CHAPTER 16
They would say that wouldn't they!
Mandy Rice-Davies during the Profumo Inquiry.
It is incontestable that as the nineties progressed populist political parties and street campaigns dedicated to preventing further economic freedom and reversing what had already been achieved gathered momentum. The motivations for these were not, however, similarly self-evident, although the "backlash" was fairly widely interpreted as having been caused by "reform fatigue". In Australia, following the rise of the populist One Nation Party and the defeat of the Kennett Government, vote-conscious politicians became reform shy. Leadership is never easy and politicians deserve more sympathy than some of their more carping and self-important critics afford them. Nevertheless, pollies are given exceptional opportunities to become informed and they do not have the moral option of following rather than leading, particularly should the populace be weary. Politicians who, knowing what they ought to do, do something else have abandoned their trust. That is, in the terms of Revel's explanation of political corruption, they have allowed themselves to be corrupted.
Moreover, if the voter disenchantment has explanations other than reform fatigue or the fatigue is based upon misapprehension that is amenable to correction, then a "tea break", or worse, a policy reversal, might be not only weak but foolish.
The evidence does not deny the existence of reform fatigue and indeed there was plenty, mostly anecdotal, that voters had lost some of their enthusiasm for reform. However, it was not so dominant a reason for either Kennett's loss or Hanson's success as to exclude other explanations. Moreover, street demonstrations are a poor indicator of numerical support and much of the fatigue was no more than the predictable consequence of the destruction of straw houses and beat up of crises. The vested interests that had lost privileges would say that people were tired of reform, wouldn't they?
THE RECORD OF THE NINETIES
After half a century of totalitarian threats, the sight of East Germans dancing on the Berlin wall had a profound emotional effect on Dries, Wets and self-serving rent-seekers alike and it shut up the socialists for a while. Few Dries then expected 1989 to be the point at which the success of their ideas would slow down in the West as they gathered momentum in Middle Europe.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic deregulated and privatised. East Germany was incorporated into modern Germany putting strains upon that economy that were to reveal its weaknesses. Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel became dry heroes, even though neither was very dry. Western dry think tanks rushed to proffer advice, not all of it good.
During the next few years, Dries learned that the civil society that they advocated was even more dependent upon the culture than many had appreciated. The communities that had had strong civil cultures before communist domination and which had only been communist for a generation managed the transition with extraordinary success. The others were plagued by crime and cowboy capitalism that, at least initially, denied the market economy's benefits to common people.
In the West, however, some of the urgency had gone from reform. At a dinner I attended to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the fall-of-the-wall, five well-recognised Dries each desponded upon the decline of liberalism. They were too pessimistic but liberalism had become yesterday's cause. The flood of liberal policy gains had abated, but there was then still a steady trickle of dry reforms and, except in New Zealand and parts of Europe, little had been reversed.
Although it was not at all the impression to be gained from the media, those whose knowledge went beyond the doom saying to the data would celebrate the new millennium knowing that humanity fared better than ever before. While much remediable poverty remained, except in Africa and a few remaining outposts of communist tyranny such as North Korea, the living standards of the world's poorest were rising faster than at any time in recorded history. Over half the world's population had enjoyed economic growth rates of over 3% p.a. during the 1990s. (475)
David Henderson, former Head of the Economics and Statistics Department of the OECD, assessed the tendency between 1975 and 1995 of 114 nations to liberalise their economies. He classified 77, including all 23 OECD and 13 of the 14 Asian nations, as "reforming", 25 as "intermediate", and 12 -- mostly in Africa and the Middle East -- as "counter-reforming". All large nations were to be found among the 77 and the 12 counter-reformers together had a combined GDP of only a little more than Canada. In 1995, Singapore and the United States were the most economically free. New Zealand, which had done 66% of what he estimated was possible, and Mauritius, which had done 61%, had done most to liberalise sclerotic economies. Germany 12% and Switzerland 13% had done least but in 1975 they had already been among the 4 most economically free nations. The greatest gains had been made with privatisation, deregulation and international trade: the least with health, education, fiscal transfers including state pensions and other benefits, and labour markets. The record has been less impressive since, but it had been a remarkable two decades. (476)
Life itself is the least easily distorted measure of human wellbeing. During the second half of the 20th Century life expectancy in India had risen from 36 years to 61 years. (477) The boon of old age was, however, distributed neither evenly nor randomly. The American Cato Institute tells us that, among 123 countries, life expectancy in the 24 most economically free was 20 years longer than in the 24 least free. (478)
During the last quarter of the 20th Century many parts of the world exchanged goods, capital, technology, culture and people more freely than ever before. The tendency, which became known as "globalisation", had these main features:
- The production and marketing of goods and services on a global scale.
- Economic organisations that cannot any longer be said to be Australian or American or any other national -- Daimler/Chrysler and News International for instance.
- Worldwide capital and currency markets.
- Everyday transnational communication, most often in English, and increasingly over the Internet.
- Intermingling and blending of the world's cultures, enriching the choices available to all and reducing the tendency for Chauvinism and misunderstanding.
- Immigration, emigration and travel.
- Rising living standards in nearly all non-African nations as people exploit comparative advantages better.
Its critics and some of its advocates say that it reduces the sovereignty of national Governments and, in one sense, it does. Governments are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their citizens in ignorance or to deny them the goods, services and ideas of foreigners. Practical sovereignty has indeed shifted, but it has not gone to foreign Governments. Instead, each nation's citizens are capturing it from their own rulers and apparatchiks. For good and ill, the various Governments' formal law-making powers are undiminished but their ability to hide the consequences of their laws is. Heaven forbid, even the women of Iran are demanding liberties that the mullahs associate with western decadence.
A three-minute telephone call to the United Kingdom that cost $350 (today's dollars) in 1926 costs 65 cents today. (479) E-mail connections are even cheaper. The rest of the world cannot be shut out. US organisations employ the Irish and Indians to undertake back-room activities, such as data processing, taking advantage of time differentials that allow the work to be done during the US night and pay scales that reduce the cost of US services and raise Indian and Irish incomes. Individual factors of production and whole industries seek out the legal, cultural and social environments that offer them such advantages as stable property rights, inexpensive or highly productive labour, social stability, pleasant environments in which to raise families, low taxes and a regulatory environment that does not unduly hinder economic activity. It remains the responsibility of national Governments' to facilitate and protect these beneficial environments.
