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Author: ozfenric

OzFenric has a background in biological sciences and information management. He has worked as a librarian, a web designer and a social researcher. In his spare time he leads a church choir, performs in amateur musical theatre and writes fiction. He has won peer awards for editing and for writing, but never anything with money attached!

A proxy for the future

November 19, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
15 Replies

Governmental and community denial of the fundamental truths of climate change can’t last forever.

Climate change impacts are going to operate over the long term. That’s why we can’t immediately envisage the danger and it’s why climate change isn’t regarded as being as pressing as balancing the budget or “securing our borders”. It is primarily for this reason that the world has missed opportunity after opportunity to respond appropriately, to the point that it is universally regarded as too late to prevent cascading climate change from occurring. Instead of falling rapidly, worldwide carbon emissions continue to accelerate. This does not mean that we should stop trying to save the environment; the eventual extent of the destruction can yet be ameliorated. But governments and populaces worldwide are deliberately kept in a state of confusion by entrenched interest groups, and confusion allows governments and populations to continue to operate in a state of denial.

At the moment in Australia, denial manifests itself in a “business as usual” approach. The Coalition is busily dismantling anything that conflicts with the idea of status quo – business as usual doesn’t include things like climate commissions, carbon prices or renewable energy research. (For the Coalition, “business as usual” also doesn’t include things like modern broadband, up-to-date healthcare or new ways of doing education either, but that’s another blog post.)

Despite this, there are things that we do now that operate on the same timescale as climate change effects, and these may begin to act as a proxy for the future. Whilst it is possible to take a “business as usual” approach to these things, doing so is neither prudent nor effective for the future.

Case in point: demographic and developmental planning for cities in Australia’s north. Under both Labor and the Coalition, development of the north of Australia is an expectation. Growth in population, increasing urbanisation, technological advance and infrastructure dissemination are a part of governmental planning. But whilst these plans are being laid, cold-eyed scientists are looking at the north of Australia and saying bluntly that, far from developing into a new demographic powerhouse, whole latitudes may need to be abandoned as not suitable for human habitation. The best laid plans of our politicians are likely to be sabotaged by the remorseless, uncaring forces of the unleashed beast of nature. It is only stubborn denial that allows governments to continue to plan future expansions that will simply not be viable.

This kind of planning quandary extends into every aspect of the future. Urban planning in cities needs to take into account projected rises in sea levels. Whilst

Urban planning is but one area where future expectations will need to be revised to cope with the new truths of a +4°C world. Other areas that come to mind include:

The future of mining and resource exploitation;
Food security;
Refugee and migration policy; and
National security.

The latter of these warrants a post of its own. Suffice to say here, that we live in a world where current generations of Australians are not ready for the concept of a war of defense. Since the 1940s, Australia has not been seriously under direct threat of military force, and our involvements have been remote. We send our boys off to war and welcome them home; we lament and mourn (rightfully so) at the loss of individual soldiers. But climate change carries with it the risk – the near certainty – of regional conflict, as whole countries start to starve, due to desertification and loss of arable land. Australia will have cause to be thankful for its remote location and inaccessibility. Our military is likely to be too concerned with domestic issues of food security to be able to worry too much about billions of starving people in India and China.

These areas of concern fall squarely into the remit of our national government, which has shown an unparalleled recalcitrance to accept the truth of global warming. It is unlikely that government policy under the current government will include much consideration of a world shaped by forces that the Coalition denies actually exist.

The best hope for future climate action, discounting the remote possibility of a spectacular implosion of our new government, is a change in public opinion forcing our governing bodies to reconsider their attitude to climate change science. The Coalition government is unlikely to change its mind without being dragged, kicking and screaming, into an unpalatable recognisation of the truth. There is more potential for change at other levels of government. From city planners to urban land management authorities, from companies divesting from coal and backing out of investments such as the Abbot Point port expansion to the application of new mandatory building codes, we need regulations and laws, based on empirical understandings of the future, which will impact on the everyday lives of Australians and people around the world.

If these bodies and organisations allow their agenda to be dictated to them by those with investments in the status quo, then not only will the investments made now be seen as foolhardy at best and downright negligent at worst, but the trajectory for the future will continue to deteriorate.

We can’t afford that. The push for climate action must come from the individual upwards, because it’s clearly not going to be led by the government on high. So, on an individual level, when we look to investments in property, when we consider our shareholdings and our superannuation, there are questions to ask. Have those who seek to sell you a future considered what climate change will mean for the investment they are proposing?

Tony Abbott’s “mandate” about removing the carbon price is not as strong as he wishes it to appear. There is already a large and growing force in the community that is concerned about climate change and willing to agitate for action. We can hope that it will not take a revolution in public attitude to tip the balance. Every individual who is confronted with the reality of climate change and the impact it will have on their own life – and the lives of their loved ones – is an important step closer to the critical mass needed to get Australia on the path of the righteous. So if your job involves you in any form of future planning, or if you are undertaking any investments of your own, make certain that climate change is an important part of your consideration. The outcomes of your planning depend on it. And the future of your planet depends on it.

Winner takes all

November 13, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
18 Replies

With the commencement of the 44th Australian parliament, and the installation of Bronwyn Bishop to the Speaker’s chair, it is appropriate timing to look at the way that democracy in Australia has been subverted over the past two terms of government, how this subversion is likely to continue, and what may be done to address it.

The subversion to which I refer may most readily be summed up as the phenomenon of “mandate”, but in more practical terms is described as the disempowerment of individual politicians, and by extension of the people that they represent.

In 2013, there are two independent members in the House of Representatives. There are one representative each from the Greens, Country Liberal Party, Palmer United Party and Katter’s Australian Party. The rest of the 150 seats in Parliament are occupied either by Labor or the Coalition.

The 2010 Parliament was famously “hung” – Labor had sufficient votes on the floor to support it in forming a government and to guarantee supply, but every piece of legislation needed to be hard-fought and negotiated in order to reach approval. It is a testament to the goodwill of Labor and the negotiating skills of Julia Gillard and her frontbench that the 2010-2013 term of government was one of Australia’s most productive, passing bills at an unprecedented rate of one every two days of being in power, all despite being in a minority government. Every member of that Parliament had a voice that counted. It would take a single member from the Coalition crossing the floor to guarantee success in any piece of legislation; similarly, a single member of Labor voting with the Opposition would be sufficient to scuttle it.

In addition to this, a defining factor of Australian parliamentary democracy was thrown into stark highlight: any party, or even any member, could bring a piece of legislation to the floor with some hope of success.

The party in government during any term enjoys a number of privileges, in terms of resources, support of government departments, and direct hands on the reins. There are any number of areas in which a government has real power, and whereby a member of the government can make real change without immediate opposition. The current government intends to capitalise on these powers to establish its Direct Action environmental plan without needing to bring legislation to the contention of the parliament.

However, the bread and butter of government is legislation – the to-and-fro of debate on the floor, of proposals and amendments and eventual acceptance of new law. It is this law that shapes society and by which governments can seek to implement their vision for the country. There are limitations to the power of politicians without recourse to legislation through the parliament, and for good reason. A hallmark of the 2010-2013 Parliament was that the Coalition had about as much chance of defining legislation and getting it approved as did Labor, the party ostensibly in government. The opposition could have brought its own vision, in the form of legislative proposals, to the floor any time during that term of government.

But they did not.

Unless you count motions to suspend standing orders, as far as I can tell the Coalition brought a grand total of zero proposals to the parliament. If you do count those motions, the total rises to one. Seventy-two times.

This article is not specifically intended to criticise the Coalition, because there is fault on all sides, and it is supported – encouraged – by the design of the system. As long as Australia lives under a two-party political system, then politics will be about politicing, not governing. That said, the current Australian government, the Liberal-National Coalition, has made a virtue of the necessity that the government rules and the opposition is powerless.

The Coalition in 2013 has been accused of purveying a “right to rule” mentality. This is propped up by continual discussion of the “mandate” that Tony Abbott claims to implement his program of legislation. Indirectly, this is in complete agreement to the Coalition’s approach during the last term. Despite having the opportunity to be productive, to work with the government of the day on finding agreement on the big issues and bringing forward, arguing and winning the contest of ideas with proposals of their own, the Coalition approached opposition with the intent of being as obstructive as possible. Instead of acting in a bipartisan manner for the benefit of the people, the Coalition talked everything down, sought to block every proposal, and belittled every intent of the government. They came in like a wrecking ball.

The eye of the Coalition was not on governing during 2010-2013. Their eye was on government for 2013-2016.

Abbott himself said as much. “Oppositions oppose. That’s what they do.” This was the justification given for not coming up with their own policy platform, for not having a suite of nation-building proposals of their own. The argument was bandied about that revealing policies simply gives the government ammunition, allowing them to take your own un-implemented policies and absorb them into their own platform. Indeed, recent history has seen this happen. But 2010-2013 was special. Before the election period, there was plenty of time for the Coalition to place its stamp on the legislative agenda of the country. Arguably, doing so would have given them an electoral fillip as they could argue they were already governing by default. As it happened, this was not necessary – the alternative approach was effective in winning government. But the Coalition had almost an unprecedented opportunity to use the term of government for the Coalition’s vision of the good of the country – if the good of the country had been their primary aim.

So why do political parties want, so strongly, to gain the reins of power? If the Coalition is not driven by the chance to implement a legislative agenda, what is the primary driver? Why buy into the winner-takes-all mentality that says that only Government can propose the agenda? Why deliberately take your own chance at power off the table?

I suspect that a big part of the reason is that it’s so much more personally profitable to be in government.

The disparity between government and opposition in terms of pay and benefits is a strong motivator to do whatever is needed to move from opposition into government. With this motivation in mind, it’s a short step from working for the benefit of the people to working for your own interests. In opposition, the priority is to win at all costs. In government, the main game is to attack the opposition. Maintaining a stranglehold on power is a corrupting influence par excellence and we can see the effects in policies that debase democracy, that result in government by stealth, that reduce the influence of the opposition and minor parties. As an example, destroying unions is not, per se, an attack by the conservatives on the working man; it is a direct assault on the Labor party. While the government should be concentrating on serving the people of the country, it instead focuses on perpetuating its own rule through any means possible.

So what solutions can we propose?

The first and best thing we could do to improve our polity is to establish equality of pay. If it makes no difference to your personal reward whether you are an MP or a shadow MP, then the political contest can be personal and local. Winning your seat becomes the ultimate aim; whether your party wins government or not, the personal rewards for victory in your seat are the same. If this simple change were to be accomplished, every member elected to Parliament could truly have the same power to serve their constituency. A shadow MP might not have the apparatus of a department behind them, but if we were to additionally put the some of the resources of government departments at their disposal, we might be a step closer to a real democracy.

Many have also pointed to the concept of “party politics” being at the root of democracy’s malaise. Perhaps best exemplified by Tony Abbott’s defense of Jaymes “Six point plan” Diaz (incidentally, Google search for ‘six point plan’ – people pay good money to have the top spot-on Google!): “He might not understand the policy, but he will vote for it. He will vote for it.” Party politics mean that individual candidates are not able to faithfully represent their constituents. At best, a vote for a major party is a vote in support of a bunch of policies you agree with, a selection of policies you have no opinion on, and probably at least a few policies you vehemently disagree with. Labor’s policies on refugees arriving by boat would seem a case in point for many people who nevertheless brought themselves to vote Labor in 2013.

The problems with party politics are legion and deserving of a post in themselves. If voting as a bloc was banned, I suspect we would have a political conversation much more nuanced, much more open and potentially much more informative. The opinions of every senator would count – whether they were in government or not, whether they were in opposition or not, even if they were an independent. If every vote on the floor was effectively a conscience vote, we might possibly get closer to an overall representation of the country rather than pandering to the desires of a few swing electorates. It would be important – nay, necessary – for every member, and every senator, to have understanding of what was being proposed in legislation. If we could somehow ensure that votes were not held unless every senator could sign a form saying they understood the legislation to their own satisfaction, it would require proposed legislation to be well examined and well explained.

