Category: Articles

Liberal Leadership Aftershocks

The resignation of Nick Minchin last week is a reminder that the aftershocks of the late November leadership mania are still reverberating around the Liberal Party.
It was Nick Minchin’s role in the revolt against Malcolm Turnbull which sparked off the debacle that gave Tony Abbott the leadership. And the two men’s views on climate change are very similar.
But climate change isn’t the only issue in Australian politics.
The near fatal accident of Nick Minchin’s son was the trigger for his resignation.
But right now there is an underlying tension within the party over Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme. And there is some speculation that Minchin, as one of the Party’s most stalwart Dries, was deeply unhappy with the abrupt change in the Coalition’s stance on the issue.
The paid parental leave scheme – funded by a tax levied only on Australia’s most profitable businesses – is anathema to the free marketeers within the party. It’s just not very ‘neo-liberal’.
Indeed, on the day the parental leave policy was announced one senior Liberal told The Australian’s Samantha Maiden, that such a scheme resembles “a typical 1930s socialist impost on big business”. This was before the senior Liberal learnt that it was Abbott who proposed it.
When Abbott said that parental leave would be instituted “over this government’s dead body” he wasn’t speaking for himself, but for the government. Abbott has different views. But opposition to parental leave was the view – still is the view – of much of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party.
So it might seem odd, but Abbott and the leader he overthrew are quite similar.
Like Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott has a firm idea of the direction he wants to take the Liberal Party and the conservative movement. And as Malcolm Turnbull discovered before him, this may not be a direction the party wants to be taken.
The direction Abbott would like to take the Liberal Party is all set out in his book, Battlelines, point by point.
Nevertheless, in November, as the shadow cabinet faced an escalating series of resignations, no-one was pulling Battlelines down off the shelves to fully consider the pros and cons of Abbott’s philosophy of government.
Abbott’s book is a quirky mixture of policy, philosophy and personal chronicle – more fun than Peter Costello’s memoirs, but nowhere near as fun as The Latham Diaries.
It was seen as a curiosity at best.
Nobody in the party room was under any illusions about Abbott’s personal views, but neither did many expect him as leader to pursue each and every policy set out in his manifesto.
The alliance between free marketeers and the conservatives who supported (very un-free market) middle class welfare and family tax benefits was stable under John Howard – he spent his career traversing both the radical dry wing of the Liberal party and its conservative wing.
Certainly, Howard favoured one side more than the other. George Brandis said in his Deakin lecture last year that “For Howard, it was as much a conservative party as a liberal party; indeed, with the passage of time, rather more the former than the latter”.
But having been in the public eye for decades, Liberal free marketeers could still believe that Howard was one of them.
Unlike Howard, Abbott doesn’t want to straddle these two Liberal camps. Abbott, as “keeper of the conservative conscience” within the parliamentary party, sees government’s job to protect society from the bleakness of the market economy.
And instead of letting society flourish independently, as free marketeers would argue, Abbott believes government should actively build society in its preferred image.
As he told The Australian in March:
“You can’t run a decent society without a strong economic base… while I think it is important that the national government promote and develop a strong economy, it’s by no means the only or even, at every point, the main task of government.”
Abbott’s distinctly conservative approach is at odds with the other philosophical objective of the many in the Liberal Party – the primacy of the individual and importance of individual liberty. Launching Battlelines last year, Abbott made this explicit: “Individuals are only realised in a social context”.
So an Abbott government is not likely to be a small government.
If Tony Abbott personifies the conservative social-democrat side of John Howard’s legacy, then Nick Minchin personifies the radical free market side. Certainly, Minchin is big on “family values”, but for free marketeers, family values complement dry economic policies like low taxes and small government. For Abbott, family values trump those policies.
As many others have noted, Abbott’s vision of renewed conservatism with the Liberal Party is informed by fairly deep reading and reflection.
It is not, however, a vision uniformly shared within the party he leads.

