Unions will get just desserts

If the unions aren't careful Tony Abbott will be forced to do something about them.  It will only take a few more violent protests on building sites in Melbourne and one or two more lurid tales of union corruption out of Sydney for a future Abbott government to get to be brave enough to have a fundamental review of how trade unions operate in Australia.

The difference between what Tony Abbott might do to the unions as PM and what John Howard tried with Work Choices is that union thuggery and corruption is clear, obvious, and easily understood.  Not all unions use violence as a negotiating strategy and not all union officials are corrupt.  But that's not an excuse to turn a blind eye to instances where there is violence and corruption.

There are good reasons why the Coalition is reluctant to talk about industrial relations and wary of even uttering words like ''labour productivity''.  The Coalition's fear is that anything the Coalition says about industrial relations will be likened to an attempt to bring back Work Choices.  The ACTU's $30 million campaign against Work Choices and the Howard government did much more than help Kevin Rudd become prime minister in 2007.  The campaign was so successful it scared off the Coalition leadership from touching industrial relations for at least a decade.

The beauty for the Coalition of talking about ''union governance'' instead of ''industrial relations'' is that the capacity of the ACTU to campaign against plans to reform ''union governance'' and reduce corruption is limited.  There's little doubt what an inquiry into union behaviour and governance would find.  The scandals in the Health Services Union and Australian Workers Union are the result of lax governance and minimal oversight, while the abolition of the Australian Building and Construction Commission removed effective enforcement against illegal behaviour.

In the wake of the HSU saga Eric Abetz, the opposition workplace relations spokesman, said union officials should face the same penalties as company directors for breaches of the law, including fines and jail.  From this it's just one small step to having trade unions regulated by ASIC — a step the Coalition has so far resisted, but it's the logical conclusion of their position.

The disparity between the treatment of companies and unions can only be explained by the fact that few Labor Party ministers have been company directors, but many have been union bosses.  The Gillard government wanted to impose a penalty on company directors of up to one-year imprisonment if they'd changed their address and hadn't informed ASIC within 28 days.  Meanwhile, Fair Work Australia spends three years investigating Craig Thomson.

Having unions regulated by ASIC won't immediately stop violence on picket lines, but it would send the message that the era of one rule of unionists and one rule for every other member of the public is over.  Unfortunately, it's a message that needs to be sent to those authorities meant to be upholding the law.  In Victoria, the state government runs television advertisements gleefully telling motorists of how the police will relentlessly fine any driver travelling even just a little over the 40km per hour speed limit.  Yet last month when protesters illegally picketed a Coles warehouse in Melbourne preventing employees from going to work the police stood by and did nothing.

The other area of trade union privilege a Coalition government is itching to overhaul is superannuation.  Industry super funds connected to trade unions are granted special treatment under industrial relations legislation and they get benefits not available to for-profit funds.

The Coalition should never have agreed to support Labor's promise to increase the compulsory superannuation contribution to 12 per cent, but given that they did, the Coalition should have at least made their support conditional on having a level playing field for all superannuation funds.  The Coalition didn't insist on this but they'll have the chance to fix their mistake if they get to form government.

Storm Financial, the financial planning company that went broke and lost millions in investors' funds was hardly representative of the financial advice industry.  But that didn't stop the Labor government in the wake of the Storm collapse unleashing waves of new regulation on financial planners.

There's every chance a Coalition government will do to the unions what an ALP government did to the financial planning industry.

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A vote for voluntary voting

Derryn Hinch is right to describe Australia's system of compulsory voting as undemocratic.

For many, staying home is itself an act of political expression, a vote of no confidence in our entire political class.

Hinch's attitude is perfectly understandable.  It is very easy to be cynical about politics today.

Our leaders do little more than attack their opponents in focus-grouped soundbites.

The national interest is subverted to the political interests of particular individuals and parties, while attention to policy is fleeting.

But it doesn't have to be this way.  The quality of political debate in our country is being corrupted by our system of compulsory voting.

Despite 14 million voters federally, elections are effectively decided by a few hundred voters in a handful of seats.

Many swing voters genuinely change their mind on the basis of some rational measure.

But just as many regularly change their minds because they can barely tell the difference.

We all know voters like this.  If asked which party has a certain flagship policy, they are just as likely to tell you the opposite party.

These people have my full sympathy.

Ignorance of politics is not a sin.  If politics doesn't interest you, that is a perfectly legitimate view to take.

But the sad truth of our current system is that the least informed and least engaged have the biggest impact on election results.

And the worst part is that our politicians know this.  They tailor their tired attack points to appeal to those voters who might catch a snippet of the news one night in four.

The major parties have developed technologies to target this handful of voters that would shock the public if it understood them.

This is exactly why political debate has become so tedious and toxic, so much so that compulsory voting has become a threat to the health of our democracy.

With voluntary voting, our politicians couldn't win elections by being less worse than the other guy.

No seat could be neglected as ''safe'' because even partisan voters must be motivated.  In short, the quality of public debate would be raised.

It's time we were given the right to stay at home on election day, whether it's because we don't care or we want to send a message to all parties.

We should demand this freedom so that if no party appeals to us we won't have to vote at all.

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Newman could do better

Renewed questions have been raised about the merits of public sector employment reductions in light of worsening opinion polls for the three-month old Newman Queensland government.

A recent Galaxy poll revealed that state Labor's primary vote in the opinion polls has increased by seven percentage points to 30 per cent, a considerable improvement for a state party literally on its deathbed since the election of 24 March 2012.

Other polls show that the popularity of Premier Newman has appreciably declined, with some figures suggesting that the Premier could lose his own seat if another election were to be held today.

There is suggestion that the Newman government's stance on public service jobs might even be contributing to the slight bounce in federal Labor's parlous opinion poll standings.

Unquestionably the organisational ability of public sector unions to get out a protestor crowd in relatively short notice has presented the political optic of growing animosity toward trimming the size of the state government.

But the truth of the matter is that the size of the Queensland public sector had grown out of control and needs to be reduced, especially under circumstances in which the jobs-generating private sector continues to feel the strain of the post-Global Financial Crisis economic stagnation.

The Costello audit commission interim report provides the tale of the tape concerning the unsustainable growth of the state government under the previous Beattie and Bligh governments.

With a key policy objective to wipe out the Bjelke-Petersen legacy of Queensland as the lowest taxing state, the Labor administration aggressively expanded public sector expenditure particularly in the areas of education, health, welfare services and housing.

From 2000-01, the first full year of the GST reforms, to 2010-11 growth in general government expenses had closely tracked the growth in revenue intake.

However it was during the Mining Boom Mark I that the state government loosened its belt allowing spending growth to escalate in unsustainable fashion.

As Treasurer and, later as Premier, Anna Bligh presided over perhaps the strongest growth in general government expenses the state had ever seen, with expenses growth averaging about 11 per cent per annum from 2006-07 to 2010-11 and almost double that of revenue intake growth.

Far from all of the proceeds of this spending growth trickling down in the form of services to final consumers, a significant share of additional spending since 2000-01 was siphoned off through additional public sector workers employed and higher salaries and benefits for these workers.

Employee expenses increased by an average of about nine per cent per annum, with wages growth rising by about five per cent per annum with growth in employee numbers accounting for the remainder.

When expenses growth consistently outstrips revenue growth, as it did during the latter years of the Beattie-Bligh governments, the certain eventual outcome is budget deficits spilling over into borrowing as government seeks to maintain its high-spending momentum.

And so from the best fiscal circumstances in the country, with low taxes, efficient service provision, budget surpluses and minimal debt, Queensland's position markedly deteriorated with the results being an increasingly uncompetitive tax position, inefficient services and a bloated public sector, ballooning debt and the worst budget bottom line in the country.

It was the issues of the falling efficiency and quality of state government which Newman campaigned heavily and subsequently won a resounding mandate from the Queensland public to fix.

With public sector employment costs representing the largest operating cost item in the Queensland state budget, it is prudent that the government seek redundancies in areas which do not provide sufficient value for money for the ever-burdened taxpayer.

Just like households and businesses that ensure their budgets remain in check, the vigorous search for expenditure efficiencies should be at the core of what any competent government should regularly perform as the steward of public finance.

By contrast public sector unions will not countenance any reduction in public sector employment under any circumstances, regardless of the state of the budget.

This might be a populist position, but is a disreputable one in public policy terms when the short term objective must be to consolidate the budget and trim public sector size providing more room for private enterprises to grow.

Even so, the Newman government has already bowed to union pressure to some extent and there is worrying speculation that it will do so again in light of the latest opinion polls.

During the pre-election campaign the Liberal-National Party vowed not to privatise government assets during the current term, in deference to the union position at the cost of policy flexibility.

The reluctance to privatise is not defensible, especially when this approach could provide sales revenue to plug the budget gap and when privatised assets can be operated more efficiently in response to market forces.

To date only 4,000 redundancies of largely contract workers in a state public service of over 200,000 people have been achieved, however the Premier has now hinted that the total public sector employment cuts could be considerably less than the originally miniscule 20,000 target.

In the interests of sound financial management and promoting private sector recovery, the state government should at least stay the course regarding its original public sector employment rationalisation plans and, in fact, go further in its quest to deliver budget sustainability.

For example, is there a need for a public sector works department in the modern world of private sector infrastructure financing and provision?

Whose economic interests does it serve to maintain the corporate welfare state development department, or the anachronisms of agriculture, mining, energy and science departments?

Is there a legitimate role of government in the arts, sport, and multicultural affairs?

Should governments remain involved in the provision (as distinct from funding) of education, health and other social services?

