McMansions A Sign Of Our Country’s Wealth, Not A Lack Of Taste

Is there any more snobbish word in the Australian vocabulary than “McMansion”? This nasty term describes the big, new houses out in suburbs with names like Caroline Springs and Kellyville. McMansions, their nickname suggests, are the McDonald’s of housing – they’re super-sized, American and mass produced.

Australians build the largest new houses in the world. The average size of a new freestanding home is 243 square metres. That’s 10 per cent larger than the average new American home. Naturally our big houses have critics. Sustainability advocates say McMansions are bad for the environment. Yet there’s more going on here. Because even the most high-brow academic critiques of McMansions seem to focus less on the houses and more on the people who live in them.

Terry Burke, a professor of urban studies at Swinburne University, wrote in The Conversation last year that McMansions breach the ”good principles” of environmental sustainability. Fair enough. But Burke doubled down: McMansions are very ugly, and their occupants, who also apparently own four-wheel-drives and send their children to private schools, are giving ”an ‘up yours’ message to the world”.

That sort of sneering contempt is not uncommon. The word ”McMansion” is usually deployed not to appraise a type of house, but an entire way of life. It is all about culture – the inner city world trying to understand their strange, alien suburban cousins.

Suburban living in general is more environmentally friendly than inner-city living. A study by the Australian Conservation Foundation (no fan of consumer capitalism) concluded that, even taking into account car use, “inner-city households outstrip the rest of Australia in every other category of consumption”.

Someone who lives in a big home can still train to work, conserve energy or water, and, if they choose, live a fashionably carbon-neutral life.

Why do we build our houses so big? Well, Australia has a lot of space. But more importantly: we can. Australia is probably the richest country in the world. We have the fastest growing income in the world. We have the highest median wealth. Our only real competition in the rich stakes comes from city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong or oil plutocracies such as Qatar. And many Australians have decided to spend their riches on new homes.

Even if you don’t put much stock in income statistics, the size of our houses is – by itself – evidence that Australia is well off. Prosperity is about more than GDP data. Money isn’t everything. Anybody who has lived crammed into too few rooms knows living standards and adequate space are closely related. In rich Australia it’s understandable that many people desire extra living and storage space.

The people who best understand the relationship between housing size and living standards aren’t architectural academics or urban planners. They’re archaeologists.

Historians of the ancient world don’t have tables of wealth and income data. To estimate how rich societies were, they look at proxies. House are among the best and most accessible.

For instance, excavated homes are one way we know ancient Greece was far richer than other civilisations in the Mediterranean. According to the historian Ian Morris, between 800BC and 300BC the median Greek house size ballooned from 80 square metres to 360 square metres. And this wealth was shared among the free population, not concentrated among the ruling elite. Just as it is in 21st-century Australia. Large homes are now within the reach of moderate-income families. This is something worth celebrating, not deriding.

Antiquity had its share of sceptics about prosperity, too. Aristotle believed there was such a thing as too much wealth. The philosopher had determined what the ”good life” was, and he argued any excess property was unnatural.

It’s easy to imagine Aristotle tut-tutting about the big houses built by fellow Athenians. But it’s just as easy to imagine those Athenians ignoring his snobbery and enjoying the prosperity Greek society could afford.

Is navel-gazing our fastest growing industry?

Our economy is doing well. We have none of the endemic problems of Western Europe. We’re not facing a fiscal cliff like the United States.

Yet the Australian response to the Global Financial Crisis – after an initial flurry of policy – has been a collapse into self-reflection.

Navel-gazing is Australia’s fastest growing industry.

Trolling on Twitter, parliamentary standards, criticism of the prime minister: that these are the issues which dominate Australian public discussion surely says something about how self-absorbed we have become.

But what if Australian public debate is getting better, not worse? That the cacophony which greets every political announcement is good? And what if, yes, parliament is full of insults, procedural tricks, and partisan talking points, but this is nothing to worry about?

Put it this way: Australia’s century has seen mass street protests and vicious industrial disputes. Political parties have split. Prime Ministers have been dismissed. Now we are consumed by debates about civility, tone … etiquette. It’s bizarre.

This week Rob Oakeshott is trying to get a parliamentary code of conduct through the House of Representatives.

The draft code says that “members must at all times act honestly, strive to maintain the public trust placed in them, and advance the common good of the people of Australia”. They must “base their conduct on a consideration of the public interest”. They must “exercise due diligence” and perform “to the best of their ability”. It goes on like that.

Codes of conduct are indulgent at the best of times. Yet there’s something deeply surreal about this parliament being asked to confirm they have “due regard for the rights and obligations of all Australians”.

Saying those Australians haven’t warmed to Julia Gillard doesn’t quite capture it. And the opposition leader has had no more success drawing popularity than the prime minister. The idea their disapproval is based on a disrespect for parliamentary procedure, or an un-parliamentary attitude, or treating their office with insufficient solemnity, is ridiculous.

