Category: Articles

Emissions Trading: Towards the biggest economic change in Australian history

With Alan Moran
‘Placing a limit and a price on emissions will change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy’, states the Federal Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper, which compares the economic impact of the proposed emissions trading scheme with the breaking down of tariffs and liberalisation of the financial sector in the 1980s.
The introduction of a wide-ranging emissions trading scheme (ETS) is, as the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong, acknowledges, a ‘tough … whole-of-economy’ measure. It is an unsettling statement of politics in the 21st century that this dramatic change to the economic structure of the nation is being formulated without any clear appreciation of what it will cost, where the costs will fall and whether the costs will bring any benefits.

The ETS vs. the GST

Many commentators have pointed to the introduction of the GST in 1999 as an economic reform on the equivalent scale of the ETS. In fact the ETS is a far more comprehensive policy measure than the GST. The GST saw the introduction of a flat and stable broad based consumption tax, to raise revenue. By contrast, the ETS seeks to penalise energy intensive forms of production, such as coal, and to a lesser degree, gas based electricity production. And it plans to do so in ever-increasing increments.
After its introduction in 2010, the government plans to steadily raise the price of emissions permits by restricting their supply, until, in 2050, the country is emitting 60 per cent less greenhouse gases than it was in the year 2000. The government’s objective is for an ETS to bring snowballing price rises spreading across the economy for at least the next four decades. But the outcome will be far more injurious than this. It will mean-at least if Australia’s tax approach is not followed by all nations-the disappearance of staple industries like smelting, cement production, cattle and sheep rearing as well as the coal based electricity industry which supplies 90 per cent of our needs, and for which there is no alternative.
It will also mean a vast increase in the taxation of petrol. The price of petrol would need to rise to over $5 and perhaps $10 per litre to choke off the demand to the level proposed by the government.
As a consequence, the ETS will vastly devalue homes, factories, and commercial premises. It will require revolutionary and painful changes to the way we socialise, work and play.
The ETS differs from the GST in many other respects. Not least among these is the duration of its prior consideration. The GST was a policy initiative debated in political and business circles for nearly two decades and road tested in many nations around the world. Since it was promoted by then-Treasurer Paul Keating at the 1986 tax summit, the country fought three elections on the issue of a consumption tax. 1993 saw John Hewson’s FightBack! package partly flounder on the GST issue, 1998 saw John Howard successfully take the GST to the ballot box, and in 2001 Kim Beazley asked voters to support a partial rollback of the now implemented tax.
By contrast, the federal government’s approach to the ETS has been to emphasise urgency, and to produce a steady stream of draft and interim reports, green papers and government responses that add to the air of inevitability.
Moreover, we are not even going to see any modelling of the economic impact of the ETS until Treasury reports back in November this year.

An open-checkbook…

Less than 18 months away from the implementation of a ‘whole-of-economy’ reform, Australian businesses and consumers have almost no idea what is going to happen to prices. It is no surprise that investment is drying up in vital sectors like energy and energy intensive activities, while firms nervously wait to find out what impact the ETS will have on their business models-or what concessions they are able to squeeze out of the implementation process.
The level of ignorance about the facts and the rationale for an ETS is widespread. In July, an ACNielson poll reported that while 67 per cent supported the introduction of the system, only 39 per cent professed to understand what it was. Confusion is also apparent in political circles. For example the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, has claimed that the inflationary effect of the ETS will be a once off. Unless the initial permit allocation somehow manages to dramatically reduce carbon emissions to 60 per cent in the first twelve months after implementation, the ETS demands a steady price increase over a number of years to achieve that goal. The government is hoping that technological change will be able to offset some of the price rises, but this is surely the first time that the health of the Australian economy has been bet on the entirely unpredictable pace of invention and innovation. And throwing money at research and development-as the government plans to do with some of the proceeds of the ETS-is no guarantee of commercially viable technology.
The ETS is the largest change to the Australian economy since settlement 220 years ago. For such a significant reform, it is being designed, prepared and implemented at unprecedented speed. It lacks the comprehensive nature that would be crucial to ensure its impacts are felt equitably-the inclusion of major sectors like agriculture is being deferred and other sectors are receiving preferential treatment.
The opportunities created by inconsistent burdens and political favours will be targeted by lobbyists seeking competitive advantages around the new system.

…and the minister with the pen

And in charge of all of this is the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong. Her stewardship of the political negotiations necessary to implement the ETS make her one of the most powerful government ministers in Australian history. Under the banner of the ETS, there is no sector of the economy which is outside of Wong’s purview; no price in the country which will not be affected by the political decisions made in her ministerial office.
One particular example of the scale of these ministerial decisions is the issue of ‘trade-exposed’ industries, which will be granted some free permits until there are ‘broadly comparable’ ETSs developed in competing countries. There are numerous unanswered questions about these measures, which will involve making arbitrary distinctions and relative value judgements. For instance, not all industries can be neatly siloed off into ‘trade-exposed’ – a small army of lobbyists are descending on Canberra with their briefcases full of trade statistics for the industries they represent. How ‘broadly comparable’ must international ETSs be to make industries ineligible for free permits? Those lobbyists will have a view on that question as well. The same challenge will be presented by the energy industry, many of which will be granted some degree of assistance as the scheme is implemented.
And as some industries are in part excused from paying for the cost of carbon, achieving the ETSs short and long term goals will be ever the more challenging, and borne by those industries which are unable to receive government assistance. Further discretion will be available to the Climate Change Minister as targets are set and adjusted and other sectors are dragged into the scheme. The complexity of the ETS and the political manoeuvring which will be necessary to implement it will make the administration associated with the GST look like a family picnic.
What of the goal of the ETS? The IPA Review has long been one of the few outlets in Australia which publishes views that dissent from the global warming consensus-from critiques of the science around carbon dioxide pollution and its impact on global temperatures, to discussions of green political ideology.
The government has to be asked how the ETS will be adjusted if the now ten-year-long period where the global climate has been stable continues. Is the ETS a policy to be pursued no matter what, or is it contingent on long term temperature rises and the sturdiness of the model of relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature?
Nevertheless, even if we accept the government’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, there is much to be critical of in the ETS. How does the government intend to leverage a domestic ETS into a global carbon pact, when the self-interest of China, India, Russia and the United States seem firmly opposed to such a pact? Australia’s contributions to global emissions are as little as 1.1 per cent of the total. Do Australian politicians have such a surfeit of hubris that they imagine others will follow simply because of the example they set or be persuaded by the rhetoric they offer?
Australia is staring down the barrel of long-term, entirely unpredictable price increases, coupled with the opportunity for rent-seeking and political opportunism to redraw the contours of the Australian economy.
And, as the government points out, a domestic ETS is only the prelude to an international agreement – one which may take these complications out of the hands of our domestic climate change minister and into international bureaucracies.
The ETS may be ‘brave’, it may be ‘tough’ and it may even be ‘courageous’ economic reform. But that does not mean it is desirable.
Australia already has in place a plethora of taxes, subsidies and regulatory measures targeted at reducing emissions. These include requirements on electricity suppliers to use renewable energy, subsidies for low carbon dioxide emitting technologies and regulations on the design of houses and whitegoods. If there is a political imperative to maintain and augment these, the government’s approach should be one that is carefully targeted and able to be withdrawn or intensified causing minimal disruption, while avoiding jeopardizing international competitiveness. Recognizing the consensus that petrol is now out for the time being, a tax on gas and electricity that is directed to the household consumer would be a place to start-offering some incentives to start on what may or may not be a long haul to diminish the nation’s wealth and transform its economy.
But in the manic rush to implement the ETS, such a measured – and reversable – policy appears to be off the government’s table. It will be the Australian economy that suffers.

