The Demise of Ansett

Ansett's collapse should send a chill around Australia.  Not just because of its demise, but because of what it says about our work culture and its effects on other industries.

The collapse starkly illustrates the fact that the workplace environment has not changed from the bad old days.  Management still see government as their ultimate protector.  They see competition as something to be eliminated with the help of government, and the workplace as something that is up to the government fix.

The unions are just as culpable as management.  The IR System gives the unions joint control over the management of human resources -- as such, they are effectively part of management.  The unions, however, have accepted the power but reject the responsibility.  As a former Ansett executive stated:  "I can recall on many occasion speaking to staff and union leaders saying, 'If we don't change some work practices, this company is going to go down the drain'.  They never, ever accepted that.  They believed Ansett was a cash cow that could just be bled to death".

The unions were fully aware of the arrangements at Virgin Blue which allowed it to operate at costs 40 per cent below Ansett's.  But when Mr Toomey, CEO of Air NZ/Ansett, came to the unions six months ago with an agenda to make the company more competitive with Virgin Blue, he was spurned.  Even when the firm went bankrupt, the unions continued their bloody-mindedness.  They initially blocked Qantas from taking Ansett's planes by demanding that it match Ansett's more generous wages and conditions.

Their solution is that the government should pay for their folly.  The unions have demanded that government take equity in Ansett despite its being bankrupt with accumulated losses of over $2 billion and in need of a capital injection of over $1.5 billion.  And they are now organising a marginal-seat campaign against the Howard Government for refusing to meet their absurd request.

The demise of Ansett is not, however, a complete disaster.  Although it has caused great harm to many, the long-term, impact could well be positive.  The demand for its services remains unchanged.  Some firm -- with luck, not Qantas -- will buy its assets, hire some of its employees, and service its routes.  The new operator may even reform the workplace culture in the airline industry.

The real concern lies with other industries more open to foreign markets.  Our cancerous workplace culture is killing off what little remains of the textile and clothing industry.  Most clothing manufacturers, even those servicing the high-value, fashion end of the market, have left for overseas.  The few that remain are under attack by unions trying to stave off change.

The food-processing industry, which should be to Australia what the IT industry is to California, is also suffering from the same malady.  Over the last six months, six factories have shut down and moved offshore, and many more are threatening to do the same.  Although competition is driving the industry, the movement offshore is caused overwhelmingly by the "them versus us" workplace culture.

Airline, textile and food-processing are not alone.  Virtually all formerly protected industries are suffering the same fate.  We are witnessing the hollowing out of the Australian economy not by force of global competition but from our own stupidity.

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Just Asking for a Rethink

Like most Australians, I was appalled by the pictures of Palestinians celebrating the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.  But considering how sections of the Western intelligentsia have responded to the barbarous events of September 11, I will grudgingly acknowledge that at least there was an infantile honesty about the Palestinians' malevolence.

No serious commentator in a Western country could ever openly condone the deliberate murder of thousands of innocent people.  So feelings of satisfaction about the devastation inflicted on the symbols of US financial and military power have to be expressed deviously;  by attempting to place the attacks in a "perspective" which shifts much of the blame onto America itself.  Many intellectuals are acting like the old misogynist judge who says that while rape is a serious offence, the attractive victim must have been asking for it.

John Pilger, expatriate Australian author and darling of the ABC, claimed that the greatest source of terror in the world was the United States, a "fact" supposedly "censored from the Western media".  Warming to his theme, he charged America with untrammelled brutality and greed in defending "power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free market" and "free trade".

The real wonder, according to Pilger, was "how patient the oppressed have been", because it has taken so long to form suicide squads that would bring home to American the horrors that they themselves have created in faraway places.  True, he did call the attacks on America "atrocities", but this seems to have been only a sop to his more sensitive readers.  His heart was clearly with the Palestinians cheering in the streets.

Of course, Pilger is renowned for his talent in staking out the most demented niches of public discussion.  But the letters pages of some newspapers suggest that his kind of thinking has permeated much more widely than decency and good sense might lead us to hope.

For instance, obviously peeved by an editorial in The Australian that stated "we have witnessed one of the greatest crimes against humanity", Dr Anthony Langlois from Flinders University responded that America and the West were daily involved in crimes of greater magnitude against the rest of the world.

Certainly Dr Langlois, a politics lecturer who specialises in human rights, did not resile from calling the attacks a "moral outrage".  Nevertheless, he claimed that the kind of mind that would inflict such awful harm "is not dissimilar to our own".

According to this prize-winning academic, this is because "every day more people die because of Western policy and our consumption culture than died in the terrorist attacks".  In other words, if you intend to get some fast food over the weekend, or plan to go shopping for electronic gadgets, you are little different from Osama bin Laden and his murderous crew.  Perhaps you should give yourself up to the FBI now, before you cause any more devastation.

The notion that the wealth of the West is built on the exploitation and suffering of the Third World should have died a dishonourable death with the obvious economic failures of communism and related doctrines.  Despite what many intellectuals believe, capitalism and its beneficiaries do best when world prosperity is widespread and increasing.

The barriers to greater prosperity in Third World countries do not stem from "free trade" or the economic system favoured by America.  Rather, they result from the kind of protectionism advocated by Pilger and his fellow travellers in the anti-globalisation movement, as well as local cultural and institutional shortcomings which hinder initiative and the creation of enterprises that can operate successfully within the rule of law.

It is unlikely that anti-Americans in Australia and other countries will change their prejudices as a result of the terrorist attacks.  But within the United States itself there may well be a reassessment of the view prevalent amongst the progressive elites and the anti-Vietnam War generation that America and its institutions are a major source of wickedness.

For the past three decades American security and investigative agencies such as the CIA and FBI have been demonised and undermined, usually by the very people who now complain about the "intelligence failures" that allowed the attacks to proceed without detection.  There has been a corresponding tendency to forgive, and even celebrate, the homicidal New Left radicals who once participated in domestic terrorism, such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.

Indeed, in what is a truly awful and revealing irony, on the morning of September 11 the liberal New York Times published a sympathetic story about ex-fugitives Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, two former leaders of the Weather Underground.  Titled "No regrets for a love of explosives", it was designed to promote the just-published memoirs of Ayers, who is now Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois.  Dorhn is the director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University and a prominent figure in the American Bar Association.

