Tag: ABC The Drum

Don’t believe the Asian century hype

The Government’s Asian century white paper finally reveals the conceptual poverty of the Asian Century idea.

Certainly, Asia will continue to grow prosperous and come to dominate the global economy.

But Ken Henry’s white paper demonstrates that the concept of an “Asian century” offers almost nothing to guide Australian public policy in 2012.

Don’t believe the hype. The Asian century is not the stuff of wonky earnestness. It is a political story.

A simple reorganisation greatly diminishes the whole project. We can group the proposals – sorry, “pathways”, a horrible word that the Government uses to conflate policies with goals – of the white paper into two categories.

The first category is things that are true no matter which continent dominates the next 100 years. The white paper wants Australia to be one of the top ten richest countries by 2025. Fair enough. But this holds regardless of whether there will be an Asian century, or an American century, or a New Zealand century. Most of the white paper is like this.

One sentence reads: “A world-class school system is essential to Australia’s success in the Asian century.” What do the last four words contribute? The government will create “a long-term national infrastructure strategy”. It will establish a Tax Studies Institute. There will be a National Plan for School Improvement. We ought to expand our trade with the rest of the world. The Asian century conceit adds nothing to these ideas.

The white paper even plugs Closing the Gap. Ending Indigenous disadvantage is extremely important, but what on earth does it have to do with Asia?

In the second category are proposals specifically designed to deal with rising Asian economies. There aren’t many in this category. And they’re all pretty minor – even token.

Of these, increased Asian language teaching is the most significant. I’ve criticised this idea in the past, and Benjamin Herscovitch from the Centre of Independent Studies has done so recently at length. Yet even if more Asian language teaching was necessary, it’s an oddly trivial hook for this ambitious white paper. Is offering Chinese at more schools really the pivot on which our nation will turn?

The quality of proposals declines sharply from there. The white paper says that one-third of board members of Australia’s top companies should have deep knowledge of Asia. This is a pretty gimmicky idea. Anyway, why is intellectual composition of the boards of private firms any business of the Commonwealth government?

One welcome proposal is to boost the numbers of tourism and working visas from Asia (you could ask: why not boost visas from everywhere?). Yet in the mid-year budget just last week the government significantly raised the cost of visas for foreign workers.

Asian century boosters have always struggled to link their statement of the obvious (Asia is growing) to concrete proposals. This white paper is most ambitious attempt yet. If Ken Henry can’t make it work, nobody can. But it fails.

Apart from continuing to strive to be productive and educated and rich – good things whether our neighbours are rising or declining – it’s not obvious that Australia needs to do anything special about the rise of Asia.

Indeed, that may be the point.

The white paper mostly just reiterates existing Gillard government policies. Far from jolting us out of our complacency, the paper encourages it … well, as long as we stick with Labor and its NBN and its schools plan and its carbon tax.

The Asian century paper is a political document. It’s a theme for the Government now that most of the Rudd-era ambitions have been squared away; a fresh “Labor vision” for the party of Keating and Whitlam. It doesn’t have to be particularly coherent or convincing. It just has to be plausible.

And, to be fair, it is. The white paper exudes seriousness. It is ridiculously Big Picture. The Asian century is intellectually flattering: everybody feels smarter when they talk about it. In the last 48 hours almost every special interest in the country has claimed their pet issues are the key to surviving the new Eastern paradigm.

Given that the Asian century is above all a political idea, it seems significant that the Opposition has been caught off-foot. First the Coalition welcomed it, said it lacked detail, then said it lacked funding. By Monday Tony Abbott had described it as “laughable, frankly”. Then he moved on to Peter Slipper.

This is probably not wise.

The Asian century looks like Julia Gillard’s election strategy. It’s a lot better than Moving Forward. But like so many political visions, it’s seems more profound than it is. We should not confuse narrative for substance.

The puritanical public health movement

For eight weeks in 2011, four public health researchers – three from the Cancer Council, one from the University of Western Australia – watched 792 music videos aired on Australian television. They recorded all the mentions of alcohol, tobacco or illegal drugs.

The results were published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism in September this year. About one-third of the music videos referenced drugs. The vast majority of those references were to alcohol.

