Politics binds US over climate

As Hillary Clinton acknowledged in Melbourne this week, the Obama administration has abandoned its landmark legislation to combat man-made global warming.

Of course, the US failure to implement an emissions trading scheme, or a carbon price more generally, is hardly novel.  Other nations, such as Canada and Australia, have also shelved cap-and-trade proposals.

What makes Washington's failure so much more significant is that without its leadership, the prospects for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable new international agreement are virtually zero.

The cap-and-trade bill that narrowly passed the US House of Representatives in June 2009 had been stuck in legislative limbo for more than a year.  But Senate Democrat leaders faced with near double-digit unemployment and skyrocketing national debt, recognised it represented political death for many colleagues.

Indeed many Democrats from midwest coal and manufacturing states ran specifically against cap-and-trade in last week's mid-term election.  Take Joe Manchin:  in one television commercial, the Senate candidate for West Virginia saved his campaign by literally shooting the bill with his hunting rifle.

As for the Republicans, only two out of the 48 primary candidates for Senate said they believed in manmade global warming during the recent campaign.

If Congress, with Democratic super-majorities, could not pass a climate bill so weak that it consisted of little but loopholes for the so called big polluters, the President has no chance of persuading a new group of more sceptical lawmakers riding an anti-tax wave to Capitol Hill.

To be sure, Barack Obama hopes to unveil other climate initiatives such as multimillion-dollar subsidies for renewable energy projects.  But most green lobby groups concede that direct-action proposals are insufficient measures to combat global warming.  Obama could use the US Environmental Protection Agency to override Congress and unilaterally impose regulations under the 1990 clean-air laws.  But such action would be deeply unpopular in several bellwether, recession-plagued states in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.  In any case, administrative regulation would almost certainly be tied up in litigation for years.

Which brings us back to a global treaty to succeed the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012.  China, India and Brazil have made it clear they won't sign.  In the European Union, an ETS has done to little to reduce emissions.  And Canada is hitched to the US.  Get ready for Cancun to be another Copenhagen.

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Houston, we have a housing problem

Adding up everything we own, the Government Statistician reckons Australian families are worth $5800 billion.  That's more than five times as much as the nation's annual income.

Houses comprise two thirds of households' measured wealth.

Real estate experts RP Data put the value of the average house in Melbourne at $500,000.

But in Houston, Texas, a metropolis at least as bustling with an economy at least as strong as Melbourne, the average house is bigger yet worth only $215,000.

How can the average Melbourne house be worth twice that of Houston?

As they say, "There are damned lies and statistics".

Housing's statistical twist is mainly caused by government regulations over supply of land.

A major reason why Houston's house prices are less than half those in Melbourne is because land there is not rationed by development controls.

By contrast, all Australian governments strictly limit land availability for building new homes on the edge of cities.

The consequent land shortage brings a fifty-fold increase in the value of that land which gets government development approval.

Yet the land is unchanged and there's no intrinsic shortage of it.  The higher value is caused only because the regulations limit supply.

And the regulatory-induced high prices on the city edge bring a knock-on effect for house prices throughout the city.

The planning control regulations at the heart of our high prices were originally a means of ensuring co-ordination between house construction and infrastructure like roads and schools.

Gradually, their goals have shifted to focus on stopping urban sprawl or redevelopments within the cities.  And added to planning controls have been other cost-enhancing regulations over density, parkland, and so on.

Other Australian governments are worse than Victoria's in preventing land being used for housing.  Even so, house prices throughout Melbourne are probably $80,000 higher than they would be without the rigid planning restrictions.

Those of us who own our home often look at its value and feel prosperous.  But it is an artificial affluence brought at the expense of those without homes -- and many younger people see home ownership as an impossible dream.

Housing regulations are already featuring in the coming state election.

The Liberals say they will open up the urban growth boundary and slash the urban planning red tape.

This would be an excellent start but will prove difficult to achieve given the decades over which the red tape has been amassed.  Worthy goals can easily be strangled in endless inquiries.

The ALP sees a much greater role for urban infill developments which are often resisted by neighbourhood groups who oppose inner city apartment building.

There is surely a role for both increased developments on the city edge and in suburbia.

Housing should allow buyers choice and neighbours cannot expect extended rights to control how other people use their property.

With both major parties focused on trying to reduce regulatory restraints to housing development, hopefully the coming election will mark a turning point in the long ascendancy enjoyed by those who seek greater controls and regulations.

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DCC briefing: a farrago of spin, obfuscation and exaggeration

Flush from its near death experience following the hung parliament, the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCC) has published its briefing to the incoming Gillard Government.

It talks of its mission to bring to the government advice of the ''highest quality'', which is ''integrated'', ''objective'', and ''well informed''.  Oh, and hiding its blushes, it promises to bring ''Quality outcomes through effective design and delivery of programs, services and regulatory administration.''

And as a euphemism for the agit-prop outfit that it is, the Department talks about ''bringing understanding of climate change risks and opportunities''.  It sees many quangos as supporting it in playing ''a central role in building community consensus for action on climate change'', including the newly formed Climate Change Committee, the proposed Citizens' Assembly and the proposed Climate Change Commission.  These add to the legion of agencies of government and NGOs dependent on government funding that are already out there using transfusions from the taxpayer to help persuade the taxpayer to accept further extortions.

Unsurprisingly, the Department's Strategic Brief is a farrago of spin, obfuscation and exaggeration.  It is also riddled with inconsistencies.

Thus it argues that a carbon price is the way to go since other measures are hidden ''and give a false impression of being cost free to households''.  Though less fashionable following Obama's post November 2 apostasy on cap-and-trade, a single economic instrument like a carbon price does have the merit of being neutral and transparent.  But having embraced this, the DCC brief goes on to promote additional measures, showing its support for a price on carbon is simply opportunistic.

Thus, the DCC brief also praises the renewable energy regulations that impose costs by forcing electricity retailers to incorporate more expensive renewable energy into electricity supplies, smearing its costs into bills hoping the consumer won't realise the price increase stems from government regulations.

DCC favours other requirements on product standards, to combat ''entrenched behaviours'' by consumers who don't have highly paid bureaucrats' sophistication and are unable to decide for themselves which products best meet their needs.

The area of briefing to incoming ministers that is particularly risible is when the Department explains that most people favour action on climate change but are wary about paying for it because of the spectre, ''often overstated'', of increased costs including electricity costs.

Though they neglect to say so, the policy they advocate cannot result in prices rising less than $1,000 per household.  Our research has found that only six per cent of people say they are willing to incur such an outlay and politicians' would have even more comprehensive data than that.

Though containing stacks of hype, the DCC brief offers no estimate of what warming would cost us if it were to take place.  And it suggests that the warming this century will likely be as much as 4 to 7°C (more alarmist even than the IPCC which puts the rise at 1.1 to 6.4°C).

One of the few cost numbers mentioned is that we will be 2.5 per cent worse off as a result of a need for new infrastructure.  This would be a gross understatement if the DCC meant we have to replace our low cost energy by the pie-in-the-sky new technologies it promotes.  However it has in mind new roads, ports and other hardware, meaning it predicts that these will increase in cost by over a quarter.  Obviously the fabricators of such a figure have not researched hotter places like Hong Kong, Singapore and the US Gulf Coast to validate whether these climates mean a higher infrastructure spend.

Nowhere does the briefing come clean on what the costs are likely to be if nothing is done.  That's because the costs are likely to be trivial.  The dozen available peer reviewed studies put the costs of warming, should it occur, at around +/- 2.5 per cent.  This cost (or benefit) takes place in the context of a growth in underlying incomes for Australia of 70 per cent (200 per cent for the world at large).

As for the costs of taking the far-reaching action it advocates, DCC cites Treasury's hopelessly over-optimistic, assumption laden modelling.  It fails to understand that replacing efficient coal generators with high cost windmills would totally destroy the resource base of the Australian economy, returning the nation to some nineteenth century pastoralist past and hoping that we will all prosper in such an economy.  And even when it cites the Treasury projections it expresses them as forecasting a loss of 0.1 per cent a year without mentioning that even this means over 10 per cent this century.

Having people and even government agencies express views is beneficial.  But we have with DCC an agency that seeks to exercise leadership in thrusting its own view of the world onto the hapless Australian public.

Like previous such Vanguards of the Proletariat, the DCC is an affront to individual liberties.

In promoting the idea that government should become the master of the people not the instrument by which the people's preferences are translated into action, it would reverse the democratic principles on which our society is based.

The DCC is not the only taxpayer funded agency that treats the public and even its direct political masters with contempt.  Agencies established to be the handmaidens of the public now see themselves as legitimately nudging us and even deceiving us into directions they favour.  It was never meant to be like this and it will worsen unless such powers are rolled back.