But it’s a classic, concrete example of this weird narcissism. Our little nation has such promise! Yet our politicians are unbecomingly partisan, and we allow Kyle Sandilands to be crude on the radio. Few other Western nations are brooding like us. (Obviously, you can only navel-gaze if everything else is going well enough.) But the causes are universal.

Partly it is a function of the opening up of the public sphere. We shouldn’t underestimate how much the elimination of barriers between the press and its audience has changed the former. Commentators used to speak into a void. They now receive an avalanche of feedback. If public debate is about exchange, we’ve never been richer. If democracy is about participation, we’ve never had it better.

Many people in public life are tricked into believing that what they see on social media is a reflection of Australia as a whole. How could they not be?

Reading the mood of the nation is art not science. Polls are expensive. Receiving harsh feedback from the public used to be like seeing mice: if you saw one you could assume there were hundreds of others the same. That rule of thumb made sense when it took effort to write to a politician. It doesn’t work anymore.

But when journalists and politicians see hundreds of tweets telling them that whatever happened in parliament that day is an embarrassment, it is bound to shape their views. Never mind that Twitter is populated entirely by statistical outliers. Its directness encourages us to see one tweet as indicative of a broader trend.

Social media is not the public but it is rapidly changing what some people imagine the public is. And this “public” is almost uniformly disappointed.

Paul Kelly argued a decade ago that the pseudo-democratic nature of talkback radio had permanently changed Australia’s political culture. Our new changes are much larger than that, and they’re happening more quickly.

It is no surprise then that public debate has collapsed into ceaseless self-reflection. Yet step outside the bubble and everything looks pretty healthy.

Australia’s parliament is as robust as anywhere else in the world. Democratic politics is meant to be about a peaceful clash of interests: we ought be worried if the political parties started working together. And when we are not sulking, the contentious issues are the big issues – immigration and the carbon price.

Australian politics is not prone to conspiracy, unlike the United States.

And we are thankfully free of that combination of ostentatious radicalism and institutional stagnation that infects much of Europe. Yes, Australia has a very middle-class democracy. And there’s nothing the middle-class enjoy more than talking about themselves.

Privacy To Be Sacrificed As Roxon Takes Liberties With Our Freedoms

Last week Attorney-General Nicola Roxon argued for one of the most significant attacks on civil liberty in Australian history – internet data retention.

There aren’t many details yet. From what we can tell, the government wants to force all internet service providers to record details about every email their customers send, every website they visit, and every communication they make.

The providers will have to store those records for up to two years, just in case the police or the Commonwealth spy agency ASIO want to look at them later.

This data retention scheme would be an institutionalised, systematic invasion of our privacy – at least as bad as the Hawke government’s proposed Australia Card was in the 1980s. And it is certainly scarier than any of John Howard’s post-September 11 security laws.

Admittedly, data retention is not an original Australian idea. Similar policies have been implemented across Europe. But their record is not flattering. Germany’s parliamentary research unit surveyed European crime statistics between 2005 and 2010 and could not find any evidence to suggest data retention was helping solve crimes. And several European countries have even found data retention unconstitutional. In 2009 the Constitutional Court of Romania found that “continuous limitation of the privacy right … makes the essence of the right disappear”. In other words, data retention is so pervasive that it eliminates privacy. You can understand why Romanians would be sensitive. They suffered under communist police state surveillance for nearly half a century.

The idea behind data retention is to try to replicate for the internet what police have enjoyed with telephone calls for decades – access to records of who we called and when. Yet there’s a big difference between phones and the internet. Telephone companies keep those records in order to bill us. So phone records already exist. Internet data retention would require companies to create a giant new database of what their customers were doing online.

This database would be many times larger and much more revealing. Most Australians make a couple of calls a day. But we send and receive dozens of emails. We visit hundreds of websites. In 2012 we do everything from banking, to researching health concerns online. The internet is nothing like a telephone.

On top of this, the government wants internet providers to take responsibility for keeping these vast new information archives secure. But there are hundreds of internet companies in Australia. Many of them are tiny. Few of them are security specialists.

The Attorney-General argued on Tuesday last week that the police needed all this new surveillance to tackle identity theft. This is clever: we need to destroy privacy in order to save it. But it is nonsense.

These new databases would be attractive targets for those very identity thieves. Criminals could just crack the security of a small internet provider. We’ve seen in the past few years how insecure corporate data can be. Even big firms struggle with security.

Making their case, Roxon and her A-G’s Department say they need to “modernise” their powers to deal with cybercrime. Yet the urgent need to modernise this law would be more convincing if it wasn’t for the fact that the 1979 Telecommunications Interception Act has been “modernised” 64 separate times since then. It has been changed on average twice a year for three decades. Indeed, the last modernisation was as recently as August.

