Articles – Page 59

Bring On The Acid Bath

Australian public debate is usually sober and routine. Policies are proposed, criticised and eventually watered down. One person calls another person a “neo-liberal” and everybody goes home at a quarter past five.

So when novelist Peter Carey claims that a technical legislative change affecting the publishing industry will encourage the growth of “a new species that can swim in acid”, it is at least an entertaining break from the normal banalities.

The Productivity Commission is investigating the removal of the ban on parallel importing, which makes it illegal to import for sale any book that has already been published in Australia. It seems that any proposal to lift this ban is like kryptonite straight to the groin of Australia’s publishing fraternity.

If the ban is lifted, Carey imagines a very bleak future: “long-term devastation” and “cultural self-suicide”; Australian book editors will be “reduced to nothing, to become marketers and publicists for Paris Hilton”. And according to Carey, treacherous – and apparently acid-resistant – global retailers will take over. They plan to rob Aussie publishers “blind”.

Also chiming in, Tim Winton was slightly less surreal but more poetic, predicting a “great bitterness” would wash through the Australian literary community.

And Matthew Reilly, whose books have sold more than 4 million copies, compared the possible influx of popular books if the ban is lifted to the introduction of McDonald’s.

Our novelists are adopting a whole new strategy into debate over microeconomic reform: emotional blackmail. As a general rule, if a law needs a lot of exceptions to avoid being idiotic, it’s probably not a very good law. And there are a lot of exceptions to the ban on parallel importing.

To ensure Australian readers aren’t shut out of the worldwide book market altogether, if a new book hasn’t found an Australian publisher within 30 days, importers are free to bring it in. Other regulatory exceptions ensure that overseas travellers don’t get arrested for bringing in the Dan Brown novel they picked up at Heathrow, and that booksellers aren’t jailed for ordering books that are out of stock in Australia.

The hardest thing in retail is trying to figure out how much consumers are willing to pay for your product.

Australians might be willing to pay a relatively high price for books, but for the less affluent Indian market, authors and publishers might have to sell at a lower price. Clever capitalists try to segment their market as much as possible – rich people pay more, poor people pay less.

So if parallel importing is legalised, Winton, Carey and a lot of publishers are worried that bookshops will be able to import those cheaper copies.

Well, hey – cheaper books for everyone! And if authors really want to keep selling their books at different prices in different markets, they should be able to use private contracts to prevent their own retailers from undercutting them. Like all protectionist laws, the ban on parallel importing privileges producers over the consumers they are supposed to serve – novelists no more deserve to be insulated from competition and consumer demand than farmers, computer programmers or line workers.

In an era where everything is available on the internet, segmenting a market is getting harder and harder. Over time, the whole issue of parallel importing may become obsolete – call it the Amazon effect. The debate shows how much Australian cultural producers have made it appear that our culture is only possible with government protection.

But strong and vibrant culture doesn’t usually come from a bureaucratically orchestrated jumble of subsidies, regulations and writers’ workshops. Culture shouldn’t need a legislative umbrella to protect it.

Peter Carey may believe that parallel importing will silence Australian authors, but there’s something anachronistic and nationalist about the crusade to encourage specifically Australian voices, Australian stories and Australian images. It is peculiar that while we might believe that modern Australia is a cultural collage of backgrounds and value systems, culture warriors on both sides of politics are not able to admit that this makes the deliberate encouragement of a uniquely Australian culture a sham. Many Australian Muslims might find Islamic authors published overseas more personally enriching than Tim Winton’s descriptions of surf in Western Australia.

Unique voices will continue to find their way in a marketplace no matter how globalised that marketplace is – globalisation may spread McDonald’s outlets across the world, but it also makes far-away Peruvian cultural products easily accessible to punters in Narre Warren.

Yet Australia’s cultural legislation protects and subsidises authors with the aim of constructing some sort of universal story that can be shared by the 21 million people living within the territorial limits of Australia. Apart from being futile, this attitude imagines that Australia is a solitary island, rather than deeply integrated in cultures spanning the globe.

Culture evolves in the wild, battered and shaped by the elements, and by the pressure of competitors. It is more likely to stagnate or starve when protected in an artificial environment. The more Australian authors have to compete, the more rewarding our cultures will become.

Tinseltown Ideology Reflects Our Cultural Obsessions

It’s no surprise that when Hollywood decided to remake the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still for modern audiences, the theme would change from nuclear war to the now much more popular fear of environmental collapse. There is a long tradition of movies with political messages.

But the strikingly different approach of each film speaks volumes about a shift in green philosophy of the last few years. It is apparently now unremarkable to believe that humanity should be sacrificed at the altar of Gaia.

