The problem is clear in the latest Closing the Gap annual report, a masterful example of sophisticated political management and bureaucratic obfuscation. This tightly organised combination of new and previous policy commitments, 2023 achievements and key actions for 2024 purports to outline the Commonwealth’s strategic priorities for the next year. But closer analysis reveals deep-seated flaws in policy design, strategic omissions and evasions and a deep-seated lack of ambition, all wrapped in a slick presentation replete with selective case studies, graphics, some useful governance charts and an avalanche of uninformative facts and figures. There is nothing strategic about this document.

The previous government was more inclined to blame the victim, cut funding and pursue punitive policies. It reshaped the Closing the Gap architecture, reconstituting and expanding its targets. Most importantly, it created a new National Agreement on Closing the Gap that directly engaged First Nations in shaping policy while shifting the bulk of political and policy responsibility — and future blame — to the states and territories.

For Labor, the failure of the Voice referendum has exposed a deficient policy framework and diminished its preparedness to pursue substantive reform. In desperation, it has fallen back — holus bolus — on the previous government’s policy architecture.

Despite their tactical and ideological differences, both major parties have used excessively complex bureaucratic processes, extremely low transparency, high-flown promises and the tactical politicisation of specific issues to divert attention from more important underlying issues. Their guiding principles appear to be to deflect, defer and delay.

A fundamental problem with the national agreement is that its policy architecture is extraordinarily over-engineered. It was designed not by a single committee of state, territory and Commonwealth bureaucrats but by negotiations between that committee and a committee of Indigenous representatives. The asymmetric power imbalance inevitably produced an imperfect structure.

It is hard to believe that the government negotiators didn’t see the ramifications of the extraordinarily complex structure that emerged from the negotiations. It created multiple choke points at which multi-party consultation and coordination is required, encouraging a culture of inertia and stasis.

To take just one important example, the agreement identifies nineteen targets and four priority reforms and allocates responsibility for implementation to eight state and territory jurisdictions along with the Commonwealth and the Australian Local Government Association. The Coalition of Indigenous Peaks — which itself has a nascent federal structure in each state and territory — is also ostensibly an equal partner.

No line of sight nor responsibility exists between any one target and any one government or minister: responsibilities and accountability are shared across a highly complex geographical and sectoral matrix involving layers of mainstream and Indigenous-specific programs. National-level data is deficient across all targets and all four priority reforms, at least partly because the targets themselves have been poorly chosen and loosely specified. Most importantly, the targets are not aligned with dedicated investment strategies.

The four priority reforms at the heart of the agreement would best be seen as overarching frameworks. But they have been broken down into arbitrary elements to be measured and reported on, notwithstanding the vagueness of these elements and their poor fit with existing data. Instead of bringing macro-level strategic coherence the four priorities have been converted into arenas of micro-focused navel-gazing.

While the agreement requires each jurisdiction to publish an annual report and develop an on-going implementation plan, the joint council that manages its operation decided some years ago to shift to annual implementation plans, adding a further layer of process. Instead of being a roadmap laying out each jurisdiction’s multi-year pathway to each target, the plans merely recount innumerable actions and funding decisions, most with limited timeframes.

The latest Commonwealth implementation plan lists sixty-five commitments of varying significance; state and territory plans are generally much more complicated. A requirement that jurisdictions explain how they would “close the gap” has been transformed into a requirement to publish a profusion of meaningless facts and intentions to develop plans.

By combining that latest implementation plan with its annual report the Commonwealth has signalled its unwillingness to develop and lay out a longer-term roadmap. Its decision-making is very much at odds with the recent Productivity Commission review of Closing the Gap, which recommends that implementation plans reflect a more strategic approach.

Any serious attempt to lay out such a roadmap would involve two elements that are seemingly anathema to the Australian government. First, the Commonwealth would need to establish a framework to coordinate the disparate and largely inadequate efforts of the states and territories. This is a glaring hole in Closing the Gap’s architecture and desperately needs attention not just from the Indigenous Australians minister but also from the treasurer, the finance minister and the prime minister.

Notwithstanding its potential to give First Nations people access to policymaking, the national agreement has formalised a regression across the federation towards the inertia last experienced before 1967. Labor would face few insurmountable obstacles if it resolved to reverse direction and effectively coordinate government efforts to deal with Indigenous disadvantage across the federation. A failure to do so will risk Closing the Gap imploding under its own weight.

The second element of a realistic and effective roadmap would be an estimate of the size of the multi-year investments required. This would facilitate better decision-making, assist in placing the myriad demands on governments in perspective and assess the financial costs — the imputed shortfalls in funding, in other words — that First Nations Australians continue to bear.

Unfortunately the Commonwealth’s latest implementation plan appears designed to preclude even modest reforms like these.

Many other questions and issues aren’t dealt with in the Commonwealth’s plan. There’s space here to look at just two of them.

The Community Development Program provides income support and job search for around 40,000 participants in remote Australia. This year’s Closing the Gap annual report lists a total 1950 new jobs employment placements/jobs created under CDP. Even so, the prime minister announced that the government was “moving on” from the “failed Community Development Program” and establishing a Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program to help community organisations create 3000 jobs over three years in remote areas, at a cost of $707 million. This funding for real jobs in regions where employment opportunities are scarce or non-existent is welcome and long overdue. Unfortunately, it is pathetically unambitious. And what is the future for the 37,000 CDP participants? Will they continue in a “failed” program?

A second example: the report lists ninety-eight actions from last year’s implementation plan and reports on their status. Most are mere process matters. Nine are listed as delayed; one as “stopped.” The latter is target 9b, relating to remote essential services infrastructure (though that’s not spelt out in the report). The target, which was approved by ministers in August 2022, states:

By 2031, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households:

• within discrete Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities receive essential services that meet or exceed the relevant jurisdictional standard

• in or near to a town receive essential services that meet or exceed the same standard as applies generally within the town…

Last year the Commonwealth declared that “delivering on Target 9b will provide vital infrastructure to support liveable, safe, sustainable and healthy communities for all First Nations peoples… The initial focus for the target will be on the development of a new Community Infrastructure Implementation Plan, in collaboration with the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) and key stakeholders.”

Why then, without explanation, has work on the implementation plan for “vital infrastructure” been stopped? Perhaps the Commonwealth fears a remote infrastructure implementation plan would encourage the states to demand increased Commonwealth funding. So much for mobilising all avenues and opportunities to overcome the entrenched inequality faced by too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

All in all, the latest Closing the Gap report makes for depressing reading. It comes across as a convoluted box-ticking exercise, overflowing with plans, partnership committees, good news stories and the like. It makes no serious attempt to look behind the available data to acknowledge and reflect on the challenges of those families caught up in extreme poverty, cycles of alcohol-and drug-induced despair, youth suicides, and the trauma of extraordinary rates of incarceration and unfathomable out-of-home-care rates for Indigenous children.

The report’s implicit agenda is to defer committing financial resources, and delay making difficult decisions. Sure, governments can’t solve all the nation’s problems, but it is inexcusable that, where governments do invest, resources don’t flow equitably.

The Closing the Gap process is perhaps the most useful way to bring these problems to the nation’s attention. Its success will require vision, political commitment and a preparedness to think through the policy issues and make decisions commensurate with the size and severity of the challenges. The Albanese government, like the government before it, has so far failed on all counts.

In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” It is time the government commissioned an independent strategic review of the Indigenous policy domain, akin to the recent 2023 Defence Strategic Review, aimed at bringing a much greater degree of discipline, rigour and, most importantly, urgency to a worsening crisis blighting the life opportunities of many tens of thousands of First Nations citizens.

The fact that the depth and severity of this crisis is largely invisible to most Australians increases the responsibility on governments to act; it is not an excuse or rationale for inaction. •

The post Gap years appeared first on Inside Story.

If these Voices are to be among the next government initiatives to deal with Indigenous disadvantage then we would be wise to study their history — for the idea is not new. For that reason, Max Angus’s new book, Too Far Out, an “administrative history” of the Ngaanyatjarra community of Western Australia, couldn’t be more timely.

The Ngaanyatjarra community — 1542 kilometres northeast of Perth, 750 kilometres northeast of Kalgoorlie, 560 kilometres northeast of Laverton, 1050 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs and (by my estimate) 2200 kilometres from Canberra — is remote from any recognised administrative centre. Imagine a London borough governed by officials living and working in Budapest with oversight from officials in Bucharest.

As a “nation for a continent” (in the words of Australia’s first prime minister) “remote” is what Australia does: assuming responsibility for all corners of this land is our sovereign project. Since the early twentieth century, the Ngaanyatjarra have become interlocutors of  Australia’s three-level state; less and less are they “too far out.” They have been Australian citizens since 1948 (and British subjects before that). They have become literate in English, and were fully enfranchised in 1984. Many would call themselves Christian, and their homeland has been of intermittent economic significance. They have been statistically visible — on the wrong side of the gap — since the 1970s. How their homeland became a governable region is the story that Angus, a former professor of education, wants to tell.

Until 1873–74, when William Gosse, Ernest Giles and John Forrest began to map cross-continental routes, no European had entered the region. An imagined Laverton-to-Oodnadatta stock route would have passed through but it never came into existence; only in the early twentieth century did prospectors venture there and humanitarians begin considering how the denizens of this arid interior might be protected.

From South Australia’s Christians came a proposal, in 1914, to declare reserves — “sanctuaries” — on each side of the border with Western Australia. Would the Commonwealth join them in its adjacent southwest corner of the Northern Territory? After years of negotiation the three contiguous Central Australian Reserves were gazetted in 1920–21 and this “inviolable” region of interacting desert peoples came under three colonial authorities.

But officials in Perth, notionally responsible for the welfare of the Ngaanyatjarra, had no program and no knowledge. In the 1930s, from Mount Margaret Mission near Laverton, pastor Rod Schenk and schoolteacher Mary Bennett peered east and hoped that Perth would not license the Ngaanyatjarra homeland to graziers and gold-seekers. Motor cars were replacing camels but there were still no roads. The Ngaanyatjarra were reported to be “gentle and well mannered” and evidently “contented and well fed.”

The WA government refused tenure in the region to all but missionaries. After Schenk established a mission at the Warburton range, near the reserve’s western edge, in 1934, he persuaded the government to extend the reserve boundary further west to include a permanent Euro-Australian presence, the United Aborigines’ Mission under William and Iris Wade.

With the state stinting the money needed to feed the desert people attracted to the mission, Ngaanyatjarra people, encouraged by the Wades, began competing for the government bounty on dingo scalps with “doggers” already active in the Western Desert. The state government sought to regulate the mission’s scalp dealings, and in 1947 visiting police observed the Ngaanyatjarra hunters breeding dingos for scalp harvesting. (In the mid sixties, anthropologists began learning of a dingo dreaming track starting at a site known as Nanku.)

By then, Australian governments were imagining Indigenous Australians’ secular pathway to economically independent citizenship. Officials wondered if the mission was giving the Ngaanyatjarra enough to eat and whether it was right to house children in dormitories. Native affairs commissioner Stanley Middleton (1948­–62) was committed to “assimilation,” even for the most distant and “primitive” people, but the policy raised a question: could a Christian mission on an inviolable reserve be an instrument of its residents’ progress?

Warburton mission’s government subsidy increased, but it was calculated on the assumption that many who frequented the mission were living as hunter-gatherers and dingo farmers rather than reliant on the mission. But the government began considering a plan to close the Warburton mission and transfer residents 200 miles to Cosmo Newberry, a settlement acquired by the missionaries in 1953 to train children with state government support. Warburton mission found an advocate in Bill Grayden MP, however, who persuaded the Legislative Assembly to set up an inquiry into the welfare of “natives” in the Laverton–Warburton Ranges region. Having found the people at Warburton to be in a depleted condition, the committee recommended that the government subsidise a pastoral enterprise for the Ngaanyatjarra.

A dispute ensued: visitors in 1957 (including a young Rupert Murdoch) debated how well or how badly off were the Ngaanyatjarra, what remedies they were entitled to, who was responsible for delivering assistance and whether English should replace Ngaanyatjarra as the region’s lingua franca. The records assiduously consulted by Angus suggest that the Ngaanyatjarra had no independent voice in these debates.

Meanwhile, the “inviolable reserve” was being subjected to excisions. The Commonwealth’s weapons testing program required it to establish an observation post within the reserve — Giles Weather Station, with connecting roads — and the WA government opened a third of the reserve (7500 square miles) to International Nickel of Canada in 1956. The Ngaanyatjarra thus became a “problem”: in order to protect them, authorities now had to exclude them from places where Commonwealth and company employees — in small numbers — were residing. Middleton hoped that the Commonwealth would assume responsibility for developing all of the Central Reserves; South Australia, for its part, initiated a pastoral enterprise at Musgrave Park, later known as Amata, in 1961.

To begin with, the Ngaanyatjarra are in the background of Angus’s story, but he is able to move them steadily to the foreground. The more their homeland was encroached on, the more their remaking of their life became visible to colonial authority and thus to the historian.

Some 450 residents were counted at Warburton in 1962. They were increasingly dependent on the food the mission provided. The following year a patrol officer reported that the Ngaanyatjarra were using their homeland’s recently graded tracks — even purchasing their own truck from sales of copper ore found near the mission. At this point it becomes possible for Angus to name individual Ngaanyatjarra.

A man called Tommy Simms had discovered the copper, and by 1961 the mission was managing the earnings derived by a small number of men from mining the ore and sending it to British Metals in Perth. The government wanted to develop the enterprise on a commercial footing, but the mission sought to defend its own interests and assure a degree of Ngaanyatjarra control. Western Mining offered to partner with the men, the government approved, and Simms became the first Ngaanyatjarra with the means to purchase his own vehicle (a Toyota and a Bedford truck).

In 1966 the government licensed Western Mining to prospect within the reserve and form partnerships with Simms and other individuals. Between forty and sixty men were involved in mining by 1967; in keeping with Western Desert people’s now well-known respect for “autonomy” within a continuously negotiated “relatedness,” those with tenements preferred individual partnerships with Western Mining to a cooperative. Others participated as employees. Would copper ore pave the way to the future governments hoped for?

But the Ngaanyatjarra easily disengaged from copper mining: the land was unevenly mineralised, the work was tedious, hunting remained an attractive alternative, and the mission would still feed them. “Their deep attachment was to the Ngaanyatjarra people and lands,” writes Angus, “not to a mining corporation or to a Western lifestyle.”

By the time Western Mining decided it was no long profitable to work with Ngaanyatjarra, one in ten Warburton residents had become eligible for the social security payments that now made up two-thirds of the community’s income. In 1969 the payments, previously made collectively, began being paid to individual recipients. The change was conceived and defended as a step towards “citizenship,” but it wrecked the mission’s system of communal provision.

Prospects of further income from the mining of nickel (around Wingellina) and chrysoprase had to be weighed against a growing official concern for the protection of sacred sites whose locations were being revealed to researchers during the 1960s by Ngaanyatjarra. They wanted income from mining, but in ways that respected country.

By this time, a new federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was looking at how employment could be brought to the region in ways that aligned with local interests. An inquiry proposed that a new, federally funded Central Reserves Trust representing Ngaanyatjarra and neighbouring peoples would gradually assume control of the three reserves, re-establish Warburton mission as a planned township, develop tourism and horticulture, and permit Aboriginal prospecting. Before that happened, the Commonwealth demanded that Ngaanyatjarra land excised for mining be returned to the reserve. Western Australia complied in February 1972, while also amending its own legislation to allow a minister to approve exploration within the reserve.

Where did Warburton mission fit into this plan? Around Australia, Christian missions were relinquishing administration to Aboriginal councils. The WA government considered that its agencies — including the new (1972) Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority — were better suited to administering Commonwealth investment in the reserves. The missionaries agreed, with misgivings, to confine themselves to “spiritual and linguistic” work. Administering the food supply — the children’s dining room and the store — devolved to Ngaanyatjarra, who were unprepared for the role. They were equally unprepared when a new Warburton Community Inc. introduced unfamiliar modes of governance in mid 1973. It was “a difficult period for all concerned,” writes Angus, but the policy of self-determination was politically irreversible.

For these policies and plans to work as “development,” much depended on which of the proliferating authorities and visitors the Ngaanyatjarra — the intended workforce and clientele — felt comfortable with. Visiting tradesmen were unfamiliar with the Ngaanyatjarra’s opportunistic approach to employment — intermittent and punctuated by spells on unemployment benefits. The local labour markets that worked in some Australian regions seemed not to apply in Ngaanyatjarra country. Teenagers rejected the daily discipline of school attendance and some residents refused to cooperate with nurses employed by the Australian Inland Mission. Blasting for the construction of a hospital upset the custodians of the Marla so much that visiting workers demanded police protection.

By 1975 Warburton was becoming known as a hostile environment for non-Ngaanyatjarra. For reasons cultural and logistical, it was proving difficult to police Warburton from Laverton. One of the Commonwealth’s responses was to assist Ngaanyatjarra to decentralise. The four resulting “homeland” communities — Wingellina, Blackstone, Warakurna and Jameson, each with its own white community adviser — were all places where Ngaanyatjarra had interacted with “whitefellas”: all were on the road network that prospectors and weapons researchers had created since the 1950s.

People from Docker River (a welfare settlement established in the Northern Territory in 1968) and Amata (a South Australian settlement established in 1961) also moved to the four communities. The Central Reserves were being repopulated using resources deliberately or inadvertently provided by a variety of non-Aboriginal intrusions. Their viability was based largely on welfare payments, as Angus writes, for the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs “had given up pretending that some large-scale economic enterprise, leading to regular paid work, was just around the corner.”

As public health practitioner David Scrimgeour tells it in his recent book, Remote as Ever, a cohort of whites with relevant skills was emerging from southern capital cities to work alongside these Western Desert people. They believed that self-determination could work as long as it was re-spatialised according to Aboriginal wishes and resourced according to their rights as citizens. For Indigenous nations living almost entirely on imported food, the “smoothly operating well-stocked store” was each new community’s foundational institution. Schools and clinics (each with itinerant staff) followed. Able to move among Ngaanyatjarra’s five communities, people occupied their homeland with fewer material constraints; but it was difficult to service “communities” so transient.

The 1967 referendum had created the potential for intergovernmental relationships to change in ways that could work to the advantage of Ngaanyatjarra. The Commonwealth sought to treat the entire Central Reserve as a single “tri-state” object of reformed administration. Decisions in Canberra meant that the Ngaanyatjarra began to look more to the local Department of Aboriginal Affairs office in Alice Springs and less to state officials in Perth. WA government agencies increasingly faced demands from community advisers who answered to Canberra.

Empowering the Commonwealth at the expense of the states caused tensions among non-Indigenous officials. A major Commonwealth innovation in 1977 was to lump unemployment benefits into a single payment to each community — the Community Development Employment Projects, or CDEP, schemes.

When their expectations were not met, Ngaanyatjarra were sometimes violent towards service providers, making policing (where, how many, what methods) a policy issue in the late 1970s. Christian evangelism (including a “Christian Crusade” in 1981) and new by-laws in Warburton reduced but didn’t stop alcohol abuse and petrol-sniffing. Angus argues convincingly that outbreaks of “lawlessness” preceded the 1970s transition to “self-determination.” But the question remained: could the institutions of self-determination reduce the frequency and severity of such “turbulence”?

A certain level of turmoil did not stop the Ngaanyatjarra and their neighbours to the east from collective action using the Commonwealth’s and South Australia’s land rights policies. The formation of the Pitjantjara Council, the continuing interest of mining companies in the reserve’s nickel, and the pro-mining stance of WA premier Charles Court stimulated the formation of the Ngaanyatjarra Council in March 1981. In well-publicised lobbying, the council demanded inalienable freehold title to the WA portion of the Central Reserve.

An inquiry initiated by a subsequent premier, Labor’s Brian Burke, recommended in 1984 a way to legislate land rights. With claimable land amounting to 47.2 per cent of Western Australia’s total area, the Liberal Party argued, as it would in 2023, against “a set of rights which will be attributable to one small group of our population,” and it had the numbers in the Legislative Council to defeat Labor’s bill.

Burke’s government was impressed by the mining industry’s public relations campaign and lobbied for the Hawke government to abandon its planned national land rights bill. Would the Ngaanyatjarra accept a ninety-nine-year lease and the prospect of a nickel mining town (with jobs for Ngaanyatjarra) instead? The Ngaanyatjarra suggested that the government use existing legislation to lease the reserve land and other desired portions to a new body — the Ngaanyatjarra Land Council — some land portions with ninety-nine-year, others with fifty-year leases. Mining companies would apply to the land council, not the mines minister, for permission to explore, with a right to take any refusal to independent arbitration. Visitors could apply to the land council for permission to enter land under lease.

This 1988 deal, which Angus describes as “a masterfully executed compromise,” has lasted through several changes of government.

Because roads are an essential part of the Ngaanyatjarra’s adaptation, it mattered that, not being rate-payers, they could not vote in shire elections. When the franchise was extended to all adult residents, voter turnout among Ngaanyatjarra was much higher (40 per cent in May 1987) than among all other voters in the Shire of Wiluna, which extended to the west. Recognising that the shire was now two regions distinguished by need, revenue base, economic activity and cultural outlook, the WA government split the Shire of Wiluna in half and established the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku in the eastern portion in July 1993.

This belated municipal enfranchisement of the Ngaanyatjarra was by then paralleled in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC. Replacing the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1989, ATSIC was made up of elected regional councils with responsibility for certain Commonwealth programs. At first, ATSIC comprised sixty elected regional councils; after amalgamations for the second round of elections in December 1993, there were only thirty-five. Ngaanyatjarra objected to being amalgamated with neighbours to their west (Martu) and south (Spinifex mob) and took legal action against the electoral process that chose the Western Desert Regional Council. Their objection — not wanting to be represented by strangers — remains a familiar theme of Indigenous Australian politics. Warren Mundine — campaigning against the 2023 referendum — cited the Ngaanyatjarra as an ally in his critique of the Voice co-design process proposed by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.

“By the mid-1990s,” Angus concludes, “the Ngaanyatjarra Council could justifiably claim that the region had become self-managing within the state and Commonwealth legal frameworks.” He lists formally incorporated enterprises (transport, stores) the Ngaanyatjarra have developed through collective action.

In an afterword, he briefly takes the story to the present. He condemns the Howard government (1996–2007) and its successors for modifying, then abandoning, the single most important financial basis of “self-management,” the CDEP. An older set of expectations regained authority in government and to some extent among the wider public: the Ngaanyatjarra would develop (must develop) into job-seekers (with “work-like habits”) despite their region still having almost no labour market (other than that provided by the CDEP).

In his valuable ethnography of the social and linguistic practices that have evolved within Ngaanyatjarra transactions with governments, The Dystopia in the Desert, former Ngaanyatjarra employee Tadhgh Purtill argues that the community, its advisers and distant public servants have tacitly agreed never to confront the tensions between the different practical senses of a word that all feel obliged to use: “development.”

Ethnography yields an account of something on which all governance rests: embedded, routinised ways of describing Ngaanyatjarra circumstances. As Purtill observes, talk and text can be seen as enacting a kind of political truce. That is, they shield the fantasy of remote Aboriginal assimilation from a reality test it could not survive. Purtill’s point of view is elusive; he seems, at times, to be a whistle-blower unmasking a systemic rort of public funds. Yet in his account of mutual complicities the reader can see an adaptive structure, a buffer against the ongoing (and potentially lethal) chaos that is settler colonial authority in its liberal democratic form.

Well advised and adept, the Ngaanyatjarra litigated against the smashing of the CDEP in 2021. They won a $2 million payment and a government promise to negotiate a new framework of public financial support. Angus concludes his book wondering how that will work out in a political system that equates centralised decision-making with administrative rationality. There is a Ngaanyatjarra voice, but it is nothing without an attentive listener. •

Too Far Out: An Administrative History of the Ngaanyatjarra Homelands
By Max Angus | Hesperian Press | $66 | 295 pages

The post Voices off appeared first on Inside Story.

There was no fraud. The postmasters’ lives were destroyed because of faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer network. But much like Australia’s robodebt system, Horizon was regarded as infallible. Attempts to raise the alarm were ignored; people who sought help were hounded for non-existent debts. As in Australia, those whose lives were turned upside down struggled to gain the attention of established media outlets; it was individual journalists and smaller publications that kept digging and probing, and refused to accept Post Office spin.

It wasn’t until January this year that prime minister Rishi Sunak conceded it was one of Britain’s greatest-ever miscarriages of justice. He has committed his government to a “blanket exoneration” of hundreds of wrongfully convicted individuals and promised them “at least £600,000 in compensation to rebuild their lives.”

Three compensation schemes have already been set up and around one hundred convictions overturned by appeal courts. A public inquiry led by a retired High Court judge began hearings in February 2021 and is likely to continue at least until September this year. In the meantime, many former postmasters remain destitute or seriously out of pocket. They are waiting not only for redress but also for the full truth about what went wrong in the executive ranks of the Post Office.

While details continue to dribble out, so far no senior managers have been held to account, though former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has offered to hand back the CBE she was awarded in 2019.

Vennells said she was “truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted.” Whether or not Vennells loses her gong is up to King Charles. The union representing Post Office employees reckons if she were truly remorseful then she’d offer to repay her performance bonuses as well.

Solicitor Neil Hudgell told a January hearing before the parliament’s business and trade committee that the Post Office spent £100 million “defending the indefensible” through the courts yet he has clients who are still waiting on reimbursements of a few hundred pounds. He said the contest between postmasters and Post Office was characterised from the start by an inequality of arms. “You are facing this big beast in the Post Office, with all the machinery that sits behind it,” he added. “You have some poor person who is being accused of doing something hideous who does not have that.”

On top of the financial losses comes the psychological toll. Hudgell says his firm has more than a hundred psychiatric reports for clients diagnosed with depressive illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia. At least four former postmasters are thought to have committed suicide, and more than thirty have passed away while awaiting justice in their cases.

The saga goes back to 1999, when the Post Office began rolling out a new computerised accounting system to its thousands of branches and sub-branches, many of which operate as franchises run by subpostmasters. Essentially, the subpostmasters are independent contractors delivering services under an agreement with the Post Office. Many also operate a shop, cafe or other small business on the side.

As in Australia, people go to their local post office for much more than stamps and parcels. Branches offer banking and bill payment services, and handle applications for passports and other critical official documents. Subpostmasters play a central role in villages and small towns. They are often trusted as advisers and confidants, especially for older, less digitally connected citizens. To be accused of putting their hands in the till was a mortifying experience.

The new Horizon computer system, developed by Fujitsu, was meant to make it easier for postmasters to balance their books. But problems were evident from the start. In 1998, Alan Bates invested around £60,000 to buy a shop with a post counter in the town of Llandudno, in north Wales. After Horizon was introduced, discrepancies quickly appeared in his accounts, and Bates found himself £6000 short.

“I managed to track that down after a huge amount of effort through a whole batch of duplicated transactions,” he recalled. Meticulous record keeping enabled Bates to show that the problem lay with the computer system and was not the result of carelessness or fraud. Still, in 2003, the Post Office terminated his contract, saying £1200 was unaccounted for.

Unlike other postmasters, Bates was not prosecuted or forced into bankruptcy, but the injustice and the lost investment cut deep. Post Office investigators insisted that he was the only subpostmaster reporting glitches with the computer system, but Bates was certain that there must be others. He was right. RAF veteran Lee Castleton challenged the Post Office in court after it suspended him over an alleged debt of almost £23,000. In the first instance, the Post Office failed to show up at court and he won. Months later, the Post Office raised the case to the High Court. Castleton represented himself, lost, had costs awarded against him and was rendered bankrupt.

Castleton managed to convince a young journalist at the trade publication Computer Weekly to investigate. Rebecca Thomson found six other examples of people who’d been accused of stealing from the Post Office, including Alan Bates, who had tried a few years earlier to interest the same magazine in his case.

National newspapers and broadcasters failed to pick up Thomson’s 2009 story. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” Thomson told the Sunday Times in 2022. “I was super-ambitious, and I was disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel like it was incredibly strong.”

What Thomson achieved, though, was to confirm Alan Bates’s hunch that he was not alone. Bates reached out to other subpostmasters in Thomson’s story and discovered they’d been told the same thing as him: no one else has had a problem with Horizon, you’re the only one. This Post Office mantra was a bare-faced lie.

Bates and his newfound allies founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance with the aim of “exposing the failures of Post Office, its Board, its management and its Horizon computer system.” Their campaign for truth and justice is the subject of the four-part television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, starring Toby Jones as Alan Bates, that aired on British TV in January.

The series put the scandal and the ongoing public inquiry firmly back in the headlines (Rishi Sunak’s belated response to years of revelations came a few days later) but it would not have been possible without fourteen years of dogged, dedicated journalism. Since Thomson broke the story in 2009, Computer Weekly has published about 350 follow-up articles on the issue. Separately, freelance journalist Nick Wallis has pursued the story since 2010, at times relying on crowdfunding to finance his work.

In 2010, Wallis was working at a local BBC radio station when a flippant response to a tweet put him in contact with Davinder Misra, the owner of a local cab company, who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Seema Misra had been convicted of theft and false accounting and sentenced to fifteen months jail. The Post Office claimed she had misappropriated almost £75,000 from her branch in West Byfleet in Surrey.

With roots stretching back to 1660 and the reign of Charles II, the Post Office is in many respects a law unto itself. It doesn’t have to jump through the hurdles of police investigations or case reviews by a public prosecutor to launch prosecutions. It has huge resources to employ top silks to represent it. Against its might, people like Seema Misra didn’t stand a chance.

Unaware at the time of Thomson’s article in Computer World, Wallis decided to investigate. He has been writing and broadcasting about the Post Office scandal ever since. He has been a producer, presenter or consultant on three episodes of Panorama, the BBC’s equivalent of the ABC’s Four Corners, he has written a book, The Great Post Office Scandal, he made a podcast series, and he maintains a website dedicated to continuing coverage of the story.

Wallis also acted as a consultant on Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He told the Press Gazette he was “blown away” by the program and what it had achieved. Yet he stressed that it is Bates and the other postmasters who should take the credit for getting the scandal into the open and convictions overturned.

Seven screens Mr Bates vs the Post Office in Australia this week. If you can put up with the ad breaks, the series is well worth watching. It’s an engaging, heartwarming story of decent, ordinary folk standing up against the powerful and the entitled and eventually winning against the odds. If you want to understand the story more fully, though, and to hear directly from those most affected — people like Alan Bates, Seema Misra and Lee Castleton — then I’d recommend The Great Post Office Trial, Nick Wallis’s podcast for BBC Radio 4. It’s a compelling tale that shows what good journalism can achieve. •

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The result of all that consulting has just been summarised in a thirteen-page report that shows respondents want governments to do much more than just “manage” homelessness. They want them to prevent and eliminate it by making sure “all Australians have access to safe and adequate housing.”

The summary identifies twelve principles to guide the plan towards this worthy outcome. The principles are sound, and include recognising housing as a basic human right, ensuring housing is accessible and sustainable, and engaging people who have experienced homelessness in designing programs and services. They also propose a “housing first” approach to homelessness that gives people a home before helping them to deal with challenges like mental illness, addiction and unemployment.

The report lists a few practical suggestions too, including stronger tenants’ rights and inclusionary zoning rules to guarantee new residential developments incorporate social and affordable housing.

Many of its key proposals, though, come down to money: building more social housing where it is most needed, for example, and providing sufficient homelessness services to meet demand.

Such aims can’t be achieved without a much higher level of dedicated, consistent government funding. Indeed, the report includes “secure funding and support” as one of its twelve guiding principles. Yet it offers no guidance as to how the necessary revenue might be raised. This is not because people engaged in the consultations failed to put forward ideas; rather, it’s because the most obvious way to secure funding for housing initiatives is to change the way housing is taxed and that’s something the government doesn’t want to talk about. Right from the start the consultation was framed to bracket out any such discussion.

Two new pieces of research reinforce just how glaring and regrettable this exclusion is.

The Centre for Equitable Housing has drawn together current and historical budget data from across different government portfolios to provide a comprehensive picture of federal housing expenditure over time. It found that tax concessions like negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount are eclipsing expenditure on other housing programs. The combined annual value of these tax breaks is more than ten times the sum Canberra disburses each year to the states and territories to build social housing and tackle homelessness. As a result, 43 per cent of federal government housing support is flowing to the top fifth of income earners, while just 23 per cent goes to the bottom fifth.

The report also found that the numerous but disparate housing-related measures in the federal budget lack clearly articulated objectives. In their absence, negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount operate as “a shadow housing policy” driving up prices by encouraging speculative investment in existing housing stock rather than new construction.

The Everybody’s Home campaign, meanwhile, has calculated that the revenue lost to investor tax breaks over the coming decade could fund 550,000 new homes for low-income households. That would be more than enough to eliminate social housing waiting lists around the country.

The single mention of tax in DSS’s summary of its consultations comes in this sentence: “Private investors and landlords need incentives like tax breaks and subsidies to provide more social and affordable housing.” It’s as if negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount are invisible, or don’t exist, and we’re being asked to invent a set of new industry supports to build affordable homes without any reference to the multibillion-dollar concessions already in place.

Again, this isn’t because participants in DSS’s consultations forgot to mention negative gearing and the capital gains discount. Both were raised at the “community conversation forum” I attended in Geelong (and not just by me). While DSS has yet to upload all 517 submissions to its Engage platform, many of those that are available raise tax reform as an essential consideration in the development of the national housing plan. These include submissions by local governments such as the City of Melbourne and Brimbank City Council, by housing providers and support services such as Mission Australia and the Western Homelessness Network, and by expert organisations such as RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research and SGS Economics and Planning.

In a joint submission, the peak industry bodies National Shelter and the Community Housing Industry Association state the problem clearly:

Currently the ability for housing markets to supply enough homes to meet the population’s needs is distorted by settings for capital gains tax and negative gearing that prioritise speculative housing acquisition for capital return over strategies that aim to ensure every household is able to meet their need for affordable housing. A key goal for the Plan should be to explore opportunities to apply taxation settings that support achievement of long-term housing outcomes over speculative investment returns.

True, statements like this go beyond the narrow focus areas offered up for discussion in the original DSS issues paper, and every page of the summary report includes a disclaimer that it “may not include all views presented by stakeholders.” Yet the same disclaimer says that the document doesn’t represent the views of the Australian government. So even though Labor finds it politically inconvenient to talk about negative gearing and capital gains tax, that’s no reason for the report to shy away from such topics.

To invite community members, housing practitioners and experts to engage in a national dialogue and then to ignore what they have to say makes a mockery of the process of consultation. The Albanese government said it wanted to hear ideas on how to tackle one of the most pressing social and economic issues confronting the nation. Many of us took that invitation at face value and went to considerable lengths to contribute. We can only feel let down. •

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Many politicians and public servants have described to me his rare magic in combining academic rigour with clear communication and a talent for finding a cut‑through line. His retirement this year is a good excuse, if one were needed, to talk about tax reform, the subject of his major academic and policy contributions. Indeed, his research and writing read like a tax reform to‑do list.

Pick up the Financial Review on any given day and you’ll find opinion pieces grounded in John’s decades-long efforts to unpick the efficiency and equity impacts of different tax reform options. He has also made the case for these reforms directly to government as a consultant to the Henry tax review, on the review panel of the NSW Federal Financial Relations Review and in other forums.

And while he has done the hard work of tilling the ground, and has no doubt been pleased with some of the progress made on tax reform, much of the broad agenda he has articulated remains on the shelf.

The question is: why? Why, after so many decades of discussion and so many points of broad economic consensus, does tax reform remain so challenging? Is progress possible or is tax reform simply an impossible dream?

To answer this question, we need to first understand why someone with John’s rare talents decided to use them to make the case for tax reform. The bottom line is that tax matters. It matters to all of us: how much we collect and how it’s collected have implications for economic activity, governments’ capacity to deliver services, and levels of inequality.

One challenge we face when we talk about tax reform is that different people start with very different objectives. So let’s unpack some of those.

The first is economic efficiency. Economists rightly focus on the fact that how we collect tax — that is, what we tax and how much — affects the “economic drag” created by the tax system. Almost all taxes come with some loss of welfare, but some drag on growth more than others.

In a static sense, this can be measured by the “marginal excess burden” — how much economic activity is lost for every dollar collected. As Treasury and others have reminded us, this varies significantly between taxes.

But while there can be big differences in the estimates different modellers come up with, they broadly agree that a tax-mix switch from higher-burden to lower-burden taxes would deliver an economic dividend.

The most clear-cut example is a move from stamp duties to taxes on land. Stamp duties are among the most inefficient of taxes. Treasury estimates suggest that every dollar collected can reduce economic activity by up to 72 cents. Stamp duties discourage people from moving to housing that better suits their needs, and sometimes discourage people from moving to better jobs. Overall, they distort choices and gum up the economy.

Another reason we might advocate for tax reform is to make government budgets sustainable and future‑proof our tax system. At a time when the treasurer has just delivered the first budget surplus in fifteen years and we are seeing apparently endless revenue “upgrades,” it may seem strange to be having this conversation right now.

But government spending overall is projected to average 26.4 per cent of GDP over this period — compared with less than 25 per cent over the three decades before Covid — and revenues have not kept up. The federal government’s latest Intergenerational Report reminds us that the ageing population and the fallout from climate change will only see this fiscal challenge grow over the next forty years. The same is true of state budgets.

The implications of not taking policy action are clear: we are asking future generations to bear the costs of today’s inaction.

Governments have three levers they can pull to tackle long-term budget challenges: they can make economic reforms to “grow the pie,” they can increase taxes and they can reduce spending.

Pursuing policies to boost growth is critical. Much of Grattan Institute’s work has focused on this first lever. And I look forward to pursuing this in a big way when I join the Productivity Commission in a couple of weeks’ time. But, as Grattan highlighted in our Back in Black? report earlier this year, we can’t rely on higher growth alone to close the budget gap.

Given the scale of the challenge, governments will also need to find ways to reduce spending and/or boost revenue. After a decade of looking at this challenge I have come to the view that we will need to do both. The scale of the challenge, and the greater buy‑in that can come when the costs are spread across the population are arguments for looking to both sides of the budget for answers.

If we do accept that some additional revenue is needed to respond to the structural challenge outlined, then we want to make sure that additional revenues are collected with the lowest possible economic costs. In fact, this can also help us grow the pie: more efficient, less distorting taxes are one of the Productivity Commission’s “enduring policy priorit[ies]” for productivity growth.

On the other hand, if we do nothing, we may end up on the path of least resistance: collecting ever-more revenue through ever‑creeping taxes on wage and salary earners. Bracket creep may be the most politically painless way to raise revenues, but it is far from the best.

Tax reform for budget sustainability should aim to broaden the base of income taxes — looking at loopholes and overly generous concessions as well as orientating our collections towards more efficient bases such as consumption, wealth, externalities or resource rents. In other words, we need to revisit the John Freebairn back catalogue.

The atrophying of tax reform in recent decades might make us pine for a golden era. In truth, though, tax reform has never been easy. So let’s take a short history lesson — five decades of tax reform in five minutes — and see what we can learn.

Let’s start in 1975. Many elements of our tax system today can be traced back to the 1975 Asprey tax review. This comprehensive, independent review was commissioned by the McMahon government in response to concerns about bracket creep and tax evasion. (Sound familiar?)

The review outlined the basic principles of efficiency, fairness and simplicity that remain our lodestars and made the case for many aspects of the system we have today, including fringe benefits tax, capital gains tax and a broad-based consumption tax.

But the report initially had little impact. Landing in the final, tumultuous year of the Whitlam government, it was written off in the media as a “tax flop,” and its main recommendations not adopted.

It took another decade for momentum to build. In 1985, fresh off the Prices and Incomes Accord and the floating of the dollar, prime minister Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating turned their attention to tax reform. They released a draft white paper on reform options and hosted a tax summit with unions, business and community groups.

These processes resulted in the adoption of some of Asprey’s recommendations, including a capital gains tax, negative gearing reform, fringe benefits tax, dividend imputation and taxation of foreign source income.

But it was a case of “two steps forward, one step back.” A broad-based consumption tax was central to Keating’s original vision but failed to win support and was dropped. And the pioneering negative gearing reforms were repealed two years later.

So the Asprey blueprint was partly implemented. Another long reform slumber followed. The next big push was John Hewson’s Fightback! platform for the 1993 election, which proposed, among other things, a broad-based consumption tax. Fightback! proved to be a false start — Hewson lost the “unlosable” election — but consumption taxes were back on the agenda.

Another six years had to pass for the reform dream to become reality. Prime minister John Howard took a proposal called A New Tax System, which included the GST, income tax cuts and the abolition of a host of inefficient state taxes, to the 1998 election. He narrowly won and the legislation ultimately passed in 1999, twenty-four years after the release of the Asprey report.

We’ve seen precious little in the way of significant, lasting tax reform since then. The landmark Henry review is close to celebrating its fourteenth birthday with most of its meaty recommendations untouched. State and territory tax reform has also, mostly, been a non-starter, despite a succession of reviews converging on similar recommendations.

So what should we take from this history? What can we learn from those rare moments when we managed to overcome the many barriers I outlined before? I see four key steps for would-be reformers.

