No wonder MPs are confused about security laws

I have a fair amount of sympathy for Anthony Albanese.

Sure, his intervention in the national security debate came nearly a fortnight late.

When Albanese told Sky News he was concerned about section 35P of the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014, it had been 11 days since he and his party voted that restriction on free speech into law.

But this is exactly why the bill was rushed through in the first place.  To prevent opposition to the measures from coalescing.  To prevent analysts and those affected by the provisions from delving into the detail.  To prevent information about the bill's practical consequences from spreading until it was too late.

In The Drum earlier this month Michael Bradley showed how little senior politicians on both sides understood of the national security legislation they voted for.

But let's not be too harsh.  Academics with expertise in national security legislation have told me that even for people who live and breathe this stuff, the legislation was incredibly opaque and the significance of some of the big concepts within it entirely unclear.

If this sort of law is hard for the experts, imagine how hard it is for the politicians who have to vote on it.

As of Tuesday morning there are 130 separate bills being considered in federal parliament.  Just reading them all is an incredible amount of work.

Some bills are brief, just a couple of pages.  Others are like a short book.  The Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill, which re-establishes the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, runs to 21,000 words.  It isn't the longest.

The bills under consideration total 594,032 words.  At an average reading speed (say 200 words per minute) it would take 49 hours just to read all that legislation.

Add the explanatory memoranda for the bills (the essential first step if we're interested not just in reading but understanding) and their 1,271,218 words would constitute another 106 hours of reading.

If somebody made that their full time job (8 hours a day, 5 days a week) that's four weeks — the better part of a month — of dedicated reading.

But reading legislation isn't enough to understand policy.  It isn't really possible to comprehend, for instance, the latest national security proposals without having read the reports of the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor.  The INSLM's 2014 report, which goes into detail about the legislative framework governing foreign fighters, is another 6 hours or so of reading.

So Australia's politicians have a mammoth amount of reading and learning if they want to become even minimally informed about what they're voting about.

No surprise that they are not minimally informed.

In the system of direct democracy in Ancient Athens, citizens would personally vote on each public policy measure themselves.

But direct democracy is incredibly time consuming.  Most people have to work for a living.  We can't all sit around all day considering legislation.  So instead we elect representatives to act on our behalf.  They do it so we don't have to.

Yet nobody who has been involved in any public policy debate can avoid noticing the incredible ignorance that legislators often have of their own proposals, or of the misinformation they accidentally peddle.

Sure, some misinformation is intentionally peddled.  But most of it is accidental, and most of it comes from this extraordinary information overload.

Your average backbencher spends their life dashing from one meeting to the next branch meeting to the next community fete.  They don't have the time to get across all the material.  That's no excuse of course.  But that's just how it is.

As a result, so much of our public policy debate falls back on a feeling about whether one ought to support the purpose of a bill, rather than the specifics of the proposals.

Politics isn't really about policy, after all — it's about signalling to voters what your values are.

Do you support greater national security powers, in general?  Then vote for the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014.  The detail is just detail.

But that detail included a new and dangerous restriction on free speech, as Labor slowly realised after they waved the bill through.

One proposal in the United States is the Read the Bills Act, which, among other things, would require legislators to sign an affidavit that they've actually read the bills they vote for.  (You can read about it, and read the bill itself, here.)

The Read the Bills Act would also require amending legislation to quote the words it intends to replace.  The idea is to make legislation not just available, but comprehensible.

This matters because laws are imposed on everybody but only a narrow group of dedicated lawyers and analysts are able to decode them.

Legal complexity and parliament's heavy workload empowers the bureaucracy and the government at the expense of legislature.  This isn't good for responsible democracy.

Last week the Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm released a tongue-in-cheek quiz — How well do you know the Foreign Fighters Bill?

That quiz was addressed to journalists.  It could have just as easily been addressed to his fellow politicians.

Abbott must learn from Whitlam

For a failed prime minister, Gough Whitlam was remarkably successful.

In 2012, a year before the election of the Coalition government, I featured a photo of the then-opposition leader, Tony Abbott and the headline "Be Like Gough — 75 Radical Ideas to transform Australia".

Some overseas my friends asked why a free-market public intellectual would suggest to anyone they emulate Australia's most left-wing prime minister.

They said what I did was the equivalent of telling a British Tory leader to be like Harold Wilson or an American Republican to be like Jimmy Carter.

When it was explained that measured by the positive feedback that had been received, that my blog post was far and away the most popular it has been for the past ten years, those overseas friends were astonished.

For the left, the point of Gough Whitlam is what he did.  For a free-market public intellectual the point of Gough Whitlam is not what he did — it was how he did it.

He was prime minister for less than three years and he lost more elections than he won (including leading his party to two almost-annihilations in 1975 and 1977) and yet as my blog post declared "No prime minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam".

The story of what Whitlam did has been well recited this week.  Forty years ago he started what Tony Abbott is now attempting to end — the age of entitlement.

In the year before Whitlam came to office, spending by the federal government on social security and welfare comprised 3.75 per cent of the economy.

In the year Whitlam was sacked that figure was 6.25 per cent.  In the 1974 budget, federal government spending increased by 21 per cent in real terms.  Inflation was 17 per cent a year.

As Russell Matthews and Bhajan Grewal identified in their comprehensive analysis Fiscal Federalism in Australia, by 1974-75, because of inflation, for every 1 per cent increase in personal incomes the tax collected by the government increased by 2 per cent.  Anyone who wasn't lucky enough to be a public servant in those years can attest to what this did to the country's work ethic.

Meanwhile, young people at university were told by the government their education was free.  It's a worry many of those students believed, and still believe it.

Julia Gillard wrote a few days ago about how her life was changed because of free university education.

AT LEAST HE HAD A VISION

The reason a free-market public intellectual urged Tony Abbott to "be like Gough" was because Whitlam had vision and ambition.

It might have been vision and ambition for the wrong things — but it was vision and ambition nonetheless.

In 1974, when Whitlam couldn't get his legislation through the Senate, he called a double dissolution election — winning it (narrowly).  Whitlam moved quickly.

My blog post talked about what happens after politicians have been in power for a year — "The support of voters drains.  Oppositions organise.  Scandals accumulate.  The clear air for major reform becomes smoggy.  Worse, governments acclimatise to being in government ... By the second year, even (a) very promising minister can get lazy ... MPs start thinking of the next election."

Also, it's not too long after a new government settles in that "polished and politically savvy public servants" start to assert their own agendas.

Vision and ambition aren't the sole preserve of the left.

