As 2011 opens, Labor is going to face that Julia Gillard’s biggest problem is a crisis of legitimacy.
Not the sort of legitimacy Tony Abbott was talking about in the weeks after the election: a government formed in a hung parliament is a valid government, and Gillard is as much a Prime Minister as any other prime minister.
But Julia Gillard commands neither influence over her colleagues, control over the processes of government, nor direction of the media cycle. In the months since taking the leadership, she has utterly failed to stamp the Government with her brand or even made clear her philosophy of government.
Everybody has noticed that the Gillard Government has no vision, but increasingly you have to wonder whether it has any purpose at all.
Kevin Rudd had an awful 2010, but his control over all these things in the first 18 months of his government shouldn’t be forgotten.
It was just the way Rudd achieved that control – the endless parade of announcements and policy revolutions that spectacularly blew up this year – that eventually did him in.
By contrast, Gillard’s leadership was precarious from its first moment. The leadership spill did more than install a new Prime Minister; it appears to have undermined the internal coherence of federal Labor’s parliamentary party.
The Greens have received the credit for the recent debate over gay marriage, but it wouldn’t have been possible if not for the erosion of Labor’s internal discipline in the wake of the spill. Gillard’s strong claim that she doesn’t support gay marriage did nothing to halt dissent from within her own government. She may have even stoked it.
It’s no longer fashionable to do so, but I still blame Rudd for Gillard’s problems.
Much was made of Gillard’s claim in an interview from Brussels that foreign policy was not her passion – education was. Yet education has been stubbornly out of the Prime Minister’s orbit since.
Rudd left so many balls in the air that Gillard’s first few months has been entirely focused on tackling them one by one.
Take the politics of asylum seekers. Rudd’s dithering between toughness and compassion throughout 2009 and his last months in 2010 left the Government with no coherent message to counter Abbott’s simple mantra.
Rudd then threw a bomb at Gillard in his penultimate press conference, incoherently and confusingly claiming that the leadership question was whether the Government should “lurch to the right” on asylum seekers.
Once she got the job, Gillard grasped a badly underdeveloped East Timor solution which didn’t seem to have left the whiteboard stage. (It’s only last week that East Timor received a document outlining the plan – five months after it was announced.)
And she struggled to demonstrate that her East Timor plan was at all different from the Pacific Solution her party had spent a decade condemning.
It’s not much better across the policy portfolios. The lavish Henry Tax Review has ended with the resignation of its author and a mining tax going into its third iteration. Gillard tried once to wrestle the mining tax down once before, but the drama looks to intrude well into the New Year.
Or a price on carbon. Gillard is committed to ambitious climate reform, we’re told. She’s just not entirely sure what that reform is yet. Perhaps it depends on Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor.
Gillard has struggled to balance these huge policy battles (you could also include health and water reform) with her avowed belief that Labor lost its way in July. She doesn’t want to abandon the appearance of reform zeal which Rudd cultivated, but knows those attempts at reform were the sources of the Government’s problems.
It leaves her government hesitant, cautious, and ever so slightly intimidated by its own policies.
The Government is deeply uncomfortable in its own skin, led by a Prime Minister whose principal qualification for leadership was being agreeable to union bosses and ALP heavies who felt neglected under Rudd.
That’s not to say Julia Gillard couldn’t have been a good Prime Minister – or even a great one – or that she couldn’t be one in the future. Right now there’s no reason to suspect this government won’t be able to survive a full term. She has time to grip the wheel of leadership.
But one thing is clear right now. Kevin Rudd’s problem was never just communication, although it must be comforting in Labor circles to imagine it was. Gillard’s struggle over the last few months surely has shown how much a fallacy that belief is: changing the messenger hasn’t helped at all.
It’s only become worse for the ALP. Tony Abbott is if anything much more electable than he was while Kevin Rudd was leader.
Hence Gillard’s legitimacy crisis. One by one, the justifications for July’s leadership spill have collapsed: the Government is less popular than it once was, it is no better managed, its suite of policies are no more coherent, accepted, or closer to implementation.
In 2010, Gillard was given the role of Prime Minister. In 2011, her goal must be to own it.
Taxpayers Are The True Victims Of The Global Financial Crisis
About two years on from the financial crisis the world looks very different to the way it seemed in the middle of the economic collapse.
The broad ideological realignment predicted by many never came. But, back in late 2008, it was hard to get away from the hyperbole. Neo-liberalism was dead. Consumerism was dead.
Even deader was the orthodox approach to economics. The entire academic economics profession was looking pretty unwell.
A cover of Newsweek claimed ”We are all socialists now.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy was photographed reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
A clearly overstimulated Kevin Rudd wrote in The Monthly: ”from time to time in human history there occur events of a truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next”.
For Rudd, it was time for governments to grab back the power his prime ministerial predecessors had relinquished.
As the global economy imploded, the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the economist who suggested government could step in to save it, were always going to be popular.
In retrospect, Australia survived splendidly. We never quite fell into recession. We should be proud. Or perhaps just relieved. Overseas, the outlook is terrible.
The formula that the government claims worked in Australia – pumping money into the economy with reckless haste – has failed elsewhere.
The United States embarked on an unprecedented fiscal stimulus, bailing out car companies and investment banks. But its economy is still moribund, unemployment projected to hover at about 9 per cent for years. Last month it began another round of printing money.
At least the US government is limping along. Across the Atlantic, the wash-up from the crisis has been even worse. Greece is broke. Ireland is broke. Spain looks like it’s about to go broke.
The crisis that was supposed to destroy neo-liberalism seems instead to have hurt big-spending governments.
