Memo AFL: Do You Play Footy ― Or Politics?

Australia is not a racist country and the Australian Football League should know better than to give its support to a movement that says that it is.

Before round two kicked off on 11 June, players from Collingwood and Richmond announced they would "take a knee" in support of Black Lives Matter, the international protest movement which claims to oppose police violence against black people.  By the end of the round, all players at every match had performed the ritualistic pre-game kneeling.  Like true rebels, this was all carried out with the approval and support of their clubs and the AFL administrators.

Black Lives Matter is on its face a phrase that is unobjectionable but masks a much more radical set of demands.  The entire premise of the Black Lives Matter movement is that Western society structurally impedes racial equality and that this can only be cured by fundamental structural change to Western institutions.

One wonders what is it that the AFL and the clubs and the players believe when they say they support Black Lives Matters' radical ideas to defund and abolish the police, "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure", or dismantle capitalism as one of the "state structures" which disproportionately harms black people.  Surely if this is true and capitalism is immoral then the AFL must have some regrets about the corporatisation and professionalisation of Aussie rules and its transformation into an entertainment consumption product.  Likewise, the players should be happy to sacrifice their salaries and lucrative sponsorship deals and play as amateurs for the love of the game.

Perhaps the Aussie rules establishment is just hopelessly naïve about this but more realistically the AFL simply doesn't care.  In recent years the league has institutionalised political grandstanding and moralising to members and spectators as a central part of the game.  The league's longstanding support to the campaign to divide Australians by race in the Australian Constitution and its support for changing the definition of marriage in 2017 has coincided with a condescending mission to change the values of fans.  In 2019 the AFL allowed Behavioural Awareness Officers to patrol fans who were barracking a bit too passionately for their team at the AFL-owned Marvel Stadium.

Aside from the political moralising, the AFL also treats its supporters with contempt with the way it manages the game.  Aussie rules fans are by and large traditionalist about the game they love, but the AFL's constant and arbitrary rule changes have confused spectators and not only changed the look of the game but highlights the AFL's faith in its ability to micromanage the game to a state of perfection.

The AFL as an organisation holds all the biases, assumptions and blind spots of any group of people who studied social science degrees at university and watch the ABC.  Like many corporate entities in the West, they believe in central plans, identity politics, and climate change.  They can not fathom why anyone would boo Adam Goodes, get upset by players "taking a knee", and probably haven't met anyone who didn't think Donald Trump was a fascist dictator.

An enduring mystery is why it is that the AFL which is supposedly a membership-based competition can have the same resemble the divisions that exist between other elites and the so-called deplorables.  One explanation might make sense of the arrogance of the AFL.  To understand the nature of the AFL it is necessary to understand the nature of "swamps".  While swamps are usually associated with entrenched and self-serving public sector institutions, swamp-like behaviour can be observed in private sector bureaucracies such as sports administrators.  The ideal that the monopolistic AFL would act selflessly and in the best interests of members is unrealistic.  Individuals act in their own best interest, and this is no less true of the individuals in the AFL.  As American public choice theorist William A. Niskanen observed, the bureaucrat is "not entirely motivated by the general welfare" ― or in the AFL's case the wellbeing of the game and service to the members.

The ambition to establish and always expand the "national competition" highlights the AFL's obsession with increasing its own prestige.  In the 1980s and 1990s, the league's expansion into South Australia and Western Australia diminished the state leagues and left fans in those states with two teams to choose from in the national league.  The end result was less choice for fans in a more distant sport, but a more prestigious AFL.  In recent years, vast resources have been committed to creating new clubs in the rugby heartland of Western Sydney as well a second club in Queensland which despite the priority treatment they have been given, have had only limited or no success on or off the field after nearly a decade of operating.

All of this was possible because the AFL had monopolised the sport and without competition could rely on the automatic support of people who loved Aussie rules and had no other choice.  And when the state governments shut down the country in response to the pandemic we found out that the league was not so secure.  Reports suggested only four of the 18 clubs could survive if the 2020 season didn't go ahead, and the AFL itself had to take out a $500 million loan to get it through the year.

Contrast this with the enviable situation in the rugby states.  The National Rugby League Commission's new chairman Peter V'landys has been a champion for the return of sport in Australia.  Despite the catastrophist claims made by the likes of the Australian Medical Association, V'landys argued that rugby league should never have shut down during the pandemic and successfully set the 28 May as the NRL restart ― a fortnight before the AFL returned.  He told 2GB that he couldn't see why there couldn't be a crowd at the first NRL game back.  V'landys said "you have to base it on data, not emotional scare-mongering clichés … They've got no data to show.  The infection rate is less than half a per cent ― how low do we need to get it?"  Those are the words of a man that is committed to representing the fans, while Aussie rules fans are consigned to the AFL swamp.

Don't Know Much About …

Yesterday Education Minister Dan Tehan announced that university students will now be paying up to $14,500 per year to study the humanities, an increase of over 110 per cent.

On all likelihood, the fee hike will mean a larger bill for the Australian taxpayer as many humanities students leave university without the skills needed to get a job and start to pay back their HECS debt.

This news has of course been greeted with outrage and anger from the National Union of Students as well as the National Tertiary Education Union.

National President of the NUS Molly Willmott, for example, said "These degrees are important.  The jobs that come out of them are important.  These students deserve better from the government."

This is very true.  Students studying the humanities do indeed deserve better.  They deserve much, much better.  This is because Australian undergraduates who have been enrolled to study degrees in the humanities have not in any way been getting their money's worth.

Students are, in short, being swindled by their institutions.

The idea behind studying the humanities used to be so that students were equipped with the tools to try make sense of and understand the world through the Western tradition of art, culture and philosophy.  This is no longer the case.  If you think Australian undergraduates are getting Plato or Socrates, Shakespeare or Dante, think again.