Thatcher, Reagan and Howard all had vision and ambition.  In fact it was more difficult for those three to achieve what they did than it was for Whitlam because they didn't have the support of their respective countries' cultural and political elites.  Whitlam swam with the tide.  Thatcher, Reagan, and Howard did not.

For the Abbott government to wind back the size and influence of the state in this country and to reduce the amount of money the government takes out of people's pockets requires just as much vision and ambition as Whitlam had — if not more — given how big government has become.  That's why Tony Abbott should "be like Gough".

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The ABC debate: we have Mamamia and BuzzFeed, we don't need the ABC anymore

The arguments for a publicly funded ABC are weaker today than they ever have been.

If there ever were a persuasive case for a lavishly taxpayer-funded public broadcaster in Australia, the digital age has fundamentally undermined it.

The digital age has radically reduced — some would say even abolished — the barriers to entry in the media industry.  While you once would have required hefty finance for a printing press, radio or TV transmission towers and studios, citizens now have the capacity to publish and broadcast from their mobile phones.

While the media industry in Australia has unquestionably fallen on hard times, on at least one measure it is stronger than ever before:  diversity.  The lowering of barriers to entry has allowed a thousand flowers to bloom — Australians now have access to news and current affairs from more sources than ever before.  Consider the impact and success of recent arrivals like The Guardian and the Daily Mail, BuzzFeed as well as older players like Crikey, New Matilda and even Mamamia.  This diversity has been replicated in the entertainment space too, and will be substantially augmented when services like Netflix finally arrive in Australia.

Australians of course now also have easy access to the best news and current affairs from around the world.  While many lament the loss of foreign correspondents, their role is far less important in a world where you can instantly access local reports from the region that interests you most.

The resources of government are always limited.  Any expenditure has to be justified, because a dollar spent on public broadcasting is a dollar that can't be spent on health, education, defence — or, ideally, returned to the taxpayer.

The continued justification of the $1 billion of taxpayer funds received by the ABC must rest on it providing a service that no one else can.  This golden age of media diversity begs the question:  what does the ABC provide that no one else can?

Children's entertainment?  Available cheaply online.  International news?  Easily accessible from more sources than ever before.  Coverage of Australian politics and current affairs?  Offered by a more diverse range of perspectives today than ever before.  Rolling 24-hour news coverage?  Sky News.  Lists of Gough Whitlam's most memorable quotes?  That's what BuzzFeed is for.

Arguably the most unique offerings on the ABC are its rural and regional coverage and its emergency services broadcasting.  But these are a tiny fraction of the ABC's activities, and could be much more efficiently delivered by direct grants through a competitive tender process.

The ABC's online services, on the other hand, clearly compete in a very well-serviced market.  There's no shortage of opinion online, and yet the ABC maintains The Drum to cater for this.  The ABC's online news is comprehensive, and also duplicates much of what's on offer from established newspapers.

This is particularly important when the ongoing viability of newspapers depends upon their ability to charge — either through advertising or paywalls — for something the ABC provides at no cost.  The ABC is certainly not responsible for all the woes of traditional media companies, but its competition online is not helping and will continue to threaten the business models of commercial news organisations.

Managing director Mark Scott justifies the ABC's online activities by pointing out their charter requires it.  But the ABC charter was only amended to specify its online scope in 2013, and the ABC's aggressive push online long predates it.  The truth is Scott and his board clearly see the ABC's online activities as central to its ongoing relevance, and were already investing heavily in it absent any encouragement from government.

Scott's recent speech at the University of Melbourne clearly outlines this philosophy.  Scott has been running an impressive rear-guard action to defend the ABC's continued generous taxpayer funding.  In what was perhaps the most blatantly political speech by an ABC managing director, he directly contradicted Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull's claim that savings can be made from the ABC budget without affecting programming.  The speech was loaded with thinly veiled threats about the political consequences of a democratically elected government altering the ABC's funding in any way.

This leaves the government with little choice but to press ahead with its proposed cuts.  If Turnbull backs down in the face of Scott's attempted intimidation, future ABC managing directors (and the heads of any government agency wishing to defend their turf) will understand that their political interventions will be rewarded.

But these cuts should just be the first step.  The ABC is long overdue for a comprehensive inquiry into the scope — not just the efficiency — of its activities.  Any fair-minded inquiry will demonstrate that much of what the ABC does today is already being done by others.

IBA climate report's ''safe environment'' right is a war on democracy

Climate change activists have lost the public debate and now seek to push their radical agenda outside of democratic processes.

The International Bar Association report into "Achieving Justice and Human Rights in an Era of Climate Disruption" is the most recent example of this new war on democracy.  The report was ­presented this week at the IBA's annual conference in Tokyo.

It sets out a deep green, leftist agenda, demanding action to bring about "climate justice".

The recommendations of the IBA Climate Change Justice and Human Rights Taskforce Report include the adoption of a "human right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment", the creation of a new international environmental court and for trade agreements to favour environmental objectives over economic ones.

Of course, there is no such thing as a human right to a "safe environment".  But the IBA thinks one should be made up.

It is a hopelessly flawed and dangerous concept.  Human rights are not a means of achieving political ends.  They represent the ideas at the heart of individual human liberty.

Yet the IBA report makes an explicit argument for the creation of a new human right in pursuit of a nakedly political objective.  As if they can be simply plucked from the air.  But human rights are ­static.  They don't change with the political fads of the day.

And that's the great strength of human rights.  As fixed protections of the most basic human freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of thought and conscience and religion — they don't discriminate and they don't confer privilege.

But the IBA wants to change all of that.

On page four of the report the authors reveal their intentions by explaining:  "The global response to (climate change) has to date largely been conducted under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its implementing mechanism, the Kyoto Protocol.  Every year, States Parties to both treaties meet with a view to progressing negotiations, though success has proved ­famously elusive."

In other words, the democratic process (such that it is) hasn't yielded the results the IBA wants.  So now it's time to override democracy.  It's time for the lawyers and judges to step in.

The recommendations to create a human right to a "safe environment" and a new court to adjudicate disputes brought under this shiny new cause of ­action are the key proposals in the IBA report.  They would allow ­individuals and groups like Greenpeace to sue democratically elected governments under the new international legal regime.

Implementing these proposals would represent the wholesale transfer of environmental policy from the democratic realm to the legal realm.  It would replace debate with litigation.

Perhaps this is exactly what we should expect from a body populated by lawyers and judges.  The regime would create a potentially significant amount of work for international and human rights lawyers (including many of the authors of the report).

But lawyers have a duty to ­uphold legal traditions and to ­respect the rule of law.

