The Sunday Age – Page 5

Internet Laws A Sledgehammer Approach To Privacy

Legislators with little knowledge of internet privacy will do more harm than good.

The protest against the American Stop Online Piracy Act recently, where Wikipedia and 7000 other websites went dark for 24 hours, made two things plain.

First, online activism can be effective. Before the protest, 31 members of Congress opposed the act. After the protest, that number swelled to 122. The bill died overnight.

More importantly, the protest emphasised that the internet is not the Wild West. Domestic laws and international treaties pervade everything we do online. And bad laws can cause profound damage.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is an example of legislative over-reach. SOPA would have given the US government broad powers to shut down access to foreign sites that were suspected of hosting material that breached copyright. This would have given governments the power to interfere with the internal workings of the internet. Such a power would have been an unconscionable threat to free speech.

Yet SOPA is not alone. The internet is surprisingly vulnerable to laws that, with good intentions or bad, have the potential to stifle online liberties. Take for instance, the European Union’s proposed ”right to be forgotten”. Changes to data protection laws now being considered by the European Parliament would give internet users the power to force websites to delete information about them.

There would be privacy benefits from this law. No question it would be lovely if we could make websites remove embarrassing photos or uncomfortable facts years after we uploaded them.

And yes, we need to keep pressure on social networks to protect our privacy. Too many companies are reckless with user data. Yet the EU’s plan goes way too far. A legislated ”right to be forgotten” would be, like SOPA, a threat to freedom of speech. These new rules would, according to the American legal scholar Jane Yakowitz, ”give EU residents an unprecedented inalienable right to control and delete facts that were once voluntarily communicated”.

In the age of social media we all happily put information about ourselves in the public domain. A right to be forgotten is actually an obligation for others to forget things they’ve been told.

Apart from being unworkable (erasing stuff from the internet is a lot more complicated than politicians seem to believe), this new obligation would envelop the internet in a legal quagmire.

The law would turn every internet user into a potential censor, with a veto over everything they’ve ever revealed about themselves. Every time media organisations referred to freely obtained information, they would have to be sure they could prove they did so for a ”legitimate” news purpose. This would create enormous difficulties for journalism. Censorship to protect privacy is just as dangerous as censorship to prevent piracy.

But unlike SOPA, there has been no outcry about these new rules. No blackout of popular websites, no mass petitions.

SOPA was driven by American politicians in the thrall of an unpopular copyright lobby. The European data protection rules are being driven by social democrats claiming to protect people’s privacy. And, in 2012, privacy is a value that many people claim to rate above all others.

By contrast, free speech seems daggy and unpopular. Even our self-styled civil liberties groups have downgraded their support for freedom of speech. Now other rights – privacy is one, the right not to be offended is another – are seen as more important. So these new laws could slip through with disastrous consequences.

Should Australians care what the European Parliament does? Absolutely. The big internet firms are global. If a legislature in one country or continent changes the rules of the game, those firms have to comply. The easiest way to comply is by making global policy changes, not regional ones.

And regulations introduced overseas have a habit of eventually being introduced in Australia. Already our privacy activists are talking up the EU scheme.

Whatever the EU decides about a right to be forgotten, it will have significant effects on the online services we use in Victoria.

Free speech isn’t the only problem with the EU’s proposed privacy laws. As Jane Yakowitz points out, people trade information with corporations all the time – for discounts or access to free services. No one compels us to share stuff on the internet. We share because we think we’ll get something out of it. The new right to be forgotten would make such trades virtually impossible. It could cripple the information economy overnight.

Governments have always struggled to legislate for the online world. Not only do politicians have little understanding of the technological issues, but the internet doesn’t take very well to regulation: according to one old tech saying, ”the net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it”. So legislators over-compensate.

The internet is complex, borderless and dynamic. Laws are inflexible and heavy-handed. Too many attempts to protect privacy or combat copyright infringement take a brickbat to freedom of expression and internet liberties.

Lost In Translation

As school returns for 2012, there are now more students learning Latin than Chinese. Once we take out Chinese-born students and those who speak Mandarin at home, there are just 300 students learning Mandarin in year 12 in Australia, according to accounting body CPA Australia. That is not how it was supposed to be.

In 2008, Kevin Rudd said he wanted 12 per cent of Australian students to be fluent in an Asian language by 2020. An earlier program, launched in 1994, was supposed to have 60 per cent of all students conversant in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian or Korean by 2006.

There has been a general decline in language education, but a catastrophic decline in Asian languages. Korean is now virtually a dead language in the Australian school system, Indonesian is likely to disappear soon, and Japanese is sliding backwards. Chinese survives – even thrives – but only because it is taught to Chinese students.

