There May Be 1300 Reasons This Law Does Not Work

There are potentially 1300 smoking guns pointing to evidence that the Attorney­-General's Department has been using the power of the commonwealth to target conservatives­ in Australia.

It is not acceptable for bureaucrats to be running a covert political operation out of the Attorney-General's Department to silence Australians because of their polit­ical beliefs, but they are able to under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme legislation.

On October 2, public servants in the Attorney-General's Depart­ment issued a notice that Andrew Cooper, founder and president of libertarian advocacy organisation LibertyWorks, provide all documents "detailing any understanding or arrangement" between LibertyWorks and the American Conservative Union.

Cooper was given 14 days to respon­d to the demands, after which criminal penalties could apply.  Despite facing possibly six months' jail, he refused to co-operat­e.

Last August, Liberty­Works and the ACU co-hosted the Conservati­ve Political Action Conference in Sydney.  It featured speakers from Australia and overseas.  CPAC is a mainstream right-of-centre conference that in the past few years has branched out to international locations such as Japan and Australia.

One CPAC speaker was former prime minister Tony Abbott, who controversially was invited to register as an agent of foreign influe­nce under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme for addressing it.

Abbott rejected the request and labelled it absurd.

Attorney-General Christian Porter has admitted that there has been a "lack of common sense to date" in the scheme's application.

Following the subsequent scandal, I lodged a Freedom of Inform­ation request asking for documents and correspondence between senior executive service-level public servants in the Integrity and International Group between March and November that mentions Cooper, Abbott, CPAC or the ACU.

This is a straightforward reques­t.  It potentially could clear the public servants of any wrongdoing or expose if there was anything more untoward.  If there was nothing seriously amiss, you would imagine the bureaucrats would be forthcoming, keen to clear up the incident.

The Attorney-General's Department responded to me this week with what is known as a "practical refusal notice".

The Integrity and International Group in the Attorney-­General's Department that oversees the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme employs only eight staff, yet says a preliminary search has identified more than 1300 documents relevant to the request.

More than 1300 documents and correspondence relating to Abbott, Cooper, CPAC and the ACU captured from eight full-time public servants across a seven-month period hardly seem the actions of one rogue employee, which is how the government has portrayed the targeting of Cooper.

Rather, it possibly suggests a co-ordinated surveillance operation being run by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats under the Attorney-General's nose.

The department needs to ­release these documents.  Innocent Australians have a right to know if they are being monitored by the state.

In giving the notice of practical refusal, the department states that the work of processing the request would substantially and unreas­on­ably divert the resources of the department from its other operations due to its scope.  Yet this same department gave Cooper just a fortnight to comply with onerous demands of supplying potentially thousands of documents relating to the CPAC conference.

Given the extent of Chinese influenc­e reported in the media this week, it is unacceptable that Australian public servants in the Attorney-General's Department have devoted such a significant amount of time and resources to targeting Australians because of their political beliefs.

It seems the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme legislation may not be being applied impartially or in good faith.  Porter has suggested that the staff overseeing the scheme will be moved, which is hardly adequate.  They also have shrugged off suggestions that they need foreign-speaking officials overseeing the scheme.

As reported in The Weekend Australian, Porter was angry to learn of the notice being issued to Cooper.  But the bluntness of the legislation and its worrying powers were foreseeable.

My Legal Rights Audit 2018 warned that the Foreign Influence­ Transparency Scheme Act 2018 was found to remove procedura­l fairness, the right to silenc­e and the privilege against self-incrimination.

The scheme should be repealed or recast so that vaguely worded legislation cannot be abused.  And there should be answers as to why commonwealth public servants were potentially misusing their power.  The state targeting people due to political affiliation or belief is a feature of authoritarian regime­s, not a liberal democracy.

Christian Porter's Defamation Reform Would Be A Catastrophic Mistake

Attorney-General Christian Porter wants social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to be legally liable for defamatory comments made by their users.

Right now, the common law can distinguish between the legal liability of active publishers of information (like newspapers and broadcasters) and the passive platform operators that allow users to publish information themselves.  Courts decide where this distinction is drawn according the unique facts of each case.

But in a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, the Attorney-General declared he wants to eliminate the distinction altogether:  "Online platforms should be held to essentially the same standards as other publishers."

The Attorney-General's proposal is fundamentally confused.  Removing the distinction between digital platforms and newspapers would have a devastating effect on both those platforms and our ability to communicate with each other.

The proposal is bad on its merits.  But even besides that, the conservative government needs to understand how destructive it would be to the conservative movement online.