Here the full horror is unveiled: “references to alcohol generally associated it with fun and humour”. Only 7 per cent of the music videos that referred to booze presented alcohol in a neutral or negative light.

The paper argued music videos mentioning alcohol positively should be classified differently and regulated out of the morning timeslot.

But more broadly, the implicit claim of this research is there is something wrong with our culture: not just “the culture of drinking”, but culture in general.

Society associates alcohol consumption with fun, humour and celebration. According to the researchers, that association is “insidious”. One might add: pretty accurate.

This minor paper tells us a lot about the spreading ambition of public health activism.

The modern field of public health started with campaigns against ignorance. Educational programs were designed to inform the citizenry of the health consequences of their choices. The messages were simple. Smoking is bad for you. Keep fit. Eat more vegetables.

Such benign information provision is a thing of the past. Now public health is a great social project. It desires nothing more than a complete rewiring of our preferences and a rewiring of the culture which it assumes formed them.

It’s not just that the study of public health is deeply paternalistic and patronising. Nanny state accusations have pursued the field for decades. And no wonder: the Rudd government’s Preventative Health Taskforce even recommended the Government regulate the portion size of restaurant food.

But nanny state doesn’t quite capture it. Public health is an imperial discipline, dragging in everything from cultural studies to urban planning. And it does so all in the service of an increasingly ambitious program to reshape society and prioritise health above all other moral values.

Take the most fashionable adjective in public health right now: “obesogenic”. This pseudo-medical term describes an environment – usually physical, but sometimes social and cultural – which encourages over-eating and under-exercising.

Under the obesogenic flag, public health activists seek to colonise debates over housing sprawl, economic policy, public transport, childcare, house size, telecommuting, infrastructure spending, consumerism, and sustainability. Even law and order has been dragged into the public health domain: high crime rates mean parents don’t let their child walk to school which means those children get fat.

Here public health becomes less a medical concern and more an umbrella social critique. As one book, Obesogenic Environments, puts it, obesity is first and foremost a social problem. Certain obesity-encouraging practices have become culturally embedded. We eat out more. We drive instead of walk. It is the self-appointed task of public health activists to change those embedded practices; that is, “promote healthier choices”. Town planning has to change. Tax policy has to change. Infrastructure spending has to be reprioritised. Our preferences have to be redirected.
With its grand social crusade, the public health movement has come full circle.

Temperance activists in the late nineteenth and twentieth century talked as much about social practices as alcohol consumption. The major American temperance lobby was called the Anti-Saloon League. Saloons weren’t just bad because they were where the drinking happened. They kept men away from their families, and encouraged other sinful behaviour.

In Australia temperance activists lashed out at everything. In 1896 the South Australian politician King O’Malley described barmaids as “the polished fangs of the stagger-juice rattlesnake… angels of mercy luring men to their own destruction”. Several states banned barmaids. One major avenue for female employment – and the economic independence it brought – was closed. Poor old barmaids were merely collateral damage for the monomaniacs obsessed with stamping out booze.

In the same way, today’s public health movement is willing to jettison many other values in its quest to rewire society.

The hard-won conveniences of modern life – cars, restaurants – are obstacles to a better world. Popular culture is “insidious”, simply because it reflects our own beliefs back at us. Choosing what we eat and drink is not a right, it is a prison.

Public health is groping towards a full-blown political philosophy. Sure, it speaks the language of medicine. But it is more ambitious and vague than that modest field. The paper on music videos is a ham-fisted attempt to give cultural studies a scientific patina.

Like the puritans of the past, the public health movement is flailing against a society and economy it believes is deeply unwell.

Why Cling On To An Outdated Refugee Convention?

The United Nations 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees is not fit for purpose.

The 60-year-old convention was designed for an era we no longer live in; an era where the causes and trajectories of global migration were quite different to today.

Yet the convention still dominates our understanding of migration, with its archaic and artificial distinction between legitimate and illegitimate irregular migrants.

The problems go deeper than historical quirks of drafting. The convention deeply distorts our understanding of 21st-century immigration. It makes humanitarian approaches to refugees harder, not easier. Australia should withdraw from it.

The refugee convention was developed in response to the World War II refugee crisis. Between 20 to 30 million people were displaced in Europe alone – “one of the greatest population movements of history” as one US State Department report described it at the end of the war.