Follow The Leader

Are you confused by the state of centre-right politics in this country? Probably never more so than this fortnight.
Tony Abbott staked his claim in the climate change debate with a vocal dislike of great big new taxes. But now he’s proposed his own. The opposition can’t coherently claim that an emissions trading scheme is nothing more than a giant burden on business while at the same time imposing a different giant burden on business in the form of a big-business-financed parental leave scheme.
Perplexed? You’re not alone.
In his March Quarterly Essay, “What’s Right? The Future of Conservatism in Australia,” lawyer and academic Waleed Aly distinguishes between liberals, conservatives, neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. For Aly, the latter two aren’t American-style “nuke Iran for freedom” neo-cons but a cross between social conservatives and free marketeers.
Then Aly finds liberal conservatives, cultural fundamentalists and neo-liberal neo-conservatives – which I think are the bad bits of all of the above. Clearly, a broad church is a complicated church.
I guess this bewildering catalogue of ideologies is some progress. For a lot of people, “conservative” seems to be used to describe anyone critical of the Labor Party, with the exception of Bob Brown.
To Aly, all this confusion is because there aren’t any real conservatives left in Australia.
Conservatives value older institutions – such as the family and common law – not because they’re old fuddy-duddies but because those institutions are the end product of centuries of trial and error. Sticking with what we know works is better than following the plan to reorganise society that you sketched on a pub coaster at 3am in the Elephant and Wheelbarrow last night. Even if you’re really smart.
But Aly claims that the conservative temperament of hesitant, evolutionary change has been hijacked by crazy neo-liberals with their crazy free-market ideas.
If only.
The fanatically neo-liberal, deregulation-obsessed Howard government actually passed more pages of law than any previous government. Government is no smaller, no lower taxing, no more conducive to individual liberty than it was a decade ago. On many measures, it’s worse.
There is no party in the Federal Parliament pushing anything near what has come to be called neo-liberalism – the potent combination of social liberalism and economic liberalism. There is no party explicitly arguing that government should stay out of both the boardroom and the bedroom.
Neo-liberals only like the free market because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals – just as other voluntary relationships, such as communities and clubs, do.
But the truth is there’s very little ideology in Australian politics. Australia’s political culture has always been somewhat apprehensive about obviously high-minded philosophies of government.
Australia’s political institutions were formed in the mid-19th century, when utilitarianism was the height of ideological fashion.
Utilitarianism is an intensely practical political philosophy that says the purpose of government should be simply to seek the greatest good for the greatest number. No more, no less.
You might get fancy things such as individual liberty or social equality out of that. But, then again, you might not.
The contrast with the United States couldn’t be stronger. America was founded at the height of the revolutionary period, when kings were killed for fanciful ideals.
Take the American Tea Party movement – a genuine, grassroots manifestation of deeply held political beliefs. Certainly, it’s an uncomfortable coalition between serious right-of-centre activists and crazed conspiracy theorists pretty sure that President Barack Obama is a dastardly Muslim, but could you imagine any remotely similar movement in Australia?
The ideological passion – whether coherent or weird and manic – just isn’t here. Even Australia’s most aggressive public controversies are banally practical.
The boat-people controversy is just a debate about the most efficient way to process asylum seekers, not a debate about immigration or open borders.
Australia joined the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq because it was seen as a nice way to reinforce our bond with the US, not because of a dream for liberty in the Middle East.
The history and culture wars seem deeply ideological, but take this week’s dispute over whether official events should be led by an acknowledgment of traditional Aboriginal owners. It’s hardly a timeless philosophical struggle between value systems – just an inanely repetitive discussion about how “proud” we should be of the founding of the country.
Sure, our lack of ideological fervour sounds like a recipe for harmony. But without any philosophical beliefs about what government should – and, perhaps more importantly, shouldn’t – do, Australian political parties tend to drift aimlessly. Especially in opposition.
Right now it seems the federal opposition has tried to substitute political philosophy with an incoherent populism.
To be fair, this is a problem that some in the Liberal Party seem to be aware of. Late last year, Queensland senator George Brandis made a speech championing the Liberal Party’s small “l” liberal tradition, and shadow treasurer Joe Hockey felt moved this month to title a speech “In defence of liberty”.
The conservatives, too, are trying to stake their claim. Tony Abbott’s book, Battlelines, was supposed to be a definitive statement of conservative philosophy as it can be applied to Australia.
But in Abbott’s tenure as Opposition Leader so far, Coalition policies have swung wildly between extremes. They’re implacably opposed to carbon emissions trading – that would be an odious tax – but keenly supportive of carbon emissions regulation and subsidies, which, they seem to imagine, will be almost cost-free and of no economic consequence.
This policy incoherence isn’t because they are blinded by a firmly held ideology. It’s because they’re blind without one.

