SOSE Sells Jumbled Key Values

There can be little doubt that the creators of the Studies of Society and Environment syllabus find capitalism and consumerism very distasteful.  This much is clear from their presentation of the "key values" that form part of the "rationale" for the new syllabus for Years 1 to 10 in Queensland schools.

The SOSE syllabus stresses the need for "relationships between people and environments that have a regard for the spiritual dimension of life", and the importance of challenging "the inequalities inherent in social institutions and structures", to enable children to "deconstruct dominant views of society".  It says nothing about the value of creating and maintaining a vibrant and competitive economy.

Indeed, you can bet that the gentle souls from the Queensland School Curriculum Council who penned this unctuous prose become quite distressed when they contemplate the vast array of goods and services that a modern economy can produce and distribute.

They must shudder when they think of the damage all this economic activity does to the spiritual qualities of those who are involved in it, or the havoc that it wreaks on our fragile natural environment.  Instead of making people realise that true fulfilment comes from hugging trees in an old growth forest, or attending a branch meeting of the Greens or Australian Democrats, our capitalist culture distracts them from criticising the terrible wrongs of our society.

But the irony is that the SOSE syllabus is itself an expression of the supermarket mentality its creators seem to despise, the notion that all the things you want and that make you feel good can be jumbled up in the great shopping trolley of life without any rhyme or reason, and without any trade-offs.

Reading the syllabus materials, there is no indication that its designers realise that there might be any serious inconsistencies amongst the "key values" they have outlined -- such as attacking discrimination on the basis of gender, sexuality, religion, race, age and half a dozen other named grounds, while also celebrating cultural diversity in a world full of cultures whose "key values" involve just such discriminations.

It is a syllabus without a coherent and rigorous intellectual framework, just a series of disjointed dollops intended to keep the children amused as well as to indulge the muddled political and social beliefs of its designers.  Students will complete the SOSE "learning area" with a trolley full of mainly politically correct names and organisations -- a box of trade unions, an economy pack of Eddie Mabo, a barrel of Mao Zedong, a big stick of Greenpeace and a Michelangelo postcard.  But they will have little idea of how these might fit into the broader scheme of things.

And the documentation for the SOSE syllabus is a mixture of breathtakingly vacuous bumf -- "students bring to Studies of Society and Environment their understandings about what it means to be young at this time" -- and extravagant promises of the kind more commonly associated with the marketing of toiletries.  Just as Brand X toothpaste is supposed to transform your mouth into the human equivalent of a sparkling mountain spring, so 10 years of SOSE is designed to make children into "lifelong learners".

Such wonderful creatures are not just people with an interest in the world around them who are always keen to enhance their education.  That would be too ordinary;  a bit like buying the house-brand toothpaste.  In the brave new Queensland that is being engineered for your children a "lifelong learner" is all the following:

• a knowledgeable person with deep understanding;
• a complex thinker;
• a creative person;
• an active investigator;
• an effective communicator;
• a participant in an interdependent world;  and
• a reflective and self-directed learner. 

But if you think the new SOSE syllabus will actually create people with these marvellous qualities, then you probably believe that the supermarket's new $24.99 jar of beauty cream with the magical herbal ingredients will make you physically irresistible.

Of course, there is one major difference between the supermarket where you purchase your groceries and the kind that the Curriculum Council is running.  Your local merchant doesn't really care what goes into your shopping trolley;  macrobiotic tofu or a carton of cigarettes, it is all the same to him as long as he makes a profit.

Not so with the SOSE crowd.  They are selling only a carefully selected range of products, especially chosen to make children feel that their own society is pretty rotten.

But the soft leftist ideology that informs the SOSE syllabus is only part of the child abuse that the Education Department is inflicting on Queensland, and arguably even the lesser part.

After all, if children are given the sound intellectual grounding that seems necessary for instilling a love of learning, they can usually slough off their teachers' political propaganda as they grow up and come into contact with information and ideas that were not offered to them at school.  As they mature they also tend to look more critically at many of the things they were never encouraged to question.  If this was not the case, my own generation would all be monarchists calling for the restoration of the British Empire.

The real sin of the SOSE syllabus is that it will not provide students with the cumulative and properly structured intellectual frameworks and knowledge necessary for comprehending how the world works and how it developed into its present form.  And it makes no attempt to foster the shared common culture and basic understandings which are necessary for the continuing vitality of Australia's liberal democratic institutions.

So despite the impressive sounding "learning outcomes" it promises, it will not give rise to large numbers of well-informed and independently minded citizens.  Intentionally or otherwise, it is a syllabus for producing mentally apathetic consumers who will always be vulnerable to the gaudy marketing campaigns of political and cultural elites and their relish for rewriting history to suit contemporary agendas.  No wonder these elites are so keen on it.

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Free Shearers Don't Click with the Union

Walk into a shearing shed today and up to half the workers are women, many are degree educated, most well traveled and many talk of careers in the wool industry.  How far Australian society has shifted is starkly apparent in this new shearing industry now under attack by an aggressive labor movement.

The sun may still scorch the body on 45-degree days.  The shearing sheds may still provide a good movie set for a remake of Jack Thompson's famous film, Sunday Too Far Away, but little else remains the same.  The 1970's classic depicted the hard, violent and beer soaked life of the Australian outback shearer.  This rugged, matey and sexist environment gave birth to the Australian union movement and the images have long been ingrained in the romantic psyche of a nation eager to pinpoint its identity.

In the new shearing industry frequently all workers are staunchly independent contractors.  The shearing award in place since the 1920's is ignored because of its millstone like effect on shearers' incomes.  Sure, the beer is still there (something has to take the sting out of the heat) but the workers themselves do not tolerate drunken workers, as they destroy the productivity of the whole team.

Moera and Barry Hammonds' shearing operation based in Charleville Queensland, provides a colorful case study of this new Australian environment.  Of the 300 or so free contractors who work through their operation each year, large numbers are in their early 20's and many are women.  This is a big turnaround for an industry until recently dominated by ageing men and a looming workforce shortage.

Men may continue to do most of the shearing, but the days of rough handling and abusing the sheep being shorn are diminishing.  A shearer causing harm to a sheep is likely to receive verbal abuse from any one of the female wool classers, who are sensitive to the sheep's well being.

And it is in wool classing that the revolution is most stark.  Wool prices vary according to the quality of the wool.  Most baled wool leaving the farm gate averages 20 microns and fetches $3.  50 kg for the woolgrower.  In comparison 19 micron baled wool can be worth $7.  00 kg and 16 micron (relatively rare) $100 plus kg.  Through better people systems in the shed, more exacting baling and treatment of wool can occur.  The future of wool growing rests largely on higher prices through better quality.  This is the free contractors focus.

Moera Hammonds is a gun wool classer.  She came 4th at the prestigious International Golden Shears wool handling championships in New Zealand, the highest ever achieved by an Australian.  Her professionalism with wool classing is reflected in the training she gives new contractors, the standards she and her teams expect of themselves and the business mentality of the contractors toward doing a quality job.

The outcome according to farmers is a better wool clip and higher wool prices.  And for this the farmers pay more.  The contractors remuneration consistently outstrips that of the antiquated award which tends to "dumb down" both attitudes and pay.

Against this backdrop the free contractors working through the Hammonds are having their new life's values challenged by the doyens of the old economy.  The AWU have made application under Section 275 of the Queensland IR Act to force the free contractors to be bonded employees and required to work under the shearing award on less remuneration under inferior conditions.  In the IRC process the contractors are forced to make public their private tax returns.

This is the same, aggressive, anti-independent, anti-new economy type legislation that the NSW government tried to ram through parliament late last week.  The labor movement is obsessed with forcing people into award wage slavery.  They hate the tide of history in the swing to independence and the 20% of Australian working men and women who classify themselves as independently self employed.

In the shearing industry the AWU claim that nothing has changed and see no reason to change.  They hold to a view of society based on warring classes.  Yet the independent contractors working with the Hammonds see their future tied to commercial co-operation not disputation.

This Queensland case and the NSW Bill involve more than a battle of legal semantics.  On trial is the old verses the new;  new thinkers realising the challenge, satisfaction and financial rewards of being in charge of ones own future, verses those who hanker for class structures of the past.  On trial, are Australian values!

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Coffee Coups of the Café Set

The passage of thirteen years may have played tricks with my memory.  But it seems to me that the kind of people who delight in public displays of moral outrage have been less incensed by George Speight's recent coup in Fiji than they were by the two coups his countryman Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka staged in 1987.

Perhaps it is simply a loss of innocence among the café latte set -- their belated realisation that idyllic Pacific island states are just as likely to degenerate into thuggery and corruption as any other Third World country.

After all, since 1987 we have seen an attempted coup in Vanuatu, the assassination of a government minister in Samoa and a plot to kill a number of other leaders, a long-running and murderous rebellion in Bougainville, a whole smorgasbord of political and military mayhem in the rest of Papua New Guinea, and the extensive criminalisation of politics throughout the region.  And earlier this week there was a coup in the Solomons, capping off eighteen months of gruesome ethnic violence which arose out of attempts by indigenous Guadalcanal islanders around Honiara to force settlers from neighbouring Malaita to return to their own island.