IPA Review Editorial, September 2008

This edition of the IPA Review focuses on the federal government’s new emissions trading scheme (ETS). It does not, however engage with the science behind climate change. In fact, in this edition at least, we avoid it deliberately.

We have all seen how the scientific contention that an increase in carbon dioxide emissions is causing rising global temperatures gets simplified and distorted by the meat-grinder that is the popular press. An article featured in The Age on August 9 shows just how far off the ranch the environmental hysteria has gone-‘rising temperatures are likely to bring increasing levels of violence to Melbourne by 2010′. As the blogger and Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Blair pointed out-‘that explains the constant riots in Queensland’.

At least these vacuous news items are slightly better than that cringe-inducing combination of moral superiority and product placement that passes for environment journalism in the lifestyle sections of our ‘serious’ broadsheets.

But anybody who points out that polar bears are not dying en masse, or that human history is full of doom-sayers who proclaim our imminent demise, are quickly characterised as ‘denialists’. Indeed, this has been the strategy pursued by the federal government to market its ETS. Rather than discussing the specifics of the scheme, the government has been careful to keep media focused on the unfortunate dithering in the upper ranks of the federal opposition.

Government-friendly commentators have been similarly eager to avoid discussing the mostly complete proposal set out in the emissions trading scheme green paper.

But as advocates for small government have argued for decades, there are two parts to every government policy. It is not enough to set a goal. You have to design and implement a policy to reach that goal. And it is most often in the design and implementation phases that policies reveal their critical weaknesses-unintended consequences creep in, and everything just seems to take on a life of its own.

But a discussion of the specifics of the ETS has been notably absent from public debate. And for good reason. For the last decade, public debate on climate change has been predictably orientated-skeptics on the right, alarmists on the left. The debate has consisted of a pastiche of hockey-stick graphs, apocalyptic predictions and ice-coverage maps.

As a consequence, left-wing commentators give the government a free pass on the scheme’s merits because they don’t fully understand the enormous economic and political complexities of an ETS. Nor do they recognise the opportunities for rent seeking and regulatory gamesmanship that the ETS presents. They don’t understand just how large the scheme looms over the economy, choosing simply to dismiss criticism as the ranting of ‘denialists’.

The science of climate change continues to be crucial to public policy debate, and the IPA Review will continue to interrogate it, as we have done for more than two decades.

But free-marketeers cannot refuse to engage and critique the ETS just because they are not happy with the science. The general public supports some sort of action on climate change, and until that support diminishes the government is unlikely to retreat from implementing a climate change mitigation policy. But as we note in this IPA Review, the public may be eager for action on climate change, but remarkably few people understand what that action might entail-let alone understand what ‘emissions trading’ means.

But if it is introduced, the ETS will define Australian economic life for decades. We have provided a condensed guide to the ETS in this edition (see pages 38-39)-we’ve stripped out the jargon, targeted the key problems with the scheme, and tried to answer some of the big questions the ETS raises.

This edition of the IPA Review was prepared under the shadow of the ETS.

Considering the ETS’s monumental importance to Australian prosperity, it could not have been any other way.

City Car Levy Is Just Another Taxing Burden

There are two basic tasks governments have historically been very good at – collecting taxes, and thinking of interesting new taxes to collect.

So it was heartening to learn that the Victorian Government has rejected a proposal by its own Department of Infrastructure to levy a tax on cars in the inner city.

Sure, the streets of Melbourne’s CBD seem to be getting more and more congested. The Federal Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics estimated in June that congestion costs us $3 billion a year. At least we don’t have as many problems as Sydney does, where congestion is so chronic that watching traffic slowly crawl through tunnels is fast becoming a popular tourist activity.

However, we should be a little suspicious when after public servants have completed a long, careful study of a problem, the only solution they can think of is to take more money from the public. As Mark Twain famously said: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” To a bureaucrat, every problem looks like an opportunity to raise taxes.

But should congestion just be taxed away?

In principle, charging drivers to use busy roads at peak time isn’t a terrible idea. Driving into the city is essentially free. (Well, it is free if you ‘assume away’ – as the economists and bureaucrats promoting these taxes like to – the cost of petrol, the cost of parking, the cost of toll roads, and the cost of the car itself.)

People tend to consume more free things than they would otherwise do if they were asked to pay for them. If the government started giving away free beer, then there really would be a widespread binge drinking epidemic in Australia.

This logic suggests that if we started charging cars to enter the city, those individuals who were unwilling to cough up the money would use public transport or avoid going into the city at all. Fewer cars on the road means a higher average driving speed in the city, and, presumably, fewer commuters going postal before lunch.

That’s the idea, anyway.

But a congestion tax in Melbourne is one of those ideas that’s great in theory, and not so great in practice. The state government has already imposed a form of congestion tax – the $850 per year charge on long-stay car parks which they originally hoped would reduce the number of people who drive to work.

But if driving to work is now a lot less appealing, then car park owners and their investors haven’t heard anything about it. There are now over 200 more car parks in the CBD than there were before the tax was introduced.

Nevertheless, the car park levy hands $40 million dollars to the state government every year, so, as Roads Minister Tim Pallas so eloquently put it a few days ago: “The government sees no reason why that levy can’t continue to operate.”

New taxes always quickly find comfortable positions in government budgets. After all, from the perspective of Spring Street, $40 million is $40 million – who cares if the car park tax has failed to do what it was supposed to do?

A very high congestion tax would, no doubt, reduce the number of cars in the inner city. But, as London’s experience has shown, a reduction comes at the expense of city retailers, who have seen a 25% drop in business following the introduction of a congestion charge in that city.

And it would also add to the many, many taxes and charges the government already imposes on motorists.

Driving is already one of the most highly taxed activities a modern Australia can pursue. Simply purchasing a car can subject you to up to five separate taxes – stamp duty, the GST, registration, and, for those with slightly more exclusive tastes, the import duty, and the luxury car tax. Car insurance gets its own separate taxes, with its own stamp duty and a GST.

