Articles – Page 63

Goddamn you all to hell: The revealing politics of dystopian movies

‘There is, of course, every reason to view the next century with fear,’ wrote a New York Times film reviewer in 1976 after having watched the Charlton Heston vehicle Soylent Green.

Smug pessimism of this type is hardly unusual in political commentary. Indeed, in only the last few years, Hollywood has released V for Vendetta and Children of Men, each of which claim that the Iraq War is the beginning of a cycle of oppression that will lead to dictatorship. Over the last century, the dystopian film has reflected society’s fears of monopoly capitalism, totalitarian socialism, environmental catastrophe, technology out of control, and now, in V for Vendetta and Children of Men, theocracy. The obsessions of the left are reflected in the dystopian movie.

But dystopias are never that simple. Certainly, the dystopian movie presents filmmakers with their opportunity for futuristic pessimism. The dystopia-a fictional society that got lost on the way to utopia-differs from traditional science fiction by its emphasis on political and social systems rather than science or technology, and therefore allows filmmakers to speculate wildly on the political future. But the genre has a tendency to trip up filmmakers, and the way it does so reveals much more about Hollywood leftism than it does the cultural fears of the broader population.

The Orwellian dystopia

George Orwell may not have invented the dystopia – John Stuart Mill coined the word in 1868, and Orwell’s vision was drawn from both Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – but with the cultural status of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he owns it. Orwell defined the now archetypical dystopian society in response to the Stalinist communism-an omnipotent, omnipresent state with a single-minded control of its citizens. And the descendants of Nineteen Eighty-Four are many. The films THX 1138, Fahrenheit 451, Alphaville, Sleeper, Brazil, The Island, Equilibrium, Logan’s Run, Renaissance, The Running Man and others are derived from Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian police state.

The traditional dystopia is concerned with the spectre of the over-bearing state-the typical plot trajectory involves the protagonist rejecting the dictatorial controls of the government and finding out the horrible truth. In the 2005 film The Island, Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor escape their post-apocalyptic dictatorship-which is run like a totalitarian fat camp-only to realise that their world was entirely artificial.

The evolution of the dystopian genre can reveal much about the popular obsessions of filmmakers and the audience, but each time those fears fall back upon a fear of the omnipotent state. For instance, even a sub-genre of dystopian films in the 1970s which featured environmental collapse eventually reveal themselves to be more concerned with state oppression than the environment. If this is a reflection of our cultural fears, then the contemporary environmentalists who would like the government to involve itself more and more in our individual choices have a much tougher task ahead of them than current opinion polls suggest.

Dreaming of the apocalypse: environmental dystopias

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 neo-Malthusian tract The Population Bomb has been entered into history as a colossally inaccurate prediction of apocalyptic overpopulation. Ehrlich’s calculations of hundreds of millions of people starving to death in the 1970s and 1980s as population outstripped resources failed to account for agricultural innovation and slowing birth-rates in developed nations.

But The Population Bomb wasn’t just a simple prediction of global food shortages. To pound his message home, Ehrlich devised an array of future scenarios which could only occur as a consequence of his bleak mathematics. Ehrlich was quick to hedge his bets-‘none of [the scenarios] will come true as stated, but they describe the kinds of disasters that will occur as mankind slips into the famine decades’-but that didn’t stop the Stanford University Professor from wild grade-school speculations that tenuously connected to his arguments. For instance, by 1979, Ehrlich foresaw that:

Only the outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of bubonic plague killing 65 per cent of the starving Egyptian population had averted a direct Soviet-American clash in the Mediterranean.

By 1980:

… general thermonuclear war ensues. Particularly devastating are the high altitude ‘flash’ devices designed to set fire to all flammable materials over huge areas.

After describing his most appealing scenario, which predicts the starvation and death of merely half a billion people, Ehrlich challenges the reader to imagine a more optimistic future, which he is pretty sure can’t be done.

Wild speculations about the future have been a staple of the environmentalist doom-saying ever since; and this sort of casual jumble of non-fiction and undisciplined fantasy doesn’t speak well for environmental pop science.

Ehrlich’s book set the tone in the early 1970s for a whole new type of dystopia. Gone are the obsessions with a monolithic state apparatus and the subjugation of individuality depicted in Zamyatin’s We and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – new visions of dystopia arose out of environmental tragedy. And the blame for humanity’s fall no longer lies with power-seeking bureaucrats and dictators, but with humanity itself. In the view of the environmental doomsayers, our own failure to keep pollution and population under control inadvertently leads us towards a dystopian future. And so when Charlton Heston curses mankind at the end of The Planet of the Apes, he speaks for Paul Ehrlich.

The Population Bomb was both serious enough to capture the imagination of the embryonic leftwing environmental movement and fanciful enough to directly inspire a boom in dystopian culture-within a year, Captain Kirk had been abducted by a race of space aliens to solve their overpopulation crisis. The book’s morally repulsive suggestions about coercing Indian males to undertake vasectomies and adding sterilisation to the food supply seem ready made for pot-boiler fiction. The 1971 film The Last Child depicted a society that had implemented a one-child policy and where the elderly were refused medical treatment, and the next year’s Z.P.G. showed a United Nations-esque ban on procreation for a thirty year period. And in 1973 Charlton Heston (an actor who appears to have been purpose-built for dystopia and angry revelations) uncovered the terrible truth behind Soylent Green, a synthetic food substitute made necessary after the United States had suffered complete economic and environmental collapse.