This is not the world we live in. We live in a black and white world, a two-party world, where the Greens fight to retain a 10% share of the vote and count themselves lucky, where independent members are courted for their vote and loathed and derided in private, and where legislation is decided by leaders and party rooms rather than by the majority rule of the people. We must work within the paradigm of government and opposition. The 2013-2016 term of government will provide less opportunities for the opposition of the day and the independent members to have a constructive voice. But more importantly than opportunity is vision, and so long as Labor operates on the Coalition’s preferred terms – that the government proposes the legislation, and the opposition opposes – and so long as reaching government is required not only to do good, but to personally profit, there can be no drive for change. So it is up to the Australian people to consider how we may resolve these conflicts of interest – because occasionally, eventually, the wishes of the people can have an influence on the policies of our leaders. But this will be a long fight, and possibly futile. The sad facts are that no government is ever likely to vote for an increase in the pay of the opposition.

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Could they?

November 8, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
29 Replies

Next week, the 19th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC and the 9th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol will be held in Warsaw. These sessions are a continuation of the process that included the important and internationally accepted Kyoto Treaty, and are building towards a final meeting with the intention of creating a binding, internationally agreed treaty on climate change mitigation, in 2015.

Not entirely surprisingly, the Abbott Coalition government will not be sending a Minister nor a senior representative. This omission is regarded as “highly unusual“, but from a government openly skeptical of the human impact on climate change (or the very existence of it) and hostile to most accepted forms of responding to it, it can perhaps be understood. It is disturbingly ironic that the Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, will instead be in Parliament trying to dismantle Australia’s world-leading attempt at carbon abatement through an emissions trading scheme whilst his international counterparts will be at a global conference discussing ways to implement exactly this kind of scheme.

More disturbingly, the government has cancelled consultations which were already planned with domestic business representatives and foreign diplomats to brief them on Australia’s stance at the talks. These consultations are traditionally held in advance of this annual meeting and some have suggested that their cancellation indicates rifts and disagreements within the Abbott government about the appropriate approach. But a more sinister possibility exists.

It is certainly possible that the meetings were cancelled because Australia effectively has no stance on the climate talks to offer; that the Cabinet is not united, the Abbott government has not had sufficient time to formulate an approach, and to engage in these consultations would reveal the extent of the disagreements. It’s also possible that the Abbott government thinks that climate change discussions are such a waste of time that the cancellation of these meetings is a cost-saving measure. But these are not the only possible explanations.

Whichever way the talks go, and whatever you think of anthropogenic climate change, Australia stands to lose, and lose big.

If climate change is real and goes unmitigated, we’re amongst the biggest losers in terms of environmental impact, with effects on health, productivity, real estate and loss of food security.
If climate change is not real but enforceable limits come into place, Australia’s biggest competitive advantage in the world – and pretty much the only one that matters under a Coalition government – is badly devalued. It’s known as a carbon bubble and the effects on Australia would be severe. If Australia can find no buyers for her coal, oil and gas, or the terms of trade for these resources decline, then Australia’s GDP goes through the floor. Cue huge unemployment, recession, social unrest – and if Australia failed to succeed in heroic efforts to retool for a new economy, failed state status would not be out of the question.

There are thus three major policy positions available.

If you don’t believe in climate change, the only position with integrity is to frustrate the creation of any kind of global, binding emissions standards. The imposition of these standards would needlessly and critically damage the Australian economy, and the Coalition is tying Australia ever more closely to the success of its carboniferous export markets.
If you are agnostic on climate change, the pragmatic position, of greatest benefit to a political party right now, is to frustrate global standards. In this way you can defer the negative impacts of binding emissions standards and the end of the carbon bubble, at least for a while. Hopefully, at least while you remain in power.
If you are a believer in climate change, the only position with integrity is to support and promote global standards, which will have significant economic consequences for Australia. The resultant devaluing of the big mining companies will mean foregoing a huge volume of tax and royalty revenue. It will require a significant effort at retooling the economy to support renewable energy, with increased research and development, funds being given to climate projects, and governmental support and backing for mechanisms to reduce carbon outputs without crippling the economy. In other words, much of the infrastructure that makes up Labor’s ETS legislation, that Greg Hunt will be trying to dismantle starting next week.

The Coalition has an overall tendency towards climate change denial, and an overwhelming amount of political pragmatism. Could they be planning to vote no; to do everything possible to sabotage international agreement on the topic of standards?

It can only be to the Coalition’s benefit to frustrate global agreement on carbon standards. Successful adoption of binding standards has the following effects:

The Coalition’s stance appears increasingly out of step with the rest of the world;
Other countries divest from oil, coal & gas, with the aforementioned economic impacts on Australia;
Other countries benefit from their own huge investments in solar/renewables, that the Coalition has turned its back on or repealed; and
The importance of the global emissions trading market burgeons, just as the Coalition may well be successful (particularly after July 2014) in deconstructing Australia’s own stake in the game.

On the other hand, continued global disagreement has the following outcomes of benefit to the Coalition:

Support is provided to the standard political excuses: “The science isn’t settled”, “The argument’s not over”, and “We’re awaiting consensus.”
A temporary delay may be achieved in the collapse of the fossil fuel market. This provides the government of the day more time to dig up and sell the fossil fuel resources Australia is so rich in, while we still can.

If the Coalition truly disbelieves in climate change, or man’s contribution to it, then if it is to be true to itself, it will mandate policies that frustrate the efforts of meetings such as Warsaw, November 2013. In so doing, it is going to be actively destroying the future of the planet; furthermore, it is currently lying to the Australian people whenever it talks about Direct Action and carbon emissions targets it doesn’t see as relevant. To readers of this blog, this is no revelation at all.

If the Coalition isn’t sure about climate change and is simply being pragmatic, in addition to destroying the future, they are more culpable: they are deliberately risking the future for the sake of their own political present.

And if, contrary to many peoples’ beliefs, the Coalition actually believes in climate change, but still acts to frustrate consensus for its own political gain, knowing the effects it will have on generations yet to come, then that would be the most evil of all.

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Talkin’ bout a revolution

November 2, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
28 Replies

Russell Brand – sometimes comedian, sometimes Christian, always a showman – is calling for a revolution. Russell’s Revolution is not about guns and bombs, it’s not about the people rising up to throw off the shackles of an oppressive government. Russell’s Revolution comes in the form of a willing disengagement from the political process, most clearly displayed in a refusal to vote. (Presumably in a country like Australia, with mandatory voting, he would be willing to settle for donkey voting.) Working in a variety of media, including an editorial in New Statesman magazine and a widely viewed interview with Jeremy Paxton on BBC’s Newsnight, Brand has pitched his message to the young and the disenfranchised. In doing so, he has hit a nerve. There are any number of copies of the video available on the web; the one I linked to has almost 9 million views in a little more than a week. Brand’s polemic has spawned a popular Facebook page, innumerable news and opinion articles, and a new kind of global conversation about politics. We should be so lucky.

As always several days late, Fairfax news has published an “article” about the phenomenon. The article serves as an introduction for those in the wider world – probably not the young and the disenfranchised – who may not have come across this particular strident voice for reform. The kind of people this article is presumably aimed at are the ones who might have little respect for anything which challenges the status quo. The article reads as a quizzical realisation, written on behalf of forty-year olds everywhere, that “People are listening to this guy, and we have no idea why.”

Well, I am forty and I feel, as this is the Independent Media Network, that I can give at least as considered an opinion.

Russell Brand’s basic contention is laid out in the first few paragraphs of his editorial.

Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites… I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance.

The editorial is well worth reading. It’s amusing and insightful, and it’s attacking the wrong target.

In his Newsnight interview, Jeremy Paxman asked: “You want a revolution to overthrow elected governments, but what sort of government would you replace it with?”

Brand’s answer is illuminating. “I don’t know,” he replied. “But I’ll tell you what it shouldn’t do. It shouldn’t destroy the planet, it shouldn’t create massive political disparity, it shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people.”

The problem is that what Brand is actually complaining about is not democracy. He is, instead, complaining about capitalism, and in this he is not the first.

Like socialism, democracy as a concept is good, it’s effective, it’s egalitarian and it works. It provides all citizens with a voice in how they should be governed. It is inherently equalising; whilst minorities of sexual preference or colour or social class may find their specific desires thwarted by the views of the majority, equally the rich, the powerful and the venal should find themselves constrained. Democracy gives us a chance as a society to force those at the top of the tree to support those at the bottom (force, because it is unlikely that this will happen without enforcement). Democracy is a good system of government. As Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

In practice, democracy is poisoned by capitalism.

Like the USSR’s dalliance with communism, like (dare I say it) China’s current dalliance with communism, any system of rule is open to abuse and corruption. The motivations behind corruption may be simple power – people gravitate to the corridors of power for all sorts of reasons, and the lust for control over your fellow man is a common and powerful driver. Or they may be for personal gratification and gain. In western democracies, the lure of profit that can spring from being in a position to influence the laws can turn many an honest politician into a bottom-feeding snouter.

It is an arguable contention, but supportable, that in our modern western democracies, rich interests have too much of a say; that the power of the rich can secure access to soapboxes and propaganda by which the opinions of the elite can influence the opinions of the poor; and that challenging the rich, the big corporations, is done at a politician’s peril.

When Russell Brand talks of our systems of government ‘destroying the planet’, provoking ‘political disparity’ or ‘ignoring the needs of the people’, these are behaviours driven by the interests of the rich and powerful. Against these forces stand integrity and idealism, and these are qualities eminently frangible. It is not fair to say that all parties in our political system are equally complicit in the continued subjugation of the downtrodden; the right and the left have very different approaches to the problem of power. (Where each party falls on the left-right spectrum I leave to the comments.) Both sides of politics, beholden to the votes of the people every three or four years, argue that they have the best interests of the whole at heart. The traditional preserve of the left is to talk about services, supported by the idea of taxing the rich in order to support the poor. The right relies heavily on the idea that when you allow the powerful to benefit, all boats will rise.

“Trickle-down economics” – the idea that improving the lot of the rich will result in an improvement for everyone – is an argument employed by the rich. It has little basis in fact. But it is so often the primary argument the electorate hears that enough will be convinced to give the conservatives another go at the reins.

Regardless of which side of politics you favour, however, all can see that our politics is broken. The argument is about degree. Whether you’re talking about the tendency of the right to remove any constraints that prevent the rich from subduing the serfs, or you’re bemoaning the latest revelations of cronyism within the left, modern politics is driven by the capitalistic system. Corruption, infighting, backstabbing, pandering and political inconsistency – these are driven not by public good, but by pecuniary self-interest. The corruption of politicians will occur as long as capitalism drives people to greater wealth, as long as it encourages people with wealth to even greater excesses, and as long as there’s a buck to be made.

By conflating democracy – a force for great good, rule by the people for the people – with capitalism – the benefit of the few at the expense of the many – Brand spoils the reputation of the one and gives the other a free pass. He is turning people off the one part of our current society that might possibly have a chance of addressing the very disparity he rails against.

In calling for a revolution, Brand has no alternatives to offer. “I don’t know,” he says, when asked what he would replace it with. As history has shown, time and again, overthrowing a system of power without having clear ideas of what should replace it leads to bad outcomes. Ambitious, grasping people will always seek to fill the holes; nature abhors a vacuum. If you replace your democracy, what you get will perforce be a government by the few at the expense of the many. In the current world where capitalism has so much sway, the likelihood of this coming to a good outcome is pretty much nil.

The need for some kind of revolution is evident, but it’s a revolution against capitalism and consumerism, rather than against democracy. Do I have an answer, an idea for a replacement? I do not. Democracy in my opinion is still the best form of government. Does this mean an overthrow of the capitalist system is required? Possibly, possibly not. Capitalism has some benefits that should not easily be dismissed; it is in untrammelled capitalism that we find the problems.