It is these and other serious questions about the appropriate role of government that the Newman administration should entertain, and actively engage the ''silent majority'' community in a careful discussion.

The government could sell this extended fiscal consolidation program as part of a broader economic growth strategy, incorporating a return to low state taxes and slashing regulatory burdens attracting the support of small businesses and individuals who would come to enjoy the economic fruits of the reform agenda.

Regardless of what fiscal and economic strategies the Newman government ultimately pursues, it should be mindful that it is it, and not the senior executive of the public sector unions, which has been charged by the Queensland public with the great responsibility of fixing the waste and mismanagement of the Beattie-Bligh years.

Should it deliver on its undertakings to return fiscal sanity to Queensland the Newman government will find, as other reformers in Australia and internationally have shown, that policy consistency will bring its own electoral reward when it matters at the 2015 poll.

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Somersaults and a belly-flop: carbon tax fails on all counts

In a humiliating backdown, Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, though failing to acknowledge the damage of a carbon tax to the Australian economy, has recognised that the tax he introduced last month — at $23 a tonne of carbon dioxide — is excessive.

The carbon tax sets Australia alone with the European Union in imposing such a measure and, at an escalating price starting at $23, is twice the level that prevails in the EU.  In now saying the tax will be linked to that of the European price by allowing Australian carbon dioxide emitters to buy emission indulgences from the EU, the government has conducted four somersaults and a belly-flop.

First, it has abandoned the intent of the carbon tax which, as the government appears to have forgotten, is an 80 per cent reduction in Australian emissions by 2050.  Achieving such a level would be impossible at $23 a tonne (a tax that has raised the wholesale price of electricity by 40 per cent).

To achieve its 80 per cent emission reduction objective would require a tax of more than $150 a tonne.  This would bring about a threefold increase in the electricity price and, as well as directly imposing colossal costs on households, would shred the present industry structure of Australia and bring about a considerable reduction in living standards.

In its eagerness to gain Green support and obtain a war chest to win supporters with tax cuts, the government eagerly grabbed Treasury forecasts that a carbon tax would have little economic effect.

Such forecasts assume far-reaching technological changes favouring low-carbon energy.  This is despite no improvement being experienced in the economics of these sources compared with conventional electricity generation for the past 20 years.

Linking the price to the European floor means it falls to $10, a level that will mean hardly an iota of emission reduction but imposes price rises on consumers and industry that will still drive many firms offshore and shrink the number of the most productive jobs.

Second, the fact that the existing and future spending requires a carbon tax of $23 a tonne, escalating year by year, has been abandoned leaves a massive hole in the budget.  This again demonstrates Labor's inability to maintain the necessary fiscal discipline.  Dropping the price to $10 means tax collections halve from the $8 billion or so a year anticipated by the government.  And if emitters fulfil all their requirements in emission credits from the EU then the government will gain no tax.  Will it now reduce spending?  If so where?

Third, opting for the highest carbon tax in the world at $23 a tonne, in the expectation that all other countries will follow suit, demonstrates the damage created by the government believing its own propaganda.  In a raft of papers designed to shore up the government's decision, all it has proved is that no major country is following Australia's lead with a carbon tax, and all of our trading competitors are simply rejecting it.

In its decision to shelve the Roxby Downs expansion, BHP Billiton acknowledged to European stock exchanges (though not in its Australian press release) that the carbon tax had been a factor.

We will see other project downgrades due to increasing supplies from new mines across the globe and a tax-driven diminished Australian competitiveness.

Fourth, the government is allowing Australian emitters to buy credits from EU countries.  If 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide credits are bought in this way that means gifting the EU about $1 billion a year.

There is no possibility that this wasteful funding of the EU at Australian electricity consumers' expense will mean any reduction of emissions on a global level.

It is time to recognise that the carbon tax is a total failure of policy and to dismantle it before it does further damage to the economy in general and to consumers in their power bills.

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WorkChoices demon used to fire up the Labor base

Nothing scares the pigeons more than WorkChoices.

Anyway, that's the theory.  Just a hint of industrial relations reform (no matter how vague) by anybody remotely associated with the Coalition (no matter how obscure) brings out the WorkChoices demon.  Ministers pound out tweets.  Hawker Britton squawks.  WorkChoices is back!

It's like a verbal tic — it's what you say when you're not sure what to say.  WorkChoices is for Labor Party strategy what ''umms'' and ''errs'' are for impromptu speeches.

One day in February 2010 the ACTU said it would campaign against Kevin Rudd's industrial changes — they did not believe Fair Work was fair enough for workers.  The next day Julia Gillard put out a press release:  ''Abbott must come clean on WorkChoices''.

''Australians can't trust Tony Abbott on WorkChoices'', the ALP told Australia citizens during the 2010 election.  The next day Abbott promised that WorkChoices is dead, buried, and cremated.  Undeterred, two days later Simon Crean sent out a press release:  WorkChoices ''has been dug up, dusted off, and is ready to be rolled out should the Coalition be elected.''  Labor's divining rod finds WorkChoices everywhere.

So no wonder the Labor Party went into convulsions when this week the Australian Financial Review reported that John Howard wants revive the industrial relations debate.  It's the perfect storm.  The guy they defeated, calling for the policy they campaigned to destroy.  Wayne Swan rushed out a press conference.  Abbott-to-bring-back-WorkChoices was again the message of the day.

But Howard wasn't even talking about WorkChoices.  The former prime minister wanted Abbott to adopt the Peter Reith model, which predated WorkChoices by nearly a decade.  As he said, ''There is no reason why this country should not go back to the workplace system we had between 1996 and 2005 where you had individual contracts.''  This line was widely cited in articles which nonetheless claimed Howard was calling for the return his post-2005 policy.

At most — at most — Howard suggested the Fair Work Act's loose unfair dismissal provisions be tightened.  His words:  ''you have got to do something about unfair dismissals.''

This is a reasonable view, even if you don't agree with it.  Under WorkChoices, one exception to an unfair dismissal finding was if an employee was made redundant for ''genuine operational reasons''.  That exception has been replaced by a vaguer ''genuine redundancy'' standard, which (for instance) only allows dismissals if workers cannot be given another job elsewhere.  This new standard turns industrial judges into human resource managers.  Questioning the new standard isn't revolutionary.  Howard's view is modest;  almost shy.

Anyway, Howard's views are moot.  He's no longer prime minister.  There is no reason to believe Abbott is thinking about touching this hot potato.  Dead, buried, and cremated, remember?  Given his campaign against the carbon tax, there's nothing a first term Abbott government will be more sensitive to than charges that the Coalition has broken an election promise, or didn't tell the voters about its plans.  The firmest guarantee an Abbott government will do what it says is how brutally they've attacked Labor for doing the opposite.

WorkChoices is an apparition.  When it is mentioned, it rarely has anything to do with the specifics of what the 2005 reforms actually were.  Four years after it was abolished, WorkChoices is now less a policy than a freelance stand-in for anything that might fire up the Labor base.  That is, anything that might bring back the old magic of the 2007 election campaign.  In those happy days, Labor campaigned as if WorkChoices was the culmination of a century of Tory attacks on the Australian settlement.

But for the right, WorkChoices is an emblem as well:  emblematic of an aging government willing to trample Australia's institutions to get what it wanted.  The right wasn't much more sympathetic to Howard's last industrial relations reform than the left.

WorkChoices took industrial relations forever out of state hands, eliminating any principle of federalism in workplace policy.  And it was an extraordinarily complicated piece of law.  It increased, rather than decreased, government involvement over labour markets.

It is mostly forgotten that the great workplace bogeyman, the HR Nicholls Society — the fortress of managers' rights, the unions' bête noire — was opposed to WorkChoices.  In 2006 ACTU boss Greg Combet described WorkChoices as ''Kremlin-like''.  The president of the HR Nicholls Society, Ray Evans, agreed.  ''It's rather like going back to the old Soviet system of command and control, where every economic decision has to go to some central authority and get ticked off.''  He went on:  ''I don't believe the Howard Government is that keen on freedom.''

This makes recent claims that the rebirth of the HR Nicholls Society is a harbinger of WorkChoices comically ludicrous.

But then, what does it matter?  The point of talking about WorkChoices isn't to warn Australian workers.  It is to find anything that might restore Labor's support.  WorkChoices is a scare campaign, sure.  It's also very tired and probably futile.

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Should there be a minimum price for alcohol?

Minimum prices for alcohol are a tax on the poor and won't deliver better health outcomes.

Public health activists claim we need minimum prices because cheap booze contributes to obesity and violence.  They claim the social costs of alcohol are around $15 billion annually.

But social costs are not an accurate reflection of the cost of alcohol to government.  Social costs are a method used by modern day wowsers to boost the appearance of costs.

They include the cost of your lost Sunday morning following a lively Saturday night barbecue.  Sorry, but your hangover comes at your cost.  Not the Government.  There's definitely a cost to government from alcohol consumption.  But it doesn't justify moral panic.

All minimum pricing will do is replicate the failure of past policies.

In 2008, the Rudd government increased taxes on pre-mixed sugary alcohol drinks alcopops by 70 per cent.

The objective of the alcopops tax was to cut drinking levels among younger Australians.

Rudd justified the measure because young drinkers were more sensitive to prices.

Rudd was right.  Price sensitive young people stopped buying alcopops.

But young people swapped from alcopops to bottles of spirits and mixed spirits with soft drink themselves.  But the most spectacular consequence of the alcopops tax was something no one predicted.

Instead of buying more expensive alcohol, some young people substituted cheap booze for illicit drugs.

University academics argued 2010 data showed some young people were popping ecstasy pills instead of alcohol.

