Danger of new thickets of gas regulation

Peter Roberts' ''Globalised gas pricing has local costs'' (Talking Point, January 30) applauds the commonwealth's National Energy Security Assessment, which advocates using export controls on gas.

The objective of this is to ensure that domestic consumers obtain supplies at less than the world price.

Roberts argues that dedicating a proportion of gas supplies for domestic use will allow more jobs by diverting exports of gas for electricity production for gas allocated to industrial processes.

In supporting this protectionist approach, Roberts fails to make the connection with the carbon tax, which penalises domestic but not overseas users of local supplies of coal and gas.  This places a far greater penalty on Australian domestic energy supplies than any advantage that export controls could offer.

Moreover, he says we can say goodbye to $4 a gigajoule gas at a time when the United States price has dropped to under $3.  Technology is unlocking formerly inaccessible coal seam and shale gas and is creating a glut.  Australia has valuable gas resources in coal and shale, but so have many other countries.

If we insist that project approvals should be conditional on diversion of supplies to local users at preferred prices, this cost imposition will reduce Australian development in these highly prospective fields as well as confronting investors with new and unwanted thickets of regulation.

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Yet another flipping flop

Credibility is draining away from Julia Gillard as if from an open wound.  The effect of a year of mounting mistrust in the nation over the carbon tax, along with the recent porkies over pokies and controversy over the Australia Day security scare, is destroying the Prime Minister's authority.

More than a few Labor partisans think she is politically finished.  Even those who rule out a change in leadership rally around Gillard with no hope.  Theirs is a contemporary charge of the Light Brigade.

Gillard's problem stems not, as many people suggest, from her stabbing a prime minister in mid-2010, which sparked a cycle of revenge knifings in the form of malicious cabinet leaks.  It has more to do with the fact the Prime Minister has no core convictions.

The flip-flops are staggering:  carbon tax, uranium sales, problem gambling, offshore processing, cash for clunkers, even the US alliance.  (Contrast her cringing, forelock-tugging to the Americans — choking up before Congress, fawning over the President, marching in lockstep with US forces in the depressing and endless war in Afghanistan — with her call in 2005 for an ''independent foreign policy'', which is left-speak for snubbing Uncle Sam at every opportunity.)

The dramatic turnarounds merely breed more doubts in people who wonder where she is coming from.  Even the Labor Left cannot be sure she is one of them.

Now, one could argue that a volte face, like bias or beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  It can reflect an alert mind, one that adjusts to changing circumstances, or it can reflect ruthless ambition without any principles.  The latter all too often defines Gillard's leadership.

It's difficult to abide the policy and philosophical U-turns.  But when style and soul are accounted for, it's even more difficult to say how she is substantively different from the man she assassinated and for whom a few people pine.

Several commentators seem to suggest Labor's troubles would disappear if only Kevin Rudd replaced Gillard.  But although it may initially lead to a poll boost, it would ultimately fail to revive the party's electoral fortunes.

Why?  Because Rudd shares with Gillard a credibility problem:  they lack deep conviction, gut instinct and will power.

That is why they lead no movement, are spokespeople for no cause and have no cheer squad.

Rudd at least won office in his own right but his evident belief that he could be all things to all people cost him power and should disqualify him any right to get a second chance.

In 2007, he seduced the voters — particularly the battlers in Queensland's sun-belt seats and Sydney's western suburbs — with his wonderful alternative of Howard-lite:  fiscal prudence and tough border protection, both packaged with evangelical talk about saving the planet.

From the outset, however, his leadership was an exercise in bad faith.

This was a man who campaigned as an ''economic conservative'', committed to low public debt and free-market reform, but who, in government, pushed a big-spending and interventionist agenda that would have made Whitlam proud.

A man who pledged to ''turn the boats back'' in 2007 but who disbanded the Pacific Solution in 2008, before preaching a ''hardline'' policy against ''evil'' and ''vile'' people-smugglers in 2009, then warning Labor not to ''lurch to the right'' on illegal immigrants in 2010.

A man who claimed global warming was ''the great moral challenge'' but who, in a changing climate — the rise of Abbott, collapse of Copenhagen, defeat of US carbon legislation — scrapped the unpopular emissions-trading scheme.

Meanwhile, the experiment was frankly weird.  When the bloke sitting next to you at the pub starts talking about ''fair shake of the sauce bottle'' and ''detailed programmatic specificities'', you excuse yourself and leave quickly.

The contrast with John Howard is striking.  Even in his darkest days when, according to polls, so many voters said they did not approve of the job he was doing, about as many people nevertheless said they respected the man himself.

Howard was, of course, authentic and, as the distinguished journalist Michelle Grattan put it, represented the ''awesome ordinariness'' of middle Australia.

Just as important, the public had faith in the broad consistency of his conservative principles, agree or not (and I disagreed with him over Iraq).

He recognised that, if one had thought through one's policies and had argued them with sound logic and deep conviction, there was a chance they would prevail in the battle of ideas.

This was the Howard phenomenon and it helped make him the greatest prime minister since Menzies.  It is also a standard against which political leaders should be judged.

What the nation needs is someone who can lead.  This does not mean someone who can read the opinion polls and focus groups and flip-flop when the moment of truth arrives.  Real leadership means standing for something.

GOP's first-rate foreign policy chaos

Distinguished US commentator Walter Lippmann once wrote what is arguably the single most important sentence written on foreign policy:  ''Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.''

That truth, alas, has been comprehensively ignored by the US Republican presidential candidates who have won the first three caucuses/primary contests:  Rick Santorum (Iowa), Mitt Romney (New Hampshire) and Newt Gingrich (South Carolina).

For the former Pennsylvania senator, Massachusetts governor and Speaker of the US House of Representatives give classic expression to the dissociation of ends and means.  On the one hand, they champion balanced budgets and smaller government.  On the other, they demand assertive US global leadership and intervention across the world.

They make the downsizing of the federal government a priority.  But they also preach an ambitious foreign policy inspired by vision and a sense of mission, a policy that has been instrumental in building up the power of the federal government since the outset of the Cold War.  They want to slash the $US14 trillion-plus debt, but do so without applying the knife to the defence budget.

Romney declares in quintessential neo-conservative language:  ''I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it''.  Never mind Nixon's realist warning 40 years ago:  ''It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises.''

Rick Santorum believes the Iranian threat is so dire that a preventive strike on Tehran's facilities is justified.  But surely the lesson of Iraq is that the tried-and-tested policy of deterrence can keep Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his box.  After all, a terrorist can run and hide, but even a rogue state has a mailing address.  If the mullahs use WMD against the US or its interests in the region, it would guarantee retaliation.

Gingrich describes himself as a ''cheap hawk''.  That is, someone who wills the end, but baulks at providing the means.  This is one of the most irresponsible and dangerous things one can propose in foreign policy.  When political figures speak in these terms, it is clear they have not thought seriously about what they are saying.  F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested ''the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function''.  Perhaps.

To advocate two dramatically opposed and incompatible policies at the same time is merely the evidence of first-rate confusion.  Foreign policy realism — with its emphasis on the balance of power, national interests, spheres of influence and recognition of limits — has shaped the thinking of Republican presidents from Eisenhower to George Bush Sr.  Sadly, this tradition is alien to today's Grand Old Party.

As Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History? and a one-time leading neo-conservative, has remarked:  ''All of the Kissinger-era realists have gone away ... Today the party is just a wasteland.  They are total amateurs on foreign policy.''

The true origins of anti-paternalism

Opposition to government paternalism wasn't always a conservative or libertarian thing.  Indeed, the use of the word ''nanny'' to describe state interference in individual choices originally came from the left.

In a 1960 article in the New Statesman, the magazine set up by members of the Fabian Society, nanny was deployed to attack the British Board of Film Censors.  ''Novels and the Press get along, not too calamitously, without this Nanny;  why shouldn't films?'' asked a New Statesman columnist William Whitebait.  Nanny ''exercises a crippling drag on the growth of a serious and healthy British cinema.''

Eight years earlier, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson (and one time wife of Sinclair Lewis, the Nobel-winning socialist writer) was using nanny to describe British imperialism in the Middle East.

Western empires, Thompson wrote in her syndicated column, have ''filled the role of headmaster, or Nanny-governess''.  The West does not treat the inhabitants of its colonies as equals.  She continued:

It is an amusing notion that comes to me that, with the retreat of empire, Britons are turning Britain itself into a Nanny-state, perhaps out of a long habit in persuading or coercing natives to do what is good for them.

Anti-censorship and anti-empire.  These are not typical conservative positions.  But both were drawn from the same anti-paternalism that drives the modern resistance to public health regulation — a belief that a powerful class should not impose their own values on the rest of society.

Colonial masters instructed their subjects in the best way to live their lives — lessons given force by military domination.  And 20th century censors claimed to be protecting the less refined from the crude excesses of popular culture — judgements only moral superiors could make.  Whitebait made much of the fact the British censors were aging aristocrats.  Sir Sidney Harris, 83, was being replaced by Lord Morrison of Lambeth, 72.  Who were they to tell Britons what they could or could not watch?

Of course, this is not how public health activists record the history of anti-paternalism.  I gullibly took their claims at face value in May last year when I wrote in The Drum that ''nanny state'' is first found in the Spectator in 1965.  This is more than a decade after Thompson used it.

