No Room For Differing Views

"What happened to me has a massive chilling effect on debate," says physics professor Peter Ridd, who was sacked by James Cook University last week after saying other scientists, including former colleagues, have exaggerated the dangers to the Great Barrier Reef.

"Any scientist who might agree with me on the reef will just keep their mouth shut, it's just too risky."

The well-published professor in coastal oceanography, reef systems and peer review, and a former head of JCU's school of physics, allegedly has "engaged in serious misconduct, including denigrating the university and its employees, and not acting in the best interests of the university", according to vice-chancellor Sandra Harding in the letter terminating his employment.

The sacking stems from comments the 29-year JCU veteran made on Sky News that "science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated" and those who claim problems with the reef are too "emotionally attached to their subject" — views already aired in his chapter in the book Climate Change:  The Facts 2017.  Ridd's academic freedom supposedly has fallen foul of the institution's code of conduct.  A disturbing pattern is emerging on Australia campuses.  The JCU experience is typical of the breakdown of free intellectual inquiry at our universities;  of debate replaced by dogma.

"I'm a lefty myself, but a monoculture is always a risk, whether you're part of it or against it," says Bill von Hippel, acting head of psychology at the University of Queensland.  "I'm very worried that the left-leaning ideology of most members of our field might skew the nature of the questions we ask and the way we interpret our findings."

Ridd has taken his fight to the Federal Circuit Court on the grounds that termination of his employment is a breach of his contractual right to academic freedom.  "We need universities to actually encourage different viewpoints so that we get argument," he says.

I have spoken to more than a dozen Australian academics across disciplines, universities, and the political spectrum who are concerned about the suffocating monoculture that is gripping our universities, jeopardising research and teaching.

These academics are members of Heterodox Academy, a network of 1865 professors from the US, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.  They come from the political left and right but are united in promoting viewpoint diversity:  a range of perspectives challenging each other in the pursuit of reason, truth and progress.

Heterodox is premised on the work of co-founder and chairman Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University.  Haidt's moral foundations theory contends that progressives have a more narrow moral palette than conservatives.  Progressives prioritise care and fairness;  the moral palette of conservatives includes these concerns, in addition to group loyalty, submission to legitimate authority and disgust.  Haidt has found that these moral intuitions drive progressives and conservatives to different world views.

This poses a danger for research.  Academics, like everyone else, are not immune from confirmation bias (interpreting information to confirm pre-existing beliefs) and motivated reasoning (developing logic to support pre-existing beliefs).  To combat these biases, individuals with different opinions need to be put together to "disconfirm the claims of others", Haidt says.

It is necessary for conservative academics to challenge progressive academics, and vice versa.  This is the essence of the Socratic method, of claim and counterclaim in pursuit of the truth, and it is what drives intellectual inquiry.

Universities, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, are dominated by progressives.  A US study found less than 10 per cent of academics identify as conservative, while another study found 39 per cent of US campuses have no Republicans.  The situation in Australia appears to be similar.  Universities seek gender and racial diversity but they are missing the diversity that is crucial for their effective functioning:  viewpoint diversity.

"When everyone shares the same politics and prejudices, the disconfirmation process breaks down," Haidt says.

Academics interviewed by me tell of a variety of ways that the progressive monoculture limits free intellectual inquiry in Australia.  Important projects do not receive funding.  Challenging papers are not published.  Important issues are not investigated.  Studies are designed to reach predetermined outcomes.  Erroneous research is misguiding society.  Academics self-censor.  Administrators censor heretics.  Students are exposed to fewer ideas and are marked down or failed for expressing a different perspective.

"Essentially, I was reprimanded for discussing issues that could make students feel uneasy or uncomfortable," an Australian academic tells me on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from the university and shunning by colleagues.

This same academic was condemned by university administrators for using challenging stories from Haidt's moral foundations theory in his teaching.  The stories, which include necrophilia, incest and cannibalism, are designed to teach students how instinctive emotional responses come before logical reasoning.

"Students are adults, not children, and within a university it should be possible to expose students to material that, even if it was distasteful and confronting, is of educational value," the academic says.

Administrators demanded the stories be removed from a new online course on ethics, despite no complaints from on-campus students in the past.  The academic reluctantly agreed to the censorship and thought this was the end of affair.  However, word about the stories spread.  Several months later the academic was reprimanded again at his annual performance review for teaching "culturally insensitive" stories.  He believes he was punished with an increased workload.  Cultural sensitivity is the progressive political belief of not offending those of non-Western backgrounds.

"Going down the path of 'cultural appropriateness' recommended by my supervisor is condemning universities to a future of pre-Enlightenment obscurantism.  For example, most of my students come from countries where homosexuality is both illegal and subject to social censure.  Does this mean that I should no longer discuss homosexuality in my teaching?  In conversing with Saudi students I have discovered that some of them believe that women should not hold political office.  Should I therefore avoid referring to female politicians in my lectures?"

Ideological monocultures create intolerance and hostility.  When you never hear opposing perspectives and spend time only with people who reinforce your ideas, it breeds overconfidence.  You come to think that the people expressing opposing perspectives are intellectually deficient or driven by sinister goals.

"If you are exposed to just one set of ideas, you're not going to understand the other person's perspective," Matthew Blackwell, an economics and anthropology student at the University of Queensland, warns from his experience.  "And even if they do begin to try to tell you their perspective, because you're so used to an entirely different way of thinking you're not going to be receptive at all."

As a result, students and academics who challenge the zeitgeist are stigmatised by their colleagues and university administrations.

One academic tells of a marker recommending a fail grade to a student thesis critical of postmodernist interpretations of terrorism.  "Having read parts of his thesis I am certain that it did not deserve a fail," the academic says.  "The only reason that I can think of for the examiner seeking to fail his thesis is ideologically based animus against his argument."

An Australian psychology academic was investigated by his university for setting an assignment that surveyed students on gender differences with regards to jealously.  "The underlying theory is evolutionary — jealousy is linked to biological sex and males and females respond differently," the lecturer tells me.

A student accused the academic of "transphobia" in a pejorative Facebook post and com­plained to the university.  The administrators spent months investigating, the lecturer was required to attend hours of meetings, and the dean of the school monitored lectures, ostensibly to make the student feel "safe".

Social psychology literature has established that men respond more strongly to sexual infidelity, and women more strongly to emotional infidelity.  The survey — which included "male", "female" and "prefer not to say" options — was designed for students to test this theory and write up the results.  The academic was never given a written complaint or formally cleared of wrongdoing and almost left his job because of the inquisition.

"I find myself having to be extremely careful, having a real anxiety about going into lectures and classes, and am very fearful of saying something that students find offensive," the academic says.  "That affects my teaching, it makes me feel uncomfortable, it makes it difficult to think and present freely and clearly."

