Tag: ABC The Drum

Les Mis: A Revolution For Our Times

What do the revolutionaries in Les Misérables actually want?

This is not a pedantic question. Victor Hugo’s 1862 Les Misérables – or, at least, its 1980s musical adaptation – is now deeply embedded in the West’s popular consciousness.

Its popularity extends far past those who know anything of 19th century French history. Indeed, for many people the musical is a stand-in for the entire French Revolution, although it depicts events that occurred many decades later.

Popular culture profoundly shapes our political beliefs, and the idea of rebellion against injustice still resonates even in the democratic era. See, for instance, Occupy.

Even those who haven’t seen the musical would know its broad strokes. A former convict who has broken parole tries to build a virtuous life while on the run. The culmination of his personal struggle coincides with a doomed Paris uprising led by idealistic students.

But that uprising seems to be against… what? The monarchy? A general sense of inequality? It’s not called Les Misérables – the victims, the wretched ones – for nothing. The musical’s logo incorporates an engraving of a young girl in rags. The 2012 film has an energetic makeup artist who gives the poor of France gratuitously broken teeth and cholera.

But it’s never clear why any of the students believe economic injustice will be resolved by barricading off a few city streets. The student revolutionaries are hopelessly vague about their goals. They’re going to “cut the fat ones down to size”. There’s some suggestion of a utopian “tomorrow”.

The uprising depicted in Les Misérables was a real uprising that happened in June 1832. It was an aftershock of a bigger political upheaval just two years earlier, which had replaced the royal restoration under the House of Bourbon with a new constitutional monarchy under the House of Orléans.

Those who really fought on the 5th and 6th of June 1832 were opposed to the new Orléanist monarchy, but for many different reasons. There were radical Republicans, who wanted parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage. There were also ultra-Royalists, who wanted the reversal of all the gains of 1789, and Bonepartists, who wanted to restore French imperial glory as it was under Napoleon. With such a bizarre coalition, no wonder the people of Paris slept in their beds that night.

And France was hardly the stagnant, rotting, unchanging regime the musical suggests. Between 1796 (when our hero Jean Valjean was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread) and 1832, France was governed by no less than five political systems, from the revolutionary Directory to the monarchy after 1830.

All this politics is missing in the musical, replaced by a vague sense of injustice and a group of students with a serious martyr complex.

Sure, the musical is a musical. You can’t ask for too much political exposition in songs. It’s easier to find a rhyme for “love” than a rhyme for “chronic wealth disparity” or “post-revolutionary dynastic confusion”.

But Victor Hugo’s original novel is not a whole lot clearer. In his 2007 book The Temptation of the Impossible, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa argues that Hugo, too, is hopelessly vague on the purpose of the revolt. One student forecasts if they succeed “monsters will have given way to the angels”. But that’s about as specific as it gets.

One way to join the dots between the poor on the streets and the students’ bloodshed is to depict the latter as proto communists. The students might be Bolsheviks dedicated to a redistributive paradise.

But the narrator of Les Misérables was hostile to communism, writing that “equal sharing abolishes competition and, in consequence, labour”.

And the cruellest oppression in the story isn’t economic. Hugo reserves his biggest criticism for the legal system. Hugo himself was a political drifter, starting as a conservative royalist and ending life, loosely, as a liberal or a social democrat. Virtually his only constant belief was opposition to the death penalty.

We think of Les Misérables as a primarily a story about revolution and social oppression. The musical does not disabuse us of this idea. But it is wrong. Hugo is more preoccupied by God than politics.

The revolutionary students do not believe their uprising will succeed. As Vargas Llosa writes, the students “know and accept that they will be annihilated because this is the role that they must play”. What comes across as a martyr complex in the musical is more for Hugo an acceptance of fate and the will of God. The entire story is a grand morality tale of fate and redemption.
Contemporary versions of Les Misérables struggle to communicate Hugo’s essentially religious message. We live in a secular age. Faith is a niche topic not a mass one.

Yet a modern reader can’t help be struck that the first 70 or so pages of the novel are a detailed profile of someone marginal to the plot – Bishop Myriel, the good priest who forgives Jean Valjean for stealing his silver. If the opening of a story sets its tone, then this is totally different from the vision of penal hardship set by the musical.

Hugo stripped the politics out of the 1832 uprising to tell a religious story. Then the musical adaptation stripped most of the religion away.

There’s not much left, except a vague exhortation to violently, pointlessly die on behalf of the poor. The students are engaged in a vanity revolution. This is insurrection as a lifestyle choice.

There’s something very modern about that. Our mature democracies are boringly practical. For us, revolution is a romantic gesture which belongs in the past.

But real, historical revolutions have been about something: tyranny or taxation or arcane theories of economic class.

In the Les Misérables musical – and our popular culture – revolution is little more than an honourable, nihilistic death-wish.

Policy Without Politics Is Pointless

John McTernan is Julia Gillard’s director of communications, a Scottish import, and, by all accounts, the man who convinced our Prime Minister to go hard on Tony Abbott’s woman problem.

In a profile in the Monthly, Nick Bryant wrote that McTernan is “renowned for his ruthlessness, and for being a hater”. He has an “all-out attack” political style. He’s usually compared to Malcolm Tucker, the iconic Scottish bruiser in The Thick of It.

But he came to Australia in a very different guise – as an “Adelaide Thinker-in-Residence”, the intellectual patronage program of former premier Mike Rann.

McTernan’s final report was belatedly released after Christmas: Are You Being Served? Toward More Responsive Public Services.