Instead, students have been getting fed a very depressing and thoroughly predictable diet of "new humanities" subjects based entirely around the postmodern theory of identity politics.

All subjects, whether it be history, literature, art or geography, must be shoe-horned into the idea that everything in the world is simply a societal power struggle of class, race and gender.

For the entire duration of their university careers, students have the same thing drummed into them repeatedly, by ideologically driven academics who present this single world view to undergraduates.

Let's have a look at some of the courses which have been on offer.

At the University of Western Australia, students have been taking Community, Power and the Common Good in which they have, "explored the community engagement and community empowerment through … social justice, power, equality and inequality, ethical public behaviour (and) theories of community building".

Over at the University of South Australia, undergraduates have been learning about the "social construct of whiteness and representations of whiteness in contemporary Australia" in a unit called Identity and Representation.  Those same students, enrolled in Gender, Sexuality and Representation have been spending their days considering "ways in which cultural artefacts reinforce or challenge dominant beliefs about gender and sexuality".

Students studying history have been getting an especially raw deal.

At least if you sign up for a degree in gender studies, you expect a generous dose of feminist studies and Queer Theory.  However, students studying both world and Australian history have been finishing their degrees with a completely distorted view of the world in which the past is viewed as a contest between the oppressors and the oppressed.

Australian history especially, has been repackaged and relabelled as a social and political commentary on contemporary issues rather than a study of actual history.

At Monash University, those enrolled in Australian Stories:  People, Place, History explored "crime and punishment, gender and sexuality, the environment, family (and) race relations", while students at the University of New South Wales taking Inequality in Australia were asked to consider "how was inequality influenced by race, gender, sexuality, age and disability?" and "when and why did it become a political issue?"

It is clear that Australian taxpayers have been funding the creation of a social warrior underclass of disaffected young Australians who emerge from universities with a particular view of Australia's history which colours their view on Australian society.

It is no wonder that these Australians have been taking to the streets decrying "racism" and wanting to expunge our history by tearing down monuments and statues.

Rather than more technocratic tinkering with university fees, the government should simply cease providing taxpayer support to any organisation that attacks and undermines Australian values.

This not only means ending funding for humanities departments, but also for our national broadcaster, the ABC, which has been a cheerleader of division through its relentless editorialising based on identity politics.

And it means no more funding for government and quasi-government organisations, such as the Australian Human Rights Commission, which spends its days soliciting complaints from Australians about how racist this country supposedly is and censoring freedom of speech.

The main dividing line of our time is not left or right, but identity politics versus mainstream Australian values.

Mainstream Australians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or background value our egalitarian way of life, liberal democratic institutions, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, hard work, small business, home ownership, and seek a better life for themselves and their children.

There is far more that unites than divides us as a country.  The humanities departments at universities must stop their relentless attack on the Australian way of life or lose their funding altogether.

The Tyranny Of The Righteous Mob

"Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children" is a phrase relevant to what's happening to universities, media organisations, and even to fashionably "woke" comedians.  Another apposite phrase is to be "hoist by one's own petard".

The demand to remove from public life any acknowledgment of anyone or anything identified as potentially racist has existed in various forms for a number of years but has gained impetus in recent weeks through the Black Lives Matter movement.

The call to remove statues in the United States of Confederate generals, in the UK of slave traders, and in Australia of Captain James Cook is one aspect, and in the scheme of things is just one minor aspect in an intellectual project attempting to do nothing less than refashion our understanding of modern society, and by extension our understanding of ourselves.

In broad terms that project involves replacing the idea that the world we live in is, or should aspire to be, one built upon concepts such as political liberalism, egalitarian democracy and a market economy, with a different idea, namely that differences between people and peoples according to class, race and gender, and the oppression that's resulted across history because of those differences, have created an irredeemably and fatally flawed society.

Therefore the conclusion that follows from this claim is that only a fundamental restructure of society can eliminate the class conflict, and the racism and the sexism which are the foundations of the modern world.  This in a nutshell and without too much exaggeration, is what every undergraduate Arts student at every Australian university is today taught to believe.

The problem with this perspective on the world is that it is created by the very system that the woke view as illegitimate.  It is akin to attempting to disentangle the Liar's paradox of "this sentence is false".

Another problem with the perspective is that it knows no boundaries and allows no room for the application of judgment, and an understanding of the reality that human history encapsulates both the best and worst of what it is to be human.

Yes ― Winston Churchill believed India should be ruled by the British.  But 80 years ago he alone was the difference between a Europe of civilisation, or one of Nazism.

It was Jacques Mallet du Pan, an 18th-century Swiss journalist, who in the midst of the French Revolution talked about revolutions consuming their children.  Revolutions are rarely things of half-measures.

Until recently few Australian university vice-chancellors would have contemplated the possibility that after years of telling students that Australia is a racist country, eventually someone would take them at their word, as the Chinese government did a few days ago.

If those journalists at The Guardian who cheer the toppling of statues of slave traders were consistent in their beliefs, they would accept the newspaper they work for should be toppled too because it was once financed by profits from spinning slave-picked cotton.

The British philosopher John Gray, who once described himself as of the left, but who now quite correctly argues that in modern politics "left and right" are largely meaningless, a few days ago wrote perceptively about the assault on values of the modern world.

"Woke activists … have no vision of the future.  In Leninist terms they are infantile leftists, acting out a revolutionary performance with no strategy or plan for what they would do in power."

As Gray points out, the rejection of democracy and liberal freedoms "concludes with the tyranny of the righteous mob".

Mobs are dangerous at the best of times and righteous mobs ― whether in the streets or on social media ― are the most dangerous of all.

