Tag: The Sunday Age

Terror Laid Bare

Flying is awful – and it looks like it’s only going to get worse. The actual “flying” part can be all right if you get one of those exotic personal entertainment systems with a trillion movies and every kind of Tetris rip-off imaginable.

Modern airlines come in two types: those that pride themselves on their hospitality, and those that pride themselves on abusing the goodwill of passengers to keep costs down. Either way, commercial airlines aim to please in some fashion.

But not even George Clooney in Up in the Air was able to make traversing the government’s airport security checkpoints look elegant.

Sociologists of the future will describe this as the “ritual” of travel: lists of what you can and cannot take into the plane; convenient check-in machines complemented by impossibly long baggage lines; the security barriers; making sure you remove your laptop; taking off your belt; and being swabbed for bomb residue.

Hop on a plane to the US and it’s worse. Since the underpants bomber failed to blow up his underpants on Christmas Day last year, airport security frisks passengers so intimately they can not only detect bombs in jocks, but can detonate them by hand.

Kevin Rudd has announced an extra $200 million for airport security. “It may,” said the Prime Minister in his best leadership voice, “mean it takes longer for passengers to pass through security, but the government believes that this inconvenience is a small price to pay for increased security.” (Incidentally, the prime ministerial jet was renovated in 2007, at a cost of $100,000.)

We’ll be paying this “small price” because the Prime Minister has decided to install full body scanners in Australian airports, scanners that can see through clothing to get almost naked images of passengers.

No surprise that some people worry about the privacy implications. In Britain, there is even serious concern that body scanners breach child porn laws. It’s illegal to create indecent images of children, and that’s what happens when children go through body scanners designed to look under clothing.

Privacy issues aside, what’s the point? Body scanners will be just another ceremony added to the elaborate ritual of travel – prime examples of “security theatre”. We might feel safer, but we’re not actually safer.

After all, how much safer could we possibly be? The risk of terrorism is infinitesimally small.

In the United States, there is an average of just one terrorist incident every 16.5 million flights, according to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

In Australia, there are half a million domestic flights per year. Every day more than 100,000 people fly from one Australian city to another; 50,000 more either leave or enter the country.

But when in 2003 a parliamentary committee asked a witness from the Department of Transport whether there had ever been a terrorist incident on an aircraft in Australia, nobody could think of one. (There had been an unsuccessful hijacking attempt of a flight between Melbourne and Launceston in May that year, but the hijacker was suffering from severe paranoid schizophrenia. Hardly a professional jihadist.)

So even if full body scanners in every airport in the country halved the risk of terrorism, half of bugger-all is still bugger-all.

Human beings are terrible at assessing risk. In the past 12 months, there have been more than 1500 deaths on Australian roads. By contrast, over the past decade, 469 airline passengers died from bombings, hijackings or pilot shootings in the entire world. More than half of those fatalities occurred on September 11. The noughties were the second-safest decade for air travel since the 1950s, and there are a lot more passenger flights now.

Perhaps it’s all that security that makes flying so safe. But security specialist Bruce Schneier argues that there are just two truly effective protections against terrorism on airlines. The first is reinforced cockpit doors – without access to the cockpit, it’s hard to turn a plane into a flying missile. Since 2001, pilots do not open that door.

The second is us. Right now, the strongest defence we have against airplane hijackings or bombings isn’t terrorist no-fly lists or body scanners. It’s the passengers who now know they shouldn’t passively comply with the demands of terrorists, and who know the guy doing chemistry in the bathroom should not be left in peace.

The Christmas underpants bomber was scary, but security worked exactly as it should have. He couldn’t get a “good” bomb on board, so he tried to detonate a bomb so awkward it required 20 minutes of preparation in the toilet. And he couldn’t get it to work. He was quickly subdued by passengers when his pants caught on fire.

The Australian attempted hijacking was also defeated by passengers.

Back in 2005, then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone was candid about the absurdity of airline security. With obvious enthusiasm, she posed this hypothetical to a private audience: “If I was able to get on a plane with an HB pencil – which you are able to – and stabbed the HB pencil into your eyeball and wiggled it around down to your brain area, do you think you’d be focusing?”

Most terrorist plots are discovered through quiet investigative work, and foiled long before they are anywhere near ready, although we still haven’t dealt with the “Amanda Vanstone driving an HB pencil into your eyeball” threat. So the risk of airline terrorism will never be zero. But let’s try not to panic.

