Why pick deluded Chomsky for prize?

Since the Vietnam war era, Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky has been a veritable paladin of the Left.

Chomsky is in the news because of the announcement that he is to be the recipient of the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize.  A closer look reveals the professor unworthy of such an honour.

Any serious student who delves into Chomsky's written work will discover a sordid underside of moral depravity and intellectual dishonesty.  This taint is particularly noxious on the issue of genocide.

The record shows Chomsky spent the latter 1970s attempting to whitewash the mass murder then under way at the hands of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. 

But the truth of the Cambodian genocide was there to see for anyone not blinded by ideology.  US Congressional hearings in May 1977 featured exhaustive testimony on the Khmer Rouge campaign of mass slaughter.

But Chomsky views the world through a simple prism in which the Washington establishment is the primary author of global evil.  And if the US is wicked, those who oppose it must be good.

Personal correspondence landed Chomsky in trouble on the topic of another genocide.  In a missive Chomsky declared:  ''I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.  Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the Holocaust is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence.''

This gives rise to why the Sydney Peace Foundation selected such a morally tainted individual for their 2011 Peace Prize.

A compelling clue is provided by Chomsky's recent essay on the SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  In this article Chomsky dances perilously close to outright 9/11 denialism, casting sarcastic doubts on bin Laden's own claims of responsibility.  He then goes on to declare that even if al-Qaeda did perpetrate the September 2001 attack, the crimes of George Bush ''uncontroversially exceed bin Laden's''.

The only award worthy of Noam Chomsky is the booby prize for moral perversion.  And that small coterie of activists who make up the Sydney Peace Foundation's board should get runner-up.

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Abbott's ''no'' rings true

Apparently Tony Abbott's problem is that he's too negative.  Given the Coalition's commanding lead in the polls, it's not a bad problem to have.

It's certainly true most of what Abbott says is negative, but then again he has a lot to be negative about.  It would be good if all of those complaining about his negativity could identify which bits of the flood tax, the mining tax and the carbon tax Abbott should be positive about.

The real reason the Prime Minister and the Canberra press gallery are frustrated by Abbott is not necessarily because he's negative;  it is because he refuses to support the sort of policies they personally believe in.

The barracking for a carbon tax, particularly from the economics correspondents for the nation's broadsheet newspapers, is obvious and almost embarrassing.  Those correspondents find it inconceivable that anyone could doubt the science of climate change or the wisdom of imposing a price on emissions of carbon dioxide in the absence of other countries doing the same.  Rather than engaging in a debate about the merits of the policy, they label anyone who disagrees with them negative.

In the coffee shop in Canberra's Parliament House there's no shortage of political journalists you could have a conversation with about the progenitors of postmodernism such as Derrida, Foucault or Habermas.  That's who English and history students study at university.

But it would be practically impossible to find anyone in the press gallery who has heard of, let alone read anything of, the most important conservative philosopher of the 20th century, Michael Oakeshott.

To paraphrase Oakeshott, the first responsibility of an MP is not to stuff things up.  For Oakeshott, if you are going to undertake ''reform'', it's essential to do so carefully and with an understanding of the law of unintended consequences.

A central thesis of Oakeshott's is that society is far more complicated than politicians understand;  indeed the interactions and complexity of society are beyond the comprehension of politicians.

In their attempt to do good, it is just as likely that policymakers will do harm.

In Australia, the tragedy of the home insulation program demonstrates this.  Oakeshott, like Edmund Burke, did not argue there never should be change.  He argued that politicians should know what they're doing when they change things, and most of the time they don't.

Abbott's self-avowed conservatism (he lists Oakeshott as one of his major intellectual influences) is a reason for commentators' lack of understanding of him.  Abbott is a conservative first and a liberal second.  Malcolm Turnbull is a liberal first, and what conservative tendencies he has follow behind.

Commentators (and for that matter many Labor Party supporters) have no trouble coming to terms with Turnbull's position on the republic or on Bill Henson's photographs, for instance.

The media refuses to acknowledge that saying ''no'' to something can be just as principled and policy-driven as saying yes.  Saying no to rushed and reckless decisions is the essence of conservatism.

Because so few journalists have an interest or affinity with conservatism, they can't understand why any politician would ever want to say no to anything.

The article about Australia in this week's Economist magazine illustrates this point perfectly.  According to the writer, the Liberal Party ''seems to have no philosophical principles at all'' and Abbott is ''above all populist, saying no to almost everything proposed by his opponents and vowing to repeal almost everything they want to do''.

What the writer fails to understand is that the reason Abbott is saying no to his opponent's proposals is because he is the leader of the Liberal Party, not the Labor Party.  If an ALP government regulates industrial relations, the task for Abbott is to reverse this.  If the ALP makes government bigger, Abbott in power should attempt to make it smaller.

It's easy for Abbott to say no to more government spending in opposition.  The, trick will be whether he can say no to the spending demands of his colleagues when they're ministers.

It's almost as if journalists will only take you seriously as a politician if you promise to change the world by lunchtime tomorrow.  And if you're promising to change the world to confront ''the greatest moral Challenge of our time'', so much the better.

Moderation, care and competence is the opposite of what political commentators demand from our elected representatives.  Yet, as judged by the polls, these are the very qualities that voters want.

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Greens' conspiracy of silence

How do you adequately describe the killing of a 13-year-old boy in the dark torture cellars of a tyrant?  How do you bring home an accurate portrayal of a teenage boy's body covered with cigarette burns, whose kneecaps are shattered and whose neck is broken?  Is our human vocabulary expansive enough to describe the horror of his severed genitals?

What adjectives should we employ?  Sadistic?  Barbaric?  Fiendish?  No, all of these descriptors fall far short of the mark.  Their promiscuous use in mundane conversation threatens to trivialise the noxiousness of this crime.

''Ineffable'' is the only word that is justly applied to the murder of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb by the Syrian secret police.  The slow and systematic slaying of a teenage boy by the torturers of dictator Bashar al Assad is beyond description, beyond comprehension and beyond absolution.

Hamza was snatched up in late April by Assad's secret police during a protest rally in the southern Syrian town of Jiza.  When the boy's remains were returned to his family several weeks later, the evidence of his brutal treatment was writ large upon his corpse.

Irate at the murder of their defenceless child in the torture chambers of the Assad regime, his parents asked a local activist to film the body.  And the posting of this footage on YouTube has since sparked an entirely new wave of protest demonstrations throughout Syria.

In recent days, the streets of cities throughout Syria have filled with people denouncing the death-by-torture of this teenage boy.  The Sydney Morning Herald related how throngs of demonstrators flocked to the central square of Hama, bearing photographs of Hamza Ali al-Khatib and chanting his name.

The Gillard Government has shown no hesitation about rebuking the Assad regime over the brutal tactics of repression.  In response to a media question Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd declared:  ''The torture of a child is inhumane in the extreme.''

On the Coalition side of politics, foreign affairs spokesperson Julie Bishop was equally blunt.  In a press statement she railed at the Syrian regime over ''shocking evidence of atrocities'' that included ''the torture and killing of a 13-year-old boy''.  But where are the Australian Greens?

Based on the Greens' own moralising rhetoric, one might naturally expect Senator Bob Brown to issue a scathing condemnation of this uniquely gruesome murder.  One might think that such self-proclaimed beacons of Greens humanitarianism as Marrickville mayor Fiona Byrne or Senator-elect Lee Rhiannon would be organising a sit-in before the Syrian embassy in Canberra.

But despite news of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb's slaying featuring in all major Australian media outlets, a Factiva search of statements and news articles reveals that the Greens have been entirely mum on the topic.  In recent days there have been press releases on party's website that assail the live cattle export trade.  There have been statements that bag ''big tobacco'' on the topic of plain cigarette packaging.  But there's been nary a word about a 13-year-old child who was tortured to death by the henchmen of a brutal despot.

Of course not, for when it comes to Middle East policy, the Greens are far too busy hurling abuse at the only true democracy in the region -- Israel.  In fact, former NSW MP Sylvia Hale is planning to participate in the flotilla that is currently being organised to run the Israeli naval cordon off the shores of Gaza.

Never mind that the Egyptian Government recently opened its border with the Palestinian territory, rendering moot all those faux allegations that Gaza was an ‘'open air prison''.  Never mind that, in essence, there's no blockade to run.

But the pro-Palestinian advocacy movement -- of which the Australian Greens are an important constituent -- never lets the facts get in the way of an opportunity to engage in political grandstanding.

This year's flotilla is beginning to play out like a Middle Eastern version of the film Groundhog Day.  Once again we see a small fleet of boats that is organised by a strange-bedfellows alliance between Western Leftists and Levantine jihadis.

Once again we see Muslim extremists spoiling for a fight, openly vowing to seek martyrdom in a violent clash at sea with the Israelis they so heartily despise.  And once again we see American, European and Australian Left-wingers running political interference on behalf of their Islamic radical allies.

Meanwhile, back at the scene of genuine human rights abuses, Syria's beleaguered pro-democracy activists need all the help they can get.  Beset by a ruthless tyrant who doesn't shrink from siccing his merciless army upon them, courageous people in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Daara continue to struggle for political liberation.

