Where did it go wrong for Turnbull? The budget

How did it all go wrong for Malcolm Turnbull?

The Coalition may be returned to government yet, either as a minority or a majority.  But it's hard to deny that what we saw on Saturday night was partly the result of a strategic miscalculation.

The eight week campaign was held at the time of the Prime Minister's own choosing.  The Government had to make some almighty efforts to do it.  Senate voting reform had to be passed.  Double dissolution triggers had to be lined up.  Parliament had to be prorogued.  The budget day had to be moved.  Scott Morrison had to write a budget that both served as a steward of the Government's finances and a political campaign document.

Almost none of this worked as planned.  The campaign — particularly its slow, strange, uncertain first month — only reinforced the impression that the Turnbull Government was dithering rather than driving.

The Senate reform was supposed to clear up the supposedly feral crossbench.  Now it looks to be delivering at least as diverse an upper house as the previous term, but one that might be more hostile to the Coalition than what it replaced.  Already it is clear that a joint sitting is unlikely to pass the double dissolution triggers.

But the biggest problem with this plan was the budget.  Some of that was about timing.  The Coalition found itself in a messy argument with its own supporters about its retrospective superannuation changes at the very same time it ought to have been energising the centre-right to defeat Labor.

The superannuation argument dragged on and on.  This might have been predictable.  Superannuation is a complex policy.  It takes time for the downstream consequences of complex policies to spread, first to be identified by specialists and for their findings to flow through to the mainstream media.  Julie Bishop was tripped up by the "transition to retirement" issue four weeks after the budget.  The ABC ran an explainer on transition to retirement on June 2.

Imagine how frustrated Coalition strategists must have felt as they found themselves debating budget details with their own fundraisers halfway through an election campaign.  As Denis Shanahan pointed out on election night, this issue has been an internal policy issue within the Coalition for eight weeks straight.

Of course superannuation did not swing the election.  But superannuation is a particularly sensitive example of the Turnbull Government's broader economic problem — and speaks to the policy reasons the Government has found itself in such an ambiguous parliamentary spot.

Budgets frame Australian politics.  They are the filter through which policy is conceived and announced.  The 2016 budget failed to give the Turnbull Government's economic story the depth it needed.  The Coalition made a pitch for economic certainty.  They asked voters to "stick to the plan".  What plan?  "Jobs and growth" is as much a catchphrase as anything Tony Abbott ever said, at least without a coherent policy agenda to back it up.

Looking at the budget papers with the benefit of hindsight is revealing.  What is marketed as the National Economic Plan for Jobs and Growth is barely distinguishable from anything a Labor government might propose:  infrastructure spending, trade agreements, wage subsidies, defence spending, and hitting high income earners.  To the extent this constitutes a "plan", then every budget that spruiks minor policy adjustments and boondoggles is a plan.

The real point of difference with the Labor Opposition is barely detectable in the budget glossies.  One of the Coalition's few budget announcements that actually speaks to its jobs and growth mantra is the company tax cut.  But the Government has been embarrassed by it.  During the campaign the Coalition spruiked the small business tax cut more aggressively than their broader, better policy.

Perhaps Turnbull would have liked to talk about the company tax cut more.  There are ideas and concepts that speak to him personally, and they work neatly together:  jobs and growth, innovation, global competitiveness, digital technology, disruption, entrepreneurship.  Turnbull is visibly giddy when inspecting cutting edge technology firms.

But not everybody works for cutting edge technology firms.  Everything he says in this context is correct — the economy is undergoing a major transformation, technological change will define the future of work, we need to be smart, we need to be agile.  But Turnbull has neither been able to translate his genuine enthusiasm into an electoral coalition, nor been able to devise a policy agenda that would suit these changes.

That is a great disappointment.  Political drama, with its narcissism and bloodletting, tends to overshadow everything.  But as the two parties vie for government, the Australian economy faces the same fundamental structural challenges it did eight weeks ago.

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The ghosts of deficits past, present and future haunt this election

The budget deficit will be the unspoken theme of the election campaign — always there, never really acknowledged.  After all, both parties have wrestled with it recently and neither is confident it has a solution.

Is it impolite, at the very start of the election campaign, to talk about the budget deficit?  Impolitic?  It's certainly unfashionable.

Budget night was so long ago.  Neither Labor nor the Coalition want to bring up this old chestnut.  You can understand why.  Each have in turn declared their intention to return the budget to surplus and each have failed, at great political cost.

Yet we must talk about the budget deficit.  Steel yourself.  It would show great disrespect to the treasurers of our ancestors if we were not to briefly acknowledge the land on which they fought and died, at least before the election carnival marches forward.  Anyway, the deficit will be the unspoken theme of the whole campaign — always there, never really acknowledged.

Treasurer Scott Morrison declared in the budget speech that the Government was on a "sustainable path" to surplus.  This language has become such a cliché that it's easy to miss how sad it is.

Last Tuesday's budget declared that the deficit would be just 0.3 per cent of GDP by 2019-2020 — the last year of the forward estimates.  Morrison's predecessor Joe Hockey declared in May 2015 that the deficit would be almost exactly the same (0.4 per cent of GDP) a year earlier, by 2018-19.  And in the 2014 budget Hockey argued we'd hit 0.2 per cent of GDP by 2017-18.

The clear reason for this sustained failure to return to surplus is Treasury's long-standing belief that economic growth will — very, very, very soon — jump above 2 per cent per year.  They've been predicting this growth leap for half a decade now.  No doubt Wayne Swan was very impressed when he first saw growth forecasts with a three in front of them in Treasury's 2010 outlook.  But Morrison's heart must have dropped when he saw the same numbers again — still just a few years away.

Yes, the budget has to have forecasts.  And treasurers can only accept what Treasury's models tell them.  But waiting for a growth spurt that never seems to come is hardly a comforting economic plan.

I'll admit to some schadenfreude.  The deficit has been a major political issue for nearly a decade.  Every commentator has refined their arguments on the topic over and over and over.  Here's the hissy fit I had on the eve of the 2013 election, when Hockey changed his promise of a surplus to a promise to be "on track" for a surplus.

But in the latter half of the Labor government it was commonplace to hear that there was no need to rush back to surplus.  Take this Australian Financial Review piece, or here in The Drum.

Many analysts and interest groups warned that the economy either could not handle the necessary budget cuts, or that the surplus was an irrational obsession cultivated by Peter Costello fan fiction.  The budget would balance itself in good time.  No need to stress about it.

The argument for a single-minded return to surplus was never that the small deficit — yes, our deficit is relatively small as a percentage of GDP compared to many other rich economies — was causing immediate and direct harm to the economy.  It was that unless there was pressure on the government to balance the books the government would never feel the need to do so.

And a long-term budget deficit is harmful.  Market economies are cyclical.  It might not feel that way — growth is sad and sluggish — but it is very possible that these are the good times.  When we face the next downturn the budget balance will plunge.  It will plunge even deeper if the government of the day decides to stimulate the economy, believing Kevin Rudd's program to have been a success.

A small deficit always threatens to be a large deficit.  And a large deficit is costly, harms macroeconomic stability, and undermines economic confidence.  It might not be much fun to cut spending during the good times, but, as Greece has shown, it's far worse to be forced to cut spending during the bad times.

No doubt we are tired of talking about debt and deficits.  Neither party will make it an issue during the campaign as neither party is confident it has a solution.  Where tax increases are proposed — such as the tobacco excise hike — they are proposed in order to fund new promises, not pay back old ones.

And spending cuts?  Not a chance.  It appears that the government has locked in a permanently higher spending plateau.  This year it is estimated the government will spend 25.8 per cent of GDP, just a fraction off the 26 per cent of GDP that Rudd spent on his extraordinary stimulus package.  Under the Howard government this figure hovered around 23 and 25 per cent.