Never dissuaded, Julia Gillard commissioned a report in November into the ”Asian century”. It is likely to recommend further investment in languages. Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop believes she can trump that and make Asian language studies mandatory for all Australian students – no exceptions.

But the idea that government should prioritise Asian languages is an unexamined faith. Champions of Asian languages cite cultural benefits (increased understanding of our northern neighbours), economic benefits (ability to deal with trading partners in their language) and educational benefits (learning a second language helps with English literacy).

None of these is particularly convincing. There’s a reason Asian languages aren’t as successful as advocates would like. And it isn’t only because the government hasn’t spent enough money. It’s that not enough students want to study them.

Australian students aren’t being irrational. Language study responds to demand, and the rest of the world is learning English. Ours is the global language, the lingua franca.

Language standardisation has come by necessity, not design. Put Japanese, American, German and Saudi executives in a boardroom and the common tongue will be English – the language of business and treaties and translation.

We all know this. So why does no one blink when policymakers imply otherwise? One advocate of Asian language learning said on the ABC’s 7.30 last week that expecting to rely on English in business negotiations with an Asian counterpart is daft. Really?

If you think Australians negotiating with Chinese producers are at a disadvantage if they don’t know Chinese, then imagine how much of a disadvantage Chinese producers have if they don’t know English – the first or second language for virtually all their international customers.

Anyway, how many students today can we seriously expect to be business negotiators in Asia – and using the exact language they learned as school kids? Trade is central to our lives, sure, but few of us personally negotiate trade deals.

That advocates use only extremely narrow cases where these languages would be useful does not inspire confidence.

English’s dominance is something to be celebrated, not regretted. The rest of the world is playing catch-up. And the education curriculum is already stuffed full. Choices have to be made. If governments want to give every student an advantage in business, perhaps basic statistics and accountancy would be more helpful.

When people need languages, they learn them. And the data shows most of our students are not choosing Chinese. The language lobbyists may need to revisit their assumptions.

But they won’t, because their goal has less to do with the economic and practical benefits of language education, and more to do with an ideological vision of the future of Australia. It’s about politics, not learning.

For those who argue that Australia must become an Asian nation, squeezing Asian languages into the curriculum is an easy way to turn that vague idea into something concrete.

Without a languages policy, the Asian nation philosophy would be revealed for the empty vessel that it is. A policy to ”deepen engagement with Asia” only makes sense in the context of international diplomacy. The rest of us non-diplomats engage personally and commercially with Asia whenever we want through business, consumption and tourism. No need for a government white paper to tell us to import Chinese goods or visit Angkor Wat. If we want to appreciate Asia better, our expansive immigration program is already far more effective at building cross-cultural understanding than the memory of a few broken words of Mandarin learned at school.

Anyway, why should the education system be a plaything for the geopolitical and cultural imaginations of our politicians? We shouldn’t pretend that shoehorning this complex, ideological vision of Australian society in the 21st century into the secondary school curriculum is going to make good education policy.

One final justification for Asian language learning is that it taxes the mind and therefore promotes general literacy – it is a worthy educational priority for its own sake. This may be true. But why Asian languages? Why not Arabic, or Greek, or Russian, or Cherokee? And what’s wrong with Latin?

Foreign languages are also a remarkably indirect way to encourage English literacy. Again, the school day is short, and languages are hard. Chinese is uniquely hard – for instance, about four times as hard as French.

Second languages should be a personal choice, not a tool for geopolitical realignment. A recent book by Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs argues that English so dominates the globe that non-English speakers should be compensated. English speakers have an advantage; therefore the world needs a ”language tax”.

This is obviously absurd, but Parijs has a point: policymakers need to understand the historically unprecedented dominance of English. Perhaps, by resisting the 20-year push for them to choose Asian languages above all others, Australian students already do.

Repeat After Me: All Tyranny Is Evil And Wrong

Simon Winchester is a best-selling author. You’ve probably seen his popular histories, in particular, The Surgeon of Crowthorne. He received an OBE from the Queen in 2006 for services to journalism and literature. He is apparently witty, charming and intelligent. And he thinks we’ve all been a bit unfair to North Korea.

In the London Times shortly after the death of Kim Jong-il, Winchester argued that, sure, the Hermit Kingdom has its ”flaws”, but life there is ”not nearly as bad as is supposed”. The restaurants are few, but the medical clinics are clean. The bars sell imported beer, and the hairdressers are friendly.

But for Winchester, the great thing about North Korea is that it isn’t South Korea. The North hasn’t been ”utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence”. It is ”a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.”

Never mind the poverty. The tyranny. Or that Winchester visited at the tail end of a famine that killed about 10 per cent of the population – a famine caused deliberately by a hereditary dictatorship. The real issue is Western consumerism. North Korea is desperately poor, but let’s focus on how crass America is.

