Tag: ABC The Drum

Time To Ditch Antiquated Media Regulations

It is incredible to think the Australian government imposes largely the same regulations on media ownership that it did in the 1930s.

Waves of change in Australia’s economic system have come and gone in that time. Not to mention technologies.

Indeed, television was in its experimental infancy when the first broadcasting ownership limits were imposed.

Statutory Rule 104 of 1935 allowed no more than one metropolitan broadcasting licence per state, two metropolitan licences in the country, three regional stations per state, and so forth.

How different a world was it? When a joint parliamentary committee examined Australia’s broadcasting regulations seven years later, the other big topic was whether to nationalise the commercial broadcasters outright. (The committee was divided on this sensitive issue.)

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull is looking at finally eliminating some of the antiquated rules that limit how much traditional media one company can own.

The two major descendants of Statutory Rule 104 are the 75 per cent rule – which prevents a firm or individual from broadcasting to more than three quarters of the Australian population – and the two-out-of-three rule – which limits a firm or individual to owning only two of three out of television, radio, or newspaper in any given market.

There are a couple of others – and of course all mergers in all industries are subject to general competition law – but it is those two rules that are apparently in Turnbull’s sights.

As they should be. It is fundamentally absurd that the same restrictions, based on the very same arguments, are being applied to our media-rich world as were being applied to the media-constrained world of 1935.

The 1942 parliamentary report spoke of “the inherent dangers of allowing the control of commercial broadcasting to become a monopoly or a partial monopoly.”

A 2013 parliamentary report into media law changes made the same argument in different words: media ownership restrictions were all about protecting “diversity” in the media sector.

The shift in language is slight, but it’s also amusingly wrongheaded. Diversity is the one thing we now have in spades. The head of the press council, Julian Disney, even complains of the”cacophony” of voices on the internet.

Just a few years ago supporters of media ownership restrictions would argue that Australia’s narrow media landscape meant that Australians had little choice but to get their news and views from the big corporate media conglomerates.

Of course nobody could seriously make that argument anymore.

So now the argument is that while there might be lots of diversity online, most Australians still consume content produced by the big newspapers and broadcasters. As a consequence, the mainstream media still leads the discussion. The reasoning seems to be something like this: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.

The patronising paternalism of this argument should be obvious – as should be the implicit suggestion that the real media diversity problem is that Australians don’t want media diversity.

But it is not novel to point out that the internet has made all the old arguments for media ownership restrictions into laughable anachronisms. At Crikey, Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer are right: It’s hard for the Government to claim it’s purely motivated by digital libertarianism in media ownership considering it also has plans for a social media censorship scheme and a “three strikes” policy for file sharing.

Broadcasting is one of the most highly protected sectors of the economy. The business is built almost entirely on rent-seeking. You can bet there’s a stream of media lobbyists filing in and out of parliament house every day. The media firms know exactly what they hope to get out of the next round of regulatory change. The deals have probably already been made.

None of that has changed since media ownership laws were last seriously revisited under the Howard government in 2006. (Labor tried to change the 75 per cent rule as part of its media regulation package early last year but that was fumbled along with the rest it.)

Then, as now, broadcasters were self-interested. The arrival of new online media firms was slightly more hypothetical eight years ago, but it was pretty obvious which way the wind was blowing.

What has changed since 2006 has been the incredible implosion of the legacy media firms. The slow erosion of newspaper profitability has become rapid disintegration. In 2012, Fairfax announced it was shedding an incredible 1900 staff. News Limited has been a bit more circumspect but the job losses are huge there as well.

Industry consolidation may be the only way to save some of our legacy media outlets.

The loss of classified advertising revenue makes the idea of a free-standing, traditionally-structured, independently-profitable newspaper a thing of the past. There has never been a more important time to ensure that the industry is institutionally flexible – capable of experimenting with ownership structures and capable of forming new alliances if necessary.

As Michelle Grattan puts it, there are big prizes about. And this is a sector that has found few prizes in recent years.

The irony is the 1930s rush by newspapers to buy radio broadcasting licences – the rush that inspired media ownership regulation in the first place – was out of fear that advertising revenue would migrate from print to the airwaves.

In the 1930s and ’40s the fear that newspapers would lose their rivers of gold was misplaced.

Now that fear has been completely, irreversibly realised.

Why keep ownership regulations that were so manifestly designed for another age?

Qantas Ball Now In Labor’s Court

So now the Qantas ball is in Bill Shorten’s court.

Last night the Abbott Government announced it was not going to provide Qantas a government debt guarantee – that is, let the airline, which has a junk credit rating, piggy-back on the Government’s triple-A credit rating.

Instead, the Coalition wants to repeal part of the Qantas Sale Act, which places a limit of foreign ownership on Qantas that its competitor Virgin is not subject to, and (of course) get rid of the carbon tax.

(Happily, partial nationalisation is off the table.)

Thank goodness. A debt guarantee would have made a mockery of the Government’s professed free market sympathies. The last few months have seen an agonising debate within the Coalition as to whether they could do such a thing. It genuinely could have gone either way.

But a debt guarantee was only on the table because Labor refuses to countenance any repeal of the Qantas Sale Act.

Allowing in more foreign investment, in the words of Anthony Albanese, would turn the flying kangaroo into the “flying camel” or the “flying panda”.