There have been many cases of censorship across Australian campuses.  Last year, Monash University and the University of Sydney capitulated to demands for course content censorship — including a quiz and a map — by nationalistic Chinese international students.  The University of Western Australia cancelled a contract to host "sceptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg's Australian Consensus Centre, and no Australian university was willing to host it.

The monoculture has institutional backing through university policies and censorship.

My Free Speech on Campus Audit 2017, which analysed more than 165 policies and actions at Australia's 42 universities, found that four in five universities had policies or had taken action that was hostile to free speech.

University policies prevent "insulting" and "unwelcome" comments, "offensive" language and, in some cases, "sarcasm" and "hurt feelings".  Some policies tell students and academics they are "expected" to value "social justice", a progressive political notion.  These misguided policies make it difficult to explore controversial ideas without fear of reprisal.

Florian Ploeckl, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Adelaide, says many acad­emics bite their tongue on con­troversial topics.  "If working on these topics is essentially futile, why should we make ourselves into targets for Twitter mobs and social media crusades?"

Ploeckl warns that academics instead are ceding the space to "activists with their fundamentalist convictions" who do not approach topics scientifically.  "Funding is easier and more plentiful if you pick the right topic, publishing is easier if you don't rock the boat and life in the department is easier if you see the world in the same way your colleagues do," he says.

David Baker, a lecturer in history at Macquarie University, says while most academics are open to diverse viewpoints, "there is a small group of academics, whose behaviour can only be described as sinister, who are in the business of brainwashing their students and who will try to harm the careers of colleagues they deem heretical to their ideology ... Grades can be devastated, careers can be cut short and there is very little one can do about it."

The lack of viewpoint diversity ultimately has an effect on the quality of public discourse.  "Universities and academics are uncritically accepting some theories, teaching them to students, and they are finding their way into society, influencing businesses and political debate," says Hardy Hulley, a finance senior lecturer at University of Technology Sydney who identifies as "pretty liberal".

The late Stephen Hawking once warned:  "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it's the illusion of knowledge."  Our ability to expose errors and discover truths is hampered by lack of free and open discussion.

There are reasons to be optimistic.  The existence of Heterodox Academy indicates a willingness by some to challenge the orthodoxy.  "I joined Heterodox because I wanted to pull myself away from my echo chamber and consider more diverse viewpoints," says Lydia Hayward, a psychology researcher at the University of NSW.

In the US, some institutions are staking their reputation on being open to debate.

The University of Chicago has declared that "it is not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable or even deeply offensive".  Thirty-five US universities have adopted this statement.

Federal Education and Training Minister Simon Birmingham, in response to the concerns raised by Heterodox Academy members, has stressed the importance of views being challenged.

"Any university that limits constructive debate doesn't just do themselves a huge disservice, they let down the Australian public and taxpayers who chip in most of their university revenue," he tells me.  "Univer­sity leaders who aren't fostering debate on campus need to remember that the autonomy they are granted comes with the responsibility to understand the social lic­ence taxpayers give them to operate."

It's Not Just Tax And Spend But Tax And Lie

If Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull were corporate CEOs, they'd be done for misleading and deceptive conduct.

They claim that the 2018-19 Budget will cut taxes.  To most people, this would mean the amount of tax they pay next year will be less than what they pay this year.  Yet, the government's own Budget figures show that taxes are rising rapidly year after year after year.

Tax receipts are forecast to rise from a record $473 billion in 2018-19 to $554 billion in 2021-22 — a 17 per cent increase, or 4 per cent per year — more than twice the rate of growth to inflation and wages.

I can hear you saying it now:  the population is growing so that means the tax burden per capita isn't as bad.  Yes, the population is growing.  But it isn't growing as fast as taxes.  In fact, just about half the rate.  So tax per capita will rise over the next four years.

When the government says it is cutting taxes, what it means is that the tax burden will continue to grow, but just at a slower rate than what otherwise would have been the case.  This isn't a cut.  It's just a slower increase.

The reason taxes are growing is because spending is growing.  The only line that matters in the Budget is the line that specifies spending.  If that number is getting bigger then taxes will grow, either now or in the future.  And growing it is.  From a record $484 billion this year, spending is projected to grow to $573 billion by 2021-22.  Every single dollar of this spending must be paid back with higher taxes.  Those taxes will be raised either today or deferred via higher debt into the future.

It is this second option that governments, including the current one, have pursued year after year.  Gross government debt grew by an eye-watering 380 per cent over the past decade to reach a record amount of an expected $561 billion next financial year.  This is projected to rise further still to $578 billion by 2021-22.

The lack of spending restraint is what makes the Treasurer's much-bragged about "tax speed limit" unworkable.  The "tax speed limit" seeks to cap the tax-to-GDP ratio at 23.9 per cent.  This is good, at least in theory.  But you cannot have a tax speed limit if you don't have a spending speed limit.  And on this count, there are no signs the government is looking to cap spending.

Of course, it's easy to bash the government.  They are the ones that have to put out fully costed policies.  It's much easier for oppositions to get away with half-baked, un-costed, and abstract rhetoric.  And Labor should not be let off the hook.  It was Labor, under Gough Whitlam that first destroyed the Budget by increasing spending by an unbelievable 20 per cent in 1974-75 and 16 per cent in 1975-76, in real terms.  It was Labor again, in 2008-09, that increased spending by 13 per cent in real terms, which sent the Budget into a debt and deficit spiral.

What this shows more than anything is that Labor, and the political left more generally, have largely owned Australian politics for the past four decades.

On virtually every front whatever Labor offers the Coalition will deliver, but in a more cost-effective and gradual manner.  This can be seen on everything from renewable energy subsidisation to Gonski education funding, to the NBN, to the NDIS.

The Coalition has been reduced to being a tax collector to pay for ever more lavish spending programs in health, education, and social services and welfare.

The issue is that this concedes the higher moral ground to Labor.  It presupposes that the left-wing political program of bigger government, smaller civil society, and more welfare instead of more work is fundamentally correct.  The quibble is only over the fiscal "sustainability" of it all.

But here's the rub.  It isn't sustainable, no matter which party holds the levers of power.  So long as governments maintain a dominant role in the education, health, and social services sectors at the expense of civil society, the call on the taxpayer will continue to rise.

The time will come, eventually, when those in power will need to be honest with Australians.  And the honest thing to say is this:  unless they change their behaviour, both major parties are going to send the nation broke.

Farmers Know Best How To Care For Land On Which They Depend

Australian farmers are under ­unprecedented attack by environmental groups and left-leaning political parties.  It's time government ministers put the gloves on and jumped into the ring.  On this page last week, Lyndon Schneiders, national director of the Wilderness Society, argued that land-clearing by farmers is a "key threat" to the environment and more must be done to counteract it.  In doing so, Schneiders called the issue "complex".  However, there is nothing complex about it.

