Month: January 2014

The Olympics: A Tool For Autocrats Since 1936

Another Olympics, another repressive state using the Olympics to boost its international reputation and gain legitimacy at home.

This time it’s Russia and the Sochi Winter Olympic Games.

When will it sink in that repression is not a regrettable anomaly in some host nations, but a central feature of the Olympic package? That the Olympic movement feeds, legitimises, and even encourages political authoritarianism?

Here’s the rap sheet for Sochi. The 2012 presidential election, which put Vladimir Putin back in the Russian presidency, was surrounded by allegations of fraud. His government met the resulting mass protest movements with a suite of legislation designed to suppress dissent, free speech, and free assembly.

The prosecution of members of the band Pussy Riot was just the most highly publicised attack on political and religious dissent in the last few years.

Amnesty International estimates that 4,000 people across Russia were detained for protesting in 2012 alone. International non-government organisations engaging, however vaguely, in “political activity” are required to register as “foreign agents” and are subject to routine harassment. Foreign journalists are intimidated and sometimes banned.

Then, of course, there’s Russia’s “gay propaganda” law, which makes it illegal to suggest that gay relationships and heterosexual relationships are in any way equal.

All this is on top of the usual forced evictions, construction and development corruption, and extra-legal environmental damage that is par for the course for any Olympics held outside the very richest countries. Putin promised a “zero waste” Olympics as part of its bid back in 2007; apparently the Olympics committee is unable to detect outrageous nonsense when they hear it.

Indeed, it was clear during 2007 that Putin’s Russia was an illiberal Russia. This chronology by FreedomHouse shows how political repression has increased since Putin’s first election to the presidency in 2000.

But by now there is a well-established Olympic media cycle. Negative stories are aired before the games commence. The opening ceremony is 10 days away. The next week and a half will, no doubt, be full of exposures of Putin’s political perfidy, about the environmental and economic cost of the Sochi Olympics, warnings that Sochi’s infrastructure isn’t up to speed, fears about terrorism, and revelations of waste and mismanagement.

But those tales subside the moment the opening ceremony wraps up. Unless there is a major political, logistical, or security crisis, the international coverage of the Sochi games will immediately focus on the sport.

Athletic performances will wash away the political stench. Putin and his government will be the beneficiaries. They will be photographed with sports stars and visiting celebrities. They will feed off the praise of organisers and fans and athletes, for whom there is no world outside the Olympic villages and stadiums.

All the pre-Games bad press will be chalked up to anti-Russian sentiment.

That’s the Olympic calculus – repressive regimes have to tolerate a few months of quiet and steady negativity, which is more than adequately compensated by a fortnight of blisteringly positive press.

Western complaints about Russia’s anti-gay law will not take the shine off Putin’s Olympics.

Defenders of the Olympics make much of the one historical instance where the games bought genuine, welcome political change: Seoul, in 1988. South Korea’s democratisation dates roughly from that time.

But this is not much of a defence. The country was at the time of its bid in 1980 controlled by a repressive military dictatorship, who wanted the Olympics to legitimise its rule.

As this 2004 paper makes clear, at best, the Olympics can be seen as a catalyst, rather than a cause, of South Korea’s democratisation. There were many factors pressuring the country towards change.

And anyway, the International Olympic Committee had no problem being used for authoritarian propaganda. From the Olympic movement’s perspective, it was just a happy accident that South Korean democracy emerged from South Korean dictatorship.

There’s simply no reason to believe the Olympic movement cares about political freedom, and many reasons to believe it is happy to be a tool of the world’s worst regimes.

The 2007 assessment of the Sochi bid (here, page 9) is a masterpiece of amoral detachment. In its assessment of Russian politics, the only factor it feels worth relating is the overwhelming political support for holding the games, as if democratic debate about the virtues of the Olympics would be would be a negative.

It’s true that the repression in Russia is now less than the last time Russia hosted the games in Moscow in 1980. Or than that of Berlin in 1936, or even Beijing in 2008.

But it’s no coincidence that the three most brutal totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century have each been granted an opportunity to host the Olympics.

Or that many other undemocratic nations have used the games to build legitimacy at home and aboard.

The Olympics movement simply doesn’t care that it – and all the athletes who compete in their events – is being used as pawns in an authoritarian political game.

Why protecting the pension is a political con job

‘The Abbott government is proposing to reduce the rate of increase of the age pension’ said Bill Shorten.

You’ll only make it in politics if you are willing to be completely shameless.

