Tag: The Sunday Age

Strange bedfellows make for better government

Something strange is happening in Britain. When the Conservative Party failed to get an outright majority in the May general election, it was forced into coalition with Britain’s (distinctly left-leaning) third party, the Liberal Democrats, to take government. But here’s the strange part: the coalition seems to be working.

The Liberal Party in Australia should be watching this embryonic alliance closely. David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat Deputy PM Nick Clegg are getting along like a parliament house on fire. The two men are even proposing to address each other’s national conferences this year.

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It’s more than just a personal relationship. Surprisingly, the coalition seems a lot stronger than you’d expect from a marriage of convenience.

If it holds, the UK could see a dramatic ideological realignment. After all, David Cameron’s project to soften the Tory image was about more than just looking green and modern.

No party calling itself ”conservative” will ever be a fully libertarian one. Social conservatives who’ve voted Tory forever would not look kindly upon mixing social liberalism (gay marriage, for example) with its Margaret Thatcher-style economics (lower taxes, smaller government).

But while the Tories are in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the government could get close to that philosophical union. At their best, the Liberal Democrats are socially liberal and civil liberty-minded.

The dynamics of coalition with the Liberal Democrats gives influence to social liberals in the Conservative Party. It also gives power to those Liberal Democrats who want to cut down the size of government and deregulate.

So the coalition could be a generally centrist, modest and mainstream government, but one that cares about individual liberty – a new ”liberal conservative” government. That’s what seems to be happening.

Clegg is working on the Great Repeal Bill, a suite of legislation to clear away some of the restrictions on civil liberties, government intrusions on privacy, creepy government databases, and nutty nanny state laws that built up in the Labour government’s decade in power.

The government is eliminating the compulsory national identification card scheme. They’ve promised to stop detaining asylum seeker children. They’re talking about devolution, giving more power to local councils and communities, expanding school choice and pushing public sector reform.

Sure, there are big things the two parties disagree on. On immigration there is tension. But Labour has evidently decided disaffection with foreigners was the reason it lost government. So while Labour is going after British National Party types, the Liberal Conservative coalition can temper its own position.

It is early days for the Cameron-Clegg partnership. But it looks good so far. So if the Liberal Party isn’t paying attention, it should be.

When Malcolm Turnbull was rolled last year as Liberal leader, there was a minor sub-genre urging him to start his own party – a party for social liberals and economic dries. Sounds delightful. But not many of the people who proposed this new party would vote for it, let alone join.

Turnbull may be all loveable and cuddly on climate change and Bill Henson, but such a party would also have to be economically pretty dry. Imagine a party with an industrial relations policy to actually deregulate Australia’s workplaces, rather than, as with WorkChoices, just smack around trade unions a bit. Or one that wanted to do more horrifying things: privatise Australia Post, cut taxes, abolish the Australian Institute of Sport.

Of course, the chances of a breakaway party are pretty slim. But it is a central tenet of the Australian Liberal Party that it’s the party of individual freedom, small government and personal responsibility.

The Cameron-Clegg alliance is a real-world test of the marketability of a government that cares about individual liberty in both economic and social spheres. It’s a style of government with promise. The Australian population is becoming more liberal on social issues every year. Gender and sexual equality are no longer debatable. Even multiculturalism, so controversial in recent decades, is widely accepted.

Yet many on the Australian right believe the reason David Cameron didn’t win big enough against Gordon Brown to hold government on his own was because he was insufficiently conservative. He could have talked more about immigration, for instance. The lesson from Britain, they argue, is that Tony Abbott needs to tack right, and tack right hard, to be credible.

But the new British coalition could offer a very different example for the Australian Liberal Party. If Cameron and Clegg can make it work, the combination of social and economic freedom may not be such electoral poison after all.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review.

Coup is good news for Whitlam

Julia Gillard has a lot to thank Kevin Rudd for. The failure of Rudd’s personal leadership style gave Tony Abbott a fighting chance at changing the government. But it is that very failure which should allow Gillard to hold power against the Coalition. Assuming nobody dies from an overpriced school hall.

The rot that set in to Rudd’s prime ministership hasn’t really infected the Labor government he led. Rudd announced every major policy personally. He pushed his ministers to the side, and claimed personal responsibility for every policy breakdown. Rudd’s desperation to make it about him buffered the government from its own fiascos.

The sole minister to pay for the government’s hasty policy making is poor old Peter Garrett — taking the fall for a rushed stimulus he had little part in devising. Even then, Rudd assured the country he himself was to blame for the insulation debacle.

Prancing about no man’s land as a lone soldier in an executive government, it was no wonder the PM drew all the fire from the opposition.

Rudd and Gillard are neither the socialists they are described as, nor the conservatives they claim to be. But Rudd’s centrism was defined by bursts of manic, uncontrolled energy. Each of those bursts would eventually end with deep lows.