The plot of both The Day the Earth Stood Still films is very simple – an alien named “Klaatu” visits Earth to teach humanity a lesson about its bad ways.

In the 1951 film, Klaatu is a sort of Christ-like figure, whose extraterrestrial intervention into human affairs brings about an age of peace. This original Klaatu is a charming alien who firmly but gently convinces mankind to abandon politics and warfare. Humanity obediently pulls back from the nuclear precipice. Peace and good times are then had by all.

In 2009, the filmmakers have changed Klaatu into a dictatorial environmentalist with a penchant for genocide. Keanu Reeves plays a Klaatu who fairly quickly decides that all humans need to be immediately eliminated for the sake of the earth. The new film is sort of like an episode of Doctor Who where the Daleks are the good guys.

Indeed, the alien civilisations of 2009 appear to be everything that the alien civilisations of 1951 were trying to stop. When the 1951 Klaatu steps out of his space ship, he immediately states that he has come to visit the earth “in peace and with good will”. By contrast, it seems that Keanu Reeves steps out of his space ship only to briefly survey the species he plans to destroy. This film has to be one of the most deeply anti-human movies in a long time.

So what does it say about our collective mental health that, when we try to imagine a “good” race of aliens, we also imagine that they would want to systematically slaughter us? If we’re lucky, the next bunch of extraterrestrial visitors will bring us the anti-depressants we so obviously need.

The extraordinary ideological change between the original The Day the Earth Stood Still and its remake shows how mainstream apocalyptic environmentalism has become. Obviously, the vast majority of those who care for the environment also think that the human race is probably worth keeping alive. But what was, just a few years ago, the harmless spluttering of Malthusian academics certain that the Earth needs to halve its population, is now being repackaged approvingly as infotainment.

Movies have always both reflected and distorted our cultural obsessions. Filmmakers aren’t stupid – they want movies to sell to as wide an audience as possible, so they try to mimic as best they can the attitudes and interests of the population at large.

But at the same time, the political views of most filmmakers hardly reflect the political views of that audience. You could shove the number of conservatives and libertarians in Hollywood into a small Prius, and still have enough room for their pets, or their guns – or whatever profit-loving, environment-hating, worker-oppressing things they like to carry around with them.

So every year, Hollywood produces a couple of films that are little more than vehicles for Tinseltown’s latest trendy ideology. Last year’s otherwise charming Wall-E depicted humanity as not just destructive, but also morbidly obese morons encased in hover-chairs. And the global warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow implied that the world was just one bonfire away from a climate implosion.

Presumably the next iteration of Godzilla will be born because of an aggregate global temperate change of 3 degrees spread over a century.

Of course, if you’re too quick to jump at the latest popular cause, it’s easy to make mistakes. Hollywood can get it spectacularly wrong. Remember the overpopulation crisis of the 1970s? A steady stream of films like Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, The Last Child, and Z.P.G. (which stood for the environmental movement’s aim of “zero population growth”) tried to popularise the bizarre idea that the amount of people the world had in 1978 was exactly the maximum population the world could hold.

But despite Hollywood’s best efforts at convincing us not to, we kept on breeding. At the time of writing, we have not yet had to resort to turning our dead into basic foodstuffs.

For decades, the film industry churned out films about the need for love, peace and just generally getting along. What made them stop? Bring back the original, kindly Klaatu, who wants to help humanity, not destroy it.

The Bail-Out Disease

If pop psychology has taught us anything, it has taught us that individuals go through five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Governments do, too. Presented with the biggest economic crisis in 50 years, the Federal Government first tried to ignore it and then angrily blamed it on greedy capitalists. Now having reached the bargaining stage, Canberra has convinced itself that it can fix the crisis if it applies just the right sort of stimulus and bails out just the right sort of companies.

Already the number of industries being prepared for bail-outs is large. Car dealers have been bailed out. Commercial property investors look to be bailed out. Banks are being bailed out with the fluffy blanket of a government guarantee. Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard appears to have spent the past few months moonlighting as the liquidator for a chain of child-care centres. Now the dairy industry wants a bail-out, presumably because of the importance of marinated fetta to economic growth.

We could also add to that list the car industry, but I’m not sure that we can blame the global financial crisis for that – propping up this sector with piles of cash and legislative favours is sort of an Australian tradition. We were probably going to do it anyway.

All of these are dwarfed by the strong possibility that the Federal Government will have to eventually bail out the state of NSW. Collectively, the NSW Government is far worse than the most reckless, hard-partying, due-diligence-ignoring Wall Street CEO. When NSW inevitably goes into receivership, its citizen-shareholders will wish they could sue.