But the cost won't just be on young people.

If all alcohol is forced to a minimum price, bottles already at the new minimum price level will increase their prices to differentiate themselves.

We also know that once these price floors are in place they only head in one direction — up.

But the biggest issue is that they act as a tax on the poor.  Political progressives have argued against consumption taxes because the poor pay a greater share of their income on consumables than the rich.

Under floor prices, more tax will be paid on cleanskin wine families drink with a cheap bowl of pasta, than French champagne popped at top-of-the-town cocktail parties.  That's not just inequitable, it's immoral.

And it's a demonstration of the sneering elitism that minimum price floor advocates have to average Aussies.

Taxi reform may put passengers in the driver's seat

In the very near future, the Baillieu government in Victoria will have the opportunity to deliver a reform of national significance.

It will soon receive the final report from the taxi industry inquiry it established last year and, when it does, it will have a classic choice to make between good public policy and sectional interests.

Taxis have become a running sore in most Australian cities — double parked on CBD ranks for most of the day, but never to be found on Friday or Saturday nights.  Customer satisfaction surveys regularly put taxis well below trains, trams and buses.

For decades, state governments around Australia have not allowed taxi numbers to grow even in line with population growth.  For instance, in Brisbane, taxis per head halved in the four decades to 2000, while the West Australian government failed to issue any new licences in rapidly growing Perth in a 14-year period to 2003.  It is little wonder that cabs became hard to find at busy times.

To its credit, soon after coming to office, the Baillieu government set up an inquiry into the state's taxi industry and ensured it would have a high public profile by appointing Allan Fels to run it.

The key part of Fels's draft report, released in May, addressed what has always been the major problem with taxi industries around the world — restrictive licensing.

The vast majority lease the plates to operators for about $30,000 a year, a cost that has to be recouped from consumers before they begin paying for the real costs of vehicles and drivers.

While some countries have achieved impressive results from complete deregulation of their taxi industries, Fels plumped for a compromise solution.

Instead of recommending that the state government release an unlimited number of new licences for a nominal fee, he proposed that prospective entrants pay $20,000 annually.

In a classic case of a contest between a specific minority vested interest and a diffuse majority general interest, since Fels released his draft report the debate has been dominated by a taxi industry scare campaign.  Consumer voices have been almost non-existent.  The industry has two basic arguments against the licence recommendations.

The first, much more emotive claim is that by reducing the value of licences, Fels is seeking to unethically deprive incumbents of a property right.  One agitated newspaper correspondent captured this sentiment:

''Who does Allan Fels think he is, telling me how much I can sell or lease my taxi licence for?  It would be the same as someone who bought house for $100,000 then years later the price has gone to $500,000, and along comes Fels and says, no, you have to sell the house for $250,000.''

The holders of the taxi licences seemingly fail to recognise the fact that their ''asset'' is a purely artificial one.  Those investing in a taxi licence have essentially been taking a punt that no state government would have the courage to act in the interests of consumers.

In several countries where the taxi industry has been deregulated, courts have found that there are no grounds for any sort of compensation when the so-called ''property right'' was established solely by government regulation in the first place.

The second argument the industry is attempting to make is that consumers will suffer if more licences are made available.  In the words of the Victorian Taxi Association submission, additional taxis will only ''flood a market that is already full''.  It does not seem to occur to taxi industry incumbents that there may be many potential new customers if they provide a better service.  Further, if one extended its argument to other industries, one could equally argue that in much of Melbourne the cafe market is ''already full'' and demand restrictions on new entrants to the market.

While overseas cities from Dublin to Washington DC, which have moved towards taxi deregulation, might not enjoy a taxi nirvana, they have certainly delivered significantly better outcomes for customers than their regulated cousins.

Too often in the past our state governments have responded to complaints about the taxi industry with ad-hoc reforms to address particular issues.  Hence, there have been edicts to paint cabs a particular colour, mandate uniforms and impose more rigorous driver testing.  Such measures tend to work for a while but, once the focus is removed, the industry slips back into old habits.  Only structural reform can provide a lasting solution.

There seems little doubt that Fels will stick to his guns and the final report he will soon deliver will ignore the special pleading of industry and continue to put consumers first.  The real test will come when the Baillieu government makes its deliberations.

If Victoria endorses Fels's vision, the O'Farrell and Newman governments, with their much larger majorities, will hopefully follow suit and we could see nationwide reform.

If the Baillieu government doesn't endorse the Fels reforms, there will be an equally powerful message that change that attacks sectional interests is too hard.  It will leave tough reform waiting on the rank like a frustrated potential taxi customer.

Electricity users cop the renewable energy bill

''Something is rotten in the state of Denmark'', says a Shakespearean character noting how poor government had caused the country to go to the dogs.

Nowadays Denmark is famous for its wind farms.  These comprise a world record 30 per cent share of its electricity production.  It is no coincidence that Denmark's electricity prices are twice those of Australia.

Clearly something is rotten in the state of Britain, another country with massive subsidies for renewable energy.  The chairman of Britain's Parliamentary Environment and Climate Change committee, Conservative MP Tim Yeo, has acknowledged receiving $220,000 a year from green companies.  Unsurprisingly, Mr Yeo is a tireless campaigner for wind farms and other forms of renewable energy.

In addition, a former Conservative Environment Minister Lord De ben has been nominated to chair Britain's ''independent'' Committee on Climate Change.  But he is also chairman of a major wind farm consortium and another company advising businesses on how to make money from global warming policies.

Similar conflicts of interest, though not involving politicians making personal gains, are evident in Australia where renewable energy businesses provide a very large share of the funding of the major political parties.

Ever since 2001, when John Howard introduced the initial scheme, exotic renewable energy such as wind and solar has benefited increasingly from subsidies at the expense of the electricity consumer.  Right now, renewable energy businesses are utterly dependent on government favours.  Their viability requires direct subsidies from the taxpayer and regulations that force consumers to use their high cost energy.  Because of this, they are vigorous political lobbyists and their prominence within political funding threatens to maintain and even expand the favours they receive to the expense of households and general business competitiveness.

Australia's renewable energy subsidies build on the carbon tax.  This was intended to replace the multitude of overlapping green energy schemes but has added yet another layer.  Even without the carbon tax, the renewable energy requirements, if allowed to continue, will raise electricity prices by at least a quarter by 2020.

At every juncture we have been assured that renewables are on the cusp of becoming viable and just need a little more temporary assistance.  But the cheapest form of subsidised renewable energy, wind, remains three times as expensive as electricity from fossil fuels.

The latest piece of Australian government propaganda published by Tim Flannery's ''independent'' Climate Commission maintains the tradition of providing an ever-receding forecast of when renewables will be competitive.  It suggests 2030.  Of course, at that date the commission will no longer be around to account for another missed target.

There has been a considerable increase in renewable energy across the globe, though hardly any installation has been built without government subsidies.

Finally we are seeing sense.  US presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he will never introduce a carbon tax and he will discontinue the US renewable energy subsidies.

However in Australia the power of vested interests is immense, and renewable energy businesses will use all their tricks to continue mugging electricity consumers.  If they are successful this will not only boost prices but, as the UK experiences show, could undermine the integrity of political process.

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Science forgotten in green movement

The Federal Government's National Food Plan green paper dismisses agricultural development in northern Australia.  This is a case study in green ideology dressed up as expert advice.

The green paper finds ''large-scale expansion of irrigated agriculture in northern Australia does not appear to be sustainable or feasible''.

The green paper rejects large-scale irrigated agriculture in northern Australia on the explicit authority of a 2009 report by the Northern Australia Land and Water taskforce.

Established by the Howard government in 2007, the taskforce's original terms of reference were to identify ways agriculture could be expanded in northern Australia, including the Gulf Savannah region.  The taskforce recognised that 65 per cent of Australia's runoff occurred in far north Australia and coastal Queensland, indicating water is under-utilised.

With a change of government in November 2007, the NALWT and its mission was changed to reflect the new government's preferences.  Under the Rudd government, members of the green lobby took hold of the taskforce, bringing their anti-development ideology with them.

One member was chosen from the World Wildlife Fund after public statements opposing the intensification of farming in the north.  Prominent members of the Australian Conservation Foundation and Planet Ark were also added, one of whom previously argued ''irrigated horticulture, intensification of beef production, expansion of mineral exploitation and clearing for forestry plantations is not compatible with protecting the most globally important values of the north — nature and culture.''

There's a cynical aphorism in Australian politics that you should never hold an inquiry unless you already know the result.  With new membership, the outlook of the taskforce changed dramatically.  Rather than an investigation of how to increase agricultural output in northern Australia, the final report sought to lock northern Australia into a low-development future, effectively making it one big nature reserve.

The opportunity to show leadership and provide an outline for future growth was lost.  Instead the report was negative, cautious, and emphasised arguments for minimal agricultural development.

In particular, opportunities for water storage through damming had no place in the report.  The taskforce's key scientific source, the CSIRO's Northern Australia Sustainable Yields project, was told not to investigate the feasibility of new dams.

The CSIRO's Richard Cresswell has said ''at the time of the study, all jurisdictions (the West Australian, Queensland and Northern Territory governments) had a no-dams policy, and therefore we did not investigate the opportunities for dams in the north.''

Because these states were Labor at the time of the CSIRO study, Dr Cresswell said ''we weren't asked not to investigate them, but we were told it wasn't necessary to investigate them''.

This goes to the authority of what has been presented as an independent scientific study.  When a major element of irrigation planning is removed from scientific investigation for what seems to be political reasons, the report's findings should be questioned.

Yet despite the NALWT report's flaws, the National Food Plan bases its case against a northern foodbowl on it.

