Author: Chris Berg

In 1979 Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim, wrote to a friend, the poet Philip Larkin. Amis’s son Martin had just published his third novel.

Kingsley was a conservative who hated feminism, welfare and the Labour Party. Martin was a young radical who hated nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War. Martin had just left Britain.
“Did I tell you Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE?”, the elder Amis wrote, obviously annoyed.

“Last year he earned 38,000 pounds. Little sh*t. 29, he is. Little sh*t.”

So that’s a conservative father angry at his left-wing son for avoiding taxes. Imagine how Kingsley felt when Martin published his most famous novel a few years later: Money, a satire on eighties greed.

Yes, people have strong feelings about tax exile.

Gerard Depardieu left France in December because he didn’t want to pay president Francois Hollande’s 75 per cent top rate – the so-called “millionaire tax”.

The Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Michael Caine, Noël Coward, David Bowie, Sean Connery, and the journalist David Frost have all at one time in their careers left home to find a cheaper tax rate.

But their actions are rarely welcomed by taxpayers who remain behind. When Depardieu joined the tax exile ranks, the French press was furious.

Take this piece in Libération by another actor, Philippe Torreton:

You are leaving the French boat in the middle of a storm?

Scroll through the whole thing. Even muddled by Google Translate it’s extraordinary. Angry, deeply nationalist, and betrayed. Torreton pretty much accuses Depardieu of treason.

To be fair, Depardieu is no freedom fighter. He has gone to Russia, a country now famous for locking up musicians. And he’s not just running away from taxes. Depardieu didn’t appear at a drink driving hearing in France last week. But, then again, those aren’t the reasons Torreton is angry.

Why do tax exiles spark so much resentment? Our views on immigration-as-tax-avoidance expose deep political differences.

But these differences are implicit rather than explicit. We’re used to sterile, utilitarian debates about the size of government or economic regulations. The Amis family would have split on these issues along standard left and right lines. Tax exile raises deeper, thornier questions about the relationship between nation and individual; between democratic obligation and liberty.

In many ways, it’s like the debate about compulsory voting. We’re not sure what the social contract actually says.

Democracy is a mechanism for making collective choices. Universal suffrage gives those choices legitimacy. That’s all good. But what happens to those who object to a democratic decision? Depardieu obviously disagreed that his tax rate should be 75 per cent. So he left. Is this legitimate? Is he being fair to France?

Let me give the classical liberal answer. When faced with something we dislike we have two choices. We can use our voice to get things changed – we can vote or protest or complain. Or we can exit. Depardieu took his business elsewhere.
But voice and exit are not mutually exclusive. The threat of exit adds strength to the voice. The fear people will send their money offshore is a powerful limitation on how much governments can tax.
So French taxpayers owe tax exiles like Depardieu some thanks. The actor’s highly-publicised flight demonstrates emigration is not an idle threat.

Reflecting in his memoir about when the Rolling Stones left England, Keith Richards wrote that:

The last thing I think the powers that be expected when we they hit us with super-super tax is that we’d say fine, we’ll leave… They just didn’t factor that in.

Governments don’t always remember their power is not absolute. Allowing citizens to leave is as powerful a check on state power as a constitution or a bill of rights.

And of course if we care about liberty, then the freedom for an individual to choose where they live has to be respected.

One major source of resentment about tax exile is that it is a luxury of the rich. A French dock worker, no matter how heavily he feels the tax burden, will not be personally welcomed into Russia by Vladimir Putin.

This is a reasonable objection. But it’s directed at the wrong culprit. Around the world, immigration policies favour high-skilled, high net-worth individuals. They specifically and intentionally keep out the poor and unskilled. This is obviously unjust, but immigration policies are to blame, not tax exiles.

Depardieu is not unique. France is experiencing a wave of tax exile much like Britain before the Thatcher years. Musicians and actors fled Britain’s high tax rates in endemic numbers. There’s a great story about Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin, dragging himself out of hospital after a car accident and rushing to the airport in order to maintain his British non-resident status for tax purposes.

There was such interplay between culture and taxation in Britain that musical genres could be defined by where the artists stood on the tax ladder. In 1976 Mick Jones of The Clash summarised the difference between new punk and old rock by saying:

We’re all down [on] the dole anyway, coppin’ our money off Rod Stewart’s taxes.

Jones was teasing. Stewart had left Britain the year before.

Many British tax exiles went to France. Today many French exiles live in Britain.