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Left-liberal lament

This is shaping up as a terrible mid-term election for Democrats in the United States.  Republicans are scheduled to pick up at least 50 seats, more than enough seats to win control of the House of Representatives.  And although Democrats will hold the Senate, they have conceded at least six seats.  Bear in mind that the average mid-term loss by a president's party since World War II is 24 House seats and four Senate seats.  No amount of sugar coating can change perceptions of this mid-term election result:  it is a forceful repudiation of the legislative agenda of both president Barack Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

So it was inevitable that Democrats and their left-liberal supporters would come up with all sorts of excuses.  Some attribute the backlash against Obama and congressional Democrats to the bad state of the economy.  Others blame the ''timid'' White House for failing to embrace a true left-liberal agenda that the electorate is really panting for.  Some satirists attribute Republican success to stupid voters who have been duped by Republicans, the Fox blonds and right-wing shock jocks.

So, what are we to make of these explanations?

Start with the economy.  It is certainly true Americans are feeling the pinch of a steep recession.  Since Obama became president in early 2009, unemployment has increased 2 per cent to near-double-digit levels, debt and deficits are escalating and home closures are swelling.  When times are tough, the argument goes, the president's party cops a big backlash.

But if a recession automatically leads to a poor electoral outcome for a president's party, why did Republicans escape the same type of electoral rebuke during Ronald Reagan's first mid-term election?  As Fred Barnes points out in the Wall Street Journal today, the blame-the-economy argument lacks validity.

In 1982, despite a deep recession and double-digit unemployment, Republicans lost only 26 House seats and none in the Senate.  Besides, if a prosperous economy guarantees mid-term success for a president's party, why did Bill Clinton's Democrats do so poorly in 1994?  Despite a bullish economy, the opposition Republicans picked up huge swings to win the House and Senate.  In any case, a CBS/New York Times poll shows that only 8 per cent blame Obama for the economy and more than two-thirds see the slump as temporary.  Clearly the economy fails to explain the Democrats' doldrums.

What about another left-liberal excuse:  blame Barack Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill for either compromising too much with Republicans or failing to prosecute a truly progressive agenda.  The litany of left-wing complaints goes like this:  The health care bill failed to provide fully universal coverage.  The government did not spend enough tax dollars on its stimulus spending package.  The administration has more than doubled troops to an unwinnable and deeply unpopular war in Afghanistan.  It has failed to close down the Gitmo detention centres or release those torture memos.  It has gone cold in the fight against man-made global warming.  And so it goes.

But however much liberal activists may wish otherwise, the fact is America remains a centre-right nation.  Two years ago, Gallup showed 40 per cent of Americans identifying themselves as conservatives, with only 20 per cent liberals.  Since then, that disparity has widened:  54 per cent are self-described conservatives whereas only 18 per cent wear the liberal label.  In such an environment, it is hardly surprising that an activist government agenda will generate resistance and a backlash -- even among Democrats!

Indeed, several Democrat legislators tried to save their seats by repudiating the Obama agenda.  Other Democrat candidates ran away from the White House.  Take for instance Joe Manchin, who won the Senate seat of West Virginia today.  In one television commercial, he loads up a hunting rifle and says:  ''I'll take on Washington and this administration, and get the federal government off of our backs and out of our pockets.  I'll cut federal spending and repeal the bad parts of Obamacare ... I'll take dead aim at the cap-and-trade bill, because it's bad for West Virginia.''  With that, he fires a round of bullets into a copy of the legislation, which was as good as dead in the Senate anyway.  He is, remember, a Democrat!  So much for the liberal argument that a liberal agenda would have helped Democrats.

Finally, some left-wing activists now conclude, ''It's the voters, stupid'', or, to be more precise, ''It's the stupid voters''.  How else to account for the insulting and contemptuous attitudes of liberal satirists Stephen Colbert and John Stewart?  Pity the poor know-nothing American who's been conned by right-wing shock jocks and Rupert Murdoch's 24-hour conservative cable news channel.

If these liberals are right, then why bother with having elections at all?  Why go through this democratic charade if the will of the people only counts when it matches the will of liberal elites?  In 2008, these same liberals hailed voters as astute judges of performance who wanted ''change''.  But now that voters are rejecting the change the Democrats offered, the same voters are said to be idiots.  Or they are now ''mean-spirited'' and ''simpletons'' who are seduced by the Fox blonds!

In 1953, after Communists crushed a worker's revolt in East Berlin, Bertolt Brecht accused the regime of wanting to ''dissolve the people and elect another one''.  Sadly, that's the attitude of many American Democrats and left-liberal backers.  Perhaps that sneering alone was a good enough reason for so many voters to kick so many of them out of office and reshape the political environment in Washington.

But perhaps the most obvious explanation for the Democratic debacle that has escaped the attention of Democrats and liberals on the left as well as Republicans and conservatives on the right is this:  that the US is in a seriously bad way.  Americans are in an increasingly foul mood.  They are suffering a crisis of confidence.  And they overwhelmingly believe their nation is going in the wrong direction.  Bad as the foreign policy scene has been, the most serious weaknesses are internal and, in the broader sense, cultural.  America's famous capacity to rebound from adversity is going to be put to a severe test.  Liberals and Democrats clearly do not have any sound answers.  Do Republicans?

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Healthy living ... in a nanny state

If there was one area of human existence which should be left to individual choice, you'd think it would be what we eat.

So the National Preventive Health Agency Bill, now ferreting through federal parliament, is quite a big deal.  The agency is charged with preventing chronic disease caused by obesity, alcohol and tobacco through education campaigns and the mass-production of research papers.

It sounds harmless, but if it passes, it will represent the institutionalisation of the Australian nanny state.

The agency is to be a government-funded body with the specific purpose of expanding the scope of government -- colonise spheres of human existence that have, until now, been left free from state interference.

We got some indication of the ambition of the new agency from the Kevin Rudd's Preventative Health Taskforce, which, when it reported in 2009, recommended its formation.  That and 121 other recommendations to tax, regulate, and impose national standards on food, beverages, and tobacco.

Julia Gillard announced last week the agency will not have the power to impose taxes on junk food.  But that misses the point:  the agency has no power to impose taxes on anything.  It will, however, be empowered to lobby the government incessantly to do so.

In the long run, the formation of a permanent institution like this is more pernicious than any individual nanny state tax the government might decide implement.

Last year the British government spent 38 million pounds funding institutions to lobby for new laws and regulations, according to a 2009 study by the Taxpayer's Alliance.

When that government launched a public consultation on potential methods to control tobacco use in 2008, there were a massive 96,515 responses.  But a full 70 per cent of those responses were email campaigns originating from government-funded lobbyists -- bureaucratic offshoots from the United Kingdom's National Health Service, like "D-MYST", the youth wing of SmokeFree Liverpool.

The situation is already much the same here:  submissions to the Preventative Health Taskforce were dominated by government-funded entities.  Councils, non-profits, health networks, and university public health departments all submitted proposals for new laws -- and more funding.

One of the key tasks of the new agency is to develop a "national prevention research infrastructure".

Usually, more research into the social problems and policy effectiveness is good.  You can never have too much research.

But much preventive health research is highly politicised, value-laden, and of use only to those who share its predetermined conclusions.

We're all familiar with the regular announcements that alcohol use, for example, costs Australia an enormous amount of money every year.  These massive numbers are described as "social costs".

As the New Zealand economists Eric Crampton and Matt Burgess have shown, the methodology which underlines almost all of these social cost studies (one endorsed by the World Health Organisation) is fundamentally flawed.

They typically mix costs borne by private individuals and firms -- like workplace absenteeism -- with costs borne by government -- like funding the health system.

But the more critical problem is the failure of these studies to adequately account for the benefits of "harmful" behaviour.

And humans like fat and salt and ale;  that's the way we're wired.  To look at only at the negative consequences of human behaviour without mentioning the positive consequences is rigging the game.

Health paternalists who propose government intervene in individual choices never make explicit the value judgements which inform their belief.  After all, not everyone has maximum health and minimum risk as their overriding goal.  (If they did, the automobile industry would disappear immediately.)

The National Preventive Health Agency cannot divine everybody's personal, highly subjective values.  For instance, how much they value their current selves (the immediate sensory pleasure of hot chips right now) compared to their future selves (the potential they will get fat if they consume too many hot chips).

But the public health community assumes the most "rational" decision in any circumstance is to favour your future health by limiting your present consumption.

And if you think otherwise, then, well, you're wrong.

Many argue, pragmatically, that we need to interfere in individual decisions because we pay for them.  Our public health system means that the cost of obesity is borne not just by the obese but by every taxpayer.  It's a fair concern.

But first of all, it's not always true:  particularly in the case of tobacco, where the taxes levied on cigarettes overwhelmingly exceed the costs smokers impose on the health system.

And the medical cost of obesity and alcohol is often mitigated by the unpleasant but nonetheless true observation that alcoholic and obese people tend not to live long enough to cost taxpayers as much as the healthy elderly.  If you're going to calculate the cost of individual choices to taxpayers, you should at least include all the data.

