University debate around ''settlement v invasion'' of Australia is creating ''bubble-wrapped'' students

Australian university students are shutting down ideas, covering themselves in bubble wrap, for fear that they be made to feel uncomfortable or offended.

The LaTrobe Student Union mandates 57 trigger warning issues, including "gore", "chewing", "slimy things", and "food".

It is compulsory to provide warnings before discussing any of these topics at the Union, for it may "negatively alter [the] wellbeing" of students.

Trigger warnings, disclaimers before potentially discomforting content, are the perfect exemplar of a new generation of student who seeks to avoid ideas that make them feel uneasy.

Australian students, following the lead of their American and British counterparts, are advocating for use of trigger warnings across teaching material and at student activities.

In practice these warnings damage the educational mission of universities and student mental health.

Trigger warnings create a false sense that there is something dangerous about discussing human history or legal issues.  They skew student understanding by focusing on certain issues.

They encourage students to acquire fears they would otherwise never have.  And they can cause academics to avoid certain material altogether, for fear of causing discomfort.

Students should feel emotionally confronted when they study the barbarism of the Holocaust, or learn the details of domestic violence against Australian women.

These responses teach students to understand the depths of human brutality.  It also helps build important resilience necessary for life outside the campus bubble.

The world is sometimes an uncomfortable place.

Our universities must reflect what exists outside the sandstone quadrangles, not treat students like pre-schoolers.

However, students are increasingly seeking to be protected from reality.  In the name of feelings and emotions they want to be treated like children.

The Melbourne University Debating Society's "Equity Policy" states that all debaters have the "right to just generally feel comfortable".

The very people on campus who are supposed to welcome intellectual combat are now concerned with the "right" to feel comfortable.

This reflects a developing anti-intellectual culture on Australian university campuses that seeks to limit the diversity of ideas.

The University of NSW's "Diversity Toolkit" dictates how students are supposed to address Australian historic issues.

The guide states that it is inappropriate to say "Dreamtime" or "Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for 40,000 years", yet acceptable to say Aboriginal Australians have been here since the "Dreamings".

Last year students at the University of Western Australia successfully campaigned against Bjørn Lomborg's Australia Consensus Centre.

The Centre was supposed to research the most economically efficient approach to global issues.  The student union president justified the silencing of an alternate voice on campus by stating that Lomborg has a "controversial track-record".

Meanwhile, students interrupted and assaulted foreign minister Julie Bishop for simply visiting the University of Sydney and Tony Abbott, while he was prime minister, was forced to cancel a visit to Deakin University due to security concerns.

Historically students sought to bring controversial ideas — like treating men and women equally or opposing conscription — to campus.  Today's students fear worldviews that do not align with their own.  They do not seek to engage in the intellectual debate, they seek to prevent viewpoints they dislike from speaking on campus.

This growing censorious culture is having a deafening impact on the intellectual climate at universities.

A wide range of issues can now only be discussed in private, behind closed doors, for fear of causing offence and being accused of insensitivity.

In other cases academics are not discussing topics, setting readings, or challenging students for fear it might upset.  This limits the exposure of students to different ideas, seriously damaging learning outcomes.

Higher education should expand young minds to new ideas, make students feel uncomfortable by challenging their perspective, and, most of all, teach young people how to think, not what to think.

Far too often students are asking for their existing viewpoints to be reinforced, rather than challenged or expanded.

Australian students are closing their minds.

The democratic case for splitting Queensland in two

As state governments do less and less, there ought to be more and more of them.  The renewed push to split Queensland into two states should be just the beginning.

"Most persons think that a state in order to be happy ought to be large," wrote Aristotle in his Politics, "but even if they are right, they have no idea what is a large and what is a small state."

And 23 centuries later, not much has changed.

A group of Queensland MPs have renewed a longstanding call to split Queensland in two.  They believe they can force a referendum on the issue.  The Minister for Northern Australia, Matt Canavan, also supports the new state proposal.

But Annastacia Palaszczuk believes "Queensland should be bigger, not smaller".  She wants Queensland to take the Tweed Coast from New South Wales.

There are other proposals.  Warren Entsch wants to split the top half of the country in two, creating a northern mega state.

Yes, redrawing the map of Australia is a classic holiday-season news story.  It's both fun and slightly frivolous.

But the question of the ideal size of a political jurisdiction pervades debates about everything from council amalgamations to whether Britain should leave the European Union — a political and economic alliance that has developed state-like characteristics.

The great Greek philosophers believed that the ideal size of a political jurisdiction was a small city.  Aristotle put it this way.  The city should be large enough to be self-sufficient.  But a city with too many people is ungovernable.  A city should be small enough so that the citizens know each other well enough to distribute offices according to merit.  Plato decided that optimal city size had 5040 families.

Neither economic self-sufficiency nor knowing office-bearers personally are imagined to be important any more.  But Aristotle did underline the basic tension in deciding whether to make states larger or smaller:  between economic desires and democratic ones.

On the one hand, economic considerations suggest that larger states are better.  Larger states can exploit economies of scale and deliver more services.  It is as much work to write a school curriculum for two schools as 2000 schools.  This is the intuition behind the steady centralisation of policy towards the federal government — the idea that it is more efficient to impose the same policy on everyone, rather than have regional governments develop their own approaches from scratch.

But on the other hand, economies of scale aren't everything.  Democracy — that is, genuine democratic engagement, not just attending a polling booth every few years — seems to thrive better in smaller jurisdictions.  The idea that the people rule is more believable when it is possible to imagine ourselves as one of those rulers — something which is less likely in a giant unitary nation than a small community.

There is, simply put, a trade-off between the economic benefits of large size and the democratic benefits of small size.

That trade-off helps us understand why the Queensland government — any Queensland government — will fight a split.  More economic power means more wealth that can be delivered to the government's supporters, and the political class rarely welcomes any more democratic participation.

Nor is the federal government likely to welcome any new states.  It is much easier to negotiate with one Queensland government rather than two.  More states reduce the concentration of political power.  Those who hold political power dislike that idea.

Back in 2009 Geoffrey Blainey argued that it was "absurd" not to establish a new state in northern Queensland because when Queensland was formed no one knew about the mineral resources in its north.

Yet as the Danish political scientists Martin Bækgaard, Søren Serritzlew, and Kim M. Sønderskov point out, the optimal jurisdiction size for any political community depends on what we want those communities to do.  Aristotelian self-sufficiency is unnecessary in a world of international trade.  But the high cost of modern militaries mean we need huge nations to pay for a single F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Bækgaard, Serritzlew and Sønderskov argue that for jurisdictions with minimal functions and responsibilities, smaller is better.  For Australian local governments the optimal size might be as little as 5,000 people.  Rather than amalgamating councils we should be splitting them up.

