Articles – Page 38

Manufactured Crisis

Ford has announced a week-long production halt in Australia. Toyota is mired in a labour dispute. But is Australian manufacturing in trouble? No. In fact, it’s thriving. Not that you’d know that from most commentary or political debate, which suggests that manufacturing is falling off a steep cliff. No matter how much taxpayer money we hand to the car industry, it is always flirting with collapse. For decades, the nightly news has told ominous tales of factory closures.

These stories mislead. Australia is by far a more successful, efficient, profitable manufacturing nation now than it was in the 20th century. When Kevin Rudd famously said in the 2007 election that he wanted to be prime minister of a country that “made things”, Australian manufacturing was already making more things than it ever had.

Over the past 60 years, the output (that is, the making of things) of manufacturing has increased fourfold, according to the Productivity Commission. Sure, that output has dipped about half a per cent since 2008. But blame the (temporary) global recession.

So why the big fuss? Well, the debate over manufacturing has never really been about manufacturing. It’s never been about economics or prosperity or even employment. The manufacturing fetish is nothing more than a marriage of nostalgia and special interests.

Manufacturing may be doing well but it holds a declining share of the total economy. Service industries are growing quicker and assuming the pre-eminent place.

People find this change hard to grapple with. Perhaps understandably. Factories are as much cultural icons as they are venues for production. For two centuries, the factory was an emblem of Western prosperity. Factory jobs were stable, well-paid, and open to all.

Our culture and politics reflected this. It was the factory wage for a married family man that underpinned our protectionist industrial relations system. Pre-war consumer advertisements tended to feature factories more prominently than the products.

By contrast, modern service industries are more diverse and less tangible. But productive work is productive work. What should it matter if we make a dollar’s worth of tractors or code a dollar’s worth of websites?

Preconceived ideas of what constitutes a healthy economy don’t disappear overnight. Especially when they’re promoted by union-tied politicians and lobbyists.

Announcing the federal government’s manufacturing taskforce last year, the then innovation minister Kim Carr said the government needed to “ensure manufacturing remains a key part of our economy for generations to come”.

That might be Labor’s priority, but it shouldn’t be ours.

The number of people working in manufacturing is a declining share of the total labour force. That’s a big political problem for the ALP. Many Labor politicians draw their support from the old industrial unions.

These unions are now less the vanguard of the proletariat, and more ageing, derelict fiefdoms. They are still able to depose prime ministers, sure, but that’s about it. The dysfunctional union-Labor relationship creates the perfect environment for dirty deals to flourish; hence the steady stream of cash the government sends the car industry’s way.

Immediately after Prime Minister Julia Gillard fended off Kevin Rudd this year, the unions were calling on her to keep manufacturing jobs from going overseas. They want some reward for their support.

But the unions are wrong. Jobs aren’t going overseas. Larry Summers, former economic adviser to US President Barack Obama and no free-trade ideologue, has pointed out that even in China manufacturing jobs are in long-term decline. It isn’t foreign competition, offshoring or the high dollar shrinking the relative importance of manufacturing. It’s technology.

This is great. Not all factory jobs are good jobs. Why have 10 people do a mind-numbing repetitive task that could be done by one machine?

In the future Australia may no longer assemble cars. Robots will. But we will design the cars. We will design, program and build the robots. We will construct the most intricate, high-value components that require the best technicians to produce. We’ll then ship everything off for final assembly in a lower-skilled country.

The industrial revolution was propelled by technological change. “De-industrialisation” is propelled by the same.

Even in some shrinking sectors of manufacturing there are niche Australian successes – particularly those areas that require high skills and high precision. But nimble niche industries won’t furnish the unions with a secure power base.

What to make of the claims that we need domestic manufacturing for national security?

Put aside that we have a vibrant manufacturing sector already. If a war came that forced us to make all our tanks – that is, if the global arms market was suddenly closed to America’s closest friend – the state of our car industry would be neither here nor there. We’re going to lose that war.

That this apocalyptic scenario is a foundation of the case for manufacturing subsidies just shows how desperate the industrial unions and the ALP are.

Manufacturing will never be the linchpin of the Australian economy. Nor should it. The sooner we get over our manufacturing obsession, the sooner we’ll be able to embrace a richer, more modern Australia.

Reward Welfare A Recipe For Entitlement Culture

Joe Hockey has been badly verballed. His widely reported speech about Western entitlement culture, delivered in London last week, contains virtually none of the claims attributed to it.

Hockey’s speech is another contribution to that small, odd genre of speeches where Australian politicians travel to Europe to inform Europeans how stuffed their economies are.

The victims in his tale were American, British, and European taxpayers – not Australian ones.

There’s nothing in the speech to suggest he wants to eliminate the welfare system in Australia, as some have claimed, or reduce spending on health or education.

Indeed, Hockey thinks Australia is nearly a paragon of virtue. Sure, we have “not completely avoided” excessively high spending, says the shadow treasurer, but we have reduced spending “to manageable levels”.

In a combative interview on Lateline afterwards, he told Tony Jones:

We need to compare ourselves with our Asian neighbours where the entitlements programs of the state are far less than they are in Australia.

