Author: Chris Berg

Immigration and growth: 200 years of success

There’s a Rowan Atkinson sketch about a (pre-David Cameron) Conservative Party speech. In character, Atkinson starts talking about Indian immigrants: “I like curry,” he says. “But, now that we’ve got the recipe… is there really any need for them to stay?”

That combination of populism and affected naivety about immigration and population suddenly dominates our political sphere.

In Tony Burke, we now have Australia’s first dedicated Minister for Population. Under Tony Abbott, the Coalition is looking to make population growth from immigration into an election issue. The shadow immigration minister has called for a dramatic reduction in migrants. There’s now an opposition sub-committee dedicated to population.

And for what it’s worth, the Greens are instinctively hostile to anything that increases consumption within our territorial borders. More immigrants, economic growth, new products, cashed up bogans buying plasma televisions, anyone buying anything – whatever it is, they’re against it.

There is no force in parliament willing to embrace the benefits of population growth and immigration – historically, the two key drivers of Australia’s success.

It’s Kevin Rudd’s fault. In October he admitted publically what most Australian governments have believed for the last century – he believes in a “big Australia” and he “makes no apologies for that”. Since then, we’ve had six months of apologies.

Certainly, immigration itself presents policy challenges. But not that many. Australia isn’t a target for welfare-shopping: migrants can’t get the dole for their first two years.

And I’d be more concerned about the cultural challenges of immigration if we hadn’t had two hundred years of successful pot melting. Each migrant cohort is always more “different” than the last. And each cohort has successfully integrated into Australian society.

But when a politician expresses concern about population pressure, it is typically nothing more than a cover for government failure.

Take infrastructure. Will governments be able to supply enough roads and railways and community services for an expanding population? Well, that’s their job. To abrogate that responsibility is to admit that they are inept. They’ll have the money: more people means more taxpayers.

Or our high house prices, which are now being blamed on migrants and foreign investors. According to opposition housing spokesman Kevin Andrews, speaking to The Australian last week, his constituents are “saying their kids can’t get into the market because they go to auctions and are outbid every time by foreigners”.

Andrews was a former immigration minister (you might remember that) so clearly he’s playing to his favoured side. Nevertheless, Assistant Treasurer Nick Sherry has announced a “new enforcement crackdown” on non-residents buying houses.

House prices are inflated for a very simple reason: governments are choking land supply by restricting housing development at the edges of our cities. When demand increases but supply is limited, prices go up.

That’s the fault of those politicians now so concerned about population. Bob Carr is one of the most passionate advocates of population restraint. And his government was deeply reluctant to release land for housing.

So the idea that we don’t know where all these extra Australians will live is very peculiar. We’ve been expanding for two hundred years, and we haven’t run out of space to build houses.

Critics of immigration and population expansion present their views as brave contrarianism – they are the only ones willing to talk about the elephant in the room.

For such “straight talkers”, their case against population growth requires some awkward moral contortions.

Take the claim made by Bob Brown earlier this month: “skilled migrants, by the way, if left in their own countries, would help raise standards of living there”. This is the “brain-drain” thesis – that when the most educated poor people leave their home countries, they further impoverish the developing world.

But it should go without saying the major problem in the developing world isn’t they don’t have enough skills. It’s that they are underdeveloped. They’re poor.

Brown is telling people in poor countries they cannot seek to improve their lives, and the lives of their family.

That’s cruelty dressed up as kindness.

Well, it’s actually worse. Migrant workers send money to their relatives back home. These remittances add up to more than the world’s foreign aid budgets combined. And, unlike foreign aid, rather being funneled to governments, or distributed according to the preferences of first world donors, remittances go straight to the people who can use the money best.

So limiting skilled migration and chocking off remittances would add to third world poverty.

Migrants to Australia seek better lives than the rest of the world can provide. That should be flattering. They should not be used as scapegoats for the policy failures of our own governments.

The Blame Game Is All Canberra’s Fault

Kevin Rudd will take over the hospital system and everything will be dandy.

That’s the election pitch to voters in New South Wales, South Australia, and Queensland, who are desperate to have the Prime Minister wrestle hospital control out of the hands of the state governments those voters elected.

Rudd’s proposal displeases John Brumby, who believes that comparing Victoria’s health system with that of New South Wales is defamatory, if not outright seditious. If both leaders hold their ground, we have the edifying prospect of a state premier defending his state against a prime minister of his own party, while they both head to an election.

It’s probably some kooky factional thing. No doubt a few Labor heavyweights know the ‘real story’ behind it all.

But Brumby is right to fight. It is very altruistic of the Prime Minister to “end the blame game” by granting himself more power.

After all, this “blame game” is entirely Canberra’s fault. Over the past one hundred years, the Commonwealth just hasn’t been able to stop itself interfering more and more with areas that are state responsibilities. Well, according to the constitution.

It’s understandable the states are so unpopular – the New South Wales government has become little more than a succession of coups d’état. Queensland looks to be heading that way too.