The communications revolution has, however, made it difficult for them to keep their people ignorant of better practices elsewhere or misGovernment at home. For instance, at the time of the Tienanmen Square massacre, accounts of what actually happened were faxed into China. Today they would e-mailed. Some of the brightest young people fled China, Vietnam and Cambodia to make homes in nations that allowed them better to use their talents. The flight of young people dramatically changed East Germany in 1989. Less dramatically, the loss of 10% of New Zealand's skilled young brought about a considerable change of thinking in that country.
Even for far-flung island States, such as Australia, international borders are becoming less restrictive. If the new order is to mean that my Chinese neighbour drives a Japanese car, which is insured in Britain where a multinational company employs my daughter, I don't see why I should not be pleased. It would, moreover, be a considerable bonus if the mixing of the international pot and the spread of liberal ideals meant that my grandsons never have to fight a war.
The trend towards the global society undermines the primacy of politics. That political activists resent this is hardly surprising. The trend is not new but the rate of its progression is. Despite the so called reform fatigue, it gives old Dries some hope that the last quarter century's reforms will not be undone in any wholesale way but not that Australia will continue to progress faster than other nations.
Promises to the contrary notwithstanding, centralised control, autarchy, state ownership, and the noblesse oblige of the privileged few has nowhere resulted in any considerable betterment of the masses. On the contrary, wherever people of equal legal status were permitted get on with their own lives under strong but limited Governments guaranteeing security of person and property, commoners have prospered (480) and truth is becoming more difficult for interests and their client Governments to hide.
A comprehensive evaluation of economic freedom by Gwartney and Lawson published by the Fraser Institute shows in both relative and absolute terms Australia's attainment of: freedom for private decisions; security of private property; stable money; internationally open markets; freedom to work, buy, save and invest; and simpler more reliable trust-inspiring regulation. From the seventh most free among 123 nations in 1970 Australia had crashed to 17th in 1975 and climbed steadily back to 6th by 1999. (481)
Australians began 2000 with fireworks, then treated themselves to more fireworks for the Olympics and more again to mark 100 years of Federation. We would probably have had these parties anyway, but after 9 years of solid economic growth some self-congratulation was warranted. Since 1991, growth had averaged above 4% p.a., consistently out-performing both the United Kingdom and the United States, themselves excellent performers. We had lifted our relative position from sixteenth wealthiest nation in the OECD to eleventh. (482) Measures of consumption by poor households indicated that these had made the fastest improvement in the living conditions. (483) Following the reduction of tariffs, from about 1991, manufacturing industry's share of Australia's GDP had, temporarily, ceased its steady decline. (484)
Unemployment, still around 6.5%, was down from 11% eight years before. It was higher than that of either the United Kingdom or the United States, but well below the average of the European Union. (485) The number of man-days lost to industrial disputes per thousand employees had fallen from a peak of over 1200 in 1974 to around 250 for the decade to 1991 and around 150 for the nine years to 1999.
Inflation had been reduced to between 2% and 3% and seemed stable, but that was true also of most of the countries with which we compare ourselves. Although net foreign debt was much less satisfactory, net public debt was far less in Australia than in most comparable nations -- a considerable advantage should the luck run out. Reflecting the gains from tariff reduction, Australian trade participation, as a proportion of GDP, was one third higher than it had been in the mid-1970s. (486) Even the doomsayers could not hide the fact that Australia had weathered the Asian setback.
Secretary to the Treasury Ted Evans told us that:
Economic shocks can be regarded as the "stress tests" of economic policies and institutions. How well an economy performs in the wake of adverse shocks such as droughts, commodity price fluctuations or disruptions to the global economy is a test of its flexibility and the quality of its policy frameworks. We can regard the Asian crisis as the stress test of the policies of the 1980s and 1990s, just as the oil price crises of the mid and late 1970s can be regarded as the stress test of the policies of the 1960s and 1970s.
To avoid a serious domestic downturn in the wake of an adverse international shock is a very important social achievement -- an important contribution to the ultimate objective of improving living standards.
I suggest that Australia's comparative growth performance and resilience to shocks have been worst when currents of economic nationalism were at their peak in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. (487)
These were the benefits that the reformers had promised that financial deregulation, reform of Government business enterprises, reduced tariffs, national competition policy and improved labour market flexibility would deliver. Surely our good relative performance had not been luck.
Multifactor (labour and capital) productivity gains during the whole of the 1990s had averaged around 2% annually (2.4% in final six years) (488) compared with a historical average of 1.5%. The difference may not sound much but in ten years that half of one percent means that real average incomes are 5% higher than they would have been had the gain been only 1.5%. That the OECD as a whole had not experienced a similar improvement at least points to a domestic cause. What else but the gains in economic freedom due to the institutional reforms of 1980s and early 1990s? In the five years to 1996-97 electricity prices fell by 10% in some States and up to 30% in others. Although Telstra's service remained suspect, telephone calls became cheaper. Those who could remember the arrogance and inefficiency of the old Telecom should not have denied the improvement but with an eye to subsidies some did. Transport had become very much less expensive and more reliable. Strikes and industrial go-slows were almost but memories.
The gains had been less than the projections made in Australia at the Crossroads, but had we started earlier and done the job more completely we could surely have done even better than we did. A virtue of wisely-chosen economic reform is that its benefits are cumulative. A mere half of one per cent improvement in productivity will raise real incomes by 30% in only 40 years. Critics of the reforms to date might imagine how they might spend another $15,000 or $20,000 each year that they would have had today had Hawke's reforms been initiated by Chifley.
Australians had achieved a great deal not only in absolute terms but also relative to other nations. We seemed, however, determined upon talking ourselves into misery.
THE ZEITGEIST IN THE NINETIES
When I had briefly attended Sunday school The Little Red Hen and The Ant and the Grasshopper were staples. Nobody then said that the farm animals that would not accept the hen's job offers and the profligate grasshopper were victims of society. Although the Christian Churches even then doubted the efficacy and even morality of free exchange, they did not doubt that wealth is produced by working and accumulated by saving. They taught that sloth and profligacy were sin.
As Governments took over the Christian churches' care of the needy, many clergy took to speaking more dogmatically about material welfare than spiritual welfare. They most often did so without reference to either commonplace economic principles or to the moral standards exemplified by the hen and the ant. Arguably they contributed to the problems they wished to alleviate. They, like the politicians, had found it easier to follow public attitudes than to lead them. Public scepticism about economic theory was far from new, but the changed attitudes to work and thrift, especially in chattering class circles, were a post 1960s phenomenon that had weakened one of economic growth's supports. However, old values die hard and it is yet a bit early to despair.