The cause of Syrian democracy deserves our active, vocal support.  But as we've observed, there's no succour forthcoming from the Australian Greens.  With their tunnel vision view of the Middle East through a pro-Palestinian prism, Bob Brown and his colleagues evince no visible interest in the wholesale slaughter going on throughout Syria.

This deafening silence on Syria is emblematic of the ethical bankruptcy that infects Leftwing foreign policy.  The selective outrage of the Greens and their fellow travellers bespeaks a fundamental hypocrisy that that strips bare their pretensions to any sort of moral superiority.

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Why Garnaut's ''independent'' committees aren't a good idea

Ross Garnaut has put a lot of work and effort into designing a carbon pricing regime.

In particular he has thought about the rules of the game -- how the scheme will operate to ensure that it actually meets stated objectives.

Let's ignore for the moment the merits or otherwise of a carbon pricing scheme and simply accept, for argument sake, that such a scheme should be implemented.

The biggest problem facing such a scheme is that we don't really know what we're doing and will have to muddle through.  Government, unlike individuals, isn't very good at muddling through.  That involves changing ideas and conceptions quickly, revising strategies, and changing direction if need be.

Built into the carbon pricing scheme is a switch from a carbon tax to an emission trading system in the next few years.  But we can't be sure when to switch, or even if a switch should be made at all.  Time will tell.

The other problem Garnaut faces is that we can't trust politicians, especially those politicians who face re-election and might be prone to populist sentiment.  In other words, all of them.  So once a carbon pricing scheme is in place how would we ensure that it functions as planned and as anticipated?

Garnaut has proposed a complex set of ''independent'' committees that would set policy and the government would have to implement that policy or explain itself to the Parliament.

An open letter, published in The Australian, endorses this idea of an independent committee setting what are really tax rates.  In the early stages what is being proposed is a tax regime that will evolve into a trading scheme.

There are, however, a number of very serious problems with this aspect of the Garnaut proposal.  We already have an independent committee whose job it is to set tax rates.  It is called the Parliament.  Unelected parliamentarians is a system of government that is undesirable and certainly inconsistent with Australian sensibility.

Parliament must approve all taxes.  This is a long standing tradition in our system of government.  The last king of England to flaunt that tradition, Charles I, was quite rightly executed for his troubles.

The separation of powers at the core of our system of government relates to the power to tax.  The executive proposes taxation and the Parliament approves taxation.

Ironically it is confusion over this very point that currently befuddles the federal Parliament.

Anthony Albanese had to stand up in the Parliament yesterday morning and explain the Constitution and standing orders to the House of Representatives.

A broad brush description is as follows:  money bills can only originate in the House of Representatives, from the executive, and must be supported by the Governor-General.  This is a specific and deliberate process that ensures that taxation is kept well under control and a coherent budget process is maintained.

What Garnaut proposes is a very different system -- an independent body would be in a position to force the government to levy taxes.  Right now, even the Parliament cannot force the executive to levy a tax;  it can change the executive but that is another matter.

Of course, there is no reason why the Parliament couldn't pass a bill imposing any taxation it can get away with, but it isn't at all clear that the Parliament should, or even can, sub-contract tax setting powers to an independent authority.

So independent bodies levying taxation is a foreign concept to our system of government.  But is it a good idea anyway?  We hear so much about the need for independence.

Independence is very over rated.  If you can't trust the politicians to do the right thing, you can't necessarily trust the mates they appoint to these independent bodies either.

Rather than rely on ''independence'' to provide good policy outcomes we should look to government to provide good policy.  In some instances that will rely on an arms-length separation from government.

So while the Reserve Bank of Australia is not independent of government, its conduct of monetary policy to meet government mandated objectives is said to be independent.  Many other government positions are statutory positions with some insulation from government interference.

As yet Garnaut hasn't explained why people, who at best can only offer advice, should be independent of government.  A smart government would want independently minded advisors anyway.

Tax me more, by all means, but make it a voluntary contribution

With the stresses and anxieties of tax-return time fast approaching, Gavin Mooney and Alex Wodak, writing in yesterday's Herald, would have us believe that higher taxes are good for our health.

My first reaction was to check the date to establish if this was an April Fools' Day joke.  Alas, the proposition that higher taxes promote well-being is drawn from The Spirit Level:  Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

Wilkinson and Pickett's analysis should be taken with a grain of salt.  They exclude high-wealth countries from their published data sets, for example, and their credibility has been diminished by the thorough critical analysis of researchers including Peter Saunders, Christopher Snowdon, Roger Kerr in New Zealand and, if I may say so, myself.

The experience of modern history shows that the best way to ameliorate poverty is to promote economic growth by freeing up markets.

Perhaps the best case study of this is the largest reduction in human history in the number of people living on less than $US1 a day as a result of pro-market reforms in east Asia, including South Korea and China.

By contrast, no country has become wealthier, or more equal for that matter, as a result of higher taxation.  This is because higher taxes reduce the amount of disposable income available for people to feed, house, clothe, transport and entertain themselves and their families, which keeps poverty at bay.  Higher taxes also distort consumption and production decisions, reducing the capacity of the market economy to generate the growth needed to scoop people out of wretched poverty.

An insidious effect of progressive income taxation is to substitute leisure for work and, combined with a large welfare state, to impose high effective marginal tax rates that punish individuals financially for supplying more labour.

There has been much community discussion since the federal budget about the merits of a large welfare state.  The higher tax burdens needed to fund a large welfare state promote a sense of dependency on the state.  And we know by now that there are significant health and social-inclusion costs for those people, including the unemployed, who are stuck on the low road to welfare.

The truth is that the primary beneficiaries of big welfare are the middle-class bureaucrats who administer the welfare state in fine detail.  To get a sense of how much welfare-state funding is being misdirected, consider this:  based on an upper estimate of 13 per cent of Australians living in poverty, the Commonwealth's social security and welfare budget of $117 billion could have been evenly shared among the poverty stricken with a $40,817 payment.

While there are difficulties in making comparisons between countries, there is also no clear and simple link between higher public expenditure on health and better health outcomes.  Singapore, which has 70 per cent of its health expenditure channelled through the private sector, has a level of life expectancy similar to that of other Asian economies, achieved at a parsimonious 3.5 per cent of its gross domestic product.

While the US is criticised for its relatively high health spending, available indicators suggest that the quality of care is very good, even accounting for lifestyle-related diseases.

Mooney and Wodak suggest that Australians should be prepared to pay more taxes to promote the ideal of the ''fair go''.  With cost-of-living pressures affecting many low- to middle-income families, and with likely new federal carbon and mining taxes in the next couple of years, the call for even more tax is going to be a hard sell.  But there are two ways out for those who wish to donate more to Treasury's coffers, on whatever grounds they may choose.

First, governments can establish ''tax me more'' funds for those who wish to make gift contributions to the consolidated revenue fund.  Such a system exists in the US, but unsurprisingly it does not secure great bucketloads of money for government.

Second, if some people are so keen to pay more for health and social equality, they could volunteer extra payments to the Tax Office as part of their tax-return assessment.  In this way they can pay more, without obliging the rest of the population to cough up as well.

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Abbott chases working votes even Menzies forgot

There's a certain irony when Tony Abbott conjures up the ghost of Robert Menzies for his ''forgotten families''.

Menzies' forgotten people were the middle class.  Where the Labor Party was sectarian -- the unpretentious political arm of the union movement -- Menzies' non-Labor politics would represent everybody else.  (The rich and powerful, Menzies reasonably suggested, could look after themselves.)

But it's obvious in 2011 Abbott has shifted his focus to the traditionally working class segments of the population -- not just Howard's aspirational battlers, but dyed-in-the-wool union members.  In other words, those whose political power Menzies sought to counter.

Addressing the state council of the Victorian Liberal Party over the weekend, the Opposition Leader stated ''Let the message go out to our country from here in Melbourne, the manufacturing heart of our country, that we must be a country that continues to make things.''

This of course recalls the claim by Kevin Rudd during the 2007 election campaign he didn't want to be ''Prime Minister of a country that doesn't make things anymore.''

With that line, Rudd offered a sop to Labor's union base.  His Industry Minister Kim Carr spoke of thumping tables in Detroit and Beijing to get better deals for Australian manufacturers, and abandoning the doctrine of ''market fundamentalism'' to arrest job losses in Australian factories.

The desire for Australia to ''make things'' is evocative.  Abbott obviously knows who said it first, and who the phrase is intended to appeal to.

The Opposition Leader claimed in his speech ''there can be no first world economy without a manufacturing industry''.

Sure, the context was carbon pricing, which the Coalition maintains will hollow out Australian industry.  Defending an industry against a tax increase is not the same as advocating it be propped up with subsidies.  When the slogan ''Helping Families, Protecting Jobs'' -- displayed prominently at state council -- the Coalition is referring, in part, to the possible consequences of an emissions trading scheme on employment.