But put aside any notion of states’ rights, of the virtues of a federal structure of government, of having the government closest to the people to be the one that makes the decisions. Or of the danger of concentrating power in just one level of government.

Right now, the biggest delusion in Australian public debate is that the federal government is inherently better at running policy.

There are calls to have Canberra take over: occupational health and safety laws, more workplace laws, disabled parking permits, taxi drivers’ training standards, the timing of daylight saving, the date for ANZAC day, travel concessions for seniors, safety standards for poultry, taxes on racing and wagering, the rules governing firearms management, inheritance laws, public transport, building standards, childcare standards, pokies licensing, bikie gang laws, carbon emissions plans, and on and on and on.

That’s only about half the list I have in front of me – every man, his dog, and his dog’s government relations officer seems to wants Canberra to assume responsibility for some state policy or another.

Last October Kevin Rudd even argued urban planning should be subject to a federal takeover. Urban planning is about as far from a Commonwealth responsibility as you could get.

Dissenting against the Howard Government’s Workchoices industrial relations takeover, Michael Kirby, called this “opportunistic federalism”. There’s no political theory, no policy consistency, or coherent direction governing what policy areas Canberra chooses to suck into its vortex. Just whatever federal politicians reckon will be most popular.

And there’s no doubt the health takeover is popular. Eight out of 10 Australians want a federal takeover of health.

But this isn’t that. The states will continue to fund 40 per cent, the Commonwealth the remaining 60.

Hospital workforce planning will be jointly managed by the federal and state governments, which will make workplace relations for nurses and doctors a hell of a lot more complicated. Specialised services will also be jointly managed, as will the mix of medical services. Procuring equipment will be negotiated between states and local hospital networks. The federal government will set performance targets, state governments will measure targets, and local hospital networks will try to achieve those targets.

This plan won’t cull bureaucracy. It’ll add it. The federal government will have a stake about what happens in the hospitals. The states will have a stake, and the local hospital networks will have a stake. And regulators get a stake. A bit like the current system, except in triplicate.

More: if you believe a federal government takeover of funding will allow local communities to run hospitals, recall the insulation industry debacle. The government that coughs up the money is ultimately held responsible when it all falls apart. The next person to die in a waiting room will be seen as Kevin Rudd’s personal responsibility. And then there’ll be more direct federal intervention into hospital management.

Brumby’s stand against this plan is great. But he doesn’t focus on the real problem.

The states cannot avoid being the lapdog of the federal government while they’re almost entirely reliant on the federal government for their money.

Rudd’s health plan takes a third of the revenue from the GST back from the states.

If Brumby wants to assert Victoria’s position as a health innovator, he’d push for something really radical: to get Canberra out of the income tax business and return the power to levy income taxes to the states.

Ask a nearby teenager. Earning your own money is the key to independence. Only with fiscal sovereignty will the states be able to reassert their policy autonomy.

Brumby’s confrontation with Rudd will be hollow unless he tackles the states’ master-servant relationship with the Commonwealth.

Let Society Shape Itself

It’s hard not to be cynical. Especially when a developer lobby claims giving the government power to force people to sell their homes – to developers – is for “community benefit”, as the chief of the Urban Development Institute did last month.

It’s universally agreed that developers have nothing but the interests of the community at heart.

Anyway, that’s the proposal of the state government: to set up a government planning authority with the power to compulsorily acquire property and hand it to private developers.

The developers will then build higher-density housing – one house replaced with nine – and flog them off at a profit. It’s an ingenious business model. Unless it’s your house they have their eye on. The government believes some houses will just have to be demolished if it is to realise its grand Metropolitan Strategy and relax the pressure on house prices.

I guess you can’t make an omelet without first passing legislation that forces poultry farmers to sell their eggs to an omelet factory.

Traditionally, governments have had the power to compulsorily acquire property for new freeways or rail lines: obviously public things.

But in recent years, that power has become a lot more extensive, allowing private companies to benefit. NSW isn’t the only jurisdiction taking one person’s property and giving it to another.

In 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled that the local authority in a town called New London, in Connecticut, could force people to sell their property to other private property owners – in that case, to the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which would inhabit a new corporate facility on the land.

The court made the same argument as the NSW government: compulsory acquisition powers can be used if there is a public benefit from doing so. In the New London case it was claimed that bulldozing homes to make way for Pfizer would bring taxes and jobs. To the New London authority and the US Supreme Court, the property rights of the homeowners were just a trivial obstacle on the road to the town’s bright future.

The court’s decision was widely condemned. Especially because Pfizer left the new site a couple of years later, taking the best hopes of the New London planning establishment with them.

Those people whose homes were forcibly purchased to make way for the Sydney Metro, before it went embarrassingly defunct, have had a similar experience.

These new powers would eliminate something that has dogged urban planners since their profession began: property rights.