Well, of course we do. Small government means low taxes. Businesses find low taxes attractive. If we, as a nation, are to “compete” with our neighbours, we’d better be offering something more than a profligate welfare system. Restraining company and income taxes has to be a key part of that.

Hockey said Hong Kong’s “highly constrained public safety net may, at times, seem brutal” – this is not high praise, and certainly not a recommendation we imitate it.
So why did the speech spark such fury?

Yes, Hockey gave it a grandiose title – ‘The End of the Age of Entitlement’ – virtually begging to be over-analysed. Tony Jones doggedly tried to pin Hockey down on how Australia would look in a post-entitlement age. But at most Hockey volunteered that “we need to be ever vigilant”.

This isn’t much to base a controversy on. Surely, after the past few years, a more vigilant government isn’t a bad idea.

So lots of smoke, but no fire.

At least, no fire where everybody was looking. Hockey’s speech was not without a domestic purpose. It seems clear he did not intend to propose changes to Australia’s existing policy settings, but to stem future ones.

The ‘age of entitlement’ thesis is a none-too-subtle contribution to the simmering debate within the Coalition about what philosophy will drive a future Abbott government.

The Institute of Economic Affairs, where he gave the address, isn’t your run-of-the-mill free market think tank. It is one of the most influential and iconic in the world, borne out of a conversation between its founder, Antony Fisher, and the great economist Friedrich Hayek. It’s the perfect place to stake a claim as a free marketeer.

And no Howard-era policy is more regretted by the free marketeers within the parliamentary Liberal Party than the former prime minister’s embrace of middle-class welfare.

Yes, by international standards, Australian middle-class welfare is low – the lowest, in fact, in the OECD. But that’s not the point. It is a symbol of the two different visions of Australia’s future on the centre-right.

The contest between free marketeers and big government conservatives rages across lots of policy areas – from free trade to cheap milk to labour market reform – but, overwhelmingly, it is in middle-class welfare that it is most sensitive.

Hockey’s boss Tony Abbott is a big fan of the Howard social spending program. Abbott’s manifesto, the 2009 book Battlelines, goes into great detail defending universal family payments.
In the Opposition Leader’s view, “supporting women who have children should be one of the important duties of governments”.

Abbott frames the debate as between those who see having children as a personal choice and those who see it as a social good.

I argued in the Drum last year that when the Labor Party inherited Howard’s social policies after the 2007 election, they changed their justification.

Where the Coalition had spoken of middle-class welfare as a tool to shape society according to conservative values, Labor simply presented things like the baby bonus as a reward for families working hard.

The importance of Hockey’s London speech becomes apparent when we identify a subtle shift in Coalition and government rhetoric on this subject over the twelve months.

Labor’s policy agenda is increasingly focused on means testing. Abbott is starting to adopt some of the “reward” language in response. He has said means testing the baby bonus is an “attack on middle Australia”.

Such an argument – and it’s really a moral argument – contrasts sharply with the more practical, policy-oriented claims he made in Battlelines.

In this context, Hockey’s thesis about the end of an age entitlement has resonance.

Of course, there’s a big difference between professing a philosophy in opposition and pursuing it in government. Especially when your leader has other ideas.

But Hockey’s right. If governments hand out money simply for working hard – or if oppositions suggest that taking such handouts away is a personal affront to families – Australia will very quickly grow an entitlement culture to rival that of Europe’s most moribund economies.

Sport As Propaganda: Bahrain’s Vile Grand Prix

The relationship between international sporting events and repressive governments can be truly vile. The latest reminder of this is the decision by Formula One to hold the Bahrain Grand Prix for 2012 this weekend.

The race will be held smack in the middle of daily protests against the Bahrain regime – a regime which is trying to avoid being washed away by the same pro-democracy tide that has seen the end of many of its autocratic neighbours.

Formula One cancelled the event in 2011 because the Bahraini government was violently cracking down on pro-democracy demonstrations. Since then, the regime has tried to rehabilitate itself.
Bahrain wants to stay one step ahead of the Arab Spring. It commissioned an independent inquiry into allegations of torture and violence during the crackdown. The inquiry reported in November last year, and recommended a range of modest judicial and policing reforms.

But Bahrain shouldn’t get off that easily. There are still 14 opposition leaders and hundreds of others in prison for participating in last year’s protests. There are still daily clashes between protesters and police. There are still continuing human rights abuses. Foreign reporters still have their entry into the country strictly limited.

The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights says there have been 31 deaths – including three from torture – since the independent inquiry released its recommendations.

Yet Formula One head Bernie Ecclestone claimed last week: “There’s nothing happening. I know people who live there and it’s all very quiet and peaceful.”

Bahrain’s rulers are using the Formula One race to rebuild their reputation. The race is part of a “normalisation” campaign. It provides the cover by which Bahrain can present a stable front to the world – and avoid serious reforms.

Yet the relationship between Bahrain and Formula One is hardly unusual. Repressive states have long recognised that international sport is a potent propaganda tool.

The granddaddy of international sporting contests, the modern Olympics, has long been a friend of tyranny. Virtually from birth, the Olympics was studiously, and shamefully, neutral about the political environment in its host countries.

During the Berlin Games of 1936, the Olympics’ founder, Pierre de Coubertin, described the “Hitlerian” elements of that event as a merely the happy by-product of Germany celebrating “in accordance with its own creative powers and by its own means”.