Economic slumps are stress-testers. Not all businesses fail in a recession. Those that do are either so marginally profitable they were on the edge of failure anyway – think car companies – or had made such poor decisions that they caused the crisis in the first place – including banks that relied on sub-prime mortgages. So too with governments.
The financial crisis was an industrial-scale test of economic wellbeing. Countries that had bad policies before the crisis failed.
Ireland suffered because, having adopted the euro, its interest rates were set by a European central bank more attuned to French needs than Irish ones. Ireland’s economy – its tax cuts and public service bloat – came to rely on a housing boom caused by those theatrically low rates. The boom collapsed.
Greece’s corrupt public sector has engulfed and suffocated its economy over decades – the government was only just able to pay all its employees during the good times, let alone during a crisis. The US economy was weak after a decade of massive overspending under George W. Bush and the trillion-dollar price of military adventurism. Barack Obama’s spending decadence tipped it over the edge. The American economy is paying for years of government irresponsibility.
Yet countries that were robust and healthy – such as Australia with our flexible labour market, good balance sheet and risk-averse Reserve Bank – thrived.
Academic economists are still studying the causes of the financial crisis. One early finding: it wasn’t ”greed”. How important were the American interventions in the housing market, the US Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, Wall Street’s too-clever-by-half mathematicians, or the global capital regulations that inexplicably favoured mortgage-backed securities?
But we know what’s happened since. The moment for Keynes has ended. Now it’s time for free-market economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The two Austrians said markets should be free to self-correct – better for governments, and better, in the long run, for economies. Governments should have restrained themselves.
Keynes once famously claimed that when the facts changed, he changed his mind. Having ended its flirtation with collectivism, Newsweek now publishes articles about ”The Triumphant Return of Hayek”. Bitter experience will do that.
The real casualties of the financial crisis haven’t been banks or businesses. They have been the rash governments that tried to save them and the taxpayers who provided the cash.
Time For A Rethink On Migrants – It’s No Crime To Seek A Better Life
The decisions of the Refugee Review Tribunal make disheartening reading.
It hears appeals from individuals who have had their application for a protection visa refused.
For instance: the Fijian man who applied for protection because “my educational outlook and possible employment opportunities may not allow me to reach my fullest potential”. Not really persecution, so he was refused a protection visa and refused entry into Australia to find work.
Or the Lebanese resident who claimed to be pursued by the terrorist group Fatah al-Islam, but applied for a protection visa because he lost his job and needed work. He was refused, too. Or the Indonesian woman seeking protection “due to economic hardship as it was impossible to make a living and support her young child”. Also refused.
The tribunal’s decisions are no doubt correct in law. Applicants often have inconsistent stories, leading the tribunal to question their truthfulness. Others simply do not fit the legal criteria for humanitarian entry. They do not have a “well-founded fear of being persecuted”.
But is Australia really better off having refused these individuals a visa?
Certainly the applicants are not. They would not have qualified for one of our numerous skilled migration programs. For many trying to get into Australia, claims of political or religious persecution are just pretexts: the real reason they want humanitarian visas is to seek employment and to participate in Australia’s high standard of living.
Advocates of strong border protection have dismissed these types of visa-seekers as “economic” refugees. And with asylum numbers booming, refugees fleeing poverty rather than persecution are clogging up the processing of humanitarian entrants.
Here is one way to fix that. The government could introduce a visa category for economic refugees.
After all, fleeing unemployment and destitution is just as justifiable as fleeing political persecution. Whatever moral obligation we have to accept political refugees applies just as easily to economic ones.
Few of the usual arguments against migration apply to economic refugees. For example, they need not be a drain on taxpayers.
Sure, humanitarian entrants immediately qualify for a wide range of government programs. They get caseworkers, language lessons and subsidised counselling. They receive settlement grants, crisis payments and Centrelink benefits and advances.
Yet a program for economic refugees needn’t be so generous. If migrants flee to Australia to seek employment, it is reasonable to insist they find employment. Or, at the very least, refuse to support them if they do not. Migrants who come to Australia looking for work seek to contribute more than they take.
Those three people rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal were eager find employment. And, presumably, they were eager to spend. They could have contributed to our economy, society and culture.
There is an enormous need in agricultural industries for workers – an unskilled demand not being supplied by Australians – and significant demand in Australia’s north-west, where a lack of unskilled labour has inflated wages to an exaggerated degree. Low-skilled labour (with its low wages) could fill a substantial gap in the urban labour market for nannies, live-in carers and house cleaners.
Bosses such as Rio Tinto’s Sam Walsh and Leighton Holdings’ Wal King have made it clear heavy red tape for sponsored employment visas are restraining their ability to bring in migrant workers.
The Australian National University’s Professor Peter McDonald argued last week foreign contract employees are needed to build vital infrastructure. Economic refugees would be ideal candidates.
If that demand doesn’t exist, then economic refugees will not be interested in coming here in the first place.
Of course, migrant labour should not be used as an excuse to ignore policy problems in our higher education and training sectors. But we have a strong economy and businesses looking for labour.
We also must remember that migrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than everybody else – economic refugees make their own opportunities for work. So to be rejecting possible participants in our economy at the same time we are crying out for them is inexplicable.
And it should not need to be said, but allowing people to seek work and opportunity in Australia is a moral and humane imperative. The tragedy on Christmas Island should remind us of how desperate some are to find a better life here.
Allowing economic migrants into Australia also helps the developing world. The money migrants send back to their home countries is the unsung engine of globalisation.