Nevertheless, this argument proves too much.  Is government provided health care really incapable of coping with free will?  So should we be changed to suit the health system -- as the health paternalists would seem to suggest -- or should the health system be changed to suit us?

If it wants to do its job properly, the National Preventive Health Agency will tackle these heady philosophical, economic and social questions.

I wouldn't put money on that.

Instead, it's a fair bet the agency's output will be drearily predictable:  inflated estimates of the costs of obesity, alcohol, and tobacco use, and incessant lobbying for new laws and regulations.

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Republicans on track for a Clayton's win

When Democrats won the White House and scored supermajorities in both houses of Congress in 2008, the conventional wisdom heralded a new progressive era in American politics.  Democratic partisan James Carville wrote a book titled 40 More Years:  How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.  Left-liberal journalists predicted the ''death of conservatism''.  Amid the Democratic euphoria, Barack Obama's policy trifecta of stimulus, bailouts and healthcare overhaul meant that Washington was decisively rejecting the right and moving leftward.

Until this week, that is.  According to the polls, today's mid-term election for all 435 House seats and 37 spots in the Senate will be a forceful repudiation of President Obama's agenda.  Independent voters are favouring Republicans by nearly 20 percentage points.  Veteran Democratic lawmakers are fighting for their political lives while many southern Democrats are repudiating the White House's legislative agenda.  And, notwithstanding the weekend efforts of satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the party's left-wing base is losing faith with Obama over Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and what activists see as policy timidity.

No wonder the experts agree that Republicans will regain the House of Representatives and slice into the Democratic majority in the Senate.  But will the coming avalanche of Democratic losses mark the dawn of a new day for the US right?  And will the election represent a new morning for America?

Left-liberals are clearly in the political doldrums, but after a cold look at the evidence, conservatives might decide to take the champagne off the ice.  Indeed, the larger cultural picture -- in which this week's election is but a minor political datum -- remains strikingly bleak for the US generally.

Republicans will win anywhere between 40 and 60 seats in the House (more than the 39 they need for a majority) and between six and 11 seats in the Senate (they need 10 for a majority).  Polls, however, show that voters distrust Republican legislators more than Democratic ones.  The difference is that the latter have presided over a 2 percentage point rise in unemployment and higher debt and deficits over the past two years.

Some argue that the Tea Party's success in Republican primaries is evidence of a rejuvenated right dedicated to a genuine constitutionalism and commitment to small government.  But while the Tea Party is tapping into the economic anxiety and political estrangement that voters feel across the nation, the movement itself has its fair share of problems.

It not only sports a few clowns and creeps who make embarrassing pronouncements;  it is also leaderless and riven by chronic divisions over social and foreign policy.  Moreover, it is not clear whether the Tea Party resonates with the broader electorate.  After the 1994 mid-term election, congressional Republicans also rode an anti-tax, anti-Washington wave to power.  Yet their overreach on various issues, culminating in the government shutdown in 1995, led to widespread public angst and Bill Clinton's remarkable re-election to the presidency a year later.

In any case, doubts dog the ability of the conservatives to practise what they preach.  It's one thing to cut taxes;  it's another thing to cut welfare entitlements.  After the congressional gains in the Bush years, for example, the Republicans became the don't-rock-the-boat party, content to feed different types of pork to different special interests.  Not grounds for optimism.

Nor does any of this bode well for liberals in a nation whose centre of political gravity is still to the right.  Gallup polling shows 54 per cent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, with only 18 per cent liberals.  Americans are pragmatic people who shun ideologues.

We know that some in the Tea Party scare centrists -- think of Delaware candidate Christine O'Donnell, the former anti-masturbation advocate who ''dabbled'' in witchcraft.  She will almost certainly lose a seat the Republicans should have won.  But many liberal Democrats are also ideologues:  many have mistaken their 2008 mandate for an opportunity to implement the most interventionist and expensive agenda since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

Which brings us to the roots of US despair.  Not only do they go beyond ideology and political brand, they stem from expectations about America's right to economic prosperity and world leadership that no administration or congress may be able to meet -- especially at a time of economic decline and increasing global multipolarity.

Americans are in the midst of near-double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing national debt, home foreclosures and a deeply unpopular war.  They are in a foul mood, suffering from a lack of confidence and overwhelmingly believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction.  All of this has given rise to rapid mood swings within the electorate, epitomised by Obama's fall from adulation to contempt within two years.

Conservatives may have much to smile about when Republicans make big gains in the House and Senate elections.  But they will be winning by default.

The true angst in America goes deeper than this week's mid-term election.

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Revolutionary's Road

Trotsky:  A Biography
By Robert Service
(Belknap Press, 2009, 648 pages)

Leon Trotsky is not only an extraordinary historical figure but a continuing political phenomenon.  His ideas continue to be read and advanced by political activists and students of intellectual history.  He is considered the political embodiment of Karl Marx -- as the only person, along with Lenin, who succeeded in implementing a revolution.

The story of his ascendency is in many ways inspirational.  Emerging from an unassuming, although by no means poor family, he managed to place himself at the confluence of historical currents to be swept to power in the 1917 Revolution.

Not only did Trotsky provide the intellectual impetus for revolution through his prolific writing and public speaking, he played an active role in the fighting that saw the overthrow of the provisional government.

Respected and at times revered by both the political and military classes, Trotsky was the natural leader of the Bolshevik Party and, by extension, the newly established Soviet Union.  It was only his modesty (or affectation of modesty) that saw Lenin take effectual control.

Robert Service's biography captures these events extremely well.  He conveys Trotsky's superb talent for statecraft, his divisive though intriguing character and his boundless determination.  But it is perfectly clear that Service does not share Trotsky's political beliefs, nor is he in the least bit impressed by what Trotsky ultimately managed to achieve.  By the end of the book, we have a story of a man whose intense political and moral hypocrisy, violent approach to the acquisition of power and, in Service's view, unforgivable personal failings, make him the perfect anti-hero.

For those who still cling not only to the ideals of Marxism but the belief that a Marxist government can be democratic, the distinction between Stalin and Trotsky is vital.

Socialists look to the wronged leaders of the revolution such as Trotsky and Bukharin as the keepers of the flame.  They are the upholders of the principles of revolution that Stalin betrayed, outgunned and outfoxed by a powerful dictatorship.

According to what is left of his contemporary supporters, there would have been no heavy-handed policies to force the collectivisation of farms, and no brutal interrogations and show trials.  There would have been a multi-party system, with greater political cooperation and consensus.  All notions of Russian nationhood and their damaging consequences would have been overridden by an allegiance to global nationhood.

For those inclined towards Trotsky's political views, Service's book provides nothing of particular comfort.  He finds no reason to overturn the established historical view of Trotskyism.  According to Service, there is nothing at all to indicate that life for the average worker, farmer or indeed capitalist sympathiser would have been any less brutal, restrictive and miserable had the Bolshevik Party acceded to Trotsky's aspirations.

He says that:

Trotsky recognised no other variant of socialism except Bolshevism.  He despised and detested the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks as enemies of human progress.  He did not object to the show-trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1922.  He did not call for Mensheviks to be released from the Solovki prison island.  He was untroubled by the brutal suppression of the Georgian national uprising in 1924.

Vladimir Lenin addressing the red Army with Trotsky on the steps

Trotsky's brutality and cold-hearted utilitarian conception of war is well-known.  As the People's Commissar for Military Affairs, he and Stalin organised the defence of Petrograd against the White Army during the Givil War.  Stalin rounded up a group of middle class citizens and used them to form a human barricade.  Trotsky made no objection.  He himself would order the execution of soldiers almost indiscriminately.  Service says, ''At times it seemed that Trotsky and Stalin were competing for the status of the most brutal commissar.'''

Trotsky was open about the need and desire for some form of dictatorship, despite never revealing an inclination to become dictator.  Lenin, as leader of the Revolution, was highly respected and later, after a failed assassination attempt, almost deified.  Yet after he was struck down with illness and a series of strokes, there was a feeling among Bolsheviks that the Soviet Union was on the inexorable path towards all-powerful dictatorship.

As Service relates, part of Stalin's political genius was to convince members of the Politburo and Central Committee that it was Trotsky who deigned to be this all-powerful leader.  As students of the French Revolution, they were paranoid that Trotsky would become the next Napoleon Bonaparte -- the one who, once given power, would disfigure the Revolution and turn it to his own purposes.

Service makes it clear that Trotsky's assassination by an agent of the Kremlin in Mexico was the result of a desire for power that Trotsky shared with Stalin.

Art and culture hold an important place in Marxist philosophy.  Western writers at the time, such as Orson Welles and Bertrand Russell, were highly impressed by the young revolutionary.  Once they visited the Soviet Union and saw for themselves the state of the masses, this admiration was quickly extinguished.  Trotsky's brusque manner was also off-putting.