Seriously, who isn’t eligible for a bail-out? Your guess is as good as anybody’s. None of the traditional policy justifications for propping up failing companies – whether you agree with them or not – seem to apply to our great bail-out bonanza.

For example, child-care organisations are clearly not “too big to fail”. Car dealers are clearly not “too important to fail”. If there is a formula governing which industries are eligible for a government bail-out, it sure is an obscure one.

But the sad reality is that the decision about which companies deserve a bail-out – and which companies should join whale oil merchants and abacus makers in the cemetery of dead businesses – is entirely arbitrary, dependent only on the political winds in Canberra.

So there’s a certain hypocrisy about a Government that on the one hand is deeply concerned about the influence of lobbyists and donations on the political process, and on the other is making it more and more attractive for businesses to seek political favours. Own a company? You’d be stupid not to try for a guarantee, or a loan, or any other trick that transfers money from the Government to you. Bail-out lotto is a surprisingly easy game to win, and it offers big prizes.

Of course, bail-outs are extraordinarily unfair to those who aren’t on their pleasant receiving end. Shareholder capitalism should be pretty simple. People bet their money in the market on businesses that they think might be a good thing. They profit when they are correct and lose when they aren’t. The companies that make bad decisions, or make products that no one wants to buy, fail. And the good ones survive.

While government bail-outs are no doubt well-intentioned – nobody likes to see companies collapse and jobs disappear – they dramatically alter this basic formula. They undermine the certainty that is so important to economic confidence – investors have no idea how the Government will react to a business heading south. Bail-outs mean that people aren’t financially punished for their bad financial decisions. They keep companies afloat that probably should sink – if your business model isn’t working, do something else with your time.

And bail-outs are expensive. There’s no clearer example of corporate welfare than the Government taking money from taxpayers and adding it to the revenue spreadsheets of Australia’s biggest businesses. Bail-outs are paid for by everybody, but they’re not available to everybody.

Does anybody doubt that if the Government was presented with the imminent collapse of Ansett that it would have quickly ponied up the cash? At the time, the Howard government resisted the howls of Ansett executives and the unions and let Ansett die the death it deserved. Nearly a decade later, flights have never been cheaper and it is safe to assume that most of those who were laid off at the time have been able to find work in a more productive enterprise.

The political eagerness to bail out failing companies just reveals that they – like a lot of us – don’t quite understand what is going wrong with our economy.

It’s actually a bit misleading to describe our economic woes as a crisis.

If anything deserves that title, it was the asset bubble that was burst in the crash last year.

All the downsizing and unemployment that we face over the next year is not the crisis, it is the correction.

So when the Government tries to stimulate the economy with big spending and tries to resuscitate dying companies, it isn’t resisting the crisis, it’s resisting the correction. And preventing the economy from healing itself isn’t doing Australians any favours.

Things fail. Napoleon failed to conquer Russia. Baz Luhrmann’s Australia failed to be the nextTitanic. And companies fail. In fact, building a successful business is an extremely hard thing to do.

The sooner we get to the last stage of grief – acceptance – the quicker our economy is going to recover.

Leave The Poor Old Chaps Alone

The State Government’s proposed application of anti-discrimination legislation to men-only clubs is an odd priority for a government during a financial crisis. States across Australia are staring down the barrel of deficits, high unemployment and the implosion of our domestic manufacturing industry. But Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls has decided to intervene in a private dispute between what he describes as “progressive thinkers” and “crusty old fogeys and young fuddy-duddies” at the exclusive Athenaeum Club over whether to allow female members.

Seriously, does our Attorney-General have no better way to spend his time? After all, if you’re wealthy enough to afford the high membership fees demanded by Melbourne’s exclusive clubs, you’re hardly a victim of debilitating discrimination.

There are many organisations in Australia with membership rules that could be considered discriminatory. There are women-only gyms. There are gay-only nightclubs. There are same-sex schools. There are churches that will only hire you as a priest if you believe in God. And there are places that insist you take off your shoes before you enter, even if you really don’t want to.

Of course, there are pockets in Australian society where people do encounter discrimination on the basis of race, gender or religion. But exclusive clubs are hardly a social problem that demands immediate action from a crack team of legislators. These clubs are a lot more harmless than the government seems to believe. As The Age reported on Friday, less than one-fifth of the Melbourne Club’s membership is also listed in Who’s Who Australia – it’s hardly a centre of power, secret rituals and the manipulation of public opinion.