In 1972, the couple were involved in bombing the Pentagon, though mercifully no lives were lost.  The New York Times article began with Ayers saying "I don't regret setting bombs.  I feel we didn't do enough".  "Enough" was done within a few hours of the story's publication, with Osama bin Laden's fanatics completing the Weather Underground's project.  As America reflects on the terrible events of September 11, it will have to consider why its major universities and other institutions have been so willing to reward unrepentant domestic terrorists from the New Left.

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Economics in One Page

Lunchtime Lecture, Melbourne, 28 September 2001

"What makes [economics] most fascinating is that its fundamental principles are so simple that they can be written on one page, that anyone can understand them, and yet very few do."

- Milton Friedman, quoted in "Lives of the Laureates".

THE above statement by Friedman got me thinking:  is it possible to summarise the basic principles of economics in a single page?  After all, Henry Hazlitt gave us a masterful summary of sound principles in Economics in One Lesson.  Could these concepts be reduced to a page?

Friedman himself did not attempt to make a list when he made this statement in a 1986 interview.  After completing a preliminary one-page summary of economic principles, I sent him a copy.  In his reply, he added a few of his own, but in no way endorses my attempt.

After making this list of basic principles below, I have to agree with Friedman and Hazlitt.  The principles of economics are simple:  Supply and Demand;  Opportunity Cost;  Comparative Advantage;  Profit and Loss;  Competition;  Division of Labour.  And so on.

In fact, one professor even suggested to me that economics can be reduced to one word:  "price".  Or, maybe, I suggested as an alternative, "cost".  Everything has a price, everything has a cost.

Additionally, sound economic policy is straightforward:  let the market, not the state, set wages and prices.  Keep government's hands off monetary policy.  Taxes should be minimised.  Government should do only those things private citizens can't do for themselves.  Government should live within its means.  Rules and regulations should provide a level playing field.  Tariffs and other barriers to trade should be eliminated as much as possible.  In short, government governs best which governs least.

Unfortunately, economists sometimes forget these basic principles and often get caught up in the details of esoteric model-building, high theory, academic research and mathematics.  The dismal state of the profession was expressed recently by Arjo Klamer and David Colander, who, after reviewing graduate studies at major economics departments around the US, asked "Why did we have this gut feeling that much of what went on here was a waste?" (Klamer and Colander, The Making of an Economist).

This is my attempt to summarise the basic principles of economics and sound economic policy.  (Suggested improvements are most welcome.)

ECONOMICS IN ONE PAGE

1. Self Interest:  "The desire of bettering our condition comes from us with the womb and never leaves till we go into the grave" (Adam Smith).  No-one spends someone else's money as carefully as he spends his own.

2. Economic Growth:  The key to a higher standard of living is to expand savings, capital formation, education and technology.

3. Trade:  In all voluntary exchanges, where accurate information is known, both the buyer and seller gain.  Therefore, an increase in trade between individuals, groups or nations benefits both parties.

4. Competition:  Given the universal existence of limited resources and unlimited wants, competition exists in all societies and cannot be abolished by government edict.

5. Co-operation:  Since most individuals are not self-sufficient, and almost all natural resources must be transformed in order to become usable, individuals -- labourers, landlords, capitalists and entrepreneurs -- must work together to produce valuable goods and services.

6. Division of Labour and Comparative Advantage:  Differences in talents, intelligence, knowledge and property lead to specialisation and higher productivity in some activities than in others by each individual, firm and nation.  So it is rational for a doctor not to allocate her (expensive) time to cleaning her office, even when she could do a better job than the cleaner.

7. Dispersion of Knowledge:  Information about market behaviour is so diverse and ubiquitous that it cannot be captured and calculated by a central authority.

8. Profit and Loss:  Profit and loss are market mechanisms that guide what should and should not be produced over the long run -- by showing what is valued more than the resources it consumes, and what is not.

9. Economic Incentives/Disincentives:  If you raise the cost (price) of an activity, you get less of it.  If you lower the cost (price), you get more of it.  So, raising the cost of crime will discourage criminal activity.  Generous tax credits for higher education will encourage more people to go to university.

10. Opportunity Cost:  Given the limitations of time and resources, there are always trade-offs in life.  If you want to do something, you must give up other things you may wish to do.  The price you pay to engage in one activity is equal to the cost of other activities you have forgone.

11. Price Theory:  Prices are determined by the subjective valuations of buyers (demand) and sellers (supply), not an objective cost of production.  The higher the price, the smaller quantity purchasers will be willing to buy and the larger the quantity sellers will be willing to offer for sale.

12. Causality:  For every cause there is an effect.  Actions taken by individuals, firms and governments have an impact on other actors in the economy that may be predictable, although the level of predictability depends on the complexity of the actions involved.

13. Uncertainty:  There is always a degree of risk and uncertainty about the future because people are of ten re-evaluating, learning from their mistakes and changing their minds, thus making it difficult to predict their behaviour in the future.

14. Labour Economics:  Higher wages can only be achieved in the long run by greater productivity;  that is, applying more capital investment per worker.  Chronic unemployment is caused by government fixing wage rates above equilibrium market levels.

15. Government Controls:  Price-rent-wage controls may benefit some individuals and groups, but not society as a whole.  Ultimately, they create shortages, black markets and a deterioration of quality and services.  There is no such thing as a free lunch.

16. Money:  Deliberate attempts to depreciate the nation's currency, artificially lower interest rates, and engage in "easy money" policies inevitably lead to inflation, boom-bust cycles and economic crises.  The market, not the state, should determine money and credit.

17. Public Finance:  In all public enterprises, in order to maintain a high degree of efficiency and good management, market principles should be adopted whenever possible:

1. government should try to do only what private enterprise cannot do;
2. government should live within its means;
3. cost-benefit analysis -- marginal benefits should exceed marginal costs;
4. the accountability principle -- those who benefit from a service should pay for the service.

Who Should Bear the Costs of Workers' Entitlements?

Employee anger over the loss of their accrued entitlements by failed firms should at first instance be directed at Australia's industrial relations system.  In effect the IR system forces employees to give employers unsecured, non interest bearing loans.  Failed businesses physically lose the money but the IR system requires employers to turn employees into creditors against their will.

It works this way.  Through the IR system employers are forced by law to withhold employee income under the banners of holiday pay, sick pay, long service leave, redundancy and other entitlements.  The word "entitlements" is used but in fact the terms "loans" and "mandated worker risk" is more truthful.

