The Death Throes Of Democracy

Democracy in Decline:  Steps in the Wrong Direction
by James Allan
Connor Court Publishing, 2014, 198 pages

A 2012 Lowy Institute poll revealed only 60 per cent of Australians believed "democracy is preferable to any other kind of government".  Of the younger generation ― those aged between eighteen and 29 years ― this figure was only 39 per cent.  Professor James Allan's Democracy in Decline serves as a "part lament and part call to arms" for those of us who still believe that democracy is the best process we have to resolve disputed social policy issues.  People, though, are losing faith in their fellow citizens, giving rise to the undemocratic age of the "expert".  We are looking to government and bureaucrats to solve all our problems, irrespective of the values and processes we destroy along the way.

For Allan, it is a simple question of the value we place on process versus outcome:  does democracy refer simply to the process of majoritarian decision-making?  Or does it refer to the quality of these decisions?  Today's orthodoxy holds that decision-making must reflect some level of "goodness" or meet a moral threshold, even if it is at the expense of the democratic process.

Allan explores the primary causes and threats to majoritarian democracy in five of the world's oldest democracies ― the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  His conclusion is that all these countries are less inclined to use democratic means today to resolve contested social, political and moral issues than they were previously.

The first cause of decline is the increasing willingness of the judiciary to override, circumvent, and reinterpret legislation.  Allan demonstrates how this threatens democracy by exploring the hypothetical situation of a country looking to adopt a bill of rights.  His approach is persuasive because it exposes the undemocratic implications of a bill of rights.  That is, it empowers unelected judges because it makes them responsible for interpreting the vague language and amorphous rights in the document.  By looking at the adoption of a bill of rights from the view of a jurisdiction without one, Allan reveals the instrument for what it really is:  an abdication of power to the judiciary.

Allan is scathing and convincing in his opposition to a bill of rights, both the constitutionally-entrenched and statutory models.  It is a dangerous fallacy that a statutory bill of rights causes less damage and is not as harmful to democracy as a constitutionally-entrenched one.  In practice, both reduce the scope for democratic decision-making and increase the power of unelected judges.

Allan contends that a bill of rights, more so than the political system, has the unbridled potential to lead to the judgements of the minority of voters transcending those of the majority.  Judges have embraced an interpretive approach giving them the power to overrule the democratic branches.  Parliament was once supreme, yes.  But judges now see themselves as the protectors of people's rights.  They are political actors.  They expect the legislature to defer and respond to them not the other way round, as it should be.

The second major cause of decline is international law, the quality of which is substandard and the process of making it lacks accountability, transparency and democratic legitimacy.  Allan discusses in detail the democratic deficiencies of treaties, the legal academics who construct customary international law, and the highly politicised and murky process of judicial appointments to the International Court of Justice.

Allan illustrates his argument with a case study on the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC).  Although written ambiguously and not explicitly stated, the United Nations (UN) argues that spanking a child, for example, violates the CRC.  So should a country outsource its opinion on the acceptability of spanking to the CRC committee and "experts", despite the fact that UN committees are not democratically appointed and often consist of non-democracies?  This proposition is laughable at best and dangerous at worst.  Allan is more convincing still when discussing how judges wrongly use international law to interpret statutes and constitutional provisions, even when it is not a part of domestic law.  This practice is grossly illegitimate and invalid.

The third threat to democracy is the rise of supranational organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU).  Allan's analysis here is especially powerful as exemplified in his attack on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), a key source of democratic decline:

It is widely seen to be ... ineffective, overly politicised, controlled by voting blocs from the world's despotic regimes, anti-Israel, anti-American, or some combination of all of the above.

It is ludicrous that authoritarian and repressive states such as Libya have served on the Council, charged with assessing the human rights situation in all UN member states.  Since the Council's creation in 2006, Israel has been condemned in 50 resolutions ― more than the rest of the world combined.  The fact is that democracies, like Israel, accord citizens more freedom and human rights than non-democracies.  The "democratic" credentials and moral intelligence of the UNHRC are completely inferior to the elected representatives in any democracy.

Allan's critique of the EU is especially compelling.  He argues it is a bureaucratic, top-down, elitist organisation that lacks democratic legitimacy.  More than that, the EU has destroyed the UK's sovereignty.  It takes decisions out of the hands of the elected legislature and places them with the EU, essentially an unelected civil service.  The reality is that UK law is trumped by EU law whenever the two are inconsistent, creating a massive democratic deficiency.

Allan's final reason for democratic decline is the growing number of "undemocratic elites" who look to bypass democratic institutions, like parliament, in favour of courts and supranational bodies to get their desired outcome.  These are the lawyers, the human rights activists, the bureaucrats, and the special interest groups.  It is these people, Allan argues, that have lost faith in democracy and their peers.  They have contempt for democratic process, instead working to impose their preference on their fellow citizens without convincing a majority that it is the best one.  For Allan, they are a key driver of democratic decay.

Allan concludes his analysis by succinctly debunking opposing arguments and detailing the challenges threatening more decline.  His destruction of the "hate speech" movement is particularly enjoyable.  For democratic decision-making to be possible, people must be free to speak their minds and debate issues openly.  Any attempt to stifle free speech, as does Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, poses a significant threat to democracy.

Ultimately, Allan argues, the traditional concept of democracy has been hijacked:  it is no longer about how decisions are made, but the goodness of these decisions.  We place too little faith and confidence in the capacity and opinions of our fellow citizens.  Sometimes in a democracy, you will lose.  You may be right and still not win in the court of public opinion.  Allan's argument is that this is no reason to change the process.

Democracy in Decline is a timely reminder that democracy is not about what is good, or right, or fair.  It is about the value we place on the process, and the rights of all citizens to have a say in shaping the society in which we live.

Sweating Out Third-World Poverty

Out of Poverty: Sweat shops in the Global Economy
by Professor Benjamin Powell
Cambridge University Press, 2014, 193 pages

Benjamin Powell's latest book, Out of Poverty, is a brilliant culmination of a decade's worth of research on sweatshops.  Powell, who is director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, provides not just the economically and morally sound defence of third world sweatshops;  he refreshingly offers an alternative course of action for anti-sweatshop activists, rather than just dismissing their concerns out of hand.

Powell's argument in favour of sweatshops is simple:  as reprehensible as the pay and conditions workers receive in sweatshops may be, the fact that people choose to work in them indicates they provide a better option for poor people than the existing alternatives.  He finds that not only do sweatshops pay wages well above the alternatives available to workers (mostly in agriculture or the service sector), but in many cases sweatshop wages are even higher than the country's national average income.

To illustrate this point, he highlights a key moment of the anti-sweatshop movement.  In 1996 Wendy Diaz, a fifteen-year-old Honduran garment worker, confronted Kathie Lee Gifford on American television regarding her wage of 31 cents an hour to produce Gifford's clothing range.  Gifford burst into tears and promised to increase wages.  However, Powell's research shows that Diaz's remuneration was well above the national average income in Honduras that year.

Indeed, Powell's indictment of the anti-sweatshop movement is a key feature of Out of Poverty.  He demonstrates how the minimum or "living" wages campaigns that are often the goals of anti-sweatshop activists end up costing jobs and forcing people into even worse situations.

For example, in 2003 the Fair Labor Association and the Worker Rights Consortium pressured Korean firm Yupoong into an agreement with a union at their factory in the Dominican Republic.  It promised to give the factory's 2000 workers "a 10 per cent wage increase, educational scholarships, paid holidays, and the establishment of a workers' committee to deal with health and safety concerns at the factory".  It was hailed as "a sign of the success of transnational organizing".  Four years later, the factory had closed.

He also shows that calls to force factory owners to improve health and safety conditions result in lower wages and that workers, if given the choice between conditions and wages, almost always choose higher wages.

Out of Poverty highlights the sinister and disturbing behaviour of the US labour movement which has underhandedly used the antisweatshop lobby, often comprising of naïve college students, to protect manufacturing in the United States at the expense of third world workers.  In support of a failed bill which would have banned the import of sweatshop goods into the US, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations said the bill would be "a powerful vehicle ... to take back our economy".

Powell also promotes the idea that the antidote to sweatshops is economic development.  He charts the historical economic development of Western nations, all of whom accommodated sweatshops in the past, like the infamous workhouses of nineteenth-century Britain.  He notes that in Western countries, anti-sweatshop labour laws did not exist until economic development had consigned sweatshops to history.

If given enough time, sweatshops drive technology transfer and human capital development, and actually play a key role in economic development.