If Francois Hollande persists with his supertax on high income earners (not a sure thing, as the 75 per cent rate was recently ruled unconstitutional) then tax flight will shape French culture this decade as sure as it shaped British culture before Margaret Thatcher.

What do the revolutionaries in Les Misérables actually want?

This is not a pedantic question. Victor Hugo’s 1862 Les Misérables – or, at least, its 1980s musical adaptation – is now deeply embedded in the West’s popular consciousness.

Its popularity extends far past those who know anything of 19th century French history. Indeed, for many people the musical is a stand-in for the entire French Revolution, although it depicts events that occurred many decades later.

Popular culture profoundly shapes our political beliefs, and the idea of rebellion against injustice still resonates even in the democratic era. See, for instance, Occupy.

Even those who haven’t seen the musical would know its broad strokes. A former convict who has broken parole tries to build a virtuous life while on the run. The culmination of his personal struggle coincides with a doomed Paris uprising led by idealistic students.

But that uprising seems to be against… what? The monarchy? A general sense of inequality? It’s not called Les Misérables – the victims, the wretched ones – for nothing. The musical’s logo incorporates an engraving of a young girl in rags. The 2012 film has an energetic makeup artist who gives the poor of France gratuitously broken teeth and cholera.

But it’s never clear why any of the students believe economic injustice will be resolved by barricading off a few city streets. The student revolutionaries are hopelessly vague about their goals. They’re going to “cut the fat ones down to size”. There’s some suggestion of a utopian “tomorrow”.

The uprising depicted in Les Misérables was a real uprising that happened in June 1832. It was an aftershock of a bigger political upheaval just two years earlier, which had replaced the royal restoration under the House of Bourbon with a new constitutional monarchy under the House of Orléans.

Those who really fought on the 5th and 6th of June 1832 were opposed to the new Orléanist monarchy, but for many different reasons. There were radical Republicans, who wanted parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage. There were also ultra-Royalists, who wanted the reversal of all the gains of 1789, and Bonepartists, who wanted to restore French imperial glory as it was under Napoleon. With such a bizarre coalition, no wonder the people of Paris slept in their beds that night.

And France was hardly the stagnant, rotting, unchanging regime the musical suggests. Between 1796 (when our hero Jean Valjean was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread) and 1832, France was governed by no less than five political systems, from the revolutionary Directory to the monarchy after 1830.

All this politics is missing in the musical, replaced by a vague sense of injustice and a group of students with a serious martyr complex.

Sure, the musical is a musical. You can’t ask for too much political exposition in songs. It’s easier to find a rhyme for “love” than a rhyme for “chronic wealth disparity” or “post-revolutionary dynastic confusion”.

But Victor Hugo’s original novel is not a whole lot clearer. In his 2007 book The Temptation of the Impossible, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa argues that Hugo, too, is hopelessly vague on the purpose of the revolt. One student forecasts if they succeed “monsters will have given way to the angels”. But that’s about as specific as it gets.

One way to join the dots between the poor on the streets and the students’ bloodshed is to depict the latter as proto communists. The students might be Bolsheviks dedicated to a redistributive paradise.

But the narrator of Les Misérables was hostile to communism, writing that “equal sharing abolishes competition and, in consequence, labour”.

And the cruellest oppression in the story isn’t economic. Hugo reserves his biggest criticism for the legal system. Hugo himself was a political drifter, starting as a conservative royalist and ending life, loosely, as a liberal or a social democrat. Virtually his only constant belief was opposition to the death penalty.

We think of Les Misérables as a primarily a story about revolution and social oppression. The musical does not disabuse us of this idea. But it is wrong. Hugo is more preoccupied by God than politics.

The revolutionary students do not believe their uprising will succeed. As Vargas Llosa writes, the students “know and accept that they will be annihilated because this is the role that they must play”. What comes across as a martyr complex in the musical is more for Hugo an acceptance of fate and the will of God. The entire story is a grand morality tale of fate and redemption.
Contemporary versions of Les Misérables struggle to communicate Hugo’s essentially religious message. We live in a secular age. Faith is a niche topic not a mass one.

Yet a modern reader can’t help be struck that the first 70 or so pages of the novel are a detailed profile of someone marginal to the plot – Bishop Myriel, the good priest who forgives Jean Valjean for stealing his silver. If the opening of a story sets its tone, then this is totally different from the vision of penal hardship set by the musical.

Hugo stripped the politics out of the 1832 uprising to tell a religious story. Then the musical adaptation stripped most of the religion away.