Step 1: Put reform on the agenda

History shows that an external push is often needed to put tax reform on the agenda. In 1985, fears about Australia’s economic decline and resentment about tax avoidance pushed the discussion forward. In 1997, the High Court’s decision to strike down a key state tax left a significant hole in the states’ budgets and opened the reform window for the GST.

The optimist in me can’t help but draw parallels with last month’s High Court decision to strike down Victoria’s electric vehicle levy. Perhaps we might have another golden opportunity for a grand intergovernmental tax reform bargain on our hands?

Tax reform was hardly on the radar for the Howard government until civil society groups — representing both social services and business — started championing the cause. The Australian Council of Social Service and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in particular, pushed in a coordinated way, culminating in the National Tax Reform Summit in 1996. The strong and united messaging put the GST and tax reform firmly back on the political agenda.

Today many groups feel similarly. Federal independent MP Allegra Spender has been spearheading a push to unite academic, business and civil society leaders to build some consensus on the need for tax reform and the way forward.

Step 2: Build a coherent package

While rewriting thousands of pages of the tax code at once would be a recipe for chaos, relying on incremental changes is probably not going to get the job done either.

History shows that reform packages can work well. In 1985, reforms that broadened the income tax base were bundled with income tax rate cuts and tax avoidance measures — a coherent story to sell to the public. In 1999, removing narrow and inefficient, but lucrative, state taxes and widely variable wholesale sales taxes made sense in the context of the broader GST deal shoring up state budgets.

Packages provide the opportunity to dull the sting of reform by sharing the costs more broadly and perhaps offering some compensation to the losers.

The major tax reforms of the past two decades have come at an upfront cost. The GST package overcompensated households by about $12 billion a year, through personal income tax changes and increases to pensions and family payments. This was a key part of its sales pitch. Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry recalled that:

the distributional tables outlining the impact of the GST were the most “thumbed” part of the documentation, certainly by those Treasury officers answering phone queries. Of course, it helped that every individual and family represented across all income levels appeared better off.

Compensation packages are particularly important where there are equity implications for lower-income households. Australians tend to reject reforms that seem unfair. But, crucially, potentially regressive reforms, such as broadening the base of the GST, can form part of larger, fairer reform packages. For example, the carbon tax package involved substantial assistance for households, particularly lower-income households, to address concerns that poorer households would be particularly affected by higher energy and food prices.

Given the long‑term budget challenges, high‑cost packages of the type needed to ensure there are “no losers” from tax changes are difficult to justify. But it is certainly possible to design packages with much lower upfront costs that still compensate vulnerable households. For example, Grattan’s previous work on the GST proposed a revenue-positive package, with a 15 per cent GST, cuts to income taxes, and an increase in welfare payments, that would leave the lowest 40 per cent of income earners better off on average.

Packages might also help address some of the other political economy challenges of reform. Ironically, opening up more fronts in the tax debate may quiet some of the more over-the-top reactions. As Ken Henry has argued, “if you give a lot of well-armed people only one target to shoot, it will take a pounding. Incrementalism sets up a single target on a battlefield occupied by well-resourced attack forces.”

And while my goal here is not to opine on the “what” of tax reform, let me give a sense of some of the types of packages that a government could put forward.

• On income tax reform, we could return to the logic of 1985: broadening the income tax base by winding back loopholes and overly generous concessions, to support a cut in rates. This could include targeting discretionary trusts and super tax concessions, or reforming capital gains tax — either by reducing the capital gains tax discount or returning to the indexation of gains.

• Another package could tackle the inconsistent tax treatment of different savings options, to reduce the distortion in savers’ choices and simplify the system. This would mean lower taxes on interest from bank accounts and bonds, and somewhat higher taxes on other savings vehicles such as superannuation (which is very lightly taxed even after accounting for the long holding periods). An even “bigger bang ” version would be a dual income tax where income from savings is taxed at a consistent low rate, regardless of source.

• On the corporate tax front, we could better tax resource rents to fund a company tax cut. We could also consider more wholesale reforms such as an allowance for corporate equity or a cash flow tax.

• For states, inefficient stamp duties could be swapped for land taxes over time, along the lines of the ACT government’s gradual phase-in or Victoria’s switch for commercial and industrial property.

• In transport, distance-based congestion charges that vary by location and time of day would be a more efficient replacement for the declining fuel tax base.

• Finally, to aid the climate transition, the government could substantially expand and strengthen the safeguard mechanism, while eliminating many higher-cost interventions to reduce emissions, such as the fringe benefits tax exemption for electric vehicles. The package would deliver both faster and lower-cost emissions reduction.

But while packages make a lot of sense, would‑be tax reformers can’t be too purist. Incremental changes in the right direction are still an improvement on the status quo, and in some cases these more incremental steps can ultimately take us towards more comprehensive packages.

Step 3: Embrace the “vomit principle”

The next step is making a compelling case for change. Complicated reforms that can’t be explained are unlikely to win support, and are more vulnerable to scare campaigns. We saw this in 2019 with the confusion about franking credits — irredeemably branded a “retirement tax” — and in 1993, when John Hewson’s tortured explanation of the effect of a GST on the price of a birthday cake helped turn the tide of popular opinion against the new tax.

Convincing the public of both the necessity of change and the proposed solution takes time and political capital. Howard and Costello spent two years and a lot of political energy highlighting the structural problems with Australia’s tax base prior to releasing their reform package in 1998.

While no one likes to pay extra tax for the fun of it, many are more inclined to agree when higher taxes are linked to better services. The proportion of Australians favouring “less tax ” has declined since the late 1980s, according to the Australian Election Study, and the proportion preferring “more spending on social services” has risen. At the time of the 2022 election, 39 per cent indicated they would prefer less tax, 31 per cent more social spending and the remainder said “it depends” — presumably on the nature of both the tax and the spending increases.

My reading is that when our political leaders do the work of tilling the ground and explaining changes and why they are needed, then hearts and minds can shift.

A more recent example, albeit one contrary to received wisdom, was the then‑Labor opposition’s 2016 policy to wind back negative gearing and reduce the capital gains tax discount. We have already discussed some of the public challenges that reform faced, but it is also worth remembering that negative gearing had formerly been viewed as a “political untouchable.”

Indeed, since the Hawke government lost its nerve and reversed its decision to wind back negative gearing in 1987, it has been considered the “sacred cow” of Australian politics. When Labor announced it would introduce these changes to improve housing affordability and contribute to the budget bottom line in 2016, just over a third of Australians supported removing or limiting negative gearing.

But, over time, as shadow treasurer Chris Bowen and others made the case, support gradually increased. Support for limits on negative gearing climbed almost 10 percentage points, from 34 per cent in March 2016 to 43 per cent in December 2018. By the time of the 2019 election, the Australian Election Study estimated that 57 per cent of Australians supported limiting negative gearing.

To me this is a textbook example of what some political strategists call the “vomit principle ” — repeat something until you feel like you are going to vomit. Only then are you cutting through.

Labor has since dropped the policy, of course, and many reading the media commentary would have gained the impression that the tax reform agenda was deeply unpopular and “to blame” for Labor’s surprise election loss in 2019. The reality was far more complex.

In any case, it’s not just down to politicians to argue for reform. Successful tax reforms need a diverse cheer squad. Historically, academics, premiers, public policy institutions, and community groups have all been important advocates for tax reform. Providing incentives for academics and non-profit organisations to participate in public debate would be a useful step to building these coalitions today.

Step 4: Make it stick

Somewhat dispiritingly, even after these hurdles have been overcome and tax reform has been passed, the job isn’t done. Tax issues tend to linger on the agenda, often for entire parliamentary terms, and reforms sometimes don’t stick. As we’ve just seen, negative gearing reforms were undone after just two years in 1987. The carbon tax and mining tax were repealed. The Perrottet government’s hesitant steps towards stamp duty reform were wound back by the new NSW Labor government.

But in other cases the controversy does die down after reform is enacted. Sometimes social norms change quickly — for example, in Stockholm, congestion charging was much more popular after it had been implemented than before, and many people did not even remember that they once opposed the idea.

In Australia, plenty of tax changes that were controversial at the time — the GST, fringe benefits tax, capital gains tax — are now so entrenched that there is no constituency or any visible public appetite for their removal.

Reforms are more likely to stick if they create positive feedback loops — for example, if they result in institutional shifts, if reform winners can be used as advocates, or if businesses make big investments under the new regime. Taking the GST as an example, the Australian Taxation Office and businesses made significant investments in the infrastructure for administering the new scheme; and the changes to federal financial relations created a key constituency — state governments — who had a strong interest in its continuation.

What are the prospects for tax reform? I, for one, remain optimistic.

First and foremost, I don’t think we have much choice. The slow‑burning platform is still on fire, and over the coming decade the gap between our spending needs and our tax system’s capacity to meet them without ever higher taxes on employment income will be stretched to breaking point.

More and more questions are being raised about the sustainability and intergenerational fairness of our current tax mix. Without action, expect them to get louder and louder over the coming decade. Tax must also come into the conversation if we are going to deliver our policy objectives in other areas, including the green transition.

Second, I am confident that our leaders can make a positive case. While I have focused on the challenges, I am also heartened by the leadership we are seeing on difficult reforms in other areas.

Over the past three months the Commonwealth and state governments have made strong commitments to boost the supply of housing through politically challenging reforms to planning laws. If they can pull it off, this would be a huge economic and social reform, and one that has been in the too-hard basket for many decades.

As a reform proposition, making the case for greater housing density is probably of the same order of difficulty as making the case for major tax changes, and yet we are seeing both levels of government go after it in a big way.

Third, I think there is appetite across a broad swathe of interested parties to shift the dial. Allegra Spender’s tax reform round tables suggest at least a consensus among business, academia and civil society that something needs to change, even if there is not yet broad agreement on the reform priorities. A process to harness this agreement, ideally led and shaped by government, could help move the conversation forward.

Finally, I have confidence in the Australian people to see through the noise. Scare campaigns and a shouty media are one thing, but if state and federal governments can hold their nerve in the rule in/rule out game long enough to make a positive case for change, and keep making it, history shows that people can be brought along.

Tax reform is hard, but it’s not impossible. It’s time we woke up from our slumber and became a little less afraid and a little more Freebairn. •

This is an edited version of this year’s Freebairn Lecture, delivered at the University of Melbourne last week. The full lecture, with charts and footnotes, is here.

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It is the eighth annual China Auto Forum, in April 2019, and a mere three months after the US electric car company Tesla began constructing a factory in Shanghai. The focus is on the transformation of an industry that is turning towards electrification. The executives are aware that what Wan says here can change the fortunes of their companies.

Many have tried to create a mass market for electric vehicles over the past 140 years, but all have failed. The widely held belief is that if anyone can succeed, it will be Elon Musk, the eccentric, ambitious and obscenely wealthy CEO of Tesla. But when the history of electric vehicles is written, it might be Wan Gang who will stand tallest.

The Musk–Tesla story is lore. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in Silicon Valley, Tesla struggled to get off the ground. Elon Musk, who had become wealthy on the back of startups like PayPal, began investing in the company in 2004 and took an active role in product design. After Eberhard was ousted following internal conflicts, Musk took over as CEO in 2008 just after the company began selling its first model, the Roadster.

Tesla sold about 2500 units of the electric sports car, but Musk’s stated goal was to make a mass-market electric vehicle. With every iteration, the car models got cheaper and sales grew — turning Tesla into the world’s most recognisable electric car brand and the world’s most valuable car maker. As of 2022, the company was selling more than 1 million cars annually. Still, the cheapest Model 3 — one that Musk promised would be the affordable car — costs well above US$35,000.

Wan Gang’s story is mostly unknown. His rise in the electric vehicle world started at about the same time as Musk’s. The car engineer by training was appointed China’s minister of science and technology in 2007. In the country’s top-down economic system, Wan’s policies incentivised the creation of hundreds of Chinese companies tied to making electric vehicles. The country now sells more than six million electric vehicles each year. That includes not just expensive cars but the complete range, with the cheapest selling for less than US$10,000.

Wan’s policies have also created some of the world’s largest and most valuable companies selling electric vehicles and lithium ion batteries. And the choices he has influenced haven’t only affected already established Chinese car companies; all big car manufacturers in the world for whom the largest market remains China have been affected.

While Musk fought Wall Street’s scepticism and benefited from waves of government subsidies to keep Tesla afloat through turbulent periods, Wan has shown how policy done right can drive technological disruption not just in China but worldwide. Both men are at the forefront of the global project to propel the world from the current economic age into the next — yet it is the lesser known of the two who has had the bigger impact.

In the mid 1960s teenager Wan found himself in the middle of a violent disruption of Chinese society. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution pitted rich against poor and urban elites against rural commoners. The Red Guard, a paramilitary force controlled by Mao, subjected those in the higher classes of society, such as Wan’s family, to humiliation, beatings and persecution. The Communist Party shuttered universities and sent students to villages for “re-education.” That’s how Wan, a city kid from Shanghai, found himself in Dongguo, a village in Jilin province near the North Korean border, working with other city teenagers to build basic infrastructure.

His work ethic caught the attention of local party members, and in 1974 he was unanimously elected as a team leader. Worried that because his parents were counter-revolutionaries he shouldn’t have been promoted, Wan spoke to the head of the local party branch. “Keep at it,” he recalled being told. “One day your parents will be heroes again.”

After Mao’s death, in 1976, universities were reopened and Wan studied physics at Northeast Forestry University in Harbin and then mechanical engineering at Tongji University in Shanghai, one of China’s most prestigious educational institutions. He excelled there and won a scholarship from the World Bank to pursue a PhD in Germany. For his doctorate at the Clausthal University of Technology he studied ways to reduce the noise made by internal combustion engines — the type of engine that powers all fossil fuel vehicles in the world.

In hindsight, his decision to study cutting-edge automotive engineering in Germany was perfectly timed. Following the oil crises of the 1970s, the global car industry was undergoing a period of major change. The German car industry wanted to stay ahead of growing competition from the United States and Japan, and was crying out for engineers like Wan.

He received job offers from six car companies, from Volkswagen to Mercedes. In 1991 he chose to join Audi, the smallest of the German majors at the time, reasoning that it presented him with the greatest opportunity to rise through the ranks.

Wan began in Audi’s car development division, helping to solve technical issues in design and manufacturing. After five years he realised that in order to climb the corporate ladder at Audi, engineers had to show success in more than one department. He duly moved to production, where he focused on car paint and was soon made head of a division with more than 2000 employees.

To effectively manage them all, he deployed techniques he had learned during his years in Dongguo. On an employee’s birthday, for example, he would carry two bottles of beer to the workshop floor and spend time getting to know them. The effort paid off, and Audi eventually promoted him to its central planning division, giving him oversight of a manufacturing process that produced a car every sixty seconds.

Wan also kept a keen eye on his home country. Deng Xiaoping, who took over as the country’s leader after Mao’s death in 1976, called the Cultural Revolution a “grave blunder.” In the late 1980s he set about reforming China’s economy, including the country’s almost non-existent car industry. He welcomed foreign companies — for example Germany’s Volkswagen and France’s Peugeot and Citroën — to build factories in joint ventures with domestic players. If foreign companies were worried that their Chinese partners would steal their technology, it seemed like a cost worth paying for access to the country’s vast untapped market.

By the 1990s the Audi brand had become a favourite of China’s elite; government officials were often seen being chauffeured around in black Audi saloons. As one of the car maker’s top Chinese-born executives, Wan led many company visits to China, at a time when the country’s car industry was expanding.

On these visits he noticed how the industry’s rapid growth was increasing air pollution and exacerbating China’s reliance on oil imports. If his home country was to go the way of its Western counterparts, as its leaders hoped, then these problems would become intractable. At the beginning of the twenty-first century China was consuming one barrel of oil per person per year, whereas in Germany the figure was twelve and in the United States it was twenty.

Wan wanted his fellow Chinese to have the quality of life he enjoyed as an immigrant in Germany, but given China’s large population, he realised that this might not be possible. It was quite likely that the country couldn’t afford the bill from importing all the oil, even if that much oil could be extracted somewhere, which itself wasn’t guaranteed. Fossil fuels are finite. The way out was to develop cars that could be powered by something other than oil.

In 2000 Wan got a chance to share his ideas with Chinese government leaders. Zhu Lilan, the country’s science minister at the time, visited Audi’s headquarters and factory in Ingolstadt, Germany. During the trip — designed to showcase what state-of-the-art car makers look like — he proposed to her that, rather than continuing to tinker with the internal combustion engine, China could leapfrog the West by using a completely different technology.

At the time, the United States produced some fifteen million cars each year while China produced only 700,000. But international car companies like BMW, General Motors and Toyota were starting to work on electric cars — powered by batteries or hydrogen — that produced no particulate pollution and reduced the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. And Wan was convinced this form of transport would be the future of the passenger car. If China were to become a leader in electric cars within the next decade or two, Wan told Zhu, the country could become the electric car hub of the world.

Zhu invited Wan to come back to China and make his case to the State Council, the country’s highest ruling body. Wan knew that if he succeeded then he could alter China’s history. He found support from Li Lanqing, then vice-premier of China, who in 1952 had started China’s first major homegrown car maker, First Automobile Works. Chinese cities were starting to struggle with the problem of smog. But more importantly, if Wan was right, China could become a technology leader and avoid the humiliation of having to rely on Western countries to bring modernity to its people.

A few months later Wan moved back to China. Under the auspices of Tongji University, which gave him a professorship, he began working as the lead scientist on a secret government program for advanced vehicle technologies. Along the way he played a key role in convincing important members of the State Council to set up policies that would encourage the development of alternative fuel transport, and in 2009 he launched a new- energy vehicle program that would reshape China’s car industry.

Wan’s political acumen was essential. “The automobile’s importance to growth, trade, innovation, military technology, and the environment is, for practical purposes, immeasurable. The industry is a point of national pride,” wrote Levi Tillemann in The Great Race in 2015. “Since the time of Henry Ford, no automobile industry in the world has ever become internationally competitive without that kind of government intervention.”

In the 1930s the US government paid for the construction of more than 100,000 miles of roads under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. It later set up research programs to push for more fuel-efficient engines and established improved safety regulations. In the same decade the Japanese government provided cheap loans to domestic car makers, funded technology programs and undermined US players through tariffs to protect domestic companies. In other words, China’s industrial policy approach, which would rely on subsidies and regulations, was a tried-and-tested method to boost the car industry.

Wan’s plans were bigger still. The car makers he would unleash wouldn’t just serve Chinese customers but would make the sorts of cars that would dominate the future of the car industry — by throwing away internal combustion engines and placing all the country’s bets on zero-emissions transportation.

Wan’s appointment as China’s minister of science and technology came one year before China was due to hold the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. An image-conscious Communist Party spared no expense to show off what it was capable of. This would be the first “green” Olympics, the party declared, as it announced the closure of coal-fired power stations and factories for weeks, returning blue skies to the smog-choked capital. It also promised to plant enough trees to offset the emissions caused by athletes’ air travel.

Wan had been on a deadline ever since being put in charge of China’s advanced vehicle program back in 2000: to produce electric buses and cars in time for the 2008 Olympics. It wasn’t the first time electric vehicles had been launched at an Olympics. BMW had produced two prototype lead-acid battery-powered electric cars for the 1972 games in Munich. But China’s plan was far more ambitious: to have 1000 electric buses and cars ready for the Beijing games.

By 2007 Wan Gang had many research institutes and industrial partners, including state-owned car makers BAIC, SAIC, Dongfeng and Chery, working on the project. But China still hadn’t mastered the technologies required to make effective electric vehicles: efficient motors powered by advanced batteries and controlled by sophisticated software. Though it had produced and even successfully tested prototypes, China did not possess the manufacturing capability to make 1000 such vehicles. Rather than admit defeat, the government scaled back its ambitions; a BAIC subsidiary would produce fifty electric buses and Chery would make fifty hybrid electric cars.

Chery had to hire Ricardo, a British engineering consultancy, to help meet the deadline, according to Levi Tillemann’s research. After many long hours the new team had developed a system, which could be bolted on to the Chery A5, a compact car, that allowed it to automatically switch between a petrol-powered engine and an electric motor.

But work on the computer algorithms that enabled the switching had begun late in the process. That meant Chery had to specifically train drivers for the hybrids who could manually switch between electric and internal combustion engine modes. The BAIC buses seemed to work well but were retired within three years because their batteries quickly degraded.

None of this came out during the Olympics, and the spectacle had the world enthralled. “Blockbuster,” wrote the New York Times. “Astonishing,” wrote the Guardian. “The world may never witness a ceremony of the magnitude and ingenuity,” said the Sydney Morning Herald.

After the Olympians went home, the industries restarted and restrictions on car use were lifted. Unsurprisingly, smog returned to Beijing. Within months, in 2009, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest market for cars, selling thirteen million gas-guzzlers. That meant even more particulate pollution — tiny particles capable of entering the human bloodstream and leading to breathing problems. The pollution can cause cancer or stroke, and the higher the number of particles belched out, the greater the harm caused.

The Chinese leadership could see the problem from the windows of its Beijing offices. That is why, even though China’s electric vehicle industry was clearly lagging, the government’s support for Wan’s ideas to electrify transport did not wane.

Despite the disappointing delivery of electric vehicles at the Beijing Olympics, Wan was able to get approval for a bigger rollout of new-energy vehicles with a hefty subsidy for each new car purchased. The bet was technology neutral, encouraging car makers to make battery-powered cars, plug-in hybrids (large battery and a combustion engine), and fuel-cell cars (consuming hydrogen fuel to produce only water as exhaust).

The program aimed to sell 1000 new-energy vehicles in each of the ten largest Chinese cities by 2012, and the government was prepared to provide as much as US$10,000 per car in direct subsidies to incentivise people to buy them. It would also give indirect subsidies to car companies and battery makers in the form of tax cuts and cheap land for factories. The government bill for all that ran into the billions of dollars.

With continued support, the plan eventually began to work. BYD, a Shenzhen-based battery company, launched the plug-in hybrid F3DM — it looked like a carbon copy of the Toyota Corolla — months after the 2008 Olympics. Thanks to the subsidies, there were 10,000 of them on China’s roads by 2011.

Even as electric vehicles began appearing on the streets of Chinese cities, the number of fossil fuel cars sold in China continued to increase. In 2012 the country sold fifteen million passenger cars. Predictably, pollution worsened, and the figures were available for all to see with the government beginning to openly share air-quality data.

Publication of these figures was a surprise. It would almost certainly make the government look bad. But it was a calculated move. In 2014 China’s Premier Li Keqiang used the data as the basis for a declaration of war against pollution at the annual gathering of the National People’s Congress.

The government had provided a carrot, in the form of direct and indirect subsidies for electric vehicle makers. Now it had a stick. Wan Gang’s ministry was directed to work with local governments to introduce regulations to control the number of new cars on the roads each year. If city residents wanted a licence plate for a fossil fuel car, they needed to either enter a lottery or bid in an auction. Sometimes the amount they would have to pay for the new licence was higher than the cost of the car itself. For new-energy vehicles, it was first come, first served.

In 2011 the country sold about 1000 battery-powered cars and plug-in hybrids. By 2022 that number stood at nearly seven million and China had become the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles. In some years, the annual rate of growth was 300 per cent. As a fraction of all cars sold, electric vehicles now make up more than 25 per cent of total sales — a figure that is already higher than the government target of 20 per cent for 2025 sales. It’s clear the future of cars in China is electric, and the country’s push has accelerated the electrification of transport globally.

In 2018 Wang Zhigang succeeded Wan Gang as minister of science and technology. Since then Wan has remained a key player in the country’s electrification efforts, but his impact was clear even before he left his government job. Between 2009 and 2017 the Chinese government spent more than US$60 billion on electric cars, according to a study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. To put that figure in perspective, it is more than the market cap of General Motors, which produces some eight million cars each year.

Wan’s push also created industrial jewels such as BYD, the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles, which counts Warren Buffett as one of its biggest shareholders. It doesn’t just sell electric cars around the world; it also sells electric buses. It operates electric bus factories in California and Ontario that have the capacity to build more than 1000 buses each year.

In that sense, the money the Communist Party spent has already paid dividends. Today, China doesn’t just have factories that can produce electric cars; it has an entire supply chain, from the globally mined metals that are used to make batteries to the complex software installed in electric cars. Crucially, the country also has people who can run every level of the supply chain. Though most of this talent is domestic, many Chinese electric car firms are now wealthy enough to poach staff from international companies.

Other countries are trying to play catch-up. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — the largest injection of cash from a US government in climate-oriented investments — includes some US$100 billion worth of incentives for electrification of transport in the United States. Similarly, bullish plans for electric vehicles have been hatched in Europe, where strict emissions criteria have forced car makers to pivot to selling only electric vehicles within the next decade.

During Wan’s time as China’s minister of science and technology, all the countries in the world signed the 2015 Paris agreement. Electric cars are a crucial climate solution, and China has shown it is possible to scale the technology quickly. That’s led to many countries banning the sale of new fossil fuel cars by 2040 or earlier. Markets covering more than 20 per cent of car sales globally now have a mandate to fully phase out internal combustion engine vehicles.

What Wan Gang, with China’s backing, has shown is that succeeding in scaling a green technology requires supportive government policies, substantial public and private investment, and empowering entrepreneurs. Done right, it can also give a country a commanding technological lead over the rest of the world. For “climate capitalism” to work, all three are required to ensure technologies can scale within a few decades to get the world to zero emissions. •

This is an edited extract from Akshat Rathi’s Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, released in Australia this month.

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Ministerial staff, on the other hand, have provoked much greater curiosity. In the 1970s, principal private secretaries Ainsley Gotto and Junie Morosi carved swathes during the Gorton and Whitlam governments, though few have since matched their flair. Much less colourful as an adviser was the current prime minister, who cut his political teeth on the staff of Tom Uren, local government minister in the Hawke government, and Bob Carr, premier of New South Wales.

Whether in the Gotto–Morosi or the Albanese mould, ministerial staff still grab a headline or two, if sometimes for the wrong reasons. They inhabit an area of the public service where accountability is minimal but proximity to power gives a sense of dash, even of gravitas — whispering in ministers’ ears, digging their leaders out of strife, telling senior public servants what to do, flitting around sometimes in VIP planes and perhaps glugging on a beaker or two of pinot grigio in a Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.

So when things go wrong with ministerial staff, people prick up their ears. And things have gone wrong with them, and with their ministers and other members of the federal parliament — wrong enough for the Human Rights Commission to be asked to review the scene. Its 2021 report, Set the Standard, made many recommendations about how Parliament House could be smartened up as a workplace.

One consequence of that report is legislation to create a new statutory body, Parliamentary Workplace Support Services, which will deal with staffing, complaints, education and training, and related matters affecting Parliament House’s denizens.

Set the Standard also recommended a review of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, now fondly known as the MOPS Act, which provides a legal base for the employment of MPs’ staff. The review, recently completed by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, is important because ministerial staff have become a linchpin between ministers’ offices and the public service. Where that connection has not worked as it should, things have often turned sour.

Before I say any more about the bill, though, a little history.

In 1983, Labor offered voters a pre-election policy on, of all things, the public service. That policy proposed reserving a proportion of senior executive service positions for political appointments, a move — however well intentioned — that would have disastrously compromised merit staffing.

The MOPS Act was designed as an alternative to Labor policy. (I confess I played a role in advising on and implementing it.) It allowed ministers, under certain conditions, to engage ministerial consultants who could be employed within departments. But it avoided a further politicisation of the public service by limiting the tenure of consultants to the period for which the appointing minister was in charge of the relevant department. Almost as an afterthought, the MOPS also gave ministers and other MPs legal power they’d not previously had to employ their office staff.

The MOPS legislation came into effect in 1984 and it has not been materially changed since then.

Now, based on the review by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, comes a bill that would materially change the MOPS Act. Some of the proposed changes are for the good, some are not, and some that should have been made have been left on the shelf. The MOPS Amendment Bill might not be as bad as the ridiculously inadequate Public Service Act Amendment Bill, also now in parliament, but it could have been a lot better.

On the positives, the MOPS Amendment Bill would do three important things. It would introduce employment principles designed to improve the behaviour of MPs and their staff. It would better define the employment responsibilities of ministers and other MPs, and elucidate different categories of staff. And it would clarify and improve termination arrangements in association with provisions in the Parliamentary Workplace Support Services Bill dealing with dismissal, grievance procedures and so on.

Given that the optimistic assumptions about the behaviour of MPs and their staff that underpinned the MOPS Act have been invalidated over the years, these changes are welcome. Unfortunately, though, the MOPS Amendment Bill heads south from that point on.

The bill would cut the heart out of the MOPS Act by removing the ministerial consultant provisions. It is as if the bill’s designers have taken fright at the word “consultants” (now an eleven-letter swear word) and simply reacted by removing it from the bill. Their explanation is that the provisions have not been used and are therefore “obsolete.”

But the consultant provisions were never intended to be greatly used. Their purpose was to protect against any return of Labor’s notion of reserving a proportion of senior executive service positions for political appointment, and to block insidious, backdoor pressures from ministers to insinuate their nominees into the public service. Any ministers trying such tricks could be deflected by the consultant provisions.

The fact that they’ve not been much used is not a sign of obsolescence; it’s a sign of success. Their planned demolition ignores the deterrent value of many little-used laws. Indeed, getting rid of laws because they’re not much used would probably wipe out half of what are now on the books.

As the MOPS Amendment Bill errs in what removes, so too is it deficient in what it fails to include.

The administrative code of conduct for ministerial staff has been around for many years. Because it doesn’t seem to have done much good, the 2019 Thodey review of the public service and the robodebt royal commission recommended it be replaced with a legislated code. The government has squibbed on those recommendations; the MOPS Amendment Bill doesn’t propose a code for ministerial staff or one for other MOPS staff.

That’s a shame because a legal code of conduct would provide a clear and unavoidable statement of expectations about proper behaviour and a solid base for keeping staff up to the mark, including with disciplinary measures.

For these reasons parliament has put a legal code of conduct for departmental and agency staff into the Public Service Act. For the government to refuse to do likewise for ministerial staff is hypocritical. If it is not to join the government in this two-faced mire, parliament should insist on legislated codes of conduct for ministerial and all other staff employed by MPs.

For all their value, legal codes of conduct are at risk if recruitment procedures allow ratbags to be employed. The MOPS Amendment Bill includes a provision requiring ministers and MPs to assess whether staff they wish to employ have the appropriate capability. That too-small step is typical of this bill.

True, it provides for the prime minister to regulate what kinds of staff can be employed and to establish related arrangements and conditions, but the powers are unspecific. For ministerial staff, the government (or the prime minister) should be required to establish by delegated legislation suitably tight procedures for selecting ministerial staff, for receiving independent advice on appointments, for security and other vetting, and for induction and training.

Unlike recruitment to public service departments, current procedures for ministerial staff are opaque and vulnerable to shady dealing. While ministers (and other MPs) need scope to employ staff with whom they can get on, more open recruitment procedures would promote public confidence and minimise the ratbag risk.

During the Hawke government, many senior positions in ministers’ offices were occupied by public servants on secondment, a factor contributing to a high point in productive relations between ministers and the public service. While those days are long gone, ministers would do themselves a favour by seeing that their offices include a reasonable seasoning of competent public servants.

There is, however, a disincentive for public servants to sign up with ministers’ offices. In doing so they effectively rule themselves out of promotion within the public service, often for years. With the Hawke government this disincentive was reduced by arrangements whereby public servants returning from ministers’ offices could be reintegrated into their department at a level appropriate to the length of time they’d been on secondment and the kind of work they’d done during it. These provisions should be brought back.

Finally, the Parliamentary Workplace Support Services Bill’s provisions for reporting on employment under the MOPS Act are insufficient. It should be up to the government itself (or the prime minister) to report on the employment of ministerial staff; after all, those given statutory powers by parliament should account directly for their exercise rather than rely on others to do so. Points of authority and accountability should match up.

It’s a pity the MOPS Amendment Bill is so modest and weak, errs significantly in removing the ministerial consultant provision, and omits more important provisions than it contains. Timidity, public service incapacity, an unwillingness or inability to see what’s important in the historical background and a sheer lack of imagination continue to dog attempts to improve the Commonwealth public service. •

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There is, however, one prediction that can be made, with almost perfect safety. For the foreseeable future, Australia’s political class will continue to worry about declining birth rates and “population ageing.”

Worries of this kind have been around since the late nineteenth century, when families first began exercising some control over the number of children they had. The panic over declining fertility was briefly interrupted by an unexpected baby boom after 1945, which coincided with an economic boom. But concerns about ageing resumed with increasing force from the 1980s, when the fact that baby boomers would one day retire started to enter budget calculations just as the prospects of continued strong growth were fading. Worse, unlike previous generations, the boomers showed a propensity to live well beyond the official pension age.

This resurgence in concern has coincided almost exactly with my own working life, and I have spent a fair bit of that time trying to debunk it. My attempts began before the first Intergenerational Report in 2002, and have continued, with very limited success, right up to last month’s release of the latest.

Criticising alarmism about fertility and ageing is something of a family tradition. In 1988, my mother Pat, a demographer, produced No Rising Generation: Women & Fertility in Late Nineteenth Century Australia, a study of the first panic about declining fertility. The title, a quotation from a typically gloomy pro-natal advocate, would work perfectly well as a summary of views being stated today.

Alarm is expressed most commonly in terms of the “old-age dependency ratio”: the ratio of people aged sixty-five and over, assumed to be dependent, and those between fifteen and sixty-four, who must therefore work to support them.

The ages built into the ratio reflected the economic realities of 1909 (at least for men), when the age pension was first introduced. Most men left school and entered the workforce at fifteen, possibly after a brief apprenticeship. Young and strong, they reached their peak earning power in their twenties. If they made it to the pension age of sixty-five they were worn out and, in many cases, incapable of working any longer. At that point, they could expect to live another ten years or so.

Women, meanwhile, were expected to leave paid employment when they married, as nearly all of them did. They then undertook the work of caring for children — an activity ignored by the dependency ratio and left out of calculations of national income. Reflecting their limited employment opportunities, women could (if single or widowed) receive the age pension at sixty.

Apart from some fluctuations, these patterns didn’t change much for the next fifty years or so. The birth rate fell sharply during the Great Depression but rebounded in the baby boom. Women entered the workforce in large numbers during the second world war but were pushed out again to make room for returned servicemen. And although reductions in premature deaths (especially infant mortality) produced a big increase in average life expectancy, prospective longevity barely changed for sixty-five-year-olds between 1900 and 1960.

After 1960, though, things changed radically at both ends of the age distribution. Leaving school at fifteen ceased to be a sensible (or even a feasible) option. By the late twentieth century nearly all young people finished high school and most went on to post-school education and training. Dependence on parents, and on publicly provided or subsidised education, continued to around twenty years of age.

At the other end of the age distribution, the number of healthy years someone could expect to live after sixty-five increased steadily. The abolition of official retirement ages meant people could choose to work until they were seventy or even older. Yet the trend of the late twentieth century — exacerbated when the 1990s recession consigned many older workers to apparent unemployability — was towards earlier retirement.

It was in this context that Coalition treasurer Peter Costello launched the first Intergenerational Report. Its predictions (or projections) were less important than the rhetorical purpose: to spread the message that reductions in public spending, and particularly in welfare payments, were urgently needed if unacceptable increases in taxation were to be avoided.

These claims were repeated in successive reports, reaching the height of absurdity under treasurer Joe Hockey, who warned that the 2015 report would make us “fall off our chairs” and raised the prospect of newborn Australians living to 150. (He forgot to mention that these future Methuselahs would not even reach pension age until the last decades of the twenty-first century.)

The alarmist tone of the Intergenerational Reports was based on the idea that old people will represent an unsustainable burden on both the health system and the retirement income system. But most of the policy changes necessary to fix retirement incomes were well under way by the time the first report came out.

First, income and assets tests for the age pension, largely abolished in the 1970s, had been reintroduced in the 1980s. Then, beginning in the early 1990s, defined benefit superannuation schemes were replaced by accumulation schemes that put the burden on workers to plan the retirement investments on which they would live.

The final step, beginning in the late 1990s, was a gradual increase in the age of eligibility for retirement incomes of all kinds. The pension age for women was increased to sixty-five. Further changes in 2009 began the process of increasing the pension age to sixty-seven, which has just been completed.

Ironically, the most important backward steps in this process were taken by Costello himself. His tax concessions for superannuation, of particular benefit to self-managed superannuation funds, have proved both unsustainable and politically hard to undo. It has taken fifteen years of effort by governments of both parties to wind them back. The absurdly generous franking credits system, against which Labor campaigned in 2019, now looks untouchable.

The resolution of the retirement income problem was finally acknowledged, with some justifiable partisan spin, in the 2023 report. As treasurer Jim Chalmers observed, “Our population is ageing but our spending on the age pension will fall — that’s the intergenerational genius of super. Super is delivering on its promise — providing a better retirement for more Australians and a better outcome for the budget over the next forty years.”

Despite this, the 2023 report sticks with the outdated dependency ratio, noting that the term “refers to the number of people aged sixty-five and over for every 100 people of traditional working age (fifteen to sixty-four).” The only concession to twenty-first-century reality is the word “traditional,” hinting that a document supposedly designed to prepare for the future is still using the mental categories of the past.

But if we use a more realistic age distribution, and take account of the fact that both young and old people are dependent, the apparent crisis vanishes. There are currently about two people aged under twenty or over seventy for every three people in between. This ratio will barely change between now and 2063.

And what about the old bugbear of health spending? Ever since the first Intergenerational Report, critics of the conventional wisdom have pointed out that the growth in health expenditure has been driven mainly by the new and better treatments that lead to longer and healthier lives. This is the reverse of the alarmist claim that an increase in longevity (the cause of which is left unstated) means longer periods of late-life illness and greater demand for medical services.

New medical technologies are part of the process of structural change inherent in modernity. In the first half of the twentieth century, manufacturing displaced agriculture as the central focus of economic activity, only to be displaced in its turn by services. Now change is occurring within the service sector, with information technology and artificial intelligence replacing some services and enhancing the importance of others.

Much of the growth in the service sector comes from human services like health and education, which governments are best placed to provide or at least fund. This will indeed require an increase in the share of national income going to government, and therefore an increase in tax rates. Rather than calling for alarm, the Intergenerational Report ought to be raising awareness of the need for these structural changes.

Like its predecessors, the latest Intergenerational Report will almost certainly fail to create the hoped-for sense of alarm among voters. But in two crucial respects it ought to be generating some alarm in the political class that produced it.

First, the report spells out the need for more tax revenue. Yet the major parties have a bipartisan commitment to cutting taxes for those with the greatest ability to pay. The stage three tax cuts, designed by Scott Morrison first as treasurer and then as prime minister, will put a hole in tax revenue that will take decades to fill. And Labor’s 2019 election defeat led it to abandon most proposals to close tax loopholes.

Our government ought to be even more alarmed about global heating. For the first time, this year’s Intergenerational Report at least attempts to estimate some of the monetary costs of the disaster towards which we are accelerating. But the government that commissioned it is doing little to improve the situation, and a great deal to make it worse.

Every day, it seems, we read of a new coalmine being approved or a new gas project receiving massive subsidies. And every day the results are evident around the world in catastrophic fires, devastating floods and the accelerating destruction of natural habitats.

We are, indeed, driving younger generations of Australians towards a poorer future. But this poverty won’t be caused by higher tax rates or the costs of aged care. Rather, our poisoned bequest will be the unliveable planet that is already in plain view. •

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The problem turned out to be technical. The computer system used by the agents, designed on the assumption that unaccompanied minors were travelling solo, had no way of recording a link between them and their parents. Some agents stuck sticky notes on infants’ onesies. Others kept makeshift records that were lost when the children were moved.

In Recoding America, technology writer Jennifer Pahlka tells the stories of how technological successes and failures have affected the way the US government operates. As founder of the non-profit Code for America and deputy chief technology officer under president Barack Obama, Pahlka is ideally placed to show why government computer systems sometimes underperform (and occasionally outperform) our expectations.

In one case, a pair of young coders set about redesigning the website for people to apply for food stamps in California. The existing website contained 212 questions and could take up to an hour to complete. Because it didn’t work on mobile devices, some homeless people would try applying at a public library computer only to find it kicked them off after half an hour. The coding duo redesigned the system to remove irrelevant questions, made it mobile-friendly, and ensured that the application process could be completed in about seven minutes.

Part of the reason government websites are so complicated, Pahlka argues, is that their creators rarely stop to think about the consequences of complexity. She quotes a colleague of hers admonishing website designers: “Every time you add a question to a form, I want you to imagine the user filling it out with one hand while using the other to break up a brawl between toddlers.”

The philosophy of good government services, Pahlka argues, rests on dignity. Services that respect our time, use straightforward terms and don’t make us feel stupid will not only work better; they will also help build a greater sense of trust in government.

Pahlka discusses the debacle of President Obama’s healthcare.gov site, whose glitches prevented hundreds of thousands of Americans from obtaining health insurance in the first few weeks after its launch. By contrast, she notes that the covidtests.gov site worked beautifully, allowing Americans to order four free Covid tests in less than a minute.