Blainey is right that it has been a long time since the map of Australia was first drawn.  But the key change since is not the discovery of resources, but the long centralisation of power in the Commonwealth government.  Policy areas that the constitution leaves to the states — like education — are increasingly being controlled by Canberra.  This is as good a reason as any to rethink the number of states.

As state governments do less and less, there ought to be more and more of those governments.  North Queensland should be just the start.

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Turnbull's only real option was bluff and bravado

Boldness is the currency of Canberra and confidence is a substitute for the control MPs will never have.  Enter Malcolm Turnbull and the double dissolution gamble he "had to take".

If Malcolm Turnbull is bluffing about a double dissolution election, it's a very committed bluff.  A dramatic bluff.  A bold bluff.

First, the Government had to pass the changes to the Senate.  No point holding a double dissolution to clear out the Senate crossbench if that election would just throw up even more minor party crossbenchers.  Lest the substance of this change be dismissed, consider that in order to hold a double dissolution which would result in the desired outcome, the Government had to change the voting system itself.

Second, Turnbull has asked the Governor-General to recall Parliament in April to consider the Australian Building and Construction Commission Bill — one of the pieces of legislation the Prime Minister would like to use as a trigger for the double dissolution.  Constitutionally, the Governor-General can call sessions of Parliament.  The Senate is less likely to seriously fight the Queen's representative on a scheduling matter.

Third, the budget is being brought forward one week.  As Antony Green explains, a double dissolution cannot be held within six months of the end of a term.  This means a double dissolution must be called on May 11 at the latest.  But the government needs to pass a budget each year for the machinery of government to keep ticking along — currently scheduled for May 10.  One day isn't a lot to pass budget bills, so the budget day is being moved to May 3.

One estimate has that small change of budget schedule costing one million dollars.  I imagine we're about to find out how much the April sitting of Parliament is going to cost.

Turnbull says if the crossbench passes the ABCC bill in April, then no double dissolution will be necessary.  But that's hardly the point.  One column in The Age has described Monday's double dissolution threat as "a colossal gamble the PM had to take".  "Had to"?  Cleaning up union corruption is legitimate and necessary — even urgent — but not quite the emergency that calling a double dissolution implies.  Rather the "had to" refers to a sense that the Government needs a narrative.  It needs a reason for being.  It needs to make a bold political move.

The media loves bold moves.  Double dissolution gamesmanship fits the bill.  It's true that the outbreaks of high drama that have characterised Australian politics since Julia Gillard rolled Kevin Rudd have also been accompanied by hand-wringing about the decline of political stability and The End of Reform^TM.  But the very same press gallery has been damning Turnbull for weeks about the Government's apparent purposelessness.

Tax reform has been on-again and off-again — characterised by half-hearted attempts at encouraging debate and subsequent backdowns.  Part of this has been some of the transactions costs of the leadership change.  The discussions about negative gearing, increasing the GST, and superannuation tax concessions were all started by the Abbott government.  But the drift made a mockery of Turnbull's claims to be a brilliant communicator.  The new Prime Minister did not usher in the end of politics after all:  just another stage of what the commentariat portray as our era of political crisis.

In this context a double dissolution looks like cut-through ... great optics ... agenda setting ... finding a narrative.  Double dissolution elections are rarely about the bills they're purportedly called to pass.  The Australia Card Bill — technically the subject of the 1987 double dissolution — didn't even go to a vote when Bob Hawke failed to win a majority in the Senate.

Rather, if this election is like any other election, it will be at its core about the economy.  Politicians like to talk about their superior "economic management".  But as I have argued on The Drum before, rather than being managers of the economy, they are in truth the economy's hostages — riding waves of international capital flows and iron ore prices and financial market hiccups that small economies like ours can barely influence.

Take a step back and this is a defining feature of Australia's political culture.  We push against events we cannot control.  We "take stands" on ground which will never be stable.  Australian governments can only facilitate change.  They cannot direct it or prevent it.  So boldness — as brazen as possible — is the currency of Canberra.  It unites Turnbull's "ideas boom" with Tony Abbott's promise to shirtfront Vladimir Putin.  Confidence is a substitute for the control they will never have.

On Monday afternoon, Bill Shorten said "Mr Turnbull has a plan for his re-election, he just doesn't have a plan for Australia."

But in truth, an election is about the only thing he can plan for.

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Running the efficiency rule over defence spending

Recent commitments to dramatically increase Australian defence spending should be placed under as much scrutiny as any other roles or programs subsidised by the cash-strapped federal government.

Belatedly meeting a commitment that former prime minister Tony Abbott made three years ago, and in the process clearing the decks for a fresh election campaign, the Turnbull government last month released its blueprint for enhancing our national defence capabilities in the long term.

Hinting at building tensions in our region, and outlining potential non-conventional threats such as terrorism and cyber disruption against Australia and her interests, the 2016 Defence white paper outlines a shopping list of arsenal and other equipment for defending the realm.

The repertoire of proposed acquisitions, no doubt designed to shock and awe, includes 12 new submarines, nine new anti-submarine warfare frigates, 12 offshore patrol vessels, seven additional maritime surveillance and response aircraft, new electronic warfare support systems, and bringing 72 Joint Strike Fighters into service from 2020.

If one gathers from the white paper's bulging shopping catalogue of proposed acquisitions of new and upgraded defence materiel, that the call upon taxpayers by the federal government seems at least a touch exorbitant, that would be entirely correct.

Over the last few years the absurd notion that defence expenditure ought to be targeted as a certain share of GDP (that being two per cent), implying a significant reallocation of financial resources to weapons and defence personnel at the expense of everything else, came to dominate the defence policy headlines.

The current government, when in opposition, promulgated the notion that Australia's defence GDP spending share had fallen during the Rudd-Gillard years to its lowest level since 1938, the year in which the infamous Munich Agreement enabled a hostile Nazi Germany to annex parts of then Czechoslovakia.

Abbott and colleagues might have been effective in pressuring the former Labor government to a defence spending equivalent to two per cent of GDP at least at a future date but, as ANU academic Andrew Carr has pointed out, pegging defence to such a target is problematic on several levels.

One of the key problems, according to Carr and Peter Dean, is that "there can never be a 'magic number' of spending which ensures security."

They went on to say, in a paper published in 2013, that "a nation needs to spend on its defence to ensure its security is a function of the threats it faces, and the interests and objectives it seeks in order to develop a sufficiently flexible planning capability and dynamic military posture."

