Tragic, But Unprecedented? Not Yet

The word unprecedented is applied to almost every bad thing that happens at the moment, as though particular events could not have been predicted, and have never happened before at such a scale or intensity.  This is creating so much anxiety, because it follows logically that we are living in an uncertain time:  that there really is a climate emergency.

The historical evidence, however, indicates fires have burnt very large areas before, and it has been hotter.

Some of the catastrophe has been compounded by our refusal to prepare appropriately, as is the case with the current bushfire emergency here in Australia.  Expert Dr Christine Finlay explains the importance of properly managing the ever-increasing fire loads in an article in The Weekend Australian.  While there is an increase in the area of national park with Eucalyptus forests, there has been a reduction in the area of hazard reduction burning.

The situation is perhaps also made worse by fiddling with the historical temperature record.  This will affect the capacity of those modelling bushfire behaviour to obtain an accurate forecast.

We have had a horrific start to the bushfire season, and much is being said about the more than 17 lives lost already, and that smoke has blown as far as New Zealand.  Unprecedented has been the claim.  But just 10 years ago, on 9 February 2009, 173 lives were lost in the Black Saturday inferno.  On January 13, 1939 — Black Friday — two million hectares burnt with ash reportedly falling on New Zealand.  That was probably the worst bushfire catastrophe in Australia's modern recorded history in terms of area burnt and it was 80 years ago next week.

According to the Report of the Royal Commission that followed, it was avoidable.

In terms of total area burnt:  figures of over 5 million hectares are often quoted for 1851.  The areas now burnt in New South Wales and Victoria are approaching this.

Last summer, and this summer, has been hot in Australia.  But the summer of 1938-1939 was probably hotter.  In rural Victoria, the summer of 1938-1939 was on average at least two degrees hotter than anything measured with equivalent equipment since, as the table below shows.

The summer of 1938-1939 was probably the hottest ever in recorded history for the states of New South Wales and Victoria.  It is difficult to know for sure because the Bureau of Meteorology has since changed how temperatures are measured at many locations and has not provided any indication of how current electronic probes are recording relative to the earlier mercury thermometers.

Further, since 2011, the Bureau is not averaging measurements from these probes so the hottest recorded daily temperature is now a one-second spot reading from an electronic device with a sheath of unknown thickness.  In the United States, similar equipment is used and the readings are averaged over five minutes and then the measurement recorded.

The year before last, I worked with the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology (BMKG), and understood their difficulty of getting a temperature equivalence between mercury thermometers and readings from electronic probes at their thousands of weather stations.  The Indonesian Bureau has a policy of keeping both recording devices in the same shelter and taking measurements from both.  They take this issue very seriously and acknowledge the problem.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has a policy of a three year period of overlap, yet the metadata shows that for its supposedly highest quality recording stations (for example Rutherglen), the mercury thermometer is removed the very same day an electronic probe is installed.  This is a total contravention of the Bureau's own policy, and nothing is being done about it.

I explained much of this to Australia's Chief Scientist in a letter some years ago — neither he nor the Bureau, deny that our current method of recording temperatures here in Australia is not covered by any international ISO standard.  It is very different from methods currently employed in the United States and also Indonesia, and as recommended by the World Meteorological Organisation.

Then there is the issue of the remodelling of temperatures, I explained how this affects trends at Rutherglen in a blog post early last year.

The remodelling, that has the technical term of homogenisation, is a two-step process.  With respect to the temperature maxima at Rutherglen, the Bureau identified a "statistically significant discontinuity" in 1938-1939.  Values were then changed.

It is somewhat peculiar that the Bureau did not recognise, in its process of remodelling the historical data for Rutherglen, that the summer of 1938-1939 was exceptionally hot because of drought, compounded by bushfires.  Rather David Jones and Blair Trewin at the Bureau used the exceptional hot January of 1939 as an excuse for remodelling the historical temperature record at Rutherglen, with the changed values subsequently incorporated into international data sets.

These made-up values are then promoted by the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  This propaganda is then tweeted by Hollywood superstars like Bette Midler to The Australian Prime Minister.

After a recent Sky News Television interview I did with Chris Smith several people have contacted me about the hottest day ever recorded in Australia.  They have suggested it is January 16, 1889, when it was 53.1 degrees Celsius at Cloncurry in Queensland.  A problem with this claim is that the temperature was not measured from within a Stevenson screen, though it was a recording at an official station.  A Stevenson screen (to shelterer the mercury thermometer) was not installed by Queensland meteorologist Clement Ragge at Cloncurry until the next month, until February 1889.

The hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia using standard equipment (a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen) at an official recording station is 51.7 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Bourke Post Office on January 3, 1909.

As the saying goes, we are all entitled to our own opinion — not our own facts.

Time To Break The Shackles

Western Australia has always been a fast-moving, entrepreneurial, and successful state.  Blessed with an abundance of natural resources, a thriving agricultural sector, and people with go-ahead attitude, WA has much to celebrate as the 2010s draw to a close.

More people than ever before are in full-time work, exports are booming, and West Australians possess a lifestyle that is the envy of the Eastern States.

Now is the time to take stock and consider the challenges and opportunities that WA has as we prepare to enter the first year of a new decade.

CHALLENGES

Red Tape

The first challenge for the West Australian economy is to cut red tape.

My recent research found WA regulations placed nearly 108,000 restrictions on businesses, organisations, and individuals.  The restriction count is comparable to the Eastern States, even though they have far bigger populations than WA.  There is significant work to do be done to cut the red tape burden that is weighing the economy down.

The Government has taken positive steps to cut red tape.  Its willingness to work with the Federal Coalition has delivered positive results.  Establishing a "one-stop shop" for environmental approvals will fast track investment in the resources sector by removing the onerous process of dealing separately with both State and Federal regulators.

Its Streamline WA project has also raised the profile of red tape reduction.  The challenge now is for the government to deliver reductions that unleash the WA economy.

Green Activism

The second major challenge is to fend off the continual attempts by the green movement to undermine WA's resources and energy sectors.

The mining industry alone accounts for 40 per cent of the WA economy.  Attempts by activists to shut down new mining projects through lawfare and boycotts must be resisted.  The Environmental Protection Authority's plans from earlier this year to introduce a backdoor carbon tax through industry "contributions" to a carbon abatement fund has fortunately been quashed.

The Government needs to ensure that environmental policy does not take the state down an economically harmful route.

The WA Government should form sensible policy to allow the resources sector to flourish.

The move to allow fracking last year was a step in the right direction.  However, the ban is still in place for 98 per cent of the state.

New gas projects will help drive down the cost of energy that is currently crippling the Australian economy.

Fair Share of GST

Thirdly, despite recent positive changes to the State distribution of GST, WA is still not receiving its share of revenue.  Even with improvements, WA continues to subsidise economically underperforming states like South Australia.

West Australians should reap the full benefits of their strong economic performance and the WA Government should argue for States to retain 100 per cent of the share of the GST that they raise.

OPPORTUNITIES

Small Businesses

With red tape reduction on the cards, and the phasing in of small business tax cuts by the Federal Government, small business in WA is in a strong position to thrive.  Small businesses account for 97 per cent of all businesses in WA and contribute over $48 billion to the State's economy.  Small business growth promotes competition and creates employment opportunities.  Favourable conditions for small business will allow WA to take full advantage of a strong culture of ingenuity and entrepreneurship.

Resources Sector

Next year will be another big year for the WA resources sector.  The deal struck between Australia and the United States on mining rare earth materials will be a boon for the State's mining sector.

The ability to form new supply chains with the US offers Australia's mining industry a significant opportunity.  WA has the resources to take full advantage of the new partnership.  WA is already home to the largest rare earths producer outside of China, Lynas, which mines and processes rare earth oxides at Mt Weld, south of Laverton.

High iron ore prices have boosted Australia's mining exports and strong demand from Asia for Australian resources is likely to continue to grow in the new year.

The strong prices have resulted in higher-than-forecast Government surpluses, which have given the Government the opportunity to tackle the State's growing debt.  While prices are expected to ease, the recent pickup in investment combined with moves to cut red tape in the resources sector will put the WA economy in a good position moving into the 2020s.

Sporting Capital of Australia

And finally, WA has the opportunity to turn Perth into Australia's new sporting capital in the new decade.

New and improved facilities will attract more sporting events.  With the redevelopment of the WACA, the iconic wicket can play a greater part in world cricket.  Optus Stadium has packed more Fremantle and West Coast fans in to create an even more hostile environment for the eastern clubs.

This should go a long way to boosting the odds of bringing a flag home to Perth in the 2020s.

