Contempt Drama May Spur Reform Of Outdated Law

Taxpayers are entitled to engage in public debate, including to criticise those whose salaries they fund:  politicians, bureaucrats, judges.

The time has come to reform contempt of court laws to better protect freedom of speech.

Earlier this month, three ministers in the Turnbull government — Greg Hunt, Michael Sukkar, and Alan Tudge — came remarkably close to becoming defendants in a contempt of court trial.

The conduct that triggered the Victorian Court of Appeal into action involved comments made by the three Victorian members of federal parliament — which were published in a news report in this newspaper — on the adequacy of sentencing in terrorism cases in their home state.

According to the court, such a trial would have proceeded but for an apology and retraction by the ministers concerned.

The decision to summon the three ministers at a hearing into the matter was an extraordinary step.  Direct clashes between the three arms of government are rare in Australia.  But this was an example of a clear conflict between the judiciary and the executive.

Victorian Chief Justice Marilyn Warren explicitly acknowledged this when she said the ministers' conduct equated to a failure "to respect the doctrine of separation of powers".

Such a claim — that robust public criticism of the sentencing habits of the judiciary by ministers of the crown amounts to a breach of the doctrine of the separation of powers — is a big call.

Frankly, I disagree with the assertion that mere words could put our system of government at risk.  But putting that to one side, the case is likely to cause ongoing ramifications.

In demanding an explanation from the three ministers, the Court of Appeal may have unwittingly set in train a process leading to the reform of the law of contempt of court.

The case certainly raises a number of legitimate concerns.  Chief among these is the threat it represents to freedom of expression.

The judgment, handed down by Chief Justice Warren on June 23, is troubling for those that believe strongly in the principle of free speech.

That the court took steps to schedule a mention hearing in this matter is frightening enough.  But the idea that the court had formed the view that the conduct of the ministers, as well as this newspaper, amounted to a breach of the sub judice rule is even more alarming.

The decision in this case has also been used as an unequivocal warning against other members of the government from acting in the same way:  "The court states in the strongest terms that it is expected there will be no repetition of this type of appalling behaviour.  It was fundamentally wrong.  It would be a grave matter for the administration of justice if it were to re-occur."

This is fiery language from the judiciary, which tends to go out of its way to use sober language.  The judgment is an attempt to narrow parameters of debate around the court, and coupled with the decision to commence these proceedings in the first place it may be successful in the short term.

However, in the long term it's likely that this will be used as an example of the need for reform.

South Australian senator Nick Xenophon's call this week for a parliamentary inquiry is the start of that process.  The initiative is a very good one.

Given the recent raw experience of the Coalition it will be inclined to support the inquiry, as will senator Derryn Hinch, as well as others on the crossbench who believe in free speech, such as the LDP's senator David Leyonhjelm.

Senator Xenophon said he intended to pursue an inquiry along the lines of terms of reference used in previous contempt of court inquiries conducted by the Australian Law Reform Commission and the NSW Law Reform Commission.

Both inquiries recommended changes to the law.

Those inquiries also show the existence of reforms that ought to garner broad support, such as the peculiarity of the process used in contempt cases.

The great US Supreme Court judge Hugo Black called for reform to the unusual mode of trial involved in contempt of court proceedings in his dissenting judgment in United States v Barnett:  "... one person has concentrated in himself the power to charge a man with a crime, prosecute him for it, conduct his trial, and then find him guilty".  Those words were written in 1964.  Surely now the time has come for reform.

A parliamentary inquiry into the crime of contempt of court will allow for the problems in this area of law to be uncovered.

How Howard's Great GST Bargain Got Trashed By Canberra

Policy elites take the view that former prime minister John Howard did a deal with Meg Lees and the Democrats to introduce the GST.  In a trivial procedural sense that is accurate.  More importantly, however, Howard did a deal with the Australian people that in return for repealing a huge bunch of nuisance taxes, the Commonwealth could levy a broad-based goods and services consumption tax.

The electorate has held politicians to that deal — tampering with the GST has very quickly become a no-go zone.  Politicians who try to vary the rate, or base, fast find themselves on the receiving end of voter dissatisfaction.

Australia has done very well out of the GST settlement — many inefficient taxes have been repealed and massive revenue flows have been directed to the states and territories.  While there is some dissatisfaction with the distribution of GST to Western Australia, the tax quickly became a widely accepted and understood part of the fiscal landscape.

Howard's genius in devising the GST was to ensure that the Commonwealth that collected the tax had no incentive to vary the arrangement while ensuring that it bore all the political cost of doing so.  After 17 years, the political class has found a loophole.

An unprincipled Coalition government is trashing the Howard settlement.  First, we saw the attempt to apply the GST to low-value imported goods bought online for under $1000.  That piece of silliness is at the Productivity Commission to work out how it can be done — mind you, the start date for this yet-to-be-designed tax is July next year.  But it is the bank levy that looks to be the most egregious violation of the GST settlement.

The levy announced at the last budget is a nuisance tax — exactly the sort of tax the GST was meant to eliminate.  All sorts of propaganda has been proposed to justify the tax, but the bottom line is that there is a hole in the budget due to excessive spending and the government needed a plug.  Who better to whack than those ungrateful banks — who, apparently, have plenty of money and can afford it anyway.

Contrast the bank levy with the ill-fated mining tax.  Taxing rent is the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine and was always a bad idea.  Nonetheless, the government hoped to substitute a tax on rent for royalties — in theory, at least, an economic improvement.  Contrast the bank levy with the carbon tax.  There the government had the notion that a less carbon-reliant economy would lead to improved living standards sometime in the future.  That view seems to be bipartisan policy.

NO NOBLE NOTIONS

The bank levy has no such noble notions — rather, it is a mechanism to raise revenue from people who have annoyed the government.

That South Australia would copy the bank levy seems to have caught everyone off guard.  In an audacious move, the South Australians have not just wedged the federal government, they have skewered them.  How does it argue that the state-based bank levy is a violation of the GST agreement but the identical federal-based levy is not?

Of course, we should all have seen this coming.  After all, when the federal government introduced the mining tax Mark II they promised to refund all royalties and the states responded promptly by raising their royalty rates.

One way of thinking about federal-state fiscal arrangements is as a cartel.  The various tax bases are carved up and shared out with a dominant player and a series of smaller players.  At the last budget, we saw the dominant player create a new tax base and provide political cover for the smaller players to increase their share.

It gets worse.

COMPELLED TO FOLLOW SUIT

If South Australia manages to "get away" with its bank levy, all the other states will almost certainly be compelled to follow suit.  The GST distribution mechanism penalises states that do not fully exploit their existing tax bases.  Not only will not having a bank levy result in lower tax revenue, it could also result in lower GST revenue from the Commonwealth.

Howard's GST settlement requires the Commonwealth to jealously maintain integrity of the system.  But when the Commonwealth itself breaks the deal, it could be impossible to stop the states from defecting as well.

SA's Bank Levy Adding To Business' Burden Is Derelict Conduct

It's hard to know where to start on the South Australian bank tax.  It is just that bad.

The massive new impost on the four major banks and the ­Macquarie Group was announced by SA Treasurer Tom Kout­san­tonis in the state budget ­released last week.

The Treasurer believes the tax will raise $370 million over the next four years.  But as we know, the assumptions behind revenue estimates from new taxes are ­almost always somewhere just short of heroic.

And the problem with the new bank tax is not whether it will raise the revenue claimed by the government.  The key issue is that new taxes on any part of the state's economy are the last thing that state needs.

