Fat chance scare tactics will trim us

In yesterday's Courier-Mail, a senior Queensland health bureaucrat proposed graphic health warning labels be put on sugary, fatty and salty foods to help tackle obesity.

The assumption behind using such labels is that because they worked in cutting smoking rates, they'll work on the naughty foods we enjoy.

It might sound reasonable, until the plan is put under the microscope.

Graphic warning labels assume we buy all our unhealthy food in ready-to-eat form.  That isn't the case.  Home-cooked meals filled with sugar, salt, oil and fat can be as unhealthy as food in a takeaway bag.

And unhealthy food isn't just limited to kitchens at home.

Under the plan, a discerning restaurant customer can order a 250g piece of wagyu beef with up to 25 per cent fat marbled through it, a bowl of pomme frittes and a tall glass of surprisingly sugary French champagne.

Their meal will come with an expensive price tag and even a chef's recommendation.

Meanwhile an average Queenslander can go to a fast food store and order a 120g beef pattie burger with a fat content of about 10 per cent, a side of fries and a Coke and get a label designed to shock them out of their choice.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out both options require a serious workout to burn off the calories.

Graphic warning labels are part of what is called the ''denormalisation'' of salty, sugary and fatty foods.  Denormalisation is a plan by bureaucrats to slowly and subtly change our behaviour and encourage us to be critical of others making unhealthy choices.

Warning labels are a media-savvy, sound-bite-friendly, one-size-fits-all approach to a much bigger public policy challenge that requires educating people about how to live healthy lifestyles.

Graphic warning labels also have the same problem as traffic-light labelling, where processed foods carry a green, red or amber symbol indicating the product's relative nutrition.  They superficially appear to be a good idea but do virtually nothing to help people understand if, and how often, a food product can be consumed.

By simplifying labelling, people can be discouraged into trusting loosely relevant information rather than taking an active decision to inform their choices.

In the longer term, the problem with graphic warning labels is that they are just part of an ongoing escalation of government interference in our lives.

Unsurprisingly, the same health official who has called for these labels advocated a fat tax last year.

Australia already has an effective fat tax.  It is called the GST, under which processed foods have a 10 per cent tax added to their price, while fresh food does not.

Yet despite this tax operating for more than 11 years, it has done little to improve our health.

The only solution, then, is to increase the rate, which would disproportionately harm the poor and tax them out of their choices.

It may not surprise some people that other health researchers have already called for discussion on plain packaging for fast food.

The only real way for people to cut their waistlines and stay healthy is for them to make informed decisions and monitor their own bodies, exercise and consumption.

That will not be achieved by simplistic and subjective shock tactics.

Mine tax didn't add up

Lord Kelvin famously said that without numbers ''your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind''.  Unfortunately, even with numbers your knowledge may be unsatisfactory.

Late last week the Treasury released its review into its macroeconomic and revenue forecasting.  As everyone knows Treasury has made significant errors over the past decade.

Before the financial crisis it underestimated revenue and since it has overestimated it.  This is important — the government has taken to spending revenue that will never eventuate, generating deficits and debt.

Of course, Treasury doesn't see things quite that way.  Readers are assured its forecasts have been unbiased and reasonably accurate.  But Treasury has had particular problems with company tax, capital gains tax, and the minerals resource rent tax, meant to net $2 billion this financial year, and raising only $126 million so far with little prospect of more.  That's not a forecast error, it's a disaster.

Yet it worked precisely as designed and delivered exactly the result critics had predicted.  Only the government and Treasury seem surprised.

The MRRT experience has been so bad that there is now some nostalgia for the ill-fated resource super profit tax.  Unlike the MRRT, we're told, this tax had teeth and would have raised substantial revenue.

Yet this revisionist view of history invites us to believe that Treasury could accurately forecast revenue for a complex RSPT when it struggles with company tax and was disastrous on the MRRT.

Indeed, this government has generally struggled with economic modelling.  The basis for FuelWatch was a dodgy regression model.  The 2010 budget papers featured a dodgy model showing that the stimulus had saved Australia from the GFC.  The argument that Australian miners only paid 13 per cent tax was due to misunderstanding an unpublished American paper.

The problem is the government has been too eager to accept the results of complex modelling at face value and then impose poor policy.  The RSPT was a particularly complicated tax that failed the common sense test.

Documents released under Freedom of Information in early 2011 reveal that Treasury didn't understand that miners would have to finance the government's share of investment at their own cost of capital while the government only paid the risk-free rate.  And Treasury seemed to think financial markets would value the 40 per cent rebate the RSPT promised.  They didn't.

The bottom line is that elegant theoretical proposals don't always translate into sensible practical policy.  The taxing of imagined mining rents is one such proposal.

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Censorship standards come from a personal place

The United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gave this famously ambiguous definition for what constitutes pornography:  ''I know it when I see it.''

The director of the Classification Board, Lesley O'Brien, feels she has seen pornography in I Want Your Love, an American film that was due to be screened at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival next month.

The primary job of the Australian Classification Board is to give films their ranking of G, M, MA 15+, and R 18+, which allow them to be sold and exhibited.

Films shown at film festivals are exempt from the usual classification processes.  But if the board's director believes that a festival film might be rated X 18+ (pornographic, and therefore only available in Canberra or the Northern Territory) or RC (refused classification:  available nowhere) the exemption is not granted.  You can read the particulars here.

To give a film either of these classifications is censorship in every relevant way.

Yes, in 21st century Australia our government still censors ''obscene'' culture — we still employ a descendant of the system that banned James Joyce's Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.  We still have bureaucrats who decide what we can and cannot watch.

It has been decided we cannot watch I Want Your Love.  The film features a ''six-minute montage of friends, housemates and partygoers'' having their intimate way with each other.  Presumably it's a pretty graphic six minutes, worthy of the X 18+ stamp.

But so what?  It's hard to see what public purpose banning a film that was to be shown only at a gay film festival achieves.  You'd expect the audience at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival to have fairly specific tastes.

The film's supporters say the six-minute scene is a critical part of the film's narrative.  The classification board says it serves no narrative purpose.  The broader question of why we want a government bureaucracy doing contextual analysis of story structure is unclear.

Is it facetious to ask what approach to narrative theory the board uses?  Vladimir Propp's?  Tzvetan Todorov's?  Claude Levi-Strauss's?  Joseph Campbell's?  Christopher Vogler's?

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have a deep understanding of narrative theory — I got that list of names here.  But if narrative relevancy is being used to justify censorship then it would be nice to know more about the board's thinking.

Either way, by bureaucratic decree, I Want Your Love is now banned in Australia.

The banning comes at a critical moment in Australian classification history.

Last February the Australian Law Reform Commission released a major report into classification.  The ALRC had a brief to bring classification up to date with the wealth of media choice that has been unleashed by the internet.  What does it mean to classify a film when in the age of YouTube?  What is the point of banning a sex scene in a film when there are many lifetimes' worth of pornography freely available online?

Indeed, the ALRC had a hopeless, even pointless task.  No mandatory, centralised, bureaucratic classification system could ever hope to monitor all content available to Australians in 2013.  Seventy-two hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  An honest reform of classification in our era would begin by rethinking its purpose, and, perhaps, throwing it all away.

Instead, the ALRC did what every inquiry before now has done.  In the report's view, the Government should try to classify ''any content with an appropriate Australian link''.  This seems more like a cry for help than a policy principle — how on earth could it be achieved in practice?  Although to be fair it's a better attempt than what was recommended by a 2011 parliamentary report, as I wrote on the Drum at the time.

The only real outcome of ALRC process has been the introduction of an R18+ rating for videogames.  For historical reasons — pretty much just hostility of policymakers towards gaming — video games have lacked this higher classification.  The new rating came into effect in most states in January.

And yet an R18+ for video games is cosmetic at best.  Australian gamers have been flouting the restrictions imposed by our archaic classification system for decades.  Gamers tend to be a technologically literate bunch.  They've been importing and downloading whatever they'd like.  And video games can still be refused classification — that is, banned.

The video game classification issue became an iconic battle within the gaming community.  It was the quintessential ''politicians just don't get technology'' story.

Unfortunately, for all their passionate defences of free speech, too many of those gamers and game-focused technology journalists have vacated the field after their minor win.  The Government's sort-of abandonment of its internet filter hasn't helped either.

But our classification board is still acting as a censorship board.  It is still a sop to the self-appointed moral arbiters.  Just because some video games have had a small reprieve doesn't mean the broader problem has been resolved.

In his 1704 essay On Obscenities, the French philosopher Pierre Bayle argued against the arbitrary nature of deciding what offends society — that is, trying to define what we would call ''community standards''.