Finally, drivers have to pay the petrol excise tax, the GST, and soon the cost imposed by the federal government’s new emissions trading scheme.

That’s nearly 10 taxes just to back out of the driveway.

No wonder the state government has hurriedly tried to reject the idea of burdening innocent motorists with yet another punitive charge.

Just because you can imagine a tax, it doesn’t mean you should impose it.

Battling Green Noise

“Beyond Petroleum” is a strange slogan for a company that sells mostly petrol. Is BP really that embarrassed by the 3.8 million barrels of oil they produce every day for grateful motorists, and presumably even more grateful shareholders?

If the amount of effort the petrol retailer is going to to promote its coffee is anything to go by, then it appears so.

BP has recently switched its entire coffee supply to “fair trade”. This switch has been matched by an ad campaign of billboards extolling fair trade’s social and environmental benefits.

Surely in the history of retail this is the first time that an oil company’s marketing department has decided to emphasise its petrol station coffee instead of its petrol. It’s an interesting strategy – come for the lattes, stay for the fossil fuels.

But BP is hardly alone. Corporations across the world are trying to squeeze into green clothes. Green is the new black. Apparently, environmentalism sells.

Traditional eco-activists describe all of this in the most disparaging of terms – “green wash”. But what did they expect? Years of environmental moralising has elevated eco-friendly products to the lofty status previously held by Chanel, Porsche and Rolex.

Would anybody really be surprised if in the next few years James Bond was driving a Prius? A licence to kill is not a licence to act irresponsibly, you know.

There are two characters in this story. The first is the usually well-meaning, if naive, environmental activist who seeks to activate green consciousness in the masses. The second is the entrepreneur who has figured out that consumers might pay just a little bit more for products described as “eco-friendly”.

We’ve seen the relationship between these two characters play out before. A few years ago, when “corporate social responsibility” was all the rage, businesses started filling their marketing departments with social activists and scheduling meetings between non-government organisations and CEOs. Both usually left these meetings either annoyed or just disappointed that they didn’t speak each other’s languages; businesses aren’t charities, and charities aren’t businesses. But everybody got to shake hands in front of the company photographer, and the photos were successfully reproduced in annual reports across the country.

But corporate social responsibility was so 2003. Activists and marketing departments are working together again – this time for the environment.

As a result, products claiming that they are environmentally conscious have flooded the market. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with trying to be environmental or ethical when you shop. And there’s nothing wrong with businesses trying to market their products according to contemporary fashions.

Nevertheless, remember the good old days when products were just either “biodegradable” or “not biodegradable”?

In those simpler times, products either decomposed quickly, or survived 60 ka-trillion years in a landfill.

It is all getting a little bit silly now. Publicists pile adjective upon adjective, desperately trying to beat the competition – eco-friendly, environmentally friendly, renewable, sustainable, recyclable, reusable, natural, organic, low-footprint, low-carbon, low-impact, or just clean. How can something be “100% earth-friendly”?

Green products and services have multiplied. Should we buy new organic jeans?

Across the world, real estate agents have started marketing themselves as “EcoBrokers”. And the idea of “sustainable graphic design” would sound like a parody if it wasn’t for the dreary earnestness of its advocates.

This isn’t green wash, it’s green noise. Claims that products are sustainable are more often than not confusing and contradictory. Those organic jeans rely on dyes and finishing agents that should chill the environmental heart.

And most of the time, labelling a product as “eco-friendly” is as meaningless as labelling a product as “great”. Think back to your childhood – just because tiny chocolate bars are described as “fun-size” doesn’t mean they are any more fun.

It seems that in 2008, no self-respecting marketing department can avoid pointing out just how environmentally beneficial their new range of shampoo is. (Marketing seems like a fun job: “New slightly thicker shampoo bottles can now be refilled with water for your convenience – and the planet!” or “Now dolphin free!”)

But there is evidence to suggest that all this green noise is leading to green fatigue – everybody is just getting a little bit eco-exhausted.

In a recent survey conducted by the Shelton Group, a Texas-based ad agency, 49% of US consumers said the environment was an important consideration when they purchased a product. But only 21% said that environmental considerations had led them to choose one product over another.

That’s right – less than half of the people who said the environment was a significant factor when choosing products had ever chosen a product because it was better for the environment.

So either a quarter of consumers are deliberately choosing the most environmentally damaging product in a manic desire to destroy Mother Nature, or people are just buying what suits their needs – environment be damned.

And the survey found that in 2007, 20% fewer consumers deliberately bought an environmentally friendly product than in 2006. Consumers seem to be figuring out that most eco-friendly claims are just a lot of marketing bluster.

Environmental groups find green fatigue frustrating, but they have been encouraging the overmarketing of sustainability. Greenpeace enjoys putting out press releases disapproving of new products – when Apple’s iPhone was launched, it was greeted with a barrage of overexcited condemnation for its lack of green features.

In the face of these sorts of campaigns, it is no wonder that marketing departments are trying to play catch-up.

But for a lot of businesses, the environment is just another publicity stunt.

Memo Starbucks: Next Time Try Selling Ice To Eskimos

Globalisation has pulled millions of people in developing countries out of poverty. It has sent goods, services and people around the world, linking humanity into a vast network of communications and commerce that has ultimately benefited everyone.

But, still. In the case of one American coffee giant, globalisation deserved to fail. Starbucks makes really bad coffee.

Starbucks is almost entirely pulling out of Australia – closing 61 of its 84 stores. In Melbourne, just five of the 16 stores are tipped to remain.

Sure, the company is closing stores across the world. But while the closure of 600 stores in the United States sounds like a big deal, it is trivial when you consider that there are nearly 12,000 Starbucks outlets in that country.

The demise of the coffee giant’s Australian ventures speaks volumes about the challenge of globalisation.

The lesson of Starbucks’ Down Under fiasco is simple. Globalisation is a bit overrated. It’s much harder than everybody seems to think.

So why has Starbucks worked in the US but largely failed in Australia? The secret of the company’s success in the American market wasn’t that it sold coffee. It sold coffee culture.

It is remarkable how alien quality coffee was to US consumers. As late as the 1980s, the National Coffee Association was producing advertisements just trying to convince people that coffee could keep them awake. And what small prestige the drink held in the US was occupied by the old “cup of joe” – cheap, stale and reheated sludge poured from a pot.

No wonder that when Starbucks came on the scene in the 1990s, Americans eagerly embraced it. Starbucks coffees may be weak, poorly made and overly reliant on syrups to mask their flavour, but they are certainly better than what had previously been available.

The other aspect of Starbucks’ appeal in the US has been its establishment of the cafe as a social hub. From a Melbourne perspective, the typical Starbucks may seem somewhat sterile and too over-eager to appear “comfortable”. But it is one of the peculiarities of the US that the idea that a cafe could be a social venue was quite new, at least outside the circles inhabited by the cultural elite. Comfy chairs and pleasant, if bland, music have been just as important a part of the Starbucks product as its coffee.