The 1976 classic Logan’s Run sets an Aldous Huxley-style pleasure dictatorship in a Paul Ehrlich world. The free-love and relaxation of the inhabitants of a domed city (a barely disguised shopping mall in Dallas) is only interrupted by the requirement that they have to be killed when they reach the age of thirty. When two escape, they discover themselves in the ruins of a Washington DC that has, it is implied, been decimated by environmental catastrophe caused by overpopulation. Logan’s Run packages all of the major dystopian fears together-a fear of technology (the dictator is in this case what appears to be a self-aware computer), a fear of population controls in the midst of a resource crisis, a fear of the loss of individuality (the Logan character featured in the film’s title actually has a more typically dystopian name-‘Logan 5′) and a fear of environmental apocalypse.

But it isn’t accurate to describe dystopian visions of Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, Z.P.G. andThe Last Child as direct ideological spawn of Paul Ehrlich. The films sympathise with those characters that rebel against the population restrictions-the woman who defies the state by having a baby, the security man who escapes the domed city, and the cop who continues to investigate a murder in defiance of his superiors-and the resolutions inevitably show the masses awakening to the horrible truth. By the time the credits appear, Ehrlich’s suggestions that the government forcibly sterilise the population have been judged as repugnant-as have the suggestions of our modern anti-natalist that we limit population growth under the banner of climate change. The moral simplicity of a Hollywood film turns out to be more ethical than the views of the Sierra Club and other environmentalists who were impressed by the perverse recommendations of The Population Bomb.

Furthermore, the environmental dystopias may initially appear to represent an entirely new cultural fear-that of ecological collapse-but they eventually reveal that they share the obsessions of ‘traditional’ dystopias-a monolithic organisation exerting super-normal controls over an unwilling or ignorant populace. Overpopulation and food shortages may be terrifying, but that terror is trumped by the fear of an omnipotent state.

Orwellian dystopias after the end of the socialist dream

While the dystopian genre has thrived over the last century, depictions of utopias have all but disappeared. The only utopias that are presented are ones that have failed. Part of this is because utopias are inherently dull. For instance, Gulliver’s Travels only loses its pace when Jonathan Swift finally tries to describe his ideal society. The race of intelligent horses called the Houyhnhnms may be perfect, but from a literary perspective they are bland and uninteresting compared to the Lilliputians. George Orwell claimed that this narrative failure of Swift’s presented a major problem for socialist thinkers-the society where everybody is happy is a boring society. And it’s hard to string a narrative around a society in which there is nothing going wrong.

But from a historical perspective, utopias rather than dystopias have been the dominant literary form. Plato and Thomas More used the utopian society to illustrate their political and economic views, which of course were little more than crude socialism. The late nineteenth century was a busy time for utopianist fantasy-classics of this period included Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward and William Morris’ News From Nowhere-but few authors have been able to conceive of utopias that are anything but socialist. (The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein is a notable exception.)

So almost immediately after the world had begun to experience an actual, living communist dictatorship, socialism jumped from a utopian fantasy to a dystopian nightmare. Dystopias replaced utopias just when we realised how bad lived socialism could be-the utopian genre was a casualty of the demise of the socialist dream. Indicatively, We was published in 1921-less than half a decade after the Bolshevik coup d’etat-and was the first novel to be banned by the new Soviet censorship bureau.

As a consequence, from the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ onwards, political radicals have been unable to come up with a fully-realised alternative to the status quo. Dystopias are much easier to conceive than utopias-after all, who doesn’t oppose dictatorship and forced sterilisation? Devising a plausible non-market economy is much more challenging.

But when Zamyatin and Orwell addressed their audiences in the first half of the twentieth century, it was within the realm of possibility that the Western world could go communist. That same demise of the socialist dream that led to the rise of dominance of the dystopia at the same time made Orwellian vision less poignant-there is simply no chance that the English constitutional monarchy will yield to IngSoc anytime soon.

And so to ensure that their visions remain relevant, filmmakers over the last few decades almost always try to shoe-horn a more modern message into their dystopias. In a particularly grating example of this, THX 1138 awkwardly shoved an anti-consumerist note into its otherwise traditional Orwellian state. A state propaganda machine first extols Robert Duvall’s character to work hard in a typically Stalinist manner: ‘Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy’. But it then goes on to deliver a message that the Soviet Politburo would have never wanted delivered: ‘Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy.’ This clumsy message against consumer capitalism undermines the otherwise compelling vision of THX 1138.

Similarly awkward attempts at relevancy are found in many other dystopian visions. The otherwise clear story of over-population in Logan’s Run is destabilised when the only character who is wise to the cause of humanity’s troubles tries to blame our desire for bigger and bigger houses. More recent films have also tried to ‘contemporise’ their stories uncomfortably-in 2005’s V for Vendetta and 2006’s Children of Men, the War in Iraq is variously described as the catalyst for the end of female fertility, a religious dictatorship in England, the suppression of classical art, total social breakdown, and concentration camps for immigrants. Their political message consists of little more than a list of bad things that could happen-a far cry from the consistent and thematically integrated dystopias of Orwell and Zamyatin. And dystopias are most emotionally powerful when they are seen as possible-nobody but the most smug leftist thinks that George Bush’s occasional affirmation of his religious faith heralds an imminent theocracy.

The 2002 Christian Bale feature Equilibrium completes the migration of the Orwellian vision from the poignant to the absurd. In this totalitarian state, human emotions are suppressed to reduce conflict and ‘Clerics’ police the city to seek out ‘Sense Offenders’. Equilibrium is a successful film from a dramatic perspective, but the improbability of its vision is merely a reflection of the dominant cultural status of Nineteen Eighty-Four – Equilibrium has now achieved cult status on the basis of its fictional martial art ‘gun-kata’ and the ferocity of its fighting sequences rather than any political message it carries.