Put a bunch of men in a room with alcohol and snacks for long enough and it’s fairly predictable what will happen. The conversation will eventually degenerate from business and high politics to cricket, the best songs on Guitar Hero World Tour and the most effective way humanity could defeat a surprise invasion of Velociraptors. Who would win in a fight: Conan-era Schwarzenegger or Bruce Lee? Perhaps the conversation will eventually turn to some gentlemanly wagers – could it be possible for one man to traverse the world in 80 days? And given the demographics of Melbourne’s most exclusive clubs, a typical evening might end with the singing of some vaguely remembered songs from boarding school.

Gentlemen’s clubs date back to 17th-century England. Far from being stodgy, stiff and proper, these original clubs were little more than a place to get drunk away from the wife. Early caricatures of English gentlemen’s clubs consistently show club members red-faced and sozzled, grasping at bottles of wine. Some clubs even provided boarding rooms for the gentlemen to sleep it off.

In the present day, the most exclusive all-male club in the world, the Bohemian Grove club, is really just an excuse for powerful Americans to participate in stupid rituals that have much more camp value than deep meaning.

So it’s no wonder that the gender exclusivity of men’s clubs inspired powerful and wealthy women to set up their own exclusive clubs – in Melbourne, we have the Lyceum and The Alexandra – where the conversations are, no doubt, on average much more sensible. And on the other end of the spectrum, Melbourne’s least exclusive club, the RACV Club, is now best known for its buffet-style dining: the Sizzler of Melbourne’s club set.

Still, at least the RACV Club is doing well. The truth is that some of the longest-standing men’s clubs are in terminal decline, with or without female membership restrictions. There really aren’t that many of Rob Hulls’ “young fuddy-duddies” quixotically tilting against the demographic windmills. Instead, many clubs are struggling to demonstrate to apprentice power-brokers and the next generation of fatcats why joining would be worthwhile. Like a lot of voluntary organisations, they are failing to encourage the generational change needed to survive.

After all, in 2009, it’s far more exciting to get a reservation at Vue de Monde than be served a plate of mutton, mashed potatoes and steamed beans at a gentlemen’s club.

The government’s proposed changes to the legislation governing the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission don’t just end at forcing private clubs to change their long-standing membership requirements. They also include the power to enter, search and seize documents. So we can look forward to burly anti-discrimination commissioners kicking down the door of the Melbourne Club and ordering scared retirees to slowly place their cognac and copies of The Spectator back on the antique mahogany side-tables.

The commission may also be empowered to act wherever they suspect discrimination is occurring, regardless of whether there have been any complaints.

In a society that values individual liberty, free association is a basic human right. And the right of free association also implies the right to exclude those with whom you do not wish to associate. So if you don’t like the exclusive membership policies of Melbourne’s clubs, start your own.

Go On, Mate, Get Out There And Make A Difference

When politicians suddenly quit halfway through their term, they’ve usually done something naughty, or stupid, or are so awful at their job that they’ve worked out the electorate can’t stand them any longer.

But if the only reason state Labor MP Evan Thornley has resigned his seat is so he can re-enter the private sector, then, well, that’s fantastic. In 2009, we’re going to want every business person on the ground working overtime to create jobs. The last thing we need is talented entrepreneurs spending their lives stuck in the world of petty rivalries and disproportionate egos that is Australian politics.

Anyway, we have a more than sufficient number of politicians trying to engineer political solutions to what is an economic crisis. Thornley founded a company that, at its height, was worth just shy of $1billion. His commercial acumen and skills could be far more useful building the economy than regulating it.

The position that Premier Brumby was reportedly going to offer Thornley – minister for industry, trade and industrial relations – is one that could easily have a few responsibilities shaved off it. A general consensus among economists is that the best trade policy is to have no trade policy at all. Industry policy has a long and venerable history of comprehensive failure. And Victoria has ceded the vast majority of its industrial relations responsibility to the Commonwealth.

It must be strange for someone who has spent his life adding value to the economy to be offered one of the ministries most dedicated to taking value out of it.

It is a widespread delusion that the best way for a person to serve others is to enter politics; that politics is a noble profession of public service. But there’s just something far nobler about working in private industry or in the not-for-profit sector – individuals who spend their whole careers trying to figure out just what sort of products or services consumers want, or trying to understand social problems and how to resolve them. If the idea of service to others has any validity, surely social and commercial entrepreneurs are worthier than the politicians who seek, above all else, the highest level of political power.

And while many people dismiss success in business as little more than the greedy pursuit of fortune, how does that compare to politics? The business of the politician is, essentially, the pursuit of power over others. The top politicians may be paid a lot less than the top CEOs but, while a CEO can at most control their corporation, many politicians seem to believe they can move everybody’s private resources around like chess pieces.