So while they still like to haul out the ragged banner of "colonialism" to excuse it all, even the most sentimental members of the "outraged" classes must be feeling drained of some of their righteousness in regards to the Pacific, just as they have become weary of thinking about African politics.

But I suspect there is more to it than a simple matter of coup fatigue.  I think there are two main differences between the situation in 1987 and today.

The government that Rabuka ousted in 1987 was a coalition between the Indian-dominated National Federation Party and the multiracial Fiji Labour Party.  It was led by Labour's Dr Timoci Bavadra, a rather naïve ethnic Fijian who readily adopted the soft Marxism and hostility to Western nuclear powers that our left-wingers expected of any genuine Third World politician.  Bavadra's party had come under the influence of Australian unionists and University of the South Pacific academics who believed that the real struggle in Fiji had to be between the Indian and Fijian working class on one side, and foreign capitalists and their local henchmen on the other.

Rabuka, on the other hand, was the kind of black man who filled the left with dismay.  Not only was he strongly anti-Communist and favourably disposed towards Western powers, he also spoke openly of his desire to convert all citizens of Fiji to Christianity -- a project which put him offside with most of the leaders of Australia's churches.

But this time round, the media-wise and articulate George Speight knows that there are certain buttons he can push to neutralise much of the hostility that might otherwise be directed against him.

He has cunningly phrased his attack on parliamentary democracy in terms that few progressive intellectuals can resist -- it is a "Western import", thus raising the hated spectre of cultural imperialism.  He also made a nice bow to the multiculturalists, saying that he would "like to encourage" the Indians "to continue to practise their cultures".  And he wants to restore the affirmative action programs for indigenous Fijians that the now-captive government of Mahendra Chaudhry had set aside.

But Speight's master stroke was to arrange a press conference for two Maori activists from Aotearoa (or New Zealand as some people still call it), who came to support his role in the common struggle of Fijians, Maoris and Aborigines for indigenous rights.  As an added bonus, they denounced every caring person's Great Satan, John Howard, as a "racist".  How dare he think that settlers -- whether Indians or Europeans -- should have equal rights with "first peoples"?

And that brings us to the second major difference between the 1987 coups and today.  Back then, the notion of special indigenous rights wasn't quite as attractive to the intelligentsia as it has become over the last decade.  The fine ideals of universal human rights and a colour-blind society still had their followers, and "racists" were those who believed that people's race or ethnic identity should play a part in determining their civic or legal rights and obligations.

Now of course, all that has been stood on its head.  I think that the crucial turnaround came when the socialist light finally petered out at the end of the 1980s.  All the tatty dreams of a revolutionary working class that would sweep away the oppressive structures of capitalism and create a wonderfully free and just society had to be abandoned, even in the most third-rate universities.

"Progressives" who once saw an emphasis on racial or ethnic identity as reactionary now celebrate "the politics of difference" as their major weapon against the liberal and democratic capitalist institutions they despise.  Indigenous peoples have an honoured place in the new pantheon, as their rhetorical commitment to strengthening their "traditional culture" against the hated forces of "economic rationalism" and "globalisation" meets many of the intelligentsia's own psychological and political needs.

So while they remain wrapped in the "first peoples" mantle, Speight and his thugs can urge Fijians to unite against "our common enemy the Indians", and the Isatabu savages on Guadalcanal can even parade the severed heads of Malaitan migrants without causing too many members of the café latte set to spill their coffee.  The dangerous notion of "indigenous rights" has become too precious to be challenged by any critical consideration of the real nastiness to which it can lead.

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Multicultural Blues

Book Reviews

After Multiculturalism
by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
The Foreign Policy Centre, London, 2000;  ISBN:  0-9535598-8-2, 88 + x pages, £9.95

Multiculturalism has never achieved the same currency and salience in Britain as it has in countries of recent settlement such as Canada, Australia and the US, where large shares of the population are descendants of recent immigrants, if not immigrants themselves.  Nevertheless, Britain's ethnic Caribbean and Asian minorities are nowadays officially expected not to assimilate to the dominant culture but are encouraged to maintain their native cultures, and all are encouraged to welcome the consequent "diversity".

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's thesis is that diversity so understood has become a source of social division and is hindering, rather than fostering, any comparative advantage that Britain might enjoy from its combination of established and immigrant communities.  She argues that globalisation is challenging everyone's sense of identity and no-one can expect to have any particular identity fixed and protected indefinitely.  She envisages a world of evolving and overlapping identities that offer opportunities from which everyone can benefit.

The author is particularly well qualified to argue in this way.  A member of the Asian community that was expelled from Uganda 30 years ago and resettled largely in the UK, she was born in Africa into an Indian culture and with a British passport.  Having grown up mainly in Britain, she insists that she is as British as anyone born in the UK.  But she is also acutely aware that the British identity is itself now being challenged by devolution (a response to the rise of Scottish nationalism) and by the British establishment's determination to involve Britain in the European Union's quest for "ever closer union".  These forces have sharpened the sense of "Britishness" among people like herself, who are not members of any of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom but whose identity is largely a product of the British Empire.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in a very lively, if rather breathless, way, and makes some devastating observations about "traditional multiculturalism".  Some immigrants have successfully invoked cultural relativism to defend brutal patriarchal practices that would not be tolerated in other contexts.  In education inspired by multiculturalism, "home cultures of black and Asian children are revered and those of white children ignored ... It does not focus on the need to extend the appeal of Shakespeare to enable black and Asian children to feel this is part of their heritage and cannot see that white children need to see Benjamin Zefaniah as their poet too" (page 70).  Her interviews with a selection of people aged between 15 and 24 suggest that multiculturalism will fade as the present generation of lobbyists and policy-makers retires.  Asked what the term "multiculturalism" meant to them, a black female aged 17 said, "I really don't use it.  I prefer to say British".  A black man aged 18 said, "I think it is a stupid word used for black people when white people think they want to be polite" (page 24).  A 20-year-old Muslim female said "I am a proud British Muslim ... We are developing a modern, cosmopolitan Islamic network across the world" (page 25).

People do seem to be able to envisage, without anxiety, multiple identities for themselves:  French and European, Australian and Asian, Muslim and British.  As international trade in goods, services and capital increases, and as pressure mounts for more freedom of international migration as well, identities will undoubtedly be challenged and evolve faster than in the past.  But it's not clear that anything needs to be done other than abandoning experiments in social engineering like multiculturalism.  The book's publisher, the Foreign Policy Centre (for which the author works), is a "New Labour" think-tank.  Reflecting this provenance, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes about "projects", "strategies", and "renegotiations":  the self-aggrandising rhetoric of Blairite hyper-activism that likes to think of itself as being in touch with, and shaping, all the emerging trends.  But, of all social phenomena, identities are quintessentially unintended and unforeseeable outcomes of human action, and can't be controlled by human design.  The real message of this book is that multiculturalism, as a set of policies for cultural maintenance, is finished.  Only the rent-seeking apparatus remains.

All Australian Children Deserve a Private Education

Also published on 3 June 2000 by Canberra Times as "Adding Reform to the Three Rs"

Why are Australian parents voting with their children's feet and fleeing to private schooling of all persuasions?  Since the Howard Government removed the restrictions on creating new private schools, the increase in the number of private schools students has been more than twice as much as the increase in government school enrolments, giving private schools an enrolment growth rate more than five times that of government schools.

That this is so represents a tragedy of several dimensions.  I speak with some feeling, being a child of public education trained as a teacher, the nephew of a teacher in the public school system, the son of a father who trained for the same and the grandson of a founder-member of the NSW Teacher's Federation.  My teacher Aunt epitomises this long-term trend, sending both her children to private schools to complete their secondary education.

It is not as if government does not spend enough money.  Back in 1972/73, Australian governments spent about $600 per Australian on education services, now they spend about $1100, not including the almost $5bn spent on [capital investment and on] income support for students (inclusion of which would raise expenditure to over $1300 per Australian).  Private spending has gone up much more, however.  In 1972/73, households spent about $90 per Australian on education services, now they spent almost $440 per Australian.  (All figures are adjusted for inflation).  Household spending on education services has increased from about 15% of total spending to 30%.

People are voting with their children's feet and their wallets.  Why this is so is a mixture of increased prosperity -- as people become more prosperous, they spend more on education -- as well as cultural and institutional factors.

There was a time when the public school system attracted as teachers people of serious intellect and cultural aspiration who were barred by mere accident of birth from university.  Alas, the cream of the working class has long since been replaced by the also-rans of the middle class (and please do not write in to say you are an honourable exception, as an Adelaide Review reader I am sure you are).

The rot is, apparently, nowhere near as bad in France and Germany as it is in the Anglomorph countries.  But in the former, concepts of cultural achievement, aspiration and preservation are in much healthier state than they are in the Anglo countries, where the sustained assault on any concept of possessing a Western culture worth preserving has had the predictable effects of a student body directed overwhelmingly to material achievement -- cultural achievement being largely denied them -- and governments with crassly utilitarian concepts of education, particularly higher education.  What other language of justification for expenditure is left to them?  Especially given the "social justice" propagandising that has mostly replaced cultural achievement rests largely on a rejection of the mainstream values most parents believe in.

