Should the government restrict super-sizing junk food?

There's a lot of competition for the most stupid Nanny State proposal.  But if forced to choose, plans to restrict serving sizes would have to take the cake.  They should be rejected outright.

Like all paternalistic attempts to change other people's lives, it is condescending and it is elitist.

And like all grand government initiatives to modify behaviour, it is highly unlikely to work and will almost certainly lead to many unintended consequences.

There's no surprise these proposals are targeted at fast foods.

After all, it is a well-known fact that it is impossible to get fat from expensive high-class food like foie gras and French cheeses.  No, the only way to gain weight is by eating fast food.

Deep down, the idea that the government should restrict how large your hamburger should be comes from people who believe that everyone else is not smart enough to run their own lives.

They target fast food outlets because they think the people who frequent them are incapable of eating in moderation.  It's deeply concerning that this kind of elitism pervades much of the public health community.

But let's assume they're right.  How could such a proposal possibly work?

Let's take pizza as a starting point.

Do we ban the family size?  Or should there be a limit on the number of pizzas you can order?  Should customers have to prove they're not eating the whole thing on their own?

It doesn't get any easier at McDonald's.

What if someone orders a Big Mac and chicken nuggets?  What if they come back for seconds?

Of course, almost no one in the country would do the majority of their eating in fast food restaurants.

If someone is obese, it's their entire lifestyle that's problematic, not just their weekly excursion for fried chicken.  And even the most ambitious Nanny Staters don't propose controlling what people eat at home yet.  Previous attempts to shift Australians' lifestyles through regulation have failed dismally.

The alcopops tax not only failed to reduce youth drinking, but it also led young drinkers to shift from pre-mixed spirits to buying hard liquor outright.

Now, instead of knowing exactly how much alcohol they are drinking, they're mixing their own concoctions that are much harder to measure.

Paternalism rarely works as well as its supporters hope.

It's these sorts of unintended and unexpected consequences of Nanny State policies that should lead us to reject them.

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Get rid of secret deals

There's a simple way to stop governments and businesses going to court to keep their deals between each other secret.  This week The Australian Financial Review has been in the NSW Supreme Court trying to get the federal Industry Department to reveal the details of the government's subsidies to the car companies.

Put simply, the Gillard government is using taxpayers' money to pay lawyers to argue that taxpayers should not be told why taxpayers' funds are being handed over to Ford, General Motors and Toyota.

The way to overcome this is easy.  It should be mandatory for all governments (federal, state and local) to publicly disclose all payments to external parties.  And the terms and conditions of those payments would also be disclosed.  External parties would include corporations, trade unions and non-government and international organisations.

There are laws against what's called secret commissions which aim to stop companies paying bribes.  But if the bribe is big enough and obvious enough the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to government.  And in Australia there's no bigger bribe than the $1.2 billion paid last year by the government to the automotive manufacturing industry.

The main objection to disclosure of government payments is that commercially sensitive information about the recipients may be made public.  It's quite possible that if the Financial Review wins the right to publish the advice that the public service gave to Industry Minister Greg Combet, information could be released that the car companies would prefer to keep confidential.  But that's bad luck.  If a company doesn't want commercially sensitive information to be disclosed then they shouldn't take taxpayers' cash.

Governments have been allowed to hide behind the convenient phrase ''commercial-in-confidence'' for too long.  State politicians are serial worst offenders.  For years successive Victorian Coalition and Labor governments refused to reveal how much they paid Bernie Ecclestone for the privilege of holding a car race.  Two days ago we found that this year's Formula One Grand Prix cost the Victorian government $56 million.  When the figure was announced the sky didn't fall in.

In a liberal democracy like Australia, secret deals between governments and business have no place.  One of the reasons liberal democracy works is because by making the activities of government transparent, government is held accountable.  Even if there's no outright corruption, there's the possibility that without accountability for what they do, public servants and ministers will be more generous in handing over taxpayer funds than they would otherwise be.

Secrecy now pervades a growing range of government activities.  The secret negotiations on the mining tax between the federal government and BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata were an appalling abuse of the legislative process.  The government secretly disclosed to these three companies the details of the tax, yet did not reveal this same information to any other company liable to pay the tax.

A few months ago, the Prime Minister wrote to Australia's media proprietors offering them the chance to negotiate with her over the government's proposals to regulate the media.  This letter has not been made public.  I had made a request to get that letter under freedom-of-information laws.  So far the request has been refused.

When the head of the Business Council of Australia complained last week about out-of-control ministerial advisers she made headlines.  However, on the list of problems of public administration, that ranks about 77th.  If a deputy secretary of a department with 25 years' experience in the public service can't handle a 23-year-old press secretary shouting at them over the phone at seven o'clock in the morning then that deputy secretary is in the wrong job.

Secret deals between government and business are a far bigger threat to democracy than the behaviour of ministerial advisers.  But business leaders aren't going to speak out about secrecy because so many of them are beneficiaries of their own secret deals with government.

As this newspaper said earlier this week, Kevin Rudd pledged to end the ''culture of secrecy''.  That promise has gone the way of those other promises like taking a meat axe to the public service, and stopping all the reckless spending by the federal government.

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Romney had a point: shift balance from takers to makers

The recent statement by United states presidential candidate Mitt Romney that 47 per cent of Americans is dependent on government has created a media maelstrom in the US and drawn international attention, including in Australia.

While the conventional view is that the Romney statement has firmly switched the tide of American electoral sentiment back to incumbent President Barack Obama, the statement shouldn't be dismissed as the self-serving grumblings of a wealthy venture capitalist.

In fact the statement made by Romney raises serious questions concerning the fiscal sustainability of modern government.

Growth in the numbers of people receiving public service salaries, welfare payments and other government handouts, other things being equal, increases the amount of taxes that governments must forcibly acquire in order to commit to such spending.

If the growth in numbers of direct recipients of these government expenditures outstrips the numbers of people receiving their incomes from market transactions, then the tax burdens imposed on the latter will increase, perhaps by economically intolerable proportions.

Governments could also exercise the option of borrowing to fund spending enabling those people dependent upon it to maintain their upkeep, but that merely translates into tax burdens imposed sometime in the future.

As has been witnessed throughout the Western world over the past century or so, when the numbers of people reliant upon government payments continue to grow the nature of political discourse fundamentally changes.

The political discussion becomes increasingly less about what political representatives should do to uphold and extend basic liberties and freedoms, to how they should best satisfy the whims of those constituents who wish to vote for a living.

For that matter, when government benefits become a major source of income for a substantial number of people questions of handout redistribution, rather than economic growth and expanding private sector employment, become a focus for electoral contests.

Since people dependent upon government payments have their effective tax price of public services greatly diminished, a core voting bloc emerges in society pushing for extensions in the size and scope of government regardless of its economic consequences.

Given the substantial increase in the numbers of Australians dependent upon government largesse for their livelihoods, this problem ought to be discussed openly and frankly here as well.

Taking a sample of data from 1983 to 2010, which mainly coincides with the 1983 2007 era of so called ''neoliberal reform'', it is possible to build a partial but representative picture of growth in government dependency.

Public sector employment by all levels of government grew from 1.63 million people in 1983 to 1.84 million in 2010, even with government privatisation of financial, telecommunication and transportation assets during the late 1980s and 1990s.

In spite of generally prosperous economic conditions until recently the numbers of people receiving some form of welfare payment has also risen, from 2.75 million people to 4.87 million.

The numbers of people on unemployment benefits have fluctuated with changes in the business cycle, with increases in recent years as the post GFC-economic stagnation has dragged on.

However, it is the growth in the age pension (from 1.39 million to 2.16 million), disability support pension (from 220,300 to 792,600) and parenting payments (224,500 to 333,500) which have substantially driven growth in overall welfare dependency.