On Tuesday Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews flagged a major review into Australia’s welfare system. One in five Australians now receives income support payments – 5 million people. That’s a lot, and the Coalition believes it is too many. The budget has to be balanced. We don’t want to become like Europe.

So far, so good. Yet 2.3 million of those people – nearly half, and the largest cohort – are on the age pension. And Kevin Andrews has specifically quarantined the age pension from his review. So, it isn’t quite the major budget-repairing review it sounds like.

Bill Shorten confidently insists that ”the Abbott government is proposing to reduce the rate of increase of the age pension”. (Never say Shorten isn’t trying his little heart out.)

This comically absurd little spat over the pension reveals a lot about Australia’s welfare system and the political system in which it operates.

The list of beneficiaries and the conditions placed on those benefits are not organised by any noble principle of need or fairness or morality, but calculations – often highly crude ones – about voting blocs. Of course it is all dressed up in the language of social justice.

Despite being the largest beneficiaries of the welfare system, pensioners are a protected species. Remember there’s no guarantee a review would recommend a cut to any particular welfare entitlement, nor any guarantee the government would follow through if it did. No, the pension is too sacred to even be studied.

Australians like to say they’re concerned about middle-class welfare. Defenders of the status quo argue our rate of middle-class welfare is relatively low by international standards.

But this week’s little pension quarrel reveals something more fundamental – the modern welfare state is, itself, a project designed to benefit the middle class above all others.

Middle-class welfare isn’t a bug or aberration. It’s the defining characteristic of any democratic welfare state.

This observation is known as Directors’ Law – named after economist Aaron Director, who argued that redistribution policies in a democracy will benefit the largest voting blocs. Invariably this is the middle class. The primary function of a welfare state isn’t to keep people out of poverty. It’s to transfer money to the powerful middle class.

Sometimes the system taxes the middle class to provide benefits to that very same middle class. Such ”churn” is a political confidence trick that relies on citizens’ ignorance of their true tax burden.

You’d be hard pressed to find a philosopher, economist, sociologist or political theorist who could support such a distorting, wasteful, politically motivated transfer system on principle. But that’s what we have. All the big political flashpoints of Australia’s welfare policy – baby bonuses, family tax payments, parental leave – are disproportionately generous to the middle class.

Nor is the age pension solely to protect the poor. Eighty per cent of people above pension age receive a part or full pension. By excluding the family home from its income test, the pension protects elderly home owners from having to use the savings they’ve accumulated in their house to fund their retirement. And, a bonus: it protects the inheritance of their children. No wonder it’s popular.

Welfare is a political compact. Sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen famously distinguished three models of welfare state capitalism: liberal, corporatist-statist, and social democratic.

Liberal welfare regimes view income support as a safety net. Think the United States, where welfare is an emergency, often short-term measure. The corporatist-statist regimes (found in Germany, France and Italy) uphold traditional class divisions. Scandinavian countries have a social democratic regime where welfare is less about poverty and more about citizenship. All classes get something.

Usually Australia is grouped in the liberal camp. This reflects our English political origins, with a focus on individual rights rather than collective belonging. And welfare for the rich seems to offend the antipodean sense of the fair go.

That’s the theory anyway.

The Abbott government seems intent on destroying the last vestiges of what makes our system liberal.

There’s something deeply alien – well, Scandinavian – about the Coalition’s paid parental leave scheme. The government will pay as much as $75,000 to new mothers for 26 weeks, according to their previous income, not their need.

The Coalition insists the parental leave scheme isn’t welfare, it’s a workplace entitlement. Nonsense. But the philosophy behind this talking point is deeply illiberal. It suggests the state is as responsible for providing your income as your employer is.

Even more symbolic: just two days after Kevin Andrews announced the welfare review, he also announced the government would give young couples $200 for marriage counselling. The average Australian wedding costs upwards of $35,000. Yet the party of free markets and individual responsibility feels the need to chip in another few hundred dollars.

Of course, a review into Newstart and the Disability Support Pension is a good thing. The latter has grown rapidly in recent decades. The chief executive of Mission Australia has said hundreds of thousands of disability support recipients should be helped into work. The social and psychological benefits of employment are unarguable. This is more than enough justification for an inquiry.

Nevertheless, any serious review of Australia’s welfare system must be a review of the entire system. Even the popular bits.

Joe Hockey has been unable to commit to returning the budget back to surplus until 2023. But if the government can’t slay – or at least scrutinise – some sacred cows, this deadline looks far too optimistic.

Neo-Prohibition Isn’t The Answer To Violent Crime

It wouldn’t be a moral panic without demands that the government do something.