Put aside the slightly xenophobic vibe there. Even if the Qantas Sale Act were repealed, the existing limitations on foreign shareholding in the Air Navigation Act would remain the same. On top of that, any investment would be subject to approval by the Foreign Investment Review Board and the Treasurer, who are supposed to take in all those nebulous ideas of national interest.

We’ve been loading up anti-foreign investment laws on our statute books for half a century now.

All this national carrier stuff about Qantas – the “still call Australia home” blather – is a political ploy. It’s the rhetoric of nationalism in the service of rent-seeking.

A debt guarantee is a corporate bailout, pure and simple.

And as with any bailout, the biggest winners of a bailout of Qantas wouldn’t be its unionised workforce but Qantas’ management.

Albanese and Shorten say they’re mostly worried to ensure that aviation jobs stay in Australia. But Qantas is shedding jobs while it remains in limbo for the Qantas Sale Act to be repealed.

Labor’s refusal to budge on the act – which would open up the airline to new sources of funding that aren’t Australian taxpayers – just adds to the instability of the airline and therefore the uncertainty of the jobs that Albanese and Shorten say they want to protect.

But ultimately, industry failure and job losses get blamed on the government in charge at the time, not its parliamentary rivals.

And, of course, Shorten’s Labor is not the first party in the world to discover the easy relationship between opposition and opportunism. Tony Abbott’s Coalition made antagonism into an art form. I wrote at the time that there was nothing wrong with an opposition opposing the government.

Yet Shorten’s approach on Qantas sits uneasily with Labor’s self-image as the party of change battling the conservative parties of reaction.

The ALP likes to see itself as the driving force behind Australian history. Labor’s role is to lead social movements and spur reform. The conservative parties are there to resist – there to restrain Labor’s overreach and sometimes reverse its excesses.

It was Labor that sold Qantas in the first place, as part of its broader liberalisation and privatisation agenda under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

Yet how should we square that sort of progressive approach to economics (and opening the Australian economy was definitely progressive, in any literal sense of the word) with Shorten and Albanese’s proposed bailout of Qantas’ management under the cover of nationalism? Or its refusal to connect a global airline to global capital markets?

The Qantas Sale Act is a legacy of old prejudices against foreign investment, old philosophies of corporate nationalism, and old economic beliefs about industry policy.

Consumers are showing no loyalty to Qantas, so why should parliament give it special treatment?

The idea that the same consumers who grab cheap Singapore or AirAsia fares to Bali or a Virgin ticket to the Gold Coast would seriously punish a government for allowing foreigners to buy some – not all – of Qantas beggars belief. Certainly not if the policy was explained properly.

Every opposition lives with the ghost of its previous government. Particularly during the early years of the Howard government, the Labor Party struggled against policy that it had considered in the decade before: the introduction of the GST, for instance, and the privatisation of Telstra. There’s every reason to believe that had Keating won in 1996, he would have continued the economic reform he begun back in 1983.

With Qantas, Labor is fighting the legacy not just of Keating but also the Gillard government,which was just about to approve some sort of debt guarantee when Julia Gillard was rolled by Kevin Rudd in June 2013. Albanese had been personally negotiating a deal between Qantas and the Commonwealth. No wonder this seems like a settled question.

Perhaps Bill Shorten can rest easy. Historians tend to remember parties by what they did in government, not what they said in opposition.

But by refusing legislative reform, Labor is punishing the national icon it claims to love, and risking the jobs it wants to defend.

Another G20 Deal For Everyone To Ignore

The G20 finance ministers and central bankers have emerged from their weekend meeting in Sydney with a promise to grow the world’s economies by an extra 2 per cent.

Okey-dokey.

It’s a cliché after these international conferences to point out they’re long on motherhood statements and short on blueprints.

But the Sydney G20 communique is a classic of its genre. It is, in a way, symbolic of the entire G20 to date: bold, plain-spoken and fundamentally worthless.

After all, who wouldn’t want 2 per cent extra growth? That’d be great.

Yet the only concrete policy in the whole document is hitchhiking on the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting action plan, which is designed to prevent multinational corporations from taking advantage of low tax countries.

And focusing on how to extract more money from the private sector doesn’t exactly scream “growth-inducing”.

The most sympathetic interpretation is as follows: The extra money governments take from multinationals might be spent on the most economically vital infrastructure and in a few years (infrastructure takes time to build) will manifest in future growth.

But the far more likely scenario is the money will be spent ineffectively and slowly on programs that please voting blocs or interest groups, and will come at the cost of suppressing international tax competition.

A tax crackdown is easiest to agree on at the G20 because it is in the G20’s interests. As some of the world’s biggest governments, they don’t like having to compete against small, lower-taxing jurisdictions.

As for other ways to boost growth? Well, we have to wait for them. The idea is that all the finance ministers now go home, brainstorm ways to reach 2 per cent growth, and come back to Australia in November along with their leaders. Then a “Brisbane Action Plan” will be devised, and everybody goes home and gets rich.

The G20 is relatively young. It was formed in 1999 to facilitate cooperation about the global financial system.

It was only when the financial system collapsed that the G20 became, as a 2009 statement put it, “the premier forum for … international economic cooperation”.

Many people argue the G20 helped prevent the world falling into a second Great Depression. This is a complete fantasy.

An emergency G20 summit held in Washington in November 2008 was all about creating a “Bretton Woods II” – completely redesigning the international monetary system – but that didn’t happen.

It also pledged to avoid the protectionism that was so damaging during the depression of the 1930s. In his book Who’s in Charge Here?, the Financial Times journalist Alan Beattie points out this pledge lasted just 36 hours before G20 member Russia announced new car tariffs.