There’s not much left, except a vague exhortation to violently, pointlessly die on behalf of the poor. The students are engaged in a vanity revolution. This is insurrection as a lifestyle choice.

There’s something very modern about that. Our mature democracies are boringly practical. For us, revolution is a romantic gesture which belongs in the past.

But real, historical revolutions have been about something: tyranny or taxation or arcane theories of economic class.

In the Les Misérables musical – and our popular culture – revolution is little more than an honourable, nihilistic death-wish.

John McTernan is Julia Gillard’s director of communications, a Scottish import, and, by all accounts, the man who convinced our Prime Minister to go hard on Tony Abbott’s woman problem.

In a profile in the Monthly, Nick Bryant wrote that McTernan is “renowned for his ruthlessness, and for being a hater”. He has an “all-out attack” political style. He’s usually compared to Malcolm Tucker, the iconic Scottish bruiser in The Thick of It.

But he came to Australia in a very different guise – as an “Adelaide Thinker-in-Residence”, the intellectual patronage program of former premier Mike Rann.

McTernan’s final report was belatedly released after Christmas: Are You Being Served? Toward More Responsive Public Services.

This report has to be read to be believed. It is superficial and scattershot and padded out with anecdotes. Poor old South Australians apparently paid handsomely for this collection of folksy wisdom masquerading as serious thinking about public service reform. In some parts it is actually quite funny. McTernan uses the word “synergies” not once, but twice.

Yet the report has one virtue: it exposes how barren thinking about public service delivery can be.

McTernan’s “challenge” was to revolutionise the relationship between public services and public service users.

To this he proposes the government “state and celebrate the purpose of public service overall”, seek to “foster a culture that empowers citizens and government to jointly own the problems that need to be solved”, and “establish a comprehensive state-wide approach to the development of 21st Century public service leadership”.

Those are the first three recommendations, word for word.

Only slightly more concrete is his call for “e-government”. Sure, e-government is a tantalising idea. In theory, it could link public services together, reduce administrative costs, increase government responsiveness and transparency, and make dealing with bureaucracies simple – even convenient.

In practice… well, you only need to see what the Australian Taxation Office’s eTax software looks like to see why massive government departments don’t do well in the online space.

E-government initiatives are, at their best, plodding and ineffective. At their worst they can be dangerous: government-run databases already have notorious privacy problems, and such problems multiply when those databases are linked together.

If e-government lends itself to fantastical thinking, even more indulgent is the claims made for the “open data” movement, where government releases wads of raw data for citizens to analyse and repurpose. For McTernan, open data could “increase transparency, accountability and collaboration”.

That all sounds great, but in reality, the most momentous open data success in Australia has been the National Public Toilet Map. Cute, modestly helpful, but hardly a revitalisation of democracy.

The limits of open data are obvious. The only data that is going to be released under an open data scheme is bland; anything which is controversial, potentially embarrassing, or even mildly off-message is going to be cleansed or suppressed.

Indeed, controlling the release of embarrassingly information is exactly the sort of thing that a communications director to a prime minister might be expected to do.

Public sector utopianism is always dashed upon the rocks of political expediency. That’s a worldly truth which makes most thinking about public service reform hopelessly naïve.

But in John McTernan’s report, this truth is elevated into a great irony. This supremely political person (the Monthly profile says McTernan can’t resist involving himself in internal ALP factional fights) appears not to have factored politics into his thinking.

For instance, McTernan proposes a checklist of sound policy development and implementation. (“Ask what is the problem?”, “What are the facts and do we have them all?”, “What are the solutions and do we have them all?” and so on.) That’s nice, and reminiscent of the “policy cycle” described in first year public policy textbooks.

But the policy cycle is an ideal model. It is deliberately simplified to the point of ridiculousness.

McTernan of all people knows that public policy is not developed by a steady, step-by-step process.

No, in a democracy, public policy is a compromise between interest groups brokered by politicians whose major interest is re-election. It is constrained by a lack of information and confounded by real-world complexity. It is implemented by bureaucracies driven by self-interest and it is evaluated by those who have a stake in its success.

All the problems McTernan implicitly identifies in the public service – excessive internal red tape, a lack of leadership, poor policy development – are not isolated problems to be surmounted but are innate features of the public sector. They are the natural result of the political incentives faced by all whose job it is to develop, choose, and implement policy.

Until thinking on public sector reform comes to terms with the political constraints of government action, it will always be pointlessly utopian.