The Workers' Great Cultural Revolution

Journalists and commentators tend to make politics a lot more complicated than it needs to be.  What happened to politics in Australia in 2019 (and after last week's United Kingdom election, in Britain too) is quite easily explained.  All you need to do is to look at what is the "2019 Word of the Year", according to the leading publishers of dictionaries in Australia and Britain.

In this country, a committee assembled by the Macquarie Dictionary voted its word of the year to be "cancel culture" (although pedants might argue that's a term made up of two words).

According to the dictionary, the word captured "an important aspect of the past year's Zeitgeist ... an attitude which is so pervasive that it now has a name, society's cancel culture has become, for better or for worse, a powerful force".

"Cancel culture" describes the "phenomenon whereby people call for a boycott of a public figure and their careers, products or businesses" in response to an accusation of a socially unacceptable action or comment by that figure.  Synonyms for "cancel culture" include "call-out culture" or "outrage culture".

In Britain, the word of the year from the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary is "climate emergency".  Runners-up are "climate action", "climate crisis", "climate denial" and "eco-anxiety".  "Climate emergency" is defined as "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it".

By way of comparison, in America the 2019 word of the year according to Merriam-Webster is "they".  Not "they" as in a group of people, but as a pronoun to refer to an individual whose gender identity is non-binary that is used in place of "he" or "she".

If ever you wanted to know the difference in the preoccupations between people who use dictionaries and those who don't, there's no clearer demonstration.

If you live in a town in regional Queensland or a city in the north of England the chances are you're more worried about your job, the family finances and your children's education than you are about gender pronouns or climate emergencies/crises/disasters, or what should happen to comedians who make rude or offensive jokes.

In 2020, "realignment" could well be in the running for word of the year — at least as it applies to politics and was revealed in the 2019 national elections.  In 2019, politics was realigned as conservative political parties gathered increasing support from "the working class" and those with less education, while left-wing parties won support from the wealthier and better-educated voters.

The role of culture is another feature of what happened to politics in 2019.

There's significant evidence that in Australia, when Bill Shorten, the then opposition leader, said a plebiscite on same-sex marriage would "give haters the chance to come out from under the rock", the Labor Party lost votes.

Similarly, in Britain, when Jeremy Corbyn as opposition leader didn't sing the national anthem at the commemorative service at St Paul's Cathedral to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the British Labour Party most likely lost votes too.

Religion, in the form of freedom to talk about your religion, played a role in the 2019 federal election in Australia.  The Coalition's attempts to pass legislation enshrining a measure of freedom of religion in this country could be one of its major parliamentary battles in 2020.

Likewise, in the British election, patriotism and the idea political leaders should be loyal to the country they lead had an influence on the outcome.

The consequences for public policy of these developments are yet to be fully revealed.  However, one outcome that can already be witnessed in this country is the Coalition's reaction to the shift in its electoral base by imposing higher regulation and more taxes on particular industries — most notably on the banking and finance industries — and generally by being more willing to use government power to intervene in the market.

For political parties in the English-speaking world one of their major challenges in 2020 and beyond will be to manage the electoral and policy consequences of the political and cultural realignments we witnessed in 2019.

Academic Agitators Rely On The Public Purse

On Sunday the ABC published an article stating that masculinity is the biggest obstacle to climate ­action.  The highly offensive piece, which was steeped in misandry and titled "Is fragile masculinity the biggest obstacle to climate action?", was written by University of Sydney academic Megan Mackenzie.  It was published exactly the way you would expect:  with a triple barrel of taxpayer funds.

First, Mackenzie is employed at Sydney University, which is a taxpayer-funded institution.  According to its annual report last year, the university pocketed a total of $710.3m in Australian government grants, plus an extra $45.5m in NSW government grants.  This is hardly an insignificant amount of taxpayer dollars.

Second, Mackenzie's research work also has been generously funded by the taxpayer.  In 2014, she received an Australian Research Council grant worth $434,692 to fund a project entitled Women in Combat:  A Comparative Analysis of Removing the Combat Exclusion.

Third, her article has been published by the ABC, which is, of course, another taxpayer-funded institution funded to the tune of more than $1bn a year.

While Mackenzie has completely bought into the notion that white men are the embodiment of evil, she needs to remember that a large number of Australian taxpayers who are funding her research are hardworking white men against whom she rallies.

It is wrong for researchers such as Mackenzie to continue to take benefit from the money of people who they consistently and openly deride in the public forum.

Last year, Sydney University hosted American professor, author and "renowned anti-racism educator" Robin DiAngelo on campus so she could harangue white people about how racist they were.  Taxpayer money is being used without the slightest hint of questioning, self-reflection or consideration for the taxpayers themselves.  If academics such as Mackenzie were to attempt to make a living from propounding identity politics, radical gender theory and eco-poetics, they would not survive in this world.  This is because there is no market among the general populace, who naturally have little desire to pay someone to insult them.  The harsh reality for those employed in the humanities is that without funding via other people's money, they would struggle to earn their keep.

What Sydney University academic Mackenzie has done is to connect two diametrically opposed topics that currently obsess the elite of this country:  gender and climate change.

This is something at which the university appears to excel.  Readers will now be familiar with its FutureFix program, in particular the Multi­species Justice project, which is described by the univer­sity as "a post human reconceptualisation of justice via a multi­species lens" and that looks at how "justice across the human and natural world (would) look like and entail".  Moreover, a lecturer also proposed that we need to consider seriously the "arguments for the formal inclusion of animal interests in democracies".

The university even has its own all-encompassing Environment Institute, which covers everything from the Great Barrier Reef to justice and culture.  In October, the institute hosted a two-day symposium titled Unsettling Ecological Poetics, during which various participants from universities around Australia gathered to read poems about climate change, sustainability, radical feminism, racism and LGBTQ+ issues.

The move to combine disciplines is part of a growing worldwide trend to create new and exciting interdisciplinary studies.  In a recent article for The Conversation, a couple of academics from the University of California stated the case for combining climate change science and the humanities with their article "Why science needs the humanities to solve climate change".

There is little doubt that Australian universities are in crisis.  This is because academics such as Mackenzie have completely rejected the cornerstones of Western civilisation and, in doing, so are cutting themselves and students off from truth, reason and knowledge.  The reason student numbers are falling in the ­humanities is because academics appear to be indulging in their own interests without consideration for anything else.

These cloistered academics are completely out of touch with mainstream Australians, but even in the face of resounding defeat they refuse to see it.  They belong to the elite who were voted out in May by mainstream Australians and rejected en masse by the British public last week.

Yet the government continues to fund agitators who are filled with the zeal of the righteous, and who not only believe their own propaganda but also insist everyone else must believe it, too.  By giving money to institutions such as the university, the ARC and the ABC, the Coalition is funding a progressive ideology that is contrary to tradition, contrary to what people believe and contrary to the truth.  The Coalition might keep winning elections, but as long as it keeps funding left-wing institutions that promulgate insidious identity politics it will continue to lose the battle of ideas.

Automating The Big State Will Need More Than Computers

Robodebt — the automated Centrelink debt issuance program that was found invalid by a federal court last month — is not just an embarrassment for the government.  It is the first truly twenty-first century administrative policy debacle.

Australian governments and regulators increasingly want to automate public administrative processes and regulatory compliance, taking advantage of new generations of technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain to provide better services and controls with lower bureaucratic costs.  There are good reasons for this.  But our would-be reformers will need to study how robodebt went wrong if they want to get automation right.

The robodebt program (officially described as a new online compliance intervention system) was established in 2016 to automate the monitoring and enforcement of welfare fraud.  Robodebt compared an individual's historical Centrelink payments with their averaged historical income (according to tax returns held by the Australian Taxation Office).  If the Centrelink recipient had earned more money than they were entitled to under Centrelink rules, then the system automatically issued a debt notice.

That was how it was supposed to work.  In practice robodebt was poorly designed, sending out notices when no debt actually existed.  Around 20 per cent of debts issued were eventually waived or reduced.  The fact that those who bore the brunt of these errors had limited financial resources to contest their debts contributed to robodebt's cruelty.  In November, the federal court declared that debts calculated using the income average approach had not been validly made, and the government has now abandoned the approach.

Automation in government has a lot of promise, and a lot of advocates.  Urban planners are increasingly using AI to predict and affect transport flows.  The Australian Senate is inquiring into the use of technology for regulatory compliance ("regtech") particularly in the finance sector.  Some regulatory frameworks are so byzantine that regulated firms have to use frontier technologies just to meet bare compliance rules:  Australia's adoption of the Basel II capital accords led to major changes in IT systems.  And the open banking standards being developed by CSIRO's Data61 promise deeper technological integration between private and public sectors.