Having pushed for the arbitrarily higher GDP share of defence spending, the new white paper under the current Coalition government proudly pronounces a program of defence expenditure inflation, enabling the magic two per cent target to be reached earlier than previously announced, in 2020-21.

But in the white paper it is made clear that the funding model for defence in the longer term, that is, over the next 10 years, will not be tied to GDP, so this enables spending to potentially run away from $32.4 billion next financial year to $42.4 billion in 2021-21 and to $58.7 billion in 2025-26.

Across the 10-year budget model, which has been externally costed, defence will be allocated almost $30 billion more than previously planned, further entrenching it as one of the largest functional spending categories on the government's budget books.

In these times of deep structural deficits and ballooning debts, it is entirely fair and reasonable for the average taxpayer to ask:  where will the money come from?

Another issue is whether the additional spending is justified beyond reasonable doubt.

The top brass of defence would doubtless argue a favourable budgetary posture for defence is justified to repel envisioned, but often unforeseen, threats against Australia, or to join war efforts elsewhere.  It is admitted in the white paper that "there is no more than a remote prospect of a military attack by another country."

To a certain extent this admission of reality implies the government perceives a host of other benefits associated with expanding Australian defence capacities.  One of these, as noted in the white paper, is the ability of defence promotion to "create economic opportunity for Australians."

Similar to this generic stimulus-type argument are industry development and even innovation rationales for additional defence resourcing;  those prerogatives are deeply interwoven into the white paper's central themes which, as an aside, play well to local shipbuilders heavily reliant upon government works programs.

But the idea that expanding defence is good for an economy is a highly controversial one, a point compellingly made by American economist Christopher Coyne.  He explains that a growing defence apparatus draws more scarce resources from the private economy into a politicised process with a long-established reputation for being unable to discover the best use of those resources.

In this context one need not be reminded of the litany of Australian audits and reviews uncovering defence procurement bungles, ineffective project outcomes and wasteful bureaucracy, to concur with Coyne's basic point that the government-dominated defence complex simply lacks mechanisms for proper economic feedback and correction.

The empirical evidence doesn't fully capture the process-oriented approach adopted by Coyne.  Nonetheless, even it shows, at best, little or no evidence of a positive correlation between defence spending and growth and, at worst, some studies point to robust negative effects of defence expansionism and economic activity.

It is frequently stated that defence is a core function of government that the citizenry cannot do without and, more to the point, cannot profitably be supplied through the market sphere.

Most people would agree with this proposition, but such agreement does not imply that defence ought to be treated as a financial special case impervious to the disciplines of efficiency that every other part of the economy responds to on a daily basis.

The 2016 Defence white paper may have been greeted with audacious praise by those who stand to benefit most directly from an even larger permanent war economy, but taxpayers are well within their rights to ask if they will be getting the best value for the extra money to be taken from them.

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Pause in global temperatures ended but carbon dioxide not the cause

There are different methods for measuring global temperatures.  The satellite record as compiled by meteorologists from the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH), is used by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  This is the temperature time series most often quoted by those sceptics of anthropogenic global warming.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz made much of the 18-year long pause in this record of his cross-examination of Sierra Club President Aaron Mair at a US Senate subcommittee meeting late last year.

Mr Mair, like most climate justice activists unfamiliar with this evidence, had no idea that this record showed no warming since the super-El Nino of 1997-1998.  Rather than provide an explanation of the trends in any of the global temperature datasets, Mr Mair could only explain that global warming was real, because there was a scientific consensus that global warming was real.  Of course a "consensus" is a form of politics, and while it can deny a fact, it can't actually change one.  Whether or not there is a trend in a series of numbers is determined by statistics, not consensus or opinion.

Until this year, there was no warming trend in the UAH satellite data.  Then the February 2016 update to the database showed a surge in global temperatures, particularly in the northern hemisphere.  This has been attributed to an El Nino event, which is exactly the same phenomena that caused the surge in temperatures in 1997-1998.  So, the pause has been broken, and the cause is not carbon dioxide.

As a colleague emailed me, "The extent of the observed increase in global temperatures is out of all proportion to the increase in carbon dioxide for the same period."  That's correct.  El Nino events are not caused by carbon dioxide.  They are natural events which manifest as changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns across the Pacific Ocean.  An El Nino typically begins with a weakening of the trade winds and is measured by a fall in air pressure over Tahiti, and a rise in surface pressure over northern Australia, measured at Darwin.

While the UAH satellite data only goes back to 1979, there is a record of changes in air pressure at Darwin back to 1876.  This time series indicates super El Ninos occurred back in 1914/1915 and also 1940/1941.  Considering the surface temperature records as measured with mercury thermometers for some locations in eastern and northern Australia, temperatures back in 1914/1915 and 1940/1941 were hotter than they are now.

So, while the global satellite temperature data indicates that February 2016 is the hottest month on record, this pertains to a record that only goes back to 1979.  If we consider the much longer surface temperature record for many individual locations across Australia and other parts of the world, February 2016 is not that hot.

But this is an exceedingly contentious claim, rejected by a "consensus" of climate scientists that rely exclusively on homogenized temperature series.  That is the early temperature records are almost all adjusted down through the homogenization process, so the present appears warmer relative to the past.  It is not contested that the official surface temperature records are adjusted, or that the early records are generally cooled.  This is justified mostly on the basis of "world's best practice" and that temperature series should show global warming from at least 1910.  I've explained the inconsistencies in the adjustment made in the homogenization of the original observed maximum temperatures at Darwin in a technical paper originally accepted for publication in the International Journal of Climatology (see postscript for more information).

Back in 1876, the weather station at Darwin was the responsibility of Charles Todd, Australia's Postmaster General and Superintendent of Telegraphs.  His priority until 1872 had been the construction of an overland telegraphic line from Adelaide to Darwin along which he established 14 regional weather stations.  Todd's first passion was meteorology and astronomy, both of which he used in his weather forecasting.

Air pressure measurements were important to the weather forecasts being issued by Todd, with these the measurements standardized based on local temperature measurements.  It was thus important that local temperatures were accurately recorded.  While these records stood for over 100 years, beginning in 1996 the Australian Bureau of Meteorology started "adjusting" all the old temperature records used in the calculation of official temperature trends, including the maximum temperature series for Darwin.

What the homogenization process tends to do to the temperature record is not only create a global warming trend where none previously existed, but it also removes the natural cooling and warming cycles so evident in the raw observational data.  For example, in the unadjusted maximum temperatures as recorded at Darwin the hottest year is 1907.  Temperatures then appeared to cool to 1942 when there is a spike in temperatures.  Note that 1941/1942, like 1997/98 and 2015/2016 were El Nino years.  These were also years of minimum lunar declination.

