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Silly Recommendations Are Very Bad For Our Health

Should the Government give tax breaks for gym memberships? Sponsor therapy sessions for smokers? Limit the number of bottleshops in each suburb?

The Federal Government’s Preventative Health Taskforce has spent the past year coming up with creative little ideas to help Australians kick their alcohol, tobacco and fatty food habits. On Tuesday, the taskforce delivered its recommendations to Canberra. But they’ve been dripping out their proposals to the media for a few weeks.

Indeed, the taskforce seems to have adopted a tactic new to policy debate: if you propose enough bad ideas in a short enough space of time, it’s impossible to rebut them all.

One of the least convincing ideas is the one that has got the most attention: subsidised gym membership and fitness equipment to tackle obesity.

Yes, gyms can be expensive. But come the raw prawn, National Preventative Health Taskforce. Gwyneth Paltrow may spend $900 a month to go to a “workout studio”, according to the British Telegraph, but most gym memberships are the cost of an average mobile phone plan.

Maybe we are all craven, stingy fatties, but if we are, then it’d be a good bet that we’re lazy too. A few small tax breaks or a small government-sponsored reduction in the price of a gym membership is not exactly a compelling motivator to cast aside the pizza boxes and pump weights.

One of the more prominent anti-smoking proposals of the taskforce is to scrub cigarette packs of all brand identification – logos, colours, everything – as if stencilled gold foil pasted onto a cardboard box is all it takes to eliminate an individual’s willpower. Are there really that many people who want to quit smoking, but keep being drawn back by the shiny wrapping, like a nicotine-addled magpie?

No doubt the taskforce hopes to replace the labels with “YOU MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD ALREADY” in a nice bold typeface on one side of the pack, and on the other side a picture of a confused and sad Bruce Willis. And you get a mandatory slap on the face with each packet purchased.

We’re a lot further down the nanny state’s slippery slope than anybody could have predicted a few decades ago. When restrictions on tobacco were first seriously implemented, those who opposed the measures asked whether fatty food could be the next target. That concern was, of course, dismissed as silly and a little bit shrill. Well, it’s government policy now.

There’s a big chasm between the medical world and the world of public policy.

Public health activists demonstrate their odd detachment from the mainstream world of politics when they start talking about our “obesogenic” environment – a term used by reputable groups such as VicHealth and the Australian Heart Foundation to describe a society which apparently makes obesity nearly inevitable.

Like those post-Marxist philosophers who study the “essential violence” of peaceful capitalism, these public health academics now seek to expose the essential fatness of 21st century Australia. Indeed, many health scholars have moved so far out of the realm of medicine that they seem to be developing a branch of sociology based solely on trans fats.

They may have good intentions. Nobody wants Australia to be needlessly unhealthy. But these medicos with ambitious regulatory proposals rarely consider some critical questions. Will there be unintended consequences? (Such as drinkers changing from alcopops to hard spirits since the tax was increased.) And where is the evidence that it’ll even work – will the specific policy being recommended actually fix the problem?

There is an almost unanimous agreement among public health lobbyists and the commentariat that the Government should ban junk food advertising to children. But theRoyal Journal of Medicine argues there is “no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children’s food consumption”.

Our peak communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which has repeatedly looked at the issue over the past decade, agrees. Nevertheless, we still get vacuous claims about “pester-power” – claims which seem to be driven by the belief that only the government can stop kids nagging their parents.

Mark Twain was concerned that giving the government the power to “meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens” risked people losing their “independence of thought and action”. Today, it seems that for many in the public health establishment, this loss of independent thought and action is not so much a warning as an assumption.

Crisis? What Crisis?

By now, we’ve all read the story, dozens of times. It goes like this: the financial crisis has brought down the Potemkin village of consumerism. The recession has exposed the internal contradictions and long-term impossibility of the neo-liberal order.

In a thousand community centres across Australia, in homes and kitchens and op shops, people are changing how they live their lives. People are cooking at home instead of eating out. Restaurants are responding by replacing gourmet with “home-inspired” meals. Friends are sharing clothes. Op shops are in fashion, a claim shown by talking to the fashion designer who picked up a pair of leather pants for (just!) $120 from the Salvos. Indeed, the Salvos have rebranded their stores as “Fashion with a Conscience”, making the leap from evangelical Christians with a focus on charity, to “urban recyclers” with celebrity endorsements describing the shops as a “new shopping hot spot”.