The WTO negotiations in Seattle were intended to launch the ninth round of trade liberalisation that was to take the liberalisation of trade in services and agricultural products further forward. Without the support of the Clinton Administration its success was impossible. Previous rounds had seen the wealthy nations reduce the average tariff for manufactured goods from 40% to 4% and few economists doubted that this had contributed significantly to the escape of many millions from poverty. (489) Nevertheless, repudiating views that he had expressed to that date, President Clinton used an unruly and incongruous rabble of environmentalists, socialists and anarchists to avoid further trade liberalisation in an election year. His pusillanimity squandered a major opportunity but it did not yet reverse previous gains. The street violence was repeated, with many of the same leading characters, in Melbourne, Prague, Davos and Genoa. Where the demonstrators found the funds to travel the world is not proven but Governments, such as the European Union which finance their organisations, that see their power dwindling, protected industries and their trade unions must rate among the suspects.
At a time when the undeveloped world was trying to capitalise on the benefits of "globalisation" -- some such as China by seeking admission to the WTO --, globalisation was being denigrated in rich countries. The professed agendas of the protestors were irrational. If trade and investment embargoes could be employed to punish North Korea, Cuba and Iraq, why should Western nations deny trade and investment to their friends? Over a no doubt expensive luncheon, Director General of the WTO, Mike Moore, told Clinton:
There is a contradiction between good people in wealthy countries who on Sunday at church give money to help out those who have suffered famine and flood, but on Monday sign a petition stopping the opportunity of workers in those same sad lands to sell what they create. (490)
In wealthy nations the economic agenda was being challenged and politicians were reordering their priorities. In Australia, One Nation appealed to the same xenophobia and economic irrationalism as the rioters in Seattle, Melbourne, Prague, Davos and Genoa. A resurgence of mercantilism called for "fair trade not free trade", "reciprocity" and "managed trade", and this was encouraged by our own Government's habitual misuse of economic argument. Yet it is small countries such as Australia with little bargaining power that have most to gain from the rules-based trading system that the WTO endeavours to uphold.
On the positive side, political leaders have so far reversed little but their rhetoric. During the last quarter of the 20th Century most countries not in Africa, when faced with economic difficulties or mere disappointment, had managed, at least temporarily, to shuck off the hold that organised voters, the colonels, landed interests, apparatchiki or other narrow interests had had over public policy. Economic regulation, such as price controls and those preventing people from participating in defined economic activities, had declined in OECD countries and continued to decline throughout the 1990s, although social and administrative regulations were expanding. (491)
Clinton, for all his dampness in Seattle, had shifted the American Democratic Party in a pro-business, pro-free trade direction. Further, the Democratic Party had reversed its position on welfare payments. With policies to "give a hand up rather than a hand-out" the number of people on welfare in the United States had fallen by 55% between January 1996 and June 2000 with one third of the gain attributed to the reforms. Clinton had embraced a balanced budget, reducing federal spending as a percentage of the US economy from 22% to 18.3%. The New York Times reported that 25 of the 50 US states were considering school vouchers -- 5 had introduced them.
In Britain, Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair had made very few changes to Thatcherism, even as it applied to the labour market, and he had introduced fees for tertiary education and given independence to the Bank of England -- two matters that the Tories had felt were beyond their political competence. When Britain became one of the strongest economies in Europe, the agenda moved on to matters that were once too difficult.
When the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland observed what had been done in Britain, they started to deregulate their labour markets. The German finance minister told the 2000 Davos economic Summit that "Germany as a closed system ... is over". Cynics might say, "At Davos he would say that, wouldn't he", but he could not say it without being reported at home. Britain, Sweden and Germany were taking small steps toward levelling the playing field upon which the private and public sectors contended to provide health care. (492)
At the end of the century, welfare reform was being attempted, if only tentatively, in most Western countries. The OECD reported that over the previous five years the only member country that had not taken some steps to address the impact of related benefits upon unemployment was Spain, which had earlier made a number of important reforms. (493)
Privatisation was showing no sign of abating. (494)
In the 1980s, the Irish were by European standards poor and looked like becoming relatively poorer but by the late nineties the relative prosperity of the Irish had become table talk. It had been their nominally socialist party that had begun privatising and budget cutting and by 2001-02 Irish Government spending was budgeted to be only 26% of Gross Domestic Product, down from 50% only 15 years before. Eleven of the 15 OECD Governments that cut tax rates during the nineties had been of centre-left persuasion. (495) The drying of leftish Governments was a remarkable feature of time.
Nevertheless, by the end of the nineties, the Western world over, political leaders were again prone to cutting deals with interest groups. With Howard's excessive reaction to the rural backlash passing for Australian leadership and Clinton's to the mobs at Seattle for world "leadership", it had to be asked whether people such as Thatcher, Douglas, Deng Xiaoping and Hawke had been creatures of the Zeitgeist of a time that had lasted but briefly.
Australian Dries had to admit that in spite of achieving most of their original agenda except labour market reform, a significant part of the public remained unconvinced. We had also to admit that Hawke, Hewson, Greiner and Kennett had gone and that Howard the Prime Minister was not the dedicated reformer that Howard the Leader of the Opposition had once been. Wets in the Liberal Party had succeeded in having themselves referred to as "moderates" and Labor had no obvious equivalents of Keating when he was Treasurer or Peter Walsh.
They had to admit that several vested interests had mounted an effective counter attack and were by 2000 more often dominating apparently weaker politicians. Howard's capitulation to the car and textile companies and Bracks' capitulation to the unions, liberalising Workcover and restoring one-size-fits-all industrial awards, were elements of a trend. Australian Governments were also again lapsing into profligacy. Howard was throwing money at infrastructure of dubious merit such as the Darwin to Alice Springs railway and worse, he was subsidising individual companies. The Bracks Government that had inherited a surplus of $1.7 billion was using it to finance big increases in the numbers and pay scales of nurses and teachers. Only a year into its administration, the Victorian Auditor General had warned of the need for budget restraint. (496)
Political opportunities to reform institutions in a citizen- and enterprise-friendly way do not arise with equal effect all the time. Those with political power and access to it tend to protect their positions, even at the expense of the average citizen and future prosperity. Ordinary citizens are not fully informed about the pursuits of politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists and, because they have little influence and reliable information is often hard to obtain, it is rational for them to remain ignorant. As long as the going is reasonably satisfactory, the common weal is therefore frequently neglected. The institutions that protect economic freedom and prosperity are allowed to degenerate (a subsidy here, a favourable regulation there and a non-enforcement of a rule to benefit a political ally somewhere else. ...). Favouritism dominates politics, politicians declare "tea breaks" in reform, and interest-group spokespeople declare "reform fatigue". Political and economic rectitude is too often postponed.
