The dichotomy of Wikileaks

Does Julian Assange understand the significance of what he is doing?  Perhaps not.

The Australian editor in chief of Wikileaks has published some extraordinary material in the past, but the release of the Afghan war logs is a big deal.  The 91,000 classified documents -- only 75,000 have been publically uploaded so far -- cover six years of the War in Afghanistan.

The meaning of it all isn't yet clear.

At Slate, Fred Kaplan has written ''Just because some documents are classified doesn't mean that they're news or even necessarily interesting.''  But if nothing else the documents provide a portrait of a war which hasn't been going well.  There may not be any smoking guns of conspiracy here.  But there is a lot of murkiness.

This isn't the way Assange sees it.  On Thursday's Lateline, Assange said the documents revealed ''negligence that's on a massive scale''.  He told Der Spiegel the material ''shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of [the Afghan] war''.  It will ''change public opinion''.

With Wikileaks Assange is trying to pursue two missions at once.  And they clash.

The first mission is to provide a repository of data and documents.  Wikileaks is where whistle-blowers can dump raw material -- everything interesting and uninteresting.

But Assange is obviously trying to match that with political activism.  In this case, activism against the war in Afghanistan.

He's welcome to walk and chew gum if he can.  But the editorialising necessary for his activism undermines Wikileaks' integrity, and ultimately weakens the site's power.

Nothing illustrates the perils of this two sided approach as well as the Baghdad air strike footage.  Released in April, three months before the Afghan War Logs, the footage depicts a 2007 American attack against insurgents and what appears to be unarmed individuals, including two journalists.

Wikileaks released two versions of the footage.

The original, unedited version was 39 minutes long.  The other version was an 18 minute highlight reel.  Opening with a George Orwell quote -- ''Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind'' -- the film, titled ''Collateral Murder'', broadcast Assange's opinion proudly.  (The video's provisional title, ''Permission to Engage'', was discarded.)  The audio was edited carefully to avoid viewers making an emotional bond with the American soldiers.

As they say:  don't telegraph your punches.  Let the material speak for itself.

Instead, by editing it he made the video into a political football.  Supporters of the war were able to dismiss the leaked video as nothing more than anti-war hype -- they focused on what was edited out, not what was left in.

Wikileaks risks being dismissed as just another partisan media outlet.

It's a shame because the site couldn't be more important.

The biggest barrier to the scrutiny of government is their monopoly over information.  Governments like secrecy a lot.  It's a precautionary thing.  From a political perspective it's far safer to claim something is confidential, or of too great importance to national security to be shared with the public.  You never know how information, once released into the public domain, could create political problems.

So it's easier not to release information at all, if you can avoid it.

Last month, the Australian Attorney General's Department gave a very clear example of how pervasive this risk-averse, secrecy-first attitude is.

A freedom of information request focused on the federal government's plans to have internet service providers monitor the surfing habits of consumers.  The request was successful.  But the document which was released by the Attorney-General's Department had been almost entirely censored -- 90 per cent of what was released had been blacked out.

In a supporting letter, the department claimed censorship was necessary because releasing more information ''may lead to premature unnecessary debate''.

Obviously the government thinks it better to encourage uninformed speculation.

The South Australian government recently kept an embarrassing list of defective bridges secret, claiming that the information could be used by al-Qaeda.

Wikileaks has the potential to disrupt this habitual secrecy once and for all;  an institutional counterweight to the government's monopoly over its information.

Yet it seems that for Assange, Wikileaks is instead a new media venture, and comes complete with an editorial stance.  Those 91,000 documents are the supporting material for Wikileaks' investigative work.

Talking to The New Yorker, he described this practice as ''scientific journalism'', comparing Wikileaks to academic scholarship:  ''If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required ... to submit the data that has informed your research -- the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it.''

But some commentators have pointed out Assange had to pitch his story to The Guardian, The New Yorker and Der Spiegel to get publicity, rather than rely entirely on his site.

Assange should take that as a compliment, not a criticism.

Wikileaks has done some amazing things since it was founded four years ago.

But its success so far shows how much the world needs an unedited, unfiltered, and above all studiously neutral, depot for data and documents, much more than it needs another new media editor with a political campaign.

Talking the talk on walking the beat

Tony Abbott's ''Action Contract'' has always sounded like it might be a gimmick to sell tickets to a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.  This week, we learnt more about the plot:  a crackdown on gangs.

In Melbourne on Thursday, Tony Abbott proposed an anti-gang squad (no doubt comprised of misfits and ne'er-do-wells with shady backstories) under the auspices of the Australian Crime Commission.

Law and order is an old political favourite.  The Coalition is offering millions of Commonwealth dollars for closed circuit television (CCTV), a knife action plan, and a database of gang activity.

Julia Gillard, in Melbourne on the same day, promised that her government would clamp down on the importation of exotic weaponry.

They're already hard to import;  she would make it slightly harder.

It says a lot about the condition of Victoria that the two leaders launched these policies here.  If Sydney voters are uneasy because there are too many people, we're uneasy because we think too many of those people want to stab us.

That's the aim of retail politics -- to sell you more of the anxieties you already have.

But law and order is a strange topic for a federal election campaign.  After all, policing is a state issue.  It's one of the few mostly state issues left.  The federal government doesn't have operational control over the forces -- and without police, you can't be serious about crime reduction.

So, we're getting minor proposals puffed up as major policy changes, as the parties try to own an issue they cannot.

Abbott said he would seek to ''work with the states'' to expand police-search powers.  But in Victoria, the Brumby government is already giving the police more extensive and draconian powers for warrantless body searches.  So what does Abbott think the Coalition is offering?

Certainly, there are things the federal government can control, such as customs and federal police.

But all that's really happening is the feeding of a perception that state governments have lost control of their streets.  Pity there's little either federal party could really do about it.

This week's duelling law and order announcements by the national leaders also gave us a small peek into the banality of local politics.

In their own electorates, federal candidates on both sides obsess over the number of officers at police stations, whether certain intersections need right-hand turn arrows, and the ''scourge'' of graffiti.  One Liberal proudly states on his website ''we need to put more police on the streets''.  If he gets the role in federal Parliament he is auditioning for, we can only hope he'll write a passionate letter to his state counterparts suggesting just that.

If federal politicians really want to talk about law and order, they could always copy John Brumby -- leave Canberra and move into state politics.

Otherwise, it's just talk.  No real action.

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Does more equal really mean all better?

The Spirit Level:  Why more equal societies almost always do better
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
(Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 352 pages)

and

The Spirit Level Delusion:  Fact-checking the left's new theory of everything
Christopher Snowdon
(Democracy Institute, 2010, 172 pages)

The criticisms of market capitalism have changed over the past two centuries.

The writings of Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century emphasised that the private ownership of the means of production benefited the bourgeoisie at the expense of the labouring classes.

Closely tied to the notion that capitalism oppresses was the charge that capitalism aggravates social inequalities, as the rich entered the financial stratosphere at the expense of the poor.

During the twentieth century, the anti capitalist strain developed on many new fronts.  Economists such as J.M. Keynes argued that, if left unattended, markets would destabilise incomes.  From the 1950s it was then argued that capitalism would lay waste to the environment and deplete our natural resources.

From the late twentieth century the opponents of markets claimed that capitalism makes us all feel unhappy, and now the latest salvo fired by the political left is that capitalism makes us unhealthy.

An explanation for the development of alternative explanations as to why markets are bad is that, over time, many of the criticisms have actually been found wanting.

The growth experience of communist countries, and nations with predatory governments, clearly illustrate that freer markets create more wealth.  The recent Asian experience tellingly illustrates how an embrace of capitalism has lifted scores of people from abject poverty.

Self reported happiness and health status' are higher in wealthier countries, where the economic capacity of individuals to attain such outcomes are the greatest.

When faced with the facts, many critics of the market system begrudgingly move on to another potential area of anti capitalist sentiment to exploit.

By contrast, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in their best selling The Spirit Level:  Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, attempt to bundle all of the anti-market criticisms together in a broad, sweeping narrative.

The basic idea proffered by Wilkinson and Pickett is that societies with a lower dispersion of relative incomes perform better on a wide range of outcomes such as life expectancy, infant mortality, mental illness, teen births, obesity, homicides, imprisonment rates, educational performance, trust and social mobility.

To prove their point, Wilkinson and Pickett illustrate a myriad of scatter plot diagrams that purport to show that more equal Scandinavian countries and Japan outperform the United States on cross country correlations between inequality and the measures cited above.

The Spirit Level chronicles a psychosocial mechanism by which the increasing anxieties of individuals in more unequal countries about their place in the social pecking order leads to lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Yep, you guessed it, those of us in unequal societies are eating junk food, assaulting each other, landing ourselves in gaol, and leading ourselves to early graves because of frustration that we can't all be as rich as Paris Hilton or LeBron James.

Upon devising their universal ''theory of everything'', where equality must rule above all else, Wilkinson and Pickett call upon the citizenry of the world to agitate for massive income redistribution, exclaiming that ''it falls to our generation to make one of the biggest transformations in human history''.

What is their solution to elicit this big transformation?  An aversion to economic growth centred upon progressive taxes and ratcheted public sector expenditure.

Yet it is notable that even egalitarian Nordic countries, such as Sweden, have moved away from this anti-growth policy recipe over the past decade or so, as evidenced by their significant cuts in corporate and personal income tax rates.