Gray concludes:  "As the woke movement spills over into parts of Europe and the UK [and Australia], it should be clear that this is no passing storm.  The paroxysm we are witnessing may be remembered as a defining moment in the decline of the liberal West.  Perhaps it is time to consider to strengthen the enclaves of free thought and expression that still remain, so they have a chance of surviving in the blank and pitiless world that is being born."

Universities Always Said We Were Racists, Now Look At Their Dilemma

Australian universities are in quite the pickle.  Not only are they watching as potentially $12bn in revenue from foreign student fees slips away, but they are also being accused of racism by the country they rely on for so much of their funding.  Last week, Beijing issued a statement in which it warned Chinese students to give Australian universities a wide berth because of both COVID-19 and endemic racism.

In response to Scott Morrison's suggestions that this amounts to "coercion", Beijing has retaliated with the suggestion that Australia needs to do some "soul searching" and that the "racist incidents" were "based on a host of facts".

This is a delicious irony.  For years so many Australian universities have been making money out of the racism industry.  Now they are on the back foot, having to defend themselves against an accusation that is demonstrably false.

For decades academics employed in our institutions of higher education, especially those in the humanities, have been using taxpayers' money to paint a picture of Australia as a country of racists.  They have been using their positions in various faculties to propagate the myth that we are a xenophobic nation.

They have taken every opportunity to berate mainstream Australians about how they should be both ashamed of their history and ashamed of themselves.  They have been telling Australians that it is somehow immoral to celebrate Australia Day, that Captain James Cook was an invader, and that the whole existence of the modern state of Australia is a terrible mistake, a crime to be endlessly deplored and for which we must constantly apologise.  They have insisted that the values and institutions of Western civilisation are racist, imperialist and outdated, and must be expunged from our society.

The University of Sydney leads the way in the business of race.  A couple of years ago, its academics infamously rejected the Ramsay Centre's bachelor of arts in Western civilisation as "white supremacy writ large".  The faculty of arts and social science boasts a taxpayer-funded "Resurgent Racism" project, which has concluded that unless something is done by the faculty, Australian society will face a dystopian future of white supremacy.  Last year, the university hosted a self-styled "anti-racism educator" from the US to lecture everyone on campus about how racist they all were.

The staff in the history faculty seem to spend significant waking hours thinking, writing and talking about race and racism, all at the expense of the taxpayer.  Since 2002, the faculty has received almost $9m from the Australian Research Council to fund 18 historical studies research projects that focus on racism in one form or another.

Nine months ago, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, Michael Spence, appeared to comment that anyone who dared question the existence of Chinese influence on his campus was basically a racist.  "We have to be careful that the whole debate doesn't have overtones of the White Australia policy," he told The Sydney Morning Herald.  In this way, he ensured next year's income — or so he thought at the time.  No one predicted that COVID-19 would wipe out, almost overnight, $884m in international student fees for the University of Sydney, a generous portion of which would come from Chinese students.

Spence is the highest-paid vice-chancellor in Australia, earning $1.5m a year.  As yet, he has not taken a pay cut like many of his colleagues.

This episode has revealed another crack in the crumbling facade of the Australian university, which is one of the crucial institutions of Western civilisation yet which fails the Australian public, having lost sight of its purpose.  Our universities are facing a systematic crisis and have been exposed as incompetently run businesses more interested in ­foreign dollars, social justice, diversity and identity politics than they are the pursuit of truth, freedom of speech and intellectual inquiry.  They are floundering in the midst of a free speech crisis, with a questionable commitment to academia and a terrible track record in dealing with academics and students who hold a contrary view to the established groupthink.  Last year's Independent Review of Freedom of Speech in Higher Education Providers (the French review) found that many of the higher education rules and policies in universities used broad language "capable of impinging on freedom of expression".

Not only have we seen the censure and unlawful sacking of Professor Peter Ridd by James Cook University, but to add insult to injury, JCU's court case is being funded by taxpayers, having already cost $630,000 in legal fees.  Meanwhile, the University of Queensland employed one of Australia's top legal firms to pursue philosophy undergraduate Drew Pavlou regarding his robust criticism of the university's connections with China as well as that country's history of human rights abuses.

Our universities have long ceased being institutions interested in the rigorous exercise of freedom or the scientific method and today better resemble elaborate public relations outfits.

The Problem With 'Topple The Racists'

Last weekend, a mob tied a rope to a statue of a 17th century Bristol merchant, philanthropist and slave trader called Edward Colston, pulled it off its pedestal, dragged it through the streets and then threw in the river.

In London, two bronzes of Winston Churchill were defaced, one of them daubed with the words "racist".  In Leeds, a statue of Queen Victoria was graffitied with the words "racist", "murder" and "slave owner".

Meanwhile, over in the US, statues of Christopher Columbus have been either toppled or beheaded.

It was only a matter of time until radical activists in this country would want to start imitating the wanton destruction and vandalism taking place in other parts of the world.

In the last few days, disparate voices on social media platforms are calling for the wholesale destruction of all monuments to Australia's early settlers, explorers and colonial administrators on the grounds that each and every individual who has been immortalised in stone, marble or bronze was a racist.

While it has yet to play out in our cities, like their counterparts in the UK, the proponents for "Topple the Racists" have already come up with a hit list.  One of their targets is Charles Cameron Kingston, who was the 20th Premier of South Australia between 1893 and 1899.  Their problem with Kingston is that he was one of the proponents of the White Australia policy.  However, what they fail to mention is that Kingston was also responsible for electoral reform which gave votes to women in Australia.  He also had working class Australians in mind when he pushed to extend workers' compensation.

In this bizarre world of statue identity politics, race clearly trumps both gender and class.