Winchester is not alone. Writing in Crikey, Guy Rundle argued that yes, North Korea is in a state of oppression, but (don’t you know?) neoliberalism and globalisation are really bad too.

There is a long history of left-wing intellectuals apologising for communist dictatorships. And it’s always been less about the places they’ve venerated, and more about the intellectuals themselves: their deep, unshakable dislike of capitalism, and their belief that Western liberties just result in vulgarity. In his 1991 book The Wilder Shores of Marx, the English psychiatrist Anthony Daniels wrote about returning from a visit to North Korea a few years before. He recalls describing to a colleague, a professor of medicine, the pervasive propaganda and brainwashing in Kim Il-sung’s regime. The professor responded: ”But have you considered how much power Rupert Murdoch wields in this country?”

Sure, no 20th-century dictatorship has been without its defenders. Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Castro’s Cuba, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam: they’ve all been praised by Western socialists looking for a model of the good society. And their ”flaws”, the tyranny and terror and poverty, have been downplayed.

Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is one of the great anti-dictatorship films, but his opposition to tyranny was selective. Chaplin thought ”the only people who object to Communism [are] Nazi agents”. When he heard about Stalin’s purges, Chaplin said they were ”wonderful” and were needed in America.

When Mao died in 1976, Gough Whitlam couldn’t praise the dictator enough: Mao ”was the inspiration to the Chinese people” and made China ”secure, stable and self-confident”. Of course, he killed 45 million people doing so. One would have hoped the wistful romance of tyranny would have disappeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its final, conclusive, unavoidable demonstration of the dangers of communism.

Not so. The romanticisation of communism survives. When the former Czech president and anti-communist dissident Vaclav Havel died last month, Guardian columnist Neil Clark complained Havel had never talked about communism’s good side. Communism offered welfare, education, and women’s rights. So ”the question which needs to be asked”, intoned Clark, is did Havel’s ”political campaigning [make] his country and the world a better place?”

Havel had been repeatedly tortured by the Czech police. He was punished for demanding democracy and human rights. But perhaps Havel’s experience of torture and imprisonment blinded him to how great life under Marxist dictatorship actually was.

Or perhaps many Western writers are so desperate to blame capitalism for the world’s problems that they’re willing to forgive, even support, non-capitalist tyranny.

Someone is always saying something nice about the worst totalitarian states. After Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation, visited North Korea in 2010, she told the media she’d seen few signs of malnutrition. Mind you, she only visited Pyongyang and had been escorted the whole time by North Korean officials.

Even better, Chan had seen no signs of obesity. North Koreans, the Director-General approvingly noted, do a lot of walking. People in affluent Westernised Asian countries do not. I guess the upside to material deprivation is how it encourages physical exercise. And there is, Simon Winchester might say, a real ”authenticity” in that.

The Good News Is, The News Is Getting Better All The Time

Europe is on the brink of collapse, the Arab Spring has taken an illiberal turn, Chinese growth might be faltering, and North Korea’s future is questionable. But there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about 2012.

Bad geopolitical news and economic indicators cloud good news and omens. Disasters – whether economic, social, environmental – are rarely as bad as predicted. And there is no reason to believe that our long-term trajectory of higher living standards, better wellbeing, and more riches will change.

Better health alone should give us reason to be optimistic. The World Health Organisation says global life expectancy has increased by two years for men and three for women in the past decade. The poorest countries have seen the greatest increase.

Fewer newborns are dying: from 29 per 1000 live births in 2000 to 24 in 2009. Maternal deaths have decreased from 3.4 per 1000 to 2.6 in the same time.

There is less tuberculosis and HIV. Malaria has taken a dive. Recession or not, things will improve – we now have seven billion people to develop cures and prevention.

Wars are getting rarer and less violent. Actually, it’s better than that. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker makes a bolder claim: globally, violence itself is declining. There is less corporal and capital punishment. Less torture. Less crime targeting gender or sexuality.

In 1993, there were 55 countries classed by Freedom House as ”not free”. Today there are 47.

Since 2005, 19 million people have migrated from one country to another. This is great. They’ve found new opportunities and more work.

Half of the world’s population now lives in cities. Urban environments offer stronger job prospects, more accessible services, cheaper transport, and more varied human relationships.

Humans are getting better at coping with natural disasters. Food prices are going down after recent highs. The prices of rare earth metals – used in virtually every electronic device – have fallen too.

And in 2011, people had more of what they want. Ignore the prattling about consumerism. Surely the fulfilment of human desire is a good sign.

Small medical clinics can now buy a hand-held ultrasound machine, connected to a smart phone, for about $7000. A team at Stanford University has learned to ”program” the cells in living organisms to act as computers. Implications range from fighting cancer to managing fertility.