Over time, this leads to a growing sclerosis in the economic system; old, established interests are protected; new opportunities are not readily taken up; and outdated, loss-making ventures are not readily scrapped. In the aggregate, economic growth slows down, and outside disturbances, such as an oil crisis, convert recessions into depressions. This happened in Australia in the 1930s and the 1970s.
After a period of malaise, political entrepreneurs of a new generation tend to be motivated to simplify regulations, make institutions more transparent and govern with less favouritism. The Dries here and overseas were such entrepreneurs. The faster growth, accelerated innovation and the new wave of enterprise of the 1980s and 1990s was their legacy. It seems that the reforms of 1980s/1990s produced the current wave of innovation and growth, comparable to the Federation boom at the start of the 20th century, and that of the 1950s and 1960s.
However, no wave runs on forever. When economic growth becomes taken for granted, political opportunism, renewed popular indifference and aggressive distribution battles begin again to dominate public policy. Institutions are allowed to degenerate. Windows of opportunity for reform begin to close, as people prefer secure positions, rather than creating new growth opportunities through active reform. The cycle begins anew.
This interaction between politics and economics seems to be the ultimate reason why economists observe long waves of economic acceleration and deceleration. They have called these long waves "Kondratieff cycles", after the Russian statistician who first showed that Marx's prediction of a collapse of capitalism was overcome by economic reforms leading to new enterprise and innovation. In the past, these waves have lasted some 40 to 50 years, and some observers are now predicting that the present backsliding in institutional reform will lead to a repetition of the 1970s experiences within the next decade. (497) More or less on cue the world may be heading into another Kondratieff downswing and only a revival of reform and resistance to the temptations of political opportunism can prevent one of the next recessions in the business cycle becoming something more serious. Australia, among the most actively reforming nations in the 1980s and early 1990s, by the end of the decade was no longer among their number.
From the mid 1990s, Dries faced the same three formidable hurdles that they had always faced:
- Economic logic was still counter-intuitive to most people who, seeing no other order, turn instinctively to command-and-control.
- Reform imposes costs on some people and the costs tend to come before the benefits.
- People who benefit from the status quo are identifiable, concentrated and organised, while those who benefit from change are less so -- the tyranny of the status quo.
As well, "institutional capital" had not anywhere risen fully-fledged from the ashes of command. As already noted, to function well, markets require not just legal freedom but the discipline, much of it cultural (moral), that permits trust to be well founded. Australia had suffered the excesses of the 1980s when unpleasant commercial characters and equally unpleasant political characters had brought deregulation into some popular disrepute. However, compared with nations that had been more statist for much longer, Australia had escaped this tendency relatively lightly. Russia, for instance, suffered so grievously that the common Russian's living standards fell in excess of a third. (498) Communities, from nations down to families, are as effective as their institutions, which they corrupt at their peril.
All of these considerations have force that future reformers cannot afford to neglect, but it will, nevertheless, be the tenor of the remainder of this chapter that the pessimism is overdone. My story necessarily becomes more speculative.
Reform will be slower also for reasons that have little to do with the Zeitgeist. The more straightforward tasks such as reducing barriers to trade and capital movements and the sale of state-owned trading enterprises are well advanced. As nations turn to reinstating a culture that instinctively honours doers and savers (the little red hens and the ants), and to reform of health-care and welfare services, reformers will face the usual special pleading. They will also, however, have to contend with more disagreement from people with whom they have more genuine philosophical differences. On the credit side, many more people, particularly among those who regard themselves as being of the Left, now appreciate that liberty, responsibility and prosperity are inextricably linked.
BACKLASH
When social democrats and labour parties espoused economic freedom for the sake of battlers, "the left" reclaimed its original opposition to privilege. As we approached 2000, the Treasury, Reserve Bank and Productivity Commission were all on record crediting the reforms undertaken by the Hawke Governments and supported by the then Opposition with Australia's strong 1990s economic performance that had saved "have¬nots" much unnecessary distress.
Nevertheless, voters had been unimpressed. Elections for the parliaments of New South Wales in 1991, Queensland in 1995, South Australian in 1997, Queensland again and the Commonwealth in 1998, Victoria in 1999 and WA and Queensland in 2001 had all seen independents and/or minor parties of a populist bent win votes at the expense of the Labor, Liberal and National Parties. Although the Green and Democrat voters were more city-based, the new element, which was the swing to One Nation, was particularly strong away from the major cities. Both majors set out to woo minor-party voters, especially in the bush. However, if they were not to sacrifice economic potential for scant political advantage, they needed to appreciate the underlying and not just the proximate causes of this "backlash".
The rise of the One Nation Party -- described by Coster and Economou as "a curious amalgam of old Labor and Country Party values opposed to economic liberalisation" (499) -- was interpreted as the death of economic rationalism. It was, however, hardly surprising that One Nation should espouse populist nostrums. All parties that do not anticipate the responsibilities of office do that, and at the 1996 election, the Greens, Democrats, One Nation and Labor dissidents, Graeme Campbell and Rex Connor Jnr, had remarkably similar platforms. (500) They were each interventionist and xenophobic. Each appealed to the traditional Australian interests of state paternalism, industry protection and White Australia, albeit that the last was couched in terms of limited immigration and rationalised in environmentalist terms by the Greens and Democrats. When they became less interventionist and xenophobic, the majors left policy space for the minors. Nevertheless, as the minor parties cannot have been expected to implement their policies and few voters study party platforms, something more impressionistic -- a style, attitude, approach or value system -- ought at least to be suspected of capturing so much voter allegiance.
Inevitably, the opponents of economic reform had used their sometimes-considerable resources to encourage disenchantment, to focus it upon their particular concerns and to encourage the belief among politicians that economic reform was its prime cause. The National Farmers' Federation had pushed the reforms but the gains for rural communities had been masked by the inexorable decline in farmers' terms of trade. These would have declined even further but for the reforms, but the economic linkages were not widely appreciated.