This report has to be read to be believed. It is superficial and scattershot and padded out with anecdotes. Poor old South Australians apparently paid handsomely for this collection of folksy wisdom masquerading as serious thinking about public service reform. In some parts it is actually quite funny. McTernan uses the word “synergies” not once, but twice.

Yet the report has one virtue: it exposes how barren thinking about public service delivery can be.

McTernan’s “challenge” was to revolutionise the relationship between public services and public service users.

To this he proposes the government “state and celebrate the purpose of public service overall”, seek to “foster a culture that empowers citizens and government to jointly own the problems that need to be solved”, and “establish a comprehensive state-wide approach to the development of 21st Century public service leadership”.

Those are the first three recommendations, word for word.

Only slightly more concrete is his call for “e-government”. Sure, e-government is a tantalising idea. In theory, it could link public services together, reduce administrative costs, increase government responsiveness and transparency, and make dealing with bureaucracies simple – even convenient.

In practice… well, you only need to see what the Australian Taxation Office’s eTax software looks like to see why massive government departments don’t do well in the online space.

E-government initiatives are, at their best, plodding and ineffective. At their worst they can be dangerous: government-run databases already have notorious privacy problems, and such problems multiply when those databases are linked together.

If e-government lends itself to fantastical thinking, even more indulgent is the claims made for the “open data” movement, where government releases wads of raw data for citizens to analyse and repurpose. For McTernan, open data could “increase transparency, accountability and collaboration”.

That all sounds great, but in reality, the most momentous open data success in Australia has been the National Public Toilet Map. Cute, modestly helpful, but hardly a revitalisation of democracy.

The limits of open data are obvious. The only data that is going to be released under an open data scheme is bland; anything which is controversial, potentially embarrassing, or even mildly off-message is going to be cleansed or suppressed.

Indeed, controlling the release of embarrassingly information is exactly the sort of thing that a communications director to a prime minister might be expected to do.

Public sector utopianism is always dashed upon the rocks of political expediency. That’s a worldly truth which makes most thinking about public service reform hopelessly naïve.

But in John McTernan’s report, this truth is elevated into a great irony. This supremely political person (the Monthly profile says McTernan can’t resist involving himself in internal ALP factional fights) appears not to have factored politics into his thinking.

For instance, McTernan proposes a checklist of sound policy development and implementation. (“Ask what is the problem?”, “What are the facts and do we have them all?”, “What are the solutions and do we have them all?” and so on.) That’s nice, and reminiscent of the “policy cycle” described in first year public policy textbooks.

But the policy cycle is an ideal model. It is deliberately simplified to the point of ridiculousness.

McTernan of all people knows that public policy is not developed by a steady, step-by-step process.

No, in a democracy, public policy is a compromise between interest groups brokered by politicians whose major interest is re-election. It is constrained by a lack of information and confounded by real-world complexity. It is implemented by bureaucracies driven by self-interest and it is evaluated by those who have a stake in its success.

All the problems McTernan implicitly identifies in the public service – excessive internal red tape, a lack of leadership, poor policy development – are not isolated problems to be surmounted but are innate features of the public sector. They are the natural result of the political incentives faced by all whose job it is to develop, choose, and implement policy.

Until thinking on public sector reform comes to terms with the political constraints of government action, it will always be pointlessly utopian.

Videogame Blame Distracts From The Real Gun Debate

Before Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he smashed the hard drive on his computer.

That act may frustrate investigators trying figure out his motives, but it has proved to be no obstacle for amateur psychologists.

Indeed, the closest the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre came to coherence in his bizarre press conference last week was when he blamed “vicious, violent” games like Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat, and an obscure browser game called Kindergarten Killer.

There are now two competing lessons about the Sandy Hook school shooting. One focuses on Lanza’s access to guns, and one focuses on Lanza’s fondness for videogames.

A plumber who worked on his home says Lanza was “obsessed” by games. This psychological issue was apparently diagnosed in the time it took to work on the Lanza household’s pipes.

A high-school classmate says his preferred weapon in videogames was an assault rifle; a damning assessment only if you’ve never played any games at all. (Assault rifles tend to be best in-game weapons.)

Police investigators report there were “thousands of dollars” of games in the home: another tidbit which is superficially compelling if you don’t know a game can cost about $100 and most gamers acquire dozens of them.

Lanza “played videogames for hours” breathlessly reported the New York Daily News, which is not remarkable considering most games last around 10 hours.

Take these little factoids with a grain of salt. The Sandy Hook shooting was nearly two weeks ago but like all tragedies almost every piece of information is provisional. The world’s press has swept through Connecticut trying to find new angles and dig up tales about the killer.

Falsehoods become embedded in our mind when they tell a compelling story. At his press conference Wayne LaPierre listed the most violent sounding games his researchers could find, but – as far as we know – Lanza’s favourite game was StarCraft, a science fiction strategy game. This Washington Post story says he was particularly good at Dance Dance Revolution. Not many assault rifles in that game.

The charge that videogames cause violence is easy to refute. There is a large amount of research on the question and it’s compelling. To give just a taste: game sales have skyrocketed in the last decade in the United States but the rate of violent crime heading towards historic lows. There’s no obvious relationship between videogame usage and gun-related murder, as this ten country comparison demonstrates. A study published in August this year (PDF) found videogames don’t seem to have consequences – negative or positive – on adolescent aggression in the short or long term. Virtual violence doesn’t desensitise gamers to real-world violence.

On the more particular topic of school shootings, a joint report by the US Secret Service and Department of Education in 2002 found only 12 per cent of school shooters had expressed an interest in violent videogames.

