November 2009 – Chris Berg

Here’s What Isn’t Happening

There’s a lot going on in the Liberal Party at the moment, and, indeed, on the Australian right. But here’s what isn’t happening. There isn’t a burgeoning ideological split between conservatives and liberals. Climate change is not a stalking horse for social conservatism. And this isn’t the old guard rebelling against the new guard. In both camps there are conservatives and liberals, seasoned parliamentarians, time-servers and first-termers.

Neither is this any sort of “Howard’s revenge”. It’s a long bow to blame a schism within a party on the one leader who kept it together for a decade.

For the Liberal Party, the emissions trading scheme is a special case.

After the 2007 election, there was much discussion about the future of liberalism and the Liberal Party. And the debate largely framed in British terms. Should the post-Howard party saunter down David Cameron’s path of moderate economics and moderate greenism, or talk about high tax rates and inflation? (For the questions that debate raised, read James Campbell in the IPA Review in March 2008.)

Anyway, it turns out that there are a few problems implementing an Antipodean interpretation of Cameronism. There appears to have been an assumption that choosing to follow the UK model was a simple as flicking a switch – just a quick rejig of the Liberal Party’s press release template and bang, the Liberals are now greener than the ALP. Hence Turnbull’s recent use of “progressive” – a word that resonates among Cameron’s strategists, but is alien to the Liberal parliamentary party and its supporters.

Campbell’s piece shows that Cameron’s strategy was more than just adding a tree to the Conservatives logo. For one thing, he took his party with him, over a period of many years. And whatever success Cameron is enjoying cannot be isolated from a few pertinent facts: the Tories have been out of power for a decade, Labour has driven the UK basically into the ground, and the ideological ghost of John Howard is not as strong as the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.

But most importantly: It’s easy for a nominally small government party to be clean and green if all you’re talking is about bicycles. By contrast, the ETS is no small thing. The ETS Green Paper bragged that the government’s scheme would “change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy”. The scheme is arguably the largest economic change in Australian history — an emissions trading scheme is like plopping a entire second economy on top of the first one.

Malcolm Turnbull’s camp wants to follow the Cameron model. Nick Minchin’s camp is more diverse. Not all of the Minchin sceptics are sceptics of the science. Weirdly, Kevin Rudd got this one right. Sceptics include those who believe the science but think the scheme is irrevocably flawed (does anyone disagree with that?). And then there are those in the Minchin camp who even believe the world should take action on climate change, but feel that Rudd’s diplomatic strategy of legislating before Copenhagen is a little bit silly. You might not agree with it, but this is an entirely defensible position. The entire economy isn’t just a bargaining chip to be handed to our diplomats to go off and play with.

Most in the Minchin camp have little interest in climate science, but believe a Liberal Party cannot claim to be liberal if it supports one of the biggest government interventions ever considered by the parliament. And with its extraordinary concessions, the ETS doesn’t even have the redeeming quality of being able to achieve its purported goal: substantially reducing emissions. It doesn’t even work as an insurance policy. It has negligible coverage and a massive premium. The ETS is, simply, a massive tax/corporate-welfare churn. Its economic cost will inevitably be substantial – doubly so in the absence of a global deal – and the Minchinites are betting that cost will be a significant political issue in future elections.

So before a global deal, for many in the parliamentary Liberal Party, opposing the ETS seems like a no-brainer.

Hey Mr Garrett! Time To Get Off Our Arts And Do Nothing

If everything goes to plan, soon Australia will have its very own national cultural policy.

This is great news if you have been concerned that Australian literature, TV, music, film, theatre, painting and performance art is a bit, well, aimless. Sure, cultural products inform and reflect our views of ourselves – but so what? What’s the end game? Think of what our culture could achieve if it had a policy!

Announced recently by Peter Garrett, what the national cultural policy lacks in ambition, it more than makes up for in discussion points.

Right now it’s just a website, described pompously as a “national conversation”. But the publicly funded arts community has wanted some sort of grandiose policy for a long time. They have always assumed that “national policy” is code for “buckets of cash”. They’re probably right.

According to the Arts Minister, culture does pretty much everything – it creates jobs, attracts tourists, harnesses “understandings” (yeah, I’m not sure what that is either) and lifts our fragile economy. So in Garrett’s opinion, it should be co-ordinated by him.