One of the great moral challenges of our time is getting people into fulfilling, meaningful work.  This is a particular challenge in SA.  The under-­utilisation rate in SA is the highest in the country at 16.6 per cent, ­according to the May labour force figures from the Australian ­Bureau of Statistics.  While unemployment fell in every other state in Australia, it climbed to 7.3 per cent in South Australia.

And this is where Koutsan­tonis's rhetoric about the profitability of the banks is most galling, because unprofitable businesses can't employ people.  It's only companies making money that are able to do so.  In a very real way, the SA bank tax is a tax on jobs.

If the Treasurer was interested in reversing the downward spiral in which his state finds itself, he might want to consider doing the opposite:  cutting taxes and cutting red tape to attract investment now draining out of the SA economy.  The ability of any state, or country for that matter, to attract investment is largely a function of risk.  Risks can take many forms, and there are some that cannot be controlled.  But regulatory risk is something over which governments have complete control.  And the SA economy has just been saddled with another risk consciously imposed by government.

It's unconscionable.  It's economic vandalism.  And it presents investors with yet another reason to turn somewhere else.

This is bad policy.  And the timing couldn't be worse.

Sadly, the ability of the federal Coalition government to attack the measure is fatally wounded by the fact it laid the blueprint.  Technical, legal and constitutional ­arguments aside, the bank tax is ­either a good idea in principle or it's not.  The suggestion that it's a good idea at the national level but a bad idea at the state level just doesn't wash.  The door to the SA bank tax was opened by federal Treasurer Scott Morrison.

Comments by Malcolm Turnbull could not have made that more obvious when he said, "... the question that Mr Weatherill has got to answer is that, is his decision going to make business in South Australia more competitive or less competitive".

Replace the words "Mr Weatherill" with "Mr Turnbull" and "South Australia" with "Australia" and you've got a knock-down ­argument against Turnbull and Morrison's own policy.

And does anyone believe this will be the end of it?  The West ­Australian government flagged ­almost immediately its interest and said it will be watching the ­implementation of the SA tax with great ­interest.

And the overseas experience gives us a good indication of what's to come here in Australia.

Britain introduced a bank liabilities tax in 2011.  Since that time the rate at which the tax applies has been increased seven times.

Of course it's also worth pointing out that while it would have been better for Britain to refuse to bail out its banks during the global financial crisis and therefore avoid the cost to the taxpayer and the ­attendant moral hazard that comes with that kind of government action, the rationale for a bank tax in Britain was stronger than here.  The British bank levy was about recouping the $47.5 billion that had been spent bailing out the banks.  In Australia, where no such costs have been directly ­imposed on the taxpayer, the ­stated rationale for both the federal and the state bank tax has been to raise revenue to pay for unrelated public expenditure.

SA is unlikely to be the last state to implement its own bank tax.  And I'd wager that the rate of the federal bank tax won't stay at 0.06 per cent either.

But at a time of slow — and in some cases negative — growth, politicians seeking to pursue policies that add further burdens on business are engaging in negligent conduct.

Instead, our elected representatives need to be implementing policies that will lead Australia into a future of opportunity and prosperity.  More and higher taxes have never been able to achieve that.

Central Bank Has A Strange Idea Of How To Strengthen The Economy

Who wouldn't like to get a huge pay increase?  According to RBA governor Philip Lowe we should all be nagging our bosses for a greater share of the national economic pie.  If we all got a huge pay increase that "would be a good thing".  Mind you — keeping our jobs would be a very good thing.

Therein lies the problem with Philip Lowe's comments.  A growing economy, with surging profits, and a declining unemployment rate should be a great time to be telling the boss that you needed a tad more in your pay packet.  But outside of official government forecasts the economy doesn't look to be in that happy place.  Right now rising wages would simply translate to rising business failures and greater unemployment.

In the last financial year private sector wage growth was a paltry 2 per cent — the lowest level since records began in 1998.  Public sector wage growth was 2.4 per cent.  In the March quarter of this year the annual private wage growth rate was even lower at 1.8 per cent.

The budget papers are forecasting an increase in Australian wage growth over the next few years — to a massive 3 per cent in 2018-19.  Yet we know that wage growth has been in decline since 2011.  Why should the turnaround happen now?  Apart from encouraging workers to get a bit more bolshie what policy will the government, or the RBA, introduce to drive economic growth to higher levels in order to justify massive pay increases?  This is the same government that is increasing the tax burden in a slowing economy.

What isn't clear is why Dr Lowe thinks higher wages is a good idea right now.  Hopefully he does not subscribe to the notion that increased wages will lead to increased inflation.  This populist notion is quite wrong — inflation leads to higher wage demands, but not vice versa.  Similarly I hope he doesn't subscribe to the notion that increased demand from consumers will stimulate the economy.  Economic stimulus will only come from lower taxes, less red tape, and fewer of the bad policy choices that have increased sovereign risks over the last decade.  Australians are very likely to use higher wages to buy down household debt.

SLUGGISH PERFORMACE

The fact of the matter is that Australian economic performance has been sluggish since the GFC.  True, we did avoid a "technical recession" but nobody could seriously argue that we are as relaxed and comfortable as we were prior to 2008.  Given the debt and deficits that successive Commonwealth governments have run and will continue to run for the foreseeable future it is entirely unsurprising that private growth, private initiative, private investment, and private wages continue to languish.

Wanting Australians to enjoy higher wages is admirable but Dr Lowe should be talking to his own bosses in Canberra about their policy choices to make that happen.  He might even talk to them about productivity.  Paul Krugman was quite correct to say that in the long run it is almost everything.  Without productivity improvements wages simply cannot increase without imposing huge economic and social costs on the economy.  With a government that taxes too much and regulates too much it is unlikely that productivity improvements will drive the sort of wage growth we'd all like to see.

Why The Libs Will Never GetUp!

Many things will be talked about when the Liberal Party's hierarchy gather in Sydney this weekend for their federal council meeting.  Those focused on the short-term will be discussing two numbers — 14 and 30.

The Coalition under Malcolm Turnbull has now lost 14 consecutive Newspoll surveys to Labor.  Famously, the current PM said the former PM had to be removed because the Liberals had lost "30 Newspolls in a row".  Those focused on the long-term will be contemplating the future for the Liberal Party and for liberalism in the years ahead.

No doubt there'll be some debate about how bright that future is.  Whether a centre-right version of GetUp! can be created to campaign for the Liberals in the same way GetUp! campaigns for the Labor Party will inevitably be raised as a topic — as it's been raised in Liberal and conservative circles for years.  After about one minute's reflection, any Liberal who knows anything at all about politics will come to the conclusion that there's no way a non-left wing version of GetUp! can be developed to assist the Liberal Party.

For as long as the Liberals' parliamentary leadership continues to claim their policies are "pragmatic", "non-ideological" and "centrist" there'll never be a centre-right version of GetUp! campaigning for the Liberals.  The reason someone sits in a cold and blowy church hall on a Wednesday night in the middle of winter telephoning strangers asking for their vote is because they want to change the world.  Opening our borders to refugees is changing the world.  As is cutting the country's emissions of carbon dioxide to zero.

The objectives of the left might be hopelessly misconceived, but to those who believe in them have convinced themselves such objectives are ambitious, optimistic, and positive.

The left-wing politicians supported by the likes of GetUp! aren't afraid to talk about their ideology of social change.  Many Liberal MPs are terrified of admitting they're motivated by a political philosophy.  The Liberals' last federal budget promised higher taxes, higher government spending, and more regulation.

If you agreed with such things you probably wouldn't join a Liberal-leaning GetUp!  The chances are you'd be out campaigning for the Greens.  Liberals now fear GetUp! nearly as much as they fear the ACTU.  One of the reasons some backbench Liberal MPs gave for not supporting a repeal of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act is they were worried GetUp! would campaign against them.