With the collapse of a strong sense of providing access to a rich and invigorating culture, the inherent institutional failings of public education have come to the fore.

Who is the body responsible for setting the rules under which the education industry operates?  The State government, particularly the Minister for Education.  Who is the body responsible for ensuring those rules are enforced?  The same.  Who is the biggest producer of education?  The same.

Having the same person be rule-maker, rule-enforcer and most important player represents a colossal conflict of interest.  We certainly would not run the AFL like that -- imagine having the Collingwood Club board set the AFL's rules and the Collingwood coach being the chief umpire.  So why do we run our schools that way?

This conflict of interest is fatal both to proper accountability and to achieving quality education.  After all, is any Minister of Education or Ministry of Education going to get up and tell the public they are doing a bad job?  And are they likely to seriously set up and maintain systems that would provide information leading to that conclusion?

The conflict of interest is even greater if teacher unions and teachers are major participants in candidate preselection in a governing political party, as is the case with the ALP in Australia and the Democratic Party in the US.

A perfect example is provided by the "normalising" of tertiary-entrance (TER) scores, so that they form a nice neat bell-curve distribution.  This has two major effects.  First, it makes it impossible to use published TER scores to compare the performance of the public school system from year to year.  Second, because students' scores are adjusted for the ranking of their school, it penalises good students from low-rated schools (whose scores get "normalised" downwards) and rewards poor students from high-rated schools (whose scores get "normalised" upwards).  This process can become incredibly perverse -- for example, because non-English speaking background is a sign of "disadvantage", adjusting down the scores of students from migrant backgrounds because above-average success shows they have been "overmarked".

Normalising is allegedly done to allow easy ranking of students.  This is nonsense:  the raw scores would do just as well.  Indeed, the raw scores are the only information from each individual student the entire process uses.  Normalising is bureaucratic make-work which shields the system from effective accountability about its year-to-year performance.  It is also an unjust system because its penalises bright students from schools which are typically in low-income areas and rewards students typically from high-income suburbs.  But since the watchdog of the public interest is also the producer being protected, this unjust frustration of accountability marches on.

While, because of this conflict of interest, there is little systematic evidence about the year-to-year performance of the school system, get a group of people who teach in higher education together and it is not hard to turn the conversation to the quality of the students coming through.  The news is pretty depressing:  stories of declining knowledge and literacy, universities setting up disguised remedial English classes, the pattern of decline being so obvious that one can see it year by year.

The standard cry is more money is needed.  This, unfortunately, is nonsense.  It would be nice if education was a simple "black box" affair where one shoved money and intentions in one end and appropriate results poured out the other.  The black box theory is certainly one education bureaucrats and teaching unions are very fond of, as it means that the answer to every problem is more money, more teachers and smaller classes.

But education is not a simple black box.  There is a great deal of evidence that education outcomes are, at best, only weakly connected to expenditure.

The United States has provided the definitive proof that the solution is not money.  In Kansas City, over a 12 year period from 1985 to 1997, US Federal District Judge Clark took charge of the school district of 36,000 students, mandating the spending of almost $US2 billion.  A lot was bought with the money -- 15 new schools, student-teacher ratios of 12 or 13 to 1 (the lowest in the US) and opulent facilities.  The one thing which was not bought with all that money was improved educational outcomes.  The students' test scores did not improve, the black-white gap did not diminish and the schools became less, not more, racially integrated.  International comparison of student skills also show no clear connection between expenditure and achievement.

If the black box theory is wrong, then we have to look at the performance of education bureaucrats and teachers, at their accountability and the incentives they face -- something highly uncongenial for them.

At which point we are back to the besetting problem of public ownership -- having the person setting and enforcing the rules also being a major player.  Governments just can't help themselves, they give themselves free kicks.

The resistance to publishing test results by schools, to testing students for literacy and numeracy are further instances of how having the main producer set the rules creates a conflict of interest which fundamentally undermines accountability and any real pressure to perform.

Dissatisfaction with the public school system has been longstanding and has lead to wave after wave of "reforms" such that reform fatigue is now a real issue.  Yet none of the reforms has seriously tackled this conflict of interest.  (Apart from the Federal governments' freeing up of the ability to set up new private schools, which has seen a boom in private schooling despite it being more expensive for parents).  So the dissatisfaction continues, leading to endless reshuffling while schools and students remain trapped within the institutionalised conflict of interest.  Australian children do not deserve the public education most of them now get.

The first thing which needs to be done is to separate regulation of education from schooling provision.  The ideal way to do that is to turn public schools into individual corporations owned by the parents and completely separate from the Education Department and the Minister.

This is the direction education reform is heading in the US.  Over 500 "charter schools" -- autonomously run schools -- have been created in the last few years.  About 10% are run as for-profit operations, with the number growing.  Given that only about half all public school employees in the US are teachers (2.4 million out of 4.5 million), that public schools operate with five times more noninstructional personnel per student than parochial schools and that noninstructional and support activities consume 42 per cent of public education spending in the US, it is not surprising that there turns out to be considerable scope for improved efficiency.  Such figures are typical results of the "producer capture" that comes from government ownership with the consequent lack of an effective owner combined with the producer-as-regulator conflict of interest.

Soviet-style, centralised command-and-control methods of production have been thoroughly discredited.  Our school system should be liberated from them as well.

Instead of funding schools, funding should be directed to students and paid by Treasury Departments.  Education Departments should be corporatised and be required to offer their services on the open market to schools, who can choose to purchase them or not.  There should be a points system -- on a scale of, say, five to ten -- based purely on indicators of educational disadvantage.  The more "points", the higher the funding that student attracts.

There should be compulsory testing of literacy and numeracy, with the average results by school being published -- both the basic average and compared to the disadvantage profile of the school, with bonuses being paid if results are significantly better than the disadvantage profile would predict.  Tertiary entrance should be by an examination run by an independent body with a system which allows results to be compared from year to year.

Schools would become far more accountable, the body setting and enforcing the rules would no longer have a crippling conflict of interest, funding would be directed to where need was greatest, and schools would be given powerful incentives to do better.

Teacher unions -- who have turned defending mediocrity and failure into an art form -- and education bureaucrats would scream.  As would all those who value public education mainly as a way to propagandise at children.  But primary and secondary education would no longer be an expensive scandal and our children would get the educations they deserve.

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Toll roads are good policy

Toll roads may be unpopular with many motorist and taboo with the Bracks Government, but they play a part in any coherent transport strategy for Victoria.

The need for an integrated network of radial and orbital expressways in Melbourne has been recognised since the 1970s.  Until the early 1990s the idea did not progress due to resistance from interest groups and lack of government funding.  During its dying months, the Kirner Government, broke and desperate for economic development, did seek to its credit seek proposals from private parties to build and fund a western and southern bypass on a toll road basis.  However, no decision was made prior to the election of 1992.

The Kennett Government faced a stark choice;  either a toll road or no road.  They wisely choose toll option.  It also expanded the scope of the project and introduced a radical new electronic tolling system that lays the foundation for future road pricing.

The task now is to complete the Melbourne network.  This includes completing the eastern freeway to Ringwood and the Scoresby Freeway, thus linking the Frankston industrial belt to the City Link system, as well as addressing the remaining bottle necks in the orbital system;  the Hume Freeway from Craigieburn to the Metropolitan Ring Road, the Western Freeway from Rockbank to the Metropolitan Ring Road at Deer Park and the link between the Eastern Freeway to City Link.

In my column two weeks ago I accused the Bracks Government of lacking a commitment to completing this network.  Mr Batchelor -- the Transport Minister -- says otherwise.  However, despite being flush with funds and committing $1.5 billion to new transport infrastructure in the budget, the government has committed funding to only one part of the task;  the extension of the eastern freeway.  The other components have received no mention or funding in the budget.  The Government appears to support the construction of the other sections but only as long as the Commonwealth provides all the funds.

The fact is, the State and Commonwealth Governments could fund the completion of the entire network out of taxes or new borrowing but will not do so this decade because of higher priorities, particularly in rural areas.

Of course, tolls are not suitable for linking the western ring road to the Hume and Western Highways, as theses are relatively small add-ons to existing public funded freeways.  However, tolls are worth considering for the Scoresby Highway and a tunnel linking the Eastern Freeway to City Link.  The Scoresby Highway would be a new, large venture costing at least $1 billion and is unlikely to start this decade if it depends on government funding.  The tunnel linking Eastern Freeway to City Link would be extensions of the existing toll system.

The public quite rightly feels ripped-off by toll roads, forced to pay twice for roads:  once through fuel taxes and another via tolls.  The fact is, governments have long treated fuel taxes as just another tax and have collected far more in fuel taxes than they ever spend on roads.  This is unlikely to change.

If Victorians want Melbourne's radial and orbital road network -- which is essential to State competitiveness -- to be complete this decade then expansion of the existing toll system must considered.