The green paper, following the NALWT report's lead, cites lack of infrastructure in northern Australia as a reason agriculture can't be expanded, ignoring that we are on the verge of major changes in global demand for food that will drive investment in agricultural infrastructure.

According to a 2010 OECD report, by 2020 more than half the world's middle class will be in Asia and Asian consumers will account for more than 40 per cent of middle-class consumption.

There is also an increasingly wealthy Chinese upper class that strongly desires our high-quality goods.  While these countries face the prospect of food stress, Australia is well-placed to take advantage of higher agricultural commodity prices and Asian capital.

At a recent In The Zone business round table attended by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Perth business leaders, Citic Pacific Mining executive chairman Dongyi Hua highlighted these opportunities.  Hua believes agriculture will drive the Australian economy as the mining construction boom has in recent years.

''Those top people, they never care about the price,'' he said of wealthy Chinese consumers' appetite for Australian beef.

To make the most of these opportunities, the anti-development ideology that has locked up large tracts of northern Australia must end so that we can overcome our irrational aversion to building new dams.

Gonski report too narrowly focused

With speculation that the Gillard government will soon release a formal policy response to the Gonski school funding review, the education funding debate has again hit fever pitch.

In many ways the preferred policy positions of the key protagonists are already set, with their main arguments previously choreographed before the audience of public opinion.

The Australian Education Union has long called for the Gonski recommendations to be implemented, and it is not difficult to understand why.  Additional taxpayer funding for government schools would further entrench teachers' employment, and provide opportunities for the union to skim some of the extra funds via higher teacher salaries in any future negotiations with the states.

If the implemented school funding reforms freeze or reduce public funding received by some non-government schools, the AEU hopes that the resultant fee pressures facing affected schools might make student enrolments drift back to fully tax-financed government schools.

The non-government school sector initially reacted cautiously to the Gonski review;  however, this stance has changed in recent weeks as Catholic and independent school representatives cite growing concerns about the distributional consequences of funding changes.

With the level of public funding for non-government schools contingent on private payments made by parents, the Gonski model potentially leads to some schools losing funds compared to existing Commonwealth and state funding systems.

Independent school associations in states such as NSW and Queensland estimate that some of their member schools could face public funding cuts, while the national independent school body estimated that about 180 of its members could lose funding under the Gonski regime.  Representatives of Victorian Catholic schools have calculated that a sizeable proportion of their schools, which tend to receive greater public funding than most independent schools, could also see their funding reduced.

A comparison of the base 2009 funding amounts proposed by Gonski with base Commonwealth and state funding does suggest, depending on student composition, that some non-government schools could lose funds.

This week's statement by Prime Minister Julia Gillard that no school will be worse off will fail to assuage the concerns of non-government schools, since the key issues of funding indexation and the phasing in of the new funding methodology remain unresolved.

Aside from continuing funding uncertainty, there are other potential traps lurking for non-government schools within the current funding reform agenda.  The Prime Minister suggests that school funding will be used to leverage improved standards, including through a National School Improvement Plan obliging schools to specify how they intend to lift student academic performance.

While the details of the government's new educational and financial accountability requirements have not yet been specified, it is likely that schools and school systems will experience a continuing increase in the amount of regulatory obligations they confront on a daily basis.

If the educational red tape tide rises significantly, then the government's promise of greater autonomy for schools risks being chimerical in nature, as principals and administrators become snowed under by paperwork and other regulatory requirements.

The scope of governmental regulatory powers over schooling would increase even more dramatically if non-government schools, with a high concentration of students with needs, are publicly funded on a similar basis to government schools.

Although Gonski suggested only those schools in these circumstances which do not impose compulsory fees should be eligible for full public funding, this suggestion if implemented could set a precedent that the government only funds non-government schools if they agree to waive their fees.

Such a development, mimicking developments in Europe and New Zealand and long advocated by the Australian public education lobby, would fundamentally alter the nature of schooling in this country.

It would reduce the ability of parents to directly invest in the schooling of their choice, and mute the ability of prices signalling the cost of school provision, on the one hand, and intensity of parental preferences on the other.  These additional concerns relate to the fact that improving the quality of school education hinges upon policy reforms far greater in scope than the proposed funding changes which, in all likelihood, will entrench the position of under-performing government schools within the system.

But where is the deregulatory agenda that allows all schools to customise their own curriculum, asset management, staffing policy and price settings to suit the needs of their students?  Why is there a lack of preparedness to embrace alternative schooling models, such as for-profit schooling, when we readily accept for-profit entities providing our daily bread?

What about allowing innovative practices such as online education, which could radically reduce costs and engage young people with fresh learning methodologies?

The flaws of Gonski are not limited to its unyielding acceptance of the funding perspectives of the public education lobby, but extend to its inability to seriously consider reforms to bring about a separation of school and state.

Expect much heat in the funding debate, but, as a result of Gonski's funding preoccupations, equally expect this debate to miss the point about the need for structural reform of Australian schooling.

The legacy and abuse of Ayn Rand

Paul Ryan told an audience in 2005 that ''the reason I got into public service'' was the novelist Ayn Rand.

That makes no sense at all.

Mitt Romney's vice-presidential candidate may be fond of Rand but Rand would not have been fond of him.  She hated the idea of ''public service''.

No, her ideal pursuits were industry and science and art.  By Rand's death in 1982, she had elaborated this view over two best-selling novels (Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead) and numerous essays and treatises.

Rand admired people who produced things;  people who created value.  The people opposed to producers are ''looters'' and ''moochers''.  They take that value and redistribute it to rent-seeking businesses and the welfare state.  They are at home with the government and the tax system;  they live in a world of subsidies and congressional hearings ... and bailouts.

Paul Ryan supported the bank and automotive bailouts, among the most obscene examples of looting in American history.  He now says he regrets those votes, and claims to oppose ''corporate welfare'' passionately.

His remorse would have done little for Rand.  There was nothing she disliked more than inconsistency in the name of politics.

Bailouts and inconsistency are not the only differences between the novelist and the candidate.  Ryan claimed his budget plan was based on his Catholic faith.  Rand despised religion.  Ryan is a fan of Ronald Reagan.  Rand thought the Gipper was ''trying to take us back to the Middle Ages''.

The war on drugs, civil liberties, abortion, take your pick:  Rand and Ryan part more often than they converge.  She described the modern conservative movement as the ''God-family-country swamp''.

So it's hard to understand the hyper-ventilating that has greeted the announcement that Ryan will join Romney on the presidential ticket.  In the New Yorker, Jane Meyer suggested that by picking such a dedicated Ayn Rand fan, Romney had ''added at least the imprint of an extra woman''.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews went further — Ryan actually ''is Ayn Rand'', and he wants to ''screw'' the poor.  One Huffington Post writer described him as a Rand ''devotee''.  Social media, of course, went bananas.

Ryan is a common type.  He apparently insists interns read Atlas Shrugged when they join his staff.  Politicians like to think they are in the business of ideas, but that's nonsense.  Politics is the business of power.  Ideas are an optional extra, more useful for appealing to already committed supporters than formulating policy.

All those horrified progressives trying to draw a direct line from Rand to Ryan are playing his game, suggesting this senior politician is driven by ornate principle rather than base politics.

Ayn Rand's books are abused in this way more than most.  Her novels may not be great literary works, but are rich and readable (something you could not say about Friedrich Hayek's dense prose, for instance).  More than any other iconic free market writer, she creates a world with its own specific — that is, strict — moral code.  And moral codes developed through fiction are seductive in a way that economic treatises are not.

We are so used to popular culture praising public service that the story of a heroic industrialist is highly subversive.  If progressive thinkers want to hunt down the source of Rand's peculiar appeal, it will be found there — radicalism is always appealing.  Right now there are few more truly radical notions than private success as noble, or of capitalism as admirable.

Rand has a reputation.  But she did not believe virtue was a reflection of wealth.  She was careful to draw portraits not only of industrialists but of workers and artisans.  One small passage in Atlas Shrugged is more suggestive of Rand's world view than any of her later claims about altruism and Aristotle:  she describes a train engineer as having ''the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but [his] was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one's task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute''.

Simply put, her novels are about human excellence, small and large.  The plot of The Fountainhead pivots on an architect refusing to compromise his unique artistic vision.  You can imagine the appeal.  And, of course, opposed to such achievement are the predatory looters with powers to tax and regulate it all away.

Does it all seem a bit cartoonish?  Surely no more cartoonish than those stories about evil industrialists and heartless capitalists defeated by noble truth seekers and crusaders for the underclass.  Rand was working in a popular fiction genre full of heavy-handed socialist tracts like Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists or the novels of Upton Sinclair.

The difference is that most of those socialist works have been forgotten and Rand's writing endures.  The themes of Tressell and Sinclair have collapsed into cliché.  Rand's remain subversive.

Rand's books have not penetrated Australia as they did the United States.  She is not part of our national consciousness.  Yes, she has her fans.  Malcolm Fraser was one.  But as John Singleton wrote, ''Malcolm Fraser admires Ayn Rand.  Ayn Rand admires Malcolm Fraser.  All this shows is that neither knows what the other is talking about.''

Rand was part of a distinctly American tradition.  The libertarian writer Charles Murray rightly notes Rand's idea of freedom is particularly Jeffersonian.  In her lifetime, she was supported by the anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal movement that died out with Robert Taft's loss to Dwight D Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952.  That movement was reprised, in a very different form, by the presidential run a decade later by Barry Goldwater — one of the few politicians Rand liked.