Regulatory compliance costs can be incredibly high.  I have estimated that red tape costs the economy around 11 per cent of GDP in foregone output.  The cost of public administration to the taxpayer is considerably more.  Anything that lowers these costs is desirable.

But robodebt shows us how attempts to reduce the cost of administration and regulatory compliance can be harmful when done incompetently.  The reason is built into the modern philosophy of government.

Economists distinguish between administrative regimes governed by discretion and those governed by rules.  The prototypical example here is monetary policy.  Rules-based monetary policies, where central banks are required to meet targets fixed in advance, are less flexible (as the RBA, which has consistently failed to meet its inflation target is keenly aware) but at the same time provide a lot more certainty to the economy.  And while discretionary regimes are flexible, they also vest a lot of power in unelected bureaucrats and regulators, which comes at the cost of democratic legitimacy.

Automation in government is possible when we have clear rules that can be automated.  If we are going to build administrative and compliance processes into code, we need to be very specific about what those processes actually are.  But since the sharp growth of the regulatory state in the 1980s governments have increasingly relied less on rules and more on discretion.  ASIC's shrinks-in-the-boardroom approach to corporate governance is almost a parody of the discretionary style.

The program of automating public administration is therefore a massive task of converting — or at least adapting — decades of built up discretionary systems into rules-based ones.  This was where robodebt fell over.  Before robodebt, individual human bureaucrats had to manually process welfare compliance, which gave them some discretion to second-guess whether debt notices should be sent.  Automating the process removed that discretion.

The move from discretion to rules is, to be clear, a task very much worth doing.  Discretionary administration feeds economic uncertainty, and ultimately lowers economic growth.  We have a historically unique opportunity to reduce the regulatory burden and reassert democratic control over the non-democratic regulatory empires that have been building up.

Of course, public administration-by-algorithm is only as effective (or fair, or just, or efficient) as those who write the algorithm build it to be.  There's a lot of discussion at the moment in technology circles about AI bias.  But biased or counterproductive administrative systems are not a new problem.  Even the best-intentioned regulations can be harmful if poorly designed, or if bureaucrats decide to use discretion in their interest rather than the public interest.

Robodebt failed because of an incompetent attempt to change a discretionary system to a rules-based system, which was then compounded by political disregard for the effect of policy on welfare recipients.  But robodebt is also a warning for the rest of government.  The benefits of technology for public administration won't be quickly or easily realised.

Because when we talk about public sector automation, we're not just talking about a technical upgrade.  We're talking about an overhaul of the regulatory state itself.

Bureau ''Cooling The Past To Declare Record Heat''

In September 2017, the Bureau declared the hottest ever September on record for the state of Victoria based on temperature data from Mildura.

I've since shown that this was helped along by the Bureau replacing a mercury thermometer with an electronic probe that can record a good 0.4 degrees hotter for the same weather.

There is not only the issue of the Bureau not providing any information on how the electronic probe was calibrated, but as I've explained to the Chief Scientist, there is also the issue of averaging:

There is a lot of natural variability in air temperature (particularly on hot sunny days at inland locations), which was smoothed to some extent by the inertia of mercury thermometers.  In order to ensure some equivalence between measurements from mercury thermometers and electronic probes it is standard practice for the one-second readings from electronic probes to be averaged over a one-minute period, or in the case of the US National Weather Service the averaging of the one-second readings is over 5 minutes.

The Australian Bureau began the change-over to electronic probes as the primary instrument for the measurement of air temperatures in November 1996.  The original IT system for averaging the one-second readings from the electronic probes was put in place by Almos Pty Ltd, who had done similar work for the Indian, Kuwaiti, Swiss and other meteorological offices.  The software in the Almos setup (running on the computer within the on-site shelter) computed the one-minute average (together with other statistics).

This data was then sent to what was known as a MetConsole (the computer server software), which then displayed the data, and further processed the data into "Synop", "Metar", "Climat" formats.  This system was compliant with World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards.  The maximum daily temperature for each location was recorded as the highest one-minute average for that day.  This was the situation until at least 2011.

I have this on good advice from a previous Bureau employee.

It is likely to have been the situation through until perhaps February 2013 when Sue Barrell from the Bureau wrote to a colleague of mine, Peter Cornish, explaining that the one-second readings from the automatic weather station at Sydney Botanical Gardens were numerically-averaged.  At some point over the last five years, however, this system has been disbanded.  All, or most, of the automatic weather stations now stream data from the electronic probes directly to the Bureau's own software.  This could be an acceptable situation, except that the Bureau no-longer averages the one-second readings over a one-minute period.

Indeed, it could be concluded that the current system is likely to generate new record hot days for the same weather, because of the increased sensitivity of the measuring equipment and the absence of any averaging/smoothing.  To be clear, the highest one-second spot reading is now recorded as the maximum temperature for that day at the 563 automatic weather stations across Australia that are measuring surface air temperatures.

Just yesterday, the Bureau fed that "hottest ever" meme with a claim that analysis of data from about 700 weather stations across the country showed Wednesday was the hottest day recorded in Australia, with the nationally averaged maximum daytime temperature reaching 41.9°C.

That was apparently a full degree higher than the previous record of 40.9°C set on Tuesday, which itself broke the mark of 40.3°C from January 2013.

But how exactly are the temperatures being measured, and which stations are being combined?

The Bureau has deleted the hottest day ever recorded with a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen, which was 51.6°C at Bourke in 1909.

Then there is the issue of the Bureau cooling the past.

For example, it is a full 1.4 degrees cooler in Darwin on 1st January 1910 in the official ACORN-SAT version 2, temperature data base, relative to the actual temperature recorded back then in a Stevenson Screen with a mercury thermometer.

I have also documented how the Bureau put a limit on how cold a temperature can be recorded.

Not to mention closing stations in high altitude regions that may record colder temperatures.  So the 700 weather stations used to calculate the hottest day on Wednesday may be skewered warmer since the closure of stations in the coldest places:

During June and July 2017, blizzard conditions were experienced across the Australian Alps, but we will never know how cold it actually got.  Because a MSI1 card reader prevented the equipment — able to record down to minus 60 — from recording below minus 10 at Thredbo and probably also at many other locations.

It is also impossible to know how cold this last winter was relative to 1994 because the weather station at Charlotte Pass was closed in March 2015 — it is no longer in operation.

I've written to the National Audit Office about only some of these issues and that was some years ago now.

Movement Of The People

Boris Johnson's landslide election victory provides Australia with a unique opportunity to strengthen ties with our oldest and one of our closest allies.

To take full advantage of this once in a generation opportunity, the Morrison government must aim for much more than a bare-bones FTA.  It should use the existing Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (CER) as a blueprint for a comprehensive agreement complete with reciprocal work rights for Australian and UK citizens.

Boris Johnson has previously supported such a proposal, and when UK trade secretary Liz Truss visited Australia in September she said freedom of movement was "certainly something that we will be looking at as part of our free-trade negotiations".

High Commissioner to the UK George Brandis has also hinted at a relaxation on visa arrangements, stating "there are different visa categories and different visa restrictions that it would be good to see relaxed".

This is one of the key benefits of the Australia-New Zealand CER agreement.  In addition to be being one of the world's most comprehensive free trade agreements — which is based on mutual recognition of standards, rather than the regulatory harmonisation approach favoured by the EU — the CER agreement includes generous rights for Australians and New Zealanders to live and work in their respective countries.

Unfortunately, Morrison has previously rejected the idea of CER agreement as a basis for an Australia-UK FTA, saying "the New Zealand arrangement is quite unique and it's not one we would probably ever contemplate".  This must be re-evaluated.

Australia and the UK share deep institutional, cultural and historical ties dating back centuries.

When the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay in 1788, they brought with them the institutions of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.  They brought a culture that valued enlightenment principles like freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech — even though they sometimes failed to live up to them.

Over the past 232 years the institutions we inherited have taken on some unique Australian characteristics, such as the American principles added to our Westminster parliamentary system.  Our culture has likewise been shaped by successive waves of immigration, as well our relations — both good and bad — with our indigenous communities.

But the culture and the institutions we inherited remain distinctly recognisable.  And our ties with the UK have been strengthened by everything from the wars we've fought together to the sports we play against each other.

This explains why the UK is the second largest source of foreign investment in Australia.  It's why almost 1.2 million Australians were born in the UK — more than any other foreign country.  And it's why living in London has been a rite of passage for many young Australians.

Unfortunately, this rite of passage has been made much more difficult in recent years.  Faced with rising discontent over the level of EU immigration, Theresa May, then the Home Secretary under the Cameron government, responded by attempting to make it more difficult for non-EU citizens to get visas (as restricting EU immigration was not an option).