Take The Politics Out Of Commerce, Not Vice Versa

Last week the Australian Electoral Commission published its latest donation figures for political parties. Donations are down from last year.

Nevertheless, these figures were accompanied by the standard appeals to “clean up” the political process and get corporate influence out of politics.

But it was also the week that the federal government introduced its emissions trading scheme into Parliament for the third time. In the government’s words, if passed, the emissions trading scheme “will change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy”. When the government has this sort of ambition, is it really any surprise businesses are trying to influence the political process?

The problem with political donations isn’t that corporations are unduly trying to manipulate laws and regulations to their benefit. It’s that politicians are trying to shape an Australia where businesses have to involve themselves in the political system or they just might go broke.

The government plans to give out billions of dollars worth of free emissions permits as part of its emissions trading scheme. And the Coalition’s policy includes an “emissions reduction fund” of about $1.2 billion per year for some companies that reduce their emissions.

So if you had an aluminium smelter, and you didn’t take any politicians out to dinner in 2009, you’ve neglected your business responsibilities. Your competitors will be wining and dining any backbencher they can grasp.

But some of the biggest donors this year weren’t energy firms. The banks handed over a few lazy hundred thousand dollars to the major parties. Even while smarting from the financial crisis, the banks were self-aware enough to recognise the government’s guaranteeing of their bank deposits at taxpayer expense was a great deal for their shareholders.

And they’ll want a say in what comes next: like the Senate inquiry announced last week into small business access to finance. And whatever the government does with executive pay reform. And the results of Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s tax review. My point isn’t that we should feel sorry for the banks; they’re as protected by the government as they are regulated by the government.

But when Kevin Rudd says Westpac should have a “long hard look at itself”, or when Tony Abbott hints that if he makes it to the Lodge he’ll impose more banking regulation in response to the interest rate rise, what do we expect these firms to do? Just sit back and cop whatever regulation the government deems? Or, worse, whatever regulation their competitors convince the government to impose?

If firms aren’t donating, they’re lobbying. The government’s register records nearly 300 lobbying firms. More than 1800 Australian organisations paid these lobbyists to saunter around the corridors of Parliament. Even The Big Issue apparently feels the need for professional representation in Canberra – the magazine is listed as a client of two of Australia’s biggest lobbyists, Hawker Britton and Enhance Corporate.

It’s strange that we seem to blame the companies who donate money to political parties for the corruption of our democracy, rather than the politicians who take that money and change the law to suit. A US study last year found that for every dollar US companies spent lobbying Congress, they received $220 in tax benefits. What firm wouldn’t want that sort of return on investment?

The solution isn’t to regulate political donations, or crack down on lobbyists. We could try. But the stakes are far too high for any limit on corporate influence to be effective. A company that feels its entire raison d’etre could be eliminated with the stroke of a legislative pen will find a way to influence politicians, whether we like it or not.

We’ve gotten into this situation because of a bipartisan belief that there are no limits to what government should do – there are almost no areas of the economy the government shouldn’t oversee, regulate or direct.

So do we want commerce out of politics? We’ll have to get politics out of commerce first.