The Ghost Of Liberals Past

Could the historical Robert Menzies be anywhere near as good as the Robert Menzies that exists in everybody’s minds?
Last week, Tony Abbott told a Sydney Liberal branch that the Liberals could win power if they embraced Menzies’ lessons – small government, and free markets.
This was, of course, a few days before he announced the super parental leave scheme, which will impose a substantial special tax on Australia’s most profitable businesses, in order to fund the middle class welfare policy to end all middle class welfare policies.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s political editor quickly damned the Abbott scheme, claiming that the opposition leader should have at the same time “apologised to the spirit of … Robert Menzies”, for abandoning his free enterprise ideals. To which The Australian quickly replied that Menzies was himself a big supporter of the welfare state.
During the Howard years there was an endless stream of columns claiming that John Howard had “betrayed the Menzies vision”. Or “abandoned his legacy”, as if Menzies would have crossed the floor against Howard, if only the passage of time had given him a chance.
Menzies is either a stick to be wielded against the modern Liberal Party, or a divining rod for seeking its future direction. But like a divining rod, those who use Menzies’ legacy are revealing more about themselves than about Menzies.
Nevertheless, when Bob Brown states on Twitter that “Tony Abbott’s new front bench makes Sir Robert Menzies look pink”, it’s a fair point. Menzies does look a little pink these days.
The post-war Menzies government was centralist enough to be a blank slate upon which anybody can impose their ideal vision of the past. Well, at least it was centralist by the standards of the time. With the hindsight of half a century, the Menzies government was a protectionist government, supportive of high levels of regulation, restrictive industrial laws, and, most damningly, the White Australia Policy.
So if Menzies really was a free marketeer, he certainly hid it well. The Australian economy in the middle of last century had levels of interference that would make the Greens blush.
The Menzies government was better than its predecessor, which tried to outright nationalise the banking system. But the conservative victory in 1949 was no breakthrough for free-enterprise, despite the subsequent myth making.
Trade policy is an obvious indicator of a government’s philosophical beliefs. And on free trade, Menzies looks very bad. With the possible exception of 1950 and 1951, when import controls were temporarily lifted in response to American demand, Australia’s markets were tightly regulated by the federal government, with import licensing and quota restrictions meant to protect industry from dastardly foreign competition.
After more than a decade of conservative government, those import restrictions were lifted in 1960, and the work of micromanaging the economy was left to tariffs. But it was Gough Whitlam, of all people, who started the real work of opening the Australian economy to the world, when he cut tariffs 25 per cent across the board.
We have a habit of thinking that being right equates with success, and being wrong equates with failure.
But just because some certain political leader was successful – and Menzies certainly was successful, if measured simply by years on the job – doesn’t mean they are an idol against which we should measure our values. If right-of-centre Australians want to evoke the spirit of their philosophical ancestors, they’d do better to remember their glorious failures.
Take the nineteenth century politician Bruce Smith, Australia’s answer to the great British liberals Richard Cobden and John Bright.
Smith wrote Liberty and Liberalism, a manifesto of free trade and small government, which the Australian Dictionary of Biography helpfully describes as ‘anachronistic’ because he believed in limiting state interference in the economy. (Economic liberty is so just so … old-fashioned.)
Smith fervently opposed the White Australian Policy, arguing that the “foundation of the [Immigration Restriction] bill was undoubtedly racial prejudice”. Smith’s liberalism was remarkably modern: “I venture to say that a large part of the scare is founded upon a desire to make political capital by appealing to some of the worst instincts of the more credulous of the people.” He should have just said “dog-whistle”.
Smith was a big supporter of business. He helped found and direct the Victorian Employers Union in 1885 and the New South Wales Employers’ Union in 1888, as a response of business to the growing trade unions.
Or we could consider George Reid, who was the first and only Free Trade Party Prime Minister. Or Bert Kelly, the “modest member” who was a dedicated supporter of free trade within Menzies’ government, and anticipated the liberalisations of the 1980s and 1990s.
Modern political parties are welcome to celebrate the achievements of their former leaders. But if they need philosophical inspiration – and they do – they’ll have to look elsewhere.