Fundamentally, the reason why countries are pursuing free market policies conducive to stronger economic growth is that more wealthy societies provide the basis for individuals to pursue their own ends in life more effectively.

As shown by the record of migration movements, countries that consistently fail to deliver economic prosperity risk the exit of their most valuable resource-people-from low to high wealth nations.

Far from providing the scientific theory of everything to settle all economic and social debates once and for all, The Spirit Level has elicited major controversy of its own.

A major rebuttal of the empirical analysis and policy conclusions by Wilkinson and Pickett has been recently presented by Christopher Snowdon, in his book The Spirit Level Delusion:  Fact Checking the Left's New Theory of Everything.

Wilkinson and Pickett's analysis repeatedly commits what is known as the ''ecological fallacy'', whereby spurious conclusions about individual characteristics are drawn from group level characteristics.

As stated by Snowdon, ''The Spirit Level relies on the conceit that wealthy countries are basically the same, with inequality being the main difference between them.  Consequently, any disparity in social problems must be the result of inequality.  This is faulty logic and a classic ecological fallacy''.

It is invariably a short step from this to demonstrate that Wilkinson and Pickett regularly confound correlation with causation, a basic error in any endeavour within the natural or social sciences.

This is powerfully illustrated by Snowdon, with his take down of the Wilkinson-Pickett scatter plot method to show that, supposedly, alcohol consumption ''causes'' divorce and recycling ''causes'' suicide!

Perhaps the most damning criticism of The Spirit Level by Snowdon is its tendency for its results to rely upon the selective use of data and, in some cases, what appears to be outright data mining.

For example, Wilkinson and Pickett use UN Human Development Report data for 2004 to show a lower average life expectancy for those residing in more unequal countries.  Strangely, Wilkinson and Pickett use data from the 2006 report elsewhere in their book.  In addition, some countries such as the Czech Republic, Hong Kong and Slovenia are missing from the illustration presented in The Spirit Level.

Snowdon shows that when the 2006 life expectancy data is plotted against inequality, and all relevant countries are considered, there is in fact a positive correlation between the two measures.  For good measure, Snowdon was able to find a similar relationship using 2009 data.

When subjected to even the basics of critical testing, for example which countries are included in the sample or whether or not published results can be replicated, The Spirit Level is simply found hopelessly wanting.

If reading Snowdon's detailed critique of The Spirit Level is insufficient to sway the true believers of big government, then perhaps quotes from others disapproving of the Wilkinson-Pickett ''inequality is everything'' dictum should provide further cause for thought.

For example, a 2002 editorial in the British Medical Journal stated ''[n]ow that good data on income inequality have become available for 16 western industrialised countries, the association between income equality and life expectancy has disappeared.''

Commentary on a quality of life index for The Economist magazine stated ''the level of income inequality had no impact on levels of life satisfaction.''

The Spirit Level Delusion suggests that the elephant in the room is Wilkinson and Pickett's advocacy of a far greater involvement of the state in our daily lives.  As stated by Snowdon, ''[r]eplicating the Scandinavian model would require the state to take half of GDP.  If wealth is to be transferred from the individual to the government on such a scale, we are entitled to ask what we will be getting in return''.

In terms of a serious comparative analysis of the economic and social conditions of the developed world, The Spirit Level is best left aside.

However for a barometer of how the modern political left think this book proves indispensable.  Indeed, Wilkinson and Pickett illustrate a fundamental change in thinking about questions of aspiration by those opposing market capitalism.

Until recently the political left fought, often violently, for radical change in an attempt to empower the disenfranchised with greater economic and social choices.

By contrast the modern left have shrugged off all pretence of aspiration, through espousing policy objectives that aim to take choices away from individuals, families and communities.

If realised, this prescription would deliver nothing short of an absolute deprivation of liberties that would lead all of us to be worse off.

The political morass that is New South Wales Labor

Betrayal:  The underbelly of Australian Labor
By Simon Benson
(Simon & Schuster, 2010, 400 pages)

We usually only hear the accounts of the internal machinations of political parties after they lose government and insiders want to make a buck reciting their version of history.

In writing Betrayal, Simon Benson, chief political reporter for the Daily Telegraph, has got in early before New South Wales Labor is wiped from the Treasury benches.

Benson acknowledges from the start that the book is about the failure of the Labor Parry ''to govern for the good of its citizens'' as the party has descended from any principle into an organisation that gives ''priority lo politics over policy''.

Benson opens the book with controversy.  He claims Kevin Rudd promised that if NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, delayed his planned electricity privatisation and consequent fight with the unions until after the 2007 election a Prime Minister Rudd would show Iemma favour and ''when the time comes ... f**k them [the unions] together''.

And from that point the core narrative of Betrayal is the contributing failure of the naked self-interest that drives NSW Labor factional players and MPs and betrayer-in-chief, Kevin Rudd, to stymie electricity privatisation ensuring Sydneysiders will become accustomed to brown-outs.

Some of the most scathing criticism of the factional system has come from its former patriarchs.  In particular former Prime Minister Paul Keating lambasts the NSW right as ''not an organic faction run by political thought and ideology ... it's a sort of patronage club creaking as it goes along''.

And the extent of the NSW right's preparedness to sacrifice principle was perhaps best demonstrated when they used their political weight to install Nathan Rees from the Left faction as leader and premier against one of their own because he wasn't perceived by the public as ''toxic''.

Doing so wasn't an act of political charity to their factional foes but an attempt to find a way to keep their grip over the spoils that come with a majority in Macquarie Street.

But despite the scathing critique provided by those Benson interviewed, there are clearly heroes that have emerged out of NSW Labor.

Former state Treasurer, Michael Costa, actually comes out of the criticism appearing committed to the best interests of the NSW people because of his preparedness to fight to ensure that some good decisions were made by the government he served.

And despite his recent political demise, Costa also shows good judgement with his foresighted attacks on Rudd exploring the very themes that led to him being rolled.

Costa's hatred of Rudd was more than just rhetoric.  In chapter fourteen an entertaining story is told about how he spent his nine hundred dollar stimulus payment on a statue of a naked small boy urinating water into the family pool with a plaque on the statue reading ''Rudd stimulates fiscally''.

But in reading Betrayal it is easy to think the rot of NSW Labor politics is a consequence of a few bad political eggs.

As much as Betrayal is a story about the failings of NSW Labor, it is also a story about the failings of politics and government to deliver positive outcomes.

Unlike markets which reward and punish decisions based on transactions when people buy goods and services that they want, politics' market signals are relationships.

And when relationships dictate outcomes from who is elected to Parliament or appointed to key public sector jobs a system of corruption is created where people can only get what they want when they buy into the system and use others to advance their own interests.

Apart from Costa, only Morris Iemma is portrayed in Betrayal as being prepared to fight the system to deliver a good public policy outcome.  But the price of him doing so is his toppling as Premier.

At least, unlike Rudd who betrayed him, Iemma lost the top job trying to do something noble and was probably the last glimmer of hope in a Labor government that deserves the judgement that will be inflicted on it by voters next March.

Alan Reid: Gallery-watcher turned history-maker

Alan ''The Red Fox'' Reid:  Pressman par excellence
By Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt
(University of New South Wales Press, 2010, 384 pages)

Ben Chifley maintained that political journalists made the best biographers of politicians.  But who should write the biographies of political journalists?

In most cases, the answer should probably be no-one.  However, in the case of Alan Reid, arguably the Canberra press gallery's most influential member ever, a biography is well merited.

It has been written by a pair of historians, the prolific Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, previous biographer of Manning Clark and speechwriter for various ministers on both sides of the Canberra political divide.  They are not the academic types Chifley thought too detached lor the task of writing political history.

The fact that the authors have been around a bit helps them bring the right sort of balance to the task of writing about Reid.  They joyfully describe all the colour of his career, while not attempting to either obscure, or condemn the fact that many of his actions would not rank highly in the journalists' code of ethics.  Ihe authors judge Reid by the standards of his time, and their commitment to a realistic representation of the past is underscored by the fact that they resisted a push to change the cover photograph, to which some objected on the grounds it shows Reid hunched over his typewriter and, horror of horrors, smoking.

Reid smoking his way through his working life is just one example of how his methods would go against everything students would now be taught in a media studies course.  Yet, there is an enormous amount to be learnt from studying his career.

Reid was a member of the press gallery for a period covering 20 federal elections from 1937 to 1984.  He worked originally for the Sydney Sun, an afternoon and Sunday paper (which did not come under Fairfax control until 1953), before shifting to the Frank Packer-owned Daily Telegraph in 1954.  He was to remain in the Packer stable for the rest of his career, but lost some of his clout when the Packers sold the Tele to Rupert Murdoch in 1972, leaving him with Channel 9 and The Bulletin as outlets for his work.

This book will reinforce the Reid-Packer link, as it somewhat skims over Reid's career prior to 1954, (whether due to a lack of source material, or perceived lesser interest is unclear) but, once it hits its straps, Reid's involvement with all the big stories makes it almost a general political history of the next three decades.

As much as his daily journalism was important, Reid also deserves recognition for his three landmark books on recent political events -- The Power Struggle (about the machinations following Harold Holt's disappearance), The Gorton Experiment and Ihe Whitlam Venture -- books which have had legions of subsequent imitators, few of which have been better.