Australian Workers' Union boss Paul Howes has made it abundantly clear some unions are willing to help the Coalition to stop, or at least defang, the carbon tax.

But there's more going on than just the building of an anti-carbon tax alliance.

After all, opposition to the Government's carbon scheme does not explain the peculiar pride in Abbott's budget reply speech of his support for stronger anti-dumping measures which, the Opposition Leader claimed, would ''protect Australian industries from way-below-cost imports''.

Anti-dumping laws are pure protectionism.  Boosting anti-dumping laws has no economic justification.  Their only rationale is psychological -- so manufacturers feel like they have a legal defence against cheap foreign products.

The Productivity Commission has found anti-dumping laws benefit a small number of industrial firms at the expense of all consumers.

And the only other major group which supports the extension of anti-dumping laws is the Australian Workers' Union.  The union's ''Don't Dump on Australia'' campaign makes them unlikely allies with the Coalition.  The AWU is being consistent.  The Coalition is being opportunistic.

Nobody imagines Tony Abbott is a doctrinaire free marketeer.

The Coalition's ''Action Contract'', released in June last year, was in many ways typically Liberal -- full of Menziesian references to small businesses and schools.

But the Action Contract was produced at a time when the Labor government was not so hopeless.  It still seemed possible in 2010 the ALP might retain many of those who gave it victory in 2007.  A year later it's clear the ALP has lost the progressive vote to the Greens, and (with the carbon price) its industrial support looks shaky.

Hence Abbott sees opportunity for the Coalition.  His regime of factory tours and shift in rhetoric suggest that if an election was held today, the Action Contract could have a substantially different hue.  The Opposition Leader appears to believe the Coalition could win the hearts of Labor's industrial left in the very near future.

But you can't be everything to everyone.

As Phillip Coorey pointed out in Monday's Sydney Morning Herald, the Coalition's approach has also meant industrial relations -- one of the few areas where Abbott personally supports serious market-orientated reform -- has been put even further back on the shelf.

It would not do to alienate the AWU by recalling the ghost of WorkChoices when you're working so well together.

This seems to be what Nick Minchin was getting at when he distinguished last week between populism and policy principle.

Much has been made of the rootlessness of the contemporary Labor Party.  And the Coalition is reshaping its image in response to problems in the federal ALP.

But by chasing the votes of the industrial left, the Coalition risks abandoning its own base, and the affinity to economic liberalism which makes it distinctive.

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Wild colonial boy

Colony:  Strange Origins of One of the Earliest Modern Democracies
By Reg Hamilton
(Wakefield Press 2010, 312 pages)

In the 1850s, the colony of South Australia was a world leader in the development of modern democratic practices.

It was the first colony in the British Empire to establish the right of all men to vote;  the first to ''permanently'' end government funding of churches;  the first in Australia, and probably the Empire, to settle on triennial parliaments as a compromise between the traditional seven and the radical demand for yearly elections;  and the third, after Tasmania and Victoria, to adopt the secret ballot.

Reminding people of the leading role of Australia in developing radical democratic practice is important in itself, because the Old Left narrative which lauded these developments as part of their paean to the Australian working man have been superseded, in recent decades, by the New Left one which tends to take a dim view of most happenings in nineteenth century Australia.

There is also an important task in asking why South Australia became the ''democratic laboratory'' for not just the Australian colonies, but also the British Empire and hence the world.

Colony:  Strange Origins of One of the Earliest Modern Democracies has a good crack at both these roles.  The author is Reg Hamilton, who has a day job as a Deputy President of Fair Work Australia, and a personal interest in early South Australian history, as a descendant of an early colonist, Richard Hamilton, who arrived in the colony in 1837.

The Hamilton family came from Dover in England, and the author devotes a significant portion of the early part of the book to a study of the life, in particular the political life, of that town in the early nineteenth century.  This section is the least successful part of the book because, while a lot of the material is quite interesting, it is too long an entree before the South Australian main course.

Of course, the developments in South Australia do have English origins and, away from the Dover detail, Hamilton demonstrates that it was the Chartist agenda which was largely adopted in South Australia, with just minor adaptations, such as the move from annual to triennial parliaments.  He explains that those who drafted South Australia's radical 1856 constitution were almost all adult immigrants, who were clearly aware of contemporary British political ideas before they headed to Australia.

Of course, in a colony that was only two decades old, those old enough to be active political participants were less likely to be native born than they would have been in New South Wales at that time, but there is also the fact that those who emigrated from Britain often had a degree of dissatisfaction with the home country that helped trigger their departure.

While British Chartism was a major contributor to the rapid adaption of democratic ideas in South Australia, Hamilton also recognises that they were fertilised in other parts of the world, both in Europe and the colonies.  For instance, he provides a good summary of developments in Canada, a source too often neglected when looking for comparable countries for Australia.

Another factor in the rapid democratisation in Australia was the very newness of colonial Australian society, which meant that there was an absence of an entrenched privileged class trying to retain power and status at all costs.  What further distinguished South Australia from the other colonies, was not just that it never received convicts, but also the fact that, under the system devised by Wakefield, land had been distributed in small parcels and hence there was no squattocracy.

In addition, Hamilton makes the point that Australian democrats had a pretty easy road to hoe compared to many others of their ilk.  While there was opposition to some aspects of the democratic agenda from governors, or the Colonial Office, overall those with existing authority were far more tolerant than were the regimes that liberals in other parts of the world were trying to reform at that time.

Even those local Conservatives who opposed a full adult male franchise, nonetheless still wanted some form of local control, rather than direct Colonial Office rule.  The quick move to an extended franchise meant that some in South Australia, in turn, came just as quickly to appreciate a point which the South Australian Advertiser made as early as 1860, that universal suffrage was ''the only firm basis for political conservatism''.

Indeed, one striking feature is how polling day rioting rapidly disappears once the franchise is widened, with the 1857 South Australian election being ''very orderly'' compared to its predecessors of 1851 and 1855 when the franchise was more restricted.

A refreshing part of Hamilton's work is that he recognises that political developments take place within an economic context.  He shows how technological developments, such as Ridley's mechanical reaping machine, and the discovery of minerals, diversified the South Australian economy in the 1840s, enough to make South Australia a candidate for responsible government and democracy.

He also spots how local councils were putting roads jobs out to tender in the 1860s, noting that it was ''before the long experiment with direct and extensive public sector employment, which was reduced in the 1980s when contracting out became once again the fashion''.  He also observes how attitudes to taxation have changed, saying ''it is hard for us to remember the level of general taxation, and the general horror that proposals for taxation led to in colonial times''.

The path to the constitution of 1856 had begun on 29-30 October 1840, when the free ratepayers of Adelaide voted in ''the first democratic election on the continent of Australia, or in the Asian part of the British Empire''.  One of the odd features of this poll was that it used a sort of proportional representation, another South Australian contribution to the worldwide development of democratic practice.  While many modern Australians fail to appreciate the historical significance of many of these events, contemporaries were also sometimes unaware of how momentous they were.  Hamilton notes that Henry Parkes's radical Sydney newspaper The Australian skimmed over the Adelaide election, an event which Hamilton describes as ''the beginning of the long and successful experiment with democracy in Australia [which] ... began in a small polling booth at the junction of two dusty and unpaved roads in Adelaide''.

However, Hamilton makes it clear that ''the long and successful experiment'' was not a linear progress, observing that ''the first experiment in democracy on the Australian continent failed'' as the council ended up in financial crisis.  A similar thing happened when there was representative government as South Australia, with regular crises leading to 47 governments in 36 years, the most unstable record of any of the Australian colonies prior to Federation.  Elections within the newly widened franchise were often met with voter apathy and low turnouts.

Yet the new system did produce some landmark legislation, most notably Torrens Title, which revolutionised the means of keeping track of ownership of real estate.

The new South Australian democracy also had an extra agenda item which was not on the Chartist list of demands -- freedom of religion.  A key factor why this issue had a particular resonance in South Australia, was the high proportion of Protestant Dissenters in the population, plus the fact that even within the Church of England there was a view that churches should support themselves.  Not that Dissenters were beyond a touch of religious bigotry, as Hamilton describes in the case of George Fife Angas, who was so upset that his son married a Catholic that he not only excluded him from inheriting anything from his £850,000 estate, but also declined a baronetcy, probably through fear that it might end up being inherited by a Catholic.

As well as personal prejudice, there were of course still other imperfections with South Australia's democracy -- women could not vote, upper houses were undemocratic and even in the lower houses, electorates varied enormously in size.  However, South Australia was at the forefront of important change, change in which Australian colonial liberalism made a crucial contribution.

Yet it was achieved in a uniquely Australian way, without revolution or great disturbance, or soaring rhetoric.  Hamilton's book helps us to understand the way it happened, and how, generally speaking, the aim of the 1856 South Australian Constitution to allow everyone the common law right to the ''quiet enjoyment'' of their property has been delivered.

Full of hope or just hopeless?