According to this story — told by the Australian public health luminary Mike Daube in a 2008 paper in Tobacco Control — it was coined by the former Conservative minister of health Iain Macleod, who later died of a heart attack.  (Macleod was a deeply ill man, suffering from an inherited weakness for gout, a war wound, and a chronic inflammatory disease.  But Daube and his co-authors imply it was just smoking that did him in.)

Does nanny's origin matter?  Yes, insofar as it demonstrates that anti-paternalism is not — or at least was not — the exclusive preserve of the right.

How would the readers of those words in the New Statesman have responded to the claim by the British Labour leader Ed Miliband last week that the Tories had failed to stop the sale of discount chocolate oranges to the masses?  Yes, Cameron complained about the same thing when he was in opposition.  But, as our New Statesman readers might say, Cameron is a Tory.  You'd expect a bit of Tory paternalism from him.

Or how would those who nodded along with Dorothy Thompson's distaste of imperial paternalism feel about the recent Australian complaints that Aldi is selling cheap alcohol?

Rejecting eight out of Aldi's 20 liquor license applications in New South Wales, the chairman of the state liquor regulator said last week that ''I don't know if there are areas that have too many bottle shops but certainly there are areas that have enough''.  Are there?  That seems a call best made by Aldi and its customers.

One could even go so far as to say that cheap is a good thing.  Recall that it was Aldi which consistently won the Rudd government's Grocery Choice competition.  Aldi is at once hero for selling consumers goods they want cheaply (food), and pariah for selling consumers goods they want cheaply (alcohol).  This doesn't have just a whiff of paternalism.  It has a stench.

And somehow such paternalism is even more obnoxious when it is petty, as it is with the Aldi licence rejection.  Sure, reports suggest Aldi's cheapest wines are rubbish.  This is no surprise at $2.49 a bottle (By contrast, a critic in The Australian suggests that the 83c beer is ''gluggable'').  But so what?  Cut-price bottom-shelf alcohol is already available at other stores.  Geographic limits on bottle shop numbers are designed to do nothing more than frustrate purchasers.  ''All this of course for our good,'' as Whitebait sarcastically told his New Statesman readers.

Those who seek to limit our choices usually have good intentions.

The film censors who banned Battleship Potemkin for three decades believed they did so in the British people's best interests.  The colonialists believed the same about the third world.  And those who would limit bottleshops in New South Wales also believe they are doing the right thing.

But the underlying philosophy is the same:  a deep paternalist belief that people must not be trusted to look after themselves.

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Lost in translation

As school returns for 2012, there are now more students learning Latin than Chinese.  Once we take out Chinese-born students and those who speak Mandarin at home, there are just 300 students learning Mandarin in year 12 in Australia, according to accounting body CPA Australia.  That is not how it was supposed to be.

In 2008, Kevin Rudd said he wanted 12 per cent of Australian students to be fluent in an Asian language by 2020.  An earlier program, launched in 1994, was supposed to have 60 per cent of all students conversant in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian or Korean by 2006.

There has been a general decline in language education, but a catastrophic decline in Asian languages.  Korean is now virtually a dead language in the Australian school system, Indonesian is likely to disappear soon, and Japanese is sliding backwards.  Chinese survives — even thrives — but only because it is taught to Chinese students.

Never dissuaded, Julia Gillard commissioned a report in November into the ''Asian century''.  It is likely to recommend further investment in languages.  Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop believes she can trump that and make Asian language studies mandatory for all Australian students — no exceptions.

But the idea that government should prioritise Asian languages is an unexamined faith.  Champions of Asian languages cite cultural benefits (increased understanding of our northern neighbours), economic benefits (ability to deal with trading partners in their language) and educational benefits (learning a second language helps with English literacy).

None of these is particularly convincing.  There's a reason Asian languages aren't as successful as advocates would like.  And it isn't only because the government hasn't spent enough money.  It's that not enough students want to study them.

Australian students aren't being irrational.  Language study responds to demand, and the rest of the world is learning English.  Ours is the global language, the lingua franca.

Language standardisation has come by necessity, not design.  Put Japanese, American, German and Saudi executives in a boardroom and the common tongue will be English — the language of business and treaties and translation.

We all know this.  So why does no one blink when policymakers imply otherwise?  One advocate of Asian language learning said on the ABC's 7.30 last week that expecting to rely on English in business negotiations with an Asian counterpart is daft.  Really?

If you think Australians negotiating with Chinese producers are at a disadvantage if they don't know Chinese, then imagine how much of a disadvantage Chinese producers have if they don't know English — the first or second language for virtually all their international customers.

Anyway, how many students today can we seriously expect to be business negotiators in Asia — and using the exact language they learned as school kids?  Trade is central to our lives, sure, but few of us personally negotiate trade deals.

That advocates use only extremely narrow cases where these languages would be useful does not inspire confidence.

English's dominance is something to be celebrated, not regretted.  The rest of the world is playing catch-up.  And the education curriculum is already stuffed full.  Choices have to be made.  If governments want to give every student an advantage in business, perhaps basic statistics and accountancy would be more helpful.

When people need languages, they learn them.  And the data shows most of our students are not choosing Chinese.  The language lobbyists may need to revisit their assumptions.

But they won't, because their goal has less to do with the economic and practical benefits of language education, and more to do with an ideological vision of the future of Australia.  It's about politics, not learning.

For those who argue that Australia must become an Asian nation, squeezing Asian languages into the curriculum is an easy way to turn that vague idea into something concrete.

Without a languages policy, the Asian nation philosophy would be revealed for the empty vessel that it is.  A policy to ''deepen engagement with Asia'' only makes sense in the context of international diplomacy.  The rest of us non-diplomats engage personally and commercially with Asia whenever we want through business, consumption and tourism.  No need for a government white paper to tell us to import Chinese goods or visit Angkor Wat.  If we want to appreciate Asia better, our expansive immigration program is already far more effective at building cross-cultural understanding than the memory of a few broken words of Mandarin learned at school.

Anyway, why should the education system be a plaything for the geopolitical and cultural imaginations of our politicians?  We shouldn't pretend that shoehorning this complex, ideological vision of Australian society in the 21st century into the secondary school curriculum is going to make good education policy.

One final justification for Asian language learning is that it taxes the mind and therefore promotes general literacy — it is a worthy educational priority for its own sake.  This may be true.  But why Asian languages?  Why not Arabic, or Greek, or Russian, or Cherokee?  And what's wrong with Latin?

Foreign languages are also a remarkably indirect way to encourage English literacy.  Again, the school day is short, and languages are hard.  Chinese is uniquely hard — for instance, about four times as hard as French.

Second languages should be a personal choice, not a tool for geopolitical realignment.  A recent book by Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs argues that English so dominates the globe that non-English speakers should be compensated.  English speakers have an advantage;  therefore the world needs a ''language tax''.

This is obviously absurd, but Parijs has a point:  policymakers need to understand the historically unprecedented dominance of English.  Perhaps, by resisting the 20-year push for them to choose Asian languages above all others, Australian students already do.

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Has politics finally moved beyond the personal?

The Libertarian James Paterson

Politcians tax us too much, spend our money wastefully and regulate our lives.  So why do we spend so much time worrying about their personal lives instead of the things that really matter?

Newt Gingrich's expectation-defying persistence in the Republican contest for US president is one piece of evidence that American voters have moved beyond the personal.  Back home, there is no evidence Australians view Bob Hawke's time as prime minister any less favourably because of their knowledge of his personal relationships.

But despite voters' willingness to overlook politicians' flaws, sadly there is also no sign that the media in the US or Australia will let go of their obsession with their private lives.  What Gingrich is alleged to have said to his then wife Marianne during their marriage in the 1990s has no relevance to his capacity to serve as president today.  But that did not stop the television network ABC from interviewing her about their family life and broadcasting it days before a crucial primary.  Nor did it stop CNN from wasting the first question in its South Carolina debate by dwelling on the former House speaker's second marriage, instead of far more important matters.

The private lives of the NSW MPs David Campbell and John Della Bosca also had no impact on their ability to discharge their duties as ministers and representatives of their electorates.  Yet the media went into a frenzy after revelations about what they got up to after hours.

It's not as if there aren't plenty of other legitimate things to judge politicians on.  Many do a lousy job as ministers.  However, decent journalists should never find themselves short of material to hold governments accountable.  And let us not forget that many of those who write about politicians would struggle to meet the high standards by which they judge others.

The reality is that politicians — just like the rest of us — are flawed beings.  The sooner we recognise that they are fallible, the less disappointed we will be when they inevitably make mistakes.  Perhaps it will lead us to entrust them with less power over our lives, and to have lower expectations about their ability to fix every social ill our modern society is supposedly afflicted by.

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Labor's Texta moment

It's only January but we've already got the quote of the year.  ''We will be getting the butcher paper and Textas out and solving the country's problems''.  That's how an unnamed federal Labor MP described what will happen on Sunday at 2pm in the caucus room at Parliament House in Canberra.

The Prime Minister has called together all her 102 MPs for a ''brainstorming'' session.  Hopefully all the country's problems will be solved in time for the next federal election.