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Who's Insecure

Facts

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The Gravy Train Ride

No critic can deny the Bracks Government strong marks in its first 200 days.  It has hastened slowly on the issues like the Snowy water while making sympathetic noises.  It has offered no comfort to the Save Albert park wowsers.  Above all, it has brought down a budget worthy of the State's best ever Treasurer, Alan Stockdale.

And in the budget, it produced a surplus while sterilising one billion dollars in the Infrastructure Reserve.  Though this may turn out to be a re-election slush fund, the appointment of Lynn Kosky as Finance Minister (by all accounts a hard nosed value-for-money taskmaster) offers the prospect of taxpayer benefit.

Some disturbing trends are however emerging.  The ban on smoking in restaurants is a typical "nanny state" action.  It forces people to do what the political elite thinks is good for them.  Similarly, the knee jerk reduction in speed limits on urban roads does not appear to have been taken with the benefit of a Regulation Impact Statement, which used to be an insurance against superficially attractive measures that turn out to be rotten.  And if moving from 60 kph to 50 saves lives (surely not 200 as some have suggested) then why not save more by moving to 40 or more still by moving to 30?

But it is in the company Labor Governments keep that have traditionally brought their downfall.  It was Paul Keating who noted that whenever Labor got elected to Government a whole set of people, with claims to have provided assistance, fell out of trees into lucrative taxpayer funded jobs.

The Bracks Government seems to be infected with this traditional Labor malady.  Its appointments of aiders and abettors and just plain sympathisers is already causing raised eyebrows.  While some like Bernie Fraser (the new head of the Superannuation Office) are well credentialled, and others like Tom Hogg have long experience, their appointments do not pass the probity test that the former Kennett Government had established.  They are clearly being rewarded as Labor mates.

Moreover, still other appointments are more blatant examples of political patronage.  These include public funding for some of Joan's boys:

• former planning minister Evan Walker received a handsome fee for his opinion on the City Square shards,
• former industrial relations minister Neil Pope was well rewarded for his failed attempted arbitration of the Yallourn Power dispute,
• and ex Cain staffer Terry Moran has been brought in to run the Premiers Department. 

These are only the most visible parts of the ice berg of panels, commissions and inquiries which are being staffed by political has-beens and activists.  These include ALP stalwart Lyndsay Connors appointed to chair a commission reviewing public education, and Jack Keating a former Victorian Teachers Association radical, appointed a member of the post-compulsory education review.

Moreover, we have yet to see the full extent of spoils being claimed by those who offered copious funding and helpers for the Bracks accession.  The teachers union, in particular will surely extract more of the favours that government can make available.  And those favours can cost us plenty in wage increases and/or a denial of access to information that will allow schools to be compared with each other.

Premier Bracks spent his university days watching social radicals cause the Whitlam Government's fall from grace.  He will surely have to remain alert to ensuring his government does not suffer a similar fate.  He might well have the big picture budget matters under control but he remains vulnerable in the host of appointments and minor decisions that can eat into such solid foundations.

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Pipeline Regulations Flawed

Duke Energy's Eastern Gas Pipeline will soon carry gas between the Bass Strait and Sydney.  Regulators' manoeuvrings regarding this new pipeline have demonstrated that the regulatory structure, finalised only last year, is seriously flawed.

Under the national Gas Code, pipelines are generally envisaged to be natural monopolies.  Their prices are regulated and they are not allowed to discriminate between potential users.

Two alternative regulatory routes are in place.

The first is through Graeme Samuel's National Competition Council (NCC).  This establishes the need for regulation, then passes the baton to Alan Fels' Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to determine prices.

The alternative is for the ACCC to accept an "undertaking" by the pipeline owner on price and other conditions.  At least according to the ACCC, this pre-empts the need for NCC involvement.

These alternatives have resulted in a regulatory demarcation dispute with both the ACCC and the NCC seeking to control the regulation of Duke's Eastern Gas Pipeline.  That pipeline will compete in the NSW market with the existing East Australia Pipeline (EAPL) which transports gas from the Cooper Basin.  EAPL is presently majority owned by AGL but is in the process of being floated.

Faced with two alternative regulatory paths, for its part, Duke opted for the ACCC route, because this allows it to offer a uniform price while avoiding the Gas Code procedures with their tortuous and inflexible cost based pricing formulae.  But both regulatory paths leaves Duke vulnerable since the company already has the pipeline in the ground and can hardly walk away in the face of regulatory zeal to lower prices.  And, in the past, the ACCC has only accepted price "undertakings" after slicing something off suppliers' proposed prices.

A more fundamental issue than who has the regulatory authority is why should there be any regulation at all?  The existence of two transmission pipelines serving NSW is the very definition of competition, the absence of which provided the initial rationale for regulation.

Some may claim that the two pipelines both need to be controlled because they traverse different paths.  But it is rarely the case that two competitive products are identical and if we were to use their differences to justify regulation, almost everything would be covered.  Two robust competitors, as long as they do not collude, are usually sufficient to bring the required efficiency driving customer focus.  With the Eastern Gas Pipeline and EAPL, we have Coke versus Pepsi, Ansett versus Qantas, and Lion Nathan versus Fosters.  Competition -- even where there are only two rivals -- prevents price-gouging and promotes cost savings far more effectively than regulation.  And it does so without the price distortions and paperburden costs that are inevitable with regulation.

Hence the issue for the Eastern Gas Pipeline is not whether the ACCC or the NCC should regulate the NSW pipelines.  Competition has broken out.  The Eastern Gas Pipeline should not be regulated and the regulatory controls on the existing East Australian Pipeline from the Cooper Basin should be lifted.  EAPL and Duke both now take the view that regulation of the two competing pipelines is unnecessary and constitutes paperburden costs and costly operational rigidities.

Not so the NCC.  In its draft recommendation it has shown an admirable defence of its regulatory turf.  Unsurprisingly, it has confirmed that it, rather than the ACCC, should determine the need for regulation.  In addition, assuring itself of a continuing busy-body role, the NCC wishes to regulate both pipelines on the basis that they are not exactly parallel.  And it further argues that even if the lines were parallel regulation would be necessary because each of the lines would have "market power"!

The distressing aspect of all this is the negative value the regulatory authorities add.  If each new pipeline needs to pass an exhaustive regulatory review before it can seek customers, there will be far fewer pipelines built.  Companies will be unwilling to leave their money hostage to an unnecessary regulatory regime and consumers will lose fuel choice options.  Ironically, not only will this mean fewer opportunities for increased income but it will mean fewer competitive pressures.

Of course, the regulatory authorities will gain since they are assured of an on-going role for themselves.  But should we really be running the economy for the benefit of the regulators?  For gas, electricity, telecommunications, ports, etc.  Australia's supposed "light handed" regulation is a masquerade for one of the world's most intrusive regulatory regimes.  The demarcation dispute between the regulators over gas illustrates the absurdity of the present regulatory morass.  The NCC's draft recommendation on the matter indicates some urgency in the need to revisit the entire regulatory structure.

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Airbrush Has no Place in History

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting", wrote the Czech dissident novelist Milan Kundera.  One of the stories he told in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" is of Vladimir Clementis, the Foreign Affairs Minister of Czechoslovakia in the early days of the Communist regime, who was hanged in 1952 on trumped up charges of treason.

The authorities immediately airbrushed Clementis's image out of a famous photo which showed him standing next to the Communist leader Klement Gottwald during a triumphal party rally in 1948.  All that remained of Clementis was his fur cap, which he had placed on Gottwald's bare head to protect his leader from the snow just before the photo was taken.

Having lived under a regime which drastically rewrote history to suit its own sordid ends, Kundera understood that truth is always the potential enemy of powerful vested interests.  This tension is present even in liberal democratic states such as our own, and when politicians start talking about "historical facts" people suspect that they may well be thinking of a past which has been airbrushed clean of embarrassing details.

Given the loathing Australia's intellectuals feel for Prime Minister John Howard, it is not surprising that this is how they chose to interpret remarks he made last month that school history teachers had placed "perhaps a little too much of an emphasis on issues rather than on exactly what happened".  Professor Martin Stuart-Fox from the University of Queensland claimed in the Courier-Mail that this must mean history should "avoid all those aspects of Australian society that Howard would prefer not to discuss -- such as deviation, deprivation, multiculturalism or Aboriginal affairs".

John Tonkin, professor of history at the University of Western Australia, sneered that Mr Howard had a "simplistic understanding" because "history is not just facts".  But the Prime Minister never suggested that it was.  He was merely urging a more balanced integration between teaching facts to school children and exploring broad issues, and by giving their own jaundiced and misleading twist to his actual statement, the history profs were demonstrating that Mr Howard really did have a point.  Clearly, the facts don't matter much to these guys.

Without a good knowledge of exactly what did happen, any consideration of historical "issues" is always likely to become captive to political fashion and feelgood moralising, which is what seems to be occurring in many Australian schools and universities today.  Students can discuss "deviation, deprivation, multiculturalism or Aboriginal affairs" till their bodies light up with a warm inner glow, but unless their discussions are constrained by a rigorous adherence to facts, they might as well be playing video games.