Another individual on the hit list is Captain James Cook, whose statue in Hyde Park was graffitied three years ago with the slogans "Change the date" ― a reference to change the data of Australia Day ― and "No pride in genocide".

It is one thing to conflate history out of ignorance, but it is another to retrospectively attribute the unspeakable crime of mass murder to the son of Scottish Farmer who died before the First Fleet had even arrived on the shores of Botany Bay in 1788.

These kinds of historical facts are of course totally irrelevant to the mob.  This is because members of this movement believe the false narrative that the modern state of Australia is a travesty which was brought into existence through violence, genocide, and dispossession.  For them, the removal of statues has become a form of atonement for guilt and self-loathing.  It is an expression of a moral revulsion at the supposed racism and ideas of cultural superiority displayed by our forebears.

We cannot divorce these characters from our history because without them, the modern state of Australia as it stands today would simply not exist.

We are going down a very dangerous path if we cave into the demand of the few because no one can tell when it will end.

Every Labor Prime Minister supported the White Australia policy until it was declared dead by the Whitlam government in 1973, which has solicited not so much as a whimper from the "Topple the Racists".  And speaking of Gough Whitlam, I doubt the mob will destroy his statue because he closed the door on Vietnamese refugees.

The movement is indicative of a deep rift which exists in Australian society between a minority of radicals who hate Australia, and the majority of Australians who love Australia.

Every year, around Australia Day, they attempt to berate, belittle, and bully mainstream Australians into being ashamed of their country and into joining them in an act of self-flagellation.

Their efforts, however, remain futile and even counter-productive, because the more they tell Australians that they should hate this country the more Australians love this country.

Every year, I commission a survey of 1000 Australians in advance of 26 January, and every year, the results come back the same.  This year, 71 per cent of Australians are proud of their history, and 85 per cent are proud of being Australian.

It is worth reminding the mob that they are perfectly free to protest about racism, and free to voice their opinions about this nations' past without reprisals or punishment, because of the civilisation brought here by the very men and women they wish to erase from history.

They also need to remember that the institutions of Western Civilisation do not give them the freedoms to commit acts of untrammelled vandalism, violence, and anarchy on Australian streets.

Everywhere you go in Australia, no matter the size of the town, you encounter a variety of plaques, statues, and memorials which have been erected by the community, for the community.

These monuments and memories reflect both individual contributions and the values of the community at the time.  If we are going to have a conversation about what statues mean to society, perhaps we need to ask the community at large what it wants, rather than leaving it up to the mob.

Why We Erect Statues ― And Should Keep Them There

Amid a world that seems hell-bent on tearing down statues in a cathartic frenzy, it is worth sparing a moment to reflect on why we erected those statues in the first place.  While the left thinks that a monument's primary purpose is to glorify great dead white men, the reality is that they were meant to be symbols of hope and progress.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook's landing at Botany Bay, so even before the Black Lives Matter protests were exported to our shores, a showdown over how we view the past seemed inevitable.  With this in mind, Connor Court Publishing has organised a reprint of the book Captain James Cook, R.N. 150 Years After.

The book was written by Sir Joseph Carruthers, one of the founders of federation and a man who therefore had a keen interest in building up a positive narrative for his country.  Left-leaning historians like Jillian Robertson blame Carruthers for helping to establish Captain Cook's lauded position as Australian founder and cultural icon.

The matters in dispute are more issues of perspective than fact.  Robertson, author of The Captain Cook Myth, bases her argument on Cook only visiting Australia once despite having the opportunity to return, his writings showing he was unimpressed by the place, and the fact that it was James Matra and Joseph Banks, his subordinates on the Endeavour, who made the real case for colonisation.

These issues do little to alter the central point;  that Australia, as we know and love it, would not exist without Captain Cook and his great voyages.  All they do is suggest that the decision to focus so exclusively on Cook was a deliberate one.

Cook was ultimately chosen because he was a great canvas on which to project Australian values.  He was a scientist and explorer pushing the boundaries of knowledge.  He was an officer and a gentleman.  And above all he was a man from humble origins whose meritocratic success captured the hopes and aspirations of an immigrant society.

Carruthers thought it was "an augury of the future of these great lands, our very founder was one who fought his way to success by unaided efforts, by industry and by patient but persevering labour.  His life is a noble example to the people of Australia, who live under institutions which freely open the door of fame and power to all who display industry and ability."

That is why we erect statues, not to glorify the dead, but to inspire the living.  As Carruthers put it "sentiment about great events and great men to whom the world owes much is but the spark which fires men to similar achievement."

Perhaps one of the reasons the left is so determined to tear down everything is because they no longer believe that such inspiration is necessary.  Identity politics teaches that your race, gender and class determine your life virtually without your input;  the individual and their endeavour count for naught.

This line of thinking is not something that Carruthers, who despite being the son of a convict rose to become New South Wales Premier, would accept.  Circumstances certainly play their role, but they do not determine our fate.  Giving in to predestination eliminates all purpose in human life.

Carruthers was quite the monument builder.  He established the public park at Cook's Landing in Sydney, he successfully lobbied for the statue of Cook in London, and he even tried to make the spot of Cook's death in Hawaii a place of pilgrimage akin to Gallipoli or Kokoda.

Some of this comes across as borderline silly, but it was never just about Cook or dwelling on the past.  It was about the great society that was being constructed where Cook had tread.  As that society faces new challenges, maybe we need some inspiration.

Building Plan Could Fall Over

The HomeBuilder scheme announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison has a worthy objective but we have to be careful it doesn't become a hand-out to the big banks and they don't forget that red tape is the biggest roadblock for Australia's construction sector.