But that was in 1945. Six years later, the idea of coordinated global action on those refugees was already anachronistic. Half a billion (mostly American) dollars had been spent resettling the majority of those who had been displaced, save a problematic ‘hard core’ of 400,000. The United States did not want sole responsibility for all refugees in the future, so the convention placed the burden on countries which the refugees themselves approached.

And by this time, refugee questions had already been subsumed into Cold War politics. The new wave of European migrants was mostly comprised of those fleeing communism. The Soviet Bloc did not help draft the refugee convention. It did not want to help “traitors who are refusing to return home to serve their country”.

As a consequence, the convention defined a “refugee” as someone who had a “well-founded fear of being persecuted”. This is the formula our Immigration Department and Refugee Review Tribunal apply to contemporary asylum cases in 2011. But it’s clearly a formula specifically designed for the Cold War. Communist states actively persecuted returning citizens. The consequences of sending such refugees back across the Iron Curtain was unambiguous.

While convention was designed to handle those who could not return home for political reasons, our contemporary requirements are vastly different. The bulk of today’s refugees are displaced not because of politics, but because of economic hardship or conflict. They do not flee totalitarianism but poverty and insecurity.

By any layperson’s definition, virtually all those who reside in 21st-century refugee camps would be considered “refugees” but it has been estimated the bulk would not fit the convention’s “well-founded fear of being persecuted” standard.

The decisions of Australia’s Refugee Review Tribunal record the often farcical attempts by migration lawyers and judges to shoehorn the complex reasons someone may migrate into this frame.

The convention did not even work as intended during the Cold War. Gil Loescher’s The UNHCR And World Politics documents how the USA sidelined the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and built a parallel system to attract refugees from the Soviet bloc.

Of the 233,436 refugees admitted into the United States between 1956 and 1968, only 925 were from non-communist countries. They were accepted into the West not because of the dictates of international law but as part of the great geopolitical game. Contrast America’s embrace of Cuban refugees with its relatively cold shoulder to those from Haiti.

The end of the Cold War undermined the political foundations of the refugee framework. We have now almost no genuinely totalitarian dictatorships persecuting their citizens, but we also have more refugees than at any time in the last half century. The distinction the Refugee Convention makes between political refugees and the rest no longer makes any sense.

In fact, it’s worse than that. Today even people fleeing totalitarianism typically believe they are doing so for economic reasons, not political ones.

North Korea is the most politically repressive state in the modern world. Yet according to a survey of refugees in the recent book Witness To Transformation: Refugee Insights Into North Korea, fully 95 per cent of North Koreans said they left the Hermit Kingdom because of poverty. Only 2 per cent cited political persecution. Absolutely, if a Korean refugee turned up in Australia, they’d change their views after five minutes with a refugee lawyer. But their initial beliefs are indicative.

The convention’s archaic distinction badly distorts the popular understanding of refugee issues.

The denigration of “economic refugees” – so widespread in the Australian press – is particularly absurd. Few realise the concept of legitimate refugee they rely on was formulated primarily to embarrass Joseph Stalin.

Our views on what is a moral approach to refugees also diverge sharply from those implied by the convention.

As Michael Pearce pointed out in The Age in September, Australians feel obligation to those in the far away refugee camp “queue” more than those who arrive in our country. The Malaysia Solution pivoted on this feeling. But that is an almost exact reversal of the convention’s approach, which is silent on the queue, and concerns only those who land on our doorstep.

One argument for the convention is that it acts to restrain the political response to asylum seekers – keeping things at least reasonably humane. Yet it’s not clear it does. Other signatory countries are no more rigorous than Australia at complying with the convention. Non-signatory countries host the majority of refugees. Here, as around the world, domestic policy is set by domestic politics, not international law.

Yet the biggest problem is not merely how it defines “refugee”, but how the refugee convention distorts our understanding of the entire immigration issue.

Rather than viewing refugees as a subset of general global migration, the convention requires us to see them as a separate thing entirely.

It’s a false dichotomy. Migration is not either forced or unforced. There are many degrees of voluntariness in modern migration. But it’s a dichotomy on which our political parties rely. The Greens support asylum seekers but wish to limit skilled migrants. The Coalition and now Labor want to stop the boats yet invite more foreign workers.