Nothing shows this pattern more clearly than the mining tax. We got the resources super profit tax because Rudd wasn’t quite sure what to do with the 138 recommendations of the Henry tax review. We got the tax review because Rudd wasn’t quite sure which of the 900 ideas of the 2020 Summit to choose. And we got the summit because Rudd wanted to demonstrate he had single-handedly ended the culture wars. Robert Manne and Cate Blanchett were to symbolically slay the Howard dragon with the sword of intellectual harmony, offered up by the new prime minister. Think that metaphor is overdone? Well, overdoing things was Rudd’s style.

Climate change was the “biggest moral challenge” of our time, which would have surprised war, third world development, state tyranny, racism, and poverty. The global financial crisis was of “truly seismic significance”, and he would “move heaven and earth” to keep Australia out of it.

The crisis was actually quite mild, causing problems only in countries with deep economic and budget issues already.

One big bluster after another and eventually we’re in 2010. The prime minister who made world headlines on the first day of parliament by saying sorry for the actions of previous Australian governments has spent the past six months apologising for the actions of his own.

Rudd’s personal failure leaves Gillard in a strong position. Rudd’s “clearing the decks” in April of all outstanding loose ends before the election season (abandoning the emissions trading scheme, freezing applications from Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers, passing the education stimulus rorts to a committee) was a dismal failure.

Yes, Gillard has been a senior member of the government that made all these disastrous decisions, as Abbott quickly pointed out. But with the four-person kitchen cabinet now halved (Lindsay Tanner has gone too), Gillard can reasonably claim this is an entirely new executive, if not an entirely new government. So now would be the time for Gillard to do some deck-clearing of her own.

First of all: there can be no ETS without a global agreement. This should be a no-brainer. With the climate change issue cleansed of Rudd’s bombastic moral rhetoric, perhaps now we can focus on whether the government’s policy will or will not meaningfully impact global emissions levels.

Without international agreement, Australia could shut every industry in the country and not change the temperature a nano-degree. A “price on carbon” is utterly pointless if Australians are the only ones paying it. Make Rudd special envoy for climate change. If he can get China and India on board, we’ll talk again.

Drop the internet filter. Nobody seriously thinks it will work. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is tying himself in rhetorical knots pretending it can.

Scrap the ludicrous freeze on accepting Afghan and Sri Lankan refugees. It’s another relic of Rudd-era policy panic. And it has that air of awkward machismo which would normally be funny, except that barring asylum claims from specific countries is just a teensy bit racist.

Gillard may do none of these things. She’ll probably still be better at selling and enacting bad policies than Rudd ever was.

If nothing else, the Gillard coup has been good for Gough Whitlam. What was once called Whitlamesque can now be called Ruddesque. Being the first prime minister to be bumped before serving a single term is pretty poor. Even Mark Latham, who has complained about being the bipartisan bogyman of Australian politics, now might be able to catch a break.

Gillard, Latham, Whitlam: This week, they’ll all be muttering their thanks to former prime minister Kevin Rudd.

It’s alive, after a fashion

Tony Abbott is a strange person to run an anti-tax, anti-spending election campaign. Sure, Abbott got the leadership on the back of a simple phrase – ”great big new tax” – liberally applied to the government’s emissions trading scheme. He’s picked up Malcolm Turnbull’s theme of careless waste in education and insulation, and run with it hard.

His budget reply speech in May sung loudly with ”this reckless spending must stop”.

But it was quickly revealed that the night before his reply Abbott had asked his shadow cabinet to approve a pretty reckless piece of spending of his own: a quick cash payment of $10,000 for stay-at-home mothers. This idea was quickly shut down by his colleagues.

That was to be on top of the opposition’s proposed paid parental leave scheme, which had been announced in March, supported by a $2.7 billion tax imposed on businesses. It would give Australia parental leave to rival Sweden’s.

(As an aside, for decades we’ve been told Australia should be like Scandinavia. So why Abbott’s policy has been so enthusiastically laughed at by those who believe we should be playing policy one-upmanship with Pippi Longstocking is beyond me.)

Anyway, now the opposition is back condemning great big new taxes. Abbott claims increasing the tax paid by the mining industry would be like digging out the heart of the economy and sending it, still beating, to Guangdong Province to work the rest of its life making iPad knock-offs.

Putting aside the merits (and demerits) of the mining tax, there’s a reason for this barrage of mixed messages.

It’s that Abbott’s small government identity doesn’t quite fit him properly.

One of the most common claims made about the Opposition Leader is that his ideas are little more than nostalgia for John Howard – to elect Abbott is to give Lazarus another triple bypass. It’s an understandable view. When in 2003 he was asked if he could think of anything he disagreed with Howard on, Abbott responded: ”No. No. I can’t.”

But Abbott isn’t exactly Howard. Abbott represents strongly just one side of the Howard legacy, a side that became more and more dominant as the Howard government got longer in the tooth – big government conservatism.

That’s the best description of the Howard government’s mix of modest social conservatism and giving the middle-class as much welfare as they can stomach.

Howard was much more like a progressive leftie than anybody gives him credit for.

Under Howard, the rich got taxed more, and the poor got taxed less. In 1996, the top 25 per cent of income earners paid 60 per cent of the Commonwealth’s total tax revenue. By 2007, they were paying 67 per cent. That’s a big increase.