Part of the difference was that mailing out tests is easier than selling insurance, but the designers of covidtests.gov also made a deliberate decision to keep their site straightforward. In distributing free Covid tests, the designers might reasonably have asked users their vaccine status and household size. They might have required everyone to check a box promising not to resell the tests. But they recognised that the longer it took to use, the fewer people would order tests. They opted for the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid.

Fixing one problem often leads to another. Pahlka tells the story of the US veterans affairs department, whose website worked only with the software versions used by those inside the agency and often crashed when used with the browsers and document readers on veterans’ home computers. When the department fixed the online form, the number of incoming applications jumped tenfold. Suddenly the problem wasn’t a faulty website, it was a backlog of applications. Some departmental officials wanted the agency to revert to its technically flawed application form. To the department’s credit, its leadership chose to clear the backlog instead.

Government is the focus of Recoding America, but the problems are familiar in many large organisations. Pahlka wryly notes Kodak’s decision to outsource most of its information technology staff to IBM in 1989. In the 1970s, the company had produced the first digital camera prototype; in 2012, sideswiped by the rise of electronic photography, the company filed for bankruptcy. We’ll never know whether the pre-eminent photography company of the twentieth century could have transitioned into the digital age if it had kept its technological expertise in-house. But the decision didn’t help.

In 2001, Robert D. Atkinson and I wrote a report titled Breaking Down Bureaucratic Barriers: The Next Phase of Digital Government for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Reading back through that report two decades on, some of it seems quaint. At the time, the US government had only been online for eight years. One of our recommendations was that government websites should allow personalisation through the use of cookies — a radical notion at the time.

But some of our suggestions still ring true. Government websites should be arranged with a focus on consumers, not producers. Just as Amazon’s homepage doesn’t feature a photo of Jeff Bezos, service-oriented government websites should be designed around customers’ needs. Atkinson and I argued that governments should avoid the silo mentality revealed by websites that show only the programs provided by a single agency, and instead structure the information around users.

Layers of government within Australia can also be time-consuming and confusing obstacles for citizens. But with sensible use of technology, government can make it easy for people to understand and access all the services available to them.

The Australian government has commenced organising services by life event. A trial allows new parents to perform one simple transaction in myGov to enrol the newborn in Medicare, initiate family assistance claims, and register the birth with the state or territory government. In principle, government can do the same with retirement. If a citizen commences on the age pension, why not offer to add state or territory government concession cards to the myGov wallet and connect the new pensioner with financial support services?

According to Pahlka, American adults spend an average of forty-two hours per year on paperwork for the federal government — a figure that doesn’t include the forms they fill out for state and local governments. Making government easier to use could pay massive dividends for the community. One way to think about it is that if the typical working day is eight hours long, then reducing the paperwork burden by one-fifth would be like giving each American adult another public holiday.

Pahlka quotes Cecilia Muñoz, head of the Domestic Policy Council under President Obama: “We need to think bigger than bringing tech solutions to policy problems.” It’s not the tech, she argues, it’s the tech people. The successful covidtests.gov site wasn’t built by a private provider, it was designed in-house by a team from the US Digital Service and the US Postal Service. The whole project took six weeks.

Technology will change, but the principles of good technology design will remain constant. Design systems based on consumer needs, not government imperatives. Keep private information secure. Beware of locking in legacy architecture. Encourage innovation by breaking projects into small, achievable components. Don’t make websites any more complicated than necessary.

If I were to take a single message from Recoding America, it would be about the relationship between tech firms and government. Governments should learn from how the best technology companies design their websites and apps, tweaking their interfaces to maximise the user experience. Yet just because there’s a lot to learn from the private sector, it doesn’t follow that outsourcing is always desirable. Having coding expertise within government helps align policy and delivery, allows troubleshooting and improvements, and places a priority on that most straightforward of goals: delivering public services effectively. •

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
By Jennifer Pahlka | Metropolitan Books | $49.99 | 346 pages

The post Recoding government appeared first on Inside Story.

To recap. A decade ago a federal minister divided society into “lifters and leaners.” It was a variant on the old “dole bludger” trope that imagined many of the unemployed as spongers needing to be cracked down on, hard. Public compassion had to be tightly rationed and a sense of guilt imposed on those reliant on government support as an incentive for them to, somehow, pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Social welfare was to be as much a source of savings as it was a salve to society’s wounds. The “lifters” should be asked to lift as little as political calculation permitted.

In this nest robodebt was hatched. A minister proud to flaunt himself as a “welfare cop” and ambitiously keen to impress his colleagues was on the hunt for big savings. Obliging officials concocted an automated scheme using tax data to estimate the annual income of welfare recipients to see if they’d been overpaid. Debt notices, inaccurately calculated, were issued to hundreds of thousands.

But the scheme was illegal — and this was known by those developing and advancing it, who between them allowed cabinet to be misled and opinions about illegality ignored or suppressed. Attempts were made to deceive the ombudsman; inconvenient decisions by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal were treated with little respect and the member who made them failed to be reappointed.

The scheme was brought undone in various ways. While it had promised savings of a billion dollars, its resolution has cost taxpayers around twice that, and there could be more.

As the royal commissioner writes in her preface:

It is remarkable how little interest there seems to have been in ensuring the Scheme’s legality, how rushed its implementation was, how little thought was given to how it would affect welfare recipients and the lengths to which public servants were prepared to go to oblige ministers on a quest for savings. Truly dismaying was the revelation of dishonesty and collusion to prevent the Scheme’s lack of legal foundation coming to light. Equally disheartening was the ineffectiveness of what one might consider institutional checks and balances… in presenting any hindrance to the Scheme’s continuance.

How could it have come to this?

In some ways the answers can be found in the obverse of the royal commissioner’s recommendations.

Holmes stresses that developing a public service strong enough to prevent a repeat of something like the robodebt scheme “will depend on the will of the government of the day, because culture is set from the top.” She says that “politicians need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments,” that “anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism” not “confined to one side of politics” and that politicians “need to abandon for good (in every sense) the narrative of taxpayer versus welfare recipient.” They must abandon the “lifters and leaners” rhetoric, in other words, which has contributed to unemployment beneficiaries being pointedly designated as “JobSeekers” and the rate of payments kept at an impoverishing level.

In summary: robodebt is a failure of the very political leadership needed to avoid it. Cultural change must happen at the top.

But Commissioner Holmes also understands that cultural change is not a rabbit that can be pulled from a hat. It requires changes in organisational structures, laws, procedures and people.

On organisation, she recommends “an immediate and full review to examine whether the existing structure of the social services portfolio, and the status of Services Australia as an entity, are optimal.” It’s likely they are not.

Although the commissioner refrains from recommending Services Australia be made a statutory authority, it makes sense to do so. Where government functions and decision-making need protection from ministers, this is the best form of organisation to protect them. That’s why taxation, public broadcasting and other functions are housed in statutory authorities. The government should give cultural change a big shove and make Services Australia a statutory authority with clearly defined powers, better protecting it from inevitably resurgent political pressures to portray welfare support in “lifters and leaners” terms.

The commissioner recommends many changes to laws and procedures. They include establishing a legal framework for automated government services and a body to “monitor and audit” such services; reinstating a six-year statute of limitations on welfare debts; strengthening the ombudsman’s powers; reviving the Administrative Review Council; giving the public service commissioner powers to investigate the behaviour of former agency heads; providing a legislated code of conduct for ministerial staff; and much more. Curiously, none of the proposed legislative changes were anticipated in the Public Service Amendment Bill touted as a major reform and now before the parliament. Regardless, the commissioner’s legal and procedural reforms should be fully accepted.

But those recommendations don’t go far enough. While making telling observations about “the lengths to which public servants were prepared to go to oblige ministers,” the “lack of independence” exercised by departmental secretaries” and evidence of senior public servants being “excessively responsive to government, undermining the concept of impartiality and frank and fearless advice,” the commission could have done more to investigate why this is so. Yet Holmes says quite reasonably that she had “neither the time nor the resources” to consider wholesale public service reform.

Still, she does say that “the current government has emphasised that the public service must be empowered to be honest and truly independent” and has asked the public service commissioner to see that the performance assessments of senior staff “cover both outcomes and behaviour.” But that’s been the case for decades: the notion that performance assessments would ignore behaviour is absurd, and the commission drolly observes that the government’s instruction “does not go far enough.” Indeed it doesn’t.

For this reason the commissioner endorses those recommendations of the 2019 Thodey review of the public service that deal with the appointment and tenure of departmental secretaries. She observes, however, that “the extent to which these have been endorsed by the government is unclear.” Too right it is. Incredibly, there’s nothing about them in the current Public Service Amendment Bill, and that self-proclaimed bastion of integrity, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (encompassing the Office of the Secretary for Public Service Reform) refuses to say which Thodey recommendations have been implemented.

The departmental secretary, Glyn Davis, has recently mused about the need for a rethinking of Westminster guardrails: “How do we reinstate the idea that yes, ministers in the end are the decision makers, but public servants have this really important role about providing detailed advice, getting it right, making sure ministers have information and can tell them when they can’t do something?”

Rethinking? The fundamental failings in the public service’s robodebt advice were well known long before the royal commission reported. Davis and Gordon de Brouwer, the public service commissioner and before that the secretary for public service reform in Davis’s department, have had a year in which to think deeply. If the Public Service Amendment Bill is anything to go by, they have thus far come up empty-handed on the “guardrail” front.

It’s time to put aside exhortations from on high; they only seem to make things worse. And a stopper should be put on the dispiriting flow of modern management jargon, clichés and platitudes with which officials have clothed their thus far modest and in some cases ill-conceived proposals for improvement. It’s time to do something.

So, in addition to considering what should be done to ministers and officials whose behaviour fell so far short during the life of robodebt and thoroughly implementing the royal commissioner’s recommendations about structures and processes, Davis and de Brouwer should be pressing the government to implement Thodey’s recommendations on the appointment and tenure of departmental secretaries, as endorsed by the royal commissioner. They shouldn’t need to do any more “deep thinking” — they were both members of the Thodey review.

They should also turn away from the distracting dead cat dragged across the path by former departmental secretary and Crown Resorts board member, Jane Halton, who has piously said that, “What worries me is that there is a whole cadre of people who don’t understand that [providing frank advice] is essentially their job.” That’s nonsense. Officials who’ve failed with robodebt have likely understood their responsibilities only too well and their failings can’t be mitigated on the basis of misunderstandings.

So why has the commission found evidence of senior public servants being “excessively responsive to government, undermining the concept of impartiality and frank and fearless advice”? There’s no simple answer to that and the situation is befuddled by the character, motivation and working methods of the ministers and senior officials involved.

One thing can be said with certainty: the present laws whereby departmental secretaries can be summarily dismissed and left on the streets with shadows over their reputations does not encourage frank and fearless advice. Officials understand all too well it can be better not to rile ministers and then see their careers and reputations destroyed.

For the thousands of years of public administration, rulers have used intimidation to keep their servants in line. Mostly that has left rulers badly served by corrupt administrations. The great reform movements in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century tried to stop this rot partly by developing a public service in which the appointment and tenure of officials were based on merit. Their dismissal was regulated by due processes and for stipulated causes because this was thought to provide efficient, effective and stable administration in which officials are better placed to advise ministers free of apprehensions about dismissal.

Australian public services inherited these tenets, but they’ve been progressively abandoned in the federal service over the past thirty years. Secretaries have been summarily sacked without explanation; concerns have grown and been forcefully reiterated by Commissioner Holmes.

Public Service Commissioner de Brouwer says a lack of tenure “doesn’t stop me from doing what I think I have to do.” Well, no one likes to admit to being intimidated, but it’s idle to think it’s not happening and that the intimidation doesn’t seep down the hierarchy. The arbitrary sackings have sent a message that’s been heard.

De Brouwer also says he’s not seen the traditional tenure protection for secretaries as a “core driver,” whatever this might mean. That is, he’s happy to turn a blind eye to what has been fundamental in British-derived public administration for going on 200 years. Yet if it’s not a “core driver,” would he like to open up all public servants to arbitrary dismissal? Or might that be too much for a public service aiming to be what it calls “a model employer”?

Certainly governments should be readily able to move departmental secretaries around, but that should not put them in the JobSeeker queue. As was the case for the first hundred years of the Australian Public Service, every effort should be made to find them other secretary positions or positions of a comparable status and remuneration. This has been a “core driver” — or in Glyn Davis’s language a “guardrail” — of Commonwealth public administration and its restoration would make a serious contribution to avoiding another robodebt. •

The post Do the robodebt recommendations go far enough? appeared first on Inside Story.

The answer depends, of course, on your view of the Albanese government’s chosen pace. Reasonable observers divide over not only its strategic smarts but also whether it is fast or slow in the first place. The government, it should be said, sometimes seems to want it both ways. It disputes the idea it is only doing small things, pointing to its climate and childcare changes, but its leader stresses the importance of being in government for a long time, implying that gradual change can be a virtue.

Or can both be true at once? In a memorable phrase, treasurer Jim Chalmers told journalist Katharine Murphy, “My theory of governing is people will cop big things done slowly and little things done quickly, but not big things done quickly or little things done slowly.”

Is that what “incrementalism” is? The term is harder to define than you might think. “Incrementalism does not always mean small steps,” Aubrey Fox and Greg Berman, American veterans of criminal justice reform, write towards the end of Gradual. “An increment can be big or small.” The first time I came across this I felt outrage rise in my chest: those two short sentences threatened to make a mockery of what I’d read. So incrementalism could be… anything? Everything?

The next sentence, however, offered some clarity. “There is nothing inherent in the idea of gradual change that rules out large steps, so long as they are politically feasible.” Now the authors’ definition of incrementalism sharpened: it meant proceeding in steps, big or small, that were politically feasible. This, of course, is what Chalmers meant when he spoke of what “people will cop.”

So, back to your book club: recommend away. However mischievous your intention in recommending the book, you will be spared Albanese’s wrath. Every politician attempts to do what is politically feasible. And what politician doesn’t like being told that the way they are already going about things is correct?

I learned many new buzz-phrases from this book. Amara’s Law: people overestimate what can be done in the short term and underestimate what can be done in the long term. Secret Congress: the legislation we never hear about because it has bipartisan support. High Conflict: when conflict becomes a feud, bewitching us into a different state of mind in which it is impossible to comprehend those on the other side (frequently encouraged by Conflict Entrepreneurs, who work to provoke disagreement).

Then there’s the Exhausted Majority: most voters, tired of polarised debate. Thermostatic Public Opinion: the tendency of public opinion to move away from the actions of those in power (if politicians spend more, the public wants them to spend less). Public Judgement: distinct from public opinion, it is a stable set of beliefs the public has arrived at after consideration.

I knew about the Deep State already: Donald Trump’s name for the way institutions and public servants conspired against his purposes. The authors point out that he was right. One of the reasons the American system tends towards incrementalism — and this point transfers easily to Australia — is the embedded habits of those who work in government. Public servants tend to do things as they have always done them. This means that even if politicians do want to deliver sudden, bold change, they find it difficult.

Which, write the authors, is fine with the public. The authors use polling, their own and others’, to make the case that voters don’t much like the idea of radical change. After a decade of re-electing one of the most inactive governments this country has seen, Australians will agree.

Given these obstacles, it is not surprising that incrementalism is already the way most of government works. Relying on research by political scientists Frances E. Lee and James M. Curry, the authors point out that important legislation from major parties in the United States passes about half of the time; compromise and consensus are common. American government is not at the standstill so many think.

This prompts the question: why write a book arguing for an approach that already dominates? The authors’ answer is that the way we talk about politics at present is skewed. We live at a time when “incrementalism is profoundly unsexy.” “It’s time to dream big again,” says the­ New York Times. The New Republic describes the “damp squib of incrementalism.”

Fox and Berman believe increasing calls for bold action — among commentators, activists and politicians themselves — are misplaced in three ways. First, they derive from a misunderstanding of the way that government works: incrementalism is its default and much of the time that’s fine. By unrealistically steering discussion towards bold solutions — often for partisan campaigning purposes — they feed the perception that there is no common ground between the parties, inflaming debate and making reasoned public discussion of genuinely possible solutions less likely.

And so we all get government wrong. Their second problem with the current obsession with boldness is that it gets incrementalism wrong too. Rather than being a way of doing nothing, it is fast (you can act immediately) and politically astute, and often leads to large and permanent change. Fox and Berman examine in detail the introduction of Social Security — the American program for payments to retirees and people with disabilities — arguing that the system was initiated slowly, with the chance for citizens to get their heads around it and for changes to be made along the way. Compromises were reached, and it is those compromises that made possible its long life and enduring importance in American society.

The third part of their case is that we tend to get bold change wrong too: we assume it is easier than it is. The authors worry particularly about implementation. It often goes haywire. Fox and Berman criticise advocates for assuming that if something is politically possible it is practically possible as well. That is hubris — and hubris is something the authors strongly warn against. Gradualists, they write approvingly, “know how little they know.” That is particularly important in this era, when it is impossible to assimilate all the information we can access. And if you don’t know enough, then proceeding slowly is wise because it enables you to use trial and error, the only way of avoiding much bigger mistakes.

What, though, if the biggest mistake you can make is not acting? Or acting too slowly to make a useful difference?

One of the largest problems with promising bold change, Fox and Berman argue, is disillusionment. Leaders promise the moon and barely reach the rooftops. What is worse, they knew all along that the moon was never an option. By raising expectations, they foster distrust of institutions and the political process and undermine the very useful things that are being achieved.

I am not sure over-promising lies at the heart of the current loss of faith in democracy. Or, if it does, I wonder if it is over-promising to a wild extent, such that “over-promising” doesn’t begin to capture it: the suggestion over decades from much of our political class that deregulated markets and slimmed-down governments would lead to a better world, when instead they have led to whatever it is we have now.

Still, the basic suggestion — of lowering expectations by accurately describing what you believe you are able to achieve — is a good one. For a start, it’s honest. But it is also an important reminder that, if leaders are going to pursue an incrementalist approach in this “radical age,” then they must make the case for it. In the relieved aftermath of Donald, Boris and Scott, it is easy to think the case makes itself. The problem is that in each of those countries the troubles wrought by decades of neglect and inaction will soon enough reassert the case for bold action. Politicians committed to gradualism will have to hold their nerve and convince voters to do the same.

This assumes gradualism is the way to go. But it is at least possible that the same set of facts the authors rely on — the disillusionment that comes from promising the moon — points to the opposite of what the authors think. What if the answer is not lowering expectations but meeting the high expectations that have been set? If that sounds naive, let me put it another way: perhaps we are particularly susceptible to bold promises right now because we accurately perceive the scale of the problems facing us. If so, the problem is one not one of rhetoric but of substance: we need boldness and we are not getting it.

Fox and Berman anticipate this objection and disagree. They acknowledge that radical change is sometimes possible and desirable, and that extraordinary moments require bold solutions. This, they believe, is not one of those moments. There are serious problems but “that has always been the case.” They quote commentator Matthew Yglesias: “mostly I think we’re living through a time of toxic self-involved drama that threatens to make things worse through twitchy overreaction.” “To which,” the authors write, “we say: amen.”

That the problems of this era are no worse than those of others is a reasonable argument to make: humans are notoriously bad at evaluating their own times in realistic terms. But the authors don’t really make the argument, and it is a difficult assertion to accept given what seem to many outside the United States like a historic set of troubles.

Easily the most important objection to this idea, though, is climate, a difficulty lightly skipped over in the text. (It is addressed most thoroughly in a footnote in which Fox and Berman acknowledge that this may be a rare issue where non-incremental change is required, before arguing incrementalism still offers the best hope.) It is a significant gap in the book’s argument. The objection comes partly because of the size of the problem, but partly too because there is a deadline on our chance to meaningfully act. It is harder to maintain a faith in incrementalism with a loudly ticking clock in the background.

In politics, we tend to remember two types of leader: those who dealt with crisis and those who changed their country through huge reforms. In the era of Albanese, Biden and Sunak (or perhaps Starmer), Fox and Berman might have found their moment, directing our attention instead to those who go about things haltingly, through trial and error, with a nuanced view of what may happen and a humble understanding that they may know less than they think. Perhaps we are at the advent of an era of a quieter type of political figure.

There is one way in which Fox and Berman do believe this time is remarkable: the fragmentation and polarisation of the electorate. Gradual change, they say, is the way to keep their country together; by choosing solutions that most voters support, rather than policies the extremes support, you avoid backlash and bring people with you.

It is an appealing argument. The difficulty for those of us in Australia is that much of the past decade has been defined by exactly that: very, very gradual change, so gradual it might as well not have existed. The most “radical” policies of the past decade were probably those proposed by Bill Shorten as opposition leader. But they weren’t really radical — they were made to seem that way by his opponents and sections of the press. Partisanship and hyperbole, at this moment, find a way. Or perhaps when gradualism becomes the norm even the smallest attempts at slightly bigger change come to seem too frightening.

As Fox and Berman remind us, we must always work to avoid the trap of believing the world is other than it is simply because we say so. If politics works the way they propose, then, whatever our opinion, we must grapple with it. If significant changes in government are occurring outside the realm of conflict, we should know what they are. And if such changes are being presented as small but have the potential to grow with time and become dominant features of our landscape, attention should be directed to that fact. For these reasons, I suspect the people who could learn most from this book are journalists.

And there is another reason. Journalism is the first draft of history. If the political history of this era is going to have to be done a little differently from before — dominated less by conflict and more by the many small things that change only gradually — then it will need a different type of journalism to draw on. If, in twenty years’ time, you are in a book club with Anthony Albanese, perhaps you will propose reading one of those history books. But that will probably depend on how the next few years turn out: whether this really is an incrementalist government and, if so, whether that really is the best approach for these times. •

Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age
By Aubrey Fox and Greg Berman | Oxford University Press | £22.99 | 232 pages

The post The incrementalists appeared first on Inside Story.

In key fields — childcare, aged care, employment services and the NDIS — what we have is not a quality system of care but a disordered ecology of self-directed providers and distant regulators. Governments write complex contracts and rain down new rules when things go wrong, but they haven’t improved the systems themselves. We pay a high price for poor quality and often fraud-ridden services.

Royal commissions, parliamentary reviews, Productivity Commission reports and dozens of independent studies show the same pattern. Successive federal governments have dealt with rising demand for social services by encouraging private companies to form a quasi-market and then encouraging citizens to search for services that suit them.

The new vocabulary of social service reform became the offer of greater choice, with the power that might create for each individual to get what they want and for services to thus become highly responsive. The engine driving this imagined process was the failed idea that unhappy customers will simply exit a bad service and thus “signal” to producers that they must lift their game.

The problem with this “choice” model is twofold.

First, new service markets don’t suddenly spring into life across the social spectrum, waiting for customers to stroll in and make their selections. They are completely different from products: they can’t be produced in advance or shipped in the post or compared on a supermarket shelf. They are created at the same moment they are consumed. They require personal delivery and careful connection to the communities they seek to serve.

Second, these services are extremely difficult to regulate from a distance. We only know how good a service is when we experience it or when we observe, up close, someone else experiencing it.

What current services offer is a “buyer beware” warning and a distant form of regulation that catches the occasional rogue but misses the day-to-day defects across the system. That’s the reason the aged care royal commission found that the majority of people in our old folks’ homes were malnourished. That’s the reason thousands of people were duped by vocational education providers signing them up to ghost courses.

The “choice” idea turns out to be a stalking horse for something else altogether. It enables governments to withdraw from social services. Top public servants now like to say they are “steering, not rowing,” which has come to mean that they lack knowledge of how services are actually produced and experienced. The choice revolution has become a means of risk shifting.

Of course, choice itself is no bad thing. Everyone likes to have a choice when it comes to the important things they have to do. But that raises critical questions. What kinds of options can clients choose? And do they want to be left to figure all that out themselves? When US researchers asked a sample of the general American population if they want to choose their own cancer treatments, a strong majority answered yes. But when they asked people who actually had cancer, only a small number said yes. What they wanted was access to quality medical advice and a chance to be fully involved in decisions. That’s not choice, that’s voice.

The services in Australia’s service “markets” are a wide mix of the great and the ghastly — which is exactly what we would predict. Not all private providers are rogues, but it is also true that they all put shareholder value first; that’s the whole point of the market model. And once fraud becomes a regular event, heavier regulation and reputational damage become common.

This system produces a low-average model with some core characteristics. The owners of the services seek to increase their margins by de-professionalising the service and stocking it instead with poorly paid and untrained staff. Because they all do it and because they are all paid the same rate by the government, they face no market risk if they run a service that conforms to a poor minimum standard. Only the truly dreadful get noticed by the regulators.

Where a star-rating system is used to show consumers how the different providers are doing, the low-average system means that the best service only has to be slightly better than its terrible comparators in order to score points.

With weak oversight of the service itself, providers are tempted to put their best effort into marketing their service to would-be clients. If you browse the websites of aged care homes you will see that most offer “home-cooked meals” and a “place like home.” But no one knows exactly what that means until they move into a centre, which may be too late. Childcare centres promise educational activity, but there is no way to know if that ever happens or for how long in the average day.

Service providers also work very hard to get the maximum subsidy they can from the government. Many seek to reclassify their clients as more needy than they really are, or delay helping them solve smaller problems so the bigger issues will generate greater subsidies. Charges meanwhile rise faster than the average in the broader community because users receive government money to cushion the blow. These dynamics help explain one of the great paradoxes of these service markets: they can become more expensive at the same time as they deliver worse services.

These tragic conditions are well known inside each of the sectors. Sadly, the better operators get tarred with the same brush as the worst. “It is a matter of luck whether our most vulnerable and forgotten citizens end up in one of these shitholes or living a good life” is how one market player described rogue operators in the disability sector.

In that contrast is the clue to the way out of this terrible mess. Instead of a chaotic world of high-risk choices, we need to redesign these services with high, transparent standards of care built in. And we need those receiving the services and those supporting them to have a strong voice in their development and delivery. Throwing more money at the problem won’t make a jot of difference until a more systemic approach kicks in.

The good news is that many of the changes needed aren’t expensive, and some will actually save money. Services need to be better grounded in communities, which will require a more imaginative social investment strategy than has been evident to date. And shared expertise will need to play a bigger role within these services so we can promote the best solutions and share the best methods.

Each of these services has its own dynamics and will require specific reform. But common problems also need to be tackled. The first and most dramatic challenge is to make services more transparent by defining the core activities and standards of all service providers and building in the peer reviewing and evidence sharing that make real-time improvements possible. An agreed model of delivery must combine the best interests of clients with an efficient and responsive approach to current users and future demand.

With transparent models of service will come a greater capacity to share useful adaptations and innovations and use resources creatively. Regulation will also be cheaper and less time-wasting. A common service model would also give employees access to training to increase their skills and to participate in sector-wide benchmarking and self-improvement.

A second area for structural change involves the necessary shift from choice to voice. By all means, let’s keep systems that involve multiple agencies. Nothing is improved by going back to a single bureaucratic supply model — if ever such a thing existed. But let’s move past the myth that these systems will improve because consumers can simply move to the better option and thus drive out poor performers. Multiple suppliers are useful when they offer specialisation and community-specific capability, not when they seek to out-compete some carbon-copy agency down the street.

What really drives improvement is a stronger voice for clients and their families. More mechanisms are needed to help these “experts of experience” make a positive contribution to agencies’ performances. For example, public funds should come with the requirement that the agency has a client board that is consulted about all the key issues.

The third area where change would generate significant benefit is in infrastructure. By over-relying on private markets for core social services we have drifted away from public assets and weakened our planning capacity. Public payments for individual users include contributions to service infrastructure, but these assets reside in private hands and can’t therefore be used for maximum benefit. New models for private–public partnership are needed to build services for the future.

Local governments often provide the planning approval for such facilities but cannot manage them over their lifespan. As a result, aged care, childcare and training facilities are often built to optimise real estate value rather than to develop joined-up services such as joint childcare and aged care facilities.

Finally, we need to re-establish the role of public service providers within the broader mix of agencies. The public service can’t improve a service it doesn’t understand using staff who have no frontline capability. Public service delivery should always drive for high standards, test new methods and activate the “flanking services” — including counselling, rehabilitation and housing assistance — needed to make complex services work. And a “provider of last resort” should always be ready to move to places where market players won’t accept risks associated with long-term investments in clients.

There’s an alternative, of course: we can keep doing what we have been doing for twenty years and watch the most vulnerable in our community get ripped off and done down. It’s not a great choice. •

The post Choice versus voice appeared first on Inside Story.

As well as rising mortgage costs, families on the fringes face steep increases in energy prices. Across most of Australia, the wholesale price of electricity has more than tripled in the past two years; retail prices have followed, and are generally double or triple what they were two years ago.

A big contributor to those cost hikes is the price of gas, which has risen sharply as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As one of the world’s largest gas exporters, Australia had been immune to such risks because of its plentiful local supplies. But we lost that immunity after 2015 when large-scale exports from the east coast led to domestic scarcity and the imposition of global pricing. The looming rundown of Victoria’s big Bass Strait gas fields poses a further risk to supply and prices.

High commuting costs, like energy market failings, result from poor planning. But they have another thing in common: transport and energy infrastructure are often financed by pension funds rather than governments. The people who administer these funds are the subject of political economist Brett Christophers’s new book, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World. These asset managers, he writes, “increasingly own and control our most essential physical systems and frameworks,” and their financial priorities are not aligned with social priorities unless governments impose that requirement.

While his style is somewhat dry and a little didactic, Christophers highlights three tendencies that raise big questions about how we finance infrastructure: the investment priorities of pension funds often determine which infrastructure projects go ahead; governments often take on risks that should belong to investors; and the conditions imposed by one infrastructure project can corrupt the process of providing public services or assets.

Christophers probes these interactions of public and private interests in detail. But I’m not sure he has stepped back to see the bigger picture. For starters, these investments aren’t big enough to justify the suggestion that asset managers rule society. Assets under management might total as much as US$1 trillion, he says, but that’s less than a third of the infrastructure investment undertaken last year by the fifty or so largest economies in the world.

The pension funds need reliable, predictable income to meet their obligation to pay regular returns, and the fees charged by proven asset managers are correspondingly generous. It’s no coincidence that the pioneering firm, Macquarie Bank, is called the “millionaires factory.” Macquarie, adept and innovative, has found new ways to skim earnings from unlikely places.

Asset management took off after the global financial crisis, partly because some assets — housing in the United States being the prime example — became relatively cheap and yet still offered good rental income. In the aftermath of the crisis the world was seemingly awash in savings; as interest rates fell, infrastructure assets became much more attractive to big investor organisations.

Christophers is inclined to focus on the incidental pitfalls of the asset managers’ investment in essential infrastructure rather than look at the design of the system that encourages this kind of asset. In many cases, these managers are standing in for governments. They raise money, just as governments do. Once an investment in a road or a tunnel or a power generator has been made, they generally manage the asset just as a statutory authority or government department would — or they outsource that function.

This form of asset management is created by government. Because the assets are often singular — a freeway or tunnel required to meet social needs — governments own the project from the start and set the terms. Asset managers often, perhaps always, get near-monopoly rights, and the primary tension between them and government is usually price.

What is this monopoly worth? If governments get that wrong, they miss out on some, or even a lot of, cash. If investors get it wrong, they don’t make much money — or sometimes go broke.

Interestingly, Christophers doesn’t examine two other fundamental questions: why roads are financed using tolls, and how better government might deliver more equitable and efficient results. And though politics can be  heavily influenced by real estate interests, he leaves property-sector influence in Western economies largely unexamined.

Our Treasury officials carry on quite a bit about rent-seeking by industry, but rarely do you see much pushback when developers demand taxpayer support as they convert broad acres into housing, often kilometres from schools or hospitals or even shopping centres. Looking back on the recent history of urban expansion, it’s fair to ask whether urban planning is extinct.

Poor planning exaggerates demand for some assets, like outer-urban freeways, that neatly fit the economic interests of asset managers. But you can’t blame asset managers for that. They might, however, have contributed to the illusions that have led governments down hazardous paths.

How did we get here? Australia’s economic debate has evolved over many years. In the decades after Federation an accord between capital and labour manifested in the Harvester judgement — our first national minimum wage — and relatively high levels of industry protection. During the 1970s and especially the 1980s a more laissez-faire consensus emerged, opening Australia up to trade, among other things, and sharply increasing the role of finance.

Once-passive pension funds, closely aligned with employers, became active investors largely driven by arithmetic. Asset trading became a big driver of Australian economic activity. And politicians became unused to thinking about public investment in any sector where business might have a role, even when the involvement of business depends on government.

One example Christophers highlights is renewable energy. He notes that asset managers haven’t much interest in large-scale traditional power stations, which are too complex and risky. He suggests that the set-and-forget nature of solar cells and wind turbines has attracted very big players to the energy transition. Government-backed purchase agreements are undoubtedly a factor, too, providing taxpayer assurance of investment returns.

One challenge of the energy transition derives from the fact that the energy itself is only part of the price consumers pay for electricity or gas. A cursory look at a typical electricity bill reveals that the supply charge is large relative to the price of the energy consumed. This charge is largely made up of the cost of wires, poles and maintenance, a monopoly activity delivered by privately owned companies largely in the hands of asset managers.

Less transparently, energy is only partly priced by markets. Australia’s National Electricity Market is good at pricing the least-cost source of power at any time of day, effectively delivering a competitive outcome. But consumers expect power when they flick a switch, and that level of reliability depends on investment in generation that isn’t needed all the time. This raises a challenge for the energy transition, and it cannot be resolved by the NEM.

The electricity supply Australians have today was built almost exclusively by state governments. Over time, New South Wales and Victoria sold power stations and other elements of their state energy authorities to private owners. In general, much of the money raised has been redirected to other infrastructure. Only Queensland and Western Australia still have a public power utility — though Victoria intends to resurrect the State Electricity Commission and the new NSW government has indicated it might have similar plans.

So far, though, state governments have been unwilling to deal in any concrete way with the reliability part of electricity supply. Yet the crucial question, occasionally hinted at by the national regulator, AEMO, but only raised in blunt terms by people like former Snowy Hydro chief executive Paul Broad, is this: will we have seriously unreliable power during the transition?

Without going into the specifics, the key point is that our power supply is a basic service that we experience in a certain way because of choices made decades ago, mostly by state governments. Today’s governments don’t appear to accept that part of their role is to ensure the next system is at least as effective as the old one.

While asset managers are certainly investing in the energy transition in a big way, they are not utilities. In fact, most of them behave more like property speculators, acquiring a right and setting up renewable generation before flipping the asset to a fund.

What seems to have happened since the 1970s is that Australia’s public management has retreated from any activity that has commercial potential, assuming instead that “the market” will deliver the right outcome as long as the “settings” are right.

In the case of power, a debate actually took place about the need for a publicly funded “capacity” payment to ensure that backup power was available for times when the system was not adequately supplied. But the states couldn’t agree. Instead, it was assumed that the very high prices that arise when normal supply is interrupted will encourage private investors to build storage capacity or “peak” gas plants that can be brought on quickly. For a variety of reasons, that latter outcome now seems less likely.

Meanwhile, we are getting good at bringing forward the dates on which the big, concentrated coal-fired plants will close, but less adept at rapidly rolling out the transmission and other investments needed to make sure those closures don’t bring serious problems.

Christophers’s exploration of the remarkable global reach of private asset managers into social assets is interesting and informative. But the other side of the asset management trend is a passivity among governments at a time when demands for active management of public assets are intense and have the potential to rise to unprecedented heights. •

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
By Brett Christophers | Verso | $39.99 | 320 pages

The post Global reach appeared first on Inside Story.

Since 2016, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory have all committed to talk about treaties with First Nations peoples. These processes are still at an early stage, but their challenges, complications and accomplishments provide important lessons for a national treaty process.

First, a refresher. Treaties are accepted around the world as a means to resolve differences between Indigenous nations and those who colonised their lands. They have been struck in North America and New Zealand and are being negotiated in Canada. Australia is an outlier: no treaties were negotiated when the British arrived, or at Federation, or in the years since then. Without any formal treaty setting out how to share the land, many First Nations peoples believe Australia’s moral and legal foundations are, in NT treaty commissioner Mick Dodson’s words, “a little… shaky.”

Many types of agreements have been negotiated between First Nations peoples and governments, but international law sets a clear standard for what makes an agreement a treaty. Treaties are formal instruments reached through a process of respectful negotiation in which both sides accept a series of responsibilities. They provide redress for past injustices, acknowledging that Indigenous peoples were prior owners and occupiers of the land and, as such, retain a right to self-government.

At a minimum, a treaty recognises or creates structures of culturally appropriate governance and establishes means of decision-making and control. Treaties are more than service-delivery agreements and provide more than symbolic recognition.

So, where are the states and territories up to?

Victoria: The Victorian treaty process is the most advanced. In 2018, after several years of consultations, the state parliament passed Australia’s first treaty legislation, the Advancing the Treaty Process with Aboriginal Victorians Act, which created a legislative basis for negotiating a treaty and set out a roadmap for that process.

First, elections for an Aboriginal representative body, the First Peoples’ Assembly, were held. Although turnout was low, the assembly has worked hard to build community support and has had some notable successes. The second step focused on building the key institutions necessary to support treaty negotiations. The assembly and the state government worked steadily and in partnership to accomplish this challenge.

The work has been impressive: an independent Treaty Authority has been created to oversee and facilitate negotiations and a self-determination fund set up to finance Aboriginal Victorians in their negotiations. The Yoorrook Justice Commission, Australia’s first comprehensive truth-telling commission, has also come into being.

In October 2022, the two parties reached agreement on a Treaty Negotiation Framework setting out the principles that will guide negotiations. New elections for the First Peoples’ Assembly will be held between May and June this year. The first treaty negotiations in Australian history are expected to begin by the end of 2023.

Northern Territory: While the patient work in Victoria appears to be heading in the right direction, recent developments in the Northern Territory emphasise the challenges involved in developing treaty processes 200 years after colonisation. Following two years of consultations around the territory, the NT Treaty Commissioner handed his report to government in March 2022.

Recognising that “the time for action has arrived,” the report recommended a truth-telling process, a Territory-wide agreement to set out broad parameters, and a series of individual treaties with First Nations or coalitions of First Nations. The aim would be “self-government, economic independence and reparations.” The report also set out a clear implementation process.

Welcoming the report’s release, Aboriginal affairs minister Selena Uibo noted that “significant support for treaties” clearly existed across the territory, and that “the Territory Labor government is proud to advance this process.”

But something changed: on 29 December, during the Christmas–New Year shutdown, the government quietly released its formal response in a statement on the Office of Aboriginal Affairs website. The independent NT Treaty Commission would be abolished and the Office of Aboriginal Affairs would run its own eighteen-month process of consultations to “test” whether Aboriginal Territorians agree with the report’s recommendations.

Queensland: The treaty process stepped up a gear in Queensland last month when premier Annastacia Palaszczuk introduced the Path to Treaty Bill. The legislation establishes a First Nations Treaty Institute tasked with preparing a framework for treaty negotiations, and a Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry to examine the continuing impacts of colonisation. As Palaszczuk explained, the bill “signals to the rest of Australia and to other nations that Queensland is ready and willing to confront that past and to listen to the painful stories that need to be told.” The move follows several years of consultations, as well as a commitment in the 2021–22 budget to provide $300 million in a Path to Treaty Fund to support the process.

South Australia: South Australia was one of the first jurisdictions to commit to a treaty process in 2016, though it was unclear exactly what the state meant by “treaty.” Some observers worried that the government was more interested in negotiating something like a service-delivery agreement. In any event, the process was abandoned in 2018 by the incoming Liberal government under Steven Marshall.

Treaty is back on the agenda following Labor’s return to government last year. On election night, incoming premier Peter Malinauskas committed the new government to “delivering on a state-based voice treaty and truth for the Aboriginal people of our state.” Respecting the sequencing of the Uluru Statement, the government has prioritised Voice. In February this year, it introduced a Bill to establish a First Nations Voice to state parliament. The government is expected to restart the treaty process later this year.

Tasmania: Treaty is not only the province of the Labor Party. In 2021 the Liberal government in Tasmania committed to finding out from Aboriginal people how the state can pursue reconciliation. The government responded positively to a report by former governor Kate Warner and law professor Tim McCormack recommending a truth-telling and treaty process. In December last year, Aboriginal affairs minister Roger Jaensch announced a new advisory group to work with government to design an Aboriginal-led truth-telling and treaty process.

Australian Capital Territory: Having declared it was open to talking treaty in February 2018, the ACT government provided funding in the 2021–22 budget to facilitate conversations with traditional owners to understand what they meant by treaty and hear how a treaty process might be developed. The report on those conversations was released, to mixed reviews, in July 2022. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs minister Rachel Stephen-Smith apologised on behalf of the government that the process “did not engage as broadly as we had intended” and acknowledged a general feeling that healing was required before treaty should be pursued. Since then, focus has shifted to the first native title claim in the ACT.

Elsewhere: Neither Western Australia nor New South Wales have made commitments to treaty negotiations. Over the last few years, however, Western Australia has negotiated two comprehensive native title claims that several people — including me — have likened to a “lower-case t treaty.” Although they are significant agreements, they were not negotiated via a formal treaty process and therefore don’t cover the full range of issues expected of a treaty.