Obviously, Wayne LaPierre mentioned videogames to muddy the policy waters. Far from the principled defenders of the American constitution, the gun lobby is happy to attack the First Amendment to protect the Second.

But targeting videogames allowed him to make this obscene claim: “does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?”

This is both logical and stupid: millions of people play videogames, so millions of people are potential mass murderers. But how LaPierre thought mass panic would serve the interests of gun owners is difficult to understand. (Although you can see why gun manufacturers might be pleased.)

In a way, it’s too late. The American education system descended into security paranoia long ago.

After the Columbine shootings in 1999, many states rigidly enforced zero-tolerance approaches to violent or threatening behaviour in schools. Zero-tolerance made sense at the time. One of the Columbine killers, Dylan Klebold, had written violent essays, and it was tempting to think the massacre could have been averted if his teachers were on guard.

But in practice zero-tolerance was highly repressive. There are countless stories of children being expelled or suspended for simply drawing pictures of guns, for playing cops and robbers, for bringing a paring knife in their lunchbox to cut fruit. These tales would be laughable if they weren’t so cruel.

On top of unthinking zero-tolerance policies, we can add metal detectors at schools, massive arrays of CCTV cameras, random locker and car searches, and armed police. This recollection of education in Virginia on BoingBoing offers a glimpse of the security madness which now characterises the American public school system.

It will only get worse. In response to the Sandy Hook shooting, all 4,000 elementary schools in Ontario (yes, the Canadian province, that Ontario) will be implementing a “locked door” policy during school hours.

The NRA’s plan was to use fear – fear of videogames, of violent culture, of “the next Adam Lanza” – as a distraction from the gun debate. Perhaps they needn’t have bothered: that fear and paranoia was already there.

2012: The Year In Political Outrage

You can still access the Facebook page for the Channel 10 talk show The Circle.

There’s a disclaimer on it now – the show was cancelled in August, and Channel 10 doesn’t want any responsibility for the page – but the page survives, its wall plastered with happy behind-the-scenes photos. It’s all a bit sad, in retrospect, but they seem like they’re having great fun.

Scroll down the Facebook timeline and that joy suddenly disappears. On February 29, a wall post titled “A message from Network Ten” officially apologised for the comments made by Yumi Stynes and George Negus about a Victoria Cross recipient, Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith on the show.

The disembodied corporate voice did not satisfy. There are 1,918 comments on that post and another 6,461 on a follow up.

“Words are cheap!” proclaimed one Facebook commenter.

“You are scum, spineless scum,” said another.

Stynes copped most of it. (The women usually do.)

“When you hear Yumi Stynes you think of stupid, gutless, low, meaningless, un Australian.”

One comment summed up the general mood:

“The nation was offended and it deserves an act of contrition from TEN that involves sacking.”

The nation got offended an awful lot in 2012. Ours was such a year of outrage that all these little episodes seem to have blurred into one: a swirling furiousness against Qantas, Alan Jones, Kyle Sandilands, in defence of Charlotte Dawson, against Charlotte Dawson, Alan Jones again, in defence of Robbie Farah, against Robbie Farah, “Twitter trolls”, Alan Jones again, and then finally, tragically, the two 2DayFM hosts.

By the time the 2DayFM hosts made their prank call, there was already a fixed outrage-on-commercial-broadcasting playbook: shut down advertising before advertisers can shut down themselves, bare your soul to the press.

But, 11 months on, can you even remember what was so outrageous about Yumi Stynes? Don’t Google. It was Negus, not Stynes, who speculated about Corporal Roberts-Smith’s sexual prowess: “what if they’re not up to it in the sack?” Hence the “dud root” comment. Stynes suggested the good soldier wasn’t that smart.

Was this a tasteless? Okay, if you want. But, really, “the nothing hosts of this second rate show MAKE ME SICK”?

The Yumi Stynes saga was a sign of things to come. As episodes of outrage accumulated over the year, they became more overwhelming.

Alan Jones’ infamous comment in September – that the Prime Minister’s father had “died of shame” – shut down political debate for weeks. The Alan Jones saga was like a centrifuge: it dragged in everything, eventually parliament itself.

We forget now that Peter Slipper was not the only “context” for Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. There was also Tony Abbott’s thoughtless repetition of Jones’ phrase moments earlier. To the extent that Labor’s modest recovery has come by painting Abbott as anti-woman, it was a recovery forged in the winds of the Alan Jones controversy.

Australia isn’t good at talking about more than one thing at once. Our population is too small, our newspapers are too skinny, and our broadcasters are too few.

As with everything else, we are hopelessly constrained by size. When these episodes of outrage occur they submerge our tiny media sector. The Alan Jones comments were first reported on September 29. It was only after Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech 10 days later that the public debate came up for air and was able to discuss something else.

It’s wrong to blame social media for our new propensity to outrage. Certainly (as I’ve argued in the past) Twitter shapes what the media and political class imagine the public thinks. Nobody would defend the proposition that Twitter is representative but, when you’re hit by hundreds of tweets in a row saying the same furious thing, it’s hard not to feel that “the public” is talking back.

Social media and the mainstream press are interdependent. The new and old media feed on each other. We mustn’t pretend that the hundreds of columns and news stories published on Jones or Stynes or Robbie Farah didn’t happen, or to minimise them by saying they’re just a symptom of online activism.

No, outrage suits the times. It’s no coincidence that episodes of outrage have dominated during the greatest contraction in the mainstream press in Australian history. They’re easy to comprehend, they’re easy to write about, and everybody has an opinion about them.