On the other side of the city, the bottom 25 per cent of earners were paying 3.4 per cent of the total revenue in 1996. Eleven years later, that number had dropped to 2.5 per cent.

Yet Howard had made his way in the 1980s as an economic dry. He was supported by the rump of free marketeers in the Liberal Party who believed Australia needed to privatise the big, lumbering bureaucrat-run businesses, deregulate and destroy the cosy government cartels (the government’s official Egg Marketing Board, for instance), lower taxes, cut spending and generally get off the economy’s back.

Let’s just call them neo-liberals. Everybody else does.

In government, Howard spent heavily and regulated heavily, but he did come good on some of the neo-liberal agenda. Telstra was fully sold, the GST implemented, media markets deregulated, and so on. Small steps, but enough of them to keep the free marketeers on side. Howard still got to call himself a neo-liberal, and everybody else got to damn him as one.

Howard was a neo-liberal on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and a big government conservative on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Neo-liberalism in Australia is primarily an economic agenda. And Abbott’s lack of interest in economics is famous: ”I have never been as excited about economics as some of my colleagues; you know, I find economics is not for nothing known as the dismal science.”

Much more than Howard, Abbott sees the economy as simply an engine to produce money for governments to spend. A good economy is important. But mainly so governments can fund social programs: ”You can’t run a decent society without a strong economic base.” The word ”run” is crucial. That’s hardly a vision of a neo-liberal, dry-as-dust, no-such-thing-as-society Brutopia.

All signals suggest an Abbott government would continue to bump up taxes in order to fund lavish subsidies to the middle class. Like Howard.

But unlike Howard, Abbott’s interest in neo-liberal reform seems limited to WorkChoices.

So there was considerable disquiet within the Liberal Party when the parental leave scheme was announced. Not just with the way it was announced, but the very idea of levying a big new tax on business.

Former treasurer Peter Costello wrote in The Age: ”I have been to a lot of Liberal Party meetings in my life and I can honestly say I have never heard a speech in favour of higher tax.”

After all, many in the party still harbour an intuitive resistance to tax increases, let alone whole new taxes. Howard and Costello knew what they were doing. Their later budgets invariably had some sort of tax cut, no matter how piddly or token.

Any leader will do if you’re winning. (That’s politics. If you’re losing, no leader is good enough.) The Opposition Leader has made big gains. But iron-man Abbott will have to work out harder if he’s going to fit into the clothes of an anti-tax, anti-waste warrior.

Privacy pose shows the minister is off his Facebook

It must have felt nice for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy not to be the bad guy. Just for a little while.At a Senate estimates hearing last week, being peppered by questions finding even more flaws in his internet filter plan, Conroy seized an opportunity to direct a bit of fury Google’s way. And at Facebook, too – the minister was on a roll.

Conroy accused Google of the ”largest privacy breach in history across Western democracies” for its apparently accidental sampling of publicly accessible data from home wireless internet networks. Then he claimed Facebook had ”gone rogue” because the social network’s privacy policy was getting increasingly complex and confused.

”What would you prefer?” asked Conroy. ”A corporate giant who is answerable to no one and motivated solely by profit making the rules … or a democratically elected government with all the checks and balances in place?”

Sure, Conroy’s sudden, passionate defence of the privacy of Australian Facebook profiles could be totally sincere. But recall this: he is a member of a government that is about to install body scanners in airports. Body scanners aren’t ”mistakes”, as Google described its inadvertent over-collection of data.

They’re designed to peek under clothes and investigate the nude contours of travellers. Some are able to capture and store images. Now that’s a privacy problem to be worried about.

At least when a corporation breaches privacy, it’s relatively easy to deal with.

If you don’t like Facebook’s privacy settings, you can, you know, quit Facebook. It’s not hard: it’s in the ”Account Settings” tab on the top right corner of the site. If enough people do, Facebook will have to reform its ways, or go out of business.

And if you don’t like that your wireless network is unsecured for Google or your neighbours to look at, secure it.

Most Australians now run high-powered wireless networks in their house and use them for online banking. Perhaps a few minutes thinking about network security wouldn’t go astray.

Certainly, Google should be chastened by its blunder. If they have broken any Australian laws, then they should be punished.

But when the government runs roughshod over our privacy, that’s much more serious.

As Conroy was launching into Facebook, a genuine threat to privacy was winding its way through Parliament – healthcare identifiers, which form part of the government’s electronic health records plan. If it passes, every Australian will be allocated a unique number, and encouraged to store their health records in a government database. No information is as sensitive as health records. And these records will be accessible to half a million healthcare workers around the country. Indeed, that’s the point.

Ensuring information security in high-stress environments (like emergency rooms) or in busy retail environments (like a Medicare outlet) is no small task. It’s easy for computers to remain unlocked, or logged-in, even if just for a short time. So it won’t take very long for a serious compromise of security to occur.

In general, eHealth is a good idea. But what the government proposes is a universal, compulsory, centrally managed and bureaucratically controlled record system. Individuals will have no direct control over their own records. (Unlike, for instance, the private online health record systems available from Microsoft and Google.)