And this means recognising limitations of the law and the importance of distinct boundaries between legal and political spheres.  Two Australians are members of the taskforce responsible for the report — Chief ­Justice Brian Preston of the NSW Land and Environment Court and Professor Jane McAdam of the University of NSW.

Preston seems oblivious to the fact that the report presents as a strategy document for a radical Left overhaul of the legal system.  As he explained on these pages earlier this month:  "In our early discussions we were trying to ensure we did not take a particular viewpoint aligning ourselves with one sort of faction or another."

It's unclear what happened by the time the later talks took place because the bias of the report couldn't be clearer.

At this point there are a couple of things that must occur.  First, the recommendations contained within the IBA report should be completely rejected by the commonwealth government, on grounds that they are anti-democratic and economically destructive.  Second, the IBA should desist from further promotion of any particular political agenda.

If the IBA or anyone else is truly interested in justice for the world's poor it should heed the wise words of Stephen Galilee, CEO of the NSW Minerals Council, who made the point that "justice for the world's vulnerable must also include access to the cheap and reliable energy that can lift them out of poverty."

Of course this isn't what green activists want to hear.  But thankfully it's a truth of which prime minister Tony Abbott is keenly aware.

As he sensibly noted last week:  "Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an ­essential part of our economic ­future, here in Australia, and right around the world."

The WHO has failed the Ebola disaster

What is the point of elaborate and expensive international bureaucracies if they are unable to deal with cross-border crises?

The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) has completely botched the Ebola disaster sweeping West Africa.

That's not my assessment, but the assessment of the WHO itself.

Ebola has now killed more than 4500 people, mostly in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.  It's the largest outbreak of the virus in history.

Over the weekend the Associated Press published details of an internal WHO report outlining the organisation's mistakes, information failures, staff incompetence, and governance problems tackling the crisis.

"Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall," the document apparently says.

The report isn't public — it's a draft — and WHO doesn't want to talk about it until it has been "fact-checked".  But WHO's failures have been publically and tragically evident long before now.

Months before WHO declared Ebola a global health emergency in August, aid agencies in West Africa were saying the disease was out of control.

In March, Médecins Sans Frontières was talking about "an unprecedented epidemic regarding the distribution of cases" in Guinea.  WHO spokespeople actively rejected that characterisation.

Even as late as July 30 WHO leadership said it was "pessimistic" to suggest that the Ebola outbreak was an international health emergency, as this Washington Post article reports.

It wasn't until August 8 that WHO finally relented and announced that the Ebola outbreak was "an extraordinary event" demanding an extraordinary response.

This is exactly the sort of crisis WHO was created to prevent.  But it delayed, denied, and obfuscated for months.

WHO was formed at the end of WWII, but its roots stretch back to the mid-19th century.

It's hard to think of a better candidate for international collaboration than infectious disease.  Outbreaks of cholera in Western Europe in 1832 and 1849 led to the first international efforts on health.  The reasoning was simple.  Cholera, and other diseases like the plague and yellow fever, paid no heed to national borders.  Controlling them would require cooperation.

This policy need remains.  The Ebola crisis demands an international solution.  Individual countries need assistance.  Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world.  Ebola is one of the hardest diseases to manage.  And cooperation is needed to prevent it from spreading.  Ebola's long incubation period — up to 21 days — means it can travel far from the place of infection.

So this is exactly the sort of crisis where international organisations should be proactive.

But WHO is directed by the World Health Assembly — an assembly of the health ministers and delegations of its 194 member states.

And that assembly is more interested in nanny state paternalism and sociology-masquerading-as-medicine than infectious disease.

The May meeting of the assembly opened with a speech by the Director General that WHO would "end childhood obesity" and focus on the health consequences of climate change and inequality.

The assembly spent its time talking about non-communicable diseases (cancer, diabetes and so forth), nutrition, and gender-based violence.

As the Ebola crisis has been developing WHO leadership has been hard at work hosting an anti-tobacco conference and pushing for increased cigarette taxes.

You may think these are all important topics.  Yet they're far away from what international health cooperation ought to be best at:  the management of cross-border pandemics.

Non-communicable diseases demand national solutions.  Pandemics demand international solutions.  Resources are scarce, and WHO increasingly spends them on the former rather than the latter.

Nor is WHO's distance from its core mission justified by any reputation for bureaucratic excellence.

The organisation has been criticised for decades for being heavy politicised, for its cronyism, for its excessive bureaucracy, and for its unwieldy structure.  (So it's a pretty typical United Nations body in that sense.)

One former WHO assistant director general wrote after the 2010 Haiti cholera outbreak that WHO was dysfunctional and coming "closer and closer to irrelevancy".  Global health academics write about WHO's "crisis of leadership".

Recent funding problems caused by the global financial crisis have led it to focus even more on non-communicable diseases.  As for pandemics, WHO's plan has been to promulgate health regulations and let individual countries sort themselves out.  But this isn't much help for poor countries like Liberia.

Now, as the New York Times reports, the entire pandemic and epidemic scientific team at WHO has just 52 permanent employees.  Until this year it had just one Ebola expert.

WHO can complain about budget troubles all it likes but in a $4 billion organisation this is pathetic.

Thank God for civil society organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières.

Perhaps nothing WHO could have done would have prevented the crisis taking the course it has so far.  Tackling infectious disease is hardest where institutions and infrastructure are worst, as they are in Liberia.

But that's a hypothetical.  The fact is, by its own assessment, WHO failed badly.

The Ebola crisis has exposed a dangerous weakness in the international security framework — a weakness caused by caused by bureaucratic incompetence and a deliberate decision to emphasise non-communicable diseases.

Surveillance and Privacy

In August 2014, the Australian government announced it intended to require internet service providers to retain "metadata" on every customer for two years for the use of law enforcement.

A first pass at this policy, offered by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Attorney-General George Brandis, suggested the government wanted ISPs to collect the internet browsing history of all users.  A second, evidently revised version of the policy was announced a few days later by the Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.  The new version was much narrower.

Privacy is a condition;  and a highly subjective and context dependent one at that.  But we all require privacy to function and thrive.

Neither variation of the proposal is an Antipodean invention.  In 2006 the European Union's 2006 Data Retention Directive required EU member states to introduce similar sorts of mandatory data retention laws.

These proposals come on top of the revelations about the United States' National Security Agency's vast global surveillance apparatus.

Democratic countries are now faced with fundamental questions.  Can the right to privacy survive the expansion of the surveillance state?  Or more fundamentally, is privacy a value worth protecting?

There's a claim you often hear in discussions about privacy:  someone who has done nothing wrong has nothing to hide.  In other words, privacy is only a concern for those who are avoiding the law.