Elections are always full of spending promises — gifts of road upgrades and sports fields dropped into struggling marginal electorates.  If the budget feels long ago now wait until we've had two months of pork barrelling.  Neither party will want to spoil the fun by talking about their embarrassing deficit.  But it will be there, uncomfortably shadowing every minute of the campaign.

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Turnbull's policies aren't Liberal, they're incoherent

In trying to keep up with the suite of policies Labor has announced, the Coalition Government is going against the principles it professes to stand for.

It's hard not to conclude that Bill Shorten has the measure of Malcolm Turnbull.  Policy after policy the Government is chasing the Opposition, rather than leading it.

For instance, this weekend's talking point — negative gearing — is only on the table because Labor announced their negative gearing policy in February.

The Government's reforms to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission are obviously because Labor called for a royal commission into the banks.

The assistant treasurer, Kelly O'Dwyer, announced a new public register of shell companies last week.  Does anybody believe the Government would be so keen on this issue if Labor hadn't made corporate tax avoidance a centrepiece of their economic message?

Labor declared earlier this year that it would hike tobacco taxes.  Lo and behold so will the Coalition.

And the mooted superannuation reforms we heard about last week appear to be specifically calibrated to trump Labor's proposal.  Where Labor will increase taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, the Coalition will increase taxes on those earning more than $180,000.

These aren't marginal issues:  if the leaked script for the post-budget advertisements is correct, multinationals, tobacco and superannuation are exactly what the Government wants voters to think about.

More damningly, those three budget centrepieces all constitute tax hikes.  (Any policy that increases government revenue is a tax hike, no matter how it is dressed up in the language of "loopholes" or "concessions" or "savings".  The Australian commentariat can be embarrassingly gullible when it comes to political euphemisms.)

If the political parties were only ever neutral policy shops freely picking and choosing ideas from across the political spectrum this wouldn't be remarkable.  Simple models of political competition suggest that in a two party system, party policies are likely to converge.

But the Coalition is not supposed to be a neutral policy shop.  The Coalition is supposed to be — indeed, professes to be — the low-tax party, reducing the burden of government on the citizenry rather than increasing it.

Shortly after becoming Treasurer, Scott Morrison declared that Australia had a spending problem, not a revenue problem.  Language ought to mean something.  If our budget problem is not a revenue problem, then why are revenue grabs at the centre of the Government's economic message?

Messiness in policy formation can always be overlooked ... But messiness in policy direction is harder to ignore.

Prime ministers usually set the standards by which they are judged.  Tony Abbott was unable to deliver the steady government he promised after the turmoil of the Rudd-Gillard years, and surrendered his "freedom wars" less than a year into office.  Turnbull set his standard — to lead a "thoroughly Liberal government" — at the moment of the spill.  It is a standard he has yet to live up to.

On the positive side of the ledger, there was the successful effort this month to abolish the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal.  This price-fixing regulator was established by the Gillard government yet left untroubled by the Abbott government.

But on the negative side of the ledger we have tax hikes and new spending promises, the latter amounting to $10 billion of expenditure announced since Turnbull took power.  And the bevy of new powers being granted to ASIC will also represent a substantial increase in the regulatory burden — and a substantial empowerment of the regulatory state.

The Turnbull Government's policy suite isn't thoroughly Liberal — it's incoherent.

This is one reason why Bill Shorten looks more electable by the day.  To Labor's credit, they have announced a suite of policies that fit together nicely and tell a coherent story about the world.  It's not a very pleasant story — banks are ripping off their customers, multinational corporations are ripping off the budget, rich taxpayers with large super balances are ripping off poor taxpayers — but it does give a picture of what Labor stands for and what a Shorten government will mean.

Voters still lack this information about Turnbull.  After the entirely-forgettable innovation statement, the Government has been on a constant backfoot — chasing the legacy of decisions made by Tony Abbott's team, such as the tax reform process, as much as trying to keep up with a stream of Labor announcements.

Some of this dynamic has been forced upon the Government.  Leadership changes are disorderly.  But not all of Turnbull's problems have been forced by circumstance.

Turnbull needs to grab the agenda, and grab it in a way that is thoroughly — discernibly — Liberal, rather than an emulation of Labor.  After all, if voters want the Labor package, why would they vote for the Coalition?

Are the Panama Papers really such a scandal?

To be mentioned in the Panama Papers looks bad.  That the Panama Papers exist looks bad.  It's the vibe.  But when it comes to the fine print it seems the scandal is more political than legal.

What, exactly, is the scandal with the Panama Papers?

You might have read in Time that it "could lead to capitalism's great crisis" and the Guardian that it depicts "the corruption of our democracy".

It's easy to draw political conclusions from the leak of 11.5 million files from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca — even take a guess how it will play out in Australian domestic politics, which we will come to shortly — but put aside the hyperbole for a moment.

Is the scandal that Vladimir Putin's inner circle has extracted billions of dollars of the wealth of the Russian citizenry and state?  Or is it that they are trying to avoid paying the Russian statutory income tax rate of 13 per cent?

Is the scandal that you can accumulate incredible wealth as a member of the Chinese government?  Or, then again, is the scandal that some of that fortune isn't being taxed domestically?

Twenty-nine per cent of all active companies represented by Mossack Fonseca were set up by its Chinese offices.  But this doesn't inherently suggest criminality.  Wealth in China risks expropriation by the state.  Investing offshore is good risk management.

Indeed, most of the foreign leaders named in or connected to the Panama Papers come from countries that are high on corruption and low on the rule of law.

Scan your eyes over the nationalities of the "power players" in the Panama Papers.  Georgia, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Ghana, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Cambodia, Kazakhstan.  This is not a list of the world's liberal democracies.

Some are, though.  The prime minister of squeaky-clean Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, stood down last week after he was named in the Panama Papers.  When his wife invested the proceeds of a sale of her father's business offshore, Gunnlaugsson failed to declare his interest in the company.  The company also held bonds in the very same Icelandic banks that the government was responsible for winding up after the Global Financial Crisis.

But Gunnlaugsson's true crime is hypocrisy.  Having professed an Iceland-first economic policy of capital controls, retaining businesses in Iceland and protecting the Icelandic króna, it understandably galls to see his own wife utilising global offshoring to — legally — maximise her wealth.

David Cameron is having similar trouble after his father was named in the papers.  All evidence suggests that Ian and David Cameron paid all taxes on the dividends they received in Britain from this offshore investment.  But the British government has spent the last few years trying to whip up a frenzy about complex tax arrangements.  Not a great look.

Still, hypocrisy is a moral violation, not a legal one.

Tax havens perform an important function by putting downwards pressure on domestic tax rates.  They are the global economy's escape valve — preventing sclerotic Western welfare states from pushing taxes up and up.

As the Cato Institute's Dan Mitchell wrote last week, the fact that law firms like Mossack Fonseca create corporate structures is no scandal.  Even though what they do is completely legal, they are now being tagged with a vague sense of criminality.  But Mossack Fonseca does not acquire the money, hold the money, or invest the money.  And it is required to do due-diligence on its clients.

Most importantly, for all the impressive scale of the Panama Papers (11.5 million files comes to 2.6 terabytes of data) it tells us little about the extent to which offshoring erodes the tax base of non-haven countries.  It is remarkably hard to identify any serious detriment to the revenue from offshoring, as even the OECD, the multinational body pushing the crackdown on tax avoidance, admits.

This is where the politics of the Panama Papers and their actual policy significance sharply diverge.

In Australia, Bill Shorten has made a crackdown on corporate tax avoidance the pillar of his economic policy.  As Lenore Taylor writes in the Guardian, Shorten is relying on the revenue gained from closing tax loopholes to fund new social spending, and close the budget deficit.