The eHealth scheme is an Australia Card for your embarrassing bowel problem.

Privacy problems are endemic to centralised government systems: 1000 Medicare employees have been investigated for spying on personal information in the past three years alone. That’s one in six Medicare employees.

There are problems in Centrelink too. In 2006, after a two-year study, investigators uncovered 800 cases of illegal snooping by 100 staff.

Now CrimTrac, the federal agency in charge of criminal databases (fingerprints, DNA, and criminal records) wants to control data from law-abiding citizens too (drivers’ licences, birth registries and passport photos), all matched up to the electoral roll and collected on a nationally accessible police database.

The CrimTrac head, Ben McDevitt, claimed police ”need to have access to the sort of data that is held by various governments in order to establish an individual’s identity”. He said some privacy may have to be sacrificed for better law enforcement: ”I don’t find that at all threatening or big brotherish.” How reassuring.

Facebook has been deeply stupid – abusing the trust of users, continuously changing their privacy settings, and playing fast and loose with personal information. The company has long seemed dismissive of many privacy concerns and it deserves to be harangued by the press and punished by the marketplace.

But at least you can quit Facebook if you’re unhappy. If a government department abuses your trust or compromises your privacy, you can’t do anything.

Why trimming the waste line is harder than it looks

It must be election time: fiscal conservatism is fashionable again. Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey go into this election with a battle cry about the Rudd government’s budget deficits and ballooning national debt. Kevin Rudd claims the budget is heading unstoppably back to sweetness and surpluses, but the opposition still has a case – by 2011, the government will owe $90 billion, 6 per cent of our GDP.

Hey, fiscal conservatism worked for Kevin07. It might work for TonyTwentyTen. But fiscal conservatism is easy when budgets are riding high and government debt is negligible. If the budget isn’t balanced, and debt needs to be reduced, then you’ll want to identify government programs to cut.

In his budget reply on Thursday, Abbott identified a couple of cuts – abandoning the national broadband network, fiddling with the building education revolution, and a freeze on hiring new public servants for a while. And reducing government advertising. Every opposition wants to reduce government advertising.

It’s a pretty tepid start, but it’s a start; Joe Hockey will apparently propose more cuts this week.

He’ll need to. If the Liberals want to walk the ”high road of expenditure restraint” and clear the national debt as soon as possible, they have to cut a lot more spending. Luckily, nobody has to look far to find things to cut.

The government is giving a not-for-profit $120,000 so they can host an interstate rickshaw ride to raise awareness of poverty. We’re giving a wallpaper company in New South Wales $36,000 to update its website, and $70,400 to another company so it can develop a ”social game platform”.

As well, $15,000 went to a team of glass percussion artists, $100,000 has gone to a Hervey Bay company to build two new cabins in their caravan park, and $8000 of federal money paid for an electric scooter-charging station in Victoria Park, Western Australia.

These are all part of multimillion-dollar programs that could be eliminated instantly.

Then there’s the $13 million we give to the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, and the Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation’s $27 million. (They’re different, apparently.)

And the $150 million the government plans to spend on that idiotic ”Nothing Like Australia” tourism campaign. And the $254 million for elite sport programs.

That should be the test. You’re not serious about reducing government spending if you’re unwilling to upset the men’s Olympic volleyball team.

With so many so obviously absurd programs, you’d think eliminating waste would be easy. But every program, no matter how silly or unnecessary, has passionate supporters.

When the government spends, it makes some individuals and industries reliant on that spending. And public servants whose careers depend on that spending’s future. No matter what, someone, somewhere, gets upset when you cut a government program.

So governments are usually reluctant to get rid of anything.

Take the Department of Climate Change. Its 640 hand-picked bureaucrats were charged with implementing the government’s emissions trading scheme.

So you would have thought once the government abandoned the scheme, those bureaucrats might no longer be needed. More fool you. They’re still there: patiently waiting for their real jobs to start, filling in the long hours of the day tinkering with renewable energy regulations and trying to fix the insulation program.

On the Labor side, politicians with ties to public service unions hate the prospect of eliminating the jobs of their supporters.

And when Joe Hockey flagged the possible public service reductions earlier this year, his Liberal parliamentary colleague Gary Humphries said Hockey would have him ”to reckon with”. Humphries is the Senator for the ACT, and Canberra is a government town.

Right now, no one is more aware of how hard cutting the size of government can be than the new British Prime Minister, David Cameron. He enters No. 10 with the country labouring under more than $A1.3 trillion of national debt. If the United Kingdom doesn’t want to become the Greece of the north, Cameron will have to do something drastic.

Certainly, both Gordon Brown and Cameron went into the general election saying how much they wanted to tackle this debt. Brown proposed reducing government expenditure by 10 per cent, cunningly campaigning on an ”I broke it, I’ll fix it” platform.

But neither candidate was eager to go into too much detail about just what spending they planned to cut. Because many of those cuts will have to be public service retrenchments.

No matter how much the British people say they want the UK’s budget back in the black, it will take a lot of political courage for Cameron to get it there.