The capacity of the left to mobilise grassroots community activism has always been admired from afar by the Liberals.  In recent years that's turned to fear as activism has been harnessed into marginal seat campaigns that could decide elections.  Of course much of that "grassroots" activism is nothing of the kind — it is scripted, coordinated, and funded by trade unions and left-wing, non-government organisations.

Young people are particularly susceptible to left-community activism because for nearly all of their life everything they got was given to them by someone else.  The core message of the left is that there's always someone else to pay.  Bitter experience of the real world gets older people to vote a certain way, whereas misplaced idealism is what directs young people to vote they way they do.

Passion goes a long way in politics.  Jeremy Corbyn, who'd be the British prime minister now if 2227 voters out of 32 million had changed their ballot, might not be exactly passionate, but he had more passion than Theresa May.  Donald Trump was passionate.  Hillary Clinton was not.  A few months before the election Clinton couldn't comprehend how Trump would be generating such momentum and so many donations given, that her campaign had 800 paid staff, and Trump's had only 130.  It's hard to recall the last time a Liberal politician in Australia was passionate ... about anything.

Perhaps the last time a Liberal displayed some passion was on election night last year when Malcolm Turnbull thought he might have lost the election.  If the Liberals ever presented an ambitious policy agenda of personal and economic freedom, and if they got passionate about it, then they wouldn't need a centre-right GetUp!  They'd be able to win elections on their own.

Is That Tax Policy Or Slapstick Comedy?

The relationship between taxpayers and government should be symbiotic — to the mutual benefit of each party.  This is certainly what Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote that everyone should contribute to the support of government in proportion to the revenue they enjoy under the protection of the state.  He also wrote that paying tax was a badge of freedom and not the mark of a slave.  How times have changed.

A lack of fiscal discipline has seen ten years of budget deficits translate into over half a trillion dollars worth of debt.  That is over five hundred thousand million dollars.  You'd think that the government would have stopped spending money, cut staff, and salaries.  Delayed, or even cancelled, big ticket spending items that are unaffordable?  Well, no.

The government have turned a symbiotic relationship into a parasitic relationship.  The past week has seen two disgraceful tax incidents.

At the last budget, the government announced a bank levy — a tax on tier-two bank capital.  As if taxing capital was ever a good idea.  This is a tax that strikes at the very heart of the banking system.  Banking, as a business, involves lending borrowed money.  Lending out your own money is venture capitalism.  Expect to see some capital rationing and higher lending rates in the next few years as banks pass this levy onto their customers.

To make matters worse, the government contrived to apply this levy to only five banks.  One of those banks has threatened to move their operations offshore.  It takes a special kind of stupid to so obviously destroy Australian economic activity and local initiative.  It seems, however, that our friends in Canberra are up to the challenge.  Mind you — have they ever stopped to think why investment, wages, and economic growth have been so sluggish of late?  Probably not.

Not to be outdone, South Australia has just announced they will be copying the federal bank levy.  This is precisely the sort of state-based nuisance tax that the GST was brought in to eliminate.  It is very disappointing that politicians are reneging on the tax deal that the Howard government negotiated with the Australian people when the GST was introduced a mere 17 years ago.  Of course, it is very difficult for the federal government to hold the South Australian government to account when they themselves are trashing the Howard legacy.

Then there is the GST on low-value imported goods fiasco.  The government has a tax law that will come into effect on July 1, 2018 but has asked the Productivity Commission to advise them how to actually make it work.  Clearly, it can't operate on the same basis as goods above the $1000 threshold.  That isn't economically viable — the government would be borrowing money to collect less tax than it cost to collect the revenue.  Even our current crop of politicians realised that wasn't too smart.

Plan B was to require online business platforms to collect the tax from their own clients and then pass it on to the Australian government.  This required foreigners to voluntarily comply with Australian tax laws when Australian citizens have to be coerced into compliance.  This would almost certainly have resulted in Australians being geo-blocked on many platforms.  On the positive side, nobody would have to worry about the slow NBN speeds if Australians were excluded from online activity.

All this sounds like some low-budget slapstick comedy, but this is what tax policy has become.  Canberra needs to get serious — stop trying to grow the tax take and focus on growing the economy.

Senator's Inspirational First Speech Savages Welfare Traps

"I remember the first time we found welfare money in our bank account shortly after our arrival in Australia," South Australian Senator Lucy Gichuhi said this week in an inspirational first speech.  "We were terrified because we were not used to receiving money for nothing from strangers.  All I knew was that the only time you get money is when you work for it.  I said to my husband, 'We will have to return it‘."

Gichuhi is Australia's first black African-born senator.  She arrived in Australia on a "warm summer day in 1999", and was immediately struck by Australia's successful melting pot.  "Right in that airport, I encountered Australians, Europeans, Asians and Africans from all over the world, living and working together harmoniously".

Nevertheless, Gichuhi explains the difficulty of financial management and balancing work, home life and raising young children.  In particular, she was shocked by our welfare system — the idea of paying people money to not work made no sense.

"The message was quite clear:  I could choose to be a victim and receive a handout for a long time, or I could choose the more challenging but empowering road and find a job and learn how to balance work and family life," Gichuhi said.  In the end, she chose empowerment, "I had to put an end to this tedious welfare-work dance ... I chose to work, even if that meant going back to school and changing my career path to suit my circumstances".

Quoting from John Howard's first speech, Gichuhi derides our welfare trap destroying opportunity and choice.  "This trap creates stress on those who soon discover they are unable to find a way out.  Welfare now becomes their only choice.  This creates a welfare-dependent syndrome that could be intergenerational."

Gichuhi also hits out at the corporate welfare trap:  "As an accountant, I believe the corporate welfare mentality should be traded for a sustainable business model mentality".

Gichuhi has "learnt that spending money you have not worked for fundamentally changes who you are and inhibits your capacity and ability to become all you could be".  In the end, "a job is the best form of welfare".

Gichuhi grew up on the beautiful slopes of Mount Kenya, where she discovered that "true poverty was when a person is unable to freely choose their own destiny.  It is when a person does not have options."  She says her:

Role as a senator is to ensure in any way I can, great or small, that Australia does not slip into the latter form of poverty.  Most importantly, Australian civil institutions, such as the legal, political, electoral and socioeconomic institutions, must remain transparent and accountable to every Australian.

Gichuhi, a first generation immigrant, has come to see what many Australians born here can miss.  The great opportunities provided by a free, democratic country.  But also seen the dangers of a welfare system that punishes work and disempowers.  The new senator from South Australia is one to watch.

Hello Triggs-Lite, Goodbye Free Speech

It's clear now that the Coalition government is not only uninterested in the idea of restructuring the bureaucracy, but it also is not even interested in making decent appointments.

The Commonwealth government has an almost untrammelled ability to appoint anyone it likes to powerful bureaucratic positions such as the AHRC presidency.  The choice was for the government was to pick someone that would defend fundamental human freedoms like freedom of speech, or to pick someone who represents the status quo who would oversee the continued erosion of our freedoms.

With the appointment of Rosalind Croucher to the presidency of the Australian Human Rights Commission, the government has chosen the latter.

Croucher, who is the outgoing head of the Australian Law Reform Commission, is Triggs-lite.  One need only read this 3 March 2016 article in The Australian authored by Croucher herself to see why.  In the article — littered with references to international law — Croucher identifies the constitutional vulnerability of section 18C's prohibition of speech or acts that "offend" because of a person's race.  Accompanying this observation is the note that not only are racial vilification laws are needed, and that "there might be a need for new criminal laws to target the most serious types of racial vilification."  Croucher concludes the article by contemplating extending 18C to other areas by noting how the ALRC's work can "complement work that considers other ways to protect rights — such as by creating new causes of action or new offences, or by enacting a bill of rights."