The writing of these books only came after Reid abandoned attempts to write fiction.  Fitzgerald and Holt explain that ''behind the cynical mask there lurked a wish to write a serious and lasting work of literature'' and this manifested itself in a novel about the crucifixion;  a tale about bushrangers in the Snowy Mountains;  and, closer to his personal experience, a book about Australian politics.

Reid's alter-ego in this last work, Macker Kalley, underlines his Machiavellian view of politics.  The fact that all the leading political figures of the day were equally identifiable meant that once potential publishers had consulted their lawyers, the novel was never likely to see the light of day.  Ironically, Reid's non-fiction books were also to fall victim to litigation, most notably when Gough Whitlam sued over aspects of The Whitlam Venture.

While the book-writing highlights that Reid was ''never satisfied with being a successful 1950s-style daily newspaper-man'', he was certainly good at that role.  It was he who first broke the story of the influence that B.A. Santamaria's Movement was having on the ALP.  Then, there was the moment that he organised one of the most famous photographs in Australian political history -- the picture of Labor Leader, Arthur Calwell, and his Deputy, Gough Whitlam, standing outside Canberra's Hotel Kingston in the early hours of Thursday, 20 March, 1963 waiting for the ALP's Federal Executive to determine the Party's policy on state aid.  The picture created the concept of the ''36 faceless men'', still recycled almost half a century later whenever backroom players influence Labor's front of house.

The book explains how, unlike his gallery colleagues, who were also waiting for a decision that night, Reid realised the potential for a devastating picture.  However, he also wanted to get it without tipping off any other journalists to the idea.  It almost never happened, as there were no press journalists available at that late hour.  But in a stroke of good fortune, Vladimir Paral, a senior scientific photographer who Reid knew through some mates with whom he went trout fishing, was also at the Hoiel Kingston that night.  Reid got Paral to get his camera and take some shots which highlighted the absurdity of the situation.

It was not just his journalistic colleagues that Reid outperformed in 1963.  That year's election featured the first ever networked election night coverage as Channel 9 linked Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne through the coaxial cable and also invested in a state-of-the-art computer to process results.  Machine was still suggesting a close result, long after man -- in the form of Reid -- had declared Menzies returned.  He ran the story in the first edition of the Sunday Telegraph to underline his confidence.  Thankfully, Channel 9 has got its computer working much better in recent elections.

However, it was not only through his news sense and writing skill that Reid influenced the course of Australian political history.  He not only reported events, he influenced them, sometimes to further his own views, sometimes to push Frank (and later Kerry) Packer's views and sometimes to push Packer business interests.  Some politicians such as Billy McMahon served the dual purpose of being both on-side and a great source of stories.

As a young man, Reid had been a supporter of Jack Lang, and in his early days in Canberra he very much approved of Curtin, and especially Chifley.  Reid was actually a member of the ALP until the late 1950s, but for much of the second half of his career he was perceived as a ''Labor hater''.  In reality, Reid remained an old-fashioned Labor man to the end of his days, and, while he believed that in Bob Hawke Labor had finally found a decent leader, his old Labor attitudes meant that ''he did not believe in deregulation and thought Chifley had been right in trying to nationalise the banks''.

The Labor leaders between Chifley and Hawke had been a big disappointment to Reid.  When he reported on Santamaria's influence, Reid had thought it would assist Evatt to galvanise the centre of the Labor Party against both Groupers and Communists.  Evatt's apparent softness towards the latter not only made Labor unelectable for a generation, but also set Reid on a path where his personal views coalesced with his employer's view that the problems within the ALP needed to be exposed at every opportunity, until communists and fellow-travellers were driven out.

A further factor in pushing Reid away from his former Labor home was his distaste for the new class of journalists and advisers who invaded his world from the mid sixties onwards and came to dominate the Whitlam era.  While getting on well with most of these younger people on a personal basis, he disliked their preoccupation with trendy issues and he disliked their overt and emotional partisanship in favour of Whitlam.

The most dramatic day in Australian political history highlighted the generational divide.  In the hours after the Dismissal, Reid ran into a group of younger reporters, some wirh tears in their eyes:

Reporters:  What do you think of this?

Reid:  It's a great story.

Reporters:  You wouldn't have said that if it had happened to Menzies.

Reid:  I'd say it if it happened to my own mother -- it's a great story.

Reid covered, and created, many great stories.  If you enjoy the stories of Australian politics you will enjoy this biography.

An African economist rejects foreign aid

Dead Aid:  Why aid is not working and how there Is a better way for Africa
by Dambisa Moyo
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, 2008 pages)

The road to hell is said to be paved with good intentions.  And the way in which the post-colonial West has satisfied its sensitivities toward the third world through foreign aid is no better demonstration of this proverb.

Economic growth of those countries most dependent on foreign aid has remained stagnant, and in some cases, has regressed.  What has perhaps emerged is one of the most egregious and iconic failures of Western humanitarianism.  Yet foreign aid attracts a consistently popular following.

In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo, an economist from Zambia, details this failed approach to African development, arguing that it is a morally cloaked crusade that has not only proven itself ineffective, but malignant to African growth.  The author's central thesis is clear -- given the patent failure of a trillion dollars in assistance, now is as good a time as any to rapidly scale back aid while promoting effective pro-market policies.

Moyo's objections to aid are two-fold.  Aid arrests economic growth by undermining the operation of emerging markets.  Constant streams of large sums of money mean nations unsurprisingly feel no compulsion to foster sustainable market growth.  At worst, aid projects have even replaced profitable and growing industries, like that of mosquito nets across the region.  The result is a culture of aid dependency, in which big and inefficient programs persistently hinder opportunities for individual economic pursuit.

Moyo also argues that aid fosters, even facilitates corruption.  Massive transfers of aid so susceptible to theft have created a vicious cycle in which many rulers actively promote continued dependency.  Rampant corruption has become almost characteristic of Africa's long road out of poverty.

Given the lessons of history, Dead Aid's free market prescriptions are unsurprising.  Moyo herself recognises that ''no economic ideology other than one rooted in the movement of capital and competition has succeeded in getting the most people out of poverty, in the fastest time.''  Unfortunately, the free market lacks the crucial altruistic shine which attracts the loudest, most influential aid advocates.  Nonetheless Moyo makes a well-reasoned and compassionate case for a departure from the decrepit aid model.

The book endorses policy instruments like encouraging African governments to raise bonds in global capital markets, nurturing foreign direct investment (essentially Chinese investment in infrastructure), establishing the same micro-credit schemes that exist in Asia, and establishing truly free trade -- a task for Africa and the developed world alike.

None of this is new.  The problem that remains, and one to which Moyo dedicates only cursory attention, is addressing the political challenges involved with compelling the most autocratic of states to relinquish significant powers to market forces.

Though Dead Aid does not profess to be a meticulous academic study of development economics, it makes an important subject matter more widely digestible.  Nor does it necessarily provide a fresh case to reconsider aid, however Moyo certainly joins fellow economists like Jagdish Bhagwati and William Easterly as articulate and accessible authorities on the issue.

Current thinking on global development often falls into the trap of looking upon Africa as an exception to the rule.  Whereas free markets have ushered in prosperity and growth elsewhere, Africa's lag is seen to demonstrate the need for a separate set of policies.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Dead Aid clarifies the impulse behind such thinking:

Western donors have an industry to feed, farmers to placate (vulnerable when trade barriers are removed), liberal constituencies with ''altruistic'' intentions to allay, and, facing their own economic challenges, very little time to worry about Africa's demise.

Aid may be easy and it may be gratifying, but its virtues end there.  Economic liberalisation has proven the most successful path to development.  Even if it lacks the moral simplicity of aid, pro-growth alternatives are the most powerful force of good for Africa.

Do we face a post-car future? Probably not.

Transport for Suburbia:  Beyond the automobile age
by Paul Mees
(Earthscan, 2010, 228 pages)

For almost three decades, Paul Mees has been the best-known figure in Victorian public transport.  For periods, Ministers, transport bosses or union leaders may have had higher profiles, but they fade away, while Mees keeps going.

He began as an amateur, leading the Public Transport Users' Association for many years, but then turned his hobby into a job by becoming a professional transport planner and university lecturer.  In both his amateur and professional guises, Mees has long been the go-to person for Melbourne's media whenever they wanted a comment on transport issues.  lie has always been happy to oblige and, despite his slightly disheveled appearance (rarely out of a T-shirt or woolly jumper), he has media talent.  He always delivers punchy lines, often with the sort of hyperbole that the media love.  It was this liking for over-the-top language which got him into trouble a couple of years ago.

Normally, those he has attacked, be they politicians, bureaucrats, transport operators or the roads' lobby have just taken criticism in their stride, but when, at a Melbourne University debate in 2007, he made some typically outlandish claims about how the Department of Transport regulated Melbourne's private train and tram operators, the Victorian Government complained to his then employer, the University of Melbourne, in a ham-fisted attempt to silence him.

Given that what he had said at the particular forum was no different to what he had said many times before, the University's decision to charge him with bringing it into disrepute looked like a shocking cave-in to government pressure.  Most of what Mees had said was wrong, but trying to take away his right to express his views made it look as if he was right.  And to cap off this debacle, he already had secured a new role at the RMIT University and was free to continue his campaigning, armed with a new sense of self-righteousness as a martyr for free speech.