For all the verbiage poured out about community standards, censors rarely make any attempt to determine what the community's real standards are.  If they did they would be confronted with a problem.  Those who, in Bayle's words, ''compose wanton verses'' are surely part of that community, and contribute to its standards.  Those who would eagerly read wanton verses are part of the community too.

So how can any model of community standards exclude the opinions of the people who might go to the Melbourne Queer Film Festival?

Ultimately, any censorship that tries to test a cultural work by (in the words of the Classification Act) ''the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults'' will be built on sand — an unstable pile of assumptions and prejudices of the officials who make the final decision.

In other words, they'll know pornography when they see it.  And that's all it takes for censorship to kick in.

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An assault on diet

When the National Health and Medical Research Council released its official new dietary guidelines this week, they helpfully included a sample daily meal plan.

This was a mistake.  The meal plan inadvertently demonstrates how ridiculously austere the NHMRC's ideal diet is.  It's almost comic.  We're being recommended the culinary equivalent of sexual abstinence.

For an average man, the hypothetical day begins with toast (wholemeal, two slices), baked beans (half a can), a tomato (medium size), and a glass of milk (250ml, reduced fat).

Breakfast is as good as it gets.  Lunch is a sandwich (wholemeal) with 65 grams of sliced roast beef, 20 grams of reduced fat cheese and some salad.  Two small coffees may be consumed at your discretion.  For dinner, look forward to a tiny piece of fish — 100 grams maximum — rice, and a small, boiled potato.  End your day with a glass of water.  (Dinner for women:  a cup of pasta, 65 grams of beef mince, kidney beans and half an onion.)

Pity those who try to follow the government's new diet.  This is self-denial pretending to be cuisine.

According to the NHMRC you mustn't even use salt — that mineral essential to the human practice of cooking.  It's no exaggeration to say the desire for salt has shaped civilisation.  To eliminate salt is to reject thousands of years of food wisdom.

Official dietary guidelines have been steadily reducing any pleasure we might draw from food.  The government-endorsed diet is getting worse;  more ascetic, more brutal, more surreal.  It's entirely divorced from human taste.

The CSIRO's bestselling 2005 Total Wellbeing Diet was positively decadent compared to the NHMRC's new rules.  Male dieters were permitted between 2½ and four times as much meat for their dinner.  Salt was allowed, in moderation.  And the entire point of the CSIRO's recommended diet was to help people lose weight.  The spartan new guidelines are for people who already have a healthy weight.

Dietary guidelines are highly political.  There are many special interests with a special interest in what we eat.  Industries that find their products downgraded protest loudly.

Meat and livestock producers don't like the idea we should eat less meat.  In the United States, dietary recommendations have been forever shaped by lobbyists.  The subsidised sugar industry has political clout.

But there's a deeper ideological battle going on around nutrition.

After all, what is the point of providing ''guidelines'' that are so far removed from the experiences of Australian eaters?  Surely health tips should not simply be scientifically accurate, but also socially plausible.

Advice is pointless if it's going to be ignored.  If our best medical minds have decided that drawing any pleasure from food is too risky, perhaps they should rethink their goals.

In 2008, the NHMRC decided any more than two glasses of wine in a single session constituted ''binge drinking''.  This decision turned the previously benign cultural practice of sharing a bottle of wine into dangerous hedonism.

But ''binge'' is a moral concept rather than a scientific one — it's just a synonym for ''bad''.  Since risky behaviour exists on a continuum, this redefinition was little more than an attempt to berate people into changing their behaviour.

That was five years ago.  Now public health activists are pushing the message ''there is no safe level of alcohol consumption''.  Another banality pretending to be insight.  There's no totally safe level of doing anything.  But expect to find ''no alcohol'' on official recommendations soon.

Food and drink are deeply intertwined with cultural identity.  No wonder our palate is a political plaything.  Environmentalists are frustrated the NHMRC didn't focus on sustainability.  Social-justice types want more attention on equity and fairness.

In Bold Palates:  Australia's Gastronomic Heritage, the historian Barbara Santich relates the story of a Sydney doctor who in 1893 proposed a national dish in the lead-up to Federation:  perhaps a ''vegetable curry'', he thought, ''or some well-concocted salad''.  Such a delicate, health-focused dish was never likely to be embraced in a land of mutton, damper, and kangaroo-tail soup.

In 2013 we still don't have a consensus national dish (why would we want one?) but the success of MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules suggests a cultural change in food and dining.  Australia is the perfect combination:  a rich, immigrant, and agricultural nation.  Our cuisine is starting to reflect that holy trinity.

The government's health guidelines are directly opposed to this new culinary culture.  They would strip away the pleasure and meaning of food.

Indeed, there's something symbolic in the way the NHMRC has offered different menus for men and women.  Sharing a meal with the opposite sex is getting in the way of kilojoule management.

Our new health guidelines are more utopian than honest.  They may be theoretically ideal — nutritionists can argue the details — but they're also unrealistic, implausible, and unappealing.

Maybe culinary abstinence is the healthy choice.  But replacing the joys of cooking and eating with a tightly engineered formula of self-denial is unlikely to be the happy choice.

Freedom fighters will save the HRC

The Australian Human Rights Commission must correct its bias towards a left-wing human rights agenda by moving to appoint freedom commissioners.

The ideological mindset of the commission led opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis last week to ask the president of the commission, Gillian Triggs.

At best, the commission pays lip-service to the idea that it needs to strike a balance between old liberal rights — such as freedom of speech, religion and association — and new progressive rights such as the right not to be offended.

But, funnily enough, we only hear about the need for balance when the commission is criticised for its failure to promote the first category of rights.

There is a simple way to overcome this problem — the appointment of freedom commissioners.  Currently, there are five commissioners of discrimination and social justice.  Balance could be achieved by appointing five freedom commissioners:  one each for freedom of speech, association, religion, property rights and the rule of law.

Such a structure could help to achieve real balance within the commission and assist in reversing the curtailment of our most fundamental human rights.

Freedom commissioners would be appointed through the passage of legislation and would have roles similar to those that already exist.

The appointment of freedom commissioners might just put an end to the leftist echo chamber that is the current Australian Human Rights Commission.

The commission has an endemic balance problem.  Rights based on constraining government power are consistently trumped by rights that necessitate government intervention.

In part, this is a structural dilemma caused by the appointment of commissioners responsible for promoting left-wing rights.  The commission has four anti-discrimination commissioners — one each for age, disability, race and sex — as well as a commissioner for social justice.

Ultimately, the best policy to achieve protection of traditional human rights is the complete abolition of the commission.  But if the commission must continue to exist, structural reform is essential.

Triggs appears to acknowledge the imbalance problem.  She believes it has arisen as a result of the legislation that established both the commission itself, and the individual commissioners.

In answering Brandis's discerning questions, she responded that the commission had ''one hand tied behind its back'' when it came to promoting freedom of speech.

That's partially right, but it's also a bit of a cop-out.  Proponents of the current structure of the commission habitually point to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as evidence to support the commission's focus on discrimination and social justice.

Reference to the ICCPR is often used as if it's a knock-down argument because the covenant includes a right to non-discrimination.

But this is a case of shameless cherry-picking.

The same covenant also protects rights to freedom of speech, association and religion, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes a right to private property.  Yet none of these rights are championed by the commission.

Indeed, if the UN conception of human rights really does form the basis for the current functions of the commission, this provides a good argument in favour of including freedom commissioners.

The commission's most recent foray into public debate demonstrates how necessary reform is.  The commission has come under fire in recent months over its response to the government's draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill.  The draft bill poses a clear threat to freedom of speech by making offensive and insulting conduct unlawful in certain contexts.

The commission's written submission to the Senate inquiry into the draft bill completely fails to address the threat it poses to our freedoms.  Worse, its submission calls for even greater restrictions on speech.

It's appalling that Australia's taxpayer-funded Human Rights Commission would actively campaign for increased restrictions on freedom of speech.  But this shouldn't come as a surprise.  The commission was deeply involved in the drafting of the bill and desperately wants to see it become law.

Triggs recently said the words ''offend'' and ''insult'' should be removed.  But, in an interview last weekend, she admitted the sole reason for this concession was the critical public reaction.

Triggs even implied the commission would lobby to reintroduce these words into the legislation at a later stage, stating that the public wasn't ready for such a restraint on free speech ''at the moment''.

This is not a recent phenomenon.  It's a trend.

The only time the commission talks about freedom of speech is when it is trying to decide how it should be limited.

A crude but interesting indication about what occupies the commission's time is revealed by the frequency with which particular terms are mentioned on its website.  Strikingly, the term ''discrimination'' appears 12,200 times, while ''freedom of speech'' and ''free speech'' accrue a measly 649.