The last time anyone was let loose with butcher paper and Textas in Canberra was the 2020 summit three years ago.  The 1000 best and brightest Australians gathered to ''harness the best ideas for building a modern Australia''.  That turned out well.

In the end, participants didn't need their butcher paper.  Given Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard have acted on only about a dozen of the 1000 ideas from the summit, the best and the brightest would have done just as well with a couple of Post-It notes.  With suggestions like a 1 per cent tax on the internet, it's no wonder the summit has been ignored.

The 102 federal Labor MPs gathering in Canberra on Sunday hopefully won't be as far removed from reality as were the 1000 people at the 2020 summit.  Hopefully this time the Textas will be put to better use.

To be fair, back in 2008, the full extent of the global financial crisis was not known.  Back then there was still hope for a V-shaped recovery for the global economy and for the world's equity markets.  Four years on, we now have the International Monetary Fund warning of a ''1930s moment'' if the fund doesn't get $1 trillion to bail out not just Greece, but also Italy and Spain.  In 2009, Barnaby Joyce was laughed out when he warned of the consequences of the United States defaulting on its debt.  Now, not so many people are laughing at Barnaby.

If Labor's brainstorming session is like others of its kind, a ''facilitator'' is going to start by getting people to shout out words and phrases that sum up the party's predicament.

Then, once a note-taker has written down in red Texta all the federal government's problems, they will write down all the solutions in blue Texta.

You can imagine what MPs will be yelling out:  ''lack of vision'';  ''no clear message'';  ''no one trusts us any more because of all our broken promises'';  ''Kevin Rudd''.  There's validity in all these points.  And these problems are all largely self-inflicted.  But federal Labor is actually facing a much bigger problem.  It is facing the problem confronting all governments in the Western world.  This problem can be summed up in one word:  ''austerity''.

The shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, got it right when he said on ABC Radio on Wednesday that Australians should prepare for two decades of uncertainty.

''The bottom line is that we are going to have a very volatile period, economic period, for the next 10 to 20 years ... And the best way to inoculate ourselves against that volatility is to ... reduce debt right across the board — in corporate Australia, in family homes and of course at the government level.''

On Sunday, no Labor MP is going to say ''maybe we should listen to Hockey''.  Maybe someone should.

The reality of austerity and the reality of what the electorate is doing every day as it starts skimping and saving and paying off debt runs completely counter to Labor's rhetoric, which is that spending kept Australia out of recession.

Voters aren't always stupid.  They know that Australia's government debt is nowhere near as bad as the rest of the world's, but they also know that the last Coalition government left Labor a budget surplus and almost zero government debt.  And as much as Keynesian economists like to pretend otherwise, voters realise that government budgets and household budgets are not very different.

In the long run, neither governments nor households can spend more than they earn, and debt, eventually, has to be paid back.

This is what Labor MPs should be talking about on Sunday.

All the debates the policy elites in this country have been having recently about productivity and industrial relations, sustainability, innovation, manufacturing and so on might not count for much at the next federal election.  The contest could rest on the basic issue of how the parties are perceived.  One side is for ''spending'', the other is for ''saving''.

The side that promises to spend more usually wins.  However, in the economic turmoil of the next 20 years, maybe this rule is about to be broken.

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Feminism: a shadow of its former self

Putting aside her tendency to namedrop personalities and organisations that the Australian left loathe the most, such as Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Humphrys has revealed just what it is about feminism that receives so much public scorn and disrespect these days.

Notwithstanding our clear ideological differences Humphrys and I at least seem to be in agreement that the term ''feminism'' has transitioned into what is now largely a dirty word, albeit for different reasons.

According to the third-wave feminist strictures of Humphrys, feminism as conventionally understood in academic circles today is inexorably tied up with patriarchy theory.  While this is an abstract, and rather contentious, basis for rejecting the feminism label, it is surely her right in a society that upholds freedom of conscience to adopt such a stance.

Earlier conceptions of feminism are also not to Humphrys' tastes since, it is claimed, they fail to adequately consider how race, religion, ethnicity and socio-economic status might serve to conflate the experiences of oppression still being felt by women.

The third, and final, key objection by Humphrys to the term feminism is that some women who subscribe to non-socialist thought have described themselves, in some form or another, as feminists.  Indeed, there seems to be no greater source of revulsion for leftists than to see classical liberals or even conservatives labelling themselves as a feminist.

So in response to all of these issues, what does Humphrys do?  She consigns feminism to the dustbin since it is tainted in her mind, embraces the possibly equally tainted second-wave feminist label of ''women's lib'' as her own, and then asks ''who is up for a fight for real emancipation from gender discrimination'' as any self-respecting third-wave feminist probably would.

No wonder why a number of commenters to her original piece expressed confusion!

By contrast she should be trying to restore that now-tarnished word to its former glory, because of what many women's libbers, second- or third-wavers today refuse to acknowledge:  feminism, properly so called, is inextricably linked with the great liberal aspiration of extending the bounds of human freedom more generally.

The early feminists from 19th and early 20th centuries, inspired by figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Voltairine de Cleyre and Suzanne La Follette, saw their primary objective as being to break down legal and other barriers preventing women from realising equality of opportunities alongside men in economic and social realms.

These and many other first-wave feminists saw governments as obstacles to the realisation of greater freedoms for women.  Accordingly, a number of influential feminists of earlier generations tended to be, although not exclusively, of classical liberal persuasion with a corresponding disposition against large, intrusive governments that restricted individual and group rights and freedoms.

Despite long and sometimes bitter campaigns the early feminists eventually earned hard-fought wins for freedom;  the legacy of which immeasurably benefits all women in advanced countries today.

Without diminishing the achievements of the early feminists, these pro-liberty gains were secured in part with the support of men sympathetic to the feminist cause.  I am not only referring to those important male philosophers and activists siding with the principles of feminism, such as John Stuart Mill in the 1800s and even John Locke as early as the 1600s.

In fact, women could not have won significant gains in equality of opportunities in education, marriage, property rights and work, for example, without the acquiescence of male legislators in often limited-franchise parliaments, who found the basic argument that ''women's rights are people's rights'' impossible to ignore any longer.

However, not satisfied with the freedoms already gained for women to work, attain a worthwhile education, own property, set up a business, and vote, the second- and third-wave feminists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries fundamentally changed their strategic focus regarding their relationship with their historical enemy — the coercive, misogynist state.

Armed with new campaign slogans such as ''the personal is political'', feminists since the 1960s have increasingly moved away from advocating the abolition of old legislative obstacles to equality of opportunity to the imposition of new legislative obstacles on business, non-government organisations and other bodies to enshrine specific gender policy objectives.

This has been reflected across the OECD in the form of workplace gender composition quotas, gendered hiring discrimination, pay equity ratios, and the like, combined with affirmative action bureaucracies to monitor existing policies and devise new ones.

These initiatives have tended to operate against the best economic interests of women, for example by raising effective costs of their employment.

Government legislative edicts also exhaust opportunities for competitive, free markets to discover new and innovative ways of satisfying the economic and social needs of women, and insidiously perpetuate the false idea that women cannot thrive without the visible hand of government preferment.

As a result, feminism has become a shadow of its former self.  The movement diminished from being a liberatory, emancipationist cause into just another lobby group attempting to squeeze discriminatory favours out of government.

Contrary to the view of Humphrys the great deregulatory moments in modern history have shown conclusively that a transition to laissez-faire economic policy, typified by more private enterprise and less government control over employment and other market conditions, has worked to improve the circumstances of women and men at large.

It is for these reasons that I'll continue to argue for social and economic policy that does good for women, and all people, rather than call for larger government that hurts more than it helps.

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The dramatic collapse of trust in government

The real story of the financial crisis isn't bank bonuses, the impending collapse of the Eurozone, or the Occupy movement.

It is how, in every Western country, trust in government has suddenly, dramatically collapsed in the crisis' aftermath.

Gallup polls have found that a massive 81 per cent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way their nation is being governed.  This is the record.  Vietnam and Watergate did not induce such broad cynicism.  Dissatisfaction only peaked at 66 per cent in 1974.

Americans believe more than ever that the government wastes their money and that congress doesn't work in their best interests.  Even the poor old Supreme Court is taking a beating.

It is just as bad in Europe.  A Guardian survey of five countries in March 2011 found that 78 per cent of people did not trust their governments to deal with the problems facing the country.  Eighty-nine per cent of people did not trust national politicians to act with honesty and integrity.

Australia fares much better, but here the decline has been steepest.  Eighteen per cent of Australians now think that the most important problem facing the country today is ''better government'', according to an Australian National University poll in October last year.  In March 2010, that figure was just 5 per cent.

We're coming into an era of post-trust politics — where voters no longer offer politicians and governments an assumption of good faith.  Instead, voters now assume political promises will not be kept, that governments are hopeless unless proved otherwise, and, no matter how honest and charming they appear, all politicians are in it for themselves.

Those are, to be fair, reasonable hypotheses.

But we'll miss trust when it's gone.  The father of liberalism, John Locke, wrote that voters hand governments power with ''express or tacit Trust, that it shall be employed for their good, and the preservation of their property''.  Government relies on trust to justify its most basic legitimacy — a trust that it will at least try to govern according to the wishes of the voters who put it there.

Certainly, there's been a decline in trust across the board — no institution is immune.