The withheld money belongs to employees but takes the form of unsecured loans to employers.  Employees are reliant on the integrity and good management of employers but have no choice over how their money is managed or by whom or if the loans should occur in the first place.

This state orchestrated deal puts employees money at risk all to the alleged benefit of employers and unions.  It's a game!  Employers have a free source of credit and dictate to workers when to take leave at the employers' convenience.  Unions secure negotiable "benefit" issues as points of dispute thus substantiating the legal facade of inequality of bargaining power and justifying their position in the Australian corporate structure.

Even if employers don't want to withhold employee entitlements they can't.  Unions fiercely oppose "cashing out" of worker entitlements and campaign against casualisation.  These well known arrangements pay employees their entitlements in higher hourly and weekly rates than that paid to full time employees.  Entitlements never accrue because money is never withheld and workers are not exposed to credit risk.

Even where entitlements are accrued the problem of losses would never exist if all employers placed the monies in trust funds.  But the standard business practice is to view this as unproductive money.  Where trust funds exit they are inevitably raided and employee money becomes listed as an accounting liability to be paid from future earnings.

The system is clearly unjust.  In no other area of society are people forced to lend someone else money, let alone without security or interest!

It's bad business because when credit is provided without due diligence poor management becomes the norm.

The Ansett debacle is typical.  Through the IR system Ansett employees were forced to provide free credit to bad managers.  If Ansett hadn't had access to $500 million of easy money the reality of the business problems would have been forced to the surface much earlier.  Instead employee credit contributed to problem denial and the downward slide.

The solutions so far offered are inadequate.  Government compensation and the union idea of a nationalised trust fund address problem management but not prevention.  The only solution that gives workers safety is to give workers control of their money by cashing out entitlements.

This is how Australia's 1.6 million independent contractors operate.  They don't suffer employee type credit risk because money is not withheld from them.  If they provide credit to clients it's their choice and not required by law.  Employees deserve similar rights.

IR institutions should not have authority to order the withholding of employee money.  "Entitlement" withholding should only occur on the written authority of each individual employee.  Then employees, like the banks, could exercise their judgement on the credit worthiness of their employer.

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Cause and Effects

Times are difficult for those who seek to demonstrate their moral superiority over other Australians by trumpeting their support for Aboriginal causes.  The shortcomings of the simplistic view in which Aborigines are solely the victims of a "racist" society which is indifferent to their plight have become increasingly apparent.

Things are clearly changing when ABC TV's Four Corners program devotes a whole program to Aboriginal domestic violence -- as it did earlier this month -- without constantly blaming the wider society, and by airing suggestions that some recommendations of the once sacrosanct Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody may have been counterproductive.

In addition, people with impeccable credentials such as Noel Pearson have detailed the debilitating effects of the progressive consensus on Aborigines.  And most ordinary Australians now readily admit that Aborigines suffered great injustices in the past.

All this means that those who wish to distance themselves from their prejudiced fellow countrymen have had to find a new cause to display their virtue.  Thankfully, a marvellous differentiator has recently become available -- the claims of illegal immigrants, or to use the sanitised term preferred by their vocal supporters, "asylum seekers".

The issue of asylum seekers currently offers greater moral potential than that of Aboriginal disadvantage.  Most Australians are genuinely concerned about indigenous poverty and poor health, and the arguments are mainly about the best means of addressing these problems.  But with asylum seekers there is a much clearer divide -- between those who see them as genuine refugees to be greeted with open arms, and those who see them as manipulative queue jumpers who are breaking our laws.

Even better, those who welcome the asylum seekers are a minority.  These individuals must have been delighted to learn of the recent poll showing that 77 per cent of Australians disagreed with them and supported the government's policies to deter illegal immigrants from arriving.  For the righteous, this means that at least three out of every four people they encounter in the street can be contemptuously dismissed as "lacking in compassion", or fearful of "the other", or just plain "racist".

Of course, like the moral campaigns of the past, certain facts have to be suppressed or distorted in order to maintain the impression that those who don't support the clients of people smugglers are wicked.  So we are told that the government is breaching Australia's obligations under the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and other international agreements.  What is not mentioned is that by travelling to Australia through other countries where they could have requested protection, nearly all the illegal arrivals fail to meet the convention's criterion which requires them to have come directly from the country which they say they are fleeing.

Nor do the unfavourable comparisons with supposedly more humane nations present the true situation in these places.  We are often urged to follow the "Swedish model", in which unauthorised entrants who have sought asylum are detained only briefly, and then released into the wider community until their status is determined.

But Sweden can afford to do this because it requires all residents to carry an identity card, which makes it much easier to keep track of individuals whose requests for refugee status have been rejected and who might be tempted to vanish rather than be deported.  In fact, unlike the current situation in Australia, most of those who seek asylum in Sweden are unsuccessful, their rights of appeal are very limited, and they are quickly removed from the country.

The virtuous defenders of the illegal arrivals are rarely forced to trouble themselves with the implications of their position, which ultimately involves a virtual "open door" policy.  With over 22 million refugees or "people of concern", and perhaps five times that number of individuals in the Third World seeking to relocate to more prosperous countries, the potential demand for entry far outweighs the numbers that Australia could ever realistically manage.

Nevertheless, advocates for the asylum seekers pretend that softening the policies designed to deter illegal entry would have little effect on the attractiveness of Australia as a long-term target for people smugglers.  Such strange logic is forced on at least some of these advocates such as the Greens, because they also claim that Australia's present population levels are too high to be environmentally sustainable.

Certainly, it is likely that some of those who support tough measures against would-be refugees are simply mistrustful of foreigners, particularly those from Muslim countries.  Rightly or wrongly, this week's barbarism in the United States will only increase their antipathy.

Some of this suspicion might be dissipated if Australians were more confident that new arrivals would be strongly encouraged to identify first and foremost with our nation, and to respect and accommodate themselves to our ways.  This was the case in the past, and is arguably one of the main reasons why Australia has been so successful in integrating a large and diverse immigrant population.

But there is another reason for public suspicion towards the current influx of boat people, and it has little to do with xenophobia.  Individuals who learn that they will ultimately be rewarded by breaking our immigration laws, rorting our generous provisions for new arrivals, and threatening violence or suicide unless their demands are met are unlikely to make good future citizens.

Surely this is one public concern that the virtuous should understand.  After all, they are always keen to tell us that they are such model citizens themselves.

