Legal Rights Audit 2018

The erosion of the fundamental legal rights of all Australians have accelerated under federal law in 2018.

My report Legal Rights Audit 2018 revealed that the legal rights of the presumption of innocence, natural justice, the right to silence and the privilege against self-incrimination are explicitly breached by 358 separate provisions in Acts of federal Parliament.

By stripping away important principles like the presumption of innocence, the right to silence, and the privilege against self-incrimination, our legal system will not achieve just outcomes.

The fact that there has been another substantial increase in legal rights breaches proves it is a systemic problem.

The Morrison government must make it a priority to reverse course and address our legal rights problem.

These findings are a huge blow to the idea that Australia’s legal system is built on the rule of law.

Businesses And Workers Pay A High Price For Zero Emissions Targets

Don Harwin is to be credited for his role as the state's Minister for Energy and Utilities.  But his recent suggestions for the future of energy and climate policy in Australia are misguided.

This week Harwin touted the NSW government's policy of net zero emissions by 2050, argued for the integration of climate and energy policy, and decried the lack of co-operation between state governments and the Commonwealth.

Interestingly, Harwin also argued for the need to "avoid unnecessary market interventions or distortions" — which is strange given that he is apparently unconcerned with the distortion caused by the $4.8 billion in subsidies that the renewables sector receives each year.

The definition of "unnecessary" appears to mean any intervention that favours coal, while all interventions that favour renewables are conveniently considered to be "necessary".

Mr Harwin also states that the NSW government "did not in principle oppose" the now-abandoned clean energy target or the emissions intensity scheme and was "quite happy to support" the National Energy Guarantee.

However this, too, appears inconsistent with the desire to avoid unnecessary market interventions, as each proposal was the functional equivalent to a carbon tax and would have ushered in mammoth amounts of government regulation.

This is because the only way that NSW could ever get close to the net zero emissions target is through substantial taxpayer-funded favouritism of the renewables sector.

And this spells one thing:  higher prices for consumers and businesses.

Over the past 10 years the share of wind and solar in the National Energy Market has grown from around 2 per cent to 10 per cent.

At the same time, over that period residential electricity prices have risen a staggering 110 per cent.  This is five times the rise compared with economy-wide inflation — which has increased by just 22 per cent.

This means that Australia now has the fourth-highest electricity prices in the world, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

That is despite the fact that Australia has over 1000 years' worth of coal, 30 per cent of the world's uranium deposits, and an abundance of onshore and offshore gas.

This is wreaking havoc on industry.

An ACCC report from 2017 gave the example of a retail grocer whose electricity bill increased by 53 per cent in just one year.

And BlueScope steel, which employs 6000 Australians, saw its electricity and gas costs rise by some 92 per cent in just two years.

All told, more than 65,000 jobs have been destroyed in the energy-intensive manufacturing sector in the past decade, in part because of high and rising electricity prices.

That is 18 jobs lost each day — 18 fewer Australians who are able to experience the dignity of work.

Mr Harwin doesn't mention these people or businesses.

Perhaps that's because they don't count to policy-makers obsessed with reducing emissions.

What is worse is that these economic and social costs are being imposed without a discernible environmental benefit.

Australia accounts for just 1.3 per cent of global emissions from human sources.  NSW accounts for just a fraction of that — and humans account for just 3 per cent of all emissions from human and non-human sources.

Even the entire Australian economy shutting down would make no noticeable difference to global emissions or the global climate.

Sitting underneath emission reduction policies is the idea that there is an inevitable global transition taking place from coal to wind and solar.  But this is demonstrably false.

Global spending on renewable energy declined by 7 per cent in 2017;  the largest drop in 15 years

China recently removed targets for the construction of solar farms and issued orders for local governments not to approve solar farms that need subsidising.

There are some 2240 coal-fired power stations currently in operation around the world.

A further 708 have been announced, or have received pre-permission or permission to be constructed.

A report released by the International Energy Agency on Tuesday found that coal still provides the largest source of electricity in the world and will continue to do so for some years.

And the jewel in the crown of the environmentalists, the Paris Climate Agreement, is disintegrating.

The largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China, is completely unconstrained by the agreement and is expected to increase its emissions by 150 per cent by 2030 on 2005 levels.

The second-largest emitter, the United States, has announced it will exit the agreement.

And not one of the nations in European Union, who are collectively the third-largest emitters of greenhouse gases, are on target to meet their emission reduction targets.

This wrangling over energy policy gets to a much deeper divide within the Coalition at the state and Commonwealth level, which in turn reflects a divide within the Australian electorate.

It is a contest between Penrith and Paris.

Between lower power prices and lower emissions.

And between the hardworking suburban working- and middle classes and the inner-city elites.

The permanent political class in Canberra and on Macquarie street have for years disregarded the interests of anyone who lives more than 10km from the city.

Whether on energy, population growth or the culture wars, the interests of the out-of-touch elite has taken precedent.

Now is the time for the NSW and Commonwealth governments to provide leadership by getting out of the Paris Climate Agreement, removing subsidies and allowing Australia's resources sector to flourish.

Tyranny Of The T-bone

While England was in the middle of tearing itself apart during the Civil War, Oliver Cromwell and his fellow puritans were so profoundly offended by the singing of Christmas carols that they passed an Act of Parliament in 1644 to ban it.  Three years later, in June 1647, the Long Parliament passed an ordinance which abolished the celebration of Christmas altogether.

Despite the prohibition, people continued to hold clandestine religious services, as well as to sing their favourite carols.  In effect, Christmas went underground, although perhaps not quite underground enough.  An MP at the time complained that he had been deprived of a good night's sleep on Christmas Eve by his neighbours' noisy preparations for "the foolish day".

By the 1650s, Cromwell had cracked down on adultery, swearing, fornication and drunkenness.  Pubs all over the country were boarded up as "dens of Satan", racehorses were confiscated from their owners and fighting cocks, bears and dogs were slaughtered.  As Thomas Babington Macaulay would later quip, the puritans were concerned less with the pain of the animal than the pleasure of the spectator.  Finally, dancing, playing cards, traditional games and joyous celebrations at country weddings also became illegal activities.

It might not come as a complete surprise that Cromwell and his ilk, who believed that they were part of the elect while everyone else was doomed to Hell, were not universally popular.  By suppressing anything remotely pleasurable, they did not endear themselves to the unelected.  The daughter of a Wiltshire church warden lamented that "we had a good parson here before but now we have a Puritan.  A plague or a pox on him that ever he did come hither".

Unfortunately, there are members of society today who appear to be doing their damnedest to replicate the austere and joyless world of 17th century Cromwellian England.  And many of them seem to work at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.  This week, they have made an important announcement regarding Christmas:  "Look out Australia, the meat-free revolution is here ...!"  Turkeys are out and tofu is in.  Apparently "it's never been easier to enjoy a cruelty-free Christmas feast."

Are the good folk at Peta really driven by a genuine concern for the wellbeing of turkeys or is it something else?  Their recent attempt to get Bunnings to replace its meat sausages with vegan versions at its ubiquitous sausage sizzle suggests that there is more to it than that.  To paraphrase Macaulay, they are less concerned with the welfare of animals than they are the pleasure of the men who shop for hardware.

Driven by equal measures of intolerance and religious fervour, these new puritans are determined that life in Australia should be devoid of all joy and colour.  The American journalist and satirist, H.L. Mencken joked that puritanism is "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy".  This modern-day morality dictates that smoking, drinking, and sugar, things which do make some people happy, are deeply sinful and thus should be expunged from society.

Carnivores beware.  The next pursuit on the growing list of transgressions is the act of eating meat.  The anti-meat taskforces argue that it is not only contributing to climate change and environmental degradation but that meat is actually being used by the patriarchy to oppress women.  Ladies, it turns out that we are being subjugated by steak and tyrannised by T-bones.

This latest insanity has of course been simmering away in the humanities departments of Western universities for decades.  In 1990, Carol J. Adams, American feminist-vegan, animal rights activist and Yale graduate responsible for introducing women's studies into the University of Rochester while she was an undergraduate in the 1970s, wrote a book entitled The Sexual Politics of Meat:  A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.