Is this really significantly different to Triggs?  Triggs even said once of the call to repeal section 18C that "Of course it is possible to tweak it, to amend it, to take language out and to put new language in that strengthens it — all of that we of course fully support as a matter of law."  Even the shadow attorney-general sees Croucher as a continuation of Triggs:

This episode can be contrasted with how conservative governments approach in the United States.  There, appointing solid conservatives to key positions is seen as a fundamental duty of the Republicans when they get into power.  President Trump's promise to appoint a legal conservative was a key election promise.

This is sadly not the case in Australia.  This is why an originalist judge in Neil Gorsuch is about to officially join the US Supreme Court, but the Coalition, ever fearing the response from the ABC and the Canberra press gallery, makes Labor's appointments for them.

What Will They Finkel Next?

The greatest contribution the Finkel Review makes to Australian public policy may, in fact, be a new verb.

From June 2017, to "finkel" will be a term to describe how a government sets up an independent review that quickly gets hijacked by vested interests, rewrites its own terms of reference and delivers a report with skewed modelling and a patchwork of contradictory recommendations burning its political masters.

It has all been too clever by half.

The Finkel Review was set up in the wake of the September 2016 blackout in South Australia which many at the time thought would be the beginning of the end of renewables' stranglehold on Australian policy makers — state and federal, Labor and Liberal.

In the twenty-first century, an established state in a modern, industrialised economy went black.  Finally, the chickens would come home to roost and a road map put together charting a way back to affordable and reliable electricity in a country that should be spoilt for choice.

Yet the preliminary report published barely two months later gave some clues that the empire was quickly striking back.

It was arranged in accordance with seven North Korean-inspired themes including "Consumers are Driving Change", "The Transition to a Low-Emissions Economy is Underway", and "Technology is Transforming the Electricity Sector".

Its limited case study of the South Australian blackout all but ignored that state's post-renewables reliance on brown coal electricity generated over 600 kilometres away in eastern Victoria.

It also included a reference to a mind-boggling 21 separate reviews currently underway or recently completed into the Australian energy market, a fact that says much about the handballing epidemic currently prevalent in our political culture.

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when the final report, released on 9 June, offered more of the same.  The difference was this time it had clearly over-stretched.

It was revealed as a report that purported to be concerned with electricity affordability and security but floated a generator emissions limit at a level (600kg per megawatt hour) that would conveniently exclude almost all coal.

This is despite the fact that Australia's wholesale electricity price, largely provided by baseload coal supplemented by gas happily bounced along between $30 to $40 per megawatt hour between 2000 and 2006 before starting its rapid rise to a new benchmark of over $100 in 2017 as subsidized solar and wind power started pushing gas and coal out of the market.

It was revealed as a report that purported to be concerned with emissions reduction but studiously avoided all but a passing reference to the one source that could provide reliable baseload power with zero emissions, namely nuclear power, despite Dr Finkel's previous support.

Others highlighted that the so-called $90 per household saving of the Clean Energy Target scheme was actually achieved by comparing it with the current, unsustainable, price-inflated mess of national and state renewable energy targets, agencies and funding mechanisms, rather than a genuine Business As Usual (i.e. no government interference) benchmark.

The Review's ham-fisted attempt to construct an edifice of rules, regulation, new reports and more powers for regulators to justify its acceptance of the inevitability of renewables came unstuck when it was revealed that the so-called $90 annual saving didn't actually include the new target's cost to retailers or the cost of back-up generators to balance the system and that the modelling firm had previously under-estimates renewables' impact on wholesale prices.

Most significantly perhaps, its call on federal and state governments to agree on an "emissions reduction trajectory" and support for a zero emissions target in the second half of the century revealed its true priorities.

The problem for the Finkel Review and for the many renewable energy advocates is that the rest of us have to live in the real world.

And it is in this real world that last week, three major electricity retailers announced double-digit price increases to take effect from 1 July, with at least one of the companies openly sheeting the blame home to the increase in wholesale electricity prices.

BP last week released its respected annual Statistical Review of World Energy, which found that non-hydro renewables provided only 3.2 per cent of the world's energy in 2016, or a little over 11 days' worth.

And renewables advocacy group Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the global push for renewables would cost $7.4 trillion between 2016 and 2040, though an additional $5.3 trillion would be needed to hold the planet to a two-degree warming trajectory.

Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg got it right in 2015 when he said that "When the wind is not blowing, wind-generated electricity is the most expensive electricity of all because it cannot be bought at any price," a point equally applicable to other weather-dependent renewables like solar and hydro.

Time is fast running out for Australia to renew its ageing energy infrastructure before major pieces of its industrial base move offshore and even more households succumb to skyrocketing power bills.

The Turnbull Government should politely thank the Finkel Review members for their work and politely put their report into the cupboard alongside the cardigans, frisbees and cassette tape recorders whose existence is acknowledged but whose absence from active use is unlamented.

Hardly On The Hunt For Facts

The ABC and the Australian Human Rights Commission have teamed up with far-left student activists for a blatant propaganda campaign about campus sexual assault and harassment.

Tomorrow the ABC is broadcasting a "documentary" called The Hunting Ground which, the ABC website says, "takes audiences to the heart of a shocking epidemic of violence and institutional cover-ups across college campuses in America".

In reality, The Hunting Ground is an activist piece replete with factual inaccuracies and exaggerated claims.

The film highlights two long since debunked cases.

The first is about Harvard Law School student Brandon Winston, who in the film is alleged to have drugged the drinks of two women, and taken them back to his apartment where he sexually assaulted them.

As Slate magazine's Emily Yoffe discovered in a groundbreaking investigation back in 2015, they were not drugged by Winston.  The cocaine was supplied by one of the women.  A DNA test found that a bloody condom, claimed to be further evidence of rape, had no connection to Winston.  He was ultimately cleared of all felony charges and reinstated by Harvard, after almost four years of suspension.  Nineteen Harvard Law School professors have slammed the "unfair and misleading portrayal" of Winston in The Hunting Ground, which they describe as "propaganda".

The second is about Florida State University star quarterback Jameis Winston (no relation to Brandon).  It is alleged that he drugged a woman, forced her back to his apartment and raped her on a bathroom floor.

However, two toxicology reports established that there were no date-rape drugs in the woman's system that evening.  The woman's claims changed over time, and did not match the physical evidence or other witnesses.  The case did not go to court.  Winston was cleared of sexual assault claims at a university hearing headed by a retired Florida Supreme Court justice.

Nevertheless, two young African-American men, with no previous criminal history, had their reputations dragged through the mud for years.

The ABC should be ashamed of itself for spreading these false claims.

The Hunting Ground also uses refuted statistics about rape and sexual assault on US campuses.  The documentary cites the extraordinary claim that 20 per cent of university women are sexually assaulted.  The US Bureau of Justice found that the number is closer to 2.5 to 3 per cent — a disgrace, but substantially less than asserted.  In fact, the rate for students is lower than for those who do not attend college.

The creators of the film have themselves admitted that its purpose is propaganda, not truth.  When soliciting interviews for the film, producer Amy Herdy stated that the film is about "advocacy for victims" and that they see no "need to get the perpetrator's side".