What Do Haitians Need Most? To Get Away From Haiti

It will take much more than a global outpouring of grief to fix Haiti. But there is one concrete way rich countries could really help out – immigration. Twelve days after the Haitian earthquake, the choices for the poorest nation in the western hemisphere are stark. Haiti was already an impoverished and virtually ungoverned nation before January 12.
Haiti’s poverty has meant it lacks the basic things that make wealthy nations better able to cope with natural disasters – functioning emergency services, law and order, safe and stable buildings, and supplies that are cheap, abundant and accessible.
So with poverty and the failure of development being at the centre of the Haitian tragedy, it’s easy to be cynical when the usual crowd pipes up. Last week, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown reportedly asked schlocky American Idol judge Simon Cowell to record a charity single to raise money for Haiti. George Clooney has hosted a fund-raising telethon, complete with “all of his famous pals”, as US Magazine succinctly described them. And Linkin Park, Alanis Morissette and Peter Gabriel are all donating “unreleased tracks” for a charity compilation. They’re no doubt trying to help in good faith.
Haiti has been a long-term recipient of foreign aid. Between 1990 and 2005, foreign aid to Haiti came to $US4 billion. Aid provides about 7 per cent of Haiti’s total gross domestic product. And for the past century, economic growth in Haiti has either been stagnant or declined. The reasons for this are many. Extraordinarily bad governments, which in the 20th century seesawed between repressive dictatorship and corrupt plutocracy, have undermined any legal framework for the protection of civil liberties, property rights, or for law and order.
It is for this reason that, when assessing the impact of its aid projects, the World Bank found “in project after project, the reason for delayed implementation or cancellation, is a coup [or] civil unrest”. This has been compounded by the bureaucratic complexity of many aid projects, administrative failures by Haitian governments, and confused priorities on the part of donors. Future assistance programs will have to directly tackle Haiti’s biggest problem – bad governance – if they are to succeed.
But if the developed world really wants to help Haiti, we could let as many Haitians as humanly possible work in the West. We could dramatically expand our guest worker and migration programs.
According to a 2008 study by the Centre for Global Development, Haitian immigrants in the US earn on average six times more than equally educated Haitians who stay home. It would be more effective and efficient to allow Haitians to move to other countries than wait for the international community or aid organisations or the Haitian Government to repair two centuries of institutional failure.
Immigration away from Haiti will actually help Haiti. Foreign aid to the country may be substantial, but it is overwhelmed by what expat Haitians send home. In 2008, foreign governments gave Haiti $US912 million. Haitian expats sent back at least $US1.3 billion, according to the most conservative estimates. Other estimates suggest unreported remittances to Haiti might account for up to a third of Haiti’s total GDP.
And while much foreign aid is delivered directly to the Haitian Government (which doesn’t have a wonderful track record in using it well), these remittances go straight to the Haitian people.
The Obama Administration’s recent announcement that Haitians already living in the US (illegally or not) will be granted temporary visas is an important step. But for domestic politicians in the developed world, increasing foreign aid is less politically complicated than dramatically expanding immigration intakes. And certainly less controversial.
Nevertheless, even a modest expansion of guest worker programs in the US and other developed nations will have a greater long-term effect than any amount of money Simon Cowell’s charity single can raise.

Lost Property: Home In Deed But Not In Fact

Debates over public policy rarely pivot on philosophical questions. But here’s one: what does it actually mean to “own” your property?
NSW farmer Peter Spencer is coming up to the 50th day of his hunger strike. Spencer is arguing that he should be adequately compensated for native vegetation regulations that prevent his chopping down trees on his land.
Fair enough. Compensation for loss of property rights is part of the Commonwealth constitution.
But native vegetation laws are state laws, and state constitutions don’t require state governments to pay just compensation for property they take. Spencer claims these laws were enacted at the behest of the Federal Government, allowing Canberra to meet its Kyoto greenhouse emissions targets without the hassle of paying those who own the native vegetation carbon sinks. (Constitutional limitations on government power must be pretty annoying.)
Certainly, the nuances of regulations governing the clearing of native vegetation sound dull, but they’re actually very important. A mountain of regulation imposed by all three levels of government is eroding one of our basic human rights – the right to own property.
This might seem a bit counter-intuitive. The Government hasn’t literally taken Spencer’s property away. He hasn’t been kicked off: he’s still allowed to wander his land at his leisure. He still holds the title. But his right to use the land has definitely been taken. Put it this way: what if the Government told you that you could keep your house, but couldn’t live in it? Sure, you’d technically still own it, but you bought that house because you thought it would be a nice place to sleep. You don’t really “own” it in any useful sense.
It’s the same with farmland. Spencer may not have been physically deprived of his land, but what’s the point if he’s not allowed to farm it? And if Spencer is not compensated for this regulatory taking, how is it much different from legalised theft? Spencer’s is not an isolated problem. In urban areas, planning regulations and heritage restrictions are increasingly onerous as state and local governments try to micro-manage the “character” of suburbs.
Karl Marx called the right to property “the right of selfishness”, and property rights are believed by many to be a synonym for individualistic greed. Sounds like greed, looks like greed, sure – but it’s not greed. More than anything else, property rights are essential for prosperity and growth. Nowhere is this clearer than in the developing world. Influential Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has found that where property rights are not respected or recognised by governments and bureaucracies, countries are poor. After all, if you can’t demonstrate you have assets to your name, it’s very hard to get a loan to start a business.
Property rights are the foundation of social mobility. Indeed, property is pretty much just another word for accumulated savings. Savings help us up the economic ladder. By contrast, a society that regularly violates property rights is an unstable society, and one where the road to personal advancement is blocked.
The right to property is so important it has long been recognised as one of our basic human rights, like free speech or the right to a fair trial. The 17th century philosopher John Locke said we had three fundamental rights: life, liberty, and “estate” – property.
But in the late 20th century, the right to property became the mistreated stepchild of human rights law. Related, but unloved.
In 1948, property rights got their own article in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”). But when they finally got around to turning the declaration into a legally binding commitment in 1966, property was thought to be passe, like Dean Martin and the patriarchy: neither the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights nor the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights mention property rights.
The European Convention of Human Rights says “no one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest”. The phrase “public interest” is meaningless. What government has ever thought it wasn’t acting in the public interest? The 2006 Victorian Charter of Rights says no one’s property can be taken “except in accordance with law” – not much of a defence from eager legislators.
Peter Spencer’s hunger strike in defence of his human right to property is drastic and dangerous. We can only hope it won’t be tragic. But his desperation must make us rethink our attitude towards this essential, but increasingly neglected, human right.