Unfortunately, along with conservation and the environment, these four issues are the very ones where academics have been most diligent in applying a political airbrush, and where hard information is always under threat of contamination by propaganda -- usually of the "Australia is wicked" kind.

The problem is made worse by many academics in the humanities and social sciences believing that "truths" and "facts" are culturally constructed.  According to them, people who insist on drawing a firm distinction between fact and fiction are "privileging" a white Western view at the expense of other equally valid ways of thinking about the world.

At a Melbourne University seminar a few years ago, I heard a prominent "progressive" historian cheerfully explain that all she and her colleagues could hope to do with their research and writing was to present coherent and interesting stories;  but stories whose truth could never be decided.  A Holocaust survivor in the audience told her that this was a foolish and highly irresponsible position, which made it easier for people like David Irving and other Holocaust deniers to spread their lies.

The historian indignantly rejected any suggestion that this might be the consequence of her remarks.  But she could not explain why it was possible to speak of facts in relation to the Holocaust, and not about other historical events.  The seminar broke up in turmoil and bitter recriminations, with the "story teller" and her supporters refusing to join their critics at the customary post-seminar meal at a nearby restaurant.

Certainly, in many circumstances determining "exactly what happened" can be a very difficult task.  Students need to learn how historians and other scholars handle conflicting evidence, and the criteria for deciding why one account might be preferable to another.  Some kinds of facts are harder to establish than others, and certain matters, such as a person's reasons for behaving in a particular way, will always be open to interpretation and debate.  But none of this is any excuse for ridiculing those who call for a greater emphasis on factual information in the teaching of history.

One of the great strengths of a liberal democratic society is the widespread belief in the importance of ensuring the independence and neutrality of the courts, the media, and the universities.  In their different ways, and with varying effectiveness, these institutions ensure that collective memory is not lost or seriously distorted, and so help to protect us from abuses common in societies where political or economic power reigns untrammelled, and where the airbrushing of history can proceed with little hindrance.

But these institutions can achieve their purpose only if they are committed to a notion of objective truth, and if they jealously guard the rules and procedures that are designed to discover and transmit the facts about the situations they investigate.

By stressing the importance of historical facts, John Howard may be expressing a notion that seems hopelessly simplistic and unfashionable to our sophisticated "progressive" intellectuals.  But his comments -- and the intellectuals' response -- show that he has a better instinctive understanding of the things that protect our freedoms than they have.

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Black and White Corroboree

Many people will feel really good about themselves after walking across Sydney Harbour Bridge next Sunday, as part of the weekend's Corroboree 2000 events.

The walk, and Saturday's formal launch of the "Declaration Towards Reconciliation" at the Sydney Opera House, are supposed to be the pinnacle of the decade-long reconciliation process.  Participants will be making a symbolic statement that they are committed to the vision of "a united Australia that respects this land of ours;  values the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage;  and provides justice and equity for all".

For nothing more than the cost of their travel to the Harbour Bridge and their time, they will be telling the world that they are caring and righteous people.  Not like all those other Australians, such as heartless John Howard and his legion of redneck supporters, who refuse to apologise to the "stolen generations" and reject the idea of indigenous rights and Aboriginal self-determination.

And that points to the key problem with the whole reconciliation process.  Despite protestations to the contrary, it is not about healing, or about celebrating the common humanity which binds Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.  Rather, it has become a highly political exercise designed to pressure governments and people into supporting an unpopular agenda which is much more likely to bring increased divisiveness and resentment than unity.

An overwhelming number of Australians now acknowledge that serious wrongs were done to Aborigines in the past, sometimes through contempt or animosity, sometimes through indifference, and sometimes as a result of good intentions that were badly misguided.  But it is also clear that the majority of Australians are deeply troubled by calls for special indigenous rights and other separatist measures.

These Australians may not have the academics' detailed grasp of every outrage committed over the past two centuries, and some may well be blasé about the extent of the humiliation and suffering that many Aborigines experienced.  But they possess a compensating quality that most of our pious intellectuals and clerics lack -- a common sense which alerts them to the dangers of currently fashionable ideas about indigenous affairs.

We could even say that these Australians have a better grasp of the real lesson to be learnt from the depressing history of relations between black and white in this country.  The root cause of all the problems has been the belief that Aborigines are a different sort of human being from other Australians, with different kinds of rights and civil obligations.  But the inappropriately named "Declaration Towards Reconciliation" has not addressed this destructive belief.

Indeed, with its talk of the "unique status" of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, its sly reference to a "treaty", its call for what can only be a racially based "self-determination", and its failure to recognise that it is advocating an impossible jumble of inconsistencies, the declaration will only perpetuate this kind of thinking.

It takes a particular kind of mind-set to believe that the follies we are being offered in the name of reconciliation will create a more harmonious nation, or that they will help to reduce the deplorable levels of social and economic disadvantage that blight large parts of Aboriginal Australia.  It is a mind-set which values conspicuous displays of moral fervour over carefully considered and honestly presented solutions to national problems.

But don't get me wrong.  It is possible that some good may still come out of next Sunday's walk across the bridge in Sydney.  Invigorated by bracing harbour breezes and the marvellous vistas of a great city, some of the participants may be moved to reflect on the reasons why ten years of reconciliation seem to have produced so little of lasting benefit.

Even better, they may find that they have far more in common with the Aboriginal person walking next to them than they had ever been led to believe, and so begin the kind of friendship on which true reconciliation is based.

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Urban Transport -- the Ideologues are back in the driver seat

A mark of a good government is a willingness to jettison ideological baggage and silly ideas accumulated in opposition.

Although the Bracks Government has shown promise in some areas, it remains strangely unreconstructed in the area of urban road transport.

For decades urban road planning in Melbourne was controlled and contorted by ideologues and interests groups.  Planning has been dominated by people who hated cars, freeways and suburbs.  Interest groups prevented change and politicians used the transport budget as lolly bag.

As a result the urban transit system in and around Melbourne has until recently has been a logistical mess.  All roads converged chaotically into the CBD despite people and jobs moving to the suburbs.  There were few expressways and those that existed where short in length and not interconnected.

The Kennett Government changed the urban transport landscape for the better.  It instituted a planning process which diluted the influence of interest groups.  It put in place a long term road transport plan which included an integrated network of radial and orbital expressways.  As part of this plan the Kennett Government converted the South Eastern Arterial into a freeway by the replacing stop lights with overpasses.  The Government also expanded the western ring road and commissioned City Link toll road complex.

In opposition the Labor Party opposed virtually all these reforms even when they were clearly in the public interest.  They are continuing this short sighted opposition in Government.

They have dropped the commitment to an integrated network of expressways.  While continuing with the extension of the Eastern Freeway to Ringwood, they have abandoned the Scoresby Freeway proposal which would links the Frankston industrial belt to the City Link system.  They have failed to address the remaining bottle necks in the orbital system including the Hume Freeway from Craigieburn to the Metropolitan Ring Road, Western Freeway from Rockbank to the Metropolitan Ring Road at Deer Park and link between the Eastern Freeway to City Link.

The abandonment of the orbital network is not for lack of money or identified need.  The Government is loaded with cash, thanks to Kennett and Co, and is committed to "Linking Victoria".  Moreover the urban expressway network could be completed at no cost to the State or to spending in the bush or to spending on public transport.  That is by extending the City Link system.  But alas the Bracks Government remains wedded to a no toll policy.

The Government's opposition to the network stems from a lack of political will to override noisy interest groups and car haters.

Victoria will suffer from this short sightedness.  As an anonymous Treasury official stated in this weeks crikey.com.au, logistics ... "is a major business in these days of electronic B2B commerce and web-based retailing:  fulfilment of orders means moving things around in trucks and planes and trains.  Those best at this, win.  Melbourne's national "hub" function puts it in front now.  To stay there, Melbourne must invest.  Scoresby is the next key link in the logistics chain".

I hope the Treasurer is listening.

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Should the Constitution expressly recognise the indigenous peoples of Australia?

Speaking Notes for Talk at Regional Schools Constitutional Convention,
Lowther Hall Anglican Girls Grammar, Thursday 11 May 2000

• This is one of those "how long is a piece of string?" questions.  The answer is:  it depends on how and why.
• For most of the history of the Australian Federation, Aboriginal Australians were specially mentioned in the Australian Constitution until the 1967 referendum removed those references.
• That referendum was the most consensual political act ever put to the Australian people, with a total "Yes" vote of over 90% -- it was more successful than the original proposals to federate Australia.
• The reason the removal of those provisions -- that Aboriginals not be counted in the Census and that the Commonwealth could legislate for any race other than Aboriginals -- was so popular is that those provisions transgressed a very powerful Australian norm:  that there should be one set of rules for everyone.
• This norm -- one set of rules for everyone -- is, in fact, a very liberating norm.  It is hard to overstate its power.
• The position of women has improved dramatically from its power.  The position of minorities have improved greatly from its power.  The point that we are all "just people", with the same basic rights and obligations is a powerful and liberating idea.
• No reference which seriously transgresses that norm should be included in the Constitution.
• Which is just as well, since no reference which transgresses that norm will be included.  The Australian public will never vote for it.
• We should be careful not to mistake media debate and comment for public opinion.  Polling clearly indicates that constitutional matters are not a major popular concern -- not even during the recent Republic debate.  And it was particularly perverse to commentators blame Howard when he is the only PM in our history to allow a proposal he did not agree with to go to the people:  neither of his immediate predecessors, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, would ever had done that.
• People are clearly reluctant to change the Constitution.  Of the 44 amendment proposals put to the people, only eight have passed.
• Yet, if a proposal has the support of both sides of politics, they tend to pass.  Of the 13 proposals supported by both Prime Minister and Opposition Leader of the day, eight have passed.  None have passed without such support.
• Should also be very careful about handing power over to judges, which adding claims or principles to the Constitution can easily do.  The popular support for mandatory sentencing fairly clearly comes from a distrust of judges.  The role of judges is important, but should be limited, since it is so difficult to hold them accountable.
• Indigenous Australians do confront very particular historical legacies.
• It may be appropriate to acknowledge that ancestors of indigenous Australians were the first human occupants of this land, but we are ultimately about building a common society, with common general rules, and our Constitution should reflect that.