But for the first time since they started asking the question, Gallup has found that in the United States satisfaction with the size and influence of the federal government is lower than satisfaction with the size and influence of big corporations.  Americans now think those faceless, amoral, profit-seeking corporations are slightly more sympathetic than the governments they vote for and who claim to act on their behalf.

And polls consistently show that, as loathed as business leaders are, they're not as loathed as politicians.  The Edelman Trust Barometer is a survey of educated people in 25 countries which this week recorded the biggest decline in its history.  It also found that while 27 per cent of people did not trust business leaders to tell the truth, 46 per cent did not trust government leaders.

Nor can we blame the financial crisis.  In the United States, trust was at record lows even before the economy tanked.

Anyway, in times of crisis people are usually drawn to government, not away from it.  After September 11, American faith in government surged — doubled, in fact, despite the obvious failure of the federal government to stop the attacks.  It is not simple enough to say that failure breeds contempt (even casual observers of politics know that failure sometimes brings support).

Governments are the biggest organisations in society.  In Western countries they consume between one-third and half of the nation's economic production.

They have their fingers in every pie.  They are relentlessly expansionary:  politicians and bureaucrats are always looking for more areas to intervene in.  Some people may feel this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that governments easily overstretch themselves;  they promise too much and deliver too little.  Politicians try to take responsibility for everything:  from interest rates to waist sizes to the price of milk, petrol and Apple products.

Sure, a government which promises to fix everything is briefly appealing.  But it is always, inevitably, a disappointment.  We saw this, in a micro way, with the Rudd government — where too much was promised too quickly and it all fell in a heap.  We're now seeing the same phenomenon play out in a macro way with the sovereign debt crisis in Europe.  Too much social support was promised for too long to too many people.

For a long time politicians have argued that they ''create'' jobs and ''manage'' the economy.  Paul Keating was speaking for all candidates and incumbents when he claimed that to change a government is to change a country.

Now, having taken responsibility for everything good, they suddenly have to take responsibility for everything bad.

The result is a massive decline in trust, and a challenge to the foundations of democratic legitimacy.

Distrust has its upside though.  Future politicians promising the world will be met with the cynicism they deserve.  Perhaps — perhaps — governments might focus on doing a few things well, rather than a lot of things poorly.

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Gingrich presses the right buttons

Winston Churchill once said of politics that it's ''almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous.  In war you can only be killed once, but in politics — many times''.  No one personifies this dictum today better than Newt Gingrich.

The former speaker of the United States House of Representatives was a beaten man a week ago.  Once the Republican presidential front-runner, he fell so precipitously in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary that he was all but written off.

Gingrich persevered, however, bet all his chips on South Carolina and staged an astounding comeback to win the weekend primary.

So resounding was his victory that the same seasoned Washington observers who had written his political obituary only days ago now say that Gingrich could even beat establishment candidate Mitt Romney in the battle to challenge President Barack Obama.

How could this have happened?  After all, it has been said that the 68-year-old Gingrich has more baggage than the airlines.

He's arrogant, he's polarising, he's a flame-thrower, he's not likable, he overreaches, he violated congressional ethics rules, he had a fall from grace as the nation's legislative leader after unexpected Republican electoral losses in 1998, and he misread public opinion about the impeachment of then president Bill Clinton.

That's not to mention the man's character flaws — including infidelity (and three marriages), extravagant shopping habits (he once spent half a million dollars at Tiffany jewellers) and a stint as a Washington lobbyist (he earned up to $US2 million for mortgage broker Freddie Mac, which conservatives partly blame for the financial crisis).

In fairness to Gingrich, he co-opted welfare reform and a balanced budget — landmark legislative initiatives during the Clinton era.  He is highly intelligent, a prolific book writer and a brilliant debater.  By all accounts, he could go 10 rounds with Obama in prime time.

However, veteran US columnist George Will speaks for many fellow conservatives when he warns that Gingrich ''embodies the vanity and rapacity that makes modern Washington repulsive''.

Gingrich's revival, contrary to the media consensus, is not only due to Romney's failure to satisfactorily defend his record as a venture capitalist or his vacillation over releasing his income tax returns.

Instead, Gingrich's comeback is more due to his ability to spell out a populist pro-growth message while he doles out the ideological red meat to the conservative faithful.

Such tactics may not play well among more moderate voters who help swing general elections.  But they work a treat among the conservative rank and file in a Republican primary.

In two debates last week, Gingrich pressed hot-button issues on welfare entitlements and the war on Islamists while challenging the left-liberal assumptions of the moderators.  In one case, he slammed the ''destructive'' and ''despicable'' ''media elites'' — and in the process got standing ovations.  It was a great television moment.

The ''Grand Old Party'' base is deeply struck by this, not just because they agree with every word of it, but because they yearn for someone who has the guts to speak their language and express themselves unapologetically.

Politicians such as the instinctively moderate Romney don't like this debate.  It means they must come out fighting for something that conservatives regard as good and positive, but which political elites regard as narrow.

The Gingrich sceptics disparage the former House speaker as a discredited figure who's spent a long time in political exile.

But the same thing was once said of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Robert Menzies and John Howard.  When they returned to the arena years after losing leadership positions, their critics gave them the kiss of death.  They all rebounded with tremendous force.

As it happens, Gingrich subscribes to historian Arnold Toynbee's theory of ''departure and return'' — the notion that some legendary leaders endure a long period in the political wilderness before returning to high office.  Say what you will about him, Gingrich rates high marks for sheer animal instincts for survival.

Need to keep fingers off the panic button

Public health advocates describe Australia's binge drinking as an ''epidemic'' for a reason.  Real epidemics have a frightening unpredictability.  They are completely out of human control.  An epidemic — think the 1918 influenza epidemic or the Black Death — inspires base, primal terror.

So when someone describes a lifestyle choice (a non-contagious lifestyle choice, at that) using such evocative language, it's pretty obvious they're trying to manipulate us.

In his new book, Panic, David Marr argues that Australia's political culture is dangerously susceptible to outbreaks of hysterical fear.

This is absolutely right.  We're scared of Facebook predators and cybercrime, GM food and Chinese investors buying farms.  The Occupy crowd harbours a bundle of conspiracies and neuroses about capitalism and Wall Street.

Remember when, in 2006, climate change activist Tim Flannery told us to ''picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof''?  If that wasn't hyperbole designed to inspire fear, what would be?

Marr focuses on what he sees as a few key panics:  those over boat people, multiculturalism, suspected domestic terrorists, radical imams, offensive speech, Bill Henson and recreational drugs.

We can all play this game:  like it or not, panic is bipartisan.

Panic is overreaction.  We panic when the likelihood of an extremely adverse event seems greater than it really is.  It's extremely unlikely that a new global war will erupt or Chinese farm investors will immediately poison our food supply, but people still worry about it.

The policy consequences of panic are significant.  In a society of panic, we no longer believe individuals can judge the riskiness of their own choices by themselves.  Instead:  there ought to be a law.  The government should manage our risk for us.  Virtually the whole regulatory apparatus is founded on the idea of panic.

It is panic that gives us the nanny state and helicopter parenting.  It is panic which inspires the more than 6000 new pages of legislation that the federal Parliament passes every year.  It is panic that has removed swings and monkey bars from school playgrounds across the country.

When governments try to manage risk, our ability to cope with future unknowns diminish.  The more governments protect us, the more susceptible to panic we become.

Governments and political partisans have a vested interest in panic.  Obviously, politicians push legislative agendas for lots of reasons.  But they require public support to get them through.  And few emotions spur us into action better than fear.

So every side of politics massively overstates the negative consequences of not supporting their preferred policies.

The apocalyptic tones of many climate activists are only the most obvious.

Oppositions pretend law and order problems are much worse than they are by claiming the government has lost control of our streets.  This is an easy one:  fear of crime has little relationship to the crime rate.

Most ludicrously, sports lobbyists say if we don't keep funding the Australian Institute of Sport, then we won't win Olympic medals and our national pride will plummet.

We were once told to panic about witchcraft.  Now we're told to panic about obesity and drinking.  But how much attention we give the professional panic-mongers is up to us.

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A lifetime of politics, shared with a daughter

In February 1969, Robert Menzies enjoyed a White House dinner with Richard Nixon and a few distinguished guests, including national security adviser Henry Kissinger, secretary of state Will Rogers and Thomas Dewey, the 1948 Republican presidential candidate.

The meeting took place within a month of Nixon's inauguration as president — and three years after Menzies' retirement as prime minister.  Think about that, about any one of Menzies' successors having a private meal with a new US president years after leaving office.  It wouldn't happen.

But the episode was more curious for another reason, one that Menzies noted in a letter to his daughter.  ''While the new president and all the others present put questions to me and were anxious to get my views and, where possible, my advice,'' he wrote, ''I was able to look back with a wry smile and remember that since I retired no member of the administration in Australia, and for that matter no Member of Parliament, has ever asked me for my views on anything.''

Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the gulf between the local and foreign impressions of Menzies in retirement.  Whereas at home he was dismissed as some sort of fuddy-duddy, abroad Australia's longest serving prime minister was lionised as a world statesman.  Such observations are evident in this edited collection of previously unpublished letters from Menzies to his adoring daughter.  Comprising correspondence written from 1955 to 1975 while Heather Henderson was living overseas with her diplomat husband, Letters To My Daughter is essential reading for any political enthusiast.