Buying Our Love With Our Money Is Just Not Sporting

The Sunday Age 27th December, 2009

Nothing excites state politicians more than having their government host major sporting events. Over the past decade, the Victorian Government has increased its self-imposed “cap” on subsidising major events from $35 million a year to more than $80 million. Why bother calling it a “cap” at all?

This mega event mania is not limited to the states: Australia’s bid for the 2018 or 2022 soccer World Cup is at $45.6 million. The bid now has its own special Commonwealth taskforce.

Roman politicians knew the most effective way to keep their citizens relaxed and quiet: lots of bread, lots of circuses. The Australian wheat industry has been almost completely deregulated over the past few years. So governments have doubled the circus money.

But politicians don’t like to admit they just buy our love. Instead they give lavish economic reasons why we need to subsidise mega events to the hilt: think of the tourism! The “eyes of the world”! The eleventy-thousand jobs!

The Victorian Events Industry Council believes our state’s mega events strategy is the key reason we have avoided the global recession. Just as helpfully, the Australian Grand Prix Corporation claims its event has singlehandedly provided the Victorian economy with $1.5 billion since 1996. (If so, one wonders why we do anything else at all.)

And federal Sports Minister Kate Ellis has argued that a World Cup in Australia would be an “important catalyst” for investment in needed infrastructure, such as roads, rail and ports” perhaps implicitly admitting that even governments need motivation to do their jobs.

Therefore, we are told, the Government must aggressively compete with other governments around the world to secure these guaranteed money-spinners.

Before it hosted the 2002 World Cup, the Government of South Korea claimed its economy would receive an $8.9 billion boost. It was being modest: its 2002 co-host, Japan, determined that the Japanese economy would be suddenly $24.8 billion richer.

As we know, Germany was the host in 2006. This explains why all Germans are trillionaries.

But here’s the shameful secret: the economic benefits of holding mega events are almost entirely fictitious. A broad survey of the economics literature published in Econ Journal Watch in September last year found an overwhelming consensus that these economic benefits are either insignificant or totally non-existent. In fact, there’s stronger agreement among economists about the uselessness of mega events and sports subsidies than there is about the benefits of free trade or the need to eliminate farm subsidies.

Certainly, the Victorian Government believes its mega events strategy has made this state $1 billion richer. They have studies! But these economic impact studies – machine-produced by pliant consulting firms and uncritically accepted by governments looking to justify their actions – rarely take into account the lost revenue from locals who leave when events come to town, or who avoid going out. Or that some money spent on tickets comes at the expense of other local entertainment. Or that there might be better, more productive ways to use the Government’s limited funds. After all, if one of the reasons we host mega events is to spur government investment in infrastructure, why can’t we just skip the events and build the infrastructure anyway? It would be a lot simpler. And much, much cheaper.

When the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, its supporters maintained the event would boost the US economy by $4 billion. But a 2004 study published in the economics journal Regional Studies found that the event actually cost the US economy between $5.5 billion and $9 billion.

And an analysis by the German Institute of Economic Research concluded that the country’s 2006 World Cup didn’t budge consumer spending at all.

Even the Sydney Olympics dismally failed to boost tourism, its ostensible purpose. We spent all this money “showcasing” Sydney to the world, yet tourism to NSW actually declined, relative to the rest of Australia.

Of course, there is a more obvious benefit we get from hosting mega events, albeit an intangible one. Having the World Cup played in Australia would be a lot of fun, particularly for people who are really into soccer.