Budget Gets the Tick

Mr Court faced two challenges in this year's budget which go to the core of his credibility as a economic manager.

First he had to produce a credible measure of the bottom-line.  Second he had to put the budget back on a sustainable footing.

He accomplishes both in the 2000-2001 State Budget.

Over the last 12 months we received four different and divergent measures of the bottom-line.  Applied to this year's accounts these produce results ranging from a healthy surplus to a massive deficit.  Understandably people have become more than a bit confused and sceptical.

The Budget properly solves this by adopting an accounting system developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

What the 2000-2001 Budget shows -- and one suspects why the this accounting system was not used in previous years -- is that the budget has been in deficit in each of the last four years.

What this means is that the government has been borrowing to meet operating or running costs for each of the last four years.  In short, it has been relying on the proverbial Bankcard.

Its only been able to run these deficits without losing its triple-A credit rating because of gains from privatisation.  However, if they continue the deficit spending much longer, a down grading is on the cards.

The Court Government has in place -- indeed is continuing with -- a massive capital works program.  However, capital spending has not been the problem.  The budget is an operating budget and it does not include capital spending.  The deficits have arisen simply because the running cost have exceed taxes, grants and other income.

The challenge was to get the budget back into sustainable balance.

And he is on track to achieve this albeit just.  The budget is expected to finish the current year (1999-2000) in deficit by around $60 million which is about $160 million better than at the start of the year and better than the $135 million deficit record the previous year.

Importantly the budget is forecast to go into surplus next year by $42 million and remain in surplus in each of the four subsequent years.  This is not a large figure and has yet to be achieved, but is clearly in the right direction.

How has this turn-around been achieved?

First and foremost operating spending has been brought under control.  Departments have been kept to budget with few overruns -- they should after years of excessive spending.  Recurrent spending will increased -- by 3.8 per cent in 2000-2001 -- but is concentrated in priority areas including health, education, public safety and welfare.

Second, the economy is on the mend and as a result revenue is growing again.  The economy has recovered from a "growth recession" and is now growing at 4 per cent and is conservatively forecast in the Budget to improve slightly over the next few years.  Mineral royalties are up and payroll tax receipts are expected to improve with faster in employment and wage growth.

Importantly business investment which went into decline during the last few years of the 1990s, is on the rise and is expected to once again drive the WA economy.

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Globalisation: A Blight or a Bounty?

An Address to the Essex-Heights Branch of the Liberal Party,
8 May 2000

THE DEMONISATION OF GLOBALISM

When I started to consider what I might say tonight, as a reflex action I turned to the Internet and typed in globalisation.  One of the first sites highlighted was that of our very own Pravda-on-the-Yarra, the Age.  This, the Australian Green Left daily, true to its colours offered a rich tapestry of matters addressing globalisation.

The first of these was the globalisation of sex.  This did not strike me as a new dimension of the issue and I reckoned it would prove too distracting to wade through the piece.  Other articles discussed the massive wealth divide, globalisation brings further injustice, the men have it better, the gap grows wider, and even The Globalised World According to Marx.  Predictably, Pamela Bone, the lioness of the Fitzroy communes, was able to warn Age readers that the planet would pay a high price for John Howard's short-sighted policies.

You've got to hand it to the Age.  They rarely miss an opportunity to propagandise about the ruin that capitalism and free markets are bringing to mankind.  In fact such attitudes have bounced back very rapidly since the shock of the end of Communism (in Europe) and its transformation (in China).  The tub thumping of those with faith in government managed economies barely missed a beat as the facts about the pathetic living standards, low life expectancy and general dreariness of life under the planned economy gained full frontal exposure in the wake of the 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall

The most contemporary opposition to globalisation erupted at the recent World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle.  That meeting was convened to do nothing more than had been done in five or six previous trade negotiation rounds.  But unlike previous such meetings we had a vast range of protesters feeding off each others' frenzies.  And they were doing so on a matter that few present understood, a matter that would otherwise have commenced a further stage along the road to having governments agree to allow their citizens the freedom to buy the goods and services they want to buy from the suppliers they favour.

The precursor to the Seattle riots occurred with an even more obscure proposal, the OECD's Multilateral Agreement on Investment.  That proposal was simply to codify what is the practice in virtually all successful world economies:  namely that foreign investors will be treated no less favourably than locals.  And if you stop to think about it, equal treatment of foreign and domestic capital is the centrepiece of the global capital flows that have allowed new world economies like Australia to develop and have been an essential ingredient to the rise of economies we once called backward.  Some of these -- HK, Taiwan, Singapore now have higher wages and living standards that many long established developed economies including Australia.

WHAT IS GLOBALISATION?

The notion encompasses several dimensions.  Some of these are traditional, particularly trade in goods.  Others, like trade in insurance and other services, have also been around a long time.  Capital movements are more modern, and the ability of nations to implement new techniques is almost the definition of a resilient and hence successful economy.  Open access to migrants, at least those capable of paying their own way, is a major aspect of this.  Indeed, prominent Japanese analysts who, acknowledging that the 20th Century was the American Century, from time to time have considered that the 21st Century will be theirs.  But, around 1990 they acknowledged that the 21st Century is also likely to be the American Century.  This is because American society and culture can readily absorb all-comers while the Japanese reject the notion of immigrant Japanese.

One vital component permitting globalisation to happen is the Rule of Law.  That is, well understood concepts of honesty and reasonableness in people dealing with each other.  This was a central feature of the growth of western civilisation as we presently know it.  Relatively unfettered trade between different political entities allowed a considerable cross fertilisation of ideas and allowed specialisation in production, while placing competitive pressures on monopolies.  And one can see for example in the Merchant of Venice how general courts arbitrated disputes so that even those considered to be outcasts obtained the same justice as others.  There was a very good reason why this was so.  Those political entities that did not offer the same respect for the rights of foreigners as they afforded their own were by-passed by traders.  They tended to decline in wealth and sometimes faced political emasculation as a result of the reduced capacity to defend themselves this entailed.

Trade and freedom of capital flows remain important aspects of globalisation today.  Freedom of capital flows -- or foreign investment -- allows countries that can convince foreigners they offer good opportunities and security to top up their domestic savings with infusions from abroad.  This is important for another dimension of globalisation:  the ability to copy other people's ideas.  Thus we see firms setting up overseas in non-tradeable services from McDonalds through to supermarkets, and construction.  The host countries benefit from these investments because they bring know-how and with it increased productivity.

Of all the forces for globalisation, the internet and telecommunications is probably the most powerful newcomer.  But there is nothing inevitable about technology driving increased economic integration.  In fact, trade was much more important in places like Australia a century ago than it was in the 1970s.  The long period of peace in the nineteenth century had brought a far greater globalisation than we were to see for close to a century -- the world was more integrated in some respects in 1900 than in 1990.  Passports, for example, were required in only the two most backward nations:  the Ottoman and Tsarist Empires.

For Australia, what is sometimes called the Deakin Settlement at the turn of the last century had two or three features that were decidedly anti-globalisation.  These included the adoption of the tariff and the White Australia policy.  The adverse effects of the first of these was supported by Australia's unique centralised wage determination system.

Australia's policy stance shifted this country further towards the false god of isolationism and away from integration with the world at large than other small and remote countries.  And we slipped from being the most prosperous nation in the world in 1900 to barely making the top twenty 90 years later.

Some of the most significant steps in unravelling this were taken by the Whitlam Government -- in most respects the worst administration in Australia's history.  Whitlam introduced the first assault on tariffs with the 25% across the board reduction.  And he put the final nail in the coffin of White Australia.

Globalisation has been a long trend, though as the setback post 1914 demonstrates it is not an inevitable one.  It is made possible by improvements in transport, and this century, improvements in communications.  Over the past forty years, the gradual increase in efficiency in sea transport has been maintained and what it took 16 days in male earnings to buy in 1950 now takes only five days earnings.  But more dramatic has been the lowering of other prices.  Thus 16 days earnings worth of air travel now takes only one and three quarters of a day to earn.  16 days' earnings of international phone calls now takes less than two hours' earnings.