May's "hostile environment policy" created a major scandal over the deportation of some legal migrants who had been in the country almost their entire lives.

But May's reforms also made it more difficult for Australians wanting to work in the UK, with the number of visas granted to Australians falling from 37,375 in 2005 to 19,134 in 2017 (according to figures compiled by the Adam Smith Institute).

Correcting this ought to be a priority when negotiating an Australia-UK FTA.

Opponents of reciprocal work rights may point out that Brexit was, at least in part, motivated by opposition to the EU's freedom of movement.  This is true.  But in 2018 a poll published by Canzuk International showed no such hostility exists to freedom of movement between Australia and the UK.

The poll asked 13,600 people in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK whether they supported freedom of movement between the four countries.  Large majorities in all countries were in favour;  the proposal 73 per cent support in Australia and 68 per cent in the UK.  Only 17 per cent of Australians and 19 per cent of UK citizens were opposed.

This highlights the ongoing strength of the institutional, historical and cultural ties between the core Anglosphere countries.  But another factor is that all four countries have similar levels of economic development and standards of living.  This reduces risk of a country being overwhelmed by the number of immigrants, which can occur when freedom of movement exists between developed and relatively undeveloped, or relatively unstable nations.

The Morrison government must cease the opportunity that Boris Johnson's election victory provides and sign a wide-ranging FTA complete with reciprocal work rights for Australian and UK citizens.  The already existing CER agreement between Australia and New Zealand provides a blueprint for the type of agreement we should be aiming for.

If there's one thing that's clear, it's that an Australia-UK FTA that lacks improved visa arrangements will be a massive missed opportunity.

Red Tape Is Costing Australia $176b A Year

Excessive government regulation is harming the economy, reducing freedom of choice and making people's lives harder.

Becoming a hairdresser in New South Wales requires approximately 1,224 hours of study and can cost $12,060.  In order to open a restaurant in the same state you must fill out 48 separate forms and acquire 72 licences.

These are just a few of the regulations that make up the endless web of federal, state, and local government red tape that is costing the Australian economy $176 billion per year — the equivalent of $19,300 per household.

Even kids' birthday parties are affected, as an Adelaide mother found out when she was fined $187 for hiring a magician to entertain 14 children at her son's birthday party in a local park.

As Jenny Barret from the City of Burnside council told ABC Radio Adelaide, members of the public must pay $185 for a permit to use the park "if [they] are going to get a third-party contractor in, such as a magician or a bouncy castle or a face painter".  This is because third-party contractors require public liability insurance.

A permit is also required for people planning to hold an event with more than 60 people, and this may be reasonable.  But it's hard to see the sense in requiring a permit for a magician to entertain 14 kids at a birthday party.

Does the council think the kids will be attacked by the balloon animals or traumatised when they see a rabbit suddenly pulled out of hat?  Unexpected things do happen, but if there is a need for insurance then surely it is the responsibility of the magician hiring out his services.

Local councils issuing ridiculous fines is sadly all too common.

Last month A Current Affair reported that Melbourne's Melton City Council had fined a man $1,000 for using an outdoor fire pit he had bought at Bunnings, while a Beaumaris woman received a $200 fine from Bayside Council, also in Melbourne, for only carrying a single dog poo bag.

But all levels of government impose red tape that makes people's lives harder.

Here in NSW there are a staggering 107,726 regulatory restrictions on the books.  And on a per capita basis, NSW is the least regulated state — with 13.3 regulatory restrictions per 1,000 people — compared to Tasmania's 74.1 regulatory restrictions per 1,000 people.

That's according to my forthcoming research, which applies a new method of measuring red tape pioneered by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in the United States.  Known as RegData, this method uses artificial intelligence to count the number of restrictive clauses in legislation and regulation, which are words and phrases such as "shall" and "must not".

The research found that the number of regulatory restrictions at the federal level is 356,000, a 9 per cent increase from just five years ago.  Staggeringly, regulations created by federal agencies, such as ASIC and APRA, have increased by 200 per cent since 2005.

The scale of this regulatory increase is surprising, but the fact it's increasing is not.  We have a permanent bureaucracy and a political class that believes its job is to constantly come up with new rules and regulations, whether they are necessary or not.

This doesn't mean reducing red tape is impossible, it just takes political will.  Governments at both the state and federal level should begin by implementing a "one-in-two-out" rule so any new regulation must be accompanied by the repeal of two outdated or unnecessary regulations.

This was the approach taken by British Columbia in Canada, which has succeeded in cutting red tape by 48 per cent since 2001.  Once one of Canada's worst-performing provinces, British Columbia is now one of its best — and personal incomes have increased by almost 20 per cent in real terms as a result.

Thankfully, there are signs that the federal Coalition government understands the problem and wants to address it.

Assistant Minister Ben Morton has set up a Deregulation Taskforce with an initial focus on three areas:  reducing the regulatory burden for food manufacturers, making it easier for businesses to employ their first person and getting major infrastructure projects started sooner.  The task force will presumably then move on to other areas.

There are also positive signs coming out of the NSW Government, with Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Planning Minister Rob Stokes recently announcing a series of reforms to the state's planning system designed to "slash assessment timeframes, reduce red tape and fast-track projects in high growth areas".

Time will tell if these efforts are able to significantly reduce the red tape burden.  In the meantime, people across Australia will have to continue to bear the burden of endless rules and regulations dreamt up in by politicians and bureaucrats across the country.

The Great Realignment

Britain's General Election — the results of which will, hopefully, be seen by the end of today (Sydney time) — is the most consequential in a generation.  It pits avid socialist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn against Brexit-backing Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Corbyn would cripple Britain's economy, associate with terrorist organisations like Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA, and wants to have a second referendum on the European Union to undermine the largest democratic vote in the country's history.  His campaign has been marred by charges of anti-Semitism, with almost half of Britain's Jews saying they would consider leaving the country if he wins.

The past six weeks have focused on Brexit, public services, and leadership.  But something bigger is happening below the surface.  The earthquake reshaping politics across Western democracies will define this election result.

In 1960, leading political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote that "for most of the 20th century, working-class voters in developed countries generally supported Left-oriented parties, while middle- and upper-class voters supported Right-oriented parties".

This is no longer true.  Working-class voters are increasingly moving to the right.  Progressive middle-class voters are moving to the left.  This realignment is defying expectations, changing party positioning and redefining left and right.  We saw this all at play in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory and Scott Morrison's surprise 2019 election result.

Now the latest YouGov poll for Great Britain has the Conservatives at an extraordinary 17-point lead among the lower middle-class and working-class voters, known as the "C2DE".  By comparison, the Conservatives lead the middle-class "ABC1" grouping by a narrow five points.

The United Kingdom is having an election because of the Remain-majority parliament's repeated failure to deliver Brexit.

Johnson's strategy is to break the so-called "Red Wall" of working-class traditionally Labour seats in the Midlands and North of England that voted Leave — but in the process sacrifice some Remain supporting areas that have voted Conservative in the past.  This is why he has spent much of the campaign wearing high-vis standing next to adoring workers.  He wants to win Britain's equivalent to Scott Morrison's "Quiet Australians", who swept the Liberals to an unexpected victory by winning outer suburban and regional voters.

These are the people who are alienated by Corbyn's London-centric elitism.  They are unlikely to have a university education, are not ashamed to be British and value stability, safety and unity.  They live in places like Bishop Auckland, a constituency in the northeast of England that has never in its 130-year history, been held by a Conservative.  But with a narrow 502 vote Labour majority, and with over 60 percent of residents voting for Brexit, it is widely forecast to change hands.

Corbyn claims to care about "workers", but his strongest support comes from progressive middle-class Remain voters in London and university towns like Oxford and Cambridge.

Labour was ahead 16 points in the final London poll from YouGov.  These are the sort of people comfortable with change and diversity, who like the cosmopolitan ideals of the European Union, and are supportive of immigration and action on climate change.

My book, Democracy in a Divided Australia, argues that major parties which developed along traditional left-right class divides can struggle to handle this new dynamic.  The main parties now depend on a coalition of voters from a mixture of both backgrounds.  If they go too much in one direction they can alienate from the other side, as Morrison found when he got a lower vote in inner-suburban areas that were historically Liberal strongholds, such as Tony Abbott losing his seat of Warringah to an independent.

The Conservatives are similarly at risk of losing seats in London and the southeast that voted to Remain.  This includes Esher and Walton held by foreign secretary Dominic Raab and leafy Richmond Park held by minister Zac Goldsmith.  If too many of these sorts of seats are lost at this election, or in future, it could spell electoral defeat for the Conservatives.