In Australia, that’s a big problem too. There’s much government waste to cut. But waste has friends and cutting waste makes enemies. Nobody wants to make enemies in an election year.

Capitalism Is Ruining The Planet, And Pigs Might Fly

The home insulation program has been scrapped. And the emissions trading scheme has been abandoned.

But try not to worry too much. We are all a lot more environmentally sustainable than you imagine. Just look what happens when a little piggy goes to the market.

In 2008, a Dutch conceptual artist, Christien Meindertsma, chose a single pig and followed what happened to every part of it as it was slaughtered, sold, distributed and processed around the world.

Pigs are not just made out of ham. Her pig – Pig 05049 – went into 185 separate products. Pig hair goes into paintbrushes. Protein from the hair is used to soften bread dough. Some pig skin is eaten (scratchings), and some sold to become practice canvas for tattoo artists. Pig leather becomes safety gloves. Collagen from the skin is sold to become glue, beauty masks, an ingredient in energy bars and a binding agent for liquorice.

Gelatine is derived from the collagen, which goes into pretty much every dessert – jelly, cupcakes, nougat, custard pastry, marshmallows, chocolate mousse, ice-cream and tiramisu. That’s just the outside of the pig.

The bladder becomes the skin of a tambourine. Haemoglobin goes into cigarette filters, and is added to ham to enhance its appearance. From pig’s bone fat we get antifreeze, floor wax, toothpaste, crayons, anti-wrinkle cream, make-up foundation, and hair conditioner.

And even bullets. Gelatine from pig bones helps move gunpowder into shell casings.

There are more than 150 other products. No pig bits are wasted.

But Meindertsma’s findings are extremely counterintuitive. We’ve been taught that we live lives of reckless, wasteful consumption. We’re told we have “affluenza” – an illness of consumerism with symptoms that include high credit card bills, environmental degradation and moral soullessness. Australia’s affluenza theorist, Clive Hamilton, has written that “consumer capitalism loves waste”.

By contrast, every school child learns that the Native Americans used “every part” of the buffalo they killed. Often they did – that’s subsistence living for you. But sometimes they herded them off cliffs (“buffalo jumps”) thousands at a time.

One 19th-century explorer, Meriwether Lewis, saw tribes killing “whole droves” of buffalo, salvaging only “the best parts of the meat” and leaving the rest to “rot in the field”.

Even at their most frugal, earlier societies could never match the resourcefulness of the global marketplace.

Pig 05049 shows how magnificently complex and refined global capitalism really is. Everything in a pig can be sold to someone, somewhere. Nobody wants to miss an opportunity to profit, even if it involves selling pig bones to be burnt into ashes which are then sold again, and again, and again, eventually helping produce German train brakes.

Or, to put it another way: waste is expensive. Time and energy are extremely valuable, and, as farmers know, so are pigs’ pancreases (to produce insulin).

After all, our entire economic system has developed on the idea that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. We sell things that other people can use better.

A competitive economy encourages businesses to be less wasteful. To reduce the amount of energy used in production, or to reduce packaging to its absolute minimum, is to save money.

Ikea “flat-packs” its furniture because it’s more economical to ship that way, and it burns fewer fossil fuels for their buck.

Walmart justified its packaging reduction program (a target of just 5 per cent less packaging by 2013) by pointing to the $3.4 billion the company would save. Corporations aren’t altruists. That’s why a 2008 survey found that 76 per cent of corporate sustainability efforts were aimed at reducing package waste.

Anybody who has travelled in the past few years will have seen that many hotels don’t wash linen any more, unless it is specifically requested. Good for the environment, perhaps, but definitely good for the bottom line.

Even the globalisation of food produce is an example of market forces pursuing sustainability.

“Food miles” advocates believe we should only eat food produced locally, that it’s environmentally obscene to be transporting food across the world.

But the biggest carbon contribution of food isn’t how far it has travelled. It’s how efficiently it was produced. And efficiency is caused by things like climate. So a British government report found that importing tomatoes from Spain was more sustainable than growing them locally. A study by three New Zealand academics found that the same was true for apples grown in New Zealand and sent to the United Kingdom.

Sure, that seems bizarre. But we live in a world where tiny bits of pig are used to produce the copper that makes up computer circuitboards, and other bits used to reduce moisture in newspaper. Globalisation is definitely weird. But it’s not as unsustainable as everybody says.

The Blame Game Is All Canberra’s Fault

Kevin Rudd will take over the hospital system and everything will be dandy.

That’s the election pitch to voters in New South Wales, South Australia, and Queensland, who are desperate to have the Prime Minister wrestle hospital control out of the hands of the state governments those voters elected.

Rudd’s proposal displeases John Brumby, who believes that comparing Victoria’s health system with that of New South Wales is defamatory, if not outright seditious. If both leaders hold their ground, we have the edifying prospect of a state premier defending his state against a prime minister of his own party, while they both head to an election.

It’s probably some kooky factional thing. No doubt a few Labor heavyweights know the ‘real story’ behind it all.