Schools Should Be Free To Teach What They Want

Most people seem to have missed the point about the national curriculum.
 
The opposition certainly has. If the national curriculum is as bad as Nationals senator Ron Boswell says – it “reads like a Marxist learner…to prepare our young for the anti-capitalist class struggle” – in a way, that’s the (decidedly not Marxist) Howard government’s fault.
 
Taking control of the curriculum out of the hands of the states and into the loving arms of the federal government didn’t begin when Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election.
 
In a speech in 2006, Julie Bishop, the then education minister, argued Canberra needed to grab the school curriculum “out of the hands of ideologues in the state and territory education bureaucracies and give it to, say, a national board of studies”.
 
But last week, after having seen the national curriculum in its proposed glory, Christopher Pyne, the coalition’s education spokesman, claimed it imposed “a particular black armband view of our history”. Obviously Bishop’s plan didn’t work.
 
There’s a lesson here. Whether we get an Abbott government after this election, a Turnbull government in 2013, or a Joyce-Tuckey government in 2016, that government will need to realise any new powers they grant themselves won’t be theirs forever.
 
Nevertheless, Boswell and Pyne are wrong. The proposed curriculum is hardly the vanguard of the international socialist movement. But it does have its peculiarities.
 
The science curriculum’s insistence that science should be taught as a cultural endeavour – with Asian and Aboriginal perspectives such as the Dreamtime – seems more like cultural studies. Worthy in their own right perhaps, but teaching myths in science class is a bit odd.
 
And its emphasis on “the human responsibility to contribute to sustainability” seems just a touch ideologically loaded.
 
The history curriculum in year 10 investigates “struggles for freedom and rights”, which is great. But it starts its investigation with the United Nations, as if the concept of human rights just popped up in 1945.
 
And perhaps having kids learn about “Sorry Day” is laudable. But it seems a bit much for the apology – which is a distinctly political achievement of the Rudd government – to be given curriculum status so soon.
 
Nevertheless, it’s probably not an awful curriculum. Unfortunately, “not awful” is the best we’re going to get from a curriculum designed to be imposed across the country. It is supposed to equally serve the needs of students attending both Camberwell South Primary School, with 496 relatively well-off students, to Gochin Jiny Jirra School, a remote school in the NT with just 25.
 
The professed reason for the national curriculum is that there are 80,000 students who move interstate each year. But there are 3 million students all up. So the curriculum is being imposed for the convenience of just 2.3 per cent of the student population.
 
Still, if we know anything about our Kevin Rudd, we know he loves to be in charge of stuff. A national curriculum is right up his alley, even without John Howard’s beat-back-the-leftie-historians agenda.
 
The federal government seems to believe a national curriculum will be inherently better than state curriculums. But “national” is not a synonym for “awesome”.
 
If we really wanted a revolution in education, we’d give schools flexibility to tailor the curriculum to the needs and profile of their student body.
 
At the very least, the study of history, which can be subject to many more interpretations than mathematics, could be left to the discretion of schools. After all, most of the bitterness over the history wars was about ideological control over the curriculum.
 
If some parents wanted their children to be taught that capitalism has brought misery and oppression and darkness, they could choose that. If other parents wanted their children to understand how market relationships lead to mutual gain, and free trade alleviates poverty, they could choose that too.
 
Until the government gives control of the curriculum back to schools, parents and students will always be somewhat unsatisfied with what Australian children are taught.

From the Rum Corps to the alcopop

A review of Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia by Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor L. Jordan

In the special episode of ABC TV’s Q&A in February this year, Kevin Rudd was asked whether he would like to raise the drinking age to 21: ‘of course’. Rudd quickly backed away from that definitive statement when the audience responded negatively. (The Q&A audience was limited to those between the ages of 16 to 25. Raising the drinking age would no doubt have been a more tangible disenfranchisement than if he had taken away their right to vote.)

In Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia, Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor L. Jordan explore Australia’s long and stormy relationship with our drinks. Australian culture reserves a prominent place for alcohol and where alcohol is consumed. And Australian history has no lack of social reformers who opposed alcohol’s cultural prominence.