What we ideally want is a democracy that is free of the pernicious influence of capitalism. We live in a world which is not ideal, where power provides benefit to those who hold it, and it is unlikely we’ll see this kind of reform without a significant upset. I don’t know what kind of upset could bring about this change – it’s probably not going to be Russell Brand’s army of the disengaged. One thing I do know, however, is that Russell Brand does not have the answers. Do I have an answer? No. But until I do, I won’t go calling for any revolutions.

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It’s the environment, stupid

October 15, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
25 Replies

In the aftermath of the 2013 Australian election, I spoke to a variety of my friends and colleagues about the core issues that motivated my voting intention. Chief amongst these was the issue of climate change, and the various parties’ approach to Labor’s ETS or another alternative. I voted below the line and took into account several important areas of policy, to the extent it was known, but the primary consideration for me was climate change.

In many cases during my discussions, I was disheartened to hear that climate change just wasn’t top of mind for these people I valued. For them, other issues took priority: Australia’s budget, its productivity, its two-tiered economy. There were others for whom provision of healthcare, education, housing and social benefits were of higher import. And there were some for whom the key issue was the two parties’ policies on refugees and boat arrivals.

What people perhaps fail to fully understand is that climate change will fundamentally alter every aspect of life and governance in this country and around the world. It is already having adverse effects on health, on productivity, on national economies and on food production. And all the scientists tell us that we are on the cusp of a downward slope, that things will get far worse from here.

Already we can see some of the effects of climate change on the front pages of our daily news. In early 2013, a report was published indicating that the 2012-2013 Sydney summer was the hottest on record. That was before the current summer of bushfires began. When every summer becomes the “hottest ever”, we have to start wondering about where the trend will lead. 2013 has seen climatic extremes across the globe: from floods to blizzards, from droughts to heat waves, from tornadoes to wildfires, all of the linked events are record breaking or without precedent. But climate disasters, even when they directly affect people, are remote in comparison to daily pressures of life. They’re too big to easily comprehend as an immediate and pressing concern.

What seems needed is a connection between the oncoming threat of climate change and the pressing policy areas that do concern people. When the protest is made that money spent on carbon abatement could be better spent on hospitals, real information on the healthcare impacts of climate change is needed. When western Sydney voters are concerned about the tide of boat-borne refugees, a cold-eyed view of the millions of people who will be displaced from our asian neighbours (due more to loss of habitable land and food yields than to rising sea levels, although both are important) might help put the numbers in perspective.

There is one specific objection to prioritising climate change mitigation efforts and carbon abatement policy, and it’s a doozy. Under both Labor and the incoming Coalition government, Australia’s prosperity relies upon a continued efficiency in extracting mineral and fossil fuel wealth from our abundant reserves and selling them overseas. Under the newly elected Coalition, it is likely that this reliance on resource mining will increase, rather than decrease, as the government dismantles Labor’s perfunctory efforts at wealth transfer from the resources sector to high-tech industries and manufacturing. The Coalition’s rabid determination to vilify and destroy the “carbon tax” (more accurately described as an emissions trading scheme) is underpinned by this unspoken need to prop up Australia’s cash cow. Nothing can be allowed to interrupt the gravy train of that lovely, lovely brown coal. If they were to give an inch, to allow the ETS to continue, it wouldn’t be long until greenies were making cogent arguments about Australia’s net carbon export via its sale of coal to China and India. Failing a rational answer to such arguments, and unwilling to be the government under which Australia’s GNP collapsed, the best solution for the Coalition is to keep the fight focused on domestic use of energy.

On the wrong side of history

But the Coalition, as well as Labor and the whole of the nation, are caught up in the march of history. Cutting back on climate change priorities is a false economy. It will hurt us in the long run – not just environmentally, but financially.

Wind-generated power is currently cheaper than coal, and solar is not far behind. A little extra investment and solar power could take care of all Australia’s energy needs. Australia has, or had, some world-leading researchers and companies in the field of renewable energy, and it has wide-open spaces with very few people and plenty of sun and wind. Australia is a prime potential for development of economically viable renewable energy, removing our own need for fossil fuels, but also giving us high-tech energy generation to sell to other countries. Doing so would be costly. But the cost would be borne almost entirely by those energy companies already heavily invested in fossil fuels. Make no mistake: the average Australian would not suffer greatly from an immediate moratorium on coal mining. It is big companies, who hold long-term leases on prime coal-bearing land and whose net company worth is supported almost entirely on the coal still in the ground, which would be most affected. See Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math – I’ve linked to this article before but it deserves it.

Just because Australia has access to all this lovely, lovely coal doesn’t mean the rest of the world is standing still. As other nations implement carbon trading schemes, as new energy generation methods become available and economical, and as shale gas and other fossil fuels become increasingly exploited, the demand for coal and oil will decrease. Australia faces a growing risk of becoming the kid in the corner hawking his trading cards when the rest of the school has moved on to He-Man figures.

The long-term argument against coal goes along the following lines: the rapid emergence of shale gas, falling renewable energy costs, air pollution regulations, governance issues, action on climate change, changing social norms and worsening water constraints are putting pressure on coal’s competitiveness. – King Coal running out of luck

This may be partly why the Coalition is desperate to clear regulatory blockages to large-scale shale gas (fracking) projects in this country. The writing is on the wall for coal, and Australia will quickly lose its competitive advantage. Then we really will be the poor white trash of Asia.

What would it take?

For every objection to the prioritisation of climate policy (beyond the frankly unworthy “it’s not happening, not listening, nyah nyah nyah”), it is possible to make a case that climate change will have a dramatic deleterious impact.

Regardless, there remain those for whom climate change is not an immediate priority. The question must be asked, what would make it an immediate priority? Will it require the displacement of millions and a logarithmic increase in climate refugees reaching Australia? At what point does the loss of much of Australia’s food production capacity trigger our concern? We’re already facing annual floods/fires/heatwaves/climate events – how far does it have to go before we see the signs? Will the recognition of a “new normal” of climate events and weather spur us to action, or will it simply move us past action to despair? When the tides are swamping our cities and sucking at our toes, will we perhaps think that climate change may be worth our investment?

By the time these things come about, it will be far too late to change them. It may already be too late. Immediate, desperate, strong action may yet provide us a chance to partially mitigate the damage. But we need to make climate change a priority.

Unfortunately those who don’t want to spend money and opportunity now to combat a remote threat from the future are the same kinds of people who don’t want to invest now to build capacity for the future. They’re the economic rationalists, and they’re in charge of the funhouse.

Co-published on Random Pariah

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Love the one you’re with

October 13, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
14 Replies

Tony Abbott is your friend.

In fact, he’s everyone’s friend. He’s so inoffensive to anyone that why there should be resistance to his ~~nefarious~~ schemes is inexplicable. Tony Abbott, and his Coalition, are unfeasibly flexible; whoever you might be, whatever interest group you represent, the Coalition is on your side. One day Abbott will be patting you on the back and swearing his undying support for your cause; the next day he’s in the enemy’s camp and promising your head. Tony Abbott is the friend who will promise you undying support, so long as it will not require him to take action against the other group to whom he has already pledged his undying support.

This article was originally going to be about the shape of Tony Abbott’s first week in government, if he’d really been held to all the promises he had made. The first week would have been spent in the north of Australia, but it’s doubtful whether Abbott would have had the time to focus on indigenous issues considering the hectic schedule of legislation he had promised. Carefully-worded non-promises aside, however, many of the concrete legislative promises which the Coalition offered have been met on schedule – at least to the point of beginning investigations and committees, if not the actual drawing of legislation. Blandishments in the current world of politics need to be made very carefully. Tony Abbott himself raised the petard of “liar”, of an inflexible requirement to deliver exactly what you promised during a campaign. Leading politicians are now very aware of this pitfall and make certain to couch their statements and their support in terms that are vague enough or specific enough in their limitations that you can get away with less than people thought you had promised.

So the article went on hold. Then the Prime Minister’s hectic round of international travel and meetings began and gave another angle to examine. The thing in common between the promises made, over many weeks to many audiences, about initial actions and legislation, and the approach to international leaders, has been one of inconstancy. Or more precisely, being a “man for all seasons” – constantly nodding agreeably to whomever he is addressing.

It’s partly an outcome of the small target approach the Coalition took to the election campaign, and in the heat of an electoral campaign a bit of “policy flexibility” may be excused. It’s not as if the Coalition is unique in this regard; Kevin Rudd took the art form to new heights himself, earning himself the moniker Chameleon Rudd.

However, once in government, and temporarily freed of the pressures of a looming election, a politician is lumbered with certain inconvenient hindrances that don’t harness him/her in opposition; hindrances like actual power, and actual interactions with people outside of the need to get them to vote for you. In this circumstance, it becomes necessary to have the courage of your convictions; in Tony Abbott’s parlance, to “say what you mean and do what you say”. It is disheartening to see that the Coalition, one month into government, appears to be maintaining its approach refined so successfully during its time in opposition. In any number of ways Tony Abbott’s Coalition is still an Opposition, still seeking to demonise the failures of the other side whilst minimising scrutiny of their own intentions and actions. And they are still telling people what they want to hear, assuming they tell them anything at all.

It may be instructive to examine a few of the many faces of Tony Abbott and the Coalition.

On Diplomacy

Kaye Lee helpfully summarised the following in the comments on “Transforming Tony Abbott” a recent AIMN post.

Japan is Australia’s closest friend in the region. However, we are also BFF with Indonesia, “in many respects our most important overall relationship”. Except, of course, for Papua New Guinea, because there is no more important relationship for Australia. One wonders how many respects are left to qualify Tony Abbott’s statement that “New Zealand is in many respects Australia’s closest relationship.” One can only hope that if they’re ever in a room together, those four countries can work out where their relative standings with Australia sit, because I certainly can’t.

On Foreign investment

Australia’s sovereignty and ability to feed itself is at risk. So obviously the laws surrounding foreign investment need to be tightened up. Except that we also need to inject “…momentum into deals with China, Japan and South Korea as a matter of urgency” and lure foreign investment back. It helps that the Coalition has under its roof representatives who passionately believe in foreign investment, and those who obstinately oppose it, so it’s possible to send the right person to the right forum to ensure the right message is given. So long as they don’t go telling their position to the media, which gets read by interests of both persuasions.

On climate change

Tony Abbott’s varied positions on climate change are well documented. Commencing with his famous 2009 statement that the science around “climate change is crap” – itself a 180 turnaround from his previous position – he has been variously a supporter of a carbon tax, a trenchant opponent to any kind of market mechanism, a reluctant convert to the anthropogenic origin of global warming, and most recently both an advocate of the Direct Action plan’s ability to meet targets, and an apologist in advance of when it doesn’t. About the only position he’s not recorded to have held is support for a market-based price on carbon, which economists and ecologists alike think has the greatest bang for buck in carbon abatement. Of course, his actions upon reaching government hark back to his original poor view of climate science, indicating that if he’s unable to change his opinion in an area where the science is becoming ever more irrefutable and the consequences ever more dire, he is unlikely to change his original beliefs in many other areas either.

See http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/03/09/climate-change-cage-match-abbott-debates-abbott/, wherein Tony Abbott debates Tony Abbott on climate change science.

On industrial relations

It’s commonly accepted wisdom that Workchoices was the Coalition’s downfall in 2007. Tony Abbott was regarded then as a moderate, which may be part of the reason that Labor’s personal attacks on the man and fear campaign regarding the resurrection of Workchoices policy was not as effective as hoped. In this policy area, the Coalition is spoilt for choice when it comes to the messages they deliver the electorate. Do they roll out Tony Abbott, the “best friend of workers“? Or if the audience is made up of big business and industrial heavyweights, would it be more appropriate to send in workplace relations spokesman Eric Abetz?