The latest manifestation of his proselytising is this work, his second book, published a decade after his first.  It is not really pitched at the general reader (most of whom would be put off by the $80 price tag), more an opportunity to deliver an uninterrupted response to everybody in the transport debate with whom he has had an argument in the past ten years.

Taking as a given that we need to move ''beyond the automobile age'', leaves Mees with two main targets for rhetorical attack;  targets strategically placed at different ends of the political spectrum.  To the left, are the transport planners and dark greens who insist that the only way to nirvana is to destroy suburbia as we know it, and replace it with a new much denser urban form;  while, to the right, are the neo-liberals who have encouraged private sector involvement in public transport.

Mees is very cross with environmentalists who argue that in order to make public transport work, there needs to be an increase in population density throughout the suburbs.  In a bid to make these advocates of the ''compact city'' reassesses their views, he points out that, by arguing that urban sprawl precludes mass transit, they are actually endorsing the position of many in the roads' lobby.  Mees does not want the task of removing cars made harder by also requiring the end of the quarter acre block.  Besides, in his view, it is perfectly possible to deliver high frequency public transport across suburbia wirhout increasing densities.

Over the years, he has pushed a number of cities as the exemplar of how to go about this -- his current favourite is Zurich -- but there has usually been the same prime example of what not to do, his hometown of Melbourne.  Of course, for the majority of his career the service he criticised was government-run, but happily he can now lay the blame for the city's allegedly high subsidies and poor service at the feet of evil ''neo-liberals'', who convinced the Kennett Government, in its second term, to privatise, or franchise, the train and tram services.

Not that one ever knew it at the time, and even now he is a little coy about it, but Mees seems to regard the first term of the Kennett Government as something of a mini golden age in public transport in Melbourne.  He recognises that there were ''genuine efficiency improvements'' which helped to halve the operating subsidy while ''improving the reliability'' of services and that ''patronage began to recover as services were restored and the economy improved''.  However, trouble was brewing as ''in late 1996, the transport minister responsible for the reform program retired, and free-marketeers in the State Treasury made their move''.

Oddly, Mees does not name the minister in question, Alan Brown, but if Brown is the unnamed good guy of Melbourne public transport, the named evil svengali is Jim Betts, a moderately senior member of the Transport Reform Unit, during the period when privatisation took place and, after several promotions, now the Secretary of the Department of Transport.  Mees claims that the Berts-led Department provides a ''striking instance of regulatory capture''.  It must have been a pretty loose capture, given that when the franchises were re-tendered last year both the train and tram incumbents lost out to new bidders.

Mees correctly identifies that there are risks with the franchising model -- ''low balling'' in bids, operator capture of the regulator etc. -- but his assessment of what has actually happened on the ground in Melbourne is so jaundiced that he loses credibility.  Mees is at a loss to explain why Melbourne has experienced a bigger patronage boom than any other Australian city, with patronage almost doubling on the trains and increasing by close to 50 per cent on the trams.  He contents himself with saying that ''whatever was driving the increase in rail patronage, it was certainly not improved service''.

At least, he now acknowledges there has been an increase.  A couple of years ago he was the lead author of a document which said that over three decades Melbourne had the biggest increase in car use and decline in public transport use.  One of the three alleged reasons for Melbourne's performance was ''poor public transport management ... a situation exacerbated by the privatisation of trains and trams in 1999''.  However, the document itself actually showed that in the ten years from 1996 to 2006, during which privatisation occurred, Melbourne had been not only not the worst, but the best performing city!  And that was before the biggest increase in the years after 2006.

Certainly, there have been plenty of problems with Melbourne's trains in recent years, often the result of trying to cope with growth, but to argue that franchising caused the problems is ridiculous.  The worst weeks in the past decade were around the record heat-wave of early 2009 and Mees queries why ''nobody tried to explain why the cancellations had begun a fortnight beforehand''.  One reason was that the rail operator, Connex, was the victim of a campaign of industrial action, but felt constrained from publicly pointing the finger until too late, in the mistaken impression that either goodwill would prevail, or the state government would sort out the problem.

To be fair, Mees does acknowledge that governments can be poor deliverers of public transport too and on several issues he has sound views.  For instance, he opposes the oft-raised panaceas of free travel or over-reliance on bikes.  He also correctly emphasises the importance of integrated ticketing (surely second only to reducing union control on the priority list for Sydney's system), the need for clarity in stopping patterns on transport routes irrespective of mode, and the need for customer-friendly intermodal interchanges.

However, ultimately Mees' aspiration that suburban public transport ''match the anywhere to anywhere of the private car'' is, in a strange way, reflective of the suburbs of a generation or two past.  There would have been no need for a car, if there were more frequent buses to take father to the station and then mother to the shops.  In the 2010s, working parents now may be dropping children at a couple of different locations, in different directions from home, before they even begin the attempt to get to work in a different suburb across town.

No matter how frequent the service, how integrated the ticketing and how efficient the interchanges, the car will probably still sound like a good bet for those journeys.  So, even in cities such as Melbourne, where public transport use is booming, it will be a while before we move beyond the automobile age.

Not quite George Orwell

The Overton Window
by Glenn Beck
(Threshold Editions, 2010, 336 pages)

Glenn Beck is the extraordinarily influential host of a self-titled current affairs show on the Fox News channel, and his new novel, The Overton Window, takes its name from the political theory concept of the same name.  It describes a ''window'' of public policy options that are considered acceptable by the public, located on a spectrum ranging from too permissive to too authoritarian.

Take personal income tax:  both a 0 per cent personal income tax and a 100 per cent personal income tax are politically unviable;  instead there is a window of publicly perceived ''acceptable'' taxation levels that various groups can try to push towards one extreme or the other.

Beck's premise is that the American public's Overton window is moving further along the spectrum towards authoritarian controls over every aspect of life, as influenced by successive governments.  But his conspiratorial style is enough to alienate all but his most avid followers.  Beck's novel abounds in ham-fisted idealisations of a mythical American past, and gross simplifications.

Beck claims in his introductory note that he hopes The Overton Window will be controversial, saying ''anything that causes people to think usually is''.  He goes on to state that obviously, some of the more bizarre claims introduced by various characters are supposed to be extremist representations, and he pre-emptively attempts to slam critics that may label him as nothing more than a conspiracy theorist.  To be charitable I will grant that Beck probably doesn't believe a shady PR company fronted by some sort of malevolent Don Draper is egging the US government closer to one world government and total control of its people, but nonetheless many of Beck's personal conspiracy theories can be found in his plot, to the detriment of his small-government message.

A few of Beck's generalisations and logical leaps deserve particular mention.  Beck idealises an America which he believes is lost.  Casual viewers of his television program will no doubt be familiar with Beck's rose-tinted view of immediate post-Revolution American society.  Throughout The Overton Window Beck makes continuous calls for the ''restoration'' of the United States as opposed to its ''transformation'', harking back to an idealised past where presumably everyone was free and had the same opportunities.  Beck also suffuses his book with an anti-technology undertone, intimating that technological advances have amounted to nothing more than the provision of new ways for government to control its citizens.  I am not disputing the fact that government now has new ways to monitor and intrude, but Beck's reluctance to concede that any positive developments have occurred over the last 300-odd years is concerning.

Beck also turns his attention to ''globalisation''.  In keeping with his ''restoration not transformation'' mantra, Beck seems eager to return to the halcyon days of American isolationism.  In just a few garbled pages, Beck manages to ignore the benefits of international trade, comparative advantage, free movement of capital and labour, and any advance in wealth and living standards that you care to think of.  Instead, ''globalisation'' becomes a neat vehicle for Beck to air his concerns about the New World Order and One World Government, not to mention take a few more confusing shots at Goldman Sachs.

''Goldman Sachs'' is Beck's short-hand for every financial institution in the world that ever benefited in any way from a government bailout, and he characterises its CEO as a puppet-master, pulling the strings of US regulators and legislators.  I'm not a supporter of bailouts by any means, but attempting to distil all legitimate criticisms into a targeted attack on one bank makes Beck seem ridiculous, and is reminiscent of Sarah Palin's tired ''Main Street not Wall Street'' rhetoric.

As political philosophy, The Overton Window is trite and unimaginative.  As fiction, it is appalling.  Beck claims that his aim was to write a ''political thriller'', but The Overton Window does not successfully mesh these genres.  Instead, the experience is not dissimilar to reading a poorly written airport thriller with large slabs of Beck's radio show occasionally slapped in.  The effect is curiously disjointed.

Ultimately, The Overton Window is a book primarily designed to appeal to Beck's followers, albeit with a thin veneer of an attempt at attracting a more mainstream audience.  If you're interested in political fiction, go read George Orwell or Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein.

Inside the hermit kingdom

Nothing to Envy:  Love, Life and Death in North Korea
by Barbara Demick
(HarperCollins, 2010, 336 pages)

Sometimes it's the simplest things that cause the most brilliant epiphanies.  Think Newton and the apple.

Despite a lifetime of propaganda and indoctrination, for many North Koreans their view of the world can change almost overnight.

For one former North Korean soldier it came whilst clipping his finger nails.  The clippers he was using were made in America.  He was amazed by the sharp clean edges they left behind.  And then it hit him:  ''If North Korea couldn't make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?'' He defected a few years later.