Combining these two sets of figures provides a total of 6.71 million people, or 30 per cent of the total population, directly dependent upon Australian governments in 2010.

This is up from 4.38 million in 1983.

While these figures only provide an indicative account of government dependency in Australian society, they highlight that this country confronts a net tax-providing ''makers'' versus net tax-consuming ''takers'' dilemma similar to that found in the United States and Europe.

Successive Intergenerational Reports released by federal Treasury show, in the absence of reforms to reduce government size, the economic and political balance risks being tipped further in favour of government dependents.

This is why the Hugo Chavez-style outbursts by Treasurer Wayne Swan against wealthy entrepreneurs in the mining sector and the chop-and-change tax and regulatory policy disposition of the government are so detrimental to Australia's economic interests.

The future prosperity of Australia hinges on more entrepreneurs and other makers selling quality goods and services to satisfied customers around the world.

By doing so they will earn profits and generate wealth.

Scaring entrepreneurs into taking their capital elsewhere or not setting up business at all, through anti-business rhetoric or policy uncertainty, will hurt the post-mining-boom economy.

And, ironically, it will deprive governments of revenue needed to fund basic protective services.

Putting limits on our economic aspirations will also reduce options for people who currently live off government handouts from finding more productive pursuits within the private sector.

We in Australia shouldn't dismiss Romney's core message to shift the balance back from takers to makers in economic and fiscal policies.

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Free speech? ''Whatevs,'' says the United Nations

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last week expressed concern about free speech because sometimes it can be ''used to provoke or humiliate''.

God forbid we allow lively debate to take place.

With the advent of this proposal the UN has nailed its colours to the mast — it is unmistakably an anti-freedom of expression organisation.

Australia decided last century to erase these heretical laws from our statute books.  We recognised they have no place in a society that values free speech and religious plurality.

Today, the only Commonwealth remnant is the Australian Maritime Safety Authority-enforced law that disallows the registration of blasphemous ship names.  That, too, should be repealed.

Throwing a person in prison for insulting someone is wrong.  Doubly so when the law can be used as a tool by governments and religious majorities to crackdown on minority groups.

Overwhelmingly, blasphemy laws have been used as an often-deadly weapon in long-running sectarian disputes.

Pakistan is the most obvious example.  Christians have been persecuted for decades under laws that allow the Muslim majority to attack the religious minority over allegations of defacing the Koran and insulting Muhammad.

Recently, a young Christian girl was accused of destroying the Koran.  She was accused of blasphemy and imprisoned for three weeks.  It has now been revealed that an Islamic cleric burned pages of a Koran himself and framed the girl for the crime.

The Catholic minister for minority affairs was assassinated last year after criticising the country's blasphemy laws.

And it's now countries like Pakistan that are pushing for blasphemy laws to be implemented around the globe.  Political leaders from Egypt and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference have also spoken out in favour of international blasphemy laws.

Momentum for these restrictions is being driven in the context of a worldwide backlash to a stupid but utterly amateur film criticising Islam.

Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf has said in response:  ''We would go to the UN and OIC and get a law passed to stop anti-Islam activities, including blasphemy, forever.''

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had this staggering addition:  ''Freedom of thought and belief ends where the freedom of thought and belief of others starts.''

This revelation is extremely concerning.

Turkey's political power is potent — it currently heads the OIC.  This is alarming because it is voting blocs like the OIC that will use their influence in the UN to push for blasphemy laws and decide which expressions will be outlawed.

Imagine the kind of radical limits to freedom of expression that would satisfy Erdoğan.  It goes way beyond restrictions of expression and probes the beliefs and values of individuals.

The proposal is disturbing and irrational.  Such a reality would invite the UN to police the thoughts and feelings of seven billion.

The UN's push for the criminalisation of blasphemy perfectly exemplifies what an artefact the organisation has become.  It is a soapbox for extremists and bigots and its orthodoxy should be dismissed as such.

It's weird that Australia would want a seat at the table of such an illiberal organisation.  Yet Prime Minister Julia Gillard is in New York all this week arguing for just that — she wants Australia to occupy one of the non-permanent UN Security Council seats.

We should abandon the attempt.  The UN should be left to the extremists and bigots who want to crush freedom of speech through relics like blasphemy laws.

It is beyond salvation.

A crackdown on illegal immigrants. Interested? Anyone?

Last week Immigration Minister Chris Bowen introduced a bill into parliament.  Had we been any other country on the planet this would have been extremely controversial.

Columns would have been published.  Talkback callers would have been enraged.  Television panels would have pontificated.

But our immigration debate is peculiar.  The Migration Amendment (Reform of Employer Sanctions) Bill 2012 will in all likelihood be ignored.

It shouldn't be.  This legislation significantly increases the penalties for employers who hire ''illegal workers'' and gives a whole range of new inspection and police powers to the Immigration Department to enforce them.

The bill erodes the right to silence, for one, and establishes powerful search warrants with which immigration officers can enter premises to hunt down evidence of illegal workers.

More broadly, the bill puts meat on a new and punitive immigration regime:  it is now the legal responsibility of employers to find out whether the people they hire are entitled to work in Australia.

So yes:  a crackdown on illegal immigrants!  The stuff tabloid dreams are made of.

Or not.  In the Australian consciousness, immigration politics is purely about asylum seekers.

By definition, asylum seekers want authorities to find them.  Illegal workers do not.  They are people who are working in breach of their visa conditions.  They may have overstayed their temporary visas, they may be here on tourist visas, or they might be working more hours than their student visas permit.

It's hard to measure, but we know there are at least 50,000 illegal workers in Australia.  A Government report (PDF) in 2010 suggested it could be as many as 100,000.

That figure is a lot more than the few thousand who have sought asylum in Australia by boat.

Why the disconnect?

Immigration politics is not about quantity but visibility.  And our borders are uniquely secure.  The twentieth century fantasy of full state control over who enters and exits a country has only come close to realisation in Australia.

Those dinky boats may seem like a threat to our ''sovereignty'', but they are actually a demonstration of it.  Our high-tech Navy picks them up, and our bureaucrats ploddingly process each one in turn.  Every migrant interacts with the system at some point.  There are no exceptions.

In almost every other country, borders are far too porous to imagine a government could be this diligent.

So in the United States, the United Kingdom and the richest nations in Europe, it is illegal workers who bear the brunt of the political and public attention.  We obsess about the people who want to come here.  The rest of the world obsesses about those who already are there.

This focus on asylum seekers means we ignore the great issue of our time:  the clash between national borders and an increasingly global employment market.

The Government's new illegal worker bill is evidence that we are not as isolated as we think.  One hundred thousand people is not trivial.

But the Immigration Department's arguments for why we need to crackdown on illegal workers are unfortunate.

First:  if we allow illegal workers to work, our immigration controls will be weakened.  In other words, immigration restrictions are needed to maintain immigration restrictions.  It gets even more circular from there.  Illegal workers are a problem because of ''costs associated with locating and removing illegal workers''.  Read that one again.

Second:  illegal workers ''deny Australian citizens and permanent residents the opportunity to obtain a job''.  It would be nice if the Immigration Department didn't endorse the claim that foreigners crowd residents out of the employment market, but, well, there you go.  Likewise, we might put aside the claim that illegal workers ''may not meet ... stringent health and character tests''.

One final argument is the most convincing, but perhaps not in the way it is intended:  illegal workers are susceptible to exploitation.

This is undoubtedly true.  But it is because those workers face the threat of deportation that they are so vulnerable.  The stricter we are about visa overstayers, the more we increase the chances that they will be exploited by unscrupulous employers who threaten to call Immigration if they complain.

We know from international experience that an aggressive pursuit of illegal workers and their employers can create as many problems as it tries to solve.

So that this crackdown on illegal workers is likely to sail through unexamined has nothing to do with its desirability.  It is, instead, a window into the strangeness of the immigration debate in Australia.