Immigration is shaping up to be the big issue of the 21st-century, in the way that trade was the big issue of the 20th. There’s nothing wrong with trying to migrate to find work and a better life. We should, indeed, encourage that. However, we will not be able to come to terms with the age of migration if our policymakers cling to the obsolete refugee convention.

What’s The Crisis In The Cuban Missile Crisis?

Fifty years ago, on the morning of October 16, 1962, the CIA delivered to John F Kennedy aerial reconnaissance photos revealing Soviet missile sites in Cuba.

Shortly after the CIA briefing, Kennedy showed the photos to his advisor Kenneth O’Donnell.

The president was alarmed. “You’d better believe it,” he told O’Donnell, coming to terms with the missiles’ significance. “We’ve just elected Capehart in Indiana and Ken Keating will probably be the next president of the United States”.

The Cuban Missile Crisis has become an icon of 20th century history: the closest the Cold War came to a hot war, two great superpowers playing a game of brinkmanship that could have slipped into Armageddon.

But it was more a domestic crisis than a foreign policy crisis. Fear of the November 1962 midterm elections loomed larger than fear of nuclear war.

There’s a lot of mythology about those 13 days in October. It didn’t take long for the tale of an heroic president pulling the world back from the precipice to take root. But that mythology massively overstates the severity of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, as a consequence, the likelihood of apocalyptic nuclear war at any time in the 20th century.

Put simply, the world never came to “the brink”.

In his excellent 2010 book, Atomic Obsessions, the political scientist John Mueller demonstrates neither Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev had any intention of escalating to nuclear hostilities.
The Soviet premier, for all his bluster, was scarred by his experience of World War II. One of the cables he sent Kennedy wrote of his fear of the “death and destruction” of total war.

Explaining himself later, Khrushchev said “I’m not a Czarist officer who has to kill himself if I fart at a masked ball. It’s better to back down than to go to war.”

It’s now clear Khrushchev placed the missiles in Cuba to deter an American invasion – that is, not in an offensive capacity. But even then, some historians have suggested there was agreement in the Soviet leadership to withdraw the weapons if the US responded with military force.

The USSR never even went on a general alert.

The Americans were even less eager for conflict. Put aside the warmongering General Curtis LeMay, who was nowhere near the decision-making team and exasperated Kennedy. David Welch and James Blight, two historians who have worked closest with the tapes of White House meetings, say the odds the Americans would have escalated hostilities were “next to zero”.

And the gambit that ended the crisis – Kennedy’s secret promise to Khrushchev that he would remove American missiles from Turkey – wasn’t much of a gambit at all. The tapes reveal the president vowing “I don’t want to go to war anyhow, but I am certainly not going to war over worthless missiles in Turkey”.

Keeping the deal secret was just good domestic politics.

Of course, neither side knew of the other’s true position. But half a dozen times during October each side made missteps which, had the world been truly on the brink, would have pushed them off. A U-2 was shot down trying to get a closer look at the missile sites. Neither superpower budged. Another U-2 strayed into Russian territory and was chased out by Soviet fighters. Neither superpower budged.

Nobody wanted war. And as Henry Kissinger once said, “despite popular myths, large military units do not fight by accident.”

So what was the crisis in the Cuban Missile Crisis?

As usual, domestic politics drove foreign policy.

Kennedy had beaten Richard Nixon in 1960 by outflanking him as a hawk – charging that the Republicans had no plan to topple Fidel Castro and stoking fears of Soviet nuclear superiority.

But after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle – where US backed Cuban exiles were routed in an invasion attempt – Cuba suddenly became Kennedy’s political problem. Cuba looked like it was going to be a big issue in November, and maybe even in the 1964 presidential race.

Two Republican senators in particular attacked him furiously over Cuba: Ken Keating, a New Yorker with White House ambitions, and Homer Capehart, from Indiana.

These attacks had hurt. Kennedy wanted to reassert his hawkish credentials. The most fateful event of the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, not in October, but in a press conference a month earlier. On September 13 Kennedy declared bombastically that “if Cuba should possess a capacity to carry out offensive action against the United States … the United States would act.”

Kennedy didn’t know missiles were already on their way. This September ultimatum was for a domestic audience – to counter Republican claims he was soft on communism – but it seriously constrained his choices in October. He’d promised action.