Far from being noble, politics is a profession that rewards expediency and even deception. Political decisions are guided mostly by polling data and a desire to hurt the other team. Legislation is the result of manic horse-trading that seeks not to find the best way to do something, but to mollify as many interest groups as possible and please the bizarre preferences of the independents that often hold the balance of power.

So it is no surprise that so many laws and government programs are ill-defined, have no clear goal, and provide no method of assessing whether they are actually working. But politicians find it’s a lot easier to start a government program than to close an old one. Bureaucracies, commissions, departments, boards, committees and taskforces pile up upon each other, each insisting on a slice of the annual budget. They say that laws are like sausages: it’s better not to see them being made. But do we really have to be forced to eat so many?

Many in the private sector are now being sadly reminded that jobs that are underutilised or unnecessary have a habit of being eliminated. This does not occur in Parliament. Inefficient or just plain disinterested backbenchers need little more than a lock on their preselection and a safe seat to feel relaxed and comfortable. Even if they underperform by every possible measure, they can remain employed for decades.

As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter once wrote: “Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with keeping in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they go.” The private sector is much less forgiving of people who spend most of their working day preparing for the next round of job interviews.

Indeed, there’s a lot to be said for the private sector. No hairdresser or bank manager can cut your hair or take your money unless you specifically ask them to do so. Politicians have no such limit – laws that impact on everybody are enacted with only the barest of consent from what constitutes a democratic majority.

While Thornley’s political colleagues might be furious at his resignation, hopefully he is able to show them that only the private sector can create the jobs that Australia will need next year.

20 Years On: Western liberty and Soviet tyranny

2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – the moment which signalled the end of the short and brutal totalitarian 20th century.

The movement had actually begun much earlier. The disintegration of Communist rule in Hungary (which, during 1989, was bringing Hungarians freedom of the press and association, and by October, constitutional reform) meant that East and West Germans were reuniting for holidays in Hungary. Worse, from the perspective of East German officials however, low-level Hungarian border guards were letting many of those East Germans holiday makers slip in out of Hungary and into the West. Porous borders became Hungarian official policy when the liberal Communist regime in September explicitly annulled the migration restrictions formed as part of the East German-Hungarian treaty. Thousands of East Germans began pouring into Austria.

The events of November are well known. Czechoslovakia granted East Germans the same migration freedoms as Hungary had. And without the support traditionally expected from the leadership of the USSR, the East German government was forced to admit that its migration restrictions, which had supported its rule in the 28 years since the Berlin Wall had been erected, had effectively failed. On 9 November, an East German official mistakenly announced that travel to West German was permitted ‘immediately’, and confused, uninformed but thankfully restrained guards on the East allowed the massive stream of excited Germans into the West.

The story of November 1989 is a story of spontaneous and uncoordinated desire for liberty – depending on political confusion, the humanity of border guards in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the bold excitement of a free future – but it would not have been possible without the world-historical leaders in Washington, Moscow and England. Mikhail Gorbachev declined to act to defend the solidarity of the Soviet Bloc at a very crucial moment. And the triumvirate of John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan redefined the essential questions of the Cold War-the stark dichotomy between Western liberty and Soviet tyranny.

In this IPA Review, John Roskam looks at just what made Reagan tick-his attitude to the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and how that attitude played a central role in winning the Cold War and liberating those behind the Iron Curtain. As Roskam points out, Reagan meant every word of what he said. His description of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ may have been ridiculed in the left-wing press, but it resonated with those who had actually experienced the Communist system, and those who still were. If it wasn’t for the moral clarity Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II brought to the Cold War stalemate, those migrants escaping across the Hungarian border, or those streams of East Germans flooding through Checkpoint Charlie would have had to stay at home.

In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine the Soviet Union lasting much into the 1990s. The liberating and democratising nature of the internet and the digital revolution might well have totally undermined the Soviet system if it had survived the events of 1989 – studies of Soviet computing show that the system was completely unable to handle the digital age, even before that era fully manifested itself with the internet.

We know now that the Soviet system was moribund and heading towards an inevitable collapse. But that it collapsed in 1989, not 1994, or 1998, is a testament to the leadership of these great figures.

Ignore Meaningless Public Health Studies? I’ll Drink To That

Before you dig into your next serve of glistening Christmas ham, rich gravy and potatoes drenched in baked fat, and before you chug another glass of frustratingly warm rose, pause for a moment and think. What impact will your actions have on the nation’s aggregate productivity statistics? Could your second portion of brandy-smothered pudding be that final straw that pushes Australia’s OECD ranking below New Zealand’s?