Unlike his successors in retirement, Menzies did not publicly air his criticisms of peers and the political scene.  Nor was he afflicted by relevance deprivation syndrome.

''I must confess that I have not missed politics since I retired,'' he wrote on the eve of the 1966 poll, the first federal election he did not contest in two decades.  ''Even the smell of the battle hardly reaches my nostrils.''

And yet these ruthlessly frank letters reveal Menzies' disgust and frustrations about many things, from the public broadcaster (''I have never been persona grata with the ABC, nor the ABC with me'') to Britain (''There are masses of splendid young men and women in this country and a mere handful of these lunatics, but the lunatics command the press'').

We are told, for instance, that John Gorton (PM, 1968-71) ''very seldom does all his homework and is therefore inclined to form a quick and ill-informed judgment''.  Billy McMahon (PM, 1971-72) was ''that untrustworthy little scamp''.  Billy Snedden (Liberal leader, 1972-75) was, among other things, ''politically, an idiot.  He always says the wrong thing, at the wrong time.''

In February 1968, Menzies watched the cricket with his long-time Labor opponent Arthur Calwell:  ''Ninety per cent of the time he devoted to his opinion of [Gough] Whitlam, which needless to say coincides with mine''.  He praised several rising Liberal stars in 1974, such as Malcolm Fraser, ''the top man in the Opposition ...  who really has a sense of statesmanship and who, unlike his predecessors, looks beyond the next day's leading article''.  But that judgment was not based on any progressivism on Fraser's part.  If anything, Menzies was contemptuous of ''small-l liberals'' for betraying conservative principles.  As he put it in 1974, they ''believe in nothing but ...  still believe in anything if they think it worth a few votes.  The whole thing is quite tragic.''

Menzies was no wet.  But neither was he a crass partisan.  On the Coalition's intention to use its Senate numbers to deny the Whitlam government supply on the eve of the 1974 double dissolution election, he said it was ''idiocy'', ''wrong in principle'', ''a matter without precedent''.

Then there are Menzies' musings about the US in the late 1960s.  He was amused how the media consensus implied that ''our special relationship'', which Menzies and Percy Spender created in 1951, was ''established after I resigned''.  On a leading Republican 1968 presidential candidate:  ''Governor Romney ...  is a Mormon [who] appears to be personally well-liked and very presentable'', but his views on important issues were ''either unknown or studiously equivocal''.  (Sound familiar?)

LBJ was ''what you call a great non-listener''.  During Menzies' trip to the Austin ranch in February 1970, LBJ ''literally talked all the time.  I got a few sentences out, but I don't think that [my wife] managed to say anything to him at all.''

This page-turning book provides a fresh and honest insight into Menzies:  a frustrated former politician, to be sure, but also a widely respected global figure and loving father.  Alas, there's just one problem:  because the timing of the letters is determined by his daughter's time overseas, we only read Menzies' private thoughts at limited stages during this 20-year period.  We never read, for instance, what he thought about the first prime ministerial knifing:  McMahon's coup against Gorton in March 1971.  If only Henderson had been overseas longer.  As Peter Costello recently quipped in The Spectator Australia:  ''That would have enriched the treasure trove even more.''

Letters To My Daughter
By Sir Robert Menzies
Edited by Heather Henderson
Murdoch Books, 304pp, $39.99 (HB)

South Carolina primary: can a divided Republican house unite around Romney?

By rights, Mitt Romney should be on the ropes.  In the years leading up to the Republican presidential primaries, he supported small-l liberal positions on anything from abortion and gun control to climate mitigation and big spending stimulus packages.

When he was governor of Massachusetts, he signed into law a healthcare plan not dissimilar to what Tea Partiers call ''Obamacare''.  He once even distanced himself from Ronald Reagan, something that amounts to heresy in conservative circles.  That should have made him an easy target for someone like Rick Perry, who today withdrew from the race after starting as an early favourite.

So you might expect the Republican Party to rally around a single conservative contender who would knockout what Newt Gingrich calls a ''Massachusetts moderate''.  Yet a remarkable thing is happening in the contest to win the GOP nomination to face President Obama this November:  not only does Romney manage to stay on his feet;  he could win virtually every primary bout in 2012 — a first for a non-incumbent president.

How so?  Why is someone whom a clear majority of Republicans think should be beatable and be beaten defeating any challenger who dares get in the ring with him?  Why is a Mormon from (of all places) the liberal north-east poised to win the all-important primary in a southern state with a strong conservative and evangelical leanings?

There are several explanations for Romney's success:  money;  organisation;  attack ads;  his record in business and running the Olympics;  important endorsements (from George Bush Sr to popular governors to influential conservative magazines);  his many policy flip flops;  and the polls that show he's the most ''electable'' candidate against President Obama.

But there is an even more plausible reason why Romney is widely favoured to add this weekend's South Carolina title to his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire:  it's his split conservative opposition.  The anti-Romney vote is so fractured and fragmented that Romney wins by default.  In other words, the folks chasing the frontrunner around the ring are also busily chasing each other.

South Carolina appears to follow the trend set in the pre-primary race.  During the past six to nine months, several conservatives were dubbed Republican presidential front runners:  former congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, Texas governor Rick Perry, entrepreneur Herman Cain and even, at one point, property tycoon Donald Trump.  All crashed and burned.

In the past six weeks, two other conservative challengers have emerged:  former Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.  After impressive starts — Gingrich recorded double-digit national poll leads in early December while Santorum narrowly lost the Iowa caucuses on January 3 — both trailed badly in New Hampshire last week.  And although their vote will increase in conservative South Carolina, neither is likely to win the Palmetto State.

(Ron Paul, the eccentric Texas congressman, will continue to place well in the lead up to the Tampa convention in August.  But although his support base is strong, his ceiling is low.  That is because his unorthodox views on foreign and financial matters alienate the Republican mainstream, especially in a state that is home to seven military bases and the highest per capita defence population in the US.)

The situation has become so desperate for the anti-Romney candidates that they are now deploying Democratic tactics against him.  In the past week, these conservatives have attacked Romney over his income tax returns and record as a venture capitalist.  But they have misjudged their audience.  Class-warfare may appeal to the New York Times editorial board, but it is unlikely to resonate with the pro-free enterprise faithful in a Republican primary.

Still, if one candidate can shock the media consensus about Romney's coronation, it is Gingrich.  In December, he was subjected to a barrage of negative advertisements that highlighted, most notably, his role as a corporate lobbyist for real-estate broker Freddie Mac, which conservatives partly blame for the subprime mortgage crisis.  Not surprisingly, the former university historian was bound for the history dustbin.

But he now has what the political class calls momentum.  In Monday night's primary debate, Gingrich outflanked and outscored his opponents, harping on hot-button issues such as welfare reform and the war on terror and, in the process, receiving standing ovations from the 3,000 Republicans.

Doling out the ideological red meat to a hungry base always helps in a GOP primary in a conservative state.  South Carolinians, meanwhile, remain uneasy about Romney and open to a compelling conservative alternative.  And Rick Perry's decision overnight to quit the race and endorse Gingrich dramatically changes the dynamics in South Carolina.  So much so that Romney's poll lead has shrunk to 1 per cent.

Whether any of this is enough for the former speaker to win the Republican nomination remains to be seen.  But one thing is clear:  the divided conservative vote hurts Gingrich and helps Romney.

Run car subsidies out of town

Continuing subsidies to car companies isn't just bad economics.  It's also bad for communities and workers as well.  Perpetuating unsustainable industries through subsidies robs a generation of workers of an economically sustainable future.

Manufacturing Minister Kim Carr's announcement gifting another $100 million into the bottomless pockets of multinational car companies has rightly drawn fire.

For more than 30 years the local car industry has enjoyed taxpayer-funded support to wean it off high tariffs that stopped it being internationally competitive.

Some progress was made initially as the industry became outward-focused and grew its export markets, particularly in the Middle East.  But those days are now over.

Last week the Prime Minister argued that her $5.4 billion New Car Plan showed those ''sceptics (who) said Australia could not emerge with its car industry still viable'' were wrong.

The evidence shows otherwise, Prime Minister.

According to the government's own Innovation Department statistics the total number of new passenger vehicles sold in Australia plateaued at about 600,000 between 2003 and 2010.

But imports have increased their market share from slightly fewer than 60 per cent of sales to nearly 85 per cent in the same time frame.

And the consistent decline started well before the global financial crisis and the risks from the dollar's high exchange rate;  though exports have taken a hit in the past few years.

If the flood of cheap imports was temporary the government could apply a short-term tariff to help the domestic industry while being consistent with international trade rules.

That's not the problem.  Instead it's part of a long-term structural trend of the domestic industry being unresponsive to consumers.

Unsurprisingly, businesses that extract cash from politically sensitive governments have little incentive to respond to what consumers want.

If the subsidies were designed to transition the industry into a situation of competitiveness there would at least be a date when the industry had to focus on being competitive and deliver real benefits to the economy.

Previously Carr has argued his industry support would ''facilitate a transition to a more sustainable, competitive industry and provide economic, social and environmental benefits for the country''.

That's not the point of these subsidies.  Instead there has been a structural shift in the handouts Canberra is prepared to pay from transition assistance toward government-industry co-investment.