Throughout the crisis, Kennedy regretted his September chest-beating: “I should have said that we don’t care”. But it was too late. He’d ruled diplomacy out. Blockading Cuba was the least warlike thing the administration could think of.

Kennedy famously declared on television that the missiles were an explicit threat to American security.

Privately however the administration thought different. “It is generally agreed,” said Kennedy’s advisor Ted Sorensen on October 17, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power – that is, they do not significantly increase the potential mega-tonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil.”

Defense secretary Robert McNamara was more direct. “I don’t think there is a military problem here.”

The successful resolution of the crisis on October 28 blunted the Republican attacks. The midterm election was only a week away. The Democrats picked up four seats in the Senate, one of which was Homer Capehart’s.

October 1962 has become central to the JFK mystique. It was quickly integrated into the legend of Camelot.

Not only that, but the episode defined how we think of nuclear politics; as if we are, at all times, minutes away from global war.

But if the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the world has ever come to a nuclear exchange, then we’ve never come very close at all.

The Capitalist Heroes We Forget

The death of Steve Jobs has offered us a symbol which is surprisingly rare: the capitalist as a hero.

The tributes to the Apple co-founder have praised his vision, entrepreneurial drive, single-mindedness, how he defied convention, and developed a business model centred on innovation.

These attributes are not unique to Jobs. He is an icon because of our relationship to the products he developed. And Apple made a point of showcasing Jobs – he launched their new products personally.

But his death reveals a peculiar cultural blindness. We don’t often celebrate the achievements of capitalist entrepreneurs, in life or in death. Military leaders, political figures, religious and royal icons, yes, but not capitalists.

August this year saw the death of Keith Tantlinger, the American inventor and entrepreneur who, with his business partner Malcom McLean, developed, marketed and sold the modern shipping container beginning in the 1950s.

The standardised container sounds simple, but it was revolutionary.

Before the container, goods would be stuffed, manually and arbitrarily, into the irregular shaped holds of ships. This incurred enormous labour costs, theft and accidental losses. Armies of unionised longshoremen would load a ship by hand, unload it by hand, load the cargo onto trains and trucks by hand, and helped themselves to samples. The expense of all of this had to be factored into the price of consumer goods.

McLean and Tantlinger had to face down unions protecting their members from the threat of a standardised, secure, labour-saving container, and the automation those containers made possible. They had to face down regulators protecting the trucking industry from competition. Ports unsuited to the new containers confronted closure. Gone are the old ports of New York. The great ports of the world are now in Le Havre, Busan, Felixstowe and Tanjung Pelepas.

This largely unheralded story is told in a 2006 book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. It is not much exaggeration to say that we owe a great deal of the last half-century of globalisation to their big metal box. Thanks to the container, the cost of transporting goods is near zero. Markets which were local are now global. Manufacturing networks are spread across hemispheres.

It is that box which allows Apple to produce the iPhone and iPad at lowest cost in Shenzhen and Brazil. And that box which facilitates the production of the iPad’s competitors.

Not to diminish Steve Jobs, but there is no person on earth who hasn’t benefited from the entrepreneurial drive of Tantlinger and McLean.

Yet when these two died, they met with a tiny fraction of the acclaim we’ve seen for the Apple boss. No prime minister or president was asked to reflect on their achievements. No newspaper rejigged its cover for the inventors of the shipping container.

The news aggregator Factiva records 23,133 separate stories on Steve Jobs in the first four days after his death on Wednesday. Keith Tantlinger only received 26 stories in the entire month after his death. When Malcom McLean died in 2001, he was mentioned 41 times.

It’s not a competition. But it is a revealing comparison. Jobs is exceptional in the public eye not simply because he was an exceptional capitalist – although he undoubtedly was – but because his products are in the front of our mind.

We know we’re using an iPad; the touch, design and functionality is clear. We don’t know that the only reason we can is because someone else invented and constructed and marketed and sold a container to bring it to us. The achievements of McLean and Tantlinger are entirely in the background. Virtually every single mass-produced item in the world finds itself in one of their boxes at some stage during the manufacturing and distribution process.