This occurred in the Asian tiger economies after World War II where textiles and simple consumer plastics sweatshops were the precursor to much more technologically advanced manufacturing such as electrical appliances.  This drove the huge growth and improvement in living standards in these countries, where sweatshops no longer exist.  Even free market sceptic Jeffrey Sachs calls sweatshops the "lowest rung" on the ladder of development.

Apart from outlining the traditional economic and moral arguments for sweatshops ― and conveniently compiling the best and latest research to support them ― what's different about this book is that Powell takes the time to spell out a new plan of attack for anti-sweatshop activists.

Powell believes that the low-hanging fruit for activists is slave labour.  Clearly slave labour is an egregious violation of an individual's rights.  The book's support for sweatshops is based on the premise that if people choose to work in them, they must be a better choice than the alternatives available to them.

Obviously this is not the case with slave labour where workers are forced into the factory by threat of violence or some other threat.  Although Out of Poverty shows that slave labour in sweatshops is actually extremely rare, where it does occur Powell wholeheartedly supports and encourages boycotts, law enforcement, legal changes, and other measures from activists.

Powell also traverses the thorny issue of child labour.  He approaches child labour in the same way he deals with adult sweatshop workers ― even though children working long hours in factories is morally outrageous, preventing them from doing so means they will be forced into something worse.  This usually means long, unprofitable hours in the fields, but it can also force children into scavenging, begging or ― even worse ― prostitution.  The key to countering this is to expand the options of children (and their parents) ― not reduce them.  To do this, he advocates that activists create non-government organisations that pay children to go to school.

He also notes that child labour rates fall dramatically as incomes rise above the poverty line.  Once again, his argument illustrates that economic development is the real key to improving lives and ending sweatshops.

Out of Poverty offers heavily qualified support for so-called "ethical" branding where garments and other products are marketed as being produced in factories where workers are paid a so-called "living" wage and employment conditions are similar to those found in rich countries.  Fair Trade coffee and chocolate are two great examples of this type of "ethical" branding.  Clearly, many consumers care about the wages and conditions of the people who make the products they buy.  To the point where they impact on consumer choices, it is in companies' interests to address these concerns with improved conditions.

However, when the improvements demanded by activists mean the company can no longer employ the worker, "ethical" branding is obviously counter-productive.  Activists can educate the public on this reality, help find the balance, and assist companies in discovering new ways to improve workers lives that appeal to consumers but don't end up with job losses.

Furthermore, activists can expose fraudulent versions of "ethical" branding such as the "Shop with a Conscience Consumer Guide".  Most of the factories identified in this guide are actually located in the USA and Canada:  rather than helping poor sweatshop workers, it is a tool that directs income into the hands of wealthy Western union workers.

Activists could also instigate a campaign for a new "ethical" branding called "Made in the Third World".  Economic development is, as noted throughout the book, the true antidote to sweatshops.  Purchasing sweatshop goods actually instigates the process of technology transfer and human capital development that will eventually see their demise.  At the very least, keeping sweatshops viable enables a poor person in a poor country to take up a better employment option than they might otherwise have.

Apart from these specific recommendations, Powell believes those concerned with the plight of third world sweatshop workers should agitate for change that helps poor countries more generally.  These include encouraging free trade by removing trade barriers to western markets, opening up prosperous nations to increased immigration, and spreading the ideas of free market economics and individual liberty to poor countries that currently don't have the institutional environment to support them.

For those who despair at global poverty, Powell sets a fantastic example to help readers understand that free economics and individual liberty are the keys to ending global poverty.  Rather than scorning other compassionate people as economically illiterate, Powell invites them into the tent.  And instead of viewing the institutional malaise of most poor countries as intractable, he offers a modest, workable, but nonetheless impactful set of actions that meet William Easterly's test of what humanitarian activities should aim to achieve:  help "some people, some of the time".

Don't Speak Don't Think

Unlearning Liberty: Campus censorship and the end of American debate
by Greg Lukianoff
Encounter Books, 2012, 336 pages

Keith John Sampson, a mature-aged student from a university in Indianapolis, did nothing more than read a book in public.  But in 2007, it cost him his reputation and employment prospects.

Following a complaint by his peers, he was found guilty of "racial harassment" for openly reading a book that was "related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject".  The book was titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan and had a grainy black and white image of Klan members on its cover.  Never mind that the book actually opposed the organisation, or that the subtitle clearly printed on the book's cover read "How the fighting Irish defeated the Ku Klux Klan", or that it was available in the college's library.  With chilling disregard for due process or any semblance of freedom of expression, the campus judiciary pronounced him guilty of racial harassment.

Unlearning Liberty by Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is full to the brim with a decade's worth of case studies concerning serious infringements of individual liberties in universities across the United States.  Every time you think you've read the worst of these, an even more outrageous one rears its head.

In 2012, the University of Missouri-St. Louis required its students to give six weeks' notice of any demonstrations and banned criticism of the university by prohibiting anything which would "discredit the student body or UM-St. Louis".  In 2005, Washington State University actually bought theatre tickets for an angry mob of students and coached them on how best to disrupt a provocative stage show which the university considered too controversial.  Several universities in the last decade have erected tiny, out-of-the-way "free speech zones", sometimes dubbed "free speech cages", where all campus pamphleteering, demonstrations and expressions of political views must be confined.

Lukianoff does not write as a conservative, but from a left-wing perspective.  Nevertheless he mounts a powerful defence for classical liberal rights ― especially freedom of speech.

To Lukianoff, literally everything collapses if freedom of speech is taken away.  The unique economic and political systems of Western society (along with countless advances in modern science) could not have come into existence without the support of a culture that valued freedom of speech.  Our preference for free enquiry rather than blunt force in disputes has saved our society, unlike so many before us, from descending into stagnation, ignorance, and oppression.

The value of free speech must be learned, as it is otherwise very difficult for students to understand why it is so important to protect dissent.  But when schools, colleges and universities punish students for speaking their minds, they teach students the very opposite of what our society needs to survive and flourish.  They teach students to shy away from voicing dissent, to be thin-skinned, and to accept censorship as a valid means for promoting an officially held cause.  Hence the main concern of this book is that many universities strongly encourage students to unlearn liberty, to discount fundamental rights as mere legalisms, and to be apathetic when these rights are threatened.

The University of Delaware's Residence Life program (which was suspended in 2007) was perhaps the worst and most flagrant violation of the students' freedom of conscience.  Students were required to attend one-on-one sessions with their Residence Assistant, in which they would be asked such prying questions as "When did you discover your sexual identity?" and "Would you be comfortable dating ... a person with different religious beliefs than yours?"  It was aimed at promoting diversity, but it punished nonconformity.  In clinical, Orwellian fashion, the Residence Life officials referred to this mandatory four-year program as a "treatment" which should "leave a mental footprint on [students'] consciousness".  It was an indoctrination program, mandatory and partly state-sponsored, as the University of Delaware receives both private and public funding.  Such a program deserved much wider public condemnation than it ever got.

Lukianoff's findings should be deeply troubling to anyone who cherishes freedom of speech, as well as freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and the right of due process.  The students who graduate from university believing that advocating free speech is equivalent to advocating hate speech will be the country's voters, politicians, lawyers and general citizens of years to come.  Already, as the author noted in the afterword, the universities' growing disdain for the freedom of speech has left its mark on the mindset of the younger generation.

According to a 2013 survey, while only 23 per cent of Americans over the age of 60 believe that "the first amendment goes too far", a whopping 47 per cent of individuals between the ages of eighteen and 30 hold that view.

The one consolation that weaves throughout this book is that whenever students have prosecuted the universities for violating their constitutional rights, the overwhelming majority of court decisions ruled in favour of the students and not the authoritarian universities.  The universities' power trips simply could not stand up to external scrutiny.

Let's be wary that the culture at our Australian universities doesn't reproduce the same ideal of a "diverse" campus in which dissent and alternate opinions are quashed.

Great writers forge minds

The only mention of William Shakespeare in the national curriculum for English appears as an example sentence in the glossary:  "Because I am reading Shakespeare, my time is limited."

This is no accident.  The ­national curriculum for English almost completely neglects the Western canon.  Instead, students study advertising and "digital texts", and the curriculum is saturated with "social studies" content, which is irrelevant and inherently ideological.

It was not always so.  In the 1950s and 60s, classic literature was at the core of school English education.  David Copperfield, One Thousand and One Nights, The ­Odyssey, Black Beauty and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in readings for 12-year-old students.

The classics have stood the test of time and include some of the best examples of writing and story­telling in the English language.  They should be a foundational element of school English.