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Cheaper Power Calling

Do you remember those evening phone calls inviting you to switch your phone carrier?  Well, within the next few months you find a new horde of callers waiting to entice you away from an existing service provider.

This time the phone marketers will be pushing electricity.  From January there will be full retail contestability.  Households will then be able to shift to a new electricity retailer.  As in the case of changing phone service provider, people switching electricity retailer will still use the same wires.

Most businesses are already able to change supplier.  This has been a great cost saver.  Average price reductions are over 25 per cent.

The enormous cost savings made by the privatised electricity industry has underpinned the price reductions.  However, the better deals were activated by competition, which forces suppliers to find ways of saving costs and offering improved value.  With competition, retailers have to research customer needs, find sources of generation that fit those needs, and package all this together in ways that are attractive -- that is at a cheap price or with great service.

The electricity investment cycle is such that household consumers will not see an early repetition of the price reductions that benefited businesses over recent years.  In fact, a rise in wholesale prices of electricity over the past year is currently placing upward pressure on all customers' prices.

This prospect is spooking the government, which is presently examining whether it should impose caps on the prices to households and other small consumers.

There will be no shortage of consumerist busybodies urging the government to hold prices down, but price caps, while superficially attractive, are dangerous measures.  Prices set too low will thwart competition.  Rival firms won't bother entering the market if they can't make a dollar.

Moreover, prices set close to the bone will automatically make the service to some customers unprofitable.  Unprofitable customers will inevitably see a degradation in their service.  In addition, low prices will make retailers reluctant to negotiate contracts with generators.  This can cause a reversal of the current upward trend in the investment cycle, bringing severe, perhaps catastrophic shortages of electricity within a year or so.

Providing government regulation allows retail competition to do its job, the effects will be highly beneficial.  Although many of us will find the electricity marketers' calls annoying, there will be some excellent deals offered, and many households will switch to the new retailers offering them.  In England fully opening the market to competition saw 27 per cent of household customers changing their electricity supplier.

The beauty of full retail contestability is that it is likely to benefit everyone.  Even those of us who are too lazy or cautious to switch or just don't see enough value in doing so are likely to gain.  This is because the existing suppliers will need to ensure all their prices are competitive simply because their once-captive customers are now free to move.

Armed with previous retailer commitments, the Government prevented electricity price rises to households during 2001.  If, however, it controls prices into the future, it will unravel the electricity reforms returning us to the bad old days of persistently high prices and poor service.

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Markets in the Firm

INTRODUCTION

Why is it that major world economies appear to be enjoying a sustained period of solid growth without the emergence of growth-destroying, wage induced inflation?  Inflation may occur as a result of other factors, but the wage-push dragon appears to have been slain.

It seems to be agreed that structural and continuous productivity improvement is the explanation [1], but why is this happening?  The information technology revolution is often cited as the cause, as is fear of losing one's job.  But neither of these explains or gets to the essence of the welcome transformation in workplace behavior.  Certainly IT has contributed by causing a spectacular collapse of transaction costs.  However, alleged fear of losing ones job is not supported by empirical analysis. [2]

In answer to the riddle the proposition presented here is that market principles have began to penetrate the internal management of firms.  When firms adopt internal markets, as opposed to being run as command and control collectives, the search by their personnel for higher incomes is tempered and constrained by firms' performance in external markets.  When command and control operates, wage reviews are dominated by warlike standoffs between workers and management where each party attempts to capture the benefits of the firm for itself.  Under command and control, external market signals relevant to the firm are ignored as the politics of envy, egotism and winner-takes-all corrupt decision-making and force staff costs up beyond the capacity of the firm to pay.

In societies dominated by command-and-control firms, the combined weight of thousands of firms paying more than their market performance can induce wage-led inflation.  But under markets in the firm, remuneration is not artificially controlled by the managerial elite but rather is the outcome of thousands of small price and other market signals that individuals constantly transmit to one another.  The result is increased income for internal staff, as their self-interested search for higher incomes is self-financed by leading to improved firm performance.  This causes the productivity explosion.  Firms that fail to share their market success with staff lose the staff upon which the success is built and ultimately collapse.  In this model the internal market is as important to a firm's success as the external market.

The debate over the Phillips curve -- "the notion that there was a permanent trade-off between inflation and unemployment, so that policy makers could choose from a menu of alternative rates of inflation and unemployment;  the higher the rate of inflation they were willing to tolerate, the lower the rate of unemployment they could achieve" -- has continued since its debunking by Milton Friedman in 1967. [3]  Friedman noted that it continues to be a popular idea particularly among lay and journalistic commentators.  Friedman introduced the idea of the "natural rate of unemployment" to which "the level of unemployment would tend whatever the rate of inflation" [4] and that to push unemployment below its natural rate required accelerating inflation.

It has since been argued that the natural rate of unemployment no longer applies.  However, Edmund Phelps, one of the inventors of the natural-rate theory, retorts that "The model's inventors never viewed the natural rate as a constant.  It is simply an economic variable determined by non-monetary forces". [5]  Further, "the real forces of enterprise and finance ... are the ultimate drivers of unemployment".

Whatever the merits of the two theories, the general idea is that unemployment has a structural floor (even if shifting) below which it cannot fall without inducing growth-destroying, wage-push inflation.  But if Phelps is right, the trick is to unlock the "forces of enterprise and finance" that allow us all to seek as much work and income as we want without triggering wage-induced inflation.

Is this possible?  Yes, if the principles of free exchange apply in the hitherto sacrosanct command and control zone:  the internal operations of firms.  Further, applying markets within firms is perhaps the final and full development of the non-monetary structural forces that could drive the natural rate of unemployment to zero.  To explore this theme further requires a revisiting of the concept of the firm itself.

THE FIRM AND CONTROL

The modern understanding of the firm starts with Ronald Coase's idea of transaction costs.  Coase famously argued in 1937 that the firm exists because it provides a structure that contains transaction costs.  However, it is less often noted that Coase argued that the containment of transaction costs was dependent on control exercised by an entrepreneur through the master-servant legal employment relationship. [6]  It has been taken for granted that without this right of managers to control employees, transaction costs could not be contained.  The prevailing idea of the market economy, then, is one in which free transactions occur between firms but do not and cannot occur within firms.  This limited view of markets dominated the theory and practice of management throughout the 20th century.