Here on Earth:  An Argument for Hope
By Tim Flannery
(Text Publishing, 2010, 352 pages)

Tim Flannery, infamous for predicting that Adelaide would run out of water by 2009, is now proposing that there is hope for us destructive humans yet.  The Chief Climate Commissioner's latest work, Here on Earth:  An Argument for Hope, claims there are only two options from which the world must choose:  self implosion or harmonious integration with our environment.

Here on Earth:  An Argument for Hope is badly named -- if there is a strong argument in the book, it is lost in a convoluted narrative about earth's history.  Based almost entirely on James Lovelock's ''Gaia'' theory, Flannery outlines the development of the world to demonstrate that every living thing on earth is interconnected and dependent on each other.

While this is not a new idea, the simplistic way that Flannery puts forth his case leaves the reader wondering what he actually believes.

A lot of effort is put into explaining that since the dawn of time, humans have left a trail of environmental destruction in their wake.  From the time homo sapiens left the trees, it is argued, we have negatively affected the ecosystems around us.  Being the most effective predator has meant we have spent our sad, sorry past living beyond our means.

Flannery then tells us that hunter-gatherer societies deserve our deep respect because they understand and revere their surroundings.  They alone, it would seem, can live harmoniously with the earth.  Perhaps this is just a clumsily oversight in his previous tale of the pernicious early human race.

The division of labour gets the great compliment of ''benefitting our species'' since cave men roamed.  Half a page later however, we discover that Adam Smith's version of the principle has turned us into tiny repetitive cogs in the global industrial machine.  As a consequence we have lost the ''individual independence and mental acuity'' of the hunter-gatherers.

After demonstrating such little faith in the ability of modern humans, suddenly it is concluded that we can after all, save the world.

The recently appointed Chief Climate Commissioner has conveniently changed his conviction that Australia's capital cities, which were destined for doom, are now magically able to be saved.  If Armageddon was Flannery's current catch phrase his recent career change would be utterly redundant.

Predictably, all this leads to a discussion about carbon dioxide emissions and the urgent issue of climate change.  What is the cause of this great urgency?  Of course:  the growth in the mining industry.

Evidence for this revelation is scarce at best.  The entire argument seems to be precariously predicated on the theoretical Gaian idea of imbalance.

Interestingly, Lovelock himself admitted in a 2010 Guardian interview that the main international climate centres arc ''more than well aware how weak their science is''.  It is unsurprising then that in Flannery's version of events actual scientific facts barely make the cut.

In fact, Flannery goes so far as to blame the mining industry for the development of ''intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia, and even perhaps why murder rates are high in some communities.''

There is no doubt that the climate changes.  It has always done so.  And organisms have constantly adapted to changing environmental conditions.  Darwin called this ''survival of the fittest''.  That the wooly mammoth died out 4,000 years ago is not a statement that necessitates blame.

Evolution and adaptation are amoral and to argue, as Flannery does, that competition in the environment is immoral shows a scarily naïve understanding of science and of the world.

Here On Earth is exactly the sermon you would expect Tim Flannery to write.  He is consistently inconsistent in describing the supposed fork in earth's environmental road.

It would seem that Flannery's latest work begs an important question of our Prime Minister.  With growing evidence that the Australian public doubt anthropogenic climate change, surely the Australian public deserves to have a tax funded ''climate expert'' who is at least able to provide a reasonable, consistent and evidence-based analysis of climate change?  Apparently not.

Wikileaked

Inside Wikileaks:  My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website
By Daniel Domscheit-Berg
(Jonathan Cape, 2011, 304 pages)

There aren't many people ambivalent about Wikileaks.  US politicians have called for the site to be shut down.  Politicians and commentators have called for its founder, Julian Assange, to be assassinated.  Wikileaks and Assange are also the darlings of the left as they;  somewhat ironically, progressively expose the absurdities and misbehaviour of big government and occasionally big business.

I suspect for most people, their reaction is a mixture of interest and caution about the benefits of having various governments' dirty linen aired, especially since they mostly tell us what we already knew.  And while Assange has a roguish charm while questioning Prime Ministers on live television about whether they're guilty of treason, at a certain point the justification for his moral piety peters out.

Which is why Daniel Domschiet-Berg's Inside Wikileaks:  My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website is a worthwhile read for Wikileak lovers and haters alike.

In short, Domscheit-Berg was second in charge to Assange, with whom he had a chaotic relationship that progressively declined as the site attracted international fame and attention.

Whether or not Domscheit-Berg's motivation for writing his tale about his experiences with Assange is to inform how he ''experience[d] firsthand how power and secrecy corrupt people'', jealously, or simply to take the gloss off Assange's reputation, the book makes you sympathetic to his situation.

He writes that ''Julian Assange ... was my best friend ... the site made him into a pop star, one of the most intriguingly zany media figures in the world'', but then details how anyone who helped him reach this status was simply someone to be used and abused.

The two originally shared a kinship built around the common idealistic purpose of their project, in a world where they dreamed ''there would be no more bosses or hierarchies, and no one could achieve power by withholding from the others the knowledge needed to act as an equal player.''

But like all grand projects led by partners, friction quickly rose as Assange sponged off Domscheit-Berg, abused the friendship with a callous indifference and then struggled with the moral dilemmas resulting from their exploits.

What became apparent is that while Assange dreamed of being the architect of an intellectually inconsistent, anarchic, pseudo-communist, property and privacy-free world built around his interpretation of equality, he also had delusions that he'd somehow sit atop.  It is very Road to Serfdom.

Domscheit-Berg argued his objective was ''to shake up society ... to knock the bastards on the head, as he once put it''.  Though who ''the bastards'' are is amorphous depending on who is in a position of power and authority at any given time.

One of Assange's favourite sayings was ''the man in the uniform has to learn his lesson''.  It was a concept that clearly drove him in all his dealings with authority.  Domscheit-Berg writes about Assange's feisty attitude with a story of him refusing to pay a questionable fee to a train ticket inspector.

Considering the circumstances now facing key leaker and ''man in the uniform'' Private Bradley Manning, who allegedly supplied Wikileaks with its famous US State Department documents;  it shows he applies the principle universally.

And based on his experience with Assange, Domscheit-Berg clearly started to doubt aspects of the vision and also the benefits of Assange's status in their new world order.

It wasn't as though Assange's friction was isolated to Domscheit-Berg.  The stories he cites of his history with Assange mostly involve a constant state of conflict from the time they attended a German conference, where they ''[encountered a lot of resistance from data-protection activists.  'Protect Private Data -- Use Public Data' -- that was the slogan''.  Domscheit-Berg confessed that they ''operated in a gray area'', because as demonstrated by the release of bank account details for suspected tax evaders earlier this year, they had little interest in personal privacy.

But while Assange is painted as the comparative villain, Domscheit-Berg clearly wasn't a defender of the private domain.

In response to publishing leaked emails from Sarah Palin's hacked personal account, Domschiet-Berg pondered ''what is public and what is private?'', before he and Assange ''were convinced that [they] were strengthening the project by pushing the limits of what was acceptable.''

And the lack of interest in the legitimacy of the private domain clearly drove much of Wikileaks' progress.

One of their early leaks was that of a donor list for US Senator for Minnesota, Norm Coleman, caused by a ''misconfiguration'' on his website resulting in the leak of ''not only the names of Coleman's campaign supporters but their exact credit card details, including security codes, as well.''

Assange's lack of respect for private property was even on display with his personal behaviour as he regularly stole or destroyed other's property for his benefit.  Domscheit-Berg relays one story, where in a private computer server storage facility, Assange ''grab[bed] a power cord from the room next door and cut it in two ... after a bit of tinkering he has a new power source for his laptop.''

To be fair, Assange also applied this lack of respect for the private domain to himself.  When faced with the unintended CC'ing of an email to their donors, Wikileak's own donor list was promptly leaked to their own website.  After some moral introspection, he conceded it had to be published like any other leaked document.  Yet Wikileaks also forces its employees to sign a draconian confidentiality agreement which forbids them from leaking.

But the absence of a private domain is not Assange's only disconnect from the realm of reality.

He clearly got swept away with his own imagination and self-importance.  Perhaps when Wikileaks was emerging, governments may have been spying on his conduct, but without evidence he also indulged in the fantasy of being a wanted man.  He clearly enjoyed it, according to Domscheit-Berg, Assange was ''perpetually concerned with finding a new look and the perfect disguise.''

And his own position within Wikileaks was also central to maintaining his deluded world.

Domscheit-Berg pondered whether Wikileaks itself had developed into some kind of religious cult.

It's become a system that admits little internal criticism.  Anything that went wrong had to be the fault of someone outside.  The guru was beyond question.  The danger had to be external.

At one point after receiving a leak about Scientology, Domscheit-Berg argues becoming an ''all-consuming religion would have simplified a lot of things'' for Wikileaks.

For Assange, personal responsibility was clearly alien, with Domscheit-Berg claiming ''rarely was anything [Assange's] fault ... instead he blamed banks, airport staff, urban planners, and, failing that, the [US] State Department''.

By the time the reader reaches the final chapters, Assange symbolises a sort of selfish pseudo-celebrity effigy, with a casual indifference to his claimed cause, those it adversely affected and even those who supported him.