But when Starbucks came to Australia to bring coffee and the cafe culture to the masses, it found that we already had it. Particularly in Melbourne, we have better coffee and more relaxing cafes than anything that Starbucks brought with it.

Undeterred, the firm simply dumped what seemed to work in America into this country. When Starbucks opened an outlet in Lygon Street – a store that has since sat empty surrounded by bustling cafes – it became an amazing example of just how comprehensively a company could fail to understand its target market.

The inability of Starbucks to adjust its product to local conditions is illustrated even more clearly when we compare it to the international strategy of that other evil American behemoth – McDonald’s. Where Starbucks offers almost the same products around the world, McDonald’s varies its menu depending on local culture and local tastes. In India, they sell the McCurry Pan. In Japan, the “Ebi Filet-O” is available – a shrimp burger. In Turkey, McDonald’s offers kebabs. Some of these products may sound stupid – and Canada’s “McLobster” sounds filthy – but their existence shows that McDonald’s understands the importance of understanding its regional markets, and tries to understand the peculiarities of local culture.

The failure of Starbucks in Australia tells us a lot about globalisation too. It isn’t enough – as some anti-globalisation activists seem to assume – for an American company just to blanket a foreign market with a mediocre product.

Multinational corporations actually have to offer something better than the local alternatives if they want to succeed.

This is true as much for products such as films and television as it is for syrupy coffee and fast food. Clearly, Hollywood films are better than Australian films on some level.

Audiences flock not just to the high-cost blockbusters but also to independent American movies well before they consider seeing a local production. Hollywood knows that a movie has to be entertaining before it can be successful.

If Starbucks can teach us anything, it is that in the global marketplace, turning up to compete just isn’t enough. You have to be really good.

Connies A Nostalgic Symbol Of Lost Community Spirit

The proposal aired in last week’s Sunday Age to reinstate conductors to Melbourne’s trams was greeted with unsurprising enthusiasm. But the nostalgia for connies probably has little to do with the mechanics of tram ticketing and more to do with a general unease about 21st-century relationships.

Admittedly, the reported $12 million a year that it would cost to reintroduce tram conductors sounds a hell of a lot cheaper than the $850 million Victorians have already had to pay for the myki automated ticketing system. For public transport users, myki is at the moment no more than a figment of the imagination. And as the price of implementing myki keeps going up, it just ends up sounding more and more fanciful, like space elevators or underwater cities.

Bear in mind that once myki has its bugs ironed out, its high-tech cards available for purchase, a colourful and energetic promotional campaign blaring out of every Victorian television and it is finally – finally – switched on, myki will still cost a hefty $55 million a year to operate. With a bill like that on the way, is it really any surprise that people are getting nostalgic for the humble old connie?

After all, this nostalgia could also be sound economics. Conductors are as good a way as any to collect transport fees. Every possible ticketing system – Metcard, myki or conductors – should be evaluated on its merits and compared with alternatives. As the State Government pushes blindly ahead with myki despite its enormous cost and a three-year delay, there seems little indication that anybody has done that.

But it probably isn’t the cost of conductors, or the ballooning cost of myki that makes so many people miss the connies. As blog comments, reader contributions and subsequent opinion pieces have made clear, what people are most nostalgic for is human contact on the tram.

This is a feeling that would be easy to mock, but I won’t. Being frustrated by firms automating and depersonalising services isn’t Luddism – it is not the same as going on a machine-breaking rampage or fearing a robot rebellion.

Instead, the apparently widespread desire to return to the days of the connies seems to come more from a feeling that individuals are being left adrift in an ocean of overly complicated superannuation options, phone plans and credit-card loyalty schemes. Unfriendly businesses are common. On many customer service hotlines, the only way callers can escape the automated system and speak to a live human being is by becoming aggressive and abusive. If anything is damaging our collective psyche, it is probably unresponsive telephone hotlines.

Of course, we should not overestimate how much people are secretly yearning for human interaction. Many, if not most, people would prefer to do internet banking at home rather than traipsing off to their branch to deal with a disgruntled teller. And it’s far easier to pay bills online than read out your credit card number to a call-centre employee over the phone.

Similarly, not everybody likes the thought of having to track down a conductor on a crowded tram before their morning coffee has kicked in. It’s not entirely obvious, as Catherine Deveney contended in The Age on Wednesday, that reinstating the connies would be like finding your favourite watch that went missing 20 years ago, or discovering a long-lost dog on your doorstep.

Think back to the heyday of government-owned public transport – not all conductors were rays of sunshine motivated by nothing more than a love of commuters. Sometimes they had bad days. Not every conductor loved every minute of their job. And some of them were – to put it mildly – miserable gits. A small minority, certainly. But it might be worth recalling that not every commuter-conductor relationship spun off into a lifelong friendship.

Sure, the ideal conductor helps parents with prams, directs tourists to interesting landmarks, and knows regular travellers by name.

But there isn’t really any reason why fellow passengers can’t lift prams or aid lost tourists. There are dozens of people on the average tram.

Rather than hoping that conductors will somehow rebuild Melbourne’s community spirit, why not look at what’s holding that spirit back? We will probably discover it is much more than dissatisfaction with ticketing machines.

Protecting Kids From TV Swearing Is Not Canberra’s Job

One of the most appealing features of Australian democracy is our enthusiasm for parliamentary committees. Committees are to politicians what Bob the Builder DVDs are to three-year-olds – if a politician is busy with a committee inquiry, then they can’t get up to any mischief.

So it was easy to be happy when it was reported earlier this year that swearing on television shows – which most people would agree is one of the top issues facing Australia today, perhaps second only to jaywalking – was to be investigated by a federal Senate committee.

Sure, it’s an embarrassing waste of taxpayers’ money to have politicians spend their days discussing the need for politeness when responding to complaints about TV programs. But doing so is a lot better than if they spent that time thinking up new taxes. Senators have to do something – let them deliberate over which words shouldn’t be said on TV.

But the final 80-page report released late last month (it took nine senators four months to write) isn’t limited to platitudes and speechifying. It recommends that all new televisions sold in Australia be compelled to offer a “parental lock”, which prevents children from watching programs above a certain classification.

On the surface, this seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? Adding a parental lock to new televisions isn’t likely to cost consumers too much more money.

But is good parenting impossible without help from Canberra?

The parental lock is very similar to a program implemented in the US after a surge in controversy about violence on TV. All TVs sold in that country have to have a V-chip installed that allows parents to block certain shows. (Journalists joked that if the sex-obsessed Republicans had introduced the measure it would have been called the S-chip.)

But while 70 to 80% of American parents claim that they are “seriously concerned” about their children watching inappropriate TV programs, their concern doesn’t extend to actually using the V-chip. In 2004, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that only 15% of parents had even tried switching it on. As a consequence, some US politicians have argued that the V-chip should be set at its most restrictive level as its factory default.