Since the 1970s, however, curriculums in all states except NSW make no mention of classic ­literature.

The classics also have disappeared from school reading lists.  The Victorian Premier's Reading Challenge listed 1700 books for Year 6 this year but only 20 can be classified as classics, including CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Most of the rest were contemporary fiction published in the past decade.

The national curriculum continues this trend.  Although it does not include a reading list, it frequently alludes to certain types of readings — for example, "contemporary" or "everyday" texts, "media and advertising", "digital texts", and texts from "different historical contexts".

Rarely does it allude to Western classic literature.  The only stories of European origin that it refers to are Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella.  There is a reference to European "representations of dragons" in Year 3 and a handful of uncited quotations of poets such as Tennyson, Burns and Blake, but that is the extent of the treatment of the Western canon.  Instead, there is a large amount of content relating to "ethics" and "social movements".

An optional "content elaboration" in Year 9 suggests "debating the reliability of the coverage in a range of news media of a contentious issue such as commercial logging of old-growth forests".

Another suggests "presenting arguments that advance opinions, justify positions, and make judgments in order to persuade others about issues such as the importance of maintaining balance in the biosphere".  Another "content elaboration" in Year 5 suggests "investigating the qualities of ­contemporary protest songs, for example, those about indigenous peoples and those about the ­environment".

This overtly political ethics-­related content has no place in an English curriculum.  It detracts from the foundational elements of English — reading, writing, spelling, and grammar — and deprives children of the opportunity to read classic literature at school.

America in the 70's

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
by Rick Perlstein
Simon & Schuster, 2014, 880 pages

Rick Perlstein is a writer from the political left who wants to know why, in America in the 60s and 70s, the growing conservative movement was not taken seriously by the liberal establishment.  At the time, most pundits agreed with the assessment of leading political scientist Warren Miller, who argued that the rapid social change of the period meant "both parties would be wise to move their ideological centres of gravity in a liberal, left-of-centre direction".

Perlstein has been grappling with the rise of American conservatism for some time.  In his 2001 book Before the Storm, he explained the rise of Barry Goldwater to the 1964 Republican presidential nomination and subsequent general election defeat.

In 2008, Nixonland, the second volume in the series, covered the social upheaval of the Vietnam era and the electoral success of Richard Nixon.

In The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein tells the story of the years from 1973 to 1976 ― a period in which, as per the sub-title, Nixon certainly fell.  Yet it was less clear that Ronald Reagan had risen.

Reagan did come close to winning the Republican Party nomination in 1976, only losing to incumbent President Gerald Ford on the floor of the convention by 1187 votes to 1070.  At the time, however, this was commonly viewed as the end of Reagan's political career, for, as the New York Times commented, Reagan was "too old to consider seriously another run at the Presidency".

Of course, Perlstein's readers know that Reagan went onto triumph in 1980 and thus understand why Reagan is the main character in this book, and not Ford, nor Democrat Jimmy Carter who actually won the Presidency in 1976.  It is why the narrative of the book is interrupted by chapters which provide a biography of Reagan from his childhood, youth and time in Hollywood.

The fact that Reagan did not win in 1976 means that Perlstein has not yet had to provide a definitive answer to his question about how the conservatives triumphed when the progressives of the era were so dismissive of the possibility.  However, in this volume he shows us where the seeds of the conservative revival were starting to flourish and along the way provides vivid descriptions of the economic, social and political malaise which seemed to be overwhelming America in the mid-1970s.

There was the crisis in national confidence engendered by the failure in Vietnam and Watergate, a scandal which seemed to symbolise all that was rotten with the political system.  At the time, it was quite logical to assume that both would contribute further to a leftward shift in politics and society.

The author makes much of the fact that Reagan made less effort than most other Republicans to distance himself from Nixon over Watergate.  Perlstein clearly sees this as a black mark on Reagan, but also acknowledges that this stance did him minimal political harm.  While Perlstein emphasises the lack of distance over Watergate, one can also see glimpses of the areas where Nixon and Reagan were furthest apart and it was these that were to have far more lasting significance.

One was Reagan's scepticism about détente.  Another was the fact that Reagan regularly talked about the size of government being a problem ― clearly not something that had ever concerned the Nixon Administration.

In 1971, Nixon had expanded government control of the economy by imposing price and wage controls.  In contrast, Reagan regularly made the case for smaller government.  Perlstein cites a meeting in 1973, where state governors were asked about the main national priorities.  The common answers related to the environment, planning, and transport, but Reagan said it was "to halt the trend toward bigger, more expensive government at all levels before it is too late".  As Perlstein comments, it was as if Reagan was speaking from "a different political planet".

However, as Perlstein demonstrates, the common answers from 1973 seemed a bit facile by 1976.  It became apparent in the intervening years that the Keynesian economic consensus, which had been in place since the Second World War, no longer had easy answers for fixing the economy.  Even before the oil price shock following the Arab-Israeli war in late 1973, the cost of items such as meat was skyrocketing.  By 1975, inflation seemed out of control but the economy was growing at negative 5 per cent.  A new word was coined ― stagflation ― to describe the situation where there was stagnation and inflation at the same time, which ― according to the prevailing consensus ― was impossible.

The response from much of the political class was to propose even more of the same type of Keynesian policies.  For instance, Republican legislator Jacob Javits and his Democrat colleague Hubert Humphrey proposed setting up an Office of National Economic Planning, which would submit six year plans to regulate areas of the economy such as factory production.  However, as Perlstein documents, many others, even Nixon's Treasury Secretary John Connally, began to have second thoughts and started using more pro-market rhetoric.  Reagan's voice seemed not to be so extra-terrestrial after all.

A key part of the book's appeal is its use of social history which, in a similar manner to Dominic Sandbrook's works about Britain in the 1970s, Perlstein links to the political crisis of Watergate and the economic crisis of stagflation.  The popular culture of the period featured horror movies such as The Exorcist and Jaws and people began joining all manner of weird self-help and spiritualist schemes, such as transcendental meditation and scientology.  One of the strangest, which Perlstein describes, was "est".  It involved paying $250 for weekends where participants were not allowed to eat, drink, or go to the toilet for twelve hours while instructors screamed abuse at them.

For many at the time, "American morality seemed all but to disintegrate", as social mores changed rapidly and crime rates soared.  To illustrate the sense of social chaos that many Americans felt, Perlstein cites a single day's stories in the Milwaukee Journal which cover kidnappings, bribery, and purse-snatchings from old ladies.  Perlstein observes that what made the sense of chaos even more pervasive was that "crime and social movements seemed almost to merge", underscored most graphically by the case of the heiress Paddy Hearst.  She appeared to be a victim of crime when kidnapped by the radical leftist Symbionese Liberation Army, but then became a perpetrator when she turned up seemingly happy to rob banks with her captors.

With Watergate, stagflation, crime, horror movies, and wacky social movements, there seemed to be no place in mid-70s America for the sunny optimism of a Reagan.  Perlstein writes cynically about Reagan spinning tales of doubtful veracity to show that things always work out for the best in the end.  He also paints Reagan's personal behaviour in a negative light, describing him exaggerating achievements, bedding Hollywood starlets, and having dysfunctional relationships with his children.

However, Perlstein also genuinely seeks to understand how Reagan was able to garner so much support.  He recognises that Reagan was a "political genius".  An example he provides comes from when Reagan first stood to be Governor of California in 1966, a time when it was fashionable to take a benign view of campus militancy.  Reagan's own advisers, armed with some of the most advanced opinion polling then available, told him that as someone perceived as an anti-intellectual, he should definitely avoid criticising students.  However, Reagan instinctively understood that mainstream America hated campus violence.  As Perlstein comments, "one of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls".

As well as its focus on the battle between Ford and Reagan in the Republican primaries, The Invisible Bridge also explains how Carter got the Democrat nomination despite being such a demonstrable phoney.  Perlstein describes how the crisis of confidence in institutions, triggered by Watergate, had created a situation where normal positives for prospective candidates, such as extensive experience in Congress, were negatives in the 1976 campaign.

As he ranges across his subject, Perlstein finds developments on the Right which were scarcely noticed at the time and that have failed to be fully appreciated since.  He introduces his readers to General Electric executive Lemuel Boulware, "the most influential American most people have never heard of".  Boulware's mission was to make all the company's employees, and the communities in which they lived, supporters of capitalism.  Perlstein analyses such seemingly obscure matters as the battle over school curriculums in West Virginia and explains how this was a key foundation issue for the Heritage Foundation.