Meanwhile Domscheit-Berg portrays himself as a reasonably honest broker who never really strayed from Wikileaks original intentions.  But behind his progressively dying support for Assange, he comes across as someone suffering from Stockholm syndrome to an intellectual and philosophical captor who he sympathises with and loves.

While the world waits to see whether Assange will be extradited to Sweden and allegations against him are pursued there, and elsewhere, there is merit to reading Domscheit-Bcrg's book to give an idea of how he ended up in this situation.

This reader started with a mixed view of Asssange, but by the last page there is scant reason to feel sorry for his predicament;  because it might be the first time in life he's had to face responsibility.

For Assange, such a conclusion should be troubling, because his brand is intrinsically linked to Wikileaks and vice versa.  This book gifts Wikileaks the weight of Assange's shortcomings and ego, and diminishes the altruism that may have existed behind its foundation.

Bourgeois Dignity

Bourgeois Dignity:  Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
By Deirdre McCloskey
(University of Chicago Press, 2010, 504 pages)

Thanks in part to the intellectual emergence of a modern Malthusianism, much of the popular narrative on the human condition, including in the West, is presented in highly pessimistic tones.

As the argument goes, a fragile, rocky outpost in the Milky Way galaxy bursts at the seams with six billion people and counting, with considerable numbers continuing to reside in the squalor of absolute poverty.  For those on the higher rungs of the socio economic pecking orders the message does not get any better, with the impending doom of resources scarcity to befall extravagant and myopic consumers sooner, if not later.

Coupled with the modern propensity for communities to be swept up by a range of moralistic fears and panics both great and small, ranging from global warming to varied forms of ''stranger danger'', one could readily be forgiven for feeling pessimistic not only about where Australia and the world is heading, but a nagging guilt about from where we have come from in the first place.

Against this gloomy background, well researched and compelling accounts that celebrate the achievement of modern humanity presents at the very least a breath of fresh air, if not something quite revolutionary.  Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Dignity:  Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, the second volume in an expected six book series, provides a basis for the renewed understanding, and even appreciation, of the economic and social marvels of modernity.

One of the key details from Bourgeois Dignity is a solitary number:  16.  Unlike the spoof of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book and television series, in which the ''Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything'' is the number 42, McCloskey's number represents the little known, but very real, fact that in advanced economies per capita incomes have risen by a factor of at least 16 over the past two centuries or so.

What does this number mean?  What relevance does it have in terms of the lives of everyday people?  As McCloskey states in the clearest of terms, ''You, oh average participant in the ... economy, go through at least sixteen times more food and clothing and housing and education in a day than an ancestor of yours did two or three centuries ago.  Not sixteen percent more, but sixteen multiplied by the old standard of living''.

Moreover, when one takes account of technological changes and output quality improvements, the factor of material improvement might well be plausibly greater than 16 times during the modern economic history of the West, with numerous developing countries such as South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore and, now, China and India, following suit.

Like any reputable scholar with an appreciative sense of the contrary ''declinism'' arguments, McCloskey is at pains to explain that this increase in income has perhaps benefited the poor the most.  The basic story goes something like this:

profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich.  But in the second act ... other bourgeois rush forward at the smell of profit.  Prices fall relative to wages, which is to say that goods and services expand per person -- they have again and again and again -- and the poor get better off in real terms.

Amen.

McCloskey also argues in Bourgeois Dignity that economic progress, driven by entrepreneurial brain power seeking to produce higher valued goods and services at lower resource costs, has not laid waste to the environment, as some of the modern variants of the intellectual left claim.  Amen to that, too.

How humankind has progressed is one thing.  Arguably the much larger, and unanswered, question in economic history, is why did we get to the position of material opulence that exists today?  Why did the ''wealth of nations'', to borrow the famed term by economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith, come about as a realistic template for the common person?

To be sure there are plenty of speculative explanations put forward by today's economic historians, some of which verge on the novel.

Gregory Clark offers what might be called a bio-genetic explanation for the modern world, in which the higher survivability rates of the offspring of the British rich led to downward social mobility, thus creating a nation of educated and virtuous shopkeepers and inventors.  Joel Mokyr arguably offers a more sweeping account of the Industrial Revolution that considers a mix of influences as diverse as political institutions, human capital investment and Enlightenment ideas and values.

The innovative contribution of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Dignity is that a specific, non materialist account of what created the modern world is put forward.

As set out in Bourgeois Dignity, the ''change in talk and thought about the bourgeoisie ... was probably of greater importance for explaining the modern world''.  This implies that alternative explanations, often propounded by the intellectual establishment of economic historians, may not provide the sole or compelling explanations for the sixteen fold increase in wealth.

In simple terms:  it wasn't capital accumulation, it wasn't foreign trade, it wasn't coal, it wasn't colonialism, it wasn't slavery, it wasn't technology, it wasn't property rights, and it wasn't religious belief that forged our wealthy world.  It was, according to McCloskey, pro market changes to ''the habits of the lip'', that accorded dignity and liberty to the emerging bourgeois classes.

As explained in further detail, after ''about 1700 in Britain, however, as earlier in Holland, the vulgarities of the economy and of money and of dealing, with their unsettling creativity came gradually to be talked about as non-corrupting.  They began to be seen as worthy of a certain respect, as not being hopelessly vulgar or sinful or underhanded or lower caste''.

Given her intense intellectual interest for at least two decades on questions of rhetoric and communication, it is unsurprising that McCloskey would collate some intriguing qualitative case studies in support of her novel account of material progress.  Bourgeois Dignity provides accounts, including observations by such notable Enlightenment identities as Voltaire, which explains that ''the merchants and machine makers and manufacturers in northwestern Europe were elevated for the first time to the rank of ''gentlemen''.

By emphasising the role of language in shaping economic attitudes and, ultimately, outcomes, McCloskey presents an economics that sharply contrasts with the neoclassical variety that is taught at most Australian and international universities.

Neoclassical economics paints a caricature of economic man (or homo economicus) in possession of full knowledge about the surrounding economic environment, including the prices and quantities of existing goods and services, and with a rational appreciation of the relative costs and benefits of alternative actions to reorder the environment.

An early critic of the neoclassical assumptions of human agency, Friedrich Hayek, emphasised the importance of relative prices for effectively communicating fragmented bits of economic knowledge amongst the innumerable participants of the marketplace.  Thus arguably began a strand of thought that acknowledged, more or less, the importance of talk to economic functioning.

McCloskey has almost certainly taken the role of communication in economic life to a different level altogether than that posed by Hayek.  There is perhaps no better evidence of this than in Bourgeois Dignity itself.

However if the use of language to persuade was instrumental in uplifting material living standards in rhe modern world, is there also not the risk that language might be framed in ways that could subdue the rate of economic growth, or even reduce it in absolute terms?  Is it possible that the poison pens of anti capitalism could eventually leave the economy unstuck?

This question is not of a hypothetical nature.  In addition to the neo-Malthusian anxieties mentioned above, Australians have borne witness to incessant ''bank bashing'' by politicians, the denigration of quarterly or annual corporate profit results by NGOs and other vested interests, and the verbal baiting of ''rich fat cats'', ''coal barons'', ''greedy big businesses'' and the like.

The force of words is also apparent due to unrelenting cloud of policy confusion, spin, and even worse, by government, often known as ''regime uncertainty''.  The recent federal carbon tax proposal floated by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, some six months after her steadfast denials over wanting to impose this tax burden on Australians, is a prominent example of this adverse effect at work.

These utterances do nothing but denigrate the accomplishment of a functioning market economy, and risk discouraging new entrants in the future who are willing to risk their time and capital to service others.  At the very least, they set a poor example to the business community and others of the need to maintain a dignified self reliance and self responsibility, at arms length from the state, if one is to prosper in a globalised, competitive world.

McCloskey has rendered a great service by reminding us that language matters.  Painting on a wide intellectual canvas, yet accessible to the intelligent layperson, Bourgeois Dignity is an obligatory read for all those interested in how Western Civilisation came to be, and its prospects for the future.

We're all devils

All the Devils Are Here
By Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
(Penguin, 2010, 400 pages)

Economists will debate the causes of the global financial crisis for decades to come.  There will never be any agreements as to the actual causes.  In the meantime many books will be written, many conferences organised and future Oliver Stones will have many movie scripts to work with.  Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera have provided a stable of characters, each of whom could be a future Gordon Gekko in their history of the crisis, All the Devils Are Here:  The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.

This book is full of detail, full of individuals making good and bad choices that all contributed to the global financial crisis.  The quasi-government agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were, without doubt, out of control and market manipulators.  McLean and Nocera tell a story of private sector players innovating to avoid dealing with the two agencies.  In the meantime, too many people traded instruments whose risk-return characteristics they didn't really understand, while relying too much on the imprimatur of the ratings agencies.