To the extent it is a serious argument, this claim has some serious practical problems.  First, it presumes that we can trust government agents to uphold their duties fairly.  That is not a trust which has been especially earned.  Second, it ignores the fact that the expanding reach of public law, the over-criminalisation of minor rule-breaking and the expanding scope of the regulatory state has bought more and more activity into the realm of the justice system.  Finally, law enforcement agencies and regulators operate as much by discretion as they do by commandment.  Not every law or regulation is just, or justly enforced.  It is not always obvious when you are doing wrong.

But more significantly, privacy is necessary for more than just the evasion of legitimate or illegitimate government action.

There is no consensus on how privacy ought to be defined, what its central attributes are and how it ought to be balanced with other principles such as the right to freedom of speech.  Privacy is a condition;  and a highly subjective and context dependent one at that.

But we all require privacy to function and thrive.  Let's start with the mundane.  Obviously we desire to keep personal details safe — credit card details, internet passwords — to protect ourselves against identity theft.  On top of this, we seek to protect ourselves against the judgment or observation of others.  We close the door to the bathroom.

We act differently with intimates than we do with colleagues.  We often protect our thoughts, the details of our relationships, our preferences, from prevailing social norms.  We compartmentalise.  How many people would be uncomfortable with a colleague flipping through their mobile phone — with the window into a life that such access would provide?

Public life is one in which we all play roles, heavily mediated by social norms, assessments or assumptions about the values of our peers.  Private life is a respite from that mediated world — a place we can drop our masks, abandon the petty deceptions that are necessary for smooth social interaction.

This desire for privacy applies to communications as well.  Eroding privacy undermines our liberty to speak our minds.  Thus, government surveillance interferes with the free-ness of speech.  The feeling — real or imagined — that we are being watched, or that our actions are being recorded, affects the way we express ourselves.  One 1975 study examined how the knowledge of surveillance changed stated attitudes on moral and legal questions.  The study concluded that "the threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech".

The legal scholar Louis B Schwartz illustrated how entangled free speech and privacy are by describing the characteristics of communication in private:  "Free conversation is often characterized by exaggeration, obscenity, agreeable falsehoods, and the expression of anti-social desires or views not intended to be taken seriously.  The unedited quality of conversation is essential if it is to preserve its intimate, personal and informal character."

The belief that a speaker might have to answer for, or justify, their speech, especially their speech to those with whom they have an intimate or close relationship, is a constraint on that speech.  We all understand how easy it is for others to misinterpret our words, and how speech can be willingly misconstrued.  As Cardinal Richelieu put it in his famous (and possibly apocryphal) words, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

What does this mean for the debate over surveillance?  As the recent debate over mandatory data retention has shown, the law governing telecommunications interception is complex, and the technologies it applies to even more so.  On top of these technical and legal complexities, the nature of the national security threat is unclear.  National security is a highly opaque area of public policy.

That opacity means the surveillance state is hard to control by democratic means.  In their book Privacy on the Line, Whitfield Diffie and Susan Eva Landau argued that the "very invisibility on which electronic surveillance depends for its effectiveness makes it evasive of oversight and readily adaptable to malign uses."  The Princeton academic Rahul Sagar has concluded that the challenge of democratic control is so great that we mostly have to rely on whistleblowers to learn what the surveillance state is doing in our name.

In April 2014 the European Court of Justice ruled that Europe's Data Retention Directive was unconstitutional.  In the court's view, the directive "interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data" and did so in a manner that was disproportionate to its stated objective of fighting serious crime.

Mandatory data retention has been wound back in many of the states that implemented it, in part because of the civil liberties issues raised by the European Court of Justice, and in part because the policy has not been a particularly effective law enforcement tool.

For Australia, that record, and the importance of privacy to individual flourishing, ought to create a presumption against the expansion of the surveillance state.

ANU divestment a failure of ethics

The Australian National University divesting its resources stocks is a short-sighted decision which, if replicated widely, could greatly harm our wealth-creating resource industries.

Last week the Australian National University announced it would sell its share holdings in seven companies involved in the resources sector.

The companies whose shares will be sold off by the university are Santos, Newcrest Mining, Iluka Resources, Sandfire Resources, Oil Search, Independence Group, and Sirius, representing $16 million (or about one per cent) of the ANU's $1 billion of investment holdings.

This move follows a study by consultants Corporate Analysis Enhanced Responsibility (CAER), which ranked the ANU share portfolio using a range of environmental, social and governance indicators.

The ANU decision is far from an isolated case, being a small part of a co-ordinated, and highly vocal, national and global campaign of financial divestment out of coal and other fossil fuel related activities.

In Australia, the United States and in other countries, various trusts, superannuation funds, universities, and financial institutions have already jumped on the divestment bandwagon, with a threat of similar actions by others to come.

Some proponents of the divestment agenda, such as the Green-aligned Australia Institute think tank, have argued that any criticism of divestment is nothing more than a hypocritical swipe at freedom of investor action.

Clearly, individuals and institutions can choose to buy or sell equities, or abstain from the share market entirely, on whatever basis they wish in societies, such as ours, embracing a considerable measure of economic freedom.

It could also be said the ANU decision, in isolation, will likely do little to financially harm the seven companies, given that there would certainly be potential investors willing to buy those shares the ANU divests.

But it is far from hypocritical to criticise the divestment agenda for what it truly is, a restless effort at stigmatising resource companies until such time they are deprived of the very capital needed to invest and expand operations.

It is in this regard that criticism of divestment is well placed, given the financial and economic risks of a widespread embrace of withholding equity capital from coal, gas and other natural resource exploration and production firms.

And when representatives of resource companies feel that divestment is intrinsically linked to a broader agenda to sully corporate reputations in unwarranted fashion, they have a right, as much as anybody else, to speak out against the divestment agenda.

The ANU has seemingly cherry-picked the seven companies for share divesture on questionable grounds, given the good record of the companies in indigenous community engagement, environmental remediation, and the like, although notably retaining shares in larger companies such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Woodside Petroleum.

The university's refusal to fully comply with demands for full divestment, at this time, suggests even it appreciates the well-established principle that more diversified equity portfolios provide greater prospects to achieve a sound return.

Indeed, when the best available projections from national and international energy agencies and private analysts are that global coal and gas demands will rise for decades to come, resource stock divestment appears as a foolhardy rush towards unbalanced portfolios, likely contributing to higher financial risks and lower returns.

As much as any institution, or individual, divesting themselves of resources stocks do so at their own risk, the divestment campaigner's end game of starving coalminers and others of equity capital would, if realised, have serious consequences for long run living standards.