But when government mates with culture, it breeds bureaucracy. Unless there is a big change in direction, a national cultural policy could easily make this worse; filtering Australia’s artistic output through yet another mesh of subsidy and red tape.

The Commonwealth Arts Council talks about culture as if it can be reduced to key performance indicators – “strategic priorities”, “aims”, “outcomes” and “outputs”. Let’s say you want a few grand for your interpretative dance version of An Inconvenient Truth. I suspect the government would quite like that idea. And once you slog through the 11-stage grant application, provide the dozens of pages of supporting material, CVs and letters of support, you’ll find out if they do. After you successful defend your idea at an assessment panel meeting, of course.

Certainly if we’re going to give money to artists, we might want to run a background check on who we are giving it away to. But government policy seems be aimed at taming our wild culture, burying it in a pile of red tape, and keeping it alive with taxpayers’ money fed through a tube.

After all, it isn’t just bad luck that Australian movies are routinely commercial failures. Filmmakers have realised it’s more important to please funding bodies with depictions of the hollowness of contemporary society than it is trying to please audiences. (I mean, come on, not every movie has to expose the “dark undercurrents of suburbia”.)

But there is an alternative. If Peter Garrett really wants his national cultural policy to make a difference, he should adopt just one principle: Australia’s culture can look after itself.

Which culture would you consider more vibrant: one in which artists are entrepreneurs – testing their work against an audience and in a competitive marketplace, or one that shepherds them into a departmental grant application process?

The entrepreneurial spirit should be as central to the art world as it is to the economy.

It’s not like the marketplace can’t produce culture. Even high culture can be popular. Nearly 40,000 people came to see Andre Rieu’s Docklands show last year. The National Gallery of Victoria puts on exhibitions all Melbourne lines up to see. And while the largest share of Arts Council funding is spent on expensive things such as orchestras, there are privately funded orchestras around the world. Profit-making culture just takes an entrepreneurial passion.

Anyway, there has never been a more futile time to try to define and direct a national culture. The very the idea of an “Australian” culture seems outdated. The internet has put the globalisation of culture into hyperdrive. Most importantly, it has allowed us to choose cultural products that are important to us as individuals, not as a “nation”.

Culture comes from the meanings that individuals derive from art, dance, theatre or film, not from a departmental funding matrix that allocates money to politically favoured art forms. So let’s scrap the idea of a national cultural policy, and embrace our 21 million individual cultural policies. A vibrant culture will come from what people want, not what the Commonwealth funds.

The Meter’s Running As Canberra Eyes States’ Powers

Reorganisation, wrote journalist Charlton Ogburn, is a wonderful way of creating the illusion of progress.

So last week the Federal Government decided that we need “nationally consistent” taxi standards. It is concerned that the geography and language tests given to taxi drivers are slightly different in Victoria and, say, Queensland.

For 108 years our federal system has been trying to divvy up tasks between the Commonwealth and the states. In Canberra’s view, it’s time to give a little bit more of that up: those states can no longer be trusted with taxis.

It’s trivial, but hardly the only trivial issue the Federal Government wants to take over. Disability parking permits is another. Not only does the Commonwealth want every state to have the same eligibility rules, but even the design of parking permits needs to be indistinguishable from Broome to Launceston.

But why? It’s hard to think of a less national issue. Permits from one state are completely and unambiguously recognised in other states. So couldn’t Canberra just leave that one for them to sort out? But no, the Federal Government wants to make sure every permit includes a Southern Cross logo and map of Australia, just in case someone wants to take their disabled parking permit overseas.

Perhaps it would be best if we just cut out the middleman and let the United Nations handle it.

Not everything the Federal Government wants to take over is so petty. In July, the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission argued that the Commonwealth should be responsible for large swathes of the health system.

We could go on. Kevin Rudd wants Canberra to be in charge of urban planning. The Preventive Health Taskforce wants Canberra to set bottleshop opening hours. The Greens want Canberra to be in charge of pokies licensing.

But where on earth does everybody get this faith in the Federal Government? Why does everybody assume Canberra will succeed where states have failed? The Commonwealth Government has, after all, racked up its fair share of failures.