Google is testing a self-driving car. Fifty million people now use Twitter every day, forging bonds across the world. E-books have made reading cheaper and easier.

Even economic crises have their upsides. Productive people kicked out of jobs are forced to be creative. Sure, a cloud with a silver lining is still a cloud. But economic turmoil can spark innovation from those compelled by circumstance to take risks. Less foreign aid has spurred economic reform. Africa is now the world’s fastest growing continent; Ethiopia grew by 7.5 per cent last year. Many analysts claimed the developing world would suffer most from the economic crisis. They were wrong.

Humans tend to equate short-term problems with long-term ones. If there is an economic downturn, we imagine it indicates a deeper, systemic problem with society and capitalism. If food prices go up, we imagine it’s the end of cheap food.

In the early 1990s recession, the United Nations held a conference in Rio de Janeiro where it was claimed that ”humanity stands at a defining moment in history”, and the world is ”confronted with a perpetuation of disparities within and between nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy”.

Yet, as Matt Ridley writes in his recent book The Rational Optimist, the next decade ”saw the sharpest decrease in poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy in human history”.

So, yes, the euro is stuffed and China might sneeze. Both would be bad. But there’s still every reason to be optimistic.

How The Red Cross Virtually Lost The Plot

As long as human beings have been creating fictional worlds, moralists have been denouncing their creations. But the news that the Red Cross might prosecute 600 million video gamers for war crimes was still pretty ground-breaking. A daily bulletin of the organisation’s annual conference two weeks ago recorded an ”overall consensus and motivation” to act ”against violations of international human rights law in video games”.

The conflicts simulated in games like Call of Duty, Battlefield and Metal Gear don’t rigorously comply with the Geneva Conventions. Game developers are understandably more interested in playability than legal realism.

But the bulletin had been written ambiguously. A week later, the Red Cross clarified that ”serious violations of the laws of war can only be committed in real-life situations”. It just wants to ”engage in a dialogue with the video gaming industry”. So we can all breathe a sigh of relief. Log back on to Xbox Live. Reinstall the iPhone games. Plug the Playstation into the TV again. But the very fact that the Red Cross decided to investigate video games is deeply, almost incomprehensibly, absurd. It is about as sensible as objecting to slasher movies because murder is against the law.

This year has been one of the most important years in human rights in decades. Yet the supreme deliberative body of the biggest human rights organisation in the world thought now would be a good time to discuss how international law is portrayed in entirely fictional settings. This suggests that some human rights activists are animated not just by an admirable defence of individual rights around the world, but by an all-encompassing moral crusade. Sure, the Red Cross does a lot of great work, but does it really think fictional violence, in games played mostly by those who will never enter a combat zone, is an urgent problem?

The liberal philosopher Richard Flathman talks about the pervasive tendency in politics towards moralism. Handwringing, showy and excessive moral judgmentalism infects democratic debate around the world. It’s driven by politicians and professional moral activists. They’re extremely confident in the rightness of their cause. They’re deeply earnest. They have a belief in an ideal world – they’re on a quest for purity. And they believe that to achieve the pure goals stipulated by their moral vision, they need to force change on the rest of society.

For those stirred by such moral fervour, even fictional depictions of the world – in video games, movies, novels – are a challenge to their vision and an opportunity for action.

It was this sort of moral activism which gave us the famous film codes in the mid-20th century. These insisted married couples could not be seen in the same bed, and no evil could be depicted as ”attractive” or ”alluring”.

And in our century, the same passion motivates the public health activists trying to ban cigarettes in movies, anti-consumerists denouncing product placement in television shows, and religious groups picketing Harry Potter book launches. Sometimes they want the offending material banned. Other times they just want to ”work with” the transgressing filmmakers and artists. Either way, moralists believe that society should be engineered to make it more moral, more ethical, more clean. And they appear to have infiltrated the otherwise clear-headed and respected Red Cross.

There’s hardly any better example of this moral self-seriousness than the 2009 research report which sparked the Red Cross’ video games discussion. Playing by the Rules, produced by a Geneva-based advocacy group, pedantically scrutinises popular games according to a strict legal criteria.

For example, in 24: The Game, a terrorist is killed after he surrenders. The report concludes that this is a violation of Article 3(1) of the Geneva Conventions, and Article 8(2)(b)(vi) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Then one of the terrorists – sorry, ”alleged” terrorists – takes a hostage. This is a clear breach of the 1979 International Convention against the Taking of Hostages. Of course, there is no cause to believe the game developers approve of terrorists taking hostages. Or that gamers will be convinced hostage-taking is an admirable thing to do.

In one edition of the Call of Duty franchise, set during the Second World War, players can use flamethrowers. Such weapons were used in that conflict, but were technically illegal according to the 1907 Hague Conventions. So, the report meticulously points out that this too is a human rights violation.