If the screening proceeds tomorrow night the ABC should at the very least accompany it with a reasoned analysis of the subsequent history of the cases at the heart of the film.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, not to be outdone by the ABC, is in on this mess as well.  Last year it launched a national survey on sexual assault at universities with help from The Hunting Ground Project Australia — which organised screenings of the debunked film — and the National Union of Students.

The results are yet to be published, however the survey is profoundly loaded.  Before asking about experiences, the commission provides a lengthy 14-point definition of sexual harassment which includes "staring", "jokes" and "gifts".  This goes far beyond community expectations and the legal definition — which includes a reasonable person test.  It demonises all sorts of courteous interaction between men and women.

Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs has called the collaboration "unique".  It is uniquely improper.  The commission is teaming up with a bunch of far-left propagandists, and legitimising, developing and spreading their dishonest claims.  The first act of the new president of the Human Rights Commission should be to shut down this farcical inquiry.

Triggs has said the survey builds on the "the important work of the National Union of Students in their 'Talk About It' survey".  The NUS claims there is "war on women", and cites the self-selecting survey that would make their American counterparts gush.  They claim 72 per cent of female Australian university students are victims of sexual assault or harassment.  This number is not believable.  The Australian Bureau of Statistics victimisation survey, albeit not including harassment, has found 0.4 per cent of adult Australians have experienced a sexual assault in the past year.

Every single case of sexual assault and harassment, on and off campus, should be handled with the full force of the law.  However, it is important that our response to this serious issue is based on analysis of the facts — not propaganda and fiction.

Taxpayer funds through our public broadcaster and Human Rights Commission should not be spent promoting a debunked documentary and a campaign premised on falsehoods.

Taxpayers Notes: Wasting Millions On Humanities Grants

This month, a number of university departments across Australia will be filled with the sound of popping corks and clinking glasses, as 91 jubilant Future Fellows and their colleagues celebrate the announcement by the Hon. Simon Birmingham that they are each to receive a slice of the Australian Research Council's considerable pie.

In this latest round of funding from the ARC, a total of $77 million of taxpayers' money is being distributed to a variety of academics from several disciplines whose research has been deemed to be both of "national priority" and "critical importance".  This of course implies that their output will benefit society at large and will make a positive and indelible impact on Australia, improving citizens' lives and ensuring its continued success as a prosperous, peaceful and stable nation.

There is no doubt that the majority of projects fall into this category.  The detection and treatment of abnormal foetal heart growth, the improvement of productivity in the mining and energy sectors, or the improvement of productivity and efficiency of Australian hospitals are undeniably worthy of financial support.

However, there are a number of projects attached to Humanities departments which have not only received very generous support from this recent round of founding, but also from other ARC schemes such as the Discovery Early Career Research Award which was awarded at the end of last year.

Their failure as projects is not because they are humanities subjects, but because they fail as humanities subjects.  They are narrow in scope, often incomprehensible and reflect the current penchant for cultural studies, critical theory and radical feminism.  These are the sorts of projects which give the Arts and Humanities a very bad name.

Take for example, the $952,843 allocated to the University of Sydney to effectively study the history of the department store in the early twentieth century.  Over the next four years, researchers will investigate the shopping habits of Sydneysiders as they peruse the cornucopia on sale in David Jones.  According to the proposal, the exercise will deepen understanding of "how the department store enhances the public's engagement with modernism".

In the meantime, researchers working on a similar theme at the University of New South Wales have been given $160,000 to document the "history of women as consumers" using "Filipino elite and migrant women between 1902-2010" as case studies.  I'd hazard a guess they excelled in the shoe department.  Apparently this could "enhance Australia's reputation in the field of women in Asia".

A further $253,000 has been allocated to the University of Sydney for "Document loss in pre-modern Europe". This particular project appears to be based on primary sources which no longer physically exist because they were either deliberately or accidently destroyed during the Middle Ages.  Rather than being an impediment to the research project however, this absence will apparently "uncover how obliteration led to both open repression and blank-slate reinvention, a powerful form of cultural creativity".  I'm not one hundred percent sure what this means, but I suspect that it is certainly easier to make claims if there is no documentation upon which to refute those claims.

Speaking of things which don't exist, the University of New South Wales has received $116,000 for a project entitled "Modern women and poetry of Complaint, 1540-1660". This venture "expects to uncover how the imagined voices of the disempowered shaped the literary and political cultures of early modern England".  Never mind that this period of English history witnessed momentous events such as the Reformation, an act of regicide and a bloody Civil War.  Instead, the ARC saw fit to fund the study of "imagined voices" of "disempowered" women during the English Renaissance.

In contrast, the University of Sydney has been given a total of $148,298 to examine a voice which is about as far away from imagined as one can possibly get;  that of Germaine Greer.  According to the project description, the venture will examine how the Australian "second wave" feminist has helped to explain how "feminist ideas circulate in the public domain".

Even if one were to possess an imagination of exceptional elasticity, could these projects, totalling $1.63 million of taxpayers' money, be considered even vaguely critical to the nation?  Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon.

There have been various attempts by the government to intervene over the years.  Back in 2004, the then Liberal education minister, Brendan Nelson, vetoed several projects, and appointed outsiders to vet grant applications.  In 2013, the Coalition government announced that it would audit and redirect funds which had been allocated under the Labor government from the ARC in an attempt to curb "waste".  The ARC needs to become more rigorous in its evaluation of projects and introduce an element of accountability at the end of each project.

Not only are these humanities projects a colossal waste of taxpayers' money, but they also reflect the fact that Australia's universities are no longer teaching the history of British institutions and Western Civilisation that are essential to understanding our present and to shaping our future.  Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of thing that we have come to expect from the current intellectual environment of Australian universities.

Perhaps a solution to this problem could come in the form of self-funded research such as exists in Britain and Canada.

If academics were forced to make a salary sacrifice or take a loan to pay for their research, then this would certainly focus their minds on what is critical to the nation and what is not.

High Tax: The Pillar Of What Civilisation?

"Progressive" think tank Per Capita recently released the results of their annual tax survey.  It turns out that 51.5 per cent of Australians think they pay about the right amount of tax.  39.6 per cent reckon they pay too much and a mere 1.9 per cent think they pay too little tax.  It turns out that both young and old people think they pay about the right amount of tax.  So much for the age-wars — it seems that young and old can agree on something.  People of lower levels of income also tended to think they paid the right amount of tax.

Now this survey has been widely reported — especially in the Fairfax press.  We've been reminded of Oliver Wendell Holmes' Jr. statement that he liked paying tax as "the price we pay for a civilized society".  He is quite correct — tax is the price we pay for a civilised society.  Yet nobody ever stops to ask what sort of civilised society Holmes had in mind.  How much tax did he pay?  In 1904, when he made that statement, the United States did not have an income tax.  The income tax was introduced in 1913 after a constitutional amendment.

There are two issues that this sort of argument overlooks.  Who actually pays the tax and what sort of civilisation are we buying?

It is not surprising that over half of Australians think they are paying the right amount of tax.  The fact is, that according to Australian Tax Office data, less than half of all Australians actually pay income tax.  In 2014-15 there were some 9.95 million taxpayers.  With only some 43 per cent of the population actually paying tax it is surprising that as many as 51.5 per cent think they are the right amount of tax.

Then there is the distribution of tax.  Australia has a highly progressive graduated income tax.  The top one per cent of income earners earn 9.45 per cent of all taxable income and pay 16.8 per cent of all net income tax.  By contrast, the bottom 25 per cent of all income earners earn 9.95 per cent of taxable income but only pay 2.83 per cent of net income tax.  Talk about unfair — the top one per cent of income earners make up less than half of one per cent of the total population and pay the lion's share of the tax that finances the commonwealth government.  The top five per cent of income earners (a mere 2.16 per cent of the population) pay 33.1 per cent of net income tax.