But Brumby is right to fight. It is very altruistic of the Prime Minister to “end the blame game” by granting himself more power.

After all, this “blame game” is entirely Canberra’s fault. Over the past one hundred years, the Commonwealth just hasn’t been able to stop itself interfering more and more with areas that are state responsibilities. Well, according to the constitution.

It’s understandable the states are so unpopular – the New South Wales government has become little more than a succession of coups d’état. Queensland looks to be heading that way too.

But put aside any notion of states’ rights, of the virtues of a federal structure of government, of having the government closest to the people to be the one that makes the decisions. Or of the danger of concentrating power in just one level of government.

Right now, the biggest delusion in Australian public debate is that the federal government is inherently better at running policy.

There are calls to have Canberra take over: occupational health and safety laws, more workplace laws, disabled parking permits, taxi drivers’ training standards, the timing of daylight saving, the date for ANZAC day, travel concessions for seniors, safety standards for poultry, taxes on racing and wagering, the rules governing firearms management, inheritance laws, public transport, building standards, childcare standards, pokies licensing, bikie gang laws, carbon emissions plans, and on and on and on.

That’s only about half the list I have in front of me – every man, his dog, and his dog’s government relations officer seems to wants Canberra to assume responsibility for some state policy or another.

Last October Kevin Rudd even argued urban planning should be subject to a federal takeover. Urban planning is about as far from a Commonwealth responsibility as you could get.

Dissenting against the Howard Government’s Workchoices industrial relations takeover, Michael Kirby, called this “opportunistic federalism”. There’s no political theory, no policy consistency, or coherent direction governing what policy areas Canberra chooses to suck into its vortex. Just whatever federal politicians reckon will be most popular.

And there’s no doubt the health takeover is popular. Eight out of 10 Australians want a federal takeover of health.

But this isn’t that. The states will continue to fund 40 per cent, the Commonwealth the remaining 60.

Hospital workforce planning will be jointly managed by the federal and state governments, which will make workplace relations for nurses and doctors a hell of a lot more complicated. Specialised services will also be jointly managed, as will the mix of medical services. Procuring equipment will be negotiated between states and local hospital networks. The federal government will set performance targets, state governments will measure targets, and local hospital networks will try to achieve those targets.

This plan won’t cull bureaucracy. It’ll add it. The federal government will have a stake about what happens in the hospitals. The states will have a stake, and the local hospital networks will have a stake. And regulators get a stake. A bit like the current system, except in triplicate.

More: if you believe a federal government takeover of funding will allow local communities to run hospitals, recall the insulation industry debacle. The government that coughs up the money is ultimately held responsible when it all falls apart. The next person to die in a waiting room will be seen as Kevin Rudd’s personal responsibility. And then there’ll be more direct federal intervention into hospital management.

Brumby’s stand against this plan is great. But he doesn’t focus on the real problem.

The states cannot avoid being the lapdog of the federal government while they’re almost entirely reliant on the federal government for their money.

Rudd’s health plan takes a third of the revenue from the GST back from the states.

If Brumby wants to assert Victoria’s position as a health innovator, he’d push for something really radical: to get Canberra out of the income tax business and return the power to levy income taxes to the states.

Ask a nearby teenager. Earning your own money is the key to independence. Only with fiscal sovereignty will the states be able to reassert their policy autonomy.

Brumby’s confrontation with Rudd will be hollow unless he tackles the states’ master-servant relationship with the Commonwealth.

Fat Lot Of Good Campaign Against Junk Food Is Doing

The debate over obesity and public health is usually black and white. It’s obvious who the bad guys are: junk food peddlers.

But last year, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo and about a dozen other firms committed to cut advertising of unhealthy products to children. This week, a spokesman for the Responsible Children’s Marketing Initiative said that “television advertising to children of certain foods has virtually ceased during children’s programs”. The firms are also reducing sugar and salt in some products.

Sounds good? Well, the president of the Public Health Association of Australia described it as “incredibly feeble”. Not “a step in the right direction”, or “good, but they could do more”, but literally so feeble it defies credibility.

Call this the “Healthy Menu Choices” conundrum.

For decades, corporations have been told they need to get “socially responsible” and think about more than just profits. And few corporations are more harangued than those selling unhealthy food. They have been demonised by the expanding public health establishment, who are certain children’s minds are being warped and their bellies expanded by the sinister alliance of sugar and advertising.

Milton Friedman wrote in 1970 that the only social responsibility of business was to increase its profits — profits being how businesses figure out whether they’re providing value. Friedman wrote in vain. Corporate philanthropy has become a bigger and bigger part of the business world. For the food industry, this corporate social responsibility means placating public health activists.

So McDonald’s – the very embodiment of unhealthy eating – has introduced salads. It has struck a deal with the Heart Foundation. In New Zealand, it has a relationship with Weight Watchers. Through the responsible marketing initiative, the confectionery industry is trying to show it is as supportive of a healthy Australia as chocolate makers ever could be.

Yet for all these attempts at conciliation, food companies just get demonised more. Each effort is condemned. If everything they do is going to be dismissed as the cynical expansion of corporate power, why should they try?