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Only real threat is to our online privacy

Imagine if Australia Post opened and read all your mail.  There would be outrage.

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has given her support to a proposal to document the online activity of Australians.

It wouldn't be acceptable to treat our offline privacy with that kind of contempt.

So why does the Federal Government think it's OK to trash our right to privacy online?

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon recently gave her support to an extraordinary proposal to document the online activity of all Australians.  That's every website we visit — recorded.

Every email — logged.

This regime is part of a huge package of national security reforms being considered by the Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security.

Proposals like this should never be considered in a free society.  Data retention is the kind of policy implemented by totalitarian regimes.

The draconian proposal would create an institutionalised system of government spying on all Australian citizens — just in case you're subject to a criminal investigation.

Nicola Roxon is being incredibly disingenuous.  She distanced herself from the proposal in July.  Then she gave a speech strongly in favour of the proposal in August.  She followed that with a letter to the Herald Sun earlier this month claiming she hadn't made up her mind.

Finally, she put up a YouTube video defending the proposals.  It's strange behaviour for a busy minister who is yet to commit to the idea.

Roxon also claims content won't be captured, but she's plain wrong.  It's simply impossible to separate what she calls ''metadata'' from content.

We don't like it when the government tries to meddle in our lives and we value our privacy.

The last time the government attempted such an extraordinary invasion of privacy was 1986.  That was when the Hawke Labor government tried to legislate a national identity card system.

The Australia Card was a proposal to collect personal information about every citizen.  The information would be collected and used by government departments.  It was effectively a licence to live — it would have been required to get a job, do your banking and receive government benefits.  The proposal was shouted down by ordinary Australians.

Roxon's proposed data retention regime represents an even greater intrusion into our lives.  The potential for mishandling our most private data is immense.

The Australia Card proposed retaining a particular set of details about each person.  But under the Attorney-General's data retention regime it's not just your name, address and date of birth that will be logged.

Everything will be stored;  from emails between family and friends to the website you visit to update your health insurance details.

In a speech given at the Security in Government Conference last week, the Attorney-General spoke about identity theft.

But the data retention proposal would mandate the creation of silos full of personal information.

They would be begging to be attacked by the very hackers and identity thieves the proposal seeks to curb.  In trying to solve a purported security problem it would be creating one of even greater enormity.

Targeted warrants are far more likely to help catch criminals.  They allow the police to collect information in the course of an investigation.  It makes sense that gathering relevant evidence is what helps in solving crime.

Indiscriminate data retention makes no sense.  It is a tyrannical idea and Australia's democratic Government should be ashamed of promoting it.

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McMansions a sign of our country's wealth, not a lack of taste

Is there any more snobbish word in the Australian vocabulary than ''McMansion''?  This nasty term describes the big, new houses out in suburbs with names like Caroline Springs and Kellyville.  McMansions, their nickname suggests, are the McDonald's of housing — they're super-sized, American and mass produced.

Australians build the largest new houses in the world.  The average size of a new freestanding home is 243 square metres.  That's 10 per cent larger than the average new American home.  Naturally our big houses have critics.  Sustainability advocates say McMansions are bad for the environment.  Yet there's more going on here.  Because even the most high-brow academic critiques of McMansions seem to focus less on the houses and more on the people who live in them.

Terry Burke, a professor of urban studies at Swinburne University, wrote in The Conversation last year that McMansions breach the ''good principles'' of environmental sustainability.  Fair enough.  But Burke doubled down:  McMansions are very ugly, and their occupants, who also apparently own four-wheel-drives and send their children to private schools, are giving ''an 'up yours' message to the world''.

That sort of sneering contempt is not uncommon.  The word ''McMansion'' is usually deployed not to appraise a type of house, but an entire way of life.  It is all about culture — the inner city world trying to understand their strange, alien suburban cousins.

Suburban living in general is more environmentally friendly than inner-city living.  A study by the Australian Conservation Foundation (no fan of consumer capitalism) concluded that, even taking into account car use, ''inner-city households outstrip the rest of Australia in every other category of consumption''.

Someone who lives in a big home can still train to work, conserve energy or water, and, if they choose, live a fashionably carbon-neutral life.

Why do we build our houses so big?  Well, Australia has a lot of space.  But more importantly:  we can.  Australia is probably the richest country in the world.  We have the fastest growing income in the world.  We have the highest median wealth.  Our only real competition in the rich stakes comes from city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong or oil plutocracies such as Qatar.  And many Australians have decided to spend their riches on new homes.

Even if you don't put much stock in income statistics, the size of our houses is — by itself — evidence that Australia is well off.  Prosperity is about more than GDP data.  Money isn't everything.  Anybody who has lived crammed into too few rooms knows living standards and adequate space are closely related.  In rich Australia it's understandable that many people desire extra living and storage space.

The people who best understand the relationship between housing size and living standards aren't architectural academics or urban planners.  They're archaeologists.

Historians of the ancient world don't have tables of wealth and income data.  To estimate how rich societies were, they look at proxies.  House are among the best and most accessible.

For instance, excavated homes are one way we know ancient Greece was far richer than other civilisations in the Mediterranean.  According to the historian Ian Morris, between 800BC and 300BC the median Greek house size ballooned from 80 square metres to 360 square metres.  And this wealth was shared among the free population, not concentrated among the ruling elite.  Just as it is in 21st-century Australia.  Large homes are now within the reach of moderate-income families.  This is something worth celebrating, not deriding.

Antiquity had its share of sceptics about prosperity, too.  Aristotle believed there was such a thing as too much wealth.  The philosopher had determined what the ''good life'' was, and he argued any excess property was unnatural.

It's easy to imagine Aristotle tut-tutting about the big houses built by fellow Athenians.  But it's just as easy to imagine those Athenians ignoring his snobbery and enjoying the prosperity Greek society could afford.

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Stagnation flows from our banana republic laws

Australia has thrived by achieving high productivity levels, especially in our agricultural and mining industries.

Commercial fishing has had a more mixed success, partly because Australia's catch quotas are set extremely conservatively.  As a result, we are a net importer of fish despite having the one of the world's largest oceanic territories.

Aggravating this is the Commonwealth Government banning the Abel Tasman, one of a new more productive class of trawlers, from taking part in Australia's fish harvesting.  The ban has no effect on the catch because it is already limited by a fixed quota.

The action was a response to a Twitter campaign by green activists openly hostile to all modern primary production activities.  The activists' campaign persuaded the Government to pass new laws that override the regulatory approval provided by the Commonwealth fisheries management.

This not only denies lowest-cost technology, but tells all entrepreneurs that rules are arbitrary and subject to political whim.  This is the banana republic approach to government — without fixed rules, enterprises must lobby to buy favours as a condition of doing business.

The outcome is economic stagnation.

In promoting the ban, Environment Minister Tony Burke falsely claimed this would conserve fish supplies.

Truth-bending is common among environment ministers eager to please anti-business constituencies.

But Mr Burke has taken this to a new low.  His trawler ban adds to his long list of productivity-busting measures, which include unnecessary duplications of environmental reviews, costly conditions imposed on projects and lengthy approval delays that have inhibited development.

However, a most disappointing feature of the trawler ban is that it is support by the federal Primary Industries Minister, Joe Ludwig.

In supporting the ban on efficient trawling technology, Mr Ludwig cited the ''precautionary principle'', which provides an excuse to curtail productive activity without evidence about any deleterious side-effects.

The ''precautionary principle'' allows politics to usurp commercial decisions, magnifying the influence of politicians and making increased costs inevitable.

Industry ministers are supposed to promote, not impede, productivity.  In the past ALP ministers have occasionally overlooked this.

For example, they supported the union ban on wide combs for shearing — a ban designed to increase jobs at the expense of productivity.