We are talking about private farmers who decide to develop their own privately held land.  It isn't the government's land.  And it surely isn't the Wilderness ­Society's land.  Government ­bureaucrats and green groups have no business telling farmers what they can and cannot do on their private land.

If the Wilderness ­Society is so concerned about land-clearing, then they should pay farmers to forgo productive land development in order to conserve vegetation.  Or, better yet, they should purchase their own land and use that for conservation purposes.

What is perhaps more disappointing, though, is the use of misleading figures.  Schneiders estimates that 1.2 million hectares of land were cleared in Queensland over three years following the Newman government's sensible relaxation of land-clearing laws.  Yet what the Wilderness ­Society doesn't say is that this represents just a 0.7 per cent ­increase in ­agricultural use ­because of land development, or just 0.23 per cent a year.  In any case, about two-thirds of ­vegetation management carried out by farmers is to ­control ­regrowth areas that had previously been cleared.

This is why over the approxi­mate period that the Newman laws were in place, the gross value of agriculture commodities produced in Queensland increased almost 30 per cent — about double the national increase — and it became Australia's most valuable agricultural state.  But you won't read that in the Wilderness Society's piece, either.

Nor will you read the fact that employment in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sector in Queensland has grown 23 per cent since 2014.  Or that the agriculture sector is home to about 85,000 businesses, many of them small and family-owned, and all of which are under threat from more government regulation.

However, what is even more concerning is that the Wilderness Society has launched what is just another prong in a co-ordinated attack on farmers.

Just last month the Labor Party included a "land-clearing trigger" in its national party platform.  Make no mistake, a land-clearing trigger would be the greatest attack on farmers since settlement.  It could potentially see every proposed instance of agricultural development subject to approval from the federal environment minister.  It would be nothing short of de facto nationalisation of privately held farmland, meaning Canberra-based bureaucrats would have veto power of farm development.  These moves have nothing to do with the environment.  Rather, it is all about control.

What is needed is less, not more, power in Canberra.  Encouragingly, the government is reviewing how to cut the amount of red tape­ ­imposed on farmers by the federal environmental laws.  The best thing the federal government could do is completely remove ­itself from the regulation of environmental matters.  Farmers ­already have to deal with enough meddling bureaucrats at the local and state level, let alone having to contend with out-of-touch, overpaid and underworked Canberra-based officials.

In fairness to Schneiders, he does get one thing right when he says "the vast majority of farmers care about the environment and know the future is all about sustainability".  Yet this completely undermines the entire case for government intervention.  Farmers know that the vitality of their land depends on their ability to properly manage it.  Only they, and not distant bureaucrats, know how to best do this.

It's time governments got out of the way and let farmers do what only they can do:  produce high-value food, fibre and grain while being responsible custodians of their land for the next generation of Australian farmers.

The Climate Inquisition Burns A Heretic

Back in 2016, when I asked Peter Ridd if he would write a chapter for the book I was editing I could not possibly have envisaged it could contribute to the end of his thirty-year career as a university professor.

Considering that Peter enrolled at James Cook University as an undergraduate back in 1978, he has been associated with that one university for forty years.

Since Peter was fired on May 2, the university has attempted to remove all trace of this association:  scrubbing him completely from their website.

But facts don't cease to exist because they are removed from a website.  The university has never challenged the veracity of Peter's legitimate claims about the quality of much of the reef science:  science on which billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research is being squandered.  These issues are not going away.

Just yesterday, May 18, Peter lodged papers in the Federal Court.  He is going to fight for his job back.

If you care about the truth, science and academic freedom, please donate to help bring this important case to court.

It doesn't matter how little or how much you donate.  Just make sure you are a part of this important effort by donating to Peter's GoFundMe campaign.

Peter deliberately chose to frame the book chapter about the replication crisis that is sweeping through science.

In his chapter — The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Coral and Problems with Policy Science — Peter details the major problems with quality assurance when it comes to claims of the imminent demise of the reef.

Policy science concerning the Great Barrier Reef is almost never checked.  Over the next few years, Australian governments will spend more than a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef;  the costs to industry could far exceed this.  Yet the keystone research papers have not been subject to proper scrutiny.  Instead, there is a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process.

Ex-professor Ridd has also published extensively in the scientific literature on the Great Barrier Reef, including issues with the methodology used to measure calcification rates.  In the book he explains:

Like trees, which produce rings as they grow, corals set down a clearly identifiable layer of calcium carbonate skeleton each year, as they grow.  The thicknesses and density of the layers can be used to infer calcification rates and are, effectively, a measure of the growth rate.  Dr Glenn De'ath and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Marine Science used cores from more than 300 corals, some of which were hundreds of years old, to measure the changes in calcification during the last few hundred years.  They claimed there was a precipitous decline in calcification since 1990, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The LHS chart suggests a problem with coral growth rates — but the real problem is with the methodology.  When corals of equivalent age are sampled, there has been no decline in growth rates at the Great Barrier Reef — as shown in the RHS chart.

However, I have two issues with their analysis.  I published my concerns, and an alternative analysis, in the journal Marine Geology (Ridd et al. 2013).  First, there were instrumental errors with the measurements of the coral layers.  This was especially the case for the last layer at the surface of the coral, which was often measured as being much smaller than the reality.  This forced an apparent drop in the average calcification for the corals that were collected in the early 2000s — falsely implying a recent calcification drop.  Second, an "age effect" was not acknowledged.  When these two errors are accounted for, the drop in calcification rates disappear, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The problem with the "age effect", mentioned above, arose because in the study De'ath and colleagues included data from corals sampled during two distinct periods and with a different focus;  I will refer to these as two campaigns.  The first campaign occurred mostly in the 1980s and focused on very large coral specimens, sometimes many metres across.  The second campaign occurred in the early 2000s due to the increased interest in the effects of CO2.  However, presumably due to cost cutting measures, instead of focusing on the original huge coral colonies, the second campaign measured smaller colonies, many just a few tens of centimetres in diameter.

In summary, the first campaign focused on large old corals, while, in contrast, the second campaign focused on small young corals.  The two datasets were then spliced together, and wholly unjustifiable assumptions were implicitly made, but not stated — in particular that there is no age effect on coral growth ...

Dr Juan D'Olivo Cordero from the University of Western Australia collected an entirely different dataset of coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef to determine calcification rates.  This study determined that there has been a 10 per cent increase in calcification rates since the 1940s for offshore and mid-shelf reefs, which is the location of about 99 per cent of all the coral on the Great Barrier Reef.  However, these researchers also measured a 5 per cent decline in calcification rates of inshore corals — the approximately 1 per cent of corals that live very close to the coast.  Overall, there was an increase for most of the Great Barrier Reef, and a decrease for a small fraction of the Great Barrier Reef.