Sewing is back – here two youngish mothers are sewing pants for their children and have started a home-made homewares club that plans to meet every fortnight in a Brunswick community hall. Fashionistas are now recessionistas; “recession chic” has replaced all-my-pants-are made-out-of-Peruvian-diamonds chic. You get the idea.

But is consumerism really on its deathbed? I mean, we’re not even technically in a recession yet.

This narrative about the consequences of the economic crisis is just a little too cute to be true – it’s like prudence and thrift as seen through the glossy eyes of an upmarket women’s magazine. These are the kind of savings found by people whose share portfolio has dipped, not the financial savings that people who have been suddenly kicked out of work have to find.

If conspicuous consumption has really gone, perhaps we’ve replaced it with conspicuous frugality. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. Are expensive ripped jeans, popular long before credit began to crunch, meant to symbolise poverty or wealth? The developed world’s press – tabloids and broadsheets alike – have managed an apparently seamless transition from stories about “why the economy is growing but we’re all really sad” to stories about “starving in style”.

An unemployment rate of 4 per cent apparently makes us concerned about working too hard, and economic growth makes us depressed. But an unemployment rate just over 5 per cent evidently encourages people to discover their inner artisan and make their own hats out of felt.

Certainly, the retail sector has sputtered in the past few months. In February, retail sales fell 2 per cent. In March, sales increased more than 2 per cent, and April’s figures show a barely discernible increase of just 0.3 per cent. But, despite the ups and downs of the retail sector since the downturn began, RMIT economists Sinclair Davidson and Ashton de Silva found, in a study released this month, that retail sales figures were sticking closely to their long-term trend – and that trend is, even in these dark economic times, moving inexorably upwards.

Sure, this could be due to the $900 gifts that most people received a month or two back, although the economists pointed out that a mostly steady trend suggests this is unlikely. Nonetheless, if consumerism is really sinking, then the seawater hasn’t shown up in the retail sector quite yet.

Obviously, rejecting consumer capitalism for political reasons isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in 2006 The Australia Institute, a left-wing think tank, claimed that dumpster-diving was gaining in popularity. Skip-dippers are conscientious objectors to consumerism who aren’t forced by adverse circumstances to dig through other people’s rubbish, but do so as a political statement about sustainability and capitalism. And, according to the Australia Institute, skip-dippers aren’t just people who enjoy reupholstering furniture, but more affluent hobbyists shoving their hands in supermarket dumpsters until they touch the coagulating bin-juice at the bottom.

And people were sewing clothes as a hobby well before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Indeed, in 2001, the satirists at The Onion wrote a piece titled “Gruelling Household Tasks of 19th Century Enjoyed By Suburban Woman”, pointing out that churning butter and making candles by hand are very strange ways to spend your free time.

Nevertheless, one somewhat more serious article in the British industry magazine Marketing Week claimed that the financial crisis comes at a moment in history when we are shifting away from consumerism anyway – the magazine described the future as a “premodern age”. According to this view, we’re seeing a new emphasis on social, rather than individual, production and we’re buying things less for instant gratification, and with social goals in mind. We’re thinking of the environmental impact of our purchases and the ethical questions they raise, and so on.

There is something to this. In 2009, there’s scarcely a product imported from the Third World that doesn’t have a fair trade equivalent. And environmental sustainability is now held as a goal not just for committed greenies, but for otherwise non-political types. After all, skip-dipping student communes can’t afford to install solar panels on their sharehouses, these basic but expensive home improvements are being taken up by largely middle-class buyers.

Rightly so. Psychologists and economists refer to a “hierarchy of needs” – once individuals have sorted out basic things like food and shelter, safety, and love, they start concerning themselves with ethical or moral questions. If you’re rich enough to afford imported cheese, you’ve also got more energy to think about where your food comes from, or what impact you might be making on the wider world.

But how seriously should we take the idea that the financial crisis is the final straw that will suddenly push us into glorious premodernity? Marketing Week pointed to the popularity of Lily Allen, whose pop music has an anti-consumerist tinge. Indeed, in the lead single of Allen’s latest album she mockingly sings: “I am a weapon of massive consumption, and it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.” Do you like her message? Have you already bought her CD? You might also want to buy the video from iTunes for $3.39. And ringtones of her songs are available from the Lily Allen Mobile Store, ensuring you can continue to collect Lily Allen memorabilia on the go. She does appreciate your support – The New York Timesreported that Allen spent $143,000 on clothes and jewellery just last year. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. It would be a stupid pop singer who didn’t offer her fans every kind of merchandising possible. And for a musician, multiple revenue streams are essential in an age of widespread music piracy.