Let's start with the legal principles.  It makes sense that newspapers and broadcasters are liable for what they publish.  They actively commission and produce the content that appears on their services.  They read it, edit it, arrange and curate it.  They pay for it.  Newspapers and broadcasters have not only an editorial voice, but complete editorial control.  Indeed, it is this close supervision of what they publish that gives them strength in the marketplace of ideas.

Social media platforms do nothing of the sort.  Not only do they not commission the content that appears on our newsfeeds (let alone read, factcheck, or edit that content), they don't typically confirm that their users are even real people — not, say, bots or foreign impersonators.  They merely provide a platform for us to communicate with each other.  Social media has facilitated a massive, global conversation.  But it has no editorial voice.

In the United States a parallel debate is going on among Republicans about whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which explicitly prevents courts from treating "interactive computer services" as publishers or speakers for the purpose of legal liability — should be abolished.

Section 230 has variously been described by scholars and commentators as "the 26 words that created the internet" or the "the internet's first amendment".  The internet law professor Jeff Kosseff writes that eliminating this provision would "turn the internet into a closed, one-way street".  Attorney-General Porter's proposal would have the same effect.

If social media platforms have to bear legal responsibility for what their users say, they will assume editorial responsibility for it.  That means editing, deleting, and blocking all content that could be even the least bit legally questionable.

Newspapers and broadcasters sometimes take calculated risks with what they print, if they believe that the information they reveal is in the public interest.  But why would a technological company — a company that lacks an editorial voice or the journalistic vision — be anything but hypercautious?  Why wouldn't it delete anything and everything with even the slightest risk?

And here is where the practical politics comes in.  Even if the Attorney-General's proposal was a good idea in principle, this policy would be particularly devastating for the conservative movement that supports his government.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine a legislative proposal that would more effectively, and immediately, cut down the Australian conservative movement online.

After all, what side of politics benefits most from the political diversity and openness of the modern internet?  What side of politics has relied most on the internet's ability to bypass traditional media gateways?  It is difficult to imagine the conservative political surge in recent years without social media — without Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all those podcast platforms.

If conservatives are concerned about social media networks "censoring" conservative content on their services now, well, making them liable for everything conservatives say would supercharge that.

And why would this policy stop at defamation laws?  Why wouldn't it also apply to liabilities around, say, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act?  Or our sedition laws?  We are looking at a future where technology companies in California (companies that many conservatives believe are stacked with culturally left employees) could be required to second-guess how the most left-wing judges in Australia might enforce this country's draconian anti-speech restrictions.

The Coalition government should also reflect on how some of its most recent legislative programs have backfired on conservatives.  The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, passed in 2018 in order to tackle Chinese interference in Australian politics, is now being used to target the organiser of the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference, Andrew Cooper, and even Tony Abbott.

The Attorney-General is right that defamation law needs reform.  Australia's defamation framework is heavy-handed and disproportionately favours private reputation over the public need to discuss significant issues.  But removing the courts' ability to determine liability for defamation — and instead deputising the world's technology companies to enforce what they imagine it could be — would be a catastrophic mistake.

Cut Red Tape, Get In Black

If Scott Morrison and his government want to deliver an economic boom, they should follow the highly successful template of President Trump in the US and cut red tape.

New research released today by the Institute of Public Affairs finds that President Trump has overseen a $45.6 billion ($31 billion USD) reduction to the cost of red tape since 2017.  That is the equivalent to around 20 new hospitals, 15 years work of Gonski 2.0 education funding, or four years' worth for funding for the NDIS.

The new research, titled The Trump Administration's Red Tape Reduction Agenda, finds that the key to Trump's success has been a one-in-two-out requirement where two regulations must be repealed for every new regulation introduced.  This requirement imposes a binding restraint on the bureaucracy to consider the costs of the new rules they impose by introducing a trade-off into the equation.  If bureaucrats consider that a new rule is of such importance then they can introduce it.  But they have to find two existing rules to get rid of first.

The outcome of the red tape reduction agenda, along with corporate tax cuts and liberalisation of domestic energy production, has been a once-in-a-generation economic boom.

The unemployment in the US fell to just 3.5 per cent in September, which is the lowest rate since 1968.  The unemployment rate in Australia, by contrast, is 5.3 per cent.  New private sector business investment is above its 40-year average.  There has been an increase to average quarterly business applications (a good indicator of new business formation) from 650,000 in 2016 to 826,000 in 2019.  And a net increase of 422,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector since 2016.  Try impeaching a President with that economic record, Democrats.

Importantly, the bounty of this economic boom has been widely shared across the US.  The unemployment rate for African Americans is at a record low 5.4 per cent, which is down from eight per cent when Trump took office.  And the Hispanic unemployment rate dipped to below four per cent for the first time on record in September this year.