While it would seem reasonable to conclude that the results of the study by D'Olivo et al.  would be reported as good news for the Great Barrier Reef, their article in the journal Coral Reefs concluded:

Our new findings nevertheless continue to raise concerns, with the inner-shelf reefs continuing to show long-term declines in calcification consistent with increased disturbance from land-based effects.  In contrast, the more "pristine" mid- and outer-shelf reefs appear to be undergoing a transition from increasing to decreasing rates of calcification, possibly reflecting the effects of CO2-driven climate change.

Imaginatively, this shift from "increasing" to "decreasing" seems to be based on an insignificant fall in the calcification rate in some of the mid-shelf reefs in the last two years of the 65-year dataset.

Why did the authors concentrate on this when their data shows that the reef is growing about 10 per cent faster than it did in the 1940s?

James Cook University could have used the chapter as an opportunity to start a much-needed discussion about policy, funding and the critical importance of the scientific method.  Instead, Peter was first censored by the University — and now he has been fired.

When I first blogged on this back in February, Peter needed to raise A$95,000 to fight the censure.

This was achieved through an extraordinary effort, backed by Anthony Watts, Joanne Nova, John Roskam and so many others.  To be clear, the university is not questioning the veracity of what ex-professor Ridd has written, but rather his right to say this publicly.  In particular, the university is claiming that he has not been collegial and continues to speak-out even after he was told to desist.

New allegations have been built on the original misconduct charges that I detailed back in February.  The core issue continues to be Peter's right to keep talking — including so that he can defend himself.

In particular, the university objects to the original GoFundMe campaign (that Peter has just reopened) because it breaches claimed confidentiality provisions in Peter's employment agreement.  The university claims that Peter Ridd was not allowed to talk about their action against him.  Peter disputes this.

Of course, if Peter had gone along with all of this, he would have been unable to raise funds to get legal advice — to defend himself.  All of the documentation is now being made public — all of this information and more can be found at Peter's new website.

Together, let's fight this!

Go fund ex-professor Ridd here.  If you haven't already, buy the book Climate Change, The Facts 2017 as another way of showing your support.

Peter Ridd at the Sydney Institute last year.

The most important thing is to not be silenced, shout about this!  I received an email last week:  "Bought Climate Change, The Facts 2017, as requested, to support Peter Ridd.  I'm not making any friends at dinner parties at the moment.  Stuff 'em."

Diversity Dangers In The Boardroom

The ideology of identity politics, the theory that individuals should be judged not on their personal merits but according to their gender, race, and class, has escaped from university lecture theatres and hit corporate boardrooms.

The Australian Stock Exchange wants at least 30 per cent of company directors of each of our 300 largest listed companies to be women.

The Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek has announced that a future ALP government would set a target that 40 per cent of chairs and deputy chair positions on government authorities be women (at the moment that figure is 33 per cent), and half of all government board appointments be provided to women.  The ALP requires 40 per cent of its MPs be women.  The Liberal Party doesn't (yet) have gender quotas.

Policies such as those suggested by the ASX and the ALP that categorise people according to their identity as a member of a group confuse what should be the policy aim of any government — that all citizens have equality of opportunity — with something far more problematic, namely, equality of outcomes.

The argument for gender quotas for politicians, while it can be disputed, is at least coherent.  The claim is that Parliament should reflect the composition of the community, and that quotas go some way towards redressing the historical discrimination suffered by women in our political system.

No such justification exists for what the ASX is trying to do.

To begin with, the composition of company's board is a matter for the company's owners, not the ASX.  But there are more fundamental objections to quotas than this.

The ASX maintains that having diversity, as expressed through gender quotas on company boards is "good for business".  Such a claim is highly contested, and given the myriad factors affecting company performance is probably unprovable.

Company boards by their very nature can't reflect society.  Company directors are appointed because their qualifications and expertise maximise shareholder value.

PLEASE EXPLAIN

Beyond these issues there's the question that as yet advocates for gender diversity have been unwilling to answer.

If it is claimed that having more women directors is "good for business", advocates for diversity have to explain why it's good for business.  They have to explain what is the casual relationship between a director of a company being a woman and the performance of that company being better than it would have been if that director was a man.

One seemingly obvious answer to this question might be that women think differently from men.  A dozen men sitting around a table might reach a different conclusion to a problem than would twelve women, or six men and six women.

Of course the difficulty with such an answer is it relies on the assumption that men and women could have different cognitive abilities — an argument supporters of gender diversity quotas are reluctant to contemplate.

In 2006 Larry Summers was forced to quit as president of Harvard University when he suggested there were biological explanations for the differences in the number of males and females in science and technology.

Last year James Damore was fired from Google after writing an email on the same topic.  Someone like Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson might say society should acknowledge and celebrate gender differences and because men and women are different therefore of course company boards should be diverse.  For such views Peterson has been labelled "anti-feminist", and worse.

Another challenge that supporters of gender quotas have yet to deal with, is why diversity among company directors should be determined only according to gender identity.

Many theorists would argue that racial identity (if indeed there is such a thing as "race") should be no less a factor in determining board appointments than gender.

Which is exactly what the Australian Human Rights Commission contemplated last month when it claimed there was a "dismal" lack of cultural diversity among government and corporate leaders.  It found 97 per cent of CEO's were of Anglo-Celtic or European background.

All of these issues merit discussion — but governments, companies and civil institutions should think carefully about the consequences of picking people for jobs according to their gender, skin colour or religion.

Tax ''Cuts'' Are Rises To Pay For Spending

The budget is littered with titbits mostly designed to garner political support.  There's the targeted, low and middle-income tax offsets which will provide relatively small tax cuts for those earning up to $125,000 per year.

There's the proposal to raise the top threshold of the 32.5 per cent tax bracket from $87,000 to $90,000, which will stave off bracket creep for one or two years.

And then there is the proposal to raise the top threshold of the 19 per cent bracket from $37,000 to $41,000 from July 2022.  This, again, will prevent a small number of low-income households from entering a higher tax bracket, for about a year or two.

These changes will benefit a healthy number of Australian workers.  But they are marginal, won't last long, and do absolutely nothing to address the deeper, structural issues in Australia's tax system.

This is where the heftier proposed changes come in.  There are two measures in the budget which stand to make a more substantial difference to people's lives.

The first is the proposal to increase the top threshold of the 32.5 per cent bracket from $87,000 to $120,000 commencing in 2022.  This would come close to removing bracket creep for many middle-income earners, providing them with years of tax relief compared with the status quo.