It’s easy for parents to claim in a telephone poll that they worry about their kids mimicking the rude words heard on TV. But you have to wonder just how seriously concerned those parents are if it is too much effort to switch on a function that their TV already has built into it. If the US experience is anything to go by, the parental lock will be a flop. And Australian television is already much tamer than TV in the US.

After all, just as you don’t have to buy your children junk food even if they really want it, you don’t have to let your children watch rude programs.

One of the more bizarre reasons the nine senators thought that parents needed help from the Federal Government was because televisions were increasingly being placed in kids’ bedrooms, far from the watchful eye of adults. But perhaps concerned parents could consider simply moving the offending TVs somewhere children don’t sleep.

Indeed, monitoring what TV programs children watch isn’t actually that hard. And for those parents that feel they need some technological help, there are numerous TVs and set-top boxes that already offer parental locks. Is it that hard for parents to inquire about these features when they first buy their TV?

Parents who want to shield their children from the rougher parts of pop culture can easily do so with off-the-shelf technology and simple common sense.

But nevertheless, politicians of all stripes pander to moralising conservative lobbyists for whom the real issue isn’t that their children could hear rude words on TV, but that there are rude words on TV at all. As usual, politicians aren’t actually thinking of the children. Politicians are thinking of marginal electorates.

Perhaps some perspective is needed. Parents and governments won’t have failed if the next generation of Australians lead happy and productive lives, but curse like drunken pirates. Society won’t crumble. The Senate committee should have asked everybody to take it easy – Canberra isn’t a parenting aide.

Politics, not sport, is the purpose of the Olympic Games

Available here in PDF.

On the March 26 1938, six months after he died, Pierre de Coubertin’s corpse was exhumed from its grave in Lausanne, Switzerland.

His heart was cut out and transported to Olympia in Greece. The heart of the founder of the modern Olympics was then reburied in a ceremony attended by his long-time friend, Nazi bureaucrat, and organiser of the 1936 Berlin Games, Carl Diem.

The tomb of Coubertin’s heart has remained a spiritual centre of the Olympic movement. The tomb was the first destination of the Beijing torch relay — after the torch was lit with the sun’s rays and a parabolic mirror by an official Olympic ‘Holy Priestess’, of course. And late last year the tomb was the site of a ritualistic olive tree planting, to symbolise the Olympic movement’s appreciation of the environment, and to demonstrate the support of Coca-Cola for the Games.

These bizarre rituals, performed around the decomposing body organ of a dead Frenchman, are emblematic of the sometimes odd, sometimes deeply disreputable, and always lumbering and heavy-handed symbolism that has soaked the Olympic Games for a century. The torrent of symbols, emblems and rhetoric that accompanies the Olympics is supposed to convince us that the Games have a moral and ethical stature beyond reproach.

But all this pageantry obscures the Olympics’ essential purpose — first and foremost, the Games are designed to shine glory upon the nations that hold them. National politicians and government use the Olympics to achieve their individual or national goals.

Certainly, the politics lying behind each Olympics may often be diffuse, but it is overt. Sport may be the style of the Olympics, but nationalism and geopolitics are the content.

The ideology of ‘Olympism’

For such a long-running institution, the Olympic Games to a remarkable degree still reflect of the idiosyncratic vision of the founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the
French baron Pierre de Coubertin.

Coubertin was born into a Catholic and Royalist family in 1863, but in the turbulent ideological climate of the French right-wing in the Third Republic, his political views quickly diverged from the traditional. From a modern perspective, his politics were quirky, even contradictory; he described himself as a democrat, yet at the same time nominated the ‘triumph of democracy’ as one of the four political innovations which humanity could have gone without. But he was in many ways typical of his era—a conservative aristocrat whose political and moral views had much in common with the left-wing progressives of the time.

While conservatives like Coubertin rejected the utopian dreams of their socialist counterparts, they shared with progressives and socialists an antipathy towards individualism, a belief in the power of experts, a deep faith in the state, and an obsession with proto-totalitarian concepts like ‘moral hygiene,’ ‘national fitness’ and eugenics.

In sport, the conservative progressivist Coubertin found an outlet where he could express all of his political and moral views. While many were searching for national meaning after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Coubertin argued that ‘sports can provide the virile formula on which the health of the state can be founded.’

But most importantly for the development of the Olympic ideology, Coubertin complemented this nationalist ethos with a staunch internationalism. Coubertin founded the Olympic movement with a doctrine of ‘universalism’, which as it appears in the most recent Olympic Charter is described as ‘any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.’ But as John Hoberman writes in The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics and the Moral Order:

What this has meant in practise is that the IOC has turned a blind eye to any sort of political crime committed by a member of the Olympic movement. In September 1978, the President of the IOC Lord Killanin, made this claim: ‘I am not for one moment saying we have any right to tell what governments should do in the interests of their own country…’ Such a disclaimer is made to preserve the ‘universality’ of the movement. What is thereby forgotten is that another side of universality is the failure to discriminate.

It is this failure to discriminate that led the Olympic movement to proclaim its support for ‘universal fundamental ethical principles’ while at the same time throwing its support behind the three largest dictatorships of the twentieth century — Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and now Communist China. Certainly, this is slightly unfair to China — in 2008 its human rights record is poor, but is markedly better than it was during the Great Leap Forward — but the country is still a dictatorship with at least 4000 domestic political prisoners.

This would, however, have been fine by Coubertin, who dismissed ethical questions with a trite affirmation of moral equivalence. In an interview during the 1936 Berlin Games, he argued that:

It is good that each nation of the world be granted the honour of putting on the Games and of celebrating them in their own manner, in accordance with its own creative powers and by its own means. In France they are disturbed by the fact that the Games of 1936 were illuminated by a Hitlerian force and discipline. How could it have been otherwise?

This doctrine of ‘universality’ above all other considerations was also the lynchpin upon which the Soviet bloc was able to hang their claims that the communist world was being unreasonably ignored by the IOC.

After all, for Coubertin, a nation’s political system is merely a reflection of its culture. For the Olympic movement, totalitarianism is not an aberration, but an accepted part of the international cultural patchwork. As a consequence, there is very little in the Olympics’ doctrine of universalism that suggests any allegiance to ‘fundamental ethical principles’.

Pagentry and politics

For the cities and corporate sponsors of the games, Olympism and its doctrine of universality are not much more than a philosophy of convenience; a pre-packaged ideology ready to be adopted when the Olympics come to town. Few outside the IOC share Coubertin’s views on the moral neutrality of political systems, or, indeed, the IOC’s view that politics has nothing to do with the Olympic ceremony.

Instead, for the host nations, the games represent an easy opportunity to conduct domestic and international politics without the distraction of being accused of doing so. Even the athletes, standing on the winners podium, draped in their national flag and singing their national anthem, must realise that politics, not sport, is the dominant Olympic event.