Labor thinks it can squeeze another $2 billion in revenue from a crackdown on tax avoidance, but won't release Parliamentary Budget Office estimates it says shows this.  Sinclair Davidson has often pointed out that the Australian government is much better at writing press releases announcing how much extra revenue it will collect from a crackdown than actually collecting that revenue.

The Panama Papers helps Shorten keep the Turnbull Government on the back foot.  Even though the Coalition has tried to beat up the tax avoidance issue itself, economic populism is not a game that nominally market-oriented parties can win.  As the prime ministers of Britain and Iceland have learned, the politics of offshore investments is about impressions not policy.

To be mentioned in the Panama Papers looks bad.  That the Panama Papers exist looks bad.  It's the vibe.  It's the optics of the thing.

Every article on the leak has a sentence saying something like, "There are legitimate uses for offshore companies", but who reads the fine print?  And in the middle of a frenzy about the super-rich and what they do in foreign, exotic countries, who would want to?

Federation reform is no political plaything

Malcolm Turnbull has a lawyer's understanding of the constitution and a politician's understanding of how to deal with the states. But federation reform is about more than just law and politics.

Every government dreams of reforming the federation, but dreams usually end in disappointment.  Malcolm Turnbull should know this.

Consider his predecessor.  Tony Abbott always had a love-hate relationship with federalism.  His attitude to the states in Battlelines ranges from ambivalent to hostile.  As Howard government health minister he helped orchestrate the "local" takeover of Devonport's Mersey Hospital from the Tasmanian state government — a takeover underwritten by the Commonwealth government, of course.

But in his 2013 budget reply speech as opposition leader, Abbott suddenly declared that under a Coalition government the states would be "sovereign in their own sphere".

It was an important moment.  That phrase had been used by the Australian founders.  During the 1897 federation conference Edmund Barton said the goal was "to create a system of government under which, as to over all the powers they retain, the States will be supreme and sovereign in their own sphere."

The technical structure of our constitution says that everything not expressly given to the Commonwealth government is to be left to the states.  But to say that the states are sovereign is to go further than legalities — it is to assert that the states have fields of control which cannot legitimately be usurped by the Commonwealth.

Of course, in the 21st century the states are anything but sovereign.  There is no area of state constitutional responsibility that does not have the federal government slobbering all over it.  These days health, education and infrastructure are all, in practice, joint Commonwealth-state endeavours.  The Commonwealth dominates the collection of taxation and distributes funds for the states to spend.  But funding tends to come with conditions, and the Commonwealth uses the leverage it gains from its revenue to pursue its own goals in the areas of health and education.

It is hard to imagine a system of governance worse for accountability, for transparency, even for democracy than to have one level of government raise funds and the other level spend it.

Abbott commissioned a taskforce in his own department to produce a white paper into federal reform.  The taskforce produced a discussion paper and four issues papers but then quietly disappeared — the promised green paper (to be "released in the first half of 2015") and white paper ("by the end of 2015") never materialised.

One explanation for the quiet death of Abbott's federation agenda was the general drift that characterised his last year in office.  But part of it was almost certainly because the taskforce had thrown up some very radical solutions to the problems of Australian federalism — like removing the Commonwealth from schooling altogether, or the Commonwealth directly spending more of the money that it raises, or encouraging the states to raise more money themselves — that were a bit too bold for the Government's taste.

There are fundamental structural problems with Australia's federal system.  Almost any solution is radical.  Turnbull is not the first prime minister to propose returning income tax powers to the states, and he's not the first to abandon it on political grounds.

Political strategists often point out that voters don't care about which level of government is responsible for what policy area.  If a road has a pothole, they just want it fixed.  They don't want to be told by a politician that it is a state or local responsibility.  Newbies to federal politics quickly find themselves discussing local traffic lights with constituents rather than foreign policy.

Yes, vertical fiscal imbalance — the term which describes the disjuncture between the Commonwealth's taxing and the state government's spending — is an esoteric problem.  But then again, the federation is an esoteric topic.  Constitutional limitations on government are esoteric.  Just because a problem is esoteric does not mean it is unimportant.

Unfortunately no government has successfully made these esoteric issues relevant — outlined the relationship between fixing the federation and practical policy consequences.  "Stop the blame game" is a great catchphrase but it's not quite great enough to justify major reform.

So Turnbull's failure to win the state income tax argument against a group of self-interested premiers last week should not have been a surprise.

If, as some commentators have argued, Turnbull is playing a long game — by showing that the state governments would rather complain about being underfunded than to take financial responsibility for their own public services — then more power to him.  The question is whether the goal of that long game is simply to justify reducing the amount the Commonwealth gives to the states for health and education in the 2016 budget, or to lay the foundation for a deeper reform of the federation itself.

Turnbull has a lawyer's understanding of how Australia's federation today looks nothing like the constitution originally prescribed, and he has a politician's understanding of how to deal with the states.  But the federation question is about more than just politics and law.  It's about how we conceive the Australian nation.  It's about whether power should be divided between states and the Commonwealth or whether we should accept the centralisation of power as inevitable.  Are states sovereign?  Or are they just subservient?

The democratic case for splitting Queensland in two

As state governments do less and less, there ought to be more and more of them.  The renewed push to split Queensland into two states should be just the beginning.

"Most persons think that a state in order to be happy ought to be large," wrote Aristotle in his Politics, "but even if they are right, they have no idea what is a large and what is a small state."

And 23 centuries later, not much has changed.

A group of Queensland MPs have renewed a longstanding call to split Queensland in two.  They believe they can force a referendum on the issue.  The Minister for Northern Australia, Matt Canavan, also supports the new state proposal.

But Annastacia Palaszczuk believes "Queensland should be bigger, not smaller".  She wants Queensland to take the Tweed Coast from New South Wales.

There are other proposals.  Warren Entsch wants to split the top half of the country in two, creating a northern mega state.

Yes, redrawing the map of Australia is a classic holiday-season news story.  It's both fun and slightly frivolous.

But the question of the ideal size of a political jurisdiction pervades debates about everything from council amalgamations to whether Britain should leave the European Union — a political and economic alliance that has developed state-like characteristics.

The great Greek philosophers believed that the ideal size of a political jurisdiction was a small city.  Aristotle put it this way.  The city should be large enough to be self-sufficient.  But a city with too many people is ungovernable.  A city should be small enough so that the citizens know each other well enough to distribute offices according to merit.  Plato decided that optimal city size had 5040 families.

Neither economic self-sufficiency nor knowing office-bearers personally are imagined to be important any more.  But Aristotle did underline the basic tension in deciding whether to make states larger or smaller:  between economic desires and democratic ones.

On the one hand, economic considerations suggest that larger states are better.  Larger states can exploit economies of scale and deliver more services.  It is as much work to write a school curriculum for two schools as 2000 schools.  This is the intuition behind the steady centralisation of policy towards the federal government — the idea that it is more efficient to impose the same policy on everyone, rather than have regional governments develop their own approaches from scratch.

But on the other hand, economies of scale aren't everything.  Democracy — that is, genuine democratic engagement, not just attending a polling booth every few years — seems to thrive better in smaller jurisdictions.  The idea that the people rule is more believable when it is possible to imagine ourselves as one of those rulers — something which is less likely in a giant unitary nation than a small community.

There is, simply put, a trade-off between the economic benefits of large size and the democratic benefits of small size.

That trade-off helps us understand why the Queensland government — any Queensland government — will fight a split.  More economic power means more wealth that can be delivered to the government's supporters, and the political class rarely welcomes any more democratic participation.

Nor is the federal government likely to welcome any new states.  It is much easier to negotiate with one Queensland government rather than two.  More states reduce the concentration of political power.  Those who hold political power dislike that idea.

Back in 2009 Geoffrey Blainey argued that it was "absurd" not to establish a new state in northern Queensland because when Queensland was formed no one knew about the mineral resources in its north.

