Tag: The Sunday Age

Liberty Gets The Chop

Where are our great public intellectuals on new threats to freedom of the press? Under the Howard government, there was a minor genre of books and essays condemning the prime minister’s apparent antipathy to public debate. With titles like Silencing Dissent, academics and activists lined up to say John Howard was cracking down on his opponents. David Marr argued in a 2007 essay that Howard was ”corrupting public debate”. Howard had ”cowed his critics” and ”muffled the press”.

So the silence on the inquiry into media bias is jarring. Yesterday the Greens proposed an inquiry to look at ”whether the current media ownership landscape in Australia is serving the public interest”. Those are weasel words. The inquiry – also supported by some independents and many within the government – is obviously intended to influence what the media publishes.

After all, Rob Oakeshott supports an inquiry because he thinks ”complete rubbish” is being written about him. Labor MP Steve Gibbons spoke of the need for an inquiry because of ”vendettas of hate” being waged against the government. Greens senator Christine Milne has said ”bias is certainly one of the things which is going to be looked at”. Bob Brown talks of the anti-Green ”hate media”.

The federal cabinet reportedly held lengthy discussions several weeks ago about ”going to war” with News Ltd and The Australian newspaper. Along with an inquiry, the cabinet also canvassed a government advertising boycott, because it wasn’t happy with coverage of the Craig Thomson affair and journalist Glenn Milne’s airing of old allegations that Julia Gillard had been tangentially associated with similar things.

But recall: in his Howard-era essay, David Marr described the government’s reluctance to use taxpayer money on objectionable artistic grants as ”censorship by poverty”.

Many agreed. Surely by this loose standard, the Gillard government’s threat of withdrawing advertising from a media company it objects to is ”censorship” as well? Where’s the outcry?

In 2007, Robert Manne wrote the foreword of Silencing Dissent. But in a Quarterly Essayreleased last week, Manne complains the ”real and present danger to the health of Australian democracy” is actually Rupert Murdoch and The Australian.

It couldn’t be that the ”health of our democracy” has been hurt by this government’s unfathomably low popularity. Or how it dumped a prime minister, reversed a core election promise and fouled up its refugee policy beyond belief.

No, more concerning is the The Australian‘s ”jihad” against the Greens. In his essay, Manne praises the Greens as ”the most important left-wing party in Australian history”. The Labor Party – Australia’s oldest political party and the first labour party to hold government on the planet – might disagree.

Well, perhaps Manne is using ”left wing” as a synonym for ”authoritarian”. Surely there’s no other word to describe Bob Brown’s recent suggestion the government should impose newspaper licences.

The only reason you’d impose a licence is so you have the power to take the licence away. That’s why in the English-speaking world, newspaper licensing was abandoned nearly four centuries ago. It was tyrannical.

Certainly, the proposed media inquiry may be limited to studying things like privacy or media ownership. Or it may not go ahead at all. The government has enough on its plate. And it is a legitimate question whether the law has set correct limits on media ownership concentration. (Or whether any limits should exist. The press is under extreme commercial pressure from the internet. At no time in history have media moguls been less powerful.)

Still, there’s a comprehensive review going on right now into every facet of media regulation – the convergence review. Few seem to care about that.

The idea that a government might regulate a media organisation specifically because it didn’t like an editorial line is an obvious attack on free speech. Should companies be broken up, their ownership divested, as punishment for being critical, fairly or unfairly, of a government?

Indeed, the fact the government is talking about an inquiry gives it leverage over critics. Surely few genuine supporters of free expression are comfortable with that. Imagine the furore if John Howard had done – or suggested – anything similar.

The Gillard government is one of the most shambolic in history. No surprise then that some people want to talk about failings of the press. Fixating on unfair media coverage must be comforting for those let down by Labor’s performance in government.

In his recent book, Sideshow, former finance minister Lindsay Tanner argued the media was too easily distracted by the frills of public life, to the detriment of policy analysis.

This might be a fair point. But his publicity tour was revealing. Tanner was the fourth most powerful person in the Rudd government. He retired just as it imploded. He’d know some things of public interest. Yet in interviews, Tanner refused to be drawn on the inside workings of that government. He just wanted to speak about media perfidy. Complaining about the media sideshow is just another sideshow.

Predictably, the News of the World scandal in Britain was used by Australian politicians to embarrass their press critics. Months later there’s still no evidence to suggest phone hacking of any kind has occurred Australia. Yet cries for a media inquiry have only gotten louder.

Silencing Dissent asked readers to ”judge for themselves whether the erosion of democratic institutions described in this book is the accidental result of a particular leadership style or part of a more insidious attempt to reshape democracy”.