It’s true that the Coalition’s IR policy – this term – is cautious, to the point that some business leaders and ex-politicians have called it “timid”. The sense is that this is an area where the electorate is still tender after being bitten by the Coalition’s previous attempt. There are exceptions, though, largely because the Coalition wants to be able to give big business good news. Thus we see the push to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission, a body whose primary achievement was to decrease workplace safety and lead directly to a spike in workplace accidents and deaths. And we see the vilification of unions.

Unions are one group to whom the Coalition does not seek to speak softly. This is why the Coalition’s rhetoric has been about “union thuggery” and “union corruption”; the intent is to drive a wedge between workers and their historic support groups. Unions provide monetary and other support to Labor and it is for this reason that they must be curtailed, but you can’t directly attack the union movement without first discrediting it.

The weakness of Teflon Tony

The examples above are prominent policy areas, but the technique of saying to each audience the thing most closely calculated to their own hearts is one that sees use in a multitude of areas. Whether he’s telling farmers that they should have the right to refuse entry of mining leases to their farms, or supporting the ability of mining companies to enter private property at will; whether he’s promising that a paid maternity scheme will be “over my dead body”, or proposing his own scheme an order of magnitude bigger than the one that Labor had just rolled out to acclaim, Tony Abbott and his Coalition will say anything to anyone. Words are cheap and promises are meaningless.

In late 2012, in the throes of the US election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney self-destructed because of this exact kind of policy vagueness. In the case of Romney, the Democrats and at least some parts of the media were willing to draw attention to his various contradictory promises and policy positions. The message to Australians is that it is possible to overcome a hostile media (in the US, Fox News is almost as overbearing as the various Murdoch enterprises down under) – so long as there is a will to expose inconstancy for what it is. It’s too late for 2013, but if the Coalition will maintain its T-1000 approach to communications, it will soon enough be time to highlight that for every favourable position the Coalition has held, it has also held the alternative position, and the only real way to tell the intentions of the party in the future is to examine them in the recent past.

We all know to judge a man by what he does, not by what he says. This is doubly true of the Coalition. During the next term of government, and leading into the next election in three years – if not before – the left, and the media, need to focus not on the Coalition’s statements, but on the range of opinions they have held as a backdrop to their statements; and not what the Coalition says and promises, but on what it has done.

If you believe in a fairer, more considerate Australia, a more progressive Australia, a clever country that designs and builds things and innovates new technology rather than relying on the non-renewable resources with which this country has gifted us, then Tony Abbott is not your friend. Whatever he might say to your face.

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Opiate of the masses

September 22, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
32 Replies

There has been a lot of angst in left-wing circles since the election of Tony Abbott and his Coalition into government. Blogs, Twitter and Facebook are all agog with posts indicating that Tony Abbott is going to be a wrecking-ball for a wide range of policies, organisations and social expectations. Under the Coalition, employee power will be smashed, unions will be outlawed, annual leave will be abolished, people on incomes under 100K will lose the right to vote, laws will be passed requiring coal-fired power stations to burn brown coal exclusively even when the power’s not needed, just in case, and small animals will be tortured in an attempt to prove that cigarettes cure cancer.

It’s not unreasonable for the left to have some fears about the approach Tony Abbott will take to government now he’s attained it. After all, the Coalition has some hard-nut right wing extremists in its fold, some even in Cabinet. Tony Abbott has been described by Kevin Rudd as “one of the most extreme right-wing conservative leaders or politicians that the Liberal party has thrown up”. The Coalition is on public record as supporting most of the ideology and specific policy suggestions of right-wing think-tank the IPA. And Tony Abbott and his Coalition have single-mindedly pursued one of the most negative agendas in history over the past term of government. So there’s reason to expect that he is now going to go early, go hard, and get many of his less popular initiatives under way while the next election is still far off.

Here’s why I think he won’t be doing that.

The first few actions of the incoming Coalition government – some of them even before swearing-in – have been viewed as the thin edge of a vindictive wedge; the first steps in the wholesale destruction of all we hold dear. But they can be viewed from a different angle, which is perfectly consistent with Tony Abbott’s approach to Opposition, to the election campaign, and now to government.

For this Coalition government, it’s all about perception. Policy and outcomes are secondary. This government knows as well as we do that the fundamentals of our economy are relatively good, in global terms. It knows that its hyperbole about a budget emergency was a politically expedient concept that now needs to be locked away. You won’t hear the Coalition talking about a budget emergency from now on, that concept has had its desired effect, and dwelling on it will raise questions about why the Coalition is not making more significant changes to the budget outlook. The Coalition knows that the NBN is not a huge issue for Australian debt, and that their alternative is inferior, and that the public actually likes the idea of fast broadband delivered to their door, so you can expect obfuscation, reviews, examinations and not a lot of actual change. The rollout will continue apace, and when it’s good and ready the Coalition just might think about a judicious adjustment to bring in some elements of its own model, just so it can say that it’s done something at the next election. The Coalition knows that the Direct Action plan is not going to work, and that the ETS has been working and has not been a “wrecking ball through the Australian economy”; it also doesn’t believe that Australia can have any impact upon global climate change even if it is real. So you can expect the repeal of the carbon tax, as one of the big ticket items on which it swears it got elected, but not a lot of Action from the Direct plan.

The most important priority for this government is not doing things. The vast majority of its election promises are to undo things, after which we’ll be back in a nice pre-Labor state of comfortable hiatus. The Coalition does not expect to make Australia better by making changes. It expects to make Australia better by letting people calm down. As Abbott has said:

“…happy the country which is more interested in sport than in politics because it shows that there is a fundamental unity, it shows that the business of the nation is normally under reasonably good management…”. (Interview with David Koch and Samantha Armytage, Sunrise).

Tony Abbott, the ex-journalist, wants to control the conversation again. For the last three years, the failings, alleged failings, ructions and supposed dishonesty of Labor have been the story. Aided and abetted by a hostile media, the Opposition has made politics continual front-page material, and has deliberately fostered interest and concern in all manner of things. Asylum seeker dog-whistling, budget emergencies, NBN appalling waste, class warfare – none of these things had very much reality to them, and all of these things were blown enormously out of proportion by the outrage of the Opposition and the media’s eternal search for the Story-of-the-Day. The net effect is a populace energised, outraged, horrified, and politically engaged – exactly what an Opposition wants, going in to an election.

The Coalition knew that elections are lost, not won. Particularly in 2013, where the one actual policy on offer from the Coalition (Tony Abbott’s PPL) was roundly debated and opposed even by some within his own party, the Coalition did not win the election on promises to build things. It won the election on its promises to undo the things that Labor had already done. Labor lost the election over the past six years, with a particular emphasis on leadership issues – issues which have no actual bearing on the governing of a country, but which added to the Coalition’s continuing barrage of concern.

Tony Abbott does not intend to lose the next election.

In order to make sure that he does not, the priority is to calm the conversation down. To take things in a “methodical, measured, calm” way. To use rhetoric that includes the words “adult”, “sober”, “calm” and “deliberate” to shape the political conversation, rather than “disaster”, “emergency”, “appalling”. To some extent, this is the transition faced by every incoming government; opposition almost demands the use of hyperbole, and government requires a more defensive approach. But with the Coalition in 2013, what may have been a necessity of politics has become a deliberate strategy.

Calming things down means keeping politics out of the media. Thus, fewer press conferences, no pandering to the 24-hour news cycle, a slower pace (compared to Kevin Rudd, this is almost a given). It means adopting a culturally neutral middle ground – one where the older white men are in charge, where success is measured in a well-turned wife and obedient children, and where men are men, women are women, and small furry animals are kept in the back yard.

Calming things down also means controlling the news. Thus the first actions of the incoming government are not actually about reducing costs or winding back bodies based on the ‘fiction’ of climate change, but rather about controlling who says (and knows) what. The new approach to boat arrivals – in that the Coalition will now give the media a weekly digest, rather than notifications upon arrival – ensures that the story of boat people will wither. The daily news cycle won’t be fed with regular news of boats, and the issue will fade off the front pages. The abolition of the Climate Commission gets rid of the body charged with providing “an independent and reliable source of information about the science of climate change, the international action being taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the economics of a carbon price” to the Australian people. It saves a pittance – the budget for the Commission was $5 million over five years. More importantly, it deprives Professor Flannery of a source of authority, it deprives the environmental movement of a source of authority, and it deprives the Australian people of a source of information. By itself, it won’t remove climate change from the front pages of the news. But the wholesale dismantling of government climate bodies will have that effect.

Tony Abbott wants you compliant, and comfortable, and happy, and smothered in marshmallow. The last thing he wants is to go making big changes that will upset people. He wants Australia to get used to the dichotomy: under Labor, you get an endless barrage of waste and fear and concern; under the Coalition you get a country that just gets on with it and lets you focus on your own life. So there will be no changes to the GST. There will be no remorseless cuts into health and education. There will be no overt attack on worker’s rights. In three years’ time, when the next election comes around, the only things the left will be able to criticise in the Coalition’s term of government will be that they dismantled the things they said they would dismantle, the things that Labor built.

Once again, the media will be an enormous assistance to the Coalition. Endless, deafening silence will help Abbott smooth the ruffled waters of Australia’s concerns. An appearance of calm and control will likely lead to actual calm, to an improved consumer and business confidence, and to better economic outcomes. The Coalition will be aided in this by circumstance. Just as Labor came to power in 2007 on the cusp of a real budget emergency – the Global Financial Crisis – the Coalition is coming to power just as Australia is showing signs of growing into a new prosperity.

Calm… or panic?

So what is the way forward from here for left-leaning progressives? The Coalition has attained government, and their ideal is to retain power for several terms at least – to be a long term government. They will attempt to do this, I believe, by not rocking the boat; by adopting and retaining many of the structural reforms that Labor put in place; by maintaining some distance from the news cycle and lulling the populace into a drowsy state of contentment. It now falls on Labor to prevent the Coalition succeeding in this. There are a couple of possible approaches that could be taken.

Labor can choose to adopt the same tactics that Tony Abbott pioneered with such success. Endless negativity, endless opposition, endless noise and fury, intended to blow up every little foible and failure of the new government into a thousand thorns of discontent. The strategy is to make sure the Coalition can’t get any clear air. After all, it worked for Tony Abbott between 2010 and 2013. Unfortunately, Labor is at a disadvantage in this battle. The mainstream media is dominated by opinions and owners hostile to Labor’s approach, and success at the Abbott model of opposition requires the involvement of the media. The media is hungry enough for stories that it might nonetheless be a viable strategy, but in a hostile environment it may prove an uphill battle.

Alternatively, Labor could attempt to rise above the example that Tony Abbott set. It could maintain a stately disdain, reserving its ire for any overt missteps or vandalism or ideologically-driven extremes emanating from the Coalition, but generally supporting or ignoring the Coalition for much of its term. Further, it could concentrate on building a new vision for the future, a policy platform that by its successes demonstrates the failures of the Coalition’s status-quo approach. The problem with this method is that it relies on missteps by the Opposition, and Tony Abbott has been astoundingly successful to date with keeping his party in line. There are many on the Coalition benches who would go too far given an opportunity, but with a deliberate don’t-offend political strategy at the helm, they may never get that opportunity. And it is astonishingly hard to win government on the basis of what you intend to do. In addition, three years of stately silence is not likely to be sufficient to prevent Tony Abbott pointing back to the hot air of 2010-2013 and blaming it all on Labor. Thus the Coalition would be bound to achieve another term or two, and this would simply reinforce the impression that ‘everything’s running smoothly, unlike under the previous mob’.

It may sound like heresy to some on this site, but the question must be asked: is it really so bad for us to have a Coalition government at the helm when they’re so intent on not offending anyone?