The second hefty change is to eliminate the 37 per cent tax bracket from 2024-25.  This would constitute the most substantial change to the income tax system for years.  And it would mean that by 2024-25, around 94 per cent of taxpayers would face a top marginal tax rate of 32.5 per cent or less compared with 63 per cent if the system was unchanged.

Yet it is precisely these more substantial changes that are being so roundly criticised.  In his budget reply speech, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten claimed the tax cuts were handouts to the wealthy.  This is misleading.

While it is true that those who earn a higher income will receive a greater benefit in absolute terms, this is because they pay far more tax than lower-income earners to begin with.  In fact, the top 10 per cent of income earners pay 45 per cent of total income tax.  And analysis by KPMG found a staggering 60 per cent of Australian households pay zero or negative net income tax.

Despite its benefits, though, the government's budget leaves a lot to be desired.

For one thing, it continues with the debt-fuelled spending binge instigated by the Rudd government in 2008-09.  Indeed, this budget is the highest taxing, spending, and debt budget in Australia's history.  Over the past decade, under both the Coalition and Labor, government debt has risen by an eye-watering 380 per cent.  And the much bragged about spending restraint of 2 per cent in real terms per year is hardly anything to write home about.

It is also bizarre that the government has pushed the most meaningful parts of its tax plan years out into the future.  Much better to go hard and fast and put substantial changes to the Senate immediately, rather than the weak and timid piecemeal approach it has chosen.

Moreover, while the budget provides tax cuts, Australians will still see their overall tax burden rise.  Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison say they are cutting taxes.  But what they are really doing is increasing taxes at a slower rate than what otherwise would have been the case.

Real taxes per capita are set to rise by close to 5 per cent over the next four years.  Taxing you more is taxing you less.

The reason taxes will continue to rise is because spending will continue to rise.  Higher spending is the true cause of higher taxes.  Every extra dollar of spending must be paid back with higher taxes, either today or deferred into the future via the accumulation of government debt.

The iron-clad reality of public finance that no one wants to recognise is that the only way to permanently reduce taxes is to permanently reduce spending.

Permanent and sustainable tax cuts will not be in the offing until a broader discussion is had about what spending is going to be reduced.  And no amount of tinkering with offsets, marginal rates or bracket creep will change that fact.

Measures To Tackle Black Economy Are Suspiciously Totalitarian

The Turnbull government's proposed ban on cash payments above $10,000 is a disturbing breach of our right to privacy, an attack on the basic liberty of free exchange, and will worsen Australia's red tape crisis.

The aim of the ban, which was announced in the budget with other measures to tackle the "black economy", is to prevent money laundering and tax cheats.  These are genuine goals.  However, there is nothing inherently immoral or harmful about cash.  The government is punishing the vast majority who do nothing wrong in an ill-fated attempt to prevent a small number of people acting illegally.

In practice, the ban will be ineffective and unenforceable.  A transaction limit will not make criminals suddenly law-abiding citizens — they will flout the rules by using multiple smaller transactions and illegal bank accounts with stolen identities.

The ban will, however, prevent the many genuine uses of cash, including keeping transactions private from prying eyes, avoiding credit card transaction fees, and the preference for physical cash over non-material digital currency.

In 1984, George Orwell explored how Big Brother uses surveillance to control citizens.  "Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you.  Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape," Orwell wrote.

The intention of the cash ban is to create an accessible digital record of transactions that government can monitor.  This establishes a creepy precedent, foreshadowing a future in which you are only allowed to make purchases that Big Brother can watch.  If the government should be able to track our transactions why stop at $10,000?  Why not $5000?  Why not, as some commentators have proposed, $0?

In the long-run, a cashless society would immensely empower the state, which could use our spending habits to reward and punish certain behaviour, or introduce taxes on savings.  Imagine a future in which because you spend "too much" on unhealthy food, the government charges you higher taxes;  or because you don't have a gym membership you have to pay a higher Medicare surcharge.

Cash is not only an important protection from state power, it also provides privacy from partners and families, and financial institutions and businesses.

ASIC has warned that a sign of financial abuse is being compelled to tell your partner or family how your money is being spent.  A common method to avoid abuse is to use cash to hide your transactions from electronic records that the abuser can see.

Imagine you've just escaped a financially abusive relationship.  It's taken months of planning, carefully siphoning your savings into cash to hide from your controlling partner.  You plan to use the money to buy a car, and the freedom that would bring.

The car salesperson, however, informs you that thanks to new regulations it is illegal to accept a payment over $10,000, because the federal government assumes that the only reason to keep money out of a bank is to scrimp on tax.

Cash also allows customers to protect their privacy from businesses.  A credit card is a unique identifier which, when combined with big data and machine learning, allows companies to track your spending habits.

Australian Conservatives Senator Cory Bernardi has pointed out the myriad privacy risks.  "If everything you spend is traceable then so too is what you eat, drink and enjoy.  Big data becomes even bigger and it won't be just advertising you are susceptible to.  Imagine the alcohol consumer identified as drinking too often and has their health premiums raised accordingly.  Or the book buyer who is blocked from purchasing 'unauthorised content'."

In addition to the cash ban, the government will also require reporting of payments in cleaning and courier industries, building and construction, trucking, security and computer systems.  This creates substantial new red tape that will harm small business and contractors, destroying jobs and lowering incomes.  I have calculated that red tape is already costing our economy $176 billion a year.

The best way to combat illegal activity is to cut red tape and reduce taxation.

Countries with higher taxes and more regulation are plagued by a larger black economy and corruption.  Tamás K. Papp and Előd Takáts of the IMF have found evidence that reducing tax rates increases revenues because of more compliance — when taxes are lower there is less incentive to avoid paying.  Academics Randall Holcombe and Christopher Boudreaux found that countries with more regulation and higher expenditures are associated with more corruption because it invites opportunities for government officials to be paid for favours, subsidies, and government contracts.

The solution to Australia's black economy is to cut taxes and red tape, not to adopt the techniques of a totalitarian surveillance state.

Only A Flesh Wound

Howls of outrage from the ABC and its fans on social media over the most mild of cuts to the broadcaster's budget ignore the fact of an institution that has drifted far away from its charter's demands for objectivity.

Judging by the howls of outrage echoing through twitter it seems that the Turnbull government has destroyed our democracy, if not Australian civilisation itself.  But no.  The Turnbull government has frozen ABC operational funding for three years.  That translates to a "funding cut" of some $83 million.

Not $83 million per year, mind you.  Over three years.

Not quite a rounding error, but hardly a crisis.