To be sure, not all of this success can be attributed to Trump's economic policies.  There has been a long-term structural improvement to the US labour market following the GFC in 2010.

But Trump's red tape cuts have supercharged the economy by making it easier and less expensive to do business in the United States.  Indeed, while business investment into the US is booming, it is stagnating in Australia.  New Private sector business investment in Australia is just over 11 per cent of GDP, which is lower than during the economically-hostile Whitlam years.

While not yet at Trumpian levels, the Morrison government have cottoned on to the fact that red tape reduction is the key to economic growth.  In a speech to the Business Council of Australia last week, the Prime Minister outlined a number of important reforms including simplifying Australia's employment laws system and speeding up approvals for major projects.

In addition, government's red tape reform efforts are being driven by the highly capable Ben Morton, who is the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister.  Just yesterday Morton outlined important changes to the policy-making process that will require departments to provide more rigorous analysis to justify new regulations.

This is a welcome start.  But much more work needs to be done.

To start with, the government must take the scissors to the mountain of green tape which is holding up projects across the country from dams and mines in Queensland to logging projects in Tasmania.

As reported in these pages on October 23, there has been a 80-fold increase in green laws since the first federal environmental department was set up in 1971.  Much of this increase is duplication — and triplication in some cases — between local, state, and federal laws.  At a minimum the government should remove areas of duplication by removing the federal government from regulating any areas that state governments or local councils are already involved with.

Most importantly, though, the government must hold the bureaucrats to account.  Every year, more bureaucrats are employed by state and federal governments and, inevitably, look for more work to do.  Unfortunately, more work for bureaucrats typically means more regulation for everyone else.

Imposing a regulatory budget on all federal government departments will bring them to heal.  Such a budget could take a one-in-two-out form, such as with President Trump.  Or it could be a numerical target of, say, a 10 per cent reduction to red tape each year.  Either way, the bureaucracy would finally have some skin in the game and would feel the pinch of the ever-expanding array of regulations.

Morrison and Morton should build on a good start to cutting red tape in Australia by applying the highly successful approach of Trump.  They too might just find it will produce a once-in-a-generation economic boom.

Australian universities are abandoning their role as custodians of Western civilisation in favour of a seemingly endless obsession with identity politics. I wrote recently about the University of Sydney's Resurgent Racism project, a flagship program that provides taxpayer funds to academics so they can berate Australians for supposedly being racist. But it is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to taxpayer-funded identity politics research. My new report has confirmed the extent to which our universities are fixated on class, race and gender — and just how much Australians are paying for it. The Humanities in Crisis: An Audit of Taxpayer-funded ARC Grants found the Australian Research Council's national competitive grants program has distributed $1.34bn in funding to humanities research since 2002. These projects cover historical studies, linguistics, cultural studies, human geography, and communication and media studies. According to the ARC, its purpose is "to grow knowledge and innovation for the benefit of the Australian community". It also claims "the outcomes of ARC-funded research deliver cultural, economic, social and environmental benefits to all Australians". So, has the research of the past 17 years done that and helped ensure our success as a prosperous, peaceful and stable nation? Not quite. What the audit reveals is academics spending millions on projects that are narrow, incomprehensible and reflect the obsession with identity politics, cultural studies, critical theory and radical feminism. At Macquarie University academics received $391,000 for a historical studies project called Sexing Scholasticism: Gender in Medieval Thought, which explored "medieval theological debates about why it was necessary that Christ was born as a man". Academics at the University of Sydney were awarded $735,000 for a cultural studies research project called Reconceiving the Queer Public Sphere: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Same-Sex Couple Domesticity. By "critically analysing queer home life" the project would "transform current understandings of the relation between homosexuality, private life and the public sphere". The ARC awarded the University of Melbourne $100,000 for a cultural studies project examining Female Stardom and Gay Subcultural Reception. And James Cook University was given a bumper $2.7m for a cultural studies proposal, How Gender Shapes the World: A Linguistic Perspective, the authors claimed would "enhance our nation's capacity to interpret and manage gender roles in multicultural contexts". The preoccupation with identity politics is especially notable in historical studies. There have been 616 such research proposals to have received funding since 2002 — with the total cost amounting to $192m. The most common theme is "identity politics", with 112 of the proposals focusing on the leitmotifs of class, race and gender. The second most common theme is "indigenous history and studies", with 99 projects, while the third most common, "war and conflict" attracted 88 proposals. In contrast, there are only three research projects that talk about the rule of law and a solitary proposal examining free speech. This shows our universities are not interested in the history or values of institutions that are essential to understanding Australia's present and shaping its future. As curators of Western civilisation, academics have a duty to look after some of society's most valuable material. But two decades of ARC funding shows they are neglecting their duties. Having bought into the postmodernist notion that Western civilisation is a white patriarchy, they have released themselves from the obligation to study the Western canon. Aristotle's thoughts on the meaning of tragedy are apparently irrelevant, as are Shakespeare's observations of human nature and John Stuart Mill's views on democracy. There is a great deal that universities could pick up from Machiavelli when it comes to the problem of free speech on campus. Today's academics mostly believe there is nothing we can learn from the 2500 years of accumulated wisdom and knowledge passed down to us by those who have lived before us. This arrogance was articulated by academics at the University of Sydney when they rejected the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation's proposed curriculum, which at the time was derided as "structurally, institutionally, morally and epistemically violent to other knowledges" and summarily dismissed as "white supremacy writ large". By rejecting the Western canon, academics not only are depriving university students of their dues but they also are depriving us all of the intellectual and moral nourishment that only the humanities can provide. Academics are no longer interested in properly feeding the society that ultimately feeds them.