Such absurdities are apparently enough to get the world’s peak human rights watchdog in a flurry. Certainly, the Red Cross has a remit to ”promote respect” of the rules of war. But the elimination of war crimes will not be furthered one bit by changing video game content. No person has ever believed that Castle Wolfenstein is a guide to just or unjust behaviour. Yet the Red Cross still solemnly claimed that ”600 million gamers” may be ”virtually violating” international human rights law. If this is not an attempt to stoke a moral panic, then nothing deserves that title.

Phoney Food Fears Ignore Nimble Market Solutions

Nothing brings out the hyperbole like ”food security”. Paul R. Ehrlich – of The Population Bomb fame – appeared on ABC radio in October to declare that ”civilisation is going to collapse” because we are farming land our ancestors were unable to, and we are no longer drinking our water ”right out of the rivers”.

The fear of the moment is that population growth might outstrip food supply. The United Nations says the planet met its 7 billionth inhabitant in November. And the past few years have seen a surprising uptick in food prices. The 20th century saw a decline in the price of food basics, but we’ve had price spikes in 2008 and 2011.

This new food crisis has something for everyone. Tim Flannery’s Climate Change Commission blames climate change. Population panickers blame too many people. Oxfam’s latest campaign attributes higher food prices to ”speculation”, following the ”when in doubt, blame Gordon Gekko” rule.

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus argued population grows at a faster rate than food production. Malthus was wrong then. And his followers are wrong now.

Certainly, high food prices are bad, particularly for those on subsistence income. But our data here is extremely patchy.

Those headline figures trotted out by activists about the millions of people going to bed hungry are so ad hoc as to be quite meaningless.

There is no reason to believe we’re about to enter an era of global hunger. Markets balance themselves. High prices attract new producers into the market, seeking the profits on offer. Those prices also make marginal land more viable. The result? Production goes up, prices go down.

In between their June and November food market report this year, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation revised its production forecasts significantly up. Wheat prices have plummeted. Analysts now talk of a wheat glut. We can thank Oxfam’s hated ”speculators” for that. Of course, in 2004, before the price spikes, the UN was fretting food prices were too low and farmers weren’t making money.

On climate change, too, the future is far more complex than the doomsayers would have us believe. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself says increasing carbon dioxide levels can have a positive effect on agricultural productivity. The 2007 report concluded up to 3 degrees of warming will increase crop yields.

Certainly, higher than 3 degrees and yields could decline. But if we factor in inevitable but unpredictable advances in agricultural technologies, then the outlook for food from climate change is good.

If temperatures and carbon dioxide have been rising throughout the 20th century, as the IPCC’s report emphatically stated, then so too have agricultural efficiency and crop yields. And quietly, away from the terrible prophecies we read in the press, agricultural innovation is happening.

The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative announced in June that scientists were close to developing ”super varieties” of wheat which would boost crop yields by 15 per cent.

A landmark study by the American National Research Council found last year farmers who adopted genetically modified crops increased their productivity. We’ve been manipulating plants since the dawn of agriculture. Genetic modification is just the most recent.

The real threat to the future of food isn’t population or climate change or stock traders. It’s ideology. Greenpeace claims to be worried about food production. But they are unrelentingly hostile to GM crops. Greenpeace activists destroyed a CSIRO crop of experimental GM wheat this year.

No wonder Greenpeace thinks food is going to be a problem in the future. They’re trying to stop the technological solutions designed to fix it. We’ll need scientific progress to feed 7 billion people.

Resistance to that progress is the biggest menace to future food security. And what about once-fashionable green policies about things such as biofuels, which convert food such as corn or sugar cane into fuel to replace petrol? Al Gore admits biofuels are a catastrophe. Americans are now burning one-sixth of the world’s food in their cars.

Yet short-term price instability and spikes are only a problem if you are poor. In the Third World, food insecurity is a symptom of economic underdevelopment. In the First World, the food problem is not scarcity but abundance.

It’s perhaps understandable ideologues are using the recent food price spikes to push their agendas – against globalisation, against population growth, against consumer capitalism. Yet it’s truly amazing that 177 years after Malthus died, we’re still falling for the old food scarcity myth.

The Less Parliament Sits, The Better Off We All Will Be

‘We’re getting on with the job.” This has long been the standard response of Julia Gillard and her leadership team to questions about low poll numbers, the Foreign Minister’s latest tweet, or anything else they don’t want to talk about.

The hung Parliament isn’t gridlocked. Far from it. More than 140 pieces of legislation have passed through both houses. And despite the gauntlet of Bob Katter, Adam Bandt and a motley crew of independents, more than 180 pieces of legislation have gone successfully through the House of Representatives.

A few months ago Treasurer Wayne Swan was bragging this was ”in pretty stark contrast” to the US and Europe, where parliaments have passed fewer laws.