Fitzgerald and Jordan nominate three moments where alcohol has played a part in three critical episodes in Australian history: the Rum Rebellion (the attempt to shut down the spirits trade being the immediate cause of the revolt against Governor Bligh), the Eureka Stockade (where a fair number of the rebels were drunk on the last night of the stockade and probably underperformed in the battle at dawn the next day), and the Dismissal (John Kerr enjoyed his drinks, and Gough Whitlam claimed in 2002 that he never would have appointed him Governor General if he’d know just how much he enjoyed them).

But Fitzgerald and Jordan back away from saying alcohol was anything but proximate to these events. They conclude that the Rum Rebellion wasn’t really about rum at all, but more about the governing style of Bligh. And if some miners were drunk at the Eureka Stockade, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference. Gerard Henderson has argued that the claim Kerr was a drunk is contradicted by no less an authority than his own physician, and to claim, as Whitlam has, that the Dismissal wouldn’t have happened without Kerr’s drinking is to ignore the rather significant political events that led it.

Nevertheless, if alcohol has had little direct impact on the big historical events, it has been a major part of Australian culture. Fitzgerald and Jordan describe the economic and cultural development of domestic wine and beer industries. They detail how what we drink has always been a marker of social status and cultural position, and the regional variations across the country. The regulatory framework that governs alcohol has also governed its cultural place-from the nineteenth century victories of the temperance movement, to the mid-twentieth century closing limits and gender discrimination laws in bars, to today’s Nanny State campaigns.

Fitzgerald and Jordan describe an eighteenth century attitude towards alcohol that was similar to today’s. The twin characteristic virtues in this period were ‘usefulness and amiability’. Usefulness was, in the early industrial revolution, of obviously value. But that usefulness had to be tempered by amiability. This amiability was more than just the agreeableness of good manners it was, in the words of one historian quoted by Fitzgerald and Jordan, ‘a genuine loving regard for other people’.

The authors argue that without understanding those twin virtues, we might mistake the eighteenth century attitude to alcohol as hypocrisy-the men who, for instance, damned John Macarthur’s role in the spirit trade, also enjoyed their fair share of alcohol. Fitzgerald and Jordan point out that there is a substantial difference between drinking to be amiable and drunkenness, and this difference was well-recognised at the time.

But that distinction has never been without its own hypocrisies. We see it today clearly-what constitutes good drinking and bad drinking is often just as much about the class of the drinker than the volume they drink. The alcopops furore of 2008 increased the tax on canned rum-and-cokes, which are consumed more in Frankston than Carlton North, where wine is drunk. Wine remains a protected and coddled industry, part of an idea of what Australians ought to drink.

By providing a sociological history of alcohol consumption in Australia, Fitzgerald and Jordan allow us to unpack the origin of the Nanny State, and the ideology that supports it.

Open the Borders

Introduction: It seems a bit odd but when we talk about immigration, we rarely talk about how good it is for immigrants themselves.

Maybe it’s too obvious. After all, people only travel when they perceive benefits from doing so. For the world’s poorest, the simple act of crossing from the developing world to the developed world raises incomes dramatically. A Mexican crossing into the United States can expect to earn more than twice the wages he or she would have earned at home, a Haitian can expect to earn more than six times the wages in Haiti. Combine this with the non-economic advantages of the developed world — stable rule of law, liberal democracies, respect for human rights — and it isn’t hard to see why packing up and shipping off to the First World is so popular.

One could perhaps leave the argument there. A core principle of liberalism is that people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they do not violate the rights of others.

But immigration is good for the developed world, too. It’s good for the economy—immigrants end up being entrepreneurs and shopkeepers; employees and employers; and consumers and producers. More people mean more creativity, more opportunity, and more culture. Migrants bring skills, knowledge and international connections.

Available here.

IPA Review Editorial, March 2010

‘People have been saying for a while now that what we need is a book industry plan’, said the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr in a speech in mid-February. ‘No one is going to ghost it for you-the industry will have to tell its own story-but I will do everything in my power to facilitate the process.’

Carr was launching a ‘Book Industry Strategy Group’ to ‘map the way forward’ for the Australia publishing industry in an era of digitisation.

So we can add ‘save books from the internet’ to the long list of ambitions of the federal government.