Roxon is talking about more surveillance powers literally a fortnight after she has been granted new ones. Our Attorney-General must know this. So when will enough be enough?

Anyway, the August reform gave law enforcement agencies exactly what Roxon claims they need: the flexibility to investigate crime online. Now if police identify a suspect, they can order internet companies to log the data of specific individuals. Such targeted data preservation is reasonable. It’s like traditional phone tapping. Police get investigative powers, but don’t treat every Australian as a criminal.

Internet data retention isn’t the only new weapon the government wants. A parliamentary committee is currently considering a government discussion paper with dozens of complex proposals to extend security power over the internet. The discussion paper makes some stunning claims. Apparently, some limits on ASIO and the police merely “reflect historical concerns about corruption and the misuse of covert powers”.

Are those concerns really out of date? Politicians like to talk about balancing the need for security and the need for liberty, as if they are shouldering a heavy philosophical burden. Yet it seems new laws only ever satisfy the former. Liberty loses, inevitably, every time.

Opening statement to Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security Potential reforms of national security legislation

With Simon Breheny

The suite of policies proposed in the Attorney-General’s discussion paper add up to one of the most significant attacks on civil liberties in Australian history. Many of the proposals breach the rule of law, severely curb civil liberties and threaten freedom of speech. Our submission focused on the data retention proposal. We were disturbed to see the Attorney-General support this proposal yesterday. In our view, the data retention proposal is a much greater threat to privacy than even the proposed Australia Card was in the 1980s. The complexity of these discussion papers’ proposals is significant. Many of them interact with multiple pieces of legislation. Few have been elaborated or justified. They should be dealt with separately, with separate legislation and separate inquiries. The burden of proof rests on the government to prove to the public that after 10 years of continuous, unrelenting increases in national security power—the last major change was as recently as August this year—there is still a clear need for such extraordinary changes. Almost every single proposal in the discussion paper has serious problems. For instance, the proposal to establish an offence for failure to assist in the decryption of communications is a clear abrogation of the government’s responsibility to uphold the privilege against self-incrimination and the right to silence—vital features of our criminal justice system. We call on this committee to reject this proposal.

We also oppose the default extended period for warrants from 90 days to six months, the lowering of thresholds for obtaining warrants, the power of the Attorney-General to unilaterally vary warrants and the power of ASIO to move, alter or delete data. But the most extraordinary proposal we would like to talk about is that of data retention. This draconian proposal for mandated and indiscriminate retention of the online data of all Australians is completely lacking in proportionality, undermines basic freedoms and is in fundamental conflict with the right to privacy. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, yet no evidence has been presented to justify one of the world’s most onerous data retention regimes. Abstract references to emerging threats and cybercrime are patronisingly insufficient as justification for such an extreme example of state power.

The collection and storage of data by internet service providers also creates a considerable data security problem. Rather than dispersing information, data retention creates silos of information begging to be attacked by the very criminals this proposal seeks to limit. Many European nations have had data retention regimes in place for a number of years. A study conducted over a five-year period, from 2005 to 2010, found no statistically significant increase in crime clearance rates in countries that had adopted data retention. ‘Australians should not allow themselves to be bullied into accepting a proposal which has ominous implications and particularly a grave temptation for abuse by the government.’ That was said by the IPA in 1986 in relation to the proposed Australia card, and the same holds true for the proposals being considered here today.

Australia’s Unfounded Foreign Investment Fear

Nothing better illustrates how phoney the debate over foreign investment is than the Coalition’s discussion paper on foreign investment in agriculture.

This deeply unsatisfying document was released last month. That is, just a few weeks before the Commonwealth approved the sale of Cubbie Station in Queensland to a Chinese and Japanese textile consortium and the foreign investment debate blew up again.

The discussion paper proposes a government land ownership register, and proposes reducing the investment review threshold to $15 million. (These ideas are hard to reconcile with the Opposition pledge to reduce red tape, but, well, there you go.)

Yet there’s almost nothing in its 15 pages to explain why on earth we need a crackdown on foreign investment at all.

This absent justification is frustrating but it’s no surprise. The debate over foreign investment is a peculiar one. Investment sceptics never quite offer their full argument.

It ought to be an obviously good thing that foreigners give Australians money for things Australians want to sell. The original owners make the sale voluntarily and they profit. No-one is forced to sell their property to someone they don’t want to. And owners seem happy to deal with Chinese-Japanese consortiums.

Economists have been arguing for decades that as long as foreign investors obey Australian law there’s no reason their dollars will pose a problem. Foreign money is as good as local money.
That argument has been unsuccessful. The public disagrees strongly. According to a Lowy Institute survey (PDF) of public opinion over time, more Australians are opposed to foreign ownership of major companies than are opposed to death penalty or the Iraq war. Even “illegal immigration” is more popular.