So the idea that 39.6 per cent think they pay too much tax is well in excess of the people who pay the lion's share of net income tax.

We also hear much about the fact that tax cuts in the naughties tended to favour high-income earners.  That is true — that is obvious.  Only people who pay tax can benefit, in the first instance, from a tax cut.  People who don't pay tax will get little obvious and immediate benefit.  It's not rocket science.

Those people who consume government services but pay little in tax are living off charity.  The single largest budget item in the federal budget is welfare — government sponsored charity.  Now there may be good reason why some people need welfare.  Yet is a large and growing welfare dependent population the kind of civilisation Oliver Wendell Holmes had in mind?

Values Matter In Politics

One statistic is essential to understanding the shock British election result:  the turnout by people aged 18 to 24.  Since 1992 only around four-in-10 young people have shown up to vote.  In 2017, that number surged to six-in-10.  This turnout was crucial to Labour's high vote and why many polls, which try to predict turnout from past experience, were off.

It's easy to point to Jeremy Corbyn's magic money tree to explain why young people voted — particularly the costly plan to scrap university fees.  However, to find the answer we must dig a little deeper.

Young people were genuinely attracted to the fact that Corbyn stood for something.  Not just against something .  They liked that he had values.  He played down his dark past, which includes describing terrorists as his "friends", and proposed an unashamedly socialist policy platform — substantially increasing the size of the state through more debt, spending, and nationalisation.

In response, one million young people registered to vote for the first time.  And, according to pollster Lord Ashcroft, Labour won an extraordinary 67 per cent of those aged 18 to 24, compared to 23 per cent of the vote for those aged 65 and over.

How did Corbyn pull the youth vote and not only ruin May's landslide but her majority altogether?

Firstly, the right have long since lost the battle of ideas in education.  Corbyn provided the same socialist message that young people already hear at schools and universities.  The left-wing perspective is the only acceptable viewpoint in social cirucmstances — and if you don't hold it you either silenced or are ostracised.

Secondly, May did not stand up for an alternative set of values or present a positive vision.  She refused to make a case for opportunity, prosperity and markets that have driven Britain's economy since the 1980s, the values that have catapulted over a billion people out of poverty in the last twenty five years, and contributed to the lowest level of global inequality since the industrial revolution.

While older Brits remember the economic basket case and mass inflation before Margaret Thatcher's reforms, today's young do not have firsthand experience of the failures of socialism.  However,  May's rhetoric, and many of her policies, accepted the socialist premise.

The Conservatives electoral lead evaporated following the announcement of their now infamous manifesto. The manifesto declared that "we believe in the good that government can do" and went on to list a wide array of interventionist policies.  May proposed an energy price cap, a policy labelled by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron as "Marxist" just two years ago.  The document also called for worker representation on boards, an "industrial strategy" and a delay in the return to surplus to at least 2025.  It read like a typical Labour document.

May's ineptitude was highlighted by the embarrassing 'U-turn' on social care policy — making a mockery of her "strong and stable" slogan.  Her campaign appearances were wooden:  the Maybot contrasted strongly with Corbyn's passion.  With little vision, and avoiding a serious policy debate, all that remained was attacks on Corbyn that came to wear off.

The abandonment of conservative principles proved electorally toxic.  Lynton Crosby, the legendary campaign strategist who won Cameron a majority in 2015 but advised rather than led this time, expressed his disquiet with the policy agenda.  In response to the manifesto he's reported to have said:  "A Conservative Party ought to have some conservative policies".

May was successful before the campaign when she focused on British values and her plans for a global Brexit.  During the campaign May failed to make a conservative or liberal case, and is now facing a terminal leadership crisis and minority government propped up by Northern Irish unionists.  What should have been an easy campaign to defeat a madman has turned into an unmitigated disaster, and her leadership is now terminal.

The parallels between May and Malcom Turnbull are vast.  To appeal to the so-called pragmatic centre, Turnbull has adopted policies of the left.  He's asked the ACCC to investigate an energy price cap.  He has abandoned plans to reduce government spending.  He has gone after the banks.  For all this, Turnbull did not receive any boost in the post-budget Newspoll.

In the end, trying to be left-lite gives no reason for people to not vote for the real thing.  To win, you have to stand by your values.

Saying What We're All Thinking

The cosy Canberra consensus on issues from terrorism to immigration erodes the public's trust in politicians.

It took someone who's been in the federal Parliament for just over a year to say what was obvious and what everyone was thinking, but which his colleagues, some of whom have been politicians for decades, were afraid to admit.

James Paterson, the Liberal senator for Victoria, said last week that following Indigenous representatives calling for "substantive" not merely "symbolic" constitutional changes, a referendum to symbolically acknowledge Indigenous Australians in the constitution would now probably never be held.

Indeed, in the words of Paterson, "the loose Canberra consensus" that some form of constitutional recognition was inevitable, turned out to be wrong.  In truth, this reality had become apparent some time ago, but no politician wanted to puncture the convenient groupthink on the issue.  Further, no one wanted to question why taxpayers were providing $30 million for a government-sponsored "Recognise" campaign, when clearly "recognition" had been over-taken by more far-reaching claims.

There's a loose Canberra consensus on many issues.  A feature of such a consensus is that the major political parties and the political class agree between themselves, while the public doesn't get a look in.  It's not a consensus between the elected and those who elected them.

Often the things on which there's a Canberra consensus are things politicians don't want to talk about with the public.

Opinion polls show only 37 per cent of Australians trust politicians.  The feeling is mutual.  Politicians don't trust Australians.

When trust between the ruled and the rulers breaks down, democracy corrodes.

The maintenance of trust between the politician and the public is essential if Australia is going to overcome the challenge of Islamist terrorism.

There's no surer way for the community to lose trust in the government and in the authorities charged with fighting Islamist terrorism than for officials to treat appropriate and legitimate questions about things like the relationship between terrorism and our refugee program with contempt and disdain.

Which is exactly what ASIO director Duncan Lewis did when replying to a question from Pauline Hanson.  He said:  "I have absolutely no evidence to suggest there is a connection between refugees and terrorism."  One suspects if Lewis has been answering a question from someone other than Hanson, he would have given a different answer.  The loose Canberra consensus on Islamist terrorism is that it's best if politicians don't talk about the issue with the public.  In this newspaper on Wednesday it was reported that Tony Abbott's comments about "Islamophobia" had "annoyed security officials, who believe such comments only make it harder to thwart domestic terrorist attacks".  The piece de resistance from the security agencies was the quote, Abbott "should know better".

The implication being that Abbott "should know better" than to say what everyone was thinking.

In 2014 one of the reasons Abbott gave for reneging on his promise to repeal section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act was that he'd received advice from the security agencies that if he did repeal the section, he'd upset the Muslim community.

Section 18c remains unchanged, and meanwhile the Islamic Council of Victoria is urging the creation of government-funded "safe spaces" where Muslim youth "could be radical".  To his credit, the Victorian Premier said yesterday:  "There is no safe way to rail against the West".  The Canberra consensus on immigration is in favour of a substantial immigration program.  On the rare occasions when the consensus has been challenged, such as Julia Gillard did as PM in 2010, the Canberra consensus quickly prevailed.

Gillard declared she didn't necessarily support a "big Australia", and Tony Burke who under Kevin Rudd had been the "minister for population" had his title changed by Gillard to the "minister for sustainable population".  Burke held this second title for just a few months.

The Canberra consensus on immigration has always been that politicians should only talk about its positives, not its potential negatives.  Maintaining that consensus now risks damaging community support for this country's immigration program.