And so it is with the alcohol-fuelled violence panic that swept New South Wales over the Christmas break.

Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute made a few proposals in the Sydney Morning Herald here. Governments could increase alcohol prices by increase taxes or imposing a minimum price. They could restrict pub opening hours. They could even set a maximum blood alcohol level for people in public places.

Such proposals are more or less the sort of neo-prohibition public health activists have wanted for years.

Today Barry O’Farrell announced a crackdown on alcohol venues, with mandatory bottleshop closures at 10:00pm, a 1:30am pub lock-out, and no pub service after 3:00am.

Let’s lay aside whether it is fair to restrict the liberties of all because of the idiocy of a few. It is utterly and despicably perverse that our immediate reaction to a highly publicised violent assault is to blame public policy, or market forces, or “culture” in general.

It’s classic guilt displacement, shifting the responsibility from the perpetrators of violence and onto society. That is, it’s not totally their fault they were violent. Alcohol vendors were plying them with liquor! Lazy politicians were neglecting their regulatory duties! Music videos have been glorifying drinking!

What does this imply for the moral responsibility of the perpetrators? After all, to punish somebody for an act they had little control over would be a travesty of justice.

Perhaps the number of bottleshops in a suburb should be a mitigating factor in sentencing. Of course, none of our latter-day prohibitionists have taken their logic this far. But such perverse reasoning is implicit when we seek social explanations for individual criminal acts.

The perversity increases when you realise that there is no alcohol-fuelled violence crisis. The rate of violence related to alcohol is stable, even declining. (This piece in the Guardian sums up the evidence for New South Wales nicely.)

Our alcohol consumption is steady, too. Australia’s per capita alcohol consumption has been hovering around 10 litres a year for the last few decades. (In the 1970s it was more like 12 litres.)

But regardless of whether it is trending up or trending down, it remains the case that the Australian public consumes a large quantity of alcohol, and gets into very few fights.

There are, as there have always been, brutal thugs who take pleasure from violence. The correct – and most direct – response is to target the thugs, not to fiddle with tax policy.

The relationship between alcohol and violence is not as clear cut as you might expect. Yes, much violent crime is caused by intoxicated people. The doctors and police are right. But figuring out whether alcohol actually causes the violence is quite hard.

Correlation, as we all know, is not causation.

The most common theory is that alcohol lowers inhibitions. It directly anesthetises the parts of the brain that we use to regulate our everyday behaviour. Alcohol changes us physically, and in a way that makes some people more aggressive.

From experiments in laboratory settings we know that people who consume alcohol exhibit more aggressive behaviour.

But the inhibition theory is not the only theory which could explain this.

Some experiments have shown that people tend to get more aggressive even when given a placebo. That is, when they are told they are going to have an alcoholic drink, but are secretly given a non-alcoholic tonic, they get aggressive anyway. Thus the ‘expectations’ theory suggests people get more aggressive when intoxicated simply because they expect to get more aggressive when intoxicated. They think aggression is more socially acceptable in a drunk.

There are other theories. The connection between alcohol and violence could be indirect. Intoxication reduces intellectual function, causing us to exaggerate provocation and to needlessly provoke others.

But these theories only take us so far. It’s one thing to show in a lab that people who believe they are intoxicated people are marginally more aggressive than those who are sober. It’s quite another to draw policy conclusions from that finding.

The overwhelming majority of people drink without getting violent. (Some people just get more helpful.) In the real world, humans are able to regulate their behaviour even while intoxicated. Even if alcohol ’causes’ violence, it only causes it rarely, and in a tiny fraction of people.

Even drunk people make choices. Even drunk people can be moral. We are not machines. Public policy ought not to treat us like machines.

The more policy-focused researchers try to side-step this issue with macro-level studies that look at correlations between alcohol consumption in an area and incidents of violence.

That’s where we get the claims that bottleshop density facilitates violence, for instance.

But these studies often struggle to distinguish between other factors. The essential feature of bars and pubs and nightclubs and bottleshops isn’t that they sell alcohol. It’s that they bring large groups of young men together in close proximity.

Ultimately, the neurological, psychological, and sociological evidence about the relationship between alcohol and violence isn’t strong enough to get us away from a simple intuition: violent acts are caused by violent people, regardless of their level of intoxication.

As one paper from 2008 concludes, “alcohol may facilitate violent behavior among those who are already inclined to behave that way. It is also possible that violent adolescents sometimes use alcohol as an excuse for their behavior.”

So the idea that we would be trying to blur the responsibility of violent offenders with alcohol regulation is utterly, utterly repugnant.