The question was shrill then. But many nodded along at the time. And for those who did, that same question should now be asked of the politicians clamouring for legislative solutions to negative media coverage.

Forget Compassion – Our Better Angels Aren’t Listening

With its Malaysia solution the Gillard government is about to implement one of the most illiberal asylum seeker policies since mandatory detention was invented. But the response from refugee advocates has been tired and musty.

In The Age on Monday, Malcolm Fraser said the major parties’ approach was an ”appeal to meanness”. Earlier, John Menadue, a former immigration department secretary, urged politicians to ”make the case for compassion and humanity”.

Releasing a report to ”break the stalemate” over asylum seekers last week, the progressive Centre for Policy Development called for ”constructive bi-partisanship”. If there’s anything the last decade of debate over refugees has shown us, calling for leadership and our ”better angels” has failed. The policies have, if anything, become harder.

And that’s not entirely the fault of political demagogues; it’s because nobody’s willing to admit just how intractable the refugee problem really is.

In June, the SBS reality TV show Go Back to Where You Came From showed this clearly. If you already support asylum seekers, it was one of the television highlights of the year. Yet the producers failed to convince some of the program’s participants.

Certainly, those who had enthusiastically admitted their views on asylum were racist had softened by the end of the three episodes. But the participants who were originally worried soft border policies create an incentive for people to travel on dangerous boats remained unmoved.

If relying on compassion for refugees couldn’t convince people who were shown first-hand the hardness of refugee camps, then what hope does it have for the rest of the country? No doubt there are people who oppose boat people because they just don’t like foreigners. But the majority seem to have serious questions about the unintended consequences of the government’s policy.

Even the Centre for Policy Development’s report quietly granted the premises of the refugee sceptics: that we must focus on how we can deter asylum seekers from travelling on dangerous boats.

Yet no serious study has found domestic policy can have more than a marginal impact on refugee flows. A 2009 paper in The Economic Journal found that, at most, countries could deter perhaps a third of potential refugees.

Evidence suggests asylum seeker flows to Australia are largely out of our hands. But governments don’t like to admit they’re subject to forces beyond their control, and oppositions won’t let them try. It’s hardly a surprise that professional legislators think legislation is both the problem and the solution. This is also why another major argument – that our asylum intake is so small we shouldn’t worry about it – is counterproductive.

It is precisely Australia’s tiny numbers of boat people that create an impression we can do something to change them. Almost every national border in the world is porous. Ours is easily monitored. For Europe or the United States, the sheer volume of refugees getting in makes any belief that domestic policy change could halt the flow seem faintly ludicrous.

Yes, there are a lot of popular myths and misconceptions about refugees. There is no queue for boat people to jump. It is not illegal to seek asylum.

Nevertheless, those myths are beside the point. Asylum seekers are a subset of a bigger issue.

There are millions of people who could have a better, more productive life in the West but are prevented from doing so by immigration policies. This is the real issue, but it suits no one to raise it. By preferring silly rhetoric about the ”essential goodness” of Australians, the refugee lobby is shooting itself in the foot.

We could embrace a renewed policy of mass migration to Australia, yet refugee advocates avoid over-thinking Australia’s immigration philosophy.

The only alternative is to admit there probably is no sustainable policy that would keep asylum numbers limited and manageable. So governments will just keep stumbling through, cyclically hardening and softening their approaches. And, if past form is any guide, our debate about asylum seekers will go nowhere.