The New York Times hailed it as a "bible of the vegan community".  In this work, she proposed that "male dominance and animals' oppression are linked by the way that both women and animals function as absent referents in meat eating and dairy production, and that feminist theory logically contains a vegan critique ... Patriarchy is a gender system that is implicit in human/animal relationships."  Adams made the highly questionable connection between meat and gender which has since been embraced by subsequent generations of academics.

Last year, for example the Journal of Feminist Geography published a peer-reviewed study produced by an academic who went to South America to interview all three of Argentina's vegetarians and who concluded that due to the toxic masculinity of meat, women have to fight back against the patriarchy by rejecting it.

Most recently, Shareena Z. Hamzah, a postdoctoral researcher at Swansea University has recommended in an article for the Conversation that in order for women to stop being oppressed and to wrestle power back from men, society needs to modify its language.  From now on, we should cease using meaty metaphors.  Idioms such as bringing home the bacon, flogging a dead horse, and the elephant in the room will henceforward be considered hate speech.

All this madness has come about since the humanities rejected their original purpose in the 1960s.  Derived from the expression studia humanitatis or the study of humanities, for 500 years, their purpose had been to make sense of and understand the world through the Western tradition of art, culture and philosophy.

In the 1970s and 1980s however, there appeared a range of "new humanities" subjects which rejected this tradition.  The new humanities were underpinned by a range of radical post-structuralism and post-modernist theories which had been conjured up in the previous decade by a predominantly French group of philosophers.

Rather than making sense of the world, academics employed in humanities departments are now flooding it with absolute nonsense which is daily encroaching on our lives.

But just as Cromwell and his cronies failed to stop the English from celebrating Christmas, drinking beer and dancing around the maypole in the 17th century, these new puritans will not stop us from enjoying our sausages and steak in the 21st century.

When Politicians Desert Their Voters

These days much is made of the so-called "crisis of democracy" in the West.  At one level it's hard to disagree with the view that even if democracy is not in crisis, at a minimum it is facing some not-insubstantial challenges.

That yesterday in London 200 Tory MPs could vote to keep in power Theresa May, a Prime Minister who is implementing Brexit in a way clearly contrary to the wishes of the British people as expressed in a referendum, is reasonably clear evidence that something somewhere isn't working.

Brexit itself, Donald Trump's election and the implosion of politics in France, Italy and potentially Germany are all assumed to be examples of the "crisis".  Certainly one way of viewing what's happening in many countries is as a challenge to democracy.

It's not democracy that's in crisis — it's politics in crisis.  The two are very different things.

Democracy is an idea.  Politics is the putting of ideas into practice.  The concept of one person one vote, of self-government and of the right to remove and replace those who rule over us is as powerful and as relevant as it's ever been.  In Venezuela people are willing to die for democracy.

When politicians and the public agreed with each other on the main issues relating to economics, politics and culture, as they did in Western liberal democracies for most of the second half of the 20th century, the process of government was relatively straightforward.

Over time the inevitable happened.  The major political parties came to resemble each other, as did the politicians representing those parties.

David Goodhart, the British political analyst, describes this process brilliantly in his 2017 book The Road to Somewhere — The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics.  As Goodhart analyses it, politics in countries such as the UK (and by implication the United States and Australia) looked increasingly like a contest between Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and "conventional party politics has become narrower, less ideologically distinct, more insider dominated, both in personnel and also in the interests represented".

The problem for the major political parties is that on many issues the politicians and the public no longer agree with each other, and parties have no way of responding to this change.  On free trade and immigration, for example, the gulf between elite political opinion and that of the average voter in the average Western liberal democracy is growing, partly because political elites have always assumed the people would always agree with them and so have stopped making the arguments for their position.

And instead the frustration of voters has been expressed through support for the minor parties.

LICENSING OF RELIGIOUS PRACTICE

At the same time as the major political parties became more alike they came to see politics as merely, as Theresa May famously said, "getting the job done".  To be successful a politician had only to display technical competence.