Yet as the Danish political scientists Martin Bækgaard, Søren Serritzlew, and Kim M. Sønderskov point out, the optimal jurisdiction size for any political community depends on what we want those communities to do.  Aristotelian self-sufficiency is unnecessary in a world of international trade.  But the high cost of modern militaries mean we need huge nations to pay for a single F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Bækgaard, Serritzlew and Sønderskov argue that for jurisdictions with minimal functions and responsibilities, smaller is better.  For Australian local governments the optimal size might be as little as 5,000 people.  Rather than amalgamating councils we should be splitting them up.

Blainey is right that it has been a long time since the map of Australia was first drawn.  But the key change since is not the discovery of resources, but the long centralisation of power in the Commonwealth government.  Policy areas that the constitution leaves to the states — like education — are increasingly being controlled by Canberra.  This is as good a reason as any to rethink the number of states.

As state governments do less and less, there ought to be more and more of those governments.  North Queensland should be just the start.

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Turnbull's only real option was bluff and bravado

Boldness is the currency of Canberra and confidence is a substitute for the control MPs will never have.  Enter Malcolm Turnbull and the double dissolution gamble he "had to take".

If Malcolm Turnbull is bluffing about a double dissolution election, it's a very committed bluff.  A dramatic bluff.  A bold bluff.

First, the Government had to pass the changes to the Senate.  No point holding a double dissolution to clear out the Senate crossbench if that election would just throw up even more minor party crossbenchers.  Lest the substance of this change be dismissed, consider that in order to hold a double dissolution which would result in the desired outcome, the Government had to change the voting system itself.

Second, Turnbull has asked the Governor-General to recall Parliament in April to consider the Australian Building and Construction Commission Bill — one of the pieces of legislation the Prime Minister would like to use as a trigger for the double dissolution.  Constitutionally, the Governor-General can call sessions of Parliament.  The Senate is less likely to seriously fight the Queen's representative on a scheduling matter.

Third, the budget is being brought forward one week.  As Antony Green explains, a double dissolution cannot be held within six months of the end of a term.  This means a double dissolution must be called on May 11 at the latest.  But the government needs to pass a budget each year for the machinery of government to keep ticking along — currently scheduled for May 10.  One day isn't a lot to pass budget bills, so the budget day is being moved to May 3.

One estimate has that small change of budget schedule costing one million dollars.  I imagine we're about to find out how much the April sitting of Parliament is going to cost.

Turnbull says if the crossbench passes the ABCC bill in April, then no double dissolution will be necessary.  But that's hardly the point.  One column in The Age has described Monday's double dissolution threat as "a colossal gamble the PM had to take".  "Had to"?  Cleaning up union corruption is legitimate and necessary — even urgent — but not quite the emergency that calling a double dissolution implies.  Rather the "had to" refers to a sense that the Government needs a narrative.  It needs a reason for being.  It needs to make a bold political move.

The media loves bold moves.  Double dissolution gamesmanship fits the bill.  It's true that the outbreaks of high drama that have characterised Australian politics since Julia Gillard rolled Kevin Rudd have also been accompanied by hand-wringing about the decline of political stability and The End of Reform^TM.  But the very same press gallery has been damning Turnbull for weeks about the Government's apparent purposelessness.

Tax reform has been on-again and off-again — characterised by half-hearted attempts at encouraging debate and subsequent backdowns.  Part of this has been some of the transactions costs of the leadership change.  The discussions about negative gearing, increasing the GST, and superannuation tax concessions were all started by the Abbott government.  But the drift made a mockery of Turnbull's claims to be a brilliant communicator.  The new Prime Minister did not usher in the end of politics after all:  just another stage of what the commentariat portray as our era of political crisis.

In this context a double dissolution looks like cut-through ... great optics ... agenda setting ... finding a narrative.  Double dissolution elections are rarely about the bills they're purportedly called to pass.  The Australia Card Bill — technically the subject of the 1987 double dissolution — didn't even go to a vote when Bob Hawke failed to win a majority in the Senate.

Rather, if this election is like any other election, it will be at its core about the economy.  Politicians like to talk about their superior "economic management".  But as I have argued on The Drum before, rather than being managers of the economy, they are in truth the economy's hostages — riding waves of international capital flows and iron ore prices and financial market hiccups that small economies like ours can barely influence.

Take a step back and this is a defining feature of Australia's political culture.  We push against events we cannot control.  We "take stands" on ground which will never be stable.  Australian governments can only facilitate change.  They cannot direct it or prevent it.  So boldness — as brazen as possible — is the currency of Canberra.  It unites Turnbull's "ideas boom" with Tony Abbott's promise to shirtfront Vladimir Putin.  Confidence is a substitute for the control they will never have.

On Monday afternoon, Bill Shorten said "Mr Turnbull has a plan for his re-election, he just doesn't have a plan for Australia."

But in truth, an election is about the only thing he can plan for.

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If you're worried about privacy, you should worry about the 2016 census

If you blinked, you missed it.  On December 18 last year, the Australia Bureau of Statistics announced that at the 2016 census in August it would, for the first time, retain all the names and addresses it has collected "to enable a richer and dynamic statistical picture of Australia".

Keeping names and addresses, we were quietly told, would enable government planners to do more rigorous studies of social trends.

It is only now that the significance of the ABS's change is spilling out into the press.

For the past 45 years, it has been the ABS's practice to destroy that identifying information as soon as all other information on the census forms is transcribed — first onto magnetic tape, and now into vast digital data banks that allow statisticians to slice and dice at their whim.

In the 2001 census, the government first offered Australians a choice as to whether they would like their name-identified information kept.  This year that opt-in system will be a compulsory system.  Your name will be kept whether you like it or not.

The risks to privacy are blindingly obvious.  The safest way to protect data is to not collect it at all.  The second safest way is destroy that data after collection.  There is no such thing as 100 per cent safely secured information.  We know this from bitter experience.  The last decade has seen a constant stream of unauthorised releases of apparently secure private information:  the 2015 Ashley Madison hack being just the most embarrassing of these.

After all, privacy risks don't only come from hackers and other rogues.  Government departments have a poor record of protecting information from their own staff.  The Department of Human Services admitted there were 63 episodes of unauthorised access to private files by its staff between July 2012 and March 2013.  The South Australian Police Force accuses up to 100 of its own members of unauthorised access to police files every single year.  ABS staff are no more or less virtuous than any other public employee.

The ABS argues that identification information will be stored safely and separately from the rest of the census data, creating a firewall that protects against individual identification.  A spokesperson told Radio National last week that the ABS "never has and never will release information that is personally identifiable".

There are a lot of unanswered questions here.  But no matter what firewalls the ABS places around access and matching, it is a truism that any data that can be used usefully can also be used illegitimately.

And of course, what are considered legitimate and illegitimate uses of data can change over time.  Rules written in 2016 could be changed in 2026.  The data collected now might be used in a very different way down the track.

Identification retention could have practical consequences as well.  A population that is rightly worried about the security of their information is less likely to answer the census either accurately or at all.  Indeed, this has historically been the ABS's big concern with keeping identification.  They told a parliamentary committee in 1998 that the reduction in data quality from a reluctance to answer questions truthfully was not worth the trade-off.

A lower quality census would lead to lower quality government statistics across the board.  A lot of things hang off the census.  Census data guides electoral redistributions, Commonwealth grants, education funding and so on.  Risking the integrity of all that in the hope that future data might be marginally more interesting to genealogical researchers and government planners seems like a terrible deal.

Although they profess to have changed their mind on the risk of lower quality data, we can speculate these concerns might be why the ABS announced the new policy in the dead holiday season.  The less publicity given to the change, the less likely Australians are going to hear enough about the new census rules to be worried about their privacy.

While the Coalition's support for traditional rights and freedoms has taken a battering over the past few years, overriding the ABS decision would go some way to reclaiming its liberal heritage.