Abbott Lines Up With Left-Wing Union On Protectionism

The Coalition’s position on anti-dumping laws is part of a worrying trend.
Rarely does the federal opposition line up with the Australian Workers’ Union on economic policy but that’s where they are on free trade. Unfortunately, the nominally market-orientated Coalition is playing fast and loose with one of its core philosophies.
This matters because as the world faces a second round of financial crises, there’s been a surge in protectionism, and it’s a fair bet Tony Abbott will be the next prime minister.
In his ”forgotten families” speech in May, the Opposition Leader made tougher anti-dumping laws a centrepiece of his economic policy.
These laws purport to prevent foreign imports being ”dumped” so cheaply in domestic markets they threaten the existence of Australian companies. The theory suggests that the foreigners will jack up prices once local companies have gone out of business.
But it’s a theory that everybody from the Productivity Commission to Nobel-winning anti-free market economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks is nonsense. Pursuing that pricing strategy would be expensive and risky. It’s hard to find an example of any company ever having done so successfully.
Anti-dumping laws are pure protectionism. They benefit a few companies at the expense of consumers. No surprise that the AWU has been campaigning to beef up anti-dumping laws for months. But a big surprise that a Liberal leader has been as well.
The government made some changes to the anti-dumping regime in June. The AWU was satisfied. The Coalition was not. Labor, they said, had ”thumbed its nose” at manufacturers. That makes the federal opposition less supportive of free trade in this case than the union movement and the government. It could be dismissed as an anomaly if it wasn’t so clearly part of a trend.
And it isn’t an argument between free-market Liberals and agrarian socialists in the National Party. Last month Liberal industry spokeswoman Sophie Mirabella said departments should buy equipment and clothing from local companies.
Doing so she came up against the Victorian government – a Coalition government. Victorian Police Minister Peter Ryan was sourcing fabric for police uniforms from a company that uses Chinese labour. Protect local jobs, or try to get the best deal for taxpayers on the competitive, international market? The federal opposition went with the former. Ryan – who is a National – went with the latter. It’s the old battle between major benefits for a few or minor benefits for all.
It goes on. The opposition has concerns about foreign investment in Australia. The bogey-man here is Chinese and Middle Eastern companies ”buying up” Australian farms. That practice is also known as ”investing”.
And investment is something you’d think a growing, capital-hungry country like Australia might embrace. Nevertheless, the Coalition has a working group to scrutinise whether it is in Australia’s national interest.
The Coalition is not alone when it wavers on free trade. The past few years of downturn has seen a resurgence in anti-trade sentiment and protectionism around the world. According to the British-based Centre for Economic Policy Research, the 20 countries in the G20 have enacted 155 trade restrictions or tariffs since November 2010.
Austerity has left politicians with a restricted set of tools to please domestic rent seekers and trade unions. When governments cannot spend, they regulate.
Protectionism is easy to sell. Who wouldn’t want the government to protect domestic jobs and industries? By contrast, the benefits of trade – cheaper goods and services for everybody and an expanding economy fuelled by engagement with the rest of the world – are more diffuse.
Yet every one of the new restrictions on trade damages economic growth and punishes consumers. Australia has largely avoided joining the wave of protectionism. That’s what makes the Coalition’s growing antipathy to free trade so concerning.
Tony Abbott has been right to oppose many proposed tax increases. But tax is only one side of the economic coin. You can’t have a strong economy without free trade. If the Coalition cannot confront this principle in opposition, it will definitely have to confront it in government.

War To End War Drugs Gains Allies On Right Flank

In 2011, the war to end the war on drugs is now being led by conservative voices, not radical ones. In March, three federal Liberal backbenchers – Mal Washer, Judi Moylan, and the Victorian Russell Broadbent – came out against the criminal status of drug use, going so far as to argue that heroin and cocaine should be legalised. Dr Washer described the war on drugs as a “crime against humanity”.

Indeed, those Liberals have been more vocal than the apparently radical Greens, who abandoned their support for drug decriminalisation after they found it brought more controversy than was comfortable.

And the backbenchers join a global phenomenon – conservative voices coming out against the drug war.

Last month the Global Commission on Drug Policy concluded that drug prohibition has been an abject failure. The panel includes Sir Richard Branson and Nobel laureate in literature Mario Vargas Llosa. Both hold right-of-centre economic views.

Two commission members, one a former US Secretary of State, the other a Federal Reserve chairman, had their argument featured on the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page.

Little has changed in a practical sense, only that the pointlessness of the approach to drugs has become even more obvious over time.

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have admitted using marijuana when they were young. So have Malcolm Turnbull, Wayne Swan and Peter Garrett.

This would all be harmless fun but for one thing. Last financial year, according to the Australian Crime Commission, 57,170 people were arrested in Australia on marijuana-related charges – a drug that Australia’s most senior politicians happily admit to having used.

Their confessions are typically made with a sheepish grin, followed quickly by a stern parental admonition – “It was a mistake to do so,” said Malcolm Turnbull. Julia Gillard: “Tried it, didn’t like it. I think many Australian adults would be able to make the same statement, so I don’t think it matters one way or the other.”

Well, it would matter if you were one of the almost 60,000 Australians arrested for holding, consuming, or supplying cannabis to aspiring politicians last year.

In Australia, marijuana is treated with a degree of leniency, at least compared to other drugs.

Nevertheless, Australian police made more drug-related arrests last year than at any time in the past decade. And about 20 per cent of Australians report having used an illegal drug. These are not the typical indications of policy triumph.

Outright prohibition has been no more a success at reducing the harm caused by drug use in the 21st century than alcohol prohibition was in the 20th.

Melbourne’s cycle of gang warfare has been fuelled by the illegal industries that have grown up around prohibition. In 2001, Portugal decriminalised everything from marijuana to heroin. Drug trafficking remained a crime, but possession and use became nothing more than administrative violations. Providing drugs to minors remained illegal, as did providing drugs to people with a mental illness.