Trotsky's aim was for the proletariat to gain the keys to the world of art and culture that were previously only available to the wealthy.  At the same time, he believed that art should always serve the revolution, and that any work of art that did not uphold the principles of revolution was of no value.  In Literature and Revolution, published in 1923, Trotsky wrote, ''The independence of art -- for the revolution!  The revolution -- for the complete liberation of art!''

Of course, as Service points out, Trotsky and other Marxist thinkers avoided explaining how the revolution would deal with art that espoused politically inconvenient ideas.

Trotsky's own musings on the cultural empowerment of the masses under communism were the most bizarre.

Man will become incomparably stronger, more intelligent, more subtle.  His body will be more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical;  the forms of daily existence will acquire a dynamic theatricality.  The average human type will rise to the level of Aristotle, Goethe and Marx.  It is above this ridge that new summits will rise.

The newly liberated workers of the Soviet Union, far from gaining the time to read philosophy, struggled daily against disease and starvation.

Trotsky, having helped to establish the most centralised government in the world over such a vast geographical expanse, complained often of a ''sclerotic bureaucracy''.  When people called for greater decentralisation, he denounced them as ''kulaks'' and capitalist sympathisers.  He clung to the grain monopoly, despite widespread starvation and logistical choke holds that saw hundreds of tonnes of grain rot in trains and depots.  The fault, Trotsky maintained, was with the speculators and merchants who were hoarding resources.

Service's biography discusses many aspects of Trotsky's life, which depict him as a complex and highly flawed individual.  His life, despite everything else, is fascinating.  His love affairs, his complicated familial relationships, his life in exile, and his Judaism, which was the source of constant embarrassment for him, are all covered superbly.

Service has produced a magnificent work.  His criticisms of Trotsky are not surprising given that his research base was at the Hoover Institute.  Nevertheless, this is widely considered to be the most authoritative account of Trotsky's life.

A wall mural of Leon Trotsky

Bourgeois burdens

Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen
(Vivid Publishing, 2010, 240 pages)

Rarely is Jonathan Franzen's name mentioned in the absence of fawning praise.

Since the critical and commercial hit of 2001's The Corrections, taste-makers have hailed him as ''the voice of a generation'', a novelist who ''uniquely reflects the way we live now'', and, without the barest hint of restraint, a ''genius of Tolstoyan proportions''.

In an era where the novel is apparently on its deathbed, Franzen has become what many of us believed extinct -- a bona fide literary superstar.

Franzen's much publicised spat with Oprah in 2001 catapulted his name into mainstream consciousness, and ensured healthy sales amongst cultural elites who viewed Oprah's Book Club as a blight on the literary landscape.  Meanwhile, The Corrections continued to notch up awards and acclamation.  By the end of 2003, his work had wormed its way into popular culture, and Franzen had become one of the biggest names in the American literary scene.  But rather than bask in his celebrity, Franzen went to ground.  Readers desperate for a new novel had to content themselves with a few titbits of criticism, a collection of personal essays, and a reflective piece on the joys of bird watching.

Nine years later, he has re-emerged with Freedom, a gargantuan work of realist fiction which, like The Corrections before it, purports to tell the story of modern America as reflected through a dysfunctional modern family.

With Freedom, Franzen further pitches himself as the biographer of America's middle class by chronicling the intimate relationships of the Berglunds, an impossibly polite, unfailingly moral Midwestern family -- or so it would seem.  When the novel opens, their ideal suburban domesticity has fallen spectacularly to pieces -- committed environmentalist Walter has inexplicably taken a job with a destructive coal mining firm in West Virginia, perfect homemaker Patty has spiralled into alcohol dependence, and golden child Joey has abandoned his family to move in with the uncouth Republicans next door.  Franzen spends the next 500 pages of the novel painstakingly reconstructing the events which have led the Berglunds to the brink of collapse through a series of extended set pieces rendered in exacting detail.

But Franzen's ambition extends well beyond the family saga.  He manoeuvres his characters through a world where the personal is inextricably connected with the political in an attempt to produce a document of the post-9/11 era.  The Berglunds' spiritual crumbling and the manner in which it occurs is a reflection of the crippling collective uncertainty of the liberal middle class following the fall of the.twill towers.

With their family unit fractured, the Berglunds each embark on a journey to satiate their emptiness -- Patty begins an affair with Walter's best friend;  Walter immerses himself in a futile quest to save a threatened species of bird;  and Joey chases further emotional and financial independence from his parents.  This desire for radical reinvention has disastrous consequences as the Berglunds are forced to confront the tyranny of choice.  Freedom shows Franzen at his most political as he crushes his characters underneath the weight of their decisions, attempting to construct a clumsy allegory of the supposed failures of the free market.  The freedom Franzen affords the Berglunds throughout the novel is contingent with giving them enough rope to hang themselves.  They are portrayed as being at the mercy of choice in a world where mistakes are not only a possible consequence of such liberation but an inevitability.

This is most startlingly exposed by Joey's misadventures in New York.  Imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit that puts him at odds with his father's relentless liberal moralising, Joey falls in with a crowd of ''frat boy Republicans'' and leverages this into employment with a warmongering right-wing think tank.  He suppresses his nagging reticence about the validity of the Iraqi conflict to engage with unscrupulous, profit-driven defence contractors with an appropriately devastating outcome.

As Freedom progresses, Franzen increasingly struggles to suppress his authorial voice.  Much of the second half of the novel is hijacked by his personal prejudices -- Walter's anti-population rants read increasingly like the author's own personal diatribes, and Franzen's talent for creating rich, fully-formed characters evaporates whenever he is forced to portray a businessman or Republican.  That a writer of such skill and ambition should allow himself to succumb to political stereotyping is unforgivably lazy, and the quality of the work is diminished by its lopsided perspective.

It is Franzen's contention that the obsession with freedom in the wake of 9/11 has stunted American society.  He writes that ''the personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage'', as if this is reason enough to avoid pursuing such an ideal.  It is a defeatist mantra not uncommon to the liberal middle class about whom Franzen writes, and who are most fervent in their praise for Franzen's work.  He has succeeded in reflecting their world view, but it is an insular view, a self-obsessed view, and it constrains a novel which becomes increasingly unsatisfying as it progresses.

With Freedom, Franzen has indeed captured a voice, but it is the voice of a privileged subset of society, rather than a generation.  Although a storyteller of considerable talent, Franzen's reluctance to step outside of his personal perspective inhibits his ability to make an enduring statement about the realities of modern American life.  Ultimately, it is what prevents Freedom from being a truly great work of art.

Post-script:  Perhaps the greatest irony surrounding the release of Freedom is that, despite their previous acrimony, both Oprah and Franzen have assented to the novel being selected for the latest instalment of Oprah's Book Club.

It seems capitalism really does heal all wounds.

From the Garden of Eden to Mad Max

The Rational Optimist
By Matt Ridley
(Harper Publishing, 2010, 438 pages)

This book should be considered a perfect foil for the pessimism of the Left, and an ideal primer for the economically illiterate.  It would be an inspiring Christmas present for anyone floundering with notions of economic progress, who doubts man's ability to respond to environmental problems, or for those worried by peak oil or climate change.  It would be just the counter for silly books like Affluenza by Clive Hamilton and for middle class Greens voters in inner city electorates.  However, don't expect the book to turn up in any of the plethora of literary festivals and ''Dangerous Ideas'' talkfests.

How many people do you know who become indignant when you suggest to them that we are better off than at any other time in human history, or dare to suggest that our cities are brilliant, exciting places, or that the West is a better place to live than any of those vibrant, picturesque ''Peregrine Adventures'' countries?  The Rational Optimist gives us a thousands reasons why this is so.

Starting with the question of why wealth and material wellbeing has increased exponentially in recent times, Matt Ridley, author of other best sellers, The Red Queen:  Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature and Nature via Nurture:  Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, explains how the four most basic human needs -- food, clothing, fuel and shelter -- have become so much cheaper and more abundant in the last two centuries, for everyone.

He starts simply with an example of a coastal tribe that trades fish with an inland tribe that makes fishing nets.  The inland tribe gains in improved nutrition and the coastal tribe gains in productivity.  They can either trade more fish or work less on fishing.  Everyone is much better off.  Everyone gets more from less.  But the most intriguing and thoroughly satisfying example to illustrate this central principle of ''more from less'' is that of the cost and availability of artificial light.  Light -- to read a book, say -- in England in 1300AD was 20,000 times more costly than it is today.  To measure it in hours of work needed to pay for that light is striking.  Today, for an hour of standard electric reading light, you need to work for half a second on an average wage.  In 1800, you would have to have worked for six hours, using a tallow candle.  That, according to Matt Ridley, is a 43,000 fold improvement.  For those intrigued by this problem, he also calculates the time needed in Babylon in 1750BC to earn that hour of reading from a sesame-oil lamp.