And there are more direct examples of the commission's distorted priorities.  In 2011, the commission intervened in Clarke v Nationwide News.

The case, which involved the company that publishes this newspaper, concerned a claim made under the Racial Discrimination Act.

The commission's outline of submissions was explicit on the question of priorities between competing rights.  It argued that anti-discrimination law should be given a ''liberal construction'' and free speech protections ''construed narrowly''.

The imbalance is there for all to see.  And until freedom commissioners are appointed it will continue to advocate against traditional human rights.

Structural reform is the only thing that can save the commission from itself.

Innovation sorely lacking in Gillard's industry move

Government ''industry'' policy in Australia has a dismal history.  In the past, policy was dominated by tariffs that sought to provide a domestic market for local firms in the hope that these would eventually become internationally competitive.

Supporting that approach was ''positive'' assistance with research, including advising firms about how to conduct their businesses.

These Government measures simply frittered away wealth in subsidies to failing firms, high prices, and in staff costs to government agencies.

That policy approach was gradually downgraded over the past 25 years.  Tariffs were reduced and industries forced to become competitive.

However, the Rudd/Gillard governments inadvertently over-cooked that process by replacing doomed, but well-meaning, attempts to enhance industry productivity with even worse policies that reduced firms' competitiveness.  These included abandoning cheap energy, allowing unions to control workplaces and impeding new developments with endless environmental impact statements.

With its ''Industry and Innovation'' statement last week, the Gillard government announced a new policy approach it hopes will resurrect the battered private sector.

The new approach promises more and ''better targeted'' subsidies.  Unfortunately, many of these require firms to hire government-approved specialists to assist them to source more inputs locally, inevitably at a higher cost.

The new approach's centrepiece is 10 new industry ''precincts'' to get special assistance.  These comprise clusters of firms operating in particular sectors of great potential and not necessarily in the same geographic area.

The first new precinct identified is ''manufacturing''.

Other designated favoured sectors are yet to be identified, though they must surely include car manufacturing, since Minister Combet has already showered that industry with subsidies largely to lift its green credentials and has designated it as ''the keystone of advanced high-value manufacturing''.

Though the precincts are not necessarily geographic, the manufacturing precinct will be centred in Melbourne's south at Clayton.  That means the area's existing businesses will be subjected to harassing offers of help from government agencies including Monash University, Austrade, AusIndustry, Commercialisation Australia, Co-operative Research Centres, CSIRO and a whole host of other taxpayer-funded outfits which can provide little real value.

Control over taxes and regulations gives governments immense powers over businesses.  Even a firm the size of BHP has felt obliged to replace its CEO, Marius Kloppers, at least in part as a result of an impending federal government change.  Although Mr Kloppers showed his worth to BHP in successfully negotiating away the impact from the mining tax, he has strongly supported the ALP's carbon tax, a position that could have prejudiced BHP's interests in working with a Coalition Government.

The government's ability to intimidate one of the world's most powerful companies underlines the vulnerability of all firms to government sticks and carrots.

While the government and its agencies have neither the skills nor the entrepreneurship to help industry become more productive, they are ambitious for control.

And they have the power to distract firms from their core tasks of meeting customer needs at least cost.  Negative outcomes are inevitable from the new ''Industry and Innovation'' policy.

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Labor has lost its way

Australia is globally competitive in three things, mining, agriculture and sport.

When the Labor government most likely loses office this year it will leave mining, agriculture and sport in a worse condition than they were in 2007, the year the party came to power.

There's actually a fourth thing Australians are very good at:  soldiering.  But the reasons why and how the defence forces have been politicised and the military capacity has been run down is a separate discussion.

How the Australian Labor Party under Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard have treated mining, agriculture and sport reveals a great deal about the modern Labor Party.

Since before federation, workers in mining and agriculture were the bedrock of the trade union movement and trade unions were the backbone of the ALP.  In years gone by, miners and farm workers had disputes, sometimes vicious and violent, with their employers but no one in the union movement or the Labor Party would honestly have believed that Australia would be better off without mining or agriculture.

At this week's national conference of the Australian Workers' Union, the country's ''oldest and largest blue-collar'' union, a seven-minute video was screened featuring the union's heritage among striking miners and shearers.

The problem for the union movement and for the Labor Party is that the pride they once both had in the resources and agriculture sectors is in the past.  And the political party that until this week was in an alliance with the Greens, is actively hostile to mining and farming.

Modern Labor treasurers don't see mining as generating wealth, employment and economic development.  Instead Wayne Swan regards the mining companies as a merely a source of taxation receipts and a convenient vehicle against which he can launch his rhetoric of class warfare.  With one or two notable exceptions, most Labor MPs, at best, take mining companies for granted.  At worst, they treat them with contempt.

Nothing sums up the current Labor Party's attitude to agriculture better than the ban on live cattle exports.  The ALP government put the feelings of a few participants in a focus group ahead of the national interest linked to Australia being regarded in the region as a secure source of food.

Numerous Labor ministers have talked up the prospects of being the ''food bowl of Asia'' but for fear of upsetting the Greens, they have shown no willingness to use more land and more water to grow more food.

Sport in Australia has always been political.  From Robert Menzies and his following of the Carlton Football Club in Melbourne, to Bob Hawke and the America's Cup, to John Howard at the Ashes, politicians and sport have been inseparable.

But Menzies, Hawke and Howard would never have attempted something so brazen and so partisan as when Labor ministers Kate Lundy and Jason Clare on the barest of pretexts relating to drugs in sport traduced the country's sporting reputation.

What those ministers did proved that to the Labor Party in 2013 there is no aspect of social activity that is not susceptible to political control.

There's many reasons why the attitudes of the Labor Party have changed.

For one thing, Labor MPs now predominately represent metropolitan areas on the eastern seaboard.  No MP in the Gillard cabinet has a seat that isn't in a capital city.  Mining and farming don't take place in capital cities.

Many jobs in mining and farming are manual and low or semi-skilled.  Again, the experiences of workers in those sectors are a world away from the clerical and professional background of Labor MPs and their staff.

At a more fundamental level, many in the ALP regard mining, agriculture, and sport as things Australians did in the 1950s.  They're things Australians have been good at for a long time.  There's nothing necessarily new or cosmopolitan about them.

If the county is going to be changed into a place where it is against the law to insult someone on the basis of their social origin (which is exactly what the Gillard government was attempting up until a few weeks ago) then the mainstays of our culture have to be changed or abandoned.

Hawke would not have treated mining, agriculture and sport the way Rudd and Gillard have.  But then again, Hawke was the old Labor Party.  Rudd and Gillard are the new Labor Party.  It's an open question as to which ALP Labor's next leader will belong.

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Bloated public service chews up industry funds

Selective industry subsidies and requirements for higher local content in major project developments form the centrepiece of the Gillard government's industry and innovation statement.  Ostensibly targeted at lifting manufacturing productivity, such support has been made necessary by union campaigns that have reduced local suppliers' competitiveness.

The government is unable to address the root causes of this, especially under Industry Minister Greg Combet, who led the union campaign against productivity improvements on the waterfront.  The relationship between industry policy departments and the industries with which they interface has changed over the past 30 years.

Previously, policy approaches came from two directions.  The first entailed protecting industries into which supposedly inflexible capital and labour resources were sunk.  The second sought to shift the economy's resources into activities that build on natural advantages and where growth prospects were good.  This meant manufacturing that capitalised on local mineral resources and the ''smart'' industries that would harness Australia's ''clever country'' credentials.

The Hawke government sought to reconstruct industry by establishing industry councils to enhance competitiveness.  Initially a system of sectoral encouragement, it evolved into tariff dismantling that reflected global trade liberalisation.

This reversed 20 years of industry policy that had downgraded sector-specific support measures.  Industry departments had adapted in downgrading efforts to push selective sector development, which anyway stemmed from a misplaced confidence in their abilities to pick winners and to focus on encouraging industries to adapt to policies that impeded their development.  Many of these are associated with environmental lobby pressures.

This change is apparent in annual reports of the departments responsible for agriculture, manufacturing and mining.  Agriculture, Forests and Fisheries, with staffing of 5000 people, spent $800 million in 2011-12.  Some of its activities stem from government maladministration, including compensation for forbidding timber getting and the suspension of live exports.  Others focused on ''clean energy'', ''climate change adjustment'', rural financial counselling, adjustment and drought assistance as well as chasing myths of human land despoliation with landcare support.

The manufacturing industry department (Industry, Innovation, Science and Research and Tertiary Education) spends about $4 billion a year and comprises research entities, with CSIRO the most heavily resourced at more than 5000 people;  climate change in its various guises claims a very high proportion of the research staffing and spending.