New South Wales is so far unmoved, though the 25 March state election might change this. The Liberal government supports action at a federal level, backing the Voice referendum in principle, but has no plans to implement a state-based Voice or treaty process. In contrast, the Labor opposition has pledged $5 million towards a year-long consultation with Aboriginal communities to determine if a treaty is desired and, if so, what it should look like. Those conversations would not begin until after the referendum later this year.

The federal government hasn’t made any formal commitments to treaty negotiations either. It is focused, quite rightly, on the Voice. Nevertheless, the Albanese government is committed to implementing the Uluru Statement “in full.” Following the referendum, attention is expected to shift towards a Makarrata Commission to “work on a national process of treaty-making and truth-telling.” Some reports suggest the government might move even faster. In October last year, it provided $5.8 million to the National Indigenous Australians Agency to commence work on establishing a Makarrata Commission.

Several themes are visible in these emerging treaty processes. The first is definitional: just what is a treaty? The fact that no treaties were ever formally signed in Australia makes modern negotiations more challenging. Not only do we need to develop brand new institutions and mechanisms to facilitate fair negotiations, but also the whole concept of what a treaty is or involves remains vague for many people, including governments.

Ambiguity on this central point is unlikely to work in favour of First Nations peoples. Indeed, uncertainty allows some people — like former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott — to argue that a treaty would be divisive and could even lead to the break-up of the nation. Ambiguity can also create space for governments to claim that revamped strategies to engage with First Nations communities mean they are already working on treaty-making. Or that existing arrangements in relation to matters like native title and land rights are sufficient.

Policies aimed at transferring government service delivery to First Nations communities are important, but they are not treaties. Already concerns have been raised on this point. Many saw the initial SA process as a vehicle for the government to push service delivery onto Aboriginal nations. Similar complaints have been heard in the Northern Territory and Queensland.

Other challenges exist. Some Indigenous rights campaigners have called for an agreement governed by international law. While the colonial-era treaties signed in North America and New Zealand were international agreements, modern treaties are different. The treaty processes under way will draw inspiration and principles from international law, but they will be subject to Australian law.

A second key theme is the question of government commitment. Many First Nations people and communities are distrustful of governments and cynical about their promises. An official public commitment to treaty — a statement on election night, or a signing ceremony on Country — breeds hope and anticipation. The passage of legislation builds further expectations. While all understand that treaty-making will be challenging and difficult, inconsistent government action can threaten the viability of the process.

The NT government’s decision to walk away from the Treaty Commission’s report has caused considerable alarm. Yingiya Guyula, the independent member for Arnhem Land, was scathing, declaring that “it’s the same old story”: “My people have always been saying they are ready for a long time and the commissioner listened to that. But the government was not and is still not ready for treaty.” Larrakia elder Eric Fejo agreed: “They’re delaying it after spending millions of dollars, just to shut us up, because they already had the answer.”

The Queensland process is also weathering these challenges. In June 2022, Jackie Huggins, co-chair of the Treaty Advancement Committee, expressed her “frustration” at the government’s seven-month delay in releasing her report. The introduction of the Path to Treaty Bill in February 2023 indicates the government is committed to progressing talks, but questions remain.

That same month the state government proposed to override the state’s Human Rights Act to make breach of bail an offence for children — despite evidence this will disproportionately affect First Nations people. As the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Protection Peak observed, “This seems directly at odds with the Queensland government’s intention to cultivate a new relationship with First Nations peoples as part of the Path to Treaty.” Whether and how governments can prepare themselves to engage fairly and constructively in treaty processes will go a long way to determining their success.

Treaty-making is challenging, but there are green shoots. The slow and steady approach in Victoria appears to be paying dividends. Community support for the treaty process has grown, and the Liberal opposition has come on board. Bipartisanship is important. Major structural reforms to the framework of governance in Australia are almost never achieved without a broad base of political support.

Developments overseas have also helped propel these processes. In 2021, Canada enacted legislation aimed at implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The UNDRIP sets a standard for negotiations and for settlement outcomes. Australia has endorsed the declaration, but it does not have legal force here. Nevertheless, Australian governments are increasingly familiar with the UNDRIP and refer to its provisions within their treaty processes. At the federal level, the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs is inquiring into the application of the UNDRIP in Australia. These are promising signs for the prospects of treaty-making.

Looming over these developments is the referendum. If it succeeds, the government will likely rely on the expertise and advice the Voice could provide to develop a Makarrata Commission. Just how that national body integrates and supports the various state and territory treaty processes will require careful thought.

If the Voice fails at the referendum, on the other hand, it is hard to know how the federal government will respond. It is worth noting, however, that the states and territories kickstarted their own treaty processes because they were “not convinced that you can wait for a national process that has never ever delivered in relation to righting these wrongs.” Regardless of the outcome, treaty-making is well and truly on the agenda for governments across Australia. •

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That’s why it is especially noteworthy when an unsung backroom researcher steps into the limelight — not from the Parliamentary Library in this case, but from Britain’s equivalent. The person in question is Georgina Sturge, the House of Commons Library’s senior statistician, and she has just released a book about data — or, more specifically, about bad data and how it misleads.

Sturge’s book, Bad Data, has particular resonance for anyone (like me) who has spent many years peering into the sausage-meat vats of public data collection and use. Almost every example of “bad data” advanced by Sturge has an Australian parallel.

I certainly let out a knowing chuckle or two reading Sturge’s discussion of “zombie statistics” — those dodgy numbers that haunt public debates. Sturge highlights how the bogus figure for Britain’s weekly contribution to the European Union, £350 million, continued to be referenced by Brexit campaigners even after it was comprehensively debunked by the UK Statistics Authority.

In Australia, similarly disingenuous numbers haunt a host of debates. Some of the more egregious come from anonymously commissioned modelling in 2015 that suggested Labor’s $1.5 billion policy to wind back negative gearing would wipe $20 billion off GDP (!) and increase rents by 10 per cent (!!).

Those numbers continued to emerge from beyond the grave even several years after they were shown to be garbage, and even after they had inspired a Media Watch episode exposing the willingness of some media outlets to publish almost any number without a sense check.

Ditto Sturge’s discussion of dodgy policy costings. Despite government forecasts that outsourcing probation services could save British taxpayers £10.4 billion over seven years, the policy was considered a failure and the government paid an additional half a billion to end the private contracts early. Similar examples of cost blowouts abound in Australia — from disability services to major infrastructure and defence projects. Optimism bias and the rubbery forecasts that result are a global phenomenon.

Then there is the “algorithm unleashed” approach to policy implementation. Anyone who has been following the fallout from Australia’s scandalous robodebt scheme will shake their heads when Sturge describes similar crackdowns on tax and benefit fraud in Britain and the Netherlands.

As well as blind faith in badly designed algorithms, both schemes generated huge waves of stress among recipients of incorrect debt notices and, in the case of the Dutch government, more than €1 billion in compensation payments.

Bad Data lays bare the good (data is very helpful for informing policy decisions) and the bad (for many policy decisions the data is non-existent or poor) in the easy-to-understand style you would expect of a data expert who spends all day communicating with the less numerate.

Sturge describes eye-openingly common problems with data ­— inconsistent definitions, sample-size problems, lack of useful time series — as well as issues with modelling. She takes a deep dive into several key areas of public life — crime, poverty, migration — and points out the inherent difficulty in delivering high-quality and time-consistent data on these crucial topics.

One surprising gap in Bad Data is its failure to highlight the exciting developments in government data collections — “good data” — that are starting to overcome at least some of the problems Sturge highlights. She mentions administrative datasets, but her readers don’t get a sense of just how revolutionary it is for policymakers to be able to link datasets that cover the whole of a relevant population.

For example, linking tax data showing someone’s income with location data and health data allows us to understand how disease prevalence, access to healthcare and health outcomes vary across locations and socioeconomic and cultural groups.

Linking data can also help understand people’s pathways through government services, creating a powerful tool for identifying gaps. How many of those turning up to emergency departments, for example, have made visits to a GP that might have kept them out of hospital?

In Australia, many key public service organisations have been slow to understand the potential of these linked whole-of-population datasets and invest in the capability needed to work with them. The light coverage in this book suggests the same may be true in Britain.

The other key omission is more understandable, given Sturge is a serving civil servant. Her book contains no strong critique of the British government’s commitment — or lack of commitment — to investing in better data.

In her opening chapter, Sturge makes the powerful observation that while we can easily find how many times Harry Kane made an on-target shot at goal with his left foot in the last season of the English Premier League, Britain doesn’t have accurate data on how many people are eligible to vote, how many died from Covid-19, and whether crime is going up or down.

The difference, of course, is investment: the football analytics industry invests in paying people to catalogue, in meticulous detail, every pass, tackle and touch.

What is apparent is Sturge’s frustration that the UK census is conducted only every ten years. But she stops short of more obvious questions about funding of statistical agencies, and how much and what data should be collected to enable government to make better decisions. In an environment where the Office for National Statistics, like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, has sometimes been starved of funds while demands on its services kept growing, this is an important corollary to the story of bad data.

But we should celebrate the fact that one of Britain’s “anonymous” civil servants has been able to share her knowledge more widely. I seriously doubt that the risk-averse Australian public service would support an employee publishing such a book.

Sturge has produced a useful and engaging guide to understanding the common pitfalls of data and modelling in public life. But perhaps, for those wanting more, the next item on her to-do list should be a follow-up book about how and when governments should invest in better data, and the opportunities they have to get the most out of enhanced analytical and computing capability. •

Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers
By Georgina Sturge | Bridge Street Press | $32.99 | 299 pages

The post Lies, damned lies, and data appeared first on Inside Story.

I thought of him and those bales last week as I sat through parliamentary hearings awash in billions of dollars. Scrabbling to monitor outlays that bloated during the pandemic I caught glimpses of a thinned-out public service with a wafer-thin capacity to evaluate the impact of all that spending.

Welcome to Senate estimates, where worth, value and accountability live on a different planet — a planet with a lot more noughts than most of us ever experience, and a lot less scrutiny.

I’m new to parliament and everything I have touched in the past four months has been new. The learning curve has been almost vertical and I have been clinging on by my fingernails. People I trust said I would love estimates. But they know more than I do, and as I nervously strapped on my calculator and worked through agency annual reports I found what I read both fascinating and alarming.

I’ve been a public servant and I’ve run government programs, some of them large. But government budgets have grown astronomically while the rigour of evaluation has withered.

Prior to the estimates hearings, in answer to questions on notice, I had received details of labour market programs worth millions accompanied by just a few paragraphs conceding there was no way to tell whether the spending had made any difference at all. A sizeable mainstream labour market program was run by one of the Big Four consulting firms: not as a strategic adviser — a role a consultant might reasonably be asked to perform — but actually running the program, probably at great profit. The evaluation was scant, to be polite.

Millions of dollars are allocated to private, for-profit employment agencies. How robust is evaluation? What are the profit margins and should they be capped? In a tight labour market, concern about these programs should be high. We know that unemployed people can be referred to the contractor’s own training providers, where they can be churned through short-term, insecure jobs. The chance of profiteering is very real. At the very least, high-quality providers need assurance that they aren’t in competition with the unscrupulous. At best, all public funds should flow to supporting citizens, not to corporate bottom lines.

The federal budget funnels very large sums directly into for-profit corporations providing childcare, aged care and employment services, among others. Dollars that might expand service provision are diverted to corporate profit on a scale that is large, far from transparent and poorly monitored. This is wrong.

Alongside this, we have too many fuzzy program goals, huge projected spending, and a lack of evaluation. Evaluation matters a lot in any government program: your next success is built on the lessons of your last. If you want to increase the proportion of women in male-dominated apprenticeships, for example — a rise that has been stalled for forty years — then you need to know what counts as a good goal, what works, and how much well-designed expenditure is required to get there.

More than a wing and a prayer will be needed to realise the Jobs and Skills Summit’s hope that more women will work in decent-paying, skilled jobs as we transition to an electrified future. What we have at the moment is a budgeted $100 million in apprenticeship subsidies that lack any target for women’s participation. This spending might be titled “The $100 Million Boys Own Electrical Adventure” given how few women are likely to see any of it. Our failure to use public funds to get more women into higher-paying, skilled jobs will lead to yet another decade of crocodile tears over the gender pay gap.

But this is small beer. I made my way to the finance and public administration estimates just in time to hear my colleague David Shoebridge’s questioning reveal a further $600 million in wasted defence funding as a result of the failed French submarine contract. This is on top of the $3.4 billion we knew had been spent on submarines we will never see.

That project had a goal of 60 per cent local content and came wrapped in promises of local jobs. When I asked how many local jobs that $3.4 billion had created in South Australia, and in Australia more broadly, and how much of the spending went to local content, the question was taken on notice. I look forward to the reply. Defence expenditure seems to live in a different galaxy: a galaxy far, far away from the one that most of us occupy.

There was more: $9.9 million spent on legal costs associated with establishing a nuclear waste dump at Kimba in South Australia — a dump opposed by the local Barngarla people, who have spent just $147,000 of their own funds in court in recent months trying to stop it proceeding. The federal Labor government has continued to accumulate legal costs to the tune of $50,000 a week. And there is still more: although the last federal budget allocated $60 million to expanding the nuclear waste storage facility at Lucas Heights, no one could tell me where the project is up to — surely with implications for when and whether we need a dump in South Australia.

And then there is the issue of accountability. Most of us would think Australians are entitled to know a little about where the Future Fund’s $250 billion (you read that right) is invested. But my efforts to find out how many of those dollars are invested in fossil fuels have been slow to bear fruit. It’s a fairly straightforward question, and one many of us ask of our own superannuation funds and banks.

At a previous Senate hearing an officer of the fund told me I’d asked the question in the wrong way and suggested we talk offline. But my attempts to do that went unanswered. I resorted to asking at estimates whether the fund had invested in any of the world’s fifty top carbon-polluting companies (answer: yes, eighteen of them, to the tune of $3.4 billion) or the top fifty gambling conglomerates (yes, six of them, to the tune of $313 million).

Should it be this hard for us to find out where our funds are invested? Is it okay for our own public sector agency to resist a senator’s reasonable requests for information about investments that directly damage our world?

Estimates can be a powerful democratic tool: a chance to ask questions about the spending and administration of government programs, to probe for waste, misallocation and ministerial misdeeds and expose them to disinfecting sunlight. Perhaps even to highlight good things done right. Estimates can also be a place of obfuscation, deferral and manipulation, not to mention ministerial protection and shouty argument.

I came out of estimates thinking that a lot of money is sloshing around in certain categories of government spending and not enough in others; and that we have to rebuild confidence in value — including a strong, strategic public sector with robust policy and evaluation capability. And that we need to stop the wasteful diversion of public funds to shareholder-driven companies when they should be performed by public workers.

Waste, profiteering, bad program design, lack of accountability, poor evaluation. A starved public sector, hollowed out and wounded. Over the past decade, we have squandered millions on marketisation and the overuse of consultants. It is a huge challenge to rein this in.

As a process, Senate estimates is a sturdy little outfit, running hard, occasionally swashbuckling, sometimes entertaining, opposed by vested interests and hardly dear to governments. Major parties can’t love it: past or future, they live in its firing line.

I find myself thinking of the knight in Monty Python: out-gunned and under-resourced, battling on even as limbs fall. Backed by the wounded and the whistleblowers, cheered on by those damaged by the state, the committee probes, ministers defend and chairs call time. We need more of it, but we already benefit from a process that even my father, I think, would call good value. •

The post What I learned at Senate estimates appeared first on Inside Story.

By lunchtime on the first day we were in Melrose, a pretty town tucked up against Mount Remarkable in the lower Flinders Ranges. Lunch was a sandwich in the municipal park, and in the park was a billboard. “Paradise Square,” it announced, perhaps with dry humour. “The following is a list of known burials that took place here in the Old Melrose Cemetery between 1846 and 1872.”

And there they were, scores of names in alpha order, each with date and age of death, and a crisp descriptor. NOTT, Thomas Freedman, a surveyor of Melrose, died aged sixty-five on 5.12.1865. NOTT, Mildred, a widow of Melrose, followed her husband on 12.11.1869, aged fifty-five. Jesse Jones, a bushman of Melrose, went aged fifty in 1861. William Jones, storekeeper, went later (1868) but younger (thirty-four).

The dead of Melrose included carpenters, shepherds, a hawker, carriers and teamsters, a corporal of police, a bailiff, a surgeon, all men. The women were daughters, mothers, wives, widows. Then there were the children, so many children, aged three months or six weeks, or five years or nine years, an “unnamed son of Richard Saunders” who died on 3.1.1863 after just four hours of life. It was a touching record of another age.

In a reverie as I read the names, the dates, the lives summed up in a few numerals and a word or a phrase, I struggled to recognise a feeling that refused to surface. And then, it did: where are the Aboriginal dead? The first of the burials in the Old Melrose Cemetery was in 1846, just ten years after the colony of South Australia was declared in Adelaide, 430 kilometres south of here. Melrose in 1846 would have been on the frontier. Where were the Aboriginal dead?

It was the same in Quorn, less than an hour up the road. Lots of info about the Ghan and the movies that had been made in the district but nothing about Aboriginal people — who they were or how they fared when the inexorable frontier arrived. Beltana, a scattering of houses and ruins further on, dwelt on its overland telegraph station, long since passed from use. Nothing about the Aboriginal people there either.

I’d begun to take photos of the many markers of the past — the monuments, the plaques, the information boards, the billboards and museums — and to puzzle over them. What was going on? Some of what was going on was obvious. “History” was a boom industry fed by tourism. Melrose announced itself as “historic,” chiefly on the ground that it had been base camp for John McDouall Stuart on his many attempts to cross the continent from south to north and back again. Quorn was “historic” because on the old line it used to be the last stop for the Ghan before it headed out into the desert for Alice Springs, a couple of days away. Beltana was “historic” by virtue of its telegraph station and by being not much more than a collection of ruins. The old road, which followed the old railway line that followed the old Overland Telegraph Line that followed Stuart’s epic plod, was itself historic. It was now “The Old Ghan Heritage Trail.”

The first of these many markers of History had been installed in the 1960s but most were of more recent date. They were about an implied “us,” our Pioneers, our Settlers, our Explorers, our feats of endurance, engineering, discovery. This was winners’ history. Where were the losers?

The losers made their first appearance near Lake Eyre, 400-odd kilometres on from Melrose. An info board there detailed the many traditional and contemporary uses of ochre, mined nearby. This was the equal and opposite of the markers in which Aboriginal people didn’t appear; there was no mention of us. Neither the markers about us nor the markers about them reported when or where or what happened when we encountered them, and they us. The ochre info board and many to follow did a jump cut: one moment we’re in Traditional Times, the next, in the present. How did they get from then to now? Just don’t mention the war.

That remained the overwhelming rule for a thousand kilometres or more, although there were exceptions: reports of the terror provoked by the huge four-legged, hard-footed animals that appeared without warning in the 1860s, references to the disruption of Indigenous land “since the Europeans first permanently arrived/invaded,” info boards about police operations “to control cattle spearing by Aborigines on newly established pastoral properties,” an info board that dispensed with evasions about “arrival/invasion” and just called the spade a spade, even an angry denunciation of the “transnationals and colonialist governments… defying the natural order of things in their quest for material wealth.”

I photographed every one of these many markers and kept on puzzling. Eventually I realised what should have been obvious: the history wars then raging in newspapers and scholarly articles and books and on the airwaves had been going on out here for decades. We’d won the country and then set out to win the story as well. The struggle over what the story would and would not tell was as much a part of the story as the events themselves.

By the time I reached Tennant Creek, a couple of weeks after lunch in Paradise Square, the telling of the story had been added to my list of things to find out about. Eventually, it worked its way to the top.

I left Tennant Creek in 1955, aged thirteen. I had never been back and never wanted to go back. In fact, I’d wanted to not go back. I didn’t like it when we lived there and ached to leave, despite the fact that it was a kind of kids’ paradise. We’d thread our way through the spinifex to old mine shafts and chuck beer bottles down to see how deep they were, or lie on our backs inside the fence around the aerodrome and scare ourselves stupid as the DC-3, feeling for the runway, roared over us just a few feet above.

Out the back of our place was the Works and Housing depot, surrounded by piles of junk from the war, then only seven years away, including, inexplicably, an old Rolls-Royce limo complete with a screened-off passenger compartment and a speaking tube through which we’d issue instructions in what we took to be toffy tones. There were topknot pigeons to be shot at with air rifles, and old tins and jars to be blown up with miners’ lamp carbide.

We stood at the dam behind the pub where the night before a bloke had bet he could swim across, but drowned, and we pedalled out to the bend in the Peko Road where Mr Archer had killed himself when he rolled his Fargo ute. We swam in the waterhole under red gums at Seven Mile, and every Saturday night there were the pictures at the open-air theatre, Westerns mostly, in my memory anyway.

Sometimes even a kid could see the magic in the desert, the sunsets, the fresh and vivid world after rain, the brilliant stars that would light our way home after the pictures. But mostly it wasn’t like that at all, just the blinding light that flattened and bleached, and the heat, and the incessant moaning of the wind and the ugly cawing of the crows.

I now suspect that in developing something close to loathing for Tennant, I had been taking my mother’s part. She suffered in the heat and despaired at the red-brown dust that was forever blowing through the flyscreened verandas onto furniture, floors, ledges, shelves, everywhere. She became anaemic, teary and homesick. She missed her family and the soft green Adelaide Hills where they worked their orchards and market gardens, and where she’d grown up, and she missed her eldest son, who’d been sent to Alice Springs for high school. She wanted to leave, and so did I, but couldn’t. She fretted that her husband would apply for a transfer rather than wait for another promotion, and it would be her fault.

Her husband, my father, was in his element. For fifteen years he’d been a teacher. Now he was the head teacher, a member of Tennant’s public service elite. Our house was one of five or six identical government houses lined up along with the police station, the post office and the school at the southern end of town. At the other end were two general stores, the bakery-cum-cafe, the cool-drink factory, the picture theatre, and the pubs, the Goldfields and the Tennant.

It was only half a mile or so to the other end of town, and we went down there just about every day. We’d ride our bikes along the narrow bitumen strip between expanses of gravelly red dirt — the Alice–Darwin highway that doubled as Tennant’s main street, lined by dusty shanties with stamped earthen floors and push-out galvanised-iron windows, which looked as though they had slumped in the heat.

I’d visit Mum at the general store where she worked behind the counter or go to mates’ places or ride past the stinky din of the front bar of the pub and see inside as the door swung open or just hang around. It was wholly familiar, but mysterious. We knew that this was the real Tennant to which teetotal public service blow-ins had no access, but we caught glimpses and heard echoes in the stories Tennant told about itself.

These were the stories we told back in Adelaide three years later as reports from another planet: stories about gold that went missing after a couple of fellas came up on the Tuesday plane and went back down again on Wednesday, about cattle rustling or bar-room brawls, about mysterious deaths and fortunes won and lost, and of course the one about how Tennant Creek the town was seven miles south of Tennant Creek the creek because that’s where the beer truck had broken down.

To these we added stories of our own about a hundred days in a row over the one hundred mark, about the dust storms and the weekly bath in a few inches of increasingly brown water, about a diet strong on meat but light on fruit and veg, about the Barcoo Rot and the conjunctivitis from the diet and the flies, about Dad asking the police sergeant whether bush turkeys were protected and being told that they were and how to cook them, and about the New Year’s Day when Danny Brookes’s Rolls-Royce limo — he’d tracked down the owner and bought it for sixty quid, apparently — trundled past our place, draped with men and women in various states of undress, still carousing, did a stately U-turn then headed back to the other end of town.

What I couldn’t understand then was that we had returned from the frontier, the place that all of Australia was at one time or another. Some of it still is.

We’d hardly arrived in Tennant before we found out about the kids from the mission. We saw them every Saturday night at the open-air pictures. We all sat in a deckchair sort of arrangement, rows and rows of long horizontal poles with canvas strips slung between them. It paid to get there early because the canvas strips, permanently exposed to the elements, often ripped to cheers and whistles in the middle of a film, and the strips got shorter and tauter every time they were repaired.

Anyway, we’d all be settled under our blankets against the cold desert nights and waiting for “God Save the Queen” when the kids from the mission would file in between us and the screen, crossing to the far side to the benches reserved for them. After the pictures they’d climb onto the mission truck and head off up the road into the darkness while we walked home under that vast, glittering sky, in the other direction.

Apart from Saturday nights you could never tell when you might see them. Sometimes there was a Black tracker at the back of the police station. Once I saw four or five Aborigines a bit of a distance out in the spinifex that stretched away from our back fence to a distant horizon. I got close enough to see them squatting in the sandy dirt behind a low humpy, playing cards. Then one day they were gone. Sometimes when I visited Mum at the general store there would be several old Aboriginal men sitting, cross-legged, on the veranda. Perhaps it was them I saw one day on a truck rigged up to carry cattle, the mission truck I suppose. They were in army greatcoats, standing motionless and silent as the truck went slowly past.

There was a sports day at the creek. We all drove out from the town and they came down from the mission. We spread ourselves under the gums by the waterhole. They were across the other side of a dusty clearing where the races were run, adults as well as children. We were invited to Sunday lunch at Banka Banka, the nearest station to Tennant Creek. Seated at a long table, we were served by Aboriginal women who padded silently across the cool concrete floor.

One September holidays Dad loaded up his single-spinner V8 Ford Custom with camping gear and off we went to Darwin, where we saw the wrecks in the harbour and neat rows of bullet holes in the walls of the old post office, and gawked at the Aborigines who hung around the back streets. They were really black, we observed, not just dark like ours.

On the way back we stayed a night at the Mataranka Station homestead, already operating as a guest house. We swam in the warm bubbling spring at the head of the Roper River, clear as crystal. In the morning, at breakfast, the room was dominated by a noisy group a couple of tables away. They’re making a film, Dad told us. Among them, quite still, and very beautiful, was a young Aboriginal woman.

These were encounters as in a tableau. So far as I can recall I never spoke to any of these Aborigines, nor they to me. The only exceptions to this rule, and even more puzzling because of it, were three Aboriginal kids at school, the brothers Roy, Rex and Rennie Hare. How come they lived in the town and not out on the mission? Was it because they weren’t real Aborigines? Their father, Mr Hare, was the nightsoil man who collected the tubs slopping with shit and phenol and sodden strips of newspaper from the back of the drop dunnies. Mr Hare was white, but Roy, Rex and Rennie’s mother was Aboriginal. The Hares lived in one of those tin shanties, the very last one right up the other end of town.

The Aborigines were nearly invisible yet somehow always there somewhere; sometimes referred to, even discussed, but never explained. Our Grade VI Social Studies text recorded the feats of John McDouall Stuart, whose explorations prepared the way for the Overland Telegraph Line, which I could see just by looking out the schoolroom window.

I was in awe of Stuart. How could he have walked all that way from Adelaide? More than a thousand miles! Five times! I designed a kind of palanquin supported by poles carried by a horse at each corner that he could have used to stroll along in permanent shade. The Social Studies textbook told us about Stuart’s encounter with fierce Aborigines just a bit further on from Tennant Creek the creek. When we crossed Attack Creek at the beginning of our big camping trip to Darwin, there was a small thrill of excitement. Shots were fired, and spears thrown, here!

 The space between that day in June 1860 and ours was filled by a vague sense of a vanished world. On one of our Sunday drives along bush tracks, we passed close to the bluffs of the gap in the range just north of the town. That’s Gins’ Lookout, Mum said, pointing to one of the bluffs. That’s where the “lubras” used to keep a lookout for the men coming back from the hunt. She told us that one of the old men who sat on the veranda of the general store was their king. Such a dignified old man, she said.

In the early 1960s I went to uni in Adelaide, to what was then generally regarded as the hottest history department in the country. In four years my cohort did no Australian history at all, let alone the history of relations between black and white. It was the fag end of the mental world of the Grade VI Social Studies textbook.

Elsewhere on campus, however, were signs of what was to come, including meetings and protests in support of “rights for Aborigines.” Scrappy little events like the two or three I went to turned into an uproar that subsequently rose and fell but never really went away — a freedom ride, a tent embassy, speeches and tracts and posters beyond counting, strikes, investigations, legislation and litigation, movies, books and docos, then Mabo, a semi-official accusation of genocide, and the ferocious history wars. All that provided the means by which people of my generation and demographic learned what we hadn’t been told and unlearned some of what we had.

For reasons that I can’t really explain but suspect don’t do me much credit, it was a long time before I started to connect all that national uproar with the one time and place at which my life had intersected so directly with the lives of Aboriginal people — and the people who kept them out on the mission, over to one side at the movies, out of our school and town, out of mind.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t know; I hadn’t realised how much I didn’t know. Thanks to all those Westerns, I could reel off a long list of “Indian” tribes, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, the Apache and the rest, but I did not even know that we had been living among the Warumungu and the Warlpiri. I didn’t know what the “mission” was or how the Warumungu and the Warlpiri got to be there or even where it was.

I began finding out, partly out of embarrassment but also out of curiosity. Who were they? Where on earth had a full-on policed and regulated apartheid regime come from? Where did it go? The more I read, the more there was to know and the more I wanted to know it.

That was a puzzle in itself. After a pretty slow start, why the obsession? No doubt it was the usual thing — the further you get from childhood the more fascinating it becomes — but it wasn’t just that. I was being carried along by a deep emotional undertow. The Aboriginal people and their relationship with the rest of us have become sites of proxy political warfare and synthetic emotions, but there’s real stuff there too, ranging from just feeling bad (in my case, whenever I think about those kids crossing in front of the screen at the Pioneer Picture Theatre) through to how everyone felt when Cathy Freeman won the big race. Against any expectation and all intentions, and with very mixed feelings, I decided to go back.

It was partly just a standard grey nomad kind of thing to do, and a chance to revisit what had been, after all, a burst of the vivid in an otherwise sepia-toned boyhood, but there were offsets too — the old aversions and a new one, the fact that Tennant had turned into Australia’s most notoriously dysfunctional town, something I had no wish to see. But I did want to find out where the Tennant Creek I’d lived in had come from, and gone, and thought (correctly, as it turned out) that I couldn’t unless I went there.

So, I set out for Tennant Creek to find out about relations between two racial groups in that particular field of life but didn’t get far — to Paradise Square in Melrose, at lunchtime on Day One to be exact — before there was something else to find out about: how the story of those relations had been told, and not told.

All the stories that the Tennant Creek of my boyhood had told about itself, and the stories we took back to tell our uncles and aunts and grandparents, they weren’t Tennant’s big story at all. By the time I’d made the last of three trips back to Tennant I’d learned that the struggles over whether and how to tell Tennant’s story were for a century and a half Australia’s struggles writ small, and intense. I found that among the protagonists were several of Australia’s intellectual luminaries and that not once but twice poor beaten-down smashed-up Tennant Creek had managed to make it onto the national stage, not in a starring role but in a big enough part to earn a place in the credits. Tennant, with and like Australia, had tried to tell the story. •

This is an edited extract from Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence (Black Inc., 2022). For a 20 per cent discount, follow this link and use the discount code INSIDE at checkout.

The post The strange career of the great Australian silence appeared first on Inside Story.

When ordinary voters are placed so insistently on the outside, cynicism is bound to be pervasive. The political class, for all its platitudes about working families, is seen as detached from everyday concerns.

As Frank Bongiorno writes in his new book, Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia, “Some of us are expected to be content with a place at the back of the grandstand, with little hope of our voices carrying to other spectators let alone those heroic figures competing in the arena.” And yet, as he shows, the interplay between spectator and player is greater than those terms might imply. The contest plays out as much in the stands as it does in the arena, and the results affect us all.

Bongiorno illustrates the point by describing 2014’s memorial service for Gough Whitlam. In front of 2000 people in Sydney Town Hall, dignitaries and speakers ranging from Noel Pearson to Cate Blanchett celebrated the influence and achievements of Australia’s twenty-first prime minister. Outside, watching the service on a giant screen, were people happy to tell the TV cameras how Whitlam’s achievements had manifested in their lives.

The abolition of tuition fees had allowed some of them to attend university. The final removal of race as a criterion in immigration policy and the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act had helped to reduce prejudice. Politics had sought them out, Bongiorno writes, and become entangled even in lives imagined as “purely private and disconnected from its demands.”

Exploring how politics has been done on this continent, from deep time through to the modern day, Dreamers and Schemers is a sweeping history that feels especially apt in the wake of the pandemic and this year’s federal election. Dismay with political institutions and processes followed hard on a renewed awareness of what government can do, mixing an exhausted cynicism with a nascent sense of hope. To what extent do Australians need to dream right now? And to what extent will they need schemers to make those dreams real?

Frank Bongiorno is one of Australia’s most versatile, lively and prolific historians. He has reached into the bedroom to explore the sexual mores of Australians, probed the imperfect humans who wore the power suits of the 1980s, and investigated the furious currents of thought and action that shaped the Labor Party. His writing — whether at book length or in shorter pieces for this magazine and others — is characterised by its reach, its wry tone and its humanity. People are always at its heart, the powerful and deprived alike given clear-eyed appraisal.

Dreamers and Schemers is built on an immense variety of sources and is replete with colour and personality — including some personalities whose behaviour might suggest Australia’s aversion to its politicians is well founded.

Who, after all, could respect John Norton, the editor turned politician who urinated on the floor of NSW parliament, repeatedly assaulted his wife, was frequently drunk in public, and ran a scandal rag whose egregiousness exceeded the modern-day Daily Mail? How to explain the election of Tom Ley, who almost certainly murdered three people in Australia, before being convicted in Britain of the murder of his mistress, to both the NSW and the federal parliament? And what about the halo that attached to Joh Bjelke-Petersen, that corrupt hillbilly dictator of the moonlight state, who was knighted for “services to parliamentary democracy” and whose death was marked by a state funeral?

Amid this parade of the conniving and vile, though, Bongiorno draws attention to figures whose influence is more nuanced and significant than a “shilling life,” in W.H. Auden’s phrase, might let on.

George Reid was dubbed “Yes–No Reid” for his equivocation on Federation, despised by Alfred Deakin for his opportunism, and relentlessly satirised by cartoonists as a monocled glob on stubby legs; yet a case can be made that he was responsible for the union of liberalism and conservatism that still colours non-Labor politics, and for the final iteration of vital clauses in the Constitution. Stanley Bruce is chiefly remembered for wearing spats and losing his seat — along with his government — in 1929, but in office he also consolidated an alliance with the Country Party that has been maintained by the non-Labor parties.

Peter Beattie, meanwhile, might well be the “media tart” who cravenly praised Bjelke-Petersen at that state funeral, but back in 1971 he was beaten by Queensland police while protesting the racially charged Springboks tour that Bjelke-Petersen had facilitated. And his election as that state’s premier, in 1998, opened space for a compromise with the Howard government over the High Court’s Wik native title decision.

Rather than dividing people like these into his titular categories, Bongiorno is interested in the expectations Australians have of their politics — utilitarian and practical, abstract and big-picture — and how those expectations have receded and resurged, failed and been surpassed. The politics of Bongiorno’s history is made up of “ideals, visions, and dreams,” yes, but also of “roads, bridges, and electric wires.” The ideal political actor is one who brings both together, who can build castles in the air as well as on the ground.

One of the reasons Whitlam’s death was so notable, in Bongiorno’s telling, is that it threw into relief the narrowness of the contemporary political class. The “old man” whom Pearson eulogised was someone who could speak to dreams and schemes — of a mature and independent country but also of lives made “happier and more enjoyable for people in small and, some might say, unusual ways.” A man who could sign international treaties and return stolen land by pouring soil into Vincent Lingiari’s hands, but also talk of improving bus services and extending municipal sewerage.

Bongiorno has an eye for the surprising detail, the epigrammatical summation and the illuminating remark. In the 1950s, prime minister Bob Menzies finds, as many do, that Vegemite jars make perfectly good drinking glasses, and Pattie, his wife, forages for mushrooms in the paddocks surrounding the Lodge. In the 1980s, Queensland’s Russ Hinze is “a morbidly obese, deeply corrupt, and yet highly capable Gold Coast politician.” Observing Alexander Downer’s faltering leadership of the Liberal Party in 1994, colleague Peter Reith confides in his diary that “the shine is coming off his balls” — cricket balls, that is.

Dreamers and Schemers maintains its shine. It is provocative and illuminating, underscoring political scientist James Walters’s claim that contemporary debate is “always a hostage to history, even when unconscious of it.” In the deeply resonant passages that open the book, Bongiorno notes the early European writers who, “through a glass darkly,” observed sophisticated political arrangements in Indigenous societies and yet denied they had government. He points to the way seniority, ceremony and contest underpinned pre-contact political life.

The “kind of magic” practised by the British — a planted flag and assertion of sovereignty that supposedly changed the country’s status — didn’t mean the end of this political life: as Bongiorno notes, the early colonial authorities assumed the existence of Aboriginal law and its ongoing force, as well as the many coexisting sovereignties on the continent. But the cracks emanating from where that flag was planted spread far: the British claim to territorial sovereignty soon became exclusive and encompassing of land and people. Campaigns of murder, deprivation, intimidation and destruction followed — as did the activism of Indigenous peoples.

Two of the most affecting examples of that activism are presented sequentially: Wiradjuri men Jimmy Clements and John Noble’s presence at the 1927 opening of Parliament House, and Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper’s 1937 petition seeking direct representation in parliament, enfranchisement and land rights. Clements and Noble’s attendance in the presence of the future King George VI was a reminder of “a sovereignty unceded, in a moment when White Australia was engaged in ceremonial performance of its own claims to possession.” The failure of Cooper’s petition — sent to the same man, now the King — lent considerable moral power to the campaign he subsequently launched with Bill Ferguson and Jack Patten to recast Australia Day as instead a Day of Mourning.

Bongiorno never underplays the obstacles to a real reckoning with the dislocation, violence and deprivation visited on First Nations people, but he also points to their resilience and adaptability, which he suggests is keenly apparent in the push for constitutional recognition and in the record number of First Nations people now in the parliament.

This is of a piece with the optimistic argument that pervades Dreamers and Schemers: that, in times of crisis, Australia’s myriad political actors, systems and institutions have been resourceful enough to adapt and pull through.

In the 1890s, economic depression in Victoria was followed by a shearers’ strike in Queensland that helped give birth to the Labor Party. Labor’s ascendency anticipated the growing domination of class politics across the colonies, but the emergence of Georges Reid (1894–99) and Turner (1894–99) saw stable government in New South Wales and Victoria.

Suffrage for women, introduced in South Australia in 1894, was debated in New South Wales and Victoria, but the only colony to enact it before Federation was Western Australia. The movement towards Federation meanwhile became stronger — inflected, perhaps, by a fin de siècle optimism that spurred one clergyman to tell his congregation they would be “entering a new life” come 1 January 1901.

Other moments of crisis — the second world war, for instance, and the economic upheaval of the 1970s — revealed a similar capacity for renewal. This account is never without nuance: Bongiorno makes note of the gaps, vicissitudes and regressions that mark events later often celebrated uncritically.

Bongiorno cites Sydney feminist Rose Scott’s criticism that Federation would create a parliament that was elitist, centralist and distant from the communities and families and homes in which women lived. The failure of successive women who tried to be elected to that parliament over the next forty years tends to bear out Scott’s point, which Bongiorno reinforces by noting that even the architecture of Parliament House was hostile: when Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons arrived in Canberra in 1943 as (respectively) a senator and an MP, a separate bathroom had to be found for them — “set well apart from the men’s.” Scott’s criticism continues to reverberate when Bongiorno describes how Julia Gillard’s “misogyny speech” in 2012 was regarded in the Canberra press gallery as a cynical ploy but outside it as a genuine and accurate account of the sexism routinely experienced by women.

Dreamers and Schemers can be read as a rebuttal of claims that an “Australian crisis” has manifested in a turnstile prime ministership, hysterical and polarised public debate, and a public service impotent and leaderless in the face of complex problems. Far from being pollyanna-ish, though, Bongiorno’s optimism is grounded in the existence of people “willing to resist complacent utilitarian appeals to majority interests and consensus opinion,” people who refuse “to accept injunctions merely to tinker rather than transform.”

In this way, May’s election results might presage a renewal of the nation’s “creative energies.” The Morrison government’s cynicism and tribalism had seemingly exhausted these energies, but reinvigoration came with the election of a Labor government promising a new politics, the election of teal independents demanding action on climate change (the problem most emblematic of policy paralysis in Australia), and the unprecedented diversity of the new parliament.

“Dreamers imagined that a new era of political creativity might be just around the corner,” Bongiorno writes. Ever judicious, he adds a caveat: “Even as the schemers manoeuvred in their familiar patterns.”

Many years ago, a retired John McEwen made a point of prefacing an oral history interview with the caveat that his perspective on the events he had seen, as leader of the Country Party, long-time deputy prime minister, and temporary prime minister, was limited. “The spectator,” McEwen insisted, “sees more of the game.”

In Bongiorno, we have a spectator whose knowledge is keen, whose outlook is expansive, and who wields his pen with elegance to deliver insight. Thanks to Dreamers and Schemers, we see much more of the game of Australian politics. •

Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia
By Frank Bongiorno | La Trobe University Press | $39.99 | 480 pages

The post Vision splendid appeared first on Inside Story.