The scheme HomeBuilder provides eligible owner-occupiers with a grant of $25,000 to build a new home or substantially renovate an existing home.  The government claims HomeBuilder will assist the residential construction market by encouraging the start of new home builds and renovations.

But as is the case with all government policy, it is important to check the fine print.  No individual earning over $125,000 or couple earning over $200,000 can access this scheme.  And the minimum cost of the renovation to be eligible for the $25,000 grant is a whopping $150,000.

It would be surprising if any individual on under $125,000 a year or couple earning under $200,000 has more than their entire annual salary lying around to spend on a home renovation to even be eligible.

To access this scheme, the practical consequence for many Australians could be, in order to access the payment of $25,000, they will increase their mortgage and pay more than the grant amount in interest.

While deliberately targeted at middle Australia, by design it may only saddle them with more debt to build a granny flat.

These rules are symbolic of the red tape that actually slows down Australia's home renovations and housing construction sector.

A superior "job creation" scheme would be cutting red and green tape that tangles basic home renovations and developments of new homes and apartments.

NIMBY councils in our major cities have not only blocked all sensible high-density development in the inner city where public transport infrastructure is readily available, but also opposed unlocking land in green wedges in our cities.

Permits for basic renovations can get tied up in council approval processes for years sometimes.

This red tape is compounded by direct costs governments place on landowners through taxation, planning red tape and stamp duty.

Scott Morrison should commit to slash construction red tape;  he could use the new National Cabinet process to get the states to the table on the issue of planning red tape and stamp duty.

We Need To Do Reform, Not Talk It

With the economy in recession, Prime Minister Scott Morrison should spend less time trying to be popular and attempting to be everyone's friend and more time advocating for the policies that will get Australians back into jobs.

When he stood up at the National Press Club last week, the Prime Minister could have announced corporate tax cuts, or reductions in red tape, or, if he had really wanted to be bold, that Australia was going to develop a nuclear energy industry.

Instead he talked about organising five working groups to have employer groups and the ACTU talk about industrial relations reforms they might each eventually agree to.  Zoom chats between bosses and unions organised by the government might well fulfil what pollsters claim is the public's desire during the coronavirus crisis for "consensus" politics and an end to partisan bickering.  But what will be the real outcomes is at this stage difficult to envisage.

To get Australia out of the recession we're now in will require the government to do more than say "we tried".  It will need a clear-eyed and hard-nosed understanding of what want to achieve

As was reported this week, Steven Kennedy, the secretary of the Treasury, said at a private meeting of the working groups "it could take five to seven years to bring the economy back to its pre-pandemic state" and with unemployment at up to 9 per cent by 2021.

Given that Australians are constantly being told "we're all in this together", presumably Kennedy will find a forum to share with those 86 per cent of Australian workers who are not a member of a trade union the insights he's willing to discuss at closed-door meetings of bosses and unions.

If there does happen to be something bosses and unions agree on it probably would have happened by now.  If there is low-hanging fruit it would have fallen to earth already.

In recent weeks the ACTU has had two opportunities to show it was interested in a different way of doing business ― but it didn't budge an inch.

The Federal Court decision allowing some casual employees access to the entitlements of permanent staff could affect more than 2 million workers, and require employers, many of whom will be small businesses, to make up back pay of up $8 billion in total.  As businesses struggle to stay afloat this is the very last thing they need, but of course it was a decision the ACTU welcomed.  According to a Roy Morgan poll, one quarter of the businesses that were surveyed said the decision will "deter them from hiring casual employees.

And when the NSW state government attempted in institute a 12-month pause in pay increases for state public servants in return for a guarantee of no job losses, the proposal was rejected out-of-hand by the ACTU.  Michele O'Neil said it was as "an insult to thousands of essential workers who had worked to get the state through the coronavirus crisis".  It's true that many essential and health workers have performed an incredible job, but NSW has 410,000 public servants.  Some are nurses and teachers, and some are administrative officers writing up diversity and inclusion plans.

Admittedly it's early days ― but so far the unions have given up nothing for their privileged seat at the table.  On the other hand, as a show of "good faith", the Coalition has shelved the Ensuring Integrity Bill to reform the administration of employer and union organisations.  What once the Coalition trumpeted as legislation to protect the interests of Australian employees it is now willing to treat as a mere bargaining chip and a political exercise ― which is what the unions have claimed all along.

No doubt there'll be some good photo opportunities when the Minister for Industrial Relations, Christian Porter, shakes hands (or touches elbows) across the table with ACTU secretary Sally McManus.  But the likelihood is that unless McManus experiences some kind of Damascene conversion towards accepting reform to nearly every aspect of Australia's industrial relations system, nice photos is all the Coalition will get from this process.

It is true that talking about reform is better than not talking about it ― but talking isn't doing.

Cut Red Tape, Green Tape And Taxes ― As Only The Private Sector Can Get Us Out Of Recession

All eyes were on the headline economic growth figure in the national accounts released on Wednesday, which shows the first quarter of negative growth since 2011.  Despite the government claiming that the economy was in good health before COVID-19 arrived in Australia, upsetting 29 years of continuous economic growth, the truth is that the economy has been in the doldrums for quite some time.

Long before the lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were introduced, private sector wages were stagnant, job creation was at a crawl and there were fewer businesses per capita compared with a decade ago.  Underemployment, where workers have a job but not enough hours, has been steadily rising and has not been below eight per cent at any time in the past six years.  Youth unemployment, which spiked to almost 20 per cent in the wake of the 1990-91 recession and steadily trended down to 7.6 per cent in August 2008, has averaged 12.1 per cent since the global financial crisis.

These are signs of a sick economy with weak foundations.  While the political class like to boast about economic abstractions that support their narrative, like GDP growth, this means little to ordinary Australians who are struggling to find work, or to get a pay rise to save for their first home.