Unlike modern meteorologists, Todd understood that climate change on Earth is driven by extraterrestrial phenomena.  But he would likely have cautioned against single-cause explanations recognizing that there are multiple and overlapping periodicities evident in the history of the Earth's climate.  There are natural cycles that spans tens of thousands of years affected by changes in the Earth's tilt, and much shorter cycles affected by changes in solar activity.  Early 20th Century astronomers and weather forecasters, particularly Inigo Owen Jones, were interested in the planets.  They noted decades in advance that 1940/41 would have been a year of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus conjunction.

Todd would have outlawed the practice of homogenization.  Scientists of that era considered the integrity of observational records sacrosanct.

At an online thread I recently read the following comment about homogenization:

Don't you love the word homogenise?  When I was working in the dairy industry we used to have a homogeniser.  This was a device for forcing the fat back into the milk.  What it did was use a very high pressure to compress and punish the fat until it became part of the milk.  No fat was allowed to remain on the top of the milk it all had to be to same consistency ... Force the data under pressure to conform to what is required.  Torture the data if necessary until it complies ...

Clearly the Bureau's remodeling of historical temperature data is unnatural and unscientific.  In erasing the natural climate cycles and generating a global warming trends, the capacity of modern climate scientists to forecast spikes in global warming is greatly diminished, as is their capacity to forecast droughts and floods.

Because of the homogenization of the surface temperature record in the compilation of national and global climate statistics, those skeptical of anthropogenic global warming, have long preferred the UAH satellite record.  Even though this record only begins in 1979.

The UAH global temperature record for the lower troposphere which once showed no trend for 18 years, now shows a surge in warming.  This warming, however, is neither catastrophic nor outside the bounds of natural variability.  And it certainly hasn't been caused by carbon dioxide.

Postscript

A manuscript entitled "Reconciling temperature trends generated from raw versus homogenized monthly temperature datasets for Darwin, Australia, 1895 to 2014", was first submitted to the International Journal of Climatology in early June 2015.  After major revisions, a letter was received from the journal's editor, Radan Huth indicating that the manuscript had been accepted subject to minor revisions.  In particular the letter from Huth stated:

Both referees are satisfied with the revisions you have made;  they have, nevertheless, a few additional minor comments.  I am, therefore, very happy to grant conditional acceptance of the paper, subject to you making satisfactory revisions as clarified below.  These revisions are minor, in the sense that there are no major recalculations or major analyses required, but there may be less-major analyses needed and there are a number of important revisions to the text that are necessary.  Please review the attached document listing the file requirements for your revision.

These revisions were duly made and the manuscript resubmitted on 18th December 2015.  On 10th February 2016, a letter was received from Huth indicating that the manuscript was now "denied publication" in the journal.  A key concern from reviewer #2 was my addition of a comment in the text which indicated that the temperature series, as homogenized by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, may not be a good representation of historical temperatures.  In the earlier drafts of the manuscript I had let the data speak for itself, but in the minor revisions I had been asked to provide commentary.

The letter from Huth also included comments from a new third reviewer who rejected the manuscript, and provided a long defense of the methods currently used by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for the homogenization of historical temperature data.

Earlier in 2015 a version of the same manuscript had been submitted to, and rejected by, two other international climate science publications.

In a letter to the editor of the journal Environmental Modeling and Assessment on 20th April 2015, accompanying the papers submission to that journal, I wrote:

The science of climate change depends very much on reliable data, which has been quality controlled.  Adjusting time series through the process of homogenization has become routine, but is controversial.  Furthermore a jargon and techniques unique to climate science have developed around homogenization, perhaps without adequate consideration of the value of more traditional statistical techniques that can be more easily replicated.  Indeed, we believe that our use of control charts has potentially broad application in the assessment of temperature data.

In the case of Darwin, which has a particularly important temperature time series used in the calculation of Australian and also global mean annual temperatures, the homogenized temperature time series display quite different trends from the raw series.  This has been a point of contention on blogs, in the popular press, and also in the technical literature.  We hope this controversy can be resolved, at least in part, through meticulous consideration of the evidence, and by applying more standard statistical techniques in particular control charts, before any subsequent assessment of rates of warming.

Comment was received back from the Editor-in-Chief that:

This paper does not fall within the scope of Environmental Modeling and Assessment.  Our readership is primarily interested in studies that analyse phenomena and complex decisions related to human interactions with the environment with the help of sophisticated quantitative models.  While the case study discussed here and its findings may well be valuable and publishable in a more specialised Climatology journal, the modelling methodology appears to be entirely routine and of little interest to our readership.

The manuscript was subsequently submitted to the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, with the editor, Hartmut Grassl, sending it out to four scientists for peer review.  He subsequently rejected the paper on the basis that:

Reviewers' comments on your work have now been received.  You will see that two reviewers reject your paper while the other two ask for modifications.  Therefore I have to reject your paper.

In fact, the comment from the first reviewer was as follows:

Reviewer #1:  Please see attached review.  I checked accept with minor revisions.  The revisions are so minor that I almost checked "Accept as is".  The paper does not need to be returned to me for further review.  It is a very nice piece of work.

If you're worried about privacy, you should worry about the 2016 census

If you blinked, you missed it.  On December 18 last year, the Australia Bureau of Statistics announced that at the 2016 census in August it would, for the first time, retain all the names and addresses it has collected "to enable a richer and dynamic statistical picture of Australia".

Keeping names and addresses, we were quietly told, would enable government planners to do more rigorous studies of social trends.

It is only now that the significance of the ABS's change is spilling out into the press.

For the past 45 years, it has been the ABS's practice to destroy that identifying information as soon as all other information on the census forms is transcribed — first onto magnetic tape, and now into vast digital data banks that allow statisticians to slice and dice at their whim.

In the 2001 census, the government first offered Australians a choice as to whether they would like their name-identified information kept.  This year that opt-in system will be a compulsory system.  Your name will be kept whether you like it or not.

The risks to privacy are blindingly obvious.  The safest way to protect data is to not collect it at all.  The second safest way is destroy that data after collection.  There is no such thing as 100 per cent safely secured information.  We know this from bitter experience.  The last decade has seen a constant stream of unauthorised releases of apparently secure private information:  the 2015 Ashley Madison hack being just the most embarrassing of these.

After all, privacy risks don't only come from hackers and other rogues.  Government departments have a poor record of protecting information from their own staff.  The Department of Human Services admitted there were 63 episodes of unauthorised access to private files by its staff between July 2012 and March 2013.  The South Australian Police Force accuses up to 100 of its own members of unauthorised access to police files every single year.  ABS staff are no more or less virtuous than any other public employee.