After all, it was a Liberal Treasurer, Billy Snedden, who first mandated the destruction of names and addresses in census forms in 1971 in response to privacy concerns.  And Cabinet records show the Fraser government — at the behest of treasurer John Howard — unhesitatingly and immediately rejecting a 1979 proposal by the law reform commission to retain census names and addresses.

The digitisation of absolutely everything has made privacy one of the central problems of the 21st century.  If anything, Australians are more aware of the dangers of identity theft and information insecurity than they have been at any time in history.

As the ABS change shows, the debate over warrantless mandatory data retention was just the tip of the iceberg.

It is true that modern governments are data hungry.  Planners and regulators want more and more information about the populations they govern.

But to the extent we have an interest in protecting ourselves against government excesses, we have an interest in denying governments carte blanche to collect information.  We are not just data points in a planner's spreadsheet.  They work for us.

There's little to stop Trump wreaking havoc as president

There are supposed to be checks and balances that would prevent Donald Trump doing too much damage as US president.  But these have been eroded and an era of "imperial presidency" means we should be worried.

The prospect of a Donald Trump presidency shouldn't be as worrying as it is.

The United States constitution is specifically designed to prevent presidents from doing too much damage.  But the carefully, intelligently designed checks and balances built into the American system of government have been so eroded over the last century that a president Trump could do the sort of harm the founding fathers wished to prevent.

The issue is not so much Trump's policies.  I complained in January that Trump was no conservative — particularly on trade — but then again, he wouldn't be the first non-conservative president.  In fact, policy-by-policy he looks like the most moderate candidate in the Republican field;  the temporary ban on Muslim immigration to the United States notwithstanding.

Nor is being a "populist" a crime.  Trump would hardly be the first president who got to power by telling voters only what they wanted to hear.

What's worrying about Trump is his unpredictability, his disregard for any boundary between truth and self-serving fiction, his unbridled narcissism, his instability, and his apparent desire to pursue his enemies with the tools of high office.

He sees himself as a "strong man" — hence his apparent affinity with other strong men like Vladimir Putin.  And at this stage it is easy to imagine a chain of events that puts him in the White House.

The American founding fathers were aware that a democratic political system could turn out a person like Trump.  The Federalist Papers, the essays written in 1787 and 1788 to argue the case for the constitution, were motivated by a theory of human nature "that men are not to be trusted with power because they are selfish, passionate, full of whims, caprices, and prejudices," in the words of one scholar.

Hence in the famous Federalist Paper 51, James Madison argued that power must be separated between different branches of government.  Each branch — the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary — would vie for power against the others.

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," Madison wrote.  The institutional structures of the American republic would ensure that a strong man or narcissist, were they elected to the presidency, would be constrained by the other branches.

Yet those structures have been systematically degraded over the past century.  The presidency has accumulated power at the expense of the legislature.

As the word implies, the executive's intended function is to execute the laws passed by Congress.  But the modern presidency has carved out an enormous field of action where it can operate virtually without the oversight of the other branches.  The historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr. called this the "imperial presidency".

The most obvious example of the imperial presidency is foreign policy.  Under the text of the constitution, only the Congress has the power to declare war.  But the last war to be declared by Congress was World War II.  Since then presidents have been asserting almost unlimited, unilateral power over military engagement and interventionism.  The upshot is that, contrary to the founders' intentions, the president can effectively send the country to war on nothing but their own counsel.

Trump says he now opposes the invasion of Iraq, but he also wants to take Islamic State's oil.  Whatever strategy he implements to do so, the combined forces of the United States military are in practice at his complete disposal.

Just as concerning is the power the president can wield over public policy.  The original idea behind Western liberal democracy is that policy is made by the legislature as they negotiate and pass law.  But the growth of regulation as a substitute for statute has vested more and more power in the executive government.

In 2014 federal departments, agencies and commissions passed 16 new regulations for every one law the Congress passed.  As the economist Tyler Cowen wrote last month:  "If there were a president who wished to pursue vendettas, the regulatory state would be the most direct and simplest way for him or her to do so."  Having the vindictive Trump responsible for all this is dangerous.

The shift from a constrained presidency to an imperial presidency has been cultural as well.  In his book The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey K Tulis argues that the presidency has assumed a symbolic role not envisioned by the founders.

Voters — and the press — describe one of the key requirements of the office as "leadership".  Yet as Tulis points out, this was not what the founders hoped.  The Federalist Papers had only a dozen mentions of the word leader.  All but one were disparaging.

During the 20th century, the presidency became about words as much as administration — presidents were rated on their personalities and ability to channel popular sentiment.

Trump is the apotheosis of this change:  a demagoguing narcissist who is all surface and shine.  But all democracies are vulnerable to such populist figures.  The founders knew that.  If only their great institutions had been maintained.

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Furniture, rent-seeking and the problem with laws

The current debate over furniture design and intellectual property is a symptom of the wider problem we face when vested interests take hold and the law takes on a life of its own.

Law often takes on a life of its own.

We see this all the time.  First, parliament introduces a law to solve a public policy problem.  Decades pass.  Things change.  Perhaps the problem might no longer be considered a problem.  Technologies change.  Opinions change.  But it is easier to pass a bill than repeal an act.  Special interests come to rely on the status quo.  As a result, governments often reconceptualise why the law was first introduced in order to defend that status quo.

Nowhere is this pattern more obvious than in that cesspit of special interest rent-seeking that we call intellectual property law.

The United Kingdom has decided to increase the intellectual property protection for design — which covers manufactured artistic creations like furniture, jewellery, and architecture — from the life of the creator plus 25 years for registered design works, to the life of the creator plus 75 years.  An extension of 50 years.

In practice this means design works will get the same length of protection enjoyed by other artistic creations.  Furniture, architecture and jewellery designs will be treated much the same as songs and movies in copyright law.  Once their protection expires, other manufacturers are free to reproduce the designs, as long as they describe their products as "replicas" or "reproductions" of original designs (lest they violate trademark law).

In Australia, furniture designers want the same changes.  Here design protection lasts just 10 years.  An Australian manufacturer told BRW in January that Australian design protection was inadequate.  A spokesperson from the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller told Fairfax's Domain last week that companies selling replica design furniture are "tricking the consumer and undervaluing the original design".

There's a lot of money at stake.  The iconic Eames lounge chair will set you back about $8,000 if you buy an authentic one produced by Herman Miller.  But the chair was first designed in 1956 and is long out of design protection.  So you can get a replica of the Eames lounge chair for a tenth of that price from any number of retailers.

A licensed edition of the even more ubiquitous, and older, Eames plastic moulded side chair will cost the better part of $1000.  Or you could pick up a replica for $80 or so.

Part of this price difference is due to quality.  Another is the price of the brand — manufacturers are able to charge a premium for customers who want the real deal rather than an inauthentic product.

But none of that price difference is because the designers have to recoup the cost of the original design.  It has been a long time since Herman Miller recouped the design cost on their lounge chair.

And that is all that matters.  Justifying the UK change, the minister for intellectual property, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, argued it would right the "unfair" imbalance between manufactured designs and other artistic production.

But what does fairness have to do with it?  Intellectual property law is not about being fair to furniture designers.  Intellectual property has a purpose.

Standard economic theory says the market will under-provide creative products because creative products are easy to copy.  To fix this, intellectual property offers creative producers a monopoly over their work.  But that monopoly is only available for a time, because we, the consumers of creative work, have an interest in accessing and repurposing the back catalogue of human creativity.

All these caveats mean that intellectual property isn't really property, as I've argued in the Drum before — it's a regulatory workaround to an assumed market failure.  It only has value insofar as it resolves that failure.  It does not exist to funnel consumers into high-priced authenticity.