Looking past the headline figure of the economy contracting by 0.3 per cent, the national accounts released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics offer some insight into Australia's economic malaise.

Australia is experiencing the longest-run decline in new private sector business investment on record.  For almost seven years, business investment has been trending downward.  And the only reason that the trend didn't start earlier is that the mining boom offset declining investment seen elsewhere in the economy.

The Morrison government has consistently failed to mention that along with a record streak of economic growth, they were overseeing a record decline in business investment.  In the first three months of 2020 business investment fell to 10.8 per cent of GDP.  For context, the lowest level ever recorded was 10.2 per cent of GDP following the 1990-91 recession, and the average level during the economically-hostile Whitlam years was 13.7 per cent of GDP.

This is a serious structural issue.  Business investment is what creates more and higher-paying jobs and improves productivity.  There will be no economic recovery without improved business investment.

There is plenty the Morrison government can do to address this issue.

For a start, they should cut red and green tape and slash the company tax rate.

Red tape costs $176 billion each and every year, according to my research.  Every dollar spent on this excessive burden is diverted away from productive uses, such as hiring a new employee or investing in new equipment.  And as my research published earlier this year has shown, green tape has put at risk over $65 billion of investment since the year 2000.  The red and green tape burden is self-inflicted economic harm Australia can no longer afford.

Australia has the second-highest business tax rate in the OECD at 30 per cent, well above the average rate of 23.6 per cent across the group of 37 countries.  An internationally-competitive business tax rate below 20 per cent will attract business investment, which leads to more jobs and higher wages.  And lowering the tax rate will reward entrepreneurial Australians who put everything on the line to start a small business, which will be vital in the post-lockdown economy where private sector business creation will lead the recovery.

As the job-crushing lockdown restrictions are eased, policy settings need to be geared towards creating a prosperous and dynamic economy.  This means unleashing the private sector, which is responsible for about 80 per cent of economic activity.  Getting Australians back into work is the number one priority, and only the private sector can do this.

ScoMo's Flawed Hawke Fantasy

As Scott Morrison eyes consensus-based industrial relations reform, he must not commit the ultimate sin for any Liberal leader and forget Sir Robert Menzies' forgotten people.

As part of his carefully branded "jobmaker" plan, the prime minister has called on big business and unions to come together at the negotiating table for the sake of our shared economic future.  The idea is to emulate the Accords of Bob Hawke, which were similarly drawn up with the input of union leader Bill Kelty to help Australia out of a tough economic spot.

Political parties court the support of particular sets of people and naturally the centre-right leader has extended a seat at the table to business.  However, that invitation has been limited to big business in a manner that threatens to silence smaller voices and reward powerful corporate interests.

Ever since the Liberal party's formation in 1943, the business community has been one of the party's core constituencies.  Business had been even more central to the party's predecessor the United Australia Party, which had been founded in the midst of the Great Depression based on an appeal to national unity similar to the one that the prime minister is currently making.

At first it made sense that the business community should be so heavily involved in a government that was primarily focused on economic recovery, but over time that presence became an electoral handicap.  People began to feel that business was using its influence to have the game rigged in its favour, much as Labor more openly supported union interests when they were in charge of the industrial relations system.

When founding the Liberal party, Robert Menzies had been keen to distance himself from this UAP legacy.  In a famous series of speeches pondering Australia's post-war future, he defined a new constituency sitting in between those rich enough to look after themselves and those protected by the powerful unions that had come to dominate the heavily regulated industrial relations system.  His people were to be the "salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on";  the forgotten people.

"They are envied by those whose benefits are largely obtained by taxing them.  They are not rich enough to have individual power.  They are taken for granted by each political party in turn.  They are not sufficiently lacking in individualism to be organised for what in these days we call 'pressure politics'.  And yet, as I have said, they are the backbone of the nation."

It is this same unprotected class of the modestly independent that are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus's economic impact.  The people who took risks in starting a restaurant or a hair salon not out of the hope of making it rich, but to have something they could call their own.  In contrast to corporate stultification, they inject innovation and enthusiasm, adding value to the economy and to the community far beyond what is immediately visible.

These people need a voice and the Liberal party was founded to give them one, yet Scott Morrison is so detached from his own ideology that he has not even granted them a tokenistic presence.

Big businesses often benefit from regulations and tax systems that create barriers to entry and lock out potential competitors.  They also often support costly renewables targets that drive up electricity prices and hurt the economy, but which nevertheless help the corporate brand.  Big business simply does not have the same interests as their smaller counterparts.

The corporatist approach that Hawke took with the Accords is not all that it is lauded to be.  It involves sordid deal-making that tends to produce results beneficial to those in power and detrimental to those without it.  But even if it had been successful, it is not an approach a Liberal prime minister should ever make because it is fundamentally illiberal.

The very idea of a negotiating table grants the figures involved the ability to speak for whole classes of people, in a significant swipe at individualism.  Corporations might have a uniform view on things but small businesses do not;  their diversity and pluralism are defining characteristics.

During the nineteenth century, Australian liberals had deliberately rejected the idea of having "interests" like the squatters represented in parliament.  When later on Labor tried to win seats for the union movement, liberals reacted negatively based on the same premise that parliament must rule in favour of the entire community and represent every citizen as individuals.  Indeed, there is some irony in the Liberal's present coalition with a Nationals party that claims a sectional right to speak for farmers and the like.

These liberals could see that if politics was simply a negotiation between the greatest interests, a huge proportion of the population might thus be disenfranchised.  This was at a time when there had been great campaigns to end plural voting;  the slogan "one man, one vote" had popularised the importance of getting an equal input to the political system.