The ABS argues that identification information will be stored safely and separately from the rest of the census data, creating a firewall that protects against individual identification.  A spokesperson told Radio National last week that the ABS "never has and never will release information that is personally identifiable".

There are a lot of unanswered questions here.  But no matter what firewalls the ABS places around access and matching, it is a truism that any data that can be used usefully can also be used illegitimately.

And of course, what are considered legitimate and illegitimate uses of data can change over time.  Rules written in 2016 could be changed in 2026.  The data collected now might be used in a very different way down the track.

Identification retention could have practical consequences as well.  A population that is rightly worried about the security of their information is less likely to answer the census either accurately or at all.  Indeed, this has historically been the ABS's big concern with keeping identification.  They told a parliamentary committee in 1998 that the reduction in data quality from a reluctance to answer questions truthfully was not worth the trade-off.

A lower quality census would lead to lower quality government statistics across the board.  A lot of things hang off the census.  Census data guides electoral redistributions, Commonwealth grants, education funding and so on.  Risking the integrity of all that in the hope that future data might be marginally more interesting to genealogical researchers and government planners seems like a terrible deal.

Although they profess to have changed their mind on the risk of lower quality data, we can speculate these concerns might be why the ABS announced the new policy in the dead holiday season.  The less publicity given to the change, the less likely Australians are going to hear enough about the new census rules to be worried about their privacy.

While the Coalition's support for traditional rights and freedoms has taken a battering over the past few years, overriding the ABS decision would go some way to reclaiming its liberal heritage.

After all, it was a Liberal Treasurer, Billy Snedden, who first mandated the destruction of names and addresses in census forms in 1971 in response to privacy concerns.  And Cabinet records show the Fraser government — at the behest of treasurer John Howard — unhesitatingly and immediately rejecting a 1979 proposal by the law reform commission to retain census names and addresses.

The digitisation of absolutely everything has made privacy one of the central problems of the 21st century.  If anything, Australians are more aware of the dangers of identity theft and information insecurity than they have been at any time in history.

As the ABS change shows, the debate over warrantless mandatory data retention was just the tip of the iceberg.

It is true that modern governments are data hungry.  Planners and regulators want more and more information about the populations they govern.

But to the extent we have an interest in protecting ourselves against government excesses, we have an interest in denying governments carte blanche to collect information.  We are not just data points in a planner's spreadsheet.  They work for us.

Why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are political soulmates

In America and around the world, many people are scratching their heads trying to explain the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

In truth, they should be spending as much time trying to explain the rise of Bernie Sanders.  If Trump is the manifestation of the failure of the message of economic liberalism, Sanders personifies what social democracy has become.

That Sanders, an avowed socialist, could somehow potentially be the presidential nominee of one of America's two major political parties is remarkable.  Trump's illiberalism shades Sanders — but not by much.  As Mark Steyn, the North American columnist and author, said when he visited Australia last month, the main difference between Trump and Sanders is a billion dollars and a hairpiece.

Trump and Sanders are populists.  As the Australian Sam Gregg, now at the Acton Institute in Michigan, has identified, they follow the classic populist playbook.  "Among other things, this involves identifying the evil-doers (China, the one per cent, etc.) supposedly responsible for all our woes and proposing simplistic solutions that will be accomplished, apparently, because they say so."

Worse than the liking they both have for big government is the disdain each has for restraints on their potential power.

Sanders declared that "any Supreme Court nominee of mine will make overturning Citizens United one of their first decisions".  (Citizens United was a US Supreme Court case in 2010 that decided the First Amendment of the American Constitution prevented the government from imposing limits on how much third parties could spend on political campaigns.)

Trump has promised to have the army obey him rather than abide by the law.

IT COULD HAPPEN HERE

Populism, like identity politics, relies on the denial of the dignity and worth of the individual.  Populism and identity politics judge individuals not by their actions, but according to their background, skin colour, sexuality or some arbitrary characteristic.

What happens to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is of more than passing interest to Australians.  And a very relevant question is whether it could happen here.

The answer has to be yes — it certainly could.  We've had our fair share of populists — from depression-era NSW Labor premier Jack Lang to Clive Palmer.

According to some, Trump is the fault of America's education system.  That's the position of a prominent American commentator whose opinion was reported in this newspaper a few days ago.

"I do also think that this is what happens when you have a democracy of people who are not well-educated.  The Trump audience are white men who graduated from high schools that have taught them little and who have not been part of any more engaged, intelligent discourse," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Democrat who held a senior position in the US State Department under Hillary Clinton, and who is now head of a progressive think-tank in Washington.

Slaughter attended Oxford University, Princeton University and Harvard.  She taught at the latter two universities.  Her views echo what's uttered in the opinion pages of Salon and The New York Times, and in Ivy League common rooms up and down the east coast of America.

BLAME ON BOTH SIDES

If the blame for Trump falls on America's schools, then the finger must surely be pointed at the people responsible for that country's school system.  By and large, those people are not Republican.

If a "white man" has not learned enough to know not to vote for Trump, responsibility must rest with the Democratic Party-aligned teachers' unions that run America's public schools.  At least the country's largest union, the National Education Association, hasn't endorsed Sanders — instead it is supporting Hillary Clinton.

Blaming democracy for Donald Trump is a slippery slope.  As is implying that voters who support Trump are stupid.

A century ago, it was the conservative Right who opposed extending the franchise to blue-collar workers.  Now it's the progressive Left who are uncomfortable with the "not well-educated" having a vote — if that vote is cast for Donald Trump.

Anne-Marie Slaughter's point about high schools and Trump could just as easily apply to universities and Sanders.

Any Princeton or Harvard graduate who believes the answer to America's problems is socialism has clearly learned nothing about economics, history or politics.

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Why frequent flyers should care about interchange fees

Frequent flyers should be concerned about the Reserve Bank of Australia's proposed changes to interchange fee regulation that specifically targets credit cards linked to rewards programs.

While there has been a lot of noise made over the Turnbull government's proposed actions to ban excessive credit-card surcharges — particularly for online flight bookings — interchange fee regulation is an issue that has slipped under the radar.

Interchange fees are charges between two banks — not a hidden consumer fee.  First, a merchant service charge is paid by retailers to their bank.  Part of that charge is then passed on to the cardholder's bank — the interchange fee.  What cut each of those banks takes reflects the costs incurred and risks they bear in making the system work.  The interchange fee goes to pay for things like fraud protection, interest-free periods, and reward points — including frequent-flyer programs.  If the cardholder's bank has less money to pay for these benefits, the value of the benefits are either reined in or fees and charges are increased — or a combination of both.