The phrase "Go Woke, Go Broke" doesn't quite apply to Westpac.  But it nearly does.

Allegations that it breached anti-money-laundering laws 23 million times probably won't send Westpac broke.  But the bank's share price has been smashed and Prime Minister Scott Morrison has as good as called for the Westpac board to sack its chief executive.

If you're a company like Westpac that parades its progressive social agenda credentials at every opportunity, you'd better make sure you're not accused of turning a blind eye and facilitating the funding of some of the most evil crimes imaginable.

One day it's going to dawn on chief executives that you can talk all you want about climate change and gender diversity and asylum seekers — as Westpac has spent the past 10 years doing — but that won't save you if you when the government and the regulators start coming after you.

Attending to your customers and shareholders and not breaking the law is usually a better path to long-term success.

The website Know Your Meme provides a handy definition of "Go Woke, Go Broke" — "an expression typically used to express the sentiment that companies who embrace political correctness or cave to demands of social justice activists will suffer financially as a result".

The idea of being "woke" originated in the United States as a way of describing someone who was awake to the ills that left-wing activists and academics believe plague Western liberal democracies, in particular racism, sexism, and "classism".

The most notorious manifestation of Australia's woke corporate culture is what Luke Sayers, the chief executive of consulting firm PwC Australia, did in 2016.

After Donald Trump's election as US President, Sayers wrote to PwC's 7,000 Australian staff offering counselling and support to those who were worried or upset by the poll result.

PwC Australia has a "chief diversity and inclusion officer" and apparently the firm puts "diversity and inclusion" at "the centre" of its strategy.  It's a topic for debate as to just how "included" a PwC staff member who supported Trump would have felt on the receipt of Sayers' message.

Admittedly Westpac hasn't done anything as outrageous as that, but nonetheless over the years it has missed few opportunities to signal its virtues, especially on climate change.

Under former chief executive Gail Kelly, Westpac was a vocal supporter of Labor's emissions trading scheme.

Current CEO Brian Hartzer received front-page publicity in 2017 when he announced Westpac would not provide finance to the Adani coal mine, and the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, a lobby group for centre-left causes, has ranked Westpac as having one of "the most progressive positions on climate change".

In the wake of what's happened to Westpac, the claim from the political left has been, "here's the proof of the crisis of capitalism".  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The tale of Westpac demonstrates what happens when a company, and especially a bank, starts to forget it's a capitalist enterprise and thinks of itself instead as a progressive political outfit, telling everyone else how to live their lives.

The pity of what's happened to Westpac, as much as the temptation to schadenfreude, is that the bigger issues of what the government and regulators can reasonably expect of companies will be ignored.

The bank has something like 14 million customers.  The worst of the 23 million breaches of the law Westpac is alleged to have committed relate to the supposed activities of 12 of those customers.  A sense of the scale of the challenge Westpac and every other financial institution faces under anti-money-laundering laws has so far not been discussed.

Westpac is theoretically liable to a maximum penalty of up to $400 trillion.  Whether the risk of a potential financial penalty a few hundred times larger than the entire Australian economy is the best way to improve corporate behaviour is likewise something that won't get much talked about.

Within a few days there'll probably be calls for yet another inquiry/investigation/royal commission into what's happened.

And no doubt there's going to be a whole new series of laws/regulations/rules proposed so that politicians can declare to the public, "I have made sure that this terrible thing will never happen again."  If only that were true.

Taxpayers Fleeced, Betrayed As Unis Ponder Why Christ Born A Man

Australian universities are abandoning their role as custodians of Western civilisation in favour of a seemingly endless obsession with identity politics.