Certainly the G20 was no constraint. Beattie writes: “I have never heard a G20 pledge cited as the reason why a serious amendment to policy was made.”

The next summit, in London, focused on fiscal stimulus plans and monetary easing. But that meeting was held in April 2009 – that is, after many countries had gone ahead and done those things anyway.

Both Australia’s and the United State’s big stimulus packages were announced in February 2009. China’s major stimulus pre-empted the November 2008 summit by a week. It’s not obvious how “coordinated” the G20’s approach to the Global Financial Crisis really was.

In subsequent years the G20 became bogged down in debates about austerity. The United States wanted everybody to continue expansionary fiscal policy. But European countries were being compelled by their dire budgets and the European Central Bank to slow government spending.

Between 2010 and 2013 the G20 argued about austerity because there was actually something to argue about. It’s not just that each country had starkly different needs. It’s that there is no consensus on how to survive and recover from a major economic crisis.

Indeed, the ease with which the G20 has managed to sign up to a growth agenda now that the crisis has abated is a sign of its irrelevancy rather than vibrancy.

Ultimately countries are going to pursue their own domestic agendas in their own way. Organisations like the G20 either endorse pre-existing national policy preferences or are ignored.

The G20 agreements are non-binding. In theory this is supposed to enhance the institution’s flexibility but just means that it is unable to achieve the goals it sets. As one paper in 2012 put it, the “G20 has proved about as far from effective as Greece is from solvency.”

Perhaps we are asking too much from what is really just a chance for finance ministers, central bankers, and government leaders to catch up.

But then perhaps it would be better to refrain from the ridiculous claims that the Sydney meeting was a “win” for Treasurer Joe Hockey, because he managed to convince the G20 to nominate a specific, entirely hollow, growth target.

Or the claims that the G20 is now “back on track” because it agreed to go for growth in the first place.

Or the most ridiculous claim of them all: That what a G20 communique says means anything of significance to the world economy.

The Great Corporate Welfare Con-Versation

It’s a worry that we’re having pretty much the same economic debates in the 21st century as Adam Smith was in the 18th century.

After all, the intervening centuries of experimentation have surely demonstrated one principle beyond doubt: do not give welfare to private corporations.

Corporate welfare is economically ineffective, politically corrupting, and morally dubious.

It lowers our living standards, entrenches privileged corporate interests, and enriches some at the expense of all.

And yet here we are. The Abbott government has spent the last few months debating whether it should stump up cash for Qantas, SPC Ardmona, Toyota, Cadbury, and now the entire farm sector.

Qantas is likely to get a government debt guarantee. SPC Ardmona’s request for money was declined by the Commonwealth, and accepted by the Victorian government. Toyota left before the Abbott government could formally decline further subsidies. Cadbury got a dozen or so million as part of an election promise. Australian farmers are about to get a big wad of cash packaged up as drought relief.

All in all, that’s not a bad success rate for the rent-seekers. If you were a struggling business, why wouldn’t you chance your arm? Why not ask for a bailout?

Firms fail all the time. It’s hard to measure, but we could guess from page 40 of this paperthat, say, one in 20 businesses fail every year.

The unknown question is how the political system will respond. If the dollar or interest rates are unpredictable, then the Australian parliament is doubly so.

It is tempting to use taxpayers’ money to “save” jobs. The benefits of doing so are highly visible, and the costs are diffused across the population. There’s always a clamour to intervene. Many people view government as a deus ex machina – an opaque and limitlessly powerful entity that can fix problems with the strong of a pen … if only it had the “will” to do so.

So the fact these claims on the taxpayers’ dollar seem to have all come at once has made an interesting test of the Abbott government. Especially after its shaky first few months.

But governments are temporary things. More important is the longer-term dynamic: That of the parliament unsure how to relate to the private sector in an era when their biggest interventionist tools have been decommissioned.

For most of the 20th century, Australian industry was protected by large and complex tariffs. The theory was that protecting manufacturers against cheap imports would grow the economy and encourage exports. Exports being better than imports. Building cars better than riding the sheep’s back.

(Tariffs and subsidies are two sides of the same coin. Tariffs transfer wealth from consumers to producers. Subsidies transfer wealth from taxpayers to producers. The Productivity Commission collapses both into the phrase “effective assistance”. The PC is too … PC … to call it all “corporate welfare”.)

Old-school protectionism has no serious supporters today. For all the hand-wringing about neoliberalism, the intellectual case for protectionism fell when the tariffs did.

Yet the political calculus that supported Australia’s corporatist industry policy remains.

Voters liked protectionism because the gains (keeping out foreign competition) were obvious, and the costs (lower standards of living, more expensive consumer goods, a slower economy) were harder to see.

Furthermore, corporatism was a vehicle through which politicians could share their vision of the future. Our political class has always declared it wants to shift the economy from primary industry to manufacturing. Both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott said they want Australia to “make things”.

In other words, they’re in denial of the fact that a government overseeing an open economy is not able to decide what that economy looks like.

And that denial leads to haphazard, confused and unpredictable policy.

Take the distinctions the Abbott government is trying to draw between the corporate welfare it is willing to pay and that which it is not. It insists that Cadbury (welfare application successful) is different from SPC (welfare application denied).