For much of the life of the modern Games, politics was defined by the Cold War, which divided participating nations into clearly delineated factions. The nationalistic passions inflamed by this international and ideological rivalry became the primary characteristic of the Games in the second half of the twentieth century.

Australians may remember Melbourne 1956 through sepia-tinged nostalgia, but the political circumstances of those Games were controversial and impassioned. They were held in the inter-
national atmosphere created by the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The then President of the IOC, the American Avery Brundage, in an attempt to separate the Melbourne Games from the fragile international situation, argued desperately that ‘the Olympic Games are contests between individuals and not between nations.’

The President of the Netherlands Olympic Committee, which boycotted the Games responded bitterly: ‘How can sports prevail over what has happened in Hungary? How would we like it if our people had been atrociously murdered, and someone said that sports should prevail?’

His questions are surely more morally clear than any of the vague platitudes contained in the lavish Olympic Charter.

The IOC’s pleas for calm had little effect on the political aggression displayed during the contests. A water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union was a violent blood bath, but Hungary managed a 4-0 victory.

The attitude described by an American contestant at Helsinki (the site of the 1952 Olympics) was characteristic of many of the Olympics during the early Cold War period:

[Russians] were in a sense the real enemy. You just loved to beat ‘em. You just had to beat ‘em. It wasn’t like beating some friendly teams like Australia. This feeling was strong down through the entire team, even [among] members in sports where the Russians didn’t excel.

Not only has the international political context of the Games undermined its claim to the moral high ground, but the Olympics have themselves been affiliated with state violence. As Hoberman writes, ‘the world of sport has given rise to more bizarre, violent, aberrant, and even criminal behaviour than its faithful public is disposed to recall.’ The most notorious
example of this was the Tlatelolco Massacre, which occurred just ten days before the 1968 Mexico City Games, where the Mexican government fired upon a demonstration of 5000 students demanding greater human rights. Some estimates of the death toll at Tlatelolco range up to 300 people.

And quite apart from the failure of the IOC to influence China’s poor human rights practices in the lead up to Beijing, critics of the communist regime can point to mass home evictions to make way for construction. One left-leaning human rights group, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, claims that there have been over 1.25 million Chinese forced to resettle, although the group has not made their report public, apparently to protect their sources. The Chinese government only acknowledges 6,000 homes seized, all with adequate compensation. Nevertheless we know that like many other previous host cities, Beijing has launched a program to ‘clean up’ the city of beggars, hawkers and prostitutes before the tourists arrive.

Much of the pageantry of the modern Games was developed by the totalitarian hosts. Nazi propagandists invented the torch relay in order to ferry Western journalists around idyllic German villages, in support of the Nazi’s rural ideology.

And the opening ceremony to the Moscow Games was reportedly the most expensive ever held, a gigantic billboardfor the social superiority of Soviet communism, setting the stage for the lavish ‘cultural’ ceremonies of the coming decades.

The Olympics offer totalitarian or otherwise oppressive governments an opportunity to repurpose the publicity accorded to sport for the benefit of the state and its ideology. The official website of the Chinese Olympic Committee is unambiguous about Beijing’s ideological content, advertising its National Fitness Program, which has been hard at work since 1995 ‘promoting mass sporting activities on an extensive scale, improving the people’s physique, and spurring the socialist modernisation of our country’.

The same website laments the attempted politicisation of the Beijing Games by ‘some Western forces’ and ‘separatists’.

For democratic states, the political purposes may be different, but they are still clear. In Sydney 2000, the government emphasised Australia’s tourist potential. Politicians wanted their country to be seen as more than just a ‘good source for raw materials—a perpetual cry of Australia’s economic interventionists.

Economic distractions

Part of the reason we be can sure that it is politics that is at the centre of governments’ relationship with the Games is because they cost a great deal but provide little economic benefit. Politicians eager to host the Olympics talk up their financial and social benefits — rhetoric which the IOC is more than happy to encourage.

The Olympic movement has had a turbulent economic history. For most of its history, the Games have been overwhelmingly supported by government finances, with corporate sponsorship and the sale of television rights playing a supportive role. This model of Games funding reached its zenith with the Munich 1972 and Montreal 1976 Olympics. But the City of Montreal ended its closing ceremony with a deficit of 2.7 billion dollars (in 2000 terms) which it only managed to finally pay off in 2006.

After Moscow 1980, the next Games held in a democratic nation were the Los Angeles Games of 1984, and following a significant protest movement, the citizens of LA refused to provide any public funds for staging the Olympics.

In 1984 there were no formal organisational links with the city, and the United States Olympic Committee managed to skirt IOC regulations which would have otherwise compelled them to provide public funds. As a consequence, the 1984 Games were the first to be fully paid by the private sector, with only minimal infrastructure upgrades and sport facilities provided by the city.

Successive games have managed to slowly reinvolve public financing, and the Sydney Games set a new standard in government involvement, when the NSW government and Commonwealth provided US$1 billion (in year 2000 dollars). For Beijing 2008, the Chinese government’s habit of trying to take credit for private investment makes it hard to properly account for the taxpayer’s contribution, but the Belgian analyst Gilbert Van Kerckhove conservatively estimated a figure of roughly $5-6 billion.

But what for? Supporters of the Games can cite a myriad of potential benefits of staging the Games. Few of them stack up. Tourism is the most common perceived benefit from the Olympics. Tracking the long term impact of the Games on a city’s tourist market is tough. In The Economics of Staging the Olympics, Holger Preuss argues that it is impossible to prove that the Sydney Games increased Sydney’s tourist market, as the impact of September 11 on the world’s tourist market muddies the evidence.

But September 11 occurred more than twelve months later and had worldwide, not Australia specific, impacts. Furthermore, as Preuss concedes, local tourism markedly decreased during the Games period. As an example, Sydney Zoo saw a 300 per cent decrease in tourism. Certainly, many studies — often commissioned by governments seeking to defend their policies — proclaim long term tourist increases to be in the hundreds of thousands.

But the causal link between a city hosting the Games is far from established. Calgary, site of the 1988 Winter Games, saw a 12 per cent decrease in tourism immediately following the Games, and a 10 per cent decrease the following year.

An increasingly common benefit claimed from the Olympics is infrastructure improvement. As the argument goes, staging the Games allows a city to conduct widespread infrastructure upgrades, avoiding the normal political bargaining required to achieve even modest investments. From this perspective, the hosting of the Olympics is merely an excuse to conduct the normal business of municipal government, allowing the city to upgrade its airports, road and rail networks and telecommunications services.

Undoubtedly, hosting the Olympics sparks a frenzy of big infrastructure projects. But a study by a group of RMIT University economists demonstrated that while overall the market did not respond to the announcement that Sydney was to host the Games, the only sector that did respond positively was the construction industry. Building firms — and politicians interested in basking in the bright light of political glory—are the only unambiguous beneficiaries of the Olympics, outside the athletes themselves.

