Articles – Page 58

Hurling Invective At CEOs Over Salaries Is A Bit Rich

Why the anger about executive salaries? Sure, that question might seem just a little naive. (“Multimillionaires, the long-term unemployed – why can’t we all just get along?”)

After all, even as companies are moulting employees like dog hair, the upwards pressure doesn’t seem to have gone off exorbitant executive pay, at least from the perspective of Joe Mortgage-Stressed. The economy isn’t technically in a recession, but it’s quite ill – perhaps the oligarchs could ease off the foie gras and Dom Perignon?

So ACTU head Sharan Burrow proclaimed last Tuesday that now is the time to crack down on CEO remuneration, and proposed a salary cap for chief executives of 10 times the wage of their average employee. Normally such a proposal would be easy to dismiss as the embarrassing post-mortem spasm of a union movement that is cooling in the morgue. A financial crisis is as good a time as any to whip up a little anger about dastardly bosses; a bit of traditional class conflict.

But Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been threatening to curb CEO remuneration since early this year, asking the Productivity Commission to inquire into the best approach to take. The inquiry has spent the past few months hearing a wide range of people who are fairly sure they know how to run Australia’s biggest companies better than they are being run now.

I’m somewhat cynical about handing authority over corporate salaries to politicians who have, in recent times, had temper tantrums about inflight food, got into fisticuffs in party-room meetings and resigned over conflicts of interest. The corporate world might be cut-throat, but Parliament is full of people who hate each other. Their moral authority is less than absolute. And their knowledge of how large companies operate is less than comprehensive.

Shareholders – who directly own Australia’s biggest companies – should perhaps turn a more sceptical eye to the salaries of the executives. After all, they have just as big an interest in the future of their company as its employees.

While the market is climbing, as it has for a decade, executive salaries climb. And when the market falls, many executive salaries fall. The Australian Institute of Company Directors has reported that the directors of big financial firms like Commonwealth Bank, AMP, ANZ and AXA Asia Pacific have had their salaries frozen, restructured, or cut in response to the downturn. Average bonus payouts on Wall Street fell by 40 per cent in 2008. Perhaps they could have fallen more.

Future corporate remuneration committees will be rethinking the salary packages that have led to some executives getting huge bonuses even as their company collapses around them.

But, still, the best people to deal with these issues are the owners of firms, not politicians.

Anyway, who seriously believes that the level of CEO pay in Australia had anything to do with the subprime crisis that set off this whole mess? It is really easy and popular to throw abuse at CEOs.

I’m not trying to suggest that executives pulling in $30 million a year are in any way underdogs. But you’d hardly call it courageous when politicians and union leaders blame the three or four Australian executives who could be considered uber-rich for the problems the world economy faces.

So when Sharan Burrow stood up last week to proclaim that “the shameful reality is that not only have there been no apologies and no jail sentences but outrageous multimillion bonuses”, she was actually telling the rest of Australia two things: 1. We should all work really hard to keep the union movement from being in any position to alter the Crimes Act; and 2. the nation’s most senior union official doesn’t know how to respond to the economic downturn with anything other than angry finger-pointing.

And when Rudd decided that this was the time to crack down on corporate compensation, he revealed his crude populism – the Government seems just as eager to blame “greed” or executive salaries or “neo-liberals” for the crisis as it is to actually tackle the causes. You’d expect that from the unions, but you’d hope for better from the Prime Minister.

Where Is The Evidence That Junk Food Ads Make Kids Fat?

Australia’s public health establishment doesn’t lack ideas. Another official report into preventative health brings another few dozen recommended regulations, subsidies, cries for greater ‘public awareness’ and demands for further (commissioned) research.

This latest edition is the result of the Senate Inquiry into Obesity in Australia put out yesterday in order to avoid being completely overshadowed by the release of a National Preventative Health Strategy that should come out sometime this month.

The committee’s proposals are predictable. Limiting – with a view to banning – advertising of junk food to children. Subsidising gym memberships. Even more food labelling. Regulating stupid diet programs. Encouraging urban planners to deliberately design cities that are inconvenient to drive in. We’ve been hearing these ideas for years.

Unfortunately, while public health advocates may talk big on ‘evidence-based’ policy, their recommendations almost always fall well below that standard.

Take the popular claim that junk food advertising is causing fat kids. The evidence just isn’t there. The federal government’s peak communications research body, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, has concluded that it is near impossible to parse out the relationship between advertising and childhood obesity. At best, advertising could account for 2 per cent of food choice.