The key argument propagated by supporters of divestment is that conventional electricity generation is associated with the release of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, and so the utilisation of these energy resources comes at a cost.

But to follow from this statement to contend that electricity generation from coal, or less-intensive carbon emitting gas, exudes an overall net cost to society is ludicrous, in light of the substantial benefits associated with conventional energy sources.

Without the coal-fired electricity predominating Australia's electricity production mix, it is impossible to contemplate a life of highly-valued economic activities generating investment and employment opportunities, a life of economic and social activities after sunset, or a life where people can escape the oppressive effects of extreme temperatures through air-conditioning or heating.

Our abundant and easily stored coal and gas resources means that Australia can disseminate these kinds of benefits more widely by playing its part in eliminating global energy poverty, whereby an estimated 1.3 people around the world still live in sufferance without electricity.

What is also not sufficiently appreciated by those arguing for divestment is that greater investment in renewable energy technologies, such as solar and wind, are not costless, either.

Wind turbines and large-scale solar farms require very extensive plots of land upon which to be established, perhaps more so than conventional electricity generation methods, and ironically require the use of steel and other materials that can only be reliably produced, with scale, through coal and other conventional energies.

Substituting renewable for conventional energy sources will likely lead to the provision of less reliable electricity for the masses, especially when, to put it bluntly, the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine.

Furthermore, on the basis of current technologies renewable energy sources produce electricity at least double the cost of coal-fired electricity, the latter which can be provided more cheaply both day and night.

This is why additional solar and wind electricity generation, as pump primed by government subsidies and regulatory holidays, has played some havoc with household electricity bills here in Australia, contributing to cost-of-living pressures.

If one is already rich and, in the case of the ANU, also has the ability to tap into taxpayer funding, it is perhaps all too easy to disengage from the latest unfashionable cause.

But the billions of poverty-stricken individuals across the developing world, and many lower-income earners around Australia, have no such luxury, and in fact desperately need more output by conventional energy companies to satisfactorily keep themselves in warmth and light.

Given the immense net benefits associated with electricity sourced from abundant, cheap, reliable coal and gas, the only ethical thing for the ANU and others engaged in divestment to do is to keep, and buy, shares in conventional energy companies.

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Book review: Triumph and Demise lifts curtain on Rudd and Gillard governments

Paul Kelly's work as editor-at-large at The Australian is distinguished by his usually rigorous political analysis and sound historical judgments.  With one of the finest journalistic minds in the country, he has talked to everyone who has counted in Canberra for more than four decades, earning the trust of key sources on both Labor and Coalition sides without compromising his mission to tell the truth.

In this fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, Kelly has produced the most authoritative and authentic account yet of one of the most astonishing periods in modern Australian history:  the six years from 2007 to 2013.  These include not just the knifing of a first-term prime minister (Kevin Rudd), who eventually backstabbed the assassin (Julia Gillard), but also the extraordinary rise of a conservative warrior (Tony Abbott), who had been widely written off.

Some of his passages, such as the account of the night on June 23, 2010, that fatally undermined not just one but two prime ministerships, or the confessions of many anti-Rudd forces that they made a historical blunder, are nothing short of masterpieces of modern journalism.  Most cabinet ministers preferred to avoid a leadership contest, Kelly reveals, but faction chiefs essentially overruled them.

The book is a sheer delight for the political connoisseur.  We learn that shortly after Abbott's elevation to the Opposition leadership, which coincided with the spectacular failure to reach a post-Kyoto climate consensus at Copenhagen, Gillard had concluded that the insular Rudd was deeply damaged in a mental sense.  He was "miserable", "depressed", and "not in the right state" to fight Abbott at the 2010 election.

Kelly further supports the evidence surrounding the night of June 23 when the PM and his deputy, in the presence of the party's elder statesman, John Faulkner, had reached a deal:  that Rudd could remain leader for a few more months.  At that point, he would either stay or go, according to Faulkner's judgment.  But the game was up in caucus anyway and Rudd was quickly dismissed.

Although Kelly is objective and well informed, there are omissions.  It would have been good to see a more substantial analysis of the changing (political) climate in Canberra during the summer of 2009-10.  Kelly is right to recognise Nick Minchin for his indispensable role in defeating not just Malcolm Turnbull's disastrous leadership but also the Rudd government's keynote legislation.

But Kelly cannot bring himself to accept that, like most media commentators, he was wrong about the politics of the emissions trading scheme.  In late 2009, for instance, he described the emissions trading system sceptics as on a "political suicide mission" who would lead the Liberal Party down "the road to ruin".

For conservatives, however, opposition to cap and tax on the eve of the Copenhagen debacle was a political godsend.  Having been in deepest valley for two years, suddenly the Coalition was on the highest mountain.  Labor never really recovered.

One other weakness of Triumph and Demise is that the system Kelly uncovers is not as dire as he says.  Sure, Opposition leaders such as Abbott and Bill Shorten have run negative campaigns, but no more than, say, Malcolm Fraser 40 years ago.  True, bipartisan support for structural reforms to ensure our future prosperity is scant today, but perhaps the Coalition's acceptance of the Hawke-Keating pro-market agenda from 1983 to 1996 was an aberration.

Certainly issues get distorted and simplified, all the more so in the relentless 24/7 news and internet environment, but the same thing happens all over the globe.  There is a national malaise, but there is no governmental crisis.  In any case, our problems pale in comparison with the rest of the world.  If an election were held in France today, for example, polls show the far-right-wing Marine Le Pen would defeat President Francois Hollande by 54 to 46 per cent.

In 2010-13 a lot of far-reaching legislation was passed, even though the prime minister had bled authority as if from an open wound.  Remember her minority government was able to introduce the carbon tax.

By comparison, Barack Obama — who won a landslide election in 2008 with super majorities of Democrats in both houses of congress — could not even persuade the US Senate to debate, much less pass, a modest climate bill that consisted of little but loopholes to the big polluters.

Still, in the growing literature on why we increasingly hate politics, the final chapter on the Australian crisis is an engaging argument.  Kelly has told a story that not only sheds new light on the failure of recent Labor governments;  he also exposes, in unflinching and graphic detail, the larger problems of contemporary Australian politics.

ANU simply playing politics with investments

The Australian National University's decision to adopt socially responsible investment criteria for managing its $1 billion investment portfolio has sparked quite a row.  An increasingly frank exchange of views between the ANU and its critics has played out in the pages of the Fairfax publication The Australian Financial Review.

Those critics have included corporate leaders, academics from other universities, an academic from the ANU itself, and both Labor and Liberal politicians, including cabinet ministers and the premier of South Australia.

Not only is it hard to see the ANU's decision standing, but there may well be change in the senior leadership team.