There’s hardly a more obvious example than the Education Revolution. The Government’s election pledge to give every school one computer per child has, after two years, delivered just 154,933 of the 820,000 promised. At this rate, it will be a promise for the next election too.

Failure abounds in Canberra. It was the Immigration Department that lost Cornelia Rau, and kicked Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon out of the country. And remember GroceryChoice?

Nevertheless, most Federal Government absurdities come out of the Defence Department. Recall the Collins-class submarines. Or the joint strike fighter program, now two years behind schedule. Defence is not even sure it wants it any more.

Oh, and each plane is now twice the price. Don’t dwell on it too much, but in 2005 the army apparently ran out of ammunition.

Nevertheless, dragging policy away from the states – let’s call it Canberra-isation – seems to have become for many federal ministers the whole purpose of going into politics in the first place.

In a way, it’s our fault.

Young politicians might run for Federal Parliament because they have ideas for foreign relations, or a grand scheme for economic policy. But local campaigns always come down to local issues. Aspiring foreign affairs ministers will quickly find themselves campaigning on issues such as graffiti vandals, or lights at a local intersection.

Terry Moran, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, threatened last week that if the states did not do more of what Canberra wants, “the future direction of the federation will change” – the Commonwealth will seize even more stuff.

State and territory ministers are now preparing for the meeting of the Council of Australian Governments on December 7.

If Moran’s comments are anything to go by, they should expect a haranguing about how their states are insufficiently obedient to Rudd. But as they sit down opposite their Commonwealth counterparts next month, the states need to ask themselves one simple question: why should we listen to these clowns?

Big Government: A Love Story

Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story “takes aim” at the capitalist system, as a few dozen supportive reviewers have mindlessly written. But that’s a tough metaphor to uphold. It’s easy to aim when you don’t care what you hit.

Moore is interested in Big-C Capitalism. So after a few stories of families having their homes foreclosed, Moore reveals his thesis.

“Capitalism is a sin”, he gets a series of priests to say darkly into the camera; it’s “obscene” and it’s “radically evil”. Capitalism is a secular “crime” and spiritually “immoral”.

Another priest reflects that he is “really in awe of (pro-capitalism) propaganda”, which is funny to hear from a minister of religion. And a bit rich: one sequence in Moore’s film describes the somewhat icky practice of firms taking out life insurance for their employees, which he tastefully illustrates with lingering shots of a grieving family, as if insurance policies cause cancer.

Moore has always been an awkwardly self-conscious working-class man. In this instalment, he is also God-fearing. And his NASCAR-chic populism is now littered with calls to “people power”, which, coming from a multimillionaire, are as authentic as the Spice Girls’ “girl power”. It’s all so laden that there’s a good chance he wants to run for office.

In a bizarrely misdirected appeal to authority, Moore quizzes the off-Broadway actor Wallace Shawn, who has “studied history and a bit of economics” about what he reckons is the problem with capitalism. (The audience Moore hopes will see his film know Shawn from The Princess Bride. But those who will actually see it know Shawn from My Dinner With Andre.) Shawn’s answer isn’t the point: what possible value could his view add?

But Moore’s argument is even more misdirected. He’s justifiably outraged at the bailouts and the way they were pushed through Congress. Who isn’t? He’s angry about the favour-trading relationship between Wall Street and Washington. Again, who isn’t?

But that’s not capitalism. It’s corporatism - a political system with a veneer of free enterprise but where a network of lobbyists, bureaucrats and politicians use the political system to achieve private goals. Moore would like to add a fourth movement to this symphony - the unions. But unless you think of unions as omniscient and beneficent guardians of the public good, doing so wouldn’t change the corporatist dynamic.

So when he describes a real outrage - like a corruption case in Pennsylvania where a corrupt judge funnelled innocent kids into a privately run juvenile detention centre - he doesn’t quite understand who the bad guy actually is: the politicians and administrators who let it happen. (After this case, two judges face charges of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, extortion, bribery, and federal tax violations. Corruption is, after all, against the law.)

And who to blame for the bailouts? The firms that ask for them, or the politicians that grant them?