Australia has none of that rich history.  Our free market tradition owes more to nineteenth century British liberalism than the American Old Right.  Rand is an import.  When Singleton helped form the libertarian Workers Party in Australia in the 1970s, he admitted he'd given up on Atlas Shrugged 80 pages in.

There's a reason one of the great histories of the American libertarian movement was titled It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.  But it rarely ends there.

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Confused NASA's role lost in space

The recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars was a great success.  But it ought to be a bittersweet one, too.  Rather than giving NASA a new lease on life, the landing underscores a big problem:  the world's premier space agency no longer has any idea why it exists.

This is not a controversial claim.  At the same time Curiosity was landing on Mars, NASA was holding an independent investigation into the agency's strategic direction.  One former NASA chief put it this way:  ''I am utterly confused.''

Does NASA exist to put humans into space?  The space shuttle program was cancelled last year and a replacement is probably a decade away — if there will be one at all.  The shuttles were mothballed with no alternative in mind.

Is it to develop new technologies?  Sending rovers millions of kilometres across space is a very roundabout way to subsidise innovation.  Anyway, NASA deserves little credit for the inventions commonly attributed to it — Velcro was actually invented in Switzerland in 1948, Teflon by a New Jersey commercial chemist in 1938.

Is NASA's job investigating basic science?  This is certainly the most plausible purpose.  But then why did NASA spend half a century symbolically placing people in capsules in the sky?  And the agency's public support, such as it has any, is based on a romantic notion of humanity touching the stars.  Voters prefer astronauts — those demigods with the right stuff.

So the US Congress does not have much desire to fund a never-ending procession of robo-jeeps on Mars taking photos and doing chemistry — no matter how impressive that is.  Support for a future rover program, a joint venture with Europe and Russia, disappeared when the US Congress realised it wouldn't even be delivering samples of Martian soil back to Earth for a decade.  Barack Obama's budget dropped any American support of this ExoMars program in February this year.

America's thrift is understandable.  The US federal budget deficit is likely to be more than $US1 trillion ($954 billion) this year for the fourth consecutive year.  Nobody has any real idea of how to pull the deficit back.  And parachuting cars onto other planets is the ultimate discretionary spend.

NASA's lot was not always so dire.  In the beginning, the agency and its supporters knew exactly what it was all for:  to demonstrate American capitalism was superior to Soviet communism.  The space race and the arms race were two sides of the same coin.  From Sputnik to Apollo 11, the space program was less about extraterrestrial exploration and more about terrestrial geopolitics.

It has been decades since NASA had that sort of clarity.  Every other justification has been added later;  awkwardly and uncomfortably welded on to rationalise NASA's budget requests.

The firmest congressional backers of the future Mars program happen to represent districts with space-related industries.  Entire programs — such as the space shuttle — have been the result of dubious claims about protecting manufacturing jobs and supporting local industry.

The space program exists to perpetuate NASA and the politically connected corporations that feed off it, not the other way around.

Hence the claims that NASA's mission is ''to open human hearts to the Martian frontier'' (as one planetary scientist wrote recently) or to ''rethink our place in the universe'' (in the words of a current NASA manager).  No one doubts the impressive achievements of all those space missions.  But basing major government programs on ''feelings'' just isn't a good use of scarce resources.

Australians might be OK with all this.  We get to enjoy the wasteful fruits of a dying superpower without having to pay for it.

Economist Robin Hanson, himself a former NASA researcher, has described the space program as ''mostly like the pyramids''.  That is, it offers prestige but is showy and expensive and pointless.

But it certainly is a monument.  The moon landing will be forever tied to John F. Kennedy.  Both Obama and George W. Bush tried to replicate JFK's legacy by promising to put humans on Mars, and soon.  Surely they knew this was fantasy.  There is no taste for an exotic and expensive space program in our austere century.

There once was a political reason to be in space.  Now, there is not.  Politicians need political reasons if they are going to pay for things.  That's how democracy functions and that's why NASA is lost.

But the private space industry is growing, rapidly.  Commercial uses of space flight will be more sustainable than the goodwill of the US Congress.

And robotic missions are much cheaper than manned missions.  Putting Curiosity on Mars cost little more than Victoria's myki ticketing system.  The global research and philanthropic community should easily be able to raise that sort of money.  (Sound far-fetched?  Then perhaps our imagination needs to start on the ground before it can dance among the stars.)  They would probably be able to do it cheaper than the bloated, politicised and hopelessly confused NASA anyway.

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One-way conversation

On Monday the Gillard government's Business Tax Working Group released its report calling for the corporate tax rate to be cut from 30 per cent to 25 per cent.

Yesterday the Gillard government's Prime Minister's Manufacturing Taskforce released its report calling for more protection from overseas competition, more tax breaks for research and development, and more government spending to stimulate the economy.

Both reports miss the point.

The reason a recent survey of executives of foreign companies operating in Australia found that they were less likely to invest in this country now than a year ago is not because of the things identified by the reports as in need of reform.

The reason executives give for Australia's decline as an investment destination is because it's getting more difficult and more expensive to do business here.  For proof of this one need look no further than to the stories that appeared on page three of this newspaper on Wednesday.

At the top of the page there was a story of decisions from each of the Federal Court and Fair Work Australia.

In the first case, the Federal Court upheld the validity of a workplace agreement between the Electrical Trades Union and a Melbourne company, ADJ Contracting, that required the company to encourage employees to join the union.  Meanwhile, Fair Work Australia decided that Endeavour Australia, an electricity company owned by the NSW government, was not allowed to introduce urine-based drug tests as the company had wanted, and instead could only use saliva testing.

Although urine tests are more accurate, unions argued they were ''invasive'' and inappropriate because they would detect long-term drug taking.

Another story on the same page was about how Nick Xenophon, the independent senator from South Australia, had suggested small business should not have to pay penalty rates.

He said:  ''When employees are telling you they are happy being paid $25 an hour on Sunday, because they will get work, rather than a penalty rate of $40, but the restaurant is closed, well something is fundamentally wrong and needs fixing.''  Indeed.

Wednesday wasn't a particularly special day for coverage of industrial relations.  On other days readers could learn about how in Victoria police refused to remove a picket line, which a court had previously declared illegal, outside a warehouse, and about how Fair Work Australia decided an employee couldn't be fired for telling his manager to ''get f---ed''.

The report of the Business Tax Working Group was a useful academic exercise.  But that's all it is.

Its terms of reference required it to find savings to match the revenue forgone from the tax cut.  Over four years, that equals $26 billion.  It's not unreasonable for the government to want matching savings, but it means the business community isn't going to agree any time soon to give up specific tax benefits in exchange for a company tax cut that might never come.

As the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said:  ''It's like turkeys voting for Christmas.''

Most of the manufacturing taskforce report is interesting because its discussion is about keeping and growing existing manufacturing industries such as making motor vehicles.

''Green jobs'' are almost nowhere to be seen in the report.  One of the justifications for the carbon tax was that it would create a whole new raft of ''green'' companies to replace all those old and dirty companies put out of business by the carbon tax.

Some of the unions represented on the taskforce may still say such things, but at least, as judged by the taskforce, they don't believe it.  The taskforce suggested that the carbon tax should ''link'' to overseas schemes.  Exactly what this means is unclear but having a rate of tax on carbon dioxide emissions that is much higher than anywhere else in the world certainly makes it difficult to ''link'' to the rest of the world.  You don't see a statement that the carbon tax is good for manufacturing.

The taskforce recommended ''a new national conversation'' about productivity.  It said Australia needed ''a sustained commitment from industry, unions and government to build the managerial and workforce skills and practices — and the innovation culture — that high-performance workplaces demand''.  The trouble with all these fine-sounding words is that it's a bit hard to have a conversation with an employee who's swearing at you.

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Sent to prison for making an ebook

In 2003, a man made an ebook.  It was not a complex task.

Belal Khazaal downloaded some articles from the internet, excerpted his favourite bits, threw them all together, and wrote a 155 word introduction.  In those brief comments, he prayed the ebook ''would be of benefit to everyone working to support'' Islam.

Khazaal called the book Provision in the Rules of Jihad.  He uploaded it to a website that is either (depending on whose expert witnesses you prefer) a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy, or a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy including some written by terrorists.

For his efforts, Australian courts sentenced Khazaal to 12 years in prison.  Late last week, the High Court affirmed Khazaal's conviction.

Described like that, Khazaal's actions are comically banal and his punishment bizarrely disproportionate.

Does that comic banality disappear if we add that according to the Australian law his ebook had ''an obvious and direct connection with assistance'' for terrorism?  This form of written work was made illegal in 2002.

Or that one chapter was titled ''Reasons for assassination''?  It included recommended targets (''diplomats, ambassadors'' and ''holders of key positions'' in ''atheistic countries'' like Australia) and recommended techniques (''wireless detonation, letter bombing, booby trapping'', ''cake throwing'' and ''hitting with a hammer'').

Yes, ''hitting with a hammer''.

Even with these extra details, Khazaal's editing job doesn't come across as a great threat to the Commonwealth.  He took things he found on the internet and packaged them up as his own.

Khazaal complains and apologises throughout his short introduction, saying the ebook would be better if he had more time, if he was fully settled in his residence (sure it would be, Belal).  No question, his professed beliefs about violent jihad are distasteful and hateful.  But more than anything, he comes across as a bit pathetic.

The courts may have been correct to say that compiling this ebook constituted an offence under the Commonwealth's Criminal Code.  That does not mean these offences are good law.

Between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2011 the federal government passed 54 new pieces of anti-terror law.  The legislative output was extraordinary.