The sole reason the Coalition’s discussion paper offers for even considering any change is this:

There is growing community and industry concern that some types of acquisitions may be contrary to the national interest and that a strengthening of the regime may be advantageous to the long-term prosperity and food security of Australia.

This bare sentence is all that’s offered to say we have a problem. “National interest” and “food security”? It’s hard to think of vaguer terms. The paper does not explain why foreign ownership may be contrary to these two concepts. And how could reducing investment make us more prosperous? Compounding the confusion, the paper informs us the Coalition “unambiguously welcomes and supports foreign investment”.

It’s all pretty thin and contradictory, but that may be the point. The Coalition’s foreign investment position is a hedge between free marketeers in the Liberal Party and agrarian socialists in the National Party. Tony Abbott seemed to have joined the latter side when he claimed in July that “it would rarely be in Australia’s national interest to allow a foreign government or its agencies to control an Australian business”. Happily, the discussion paper is not as bellicose.

Yet all political parties struggle to square what the public say they want, and what is truly in the national interest. As I argued in March in the Drum, Labor is no free market hero on foreign investment either. The Greens are openly hostile.

Cubbie Station is not a thriving business. It went into administration a few years ago. The Chinese and Japanese consortium, Shandong Ruyi, is picking up a distressed asset.

Nevertheless, according to Barnaby Joyce, the sale is a “disgrace”. Australians should have had a “first crack” at Cubbie Station.

In his view, the Chinese-Japanese firm might “compromise market competition”. Certainly, Cubbie Station is big. It produces up to 13 per cent of Australia’s cotton crop. But how would foreign ownership change that? If new owners have power to distort cotton prices, then so might any Australian owner who sold their crop overseas.

Or Shandong RuYi might avoid paying their fair share of tax in Australia. But the tax office is used to dealing with reluctant taxpayers by now.

In an interview with ABC Brisbane, Joyce said “land sovereignty” demands Cubbie Station stay in Australian ownership.

The political class expects policy debates to be economic debates. The language of public policy is the language of cost-benefit analyses, of trade-offs and productivity gains and multipliers and impact studies.

Yet Joyce’s idea of land sovereignty is nothing like our usual mechanical utilitarianism: he is making a moral claim. Australian land should be owned by Australian passport holders. It just should. There is no need to elaborate.

It is true that a big part of the foreign ownership debate is economic xenophobia, but that’s not the only part. For agrarian socialists in the National Party, it’s about nostalgia. It is about a rural Australia characterised by small family farms rather than agribusiness, of communities rather than capital markets, of local owners rather than foreign consortiums. It’s also a vision of a rural Australia where the National Party still dominates.

That world is rapidly dissipating in the face of global food markets and global competitors. Once successful agricultural businesses have to change or get out of the industry. So with this enormous structural adjustment, could it really be in our national interest to prevent distressed farmers from getting the best price for their assets? Surely not.

WorkChoices Demon Used To Fire Up The Labor Base

Nothing scares the pigeons more than WorkChoices.

Anyway, that’s the theory. Just a hint of industrial relations reform (no matter how vague) by anybody remotely associated with the Coalition (no matter how obscure) brings out the WorkChoices demon. Ministers pound out tweets. Hawker Britton squawks. WorkChoices is back!

It’s like a verbal tic – it’s what you say when you’re not sure what to say. WorkChoices is for Labor Party strategy what “umms” and “errs” are for impromptu speeches.

One day in February 2010 the ACTU said it would campaign against Kevin Rudd’s industrial changes – they did not believe Fair Work was fair enough for workers. The next day Julia Gillard put out a press release: “Abbott must come clean on WorkChoices”.

“Australians can’t trust Tony Abbott on WorkChoices”, the ALP told Australia citizens during the 2010 election. The next day Abbott promised that WorkChoices is dead, buried, and cremated. Undeterred, two days later Simon Crean sent out a press release: WorkChoices “has been dug up, dusted off, and is ready to be rolled out should the Coalition be elected.” Labor’s divining rod finds WorkChoices everywhere.

So no wonder the Labor Party went into convulsions when this week the Australian Financial Review reported that John Howard wants revive the industrial relations debate. It’s the perfect storm. The guy they defeated, calling for the policy they campaigned to destroy. Wayne Swan rushed out a press conference. Abbott-to-bring-back-WorkChoices was again the message of the day.

But Howard wasn’t even talking about WorkChoices. The former prime minister wanted Abbott to adopt the Peter Reith model, which predated WorkChoices by nearly a decade. As he said, “There is no reason why this country should not go back to the workplace system we had between 1996 and 2005 where you had individual contracts.” This line was widely cited in articles which nonetheless claimed Howard was calling for the return his post-2005 policy.

At most – at most – Howard suggested the Fair Work Act’s loose unfair dismissal provisions be tightened. His words: “you have got to do something about unfair dismissals.”