Bringing down a budget in this environment is tough work. Six months ago, during the campaign, Labor was blaming the Coalition for falling real wages: now it is in power and real wages are falling faster than ever, for reasons beyond any government’s control.

Six months ago Labor was ridiculing the Coalition’s economic management for deficits and debt: now it is in power, and has come clean and told us what the Coalition wouldn’t: that the budget, on realistic assumptions, is in even worse long-term shape than we thought.

Does this budget tackle those looming deficits? Yes, but only at the margins. It’s designed not to make them too much worse. In net terms, it adds another $10 billion to the expected deficits for the next four years, but most of that is in 2025–26, when inflation is forecast to be back in its box.

Does it do anything fresh to raise real wages or cushion the rising cost of living? No. Like the Reserve Bank, it accepts the consensus that governments’ most urgent task is to crush the unexpected resurgence of global inflation, and that takes priority over everything.

Well, almost everything. Net new spending in four years totals almost $23 billion, and item after item in the budget papers is introduced with the footnote: “This measure delivers on the government’s election commitment as published in the Plan for a Better Future.” Even the bad bits of the plan have been delivered, presumably to underline the message that Labor’s word can be trusted.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers had an unenviable task in framing this budget, and he got the big call right: fight inflation first. Part of the reason that our standards of living have kept rising over the past thirty years — the International Monetary Fund estimates that Australia’s real GDP per head has grown by 69 per cent in that time — is that the Reserve Bank has not needed to slow the economy to tackle inflation. It would not be in our long-term interests to allow this outbreak to become entrenched.

And Chalmers and Anthony Albanese are playing the long game. They don’t want a term in power to make changes, they want a decade in power to make changes. The first step is to gain credibility with voters so that they will support those changes. Rome wasn’t built in one budget.

But Labor came to power bearing diverse hopes and expectations from the 52 per cent of Australians who preferred it to the Coalition. This budget could disappoint many of them. Let’s look first at what Labor hasn’t done.

It hasn’t directly tackled the biggest problem facing Australian families: their falling spending power as a result of inflation far outpacing wage growth 

The strategy the Reserve Bank and the government are using to beat down inflation is to reduce the spending power of Australian households. Inflation is best defined as too much money chasing too few goods and services. That is what has happened here. And now the Reserve Bank and the government are aiming to reduce the amount of money Australians have at their disposal.

Today’s figures from the Bureau of Statistics show inflation jumped to 7.3 per cent in the year to September, its highest level since 1990, and was spread throughout the dozens of items in the consumer price index. By far the biggest contributor was the cost associated with buying a new house (stamp duty, conveyancing fees and so on). We can blame that on the Reserve itself and the Morrison government: the Reserve for keeping interest rates too low for too long, and Morrison and Josh Frydenberg for trying to win re-election by throwing more and more money at voters.

Chalmers forecast that gas and electricity prices will rise over 2022 and 2023 in the order of 50 per cent, mainly because of the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet so far they’re way short of that. While household gas prices were up 16.6 per cent in a year, the Bureau’s data contradicts many of the inflation narratives we hear: it found electricity prices were up only 3.2 per cent in a year, and household rents up 2.8 per cent, while childcare costs were down 5.4 per cent. After home-buying costs, food, fuel and travel are the other main costs driving inflation.

The Reserve Bank is severely shrinking the spending power of mortgagees and others in debt by rapidly hiking its cash rate. That will push down home-buying costs and the loose spending that breeds inflation. But it also makes people poorer, and voters angry.

Chalmers amiably pretends that Labor is tackling the problem by delivering five campaign promises — higher childcare subsidies, expanded paid parental leave, more social and affordable housing, lower pharmaceutical costs, and workplace relations reforms — as “responsible cost of living relief.” In fact, all those commitments predated the current fall in real wages; they are neither designed nor able to offset those losses.

If the budget forecasts are right, by the end of next year many households will be significantly worse off. Treasury predicts prices will rise 5.75 per cent in the year to June 2023, on top of the 6.1 per cent rise in the financial year just ended. It forecasts that wages will rise 3.75 per cent in both years, but on Treasury’s past form and the latest data on wage growth, that could be optimistic. Even if it is right, real wages will fall 5.1 per cent over the two years. If it is wrong, they will fall even more.

To make matters worse, as the Guardian’s Greg Jericho reminds us, the low- and middle-income tax offset, a significant tax break for working households, was abolished by the Coalition from this financial year. Labor has chosen not to revive it, nor has it offered households anything new (post-election) to cushion the fall in their living standards.

It is important to understand what’s happening here. Jessica Irvine covers it well in today’s Age/SMH. Faced with a crisis affecting millions of people who voted for it, Labor has taken the high road of responsible budgeting rather than come to the rescue. That is a different way of governing from the opportunism of the Morrison government, and economists will hope it is proved right: that wage growth will rebound while price growth shrinks and few people get badly hurt. But politically, Labor is taking a big risk.

After five months in which Labor has been untroubled by the opposition, this opens up a real issue for the Coalition to exploit by demanding relief for households (which of course would have to be funded by taking on more debt, to be repaid by future generations). Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor is correct in saying there are many ways to do that. But given the chronically irresponsible budgeting of the Coalition’s last twelve years in office — the final three years of the Howard government and the entire nine years of the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government — you’d expect them to take that road.

This budget forecasts that future budgets will remain heavily in deficit, averaging 2 per cent a year, for at least the next ten years — but it puts off the task of fixing that deficit by serious tax reform

As promised in the campaign, Chalmers has plugged some of the loopholes used by multinationals and others to avoid tax. Treasury estimates that various anti-avoidance measures will raise $4 billion from multinationals and $2 billion from others over the next four years. But that’s only a small first step towards tackling budget deficits forecast at $182 billion over that time.

Similarly, Labor says it has saved or deferred $22 billion of spending over four years by scrapping or “reprofiling” Coalition programs, such as infrastructure investments and community development programs. But compared with the size of the deficits ahead, that’s puny. It’s a start, and it pays for some of the cost of Labor’s own programs, but politically, that’s the easy stuff.

Australia should not be running budget deficits at all when jobs are abundant and its mineral export earnings are at record levels. The budget rises and falls with mineral prices. Thermal coal and gas prices are now sky-high, so company taxes are now forecast to raise $127 billion in 2022–23 rather than the $90 billion forecast in April — and so Treasury now forecasts a deficit of $37 billion rather than the $78 billion forecast then.

Conversely, a key reason why Treasury predicts that deficit will rebound within two years to $51 billion, and then stay at that level in real terms is that it forecasts commodity prices to “glide down over the December 2022 and March 2023 quarters to their assumed long-term fundamental price levels.” Given the abrupt slowing in China and the Western economies that’s certainly possible. It’s also sensibly conservative.

Another reason for Treasury’s alarm about the budget’s future is that, with the government’s approval, it has reduced its estimate of future productivity growth from 1.5 per cent a year to 1.2 per cent. Over time, such a shift has a big impact on cumulative economic growth.

Treasury justified its previous assumption on the grounds that productivity growth had averaged 1.5 per cent growth a year over the previous thirty years. But most of the rapid growth was in the 1990s, when we had that decade of “jobless growth.” Since 2005, the Bureau of Statistics estimates, productivity growth has averaged just 1 per cent. Even 1.2 per cent would be doing well.

The bottom line is that, on current settings, the budget would stay in deficit by roughly 2 per cent of GDP, $50 billion a year in today’s money. Without changes, within a decade the government would run up another $500 billion in debt — similar to what the Coalition ran up in its nine years in power.

Something’s gotta give. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Australia’s budget has been in structural deficit since before the global financial crisis. The Coalition promised to fix it, but once in office just made it worse. From 2019 to 2021, on average, the IMF estimated Australia’s structural deficit as 6 per cent of GDP, the third highest among the forty countries it groups as “advanced economies.”

What should Labor do? As I reported a fortnight ago, the consensus among many economists is that the answer, inescapably, is higher taxes. Australia is trying to provide First World services with a revenue base far lower than the First World average, and it’s not working. As both sides have shown us, it’s not politically feasible to make spending cuts on the scale needed, and in today’s world we can’t grow our way out of deficits like this.

Chalmers has been subtly making similar points; as Michelle Grattan points out, he clearly sees this as the start of a long campaign. In his budget papers and media shows, he cites Treasury’s estimates of the expected annual growth in spending over the next decade in key areas: interest bills (forecast to rise by 14.4 per cent a year) and the cost of the NDIS (up 13.8 per cent a year) lead the way, but other heavy items such as hospital costs (annual growth 6.5 per cent) and medical bills (5.4 per cent), aged care, defence and the age pension are all set to grow faster than the economy.

The escalating cost of the NDIS is a deep concern — Treasury says it is now the second most expensive government program behind the age pension, and it’s on track to overtake that by the end of the decade. I doubt that any of us thought that was what we were signing up for. It shows why the government has commissioned NDIS founder Bruce Bonyhady and former departmental head Lisa Paul to chair a year-long review of the scheme. This budget sets up an NDIS taskforce to investigate fraud.

But most of the rising costs stem from the reality that we’re an ageing society, and it’s expensive to  look after old people: pensions, medical and hospital costs, aged care services. It was simply phoney for former treasurer Josh Frydenberg to pretend these costs could be paid for while taxes were capped at 23.9 per cent of GDP. They can’t; Treasury estimates that on current settings, spending would climb to 27.9 per cent within a decade. In scrapping the tax cap, Chalmers has taken a sensible first step towards the tax debate we have to have.

Much will depend on whether Albanese and his colleagues — and others with a selfless interest in the issue — support him by joining that debate. It is important that we get the answers right, then implement them, rather than assuming, as the Coalition did, that if we don’t talk about it, reality will just disappear. It won’t; one day the markets will see to that, as they have in Britain.

So did Chalmers and his Labor colleagues get the budget wrong? No. Australia will need to take action to close the deficit, but it didn’t have to do it in this budget. By and large, Labor is moving in the right direction, generating a debate we have to have, and pointing out the hazards we face. Australia has time on its side, and the markets are unlikely to lose faith in a government that shows the right intentions.

But Labor could have done better. How on earth could it seriously claim to be cutting out “waste” while in the same breath committing $2.25 billion to Daniel Andrews’s pet lemon, Melbourne’s southeastern “suburban rail loop”? Victoria’s auditor-general has pointed out that on conventional cost–benefit rules it would deliver only 51 cents of benefit for every dollar spent on it.

The project has now finally been submitted to Infrastructure Australia, which might well come up with a similar finding. Why did Albanese and Chalmers commit now without even waiting for their advisers to report? They have made a rod for their own backs, and the Liberals and Nationals will whack them with it all over Australia — especially in regional Australia, where Labor cancelled every Coalition commitment without even trying to sort out the good from the bad.

Time will tell whether Labor has made the right call in ignoring the pressures on Australia’s kitchen tables. There are lots of ways to cushion lower and middle-income households’ loss of buying power, and Labor should get these solutions ready. Restoring the tax offset is obviously one. Bringing forward the proposed cut in the 32.5 per cent tax rate to 30 per cent would be another (while redrafting the stage three tax cuts to retain a 37 per cent marginal tax rate on income in upper middle levels).

The one surprise packet in the budget, the commitment to build a million new homes in five years from 2024 to 2029, could be upgraded. It’s not as significant as it sounds. A smaller Australia built more than a million homes in the five years to 2019 — and the Reserve Bank and others keep telling us that was not enough.

If the industry, the states and the federal government agree, they should aim higher (a million homes in four years?), target more precisely (at least 50,000 new social/affordable homes a year, and preferably more), and focus on areas of clear housing shortage, particularly in regional Australia. To me, pledging to repeat what we did before Covid is not a big advance.

Chalmers’s roll-up-your-sleeves rhetoric in his budget speech would lend itself well to taking on a new reform agenda: tax reform, and any unfinished business that would make the economy more productive and use our human and natural resources better. One example — his budget contained a little token pressie for pensioners: if you work a little part-time, for this year only, you can earn an extra $4000 without it affecting your pension. Wow.

If that’s worth doing, imagine what the gains might be if Labor picked up Joe Hockey’s lost crusade to gradually dial up the retirement age to seventy? When longevity is improving at a rate of knots, it is not unfair to ask its beneficiaries to spend some of their expanded lifetime in the workforce, rather than taking the lot as retirement.

And why not pick up the sound proposal from the aged care royal commission to lift the Medicare levy by half a cent in the dollar to pay for the cost of improving aged care? I’m pretty sure Australians would accept a tax rise like that if they can see where the money is going.

There are many fertile, exciting ideas Labor can explore. This budget has been a good start. As Chalmers immodestly put it yesterday, the adults are back in charge. Australia is better off for it. •

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The news isn’t all good. The government has been less assured in its treatment of its unwise commitment to the lingering and now discredited heritage of trickle-down economics, in the form of tax relief for those who need it least at the expense of more urgent spending demands.

It is not a propitious time to be in government. Everywhere, problems crowd in: the need for rapid transitions to slow climate change; the deterioration of the US polity and the West’s declining investment in the rule of law; the rise of China; the backsliding of some democracies towards autocracy; a war in Europe threatening energy supply, resources, supply lines, trade and international relations; and galloping inflation, exacerbating cost-of-living pressures.

On the one hand, it’s heartening to recall that Labor governments have taken the helm before in times of crisis, notably during the two world wars, and in the second instance drew on that experience to initiate the programs that transformed Australia’s postwar development. A later Labor government, whatever its shortcomings, was much more successful than most of its international counterparts in limiting the depredations of the global financial crisis.

On the other hand, Labor struggled in the 1930s to reconcile the expectations of its supporters with the stringencies it felt induced to impose on the country during the Great Depression, with disastrous electoral consequences. The risk lies in another disjunction between political demands for relief and what are interpreted as global economic forces beyond our control, but to which our leaders must respond.

What we do know with certainty is that when perceptions of crisis are elevated, anxious people can be persuaded to back individuals who think themselves strong leaders who alone have the answers. This is the obverse of what is needed. Leaders must be able to communicate a sense of purpose, of course, but they must also know salvation lies in their capacity, with their team, to orchestrate the many in cabinet, in the public sector, in advisory capacities, in adjacent repositories of influence or authority (law, business, unions, community movements, non-government organisations) who can jointly contribute to solutions. The channels for outreach to all of these sectors will not only rely on personal and political networks, but must also run through the public service and the ministerial minders entrenched alongside the executive.

While it is foolhardy to predict the future, looking at each of three elements — communication, orchestration and managing the prime ministerial machine — from a historical perspective clarifies the factors that might assist or impede the Albanese government’s ability to meet the challenges we face.

Communication

Leaders must communicate a sense of purpose for their administration. Yet, just as the default to strong leaders often proves problematic, so too does the expectation that fraught conditions or urgent reform are best served by inspirational leadership. Australia has had inspirational leaders — Bob Menzies, Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating, perhaps Bob Hawke — and all, arguably, had transformative impact in their day. Treating this as a necessary element would give us pause: inspirational rhetoric is not part of Albanese’s skill set, nor that of his cabinet colleagues.

But this is not the only way transformation happens. I’ve argued before that Winston Churchill’s war record is sometimes mistakenly thought to be the epitome of salvation by inspirational leadership. Once the war was over, though, he was defeated by Labour’s Clement Attlee, who was considered a pygmy against the Churchillian lion and was once described by a colleague as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” But Attlee was a straight talker, buoyed by research — including the landmark Beveridge report on the welfare state — showing what needed to be done, and persuaded the country to invest in a postwar nation-building and welfare regime that hardline Tories have taken sixty years to unravel.

Examples are available closer to hand. In the 1930s, United Australia Party prime minister Joe Lyons, never a patch on Menzies as a parliamentary and public performer, was able to establish a rapport with the public that induced a predecessor and critic, S.M. Bruce, to concede that “he knew how to win elections.”

And then there is John Howard, who would scarcely figure as an inspiring leader. He doggedly prefaced every policy announcement with a statement of its relation to Liberal values; travelled the country constantly, speaking at party branches, to carry the party with him; and cleverly exploited favoured media channels to disseminate his message. Nobody could misunderstand his purpose. The leading historian of the Liberal Party, Judith Brett, concluded that he was the most creative conservative leader since Menzies.

Has Albanese such capacities? Leading up to the 2022 election he was criticised for his cautious policies, but he nonetheless managed to persuade people of his principal purposes. After his election, some were inspired by his intended referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the commitment to an integrity commission, and the rapid coordination of the Job Summit, through which he sought to initiate “a culture of cooperation.” Still, he continued to face criticism for his modest suite of policies and a lack of vision. Against that view, Paul Strangio has persuasively argued that Albanese has signalled, in speech and action, that “he wants to be a collaborative prime minister, a leader who does not assume he has all the answers, a leader who forges consensus from alternative viewpoints.” Has Australia got the message?

Orchestration

Successful administrations delegate responsibilities and allow those so charged to get on with their jobs without undue meddling, while maintaining a commitment to common purposes. The master of distributed leadership was Bob Hawke, who was central, with Paul Keating, in setting his government’s objectives. Hawke ensured cabinet members knew to keep him informed but famously trusted them to do what was expected without surveillance. He also used summits to draw in advisers and experts, and reached out to specific interest groups.

Less successful as prime minister was Gough Whitlam. A remarkable change agent in opposition, he reformed his party and developed its policy agenda while building up a notable contingent of experts who provided the detail necessary to implement his broad aims. Yet, having written “the Bible,” he assumed people would simply follow its dictates. Always forging ahead, he ignored the need for a watching brief, and was unprepared and dismissive when people faltered or failed him.

Some of Whitlam’s successors were excessively controlling, expecting everything to pass though their hands, creating logjams and delay (Kevin Rudd), or believing themselves responsible for everything (Scott Morrison) and therefore licensed to act unilaterally.

Albanese can’t fail to be aware of these precedents. To date, he has worked consistently with his ministers, who in turn have already made an impression in their roles. Few can doubt who speaks for key policy areas: Jim Chalmers for Treasury; Penny Wong for foreign affairs; Mark Dreyfus as attorney-general; Katy Gallagher for finance, women and the public service; Chris Bowen for climate; Tanya Plibersek for environment; Linda Burney for Indigenous affairs; and so on. This too is an encouraging start. But it is still possible that everything will be refracted, for good or ill, through the prime ministerial machine, which has chewed up many of Albanese’s predecessors.

Managing the prime ministerial machine

The accretion of resources around leaders — the much-enhanced Prime Ministerial Office, or PMO, and the powerful, coordinating Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, or PM&C — that began with Whitlam and Fraser and was augmented by Hawke, Keating and Howard has created a legacy with which later leaders have struggled. It is a strategic resource, but it encourages prime ministerial rather than cabinet government.

Under Hawke and Keating, with the PMO growing relentlessly and the prime minister given greater power over senior public servants’ tenure, two things restrained the leader-centric trend. One was that practice of distributed leadership, of which Hawke was the master. The other was the custom of appointing as principal private secretary an experienced public servant, which served, by and large, to promote cooperation and collaboration between the PMO and PM&C, and hence the public service at large.

As Paul Kelly has argued, Howard took a different route, perfecting the art of prime ministerial government. The PMO had grown from seventeen staff under Hawke to thirty under Keating; Howard boosted it to forty-plus. While policy development was ideally collaborative, the intention behind the development of the PMO was clear: it would have the capacity not only to engage with but to direct the public service, and an unrivalled ability to dictate the government’s story.

After a rocky start, Howard’s approach worked successfully largely because Arthur Sinodinos — a partisan certainly, but an experienced public servant — was appointed as his chief of staff. Sinodinos brought political understanding, an appreciation of the prime minister’s objectives, and bureaucratic experience to the PMO and facilitated the networks necessary for policy development, especially in the crucial relationship with PM&C. “It was a strong relationship.” Peter Shergold, the department’s secretary from 2002 to 2007, told me. “A lot of the relationship was about policy and Arthur… Well, I think he was quite exceptional… because he liked policy. And he was interested.”

The concept of the prime ministerial machine emerged from my discussions with Howard’s senior officials. “If a prime minister comes in and doesn’t understand the history of the machine… they’re inheriting, they’re at a grave disadvantage and are likely to be chewed up by it,” one senior official said. “Outside of the government, outside of the prime minister’s office — the media, the lobbies — all have grown to have a particular understanding of what the prime minister is capable of. I don’t mean personally but what… his or her machine is capable of, what they’re responsible for and what they should be doing. It’s not so much the character of the individual but the office and what the office has become that dictates the way it works.”

John Howard commanded it “superbly,” the official added. “He knew what he was getting… He took it on in a particular way and ran it in his way.”

This approach helps account for Howard’s lengthy tenure of office and ability to achieve much of his agenda. Yet some episodes revealed telling flaws and the potential for overreach by the prime minister’s inner circle. Patrick Weller’s and Anne Tiernan’s analyses of the “children overboard affair,” for instance, demonstrated how and why the guardrails were less than adequate.

Under pressure or in a crisis, ministerial staff were significant influencers, not simply cooperating with officials but improperly attempting to direct them and to spin the dissemination of information. An emphasis on what ministers wanted stifled public interest concerns or the integrity of processes. Inconvenient detail was seemingly suppressed by staffers in communicating with the media, and possibly with their political masters, allowing ministers to take refuge in “plausible deniability” when those details emerged. Unlike public servants, those staffers were not subject to rigorous accountability: it was their minister who was technically responsible but could evade accountability by claiming not to have been told.

None of Howard’s successors has been as effective in commanding the prime ministerial machine, and some have indeed been chewed up by it. Rudd’s problem was his retreat into a small inner circle — a handful of senior colleagues and personal advisers — impeding the networks essential to tackle the challenges he identified, and generating dysfunctional relations between the PMO and PM&C, and eventually with his caucus.

Julia Gillard was more successful administratively, both in negotiating the passage of legislation and in generating the loyalty and admiration of staff and the public service. But she failed to win the public. She couldn’t muster the rhetoric to counter the Coalition’s relentless antagonism, couldn’t demolish the proposition that her carbon trading scheme was a tax, and couldn’t explain why the negotiation and compromise necessary to sustaining minority government didn’t inevitably sacrifice principles.

Her successor, Tony Abbott, was opposition personified, and so intent on demolishing everything Labor had achieved that he failed to develop a coherent program. He, too, was immured in his warrior-oriented PMO, and so preoccupied with his unrepresentative party base that he failed adequately to register broad public concerns. He rapidly lost support.

Malcolm Turnbull was genuinely interested in policy, established stable relations between his PMO and PM&C, and successfully communicated with a broader, liberal, voter base. But he shattered their hopes by making too many concessions to the right — concessions that failed to resolve the divisions in his party. So, in a signal struggle over an ambitious policy, the National Energy Guarantee, he was brought down.

Scott Morrison was perhaps the one most definitively chewed up by a machine he failed to understand. His department was seen as politicised, the public service as hobbled, and his PMO as defensive, secretive and addicted to spin. Having ensured that both the public service and the PMO were geared to respond to his wishes, his enterprise was undermined by the lack of any guiding purpose. Even John Howard finally, ruefully, conceded that “the absence of a program for the future… the absence of some kind of manifesto, hurt us very badly.”

Morrison revealed not only the extent of his misunderstanding of the role, but also why responsible cabinet government — the necessarily collective enterprise — had been so undermined when he claimed after his election loss that he had assumed extra portfolios because it “was put to me on a daily basis by members of the media, by the opposition, constantly telling me that I was responsible for everything… The expectation was created of that responsibility, and I made sure that I was in a position to act should I have to.”

The prime ministerial machine is both a powerful resource, promising strength, influence and coordination (as it did under Hawke, Keating and Howard), and a potential trap. The misadventures of every prime minister since Howard show why it must be handled with care. So far, Anthony Albanese’s administration has demonstrated its careful awareness of this conundrum.

In expounding purpose, encouraging cooperation and emphasising collective responsibility, Albanese promises to restore distributed leadership and cabinet responsibility. It is a stance most unlikely to encourage the delusion of being “responsible for everything.” Having been in politics a long time, the prime minister has seen firsthand the consequences of an untrammelled and unaccountable PMO. His appointment of Glyn Davis — a highly regarded analyst and researcher in public administration, widely experienced in leading roles in the public sector, philanthropy and academia, and a key member of the Thodey review — to head PM&C bodes well for a revitalisation of the public service.

Yet challenges of the dimensions we face always threaten to push leaders back into the secure confines of small, trusted circles, with the danger of groupthink and over-reliance on the machine; and extreme partisan antagonism and intra-party division, such as Gillard experienced, amplify the problems. Will the magnitude of the difficulties ahead encourage the return of civility and collective enterprise, a rejection of the warrior culture and the fostering of bipartisan consensus needed if we are to prosper in these hard times? •

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It’s a rare enough representation of the genus to be notable, in terms of both its identification of this emergent class of knowledge worker and its creation of a popular image. Mal talks, expansively and emptily, but with the confidence of expertise and comfort with change. Williamson exacts on a him a modicum of revenge, having the character kneed in the balls, physically by a female antagonist and metaphorically by the election result. But if you consider the arc of the times, Mal is the character whom the looming years will best suit, in tune with the managerial revolution, the permissive society and, eventually, the electoral cycle.

Nowadays you can imagine Mal on the north coast, the poorer possibly for a couple of divorces but still retired in comfort, looking back serenely on the pioneering days of an industry now worth around $45 billion in Australia and employing about 160,000 people. The global industry is valued at nearly a trillion American dollars.

In the intervening years, as it happens, nobody has really come along to update the original public conception of those now known simply as “consultants” — “management” was presumably discarded as too explicit or too dowdy. Their tasks have remained nebulous: after all, no business must employ a consultant in the way they regularly depend on a lawyer or necessarily appoint an accountant or auditor. Even the jokes remain pretty much the same. (“They borrow your watch to tell you the time.” “How many consultants does it take to change a lightbulb? Depends on your budget.”)

Consultants are probably sensed more than seen, communing mainly with the C-suite rather than the rank and file. If you learn of the presence of consultants in the vicinity of your workplace, you will probably react as employees did at BP in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they coined the timeless abbreviation of fatigue by management restructure, BOHICA (“Bend over, here it comes again”).

Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe of the New York Times want to update the image of consulting giants as vague and jargonistic but more or less benign. The target of their new book, When McKinsey Comes to Town, is the best, brightest and toniest of all consulting businesses, McKinsey & Company, known to itself as “the Firm,” with its reputation for polished presentation, extreme discretion and handsome fees. Said of the Firm is what once was said of IBM — nobody was ever sacked for buying its services. When you lend your watch to McKinsey, you’re making clear that you really want to know the time, with the precision of an atomic clock.

Bogdanich and Forsythe’s book is a chronicle of McKinsey’s failures — at least in a reputational sense, for every consulting gig is in some way a success for the consultant unless for some reason they don’t get paid. It is not a history of the firm: Duff McDonald’s The Firm (2013) remains unsurpassed. Rather, each chapter is a case study: in overreach, in amorality, in complicity and, at bottom, in an indifference to human suffering all over the world, from the United States and Britain to China and South Africa.

The last of those criticisms also makes this a survey of hypocrisy, for McKinsey preens itself as a “values-driven organisation” and a promotor of the enlightened capitalism pledged to “doing well by doing good.” Bogdanich and Forsythe make a consistent, even relentless case that McKinsey is every bit as much a bullshit artist as Mal, if to a far more toxic degree and in a far more self-absolving fashion. As one partner they quote says when criticised for facilitating cruel and punitive American immigration practices on the US’s southern border: “We don’t do policy, we do execution.”

Bogdanich and Forsythe explore only cursorily the antecedents of that flair for influence and capacity for delusion. McKinsey exudes a sense of its specialness because it is special, a unique hybrid. Its founder, James McKinsey (1889–1937), was a university accounting professor and army logistics expert who evangelised that the charismatic business builder of yore would perforce give way to the “the scientific man, accustomed to research work and careful planning”; its greatest eminence, Marvin Bower (1903–2003), accented strategy and structure, and brought from a prior career in the law a strong ethic of client service, discretion and confidentiality. To this day, McKinsey keeps a low profile — rather as the shark keeps a low profile in Jaws.

McKinsey pioneered many of the customs now de rigueur in consulting, such as skimming off the cream at business schools, with a partiality to the so-called Baker Scholars at Bower’s alma mater, Harvard Business School. Later, Bower was instrumental in protecting the school from the incursions of Harvard’s president Derek Bok, who wished to tilt curriculum away from the famous “case study” method. During this fascinating late-seventies kulturkampf, described in J. Paul Mark’s The Empire Builders (1987), Bok argued for a more holistic approach to an increasingly complex domain:

The thing is to build into the faculty people who have a training both in moral philosophy and a knowledge of business. If the person’s base is only in philosophy you have been putting people to sleep and if his base is only in business, he will be saying things that are ethically naive. The only way to get at this is to hire some PhDs in moral philosophy and give them training in the business school. This way the students from these people’s courses will raise ethical issues with professors in other courses and those professors will have fellow faculty members to whom they can turn for advice.

Bower commissioned a report that successfully recommended maintaining the status quo. Its author was another prominent McKinsey personality, Tom Peters, later to ride to global renown as co-author of In Search of Excellence (1982), management theory’s inaugural global bestseller. We’ll never know the impact of the ethical lead Harvard failed to offer other business schools forty years ago, but I suspect its defeat helped reinforce the notion of business ethics as a contradiction in terms.

Bogdanich and Forsythe’s failure to get seriously to grips with McKinsey’s heritage and culture becomes something of a shortcoming of When McKinsey Comes to Town. McDonald has already made a compelling case in The Firm that McKinsey has been “the greatest legitimiser of mass layoffs… in modern history”; Bogdanich and Forsythe extend this, but without deepening our understanding. They have accumulated a good deal of inside information — including, as we are repeatedly told, the firm’s fiercely guarded client list. But they rather lack both broader context and inside testimony from senior figures.

Part of the problem is that there has never been a significant McKinsey whistleblower. The Firm is both averse to external recruitment and discouraging to those who wish to leave; on the contrary, its alumni network is a freemasonry of financial and commercial life. When it comes to pitching their services, the partners believe, it’s all the better to be dealing with those who have previously sold the same product.

What Bogdanich and Forsythe do provide is a cascade of the client depravity the Firm has enabled. McKinsey helped Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” sales of Oxycontin, the highly addictive opioid. McKinsey argued strenuously for the securitisation of loans that was a precondition of the global financial crisis. McKinsey’s insurance practice grew expert at enabling insurers to reduce and avoid payouts for claimants. McKinsey’s sustainability practice continues to “follow the money” towards oil and gas majors.

Bogdanich and Forsythe report some killer stats. Since 1965, McKinsey has worked for forty-three of the world’s top one hundred polluters, still collectively responsible for more than a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. In the last six years of Enron’s existence, McKinsey Quarterly, the periodical of ideas that also acts as a corporate brochure, praised the fraudulent energy financier 127 times. More than that, McKinsey is deft at “playing offence and defence” — getting on all sides of a market, advising multiple competitors and regulators, private capital and public interests, and relying on its reputation to sanitise what in other eyes would represent a palpable and unconscionable conflict.

When McKinsey Comes to Town largely summarises exposés Bogdanich and Forsythe have already reported in the New York Times, and still reads like it, wanting for the intimate detail that characterises James O’Shea and Charles Madigan’s great consulting survey Dangerous Company (1997), with its lively reportage of disasters at companies like Figgie International and Sears.

Not all the blows land either. Blaming McKinsey for the runaway inflation in CEO remuneration because partner Arch Patton broke the taboo on airing executive salaries in Harvard Business Review in 1950, for instance, is too much of a stretch; the economist Michael Jensen, brilliantly profiled in Nicholas Lemann’s Transaction Man (2019), is a far more significant individual figure. And while it is gruesome to contemplate McKinsey compiling a report on government critics called “Austerity Measures in Saudi Arabia” for the regime in Riyadh shortly before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, without more on the relevant consultants and their consciences it is hard to enter into the psyche of the Firm, or even to establish definitive cause and effect.

Bogdanich and Forsythe’s limp two-page epilogue, finally, leaves us with more questions than answers. Why have corporates and lawmakers developed such learned helplessness that they depend on the services of consultants? Why is McKinsey’s imprimatur so prestigious? How do people end up relating to the world so abstractly that they do not apprehend the antisocial outcomes of their deliberations? Maybe it is all an instance of what management has called the Abilene paradox, where a group of people collectively decide on a course of action counter to the preferences of many or all of its individuals. Or maybe it’s just what Don acknowledges when Mal celebrates having “shat on” his contemporaries: the consultant’s “talent for obsequiousness and bullshit.” •

When McKinsey Comes to Town
By Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe | Bodley Head | $32.50 | 354 pages

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A record 33 per cent were “pre-poll ordinary” votes. This option, available since 2010, essentially replicates the election-day experience but can happen anytime during the two weeks before. (For the 2016 and 2019 elections the period was three weeks.) Another 4 per cent voted early, in person, by “declaration,” meaning their ballot was submitted inside an envelope with a signed form (usually because their name couldn’t be found on that portion of the roll).

And a record 14 per cent voted through the mail — an almost doubling of 2019’s 8 per cent, which was a drop from the previous election. This year’s figure was, of course, a result of the pandemic. And like many Covid-induced behavioural changes, the extent of any snapback to previous modes of behaviour remains to be seen.

What does the electoral class — experts, parliamentarians and others interested in the running of elections — think about these evolving voting methods? Should we all relax and go with the flow, or would it be better to insist that as many people as possible turn up on election day to immerse themselves in its binding rituals?

The answer so far has been to accommodate demands for convenience gradually, repeatedly drawing a line before yielding a little more several years later.

In the medium term, the explosion has been most obvious in pre-polls. Eighteen years ago, pre- and postal voting each accounted for around 5 per cent of turnout. As figures quoted above show, even in 2022 pre-polls were more than double postals. That’s due to the 2010 changes, and a commission that publicises pre-polling’s availability almost to the point of encouragement. Postal voting, on the other hand, is treated more like a necessary evil. (See, for example, electoral commissioner Tom Rogers explaining to a parliamentary committee just before the 2022 campaign why the commission prefers pre-poll.)

And yet, according to the electoral law, if you meet a criterion for one you meet it for the other; indeed, criteria for both are stated in the same schedule. Postal voters must sign a form or tick an online box declaring they meet one of those conditions. The pre-poller verbally affirms it to an electoral official. (The long schedule of reasons obviously isn’t read out; instead there’s a conversation along the lines of “Do you qualify to vote pre-poll?” “Yes.”)

What’s wrong with postal voting? To most election watchers its greatest sin is that it can hold up the election result because postal votes are not counted until the following week. (It really needn’t be like this; the Brits manage to count theirs on election night. If we really tried we could include most of them in the Saturday evening tally.)

A random voter, if asked, might offer that postal voting is more vulnerable to abuse. Letterboxes can be stolen from and postal workers might be tempted to interfere. Anecdotes — or sometimes versions of the same anecdote — abound of postal voting applications going unanswered. (It certainly happens, as two people I know found out in May.)

Perhaps people worry about postal delivery times. Letters take much longer to deliver than they used to, potentially missing the cut-off two weeks after polling day.

But there’s another problem. It doesn’t tend to worry the average voter, but it does concern many in the electoral law class: postal votes are not truly secret.

Why do we have the secret ballot? In Australia and other “advanced democracies” we tend to see it as a “right” — and so, by implication, an add-on. But secrecy was actually an integral part of the “Australian ballot” right from the beginning. It had to be, because if people were bribing or threatening others to vote a certain way (including at polling places), opt-in secrecy alone wouldn’t eradicate it. The state had to ensure a person had no way of proving to another how they had voted.

And postal voting isn’t compulsorily secret. Voters could be filling out their ballots in the visual presence of family, friends or anyone else. That was why voting by post came so long after the move to the Australian ballot in the 1850s. If postal voting had been available in the nineteenth century, bosses could instruct their employees, and landlords their tenants, to (a) apply for a postal vote and (b) fill it out the desired way, show it to them and let them to put in the mail. It was obviously a tractor-sized loophole.

In democratic countries with less-developed economies, such as our close neighbours East Timor, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, postal voting is either non-existent or limited to tiny classes of people — for example armed forces overseas — for this very reason. (In the case of East Timor at least, the absence of a postal system is an overriding factor.)

In Australia, though, anyone can vote postal as long as they sign the form claiming they qualify. Does this loose arrangement matter? The logistics, expense and likelihood of getting caught render the risk of this potential absence of privacy tiny, but we might still envisage, for example, one spouse (most likely the husband) instructing and supervising the other. Nursing home staff voting on behalf of residents is a possibility. Maybe the question is whether it would happen enough to worry about.

Earlier this year, as a Covid measure for a set of by-elections, the NSW electoral commission skipped the application process and sent postal votes to everyone on the roll. Voters could use them, or they could cast their vote in person. A touch under half of the turnout, 49 per cent, was postal.

In Switzerland they do this as a matter of course for national elections, and about 90 per cent of voters mail their ballots back. Estonia has for many years made internet voting available to all, and around a third of the electorate uses it. Some Australian local council elections are postal only. Is our third tier of government so unimportant that enforced secrecy doesn’t matter?

This, then, is a question for the future of voting at national and state elections: should remain hung up about secrecy?

There’s one other complicating factor: how private is in-person voting anyway? The Electoral Act says votes must be cast privately, but no penalties seem to apply for breaches. Australia’s booth layout sits at the more relaxed end of international practice. It’s easy to peek at your neighbour, especially if they’re willing to show you. (A couple of visual examples.) Few eyelids are batted. Electoral officials would probably intervene in egregious examples — but it would be too late in most cases.

And if I filled in my ballot and then, on the way to the ballot box, shouted out who I was voting for and held it up, I would likely receive a stern admonition but little else. Even if the official reached me before I got to the box, would they throw my ballot away?

Contrast this with rules during the counting of votes: if you put your name, or anyone’s name, on the ballot it is rendered informal because it supposedly breaches secrecy. (This rule really is an unneeded remnant of a bygone era, if for no other reason than that officials really have no way of knowing who wrote the name.)

Let’s step back and imagine elections were just invented and we were setting up an apparatus to conduct them. What might the arrangements look like?

We would create and maintain the electoral roll largely as we do now. A decade ago, with direct enrolment, Australia embraced modernity, using various government agency databases to do most of the work, complemented by elector-initiated activity.

And voting itself? Would it really be in person, on a single day? Or would it mostly be via the internet, including by email — security, and perceptions of security, allowing? A lot more work would be needed; NSW’s Ivote, which has been wound back to its original use by vision-impaired voters, provides a cautionary tale.

People who can’t access the internet would need some form of postal voting. And voting in person? In a big country like Australia, the fewer people who vote on election day the less easy it is to justify having six or seven thousand polling places scattered across the continent. (Switzerland, mentioned earlier, has a population density around sixty-six times Australia’s.) But decreasing the availability of Saturday voting would further encourage other voting channels.

The most recent ACT election, conducted during the pandemic, was framed by that jurisdiction’s electoral commission as a five-week “election period.” This might provide a partial template.

The early forms of “postal voting” in this country, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, actually involved people visiting their post office and doing the deed there, in front of the postmaster (but without he or she seeing how they voted!). The postmaster then posted an envelope containing the ballot to the returning officer. Gradually the class of people who could take votes in this way was widened. (Federally, it wasn’t until 1918 that electors began posting their own ballots.)

The mid-twenty-first-century version might see people voting at various government agency offices during the voting period.

And would something like MyGov have a place? In terms of perceptions of integrity, something might be said for people possessing evidence of how they voted. But see notes on secrecy, above.

Around the globe all manner of vote-taking can be observed. In America alone, the 3000-odd counties provide a rich tapestry, not just for their own but also for state and national elections. Some of that international experience is worth considering.

My crystal ball is no less murky than the next person’s, but change is already happening thanks to evolving social expectations and the contradictions inherent in current laws governing convenience voting: yes it’s allowed, but floodgate’s hinges remain intact by making people claim to have a good reason, even if it’s with a wink and a nod.

And much of the change will depend on decisions, explicit or otherwise, about mandated secrecy. •

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Since the election, Anthony Albanese and his government have pushed ahead with yet another option — a referendum first, without too much detail about how the Voice would be formed and operate, with legislation to follow. At the Garma Festival on 31 July the prime minister provided the words he would like voters in that referendum to add to the Australian Constitution.

There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to the composition, functions, powers and procedures of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

That approach seems popular. Sixty-four per cent of the 3168 Australians surveyed by the Resolve Political Monitor in August and September said “yes” when asked, “Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

The government, Albanese added, is open to further consultation on the exact words to be added to the Constitution. Over the next few months, a series of expert workshops will consider Albanese’s words and perhaps suggest changes. How the Constitution should refer to the Voice’s scope is likely to be one theme of discussion: arguably, all matters dealt with by Australian governments are “relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples” but some people will want to circumscribe the Voice’s attention.

At the same time, the government is seeking counsel on how to run the referendum itself. In August, it appointed a working group of First Nations leaders, including Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney and senator Pat Dodson, to advise on three matters: the timing of a referendum, the words of the proposed referendum question and the information about the Voice to be issued to the public before the vote.