Supporters of the Olympics’ bizarre ideology say its political know-nothingism would be better described as “universality” – a belief that all people of the world are entitled to participate in the Olympics, no matter what political system they have chosen.

But as one historian has written: “What this has meant in practice is that the [International Olympic Committee] has turned a blind eye to any sort of political crime committed by a member of the Olympic movement.”

Jean Todt, the president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, said this week that he and Formula One were “only interested in sport, not politics”.

He might be, but his hosts are not. For repressive governments, the purpose of holding an international sporting event is simple: it confers political legitimacy and the approval of the foreign press.

Todt may imagine otherwise, but for host governments, international sport is entirely about politics.

When Moscow hosted the Olympics in 1980, it was an occasion to impress the world with Soviet superiority; when Beijing did the same in 2008, the Chinese regime used the Games to show off its “socialist modernisation” project.

One infamous example of this phenomenon is how the brutal Argentinian military junta used the 1978 World Cup to solidify its domestic and international position.

The junta had seized control of the country just two years earlier. It immediately directed its propaganda efforts to the Cup, as well as 10 per cent of the national budget. Indicatively, one of the new regime’s first priorities was to improve the foreign journalists’ accommodation for the upcoming event.

The glamorous World Cup was held in the middle of Argentina’s Dirty War, where tens of thousands of people were being murdered by the state.

The protestations that international sport is above tedious national politics are doubly false when we consider the money those governments pay to host major sporting events. States are willing to spend big on premium carnivals. And a cosy relationship with host governments is a key part of international sport’s business model.

When it comes to human rights violations in Bahrain, Formula One cannot pretend to be neutral.

Amnesty International says “the human rights crisis in Bahrain is not over”. The International Crisis Group says Bahrain is “sliding toward another dangerous eruption of violence”.

And it’s hard to disagree with Human Rights Watch when it says the Formula One race gives Bahrain’s rulers “the opportunity they are seeking to obscure the seriousness of the country’s human rights situation”.

If so, Formula One has to take some responsibility.

Secular World Has A Christian Foundation

The contemporary atheist movement has a scorched earth strategy – chop down Christianity, root and branch. I don’t believe in God either, but this strategy is entirely counterproductive.

Not satisfied to point out that elements of Christian belief are historically implausible, or that religion is scientifically unsubstantiated, the New Atheist movement wants to prove something more. That Christianity has been a force for bad, that there is something fundamental about religious belief that holds back progress, approves of oppression, and stokes hatred.

Yet virtually all the secular ideas that non-believers value have Christian origins. To pretend otherwise is to toss the substance of those ideas away. It was theologians and religiously minded philosophers who developed the concepts of individual and human rights. Same with progress, reason, and equality before the law: it is fantasy to suggest these values emerged out of thin air once people started questioning God.

Take the separation of church and state – a foundation of the modern secular world, and a core of the political philosophy that atheists should favour above all else. It was, simply, a Christian idea.

Early Christian philosophers thought seriously about what Jesus’s words, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” meant for the formation of political society.

St Augustine, writing as Rome fell, saw the City of Man and the City of God as clearly separate. For Augustine, the religious and secular worlds were disinct. The long conflict between the papacy and medieval European kings over the ensuing centuries reinforced this division.

When the father of liberalism, John Locke, argued for religious liberty, he noted there was no such thing in the gospels as a “Christian Commonwealth”. The Bible insisted on states “with which the law of Christ hath not at all meddled”.

So, by the time Thomas Jefferson devised the formula of a “wall of separation between church and state”, he was drawing on 1500 years of Christian thought. The basic philosophy of modern secular democracy – that religious belief is a matter of individual conscience, not government – is a Christian idea. Even more central to our modern identity is the idea that all individuals have human rights, that simply by virtue of being human we have basic liberties that must be protected by law.

This idea too has a deep theological origin. Such mediaeval philosophers as Thomas Aquinas and his follower Francisco de Vitoria married biblical study with classical philosophy.
By doing so, they developed the concept of rights as we understand it today. For these Christian thinkers, “natural” rights originated from God. Humans formed societies in order to defend those rights.

Yet many modern human rights activists seem to believe that human rights sprang forth, full-bodied and with a virgin birth, in United Nations treaties in the mid-20th century.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The idea of human rights was founded centuries ago on Christian assumptions, advanced by Biblical argument, and advocated by theologians. Modern supporters of human rights have merely picked up a set of well-refined ethical and moral arguments.

Of course, it could not be otherwise. The modern world is shaped by 3000 years of philosophical evolution. And for half that time the dominant moral philosophy in the Western world has been a Christian one. For most of our history, all the great thinkers have been religious. So our secular liberalism will inevitably owe a huge amount to its Christian origins.

Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. If we imagine they were invented yesterday, they will be easy to discard tomorrow. So why are modern atheist agitators so eager to shed Western civilisation’s Christian legacy? Their reasoning – that atheism is attractive not only because it’s accurate but because religion is morally bad – ironically resembles the simplistic good-versus-evil propaganda of history’s most dangerous religious fanatics. Yet many Christians defend their faith by simply citing the good works of their co-religionists.