And they are entertaining. What Alan Jones said at a private Young Liberal function is a collective cultural experience in an era where collective cultural experiences are few and far between.
Sure, outrage can be confected. No-one was really offended by Peter Slipper’s text messages. Showy moralising anger is a new weapon in the political arsenal.

But if you want to see genuine anger, take a moment to scroll through The Circle’s defunct Facebook page.

“You have lost me FOREVER Chan 10…… and I will be telling everyone else to dump you guys too.”

“Disgraceful and un-Australian! How about u go over to the gan and fight for your country and then come back and think about flappin your lips!!”

Outrage is politics packaged up for the water cooler: it’s transient, meaningless, forgettable, and, for a brief moment, intensely all-consuming.

Losing Interest In Our Rate Obsession

As the 20th century opened there were 18 central banks around the world. One hundred years later there were 173.

But none of them have as tight a grip on the political culture as Australia’s Reserve Bank.

No other country grants so much mystical significance to their central bank’s interest rate decisions. We are obsessed.

Last Tuesday the bank lowered the cash rate to 3 per cent, releasing another torrent of claims and counterclaims. Wayne Swan declared it was testimony to his great management of the economy. Joe Hockey said the rates had been dropped to “emergency levels”. Retail banks were threatened. Peter Costello’s name was invoked.

Politicians have deified the Reserve Bank. It’s unusual for a politician to publicly second guess the board’s encyclicals. Happily, commentators do not share their faith. So last week, as always, columns were written and talking heads talked. Is the bank’s board being bold, prudent, reckless, negligent? Take your pick.

We’re so used to these theatrics that we don’t realise how unusually Australian it all is.

But compare how foreign politicians and parties view their interest rate movements.

For the British Conservative Party, low interest rates are merely a feature of a healthy economy – and not a particularly central one. Here’s a Google search of the Conservative Party website. The most concrete claim they make is that their hard-won fiscal credibility keeps interest rates low.

The Australian Liberal Party’s website shows a completely different picture. Here, low interest rates are themselves the goal. Interest rates will be lower under the Coalition. They’re higher under Labor. Gillard finally admits she has forced up interest rates. And on and on and on.

We can play the same game with the labour parties, although to be fair the difference is not as stark. Here’s the ALP, and here are their British cousins.

And the Americans? Well, in the 32,000 word, 55 page Republican Party platform (PDF), interest rates are mentioned … once. Even though it’s pretty plausible that extremely low Federal Reserve rates were a major cause of the financial crisis.

So yes, Australians are a bit different. Interest rates are the bread and butter of the political contest – as Australian as asylum seekers. The federal Liberal campaign in 2004 was almost entirely structured around interest rates.

In April this year Bill Shorten even suggested that knowledge of Reserve Bank meetings was central to political leadership in this country. Yes, we smugly all laughed as Shorten tried to correct Tony Abbott’s factual error with his own factual error (the bank meets the firstTuesday of every month, not the second). But more important was why Shorten thought Abbott’s mistake was a big deal: “when you want to be the alternative Prime Minister of Australia, interest rates is just such an important issue”.

And all this rhetoric for something governments have almost no control over.

The Reserve Bank is independent; it makes its decisions in private, pretending to know nothing of the busy political world outside its boardroom. When parties take credit for rate cuts or damn their opponents for rate rises, they are simply bluffing. They have no direct control over the rates. They have little indirect either. Of all the sources of inflation in a modern, open, liberal economy, national governments can only really influence one or two.

In other words, our politicians are playing a game with pieces they don’t control, but it’s worse than that. If rates go up, mortgage holders will hate it. If they go down, then the economy may be going down as well, but the Mum and Dad homeowner will be delighted. Throw into this mix the typical contrarian lines: the economy is “over-heating”; what about retirees? Nobody can win this game, but everybody is desperate to play.

A more interesting issue has arisen in recent years: we’re learning that even the Reserve Bank has only so much power over economy-wide interest rates.

Australia grew accustomed to the big four banks dancing to the tune of the Reserve Bank’s decisions. During the Howard years rate cuts were dutifully passed on to consumers. But history may record that as an anomaly – a short decade where retail banks and the central bank were aligned.

We tend to imagine anything that lasts a few years is natural and permanent. But Australia’s banking sector is still evolving since the financial liberalisation of the 1980s. So too is the Reserve Bank itself; it only achieved full independence in 1996.

When the Global Financial Crisis came, the close relationship between banks and the central bank broke. Few regretted this breakup more than the Labor Government. Now we have the embarrassing spectacle of a Government trying to bully mortgage rates down, and an Opposition pretending they possess a magic hammer that would set the banking system straight again.

Nothing frustrates politicians like powerlessness. For much of the 20th century, governments were able to control prices across the economy. They had many levers to do so – tariffs and taxes and quotas and so forth – and the public expected governments to pull those levers.

But the 20th century was a long time ago. The Reserve Bank cash rate is one of the few centrally planned prices left, and even then it set by a body independent of the government of the day.
When the Reserve Bank cut rates last week, Wayne Swan proclaimed this was the early Christmas present Australia’s hard-working families deserved.

But if rate cuts are gifts, does that mean rate rises are punishments? Of course not. Sometimes prices go up and sometimes prices go down. Our political culture needs to stop being so futilely obsessed with the Reserve Bank.

It’s About More Than Just Phone Hacking … Unfortunately

If you want to know what actually happened in the British phone hacking scandal, you won’t find it in the Leveson inquiry report released last Thursday.