This is a reasonable view, even if you don’t agree with it. Under WorkChoices, one exception to an unfair dismissal finding was if an employee was made redundant for ‘genuine operational reasons’. That exception has been replaced by a vaguer ‘genuine redundancy’ standard, which (for instance) only allows dismissals if workers cannot be given another job elsewhere. This new standard turns industrial judges into human resource managers. Questioning the new standard isn’t revolutionary. Howard’s view is modest; almost shy.

Anyway, Howard’s views are moot. He’s no longer prime minister. There is no reason to believe Abbott is thinking about touching this hot potato. Dead, buried, and cremated, remember? Given his campaign against the carbon tax, there’s nothing a first term Abbott government will be more sensitive to than charges that the Coalition has broken an election promise, or didn’t tell the voters about its plans. The firmest guarantee an Abbott government will do what it says is how brutally they’ve attacked Labor for doing the opposite.

WorkChoices is an apparition. When it is mentioned, it rarely has anything to do with the specifics of what the 2005 reforms actually were. Four years after it was abolished, WorkChoices is now less a policy than a freelance stand-in for anything that might fire up the Labor base. That is, anything that might bring back the old magic of the 2007 election campaign. In those happy days, Labor campaigned as if WorkChoices was the culmination of a century of Tory attacks on the Australian settlement.

But for the right, WorkChoices is an emblem as well: emblematic of an aging government willing to trample Australia’s institutions to get what it wanted. The right wasn’t much more sympathetic to Howard’s last industrial relations reform than the left.

WorkChoices took industrial relations forever out of state hands, eliminating any principle of federalism in workplace policy. And it was an extraordinarily complicated piece of law. It increased, rather than decreased, government involvement over labour markets.

It is mostly forgotten that the great workplace bogeyman, the HR Nicholls Society – the fortress of managers’ rights, the unions’ bête noire – was opposed to WorkChoices. In 2006 ACTU boss Greg Combet described WorkChoices as “Kremlin-like”. The president of the HR Nicholls Society, Ray Evans, agreed. “It’s rather like going back to the old Soviet system of command and control, where every economic decision has to go to some central authority and get ticked off.” He went on: “I don’t believe the Howard Government is that keen on freedom.”

This makes recent claims that the rebirth of the HR Nicholls Society is a harbinger of WorkChoices comically ludicrous.

But then, what does it matter? The point of talking about WorkChoices isn’t to warn Australian workers. It is to find anything that might restore Labor’s support. WorkChoices is a scare campaign, sure. It’s also very tired and probably futile.

The Legacy And Abuse Of Ayn Rand

Paul Ryan told an audience in 2005 that “the reason I got into public service” was the novelist Ayn Rand.

That makes no sense at all.

Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate may be fond of Rand but Rand would not have been fond of him. She hated the idea of “public service”.

No, her ideal pursuits were industry and science and art. By Rand’s death in 1982, she had elaborated this view over two best-selling novels (Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead) and numerous essays and treatises.

Rand admired people who produced things; people who created value. The people opposed to producers are “looters” and “moochers”. They take that value and redistribute it to rent-seeking businesses and the welfare state. They are at home with the government and the tax system; they live in a world of subsidies and congressional hearings … and bailouts.

Paul Ryan supported the bank and automotive bailouts, among the most obscene examples of looting in American history. He now says he regrets those votes, and claims to oppose “corporate welfare” passionately.

His remorse would have done little for Rand. There was nothing she disliked more than inconsistency in the name of politics.

Bailouts and inconsistency are not the only differences between the novelist and the candidate. Ryan claimed his budget plan was based on his Catholic faith. Rand despised religion. Ryan is a fan of Ronald Reagan. Rand thought the Gipper was “trying to take us back to the Middle Ages”.

The war on drugs, civil liberties, abortion, take your pick: Rand and Ryan part more often than they converge. She described the modern conservative movement as the “God-family-country swamp”.
So it’s hard to understand the hyperventilating that has greeted the announcement that Ryan will join Romney on the presidential ticket. In the New Yorker, Jane Meyer suggested that by picking such a dedicated Ayn Rand fan, Romney had “added at least the imprint of an extra woman”.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews went further – Ryan actually “is Ayn Rand”, and he wants to “screw” the poor. One Huffington Post writer described him as a Rand “devotee”. Social media, of course, went bananas.

Ryan is a common type. He apparently insists interns read Atlas Shrugged when they join his staff. Politicians like to think they are in the business of ideas, but that’s nonsense. Politics is the business of power. Ideas are an optional extra, more useful for appealing to already committed supporters than formulating policy.

All those horrified progressives trying to draw a direct line from Rand to Ryan are playing his game, suggesting this senior politician is driven by ornate principle rather than base politics.

