Tag: The Sunday Age

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.

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.

How A Joker Sent Battman To The Rescue

Confident that the Prime Minister can steer us out of the financial crisis? Don’t be. Every policy announcement, every job-creation program, every plan to fix the economy point to one thing: The Government’s just makin’ it up.

Want proof? The team at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet have developed www.economicstimulusplan.gov.au to tout all the ways they’re fighting the downturn. And the first, most prominent, measure listed on the website is a subsidy to home insulation.

Call me cynical, but it seems very unlikely that historians will describe the recovery from the financial crisis as “insulation driven”.

Sure, they say the victors write the history books. But unless Moorabbin Coat-O-Foam Discount Insulation opens a publishing arm, there’s a fair chance Pink Batts won’t ever get the place in the history of the Australian economy that Kevin Rudd appears to think it deserves.

If there is one overarching theme in this crisis, it is that nobody really knows what they are doing.

When the Government announced the commercial property bail-out in January, it claimed the measure would save 50,000 jobs. In the Senate inquiry that followed, Treasury officials admitted they really didn’t have any idea how many jobs their measure would create – they just extrapolated job losses from a previous downturn and wished upon a star.

And the multibillion dollar stimulus package announced in February? The Secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry, admitted to another Senate inquiry that the Government had no idea whether the package would help the economy at all.

All these exciting announcements, but the only thing anybody knows for certain is how much they will damage the federal budget.

It’s like going to a magic show where a magician keeps making bunches of roses disappear. The show is entertaining and uplifting, until you leave – and discover a sad, discarded pile of battered roses on the floor by the exit. There was no magic. You just spent your evening watching a goateed guy destroy flowers.

Sure, it seems fun watching the Government conjure up jobs and prosperity out of nowhere, but in retrospect, after none of those jobs appear, the economy keeps going down the toilet, and bureaucrats have eventually admitted they made it all up – it’s actually quite depressing.

Another unlikely measure to drag us out of the global financial crisis is the $150million Boom Gates for Rail Crossings Program that Infastructure Minister Anthony Albanese believes will “support local jobs and local businesses during the current global recession”.

Hey, we’re all for boom gates. But claiming that they can help stave off recession seems a bit of a stretch. Same goes for solar hot water rebates, repairing the gutters on school portables, or refurbishing playgrounds.

And isn’t it a little dubious that the best way to fix the crisis just happens to be $900 delivered straight into the bank accounts of almost every Australian voter? Wouldn’t you be more convinced the Government was trying its hardest if they thought they had to do something that the electorate absolutely hated?

I’d have a lot more faith in Rudd’s healing powers if he believed he had to raise taxes massively on working families or sympathetic pensioners to save the economy – you know, something that really hurt his poll numbers. If he announced he needed to slaughter one cute puppy every day until toxic debt was completely eliminated, he’d be cuckoo, but at least you’d know he was trying.

Last week there was another example of how the Government is trying to save the economy by giving away stuff – the latest iteration of the National Broadband Network, which, by all accounts, was developed on the back of a napkin after six or seven beers.

For a paltry $43billion, we are told that the new broadband network will directly “support” 37,000 jobs. If I have entered enough zeroes into my calculator, that’s a cost of over $1 million per job.

Whatever. Jobs are jobs, dude. It’d be a bargain at twice the price.

But it must take a lot of hubris to follow your failure to get an $8billion broadband plan off the ground with a $43billion plan, and still pretend you are in control.

When we get out of this crisis, it won’t be because the Government has come up with a policy that works, it will be more likely because the economy just can’t bear to be miserable any longer.

Market traders will discover pretty much every stock in the world is hugely undervalued, and blue chips are a better investment than canned soup, shotguns and pre-fabricated bomb shelters.

While we wait, it’s hard not to conclude that the Government is just tossing a random collection of expensive policies at the wall and praying for one eventually to stick.

Generation Pepsi All Froth And Bubble On Leadership

Demographers fantasise that we can all be split into distinctive groups: baby boomers, and generations X and Y. But there are other categories.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics calls those born between 1926 and 1946 the “Lucky Generation”, which surely must be an inside joke, considering those years contained the Great Depression and World War II. Those born after 1986 are trendily described as “iGeneration”, which seems to have displaced the better-known title of “generation Pepsi”.

Despite the millions of words amateur sociologists and management consultants have written concluding that generations X, Y and iGen are flighty, demanding, reckless, and prone to switching jobs without warning, there is no doubt that younger workers will make more rational career choices as the economy slows. Just because someone was born in the ’80s doesn’t make them stupid.

Still, those who deliberately go out of their way to describe themselves as “the youth of today” do seem to be unusually daft. (I say this as someone who is only 26, so, happily, I escaped the “youth” designation two years ago.)