And all this is being further revolutionised by the internet.  Ironically, it is the internet that has allowed disaffected groups to caucus and assist each other in pushing agendas that are in general seeking to thwart the greater global interconnection that has made their caucusing possible.

For many people in these disaffected groups, globalisation can be stylised to mean:

• big business and an acceleration of what used to be called the rat race
• less job security than was enjoyed in previous times
• and a grinding down of living standards.
• For those outside major urban areas it means an intensification of the relative disadvantages that mass populations can avoid -- communications transport, culture.

To examine what globalisation means in this stylised version I consulted one of the feral sites that were prominent in derailing the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.  The site said

1. CITIZENS WILL HAVE NO RIGHTS TO LIVELIHOOD, TO WORK, TO FOOD, TO WATER, TO SAFE ENVIRONMENT.

Well if we examine this what do we find?  The countries that have adopted globalisation most readily:  US, UK, Australia, Singapore, HK Canada, have prospered most over the past decade or so.  These countries have enjoyed rising living standards and considerable employment growth.  Within the developing nations the countries that adopted freedom of capital movements and reduced tariff protection saw an acceleration of growth.  One outstanding example in Latin America was Chile.  Castigated as a 'fascist' state in the 1970s and subject to shipping sanctions from militant unions like the freedom loving Australian Waterside Workers, its policy of reducing taxation abandoning tariff and other support for particular industries pushed its citizens prosperity to the head of the Latin countries.  Its success was not lost on others in the continent and one after the other Latin American countries have abandoned the protectionism with which they sought to insulate themselves from Yankee Imperialism.  The outcome has been an end to the sluggish growth the Continent experienced over the four decades to the 1990s and a new dynamism.

The one Latin American country that refused to join this capitalist resurgence was Cuba.  Once portrayed as the model for the Continent, Cuba is now recognised as an international basket case.  It is a place to which many are flocking to see a 1950s museum piece, but a place from which its own citizens are so desperate to escape that they take colossal risks to do so.

A similar contrast can be seen in Asia.  During my lifetime I have seen the disparity in outcomes between nations like Burma and North Korea and the Asian tiger economies.  At least two Asian Tigers have overtaken Australia and enjoy income levels twentyfold those of nations that were comparably placed forty years ago.  In a less dramatic fashion, we have seen India and Pakistan, both of which have adopted insular policies for most of the post war years, being surpassed in wealth by nations like Taiwan and South Korea.  These countries started the Post World War II era in a far more wretched condition.

Even environmental outcomes have proven to be better under globalisation embracing economies.  Partly this is because the economic freedom entailed in globalisation improves the capacity of economies to afford better environments.  In countries like Australia we have seen an immense improvement in things like Melbourne's atmospheric pollution ozone, smoke, carbon monoxide now down to half their levels of the early 1970s.  Perhaps we'll even return the Yarra to a genuine fishable and swimmable condition that has now been achieved with the Thames.

Similarly improved living standards have also allowed us to set aside more land for the environmental assets we prize.  There is for example considerably more forested area in Australia today than there was a century ago.  Partly this is due to national parks but it is also due to the increased productivity of land that has made it unnecessary and unprofitable to farm marginal land.  This is in contrast to outcomes in the poorer countries where low living standards and low levels of capital force a more intensive agriculture.

But better environmental outcomes also result from the same forces that bring globalisation.  The more insular economies with arbitrary law, like the old East European economies have had the worst possible economic outcomes with the eutrification pollution of vast inland seas and air pollution in the cities.  The better outcomes in the economies embracing globalisation have come about partly because of the accompanying facets:  individual property rights and obligations.  These mean there can be no headlong rush towards a goal if that means impinging on others' rights.  This is an automatic stabiliser that has been free societies' guardian against some of the grievous environmental outcomes seen in Eastern Europe.

2. YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER IDENTITY OR MORALITY EXCEPT THAT OF BEING CONSUMERS IN THE GLOBAL MARKET PLACE

The opponents of globalisation argue that it will bring a uniformity, a McDonaldisation.  Indeed at Seattle, the Starbucks coffee chain was targetted.  But nothing is further from the truth.  Globalisation means cosmopolitisation.  It has brought the transformation of Australian cuisine.  Some people object to it also bringing the Pizza Hut but their objection is to others' preferences.  We must ask ourselves whether we would rather be consumers in a global market place or in a local one.  Because if we want the latter we can opt for it.  Globalisation simply offers us an option, one that its enemies would seek to deny us, preferring instead to impose on us their own doubtlessly impeccable taste.

Opponents of globalisation also argue that the outcome will be a concentration of power in transnational firms.  This was previously a refrain in France during the 1970's with Servain-Schreiber's Le Defi Americain.  At the present time we have some transnationals growing and some downsizing.  For many years now, more jobs have been created by smaller businesses as a result of downsizing and subcontracting, the latter resulting from firms outsourcing non-core functions.  In other cases we have seen the rapid growth of the innovative firms that, at least until recently, was dragging some of the best managers away from established concerns into start-ups where they had an opportunity to back themselves and make fortunes.

3. YOU SHALL ELECT GOVERNMENTS BUT THE GOVERNMENTS' ROLE SHALL NOT BE TO PROTECT YOU.  THEY WILL PROTECT CORPORATIONS.

Well I hope the corporations will be protected from arbitrary assault.  Because if they are not, we would see the undermining of the security of property rights and the rule of law that has been the bedrock of our present prosperity.  Equally, the individual is protected from the corporation and any others who are deemed to be rich and powerful.

This demonisation of the corporation has never made less sense than it does today.  Corporations are not remote institutions owned by an oligarchy of rich people.  They are businesses desperately trying to seek out customers and ways of meeting their ever-changing needs, and doing so with a constant eye on better techniques and other cost savings.  Competition forces these cost savings to be passed on to customers if the firm is to continue to exist.

Even more significantly, the corporations are owned by individuals, by everyone who has superannuation or any other form of saving.  And the corporations are desperate to keep our money by constantly showing us, if we are individual shareholders, or our institutional agents in the case of superannuation etc. that they are augmenting our funds.

GOBALISATION:  THE REALITY

Over the past decade or so we have seen a transformation of the Australian economy.  This has greatly enriched us.  In the decade to 1980, average wealth per capita actually declined by a couple of percent.  During the 1980's this rebounded with a 21 per cent increase.  But during the 1990s wealth per capita increased by 38 per cent.

The same sorts of trends are seen in income levels.

Major stimulants to these trends have been globalisation and our adoption of it.  During the 1980's we saw tariff reform that forced Australian industry to cease being coddled and to take its place within the world economy.  The outcome was a quantum leap in productivity.  During the 1990s we saw governments react to the need to maintain global efficiency by reinforcing the importance of competition law.  This meant subjecting government owned businesses to the same market disciplines the private sector faced.  It also, especially here in Victoria, meant privatisation with the unlocking of previously hidden value and a massive upsurge in productivity.

These developments were in part a response to the avalanche of increased global interaction that technology was bringing.  In many cases the response was to the manifestations of technology rather than technology itself.  Thus, the inefficiency of Victoria's gas and electricity industries had been tolerated for years but was becoming less so as industry sought every opportunity to achieve international competitiveness.  The financial catastrophes visited on Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia by government owned financial institutions failing might have been avoided in an era where finance houses could be insulated.  But once individuals could see better returns than those that the mistake riven state owned businesses could offer they voted with their own dollars, leading to crises.

This greater discipline on financial institutions to perform is another example of the benefits of greater globalisation.  When citizens can respond to uncertainties in the domestic investment climate by moving funds elsewhere, inefficient firms or financial intermediaries become unable to continue their poor management.  Globalisation of capital flows and the freedom of the saver to shift funds overseas puts pressure on governments to cease their previous policies of favouring certain kinds of investment and placing the risks onto captive local savers.  It is no coincidence that the failings of state owned banks and investment houses occurred with the greater globalisation we have seen in recent years.  Globalisation revealed these failures much more starkly.  It is also no coincidence that such occurrences have led to the abandonment of state owned banking worldwide.  This is yet another way that globalisation has brought benefits:  it has delivered us from some of the tyrannies that governments are apt to impose on their citizens.

This and other changes have made their mark on our prosperity.  The Productivity Commission has estimated that Australian labour productivity in the period since 1993 has risen from its long term trend of 2.1 per cent per annum to 3.1 per cent.  The most rapid increased in productivity were in the industries that adapted most closely to the needs of globalisation:  energy, communications and finance and insurance.  Even more strikingly, the productivity with which we make use of our capital had been steadily declining until the 1990's but is now increasing.

Perhaps for the first time in a century, over the past decade, we have now embarked on a period where our productivity levels are higher than those of the average OECD nation.  Moreover, we weathered the Asian crisis without a pause spite of our close export ties to the countries that suffered catastrophic reductions in their production levels.

The outcome of embracing globalisation has meant a far more efficient set of industries and object lessons to governments that they are poor operators of businesses, lessons learned even by Labor administrations which follow the role model set up by Tony Blair.