According to a study by the Cato Institute, an American free-market think tank, the results of this experiment have been positive. Drug use didn’t go up, contrary to the nightmare scenarios predicted – particularly among 13 to 18-year-olds.

This is unsurprising. As a product comes out of the illegal underground, it is easier to regulate, control and manage. Cato found that almost every single measure of progress – HIV rates, drug-related mortality – had gone down since 2001.

Obviously decriminalisation is very different from full legalisation. The latter would be an understanding that individuals had the right to ingest whatever they liked. The former balances the criminal and the individual responsibility approaches.

Portugal chose to decriminalise because they didn’t intend to normalise or encourage drug use. And none of the conservative voices who have joined the chorus against the drug war are pro-drugs.

But Portugal’s strategic retreat has done more good in its 10 short years than 30 years of criminalisation. The United States, which has the harshest penalties for drug possession, also has the highest levels of cannabis and cocaine consumption.

Portugal’s model is one Australia could – and should – adopt.

Unfortunately, governments get easy political mileage out of looking tough on drugs. Ted Baillieu wants to crack down on the sale of the bongs – an entirely symbolic gesture – but one that apparently resonates with a certain type of voter.

And social reform can take a long time. One of the intellectual heroes of the free-market movement, Milton Friedman, called for an end to the war on drugs way back in 1972.

Yet conservative scepticism about the criminal approach to drug use is spreading.

If both sides of politics are starting to doubt the wisdom of the drug war, there’s a chance – a chance – we may eventually take Portugal’s lead and call a ceasefire.

One Hack Of A Crime Wave, Or So They Say

Keep calm and carry on: cyber crime is not the threat it’s made out to be. There is no better fodder for naked fearmongering than crime conducted online. You’ve about heard them all: Nigerian scams, 410 scams, and phishing scams. Banking fraud, credit card fraud, hackers, viruses and keystroke loggers. And there’s spam, zombies, malware, spoofing, scareware, worms, etc.
 
And there are the biggies: cyber crime, cyber terrorism, and full-blown cyber war. Typically these threats are all merged into each other, blurred by fearmongers to create a picture of a risky Wild West online. They feed into a fear that technology has somehow got out of control, a fear that our lives have become more dangerous as we’ve been sucked online.
 
On Tuesday, ABC’s 7.30 cited the usual mix, warning of everything from petty identity theft to the ”cyber crime underworld”. The show claimed proceeds of cyber crime were now more than proceeds from illicit drugs. The next day, the federal government announced it would sign the Council of Europe convention on cyber crime – a treaty for international co-operation.
 
The size of any illegal industry is hard to estimate. But the claim that cyber crime is now a bigger concern than the drug trade relies entirely on an off-the-cuff remark made by a consultant to the US Treasury Department in 2005: ”Last year was the first year that proceeds from cyber crime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, and that was, I believe, over $US105 billion.”
 
Last week’s 7.30 interviewed a US defence contractor saying cyber crime was now $US3 trillion. At that price, cyber crime is the fifth-biggest economy in the world, slightly below Germany. It doesn’t ring true. Cyber crime would be the biggest crime wave in human history – hackers stealing an entire German economy every single year. Of course, we mostly hear these gargantuan numbers from consultants (drumming up business from law enforcement) and internet security companies (trying to sell software).
 
A new paper by researchers from Microsoft – Sex, Lies, and Cyber crime Surveys – explains why estimates of cyber crime have become so absurdly large. The authors, Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley, point out that the bulk of what we know comes from tiny surveys. The authors found at least 75 per cent of losses were extrapolated from just one or two unverified, cases.
 
In other words, one bloke falls for the old ”I’m a prince from Nigeria” scam, and it is reported that cyber crime is a $3 trillion industry. This is not to deny that criminals use the internet.
 
But crime is crime, whether it’s online or not. Many cyber crimes are just digital variations of old cons. The Nigerian scam was originally conducted by post.
 
And much cyber crime is just vandalism, hard to police, but not hard to protect against. Lock your gate, use complicated and varied passwords, make backups. Don’t trust foreign princes or popups. Accept the updates for your anti-virus software. Make sure internet companies you deal with are responsible.
 
These are all pretty simple, and they will protect you from 90 per cent of the danger. Education is more necessary here than legislation. The majority of online transactions are safe. And certainly no reason to give government a blank cheque for any new law it wants.
 
Some of the proposals to deal with the cyber crime ”epidemic” have serious civil liberties issues. The treaty the federal government intends to sign may mean Australian internet service providers have to store records of every website we visit, and every person we email, just in case the police need it later.
 
We like to complain about privacy and Facebook, but that will be nothing compared with the massive amount of data compulsorily stored by our internet provider. Apart from the privacy implications, that requirement itself could increase online risk. There’s little more attractive to criminals than large banks of data stored in one place.
 