These are the big questions the Government would like us to ask over the Christmas break. The Federal Government’s Preventative Health Taskforce – one of the higher-profile inquiries of the few dozen announced this year – wants to make individual overindulgence everybody’s problem.

According to the taskforce, obesity costs Australia $58.2billion a year, which makes you wonder why we don’t just keep all our money in an oatmeal tin where obesity can’t find it. This is a huge amount. The taskforce claims that the cost of alcohol abuse is a bit more modest – $15 billion – but that’s still a lot.

We are used to reading enormous numbers like that every day in the press. But for the most part, they consist of so many assumptions piled upon yet more assumptions that they are worthless.

One study last year claimed that Australia loses $2billion in productivity to email spam every year. The consultancy that published the study imagines that every millisecond Australians spend deleting spam emails is a millisecond that they aren’t extracting money from consumers. But, in reality, most employees find deleting spam a welcome distraction from refreshing Facebook.

So when the taskforce and the Government tell us that alcohol and obesity cost us the better part of $100 billion, what does that actually mean? Not that much.

It would be fair enough if the cost was limited to the direct cost of alcohol and obesity to the government. With a public health care system, taxpayers bear some of the costs of hospitalisation but, in defence of fat people and drunkards, they pay taxes too.

Anyway, the idea that we need to stop people overindulging because taxpayers pick up the tab has always seemed more like an argument against public health than an argument for banning junk food. Is a public health system incompatible with individuals making their own choices about what to eat?

These arguments are frequently overblown – in the case of drinking, the direct costs to the taxpayer are exceeded by the taxes on alcohol. Public health activists argue that obesity and alcohol are ripping dollars out of the Australian economy – as if we could figure out how much an overweight 50-year-old bank manager could have earned if he ate only salads. If we were all teetotal triathletes with doctorates in pure mathematics, the country’s productivity stats would be awesome.

Some of the other “costs” are even less grounded in reality. To derive the $15billion cost of alcohol, the taskforce adds up things like the cost of policing, property damage, insurance administration, and the lost productivity of those prisoners who may be locked up for crimes committed after drinking a six-pack. They even count the cost of lost household labour, as if instead of relaxing with a glass of wine in the evening everybody should be vacuuming the lounge room.

We can all imagine better choices other people could make. Yes, if the intern hadn’t been out till 5am, there wouldn’t have been that typo in the annual report. And perhaps instead of going to Friday after-work drinks we could all be inventing stuff. But that doesn’t mean we should blame alcohol for the intern’s lack of dedication or our lack of time machines.

There are costs incurred by every choice we make. If there weren’t costs, they wouldn’t be called “choices”, they’d just be “things we do”. But multiplying ridiculous assumptions in order to arrive at the largest possible number only obscures the real question at hand: is your fondness for cake anyone else’s business?

In a savvy political move, the taskforce plans to report back in the new year. No sane government would want to be caught nagging us during our cherished festival of gluttony and inebriation.

So every time you sip your Christmas coldie, a statistician updates a spreadsheet. But don’t worry too much about it – you’re having more fun than he is.

Radical Reform Needed To Clear Up The Telco Mess

Telstra’s exclusion from the bidding process for a national broadband network reinforces how much of a fiasco Australian telecommunications policy really is.

The Labor Party’s high-profile promise that it would have in place by November 2008 a fibre-optic network was supposed to outflank the regulatory stagnation that had developed since Telstra first announced its plans to build such a network in late 2004.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy clearly had no idea how difficult and entrenched the regulatory problems were.

The latest decision sets a terrible precedent for a minister with an already poor reputation. The Government is claiming the Telstra proposal was rejected because the company had not included a detailed plan to involve small and medium enterprises in the network’s construction. The first striking thing about this requirement is just how extraordinarily micro-managing it is. Does the Government want the fibre-to-the-node or not? Surely voters don’t care whether their broadband network is built by big companies, little companies or robots subcontracted by aliens.

Nevertheless, it is hard to avoid the impression – and certainly this is Telstra’s view – that being excluded over this odd requirement is nothing more than a convenient excuse to kick Australia’s biggest telco out of the running. After 11 years of forced access regulation, there is a lot of bad blood between Telstra, the industry, the regulators and, of course, the Government.

This decision signals a government willing to make decisions based on animosity rather than neutrality. Big Australian companies will be quickly learning how important their Canberra lobbyists are under the Rudd Government: with a resurgent industry policy, an emissions trading scheme with more exceptions than consistencies, and a steady program of commercial bail-outs, it has been a long time since having the ear of a minister has been so important.