Not only does this prove little (of course, some people are good, and some people are bad) it almost always ends in the tit-for-tat, your-team-killed-more-than-my-team debate. Was Adolf Hitler a Christian? Would an answer be at all meaningful? Both sides do this. Richard Dawkins claimed on ABC’s Q&A last Monday that Christians were missing in action in the fight against slavery. This is clearly wrong. Has he not heard of the Christian abolitionist movement or William Wilberforce? But it’s a revealing error.

Surely, to argue for atheism, there is no logical need to denigrate past Christian accomplishment.

The anti-slavery argument that all humans were of equal moral worth won the day, and this was, to all concerned, a Christian argument. To acknowledge the religious heritage of the modern world is to say nothing about religious “truth”. But while our age may be secular, it is, at the same time, still a deeply Christian one. If atheists feel they must rip up everything that came before them, they will destroy the very foundations of that secularism.

The Real Reason for the Tragedy of the Titanic

Published in ABC’s The Drum as ‘Regulatory Failure of Titanic Proportions’, 11 April 2012, and in the Wall Street Journal as ‘The Real Reason for the Tragedy of the Titanic‘, 12 April 2012.

In the 1958 Titanic film “A Night to Remember,” Captain Smith is consulting with the shipbuilder Thomas Andrews. After the two realize that the Titanic will sink and that there are not enough lifeboats for even half those aboard, Smith quietly says “I don’t think the Board of Trade regulations visualized this situation, do you?”

In the run-up to the 100th anniversary of this tragedy this weekend, there’s been a lot of commentary about who and what were to blame. Left unsaid is that the Titanic’s lifeboat capacity is probably the most iconic regulatory failure of the 20th century.

The ship had carried 2,224 people on its maiden voyage but could only squeeze 1,178 people into its lifeboats. There were a host of other failures, accidents, and mishaps which led to the enormous loss of life, but this was the most crucial one: From the moment the Titanic scraped the iceberg, the casualties were going to be unprecedented.

Yet the Titanic was fully compliant with all marine laws. The British Board of Trade required all vessels above 10,000 metric tonnes (11,023 U.S. tons) to carry 16 lifeboats. The White Star Line ensured that the Titanic exceeded the requirements by four boats. But the ship was 46,328 tonnes. The Board of Trade hadn’t updated its regulations for nearly 20 years.

The lifeboat regulations were written for a different era and enforced unthinkingly. So why didn’t the regulators, shipbuilders or operators make the obvious connection between lifeboat capacity and the total complement of passengers and crew?

It had been 40 years since the last serious loss of life at sea, when 562 people died on the Atlantic in 1873. By the 20th century, all ships were much safer.

Moreover, the passage of time changed what regulators and shipowners saw as the purpose of lifeboats. Lifeboats were not designed to keep all the ship and crew afloat while the vessel sank. They were simply to ferry them to nearby rescue ships.

Recent history had confirmed this understanding. The Republic sank in 1909, fatally crippled in a collision. But it took nearly 36 hours for the Republic to submerge. All passengers and crew—except for the few who died in the actual collision—were transferred safely, in stages, to half a dozen other vessels.

Had Titanic sunk more slowly, it would have been surrounded by the Frankfurt, the Mount Temple, the Birma, the Virginian, the Olympic, the Baltic and the first on the scene, the Carpathia. The North Atlantic was a busy stretch of sea. Or, had the Californian (within visual range of the unfolding tragedy) responded to distress calls, the lifeboats would have been adequate for the purpose they were intended—to ferry passengers to safety.

There was, simply, very little reason to question the Board of Trade’s wisdom about lifeboat requirements. Shipbuilders and operators thought the government was on top of it; that experts in the public service had rationally assessed the dangers of sea travel and regulated accordingly. Otherwise why have the regulations at all?

This is not the way the story is usually told.

Recall in James Cameron’s 1997 film, “Titanic,” the fictionalized Thomas Andrews character claims to have wanted to install extra lifeboats but “it was thought by some that the deck would look too cluttered.” Mr. Cameron saw his movie as a metaphor for the end of the world, so historical accuracy was not at a premium.

Yet the historian Simon Schama appears to have received his knowledge of this issue from the Cameron film, writing in Newsweek recently that “Chillingly, the shortage of lifeboats was due to shipboard aesthetics.” (Mr. Schama also sees the Titanic as a metaphor, this time for “global capitalism” hitting the Lehman Brothers iceberg.)

This claim—that the White Star Line chose aesthetics over lives—hinges on a crucial conversation between Alexander Carlisle, the managing director of the shipyard where Titanic was built, and his customer Bruce Ismay, head of White Star Line, in 1910.

Carlisle proposed that White Star equip its ships with 48 lifeboats—in retrospect, more than enough to save all passengers and crew. Yet after a few minutes discussion, Ismay and other senior managers rejected the proposal. The Titanic historian Daniel Allen Butler (author of “Unsinkable”) says Carlisle’s idea was rejected “on the grounds of expense.”

But that’s not true. In the Board of Trade’s post-accident inquiry, Carlisle was very clear as to why White Star declined to install extra lifeboats: The firm wanted to see whether regulators required it. As Carlisle told the inquiry, “I was authorized then to go ahead and get out full plans and designs, so that if the Board of Trade did call upon us to fit anything more we would have no extra trouble or extra expense.”