When politicians are unwilling or unable to engage in an honest discussion with the public about immigration then the public's trust in politicians is eroded even further.

We Are The Boiling Frog

The growing influence of the state throughout the western world, buttressed by technological development and a crisis of confidence in the capitalist system is shaping up as a major threat to personal freedom.

The genius of capitalism is that through the system of risk and reward, within a framework of secure borders, an independent legal system, and respect for personal property rights, it has provided the means for the genuine needs of billions of individuals to be met.

It is consumer demand and capitalist initiative that has driven the creation of new markets worldwide and led to the unprecedented reduction in poverty and improvements in living standards over the last 200 years.

However, while there is a natural role for government in this framework as the guardian of the legal system, guarantor of competition and the method by which the people can change the law through democratic elections, modern bureaucracy, crony capitalism, and producer capture of government is busily removing choices and putting liberty in peril.

Some examples illustrate the extent of the problem.

In the primary and secondary education system, schools are increasingly funded and run for the benefit of teachers, unions and sectoral interests rather than responding to the needs of students.

Resource decisions in the health system are made for the benefit of medical administrators, bureaucrats and doctors rather than to address the needs of patients.

In child care, billions of dollars each year are paid directly to identikit child care centre operators artificially inflating prices and reducing parent choice.

Unfortunately, this is not getting better any time soon.

On energy, both sides of politics are increasingly in the business of selecting what type of producers are allowed to compete in the market, and grid operators are increasingly in the business of controlling demand and supply including in Australia and the UK.

It doesn't take too much imagination to know where the "successful" 2012-15 trial by an English electricity distributor which at the press of a central button could remotely reduce each household's power usage, or Dark Green activist mutterings of a human "carbon budget" or "carbon quotas" are headed.

The next "big thing" will be National Disability Insurance Scheme where, as Vern Hughes wrote in April 2017, instead of consumers being encouraged to purchase the services they need as originally envisaged, the system is being geared up for providers to determine the range and price of services.

Human rights and environmental legislation as well as international treaties are increasingly being used by NGOs and bureaucracies in Australia and overseas to resist moves to influence the "centre-knows best" policy agenda

Uber and Airbnb are two companies at the forefront of regulatory moves to restrict whose car people can get into and in whose home people can stay, the Fair Work Commission polices who people are allowed to work for, and of course hardly a week goes by without a publicly-funded activist calling for sugar, fat or cigarette taxes to restrict what legal products you can put into your mouth.

Economics Professor Tyler Cowen recently claimed that the West is being killed by comfort and the desire of baby boomers to build a harm-free world, under the guiding hand of government.

Of course, the most extreme manifestation of this trend is becoming evident in China with the evolution of the Communist Government's "social credit scheme" which will rank a citizen's "place in society" according to their social, moral and financial history.  No points for guessing what may happen in China when a person's social credit expires!

Whether China, the US, UK or Australia, the rationing of goods, limiting of supply or demand or direct funding or favouring of producers by governments, are cut from the same cloth — i.e. the increasing tendency of the state to be the sole arbiter of what is permitted.

The fault however lies not with capitalism as some claim, but what we as individuals have allowed to be done in capitalism's name.

Fortunately, the solution is simple.  We need a new, people-centred approach to government, where personal choice is taken back from the state and from producers, and put firmly into the hands of consumers.

A new agenda would see government spending limited to a fixed proportion of GDP, ideally around 20 per cent as it was in Australia prior to the election of the Whitlam Government.

The vast bureaucracies that regulate non-criminal personal behaviour between individuals and between governments should be dismantled.

Governments should get out of the business of picking winners in energy, telecommunications, workplace relations and other social policy contracts.

Education vouchers should be the primary means of funding the education system, with providers required to tailor their offering to parental demand.

Child care vouchers that allow parents to choose whether to stay home, pay a relative or put their child into the formal system would save money and acknowledge the different situation in each household.

Market operators in all industries should simply provide a meeting place for buyers and sellers and not try to restrict producers or curtail demand.

Unless we rapidly re-imagine the role of the state in the twenty-first century, our future will be increasingly governed by the space we are allowed to occupy, and may very well resemble this recent dystopian glimpse of a "small footprint approach" to domestic housing.

While there is still time for the boiling frog to escape, it is getting awfully warm.

Filling Triggs' Shoes

The Human Rights Commission's selective agenda does not include the protection of fundamental human rights like freedom of speech.  For that reason alone, it must be abolished.  But while the Commission does exist, it is entirely reasonable to expect that a Coalition government should appoint to the Commission individuals who do believe in individual liberties.  With the government considering who to appoint president of the HRC this month, there is an opportunity for the Coalition to live up to the expectations of how a centre-right government should act.  Until now, one of the significant failures of the Abbott and Turnbull governments has been the refusal to make reliably conservative appointments to key positions in the bureaucracy.

Until now, their High Court appointments could just as easily have been made by a Labor government — which isn't a problem unless you consider the progressive interpretation of the Australian Constitution that has made centralised government the norm a disaster.  It's a similar story at the AHRC:  Ed Santow, who was appointed the Human Rights Commissioner in May 2016, has said nothing of the QUT case or the Commission's pursuit of Bill Leak last year.  The very least the government could do is to save the country from another Gillian Triggs.  Instead, the government has the opportunity to appoint a president who actually believes in human rights;  and make an important symbolic choice by appointing someone who prioritises mainstream values like freedom of speech and of religion.

The very least the government can do is to assist the government, we've compiled a brief list of candidates (in no particular order) it might consider to be the next HRC president.  If it doesn't pick one of these outstanding individuals, or someone of a similar calibre, it will have revealed what a joke the bureaucratic appointment process has become.

James Allan is Australia's leading natural rights philosopher, and is the Garrick Professor in Law at the TC Bierne School of Law at the University of Queensland.  Allan is the perfect choice to begin the process of dismantling the HRC:  not only is there no risk that Prof. Allan would "go native", there is perhaps no other candidate who would cause more headaches for the other commissioners.

Augusto Zimmermann is the senior lecturer in law at Murdoch University, a commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia and president of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association.  He was the co-author of No Offence Intended, an important book published in 2016 that explains how section 18C is incompatible with the Australian Constitution on several grounds.

Lorraine Finlay is a lecturer in law at Murdoch University whose expertise covers constitutional law, freedom of speech and property rights.  Finlay was a co-author of No Offence Intended.

Suri Ratnapala, former law professor at the University of Queensland and expert in the rule of law, constitutional law and legal theory, joined the Law Reform Commission in 2015 part-time to help conduct its inquiry into traditional rights, freedoms and privileges.

Bob Day is a former Family First SA senator and a leader in the fight to reform 18C.  Day was previously the secretary of the Samuel Griffith Society.  As secretary of the H.R. Nicholls Society, he argued for the rights of the unemployed to get a job.

Ramesh Thakur is the director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament in the Crawford School at the Australian National University.  His criticisms of Triggs' tenure indicate he would rein in the excesses of the Commission, and have a clearer view of what kinds of complaints are clearly trivial, vexatious or frivolous.

Neil Brown was the deputy leader of the federal Liberal Party from 1985 to 1987, is a distinguished barrister in the relevant field of mediation and arbitration, and writes a regular column in these pages.

Ian Callinan is a barrister and was a Justice of the High Court.  In 2012, Callinan spoke out strongly against the Gillard Government's attempted press censorship laws, saying "The struggle for free speech has been long and painfully achieved and I wouldn't want to go back on it".