And the fuzziness of the relationship is clearly reflected in the academic literature: “Despite media claims to the contrary, there is no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children’s food consumption and, consequently, no reason to believe that a complete ban on advertising would have any useful impact on childhood obesity rates.”

Yet despite this almost complete lack of evidence – which was acknowledged in the committee’s public hearings – the committee’s report just recommends more stringent regulations on advertising, and, of course, more research. And the Senate was actually quite conservative compared to the waves of doctors and public health activists who participated in the inquiry, agitating for every sort of ban and regulation on marketing to children they could think of.

So why such a casual approach to the use of evidence in developing effective public policy, from an industry that prides itself on the close scrutiny of evidence as it affects medical outcomes? Regulation might not be a science, but does nevertheless require careful attention to cost-benefit analysis, and some analysis of efficacy and efficiency. And then governments need to consider the philosophical implications of many regulations – how it relates to responsibility and choice, and who will bear the brunt of the costs.

But as we wait for the Preventative Health Taskforce to lodge its report, we’re still seeing no signs that these issues are really being considered.

New Sheriff Needed To Ride Shotgun On Heritage Suburbs

It’s a bit of a rhetorical leap to compare Melbourne’s gentrified suburbs with the Wild West.

But after a Port Melbourne man knocked down his own home in order to build a double townhouse, that was apparently what came to mind for the mayor of Port Phillip.

“Saddle up your horse and ride out of town now if you think you can get away with it,” the mayor wrote in an official statement released last week, obviously confusing his role as the chief political representative of a wealthy inner-city suburb with a gun-slinging saloon manager in Deadwood.

When demolishing houses is outlawed, only outlaws will demolish their houses. The property’s owner, Hodo Zeqaj, was fined more than $52,000 for the demolition because his rather ordinary-looking brick duplex had been subject to a “heritage overlay” – that is, it’s located in an area of Port Melbourne the proud and self-satisfied local government has decided is historically significant.

A team of three men managed to demolish the house in less than 15minutes using a couple of chainsaws, which, no matter what you think of heritage laws, sounds like it would have been a lot of fun.

Certainly, Mr Zeqaj shouldn’t have demolished his house without getting a permit to do so. (And he definitely should have consulted his neighbour, with whom he shared a wall.) Even so, the council has publicly stated that had Mr Zeqaj applied for a demolition permit, it would have refused him one.

Once your home has been “heritaged”, well, you don’t really own it any more, no matter how much money you’ve paid off your mortgage. The council effectively does. Almost every petty little alteration has to be approved by local government functionaries.

Want to paint your door? In Port Phillip, there are 27 approved colours. But don’t get too excited – you can’t choose from the whole range. You will need to carefully maintain historic consistency.

Want to install an air-conditioner? There are planning permits to fill out, of course, and you need to make sure the unit is as hidden from the street as possible. After all, we wouldn’t want to ruin the seductive milieu of a suburban road by revealing that people actually live in those houses.

But don’t we as a society need to protect historically significant properties from the ravages of the marketplace? Perhaps. But what is historically significant? For the past half century, social history – the history of ordinary people, as opposed to the history of priests, politicians and warriors – has dominated the way we look at the past. That’s all great. But the rise of social history does make it a bit harder to assess what is uniquely important.

For a social historian, almost everything can be counted as “historically significant”. Everything reflects in some fashion the social circumstances of the past. So we get a barely interesting piece of trivia – the properties around Mr Zeqaj’s house are apparently early examples of low-cost homes built by the Housing Commission after World War II – transformed into a harsh legal edict. It isn’t quite Captain Cook’s cottage we’re talking about here. Does an entire neighbourhood need to be frozen in time so we can display cheaply and quickly built government housing in its full glory? For those people who care about the history of public housing, wouldn’t, perhaps, a few photographs suffice?

Anyway, if councils really want to protect important buildings, they should just buy them – or at minimum compensate the owners for their loss of control over their own property. If councils had to pay for the rights they steal, then they would perhaps be a little more cautious about doing so. Right now, it’s far too easy for local government to casually brand whole suburbs as critically important heritage areas while bearing none of the substantial costs.

It might seem glib to point out that we can’t stop all development. But it appears some councils are trying to do so. Vast swathes of Melbourne’s suburbs are being locked up by heritage regulation.