So the issue was not cost, per se, or aesthetics, but whether the regulator felt it necessary to increase the lifeboat requirements for White Star’s new, larger, class of ship.

This undercuts the convenient morality tale about safety being sacrificed for commercial success that sneaks into most accounts of the Titanic disaster.

The responsibility for lifeboats came “entirely practically under the Board of Trade,” as Carlisle described the industry’s thinking at the time. Nobody seriously thought to second-guess the board’s judgment.

This is a distressingly common problem. Governments find it easy to implement regulations but tedious to maintain existing ones—politicians gain little political benefit from updating old laws, only from introducing new laws.

And regulated entities tend to comply with the specifics of the regulations, not with the goal of the regulations themselves. All too often, once government takes over, what was private risk management becomes regulatory compliance.

It’s easy to weave the Titanic disaster into a seductive tale of hubris, social stratification and capitalist excess. But the Titanic’s chroniclers tend to put their moral narrative ahead of their historical one.

At the accident’s core is this reality: British regulators assumed responsibility for lifeboat numbers and then botched that responsibility. With a close reading of the evidence, it is hard not to see the Titanic disaster as a tragic example of government failure.

Offence Against Free Speech

No question: in the Western world, offence is gradually trumping free speech. Consider four separate incidents, all of which occurred in the last week.

Back in 2008, News Limited’s Perthnow.com.au published a series of articles covering the deaths of four Aboriginal boys, who had stolen a car and died in an accident shortly after. The mother of three of the boys took legal action over comments published below the articles.

The Australian Federal Court found last Tuesday a number of those comments breached the Racial Discrimination Act.

Absolutely, the comments were cruel. They should not have been posted. One read “if you’re hopeless at mothering, recognise you are hopeless and don’t breed”. Another told law makers to “get out of thier [sic] ivory towers and start dealing out real punishment… instead of the 5 star treatment they get in prison”.

News Limited was ordered to pay $12,000 compensation for “offence, insult and humiliation”.

There has been one report (published in Fairfax papers) about this trial. Compare that to the outpouring of commentary about the Andrew Bolt case late last year: Factiva counts 333 separate pieces in newspapers alone.

Yet the Perthnow finding draws heavily on precedents set by the Bolt case. Sure, the Racial Discrimination Act found its current language back in 1995. But the act’s substance is only now being tested, and that substance suggests that the limitations on freedom of speech which it sets are very broad indeed. This is an evolving – and expanding – area of law.

For instance, notice that nothing in the comments quoted above makes reference to the fact that the boys were Aboriginal. The Federal Court decided, given the context of the news stories, the comments should be considered racial hatred nonetheless.

Much more attention has been given to the Kyle Sandilands episode – not least because of the extraordinary outcry when Sandilands originally aired his bizarre rant against a critic of his television show in November 2011.

Many people have suggested the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s response to Sandilands has demonstrated how weak the regulator is. But obviously a regulatory agency does not have the power to sack an employee of a private company.

And the new license condition which ACMA intends to impose on Sandiland’s station 2DayFM is actually quite significant. These new conditions provide a pretext under which ACMA could take away the station’s licence.

The conditions stipulate that 2DayFM cannot broadcast material which “demeans or is reasonably likely to demean women or girls generally and/or any woman or girl in particular”. Read that last clause carefully. For a speaker to “demean” any person who happens to be female is now forbidden – at least if they speak on 2DayFM. Sure, “Juliar” is in bad taste, but is it something that really needs to be regulated?

This is a dangerously illiberal path we are walking. And it’s a path other Western countries have travelled further along.

The conviction last Tuesday of a 21-year-old student in England for a stream of racist tweets provides no better illustration. Liam Stacey has been sentenced to 56 days jail for the sort of obscene trolling which is unhappily common on Twitter.

What Stacey wrote was foul, but his is an extraordinary punishment. Stacey was apparently drunk, and hastily deleted his tweets.

Of particular importance is the law he was prosecuted under. The UK Public Order Act 1986 prohibits “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour”, which it places under the heading “fear or provocation of violence”. That this has evolved to become the criminalisation of idiocy shows how apparently modest laws can become tyrannical ones.

Even further along the path is France, where the perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain was fined 6,000 euros for saying in a TV interview that he “set to work like a Negro”. Guerlain got off lightly. The French court could have imposed a six month prison term.

Obviously, Perthnow should not have published the seriously hurtful comments. Kyle Sandilands should not be such an oaf. One ought not get drunk on Twitter and hurl racist insults.

But if we are to remain free we must keep alive the philosophical distinction between things which are unlawful, and things which morally wrong but still lawful.

As governments expand their regulatory reach, they appear unable to conceive of the latter. Perhaps that’s no surprise. Legislators, lawyers and judges see all social issues through the prism of law.

But this legalism means we are losing confidence in society to police itself; to maintain its own standards. 2DayFM saw its sponsors drain away and its audience shrink. Liam Stacey was shouted down by others on Twitter and recanted his hateful words.

Indeed, the judge in the Stacey trial said something accidentally revealing while delivering his sentence: “I have no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what you have done”. The power and effect of that public outrage goes unremarked here. Obviously, state regulation seems intent on supplanting society’s ability to ostracise and condemn.