As George Williams notes, during the Howard years, the government was passing one new anti-terror law every 6.7 weeks.  As soon as one bill was through the Parliament, it was onto the next.

Another commentator has called this ''hyper-legislation''.  By volume and impact, the new Australian anti-terror laws greatly exceeded those passed in the United Kingdom, Canada and even the United States.

The 2002 changes to the Criminal Code are, in fact, some of the more benign changes made in that decade of frenzied activity.  More aggressive reforms in 2005 even reintroduced the long-dormant concept of sedition.  (To its credit, the Rudd government relaxed those sedition laws in 2010.)

Yet that decade of hyper-activity has damaged our legal system.  The boundaries between legal and illegal activity have dangerously faded.

And with all that new law, it has still taken nine years of police work, anti-terror intelligence, and legal argument to get to the Khazaal High Court decision last week.  Are we safer?  Khazaal's source material is still online.

In a long and important paper from 2005, the American constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh asked whether ''crime-facilitating'' speech should be considered free speech.  That category includes everything from the Anarchist Cookbook, which describes in detail how to make drugs and bombs, to a lookout yelling ''run!'' when police arrive to arrest his criminal friend.

Volokh concluded that much crime-facilitating speech is ''dual-use''.  Speech which can facilitate crime can also inform non-criminals about risks, about issues of public importance (such as the vulnerability of key Australians to hammers), or even just entertain.

A government should not ban speech that has a lawful and valuable use simply because it may also be used by criminals.  Volokh argued that to the extent crime-facilitating speech has such value, it should be considered to be within the bounds of free speech.

Khazaal's ebook would fall easily within those bounds.  Does Islamic theology demand violent jihad, and against whom?  Khazaal has published his view.  Know your enemy.

And it's hard to say there has been any great, compelling harm caused by his compilation.  Words are cheap.  The Anarchist Cookbook provides more technical detail than Khazaal offered, and is free to read across the internet.

Belal Khazaal may be a bad guy.  He may deserve to be in prison.  Australian courts decided he could not be regarded as ''a person of good character'' at sentencing because of convictions in Lebanon for donating to alleged terrorist organisations.

But if he deserves to be in prison in Australia, he deserves to be there for a greater crime than making an ebook.

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Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Pantheon, 2012, 448 pages

Few recent social science books have arrived with as much acclaim as Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  The book has been repeatedly reviewed and referenced in opinion pieces around the world.

This is not surprising.  The debate it has sparked is lively in large part because of the controversy about one of its more striking conclusions:  that conservatives appreciate the arguments of progressives better than progressives appreciate the arguments of conservatives.  In Haidt's words, "Republicans understand moral psychology.  Democrats don't."

This claim seems partisan and cheap, but Haidt is not a polemicist.  He is a serious academic.  He is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and a self-identified member of the left.  When Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in 2008, Haidt was "thrilled".

Haidt begins The Righteous Mind with an old question in moral philosophy.  Which governs human thought and action more ― reason and the rational mind, or emotion and passion?  Reviewing the last few decades' worth of psychological research and experimentation, Haidt firmly falls down on the side of David Hume, when he wrote that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them".  People engage their faculties of reason only after they make their decisions;  they do not reason in search of truth, but in support of their emotional reactions.

Hume's Enlightenment colleagues taught us to worship reason above all else.  This elevation of reason ― "one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history" ― has had a perverse effect.  As Haidt writes, the "rationalist delusion" is not merely about how we think:  "it's also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power".

The centrepiece of the book is an investigation into the moral foundations of political belief.  Using a large collection of interview and experimental evidence, Haidt formulates six separate "passions" which we instinctively draw upon to come to conclusions about everything from the existence of God to the rights of unions.

The first foundation is "care/harm" ― the drive to compassion for others.  Haidt cites progressive campaigns like humane eating and third world hunger as archetypal causes that rest on the care/harm foundation, and conservative causes like the "wounded warrior" project for veterans' support.

Then there is "fairness/cheating".  Conservatives and progressives both feel fairness and cheating keenly.  The Occupy Wall Street crowd emphasised the fair redistribution of wealth, and the Tea Party protested the unfair redistribution of hard-earned money.

Another shared foundation is "liberty/oppression" ― where advocates of human rights on the left and individual rights on the right deploy similar arguments for slightly different ends.  Classical liberals make much of the distinction between positive freedom and negative freedom.  But Haidt urges us to recognise, among that complex philosophical argument, the shared emphasis on freedom.

These three foundations are shared by progressives and conservatives alike.  How the two ideologies differ is explained by the fact that conservatives have a further three foundations which progressives do not share.

Conservatives also have strong emphasis on the "loyalty/betrayal" foundation ― an instinct for the importance of group membership and the associated negative belief that one can be disloyal to the group.  Another key ideal is "authority/subversion", which focus on acts of obedience and disobedience, rebellion or respect.  For conservatives, authority is the difference between Hobbesian brutishness and civilisation.

The final foundation, held by conservatives but not progressives, is "sanctity/degradation" ― a sense that some values or institutions should be seen as untouchable.  This is most obvious in religious debates ― take, for instance, questions about the sanctity of marriage ― but has its secular manifestation in concerns about the flag and other "sacred" objects.

All of these foundations have to be balanced.  But, in the battle of ideas, Haidt argues that conservatives have a distinct advantage ― "the obstacles to [ideological] empathy are not symmetrical".  Progressives "have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six".

Conservatives tend to understand progressive arguments because they recognise shared moral foundations.  Progressives tend not to understand conservative arguments because they do not share the same concern for group loyalty, sanctity or authority.  They do not feel group betrayal as sensitively, and they often see sentiments about sanctity and authority as obstacles in the way of other goals.

There are, of course, a large number of ideological permutations we could draw from these six foundations.  Haidt is hampered by the fact that most social science research on political philosophy to date has assumed there is a simple left-right axis where all ideologies fall.  There are varieties of left-wing thought that are heavy on sanctity, like environmentalism and new age philosophy.

The most obvious gap in The Religious Mind is libertarianism and classical liberalism.  Libertarians are usually classed with the right, but on Haidt's schema many libertarians would seem to have more in common with the left.  None of group loyalty, sanctity or authority are obviously part of the moral framework held by most libertarians.

So why don't libertarians vote with progressives?  That is, why don't libertarians support the Australian Labor Party or the Democrats?  As Haidt points out, libertarians have an extreme emphasis on the "liberty/oppression" foundation ― almost to the exclusion of all other foundations.  And that aligns them much closer with conservatives, who, through the interaction of their six foundations, see liberty as far more about preventing government interference than do progressives.  Conservatives see the welfare state as destroying a group's moral fibre.  Libertarians see the welfare state as destroying an individual's liberty.  Despite their many differences, the conservative-libertarian alliance is fairly assured.

Obviously, that conservatives utilise six moral ideals while progressives and libertarians utilise three tells us little about the validity of each of their positions.  But it does have great explanatory power.  And it allows us to answer the question raised in Haidt's subtitle.  Why do good people disagree about politics?  Because their disagreement stems from entirely different worldviews.  Though to a progressive conservatives might seem like "bad" people who are driven by greed or envy or ignorance, the reality is that their differing opinions can be much more easily explained.  Conservatives and progressives simply have innate and entrenched differences in moral philosophy, which causes them to view the world in totally different ways.  It's a lesson many participants in public debate could benefit from learning.

Real Conservatives

The Conservatives:  A History
by Robyn Harris
Bantam Press, 2011, 640 pages

This is a marvellous book.  It has many things to recommend it.  A list of the book's many merits would go something like this (in order of importance):  it's interesting;  it's opinionated;  it's extremely readable;  it explains why John Major and Edward Heath were failures;  it predicts David Cameron will be a failure;  and it nominates only Lord Salisbury, Benjamin Disraeli, Bonar Law, and Margaret Thatcher as Conservative leaders who can in any way be regarded as good leaders of their Party.  (That Churchill qualified for greatness is not disputed.  But Churchill was leader of the Conservatives in name only.  He did nothing to advance the interests of the Conservative Party, hence the result of the 1945 general election.)

The Conservatives:  A History is about people first and policy second.  That's not an accident.  In fact it's the demonstration of the thesis of the book.  Because the Conservative Party encompasses an array of ideologies and philosophies that is almost alarming in its range, any leader of the Conservatives therefore has enormous scope to impose their own vision on the party.  The Conservative Party is hostage to its leader.  In that regard it's very similar to the Liberal Party in Australia.

Harris cites Michael Oakeshott for the statement that conservatism is not a political program.  "The link between the conservative mind and Conservative politics is indirect, and it stems from the conservative person's attitude to change ― namely that he or she is suspicious of it".  As Oakeshott famously said, conservatism is a "disposition".  Harris begins the story of the Conservatives with Edmund Burke and the Tories and the Whigs, but it's with Robert Peel that the modern-day party starts to take shape.  Harris is sympathetic to Peel's effort towards Catholic emancipation, but can't forgive Peel for causing the Tories to split over the issue.  Tory and then Conservative splits are a constant theme of the book.  Indeed it's when he writes about the numerous splits on the conservative side of politics, for example, Catholic emancipation, the Corn Laws, parliamentary reform, appeasement, Suez and Europe, that Harris is at his best.