The ABC only has itself to blame.  In the pre-budget period it went well out of its way to annoy the government.  The prime minister — a former communications minister — is something of a fan.  Yet the ABC chose to publish a highly opinionated and factually challenged analysis by the ABC's Chief Economics Correspondent of the government's centrepiece economic policy.  Then there was the small matter of pooh-poohing the current communications ministers' complaint about a conservative politician being pointlessly abused in a comedy skit.

These hostilities have not come cheap.

There may well be a market for "edgy" humour, but the ABC's efforts tend to boorishness.  Reproducing flawed ALP and Greens talking points on company tax cuts as being "independent" and "trust worthy" is arguably a greater problem.  These are not minor lapses in editorial policy — the ABC is politically biased and incapable of self-regulation.

Rather than viewing the ABC as a "trusted" news source we should recognise it as being a political actor in its own right.  Not just any sort of political actor.  Journalists, as David Marr has suggested, are usually "vaguely soft-left" and sceptical of authority.

The ABC, however, is not so vague and not so soft.  A 2013 survey of journalists revealed that 41.3% of ABC journalists intended to vote Greens at the 2013 election.  That compares with 19.8% of journalists at both Fairfax and News and just 8.7% of the electorate.

ABC journalists are well to the left of journalists in general, and nearly five times more likely to vote Greens than the general public.

To be fair — there is nothing wrong with voting Greens or being left-wing.  Journalists are citizens too.  But the ABC claims to be a bulwark of our democracy.  While nearly 80% of Australians claim to believe that the ABC is balanced and even-handed there is a huge drop off in actual audience numbers.  There are three to four times as many Australians who claim to trust the ABC than who actually watch the ABC.  Sure 86% of Australians value to ABCs service to the community, but that probably reflects its status as an emergency broadcaster.

Generally there is no reason why political opinion should cloud professional performance.  Coalition voting journalists are a minority even at News.  Yet none of the mechanisms that crowd out personal preference operate at the ABC.  It does not have to please advertisers, it does not have to earn a profit, nor does it not have to explain itself to controlling shareholders.

To claim that the ABC Charter constrains it is laughable.  The Charter is written in legislation but it is not law.  It doesn't require anyone to do anything, it contains no penalties for non-compliance, and it has no enforcement mechanism.  If only the Tax Act worked on the same principles.

The ABC pleases itself;  in practice that means it pleases its staff.  To the extent that many ABC journalists are professional in their activities that is a personal preference and not institutional discipline.

Unsurprisingly the ABC does as it pleases and largely it gets away with doing as it pleases.

Being stripped of a mere $83 million over three years is a very mild rebuke from an otherwise indulgent government.  Yet the ABC seems to have chucked a temper tantrum in response.  Threats to bully the government into restoring funding indexation should be resisted.

Rather than simply restore indexation after three years the Turnbull government should be looking at innovative market solutions to commercialise and professionalise the ABC.  Expecting value for money from the ABC is not an attack on its independence but rather a minimum expectation of any government program that costs the taxpayer $1 billion per annum.

Budget 2018: What Have You Achieved?

Treasurer Scott Morrison's budget speech opened with the remark "What have you achieved?" to which the chamber responded with howling laughter.

This was the fifth budget of the Coalition government and may very well prove the last before the Australian people hand power to Bill Shorten and Labor.  This provides an opportune time to answer — what have they achieved?

More tax and more spending is the Abbott-Turnbull legacy.  Since 2012-13, expenditure has grown by $117.4 billion, and revenue by $89.4 billion.  As a proportion of GDP, spending is up 1.5 per cent to 25.4 per cent of GDP and taxation is up 2 per cent of GDP to 24.9 per cent, the highest in a decade.

If the Coalition loses the next election they will not only have failed to roll back the spending instigated by Labor, the situation will have been made actively worse under their watch.

The right of Australian politics will look back on this period as a time of lost opportunity.  The closest historical comparison is the Fraser Government.  Australia faces substantial challenges that are not being met while the Liberals take a Labor-lite approach to policymaking.

Morrison's latest budget includes some positive elements.  There is a small reduction in income taxes, a lower tax on craft beer, and a freezing of funding to the ABC.  Morrison was correct to argue that a tax windfall should be given back to taxpayers — it's not government's money, it's our money and we should be able to keep more of it.  For the economy to grow, jobs to be created, and living standards to increase, government must get out of the way.

Nevertheless, the spending disease continues.  The pre-election bonanza budget includes billions more spending on infrastructure, aged care, the environment, technology, and culture, and human services and security.  The is a blatant effort to buy off particular constituencies with the hope of regaining political popularity.

The government is also bizarrely banning cash payments above $10,000 in the name of minimising the "black economy".  This is a creepy infringement on the basic liberty of free exchange.  It sets a terrible precedent, foreshadowing a future in which you are only able to make purchases that the surveillance state can watch.  Meanwhile, the further attack on multinationals tax arrangements, limiting the use of debt to reduce tax liabilities, is a guaranteed way to discourage foreign investment.

There is a tiny $2.2 billion projected surplus in 2019-20.  The surplus, however, relies on increased taxes, bracket creep, and rosy projections of a growing economy.  Under Morrison, the government has introduced the bank levy, reduced super concessional contributions and introduced the transfer cap, frozen the family tax benefit, and increased the tobacco excises.

The tiny size of the surplus, just 0.5 per cent of expenditure, is not reassuring.  Australian politics is already suffering from a trust deficit.  Bipartisan over promising and under delivering is toxic for our political culture.

In 2011, Wayne Swan promised a budget surplus by 2012-13.  In 2012, Joe Hockey committed to a surplus in the first year of a Coalition government.  In 2014, when Hockey delivered his first budget the surplus projection was pushed out till 2018-19.  In the not unlikely event of a minor downturn in Australia's economy the latest surplus will be just another broken promise.

Gross debt is now projected to reach a record $578 billion.  It is a decade after the Global Financial Crisis which sunk the budget into deficit and Australia into debt.  Even a Keynesian could admit that, with the economy growing, it is time to save, or at least stop borrowing, to have some slack for a rainy day.  That slack is non-existent in fiscal policy, and monetary policy, with a cash rate of just 1.5 per cent, would be no more helpful in a crisis.

Cutting spending is the only way to put the budget on a sustainable footing and pay down this debt.  If we cut spending by just 1 per cent there would be a $9.3 billion surplus in 2018-19.  A further 1 per cent cut would deliver a $52.9 billion surplus in 2019-20.  Sadly, the current government appears to have practically given up on reducing the size of government.

Australia has serious challenges in the years ahead.  The latest intergenerational report predicted that Australia's national debt will reach $2.8 trillion by 2055.  The number of people in the workforce for each person in retirement is predicted to dramatically decline — from 4.5 workers per retiree today to 2.7 by 2055.  This is a recipe for higher taxes on young Australians and a lower quality of services for retirees.