We talk a lot about how over-regulation is burdening the Australian economy. But more perverse is the way that state and federal governments want to pull entrepreneurs into their loving, bureaucratic arms.

The government offers a bewildering array of subsidies and grant programs to do so. We have the ‘Australian Tourism Development Program’, the ‘Automotive Competitiveness and Investment Scheme’, the ‘Biofuels Capital Grants Program’, ‘Building Entrepreneurship in Small Business’, and the ‘Certain Inputs to Manufacture Program’.

There’s ‘Clean Business Australia’ (that one gets $240 million to work with), the ‘Climate Ready Program’, ‘Commercial Ready’ ($200 million), Commercialising Emerging Technologies (proudly described as ‘merit-based’, implying that the marketplace wouldn’t know merit if it stepped on its head), and the ‘Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership Program’.

And about forty others. Hop on to the government’s AusIndustry website: you might be eligible for a grant.

In her review of Ron Manners’ book, Heroic Misadventures, in this edition, Julie Novak points out that entrepreneurs are still the fuel with which the Australian economy moves forward. The entrepreneurial drive harnesses the potent combination of risk and creativity – without it we would not have an economy, let alone the technology and living standards we enjoy today.

Do we really want Australia’s budding innovators spending their time filling out paperwork for the ‘R&D Start’ program, instead of scrimping for capital and pitching to potential investors?

In fact, the very idea that we have an ‘innovation’ minister is extraordinary. Innovation is at the very centre of a capitalist economy – companies innovate in order to compete with each other. They don’t – or shouldn’t – need the advice and coordination of a Commonwealth minister to do so.

So it is with the book industry. The digital revolution is a potent challenge to Australia’s publishing industry. Amazon’s ebook reader Kindle and Apple’s soon-to-be-released iPad has emphasised the extent of that challenge. But industries meet challenges by experimenting with business models, and developing better products. Not by looking to government for a ‘Book Industry Plan’.

The drive to fully socialise vast swathes of the economy disappeared some years ago. But the drive to control the economy – to direct it, to subsidise it, to coordinate it – is just as strong as ever.

Terror Laid Bare

Flying is awful – and it looks like it’s only going to get worse. The actual “flying” part can be all right if you get one of those exotic personal entertainment systems with a trillion movies and every kind of Tetris rip-off imaginable.

Modern airlines come in two types: those that pride themselves on their hospitality, and those that pride themselves on abusing the goodwill of passengers to keep costs down. Either way, commercial airlines aim to please in some fashion.

But not even George Clooney in Up in the Air was able to make traversing the government’s airport security checkpoints look elegant.

Sociologists of the future will describe this as the “ritual” of travel: lists of what you can and cannot take into the plane; convenient check-in machines complemented by impossibly long baggage lines; the security barriers; making sure you remove your laptop; taking off your belt; and being swabbed for bomb residue.

Hop on a plane to the US and it’s worse. Since the underpants bomber failed to blow up his underpants on Christmas Day last year, airport security frisks passengers so intimately they can not only detect bombs in jocks, but can detonate them by hand.

Kevin Rudd has announced an extra $200 million for airport security. “It may,” said the Prime Minister in his best leadership voice, “mean it takes longer for passengers to pass through security, but the government believes that this inconvenience is a small price to pay for increased security.” (Incidentally, the prime ministerial jet was renovated in 2007, at a cost of $100,000.)

We’ll be paying this “small price” because the Prime Minister has decided to install full body scanners in Australian airports, scanners that can see through clothing to get almost naked images of passengers.

No surprise that some people worry about the privacy implications. In Britain, there is even serious concern that body scanners breach child porn laws. It’s illegal to create indecent images of children, and that’s what happens when children go through body scanners designed to look under clothing.

Privacy issues aside, what’s the point? Body scanners will be just another ceremony added to the elaborate ritual of travel – prime examples of “security theatre”. We might feel safer, but we’re not actually safer.

After all, how much safer could we possibly be? The risk of terrorism is infinitesimally small.

In the United States, there is an average of just one terrorist incident every 16.5 million flights, according to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

In Australia, there are half a million domestic flights per year. Every day more than 100,000 people fly from one Australian city to another; 50,000 more either leave or enter the country.