So perhaps, after all the taxpayers’ money we spend on it and the burden it will place on our economy, it might still be worth doing. (Well, maybe: we could put it to a vote.) At the very least, we shouldn’t miss an opportunity to stick it to the Brits, who are also bidding for the next World Cup.

Human Rights? Sorry, We’d Rather Strip-Search Children

What’s the point of having a charter of human rights if it just gets ignored?

The Summary Offences and Control of Weapons Acts Amendment 2009 is burrowing its way through State Parliament at the moment. Designed to tackle “knife violence”, this bill will give police an extraordinary new array of powers, including the power to fine people for being disorderly, for being drunk and disorderly, and for being just plain drunk. And police will be able to kick people out of any area if they think they might become disorderly.

Most disturbingly, the bill will give police the power to search anyone without needing to show any sort of reasonable suspicion they might be doing or carrying anything illegal. Searches can be done completely at random.

Oh, and children and the disabled can be strip-searched.

Sound a bit draconian? It is. In fact, the Government even says it’s a human rights violation – these police powers are contrary to its own 2006 human rights charter. Police Minister Bob Cameron told State Parliament the new bill “is incompatible with the charter to the extent that it limits rights”, but, well, too bad for rights, because “the government intends to proceed with the legislation in its current form”.

Cameron told The Sunday Age recently “people have a right to privacy, but they also have a right not to be stabbed”. That’s certainly true. But there’s no escalating knife violence in Melbourne. Police statistics show that in the past two years, assaults where a knife was brandished or used declined by 2.9 per cent. But even if they were increasing, would giving police the power to search anybody be the best solution?

Police can only do these arbitrary searches within “designated areas”. But the police commissioner designates the areas. He only needs to suspect there might be some disorder in that area, or has been in the past. I’m fairly sure some sort of “disorder” has happened in even the most bourgeois suburbs in the past year.

When you give police extra powers, you increase the chance that power will be abused. And the victims of police abuse will, more often than not, be minorities and youths. “Random” searches are never statistically random; they’re arbitrary. Police will be able to target whoever they want, without the restraint of having to suspect their targets are doing anything wrong.

But most importantly, if our human rights charter doesn’t prevent governments giving police the power to randomly search children, it can’t be much of a charter.

Politicians like to talk big about how they can protect human rights. The National Human Rights Consultation told Federal Parliament in September that an awareness of basic human rights should be enshrined in our education system and culture. And the debate over a federal bill of rights has covered such lofty issues as parliamentary sovereignty and the role of the judiciary in our constitutional system.

It’s a great debate. But if our experience of the Victorian charter is any indication, all those weighty arguments are moot. Victoria’s knife control bill shows that governments only respect human rights charters when they want to.

And this bill is hardly the only example. The Victorian charter claims “people have the right to hold opinions without interference” but this is hard to reconcile with the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, which makes “severe ridicule” of religious people unlawful. And how do we square Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls’ threat to shut down private men’s clubs with the charter’s claim we ‘have the right to assemble peacefully”? The entrepreneur who tried to set up a women-only travel company, just to be told it would breach the Equal Opportunity Act, might be sceptical she holds “the right to freely associate with others”.

The Victorian Government’s doublethink about human rights might be understandable if it was ignoring a pesky restriction on its powers imposed by a previous government. But Hulls was the one who pushed the charter through in the first place.

It seems human rights and governments are a marriage of convenience. If politicians find a more attractive political aim to pursue, our basic human rights are cuckolded and abandoned.

Hey Mr Garrett! Time To Get Off Our Arts And Do Nothing

If everything goes to plan, soon Australia will have its very own national cultural policy.

This is great news if you have been concerned that Australian literature, TV, music, film, theatre, painting and performance art is a bit, well, aimless. Sure, cultural products inform and reflect our views of ourselves – but so what? What’s the end game? Think of what our culture could achieve if it had a policy!

Announced recently by Peter Garrett, what the national cultural policy lacks in ambition, it more than makes up for in discussion points.

Right now it’s just a website, described pompously as a “national conversation”. But the publicly funded arts community has wanted some sort of grandiose policy for a long time. They have always assumed that “national policy” is code for “buckets of cash”. They’re probably right.

According to the Arts Minister, culture does pretty much everything – it creates jobs, attracts tourists, harnesses “understandings” (yeah, I’m not sure what that is either) and lifts our fragile economy. So in Garrett’s opinion, it should be co-ordinated by him.