Nothing to Envy:  Love, Life and Death in North Korea, by Barbara Demick, is the story of ordinary North Koreans who have all managed something extraordinary -- they escaped from the clutches of one of the world's most tyrannical regimes.  Indeed, the similarities between North Korea and the dystopian nightmare Orwell imagined in 1984, are striking.

Nothing to Envy gives a brilliant account of the real North Korean experience.  It's a story seldom heard before.  Hardly surprising given North Korea is still the most secretive country on earth.

Tourists are rarely allowed into North Korea (investigative journalists writing books about North Korea, even less frequently), and when they are, the visit is limited to the capital Pyongyang only.  Even then, the tours around the city are highly choreographed, with two guides accompanying tourists at all times (one to ensure the other isn't being bribed).  ''Thanks to our dear leader Kim Jong-il'', Demick remarks, is a phrase used by the guides with strange regularity.

The North Korean government goes to great lengths to ensure that nobody from the outside ever gets to see the real North Korea.  While many countries heavily censor it, North Korea is the only country to have almost entirely rejected the internet.  There is no international postal or telephone service and listening to South Korean radio or television is punishable by death.

But even if you could move freely around North Korea without the ''help'' of the local guides, Pyongyang's residents are hardly representative of the average North Korean.  Traditionally Koreans have measured their success by their proximity to the seat of power -- usually the imperial palace.  Before the Korean War this meant living as close to Seoul as possible.

Not surprisingly, North Koreans don't get to choose where they live -- the Workers Party decides this for them based on a class order that is once again eerily reminiscent of Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Following World War 2, newly installed president Kim Il-sung made it his first order of business to weed out friend from foe.  Each North Korean was put through eight background checks to determine their songbun -- their social ranking.

North Korean society is broken into 51 categories which are part of 3 broad classes -- the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class.  You can never rise up through the social order, only fall down.  Only those high up on the pecking order get the privilege of living and working in Pyongyang.  For the average North Korean, this means living in a city like Chongjin.

In the course of writing Nothing to Envy, Demick interviewed over 100 North Korean defectors, but the book zeros in on the stories of just six -- all from the northern city of Chongjin, near the Russian border.  Chongjin, she explains, was chosen deliberately because ''I believed that I could verify facts more easily if I spoke to numerous people about one place.''  She adds ''I wanted that place to be as far from the well-manicured sights that the North Korean government shows to foreign visitors -- even if it meant I would be writing about a place that was off limits.''

If the measure of one's standing in North Korea is one's proximity to Pyongyang then many of Chongjin's residents sit on the bottom rung of the societal ladder -- about as low as you can go without residing in one of the countries many gulags.

Those interviewed paint a bleak picture of Chongjin.  The only respite from the depressing shades of grey that overwhelm the landscape arc the depictions of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in the propaganda posters which dot the city's streets.  As an industrial town, Chongjin was hit hardest following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Without the Soviet Union to provide raw materials at ''friendship prices'', the factories for which Chongjin was known, shut down almost immediately.  But like all other North Korean cities, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant Chongjin was plunged into darkness.  The government simply couldn't fuel the nation's power stations anymore.

For some of those interviewed by Demick, like Mi-ran and Jun-sang, the darkness became something of a saviour.  The cover of absolute darkness allowed many North Koreans to do many of the things that are simply nor allowed during the day.  For Mi-ran and Jun-sang -- whose families sat too far apart in the social order -- that meant beginning a forbidden relationship that would last 9 years and only end when Mi-ran fled the country.

But for most the darkness was just symptomatic of greater problems that existed.  No electricity meant no industry, which meant no exports, which meant the North Korean regime was unable to import enough food to feed its population.  To avoid starvation, many North Koreans resorted to what they were always told was evil -- capitalism.

For Song Hee-suk (Mrs Song as she is now known in South Korea), this was a particularly difficult step to take.  Mrs Song was a true believer -- a model citizen, literally up to the day she escaped.  She recalls later:  ''I lived only for Marshal Kim Il-sung and for the fatherland.  I never had a thought otherwise.''

Reluctantly, she began buying and selling produce at the flourishing -- but still very much illegal -- farmers markets.  In the end, it was Mrs Song's entrepreneurial spirit which ensured that she and her daughters survived a famine which claimed the lives of approximately 2 million of her fellow North Koreans.  Tragically, she notes that the ''people who did what they were told -- they were the first to die.''

Before the famine, the people of North Korea were quite content.  They had food, shelter, education and healthcare.  There were almost no defections to South Korea.  In fact during the Great Leap Forward of the 1960s many Chinese actually defected to North Korea.  Their lives may not have been perfect, but they were assured their South Korean cousins were far worse off.  In school the children sung:

Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world.

Our house is within the embrace of the Workers' Party.

We are all brothers and sisters.

Even if a sea of fire comes towards us, sweet children do not need to be afraid.

Our father is here.

We have nothing to envy in this world.

But the politics of starving changed things.  Where once people feared to make even a slightly disparaging remark about Kim Jong-il's height for fear of imprisonment, they were now openly questioning their government -- the fear of execution by your government just isn't as frightening when you are starving to death.

Just 71 people defected to South Korea in 1998.  Since then the number defecting has risen to between 1,000 and 3,000 annually.  In addition there are hundreds of thousands of North Koreans illegally living in China.  Countless more have died trying to cross the Chinese-North Korean border.

But for many North Koreans, assimilating with the South Korean way of life is a difficult experience.  Although she suspected more thought the same way, of the 100 people Demick interviewed, only one admitted she regretted making the journey:  ''I wouldn't have come here if I knew what I know now" she lamented.  But these feelings are generally short-lived.

Once the shock of living in a world that is almost entirely alien passes, few North Koreans look back.  They embrace their new found freedom and prosperity, and grasp with both hands every opportunity it affords them.  These are the North Koreans who truly have nothing to envy.

Kevin Rudd's darkest days

Shitstorm:  Inside Labor's Darkest Days
by Lenore Taylor and David Uren
(Melbourne University Publishing, 2010, 240 pages)

New evidence shows just how out of control the Rudd government actually was.

Kevin Rudd spent a fair amount of his intellectual capacity drubbing Friedrich von Hayek.  Two major speeches given to the Centre for Independent Studies put the boot into Hayek who had also featured prominently in Ruddite essays deploring free markets.  If Rudd had spent more time reading and understanding Hayek his prime ministership might have been more successful.  His was not even a one-term government.  His leadership was brutally, but efficiently, terminated in a matter of hours.

Perhaps a greater understanding of Hayekian principles would have better prepared him for the trials of national leadership.

The failings of the Rudd government were largely economic;  its successes were symbolic.  Rudd was a utopian -- he had a vision for Australia, but in the end the cost of imposing that vision was too high.  The great English philosopher Michael Oakeshott argued political leaders should not impose their visions for a better world on the broader population, ''if it is boring to have to listen to the dreams of others being recounted, it is insufferable to be forced to re-enact them.''  Rudd was insufferable and worse;  his behaviour and temper tantrums had become more erratic and public over time.  Oakeshott continues, ''We tolerate monomaniacs, it is our habit to do so, but why should we be ruled by them?''  Indeed.

Hayek had written a chapter in The Road tn Serfdom entitled ''Why the worst get on top''.  In that chapter Hayek had warned on expediency becoming a moral imperative.  When the end justifies the means individuals are cut off from all moral moorings and any sort of poor behaviour is justifiable.  Rudd was very expedient and this contributed to his government's greatest failure -- the mismanagement of the global financial crisis.  But the pointers to that failure were clearly visible early in his term of government.

One of the first economic policies that the Rudd government attempted was a national FuelWatch scheme.  The argument was that consumers would benefit by about two cents per litre of petrol and the government had some econometric modelling to substantiate their claims.  As it turned out the modelling was based on non-transparent data and had a number of fatal flaws that undermined the whole case for the scheme.  It was eventually defeated in the Senate, but only after a bitter public debate.  The refusal to consult and to make data and modelling results available to outside scrutiny was to become a hallmark of the Rudd era.

GroceryWatch was the notion that government could provide consumers with comparative price information that would allow them to make better purchasing decisions.  Of course, many retailers already spend their own money and time providing consumers with price information in a process known as ''advertising'' -- yet the government persisted for some time before abandoning this project.  It turned out the data government had on prices was often out of date and highly aggregated.  In other words, it was of little use in actual decision making.

These were early problems the Rudd government encountered.  There will always be some teething problems with a new government.  It is clear, however, that any lessons that could have been learned from these instances went unlearned.

The defining feature of the Rudd government was the response to the global financial crisis.  Rudd referred to this as being a ''shitstorm''.  Obviously, this was an attempt at humanising the PM, who ''accidentally'' dropped the word on national television when describing the crisis.  What is important to remember is that the Australian shitstorm was more of a political crisis than an economic crisis.

Rudd had come to office in November 2007 passing himself off as an economic conservative and promising that ''this reckless spending must stop''.  By the end of his prime ministership his government had never achieved a single budget surplus and public debt had exploded to 1996 levels.  It is very unlikely that Australia will have much to show for all that spending, but Australia did avoid a recession.  The defining question of the Rudd era must be how much did his actions contribute to Australia avoiding recession?  Or would Australia have avoided recession anyway?  Was Rudd worth it?