The latest budget will be shortly forgotten as both uninspiring and unremarkable in a long line of uncourageous disappointments.

Scott Morrison Must Show He Has Real Courage

When a politician promises to give you something in 10 years, you can bet it'll never happen.

Promised tax cuts in Tuesday night's Budget won't match expectations, and a Coalition government — which, after almost five years in office, should be renowned for getting government out of our lives — will have overseen further growth in government expenditure and debt.

At 7.30pm, Treasurer Scott Morrison will rise to deliver the 2018-2019 Commonwealth Budget.

Every Budget is important.  They are crucial to marking out a government's agenda.  But this one is particularly important because it will be the last to be delivered before the Australian people deliver their verdict on the Turnbull Government.

As we've come to expect, much of the broad policy agenda behind this year's Budget is already on the public record.

We know there will be personal income tax cuts.  We know there will be infrastructure spending, much of it in the great state of Victoria.  We know spending will continue to increase about 2 per cent.  We know there will be a deficit of about $20 billion.  And we know there is a debt bomb that keeps getting bigger every year, currently headed for an eye-watering $684 billion by 2027-28.

What we don't yet have a clear idea about is the detail.

And for the 2018-19 Budget, the disappointment will be in the detail.

The tax cuts will be small.  At the weekend, Morrison said:  "I'm not going to pretend these are going to be mammoth tax cuts or anything like that."  Which means they'll be way down the other end of the scale.  More mouse than mammoth.  They will also be phased in over 10 years.  Which means they won't actually happen.

Promising a cut to the top marginal tax rate somewhere in the mid-2020s is worthless.  In order for you to believe that will actually come about, you've got to believe the Coalition will remain in power until 2029 to see out its 10-year plan.  That would make the life of the Abbott/Turnbull Government longer than that of the Howard government.

Another aspect of the tax plan is that any cuts in the early years will be focused on low- to middle- income earners.  It's likely we'll see an increase in the tax-free threshold, an increase in the low-income tax offset and a reduction in the rate applied to those earning $87,000 or less (and/or a slight increase in the income threshold for those brackets).

These are not the ingredients of thoughtful tax reform.  Any serious attempt at reforming Australia's income tax system needs to confront some hard truths about who pays tax and who doesn't.

Here are a few:

1. The top 1 per cent of income earners are responsible for 17 per cent of the total personal income tax revenue;
2. The top 10 per cent of income earners are responsible for 45 per cent of the total personal income tax revenue;  and
3. The bottom 50 per cent of Australian households have an effective personal income tax rate of 0 per cent.

The reason these inconvenient facts are important is obvious:  you can't give tax relief to people who don't pay any tax.  Cutting taxes only matters for people who actually have the money they have earned confiscated by the ATO.

Tax relief at the bottom end of the income scale also pushes the burden of government on to fewer people.  This problem is amplified in an environment such as the one we find ourselves in now, where government expenditure continues to increase.

A tax rate of 45 per cent at any point on the income scale is preposterous.

Spending almost half your time working for the government and not your family, friends or local community, or yourself is absurd.

A serious tax reform agenda would confront that issue head on, in full recognition these are people who take risks, invest, create jobs and help to build a flourishing and prosperous economy.

They are also the people who would flock back to the Coalition, after the infamous superannuation betrayal, if the top marginal tax rate was cut from 45 per cent to, say, 40 per cent.  They would still be enormous contributors to government coffers but they would have a reason to be invested in this government.

None of the discussion about tax reform is to deflect or ignore the painful cost-of-living pressures that, in particular, those on lower incomes struggle with every day.

My analysis has revealed that over the past 20 years, house prices have increased by 330 per cent, childcare costs have soared by 310 per cent, electricity prices have increased by 215 per cent and insurance is up 209 per cent.

Every household in the country is dealing with those out-of-control costs and, especially in an environment of low wages growth, governments are not doing enough to cut the red tape that keeps pushing prices higher.  In fact, if the government slashed red tape in Australia, the economy would grow by about the same amount as the government takes in personal income tax — every year.

There is a clear way forward for the government but doing the right thing sometimes takes an enormous amount of courage.

US president Ronald Reagan cut company and personal income taxes before the 1984 presidential election and went on to win 49 out of 50 states.  Imagine what might be possible if Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Mr Morrison surprised us all on Tuesday night.

Wishing You A Miserable 200th Birthday, Karl Marx

Karl Marx's ideas have led to the death of 100 million people, extreme poverty, immense suffering, and relentless oppression — and you can't even say he's a nice guy.

Marx treated people cruelly, was two-faced, and used racial slurs.  In a 1862 letter, Marx described an opponent as a "Jewish Nigger".  He was also a slob.  "Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he is often drunk", a Prussian police spy reported.

Marx had an affair with his life-long family maid Helen Demuth, who was, ironically, never paid for her backbreaking labour.  The affair resulted in a child that Marx refused to acknowledge and was fostered out.  When the child came to visit he was forbidden from using the front door and obliged to only see his mother in the kitchen.

The striking feature of those who claim to support Marx's socialist ideas is that they know practically nothing of Marx the person, who was a monster, and the result of his ideas, which is monstrous societies.

Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia were both oppressive and unsuccessful.  The "people's revolution", the socialising of the means of production directly inspired by Marx, led to the thousands of murders, millions of deaths in famines, and decades of political oppression and economic failure.

Today, Venezuela is the latest socialist catastrophe.  Venezuela, despite having the world's largest known oil reserves, is desperately poor.  Nine in ten Venezuelans go hungry.  Prison inmates desperately forage for dead rats.  Basic prescription drugs are unavailable.  HIV/Aids cases are flooding hospitals because of the lack of contraceptives.  Babies are dying by the thousand.  Crime and murder are spiking.

It is often remarked that socialism is "good in theory, bad in practice".  It's a pretty rubbish theory if in practice it has failed every time it has been tried.

Socialism is built on shoddy intellectual grounds.  Socialism depends on people working for others, with no immediate benefit.  Socialism can only be implemented with coercion and force.  To stop people from private economic, social and political activity, you have to oppress.  That is why, in socialist countries, opposition political parties are banned, dissenters are jailed, and speech is curtailed.

So, what's the record of the system Marx labelled "capitalism"?  The free market has unleashed human flourishing and delivered freedom.  The adoption of markets and free trade in the developing world has lifted a billion people out of poverty in the past 30 years.  Global life expectancy has doubled in the last century from thirty to over sixty years.  Meanwhile, global inequality is declining for the first time since the industrial revolution.

In capitalism, you can pursue you own desires, live as you choose, earn money as please and spend it on what you want.  In socialism, you are inevitably oppressed if not staved.