I wrote recently about the University of Sydney's Resurgent Racism project, a flagship program that provides taxpayer funds to academics so they can berate Australians for supposedly being racist.

But it is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to taxpayer-funded identity politics research.

My new report has confirmed the extent to which our universities are fixated on class, race and gender — and just how much Australians are paying for it.

The Humanities in Crisis:  An Audit of Taxpayer-funded ARC Grants found the Australian Research Council's national competitive grants program has distributed $1.34bn in funding to humanities research since 2002.

These projects cover historical studies, linguistics, cultural studies, human geography, and communication and media studies.

According to the ARC, its purpose is "to grow knowledge and innovation for the benefit of the Australian community".  It also claims "the outcomes of ARC-funded research deliver cultural, economic, social and environmental benefits to all Australians".

So, has the research of the past 17 years done that and helped ensure our success as a prosperous, peaceful and stable nation?

Not quite.  What the audit reveals is academics spending millions on projects that are narrow, incomprehensible and reflect the obsession with identity politics, cultural studies, critical theory and radical feminism.

At Macquarie University academics received $391,000 for a historical studies project called Sexing Scholasticism:  Gender in Medieval Thought, which explored "medieval theological debates about why it was necessary that Christ was born as a man".

Academics at the University of Sydney were awarded $735,000 for a cultural studies research project called Reconceiving the Queer Public Sphere:  An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Same-Sex Couple Domesticity.  By "critically analysing queer home life" the project would "transform current understandings of the relation between homosexuality, private life and the public sphere".

The ARC awarded the University of Melbourne $100,000 for a cultural studies project examining Female Stardom and Gay Subcultural Reception.  And James Cook University was given a bumper $2.7m for a cultural studies proposal, How Gender Shapes the World:  A Linguistic Perspective, the authors claimed would "enhance our nation's capacity to interpret and manage gender roles in multicultural contexts".

The preoccupation with identity politics is especially notable in historical studies.

There have been 616 such research proposals to have received funding since 2002 — with the total cost amounting to $192m.

The most common theme is "identity politics", with 112 of the proposals focusing on the leitmotifs of class, race and gender.

The second most common theme is "indigenous history and studies", with 99 projects, while the third most common, "war and conflict" attracted 88 proposals.  In contrast, there are only three research projects that talk about the rule of law and a solitary proposal examining free speech.

This shows our universities are not interested in the history or values of institutions that are essential to understanding Australia's present and shaping its future.

As curators of Western civilisation, academics have a duty to look after some of society's most valuable material.  But two decades of ARC funding shows they are neglecting their duties.

Having bought into the postmodernist notion that Western civilisation is a white patriarchy, they have released themselves from the obligation to study the Western canon.  Aristotle's thoughts on the meaning of tragedy are apparently irrelevant, as are Shakespeare's observations of human nature and John Stuart Mill's views on democracy.  There is a great deal that universities could pick up from Machiavelli when it comes to the problem of free speech on campus.

Today's academics mostly believe there is nothing we can learn from the 2500 years of accumulated wisdom and knowledge passed down to us by those who have lived before us.  This arrogance was articulated by academics at the University of Sydney when they rejected the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation's proposed curriculum, which at the time was derided as "structurally, institutionally, morally and epistemically violent to other knowledges" and summarily dismissed as "white supremacy writ large".

By rejecting the Western canon, academics not only are depriving university students of their dues but they also are depriving us all of the intellectual and moral nourishment that only the humanities can provide.  Academics are no longer interested in properly feeding the society that ultimately feeds them.

What The Liberals Must Learn From Labor

The Labor Party's review of its federal election debacle was delivered to the party's national executive on Thursday.  Apparently the review has concluded the ALP ran a poor campaign, had too many policies and was led by an unpopular leader.  Labor didn't need six months to work that out — they knew that on the Sunday morning after the election.  Since the poll in May, as the former deputy leader Tanya Plibersek so nicely put it, the ALP has been doing "its therapy in public".

While Labor engages in its seemingly endless soul-searching, it should remember one thing:  it's losing elections but it's winning the battle of ideas.

That Labor has won only three of the last 10 federal elections has been pointed out endlessly.  It's true that if you judge Labor only by the number of its victories at the polls, it's lost many more electoral battles than it has won.

However, if you judge Labor not by its election results but by its success in deciding the nation's policy agenda, on any fair assessment you'd have to say that for at least the past two decades Labor has been winning comprehensively.

Almost every contour of public discussion about economic and social policy in Australia has in recent years been determined by the Labor Party and its allies on the left.  The only two exceptions to this rule are foreign policy and border security.