The Invisible Bridge has been a controversial book in the United States, with many conservatives taking issue with Perlstein's treatment of Reagan.  Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has accused Perlstein of plagiarism and there have been complaints that the book is not sufficiently scholarly.  Many readers, including this one, have not appreciated the decision to put the endnotes online rather than at the back of the printed volume.

However, this is an eminently readable and informative book.  Perlstein's writing style has become more assured in each volume of the series and so one can only await with anticipation the next instalment.  In it, as the ever-optimistic Reagan would have predicted, the good guys might finally win.  Not that Perlstein will be celebrating.

The jig is up on data retention plans

Last week was the second time the Government announced its mandatory data retention policy, and the second time it gave the game away while doing so.

Data retention keeps spinning out of the Government's control.

First, in August, Tony Abbott admitted in a television interview that requiring internet service providers to retain data on their customers' activity was not just about anti-terrorism and national security but could be used to fight "general crime".

This time the mistake was made not by politicians but by the Australian Federal Police commissioner Andrew Colvin.

Asked whether data retention could be used to police copyright infringement, Colvin responded:

Absolutely, I mean any interface, any connection somebody has over the internet, we need to be able to identify the parties to that connection ... So illegal downloads, piracy ... cyber-crimes, cyber-security, all these matters and our ability to investigate them is absolutely pinned to our ability to retrieve and use metadata.

Over the next few days George Brandis, Malcolm Turnbull and Colvin tried to roll this back.  Copyright is a civil wrong, not a criminal one, they said.  Copyright holders are responsible for bringing legal action against pirates.  The AFP isn't interested in civil cases.  (This is only partly true.  Commercial scale copyright infringement is a criminal offence.)

But here's why Colvin's misstep matters.

Mandatory data retention would create massive new databases of internet users' activity in every internet service provider across the country.

A lot of opponents of data retention have pointed out that this creates a very real risk of unauthorised access.  It's hard to keep data secure.

Yet just as concerning is authorised access.  Once these databases have been created they will be one subpoena away from access in any and every private lawsuit.

Many people have some residual faith that police and security services are benevolent.  After all, their mission is absolutely essential — to protect us.  But do Australians have the same faith in movie studios?  Their neighbours?  Their employers?

After all, it's been undeniable that data retention could help copyright infringement cases ever since the Government included "download volumes" in the list of data it wanted ISPs to retain.

But this is just getting started.  Think about how useful mandatory data retention might be in other civil cases.

It would be easy to trace where somebody has been based on the source IP addresses of their mobile phone, as the phone moves from cell tower to cell tower, connecting and reconnecting to the network and internet every time.

In other words, under mandatory data retention ISPs will have to keep records of your movements for two years.

Imagine how this sort of information might be used, for instance, in a workplace relations lawsuit.

Likewise, online defamation cases will be strengthened by records that match IP address to account holder.  Do you sometimes comment anonymously on blogs and news websites?  Under data retention lawyers could track down who you are months after the fact.

We could go on.

Remember the Government wants this data stored solely for the purpose of future law enforcement investigations.  It would be deleted otherwise.  It has no business purpose.

Yet not everything about the policy the Government announced last week is terrible.

It was long assumed that data retention would be shoehorned into the existing telecommunications access regime — the regime that allows agencies and authorities from ASIO to the RSPCA to access your phone records without needing a warrant.

Instead, the Government has decided to change that regime.

The proposed bill limits warrantless access to the both the existing set of data, and any future data retained under the new policy, to "criminal law enforcement agencies".  Those agencies are the AFP, Customs, state police, and the state anti-corruption commissions.  (You can see the list in the explanatory memorandum here, paragraph 197.)

The upshot is that the RSPCA will no longer have warrantless access to phone records.  Nor will the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, or any of the dozens of bodies that have enjoyed such access for years.

They, like movie studios and your neighbours, would have to ask a judge for permission.

I'd guess there was a fair bit of jaw-dropping in bureaucracies across the country when Brandis and Turnbull announced that new rule.

Now, the legislation allows the Government to authorise more agencies at will, so the list could easily expand.

Still it is a striking admission that there has been too much access to too much data by too many bureaucrats for too long.

And that's why the new limits on agency access to telecommunications data doesn't compensate for the threat to civil liberties that is mandatory data retention.  Fewer agencies, sure, but with access to a much more complete record of our lives.

One of the clichés of the internet era is that "information wants to be free".  But information doesn't want anything, of course.  People want information.

Data retention will create vast archives of data about what we have done and where we have been.  People will definitely want that.

No to increasing the GST

Reform of the Australian federation should not serve as the stalking horse for worsening our already uncompetitive taxation burdens.

On the 125th anniversary of Sir Henry Parkes' famous Tenterfield federation speech, Prime Minister Tony Abbott spoke of the need to reform what is widely seen as an increasingly dysfunctional federal system.

Abbott posed a question that many would not have foreseen a Liberal Prime Minister, rhetorically inclined to lower taxation, to ask:  "might the states be prepared to accept responsibility for broadening the indirect tax base?"

With the commonwealth government imposing a goods and services tax (GST) since 2000, and transferring all the revenues raised to the states and territories, Abbott's question was code for suggesting the GST rate be increased, or its base be broadened.

But the arguments in favour of a heavier GST tax load for Australia are weak.

They ignore the fact Australia already imposes a very heavy taxation burden, from an international perspective, and that institutional arrangements preventing the commonwealth unilaterally increasing the GST are in place for good reason.

Numerous academics, social welfare lobbyists and trade union officials cite published OECD statistics, showing our tax-to-GDP ratio some seven or eight percentage points below the OECD-member average, as irrefutable proof that Australia is a "low taxing country".

However these figures do not present a "apples with apples" tax comparison since they include European social security contributions, but not Australia's compulsory superannuation guarantee scheme which fulfils similar policy purposes.

Within the latest OECD Revenue Statistics publication a "apples with apples" comparison (excluding European social security contributions) is also published, illustrating that Australia's tax-to-GDP ratio is over a full percentage point greater than the OECD average.

In our globalised world, Australian tax policymakers also need to bear in mind that international tax burden comparisons should incorporate much lower taxing non-OECD member countries in our region, which we compete against for capital and skilled labour flows.

Much of the frustration for those supporting a higher GST stems from the fact that a longstanding intergovernmental agreement indicates changing the GST rate or base requires unanimous support from the commonwealth and all states and territories, as well as the successful passage of legislation through Parliament.

The rationale, and indeed importance, of this GST "fiscal constitution" becomes apparent when one considers the frequency of increases in similar taxes in other developed countries.

From 2000, when the Australian GST was introduced, to 2013, central governments across the OECD raised value-added tax or GST standard tax rates on 35 occasions, including 22 times during the aftermath of the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

The prohibition against unilateral changes to the GST rate or base can also be argued on other grounds.

For one, those on lower incomes would be likely to financially suffer as a result of increasing the GST, particularly in the absence of offsetting compensation, because more of their disposable incomes are directed toward everyday consumption items.

The rules surrounding GST rate and base changes also provide some protection against the dissipation of efficiency gains, in the event that any resultant growth in revenues from GST extension are to be spent by governments upon wasteful programs and activities.

In any case, contrasting the notion that the prohibition against unilateral changes to the GST rate or base has punitively starved the states of revenue is the fact that Australia has recorded a substantial increase in GST revenue collections.

As a consequence of general growth in nominal consumption expenditures, GST revenue has increased from about $24 billion in 2000-01 to about $51 billion last financial year.

This GST revenue growth was equivalent to an annual growth rate of about six per cent;  well in excess of the average annual increase in general prices throughout the Australian economy.

With Australia hamstrung by duplicated bureaucracies and predatory commonwealth intervention in state policy affairs, the case for federalism reform is as obvious as it is imperative.

But the federalism reform Australia needs is not a GST hike worsening our tax competitiveness, and which would fail to resolve the underlying spending and tax assignment problems inherent within intergovernmental relations.

Therefore, the only reasonable answer to Abbott's Tenterfield question about a bigger GST would have to be a resounding "no".

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Indigenous recognition will hand power to judges

Democracy in Decline is an important new book by James Allan, a law professor at the University of Queensland, published by Connor Court.  In 2009, in the midst of climate change as "the greatest moral challenge of our time", Connor Court brought out Heaven and Earth:  Global Warming, the Missing Science by the resolutely sceptical professor Ian Plimer.