According to one survey, 96 per cent of migrants from the Horn of Africa remitted part of their earnings back to family and friends at home. In 2006 (the last good estimate we have), migrants in Australia remitted $2.8 billion to the developing world.
It is more than we spent on foreign aid that year: $2.1 billion. Globally, the amount transferred in remittances is larger than that spent on aid. This money goes straight to families, rather than being filtered through aid agencies or corrupt governments.
So when three people are refused residency in Australia because they don’t have a well-founded fear of persecution, most people’s gut reaction might be that the legal system is working as it should.
But every economic refugee – every potential worker and consumer – we exclude makes Australia ever so slightly poorer.
Give Unto Others As You Would Have Them Give Unto You
It’s a key part of the human condition: Christmas and the end of the year always inspires a bit of soul-searching. And in the 21st century, that soul-searching is as political as it is personal.
So this year, as sure as Christmas pudding, the anti-consumerist Australia Institute has released a survey suggesting most Christmas presents are a waste of money, resources and time: “millions of unused foot spas require enormous amounts of resources”.
Better to reject what the Australia Institute’s executive director, Richard Denniss, calls the “growing culture of obligatory giving”.
This Christmas, scepticism does have a strand of scholarship on side. Economists have claimed that, at the very least, gift giving appears to be highly inefficient – rarely does a recipient value their gift as much as the giver paid.
Obviously, we know what we want better than others do. So we never manage to buy each other quite the right present.
In a famous paper, now nearly two decades old but trotted out every holiday season, the economist Joel Waldfogel argued Christmas constituted a major “deadweight loss” – we were all poorer for having indulged in the Christmas spirit. It’s now a book: Scroogenomics.
One could respond to Scrooge and the Australia Institute that gift vouchers or cash might be a solution to this apparent dilemma.
It’s hardly romantic, but if holiday makers were serious about cutting down the deadweight loss of Christmas, then bank transfers would probably be best. No need for environmentally unfriendly cards either, with an email notifying the recipient of an incoming money transfer.
But we don’t just email each other receipts at Christmas. The idea that Christmas is really just an enormous waste of money and resources would make sense if it was simply a transfer designed to increase aggregate financial wealth.
But gifts are in the giving. Tallying up the relative value of items exchanged misses the whole point of gifts. Gifts are a mechanism we use to convey private information about the closeness of our relationship with each other. The better the gift, the better the relationship.
Waldfogel found the closer the giver is to the recipient, the more efficient their gift buying. (He also confirmed that aunts and uncles are bad at giving high-value gifts.)
So maybe giving a loved one a foot spa, despite the cost, waste and how rarely it gets used, actually fulfils a real function – to signal you want that loved one to relax and look after themselves.
It may seem like those millions of foot spas are wasted – it’s not clear where the Australia Institute got the “millions” figure from – but the promotion of our interpersonal relationships may be well worth the money.
The Australia Institute recommended that instead of giving unwanted gifts, we could instead donate to charity on each other’s behalf. Oxfam offers gift cards that purport to donate goats or sheep or buffalo or seeds to someone in the developing world.
Read the fine print. Oxfam are careful to say that just because the card has a photo of a goat, no goats may be exchanged – “your donation might also be covering the cost of buying a goat or the cost of something else . . . tracking each individual item and the community it goes to would be expensive.”
In other words, the money may be used for something goat-related, or just for general development. Probably better that than a surfeit of unneeded goats dumped in sub-Saharan Africa.
But it’s Christmas. Think of what you’re signalling. Gifts should be about what the recipient wants, not about the giver’s compassion for development.
So if the recipient finds donations endearing, then great, and we can only hope your money is deployed effectively. But if not, then donate to charity in your own name later. Christmas gifts are not an ideal medium for broadcasting your conspicuous compassion for the third world.
Christmas gifts should be a statement about the strength of our relationships, not a statement about our personal politics.
Can’t Compare: Emissions Trading And Reforms From The Past
It’s now an accepted part of political folklore: the era of reform is over. Our boldness has gone. No longer are we able to push through major economic changes. We have no appetite for challenge.
Australian politicians are hesitant to take risks, intimidated by polls, and the Government is cripplingly scared of focus groups and opposition.
That’s the broad outline. Fill in the details yourself.
This story has a lot of truth in it. In his recent Quarterly Essay, George Megalogenis carefully and convincingly documents the way federal Labor reacted to falling opinion polls in ways which only made those opinion polls drop further.
But the end-of-reform tale pivots on one critical comparison which doesn’t hold up – that between the liberalisation of the Australian economy in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the failure to (so far at least) introduce an emissions trading scheme.
The parallels are admittedly seductive. The decade-long program of financial deregulation, reduction in tariffs and industry protection, privatisation and corporatisation of state enterprises, and labour market reform required unheard-of boldness. It caused pain. Industries which had relied on protection were no longer viable, workers were exposed to the stresses of competition and new private operators took knives to the bloated payrolls of formerly public sector businesses.
The emissions trading scheme will bring hurt too: making some forms of energy production unprofitable (with the attendant risk to jobs) and add substantially to everybody’s power bills. The government that introduces it will be a bold government.
But that’s where the similarities end.
The reform of the 1980s had one clear and unambiguous goal: to clear up a century of accumulated, unnecessary or entirely counterproductive regulatory burdens. These burdens were holding back Australia’s economic growth, limiting personal income, and entrenching private interests at the public expense.
The goal of an emissions trading scheme is very different: to impose burdens on the Australian economy.
Not a bug, a feature. Placing new costs on the cheapest energy will inspire people to reduce their energy use. It will also make technologies which were uncompetitive in a world of cheap coal suddenly competitive.