Last year, Citibank was the first major credit-card issuer to make cuts to its reward programs — and now the trend is hitting the major banks.  Commonwealth Bank customers have had the value of their credit-card rewards points slashed by 20 per cent last week.

These announcements should not come as a surprise, because this is the experience right around the world.  For example, the European Union recently capped interchange fees at 0.3 per cent.  Within weeks, credit-card companies started to scrap mileage points and other rewards attached to their cards.  Annual fees for consumers were also heavily increased.

In 2003 the RBA capped the interchange fee.  This year, the RBA is proposing to tighten the cap even further by setting maximum limits, rather than an average.  The empirical evidence from all over the world proves that interchange regulation benefits retailers at the cardholders' expense.  As RMIT University professors Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts noted, "[In 2003] the RBA engaged in an extensive regulatory intervention based on poor theory and no empirical evidence."

The RBA's own data shows that interchange fee regulation has cost Australian credit-card consumers more than $8 billion over the past 12 years.  Yet, no evidence has been provided by the RBA — or any other body — to justify its plans for further regulation.

Unless the RBA learns from the past it is destined to repeat its mistakes.

The Turnbull government's response to the Murray Financial System Inquiry did not endorse a recommendation to lower interchange fees.  Last December, the Senate economics committee did not recommend any further regulation on interchange fees, instead proposing that the issue be referred to the Productivity Commission.

Yet, the RBA continues to stubbornly press on with its plans for further regulation.  These controls explicitly target credit cards linked to rewards and frequent-flyer programs.

This is bad news for all consumers with a rewards credit card.

First, because discounts, status credits, mileage points and reward seats are all benefits that travellers use regularly to keep their travel costs down.  Business travel is often a necessity, not a luxury.  For Australian domestic travel, programs including Qantas Frequent Flyer and Virgin Australia's Velocity are an important aspect of non-price competition for domestic routes, which helps to keep airfares low.

Second, because the regulations will also hurt competition and innovation in the credit-card market itself.  Every major bank has a co-branded Qantas credit card earning Qantas Points.  Velocity has co-branded arrangements with NAB and American Express and has a scheme where ANZ's Rewards credit-card points can be converted to Velocity points.  Virgin Money issues its own card linked to the Velocity program, while Qantas' subsidiary Jetstar issues its own credit card.  In total, frequent-flyer programs add more than 100 financial products to the credit-card market.

For some reason the RBA does not like reward points or frequent-flyer programs, and is determined to micromanage what cards consumers have access to.

The RBA fails to realise that a competitive market providing choice to consumers is the best way at regulating interchange fees.

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There's little to stop Trump wreaking havoc as president

There are supposed to be checks and balances that would prevent Donald Trump doing too much damage as US president.  But these have been eroded and an era of "imperial presidency" means we should be worried.

The prospect of a Donald Trump presidency shouldn't be as worrying as it is.

The United States constitution is specifically designed to prevent presidents from doing too much damage.  But the carefully, intelligently designed checks and balances built into the American system of government have been so eroded over the last century that a president Trump could do the sort of harm the founding fathers wished to prevent.

The issue is not so much Trump's policies.  I complained in January that Trump was no conservative — particularly on trade — but then again, he wouldn't be the first non-conservative president.  In fact, policy-by-policy he looks like the most moderate candidate in the Republican field;  the temporary ban on Muslim immigration to the United States notwithstanding.

Nor is being a "populist" a crime.  Trump would hardly be the first president who got to power by telling voters only what they wanted to hear.

What's worrying about Trump is his unpredictability, his disregard for any boundary between truth and self-serving fiction, his unbridled narcissism, his instability, and his apparent desire to pursue his enemies with the tools of high office.

He sees himself as a "strong man" — hence his apparent affinity with other strong men like Vladimir Putin.  And at this stage it is easy to imagine a chain of events that puts him in the White House.

The American founding fathers were aware that a democratic political system could turn out a person like Trump.  The Federalist Papers, the essays written in 1787 and 1788 to argue the case for the constitution, were motivated by a theory of human nature "that men are not to be trusted with power because they are selfish, passionate, full of whims, caprices, and prejudices," in the words of one scholar.

Hence in the famous Federalist Paper 51, James Madison argued that power must be separated between different branches of government.  Each branch — the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary — would vie for power against the others.

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," Madison wrote.  The institutional structures of the American republic would ensure that a strong man or narcissist, were they elected to the presidency, would be constrained by the other branches.

Yet those structures have been systematically degraded over the past century.  The presidency has accumulated power at the expense of the legislature.

As the word implies, the executive's intended function is to execute the laws passed by Congress.  But the modern presidency has carved out an enormous field of action where it can operate virtually without the oversight of the other branches.  The historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr. called this the "imperial presidency".

The most obvious example of the imperial presidency is foreign policy.  Under the text of the constitution, only the Congress has the power to declare war.  But the last war to be declared by Congress was World War II.  Since then presidents have been asserting almost unlimited, unilateral power over military engagement and interventionism.  The upshot is that, contrary to the founders' intentions, the president can effectively send the country to war on nothing but their own counsel.

Trump says he now opposes the invasion of Iraq, but he also wants to take Islamic State's oil.  Whatever strategy he implements to do so, the combined forces of the United States military are in practice at his complete disposal.

Just as concerning is the power the president can wield over public policy.  The original idea behind Western liberal democracy is that policy is made by the legislature as they negotiate and pass law.  But the growth of regulation as a substitute for statute has vested more and more power in the executive government.

In 2014 federal departments, agencies and commissions passed 16 new regulations for every one law the Congress passed.  As the economist Tyler Cowen wrote last month:  "If there were a president who wished to pursue vendettas, the regulatory state would be the most direct and simplest way for him or her to do so."  Having the vindictive Trump responsible for all this is dangerous.

The shift from a constrained presidency to an imperial presidency has been cultural as well.  In his book The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey K Tulis argues that the presidency has assumed a symbolic role not envisioned by the founders.

Voters — and the press — describe one of the key requirements of the office as "leadership".  Yet as Tulis points out, this was not what the founders hoped.  The Federalist Papers had only a dozen mentions of the word leader.  All but one were disparaging.

During the 20th century, the presidency became about words as much as administration — presidents were rated on their personalities and ability to channel popular sentiment.

Trump is the apotheosis of this change:  a demagoguing narcissist who is all surface and shine.  But all democracies are vulnerable to such populist figures.  The founders knew that.  If only their great institutions had been maintained.