Unless we want Melbourne and its suburbs to become nothing but museum pieces, we’re going to have to accept that the flip-side of having a dynamic, modern city is having to occasionally watch that dynamism sweep aside physical remnants of the past.

Never Mind The Deficit, Look At The Spending

It must take a lot of confidence to blame the size of our new deficit on revenue loss due to the financial crisis just seconds after you have finished a mind-numbingly long list of new spending measures.

In fact, there’s a weird – almost creepy – sense of confidence surrounding Wayne Swan’s second budget.

Treasury’s reputation should be very battered. Just last year, the inflation genie was out of the bottle and we were looking at a beautiful vista of economic happiness stretching as far as our eyes could see. But Treasury seems to be getting more sure in its ability to predict the future, not less.

Wayne Swan’s conceit that this recession will be quickly followed by a burst of astonishing, face-saving growth relies on a predicted GDP growth of more than 4% in the next couple of years. That’s a pretty big call in the middle of a recession that took the Treasury itself by surprise. And it’s an even bigger call considering during the twentieth century, the average GDP growth was only 3.4%. So if Treasury’s forecasts are accurate, then the fire in which this budget was forged was not very hot.

The misplaced confidence of this budget is even clearer when we look at Wayne Swan’s counterfactuals. Without the property bailout, the Wellington Street bus station, the highways up (and down) the coast, the detailed design work for the Sydney West Metro, and the $900 recession hush-money, the Treasury believes that Australia would apparently be 2 ¾ per cent poorer next year. And there’d be 210,000 fewer people in work. Not 220,000, not 200,000 but 210,000.

Of course, these numbers are almost always invented out of thin air. Treasury secretary Ken Henry admitted as much in February.

So without these impressively self-assured Treasury figures we are left with just a historically large deficit and a government piling its promises up behind the next election. We have spending levels not seen since the Second World War, and not a whole lot to show for it.

Wayne Swan’s budget is a chickie run between Treasury and the global economy. Sure, both could get out of it safely, but you wouldn’t want to bet on it.

The Road To Hell Is Not Paved With Poker Machines

Is there any form of entertainment more reviled than the pokies? Perhaps cockfighting, or rabbit hunting. Or Russian roulette. But then again, nursing homes aren’t sending the elderly in groups to watch blood sports.

Obviously, when problem gambling manifests itself as a serious mental illness, there should be, and is, professional help available. But levels of problem gambling are actually quite low. According to the most recent study in Victoria, less than 2per cent of pokies players are problem gamblers, and that’s with a pretty fuzzy and expansive definition of what constitutes a “problem”.

Ninety-eight per cent of people who play the slots suffer no negative consequences. Why then is there such extraordinary venom directed at the industry? The average Victorian spends just $50 on poker machines a month – the cost of dinner and a movie.

So there’s something a bit distasteful about the passion with which the great and good declare their anti-pokies views.

Not even cigarettes cop as much flak as the pokies. Anti-tobacco activists appear to believe smoking is the equivalent of being stabbed in the face by a cigarette company – every cigarette is doing you damage – but few community leaders go so far as proposing the complete elimination of smoking, as they do with the pokies.

Perhaps it’s like that old anecdote about the academics who have never met anyone who voted for John Howard – pretty much everybody has tried a cigarette, and most people have friends who regularly smoke, but who could be so tasteless as to enjoy gambling with a machine? Certainly not anyone I know.

Still, it makes sense that poker machines would cop the brunt of anti-gambling sentiment. The pokies have none of the romance of other types of gaming. Playing high-stakes poker around a table while wearing a tuxedo could be very romantic. One-cent pokies? Very rarely romantic. In his 22 adventures so far, James Bond has never once seduced a leggy European femme fatale while grasping a cup full of change and hoping three strawberries will appear in a row, as delightful as that would be to watch.

Sure, it doesn’t always look like pokies players are having a whole lot of fun. But while it’s easy to disdain those who spend Saturday night pulling a lever in a suburban pub – their vacant look, their robotically repetitive movements, their apparent joylessness – have you ever looked at somebody else while they watched a movie?

I don’t want to sound all “neo-liberal” here – respecting individual choice and economic liberty is so 2007 – but for the most part, people do things because they want to.

As a consequence, saying that Victorians “lost” $2.4billion at the pokies last financial year makes about as much sense as saying Victorians lost $2.4billion at the cinemas. Perhaps the critics of poker machines could grant that people who go out of their way to play the pokies derive at least some small benefit from doing so? As much as it enjoys the revenue from taxes on poker machines, the State Government doesn’t force anybody to play.