That’s the plan, anyhow.
In practice, the emissions trading scheme was rife with exemptions, subsidies, wealth transfers and policy distortions which favoured some industries above others. Emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries were eligible for assistance, so the definition of what constituted “emissions-intensive” and “trade-exposed” was pretty important.
The lucky winners, according to a paper released by the Department of Climate Change in October: Alumina refining (of which there are four companies operating in Australia), aluminium smelting (also four companies), carbon black production, (one company), carbon steel from cold ferrous feed (one company), clinker, copper, ethylene, flat glass, fused alumina, and glass container production, among others, are now considered “highly emissions intensive” and “trade exposed”.
Other businesses, like tissue paper and white titanium dioxide pigment production, are considered to be trade exposed but only moderately emissions intensive. They get a different rate of assistance.
Then there were the free and subsidised emissions permits. And the household assistance payments to compensate poorer Australians for higher energy costs.
The end result of all this regulatory complexity, new subsidies, and tax-welfare churn shouldn’t remind us of the great reform movement of the 1980s. It should remind us of what that reform movement tried to clear away.
Treasury suggests emissions reduction will cost Australia’s economy 2 to 3 per cent of GDP over the next 50 years.
That too compares poorly with the great reforms of the 1980s, which were designed to boost, not restrain, economic growth.
The pain of deregulation was limited to companies which had profited at the expense of the rest of everybody else. Like the tariffs which kept inefficient clothing companies in business and inflated clothing prices. The pain of emissions reduction will be borne by all Australians who use energy.
In a speech last week, the Chairman of the Productivity Commission, Gary Banks, tackled just this question: what constitutes “reform”?
At the very least, reform has to be productivity-enhancing. Reform has to achieve its goal – if carbon pricing is to be considered a success, it has to go some way to mitigating global emissions and then climate change. And reform has to be long term – not so precariously controversial it will be eliminated at the next change of government, like, for instance, WorkChoices.
Banks also cited the Baby Bonus, light globe bans, FuelWatch, Grocery Choice, and Cash for Clunkers as “reforms” which failed to meet these modest but important criteria.
Emissions trading would fail too. No emissions trading proposal before Parliament could achieve its ambitious goal. And no proposal before Parliament would be “sustainable”; that is, would be able to survive into the long term without major revision.
Banks does not go so far as condemning emissions trading. But his argument for action on climate is half-hearted: “perhaps the strongest economic argument for carbon pricing is that it would displace more costly alternative measures targeted at particular products or technologies.”
In other words, it would be marginally better than the even-worse things we’re doing now. That’s hardly an inspirational argument for bold new reform.
How desirable you think carbon pricing is will depend on your view of the science of climate change and the likelihood of significant global action.
But to compare it to the great reforms of the 1980s and 1990s is a mistake. It does a disservice to the legacies of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. And it gives emissions trading a sense of historical inevitably which this compromised, undercooked, and ineffective policy has not earned.
The Weight Of The Word
Are Julian Assange and WikiLeaks really doing anything that unusual? After all, leaks are one of the foundations of contemporary journalism. Leaks are one of the best techniques we have to peek behind the curtain of government. So the aggressive political reaction to WikiLeaks is very disturbing.
Governments, whether democratic or totalitarian, do not deserve a presumption of secrecy. Few people objected on a philosophical level to the leaks out of Labor’s cabinet during the federal election. Few people have principled objections when the press releases documents they’ve received from whatever legal or illegal source.
There’s no question Assange is a media publisher. He describes himself as a journalist, albeit of an unconventional type. So the only material difference between what WikiLeaks is doing and “normal” leaking is scale. The diplomatic cables have dominated global politics for two weeks, but we’ve only seen the contents of just over 1000 of them. There are 249,000 to go.
The slow (and for US diplomats, excruciating) drip-feed is far from the “data dump” critics have accused Assange of doing.
Few of the cables have been released without first having been given exclusively to the mainstream press. The Sunday Age has some today. These papers have been vetting the documents for sensitive or risky information.
WikiLeaks only publishes the edited cables. WikiLeaks even asked the US State Department for help editing unnecessarily risky documents, a practice common when the press deals with classified material. The State Department refused. The Pentagon has had to admit there is no evidence anybody has ever been harmed due to a WikiLeaks release. Yet the WikiLeaks cables depict more than just “gossip”. They reveal things we didn’t know and shed substantial light on things we thought we did.
For instance, it’s one thing to hear commentators and self-aggrandising leaders in the Labor Right say Kevin Rudd was a control freak. But it’s quite another to read it in a private internal memo of our closest ally. We now know that Rudd’s freakishness was affecting our relationship with the world.
Since the cables have been released, we’ve learnt that: Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin have a relationship bordering on corruption, US diplomats have been asked to spy on UN leaders, the same US diplomats believe a disturbing number of foreign leaders have mental health issues, and the US pressured Spain to shelve human rights cases against American officials. There will definitely be more.
To oppose WikiLeaks is to oppose freedom of the press and, more critically, free speech. Strip away Assange’s revolutionary libertarian rhetoric and inflated sense of self, and what we have is a media outlet that’s innovative but is not really doing much different from what the press has been doing for centuries. Which makes the events of the past week particularly significant.
Corporate support for WikiLeaks is being stripped away. Amazon.com, which was hosting WikiLeaks for a short time, dropped its account. The company had received calls from staff of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security: asking “Are there plans to take the site down?”
Another company, Tableau, which was providing software for WikiLeaks to visualise the data, was also contacted by congressional staff. They severed their relationship with the site too.