In an important way, Tony Abbott is right. Cadbury is different from SPC. Cadbury is being paid to build “tourism infrastructure”. Tourism is a bottomless pit of government spending: A unique policy area where no spending can be too much and where no evidence needs to be produced that the spending is effective.

In this way Australian governments have camouflaged traditional industry assistance to fit the economic philosophy of the times.

After all, it wasn’t an accident Kevin Rudd recast car subsidies as “green” car subsidies. He wanted to pretend Labor’s customary support of automotive unions was instead part of its climate change plan.

Likewise, the government’s drought assistance package is old industry policy in a new guise. 20th century Australian governments aggressively regulated and protected the agricultural sector. They controlled production volumes, stabilised prices, and imposed marketing boards.

Most of those direct interventions have been eliminated. Now agricultural subsidies come at arms-length, disguised in the form of periodic drought packages, and wrapped in rhetoric about national disasters.

Yes, we have learned a lot since Adam Smith’s day. But economic knowledge and political incentives are very different. The government simply cannot resist the political demand for corporate welfare.

Divining The Meaning Of Elections Is A Mug’s Game

What does the Griffith by-election mean? What is its deeper, broader significance for the trajectory of the Abbott Government, and, through it, Australian politics?

In Fairfax papers, Peter Hartcher said Labor’s win suggests “the people are reserving their judgment on Tony Abbott’s government”. The victor, Terri Butler, thinks, “We’ve said to Tony Abbott: hands off Medicare.” Tony Abbott believes it’s “a poor result for Bill Shorten”. A Labor pollster reckons, “The by-election showed Labor too has some way to go to build trust with many in the electorate.”

Of course none of them have any idea what the Griffith result means. Politics is all about converting ignorance into popularity.

There are two theories about what drives a by-election result. The first, and most appealing, is the referendum theory. This says that a by-election reflects the electorate’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a government. Polls are necessarily hypothetical – they can only ask people how they might vote. By-elections are definitive.

The second theory is that a by-election is all about local candidates. In the off-election season (and assuming the by-election won’t topple the government), voters are free to think more about the personality of individual politicians. Without the national significance, voters are more interested in local issues.

But in an important way, it doesn’t matter which theory is most true. What matters is which theory the political class believes.

Pundits like the referendum theory because it makes by-elections more significant; more worthy of their scrutiny. Losers like the local candidate theory because it’s all about creating exceptions to national trends – “that by-election was unique because the candidate had a strong local profile, well-known in their community…” etc, etc, etc.

Of course, much of the nonsense of Australian politics is self-interested nonsense. But the desire to impose narrative on disparate and complex events isn’t just driven by the political necessity to spin in their favour.

We have an innate human desire to create order where there is disorder – to create meaning from the muddle of history.

The question at the front of this column – what does the Griffith result mean? – is an example of exactly that. Commentators who try to answer it aren’t just filling word counts and news pages, but are trying to make the world intelligible.

Too bad that meaning-seeking is utterly futile. At best it lulls us into a false sense of security that we understand more than we do. At worst it’s a confidence trick.

Philip Tetlock influentially argued in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment that political experts – pundits, pollsters, analysts, consultants – are no better at making predictions than the general public.

Tetlock found that while a little knowledge about a subject can help us improve our predictions about political events, having a great deal of knowledge is actually counterproductive.

When the book was published, most people focused on why it was so hard to get experts to make bets – that is, put money on the line – to back their predictions up.

But what was more important, and more interesting, was why experts are incredibly bad at predictions. It’s that our social system is far too complex to even read, let alone understand well enough to forecast its future. The most learned expert can grasp only a few small elements of a political order.

When it comes to understanding infinitely complex systems, learning doesn’t create authority, it creates overconfidence.

Far from being harmless, our demand for narrative and meaning in politics creates heroes where there are none.

The political class builds up elaborate mythologies about great election campaigns and great election strategists to explain the twists and turns of political fortune. There are giants of Australian politics who can read the “mood” of the electorate, who have a unique vision into what the battlers or working families want.

But these giants are more like soothsayers than scientists. Statistical chance is just as plausible an explanation for short term political change.

There’s a parallel here with financial markets. Eugene Fama won the economics Nobel last year for his bubble-bursting empirical work on the efficient market hypothesis, which suggests most success in the share market is determined by random chance.

Every fund manager claims to consistently beat the market. Yet statistically speaking, somebody has to be Warren Buffett, and somebody has to be Gil Gunderson. It’s the same in politics.

Hopefully Terri Butler doesn’t actually believe Griffith was a referendum on Medicare. Hopefully Peter Hartcher doesn’t believe the by-election can reveal anything deep about the aggregated opinions of the Australian electorate with any degree of certainty.

Hopefully they realise the game that they are playing: trying to impart meaning on events no person can possibly understand.

PM’s ABC Critique Masks Deeper Security Debate

Sometimes the backdrop is more interesting than the performance.

It was significant that, when Prime Minister Tony Abbott launched his critique of the ABC last Wednesday, he singled out the ABC’s apparent promotion of the National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, who he described as “a traitor … who has betrayed his country”.

Because it’s easier to argue about the ethics of whistleblowing or the role of public broadcasting than come to terms with the radical changes in the politics and governance of national security over the past decade.

As my Institute of Public Affairs colleague James Paterson wrote in Fairfax papers last week, the case for ABC privatisation isn’t altered one bit by whether the network is pro-Australia or not.

(The hysterical fears about Malcolm Turnbull’s efficiency review are also a bit much. The ABC is a $1.2 billion piece of public policy. Public policy ought to be constantly reviewed – especially public policy that big.)