The report comprises almost 2,000 pages; it’s spread across four volumes and has 59 separate chapters. It has a lot of stuff about media history and ethics and philosophy; a lot of hand-wringing about press “culture” and personal friendships between Fleet Street and Westminster.

But not a lot about who committed what crime and when.

For instance, the fact that Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson (both ex-News of the World editors) are in court this week facing charges of corrupt payments to public officials does not inform the report.

Nor the fact that at least three public officials have been arrested for misconduct in a public office – that is, corruption.

Lord Justice Leveson is recommending statutory regulation of the press before his inquiry has gotten to the bottom of the phone hacking scandal.

Even by the woolly standards of judge-led policy advocacy, this is pretty stark. Especially considering his proposals would be a reversal of the four-century-old victory of free press over state power.

The Leveson inquiry’s terms of reference are split in two. Part 1 looks at the “culture, practices, and ethics of the press”. Part 2 investigates the specific allegations of unlawful conduct and corrupt payments between press and police.

This is the real issue, as I argued in July last year. Criminal acts are a bad thing and should be punished. But criminal acts with the assistance of police are much, much more disconcerting. Thursday’s report is Part 1. Part 2 hasn’t even started yet.

Operation Elveden – the Metropolitan Police Department’s investigation into corruption in the police force – is ongoing. Leveson writes that he doesn’t want to step on its toes. Repeatedly throughout the report, witnesses suggest serious things. For instance, unnamed senior officers are “rumoured to be corrupt”, but the story ends there, “for fear of undermining what could be an ongoing investigation”.

Still, the first report reveals a litany of errors, misjudgements and bureaucratic backside-covering that allowed the scandal to build before it exploded in 2011.

Between 2001 and 2003, the Devon and Cornwall Police discovered a ring of retired and serving police officers selling information from police databases to private investigators. The investigators were then selling that information to various clients, some of whom were journalists.

Such privacy breaches are not unusual. Over the last decade, more than 200 Metropolitan police officers and civilian administrators have been disciplined for wrongfully accessing the Police National Database. The current commissioner described this to the Leveson inquiry as a “chronic problem”.

But when the Devon and Cornwall Police cases went to court, the judges let the accused go with conditional discharges. They didn’t even get fined.

When the story surfaced again in 2006 (this time the Royal family was claiming its private phone messages were being listened to) memory of the pathetic sentences given to the earlier cases meant the London police were reluctant to aggressively push their investigations. It just wasn’t worth the effort. That, and Britain was at the height of the anti-terrorism campaign. In the wake of the London bombings, chasing privacy prosecutions was less a priority than hunting violent Islamists.

Still, one reporter – News of the World’s “one rogue reporter” – was prosecuted. As part of its investigations, the police found a huge list of potential victims, but it failed to notify them.
Three years later, the Guardian and the New York Times published allegations of widespread phone hacking. This time, the police stonewalled. The issue had already been dealt with. To admit that there was more to the case was to admit that they were wrong to draw a line under the rogue reporter in 2006.

The Milly Dowler story erupted in July 2011. The police had been in possession of seized documents with her name – and Hugh Grant’s name – since the first investigations in 2003.

I’ve dwelled on this timeline because it is the closest the Leveson report gets to an exploration of the specific failures that led to the phone hacking scandal.

It’s all well and good to wax lyrical about ethics and press culture. But if we want to link problem to solution – a basic requirement in the development of good public policy – we have to know what actually caused the events we’re concerned about.

And too much of the Leveson report is divorced from the phone hacking itself. You can understand why David Cameron offered Leveson such a wide brief – he was embarrassed about his relationship to the now disgraced Andy Coulson. But the distance between scandal detail and regulatory proposals undermines the point of the whole inquiry.

To be fair, Leveson’s effort is far better than Australia’s Finkelstein inquiry. Here, Justice Ray Finkelstein wasn’t even given a scandal to work with – he had to construct a justification for press regulation out of thin air. Where Britain had the Milly Dowler case, Australia had the vibe of the thing.

So it is not insignificant that the Finkelstein and Leveson recommendations were so similar: statutory regulation of the press disguised as “self-regulation”. In the UK this is apparently the solution to widespread criminality. In Australia it is apparently a solution to … well, what exactly? The strongest case Finkelstein could come up with was that newspapers gave an unbalanced presentation of climate science.

But there’s a vocal group of people who want a new regulator backed by government, so that’s what gets recommended. Is there anybody who didn’t think Leveson or Finkelstein would call for new regulation? The only suspense has been for the details.

Last week David Cameron rejected those details – he would not cross the Rubicon into press regulation. Hopefully, Julia Gillard and Stephen Conroy will do the same.

Liberals’ Legacy Of Mass Migration Is At Stake

If Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister next year, he is going to have to make a decision: what to do about immigration?

Not asylum seekers: immigration.

After all, the size and composition of the total immigration intake is certain to shape our nation much more than the few thousand people who arrive by boat.

While the parties shout themselves hoarse over refugees, we’re at a unique juncture in immigration politics.

For the past 70 years, the party that has most embraced permanent migration in government has been the Liberal Party, not Labor.

Permanent and long-term arrival numbers vary every year; and not all of those variations are driven by Commonwealth government policy. But most are.

(For those interested in playing along, the Immigration Department offers a spreadsheet of historical migration numbers since 1945 here.)

The largest declines in our migration intake have occurred under Labor governments.

When Gough Whitlam, that darling of the progressive movement, came into power, immigration plummeted. In 1970, the Liberal government of John Gorton had admitted 185,000 migrants. The Whitlam government shrunk that to just over 50,000.