The answer to this depends on your expectations for a long-term future under the Coalition. To date, Tony Abbott’s opposition and government has shown no practical answer to the two-speed economy – indeed, Coalition policies will undo what little progress Labor has made in refocusing Australia’s approach to this problem. The Coalition is certainly no more supportive of education, of R&D, and of high-technology industries than were Labor. Clever country, we are not. The Coalition’s approach to climate change and mitigation of carbon emissions is well understood, and will withdraw Australia from even what little it has the ability and commitment to do in this field. And by promising to slow or halt the rollout of the NBN, if the Coalition actually intends to follow through on this promise, it is engaging in a deliberate sabotage of one of the most critical pieces of national infrastructure in history. All of these things give me no confidence that Australia’s future beyond the immediate three-year electoral cycle is at all promising.

Are we locked in to this cycle? Does life, the economy, industry and Australia’s status have to slowly stagnate under the Coalition until another inspirational Labor leader comes along with grand visions of what we might have if only? Or is there a third way?

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What do we do now?

September 14, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
96 Replies

So it’s over; the Coalition has triumphed in the contest of ideas and will (eventually, one hopes) form a government.

Tony Abbott has been described as the most effective opposition leader in a generation. This may or may not be accurate, but it cannot be argued that he has achieved his goals with a combination of balls-to-the-wall confrontation and maintaining a small target on his weakest points. The question now becomes what kind of a Prime Minister he will make, and what his collection of Howard-era ministers will do now they’ve reached power in the 21st century.

The first thing we need to understand is that what the Coalition government will do, now it’s in power, is not what they said they would do while they were in opposition.

To some in the electorate, this may come as a surprise. They may actually think the Coalition fully intends to do the things they talked about during the campaign. But things promised during the campaign were not real; they were props, to support Tony Abbott’s approach to the job of opposition. They continued on from the years preceding the election, from the very moment of Abbott’s elevation to the position of Leader of the Opposition.

“The job of an opposition is to oppose”, and that’s what the Coalition did – regardless of whether they agreed with the policies on offer or not.

Prior to Tony Abbott, worthy policies had a chance of bipartisan support. Abbott himself in years gone by argued for the imposition of a carbon tax; Malcolm Turnbull was ready to sign on to support Labor’s policy in this area.

It was on this very matter that Abbott was able to replace Turnbull as the leader, and he never looked back. Even in those areas where there is “bipartisan support”, it is conditional; according to Tony Abbott, the Coalition wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t find aspects to criticise in even the best policy.

The Coalition’s stated intention since 2010 has been to oppose the government on any and all fronts. Opposing requires you to have an alternative solution to point to. It doesn’t have to be fully fleshed, or even achievable; nobody will look at it too closely whilst it’s just an alternative. But you can’t oppose a successful or important piece of policy or legislation without pointing people to an alternative; it shows that the thing you’re opposing is not inevitable.

So the Coalition threw its weight behind a bunch of pointless, useless or impractical ideas – not as real policies, but as props for its position of opposition. NBN-lite, Direct Action, the easy bits of Gonski; these helped it to point to Labor’s NBN, the carbon price, and the full package of Gonski and say “we don’t agree with these, and we don’t need them.” Despite the fact that experts universally panned the alternatives on offer, showed that they were impractical and expensive and simply couldn’t do what the Coalition was claiming, the opposition stuck to its guns knowing that the electorate didn’t care about details and didn’t care about feasibility. Pandering to a voter’s fears is eighty percent of the job, but the other twenty percent is to quiet that little part of their subconscious that says “what do we do instead”?

But now the time of opposition is over, and Tony Abbott and the Coalition have made a rod for their own back. They’ve sworn not to do deals. They’ve sworn to stick to their guns and get their promises delivered. They’ve sworn to be a no-nonsense government that says what it means and does what it says. And now it’s achieved government saying all of these impractical and counterproductive things that it is going to be required to do.

There are always get-out-of-jail clauses; every incoming Coalition government goes down the same path. The “budget position is so much worse than we knew that we can’t do the things we promised” route. Will the Australian people stand for it this time? For the first time, there was a PEFO, as thorough a retelling of the budget standing as possible, to ensure there are no surprises for an incoming government. Despite this, the amazing invisible Joe Hockey has been reported as saying that the Coalition would need an independent, external audit of the finances before they knew the true budget standing, so it seems obvious that they’re going to try this well-travelled road again.

And if the “not enough money” issue isn’t going to serve – for instance, in repealing taxes that you’ve sworn black and blue are losing money, or replacing a nation-building effort with something cheaper and nastier – then you can delay. Thus, the NBN will undergo “three separate reviews and a forensic audit” before the Coalition will even know what to do with it. Who wants to bet that these won’t take up most of the Coalition’s first term of government and be ready with propositions by the time the next election comes around? (Labor took a very similar approach to a series of policy areas in 2007, so it’s certainly not without precedent).

But eventually a government has to be judged on what it did, not what it said it would do. Sometimes, the promises that a government has made to get elected can come back to bite them. Thus Labor’s rounds of tax cuts, promised at the 2007 election in answer to the Coalition’s same promises, had to be delivered in subsequent years as the budget situation worsened and they became progressively more unaffordable. Those tax cuts may even have contributed to Labor’s more recent budget woes and its need to find new sources of revenue. Kevin Rudd, in those days, was desperate to keep all of his promises, just as Tony Abbott is now. Julia Gillard found out the hard way the results of being publicly excoriated over reneging on a promise (even though Gillard’s was a matter of semantics rather than intent). So will Tony Abbott back off his promises on NBN, on direct action, on PPL, on returning to budget surplus?

Those with memories of past conservative governments fear what this one might do when the promising is over and the sharp teeth of conservative policy are revealed. In any number of areas, in the last days of the election campaign, Tony Abbott and his senior staff were careful to put caveats on their promises. Undertakings which had previously been unequivocal – promises in blood, you might say – became subject to conditions. If the Direct Action plan on climate change fails to reach agreed emissions targets, the Coalition will renege rather than spend more money. The boats will be turned around – presuming it is safe to do so, which it never will be. (And incidentally, we won’t hear about it one way or another, because boats arriving is a politically damaging sight.) The NBN will be killed, with the exception of contracts already signed, because you can’t break contracts.

The big test for the Coalition is still to come. Will it stick to its guns? Will it attempt to implement damaging and ineffective policies that it doesn’t believe in itself? Will it revert on policy to ideas that are more useful, that might actually work, at the expense of going back on their word? And if so, what tricks will they pull to prove that what they said before the election was not a lie, but simply a position that had to be changed as circumstances changed?

And will the Australian people remember how well that particular approach worked for Julia Gillard?

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The Coalition’s Savings measures – what do they mean for you?

September 2, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
7 Replies

In defiance of the strategy, that won them power in 2007 and the obvious preferences of a large part of the electorate, Labor has adopted a markedly negative approach to the 2013 election, with a proliferation of attack advertisements and a party line selling, in effect, fear of the Coalition rather than aspiration for what a returned Labor government could do. Somewhere there are party strategists who made that decision, and in the future, there may be analysis as to why this approach was taken. It doesn’t appear to be having the desired effect and, failing a major upset in coming days (Tony Abbott swearing at a one-legged woman in a burqa, perhaps?) the Coalition looks likely to sail to victory.

There are two main problems with a negative approach to campaigning. Most obviously, it keeps the attention of voters focussed squarely on the party you don’t want elected, rather than on yourself. Ironically, it’s the approach that the Coalition has taken for all of the last three years – explaining why they’ve been able to get to the doorstep of an election without needing to clearly explain what they would do better.

The second problem is more pertinent; a campaign based on fear is easy to blunt.

In answer to Labor’s continual fearmongering about the Coalition’s planned cuts to health, welfare, job security, education and everything else, the Coalition has released a seven-page document outlining where they expect to get the money to pay for some of their signature policies. The charge that they are $30bn overspent is weakened, if not fatally, by this document that spells out $31bn of savings over the forward estimates. The document is available from Fairfax media here.

In light of the likelihood that the Coalition will be in power one week from now, what follows is a breakdown of the Coalition’s savings estimates document, with my admittedly poor analysis of what the outcomes might be for Australian society.

This is a political document

From the first line of the document, it is overtly political. This is not an audited financial statement but sounds more like a press release. Of the seven pages of the document, almost three are given over to attack rhetoric about Labor’s record. The document compares Coalition budgets (mostly in surplus) to Labor budgets (deficits) and criticises Labor’s approach to debt and taxes.

The bulk of the document is taken up with details on costings for the Coalition’s paid parental leave plan, and estimates of savings on the back of the two primary pillars of the Coalition’s approach to saving in a first term: scrapping the carbon tax and the mining tax.

The carbon tax package has been “terrible for the economy and terrible for the budget”. Spending exceeds revenue, so scrapping the package, except for the household compensation measures which will be retained, will return funds to the budget. The document goes into significantly more detail on this later.

The mining tax package similarly is described as “a disaster for the mining industry and a disaster for the budget”. The MRRT has raised at least $40bn less than projected, and a range of compensations and other packages funded from the mining tax have overspent revenue by $18bn. Abolishing the MRRT and associated packages will thus likewise return funds to the budget.

The document reaffirms that the Coalition doesn’t like the savings measures announced by Labor in the most recent budget, but will keep them all except for the changes to fringe benefits arrangements on vehicles. The savings document includes no cuts to hospitals or schools, no cuts to defence or medical research, and no change to the GST.

Paid parental leave schemes

The costings document goes to some length to describe the funding expectations for the Coalition’s paid parental leave plan. The overall cost of the scheme is quoted at $9.8bn over the forward estimates. Of this, the Coalition expects to fund:

$3.7bn currently allocated to Labor’s scheme, which this will replace;
$1.2bn in savings from public servants, who currently have their own entitlements and are expected to largely move onto the new scheme;
$1.6bn in what the document describes as “Some increase in tax receipts and decrease in benefit payments owing to the higher remuneration mothers receive as a result of the Coalition’s scheme.” I would question whether the tax income from the existing scheme is being likewise used to offset the $3.7bn quoted as its current expense?

This leaves an outstanding amount of $3.3bn, to be funded from a levy on businesses earning taxable income over $5m/year. This levy is expected to raise $4.4bn, giving $1.1bn extra that the Coalition claims as a part of its overall savings.

Mining Resource Rent Tax

The Coalition expects to abolish a range of programs and compensations that form part of the MRRT. The mining tax is raising “hardly any revenue” so the Coalition counts all of these as budget savings. The document lists a variety of measures to be discontinued, most significantly the instant asset write-off. Overall, the savings from discontinuing these programs is estimated at about $5bn. Few, if any, of the programs listed, will have significant outcomes on the majority of Australians following a Coalition victory. If the MRRT is really generating no revenue but costing the budget in terms of compensation programs, then fears that the Coalition is abolishing one of its sources of revenue are unfounded.

The document does not, however, mention that the ATO estimates that revenue from this tax will increase over the forward estimates to about $6bn, which is currently included in Labor’s budget planning; the Coalition’s document appears to assume that the MRRT will continue to be ineffective at generating revenue.

The effect of abolishing the MRRT on the average household will be minimal, both directly and indirectly. The MRRT has not contributed to inflation or household prices, and there is no indication that business confidence will be greatly improved by its removal. There may be a few mining and resource projects that go ahead that might otherwise not, but these are generally not great contributors to employment nor revenue to Australians.

Carbon Tax

The Coalition expects to return $7.5bn to the budget from the repeal of the carbon tax and associated compensation programs. Most of the programs specified are aimed at sheltering specific businesses and industries from the effects of the carbon tax and mitigating its effects on employees and communities affected by it. Effectively they are industry transition schemes, including the Steel Transformation Plan, the Clean Technology Program and the Coal Sector Jobs Package. Five programs listed are well under $0.5bn each, in addition to the major savings from the removal of the Jobs and Competitiveness Program ($4bn).

Also disappearing will be energy market compensation schemes designed to assist energy companies in the transition to the carbon price ($0.5bn); the Climate Change Authority ($0.4bn) and “other measures linked to the carbon tax that is wasteful or will no longer be required”. This extra $1.5bn is not specified.