No, what we are seeing is the antipodean wing of a bigger debate about the place of national security in an open society.

The Indonesian spying revelations and the National Security Agency surveillance scandal are elements of this larger issue.

And with the military secrecy focus of Operation Sovereign Borders, the Abbott government has managed to drag asylum seeker policy into the national security net.

National security has always been an insiders’ game – a privilege of political power. Politicians who win government are suddenly taken into the tent. They’re granted the right to hear secrets kept from the people who elected them.

This is both an honour and a terrible responsibility: Those politicians inevitably get the blame if anything goes wrong.

Their responsibility makes them risk-averse and more sensitive to the desires of intelligence bureaucracies than other bureaucracies. It’s easier to say no to the deputy secretary of the Education Department than the director general of ASIO. It’s easier to bring innovative ideas from outside government to education than to the black box of national security and intelligence.

This has always been the case. What’s changed is the size of that black box.

It’s hard to overestimate the significance of the September 11 terrorist attacks for the development of the modern national security state.

With a decade’s hindsight, it has been as big a deal as the introduction of standing armies in the 19th century – a permanent, impossibly ambitious mass intelligence operation on a constant war footing.

Hence the United States’ historically unprecedented surveillance program, where a secretive bureaucracy hoovers up the world’s internet and phone records under the theory that almost anyone, anywhere is potentially a terror suspect.

The program is either unconstitutional or questionably constitutional. Either way, it certainly exceeds its legislative mandate.

At the end of last month a bipartisan government commission found the National Security Agency was misusing powers in its collection of phone records.

It’s pretty damning. Congress only permitted the collection of material related to ongoing investigations, and, even then, the agency given this power was the FBI, not the NSA. Nor could the commission identify any terrorist attack that had been directly thwarted by the use of this program.

This is all before we get to the grave civil liberties consequences of the mass data collection.

Of course, much of what we know about it comes from the Edward Snowden leaks. It doesn’t matter whether you think Snowden is a traitor or hero or something in-between. It is undeniably true that had those leaks not occurred, we would be none the wiser about the Obama administration’s probably illegal, unquestionably disturbing, and obviously dangerous security program.

It’s an interesting hypothetical as to whether, even had September 11 never occurred, governments would have sought and acquired such powers anyway.

But that’s the key: The NSA surveillance is only possible thanks to technological developments that enable such huge amounts of information to be collected, stored and processed.

And, conversely, it is those technological developments that have made it possible for the new era of whistleblowers and leakers to have the impact they have had.

Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy the Pentagon Papers by hand on a very new and unfamiliar Xerox machine. It took him and a colleague all night. By contrast, Bradley Manning easily transferred a quarter of a million documents onto a blank CD while pretending to lip-sync a Lady Gaga song. Uploading them to WikiLeaks would have been even quicker.

As explosive as they were, the Pentagon Papers were only an internal history of the Vietnam War up to 1967 – not the raw material of diplomacy and intelligence we’re seeing today.

There’s another important development that has been somewhat obscured by the political contest surrounding our new era of leaks.

What we’re seeing is not the surreptitious transfer of secrets from one country’s intelligence agency to another country’s intelligence agency – as has been the historical norm – but the very open transfer of secrets from intelligence agencies to the public sphere.

All the political sound and fury has been over the release of information to voters. In other words, the opening of the national security black box to democratic scrutiny and debate.

The Indonesian spying scandal was a particularly stark demonstration of that dynamic. Indonesia knows we spy on them, as we know they have spied on us. The political problem is that the Indonesian public now know too.

These leaks will keep happening. Maybe not from Snowden or Manning, but the next person. Embarrassing disclosures about the secret inner workings of the national security state is the new normal. It’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing – it just is.

And democratic governments are just going to have to learn to deal with it.

The Olympics: A Tool For Autocrats Since 1936

Another Olympics, another repressive state using the Olympics to boost its international reputation and gain legitimacy at home.

This time it’s Russia and the Sochi Winter Olympic Games.

When will it sink in that repression is not a regrettable anomaly in some host nations, but a central feature of the Olympic package? That the Olympic movement feeds, legitimises, and even encourages political authoritarianism?

Here’s the rap sheet for Sochi. The 2012 presidential election, which put Vladimir Putin back in the Russian presidency, was surrounded by allegations of fraud. His government met the resulting mass protest movements with a suite of legislation designed to suppress dissent, free speech, and free assembly.

The prosecution of members of the band Pussy Riot was just the most highly publicised attack on political and religious dissent in the last few years.

Amnesty International estimates that 4,000 people across Russia were detained for protesting in 2012 alone. International non-government organisations engaging, however vaguely, in “political activity” are required to register as “foreign agents” and are subject to routine harassment. Foreign journalists are intimidated and sometimes banned.

Then, of course, there’s Russia’s “gay propaganda” law, which makes it illegal to suggest that gay relationships and heterosexual relationships are in any way equal.

All this is on top of the usual forced evictions, construction and development corruption, and extra-legal environmental damage that is par for the course for any Olympics held outside the very richest countries. Putin promised a “zero waste” Olympics as part of its bid back in 2007; apparently the Olympics committee is unable to detect outrageous nonsense when they hear it.

Indeed, it was clear during 2007 that Putin’s Russia was an illiberal Russia. This chronology by FreedomHouse shows how political repression has increased since Putin’s first election to the presidency in 2000.