This was a deliberate policy decision. Whitlam even shut down the Department of Immigration, placing migration under the Department of Labour and Immigration.

That might seem a minor institutional change but it wasn’t: when merged with labour, immigration policy came under the influence of a traditionally pro-union bureaucracy. And unions don’t like it when the government imports foreign workers.

There’s long been a debate about whether it was Whitlam who ended the White Australia Policy or Harold Holt. Both did their part. But even though Whitlam proclaimed the end to the infamous policy, the sharp decline of total immigration on his watch meant that few non-European migrants could come to Australia regardless.

In March 1974 The Age pondered whether Gough Whitlam was doing as every government had done: “preaching tolerance while still practicing discrimination”.

Bob Hawke described himself as a “high immigration man”. But when he took government in 1983, the immigration intake dropped by more than a third. To Hawke’s credit, migration crept up over the next decade. But when Paul Keating took over, it plummeted again.

The Liberals have a much more impressive record.

Post-war immigration was at its peak under John Gorton. And Malcolm Fraser reversed the Whitlam backslide.

Under John Howard – that bête noire of pro-migration progressives – immigration jumped up well above the Gorton heights. In 2007, the number of permanent migrants arriving on our shores hit 191,000 – the largest cohort since the Second World War.

As George Megalogenis wrote in The Howard Factor, the real story was how “the former Hansonite belt … think Howard is keeping out all the foreigners, when he is bringing them here at a rate Paul Keating never contemplated”.

Yet Howard’s record-breaking immigration intake is apparently an awkward truth. In the standard text on this subject, From White Australia to Woomera: the Story of Australian Immigration, the academic James Jupp briefly acknowledges the Howard record – in one sentence. But the real issue for Jupp is that Howard was considering a temporary guest worker scheme, and such a scheme would hurt unions already battered by WorkChoices.

But then came the Rudd government, and the partisan pattern broke. Rather than immediately shrinking the intake, Rudd continued the trend upwards – hugely. More than 224,000 migrants entered Australia in 2010. And that terrifying guest worker scheme? A pilot program was eventually introduced not by the union-hating Liberal Party, but by the ALP.

Even Julia Gillard’s government – she of small Australia fame – has not appreciably reduced the number of migrants we take.

Given the showy anti-population rhetoric of the 2010 election, it is remarkable that we’re taking nearly twice as many foreigners than we did under the government of Bob “high immigration” Hawke.

There’s one obvious lesson here. Don’t trust what politicians say about immigration.

But when Rudd broke the pattern, he also broke the Liberal Party’s cover. After Labor prime ministers had lowered the intake, Liberal prime ministers were free to raise it; they gained no political benefit from doing otherwise. The Coalition could bang on about multiculturalism and refugees, but it would still bring in many more people than Labor.

Thanks to Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott faces different incentives to his predecessors. And the 2010 election demonstrated the Coalition’s willingness to play the anti-population card.

So there is perhaps an added significance to the Abbott’s announcement last week that he would reduce the Gillard government’s refugee intake by 6,000 places.

It’s one thing to call for temporary protection visas and off-shore processing. It’s another thing to actually reduce the refugee intake. His announcement was reported through the standard stop-the-boats prism but it hints at something deeper: the Coalition may sense an opportunity to rehash the 2010 themes in 2013.

Abbott has previously said that he would like to make skilled migration – that is, 457 working visas – the mainstay of a Coalition’s immigration program. But he has framed it in a peculiar way. Businesses should be able to bring in workers, “provided there aren’t Australians who could readily fill particular jobs”.

This sees immigration as a mechanism to solve problems, not way of building Australian economic strength in and of itself. And remember, 457 visas are temporary visas – not permanent ones.
Admittedly, this is like reading tea leaves. History cautions us to not take anything politicians say too seriously. The real story of immigration is only ever found in statistical appendices.
But should Abbott win government next year, immigration will be a major question for his new government.

Does he want to continue the Liberal legacy – a legacy of mass migration and population growth? Or, as he has at times unfortunately suggested, does he want to repudiate it?

The Politics Of Consensus Has A Dark Side

Memory is a funny thing. “In the days of the Accord,” Business Council head Tony Shepherd told an audience last week, “different sectors were able to agree on a common purpose and a plan to foster productivity, competitiveness and growth … there is no reason we cannot do this again.”

Shepherd is not alone. Hardly a week goes by without another CEO recalling the ambitions of past governments, and lamenting the timidity of current ones.

Their story has been repeated so often it’s become a banal cliché: in the days of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, businesses, government and unions put down their swords, held hands, and made beautiful microeconomic reform together. We need to rediscover the politics of consensus and conciliation. It’s time for an end to partisanship and to get on with … anyway. It’s boring to write, let alone read. Imagine hearing it in a speech.

But let’s be clear about what that cooperation would be in practice: institutionalised collusion between big business and big government.

This is the unacknowledged truth behind the business lobby’s complaints that Australia has left its reform era behind, or that politics is too divided to make the big historical changes.

Getting business and government around a board table isn’t necessarily a good thing. In politics, cooperation can be dangerous.

Big businesses are no fans of the free market. They only like competition in the abstract. In the real world, competition is traumatic. So when they are given the opportunity to set the rules of the game, they always try to fix it in their favour.

That’s why we talk so much about lobbyists. That’s why we talk about crony capitalism. And that’s why we talk about regulatory capture – when a business promotes regulation to shut down its competition. The politics of consensus has a dark side.

