, rule of law, and representative institutions, it carries with it equality and human rights. By contrast, at best, trading economic growth for lower emissions will just leave us with lower emissions. And we’ll be poorer.

Without an emissions treaty, there’s still reason for optimism. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says by the end of the century, per capita income will have doubled, at least. The world could be 20 times richer.

Take such predictions with a grain of salt: imagine a bunch of geniuses in 1910 trying to guess what the economy in 2000 would look like. Or what the chemical make-up of the atmosphere would be. (We think we’re pretty smart, well so did our ancestors.)

But the IPCC predicts economic costs of global warming will be a tiny fraction of that growth – between 1 per cent and and 5 per cent of gross domestic product. As the environmental economist Richard Tol wrote in January, “a deep recession wreaks as much havoc in a year as climate change would do in a century. Climate change is therefore not the biggest problem of humankind.” (Tol is an IPCC lead author and therefore not a crackpot.)

It doesn’t really matter whether climate change is caused by humans or part of a natural cycle. It might halve the yield of crops planted in the poorest parts of the world. But if those farmers used the advanced techniques of rich countries, they could more than make up for it.

Malaria caused by rising temperatures could be combated by a co-ordinated political effort to reduce global emissions. Or we could concentrate a fraction of that effort on developing a malaria vaccine.

Growth will fortify us against a climate that always changes.

For if you can’t cure the disease, manage the symptoms

Fat Lot Of Good Campaign Against Junk Food Is Doing

The debate over obesity and public health is usually black and white. It’s obvious who the bad guys are: junk food peddlers.

But last year, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo and about a dozen other firms committed to cut advertising of unhealthy products to children. This week, a spokesman for the Responsible Children’s Marketing Initiative said that “television advertising to children of certain foods has virtually ceased during children’s programs”. The firms are also reducing sugar and salt in some products.

Sounds good? Well, the president of the Public Health Association of Australia described it as “incredibly feeble”. Not “a step in the right direction”, or “good, but they could do more”, but literally so feeble it defies credibility.

Call this the “Healthy Menu Choices” conundrum.

For decades, corporations have been told they need to get “socially responsible” and think about more than just profits. And few corporations are more harangued than those selling unhealthy food. They have been demonised by the expanding public health establishment, who are certain children’s minds are being warped and their bellies expanded by the sinister alliance of sugar and advertising.

Milton Friedman wrote in 1970 that the only social responsibility of business was to increase its profits — profits being how businesses figure out whether they’re providing value. Friedman wrote in vain. Corporate philanthropy has become a bigger and bigger part of the business world. For the food industry, this corporate social responsibility means placating public health activists.

So McDonald’s – the very embodiment of unhealthy eating – has introduced salads. It has struck a deal with the Heart Foundation. In New Zealand, it has a relationship with Weight Watchers. Through the responsible marketing initiative, the confectionery industry is trying to show it is as supportive of a healthy Australia as chocolate makers ever could be.

Yet for all these attempts at conciliation, food companies just get demonised more. Each effort is condemned. If everything they do is going to be dismissed as the cynical expansion of corporate power, why should they try?

There’s a big anti-business component to the push for a nanny state. Many public health activists believe the blame for obesity lies with corporations – not with the choices of the people who buy unhealthy food. In the activists’ view, marketing is making people eat things that they would rather avoid, if only they weren’t so entranced by all the flashing lights and catchy jingles.

Hence the attention public health activists pay to multinationals, and the lack of attention they pay to, say, local fish and chip shops, pizzerias or Indian restaurants. Or Gordon Ramsay’s new restaurant — sometimes rich people eat bad things, too.

Last year, McDonald’s started sponsoring a maths tutoring program, Maths Online, for Australian students. The program charged students $40 a month, but McDonald’s sponsorship means it is now free.

The McDonald’s logo is displayed at the bottom of the front page. It’s not like kids are multiplying cheeseburgers and dividing Happy Meals. But, of course, one prominent public health activist, nutritionist Rosemary Stanton, celebrated by asking: “Are we happy [to] sell our children to McDonald’s?”

The public health establishment likes to see itself as a bunch of impartial medical professionals, but it is a coalition of self-styled consumer advocates, “lifestyle advisers” and politicised academics. They see our health as a standoff between corporate profits and the health profession.

But the reality is more mundane, and more frustrating: not everybody believes that every fatty steak is doing them damage.

Certainly, most Australians value their fitness, weight, and life expectancy. But that is not all they value. Unhealthy food sells not because of insidious corporate messaging, but because people like it. Reducing the capacity of corporations to advertise their products won’t stop people wanting fatty or salty food. Unless you believe our primal taste instincts were invented in a boardroom.

So when public health types reduce complex issues of obesity and unhealthy lifestyles to a diatribe about the power of big business, it’s an emotional argument — not an honest one.

Individuals – and in the case of children, their parents – are the ones who choose what they eat. If public health activists want to influence that, they’ll give up the anti-corporate grandstanding and start treating us as if we make our own decisions.