Jobs has breached the unwritten rule that only statesmen, or intellectuals, or others who spurn profit can be true heroes. Even though it is capitalists more than anyone else who have built the world.

Indeed, the idea of a hero entrepreneur is almost entirely absent in popular culture.

Amazon.com lists 33,000 biographies of political, military, and royal figures – nearly 50,000 if you include religious leaders. It lists only 3,000 biographies of business leaders.

Extraordinarily few films depict business people in a positive light. Two biopics stand out: Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator is one of the rare pro-capitalist genre, as is the largely forgotten Tucker: The Man and His Dream, the Francis Ford Coppola film based on the automobile innovator Preston Tucker. They offer portraits of individuals who were both heroic and tragic. Howard Hughes and Preston Tucker were innovative risk-takers whose success rested on filling the demands of their consumers.

And in both of these films, the dramatic obstacle they have to surmount is not just commercial but political. Competitors allied with governments tried repeatedly to frustrate both Hughes and Tucker by raising the regulatory barriers to innovative entrants. The same happened with McLean and Tantlinger. Any truly great innovation necessarily upsets the interests of the status quo.

Steve Jobs’ achievements were substantial. Anybody who brings a product to market that so many consumers want is worth celebrating. But there are many other stories of capitalists and entrepreneurs who have shaped our social and economic lives. In light of the huge reaction to Jobs death, we might think about broadening our search for heroic icons to the profit-making world.

We Do Not Need An Internet Overlord

At first glance, the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU) seems benign.

The agency helps coordinate global telephone interconnections so we can make overseas phone calls. It manages radio spectrum and satellite orbits. All tedious and technocratic work.

But the ITU is holding a meeting in December to decide whether it – and by implication, the United Nations – should take over the internet.

This meeting in December will be the culmination of a long contest between the decentralised, private internet and the leaden hand of state control.

A UN takeover of the internet could be incredibly bad. Bad for liberty and free speech online. Bad for technological innovation.

Why would we want to hand the basic structure of the internet to a committee of governments – many of which censor the internet at home?

ITU chief Hamadoun Touré pleaded in the Guardian earlier this year that only his organisation had the “depth of experience” to regulate the online world.

The ITU is an agency in decline. It was founded in 1865 to negotiate connections between national telegraph lines, set technical standards, and manage the fees each network would charge each other. Over time, it gathered more responsibilities, dealing with telephone networks from the end of the 19th century, and broadcast frequencies from the 1930s. When the UN was founded in the 1940s, the ITU was wrapped in the blue flag.

This top-down control over telecommunications had a perverse effect. As a paper in the journal International Organization argued in 1990, the ITU “created one of the most lucrative and technologically significant international cartels in history”. It picked winners and entrenched technological monopolies.

It is the last organisation we would want to govern the dynamic, bottom-up internet.

The political economy of communications has completely changed in recent decades.

During the 20th century, governments dominated telecommunications. Telephone networks were state-owned. Even in the United States, which avoided fashionable state socialism, telephone companies were legally-backed monopolies.

The ITU thrived in this environment. When governments controlled the telephone system, negotiating a connection between two national networks was more an issue of diplomacy than private commercial contracts.

Then along came neoliberalism. Public utilities were privatised. Monopolies were exposed to competition. The need for a diplomatic body to manage the planet’s spidering communications infrastructure dissipated.

It’s been a quarter of a century since the ITU’s mandate was renewed. As such, the ITU has no authority over the internet. Network companies have developed diverse interconnection contracts with each other, and have done so independently. Technical standards have developed voluntarily and organically and in response to market demand.

Above all, the internet is largely decentralised. It is a product of civil society, not government. And what few centralised functions the internet does have – for instance, the management of domain names and IP addresses – are managed by non-government organisations based in the United States.

(This is not without problems. The Bush administration intervened to stop the introduction of the .xxx domain, an own goal which undermined American claims of neutrality. But for the most part, the internet still governs itself.)

The advantage of decentralised self-governance means internet architecture is mostly out of the reach of traditional politics and statecraft.

That’s what the ITU power grab is all about.

The ITU doesn’t want control over the internet’s foundations merely to deal with technical issues like interconnection and standards. No, ITU wants policy control: to have a hand in regulating cybercrime, child pornography, even spam. It wants to pursue social goals. Hamadoun Touré talks about creating “a fully inclusive information society” – a phrase which would be easy to dismiss as meaningless if it didn’t reveal an extraordinary mission creep.