Ayn Rand’s books are abused in this way more than most. Her novels may not be great literary works, but are rich and readable (something you could not say about Friedrich Hayek’s dense prose, for instance). More than any other iconic free market writer, she creates a world with its own specific – that is, strict – moral code. And moral codes developed through fiction are seductive in a way that economic treatises are not.

We are so used to popular culture praising public service that the story of a heroic industrialist is highly subversive. If progressive thinkers want to hunt down the source of Rand’s peculiar appeal, it will be found there – radicalism is always appealing. Right now there are few more truly radical notions than private success as noble, or of capitalism as admirable.

Rand has a reputation. But she did not believe virtue was a reflection of wealth. She was careful to draw portraits not only of industrialists but of workers and artisans. One small passage in Atlas Shrugged is more suggestive of Rand’s world view than any of her later claims about altruism and Aristotle: she describes a train engineer as having “the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but [his] was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one’s task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute”.

Simply put, her novels are about human excellence, small and large. The plot of The Fountainhead pivots on an architect refusing to compromise his unique artistic vision. You can imagine the appeal. And, of course, opposed to such achievement are the predatory looters with powers to tax and regulate it all away.

Does it all seem a bit cartoonish? Surely no more cartoonish than those stories about evil industrialists and heartless capitalists defeated by noble truth seekers and crusaders for the underclass. Rand was working in a popular fiction genre full of heavy-handed socialist tracts like Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists or the novels of Upton Sinclair.

The difference is that most of those socialist works have been forgotten and Rand’s writing endures. The themes of Tressell and Sinclair have collapsed into cliché. Rand’s remain subversive.
Rand’s books have not penetrated Australia as they did the United States. She is not part of our national consciousness. Yes, she has her fans. Malcolm Fraser was one. But as John Singleton wrote, “Malcolm Fraser admires Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand admires Malcolm Fraser. All this shows is that neither knows what the other is talking about.”

Rand was part of a distinctly American tradition. The libertarian writer Charles Murray rightly notes Rand’s idea of freedom is particularly Jeffersonian. In her lifetime, she was supported by the anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal movement that died out with Robert Taft’s loss to Dwight D Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. That movement was reprised, in a very different form, by the presidential run a decade later by Barry Goldwater – one of the few politicians Rand liked.

Australia has none of that rich history. Our free market tradition owes more to nineteenth century British liberalism than the American Old Right. Rand is an import. When Singleton helped form the libertarian Workers Party in Australia in the 1970s, he admitted he’d given up on Atlas Shrugged 80 pages in.

There’s a reason one of the great histories of the American libertarian movement was titled It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. But it rarely ends there.

Confused NASA’s Role Lost In Space

The recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars was a great success. But it ought to be a bittersweet one, too. Rather than giving NASA a new lease on life, the landing underscores a big problem: the world’s premier space agency no longer has any idea why it exists.

This is not a controversial claim. At the same time Curiosity was landing on Mars, NASA was holding an independent investigation into the agency’s strategic direction. One former NASA chief put it this way: “I am utterly confused.”

Does NASA exist to put humans into space? The space shuttle program was cancelled last year and a replacement is probably a decade away – if there will be one at all. The shuttles were mothballed with no alternative in mind.

Is it to develop new technologies? Sending rovers millions of kilometres across space is a very roundabout way to subsidise innovation. Anyway, NASA deserves little credit for the inventions commonly attributed to it – Velcro was actually invented in Switzerland in 1948, Teflon by a New Jersey commercial chemist in 1938.

Is NASA’s job investigating basic science? This is certainly the most plausible purpose. But then why did NASA spend half a century symbolically placing people in capsules in the sky? And the agency’s public support, such as it has any, is based on a romantic notion of humanity touching the stars. Voters prefer astronauts – those demigods with the right stuff.

So the US Congress does not have much desire to fund a never-ending procession of robo-jeeps on Mars taking photos and doing chemistry – no matter how impressive that is. Support for a future rover program, a joint venture with Europe and Russia, disappeared when the US Congress realised it wouldn’t even be delivering samples of Martian soil back to Earth for a decade. Barack Obama’s budget dropped any American support of this ExoMars program in February this year.

America’s thrift is understandable. The US federal budget deficit is likely to be more than $US1 trillion ($954 billion) this year for the fourth consecutive year. Nobody has any real idea of how to pull the deficit back. And parachuting cars onto other planets is the ultimate discretionary spend.

NASA’s lot was not always so dire. In the beginning, the agency and its supporters knew exactly what it was all for: to demonstrate American capitalism was superior to Soviet communism. The space race and the arms race were two sides of the same coin. From Sputnik to Apollo 11, the space program was less about extraterrestrial exploration and more about terrestrial geopolitics.
It has been decades since NASA had that sort of clarity. Every other justification has been added later; awkwardly and uncomfortably welded on to rationalise NASA’s budget requests.