But a celebrity’s failure to practise the ascetic lifestyle they preach does nothing to assuage that nagging suspicion that political views about conspicuous consumption can be as much a fashion as any brand-name T-shirt.

Even the popular anti-advertising culture-jamming outfit Adbusters puts out an overproduced magazine designed more for the coffee table than the barricades. Yet, the publisher of Adbusters decries our lazy consumerism: “We watch nature shows instead of venturing into nature. We laugh at sitcom jokes but not at our spouse’s. We spend more evenings enjoying video sex than making love ourselves.”

Does that description hold true for anyone you know personally? We speak of other people seeking out “status goods” – things purchased primarily to signal to others that they could afford them – and “conspicuous consumption”, but we are apparently never guilty of such irrationality ourselves. Soulless consumerism is easy to identify in others, not so easy to identify at home.

Just a few years ago, social critics were claiming that people bought iPods in part to show off their distinctive white earbuds. But as Apple reduced its prices and introduced new, cheaper models, it undermined the “status” value of its products by making them available to even more people. The presumed exclusivity of the iPod range was totally shattered. Yet since then, sales of iPods have increased exponentially.

I don’t know about you, but I buy things because I think they might make my life better in some way. Sometimes we all get it wrong – a book isn’t as good as we hoped, a piece of technology doesn’t integrate into our lives as smoothly as we would like, or we bought too many mushrooms to put in the risotto. Most of the time, we get it right.

So what is so “consumerist” about that? Is it really conspicuous consumption if the enjoyment we derive from stuff comes from when we use them, not just simply from purchasing them? And if it is, then what’s the problem? I suspect that the vast literature on consumerism and consumption can be reduced to one banal observation: life is getting better. We have more ways to raise our living standards, and some of those ways involve buying stuff.

There’s a funny thing about recessions: if – a pretty important “if” – you don’t lose your job, recessions aren’t really that bad a time to be alive. Interest rates tend to go down and panicky retailers aggressively discount their goods to try to draw customers back and clear stock. If you like your designer fashion or just no-brand accessories, they will be going on sale earlier and at prices lower than when the economy was booming. So, except for shrinking superannuation savings, there really isn’t too much to panic about. For better or worse, a recession needn’t precipitate any major changes to the way we live our lives. If you haven’t done anything stupid, like max out your credit card, or taken out a mortgage you couldn’t even pay off in a booming economy, then everything should be fine.

Of course, for the minority that lose their jobs, recessions can be very traumatic. Sure, the unemployed may be spared the consequences of “affluenza” – the crippling emotional emptiness of consumerism – but losing a job is widely considered a big risk factor for mental illness, poorer physical health and relationship problems.

As always, our historical linchpin for economic downturns is the Great Depression. We all know of parents or grandparents who acquired a distinct frugality during the 1930s. But it’s not like consumerism took a holiday during the Great Depression. The 1930s was a formative period in the development of the advertising industry, when marketers started to focus on marketing directly to the vanity of individuals.

Beauty products are famously counter-cyclical – that is, as the economy goes down, sales of lipstick and foundation go up – as people spend money on cheaper forms of self-improvement and satisfaction. This held just as true for the 1930s as it has for the recessions that followed. Yet this focus on the individual during an economic downturn doesn’t quite fit our idea of the communal, co-operative and fundamentally anti-consumerist culture in the period.

And, of course, we have to remember that, whatever cultural changes did occur during the Depression, that period was followed by a long postwar boom. The golden age of advertising built on the foundations developed during the 1930s and 1940s – two decades of apparent selflessness.

Economic downturns always end. Broad shifts in culture aren’t just brought about from an economic crisis. They take time. Maybe there are big changes afoot in society. But the activists and trend-spotters who treat the financial crisis as the harbinger of a global anti-consumer sustainability revolution are reading just a little too much into a few anecdotes about sewing and vegie patches.

Anyway, a green economy will require a little more than “reduce, reuse and recycle” – going green takes greenbacks. Energy produced by wind power costs much more than energy produced by brown coal; the cheapest electric car is far more expensive than the cheapest gas-guzzler. Whatever consumer preferences are shifting towards green products is only possible because of our historically unprecedented wealth. We’ll all need to buy our way into a cleaner future – energy-saving devices don’t buy themselves. The same is true for almost all other social and ethical causes. Concerned about global poverty? Producers in the Third World would appreciate our continued demand for their goods.