Co-investment is essentially about making government a key stakeholder in the industry and putting it back into the heart of the economy.

As a co-investor it won't be long before political priorities start influencing car companies' business decisions.  The result is the industry is likely to be even less responsive.

Recognising that doling out money to multinational car companies isn't an easy political sale, advocates for perpetuating subsidy-based protectionism focus on the 60,000 people employed in the industry.

The geographic concentration of the industry in places such as Victoria's Geelong and South Australia's Elizabeth aids that argument because of the impact it will have on communities.

If the subsidies were designed to help communities and workers transition toward a sustainable economic future there would be few critics of the government's plans.

After all, government-sponsored protectionism got workers and communities into this mess.  It's a reasonable justification that governments have a role in fixing it.

Instead the subsidies are designed to perpetuate the status quo until the car companies rattle their tin cans looking for another handout.

But it's too often ignored that subsidies are also environmentally and socially unsustainable as well.

They're environmentally damaging because the industry is being shielded from the simple message that consumers don't want the larger cars they're producing.

Socially they're damaging because new workers are being provided with a career pathway in an unsustainable industry.  When a future government stops these subsidies those same workers will lose their career.

The same workers are also being misled into starting an alternative economically unsustainable career path to support them and their families.

Considering the demographic transition with baby boomers exiting the workforce and generation Y entering the workforce, now is the time to stop subsidies so the social costs aren't passed on to another generation.

Considering the Rudd government's initial car plan subsidised workers by nearly $100,000 per head it meant that one job in the car manufacturing industry cost around two average-income jobs in the rest of the economy.

That's not fair to those currently locked out of work.

The absurdity of the government's ongoing support isn't just irresponsible.  It's immoral.

What's depressing is that continuing subsidies is even a point of debate.  If the Gillard government really wanted to claim the Hawke-Keating mantle of reform it would actively reject co-investment subsidies.

For a Liberal-led opposition opposing industry welfare should be a no-brainer if it wants to avoid charges of economic vandalism.  The case is even stronger since they're looking for expenditure savings.

But in developing policy both sides of politics shouldn't just consider the economic case;  they should also consider the damage subsidies make to creating unsustainable paths for workers and the communities that rely on them.

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Car makers cling to subsidies of old

Seeing a Commonwealth minister beg on behalf of a special interest is embarrassing.

The Manufacturing Minister Kim Carr wrote in The Australian over the weekend that automobile manufacturing is ''an industry at the core of the society we want to be''.

Less than half of one per cent of the labour force works for the car industry.  Yet it is, according to the Minister, absolutely central to our national identity.

Perhaps he's right;  insofar as our national identity is tied up with handing taxpayer money over to a few politically well-connected and otherwise uncompetitive businesses.

It's all well and good to believe that Australian industry should be encouraged to ''make things''.  But in practise it leads to the complete subordination of an entire industry to politics, backroom dealing, and electoral calculations.

Few other industries get such hands-on cabinet attention.  Every investment, every new product announcement, every decision to open or close a factory is met with a media release and ministerial statement.

In the lead up to the 2007 election, Carr spoke about how he would ''thump the tables in the boardrooms of Detroit, in Tokyo, in Beijing'' if Labor won government.

The promise was apparently kept.  The car industry appears to have their own Minister of the Crown deputised to help with business negotiations, and their own pool of taxpayers' money on hand to sweeten deals.

This naked corporatism is surely no person's idea of the ''society we want to be''.

The first federal tariffs in 1907 covered vehicle components, as part of ''protection all round''.  Since then, state support for other industries has fallen away.  The car manufacturers' stubborn hold on their subsidy is only thanks to close political friendships.

Carr's demotion in the reshuffle late last year was widely noted.  But his new roles are important too.  Carr is not only the Minister of Manufacturing;  he is also the Minister for Defence Materiel — that is, minister in charge of the wasteful sink-hole of military equipment acquisition.

The two roles have a perverse synergy.

Carr has long argued that that a domestic manufacturing industry is needed for national defence.  He told ABC radio back in 2008 that ''You can't make a jet fighter without having a strong car industry''.

This is obviously ridiculous.  Holden needs $100 million just in case World War Three starts and the international arms market no longer sells Joint Strike Fighters?  Australians will need to beat their ploughshares back into swords?  If the Government truly believes this scenario is anything other than fantasy, well, aircraft production is the least of our problems.

Carr firmly believes that taxpayers' money should artificially prop up domestic manufacturing.  Now that he is also in charge of defence acquisitions, it is easy to see how Australian-made military equipment will be favoured even when there is better, cheaper, foreign equipment available.

On The Drum last week, Annabel Crabb pointed out almost every other country pours cash into their automobile industry.

But that doesn't mean that we need to keep supporting ours.  Right now, the rest of the world supports the car industry for the same reason we do — because during the second half of the 20th century, manufacturing unions built extremely close relationships with political parties.  Those relationships have paid off handsomely in subsidy, protection, and parliamentary representation.

There's nothing special about automobiles that demands government support.  They're not particularly challenging to make.  They're not particularly central to the economic structure.  They're not particularly hard to buy from overseas.  Their manufacturing is not particularly high-tech, at least compared to any other industry.  Yet they are particularly well connected.  And that's it.  That's why we support them.

Happily, this week has demonstrated how increasingly hard it is for the automobile industry to justify their claim on our money.

But what on earth is the Coalition thinking?

A big part of Joe Hockey's plan to reduce government spending is a $500 million cut to car industry subsidies.  That would be great.

Yet last week there were suggestions the cut may be abandoned.

Shadow ministers now talk about how critical the automotive industry is.  How ''savagely'' the Government abandoned the Cash for Clunkers scheme.  How cruelly the Green Car Innovation Fund was decimated.

The Coalition was rightly scathing about these boondoggles when they were announced.

Hockey and Andrew Robb — both described by their colleagues as ''economic rationalists'', in a neat throwback to the 1990s — are apparently holding firm on the cuts.

That the Coalition is going wobbly on spending reductions is no surprise, given Tony Abbott's deliberate attempt to take Labor's industrial base, and his embrace of economic nationalism to do so.

Still — car subsidies?  If the Coalition can't even bring itself reduce this irrational, wasteful, pointless, politicised corporate welfare program, they're going to struggle to cut anything at all.

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Paul is a prophet deserving honour in warning on America's limits

He rails against the ''American empire'' that ''brought the September 11 attacks on us''.  He condemns Obama for killing Osama.  He is indifferent to attempts to prevent Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.

He defends Julian Assange and lauds Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking US secrets to WikiLeaks, a ''true patriot''.  And he is barred from addressing a Jewish forum because of his ''misguided and extreme views'' on Israel.

Who is this crazed left-wing radical?  If you're not closely following the Republican presidential race, you might think he was Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore.

In fact, he's Ron Paul:  the free-market crusader, cultural conservative and intellectual godfather of the Tea Party movement, from (of all places) Texas.

He's also the only Republican candidate other than Mitt Romney to place well in two very different electorates:  Iowa and New Hampshire.

Paul won't win his party's nomination to run against the President, Barack Obama:  his support base is solid, but not broad.  Yet his candidacy could prove to be a harbinger of what is next for American politics.  As leading neo-conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer recognises:  ''Paul is out there to build a movement that will long outlive this campaign.''

The 76-year-old Paul's most endearing quality is that he has sincere beliefs — support for social tolerance, free-market capitalism and a healthy scepticism towards foreign military adventurism — and he is not afraid to yell them out.  That sets him apart from the pack in this age of focus groups and media spin.

Most pundits highlight Paul's rigid adherence to libertarianism, most notably his pledge to slash the federal Leviathan.  But he is also the political heir to the notion of American decline that has gained intellectual currency.

In 1987, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which argued the US was in danger of ''imperial overstretch'', became an international bestseller.

Since then, a plethora of books and articles — including most recently ''Is America Over?'' (the cover of the prestigious Foreign Affairs) — have declared the end of a Pax Americana and urged more modest visions for the US role in a plural world.

Meanwhile, Americans are suffering from foreign policy fatigue.  For 70 years — first against fascism, then communism and more recently against militant Islam — they supported and sustained a defence commitment of the most intense and comprehensive kind.  Everything else was subordinated to it;  all sorts of domestic concerns were neglected.

Today, there is no Hitler seeking global hegemony.  Yet a cash-strapped Washington spends more on military than the next 15 top nations combined.  Since both Iraq and Afghanistan have cost America dearly in blood and treasure as well as credibility and prestige, there is overwhelming support for a more prudent approach to foreign affairs and a respite from responsibilities.

Only 33 per cent of Americans, according to a 2010 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, think the US will remain the world's leading power in decades to come.

In acknowledging an ambitious foreign policy is incompatible with the goal of cutting spending, Paul is behaving like a true fiscal conservative.  After all, if you oppose big government, why exempt the biggest part of the state — the Pentagon — from scrutiny?  In the post-September 11 decade, annual US defence spending has risen 70 per cent to about $700 billion.

Now, one can reject Paul's views on the Federal Reserve and the US-Australia alliance (both of which he would scrap) and still accept his thesis the US is in decline and it should come to grips with this reality.  In doing so, US leaders would be in a better position to deal with the long-term structural problems plaguing the nation.