In their new book, Shitstorm:  Inside Labor's darkest days, Lenore Taylor and David Uren come to the conclusion that Rudd wasn't worth it:

... it is hard to resist the conclusion that the government spent more than was needed, no matter how reasonable its actions appeared at the time ...

The government and Treasury had expected collapsing businesses to drag the economy into a long recession, but instead the shock caused by the collapse in world trade and the panic in financial markets passed after a few month, leaving the corporate sector largely intact.  The government was left completing large stimulus projects that were no longer really needed ...

It is the opportunity cost -- the things that cannot be accomplished by either this government or the next -- that weighs heaviest as a result of the government's spending more than was needed.  Had the economy behaved anything like Treasury's forecasts for it, no-one would have begrudged the money spent.  But now $75 billion has gone, with a negligible addition to Australia's productive capacity.  The debt must be serviced and in due course paid back.  In the context of a $1 trillion economy, it is not a crippling burden, but there is depressingly little to show for it.

That is a fairly damning assessment from two journalists who would normally be somewhat sympathetic to the government's stance on the stimulus packages.  Unfortunately, what isn't quite clear, is how they came to that conclusion.  They tell the story of the Rudd government and the events of the crisis, including the climate change debate, but do not really come to terms with why the stimulus had failed, or why Australia avoided the crisis.  To be sure, the failure of the Australian stimulus package is a lesser problem than the failure of stimulus packages in other parts of the world.  The US, for example, spent a larger fraction of GDP on stimulus programs and still experienced a deep recession.

To understand the failure of the Rudd government we need to consider an argument made by US blogger Arnold Kling in his recent book Unchecked, and Unbalanced.  He makes the argument that knowledge has become more specialised and diffuse while political power is becoming more concentrated.  The fact that knowledge is unevenly distributed across the economy is Hayek's great contribution to economic analysis.  Kling argues persuasively that knowledge is becoming more diffuse over time.  This trend, however, interacts very poorly with the fact that political power is becoming more concentrated.  Kling's argument is that the same forces that ensure greater diversity in knowledge are concentrating political power.  These forces occur anyway, but when combined with activist government they arc a recipe for disaster.

The government's ability to successfully micro-manage ever sophisticated aspects of the economy declines as knowledge becomes more diffuse.  Government are still able to provide one-size-fit-all policy solutions at a time when consumers expect business to provide tailored micro-solutions.  This, of course, leads to greater dissatisfaction with public services.  The great irony of this is that government has never been better at doing what it does.  Nonetheless, public dissatisfaction with government services seems to be on the rise as expectations grow faster than government can deliver.  Rudd came to power promising to deliver more.  Over time he gained the reputation of over-promising and under-delivering.  As Taylor and Uren argue:

Even before the global meltdown, the government was struggling with the gap between what it was trying to do and what it could explain in its hyperactive drive to control the 24-hour news cycle.

The point here is that even before we get to the personal failings of the individuals involved, the Rudd government was always going to struggle to meet the lofty goals it had set for itself.

It seems Rudd had a natural inclination towards micromanagement and an exaggerated opinion of his intellect.  Confidence in your own opinions and views is a necessary trait in any leadership aspirant -- so too is the wisdom to recognise limitations.  Many organisational constraints exist that temper the strongly held views of leaders.  The separation of powers within government exists for this very reason -- to make it difficult for charismatic individuals to accumulate large swathes of power.  One of the failures of the Rudd government can be attributed to the failure of institutional constraints on government.  Cabinet meetings where policy is debated by senior ministers of the crown having been fully briefed by their staff simply did not occur.  Why so many safeguards in the Westminster system of government failed to work, or even sound any alarm, before Rudd was deposed as prime minister is an open question.

The argument that the government had to react quickly to the economic crisis and had insufficient time to gauge the opinions of the full cabinet simply does not hold.  Taylor and Uren make the point, ''The Rudd Government saw the global economic storm coming''.  Rudd had asked Ken Henry -- Secretary of the Treasury -- for some worst case planning in February 2008.  By the time the government felt the need for an active fiscal response to the crisis in mid-October those plans were well advanced.  Yet only Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan knew of the planning.  Uren and Taylor report that Julia Gillard and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner first heard of the plans on October 7, 2008.  This represents an extraordinary process failure in government policy formulation.  The Minister of Finance discovered a plan that would eventually spend half the nations' budgeted surplus a few days before the decision was made.

Tanner had been on the back foot throughout.  He left the Brisbane meeting unconvinced of the need for a package and it was only on the Thursday [October 9] that he'd been informed by his department head, Ian Watts, that it looked as though one was going to happen away.

When that decision was eventually taken Tanner wasn't even there -- he was on a phone hook-up from Melbourne, babysitting his children.

Swan wasn't at the meeting either.  He was in Washington D.C. at the IMF meetings.  Swan clearly had been terrified by what he had heard in the US and it is clear that he over-reacted to the news.  That is unsurprising.  The US Administration had struggled to pass its TARP legislation through the Congress.  Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had employed much stronger rhetoric than circumstances indicated to promote his bailout package.  Roger Congleton, professor of economics at George Mason University, argues that prior to this point the US had been experiencing a standard recession but government rhetoric of a new great depression was ''news'' to many investors and believing that the government had superior information they immediately responded to that information.  Panic from the US infected the Australian decision makers.

It was over the weekend of October 11 and 12 that the Rudd government made the decision to spend $10.4 billion -- half of the budget surplus.  It was at this meeting that Ken Henry coined the phrase ''Go Hard, Go Early, Go Households''.  Apparently this was the distillation of Henry's views of how to respond to an economic crisis.  But Uren and Taylor suggest there is more to the Treasury involvement than simply giving disinterested advice.  Henry had previously workshoppcd responses to an economic crisis.  As he told Uren and Taylor:

The view we came to out of both those workshops was that, in periods of serious economic weakness, we in this department should be the first to say to government ''do something'';  we shouldn't be the last', he says.

In other words, Treasury had abandoned any pretence of an orthodox economic response to a downturn.  Furthermore, Treasury would now have to be in the market timing business.  Being able to accurately predict turning points in the economy is a remarkably rare, yet highly profitable, skill.  Yet that is precisely what Treasury thought they could do.  Shitstorm continues:

David Gruen, who was part of the 2004 workshops, saw the problems of using government spending to cushion an economic downturn as essentially practical.  To avoid the problems of Keating's One Nation package, Treasury had to be quick to recognise that the economy was in a downturn, and the government had to be quick to start spending.  If these conditions were met, Gruen believed an increase in government spending could deliver a much faster-acting and more direct boost to the economy than a rate cut.

This view invites us to imagine that fiscal stimulus has never worked in human history simply because government can't spend money fast enough.  Gruen, we are told, was also unimpressed by the theoretical arguments against stimulus spending.

The most famous argument against stimulus spending is a theory known as Ricardian equivalence.  This argument suggests that most people will save a cash handout on the basis that future tax liabilities will increase.  There is a huge academic debate as to whether this theory is correct or not.  Yet Gruen, as a doctoral student, had surveyed ANU students on public debt and compared that to ANU academics expectations of student knowledge of public debt and had ''concluded the theory was an economists' fantasy''.  Perhaps it is.  But a dodgy experimental economics exercise on ANU staff and students is hardly authoritative and insufficient grounds to spend half the budget surplus.

Ken Henry apparently had wanted to commit $5 billion to the first stimulus package.  By the end of that fateful weekend Rudd had decided to spend $10.4 billion.  The cabinet rubber-stamped the decision the following Tuesday after the press releases had already been printed.  To sum up what had happened;  Rudd and Swan had been worried about the economic crisis since early in the year.  They had consulted with Treasury about a worst case scenario -- a Treasury that unbeknown to anyone had an activist non-orthodox economic mind-set -- but had not advised any of the rest of the government, including the other two members of the gang of four.  To compound the problem the opposition under Malcolm Turnbull offered bipartisan support and, with one honourable exception, did not subject the government, or Treasury, to any much needed scrutiny.

There has been debate as to whether the first stimulus package was successful or not.  Ashton de Silva and I have argued that most of the money was saved and not spent.  In contrast the government and its media allies have pointed to retail sales over Christmas 2008 to argue that it was a success.  Of course, the biggest argument against the first stimulus package being successful is the fact that the Rudd government immediately unleashed a second stimulus package of some $42 billion.  Here the Rudd government intended only to save jobs.

The mathematics behind the massive outlay -- and the total preoccupation of the prime minister -- was how much money the government needed to spend to make up for the collapse in demand;  it was how many jobs each component would create in each sector of the economy, and how that measured against Treasury's predictions of the damage likely to be caused by the global recessions.

One of the major problems with the second stimulus package is that the Treasury massively over-estimated the impact of the global financial crisis on the Australian economy.

The other problem is that an extraordinarily large amount of money needed to be spent in a very short period of time.

It would also turn out that no system on earth could deliver promised spending of almost $60 billion in just four months without hitting some big implementation snags.

This must be one of the greatest understatements in Australian history.  The home insulation scheme that the government had introduced to provide employment to low-skilled individuals lead to four deaths and over 180 house fires.  As much as the government has tried to argue that individuals and householders and the states should take responsibility for the debacle, the public have been clear as to where to lay the blame.  The Building the Education Revolution expenditure has also proven to be controversial with The Australian newspaper running stories about waste almost every day.