If before the crisis hit you were a reckless spender and debt-accumulator, then I’m glad a recession could come along to shock you out of your idiotic ways. And if you refused to share your clothes with your friends, but now that your investments have tanked you’ve been able to find just that little bit of residual neighbourliness deep within you, then that’s marvellous.

Nevertheless, for the vast majority of Australians, life will continue as before, largely unaffected by the economic downturn. The global financial crisis is a big deal. But it’s not that big a deal.

Stimulus (N): A Huge Sum Of Money Spent On Any Old Crap

What doesn’t count as economic stimulus? Or, if we are to use the more formal term, is there any spending Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wouldn’t consider to be Nation Building for Recovery?

The Commonwealth Government is planning to spend $1.4 million helping a recreation hall in the ACT install iPod docking stations, among other things. Children these days apparently won’t go anywhere if they can’t plug in their MP3 players. And the global economy needs – really, really desperately needs – a couple more iPod docks.

Just like it really, really needs the renovation of the Guildford community hall’s interior linings, the upgrade of the Harry Trott reserve car park in Kennington, and the new BMX track in Gardiner Reserve, Gisborne. And the credit crunch really needs the old tourist welcome sign in Tenterfield, NSW, to be replaced. (That one will cost us $30,000, but I’m sure Tenterfield deserves only the best in welcome sign technology.)

All of these recession-busters are contained in the Federal Government’s community infrastructure program as part of the stimulus package. There’s a quarter of a billion dollars being spent on these sorts of “community” projects, which apparently differ from normal infrastructure because of the occurrence of group hugs or Kumbaya singalongs.

Don’t get me wrong. Community is lovely and heart-warming and sharing-tastic. But reading the list of community projects makes it seem as though the Rudd Government is giving the whole country a full body massage, except the ending will only be happy if you’re into eucalyptus distillery museums and really big budget deficits.

It would be interesting to find out what proposals the Government thought were bad value for money, if any. If the iPod docking stations got through, what wouldn’t have?

Admittedly, if you are going to try to flood the economy with borrowed cash, you have to buy something – you might as well build a shed for Warrnambool’s Holiday Actors theatre group or give a Glenroy toilet block a once-over.

The purpose behind the stimulus plan seems to be just getting people to do stuff. But why this particular stuff? Why not build a super-fast underground railway from Perth to Hobart? At least that’d be exciting. Or what about investing in a giant computer to figure out the meaning of life? We’ve always wanted to be a knowledge nation; that would finally clinch it.

It’s hard to believe the future of the Australian economy depends on the mass upgrade of toilet facilities. In fact, it’s hard to believe that the Government can do anything about the world economic downturn that got us into this mess.

The old rule about government is that everything it builds costs at least twice as much. In the past few days, a Queensland school has received $250,000 for a shed that is only worth $29,000. So when we see the Commonwealth paying $38,000 for chain-wire fencing around a junior oval in Carisbrook, it seems a bit steep – unless the fence is made out of titanium and hand-chained by vestal virgins with PhDs.

I’m no expert, obviously, but Tumby Bay on the Eyre Peninsula is managing to fence a full-sized oval, and rehydrate some drought-stricken trees, for just $25,000.

If the Government called you and insisted it pay for you to build an extra wing on your modest home, you’d be an idiot not to budget generously.

At the 2007 election, the Liberal Party handed out maps of its electorates pointing out all the cool stuff it was able to scrounge from the Government: a traffic light upgrade, a new carpet for the local school, a microwave for a CFA station in Kooweerup. These maps helped inculcate the belief that the sole task of federal politicians is to snatch as much money out of the common pool of taxation as they can. Every electorate for itself until the next budget.

The community infrastructure program reproduces this principle on an industrial scale. Government MPs will dine out for years on the photographs of them wearing safety hats while observing the construction of sheds and toilets in every corner of their electorate. And that may be the whole point.

Hurling Invective At CEOs Over Salaries Is A Bit Rich

Why the anger about executive salaries? Sure, that question might seem just a little naive. (“Multimillionaires, the long-term unemployed – why can’t we all just get along?”)

After all, even as companies are moulting employees like dog hair, the upwards pressure doesn’t seem to have gone off exorbitant executive pay, at least from the perspective of Joe Mortgage-Stressed. The economy isn’t technically in a recession, but it’s quite ill – perhaps the oligarchs could ease off the foie gras and Dom Perignon?