This daftness is no more evident than in the recently published collection of essays called The Future By Us. The book claims to take a bold, fresh approach to Australian public policy. Not surprisingly, most of its proposals are unrealistic, unlikely to be effective, or just deeply unappealing. And some of its proposals are off the planet. For instance, the book’s authors recommend that, along with IQ tests, the Government test every citizen’s GQ (global intelligence quotient) to measure individual awareness of foreign cultures, their travel experience and language ability. Seriously? That’s the quality of ideas that our brightest youths are devising?

Another proposal concerns a healthy fast-food chain, which could, the author imagines, “become a new drive-thru craze”. That’s true, but I wouldn’t bet the organic farm on it. Surely, if an idea like this is really that great, it would be far more productive to open the fast-food chain than write about it.

A strange belief of those who advocate greater youth engagement in politics is that young people bring fresh perspectives to policy debates.

Sure, being able to step back from an area of expertise to look at it from a new angle can be helpful. But simply not knowing very much about a topic doesn’t provide “fresh” perspectives, it just provides uninformed perspectives. Despite the manifest absurdity of policy proposals in The Future By Us, the Prime Minister gave the book a highly complimentary foreword.

The authors of The Future By Us are a typically star-studded bunch. They have been Young Australians and Young Victorians of the Year. Their collaborators serve on councils of youth, they head up youth movements, the United Nations Youth Association and Youth Climate Coalition. They are the directors of youth-specific think tanks, they join state and federal government youth consultancies, become youth ambassadors, chair youth boards and youth advisory committees, and they attend youth-only summits.

Apparently, there is even a discernible youth establishment, with its own turf rivalries, and resistance to competition from other self-appointed youth representatives.

And, consistently, all these proud youths conclude that there should be more engagement between the Government and young people – more boards, more committees, more panels and more consultancies.

But the Federal Government does not exist merely to help people pad their resume. Australia’s cultural obsession with “representation” just results in everybody spending an inordinate amount of time discussing silly ideas instead of getting on with the job.

Anyway, do we really want people under the age of 20 understanding what the phrase “interdepartmental advisory reference group” means, let alone them being members of one? Steering committees should be left to the adults who are compelled to join them only to keep their jobs.

It’s a good thing that most of these young people won’t actually become the leaders of tomorrow. Nobody likes people who describe themselves as leaders before they have found any followers. So attending a youth parliament makes it less, not more, likely that you will ever get a go at “adult” parliament.

Australia’s self-appointed youth representatives will have to start realising that they can’t keep pretending their naivety is actually creativity and therefore demand serious attention. Generation Pepsi deserves better.

More Police, Fewer Daft Ideas, The Answer To City Violence

Everybody has an idea how to fix the problem of “alcohol-fuelled” violence in the city. Last week, the Victorian Parliament tried another idea. It granted the liquor licensing authority $17.6million a year for 30 new “civil compliance inspectors” to patrol the city’s nightlife and fine pub owners. These inspectors can also enter premises without warrants if they suspect license breaches, and demand the names and addresses of patrons.

But surely there are certain legal powers in a liberal democracy that should be only held by the police? Police go through extensive education about the legal and practical limits of their powers. They are accountable to their superiors.

By contrast, the primary qualification that these new liquor inspectors require is the ability to pass a police check. They also apparently have to be of “good repute, character, honesty and integrity” – qualities that are hard to determine from a resume submitted via the internet. Should we be really giving such rudimentarily qualified bureaucrats a fair chunk of the powers of the police force?

Six months after the 2am lockout of Melbourne’s clubs and pubs resoundingly failed – late night violence went up during that period, not down – it is understandable that governments are trying new ideas to tackle the problem.

By far the most surreal idea to restrain city brawling has been Lord Mayor Robert Doyle’s recent proposal to make the hailing of taxis on the street illegal every Friday and Saturday night. He wants to direct all taxi-seekers to four giant taxi ranks around the city.

How this idea actually connects to the problem of violence isn’t entirely clear. Doyle’s plan appears to depend on the not entirely convincing theory that drunks would be less violent if they were all put in the same spot and told to wait for half an hour in a queue.

Other ideas to reduce violence are not much more convincing. Should we really ban the sale of single shots of liquor, as local governments have done in many smaller towns around the country? (Only if you believe that violent thugs exclusively drink Midori slammers.) Or should we stop people from purchasing more than a few drinks at a time, as they have done in NSW? (This rule effectively makes the Australian custom of buying rounds illegal.)

In fact, in NSW they are even stopping bars from serving alcohol for a 10-minute period every hour after midnight. In that 10-minute time-out, bar staff have to refuse any request for alcohol and offer water instead, even to those who lined up to be served well before the time-out began. Understandably, this policy tends to make drinkers more aggressive, not less.

Australians have a proud history of making a mockery of silly drinking laws – the legendary six o’clock swill was, after all, a massively counterproductive result of restrictions on the sale of alcohol. Getting around annoying regulations is just as much an Australian custom as buying rounds for mates.

Anyway, just because somebody comes up with an idea that will make buying alcohol harder, or more expensive, or just less fun, doesn’t mean that idea will prevent violent idiots from hitting each other at the end of the night.