To decide what to say about the Voice itself before the referendum is the most difficult issue facing the government. The Albanese government has said very little so far because it would like to distinguish two political tasks: the task of persuading voters to put an Indigenous Voice in the Constitution, and the task of persuading parliament to legislate the Voice in a certain form. But the distinction between the two has come under pressure: the government won’t be able to campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum without giving an outline sketch of the Voice. It will need to say something, soon, about the bill it would introduce after the referendum to legislate the Voice.

The government is correct in saying that parliament will have the final say in the Voice’s design, but parliament can’t deliberate without a bill to consider. Many want to know what would be in that bill. The prime minister’s plea at Garma that we endorse a change to the Constitution as an act of good manners has fallen flat.

Morrison’s road not taken

Before it was thrown out of office in May, the Morrison government had made two significant steps towards creating the Indigenous Voice. The first, in December 2021, was to release the final report of the Indigenous Voice co-design process chaired by Calma and Langton. The second was to allocate $31.8 million in this year’s budget “to progress the establishment of Local and Regional Voices,” in the words of the Coalition’s Indigenous Australians minister, Ken Wyatt. (Langton and Calma’s report received very little public attention, but I have provided an overview at Australian Policy and History.)

Langton welcomed the Morrison government’s financial commitment. Against those who want a referendum on the Voice as soon as possible, before the legislation is developed, she and Calma have argued for building the Voice first. Work would start on constructing the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices, which would then, after an estimated two years, choose the members of a National Voice to Parliament.

Only then, in this scenario, would a referendum be held — though Calma and Langton could not say this in their final report because Wyatt’s terms of reference forbade any mention of constitutional recognition. If the voting public saw the existing Voice as an effective and legitimate body, a future government committed to constitutional recognition would find it easier to persuade voters to put the Voice into Australia’s Constitution.

This legislate-first scenario had three political weaknesses. One was that Scott Morrison had followed his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull in saying that he would not submit the Voice to a referendum. Morrison was prepared to start building a Voice, but constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, he said, should take some other form. The second was pointed out by those agitating for constitutional entrenchment to precede legislation. A Voice that was merely legislated would lack the moral and political legitimacy that a referendum would provide, making it less effective, less attractive to potential Indigenous leaders and always vulnerable to legislative dissolution — the fate inflicted in 2004–05 on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC, by a Coalition government with Labor’s support.

A third weakness was that a government and the voting public might say of the functioning Voice: is there any need to provide for it in the Constitution if it is already working well as a legislated body?

The election as mandate

Backing the referendum-first approach was one way for Labor to differentiate itself from the Coalition. But between the announcement of the election and polling day the major parties said little about the Voice or constitutional recognition. For voters concerned with Indigenous affairs the election did present a choice, however: Labor promised and the Coalition refused a referendum on the Voice. But both parties treated this difference as if it did not matter to voters.

The Voice advocates who assembled in April to make the Yarrabah Affirmation sought to make it matter. They framed Labor’s commitment to a referendum as voters’ opportunity to help stage national renewal. “History is calling,” they said.

Did the effort to promote a Voice referendum as a nation-defining opportunity make a difference to anyone’s vote in May? We can’t say, but it certainly gave Anthony Albanese the theme for his victory speech on election night. He chose to highlight Labor’s promise to hold a referendum in the next term of parliament, as if that had been what the election was all about. Labor’s triumph, he implied, was his mandate to conduct a referendum.

The change of government thus switched Australia onto a different pathway to the Voice. Instead of slowly constructing a legislated Voice, building from the local and regional upwards — without assurance that the Voice would ever be put to referendum — Australia will debate, between now and the end of 2024, whether to entrench the Voice in the Constitution. If the referendum is successful, the government will be obliged to legislate the Voice. If the voters reject the referendum, a government could still decide to legislate a Voice.

An almost-neglected model of the Voice

Having committed to holding a referendum first, the Labor government must now decide what to do with the model the Morrison government had budgeted for.

In the first week of August, after Garma, the prime minister acknowledged the existence of the Calma–Langton report and its relevance to Labor’s post-referendum drafting of a bill. But he would say nothing about what Labor likes and dislikes about the Calma–Langton model. Linda Burney was less circumspect. Evidently, she doesn’t agree with one of the report’s central recommendations: that the members of the National Voice be chosen by the Local and Regional Voices, meeting within their state or territory, rather than directly elected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voters.

A few days after being sworn in as minister Burney was reported as saying that the Voice “needs to be elected, that it should have gender parity and that young people and the voices of Torres Strait Islanders must be represented within the body.” Burney didn’t acknowledge that she was here contesting a major Voice design issue.

The history of ATSIC suggests that only a small proportion of Indigenous Australians would vote in a non-compulsory poll. Rather than allowing all Indigenous Australian voters to elect National Voice members, Calma and Langton’s “structurally linked” membership model would, they suggest, secure the legitimacy of the National Voice better than the direct election of its members by a small proportion of Indigenous voters.

Little commentary on the Calma–Langton model has been published since Burney’s remark. Megan Davis, writing in the Australian in July, made two criticisms of what she calls “the Wyatt model.” She reminded readers that Wyatt had not allowed Calma and Langton to say whether the Voice should be entrenched in the Constitution. I understand Davis as saying that now Labor is committed to a referendum on the Voice any model that was conceived under Wyatt’s brief is less relevant.

Davis also said that the Wyatt model was “a voice to government, not a voice to parliament.” Actually, Calma and Langton proposed that it be both. Putting that aside, why should the Voice not be “to government”? Davis didn’t say.

Any discussion of how Indigenous Australians might use a Voice to speak “to government” will need to include Pat Turner, chair of the Coalition of Peaks, an alliance of Indigenous organisations that believes it has created a way of talking to government agencies delivering Closing the Gap programs. As far back as November 2019, Turner was quoted as fearing that a “messy, incoherent ecosystem of Indigenous representative mechanisms” was forming. Perhaps that is also Davis’s concern?

Wyatt invited Turner to sit on Calma and Langton’s advisory group, and it is likely that she contributed to their recommendation that the Local and Regional Voices be formed in a way that respects and complements the processes of Indigenous representation already established in each region. Such existing Indigenous organisations are the base of Turner’s Coalition of Peaks.

After the election of Labor in May 2022, Turner renewed her vigilance about Voice design. In June and July she was reported to be urging the government to issue more “detail on how a national Voice would work.” Marcia Langton felt obliged to assure Turner that “nothing in our [final report] will affect the Coalition of Peaks or efforts to close the gap.” Langton was also reported to be critical of Turner for saying that she couldn’t support the Voice until she sees some “meat on the bones.”

Though some Voice advocates have been irritated by Turner’s calls for detail, she has reportedly said that she is seeking merely to counter “unhelpful speculation” about the Voice. Here we see a puzzle facing those campaigning for Yes. Whose demands for more detail are merely mischievous (bad faith campaigning for a No vote, in other words) and whose demands arise from their legitimate interest in what the Voice could be?

Turner was also concerned that focus on the Voice was drawing the public’s mind away from the Closing the Gap agenda. “The Voice is easier to talk about than Closing the Gap. We need to do both,” she is reported to have said.

Thorpe and Price as outliers

Flanking this patchily reported Indigenous discussion of the Calma–Langton model are the dissenting commentaries of two senators, Lidia Thorpe, a Victorian Green, and Jacinta Price, an NT Country Liberal member. Neither seems interested in questions of Voice design.

Since choosing Thorpe to replace Richard Di Natale in June 2020, the Greens have opposed the creation of the Voice before the Australian government negotiates a treaty based on truth-telling. The May 2022 election gave Thorpe a further six years, and the Greens have made her their deputy leader in the Senate. Her strength within the party raises the question: would the Greens vote against a Labor referendum bill?

After the election, Yes campaigner Thomas Mayor thanked Greens leader Adam Bandt for saying that the Greens would not try to stop a referendum being held. Mayor also pointed to survey evidence that “more than 70 per cent of Greens voters support a Voice referendum.” But Thorpe also speaks for the Greens, and in June, according to the Australian’s Troy Bramston, she said that Australians aren’t ready to vote on the Voice and it would be risky to proceed before a treaty was negotiated between the Commonwealth and Indigenous Australians.

Looking for common ground, Burney and the Greens have conceded that the Voice, the treaty and truth-telling could be pursued simultaneously. As a quid pro quo, Thorpe has asked the government to commit to implementing all the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991) and of the Bringing Them Home report (1997), and to legislating the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) as Australia’s standard of Indigenous self-determination.

Labor would not have to find common ground with the Greens if the Liberal and National parties agreed to support a referendum bill and joined Labor to argue for Yes. A Yes campaign led by an Albanese–Dutton unity ticket would have a very good chance not only of winning but also of marginalising the Greens’ (or at least Thorpe’s) approach to Indigenous affairs.

When Dutton appointed Liberal moderate Julian Leeser as shadow Indigenous Australians minister he signalled that he is keeping the door to bipartisanship open. But Price pledged on 27 July, in her first speech to the Senate, to resist the opposition’s move to the political centre.

“This government has yet to demonstrate how this proposed Voice will deliver practical outcomes and unite, rather than drive a wedge further between, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia,” she said. Not all Indigenous Australians wanted the Voice, she went on, arguing that a Voice would, in effect, “disregard” Indigenous MPs such as herself. Narratives about Australia’s racism, she added, were being mobilised to promote a Voice that was itself predicated on racial division.

Hailing Price’s speech, some of the more right-wing Murdoch journalists regretted that Dutton had appointed the conciliatory Leeser.

More detail on the Voice?

If we take Thorpe and Price at their word, they are unlikely to be won over by more detail from the government about the Voice’s likely form, functions and powers. Neither of them has commented, as far as I know, on the Calma–Langton plan – for better or worse, the only published model of the Voice. For these two senators to grapple with issues of institutional design, they would need to climb down from the rhetorical plinth where each has become an icon of her constituency. We may yet see such engagement, but don’t hold your breath.

Political progress on the referendum is within Albanese’s reach if he discusses with the opposition the possible institutional meanings of the words “make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” Perhaps that discussion is already taking place in private. Some have suggested a parliamentary inquiry as a forum for such an exchange. It could lead to a set of principles — agreed between government and opposition — to guide the drafting of a post-referendum bill.

That possibility was touted by Malcolm Turnbull when he announced in the Guardian on 15 August that he would vote Yes. Turnbull spent much of his article respectfully summarising the Calma–Langton model, with the disclaimer that it is unlikely to be “the definitive last word.” Acknowledging that parliament, not Albanese and his colleagues, would design the Voice, he asked the government for “some clear design parameters.”

Such a move would give rise to more public discussion — before the referendum — of the form, functions and powers of the Voice. But is the government willing to stimulate such discussion? Since Burney presented her view that the Voice should be elected, she and the rest of the Albanese government have gone quiet.

They have justified their reticence by referring to the defeat of the 1999 republic referendum. On that occasion, proponents of a republic were divided on the question of whether a head of state should be chosen by popular vote or a decision of parliament. When the 1999 referendum question offered parliament as the body to appoint a head of state, some republicans who favoured direct election sided with monarchists rather than campaign for a “politicians’ republic.”

Burney fears alienating some supporters of the Voice by being too specific about its form, functions and powers. “I don’t know having a detailed model [of the Voice] out there would lead to a clean question about what should be observed in the Constitution,” she has been reported as saying. At the Garma Festival Albanese said that “one of the things I am trying to avoid” is “people looking for all of the detail and saying well… if you disagree with one of the fifty but forty-nine are OK, vote no. We’re not doing that. We’re not doing that. We’re learning from history.”

A No campaign would have a range of messages — not only the argument of principle to which some Liberals hold (that an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice privileges some Australians on the basis of their “race”) but also the cautionary argument that the Voice is an incalculable and unnecessary risk.

By showing that the Yes vote for the Voice is “soft,” Resolve’s poll pointed to an opening for the cautionary argument. It found that 64 per cent preferred “yes” to “no” when they were the only two answers allowed, but just 53 per cent said “yes” when “undecided” was an option, because one in five (19 per cent) respondents said that they were “undecided.”

A No campaign that targets those undecideds could refer to the Voice as a hazardous unknown. The risk in saying nothing about the model of the Voice is that voters who don’t feel sufficiently well-informed will be susceptible to that argument. •

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The most glaring example is the lack of systematic action on climate change. Australia drags the chain on emissions reduction and continues to punt on energy-intensive exports with a dwindling customer base. A price on carbon wouldn’t have solved all our climate challenges, but it would have left us better placed than we are now.

The failure to rein in house prices is another case in point. The tax system has helped turn housing into a speculative asset, pushing funds into property rather than productive sectors of the economy, driving household debt to spectacular levels, and ramping up inequality. Again, reforming the tax treatment of residential property would hardly solve all our housing woes, but it would ameliorate some of the real estate boom’s worst effects.

In a new essay in Monash University Publishing’s “In the National Interest” series, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen argue that carbon pricing and property tax reform have become “pariah policies.” Despite evidence that they would have a net positive impact on Australian society, these measures have become untouchable. Events bolster their case: as we gear up for a federal election, Labor has walked away from its modest reforms to negative gearing and capital gains, and the phrases “carbon price” and “emissions trading” are banned from its political lexicon.

But, Errington and van Onselen argue, weak opposition means poor government: “The progressive side of the two-party divide is too inept to apply pressure to the conservative side, meaning conservatives stay in government without lifting their game.”

The title of their short book is Who Dares Loses. If this bleak declaration is true, then ambitious policy proposals are a recipe for electoral defeat, which appears to be the conclusion Labor has drawn from its loss in 2019. The flip side is that winners aren’t reformers. Having achieved office, governments avoid risking political capital to change society for the better.

Errington and van Onselen set out to “selectively challenge the conventional wisdom” by arguing the case for several “pariah policies,” including a universal basic income, the reintroduction of estate duties, a tax on the family home, a price on carbon, a levy on sugar, and the commercialisation of the ABC. Some of their arguments are convincing, others less so.

The case for a levy on sugar is strong. It would induce manufacturers to produce healthier food and encourage consumers to eat it, reducing the burden of diseases like diabetes and raising extra health dollars to boot. The idea that education campaigns and better labelling can drive this much-needed behavioural change was debunked long ago.

By contrast, the case for putting ads on the ABC is thin. Bizarrely, the authors propose this as a way of countering the decline of quality journalism in Australia. Their argument runs as follows: having lost valuable revenue streams like classified ads, commercial media have cut their newsrooms to the bone; as a result, subsidies for investigative reporting and quality debate must now “reach beyond the current public broadcasters.” So far so good — the case for funding more public interest journalism is strong. But their conclusion — that the ABC, like SBS, “will have to generate more of its own revenue” — is a non sequitur.

Are budget constraints so great that we can only increase funding in one area by reducing it in another? Believing that would be inconsistent with Errington and van Onselen’s support for a universal basic income, at an estimated $125 billion annual cost they claim “isn’t quite as eye-watering” as it may have seemed before JobKeeper.

In order to get more of the public interest journalism and investigative reporting that the ABC still does well, they want to make the ABC more like the commercial media. With the ABC competing for ads, they say, the other networks “would have a market incentive to lift their standard of news coverage, in a bid to steal ABC viewers and their lucrative advertisers.”

The reverse scenario is far more likely — the ABC would move downmarket as it sought to peel advertising dollars away from its (more) commercial rivals. And if it succeeded, the government would quickly cut public funding accordingly.

The “pariah policies” in Who Dares Loses overlap significantly with the reforms identified by the former chief executive of Grattan Institute, John Daley, in his recent report, Gridlock. Daley identifies carbon pricing, the tax treatment of housing, and sugar taxes as areas where government action has stalled. (He doesn’t mention commercialising the ABC.) Other initiatives consigned to the too-hard basket include congestion charging on roads, raising the pension age, introducing an effective mining resource rent tax, broadening (or increasing) the GST and lifting unemployment benefits.

Gridlock sets out to answer three questions. To the first — are twenty-first-century governments more reform-averse than their predecessors? — Daley’s answer is an emphatic yes. The 1980s and 1990s under Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and, initially at least, John Howard were “golden years” for reform. We might argue about the relative merits of measures like floating the dollar, cutting tariffs, deregulating the banks, introducing compulsory superannuation, imposing the GST, and privatising Telstra, Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank, but it is hard to dispute Daley’s contention that recent governments have been far less ambitious.

Daley’s second, more difficult, question is why are contemporary governments so timid? He identifies three obstacles that seem to be stopping governments from tackling major reforms: the lack of popular support for particular changes; the power of the “shibboleths” that mark out loyalties within parties or factions; and the opposition of powerful interest groups. The size of the required budget investment can also be a barrier, but Daley dismisses as relatively insignificant two of the most oft-cited roadblocks — the Senate and the messy division of responsibilities between the Canberra and the states.

But these obstacles aren’t new. The GST was deeply unpopular, but Howard risked electoral defeat to go ahead anyway. Privatising the Commonwealth Bank contradicted Labor shibboleths, but Hawke and Keating pressed on regardless. Vested interests vigorously opposed native title legislation, but it was still steered through parliament.

What’s different today? The glib response is that we’ve stopped electing politicians willing to push through obstacles in the belief that the change is worth the fight. As we contemplate an unedifying electoral contest between “ScoMo” and “Albo,” it’s easy to believe that current leaders don’t measure up to leaders past. That might be an emotionally satisfying answer, but it leaves us hoping forlornly that someone better will eventually turn up.

Deeper answers lie in structural economic and social changes. The echo chamber of social media has driven polarisation and division. The twenty-four-hour news cycle and the professionalisation of politics mean policies are more likely to be shaped by polling and focus groups than by evidence. The shifting and shrinking bases of the major political parties have reinforced polarisation.

Meanwhile, the hollowing out of the public service, the rising power of political staffers and the outsourcing of advice to corporate consultancies have weakened governments’ capacity to generate and implement good ideas. And the “revolving door” that turns a ministerial adviser into a “government relations” professional has picked up pace, as has the “golden escalator” from ministerial portfolio to corporate board or strategic advisory role.

Daley’s third question is obvious: what is to be done? If we want more ambitious, reform-minded leaders, we need to change the system that supports the current epidemic of policy timidity. “Institutional changes to ministerial adviser roles, to processes for appointing and dismissing senior public servants, to ministerial influence over government contracts and grants, and to controls over political donations, campaign finance, lobbying, and post-politics careers would all help to break the gridlock in policy reform,” he writes.

Errington and van Onselen recommend similar changes, and throw in a shift to proportional representation. If New Zealand can change its electoral system, why can’t we? The catch, as always, is that the people we need to fix these problems are a big part of the problem. As Daley says, the institutional changes he proposes “are themselves an example of blocked policy reform.” If our political caste can’t manage to abolish franking credits, let alone create a federal corruption commission, then the chances of substantial systemic reform appear slim.

Daley puts his hope in more independent MPs getting elected to parliament and using the balance of power to force systemic change. It’s hardly a quick fix, but it chimes with the fact that the reform highlights of the past two decades — including the (shortlived) carbon pricing mechanism, the NDIS, the Gonski school funding scheme, and plain-paper cigarettes packaging — mostly came when Julia Gillard was leading a government reliant on crossbench MPs.

Daley’s conclusion suggests the answer lies in getting back to the basics of political organisation at the local level: engaging citizens, listening to their concerns, and involving them in developing campaigns and policies. This is the nuts-and-bolts work that helped the campaign for marriage equality succeed. It is the kind of community organising that elected independent Cathy McGowan in the formerly safe Liberal seat of Indi in 2013, and enabled Helen Haines to succeed her in 2019.

In other words, we need to build democracy from the bottom up, not suffer it from the top down. Electing more independents to parliament seems like a good place to start. •

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Friedrich Hayek’s disciples Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan fuelled the loathing for government that has swept many people along for the best part of four decades, but Prabhu believes that governments have the opportunity to regain recognition as forces for good. For this to happen, he argues, they need to develop their capacities and keep learning. s

First, they must get better at using advanced and emerging technologies — not just hardware and software but also evidence-based policy design and behavioural technologies of the “nudging” variety — to tailor, target and deliver public services that help citizens across the full spectrum of society. This is not just about government bureaucrats getting smarter with apps and other toys. It is about improving the quality of their engagement with citizens.

Prabhu draws on inspirational case studies from around the world across domains as diverse as healthcare, education, financial services and social security to show the enormous potential of actively enabling and empowering citizens to themselves harness technologies to improve their own lives. The Bolsa Familia cash-transfer scheme, which helped tens of millions of Brazilians lift themselves out of extreme poverty, is one. The M-Pesa scheme, which turned millions of Kenyans’ mobile phones into their first-ever, ultra-nimble bridge into the country’s financial and insurance systems, is another. The Buurtzorg organisation’s revolutionary “cut out the managers and the back offices” approach to delivering homecare services in the Netherlands, emulated in dozens of countries, is yet another.

In all of these instances, governments devolved authority and overcame deep-seated paternalism by listening to and collaborating with social entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens. Everybody can win when governments manage to incorporate entrepreneurial creativity and citizens’ lived experiences in the design of public services, Prabhu argues. Governments can achieve that elusive late-twentieth-century ideal of doing more with less, and citizens get more meaningful and easier-to-negotiate services.

Governments are not just users of technologies, though. They are also expected to ensure that public values influence how other organisations, and market forces deploy these technologies. Doing this well constitutes the second main route to better government in the age of technological transformation. Prabhu wants governments to become more astute and measured in regulating the uses to which these technologies are put. This includes checking the power of the sometimes massive corporations whose business models are built on the exploitation of those technologies. Overseeing them effectively means keeping up with techno-capitalism’s relentless pace of creative destruction, and retaining the regulatory clout and credibility to tame it when the public interest so dictates.

In practice, this means taking on the likes of Uber, Google, Facebook and Amazon on issues such as privacy, workers’ rights, monopolistic behaviour, and their role in weakening democratic institutions and processes. Prabhu is not a crusader but a “what works” pragmatist, and so he emphasises the other side to the regulatory coin with equal vigour: that regulators’ overreactions can smother, stifle, delay or even destroy the economic and social benefits of technological innovation. Smart regulation of high-tech industries thus requires a delicate balancing act: enabling and unleashing the economic dynamism it can bring while curbing its very real downsides and dark sides.

Prabhu writes briskly and his engagement with his topic is genuine. He has a knack for storytelling, crafting catchy tales of technological wizardry and cutting-edge scientific evidence put to social purpose. Don’t be put off by the occasional slip into business school and consultancy jargon: the book’s main, four-part “should and can” message comes through loud and clear. One, government should and can become more responsive to citizens. Two, it should and can be more inclusive in how it designs its interventions and crafts public services. Three, it should and can become more experimental, enhancing its capacity to progress iteratively and learn as it’s going along — much as innovative ventures do (as captured in the now-clichéd dictum, “fail early, fail often, fail forward”). Four, in regulating and cultivating private enterprise, it should and can learn to “steer and not row” (an uncredited turn of phrase borrowed from the loved and loathed popularisers of New Public Management, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler).

While often leaning on classic as well as recent high-circulation guru books to argue the “should,” Prabhu’s case histories provide anecdotal evidence of what drives the “can.”

The combination works well throughout, and yet there remains something of an unresolved tension between the book’s main title (How Should a Government Be?) and its subtitle (The New Levers of State Power). The main title suggests a normative book, exploring what the values of good governance ought to be, and perhaps how tensions between them should be resolved. The subtitle has a ring of how-to instrumentalism to it: consultants’ advice to rulers about how they can retain and wield their power in an age of potentially disruptive technological change.

This tension reveals the main weakness of this otherwise commendable book, which lies in its treatment of politics, and indeed power. At the start, we are told just how politically charged the issue of governing in a fast-paced, high-technology world is. Prabhu rightly notes how governments that have become terribly good at harnessing modern technologies and doing deals with tech giants can be outright scary. Think China’s successful mix of better service provision and ruthless surveillance and control of its citizen-subjects. Or India’s successful, if controversial, rollout of its tech-savvy Unique ID project, which created an unprecedented digital infrastructure not just for serving and empowering but also for “knowing” its citizens.

But as Prabhu develops his four-part vision of a better government in the heart of the book, the political conundrum of the multiple uses to which the oceans of data can be put — by citizens, entrepreneurs, corporations and governments alike — disappear in the rear-view mirror. Dealing with this conundrum responsibly is also a crucial tenet of “how [good] government should be,” but Prabhu’s pragmatist stance doesn’t provide much help to democrats striving to negotiate it. Instead we get soundly argued claims that states should neither overreact nor underreact to the rise of tech giants and the potential for excess this brings. But who is to determine where the boundaries of (dis)proportionality lie?

And while Prabhu pays some lip service to the notion that “government” is often a rather feeble actor in relation to big tech, he gives little attention to how policymakers and institutions — at which level, by which of its branches, in what forms, at what cost, and checked by whom? — can become powerful enough to even contemplate taking them on and winning.

How Should a Government Be? was presumably completed before the pandemic raised unsettling questions about governments’ appropriation of executive powers to monitor, steer and control their citizens. These developments have highlighted just how vexed the challenges of technology-enhanced governing have become. Working through these issues will require a more thorough engagement with the normative issues of state power than Prabhu’s sensible, pragmatic but somewhat technocratic account has to offer. •

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My enthusiasm for royal pageantry vanished as I became more politically aware. The monarchy, if I thought about it, seemed a relic of a previous world that had no place in a democratic society. When Australia held a referendum on whether to become a republic in 1999, I voted yes enthusiastically, and shared the disappointment at its failure. Today, I would vote yes again, mainly because of the absurdity of having a head of state who is sovereign of a foreign country.

Over the past century large numbers of monarchies have collapsed, including those of major powers such as China, Russia and Germany, and only a few new ones have come into being. This would suggest that the very idea of monarchy is likely to disappear in the face of increasing demands for democratisation.

When he was deposed in Egypt in 1952, King Farouk predicted that there would be five monarchs left at the end of the century: the kings of hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades and England. Although his prediction proved wrong, the twentieth century did see the collapse of monarchies across Europe, and discontent appears to be growing in countries including Spain and Thailand. But many democratic societies have retained monarchical systems, and well-organised supporters of monarchical restoration are active in Romania, Serbia and Georgia.

Monarchies are expensive, extravagant, a remnant of feudalism, bastions of privilege, and symbols of inherited power. On the face of it, they are also deeply antithetic to democratic principles. Yet before we dismiss the institution as a refuge of right-wing fantasies, it’s worth noting that, on balance, constitutional monarchies rank among the most democratic and egalitarian countries: the Scandinavian and Benelux states (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) all have hereditary heads of state. In Spain, King Juan Carlos played a crucial role in establishing parliamentary government after the death of Franco in 1975 and the restoration of the monarchy.

More than forty countries retain monarchies in the twenty-first century. With a few exceptions, such as Saudi Arabia and Brunei, absolute monarchs have disappeared, although a number are what I term transitional, with power shared uneasily between hereditary and elected officials. Outside the Arab world the majority of monarchs today wield little power and play a largely symbolic role, representing an apolitical and idealised image of the nation.

Looking at constitutional monarchies across the world gives us a new perspective on our all-too-familiar picture of the British monarchy. The English-speaking world knows relatively little about non-British royals, except when someone from the Anglosphere — such as Grace Kelly in Monaco or Mary Donaldson in Denmark — marries up. But all hereditary rulers share the dilemma summed up by Craig Brown in his excoriating portrait of Princess Margaret: “Born in an age of deference, the Princess was to die in an age of egalitarianism.” After all, if the royals become like everyone else, what is the point of having them? And if they remain aloof, how do they maintain popular support?

Concepts of royalty are deeply embedded in the popular imagination, even in countries that have long ago abolished monarchical rule. Surprising numbers of autocratic states encourage the study of royal history to establish their legitimacy. The Russian Revolution might have seen the bloody assassination of the tsar and his immediate family, but in 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonised Nicholas II and his family, and in recent years hundreds of books and films about the Romanovs have been released. In China, the mythical Yellow Emperor, who is claimed to have originated the centralised Chinese state, is invoked by communist leaders to justify Beijing’s control over its extended territory, including Tibet, and its claims for Taiwan.

Why bother, several people asked me when I mentioned I was writing a book about monarchies. Ben Pimlott, the Fabian socialist whose biography of Elizabeth I is perhaps the best book yet written on the modern British monarchy, wrote that his interest in the subject was piqued by the reality that “an institution and a family dismissed by the sophisticated as trivial and irrelevant was nevertheless the subject of fascinated analysis, humour and comment.” Like Pimlott, I was increasingly drawn to exploring an institution that persists in societies as different as Norway, Lesotho and Japan.

I began writing my book intrigued by the possibility that constitutional monarchy might be a bulwark against the worst sort of populist authoritarianism, and curious about whether a study of existing monarchies might help our understanding of contemporary political developments. The apparent triumph of liberal democracy after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union has given way to a number of regimes that the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, terms “illiberal democracies.”

Orbán is one of a number of political rulers who have greatly expanded their constitutional powers to resemble those of absolute monarchs: think of Putin in Russia, Erdoğan in Turkey, Maduro in Venezuela and, although less successful in exerting total control, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Modi in India. Donald Trump was clearly fascinated by such strongmen — and they are all men — but the United States retained sufficient checks to prevent him from emulating them. China’s Xi Jinping , meanwhile, presides over an unapologetic one-party state.

It is striking that none of these “illiberal” countries, democracies or not, is among the constitutional monarchies still in existence. Does this mean that constitutional monarchies are an antidote to the worst excesses of populist politicians? In an era of growing authoritarian and populist leaders, constitutional monarchs, who are perceived as standing above partisan politics, look increasingly attractive. Much as we might deplore the undemocratic nature of monarchy, is it less damaging than illiberal forms of democracy? If we crave bread and circuses, might the perpetuation of royal sagas be less harmful than the fantasies of autocratic rulers?

If a certain sort of authoritarian machismo seems on the rise globally, so too are demands for greater accountability and participation. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the year 2020 saw major demonstrations for democratisation in countries as varied as Belarus, Lebanon, Hong Kong and Thailand.

Writing about politics is always fraught; events can change what seemed certainties in the period between writing and publication. Even where it seems entrenched, monarchy needs to reinvent itself to remain relevant; in the course of writing my book, there were major challenges to the King of Thailand, continuing scandals around the royal families of Belgium, Britain       and Spain, and political uncertainties in Malaysia that required the intervention of the king. Even in an era of constitutional monarchy, the person who holds the throne can be significant in determining whether the institution survives or crumbles. •

Dennis Altman’s new book, God Save the Queen: The Strange Persistence of Monarchies, is published by Scribe.

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Political ideology was also driven by assumptions about what structures would deliver the best results. Labor believed that government delivery of services would solve the failures of the private sector to deliver. The Liberals believed that competition between service providers would deliver better services overall.

During the 1980s and 90s these ideologies broke down in many ways. People on all sides of politics realised that much of the time they weren’t disagreeing about which results were worth having. They were instead disagreeing about a factual question rather than a values question: which structures delivered the best results? Experience showed that well-designed competitive markets, with government regulations to protect the worst-off and prevent exploitation, delivered cheaper and better electricity services than a government monopoly. And so privatisation — well designed — was an idea that all sides of politics could back. Of course, that meant market design was vitally important, but that’s another story.

Today, a new kind of tribal belief is increasingly blocking policy reform, as we show in our recent Grattan report, Gridlock. These are tribal beliefs that some policy positions are simply right. Often these beliefs aren’t based on any consistent view about the importance of one value over another, or about what kind of regulatory structures work in practice. Rather, they’re often the result of history — political battles won or lost, sometimes many years ago.

For example, you won’t find a single Labor parliamentarian prepared to suggest (publicly at least) that changes to the rate or scope of the GST might be a good idea. It’s not a belief based on ensuring the needs of the worst-off are met. A well-designed GST reform package could deliver welfare changes and income tax reductions that would make people in the bottom 30 per cent of the income distribution much better off on average, an outcome Labor has traditionally sought. Having fought and lost two elections over a GST, though, it’s hard to move on.

Among the conservative wing of today’s federal Coalition, you won’t find anyone who thinks government should do anything about climate change. Some of them don’t think that carbon emissions are leading to global warming; some think global warming is a good thing that will increase rather than reduce prosperity; some think the costs of reducing emissions exceed the costs of living with a hotter world. Many believe all three. What unites those beliefs is not a value, or an observation about what kind of policy works best, but a commitment to a particular policy outcome.

To take another example, no serving federal Labor member has publicly acknowledged that there is any argument against increasing the superannuation guarantee from 9.5 to 12 per cent. I’m unaware of any of them having conceded in the past few years that an increase in that rate will lead to lower wages. No matter the conclusions of independent experts, backed by Treasury modelling, that a contribution rate of 9.5 per cent is already pushing the living standards of people on low wages lower than their incomes will be once they retire. No matter the conclusions of distinguished academics, the Reserve Bank and the Fair Work Commission (and many Labor MPs in the past) that increases in the super guarantee are an alternative to higher wages growth. And no matter that the major beneficiaries of increasing the rate will be the top 20 per cent of income earners, who will pay less tax over their lifetimes.

So if these beliefs aren’t about values — or what kind of government works best in practice — what are they about?

Their major function is to mark membership of a tribe. That’s why the need to conform to these beliefs is seen within a party as much greater than in the past. Simply holding the right belief marks you as “us” rather than “them.”

They are “shibboleths,” a word now at least 2500 years old. The book of Judges in the Old Testament tells the story of two warring tribes, one of which got stuck on the wrong side of a river. The other tribe, which controlled the river crossing, set as a password the Hebrew word for an ear of corn. They knew that people from the opposing tribe pronounced “shibboleth” differently. And so, in contemporary English, a shibboleth is a belief that marks membership of a tribe, rather than a consequence of rational thought or a particular value. Indeed, beliefs tend to make better tribal markers if they’re irrational. Otherwise there would be people who believe them because they think they’re true rather than because they identify with the tribe.

Having tribal markers is very important if the tribe looks after its own. If the leaders of the tribe are handing out government appointments, grants and contracts to their own members, they need a way of knowing who is “us” and who is “them.”

Shibboleths only work like this if there are penalties for not holding to the right belief. Another Coalition article of faith is that tax rates should never go up, particularly not taxes on investments. So when the Turnbull government announced that it would wind back generous tax concessions on superannuation, all hell broke loose — inside the party. The party’s broadsheet, the Australian, published article after article denouncing the changes. Major donors said they would never give again because the party had abandoned its “values.” The preselection of Kelly O’Dwyer, the responsible minister, was threatened.

Never mind that these changes were popular — particularly with those who had the most to lose, perhaps because they realised how indefensible the concessions were. Never mind that the proposals were consistent with the underlying policy purpose of superannuation. Never mind that the Coalition disproportionately won votes in the electorates most affected. A shibboleth had been questioned, and there had to be consequences.

Shibboleths are a big problem in politics precisely because they’re not rational. Almost by definition they lead to policy outcomes not based on the evidence. Over the past decade they’ve blocked progress on ten significant reforms recommended by Grattan Institute, particularly in three of the most important policy areas for Australia’s future prosperity: tax, superannuation and energy.

It’s a far cry from the golden years of reform in the 1980s and 90s, when the Hawke–Keating government jettisoned large quantities of party dogma to bring down tariff barriers, privatise industries and reform industrial relations.

So why are shibboleths dictating policy outcomes? Two forces are coming together: shifts in the electoral bases of our major parties; and the professionalisation of major parties so that they become almost arms of government rather than organisations that mediate between the population and government. Both trends are mirrored in other democracies around the world.

As Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have shown, the base of political parties is shifting. Traditionally, right-wing parties were aligned with business owners, high-income earners and people with high levels of education. But now people with high levels of education, including those with relatively high incomes, increasingly vote for left-wing parties. People with lower levels of education don’t belong to unions as much as in the past, now often work as sole traders, and are more likely to vote for right-wing parties.

Because the interests of their core constituencies are changing, policy issues are becoming more fluid within the parties. Issues that defined political parties for decades, such as government intervention in the economy and industrial relations, have converged on largely consensus positions. Social and identity issues such as marriage equality, workplace harassment, migration and racial disadvantage remain more contested. Many of these social issues cross traditional party lines. Bill Shorten has many policy views in common with Simon Birmingham, Joel Fitzgibbon has much in common with George Christensen, and it’s less obvious what policies they share with others in their respective parties. So instead, parties need shibboleths to mark who is a member of the tribe.

And tribal membership is increasingly important because of what political parties do. Politics has professionalised. Many more people have a career that starts as a political adviser, a union representative or an analyst at an aligned think tank and then progresses to preselection, parliament and the golden escalator to a lucrative government-relations role.

The professionals working for each party look after their tribe. Longstanding conventions are being trashed as government appointments to bodies such as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and state government corporations increasingly favour those connected to the party in power rather than those best qualified. Government grants and contracts are often awarded to party donors, and those well connected — which may just be coincidence, but because the processes are increasingly opaque, who would know?

Patronage like this reinforces shibboleths. The rewards for toeing the party line are much higher. Breaking with the tribe can disqualify you from future patronage and jobs.

The disease is hard to cure. Politicians from all major parties have trashed valuable conventions that restrained politicisation of appointments, grants and contracts, and imposed consequences when politicians behaved badly. But there’s no going back. To restore good governance, these conventions will need to be replaced by hard rules policed by genuinely independent and well-armed regulators. The insider world of political advisers needs to be opened up to more people with policy expertise from the public service and fewer people with political expertise from student politics. Limiting political donations and campaign spending, and tightening controls on lobbying would also help to weaken the cosy coterie of politics and its clients.

Unfortunately the patient is not very interested in being cured. The current arrangements suit the major political parties and the professional political class very well. Although the treatments for the disease are well known, and voters strongly support them, the list of excuses for inactivity just gets longer.

History suggests that major institutional changes mostly happen only when there is an ongoing public scandal. Damning auditor-general reports aren’t enough. Only the nightly theatre of cross-examination at a royal commission or an independent corruption commission leads to voters focusing on institutional change rather than their usual concerns of jobs, health and education.

So the most likely path to change is for independent and minor-party members of parliament to insist on institutional reforms when they hold the balance of power. That’s how we got the Parliamentary Budget Office, the most significant institutional reform of the past fifteen years. And it’s an increasingly plausible scenario as the vote for minor parties and independents marches upwards, not least because voters are losing trust that the traditional parties are putting the public interest ahead of their own.

Shibboleths are a cancer eating away at good government. We need institutional change to weaken their tightening grip on our political class. Otherwise, many policy reforms that would benefit the country will continue to sit on the shelf. •

Gridlock is John Daley’s last report for Grattan Institute, where he was the CEO from its creation in 2009 to 2020.

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Scott Morrison did for about six months after his heroic May 2019 election win. Malcolm Turnbull, on the other hand, never did. As Arthur Sinodinos let slip on Insiders in early 2016, Turnbull anticipated a big electoral win that year followed by a reality check for the party’s right. Voters had other plans.

Tony Abbott possessed that elixir for a few months after the 2013 change of government. But the opinion polls suspiciously failed to show a honeymoon, the 2014 budget was very poorly received — and, arguably even worse, it failed to get through the Senate. It instead hovered in plain sight, a list of horrors the government wished to inflict but wasn’t able to.

What generates party-room authority? Election wins mostly, big ones or ones much better than expected. Taking government from opposition, of course. A perception of electoral prowess, the party believing it couldn’t win without that person.

That was Kevin Rudd for about two years after November 2007, John Howard from 2001 to 2007 and, before that, his first six months or so in 1996. Howard put that early capital to excellent use, dragging his own side towards national gun laws, which boosted his popularity in the electorate. Not long after that a kind of torpor set in. What was he here for?

Tampa and 9/11 eventually answered that question, but it’s hard to find anything much that flowed from his all-conquering final two terms. Perhaps it’s in true believers’ tolerance of the size of government, those record high taxes as a percentage of GDP. Little grumbling could be heard from the party’s right because of Howard’s perceived indispensability and general adherence to right-wing causes.

Paul Keating after his 1993 Morrison-like victory is another example. Bob Hawke, for three terms; Malcolm Fraser for his first two. Gough Whitlam, of course.

Hawke, with Keating, dragged his party to the economic centre, embracing, or at least accommodating, “economic rationalism.” In his last term, Keating did industrial relations, tariffs, competition policy, all things that don’t come naturally to the Labor Party.

Then there’s authority in the electorate. Much of the commentariat believes voters want someone they could imagine going to the footy with; but what they actually crave is leadership, tough love, being made to eat their greens. They don’t like it at first, but once the nasty change is made — and once most people find it didn’t inflict much misery on them after all — they give the leader a tick. Howard’s GST was a great example. Fraser was just the “bastard” the country needed after the excesses of the Whitlam years; the sizes of his first two wins have not been surpassed since.

Rudd never understood that dynamic, or if he did he wasn’t able to overcome his own inclinations: he wanted to be the one always handing out goodies.

In the current decade, Covid tough love has done wonders for our premiers and chief ministers, but the Commonwealth, despite footing most of the gigantic bill, doesn’t seem to have benefited as much.