Some have described this book as telling the story of smart people suddenly doing dumb things.  To be sure, with the benefit of hindsight a lot of people did a lot of dumb things, yet that explanation is very unsatisfying.  Given that a major financial crisis has occurred with many old and respected banks swept away, many millions suddenly unemployed and the global economy teetering on collapse, a tragi-comedy explanation is seriously incomplete.

Smart people doing dumb things is a necessary but not sufficient explanation for the crisis.  Smart people do dumb things all the time, yet the global economy is normally quite sound.  McLean and Nocera include a lot of detail in their book -- fascinating detail -- but ultimately it is bad history.  To be clear, this book is well-written, well-researched and engrossing but it is bad history because ultimately it is just one damn thing after another.  McLean and Nocera provide no narrative, just a wealth of information and facts.

Those facts -- damning facts -- do not go to the question of the causes of the crisis.  In many respects we see people reacting to Fannie and Freddie, relying on ratings agencies, making dodgy loans and repackaging them, taking on risks they didn't understand, behaving very poorly.

The biggest problem with the book, however, is the lack of discussion about the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act.  This goes to the heart of the issue.  Bankers are notoriously risk-averse -- indeed several individuals in the book are described as being particularly risk averse -- yet American bankers went on a lending spree, where they deliberately lent money to people whom they knew couldn't pay back the loans.  They then repackaged these loans into junk bonds, got ratings agency approval, and then sold them as triple A rated securities.  Where was the common sense response to this nonsense?

Many US policy makers are still in denial over the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).  Peter Wallison, a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry, issued a minority report which details the multiple failures of government policy, such as the CRA.

Hank Paulson gets off too lightly as well.  It is certainly true the US was in recession in 2008, but there can be no doubt their actions in August and September 2008 contributed to the crisis.  The US government nationalisation of Fannie and Freddie damaged investor confidence -- as McLean and Nocera point out.  What they don't point out, however, is how Paulson further damaged confidence in September.  He was talking down the economy and warning of another great depression and investors, who might have thought the government had access to superior information, responded accordingly.  Of course, the government didn't have superior information, but the market responded nonetheless, and the collapse of Lehman Brothers intensified a recession into a far greater economic crisis.

Of all the books on the financial crisis, this is the most comprehensive and has been held up by some as the definitive account.  While it is incomplete, it nonetheless is an important contribution to our understanding of the events of the past few years, adding a level of detail that few accounts to date have included.

Where are you Superman?

Waiting for Superman
Directed by Davis Guggenheim
(Paramount Vantage, 2010, 102 minutes)

''What we're against is proposals that divide people''.  So says Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, in response to a proposal from Washington D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.  Rhee's controversial idea was to give teachers a choice between retaining their unrivalled job security and a modest pay rise, or forgoing it for the chance to earn dramatically higher wages based on performance.  As Davis Guggenheim, director and narrator of Waiting for Superman, tells us, local union leaders were so threatened by Rhee's proposal that they refused to allow their members to vote on it.

Guggenheim, director of Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is not exactly a fire-breathing conservative.  He was also responsible for Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention biographical film and his 30-minute television campaign advertorial.  But with Waiting for Superman, this director could hardly have delivered a more stunning indictment of education bureaucrats, teachers unions and, by extension, the Democratic Party.

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek (who wrote a flattering biography of Franklin Roosevelt and is generally sympathetic to Democratic presidents) says in the documentary that ''teachers unions are a menace'', and that the national Democratic Party is their ''wholly-owned subsidiary.''

Waiting for Superman combines devastating survey data and examination scores with an often emotional portrayal of five young Americans whose local schools are failing them, to paint a bleak picture of US public schools.

Since 1971, spending per student on education in the United States has increased from $4,300 to $9,000 in inflation-adjusted terms.  At the same time, test scores of American students have stagnated while the rest of the world surged ahead.  The proportion of American students judged ''proficient'' in reading and maths for their year level is appallingly low -- less than 40 per cent in most states, and as little as 12 per cent in the worst educational districts like Washington D.C.

The system of granting ''tenure'' -- which effectively guarantees a teacher's job for life -- as well as staunch resistance from unions to merit-based pay come under heavy fire in the movie.  In just one example of the damage inflicted by tenure, the state of Illinois has had only 38 school districts out of 876 ever successfully fire a tenured teacher.  Compared to other professions -- where one in fifty-six doctors and one in ninety-seven lawyers lose their right to practise, just one in every two and a half thousand teachers ever lose their jobs.

The challenges of firing incompetent or negligent teachers were demonstrated by New York State's notorious ''rubber room'', where more than 600 tenured teachers awaited disciplinary hearings on their full salaries and benefits.  In these fiscally-straitened times and at a cost of more than $100 million annually to taxpayers, the rubber room highlights the threat posed by education unions not just to quality education, but also to the fiscal solvency of state governments.

Statistics like these are particularly galling when considered against testimony from experts interviewed in the film.  One argues that the effect of sacking just the worst 6-10 per cent of teachers and replacing them with merely average ones would catapult the United States to the top of educational world rankings.

Waiting for Superman, however, is not all doom and gloom.  Against this depressing backdrop, the film also profiles educational entrepreneurs who offer some hope for American students from low-income backgrounds.

Geoffrey Canada is one such visionary.  Himself a product of a rough neighbourhood and raised by a single mother, he set out to reform education in the United States first as a teacher, then as an educational consultant.  But frustrated by continual barriers put up by education bureaucrats, and an unwillingness to tackle the problems caused by union obstinacy, Canada took charge of the Harlem Children's Zone, an all-encompassing social-welfare charity that includes charter schools.

Each of the children profiled in the film have applied for a charter school like Harlem Success Academy, one of seven charter schools in New York run by the Success Charter Network.  Charter School network KIPP (''Knowledge is Power''), also profiled in the documentary, now includes 99 schools which span across 20 states and Washington D.C.  Another, SEED in Washington D.C, was the first charter to open an urban boarding school.  All are hugely successful, and as a result demand for places far exceeds what they are able to offer.  Charter school legislation in the United States requires oversubscribed schools to hold a public lottery to select their students.

This process sets up the final shattering scenes of the movie, as each of the children learns their fate:  will their number be drawn out of the lottery, meaning they are accepted into an outstanding charter school, or will they be consigned to their local ''dropout factory''?

Although the film has generally been well received, it is has not been without criticisms.  Aside from what you would expect from vested interests, the strongest charge against Waiting for Superman is that it is light on solutions.  To an extent, this is true.  While the movie does an excellent job describing the problems the American education system faces, it resists being bogged down in the policy detail of potential solutions.  In just one example of this oversight, school vouchers -- a popular tool for facilitating school choice worldwide -- are not mentioned once in the movie.

Yet the villains and heroes in this story are made abundantly clear.  Solutions follow logically.  Unions who protect failing teachers at all costs, resist merit-pay and stifle innovation through their political patronage must be weakened.  Educational entrepreneurs who are building excellent schools need to be supported, freed from red-tape and left alone to do their work.

The film also trumpets an important finding from the data of successful charter schools:  the achievement gap can be bridged.  For years, many academics in the education field believed it was impossible, or at least extremely difficult to get the same results from kids from disadvantaged backgrounds as you could get from students from privileged upbringings.  Yet the best charter schools have demonstrated, that in just a few years, they can transform students who previously tested at the lowest levels of academic achievement to the highest.

It certainly isn't easy -- requiring longer school hours, highly paid and highly competent teachers, lofty expectations and an unapologetic focus on college as an end goal.  But what it does prove is that there is nothing inherently wrong with the children, just the system that adults are responsible for designing and running.

Some commentators have been quick to argue that the film offers limited valuable lessons for the Australian education system.  It may be true that it doesn't suffer from as many chronically underperforming schools as the United States, and educational choice is facilitated by generous government funding to private schools.  But we would be kidding ourselves if we think that our schools are immune from the problems facing the United States.  Perhaps the public availability of NAPLAN test data will influence Australian perception of school performance over the next few years.

An interesting post-script to the film is the fate of the hard-charging D.C Schools Commissioner Michelle Rhee.  Rhee, a Democrat, resigned from her office after the mayor that appointed her, Adrian Fenty, lost a hotly contested Democratic primary.  Fenty's opponent was heavily backed by the American Federation of Teachers, who spent more than $1 million in an effort to defeat the pro-reform mayor.

Since resigning, Rhee has founded Students First, a nationwide political advocacy group that aims to raise $1 billion to run campaigns in favour of education reform, and to counteract the influence of teachers' unions.  Rhee has also been working with Republican governors across the country who want to tap her expertise.

This underlines a political realignment currently taking place in the United States.  Many ideologically liberal activists and even Democratic Party officials are lining up closely with conservative educators who have long argued for expanded choice and reducing the role of the state in the provision of education.  Minority community leaders like Geoffrey Canada are articulating the message that, by not tackling vested interests in education, Democrats are failing to address the poverty cycle that engulfs the low-income and ethnic minority voters they claim to represent.  A film like Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim, with his impeccable liberal pedigree, can only spur this realignment.