One of Adam Smith’s most famous quotes comes from his Wealth of Nations: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

Most people citing Smith’s warning leave it there. You can see the appeal. Business cartels are bad, said the neoliberals’ favourite economist.

But he went on: “Though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.” That is, cartels are bad – so the government should be careful not to create them.

On Monday, Julia Gillard announced that she wanted to do just that. Writing to the Business Council and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, she proposed a National Economic Reform Panel. This new body would encourage Australia’s biggest businesses, largest unions, and most well-connected community groups to build a national consensus on reform.

Happily, it won’t go anywhere. Remember Kevin Rudd’s relationship with Sir Rod Eddington, announced in a flurry of publicity in the 2007 election? It’s not clear that Eddington gave any advice, or that Rudd took any. The post-election Business Advisory Group didn’t seem to go anywhere, either. Similarly, it is doubtful historians will mark Julia Gillard’s tax summit in June this year as a key moment in Australian economic history.

We are haunted by memory of the Accord. When Hawke and Keating convinced the ACTU to restrain wages in return for social reforms in 1983, they created one of the few hero moments in Australian history. In our national mythology, the Accord was a necessary first step for the liberalisations of the next decade.

But the Accord was explicitly corporatist. It was a way to buy off the unions and (although they did not formally sign the Accord) a fair chunk of the business sector. It may have brought these bodies inside the tent, but it also gave them new influence and power over government.

Yes, many special interests gained from the Accord. But it does not follow that the Accord was in the general interest.

For instance, given Keating’s later efforts liberalising the labour market, we forget that the Accord constituted one of the most significant increases in industrial relations control in Australian history. To their credit, some unions recognised this. Not all unions signed up.

By the end of 1980s, advocates of liberalisation were arguing that, by locking the biggest unions within the policy system, the Accord was actually holding back reform. Privatisation, tax changes and tariff reduction were made harder, not easier, by the government’s newfound special relationship with labour. As Des Moore wrote in 1988, the Accord had granted unions a “privileged position … to defend their own narrow, short-term interest at the expense of the Australian community and of their own members”.

The politics of consensus is really the politics of privilege. It’s easy to understand why special interests want control over the levers of power, but it’s hard to see why we would give it to them.

The Art Of Telling The Truth

Getting political journalism to focus on fact checking is appealing in principle. It is disappointing – even futile – in practice.

You can understand why people find fact checking seductive. Our politicians pander to prejudices, fudge policy details, vilify their opponents, and exaggerate their own virtues for votes.

But as good democrats we put the winners of this squalid electoral contest in charge of the levers of government. So it would be nice to know which politician lies least.

And there’s clearly frustration with journalism as it is practiced today: why not make its new duty to judge political untruths?

Fact checking was a feature of the 2012 Presidential campaign. One frustrated Mitt Romney advisor said he wouldn’t “let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers”.

But, in a column over the weekend, Australia’s Laurie Oakes unintentionally demonstrated how faddish and illusory the fact checking idea really is.

Writing that he expected fact checking to become a central part of Australian journalism, Oakes identified two recent falsehoods: Julia Gillard’s “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”, and Tony Abbott’s claims about the future economic cost of that tax.

If only it were so clear.

Did Julia Gillard lie about the carbon tax on 16 August 2010? Well, yes. And no.

She probably thought she wouldn’t introduce a “carbon tax” in the next term of government. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t introduce an emissions trading scheme. And what we call a carbon tax in 2012 is actually the latter with an initial fixed price.

Yet free market economists have long insisted that, contrary to popular wisdom, there’s not a big conceptual difference between a tax and a trading scheme. They both price carbon. A tax could be described as a “market mechanism” too.

The point is these are terms of art, not science.

The idea that a journalist – or scientist, or economist, or philosopher – would be able to provide anything near a definitive statement of whether Julia Gillard was being factually accurate is nonsense.

Anyway, how on earth could the press gallery fact check a prediction? Tony Abbott’s claims about the carbon tax’s economic impact are almost entirely rhetorical. Yes, he understates how much of recent electricity price rises have been due to the changes in the energy industry – an understatement which is regularly pointed out in parliament and the press. But as to the carbon tax’s real cost?

Models of future economic costs merely reflect the assumptions they’re built upon. We don’t know how much a policy hurts until long afterwards. Even then it’s still quite hard to tell. Fact checking of such predictions is just arguing the toss.

This problem is clearly illustrated in the latest piece on The Washington Post’s Fact Checkerblog. Run by a veteran correspondent, Glenn Kessler, Fact Checker is apparently the gold standard in the field.

The story goes like this. Republicans have been citing an Ernst & Young study saying tax increases on the rich would “destroy nearly 700,000 jobs”.

Kessler notes that a) the jobs are lost over a decade or more, b) 700,000 jobs is only a tiny fraction of total employment, c) the study ignores the benefits of reducing the deficit, and d) there’s a different study that says otherwise.

For their “misleading” analysis, he awarded the Republicans three out of four Pinocchios.

But who is being misleading here? The Republicans aren’t wrong. At best they are guilty of an ungenerous presentation of the evidence. The Ernst & Young study says 700,000 jobs will be lost – just not immediately. You can’t refute rhetorical excess.

What Kessler isn’t doing isn’t fact checking, really. It’s just more argument. Which is fine, but let’s not pretend that more argument is a journalism revolution. And it’s definitely not new.
Even apparently clear falsehoods – for instance, Mitt Romney’s ad saying Barack Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China” – are more subtle than they’ve been presented. In a confusingly worded Bloomberg article, Chrysler was reported to be considering exactly that.