Meanwhile, in the hope of winning over traditionally Labour-supporting Brexiteers, Boris has moved to the left on economics.  He has promised more spending and state intervention to help failing businesses, albeit much less than Corbyn.  This strategy, which has echoes of Trump's approach to trade and manufacturing, is not risk-free.  It gives credence to many of Corbyn's economic arguments.

Even if, as predicted, the Conservatives win, this is not the end of tumultuous times, Politics remains very much in flux, in Britain and throughout the English-speaking world and beyond.

A Fake Assault On ''Fake News'': Government's Intervention Is As Chilling As It Is Insulting

The Morrison government bills its proposed digital platform reforms, announced on Thursday, as "world-leading".  That may be true, in the same way that China's "Great Firewall" — a tool of authoritarian suppression — was "world-leading" when it began in the 1990s.

If that comparison seems dramatic, it is meant to be.  The government's ham-fisted measures have absolutely no place in a liberal democracy like Australia.

The proposed laws come as a response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's digital platforms inquiry, which in itself was largely a response to complaints by conventional media outlets about the impact of social media on their business models.

Not that they don't have a point.  There is an uneven playing field, with broadcasters and publishers subject to a suite of regulations that digital platforms are not, ranging from advertising standards to defamation law.  But the way to achieve "platform neutrality" — as the government calls it — is to scrap said regulations, not apply them to new players in ways that are almost certainly unworkable.

But what should worry us most is the proposed remedy for "fake news" — fabricated stories on dubious websites purporting to be legitimate reporting.  Citing the "increased prevalence of fake news and disinformation", the government plans to have the digital platforms develop a "voluntary" code of conduct on "news quality", overseen by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

For one thing, as problems go, fake news is extremely exaggerated, largely by sections of the commentariat seeking to explain away electoral phenomena such as Brexit or Donald Trump.  The conventional narrative is that huge sections of the population are being duped by nefarious conspiracy theorists flooding the internet with bogus reports.

But the evidence doesn't stack up.  Analysis of Twitter user patterns published in Science magazine this year, for example, found that more than 80 per cent of fake news sources were consumed by just 1 per cent of users and shared by just 0.1 per cent, largely on the extreme right.  In other words, most fake news is read and shared by a tiny proportion of social media users.

Even if fake news were a problem, the cure here would be much more cancerous to our democracy than the disease.  Sure, the code would be "voluntary" on paper, but that's not saying much.  We live in a world where regulators try to enforce a "culture of compliance" rather than just the laws themselves.

Companies that fail to comply with the code will just be named, shamed and beaten into submission.  And that is the pernicious rub.  One way or another, we will arrive at a situation in which unelected bureaucrats will decide what is real and what is fake, what is fit for public consumption and what is off-limits.

And how wide will ACMA cast the net?  Will it stick to obvious hoaxes containing plainly false reports?  Or will "fake news" include ill-informed opinion pieces?  Simplistic analysis?  Empty gossip?

We should be deeply suspicious of this, for the same reason we should be suspicious of every attempt by government to regulate the public debate.  The free and open exchange of ideas, reflected via the ballot box, is what confers democratic legitimacy on government.  It is not the place of government to confer legitimacy on the public debate.

John Howard has often said that in the end, the Australian people always get it right.  Scott Morrison seems to be saying that the Australian people will get it right if the government ensures they receive the right information.  It is a mindset as chilling as it is insulting.

Hayne Is The Green Harbinger Of More Red Tape

Far from being a disinterested arbiter of banking regulation, Kenneth Hayne's comments about climate change have proven he is just another left-wing representative of the Canberra swamp and the wrong person to head the banking royal commission.

In an address to the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) last month, Hayne argued "a director acting in the best interests of the company must take account of, and the board must publicly report on, climate-related risks and issues relevant to the entity".  Hayne appears to believe climate risk should be considered a fiduciary duty for company directors, which under the Corporations Act would mean it attracts a maximum penalty of five years in prison for a breach.

It is significant that Hayne chose to deliver his remarks to a left-wing think tank.  The CPD is funded by organisations such as the Community and Public Sector Union, which is the chief lobbyist for bigger government and more bureaucrats.

It is also significant that Hayne failed to include details to his policy proposal.  As a former High Court justice, Hayne should know the perils of poorly worded and vague laws which lack direct accountability.  It is also a fundamental principle of the rule of law that legal obligations must be predicable and clear.

In justifying his remarks, Hayne said that "international opinion is clear" and is "now firmly behind the need for all entities with public debt or equity to respond to climate change issues".  The opinions — not facts — of a small cadre of unelected internationalist bureaucrats should apparently decide if someone living in central Queensland gets to have a job.

This is precisely the "negative globalism" that Prime Minister Scott Morrison criticised in a speech to the Lowy Institute earlier this year.

In his speech, Hayne disturbingly asks:  "What is there left to debate?"  Perhaps we could debate the fact that China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases yet is unconstrained by the Paris Climate Agreement, or that nuclear power offers a path to low emissions without economic damage yet remains banned in Australia, or that there are many different opinions about climate change — just ask Professor Peter Ridd who was sacked by James Cook University for expressing one — or that the costs of mitigation could exceed adaptation.

Any of these points must be debated in a manner consistent with the values of a liberal democracy like Australia.

Instead, Hayne seeks to shut down debate by accusing those who hold a different opinion of "short-termism" and "learned helplessness".

Learned helplessness is a psychology term referring to a belief that someone cannot change something they actually can change.  Australia, though, is not in a state of learned helplessness.  What Australia does will make no noticeable different to the global climate.  Even Australia's Chief Scientist Alan Finkel said that the impact of Australia ceasing all of its emissions is "virtually nothing".

This is in part why the Paris Climate Agreement exists.  Although Hayne may not have mentioned that, because he would then have to recognise that Australia has committed itself to the deepest cuts to emissions per capita in the developed world.

TEAM EFFORT

The issue is not just confined to Hayne.  High-level executives from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) have addressed the CPD on the issue of climate change in the past two years.

That is the same RBA which has only met its mandated inflation target twice in the past 20 quarters, the same ASIC which failed in its oversight of the banking sector, and the same APRA which was slammed earlier this year in an independent review for having a poor culture and "variable leadership".  Yet representatives of those organisations are happy to lecture the rest of Australia on a matter of which they eminently unqualified.

The behaviour of Hayne, corporate Australia, and the unelected regulators poses a big problem for the Morrison government.

At the heart of the government's agenda is red tape reduction and a reshaping of the bureaucracy to better serve the interests of mainstream Australia.

The work commenced in these areas is good.  For example, Ben Morton as Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister is working with the WA Labor government to reduce the approval time of major projects in that state.

But this good work will likely amount to nothing if those who are at the commanding heights of the Australian public service and industry do not even want to debate one of the pre-eminent policy issues of our time.

Morrison is starting to clean out the public service.  Next stop should be the RBA, the regulators, and those appointed to senior positions on government boards.  Drain the swamp.

Canberra Swamp Needs Draining

Yesterday, Scott Morrison announced the number of federal government departments would be cut from 18 to 14.  Even if the Prime Minister hasn't quite pulled the plug on the Canberra swamp, at least he's started to empty it thimbleful by thimbleful.  One of the biggest complaints from federal Coalition MPs is that more than six years after the election of the Abbott government, the Canberra public service acts as if Paul Keating was still in power.

Commonwealth public servants have had no big-picture reform narrative to work towards, and while the Coalition has spent the past few years chopping and changing prime ministers and ministers, the public service has been left alone to amuse itself.

The outcome of all of this is that even if the bureaucracy wanted to implement the Coalition's agenda, it is completely out of practice.

When politicians don't tell them what to do, public servants and regulators decide for themselves what to do.

A few months ago the Prime Minister got upset when he discovered his own department had put up signs outside the department's bathrooms saying "PM&C [the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet] is committed to staff inclusion and diversity.  Please use the bathroom that best fits your gender identity".

Of itself this is a small example, but every hour public servants spent talking about and producing and putting up the signs was an hour they weren't spending cutting red tape.

A far more serious example of the public service doing whatever it wants is the admission from Attorney-General Christian Porter that a deputy secretary in his department was using laws aimed at restricting foreign interference in domestic politics to target conservatives, and he didn't know about it.

Cutting the number of federal departments by 20 per cent is a start to developing a Coalition reform program.

An even better start would be to reduce the size of government by 20 per cent and then to cut red tape by at least 20 per cent too.

And while Morrison is at it, he can cut what the federal government pays consultants.  In 2016-17 the federal government spent more than $580 million on consultants.