Mainline units comprise 17 divisions with 2500 officials who purport to offer advice on matters such as industry skills, innovation, venture capital, research funding, and international strategy.  These elements have few relevant skills and almost all should go.

Resources, Energy and Tourism has about 1500 staff, half of whom are in bloated policy advisory areas that mainly duplicate state government agencies.  Other positions are loaded with confected duties involving energy savings and greenhouse.  Even useful components such as Geoscience Australia are over-infected with environmental and greenhouse duties.

In aggregate terms, the number of public servants has increased by 11 per cent in the past five years.  The forward estimates show only a 1 per cent reduction planned for this year and the three industry departments actually have a 3 per cent staffing increase.  Excessive staffing is difficult for the ALP to address because its green orientation leaves obvious areas of waste untouched.  This adds to a predisposition among politicians to see a need for controls to combat what they perceive to be market failures, a need that the new policy reinvigorates.

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Protectionism, symbolism and Gillard's jobs plan

Timing is everything.  On Sunday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced her ''plan for Australian jobs'' at the Boeing factory in Melbourne:  $1 billion ''to make sure that we are a manufacturing nation''.

The next day, the nation's largest manufacturing union assembled for its national conference on the Gold Coast.  Australian Workers' Union (AWU) chief Paul Howes announced he backed her leadership ''110 per cent''.

This is as good a way to measure public policy success as any.

Gillard's jobs plan (formally titled the Industry and Innovation Statement) is an obvious sop to the protectionist wing of the union movement.

You can read the plan yourself here.  But it's actually pretty uninspiring;  a grab-bag of miscellaneous policies trying to form a cohesive whole.

Some of the policies are new.  The 10 ''Industry Innovation Precincts'' are an attempt to cluster industries à la Silicon Valley.  We're throwing $238 million at this little idea.

Industry Innovation Precincts are no more likely to be successful than a similar Howard and Kennett joint venture:  the Commonwealth Technology Port, sited in the Melbourne Docklands.  ComTechPort failed to attract digital entrepreneurs and was instead colonised by government departments.  Now it's been rebranded as an ''inner urban community''.  Let's see what the Gillard precincts look like in a decade's time.

Others policies in the jobs plan have already been announced.  Legislation for the Anti-Dumping Authority is already squirrelling through parliament.

All up, the jobs plan is not really a new ''$1 billion'' package.  It's a $791 million one.

But the plan's big ticket items are the worst of both worlds:  they're both administratively complex and completely unable to achieve their purported goals.

In other words, Julia Gillard's jobs plan is protectionism as symbolism.  It's a ''victory'' that the old industrial unions can bring back to their members.

All large projects with a capital expenditure cost above $500 million will be required to submit Australian Industry Participation plans that detail how they intend to involve local firms in their project.  Australian Industry Participation plans started back in the early 2000s but only applied to government-funded projects.  The Gillard Government is extending them to independent private projects.

In practice, Australian Industry Participation plans end up being pointless red tape.  Only the most reckless project manager would deliberately exclude cheaper local suppliers.  The plans are mainly there to make local firms feel like they're in with a chance.

Really large projects ($2 billion and above) that are receiving concessions to import goods tariff-free will have to ''embed Australian Industry Opportunity officers within their procurement teams''.  It's not clear exactly what that means.  It sounds like embedded public servants.

Now, embedding public servants in private enterprise sounds a bit creepy.

But plus a few increases to existing programs (the Government's venture capital fund gets an extra $350 million) that's all there is to the Government's ''jobs plan''.  It's a couple of tokenistic, bureaucratic measures presented as a great win for Aussie jobs and Labor values and the Asian Century.

The fact that union bosses have taken this thin gruel back to their members with such enthusiasm is revealing.  They are as much in on the game as the politicians.

No doubt there are many in the AWU's rank-and-file who want the Government to protect manufacturing and blue-collar jobs by major government intervention — protectionism and planning and government investment.  If so, then they've been completely sold down the river by their union representatives.

Gillard's Labor Party faces the same dilemma as many other labour parties around the world.  The ALP has become entirely technocratic, as Tim Soutphommasane lamented in the Age recently.  Managerialism has replaced ideology.  Quite rightly, they've learned that open markets and free trade deliver higher living standards for the whole country.  But this is hard on their old base.  The winds of international competition have been tough on manufacturing unions.

So the protectionism we do get is tokenistic — little regulatory rules and futile programs.  Nobody seriously believes these policies will have a substantial effect on the viability of manufacturing in Australia.  If the Government really believed that the secret to national economic success was clustering firms geographically or forcing big projects to buy local, these policies would be 10 times as large.

In the case of anti-dumping law (which prohibits foreign manufacturers from selling products in Australia below their ''normal'' price) the Productivity Commission has explicitly said it exists for psychological reasons rather than economic ones.

We can see the same dynamic in the United States.  The political scientist Dan Drezner noted the mercantilist theme running through Barack Obama's recent State of the Union speech.  Obama needs to signal to blue-collar manufacturing workers that he wants to protect them but at the same time the administration can't abandon the free trade necessary for its long-term economic growth.

There was a great worry at the start of the global financial crisis that the world might take a turn towards protectionism.  Politicians often respond to economic downturns by attacking trade.

But rather than demonstrating a lack of faith in free trade, symbolic protectionism does the opposite.  Protectionism and state economic planning hasn't just lost the intellectual debate.  It's completely lost the political one as well.

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Gillard's jobs plan will suffocate business with more red tape

At best, government can redistribute wealth but usually it just destroys wealth.  The government's $1 billion jobs plan announced yesterday falls into the ''destroys wealth'' category.

It seems obvious that any plan promoting business at home and abroad and encouraging small business must be good.  Yet the Prime Minister's announcement was long on rhetoric and short on serious policy.

To argue that Australia needs a ''real plan'' to deal with the consequences of a high dollar misses a very important point.  Australia as a nation doesn't need government plans — individual businesses need to plan.  For every business suffering the ill effects of a high Aussie dollar another business is prospering.

Government needs to create an environment where individual businesses can plan and prosper.

Ms Gillard wants the government to plan for business, a tried and tested model known as ''picking winners''.  The problem is that government is very good at picking losers.

The Australian Industry Participation Plan is a recipe for increased red tape.  Rather than making it easier for foreign business to operate in Australia, this plan will punish those who do business here.

It will create public service jobs in Canberra where bureaucrats will be allowed to second-guess business choices.  This government has never understood that make-work schemes detract from profit making and so deter business.

Small business is the work horse of the economy but what can Ms Gillard promise?  Well, she wants to make it easier for small business to raise finance.  She provided no detail but hinted at a grant system.  That is just picking winners.

It is not just access to finance that crushes the small business sector.  Red tape, compliance costs, BAS statements all make it hard for small business to expand.  Not to mention state-based payroll taxes, ever-increasing compulsory superannuation and minimum wages.

It is true the Aussie dollar is high, and that does make it tough for Australian business to compete on world markets.  Ms Gillard is correct when she says there are limits to how much cost-cutting can be done.  Business has to work out how to provide higher value products in international markets.

Innovation and smart thinking will play a huge role.  It isn't clear that government can add value beyond making it easier to do business.

Another round of picking winners and provide grants to small business isn't a sustainable way to improve business profitability and ultimately productivity.  Turning businesspeople into bureaucrats won't create jobs or add to our prosperity.

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James Paterson's Diary

The best thing about appearing on Q&A is not hanging out with Tony Jones backstage, or even appearing before 700,000 viewers on ABC1.  It's logging on to Twitter afterwards and reading hundreds of abusive tweets from enraged lefties so that you know you've done your job.

This time was no exception.  In fact, I even managed to clock up dozens of tweets before the show went to air.  Many are not printable in an august publication like The Spectator Australia.  When the official Q&A Twitter account announced on Monday morning that due to an illness I would be replacing Australian Catholic University Vice-Chancellor Greg Craven, the howls of protest began.  One tweeter even announced he'd be boycotting the show because someone from the Institute of Public Affairs was appearing.  I'm sure the ABC was devastated by the advertising revenue they lost as a result.

After the show I log in to check if I met my KPIs.  Marieke Hardy is a writer whose work has been featured extensively on the ABC.  She's most famous for writing on ABC's The Drum website that she would like to see Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne ''attacked by a large and libidinous dog''.  So I must admit to being quite chuffed that she took to Twitter to label me a ''douchecanoe'', whatever that is.  Craig Reucassel, another recipient of taxpayer largesse via the ABC as a member of the Chaser team, is equally unimpressed.  He skilfully manages to fit an attack on me and my boss into just 140 characters, writing ''Sure James Paterson's #qanda appearance isn't great unless you remember John Roskam's appearance''.  Ouch!  Funnily enough his colleague Julian Morrow was much more complimentary in the green room after the show.