But when government mates with culture, it breeds bureaucracy. Unless there is a big change in direction, a national cultural policy could easily make this worse; filtering Australia’s artistic output through yet another mesh of subsidy and red tape.

The Commonwealth Arts Council talks about culture as if it can be reduced to key performance indicators – “strategic priorities”, “aims”, “outcomes” and “outputs”. Let’s say you want a few grand for your interpretative dance version of An Inconvenient Truth. I suspect the government would quite like that idea. And once you slog through the 11-stage grant application, provide the dozens of pages of supporting material, CVs and letters of support, you’ll find out if they do. After you successful defend your idea at an assessment panel meeting, of course.

Certainly if we’re going to give money to artists, we might want to run a background check on who we are giving it away to. But government policy seems be aimed at taming our wild culture, burying it in a pile of red tape, and keeping it alive with taxpayers’ money fed through a tube.

After all, it isn’t just bad luck that Australian movies are routinely commercial failures. Filmmakers have realised it’s more important to please funding bodies with depictions of the hollowness of contemporary society than it is trying to please audiences. (I mean, come on, not every movie has to expose the “dark undercurrents of suburbia”.)

But there is an alternative. If Peter Garrett really wants his national cultural policy to make a difference, he should adopt just one principle: Australia’s culture can look after itself.

Which culture would you consider more vibrant: one in which artists are entrepreneurs – testing their work against an audience and in a competitive marketplace, or one that shepherds them into a departmental grant application process?

The entrepreneurial spirit should be as central to the art world as it is to the economy.

It’s not like the marketplace can’t produce culture. Even high culture can be popular. Nearly 40,000 people came to see Andre Rieu’s Docklands show last year. The National Gallery of Victoria puts on exhibitions all Melbourne lines up to see. And while the largest share of Arts Council funding is spent on expensive things such as orchestras, there are privately funded orchestras around the world. Profit-making culture just takes an entrepreneurial passion.

Anyway, there has never been a more futile time to try to define and direct a national culture. The very the idea of an “Australian” culture seems outdated. The internet has put the globalisation of culture into hyperdrive. Most importantly, it has allowed us to choose cultural products that are important to us as individuals, not as a “nation”.

Culture comes from the meanings that individuals derive from art, dance, theatre or film, not from a departmental funding matrix that allocates money to politically favoured art forms. So let’s scrap the idea of a national cultural policy, and embrace our 21 million individual cultural policies. A vibrant culture will come from what people want, not what the Commonwealth funds.

The Meter’s Running As Canberra Eyes States’ Powers

Reorganisation, wrote journalist Charlton Ogburn, is a wonderful way of creating the illusion of progress.

So last week the Federal Government decided that we need “nationally consistent” taxi standards. It is concerned that the geography and language tests given to taxi drivers are slightly different in Victoria and, say, Queensland.

For 108 years our federal system has been trying to divvy up tasks between the Commonwealth and the states. In Canberra’s view, it’s time to give a little bit more of that up: those states can no longer be trusted with taxis.

It’s trivial, but hardly the only trivial issue the Federal Government wants to take over. Disability parking permits is another. Not only does the Commonwealth want every state to have the same eligibility rules, but even the design of parking permits needs to be indistinguishable from Broome to Launceston.

But why? It’s hard to think of a less national issue. Permits from one state are completely and unambiguously recognised in other states. So couldn’t Canberra just leave that one for them to sort out? But no, the Federal Government wants to make sure every permit includes a Southern Cross logo and map of Australia, just in case someone wants to take their disabled parking permit overseas.

Perhaps it would be best if we just cut out the middleman and let the United Nations handle it.

Not everything the Federal Government wants to take over is so petty. In July, the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission argued that the Commonwealth should be responsible for large swathes of the health system.

We could go on. Kevin Rudd wants Canberra to be in charge of urban planning. The Preventive Health Taskforce wants Canberra to set bottleshop opening hours. The Greens want Canberra to be in charge of pokies licensing.

But where on earth does everybody get this faith in the Federal Government? Why does everybody assume Canberra will succeed where states have failed? The Commonwealth Government has, after all, racked up its fair share of failures.

There’s hardly a more obvious example than the Education Revolution. The Government’s election pledge to give every school one computer per child has, after two years, delivered just 154,933 of the 820,000 promised. At this rate, it will be a promise for the next election too.