The inefficient dystopia

By contrast, Terry Gilliam’s joyfully absurdist 1985 film Brazil is a much closer reflection of the lived experience of totalitarian socialism. In Equilibrium and THX 1138, the totalitarian state is an efficient state-public servants are passionate, dedicated, and above all, effective, and the trains run on time. In Brazil, Orwell’s state has fallen into disrepair. The omnipotent eye of the dictator is revealed to be a vast and sluggish bureaucracy. State employees watch old movies when the boss isn’t watching them- the workers are more like Charlie Chaplin than Alexey Stakhanov. Individual bureaucrats act as bullies rather than servants of the state. And in Brazil, tyranny is delivered in triplicate. Terry Gilliam may have set out to make an absurdist comedy out of the traditional dystopia, but in doing so, he made a society which accords more closely with the USSR depicted in memoirs about life in the Soviet Union, especially in the post-Stalin era. Endemic corruption and bureaucratic mismanagement is the experience of socialism, not the clean, streamlined and seamless unitary state of Orwell. Pyongyang’s incomplete and structurally unsound Ryugyong Hotel is more representative of real-world socialist architecture than Oceania’s glistening white Ministry of Love. But in traditional anti-communist dystopias, the government is never so unglamorous as to run out of money. Orwell thought totalitarian communist governments would be terrible, but he also thought they would work.

Perhaps then the most poignant dystopian film made in the last half century is Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. Upon first glance, A Clockwork Orange is not immediately recognisable as a dystopia. The biggest indicator – a totalitarian state – is absent in Kubrick’s vision. Indeed, the plot pivots around a politician desperate to solve the crime problem before the next election. And A Clockwork Orange strides across so many themes that its political views are not immediately obvious.

But A Clockwork Orange is a startling film about a decaying socialist Britain-not the socialism of the eastern bloc, but mid-century democratic socialism. The depraved protagonist Alex lives in ‘Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North’, part of a vast housing project which is so poorly maintained that it appears to be decomposing. The democratically elected government is revealed to be on a slow decline towards totalitarianism. A writer who eventually kidnaps Alex is described as a ‘subversive’, and perhaps more indicatively, the Minister of the Interior lets slip that he needs to clear the prisons of normal criminals to make room for political prisoners. And it is a society that is about to breakdown. After all, it is quickly indicated that Alex and his droogs are not the only gang terrorising England-law and order appears to be the government’s biggest problem.

When A Clockwork Orange resonates, it does so because social breakdown and socialist decay are very real features of west European states today. The northern banlieues around Paris are just the sort of low-income ghettos which are inhabited by Alex. In these areas, the state is present but ineffective-delivering welfare but not order-and the inhabitants are both oppressed and independent. Indeed, when David Cameron describes England’s ‘broken society’, he raises the spectre of ultra-violent and truant adolescents.

The vision of A Clockwork Orange is, like all dystopias, an exaggeration, but it is far more real than the states of Logan’s Run or THX 1138. And A Clockwork Orange manages to be far more cynical than a democratic socialist like Orwell could ever be. (Both Kubrick’s politics, and the politics of Anthony Burgess who wrote the original novel, could hardly be described as standard arts industry leftyness. Indeed, Burgess went onto write his own dystopian homage to Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he titled 1985, that featured a Britain dominated by trade unions and where Islam had become the dominant political force.)

Images of dystopia are necessarily reflections of their time. When Orwell wrote his book, he addressed it to fellow-travelling socialists-his story was directed at his comrades who supported the Soviet ‘experiment’. Subsequent dystopian visions-at least those ones that have been more than just paint-by-numbers duplications of Nineteen Eighty-Four-have variously railed against environmental destruction, corporate monopolies, genetic engineering, censorship, technological dependence, religious extremism and neo-conservative warmongering. But they always oppose the state-even in those films that blame corporations for the ills of the world, it is the state that provides the power to oppress.

But when a dystopian vision fails, it fails because it misunderstands the nature of the contemporary state. Brazil and A Clockwork Orange are more ominous dystopias because they are-perhaps surprisingly considering that one is an absurdist comedy and the other a violent criticism of behavioural psychology-realistic.

What ‘fascist mob’? Overland and the IPA

Opposing government interference in the economy and society is hardly support for ‘fascism’. An attack on the Institute of Public Affairs in the latest edition of Overland by Shane Cahill shows just how far the socialist literary magazine has strayed off the ranch.

Just the title of the piece – ‘This Fascist Mob’ – indicates Overland’s relaxed approach to scholarship. ‘Fascist’ is a word with a very specific meaning. But its use in this case is drawn from an anonymous critic complaining about that the IPA’s opposition to the Curtin government’s heavy-handed approach to regulation during the war meant that the IPA was probably a Japanese sympathiser.

In 1944, a furious letter written by an anonymous air force officer complaining about the IPA was sent to the Deputy Prime Minister. In this letter, he accused the IPA of sabotaging the war effort by producing a wartime radio programme. This programme, The Harris Family, was a scripted radio play where a family discussed and debated the dangers of over-regulation, price controls, and centralisation.

The show, as the airman pointed out, was rarely very friendly to the Labor government. This letter made its way to the Commonwealth Security Service (CSS) – the precursor to ASIO – and provoked a minor investigation into its allegations. The CSS commenced the serious task of finding out whether the IPA was, as the letter writer claimed, ‘more vile and sinister than any Jap’. In early 1944, the CSS collected reports from its state divisions on the activities of the IPA across the country, but nothing surfaced to indicate that the IPA’s activities were anything outside of the normal political debate.

The scripts for The Harris Family had been duly submitted to the Commonwealth wartime censors and approved; the IPA’s constitutions and executive officers were public record, and apart from an inclination to ‘discredit the Labor government’ – hardly a crime in a liberal democracy, even during the war – the investigation turned up nothing incriminating. Indeed, the CSS file is replete with scrawled notes doubting the necessity of the investigation – ‘this appears to be to be just a political matter’. And the CSS Deputy-Director dismissed the investigation with the comment that ‘the committee and others sponsoring the Institute are well known representative people in Melbourne whose integrity and loyalty should be beyond reproach’.