CBA Gets Beaten Up By The Culture Cops

Maybe the easiest thing to do about the banks would just be to nationalise them.  At the moment they are semi-government public authorities anyway.

Politicians hold press conferences telling the banks the prices they should charge for their products.  Under the so-called "Banking and Executive Accountability Regime", a government-appointed committee (the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) decides who the banks can employ and how much they're paid.  The structure of the financial sector is decided by the government, and banks are of course prevented by the government from going broke.

Australia's business community tends to regard the banks as a special case and has generally abandoned the banks to fight their own battles.  The attitude from CEOs in other industries has been that because banks get the benefit of government regulation they also have to bear the costs of complying with that regulation.  Many CEOs prefer to talk about topics like climate change, Indigenous recognition in the constitution, and board diversity targets than engage in fundamental questions such as whether a private-sector company has the right to choose its own staff and choose the manner of their remuneration.

Given that the government and government-appointed regulators already regulate so much of what banks do, it's inevitable that eventually attempts would be made to regulate their "culture".  Which is exactly what has happened.

In the wake of allegations as to how the Commonwealth Bank managed alleged money-laundering, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority established a "Prudential Inquiry into the CBA" to examine the bank's "framework and practices in relation to governance, culture and accountability".  The 109-page report of the Inquiry with its 35 recommendations was made public this week.  Matt Comyn, the new Commonwealth Bank CEO, immediately announced "we will fully implement the recommendations of the report" and he would forgo his short-term incentive remuneration.

Realistically, Comyn and his chairman Catherine Livingstone had no choice but to surrender to APRA, especially while the bank is in the middle of a royal commission, and as it was likely they knew there would be front-page news stories in the following days about the CBA losing the records of nearly 20 million accounts.

In an ideal world Comyn and Livingstone would have told APRA to go jump.  The idea that government regulators should require the CBA to "ensure that its senior leaders are capable of cascading the desired tone at the top in a personal and authentic manner" (Recommendation 28) is laughable — if it wasn't so dangerous.

AMBIGUOUS AND VAGUE

The responsibility of the directors of the CBA is to obey the law.  And any law, regulation, or rule which the government expects a citizen to abide by, whether as a pedestrian crossing the street or as a CEO of a $100 billion bank, must be clear and comprehensible.

Attempting to regulate corporate culture breaches the rule of law because regulators are imposing rules which are ambiguous, vague and open to multiple and conflicting interpretations.  How Matt Comyn and Catherine Livingstone can prove to APRA they are "authentic" and that "Senior leaders reinforce key behaviours of increasing self-reflection, giving and receiving constructive challenge [sic] and dealing with conflict effectively" (Recommendation 27) is anyone's guess.  Regulating for something as inchoate as "culture" basically allows regulators to impose their own personal standards and opinions without the democratic mandate of legislation.

Much of what's in the Inquiry report might be not unhelpful for CBA directors.  But it's not APRA's job to act as glorified management consultants.

It speaks volumes about the general hopelessness of so many of this country's business leaders that government regulation of a company's "culture" is accepted without even a whimper.  Those CEOs who think the government will want only to regulate the culture of companies in the finance industry will be in for a rude shock when Bill Shorten as prime minister appoints Sally McManus to report on the culture of companies in some other sector of the economy.

Australia's business community is quite rightly exercised by the threat posed to free market capitalism in this country by the ACTU, GetUp!, and George Soros — but the regulation of corporate culture by the government is in the long term no less of a threat to the future of private enterprise.

No, Four Corners, Brown Brothers Is Not Moving To Tasmania

When the ABC ran its Four Corners program on climate change some weeks back, it had as its theme farmers, small businesses, government planners and major corporations have stopped waiting for politicians to decide whether climate change is real.  They're acting now.

One of the more compelling examples provided was that well-known Australian wine producer Brown Brothers was moving part of its operations to Tasmania — to a cooler climate.  That is what journalist Michael Brissenden said:

But that's not all — the company has now also decided to move part of its operation to cooler country.

The inference was clear.  It has become so hot on mainland Australia, due to catastrophic climate change, that this business was having to act in quite a dramatic way by relocating.

But company representative, Ross Brown, never actually said this.  Correspondence has since established that it's actually business as usual for Brown Brothers:

On camera, Brown did go on somewhat about how the grape harvests now are getting shorter and earlier because temperatures are rising.

It is well known that temperature is central to all aspects of viticulture (grape growing and harvest) and that records of changing harvest dates have long provided an indication of local climate change.  For example, the number of days from 1 September for the wine harvest in Bordeaux, France, has long been an estimate of climate change in Western Europe.  As the start date pushed into October from the late 1400s so Europe entered a period known as the Little Ice Age, which followed the Medieval Warm Period.  By 1850 — the beginning of the current warm cycle — the average dates of starting vintage were back in September.

There have always been cycles of warming, followed by cooling.  For the ABC to really have a story about grape growing and climate change, Brissenden would need to establish the extent to which the current warming cycle is outside the realm of what might be expected from natural climate change.

But, consistent with the ABC's misguided editorial policy natural climate change was not even mentioned in "Weather Alert".  Nor did Brissenden mention a new book on the fascinating subject of wine and climate — a book written by an expert with a focus on Australian wine.  "Wine Terroir and Climate Change" by John Gladstones (Wakefield Press 2015) concludes that viticulture in Australia is not threatened by global warming and that much of the computer modelling that underpins the hype is wrong.

Gladstones also notes that:

Of the estimated rise in recorded temperatures over the 20th century of 0.6 degree Celsius, about half is almost certainly spurious, caused by urban warming around thermometers and an increasing proportion of topographically warmer recording sites.  The methods claimed to have removed these biases from the record have been seriously inadequate.

If Brissenden was really interested in temperature change in southeast Australia he could have even interviewed me.  Scientific publishers Elsevier recently published a book chapter by me on exactly this topic.  In "Southeast Australian maximum temperature trends, 1887-2013:  an evidence-based reappraisal" I conclude from a weighted mean of the five highest quality maximum temperature time series for southeast Australia, trends from 1887 show statistically significant cooling to 1950 of minus 1.5°C per century, followed by rapid warming of 1.9°C per century to 2013.  Neither the cooling, nor the magnitude of the recent warming, can be explained by global warming theory.

Brissenden, considered by many to be one of the ABC's most experienced, failed on so many counts with this story.  He suggested that Brown Brothers are relocating at least part of their business to Tasmania because it is too hot in Victoria, which is untrue.  He also failed to explain to the public that climate change can be natural, and for as long as humanity has been growing wine grapes harvest dates have changed.  He also failed to provide balance by getting some expert perspective of the extent of recent climate change and its likely effect on wine growing.