It seems a long time ago now but just five years ago Labor and the Liberals supported an emissions trading scheme and the Canberra press gallery still believed anyone "opposing the science" was doomed to electoral ignominy.  Heaven and Earth sold 140,000 copies worldwide including 40,000 copies in Australia.  Not bad for a book that was all but ignored by much of the mainstream media here.  These days if a book sells 10,000 copies in Australia it counts as a bestseller.

Heaven and Earth signalled the beginning of the end of the hold hysterical warmism had on Australian public policy and a few months ago Tony Abbott repealed the carbon tax.  Australia's political elite is no longer preoccupied with climate change.  Their new preoccupation appears to be "recognition" of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian Constitution.

Democracy in Decline may do to the campaign for indigenous recognition in the Constitution what Heaven and Earth did to climate change policy.  Allan's book is not about indigenous recognition.  It is a vigorous, forensic analysis of how judges and lawyers in the US, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia have taken it on themselves to overturn the decisions of democratic majorities for their own personal, invariably left-leaning version of what is good for society.

Judges and lawyers have done this by using a combination of bills of rights, international law and international institutions.  As Allan makes clear, anyone who thinks that an amendment to the Constitution to recognise indigenous Australians will not ultimately be used by judges to subvert the decision of parliament has no understanding of history.

The decline of democracy is most obvious in countries with explicit bills of rights that give the judiciary the express power to pronounce on the validity of laws.

While Australia doesn't have a legislative bill of rights, Allan documents how the High Court has, through a series of decisions, basically invented a range of previously unknown constitutional rights such as the right to "freedom of political communication".  In the US the democratic contest is all about elected politicians who get to choose the judges who interpret the laws.  In Britain there's not much point to the democratic contest because most of the laws are made by the European Union anyway.

Majoritarian democracy remains the best guarantee of individual rights.  As Allan explains, when judges intervene against a majority decision it is seldom to correct an egregious denial of human rights — most often it is to impose their own preference on policies such as abortion, marriage, the limits on free speech, and the place of religion in public life.  The best way to resolve questions on which there are fundamental disagreements over values is by "counting each of us as equal and letting the numbers prevail".  A decision arrived at by the majority has democratic legitimacy — a 4-3 decision in the High Court doesn't.

Exactly how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders will be recognised in the Constitution is not yet known.  Nor what such recognition will achieve.  Indigenous recognition is a lot like the carbon tax — whenever its advocates were asked what difference it would make to the world's temperature, they refused to answer.  It's the symbolism that counts.

The trouble with symbolism that is that sometimes symbols matter.  That's the case when it comes to indigenous recognition in the Constitution.  The history of the High Court demonstrates repeatedly how words that are seemingly clear can be twisted to suit the political agenda of judges.

Even if a constitutional amendment on indigenous recognition expressly states judges cannot override the parliament's decision, judges will find a way around that prohibition.  That's what happened to New Zealand's Bill of Rights Act of 1990.

Even though it specifically stated it was to have no effect on any other piece of legislation and gave the courts no authority to provide remedies for the breach of the law, within a few years judges were ignoring the written words of the act.  The president of the country's highest court declared that the Bill of Rights Act required judges depart from the longstanding practice of applying what the words of a law actually mean because "we in New Zealand try to live up to international standards or targets and keep pace with civilisation".

There's no knowing what a future High Court will do to a constitutional amendment that recognises indigenous Australians to "keep with civilisation".

The irony of all of this is, as the great Mark Steyn says in his endorsement of Democracy in Decline, the core anglophone democracies have over the centuries done a pretty good job at keeping pace with civilisation.  Yet at the beginning of the new millennium in the name of ersatz "human rights" and transnationalism some of the world's oldest and most successful democracies have decided that rule by judges and lawyers is preferable to rule by a democratic majority.

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Election Column: Gimmick items dominate Victorian campaigns

Is this all there is?

The Victorian election this week started with a Monday announcement that the Napthine government would give every government secondary school a 3D printer.  There are lots of problems with education.  Lack of 3D printers is not one of those problems.  Right now 3D printing is just an interesting toy.

On Wednesday Denis Napthine's team offered $12 million for an "Almond Centre of Excellence" to conduct research into almonds.  Yes.  It did.

Then came a government promise of free Wi-Fi across Melbourne, Ballarat and Bendigo.  Talk about a solution to a problem we don't have.  Citywide Wi-Fi projects were popular about 10 years ago.  But now we've all got phones with internet access.  ("Whatever happened to municipal Wi-Fi?" asked an Economist article last year.)

There are serious things happening in the election.  Labor offered $1.3 billion worth of education promises at their launch last weekend.  The Coalition wants to boost police powers to search homes in secret.  Both are big deals.

But these things get crushed in the conga line of fatuous and unnecessary policies, whose only purpose is to fill campaign days and spend money.

Voters have only so much attention to dedicate to state politics.  3D printers and Wi-Fi cut through.  Yet they make state politics look trivial, and the parties which contest it even more so.

For instance, the $2.2 million for 3D printers was announced the same day as a much less silly extra $5.4 million for community language schools.  Guess which announcement the Premier led?  Guess which got the media focus.

It's not like the Napthine government lacks a good story.  It has a healthy budget — something which cannot be said by its federal colleagues — and has managed to govern reasonably well despite a thin and unstable parliamentary majority.

If Daniel Andrews is premier at the end of the year it won't be because Napthine has done anything particularly wrong.  Nor, indeed, because Andrews has done anything particularly right.  He has a taste for gimmick too.  (Take Labor's policy of half-price rego for apprentices, also announced this week.  Why not just give apprentices the money directly?)  Andrews could be catapulted into power on ennui alone.

State politics is a pale shadow of what it once was.  The federal government has taken control of so many areas of policy that state governments have little room to move, and less in which to innovate.  This control has almost always been voluntarily surrendered.

As a result state politics is frivolous and hollow.  Everybody involved knows Canberra is where the action is.

Napthine had two wins this week though.  First, he lashed out when the Abbott government said it was going to raise the fuel excise.  Second, he stood beside the Prime Minister at the announcement of a joint police taskforce into union corruption.

Victorian politics at its best piggybacking on the Commonwealth.  That says a lot.

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Let's cast off the shackles of inequality

Tackling poverty is important, but the inequality debate largely overlooks the fact that many Australians' lives have vastly improved over time.

A number of welfare advocacy groups, such as the Australian Council of Social Service, tell us that poverty in Australia is worsening, if we take the numbers of households earning half the median income (adjusted for household composition and housing costs) as the poverty benchmark.

This focus on "relative poverty", in this case the level of income attained by certain households compared with others in the community, does not reveal whether the living standards of the poor, or anybody else, have improved or declined.

This distinction matters, because most people associate poverty with severe material deprivation or low life expectancy, whereas rising incomes for middle and higher income earners, in isolation, increases relative inequality even though overall living standards are on the improve.

Looking at living standards from a broader, macro-level perspective, recent research highlighted the incredible upward trajectory of indicators of health, income and wealth, education and connectivity that Australians have enjoyed for the past two centuries.

Infant mortality was much more common at the turn of the 20th century than it is today, with the number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births falling from 104, in 1901, to a little over three today.

Thanks to advances in medicine, and the discovery of antibiotics, few people now die of infectious and parasitic diseases such as cholera, typhoid, polio, smallpox and measles.

However, in the 1920s, as many as 154 people per 1,000 lives died each year due to such diseases, and even more unfathomable is the thought that 10,000 Australians died during the Spanish influenza outbreak in 1919.

The average Australian is also living longer than ever, in what must surely count as one of the most profound human achievements.

An infant born in 2012 will on average live to 82, while one born in the early 1920s would, on average, live to just over 60.  In other words, over the span of eight decades an average Australian could expect to add another 20 years to what was likely to be an increasingly fulfilling life.

The available statistical evidence shows Australians have tended to become more productive, and have amassed more income and wealth, with each passing year.  Adjusting for inflation, the value of final market production per head of population, or real GDP per capita, rose from about $11,100 at the time of Federation to over $66,500 last year, an impressive increase in average economic wellbeing.

One of the most visible manifestations of our improving living standards are the abundant household appliances and entertainment equipment furnishing our larger homes, not to mention our capacity to more easily connect with each other as technological advances become more pervasive.

Contemplate the radical reconfiguration of the humble telephone, say, from a clunky dial-up connected by fixed wires through telephone exchanges, to portable mobile phones transmitting signals through microwave transmission, to Skype connections through a personal computer, laptop or tablet device hooked up to Wi-Fi.