Tonight's panel consists of myself, shadow Attorney-General George Brandis, Chris Evans, the ALP's recently-retired Senate leader, comedian Corrine Grant and Rachel Botsman, whose biography describes her as a ''social innovator'' and ''global thought leader''.  I still have no idea what that means.

I'm very glad one of the topics we discuss is freedom of speech and the way the Gillard government's draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill threatens it.  The IPA through our Legal Rights Project has been the leading voice against the Bill.  It's great to see George Brandis use the opportunity to deliver a strong defence of free speech and make it clear the Liberal party will oppose the Bill outright.  One of the aspects of the Bill that has not received sufficient coverage is how it reverses the onus of proof and thereby undermines the presumption of innocence.  As I point out, if I'm offended that Tony Jones doesn't give me sufficient air time, under the new anti-discrimination laws I can sue the ABC, and they have to prove themselves innocent!

We move on to the mining tax, and a self-described lifetime Labor voter complains to Chris Evans that the Gillard government hasn't hit the mining industry hard enough, to the delight of the studio audience.  In his answer, Evans suggests that the applause is a good indication of changing community sentiment and perhaps the government should look at reforming the tax to collect more revenue.  I can't resist the opportunity, and point out that if the ALP really thinks a Q&A audience is a representative sample of the Australian community, no wonder they are in such bad shape.  It wins me no friends in the audience, who loudly groan.  But at least Sinclair Davidson at the excellent blog Catallaxy Files appreciates it — he writes that it was my best comment all night, and Andrew Bolt agrees on his blog.

The audience seems determined to prove my point.  At the end of the show, when Tony Jones announces next week's line up, they again audibly groan when he says one guest will be from the Centre for Public Christianity.  It's as if having a Christian on the ABC is something to be outraged about.

A perennial frustration for Q&A watchers is the amount of time dedicated to the ins and outs of politics instead of policy issues.  Corrine Grant is particularly vocal early in the episode about how Australia doesn't have enough big policy debates.  To be fair, this is a pretty policy-dense one.  But the final question of the night, in the form of a video, concerns why Tony Abbott will no longer be appearing every Friday on the Today show.  I can't think of a less important topic to discuss than the Opposition Leader's media appearance schedule and the panellists' theories of what sort of media management tactics his team are running, so I say so.  Of course, Corrine Grant believes this is a deadly serious matter of national concern.  And nobody mentions the failure of every Gillard government minister bar Anthony Albanese to appear on The Bolt Report on Ten.  Tony Jones doesn't seem to appreciate my criticism of Q&A for spending time on trivial topics like this and announces in response that they will be pioneering a new format with detailed questions to ministers and shadow ministers in the lead-up to the election.

A sympathetic tweeter asks me why me and my colleagues bother turning up to events behind enemy lines.  The obvious answer is that it is a great platform to advocate for freedom.  But it's also true that sending the Left into fits of rage is actually pretty fun.  And I think we provide a useful community service.  There's even an online petition with 2,000 signatures calling for the IPA to be banned from the ABC.  Without us, what would these people do with their lives?''

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Forget drugs — there's nothing natural about modern athletes

When the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) brought down its report into performance enhancing drugs in Australian sport, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced she was ''sickened'' by the revelations.  Justice Minister Jason Clare used the word ''disgust''.

Sickened and disgusted.  Visceral reactions.  It's easy to dismiss the Government's extreme response to the ACC report as mere political expediency.  But the reaction — not just the Government's, but across the press and public — suggests something deeper.  We have elevated the anti-doping crusade into a quasi-religious battle between good and evil.  It's ideological.

Spectators and publicists have always wrapped sport up with notions of purity.  The people who revived the Olympics believed that nakedness of Ancient Greek athletics was an expression of that purity.  In the early 20th century purity and sport took a creepy, racialised form.

Our modern ideals of purity are more benign.  We extol natural fitness, health, and sportsmanship.

Doping feels like a direct attack on these ideals.  It is artificial, seems dangerous and it is kept secret.

But that attitude is only recent.  Until the 1960s, drug enhancement was integral to sport.  It had been that way for nearly a century.  The first experiments with doping — the use of coca in long distance walking — date from the 1870s.  Early drug use was optimistic.  Science had the potential to increase strength and stamina.  Scientific progress and athletic achievement went hand in hand.

There's a great story about an early effort at doping by the Arsenal football club.  In 1925, Arsenal's manager, Leslie Knighton, was visited by a ''distinguished West End doctor'' who offered ''courage-pills'' (probably amphetamines) for an upcoming game against West Ham United.  Having been reassured the pills were safe, Knighton accepted.

Just before the match began, Knighton's team took their pills.  The problems began when the referee postponed the game due to thick fog.

Getting the boys back to Highbury that afternoon was like trying to drive a flock of lively young lions.

The entire team was violently restless and impossibly thirsty.  The next week, the team dutifully swallowed the pills again.  The match was again postponed.  Once more came edginess and thirst.  When they finally played West Ham, the energetic, drugged up team managed a nil-all draw.  In the rematch, the poor old Arsenal players rebelled.  No more drugs.

The only reason we know about the episode is because Knighton included it in his 1948 memoir, under the chapter title ''I Dope Arsenal for a Cup Tie''.  At no time did Knighton have any ethical qualms.  Neither, it seems, did the team.  They had no sense that this was cheating.  But they wanted to keep it secret nonetheless.

Knighton saw the pills as a variation on normal practice.  Doping was like any other psychological or medical inducement — another way to give his team ''hearts as big as bullocks''.

Bertolt Brecht said that ''Great sport begins where good health ends''.  Athletes subject themselves to brutal fitness and exercise regimes.  We isolate talented children from a very young age, direct their life towards training and competition, control what they eat and how they exercise, and send them to specialist academies where we deny them the usual pleasures of growing up.  It is ludicrous to claim that the highly-engineered extremes of modern competition are in any way ''natural''.

Indeed, one of the most pernicious myths in the anti-doping crusade is that drug use destroys the level playing field of competitive sport.  In his book A History of Drug Use in Sport:  1876-1976 the sports academic Paul Dimeo pointed out the entire purpose of training and preparation is to make that playing field uneven.

When does a natural substance such as oxygen, altitude or even testosterone become cheating?  How is taking a chemical substance that much different from using specialised equipment, psychological counselling or team tactics?

As Leslie Knighton understood, an advantage gained by doping is a question of degree, not kind.  It's just another way to get an edge.

The tide turned in the 1960s.  ''Doping is an evil,'' proclaimed the anti-doper Sir Arthur Porritt, ''it is morally wrong, physically dangerous, socially degenerate and legally indefensible''.

The campaign against drug use was a campaign to raise the status of sport to something impossibly noble and moral.  Drugs weren't the only thing these anti-dopers believed had corrupted the sporting ideal:  commercialism, professionalism, and an obsession with personal glory were also undermining sport's essential purity.  The anti-dopers wanted sport to be a reflection of an ideal world of health, morality and virtue.  One of the charges against female athletes using drugs was that doping denied their femininity.

Dimeo argues the anti-doping ideology is deeply hypocritical.  On the one hand we want athletes to sacrifice their lives in the pursuit of victory and record-breaking.  Elite competition is destructive, all-consuming.  But then we demand they know exactly when to stop, that they know what risks they should not take with their body.  The old fantasies about purity and sport have been turned into systems of control.  The crusade against artificial stimulants has been imposed from above by sports bureaucrats who want to regulate the moral choices of athletes.

One legendary Belgian cyclist of the 1950s, Rik van Steenbergen, said after his career that ''there are no such things as supermen.  Doping is necessary in cycling.''

Throughout the 20th century many riders have argued that professional cycling is so punishing it would be virtually impossible without performance enhancement.

Any sport can make whatever rules it likes about drug use.  But let's get off the high horse.  We insist that athletes stop at nothing for our entertainment.  Why the horror when they do exactly that?

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Lincoln sheds little light on some of history's dark deeds

Sometimes the reaction to a movie is more interesting than the movie itself.  In Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow controversially suggests torture played a necessary role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Given that this suggestion is both untrue and politically provocative, Zero Dark Thirty has been widely condemned.  Bigelow's film seems to implicitly approve of human rights abuses in the name of the 'War on Terror'.

Another recent film is similarly coy about civil liberties and human rights.  Yet there has been no outcry about Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, released in Australia last week.

Spielberg's tale of the constitutional amendment to end slavery shrouds Abraham Lincoln's legacy in myth.  The Civil War is the ultimate ''just'' war.  It was fought to end the vile institution of slavery.  Hard to think of a more noble cause than that.

But Spielberg whitewashes some of the great stains on the Lincoln presidency.  The film obscures, even ridicules, any suggestion Lincoln reduced American liberties during the Civil War.