And a society that drags people into the courts for nothing but offence is a deeply unhealthy society.

Westerners Consumed By Tech Toys Wallow In Misplaced Guilt

Nothing demonstrates how self-absorbed Western moral sensibilities are than the recent controversy over working conditions at the Chinese manufacturer Foxconn.

Foxconn makes Apple products. And culturally, Apple’s iPad and iPhone are no mere gadgets. They symbolise high-tech consumerism. Apple’s brand is like a squeaky-clean combination of Greenpeace and Scientology. So criticism of Foxconn has been as much about popping Apple’s otherworldly bubble as anything else.

At least it was until this month, when the radio program This American Life was forced to retract a major “expose” of Foxconn it aired in January. In a special episode, reporter Mike Daisey admitted he had fabricated the worst stories. Daisey had never met under-age workers, never met poison victims and never saw armed guards at Foxconn factories.

But by then, the anti-corporate activists had already moved on. A petition with 250,000 signatures had been quickly delivered to Apple. (That petition was, of course, promoted by our own opportunists at GetUp!) Technology writers around the world had called for a boycott of Apple products. Yet Foxconn has better working conditions than comparable workplaces in China. Apple conducts more inspections and audits of its supplier than any other electronics company. By Western standards, most Foxconn jobs are repetitive, boring, the workers’ accommodation cramped, and there have been well-reported OH&S incidents. But by the standards of Chinese industry, they are still highly desirable jobs.

But the Foxconn story has had enormous resonance because it fits neatly into a moral tale of Western guilt. You, with your white earbuds and leather-covered iPad, are the direct beneficiary of a nightmarish, Victorian-era sweatshop. Foxconn’s 1.2 million workers suffer so Australians can play Angry Birds. It’s an alluring tale, perfect for sermons and email forwards. But think what this tale excludes. That is: sympathy for those who have failed to acquire a job at Foxconn. Sympathy for those who lack the skills to get a desirable factory job at all. Sympathy for those who produce goods not destined for First World boutique retail outlets.

So these consumer activism campaigns have a perverse result. We more pity the Chinese workers who have found the jobs that will lift them out of poverty than those who have been unable to do so.

Even more perverse is the implicit message behind these campaigns: that Western consumerism is to blame for the dire plight of Chinese workers. Sure, no one has to buy an iPad. But Chinese workers covet Foxconn jobs. The idea that we should boycott its products is counterproductive. A boycott would not raise labour standards but would deprive people of needed work. We don’t like to think about how the moral choices we make in the developed world could be stopping people in other countries from flourishing. That is most obvious when it comes to immigration.

When Tony Abbott announced he was considering subsidising nannies, feminist academic Eva Cox complained it could lead to calls for “cheap labour from overseas”. She was not alone. You’d think it’s pretty cruel to bar poor people from seeking better jobs for themselves. But somehow, such sentiments get wrapped up in the rhetoric of compassion. Perhaps Third World poverty just seems more pressing if it’s nearby. Foxconn makes high-profile products we use every day. Migrant nannies in Australia would no longer be in poor, faraway countries, but right under our noses. It’s an odd, repugnant and very modern notion of moral responsibility: that we must keep a respectable distance from poverty, even if by doing so we only exacerbate it. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s not the developed world’s fault that some countries are poor. But it is definitely our fault if we are intentionally stopping them from seeking opportunities to get rich. And is there anything more patronising than the assumption that choices made by people in the Third World are merely the result of unthinking exploitation from the West?

Global capitalism doesn’t work like that. When Australians seek employment, we hope to get something out of it. Foreigners are no different. Foreigners are morally autonomous human beings like us, with preferences and plans and intelligence. They know if they are being exploited. They know better than us their employment alternatives.

One of the revelations of the This American Life retraction was that the long hours worked by some Foxconn employees was often entirely their choice. Just as Australian workers sometimes want to work overtime, so too do Chinese workers. Certainly, not everything is rosy in Foxconn plants. But then, not everything is rosy in the developing world. Our neurotic eagerness to blame ourselves does nothing to fix that. Worse, it could easily harm the people we wish to help.

Tasers: The Non-Lethal Force That Kills

It’s time to stop describing Tasers as “non-lethal” weapons. They are quasi-lethal. At best.

That much should be clear from the death of 21-year-old Roberto Laudisio Curti in New South Wales last week.

The widely broadcast security camera footage shows Curti running away. One police officer in pursuit appears to pause, raise, and fire his Taser’s barbed projectiles at the Brazilian student. Curti stopped breathing shortly after.

If accurate, this incident would clearly be what the NSW Ombudsman warned about in a major report four years ago: Taser use is highly susceptible to mission creep. Nothing in the security footage suggests Curti presented an “extremely high risk” to officers or the public – the grounds for Taser use. From what we can tell, there was no threat or aggression.

But let’s put the specifics of this case aside. There are inquiries by the New South Wales Coroner and NSW Ombudsman which will be looking closely at those.

There is a more basic problem with the use of Tasers.

In the United States, 12,000 law enforcement agencies now carry the weapon. Assessing the evidence collected in that country, the National Institute for Justice (the research wing of the Department of Justice) found in 2011 there is “no conclusive medical evidence” indicating “a high risk of serious injury or death” from Tasers.