But by now there is a well-established Olympic media cycle. Negative stories are aired before the games commence. The opening ceremony is 10 days away. The next week and a half will, no doubt, be full of exposures of Putin’s political perfidy, about the environmental and economic cost of the Sochi Olympics, warnings that Sochi’s infrastructure isn’t up to speed, fears about terrorism, and revelations of waste and mismanagement.

But those tales subside the moment the opening ceremony wraps up. Unless there is a major political, logistical, or security crisis, the international coverage of the Sochi games will immediately focus on the sport.

Athletic performances will wash away the political stench. Putin and his government will be the beneficiaries. They will be photographed with sports stars and visiting celebrities. They will feed off the praise of organisers and fans and athletes, for whom there is no world outside the Olympic villages and stadiums.

All the pre-Games bad press will be chalked up to anti-Russian sentiment.

That’s the Olympic calculus – repressive regimes have to tolerate a few months of quiet and steady negativity, which is more than adequately compensated by a fortnight of blisteringly positive press.

Western complaints about Russia’s anti-gay law will not take the shine off Putin’s Olympics.

Defenders of the Olympics make much of the one historical instance where the games bought genuine, welcome political change: Seoul, in 1988. South Korea’s democratisation dates roughly from that time.

But this is not much of a defence. The country was at the time of its bid in 1980 controlled by a repressive military dictatorship, who wanted the Olympics to legitimise its rule.

As this 2004 paper makes clear, at best, the Olympics can be seen as a catalyst, rather than a cause, of South Korea’s democratisation. There were many factors pressuring the country towards change.

And anyway, the International Olympic Committee had no problem being used for authoritarian propaganda. From the Olympic movement’s perspective, it was just a happy accident that South Korean democracy emerged from South Korean dictatorship.

There’s simply no reason to believe the Olympic movement cares about political freedom, and many reasons to believe it is happy to be a tool of the world’s worst regimes.

The 2007 assessment of the Sochi bid (here, page 9) is a masterpiece of amoral detachment. In its assessment of Russian politics, the only factor it feels worth relating is the overwhelming political support for holding the games, as if democratic debate about the virtues of the Olympics would be would be a negative.

It’s true that the repression in Russia is now less than the last time Russia hosted the games in Moscow in 1980. Or than that of Berlin in 1936, or even Beijing in 2008.

But it’s no coincidence that the three most brutal totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century have each been granted an opportunity to host the Olympics.

Or that many other undemocratic nations have used the games to build legitimacy at home and aboard.

The Olympics movement simply doesn’t care that it – and all the athletes who compete in their events – is being used as pawns in an authoritarian political game.

Neo-Prohibition Isn’t The Answer To Violent Crime

It wouldn’t be a moral panic without demands that the government do something.

And so it is with the alcohol-fuelled violence panic that swept New South Wales over the Christmas break.

Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute made a few proposals in the Sydney Morning Herald here. Governments could increase alcohol prices by increase taxes or imposing a minimum price. They could restrict pub opening hours. They could even set a maximum blood alcohol level for people in public places.

Such proposals are more or less the sort of neo-prohibition public health activists have wanted for years.

Today Barry O’Farrell announced a crackdown on alcohol venues, with mandatory bottleshop closures at 10:00pm, a 1:30am pub lock-out, and no pub service after 3:00am.

Let’s lay aside whether it is fair to restrict the liberties of all because of the idiocy of a few. It is utterly and despicably perverse that our immediate reaction to a highly publicised violent assault is to blame public policy, or market forces, or “culture” in general.

It’s classic guilt displacement, shifting the responsibility from the perpetrators of violence and onto society. That is, it’s not totally their fault they were violent. Alcohol vendors were plying them with liquor! Lazy politicians were neglecting their regulatory duties! Music videos have been glorifying drinking!

What does this imply for the moral responsibility of the perpetrators? After all, to punish somebody for an act they had little control over would be a travesty of justice.

Perhaps the number of bottleshops in a suburb should be a mitigating factor in sentencing. Of course, none of our latter-day prohibitionists have taken their logic this far. But such perverse reasoning is implicit when we seek social explanations for individual criminal acts.

The perversity increases when you realise that there is no alcohol-fuelled violence crisis. The rate of violence related to alcohol is stable, even declining. (This piece in the Guardian sums up the evidence for New South Wales nicely.)

Our alcohol consumption is steady, too. Australia’s per capita alcohol consumption has been hovering around 10 litres a year for the last few decades. (In the 1970s it was more like 12 litres.)

But regardless of whether it is trending up or trending down, it remains the case that the Australian public consumes a large quantity of alcohol, and gets into very few fights.

There are, as there have always been, brutal thugs who take pleasure from violence. The correct – and most direct – response is to target the thugs, not to fiddle with tax policy.

The relationship between alcohol and violence is not as clear cut as you might expect. Yes, much violent crime is caused by intoxicated people. The doctors and police are right. But figuring out whether alcohol actually causes the violence is quite hard.

Correlation, as we all know, is not causation.

The most common theory is that alcohol lowers inhibitions. It directly anesthetises the parts of the brain that we use to regulate our everyday behaviour. Alcohol changes us physically, and in a way that makes some people more aggressive.

From experiments in laboratory settings we know that people who consume alcohol exhibit more aggressive behaviour.

But the inhibition theory is not the only theory which could explain this.