The Government can’t claim to be concerned about the influence of lobbyists in the halls of Parliament while making it impossible for companies to do business without them. The problem facing Australia’s communications industry is deceptively simple. The original regulatory approach was to try to inject some competition after the industry’s partial deregulation. And so Telstra was forced to allow its competition to access the copper wire network, and at a price set by the ACCC.

Yes, Australia has seen an explosion of small telcos. If competition is a synonym for hundreds of companies selling pretty much the same product, then regulators can declare victory. But the more important point of the forced access model was to encourage companies – after they had a comfortable foothold in the industry – to build their own networks. That has not happened. Instead, Telstra’s competitors have invested more and more of their own resources into the ageing copper-wire network.

And when the idea that we need a new network comes along, it creates a perfect storm. Telstra isn’t sure how the access regime will be applied to a whole new network on which it wears all the financial risk. Telstra’s competitors are disgruntled because suddenly all their expensive equipment will become obsolete, and mortified by the prospect of being unable to compete with a flashy new network. The Government doesn’t like copping public criticism from a company that used to be its political stress ball, and the regulators would prefer it if they could issue orders unchallenged, as they could before.

With stakeholders at each other’s throats, the industry is unable to build the network. But this is no market failure by any definition of the phrase; it is a failure of the Government’s regulatory policies, which discourage investment in infrastructure.

It must be easy for politicians to imagine that a government could magically fix problems by throwing money at them. But yesterday’s exclusion of Telstra from the broadband tender indicates that the Labor Party might find our regulatory mess a trifle more complex to deal with.

The forced access framework has, ironically enough, cemented Telstra even further into the centre of the telecommunications industry. It will take radical reform to fix the telco mess. Governments are going to have to step back from micro-managing the telecommunications sector. Market forces need to determine the shape of such a quickly developing industry, not regulators.

Neutering The Net Is About Repression, Not Protection

It seems like only yesterday that the country was prosperous and the Labor Party was going to make everyone’s internet faster.

But now the Federal Government’s great broadband gift is floundering in the waves of the financial crisis and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is pushing ahead with an internet filter that will dramatically slow Australian internet speeds.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority conducted tests earlier this year on six filters that could be imposed on internet service providers. Five slowed internet speeds by at least 20 per cent. And two of them crippled speeds by more than 75 per cent.

And this is before we look at their habit of falsely blocking legal sites. A 1999 trial of internet filtering (censoring the internet has long been a bipartisan goal) even accidentally blocked some government websites. Filters have improved since then but, as ACMA’s test revealed, it is a certainty that some sites will be incorrectly blocked – let’s be honest, the technology to efficiently and effectively censor the internet isn’t quite ready yet.

Nevertheless, technology has a habit of getting better, given enough time. It’s more than just technical issues that makes internet censorship a terrible idea.

Last year, Mr Conroy said that: “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.” Fair enough. But to claim the filter is designed to eliminate child pornography is too tricksy by half.

After all, child pornography is already illegal. And imposing an elaborate filter on every Australian internet connection is unlikely to have a significant impact on the child pornography trade – as everyone who has sent an email or tried to download a song is aware, there is a bit more to the internet than static web pages. Child pornography isn’t just sitting on openly accessible websites waiting to be downloaded – from what we know about it, it is traded clandestinely by abhorrent individuals. It takes police work and forensics to uncover those sorts of criminals. The dark recesses of the internet won’t be disturbed at all by the new filter.

Who knows, perhaps accusing the entire country of being potential child pornographers polls really well in telephone surveys?

Nevertheless, the biggest problem with the filter isn’t technical and it isn’t its likely failure to reduce child pornography.

The biggest problem is a little word that Mr Conroy slipped out in the middle of a Senate committee hearing. The pilot filter program will not only target the existing blacklisted sites, most of which are child pornography, but will also target “unwanted” content, whatever that means.

The Government has developed a secret list of 10,000 unwanted sites (there are only 1300 on the current blacklist).

But what the Communications Minister wants on the internet and others want on the internet are likely to be two very different things. Nick Xenophon doesn’t want online gambling. Stephen Fielding doesn’t want hardcore pornography and “fetish” material – if Mr Fielding gets to wield his senatorial power over the filter system, expect shares in www.feet.com to slump. If the Government gets the power to control internet content, legal pornography, gambling and violent images will all be candidates for online censorship.

Of course, whenever the censorship of legal material is raised – with its massive implications for freedom of speech in Australia – the Government immediately tries to bring the discussion back to child pornography.

It’s a bit embarrassing that we’re discussing censoring the internet at all. What does it say about Australian politics that the reaction of both major parties to such a liberating technology is to demagogue about its dangers? Our politicians rave about evils online more than any other liberal democracy. As a consequence, the Federal Government’s proposal is far more extensive than any other internet censorship scheme outside the totalitarian world.