All the hype about cyber crime is nothing compared with the noises made by defence contractors and American military commanders who have been stoking fears of ”cyber war” and ”cyber terrorism”. But even the most famous instances of cyber war – like the StuxNet virus, which damaged Iran’s nuclear program in 2010 – are more hype than reality. StuxNet was trotted into an Iranian enrichment facility on a USB stick. It was plain, old espionage. So, next time you read of the dangers online, consider: the seriousness of the threat is inversely proportional to the number of uses of the word ”cyber”. There are risks online. But they are manageable.

Dig In, Don’t Wait. Our Slow Food Nostalgia Is Misplaced

We want food to be simple and honest, local and seasonal. We want it to be organic, ”natural”, free of preservatives and homemade. This, at least, is the message from food journalists and critics, celebrity cooks, recipe books and MasterChef.

It’s a vision of food-before-the-fall, when people had a relationship with what they ate. A lovely dream, but dream it in moderation.

For the most part, when it comes to food and agriculture, industrial is good. Corporate farming is good. Even processed is good. Natural food is an illusion. We wouldn’t want it if we had it. Our ancestors had natural food. It was awful.

The history of eating is the history of shaping, manipulating, preserving and trading our food into digestible shape. Only since the development of modern agriculture, reliable transportation and refrigeration – in other words, industrial society – has food been cheap, plentiful and safe.

In the 17th century, fruit was dismissed as ”unwholesome” and blamed for the plague. It was hard to grow and extremely susceptible to pests and the weather. Today, even the most organic, locally sourced, seasonal tomato is the result of hundreds of years of human manipulation.

And even the most dedicated foodie’s pantry is stuffed with items that are industrial.

Like soy sauce. Nobody makes it from scratch. One recipe warns: ”If you get bored easily … this project might not be the best for you. It can take up to six months to see the finished product.”

You can just buy half a litre for $2, shipped in great quantities from China and available from a corporate supermarket. Not local, not bought at a farmers market, but indispensable.

By far the biggest benefit of industrial food has been saved labour. The only groups who practice ”slow food” (regional cuisines cooked from scratch with local ingredients) are the extremely well-off with the luxury of time and the desperately poor who have no alternative. The rest of us can buy our way out of dreary kitchen work.

As the food historian Rachel Laudan has pointed out, Japanese women in the 20th century embraced white manufactured bread because serving that was a lot easier than getting up early to make rice. Prior to the 1950s, Mexican women spent up to five hours a day making tortillas. And when they became available, Italians eagerly bought dehydrated pasta and canned tomatoes. The potential for gender equality was immeasurably enhanced when women were freed from the kitchen.

Even much-maligned processed food is an advance on the past. The processing of bread has not only made bread safer and healthier but it stores longer and is more nutritious than much of the food eaten by our ancestors.

The nostalgia for a lost world of pure food is nostalgia for a world of nutritional poverty. Laudan describes it as ”culinary Luddism”. And increasingly it has policy implications.

The recent debate over cheap milk was at its heart a debate over how we think about food. Should governments protect family farms? Or accept that in most cases the cheapest and most reliable way to feed the nation is industrial agriculture?

Yes, agribusiness is less romantic than the small farm that’s been worked by a single family for generations. But it’s economically viable. The Senate inquiry into dairy pricing heard stories of independent farmers toiling 12 hours, seven days a week, earning less than they could get from unemployment benefits. That’s no pastoral ideal.

Specialisation and economies of scale are just as necessary in agriculture as any other industry. No wonder most organic food sold in Australia is grown by large agribusiness rather than small family farms.

Throughout history, and for all but the rich, the production of slow, natural food has been an arduous necessity. Making food from scratch was the marker of a life of subsistence. Eating local was a requirement. The family farm was no Arcadian idyll. It’s long been a site of hard labour.

So let’s embrace the higher standards of living offered by commercial, industrial food.

Free Economies Will Choose Money Over The Gun

We live in an age of world peace. To be more specific: a ”neoliberal” age of world peace. Certainly it doesn’t seem like it. The 21st century opened with a terror attack that sparked wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter seems to be getting more violent.

But the data is unambiguous. The world is fighting fewer wars. And the wars that are being fought are less deadly than at any time in living memory.

A Canadian non-profit, the Human Security Report Project, has been tracking the number and intensity of conflicts in the past 50 years. Between 1950 and 1959, there was an average of 6½ international conflicts per year – the vast bulk of them fought between states. In our decade, the average has been less than one, almost all civil wars.

Sure, after the fall of communism, internal conflicts sharply spiked, as a decaying Russia and disengaging United States withdrew support for many petty tyrannies in the Third World. But the number of conflicts has since resumed its long-term decline.