Visa and MasterCard followed suit, banning donations to WikiLeaks. So too did the Swiss PostFinance, which held a WikiLeaks bank account. PayPal suspended payments to the site because it felt threatened by a letter implying WikiLeaks had broken an unspecified law.
There are too many volunteers and donors and copies of the site around the world to fully shut it down. But these political attempts to choke WikiLeaks’ funding and foundations are a clear breach of freedom of the press. They illustrate the use of political pressure to silence a media outlet that has done no more wrong than cause embarrassment to the United States government.
Sure, PayPal and Amazon.com could have refused to co-operate. It is not at all clear that WikiLeaks has broken any US laws. But put yourself in their shoes: would you defy Congress, the 535 members of which could destroy your business model with the stroke of a legislative pen?
After all, if we give governments power to make or break businesses through tax and regulation, we also give those governments power to threaten and cajole those businesses into co-operating with their political aims. This is a far more disturbing turn of events than highly publicised rantings of bloggers calling for Assange’s assassination.
Assange may be reckless. From the US government’s point of view, he is virtually stateless.
And the retaliatory attacks by the independent internet hacking group Anonymous on those corporations gives WikiLeaks an unjustified veneer of illegality.
Yet it is not the job of journalism to make the diplomacy easier, or to grease the wheels of communication between foreign leaders. Nor is it to protect diplomatic privacy.
The US government was unable to secure its internal communications. Whatever the long-term repercussions of the diplomatic leak – and they may be substantial – that colossal failure is to blame; not a journalist who, having received newsworthy information, publishes it.
The last thing we want is our media to be deferential or subservient to the interests of the state.
Of course, the battle between governments and the press is an old one. In a moment of well-timed irony, this week the US Department of State announced it would be hosting World Press Freedom Day in 2011.
No matter how new the medium, or how irresponsible its publisher, it is an absolute and fundamental infringement of free speech when a government tries to gag a media outlet it doesn’t like.
Overreaction To Terrorism The Big Threat
Governments take terrorist threats very seriously. But the seriousness of terrorism has to be balanced against how very ineffective – even incompetent – most terrorists actually are.
When printer cartridge bombs were found on a flight about to depart from East Midlands Airport in England to the US on October 29, the regulatory and security response was immediate and uncompromising.
The packages originated from Yemen, so all cargo from Yemen was banned. And Somalia, too. The German government even stopped all passenger flights from Yemen. Toner and ink cartridges above 450 grams were completely banned from passenger flights travelling to the US, not just coming from Yemen, but coming from anywhere at all. The pat-down security procedures on all passengers travelling anywhere within or into the US were boosted.
A substantial reaction, but not an unusual one. Security agencies always hastily crack down on all sorts of activity when terrorist plots are discovered.
Yet just a few weeks later, it is hard to be scared by the printer cartridge bombs at all.
The plot failed on multiple counts. The bombs were found, they were disarmed, and they posed a minimal threat to human life and property. Neither does it represent innovation in terrorism – mail bombs have been around for centuries.
The bombs travelled on passenger jets, certainly, but only by accident. As they were cargo, the bombs were carried on passenger aircraft early on the journey from Yemen through the Middle East. The plan was to explode the bombs in US airspace, but investigators suggest it could have exploded over Canada.
Had the bombs exploded, they would have destroyed a cargo jet and its tiny crew, not the synagogues to which they were addressed.
The bomb maker to whom this has been attributed – Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, al-Qaeda’s chief engineer in the Arabian Peninsula – is responsible for the failed Christmas Day 2009 bomber, and a failed assassination attempt on a Saudi intelligence chief. The only fatality of that latter incident was al-Asiri’s brother, who had hidden the explosives in his rectum.
The printer cartridge bomb plot was detected by traditional counterterrorism intelligence. Some reports suggest information about the plan came from undercover Saudi agents within al-Qaeda’s Yemen operation – the terrorist network is, apparently, a lot easier to infiltrate as it tries to stave off long-term decline by expanding its franchises into Yemen and the Maghreb.
So, like many other terrorist scares, in retrospect, there is a lot less to the printer cartridge bombs than first seemed. There seems little reason to be worried.
But nothing quite demonstrates the strangely pathetic nature of the terrorism threat more clearly than al-Qaeda’s new English language magazine.
The October issue of Inspire contains some bizarre suggestions for jihadists plotting in the West. For instance: one article recommends terrorists weld steel blades onto the hubs of a four-wheel-drive and drive up onto a crowded footpath. Doing so, we read, will “achieve maximum carnage”. But that seems more like a terrorist plot hatched by Mad magazine than professional, trained Islamic revolutionaries.
When they’re not utterly stupid, they are oddly banal. Another Inspire recommendation is to shoot up lunch spots that are popular with government workers. So in a decade, al-Qaeda has gone from targeting the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon – the two symbolic organs of American power – to threatening Starbucks outlets one at a time.
Then there is “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom”, which suggests repurposing a home pressure cooker to become an explosive device. Such a device is weak, apparently, so the magazine recommends it is placed “close to the intended targets”.
It is surprisingly hard to detonate explosives successfully. Despite the large number of detailed guides to bomb-making littering the internet – whether written for anarchists or jihadists or self-destructive teenagers – the history of terrorism suggests budding bomb-makers are undertrained and underprepared.
The shoe-bomber, Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami in late 2001, failed because his explosives were damp. The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, burnt his trousers off trying to ignite explosives in his underpants.
The May 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, could not get his car bomb to detonate. He just set the car on fire. Shahzad was apprehended, in part, because he left his house keys in the ignition.