What would have seemed to be a fairly straightforward and routine decision — after all, few people would be surprised to read that a university would or should be "socially responsible" — has turned into a public relations disaster for the ANU.

The background to the story arose after the ANU adopted a socially responsible investment (SRI) policy and contracted out for an analysis of its current investments.  Those companies identified as not having passed SRI filters on the environment, human rights, corporate responsibility and governance would be sold from the portfolio.  Seven such companies were identified.  Then the ANU took it upon itself to adopt a name and shame policy with Vice Chancellor Ian Young describing the decision as follows:  "We should not invest in companies that cause social harm."

There is an argument that simply adopting the "Wall Street walk" rather than being an activist shareholder and improving corporate behaviour to minimise social harm is itself socially irresponsible.  But that argument doesn't even arise.  The real problem here is that it appears the ANU had not undertaken sufficient due diligence before making its decision, and then announcing that decision to the world.

Generally speaking nobody would care much if universities didn't invest in tobacco companies or land-mine manufacturers.  In fact, subject to fiduciary duties being observed few people would care much about portfolio investment decisions overall.  There would always be good reason why a large portfolio would include this stock or exclude that stock.  There are even good reasons why the ANU might have wanted to divest particular stocks — for example, they may have been overweight in some sectors, or formed the view that particular stocks would not perform as well as hoped, or simply needed the cash, and so on.

All of those reasons relate to the risk-return characteristics of the stocks themselves, or the risk-return characteristic of the overall portfolio.  Few people would want to second guess such technical considerations that relate to portfolio management.  What the ANU has done, however, is not make a technical portfolio management choice, but rather it has made a political choice.

What suggests this as being a political decision, and not an investment decision, is that the ANU council includes an individual whose day-job employer is currently recommending that investors buy two of the stocks the ANU claims are causing social harm.

Private investors can make any political choice they like;  but the ANU is not a private investor.  It is a public university, and can expect greater scrutiny of its actions than purely private organisations.

There is no credible evidence to support the argument that any of the companies named and shamed by the ANU are "doing harm" — quite the contrary.  Some of them had won state government awards for environmental rehabilitation, and engagement with indigenous communities.  One company, Santos, is listed on the Dow Jones Global Sustainability Leaders' index.  Others have received strong community support for their work and business practices.

The "ANU Seven" have had their corporate reputations trashed by a sloppy process and an arrogant public institution.  Understandably they are upset — this goes well beyond the sums of money involved and to the principle involved.

Australian universities simply do not have the social licence to trash the domestic economy or place the livelihoods of thousands of Australians at risk on a whim.  The personal preferences of university administrators should not drive the investments decisions of those institutions.  This is especially so when the basis of those investment decisions are demonstrably false.

In particular the Australian community has every right to expect that universities themselves are good corporate citizens.  That means managing their portfolios responsibly and professionally.  That means treating other players within the community with dignity and respect;  that includes the business community.  Participating in international campaigns to undermine local industry and trashing corporate reputations is not appropriate behaviour, especially for publicly funded institutions.

Perhaps the ANU senior management thought it is self-evident that business would cause social harm.  Perhaps they have bought into the notion that fossil fuel producers, and other resource companies, have become "a rogue industry" that should be shunned.  With such a world-view perhaps it is unsurprising that they didn't bother to double-check when their suspicions were confirmed by what appears to be shoddy research.

The Australian community, however, expects more and deserves better.

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National curriculum: written, but not designed

Does the national curriculum even exist?

Much press coverage of the Abbott Government's review of the national curriculum has focused on the "culture wars" bits.

The report, written by Kevin Donnelly and Kenneth Wiltshire, identifies a stark absence of Australia's Judeo-Christian and Western Civilisation heritage in the curriculum.

But the most important findings concern the national curriculum as a piece of public policy.

For the most part Donnelly and Wiltshire support a national curriculum.  But they write, almost casually, that, "If the definition of a national curriculum includes that it must be implemented comprehensively, with certainty, and consistently, then Australia does not currently have a national school curriculum."

There is widespread confusion about how tightly teaching should cohere to the curriculum.  Is the national curriculum a strict syllabus, or a "guideline", or just "a bit of a framework"?  Is it compulsory or optional?  How much can the curriculum be adapted to suit teachers and student bodies?

And, most importantly, who decides?

While in theory adopting the curriculum is a requirement for states and sectors to receive national school funding, in practice there's no way to ensure compliance.

While Donnelly and Wiltshire conclude that most stakeholders like, or have come to accept, the idea of a national curriculum in the abstract, they also find that this acceptance is based on the curriculum's vagaries.  The national curriculum is in the eye of the beholder.

For all the hundreds of pages of text that has been produced by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), in practice the curriculum is a surprisingly blank slate onto which various education players can impose their own ideas about what ought to be taught and how.  It's "all things to all people".

That is, the national curriculum is not really a national curriculum at all.

I argued on The Drum in January that the national curriculum ought to be abolished.  But what we have now is the worst of both worlds — a curriculum whose implementation is deeply uncertain and confused.

The national curriculum is a classic case study of how political imperatives churn out undercooked and poorly thought out policy programs — even when the process is handed over to a cadre of experts.

In 2008 Commonwealth education minister Julia Gillard managed to get all Australian education ministers to agree to the "Melbourne Declaration" — a statement of intent about the way forward for the national curriculum.  You can read it here.

The development of the curriculum itself was then handed over to ACARA, and ACARA got to work writing up the subjects.

But the Melbourne Declaration was a statement of broad principles whose big takeout was an overall agreement to develop a national curriculum in the first place.

The Melbourne Declaration was not an investigation into the philosophy that a national curriculum should adopt.  It was not a discussion about the educational foundation of the new curriculum.  It was not an argument for a national curriculum — it was just instructions to get one written and introduced.

Donnelly and Wiltshire call this the "missing step" problem.  There was a lot of discussion and consultation about what should go into each individual subject.  But at no time was there a detailed, rigorous investigation of what we actually wanted out of the curriculum overall, what values should underpin it (beyond motherhood statements like the "curriculum will include a strong focus on literacy and numeracy skills") and how students' time should be divided and balanced.

Hence the overcrowded subjects.  ACARA dumped more and more material in the curriculum to appease various education lobbies, untethered by any ideas of what the curriculum, as a whole, should look like.

In other words, the national curriculum was written, but never designed.

The worst example of the missing step problem is also the most controversial part of the curriculum — the so-called "cross curriculum priorities".  In the words of ACARA, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia, and sustainability are "embedded in all learning areas".