But Minister Ludwig has made such policy aberrations the norm.  He banned exports of cattle to the valuable Indonesian market because an ABC program showed apparent ill-treatment of the animals before their slaughter.  That knee-jerk reaction created a major loss of wealth for northern Australia's beef growers.

Minister Ludwig toed the green line in opposing additional dams to provide irrigation.  And he also railed against cuts to an unproductive agricultural bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, other primary industry ministers seem to have caught the Ludwig disease that substitutes political for commercial decisions.  Victoria's Agriculture Minister, Peter Walsh, and South Australia's Fisheries Minister, Gail Gago, have endorsed the trawler ban, absurdly claiming that it would prevent over fishing.

Unless quickly reversed, the idiocy prevailing among agricultural ministers will bring a costly toll to primary production.

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Foreign policy rates barely a mention as US turns inward

Only the spectacle of anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond has made foreign policy a live issue in the race to the White House.  Until last week, the subject was being comprehensively ignored in this year's presidential election.

According to a CBS News poll last month, just 2 per cent of Americans rate it as the most important issue facing the nation.  In other surveys, national security has not even ranked as the single most important issue in voters' choice for president.

That explains why one of President Barack Obama's most popular lines on the campaign trail has been his call ''to do some nation-building right here at home''.  It also explains why Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, dedicated only one paragraph to foreign affairs (with no reference to Afghanistan) in his 40-minute speech to his party's national convention last month.  This while his budget-focused running mate, Paul Ryan, skipped the subject altogether.

Why is this?  Why are Americans less concerned about foreign policy than at any time since the heyday of isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s?

For one thing, Americans have tired of the world.  For generations — first against fascism, then communism, and more recently Islamist terrorism — they supported an activist and engaged defence commitment across the globe.  Today, however, Americans are re-ordering priorities.

Last week, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs published its annual survey of American public opinion and US foreign policy.  Among other things, it found that Americans are now less likely to support the use of force in many circumstances and are more likely to endorse defence spending cuts;  that fewer Americans are concerned about global terrorism as a ''critical'' threat to the US than at any time since September 11, 2001;  and that majorities oppose either a unilateral US pre-emptive strike on Iran or even an attack authorised by the UN.  It also highlighted the dovish views of ''Millennials'' — those between the ages of 18 and 29:  52 per cent believe that the US should ''stay out'' of world affairs.

To the extent that such views prevail, they contradict the notion that the US, as the world's sole remaining superpower, should impose its will and leadership across the globe.

Indeed, the lesson of the mid-2011 brush with debt default, which culminated in the Standard & Poor's credit downgrading and the debate over entitlement spending, is that Washington will make cutting spending a very high priority in the next decade.

An ambitious foreign policy inspired by a sense of mission — the kind of world view that helped build up the power of the US federal government in the past 70 years — is incompatible with that goal

There is another reason why Americans are turning off foreign policy:  they are used to a state of world affairs in which things are set out in Manichaean terms.  Them and Us;  Good versus Evil;  Freedom against Totalitarianism:  the sort of thing that can be summed up easily in one of those doctrines that have defined America's world role (think Harry Truman in 1947, George W. Bush in 2002).

Those terms are not only familiar but congenial to an American temperament that is idealistic and impatient of nuance.  The Australian conservative Owen Harries once applied the Oxford political philosopher Isaiah Berlin's well-known labels ''hedgehogs'' and ''foxes'' to the US context.  Americans are the former:  hedgehogs want the world explained in terms of one big, all-embracing idea;  foxes relish complexity and see things in terms of many different, discrete truths.

For much of the Cold War and in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans, perhaps understandably, had a hedgehog view of international relations.

Today's world, however, is becoming a foxy, pluralistic, ambiguous one to which the ordinary American does not respond so easily.

No longer is there a compelling national mission that can clearly be explained to the American people to justify a Pax Americana.

Having said that, given their genuine concern for their nation's dignity and honour, it is easy to see how Islamist violence outside US embassies across the Muslim world could taunt and goad Americans out of their torpor.

But it is bound to be a short-term distraction.  Ditto a pre-emptive strike on Tehran's nuclear facilities.  The upshot of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is that Americans are suffering from foreign policy fatigue and they lack the attention span and staying power that comes with being a genuine world policeman.

The US will remain the most important presence on the global stage.  But in the absence of a great defining goal to motivate his fellow citizens, and given Washington's budget priorities, the next president is unlikely to assert US power and influence across the globe as his predecessors have done for much of the past seven decades.

That is why foreign policy will remain a negligible concern in American politics.

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Pollies just trawling for votes over super-sized ship

If a movie director was going to invent a name for the ''ship of doom'' they'd probably come up with ''supertrawler''.

Let's face it, supertrawler sounds bad.  It's super (and not in the good way) and it ''trawls'' the ocean rapaciously consuming fish into its vast nets and freezers of doom.  When the word ''supertrawler'' is said out loud it almost deserves its own soundtrack.

But it's politics that led the Gillard government to turn its trawl of duty from the Netherlands to Australia a wasted journey.  Now the government's legislative response means the same quota of fish can be taken out of Australian waters by smaller, less efficient boats.  Their net sizes can be the same.  And they can waste fuel and emit greenhouse gases by returning to shore to dump the fish before going out to get extra catch.

Unsurprisingly some scientists are arguing the government's moves smack of ''populism before science''.

Congratulations Environment Minister, Tony Burke.  You've really chalked up another victory for the environment.

Sadly the government's reaction fits into a much broader pattern of behavior by our nation's politicians and their indifference to how legislative action can deliver environmental outcomes.

Take the Federal government's current progressing of its Illegal Logging Bill.

The point of the Bill is to stop timber illegally felled in other countries from making its way into Australia and being sold as the desk that your computer sits on top of.

The objectives sound admirable on environmental grounds.  Illegally logged timber ''bad''.  Legally logged timber ''good''.  And in many ways the government's motivations are right.

But good motivations don't ensure the policy response attracts the same qualities.  Especially when the government's own advisers concluded an Illegal Logging Bill wouldn't work.

The Centre for International Economics was commissioned by the Federal government to investigate what any illegal logging law would do.

Their study concluded ''0.034 per cent of global timber production, and 0.34 of products incorporating illegally logged timber ... [so the Bill] could reduce the global costs of illegal logging by 0.34 per cent ... and may not be fully effective in eliminating illegal logging''.

Put more bluntly, a new law won't stop the small problem but we'll all feel a warm inner glow.

The problem is it that the Australian timber industry will pay for our good intentions by carrying more cost to prove they're not illegally logged impacting on their international competitiveness.

Not that illegal logging is alone.

Taxpayer-funded organisations are similarly lobbying the government to make consumer boycotts against palm oil easier.

You know the drill — forests are being converted into agriculture land to grow palm oil in parts of Malaysia and Indonesia.  And those palm oil plantations threaten orangutan populations.

So if we legislate to label palm oil on products, consumers can haze products that use it as an ingredient and save the orangutans.

Except, it isn't that simple.

A recent study published by the New York Academy of Sciences found that there are a range of measures causing orangutan population loss, including farming practices and hunting by those on a subsistence living.

The study identified that ''singling out a particular industry as the main culprit in this process ignores the contribution from others and is unlikely to lead to lasting solutions''.

Using simplistic measures like consumer boycotts might make ourselves feel better, but it only have a modest impact on addressing the root problem.

Worse, it could have the reverse effect and make it harder for subsistence farmers to survive meaning they convert more forest land for agriculture, not less.

That hasn't stopped local retailers, like Subway, being targeted to change behavior in the false expectation that it will actually save orangutans.

That outcome wouldn't be a victory for the environment.  Unless a problem that is out of sight, is also out of mind.

Despite the reality of these simplistic campaigns their consequences were largely ignored in Parliamentary hearings into a Bill designed to drive consumer boycotts.  Again, the passage of the Bill would have allowed us all to feel good about ourselves, even if it did nothing for the environment.