Kessler gave Romney four Pinnochios for his Chrysler ad, but his actual conclusion was more modest.

The ad was “a series of statements that individually might be factually defensible, but the overall impression is misleading”.

In the hands of partisans this has become a classic Romney ‘lie’.

Certainly, Romney had confused the Chrysler issue in an earlier speech in Ohio. But senior politicians are usually very clever with their words. They don’t lie. They dissemble.
Kessler to his credit is relatively even-handed. He goes after both left and right.

Such non-discrimination is unusual. Fact checking is more common as a political attack than journalistic technique. Hacks of all sides push their own fact checkers. It’s just another weapon in the partisan’s armoury. Smugly purporting to be on the side of ‘reality’ is a fashionable way to hit your opponent.

There’s a more critical problem with the fact checking fad. Political journalism is a business of generalists not experts. The best reporters know a little about a lot, not a lot about a little.

That, indeed, is why the ‘he-said, she-said’ model of journalism was developed. He-said, she-said has a bad reputation these days – it is often used unthinkingly – but it exists for a reason. It reflects a modesty that generalists cannot rule definitively on all issues. Sometimes you need to call a specialist. If something is controversial, you may need to call two.

Political rhetoric is rarely true or false. When an issue is simple, politicians will fudge it. When an issue is complicated, it requires experts to unpack.

Either way, self-conscious and self-satisfied ‘fact checking’ is no magic bullet.

Grandstanding about mobiles won’t reduce the road toll

It’s an old principle of policing – if you can’t enforce the laws on the books, demand more laws.

More than 55,000 people in Victoria were booked for using their mobile phones while driving last year. That’s around 150 people a day.

So on Monday, the front page of the Herald Sun reported that Victoria’s chief highway patrol cop wanted the government to force drivers to switch their phone off in cars.
Never mind that a ban on phones in cars would be completely unenforceable.

Victorian road rules are clear. The Road Safety Act bans mobile phone use while a car is running. The only exception is receiving calls or using navigation functions with a commercially fitted holder. Even then, the driver cannot touch the phone at any time. The fine is $300 and three demerit points. New South Wales enacted similar laws last week.

Yet one survey suggests around 60 per cent of Victorians still use their phone while driving. That 55,000 people booked isn’t a lot, considering more than two million of the state’s 3.7 million licensed drivers are breaking the rules.

The Herald Sun article said “thousands of rogue motorists flout the law”. No – millions do.

First things first: it is incredibly stupid to use a mobile phone while travelling at speed. Driving is a complex task. Sending a text message on a phone increases the risk of accident up to 23 times. That much is easy to demonstrate in simulations and in-car experiments.

But things get less certain from there.

The “while driving” data is a bit misleading. They include a lot of circumstances we wouldn’t usually call driving – like checking your phone while stopped at a traffic light. But if the engine is running, it counts.

The NSW government commissioned a study into the extent of the problem earlier this year as part of a parliamentary inquiry. The results were striking and counterintuitive.

Seven per cent of accidents in NSW in the last decade involved driver distraction. And within that 7 per cent, only 1 per cent involved a handheld phone.

Don’t get too hung up on the specific numbers. There are many complicated definitional issues. There’s a large body of academic research on driver distraction but it’s not all comparable. And, obviously, the ideal number of accidents is zero, whether related to phones or anything else.

Yet it still remains that mobile phones are extremely small proportion of the causes of distracted driving involved in accidents. The majority of distractions come from outside the car. Then there are those within the car – like fellow passengers, grooming, or eating and drinking.

There are even three times as many accidents involving police pursuit as mobile phones.

The overwhelming majority of accidents involve exactly what you’d expect: speed, fatigue, and drink. Mobile phones hardly rate.

But you wouldn’t know that from the press. Phones dominate the popular discussion of car accidents. Using a phone while driving seems to be the ultimate in recklessness. It is terrifying to imagine there are people speeding down the freeway while tapping out text messages.

Smart phones are a novelty, and novelty makes news. Stories about how mobile phones cause accidents has all the characteristics of a moral panic – a disproportionate reaction to a small problem. Drivers face worse distractions. There are more disconcerting risks on the road.

For instance, one 2005 study found in-car entertainment systems are a far bigger real-world distraction than phones. You have to take your eyes off the road to change a CD or radio station. Handheld phones are problematic not because they impair drivers physically, but because talking while driving takes extra mental effort. It’s the conversation which is dangerous, not the phone. (This explains why some studies have found hands-free phone systems are no safer than hand-held ones.)

These are uncomfortable findings. No politician wants to challenge the right of drivers to chat with passengers or listen to the radio. Anyway, that’s why we have careless driving laws, and take recklessness and negligence into account in criminal accident proceedings.

Nevertheless, there has been a remarkable decline in car fatalities over the past few decades. The Commonwealth government has been tracking road deaths since 1925. Deaths have reduced from 30 per 100,000 population in 1970, to seven in 2008. If anything, that understates the decline: we’re driving twice as much as we did 40 years ago. And the death toll is still going down, even as more people buy more complicated phones.

A society should try not to have too many unenforceable laws. They breed contempt for the law as an institution. If people get used to disobeying one law, they may become comfortable with disobeying others.

As the American writer Radley Balko has argued, calls to increase restrictions on mobile phones in cars aren’t about safety; they’re about symbolism.

It’s already illegal to use phones in the car. Lots of people do it anyway. But political grandstanding about mobiles is not the same as reducing the road toll.