The effects of these abolitions and repeals on city-dwellers will barely be felt. The Coalition claims that without the carbon tax, energy prices will immediately come down. This is arguable at best; it has previously been shown that the majority of price increases in energy are the result of gold-plating practices and not the carbon tax; in fact, perversely, abolishing the carbon tax may actually lead to electricity price increases.

For people and communities in regional areas involved in coal mining, and those involved in power generation, the effects may be more substantial. Programs designed to help cushion employees who lose their jobs as power companies become more efficient will cease. If the companies were to immediately reverse any changes they had made and rehire their ex-employees, this might be appropriate, but companies will have no incentive to reverse any changes, while individuals will lose access to programs that might otherwise have helped them.

Basic savings breakdown

The last part of the document is a tabulated list of savings measures, the lion’s share being the carbon tax and MRRT savings listed previously. Also listed are some of the other big-ticket savings measures the Coalition has previously announced. They include:

Re-phase superannuation guarantee increase – i.e. the legislated increase in the minimum superannuation contribution from employers will be delayed (or abandoned). This will save businesses and the government money but obviously will hurt the savings of workers. Still, for most people superannuation is a long way away and a very remote consideration.
Not proceed with low-income superannuation guarantee. This super top-up scheme was designed to help stay-at-home mothers and other low-income workers by contributing up to $500/p.a. to your superannuation. Obviously, the abandonment of this scheme will come at a cost to low-income workers and the unemployed. It may be that many of those who will vote on Saturday are unaware of this scheme and its imminent implementation.
Abolish school kids bonus – this is worth $4.6bn over the estimates. Obviously, if you have kids you should be able to afford to send them to school without taxpayer help.
Reduce public service by 12,000. Some estimates have said that the Coalition may intend to go further than this, but 12,000 is the currently published number. The effects of this cutback will be, obviously, 12,000 more people unemployed, plus fewer staff to implement Coalition policy. But that will be OK as one of the KPIs of the public service going forward will be to cut red tape and administration requirements, year on year. We are all business analysts now.
Reduce Automotive Transformation Scheme funding. This is part of Labor’s support for the automotive industry, contingent upon developing new cleaner technology. As the Coalition doesn’t believe in anything that opposes the introduction of that lovely, lovely plant food carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, this was an obvious one to go. Not that the automotive industry is really doing anything green with the money, this will just be another nail in the coffin of our car manufacturing sector.

That concludes our tour of the Coalition’s costings document. The actual impacts on households of many of these changes will not be keenly felt. The real effects will come in with a continued two-speed economy and stagnation of anything that isn’t mining, an unchecked increase in carbon emissions (but it’s probably too little, too late on that front in any case), hits to manufacturing (particularly automotive) and decreased support for parents of school-aged children.

We ought to be more concerned about the Coalition’s other intentions. Not mentioned are such other issues as the reduction of the tax free threshold from $18,000 to $6,000, the cancellation of Medicare Locals so the health system can go back to its smooth-as-butter conditions, the nobbling of the NBN or the sudden availability of cheap second-hand fishing boats to our local industry, as none of these count as savings measures.

The increase in the tax-free threshold was offset with increases in marginal rates for higher income earners, so it was revenue neutral, placing a slightly higher tax load on the wealthy. Obviously, this goes counter to the Coalition’s ethos and will be reversed. Labor’s attack strategy on the Coalition’s supposed budget black holes and threatened Cuts to Everything (TM) is flawed because it is so easily countered, and it ignores so many much more real implications of a Coalition victory.

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This is Democracy

August 31, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
15 Replies

500 BCE, Athens
This is Democracy.

Each year, 500 names are randomly drawn afresh from the pool of eligible voters. These 500 citizens will serve the next year as the legislators for the city. All citizens of Athens are required to vote on any new law that this body creates. Votes are won by a simple majority: one voter, one vote.

There are some people whose opinion does not count; who do not get to vote. In ancient Athens, these include women, children, and slaves. Modern estimates indicate that of up to 300,000 people living in the region at the time, about 20% have voting rights.

Political literacy is high. The opinions of the people are heavily influenced by the media of the day – political satire performed in the theatres.

There are no politicians.

—

Democracy is dangerous. It takes power away from those who have it, and distributes it amongst those who may have different ideas. It cannot be easily controlled, only influenced. It equalises and it disempowers the powerful.

Thus, since time immemorial, those with responsibility for administering democracy have sought to control its use by limiting the people who may participate. Slaves, foreigners, women, coloured people, non-citizen residents – they’ve all, at some point or another, been excluded from the processes of power.

The great likelihood is that currently, you who are reading this blog post are amongst them.

It is sometimes asked why, if somewhere between 64% and 68% of the Australian people want gay marriage legalised, the major parties are so intransigently opposed to it, or why with seemingly a high proportion of Australians simultaneously outraged by Labor’s and the Coalition’s plans on refugee arrivals, both parties continue trying to out-hardline the other. (I’ve found it impossible to find an actual figure for the proportion of Australians for whom this is a driving issue. If anyone can point me to this number it would be appreciated!

The answer, of course, is that the seats that matter, the swing seats, do not share the outlook of the whole of Australia. Both major parties spend huge resources polling and evaluating their standing in the swing seats.

Both parties target individual seats for marketing, for campaigning, for pork-barrelling and election promises, and both parties heed the opinions and prejudices of the people in these marginal seats as a matter of high priority.

If a policy is adopted that panders to a swing seat, the parties can do this without fear of the outcomes because they know that the rest of Australia will either vote for them or not vote for them, regardless of actual policies.

Of the 144 seats in the Australian parliament, 74 are “safe” – they require a minimum of an 8% swing in order to change hands. The traditional view of “safe” seats is any seat that requires a minimum of a 6% swing, so I’m being conservative here.

Technically, every seat in Australia can change hands at any election. At the 2010 election, some electorates swung by as much as 13%. 18 of the 144 electorates swung by over 8% (17 of them in the direction of the Coalition).

At the 2013 election, with the current projected swings based on polling, any seat on 10% or less might be regarded as a marginal seat.

—

1789 AD, United States of America
This is Democracy.

“We the people”, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, have the right to vote for their Congress. Most major offices in the country, up to and including the office of President, are elected positions and the people can vote for their preferred candidates to hold them. Legislation is passed by the Congress and ratified by the President.

There are some people whose opinion does not count; who do not get to vote. In post-independence USA, these include women, children, slaves, negroes, native Americans, and non-landholding males. Modern estimates indicate that of up to 5.3 million people living in the USA at the time, about 17% have voting rights.

Technically, the United States is a Democratic Republic. There is already, effectively, a two-party system in operation, with Democrats and Republicans making up the two main schools of thought.

—

The outcome of the feverish focus on swing seats is twofold. It results in two paradoxically opposed effects. It pushes the parties closer together on big-ticket items, and it increasingly leads to class politics in day-to-day governing.

Both parties are desperate to win the votes of a handful of electorates. Electoral strategy revolves around picking your battles and pitching your offer directly at the heartland of the undecided.

With a limited number of seats in contention, and the stakes so high, both parties have incentive to follow the same path. In Australia, at present, this is slightly right-of-centre.

On refugees, on infrastructure, on education, on the economy, both parties are guilty of me-too politics, as clear vote-winning policies are adopted and co-opted. The opinion of the majority of Australians is not the major consideration. This is one contributing factor to the electorate’s general disengagement from politics in recent years.

The other effect is one of separation, as Labor and the Coalition focus their policy development on particular demographics. Electorates vote on the basis of the people who live there, and most electorates have a character, a homogeneity of age and social class.

As Labor continues to court the vote of the young and the educated, they develop policies that suit their safe electorates. As the Coalition continues to pitch to the battlers and the owners of small businesses, they develop a different set of policies that suit their own electorates.

Neither party is operating in a centric fashion with concern for the opinions of the electorates and demographics that they historically have not appealed to and can’t afford to put effort into winning.

—

2013 AD, Australia
This is Democracy.

All adult citizens of Australia are expected and required by law to enrol to vote, and are eligible to vote in local, State and National elections. Federal elections allow citizens to elect representatives for their local area, who despite election may not be a part of the governing party. All elected representatives may bring legislation to the house regardless of party affiliation.

Everybody gets to vote, but there are still some people whose opinion does not count. In practical terms, residents who do not follow the majority view of their electorate have no effective voice in parliament and their opinions are not important in the development of policy by the major political parties.

If we estimate that the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has been reasonably successful in distributing votes evenly between electorates, and if we assume further that an electorate requiring at least an 8% swing is “safe”, then of 22.3 million citizens, about 49% live in electorates where their vote is actually likely to be courted. 51% of the populace lives in electorates where the outcome is assumed.

The people are largely ignorant about the day-to-day processes of government and legislature, with attention paid to a small number of big-picture policies and ideologies, and most activity of the Parliament unseen and unremarked.

—

So what is the answer?

I increasingly feel that the two-party system is broken. Has representative democracy had its day? The day becomes ever nearer when we will have the technical and administrative ability to develop policy on the basis of the intentions of the people as a whole, rather than a representative attitude of the people in your suburb.

A time when every major decision is treated as a referendum and every voter’s attitude is counted, even if only in determining the overall intention of law. (Much of modern legislature is far too complex to be suitable for a census of opinion, but bureaucrats and lawyers can argue the semantics of law required to implement the expressed will of the people.)

This may be a pipe dream and unlikely in the foreseeable future. Until then, the best we can do if we want to ensure our voice is heard is to move to live in a swing electorate.

Co-posted on Random Pariah on 31 August 2013.

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The government that doesn’t want to govern

August 26, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
9 Replies

On 1 October, the Affordable Health Care Act comes into force in the United States. It has split the US down the middle – by some polls, over half of the population hates the Act. Detractors call it “Obamacare” as if to identify it with a single person is to devalue the raft of policy and the nation-changing effects it will have. Republicans, quite simply, hate it outright.

I recently requested clarification from a right-wing, evangelical Christian blog as to why, if the Act is of so much benefit to the poor and downtrodden of America, the right oppose it.

I received in response a bullet list of seven reasons “Obamacare” is a disaster for America. Of these seven objections, one is a moral statement: the argument that some aspects of the law don’t suit all people, but will apply to all people. The argument was made that funding for abortions may be made available through the Act. This is highly arguable, at least in the law as enacted, but fair enough; this seems like a valid objection.

It is entirely legitimate to oppose legislation on the basis of disagreement with the moral outcomes. Two of the objections question the effectiveness of the legislation. Similar to the Australian Coalition flatly stating that Labor, even when in possession of a good idea, cannot turn it into effective action, opponents of the AHCA point to other countries with national healthcare systems and claim that they’re not perfect.

They argue that such systems will be open to abuse, rorting and fraud. You could argue that all systems are open to abuse, rorting and fraud and that this is a good reason to refine the legislation to progressively remove these opportunities; however, it’s not an entirely invalid objection.

And three of the objections boil down to the basic assertion: “We can’t afford it”. The policy will cost the US government, and thus the taxpayer. The US is already debt-ridden. The government ought to concentrate on paying down debt before engaging in further expenditure. Fair enough. That does seem a valid, and eerily familiar, objection. Except…

“We can’t afford it” has become a catch-cry of conservatives the world over. The Affordable Healthcare Act? Can’t afford it. National Broadband Network? Can’t afford it. Public servants? Can’t afford them. Social support and welfare? Can’t afford them.

Government is a case of competing priorities. All governments work within limitations of resources, in terms of finance and political goodwill and legislative time and personnel; every potential advance in society which government needs to enact comes at the expense of other needs. To evaluate whether “can’t afford it” is ever a valid objection to policy advances, let us take a step back and examine what it is that we have a government for.

The human species is gregarious by nature. Since the formation of the first agrarian communities, we have instituted some kind of authority structure. All governments throughout history have entailed a personage, or group of personages, to which the people voluntarily surrender power and authority. The people sacrifice their autonomy, their time, and their taxes, for the sake of the benefit of the whole.