Businesses are rarely perfect.  But in all three cases working with the companies involved seem like a more logical solution to achieving good environmental outcomes.

But as political responses to the supertrawler, palm oil and logging show, facts and evidence only play a small part behind grandstanding politicians who want to be seen to be in favour of the environment — even when there is no environmental benefit at all.

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Assange circus takes the steam out of WikiLeaks' whistle

WikiLeaks first popped up in the Australian press in January 2007.

It had released its first document the month before.  These earliest Australian news reports were either neutral or welcoming.

''It may get a lot safer to leak sensitive documents about unethical behaviour by governments or organisations if a new online service goes ahead,'' noted the Australian Financial Review.

The Sydney Morning Herald told readers WikiLeaks' ''primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet Bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East''.  There was a local connection, too:  ''Australians are among the volunteers behind the site''.

In retrospect that is a very ominous last sentence.

In 2012 there must be no informed person on the planet who doesn't have strong views about the character and activities of the Australian Julian Assange.

The sad thing is that character and those activities have completely undermined WikiLeaks mission.

To read the early, matter-of-fact news reports is to recall a time when WikiLeaks had promise.  What could be more appealing than a permanent, resilient, secure institution to expose the raw workings of the world's most powerful bodies?

It was not to be.

Five years later it is clear nothing has been more damaging to WikiLeaks than Julian Assange's personal soap opera.  Not the US government's attempt to choke the stream of donations, not the political reaction to the release of diplomatic cables, not the hosts who have periodically shut the site down.

There was a time when WikiLeaks was widely admired.  Even senior Bush administration officials described it as a ''force for good''.  The diplomatic cables alienated the Washington establishment, but we shouldn't imagine WikiLeaks was isolated as it is today:  the site had many supporters and many admirers.

Yet by 2012, WikiLeaks is just the Julian Assange show.  His personal struggles have destroyed WikiLeaks' moral integrity.  Now having a view on leaking documents anonymously comes bundled with a lot of other views:  for instance, the severity or otherwise of Swedish rape laws.

Assange's journey to the Ecuadorian embassy is not his only public debacle.

Remember the saga over his autobiography?  The contract went sour and his publisher released an edited draft in September last year.  WikiLeaks released a furious statement describing this as a ''breach of confidence'', probably the least self-aware claim in modern history.

Remember the long promised Bank of America leak?  It was a dud.  Assange claimed to have the power to ''take down a bank or two''.  This seemed briefly plausible.  Mere rumours of the leak saw the share price drop 3 per cent in trading.  But during 2011, Assange stopped talking about the future release.  In private, he began talking it down.  WikiLeaks eventually decided the whole Bank of America leak had been destroyed by a rogue employee.

Remember Julia Gillard's Q&A special?  In a video question, Assange told the Prime Minister he had ''intelligence [the] government has been exchanging information with foreign powers about Australian citizens working for WikiLeaks''.  In his view, the Australian people should consider charging her with ''treason''.  The media debated whether it was impolite for Q&A to ambush the Prime Minister like that.  But what about his claims?  They, too, were just big talk.

Organisations can get over boisterous founders.  WikiLeaks has not.

The latest editorial on the WikiLeaks site promises ''never before released details about Julian Assange and the operations of WikiLeaks'' and exclusive details of his complaint he made to the British communications regulator about a documentary which aired nearly a year ago.

Assange's smartest defenders say we need to separate the specifics of the sexual assault claims from the worry he could be extradited from Sweden to the United States on espionage charges.  Someone ought to inform WikiLeaks of this distinction.  In June the organisation was promoting a book titled A Brief History of Swedish Sex.  The subtitle was even more damning:  How the Nation that Gave Us Free Love Redefined Rape and Declared War on Julian Assange.

The WikiLeaks Twitter account claims the Swedish media are ''racist'' towards Australians.  Another post idiotically asked ''why do people hate Sweden?'' and linked to this inane site.  That isn't the most absurd post though:  the account has compared Assange's exile in the Ecuadorian embassy with the violent assault of the US embassy in Libya.

These are just the official statements.  His most diehard supporters have suggested much, much worse.

I argued on the Drum in 2010 that WikiLeaks had a bad habit of editorialising its leaks.  When it released the video of a Baghdad helicopter strike in April that year, Assange produced a highly edited version called ''Collateral Murder''.  He preceded it with a George Orwell quote and carefully altered the soundtrack to reduce sympathy with the American soldiers.

This sort of editorialising was directly in conflict with its purported mission to practice ''scientific journalism''.  It made WikiLeaks and Assange the focus, instead of what they were leaking.

Two years later, even the promise of scientific journalism is a distant memory.

All WikiLeaks' energy has gone into its founder.  If there is to be a future of whistleblowing it will be found elsewhere, far away from the Julian Assange carnival.

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Obama-land shrinks jobs

It could be a good thing if Barack Obama were re-elected US president.

That way we'll have eight years of proof that higher taxes and higher government spending don't stimulate the economy and don't create jobs.  If Mitt Romney somehow wins the election the cry will forever be that the economic policies of the Obama administration would have worked if only they had been given more time.

Likewise here in Australia it could be good to have the Julia Gillard government re-elected.  That way it would have to deliver on its promise to have a budget surplus, while spending billions of dollars more on education, dental services and a national disability scheme as commodity prices plummet and tax revenue declines.

President Obama's $800 billion stimulus package was meant to have got the unemployment rate in the United States down to less than 6 per cent by now.  The unemployment rate for August was 8.1 per cent.  In July the rate was 8.3 per cent, and the reason it fell was because people stopped looking for work.

If the labour force participation rate was the same today as it was when Obama became president in January 2009 the unemployment rate in America would be 11.2 per cent.  Just 70 per cent of adult American men are either employed or seeking employment.  That's the lowest figure since records began in 1948 — the comparable rate then was 87 per cent.  On Wednesday the US Census Bureau reported that 46 million Americans live in poverty.  The poverty rate in the US is the highest it's ever been.

It wasn't meant to be like this.  In January 2009, after Obama had won election but before he was sworn in as president, his chief economic advisers Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein published a 14-page report titled The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.  It promised that a massive increase in government spending would save the economy.  And it ruled out tax cuts.  ''Tax cuts, especially temporary ones, and fiscal relief to the states are likely to create fewer jobs than direct increases in government purchases.''

The report contained a chart which has become famous.  It plotted what Romer and Bernstein anticipated would be the US unemployment rate with and without stimulus spending.  On the day of its release, Paul Krugman praised the report in The New York Times and wrote, ''It will be a joy to argue policy with an administration that provides comprehensible, honest reports, not case studies in how to lie with statistics.''

Romer and Bernstein thought that without the stimulus unemployment would peak at 9 per cent in 2010, but with the stimulus unemployment would rise to 8 per cent in late 2009.  All of these predictions were wrong.  Unemployment reached its maximum of 10.1 per cent in October 2009.

To a normal person the evidence would tend to indicate the stimulus package failed to do what was intended and maybe a new approach is needed.  But that's not how economists who want more government spending think.  Professor Laura Tyson, an economics adviser to Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama, said the problem with the stimulus package was that it wasn't large enough.  She didn't explain why even more stimulus would be any more likely to achieve its target than the original $800 billion stimulus.  When something has failed, only an economist would think of trying it again but on a bigger scale.

A few days ago, Tyson said that Romney's plan for cutting taxes and cutting non-defence government spending would weaken growth in the US economy.  Whether this is true or not will only be known if Romney is elected and implements his plan.  But one thing is known.  The alternative plan, higher taxes and higher government spending, practised for the past four years, doesn't have a great track record.