The Hawke Government in 1990 was elected with only 39.4% of the primary vote and the Howard Government in 1998 with only 39.5%. During the 1990s the share of the primary vote gained by the Labor, Liberal and National Parties at Federal elections had declined by about 6 percentage points. After 2000, the trend to minor parties gathered further momentum. In 2001: the reform-inactive Richard Court Government in WA lost in a landslide to Labor; in Queensland the Coalition lost to Labor, also in a landslide; the one-time reformer gone soft, Howard, lost the safe Liberal seat of Ryan at a by-election; and the conservatives lost the Northern Territory to Labor. In each case minor parties had polled heavily and Labor had benefited from the distribution of preferences. Much argument followed about what the Coalition might have done to attract particularly One Nation preference votes. Its adverse poll results had no doubt been exaggerated by in some cases the tactic of putting One Nation last on how-to-vote cards and in others by ethnic voters punishing it for not putting One Nation last, but that is not my concern. The swings would have been substantial anyway. Why?
Hanson's support had been extraordinary. Apart from her 54.7% of the vote in the "safe" Labor electorate of Oxley, her One Nation Party polled 22.7% of the primary vote in the subsequent Queensland State election and she personally polled 36% of the primary vote in Blair in 1998. (With the Labor and Liberal Parties exchanging preferences she was not elected.) These were not, moreover, results that could be attributed to Hanson's personal appeal alone. Kalgoorlie voters had returned Graeme Campbell, who had been disendorsed by the Labor Party for, among other perceived misdemeanours, expressing the same opinions as Hanson on Aboriginal welfare and immigration. (He had expressed them long before Hanson but, a member of the Labor Party, he had almost escaped criticism.) Voters in 1996 also gave especially large swings to Bob Katter and Bob Burges, two National Party MPs who had questioned what they saw as the preferred treatment of Aborigines. The Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Robert Tickner, who had vetoed the Hindmarsh Island Bridge because of secret Aboriginal women's business, suffered a marginally greater swing against him in his non-rural Sydney seat than that towards Pauline Hanson in Oxley. His 54.89% of the two-party preferred vote was reduced to 45.11%.
The Australian electoral experiences were consistent with a worldwide phenomenon. (501) Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in the USA, Winston Peters in New Zealand and the German Greens had also done well with policies that like the Greens, Democrats and One Nation in Australia were opposed to ethnic diversity, trade, immigration and globalisation -- that in short were xenophobic.
In sharp contrast, however, not long before the 1996 general election, the Australians Against Further Immigration Party had received a derisory vote in the Lindsay by-election. The arch reformer, Jeff Kennett, had lost by only a narrow margin in Victoria in 1999. His share of the two-party preferred vote (49.8%) had been better than Howard's in 1998 (49.0%).
Kennett's reasonable showing notwithstanding, the Coalition Parties were in trouble and policy had probably contributed, but to what extent? A substantial number of electors had wished to send a negative message to the major parties and it seemed to have had something to do with Aboriginal and/or economic policy. The Lindsay result indicated at least tentatively that no similarly large number was strongly concerned about migration levels.
AN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION OF THE PAULINE HANSON PHENOMENON
Alienation, a sense of being left out, offers an alternative plausible cause of voter disenchantment. It is one that does not require people to form opinions on micro-economic issues. Anecdotal evidence of at least rural alienation abounded and many had commented on it. There were also stories circulating of the disenchantment of the people whom Kim Beazely Snr had once described as the cream of the working class. That such alienation is more likely than self-interest or shifting ideology to have caused significant numbers of people to change their vote is hard to demonstrate. John Hyde's belief that it has been at least significant and maybe dominant is based primarily on his electorate experience. However, Katherine Betts' survey described below and Commonwealth Parliamentary Library research offer him support.
John Hyde lost his parliamentary seat in 1983, but even then his farming and trades constituents were resentful of the imposition of politically-correct values that discounted their "old-fashioned" morality while insisting upon a new code of dos and don'ts that seemed to them to trivialise morality itself. The obvious disdain with which their opinions were treated hurt them, as did epithets such as "red-neck" and "racist". Few would (perhaps could) articulate their resentment in general or abstract terms. Many would, however, talk bitterly of specific instances.
Looking first at Aboriginal policy: Voters could see the money spent on alcohol and on housing that was quickly destroyed. In John Hyde's political days it had, nevertheless, been rare for Hyde to meet a constituent who was callous and equally rare to find one who believed that he knew what to do about indigenous affairs policy. Although rural and city-fringe voters who later turned to One Nation were concerned for the safety of their own properties and persons, it had not been an obsession. More of them were more concerned for the unhappy plight of too many Aborigines and they suspected that Government policy contributed to rather than alleviated their plight. Repeated accounts of people "working the system" encouraged the belief that the Government was so entrapped by politically-correct mores that it was not concerned to administer its own policies. (502) The votes were cast against politicians not against Aborigines.
It is, of course, difficult to refute the inevitable charge that John Hyde's own racial prejudices make him blind to those of these voters. Hyde can with justice claim, however, that as an MP and columnist he has defended racial minorities to greater effect than many of his critics. Hyde left the matter to his readers. Having conceded that Aboriginal policy featured largely in the debate, that this one issue -- important and frustrating though it is -- accounted for a large shift in voter behaviour seems to him to be implausible.
I also find it implausible that economic policies that had so benefited rural industries could despite the run of bad prices have produced such a backlash. There needed to be a more visceral, more deeply felt cause. I suspect it to have been a sense of alienation, of being despised and dismissed, of being outside the political and social loop. I think some voters felt that they had been deliberately left out, although that was not the case. Hanson's counterpart in New Zealand, Winston Peters, had not gained as much support, but New Zealanders had not made a martyr of him and pariahs of his supporters. The chattering class never understands that its contemptuous disrespect for the opinions of the common man makes a cussed voter of him.
I was not alone in casting about for an explanation when, in August 1998, I filed the following:
The dreaded Pauline has too many Liberal, National and Labour MPs scrambling to emulate her economic policies; while Greens and Democrats aren't scrambling only because they espoused them first.