Advanced levels of human capital investment, through a higher education, are no longer a rarity, with about 1.3 million people enrolled in Australian universities last year, compared with fewer than 2,600 in 1906.  Importantly, more than 50 per cent of students in higher education institutions in 2013 were female, up from only 21 per cent in 1949, contributing substantially to their long-term income earning potential.

Life has improved dramatically for successive generations of Australians, and there is some encouraging evidence that the economic circumstances of the poor have, likewise, been improving.

A 2012 University of Canberra study showed that, after adjusting for living costs, the incomes of households situated within the bottom 20 per cent of the income distribution rose, on average, by $93 per week from 1984 to 2010.  Selective indicators show that the extent of assets and goods ownership by lower income households also appears to have grown over time.

ABS data shows about 23 per cent of households on incomes up to $44,000 had home internet access in 1998, rising to about 57 per cent of households with income less than $40,000 in 2013.

In the mid-1950s it was estimated about 40 per cent of all households had a washing machine, whereas by the late 1990s about 93 per cent of households living in highly disadvantaged areas owned a washing machine.  About 55 per cent of all households had at least one television in the early 1960s, yet by the late 1990s about half of disadvantaged-area households owned at least one television.

The presentation of these statistics is not to intimate that the poorest in our community, such as the 6000 people living rough on the streets nationally, are all living in the lap of luxury, but that people on lower incomes have not been strictly deprived of the various benefits afforded by a growing economy.

Although the lives of most Australians have improved, it is unwise to believe that future economic growth and social improvement is automatically assured.

Increases in the average price of goods and services have generally been modest since 2001, but in industries dominated or extensively regulated by government the opposite is true.  Prices of utilities, education and healthcare have all dramatically increased in recent years, far outstripping inflation, and regulated land supply limitations have played a critical part in driving up housing costs.

These rising costs adversely affect the living standards of lower income earners more than others, since they tend to be deprived of the greater choices made more affordable for those earning middle to high incomes.

Maintaining a free and prosperous society will be pivotal to ensuring that Australians continue to live longer, healthier, wealthier, smarter and, thereby, more fulfilling lives.

But in order for Australians to continue to enjoy more prosperous lives, we must restrain the growing burdens of government regulation, taxation and spending that hold all of us back.

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No wonder MPs are confused about security laws

I have a fair amount of sympathy for Anthony Albanese.

Sure, his intervention in the national security debate came nearly a fortnight late.

When Albanese told Sky News he was concerned about section 35P of the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014, it had been 11 days since he and his party voted that restriction on free speech into law.

But this is exactly why the bill was rushed through in the first place.  To prevent opposition to the measures from coalescing.  To prevent analysts and those affected by the provisions from delving into the detail.  To prevent information about the bill's practical consequences from spreading until it was too late.

In The Drum earlier this month Michael Bradley showed how little senior politicians on both sides understood of the national security legislation they voted for.

But let's not be too harsh.  Academics with expertise in national security legislation have told me that even for people who live and breathe this stuff, the legislation was incredibly opaque and the significance of some of the big concepts within it entirely unclear.

If this sort of law is hard for the experts, imagine how hard it is for the politicians who have to vote on it.

As of Tuesday morning there are 130 separate bills being considered in federal parliament.  Just reading them all is an incredible amount of work.

Some bills are brief, just a couple of pages.  Others are like a short book.  The Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill, which re-establishes the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, runs to 21,000 words.  It isn't the longest.

The bills under consideration total 594,032 words.  At an average reading speed (say 200 words per minute) it would take 49 hours just to read all that legislation.

Add the explanatory memoranda for the bills (the essential first step if we're interested not just in reading but understanding) and their 1,271,218 words would constitute another 106 hours of reading.

If somebody made that their full time job (8 hours a day, 5 days a week) that's four weeks — the better part of a month — of dedicated reading.

But reading legislation isn't enough to understand policy.  It isn't really possible to comprehend, for instance, the latest national security proposals without having read the reports of the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor.  The INSLM's 2014 report, which goes into detail about the legislative framework governing foreign fighters, is another 6 hours or so of reading.

So Australia's politicians have a mammoth amount of reading and learning if they want to become even minimally informed about what they're voting about.

No surprise that they are not minimally informed.

In the system of direct democracy in Ancient Athens, citizens would personally vote on each public policy measure themselves.

But direct democracy is incredibly time consuming.  Most people have to work for a living.  We can't all sit around all day considering legislation.  So instead we elect representatives to act on our behalf.  They do it so we don't have to.

Yet nobody who has been involved in any public policy debate can avoid noticing the incredible ignorance that legislators often have of their own proposals, or of the misinformation they accidentally peddle.

Sure, some misinformation is intentionally peddled.  But most of it is accidental, and most of it comes from this extraordinary information overload.

Your average backbencher spends their life dashing from one meeting to the next branch meeting to the next community fete.  They don't have the time to get across all the material.  That's no excuse of course.  But that's just how it is.

As a result, so much of our public policy debate falls back on a feeling about whether one ought to support the purpose of a bill, rather than the specifics of the proposals.

Politics isn't really about policy, after all — it's about signalling to voters what your values are.

Do you support greater national security powers, in general?  Then vote for the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014.  The detail is just detail.

But that detail included a new and dangerous restriction on free speech, as Labor slowly realised after they waved the bill through.

One proposal in the United States is the Read the Bills Act, which, among other things, would require legislators to sign an affidavit that they've actually read the bills they vote for.  (You can read about it, and read the bill itself, here.)

The Read the Bills Act would also require amending legislation to quote the words it intends to replace.  The idea is to make legislation not just available, but comprehensible.

This matters because laws are imposed on everybody but only a narrow group of dedicated lawyers and analysts are able to decode them.

Legal complexity and parliament's heavy workload empowers the bureaucracy and the government at the expense of legislature.  This isn't good for responsible democracy.

Last week the Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm released a tongue-in-cheek quiz — How well do you know the Foreign Fighters Bill?

That quiz was addressed to journalists.  It could have just as easily been addressed to his fellow politicians.

Abbott must learn from Whitlam

For a failed prime minister, Gough Whitlam was remarkably successful.

In 2012, a year before the election of the Coalition government, I featured a photo of the then-opposition leader, Tony Abbott and the headline "Be Like Gough — 75 Radical Ideas to transform Australia".

Some overseas my friends asked why a free-market public intellectual would suggest to anyone they emulate Australia's most left-wing prime minister.

They said what I did was the equivalent of telling a British Tory leader to be like Harold Wilson or an American Republican to be like Jimmy Carter.

When it was explained that measured by the positive feedback that had been received, that my blog post was far and away the most popular it has been for the past ten years, those overseas friends were astonished.

For the left, the point of Gough Whitlam is what he did.  For a free-market public intellectual the point of Gough Whitlam is not what he did — it was how he did it.

He was prime minister for less than three years and he lost more elections than he won (including leading his party to two almost-annihilations in 1975 and 1977) and yet as my blog post declared "No prime minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam".

The story of what Whitlam did has been well recited this week.  Forty years ago he started what Tony Abbott is now attempting to end — the age of entitlement.

In the year before Whitlam came to office, spending by the federal government on social security and welfare comprised 3.75 per cent of the economy.

In the year Whitlam was sacked that figure was 6.25 per cent.  In the 1974 budget, federal government spending increased by 21 per cent in real terms.  Inflation was 17 per cent a year.

As Russell Matthews and Bhajan Grewal identified in their comprehensive analysis Fiscal Federalism in Australia, by 1974-75, because of inflation, for every 1 per cent increase in personal incomes the tax collected by the government increased by 2 per cent.  Anyone who wasn't lucky enough to be a public servant in those years can attest to what this did to the country's work ethic.

Meanwhile, young people at university were told by the government their education was free.  It's a worry many of those students believed, and still believe it.

Julia Gillard wrote a few days ago about how her life was changed because of free university education.

AT LEAST HE HAD A VISION

The reason a free-market public intellectual urged Tony Abbott to "be like Gough" was because Whitlam had vision and ambition.

It might have been vision and ambition for the wrong things — but it was vision and ambition nonetheless.

In 1974, when Whitlam couldn't get his legislation through the Senate, he called a double dissolution election — winning it (narrowly).  Whitlam moved quickly.

My blog post talked about what happens after politicians have been in power for a year — "The support of voters drains.  Oppositions organise.  Scandals accumulate.  The clear air for major reform becomes smoggy.  Worse, governments acclimatise to being in government ... By the second year, even (a) very promising minister can get lazy ... MPs start thinking of the next election."

Also, it's not too long after a new government settles in that "polished and politically savvy public servants" start to assert their own agendas.