Discussion about taxes is centred on debates about fairness and inequality, not on how to cut them.  Industrial relations policy is regarded as the means to punish bad bosses, not to create jobs.  And energy policy is focused on how to increase renewables, not how to bring down power costs to internationally competitive levels.  The big social policy programs implemented by Coalition governments since 2013 have been the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the so-called Gonski education reforms.  Both were Labor initiatives.  That's happening at the macro level.

At the micro level taxpayer-funded universities are sacking academics who challenge the extremist climate change orthodoxy.  Meanwhile, Commonwealth public servants are using arbitrary and unchecked powers under a law designed to curb foreign influence and passed by the Liberals themselves to persecute individuals organising and participating in conferences aligned with conservative causes.  Not a single left-wing or green-aligned group has had the law applied to it.  Attorney-General Christian Porter, who is responsible for the law, says he's got no problem with the law and the only issue is the way it's been administered.  (Presumably the Attorney-General will have that same attitude to the law when Labor is in power.)

It's no consolation to the Labor MPs sitting in Parliament on the opposition benches, but there's lots of parallels between the ALP in the 2010s and the Liberals in the 1980s.

Back then Labor governments were implementing the policies of the centre-right.  Since 2013, Liberal governments have been implementing the policies of the centre-left.

All of this goes to the question of the purpose of political parties.  Success and failure can't be measured only by parliamentary seats and ministerial salaries won and lost — a point which hopefully will be made by Labor's election review.

Why Labor has been so successful in the battle of ideas and so bad at elections is the subject of a much longer discussion.  Partly it might be because the labour movement has always a movement of philosophy, not politics.  On the flip side, the Liberal Party has traditionally disdained philosophy for pragmatism.  Of course there's nothing wrong with pragmatism.  It wins you elections.  But pragmatism doesn't change anything.

The ALP and the left have a far better appreciation of the role and power of bureaucratic and cultural institutions than do the Liberals.  Labor doesn't win as many elections as the Liberals, but when Labor does win it does things.  When the Liberals win elections, they're in government but not in power.

The global financial crisis and its ongoing consequences must also help explain what's happened.  The times suit the ideology of the centre-left.  And depending on the results of the British general election and the American presidential ballot, we could discover that the times might even suit a modern-day version of socialism.

Australia Must Withdraw From Paris Agreement

President Trump is keeping a promise he made during the 2016 election campaign to get the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement.  Australia must do the same.

In a speech to the Lowy Institute in October, Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned of the dangers of "negative" globalism;  which "coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community."  "And worse still", Morrison added, "an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy."

The Paris Climate Agreement is an exemplar of this "negative globalism."

The Paris Agreement is a global agreement between 188 nations, which mandates greenhouse gas emissions reductions.  It is littered with neo-pagan earth-worship neologisms like "Mother Earth" — with a capital "M" and capital "E" — "climate justice", and "international equality".  This could have easily have been penned by the great unwashed of Extension Rebellion in between spells of gluing their hands to footpaths, or spitting on passers-by as they make their way to work.

Seriously, do any Ministers read these agreements before they sign them?

Under the Paris Agreement, Australia is forced to reduce its emissions by 28 per cent by 2030 on 2005 levels.  These are the deepest cuts imposed on any nation on a per capita basis.

While Australia must cut its emissions, China — the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gasses — is able to increase its emissions by 150 per cent.

The world's second largest emitter, the United States, has now issued formal notice that it will be exiting the agreement.

Not one of the nations of the European Union — collectively the third largest emitters — are on target to meet their emission reduction obligations.

And India, the fourth largest emitter, will meet its emission reduction requirements under the business as usual scenario, meaning the Paris Agreement has no effect.

So while the Greta Thunberg's and Bob Brown's of the world may want to stop Adani, they are curiously silent about the fact that China has some 1,032 coal-fired power stations currently in operation, and a further 126 under construction.  Or that has India 291 coal plants and 33 more on the way.

Much of China and India's coal plants are fuelled using Australian coal.  Yet Australia has just 20 coal-fired power plants in operation and a grant total of zero in construction.  Apparently, Australian coal is good enough to be exported around the world, but cannot be used to deliver affordable and reliable energy at home.  Australia first?  More like Australia last.

You might be wondering which nations are actually meeting their Paris Agreement obligations.

The Climate Action Tracker, a consortium of three research organisations, tracks the progress of 32 nations in meeting their Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets.  These 32 nations account for 80 per cent of total emissions — so they provide a good baseline for how the agreement is faring.  The tracker finds that only Morocco has policies which are "Paris Agreement compatible".  Morocco might be an economic powerhouse, but it accounts for just 0.6 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Put simply, Australia is being taken advantage of by the rest of the world.  The negotiators from Brussels, Beijing, and Mumbai, have out-played Australia's inept and incompetent foreign policy and economic establishment.