Indeed, a very weird concern of the anti-pokies movement is that state governments are addicted to the revenue they receive from heavily taxing poker machines. Admittedly, in the Victorian budget last week, the Government expects to receive slightly over $1.6billion from its assorted gaming taxes – most of which comes from the pokies. But this is a tiny 4per cent of total state revenue.

Anyway, if the Government needs “to wean itself off gambling revenue”, as the head of the Interchurch Gaming Taskforce said last week, then the quickest way would be to dramatically reduce taxes on gambling. This may not, however, be the solution anti-pokies activists are looking for.

Traditionally, governments have banned the lower classes from card games and betting. And those same cash-hungry governments kindly offered the middle classes official revenue-raising lotteries. The upper classes have had free rein to indulge in whatever stupid games of chance they can devise. In fact, in the history of Europe, a surprising number of territorial acquisitions have been made not through war but as a result of bets between over-confident monarchs.

After centuries of paternalism, anti-gambling activists perhaps need a change of attitude. Even if you don’t enjoy the pokies, others do.

Depopulate And Die Of Boredom

It must take a rather active imagination to look at a map of Australia and think that it is too full.

Last week Sandra Kanck, the national president of the environmental group Sustainable Population Australia, urged the country to cut down its population from 21 million souls to just 7 million. To do so, she recommended we adopt a one-child policy, completely eliminating middle-child syndrome and saving the planet in the process. China’s one-child policy appears to have gone from a massive human rights violation that is universally condemned to “Hey, now that’s an idea”.

One article on the Sustainable Population Australia website berates Nadya Suleman for being a “criminal” and a “murderer”. Best known as “Octomum”, the Californian Suleman famously gave birth to eight children earlier this year. And she is – at least according to Sustainable Population’s site – “killing all of us”.

Fair enough: someone needs to stand up to those murderous breeders. No opportunity to inform them about their criminal behaviour can be wasted; the environment demands it. For example, transport regulations may require you give up your seat to a pregnant woman, but once the mother-to-be has sat down, you have a good opportunity to berate her for destroying the planet.

Certainly, Sustainable Population Australia is just a fringe environment group, and criticising them for their warped moral compass is like criticising the Citizens Electoral Council for their bad economics. But the idea that we desperately need to shut down breeding for a while in order to save the planet is surprisingly widespread.

In Britain, one of Gordon Brown’s environmental advisers has been urging the Prime Minister to support the halving of Britain’s population to just 30 million. And the president of the Sea Shepherd Society – an organisation regularly praised for stalking Japanese whalers – wants to reduce the global population to less than a billion. Yet, the population of the world continues to grow, not least in the developing world.

But if you believe that population growth will eventually lead to the collapse of our civilisation and planet, then the last millennium of human history must be very confusing. Over and over, we have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to innovate our way out of any theoretical “limit to growth”.

So it takes a strange sort of intellectual hubris to imagine that the exact moment you are alive just happens to be the exact moment in human history that we cross the “too many people” line. In the 1970s, zero population growth advocates were pretty sure the end was nigh, but humanity has managed to barrel on for a few more decades. Anyway, few species have found flirting with extinction a particularly effective survival strategy.

But we could spend all day debating the impact of population on the environment. I’m more concerned about another thing: can you imagine how excruciatingly boring Australia would be with only 7 million people?

Last week’s Sunday Age reported that a large proportion of “tree-changers” regretted their decision to move from the suburbs to the quieter countryside. Shockingly, in remote and regional Victoria there are fewer and less varied jobs available, fewer services and less commercial activity than in the cities.

An Australia with just 7 million people would be like a mandatory tree-change for everybody, with those who survived the great population decline skulking about the ruins of this once-busy nation.

Australia already suffers because of its small population. We have a small audience for culture. We have a small market for goods and services, and a small base to produce them from. If it weren’t for the fact that we can trade stuff with other countries, it would hardly be worth having an Australia at all.

Pretty much everything interesting and exciting about the world is the direct result of human action. Fewer people would mean fewer people doing cool stuff. How would life be without basil pesto, the British version of The Office, single malt whisky, SuperTed or Facebook? Nasty and brutish, sure, but agonisingly long.