Take one memorable scene.  In Congress, a fiery New York Democrat, Fernando Wood, accuses the president of being a tyrant.  Lincoln, Wood shouts, is a ''violator of habeas corpus and freedom of the press, abuser of states' rights, radical republican autocrat ruling by fiat and martial law''.

The film skates quickly over the accusation.  Wood seems ridiculous.  He describes the president as ''our Great Usurping Caesar''.  He supports slavery, a much greater tyranny.  But many of his claims were correct.

The Lincoln administration declared martial law.  It suspended the writ of habeas corpus, allowing the government to detain civilians without charge and without trial.  And Lincoln didn't ask permission from Congress first — a major increase in the power of the executive branch of government.

At first the administration simply wanted to enforce military conscription.  But very quickly people were being jailed for doing perfectly legal things.  Many civilians were locked up for selling alcohol to soldiers, even though there was no law against it.  Others were locked up for ''disloyalty'' or using ''treasonable language''.  Local authorities found that incarceration without charge was convenient.  They could arrest first and ask questions later.

At least 14,000 people were locked up as political prisoners during the war, according to the historian Mark E. Neely, jnr.  The real figure could be twice that.

The suspension of habeas corpus was controversial.  The Republican Party was supposed to be the party of individual liberty.  Many Republicans were uncomfortable with Lincoln's heavy hand.  Democrats filled the gap and restyled themselves as the ''habeas-corpus party'' — obvious hypocrisy from supporters of slavery.

For a long time historians believed there was a militant underground within the North that justified a clampdown on civil liberties.  It is now clear that there was no such mass resistance.  There is no reason to believe the elimination of legal rights helped win the war.

Lincoln's administration suppressed at least 300 newspapers.  Most of the suppressed papers were Democrat ones.  Nineteenth-century journalism was proudly partisan.

Lincoln authorised torture, too.  The technique, also used against civilians, is eerily familiar.  It is described in historical record as a ''violent cold water shower bath''.  Essentially, a high-powered hose was sprayed against a person's body until skin broke.  This ''shower'' could last for hours.  There was no attempt to cover up this torture.  The president didn't seem fazed by it at all.  We only know it happened because of formal protests made by the British ambassador when British citizens were victims.

Certainly, in the American Civil War the North were the good guys.  There can be no question about that.  The country had been torn apart.  Many of those whose liberties were eliminated supported the slave trade.  They're not sympathetic characters.

But that's the thing about legal rights.  Even bad people deserve the protection of the law.  There's no question that modern Islamic terrorists are bad.  But their sheer badness doesn't make indefinite detention or torture justified.  The justice of a war says nothing about whether rights should be protected.

Lincoln's choices during the Civil War had long-term consequences.  Memory of Lincoln helped justify Woodrow Wilson's even more considerable rights abuses during the First World War.  And Lincoln's legacy has been regularly used to defend depravities in the War on Terror — if the greatest president did it, then surely so can George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  Lincoln's memory should be a sensitive issue.

Both Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln are up for best picture Oscars in a few weeks.  The storm over torture makes Bigelow's chances small.  Lincoln is just the sort of film the academy likes.  It is pure Americana, at times cloyingly so.  Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis deserves every Oscar he can get.  But Spielberg grants little room for moral ambiguity in his hero-president.

Some people have seen the Zero Dark Thirty debate as America starting to deal with the civil liberties incidents of the last decade.  The silence on Lincoln suggests there is a long way to go.

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We go above, beyond with emissions pledge

While increasing our carbon tax bill, at last December's climate change summit in Doha the Gillard government committed to cutting emissions by more than twice as much as comparable countries.

The headline story from the summit was that Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Russia walked away from the Kyoto Protocol.  Like the US and developing nations, these countries are now sitting outside the Kyoto tent while a new international agreement is negotiated to cover emissions after 2020.  But not much scrutiny was applied to those who stayed inside the tent, such as Australia.

With the EU, Norway and Switzerland, we remained a ratifying Kyoto party, and made commitments to cut gases between this year and 2020.

At the original 1997 Kyoto conference, Australia agreed to cap emissions at 108 per cent of 1990 levels.  Since then the green movement has pilloried Australia's emissions ambition.

Similar claims are now being made of the Gillard government's Doha commitment to cut emissions to 95 per cent of 1990 levels between now and 2020.

On the raw numbers, Australia's cuts seem lacklustre against the EU's commitment to cut emissions to 80 per cent, but that assumes we are all working off the same trajectory.  Unsurprisingly, we are not.

An analysis requires an assessment of emissions cuts made off our business-as-usual trajectory.

As the Treasury's own Strong Growth, Low Pollution carbon tax modelling shows, much of Australia's efforts to cut emissions won't occur locally.  Instead, Treasury modelling rightly assumes we will cut offshore where it is cheaper per tonne of emissions.  That leaves the trajectory of Australia's domestic emissions rising.

Once an analysis of the Doha commitments is completed off business-as-usual calculations, the extreme generosity of the government's commitment becomes clear.

Despite appearances that Europe's 80 per cent of 1990 emissions targets is more generous than Australia's 95 per cent, analysis of business-as-usual projections shows Europe's is only 23 per cent and Australia's 47 per cent off projections for 2020 emissions levels.

So Australia has offered to cut emissions by more than double the rate of Europe.

It's not the only hit we are taking for the team.  By signing up to Kyoto's extension, we have also adopted revised carbon accounting rules that increase Australia's methane footprint by 20 per cent.  The updated calculations also cut the footprint of some other, less significant gases.

Once the revision of all gases is factored in our national register, Australia's emissions profile increases by around 22 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent gases.

An increase of 22 million tonnes adds another $230 million to the nation's carbon tax bill this financial year, and will go up further when the carbon tax rate goes up on July 1.

It's another unwelcome feather in our cap:  in addition to having the world's largest, most broadly applied carbon tax, we can also add the most generous commitment to cut emissions, using a tax that is set to go up and up.

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Agricultural blocks squander our chance to play vital food role

Bad policies underpinned by warped environmental priorities don't just hold back agriculture in Queensland and hurt farmers in the state.

They have a disastrous impact on poor people living in the region.

Australia has long been a net exporter of food, currently producing enough to feed 60 million people.  Queensland has the largest area of agricultural land of any Australian state and produces almost a quarter of the nation's gross value of agricultural commodities.  Australia and Queensland could double their agricultural output if it weren't for policies that block agricultural development.

Dam building, for example, has been blacklisted from state and federal policy agendas for two decades because of pressure from green activists.  Queensland has only built three dams in the past decade, compared to 15 in the 1990s and 20 in the 1980s.  Yet the CSIRO cites lack of water availability for why 5 to 17 million hectares of arable land in Australia's north isn't used for agriculture.

Food prices in the Asia-Pacific have doubled in the past decade.  If Queensland was to operate at anywhere near its agricultural potential, the resultant increase in supply would ease this pressure for millions of the world's poorest.

In light of the 578 million people in the Asia-Pacific who are malnourished and the 3.3 million children under the age of five who die each year from hunger and malnutrition globally, this state of affairs should be viewed as the disgrace that it is.

As assistant director-general of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation Hiroyuki Konuma rightly said last year, ''huge investments in the agricultural sector'' are needed to address malnutrition in the region.

Undoubtedly, Queensland is blessed with incredible natural treasures that warrant protection from the effects of building dams.

But not all of the state is the Great Barrier Reef or the Daintree Rainforest.

Likewise, live cattle exports were halted to Indonesia last year in the wake of a Four Corners report depicting horrific treatment of the animals.  There were further calls to ban live exports after similarly barbaric treatment of sheep was filmed in Pakistan.

Beef is Queensland's largest rural-based industry and its second biggest export industry (behind coal).  The state easily has the largest beef industry in Australia, providing almost two-thirds of Australia's beef exports to high-value, premium overseas markets.

But it could be even bigger and more beneficial to Queenslanders and those beyond our shores.

Maltreatment of animals is reprehensible and efforts must be made to prevent it from happening again.  But Indonesia sources 25 per cent of its beef from Australia.  And there are 65 million people living in extreme poverty in Indonesia and Pakistan combined.

Incredibly, in combination with policy decisions made by the Indonesian Government as a result, the ban caused beef prices to double in Indonesia, denying poor people access to an important source of nutrition.

Putting aside the fact that there are ways to solve this problem without completely halting live exports, do supporters of the measure really think that animal welfare is more important than the lives of some of the world's poorest people?

A further barrier to Queensland fulfilling its agricultural potential are farm labour costs, which rose 151 per cent between 1996 and 2008 in Australia.

This rise was substantially contributed to by the scrapping of individual workplace agreements.