Furniture design is an example of a creative market that thrives despite lacking much of the intellectual property protection enjoyed by other creative works.  Indeed, the fact that Herman Miller can still charge enormous sums for a design available at a tenth the price shows that both the cheap and expensive wings of the market can co-exist.

The availability of replica mid-century design means more people can enjoy better aesthetics at home.  It is hard to see what public benefit restricting these designs to people who can spend $800 on a single side chair — as the UK government is doing — would provide.

Sure, on the scale of national politics, how long the design monopoly over Eames chairs should last is a pretty minor thing.  But it is an informative one.  If the government establishes privileges for one group others will want equivalent privileges.

The content of intellectual property law is almost never considered from first principles — that is, what do we fundamentally want our intellectual property regime to achieve.  Rather, it is a scruffle of political power, long divorced from the theory of market failure and a textbook need for clever regulatory intervention.

The Coalition Government has spent the last few years trying to crack down on copyright infringement.  If policymakers cared about the purpose of copyright protection they would only do so if it was clear that such a crackdown would lead to the creation of more new creative works.  Of course there is no evidence that it will.  But the holders of the rights to movies and music believe that pirates are depriving them of revenue.  And governments listen because they've forgotten why copyright protection was introduced in the first place.

In other words, intellectual property has become its own justification.  Put down your textbooks.  This is how law works in the real world.

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Is Abetz right about the same-sex marriage plebiscite?

Eric Abetz's comments on same-sex marriage expose deep confusion about the relationship between politicians and voters.  Are MPs there to do the bidding of the electorate, or follow their own whims?

Senator Eric Abetz's statement to the Guardian last week that he would not consider the results of a plebiscite on same-sex marriage binding — that is, he might vote against a same-sex marriage bill even if a majority of the population had voted for it — is revealing.

Yes, it has an obvious political explanation.  There's been a lot of "clever" politicking over same-sex marriage.  The plebiscite was an attempt to kick the issue into the long grass — an expensive delaying tactic.  Nominally conservative politicians have even called for pointless constitutional change to hold back a policy that has a clear majority of support.

But Abetz's statement is more interesting in that it exposes deep confusion, uncertainty and ambiguity about the relationship between politicians and voters.  Aren't politicians supposed to be our representatives?  And if so, what does that mean?

Abetz made two arguments.  First, he reserved judgment as to whether the plebiscite would be a fair reflection of the public's views.  If he felt it was stacked against traditional marriage (say, through an unbalanced distribution of funding) he would not consider it binding.

But Abetz also left it open to reject the plebiscite's results regardless.  As he said:  "People elect us so that we exercise our own best judgments on all the issues that come before us."  Politicians must "take into account the views of the electorate, the views of the nation and their own personal views."

But why should the "personal views" of politicians have any weight in political decision making?  What is so special about political consciences?

I can think of few professions that I would trust less to follow their consciences than politics — surely the only industry where megalomania, narcissism and confrontation is not just tolerated but is actually a positive.  And the idea that political consciences need to be protected is precious beyond belief, given that the practice of politics involves trading off personal beliefs for electoral gain.

There are workarounds to Abetz's objections.  The enabling legislation for the plebiscite could be written so that same-sex marriage is legal automatically after a positive popular vote.  Concerns about unfair funding balance should be resolved by not funding any side at all.

But the real question raised by both the plebiscite (which suggests same-sex marriage is too important to be resolved by Parliament) and Abetz's insistence on a conscience vote (which suggests same-sex marriage is too important to force parliamentarians to go against their beliefs) is why we elect politicians in the first place.

Are they there to represent the views of the voters in Parliament — effectively employees whose job is to do the bidding of their electorate as faithfully as is practicable?  Or are they there as sort of an elected aristocracy — placed into power as a popular endorsement of their inner selves?

It is in the interests of the political class to believe the latter, with all the quasi-mystical implications about power and political authority it brings.  The most famous expression of this worldview was offered by the great conservative Edmund Burke in a speech immediately after he was elected for the first time as the member for Bristol in 1774.  Burke argued he was first and foremost a member of parliament with a responsibility to deliberate on behalf of the whole nation, and was not there to reflect "local purposes" or "local prejudices".

The speech to the electors of Bristol is one of the basic texts of Western democratic politics.  But rarely are the views of the electors of Bristol reported.  Burke was not a popular local member.  When the next election came around — six years later — he had so clearly dissatisfied Bristol voters that he deliberately ran dead, ultimately coming fifth in a ballot of five candidates.  Burke did not represent the electors of Bristol again.

The voters seem to have believed Burke had been elected to represent them, and had no hesitation dumping the great conservative thinker when they learned he did not share that view.

In this light, the decision to hold a plebiscite on same-sex marriage rather than a parliamentary vote was a rather devastating indictment of the Australian political class.  First it suggests that our so-called representatives are unable to adequately represent our views — whether those views be for or against marriage reform.  Second, for those who hold to a more Burkean vision of democracy, it makes politicians look less like confident, deliberative aristocrats and more like cowards, unable to come to decisions on policy questions they find uncomfortable.

Don't get me wrong.  If the goal of democratic choice is to discern what most people want, then direct democracy is much more effective than delegated representation.  But then we should be subjecting more government policy to a plebiscite.  Things like tax increases, spending programs, military engagements, regulatory interventions, law and order schemes — they could all go to a popular vote.

I know, I know.  This is fantasy stuff.  Imagine the political class admitting it was not competent to rule on the big issues.

There is much to celebrate on Australia Day

Ninety-one per cent of Australians are proud to be Australian, and 85 per cent believe Australia Day is a day for celebration, according to a poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs.

There is good empirical reason to be proud of what Australia has achieved.  Sometimes it is worth taking stock.

First:  Australia is one of the richest countries in the world.  Australia's GDP per capita was US$61,925 in 2014, the latest year collated for comparison by the World Bank.  Only Norway, Switzerland and a few city-states are richer than us.  (Financial market turbulence and the exchange rate will have played havoc with our rankings since, but, well, comparative economics is a tough gig.)

Being rich is not everything, of course.  The United Nation's Human Development Index, which takes into account things like life expectancy, inequality and environmental sustainability, puts us at number two, just below Norway.

Second:  Australia is one of the most democratic countries in the world.  FreedomHouse gives Australia its highest ranking:  a "1" for both civil liberties and political rights, including perfect scores for electoral process, functioning of government, freedom of expression and belief, associational and organisational rights, and near perfect scores for personal autonomy and individual rights, the rule of law, and political pluralism and participation.  The Economist gave Australia 9 out of 10 in its 2014 Democracy Index.  Polity IV gives us full marks for democracy.

Third:  Australia is one of the freest countries in the world.  We are in equal third place for overall human rights respect in the CIRI's Human Rights Data Project.  We're ranked number seven on the Cato Institute's Human Freedom index, and number 12 on the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index.

These are no trivial achievements.  The majority of the world's population lives in countries which are less free, less democratic, and less respecting of the rights of its citizens than Australia.  What we have in this country is a constellation of institutions and cultural norms that are among the best on the planet.

Consider how hard it has been to export those institutions to poorer countries.  The best minds have spent decades trying to make developing countries like Australia, and their record of success is, shall we say, mixed.  Somehow we have a stable institutional order that combines both wealth and liberty.  This is more than enough to celebrate on Australia Day.  It is more than enough reason for pride of country.

Pride does not have to be a synonym for obliviousness.  There are significant pockets of disadvantage and too many people are unable to enjoy our aggregate prosperity.  Every news outlet and every columnist — myself included — pours out a litany of problems with Australia;  its government, its society, its culture.  These are very often justified.

Even among the aggregate measures of success, there are some worrying outliers.  For instance, we are lower than we ought to be on Reporters without Borders' World Press Freedom Index:  number 25 in the world, well below many of the countries we consider our peers.