But hold on: why is all this law-making a good thing? (Great! More rules!) The government’s delight at its hectic law-writing schedule must be surprising to those who actually have to deal with the consequences: judges.

Chief Justice of the Federal Court Patrick Keane said earlier this year the ”volume and complexity of federal laws” meant that ”opening the Tax Act [which has blown out to 6000 pages long] is like entering a parallel universe”.

So it’s weird the government thinks placing even more Byzantine restrictions on society and the economy is worth boasting about. Certainly, not every piece of legislation passed has made a new law. Some bills change laws already on the books, others eliminate existing laws. Yet every change has consequences.

Business surveys report a huge increase in the amount of time it takes to monitor regulatory and legislative change. Corporate boards spend more time than ever focusing on legal compliance, instead of on service delivery or innovation.

That’s not just the fault of Gillard’s government. It’s the fault of successive governments, Labor and Coalition, which have steadily increased parliamentary productivity. Now there is an orgy of fresh legislation every year.

And those governments have been egged on by a political culture that favours action – any action – over steady-as-she-goes.

Commentators have recently complained that governments no longer have an appetite for big reform. At least, not like Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard did. Let’s put aside the questionable evidence for this claim. Isn’t it remarkable how so much of this commentary avoids judging the virtues or otherwise of that ”reform”? The criticism seems to be that legislators aren’t pushing through massive change at a sufficient clip. Anything will do. Huge new taxes, or huge new tax cuts. Doesn’t matter. Just as long as they’re huge.

The Parliament and the press gallery are predisposed to like active governments. A great politician is one who changes the country. A great parliament is one that maximises its opportunity to write and pass new laws. Australian political history is one long game of one-upmanship.

Poor old Kevin Rudd took this bias to its logical conclusion. He spun so many government wheels in motion that his successor is only now starting to control its oversized chassis.

The bias towards legislative frenzy is not helped by oppositions that accuse the party in power of being all talk and no action. This was true while Brendan Nelson held the Liberal leadership. But it’s an odd criticism coming from a conservative party. Conservatives believe change for change’s sake is fundamentally bad. The last thing a conservative would want is frenzied reform. ”Do nothing” should be a compliment. Let society evolve by itself.

Just as bizarre are the opposition’s complaints the government hasn’t planned for enough parliamentary sitting days. The government will sit ”only” one in four working days in 2012. But that’s excellent. ”No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session,” wrote a 19th century lawyer. The fewer sitting days the better. The father of liberalism, John Locke, argued that while parliament was better than monarchy, parliamentarians need to be restrained. One way was to limit how often they sat.

Conservatives who understood these issues hoped the 2010 election result might restrain Parliament’s obsessive law-making. Obviously not. If only the hung Parliament was as deadlocked as its critics claim.

Memo To Unions: White Australia Was A Bad Idea

Rarely was the relationship between economic nationalism and xenophobia made so clear. The Transport Workers Union’s Tony Sheldon, after complaining about Qantas’s industrial relations tactics, said that his union would ”stand by the workforce, the Australian brand of Qantas and not have it Asianised”.

Asianised? This was not a slip of the tongue. A variant Sheldon has also used is ”Asianisation”. So is Asianisation worse than normal outsourcing?

That’s no dog whistle; there is no subtext. Google ”Asianisation” and the first page of results offers up ”Australian nativists”, manic claims about the Yellow Peril, and warnings about our ”national suicide”. Sure, those hysterics are on the margins of Australian society. But the TWU boss is the chief opponent of the Qantas restructure and of Alan Joyce who, as many people have pointed out, has a thick accent, betraying his foreignness. Sheldon’s easy use of these terms is damning.

Damning, but not damned. Contrast this missing outrage to the handwringing that followed Tony Abbott’s clearly rhetorical ”blood pledge” to repeal the carbon tax. There would have been fury if a conservative leader said anything remotely like what Sheldon did. The ABC’s Q&A would have spent a show debating whether Australia is a racist country. Serious talkback hosts would have spent the week talking about Enoch Powell. None of those things happened.

Opposition to trade, outsourcing and labour migration has always been tightly bound up with xenophobia. In Australian history, racism has usually had an economic context. After all, why should it be a matter of urgent public policy that some jobs be kept within Australian borders? On what moral basis is limiting immigration to protect workers from competition a good thing, as was proposed by unions at the start of the financial crisis.

Protectionism is bad for many reasons. It raises prices and lowers living standards – worrying enough. But its moral core is dark. Surely Australians are no more deserving of jobs than people from China, Japan or Singapore. Economic nationalism implies natives are worth more than foreigners. The far right is explicit about this. The Australian Protectionist Party makes its regressive views (nationalisation, high tariffs, less immigration) part and parcel of its hostility to multiculturalism. One Nation was also sceptical about globalisation.