It's the pollies fault, too

Sideshow:  Dumbing Down Democracy
By Lindsay Tanner
(Penguin, 2011, 240 pages)

Late last year the English journalist and cricket writer Matthew Engel spent some time in Australia.  He found much to admire.  Aside from the extraordinary success of our economy ''the most successful ... of any western democracy'', he was impressed by our ''remarkable respect for the rule of law and a great sense of civic responsibility.''

And then he visited Canberra.  ''I have seen a few crazy parliaments'', he wrote in the Financial Times:

I have watched the Israeli Knesset, where one extreme would happily exterminate the other -- and the Dáil in Dublin, the only known gathering of inarticulate Irishmen.  I have seen the empty shell that constitutes the US Senate.  I have done time at the Commons, and been appalled by the pathetic lack of individuality of the whipped curs.  I thought I was unshockable.  But Canberra's House of Representatives is the worst.  These curs only snarl as instructed.

The empty robotic nastiness of public life in Australia has been with us so long that we fail to notice how unusual it is.

It is only when you have lived overseas that you realise that it is only in Australia that politicians cannot open their mouths except to insult each other.

Lindsay Tanner is a clever and thoughtful man, who having ''devoted his life to the serious craft of polities'', admits he found the previous election dispiriting.  He is distressed by what politics has become in this country.  He can see -- as anyone can -- that by behaving as mindless automatons, endlessly repeating stupid slogans, politicians drive us to change the channel whenever their heads appear on our screens.

You might have thought therefore that -- free-at-last -- the former finance minister might have used his first book after leaving politics, Sideshow, to chastise his former colleagues for their behaviour.

Not a bit of it.  Apparently the debauched state of public life in Australia is not the fault of its participants.  It's all the fault of the media.  Yes, Tanner admits, we politicians ''indulge in puerile stunts in parliament designed to win momentary television coverage'', yes we gate-crash light entertainment programs.  Of course we run scare campaigns about higher taxes, boat people, or people's working conditions.  But it's not our fault.  Says Tanner:

No one in the Labor Government, or indeed the Howard Government, should be blamed for surrendering to these pressures.  If we had taken a purist approach, we would have left ourselves naked in the middle of the media storm, defenceless against the irresistible commercial pressures to sell newspapers and win ratings.

What utter self-serving nonsense!  Politicians behave as they do because it suits their purpose to do so.  This is demonstrated by the ease with which they switch off the abuse when it suits them.  When one of them rides on ahead and it comes time in parliament to praise their fallen colleague, they gush about the public spiritedness and noble achievements of men and women they never had a good word for when they were alive.

If journalists wait for any scrap of unscripted behaviour -- whether it's tiny differences of opinion between politicians from the same team, or unintentionally revealing body language -- to pounce on to blow it up and distort it into a row or a gaffe, whose fault is that?

I would argue it's theirs, not ours, because of their refusal to drift off message.  Even on the ABC's panel show Q&A, which is meant to allow a flow of ideas, politicians never drift from their script and say anything interesting, (in marked contrast to its British equivalent Question Time).

Which is not to deny that of course a lot of what passes for political journalism in this country is not much chop.

Yes, we distort things to create conflict where perhaps none exists, and of course we sensationalise things to attract our audience's attention.

But we are competing for the attention of an audience that welcomes politics as child welcomes a dose of Agarol.

To be fair to Tanner, he does not accuse the Australian media of behaving as it does out of caprice.  He acknowledges most Australians don't want to hear about serious politics.  He blames this indifference in part on prosperity.  It was different, he suggests, back in the 1980s when there was a widespread agreement that Australia needed to do something to save its economy.  The apathy of the public -- and hence the media -- can be explained, in part, by the fact we have not had a recession for the past twenty years.

There is no doubt something to be said for this argument, reminiscent as it is of Malcolm Fraser's promise that he would run the country so well that he would get politics off the front page of the newspaper.

On the other hand, the United Kingdom and United States have both suffered vicious recessions in the past three years without any apparent flight to quality in their media -- indeed, in America the ''serious'' newspapers that Tanner seems to favour are losing staff and market-share at such a pace that their futures have been called into question.

Alongside prosperity, Tanner blames the proliferation of media for the public's escapism.  At times he seems to come close to despairing of the way the variety of modern media make it easy for the average punter to tune him and his colleagues out.

But while he may pine for the golden age of the mass media, with middle-brow mass audiences forced to absorb information thrown at them for want of choice, he knows it isn't coming back.

Tanner believes the consequences of this decline imperil democracy:

There is a clear risk that genuine political engagement with the political process will shrink back into the provenance of an educated, aware minority as the media connection between ordinary citizens and the decision-making process continues to wither.

We could he warns, ''revert to the kind of restricted democracy that prevailed in Europe in the nineteenth century, with education and engagement the barriers to involvement, instead of property and income''.

There is no doubt the problem is a real one, though the ignorance of the masses has been one of the arguments against democracy since time immemorial.  What we ought perhaps to ask ourselves, is how is it that relentless dumbing-down of mass culture has taken place at a time when western societies have allegedly never been better educated?

That there are no real answers to the problem is demonstrated by how pathetic and small are the glimmers of hope he offers for those worried about the state of political culture.

Bloggers -- yawn -- feature high on the list, suggesting as they do, that ''the internet is broadening quality commentary on issues and ideas''.  He then reels off a list of bloggers, ignoring the fact that the best-read political blog in Australia is written by Andrew Bolt, a journalist who works for the very oldest of medias, the newspaper.

Other suggestions are bizarre, including his idea that American crime series Law and Order is a possible template for communicating complex policy issues to Australian audiences.

(Actually perhaps this isn't such a bad idea -- if they ever make a drama about Rudd's office they could do worse than call it The Special Victims Unit.)

Oddly, the most vicious, ill-informed and partisan of the old media -- talkback radio -- is exempted from Tanner's criticism.  Shock jocks, are, he explains ''a vital point of connection between the democratic process and the wider world''.  And while Tanner was apparently ''occasionally hammered a little unfairly'' when he appeared on them, ''they invariably allowed me to get a serious point across.''

Tanner ends his book with a call to arms which is really a howl of despair:

We have no magic wand to solve the sideshow problem, but by acting individually and collectively we can start to push back against the forces of entertainment colonising our democracy.

Earlier, in a passage of his book devoted to ''gotcha'' journalism, Tanner recounts an anecdote from an interview he once gave to Leigh Sales.  Asked to sum up Kevin Rudd in one word, he answers ''nasty''.  Alas he had misheard the question;  he thought he was being asked to sum up, John Howard.  Luckily the kind people at Lateline edited it out.

Tanner does not reflect what it says about him, or the political culture he comes from, that such a childish insult was the first word that popped into his head.

If he wants to start pushing back against the entertainment values he despises, and to get the people Australia engaging with serious ideas he professes to love, he would have done better to have called on his former colleagues to stop acting like moronic thugs.

The fault, dear Lindsay, lies not in the stars of Sunrise but in yourselves.

Winning the war against electricity

Writing on The Drum last week, Jane Shaw saw the carbon tax as a Trinity comprising an ideological touchstone for the Greens, a political weapon for the Opposition and a millstone around the neck of Labor.

The new carbon tax advertising campaign featuring Cate Blanchett aims to turn the Liberals' weapon into a suicide pill and convert Labor's millstone into a bright red ruby and transform the ideological touchstone to an emerald.  On the heels of Cate's crucifixion comes Malcolm Fraser and John Hewson's endorsement of the carbon tax, and as if on cue, Tony Windsor vocalising the wait-for-the-rest-of-the-world policy that most in the Coalition want.

Shaw set out to illustrate that a price on carbon is not sufficient to bring about a carbon-lite industry.  While recognising that electricity wholesale prices can range between -$1,000 and $12,500 per megawatt hour (MWh), she took as her starting point a wholesale market price for electricity set by the highest cost bidder at $90.

On this basis she defined as windfall profits the sums other suppliers earned in excess of marginal costs.  So a brown coal generator with costs at $25 per MWh would earn $65 and a black coal generator with costs at would earn $55.

The specified price juncture of $90 pre tax would become $96 post a carbon tax of $20 per tonne on the basis of the higher costs incurred by marginal generators (Combined Cycle Gas).  Even at that particular price juncture, the margin of the brown coal generator after having paid the carbon tax is reduced from $65 to $45;  the black coal generator sees its profit cut from $55 to $41.

Moreover, a price of $90 per MWh is a relatively rare excursion in the National Electricity Market where the average spot price is under $40 per MWh.  A consistent $90 per MWh price would convert the coal-based generators into rivers of gold for their owners.

But existing suppliers actually earn very low profits.  Thus Loy Yang Power (32.5 per cent owned by AGL) according to the latest AGL accounts earned an annualised profit of about $135 million.  That is on an asset with a replacement cost of over $4 billion.  Loy Yang Power's latest profits mean it yields a return of a little over 3 per cent.

This wafer-thin profit margin is earned notwithstanding massive improvements in productivity of the coal-based power stations.  Twenty years ago there were over 10,000 workers in the Victorian brown coal stations.  Today, in spite of output increasing by one third, and massive improvements in reliability, the number (including contractors) is under 4,000.