Urban planning has always been about more than nominating where streets should go. Planners imagine that if only they could impose their ideal configuration of roads, apartment complexes, and “community spaces”, they could save the environment, improve quality of life, fix the obesity crisis, restore social capital, encourage historical awareness, and boost a city’s self-esteem.

I’d trust them more if their plans weren’t always thrown away well before their use-by date.

The first major plan for Sydney, the 1948 County of Cumberland Plan, was supposed to be in place up to 1980. It was supplanted by a new plan in 1968, supposed to last until 2000. Then came one in 1988, another in 1994, in 1997, in 1998 and in 1999. That last plan should have lasted until 2016. It didn’t.

The planners imagine that the next one will last till 2036. It won’t.

But not discouraged by this seemingly endless cycle of bluster and disappointment, the government’s plans are always extremely ambitious. They’re full of watercolour drawings and accompanied by expensive dioramas.

For modern planners the challenge is how to impose their vision of paradise on existing urban environments. These environments are already full of roads and parks and businesses and various-density housing – remnants of older, forgotten plans, or just a reflection of where people want to live.

The complication is property rights. People own the houses governments want to bulldoze. And the government that tramples property rights tramples the foundation of economic growth, of personal savings, and of economic security. Because, fundamentally, property rights are human rights.

So compulsory acquisition to expedite the government’s planning strategy should be seen for what it is: a cartel of developers and legislators offering a blank cheque to urban planners to undermine the fundamental right of property ownership.

But there is something Sydney can do to ease the pressure on house prices. Governments could just let society and the urban environment shape themselves. It would take the fun out of urban planning, but it’d be a lot more successful.

Some people like living in inner-city shoeboxes. But not everyone does – should their preferences be forfeited? Instead of trying to force as many people into as small a space as possible, the government could release more land for new houses to be built.

There’s enough land on the Cumberland Plain to expand Sydney 50 per cent. And infrastructure spending could follow where people want to live. (That really shouldn’t be beyond the capability of a competent government.)

That would ease the pressure on house prices. Certainly more than giving urban planners the power to eliminate property rights would.

Green Tea Party

Call it Tea Party derangement syndrome.

For the ABC’s Kim Landers, writing on The Drum a fortnight ago, the Tea Party Movement inspired thoughts “about the rise of One Nation and Pauline Hanson in Australia.”

And in the National Times in February, Bella Counihan speculated about the possibility of Hanson running as a Tea Party sponsored candidate.

The Tea Party Movement has been a force in US politics for more than a year now, arising in February 2009 to oppose George Bush’s extraordinary bailouts of the banking system.

But what seems to really perplex Australian commentators is the idea that an American grassroots movement could be against Barack Obama’s health care reform. Many Australians seem to imagine that being anti-Obama’s plan is same as being pro-death – how could people be protesting it?

But the Obama plan is less about ensuring free health care than making it illegal for individuals not to buy health insurance. And the plan eliminates many low-cost insurance options, compelling nearly a third of the country to switch to more expensive insurance.

So putting aside the occasional Tea Party hyperbole – Barack Obama is not literally a member of the Communist Party – being opposed to the health care legislation isn’t a priori evidence of craziness.

Pauline Hanson’s supporters had a scattershot animosity towards immigrants, aborigines, and greenies. The Tea Party Movement is concerned about a much more prosaic thing: the reckless spending of the federal government.

Certainly, George Bush was a massive spender. Of all the presidents since the Second World War, only Lyndon Johnson increased federal spending more than Bush did.

But Barack Obama makes Bush administration look cheap. His proposed budget for this year increases taxes by $3 trillion over the next decade. And his policies will increase the national debt will by $9.7 trillion.

Few areas of the federal spending are as out of control as health care. Obama’s plan will do nothing to keep down costs.

And the US government now pretty much owns General Motors.

Is being opposed to a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to bailout private banks and car companies, or being opposed to massive tax hikes and huge budget deficits, really the same as claiming that we’re being swamped by Asians?

The Tea Party was sparked by the extraordinary bailouts at the start of the financial crisis, but there has been distress within American conservative circles about uncontrolled government spending for some time.

Porkbusters was a campaign started in 2005, dedicated to exposing examples of government waste. Things like $1.8 million for swine odor and manure management research, and $50 million for an indoor rain forest for Iowa, slipped innocuously into an unrelated energy bill.

It was Porkbusters which exposed plans for the infamous “bridge to nowhere” – a federally funded, $398 million bridge to an island in Alaska that has fifty inhabitants and an airport. The island was already serviced by a ferry every half an hour. Sarah Palin campaigned on a “build the bridge” platform when she was running for Alaskan governor in 2006.

The bridge was cancelled. Palin now claims to be a born-again Tea Partier, dedicated to opposing pork in all its forms.

Clearly the movement has a quality control problem.

There is a belief that if Obama tackles immigration reform, the Tea Party movement will reveal itself as nativist and anti-immigration. But a recent survey of Tea Party members found their views on immigration roughly corresponded with those of the general US population.