There’s a big anti-business component to the push for a nanny state. Many public health activists believe the blame for obesity lies with corporations – not with the choices of the people who buy unhealthy food. In the activists’ view, marketing is making people eat things that they would rather avoid, if only they weren’t so entranced by all the flashing lights and catchy jingles.

Hence the attention public health activists pay to multinationals, and the lack of attention they pay to, say, local fish and chip shops, pizzerias or Indian restaurants. Or Gordon Ramsay’s new restaurant — sometimes rich people eat bad things, too.

Last year, McDonald’s started sponsoring a maths tutoring program, Maths Online, for Australian students. The program charged students $40 a month, but McDonald’s sponsorship means it is now free.

The McDonald’s logo is displayed at the bottom of the front page. It’s not like kids are multiplying cheeseburgers and dividing Happy Meals. But, of course, one prominent public health activist, nutritionist Rosemary Stanton, celebrated by asking: “Are we happy [to] sell our children to McDonald’s?”

The public health establishment likes to see itself as a bunch of impartial medical professionals, but it is a coalition of self-styled consumer advocates, “lifestyle advisers” and politicised academics. They see our health as a standoff between corporate profits and the health profession.

But the reality is more mundane, and more frustrating: not everybody believes that every fatty steak is doing them damage.

Certainly, most Australians value their fitness, weight, and life expectancy. But that is not all they value. Unhealthy food sells not because of insidious corporate messaging, but because people like it. Reducing the capacity of corporations to advertise their products won’t stop people wanting fatty or salty food. Unless you believe our primal taste instincts were invented in a boardroom.

So when public health types reduce complex issues of obesity and unhealthy lifestyles to a diatribe about the power of big business, it’s an emotional argument — not an honest one.

Individuals – and in the case of children, their parents – are the ones who choose what they eat. If public health activists want to influence that, they’ll give up the anti-corporate grandstanding and start treating us as if we make our own decisions.

Follow The Leader

Are you confused by the state of centre-right politics in this country? Probably never more so than this fortnight.
Tony Abbott staked his claim in the climate change debate with a vocal dislike of great big new taxes. But now he’s proposed his own. The opposition can’t coherently claim that an emissions trading scheme is nothing more than a giant burden on business while at the same time imposing a different giant burden on business in the form of a big-business-financed parental leave scheme.
Perplexed? You’re not alone.
In his March Quarterly Essay, “What’s Right? The Future of Conservatism in Australia,” lawyer and academic Waleed Aly distinguishes between liberals, conservatives, neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. For Aly, the latter two aren’t American-style “nuke Iran for freedom” neo-cons but a cross between social conservatives and free marketeers.
Then Aly finds liberal conservatives, cultural fundamentalists and neo-liberal neo-conservatives – which I think are the bad bits of all of the above. Clearly, a broad church is a complicated church.
I guess this bewildering catalogue of ideologies is some progress. For a lot of people, “conservative” seems to be used to describe anyone critical of the Labor Party, with the exception of Bob Brown.
To Aly, all this confusion is because there aren’t any real conservatives left in Australia.
Conservatives value older institutions – such as the family and common law – not because they’re old fuddy-duddies but because those institutions are the end product of centuries of trial and error. Sticking with what we know works is better than following the plan to reorganise society that you sketched on a pub coaster at 3am in the Elephant and Wheelbarrow last night. Even if you’re really smart.
But Aly claims that the conservative temperament of hesitant, evolutionary change has been hijacked by crazy neo-liberals with their crazy free-market ideas.
If only.
The fanatically neo-liberal, deregulation-obsessed Howard government actually passed more pages of law than any previous government. Government is no smaller, no lower taxing, no more conducive to individual liberty than it was a decade ago. On many measures, it’s worse.
There is no party in the Federal Parliament pushing anything near what has come to be called neo-liberalism – the potent combination of social liberalism and economic liberalism. There is no party explicitly arguing that government should stay out of both the boardroom and the bedroom.
Neo-liberals only like the free market because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals – just as other voluntary relationships, such as communities and clubs, do.
But the truth is there’s very little ideology in Australian politics. Australia’s political culture has always been somewhat apprehensive about obviously high-minded philosophies of government.
Australia’s political institutions were formed in the mid-19th century, when utilitarianism was the height of ideological fashion.
Utilitarianism is an intensely practical political philosophy that says the purpose of government should be simply to seek the greatest good for the greatest number. No more, no less.
You might get fancy things such as individual liberty or social equality out of that. But, then again, you might not.
The contrast with the United States couldn’t be stronger. America was founded at the height of the revolutionary period, when kings were killed for fanciful ideals.
Take the American Tea Party movement – a genuine, grassroots manifestation of deeply held political beliefs. Certainly, it’s an uncomfortable coalition between serious right-of-centre activists and crazed conspiracy theorists pretty sure that President Barack Obama is a dastardly Muslim, but could you imagine any remotely similar movement in Australia?
The ideological passion – whether coherent or weird and manic – just isn’t here. Even Australia’s most aggressive public controversies are banally practical.
The boat-people controversy is just a debate about the most efficient way to process asylum seekers, not a debate about immigration or open borders.
Australia joined the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq because it was seen as a nice way to reinforce our bond with the US, not because of a dream for liberty in the Middle East.
The history and culture wars seem deeply ideological, but take this week’s dispute over whether official events should be led by an acknowledgment of traditional Aboriginal owners. It’s hardly a timeless philosophical struggle between value systems – just an inanely repetitive discussion about how “proud” we should be of the founding of the country.
Sure, our lack of ideological fervour sounds like a recipe for harmony. But without any philosophical beliefs about what government should – and, perhaps more importantly, shouldn’t – do, Australian political parties tend to drift aimlessly. Especially in opposition.
Right now it seems the federal opposition has tried to substitute political philosophy with an incoherent populism.
To be fair, this is a problem that some in the Liberal Party seem to be aware of. Late last year, Queensland senator George Brandis made a speech championing the Liberal Party’s small “l” liberal tradition, and shadow treasurer Joe Hockey felt moved this month to title a speech “In defence of liberty”.
The conservatives, too, are trying to stake their claim. Tony Abbott’s book, Battlelines, was supposed to be a definitive statement of conservative philosophy as it can be applied to Australia.
But in Abbott’s tenure as Opposition Leader so far, Coalition policies have swung wildly between extremes. They’re implacably opposed to carbon emissions trading – that would be an odious tax – but keenly supportive of carbon emissions regulation and subsidies, which, they seem to imagine, will be almost cost-free and of no economic consequence.
This policy incoherence isn’t because they are blinded by a firmly held ideology. It’s because they’re blind without one.