The rest of the Cahill piece tries to tie this small sidenote in the history of the IPA to broader investigations about sympathy for Japanese fascism in Australia’s business community. Two senior businessmen and members of the IPA council were recorded as members of the pre-war Japan-Australia Society. In the 1920s into the 1930s, Japan was an important trade partner of Australia. By the time of the IPA’s foundation, the Japan-Australia Society was history.

But nevertheless, in Cahill’s hands, this represents the ‘compromised and murky milieu from which the IPA emerged’. The implication of the Overland piece is that, while the IPA may nowadays claim to be a vigorous defender of representative government and liberal freedoms, its founders would have found a fascist dictatorship just as nice. As Cahill writes, ‘In the 1930s and the 1940s the link between freedom and the “free flow of capital” didn’t seem so apparent’.

Perhaps not for the intellectual ancestors of Overland, who, in the mid 1940s, were still debating whether democracy was necessary in a socialist paradise. But the reality is far more mundane than Cahill’s conspiracy theory of fascist Japanese sympathisers undermining the Curtin government from within the business community.

What was the IPA doing during the later stages of the war? The IPA was the first free market think tank in the world. As it had no clear international parallel or precedent to give guidance, each state division of the IPA took a different view of how engaged the think tank should be with the day to day political fray. The Queensland and New South Wales divisions were prolific propagandists – The Harris Family was complemented with imitation cheques which were slid into Queenslanders’ pay packets asking them not to sign away their freedoms to Canberra in the 1944 constitutional referendum. The Victorian division by contrast was more interested in longer-term, and more sober, policy analysis.

In 2008, the IPA is accustomed to abuse from the left, and is too often accused of ‘fascism’-as if the IPA’s mantra of free markets and free societies is the equivalent of totalitarianism and militant nationalism. The tone of Overland is too quasi-scholarly to openly accuse the IPA of fascist sympathies, but, through a careful manipulation of the historical record and abuse of political terminology, Cahill tries to let the anonymous air force officer speak for the modern left. About the only accurate thing in the Overland piece is calling the IPA of 2008 ‘prolific’.

Ilf and Petrov’s excellent adventure

A review of Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip.

In 1931, some 10,000 American tourists travelled to the Soviet Union in order to see what the great Soviet Experiment could offer their depression ravaged country.

But the tourist traffic heading the other direction was much lighter. Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip is the travelogue of two Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, as they crossed the United States, scribbling reports for Pravda readers back home. Like the American fellow-travellers who were merrily shuttled from Potemkin village to Potemkin village, the report of their journey reveals more about their home country and culture than the country they ostensibly went to investigate.

The resulting photoessay, which was originally published in the Russian magazine Ogonek, (roughly equivalent to Life) reproduced the snapshots taken by Ilya Ilf on their journey with their satirical impressions of their trip. American Road Trip is a delightfully naïve interpretation of American society in the depression era.

In this book edited by Erika Wolf, a historian of Soviet art, Ilf’s photographs are affectionately reproduced for the first time in an English language publication. Ilf’s photographs are more happy-snaps than Ansell Adams. Many photos appear to have been taken by sticking the camera out of the windows of their car. The book is full of slightly askew pictures of things the two Russians found interesting, or at least notable – some ‘handsome and unusually elaborate’ species of cactus, the childhood home of Mark Twain, an advertisement for whiskey that incorporated a statue of a horse, and a sign that notified visitors they were entering the little town of Moscow, Ohio.

There are some photographs of more political importance. A swaying sign in the street with the lettering ‘REVOLUTION IS A FORM OF GOVERNMENT ABROAD’ is, to Ilf and Petrov, bourgeois intimidation of the working class. (As Erika Wolf notes, the joke was on the Russians-the sign was instead an advertisement for a popular humour anthology illustrated by Dr Seuss. Ilf and Petrov were the foremost satirists of the Soviet Union, but they were unable to recognise the work of their American colleagues.)

For the most part, Ilf’s camera is non-political. Indeed, American Road Trip generally avoids direct political criticism. Ilf and Petrov are obviously fond of the country they are studying. They are fascinated by the advertising they see plastered across their trip, and direct much of their satirical energy towards Coca-Cola and cigarette advertising:

The fiery writing burns all night long above America and all day long the garish billboards hurt your eyes: ‘The Best in the World! Toasted Cigarettes! They Bring You Success! The Best in the Solar System!’

When we read how foreign the most basic and innocuous advertising seems to the two Russians-they are surprised that that towns advertise themselves on billboards beside the highway-we don’t gain a better picture of the United States in the 1930s, but of the Soviet Union. They are highly sympathetic to the Native Americans living on reservations, predictably seeing them as remnants of a social structure in opposition to the dynamic capitalism of the east and west coasts. (Although as Erika Wolf notes, Ilf and Petrov are once again tricked, as a Native American who pretends to be unaware of civilisation was actually a famous photographer and clown dancer on tour.) Similarly, a trip through North Carolina confirms their Soviet views about American race relations – deep in the Jim Crow era, it is fair to say they had a point.

What does surprise the modern reader is the unfocused rage they direct towards American filmmaking. ‘We watched at least a hundred picture shows and were simply depressed by the amount of vulgarity, stupidity and lies’. Certainly, it would be hard to defend the vast piles of films which were produced to fulfil contractual obligations in the studio system during Hollywood’s Golden Age, but cheaply written and produced movies are hardly a unique feature of American cinema. The cookie-cutter productions of Soviet cinema during the ideologically rigid Stalin era are, on average, of a far lower quality than comparable American films, and have certainly held up worse over time. Ilf and Petrov may have been outraged more by the ideological content of Hollywood films than their quality.