They can never take Morrison’s 2019 “miracle” from him, and Covid still gives him purpose, but he’s not the prime minister he was two years ago. The lackadaisical attitude to the vaccination rollout, which was actually shared by others for a time, has truly come back to damage the country and the government.

How could Morrison have employed his god-like post-election status two years ago? Most obviously, he could have pushed his party towards reality on climate change. Instead he went the other way, encouraging their delusions with UN-sceptic speeches.

Australia has long been selfish in its emissions commitments (see this Rod Tiffen explainer) but the ideological dimension kicked in in December 2009, when the Abbott-led opposition chose to campaign against a carbon price. The Labor government went to water, and the rest is history. It became a deep feature of culture wars, perceived as a key component of the Coalition’s political arsenal. As with asylum seekers, party supporters and backbenchers demand a hard line.

As for the National Party, the “coalition arrangement,” a relic of a previous century, sees 19 per cent of the party room deciding who will be deputy prime minister, and retaining the capacity to hold the government to ransom.

Everyone now understands we can no longer freeload on climate change, or at least as egregiously as we are used to doing, but the government is incapable of even committing to the unambitious target of zero net emissions in 2050.

For the Labor opposition it’s a conundrum, because taking serious action to the ballot box would hold dangers.

The sooner those carbon adjustments and even tariffs hit us the better. If that’s what it takes to spur action, then so be it.

And if the next election produces a majority government, authority should once again belong to whoever is prime minister. For a time. •

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That image is rather tarnished by this month’s Australian National Audit Office report on commuter car parks. Simon Longstaff, of The Ethics Centre, described what had been unearthed in plain language: “Let’s not beat around the bush here. The use of public money (or power) for private political purposes is corrupt.”

This Audit Office report has echoes of its probe into the sports rorts affair, released early last year. Both are about ministerial interference in a grants program which overrode benefit–cost criteria and favoured the Coalition’s electoral interests, and both reveal a lack of transparency in the government’s decision-making process. There are some important differences, however.

First, the car park grants are on a much bigger scale. Only $103 million of funding was announced in the Community Sport Infrastructure Grant Program, while so far $660 million has been committed under commuter car park projects within the Urban Congestion Fund.

Second, while the sports projects were mainly in rural electorates, the commuter car park spending is directed at park-and-ride projects in capital cities. The former was a Nationals boondoggle; this one was a Liberal Party boondoggle.

Third, in terms of corruption of process, the car park program seems to have hit a new low. The Audit Office didn’t find even the fig leaf of an open competitive process: “Funding was allocated using a non-competitive, non-application based process.”

Fourth is the strength of language in the report. Journalists, academics and public servants who habitually read Audit Office reports were surprised by its assertiveness — “the most scathing audit report we’ve ever read,” according to veteran public service watcher Verona Burgess. The Audit Office is rarely as explicit about electoral calculations as it has been in this report: its maps of project locations superimposed on red and blue shaded Electoral Commission maps look as if they have been taken from the wall of the transport minister’s office.

The fifth, and perhaps most important, difference lies in the way the Morrison government has reacted to the two reports. The sports rorts did at least see some embarrassment expressed, and perhaps even a little shame — certainly enough to see sports minister Bridget McKenzie scapegoated and sent to the backbench, in spite of the clear involvement of the prime minister’s office.

This time the government has used a different approach: it’s all okay; it’s what every government does. When Insiders host David Speers asked finance minister Simon Birmingham about the car park funding report (“pork and ride,” to use Anthony Albanese’s term), Birmingham responded, “The Australian people had their chance and voted the government back in at the last election.” He also gave every indication that the Morrison government will do the same at the next election. End of story.

It’s this last aspect — the attempt to normalise such behaviour — that has been most shocking for Longstaff and others who assumed that even if the Morrison government lacks moral principles to guide how it uses public money, it might at least be constrained by a sense of shame.

At one level, Birmingham’s rationalisation is simply a statement of Politics 101. Public servants may rank projects on benefit–cost criteria, but the responsibility for allocating public money lies with the government, and if the public don’t like it they can throw the government out of office.

It’s a superficially appealing argument based on the assumption that voters are well informed. Sometimes they may well be, and sometimes governments explain why they are departing from considered advice. On release of reports from royal commissions or the Productivity Commission, for instance, the government generally states which recommendations it accepts and which it rejects, and provides reasons. But the harder it is to justify departures from advice, the more likely it is that the government will shroud its decisions in secrecy. It’s hard to imagine Morrison having said to Melbourne voters, in the pre-election period, “Public officials have assessed a need for commuter car parks in Melbourne’s western suburbs, but we have decided to provide them in the more prosperous southeast, where our loyal mates live. They have expensive European cars that need the protection of secure undercover parking.”

In terms of accountability, it’s generally better if governments exercise their discretion not at the final stage of project assessment but at the stage where programs are designed, specifying clear guidelines in line with their political values. It’s not a rort-proof process: ministerial advisers armed with electoral maps are adept at writing guidelines that happen to align with their bosses’ interests, but at least it protects the government from accusations of pork-barrelling and conveys an impression of clean administration to the outside world.

In this case the Morrison government hasn’t even been that clever. It has simply treated discretionary funding as a slush fund to advance its own electoral interests, and Birmingham has effectively admitted as much. Evidence of such behaviour should be enough to bring a charge of corruption in a properly constituted system of governance, but as Yee-Fui Ng, deputy director of the Australian Centre for Justice Innovation at Monash University, points out, it would take a well-resourced and independent commission against corruption to pursue a legal case of that kind. The Audit Office’s role is that of an auditor, not a prosecutor.

Nor does the Audit Office have a brief to report on government policy. Understandably, the media has had a feast going through the misdeeds uncovered in the report — there are plenty to fill journalists’ columns.

That leaves a policy question so far unanswered, in both the sports and car park programs. Why should the Commonwealth be involved in such programs in the first place?

Australia is a federation, and while section 51 of the Constitution — the part that specifies Commonwealth powers — says nothing about sporting club change rooms or car parks, commonsense administrative reasons indicate that the Commonwealth shouldn’t have been involved in either of these programs. It’s understandable that the federal government may

have a general interest in sport because of its health benefits, and the politicisation of international sporting events means it has been dragged into a role in elite sports. But grandstands and change rooms in country towns? Surely state and local governments are better able to allocate funds to such projects.

Similarly with transport: the Commonwealth should be involved in international ports and airports, national highways and railways, and setting standards. But commuter car parks? These surely should be matters for state government transport departments to work out in coordination with their public transport authorities.

It’s not only a question of local knowledge; it’s also about the Commonwealth’s loss of administrative capacities over the years as it has privatised and corporatised government functions. Anyone who needs convincing on this point should consider the current vaccination program or, to use an example from a Labor government, the Rudd–Gillard government’s home insulation program. The latter certainly had political costs for the government of the day, and the former seems to be doing considerable political damage to the Morrison government.

Even on a political level, though, why does the federal government get involved in schemes better left to the states? Surely it would be better to hand over the money and let the Grants Commission process do the rest. Or if it particularly wants to help country sportspeople, or urban commuters, it can hand over funds to the states as tied grants, with carefully specified criteria. Then the state governments can bear the political costs of delayed projects — the forty-two car park sites where no work has commenced out of the forty-seven approved, or the fact that members of the Betoota Bowls Club are still changing into their whites in their cars. And does not the Coalition have a tradition of “states’ rights”?

Those who ask such questions may be accused of naivety. Turning again to Politics 101, it is virtually axiomatic that no government wants to give up fiscal powers, particularly when it can use them to electoral advantage. Political analysts may assume that a government facing a tight contest, as the Morrison government was in 2019, would do a careful calculation and distribute discretionary funding to its immediate advantage — to its own seats held on a slim margin if it fears losing the election, or to opposition seats held on a slim margin if it hopes to consolidate its majority.

The Poll Bludger’s William Bowe examined this possibility in relation to the sports grants by looking at booth-by-booth swings in 2088 local regions. He found “no correlation whatsoever between the amount of funding they received and how much they swung to or against the Coalition.” Some allocations were made to seats so safely held that no amount of pork was likely to move them, and some of those projects may have been justified on benefit–cost grounds. (The Audit Office concluded that some were worthwhile but didn’t provide detail about specific allocations.) While the Audit Office found that funding allocations did not align with criteria of need, Bowe found that neither did they align with criteria of politically optimising the allocation of pork.

No similar analysis has been done on the car park program, but it’s hard to see how it might have had much effect on the 2019 election. Southeast Melbourne is fairly solid Liberal Party territory, for example, and only one of the Liberal Party’s seats (Deakin, then held by Michael Sukkar on a 3.2 per cent margin) in that region looked vulnerable. In any event it’s hard to see how promising a commuter car park would give a government a meaningful political dividend. It’s a benefit targeted at quite a small subset of the electorate — CBD commuters who own a car, don’t need it during the day, realise that the Commonwealth has committed to build a car park at their train station, and would find its provision a deciding factor in how they vote in a federal election.

One reason why pork-barrelling may not yield political benefits in Australia is that the Senate is elected on a statewide basis. The electoral mathematics of marginal seats doesn’t hold for the Senate, and it’s a useful outlet for a revenge vote by someone who has felt the negative side of pork-barrelling.

Bowe’s findings tend to confirm academic research on discretionary election spending. It’s hard to discern any impact of pork-barrelling on electoral swings. But there is some suggestion that discretionary spending is treated as a reward to loyal constituents, possibly explaining high levels of expenditure in safe seats. We can imagine, perhaps, that politicians with prominent profiles in their electorates, as may be the case for some National Party members, might seek to present themselves as the big men or women who can deliver for their tribe — a strategy directed more at holding on to preselection than securing a seat for the party.

Or maybe it’s futile to trawl through the data looking for any logic to pork-barrelling, and particularly by governments of the right, who tend to see public spending as a necessary evil to keep on side a greedy electorate who unreasonably want things like schools, hospitals, roads, police and other public services.

Built into the Liberal Party’s statement of core beliefs is the notion that nothing of value is achieved through public expenditure. If it’s all wasteful, then techniques such as benefit–cost analysis can be ignored as meaningless because there are no benefits. Ministerial or prime ministerial choice may as well prevail, and maybe these projects can provide photo-ops or support for a local candidate.

And just as those same ministers disregard the advice of economic experts in their departments, they probably disregard the political advice of polling experts on their staff. It’s the style of a salesperson who really doesn’t have much faith in the quality of the product. In that context Birmingham’s rationalisation makes perfect sense.

The ineffectiveness of pork-barrelling may provide some comfort when we observe the way the Morrison government has treated discretionary appropriations as extensions of the Coalition’s electoral war chest. But the opportunity cost of such misappropriation is high — the car parks that never get built in areas where they would have provided more public value; the wasted efforts by country sporting bodies in preparing well-considered submissions for grants. More significant, but harder to quantify, is the cost of cynicism as people see the contempt with which governments spend voters’ hard-earned taxes. It’s a cynicism that, if sustained, can lead all the way to a failed state.

As Simon Longstaff said, the car park grants “rot the body politic.” To stop the rot we need an independent anti-corruption commission, not just to arrest a slide down the Transparency International index but also to help restore good government. •

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All is not lost for the government. The media bandwagon has changed gears in recent days and, possibly feeling pity for a regime so unable to present its citizens with clear public health messages, seems to have decided to take on the job itself. To take just one example: this week’s episode of Media Watch was largely devoted to countering the “beat-up” over AstraZeneca. It reported on other media but did so in a way that made it clear Paul Barry thinks we should stop worrying and learn to love the jab. It was essentially an op-ed.

The prospects for a government that can rely on help of this kind from the supposedly left-leaning ABC should not be written off. But it doesn’t deserve such help. The vaccination disaster is the worst national public policy failure in modern Australian history, rivalled only by Paul Keating’s early-1990s recession “we had to have.”

Australia will eventually complete its vaccination program — presumably, some time in 2022 — and it might even manage to do so without the loss of several hundred more lives to Covid-19. But the casual approach we have seen so far, especially in getting aged care workers vaccinated, means that we are far from out of the woods. Still, it is too easy to blame the nation’s vaccination ordeal on an incompetent government and its publicity-obsessed leader. There is more to it than the frailties of any particular government.

What we have seen in recent months is the workings of a hollowed-out national government. It has decent systems — run by the Australian Taxation Office and Centrelink — for shuffling money around, provided you are not a robodebt victim. It has some agencies that have been able to undertake their regulatory work effectively, helping to keep the economy going and supporting efforts to manage public health.

But when it comes to hands-on service delivery, the federal government now seems rather hopeless. It is incomprehensible that it placed so many eggs in the AstraZeneca basket; no explanation has ever been offered, and many journalists seem to have the attention span of a goldfish in such matters.

It was not always the case that federal governments were so distinguished by what they could not do. Writing a quarter of a century ago, the historian A.T. Ross showed that in the interwar period the federal government pursued a defence policy based on the development of a local capability in munitions production — called “self-containment” — so that Australia would not depend on overseas supply. At the heart of the effort was a Munitions Supply Board, established in 1921, which would provide incentives for companies to produce locally by funding research and development. It even set up government factories in priority areas, to pioneer complex production processes. Ross went so far as to argue that Australia was saved from invasion in 1942 by its industrialisation more than by the United States of America.

Those were the days when federal governments held the hose. There is an even more telling example for our own times: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1919. The effectiveness of the government-led vaccination program is open to question, especially as it was another decade or more before flu was recognised to be viral rather than bacterial, but the ambition is worth recalling.

Even before the Spanish flu arrived in Australia, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories — established as recently as 1916 — was working on a vaccine. CSL had collected sputum from returning soldiers who had already been exposed to the outbreak, and used agar — derived from a Japanese seaweed — to grow the bacillus. The vaccine comprised a mixture of chemically killed bacteria, some recovered from the deceased victims of earlier flu outbreaks.

By February 1919 CSL had already distributed more than a million doses, and orders arriving at CSL’s new Parkville premises were being met within twenty-four hours. CSL would eventually produce something like three million doses for a country with a population of only about five million. In Sydney, the Prince Alfred Hospital and the Royal North Shore Hospital were each making a vaccine. Nurses sometimes donated the blood needed to make the product. Vaccine depots were well patronised, and heavy demand did occasionally lead to shortages and the administration of part-doses.

There was some vaccine hesitancy, then as now, but certainly with more reason. The vaccine content was based on guesswork — which was wrong, as it turned out — and the needles were much bigger and really hurt. A Dr Joel, who reported “results which are nothing short of miraculous” for the CSL vaccine among the sailors on his watch as a naval doctor, gave the hesitators short shrift: “Conscientious objectors, if the legislature has not the courage to compel inoculation, should be isolated from the rest of the community, it being pointed out to them that we object not so much to their attempted suicide as to their carrying the disease unmitigated to those who are not tired of life.”

No extensive clinical trials were carried out; nor was there a rigorous approval regime. Governments didn’t need to worry whether one or two in a few hundred thousand recipients might get a blood clot. They did not have the political nightmare of the pink batts saga a few years behind them, a permanent reminder to government that if your efforts to save the country from a global crisis result in the tragic deaths of four citizens, that is all that anyone will recall. Citizens certainly won’t remember the million houses that were successfully insulated, or the carbon emissions reduction achieved. They won’t be convinced by arguments that workers are too often losing their lives on building sites yet no one calls a royal commission to investigate.

Some recent commentary suggests the CSL vaccine might have benefited recipients by boosting their immune systems. In a way, though, whether it worked or not is rather beside the point today. The scientists were operating in the context of extremely limited knowledge about influenza, and they did their best to protect the Australian people, with the rapidly rising capacities of a national government behind them.

The confidence of the Australian federal government of that era of nation-building is striking — as is the contrast with its low ambition and incapacity today, despite its vastly greater size and the massive material, intellectual and technological resources now at its disposal. We should all be alarmed by what the federal government has shown it cannot do — by its incompetence in both words and deeds — as well as by what the present occupants don’t regard as any of their business.

The lesson has relevance to much more than pandemic management. Is it any wonder that people are looking to state governments to protect them, and turning to nutters on the web for health advice? •

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When he asked for highly classified cables on Syria in order to prepare a brief on a prospective Allied intervention, he was brought a file on Tasmania. As he recounted, the clerk “could not find Syria in the index of files but one of the boys told her later it was a town in Tasmania so that is where she put it.” These experiences made Hasluck an expert witness to the fragility of the archival record when he came to write an official history of Australia at war.

I was reminded of this account when Senator Amanda Stoker recently dismissed concerns about the state of the National Archives of Australia. “Time marches on and all sources degrade over time,” she remarked breezily. That response to a question in a Senate committee hearing has provoked much discussion about the value of the archives to the “nation’s memory.”

“Help save the nation’s memory before it’s too late” has been the plaintive cry of the National Archives itself in its appeal for public donations. A vigorous campaign by Gideon Haigh and Graeme Davison gathered 150 signatories to a public letter to the prime minister that led to a belated emergency grant of $67 million to preserve and digitise records at risk. Whether that will be enough to extend the life of the rest of the repository is a question hanging over this major national institution.

Most of the public campaign advocating preservation highlighted the place of the National Archives in a nation’s memory, a place that may be mined for personal stories as well as stories crafted into national narratives. But the National Archives matters at another level — and that is for government itself, for its quality, its accountability, and its capacity to respond to questions about past actions that may have present consequences and incur future liabilities. The keeping of records and access to them, as Haigh has put it, “is fundamental to the protection of citizens and the prevention of harm.”

Paul Hasluck came into public service — becoming official historian, senior minister in the Menzies government and eventually governor-general — from a background in journalism. He knew how to write a good story, and he knew the importance of good sources.

In 1942 he published Black Australians, the first serious history of Aboriginal policy in Australia, in which he recovered from the fledgling archives the inside story of how early colonial governors decided the fate of Aborigines in his home state of Western Australia. His experience in wartime government administration, and his skills in researching those ill-kept files made him a gifted practitioner of public history in his two volumes of the Australian official war history, The Government and the People. Hasluck knew about archives and their preservation mattered deeply to him.

How does a government know its people? And how does a people know its government? How does a government account for actions that in later times may be questioned, even to the point of imposing new obligations? Over recent decades numerous inquiries into matters that have become socially and politically contentious have shown us why these questions matter. They have shown us why archives matter, not just to a nation’s memory but to a nation’s governance.

Take the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987–91), for example, where identifying the “underlying conditions” that resulted in disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous peoples demanded extensive probing, frequently hampered by poor record-keeping and lost records.

Or the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse (2013–17), where the condition and accessibility of public and private records became central to calculating harms done and responsibilities incurred.

Or the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia (1985), which investigated the conditions under which nuclear tests were conducted in the 1950s in order to establish a basis for seeking British compensation for damage little understood at the time of the tests.

Or the Menzies review of suspected war criminals’ entry to Australia (1986) — and later Commonwealth agency inquiries on this subject — which required painstaking scrutiny of security and immigration records to determine whether the federal government had acted in line with its international and domestic legal obligations.

Or the Bringing Them Home report of the Australian Human Rights Commission (1997), which drew on personal testimony and public records to reveal the sorry story of removals of Indigenous children and their intergenerational consequences.

Or the Senate inquiry into the “forgotten Australians” (2003–04), which investigated the history and consequences of institutional care and child migration to Australia in the postwar years.

This is but a small sample of how government actions in one era became cause for government inquiry in another. In each case, researchers drew on surviving records in many media, and on personal testimony where it was still available, to establish historical liability retrospectively.

This purpose — a government that is accountable and responsible — is one reason why we need excellent archives, and the best conditions for keeping them expertly curated and accessible. The National Archives of Australia is not an optional extra; it is a necessary pillar not only of a healthy culture but also of good government. •

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The countries that ignored these principles were the ones that proved ill-equipped to respond to the enormous challenge of the pandemic. As the political scientist Ivan Krastev writes in this new book about the pandemic, just as Covid-19 is “particularly dangerous for those individuals with ‘pre-existing conditions,’” so too has it created more havoc in political systems already suffering from important dysfunctions.

Populism was a key ingredient. As the historian Michael Burleigh notes in another recent book, Populism: Before and After the Pandemic, on the eve of the pandemic populist parties were supported by roughly a quarter of Europeans, and populist parties formed part of one-in-three European governments (and held sole power in two, Hungary and Poland). Elsewhere, two populist-style leaders, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, were reshaping their countries’ political agendas and conventions.

Where populist influences were strongest, governments tended to respond least well to the pandemic. The association is far from perfect, and other influences, including geography, luck and the strength of healthcare systems, naturally played some part. But many populist leaders — America’s Trump, Britain’s Johnson, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, India’s Narendra Modi — had bad pandemics.

Most of them met the pandemic with “magical thinking, cowardly blame-shifting and a weirdly dazed immobility,” says Krastev. Their failure to respond effectively derived from a preference for loyalty over competence, their dislike of independent advice, and their inability to cope with, or even recognise, the complexity of government.

“Flashy stunts by men of action” needed to give way to “slow and laborious efforts by anonymous professionals,” says Krastev. The premium on evidence and careful investigation didn’t play to populists’ strengths.

Even before the pandemic, the evidence showed that populist politicians were more successful at mobilising resentment than ameliorating the grievances that fed their support. Steve Bannon, an architect of Trump’s election campaign, and Dominic Cummings, chief strategist of the Brexit campaign and of Johnson’s ascent to the prime ministership (described by former prime minister David Cameron as a “career psychopath”), were both gone within a year, unable to cope with the discipline of governing.

The one variety of populist sentiment that was almost certainly strengthened by the pandemic was opposition to globalisation. The first instinct in a pandemic, and the most basic response, is to shut borders and reduce physical mobility. In Australia and elsewhere, governments that did so were largely rewarded by public approval. (An exception may be the Australian government’s more recent decision to stop citizens returning home from India. Homing instincts seem strong during pandemics: Krastev says that more than 200,000 Bulgarians, including him and his family, returned to their home country after the outbreak.)

Yet in other ways the pandemic has highlighted the strengths of globalisation. As Krastev points out, the 1918–19 Spanish flu “was a global event but people did not remember it as one, because the idea of a common world had collapsed during the long years of war.” In 2020, by contrast, leaders in every country knew the pandemic was a global issue and the coordinated efforts of scientists around the world — with data and insights flowing across national borders — would be the key to success.

Although the immediate and urgent tasks facing government were the antithesis of populist priorities, such an unprecedented and threatening event was ripe for conspiracy theories: that the pandemic was a hoax; that the virus had been deliberately created by the Chinese. It didn’t take long for an experienced populist like France’s far-right Marine Le Pen to assimilate the new reality into familiar themes: as Michael Burleigh notes, she blamed a lab in Wuhan for engineering the virus and the mosques for spreading it.

The biggest controversies centred on lockdown as a means of containing the virus. Critics of lockdowns wanted to let the virus spread until herd immunity was achieved, ignoring the fact that herd immunity has never been achieved in the contemporary world without near-universal vaccination. The deaths associated with seeking pre-vaccine herd immunity would have been far too great to contemplate, electorally or on humanitarian grounds, in most democratic countries.

Although Australian governments never came close to adopting such a strategy, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen reveal in their new book, How Good Is Scott Morrison?, that Peter Dutton urged it in the privacy of the cabinet room, while Josh Frydenberg referred to Donald Trump’s “interesting experiment.”

The advocates of herd immunity seemed the antithesis of populist demagogues. They prided themselves on their tough-mindedness, and their willingness to contemplate unwelcome realities and to weigh costs and benefits without being squeamish. But they shared with populists a dogmatic style and a belief that government action is typically futile. Some seemed to think that any active government role would always be worse than the disease. (“No wonder many feel we are heading on a path more dangerous than a virus,” mused the Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen.) And they often seemed immune to counterevidence.

Such evidence was freely available by early this year. For most of last year, while its neighbours adopted lockdowns of various durations, Sweden followed a herd immunity strategy. It had by far the highest death rate in its neighbourhood — 1368 per million population compared with Denmark’s 425, Finland’s 163 and Norway’s 135.

And Sweden also did slightly worse economically. The absence of a lockdown strategy not only led to a much higher death toll but also had no compensating economic benefits.

The US administration’s response, meanwhile, lacked even the coherence of herd immunity. Donald Trump lurched between promising it was all about to end, promoting quack cures, blaming China, blame-shifting to the Democrats, and trying to ignore the problem. It is hard to remember a more dysfunctional response to a crisis by the leader of a major nation.

Not surprisingly, opinion surveys in the United States showed strong partisan differences. The best data came from polls conducted regularly by the Pew Research Center with very large samples of around 10,000 respondents. In its February 2021 survey, 30 per cent of respondents said they would not get a vaccination, down from a peak of 49 per cent the previous September. But the partisan divide had become larger: Democrats were twenty-seven percentage points more likely than Republicans (83 to 56 per cent) to say they had been, or planned to be, vaccinated.

A parallel trend was evident in views about the impact of science on society. The percentage of Democrats who think the impact of science on society has been mostly positive remained stable at around 78 per cent. Among Republicans the figure declined from 70 to 57 per cent. These figures reinforce the impression that the pandemic did little to reduce polarisation among Americans.

But other signs suggest the centre of political gravity might have moved somewhat. “Covid-19 has impelled people to reassess the role of government in their lives,” declares Krastev, perhaps too optimistically. The dominant sentiment in Western democracies in recent decades has been towards smaller government. It was best expressed by the great simplifier, Ronald Reagan: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

The evidence in support of Krastev’s proposition is slight but suggestive. Gallup has been asking Americans since 1992 whether they agree with people who think the government “is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses” or with those who think government “should do more to solve our country’s problems.” On only two occasions have more respondents held the second position: after the 9/11 attacks and in August 2020. Under-thirty-fives hold the second view two to one.

Another sign of change, although it is not clear how long it will last, emerges when people are asked about their trust in government. Krastev thinks that a society’s trust in government was crucial to how well their containment strategies worked. “China, Singapore, and South Korea have quite different political regimes,” he writes, but “all three are in the top ten countries in the world when it comes to public trust in government.” In authoritarian Iran and democratic Italy, on the other hand, “the public’s low trust in their institutions has made the introduction of social distancing more problematic.”

In Australia, the Scanlon Foundation’s 2009 Mapping Social Cohesion report found that almost half of respondents trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time or almost always. Over the next several years the figure was just under a third, but in November 2020 it leapt to 54 per cent.

Faced with an urgent problem, many people suspended their usual distaste for politics. But will this lead to lasting change?

The short answer to the question posed in Ivan Krastev’s title, Is It Tomorrow Yet?, is no. Ever since the pandemic started spreading exponentially in early 2020, people have been looking forward to its end. It is still too early to forecast when and how the world will move on. The tragedy in India is a reminder of how contagious and adaptive the virus is, and the suddenness of its onset is a warning against assuming no more shocks are still to come.

The pandemic may have changed attitudes to government, may have increased respect for expertise, and may lead to more constructive political debate. Then again, many of the reasons usually given for the rise of populism — the rapidity of change, the insecurities of globalism, provincial resentments against major metropolises, hostility to out-groups, the hypocrisies of elites — are very likely to continue. The pandemic hit a body politic that was struggling with deep problems and intractable conflicts. Its toll is a sharp reminder that flawed political processes have real-world consequences. •

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The former governor-general, by this time living in his European exile, wanted the copy to help him write his memoir, Matters for Judgement, which he hoped would vindicate his role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government and make him a lot of money. Family members later deposited that copy in the National Archives and, under the instrument of deposit they signed, made the letters available to researchers in 2005.

Meanwhile, the Archives had ruled that its own Palace Letters were “personal,” and therefore not ordinary Commonwealth records subject to the Archives Act. Until a court overturned this ruling — as the High Court of Australia would eventually do in a 6–1 decision in May last year — the letters would be closed to researchers for many years, if not indefinitely.

Here was the delicious conundrum: if the Archives’ ruling that the original set of letters was “personal” — a ruling designed to prevent access for researchers — were followed to its logical conclusion, then access to Kerr’s copy of the correspondence, also deemed personal, would be in the hands of the family.

When the Archives finally produced the documents covering the deposit of the copy, Jenny Hocking and her lawyers, who brought the Palace Letters case to court, had growing confidence in the likelihood of success. Their mistake might have been to underestimate the challenge of fighting someone who gets to change the rules after the game has begun.

Even as the litigation was in progress, the Archives was quietly renegotiating the instrument of deposit with Kerr’s stepdaughter. Under the new conditions, the letters were to remain closed for fifty years after the end of Kerr’s appointment as governor-general — until December 2027, that is — and their release would then be subject to the approval of Buckingham Palace and Yarralumla.

This is how a “pro-disclosure” organisation, as its director-general David Fricker likes to call the National Archives, does its business. In her account of the Palace Letters case, Hocking justly calls the actions “devious, artful, and devastatingly effective.” At one point, Hocking reports Fricker’s complaining to her of the money he was burning up to fight to withhold the letters: “It’s really eating into my budget.”

Fricker is now out and about calling for an injection of government money to digitise a large collection of at-risk records, especially photographs, films and audiovisual materials. The case that the Australian community will lose a significant trove of its cultural heritage if this material is permitted to deteriorate any further is unassailable. The problem was also highlighted in a review of the Archives completed by former public servant David Tune in January 2020.

Even allowing for a pandemic, the fact that it took the federal government until March 2021 to release the review, and only then under pressure from the media and a barrage of freedom of information requests from Senator Rex Patrick, does little to inspire confidence in any early boost to funding, although we all live in hope. While the philosophy of government funding for the Australian War Memorial is perhaps best summed up by Matthew 7:7 — “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” — Canberra’s other national cultural institutions are less fortunately placed. Amanda Stoker, the responsible minister, greeted the review with the news that the government “would not be rushed.”

The Tune review dealt with plenty of other matters, too. Much of its report is devoted to examining how to achieve a “whole-of-government” approach to records and archives, including the massive volume of digital records now being generated. It recommends a greatly expanded presence for the National Archives inside the individual agencies themselves.

Historians, though, were more likely to turn to that part of the report concerned with access. Their longstanding grievance has been the excessive amount of time the National Archives takes to clear documents more than twenty years old, which are available, in principle, to researchers. There are various grounds for withholding documents, yet all but a small minority are released in full or in part (that is, with some redactions) once they have been examined. But that can be slow. To take one example from my own experience: it was only on 3 October 2019 that I received notification of a decision on a foreign affairs file I had requested in 2014 in the process of researching a book I published in 2015. Even after five years, the process was not yet complete; I was also informed that “there is information on this item that remains withheld pending advice from another agency on whether it remains sensitive.”

The Archives routinely refers records to the originating agencies for advice about whether a file should be released and, if so, whether it should be issued in part or full. Without any apparent sense of irony, the notification also informed me that “Archives has processes in place to ensure that items are examined as efficiently as possible. Most examination is completed within ninety days” but “it can take longer than the statutory ninety days if information in an item needs to be referred to another agency for advice.”

Part of the Archives’ modus operandi when confronted with these failures has been to point to the problem posed by a small number of researchers requesting a very large number of files. But I have always found this argument too reminiscent of the grade three schoolteacher who regrets that the class will not be allowed any playtime because a group of naughty children up the back is spoiling things for the rest.

In fact, the figures provided in the Tune review paint a more nuanced picture. It is true that among the Archives’ backlog of 22,000 requests are four applicants who have requested more than 1000 files each. But other figures are more interesting. Sixteen applicants have requested between one hundred and 999, and another seventy between twenty-five and ninety-nine. These numbers seem to me indicative of researchers — many of them historians — simply doing their job (or, rather, trying to do their job). The online description of a record often gives a poor indication of its contents, so researchers must sometimes consult many files before finding what they want. A project substantially dependent on the Archives could well run to several hundred requests. In any case, just over 1300 applicants in the backlog are requesting fewer than one hundred files each.

When I sat on the Canberra consultative committee of the National Archives, I received many complaints from researchers who had hit a roadblock. I recall one academic who had decided to take a research trip to Japan because many of the records the National Archives had not yet permitted him to see were freely available there. Another, who was writing a doctoral thesis substantially dependent on National Archives material, eventually took the Archives to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, but even that didn’t seem to work. His local member, Malcolm Turnbull, did his best to help out.

I left the committee because it didn’t seem the best way for key interest groups to influence the Archives’ policies — I was representing the Australian Historical Association — and after several years I had tired of the twice-yearly delivery of the bad news about the backlog of requests. It’s also notable that the much more significant Archives Advisory Council doesn’t include a single university-based historian. The council is supposed to have thirteen members, but currently has only ten. Its numbers were recently reduced by one with the departure overseas of News Corp journalist Adam Creighton, well known for his pandemic commentary in the Australian and on Twitter.

The Archives Act was a model of its kind when it passed in 1983 — an admirable contribution to Australia’s administrative law that played a big part in the exponential increase in our understanding of the nation’s twentieth-century history. Today, by way of contrast, its operations are a barrier to research across a vast domain of our modern history. Even if your file has been cleared for research, you need to allow five business days between ordering it and receiving it in the Archives’ reading room.

There is a feeling among researchers that while the Archives definitely needs much more money, it also needs to do better itself. •

The post The wait of history appeared first on Inside Story.

The story begins with the Rizhao-based Landbridge Group’s successful bid for a ninety-nine-year lease of the Port of Darwin in 2015, which prompted soul-searching in Canberra about how best to protect strategic assets from the large sums of Chinese cash sloshing around international markets. The result was a set of new laws and procedures to regulate investments by companies owned or controlled by foreign governments (China is never mentioned by name). And those laws came with what seemed like a minor footnote — an enforceable public register for lobbyists — that began throwing fresh light on Australia’s underregulated lobbying industry.

Since 10 December 2018, anyone lobbying Australian officials on behalf of a foreign government or a company controlled by a foreign government — and almost all Chinese companies are likely to fall into that second category — must sign up to the Transparency Register. Failure to fill out the form comes at a significant price: violations of the 2018 Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act can lead to prison terms of up to five years, depending on the seriousness of the omission. Landbridge’s high-profile Australian consultant, former trade minister Andrew Robb, reportedly ended his association with the Chinese company during the new legislation’s grace period.

Because the legislation applies only to what it calls “foreign principals,” the Transparency Register illuminates a very narrow subsection of the lobbying industry. Lobbyists representing Australian businesses or foreign companies that aren’t government owned or controlled are still free to ply their trade without having to worry too much about the separate but much weaker Australian Government Lobbyist Register, which was established under the 2008 Lobbying Code of Conduct.

Even so, the Transparency Register represents progress for a country that has a comparatively weak record of transparency — a record compounded by the inadequacies of Australia’s freedom of information laws and the absence of rules to prevent officials from moving freely between government and private enterprise. By contrast, the US Lobbying Disclosure Act forces all lobbyists to sign up to a public register or face a fine or a jail sentence of up to five years.

But for those with the time and inclination, a delve into the Transparency Register does offer real insights into how “foreign principals” target government ministers and MPs. It tells us, for example, that former foreign minister Alexander Downer is registered as a lobbyist on behalf of the British overseas territory of Gibraltar now that Britain has taken back control of trade negotiations from Brussels. It also tells us that Sanlaan, the firm of Howard government minister Santo Santoro, has engaged in “general political lobbying” and “parliamentary lobbying” for the Port of Brisbane, partly owned by a Canadian superannuation fund backed by the provincial government of Québec, and has also worked for Beijing Jingneng Clean Energy (Australia) and other Chinese renewable energy companies.

Other celebrity lobbying figures on the Transparency Register include one Anthony John Abbott, who declares that he is an “unpaid adviser to the UK Board of Trade” with the role of “advocat[ing] for free and fair trade, especially trade with the UK and its allies.” In other words, the former PM will be lobbying his former colleagues in Australia to help bring about a trade deal that British prime minister Boris Johnson desperately needs as part of his post-Brexit narrative.

Abbott’s decision to register is controversial because he once described calls for him to sign up as a result of a gig speaking to foreign conservative leaders as “absurd.” He also warned journalists “to rethink the making of such misplaced and impertinent requests in the future.”

Kevin Rudd, another former prime minister, has made his dissatisfaction with the law’s lack of clarity publicly known via an essay in his Transparency Register entry describing the uncertainty about whether he needed to register. Rudd lists all the government-owned foreign media outlets he has appeared on — from the BBC to the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation and Radio New Zealand — because they are state-owned and, he argues mischievously, may fall within the law’s current wording. He says that requiring a former prime minister to list his media appearances, as well as unpaid speeches to the European Parliament and the National University of Singapore, amounts to an absurd interpretation of the law, albeit one that he has been forced to accept.

More importantly, though, while the Transparency Register may reveal that Kevin Rudd isn’t above appearing on Canada’s TVOntario, the information he provided is still insufficient to allow the public to join the dots. We may know that Alexander Downer is lobbying for the Gibraltarians, but we don’t know whom he has spoken to and the matters being discussed. That information is key for anyone trying to establish a connection between lobbying efforts and government decisions. What’s more, the Transparency Register offers no insight into the activities of companies that aren’t owned or controlled by foreign states.

What these cases highlight is that Australia’s transparency system doesn’t stand up well internationally. If you type the name of Chinese technology giant Huawei into the search engine of Ireland’s lobbying register, for example, you will find a list of meetings held by the company and an explanation of the matters discussed. On 17 January, Huawei disclosed that it had met Heather Humphreys, an Irish minister, to discuss “the investment of €70 million in Irish R&D and the creation of 100 new jobs.” That’s marketing spin, to be sure, but when added to previous entries it’s clear Huawei was lobbying to play a part in the country’s rollout of new 5G technology. We also know that the company was in touch with the government via PR and lobbying firms, whose telephone numbers and email addresses the Irish register helpfully includes.

That’s not to say that Ireland’s transparency regime has all been smooth sailing. I was working in Europe when the register took effect, and an Irish lobbyist told me that when he saw a local politician at the supermarket at the weekend he would turn the other way to avoid having to spend his Monday morning filling out disclosure forms. What’s more, the administrative burden of such transparency requirements tends to fall more heavily on small community groups. Extensive and probably time-consuming entries in the register tell us, for instance, that the charitable Irish Guard Dogs for the Blind organisation has been in regular contact with the Irish government.

Australia’s Transparency Register tells us, for example, that between March and December 2019 former defence minister Brendan Nelson took on a role with the Thales Group, the publicly listed, Paris-based company that provides technology for military, aerospace and transport projects. But whom did Nelson speak to on behalf of Thales? And what did they discuss? The register doesn’t offer any answers and the arrangement was only picked up because of the French state’s 25 per cent ownership of Thales.

The parallel Lobbyist Register, which lists third parties but not direct contact from company managers, doesn’t mention either Thales or Brendan Nelson. As for the network of state-based transparency registers, Thales only appears in New South Wales, where it’s represented by a firm listed as Lyndon George, co-owned by a former senior adviser to John Howard, Hellen Georgopoulos. None of this information sheds light on what Thales got out of its relationship with Nelson and how his work may have affected government.

This leaves freedom of information requests as the only fallback, and here the frustrations multiply. Several years ago, I heard that US software company Oracle had met with officials at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to brief them on privacy concerns surrounding Google. We know that Oracle had been fighting the search giant in a US court for over a decade, but what was said in those meetings? Neither the ACCC nor the OAIC revealed whom they spoke to as part of their investigations, and Oracle wasn’t talking either.

Even if the foreign-lobbying laws had applied back in 2017, they wouldn’t have picked up these meetings because Oracle isn’t owned or controlled by a foreign government. The more general Lobbying Register would not have been much use either, because it only includes “third party” lobbying firms rather than direct contact between the company and state officials. And unlike, say, the European Union’s competition commissioner, the ACCC doesn’t publish daily lists of meetings attended by its top officials, making cross-referencing impossible.

I made a freedom of information request to both the ACCC and the OAIC that yielded correspondence confirming the meetings had taken place but little about what had been discussed. The central slideshow presentation made by the visiting Americans couldn’t be released, I was told, because the company had objected. Almost two years after I had filed my FOI request, an Administrative Appeals decision produced the full slide show, which laid out what became the ACCC’s consumer-law court action against Google over the data collected by its Android devices.

That’s not to say there was a causal link between the two — the ACCC may well have been planning the enforcement action anyway. Transparency is simply designed to let the public know who is being lobbied by whom, and about what. A two-year wait for documents frustrates and ultimately derails any attempt to understand how lobbying unfolds.

The Transparency Register came into being as part of Australia’s revamp of foreign investment and security policies after the Port of Darwin controversy. The sweeping changes included tougher rules for foreign investment, a new agricultural land register, and the creation of the Critical Infrastructure Centre, which would draw a line in the sand for foreign government–backed companies looking to invest in Australia. New laws also awarded the government the power to veto significant investment plans signed by Australian states and territories involving foreign companies owned or controlled by foreign governments — the same laws that last week dismantled Victoria’s Belt and Road deal with China and may now be used to unwind Landbridge’s control of Darwin’s port.

These rule changes also revealed fissures between Treasury, traditionally supportive of foreign investment, and a home affairs department preoccupied with espionage and the security implications of Chinese control of key infrastructure. Until now, the Foreign Investment Review Board has assessed foreign takeover bids and the treasurer has had the final say. But the new Critical Infrastructure Centre is part of home affairs and its focus is rooted in security concerns rather than economic considerations.