It is the profundity of examples like this about a thing we take for granted that demonstrates that most of us have no idea of just how good things have become for us and most of the world's poor, even in our own life time.  Botswana, a typical African country, is landlocked, drought-prone, and had only 8 miles of paved road at independence in 1966.  It then had only 22 black university graduates and 200 school finishers.  Devastated by AIDS, a one-party state, and by cattle disease, it was the fourth poorest country in the world.  According to Ridley, this country had every one of Africa's curses.  But what happened?  Botswanans today earn more than the average Finn did in 1951.  Examples of staggering improvement abound.  Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951.  The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955.  How on earth did this happen?  This book explains why.

These considerations force two major issues to surface in this reviewer's mind.  Why is it that the rich middle class that we inhabit in the West has so little idea of how much things have improved for everyone over time, and has so little idea of how and why things have improved?  The corollary is, of course, the impossibility for us to imagine just how bad things were, even in our recent past.  The Rousseauian fantasy is alive and very well amongst us.  Matt Ridley tackles the problem by pulling hard on the village peasant's muddy boot-straps to disabuse the reader of any notion that life was better in the past.  His description of the life of an eighteenth century peasant is harrowing.  The ''rose-tinted nostalgia'' of today's wealthy, who pine for a better past on grounds of ''simplicity, tranquillity, spirituality, free of dioxin or radioactive fall-out in the cow's milk'', the author sardonically reminds us, is only possible because they have ''fallen in love with mud''.

Or, if the reader is still not convinced about how things have improved he throws in another problem;  that of the chaos and suffering brought on by nearly constant warfare.  To the romantic comment that hunters and gatherers were lithe and healthy, he replies, ''it was because the fat and slow had all been shot in the back at dawn''.  The horrors of the twentieth century compare well to the world of the noble savage.

... the warfare death rate of 0.5 percent of the population per years that was typical of many hunter-gatherer societies would equate to two billion people dying during the twentieth century ... forget the Garden of Eden;  think Mad Max.

Ridley succinctly sums up the progress of just the last 50 years.  It is worth quoting:

The average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money, ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer.  She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder, child-birth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, small-pox, scurvy or polio.  She was less likely at any given age, to get cancer, heart disease, or stroke.  She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school.  She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator, and a bicycle.  All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded.  It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.

Under different headings, the book looks at the mechanisms for this universal human improvement.  Ridley canvases the effect of virtue and trust developed through trade and commerce.  He rehearses the familiar arguments that market societies require fairness in interaction and trade.  As a result, time and again, traditional honour-based feudal societies give way to commercial, prudence-based economies, and the effect is civilising rather than coarsening.  He explains the impact of exchange and specialisation through what he calls ''the collective brain'', and the explosion of ideas, inventions, new technologies and discoveries-the ''invention of invention''.  Improvements in farming and food production will allow humanity to feed 9 billion in the near future.  But, central to all progress has been the revolutionary discovery of mechanical energy-carbon-from 1700 onwards.  ''The story of energy is simple.  Once upon a time all work was done by people for themselves using their own muscles.''  To put it graphically, Ridley tells us the average person consumes about 600 calories a second of mechanical energy.

This means that it would take 150 slaves, working eight-hour shifts each, to peddle you to your current lifestyle.  Next time you lament human dependence on fossil fuels, pause to imagine that for every family of four you see in the street, there should be 600 unpaid slaves back home, living in abject poverty:  if they had any better lifestyle they would need their own slaves.  That is close to a trillion people ... Were it not for fossil fuels, 99 percent of people would have to live in slavery for the rest to have a decent standard of living, as indeed they did in Bronze Age empires.

Nevertheless, an important corollary to Ridley's very convincing optimism is his keen understanding and salutary historical reminder of the inevitability of pessimism.  He well understands the familiar ''sustainability'' song:  ''Growth Can't Continue at its Present Pace.''  He bluntly agrees:  ''If it can't then it won't.''  However, he adds, this green-left mind block about limits misses the whole point.  Humans adapt.

''That is the whole point of human progress, the whole message of cultural evolution, the whole import of dynamic change -- the whole thrust of this book.''

Ridley reminds us that pessimism is not a new idea, and is fundamentally unfounded.  In the 1830s when the West was about ''to explode into modernity'', with a life of ''ever-increasing wealth, health, wisdom and safety'', there were the ever-present critics.  They worried that passing trains would cause horses to abort their foals, and what would the use of trains going so fast be, anyway.  The Quarterly Review at the time urged Parliament to limit trains legally to eight or nine miles an hour.  The British Poet Laureate Robert Southey not only thought the present day progress for people was far worse than in the days of Henry VIII or even in the time of Caesar and the Druids, he was certain of a future of misery, famine, plague and a decline of religion.  This was at a time when the ''British working poor's earnings were about to double in thirty years.''

Thomas Macaulay in 1830 was talking about those who believed that society had reached a ''turning point''.  Ridley points out that defining moments, tipping points, thresholds and points of no return have been encountered, it seems, by pessimists in every generation since.  In spite of the extraordinary progress in every domain, there are always intellectuals obsessed with imminent decline, degeneration and disaster.  Bestsellers of time, included Max Nordau's Degeneration, Charles Wagner's The Simple Life, Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthopists to Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams, in which he contrasts the spiritual energy of the Virgin Mary with the material energy of a huge dynamo seen at an exhibition.  Adams thought this ''foresaw the “ultimate, colossal, cosmic collapse” of civilization''.  Ridley points out how we are overwhelmed by the pessimistic.  At an airport lounge he finds books by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Al Franken, Al Gore, John Gray, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot and Michael Moore ... Even good news is presented as bad.

It is unnecessary here to detail the list of mad predictions that have been uttered in the recent past:  from the Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich's repetitive nonsense, Rachel Carson's irresponsible and damaging Silent Spring, right down to Australia's own Tim Flannery on his predictions of imminent demise of almost all of Australian capital cities' water supplies!  Overwhelmingly, on reading this book, one asks oneself, why are we all so gullible?  John Stuart Mill pinned it down in a speech on ''perfectibility'' when he said:

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

It would not be hard to claim two things.  Firstly, the above statement is absolutely true when we think of Tim Flannery becoming Australian of Year – under the Howard government.  Secondly, it goes a long way towards explaining why people eagerly absorb doomsday messages from the media about melting ice caps, extinction of species, runaway global warming, peak oil or whatever.  However, Ridley gives us a combative epigraph by Macaulay in one of his chapters, which effectively sums up the book;

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

We should confront every alarmist with this retort every time he or she is encountered.

An 18th century depiction of the end of the world by William Hogarth | iStockphoto

Is there a spin-doctor in the house?

Stay on Message
By Paul Ritchie
(Vivid Publishing, 2010, 240 pages)

Being a ''spin doctor'' must be among the world's least trusted professions.  No one likes ''spin''.  It lacks authenticity and is used to evade the truth and avoid disasters.

But if you are interested in practicing the dark arts of ''spin'', you shouldn't avoid Stay on Message.

To be fair, Stay on Message is not a ''spin'' bible.  Instead it is rare guide on the skills and techniques on how to communicate effectively.

How individuals use these skills is up to them.

Paul Ritchie's Stay on Message, if properly absorbed, provides a digestible guide for everyone who needs to learn the art of effective communication -- both new and seasoned.

The book mixes stories of Ritchie's long experience in politics and public debate with the tools and skills he developed to survive these roles.

A core message of the book is that there can be a large difference between what people communicate and how it is received.  And the capacity to ensure these align is central to effective communication.

Ritchie identifies his point early by outlining the difference between messages carried by a ''spin doctor'' and a public relations professional.

Despite both seemingly being the same profession, perceptions of who is communicating (spin doctor vs PR professional) radically impact how messages are received based on perceptions and connotations associated with those professional titles.

Ritchie then continues by articulating the rules of a good message from its simplicity, to the conviction and authenticity of those delivering it, to the necessity of understanding the audience to which it is communicated.

Much of Ritchie's book is not new.

Many of the tools and skills he promotes can be developed intuitively by communications professionals through practice.

The contribution he has made is to break them down into bite-size lessons that can inform those seeking to get their message across.

No doubt anyone who thinks they can read Ritchie's book and become a professional communicator are wrong.

Like all skills, practice improves an individual's capacity, and from the examples he uses Ritchie himself exemplifies this point as someone who understands, but occasionally fails in his attempts to communicate successfully.

Perhaps the most entertaining story was the time his own shortcomings resulted in a letter nearly being distributed during the 1993 federal election, from the then leader of the opposition, John Hewson, to marginal electorates.

The letter ended with a statement from Hewson that ''if you elect me next Saturday, I will restore the recession and end hope for our country.  This is my pledge to you.''

Thankfully, for Ritchie's own sake, the letter was never distributed to the intended swinging voters.

Laden with examples, Ritchie successfully provides context and evidence to back up his arguments.