If there’s one thing about Australian public debate, everybody has a lot of bright ideas – we don’t lack for initiatives or proposals or different ways to do things.

Every year small publishers release a few dozen books with titles like Reinventing Australia’s Green Future into the Next Century of Prosperity, or 27 Social Ideas for a Good Australia Now. These books are inevitably filled with possible new laws and government spending initiatives that are certainly creative, but are usually totally nuts.

Indeed, the only accomplishment of Kevin Rudd’s long-forgotten 2020 summit was to show just how many stupid ideas there actually were floating out there in intellectual-land – ideas that were vague, bizarre or, like the Lord Mayor’s taxi rank plan, completely disconnected from the problems they were trying to solve.

Government policies should be as direct as possible. The Government shouldn’t just arbitrarily punish drinkers and liquor licensees in the dreamy hope that the results will be politically beneficial.

While state and local governments have been dithering about with their own creative punishments for taxi hailers and pub owners, the most direct way to tackle violence still remains an increased police presence.

Unfortunately, like his predecessor Christine Nixon, new Chief Commissioner Simon Overland seems to believe that creative new regulations, not more police on the streets, will provide a solution to the city’s violence problem.

Sure, thinking outside the box is great. But when it comes to problems of law and order, don’t forget the box is there.

Despite Job Fears, We Must Keep Migration Door Open

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, was right when he noted last week that the first people to cop the blame for an economic downturn are foreigners. In the UK, the “British jobs for British workers” movement is getting more popular and more shrill.

So, until recently, it was good to see that Kevin Rudd’s Government was intent on maintaining – and even increasing – the high migration intake it had inherited.

But Immigration Minister Chris Evans announced on Monday that the Government was planning to reduce the number of skilled workers it lets into the country every year.

ACTU boss Sharan Burrow pretty much gave the game away when she claimed in response that migration had to be restricted to “protect jobs” because of the financial crisis. The union movement has never met an immigration cut it didn’t like.

The idea that one more immigrant equals one fewer job for Australians sounds vaguely plausible. But modern labour markets are far more complicated than that. A national economy isn’t just a fixed number of jobs waiting to be divvied up between all the available workers – it is a constantly changing mixture of opportunities to work, produce and profit.

Let’s be honest: if there were a real risk that immigrants were going to rip potential employment away from red-blooded Australians looking for work, those Australians would be doing those jobs already.

Critics of immigration conveniently forget that immigrants do more than just work – they buy houses and consume products too. Hell, they even pay taxes. Adding more people into the economic mix is a recipe for long-term growth – this is as true when the economy is slowing down as it is when the economy is booming.

After all, there are a lot of things to do in an economy, even during a recession. The whole country doesn’t immediately seize up because a department store reports that their mid-January sales figures are down 17 per cent on last year’s.

So if we respond to the economic crisis by dramatically shrinking our migration intake, we could easily end up in the bizarre situation of having both widespread unemployment and widespread job vacancies. Sound unlikely? Perhaps, but we haven’t seen those laid-off Macquarie Bank alumni hopping on V/Line to pick pistachios in Swan Hill yet.

Sure, there are now a lot of people actively seeking work since the global financial crisis really hit six months ago. But there have been unemployed people since before then, and those jobs in the fruit-picking industry have long been unfilled.

Only when the finance industry’s brightest sparks begin seeking agricultural employment should we start denying farmers the labour force they need – and denying eager migrant workers the opportunity to earn.

Ever since the First Fleet landed, Australia’s most pressing economic problem has been our population size. Our labour force has always been small, our consumer base small, and the size of our national market small. Compounding this has been the fear of an inexorably ageing workforce. But the credit crunch has presented long-term opponents of immigration with an opportunity to flog their favourite dead horse.

Even more erroneous is the belief held by many opponents of immigration that we should limit the entry into Australia of certain non-Western religions because our cultures are incompatible.

The history of migration has surely taught us that individual liberty and equality are quite appealing when seen up close – every migrant group has integrated into Australian society within a generation or two.

What we ask from immigrants to Australia is that they obey the nation’s laws, just like those whose families came over two centuries ago. And we have a shiny, expensive police force to make sure we all do.

Anyway, we have a moral necessity to maintain a high immigration intake.

Much more than foreign aid, charity, Live Aid wristbands, and even the bulk-purchase of fair trade coffee, the most effective way we can help somebody living in the third world to crawl out of poverty is allowing them to move to the first world.

On the one hand, the ACTU’s Union Aid Abroad claims solidarity with overseas workers, but on the other hand the union insists that poor workers in other countries be restrained from doing the one thing that could most comprehensively help them – moving here.

Certainly, the economic crisis is hard.

But blaming foreigners and cutting immigration isn’t going to get us out of it any quicker.

Bring On The Acid Bath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bail-Out Disease

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave The Poor Old Chaps Alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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