The firmest congressional backers of the future Mars program happen to represent districts with space-related industries. Entire programs – such as the space shuttle – have been the result of dubious claims about protecting manufacturing jobs and supporting local industry.

The space program exists to perpetuate NASA and the politically connected corporations that feed off it, not the other way around.

Hence the claims that NASA’s mission is ”to open human hearts to the Martian frontier” (as one planetary scientist wrote recently) or to “rethink our place in the universe” (in the words of a current NASA manager). No one doubts the impressive achievements of all those space missions. But basing major government programs on “feelings” just isn’t a good use of scarce resources.
Australians might be OK with all this. We get to enjoy the wasteful fruits of a dying superpower without having to pay for it.

Economist Robin Hanson, himself a former NASA researcher, has described the space program as “mostly like the pyramids”. That is, it offers prestige but is showy and expensive and pointless.
But it certainly is a monument. The moon landing will be forever tied to John F. Kennedy. Both Obama and George W. Bush tried to replicate JFK’s legacy by promising to put humans on Mars, and soon. Surely they knew this was fantasy. There is no taste for an exotic and expensive space program in our austere century.

There once was a political reason to be in space. Now, there is not. Politicians need political reasons if they are going to pay for things. That’s how democracy functions and that’s why NASA is lost.

But the private space industry is growing, rapidly. Commercial uses of space flight will be more sustainable than the goodwill of the US Congress.

And robotic missions are much cheaper than manned missions. Putting Curiosity on Mars cost little more than Victoria’s myki ticketing system. The global research and philanthropic community should easily be able to raise that sort of money. (Sound far-fetched? Then perhaps our imagination needs to start on the ground before it can dance among the stars.) They would probably be able to do it cheaper than the bloated, politicised and hopelessly confused NASA anyway.

Sent To Prison For Making An Ebook

In 2003, a man made an ebook. It was not a complex task.

Belal Khazaal downloaded some articles from the internet, excerpted his favourite bits, threw them all together, and wrote a 155 word introduction. In those brief comments, he prayed the ebook “would be of benefit to everyone working to support” Islam.

Khazaal called the book Provision in the Rules of Jihad. He uploaded it to a website that is either (depending on whose expert witnesses you prefer) a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy, or a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy including some written by terrorists.

For his efforts, Australian courts sentenced Khazaal to 12 years in prison. Late last week, the High Court affirmed Khazaal’s conviction.

Described like that, Khazaal’s actions are comically banal and his punishment bizarrely disproportionate.

Does that comic banality disappear if we add that according to the Australian law his ebook had “an obvious and direct connection with assistance” for terrorism? This form of written work was made illegal in 2002.

Or that one chapter was titled “Reasons for assassination”? It included recommended targets (“diplomats, ambassadors” and “holders of key positions” in “atheistic countries” like Australia) and recommended techniques (“wireless detonation, letter bombing, booby trapping”, “cake throwing” and “hitting with a hammer”).

Yes, “hitting with a hammer”.

Even with these extra details, Khazaal’s editing job doesn’t come across as a great threat to the Commonwealth. He took things he found on the internet and packaged them up as his own.
Khazaal complains and apologises throughout his short introduction, saying the ebook would be better if he had more time, if he was fully settled in his residence (sure it would be, Belal). No question, his professed beliefs about violent jihad are distasteful and hateful. But more than anything, he comes across as a bit pathetic.

The courts may have been correct to say that compiling this ebook constituted an offence under the Commonwealth’s Criminal Code. That does not mean these offences are good law.

Between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2011 the federal government passed 54 new pieces of anti-terror law. The legislative output was extraordinary.

As George Williams notes, during the Howard years, the government was passing one new anti-terror law every 6.7 weeks. As soon as one bill was through the Parliament, it was onto the next.
Another commentator has called this “hyper-legislation”. By volume and impact, the new Australian anti-terror laws greatly exceeded those passed in the United Kingdom, Canada and even the United States.

The 2002 changes to the Criminal Code are, in fact, some of the more benign changes made in that decade of frenzied activity. More aggressive reforms in 2005 even reintroduced the long-dormant concept of sedition. (To its credit, the Rudd government relaxed those sedition laws in 2010.)

Yet that decade of hyper-activity has damaged our legal system. The boundaries between legal and illegal activity have dangerously faded.

And with all that new law, it has still taken nine years of police work, anti-terror intelligence, and legal argument to get to the Khazaal High Court decision last week. Are we safer? Khazaal’s source material is still online.

In a long and important paper from 2005, the American constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh asked whether “crime-facilitating” speech should be considered free speech. That category includes everything from the Anarchist Cookbook, which describes in detail how to make drugs and bombs, to a lookout yelling “run!” when police arrive to arrest his criminal friend.

Volokh concluded that much crime-facilitating speech is “dual-use”. Speech which can facilitate crime can also inform non-criminals about risks, about issues of public importance (such as the vulnerability of key Australians to hammers), or even just entertain.