He correlates his points with real-world examples from Winston Churchill's speeches to stir a nation's attention to the ''Nazi menace'', and Barack Obama's harnessing of his endorsement speech for then Democrat presidential candidate, John Kerry, to suit his and Kerry's ends.

Even seasoned media professionals will take away gems from Ritchie's insights.

He usefully provides checklists at the end of every chapter which provide a digest and, consistent with his own advice, ensures ''the message'' is repeated at length.

Probably Ritchie's most important contribution is his discussion on the use of social media.

There is still relatively little written about the use of social media as a communication tool as companies and politicians continue to bumble through with boring tweets and stiff YouTube videos.

While Ritchie seeks to shine a torch light on the technology, the reality is that, apart from its dynamism and the necessity to be aware of the millions of new potential journalists with a mobile phone connected to the network, the only certainty is that it will keep changing.

Turning up the heat on climate change alarmists

Climate:  The Counter Consensus
By Prof.  Bob Carter
(Stacey International, 2010, 200 pages)

In February this year, Penny Wong, the then climate change minister said:  ''Globally, 14 of the 15 warmest years on record occurred between 1995 and 2009'' and she argued that the Bureau of Meteorology had concluded that ''2009 was the second hottest year in Australia on record and ended our hottest decade.  In Australia, each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the last.''

It is claims such as these that provide the justification for Australia putting a ''price on carbon'' to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide.  However, as Professor Bob Carter explains, what Penny Wong said might be true, but in the debate about climate change the minister's claims are meaningless.  As Carter says ''Minister Wong's statement, and others like it, are scientifically trivial and appear to be deliberately intended to mislead.  In reality it is no more significant that 14 of the last 15 years are the warmest since instrumental records began than it is that the hottest days of each year cluster around and shortly after midsummer's day.''

That's because we only have about 150 years of accurate, instrument-measured, temperature records.  In the context of the history of the earth's climate what's occurred in the last few decades is not unusual.  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries temperatures increased following the ''Little Ice Age'', successive phases of which lasted from roughly 1350 to 1860.  The Little Ice Age followed the ''Mediaeval Warm Period'' of 800 to 1000 AD.  Reconstructed temperatures for the Mediaeval Warm Period are based upon proxy data such as tree ring analysis and various geochemical measurements, which imply that at many localities temperatures then were as warm or warmer than those of today.  Similarly, during the ''Holocene climatic optimum'' of several thousand years ago, temperatures were a degree or so warmer than they are now;  during the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago temperatures were approximately two degrees warmer than now;  and six million years ago, temperatures were about two to three degrees warmer than now.

None of this was mentioned by Penny Wong.  Nor did she mention that it is likely that global temperatures peaked in 1998 and started declining in 2002.  The new minister for climate change, Greg Combet, hasn't taken the trouble to talk about any of this either.

As we find out from Climate:  The Counter Consensus there's lots of other things we haven't been told by those politicians who believe that humans are causing potentially catastrophic global warming and that therefore drastic action must be taken.

While the politicians are constantly telling the public ''the science is settled'' and there's a ''consensus'', they have never dared inform the public of the basic facts of climate change.  Thankfully it's an omission rectified by Professor Carter.

Carbon dioxide, water vapour, methane, nitrous oxides, and ozone are called ''greenhouse'' gases because they absorb heat and warm the atmosphere.  Without greenhouse gases the temperature of the earth's atmosphere would be about minus 19°C.  The proportionate impact of each of the greenhouse gases on atmospheric warming is approximately as follows:  78 per cent from water vapour, 20 per cent from carbon dioxide, and 2 per cent from the other gases.  Of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, up to 5 per cent is the result of burning fossil fuels.  What this translates into is that 0.45 per cent of the greenhouse warming in a particular year is the result of human activity.  Or expressed in another way, 99.55 per cent of the greenhouse effect has nothing to do with carbon dioxide emissions caused by humans.  It's widely acknowledged that partly as a result of human activity atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, but as Carter points out the impact of this increase is disputed.  For one thing our understanding of important processes like the exchange of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the oceans remains limited.  But the context is clear, for:

even if human emissions were to be reduced to zero, the difference would be lost among other uncertainties in the global carbon budget.  What is presently missing from the public debate, then -- and it is not provided by computer model outputs, either -- is an appreciation of both the small scale (in context) of human emissions, and the range of uncertainty in the carbon budget.

Uncertainty, and the limits of our knowledge of climate change is a constant theme of Carter's book.  What we do know is that the climate is constantly changing, and that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been unable to demonstrate that anything that has so far happened to the earth's temperature is not part of normal climatic variation.

Carter's position on climate change can be summarised as follows:

There is unanimous agreement that human activities can affect climate at local scale;  summed across the globe, these local affects may have a measurable effect on global climate;  for the period of the instrumental record (say the last 100 years), however, climate change has proceeded at rates that lie within previous natural rates and magnitudes, and any anthropogenic effect cannot be distinguished from the noise and natural variation in the system.

There are few people in the world better able to marshal the evidence on climate change than Professor Bob Carter.  He's an Emeritus Fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs and one of the world's leading climate change ''sceptics''.  His qualifications include a degree in geology from Otago University, and a PhD in palaeontology from Cambridge University, and he's taught at Otago University, the University of Adelaide, and James Cook University.  Famously, Carter was a witness, against the scientific might of the UK's Meteorological Office, in the London High Court case which identified nine major errors in Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth.

Climate:  The Counter Consensus is one of the very best expositions of both the science and the politics of climate change yet written.  It can serve as an outstanding introduction to the issue of climate change, and as an accurate and up-to-date summary of the latest research.  It includes a discussion of Climategate and the Copenhagen Conference.  The range of scholarship that Professor Carter has mastered is astonishing.  The language is clear and simple, but never over-simplified.

At the end of the book Carter asks the question ''how did it come to this?''  How did we get to the sort of the situation whereby in 2006 the former president of the Royal Society, Robert May told a meeting of BBC journalists and executives ''that the science supporting global warming alarm was so certain that it was the BBC's public duty to cease providing airtime to alternative viewpoints.''  How did we get to the position whereby policymakers around the world have been dictated to by a handful of scientists who have shown themselves willing to fabricate evidence, destroy original data, and defeat public scrutiny?  How did we get to a situation whereby one of Australia's two major political parties is demanding a substantial reduction in the nation's standard-of-living which would make practically zero contribution to limiting the increase in global temperature?

In a nutshell, according to Carter what's happened is the result of ''noble cause corruption'', a modern political disease that has been analysed in depth by Tasmania's Professor Aynsley Kellow in his book Science and Public Policy.  When belief in moral righteousness overwhelms dispassionate and disinterested research, noble cause corruption takes hold.  The significance of Kevin Rudd calling climate change a ''moral challenge'' is that he was implying that anyone who disagreeing with him was not just wrong, they were immoral.  Claims to a superior morality have little to do with science.

Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic is quoted on what happens when noble cause corruption is turned into a political movement:

As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants.  Communism (has been) replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism ...

Man made climate change has become one of the most dangerous arguments aimed at distorting human efforts and public policies in the whole world.

There's much about the science of climate change in Carter's book that challenging and thought-provoking.  But perhaps what gives the work a unique importance is that Carter is willing to also examine the socio-political pathology that now surrounds Australian public policy on climate change.  And he's willing to be more than a critic -- he's willing to chart a way forward through what he terms ''Plan B:  a fresh approach''.

Recall that the public argument over climate policy in Australia has already weakened the position of one Australian prime minister (Howard), toppled two successive leaders of the opposition (Nelson and Turnbull), helped to topple another prime minister (Rudd) and elevated another opposition leader to his current position (Abbott).  Maybe a fresh approach might just be useful.

Carter's Plan B, also espoused by Nigel Lawson in the UK, is a classic no-regrets policy that is both cost-effective and politically feasible.  It is that we acknowledge the very real dangers of natural climate change, and plan so as to minimize the impacts of future climate-related disasters by better preparation, and by adapting to such events-which include floods, storms, droughts and bushfires, as well as longer term climate trends-as and when they occur.  As Carter concludes:

It is ... time to move away from stale ''he-says-she-says'' arguments about whether human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous warming, and on to designing effective policies of hazard management for all climate change, based on adaptation responses that are tailored for individual countries or regions.  The key issue on which all scientists agree is that natural climate change is real, and every year brings new examples that exemplify the substantial human and environmental damage that it can cause.  By their very nature, strategies that can cope with the dangers and vagaries of natural climate change will readily cope with human caused change too should it ever become manifest.

Aerial shot of a glacier in New Zealand

Greens have an irrational fear of foreign money

Over the past decade, the Greens have rebadged themselves as a polished and sophisticated third party.  But their spat over the potential sale of the Australian Securities Exchange is a revealing one.

On Tuesday, Bob Brown announced his party has deep reservations about allowing the ASX to merge with the Singapore stock exchange.  Brown says the merger may not be in the national interest, and Australia needs to protest the lack of Singaporean democracy and the execution of Australian citizen Nguyen Tuong Van in 2005.