Vision and ambition aren't the sole preserve of the left.

Thatcher, Reagan and Howard all had vision and ambition.  In fact it was more difficult for those three to achieve what they did than it was for Whitlam because they didn't have the support of their respective countries' cultural and political elites.  Whitlam swam with the tide.  Thatcher, Reagan, and Howard did not.

For the Abbott government to wind back the size and influence of the state in this country and to reduce the amount of money the government takes out of people's pockets requires just as much vision and ambition as Whitlam had — if not more — given how big government has become.  That's why Tony Abbott should "be like Gough".

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The ABC debate: we have Mamamia and BuzzFeed, we don't need the ABC anymore

The arguments for a publicly funded ABC are weaker today than they ever have been.

If there ever were a persuasive case for a lavishly taxpayer-funded public broadcaster in Australia, the digital age has fundamentally undermined it.

The digital age has radically reduced — some would say even abolished — the barriers to entry in the media industry.  While you once would have required hefty finance for a printing press, radio or TV transmission towers and studios, citizens now have the capacity to publish and broadcast from their mobile phones.

While the media industry in Australia has unquestionably fallen on hard times, on at least one measure it is stronger than ever before:  diversity.  The lowering of barriers to entry has allowed a thousand flowers to bloom — Australians now have access to news and current affairs from more sources than ever before.  Consider the impact and success of recent arrivals like The Guardian and the Daily Mail, BuzzFeed as well as older players like Crikey, New Matilda and even Mamamia.  This diversity has been replicated in the entertainment space too, and will be substantially augmented when services like Netflix finally arrive in Australia.

Australians of course now also have easy access to the best news and current affairs from around the world.  While many lament the loss of foreign correspondents, their role is far less important in a world where you can instantly access local reports from the region that interests you most.

The resources of government are always limited.  Any expenditure has to be justified, because a dollar spent on public broadcasting is a dollar that can't be spent on health, education, defence — or, ideally, returned to the taxpayer.

The continued justification of the $1 billion of taxpayer funds received by the ABC must rest on it providing a service that no one else can.  This golden age of media diversity begs the question:  what does the ABC provide that no one else can?

Children's entertainment?  Available cheaply online.  International news?  Easily accessible from more sources than ever before.  Coverage of Australian politics and current affairs?  Offered by a more diverse range of perspectives today than ever before.  Rolling 24-hour news coverage?  Sky News.  Lists of Gough Whitlam's most memorable quotes?  That's what BuzzFeed is for.

Arguably the most unique offerings on the ABC are its rural and regional coverage and its emergency services broadcasting.  But these are a tiny fraction of the ABC's activities, and could be much more efficiently delivered by direct grants through a competitive tender process.

The ABC's online services, on the other hand, clearly compete in a very well-serviced market.  There's no shortage of opinion online, and yet the ABC maintains The Drum to cater for this.  The ABC's online news is comprehensive, and also duplicates much of what's on offer from established newspapers.

This is particularly important when the ongoing viability of newspapers depends upon their ability to charge — either through advertising or paywalls — for something the ABC provides at no cost.  The ABC is certainly not responsible for all the woes of traditional media companies, but its competition online is not helping and will continue to threaten the business models of commercial news organisations.

Managing director Mark Scott justifies the ABC's online activities by pointing out their charter requires it.  But the ABC charter was only amended to specify its online scope in 2013, and the ABC's aggressive push online long predates it.  The truth is Scott and his board clearly see the ABC's online activities as central to its ongoing relevance, and were already investing heavily in it absent any encouragement from government.

Scott's recent speech at the University of Melbourne clearly outlines this philosophy.  Scott has been running an impressive rear-guard action to defend the ABC's continued generous taxpayer funding.  In what was perhaps the most blatantly political speech by an ABC managing director, he directly contradicted Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull's claim that savings can be made from the ABC budget without affecting programming.  The speech was loaded with thinly veiled threats about the political consequences of a democratically elected government altering the ABC's funding in any way.

This leaves the government with little choice but to press ahead with its proposed cuts.  If Turnbull backs down in the face of Scott's attempted intimidation, future ABC managing directors (and the heads of any government agency wishing to defend their turf) will understand that their political interventions will be rewarded.

But these cuts should just be the first step.  The ABC is long overdue for a comprehensive inquiry into the scope — not just the efficiency — of its activities.  Any fair-minded inquiry will demonstrate that much of what the ABC does today is already being done by others.

IBA climate report's ''safe environment'' right is a war on democracy

Climate change activists have lost the public debate and now seek to push their radical agenda outside of democratic processes.

The International Bar Association report into "Achieving Justice and Human Rights in an Era of Climate Disruption" is the most recent example of this new war on democracy.  The report was ­presented this week at the IBA's annual conference in Tokyo.

It sets out a deep green, leftist agenda, demanding action to bring about "climate justice".

The recommendations of the IBA Climate Change Justice and Human Rights Taskforce Report include the adoption of a "human right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment", the creation of a new international environmental court and for trade agreements to favour environmental objectives over economic ones.

Of course, there is no such thing as a human right to a "safe environment".  But the IBA thinks one should be made up.

It is a hopelessly flawed and dangerous concept.  Human rights are not a means of achieving political ends.  They represent the ideas at the heart of individual human liberty.

Yet the IBA report makes an explicit argument for the creation of a new human right in pursuit of a nakedly political objective.  As if they can be simply plucked from the air.  But human rights are ­static.  They don't change with the political fads of the day.

And that's the great strength of human rights.  As fixed protections of the most basic human freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of thought and conscience and religion — they don't discriminate and they don't confer privilege.

But the IBA wants to change all of that.

On page four of the report the authors reveal their intentions by explaining:  "The global response to (climate change) has to date largely been conducted under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its implementing mechanism, the Kyoto Protocol.  Every year, States Parties to both treaties meet with a view to progressing negotiations, though success has proved ­famously elusive."

In other words, the democratic process (such that it is) hasn't yielded the results the IBA wants.  So now it's time to override democracy.  It's time for the lawyers and judges to step in.

The recommendations to create a human right to a "safe environment" and a new court to adjudicate disputes brought under this shiny new cause of ­action are the key proposals in the IBA report.  They would allow ­individuals and groups like Greenpeace to sue democratically elected governments under the new international legal regime.

Implementing these proposals would represent the wholesale transfer of environmental policy from the democratic realm to the legal realm.  It would replace debate with litigation.

Perhaps this is exactly what we should expect from a body populated by lawyers and judges.  The regime would create a potentially significant amount of work for international and human rights lawyers (including many of the authors of the report).

But lawyers have a duty to ­uphold legal traditions and to ­respect the rule of law.

And this means recognising limitations of the law and the importance of distinct boundaries between legal and political spheres.  Two Australians are members of the taskforce responsible for the report — Chief ­Justice Brian Preston of the NSW Land and Environment Court and Professor Jane McAdam of the University of NSW.

Preston seems oblivious to the fact that the report presents as a strategy document for a radical Left overhaul of the legal system.  As he explained on these pages earlier this month:  "In our early discussions we were trying to ensure we did not take a particular viewpoint aligning ourselves with one sort of faction or another."

It's unclear what happened by the time the later talks took place because the bias of the report couldn't be clearer.

At this point there are a couple of things that must occur.  First, the recommendations contained within the IBA report should be completely rejected by the commonwealth government, on grounds that they are anti-democratic and economically destructive.  Second, the IBA should desist from further promotion of any particular political agenda.

If the IBA or anyone else is truly interested in justice for the world's poor it should heed the wise words of Stephen Galilee, CEO of the NSW Minerals Council, who made the point that "justice for the world's vulnerable must also include access to the cheap and reliable energy that can lift them out of poverty."

Of course this isn't what green activists want to hear.  But thankfully it's a truth of which prime minister Tony Abbott is keenly aware.

As he sensibly noted last week:  "Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an ­essential part of our economic ­future, here in Australia, and right around the world."

The WHO has failed the Ebola disaster

What is the point of elaborate and expensive international bureaucracies if they are unable to deal with cross-border crises?

The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) has completely botched the Ebola disaster sweeping West Africa.

That's not my assessment, but the assessment of the WHO itself.

Ebola has now killed more than 4500 people, mostly in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.  It's the largest outbreak of the virus in history.

Over the weekend the Associated Press published details of an internal WHO report outlining the organisation's mistakes, information failures, staff incompetence, and governance problems tackling the crisis.

"Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall," the document apparently says.