All the nations failing to follow the agreement are able to obtain a competitive economic advantage against Australia.  Low electricity prices mean more investment, jobs, and economic growth.

It would be a comedy if it weren't so tragic.

My research has estimated that the Paris Agreement will increase the cost of generating electricity in Australia by $52 billion, or $8,566 per family.  This $52 billion could provide funding for 22 new hospitals, two decades' worth of the Gonski 2.0 education funding, or over four years' worth of funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

For families, $8,566 would provide funding for five years' worth of schooling at a local government school, paying down entire credit card debt, or four years' worth of electricity bills.

For all of this economic self-harm, there will be no noticeable environmental benefit.  Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have estimated that the Paris Agreement will only produce a two-tenths of one-degree Celsius reduction in global warming by the year 2100.

In other words, instead of the temperature reaching 42 degrees on a hot summer's day, it will be just 41.8 degrees — so don't throw away your air-conditioner just yet.

This economic self-harm is even more foolish when you consider the fact that Australia accounts for just 1.3 per cent of the global emissions caused by human activity, and human activity accounts for just three per cent of total emissions.  Even Australia's Chief Scientist Alan Finkel said the complete cessation of all emissions from Australia would do "virtually nothing" to the global climate.

President Trump is putting America first and the globalists last by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Scott Morrison and the Coalition would do well to remember that they were elected by the Australian people to represent the voters of Penrith and Parramatta, not Paris.  An agreement which imposes significant and irreparable economic damage without delivering a discernible environmental benefit is the very definition of negative globalism.

This Foolish Act Must Be Repealed At Once

Bureaucrats are using Australia's foreign-influence laws to run a covert political operation out of the Attorney-General's Department to silence Australians becaus­e of their political beliefs, all under the nose of the Coalition government.

This is the kind of behaviour one would expect from the Stasi in East Germany in 1961, not in Australia­ today.

On Saturday, The Weekend Australian reported that Andrew Cooper, the founder and president of libertarian advocacy organisation LibertyWorks, had received a letter from the Attorney-General­'s Department advising him to provide all documents ­"detailing any understanding or arrangement" between LibertyWorks and the American Conservative Union.

LibertyWorks and the ACU co-hosted the Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney in August, which featured a range of speakers from Australia and overseas.

The notice, issued by the deputy secretary of the department's Integrity and International Group, also requested copies of correspondence with speakers, as well as the transcripts and recordings of the addresses given at the conference.

It further noted that a failure to comply with the notice within 14 days could expose ­Cooper to criminal penalties, with a maximum penalty of six months' jail.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has also been harassed by A-G's bureaucrats under the same laws.  This political intimidation was enabled by the government's Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, which came into force last December.

Under section 45(2) of the scheme, officials in the Attorney-General's Department are given broad powers to issues notices requiring a person to produce­ information where offic­ials "reason­ably suspect" that a person might be liable to register under the scheme.

When the Turnbull government introduced the laws into parliament in 2017, the scheme was purportedly designed to counter the "serious threat posed to Australia and our interests by covert interference and espionage".  Specifically, the laws were introduced as part of a push to challenge intrusions into Australian democratic activities undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party and its agents.

The Chinese government operate­s an extensive influence apparatus that includes Confucius Institutes embedded within Australian universities, Chinese govern­ment-owned companies that are deeply linked to the Commun­ist Party, and so-called community groups active in Aust­ralia but that lobby governments here on behalf of foreign powers.

However, instead of implementing careful and proportionate measures to curtail foreign influence, the Coalition government has handed the bureaucracy untrammelled power to operate a covert political operation to target Australians based on their political views.

Cooper has not been charged with a crime.  The laws enable a bureaucrat to go on fishing exped­itions without a warrant or court order to collect information on the mere suspicion of foreign influence.  The nature of this scheme raises the question of which govern­ment parliamentarians sat down to read the bill, and how they could approve of it.

Apparently the department has sent about 500 letters to a range of individuals asking them to consider whether they need to register under the scheme.  It is not an isolated problem.

Under the circumstances, the departmental secretary should be stood down so that an investigation can take place to understand why this has happened, who else has been targeted, and to ensure it does not happen again.

Observers of American politics will recognise the parallels to the Lois Lerner saga during the latter half of the Obama administration.  Lerner was the head of the Internal Revenue Service division which processed applications for tax-exempt groups.

A 2013 investigation found that the IRS had singled out conservative organisations for intense scrutiny, sometimes based on such arbitrary grounds as the name of the organisation.  The IRS delayed applications and improperly questioned some organisations about their donors and religious affiliations and practices.