So ACTU head Sharan Burrow proclaimed last Tuesday that now is the time to crack down on CEO remuneration, and proposed a salary cap for chief executives of 10 times the wage of their average employee. Normally such a proposal would be easy to dismiss as the embarrassing post-mortem spasm of a union movement that is cooling in the morgue. A financial crisis is as good a time as any to whip up a little anger about dastardly bosses; a bit of traditional class conflict.

But Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been threatening to curb CEO remuneration since early this year, asking the Productivity Commission to inquire into the best approach to take. The inquiry has spent the past few months hearing a wide range of people who are fairly sure they know how to run Australia’s biggest companies better than they are being run now.

I’m somewhat cynical about handing authority over corporate salaries to politicians who have, in recent times, had temper tantrums about inflight food, got into fisticuffs in party-room meetings and resigned over conflicts of interest. The corporate world might be cut-throat, but Parliament is full of people who hate each other. Their moral authority is less than absolute. And their knowledge of how large companies operate is less than comprehensive.

Shareholders – who directly own Australia’s biggest companies – should perhaps turn a more sceptical eye to the salaries of the executives. After all, they have just as big an interest in the future of their company as its employees.

While the market is climbing, as it has for a decade, executive salaries climb. And when the market falls, many executive salaries fall. The Australian Institute of Company Directors has reported that the directors of big financial firms like Commonwealth Bank, AMP, ANZ and AXA Asia Pacific have had their salaries frozen, restructured, or cut in response to the downturn. Average bonus payouts on Wall Street fell by 40 per cent in 2008. Perhaps they could have fallen more.

Future corporate remuneration committees will be rethinking the salary packages that have led to some executives getting huge bonuses even as their company collapses around them.

But, still, the best people to deal with these issues are the owners of firms, not politicians.

Anyway, who seriously believes that the level of CEO pay in Australia had anything to do with the subprime crisis that set off this whole mess? It is really easy and popular to throw abuse at CEOs.

I’m not trying to suggest that executives pulling in $30 million a year are in any way underdogs. But you’d hardly call it courageous when politicians and union leaders blame the three or four Australian executives who could be considered uber-rich for the problems the world economy faces.

So when Sharan Burrow stood up last week to proclaim that “the shameful reality is that not only have there been no apologies and no jail sentences but outrageous multimillion bonuses”, she was actually telling the rest of Australia two things: 1. We should all work really hard to keep the union movement from being in any position to alter the Crimes Act; and 2. the nation’s most senior union official doesn’t know how to respond to the economic downturn with anything other than angry finger-pointing.

And when Rudd decided that this was the time to crack down on corporate compensation, he revealed his crude populism – the Government seems just as eager to blame “greed” or executive salaries or “neo-liberals” for the crisis as it is to actually tackle the causes. You’d expect that from the unions, but you’d hope for better from the Prime Minister.

Where Is The Evidence That Junk Food Ads Make Kids Fat?

Australia’s public health establishment doesn’t lack ideas. Another official report into preventative health brings another few dozen recommended regulations, subsidies, cries for greater ‘public awareness’ and demands for further (commissioned) research.

This latest edition is the result of the Senate Inquiry into Obesity in Australia put out yesterday in order to avoid being completely overshadowed by the release of a National Preventative Health Strategy that should come out sometime this month.

The committee’s proposals are predictable. Limiting – with a view to banning – advertising of junk food to children. Subsidising gym memberships. Even more food labelling. Regulating stupid diet programs. Encouraging urban planners to deliberately design cities that are inconvenient to drive in. We’ve been hearing these ideas for years.

Unfortunately, while public health advocates may talk big on ‘evidence-based’ policy, their recommendations almost always fall well below that standard.

Take the popular claim that junk food advertising is causing fat kids. The evidence just isn’t there. The federal government’s peak communications research body, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, has concluded that it is near impossible to parse out the relationship between advertising and childhood obesity. At best, advertising could account for 2 per cent of food choice.

And the fuzziness of the relationship is clearly reflected in the academic literature: “Despite media claims to the contrary, there is no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children’s food consumption and, consequently, no reason to believe that a complete ban on advertising would have any useful impact on childhood obesity rates.”

Yet despite this almost complete lack of evidence – which was acknowledged in the committee’s public hearings – the committee’s report just recommends more stringent regulations on advertising, and, of course, more research. And the Senate was actually quite conservative compared to the waves of doctors and public health activists who participated in the inquiry, agitating for every sort of ban and regulation on marketing to children they could think of.