Sometimes, though, reconciling different values and beliefs doesn't lend itself to managerialist solutions.

So, for example, yesterday in an attempt to protect "religious freedom" the Morrison government announced it would legislate to prevent discrimination on the basis of religion.  In essence what the government proposes is that, to remedy the problems of existing state-based anti-discrimination law interfering with the exercise of religious beliefs, it will introduce its own additional federal anti-discrimination laws.

There are numerous problems with such a proposal, including the fact the federal government would be engaging in the de facto licensing of religious practice.

Despite what Liberal and Labor politicians believe, energy and climate change policy doesn't lend itself to a managerialist fix either.  The choice between lower carbon emissions and lower energy prices is ultimately determined according to the principle of what subjective value is to have priority.

In America, on the right Donald Trump blew up the Republican Party after he realised (by accident or design) that what Republican voters wanted was different from what their party was offering.  On the left Bernie Sanders nearly blew up the Democratic Party.  In Britain Jeremy Corbyn is doing something similar to the Labour Party.

In Australia it remains to be seen whether our system of compulsory voting can continue to temper the Trump and Brexit-like convulsions of other countries.

Integrity Body Has Limited Power Now But Just Watch This Space

The only way to ensure vested interests in the federal government don't misuse their power is to ensure the federal government doesn't wield so much power in the first place.

The Morrison government's proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission, designed to sit above the multitude of other special purpose integrity oversight agencies, is a repudiation of bedrock principles of the English legal system.

Wide-ranging anti-corruption agencies too often turn into kangaroo courts.  Tackling corruption is on its face a highly virtuous mission, and agencies committed to this are always under threat of elevating this mission above inconveniences such as complying with the rule of law and respecting the legal rights of individuals caught up in their investigations.

In NSW, the Independent Commission Against Corruption has left a trail of destruction in its wake since its establishment in 1988.  It has proven much better at destroying lives and careers than it has at tackling real criminality.

Its pursuit of Australian Water Holdings in 2014 ended the political career of then premier Barry O'Farrell for failing to remember receiving a bottle of wine.

A magistrate in 2016 dismissed allegations of misconduct against former emergency services commissioner Murray Kear from an incident in 2013.

ICAC also has displayed a tendency to exceed its defined authority, as the High Court found in the commission's pursuits of former NSW premier Nick Greiner in 1994 and former crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen in 2015.

To its credit, the federal government is trying to avoid the excesses of NSW's ICAC by limiting its power and scope.  It may not realise how vulnerable those designs are:  Bill Shorten immediately responded yesterday by calling for a federal ICAC to have more power and a wider scope.  The Coalition has given it the keys to do this.

The proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission is a new bureaucracy, and the nature of bureaucracies is to grow in size and power across time.  Members of a bureaucracy are, just like people in other sectors of the economy, motivated by increased job and financial security.

As US economist William Niskanen once observed, the bureaucrat is "not entirely motivated by the general welfare or the interests of the state".  In other words, a bureaucrat working at a federal ICAC will have a natural incentive to increase the size and prestige of ICAC, and to justify its existence by pursuing cases that don't necessarily merit the attention in the first place.  As former High Court justice Dyson Heydon noted in a 2010 case, special purpose quasi-judicial bodies tend to "lose touch with the traditions, standards and mores of the wider profession and judiciary" while becoming "overenthusiastic about vindicating the purposes for which they were set up".

On the other hand, the incentive for politicians is never to criticise ICAC lest they be criticised as weak on corruption.

When the High Court in 2015 ruled the NSW ICAC had gone too far with its powers, the state rewarded ICAC with retrospective statutory validation for past investigations.

When a government passes laws to approve its past mistake, is it any wonder that Australians have had a gutful of politics as usual?  Just 46 per cent of Australians have trust and confidence in the federal government, down from 82 per cent in 2008, according to recent research published by Griffith University and Transparency International.

Less than 50 per cent of Australians aged between 18 and 44 believe democracy is preferable to any other form of government, according to the Lowy Institute.  Meanwhile, voters increasingly are rejecting the major parties in elections across the country.