These priorities have always been Exhibit A in the case that the curriculum is deeply infused with ideological bias — one might that ideology has been embedded in all learning areas.

But why are the priorities there at all?

Donnelly and Wiltshire find that "not a lot of thought has been given to the actual concept of cross-curriculum priorities" — they seem to have been conceived by education ministers and shoehorned into the process.  It appears we're the only country that has such a thing.  "No attempt seems to have been made ... to conceptualise the cross-curriculum priorities in educational terms."

In her just published memoirs Julia Gillard says she was "adamant" that experts, not politicians, needed to design the curriculum:  "There was absolutely no political interference in the content."

But that just isn't true.  It was education ministers — professional politicians — that came up with the cross-curriculum priorities, not experts.  And the much-praised experts didn't second-guess their orders.

So much for a non-political national curriculum.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne has said the Abbott Government will take on board the findings of the Donnelly-Wiltshire review, reduce overcrowding, and bring the curriculum "back to basics".

Funnily enough that's exactly what Gillard said when she became education minister in 2007 and kicked off this national curriculum project in the first place.

An enormous amount of political capital has been vested in the national curriculum process.  For decades educationalists have treated the national curriculum as the great unpursued reform, akin to floating the dollar and lowering tariffs, and essential for our "maturing" as a nation.

That, when given the opportunity, they stuffed it up so comprehensively is a major indictment on Australia's education establishment.

Interest rate tweaks won't manufacture animal spirits

The economy is not a washing machine.  To make it work you can't just press buttons and turn dials.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote in 2012 in Antifragile:  Things that Gain from Disorder, the messiness of human action is a constant frustration to all those experts who suffer from what he calls the "Soviet-Harvard" delusion and who believe all that's required for the economy to operate the way they'd like it to is data and reason.

As Taleb points out, "a complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.  The simpler the better ... Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession."

Taleb is famous because in 2007 his book, The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable, anticipated many of the events of the global financial crisis a year later.  He is best-known for his study of the impact of seemingly random and infrequent events, such as the failure of the subprime mortgage market in Florida.

However, the consequences that flow from his work are that the more complicated the thing being regulated is, the more simple should be the regulations.

Likewise, the more complex the thing is that government is trying to influence, the more careful and gentle should be the government's interventions.

Maybe Reserve Bank of Australia staff have been reading Taleb lately.  In a series of speeches over the past few months, RBA governor Glenn Stevens and his deputies have been refreshingly honest about what they don't know.  It's the sort of honesty few politicians display.

Put simply, what the RBA says it can't work out is why, with record low interest rates and a relatively benign domestic and international outlook, local businesses are not investing.

BUSINESS INVESTMENT AT RECORD LOW

In a speech last month, assistant governor Christopher Kent identified that non-mining business investment is at a record low.  He gave a range of reasons for this, including the cost of finance and the level of the exchange rate.

One explanation stood out and it was something Stevens has talked about on more than one occasion.  But the problem is that it's not amenable to button-pressing and dial-turning by policymakers.

Kent asked whether "animal spirits are too weak?"  In his evidence to the House of Representatives standing committee on economics in August, Stevens pondered the same question.

John Maynard Keynes popularised the term in the 1930s in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, describing "animal spirits" as the "spontaneous optimism rather than the mathematical expectations" of humans.

Keynes wasn't keen on animal spirits because they're not susceptible to data and reason (or control by government), which is why things such as business confidence play such a small role in his theories.

On the other hand, for proponents of the Austrian school of economics such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek the confidence and expectations of business are central to understanding the economy.

The RBA has identified the blindingly obvious:  the animal spirits of the economy are absent.  And they're especially absent among the owners of small and medium-sized enterprises, which employ more than two-thirds of all the private-sector workers in this country.  What the RBA hasn't done is identify why animal spirits are absent.

The answer to that question is not hard to find, and in fact Stevens has given it himself when he ventured some advice:  "At some stage, hopefully sharemarket analysts and the investor community will ask fewer questions about risk reduction, and more about the company's growth strategy."  If only they would.

The problem is that in the name of eliminating risk — and protecting workers and consumers and future generations and the environment and so on — governments through ever-growing regulation have done their best to snuff out the animal spirits of business.

Changing what governments do will take time.  As we're now discovering, putting the animal spirits back into the economy is unfortunately more complicated than just pressing a few buttons and turning a few dials.

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Can we really afford to go to war?

On Tuesday morning Prime Minister Tony Abbott categorically ruled out introducing new taxes to pay for Australian participation in the third Iraq war.

Thank goodness.  Imagine that:  a war tax.  But the episode — sparked by Finance Minister Mathias Cormann's refusal to rule out such a tax over the weekend — demonstrates one thing clearly.

Despite the Abbott Government's turn towards national security and foreign policy, it just can't get away from its budget problems.

Abbott has suggested the mission might cost Australian taxpayers about half a billion dollars per year.  David Johnston, the Defence Minister, says the mission will last many months.

Let's take both those guesses with a grain of salt.  The cost of military action always blows out.

In early 2003 estimates for our participation in the invasion of Iraq were about $500 to $700 million.

John Howard thought the war would last at most several months.

In the end, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's latest Cost of Defence report, our participation ended up in the order of $3 billion over eight years.

And for all its follies, the original invasion of Iraq had relatively clear goals — overturn the Baathist regime and install a democratic government.

By contrast, this war's goals are as open-ended and obtuse as they come.

Pressed to give some indication of how the Government will measure its success, all Abbott could say was when the Islamic State is "in retreat, not in advance".

The Australian Government is talking about months, but British prime minister David Cameron is talking about years of war against the Islamic State.

Another big difference between 2003 and today:  Howard had a budget surplus.  Abbott has a deficit, a deteriorating economy, an unpredictable senate, and an unfulfilled election promise to return the budget into the black.

Joe Hockey has been trying to manage expectations as he prepares for December's mid-year economic and fiscal outlook statement.

Yet the cost of military action always seems to be a second-order issue for governments making a decision to go to war.

Financial issues always take a back seat to loftier visions about foreign policy and the role of Australia in the world, to humanitarian concerns and the stability of the geopolitical order, to questions of morality and casualties.

But the mundane reality is that military intervention is a public policy decision like any other and has to be paid for with scarce funds.

Even in peacetime defence is a notorious money sink.  The Australian Auditor-General regularly lashes defence procurement processes for poor, over-budget delivery.

(A few years ago in The Drum I noted that one of those projects to have gone 20 per cent over budget was a logistics system specifically designed to reduce waste.)

American estimates of the cost of keeping a single soldier in Afghanistan for a year range between $US815,000 and $1.4 million.  That's many multiples of a soldier's basic salary, which is between $20-30,000 per annum.