Some experiments have shown that people tend to get more aggressive even when given a placebo. That is, when they are told they are going to have an alcoholic drink, but are secretly given a non-alcoholic tonic, they get aggressive anyway. Thus the ‘expectations’ theory suggests people get more aggressive when intoxicated simply because they expect to get more aggressive when intoxicated. They think aggression is more socially acceptable in a drunk.

There are other theories. The connection between alcohol and violence could be indirect. Intoxication reduces intellectual function, causing us to exaggerate provocation and to needlessly provoke others.

But these theories only take us so far. It’s one thing to show in a lab that people who believe they are intoxicated people are marginally more aggressive than those who are sober. It’s quite another to draw policy conclusions from that finding.

The overwhelming majority of people drink without getting violent. (Some people just get more helpful.) In the real world, humans are able to regulate their behaviour even while intoxicated. Even if alcohol ’causes’ violence, it only causes it rarely, and in a tiny fraction of people.

Even drunk people make choices. Even drunk people can be moral. We are not machines. Public policy ought not to treat us like machines.

The more policy-focused researchers try to side-step this issue with macro-level studies that look at correlations between alcohol consumption in an area and incidents of violence.

That’s where we get the claims that bottleshop density facilitates violence, for instance.

But these studies often struggle to distinguish between other factors. The essential feature of bars and pubs and nightclubs and bottleshops isn’t that they sell alcohol. It’s that they bring large groups of young men together in close proximity.

Ultimately, the neurological, psychological, and sociological evidence about the relationship between alcohol and violence isn’t strong enough to get us away from a simple intuition: violent acts are caused by violent people, regardless of their level of intoxication.

As one paper from 2008 concludes, “alcohol may facilitate violent behavior among those who are already inclined to behave that way. It is also possible that violent adolescents sometimes use alcohol as an excuse for their behavior.”

So the idea that we would be trying to blur the responsibility of violent offenders with alcohol regulation is utterly, utterly repugnant.

It’s exactly what the thugs, and their lawyers, want us to do.

The Farce Of An Ideologically Neutral Curriculum

Christopher Pyne has done irreparable damage to the national curriculum project.

This is fantastic.

The damage hasn’t occurred because there’s anything wrong with appointing Kevin Donnelly and Professor of Public Administration Ken Wiltshire to review it.

No, it’s because the supporters of the national curriculum can no longer pretend that imposing a uniform curriculum on every single student in the country isn’t an ideological undertaking.

Donnelly is a conservative and in his work as a political commentator, he has made no attempt to obscure his conservative views. Not least on the Drum.

Conservatives are such strange and alien creatures that the appointment has turned outrage up to 11. The teachers’ union described it as the “politicisation” of education. Bill Shorten implored Tony Abbott to “please keep your hands off the school books of Australian children”.

And one of the authors of the history curriculum, Tony Taylor, complained that with the Donnelly and Wiltshire appointment, “we can look forward to 20 years of tedious culture wars in the classroom”.

But if there is a ‘culture war’, it wasn’t the right that started it. The national curriculum is already deeply ideological.

That ought not be a controversial claim. The curriculum is explicit, open, and unabashed about its ideological content. It’s not buried or implied. It’s as bold as a billboard.

The curriculum nominates three great themes (that is, three ‘cross-curriculum priorities’) which are to dominate and define Australian education for the next few decades: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and Sustainability.

All worthy topics, of course. How are they ideological? Take sustainability. The sustainability theme is intended to “[create] a more ecologically and socially just world through informed action”. That’s virtually the definition of ideology: a positive description (we are harming the planet) combined with a normative ideal of a better social order (an ecologically and socially just world).

If this isn’t clear enough, well, one of its ‘organising ideas’ is the sustainability ‘world view’: “value diversity and social justice are essential for achieving sustainability”.

Perhaps this is an ideology you agree with. Ideology isn’t a bad thing. Everybody’s thought is shaped by ideology, whether they’re aware of it or not. But it’s ideology nonetheless.

So it is bizarre to object, as Julia Gillard did on Friday, that the ideological direction of the curriculum was not dictated by the Prime Ministers’ Office. Are we supposed to feel better that a group of independent (read: unelected) education specialists (Kevin Donnelly calls them “educrats”) determined the future philosophical underpinnings of our compulsory education system?

(That rule by unelected experts is supposed to be more legitimate and morally superior to rule by elected representatives just shows how anti-democratic our era really is.)

A curriculum is always going to be ideological, in the basic sense that an ideology is a lens through which we make sense of the world.

Alan Reid summarises one view of a national curriculum as “the major means by which the citizenry, collectively and individually, can develop the capabilities to play a part in the democratic project of nation-(re)building.”

An ideologically neutral curriculum is a contradiction in terms.

So at best the national curriculum faces a sad future of continuous rewriting at every change of government. Politics is about competing world views, after all. In the words of Christopher Pyne, “I don’t think the national curriculum is a static document.”

Luckily, in a liberal democracy, we have a way to bypass fundamental disagreements about world views – decentralisation.

There is, simply, no good reason to have a national curriculum.

The first moves towards federal government involvement in the curriculum were initiated, hesitantly, by Malcolm Fraser as John Gorton’s education minister, who complained that there were “unnecessary differences in what is taught in the various states”.

Since then a national curriculum has been a persistent goal of the Commonwealth education department and the small world of education academics.

The intellectual case for a national curriculum, developed over half a century, has involved a lot of theorising about democracy and nation-building and civic virtues.