But when in 2003 a parliamentary committee asked a witness from the Department of Transport whether there had ever been a terrorist incident on an aircraft in Australia, nobody could think of one. (There had been an unsuccessful hijacking attempt of a flight between Melbourne and Launceston in May that year, but the hijacker was suffering from severe paranoid schizophrenia. Hardly a professional jihadist.)

So even if full body scanners in every airport in the country halved the risk of terrorism, half of bugger-all is still bugger-all.

Human beings are terrible at assessing risk. In the past 12 months, there have been more than 1500 deaths on Australian roads. By contrast, over the past decade, 469 airline passengers died from bombings, hijackings or pilot shootings in the entire world. More than half of those fatalities occurred on September 11. The noughties were the second-safest decade for air travel since the 1950s, and there are a lot more passenger flights now.

Perhaps it’s all that security that makes flying so safe. But security specialist Bruce Schneier argues that there are just two truly effective protections against terrorism on airlines. The first is reinforced cockpit doors – without access to the cockpit, it’s hard to turn a plane into a flying missile. Since 2001, pilots do not open that door.

The second is us. Right now, the strongest defence we have against airplane hijackings or bombings isn’t terrorist no-fly lists or body scanners. It’s the passengers who now know they shouldn’t passively comply with the demands of terrorists, and who know the guy doing chemistry in the bathroom should not be left in peace.

The Christmas underpants bomber was scary, but security worked exactly as it should have. He couldn’t get a “good” bomb on board, so he tried to detonate a bomb so awkward it required 20 minutes of preparation in the toilet. And he couldn’t get it to work. He was quickly subdued by passengers when his pants caught on fire.

The Australian attempted hijacking was also defeated by passengers.

Back in 2005, then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone was candid about the absurdity of airline security. With obvious enthusiasm, she posed this hypothetical to a private audience: “If I was able to get on a plane with an HB pencil – which you are able to – and stabbed the HB pencil into your eyeball and wiggled it around down to your brain area, do you think you’d be focusing?”

Most terrorist plots are discovered through quiet investigative work, and foiled long before they are anywhere near ready, although we still haven’t dealt with the “Amanda Vanstone driving an HB pencil into your eyeball” threat. So the risk of airline terrorism will never be zero. But let’s try not to panic.

Take The Politics Out Of Commerce, Not Vice Versa

Last week the Australian Electoral Commission published its latest donation figures for political parties. Donations are down from last year.

Nevertheless, these figures were accompanied by the standard appeals to “clean up” the political process and get corporate influence out of politics.

But it was also the week that the federal government introduced its emissions trading scheme into Parliament for the third time. In the government’s words, if passed, the emissions trading scheme “will change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy”. When the government has this sort of ambition, is it really any surprise businesses are trying to influence the political process?

The problem with political donations isn’t that corporations are unduly trying to manipulate laws and regulations to their benefit. It’s that politicians are trying to shape an Australia where businesses have to involve themselves in the political system or they just might go broke.

The government plans to give out billions of dollars worth of free emissions permits as part of its emissions trading scheme. And the Coalition’s policy includes an “emissions reduction fund” of about $1.2 billion per year for some companies that reduce their emissions.

So if you had an aluminium smelter, and you didn’t take any politicians out to dinner in 2009, you’ve neglected your business responsibilities. Your competitors will be wining and dining any backbencher they can grasp.

But some of the biggest donors this year weren’t energy firms. The banks handed over a few lazy hundred thousand dollars to the major parties. Even while smarting from the financial crisis, the banks were self-aware enough to recognise the government’s guaranteeing of their bank deposits at taxpayer expense was a great deal for their shareholders.

And they’ll want a say in what comes next: like the Senate inquiry announced last week into small business access to finance. And whatever the government does with executive pay reform. And the results of Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s tax review. My point isn’t that we should feel sorry for the banks; they’re as protected by the government as they are regulated by the government.

But when Kevin Rudd says Westpac should have a “long hard look at itself”, or when Tony Abbott hints that if he makes it to the Lodge he’ll impose more banking regulation in response to the interest rate rise, what do we expect these firms to do? Just sit back and cop whatever regulation the government deems? Or, worse, whatever regulation their competitors convince the government to impose?