It's disappointing the Prime Minister said his decision was made to "improve structural processes rather than as a savings measure".  Eventually the privileges of the public service must be tackled.

Public sector salaries and conditions are starting to far outstrip what the private sector can offer.  For example, in 2016-17 average weekly earnings in the public sector were $1,400 while in the private sector the figure was $1,116.

On top of this, Commonwealth public sector employees get 15.4 per cent superannuation while workers in the private sector generally receive 9.5 per cent.

UNAFFORDABLE LARGESSE

This sort of largesse might be affordable when the economy is booming, but as the latest national accounts reveal, Australia is far from doing well.  New private sector business investment dropped to a near-record low and its rate is now even lower than it was under Gough Whitlam.

Hopefully, yesterday's announcement is the beginning of the development of a reform agenda from the Coalition recognising that the public service is as often part of the problem as it is part of the solution.

Making something bigger rarely makes it more efficient.  The challenge, though, will be — as anyone who has spent more than five minutes in Canberra knows all too well — that when a reorganisation as big as this occurs, what happens is that rather than focusing on how to improve what they do, public servants are more interested in carving up the bureaucratic spoils from the carcasses of the abolished departments.

Two thousand years ago, the Roman satirist Gaius Petronius Arbiter is said to have captured the experience of anyone who has ever worked in a large organisation.

"We trained hard, but it seems that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganised," he supposedly noted.

"I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising;  and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation."

Unfortunately the quote is apocryphal, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Cutting Red Tape Will Drive Growth

Momentum is building for bi-partisan reform between the Western Australia state Labor government and the federal coalition government to cut red tape and boost economic growth.

As reported in these pages on 27 November, the McGowen government has reached out to the federal government to establish a "one-stop shop" for environment approvals.  This means that WA would be able to conduct the environmental assessment on major projects in the state, such as gas, gold, and iron ore developments, removing the need for assessment at the federal level as well.

This is a very important development which could reduce the approval time of major projects by up to six months.  The fast-tracking would not alter environmental standards because it is the duplication between state and federal regulations that is to be removed, rather than reducing underlying regulatory obligations.

In announcing the initiative Premier McGowen said "industry has been crying out for bilateral approvals and we are responding to these calls.  This plan ensures we maintain the highest environmental standards, but don't get bogged down in bureaucracy."

This is an example of Team WA working across party lines to achieve sensible economic reform.  At the federal level red tape reduction is being led by the highly capable Ben Morton, who is the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister and the Federal Liberal Member for Tangney in the city's south.

The bi-partisan initiative comes at an important time.

Across the nation business investment is just 10.9 per cent of GDP, which is lower than it was during the Whitlam years and is slightly above the recessionary lows of the early 1990s.

New private sector business investment in Western Australia is 54 per cent below the 2013 peak which is holding back productivity, employment, and wages growth.

While there are non-policy reasons for this decline, it is red tape which has caused the decline to business investment to be deeper, wider, and more protracted than it otherwise would be.

My recent research estimated there are 107,817 regulatory restrictions contained in Western Australian legislation alone.  To put this in context, New South Wales has a population around three times that of WA, yet has slightly fewer regulatory restrictions on the books.

Regulatory restrictions refer to instances in legislation which restrict or compel behavior, including words such as "should", "must", and "shall not".

Importantly, my research found that the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety was responsible for imposing the most regulation on the Western Australian economy with 17,097.  This was followed by the Department of Jobs, Tourism, Science and Innovation with 16,272 regulatory restrictions, and the Department of Justice with 15,226 restrictions.

It is a big problem that the two departments who have primary oversight of the WA resources sector and job creation, respectively, are also responsible for imposing the most regulation.

This will undermine the ability of the McGowen government to achieve its ambitious objective of overseeing the creation of 150,000 new jobs in WA over the next five years, which includes some 30,000 new regional jobs.

To understand the problem of red tape in the resource sector, consider the Roy Hill iron ore project located in the Pilbara region.

The Roy Hill project required some 4,967 licenses, permits, and approvals for the pre-construction phase alone, approximately 79 per cent of which were imposed by the state government.

And while Roy Hill has been able to successfully navigate the reams of red tape, many other projects, particular those being undertaken by smaller businesses, cannot.

To further build on the encouraging bi-partisan effort to cut red tape, the WA and federal governments should also introduce a one-in-two-out approach where two regulations must be repealed for every new one introduced.  This will place a binding constraint on bureaucracy to ensure there is a steady decline in regulation.

Academia Rooted

The University of Sydney's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences continues to be the standard bearer for everything that is desperately wrong with modern academia.  In October, the university's Environment Institute hosted a two-day symposium entitled "Unsettling Ecological Poetics".  For the uninitiated, ecological poetics, also known as ecopoetics, is a relatively new genre of profoundly pessimistic poetry which laments the supposedly irreversible damage that human beings have wreaked upon our planet.  Much of the poetry also has a generous dose of feminism, racism, colonialism and LGBTQ+ issues thrown in for good measure.  Uplifting it is not.

The subject matter discussed during this convention would have left anyone in the room who was not currently employed in the humanities wondering if they were witnessing the collapse of Western Civilisation.  Day one began with a presentation called Ecopotency:  Writing blak to power and influence in Australian ecopoetics, which was concluded by "an embodied performance of new poems and an exploration of ecopoetic spaces from the perspective of a young Munanjali queer".  Following lunch, the audience enjoyed an afternoon of group self-flagellation while they listened to poems designed to "disrupt the national amnesia of the settler mythscape through dismantling the modern mythology of Australia as a settled space".  They were also asked to ponder "much if not most of the built-up and over-built landscape that is the crime scene of post-Invasion Australia".  In another presentation Naming without Claiming?  Compositing Feminisms in the Environmental Humanities, the audience was told that "from the nature/culture binary to the notion of situation knowledges, feminist conceptual labours are arguably foundational to contemporary environmental humanities scholarship".

Things got a bit more interesting on day two.  In Vagrant Desires and the Homely Queer;  Intimacy, ecopoetics, and the local, the presenter quoted from Timothy Morton's Queer Ecology.  This may well be a work unfamiliar to readers of this periodical, but the main thesis is that nature insists on being too heterosexual.  With a knowledge of tree hugging that can only be attributed to empiricism, Morton asserts that "Tree hugging is a form of eroticism, not a chaste Natural unperformance.  To contemplate ecology's unfathomable intimacies is to imagine pleasures that are not heteronormative, not genital, not geared to ideologies about where the body starts.  Perhaps this is why mysticism contain reserves of unthought zones of materiality."  Perhaps.

This excerpt, and indeed the entire contents of the symposium, are as unfathomable as the "intimacies" that preoccupy Timothy Morton.  The "Unsettling Ecological Poetics" symposium is not merely unsettling;  it is baffling, confounding and discombobulating.  It is Sir Roger Scruton's Parisian nonsense machine cranked up to eleven, churning out volumes of indecipherable post-modernist gibberish masquerading as scholarship.  None of it means anything at all.  How anyone can devote their life to this madness and remain sane in the process is a mystery.

That the University of Sydney's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences hosted this symposium is not surprising.  The current dean lists her research interests as "feminist studies, lesbian/gay studies and queer theory", while her most recent monograph entitled Orgasmology, "takes orgasm as its scholarly object in order to think queerly about questions of politics and pleasure;  practice and subjectivity;  agency and ethics".  Furthermore, the faculty is home to "FutureFix", a program devised by academics in a futile attempt to show tax-paying Australians that their money is being put to good use and which includes such projects as "Resurgent Racism" and "Multispecies Justice".

Sydney's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences merely exemplifies the depths to which the humanities departments across the nation have sunk.  Whether it be History, English, Anthropology or Social Sciences, everything is now geared towards the intellectual equivalent of a totalitarian state governed by one orthodoxy;  identity politics.  This has been exposed in my latest report The Humanities in Crisis.  An Audit of Taxpayer-funded ARC Grants which looks at the sorts of humanities projects which have been funded since 2002.

According to the Australian Research Council, its purpose is "to grow knowledge and innovation for the benefit of the Australian community" and that "the outcomes of ARC-funded research deliver cultural, economic, social and environmental benefits to all Australians".  One would hope therefore, that the research undertaken in the last seventeen years would benefit society at large and would make a positive and indelible impact on Australia, improve citizens lives and ensure its continued success as a prosperous, peaceful and stable nation.  There is an enormous disconnect between the stated aims of the ARC and the quality of the proposals which have been funded by taxpayers for nearly two decades.