For many centuries, the fundamental purpose of government was law and order, and peace/protection from invasion. In other words, government’s areas of responsibility went no further than setting the legislature and maintaining a standing army which, in addition to its function of protecting the people against hostility from outside, also enforced the law.

Some empires also dabbled in infrastructure. The ancient empire of Rome is famous for its network of roads; after the fall of the Roman empire, significant expenditure on roads would not be seen again in Europe until the 1800s. Rome also built aqueducts to service its wealthy citizens. The Roman empire was centuries ahead of its time, but in modern society, we expect governments to spend some resources on infrastructure. Roads, water, sewerage, power, telecommunications – these things that modern society relies upon are part of the bread and butter of modern government.

Governments of old, however progressive in their approach to infrastructure and law and defense, had no interest in some of the areas we currently consider to be expected parts of civilisation. Rome implemented a “corn dole” for citizens too poor to buy food; the Song dynasty in China (circa 1000 AD) managed a range of progressive welfare programs. Apart from a few stand-out examples such as these, however, social support was nonexistent.

Modern-day welfare came into being in the 19th and 20th centuries. We now consider a certain level of unemployment benefit, disability benefit, aged care benefit, etc. to be a reasonable imposition on society. Before the 1900s, the unemployed and the aged (and unmarried women) were the responsibility of their families, not of society as a whole.

It wasn’t until the 1700s that history saw the first public, secular hospitals being created. Prior to this, health care would have been taken care of by organisations other than government; primarily, in Europe, by the Church and the monasteries. Education is a similar story. Before the emergence of universal education for the populace – as early as the 1700s in some parts of Europe, but not widespread until the 19th century AD – education was reserved for the elite and provided by the churches.

It is important to note that for all of this time, the churches and other bodies responsible for providing these services – education, health care, welfare – were accepted and fundamental parts of society, and society contributed to them regularly and generously. Everybody gave alms to the churches. The monasteries were at the center of landholdings in their own rights and levied taxes upon their surrounds. In a way, these organisations were analogous to government – they received support from society as a whole, and in return, they provided certain necessary services.

In the modern world, the social bodies that would have been responsible for education and healthcare are declining or have died. Catholic schools and hospitals still exist, but not to the extent required to support our population. For the past 200 years governments have taken on these responsibilities, as the world gave way to secular sympathies, and governments took on these responsibilities as key determinants of national progress and success. A healthy, educated populace was the key to national prosperity.

Which brings us to the present. In 2013 we have conservative groups and political parties wanting the government to get out of the way while the market takes care of these things. On infrastructure – for example, the NBN – let it be driven by market forces. Environmental action, likewise: rather than a carbon tax operated by the government, a “direct action” policy will find the emissions abatements efforts that already exist and support them, rather than mandating change from the outside.

We have Republicans and Liberals wanting the government to get out of the business of mandating healthcare because it ought to be driven by market forces. We have governments of all persuasions pursuing privatisation and outsourcing of previously fundamental responsibilities in the name of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. And we have governments preferring to return the community its taxes in the form of tax cuts (to individuals; to business) and infrastructure spending. All of this comes with a wave of the hand and a “we can’t afford [whatever]”.

But can the government really abrogate its responsibilities in these areas? Without other bodies or structures to take on these responsibilities, it’s not ethical to stop providing them. So can the free market be relied upon to do this?

Money to pay for education, fire services, health, broadband, has to come from somewhere. The social structures – primarily church – which previously might have supported these things no longer have the resources or the popular support to be able to take up the slack. Charities around the country are crying out for support and berating the government for not providing enough basic resources/support; something has to give. In this environment, the idea of “small government” doesn’t make sense.

The government has to be big enough to do the things that the monasteries aren’t around to do anymore.

The Republican right in the US and the Lib-Nats in Australia run on a platform of “individual empowerment”. With the exception of a few big-ticket items, where they have specific, active policies – policies towards boat people come to mind – the Coalition’s ideology is to get out of the way, reduce government’s interference in society, reduce the tax burden on individuals and corporations, and let the free market have its way. It believes that everyone will benefit if there are lower taxes and more money moving.

Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that trickle-down economics doesn’t work. Even in some fictional world where successful humans were altruistic enough to plough their profits back into providing more employment and more productivity, rather than squirreling away the proceeds as profit, we still need these other functions to happen.

And these other functions – hospitals, schools, heavy rail, telecommunications infrastructure – don’t happen at the behest of successful capitalists. They happen because the community needs them and the community as a whole will pay for them.

Individualism is what you have when you don’t have strong governments. Individual empowerment is what you get when the strong ride roughshod over the weak.

Now we seem to be on the verge of voting in a Coalition government which will be forced to cut back on all sorts of areas of service provision and expenditure if it is to meet its overriding goal of bringing the budget back to surplus.

A government whose budget figures and estimates we’ve not been allowed to see, which is promising to repeal several sources of revenue and increase expenditure in several areas, whilst not increasing taxes. Something has to give. It seems certain that “We can’t afford it” will come into force after the election in a big way.

“We can’t afford that” is never a valid excuse. That’s what government is for: to find a way to be able to afford the basic things we need our government for. If that involves raising taxes in an equitable manner, then that’s what you do – it’s exactly why we pay taxes in the first place.

If it involves an imposition on businesses to achieve an end that the community desires – for example, a carbon tax – then that is why we have a government. The whole purpose of government is to place impositions on the strong to benefit the weak and to regulate the individual to offer benefits to the whole.

A government that doesn’t want to do these things is not governing.

A government that doesn’t want to provide these things is a government that doesn’t want to govern.

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NBN: Redefining Possible

August 19, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
16 Replies

There’s been a lot of noise in certain corners of the media about Rupert ~~Morlock~~ Murdoch and his opposition to the NBN in Australia, which translates to his pulling out all the stops to bury the Australian Labor Party’s chances of electoral victory. It is unknown whether he will be successful in this effort. It’s certainly possible; by the American model of politics, it is possible to buy elections, and he wouldn’t be using such prime broadsheet real estate if it wasn’t at least somewhat effective. It’s also unclear whether the sudden ramping up of hysterical anti-Labor rhetoric is specifically due, as Fairfax posits, to a fear of the NBN’s commercial impact upon Murdoch’s cash-cow, Foxtel, or simply because News Ltd papers have been steadfastly against Labor since day one and the announcement of an election was a bait they couldn’t resist. But let’s, for the moment, accept the former proposition: this is all about the NBN and Foxtel. What a great excuse to examine the potential benefits of the NBN under Labor’s FTTP model.

(Technical note for lay people: FTTP = Fibre to the Premises – wherein NBN Co foots the bill for not only laying optical cable along every street, but also for wiring it to your property, like your current fixed-line telephone cable. Assuming you have one, which is no longer a given in the modern age. The Coalition’s alternative will run the cable along the streets, but it will terminate roughly on each street corner, and if you want to use it you’ll use a connection between your existing copper phone cable and the closest Node to your property, with physical limits on the speed that you can achieve over copper, even assuming it to be in good condition. Alternatively you can pay for optical fibre to be run from the node to your premises, at an estimated cost of up to $5000… ahem. Enough proselytising: we’re here to talk about the plan as it exists now, not the hobbled version of a Coalition future. The costs of the two models, and the technical merits thereof, are beyond the scope of this post.)

Detractors of the government’s FTTP NBN model often make the claim that its primary uses will be for “more interactive gambling or more movie downloads” (Tony Abbott: 2011, and just about every comment troll on this subject, everywhere, ever.) The image invoked is of greasy-haired teenagers in their parent’s basements, only pausing from downloading Game of Thrones and playing World of Warcraft for a quick spot of pornography before moving on to the next map in Counterstrike. If that were all that the NBN offered, I would find myself hard pressed to justify the investment too. (Although I wouldn’t make the continued mistake of calling it a massive waste of taxpayers’ money, seeing as taxpayers are actually not paying for it.) But as some have said, the NBN is a case of “build it, and ideas will come“. We don’t know the majority of uses the NBN will eventually be put to. They haven’t even been thought of yet. We need to have the capacity before people will start thinking of the opportunities it will offer.

That said, it is reasonable to use the leading edge of technology practice today to make some informed guesses about the technological directions that might be in use in the world of tomorrow. A lot of the ideas that follow are already here or just on the horizon. I’m also looking specifically at uses that will affect the everyday user in their suburban home, rather than offices; the need for fast broadband in office buildings is pretty much a given. When the accusation is made that all uses of the NBN will be for trivial purposes, it’s couched in terms of homes, so let’s focus specifically on that environment.

Entertainment

Let’s start with Tony Abbott’s “more interactive gambling or more movie downloads”. It’s certainly one area where current users can benefit from the increased bandwidth on offer from Labor’s FTTP model. The Coalition must have a few MPs with streaming foxtel, because they are certain that “25MB per second will be more than sufficient for most users”. But obviously their MPs haven’t upgraded to UltraHD TVs, which have four times the resolution of standard HD. Personally I’m not intrigued, but if television that eats 25MB/s is already available in the stores, I’m not taking a bet that the next generation of entertainment devices (perhaps holographic? Smellovision?) will require significantly more again. And yes, faster bandwidth means faster downloads of torrented material as well as the legal stuff. But this is hardly forward-looking.

Videoconferencing and telecommunications

Most top ten lists of NBN uses talk about e-Health. Some also list e-learning. A few might talk about videoconferencing. It all boils down to the same thing: long-distance high-speed communication with pictures. Whether it’s high-def imagery of a mole or a wound so your doctor can make an informed decision, or streaming the operating theatre so the surgeon can remotely control the robot arm that’s taking out your appendix, or interactive whiteboards and teleconferencing with your teacher, the possibilities of this use alone are endless. Imagine what today would be like if we were still restricted to the telegraph. That’s how today is going to look from the perspective of the future. (Note that unless someone has a really bad morning before drafting legislation, video content on your phone calls will still be optional in the future.) Videoconferencing is already here and in wide use in business circles. As an IT professional, I can attest to the poor quality currently offered even in an office equipped with high-speed current-generation broadband. At its simplest, this is because the quality of the communication depends upon two things: the quality of the connection for every participant, which is why ubiquity of service is important; and the upload bandwidth available. Most current “broadband” uses a technology that gives reasonably fast download speeds to your computer, but much slower speeds on upload back to the internet. For most internet use this isn’t a problem, all you’re sending is small requests for content. But in videoconferencing, you’re sending as much data as you’re receiving, and current technologies don’t cut it. The NBN is a symmetrical technology, meaning that your upload speeds can be as fast as your downloads, so now the person on the other end of the call can see and hear you as well as you them.

The Internet of Things

This current buzzword refers to internet functionality being built into all kinds of household devices. There is a trend in this direction, with entertainment devices leading the charge, but being followed closely by refrigerators (new models which can maintain an inventory of contents and automatically order replenishments when stocks are getting low) and remote household control of lights, central heating, and checking if you left the oven on. Electricity and water smart meters will require connectivity. Your answering machine will be video capable, connected to your front door camera, and available to stream the video of the Jehovah’s Witnesses leaving that pamphlet on your doorstep despite your “no junk mail” signs. It’s even feasible that you might be able to answer the door or your home phone while you are in the office. None of these applications will require huge amounts of bandwidth or speed, but taken together they add to a low level noise that is always on.

Telecommuting

Many people currently work from home. In an ever more connected world, where workers in many fields are continually mobile and supplied with laptops and tablet computers, the maintenance of a dedicated office may become more and more an extravagance. But there are limitations and hurdles to overcome, not least being the requirement for home workers to have access to the resources they need. Often these resources are tangible – computers, printers, phones. But these things can be purchased and are increasingly simple to support and manage from a central location. More difficult are information and data resources.