If firms aren’t donating, they’re lobbying. The government’s register records nearly 300 lobbying firms. More than 1800 Australian organisations paid these lobbyists to saunter around the corridors of Parliament. Even The Big Issue apparently feels the need for professional representation in Canberra – the magazine is listed as a client of two of Australia’s biggest lobbyists, Hawker Britton and Enhance Corporate.

It’s strange that we seem to blame the companies who donate money to political parties for the corruption of our democracy, rather than the politicians who take that money and change the law to suit. A US study last year found that for every dollar US companies spent lobbying Congress, they received $220 in tax benefits. What firm wouldn’t want that sort of return on investment?

The solution isn’t to regulate political donations, or crack down on lobbyists. We could try. But the stakes are far too high for any limit on corporate influence to be effective. A company that feels its entire raison d’etre could be eliminated with the stroke of a legislative pen will find a way to influence politicians, whether we like it or not.

We’ve gotten into this situation because of a bipartisan belief that there are no limits to what government should do – there are almost no areas of the economy the government shouldn’t oversee, regulate or direct.

So do we want commerce out of politics? We’ll have to get politics out of commerce first.

What Do Haitians Need Most? To Get Away From Haiti

It will take much more than a global outpouring of grief to fix Haiti. But there is one concrete way rich countries could really help out – immigration. Twelve days after the Haitian earthquake, the choices for the poorest nation in the western hemisphere are stark. Haiti was already an impoverished and virtually ungoverned nation before January 12.
Haiti’s poverty has meant it lacks the basic things that make wealthy nations better able to cope with natural disasters – functioning emergency services, law and order, safe and stable buildings, and supplies that are cheap, abundant and accessible.
So with poverty and the failure of development being at the centre of the Haitian tragedy, it’s easy to be cynical when the usual crowd pipes up. Last week, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown reportedly asked schlocky American Idol judge Simon Cowell to record a charity single to raise money for Haiti. George Clooney has hosted a fund-raising telethon, complete with “all of his famous pals”, as US Magazine succinctly described them. And Linkin Park, Alanis Morissette and Peter Gabriel are all donating “unreleased tracks” for a charity compilation. They’re no doubt trying to help in good faith.
Haiti has been a long-term recipient of foreign aid. Between 1990 and 2005, foreign aid to Haiti came to $US4 billion. Aid provides about 7 per cent of Haiti’s total gross domestic product. And for the past century, economic growth in Haiti has either been stagnant or declined. The reasons for this are many. Extraordinarily bad governments, which in the 20th century seesawed between repressive dictatorship and corrupt plutocracy, have undermined any legal framework for the protection of civil liberties, property rights, or for law and order.
It is for this reason that, when assessing the impact of its aid projects, the World Bank found “in project after project, the reason for delayed implementation or cancellation, is a coup [or] civil unrest”. This has been compounded by the bureaucratic complexity of many aid projects, administrative failures by Haitian governments, and confused priorities on the part of donors. Future assistance programs will have to directly tackle Haiti’s biggest problem – bad governance – if they are to succeed.
But if the developed world really wants to help Haiti, we could let as many Haitians as humanly possible work in the West. We could dramatically expand our guest worker and migration programs.
According to a 2008 study by the Centre for Global Development, Haitian immigrants in the US earn on average six times more than equally educated Haitians who stay home. It would be more effective and efficient to allow Haitians to move to other countries than wait for the international community or aid organisations or the Haitian Government to repair two centuries of institutional failure.
Immigration away from Haiti will actually help Haiti. Foreign aid to the country may be substantial, but it is overwhelmed by what expat Haitians send home. In 2008, foreign governments gave Haiti $US912 million. Haitian expats sent back at least $US1.3 billion, according to the most conservative estimates. Other estimates suggest unreported remittances to Haiti might account for up to a third of Haiti’s total GDP.
And while much foreign aid is delivered directly to the Haitian Government (which doesn’t have a wonderful track record in using it well), these remittances go straight to the Haitian people.
The Obama Administration’s recent announcement that Haitians already living in the US (illegally or not) will be granted temporary visas is an important step. But for domestic politicians in the developed world, increasing foreign aid is less politically complicated than dramatically expanding immigration intakes. And certainly less controversial.
Nevertheless, even a modest expansion of guest worker programs in the US and other developed nations will have a greater long-term effect than any amount of money Simon Cowell’s charity single can raise.