And let’s face it – whatever meaning has been imposed on the environment has been imposed by people. So when deep greens exalt nature as morally superior to humanity, it comes across as just a little bit stupid. When the chips are down, surely our loyalty lies with the human race.

How A Joker Sent Battman To The Rescue

Confident that the Prime Minister can steer us out of the financial crisis? Don’t be. Every policy announcement, every job-creation program, every plan to fix the economy point to one thing: The Government’s just makin’ it up.

Want proof? The team at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet have developed www.economicstimulusplan.gov.au to tout all the ways they’re fighting the downturn. And the first, most prominent, measure listed on the website is a subsidy to home insulation.

Call me cynical, but it seems very unlikely that historians will describe the recovery from the financial crisis as “insulation driven”.

Sure, they say the victors write the history books. But unless Moorabbin Coat-O-Foam Discount Insulation opens a publishing arm, there’s a fair chance Pink Batts won’t ever get the place in the history of the Australian economy that Kevin Rudd appears to think it deserves.

If there is one overarching theme in this crisis, it is that nobody really knows what they are doing.

When the Government announced the commercial property bail-out in January, it claimed the measure would save 50,000 jobs. In the Senate inquiry that followed, Treasury officials admitted they really didn’t have any idea how many jobs their measure would create – they just extrapolated job losses from a previous downturn and wished upon a star.

And the multibillion dollar stimulus package announced in February? The Secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry, admitted to another Senate inquiry that the Government had no idea whether the package would help the economy at all.

All these exciting announcements, but the only thing anybody knows for certain is how much they will damage the federal budget.

It’s like going to a magic show where a magician keeps making bunches of roses disappear. The show is entertaining and uplifting, until you leave – and discover a sad, discarded pile of battered roses on the floor by the exit. There was no magic. You just spent your evening watching a goateed guy destroy flowers.

Sure, it seems fun watching the Government conjure up jobs and prosperity out of nowhere, but in retrospect, after none of those jobs appear, the economy keeps going down the toilet, and bureaucrats have eventually admitted they made it all up – it’s actually quite depressing.

Another unlikely measure to drag us out of the global financial crisis is the $150million Boom Gates for Rail Crossings Program that Infastructure Minister Anthony Albanese believes will “support local jobs and local businesses during the current global recession”.

Hey, we’re all for boom gates. But claiming that they can help stave off recession seems a bit of a stretch. Same goes for solar hot water rebates, repairing the gutters on school portables, or refurbishing playgrounds.

And isn’t it a little dubious that the best way to fix the crisis just happens to be $900 delivered straight into the bank accounts of almost every Australian voter? Wouldn’t you be more convinced the Government was trying its hardest if they thought they had to do something that the electorate absolutely hated?

I’d have a lot more faith in Rudd’s healing powers if he believed he had to raise taxes massively on working families or sympathetic pensioners to save the economy – you know, something that really hurt his poll numbers. If he announced he needed to slaughter one cute puppy every day until toxic debt was completely eliminated, he’d be cuckoo, but at least you’d know he was trying.

Last week there was another example of how the Government is trying to save the economy by giving away stuff – the latest iteration of the National Broadband Network, which, by all accounts, was developed on the back of a napkin after six or seven beers.

For a paltry $43billion, we are told that the new broadband network will directly “support” 37,000 jobs. If I have entered enough zeroes into my calculator, that’s a cost of over $1 million per job.

Whatever. Jobs are jobs, dude. It’d be a bargain at twice the price.

But it must take a lot of hubris to follow your failure to get an $8billion broadband plan off the ground with a $43billion plan, and still pretend you are in control.

When we get out of this crisis, it won’t be because the Government has come up with a policy that works, it will be more likely because the economy just can’t bear to be miserable any longer.

Market traders will discover pretty much every stock in the world is hugely undervalued, and blue chips are a better investment than canned soup, shotguns and pre-fabricated bomb shelters.

While we wait, it’s hard not to conclude that the Government is just tossing a random collection of expensive policies at the wall and praying for one eventually to stick.

The Winds Of Change Will Not Wait For Rudd’s Broadband

The failure of the National Broadband Network tender to find a sensible and willing private sector company is not surprising. But the failure cannot be blamed on the global financial crisis – the economy may look pretty dismal, but the government’s broadband policy was never very good anyway.