What is missing from the Taylor and Uren account is any of the economic debate that occurred within Australia.  They discuss the government and Treasury views and much about the opposition, yet there is no mention of economists outside those circles.  The fact of the matter is the government was unwilling to listen to any opinions it didn't like.  In the discussion of Malcolm Turnbull's advice, Taylor and Uren argue:

With the benefit of hindsight, his ideas may have avoided a lot of the government's subsequent problems, but the government rejected them entirely.  Its reaction was immediate and scathing.

They are being far too generous -- the Rudd government was too arrogant to accept any advice.  When individuals make specific predictions that subsequently come true, hindsight has played no role in the analysis.

Two government ministers -- albeit the prime minister and the treasurer -- and Treasury organised and coordinated the response to the crisis.  Kevin Rudd has subsequently lost his job -- his government had ''lost its way''.  Yet it does seem clear that Treasury has lost its way too.  Ken Henry was able to opine that:

History may judge that first stimulus package as too early, too large or the configuration of it was wrong, but my view was that we needed to do something big and do it quickly.

There has been no public debate or scrutiny of that comment.  Taylor and Uren writes that after a series of workshops Treasury had decided that it was always going to do -- should that be ''recommend'' -- something big and quick.  This raises the question about the brand of economics practiced in Treasury.  As Henry told the Senate last year

whilst being very aware of those issues for many years, I can tell you that, confronted with the crisis that the world has been dealing with these past 12 months or so, those few quibbles with the use of expansionary fiscal policy -- or expansionary monetary policy, for that matter -- or other actions of governments to prop up credit markets are not ones that I considered should detain us for too long.  They were rather quickly put aside.

In other words Treasury practices a brand of economics that is unknown to the economic profession.  They make it up as they go along.  Small wonder that Henry was recently advising economists to shut up and support government policy.

As Taylor and Uren admit, a large sum of money has been spent with little to show for it.  There was no rush -- Rudd and Swan and Henry and Gruen had planned for a long time before they felt the need to spend -- yet in that time they consulted with no-one and didn't even advise other elected representatives.  They thought they could manage an economic crisis simply by spending, that they knew enough to replace private spending, and that they could save Australia from recession.  Yet we know from the FuelWatch and GroceryWatch debacles that government had little understanding of markets and poor data.  It is implausible to believe that they could get the macro details right, when they had failed in the smaller aspects of their policy.

Greens' population policy no better than the others

Bob Brown didn't manage to get in the leaders' debate, to the annoyance of his supporters.  In a way, that's a shame.

Sure, the Greens treat human society as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment.  But they do try to present clear policy where Labor and the Coalition just waffle.

They're definitely against the internet filter (although admittedly they chose the person responsible for the filter, Clive Hamilton, to run as a candidate).  They're definitely for climate change policy (although admittedly they voted with the Coalition against the emissions trading scheme).

A fourth body on the stage could have made the debate a little less of a sixty minute slogan slog.

Nevertheless, on the big issue of the campaign so far -- immigration and population growth -- Bob Brown offers nothing but equivocation and confused messages.

First:  equivocation.

In response to the intergenerational report last year which famously projected Australia would have nearly 15 million more people in 2050, Brown called for ... wait for it ... an inquiry.  A review.  Another report.

Speaking in March, Brown asked, "How they think we're going to handle 35 million, I don't know, but if they think we can, let's see the plan.  It's just really saying let us have the knowledge base that responsible policy making should come out of."

The Greens are obviously learning the politics of policy from the big kids.  Kevin Rudd would be proud.

Then confusion.  In her Twitter feed on Sunday night, Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens senator from South Australia, tried to claim "Compassion is key to any discussion of population growth".

Certainly, the party's approach to asylum seekers is clear cut.

The Greens want to increase Australia's refugee intake, which is good.  Their asylum seekers policy is one carefully refined after years of activism and involvement with refugee protests, and driven by dissatisfaction on the left with the major parties.

Yet the party is as rife with contradiction as any of the majors they despise:  the Greens also want to cut back other immigration.

And they're clearer than the ALP or Coalition about who the bad guys are in the population debate -- skilled migrants.

Oh well, the Greens were never going to get much of the business vote.

Hanson-Young has argued the skilled migration program could have some "fat" trimmed from it.  (Masterchef has made food metaphors cool.)

Indeed, the best comment this week came from a regular Masterchef guest, Neil Perry, responding on Twitter to the opposition's similar promise to cut migration:  "great can't get enough people to work now!!  Guess I should think about closing restaurants not opening them!"

Perry's comment applies as readily to the Greens' proposed immigration cut as it does to the Coalition's.

Our current immigration program only partly alleviates business needs.

There is a genuine demand in the Australian economy for skilled and semi-skilled workers right now.  No amount of high-handed rhetoric about the need to train local workers will change that fact.

And the lucky migrants who get into Australia benefit from our high living standards, stable rule of law, and liberal democracy.

So how is stopping people finding a new life in Australia, as the Greens would like to do, in any way compassionate?

Let's be clear.  If you are a refugee fleeing persecution, then a Green government will embrace you.  But if you are fleeing something as banal and commonplace as poverty, economic hardship, low wages, a lack of opportunity or jobs, or if you're just looking for a better life for you and your family -- then the door to Australia is closed.

The Greens are torn.  On the one side, they have supporters who value Australia's role accepting more refugees and providing opportunity for migrants.

But on the other side, they have supporters who see people as the ultimate environmental problem.  Each Australian has a relatively high carbon footprint.  So, for some environmentalists, the goal should be to make sure there are as few Australians as possible.

That means keeping foreigners out.  Poor people are better for the environment.  They can't afford gas guzzling cars, or always-on-standby plasma televisions, or gaudy McMansions with heating and cooling systems.

Anyway, that's the theory.  Many people holding this view say we should increase foreign aid, but they are convinced the effective path out of poverty -- immigration -- should be blocked.

Bob Brown has to negotiate the terrain between these two views.  It's clearly uncomfortable.  (Refugees settling in Australia have growing carbon footprints as well, but that's best not spoken about.)

Brown's hedging means the Greens are no better on population than the Coalition and the ALP.  No party wants to embrace the high immigration which has been the fuel of the Australian economy for two centuries.

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Thank NSW Labor for small thinking

Western Sydney, we get it.  Your state government is laughably incompetent.  It's unable to build the infrastructure and supply the services needed by a growing city.

The New South Wales government is too busy destroying its leaders to bother with boring roads and railways.  For years, the chief focus of the government has been mining the backbench for new premiers.  What are they on now?  Not Team B, or Team C;  it must be Team E, at least.

But give us back our federal election, please.

The anti-population growth policies of Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are specifically calibrated to stoke western Sydney's disaffection with the failings of their ageing Labor government.  Asylum seekers, multiculturalism, sustainability, infrastructure, congestion, the lot -- it's all been dropped into the population bag.

That's right:  the anxieties of a few clustered electorates in NSW have inspired every major political party to abandon Australia's two-century-long goal of population growth.

It's no surprise one of the most prominent anti-population activists is Bob Carr, whose premiership kicked off Sydney's decline.  Mark Latham -- the self-styled voice of the west -- is annoyed at his old friend Gillard for treating his brethren as mugs.  Latham thinks the PM should be openly enthusiastic about slashing immigration.

And one of Gillard's first acts as Prime Minister was to fly David Bradbury, ALP member for the marginal Sydney seat of Lindsay, to Darwin so they both could join a navy exercise.  The two posed with handsome navy officers and played a spot-the-refugee-boat game for photographers.  Border security is a western Sydney issue, you see.

The phrase ''little Australia'' says it all:  little population, little economy and tiny aspirations.  The Coalition even wants to neuter one of our great institutions, the Productivity Commission -- admired and imitated internationally -- and recast it as the ''Productivity and Sustainability Commission'' to focus on limiting population growth.

Admittedly, they'll have to change its name, otherwise the commission would tell them Australia needs increased population growth for economic reasons -- we need labour, skilled and unskilled, to expand our prosperity, to keep inflation down, and to protect ourselves against future economic crises.

There's also a good moral argument for letting people from the developing world live and work in Australia, but an election is no place for moral arguments.

Late last year Kevin Rudd was concerned voter dissatisfaction with NSW Labor would undermine his re-election.  The 25 per cent massive swing to the Liberals in the Penrith state by-election in June apparently confirmed this view.

There's not a lot the federal government can do to fix western Sydney's congestion problem.

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Renewable energy comes at exorbitant price

Coal-powered electricity generators and abundant coal supplies bring Victoria the world's cheapest electricity.

This will change, partly because of the risk of a government carbon tax.  This makes it impossible for companies to build new coal-powered generators.

In addition, government programs subsidise wind and solar energy.  And the Commonwealth has a ''20 per cent renewable'' requirement.  This forces consumers, through electricity retailers, to buy expensive electricity from renewable sources.

Large-scale hydro electricity is the only low-cost renewable energy source, but no more dams can be built -- so renewable electricity supplies must come from high-cost sources.

The Greens think they can run Melbourne on renewable energy within a decade with innovations such as covering the MCG in solar panels.  They want to ''Repower Melbourne'' with massive subsidies to renewables and a national carbon price.

These truckfuls of your money are to fulfil ''forward to the past'' dreams of a de-industrialised car-free city.

We expect the Greens to promote off-the-planet energy policies.  But Labor and the Liberals also favour expensive impositions.