This, in combination with other burdens such as the carbon tax and the duplication of state and federal environmental regulation, has made it less profitable to run a farm and discourages investment in increasing production.

For example, after being subjected to a three-year-long approval process that cost more than $30,000 to meet state and federal obligations just to grow a cassava crop, one Burdekin farmer commented, ''once you realise all this (regulation), you would never start''.

It has been argued long and hard by those who support agricultural development — and oppose the blacklisting of dam building, a ban on live exports and the over-regulation of Queensland's agricultural sector — that such policy positions put Queensland industry and jobs in peril.

They are right.  But these are not the only considerations in play.

Queensland's agricultural sector can feed millions of people in the region — many of whom are extremely poor.  But the state is passing up the opportunity to be Asia's food bowl on the basis of environmental claims that are questionable at best.

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The adulteration of innocence

After Craig Thomson MP was charged with more than 100 fraud offences, Trade Minister Craig Emerson declared Thomson was entitled to the presumption of innocence.  Emerson repeated what most people assume to be true, namely that in Australia you're innocent until you're proven guilty.

The idea that people should be presumed innocent pervades all walks of life.  To take an example from just a few days ago, in Melbourne as claims were made about drug-taking at the Essendon Football Club, sports journalists were at pains to emphasise officials and players at the club were ''innocent until proven guilty of any allegations''.

The problem with claiming someone is innocent until proven guilty is that the statement isn't accurate.  It all depends.  There are dozens of Commonwealth and state laws declaring people guilty first which then require them to establish their innocence.  The offences under Commonwealth law of which people are automatically assumed to be guilty range from importing illegally logged timber, to arranging sham marriages, to drug trafficking.  And the trend for politicians to do away with the presumption of innocence is increasing.

The Gillard government's draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill unveiled at the end of last year proposes that an employer accused, for example, of racial discrimination should be presumed to be guilty.  A few days before her resignation as attorney-general, Nicola Roxon announced she had backed down on that part of the bill which would have made it illegal to insult or offend someone.  However, the sections of the bill which require those charged with discrimination to establish they're not guilty remain.

A new and worrying trend is the way politicians are eroding the presumption of innocence by requiring individuals to prove they have fulfilled obligations of ''due diligence''.  An ever-growing number of laws require individuals to prove they are innocent of an offence by demonstrating that they complied with whatever obligations would be appropriate for someone exercising due diligence.  Many of these due diligence requirements are aimed at company directors.  The requirements of due diligence can be incredibly vague and almost impossible to comply with.

Vague laws give bureaucrats and judges enormous discretion to decide what is appropriate behaviour.  For instance, section 27 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 specifies that fulfilling the requirement of due diligence under the legislation includes taking reasonable steps to have ''up to date knowledge of work health and safety matters''.  In this context ''up to date'' could mean nearly anything, and as a result company directors attempting to comply with the law have little or no guidance of what is required of them.

Although in a technical sense the term ''presumption of innocence'' applies only to criminal cases, the principle behind it applies regardless of whether an individual is accused of committing a crime or a civil offence or is a defendant in civil litigation.  The principle is that the person making the accusation has to prove their case.  It is not for those against whom the claim is made to prove their innocence.  There are a host of practical justifications for the presumption of innocence, but ultimately the justification of the principle rests on political philosophy.

A liberal and democratic society can only exist and flourish if it is assumed by its citizens and its government that individuals are more likely to abide by laws than break them.  The consequence of this assumption is therefore that government doesn't need to, and shouldn't, regulate every aspect of human behaviour, and individuals can enjoy any freedom that hasn't been explicitly taken away from them by the government.

The alternative formulation assumes people are more likely to be bad than good and assumes someone is more likely to be guilty than innocent (which is the assumption made whenever the presumption of innocence is abandoned).  These sorts of assumptions produce a legal and political regime that favours control over freedom.  In such a regime the only freedoms that citizens are allowed are those granted to them by government.  This sort of regime bears no resemblance to a liberal democracy.

The Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill is only the most recent and most high-profile instance of politicians attempting to do away with a legal principle that up until recently most people assumed was inviolate.

There's something deeply ironic about a piece of legislation that has ''Human Rights'' in its title which abolishes the right to be presumed innocent.

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Social spending plans will be a hit ... in the pocket

That the federal election campaign seems set to be dominated by a social policy auction between the two major parties illustrates just how profoundly the nature of government has changed over time.

To a great extent, Labor and the Coalition are in lockstep on the desire to implement a National Disability Insurance Scheme, arguably representing the single greatest extension to the social services state since Medicare in 1984.

In an effort to shift female electoral sentiment away from a female prime minister, the Coalition has maintained its promise to introduce a lavish parental leave scheme, partly funded by an increase in the corporate tax rate for large companies.

To date the two major parties continue to lock horns over the details of the Gonski education funding plan, with a sticking point concerning potential public funding losses for certain non-government schools under the proposed needs-based model.

The ramparts of our modern social policy were erected from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, with Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck playing a key demonstration role in implementing the likes of a state age pension, disability and unemployment insurance, medical care subsidies and state education.

The policy seeds Bismarck sowed quickly sprouted in many other Western countries, especially in Australia and New Zealand, and his policy legacy remains deeply embedded within the economic, fiscal and social structures of countries today.

The growth of federal education, health and welfare spending has snowballed since the early 20th century, as successive commonwealth governments shifted their expenditure mix favouring the Bismarckian model of redistributive state activity.

In 1909 the first Commonwealth social expenditures were undertaken, comprising a share of less than 1 per cent of total spending, but the rate of expenditure increased rapidly and by World War I already accounted for about 13 per cent of spending.

During the interwar period, social expenditures kept consuming a greater share of the commonwealth budget, but the federal takeover of state income taxes during World War II and a successful social services referendum proposal shortly after provided the impetus for the welfare state to be extended in ways previously unimaginable.

From the height of World War II to the defeat of the McMahon government in 1972, the Commonwealth embarked on social expenditure forays such as unemployment payments, pension and family payments, funding for state hospitals and disability services, and financial support for non-government schools.

By the time Gough Whitlam's brief period of fiscal adventurism concluded by the mid-1970s, social spending represented about 44 per cent of total Commonwealth spending covering Australians from cradle to grave, from child endowment to funeral payments.

By the early 1990s recessionary period, education, health and welfare spending by the Commonwealth accounted for at least half of its total expenditures, however during the following 15 years of largely unbroken economic growth the share of spending for social purposes continued to expand.

In 2011 it is estimated that social spending represented about 58 per cent of commonwealth expenditure, with welfare cash payments and other social security expenditures in turn accounting for more than half of the social spending.

The relentless growth of federal social expenditure is astounding on its own terms, but perhaps even more so when it is recognised that the Commonwealth does not own schools and hospitals, and is a relatively minor player in delivering welfare and other social services.

With the government struggling to contain its self-induced budget deficit, and with gross indebtedness exceeding $260 billion, it is entirely appropriate for voters to ask from where exactly will the money come to make future rounds of social spending expansionism a reality?

As fundamental as such a question is, and putting aside the usual inter-country variations, it also seems useful to ask what makes the Bismarckian state such a prevailing and common feature of modern democracies?

There is little intuitive doubt that politicians prefer to expend on programs rather than compulsorily raise tax and other revenues to finance these, but perhaps politicians also prefer to target swinging voters with direct spending programs rather than undertaking initiatives which provide generalised, though less perceptible, benefits across the entire community.

The recipients of welfare payments tend to know that the incumbent political party butters their bread, so to speak, whereas voters may have difficulty in attributing electoral credit to a party for providing long-lived assets, such as infrastructure, especially if there is a reasonably regular turnover of governments in time.

Politicians also discovered long ago that social spending allows them to electorally position themselves as philanthropic, even though the reality is that all public spending financed by taxes deprives individuals and families of disposable income and crowds out non-governmental spending and services.

The Bismarckian state is eating the Commonwealth government budget alive, and without significant corrective action it will continue to do so at great economic and financial expense as a growing share of our population ages.

Political parties, all and sundry, may want to commit taxpayers into big-spending NDIS, Gonski and parental leave payment futures, but the voting public should defer its judgment about such proposals until they are fully assessed with regard to their economic, financial and social implications.

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It's time to reveal car subsidies

Informed debate about government largesse is meaningful debate, especially when private corporate and political interests are involved.

Yesterday The Australian Financial Review reported that the Commonwealth Industry Department blocked access to data about levels of car industry subsidies.

According to the department, the information requested under Freedom of Information legislation would not ''contribute in any meaningful way to informing debate on a matter of public importance''.

The department clearly has a warped sense of ''meaningful'' and ''public importance'', unless it randomly interchanges them with ''helpful'' and ''political interest''.