There is a desperate need for industrial relations reform.  The current legislation was written after the Coalition rout of 2007, and therefore faced little scrutiny for its cumbersome and job-destroying nature.  However, this reform should be made on sound principles completely independent from vested interests.  Any system weighted in favour of a shrewd negotiator is going to be imbalanced and inefficient.  Worse still, we know how easily the Coalition might get spooked by any failed attempt and avoid the issue for another decade.

What we want is variety and innovation and this comes from getting the government, the unions and the corporations out of the road and letting individuals pursue their dreams unhindered by unnecessary taxation and regulation.  Thanks to what government intervention has already gone on, there are plenty of dreams that require rebuilding.

Not Kean On Climate Plan

The only excuse energy minister Matt Kean could have for recklessly forging ahead with the hard-line policy of net-zero emissions in NSW by 2050 is that he missed the latest jobs report showing 320,000 jobs in NSW had been destroyed since the coronavirus lockdown measures started in March.

The extent of the job losses are the worst in the nation.

At the same time as businesses are shutting and Australians are losing their jobs in numbers never seen before, a senior minister in Australia's largest state apparently has nothing more to offer than mandating that 30 per cent of all new government vehicles be electric or hybrid in three years' time.

And many would be wondering why at a time when getting into and out of the city on public transport is almost impossible due to social distancing, the energy minister would suggest making 8000 of Sydney's buses electric.

At least Treasurer Dominic Perrottet appears alive to the issue, with his proposal to freeze the pay of public servants for a year and for the $3 billion in savings to be reinvested into job creating projects to help get NSW back to work.

The plan to mandate the electrification of NSW government fleet vehicles is being undertaken to help NSW reach its goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which includes the interim aim of a 35 per cent cut to emissions by 2030 on 2005 levels.

This goal is reckless and goes beyond even what the federal government committed to in 2015 when it signed Australia up to the Paris Climate Agreement.

Under that agreement, Australia must cut its emissions by 28 per cent by 2030 ― which are already the deepest cuts to emissions per capita in the developed world.

At the same time, China, which is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is completely uncontained by the Paris Climate Agreement and is expected to increase its emission by some 1454 per cent.

As the Senator for Queensland and former resources minister, Matt Canavan argued in The Australian on May 27:  "We should end our participation in the Paris Agreement, given the more immediate need to secure our manufacturing jobs."

But even Mr Keane's own climate strategy document Net Zero Plan Stage 1:  2020-2030 shows that electric vehicle technology and more renewable energy generation are dud policies.

According to the document, the plan will create just 240 jobs each year for a decade at a cost of $2 billion.  That is more than $830,000 per job.

In any event, the number of jobs created is peanuts compared to the number of jobs that are likely to be destroyed through higher electricity prices which inevitably result when more wind and solar are brought onto the electricity grid at the expense of coal.

About 42,000 jobs have been lost in the energy intensive manufacturing sector in NSW since the year 2000 when the commonwealth government first introduced the Renewable Energy Target, which drove more wind and solar onto the energy grid.

Over the time electricity prices have risen by a staggering 237 per cent, or 12 per cent per year, which is four times the rate of economy-wide inflation in NSW.

A report prepared by consulting form Frontier Economics for the government agency NSW Coal Innovation estimated that electricity prices could jump by 15 per cent if there was to be greater emphasis on renewable energy, such as that outlined by the energy minister.

What this means for the future of manufacturing in NSW, or the 75,000 jobs dependent on the coal sector, Mr Kean does not say.

All of this at a time when the unnecessarily prolonged and exaggerated COVID-19 lockdown measures, which continue to force Australians out of business and out of work, remain in place.

In terms of electric vehicles, the mainstream of NSW has already had their say, and they said they don't want them.  Again, according to Mr Keane's own analysis just 47,000 motorists in NSW have "opted for an electric or hybrid vehicle" out of a total of 5.2 million vehicles.  This is even though electric vehicle battery prices have also fallen by more than 85 per cent since 2010.

The fact remains that none of the policies will make any noticeable difference to the global climate or the global temperature ― much less weather and climatic conditions in NSW.

Humans account for 1.3 per cent of carbon emissions around the world.  And NSW accounts for a quarter of Australia's total emissions.

This means that NSW contributes just 0.000075 per cent of global human greenhouse gas emissions.

Many Australians have largely accepted the need for extraordinary government measures to stop the spread of coronavirus which have resulted in job losses and business closures.

But mainstream Australians living in the suburbs, outer suburbs, and regions want to get back to work and to see small businesses up and running again.  Not just because of the financial independence that work and business formation bring, but because of the dignity and self-sufficiency that they enable.

Not only does this mean freezing ― and ideally reducing ― public sector pay and reinvesting the savings in job-creating private sector projects, but it means reducing red and green tape, cutting taxes, and, most importantly, getting electricity prices down to support job creation and small businesses.

Coronavirus: Cover For A Fresh Attack On Free Speech In Victoria

Victorians have experienced an unprecedented trashing of their rights and liberties in response to the coronavirus pandemic, but now the temporary problem is being used an excuse to impose new and permanent limits to their freedom of speech.

The recent call to expand hate speech laws comes in the context of an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into the Racial and Religious Tolerance Amendment Bill.

This bill was introduced into the Victorian parliament in August 2019 and as drafted promises to expand and supercharge anti-vilification laws.

In an email recently sent to anyone who has already participated in that inquiry, the Legal and Social Issues Committee announced that it was extending the inquiry to consider the impacts of the coronavirus.

In the email Committee chairman, Labor MP Natalie Suleyman, claimed that "the need to examine the effectiveness of Victoria's anti-vilification laws has become even more apparent with the reported rise in racially motivated incidents resulting from the pandemic."