There is a certain element of Australian political culture that sees censorship and banning as the panacea to almost every social and policy question. But wowserism dressed up in concerned rhetoric about the sanctity of childhood is still wowserism.

Politics And The Top Cop

Being the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police sounds like a terrible job. In the aftermath of Christine Nixon’s announcement to step down as Victoria’s top cop, her political masters have been full of praise, but her colleagues in crime fighting have been less complimentary. The upper echelons of the police force seem to be drenched in personal animosity and rivalry.

Some of Nixon’s critics really deserve to be ignored. In the wake of her resignation, the Victorian Police Association chose to emphasise that the most important thing the next chief commissioner should possess is a birth certificate from Victoria. Fair enough – unions are paid to look after their members first. But they could at least pretend not to have naked self-interest as their only focus.

Nevertheless, in March Nixon will leave Victoria Police with a mixed record at best. High-profile corruption scandals, the gangland killings, internal police reforms, her approach to domestic violence and community-based policing strategies have dominated the discussion about her successes or otherwise. The Government’s effusive praise of Nixon, however, ignores the increasing problems of basic law and order that have developed under her stewardship.

Yes, in aggregate, crime has gone down in recent years. Since 2001, when Nixon was appointed Chief Commissioner, the total crime rate has dropped by nearly 25%.

But the word “crime” is so broad as to be almost useless. If we look closely at the official police statistics, the Nixon legacy is much less impressive. Since 2002, crimes against the person – that is, homicide, rape, sex offences, assault and abduction – have jumped from fewer than 36,000 to nearly 43,000 incidents a year.

Instead of tackling this dramatic increase in violent crime, Victoria Police has been focusing on aggressive “blitzes” against utterly banal offences like jaywalking – that ridiculous crime committed by nearly everybody every day.

Show me someone who has never jaywalked and I’ll show you someone who has never left the house. Sure, the police should try to enforce every crime on their books, but they should also be a bit sensible about it.

The State Government could quadruple the number of police on the streets and still not successfully eliminate the scourge of jaywalking.

Can they really justify deploying Victoria Police’s limited resources on Swanston Street at 8am on Monday mornings when there is a violence problem on King Street at 4am every night?

Criticising the police force’s periodic jaywalking crackdowns might seem petty, but it actually raises some important questions about the rule of law in Victoria. Jaywalking is the sort of crime that most police would ignore, except for those times when there is a “blitz”. Enforcing one of the State Government’s most ridiculous social regulations does little more than annoy otherwise entirely law-abiding pedestrians.

Victorian police are proud that there has been an increase in the rate at which crimes are being solved. But much of this is because of cultural changes that have encouraged individuals to report cases of domestic violence and rape that have historically gone under-reported.

It is, of course, wonderful that Victoria’s thugs are being identified and caught after they assault someone. But from the victim’s perspective, it would be better not to be assaulted at all – no amount of detective work will encourage bruises to heal quicker.

The vast majority of Nixon’s highly publicised drop in overall crime rates is found in the category of crime against property – you are certainly less likely to be burgled or have your bike stolen than you were five years ago. But again, Victoria Police cannot really take too much credit for the increased use of bike locks, or the prevalence of storefront security guards, or for the increased popularity of home alarm systems.

If we look even closer at the crime statistics, the true state of Victorian crime becomes more worrying. Over recent years, crimes against the person have increasingly been seen in public, rather than private, locations – on public transport, in open spaces, on streets and sidewalks; the sorts of places that require regular patrolling.

It is these crime patterns that form the basis of the recent panic about violence in the city – a rare occasion in politics when there actually is fire where there is smoke. The 2am lockout may have been inept, ill-considered and unpopular, but it was actually trying to tackle a genuine problem: there just aren’t enough police on the streets to prevent crime.

Unfortunately, Nixon has chosen to emphasise that the violence in the city has been “booze-fuelled” – a description that tries to shift the blame for the sharp increase in urban violence off the police and on to Melbourne’s bars and pubs. No matter what fuels violence, it still needs to be dealt with by the police on the street. Liquor licence changes will never be a substitute for more cops.

But since 2002, patrol hours have decreased by nearly one-quarter. The numbers of sworn operational staff have declined as a percentage of the total police force. It seems that much of the State Government’s increase in police resources has been absorbed by administrative staff and bureaucrats. No wonder the Police Association, when it is being more sensible, has argued that Victoria’s police force is understaffed by at least 3000 officers.

With a rising rate of assaults and urban violence, Christine Nixon’s biggest legacy may simply be making law and order a political issue once again.