Among these is requiring electricity businesses to pay households for the energy produced by solar panels.  Victorian energy retailers have to pay households 60 per kilowatt hour -- tenfold its worth.  Other state governments require even greater payments.  In NSW that price must be paid even for the electricity the consumer uses in their own house.

The costs of this are paid for in the electricity bills of consumers without solar panels.

Then there's the ''20 per cent renewable'' requirement.  The penalty for using renewable energy includes its inherently high cost and the need for back-up supply, because the vagaries of the weather make wind and solar intrinsically unreliable.  A further cost is transmission investment to bring electricity from dispersed wind farms or solar factories.

In kilowatt/hour terms it costs about 8 to get coal-generated electricity from the Latrobe Valley to the Melbourne hub.  For wind farms the cost is about 17.  For large-scale solar power the cost is closer to 30.  And rooftop solar panels need a payment of 60 plus assorted other subsidies.

Wind power is a mature technology that won't get any cheaper.

Solar is hopelessly uneconomic.  All the solar generating facilities started in Australia have failed.  The Commonwealth and Victorian governments together gave $120 million to a $420 million large-scale solar power plant in Mildura, ''the biggest and most efficient solar photovoltaic power station in the world''.  Even with the subsidy the plant was not viable -- and was closed with the money wasted.

Victorian Premier John Brumby says his climate change policy will create 1200 new jobs.  These will be phantom jobs, just like the 2000 new jobs that were previously forecast from a subsidised windmill blade factory.  And if, as suggested, the policy involves closing the Hazelwood Power Station it would prove disastrous.  Hazelwood delivers a third of the state's electricity at a quarter the cost of renewable alternatives.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has spoken about Australia's mineral wealth as a birthright.  But our real birthright is low-cost energy -- an asset politicians seem intent on eradicating.

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Business lacks courage

Six days into the federal election campaign and Work Choices has dominated the news on five of those days.  We know all about Tony Abbott ducking and weaving and somersaulting on whether Work Choices is alive, dead, or just cryogenically frozen.

If Abbott isn't careful this could be the second election in a row that Work Choices has helped sink the Coalition.  Certainly the ALP and the ACTU have done a brilliant job at demonising Work Choices.  But there's more to it.  The Coalition has allowed itself to be defined by the single issue of industrial relations.  At the moment the only two Coalition commitments that most voters could name would be Abbott's tax on business to pay for parental leave, and his promise on Work Choices.

It's perplexing that Abbott has got himself into this position, given that he's written an entire book about what he believes in and why.  He was a minister for nearly a decade, compared with Julia Gillard, who has been a minister for less than three.

Given its interest in Abbott's industrial relations policies, you'd think the Canberra press gallery would press Gillard on the problems with her own Fair Work legislation.  Alas -- no such luck.  If ever proof was needed of the different standards journalists apply to Labor and conservative politicians this is it.

Matthew Spencer should be a household name, but he isn't.  The media's priority is getting a ''gotcha'' moment against Abbott.  Spencer was a then 17-year-old employed at a hardware store operated by the Terang and District Co-op in country Victoria.  He worked there after school from 4pm until the store closed at 5.30pm.  His situation was no different from thousands of other young Australians in part-time retail jobs.  Spencer was working to earn enough money to pay back his parents for the loan they gave him to buy a car.

In February this year, he was told that he had lost his after-school shift because of changes to the industrial award covering the retail industry.  As a result of Labor's ''Fair Work'' legislation, businesses are banned from offering shifts of less than three hours' duration.

An appeal to allow a two-hour minimum shift and to give special consideration to school students was dismissed.  The vice-president of Fair Work Australia, Graeme Watson, acknowledged that jobs would be lost as a result of the award changes but he said the legislation gave him no choice but to uphold the three-hour minimum.

This decision doesn't quite match the ALP's promise made before the 2007 election that no worker would be left worse off by Labor's award changes.

On Wednesday at the launch of a new trades training program for students, the PM was asked, considering she thought work experience was so important, ''why won't you clear the way for kids to get after-school jobs?''.

Her answer was:  ''Well I certainly believe the Fair Work Act has got the balance right.''  And then the press conference moved on to asylum seekers.

It's no wonder people such as Brambles and Bluescope chairman and Reserve Bank of Australia board member Graham Kraehe are frustrated.  As Kraehe said a few days ago:  ''It is disappointing that some of the rigidity put in place by Fair Work Australia will not be addressed in the next parliament.  There are some flaws in Fair Work Australia that need to be urgently corrected''

Kraehe is right, but his disappointment is misdirected.  Given the current situation it would be political suicide for Abbott to suggest changing the Fair Work Act.  If he did so the ALP and the ACTU would oppose him tooth and nail, while most business organisations would stand on the sidelines.  If business wants the Coalition to take up the industrial relations fight it is going to have to do more than just talk about it -- it will have to fund it as well something it has shown no inclination to do.

This week the ACTU endorsed a $1 levy on every union member to fund advertising against Work Choices.  That's $1.8 million that will be spent to, in effect, campaign against the Coalition.

If business leaders want changes to the Fair Work Act they could urge a levy on companies to pay for a campaign to achieve this.  Of course this won't happen.  It's much easier to sit in the boardrooms of Martin Place and Collins Street and murmur complaints about the opposition and its lack of policy bravery.  At least there's one thing that can be said about the union movement:  it puts its money where its mouth is.  The same can't be said of business.

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Spending cuts in the obvious places

The government spends a lot of money on a lot of things.

Not all of it wisely.  It's easy to be careless when you're spending other people's cash.

So credit where credit's due:  in the unlikely event there is an Abbott government in Canberra at the end of next month, the Opposition has proposed some genuine cuts to the federal budget.  Tuesday morning they released another list of ''savings'' -- some $1.2 billion worth -- which they claim would help get the budget back into surplus.

Some of them are so stultifyingly obvious it's amazing nobody has committed to scrapping them yet.

Retooling for Climate Change was announced by a fresh looking Rudd government all the way back in 2008.  The government pays selected small businesses to upgrade to more environmentally friendly machinery.

In the two years the program has run, it has been taken up by just 65 businesses.

So it probably hasn't made a substantial impact on global carbon emissions levels.

The Green Building Fund, a program to upgrade buildings in a green-ish manner, is even more expensive, and just as futile.  The Opposition says scrapping it will save $400 million over the next few years.

The United Nations Security Council bid was another of Kevin Rudd's attempts to aggrandise himself on the world stage.  Dropping the bid, and keeping the $5.7 million the Coalition claims it would have cost, should be a no-brainer.

Every budget cut is controversial.  Even this one.  After Abbott announced his hostility to the UN bid, the Australian foreign policy establishment was decrying that doing abandoning this would undermine our ''prestige''.

We've spent a lot of money in the past trying to enhance our ''prestige'' in the world.  Remember the Sydney Olympics?

Indeed, if Tony Abbott is in the mood to kill some sacred cows he might consider abandoning Australia's bid for the World Cup.  We've given $45.6 million to Football Federation Australia to manage the bid so far.  The cost to the Australian economy will be extraordinary if we win:  PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated hosting the Cup will cost at least $2.9 billion.

Supporters of the World Cup claim we'll recoup the money through tourism and other miscellaneous sources.  But a mega event which pays back is an extraordinarily rare one, despite the fevered dreams of their advocates.  Let's cut our losses while we still can.

Community cabinets, which Abbott also wants to eliminate, were always bit of a joke.

Sure, they flattered those communities which had a turn meeting senior politicians and complaining to their face.  But if the Labor Party wants to run focus groups, it should pay for them itself.

And Rudd's community cabinets were absurd when you realise that his actual cabinet was being marginalised.  Senior ministers couldn't get a few minutes of Rudd's time to discuss major policy -- so spending an hour with the PM at a community cabinet meeting was probably as exciting for his colleagues as it was for the dutiful citizenry.

The Opposition claims that, when added to the savings already announced before and after the May budget this year, it adds up to $23.8 billion of cuts.  The federal government spends around $350 billion per year, but you have to start somewhere, I guess.

Nevertheless, we should dwell on the net effect of these savings.  Both the Government and the Coalition believe that they will bring the budget to surplus by the 2012-13 financial year.

And projections of what the budget will look like in 2013 are, well, projections.  Economic circumstances change.  (After all, recall that as the global financial crisis was beginning to hit, the Rudd-Swan-Gillard-Tanner team were still saying our economy was doing too well, and pushing up interest rates.)  And political circumstances change;  governments decide they have new spending priorities.

So there is reason to be optimistic about these proposed cuts.

The Opposition could go a hell of a lot further.  Here's another idea for them to mull over:  if a program appears on the AusIndustry website -- as Retooling for Climate Change does -- that should qualify it for immediately abolition.  The site lists 53 separate government programs:  all of which funnel money to favoured industries and lucky applicants who have mastered the art of filling out paperwork.

Of course, when the Opposition claims that it is dedicated to reducing ''Labor waste'' they are being too disingenuous by half.  The Howard government was no stranger to waste.  Their Regional Partnerships Program defined for a generation what pork-barrelling looks like in Australia.  When Abbott claims ''this reckless spending must stop'' he is just redeploying Kevin Rudd's powerful critique of Howard.

And Abbott is putting new pressure on the budget too:  yesterday he announced more tax rebates on education.

No party has a good record on cutting spending.  But every promise to do so counts.

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