War is also becoming less deadly. In the 1950s, the average international conflict killed 20,000 people per year. The average conflict in the 2000s killed a 10th of that. You’d think this would be widely recognised and celebrated. But it’s entirely at odds with the impression of escalating global violence we get from the nightly news.

So, war is now rare. Take a moment to celebrate. Then think of the simple ideological narratives these observations upset.

Anti-capitalist intellectuals from Lenin to Naomi Klein have associated competition in the marketplace with competition on the battlefield. Yet while the world is more commercial and more globalised than at any time in history, it’s more peaceful too.

Foreign policy realists long claimed the post-Cold War world – without two superpowers holding the globe together under a threat of mutual nuclear destruction – could be unstable. But if anything conflict has declined faster in the past two decades.

So what accounts for all this world peace? If we want war to be even less common, we’d better figure out what’s causing its demise. Many people would credit democracy – if citizens are given a chance to vote, they’ll elect pacifists. But as American political scientist Patrick J. McDonald pointed out in his 2009 book The Invisible Hand of Peace, democracy is not immune to war mania.

McDonald finds that during the 19th century democratic states were more likely to go to war than autocratic ones.

This is not an academic question. If we want Middle East peace, focusing on democracy at the expense of everything else won’t succeed. And we shouldn’t pin our hopes for the peaceful rise of China solely on elections.

The other big theory on the causes of peace focuses on commerce. Nations that trade with each other don’t fight. War is bad for business. But this theory doesn’t quite work either. What about World War I? European commerce was booming early in the 20th century, but 37 million people still died.

McDonald argues it isn’t the volume of commerce or the extent of globalisation that creates peace. It’s the domestic institutions that promote commerce – that is, the ”neoliberal” policies of low trade barriers, limited government ownership, and private property – which eliminate the incentives for war.

By studying hundreds of interstate conflicts over the past two centuries, McDonald finds that only economic freedom is closely correlated with peace.

That’s because regulatory barriers to trade spark international political conflict, not co-operation. And businesses that enjoy trade protection like military conquests. It’s how they expand their markets.

These are general rules and it’s a messy world. America’s free markets and democracy did not stop it invading Iraq.

Yet a 2005 study by the Cato Institute, an American think tank, found ”economic freedom is about 50 times more effective than democracy in diminishing violent conflict”. If we want the age of world peace to last, that’s what we need to focus on.

Charade Must End, And Both Sides Of Politics Know It

Perhaps now Labor and the Coalition could come clean with voters. Both sides of politics intend to grow Australia with immigration – to continue the 200-year project of population expansion. This project is as important today as it was during the Victorian gold rush. They just don’t want to admit it.
 
Treasurer Wayne Swan announced in last week’s budget an increase in immigration of 16,000 people; three-quarters of those will be skilled migrants sent to regional areas.
 
That’s on top of the government’s new Enterprise Migration Agreements. The agreements allow large mining and infrastructure firms to negotiate tailored guest worker schemes for foreign labour, as long as they implement training programs for local workers too.
 
Sure, in the scheme of things, these changes will only modestly increase immigration levels.
 
But they’ve been announced by a government that spent the 2010 election talking about how they planned to slow population growth, blamed skilled migrants for undercutting wages, and promised to “take a breather” on immigration.
 
The increases have been embraced by an opposition that ran even harder against population during the campaign. Supporting the government’s migration increase last week, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey said it was necessary if we were to avoid inflation.
 
Last year Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott fell over each other trying to appeal to voters convinced that traffic jams and refugee boats were two sides of the same problem.
 
Labor announced an inquiry into sustainable population, plainly hoping it would calm those who hated Kevin Rudd’s ”Big Australia”.
 
The “stable population” types welcomed the opportunity to present their misanthropic views on closed borders and reduced birth rates. Green groups proposed population limits too, prioritising the Australian environment above the well-being of potential migrants.
 
But the government must have known that business lobbyists would call for higher migration during the inquiry. The likely final result would be an expansion, not a reduction, of foreign skilled migration.
 
The government released the inquiry’s report on Friday. It simply says that skilled migrants should be sent to targeted industries and regions, and that governments should plan better.
 
The ”small Australia” rhetoric of the 2010 election was just for show. So let’s give up the charade. Australia needs more migrants; our economy is begging for them.
 
The enormous mineral projects in Western Australia and the North need mass labour if we’re going to continue to rely on the resources boom to underpin growth. The Chinese demand, which Treasury hopes will save the federal budget, will only be met with new workers.
 
The National Farmers Federation reckons agriculture needs at least 100,000 more workers now that the drought has lifted.
 