Some countries want the UN to control what network operators charge each other. Other countries even want to tax internet telephony firms like Skype to protect the revenue of their old national telephone monopolies.

It gets worse from there. A coalition Russia, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan want the UN to regulate online speech by curbing:

The dissemination of information that incites terrorism, secessionism or extremism or that undermines other countries’ political, economic and social stability.

Of course, their idea of what information undermines “stability” may differ from ours.

Will that authoritarian coalition get its way? Probably not. But the absurdity of this last proposal simply demonstrates the risk of UN control. Under the ITU, the internet will be a geopolitical plaything.

It’s hard enough protecting online freedoms from the national security excesses of liberal democracies.

Imagine vesting the power to tinker with the basic structure of the internet with as discreditable a political body as the United Nations.

Don’t Just Tinker With Government – Reduce It

There are few concepts more nonsensical in Australian politics than the “efficiency dividend”.

Yet in the politics of public service cuts, few are more heavily relied upon.

You’d think that an efficiency dividend was a financial benefit that came once efficiencies were found. That’s what it sounds like, after all. Nope: it’s the other way around. By cutting the public sector, governments take the dividends first – in the form of reduced payroll costs – and just hope the efficiency comes later.

The reasoning is pretty crude: with fewer staff, the public service will simply have to be more efficient. How, exactly? They’ll figure it out. Efficiency through adversity.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with reducing the size of the public service. It’s worthwhile.

The Commonwealth employs 160,000 people; the states and territories around 1.2 million. These are huge figures. So while it sounds pretty extreme that the Federal Coalition might cut 12,000 jobs over two years, that’s a small part of the whole and roughly the pace of natural attrition.

Campbell Newman’s target of 20,000 jobs is more ambitious, but even then that comes out of Queensland’s public service pool of 207,000.

In any organisation, labour costs are among the biggest costs. Governments that need to balance budgets tend to look at public service size first – particularly conservative governments, who don’t see bureaucrats as a voting constituency.

Public service cuts have their own little ritual. “Frontline staff” will be fine, assures the government. “Essential services” will disappear, counter public sector unions. Bureaucracies – for whom size is a measure of success – shift around staff and threaten to eliminate their most politically popular functions. The press speak of promises broken and everybody tries to divine in the entrails of Newspoll and Essential what it all means.

By the end of this, the poor old government will be lucky if it gets its dividend. It certainly won’t get any “efficiency”.

Because these big job cuts – a dozen thousand here, a dozen thousand there – are like taking a baseball bat to a photocopier: briefly satisfying, perhaps, but it won’t make it copy better.
The only way to meaningfully reduce the size of government is to reduce what government does.

There are, no doubt, inefficient elements within the public service. But those inefficiencies will not be identified through orders from on high about across-the-board workforce reductions.
Cutting jobs without cutting the tasks which those jobs exist to perform will – in every likelihood – undermine service delivery, without sustainably lowering the burden on the taxpayer.

This is an uncomfortable reality. Far easier to insist the public service goes on a diet.

The vast majority of public finances are tied up in health and welfare. Take the Commonwealth, for instance. Its largest agencies are Centrelink, the Taxation Office and Defence. These agencies harbour between 20- and 27,000 staff each. The next largest agencies are substantially smaller: immigration has a labour force of around 7,000, Medicare just over 5,000.

You can see why for new governments, it is appealing to shave these departments by a fraction.

But they are also the departments most closely integrated within the political system. Welfare and defence are two of the central features of the modern state. You can tell how serious an opposition is about reducing the size of government by whether they talk about these biggies, or whether they just rabbit on about marginal things like foreign aid, which are, in truth, a tiny fraction of the budget.

So if governments want to reduce the public sector permanently they’ll have to be creative and courageous. Want Centrelink to be a lighter load? Then your priority has to be welfare reform, not public service cuts. Want the Defence Department to be less of a money pit? Then reassess our defence strategy, or our wasteful acquisitions program. Simplify the tax system if you want to shrink the tax office.