So why such a casual approach to the use of evidence in developing effective public policy, from an industry that prides itself on the close scrutiny of evidence as it affects medical outcomes? Regulation might not be a science, but does nevertheless require careful attention to cost-benefit analysis, and some analysis of efficacy and efficiency. And then governments need to consider the philosophical implications of many regulations – how it relates to responsibility and choice, and who will bear the brunt of the costs.

But as we wait for the Preventative Health Taskforce to lodge its report, we’re still seeing no signs that these issues are really being considered.

Over-ruled: How excessive regulation and legislation is holding back Western Australia

With Christopher Murn

Executive Summary: The global financial crisis and economic downturn makes a review of Western Australia’s regulatory burden urgent. Over the past decade, the amount of new legislation has increased by an average of 158 pages per year. This increase is substantially faster in Western Australia than in any other state, even after controlling for economic growth and population. Western Australia has developed an international reputation as the most over-regulated Australian state. Over-regulation has significance financial, social and indirect costs to Western Australians. There are also substantial hidden costs.

Available in PDF here.

New Sheriff Needed To Ride Shotgun On Heritage Suburbs

It’s a bit of a rhetorical leap to compare Melbourne’s gentrified suburbs with the Wild West.

But after a Port Melbourne man knocked down his own home in order to build a double townhouse, that was apparently what came to mind for the mayor of Port Phillip.

“Saddle up your horse and ride out of town now if you think you can get away with it,” the mayor wrote in an official statement released last week, obviously confusing his role as the chief political representative of a wealthy inner-city suburb with a gun-slinging saloon manager in Deadwood.

When demolishing houses is outlawed, only outlaws will demolish their houses. The property’s owner, Hodo Zeqaj, was fined more than $52,000 for the demolition because his rather ordinary-looking brick duplex had been subject to a “heritage overlay” – that is, it’s located in an area of Port Melbourne the proud and self-satisfied local government has decided is historically significant.

A team of three men managed to demolish the house in less than 15minutes using a couple of chainsaws, which, no matter what you think of heritage laws, sounds like it would have been a lot of fun.

Certainly, Mr Zeqaj shouldn’t have demolished his house without getting a permit to do so. (And he definitely should have consulted his neighbour, with whom he shared a wall.) Even so, the council has publicly stated that had Mr Zeqaj applied for a demolition permit, it would have refused him one.

Once your home has been “heritaged”, well, you don’t really own it any more, no matter how much money you’ve paid off your mortgage. The council effectively does. Almost every petty little alteration has to be approved by local government functionaries.

Want to paint your door? In Port Phillip, there are 27 approved colours. But don’t get too excited – you can’t choose from the whole range. You will need to carefully maintain historic consistency.

Want to install an air-conditioner? There are planning permits to fill out, of course, and you need to make sure the unit is as hidden from the street as possible. After all, we wouldn’t want to ruin the seductive milieu of a suburban road by revealing that people actually live in those houses.

But don’t we as a society need to protect historically significant properties from the ravages of the marketplace? Perhaps. But what is historically significant? For the past half century, social history – the history of ordinary people, as opposed to the history of priests, politicians and warriors – has dominated the way we look at the past. That’s all great. But the rise of social history does make it a bit harder to assess what is uniquely important.

For a social historian, almost everything can be counted as “historically significant”. Everything reflects in some fashion the social circumstances of the past. So we get a barely interesting piece of trivia – the properties around Mr Zeqaj’s house are apparently early examples of low-cost homes built by the Housing Commission after World War II – transformed into a harsh legal edict. It isn’t quite Captain Cook’s cottage we’re talking about here. Does an entire neighbourhood need to be frozen in time so we can display cheaply and quickly built government housing in its full glory? For those people who care about the history of public housing, wouldn’t, perhaps, a few photographs suffice?

Anyway, if councils really want to protect important buildings, they should just buy them – or at minimum compensate the owners for their loss of control over their own property. If councils had to pay for the rights they steal, then they would perhaps be a little more cautious about doing so. Right now, it’s far too easy for local government to casually brand whole suburbs as critically important heritage areas while bearing none of the substantial costs.

It might seem glib to point out that we can’t stop all development. But it appears some councils are trying to do so. Vast swathes of Melbourne’s suburbs are being locked up by heritage regulation.