What is at issue is that an out-of-touch governing elite has ­effectively rigged the political and economic system for its own ­benefit.

This elite does not necessarily break any laws but acts as a successful business model that confers more power on itself at the expense of tax-paying Australians.

These vested interests permit only the policies that support their interests, usually characterised by a greater role for regulators in the economic life of Australians.

This is why Australia's red-tape burden is equal to about 11 per cent of its GDP, or why the federal parliament has passed more than 5000 new pages of legislation this year, or why the number of provisions that undermine fundamental legal rights such as the presumption of innocence or the right to silence are persistently increasing.

Another layer of bureaucracy within the federal government will only add to this problem.

The federal government's decision to capitulate on a federal ICAC is a signal it has accepted the size and scope of the state must always increase.  The result is domineering government and a populace that enjoys shrinking freedoms.

Literacy And Numeracy Skills Are Declining As Students Are Taught To Be More Politically Active

Last week, thousands of angry and emotional schoolchildren carrying an array of crudely-made placards bearing messages of varying degrees of originality took to the streets of Sydney to protest against the Morrison government's "lack of action" on climate change.

Meanwhile, in a Melbourne kindergarten, four-year-olds were recruited by their teacher to protest against refugee rights on Nauru.

These baby-faced campaigners were pictured holding up a selection of signs with catchy slogans such as "Locking Up Our Children is Never the Answer", "No Child Should Live Like This" and "Political Leaders Must End this Harm".

However, the lack of Clag, along with the level of sophistication of both vocabulary and poster design, suggests that just maybe these preschoolers might not have made their own posters.

In the world of today's educationalist which is dominated by Left-wing and out-of-touch ideologues, you're never too young to protest.

Apparently if you're able write your own name, albeit in a thick blue pencil, stand on one foot for more than nine seconds, or draw a person with a body, you're old enough to be a political agitator.

What we are seeing is evidence of the degree to which Australian children, from preschool to Year 12, are being actively politicised in our classrooms by ideologically obsessed individuals masquerading as professional educators.

But the educator's job is to educate children, not indoctrinate them.

The students participating in the #SchoolStrike4Climate were clearly encouraged by their teachers to dodge their lessons to engage in a political activism.

These men and women are brazenly and energetically enlisting their charges in a political struggle against the current government.

Many teachers are far more concerned with creating legions of mini-me social justice warriors than they are with ensuring that their students actually know how to read and write.

Falling standards in reading, science and mathematics across every economic quartile and in all schools is testament to the fact they believe education to be about developing a social identity rather than acquiring knowledge.  Since 2015, Australia has performed abysmally in world rankings.

Reading literacy has seen us fall from fourth to sixteenth in the world, from seventh to twentyfifth in maths, and in science from fourth to fourteenth.  Much of this is due to the fact that Australian children are being uneducated at a terrifying pace, thanks largely to our flawed National Curriculum.

The first major problem is the existence of three cross-curriculum priorities which refuse to go away.

They are "Sustainability", "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures", and "Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia".

The curriculum has been deliberately designed so they are in every subject.  You'll find them in English, mathematics, science, humanities and social sciences, the arts, technologies, health and physical education, and languages.

For example, in English students will "develop the skills necessary to investigate, analyse and communicate ideas and information related to sustainability, and to advocate, generate and evaluate actions for sustainable futures".

In maths, children are taught to "develop the proficiencies of problem-solving and reasoning essential for the exploration of sustainability issues and their solutions".

In the meantime, five-year-olds in science class are being taught about how "Earth's resources are used in a variety of ways" while in Level 2 mathematics, algebra is taught by "using models such as linking blocks, sticks in bundles, place-value blocks and Aboriginal bead strings ..."

The second major problem with the curriculum is with their so-called General Capabilities.

These would on face value seem to be an attempt to teach children useful values, which is of course a very good thing.

However, rather than instructing them about the values around individual rights, parliamentary democracy and equality before the law, it turns out that these capabilities are simply a regurgitation of the Left's favourite tropes of identity politics, environment and social justice.

Take "Personal and Social Capability".