It’s not completely hopeless. There are many things that could be done. For instance, a truly cost-cutting government could get the Commonwealth out of education – that is, return education to the states where it is constitutionally allocated. (And, because they actually run schools, the states have a far better idea than Canberra about where money should be spent.)

In other words, find the efficiencies, and then take the dividend.

Of course, there is no government or opposition in the country that wants to seriously rethink what the public service does. There’s a lot of tinkering planned, but no reform.

Targeting the bureaucracy mistakes the symptom for disease. If you really want smaller government, you need to reduce its functions.

A Crackdown On Illegal Immigrants. Interested? Anyone?

Last week Immigration Minister Chris Bowen introduced a bill into parliament. Had we been any other country on the planet this would have been extremely controversial.

Columns would have been published. Talkback callers would have been enraged. Television panels would have pontificated.

But our immigration debate is peculiar. The Migration Amendment (Reform of Employer Sanctions) Bill 2012 will in all likelihood be ignored.

It shouldn’t be. This legislation significantly increases the penalties for employers who hire “illegal workers” and gives a whole range of new inspection and police powers to the Immigration Department to enforce them.

The bill erodes the right to silence, for one, and establishes powerful search warrants with which immigration officers can enter premises to hunt down evidence of illegal workers.

More broadly, the bill puts meat on a new and punitive immigration regime: it is now the legal responsibility of employers to find out whether the people they hire are entitled to work in Australia.

So yes: a crackdown on illegal immigrants! The stuff tabloid dreams are made of.

Or not. In the Australian consciousness, immigration politics is purely about asylum seekers.

By definition, asylum seekers want authorities to find them. Illegal workers do not. They are people who are working in breach of their visa conditions. They may have overstayed their temporary visas, they may be here on tourist visas, or they might be working more hours than their student visas permit.

It’s hard to measure, but we know there are at least 50,000 illegal workers in Australia. A Government report (PDF) in 2010 suggested it could be as many as 100,000.

That figure is a lot more than the few thousand who have sought asylum in Australia by boat.

Why the disconnect?

Immigration politics is not about quantity but visibility. And our borders are uniquely secure. The twentieth century fantasy of full state control over who enters and exits a country has only come close to realisation in Australia.

Those dinky boats may seem like a threat to our “sovereignty”, but they are actually a demonstration of it. Our high-tech Navy picks them up, and our bureaucrats ploddingly process each one in turn. Every migrant interacts with the system at some point. There are no exceptions.

In almost every other country, borders are far too porous to imagine a government could be this diligent.

So in the United States, the United Kingdom and the richest nations in Europe, it is illegal workers who bear the brunt of the political and public attention. We obsess about the people who want to come here. The rest of the world obsesses about those who already are there.

This focus on asylum seekers means we ignore the great issue of our time: the clash between national borders and an increasingly global employment market.

The Government’s new illegal worker bill is evidence that we are not as isolated as we think. One hundred thousand people is not trivial.

But the Immigration Department’s arguments for why we need to crackdown on illegal workers are unfortunate.

First: if we allow illegal workers to work, our immigration controls will be weakened. In other words, immigration restrictions are needed to maintain immigration restrictions. It gets even more circular from there. Illegal workers are a problem because of “costs associated with locating and removing illegal workers”. Read that one again.

Second: illegal workers “deny Australian citizens and permanent residents the opportunity to obtain a job”. It would be nice if the Immigration Department didn’t endorse the claim that foreigners crowd residents out of the employment market, but, well, there you go. Likewise, we might put aside the claim that illegal workers “may not meet … stringent health and character tests”.

One final argument is the most convincing, but perhaps not in the way it is intended: illegal workers are susceptible to exploitation.

This is undoubtedly true. But it is because those workers face the threat of deportation that they are so vulnerable. The stricter we are about visa overstayers, the more we increase the chances that they will be exploited by unscrupulous employers who threaten to call Immigration if they complain.

We know from international experience that an aggressive pursuit of illegal workers and their employers can create as many problems as it tries to solve.

So that this crackdown on illegal workers is likely to sail through unexamined has nothing to do with its desirability. It is, instead, a window into the strangeness of the immigration debate in Australia.

Is navel-gazing our fastest growing industry?

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

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

Navel-gazing is Australia’s fastest growing industry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australia’s Unfounded Foreign Investment Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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