In late November, the “Portland car bomb plot”, in which a 19-year-old Somali-American tried to blow up a Christmas event, was foiled because his car bomb was a fake. The explosives had been provided by undercover FBI agents who – it appears – had goaded him into becoming an operational terrorist in the first place.
If so, it would not be the first time: a 2007 plot to attack a US army base in New Jersey was almost certainly a case of FBI entrapment. And it will no doubt occur again. There was a bizarre case reported in The Washington Post this week of a mosque in Los Angeles taking out a restraining order on a man spouting pro-terrorism views, and reporting him to the FBI. The man turned out to be an FBI informant trying to infiltrate the jihad.
Despite all this clownishness, the overreaction to every failed terrorist attack has serious consequences. Terrorism succeeds not because of what it does to its target, but what its target does to itself in response.
Measured in money, the cost of terrorism is dwarfed by the cost of the reaction to terrorism. Security responses threaten civil liberties and the rule of law. Nobody needs to be reminded how, since the September 11, 2001, attacks the legal, political and administrative security apparatus has been unalterably changed in the US, Australia and throughout the Western world. The economic cost of this alone is staggering. There are now 1271 separate American government bureaucracies dedicated to security.
Millions of Americans have security clearance and access to this sprawling bureaucracy – apparently allowing a disaffected, low-ranking soldier to gather a huge number of military and diplomatic records and send it to WikiLeaks.
Our government has embarked on its own national security empire-building. The size of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation has tripled in the past decade.
Then there are the inconveniences caused by knee-jerk reactions to failed terrorism plots. The discovery of the printer cartridge bombs may mean in-flight wireless internet is scrapped, in case the internet is used to detonate explosives. After all, if it is possible to imagine, it is necessary to ban.
There’s also political pressure in Britain to install high-tech screening devices to scan every piece of cargo travelling on aircraft, with the cost borne by freight companies.
After November’s car bomb attempt, Portland is now beefing up security and getting rid of parking at public events.
And after the Christmas bomber, the US government dramatically increased the number of body scanners and intrusive pat-downs. The outcry over the privacy and health consequences of these extraordinarily invasive measures has been deafening. The phrase “security theatre” has become widely used, even among commentators predisposed to being tough on terrorism.
Two things to note: the invasive body scanners have been installed in response to a failed terrorism attempt, not a successful one. And independent security experts have discovered that the scanners are unable to detect the sort of explosives the Christmas Day bomber tried to use.
So, naturally, the Australian government plans to spend $200 million introducing body scanners here within the next few months.
And measured in lives, the reaction to terrorism is often far worse than the potential damage caused by terrorists.
Admittedly, this point does not apply if you believe drone strikes and other military actions kill terrorists exclusively. There are indications the US will respond to the printer cartridge bombs by escalating its covert war in Yemen to include drone attacks.
Next year will be the 10th anniversary of September 11. The devastation of those attacks now looks like a rare fluke. It is one which is unlikely to be repeated. If nothing else, aircraft passengers will no longer passively allow anyone to forcibly take over a plane. Passenger awareness is probably the most powerful airline security “innovation” in the past decade.
And it is becoming increasingly clear there are no great terrorist “masterminds”. The war on terror has no great Bond villain. There is no Einstein of al-Qaeda.
Incompetent terrorists are still dangerous; they can still kill.
But after the initial panic, the vast majority of terrorist incidents are less threatening than they first seem.
The director of the US National Counterterrorism Centre said last week “we help define the success of an attack by our reaction to that attack”. Let’s try not to make our reaction to terrorism worse than the threat of terrorism.
WikiLeaks and the virtue of transparency
WikiLeaks’s release of American diplomatic cables “may put lives at risk”. The White House spokesman Robert Gibbs claims that the release may damage the “cause of human rights”. WikiLeaks’s actions are “reckless” and “dangerous”.
Sounds serious. But we’ve heard these claims before.
When each of the Afghan and Iraqi war logs were released earlier this year, US officials lined up to condemn the whistleblowing site in the strongest possible language. The Afghan documents, “put the lives of Americans at risk”, according to the US national security advisor. The Department of Defense said the Iraq files dump “could make our troops even more vulnerable to attack in the future”.
On Sunday night a Republican Senator from South Carolina wildly argued on Fox News that “The people at WikiLeaks could have blood on their hands.”
The operative word in that sentence is “could”.
Having lived with WikiLeaks’s release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs for months now, Pentagon officials concede there is no evidence that a single person has lost their life as a result. Not one.
And when requested in the lead up to the latest release, the State Department refused to guide WikiLeaks as to which documents should be redacted to protect against “significant risk of harm”.
Instead they insisted the site delete all the documents and forget it ever happened – something the messianic and volatile WikiLeaks head Julian Assange was quite unlikely to do.
Crazy-brave, with all those lives at stake. But more likely just a bad bluff. Major government departments aren’t good at poker.
The passionate assertions that national security will be compromised, that lives will be lost, that the cause of human rights will be set back: shameless, unadulterated hyperbole, by a government not even sure what’s about to be released. Transparent attempts to dissuade WikiLeaks from revealing uncomfortable material.
To take a random example out of the 243 documents released so far, it mustn’t be nice to have it publicly known US diplomats think Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer is “unpredictable” and has only “shallow foreign policy expertise”.
The full diplomatic archive of a quarter of a million documents will be released in dribs and drabs over the coming months.