Command and control management won great prestige between the 1920s and the 1970s [7], when the Taylorist or scientific approach to management prevailed.  Taylorists held that it was possible to assess and formally structure every process and action required in a firm and that every employee subordinate to senior management would exercise thought and initiative only to the extent allowed by management.  This approach achieved its apogee of sophistication under Elliot Jacques as late as the 1980s. [8]  Jacques, a psychoanalyst by background undertook detailed studies of human behaviour in bureaucracies, and on that basis constructed a theory of management in which every function in a large organisation could be scientifically analysed for the "time span management" required to facilitate the function.  This made it possible to construct and apply a precise bureaucratic structure.  Under it, staff remuneration and ambition were determined by the firm's bureaucracy, thus establishing order, control and harmony.  Disharmony occurred only when staff sought to break free from the structure.  Jacques' principles continue to be applied in some of the world's largest mining companies, the US military, and elsewhere.  Interestingly, Jacques himself was careful to state that his principles did not apply to small business and in his own experience failed in the academic and education areas.

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The Idealisation of the Primitive

The Culture Cult:  Designer Tribalism and Other Essays
by Roger Sandall
Westview, Boulder, Colorado, 214 pp, $55

Roger Sandall's new book The Culture Cult has generally attracted attention because of the link made between his critique of Romantic Primitivism and the current situation regarding Aborigines in Australia.  To concentrate on just this dimension of Sandall's analysis, however, does not do justice to the richness of Sandall's discussion of the nature of Romantic primitivism, and its implications for an understanding of the nature of contemporary civilisation.

At the heart of Sandall's discussion lies a contrast between those who favour a modern commercial order, with its qualities of openness and dynamism, and those who desire a return to some sort of "primitive", closed communal society.  Sandall correctly traces the modern origins of this dichotomy to the Enlightenment.  On the one hand, the Enlightenment saw the advocacy of "sweet commerce" by Montesquieu, Hume and Adam Smith;  on the other hand, there was the desire to resist the embrace of commerce and return to a social order marked by solidarity and close social bonding, as seen in the work of Rousseau and the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Herder.

Sandall connects the cult of primitivism and the "noble savage" with those intellectuals and littérateurs who were disillusioned with the modern world and its commercial values.  The bulk of the book consists of a number of case studies of people who contributed to what he terms the "culture cult":  from Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead to Karl Polanyi, Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Williams.  What all of these intellectuals had in common was an opposition to modern commercial society and a concept of culture that exalted the primitive and/or closed social order.  They are contrasted with others, including Popper, Hayek and Michael Polanyi who advocated the benefits of an open society.  In particular, Sandall sees early twentieth-century Vienna as the primary battleground over which this intellectual conflict raged.

In many ways, however, Sandall leaves the crucial questions unanswered.  Why are so many intellectuals attracted to visions of an ideal primitive past?  Is it because, as Paul Johnson suggested in his Intellectuals, there are factors of individual psychological pathology at work?  Or is that interpretation too limited?  This is not a new phenomenon.  In late fifth-century Athens, there was an idealisation of traditionalist "primitive" Sparta amongst the aristocratic intelligentsia led by Socrates, an idealisation that has lasted to our time, in the shape of Plato's Republic.  Moving to the modern era, François Furet has described the bourgeois self-hatred that was a feature of Europe in the wake of the French Revolution.

In fact, a deeply ingrained prejudice against commerce, and in favour of "heroic", "aristocratic", or "cultured" values, has been part and parcel of most human societies.  Paul Rahe has convincingly demonstrated that the ancient Greeks, including the Athenians, were motivated by military and political values and saw commerce as at best a means to a military end.  Rome and China kept the men of commerce in their place.  Even England did not so much exalt as tolerate commerce:  the rule of law meant that the state could not plunder the profits of merchants.  Burke believed that commerce should operate within the framework of established civilised, that is to say aristocratic, values.  Until recently the élite in Australian society was turned away from studying commerce in favour of classics or law:  business was something reserved for the less able.

This not to say that many of these societies did not possess qualities of "openness";  rather, it is to observe that the "open society" has always been a tender growth and in need of constant cultivation, because it has never been without its detractors and enemies.  The roots of opposition to the "open society" run deep, and are in need of explanation.  Marcel Gauchet has observed that, for 90 per cent of their history, human beings were locked into a communalism that enforced equality and discouraged initiative.  Only with the development of agriculture did the possibility emerge of escaping this timeless communalism.  Even then, most human beings during the agrarian age spent their time as downtrodden agricultural workers or slaves.  Only in the last two centuries has the possibility emerged of a universal social and political order that delivers both freedom and dignity.  Human beings are plastic creatures, capable of a whole range of cultural adaptations, but they are also prone to a whole range of anxieties and fears.  Perhaps primitivism is a response to some of those anxieties.

It is also worth noting that the bold individualism of fifth-century Athens enjoyed general support, but that Spartan primitivism infected the pro-aristocratic intelligentsia in the wake of the failures of the Peloponnesian war.  Could it also be that "Romantic primitivism" is especially attractive to those who feel left out in an open society, that is, aristocrats and those who believe themselves to be aristocrats of the spirit, in other words, the intelligentsia?  Both the intelligentsia and the aristocracy are profoundly suspicious of ordinary people being free to make decisions, and often advocate means of restricting and regulating that activity.

Whatever may be the cause of the desire of many modern intellectuals and academics to revert to some sort of closed society, the agenda of "Romantic Primitivism" is one that needs to be both exposed and rejected.  Sandall has done us all a great service by bringing together in these essays both a wide-ranging analysis of the phenomenon and a critique of its underlying ideas.  He has also provided us with a warning about the fragility of the open society, at a time when its benefits are so manifest.  Even if openness is a source of anxiety for some people, the alternative is so much worse;  the communalism of 90 per cent of human history may seem attractive now, but at the time life really was "nasty, brutish and short".

Spiritual Eczema

The Life and Soul of the Party:  A Portrait of Modern Labor
by Brett Evans
University of New South Wales Press, 128 pp, $19.95

Amused, amusing and apposite, this book falls short of masterpiece status;  it bears too many signs of haste and sloppy editing ("a political phenomena";  "both of the them") for that accolade.  Yet Brett Evans -- an old-fashioned reporter who, would you believe, reports -- deserves thanks for his investigation of a political movement that, for the first time ever, now seems both electorally unstoppable and ideologically null.