And it's also true that January 26 is a peculiar day to celebrate Australia Day, given it is the day a floating prison colony found land as distant from home as eighteenth century policymakers could conceive.  That landing was no more the birth of the country we live in than Queen's Birthday is actually the Queen's birthday.  In The Age yesterday, Martin Flanagan argued that we should switch Australia Day to another day.

But what has made Australia so successful compared with other settler societies has nothing to do with the landing of the First Fleet or the intentions of the early military governors.  Success from that moment was not guaranteed.  Nor, indeed, did the landing force the settlers into an inevitable clash with the continent's Aboriginal inhabitants.  The pivotal choices were yet to be made.

In his How Australia Prospered, Ian Maclean looks at the paths Australia did not travel.  For instance, we avoided becoming like Argentina, a country with which we share many similarities, when the aristocratic squatters failed to entrench a privileged place in nineteenth century Australian politics.  There have been many junctures in our history where the Australian project could have fallen apart.

More fundamentally, stable and successful institutional orders do not have "birthdays".  If Australia Day was not January 26, then when should it be?  Australia's origins cannot be pinpointed to colonial self-government in the 1850s, the end of transportation in 1868, federation in 1901, voting rights for women from 1895, the adoption of the Statute of Westminster in 1942, full Commonwealth voting rights for Aboriginal people by the 1960s, or the Hawke government's 1986 Australia Act, which severed the Australia from the British legal system.  Each of these were milestones, yes, but milestones in what was really an evolutionary process.  Australia was not created, it grew.

Pretending that January 26 is Australia's day, even just symbolically, actually undervalues the achievement that is Australia's institutional heritage.  We could just as easily say the institutions that made Australia a success — representative democracy, the rule of law, a market economy — date back long before 1788, even before Britain existed as a discrete political entity.

Any celebration of a nation has to be coupled with an awareness of its past, for good or ill.  But while we must not let the good whitewash the ill, neither should the ill be allowed to drown out the good.  There is much to celebrate on Australia Day.  At least, that's what the data says.

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In defence of ''peak sequel'' capitalism

Is Hollywood running out of ideas?

In the wake of the unsurprising success of the seventh iteration of Star Wars, it can't have escaped anyone's attention that the American film industry is now pouring out sequels and reboots and exploiting established franchises.

This year we're going to get Zoolander 2, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Kung Fu Panda 3, Batman v Superman, Finding Dory, Captain America:  Civil War, X-Men:  Apocalypse, Now You See Me 2, a Ghostbusters reboot, a fifth instalment of the Jason Bourne series, Bridget Jones's Baby, another Jack Reacher movie, another Independence Day, a sequel to Bad Santa, and of course the next Star Wars film.

After 2016, there's another Indiana Jones in the works, at least one more Alien, another American Pie, more Avatars, another Blade Runner, a Die Hard prequel, another Frozen, and apparently a Star Wars every year until we die. Dominic Knight has dubbed this "peak sequel".  By one count there are 156 sequels in the works.

So it's easy to be pessimistic about the imaginative vibrancy of Hollywood.  One influential essay in GQ in 2011 forecast the "(potential) death" of American film as an art.  There's a helpful infographic floating around on "Hollywood's waning creativity".

But there is every reason to look at Hollywood's sequel, franchise and reboot fashion with optimism, even admiration.  They are a symbol of cultural health, not stagnation.

First, the situation is not exactly as it looks.  While there are more sequels there are also a lot more movies, as trade sources in the US and UK complain.  Don't like the flashy pop juggernaut of Star Wars:  The Force Awakens?  Go see the bleak Revenant, which just won the best picture Golden Globe.

Anyway, adaptations and franchises have been Hollywood's game since the very beginning.  Cinema has always dug through and repurposed other cultural products.  One of the earliest, greatest films, the 1902 silent A Trip to the Moon, is a mixed adaptation of stories by HG Wells and Jules Verne.

In the golden age of studios, filmmakers happily converted popular novels into film.  By my count, at least 15 of the 20 best picture Oscar winners between 1950 and 1969 are adaptations of novels, plays and musicals.  These were sometimes very well known, including Oliver! (a film adaptation of a musical adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel);  My Fair Lady (an adaptation of a musical adaptation of a film adaptation of the stage play Pygmalion);  and Ben Hur (a reboot of a 1925 adaptation of an 1880 novel that had been made into a play in 1899 and a 1907 film).  Possibly the best American film is a sequel of an adaptation:  The Godfather Part II.  Look at how derivative the Internet Movie Database's top 250 movies are.

It's not clear how adapting well-loved and established stories for film is substantively more creative than adapting well-loved and established film stories for more films.  What standard of creativity does the all-female reworking of Ghostbusters violate that West Side Story (a film adaptation of a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet) did not?  It would be weird to complain we're getting too many Shakespeare reboots.  For what it's worth, The Revenant is an adaptation of a novel too.

I made the point before Christmas that all culture relies on appropriating from earlier culture.  George Lucas's 1977 Star Wars was boldly original, but was also a complex pastiche of narrative tropes and imagery.

But there are stronger arguments for a Hollywood full of franchises than everyone-does-it and if-you-don't-like-it-go-see-something-else.

As TV shows become more film-like — with higher production values, and longer stories that stretch across an entire television season — franchising means films are becoming more TV-like.  Imagine those endless Marvel films (Iron Man, The Hulk, The Avengers, Thor, Captain America and so forth) as episodes in a long running story, rather than standalone movies.  Like any show there are better episodes and worse episodes, but in sum they add up to a stronger whole than each individual would be.

Star Wars is a great example of how franchises can enrich a culture rather than shrink it.  Everybody but the most contrarian agrees that Lucas's three Star Wars prequels, released between 1999 and 2005, mostly fail as individual pieces of dramatic entertainment.  (Yes, OK, an arguable exception is 2005's Revenge of the Sith, sure.)  But as exercises in constructing a rich and deep fictional world, they are remarkable.  Sequels and franchises allow filmmakers and audiences to mine further veins of potential stories.  No character need briefly appear on the screen and disappear forever.  There's always the opportunity for a spin-off.

Audiences clearly want this.  The fanfic subcultures which pop up around every major film reveal an audience eager to further immerse themselves in the fictional universe.  Books, comics, and TV specials are released to add depth for those who want more.  The Star Wars expanded universe offers audiences a map of the long-ago, far-away galaxy with its own traditions and tales.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe has its own comics, short films, TV shows, and the enormous back catalogue of stories and characters dating to the Second World War.

Even all that tacky merchandising that consumers lap up is a sign of cultural engagement.  They want to take the film experience home with them.  Surely this is what we want from culture — a communal experience, shared stories, imaginative worlds.

Movies have always been the most explicitly commercial art form.  If you view art and commerce as distinct, separate spheres then it must be tempting to view "peak sequel" capitalism as displacing the original visions of genius auteurs with repetitive dreck.  But art surely has to speak to people.  These grand worlds being built by sequels and franchises are doing that.  They should not be regretted;  they should be embraced.

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Is cultural appropriation the bogeyman it's made out to be?

A spectre is haunting the planet:  the spectre of cultural appropriation.

To appropriate symbols from cultures that are not one's own is apparently now disrespectful, insensitive and offensive.

A student body at the University of Ottawa has banned yoga classes as an example of "cultural genocide" and "Western supremacy".  Student unions at the University of East Anglia have targeted Mexican sombreros for "discriminatory or stereotypical imagery".

At Oberlin College in Ohio, it is food that is problematic.  The student dining hall is accused of modifying "traditional" Asian recipes "without respect".  The "undercooked rice and lack of fresh fish" offered in sushi "is disrespectful".  The Banh Mi sandwich, served on ciabatta rather than a baguette, is "uninformed", a "gross manipulation" of this "traditional" Vietnamese dish.  And the General Tso's chicken dish is prepared with steamed chicken, rather than fried chicken — another disrespectful appropriation.