Louise Clegg is an accomplished barrister, author and lecturer.  Since being called to the Bar in 2001, Clegg has conducted more than 100 Federal Court appeals, mostly in the areas of public law and workplace relations.  Clegg has criticised the Commission in the past for for going rogue and seeing itself as the "vanguard of identity politics".

Graeme Watson, a former vice president of the Fair Work Commission, recently spoke to the Centre for Independent Studies on the threat to democracy posed by quasi-judicial government agencies.  Of the HRC, Watson said:  "Overreach, looseness with the truth, low commitment to accountability and excessive zeal are not appropriate attributes."

There is another reason the government must make a solid appointment to the HRC;  it completely failed to enforce accountability following a series of recent Commission missteps.  Buried in the budget was a sad statistic.  Despite giving every reason for its abolition, the HRC's allocated budget is unchanged from last year.

The lesson is obscene:  if you're a government agency, you can completely fail to live up to community expectations and face no consequences.  For the HRC specifically, the lesson is it can deprive respondents to complaints of natural justice or procedural fairness (as in the QUT case, which turned into a three-and-a-half-year legal drama) or pursue obviously vexatious complaints against cartoonists (as happened with the late Bill Leak) without even the consequence of budget cuts.  A failure to rein in the organisation, let alone abolish it entirely, is a serious failure to enforce accountability on an agency that has a track record of over-reach and stifling debate.  But there is an easy way for the government to begin to make up for its failure.  It is time to appoint to the Commission someone that is committed to the ideas of freedom and to the rule of law.

Our political system gives the government of the day an untrammelled power to appoint anyone it likes to positions in the bureaucracy.  Why not use it?

No Place For Race In Our Constitution

RACE has no place in the Australian constitution.  Proposals to grant special legal rights to any group of Australians based on their race will be rejected.  Australians are egalitarian.  Fairness is a concept that runs deep in the Australian psyche.

This is why the two proposals contained in the Uluru Statement released last week — a treaty between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians and a new constitutional body to represent the interests of indigenous Australians — will not be accepted by the public.  Both proposals would divide Australians by race.  And Australians will not have a bar of that.

Indigenous Australians have made a significant contribution to the success of modern Australia.

The first British settlers of the 18th century, and the waves of migrants that have followed from all corners of the globe, have also helped to make Australia what it is today.

Australia's story is a tale of diversity.  Australians are right to be proud of the fact we are a successful, peaceful, prosperous country built on a respect for ethnic and religious plurality.  But just as we recognise the contribution that has been made by individuals from so many ethnic backgrounds, we also recognise that race itself is an outdated concept.

We are all members of the human race.  Civilised people know that differences between races are skin deep.

For that reason, race should never be used as a motivation for passing new laws, and it certainly shouldn't be used to grant or to take away rights in our constitution.

The Australian constitution should be colour blind.  It should treat every citizen equally, and it should not give the government the power to make laws that treat different groups differently because of their race.

This is why — if we are to make any changes to the constitution — we should ensure that any references to race are removed, not added.

Currently there are two sections of the constitution that refer to race.  The first is section 25, which was designed to discourage state governments from banning people of any particular race from taking part in elections.

The second is section 51 (xxvi), which grants the Commonwealth the power to pass race-based laws.

If Australians are to be asked to change the constitution it is this change that should be supported — the deletion of the two provisions that make reference to race.

But anything that seeks to insert race back into the constitution is dangerous and divisive.

Leaving aside the principle that the constitution should be completely free of references to race are a series of practical problems.

The biggest of those problems is that indigenous Australians are individuals who don't all necessarily think the same way about matters of public policy.  The suggestion that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders can be represented by a single voice is condescending and paternalistic.

Every adult indigenous Australian has the vote and their ability to be heard at an election is the same as all other Australians.  Treating indigenous Australians differently because of their race is wrong.

The proposal for a treaty makes even less sense.  Treaties are legal agreements between two or more sovereign countries.  But indigenous Australians are Australians.  How can a country make a treaty with its own citizens?  Some members of the indigenous community are open about the need for indigenous sovereignty to come before the negotiation of a treaty.

These members of the indigenous community do not accept the legitimacy of the constitution itself.  This was why a group of delegates walked out of the Uluru summit last week, when a Victorian delegate said of her delegation:  "We as sovereign First Nations people reject constitutional recognition.  We do not recognise occupying power or their sovereignty, because it serves to disempower, and takes away our voice".

This form of radical race politics sits at the heart of the constitutional change put forward in the Uluru Statement.  It is a divisive ideology.

Our constitution is a rule book.  It clearly sets out the way the Australian government should be organised.  It is not an exciting document.  But it treats all Australians equally.

Killing The University

In March, the University of Melbourne Student Union ran an "intersectional and student-led workshop around the ways in which privilege and unconscious bias permeate tutorials and seminars ..."  According to the official report following the workshop, there is a colossal amount of unconscious bias floating around Melbourne University, and which by all accounts appears to be emanating from one particular privileged group;  white men.

Workshop attendees reported that the behaviour of such individuals in tutorials and seminars made them feel bad about themselves and to doubt their own abilities.  They even employed the term "gaslighting" in order to describe how they felt about the way in which white men interacted with women and non-white fellow students.  "Gaslighting" is a psychological technique used by sociopaths and narcissists to manipulate their victims.

The upshot of the discussion was that henceforward men should endeavour to be less like men and workshop attendees came up a helpful list to facilitate the process of emasculation.  Before they voice their opinions, for example, men should conduct the type of examination of conscience usually reserved for the Confessional.  They need to ask themselves the following question:  "Is it to self-aggrandise or to learn and contribute?"  Once satisfied that it is the latter, men should then endeavour to speak more like women, in that they should not speak with "absolute confidence" but qualify their statements with "I'm sure that this is a good idea but ..."  Finally, men should also refrain from partaking in "Australian banter".

These measures are worrying on a number of levels.  They are basically perpetuating the "white male privilege" myth of identity politics which claims that biology, race and gender determine our destinies.  Does this mean that if you are born a non-white male, then there is no point in trying to succeed in life because you are set up for a future of failure?  Conversely, there is no need to try if you are a white male because your future success is already guaranteed.

This dangerous form of racial determinism is totally at odds with the notion of individual responsibility and the idea that as human beings, we instigate our own actions and are thus morally accountable.  It is a long way from Martin Luther King when he said that people should be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.  This seems to have been completely forgotten by the current practitioners of identity politics.

These workshops are also a direct assault on "masculinity" and are designed to make men ashamed of being men.  By asking men to tone down their "Australian banter" and to "speak more like women", the University of Melbourne Student Union is simultaneously discriminating against men and patronising women.  It is illiberal and totally sexist.  The next logical step is that white men will be prohibited from attending particular tutorials and seminars on the grounds that their very presence will cause too much discomfort.

The demand that a certain group self-censors is creating a highly censorious and politically correct culture which is detrimental to the university's core mission of education.  There are already reports that academics are being policed by students and are deliberately refraining from discussing ideas which might offend members of the student body.

In September, Monash University will be the first Australian institution of higher learning to implement a policy of "trigger warnings", by asking academics to review course content before teaching it.  This will ultimately result in fearful tutors deciding that none of their material is suitable on the basis that it could potentially offend everyone in the classroom.

The fact that Melbourne University, one of Australia's oldest and most respected institutions of higher learning, has not only allowed the student union to conduct this workshop but has also taken it seriously, shows just how politically correct the culture of our universities has become.  This is part of a growing movement in Australian universities, largely driven by students, to scrub the campuses clean of words, ideas and subjects which might cause discomfort or give offence, and it raises serious questions about the future of free speech on our campuses.