Partly this is because technological change has boxed the government into a corner. Earlier this year, while the NBN expert panel was dithering about looking for a firm to make good on the Labor Party’s election promise of a 12Mbps network, Telstra announced that it was planning to upgrade its already-existent cable network to 100Mbps, without a scrap of government support or subsidy. Even the firm’s mobile Next G service – which right now covers far more of Australian population than any future fixed-line network could hope to – is being upgraded to 42Mbps. And it’s not just Telstra – Optus has been periodically upgrading its cable network to match the speeds of its competitor.

Simply put, it would have been humiliating for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to trumpet a 12Mbps network while there are superior products in the broadband marketplace.

And these are just the private sector’s plans for the next twelve months. The government intends to roll its network out over eight years – who knows what we will expect from our internet connections in 2018? There’s a very good chance that the new network will be long obsolete by the time it is finished.

While the Prime Minister announced that the network will cost “up to” $43 billion over those eight years, it has only committed to an initial $4.7 billion investment into the project. This cost is, at least on the face of it, a drop in the bucket. Since coming to office, the Rudd Government has increased the size of government by a massive 21%. And the Commonwealth Government’s contingent liabilities have increased ten-fold in the last year. Nevertheless, the new NBN plan opens the door even wider to future financial obligations, especially if the fundraising and rollout doesn’t proceed as smoothly as the government is hoping.

So far no government has been willing to treat the cause of our broadband problem – the long outdated access regulations which compel Telstra to share its network at a regulated cost.Today’s announcement just maintains the fiction that the government can buy its way out of a long-term regulatory mess.

Generation Pepsi All Froth And Bubble On Leadership

Demographers fantasise that we can all be split into distinctive groups: baby boomers, and generations X and Y. But there are other categories.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics calls those born between 1926 and 1946 the “Lucky Generation”, which surely must be an inside joke, considering those years contained the Great Depression and World War II. Those born after 1986 are trendily described as “iGeneration”, which seems to have displaced the better-known title of “generation Pepsi”.

Despite the millions of words amateur sociologists and management consultants have written concluding that generations X, Y and iGen are flighty, demanding, reckless, and prone to switching jobs without warning, there is no doubt that younger workers will make more rational career choices as the economy slows. Just because someone was born in the ’80s doesn’t make them stupid.

Still, those who deliberately go out of their way to describe themselves as “the youth of today” do seem to be unusually daft. (I say this as someone who is only 26, so, happily, I escaped the “youth” designation two years ago.)

This daftness is no more evident than in the recently published collection of essays called The Future By Us. The book claims to take a bold, fresh approach to Australian public policy. Not surprisingly, most of its proposals are unrealistic, unlikely to be effective, or just deeply unappealing. And some of its proposals are off the planet. For instance, the book’s authors recommend that, along with IQ tests, the Government test every citizen’s GQ (global intelligence quotient) to measure individual awareness of foreign cultures, their travel experience and language ability. Seriously? That’s the quality of ideas that our brightest youths are devising?

Another proposal concerns a healthy fast-food chain, which could, the author imagines, “become a new drive-thru craze”. That’s true, but I wouldn’t bet the organic farm on it. Surely, if an idea like this is really that great, it would be far more productive to open the fast-food chain than write about it.

A strange belief of those who advocate greater youth engagement in politics is that young people bring fresh perspectives to policy debates.

Sure, being able to step back from an area of expertise to look at it from a new angle can be helpful. But simply not knowing very much about a topic doesn’t provide “fresh” perspectives, it just provides uninformed perspectives. Despite the manifest absurdity of policy proposals in The Future By Us, the Prime Minister gave the book a highly complimentary foreword.

The authors of The Future By Us are a typically star-studded bunch. They have been Young Australians and Young Victorians of the Year. Their collaborators serve on councils of youth, they head up youth movements, the United Nations Youth Association and Youth Climate Coalition. They are the directors of youth-specific think tanks, they join state and federal government youth consultancies, become youth ambassadors, chair youth boards and youth advisory committees, and they attend youth-only summits.

Apparently, there is even a discernible youth establishment, with its own turf rivalries, and resistance to competition from other self-appointed youth representatives.

And, consistently, all these proud youths conclude that there should be more engagement between the Government and young people – more boards, more committees, more panels and more consultancies.

But the Federal Government does not exist merely to help people pad their resume. Australia’s cultural obsession with “representation” just results in everybody spending an inordinate amount of time discussing silly ideas instead of getting on with the job.