That sounds all well and good until you read the NIJ’s caveat: “… in healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons.”

This is a particularly crucial caveat, as it is dealing with unhealthy, abnormal, highly stressed and blindingly intoxicated persons where Tasers are most useful.

One anonymous police officer wrote in the Punch after last week’s fatality he had “wrestled a lot of drug-affected people and they don’t give up easily. Often a lot of force needs to be used in order to bring them under control.”

More than half of those tasered in NSW between 2002 and 2007 were identified as having drug or alcohol problems, or having been intoxicated at the time of the incident.

A Taser is effective in such situations because it does not rely on pain, or the threat of pain, to compel compliance. The shock delivered through the darts completely incapacitates its target – the electric current overrides the brain’s control of the body and causes the muscles to spasm involuntarily.

So as a policing tool, it is most useful against drug-affected people who display “superhuman” strength.

And that is also exactly the circumstances where the research suggests Tasers are going to be at their most lethal.

This analytical disconnect allows supporters to claim Tasers are much safer than they actually are in practice.

Yet announcing the rollout of Tasers to general duties police in 2008, the Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said “if this is but one option that gives the police officers in the streets of NSW some alternative rather than to use deadly force, rather than to shoot somebody and killing them, then this is a good option.”

Even our limited experience in Australia shows Tasers don’t replace firearms. The Western Australian Corruption and Crime Commission found they are a substitute for other tools like pepper spray.

Taser use has increased substantially over the last few years in WA, but firearm use has increased as well. This is a phenomenon overseas jurisdictions have discovered too, and it makes some sense. Depending on the environment and the officers’ training, attempts at tasering someone fail 10-20 per cent of the time. If a situation is truly dangerous, police officers use much more reliable guns.

It has been suggested the use of a Taser could have saved the life of the carjacker who was shot in a Parramatta shopping complex on Sunday.

Perhaps. But if the officers in question believed anybody was seriously at risk, a Taser would not have been their response. There is a reason officers still carry firearms.

Tasers don’t always attach to their target properly. The model in use in NSW can only fire once – if the darts miss, the officer has to reload. And in only 35 of 48 incidents studied by the NSW Ombudsman in 2008 were Tasers described as “effective”.

So yes: Tasers are less lethal than firearms, and in some circumstances would be preferable. But that is not how they are actually used. They are now, according to the WA CCC, the “force option of ‘choice'”. And, given the usual profile of individuals which they are used against, Tasers are a more potentially lethal replacement for other non-lethal methods.

Some reports have said Roberto Laudisio Curti was on drugs when he died.

The problem for Taser advocates is to devise a standard of use which recognises first, that Tasers are most useful when for dealing with highly intoxicated individuals and second, they are at their most deadly when doing so.

Newspapers Tangled In Politics… That’s Yesterday’s News

Every generation thinks the world they are presented with is unique.

Reflecting on the 1819 parliamentary session, the British conservative Henry Bankes regretted that the government had not done more to “restrain and correct the licentiousness and abuse of the press”. Newspapers are “a tremendous engine in the hands of mischievous men,” Bankes wrote.

Bankes’ complaint was old hat even then. There’s not much new in media criticism. When Ray Finkelstein argued the press fosters “inequality, abuse of power, intellectual squalor, avid interest in scandal, an insatiable appetite for entertainment and other debasements and distortions”, he may not have realised how tired a note he was striking.

The great champion of press freedom, Thomas Jefferson, lamented that nothing in a newspaper could be believed. With obvious disappointment, Jefferson wrote “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them”. Journalists had welcomed “prostitution to falsehood”.

John Stuart Mill described the London press as “the vilest and most degrading of all trades”. Edmund Burke considered newspapers as a “grand instrument of the subversion of order, of morals, of religion and… of human society itself”.

We could go on. For as long as there has been media there have been complaints that it is biased, unbalanced, unfair, immoral, reckless, unethical, excessively powerful, and untrustworthy. An unhappy Samuel Johnson said too many journalists of his day were political partisans “without a wish for truth or thought of decency”.

So – for instance – it is hard to understand Robert Manne’s claim that in recent years The Australian has “transcended the traditional newspaper role” and become an “active player in both federal and state politics”. Newspapers have always been tangled up in politics. There is no traditional, non-political role for them to transcend.

Manne wrote in his Quarterly Essay that The Australian is a “remorselessly campaigning paper”. Is this description supposed to be damning?

One of the world’s greatest media moguls, William Randolph Hearst, claimed his newspapers “control the nation”. His New York Journal didn’t just report, it participated. It distributed welfare and disaster relief. It launched public interest lawsuits. It even broke someone out of a Cuban prison – “the greatest journalistic coup of this age,” according to the Journal.

Popular mythology reflects Hearst’s self-aggrandisement by crediting his papers with amazing political power as well. But the reality does not reflect the legend. It suits everyone to talk up the power of the media. Proprietors trade on the illusion of clout, and politicians want excuses for their own impotence. Hearst later made a series of failed political runs. Clearly he thought public office a desirable promotion.

Across the Atlantic, the mid-century press baron Lord Beaverbrook famously said he ran the Daily Express “merely for the purposes of making propaganda and with no other motive”.