That’s not to say there aren’t members who want to crack down on illegal immigrants. Tom Tancredo, a prominent anti-immigration Republican, addressed the Tea Party national convention in February this year.

Dick Armey (chair of the conservative group FreedomWorks and as close to a “leader” as the Tea Party movement has) is trying to keep voices like Tancredo out.

But worse again: the convention also controversially invited a ‘birther’ to speak, who wanted to ensure “signs saying ‘Where’s the Birth Certificate'” followed Obama everywhere in the 2012 campaign.

These distasteful elements are a direct result of the Tea Party’s lack of structure and leadership. On the one hand, the Tea Party is being courted by mainstream Republicans looking for endorsement. But on the other hand, fringe groups like the Larouchites, birthers, 9/11 truthers, and the John Birch crowd see the Tea Party Movement as a possible vehicle for their own message.

It’s messy. But it’s no more messy than the writhing mass of ideologies and agitators who comprised the Vietnam-era New Left.

There is one parallel between One Nation and the Tea Party Movement. Their members feel ignored and disenfranchised by politicians and political elites.

Both want governments to justify their decisions to the people.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Who Should Run The Biggest Business In The Country?

Peter Garrett displayed “monumental incompetence” when it came to managing the government’s insulation scheme, claimed Tony Abbott in February.

Put aside for a moment whether Abbott is right.

The federal government spends nearly 28 per cent of our GDP. It’s the biggest business in the country. So imagine being Prime Minister. Imagine choosing who makes up your cabinet – who should be in charge of all that?

They’ve all got to be politicians with a spot in federal parliament. That’s the first major hurdle.

Skills that make someone an effective politician are not necessarily skills that make someone an effective manager of a national, multi-billion dollar enterprise.

It’s a rare preselection which takes into account a candidate’s capacity to run a large enterprise. The art of politics is the art of accumulating rank and power at the expense of others – not the first priority when looking for a capable manager.

Sure, everyone claims to have “leadership qualities” (parliament is full of future Prime Ministers) but few claim to be future executives.

Nevertheless, out of this less-than-inspiring crop of 226, you can only pick from your team. Labor has 115 MPs and Senators. And there are nearly 50 cabinet, ministerial, and parliamentary secretary positions to fill.

You have to take into account seniority and potential, youthfulness and senility. Then factions – you don’t want your controversial pick for the Parliamentary Secretary for Social Inclusion and the Voluntary Sector to be the reason you are rolled two years down the track.

And you’ve got to get the gender and geographic balance right.

All that is before you start considering who would actually be good at managing a government department. Or who is interested in the department you’d like for them. A parliamentary secretary for ageing in the Howard government reportedly once let it slip that he was less interested in his portfolio than his real “passion” – foreign affairs.

You have to hope that the best people are in the safe seats.

It’s a bad look for your government if at the next election you hold power but lose your three most important ministers in one per cent swing.

Choosing from such a limited pool, the question isn’t why ministers fail. It’s how they ever succeed.

So one of the weakest attacks you can make on a government is that it is incompetent – could you expect anything else? Oppositions like claiming the other side is incompetent because it implies they would do better even if they had the exact same policies.

That way, when the opposition identifies widespread failures, it need not undermine all the grand plans they have for their turn in power.

The Labor Party in opposition was no exception. They were fairly certain the Howard government was the most incapable, inept,and (lest-we-forget) most “out-of-touch” in Australia’s history.

But the Rudd government’s problem isn’t incompetence. It’s ambition.

In early 2009, the insulation scheme seemed like a small element of the Rudd government’s stimulus package, but, in retrospect, it was actually a pretty big deal. It is hard to imagine any government minister, no matter how skilled at policy implementation, could dump $2.7 billion into an industry and not have it flooded with dodgy operators out to make a quick buck.

Yet this was the whole point – funneling (presumably unemployed) workers into an industry which required little skill. In one stroke of a multi-billion dollar pen, the Prime Minister could save the economy and save the environment.

Over-ambition, not incompetence, explains why the government is still struggling to deliver its election promises. The school laptop program has still barely started, and the GP super clinics, and the childcare drop off centres. FuelWatch and Grocery Choice have been abandoned.

But it’s only by chance we’ve been able to peek behind the curtain to see other government policies which have been badly undercooked.

Yourhealth.gov.au was supposed to be a major health initiative – a forum for consultation where Australians can go with their ideas about the health system. But according to a whistleblower writing in The Sunday Age, it was done in a weekend; conceived on a Friday, released on a Monday afternoon.

And, as we learnt from the Godwin Grech affair last year, Ozcar – the “vital” bailout package of the automotive sector – was entrusted to a solitary, sickly bureaucrat, clearly in way above his head. Grech was the only one the Treasury Department put to work on it. So every time he took time off work, progress on the apparently essential bailout simply stopped.

These make the insulation scheme look like an exemplary model of policy implementation.

Dealing with policy failures is not a matter of shuffling around ministers, or even voting out governments. The surest way to avoid policy failures is to have fewer policies.