True, the US remains the world's largest economy and its lone military superpower.  But the US, far from remaining the world's policeman, is bound to define distinctions between the essential and the desirable;  between what is possible and what is beyond its capacities.

That is essentially what Paul is saying, albeit in a cranky, even eccentric, manner.  For his pains, he is denounced as a ''kook'' and ''appeaser'' and disowned by many in his own party.  But US leaders will increasingly place more stress on modesty and limits in a complex and ambiguous world.  To fall back on feel-good slogans about a ''new American Century'' may lead to a painful comeuppance.

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Repeat after me: all tyranny is evil and wrong

Simon Winchester is a best-selling author.  You've probably seen his popular histories, in particular, The Surgeon of Crowthorne.  He received an OBE from the Queen in 2006 for services to journalism and literature.  He is apparently witty, charming and intelligent.  And he thinks we've all been a bit unfair to North Korea.

In the London Times shortly after the death of Kim Jong-il, Winchester argued that, sure, the Hermit Kingdom has its ''flaws'', but life there is ''not nearly as bad as is supposed''.  The restaurants are few, but the medical clinics are clean.  The bars sell imported beer, and the hairdressers are friendly.

But for Winchester, the great thing about North Korea is that it isn't South Korea.  The North hasn't been ''utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence''.  It is ''a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture.  And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.''

Never mind the poverty.  The tyranny.  Or that Winchester visited at the tail end of a famine that killed about 10 per cent of the population — a famine caused deliberately by a hereditary dictatorship.  The real issue is Western consumerism.  North Korea is desperately poor, but let's focus on how crass America is.

Winchester is not alone.  Writing in Crikey, Guy Rundle argued that yes, North Korea is in a state of oppression, but (don't you know?) neoliberalism and globalisation are really bad too.

There is a long history of left-wing intellectuals apologising for communist dictatorships.  And it's always been less about the places they've venerated, and more about the intellectuals themselves:  their deep, unshakable dislike of capitalism, and their belief that Western liberties just result in vulgarity.  In his 1991 book The Wilder Shores of Marx, the English psychiatrist Anthony Daniels wrote about returning from a visit to North Korea a few years before.  He recalls describing to a colleague, a professor of medicine, the pervasive propaganda and brainwashing in Kim Il-sung's regime.  The professor responded:  ''But have you considered how much power Rupert Murdoch wields in this country?''

Sure, no 20th-century dictatorship has been without its defenders.  Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam:  they've all been praised by Western socialists looking for a model of the good society.  And their ''flaws'', the tyranny and terror and poverty, have been downplayed.

Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator is one of the great anti-dictatorship films, but his opposition to tyranny was selective.  Chaplin thought ''the only people who object to Communism [are] Nazi agents''.  When he heard about Stalin's purges, Chaplin said they were ''wonderful'' and were needed in America.

When Mao died in 1976, Gough Whitlam couldn't praise the dictator enough:  Mao ''was the inspiration to the Chinese people'' and made China ''secure, stable and self-confident''.  Of course, he killed 45 million people doing so.  One would have hoped the wistful romance of tyranny would have disappeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its final, conclusive, unavoidable demonstration of the dangers of communism.

Not so.  The romanticisation of communism survives.  When the former Czech president and anti-communist dissident Vaclav Havel died last month, Guardian columnist Neil Clark complained Havel had never talked about communism's good side.  Communism offered welfare, education, and women's rights.  So ''the question which needs to be asked'', intoned Clark, is did Havel's ''political campaigning [make] his country and the world a better place?''

Havel had been repeatedly tortured by the Czech police.  He was punished for demanding democracy and human rights.  But perhaps Havel's experience of torture and imprisonment blinded him to how great life under Marxist dictatorship actually was.

Or perhaps many Western writers are so desperate to blame capitalism for the world's problems that they're willing to forgive, even support, non-capitalist tyranny.

Someone is always saying something nice about the worst totalitarian states.  After Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation, visited North Korea in 2010, she told the media she'd seen few signs of malnutrition.  Mind you, she only visited Pyongyang and had been escorted the whole time by North Korean officials.

Even better, Chan had seen no signs of obesity.  North Koreans, the Director-General approvingly noted, do a lot of walking.  People in affluent Westernised Asian countries do not.  I guess the upside to material deprivation is how it encourages physical exercise.  And there is, Simon Winchester might say, a real ''authenticity'' in that.

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Fair's fare benefits government, not business

The Rudd/Gillard governments have introduced many business-unfriendly policies.

Three of these the mining tax, Fair Work Australia (FWA) and the carbon tax were to promote the ALP's political ends, rather than those of the nation, and many business representatives offered inadequate opposition to them.

A high point was the mining associations' stand against Rudd's mining tax.  In its original form, that tax would have seized much of the value of firms whose success has cushioned the impact of the global financial crisis on Australians.  Vigorous business opposition reduced the proposal's damaging effect.

FWA, masquerading as a ''fair go'', loads the dice in favour of unions and vastly enlarges their role, even though they barely represent 12 per cent of private sector workers.

It is designed to reverse the trend of declining union membership and to increase unions' abilities to fund Labor's election campaigns.

The outcome has been hit-and-run industrial disputes and wage increases uncompensated by productivity improvements.

This strangles competitiveness and increases costs -- by $200 million in the case of the Qantas dispute.

To save the business, Qantas management confronted union blackmail, which invited attacks from government ministers, including Bill Shorten, the man most likely to replace Gillard as Prime Minister during 2012.

With the carbon tax, business compliance has been crucial to the government passing a program, which, if left to stand, will progressively choke competitiveness across our most productive industries.

Only one of the three industry-wide business association, the Australian Council for Commerce and Industry, consistently opposed the carbon tax.  The Australian Industry Group (AIG) and the Business Council of Australia (BCA) offered various degrees of support.

The AIG sought a carbon tax but at half the Government's $23 rate.  Heather Ridout, its CEO throughout the negotiations, has since been appointed to the Reserve Bank board.

The BCA shifted from support of an emissions trading tax, to seeking a $10 carbon price and then to opposition unless other countries implemented similar policies.

Few of the major sectional industry associations have been prominent in pointing to the economic damage inherent in the carbon tax legislation.

The Minerals Council opposed it vigorously but originally did so only because it offered inadequate compensation to its member firms.

The Housing Industry Association also originally opposed the tax only on technical grounds but this hardened to bring the association adamantly against the government's carbon tax and its Liberal Party direct action alternative.

THE Australian Bankers Association opposed the carbon tax only because it prefers a cap and trade system so that its members can benefit from trading in carbon credits.

The carrot of soil-enriching subsidies tempted support from the National Farmers Federation but eventually the federation opposed it.

The electricity and gas industry peak body, the Energy Supply Association of Australia supported a carbon tax as long as the brown coal generators receive adequate compensation.

Experience shows that industry representative bodies focus on promoting their members' sectional interests.

In order to obtain particular concessions, they frequently offer support to government 'big picture' policies.

Unfortunately this provides cover for policies that enhance the government's political interests at the cost of the nation's interests.

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Slay the super sacred cow

There's one good thing about the local stockmarket falling 15 per cent last year:  people are beginning to ask what the point is of compulsory superannuation.

Instead of arguing about things at the margins of superannuation policy, like how to enforce fund transparency and give members choice between funds, we should debate the fundamentals.  We should talk about whether compulsory superannuation should even exist.

Compulsory superannuation has become a sacred cow for both sides of politics.  It is worshipped because it has given Australia the fourth-largest pension market in the world.  And it has created an industry of superannuation rent-seekers.  Compulsory super is now a very fat and lazy sacred cow and no one is willing to touch it — let alone slaughter it.

The Labor Party won't do anything to disturb this cosy world.  Compulsory super was invented by Paul Keating and Bill Kelty, and they knew exactly what they were doing.  The influence of the trade unions in Australia no longer rests on membership.  Union power is now exercised through the hundreds of billions of dollars controlled by the industry superannuation funds.

And now that 12 per cent has become accepted as the new level of compulsory contribution, watch how the ALP and the super industry will agitate to set a new standard of 15 per cent and higher.

Why John Howard and Peter Costello did not repeal compulsory superannuation when they came to power in 1996 is a mystery.  Why the Liberal Party supports it is a mystery.

Even more mysterious is why Tony Abbott, who has no qualms about opposing every other piece of bad policy from the Gillard government, decided in November last year not to fight Labor's increase in the contribution level to 12 per cent.

The idea that, in addition to levying taxes, the government should also stop people spending their own money by forcing them to save is something that should make Liberals very uncomfortable.  And in the current financial climate Australians aren't able to save their superannuation.

They're losing it on the stockmarket.  Forced saving, regardless of whether the returns are positive or negative, is inconsistent with any notion of personal freedom of choice.

It's about time Liberals started scrutinising some of the traditional justifications for compulsory super.

There's the paternalistic argument that individuals must be forced to save ''for their own good'' because otherwise they'll retire and not have enough money to live on.  This arguments rests on the assumption that at the age of 65 a person will be financially better off if 12 per cent of that person's wages have been saved in superannuation.  In some cases this will be true.  But in many other cases it won't be.