American Road Trip is certainly at the margins of Soviet culture in the 1930s, but it is more than a historical curiosity. Satire was a major part of Russian culture before and after the October Revolution. The lives of Illya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov illustrate how mixed the bureaucratic approach to political satire could be. Their 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs flirts with political criticism, but they remained in favour-other well-known satirists, such as those in OBERIU literary collective, were killed in Stalin’s purges for sedition.

Ilf and Petrov do little more than reflect dominant Soviet thinking about their ideological opponent, but they are never heavy handed or propagandistic. American Road Trip purports to be a study of the United States, but instead fascinatingly reveals the strength of Soviet ideology and the Russian mindset.

20 years reveals gigantic strides in international trade

The politics of trade policy often obscures what should be an unambiguously positive story about the globalisation of the world economy. Goods which were previously produced on a single site are now produced in a virtual international factory-each element assembled in different countries, even continents, and linked by the international shipping network.

In his 2006 history of the shipping container The Box, Marc Levinson illustrated this by detailing the convoluted production process of a Barbie doll – Chinese workers produce the figure using moulds from the United States, machinery from Japan and Europe, and plastic from Taiwan; her hair is produced in Japan, the pigments from the United States, and the clothing from China.

Just how rapidly the world’s economies are becoming interdependent is clear when we look at the shipping container. The US-based Progressive Policy Institute has recently noted that the container capacity of an average container ship has massively increased over the last two decades. The average ship can now carry the 2,348 twenty-foot equivalent units (the size of a standard shipping container). The international container ship fleet has itself grown four-fold since 1987.

And this is only set to increase. The world’s longest container ship, the Danish-owned Emma Maersk can carry 11,000 units.

This rapid and dramatic increase in international economic integration has been just as significant for our economic well-being as have any changes in public policy. The entrepreneur who popularised the shipping container – Malcolm McLean – should be just as well remembered as the politicians who cut tariffs. And when we look at the low cost and high variety of goods available in our stores, we should remember that it was entrepreneurs who brought them there, not well-crafted public policy.

One For The Country

Anybody who remembers that photograph of Peter Costello gleefully surrounded by newborn infants knows one thing: it isn’t only aspiring parents who can go a bit baby crazy. Few areas are as familiar with poorly designed government policy as childhood and parenthood.

So when the Federal Government this week announced an inquiry into the possibility of paid parental leave, it was tough to remain optimistic. You need only to look at the baby bonus to see that the black hole of bad policy is deep. Costly, blunt and poorly designed policy instruments have just as many unintended negative consequences as benefits.

The exact details of Labor’s parental leave scheme won’t be known until after the inquiry reports back next year, but most proposals for paid parental leave would require the Government to pay a nominated parent roughly the minimum wage for a dozen or so weeks.

Certainly, this is far better than simply requiring businesses to pay the cost of the leave out of their own pockets. The biggest risk that government-mandated workplace entitlements pose is that they make it more costly to hire workers – and the unintended consequence is that employers are reluctant to hire in the first place.

Nevertheless, for a government that proclaims itself eager to cut spending, the addition of what will probably be at least a half-billion dollar expenditure into the federal budget is not going to help the Labor Party nurture a small government image.

Paid parental leave could also break a fundamental principle of good welfare policy – the most effective policies are means-tested policies. There is no good reason for taxpayers to give the $5000 baby bonus to a family that is already comfortable enough to look after its newborn. At least the issue of parental leave has been referred to the Productivity Commission – the government’s independent research department that can claim much of the credit for advancing the cause of economic reform since its inception. This contrasts with the worrying reluctance of Labor to trust the commission with anything else important.

Inquiries into climate change, car manufacturing and international trade have all been established separately – Kevin Rudd may not trust the government’s experts to give him the answers he wants.

But the biggest problem with a paid parental leave scheme is how it encourages the redefinition of our relationship with government. The baby bonus has already established in the mind of Australians that having children is more than just a personal decision – it is part of a long-running negotiation between parents, the Federal Government and the tax office. The former Liberal government shamelessly encouraged this idea, but if what appears to be the instinct of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard is followed through, soon no one will start a family without lengthy consultations with the Australian Taxation Office and Prime Minister’s Department.

Of course, from the Government’s perspective, this is a perfectly rational approach. All those newborns that surrounded Peter Costello are future taxpayers. And business lobbyists keep urging the government to do something about the skills shortage and ageing workforce. So the government wants us to breed.

But the people whose decision could be influenced if they are given a few grand by the government may not actually be the best parents.

And the problems of ageing populations and skills shortages don’t have to be resolved by funnelling subsidies to young families. It would instead be better for children if individuals were allowed to come to their own decisions about parenthood uninfluenced by politicians desperate to pay their way out of the latest political crisis.

Perhaps if the government really thinks that we have a population problem, it could be looking carefully at increasing immigration – skilled and non-skilled – and relaxing the high costs of work visas.

Nevertheless, introducing subsidies to new parents conveniently supports Rudd’s working families narrative. It’s politically savvy to pay off your supporters.

The fundamental question that the Labor Government’s proposal for parental leave raises is whether parents should have children for themselves, or for society. But that answer is fairly clear. After all, what parent spends time thinking about how starting a family could help Australia’s OECD rankings? Hopefully none.

Rudd’s Super Summit Puts The Con Into Consensus

There is a strange fantasy held by many serious people in politics that if you get enough experts in a room, some sort of magical consensus will emerge and everything will be wonderful.

But suppose we could get a consensus about the future of this country. Would that even be good?

This fantasy appears to be the idea behind the 2020 summit that Kevin Rudd announced last week. For two days, 1000 of Australia’s best, and best-connected, individuals will convene in Canberra to nut out some solutions to our social and economic problems.