But infrastructure disasters are common in the history of the Games — many projects, like the Montreal-Mirabel International Airport, while initially praised, are quickly revealed to be little more than boondoggles.

At their best, the Olympics are a government supported circus provided by politicians from democratic countries who want the world’s media to flock to their most attractive city. But at their worst, the Olympics have have provided totalitarian regimes with pre-packaged marketing programs, allowing them to paper-over serious human rights issues while they pretend to be enlightened members of the international community. The moral authority that the International Olympics Committee continues to claim has been repeatedly shattered by the experience of 100 years of the Olympic Games.

Have bad movies edged out good?

A review of Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics.

It may not come as a surprise that Hostel: Part II, the 2007 movie which depicts nearly an hour and a half of brutal, explicit and uninterrupted torture, is part of a rich cultural lineage.Hostel II is part of a new movement of neo-exploitation cinema, and its direct artistic ancestors date back nearly half a century.

So have ‘bad’ movies like these edged out ‘good’ movies?

Few cultural fields illustrate the blurring between ‘highbrow’ art and ‘lowbrow’ craft more than the movies. As Jeffrey Sconce points out in the new edited collection of essays on trash cinema Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics, movies were never an elite art; condemned to be practiced and enjoyed only by the cultured few. Instead, movies have always existed only to entertain, and as such, have always been a ‘vulgar medium’ designed to appeal to the unwashed masses.

But there is vulgar, and then there is vulgar. Sleaze Artists explores the depths of trash, exploitation and grindhouse cinema of the last forty years. Not only do the films discussed inSleaze Artists have no artistic pretentions; they barely even have entertainment pretensions. For the cinema underground, the first priority is to titillate.

The essays in Sleaze Artists are diverse, as is typical for an academic collection, with contributions covering gay military films, boredom as a motif in the Italian underground, the quasi documentary elements of the postwar nudie film, and an account of the production and distribution of a gothic horror movie that couldn’t find an obvious market. The authors are an assortment of professors and cultural studies academics from the United States; if they were Australians, our first reaction would be to decry a university system that redistributes taxpayers’ money to tenured lecturers just so that they can watch all eleven Friday the 13thfilms, but as they are Americans we can just marvel in amusement. So it is easy to write that many of the essays in Sleaze Artists are fascinating. After all, it’s not our taxes.

As an example, an interesting chapter by Kay Dickinson looks at the strange partnership between Italian horror of the 1970s and early 1980s and the often very beautiful soundtracks which accompanied them. In this, the archetypal example is the infamous 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust. The gruesome violence of this film-the director, Ruggero Deodato, was forced to prove in an Italian court that he had not actually killed anybody during filming, and the film shows the actual slaughter of half a dozen live animals-is matched with an unpredictably lush synthesizer jazz score by the composer Riz Ortolani. Dickinson nominates the dissociative and unnatural quality of the synthesiser itself as a conscious artistic decision by the filmmaker to unnerve the viewer-as if seeing a live turtle dissected on screen was not unnerving enough.

Tania Modeleski’s chapter on the 1960s director Doris Wishman is one of the few in Sleaze Artists that shows the necessarily ambiguous relationship modern audiences have with exploitation cinema. Modeleski, a Californian academic with an interest in feminist film criticism, is deeply ambivalent about her subject. Doris Wishman produced some brutal films. Her female protagonists get raped, abused and forced to murder. Every bruise is carefully fetishisticly recorded for the silent male audience.

For Modeleski, that a female director produced the most misogynistic films of the genre is a distinct challenge. Most of the essays in Sleaze Politics seek to normalise their films and their audiences-to make the unusual seem pedestrian. Furthermore, a focus of the cultural studies movement over the last few decades has been not just to make marginalia the focus of legitimate academic study; it has been a conscious effort to detect ‘transgressive’ artistry and politics in the cultural underground. Movies are carefully parsed and examined to discover ironic visions worthy of the twenty-first century arts faculty in even the most forgettable cookie cutter exploitation genres. If you pick up a copy of any schlock horror film in a bargain DVD bin, the advertising on its case will proclaim its ‘subversive’ nature. In most cases, this subversiveness is absent and rarely more than wishful thinking. After all, modern audiences, trained on Quentin Tarantino-esque postmodernism, like to think everything is ironic.

But Wishman’s ‘roughie’ films are too grotesque to support such a reading; there is no self-conscious and knowing winks in her depictions of female abuse. Her protagonists may have lesbian encounters, but Modeleski is unable to interpret these as in any way ‘feminist’-instead, they are shown as just more abusive relationships down the rabbit hole of female degradation. Some of Wishman’s films simply cannot be reformed under the banner irony and subversiveness-they are too repulsive to be squeezed into the feminist narrative, despite Wishman’s gender. (This has not, however, stopped some critics from trying.) Modeleski concludes mundanely that Wishman needed the money, and simply adhered to the conventions of the genre she worked in.

The American movie critic Pauline Kael once provocatively wrote that she found Wild in the Streets, an unassuming and cheaply made film about hippy teens taking over the American government, far more interesting than Stanley Kubrick’s achingly important and serious 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in the same year. The final essay, ‘Movies: A Century of Failure’ takes this observation as its jumping off point, and tries to work out just what the appeal of underground or otherwise unsuccessful films is. How have embarrassingly bad movies-like Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s wildly unpopular 2002 romantic comedy Gigli, or 2004’sCatwoman, which reduced the Oscar winner Halle Berry to a lifeless, latex wearing sex object-managed to ascend the cultural ladder and gained cult status? How has the 1950s director Ed Wood, whose films are barely able to sustain a timeline, let alone a plot, become a modern film legend? Whenever Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space is again nominated as the worst film ever made, it assures that he will be watched and discussed for far longer than some of the middle of the road directors today. And it is likely that Showgirls, the 1995 film that was little more than an excuse to display the former teen actress Elizabeth Berkley naked, will, having now achieved cult status, be seen for decades.

Jeffrey Sconce argues that film going is, at least for those who ask for great things from the movies, almost always one of disappointment-rarely do movies live up to their expectations. Films are always too formulaic, characters are always too poorly drawn, and direction is always too flat to maintain our interest. And so, the pleasure of unexpectedly finding an inexplicably bizarre film on late night SBS or buried at the rental store becomes a far greater thrill than can be provided by the majority of material produced in the Hollywood machine. The frustration with ‘bad’ cinema became a search for ‘so bad it’s good’ cinema.

But, as Sconce writes, disappointment is never too far away, even if we are actively searching out movies that are cringe-inducing sub-par. After all, how could a film with the title ofSatan’s Cheerleaders (the poster for which adorns the cover of Sleaze Artists) ever live up to the expectations encouraged by its title? Ditto for Zombie Holocaust; Santa Claus Conquers the Martians; Two Thousand Maniacs! or Nude for Satan. Could Death Bed: The Bed That Eats ever be as good as it sounds?