Her critics' very public accusations of racism and the inadequacy of opinion polling to which they are accustomed slaves stop them understanding the phenomenon they would combat. Having declared that Hanson is a witch to be burnt at the stake, our over-excitable opinion leaders now find it too difficult to admit that almost a quarter of the electorate accept her heresy. They are unwittingly and unwisely turning her into the equivalent of Joan of Arc -- who, it is true, was eventually burned.
They would have us believe that, while Hanson is motivated by race, her voters are motivated by economic reform that is too fast and has been going on for too long. The latter is, however, too hard to reconcile with support lost by the Australian Democrats, Greens, Australia First and Advance Australia which all have very similar economic and immigration policies to those of One Nation.
One Nation could not have made it into the big league of lower-house seats, if it had not been vociferously and unfairly attacked in the very terms employed to denigrate the forgotten people themselves. Hanson is their champion. An unlikely and in my opinion misguided one, it is true, but a brave one.
Opinion polls have not more clearly picked up this feeling of rejection because the direct question cannot be answered. If you doubt me, the next time your family is ignoring your undoubted wisdom, try explaining your problem in twenty words. You will settle for some minor concrete grievance as One Nation voters have in turn said guns, immigration, Australia Post, etc.
From being cross with the Howard Government for not governing purposefully when it had the climate and the standing to do so, I now find myself defending Howard as he tries to hold a sagging line against politicians wanting to out-Hanson Hanson. And the sight on television of that good soldier, Tim Fischer, saying that he would not save his seat by abandoning policies that he knew were needed should have brought a tear to the eye of any patriot.
Too few will appreciate his courage. Nevertheless, I once represented both bush and upper blue-collar country in WA where the Hanson vote is today even higher than it is in Queensland. For what my opinion is worth, the votes of these forgotten battlers can be won with recognition and respect for their values, but never with handouts.
In 1999 a Parliamentary Research Paper reported:
There is anecdotal as well as survey evidence that Pauline Hanson's One Nation (PHON) has gained some support from frustrated citizens who feel that the major parties have stopped listening to them -- as a recent study on the 1998 Queensland election put it, the PHON constituency is "a large component of the community that is both disenchanted [and] feels disenfranchised".
There was a further possible strand to Hanson's support and it too had little to do with either Aboriginal or economic policy. Because she was unfairly treated, she attracted sympathy, and because she is brave, she was admired. Again and yet again she was met, not with argument, but with invective and street demonstrations that were at best uncivil and at worst violent. TV coverage of her meetings caused Hanson to be seen as the victim of orchestrated persecution, as indeed she was. Two particularly disgraceful events became well known. 59¬year-old Keith Warburton, not a member of the One Nation Party, was attacked while leaving a Hanson meeting. His skull was fractured by so called anti-racist vigilantes.
One or two thugs can fracture an elderly man's skull: the other particularly disgraceful event was the more significant. Michael Duffy described it in the Daily Telegraph this way:
It was Australian democracy, 1990s style, typical of what many people have had to put up with to hear Pauline Hanson speak during the last 18 months. Jeff Kennett's police did a deal with the demonstrators and the meeting was called off in return for the physical safety of the people who had come to hear a federal politician speak. It was a black day for Australian democracy. It's difficult to know who deserves more contempt -- the thugs who are now using physical force to repress free speech, the politicians and the police who are letting them get away with it, or the moral posturers who, with their spurious outrage about One Nation racism, are condoning increasing levels of violence and repression.
If those events did not cause at least tens of thousands of Australians who would not otherwise have given her a second thought to support Hanson, then I am no judge of public sentiment. Courage, of which she displayed plenty, is admired even in the unwise. Unfairness, of which she suffered plenty, is condemned even when perpetrated against the foolish. Australians are, on the whole, a fairly decent lot!
The orchestra tors of the anti-Hanson campaign were trying to land a bigger fish. They wanted to force the Prime Minister into endorsing their New Class attitudes and put the Liberal Party in a no-win political situation. They began by insisting that Howard condemn Hanson's maiden speech that had said nothing that Graeme Campbell had not already said, and they continued to demonise her and One Nation. What began as an organised beat up took on a life of its own yielding benefits to Labor that must have been beyond its wildest hopes. The media again did not emerge with honour.
Hansonism was and still is a threat to the dry cause. She is a populist, playing on fears and offering glib solutions to both real and imagined problems. Dries might sympathise with her demand for law that is blind to ethnic origin and welcome her dislike of politically-correct injunctions against free speech, but for the rest she is wet. In most of what she claimed, Hanson was wrong. She was not, however, the evil character or influence that self-righteous and/or Machiavellian cynics portrayed her as being. Her courage aside, she was but an ordinary person who had set herself a task that was past her understanding. Very many people got very sick of being told that she was only a fish and chip shop proprietor!
Following the Republic referendum, Katherine Betts, identified a resentment that was in its nature likely to influence more than attitudes to republicanism. She wrote:
This survey shows that economic class and region were both associated with attitudes to the referendum; better-off, better-educated people in inner city suburbs were more likely to vote yes and poorer, less well-educated people in outer suburbs were more likely to vote no. Trust in political institutions was also important; the more people trust Government and political parties the more likely they were to vote yes. However, another factor has a stronger effect on the vote than either economic class or trust, and it is attitudes to the new cosmopolitan agenda developed in the Hawke and Keating years.
Economic and locational variables can be thought of as one set of causes of the outcome of the referendum and attitudes to the cosmopolitan agenda as another. There is an overlap between the two sets but the overlap is only partial, and the effect of support for the cosmopolitan agenda is stronger than the effect of economic circumstances or region. The effect of trust is mid-way between the two major sets. (503)
If these attitudes were sufficiently strong to cause people to vote against a republic, then they were sufficiently strong to cause them to vote against the major parties.
Betts' survey (see appendix) indicated that:
- The electorate thinks Australians should have closer relations with Asia and this might mean that it is not unhappy with the elements of globalisation even if they have been taught to dislike it by name.
- The rights for minorities to which the respondents objected were only the minorities' exclusive rights, that is, their privileges.
- The electorate believes that immigration (and probably also imports) affect unemployment adversely.
Only the last was a problem for dry policy and it was an old one, whereas voting behaviour was affected by a political agenda that was so broad that it might fairly be referred to as cultural.