Given that it is unlikely the Rudd Government will adopt any of the summit’s proposals – at least, none they weren’t already familiar with – the 2020 talkfest is unlikely to do too much harm.

No doubt the proposals from 2020 will be as pedestrian as those produced by the half-dozen “future-oriented” conferences around the country each year. That is, we should do more on climate change, spend more on education, infrastructure and innovation, engage more with Asia, the republic is the most important issue facing Australia today, children are our future, and on and on and on.

The Government will surely be familiar with these ideas – many of them formed Labor’s campaign platform. So if the only big idea behind Rudd’s education revolution was to set up an education committee at a gigantic conference, it’s hard to avoid wondering why we bother having revolutions at all.

After all, what great idea ever came from a committee? Committees usually end up choosing the worst idea that at least two people agree on. It was a committee that chose the hideous London Olympics logo, which looks like Lisa Simpson doing something she shouldn’t.

The old adage that “a camel is a horse designed by committee” will be doubly true for public policy designed by a committee that consists of 1000 “leaders” – hardly the sort of people who are known as team players.

Nevertheless, at the end of two days, the 2020 summit will have bought off Australia’s public intellectual class. There is nothing more flattering for a self-styled opinion maker than to be approached by the federal government for ideas. With an invite list of 1000, this summit is flattery on an industrial scale.

There is a serious point to be made about the 2020 summit, and it doesn’t bode well for future policy. The summit appears to make good on one of Labor’s key election promises: a new style of consensus-based politics. Under Kevin Rudd, the party said, the states and the Commonwealth would work together and businesses and governments would work together. Even Labor’s factions might tone down their mutual hatred and start going to the same parties.

It would be easy to run a country on consensus if everybody shared the same views. But not only do people disagree on means, they also disagree on ends. For some, the aim of public policy should be liberty and the maximisation of personal choice; for others, economic and social equality. With such disparate and often strongly held views, the idea that we can all eventually agree is a fiction. But the problem with the 2020 summit is more than the impossibility of getting everybody into a group hug. The dirty secret of Australian politics is that conflict makes good government.

For instance, state and federal governments aren’t supposed to co-operate. The idea behind Federation was that the states would compete to develop the best public policy and that the Commonwealth would do the things that the states didn’t. If they start working closely together, as Rudd has assured us will now happen, it will only further erode our critically weakened federal system. We may not actually want to “end the blame game”.

Similarly, trying to get business and government working together is fraught with difficulty. Usually, the only things business want from government are money or protection from competitors. The only thing governments want from business is help achieving political goals.

And when the government works with the “community”, it inevitably ends up consulting special-interest groups who harbour ideological views not shared by the community as a whole. It is us, as citizens and consumers, who get the raw deal.

The 2020 summit is more than just a happy-clappy approach to governing. Rudd has to be careful that his eagerness to build “consensus” doesn’t leave the Government open to interest groups and poor policy.

Isn’t All This Talk Of An Apocalypse Getting A Bit Boring?

This year is the 40th anniversary of Paul Ehrlich’s influential The Population Bomb, a book that predicted an apocalyptic overpopulation crisis in the 1970s and ’80s.

Ehrlich’s book provides a lesson we still haven’t learnt. His prophecy that the starvation of millions of people in the developed world was imminent was spectacularly wrong – humanity survived without any of the forced sterilisation that Ehrlich believed was necessary.

It’s easy to predict environmental collapse, but it never actually seems to happen.

The anniversary of The Population Bomb should put contemporary apocalyptic predictions in their proper context. If anything, our world – and the environment – just keeps getting better.

Ehrlich was at the forefront of a wave of pessimistic doomsayers in the late 1960s and early ’70s. And these doomsayers weren’t just cranks – or, if they were cranks, they were cranks with university tenure.

Despite what should be a humiliating failure for his theory of overpopulation, Ehrlich is still employed as a professor of population studies by Stanford University. Similarly, when George Wald predicted in a 1970 speech that civilisation was likely to end within 15 or 30 years, his audience was reminded that he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist.

These predictions were picked up by people eager to push their own agendas. And a subgenre of films arose to deal with the “inevitable” environment and population crisis. Soylent Green(1973) depicted a world where all food was chemically produced, and other films imagined dystopias where amoral bureaucrats strictly controlled the population – just the sort of things advocated in The Population Bomb.

In retrospect, these fears seem a little bit silly. The green revolution that was brought about by advances in agricultural biotechnology came pretty close to eliminating the problem of food scarcity. Nor did the alarmists expect the large changes in demography and fertility rates that have occurred during the past few decades.

Nevertheless, for people in the 1970s, predictions of apocalypse through overpopulation and famine were just as real as the predictions of an apocalypse caused by climate change are today. And, just like today, environmental activists and their friends in politics were lining up to propose dramatic changes to avert the crisis.

For instance, the vice-president of the Australian Conservation Foundation wrote just last week in The Age that we needed to imagine global suffering before we can tackle climate change through “nation-building” – whatever that is.

But there are substantial grounds for optimism – on almost every measure, the state of the world is improving.

Pollution is no longer the threat it was seen to be in the 1970s, at least in the developed world. Changes in technology, combined with our greater demand for a clean environment, have virtually eliminated concerns about pungent waterways and dirty forests. Legislation played some role in this, but as Indur Goklany points out in his recent study, The Improving State of the World, the environment started getting better long before such laws were passed.

Goklany reveals that strong economies, not environment ministers, are the most effective enforcers of cleanliness in our air and water. Indeed, the world’s 10 most polluted places are in countries where strong economic growth has historically been absent – Russia, China, India and Kyrgyzstan have not really been known for their thriving consumer capitalism.

Other indices, too, show that humanity’s future is likely to be bright. Infant mortality has dramatically declined, as has malnutrition, illiteracy, and even global poverty.