Booming global demand for resources, and booming global demand for food – a government that did not make policy changes to meet those demands would be negligent.
 
Could we try to fill all these positions with existing Australian residents? Well, the unemployment rate is in the fours. There aren’t many Australians available.
 
But the more troubling answer to that question comes from another proposal in this budget – the $1700 bonus for apprentices if they complete their training. That seems perverse. Do we really have to bribe people to qualify for jobs that offer high wages?
 
There is, of course, a powerful moral argument for accepting more immigrants. Migrants do more than just help our economy. They travel here for work to support themselves and their families. That’s the moral dimension – people should be free to build a better life, as long as they don’t harm others in the process.
 
Migrants do not steal jobs from locals who want to work. The economic literature on that question is unambiguous.
 
Nor is infrastructure the problem immigration sceptics claim. Migrants pay taxes. Competent governments should be able to deploy those taxes for transport and services. When incompetent ones – read New South Wales – do not, that’s not immigrants’ fault.
 
All these points are as true for unskilled migrants as much as skilled ones. A far-sighted government would look at expand-ing the unskilled cohort. The economy could easily use them.
 
Immigration is overwhelmingly more effective than foreign aid at boosting development in the Third World. Migrants send money back home. Globally, the amount of cash remitted to the developing countries is more than total global spending on foreign aid. And it goes directly to those who need it.
 
So for Bob Brown to describe economic migrants this week as “queue jumpers” is obscene. The Greens’ support for humanitarian programs is laudable; their opposition to immigration in general is not.
 
Throughout Australian history, the “population problem” has been about how we will people the continent, not whether we should. And despite the aberration that was the 2010 election, it still is.

Big Business In Full Flight Is The Clarion Cry Of Democracy

Is big business running rings around the government? That’s the view of an increasing number of commentators convinced the era of economic reform is over because business won’t play ball.
 
Their argument rests on the campaign by mining interests against the Rudd government’s resources tax last year, a campaign described by one journalist as ”thuggery, pure and simple”. In the Julia Gillard era, many say similar business thuggery will destroy any future reform. Put aside the implicit assumption businesses should meekly accept tax rises and new regulations.
 
In his Quarterly Essay, George Megalogenis wrote: ”The miners were seeking a veto no lobby is entitled to – to deny a government the right to set taxation rates.”
 
But that’s the nature of democracy. Individuals (and individuals in business) can aggressively criticise the actions of the government, to try to influence opinion, to make their case in public. Nobody was trying to strip the tax power from the Commonwealth, just saying that a particular new tax should be open for debate.
 
The anti-mining tax campaign will be the template for corporate activism for decades to come – like the attempt by Clubs Australia to drum up opposition to proposed pokies regulation with that turgid word ”un-Australian”.
 
But was the miners’ campaign really that strong? The ads weren’t that good. They were light on detail. Certainly they lacked the detail to be convincing. Voters are not so naive to take what a lobby group says on face value. Every single business facing new regulation or tax says they’ll be ruined. Australians aren’t stupid.
 
The success of the anti-mining tax campaign reflects nothing more than the weakness of the Rudd government. After watching Kevin Rudd launch policy after policy with little to show for it, voters were not convinced increasing the taxes on one of Australia’s most successful industries was really a pressing issue.
 
Still, it’s true that business seems to have given up quietly lobbying behind the scenes, and now makes its arguments in carefully scripted television spots.
 
That’s not a bad thing. Better that special business interests lobby against legislative change in public than in secret boardroom lunches with ministers.
 
Anyway, whatever influence business has in Australia, it’s dwarfed by Canberra’s influence. While the mining sector contributes about 6 per cent of our GDP, the federal government spends 23 per cent. While the miners spent $22 million on a one-off ad campaign, the Australian government spends about $100 million in advertising every year.
 
But most of all: business can’t impose new taxes or laws on everybody else. There’s definitely a power imbalance between business and government, but it isn’t business that has the upper hand.
 
The most intense campaign against a government policy in Australian history was the opposition to the Chifley government’s proposed nationalisation of banks between 1947 and 1949.
 
The private banks produced millions of pamphlets stating their case for private enterprise. They took out thousands of column inches of advertising. They sponsored anti-nationalisation ”interviews” on commercial radio. Town hall meetings against nationalisation were attended in the thousands. The nationalisation failed. Ben Chifley lost the 1949 election to Robert Menzies.
 
That campaign makes the anti-mining tax ads seem like an inaudible squeak. If such a campaign happened today, it would be dismissed as a ”billionaires’ revolt”. But the banks did us a favour by opposing Chifley’s plan.
 
Australian politics does not remember the bank campaign. Certainly not as romantically as it remembers the environmental campaigns in Tasmania, or anti-Vietnam War rallies, or Gough’s It’s Time slogan.
 