Since 2002, the ARC has distributed a total of $1.34 billion in funding to humanities projects which are narrow in scope, often incomprehensible and which reflect the current obsession with identity politics, cultural studies, critical theory and radical feminism.  Examples are as numerous as they are terrible.  Academics at the University of Sydney pocketed $735K for a cultural studies research project called "Reconceiving the queer public sphere;  an interdisciplinary analysis of same-sex couple domesticity", by "critically analysing queer home life to transform current understandings of the relation between homosexuality, private life and the public sphere".  At Melbourne University the ARC awarded $100K to a cultural studies project examining "Female stardom and gay subcultural reception" while James Cook University was given $2.7 million to look at "How gender shapes the world;  a linguistic perspective", which would "enhance our nation's capacity to interpret and manage gender roles in multicultural contexts".

There is no doubt the humanities are in a state of crisis because academics have rejected the cornerstones of Western Civilisation.  In doing so, they have cut both themselves and their students off from truth, reason and knowledge.  They have taken control of, and are despoiling the very culture they are occupying.

Haunted By The Miserable Ghost

I still think back to that night in mid-May this year:  scrutineering in some far-flung warehouse in suburban Melbourne, running down my phone battery to check seat-by-seat results, as it dawned on us that — seemingly against the laws of political gravity — Scott Morrison had pulled it off.

Nobody had loathed Morrison's predecessor more than I had, but even I'd underestimated the way in which the Liberal party's vote would be boosted by blasting Malcolm Turnbull out.  I shouldn't have, though, because there was a precedent.  And so now, as we approach the tenth anniversary of the 2009 leadership spill, on the first of December, it's worth reflecting on the first time that the Liberal party vanquished its miserable ghost — and with him, the Coalition's electorally-poisonous climate change policy.

I still remember where I was on that day, too.  Crammed into a hot office, hitting refresh on one of the first crude versions of Twitter until I and every other long-suffering conservative were delivered a miracle, long before that word had entered the Australian political lexicon.  Tony Abbott had defeated Turnbull by a single vote.

Naturally, no sooner had he stepped out of the party room, Abbott was written off.  Labor couldn't believe their luck, safe in their misguided certainty that Tony Abbott would never, ever be prime minister.  And then the first polls came in, showing that after years of being in the toilet, the Coalition's vote had recovered.  Then another good poll came in.  And another.  And before long it was clear that under Tony Abbott, the Liberal party was back in business.

But the Abbott ascendency meant more than just a sugar hit in the polls.  It meant that Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme was dead, buried and cremated.  And, more to the point, it meant that the cosy duopoly between the major parties on global warming had been shattered forever.

Under Turnbull, an emissions trading scheme of some kind had been a fait accompli.  The only "debate" was how the whole monstrosity was supposed to actually work.  When it came to climate change, all we got from the press gallery were the finer details, breathless reporting on what happened in that day's haggling between Penny Wong and — for his sins — Ian Macfarlane.

We were bombarded — bamboozled — with a flood of useless detail that only a government led by Kevin Rudd could generate.  Endless speculation of who was in, who was out, who was exempt and who would have to cop it.  Endless warnings of how the "rest of the world is acting" (they weren't) and how terribly upset everyone would be with us if Kevin Rudd didn't front up to Copenhagen with an emissions trading scheme signed, sealed and delivered.

Endless talk of carbon credits, carbon permits, carbon reporting, carbon farming, carbon sequestration and carbon accounting.  This was Australia in 2009, a country consumed by the bureaucratic minutiae, the swarm of trivialities, that came with the absurd task of regulating an element of the periodic table.

What the chattering classes didn't understand is that most Australians saw through it, and knew instinctively that it was a bad idea.  With Tony Abbott's ascension to the leadership, they were awakened.  And all it took for Tony Abbott to bring the whole grotesque Jenga tower of stupidity crashing down was seven words:  Kevin Rudd's ETS was nothing more, and nothing less than "a great big new tax.  On everything."

Why is any of this relevant now?  Because even to this day, the Liberal party refuses to learn from its successes.  For one thing, it took less than six years for 54 Liberal MPs to suffer from such a severe bout of political amnesia that they handed the keys to the Ferrari (and the Lodge) back to the kid who had crashed it.

But more importantly, both disastrous incarnations of the Turnbull experiment debunk the great electoral myth that climate change is some kind of barbecue-stopper in middle Australia.  As his leadership melted down in 2009, Malcolm Turnbull had famously declared that "I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am" (a declaration which, incidentally, turned out to the most prescient thing he ever said).  His second stint was not much different, as Turnbull's obsession with emissions reduction — this time by stealth via the NEG — pushed his colleagues too far.

The "miracle" victory of 2019 should have been the end of the matter.  Bill Shorten ran hard on climate change and bombed, while — by the Left's own admission — the "climate election" was won by a party with "no climate policy".  In fact, Australians have said no to "climate action" at every electoral opportunity — save for 2007 when the afterglow of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was such that even John Howard went to the election promising an emissions trading scheme.

It isn't just Australians who reward politicians going against the climate zeitgeist.  Donald Trump bucked similar predictions to Scott Morrison, won the 2016 election and promptly withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement.  And even in luvvie Ontario, Doug Ford was elected premier on a platform of scrapping the Canadian province's carbon tax.

But even after all that, the Coalition's habit of doffing its hat to climate alarmism stubbornly persists.  One recent example is the inexplicable decision to pump a cool billion dollars into the Gillard-era Clean Energy Finance Corporation.  Meanwhile, although Tony Abbott scuttled the widely-loathed carbon tax, the Coalition has left almost every other aspect of Labor's grotesque green energy apparatus intact — like the souped-up renewable energy target that has lined the pockets of "clean energy" carpetbaggers while middle Australia pays through the nose.

There is a reason why Malcolm Turnbull was embraced by the basket-weavers of Bondi and was electoral poison everywhere else.  Ten years on, the Morrison government should look back and remember what happens when the Coalition looks beyond the climate bubble.

More Regulation Is Not The Solution To Westpac Revelations

Yet another scandal among Australia's banks suggests the industry is in dire need of a clean-out.  Westpac has committed one of the most startling failures of corporate governance in Australian history.  After a year-long investigation, the bank stands accused of failing to report, as required by law, 23 million transactions that it had facilitated, and, in particular, failing to notice a series of suspicious transactions originating from South-east Asia that have been implicated in child exploitation.

The consequences for Westpac continued to mount.  The bank is expected to be fined more than $1 billion.  It lost $6 billion in market capitalisation, or 7 per cent of its value.  Its chairman and chief executive have both resigned.  All of this is fair enough.  The allegations are extremely serious and, if proved, demonstrate an almost-incredible negligence.

Inevitably, these facts raise the question of whether a policy response is required, and what kind.  Given the recent Hayne inquiry into various kinds of malfeasance by Australia's banks, it would be understandable if the first recourse that comes to political minds is more legislation or regulation.  But this would be a mistake.

Banks, as unsympathetic as they are, already labour under the weight of a substantial regulatory burden:  apart from the various civil and criminal laws to which they are subject, my research has shown that banks and the finance industry are governed by 76,000 pages of regulatory dark matter, referring to legislative instruments and bureaucratic guidance.  An earlier report by Deloitte found that one in 11 Australian workers is employed in compliance, with the number in finance estimated to be even higher.

None of this amounts to a defence of Westpac, but it suggests that Australia's banking industry does not suffer for a lack of rules.  Instead, the better question is:  why are Australia's banks so bad?  We ought to consider whether all of these scandals point to a systemic problem.

To begin to answer this question, note first that the big banks, and big business generally, welcome regulation and actively co-operate in its creation.  For example, the act under which Westpac was charged was passed in 2006 after extensive consultation with the sector, and in particular with the then Australian Bankers' Association.  For big businesses, it is well understood that compliance can be useful for limiting competition from smaller rivals that are less able to bear the associated costs.  They have little incentive, then, to adopt an adversarial approach to regulators.

For this reason, it is not surprising that a 2018 Grattan report found businesses in heavily regulated industries put more effort into lobbying than other businesses.  It might be thought that this effort is towards deregulation.  But if that is the case, then it is the least successful lobbying operation in history.  The simpler explanation is that this effort is towards self-interested regulation.

In the case of banking, the most obvious self-interest is the perpetuation of Australia's anti-competitive cartelisation of the industry.  The "four pillars" policy prevents mergers between Australia's biggest four banks.  Despite the Productivity Commission last year advising that the policy be dropped, it has the support of the now Australian Banking Association.  Its chief executive, former Queensland Labor premier Anna Bligh, told the ABC after that report came out that the policy had contributed to stability, which necessarily has to be traded off against competition in the marketplace.