Schools Should Be Free To Teach What They Want

Most people seem to have missed the point about the national curriculum.
 
The opposition certainly has. If the national curriculum is as bad as Nationals senator Ron Boswell says – it “reads like a Marxist learner…to prepare our young for the anti-capitalist class struggle” – in a way, that’s the (decidedly not Marxist) Howard government’s fault.
 
Taking control of the curriculum out of the hands of the states and into the loving arms of the federal government didn’t begin when Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election.
 
In a speech in 2006, Julie Bishop, the then education minister, argued Canberra needed to grab the school curriculum “out of the hands of ideologues in the state and territory education bureaucracies and give it to, say, a national board of studies”.
 
But last week, after having seen the national curriculum in its proposed glory, Christopher Pyne, the coalition’s education spokesman, claimed it imposed “a particular black armband view of our history”. Obviously Bishop’s plan didn’t work.
 
There’s a lesson here. Whether we get an Abbott government after this election, a Turnbull government in 2013, or a Joyce-Tuckey government in 2016, that government will need to realise any new powers they grant themselves won’t be theirs forever.
 
Nevertheless, Boswell and Pyne are wrong. The proposed curriculum is hardly the vanguard of the international socialist movement. But it does have its peculiarities.
 
The science curriculum’s insistence that science should be taught as a cultural endeavour – with Asian and Aboriginal perspectives such as the Dreamtime – seems more like cultural studies. Worthy in their own right perhaps, but teaching myths in science class is a bit odd.
 
And its emphasis on “the human responsibility to contribute to sustainability” seems just a touch ideologically loaded.
 
The history curriculum in year 10 investigates “struggles for freedom and rights”, which is great. But it starts its investigation with the United Nations, as if the concept of human rights just popped up in 1945.
 
And perhaps having kids learn about “Sorry Day” is laudable. But it seems a bit much for the apology – which is a distinctly political achievement of the Rudd government – to be given curriculum status so soon.
 
Nevertheless, it’s probably not an awful curriculum. Unfortunately, “not awful” is the best we’re going to get from a curriculum designed to be imposed across the country. It is supposed to equally serve the needs of students attending both Camberwell South Primary School, with 496 relatively well-off students, to Gochin Jiny Jirra School, a remote school in the NT with just 25.
 
The professed reason for the national curriculum is that there are 80,000 students who move interstate each year. But there are 3 million students all up. So the curriculum is being imposed for the convenience of just 2.3 per cent of the student population.
 
Still, if we know anything about our Kevin Rudd, we know he loves to be in charge of stuff. A national curriculum is right up his alley, even without John Howard’s beat-back-the-leftie-historians agenda.
 
The federal government seems to believe a national curriculum will be inherently better than state curriculums. But “national” is not a synonym for “awesome”.
 
If we really wanted a revolution in education, we’d give schools flexibility to tailor the curriculum to the needs and profile of their student body.
 
At the very least, the study of history, which can be subject to many more interpretations than mathematics, could be left to the discretion of schools. After all, most of the bitterness over the history wars was about ideological control over the curriculum.
 
If some parents wanted their children to be taught that capitalism has brought misery and oppression and darkness, they could choose that. If other parents wanted their children to understand how market relationships lead to mutual gain, and free trade alleviates poverty, they could choose that too.
 
Until the government gives control of the curriculum back to schools, parents and students will always be somewhat unsatisfied with what Australian children are taught.