Some of what we’ve seen is little more than banal gossip. Nobody needed leaked diplomatic communication to realise, say, Dmitry Medvedev “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman” as one cable put it, although it’s great fun to see it in an official document. Or that Kim Jong-Il is a “flabby old man”. That Silvio Berlusconi is “vain” with a “penchant for partying hard”. It will shock the international community to learn Hamid Karzai is “extremely weak”.
One overwhelming impression from the cables which have been released: professional diplomats are unimpressed by the politicians they’re compelled to work with. If only we could see their pens turned against their US political masters.
Other cables are more important, but still only embellish what we know already.
For instance: the US government has been trying to convince other countries to resettle its Guantanamo Bay detainees for years. But thanks to WikiLeaks we now know how desperate those US negotiators sound: officials tried to convince Belgium accepting prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe”.
This is not materially new information. But it is more revealing than the sterile reports we’re familiar with.
After all, it is one thing to know the world’s superpower is negotiating to resettle detainees. It’s quite another to learn that the superpower sounds like an anxious salesman as it tries to do so. Or like a shonky political party treasurer selling tables to a fundraiser: Slovenia was told resettling a detainee would earn Slovenian leaders an audience with Barack Obama.
These cables further underline how the original decision to set up Guantanamo Bay dropped the US into a complicated long-term legal bind from which it is still struggling to extricate itself. It’s not revelatory. But the desperation is very, very revealing.
So too is the deep mistrust within the Middle East towards Iran.
Arab leaders in the region endlessly crow about Israel, but in private it is Iran they worry about. The cables vividly show that the leadership of Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Oman and Bahrain are all deeply concerned about Iran’s nuclear program. Saudi Arabia has been urging a US attack on Iran.
Analysts have been saying this for years, of course. But the unadorned cables make their points starkly and unambiguously.
Julian Assange is anti-war. But when the world reads the Egyptian president telling the US ambassador to only enter dialogue with Iran “so long as the [US] does not believe a word [the Iranians] say”, the case for dealing with Iran as soon as possible is strengthened, not weakened.
The documents are unlikely to damage America’s global reputation.
While foreign governments will kick up a fuss about what they read, they know how diplomacy works. They’re worried they could be the victims of the next WikiLeaks release.
Neither are they likely to be of great interest to foreign intelligence services. At a minimum, 3 million American soldiers and officials have access to the cables and the clearance to read them. That’s the security problem, not WikiLeaks. Let’s assume much of these cables have leaked before, just less publicly.
In the past, the US government itself made use of WikiLeaks to expose corruption and mismanagement in the United Nations. One of George Bush’s senior officials said in July, “Transparency and accountability in government and international institutions is a best practice and of great importance and WikiLeaks previously has been a force for good in the area.”
It must be harder to see the virtue of transparency when you’re the target.
Chris Berg is a Research Fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs. Follow him attwitter.com/chrisber
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If Marriage Is So Good, Why Not Invite Everyone In?
It didn’t take much for a wave of pro-gay marriage sentiment to echo through the socially liberal wing of the Labor Party.
A Greens motion that politicians should “gauge their constituents’ views” on gay marriage (which you’d have thought was their job anyway) has led a growing list of Labor MPs to declare their support. And Julia Gillard has brought Labor’s national conference forward six months so her party can debate the issue next year.
That’s Labor. What about the Liberals?
You’d think conservative opposition to same-sex marriage would be a no-brainer. Resistance to major social reform is seen as part of the DNA of Australian conservatism. Certainly, no Liberal politicians have stuck their necks out. Malcolm Turnbull, who you’d think would be the best bet, has made it clear he believes marriage is between a man and a woman.
Yet there is a strong conservative argument for legalising gay marriage. Conservatives who decry the decline of marriage as an institution are right. Straight people have been undermining the sanctity of marriage for decades. This is a bad thing.
Marriage is a private form of social welfare. Spouses insure each other against sudden loss of income. Married couples are less vulnerable to financial stress than single people.
The benefits of marriage on mental health and wellbeing, income and happiness are widely acknowledged. Married people tend to lead more stable lives. Their relationships are more durable.
There’s justified concern Australia is losing “social capital”; that the bonds of the community are weakening. And the evidence suggests married people integrate better in communities and the workplace.
So extending the marital franchise to gay and lesbian couples would multiply the number of Australians who can join this crucial social institution, spreading the positive impact of marriage on society.
The most common conservative case against gay marriage is that the very idea is an oxymoron; marriage, by definition, is between a man and a woman. But this seems less about protecting the sanctity of marriage and more about protecting the sanctity of the dictionary.
Conservatism isn’t opposed to change. It simply seeks to make change manageable. And if the symbolic value of the word “marriage” is important, then the social benefits accrued by that symbolism should be available to same-sex couples. On the other hand, if the word is merely shorthand for a utilitarian contractual relationship between two rational, calculating individuals, then barring gay individuals from signing such a contract is obviously discriminatory.
Conservatives have one more question to be answered. Doesn’t gay marriage hurt straight marriage? That’s an empirical question we can measure.
In their book Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We’ve Learned From the Evidence, William Eskridge and Darren Spedale look at the effect that recognition of same-sex relationships – marriage and civil unions – has had on Scandinavia since Denmark introduced registered partnerships in 1989. The authors found that after nearly two decades of registered partnerships in Scandinavia, social indicators, if anything, were getting better. Total divorce rates were lower. There were higher rates of straight marriage, fewer out-of-wedlock births.
Caution is worthwhile. These changes aren’t due to same-sex unions – just because two women get married doesn’t mean you’re more likely to stay with your opposite-sex spouse. But it does suggest gay relationships do not undermine straight relationships.