For Moore, Barack Obama’s election is a spiritual catharsis, an explosion of people power, and a sudden break with the capitalist nightmare. But the outrages he spent 90 minutes detailing have, if anything, gotten worse under the Obama administration. The employment pipeline between Goldman Sachs and Treasury has is even busier. And Obama has graduated from bailing out banks to bailing out car companies. For Moore, when Bush did this sort of thing, it was capitalism. When Obama does, it’s democracy.

In Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore can’t quite get himself to the problem. If he did, he’d have to admit that the big activist government of his dreams is actually the cause of his nightmares.

Vegetarians’ Meat Tax Plan Just A Load Of Hot Air

This week British economist Lord Stern called for the world to get off beef and on to broccoli: go vegetarian for the planet. Methane – burped, belched and otherwise released by cows in impressive amounts – is around 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

So the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review into global warming told Britain’s Timesnewspaper that the climate change meeting in Copenhagen would only be a success if it led to skyrocketing meat prices. Otherwise, Stern predicts, climate change will turn southern Europe into a desert and there will be ”severe global conflict”.

Stern isn’t alone. Also this week, Peter Singer called for a 50 per cent tax on all meat. According to the Australian vegetarian philosopher, cows are pretty much like cigarettes: they’re bad for you and smelly. They should be taxed accordingly.

It may come as a surprise, but there are flaws in this plan. We could all go vegetarian tomorrow if we tried – good news for the vitamin supplements industry. But a world without meat would be a much sadder world. And at best we’d be making a marginal change to global emissions.

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 85 per cent of methane from cattle is produced by cows in the developing world, because they have poorer diets, which produces more methane. And many of those cows aren’t just hanging around in paddocks waiting to become tasty beef – they’re work cows. India’s 283 million cows aren’t being eaten.

One environmentalist gripe is that cattle raised for human consumption themselves consume vast amounts of food that could go instead to humans. But grain-feeding produces less methane than feeding on wild grass. Purpose-grown feed is, at least in some respects, more environmentally friendly.

So: cow farts are a surprisingly complex issue.

It’s easy for Stern and Singer to urge the developed world to change its ways. But it would be much harder – and would get them invited to far fewer cocktail parties – if they decided a good use of their time was haranguing poor Indians into giving up their livestock. Stern and Singer are proposing little more than a green indulgence for the wealthy.

Anyway, practical problems aside, there’s something obscene about the idea that governments should deliberately make basic staples of life more expensive.

After all, Stern and Singer’s meat tax is hardly the only tax on food being proposed. Public health activists are adamant that the only way to get people to shed their ugly kilos is by making sweets more expensive.

Taxes on food have been among the most punitive in history. Dissatisfaction with taxes on salt was one of the causes of the French Revolution. Gandhi marched against the British salt tax.

We forget just how far we’ve come. A few centuries ago, getting hold of affordable and edible meat was like playing roulette – if the roulette wheel was made of parasites and salmonella.

Early cookbooks spent almost as much time teaching household chefs how to identify spoiled meat as they did describing recipes. The Compleat Housewife, published in 1727, told readers to prod carefully at beef in a marketplace. If the meat sprang back, it was fresh.

Admittedly, there is a positive spin you could put on the proposals to tax our food consumption: finally, the human race is so rich, so comfortable, that we can start making it a bit harder to get our basic needs. But food taxes will disproportionately affect the poor. If meat was as expensive as environmentalists would like, the rich wouldn’t significantly reduce their wagyu steak intake, but families on a tight budget would certainly eat less three-star mince.

And (need it be said?) hunger caused by inadequate or low-quality food supplies is still a major problem in the developing world. Just this year, in the Central African Republic, malnutrition caused by limited meat has created a humanitarian disaster.

These contemporary crises should remind us that humanity’s greatest struggle has been against malnutrition and starvation. Not for nothing did the Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel title his groundbreaking study of recent global history The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.

Since 1950, the global population has increased more than 150 per cent. But, in real terms, the price of food has sharply declined in that period. Basic commodities such as grain and vegetables are 75 per cent cheaper than they were 60 years ago. And it’s the potent combination of rapidly expanding economic growth and technological change that did it.

But we shouldn’t forget how hard it was to get where we are today. Cheap food is our inheritance as human beings.