It would be easy to conclude that the cinema described in Sleaze Artists is no longer on the cultural margins, but has now firmly entered the mainstream. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez self-consciously replicated the underground aesthetic in Grindhouse-their double billed feature which included a road revenge flick Death Proof and the Texas zombie homagePlanet Terror. The video store clerk, proudly schooled in the most obscure exploitation and horror films, is a nearly extinct cliché; displaced by online forums dedicated to bad cinema and the steady archiving of cinema’s miscellany onto DVD.

And our relationship with underground films has even changed in the meantime. In the early 1990s, the American television show Mystery Science Theater 3000 specialised in uncovering some of these B-grade science fiction films and subjecting them to relentless ridicule. Nearly two decades later, our response to yesterday’s cultural leftovers is less likely to be ridicule than ironic respect. Not just the high-profile self conscious mimicking of Tarantino, but scores of films are released each year that resurrect themes and techniques of the underground. The famously dated zoom shot was once an amusing anachronism, but it now appears in many contemporary productions with barely a hint of irony. Contemporary horror franchises likeSaw and Hostel which feature extended torture scenes are nearly indistinguishable from the video nasties popular two decades ago, although more professionally produced.

The English Conservative MP Charles Walker described 2007’s Hostel II not inaccurately when he said that ‘from beginning to end, it depicts obscene, misogynistic acts of brutality against women-an hour and a half of brutality’; a description which could just as easily apply to a Doris Wishman film. Grindhouse cinemas may have closed down and videos been replaced by DVDs and internet file-sharing, but movies whose first priority is to shock are shown in chain theatres across the globe, not in small off-Broadway adults only theatres.

But standards have changed. Modern audiences may accept-it would be inaccurate to write ‘are comfortable with’-special effects depictions of sadistic violence at the cinema but they would not accept the very real slaughter of a very real turtle, as occurs in Cannibal Holocaust. Similarly the masochistic brutality seen in the video nasties are absent in modern homages to exploitation. Even the semi-pornographic undressing scenes which were awkwardly squeezed into the typical underground 1970s horror film have no contemporary equivalent. The moral content of mainstream exploitation in the twenty-first century and postwar underground exploitation may seem superficially similar, but there are major differences; there are new ethical and moral lines which modern filmmakers do not cross.

For these reasons, it is important to avoid the typical conservative reaction to seemingly immoral-or disconcertingly amoral-culture. It is certainly not clear that the mainstreaming of trash is a sign of a cultural decay. Highbrow cultural production exists comfortably beside trash, and more often than not they share the same audiences. Furthermore, there exists no convincing argument that immorality and criminality at the movies transposes to immorality and criminality in the real world. For the most part, violent crime is in decline across the western world.

Filmgoers are not that easily influenced. Individuals who watch the movies invariably apply their own moral standards to the movies, rather than the movies imposing morality upon viewers.

Jeffrey Sconce’s final essay may be melancholic, but it is not uniformly negative about the film industry. And the dominant emotion after having read Sleaze Artists isn’t one of regret for the decline of moral standards. The underground can certainly be ugly, but it is vibrant. For every Oscar winner, there are one hundred middle brow romantic comedies, and ten Nude for Satans. If we ignore our cultural trash, we ignore a large part of our culture.

IPA Review Editorial, July 2008

Last year, the IPA Review had its sixtieth birthday, making it the oldest continuously published political magazine in the country since the demise of The Bulletin. And this year we were awarded the Sir Anthony Fisher International Memorial Award for best magazine by the US-based Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

The mission of the Atlas Foundation is, in the words of its former President, John Blundell, ‘to litter the world with free market think tanks’. To do so, it supports new and existing think tanks by providing logistic and intellectual advice. Much of its work is focused on encouraging free market activists in parts of the world where our message is so alien that operating a think tank has as many legal and safety challenges as intellectual ones.

The Fisher prizes are awarded by a distinguished panel of judges which includes Atlas President Alejandro Chafuen and George Mason University Professor Tyler Cowen, as well as economists and political scientists from the Heritage Foundation, the Mont Pelerin Society, the leading German think tank Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, and the Institute for Humane Studies, among others.

The IPA Review, long established as a central part of Australia’s political culture, has now been recognised by this influential free market group as doing something genuinely important for the cause of liberty. Australia is neither on freedom’s frontiers or a monument to its greatest successes, but internationally the health of Australian liberty is important.

It is hard to think of another country that has been so completely colonised by green dogma as Australia-we should hope, for the sake of the world’s poor, that our environmentalists aren’t too focused on exporting their anti-growth ideologies elsewhere. How our governments respond to the controversies over climate change, or the Nanny State, or over-regulation, is keenly observed by foreign politicians and activists.

Just as we dig through the impacts of the policies of foreign governments, so do policymakers and critics outside our borders. As Australian governments implement more and more regulations which inhibit individual choice and liberty, we can be sure that aspiring Nanny-Statists in other countries will be watching closely.

Why is the IPA Review important? Australia is a small country. As we lack the size of our English-speaking friends – the United States and Great Britain – we can never be entirely confident that the voice of liberalism will always be heard. As Richard Allsop points out in his review of two recent political biographies in this edition, the Australian public went almost forty years at the beginning of the twentieth century without hearing the cause of political and economic liberty defended in the federal parliament. When it was heard, it was a rare curiosity; widely dismissed as an ideological anachronism. Liberalism’s supporters in the public arena were just as scarce.

In 2008, there is among the educated public a much greater awareness of the existence – if not an understanding of the importance – of liberalism’s political and public policy views. Liberalism’s opponent today is not socialism, as it was when the IPA Review was founded in 1947; liberal philosophy now stands against an arguably more challenging adversary – soft ‘market-orientated’ managerialism, which professes an appreciation of competition and commerce, but is in fact dedicated to limiting it.

Today’s left do not carry utopian Marxist tracts that contain fully elaborated plans for revolutionary government. But now the left clutches cherry-picked studies from the fields of psychology and behavioural economics. We are told that markets are irredeemably irrational, that we need to increase taxes in order to fully account for ‘social costs’ and externalities, and that only a Nanny State can look after us. The left has replaced the socialist objective with a rigid utilitarianism that has no interest in any philosophical or moral discussion about the appropriate limits of government action. They are nonchalant about the impact their policy prescriptions will have on individual freedom. And they are positively hostile to the concept of personal responsibility – people are too irrational to take responsibility for their own actions, and if they did, there would be too many ‘social costs’ for the government to possibly tolerate.

The need for a voice of liberalism in 2008 is just as strong as it was in 1947. The Sir Anthony Fisher International Memorial Award recognises the vital role the IPA Review has in defending liberty in Australia.