The current guess of how much it will cost to send Australian troops to the staging post in the United Arab Emirates is about $670,000 per soldier.

The high financial cost of warfare has been one of the great drivers of human history.

Indeed, liberal democracy itself was built in the shadow of war finance.  Tudor and Stuart kings found themselves reluctantly asking parliament for more taxation in order to fight on the European continent.  Parliament used these opportunities to eke out more power relative to the monarchy.

The First World War gave Australia the federal income tax.  This was an innovation post-war politicians were happy to retain once hostilities were over.

Between the wars the reparations scheme imposed on Germany to pay for Allied war debts sparked the rise of Nazism.

In WWII Western governments introduced income tax withholding — a neat little innovation that obscured how much tax the government takes.

The cost of stationing troops in West Berlin during the Cold War nearly sunk the Bretton Woods system of managed exchange rates — and therefore the entire global monetary framework.

The spiralling cost of the Vietnam War spelled the end of the Kennedy-Johnson liberal reform program and created the setting for the rise of the conservative movement.

The American fiscal crisis has in large part been caused by the $2 trillion cost of the 2003 Iraq War.  (Recall that the federal budget was already broken when the subprime meltdown hit.)  We can blame that fiscal crisis for the dysfunctional nature of contemporary Washington politics.

Those ambitious neoconservatives who sought to reshape the world after September 11 imagined the financial cost of their military interventionism as a minor detail.  Who could be so crude as to quibble about money when democracy and liberty was at stake?

More than a decade later few American taxpayers would be so blasé.

An old military saying is amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.  Given the state of the Commonwealth budget, perhaps we ought to start talking finance first.

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Politicians must deliver on competition policy reforms

The recently released draft report into competition policy proposes several bold steps for reform, but will there be the political will to deliver?

One of the major highlights of the heady microeconomic reform era in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s was a national competition policy encouraging all levels of government to wipe away regulatory and other impediments to the exercise of economic competition.

But, as with seemingly all other efforts to improve our economic potential, and in this case by unleashing competitive incentives by those engaged within the supply side of the economy, the competition policy reforms have remained incomplete, and in other cases compromised, by the interactions of populist political deliberation and vested interest lobbying.

As was so often the case Adam Smith had it right when he said, "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public".

And when those people of the same trade happen to descend upon the centres of political power to influence and persuade, it is almost certain the policy outcome is that industries come to be sheltered by regulatory and other government favouritisms.

In turn, that means the politically uninfluential consumers end up having to bear the brunt of lower-quality goods and services at higher prices.

To a considerable extent, the latest draft report into competition policy, headed by esteemed economist Professor Ian Harper, has picked up where Fred Hilmer left off over two decades ago, repeating calls to inject further competition into pharmacies, agricultural marketing arrangements, professional licensing and standards, and taxicab operations.

Even so, the operating environment affecting these sheltered industries, and all others, has shifted seismically over the relatively brief span of 20 years.

A far less encumbered international trading environment enables consumers to enjoy a wide array of cheaper imports, while the disruption of conventional ways of producing and retailing, in the form of the internet and smartphone apps, empowers consumers to avoid incumbent suppliers too slow footed to provide the best value at the lowest price.

If anything, these influences reinforce the need to reform the longstanding sectoral holdouts on competition policy, and, indeed, to extend the reform envelope to new, and supposedly exempt, segments of the economy.

It is for this reason that Harper's suggestion to more deeply extend competition policy principles into public sector services is also welcome, particularly when many lower income earners lack the financial means of using anything other than services often monopolistically provided by governments.

As the draft competition policy review paper states, "given the size and pervasiveness of government in the Australian economy, as funder, provider and regulator, there is a need to consider new ways to foster diversity, choice, and responsiveness in government services."

According to Harper and his colleagues on the review panel, governments should separate funding, regulation, and service provision roles to avoid any conflicts of interest impeding competition especially in human services, and embrace a "choice presumption" by allowing portable funding and providing performance information.

In the draft report, governments are also encouraged to be open and flexible in allowing a wider range of entities, including not for profits and co-operatives, to provide services traditionally assumed by governments.

This is a particularly important point, as this sort of reform would raise the prospect of transcending the conventional privatisation debate into a broader agenda of "depoliticisation" for human and other services, whereby contestability and choice is extended beyond those, perhaps limited, segments of the public sector deemed amenable to for profit provision.

Another welcome feature of the Harper report is its reference to the impact of existing land-use regulations, particularly planning schemes and zoning restrictions, on restricting new entrants into markets, and impeding general competitive forces within the economy.

It is noted in the draft report that "the operation of planning systems can create barriers to entry, diversification or expansion, including through limiting the number, size, operating model and mix of business.  This has the effect of reducing the responsiveness of suppliers to the needs of consumers."

Most Australians have experienced, or have at least seen, the pernicious effects of land-use regulations:  astronomical housing prices and rents in a vast continent;  heady commercial property rents feeding into high prices for inner city services;  and even political corruption as property developers and similar interests aim to curry favour with ministers and regulators.

While competition policy issues in recent years seem to have been largely centred upon claims and counter claims about big supermarket chains predatorily sweeping smaller grocery stores out of the market, the costs posed by rigid and prescriptive land-use planning and zoning have been largely ignored.

The Harper draft report into competition policy makes for a welcome change in this respect, and would hopefully serve as catalyst for an extensive liberalisation of land-planning regimes.

Arguably the most controversial suggestion is the proposal that legislation be extended preventing a corporation, with a "substantial degree" of market power, engaging in conduct with the effect, or likely effect, of substantially lessening market competition.

This so called "effects test" has been rejected by previous government inquiries, with one past review into the Trade Practices Act, chaired by Sir Daryl Dawson, finding that "the addition of an effects test would increase the risk of regulatory error," and could discourage competitive conduct for fear of litigation.

In the competitive market, some firms will, as a matter of course, be threatened, or even confront the reality, of financial losses or market exit, as their attempts to economically please the buying public are found wanting, and this should only encourage them to improve their future efforts.

But there is a worry that a legislative effects test could exert a chilling effect upon competition, for the sake of protecting less-efficient market participants, and so one might hope the review panel would reconsider its stance on this issue between now and the release of the final report.

Setting aside the odd policy wrinkle here or there, the Harper draft competition policy review provides an ambitious roadmap to extend competition in places where it is greatly needed.

But with the governments currently preoccupied with military adventures, snooping on their own citizens, and fixing up often self imposed budget messes, it unfortunately seems far from certain, at this stage, that consumer interests for a more competitive Australia would even get a look into the political agenda.

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