By Christmas, assuming that voters feed John Howard to the same sharks which formed a welcoming committee for Denis Burke and will presumably devour John Olsen, non-Labor government will be unimaginable for at least another decade.  Nevertheless, answers to the question "What principle would Beazley, Carr, Bracks, Bacon, Beattie, or Gallop die defending?" are as elusive now as they ever were.  The hints of conscious social engineering here and there -- Bracks' abasement to Buggery Barn's legislative demands;  Carr's preoccupation with making NSW an "education State", as opposed, presumably, to an educated State -- scarcely mask the absence of those great rent-a-mob causes which abounded as recently as the Kirner Premiership.  Even the pseudo-causes so prevalent among leftist parties abroad (for example, Blair's vengeance upon Pinochet and the British aristocracy) find few if any echoes in ALP breasts.

Of course a Beazley Government would formally ditch the Queen.  But then, so would a Costello Government.  As for the other current catch-cries among Labor's True Believers (Aboriginal activism;  the "Knowledge Nation" that seems, in so far as any topic can, to set Beazley's own ticker racing;  the much-vaunted "right" to IVF for those classes now cryptically known as the "socially infertile"), it would defy even the silliest Obergruppenführer of the Liberals' twinset-and-pearls brigade to imagine that a post-Howard Coalition would wish, or be able, to oppose these shibboleths.

So:  given that between Labor and the other lot there no longer exists (as Alabama Governor George Wallace used to say) "a dime's worth of difference", what sops, if any, can Beazley or his State counterparts throw the baying party faithful?  Well, the politics of envy continue to be a nice little earner, as Evans' research attests.  Supporting Evans' narrative at both ends are two panels, as lovingly detailed as the artwork on a mediæval altar-piece.  Panel One depicts Keating at Sydney's Town Hall in late 1999, spewing anti-monarchist and anti-Timorese invective over an audience that would probably have cheered on a gang-rape, provided the rapists wore ALP badges.  Panel Two depicts John Button, groaning under the weight of his parliamentary superannuation scheme, yet still seeing himself as a battler, and hissing his hatred of Collins Street's "bloody stockbrokers".

Is a Keating's or a Button's inverted snobbery a conscious fraud?  Unlikely.  It seems more like a kind of spiritual eczema, which no personal affluence can soothe.  And when this ailment afflicts the ALP's most economically literate members, conceive of what havoc it must wreak on out-and-out class warriors.  Even Mark Latham, when dilating on the purpose of life, offers no more compassionate or large-minded credo than "Stick to the working class like s**t to a blanket".  The phrase "working class" is, surprise surprise, never defined;  but that it can coexist with the most voracious appetite for tertiary qualifications, and the most outré sexual enthusiasms, the Beazley epoch amply confirms.

Naturally authentic pre-modern boorishness, as well as cheap post-modern imitations thereof, finds a place in Evans' pages.  To read of Labor festivities at NSW's Oban Nursing Home on St Patrick's Day ("You young sheilas enjoying your drink?") is to be transported back to the golden era epitomised by South Australia's long and deservedly forgotten Premier Frank Walsh, whose idea of courteously accepting a Japanese diplomat's present was to bellow "Gee, thanks, Shorty!"  Opinion polling, Evans reveals, played no part in Australia before 1946's Federal election:  with the result that pre-pollster rustics who would not have known a spin-doctor from a spirochæte continued to work their way through the national body politic till the 1970s.

Evans might have explored this fact's ramifications further, since it raises the issue Beazley dares not avoid:  which group does the less harm?  White-bread politicians who at least combine amorality with some economic prudence?  Or entirely sincere, entirely ethical troglodytes who, given a quarter of a chance, would re-regulate absolutely every commercial transaction except two-up?  (Latham tosses off a nice one-liner about re-regulatory obsessives:  "They've tried that approach in North Korea, and they're eating the bark off the trees").  To those who sit around longing for a Curtin or a Chifley to re-emerge among us, like some King Arthur back from Avalon, reminders of the old Jewish proverb are germane:  "Be careful what you pray for.  You might get it".

Certainly, even if neither Curtin nor Chifley has returned, Sir William McKell still runs NSW Labor from the grave.  McKell and his successors controlled Australia's most populous State for 24 years (1941-65) by ensuring a bloc of vacuous but unfailingly amiable Labor backbenchers representing constituencies that should have been Country Party heartlands.  Sixty years on, these backbenchers' Labor successors continue to preserve Carr's administration from all perils save the sheer boredom of invincibility.  Yes, that's right, this is Labor's idea of root-andbranch internal reform.

Evans has great and justified fun with the spectacle of post-1975 ALP apparatchiks demanding the most stringent sacrifices from one community group after another, while Premier after Premier and State secretary after State secretary tosses into too-hard baskets any suggestions (however demurely offered) of an end to branch rorts.  In this context we must note -- and tireless visionaries like Senator Chris Schacht are only too keen to make us note -- that what most people call branch-stacking is not what the ALP calls branch-stacking.  The ALP's rather narrow definition covers only:  (a) such stacking as makes the newspapers;  (b) the subset of (a) excluding fashionable ethnic groups.  Unfashionable ethnic groups are, by definition, "Nazi war criminals".  Thus, whereas Labor's foes "stack branches", Labor is only ever (to quote a choice Keatingism) "engaged in the issues of enlargement".  Got that?

In case the above has not deterred you from joining your local ALP branch, Evans provides useful tips.  Walking in off the street with a declared interest in policy will get you nowhere.  Membership of a vast extended Lebanese family, preferably with potential ALP foot-soldiers in utero, is a much better option.  The Stakhanovite triumph of Australia Day 1999, which saw 2,000 new troops conscripted within 24 hours, has already entered ALP folklore.

Ultimately those of us not among the Elect -- who, that is, have neither joined the ALP nor felt the smallest desire to do so -- must find Labor rites as impenetrably mysterious as those of other secular priesthoods:  Freemasons, surfies, football teams.  Even Townsville Council's Karen "The Spider Woman" Ehrmann (but for whose chicanery Jim Elder would still be Queensland's Deputy Premier and the Shepherdson Inquiry a mere pious hope) appears to have had a genuine sense of mission.  As to what this mission is, and why thousands of otherwise sane people can delude themselves into crediting (say) Senator Nick Bolkus with a cosmic significance that Goethe plus Michelangelo could hardly boast, perhaps we heathens will never know.  But the ALP's innate penchant for public navel-gazing and Howard's seemingly incurable pixillation are both doing everything possible to guarantee that we all soon find out.