Face Facts And Adapt To Warmer World

It might not seem like it, but climate sceptics and climate alarmists agree on a fair bit. One of the biggest flaws with both Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme and Tony Abbott’s direct action plan isn’t that they are great big taxes or climate con jobs. It’s that they are futile.

Any Australian cut in carbon dioxide emissions is worthless if not part of a global effort. And right now it looks like the chances of a global agreement on serious emissions cuts are effectively nil. You don’t have to be a sceptic or alarmist to understand a policy that can’t achieve its goal is a failure before it starts.

The Copenhagen meeting reminded the world the domestic politics and pressures of emerging economies like China and India cannot easily be submerged by a global flood of environmental goodwill. And without including those two polluters, a global agreement will be meaningless.

Worse, it will look meaningless. That is a bigger problem for leaders like Kevin Rudd who wanted success in Copenhagen to endorse their leadership at home. Foreign policy is domestic politics with translators.

There will be another United Nations climate meeting in Mexico City later this year. Don’t get your hopes up. Yvo de Boer, the UN climate chief who retired in February, told the Financial Times he did not expect an emissions treaty in 2010 either. And public support for emissions reduction is dwindling. If you, like our Prime Minister, believe climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time, you’re probably pretty glum.

But we haven’t had the genuine debate about climate policy.

We could keep trying to stop global warming with taxes, industry plans, corporate welfare, solar panel and insulation subsidies, and fruitless diplomacy. Or we could try to adapt to it. After all, the problem with global warming isn’t the warming per se, it’s the consequences of warming.

Climate change has a disproportionate impact on the poor. The developing world has neither the resources nor the infrastructure to cope with changes in climate. Bangladesh is more at risk from climate change than Holland, even though both are susceptible to flooding.

Bangladesh doesn’t need global carbon dioxide emissions to stabilise. Bangladesh needs to become like Holland. The poor need to get rich. They need economic growth. It also makes countries resilient against disasters not caused by climate change, like the earthquake in Haiti.

Growth produces increasing living standards, jobs, innovation, and individual wellbeing. Because growth is strongest in countries with liberalised markets, rule of law, and representative institutions, it carries with it equality and human rights. By contrast, at best, trading economic growth for lower emissions will just leave us with lower emissions. And we’ll be poorer.

Without an emissions treaty, there’s still reason for optimism. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says by the end of the century, per capita income will have doubled, at least. The world could be 20 times richer.

Take such predictions with a grain of salt: imagine a bunch of geniuses in 1910 trying to guess what the economy in 2000 would look like. Or what the chemical make-up of the atmosphere would be. (We think we’re pretty smart, well so did our ancestors.)

But the IPCC predicts economic costs of global warming will be a tiny fraction of that growth – between 1 per cent and and 5 per cent of gross domestic product. As the environmental economist Richard Tol wrote in January, “a deep recession wreaks as much havoc in a year as climate change would do in a century. Climate change is therefore not the biggest problem of humankind.” (Tol is an IPCC lead author and therefore not a crackpot.)

It doesn’t really matter whether climate change is caused by humans or part of a natural cycle. It might halve the yield of crops planted in the poorest parts of the world. But if those farmers used the advanced techniques of rich countries, they could more than make up for it.

Malaria caused by rising temperatures could be combated by a co-ordinated political effort to reduce global emissions. Or we could concentrate a fraction of that effort on developing a malaria vaccine.

Growth will fortify us against a climate that always changes.

For if you can’t cure the disease, manage the symptoms

Fat Lot Of Good Campaign Against Junk Food Is Doing

The debate over obesity and public health is usually black and white. It’s obvious who the bad guys are: junk food peddlers.

But last year, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo and about a dozen other firms committed to cut advertising of unhealthy products to children. This week, a spokesman for the Responsible Children’s Marketing Initiative said that “television advertising to children of certain foods has virtually ceased during children’s programs”. The firms are also reducing sugar and salt in some products.

Sounds good? Well, the president of the Public Health Association of Australia described it as “incredibly feeble”. Not “a step in the right direction”, or “good, but they could do more”, but literally so feeble it defies credibility.

Call this the “Healthy Menu Choices” conundrum.

For decades, corporations have been told they need to get “socially responsible” and think about more than just profits. And few corporations are more harangued than those selling unhealthy food. They have been demonised by the expanding public health establishment, who are certain children’s minds are being warped and their bellies expanded by the sinister alliance of sugar and advertising.

Milton Friedman wrote in 1970 that the only social responsibility of business was to increase its profits — profits being how businesses figure out whether they’re providing value. Friedman wrote in vain. Corporate philanthropy has become a bigger and bigger part of the business world. For the food industry, this corporate social responsibility means placating public health activists.

So McDonald’s – the very embodiment of unhealthy eating – has introduced salads. It has struck a deal with the Heart Foundation. In New Zealand, it has a relationship with Weight Watchers. Through the responsible marketing initiative, the confectionery industry is trying to show it is as supportive of a healthy Australia as chocolate makers ever could be.