The Greens leader is no doubt heartfelt about Singapore, which definitely has human rights problems.  The death penalty is one.  Its mandatory military service is another.

But his outrage about the ASX-Singapore merger is all too convenient.  If you were to take Brown at his word, you'd have to assume he has been apoplectic over Optus's prominence in Australia (Optus is owned by Singapore Telecommunications), and furious about American investment -- last year, 52 people were executed in the US.

Instead, Brown's symbolic stand on the ASX seems motivated by quite another thing entirely:  a general opposition to foreign investment in Australia.  Economist Wolfgang Kasper called this ''capital xenophobia'' -- the irrational fear of foreigners' money.

Bob Brown would say the ASX is special, as Australia's primary stock exchange, a privilege granted by government.  But the government has already licensed another exchange.  Chi-X will start trading in early 2011.

Foreign companies owning assets and operating businesses in Australia have to operate under Australian law, even if those companies are partly owned by foreign governments.  That should be the end of the story.

The ASX sale may not go through.  But it's not the only foreign investment the Greens oppose.  They want to limit foreign ownership of land and water to ''avoid exploitation''.  As Greens Senator Christine Milne said in her July blog:  ''Our children will never forgive us if we become tenant farmers in our own country.''

For years the Greens have stoked fears international investors might buy farms, claiming they threaten ''food security''.  Perhaps, but only if you believe global trade is going to suddenly collapse and foreign investors flee the country, burning their crops as they go.

Despite their urbane and worldly image, and their compassion for the poor in developing countries, the Greens are oddly hostile to the world actually coming to Australia.  They want to keep Australian stuff in Australian hands, paid for with Australian money.

The Greens seem to be motivated by a peculiar form of nationalism -- it's downbeat, stripped of any patriotism or even pride of country, and one which imagines the ideal Australia to be small, self-sufficient, and somewhat isolated.

Take, for instance, their attitude to immigration.  They want Australia to accept more refugees, which is good.  But they also want to reduce the total number of migrants coming into Australia by further limiting skilled migrant places.  The world should keep its money and stay where it is.

Australia has one of the most restrictive foreign investment regimes in the OECD.  The Financial Times described our system as a ''protectionist relic''.

The Australian and Singapore stock exchange merger will have to go through the Foreign Investment Review Board, which could easily recommend the government reject it.

Then it has to get past the Treasurer, who can knock it back if he determines the investment wouldn't be good for the ''national interest''.  (Read:  ''for any reason whatsoever''.)

The economic consultancy ITS Global suggests we forgo $5.5 billion of investment every year because of this strict regime.  That's money which could have created jobs, and been used for innovation and training.  And even been taxed.

Joe Hockey has also been asking Wayne Swan to explain why Australia should let the Singapore exchange buy the ASX.

Admittedly, this has not been Hockey's best week.  Yet on foreign investment, the Coalition and the Greens line up disconcertingly often.  During the election campaign, Tony Abbott called on the government to monitor -- with a view to limiting -- foreign investment in farmland.

These announcements make the Coalition look like populists abandoning their lofty free-market principles.

But for the Greens, opposition to foreign ownership and immigration seems to be a key plank of their political philosophy.

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Hooked on government

Shadow treasurer Joe Hockey's suggestion for the regulation of bank interest rates is a problem for the liberal Party.  Regardless of the fact that Hockey was not proposing that the Federal Parliament legislate to set interest rates on some mortgages, the damage was done.  His valid points about the need for more competition in the banking sector were overshadowed by the impression he created.

In this case, what people thought he said was more important than what he actually did say.  Perception is reality.  Which is what Hockey's opposition colleagues think as well.  It was reported that he was told in no uncertain terms that he shouldn't ''trash'' the Liberal Party brand.

As soon as Hockey started talking about ''social compacts'' between banks, the government and the community it became all too easy to accuse him of turning his back on three decades of financial reform.  It's the Liberal Party that's meant to be the party of competitive markets and economic liberalism.  And Hockey has let Labor off the hook.  From now on, any time a Liberal talks about the national broadband network (NBN) as a $43 billion white elephant we can look forward to a response from the ALP along the lines of ''well, at least we've never called for the federal treasurer to decide who can get a home loan and who can't''.

As we know, federal Labor ministers aren't too keen on cost-benefit analyses, and they're refusing to allow any such scrutiny of the NBN.  But you can bet they'll have no such qualms about having the Treasury Department do a cost-benefit analysis of the reregulation of interest rates.  We shouldn't be surprised if in the next few weeks a ''leaked'' Treasury brief reveals that the department has somehow calculated that implementing Hockey's suggestion would increase interest rates on mortgages, increase bank profits, and increase the salaries of bank executives.

Anyone who wants to know about what happens when politicians tell banks what to do need only look to the Community Reinvestment Act in the United States.  The Carter administration thought it would be a good idea for banks to fulfil their social obligations by forcing them to lend to low-income borrowers.  This enlightened piece of social policy helped contribute to the US housing crisis as banks made loans to people who couldn't afford to repay them.

It seems that in Australia none of this history matters.  No one likes banks and no one (except their shareholders) likes their profits.

In July this year, a survey of public attitudes to the banks was commissioned:  1052 voters across Australia were asked whether they supported a super profits tax applied to banking and investment banking -- 59 per cent said they supported such a tax, 28 per cent said they didn't and 13 per cent didn't have an opinion.  What's interesting is that 71 per cent of Labor voters and 63 per cent of Greens voters supported the tax, and 47 per cent of Coalition voters supported the tax.  Support for a super profits tax was roughly consistent across all age groups, income groups and locations.  It's clear it's not only farmers who want to punish the banks.  On this issue, white-collar workers in metropolitan Sydney have the same attitude as their country cousins.  Bizarrely, what opposition there was to the super tax was stronger among Greens voters than Labor voters -- 21 per cent of Greens voters, 19 per cent of Labor voters and 41 per cent of Coalition voters opposed the tax.

So it could have been worse.  Hockey could have proposed a super profits tax on the banks and he would have had overwhelming public support.  And he would have had a precedent, which of course was Kevin Rudd's resource super profits tax (As yet, no one in the Labor Party has explained the reason for taxing the super profits of some companies and not others.)

It's not just the liberals who have a problem.  The country has a problem.  The positive response Hockey has received on talkback radio and through the popular press is just a little alarming.  We've seen another manifestation of Australians believing that for any problem there is a solution the government can -- and should -- provide.  The financial commentators hated the notion of regulating interest rates but everyone else loved the idea.

Too many people, and unfortunately too many politicians, automatically assume that the answer to high interest rates and billion-dollar profits is more regulation and more bureaucratic interference in the operations of business.

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Economic populism: a minefield for the Liberals

It's an odd sight to see the Liberal Party push for more regulation of the finance industry.

Joe Hockey said yesterday the Coalition would push for an inquiry into the finance sector, because the banks are ''out of control''.

He has a big, bold plan -- full of additional powers to regulators, increased scrutiny of bank profits, cracking down on what seems to be risky behaviour, and enlisting Australia Post as an outlet for small lenders.  That's a taste:  it's got nine points.  The details will be earnestly debated.

Nevertheless, it seems strange to announce a policy two months after an election with more detail than most of the policies you took to the election.

And having banged on about the Rudd government's never-ending series of inquiries, the opposition is now calling for one itself.

But, remember, last week Hockey was saying the government should regulate home loan interest rates.  It can't be a coincidence.

Politically, Hockey's proposals are less about managing risk in the finance sector, and more about being tough on banks.  Being tough on banks is very popular.

And as much as Hockey dresses it up, that popularity has nothing to do with the bank's government guarantees, or the four pillars policy which makes the sector into a quasi-oligarchy.

According to a Galaxy poll commissioned in July, 59 per cent of voters want a super-profit tax levied on banks.

All treasurers and shadow treasurers love to threaten lending banks every time the Reserve Bank lifts interest rates.  Afraid of criticising the Reserve itself -- that would be an unsportsmanlike violation of central bank independence -- the Big Four are fair rhetorical game for politicians wanting to demonstrate their concern for middle Australia.

Kevin Rudd once famously told Westpac to ''have a good hard look at itself'' after a rate rise.  As hard as they try, moral suasion and confrontational language do not change household mortgage payments.

So banking is not well-loved.

Yet Hockey's intimation last week that he wants to limit interest rates increases was not met with wide acclaim.

One colleague, mistaking it for a Greens proposal, called it a ''lunatic, fringe-type'' idea.  Malcolm Turnbull took a different, but much more hurtful, tack. He adopted a tone of naive confusion, before belatedly backing the shadow treasurer.

Wayne Swan blusteringly compared Hockey to Hugo Chavez, as if his counterpart was one step away from shutting down critical television stations.  And every second press article claimed Hockey's views were a direct repudiation of the Liberal Party's ''free market principles''.