In fact, this highlights the Soviet-style one-size-fits-all super policy that applies in this country.  Everyone is forced to save at the same rate regardless of their personal circumstances.  A person wanting to use their salary to pay for an educational qualification to help them gain a higher income is treated the same way as someone who feeds their weekly pay into a poker machine.  Because of the behaviour of a few, the government makes everyone suffer.

The main economic justification for compulsory super is that in the long term it will reduce government spending on the pension.  This is questionable.  Treasury estimates that in 2050, 75 per cent of retirees will still be able to get all or part of the pension because their super will be inadequate.

That doesn't look much like a system that's reducing the taxpayer's burden.

Compulsory superannuation offends practically every principle of what should be Liberal Party philosophy.

If an Abbott government does keep compulsory superannuation it must, at a minimum, make drastic changes.

For a start, it should impose the same regulatory requirements on union-dominated industry funds as are applied to retail funds.  Next, it should liberalise the list of assets in which superannuation can be invested.

If a government is genuinely concerned for the long-term financial security of individuals, then those individuals should be allowed to use their super to invest in their home.

Owning a home provides more financial security than a share portfolio.

If Abbott and the Liberals won't abolish compulsory superannuation, they should at least consider allowing individuals some semblance of choice by providing an opportunity for opting out of the system.

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Era of cheap energy needn't be over

Energy Minister Martin Ferguson has launched the government's draft white paper on energy.  Having run the gauntlet of bureaucratic committees, much of the paper comprises anodyne phrases that talk about energy use doubling, new markets emerging and so on.

It also contains fantasies about how renewables are going to replace fossil-fuelled electricity.  That said, the draft is a useful compendium of energy market material.

Ferguson's remarks in launching the draft paper's policy statements were highly pointed.  He used the occasion to make explicit some of the policy formats that are lurking inside it.

Among these is his acceptance that private ownership will always be a more efficient means of supplying electricity, including in the distribution and transmission networks — the poles and wires that account for half of electricity's costs.  His call for privatisation of these networks recognises the inevitable workplace inefficiencies of government entities and sets him apart from state politicians, Labor and Coalition, other than in Victoria and South Australia.

He also wants to accelerate the process of retail competition in electricity, where residual regulatory barriers raise costs in all jurisdictions other than Victoria.

Ferguson has long been an advocate of increased uranium exports.  Building on this, he further courts the ire of the Green left by proposing nuclear power for Australia.  However, this is conditional on the failure of the optimistic nostrums about technological breakthroughs in renewables.

A key part of his vision of future energy supply is coal seam gas (CSG) reserves, which he noted were comparable in size and rather more conveniently located than conventional sources of gas.

He says he opposes populist calls to force producers to set aside some part of CSG production for local use on non-commercial terms.  But he does leave the door open for such intervention.

Even so, Ferguson's promotion of CSG marks him out as more pro-development than the somewhat prevaricating Coalition position and certainly differentiates Labor from its Green allies.  In that respect he also saw the case for having the government's research and development spending encompass nuclear, carbon capture and storage, and clean coal.  All were ruled out by the Greens in the $10 billion Clean Energy Foundation.

But this faith in government research and development is at odds with the poor record of Australian government spending in commercialising R&D.  The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that though governments and universities account for 36 per cent of the nation's R&D spending, this is the source of less than 7 per cent of innovation.

Undiscouraged, Ferguson has snared increased spending for his Energy portfolio through the carbon tax policy.  Research into technology like carbon capture and storage, low-emission coal and renewable energy will soak up more than $475 million of taxpayer money next year.  A subsidy to converting food into ethanol will take up another $67 million.  It would be astonishing if this spending delivered any value.

The Energy portfolio accounts for only a small part of the wasteful expenditure the government devotes to green schemes.  Even excluding the direct departmental overheads, this expenditure amounted to $3 billion in 2009-10, the most recent year for which Canberra has published an aggregate figure of such outlays.

Ferguson claims that a Coalition government could never repeal the carbon tax, given the constellation of political forces in the Senate.

This view is inconsistent with his support for the surge of spending on green R&D.  Putting a ''price on carbon'' was trumpeted as the single instrument that would efficiently encourage lower carbon emissions, while also fostering carbon-free and carbon-light technology.

Government R&D spending is a double subsidy that undermines the supposed theoretical elegance of the single instrument on which a carbon tax or cap-and-trade is based.  The avalanche of new green energy projects shows no faith in the carbon tax policy.  At best, this is wasteful ''winner-picking'' policy.

In the final analysis, Ferguson declared ''the era of cheap energy is over''.  But we are not running out of cheap coal and gas, so it's only over if the government requires the fat lady to sing a final aria that our carbon tax is irremovable.

That, with China alone each year adding more coal-fired electricity generation than Australia's total capacity, would be a fruitless economy-busting end to the opera.  A Chinese carbon tax at the trivial level mooted would not change this.

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The closing of the Australian mind

It has long been the lament of academics that their self-evidently brilliant ideas and advice are seldom heeded in the ''real'' world.  Nowhere is this disappointment more evident than in the field of social sciences, particularly political science and public policy.

One recent illustration of academics' frustration with their failure to influence public policy was the launch of The Conversation, a website which describes itself as ''an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector''.  Headed by former Age editor Andrew Jaspan, the website is primarily resourced by the Group of Eight elite Australian universities.

Evidently, it is well-funded.  Besides Australia's major universities, it also enjoys support from corporate partners, the CSIRO, the Federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, and the Victorian Department of Business and Innovation.  This support appears to allow it to employ dozens of staff, including editors — and in some cases, deputy editors — for each of the website's ''sections'' (''Science + Technology'', ''Politics + Society'', ''Environment + Energy'' and so on).

The Conversation was launched explicitly to address the ''problem'', as described by University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis, that universities are not successful at communicating their messages to the public;  as if the reason academics are unable to influence public debate is because they lack a highbrow version of News Limited's opinion website, The Punch.

As the site's charter admits, it hopes to ''give experts a greater voice in shaping scientific, cultural and intellectual agendas'', and aims to work for the advancement of the ''public good''.  It also promises to be ''editorially independent'', provide ''diverse'' content and be ''free of commercial or political bias''.  Whether it achieves this is open to question.

Professor Judith Sloan, one academic who can boast a tangible impact on policy and public debate, is unconvinced:  ''This site strikes me as emblematic of all that is wrong with Australian universities.  Crammed with puerile, naïve, left-wing tosh, the contributing academics really have no idea when it comes to serious public policy contributions.''

Indeed, if you believe that diversity should extend to the ideological realm, The Conversation is hardly fulfilling its charter.  Take a recent sampling from its ''Environment + Energy'' section:  one article labels the governments' carbon tax as ''profoundly inadequate'' because it doesn't go far enough, another argues that the climate debate focuses far too much on ''the risks to Australia's economic prosperity'', and a piece cheerily points out that businesses could become more ''efficient'' thanks to the carbon tax.  Others suggest that ''one small thing you can do for the environment'' is to ''be inspired'', and yet another argues that scientists have a duty to speak out against policies such as the Victorian government's decision to allow grazing in Alpine national parks.

On a brighter note, one article suggested that Christopher Monckton should not be prevented from speaking at a university, but not before comparing climate sceptics to ''Holocaust deniers, supporters of paedophilia, critics of vaccination [and] advocates of racial inequality''.  The website also proudly featured ''Monckton watch'' on its homepage, a section dedicated to criticising the British climate sceptic during his visit to Australia.

Every article that appears on the website is accompanied by a disclosure statement that lists any possible conflicts of interest the academic author may have.  Obviously, this is part of The Conversation's efforts to elevate itself above commercial media and demonstrate the rigorousness of its content.

But many of these articles, supposedly ''curated'' by The Conversation's team of professional journalists, are littered with political talking points like ''clean energy future'', a phrase that features in headlines and introductory paragraphs of numerous articles on the website, and — coincidentally, of course — in the Gillard government's publicly-funded advertising campaign in support of its carbon tax package.  This represents either willful participation in the government's propaganda campaign or, more charitably, sloppy editing standards, because neutral language would be both more accurate and more illuminating.

Moreover, one way that academic writing distinguishes itself from opinion journalism is that it is referenced and peer-reviewed.  Yet the articles that appear on The Conversation are rarely footnoted and only occasionally contain links to other articles which back up their claims.  Neither are articles on The Conversation peer-reviewed, which is ironic considering many articles published on the website assail climate sceptics for not submitting their work to this process.

Conservative or even vaguely centre-right voices appear extremely rarely on the site.  To be fair, that is not totally the fault of the editors:  the reality is that academia is substantially dominated by the Left, and paeans to renewable energy are probably easier to source than robust critiques of big government.  But herein lies the problem.  One of the reasons academic ideas are not taken seriously in the political world is the perception that they come solely from one end of the ideological spectrum.

In this light it hardly seems surprising that academics fail to make their mark on public policy debates.  The dominance of the Left on campus may be gratifying for those who hope to change society by influencing the young, but it actually contributes to their exclusion from the public policy process.  And in order to actually influence public debate, you need ideas that are relevant, achievable and have some semblance of community support.  Australian academics are not just one flashy website away from reshaping the nation according to their vision.  To achieve that, they require nothing less than a fundamental cultural revolution.  Until then, others will hold sway.  Judging by their contributions to date, that might not be a bad thing.

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