This aversion to competition can also be attributed to the growing role of institutional investors, such as super funds.  Super funds value stability over growth because their product is low-risk guaranteed returns to members.  Not coincidentally, the removal of Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer reportedly followed a meeting with Australian Council of Superannuation Investors chief executive Louise Davidson.  Her organisation represents all of the major super funds, which control $2.2 trillion of capital, much of which is invested in blue chip Australian companies like the banks.  Super funds own an average of 10 per cent of every ASX 200 company.

The banking industry, then, has been deliberately constructed — by government, its practitioners and its investors — to prefer regulation and stability to competition and dynamism.  This is the context within which the recent scandals have occurred.  It is an industry that knows that no matter what it does, it has the protection of its powerful friends.  So it feels at liberty to behave badly, or negligently.  As risk analyst Nassim Taleb would say, Australia's banking industry has no "skin in the game" — and its performance is worse for it.

Any policy response should target this insularity by instilling some competitive discipline into the industry.  The alternative is more regulation and more compliance costs.  But if the root cause of Australia's banking problems is that the banks, the regulators, the government, the lobby groups and so on are all in it together, then further regulation should be seen for what it is:  the ruling class closing ranks.

There May Be 1300 Reasons This Law Does Not Work

There are potentially 1300 smoking guns pointing to evidence that the Attorney­-General's Department has been using the power of the commonwealth to target conservatives­ in Australia.

It is not acceptable for bureaucrats to be running a covert political operation out of the Attorney-General's Department to silence Australians because of their polit­ical beliefs, but they are able to under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme legislation.

On October 2, public servants in the Attorney-General's Depart­ment issued a notice that Andrew Cooper, founder and president of libertarian advocacy organisation LibertyWorks, provide all documents "detailing any understanding or arrangement" between LibertyWorks and the American Conservative Union.

Cooper was given 14 days to respon­d to the demands, after which criminal penalties could apply.  Despite facing possibly six months' jail, he refused to co-operat­e.

Last August, Liberty­Works and the ACU co-hosted the Conservati­ve Political Action Conference in Sydney.  It featured speakers from Australia and overseas.  CPAC is a mainstream right-of-centre conference that in the past few years has branched out to international locations such as Japan and Australia.

One CPAC speaker was former prime minister Tony Abbott, who controversially was invited to register as an agent of foreign influe­nce under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme for addressing it.

Abbott rejected the request and labelled it absurd.

Attorney-General Christian Porter has admitted that there has been a "lack of common sense to date" in the scheme's application.

Following the subsequent scandal, I lodged a Freedom of Inform­ation request asking for documents and correspondence between senior executive service-level public servants in the Integrity and International Group between March and November that mentions Cooper, Abbott, CPAC or the ACU.

This is a straightforward reques­t.  It potentially could clear the public servants of any wrongdoing or expose if there was anything more untoward.  If there was nothing seriously amiss, you would imagine the bureaucrats would be forthcoming, keen to clear up the incident.

The Attorney-General's Department responded to me this week with what is known as a "practical refusal notice".

The Integrity and International Group in the Attorney-­General's Department that oversees the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme employs only eight staff, yet says a preliminary search has identified more than 1300 documents relevant to the request.

More than 1300 documents and correspondence relating to Abbott, Cooper, CPAC and the ACU captured from eight full-time public servants across a seven-month period hardly seem the actions of one rogue employee, which is how the government has portrayed the targeting of Cooper.

Rather, it possibly suggests a co-ordinated surveillance operation being run by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats under the Attorney-General's nose.

The department needs to ­release these documents.  Innocent Australians have a right to know if they are being monitored by the state.

In giving the notice of practical refusal, the department states that the work of processing the request would substantially and unreas­on­ably divert the resources of the department from its other operations due to its scope.  Yet this same department gave Cooper just a fortnight to comply with onerous demands of supplying potentially thousands of documents relating to the CPAC conference.

Given the extent of Chinese influenc­e reported in the media this week, it is unacceptable that Australian public servants in the Attorney-General's Department have devoted such a significant amount of time and resources to targeting Australians because of their political beliefs.

It seems the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme legislation may not be being applied impartially or in good faith.  Porter has suggested that the staff overseeing the scheme will be moved, which is hardly adequate.  They also have shrugged off suggestions that they need foreign-speaking officials overseeing the scheme.

As reported in The Weekend Australian, Porter was angry to learn of the notice being issued to Cooper.  But the bluntness of the legislation and its worrying powers were foreseeable.

My Legal Rights Audit 2018 warned that the Foreign Influence­ Transparency Scheme Act 2018 was found to remove procedura­l fairness, the right to silenc­e and the privilege against self-incrimination.

The scheme should be repealed or recast so that vaguely worded legislation cannot be abused.  And there should be answers as to why commonwealth public servants were potentially misusing their power.  The state targeting people due to political affiliation or belief is a feature of authoritarian regime­s, not a liberal democracy.

Christian Porter's Defamation Reform Would Be A Catastrophic Mistake

Attorney-General Christian Porter wants social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to be legally liable for defamatory comments made by their users.

Right now, the common law can distinguish between the legal liability of active publishers of information (like newspapers and broadcasters) and the passive platform operators that allow users to publish information themselves.  Courts decide where this distinction is drawn according the unique facts of each case.

But in a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, the Attorney-General declared he wants to eliminate the distinction altogether:  "Online platforms should be held to essentially the same standards as other publishers."

The Attorney-General's proposal is fundamentally confused.  Removing the distinction between digital platforms and newspapers would have a devastating effect on both those platforms and our ability to communicate with each other.

The proposal is bad on its merits.  But even besides that, the conservative government needs to understand how destructive it would be to the conservative movement online.

Let's start with the legal principles.  It makes sense that newspapers and broadcasters are liable for what they publish.  They actively commission and produce the content that appears on their services.  They read it, edit it, arrange and curate it.  They pay for it.  Newspapers and broadcasters have not only an editorial voice, but complete editorial control.  Indeed, it is this close supervision of what they publish that gives them strength in the marketplace of ideas.

Social media platforms do nothing of the sort.  Not only do they not commission the content that appears on our newsfeeds (let alone read, factcheck, or edit that content), they don't typically confirm that their users are even real people — not, say, bots or foreign impersonators.  They merely provide a platform for us to communicate with each other.  Social media has facilitated a massive, global conversation.  But it has no editorial voice.

In the United States a parallel debate is going on among Republicans about whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which explicitly prevents courts from treating "interactive computer services" as publishers or speakers for the purpose of legal liability — should be abolished.

Section 230 has variously been described by scholars and commentators as "the 26 words that created the internet" or the "the internet's first amendment".  The internet law professor Jeff Kosseff writes that eliminating this provision would "turn the internet into a closed, one-way street".  Attorney-General Porter's proposal would have the same effect.

If social media platforms have to bear legal responsibility for what their users say, they will assume editorial responsibility for it.  That means editing, deleting, and blocking all content that could be even the least bit legally questionable.

Newspapers and broadcasters sometimes take calculated risks with what they print, if they believe that the information they reveal is in the public interest.  But why would a technological company — a company that lacks an editorial voice or the journalistic vision — be anything but hypercautious?  Why wouldn't it delete anything and everything with even the slightest risk?

And here is where the practical politics comes in.  Even if the Attorney-General's proposal was a good idea in principle, this policy would be particularly devastating for the conservative movement that supports his government.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine a legislative proposal that would more effectively, and immediately, cut down the Australian conservative movement online.

After all, what side of politics benefits most from the political diversity and openness of the modern internet?  What side of politics has relied most on the internet's ability to bypass traditional media gateways?  It is difficult to imagine the conservative political surge in recent years without social media — without Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all those podcast platforms.

If conservatives are concerned about social media networks "censoring" conservative content on their services now, well, making them liable for everything conservatives say would supercharge that.

And why would this policy stop at defamation laws?  Why wouldn't it also apply to liabilities around, say, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act?  Or our sedition laws?  We are looking at a future where technology companies in California (companies that many conservatives believe are stacked with culturally left employees) could be required to second-guess how the most left-wing judges in Australia might enforce this country's draconian anti-speech restrictions.

The Coalition government should also reflect on how some of its most recent legislative programs have backfired on conservatives.  The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, passed in 2018 in order to tackle Chinese interference in Australian politics, is now being used to target the organiser of the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference, Andrew Cooper, and even Tony Abbott.

The Attorney-General is right that defamation law needs reform.  Australia's defamation framework is heavy-handed and disproportionately favours private reputation over the public need to discuss significant issues.  But removing the courts' ability to determine liability for defamation — and instead deputising the world's technology companies to enforce what they imagine it could be — would be a catastrophic mistake.