STRAW HOUSES AND BEAT-UP CRISES
Fashions in disaster change frequently. Since World War II we have been told that we will die young because we are ingesting too much salt, sugar, saccharin, cholesterol, caffeine, steak, tinned baby food, junk food, eggs, vegetables sprayed with weedicide, fungicide and insecticide, fish with high mercury levels, monosodium glutamate and alcohol; and too little fibre and too little fish. We might also die young because we breathe tobacco smoke, lead, alumina dust, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, furnace smoke and motor car exhaust fumes. We have been told to get more exercise but not in the sun, drive in a more satisfactory manner and never touch opiates. Radiation from visual display units and later mobile telephones was to have killed us, if the asbestos in the ceiling did not do so first. We have been threatened by, overpopulation, electro-magnetic and atomic radiation, an energy crisis, depletion of non-renewable resources, acid rain, AIDS, global cooling and then warming, holes in the ozone layer and most recently genetically modified organisms. Etc, etc, etc. Yet Australians have never lived longer and in better health than now. Opposition to economic freedom is also based substantially on predictions that may not come to pass.
Dries' opponents set about the demolition of several straw houses. They almost routinely accused economic rationalists of having unlimited faith in markets. On the contrary, Dries have had a lot to say about the phenomenon of market failure. Have not their opponents noted what they have said about regulating open-access goods (such as fish stocks), regulating to reduce transaction costs (such as prudential supervision of banks and food standards), developing trade practices law for unnatural monopolies and pricing caps and regulations for natural monopolies (such as rail lines)? Dries have never proposed anarchy, but fought hard for citizen-friendly rules. They understand that liberty is not license.
Recognition of the imperfect nature of markets is part and parcel of the economic tradition. In 1776 Adam Smith observed that:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices.
It has been Government connivance in this sort of behaviour that has most offended Dries.
With even less excuse, opponents accuse Dries of favouring the interests of businesses above consumers. Again on the contrary, Dries have consistently advocated the competition and freer trade that empower consumers and opposed tax breaks, subsidies and monopolies that empower big businesses and big unions.
Globalisation is said to harm the poor in the poorest nations, yet those most basic measure of human physical well-being, average food consumption and longevity, have increased far more rapidly than population. As the world has "globalised" (horrible word), developing economies have grown even faster than developed economies.
Some critics admit this tendency -- it is difficult to deny -- but say that it is not sustainable. The Club of Rome forecast in 1972 that the world would run out of copper in 1993, gold in 1981, lead in 1993, mercury in 1985, natural gas in 1994, petroleum in 1992, and silver in 1985. (504) However, wherever markets are permitted, whenever anything becomes less plentiful, it does not run out but becomes more expensive, causing less to be used and more to be produced. Commodity-producing Australians may wish that they had not, but the real prices of all commodities have fallen.
An extraordinary 83% of Australians believe that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. (505) In fact, from 1982 to 1997-97, while the wealthiest 10% of Australians have increased their real incomes by 12%, the poorest 10% have done so by 32%. The middle classes have not done as well, but all are getting richer. (506) Roy Morgan Research has not in 25 years of polling found more than 42% of its samples that believed unemployment would fall, (507) but fallen it has. There has always been pessimism in the Australian psyche that can be interpreted as backlash by careless or disingenuous analysis.
People who deign not to notice what Dries say on welfare policy, accuse them of advocating devil-take-the¬hindmost competition, occasionally referred to as social Darwinism. Theory tells us that an absence of laws favouring some at the expense of others and markets in which outcomes are not predetermined will increase the living standards of the poorest people. Rather than rely on theory, Dries have, nevertheless, usually found it more effective to point to the fate of the poor and the wider divergence of wealth in countries where these conditions do not apply and they have done so consistently.
Contrasting the economic agenda favoured by Dries with a social agenda said to be opposed by Dries involves further misrepresentation. I admit that some Dries had been guilty of giving too little attention to the institutions that make a society, but that was much more the case twenty years ago and the sin was neglect not opposition.
Markets rest on a foundation of institutions. Some, however, are so basic to daily economic life as to go unnoticed unless they are absent, as they are in many parts of Africa today. Without the social order underpinned by institutions such as truth telling, civility, sobriety, respect for other's rights, the obligation to undertake work and save, and many more, markets simply cannot function. But Dries have never contended otherwise.
Another group of critics dislikes markets' impersonality. It is true that, unlike rulers, markets are not in themselves moral or immoral. For Dries their blindness to race, sex, wealth, political affiliation and all subjective measures of personal worth are their social virtue. They provide opportunities for morally discerning individuals to interact by known rules which to break is immoral and to uphold is moral. By permitting choice they make room for acts of generosity and morality generally. The autonomy that is impossible without stable rules is the distinction between vassals and citizens. (That is why John Hyde's friends still call him wet for his support of Fraser's retrospective legislation to recover the bottom-of-the-harbour taxes.) Dries do not wish to settle every issue by voluntary market transaction and Wets do not wish to settle every issue by command, but the way that each feels about the impersonality of markets influences where each group draws its line.
Often, when economic reform is proposed, dire consequences are predicted. Some eventuate, but the forebodings have an abysmal record. Unemployment did not rise with reduction of the tariff; it fell. Telecom's service standards did not fall with the entry of Optus and semi-privatisation; they rose dramatically. Following privatisation, electricity prices did not rise in Victoria; they fell. Bank margins are today lower not higher as some would have had us believe they would be.
Perhaps the most persistent and authoritative accusation with which Dries have had to contend is that their prescriptions prejudice communities. Given Dries' preference for decentralised authority and responsibility, the exercise of which requires cooperation at a local level, it is also hard to believe that their effect upon autonomous communities is not positive. It is, therefore, tempting to dismiss the particular accusation as nonsensical but it is widely made and sometimes by people with no obvious axe to grind.
It is certainly the case that Dries' preferences for laws that do not discriminate by race, industry or whatever is deleterious to those communities that owe their existence to privileges, but privilege can be exercised only at the expense of other communities. Since favouritism is inefficient, there is less to go round. And, since it is unfair, inter-communal resentment is encouraged. Dries argue merely that the cost of preserving these communities by these means is too high. Some assert that Governments should channel economic change. Dries ask in what direction and who will guard the guardians?
The family is the most fundamental community. Despite much theorising and experimentation from Plato on, nobody has yet devised an equally satisfactory alternative means of nurturing and civilising the young. Dries, who question the ability of the state to undertake any detailed and variable activity well, have been unequivocally pro-family, if only because they see no competent alternative.