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US voters need to beware of Sanders' false nostrums

Inequality issues are gaining traction in the American presidential campaign, but populist solutions threaten to make income and wealth extremes even worse.

Fatigued by war losses under George W. Bush, and flagging economic opportunities under Barack Obama, ordinary Americans in their droves are gravitating toward the political extremes, to the left and to the right, during the current presidential campaign.

Political conservatives have expressed their strong support for controversial businessman Donald Trump, whereas on the other side we have Bernie Sanders who had, in the northern American states, been waging a highly effective campaign undermining the Democratic Party establishment favourite Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps the hallmark of the Sanders campaign has been his preparedness to elevate the issue of inequality for his own political gain at every opportunity, and to be sure the distinctiveness of his anti-inequality message has resonated particularly strongly among American Millennials.

In these days of economic underperformance dashing the ambitions of millions of Americans, Sanders's narrative favouring massive government redistribution to fix inequality is a very far cry from stresses upon broad-based economic growth by even former Democrat presidents.

Bernie Sanders has shown he is certainly no tax-cutting Kennedy or welfare-reformist Bill Clinton when using his bully pulpit to foment feelings of angst and envy amongst the electorate about what is now being described as the "rigged" American economy.

Speaking to an audience at the private educational institution Liberty University in September last year, Sanders characterised the US economic scene as one "designed by the wealthiest people in this country [that is, the United States] to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else".

Sanders has been highlighting that the top 1 per cent of earners in the income distribution have amassed aggregate incomes vastly exceeding those earned by Americans towards the bottom of the economic heap, especially minority groups enduring above-average unemployment rates.

But to understand what Bernie Sanders means by the rigged economy, and why his proposed solutions are deeply problematic we need to take a back step.

Most people would probably accept some degree of inequality between people, or groups of people, arising from voluntary, win-win exchanges of valuable goods or services, where typically a successful seller earns more income relative to everybody else but the buyer gets the benefit of a bigger consumption bundle.

As a number of economists have pointed out, inequality trends should be interpreted in light of, among other things, a massive improvement in the availability and affordability of a wide range of products becoming more easily within reach of even someone earning a very modest income.

But as the American economist Richard Wagner points out, there is a great deal of difference between a win-win connection between people engaging in a market transaction and the nature of any political intervention in the economy.

In a political deal we have, first, the politician doling out a subsidy, tax break or regulatory holiday, and, then, a dependent voter or crony capitalist who receives the benefit.

But then there are the rest of us, who lose out as a result of the political connections being made.

The rest of us happen to get slugged with a tax impost to pay for somebody else's benefits, or we are being prevented from easily climbing up the economic ladder for ourselves because of punitive regulations.

It is this win-win-lose political triadic that Sanders refers to when decrying the corrupting effects of the likes of bank bailouts, corporate welfare, and political donations, a message even receiving support from American businessman, philanthropist and self-described classical liberal Charles Koch.

Concurring with Sanders' concern about a rigged economy Koch recently said, "Democrats and Republicans have too often favoured policies and regulations that pick winners and losers.  This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States".

Classical liberals and left-progressives can generally agree that vastly winding back the rigged economy, favouring the few at the expense of the many, is an important matter, but they sharply differ between each other on the most desirable means to achieve that end.

Figures within the political left nowadays, including Bernie Sanders, support even more political intervention to suppress inequality, advocating progressive tax hikes hitting the top combined with free social services and pay rises favouring the bottom, and Sanders is certainly no exception in this regard.

In the scenario, now looking far less likely, that Sanders wins the presidency, the big winner from his program would happen to be Sanders himself, who gains a big pay rise and massive political power at the expense of American citizens and taxpayers.

The US federal bureaucracy would also win large under a Sanders presidency, with estimates that implementing single-payer health care, free tuition at public universities and other "freebies" to targeted political constituencies would cost at least $18 trillion over 10 years.

Such a massive boost in concentrated political power would, in itself, aggravate inequality outcomes in the United States and thus be highly counterproductive in the quest to rid America of its rigged economy.

Estimates produced by the Brookings Institution show increasing top income tax rates would make little dent in statistically evening out the income distribution, whereas the tax costs of specific programs such as single-payer health care would fall primarily upon the middle class.

The economic effects of minimum wages remains the subject of debate, but the weight of the evidence indicates the Sanders proposal to raise US minimum wages will lead to considerable job losses among the young, the unskilled, and others with only a fleeting connection to the job market.

All in all, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the ultimate beneficiaries of the Bernie Sanders agenda would be high-wealth individuals and incumbent corporations who can already afford to pay high levels of tax and bear the brunt of prescriptive regulations.

In other words, Sanders would rig the American economy even more at the expense of politically disconnected innovators aspiring to undercut the featherbedded crony capitalists, and the poor looking to get their break to earn more income and attain more wealth for themselves and their families.

When all is said and done, Sanders may not win the Democratic nomination, but Hillary Clinton and Western leftists everywhere else will be keen to embrace Sanders's populist campaign of envy as their own.

Before that shift in rhetorical strategy becomes entrenched one can only hope that voters will appreciate that trying to eliminate inequality by making government bigger will make matters only worse.

Now Michael Lawler's gone, abolish the Fair Work Commission too

Yesterday's resignation of Fair Work Commission Vice President Michael Lawler should be the first in a two-step reform process.

The second step should be the resignation of his forty three colleagues and the dissolution of the Commission itself.

The Fair Work Commission, which has been around in different forms since 1904, is the last surviving relic of a bygone era of centrally mandated wages, high tariffs, a fixed exchange rate, restricted immigration and preferential trade within the British Empire.

But while the rest of the Australian economy has modernised over the last hundred years, the Commission lives on, with its age starting to show.

Fair Work has a ridiculously top-heavy structure including a President, two Vice Presidents, one (now) Vice President styled as a Deputy President, six Senior Deputy Presidents, eleven Deputy Presidents, and twenty two ordinary Commissioners.

Commissioners enjoy "the same protection and immunity as a Justice of the High Court," are appointed until they turn 65, and can only be dismissed by both houses of the federal parliament.

Its wide responsibilities include deciding minimum wages and the contents of awards, resolving workplace disputes, approving enterprise agreements, allowing strikes, granting right of entry permits and regulating trade unions and employer organisations.

Yet despite last year's Productivity Commission's report into Australia's workplace relations framework describing it as the "largest price setting entity in the Australian economy" its inconsistent and out of touch decisions are legendary.

Just last year it decided that CFMEU-affiliated miners were entitled to a productivity bonus while on strike, unfriending a workplace colleague on Facebook constituted bullying, and a worker who drank too much at an office Christmas Party then abused and harassed colleagues was unfairly dismissed partly because he was "never refused a drink".