Yet for all these attempts at conciliation, food companies just get demonised more. Each effort is condemned. If everything they do is going to be dismissed as the cynical expansion of corporate power, why should they try?

There’s a big anti-business component to the push for a nanny state. Many public health activists believe the blame for obesity lies with corporations – not with the choices of the people who buy unhealthy food. In the activists’ view, marketing is making people eat things that they would rather avoid, if only they weren’t so entranced by all the flashing lights and catchy jingles.

Hence the attention public health activists pay to multinationals, and the lack of attention they pay to, say, local fish and chip shops, pizzerias or Indian restaurants. Or Gordon Ramsay’s new restaurant — sometimes rich people eat bad things, too.

Last year, McDonald’s started sponsoring a maths tutoring program, Maths Online, for Australian students. The program charged students $40 a month, but McDonald’s sponsorship means it is now free.

The McDonald’s logo is displayed at the bottom of the front page. It’s not like kids are multiplying cheeseburgers and dividing Happy Meals. But, of course, one prominent public health activist, nutritionist Rosemary Stanton, celebrated by asking: “Are we happy [to] sell our children to McDonald’s?”

The public health establishment likes to see itself as a bunch of impartial medical professionals, but it is a coalition of self-styled consumer advocates, “lifestyle advisers” and politicised academics. They see our health as a standoff between corporate profits and the health profession.

But the reality is more mundane, and more frustrating: not everybody believes that every fatty steak is doing them damage.

Certainly, most Australians value their fitness, weight, and life expectancy. But that is not all they value. Unhealthy food sells not because of insidious corporate messaging, but because people like it. Reducing the capacity of corporations to advertise their products won’t stop people wanting fatty or salty food. Unless you believe our primal taste instincts were invented in a boardroom.

So when public health types reduce complex issues of obesity and unhealthy lifestyles to a diatribe about the power of big business, it’s an emotional argument — not an honest one.

Individuals – and in the case of children, their parents – are the ones who choose what they eat. If public health activists want to influence that, they’ll give up the anti-corporate grandstanding and start treating us as if we make our own decisions.

Liberal Leadership Aftershocks

The resignation of Nick Minchin last week is a reminder that the aftershocks of the late November leadership mania are still reverberating around the Liberal Party.
It was Nick Minchin’s role in the revolt against Malcolm Turnbull which sparked off the debacle that gave Tony Abbott the leadership. And the two men’s views on climate change are very similar.
But climate change isn’t the only issue in Australian politics.
The near fatal accident of Nick Minchin’s son was the trigger for his resignation.
But right now there is an underlying tension within the party over Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme. And there is some speculation that Minchin, as one of the Party’s most stalwart Dries, was deeply unhappy with the abrupt change in the Coalition’s stance on the issue.
The paid parental leave scheme – funded by a tax levied only on Australia’s most profitable businesses – is anathema to the free marketeers within the party. It’s just not very ‘neo-liberal’.
Indeed, on the day the parental leave policy was announced one senior Liberal told The Australian’s Samantha Maiden, that such a scheme resembles “a typical 1930s socialist impost on big business”. This was before the senior Liberal learnt that it was Abbott who proposed it.
When Abbott said that parental leave would be instituted “over this government’s dead body” he wasn’t speaking for himself, but for the government. Abbott has different views. But opposition to parental leave was the view – still is the view – of much of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party.
So it might seem odd, but Abbott and the leader he overthrew are quite similar.
Like Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott has a firm idea of the direction he wants to take the Liberal Party and the conservative movement. And as Malcolm Turnbull discovered before him, this may not be a direction the party wants to be taken.
The direction Abbott would like to take the Liberal Party is all set out in his book, Battlelines, point by point.
Nevertheless, in November, as the shadow cabinet faced an escalating series of resignations, no-one was pulling Battlelines down off the shelves to fully consider the pros and cons of Abbott’s philosophy of government.
Abbott’s book is a quirky mixture of policy, philosophy and personal chronicle – more fun than Peter Costello’s memoirs, but nowhere near as fun as The Latham Diaries.
It was seen as a curiosity at best.
Nobody in the party room was under any illusions about Abbott’s personal views, but neither did many expect him as leader to pursue each and every policy set out in his manifesto.
The alliance between free marketeers and the conservatives who supported (very un-free market) middle class welfare and family tax benefits was stable under John Howard – he spent his career traversing both the radical dry wing of the Liberal party and its conservative wing.
Certainly, Howard favoured one side more than the other. George Brandis said in his Deakin lecture last year that “For Howard, it was as much a conservative party as a liberal party; indeed, with the passage of time, rather more the former than the latter”.
But having been in the public eye for decades, Liberal free marketeers could still believe that Howard was one of them.
Unlike Howard, Abbott doesn’t want to straddle these two Liberal camps. Abbott, as “keeper of the conservative conscience” within the parliamentary party, sees government’s job to protect society from the bleakness of the market economy.
And instead of letting society flourish independently, as free marketeers would argue, Abbott believes government should actively build society in its preferred image.
As he told The Australian in March:
“You can’t run a decent society without a strong economic base… while I think it is important that the national government promote and develop a strong economy, it’s by no means the only or even, at every point, the main task of government.”
Abbott’s distinctly conservative approach is at odds with the other philosophical objective of the many in the Liberal Party – the primacy of the individual and importance of individual liberty. Launching Battlelines last year, Abbott made this explicit: “Individuals are only realised in a social context”.
So an Abbott government is not likely to be a small government.
If Tony Abbott personifies the conservative social-democrat side of John Howard’s legacy, then Nick Minchin personifies the radical free market side. Certainly, Minchin is big on “family values”, but for free marketeers, family values complement dry economic policies like low taxes and small government. For Abbott, family values trump those policies.
As many others have noted, Abbott’s vision of renewed conservatism with the Liberal Party is informed by fairly deep reading and reflection.
It is not, however, a vision uniformly shared within the party he leads.