Unless we want Melbourne and its suburbs to become nothing but museum pieces, we’re going to have to accept that the flip-side of having a dynamic, modern city is having to occasionally watch that dynamism sweep aside physical remnants of the past.

Never Mind The Deficit, Look At The Spending

It must take a lot of confidence to blame the size of our new deficit on revenue loss due to the financial crisis just seconds after you have finished a mind-numbingly long list of new spending measures.

In fact, there’s a weird – almost creepy – sense of confidence surrounding Wayne Swan’s second budget.

Treasury’s reputation should be very battered. Just last year, the inflation genie was out of the bottle and we were looking at a beautiful vista of economic happiness stretching as far as our eyes could see. But Treasury seems to be getting more sure in its ability to predict the future, not less.

Wayne Swan’s conceit that this recession will be quickly followed by a burst of astonishing, face-saving growth relies on a predicted GDP growth of more than 4% in the next couple of years. That’s a pretty big call in the middle of a recession that took the Treasury itself by surprise. And it’s an even bigger call considering during the twentieth century, the average GDP growth was only 3.4%. So if Treasury’s forecasts are accurate, then the fire in which this budget was forged was not very hot.

The misplaced confidence of this budget is even clearer when we look at Wayne Swan’s counterfactuals. Without the property bailout, the Wellington Street bus station, the highways up (and down) the coast, the detailed design work for the Sydney West Metro, and the $900 recession hush-money, the Treasury believes that Australia would apparently be 2 ¾ per cent poorer next year. And there’d be 210,000 fewer people in work. Not 220,000, not 200,000 but 210,000.

Of course, these numbers are almost always invented out of thin air. Treasury secretary Ken Henry admitted as much in February.

So without these impressively self-assured Treasury figures we are left with just a historically large deficit and a government piling its promises up behind the next election. We have spending levels not seen since the Second World War, and not a whole lot to show for it.

Wayne Swan’s budget is a chickie run between Treasury and the global economy. Sure, both could get out of it safely, but you wouldn’t want to bet on it.

The Road To Hell Is Not Paved With Poker Machines

Is there any form of entertainment more reviled than the pokies? Perhaps cockfighting, or rabbit hunting. Or Russian roulette. But then again, nursing homes aren’t sending the elderly in groups to watch blood sports.

Obviously, when problem gambling manifests itself as a serious mental illness, there should be, and is, professional help available. But levels of problem gambling are actually quite low. According to the most recent study in Victoria, less than 2per cent of pokies players are problem gamblers, and that’s with a pretty fuzzy and expansive definition of what constitutes a “problem”.

Ninety-eight per cent of people who play the slots suffer no negative consequences. Why then is there such extraordinary venom directed at the industry? The average Victorian spends just $50 on poker machines a month – the cost of dinner and a movie.

So there’s something a bit distasteful about the passion with which the great and good declare their anti-pokies views.

Not even cigarettes cop as much flak as the pokies. Anti-tobacco activists appear to believe smoking is the equivalent of being stabbed in the face by a cigarette company – every cigarette is doing you damage – but few community leaders go so far as proposing the complete elimination of smoking, as they do with the pokies.

Perhaps it’s like that old anecdote about the academics who have never met anyone who voted for John Howard – pretty much everybody has tried a cigarette, and most people have friends who regularly smoke, but who could be so tasteless as to enjoy gambling with a machine? Certainly not anyone I know.

Still, it makes sense that poker machines would cop the brunt of anti-gambling sentiment. The pokies have none of the romance of other types of gaming. Playing high-stakes poker around a table while wearing a tuxedo could be very romantic. One-cent pokies? Very rarely romantic. In his 22 adventures so far, James Bond has never once seduced a leggy European femme fatale while grasping a cup full of change and hoping three strawberries will appear in a row, as delightful as that would be to watch.

Sure, it doesn’t always look like pokies players are having a whole lot of fun. But while it’s easy to disdain those who spend Saturday night pulling a lever in a suburban pub – their vacant look, their robotically repetitive movements, their apparent joylessness – have you ever looked at somebody else while they watched a movie?

I don’t want to sound all “neo-liberal” here – respecting individual choice and economic liberty is so 2007 – but for the most part, people do things because they want to.

As a consequence, saying that Victorians “lost” $2.4billion at the pokies last financial year makes about as much sense as saying Victorians lost $2.4billion at the cinemas. Perhaps the critics of poker machines could grant that people who go out of their way to play the pokies derive at least some small benefit from doing so? As much as it enjoys the revenue from taxes on poker machines, the State Government doesn’t force anybody to play.