Beaverbrook was being playful. The occasion for those words was his interrogation by the 1947 Royal Commission on the Press. That Commission had an eerily similar origin to our recent Independent Inquiry. The post-war Labour party was frustrated with press hostility. Labour had won the 1945 election by a landslide. But most papers in that election had editorialised in favour of the Tories. For Labour politicians egged on by the journalists’ union, this was proof the papers and their owners were dangerously out of touch.

Any semblance of historical awareness should lead us to focus our attention not on the repetitive, unchanging complaints about how venal the press is, but on what is genuinely new.
And that is the extraordinary wealth of new information, new sources, and new outlets available to media consumers in 2012; our access to the global press online, social media and ‘citizen’ journalism, the opening up of the journalistic processes, and, even, the democratisation of media criticism.

While the complaints about journalism made today are virtually indistinguishable from those made by Henry Bankes in 1819, the environment in which the media operates is totally different.
The Finkelstein Inquiry was given two tasks. The first was to look how the internet challenges newspaper business models. The second was to look at press standards and quality. One of Finkelstein’s biggest failures was not coherently joining the two tasks together – what the second task meant in light of the first.

Finkelstein’s proposed News Media Council is strikingly similar to the 1947 Royal Commission’s recommendation that British newspapers be governed by a General Council of the Press. (The Royal Commission’s threat of statutory regulation led the industry to form the UK Press Council.)

It’s as if nothing has changed in the meantime.

The Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon and made it to the office of prime minister – few were more respected and influential than Wellington – but he privately complained to his family that Britain’s real rulers were “the Gentlemen of the Press”.

It is a professional pastime of politicians to complain about newspaper influence and the grubbiness of journalism. We do not have to treat their whining as novel. And we must not believe it is anything more than the traditional antagonism between government and press.

We’re Bombarded With Swearing But Who #@%! Cares?

“I like swearing; I think it’s very healthy,” Ewan McGregor told a celebrity gossip magazine last week. Good for Ewan. He could have added: swearing is so common it’s mundane. It can make you more persuasive. And it’s less offensive now than ever.

No one apparently cared when actor Jean Dujardin yelled “putain!” in his 2012 Oscar acceptance speech. “Putain” literally translates as “whore” but means “f— yeah!”. And remember when the Gillard camp released that video of Kevin Rudd swearing before the federal leadership spill? Nobody could even pretend to be offended. How refreshing. How honest. But really, any other stance would have been rank hypocrisy.

The leading scholarly authority on swearing, US psychologist Timothy Jay, estimated in a 2009 paper “The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words” that the average speaker of English utters around 80 to 90 swear words every day. That’s only about half as frequent as we use first person plural pronouns such as “we” and “us”.

Certainly, the offensiveness of swear words varies. Jay found 10 words dominate. Some of them are gentle: “goddamn” and “sucks”. But the F-word is both the most common and the most extreme in the top 10. So it’s entirely possible the former foreign affairs minister swears less than most people do.

Yet we seem to think people are swearing more often, and more harshly. It isn’t true. There’s no statistical evidence to suggest swearing has increased over the past few decades. Studies of recorded speech demonstrate swearing has remained steady and we’re using the same words we did 30 years ago.

But swearing is more public, more frequent in film, television, on radio and in print. It’s been normalised. The prevalence of swearing hasn’t changed, but its cultural status has.

The result, as a New South Wales magistrate noted in a ruling in 2002, is that the F-word “has lost much of its punch”.

We don’t blink at French Connection UK’s acronym “FCUK”. The name of the new snack “Nuckin Futs”, approved by Australia’s trademarks examiner in January, is playful rather than obscene. If profanity can sell nibbles and knitwear, can it be considered profane at all?

This is all surely a good thing. More swearing doesn’t mean society is becoming less polite.

One can be deeply racist or sexist or homophobic without swearing. On the other hand, we have all met friendly and well-intentioned people who pepper their speech with profanity. The former (racism, sexism) has become rightly unacceptable, and the latter is becoming innocuous. This is great. Any moral compass that treats mere words on par with malicious intentions is a badly calibrated one. That’s why the N-word is now much more offensive than the F-word – it indicates racist intentions.

Traditionally, swearing has also been governed by a double standard: men would curse freely among other men but bite their tongue around women out of patronising respect. Gender equality has eroded that anachronism.

Nor does the “think of the children” mindset offer any clear restraint on profanity.
As Ewan McGregor said: “I like hearing my kids swear, and I’ll pretend they’re not allowed to … but actually I think it’s quite funny.”

McGregor shouldn’t bother pretending. Jay points to findings that parental sanctions have no effect on how much a child swears when they reach adulthood. The scholarly evidence tells us children learn rude words from kids, not adults.

Last year, research psychologists established that swearing can help with pain relief. A 2006 study published in the journal Social Influence even found swearing “significantly increased” the persuasiveness of an argument. As the authors wrote, “the use of obscenity could make a credible speaker appear more human”.

When the Baillieu government introduced on-the-spot fines for swearing in June last year, there was an understandable outcry. Almost everybody swears, and swears a lot. Punishing extremely common language is obviously a bad idea. Something so banal should not be a police matter. Even prime ministers do it, after all.