Internet bandwidth is already a limiting factor for many teleworkers. Architects need to regularly download, work on and then re-upload plans and diagrams. CAD operators, 3D modellers, graphic artists – these creative or information-reliant jobs are the kinds of jobs most suited to working from a remote location, but also the most reliant on the traffic of large amounts of data. Some workers currently migrate from rural areas to the cities in order to acquire the bandwidth they need. Others simply give up on teleworking and base themselves in an office, with all of the impacts on travel time and work/life balance that this entails.

Again, it is upload speed that is often the killer. Information workers and creative experts often spend many hours building, drawing, sketching or designing highly detailed outputs, creating very large files. Hard disk space is cheap. Your personal computer is more than powerful enough to data-crunch rendered 3D animated scenes with aplomb. But getting the resulting terabytes of data back to the office is where it all falls down. The NBN to your home will allow you to send those files back to your office in blinding speed, allowing you to download the next set of files and get back to work quicker. The only thing that suffers under this proposal is your spare time to play with your children while you might have otherwise been waiting an hour for the files to finish uploading.

One of the downsides of teleworking is the lack of presence with the team. This is another area where the NBN will unleash potentials. Multi-party videoconferencing with collaborative editing of a document is currently the reserve of advanced companies within their offices. In the future, being at home will be no barrier to being a part of the team brainstorming session or the design project team.

The future of computing

All of the above ideas are currently in practice to some extent. Some are in use in business which can afford the bandwidth and equipment requirements. Others are in their first stages of development into the domestic market. But all of them will benefit from increased investment and phenomenal increases in usability and functionality once they are adopted much more widely. Now we can start to think a bit more ambitiously.

Software as a Service (SAAS)

Recently Adobe Software discontinued the production and sale of boxed versions of their software applications. They are part of a growing trend towards digital distribution of software. But this is old-school: you still install the software on your local hard drive and from that point you run it from your own computer. Even if it requires always-on internet (generally not received very well in internet-challenged Australia) it’s not really SaaS.

Microsoft’s Office365 offering is a much better example of consumer-level SaaS. If you have a license for 365, you can open, edit and save Microsoft Office files from your cloud storage on a computing device with nothing but an internet browser. This includes your Android tablet, internet kiosk computer, or your iToy of choice. You can even use your touchscreen phone if you’re feeling masochistic. The web server does all the work of generating the interface and accepting your commands. There are clear benefits for users in the freedom from dependence upon a specific computer; all you need is an account and an internet connection.

Office365 is late to the game, of course. Google Docs has been doing this for years, allowing users to create, edit and share word processed documents, spreadsheets and other files in the cloud. The recent Chromebook computers that the search behemoth has brought out don’t include an operating system to run Office, Pages or other traditional software. They rely entirely upon internet-served software including Google Docs. Clearly, local hard drives and installed software are not a big part of the future Google sees.

In addition to sending and receiving your working files, though, this model requires regular transmission of the data that forms the applications you’re using. As more and more software companies make the switch to serving their application through the web, rather than requiring installation, fast broadband will become ever more important.

Platform as a service (PAAS)

The logical extension of SaaS is Platform as a Service. PaaS spells the end of the computer as we know it. The idea is driven by the need for control and standardisation. As any IT systems manager knows, IT management is largely a matter of disaster prevention. Computer users have a long and proud history of installing anything and everything on their computers, up to and including a file for showing cute pictures of cats, named “Cat-Haxxor-lmfao!1!.exe”. In order to prevent this, or to easily repair the damage once it’s occurred, large organisations adopt Standard Operating Environments: a set of accepted software from operating system to installed programs. Anything else is not allowed to install, and if disaster strikes it’s easy to wipe the slate clean and reinstall the whole package.

The NBN will allow large companies to control the systems environments of their employees, in the office or at home, by streaming a new copy of the whole package every time you log onto your computer for work. Employees will only be able to log onto the work network with an appropriately controlled and safe computer. With the NBN, a home-based Australian employee of a US company will share exactly the same operating environment as everyone else in the organisation.

It’s not too much of a stretch to see this concept extended beyond the realm of work; where Microsoft or another company will offer a complete virtual computing experience. Windows 8 is already moving down this path; you log on to the computer using your Microsoft account, and your account is synchronised between any Windows 8 computers you log into. When this happens, it really will be the end of the desktop PC. It will probably also be the end of laptops and possibly tablets as well. Why carry a screen with you, when any surface can be turned into a desktop? When every house and every office and every shopping centre has connected terminals that you can log into to stream either your work environment or your personal (play) environment? The recent remake of Total Recall, despite its various flaws, showed this kind of computing future. It may be another thirty years away – it equally might be less than ten. But it won’t happen in Australia if we don’t have ubiqitous fast broadband.

Haptics

What’s video conferencing and ultra-high-definition holographic entertainment without utilising the sense of touch? There is already plenty of work being done in the area of touch feedback. From sensory gloves to complete virtual reality systems, the ability to add vibrational and motion feedback has good potential to be a major part of future computing. But touch feedback, like video conferencing, requires fast data transmission in both directions: a remote computer needs to sense what you’re doing pretty much instantly and feed back the appropriate response. A delay of even a few milliseconds may be enough to break any suspension of disbelief that working on a remote machine may require. Fast broadband will make all sorts of things possible, from remote driving of mechanical suits in hazardous areas to fine motor control over surgical instruments, to virtual reality and, naturally, a revolution in the experience of online pornography.

3D printing and fabrication

Domestic 3D printing is all the rage these days. 3D printers use detailed CAD plans to build physical objects using a substrate – often a kind of plastic. The technology has been in development for well over a decade, and is now reaching the exponential stage. What are now large, expensive and fiddly machines and processes will become ever smaller and faster and more useful over time. It won’t take too long before 3D printers will be available to buy at Harvey Norman, and not too long after that potentially even embedded into wearable devices. The possible uses of 3D printing are still being discovered, but could easily include assembly parts (from tools to clips and screws; from panels to electronics), 3D models, even musical instruments. People have succeeded in printing their own weaponry. For some kinds of online shopping in the future, you won’t need to wait for delivery; you’ll instantly download a 3D plan and send it to your printer for fabrication. Once again, scads of data transmission is required for every downloaded plan, and if the technology takes off it will add to the ongoing demand for bandwidth.

While we’re talking Star Trek technology, let’s go one step further. If transporter technology is ever developed, it will entail disassembling an item (or a person) at one location and reassembling an exact replica at the destination. Whilst the actual method of accomplishing this is still unknown, you just know that it’s going to require the near-instantaneous transmission of quintillibytes of data. Believe it or not, there are people currently working on this kind of technology. If they succeed, it will be decades before it becomes commercially available. But the thing about the fibre cable that forms the NBN is that it won’t be outdated; it will likely still be around and in daily use.

The future is an exciting place and the technological possibilities seem endless. But life and society will increasingly revolve around fast, ubiquitous, and always-on network connectivity. Labor’s NBN sets Australia up to be a part of this, and potentially to be a leading developer of the technologies that will shape the lives of the next generations.

First posted 9/8/2013 on the Random Pariah.

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Worse than disrespect

August 18, 2013
Written by: ozfenric
42 Replies

On the face of it, Joe Hockey’s statement that talking about things like “costings” in this election campaign will bore everyone to death seems like run-of-the-mill disrespect for the electorate. After all, we’re in week two of an official election campaign, and spin and mistruths are par for the course regardless of your poison of choice. (Actually, this is not quite true: I cannot find any examples of egregious mistruth or deliberate spin in any statements by the Australian Greens. This may simply reflect that they have such a low proportion of the media coverage.)

An obvious reason that might explain their reluctance to pony up the details is that they don’t want to spend the next several weeks addressing and rebutting the queries and accusations the media and Labor might bring against them. If they had trust that their numbers were robust and correct, this would be about the only legitimate fear, but it’s a short-sighted one. Large swathes of the electorate are tired of continual negative politics, personal attacks, and three word slogans: not sufficient, but a decent proportion of the all-important swing voters. Defending your own policy position with trustworthy numbers could become a very good thing. Hockey’s statement – “…about costings, rather than about policies…” – seems to indicate that they want to keep the focus on their policies at a very superficial level. Naming a policy and giving a one-line abstract of it may be sufficient to get the immediate sugar hit of a positive attitude, but digging into the details and the numbers risks actually finding out the limitations and caveats behind every policy. I can see why they might want to avoid that, when they’re ahead in the polls.

But I think that the Coalition’s attitude towards revealing their costings to the Australian people (and the media) in advance of the election is about more than avoiding contention. Taken in combination with the coalition’s approach to ~~climate change~~ ~~the NBN~~ ~~the carbon price/tax~~ ~~Labor’s budget~~ everything, there’s a repeated and demonstrable pattern here. The real world doesn’t match up to the Coalition’s worldview; the facts are too inconvenient to be borne. So we don’t trust those facts, and we’ll instead rely on (or make up) our own.

As a scientist, I find this thinking to be actively offensive. As a member of Generation X, I find it to be profoundly arrogant. And as an Australian, I consider it to be morally repugnant.

It’s also astonishing that they’re getting away with it. When you’re driving towards a cliff, redefining your reality to insist that the road to riches continues forever won’t save you from a crash. When you’re falling off that cliff, a blind insistence that there’s a truck full of mattresses at the bottom isn’t much help either. So by all means argue about the terms of measurement of the height of the cliff. Have your political argy-bargy about the effectiveness of the brakes and when you need to start applying them. But don’t discount the reality just because it’s inconvenient for your agenda.

In May, Joe Hockey said he didn’t believe the government’s figures in the budget: “they don’t tell the truth“, he said.

In July, Joe Hockey said he didn’t believe the government’s figures in the revised economic statement: “I don’t believe these numbers“, he said. The Coalition would not be drawn into revealing its costings. It needed to see the state of the federal budget – in numbers they could trust, and they didn’t trust anything the government had any involvement in.

Fair enough.

Even though Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson went to some lengths to confirm that the numbers had not been influenced by the government, that the numbers in the Economic Statement (ES) would be the same as in the PEFO, the Coalition reserved their right to doubt the figures. Labor has no input into the PEFO and most analysts feel the revised ES was an attempt to pull the government’s figures into line with the Treasury numbers if had no control over, but the Coalition is within its rights to suspect that governmental interference is at least possible. Still, it’s starting to sound less like a reason and more like an excuse, but OK.

In August, Joe Hockey said he didn’t believe the Treasury’s figures in the PEFO: its policy costings will be based on “a range of other data“, he said.

Now the PEFO is out, and as promised, it’s virtually identical to the ES. And the Coalition has had it for almost two weeks (at the time of writing these words). Mr Hockey, your excuse just ran out of legs.

It’s no longer defensible to claim that the real numbers are not available. So the newest reason given for not providing the numbers is that people are bored hearing about the numbers. (Here’s a little tip, Mr Hockey: the people aren’t bored by the numbers. They’re bored by the continued discussion about the fact that we have no numbers.)

The alternative reason that the Coalition may not wish to reveal their costings is that they don’t believe in their own numbers. That they have no intention of ever putting their election promises into practice. Not trusting the ES and the PEFO is Hockey laying the groundwork, once the Coalition comes into government as they still expect to do, for the time-honoured “The state of the economy is so much more parlous than we had known that we have to go back to the drawing board for our policies”.

All parties in an election will make promises. Most will over-promise and find it difficult to deliver, or will deliver a cheaper/smaller version, or will deliver in tiny chunks that somehow require another term or two to complete. This is par for the course. But if an election is a game of one-upmanship, you need to play by the rules, and the rules include at least pretending to have done the numbers to make your promises affordable. Once you remove the requirement to show that your promises can be funded, you can promise just about anything, and that does not lead to an edifying or fair election.

In an election, the people are entitled to the facts. The parties in contention must be on a level playing field. Once one party starts redefining the facts to fit their own worldview, that playing field is lost. In this case, elections are won and lost on emotion, invective, and the money spent on advertising. This is an assault on democracy, and as democracy is defined as government by the people, you could view it as an assault on the people themselves.

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” – attr. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

First posted 15/8/2013 on the Random Pariah.

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