Anyway, do we really want people under the age of 20 understanding what the phrase “interdepartmental advisory reference group” means, let alone them being members of one? Steering committees should be left to the adults who are compelled to join them only to keep their jobs.

It’s a good thing that most of these young people won’t actually become the leaders of tomorrow. Nobody likes people who describe themselves as leaders before they have found any followers. So attending a youth parliament makes it less, not more, likely that you will ever get a go at “adult” parliament.

Australia’s self-appointed youth representatives will have to start realising that they can’t keep pretending their naivety is actually creativity and therefore demand serious attention. Generation Pepsi deserves better.

More Police, Fewer Daft Ideas, The Answer To City Violence

Everybody has an idea how to fix the problem of “alcohol-fuelled” violence in the city. Last week, the Victorian Parliament tried another idea. It granted the liquor licensing authority $17.6million a year for 30 new “civil compliance inspectors” to patrol the city’s nightlife and fine pub owners. These inspectors can also enter premises without warrants if they suspect license breaches, and demand the names and addresses of patrons.

But surely there are certain legal powers in a liberal democracy that should be only held by the police? Police go through extensive education about the legal and practical limits of their powers. They are accountable to their superiors.

By contrast, the primary qualification that these new liquor inspectors require is the ability to pass a police check. They also apparently have to be of “good repute, character, honesty and integrity” – qualities that are hard to determine from a resume submitted via the internet. Should we be really giving such rudimentarily qualified bureaucrats a fair chunk of the powers of the police force?

Six months after the 2am lockout of Melbourne’s clubs and pubs resoundingly failed – late night violence went up during that period, not down – it is understandable that governments are trying new ideas to tackle the problem.

By far the most surreal idea to restrain city brawling has been Lord Mayor Robert Doyle’s recent proposal to make the hailing of taxis on the street illegal every Friday and Saturday night. He wants to direct all taxi-seekers to four giant taxi ranks around the city.

How this idea actually connects to the problem of violence isn’t entirely clear. Doyle’s plan appears to depend on the not entirely convincing theory that drunks would be less violent if they were all put in the same spot and told to wait for half an hour in a queue.

Other ideas to reduce violence are not much more convincing. Should we really ban the sale of single shots of liquor, as local governments have done in many smaller towns around the country? (Only if you believe that violent thugs exclusively drink Midori slammers.) Or should we stop people from purchasing more than a few drinks at a time, as they have done in NSW? (This rule effectively makes the Australian custom of buying rounds illegal.)

In fact, in NSW they are even stopping bars from serving alcohol for a 10-minute period every hour after midnight. In that 10-minute time-out, bar staff have to refuse any request for alcohol and offer water instead, even to those who lined up to be served well before the time-out began. Understandably, this policy tends to make drinkers more aggressive, not less.

Australians have a proud history of making a mockery of silly drinking laws – the legendary six o’clock swill was, after all, a massively counterproductive result of restrictions on the sale of alcohol. Getting around annoying regulations is just as much an Australian custom as buying rounds for mates.

Anyway, just because somebody comes up with an idea that will make buying alcohol harder, or more expensive, or just less fun, doesn’t mean that idea will prevent violent idiots from hitting each other at the end of the night.

If there’s one thing about Australian public debate, everybody has a lot of bright ideas – we don’t lack for initiatives or proposals or different ways to do things.

Every year small publishers release a few dozen books with titles like Reinventing Australia’s Green Future into the Next Century of Prosperity, or 27 Social Ideas for a Good Australia Now. These books are inevitably filled with possible new laws and government spending initiatives that are certainly creative, but are usually totally nuts.

Indeed, the only accomplishment of Kevin Rudd’s long-forgotten 2020 summit was to show just how many stupid ideas there actually were floating out there in intellectual-land – ideas that were vague, bizarre or, like the Lord Mayor’s taxi rank plan, completely disconnected from the problems they were trying to solve.

Government policies should be as direct as possible. The Government shouldn’t just arbitrarily punish drinkers and liquor licensees in the dreamy hope that the results will be politically beneficial.

While state and local governments have been dithering about with their own creative punishments for taxi hailers and pub owners, the most direct way to tackle violence still remains an increased police presence.

Unfortunately, like his predecessor Christine Nixon, new Chief Commissioner Simon Overland seems to believe that creative new regulations, not more police on the streets, will provide a solution to the city’s violence problem.

Sure, thinking outside the box is great. But when it comes to problems of law and order, don’t forget the box is there.