The Culture War: US and Australia

The Art of Political War
by David Horowitz
Spence Publishing, Dallas, 224 pp, $50

Ask not what you can do for your country but what your government can do for you.  This inversion of the famous lines of JFK's speechwriter might be the operating slogan of the middle-to-Left ALP, the Australian Democrats, the union bureaucracy, the broadsheet press, allies (and, frequently, close relatives) in the ABC, and the arts/ social sciences commentariat from our leading universities.

This was the cohort which greeted with both incredulity and hostility Peter Costello's recent call for the fostering of civic virtues, such as care for one's neighbours and the donation of time and effort to community activities.

Costello and his Party quickly found that to advance the notions that government is and should be limited, that the interaction of neighbours, families, and community groups is the foundation of the good society, is to open up a vulnerable flank to the slogans of the broad Left, with its practised use of verbal weapons such as "uncaring", "neglecting the under-privileged", "preferring economics to people".

Which brings us to David Horowitz, a name some will remember from the 1960s and 1970s when he led radical movements supporting Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, George McGovern, Jane Fonda, and a student/ blacks revolution in the USA.  He once organised a school for the children of the Black Panther Party.  He was also an editor of Ramparts, the most influential magazine of the American Left.

His autobiography, Radical Son, tells the important story of his progress from radical student activist against pluralism and market economies, to promoter of the good sense in the motives and policies of John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison.  (Can any reader let me know if these three greats are seriously taught in any Australian university?)  He is still a regular contributor to the leftist Internet magazine Salon.

The Art of Political War is his latest book on US political life, but much of it applies to the situation in Australia, Britain, or Germany (where the ruling Social Democratic Party is organising a partnership deal with the former Communists of East Berlin).  His urgent proposition is that the US liberal/ socialist alliance is, overall, winning the debate and the strategic power that follows, on a wide range of public policies, from education to public safety to the size and intrusion of the government sector.

A number of his observations, intended to advise American Republicans, have application to Australia:

• Every issue that (most) Democrats contest is coloured in their minds by the larger purpose of redeeming the world through government.
• When Democrats speak politically, every other word is a public device to seem to be on the side of the angels:  an appeal to "minorities", "working Americans", "women", "poor children".
• Republicans, by contrast, tend to speak in abstract language about legalistic doctrines and economic budgets, sounding like lawyers and accountants.
• Through these devices, Clinton trounced the Republicans over vastly increasing the Federal education budget, even though most of the extra spending ended up in the hands of the education bureaucracy and not the children.
• The Democrat leadership doesn't try to wipe its toughest opponents in debate, it aims to wipe out, period:  for example, a litany of false charges against Newt Gingrich, which the East Coast media relentlessly repeated (Gingrich was ultimately cleared on every count, but ruined in the process);  the Democrat attacks on prosecutor Kenneth Starr until it seemed that he, and not Clinton, was on trial;  the smear campaign against Judge Clarence Thomas as a warning to all black leaders not to leave Democrat territory.
• The common understanding that the Constitution sets limits to what government may do has broken down, as "rights" are manufactured, progressives are appointed to the benches, and Democrat lawyers stake out new ground throughout the republic.
• The key Left Democrat program is to redistribute the tax impositions on individuals, families, and enterprises, on the basis of political prejudice.
• The political war as outlined above is also a culture war, as the Left Democrats move through the parliaments, public offices, the media, teaching institutions, and even the benevolent foundations set up by business entrepreneurs.

Australian Liberals and US Republicans suffer another political disadvantage.  As Horowitz explains, US Democrats enter party politics out of socialist-type organisations, trade unions, social crusades about various minority rights, etc.  "They are combat-ready before they begin their political careers".  (See how easily the three former ACTU leaders moved into Canberra Labor's Shadow Cabinet).

Generally, US Republicans want to manage or even roll back the umbrella of political institutions;  whereas Democrats want to transform them.  Republicans want to fix government;  Democrats want to fix the world.

It is interesting that four Australian Federal Liberal Prime Ministers are lawyers.  Menzies was a lawyer, and so were Holt and McMahon.  Each of them is or was skilled in verbal attack and defence.  Menzies and Howard have shown an ability to connect with significant elements of the community:  "the forgotten people", Menzies women's support groups, Howard's "battlers", small business groups (until Treasury and the Tax Office were allowed to take control of BAS, IAS, issues affecting independent contractors, etc).

But none of these leaders has been able to articulate an attack on big Government, or an attack on Labor's social crusades, which connect with the public.  Liberals are good at debating points, but not social issues.  Keeping it simple is not easy.

The connection between fast-rising government spending, inflation, and unemployment became clear to the wider public during the Whitlam/Cairns years, through harsh experience.  The connection between high taxation, government waste, and capital and intellectual flight, is not yet apparent to most people who depend on shortish TV, radio, and newspaper items and headlines for their political intake.

Clearly, "Taxation Breaks for Big Business and Investors" is a policy item which will be savaged and lampooned in the middle-brow media.  But Horowitz demands that conservatives and Republicans make a massive effort to connect.  "Tax Breaks for Families, Cuts in Washington's [Canberra's] Bureaucracy", are the kind of things he would recommend.

Education is one of his prime examples of how Democrats make a plus of a minus.  "Millions of black, Hispanic, and other 'minority' (but not Chinese) youths leave school without being able to read English or multiply 10 by 11".  There are a number of reasons for this, including the public sector education unions refusing tests for children on the way through, as well as their refusal to accept career supervision of teachers.

The Democrat answer is more and more government funding.  The Republican reaction is inevitably reported as "Republicans Refuse Money for Schools" or some such.  Not a winner.  Shades of Australian reports of "More Grants to Private Schools", when the great increase in public funding overall was to government and poorer schools.

As Horowitz points out, although public education is a big Democrat plus issue, none of the Democrat Congress leaders or education policy promoters sends his/her children to a government school.  The attack should be, he says:  why do they condemn the children of minorities to the failed school system which their biggest supporter group runs?  Easily said, but winning that war needs careful policy preparation, a national frontal attack, persistence, and sharp words.

Horowitz proposes that the Republican Party and its general supporter base must fight on a broader cultural front.  Rather than just defending their own views on individual and commercial liberties, and the virtues of the balanced budget, etc., they should be out attacking the Left/Democrat alliance for condemning black children to poor schools and violence ("Guns Don't Kill Blacks, Other Blacks Do");  and for advocating a health system which would abolish the family doctor.