But now the defenders of the curriculum are trying to pretend these great philosophical goals never existed – that their curriculum is a pragmatic, neutral, unambitious thing.

The utilitarian case for Commonwealth curriculum control has always been absurdly weak. It rests on the desire for “consistency” for the tiny proportion – less than 3 per cent – of students that move interstate during their schooling.

At the very least, the curriculum should be handed back to the states. It is not a project worth pursuing.

But better yet would be a system of multiple, competing curriculums which schools and parents can choose from, according to their own values, tastes, preferences, and philosophies of education. This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Australian schools already offer the International Baccalaureate, Montessori, and Steiner curriculums.

When a population’s values conflict, we should look for solutions in political economy.

Don’t want Christopher Pyne deciding what your children are taught? Perhaps a curriculum imposed by the Commonwealth Department of Education is not for you.

Devolving curriculum decisions down to the school level ought to satisfy both critics of Kevin Donnelly and critics of the curriculum as it stands. And it would instantaneously end the culture war that everybody seems so worried about.

The national curriculum is a high ground. It was designed to be that way. Bulldoze the high ground, end the war.

There Is No Such Thing As Reform Without Risks

The Australian political class has a complex, neurotic, and self-destructive relationship with the word “reform”.

On the one hand, every incentive faced by incumbent governments favours the status quo. Serious policy change is complicated and risky. Reform is easy to stuff up, it’s bound to upset interest groups, and it’s a gimme for the opposition.

It’s safer to minimally implement your election promises, relax in the comfy chair of government, and focus on distributing the benefits of office.

But on the other hand, “reform” is the gold standard of Australian politics. Journalists and historians like to see big policy changes that reshape the country, and they like to see lots of them.

Australian political legacies are a simple equation. Good governments are those that reform (Whitlam, Hawke, early Howard). Bad governments are those that squib reform (Fraser, Rudd).

This trade-off is no doubt what has preoccupied the Abbott Government over the Christmas break.

The Coalition won government by promising to be everything Labor was not: calm, austere, and rigorous. But not-being-Labor is an agenda for 12 months, not three or four terms.

Every Coalition government lives in the shadow of the Fraser government. Those press articles about “business urging reform” may be paint-by-numbers but they aren’t going to go away. (Here’s one from yesterday in the Australian Financial Review. Here’s one in the Australian today.)

The Coalition’s long-term political legacy rests on three major inquiries due to report in the next year – three inquiries that have been specifically designed to provide the Abbott Government with a reform agenda.

The Commission of Audit reports in March. The review of Australian competition policy will take 12 months once it is formed (presumably in the next couple of weeks). The financial system inquiry has been formed and will deliver its final report by November.

The Commission of Audit is obviously important to get the budget back under control. The other two ought to be big deals as well. Previous inquiries into competition policy and the financial sector fundamentally reshaped the Australian economy. Think the Hilmer Report that kick-started Keating-era National Competition Policy, and the Fraser government’s Campbell Committee which lay the foundation of financial deregulation.

Yet so far the Abbott Government’s reviews seem modest, even bashful.

The inquiry into competition policy is supposed to be “root and branch”. But its political sponsor is Bruce Billson, the Minister for Small Business, and has been sold almost entirely as a way to level the playing field between small and big business.

Competition policy ought to be about ensuring market forces have free play to drive prices down and spur innovation. However, the Coalition seems to think competition policy is about ensuring consumer prices are high enough to give farmers a “fair go”.

The Financial System Inquiry is also peculiarly insular. Joe Hockey thinks Australian banks should source more capital from within Australia. It appears the lesson the Government has taken from the Global Financial Crisis is that we are too integrated with the world economy.

This lengthy analysis in the Australian Financial Review from November suggests the inquiry will focus on developing a domestic corporate bond market. If that’s the big policy from the financial system inquiry, then the whole endeavour will have been a bit of a flop.

Indeed, a flop may be what the government is hoping for – that the results of the inquiries are managerial but not bold.

The story of the Rudd government explains why. In 2010, Ken Henry’s review into taxation gave Wayne Swan a whopping 138 separate recommendations to reform the tax and transfer system. But Swan wasn’t sure how to handle reform on such a grand scale, and ended up pursuing just one – the mining tax. We all know how that ended.

“Reform” is such a vague and ambiguous concept that any significant policy change is described as reform. For some, reform is carbon taxes and abolishing negative gearing. For others, it’s labour market deregulation and reducing green tape.

Either way, reform is presented as a good in and of itself. Every government is desperate to be seen as the Hawke government – the ideal reforming type. In part that’s because of the near universal consensus in Australia’s policy community that freeing up the economy was a great idea.

Just as significant are the Coalition’s constant reminders that they supported Labor’s liberalisations and asset sales at the time.

It’s easy to assume in hindsight that the politics of reform were relatively simple. But the 1986-1987 cabinet papers released last week underscore just how uncomfortable and bitter economic reform actually was.

Take shipping – one of the key liberalisations in the story of Australian productivity. Greg Jericho tells the story here of how the Hawke government’s desire to open up the Australian coastal trade to foreign ships was scotched by the ACTU. Shipping reform had to wait for the Howard government, for whom broken relations with the union movement was no great loss.

The hero story of the reform era that is told in the business pages every week is no more a reflection of what happened during the Hawke and Keating governments than the West Wing is of the Clinton administration.

If the Abbott Government wants the historical mantle of “reform”, it will need to take some risks. And it will need to make some enemies.