In this capability, students will "gain an understanding of the role of advocacy in contemporary society and build their capacity to critique societal constructs and forms of discrimination, such as racism and sexism".

In "Ethical Understanding", they are told that "complex issues require responses that take account of ethical considerations such as human rights and responsibilities, animal rights, environmental issues and global justice".  This is not education.  This is propaganda.

Next week, the University of Melbourne Graduate School of Education is hosting the 6th World Curriculum Studies Conference.  Unsurprisingly, there is an entire session devoted to man-made climate change.

It's also no wonder that according to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, 14 per cent of 15-year-old Australian students are functionally illiterate, and would not understand the instructions on a packet of headache tablets.

What's more is that 20 per cent of Australian youth's arithmetic skills are so bad that and they wouldn't be able to work out how much petrol is left in a tank by looking at a gauge.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is spot-on when he says that there should be less activism and more learning in the classroom.

Let's start by depoliticising education by getting rid of these dangerous, ideologically driven fads and Left-wing platitudes masquerading as values and return to the fundamentals of what education is all about.

Turnbull's Act Of Woeful Hypocrisy

It is disappointing that Malcolm Turnbull appears to be taking part in the same headline-grabbing antics for which he has criticised others.  When his efforts to get clean air and run with a political narrative were disrupted by an intervention by Tony Abbott, prime minister Turnbull and his supporters were rightly frustrated and would blame his conservative rival for many of the government's problems.

Now, by publicly calling on Prime Minister Morrison to bring forward the federal election, and intervening in Liberal Party factional matters, Turnbull is allowing his legacy to become entangled in the same personal bitterness and vitriol he so despised as prime minister.  It is an act of woeful hypocrisy.

There is no doubt that the revolving door of prime ministers has caused instability over the past decade.  From this instability has flowed policy paralysis, which has led into the federal Liberal Party lacking a reform agenda to rally around.

What the Liberals have to understand is that a cultural narrative is just as important as an economic narrative.  A cultural narrative also needs to go beyond wearing a lapel pin.

Turnbull's key mistake was focussing solely on economic matters, and even there he disappointed.

His reasons for toppling Abbott were solely about an economic message and Newspolls.  His signature tax policy was to return a portion of income tax to the states, a good policy to address a serious issue of fiscal imbalance.  Yet he disappointed many by ruling it out just a few days later.

But more fundamentally, Turnbull as prime minister was not interested in culture.  He once said that he supported protecting religious freedom just as much as he supported same sex marriage, only to flick the issue off to the review for someone else to deal with.

If a leader is purely focussed on economic policy, then who is there to defend religious schools that could soon lose the right to teach their ethos according to their faith?  Who will stand up for freedom of speech on campus?  Who will stand up for workers once every coal mine in Australia is run out of town?  And who will argue for literacy and numeracy in schools, over trendy activism?

It was only after a fierce effort by those that believe in freedom of speech that Turnbull was prepared to put a bill to the Senate to deal with 18C, something his predecessor was unable to do;  Turnbull should be credited for this.

But his latest entry into the public consciousness is unhelpful and hinders the party from building the holistic story that can capture the imagination of voters.  Voters will support a party with a coherent plan and a vision for the nation's future.

Many journalists and commentators are running the line that the Liberal Party lost in the Victorian state election because the party was too right wing on issues such as climate and energy policy.

This is wrong.  The exact same journalists and commentators were not as forthcoming with an equal analysis of the left of politics after Labor's defeat at the 2013 federal election, or the defeat of the Labor government in South Australia, both largely based on climate and energy policy.

Mainstream Australians want lower power prices rather than global warming gesturing.

They don't think it should be illegal to offend somebody.  They find identity politics grotesque and anti-ethical to the spirit of egalitarianism and merit-based selection.  They want lower taxes for themselves and for their children through lower debt.  And they want to celebrate Australia Day, sing Christmas carols at Christmas time, and for their children to receive a first-rate education regardless of the income of their family.

If the Liberal Party can rally behind a united economic and cultural message to sell to voters, without being distracted by former leaders, it will go a long way to winning the next election, whenever that may be.