It’s exactly what the thugs, and their lawyers, want us to do.

The Farce Of An Ideologically Neutral Curriculum

Christopher Pyne has done irreparable damage to the national curriculum project.

This is fantastic.

The damage hasn’t occurred because there’s anything wrong with appointing Kevin Donnelly and Professor of Public Administration Ken Wiltshire to review it.

No, it’s because the supporters of the national curriculum can no longer pretend that imposing a uniform curriculum on every single student in the country isn’t an ideological undertaking.

Donnelly is a conservative and in his work as a political commentator, he has made no attempt to obscure his conservative views. Not least on the Drum.

Conservatives are such strange and alien creatures that the appointment has turned outrage up to 11. The teachers’ union described it as the “politicisation” of education. Bill Shorten implored Tony Abbott to “please keep your hands off the school books of Australian children”.

And one of the authors of the history curriculum, Tony Taylor, complained that with the Donnelly and Wiltshire appointment, “we can look forward to 20 years of tedious culture wars in the classroom”.

But if there is a ‘culture war’, it wasn’t the right that started it. The national curriculum is already deeply ideological.

That ought not be a controversial claim. The curriculum is explicit, open, and unabashed about its ideological content. It’s not buried or implied. It’s as bold as a billboard.

The curriculum nominates three great themes (that is, three ‘cross-curriculum priorities’) which are to dominate and define Australian education for the next few decades: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Sustainability.

All worthy topics, of course. How are they ideological? Take sustainability. The sustainability theme is intended to “[create] a more ecologically and socially just world through informed action”. That’s virtually the definition of ideology: a positive description (we are harming the planet) combined with a normative ideal of a better social order (an ecologically and socially just world).

If this isn’t clear enough, well, one of its ‘organising ideas’ is the sustainability ‘world view’: “value diversity and social justice are essential for achieving sustainability”.

Perhaps this is an ideology you agree with. Ideology isn’t a bad thing. Everybody’s thought is shaped by ideology, whether they’re aware of it or not. But it’s ideology nonetheless.

So it is bizarre to object, as Julia Gillard did on Friday, that the ideological direction of the curriculum was not dictated by the Prime Ministers’ Office. Are we supposed to feel better that a group of independent (read: unelected) education specialists (Kevin Donnelly calls them “educrats”) determined the future philosophical underpinnings of our compulsory education system?

(That rule by unelected experts is supposed to be more legitimate and morally superior to rule by elected representatives just shows how anti-democratic our era really is.)

A curriculum is always going to be ideological, in the basic sense that an ideology is a lens through which we make sense of the world.

Alan Reid summarises one view of a national curriculum as “the major means by which the citizenry, collectively and individually, can develop the capabilities to play a part in the democratic project of nation-(re)building.”

An ideologically neutral curriculum is a contradiction in terms.

So at best the national curriculum faces a sad future of continuous rewriting at every change of government. Politics is about competing world views, after all. In the words of Christopher Pyne, “I don’t think the national curriculum is a static document.”

Luckily, in a liberal democracy, we have a way to bypass fundamental disagreements about world views – decentralisation.

There is, simply, no good reason to have a national curriculum.

The first moves towards federal government involvement in the curriculum were initiated, hesitantly, by Malcolm Fraser as John Gorton’s education minister, who complained that there were “unnecessary differences in what is taught in the various states”.

Since then a national curriculum has been a persistent goal of the Commonwealth education department and the small world of education academics.

The intellectual case for a national curriculum, developed over half a century, has involved a lot of theorising about democracy and nation-building and civic virtues.

But now the defenders of the curriculum are trying to pretend these great philosophical goals never existed – that their curriculum is a pragmatic, neutral, unambitious thing.

The utilitarian case for Commonwealth curriculum control has always been absurdly weak. It rests on the desire for “consistency” for the tiny proportion – less than 3 per cent – of students that move interstate during their schooling.

At the very least, the curriculum should be handed back to the states. It is not a project worth pursuing.

But better yet would be a system of multiple, competing curriculums which schools and parents can choose from, according to their own values, tastes, preferences, and philosophies of education. This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Australian schools already offer the International Baccalaureate, Montessori, and Steiner curriculums.

When a population’s values conflict, we should look for solutions in political economy.

Don’t want Christopher Pyne deciding what your children are taught? Perhaps a curriculum imposed by the Commonwealth Department of Education is not for you.

Devolving curriculum decisions down to the school level ought to satisfy both critics of Kevin Donnelly and critics of the curriculum as it stands. And it would instantaneously end the culture war that everybody seems so worried about.