The average annual rate of economic growth under Barack Obama as the US economy has come out of the global financial crisis has been 2.2 per cent.  When the US economy recovered from a recession under Ronald Reagan the average growth rate was 5.7 per cent.

Chances are that the Obama economic experiment still has four more years to run — but it's not necessarily certain.

When Reagan was running against the incumbent president Jimmy Carter in 1980, Carter was the favourite to win right up to the last weeks of the campaign.

Reagan won the election easily, 51 per cent to Carter's 41 per cent.

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Is navel-gazing our fastest growing industry?

Our economy is doing well.  We have none of the endemic problems of Western Europe.  We're not facing a fiscal cliff like the United States.

Yet the Australian response to the Global Financial Crisis — after an initial flurry of policy — has been a collapse into self-reflection.

Navel-gazing is Australia's fastest growing industry.

Trolling on Twitter, parliamentary standards, criticism of the prime minister:  that these are the issues which dominate Australian public discussion surely says something about how self-absorbed we have become.

But what if Australian public debate is getting better, not worse?  That the cacophony which greets every political announcement is good?  And what if, yes, parliament is full of insults, procedural tricks, and partisan talking points, but this is nothing to worry about?

Put it this way:  Australia's century has seen mass street protests and vicious industrial disputes.  Political parties have split.  Prime Ministers have been dismissed.  Now we are consumed by debates about civility, tone ... etiquette.  It's bizarre.

This week Rob Oakeshott is trying to get a parliamentary code of conduct through the House of Representatives.

The draft code says that ''members must at all times act honestly, strive to maintain the public trust placed in them, and advance the common good of the people of Australia''.  They must ''base their conduct on a consideration of the public interest''.  They must ''exercise due diligence'' and perform ''to the best of their ability''.  It goes on like that.

Codes of conduct are indulgent at the best of times.  Yet there's something deeply surreal about this parliament being asked to confirm they have ''due regard for the rights and obligations of all Australians''.

Saying those Australians haven't warmed to Julia Gillard doesn't quite capture it.  And the opposition leader has had no more success drawing popularity than the prime minister.  The idea their disapproval is based on a disrespect for parliamentary procedure, or an un-parliamentary attitude, or treating their office with insufficient solemnity, is ridiculous.

But it's a classic, concrete example of this weird narcissism.  Our little nation has such promise! Yet our politicians are unbecomingly partisan, and we allow Kyle Sandilands to be crude on the radio.  Few other Western nations are brooding like us.  (Obviously, you can only navel-gaze if everything else is going well enough.)  But the causes are universal.

Partly it is a function of the opening up of the public sphere.  We shouldn't underestimate how much the elimination of barriers between the press and its audience has changed the former.  Commentators used to speak into a void.  They now receive an avalanche of feedback.  If public debate is about exchange, we've never been richer.  If democracy is about participation, we've never had it better.

Many people in public life are tricked into believing that what they see on social media is a reflection of Australia as a whole.  How could they not be?

Reading the mood of the nation is art not science.  Polls are expensive.  Receiving harsh feedback from the public used to be like seeing mice:  if you saw one you could assume there were hundreds of others the same.  That rule of thumb made sense when it took effort to write to a politician.  It doesn't work anymore.

But when journalists and politicians see hundreds of tweets telling them that whatever happened in parliament that day is an embarrassment, it is bound to shape their views.  Never mind that Twitter is populated entirely by statistical outliers.  Its directness encourages us to see one tweet as indicative of a broader trend.

Social media is not the public but it is rapidly changing what some people imagine the public is.  And this ''public'' is almost uniformly disappointed.

Paul Kelly argued a decade ago that the pseudo-democratic nature of talkback radio had permanently changed Australia's political culture.  Our new changes are much larger than that, and they're happening more quickly.

It is no surprise then that public debate has collapsed into ceaseless self-reflection.  Yet step outside the bubble and everything looks pretty healthy.

Australia's parliament is as robust as anywhere else in the world.  Democratic politics is meant to be about a peaceful clash of interests:  we ought be worried if the political parties started working together.  And when we are not sulking, the contentious issues are the big issues — immigration and the carbon price.

Australian politics is not prone to conspiracy, unlike the United States.

And we are thankfully free of that combination of ostentatious radicalism and institutional stagnation that infects much of Europe.  Yes, Australia has a very middle-class democracy.  And there's nothing the middle-class enjoy more than talking about themselves.

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States shrink at culling bloated bureaucracy

Tomorrow's Queensland budget will provide a true litmus test of the preparedness of state Coalition governments across the eastern seaboard to reduce the size of government.

With revenue growth weak, budgets in deficit or wafer-thin surplus, and as public sector debts continue to mount, cutting government spending is essential to help restore sustainable state public finances.

Since public sector employment costs average about 44 per cent of general government sector operating budgets in the three big states, governments should reduce their workforces as part of meaningful fiscal consolidation strategies.

But the quantum of the public service cuts that the O'Farrell, Baillieu and Newman governments have announced or implemented have been, to put it kindly, meek and mild at best.

In NSW there has been speculation the government will cut up to a further 10,000 jobs, following its announcement last year to reduce its employment by 5000 people.

Queensland has already reduced its public sector by about 5000 jobs, with the budget likely to shed up to 14,000 jobs.

In Victoria, the Baillieu government has announced two rounds of public service reductions totalling about 4000 positions.

While these figures may seem large in isolation, in the context of total public sector employment these reductions represent a drop in the ocean.

According to the ABS, excluding the tertiary education sector, there were over one million state government employees in NSW, Victoria and Queensland as at June 2011.

In effect the job reductions already announced or implemented by coalition governments in the three big states roughly amount to less than two per cent of total state government employment.

And a considerable proportion of the redundancies so far have been either voluntary redundancies or retrenchments of contract workers whose terms were about to expire in any case.

Apart from the actual numbers of employees engaged, salaries and benefits paid will also have a bearing on the ability of state governments to contain their costs.

The O'Farrell government has been particularly active in this area, with its application to the state's Industrial Relations Commission to limit public servants' entitlements following its decision last year to legislate a cap on wages growth of 2.5 per cent.

These reforms are a commendable first step to ensuring that public sector entitlements are not out of line with underlying economic conditions or community expectations, and should be considered by other states.

But as the Baillieu government has discovered through its pay negotiations with police and nurses, alternatively bowing to public sector union demands to be the ''best paid in the country'' only delivers unnecessary political and budgetary pains.

Clearly the public sector unions have marshalled a well-organised campaign opposing any reductions in public sector employment or entitlement limitations, regardless of the union membership status of affected employees or the state of the budget.

The conventional wisdom is that this campaign is wearing away the political shine of the new kids on the state political block, especially in Queensland where the LNP's opinion poll standings have fallen away considerably over three months.

While all three governments when in opposition rightly made the budgetary recklessness of their predecessors an election campaign priority, they failed to take the next step, then and now, to outline why future public sector employment reductions are necessary.

There was no explanation that state bureaucrats are funded by state taxes, or perhaps even by taxpayers in other states through GST redistributions, and that these adversely affect economic activity and private sector growth.

No mention was made of the fact that fewer skilled workers are available to the private sector, where they could be used more productively, when public sector employment expands as it did over the past decade in NSW, Victoria and Queensland by 290,600 people.

There was silence about the way in which extra public policy bureaucrats advising or enforcing taxes and regulations accentuate cost pressures upon private sector businesses and individuals.

Nor did the Coalition parties mention that frontline staff often deliver sub-optimal services, in areas such as education, health care or welfare services, that could be delivered more efficiently by the private sector.

In fact, they concurred with then Labor governments that frontline staff should be preserved as a protected species shielded from the winds of reform.  It is in this deafening silence about the need for public service attrition that public sector unions, and others on the big-government gravy train, fill the vacuum by arguing for the disreputable position that government employment should be either set in stone or even expanded.