Meaningful debate is informed debate, even if it is not helpful to government policy.

Considering the cost structures exporting manufacturers face and financial limitations on tightening government revenue, the extent and time frame for continued taxpayer subsidies to the car industry is an entirely appropriate subject for newspaper inquiry and debate.

Every taxpayer dollar that enlarges the revenue and profits of a corporate welfare recipient needs to be justified.  And with Holden collecting subsidies valued at $89.7 million last financial year, a figure that perfectly mirrors its profit, there are serious questions to be asked about subsidy levels.

The car industry is not alone.The same principle applies to all industries that enjoy government support.

As the Productivity Commission's 2011-12 Trade and Assistance Review outlines, total government assistance to industry is estimated at $17.7 billion.  The beneficiaries ranged from renewable energy to food manufacturing.

But the nature of assistance to the car sector makes it particularly important that it be transparent.

As tariffs have been cut, there has been a rise in subsidies to the car sector, arguably undermining the structural adjustment intended.

Throughout the Rudd and Gillard governments, the objective of these subsidies has changed from assistance to wean companies off tariffs to ''co-investment''.

Co-investment is not like past subsidies that were designed to wrongly protect private interests under the disguise of public interest.

Co-investment is about achieving a public interest through private companies, in effect making taxpayers pseudo-shareholders in these companies and their future.

The need is even greater considering the private political interests involved.

The same car companies that receive subsidies with public money are concurrently striking very generous deals with ALP-affiliated unions for their members.

A government that likes to claim the reform mantle of the 1980s and '90s should understand that getting government out of business, not co-investing in it, is key;  as is decreasing the incentive for rent-seeking provided by tariffs and subsidies.

Instead the legacy of the Gillard government has been to re-inject government into the heart of the economy.

The cost ultimately is paid by taxpayers and consumers.  The least the government could do is tell us how much we pay and who benefits.

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If it looks and smells like a campaign, then it's a campaign

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard told the National Press Club that she did not want to start ''the nation's longest election campaign'', the whole room laughed.

Because that's what she had just done.  She knew it, the press gallery knew it, and the public knows it.

The announcement only happened on Wednesday but the intervening six days have been an eternity.  One MP has been arrested, two senior ministers have resigned, we have a new Attorney-General and a new Minister for Immigration (the Commonwealth's two most contentious jobs) and now the Prime Minister is reprimanding Labor MPs for leaking against her Government.

But let's stick with the election announcement for a bit.  It exposed pretty much everything that's wrong with Australian politics today.  The obsession with minor media idiosyncrasies.  Our parliamentarians' ridiculously self-important attitude.  Most of all, the drifting aimlessness of the parties.  Julie Gillard didn't just reveal a date — September 14.  She opened a little window into our current malaise.

There are three public explanations for why Gillard announced the election now.

The first two are briefly plausible.  In her speech, the Prime Minister said it would give the business community ''certainty'', and spike the inevitable press speculations about the date.

The former claim inflates the importance of politics.  It's easy for the political class to imagine the whole country lives on their every word.  It flatters the politicians, who want desperately to believe when the government changes the country changes.  It flatters the pundits, who imagine their interpretation of the momentous events of Canberra are of great significance.  It patronises everybody else.

The latter claim ridiculously, hilariously exaggerates the importance of opinion columns.  Are we really so obsessed with the media we think the occasional, harmless speculation about an election date hurts our democracy?  That spiking the future column ideas of press gallery reporters is somehow a brilliant political manoeuvre?

If Julia Gillard's office genuinely believes so, Labor is in more trouble than even the polls suggest.  For the last few years anti-media hysteria has grown out of control.  Now all that marginal bleating about the ''MSM'' is starting to subsume the functions of government itself.

Gillard's third and final explanation for announcing the election date isn't even coherent, let alone convincing.  Why would announcing an upcoming election date make it ''clear to all which are the days of governing and which are the days of campaigning''?  It does exactly the opposite.  It blurs the boundaries.

The announcement has left everybody confused.  Her parliamentary colleagues seem to have gone into a strange, half-hearted campaign mode, not sure where they are in the political cycle.  Wayne Swan went on 7.30 the night of Gillard's Press Club speech for no obvious reason except to demonstrate he exists.  If the Treasurer had something to announce, some new question to answer, it never came out in the interview.  Was Swan campaigning or governing?  Did he even know?

A ''campaign'' is not a strictly defined thing.  It exists in the mind of the beholder.  It's an attitude.  That some state parliaments have fixed terms is irrelevant.  In federal politics the campaign starts when the Prime Minister reveals the polling day.  If something looks like a campaign, smells like a campaign, then it's a campaign.

Indeed, the launch of a campaign is the only way Gillard's Press Club speech makes sense.  Labor has long hoped voters would eventually be so revolted by Tony Abbott they would turn against the Coalition.  The Press Club address was one final ploy to up the stakes;  a last attempt to try to shift the burden of proof onto the Opposition.

The Government needs the election to seem imminent enough that voters start really questioning Abbott's preparedness for government.  But electoral attitudes don't change overnight, so there needs to be time to turn the public around.

Certainly, Gillard didn't just announce the election date at the Press Club.  She gave a 3,500 word speech.  The rest of it was a serious discussion with a few important arguments about the state of the Australian economy.  Unsurprisingly people have criticised the media for ignoring all that heavy stuff.

But whose fault is that?  Julia Gillard didn't come down with the last shower.  She must have known people would focus more on the surprise election date reveal than her thoughts about long-term trends in superannuation returns.  The Prime Minister couldn't have diverted more attention from the body of her speech if she tried.

Yes, we've got to the stage that people are blaming the press for what politicians do.

Labor people want Tony Abbott's Coalition to be subjected to more scrutiny.  That's fair enough.  The Coalition has been calling for an early election for years, and we've a right to see more of what they'll do in government, not just how much they think Julia Gillard is a bad prime minister.

So for all its flaws Gillard's early announcement gambit could work.  Even if it doesn't, what has the Government got to lose?

But let's not pretend it isn't an explicitly political gesture, only made possible by our sickly and dissatisfied national political culture.

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Cancun can-do is a con

Ross Garnaut says carbon dioxide emissions are on track to meet targets set at the 2010 Cancun international climate change meeting.  True or not, it is irrelevant.

Unlike the 2007 Bali climate change meeting, where Kevin Rudd basked in international adulation by signing Australia up to the doomed Kyoto agreement, Cancun imposed minimalist disciplines.  Friends of the Earth described it as ''a weak and ineffective agreement [which] gives us a small and fragile lifeline''.

Recognising the reality of fossil fuel use, developing countries at Cancun simply committed to greenhouse gas emission levels based on business as usual.  China is central to this.  Soon after 2030, China's dominance of world manufacturing will bring greenhouse gas emissions in excess of those of the US and EU combined.

But China is taking no steps to mitigate emissions.  Its Cancun targets are expressed in terms of CO2 emissions per unit of GDP, the aim being to cut its 2020 emission intensity by 40-45 per cent compared with 2005.  Meeting that will take China to only Australia's current level of emissions per unit of GDP.

China's emission reductions owe nothing to income-sapping carbon tax and mandatory renewable policies — in 2020, wind and solar will contribute only 0.3 per cent to electricity supply.

Commercial decisions are the sole deliverers of lower carbon emissions per unit of GDP.  These include closing outdated plant and rapid expansion of more efficient plant.  China, unlike Australia, also has no moratorium on new hydro capacity and nuclear power.

Zero carbon-emitting nuclear power under the five-year plan will raise its share of electricity from 1 per cent in 2010 to 6 per cent by 2020.  Although coal's market share will decline, it will still represent more than two-thirds of electricity supply and its generating capacity will double.

Developed countries are also avoiding new emission abatement measures.  While politicians enjoy the accolades of the green commentariat, cold reality usually dominates policy.  Thus, Canada's Kyoto commitment was to cut emissions by 6 per cent below their 2000 levels by 2012.  But with emissions tracking at 30 per cent above this, Canada simply abandoned the pledge.  Last month Japan became the latest country to drop its greenhouse reduction targets.

Europe, the epicentre of climate orthodoxy, is now re-examining its greenhouse gas abatement policies.  These are aggravating the region's economic demise.  They are hurtling it towards Angela Merkel's nightmare in which Europe becomes merely ''an interesting place to visit''.

Like Europe's emission policies, ours are also causing economic damage.  We have a carbon tax which, at $23, more than doubles the wholesale electricity price and is five times the EU's carbon tax.  We share with the EU crippling requirements for the use of wind-generated electricity, which costs more than twice as much as electricity from coal.  The costs these measures bring do not affect emissions at the global level but do cause relocation of industry and lower income levels.

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