Globalisation is often used as a bogey word like economic rationalism before it.  In both cases the words are neutral but are used to impart notions of imposed helplessness on a hapless public.  Such constructions are the worst forms of Orwellian Newspeek.  They reverse the meaning of concepts that simply represent freedom for the consumer to choose for herself what to spend her money on.  Economic rationalism means getting government out of the way of decisions and allowing individuals to decide whether they buy one good rather than another, whether they buy services produced overseas rather than at home, whether they choose to spend their own money or save it, whether they invest at home or overseas.  Globalisation does the same thing by making it difficult to do otherwise.  The great advantages of this policy approach are:

• it means freedom for the individual to do what he or she pleases with her own money
• it offers no privileged path of a domestic producer into the pocket of a domestic consumer and forces the producer to constantly seek to ensure good value is given and to scrutinise developments overseas to ensure competitiveness is maintained
• it means as a result of these processes that the productivity of the economy is constantly honed and as this is the only way to enjoy high living standards,
• and it means a diminished role for government in bossing individuals around and dictating their patterns of consumption and tastes;  such a diminished role offers immense hope for the future emerging as we have from a century which the enlarged role of governments brought untold misery with totalitarian regimes.  And this is so even in the softer, gentler regimes of expanded state control and nationalisation that reduced living standards in many western countries like Australia.

In summary, globalisation brings greater prosperity and freedom from government control.  As can be seen from the relative peace we presently enjoy, and in contrast to the inter war and Cold War years it also tends to foster international harmony because its focus is on cooperation and win-win interchanges rather than use of force.

Apology is Not a Clear Black and White Case

Australians with an ironic appreciation of the folly that pervades much of our contemporary politics must be savouring the fact that reconciliation has become such a source of strife.

After considerable argument last weekend, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation approved a document called the Australian Declaration Towards Reconciliation, which will be launched in three weeks time at Corroborree 2000 in the Sydney Opera House.  This corroborree was supposed to be a high point of the reconciliation process, but already it has caused a great deal of anger.

Prominent Aborigines such as Charles Perkins and Galarrwuy Yunipingu have said they will join former CAR chairman Pat Dodson in boycotting the event to protest against the Howard Government's approach to dealing with reconciliation and Aboriginal issues.  In response, Senator Aden Ridgeway has accused Dodson of a "blatant and bitter act", and of attempting to undermine the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation for his own ends.

On the other hand, if media reports about its contents are correct, the Declaration will only increase the disquiet and irritation that many Australians feel about the thrust of demands for atonement for past wrongs against Aborigines.  Instead of adopting something that could gain the support of the Howard Government as well as ordinary Australians, CAR extended the very aspects of its previous drafts that caused the greatest concern.

The Declaration reportedly strengthens the demand for a national apology to Aborigines and bemoans the fact that there was never a treaty between Aborigines and white authorities.  It also calls for "self-determination" which, as interpreted by many activists -- including CAR member and ATSIC chairman Geoff Clark -- means a much greater push for Aboriginal separatism.

All this suggests what many of us have long suspected.  Some of the most vocal advocates of "Reconciliation" have no interest in a healing process which would create a unitary and harmonious nation and produce constructive solutions to Aboriginal disadvantage and resentment.  Rather, they seek new issues that will help them to "maintain the rage" amongst their constituency, and further ways of making claims on non-Aboriginal Australia.

Many Aboriginal individuals and communities still suffer serious social and economic hardship.  But one of their greatest misfortunes is that their misery is the plaything of middle class whites keen to engage in displays of conspicuous compassion, as well as being a resource for the cynical beneficiaries of the "Aboriginal industry", both black and white.

Until this ends Australia will never make genuine progress in solving Aboriginal problems.  Any attempts to identify the real causes of these problems or to propose solutions which do not meet the psychological requirements of the breast-beaters, or which threaten the interests of the "Aboriginal industry", occasion a storm of righteous abuse.

An example of the harmful consequences of this situation was presented earlier this week by Bernard Lane, The Australian's legal correspondent.  Lane wrote about Joan Kimm, a Monash University academic whose research forced her to conclude, against all her previous "politically correct" convictions, that "Aboriginal customary law had to carry much of the blame for the horrific violence suffered by Aboriginal women".

Unfortunately for Ms Kimm, the recognition of customary law has become a supposed pre-requisite for reconciliation -- although any effectiveness such law may once have had depended on punishments, including execution, that would cause even the most florid rednecks to blanch.  So while she is now publicly discussing her work, Ms Kimm was initially so distressed by her findings and the reaction they might cause that she abandoned her research for 18 months, fearful of giving ammunition to "Pauline Hansonites".

Both John Howard and Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron seem to recognise the need to break the logjam that bedevils their attempts to chart a more constructive approach.  Their strong focus on practical outcomes for Aborigines is admirable, but they continue to stumble on the important symbolic issues, allowing their political opponents to portray them as heartless at best, and racist at worst.

Even were the Prime Minister to offer an apology so grovelling as to embarrass the most sanctimonious member of the Australian Democrats, it would not be enough.  New grounds for berating him and his government would quickly be invented, designed to ensure that the Coalition will forever be denied the moral high ground.

So Mr Howard should forget about ever winning over the cultural elites.  But this does not mean that he should ignore the need to undermine their posturing by offering a worthy and morally justifiable alternative vision that could appeal to the majority of Australians, whether white or Aboriginal.

Perhaps he could begin by offering an appropriate apology to Aborigines.  Not the destructive kind of apology he is currently being told he must make, which would enshrine Aboriginal victimhood;  but one which would encourage Australians to reflect on what has really been wrong in our treatment of Aborigines.

The root cause of all the problems has been the belief that Aborigines are a different sort of human being from other Australians, with different kinds of rights and civil obligations.  For over 200 years Aborigines have been treated as inferior and requiring protection -- either explicitly, as was the case in the past, or implicitly, as is the case with today's nostrums which seek to cosset Aborigines from facing the realities of individual responsibility and freedom.

As Peter Howson pointed out in the Courier-Mail a couple of weeks ago, all sides of politics have been guilty of this kind of thinking, of expecting Aborigines to conform to a different set of rules to those which apply to the rest of us.  Mr Howard knows this is wrong, but because he has been generally ineffective in conveying this understanding to the Australian people, his government has not had the courage and the will to urge the radical rethink that is necessary.  And for this, he should apologise.

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China, Taiwan: One Future? Which Future?

Introduction for Dialogue
"China, Taiwan:  One Future?  Which Future?"
3 May 2000

Tonight, rather than a single speaker, we have two speakers.  One, Rowan Callick, is an award-winning journalist:  one of those, who, as the phrase goes, write the first draft of history.  The other, Dr Thomas Bartlett, is an academic specialising in Chinese history:  something which has gone through more drafts than just about any other history.

There is a great deal of fashionable boosting of China about:  all that stuff about if current trends continue then China will be the largest economy in the world by 2000-and-whatever.

But it was a mere 10 years ago people were talking about the Japanese challenge to American economic hegemony:  predictions which now look incredibly sad.

Trends are the result of the interaction of institutions, people and circumstances.  If we look more carefully at institutional structures, much of that China-boosting looks very hollow.

After, what is the greatest riddle of human history?  Is it why Europe and European-descended societies came to dominate the globe?  Or why China did not?  China apparently had everything going for it -- numbers, culture, technology, institutional complexity.  A Ming Dynasty Admiral, Zheng He, reached Mogadishu (in what is now Somalia) and Mombasa (in what is now Kenya) with a fleet of about 300 ships and 28,000 men 77 years before Vasco da Gama, coming the other way, went to India with 4 small ships and 171 men.  The enormous force of a mighty empire achieved far less of lasting significance than the tiny expedition of a small kingdom on the periphery of Europe.  The failure of China is as least as much a subject for thoughtful consideration as the success of Europe.

China is presently attempting a form of the capitalist road to economic development while being ruled by a regime whose mandate to rule rests on transcending and abolishing capitalism.

So we have a Great Power whose path to modernisation fundamentally undermines the legitimacy of the ruling regime.  We have been here before:  Imperial Germany before the First World War, Imperial Japan before the Pacific War.  They are not reassuring antecedents.  And China is geographically closer to us than Japan:  less than an hour's flight by missile.

Meanwhile, on 20 May, the first peaceful transfer of power in Chinese history will take place when Chen Shui-bian will be sworn in as President of what is still officially the Republic of China in Taipei on the island of Taiwan.

Our two speakers tonight are very well qualified to speak of these events of hope and portents of danger.

Rowan Callick has recently returned from being the Hong Kong-based Greater China Correspondent of The Australian Financial Review for almost four years.  He is the author of Comrades & Capitalists:  Hong Kong Since the Handover.  He has won the Graham Perkin Award of Australian Journalist of the Year, for 1995 and the Walkley Award for Coverage of Asia, for 1997.

Dr Thomas Bartlett was born in London to American parents, and was educated at Harvard, National Taiwan and Princeton Universities.  He was Director of the Chinese Language Teaching Programme at Harvard from 1989 to 1994 before moving to John Hopkins and then on to La Trobe in 1996, where his wife also teaches.  His doctoral dissertation was on late Imperial Political Thought.