Much of the growing opposition to the freedoms the Dries had advocated was directed to positions that the Dries had never held, often even opposed. It should have been possible to rebut that sort of criticism but as the decade progressed the will to do so flagged. In 2001 the Western Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry wrote:
The academic crusaders for economic liberalism of a generation ago are now largely silent.
The think tanks which ardently promoted reform have now moved on to other areas or have lost credibility.
And it is difficult to find more than a handful of reputable media figures willing to promote the cause.
The economic reform agenda is in danger of fading away -- and with it our chances of maximising sustained long-term prosperity. (508)
BACKLASH AGAINST WHAT?
Of the Governments to suffer the backlash, only Kennett's had a program of full-blooded reform. Only it at the time of its defeat was still practising what Thatcher called "commitment politics". Only of it, is it not possible to say that it was defeated because it had lost direction. Only it did not suffer a landslide. The Coalition in Victoria had won more seats than Labor but had been unable to govern only because Kennett was unable to work with three independents. Yet the Victorian election, particularly the adverse result in rural Victoria where the Government did do very badly, was the one that most obviously spooked the Federal Coalition Parties.
While not denying that the Kennett Government's breakneck reforms cost it some votes, we need to take into account all the other causes of its defeat to see if it might have survived another term if one or more of these had not contributed. There was in 1999, when nothing credible was advanced to indicate that the Bracks Labor Party was either dishonest or incompetent, a sufficient catalogue of reasons not to vote for Kennett to have seen most Governments routed. What is more, Bracks gave the electorate few undertakings to reverse the Kennett policies. The conclusion that Kennett would have lost more heavily had he abandoned his dry policies is beyond proof but, when the other ways that Kennett offended his electorate are weighed, it is reasonable.
Thus, in Victoria as elsewhere, reform fatigue's dominance of voter attitudes must be questioned. Everywhere, it had surely been unwise to talk down to people whose self-images were those of self-reliant battlers. In Victoria as elsewhere, the reaction was evident before Hanson tapped it, and it had been boosted hugely when, rather than offer answers to her assertions, her critics talked down to her and by implication to those who shared any of her views. Did a backlash need more?
There had, however, been much more and it bears repeating. Everywhere, rural and upper blue-collar people tend to be socially conservative, honouring family ties and personal responsibility. Independent as a point of honour themselves, they worried about rising levels of dependency. They worried about the declining status of marriage when it was being weakened by ideological attacks that portrayed it as a cauldron of incest, violence and financial pressures totally unlike their own marriages. They worried that the standards of right and wrong behaviour that they tried to teach their children were being undermined at school and in the media. They bitterly resented politically-correct barriers to their expressing their concerns. No one frequenting such places as building sites, wool sheds and grain-terminals could doubt the resentment of these people.
It is true that people do not on the whole like having their privileges abolished, but voters are not utterly venal, they do to some extent assess public policy by asking will future Australians benefit? If voters are feeling alienated rather than disadvantaged, then politicians will gain more at less cost to their budgets by addressing their alienation rather than their material wants, yet Commonwealth general government spending increased by 12.6% in 2000-01 (509) with more promised by Labor. As the 2001 Federal election approached the political parties seemed not to have considered the possibility that voters might despise the briber while accepting the bribe.
If such reform fatigue that there is has been encouraged by patently false claims about the nature and consequences of the reforms, might not the voting public again respond to the sort of principled advocacy that it heard in the late 1980s? Reform itself needs again to be defended.
Politicians might note with electoral profit that the Governments that were most soundly routed have all been ones that had been perceived to have lost their way.
ENDNOTES
475. Wolfgang Kasper, Building Prosperity, CIS, 2000, p 32
476. David Henderson, The Changing Fortunes of Economic Liberalism, Yesterday Today and Tomorrow, The Institute of Public Affairs and New Zealand Business Roundtable, 1999, p 16 and following. First published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, Occasional Paper 105, 1998.
477. Productivity Commission Annual Report 1999-2000, p9
478. Cato Institute quoted by WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Free Enterprise, 2001, p 29
479. Productivity Commission Annual Report 1999-2000, p5
480. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, Bantam Press, 2000
481. J Gwartney and R Lawson, Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report 2001, p 126.
482. Charles Bean, Australia's Economic 'Miracle'; a View from the North, Reserve Bank of Australia.
483. In Support of Free Enterprise, The Western Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 2001, p 21
484. Productivity Commission, Some Aspects of Structural Change in Australia, 1998, p xiv
485. Charles Bean, Australia's Economic 'Miracle'; a View from the North, Reserve Bank of Australia
486. Productivity Commission Annual Report 1999-2000, p2
487. Ted Evans, Ninth Annual Colin Clark Memorial Lecture, 3 June 1999
488. Graeme Samuel, Australian Financial Review, 21 June 2000, p 41
489. Australian Financial Review, 11 September 2000, p 7
490. WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Free Enterprise, 2001, p 27
491. Phil Barry, How do we Compare, New Zealand Business Roundtable, p 12 quoting OECD (1997b) Report on Regulatory Reform: Synthesis p 7.
492. Phil Barry, How do we Compare, New Zealand Business Roundtable, p 25
493. ibid, p 19-20
494. ibid, p 17 and Annex 5
495. ibid p 7
496. Ivor Rees, Australian Financial Review, 22 November 2000
497. Wolfgang Kasper, Building Prosperity, CIS, 2000, pp. 6-11
498. Wolfgang Kasper, Building Prosperity, CIS, 20, p 34
499. Costar and Economou Editors, The Kennett Revolution, UNSW Press, 1999, p 263
500. Lyndon Rowe, Odd Bedfellows, IPA Backgrounder, July 1998
501. Scott Bennett, Research Paper No 10, 1998-99, Library of the Commonwealth Parliament.
502. In the 1971 Census, 671 Tasmanians said they were indigenous Australians. For the 1996 Census, 13,782 Tasmanians said they were indigenous, making Tasmanian Aborigines the world's fastest-growing ethnic group and giving Tasmania the proportionally highest indigenous population of any State. Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell has said that there are a lot of phoney Aboriginals who are claiming to be such for the money.
503. Katherine Betts, People and Place, vol 7, no 4, page 32
504. WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Free Enterprise, 2001, p 19
505. Newspoll survey conducted in January 2000 quoted by the WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Free Enterprise, 2001, p 21
506. WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Free Enterprise, 2001, p 21
507. ibid, p 22
508. WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Free Enterprise, 2001, p
509. The Australian Financial Review, November 10-11, 2000.