An important matter raised by Shaw's article is that a tax alone is unlikely to force the substitution of low for high carbon dioxide-emitting plants.  It may well be that a carbon dioxide price of $20 per tonne would have no effect in forcing an existing generator out of the market.  At some price one or more would be forced to close -- estimates are that a major brown coal generator might exit at a tax of $80 per tonne of carbon dioxide.

An $80 tax would add mean a trebling of the wholesale electricity price.  But it is unclear how even that level of tax would attract significant new entry from low-emitting generators (presumably gas).  An investor would need to be certain that the impost on carbon dioxide emissions would remain.  If the tax were to be dropped (either because the global warming scare had abated or because no other country was implementing such a regime) gas fired base load stations would see their value shredded.  Accordingly, the investors would require a government assurance that they would be reimbursed for such an eventuality.

This returns us to the pre-1995 situation of government ownership or power purchasing agreements.  That in turn nudges us towards the central planning regime that we escaped with the national market, and with it the onset of all the inefficiencies that we had escaped.  Canberra has embarked on a War Against Electricity, at least against the carbon dioxide-emitting electricity generators that account for 95 per cent of supply.

If success in the war means closure of some coal fired capacity it will be bought at the cost of a steep rise in prices to households and to producers.  Shaw erroneously suggests that only 12 per cent of demand comes from industry.

In fact the large industry consumers alone account for 26 per cent of demand.  Households and small business together comprise around 50 per cent of demand.  Whatever the industry/household share of electricity, contrary to the Government and other ads presently running, costs will not be carried by the ''big polluters'' but by the consumer.

There is no possibility of carbon-free generation like wind playing a significant role except at considerable expense, while nuclear, the other carbon-free source of electricity, is demonised.  And the possibility of failure in Canberra's War Against Electricity prevents less efficient alternatives, like gas generators, playing a major role in filling a gap from closing down coal generators.

This is because the failure to force existing closures and the prospect of new coal generators leaves these high-cost alternatives vulnerable.  Ideological touchstone or green emerald, a carbon tax will leave its indelible mark on the economy and on the body politic.

Memo to Indonesia: clear the red tape

Despite decades of reform, Indonesia's potential as a strong growth economy fuelled by investment won't be realised until all levels of government learn to get out of the way.

Like a lot of countries throughout south-east Asia, Indonesia came through the global financial crisis relatively well.

Working from a low base, its growth has been consistently around 5 and 6 per cent annually and it had low exposure to American and European markets in comparison with the growth markets on this side of the Pacific Ocean.

Despite continuing uncertainty, in the first quarter of this year the growth rate was 6.5 per cent, according to official government statistics, and Australia has been part of the charge.

Australia is one of the few countries that has been increasing foreign direct investment in the archipelago since dips resulting from the global financial crisis.  While Australian investment has plateaued in some sectors, considerable capital has flowed into the construction industry over the past three years.  And direct investment makes up more than half of all capital invested.  The trend should hardly come as a surprise.

Since the mid-1980s, the national government has staggered liberalisation of investment laws and regulations to make Indonesia a more attractive destination.

The impetus for doing so has been the dramatic need to tackle poverty alleviation, the realisation that international companies are needed for their skills and expertise to build industries, and to compete with other countries in the region.

Major investment reforms passed in 2007 were a watershed, affording foreigners the same treatment as domestic investors and removing opaque regulations about industries open to investment.  Instead, the government introduced a transparent ''negative'' list that made it clear which sectors were out of bounds.

Coupled with other reforms, the market has rewarded reforms and Indonesia's international investment reputation has improved.

But the challenge isn't over.  Faced with international capital constraint as developed markets pull themselves out of recession, Indonesia now needs to act to keep itself internationally competitive.

And the challenge is more urgent because of the investment risks now being posed by the country's mass-democratisation.

Recent examples show local governments are becoming the source of unnecessary investment risk resulting from petty bureaucracy, inconsistent local regulations and conflicts with the national government.

It's a reality now being faced by international mining company Newmont, and its investment on the island of Sumbawa.

The company's investments are being squeezed in a fight over a divested 7 per cent ownership share in its Sumbawa gold and copper mine that both the national and local government wants.

With the national government making the acquisition, the local government, with the support of politicians in the national House of Representatives, is threatening to revoke the mining licences altogether.  In retaliation, the House of Representatives is even considering sacking the Finance Minister.

Examples of investors being caught in between political struggles are hardly new.  But for a country in a fragile state of economic development, political struggles undermine Indonesia's capacity to soften perceptions of risk when it is already known for corruption and weak governance.

These risks go well beyond Sumbawa, with a Standard & Poor's report concluding that recent investment reforms provide greater investor clarity.

In the latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development index, Indonesia ranks as one of the most restrictive investment destinations among the countries surveyed.

Combined, the consequences of investor experiences and poor international ratings may already be playing out in investor's minds, with some sectors not attracting the same level of investment before the global financial crisis.  Faced with a capital-constrained world, Indonesia will need to be both an attractive as well as competitive destination for investment.  To do so, further reform is now needed.

Instead of managing the problems of politics, the government should be removing the remaining investment restrictions by extending the principles of transparency and certainty that underpinned the 2007 reforms.

Reformers should look at liberalising mandated government ownership that will only heighten the perceptions and realities of risk from all levels of government in an immature democracy.

The Indonesian national and sub-national governments have a right to secure appropriate income from developing natural resources, but that can be secured through well-designed licences and contracts.

Sophisticated contracts are even more important since the government is looking to utilise public-private partnerships to attract investment finance to tackle under-investment in infrastructure that is also holding back the country's attractiveness as an investment destination.

Liberalisation should also seek to reduce the number of sectors on its negative list, particularly in utilities, considering national infrastructure priorities.

The investment dividend that could flow from further reforms would help Indonesia build the industries needed to further harness opportunities during the next round of the region's economic growth.

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Free economies will choose money over the gun

We live in an age of world peace.  To be more specific:  a ''neoliberal'' age of world peace.  Certainly it doesn't seem like it.  The 21st century opened with a terror attack that sparked wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The latter seems to be getting more violent.

But the data is unambiguous.  The world is fighting fewer wars.  And the wars that are being fought are less deadly than at any time in living memory.

A Canadian non-profit, the Human Security Report Project, has been tracking the number and intensity of conflicts in the past 50 years.  Between 1950 and 1959, there was an average of 6½ international conflicts per year -- the vast bulk of them fought between states.  In our decade, the average has been less than one, almost all civil wars.

Sure, after the fall of communism, internal conflicts sharply spiked, as a decaying Russia and disengaging United States withdrew support for many petty tyrannies in the Third World.  But the number of conflicts has since resumed its long-term decline.

War is also becoming less deadly.  In the 1950s, the average international conflict killed 20,000 people per year.  The average conflict in the 2000s killed a 10th of that.  You'd think this would be widely recognised and celebrated.  But it's entirely at odds with the impression of escalating global violence we get from the nightly news.

So, war is now rare.  Take a moment to celebrate.  Then think of the simple ideological narratives these observations upset.

Anti-capitalist intellectuals from Lenin to Naomi Klein have associated competition in the marketplace with competition on the battlefield.  Yet while the world is more commercial and more globalised than at any time in history, it's more peaceful too.

Foreign policy realists long claimed the post-Cold War world -- without two superpowers holding the globe together under a threat of mutual nuclear destruction -- could be unstable.  But if anything conflict has declined faster in the past two decades.

So what accounts for all this world peace?  If we want war to be even less common, we'd better figure out what's causing its demise.  Many people would credit democracy -- if citizens are given a chance to vote, they'll elect pacifists.  But as American political scientist Patrick J. McDonald pointed out in his 2009 book The Invisible Hand of Peace, democracy is not immune to war mania.

McDonald finds that during the 19th century democratic states were more likely to go to war than autocratic ones.

This is not an academic question.  If we want Middle East peace, focusing on democracy at the expense of everything else won't succeed.  And we shouldn't pin our hopes for the peaceful rise of China solely on elections.

The other big theory on the causes of peace focuses on commerce.  Nations that trade with each other don't fight.  War is bad for business.  But this theory doesn't quite work either.  What about World War I?  European commerce was booming early in the 20th century, but 37 million people still died.

McDonald argues it isn't the volume of commerce or the extent of globalisation that creates peace.  It's the domestic institutions that promote commerce -- that is, the ''neoliberal'' policies of low trade barriers, limited government ownership, and private property -- which eliminate the incentives for war.

By studying hundreds of interstate conflicts over the past two centuries, McDonald finds that only economic freedom is closely correlated with peace.

That's because regulatory barriers to trade spark international political conflict, not co-operation.  And businesses that enjoy trade protection like military conquests.  It's how they expand their markets.

These are general rules and it's a messy world.  America's free markets and democracy did not stop it invading Iraq.

Yet a 2005 study by the Cato Institute, an American think tank, found ''economic freedom is about 50 times more effective than democracy in diminishing violent conflict''.  If we want the age of world peace to last, that's what we need to focus on.

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