A government should not ban speech that has a lawful and valuable use simply because it may also be used by criminals. Volokh argued that to the extent crime-facilitating speech has such value, it should be considered to be within the bounds of free speech.

Khazaal’s ebook would fall easily within those bounds. Does Islamic theology demand violent jihad, and against whom? Khazaal has published his view. Know your enemy.

And it’s hard to say there has been any great, compelling harm caused by his compilation. Words are cheap. The Anarchist Cookbook provides more technical detail than Khazaal offered, and is free to read across the internet.

Belal Khazaal may be a bad guy. He may deserve to be in prison. Australian courts decided he could not be regarded as “a person of good character” at sentencing because of convictions in Lebanon for donating to alleged terrorist organisations.

But if he deserves to be in prison in Australia, he deserves to be there for a greater crime than making an ebook.

A Proud Nation Should Not Be Bashful Of Its Past

Our Foreign Minister can be very emphatic. Bob Carr told an audience last month it was “too risky” for Australia “even to glance in the direction of talk of an Anglosphere”.

That is, to even think about talking about the deep relationship we have with the English-speaking world would be international relations suicide – like using the wrong fork at a dinner party. We would offend our neighbours and lose our friends.

It was clear who Carr was criticising. His speech didn’t mention the Opposition Leader, but Tony Abbott is a big fan of the Anglosphere. Earlier this year, Carr’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd, was explicit: Abbott’s belief in the Anglosphere is one of the reasons he must be kept out of government.

But Abbott is right. It is obvious and important that we are part of the English-speaking world. Our heritage is not something to be ashamed of. It is not a coincidence the oldest surviving democracies are in the Anglosphere. Or that the Anglosphere harbours the wealthiest countries. Or that a tradition of liberty, stretching back to the Magna Carta, has given English-speaking nations a greater protection of human rights and private property than anywhere else. We ought to be proud, not bashful.

Sure, it’s more fashionable to talk about the Asian Century; the rise of China is fodder for white papers and airport non-fiction. But, for Australia, the Anglosphere will still shape our social, cultural and political views over the next 100 years. It’s a shame only conservatives feel comfortable talking about it.

To accept that old relationships should endure isn’t to close us off from the Asian Century. Instead, the acceptance will allow us to engage that future more confidently.

The Anglosphere is not about the English language. It is about a collection of values – individual liberty, the common law, parliamentary democracy, and open markets – we share with Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the US. It recognises that different nations are joined by a common political culture. Carr and Rudd can protest all they want: the existence of that common culture is beyond question, and we are part of it.

Yet in his recent speech, Carr threw every barb he could against the Anglosphere, even dragging up the spectre of Pauline Hanson. This is a standard trope when anybody raises our English-speaking heritage – a suggestion, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, that conservatives are not so much interested in the Anglosphere, per se, but the Anglo-Saxon race.

That charge is total nonsense. The English-speaking world includes the most successful multicultural nations on the planet. All but Britain and Ireland are built almost entirely on immigration. And their success is entirely due to their institutional heritage – a liberalism which says all people, regardless of background, can peacefully coexist under a legal system that treats them neutrally. It is thanks to our Anglosphere inheritance that Australia’s multiculturalism functions as well as it does. We must not forget the former while we pursue the latter.

And spruikers of the Asian Century ought to be cautious. Forecasting the geopolitical future is tough. A highly praised book was published in 2005 titled Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. That didn’t work out. Likewise, the Asian Century may turn out very different from what our best and brightest predict.

For instance, if China’s economy takes a dive, the region may well be led instead by India – a country almost as big, certainly more free, more closely integrated with Australia, and a former British colony to boot. India may now have the largest number of English speakers in the world. Even in the Asian Century, the Anglosphere is expanding.

Geography is less important than ever. And regions are less important than ever. Australia no longer suffers under the yoke of the tyranny of distance. Globalisation, technology, and near-zero shipping costs have taken care of that. The 21st century will be about relationships and ideas, not proximity.

So there’s an irony here. When Australia was an outpost of the British Empire, we were isolated. It took months to deliver a letter to the mother country. Now, as an independent nation, Australia is closer to other English-speaking nations than ever before. Global interconnection makes shared cultures and institutions more significant. We can communicate with the rest of the Anglosphere in a second, and travel there within a day.

The Labor Party’s intellectuals have been saying for decades Australia must assert its independence. You know the drill. We must not play deputy sheriff for the US. We ought to pursue a strong and self-sufficient foreign policy. We must be confident in our identity.

So it’s bizarre to hear our Foreign Minister claim that Australia should downplay its historical relationship with the English-speaking world – not because that relationship doesn’t exist, but because simply stating it might offend our neighbours.

You would think that was the opposite of what a confident nation should do.