This was the result of a massive bureaucracy becoming a power unto itself.  The signs from Aust­ralia's foreign-influence laws suggest­ we may be heading down a similar path.  The difference here is that the abuse of power is ­happening under the noses of an ostensibly centre-right government.  This is what happens when you try to govern with a public service­ stacked with people who align with a green-left agenda.

These consequences were not unknowable or unforeseen.  In research published in January, I identified that the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 added to the body of laws that undermine our fundamental freedoms and betray the rule of law.

The research revealed that the legislation removes the right to silenc­e and imposes criminal penalties for failing to give inform­ation when requested to do so under a notice.  It even abolishes the privilege against self-incrim­ination when such information might expose the person to a penalty.  Finally, natural justice is ­removed as departmental officials are not required to observe procedural fairness when exercising the powers granted under the act.  An investigation must be launched into the Attorney-­General's Department to find out how deep and widespread the ­potential abuses of power are.  For every Andrew Cooper and Tony Abbott, who have the profile and public support to fight back, there could be thousands of conservative Australians being told to shut down and shut up.

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 must be repealed.  If the government fails to act swiftly, it could find that s45(2) becomes the new s18C.

End The Man-Made Drought. Rip Up The Murray Darling Basin Plan

The failure of the Murray Darling Basin Plan is an example of what happens when decisions are taken out of the hands of locals and given to distant Canberra bureaucrats.

By taking an extra 2000GL of water out of the agricultural sector every year since 2012 — the largest re-direction of water to the environment for any large river basin in the world — the Murray Darling Basin Plan has created nothing less than a man-made drought.

This could all have been avoided if the Australia's state and federal governments had heeded the advice of our founding fathers, who deliberately left responsibility for the administration of rivers to the states.

Our founding fathers understood that when it comes to juggling environmental and economic needs, local knowledge is crucial.  People on the ground have a vested interest in ensuring both the viability of long-term investment as well as the environmental sustainability that will keep that investment secure.

But when decisions are made at a distance, environmental utopianism is often given priority over people's livelihoods.  This phenomenon was demonstrated in the May 18 election, when Queenslanders reliant on mining jobs voted overwhelmingly to reject the ecological extremism being pushed in the inner suburbs of distant major cities.

This local knowledge is why New South Wales Deputy Premier John Barilaro has called for his state to withdraw from the Murray Darling Basin Plan.  As the MP for an electorate near the Murray, Barilaro has first-hand knowledge of the damage the plan is doing to hardworking Australian farmers.

Constitutionally speaking, NSW should be able to act on the deputy premier's proposal.  The question of rivers was raised during the federal conventions of the 1890s, with the South Australians concerned that Victorian and New South Wales agriculture would use up the water they wanted for river boating.  In the face of this controversy, the delegates deliberately chose to leave the issue to the states under the premise that decisions should be in the hands of those immediately affected by them.

The only mention of rivers in the entire Constitution is in Section 100, where it deliberately restricts the federal government from using its Trade and Commerce powers to "abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation".  "Conservation" in this context meant pastoralism, with the founders aware that in a country as dry as Australia there was a limit to how much water could be used for irrigation.

Unfortunately, the federal government has bypassed this protection and taken control of the issue, damaging the principles of federalism in the process.

While there have been centrally coordinated agreements over the use of the Murray River since 1914, the current Murray Darling Basin Plan is based on Section 96 of the Constitution, which allows the federal government to make grants to the states with attached conditions.

Because the Commonwealth has deliberately monopolised the major sources of taxation, states are now reliant on these grants which allow the central government to dictate to them on policy areas where they have no constitutional right.

As a result, any attempt on the part of NSW to withdraw from the plan would carry with it significant financial penalties.

Even if the state government was willing to endure this, there is every chance that the High Court would allow the federal government to legislate on the basis of the External Affairs power in Section 51(xxix) of the Constitution.  This has been interpreted as allowing the federal government to enforce international environmental agreements regardless of the intended delegation of powers.

If we want a healthy system of federalism, we need to reverse this process and restrict the ability of the Commonwealth to centralise control without a constitutional mandate.

As far as the Murray Darling Basin Plan is concerned, it is probably too late for such a structural initiative.  The Morrison government must urgently tear up the plan and allow desperate farmers to access the water that is flowing agonisingly past their front doors.

To lessen the likelihood that such awful decisions are made in the future, policymakers should look to the wisdom of our founding fathers and allow decisions to be made at the most local level practicable.  At a minimum, this means the state level, where the smaller size of the electorate allows individuals to have a greater impact on political decision-making.

The concept of federalism is about letting individuals take control of their own lives — it is a principle on which our great nation was founded, and it's a principle we must revive.