And there are good grounds for hope that we can adapt to changing climates as well. History has shown just how capable we are of inventing and adapting our way out of any sticky situation – and how we can do it without crippling our economies or imposing brutal social controls.

Environmental alarmists have become more and more like those apocalyptic preachers common in the 19th century – always expecting the Rapture on this date and, when it doesn’t come, quickly revising their calculations.

Optimism is in too short supply in discussions about the environment. But four decades afterThe Population Bomb, if we remember just how wrong visions of the apocalypse have been in the past, perhaps we will look to the future more cheerfully.

Next Time You Sip A Latte, Look Beyond The Feel-Good Choice

Just how fair is fair trade? Mass market retailers from Safeway to Starbucks now sell us coffee that is supposed to quench our thirst and appease our conscience, but there is more to fair trade than feel-good marketing and social justice.

Coffee has long been highly politicised. In 17th-century England, coffee became allied with the cause of free speech when Charles II shut down the coffee houses that he thought were brewing criticism of his government.

And in the eyes of modern activists, coffee is symbolic of the unfairness of international trade. Their story of coffee is of the developing world exploited by globalisation and wicked multinational corporations. And their solution is fair trade – marketing coffee under a brand that guarantees growers more bang for their beans, sustainable agricultural practices and so on.

But there is more to fair trade than meets the eye. It comes at a high price. The program carries a great deal of ideological baggage and fair trade certification is full of requirements that can limit economic development rather than encourage it. For example, to achieve certification, coffee producers are required to structure their organisations not as the small businesses that have been so successful in capitalist economies but as democratic worker co-operatives.

For fair trade advocates, the only way the developing world can compete in a global coffee market is by adopting the quasi-socialist communal structures that have constantly failed to compete in other industries.

Individual farms are unable to achieve certification by themselves – the fair trade organisation will only approve co-operatives that can contain hundreds of farms. This practice reduces entrepreneurship and competition between producers, eliminating the benefits of innovative farming techniques. And in some regions, the fair trade system encourages farmers to grow in less climatically favourable areas, depressing the quality of the coffee beans.

Nevertheless, the fair trade marketing machine is extraordinarily powerful, and the brand has revealed an eager base of socially aware consumers.

The politicisation of the coffee industry has happened in conjunction with another major change: the awakening of the Australian palate. Coffee, like many other foods and drinks, has benefited from an expansion of taste that has added, for instance, sushi and specialty cheeses to our diet. It’s worth remembering just how recently it was that mass market stores like Gloria Jean’s were seen as gourmet retailers pushing the radical idea that the flavour of our flat whites actually mattered outside niche cafes.

In the middle of this gourmet revolution, whether we buy fair trade or just good old free trade coffee is merely another one of the thousands of choices we face in our overloaded supermarket. And Australians are wealthy enough to spend extra on products we feel are more ethical.

Indeed, symbolism has become an important part of the way we dine. Similar campaigns against genetic modification and for organic and sustainable agriculture are just as much about image as reality – too often they are based on flimsy evidence and have negative consequences for producers and the environment.

The fair trade system is more than our preferences in the supermarket. At best, fair trade has an ambiguous effect on the economic wellbeing of coffee growers in the developing world; at worst, it may actually be holding them back.

Tackling Obesity – Should The Public Pay?

The demand by AMA Victoria that the State Government fund bariatric surgery for the chronically obese is no doubt motivated by compassion, but illustrates some of the ways the debate about obesity has become severely distorted. Obesity is not a public health problem and should not be treated as one.

Until relatively recently, the phrase “public health” indicated health problems that were actually public problems – sanitation, the control of epidemics, water quality, airborne pollution and so forth. But increased obesity is not a public health crisis like an outbreak of bird flu would be. Obesity is not contagious – when one person overindulges on fast food, their colleagues and neighbours aren’t put at risk. And, in 2008, nobody orders pizza without being fully aware that cheesy crusts can lead to weight gain.

For these reasons, obesity is too often tragic, but it is first and foremost a private problem. Medical campaigners who seek to redefine the parameters of public health are eliminating the crucial policy distinction between public and private health concerns. When every health problem becomes a national crisis, no medical treatment is ineligible for government funding. Bariatric surgery may be an important, even necessary, tool to treat obesity, but it does not automatically follow that it should be paid for directly by the taxpayer.

Of course, the most common objection to this line of reasoning is the simple calculation that the cost of treating obesity now is far less than the cost of treating the consequences in the future – resolving heart disease and diabetes may be more expensive than bariatric surgery.

All public policy should be subject to economic assessment. But this is a slippery slope. Britain’s National Health Service shows what can happen when the government makes all health problems its business – those calculations rapidly lose their compassion and become cruel assessments of moral, rather than medical, questions. Last week British PM Gordon Brown hinted that individuals whose lifestyle choices had created their health problems – obesity is the classic example – may be refused treatment in order to cut costs.

The only way to avoid this trap is to drop the conceit that all medical problems are public problems, and to reintroduce the idea that individuals should be responsible for their own health.

What next? Liberalism after the Howard government

‘When you change the government’, argued John Howard in the last few days before the election, ‘you do change the direction of the country’.

Paul Keating’s clarion call proved to be just as ineffectual the second time round. That could perhaps be because it obviously isn’t true. Despite the high level of state economic and social intervention in Australia, the nation isn’t steered by Captain Government.

As Tim Wilson writes in this special section on liberalism after the Howard government, part of the problem that the Coalition faced in its final years was the unwillingness of the government to grapple with key demographic and social changes. Similarily, as Ken Phillip notes, in industrial relations the rise of independent contracting has been meteoric—to the extent that there are now far more self-employed people than there are members of a union — but the cause of this change was economic, not legislative.