I put that phrase in quote marks because that's where it gets tricky.

Hockey's push against banks clearly illustrates the Liberal Party's uncomfortable balancing act.  In opposition, it flirts with economic populism, but can't quite bring itself to travel down that dark road.

We saw this play out a fortnight ago as well.  Shadow finance spokesman Andrew Robb started to talk about using the levers of government to modify our exchange rate.  As colleagues publicly proclaimed their confusion, Robb backed away from that one too.

Now both Robb and Hockey are searching around for legislative mechanisms to achieve policy goals that a) don't get them branded as economic interventionists and b) don't sound idiotic.

It's all about finding the right ''levers'' -- a strange word which seems to imply that governing is like running a factory for the first time.  Robb and Hockey seem to be hoping there are levers the previous factory owners didn't know about.

Of course, there are none.  Hence the policy confusion of the last two weeks.

In a way, Labor had the same problem.  They went to the 2007 election promising to ease cost of living pressures.  But there really wasn't anything Labor could do about prices at the supermarket and bowser;  Kevin Rudd settled on the feeble GroceryChoice and Fuel Watch instead.

The Liberal Party has a harder time at this cheap economic populism, because they're supposed to be, well, ''liberal''.  Certainly, on balance, the Liberals tend to favour more market oriented solutions to policy issues.  And often the party leans towards smaller government than the Labor Party.  They usually oppose more regulation, and propose more tax cuts.

But we can all think of dozens of exceptions to the Liberal Party's free market inclination.

The purpose of a political party is to get elected.  And the free market approach to public policy is an unpopular one.  This is true across any number of policy areas.  If the great financial reforms of the 1980s had gone to a referendum, they would have been rejected.  A party that cuts the size of government usually cuts the size of their approval ratings.

Voters are hypocrites:  they hate bureaucratic busybodies, but want government to solve their problems.  They think there are too many laws, but think there should be a law to fix everything.

Obviously, it's an ideological minefield out there.

If the last two weeks have shown us anything, it's a minefield Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb are struggling to navigate.

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It's better to take Q&A as a comment, not democracy

Why didn't the Q&A shoe thrower Peter Gray toss former Prime Minister John Howard a lamington instead?

Taking his cue from an Iraqi journalist, turned footwear rejecter, who flung his possessions at then US President George W Bush, Gray in one unoriginal act exposed the limitations of the Q&A program as an uninhibited experiment in deliberative democracy.

According to the program's website, Q&A aims to place punters, pollies and pundits together to ''thrash out'' the hot issues of the week.  Think of it as the political equivalent of a WWE steel cage match.

The website also insists ''it doesn't matter who you are, or where you're from -- everyone can have a go and take it up to our politicians and opinion makers.''  Gray certainly took this calling to heart, and later proceeded (perhaps in a shoeless state) to hyperbolically claim that Howard is a ''war criminal''.

It is understandable why the format of the program, with insider politicians subjected to critical questioning by outsider citizens, would prove to be an attractive hour of television viewing for many.

With the act and consequences of political action often falling short of their objectives it is also clear why numerous people may wish to submit questions or Tweet messages that, ahem, exhort the likes of Gray to throw shoes at political panelists they don't like.

However to objectively call Q&A a successful application of Australian ''democracy in action'' would be grossly stretching the argument on two counts.

A mere 656,000 people witnessed the shoe debacle this week (for the record, I finished watching the ''Vampire Diaries'' on Channel Go! and settled in for the night browsing online).  That same evening, considerably greater numbers of Australians watched Today Tonight (Seven) (1.33 million viewers), A Current Affair (Nine) (1.07 million) and The 7pm Project (Ten) (752,000 viewers).

The important point to emphasise is that Q&A does not attract mainstream attention, even though it might enjoy a ''shoe echo'' improvement in its ratings next week.

Arguably, nor should Q&A be receiving any special attention above the light entertainment options on other channels or elsewhere since, after all, the political panel will respond to questions with their normally dismissive spin.

In any case, the ''hot issues'' of today become yesterday's news tomorrow and, besides, the chances that a given individual's vote will be decisive at the next election is infinitesimal.

What Q&A tends to draw for a crowd are the political junkies, the lobbyists, the pressure group flunkies, and those with intense single-issue opinions on sometimes rather obscure issues.

The idea that Q&A should be a riotous, unabashed celebration for the intense to say whatever they want to say, and do whatever they want to do, leads to the disrepectful outbursts waged by the likes of Gray where strength of feeling, rather than consequences, are applauded.

Instead of shoe-throwing or verbal barbs expressed by the Twitterati on a television program gone awry, there is arguably a much better place to register one's intensity of preferences concerning political opinion -- and that is votes for preferred candidates for the Australian Senate.

I suspect like many other Australians if I want entertainment I won't go to a current affairs program, ''democracy in action'' or otherwise.  We'll keep tuning into entertainment programs provided by the commercial channels or, in my own case, watch romantic vampires followed by surfing the far more interesting Internet.

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An illusion of safety

Here's a way to make driving safer:  make it riskier.

A German safety expert recommends we raise speed limits on our roads, not lower them.

Ulrich Mellinghoff, head of safety at Mercedes-Benz, argues that raising the top speed on long stretches of Australia's roads to 130 or 140km/h could help combat driver fatigue.

Mellinghoff's argument is counter-intuitive.  It will definitely make driving feel less safe, but it could result in fewer accidents.  And it fits in with an increasing body of knowledge that suggests government attempts to protect us are have the opposite effect -- making us less safe and, crucially, less able to manage risk.

We've had widely owned, personal transport for more than a century now.  And we've learnt a lot about safety in that time.  The University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman famously studied the results of the American 1966 Motor Safety Act that mandated new car safety standards.  Instead of making driving safer, Peltzman found, the new standards prompted drivers to be more reckless on the roads, and endangered the lives of pedestrians.  Other risk analysts have found the same occurred when seatbelt laws were introduced around the world.

Economists call that ''moral hazard'' -- when people feel they are insulated from the consequences of their actions and behave differently as a result.

In 2007, a researcher in Bath, England, attached proximity sensors to his bicycle to see how car drivers responded to his bike helmet use.  On average, cars came nearly 10 centimetres closer when he wore a helmet than without.  Drivers acted much more dangerously because they assumed the rider was safe.  These problems aren't limited to road safety.

The insurance industry is acutely aware that some customers fail to protect their property when it's insured.  Bushwalkers venture further away from civilisation if they believe search and rescue will be there to help them.

Researchers have even found the introduction of improved ripcords on parachutes did not lower the incidence of skydiving accidents.  Instead, they just encouraged skydivers to pull their cords later.

We saw the moral hazard dynamic play out most dramatically in 2008, as the global financial crisis looked set to sweep away the entire world economy.  Wall Street made riskier and riskier financial trades and employed ever more complex and precarious financial instruments because of an assumption, cultivated over decades, that if they got in too much trouble the government would bail them out.  It would be bad if they lost their financial gambles.  But they wouldn't lose the business over it.  They were too big to fail.

Calling a company ''too big to fail'' is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The marketplace starts to imagine the company is unsinkable and relies on it.

Having bailed out other firms, the market really went into free fall when the US government declined to bail out Lehman Brothers in September 2008, dramatically reversing that assumption.

It wasn't the government's failure to bail out Lehman Brothers that caused the panic.  It was implying they would do so, and at the last minute whipping the protective blanket away.

The long-term cause of the financial crisis was the suggestion the government would do anything to protect bankers.  The short-term cause was that it didn't.

This isn't an argument against seatbelts or bike helmets.  Seatbelts combined with drink-driving laws, education and cultural change have reduced Australia's road toll significantly.  But it should be a warning:  many of the well-meaning attempts to make us safer are counterproductive, making us more likely to take risks, and less likely to think about the consequences.

There are solutions.  In a revolution in traffic management across Europe, a number of towns are removing traffic lights, stop signs, and other road markings.  Once eliminated, drivers enter intersections more slowly and more attentively.  Instead of focusing their attention on signs, they make eye contact with other drivers.  They negotiate.  Accidents in these towns have dramatically declined.

The Dutch have been experimenting with ''shared streets'', where the barriers between pedestrian walkways and roads are eliminated.  Again, this sounds abominably dangerous.  But when guard railings between the footpath and the road were removed from London's Kensington High Street, accidents fell by 47 per cent.

A spontaneous order emerges when people feel they are fully responsible for their own driving.  And it's a safer one than in a traffic management system that tries to push drivers along pre-determined paths, barking orders along the way.

It's like the spontaneous order that emerges in society and markets when people are responsible for their actions.  So let's hope risk and reward can be rejoined in the financial sector too.

We talk a lot about helicopter parents who over-parent and insulate their children from the world.  The obvious downside of this kind of parenting is that children learn nothing about managing danger.

Perhaps it's time to talk about helicopter governments as well:  always hovering above their citizens, ready to swoop in the moment they stray off the safest path.

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