In the past few years, a number of countries have adopted gender-neutral definitions of marriage. Opponents of gay marriage should reveal how they predict straight marriage will be harmed? Early indications suggest it has not been harmed.
The conservative case for gay marriage is one that respects and venerates the institution of government-approved marriage.
A more radical answer to the gay marriage question would eliminate government’s role. There are, after all, two distinct aspects to marriage in Australia. There’s the religious and cultural aspect: marriage is a sacrament, sanctified by religions, families and friends. Then there is the legal aspect: marriages are stamped and approved by the government.
Why do we need the latter? Marriage could be privatised. There’s really no need to have any central authority deciding who is married and who isn’t.
This is, of course, not an approach the Greens or the ALP are likely to adopt. Nor is it the most conservative approach.
If marriage is so socially beneficial, why not encourage as many to join it as possible? The choice is between excluding gay people from the foundation of strong families or inviting them in.
Staring Through The Greens’ Populist Prism
In The Drum last week, Liberal shadow minister Kevin Andrews described the Greens as little more than Marxists for Forests.
The Victorian Liberal Party’s decision to not preference the Greens in the state election, was, in part, because that view is widely held within the party’s grassroots. The decision seems to be the right thing by their supporters: Liberal voters do not want to feel responsible for entrenching the far-left in a position of power.
But this presumes the Greens’ policy views are driven by a bleak, terminally unpopular radicalism.
The recent political melee over banks and their stubborn insistence on making profits suggests otherwise.
Neither the ALP or the Coalition are the biggest populists in Federal Parliament. The Greens are.
Compare the major parties’ responses to the recent interest rate rises with that of this blossoming minor party.
Seeking to get a leg up over the Government on interest rates, Joe Hockey flirted with naked and obvious populism – railing against the Government for not acting against the perfidy of bankers, and full of dark hints about “levers” which the Coalition could pull.
Yet when challenged on what those levers actually were, Hockey stepped back from the populist brink. The shadow treasurer released a complex nine-point plan for regulatory reform of the finance system.
Wayne Swan has had great fun threatening the banks on talkback radio when they’ve callously raised rates, but the art of governing is managing competing objectives – it wouldn’t be prudent, or good policy, to directly stop them from doing so.
So the Federal Treasurer met the political opportunity of the Commonwealth Bank’s interest rate rise with assurances he, too, would be releasing a detailed and complicated plan for regulatory change in the future.
But then there’s Bob Brown.
On Sunday the Greens leader announced his party would prefer to simply ban banks from lifting their interest rates past Reserve Bank movements for two years.
In other words, Brown had no complicated plan; no attempt to delicately balance the incentive structures of the banking industry with community dissatisfaction about those profitable institutions. He proposed a bludgeon: outlaw banks doing what the Greens think is a bad thing.
“It’s time they gave something back to the average Australian,” Brown said.
Then forcibly lower ATM bank fees, force banks to offer fee-free savings accounts, and forcibly limit mortgage exit fees: all to stop, in Brown’s words “excessive profiteering”.
Helpfully, profiteering is defined. “Banks continue to exploit this essential service to maximise their profit.” In other words, profiteering is exactly what all businesses try to do, all the time.
Of course, all parties are prone to blustery populist rhetoric.
A Google site search uncovers nine uses of the word “profiteering” on the Liberal Party website, (mainly about people smugglers, and, for some reason, lobster fishers) and two uses on the Labor Party’s site.
But that’s nothing compared to the Greens, whose website features the word “profiteering” 295 times.
And there’s something deeply populist about a party which thinks it can give everything to everyone, at any price, at any time.
In Victoria, the Greens transport plan for Melbourne pours tasty infrastructure manna across the city. Under the Greens’ plan, the city would receive 10 new rail lines, nearly 40 new stations, 12 new tram lines, and 550 new trams. (Why not 650? Why not 11 new rail lines? Why stop building stations when you get to your 40th?)
And, of course, the Greens promise to reinstate tram conductors, because, well, people say they miss the old conductors.
This plan will never, ever happen. Not just because Greens won’t win government in their own right. But because there is no chance they’d ever be able to afford it if they did.
Understandably, the major parties have been a little miffed by the Greens’ transport generosity. Why should the Greens be able to shower the electorate with promises of gifts it will never be able to give, when Labor and the Coalition are so constrained by the tradition of pretending their policies are cost-effective?
In Victoria, the reluctance of the Greens to have their policies costed is a tacit admission that, really, cost-effectiveness isn’t the point. It’s the thought that counts. Their plans and policies are specifically designed to make the major parties look miserly.
When seen through the populist prism, the Greens’ policy platform looks very different to their radical reputation.
They’re the most vocal defenders of the anti-siphoning laws, which “protect” sports fans from having to get Foxtel. (Sure, the anti-siphoning laws entrench the free-to-air television oligopoly, but that is a minor point when there is pandering to be done.)
The Greens want the Government to limit private sector working hours, which sounds appealing after you’ve worked a long day, but only makes sense if you don’t believe government policies can have any unintended consequences whatsoever.
The Greens claim Australia has an expansive immigration program only because nasty “big business” controls population policy.
And, of course, there’s no government service they don’t plan on spending more on. Governments have limited resources. Popular expectations of what government should do are limitless. This is, however, not a constraint the Greens feel applies to them.
Of course, there are many deeply unpopular policies the Greens support. Parties should be praised for defending unpopular things. Too often it’s the only way we get positive reform.
And it’s more noble than the alternative.
Better a party stands up for unpopular radical views it truly believes in than succumb to simple populist demagoguery.