Between 1996 and 2007 a lot of things happened, and very few of them were the consequence of Commonwealth legislation.

The ‘change the country’ line was doubly inappropriate because of the status quo strategy of the Rudd opposition. Federal Labor’s big ticket items may have been climate change and broadband, but fibre optic networks and carbon trading don’t win elections. Rather, it was Labor’s mantra of ‘economic conservatism’ that was specifically designed to repudiate Howard’s argument. To try to emphasise their credentials, Rudd and Gillard’s repeatedly affirmed the independence of the Reserve Bank — as if that was ever up for grabs.

The message was simple: vote for the ALP, and they won’t change the country. But if you vote for the Coalition, they will embark on another round of industrial relations reform, and the country certainly will change. The Howard government became alienated from its own record of conservative governance.

The 2007 election re-established the status quo brand in the minds of political strategists. It will likely go down as one of John Howard’s major legacies, and it is largely a positive legacy. With the government’s extraordinarily flattering economic record, it is no wonder that voters prefer more of the same.

Unfortunately, brand status quo has applied to areas which advocates of liberal philosophy — that is, the ideological combination of limited government and the open society — would prefer it did not. As Des Moore shows in his piece on the Howard government’s spending and taxing record, despite their professed sympathy with small government principles, the Coalition delivered no reduction in discretionary spending and its election promises foreshadowed no future reduction.

Along a wide range of public policy areas, the Howard government could have done more. Industrial relations reform was used as a federal power grab, rather than as a push towards common law contracts. Taxation reform drove yet another stake into the already terminal federal compact.

Other reforms were barely reforms at all—the 2006 changes to media law did little to free up a stifled commercial media sector. It is hard to avoid concluding that the government’s approach to reform was about quantity, not quality. Economic reform packages may have started out well-intentioned, but when they emerged from the meat-grinder of parliament, they too often represented steps backward.

This mixed record — the Howard government was extremely successful at managing the economy, but disappointing at reforming it—is reflected in this IPA Review issue by the conflicting, but not irreconcilable, accounts by Tom Switzer and Christian Kerr.

Liberalism’s dilemma

Nevertheless, elections are not won or lost on the size of government, weak media regulations, or eroding federalism. Elections are won on appeals to the status quo, issues such as immigration, or security fears. Federal seats are won on vacuous — and, as Richard Allsop points out, for federalists deeply concerning — issues such as graffiti, hoons and train lines. It isn’t just that voters are not interested in liberal policies. In many cases it has proven far easier to win votes with an illiberal platform.

Part of this gulf between the policy preferences of voters and liberal policy preferences has been explained well by Bryan Caplan in his 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. In it, Caplan nominates four biases held by the average voter that are not empirically justifiable. The ‘make-work bias’ is a tendency to equate economic growth with jobs, rather than productivity; the ‘anti-foreign’ bias ignores the importance of foreign trade; the ‘pessimistic bias’ overplays contemporary economic problems; and the ‘anti-market’ bias underestimates the benefits of market exchange.

Caplan’s four biases go most of the way to explaining the distance between liberal philosophy and Liberal Party policy. As a consequence, the Coalition’s loss of government illuminates sharply a debilitating problem that liberalism faces in 2007.

What role can liberal philosophy have if it can’t be successfully marketed to voters? Certainly, ideology cannot be the sole guide to policy. This is the classic dilemma for libertarians seeking public office. As one American libertarian noted, ‘There is no mass constituency for seven-year-old heroin dealers to be able to buy tanks with their profits from prostitution.’

Liberal political parties are unlikely to win future government on a platform of radical change, except in times of crisis. The four biases of the irrational voter mean that dramatic increases in immigration or a reduction in the minimum wage are hardly tickets to electoral success. In an era of status quo politics, it appears that ideology is, on net, an electoral negative rather than a positive.

But conversely, the final years of the Howard government demonstrated what can result when a political party has no philosophical base, lacks the fiscal restraint imposed by ideology, and simply purchases the votes it needs. Sooner or later, voters — or in the case of the 2007 election, the opposition — punish them for their directionless expedience.

Perhaps one reason why liberalism seems impossible to market to voters is because it hasn’t yet been tried. No major party has gone to an election — from opposition or from government — with a full programme of social liberalism and economic liberalism.

In her piece, Louise Staley starts to examine what an array of liberal social policies might look like. Importantly, she argues that ‘liberal’ in this context is not merely a synonym of ‘left’, but neither is it ‘conservative’. Instead, liberalism needs to develop its own approach if it is to break through the social policy impasse. But this is an area where modern liberal thought is conspicuously lacking, and filling that hole will need to be a part of any liberal revival.

There is the possibility, too, to develop an economically liberal message that may resonate with voters. The Howard government suffered from its abstract message — ‘economic growth’ is far less concrete than fibre-to-the-node and the Kyoto Protocol. Voters may instead respond to campaigns targeting over-bureaucracy and regulation, particularly as they affect business and community life. The record levels of regulatory and legislative activity during the Howard government provide ample scope to do so. It is fair to say that such a campaign would be a direct repudiation of the Howard record.

Ronald Reagan campaigned along these lines, although it should be noted that Australia lacks the anti-statist political culture of the United States. But if the Rudd Labor government turns out to be anything like the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, this regulation is likely to increase exponentially — presenting possible policy targets such as privacy and bureaucratisation.

Nevertheless, again we reach a strategic bottleneck — campaigns against the Nanny State may swing voters towards liberal parties at the margins, but probably not deliver two dozen seats. Arguing that a consistently liberal message could win an election would be convenient, but doesn’t seem to be true.

In this IPA Review, we have assembled a range of approaches to this challenge. What is not under question however is the need for liberalism in Australia, and the challenges which liberals face — limited government and the open society remain ‘simple and obvious’ goals regardless of their electoral popularity.