Follow The Leader

Are you confused by the state of centre-right politics in this country? Probably never more so than this fortnight.
Tony Abbott staked his claim in the climate change debate with a vocal dislike of great big new taxes. But now he’s proposed his own. The opposition can’t coherently claim that an emissions trading scheme is nothing more than a giant burden on business while at the same time imposing a different giant burden on business in the form of a big-business-financed parental leave scheme.
Perplexed? You’re not alone.
In his March Quarterly Essay, “What’s Right? The Future of Conservatism in Australia,” lawyer and academic Waleed Aly distinguishes between liberals, conservatives, neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. For Aly, the latter two aren’t American-style “nuke Iran for freedom” neo-cons but a cross between social conservatives and free marketeers.
Then Aly finds liberal conservatives, cultural fundamentalists and neo-liberal neo-conservatives – which I think are the bad bits of all of the above. Clearly, a broad church is a complicated church.
I guess this bewildering catalogue of ideologies is some progress. For a lot of people, “conservative” seems to be used to describe anyone critical of the Labor Party, with the exception of Bob Brown.
To Aly, all this confusion is because there aren’t any real conservatives left in Australia.
Conservatives value older institutions – such as the family and common law – not because they’re old fuddy-duddies but because those institutions are the end product of centuries of trial and error. Sticking with what we know works is better than following the plan to reorganise society that you sketched on a pub coaster at 3am in the Elephant and Wheelbarrow last night. Even if you’re really smart.
But Aly claims that the conservative temperament of hesitant, evolutionary change has been hijacked by crazy neo-liberals with their crazy free-market ideas.
If only.
The fanatically neo-liberal, deregulation-obsessed Howard government actually passed more pages of law than any previous government. Government is no smaller, no lower taxing, no more conducive to individual liberty than it was a decade ago. On many measures, it’s worse.
There is no party in the Federal Parliament pushing anything near what has come to be called neo-liberalism – the potent combination of social liberalism and economic liberalism. There is no party explicitly arguing that government should stay out of both the boardroom and the bedroom.
Neo-liberals only like the free market because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals – just as other voluntary relationships, such as communities and clubs, do.
But the truth is there’s very little ideology in Australian politics. Australia’s political culture has always been somewhat apprehensive about obviously high-minded philosophies of government.
Australia’s political institutions were formed in the mid-19th century, when utilitarianism was the height of ideological fashion.
Utilitarianism is an intensely practical political philosophy that says the purpose of government should be simply to seek the greatest good for the greatest number. No more, no less.
You might get fancy things such as individual liberty or social equality out of that. But, then again, you might not.
The contrast with the United States couldn’t be stronger. America was founded at the height of the revolutionary period, when kings were killed for fanciful ideals.
Take the American Tea Party movement – a genuine, grassroots manifestation of deeply held political beliefs. Certainly, it’s an uncomfortable coalition between serious right-of-centre activists and crazed conspiracy theorists pretty sure that President Barack Obama is a dastardly Muslim, but could you imagine any remotely similar movement in Australia?
The ideological passion – whether coherent or weird and manic – just isn’t here. Even Australia’s most aggressive public controversies are banally practical.
The boat-people controversy is just a debate about the most efficient way to process asylum seekers, not a debate about immigration or open borders.
Australia joined the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq because it was seen as a nice way to reinforce our bond with the US, not because of a dream for liberty in the Middle East.
The history and culture wars seem deeply ideological, but take this week’s dispute over whether official events should be led by an acknowledgment of traditional Aboriginal owners. It’s hardly a timeless philosophical struggle between value systems – just an inanely repetitive discussion about how “proud” we should be of the founding of the country.
Sure, our lack of ideological fervour sounds like a recipe for harmony. But without any philosophical beliefs about what government should – and, perhaps more importantly, shouldn’t – do, Australian political parties tend to drift aimlessly. Especially in opposition.
Right now it seems the federal opposition has tried to substitute political philosophy with an incoherent populism.
To be fair, this is a problem that some in the Liberal Party seem to be aware of. Late last year, Queensland senator George Brandis made a speech championing the Liberal Party’s small “l” liberal tradition, and shadow treasurer Joe Hockey felt moved this month to title a speech “In defence of liberty”.
The conservatives, too, are trying to stake their claim. Tony Abbott’s book, Battlelines, was supposed to be a definitive statement of conservative philosophy as it can be applied to Australia.
But in Abbott’s tenure as Opposition Leader so far, Coalition policies have swung wildly between extremes. They’re implacably opposed to carbon emissions trading – that would be an odious tax – but keenly supportive of carbon emissions regulation and subsidies, which, they seem to imagine, will be almost cost-free and of no economic consequence.
This policy incoherence isn’t because they are blinded by a firmly held ideology. It’s because they’re blind without one.