Horowitz doesn't mention it, but a new term called "Capitulation Conciliation" has entered the vocabulary of PR.  The syndrome is also called "Cave-In Conciliation".  If attacked by Greens or radicals of any kind, companies are encouraged to phone their friendly PR company, which will arrange the terms of their surrender.  As one PR director said, "You can't fight them, because they get all the good press".

Large and productive public companies (mostly owned by workers' superannuation funds, middle-class families, and the elderly retired) rolling over to dark Greens, Trotskyites, and even Stalinists:  these do not make a pretty sight, though they are making one that is becoming more common.  It is a lot to ask of Liberal, Conservative, and Republican Parties to carry this extra load.

The parties of the democratic market and limited politics need to harness themselves to community organisations, international traders, smaller business, the professions which have not attached themselves to big government, aspirational voters (who want good schools and lively local scenes), and the independent trades and contractors (fortunately a fast-growing lot).

Above all, says Horowitz, they must recognise that they are involved in a culture war.  Language and symbols are mighty weapons in this war.  The Left has fought hard for the monopoly on "caring", "compassion", "public", "social funding", etc., even though its policies lead to illiterate school graduates, a raft of government benefactions to middle-class cronies, harassment of independent workers and innovators, endless litigation by insiders, and an increase in impersonal bodies and controls.  (Would you rather be cared for by the Department of Social Something or the Salvation Army?)

By "public", of course, they mean "government".  Social funding can mean "caring" policies, like granting educated and vocal operators with some Aboriginal ancestry the funds which should go to poor communities of mostly or full Aboriginal ancestry.  By "compassion" they mean offering heroin-injecting facilities to suffering creatures who need immediate hospital treatment.  All this needs to be said loudly, and better.

Secrets & Lies

Is it possible to distinguish genuine Aboriginal traditions from those that have been invented recently for cynical motives?  Last week's extraordinary Federal Court decision from Justice von Doussa suggests that it is not.

In 1994, Ngarrindjeri Aborigines said that a proposed bridge across the lower Murray between Hindmarsh Island and Goolwa would desecrate secret women's traditions which required that the island must remain separate from the mainland.  They successfully appealed to Robert Tickner, then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Federal Labor government, to block construction of the bridge.

But the following year a diverse group of Ngarrindjeri women said the supposed traditions were a hoax.  In response, the South Australian Liberal government set up a Royal Commission which, after five months of investigation, found that the "secret women's business" had been fabricated.

After legal challenges and the passage of special legislation, the bridge was finally completed earlier this year.  Nevertheless, developers Tom and Wendy Chapman said they had suffered massive losses because of the fabrication, and sued the Commonwealth Government and Mr Tickner, as well as an anthropologist and a lawyer who had prepared reports for the minister.

Initially, it was expected that the Chapmans' action would avoid matters considered by the Royal Commission, and concentrate on alleged offences under the Trade Practices Act.  But as the case progressed, Justice von Doussa indicated that the outcome could depend on whether or not the women's traditions were bogus, and this became a major focus.

The key proponents of the "secret women's business" had boycotted the Royal Commission, which decided not to invoke the powers it possessed to compel them to testify.  However, the proponents did appear in the Federal Court case, strengthening von Doussa's conviction that he heard evidence significantly different to that heard by the Royal Commission.

But although he disparaged the Chapmans for not calling witnesses who might possibly have questioned their assertions, von Doussa did not seem similarly troubled by the refusal of the major "women's business" proponents to appear before the Royal Commission.  He thought the proponents were "credible witnesses", and where cross-examination had shown their evidence to be unreliable, he readily excused them as having made innocent mistakes.

Consequently, Von Doussa said that on the evidence before him, he was "not satisfied that the restricted women's knowledge was fabricated or that it was not part of genuine Aboriginal tradition".  But he also admitted that it was impossible for him to be definitive about whether the "secret women's business" was authentic, and that others "may well come to different conclusions".

My confidence in Justice von Doussa's conclusions is not helped by the faulty account he gave of a paper of mine which had been placed before the court by an anthropologist appearing for the Chapmans.  My paper criticised another anthropologist, Professor Diane Bell, who had written a book attacking claims that the Ngarrindjeri women's traditions had been fabricated, although she had not explained why the Royal Commission had come to its findings and then shown why its arguments should be rejected.

I stated that there were a number of "apparently stubborn and massive facts" that "must either be disproved, or else shown to be compatible with assertions that opposition to the bridge was based on ancient traditions".  But von Doussa simply ignored my first alternative and then incorrectly criticised me for supposedly regarding the Royal Commission's findings as incontrovertible facts.  Only a small matter perhaps, but a revealing one nonetheless.

Von Doussa's own treatment of some of these apparent facts also leaves much to be desired.  For instance, he acknowledges that the timing of the claims about "secret women's business" seems strange to what he calls "the Eurocentric mind" -- a term which suggests that he is unaware that the great majority of Ngarrindjeri, a people who have been actively engaged with mainstream Australia for well over a century, also share "Eurocentric" assumptions.

He acknowledges that at least some individuals who supposedly knew about the women's traditions would also have known of the proposed bridge long before any Ngarrindjeri expressed opposition to its construction.  However, he accepts questionable claims that the women's traditions were only invoked at the last minute because they were so secret.

Furthermore, he does not properly explain why the traditions were not disclosed in the 1930s and 40s, when a series of barrages which permanently connect Hindmarsh Island to the mainland were constructed, and when some traditionally educated Ngarrindjeri were still alive.  Indeed, in the early 1990s, the possibility of converting the Hindmarsh Island barrage to a vehicle bridge was seriously investigated, although this was found to be impractical.

Von Doussa seems to go along with arguments that Aborigines were too powerless to protest at the time.  Nevertheless, anthropologists who were studying Ngarrindjeri culture when the barrages were being built did record protests from Ngarrindjeri traditionalists that various other actions by non-Aborigines were desecrating their country.  But the same anthropologists seem to have heard no complaints about the barrages.  Indeed, a number of Ngarrindjeri were involved in their construction.

While von Doussa's arguments have not convinced me that I should change my mind about Hindmarsh Island, on one matter I sympathise with the proponents of "secret women's business".  If his judgement is taken seriously, building the bridge constituted an injustice against the Ngarrindjeri who claim custodianship of the women's traditions.  Perhaps the South Australian and Federal opposition parties should offer to demolish the Hindmarsh Island bridge as one of their election promises.

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