The report isn't public — it's a draft — and WHO doesn't want to talk about it until it has been "fact-checked".  But WHO's failures have been publically and tragically evident long before now.

Months before WHO declared Ebola a global health emergency in August, aid agencies in West Africa were saying the disease was out of control.

In March, Médecins Sans Frontières was talking about "an unprecedented epidemic regarding the distribution of cases" in Guinea.  WHO spokespeople actively rejected that characterisation.

Even as late as July 30 WHO leadership said it was "pessimistic" to suggest that the Ebola outbreak was an international health emergency, as this Washington Post article reports.

It wasn't until August 8 that WHO finally relented and announced that the Ebola outbreak was "an extraordinary event" demanding an extraordinary response.

This is exactly the sort of crisis WHO was created to prevent.  But it delayed, denied, and obfuscated for months.

WHO was formed at the end of WWII, but its roots stretch back to the mid-19th century.

It's hard to think of a better candidate for international collaboration than infectious disease.  Outbreaks of cholera in Western Europe in 1832 and 1849 led to the first international efforts on health.  The reasoning was simple.  Cholera, and other diseases like the plague and yellow fever, paid no heed to national borders.  Controlling them would require cooperation.

This policy need remains.  The Ebola crisis demands an international solution.  Individual countries need assistance.  Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world.  Ebola is one of the hardest diseases to manage.  And cooperation is needed to prevent it from spreading.  Ebola's long incubation period — up to 21 days — means it can travel far from the place of infection.

So this is exactly the sort of crisis where international organisations should be proactive.

But WHO is directed by the World Health Assembly — an assembly of the health ministers and delegations of its 194 member states.

And that assembly is more interested in nanny state paternalism and sociology-masquerading-as-medicine than infectious disease.

The May meeting of the assembly opened with a speech by the Director General that WHO would "end childhood obesity" and focus on the health consequences of climate change and inequality.

The assembly spent its time talking about non-communicable diseases (cancer, diabetes and so forth), nutrition, and gender-based violence.

As the Ebola crisis has been developing WHO leadership has been hard at work hosting an anti-tobacco conference and pushing for increased cigarette taxes.

You may think these are all important topics.  Yet they're far away from what international health cooperation ought to be best at:  the management of cross-border pandemics.

Non-communicable diseases demand national solutions.  Pandemics demand international solutions.  Resources are scarce, and WHO increasingly spends them on the former rather than the latter.

Nor is WHO's distance from its core mission justified by any reputation for bureaucratic excellence.

The organisation has been criticised for decades for being heavy politicised, for its cronyism, for its excessive bureaucracy, and for its unwieldy structure.  (So it's a pretty typical United Nations body in that sense.)

One former WHO assistant director general wrote after the 2010 Haiti cholera outbreak that WHO was dysfunctional and coming "closer and closer to irrelevancy".  Global health academics write about WHO's "crisis of leadership".

Recent funding problems caused by the global financial crisis have led it to focus even more on non-communicable diseases.  As for pandemics, WHO's plan has been to promulgate health regulations and let individual countries sort themselves out.  But this isn't much help for poor countries like Liberia.

Now, as the New York Times reports, the entire pandemic and epidemic scientific team at WHO has just 52 permanent employees.  Until this year it had just one Ebola expert.

WHO can complain about budget troubles all it likes but in a $4 billion organisation this is pathetic.

Thank God for civil society organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières.

Perhaps nothing WHO could have done would have prevented the crisis taking the course it has so far.  Tackling infectious disease is hardest where institutions and infrastructure are worst, as they are in Liberia.

But that's a hypothetical.  The fact is, by its own assessment, WHO failed badly.

The Ebola crisis has exposed a dangerous weakness in the international security framework — a weakness caused by caused by bureaucratic incompetence and a deliberate decision to emphasise non-communicable diseases.

Surveillance and Privacy

In August 2014, the Australian government announced it intended to require internet service providers to retain "metadata" on every customer for two years for the use of law enforcement.

A first pass at this policy, offered by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Attorney-General George Brandis, suggested the government wanted ISPs to collect the internet browsing history of all users.  A second, evidently revised version of the policy was announced a few days later by the Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.  The new version was much narrower.

Privacy is a condition;  and a highly subjective and context dependent one at that.  But we all require privacy to function and thrive.

Neither variation of the proposal is an Antipodean invention.  In 2006 the European Union's 2006 Data Retention Directive required EU member states to introduce similar sorts of mandatory data retention laws.

These proposals come on top of the revelations about the United States' National Security Agency's vast global surveillance apparatus.

Democratic countries are now faced with fundamental questions.  Can the right to privacy survive the expansion of the surveillance state?  Or more fundamentally, is privacy a value worth protecting?

There's a claim you often hear in discussions about privacy:  someone who has done nothing wrong has nothing to hide.  In other words, privacy is only a concern for those who are avoiding the law.

To the extent it is a serious argument, this claim has some serious practical problems.  First, it presumes that we can trust government agents to uphold their duties fairly.  That is not a trust which has been especially earned.  Second, it ignores the fact that the expanding reach of public law, the over-criminalisation of minor rule-breaking and the expanding scope of the regulatory state has bought more and more activity into the realm of the justice system.  Finally, law enforcement agencies and regulators operate as much by discretion as they do by commandment.  Not every law or regulation is just, or justly enforced.  It is not always obvious when you are doing wrong.

But more significantly, privacy is necessary for more than just the evasion of legitimate or illegitimate government action.

There is no consensus on how privacy ought to be defined, what its central attributes are and how it ought to be balanced with other principles such as the right to freedom of speech.  Privacy is a condition;  and a highly subjective and context dependent one at that.

But we all require privacy to function and thrive.  Let's start with the mundane.  Obviously we desire to keep personal details safe — credit card details, internet passwords — to protect ourselves against identity theft.  On top of this, we seek to protect ourselves against the judgment or observation of others.  We close the door to the bathroom.

We act differently with intimates than we do with colleagues.  We often protect our thoughts, the details of our relationships, our preferences, from prevailing social norms.  We compartmentalise.  How many people would be uncomfortable with a colleague flipping through their mobile phone — with the window into a life that such access would provide?

Public life is one in which we all play roles, heavily mediated by social norms, assessments or assumptions about the values of our peers.  Private life is a respite from that mediated world — a place we can drop our masks, abandon the petty deceptions that are necessary for smooth social interaction.

This desire for privacy applies to communications as well.  Eroding privacy undermines our liberty to speak our minds.  Thus, government surveillance interferes with the free-ness of speech.  The feeling — real or imagined — that we are being watched, or that our actions are being recorded, affects the way we express ourselves.  One 1975 study examined how the knowledge of surveillance changed stated attitudes on moral and legal questions.  The study concluded that "the threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech".

The legal scholar Louis B Schwartz illustrated how entangled free speech and privacy are by describing the characteristics of communication in private:  "Free conversation is often characterized by exaggeration, obscenity, agreeable falsehoods, and the expression of anti-social desires or views not intended to be taken seriously.  The unedited quality of conversation is essential if it is to preserve its intimate, personal and informal character."

The belief that a speaker might have to answer for, or justify, their speech, especially their speech to those with whom they have an intimate or close relationship, is a constraint on that speech.  We all understand how easy it is for others to misinterpret our words, and how speech can be willingly misconstrued.  As Cardinal Richelieu put it in his famous (and possibly apocryphal) words, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

What does this mean for the debate over surveillance?  As the recent debate over mandatory data retention has shown, the law governing telecommunications interception is complex, and the technologies it applies to even more so.  On top of these technical and legal complexities, the nature of the national security threat is unclear.  National security is a highly opaque area of public policy.

That opacity means the surveillance state is hard to control by democratic means.  In their book Privacy on the Line, Whitfield Diffie and Susan Eva Landau argued that the "very invisibility on which electronic surveillance depends for its effectiveness makes it evasive of oversight and readily adaptable to malign uses."  The Princeton academic Rahul Sagar has concluded that the challenge of democratic control is so great that we mostly have to rely on whistleblowers to learn what the surveillance state is doing in our name.

In April 2014 the European Court of Justice ruled that Europe's Data Retention Directive was unconstitutional.  In the court's view, the directive "interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data" and did so in a manner that was disproportionate to its stated objective of fighting serious crime.

Mandatory data retention has been wound back in many of the states that implemented it, in part because of the civil liberties issues raised by the European Court of Justice, and in part because the policy has not been a particularly effective law enforcement tool.

For Australia, that record, and the importance of privacy to individual flourishing, ought to create a presumption against the expansion of the surveillance state.