Indeed, a very weird concern of the anti-pokies movement is that state governments are addicted to the revenue they receive from heavily taxing poker machines. Admittedly, in the Victorian budget last week, the Government expects to receive slightly over $1.6billion from its assorted gaming taxes – most of which comes from the pokies. But this is a tiny 4per cent of total state revenue.

Anyway, if the Government needs “to wean itself off gambling revenue”, as the head of the Interchurch Gaming Taskforce said last week, then the quickest way would be to dramatically reduce taxes on gambling. This may not, however, be the solution anti-pokies activists are looking for.

Traditionally, governments have banned the lower classes from card games and betting. And those same cash-hungry governments kindly offered the middle classes official revenue-raising lotteries. The upper classes have had free rein to indulge in whatever stupid games of chance they can devise. In fact, in the history of Europe, a surprising number of territorial acquisitions have been made not through war but as a result of bets between over-confident monarchs.

After centuries of paternalism, anti-gambling activists perhaps need a change of attitude. Even if you don’t enjoy the pokies, others do.

Depopulate And Die Of Boredom

It must take a rather active imagination to look at a map of Australia and think that it is too full.

Last week Sandra Kanck, the national president of the environmental group Sustainable Population Australia, urged the country to cut down its population from 21 million souls to just 7 million. To do so, she recommended we adopt a one-child policy, completely eliminating middle-child syndrome and saving the planet in the process. China’s one-child policy appears to have gone from a massive human rights violation that is universally condemned to “Hey, now that’s an idea”.

One article on the Sustainable Population Australia website berates Nadya Suleman for being a “criminal” and a “murderer”. Best known as “Octomum”, the Californian Suleman famously gave birth to eight children earlier this year. And she is – at least according to Sustainable Population’s site – “killing all of us”.

Fair enough: someone needs to stand up to those murderous breeders. No opportunity to inform them about their criminal behaviour can be wasted; the environment demands it. For example, transport regulations may require you give up your seat to a pregnant woman, but once the mother-to-be has sat down, you have a good opportunity to berate her for destroying the planet.

Certainly, Sustainable Population Australia is just a fringe environment group, and criticising them for their warped moral compass is like criticising the Citizens Electoral Council for their bad economics. But the idea that we desperately need to shut down breeding for a while in order to save the planet is surprisingly widespread.

In Britain, one of Gordon Brown’s environmental advisers has been urging the Prime Minister to support the halving of Britain’s population to just 30 million. And the president of the Sea Shepherd Society – an organisation regularly praised for stalking Japanese whalers – wants to reduce the global population to less than a billion. Yet, the population of the world continues to grow, not least in the developing world.

But if you believe that population growth will eventually lead to the collapse of our civilisation and planet, then the last millennium of human history must be very confusing. Over and over, we have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to innovate our way out of any theoretical “limit to growth”.

So it takes a strange sort of intellectual hubris to imagine that the exact moment you are alive just happens to be the exact moment in human history that we cross the “too many people” line. In the 1970s, zero population growth advocates were pretty sure the end was nigh, but humanity has managed to barrel on for a few more decades. Anyway, few species have found flirting with extinction a particularly effective survival strategy.

But we could spend all day debating the impact of population on the environment. I’m more concerned about another thing: can you imagine how excruciatingly boring Australia would be with only 7 million people?

Last week’s Sunday Age reported that a large proportion of “tree-changers” regretted their decision to move from the suburbs to the quieter countryside. Shockingly, in remote and regional Victoria there are fewer and less varied jobs available, fewer services and less commercial activity than in the cities.

An Australia with just 7 million people would be like a mandatory tree-change for everybody, with those who survived the great population decline skulking about the ruins of this once-busy nation.

Australia already suffers because of its small population. We have a small audience for culture. We have a small market for goods and services, and a small base to produce them from. If it weren’t for the fact that we can trade stuff with other countries, it would hardly be worth having an Australia at all.

Pretty much everything interesting and exciting about the world is the direct result of human action. Fewer people would mean fewer people doing cool stuff. How would life be without basil pesto, the British version of The Office, single malt whisky, SuperTed or Facebook? Nasty and brutish, sure, but agonisingly long.

And let’s face it – whatever meaning has been imposed on the environment has been imposed by people. So when deep greens exalt nature as morally superior to humanity, it comes across as just a little bit stupid. When the chips are down, surely our loyalty lies with the human race.