My report in mid-2015 found that half of its Commissioners were former trade union officials or had a past involvement with the ALP.

The typical union response that the current Coalition Government has appointed a handful of "employer-organisation friendly" members since 2013 misses the point.

Arguments about how many union or employer organisation officials are appointed to the Fair Work Commission, and persistent assertions of Commissioner bias when making decisions, have no equivalent in similar bodies, whether they be the High or Federal Courts, State Supreme Courts or other judicial tribunals.

When two teams fight about who "owns" the umpire, you know you have a problem.

Fair Work has only survived because of its symbiotic relationship with the trade union movement and the ALP, as well as the inability of the Coalition to mount a consistent case for change.

While the Productivity Commission recommended excising its minimum wage and award determination powers, tightening unfair dismissal procedures, limiting member appointments to ten years, and increasing external scrutiny, it should have gone further.

All functions to do with the regulation of employer organisations and unions should be transferred to a new Registered Organisations Commission.

Its dispute resolution functions could be handled either by a new, small, professional arbitration panel, or by independent private sector arbitrators free of stakeholder entanglements.

The various workplace safety nets could be managed by a new, economically-focused body or better still, consolidated into a single set of National Employment Standards.

A truly modern vision for a 21st century workplace relations system would actively seek to break down the old big boss, big union, big government relationship.

The effective exemption of unions and employer organisations from competition law, prescription of uniform wages and conditions regardless of the ability of a business to pay, and blurred lines between participant, regulator, and legislator are all policy areas worthy of fresh scrutiny.

A workplace relations system that reinforces union privilege despite union membership dropping from 46 per cent of the workforce in 1986 to 15 per cent today does not accurately reflect employee choices.

In fact, with union membership in the private sector down to 11 per cent, there are now more Australians who are members of an Australian Rules football club than there are private sector full-time employees who are trade union members.

Wages aren't paid by industries, states or countries.  They are paid by individual businesses, and the workplace relations system should reflect this.

The Turnbull Government's self-professed enthusiasm for innovation will count for little if its new start-ups are too afraid to hire people.  The Government should bite the bullet and take a significant reform package to the Federal Election that includes the Fair Work Commission's dissolution.

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Furniture, rent-seeking and the problem with laws

The current debate over furniture design and intellectual property is a symptom of the wider problem we face when vested interests take hold and the law takes on a life of its own.

Law often takes on a life of its own.

We see this all the time.  First, parliament introduces a law to solve a public policy problem.  Decades pass.  Things change.  Perhaps the problem might no longer be considered a problem.  Technologies change.  Opinions change.  But it is easier to pass a bill than repeal an act.  Special interests come to rely on the status quo.  As a result, governments often reconceptualise why the law was first introduced in order to defend that status quo.

Nowhere is this pattern more obvious than in that cesspit of special interest rent-seeking that we call intellectual property law.

The United Kingdom has decided to increase the intellectual property protection for design — which covers manufactured artistic creations like furniture, jewellery, and architecture — from the life of the creator plus 25 years for registered design works, to the life of the creator plus 75 years.  An extension of 50 years.

In practice this means design works will get the same length of protection enjoyed by other artistic creations.  Furniture, architecture and jewellery designs will be treated much the same as songs and movies in copyright law.  Once their protection expires, other manufacturers are free to reproduce the designs, as long as they describe their products as "replicas" or "reproductions" of original designs (lest they violate trademark law).

In Australia, furniture designers want the same changes.  Here design protection lasts just 10 years.  An Australian manufacturer told BRW in January that Australian design protection was inadequate.  A spokesperson from the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller told Fairfax's Domain last week that companies selling replica design furniture are "tricking the consumer and undervaluing the original design".

There's a lot of money at stake.  The iconic Eames lounge chair will set you back about $8,000 if you buy an authentic one produced by Herman Miller.  But the chair was first designed in 1956 and is long out of design protection.  So you can get a replica of the Eames lounge chair for a tenth of that price from any number of retailers.

A licensed edition of the even more ubiquitous, and older, Eames plastic moulded side chair will cost the better part of $1000.  Or you could pick up a replica for $80 or so.

Part of this price difference is due to quality.  Another is the price of the brand — manufacturers are able to charge a premium for customers who want the real deal rather than an inauthentic product.

But none of that price difference is because the designers have to recoup the cost of the original design.  It has been a long time since Herman Miller recouped the design cost on their lounge chair.

And that is all that matters.  Justifying the UK change, the minister for intellectual property, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, argued it would right the "unfair" imbalance between manufactured designs and other artistic production.

But what does fairness have to do with it?  Intellectual property law is not about being fair to furniture designers.  Intellectual property has a purpose.

Standard economic theory says the market will under-provide creative products because creative products are easy to copy.  To fix this, intellectual property offers creative producers a monopoly over their work.  But that monopoly is only available for a time, because we, the consumers of creative work, have an interest in accessing and repurposing the back catalogue of human creativity.

All these caveats mean that intellectual property isn't really property, as I've argued in the Drum before — it's a regulatory workaround to an assumed market failure.  It only has value insofar as it resolves that failure.  It does not exist to funnel consumers into high-priced authenticity.

Furniture design is an example of a creative market that thrives despite lacking much of the intellectual property protection enjoyed by other creative works.  Indeed, the fact that Herman Miller can still charge enormous sums for a design available at a tenth the price shows that both the cheap and expensive wings of the market can co-exist.

The availability of replica mid-century design means more people can enjoy better aesthetics at home.  It is hard to see what public benefit restricting these designs to people who can spend $800 on a single side chair — as the UK government is doing — would provide.

Sure, on the scale of national politics, how long the design monopoly over Eames chairs should last is a pretty minor thing.  But it is an informative one.  If the government establishes privileges for one group others will want equivalent privileges.

The content of intellectual property law is almost never considered from first principles — that is, what do we fundamentally want our intellectual property regime to achieve.  Rather, it is a scruffle of political power, long divorced from the theory of market failure and a textbook need for clever regulatory intervention.

The Coalition Government has spent the last few years trying to crack down on copyright infringement.  If policymakers cared about the purpose of copyright protection they would only do so if it was clear that such a crackdown would lead to the creation of more new creative works.  Of course there is no evidence that it will.  But the holders of the rights to movies and music believe that pirates are depriving them of revenue.  And governments listen because they've forgotten why copyright protection was introduced in the first place.

In other words, intellectual property has become its own justification.  Put down your textbooks.  This is how law works in the real world.

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