Having successfully wagged the dog of state Labor governments for the best part of a decade to fulfil their socialistic objective of public sector expansion, public sector unions are now waging a rearguard, conservative campaign to protect their membership base.

With Coalition governments finding themselves under intense pressure to pull back from trimming the public service to more reasonable proportions, the big question is will they concede to the statist agenda of the public sector unions?

The record so far has been rather uninspiring, but at least the first Newman budget should provide some vital clues as to whether democratically elected state governments have finally acquired an appetite for serious small-government reform.

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Privacy to be sacrificed as Roxon takes liberties with our freedoms

Moves on internet data retention are an attack on our rights.

Last week Attorney-General Nicola Roxon argued for one of the most significant attacks on civil liberty in Australian history — internet data retention.

There aren't many details yet.  From what we can tell, the government wants to force all internet service providers to record details about every email their customers send, every website they visit, and every communication they make.

The providers will have to store those records for up to two years, just in case the police or the Commonwealth spy agency ASIO want to look at them later.

This data retention scheme would be an institutionalised, systematic invasion of our privacy — at least as bad as the Hawke government's proposed Australia Card was in the 1980s.  And it is certainly scarier than any of John Howard's post-September 11 security laws.

Admittedly, data retention is not an original Australian idea.  Similar policies have been implemented across Europe.  But their record is not flattering.  Germany's parliamentary research unit surveyed European crime statistics between 2005 and 2010 and could not find any evidence to suggest data retention was helping solve crimes.  And several European countries have even found data retention unconstitutional.  In 2009 the Constitutional Court of Romania found that ''continuous limitation of the privacy right ... makes the essence of the right disappear''.  In other words, data retention is so pervasive that it eliminates privacy.  You can understand why Romanians would be sensitive.  They suffered under communist police state surveillance for nearly half a century.

The idea behind data retention is to try to replicate for the internet what police have enjoyed with telephone calls for decades — access to records of who we called and when.  Yet there's a big difference between phones and the internet.  Telephone companies keep those records in order to bill us.  So phone records already exist.  Internet data retention would require companies to create a giant new database of what their customers were doing online.

This database would be many times larger and much more revealing.  Most Australians make a couple of calls a day.  But we send and receive dozens of emails.  We visit hundreds of websites.  In 2012 we do everything from banking, to researching health concerns online.  The internet is nothing like a telephone.

On top of this, the government wants internet providers to take responsibility for keeping these vast new information archives secure.  But there are hundreds of internet companies in Australia.  Many of them are tiny.  Few of them are security specialists.

The Attorney-General argued on Tuesday last week that the police needed all this new surveillance to tackle identity theft.  This is clever:  we need to destroy privacy in order to save it.  But it is nonsense.

These new databases would be attractive targets for those very identity thieves.  Criminals could just crack the security of a small internet provider.  We've seen in the past few years how insecure corporate data can be.  Even big firms struggle with security.

Making their case, Roxon and her A-G's Department say they need to ''modernise'' their powers to deal with cybercrime.  Yet the urgent need to modernise this law would be more convincing if it wasn't for the fact that the 1979 Telecommunications Interception Act has been ''modernised'' 64 separate times since then.  It has been changed on average twice a year for three decades.  Indeed, the last modernisation was as recently as August.

Roxon is talking about more surveillance powers literally a fortnight after she has been granted new ones.  Our Attorney-General must know this.  So when will enough be enough?

Anyway, the August reform gave law enforcement agencies exactly what Roxon claims they need:  the flexibility to investigate crime online.  Now if police identify a suspect, they can order internet companies to log the data of specific individuals.  Such targeted data preservation is reasonable.  It's like traditional phone tapping.  Police get investigative powers, but don't treat every Australian as a criminal.

Internet data retention isn't the only new weapon the government wants.  A parliamentary committee is currently considering a government discussion paper with dozens of complex proposals to extend security power over the internet.  The discussion paper makes some stunning claims.  Apparently, some limits on ASIO and the police merely ''reflect historical concerns about corruption and the misuse of covert powers''.

Are those concerns really out of date?  Politicians like to talk about balancing the need for security and the need for liberty, as if they are shouldering a heavy philosophical burden.  Yet it seems new laws only ever satisfy the former.  Liberty loses, inevitably, every time.

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Fair Work Act has unleashed mob rule and it's spreading

A clear failing of the Gillard government's fair work system is increased industrial action and union militancy.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data released yesterday shows an alarming jump in industrial action to an eight-year high.  A staggering 101,700 working days were lost because of industrial action in the June quarter.

The system encourages unions to take strike action.  Australian workplace culture is being transformed as we experience protracted bargaining attended by strikes and unruly blockades.  A range of industries are affected in the latest figures, including mining, the public sector and construction.

It is fanciful for Bill Shorten to blame Coalition premiers.  The system confers on union leaders an increasing arrogant confidence that they can beat employers into submission.

Melbourne is now accustomed to daily pictures of the union mob battling a contractor, its workers and police.  The Grocon dispute is critical because it involves blatant unlawful conduct including the defiance of Supreme Court orders.  A win for the mob would do untold damage to Australia's reputation for managing workplace relations.

Sadly, such workplace relations thuggery is not limited to Victoria.

The Queensland building industry is experiencing a similar standoff.  Abigroup, a national contractor, is building the Brisbane Children's Hospital.  It is a $900 million project due for completion in 2014.

The site has been shut down for more than four weeks because of a strike by workers.  The unions involved are the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union and the Builders Labourers Federation.  They are demanding Abigroup engage all subcontractors and their employees on the same rates as workers employed by Abigroup.

The company is being pressured to abandon its legally registered enterprise agreement in favour of a union pattern agreement.  Protesters have assembled at the site to discourage workers entering.  The taunts and abuse hurled at those who wanted to work were so vicious that entry was not attempted for weeks.  Employees were photographed and told they would be remembered.

Orders by Fair Work Australia and the Federal Magistrates Court have failed to secure access to the site.  A blockade remains in place that the union disavows having any involvement in organising.  At the same time Abigroup was told that a phone call accepting the demands will have the matter fixed.

Restrictive clauses of the type claimed by the CFMEU have already been adopted by other national building companies operating in Queensland:  Laing O'Rourke, Grocon, Theiss and Baulderstone.  All endured protracted disputes of two weeks or more.

It is an established right for employers and workers to access their place of work.  Industrial action affecting the workplace does not detract from that right.  Workers have a lawful right to choose not to engage in industrial action.

Union militancy by building and construction unions is escalating across the country.

The militancy is the result of capitulation by the Gillard government.  The strong regulator, the Office of the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, has been abolished.  Its replacement, the Fair Work Building and Construction Inspectorate, has superficial powers and adopts a cautious approach to securing lawful conduct on building sites.  The government also diluted the application of the national code of practice across the industry.

The rise in protracted disputes is clearly a failure of the Gillard policy.  If added to this is an inability to contain or punish unlawful conduct then the future is grim.

Some are indifferent to these disturbing trends on the grounds that they reflect the rugged culture of building and construction.  Such indifference is misplaced.  Queensland has a substantial construction program.  Population growth, mining development and infrastructure upgrades mean that building and construction play a vital role.

The real reason for the industrial campaigns is to consolidate union influence over commercial construction.  The emergence of an unchecked, militant culture inevitably will involve higher costs and delays in project completion.

More important, the lawful rights of employers and workers are threatened.  Victoria and Queensland appear to be the current focus.  If mob rule is allowed to prevail then the conduct will likely spread.  Australian workers and industry will suffer.

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Australia's unfounded foreign investment fear

Nothing better illustrates how phoney the debate over foreign investment is than the Coalition's discussion paper on foreign investment in agriculture.

This deeply unsatisfying document was released last month.  That is, just a few weeks before the Commonwealth approved the sale of Cubbie Station in Queensland to a Chinese and Japanese textile consortium and the foreign investment debate blew up again.