The national curriculum is a high ground. It was designed to be that way. Bulldoze the high ground, end the war.

There Is No Such Thing As Reform Without Risks

The Australian political class has a complex, neurotic, and self-destructive relationship with the word “reform”.

On the one hand, every incentive faced by incumbent governments favours the status quo. Serious policy change is complicated and risky. Reform is easy to stuff up, it’s bound to upset interest groups, and it’s a gimme for the opposition.

It’s safer to minimally implement your election promises, relax in the comfy chair of government, and focus on distributing the benefits of office.

But on the other hand, “reform” is the gold standard of Australian politics. Journalists and historians like to see big policy changes that reshape the country, and they like to see lots of them.

Australian political legacies are a simple equation. Good governments are those that reform (Whitlam, Hawke, early Howard). Bad governments are those that squib reform (Fraser, Rudd).

This trade-off is no doubt what has preoccupied the Abbott Government over the Christmas break.

The Coalition won government by promising to be everything Labor was not: calm, austere, and rigorous. But not-being-Labor is an agenda for 12 months, not three or four terms.

Every Coalition government lives in the shadow of the Fraser government. Those press articles about “business urging reform” may be paint-by-numbers but they aren’t going to go away. (Here’s one from yesterday in the Australian Financial Review. Here’s one in the Australian today.)

The Coalition’s long-term political legacy rests on three major inquiries due to report in the next year – three inquiries that have been specifically designed to provide the Abbott Government with a reform agenda.

The Commission of Audit reports in March. The review of Australian competition policy will take 12 months once it is formed (presumably in the next couple of weeks). The financial system inquiry has been formed and will deliver its final report by November.

The Commission of Audit is obviously important to get the budget back under control. The other two ought to be big deals as well. Previous inquiries into competition policy and the financial sector fundamentally reshaped the Australian economy. Think the Hilmer Report that kick-started Keating-era National Competition Policy, and the Fraser government’s Campbell Committee which lay the foundation of financial deregulation.

Yet so far the Abbott Government’s reviews seem modest, even bashful.

The inquiry into competition policy is supposed to be “root and branch”. But its political sponsor is Bruce Billson, the Minister for Small Business, and has been sold almost entirely as a way to level the playing field between small and big business.

Competition policy ought to be about ensuring market forces have free play to drive prices down and spur innovation. However, the Coalition seems to think competition policy is about ensuring consumer prices are high enough to give farmers a “fair go”.

The Financial System Inquiry is also peculiarly insular. Joe Hockey thinks Australian banks should source more capital from within Australia. It appears the lesson the Government has taken from the Global Financial Crisis is that we are too integrated with the world economy.

This lengthy analysis in the Australian Financial Review from November suggests the inquiry will focus on developing a domestic corporate bond market. If that’s the big policy from the financial system inquiry, then the whole endeavour will have been a bit of a flop.

Indeed, a flop may be what the government is hoping for – that the results of the inquiries are managerial but not bold.

The story of the Rudd government explains why. In 2010, Ken Henry’s review into taxation gave Wayne Swan a whopping 138 separate recommendations to reform the tax and transfer system. But Swan wasn’t sure how to handle reform on such a grand scale, and ended up pursuing just one – the mining tax. We all know how that ended.

“Reform” is such a vague and ambiguous concept that any significant policy change is described as reform. For some, reform is carbon taxes and abolishing negative gearing. For others, it’s labour market deregulation and reducing green tape.

Either way, reform is presented as a good in and of itself. Every government is desperate to be seen as the Hawke government – the ideal reforming type. In part that’s because of the near universal consensus in Australia’s policy community that freeing up the economy was a great idea.

Just as significant are the Coalition’s constant reminders that they supported Labor’s liberalisations and asset sales at the time.

It’s easy to assume in hindsight that the politics of reform were relatively simple. But the 1986-1987 cabinet papers released last week underscore just how uncomfortable and bitter economic reform actually was.

Take shipping – one of the key liberalisations in the story of Australian productivity. Greg Jericho tells the story here of how the Hawke government’s desire to open up the Australian coastal trade to foreign ships was scotched by the ACTU. Shipping reform had to wait for the Howard government, for whom broken relations with the union movement was no great loss.

The hero story of the reform era that is told in the business pages every week is no more a reflection of what happened during the Hawke and Keating governments than the West Wing is of the Clinton administration.

If the Abbott Government wants the historical mantle of “reform”, it will need to take some risks. And it will need to make some enemies.