Failure abounds in Canberra. It was the Immigration Department that lost Cornelia Rau, and kicked Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon out of the country. And remember GroceryChoice?

Nevertheless, most Federal Government absurdities come out of the Defence Department. Recall the Collins-class submarines. Or the joint strike fighter program, now two years behind schedule. Defence is not even sure it wants it any more.

Oh, and each plane is now twice the price. Don’t dwell on it too much, but in 2005 the army apparently ran out of ammunition.

Nevertheless, dragging policy away from the states – let’s call it Canberra-isation – seems to have become for many federal ministers the whole purpose of going into politics in the first place.

In a way, it’s our fault.

Young politicians might run for Federal Parliament because they have ideas for foreign relations, or a grand scheme for economic policy. But local campaigns always come down to local issues. Aspiring foreign affairs ministers will quickly find themselves campaigning on issues such as graffiti vandals, or lights at a local intersection.

Terry Moran, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, threatened last week that if the states did not do more of what Canberra wants, “the future direction of the federation will change” – the Commonwealth will seize even more stuff.

State and territory ministers are now preparing for the meeting of the Council of Australian Governments on December 7.

If Moran’s comments are anything to go by, they should expect a haranguing about how their states are insufficiently obedient to Rudd. But as they sit down opposite their Commonwealth counterparts next month, the states need to ask themselves one simple question: why should we listen to these clowns?

Vegetarians’ Meat Tax Plan Just A Load Of Hot Air

This week British economist Lord Stern called for the world to get off beef and on to broccoli: go vegetarian for the planet. Methane – burped, belched and otherwise released by cows in impressive amounts – is around 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

So the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review into global warming told Britain’s Timesnewspaper that the climate change meeting in Copenhagen would only be a success if it led to skyrocketing meat prices. Otherwise, Stern predicts, climate change will turn southern Europe into a desert and there will be ”severe global conflict”.

Stern isn’t alone. Also this week, Peter Singer called for a 50 per cent tax on all meat. According to the Australian vegetarian philosopher, cows are pretty much like cigarettes: they’re bad for you and smelly. They should be taxed accordingly.

It may come as a surprise, but there are flaws in this plan. We could all go vegetarian tomorrow if we tried – good news for the vitamin supplements industry. But a world without meat would be a much sadder world. And at best we’d be making a marginal change to global emissions.

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 85 per cent of methane from cattle is produced by cows in the developing world, because they have poorer diets, which produces more methane. And many of those cows aren’t just hanging around in paddocks waiting to become tasty beef – they’re work cows. India’s 283 million cows aren’t being eaten.

One environmentalist gripe is that cattle raised for human consumption themselves consume vast amounts of food that could go instead to humans. But grain-feeding produces less methane than feeding on wild grass. Purpose-grown feed is, at least in some respects, more environmentally friendly.

So: cow farts are a surprisingly complex issue.

It’s easy for Stern and Singer to urge the developed world to change its ways. But it would be much harder – and would get them invited to far fewer cocktail parties – if they decided a good use of their time was haranguing poor Indians into giving up their livestock. Stern and Singer are proposing little more than a green indulgence for the wealthy.

Anyway, practical problems aside, there’s something obscene about the idea that governments should deliberately make basic staples of life more expensive.

After all, Stern and Singer’s meat tax is hardly the only tax on food being proposed. Public health activists are adamant that the only way to get people to shed their ugly kilos is by making sweets more expensive.

Taxes on food have been among the most punitive in history. Dissatisfaction with taxes on salt was one of the causes of the French Revolution. Gandhi marched against the British salt tax.

We forget just how far we’ve come. A few centuries ago, getting hold of affordable and edible meat was like playing roulette – if the roulette wheel was made of parasites and salmonella.

Early cookbooks spent almost as much time teaching household chefs how to identify spoiled meat as they did describing recipes. The Compleat Housewife, published in 1727, told readers to prod carefully at beef in a marketplace. If the meat sprang back, it was fresh.

Admittedly, there is a positive spin you could put on the proposals to tax our food consumption: finally, the human race is so rich, so comfortable, that we can start making it a bit harder to get our basic needs. But food taxes will disproportionately affect the poor. If meat was as expensive as environmentalists would like, the rich wouldn’t significantly reduce their wagyu steak intake, but families on a tight budget would certainly eat less three-star mince.