So given the union movement’s historical culpability for the White Australia policy, you would think someone like Sheldon might be sensitive to the nuances of xenophobia.

Labor-sympathetic historians in recent decades have tried to sheet the White Australia policy home to prejudice. Immigration restriction was, many post-1960s historians have claimed, simply the result of a racist zeitgeist.

But the White Australia policy was led by a union movement trying to eliminate competition in the labour market. This is an awkward truth.

The government’s own fact sheet on the policy mentions how ”hard-working” immigrants were, yet neglects to mention the role played by unions and the Labor Party in kicking them out.

Immigration restrictions were just a part of it. It was the official policy of Labor prime minister Andrew Fisher to grant ”absolute preference” to white unionists in workplaces – and to encourage employers to fire ”coloured” workers. The Australian Socialist League called for the ”exclusion of races whose presence under present competitive conditions might lower the standard of living of Australian workers”.

The only serious opposition to White Australia came from pro-market thinkers – particularly the great free-trade MP Bruce Smith, who described the policy as ”racial prejudice”.

Steven Landsburg, an American professor of economics, asked recently: ”If it’s OK to enrich ourselves by denying foreigners the right to earn a living, why shouldn’t we enrich ourselves by invading peaceful countries and seizing their assets?” Obviously the latter is wrong. The former is just as wrong.

There’s no reason to believe workers made redundant by Qantas will end up on the scrap heap. That sort of theory was barely plausible when the Australian economy was being opened up in the 1980s and 1990s. It is ludicrous now. We’ve had 30 years of globalisation and the unemployment rates are at record lows. International trade is not war. There is no fixed pie of jobs over which protectionist governments must fight for a share. Nor is there any reason to believe basing some Qantas services in Asia will be bad for consumers. Few companies would deliberately make their service less desirable.

All this leaves us with is a union boss attempting to stoke xenophobia in service of his own economic interests. That’s something with which Australian history is sadly familiar.

Idealism Turns Us On, But Reality Bites

There’s a particularly idiotic moment in the 2003 movie Love Actually when British Prime Minister Hugh Grant loses it. Grumpy at President Billy Bob Thornton for hitting on No. 10 staff, he breaks off script at a press conference, describes his American ally as a ”bully”, and abandons the ”special relationship”.

Unbelievable? Absolutely. But what really throws this scene into the realm of high surrealism is the grinning faces of the PM’s political and policy team. Their leader has threatened the leader of the richest and most powerful economy on the planet. And Grant’s staff – who would have to deal with the consequences – are over the moon about it. Hooray!

Pop culture doesn’t do politics very well. The depictions of government (and the people we elect) in movies and television are either wilfully naive, or naively conspiratorial. Take The American President, where a Michael Douglas administration is inspired by the love of a good woman to decarbonise the US economy. Right now, in 2011, radical climate change action by America is pretty unlikely. But it was ludicrous to imagine when the film was made in 1995. In more pessimistic and dramatic films, politicians and governments head up elaborate conspiracies – they manufacture fictional wars (Wag the Dog), run military actions in secret (Clear and Present Danger) and cover up murders (State of Play, Absolute Power, and Enemy of the State).

But here’s the funny thing. All of these conspiracies pretty much work. They’re successful – at least until the movie’s hero intervenes. Doing the wrong thing might be wrong, but the movies assume it will be simple.

In the movies, covering up a conspiracy is no big deal. When needed, the wheels of government move effortlessly. It’s the same in the films with a more optimistic view of political leadership. Prime Minister Grant or President Douglas only have to put their foot down to get stuff done. Governments in the movies are competent. They’re nothing like the real world. In the real world, government projects are characterised by disappointment and compromise. Political operatives, not experts, make the final decisions over policy. Petty leaks and cheap betrayals are commonplace. Political favours are used like currency.

Even the worst fictional depictions of politics typically exclude the sad reality of policy botches, bureaucratic waste, and politicians with an exaggerated sense of self-importance.

More than anything else, the television show The West Wing has demonstrated pop culture’s bizarre faith in the competence of government and the goodness of politics. The show has a cult following among political boffins. No wonder: The West Wing flatters the political class by its suggestion that every person involved in politics is well informed.

And extremely well-intentioned. The West Wing‘s President Bartlett (pictured) is incorruptible. Power has done nothing to him. If anything, holding the most powerful office on earth has made him more honourable. And his staff are all dedicated to public service, extolling self-sacrifice and duty.

Something’s wrong here. In The West Wing‘s depiction of politics, there appears to be no politics. As Gene Healy, the author of the book Cult of the Presidency, has written: ”Fans of the show never saw the sort of infighting, backstabbing and jockeying for position that appear in real-world accounts of White House life.”