Conservatism gives leaders of the Conservative Party a suite of policy options to choose from.  As Harris is not afraid of saying, the Conservatives of the modern era have been happy to hold nearly any ideological position so long as it wasn't outright socialist.  While the Conservative Party of course never advocated socialism, in government it usually did nothing to reverse the economic decisions of the Labour Party.  So for example Atlee's program of nationalisation in the 1940s was not reversed until the 1980s under Thatcher.  And of course no Conservative leader has been brave enough to touch the National Health Service.  This is partly because any attempt to undo the NHS is perceived as political doom, and partly it is because the Conservatives are not uncomfortable with a nationalised health system.  From the end of the Second World War to Thatcher, the Conservatives were signed-up Keynesians.  In fact they were probably more Keynesian than the Labour Party because up until the mid-1960s, the Labour Party was more socialist than Keynesian.  Prime Minister Harold Macmillan received economic advice from his friend, the "hyper-Keynesian" (Harris' terminology) Roy Harrod, who was Keynes' biographer.  As prime minister, Edward Heath embraced government control over wages and prices.

The Conservatives' approach to political philosophy gives their leaders a great deal of power:  leaders make the policy.  The consequence of this, as Harris makes clear, is that to change policy, the party must change leaders.  As Bonar Law said in 1922, in the context of the debate about whether the Conservatives should remain in coalition with Lloyd George's Liberals, "The Party elects a Leader, and that Leader chooses the policy, and if the Party does not like it, they have to get another Leader".

That sounds not all that different from what happens in the Liberal Party in Australia.  The policy of the federal Liberal Party on first the emissions trading scheme and then the carbon tax was never formally voted on by MPs.  The only way rank-and-file MPs got to have a say was through their vote for leader.  The way the Liberals changed their policy on the emissions trading scheme was by removing Malcolm Turnbull, their leader who supported the scheme.  The authority the Liberal Party in Australia gives to its leader was first noted by David Kemp writing about Malcolm Fraser.  What Kemp said about the Liberals also applies to the Conservatives.

It's because of the power Conservative leaders have that Harris is so concerned about David Cameron.  Harris' disdain drips from the page.  Under Cameron "Green issues took centre stage.  A tree replaced the torch of freedom as party symbol ... The Tory image was too negative, too pessimistic, too unappreciative of modernity, too hostile to diversity.  David Cameron cultivated his own image as the opposite.  'Let sunshine win the day!' he exhorted the party conference ― and, whatever that meant, his audience seemed happy to go along".

The philosophical ambiguity of the Conservatives translates into ambivalence about the Conservative Party itself, at least as compared to the Labour Party.  Harris captures the difference effectively when he quotes a June 2009 letter from James Purnell to Gordon Brown.  Purnell was the UK Work and Pensions Secretary and he had written a letter of resignation to then PM, Gordon Brown.

"In order to assert his nobility of intention, not least in the eyes of Labour Party supporters, Mr Purnell ― with what degree of sincerity it is difficult to gauge ― echoed a sentiment often heard on the left:

'Dear Gordon

We both love the Labour Party.  I have worked for it for twenty years and you far longer.  We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing ...'

No Conservative politician at any stage in the party's history would have written such a letter.  No one has ever pretended to "love" the Conservative Party ... Any serious Tory figure adopting such a pose would incur immediate ridicule.  The Conservative Party exists, has always existed and can only exist to acquire and exercise power, albeit on a particular set of terms.  It does not exist to be loved, hated or even respected.  It is no better or worse than the people who combine to make it up.  It is an institution with a purpose, not an organism with a soul."

That indeed sums up one of the key differences between the Conservatives and their opponents.  For Conservatives (and Liberals) an organisation is the sum of its constituent parts.  Which is what Thatcher was expressing when she said "there's no such thing as society".  Of course she went on to say ― "there are individual men and women, and there are families".  The left on the other hand are quite happy to impute a soul into the collective.

Harris is an unabashed supporter of free market liberalism, and he's written a biography of Thatcher which will be published after her death.  It's a relief The Conservatives is as a good as it is.  Expectations of Harris were high and he's exceeded them.

Greed and Politics

Capitol Punishment:  The Hard Truth About Washington from America's Most Notorious Lobbyist
by Jack Abramoff
WND Books, 2011, 320 pages

Wall Street is better known for a different quote, yet this line would be a perfect epithet for the life and times of Jack Abramoff, the K Street lobbyist who went to prison in 2006 for fraud and conspiracy to corrupt a number of US congressmen.

The Abramoff scandal didn't receive great coverage in the Australian press, but it was significant enough in the United States that nearly a dozen lobbyists and politicians faced criminal charges.  It also forced Republican congressman Tom DeLay to resign as Speaker of the House.

Abramoff was born into a secular Jewish family but decided in his teens that he wished to follow the Orthodox Jewish faith, despite the problems that caused his family.  His family were already very Republican, but it was this religious conversion that particularly informed his politics and he became an especially fanatical supporter of Ronald Reagan prior to and during his presidency.

He studied law at Georgetown but rarely attended classes, because he was by then taken with a passion for politics ― he had become the national chairman of the College Republicans and became one of a rare few to serve multiple terms leading that organisation, such was his success as an organiser.  He outshone contemporaries such as Rick Santorum, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed as the leader of a new breed of small-government conservatives, and he seemed headed for a long and successful career in politics when he was appointed as executive director of Citizens for America (Reagan's personal lobby group) at the tender age of 26.

Unfortunately however, his career began to head in a different direction from this time onwards.  He seemingly never realises it, but everything Abramoff writes about himself from this time indicates that he had an insatiable thirst for money.  He describes the $150,000 salary he was receiving at Citizens for America in 1986 as "modest".  He left politics for nearly a decade to make films because he thought they would be better for his bank balance.

It says a lot about the ability of Mr Abramoff that a complete novice was able to turn himself into a moderately successful filmmaker, with minor hits such as Red Scorpion (1989), starring Dolph Lundgren.  Yet he still didn't believe he had enough money.  He saw the Republican "revolution" in 1994 as the opportunity to leverage his considerable contacts to his commercial gain.  Abramoff rightly recognised that he had skills and contacts within the conservative movement that most of the other K Street firms did not.  And so began the most controversial lobbying career in history.

Between 1995 and his imprisonment in 2006, Abramoff collected an eclectic mix of clients, which included Russian oligarchs, Native American tribes, the Northern Marianas Islands and even Imelda Marcos, most of whom were charged a retainer of $150,000 per month for his services.

His big break came early in 1995 when he met Mr DeLay, who was then the Majority Whip in Congress and effectively controlled the numbers on the floor of the House.

The two hit it off when they realised that each other had a great knowledge of The Bible.  They came to an unspoken understanding that if Mr DeLay could deliver results for Mr Abramoff's clients, then those clients would help DeLay.  Abramoff recounts a tale of how one Russian oligarch attempted to funnel millions of dollars to DeLay's campaign fund by placing "bets" on each hole of golf they played, and then proceeded to deliberately lose the hole.  This apparently was not a breach of campaign finance laws.

This arrangement also proved to be very lucrative for Abramoff and his clients.  The most controversial client relationship that Abramoff had was with many Indian tribes.  In a almost incomprehensible maze of overlapping regulations, the tribes are all recognised differently under federal and state laws, which means that some tribes have the right to operate full casinos, others only have the right to operate slot machines, (pokies) while others have no special rights to offer gambling services at all.  The tribes with no casinos wanted in, whilst those in the tent wanted to stop others from joining them.  Given that Abramoff's biggest tribal client, the Choctaws of Mississippi, were grossing $400 million annually from gaming operations, this was very big business for them and they were prepared to pay a lot to protect it.  As the stakes grew, so did the opportunities for congressmen on relatively paltry salaries to fatten their wallets.

In time, Abramoff would collect a staggering $60 million in fees from all of his Native American clients.  Yet at the same time he was gathering powerful enemies whose interests he was hurting, and they were looking for opportunities to destroy him.  Eventually, Abramoff provided these opportunities in spades.  He had started to double-deal with the tribes.  After working with one tribe to defeat another's application for a casino, he would then offer his services to the vanquished tribe.

It was only a matter of time before this backfired and Senator John McCain took the opportunity to boost his career by launching an inquiry into it all.  Abramoff's rapacious appetite for money also caused him to get involved in side projects that ended up mired in financial difficulties and gangland murders.  In the wash-up, it would become apparent that Abramoff had committed fraud on some loan documents, so desperate was he to seal the deal.

At the height of his career, Abramoff was doing whatever it took to achieve results for his clients, including breaching his own religion just for personal gain.  It is ironic, somehow lost on Abramoff, that the same man who refused to dine with his hero Reagan at the White House in 1982 because the meal was not kosher, was now regularly working on the Sabbath for clients who made their money from gambling (both sins);  all the while donating large sums of money to open Jewish schools and Kosher restaurants in Washington.  Perhaps the charity was done to assuage his guilt.  Abramoff never says.

Abramoff concludes his account by arguing that the "system" caused him to do what he did and that the solution is to ban all politicians from accepting any sinecure at all, such as box seats to Red Sox games.  Surely that entirely misses the point.  Abramoff himself regularly recounted tales of ways in which he dodged campaign finance laws.  Similar creative thinkers will also find their way around new laws too.

One solution ― not proposed by Mr Abramoff ― would be to pay politicians more.  Singapore is famous for the moral hygiene of its officials primarily because it pays them so well from the public purse.

His college contemporaries, Messrs Santorum and Norquist, have in different ways made a lasting and positive contribution to the conservative cause in American politics, so it is disingenuous of Abramoff to claim that "the system" is entirely to blame.  Abramoff chose his path.  But if the system is to blame in any way, then surely it is because the American government has become so bloated and interventionist that it has enhanced the opportunity for corruption.  Where else in the world would you have 400 Indian tribes individually jockeying for gaming rights with the decision often entirely in the hands of a state governor?  Big government will inevitably tempt influence-peddlers.