The fact that this story has been largely forgotten reveals a misplaced and deeply undemocratic hostility to business participating in public debate.
 
Business is no less justified in protesting policy than, say, the medical research community in protesting the rumoured reduction in funding this federal budget. An ad campaign isn’t thuggery. It’s argument.
 
Now business is speaking up again as the government prepares the carbon price. So be it.
 
To imagine business leaders should take every government impost on the chin is absurd. They have as much right to participate in democracy as everyone else.

Plain Packs Pointless When Smoke Gets In Our Eyes

When the Rudd government’s National Preventative Health Taskforce released a position paper on anti-tobacco measures, they titled it “Making Smoking History”.

If that was the goal you’d think the government could just ban cigarettes – a clear, bold, unequivocal stance on what it has condemned as a very dangerous and addictive product.

But the title does help us understand the reasoning behind plain packaging of tobacco, a policy which federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon announced a few weeks ago. It’s punitive.

The nanny state is no longer trying to inform us of the best choices and the risks of unhealthy behaviour. Now it’s just resorted to bullying – haranguing and punishing people who still make those unapproved choices contrary to nanny’s wisdom and despite nanny’s best efforts.

Where will this end? Surely, after decades of anti-smoking education, the presumption eventually has to fall back onto individual responsibility.

You can hate tobacco companies. You can hate what cigarettes do. But the government is planning to make Australia the first country in the world to impose plain packaging on cigarettes. It seems reasonable to ask whether it will work.

Here’s what we know: smokers are influenced by packaging, to a degree. Lighter colours seem to imply less risk. One leaked Phillip Morris document admitted as much. “Smooth” and “silver” also suggest safer cigarettes.

Hence the government’s proposed new packet design – an unappealing olive green, with unadorned text for the label. But the literature suggests package marketing only influences the choices of existing smokers.

The government’s goal for packaging is to stop people becoming smokers in the first place. Roxon argues “catchy colours” are designed to “suck in young people”. Her aim is to “make sure fewer people start on this dangerous habit”. And there’s no clear evidence packet design inspires non-smokers to start smoking.

The most that reviews of the scholarly evidence can find are surveys in which teenagers are asked to imagine whether their friends could be duped by shiny packages. You may not be surprised to learn teenagers assume their friends are idiots.

This lack of evidence isn’t surprising. People start smoking because they want to try the sensation of smoking, not try the sensation of holding a well-designed package. And what about existing smokers? Let’s just say if graphic photos of bleeding lungs haven’t inspired you to kick the habit, an olive box probably won’t either.

The tobacco companies are upset about plain packaging because it will make it harder to compete for the existing pool of customers. They focus on packaging design because there’s nothing left for them to do.

It’s not as if cigarette marketing isn’t highly regulated already. Smokers won’t even be able to see the olive-ness of the packets until after purchase. New Victorian laws mean cigarettes are closeted out of view behind the counter. Now retailers can only display a sign, provided by the state government, with the words “We Sell Tobacco Here” in black on a white background.

Existing laws will undermine the effectiveness of future anti-smoking policies the government might implement.

After all, it’s one thing to show that people in an experimental psychology lab think lighter colours mean lighter cigarettes. But it’s quite another to imagine that – after decades of anti-smoking advertising, warning labels and social disapproval – the colour of the packet will make a lick of difference to the decision to smoke.

The traditional justification for nanny state-style regulation is that people don’t understand the consequences of their choices.

Should people be allowed to manage their own risks: to conduct themselves in their own way, to abuse or protect their bodies as they see fit?

The answer to that question ultimately depends on your personal values. But the first health warning on cigarette packets was imposed 38 years ago.

Anyway, we’re a long way past the days of health bureaucrats gently nudging us to make better decisions, and moderate sin taxes to recoup the costs to taxpayers.

Budget after budget of tobacco excise increases mean tobacco taxes now far outweigh the burden of smokers on the publicly funded health system.

The government estimates smoking-related illness costs about $300 million a year. But it collects $5.8 billion each year in tobacco excise duty.

If the very existence of brands causes harm, as the government’s plain packaging strategy suggests, then plain packaging for alcohol will no doubt be next. Eighty per cent of Australians believe the nation has a drinking problem.

Brewers won’t be able to get away with fluorescent and sparkling alcopops forever. They’re obviously targeted at younger consumers. Nobody drinks Bacardi Breezers “responsibly”.

Prominent text warning labels will come first. Then graphics.

Seems unlikely? Well, 10 years ago the idea that the government would eliminate logos from cigarette packs would have seemed pretty unlikely too.

In a nanny state, what first sounds absurd can quickly become the law of the land.