And (need it be said?) hunger caused by inadequate or low-quality food supplies is still a major problem in the developing world. Just this year, in the Central African Republic, malnutrition caused by limited meat has created a humanitarian disaster.

These contemporary crises should remind us that humanity’s greatest struggle has been against malnutrition and starvation. Not for nothing did the Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel title his groundbreaking study of recent global history The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.

Since 1950, the global population has increased more than 150 per cent. But, in real terms, the price of food has sharply declined in that period. Basic commodities such as grain and vegetables are 75 per cent cheaper than they were 60 years ago. And it’s the potent combination of rapidly expanding economic growth and technological change that did it.

But we shouldn’t forget how hard it was to get where we are today. Cheap food is our inheritance as human beings.

Being Tough On Refugees Is Pretty Weak

We’re all just like Pavlov’s dogs. Last week, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave the Pacific Solution a quick polish, rebranded it the Indonesian Solution, and immediately everybody started yelling at Philip Ruddock.

Yep, if it wasn’t clear by now, ideological and partisan divisions over asylum seekers and boat people are deeply entrenched. But here’s the problem. Even from a liberal, libertarian or even conservative perspective, the case for being tough on border control just isn’t that strong.

Immigration is a good thing, for migrants and for the places migrants go. Aren’t people who are willing to risk their lives on boats propelled by motorbike engines to get to a society with social and economic freedom exactly the sort of people we want in Australia? (I can think of a lot of Australians I’d rather kick out.)

The sanest case for strict borders is a paternalistic argument that refugees need to be deterred from making the dangerous journey by boat to Australia. But it’s not convincing. Isn’t the danger of the journey a pretty significant deterrent itself? Refugees risk their lives and permanent separation from their families – a decision normally made under pain of imminent death.

So exactly what are we trying to deter? Refugees aren’t just going to quit being refugees.

It’s not clear whether deterrence even works. Australian refugee volumes correspond to global and regional refugee trends. That this recent surge of refugees is mostly Sri Lankan is because of the war there, not because of the Migration Amendment Bill 2009 (which hasn’t even been passed in Parliament).

But most damningly, deterrence leads to some atrociously illiberal, inhumane policies. Taking deterrence to its absurdly logical conclusion, in 1992 the federal Labor government decided to bill refugees the cost of their detention. Nobody in a liberal democracy should be locked up and charged for the privilege. To its enduring credit, the Rudd Government eliminated this punitive measure in September.

Still, Rudd seems eager to depict his Government as tough on refugees. The idea that we should punish those who do make it to Australia alive, to dissuade others from trying, quickly descends into outright cruelty.

There’s a deeper issue at stake about asylum seekers than just migration levels. Boat people force us to confront the classic opposition between the nation state and the universal rights of the individual.

John Howard’s line – that his government would choose who came to the country and the circumstances in which they came – has become the ultimate expression of state sovereignty and the supremacy of executive government. His doctrine has been implicitly shared by Australian governments for a century.

Governments have treated immigration as a kind of fruit and veg shop, where they can rifle through the available human produce to pick only the ”best” foreign stock. Fifty years ago, it was white migrants. Now it’s skilled migrants – the unskilled are left for other countries.

Obviously we’re a long way from the liberal ideal of global free movement of people to complement global free trade.

Paul Kelly’s book, The March of Patriots, quotes a Howard government official, reflecting on the navy’s policy of taking stranded people to the nearest port, saying ”the maritime industry in Australia [has] essentially a Left attitude” – as if the moral mandate to protect lives above all else was just some silly leftie thing, like peace studies.

But individual liberty stands implacably opposed to the sort of nationalistic state sovereignty which has been the foundation of our immigration and refugee policies. Those who place liberty at the front of their politics should be against harsh border measures, not for them.

According to some, there are 10,000 refugees massing on foreign shores, just waiting for the right moment to sneak across the ocean. Putting aside the dubious evidence for that figure, yes: 10,000 people would be a lot to squeeze into a living room. But the Australian continent is quite large. The settler arrival figures increased by nearly that amount just this year – from 149,000 in 2007-08 to 158,000 in 2008-09 – and we hardly heard a peep from anybody.

So if 10,000 refugees is the worst-case scenario, it’s not that worst a case. With 15.2 million refugees worldwide, the few thousand who make it to Australia are pretty insignificant. No one has a moral obligation to remain in the country of their birth. And no country has a moral right to deny anyone the chance to improve their living standards, or save their own lives.