The "reported rise in racially motivated incidents" almost certainly refers to claims made by the Australian Human Rights Commission and shared to the ABC in April that one in four people who reported racial discrimination in February and March linked it to the coronavirus pandemic.

However, this is a vague claim and the raw numbers were not released.  The claim as reported by the ABC refers to "racial discrimination" which includes but is distinct from racial vilification complaints made under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 which prohibits public acts which offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate another person because of their race or ethnic origin.

Regardless of the validity of the number, it is true that any instances of abuse on racial grounds is a human and moral failure and it may be the case that the distress and anxiety related to the pandemic has manifested in poor social behaviour.

However, it cannot be assumed that every claim of discrimination is valid.  Anti-discrimination commissions are generally required to inquire into all complaints that are submitted to them regardless of whether or not they are frivolous or vexatious.

Mixing the claims of COVID-related abuse with the Victorian parliamentary inquiry is a transparent attempt to strengthen the case for expanding anti-vilification laws in the state.

And yet the amendments before parliament are not directed towards COVID-related events.  Legislation tends to be written in general terms, and general terms will apply more broadly than the specific harms they are intended to address.

The bill being considered by parliament would lower the threshold for making complaints of serious vilification, give the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission new information gathering powers to violate a person's right to silence, and would add gender, disability, and sexual orientation as new "protected attributes" under the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001.

This law currently makes it unlawful for a person to engage in conduct that "incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule" of another person because of their race or religious belief or activity.

Just like Section 18C, Victoria's anti-vilification laws are vaguely worded and don't refer to an objective standard for unlawful speech.  It will leave the door open for a judge to draw their own conclusions about what kind of speech is "likely to" "incite hatred" or "severe ridicule".

There is no meaningful difference between an act that is likely to incite hatred and an offensive act because it is based on the subjective assessment of whether an expression is likely to evoke an emotional reaction in another person.  Subjective laws mean you can never be sure when you will be deemed to be breaking the law since you can't anticipate how the law will be applied.

If you are driving 112km in a 100km zone, you know that you are over the limit.  In this case, the offending person won't actually know if they're committing an offence, because "likely to" is so broad.

It is a poor basis for designing laws, and an exceptionally poor basis for laws which restrict one of our most important freedoms.

Since all complaints are heard and investigated, dealing with the process can itself be the process.  The risk of expressing an opinion will frighten people into silence.

This chilling on speech is a feature of all anti-vilification laws and will be a feature of the Victorian amendments.  Those pushing for greater powers for anti-discrimination commissions or expanded anti-vilification laws have not proven that the current laws have failed or that the proposed laws are relevant to the problem they seek to address.

Victorians should be deeply sceptical of any attempt to use the coronavirus to achieve lasting and unrelated policy goals, especially those that would curtail their liberties and freedom of speech.

ACTU Rump In Morrison's Tent But Quiet Aussies Are Left Out

Margaret Thatcher once remarked that consensus was "the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects;  the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved".

Talking about talking in the name of finding consensus without a specific goal will never be the quickest route to results that will help build a more resilient economy.  This is likely to be the fate of Scott Morrison's drum-circle council of unions, big business and employer groups.

At the last election Morrison said he and his government would be the voice of quiet Australians.  But it is not clear if the quiet Australians will be heard by the industrial relations working groups outlined by the Prime Minister in his address to the National Press Club last week.

Rather than include mainstream Australians from the outer suburbs who work as mechanics, tradesmen, or own a small business, the government instead invited an ACTU that at most speaks on behalf of just 14 per cent of Australian workers.  The Prime Minister didn't mention who would speak on behalf of the other 86 per cent.

The ACTU increasingly represents older public servants who have been shielded from job losses and pay cuts resulting from the COVID-19 lockdown measures, unlike workers in the productive, private sectors of the economy.

The government also left small businesses — the heart and soul of mainstream Australia — out of the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission;  it includes four commissioners from big business, one from the public service, and one from both the trade union movement and the Labor Party.

An early indication of how the development of a new consensus might evolve was revealed the day after the Prime Minister's speech.  Unions representing public sector workers in NSW immediately opposed the NSW government's relatively timid proposal to freeze NSW public sector pay for 12 months.

ACTU president Michele O'Neil said the pay freeze was "a terrible decision" that would be "bad for the economy and for small business", a claim on which she did not expand.

If unions can't agree to delaying pay rises to often well-remunerated public servants for a year there is little hope they'll agree to anything else that will help small businesses such as reforming unfair dismissal laws, dealing with the issue of rising minimum wages, and industry-wide awards.

The way to create jobs and higher wages for Australians is not to have a narrow group of unionists trying to rewrite laws about who can work and how much they are to be paid, but to have governments cut red and green tape, reduce taxes and secure reliable electricity at affordable prices.

But none of these issues, all of which could be quickly dealt with without the need for wide-ranging talks, was specifically mentioned by the Prime Minister last week.

Last Thursday Niki Savva wrote that "Morrison's lack of ideology, his policy flexibility … is not shared by sections of his party, particularly the capital-C conservatives.  So when he reaches the crunch points, he will come under pressure to throw out red meat to satisfy the bloodlust of the base and those who cater for it".

But it is less about ideology than belief about what is right for the country and how best to achieve that.

Mainstream Australians may remain mostly quiet.  But they are not quitters.  They firmly believe in the importance of having a job, being independent and not reliant on taxpayer handouts, the dignity of owning and running a small business, owning their own home, the Australian way of life, freedom of speech and religion, and our egalitarian democratic institutions.

And if Morrison listened more closely to the mainstream Australians who voted for him, he might come to the conclusion he doesn't need the permission of the ACTU to make it easier for businesses and employers to create jobs and get Australians back into work.