The Ghost Of Liberals Past

Could the historical Robert Menzies be anywhere near as good as the Robert Menzies that exists in everybody’s minds?
Last week, Tony Abbott told a Sydney Liberal branch that the Liberals could win power if they embraced Menzies’ lessons – small government, and free markets.
This was, of course, a few days before he announced the super parental leave scheme, which will impose a substantial special tax on Australia’s most profitable businesses, in order to fund the middle class welfare policy to end all middle class welfare policies.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s political editor quickly damned the Abbott scheme, claiming that the opposition leader should have at the same time “apologised to the spirit of … Robert Menzies”, for abandoning his free enterprise ideals. To which The Australian quickly replied that Menzies was himself a big supporter of the welfare state.
During the Howard years there was an endless stream of columns claiming that John Howard had “betrayed the Menzies vision”. Or “abandoned his legacy”, as if Menzies would have crossed the floor against Howard, if only the passage of time had given him a chance.
Menzies is either a stick to be wielded against the modern Liberal Party, or a divining rod for seeking its future direction. But like a divining rod, those who use Menzies’ legacy are revealing more about themselves than about Menzies.
Nevertheless, when Bob Brown states on Twitter that “Tony Abbott’s new front bench makes Sir Robert Menzies look pink”, it’s a fair point. Menzies does look a little pink these days.
The post-war Menzies government was centralist enough to be a blank slate upon which anybody can impose their ideal vision of the past. Well, at least it was centralist by the standards of the time. With the hindsight of half a century, the Menzies government was a protectionist government, supportive of high levels of regulation, restrictive industrial laws, and, most damningly, the White Australia Policy.
So if Menzies really was a free marketeer, he certainly hid it well. The Australian economy in the middle of last century had levels of interference that would make the Greens blush.
The Menzies government was better than its predecessor, which tried to outright nationalise the banking system. But the conservative victory in 1949 was no breakthrough for free-enterprise, despite the subsequent myth making.
Trade policy is an obvious indicator of a government’s philosophical beliefs. And on free trade, Menzies looks very bad. With the possible exception of 1950 and 1951, when import controls were temporarily lifted in response to American demand, Australia’s markets were tightly regulated by the federal government, with import licensing and quota restrictions meant to protect industry from dastardly foreign competition.
After more than a decade of conservative government, those import restrictions were lifted in 1960, and the work of micromanaging the economy was left to tariffs. But it was Gough Whitlam, of all people, who started the real work of opening the Australian economy to the world, when he cut tariffs 25 per cent across the board.
We have a habit of thinking that being right equates with success, and being wrong equates with failure.
But just because some certain political leader was successful – and Menzies certainly was successful, if measured simply by years on the job – doesn’t mean they are an idol against which we should measure our values. If right-of-centre Australians want to evoke the spirit of their philosophical ancestors, they’d do better to remember their glorious failures.
Take the nineteenth century politician Bruce Smith, Australia’s answer to the great British liberals Richard Cobden and John Bright.
Smith wrote Liberty and Liberalism, a manifesto of free trade and small government, which the Australian Dictionary of Biography helpfully describes as ‘anachronistic’ because he believed in limiting state interference in the economy. (Economic liberty is so just so … old-fashioned.)
Smith fervently opposed the White Australian Policy, arguing that the “foundation of the [Immigration Restriction] bill was undoubtedly racial prejudice”. Smith’s liberalism was remarkably modern: “I venture to say that a large part of the scare is founded upon a desire to make political capital by appealing to some of the worst instincts of the more credulous of the people.” He should have just said “dog-whistle”.
Smith was a big supporter of business. He helped found and direct the Victorian Employers Union in 1885 and the New South Wales Employers’ Union in 1888, as a response of business to the growing trade unions.
Or we could consider George Reid, who was the first and only Free Trade Party Prime Minister. Or Bert Kelly, the “modest member” who was a dedicated supporter of free trade within Menzies’ government, and anticipated the liberalisations of the 1980s and 1990s.
Modern political parties are welcome to celebrate the achievements of their former leaders. But if they need philosophical inspiration – and they do – they’ll have to look elsewhere.