No wonder virtually every character in The West Wing has an unwavering faith in government action as the solution to every problem. They never come up against incompetence or dysfunction. And barely any opposition.

This matters because these portrayals of politics shape in a big way how we understand real-world politics. Rather than pointing at the inevitability of much government failure – caused by its plodding bureaucracy, its base politics, and the inevitability that power will be used to pursue private interests – movies and TV trivialise it.

If only the good people were in charge. If only Mr Smith really had gone to Washington. If only political leaders didn’t use their powers for evil. If only politicians weren’t weak.

Politicians have tried to exploit these sorts of sentiments, but the dull, sad reality of government always sinks in. Reforms go off the rails. Supporters lose faith.

There are rare exceptions, like Yes, Minister, and the more recent, even more cynical The Thick of It. But these are great because they are depressingly authentic compared with what we usually see on our screens.

Even in the darkest political thriller, pop culture’s overwhelming vision of government is optimistic, almost utopian. Shame the real thing can’t live up to the fiction.

Inside Dirt On Clean Energy Schemes: They Don’t Work

If Julie Gillard isn’t paying attention to what’s happening in Washington DC right now, she should be. The first major scandal of the Obama administration looks similar to one of the centrepieces of her carbon price package.

Solyndra was the jewel in the crown of Barack Obama’s green energy program. This California-based solar cell manufacturer received a $US535 million loan guarantee from the US government in 2009. Part of the administration’s stimulus package, the guarantee was supposed to help spark the green revolution.

When Obama visited the company in May 2010, he announced Solyndra would demonstrate that ”the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith” and would lead the way ”towards a brighter and more prosperous future”.

It wasn’t just the federal government: Solyndra was the biggest beneficiary of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s energy subsidies. It was one of the most well-funded start-ups in history.

But last month Solyndra declared it was bankrupt. A year and a half after Obama waxed lyrical about the oodles of green jobs the company would create, 1100 people are out of work. There’s a criminal investigation under way. Executives have been put in front of a congressional hearing, where they have refused to answer questions for fear of self-incrimination.

Solyndra is Obama’s Enron. Not only a political mess (one of the company’s private investors is a major Democrat donor), but it’s a huge policy mess, too.

So why should Gillard care? Because the program that financed Solyndra does much the same thing as her proposed Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

The corporation is part of the deal to get Greens support for the carbon package. It will have a piggy bank of $10 billion to invest in ”clean energy proposals and technologies”.

Solyndra burnt through half a billion dollars of taxpayer money in two years. The reason for its failure is obvious: if the market thought Solyndra was good value, then the company wouldn’t have needed the federal loan guarantee in the first place.

Companies collapse all the time. But who could think a company that can only attract investment if the government promises to bail it out is the portent of a bright, green future?

The phrase ”picking winners” is deeply misleading. Governments generally subsidise firms that the market has already decided are losers. Sure, it’s possible to imagine a committee of career bureaucrats might stumble onto a great opportunity that investors have missed. But you wouldn’t want to put money on it. Well, perhaps somebody else’s money.

Like Obama in 2010, Gillard in 2011 is stamping her approval on a few trendy, subsidised companies.

The government’s Clean Energy Future advertising blitz is stuffed full of fawning interviews with wind and solar energy companies. It boasts about the new jobs they’ll create. But these jobs rely on government grants, or the carbon price, or mandatory renewable energy targets. They wouldn’t survive on their own. The market has already bet against them. Soon there will be $10 billion more to fund dozens of antipodean Solyndras.

And that money puts the lie to the claim that Gillard’s climate package is a ”market-based” solution to global warming. Not even the government believes so. Otherwise it would have eliminated the masses of climate programs that already exist. (According to the Commonwealth Auditor-General, there are 550 across the country.) Instead, they’d leave the tax to do the work of directing investment. They definitely wouldn’t be offering up even more subsidies.

Tony Abbott should study Solyndra, too. Conservative parties aren’t shy about spending money on energy boondoggles. Even as they happily dance on Solyndra’s grave, Republicans support loan guarantees for nuclear power plants.

And the Coalition’s direct action plan will do its fair share of winner picking. In fact, that’s its whole point. Their Emissions Reduction Fund will spend $1 billion per year on projects that an Abbott government reckons might reduce emissions.

When Obama announced his green stimulus plan in 2008, a coalition including the ACTU, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Property Council and the Climate Institute urged the government to ape the American program. Renewable energy outfits are fashionable, after all.

But doling out other people’s money to businesses that only bureaucrats think are exciting is begging for trouble. Most people thought governments had gotten over this sort of speculative activity. Clearly that’s not the case. But the collapse of Solyndra should remind us why governments gave up, for a short while, trying to pick winners.