Conventional Wisdom

The Australian Moment
by George Megalogenis
Penguin Books, 2012, 400 pages

With the federal government finally forecasting Australia's first surplus since the global financial crisis (GFC) hit, it is interesting to look back at how we came out of the catastrophe relatively strongly.  While Wayne Swan's surplus may rely on some dubious accounting, the fact remains that Australia is not nearly as broke as almost every other country on the globe.  Enter The Australian Moment, journalist George Megalogenis' economic history of Australia from the early 1970s until Rudd's stimulus package, which seeks to answer the question of how we came out of the financial crisis as the "last rich nation standing".

According to Megalogenis, the reason we came out of the GFC as the last nation standing is because of a number of inspired decisions made in our economic past.  The three he predominantly focuses on are firstly, our willingness to trade with the rapidly rising Asian region earlier and with more effort than most (if not all) Western nations;  secondly, getting the government as much out of the finance sector as possible without complete deregulation;  and finally and most controversially, the success of former prime minister Kevin Rudd's stimulus package.  Megalogenis argues that much of our success was not thanks to China's demand for our natural resources, but by the collaboration between Rudd and the Reserve Bank.

It only takes a couple of pages to realise how much work Megalogenis has put in to this book.  Megalogenis does not only say who won which election, but also provides the net gains and losses of seats by state, and the economic conditions that accompanied them.  He does not simply list inflation numbers in Australia, but compares them with other nations and explains the trends that underline why economies grew or shrunk.  No stone is left unturned.  Annabel Crabb calls him "Australia's best explainer", and this book stands testament to that.

Although what is there is substantial, the central weakness of the book is that it tries to cover too much in too few pages.  It is an ambitious feat to provide a complete economic and political history of Australia since 1970 in one book.  Though economics and elections are well covered, other major events in Australia's history are skimmed over without getting to the heart of the matter ― especially when it comes to the Howard government.  John Howard's time as prime minister is summarised in 50 pages, focusing mainly on WorkChoices, the Tampa incident and other aspects of the government that Megalogenis is critical of.  The reader undoubtedly finishes the chapter with the impression that Megalogenis thinks Howard only did three things right, and only in election years, which, if logic is followed, does raise questions as to how Howard managed to last almost 11 years in office.

Howard can only dream of the treatment that Labor gets.  Gough Whitlam, in Megalogenis' view, was not so much incompetent as pushed to the brink by circumstances beyond his control, like stagflation.  Apparently that's why his ministers accepted Khemlani's loans, and of course Whitlam should never have been sacked.  The recession we had to have snuck up on the Hawke/Keating "dream team" out of nowhere ― the reader is completely blindsided by it ― and even then, the recession is painted as insubstantial.  In other words, Megalogenis conforms to the popular view of most press gallery journalists in modern Australian politics.

The key selling point of this book is the fact that it had input from many of Australia's living former prime ministers.  But their actual contribution to the book is really not as substantial as it should be.  Instead hearing their opinions on different policies or events spread out through the book, they are relegated to the end of chapters, so enjoyable rants from Paul Keating are unfortunately few and far between.  It often feels as if there are pages and pages of Megalogenis and then a few paragraphs of the major figures involved, which could have been better balanced.

If you really want to know what the collective view of the federal parliamentary press gallery is of the last 40 years of Australian history, you'll enjoy this book.  But a book written by a writer of Megalogenis' stature, with enviable access to former prime ministers, should be much more than that.

How Western Civilisation Came To Be

The Birth of Classical Europe:  A History from Troy to Augustine
by Simon Price and Peter Thonemann
Penguin Books, 2010, 398 pages

Penguin is producing an eight-volume history of Europe from antiquity to the end of the 20th century.  Interestingly, the works are not appearing in chronological order ― this volume, which kicks things off chronologically, is actually the fourth to be published.

The sub-title of this volume is a little misleading as its story begins in Minoan Crete several centuries before Troy.  In some ways, the decision to start with Crete is an odd one for, as the authors themselves acknowledge, once that civilisation collapsed "their inheritance to the next generations was meagre".  In the second millennium BC, it was not Crete or Mycenae, but the civilisations of the Near East that proved to be "the real drivers of change".

However, Troy is important because the stories it created, whether real or mythical, were to have a profound influence on all subsequent beliefs in classical Europe.  The book details some of the most recent archaeological discoveries at Troy, but also explains that there are limitations to what archaeology can reveal, for while it "is good at producing evidence for long term patterns" it does not provide answers "in relation to specific events (or alleged events)".

The authors reiterate the same point when discussing the veracity of events described in the Old Testament.  However, they do believe the archaeological evidence is strong enough to conclude that the biblical writers of the 7th century BC over-dramatised the events of earlier centuries to increase the degree of conflict.  On the other hand, the authors reject the arguments of sceptics who doubt the existence of characters such as David and Solomon.  In other places, such as the Celtic migrations of the 3rd and 4th centuries BC, the written and archaeological evidence "are in perfect alignment with one another".

As well as their views on the degree of use of archaeology, another point the two authors ― both of whom are historians at Oxford ― make more than once is that mono-causal explanations for historic events, such as the collapse of civilisations, are rare, and when proffered need to be treated sceptically.

The fact that a book covering more than 1,500 years of European history is dominated by the lands around the Mediterranean is because that is where the historically significant action was.  In considering the drivers of progress, the authors point to technological innovation, which allowed agricultural intensification, which in turn produced population growth and the scope for entrepreneurism.  One key factor that shines through is the importance of the movement of goods and people.  After centuries of decline, the Greek world revived in the 10th century BC, stimulated by "the reestablishment of its old external contacts", a process that culminated around 500BC when the Mediterranean becomes "a single cultural unit".  Similarly, at the highpoint of the Roman Empire, the extent of trade is shown to be quite phenomenal as "staggering numbers of Roman coins have been found in Sri Lanka and southern India", and there is even evidence of Roman influence on shipbuilding in Vietnam.

This volume tries to relate how the ancients perceived themselves, not how we view them with hindsight.  The authors are at pains to stress that while we think of the ancients as being at the beginning of something, they saw themselves at the culmination of centuries of history, and in almost everything they did they justified their actions by reference to a real or imagined historical precedent.  Reform was never reform to them and the Athenians would have found the suggestion that they had created something radically different to be "a deeply alarming idea".

Roman political leaders were also determined to maintain that all their actions were part of the city's traditions.  Hence, while we moderns see a clear break between the Republic and the Empire, Augustus "would have been horrified to find us making the battle of Actium a break between two historical periods".  Of course, any study of the ancient world does throw up a multitude of firsts and this book is able to draw out a number of slightly esoteric ones.  My personal favourite occurs at the museum in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC where Eratosthenes produced the first critical chronology of Greek history, dating back to 776BC.  The authors argue that while the substance of his document was largely guesswork, and is thus of dubious value in trying to date past events, "the importance and originality of his work lay in its method".  The commencement of making lists and compiling dictionaries and encyclopaedias "marked a new way of thinking about the past" and the Museum's scholars were for the first time attempting to classify and organise their cultural heritage.  One might suggest that a few more Eratosthenes, and a few less post-modernists, might be a significant boon to many modern university humanities departments.

Given the nature of this work it is not surprising that there are some omissions, perhaps most topically given recent debate in Australia around free speech and its history, the trial of Socrates.

The authors emphasise the importance of the year 146BC by ending consecutive chapters there to mark the end of Corinth and Carthage respectively, and to make clear that from now on the story of antiquity is dominated by Rome.  And the chapters on Rome are perhaps stronger than the ones on Greece.  They demonstrate a great ability to meld economic, political and cultural history as within a few pages we progress from how the economy of Gaul worked in the 1st century BC, to how Julius Caesar captured it, to the politics of the end of the Republic, and to how Virgil's Aeneid became the classic literary work of the time.

One of the most interesting sections of the book is the description of how Rome applied "soft power" to its empire, something which they compare to the modern cultural hegemony of the United States.  Celtic peoples coming under the orbit of Rome quickly changed from their traditional diet of porridge and beer to the preferred Roman ones of bread and wine.  Related to this is how rare rebellion was for several centuries as captured peoples showed little inclination to throw off Roman control.  However, the authors explain that is hard at this distance to get a clear view on what "the real cultural affiliations" of many of these people were as they often displayed an intriguing mix of Latin and native language and Roman and traditional deities.

Another feature of the book is the regular deployment of boxes that discuss features of the ancient world with modern relevance, covering everything from the calendar, to the constitution of the United States and the ethnicity of ancient Macedonians in relation to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.  It is not just in the boxes that interesting comparisons with the modern are made.  When discussing the Social Wars of early in the 1st century BC, the writers make the point that the Italians opposing Rome were the last leaders to proclaim an Italian state until Victor Emmanuel in 1861.

The authors are also alert to the potential ideological biases of other scholars working in the field.  For instance, they describe how a hundred years ago there was a tendency to see every aspect of the early part of the ancient world through Greek eyes and hence the Phoenicians were dismissed as "mere traders".  Conversely, "a younger generation of scholars, predominantly from the New World (the United States and Australia)" have tended to give the Phoenicians credit for all the developments of the 7th and 8th centuries BC, "with the Greeks stumbling along in their wake".  Price and Thonemann describe this as "little more than ideologically driven wishful thinking".  The authors also point out where often repeated "facts" are completely spurious ― such as that Carthage's soil was laced with salt by the Romans to make it infertile;  this is pure fabrication "invented by a historian writing in 1930".

This volume provides an excellent introduction to those with a limited knowledge of ancient history and its insights into the latest archaeology contributes to it being a wonderful new synthesis for those already possessing a good working knowledge of the commencement of the European story and Western Civilisation.