These complaints are apparently serious.  They could just as well be satire.  Because each of those named foods are themselves the result, not the victims, of cultural appropriation.

Sushi has an ancient history in Japan but what many people in Japan and the West now see as good sushi — with its rich slices of tuna and salmon — is the result of Japanese chefs adapting their traditional dish to the tastes of American GIs during post-war occupation.

The Banh Mi is a fusion dish of French baguette — brought to Vietnam through French colonialism in the nineteenth century — and Vietnamese flavours.

And General Tso's chicken?  It dates back, at the earliest, to the 1950s, has nothing to do with the nineteenth century general Tso Tsung-t'ang, and only became famous when it was first served in a New York Chinese restaurant.

Sure, it's easy to mock a few uninformed university students.  So let's continue.

The sombrero comes not from Mexico, but was brought from Europe by the Spanish — Don Quixote is often depicted with a flat-topped Spanish sombrero.  The sombrero was then culturally appropriated by early American cowboys and evolved into their distinctive cowboy hat.  For their part, the Spaniards got the sombrero from the Mongolians.

Modern yoga is so far from the ancient Indian tradition that it is better seen as a totally separate endeavour.  The typical modern yoga fitness class draws on gymnastics, calisthenics and Indian wrestling.  Its relationship to the fourth century Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is like the relationship between the cowboy hat and the Spanish sombrero:  related but far enough apart to be considered substantively different.

Why is this important?  Because the history of culture is the history of cultural appropriation.  What we see as traditional national or ethnic cultures today are the just the current manifestation of a long evolutionary process.  Traditional foods, religions, dress and practices are constantly changing as they are exposed to other cultures, picking up and integrating the most appealing or adaptable parts.

In her important 2013 book, Cuisine and Empire:  Cooking in World History, the food historian Rachel Laudan documents the many ways so-called "national cuisines" are almost always an amalgam of foreign influences, incorporating plants, animals, techniques, spices and styles that have been pushed around the globe by politics and economics.  There are no "authentic" cuisines, no "traditional" foods.  Everything is fusion.

The same story could be told for language, architecture, dress, religion, music, art, literary culture and on and on and on.

So the issue here is not just that the criticism of cultural appropriation is historically illiterate.  It's deeply ironic.  The critics of cultural appropriation claim to be progressive.  But they are in fact engaged in a deeply conservative project:  one which first seeks to preserve in formaldehyde the content of an established culture and second tries prevent others from interacting with that culture.

Appropriating other cultural symbols is not empty, cynical role-playing, it is development.  By appropriating we add meaning, creating complex new rituals and relationships.

Take, for instance, the most prominent example of cultural appropriation and evolution in the modern West:  Christmas.

It is well understood that Christmas is an amalgam of Christian beliefs and Pagan rituals.  The Christmas tree comes from Germany, Father Christmas from England, and Christmas carols from Roman-era Christian hymns.  Most people would class candy canes as one of the secular icons of Christmas but they may have been meant to represent the shepherd's staff.

To observe a nativity scene (a first century AD stable in Bethlehem) next to a Christmas tree (an evergreen winter climate plant) is to see that there is a lot going with this apparently simple holiday.

Why is gift-giving part of the way we celebrate of the birth of Jesus Christ?  Not solely because of the Three Wise Men.  We might as well ask why Jewish families in the United States enjoy a plate of General Tso's chicken on December 25.  Lots of reasons.

Cultural evolution is like that:  a contradictory, rich, unstable mix of tradition and change.  To attack cultural appropriation as offensive, or insensitive is to attack culture itself.  And just as absurd.

When ''safe spaces'' become an attack on ideas

There is something deeply reactionary brewing in American higher education.

The events at Yale and the University of Missouri over the last few weeks make plain that the movement for trigger warnings in university classrooms and safe spaces on campus has turned into a dogmatic moral illiberalism.

We should pay attention to what's happening.  With a few years lag, Australia tends to enthusiastically adopt American intellectual fashions.

At the University of Missouri, anti-racism activists announced that their protest encampment on public property was a "safe space".  A student journalist, Tim Tai, tried to report on the protest.  You can watch what happened.  In the first half of the video, you'll see the activists surround and attempt to intimidate Tai.  In the last 10 seconds you'll see no less than an assistant professor of mass media shout for "muscle" to remove another journalist for simply filming a public protest.

The Yale incident appears more trivial, but is more telling.

Just before Halloween, Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee emailed students asking them to ensure their Halloween costumes did not involve offensive "cultural appropriation and/or misrepresentation".  In response, one Yale lecturer and associate master at Yale's Silliman College, Erika Christakis, objected that the idea that cultural appropriation was inherently wrong could stifle free speech and open debate.

Christakis' email was apparently beyond the pale.  Outrage spread across Silliman College.  An opinion piece in the Yale Herald responded that "I don't want to debate.  I want to talk about my pain."  (The piece was taken down but you can read an archived version.)  The New Yorker complains Christakis was "privileging abstract free-speech rights over the immediate emotional experiences of those who are likely to experience discrimination at the university."

In these two events, we've dramatically seen how the apparently benign movement for trigger warnings in university classes and safe spaces for students has metastasised into a more general assault on the contest of controversial ideas in higher education.

The original idea behind trigger warnings was to advise students who had experienced serious and severe trauma, such as sexual assault, that they were about to hear some disturbing content.  You can understand the reasoning behind the warnings, as a reasonable concession to the fact that some material, particularly in humanities subjects, can be highly confronting.  Likewise the safe space — say a women's room — might be seen as a benevolent amenity.

But trigger warnings have become absurd.  Some students are requesting classic literature come with warnings.  And safe spaces are morphing into places where infantilised students hide from ideas.

Now this movement has turned into a generalised attack on open discussion.  The entire higher education experience is being reconceptualised as a zone of post-trauma, in which students demand faculty protect them from the expression and thoughts of others.

Using the language of psychological harm, ideas are condemned, rather than rebutted.  Students can receive "pain" from the decision of another person to write an email.  It is wrong to "privilege" free speech, a mere "abstract right", over personal emotional experience.

It's hard to think of anything more contrary to the purpose of education — which is, in the broadest sense, the systematic exposure to ideas outside personal experience — than that.

One of the arguments in Christakis's email is worth dwelling on.  Not her main points about the benefits of provocation, or the challenge of defining what costumes are offensive, but her point that, from a childhood developmental perspective, students need to learn how to reject ideas that trouble them, rather than running immediately to ban and punish.

This accords with the most well-known argument for freedom of speech — that made by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty.  Mill argues that by hearing contrary ideas, if only to consider and discard them, we grow intellectually.

In this way, free speech and education are tightly intertwined.  Limit the former and you hinder the latter.  An education system where the students are excessively cushioned from the provocation of others will stifle that development.  One would hope you could graduate from Yale being able to articulate why some ideas are wrong.

But what about students who have experienced genuine trauma?  Even then, it's not clear that preventing "triggering" is the best response, as Jonathan Chait noted earlier last year.  Students who are genuinely unable to cope with incidental references to that trauma might not be ready for the window into the breadth of human experience that education is supposed to provide.  If you are triggered by the racist language in Huckleberry Finn, you are not ready to study 19th century literature.

For those who are ready, hiding from every reminder of trauma can be counterproductive.  There's a growing area of research into what's known as "post-traumatic growth", the idea that some people who experience trauma can become stronger for the experience, rather than made permanently fragile.

This isn't for everyone, of course.  Talk to your doctor.  But education is supposed to foster intellectual development.  It is not supposed to be a safe zone of comfort and emotional protection.  Campus radicals used to brag about how transgressive and provocative they were.  Now, it seems, they're more interested in policing the transgressions and provocations of others.

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