The discussion paper proposes a government land ownership register, and proposes reducing the investment review threshold to $15 million.  (These ideas are hard to reconcile with the Opposition pledge to reduce red tape, but, well, there you go.)

Yet there's almost nothing in its 15 pages to explain why on earth we need a crackdown on foreign investment at all.

This absent justification is frustrating but it's no surprise.  The debate over foreign investment is a peculiar one.  Investment sceptics never quite offer their full argument.

It ought to be an obviously good thing that foreigners give Australians money for things Australians want to sell.  The original owners make the sale voluntarily and they profit.  No-one is forced to sell their property to someone they don't want to.  And owners seem happy to deal with Chinese-Japanese consortiums.

Economists have been arguing for decades that as long as foreign investors obey Australian law there's no reason their dollars will pose a problem.  Foreign money is as good as local money.

That argument has been unsuccessful.  The public disagrees strongly.  According to a Lowy Institute survey (PDF) of public opinion over time, more Australians are opposed to foreign ownership of major companies than are opposed to death penalty or the Iraq war.  Even ''illegal immigration'' is more popular.

The sole reason the Coalition's discussion paper offers for even considering any change is this:

''There is growing community and industry concern that some types of acquisitions may be contrary to the national interest and that a strengthening of the regime may be advantageous to the long-term prosperity and food security of Australia.''

This bare sentence is all that's offered to say we have a problem.  ''National interest'' and ''food security''?  It's hard to think of vaguer terms.  The paper does not explain why foreign ownership may be contrary to these two concepts.  And how could reducing investment make us more prosperous?  Compounding the confusion, the paper informs us the Coalition ''unambiguously welcomes and supports foreign investment''.

It's all pretty thin and contradictory, but that may be the point.  The Coalition's foreign investment position is a hedge between free marketeers in the Liberal Party and agrarian socialists in the National Party.  Tony Abbott seemed to have joined the latter side when he claimed in July that ''it would rarely be in Australia's national interest to allow a foreign government or its agencies to control an Australian business''.  Happily, the discussion paper is not as bellicose.

Yet all political parties struggle to square what the public say they want, and what is truly in the national interest.  As I argued in March in the Drum, Labor is no free market hero on foreign investment either.  The Greens are openly hostile.

Cubbie Station is not a thriving business.  It went into administration a few years ago.  The Chinese and Japanese consortium, Shandong Ruyi, is picking up a distressed asset.

Nevertheless, according to Barnaby Joyce, the sale is a ''disgrace''.  Australians should have had a ''first crack'' at Cubbie Station.

In his view, the Chinese-Japanese firm might ''compromise market competition''.  Certainly, Cubbie Station is big.  It produces up to 13 per cent of Australia's cotton crop.  But how would foreign ownership change that?  If new owners have power to distort cotton prices, then so might any Australian owner who sold their crop overseas.

Or Shandong RuYi might avoid paying their fair share of tax in Australia.  But the tax office is used to dealing with reluctant taxpayers by now.

In an interview with ABC Brisbane, Joyce said ''land sovereignty'' demands Cubbie Station stay in Australian ownership.

The political class expects policy debates to be economic debates.  The language of public policy is the language of cost-benefit analyses, of trade-offs and productivity gains and multipliers and impact studies.

Yet Joyce's idea of land sovereignty is nothing like our usual mechanical utilitarianism:  he is making a moral claim.  Australian land should be owned by Australian passport holders.  It just should.  There is no need to elaborate.

It is true that a big part of the foreign ownership debate is economic xenophobia, but that's not the only part.  For agrarian socialists in the National Party, it's about nostalgia.  It is about a rural Australia characterised by small family farms rather than agribusiness, of communities rather than capital markets, of local owners rather than foreign consortiums.  It's also a vision of a rural Australia where the National Party still dominates.

That world is rapidly dissipating in the face of global food markets and global competitors.  Once successful agricultural businesses have to change or get out of the industry.  So with this enormous structural adjustment, could it really be in our national interest to prevent distressed farmers from getting the best price for their assets?  Surely not.

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EU carbon link just more hot air

Any business that buys cheap European emissions permits now may find them worthless by the end of the year.  Linking emissions trading schemes isn't as easy as the Gillard government makes it out to be.

On Tuesday, Climate Change Minister Greg Combet announced that the government was scrapping the floor price for carbon permits in a post-2015 emissions trading scheme.

The rationale is that it will remove the need for extra complex regulation for Australia's ETS now that it will be linked to Europe's.  If the price floor were kept in place it would create a regulatory nightmare for our government as it chased companies to pay the gap between the cost of European permits and the Australian floor price.

With the European Climate Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, Combet also announced that Australian companies could buy EU permits ''starting today''.  The same doesn't apply to European companies, which won't be able to buy Australian permits for some time.

Combet's clear objective is to get business to forward-purchase permits and make it harder for Tony Abbott to repeal the government's carbon pricing scheme if he is elected to government.

The economic impact of this deal is particularly confusing.  The government's carbon price modelling was always flawed.

For example, the Treasury's Strong Growth, Low Pollution modelling assumes nearly two-thirds of Australia's emissions cuts will be achieved by international permits by 2020.  Yet the cap will allow only 50 per cent of permits to be sourced offshore.  A European linking deal that might halve Australia's carbon price from about $25 to about $12 overnight provides no respite from the great known-unknowns of an ETS's impact, especially for carbon-tax paying businesses.

Ignoring domestic political risks, business should still be very wary of the ''benefits'' of cheaper European emissions permits.

Europe is playing hardball in international negotiations, making forward-purchased permits potentially worthless.

The Kyoto Protocol specifically stipulates how international permits can be traded and how they can be counted against national emissions targets.  But at the end of this year the first commitment period to cut emissions under Kyoto will expire.

Negotiations on if, and how, Kyoto will be extended into a second commitment period, and how international rules over carbon trading will operate beyond this year, are ongoing.  Until mid-next week countries are meeting in Bangkok in an attempt to finalise a deal for the future of Kyoto.

December's UN Climate Change conference in Qatar is the definitive deadline to avoid a gap between a first and second commitment period under Kyoto.

Few think a comprehensive Kyoto agreement will be ratified.

A survey last year by the World Bank's carbon finance unit found that fewer than 5 per cent of carbon traders were optimistic there'd be a multilateral agreement to cut emissions in operation by the end of 2015.  About 70 per cent are pessimistic.  Their optimism jumps to 20 per cent for a 2020 deadline.

What's possible is that a second commitment period under Kyoto will be agreed to by the end of the year covering developed countries.  The caveat will be that only Europe and a few other countries will actually bind themselves to its emissions reduction targets.

When challenged publicly, Australian government ministers are non-committal about signing up to an extension of Kyoto.  But Australia's negotiating position in international talks makes it clear there is no intention to do so.

On the record, the government's latest submission to international climate negotiations argues they have ''consistently maintained that a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol must be balanced by an agreement with legally binding mitigation commitments by all major economies''.

Considering we know the US, Canada, Russia and Japan won't be signing up, Australia's negotiating position to a second commitment period under Kyoto is mere bluster.

It's a spectacular turnaround for a party that rode into office in 2007 on Kyoto's ratification.  It also spells trouble for international linking.

In international climate negotiations, Europe is pushing for countries to be able to use cheap international permits to meet their emissions targets after the end of this year only if they sign up to an extension of Kyoto.  If successful, that means Australia may have a bilateral deal with Europe to allow business to buy cheap emissions permits to reduce costs, but multilateral rules will mean they cannot be counted.

If Europe gets its way in international negotiations it will have effectively forced Australia's hand into adopting an extension for Kyoto, even if the final deal is strongly against our national interests.

The alternative is that Combet and the Gillard government will have to explain to Australian business why forward-purchased European permits are worthless.

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