Chinese control of Darwin’s port may indeed raise espionage concerns — this is the criticism that was levelled in 2015 by former US secretary of state Richard Armitage, who was concerned about the movements of US navy ships being monitored by the Chinese-run operation. And Canberra’s August 2018 decision to exclude Huawei and fellow Chinese telecommunications company ZTE from the 5G rollout could also be justified on those grounds.

But stopping Chinese companies from owning gas pipelines or agricultural land remains highly controversial. Some observers question the fear that China could turn the tap on a domestic Australian pipeline during a conflict or export food from Australian farms without Canberra’s consent. Yet the Critical Infrastructure Centre’s job description is indeed to list “those physical facilities, supply chains, information technologies and communication networks which, if destroyed, degraded or rendered unavailable for an extended period, would significantly impact the social or economic wellbeing of the nation” — a definition that shoehorns the home affairs minister into a Treasury-based decision-making process.

But perhaps the Treasury and home affairs perspectives were already converging. In November 2018 treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced he would block the $13 billion acquisition of APA Group, Australia’s largest natural-gas infrastructure business, by a consortium led by Hong Kong’s CK Infrastructure. Treasury already appeared to be falling into line with home affairs — a shift that had arguably been on the cards since former ASIO head David Irvine was appointed to run the Foreign Investment Review Board.

Of course, the push for greater transparency in foreign lobbying doesn’t appear to have been motivated by a broader interest in aligning Australia’s lobbying rules with the United States or some European countries. In fact, you could argue that the erosion of funding for the OAIC, which attempts to oversee freedom of information, and the government’s unwillingness to release unredacted documents continue to tarnish Australia’s international reputation.

Nonetheless, as a map of foreign political lobbying in Australia by foreign companies, the Transparency Register is an important tool. It also provides a blueprint for an expanded and legally enforceable lobbying register that could shed important light on what takes place behind Australia’s closed doors. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The predicament can be traced back to the government’s outbreak of self-congratulation after keeping infections so low. Hastening vaccinations was unnecessary, we were told, and there were advantages in learning more about the vaccines as they were administered in countries that didn’t have the luxury of waiting.

This was a risky strategy, as was the decision to rely so heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine. The risk was compounded by the federal government’s decision to take the leading role in the vaccination program. Giving the states the primary responsibility for dealing with the spread of Covid-19 had made sense: they manage the hospitals and they alone had the constitutional authority to enforce a lockdown; and they would also wear the blame for mishaps and incur resentment at the restrictions. But it turned out that even the most vehemently parochial premier reaped electoral advantage from the lockdown while the Commonwealth, which paid the bills, was given little credit. This time it would take the lead.

But how? The federal government administers Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. It controls private medical insurance, subsidises aged care and supports research through the National Health and Medical Research Council. It also regulates medicines through the Therapeutic Goods Administration and buys the vaccines for the national immunisation program. But none of these activities involves treating patients, and the Commonwealth has never had the clinical expertise to undertake a mass immunisation program.

Undaunted, Scott Morrison declared that his government would procure, store and distribute vaccines and itself vaccinate “frontline” staff in quarantine and border control as well as aged care residents and their carers. To this end the health department engaged logistics companies and private health providers. The states, for their part, were to provide the clinics and health workers for the general vaccination program.

Problems quickly became apparent. Several vaccines due to arrive in the first half of 2021 were held up or, in the case of the one developed by the University of Queensland, required further work. The European Union restricted exports of AstraZeneca and the timetable for mass production by CSL proved unrealistic. Australia was to have administered four million doses by the end of March but had received just 1.57 million. Distribution to clinics was mismanaged, general practitioners left high and dry. Many aged care centres are still waiting.

The Commonwealth took on a further responsibility: it would provide “timely, transparent and credible information” on the progress of the vaccination program. From the outset it failed to do so. Each setback was dismissed with assurances that the timetable would be met. All questions were brushed aside with an airy confidence that all was well. “Our approach is to under-promise and over-deliver,” boasted health minister Greg Hunt at the end of last year.

A popular explanation for this debacle is that it confirms the federal government’s incapacity to undertake essential services. The prime minister’s explanation for his absence on holiday during the bushfire emergency of December 2019 — “I don’t hold the hose” — was widely criticised as a glib repudiation of personal responsibility, but no Commonwealth agency (apart from the army) has ever held a hose. The states have always been the providers of education, health, transport, utilities and other principal public services, and they accordingly have expertise in conducting such large undertakings.

As Centrelink’s robodebt scheme revealed, the Commonwealth’s record in administering its own programs is poor, and the Hayne royal commission criticised its failure to competently regulate the financial system. The aged care sector has been dogged by scandals going back more than twenty years to Bronwyn Bishop’s kerosene baths. The record in large national projects — the National Broadband Network, Building the Education Revolution and the National Disability Insurance Scheme among them — is little better.

One well-known casualty was the Rudd government’s home insulation program, abandoned in early 2010 after four deaths occurred among those installing foil-lined insulation and pink batts. The program was handicapped from the beginning, hastily conceived and relying on contractors who cut corners. Even so, I recall my amazement at what quickly became the conventional wisdom: that the problems were entirely predictable since the Commonwealth was incapable of conducting major projects. My mind went back to the introduction of wartime rationing in 1942, devised and implemented with remarkable success in just three months, and the Commonwealth’s central role in the country’s largest construction project, the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme, in the 1950s.

In little more than a decade the Australian Public Service has been subjected to a score of reviews. The purpose of the most recent major report, Our Public Service, Our Future, which was published in 2019, was to “identify an ambitious program of transformational reforms to ensure the APS is fit for purpose.”

Throughout the report, the guiding assumption that Australia and its public service stood on the threshold of unprecedented change finds breathless corroboration. While “not broken,” the public service is “at a watershed,” presented with “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to prepare for a “new era” and a “different world.” On closer inspection, this apocalyptic diagnosis rests on little more than the changes brought about by new digital platforms and interconnectivity. The problem with such technological determinism is that the history of communications is replete with technological change. On what basis is the latest judged so momentous?

An inattention to history is a feature of public policy reviews. Their frame of analysis prescribes what is to be done rather than engages with what actually happened.

A very brief passage in Our Public Service, Our Future identifies just two eras in the Australian Public Service over the past seventy years. The first, which lasted to the 1970s, was “one of public service pre-eminence — a powerful, centralised and hierarchical organisation” that exercised inordinate influence. That’s true, though the APS had almost no policy capacity until the second world war, and the powerful influence of the original mandarins didn’t extend to all departments. As territories minister throughout the 1950s, Paul Hasluck forbade his officers from making any recommendations.

The second era saw a new public management philosophy distinguished by decentralisation, program budgets, an emphasis on efficiency and performance management, rigour in program and policy evaluation, and much greater responsiveness to ministers. This new orientation is credited with enabling the reforms made by the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments.

Why, then, the need for change? The short answer is that shortcomings become apparent in any established paradigm as the world changes. What shortcomings? The report’s authors mention the depletion of expertise as a cumulative effect of the government’s efficiency dividend, the proliferation of contractors and consultants, and the continued growth of ministerial advisers. They observe that no other country with a Westminster system of responsible government allows the prime minister unfettered discretion in the appointment and termination of departmental heads.

They also note that many of the recommendations have been made in successive earlier reviews. This surely should have prompted questions. Did the government fail to accept those recommendations? Or did they turn out to be impractical or ineffective? What reason is there to think that this time they will do the trick? To ignore these question is to reinforce failure. Let’s hope those who devised our vaccination program will recognise the risk of ignoring them again. •

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The pandemic has posed immense tests for governments and political leaders everywhere, and many have failed them. Sharp divisions have opened in many countries over mishandled responses. Decades-long trends of declining confidence in government have accelerated as Covid-linked tolls of death and illness have grown, spreading feelings of loss, fear, insecurity and frustration.

The recently released 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer reported that dissatisfaction with governments — especially in the English-speaking democracies — has risen steadily over the past twenty-five years. Australia was listed as one of the countries in which the trust deficit had grown most.

The finding was consistent with the ANU’s 2019 Australian Election Study, which found that public trust in government was at its lowest point in forty years. Just 25 per cent of respondents indicated that they trusted the government to do the right thing at the right time, a decline of almost half since 2007.

“Across Australia trust in our democracy is on the decline,” the Museum of Australian Democracy’s first Democracy 2025 report warns. “Trust is the glue that facilitates collective action for mutual benefit. Without trust we don’t have the ability to address complex, long-term challenges.”

Since Covid-19 arrived, though, Australia’s story has diverged not only from past trends but also from views across much of the world. The Scanlon Foundation’s most recent Mapping Social Cohesion survey reports that trust in government in Australia rose 54 per cent during 2020 — the highest rate since the survey began in 2007. More than 70 per cent of respondents said the system of government in Australia was working fine, or only needed minor changes.

The reason is obvious. The outstanding success of Australia’s Covid-19 response was politically transformative. Australia’s current mortality rate from Covid — 3.6 per 100,000 population — is lower than all developed countries except New Zealand (where Jacinda Ardern’s government won a landslide election in October). Rates in Britain and the United States, by contrast — at 190 and 165 per 100,000 respectively — are many times greater.

Approval ratings for governments and their leaders in Australia soared in proportion to their Covid success — as reflected in election results in Queensland as well as Western Australia. As the Scanlon Foundation concludes, “The key to the positive findings obtained in the survey appears to be the level of satisfaction with government, the widely held view that effective leadership is being provided in the time of crisis, including financial support to those who have lost their jobs and those whose businesses have been impacted.”

Dramatically lower infection and death rates in Australia, combined with a relatively rapid revival of economic activity after massive government spending, converted political leaders into saviours. The long decline of Australian political discourse into partisan bickering and conflict suddenly halted.

Scott Morrison’s decision to establish a national cabinet in which Covid policy was developed in coordination across all Australian governments was transformative. Australians, used to seeing important national issues bogged down in brawling and grandstanding at meetings of the Council of Australian Governments, suddenly witnessed fruitful intergovernmental relationships. Consensus, compromise and cooperation resulted in lightning-speed decision-making and policy implementation. Old ideological battlelines melted away.

It seemed that the consensus, multi-level government decision-making that had been almost impossible before was now dead easy. Trust between leaders and their governments working together in national cabinet created a new vision of what was possible. Voters’ confidence in the machinery of democracy soared. We were witnessing a new dawn.

Or was it just a moment of sunshine?

If the Covid-caused transformation in political attitudes offered hope of real change, what are we to make of increasingly loud warnings that the coming debates about the challenges ahead are likely to plunge us back into the ideological and partisan conflicts that frustrated national progress and disillusioned voters in the pre-Covid years?

For a new Monash University Publishing project, “In the National Interest,” prominent Australians have been invited to contribute essays about challenges facing Australia in the post-Covid era. Each of the essays is being published as a short book; taken together, they add up to a daunting range of problems confronting policymakers and the political system.

Ideally, these discussions could harness the surge in trust in politics for a new age of reform in Australia. In this new phase, we would not return to the long years of partisanship and the divisive cultural wars that hogtied the reform process after the Howard government’s tax changes early in the century.

The bitter and divisive debates about immigration, multiculturalism and identity unleashed by the emergence of Hansonism, seen as a reaction against the pace of change in the 1980s and 1990s, drove deep and painful wedges into Australian society that have resulted in a lost era of progress and a failure to adjust to a world fast changing around us. Southeast Asia’s growth in economic power and sophistication has created great opportunities for Australia, but also poses grave dangers if we fail to keep up.

In fact, Australia is already failing to keep up. In the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, which compares the performance of students at fifteen years of age, Australia has dropped fourteen places to twenty-ninth in the ranking for maths. Transparency International has reported an increased perception of corruption in Australia. In his new book, Reset: Restoring Australia after the Great Crash of 2020, economist Ross Garnaut points out that in the eight years between 2013 and 2021 — a period he calls “the dog days” — virtually no increase in household disposable income was recorded (a problem Australia is not alone in suffering).

And on climate change, the 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranks Australia near the bottom. Scientists have warned that unless this country dramatically increases its policy ambition very soon, it will need to increase its effort tenfold in the twenty years from 2030 to meet the global target of zero emissions by 2050.

Each of the contributors to the “In the National Interest” series was invited to “make the case” for reform in areas where they had particular knowledge. The list of concerns is long. Some — particularly in Rachel Doyle’s Power & Consent, a powerful essay on the plague of sexual harassment — are urgently topical.

The four written from the perspective of having been at the centre of Canberra power — Kevin Rudd and Scott Ryan as politicians, and Martin Parkinson and Don Russell as advisers to prime ministers and heads of powerful government departments — present different perspectives on the same problems. But taken together, they outline an agenda for change that is not only daunting in itself but also a particular challenge for our political system.

Rudd opens his book, The Case for Courage, with the following statement: “Over much of the last decade, Australia’s democracy has been slowly sliding into disrepair and despair. Our major national policy challenges go unaddressed.” Warming to his theme, he sees little prospect of change while “the cancer on our democracy that is the Murdoch media monopoly” remains — and hence the need for urgent reform of media ownership laws as a prerequisite to adopting a bold reform agenda.

In Challenging Politics, Ryan warns that an essential piece of our political system — the art of compromise — is in trouble in the new age of social media and political tribalisation. “If we don’t find a way to re-enliven it, we will face deepening gridlock.”

In A Decade of Drift, Parkinson says that what he calls “the collapse of the political centre” over the seventeen years since the 2007 election has left Australia incapable of making vital decisions. As a result, Australians risk being consigned to “declining relative living standards” and “unable to grasp the opportunities provided by living in the most dynamic and exciting part of the world.”

In his contribution to the series, Leadership, Russell reflects on the difference between his experience working with Paul Keating during the great reform era of the eighties and early nineties and the current levels of frustration and disengagement in Australia. But he sees hope in the way the nation responded to the Covid crisis — as it did to the May 1986 “banana republic” crisis, he says. The unprecedented step of creating a national cabinet and the adoption by governments of a “problem-solving approach, not an ideological one” resulted in a quite remarkable acceptance by the community of lockdowns and other protective measures. “This was a complete break with Australia’s recent attitude to government,” says Russell.

The experience of the past year poses an obvious question: can the sense of shared responsibility be applied to the task of ensuring the future health and prosperity of the nation?

The Covid-induced pause in politics-as-usual certainly offered the chance to reflect on the failures of politics and policy during a decade in which the revolving door of political leadership spun six prime ministers in and out. As these books make clear, the backlog of unfinished and uncommenced policy work means there is much to be done.

Beyond the immediate task of getting the population vaccinated and life back to as normal as possible, the backlog of unresolved issues and yet-to-be-tackled reforms is eye-watering. The overriding challenge is the task of navigating the post-Covid economy to stronger, sustainable growth, higher productivity, lower unemployment, higher wages, better living standards and lower debt. Indeed, it is easy to come up with a top ten list of reform areas that need to be tackled urgently.

But there’s much more: the crisis in aged care, growing inequality and disadvantage, Indigenous disadvantage and representation, population policy, tax reform, education funding, water policy and the Murray-Darling basin, women in the workplace, domestic violence, national security, trade and relations with the increasingly argumentative superpowers, infrastructure, and government integrity and corruption. And these are just the most urgent, bar one very big one.

Asked by pollsters what they consider to be the most pressing issue facing Australia — after the Covid crisis — the majority of people consistently nominate climate change and the threats it poses. Climate change policy is the example that proves the point about the failure of politics over the past decade. The fierce but largely fruitless battle has been background noise to an era of stalled reform.

Martin Parkinson provides a depressing narrative of the twists and turns in climate policy failure. Decarbonising the Australian economy, he says, is the key to stimulating new jobs, industries and export opportunities. He dares to speculate that maybe the success of managing Covid — the transparency shown in describing the challenge, the creation of the national cabinet, the obvious recognition and embrace of experts’ advice — will help to embed these aspects in our policy debates and turn around the trust deficit. If so, it will be to the benefit of all Australians. “It would be an extreme irony,” he writes, “if a medical emergency created the circumstances for a renewed vigour in tackling the challenges ahead.”

Until a few weeks ago, Parkinson’s dream of a post-Covid return to middle-ground political consensus seemed to have a chance. But the ugly mix of sex and politics has plunged political debate back into the rancour and partisanship that have poisoned political dialogue for years. Marches by women demanding action have rattled the federal government. Scott Morrison’s judgement has faltered, and problems with Covid vaccine rollouts have begun to cast doubt over the notion that the next election is all but certain to return his government.

The opportunity to look well ahead and think longer-term about the most urgent reforms — especially climate change — may well have been lost. With the WA election result shaking the national political foundations, the government’s focus is likely to be no further than the next federal election. The political vibe of Covid crisis management — of rising trust in politics and leaders — may already have been wiped out. •

The first seven books from the “In the National Interest” series have been released by Monash University Publishing.

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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What Frydenberg neglected to mention were the identities of the key regulators in Team Australia. The only one singled out for attention was APRA, the prudential regulator — which was hardly surprising given the role it played in ensuring that Australian banks backstopped the economy during the crisis. But even on Frydenberg’s reckoning, Australia’s resilience owed much to the share market having continued to operate reasonably well. And share markets, of course, are just one of the many activities supervised by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, the much-maligned corporate, markets and financial services regulator.

Failing to acknowledge ASIC’s contribution is very much in keeping with the prevailing view in the business media that it is a great regulatory disappointment. In the past year it has been taken to task for losing high-profile court cases; for excessively remunerating its chair and his now departed enforcement deputy; for delving into policy areas where it isn’t wanted; and for failing to read the “mood” of change inside the government. Its commissioners — of which there are too many, say the critics — are not sufficiently business-oriented in their approach to responsible lending, and the relationship between the soon-to-depart chair, James Shipton, and his remaining deputy, Karen Chester, is said to be toxic. The critics want the treasurer to “take the axe” to ASIC.

So busy are they pointing out ASIC’s failings, in fact, that seemingly no one, including the treasurer, has been able to acknowledge what ASIC did for the Australian economy, and how quickly, during 2020. It didn’t wait for instructions from government: it was on the job well before the enormity of the crisis was recognised by the business community.

Quickly, confidently and deftly, ASIC applied its regulatory craft. It anticipated problems well in advance, engaged with and assisted companies, responded quickly to new circumstances, spelt out revised priorities, tracked and reported its activities, and planned its regulatory agenda for a post-Covid world. None of this was any secret, yet it was missing from Lessons Learned from COVID-19 on Regulatory Responsiveness, a recent, hard-to-find report from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to which I’ll return.

Timing, as they say, is everything, and for once, ASIC got it just right. On 28 February last year, during his opening address to the joint parliamentary committee on corporations and financial services, Shipton advised that ASIC was already identifying looming risks for the sector it regulates. It was anticipating the potential consequences and contacting affected firms, he said, as well as preparing a plan for surviving the approaching storm.

ASIC’s monitoring and planning proved critical. On 15 March, with global equity markets gyrating wildly, it pre-emptively limited the number of trades executed each day in Australia’s stock markets to protect their processing and risk-management capabilities and ensure they remained fair and orderly for all market participants. Panic was cauterised before it could take a destructive path. Markets have been volatile since then, of course, but less so than before that March direction.

By 20 March, ASIC had turned its attention to public companies, and especially those with annual general meetings due before the end of May. It announced that affected companies could delay their AGMs or — despite the Corporations Act’s prohibition — opt to hold them virtually. The federal government subsequently passed laws permitting virtual AGMs, and now proposes that this option be permanent.

ASIC was well aware that it had to do all within its power to carry out its mandate while helping businesses to emerge from the pandemic as viable entities. Only the absolute essentials of its existing regulatory work could continue.

The extent of ASIC’s responsiveness became clear later in March when it announced a recalibration of its regulatory priorities for the next six months. Efforts would focus on the challenges of Covid-19, particularly where there was a risk of significant consumer harm, serious breaches of the law, damage to market integrity, or business failure. ASIC’s enforcement work would focus on preventing consumer harm and egregious illegal conduct. Where warranted, industry participants would be given relief or waivers from complying with legal requirements.

And so it went on through 2020. Every activity was recorded for posterity by ASIC’s online regulatory tracker, ensuring ASIC’s actions and responsiveness were transparent and disclosed to the public. Those regulatory initiatives and responses were as varied as ASIC’s regulatory remit; its capital-raising changes alone have enabled companies to raise more than $31 billion since the pandemic began.

Much of this work was “embedded,” as ASIC describes it, by June. While it continued to respond to regulatory requests, it could now plan ahead and revive regulatory activities and priorities sidelined by Covid. In August, reasoning that businesses needed to begin mapping out their post-Covid futures, the organisation released a new corporate plan highlighting areas of particular regulatory concern, including the automotive, continuing credit and debt-management industries. It also issued guidance on what it expected of mortgage brokers once the delayed laws imposing a “best interest duty” became operative, and what was expected of banking institutions when the period of mortgage loan deferrals came to an end.

ASIC was mindful that restoring confidence in the Australian economy post-Covid meant improving legal standards of conduct. “As we transition to ‘Covid normal’ we cannot allow this halt in reality caused by the pandemic to mean that we stand still,” ASIC commissioner Sean Hughes told a retail credit conference in November. “We must continue to strive to address failings, embrace reforms and improve standards. We must keep moving forward as a regulator, as financial services industry participants and as a community/nation.”

Just five days later the treasurer was giving his “ode to Team Australia” speech. While he could not bring himself to acknowledge ASIC’s contribution directly, he did comment on what was expected of regulators generally during the crisis and henceforth: “In the context of the Covid recovery, it is critical that our regulators are conscious of the environment they are operating in and have the flexibility to respond in a way that simultaneously fulfils their mandate, enhances consumer outcomes and supports rather than hinders the recovery.”

Frydenberg’s words weren’t selected at random. They mirrored the findings of the Lessons Learned report, published a few weeks earlier. Considering it covers critically important ground, though, the report is exceedingly hard to get hold of. It isn’t available on the website of its publisher, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and my attempts to procure a copy by email and phone were met by silence: no reply emails were forthcoming, no phone calls returned. Even my messages to the office of the minister assisting the prime minister went unanswered. The only person outside government who appears to possess the report is Tom Burton of the Australian Financial Review, who kindly sent a copy.

The Lessons Learned report highlights the importance of regulators responding to Covid-19 in two fundamental ways: by changing their regulatory settings and instruments; and by changing their own attitudes and behaviour. To test whether this had happened, the department consulted “partners” across the Commonwealth public sector and figures in the business community. (“Partners” appear to be the peak business organisations that consulted with regulatory agencies during the crisis.)

Like the treasurer’s speech, the report is short on rather critical details. No list of business organisations and regulatory agencies consulted is included. Some examples are given — including the Fair Work Ombudsmen, Safe Work Australia, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, and the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment — but no mention is made of ASIC, APRA or even the undisputed financial regulator of the year, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, or AUSTRAC.

The report gives three criteria by which the department evaluates the effectiveness of regulatory behaviour and culture. First, evidence of strategic clarity and balancing of risk by regulators. Second, flexibility and speed in regulatory responses. Third, customer-focused engagement.

ASIC’s strategic clarity and balancing of risk were evident in March 2020, when it began fostering collaboration with industry and industry groups and consequently shifted its regulatory focus to help them remain resilient during the pandemic. Virtually overnight, with some assistance from urgent legal reforms passed by the government, large chunks of corporate law compliance were made significantly more flexible.

The report commends the Therapeutic Goods Administration for cutting red tape and allowing more hand-sanitising disinfectant to reach market. At or about the same time, ASIC was permitting the $31 billion in low-document capital raisings that helped underwrite the survival of many companies. Both achievements are important, but ASIC’s role is simply never mentioned in the report.

Critical to ASIC’s approach was engagement with stakeholders. The report champions this outcome in general terms, noting how industry peak associations spoke of the less adversarial relationships that resulted. Again, it would be good to know if those comments pertain to financial industry regulators like ASIC, but the Lessons Learned report frustrates on that front time and again.

At the conclusion of the report, the authors suggest that the next question to consider is whether any of the temporary regulatory changes should be included among the key performance indicators for regulator performance. In essence, the question they seem to be asking is whether the regulatory changes prompted by Covid should be made permanent.

In pondering that question, they would be well advised to read Sean Hughes’s November speech. Cutting red tape is one thing, but maintaining longer-term confidence and trust in the financial sector depends on maintaining legal standards. Kenneth Hayne certainly thought so when he delivered the report of the banking royal commission.

ASIC has its faults, but facts are facts. The organisation deserves to take a bow for its regulatory effort during the pandemic year. It’s a pity that any applause from government and the business media will be rather half-hearted. • 

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The passing of Biden’s legislation is the result of both his presidential election victory and the run-off elections in Georgia, which gave the Democrats fifty votes in the US Senate (with vice-president Kamala Harris holding the casting vote). The central issue in the Georgia elections was the choice between the relatively modest stimulus package passed by Congress in December 2020 and the much more ambitious proposals from the Democrats. In hip-pocket terms, the distinction was between the payments of US$600 per taxpayer from the Republicans and a total of US$2000 offered by the Democrats.

That wasn’t the only difference. The Republican legislation allocated nearly a third of funds to the Paycheck Protection Program, a version of Australia’s JobKeeper, but gave nothing to state and local governments. Because their tax revenues have been reduced by the pandemic, and because they have little or no capacity to run deficits, state and local governments in the United States have been forced to cut spending and employment. Biden’s package includes large-scale support for these levels of government.

The measures in the Rescue Plan are temporary and most are expected to cease as the economy recovers. But the package includes funding for policies the Democrats would like to make permanent, the most important of which are increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, the two main measures that assist families with children. If sustained, these increases would reduce child poverty by an estimated 40 to 50 per cent.

Republicans’ opposition to the package may safely be dismissed as political posturing, given their eagerness to pass the Trump cuts. But some more credible commentators, most notably Larry Summers (who held senior economic positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations), have expressed concern about the scale of the stimulus.

These concerns have mostly focused on inflation and the growth of budget deficits and public debt. A more useful way to consider the problem (an approach sometimes referred to as functional finance) is to ask whether the resources available to the economy are sufficient to meet both the extra public expenditure in the stimulus package and the rise in consumption and private investment expenditure that follows.

For the moment, finding those resources isn’t a problem. The conditions created by the pandemic have reduced private consumption and investment expenditure. Households whose incomes have been unaffected by the pandemic have used the money saved by working from home and limiting holidays to pay down debt. Businesses have held off big investment decisions.

But once life returns to normal, and spare capacity in the economy is exhausted, households will want to start spending the liquid assets they have built up. Their increased demand will collide with permanently higher levels of public expenditure and renewed investment to produce a level of aggregate demand beyond the capacity of the economy to supply.

The outcome will create shortages, rationing and bottlenecks — which means none of these demands will be satisfied. Eventually, the shortages will produce higher prices and wages, and a renewed burst of inflation. But inflation is just a symptom of excess demand; it’s the shortages, and the problems they create, that are the real source of economic damage.

Once the economy recovers, the only way to meet the need for increased public expenditure, given the productive capacity of the economy, will be to reduce the spending power of private households through taxation. Given the highly unequal distribution of income in the United States, most of the reduction must be borne by those in the top 10 per cent of the income distribution and particularly those in the top 1 per cent. Since these groups were the biggest beneficiaries of the Trump tax cuts, the immediate response must be to repeal part or all of those tax cuts.

What about the public debt built up during the pandemic, and the further increases in debt implied in sustained budget deficits? In the short run, much of the debt has been monetised: the US Federal Reserve has bought around US$4 trillion in Treasury bonds since the pandemic began, and will be able to buy more to offset the increase in public debt associated with the latest stimulus. But the Reserve’s capacity to do this is limited by the public’s willingness to hold cash and zero-interest deposits rather than spend their wealth or invest it in higher-yielding assets. Once this willingness is exhausted, further monetary expansion will translate into higher expenditure and therefore run the economy into resource constraints.

To resolve the situation, the ratio of debt to GDP will need to be reduced during the expansion created by the stimulus package. Fortunately, low interest rates mean that will happen automatically, as long as tax revenue is sufficient to cover government “primary” expenditure (exclusive of debt).

But a faster reduction is probably desirable. The small policy adjustments (such as twenty-five basis points in central bank interest rates) that seemed to work in the couple of decades before the global financial crisis aren’t adequate for managing the unstable economy we can expect for the foreseeable future. The larger the stimulus we want government to provide in bad times, the bigger the surpluses it should run when private demand would otherwise be excessive.

All that is for the future. If Biden’s stimulus plan achieves its goals, it will be the clearest demonstration in many years of the central role of government — in the United States and countries like Australia — in stabilising the economy and delivering outcomes more sustainable and equitable than those of unregulated capitalism. Let’s hope it works. •

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The ONI chief briefs the prime minister daily, drawing on the agency’s analysis of human intelligence from ASIO and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, signals and cyber intelligence from the Australian Signals Directorate, military intelligence from the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and input from the burgeoning intelligence arms of the federal police, border protection and other federal bodies.

Upgraded from the smaller Office of National Assessments in 2018, the ONI was given an enhanced coordination role after an intelligence review by former foreign affairs department head Michael L’Estrange and former Signals Directorate chief Stephen Merchant. Where the heads of the other agencies report to their ministers (though ASIO’s director-general does traditionally have a direct line to the prime minister on urgent matters), the ONI chief’s daily contact with the PM provides an unusual degree of influence over crucial matters of state.

So should we be alarmed that the newest occupant has been described by the federal opposition as too “partisan”? This is what happened last Friday when Scott Morrison’s office named Andrew Shearer, currently cabinet secretary, as the ONI’s new director-general, replacing veteran diplomat and intelligence official Nick Warner, who is retiring at seventy. Shearer’s five-year term will begin next month.

“Labor has indicated to the prime minister that it does not have confidence in his choice to head the Office of National Intelligence,” an unnamed Labor staffer told journalists, describing Shearer as a “partisan operative.” “He is not an appropriate choice and Mr Morrison should reconsider in the national interest,” she went on. “This position requires public confidence in independent, contested and apolitical assessments of our security.” Beyond that statement, the office of Labor’s shadow foreign affairs minister Penny Wong says it has no further comment.

While no one doubts Shearer’s abilities, he has certainly cleaved to one side of politics — and one side of that side — in his rapid climb up the Canberra national security pyramid, much more so than his predecessors at the ONA, including Warner, Peter Varghese, Allan Gyngell and Richard Maude, each of whom also had earlier stints on a prime minister’s staff. “There is no doubt that Andrew is a more political appointment, a person who has a deeper background in politics than any of his predecessors,” says a former senior foreign policy official who asked not to be named.

An honours graduate in arts and law from Melbourne University, Shearer’s public service career accelerated after he was transferred from Immigration to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the wake of the Tampa incident in August 2001, after DFAT decided it need more expertise in migration and refugee matters. “He displayed enormous ambition as soon as he arrived,” one former colleague recalls.

Then followed a rapid shuttle around DFAT, the ONA and the office of Coalition defence minister Robert Hill. A Chevening Scholarship from the British foreign office (an anointment later given to Alexander Downer’s daughter Georgina) funded a master degree at Cambridge, and was followed by a posting as minister-counsellor to Australia’s embassy in Washington. There he gained a key mentor, ambassador Michael Thawley, a notably hardline defender of the US alliance.

On returning to Canberra, Shearer joined prime minister John Howard’s staff as an adviser. When Labor took power, he moved to the Lowy Institute, helping add conservative political balance, and then to the Coalition-held Victorian state government as a deputy secretary in charge of further international relations. Rather ironically, in view of current depictions of Daniel Andrews as a Beijing captive, Shearer was behind the opening of representative offices in China.

Tony Abbott’s victory in 2013 brought him back to Canberra as a national security adviser in the prime minister’s office, where Abbott had already appointed Thawley as secretary of his department. Shearer joined Abbott in cultivating Australia’s relationship with Japan, including trying to persuade the navy to buy its new submarines from there. He is thought to be the author of Abbott’s extraordinary speech welcoming the return to office of retro-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe, in which the naval funeral given to the Japanese submariners killed in the 1942 raid on Sydney Harbour was cited as an example of the “chivalry” underlying wartime hostility.

In opposing his appointment, Labor has blamed Shearer for inspiring some of Abbott’s more quixotic proposals — which included sending an Australian army battalion to secure the site of the downed Malaysian airliner in the Ukraine, despatching an army brigade to Syria against Islamic State, and sending the SAS to Nigeria to rescue the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram — though it’s more likely he helped talk Abbott out of these forays.

Abbott lasted two years, and Shearer was out again in Malcolm Turnbull’s clean sweep of staff. He waited things out as a senior adviser on Asia-Pacific security at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, a well-heeled think tank that exchanges personnel with the Pentagon and US foreign policy and security agencies.

From there, Shearer frequently urged the United States, Japan, Australia and India to firm up their strategic ties in the long-mooted “Quadrilateral” arrangement. His articles were published here by the Lowy Institute and the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, of which he has been a fellow for many years.

After it was Turnbull’s turn to be ousted by his colleagues, Shearer returned to Canberra, first as deputy director in the ONI, then as cabinet secretary under Scott Morrison, and now as ONI chief, just as Canberra gets to grip with the result of the US presidential election.

In many ways Shearer’s beliefs are an open book. He remains a strong supporter of tightening the US alliance. He wants to expand the trilateral strategic partnership with Japan. And he would like to draw India more closely into the “Quad,” having castigated Labor for holding back so long over India’s nuclear program and worrying about perceptions Australia was trying to “contain” China. Foreign policy experts tend to agree he is a straight-up-and-down hawkish conservative. (ONI did not respond to a request for an interview with him.)

In his writings from Washington, Shearer tried to put the best light on Donald Trump’s offhand dealings with allies and erratic closeness to strategic opponents. But he is unlikely to be fazed by Biden’s win. Before the election, some seventy former Republican-aligned US security officials, including Shearer’s Center for Strategic and International Studies colleague Michael Green, signed an open letter supporting Biden over Trump.

A Democrat administration would pick up the thread of the post-1945 security order in Asia as best it can in the face of rising Chinese power, but without Trump’s gratuitous insults. When Japan looked like breaking out of this order with the election of Yukio Hatoyama’s “Asia for the Asians” government in 2009, secretary of state Hillary Clinton left it to the Pentagon to freeze him back into line. Nor did Australia under prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard give Hatoyama any encouragement. Gillard eagerly signed the deal with Barack Obama for US marines to be “rotated” every year through Darwin.

In the back of everyone’s minds is the controversy that erupted after it was revealed that the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction — was unfounded. Critics alleged that the ONA had joined its US and British counterparts in either fabricating or “sexing up” evidence of the weapons. In his official inquiry report, Philip Flood, a former head of the ONA and DFAT, cleared Howard of having put “direct or implied pressure [on intelligence agencies] to come to a particular judgment on Iraq for policy reasons, or to bolster the case for war.” But he did conclude that ONA had got it wrong, if not as badly as the US and British agencies.

As Labor says, the ONI’s advice to the government is supposed to be strictly analytical. Under its charter act, the organisation must stand clear of policy and politics, and the director-general can’t be told by the prime minister or anyone else what to write and report.

“The person who is in charge there, to do his job, needs to be completely independent of the policy process, to have no policy preconceptions,” says the former foreign policy official. “That’s the analytical side of ONI, to ensure that always within the government there is a voice looking at the evidence objectively and telling truth to power.”

This was the intention of Justice Robert Hope, who led the royal commission on intelligence and security that recommended the formation of the ONA in 1977. “There were examples of governments which tended to see the world in terms of the prescriptions they had written,” the former official says.

Some other Canberra insiders think the noble, disinterested role has already been vitiated, and the heads of the intelligence agencies are now “players” in setting policy. “The intelligence jobs have become more central and powerful in recent years,” concedes the former official.

But Shearer’s short period as an ONI deputy director didn’t lead to complaints that he was exceeding his brief, the former official added. Nevertheless, the question, and the one that worries Labor, is whether, in his daily briefings of a prime minister not so experienced in world affairs, he can resist steering in certain directions. •

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The ANAO is not alone. Government funding for the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, the information commissioner (who deals with freedom of information appeals), the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Commonwealth ombudsman have all gone backwards this year, too. These are some of Australia’s most important accountability agencies, and they’re shrinking.

When treasurer Josh Frydenberg was questioned about the ANAO cuts on ABC TV’s Insiders, he brushed them off as largely inconsequential. “The departmental appropriation is only $600,000 lower this year versus last year,” he said, “and importantly the average staffing levels are broadly similar as well.”

The treasurer is right to say that the funding cuts are not huge in dollar terms and that staffing has been roughly maintained. But this ignores a long history of cuts, year after year, to a small agency with little fat to absorb further savings.

The ANAO’s budget has been going backwards for a decade. As a share of government expenditure, the pattern is even more striking: it has fallen for most of the past twenty years. It has more government spending to monitor, but fewer resources to do it.

The shrinking budgets for accountability agencies partly reflect a long-term trend of reduced spending on the public service. In office, both major parties have used an “efficiency dividend” to cut expenditure. This small annual reduction in operating expenses applies across almost all of the public service (with the notable exceptions of the National Disability Insurance Agency and most of the defence budget).

Efficiency dividends have been around for decades but have grown much larger in recent years. They apply budgetary pressure, which can encourage departments to continually seek new or more efficient ways of doing things. But they are a blunt tool that can punish agencies that are already running efficiently.

A 2008 review found that the efficiency dividend is especially punishing for small agencies like the ANAO that have more tightly defined functions and, thus, less flexibility to find savings. And because they are rarely involved in new policy, small agencies are also much less likely to be able to top up their funding by proposing new programs.

Before the 2020 budget, the auditor-general wrote to the prime minister pleading for additional resources. The ANAO has operated at a loss for the past couple of years and will (again) need to reduce the number of performance audits provided to parliament.

That means fewer reports like those that revealed the sports rorts and the Western Sydney land scandal. This might make life more comfortable for politicians and public servants, but it could embolden the type of maladministration seen in those cases.

Weakening the watchdog is an even bigger worry in the context of unprecedented post-pandemic government spending, including hundreds of millions for community infrastructure, capacity building and tourism-related infrastructure projects. These are exactly the types of political danger zones that benefit from scrutiny.

The plight of the ANAO also highlights a much broader problem. Accountability and integrity agencies must survive on budgets granted by the government of the day — the very governments whose programs they are set up to monitor. Australia needs a better way of providing adequate, secure and stable resourcing. In the first instance, the Productivity Commission should review the budgets of these agencies and provide guidance to parliament on a more appropriate and sustainable funding model.

When the government is shrinking the budgets of the few agencies that ask difficult questions — meanwhile attempting to justify its glacial progress on a federal ICAC — perhaps the only logical conclusion is that accountability isn’t high on its list of priorities. •

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We need to bear in mind one striking characteristic of this virus: it spreads in clusters. Between 10 and 20 per cent of cases are believed to be responsible for 80 per cent of infections via “superspreader” events. These happen when a symptomatic person with a high viral load is coughing, sneezing or talking loudly in a group of people in a poorly ventilated environment. By contrast, most infected people don’t pass on the virus at all.

Of the key metrics epidemiologists employ to describe an epidemic, the one most commonly cited is the effective reproduction number, or R. As we all know by now, this number captures how many new people each case infects on average, and roughly corresponds to the relationship between the number of new cases today and the number we had one incubation period ago (the five to six days it takes for a person to become infected following exposure). A reproduction number of one means that each case infects one other person on average; above one, the outbreak will take off exponentially.

Uncontrolled, the R value for this coronavirus is somewhere between two and three, depending on the setting, which means the caseload more than doubles each five to six days. Once you have 200 cases, you will quickly get to 400 and then 800 within the space of just ten days. Get R below one, and the outbreak peters out.

We reduce R by putting in place interventions including the individual precautions of distancing, hygiene and masks, as well as population-level restrictions such as closing hospitality venues, retail outlets and other services deemed non-essential. Generally the advice on lockdowns is to go early and go hard; four to six weeks covers up to eight average incubation periods, and is seen as sufficient to close down community transmission while testing facilities are moved to surge capacity and workplaces prepare to operate in Covid-safe ways. Shorter, stricter lockdowns can work as circuit-breakers in established outbreaks when transmission rates have started to creep higher.

As a measure of the epidemic, the R number has the drawback of being an average. We now know that the number of cases one person infects can vary from zero to one hundred or more, but we also know that an average doesn’t tell the full story. So we use another metric as well: the dispersion factor, or k. This figure has not been routinely reported in Australia, but it is important for Covid-19 because it describes how much a disease clusters. The lower the k value, the smaller the proportion of cases responsible for transmissions. Flu, for example, has a higher k value than SARS-CoV-2 (the virus responsible for Covid-19) and spreads more evenly through the population if people aren’t immune. SARS and MERS outbreaks, also caused by coronaviruses, featured cluster transmission and in fact had even lower k numbers — and hence greater clustering — than the virus responsible for the current pandemic.

Like the reproduction number, k depends on local population characteristics (demographics, population density, number and size of high-risk transmission settings) and the interventions made by health authorities and governments. We didn’t know all this at the start of the pandemic, and the clustering transmission only became dramatically evident in wave two.

The beginning of Victoria’s second wave was buried in the tail of the first wave. Some of the new cases came as no surprise — authorities were still wrapping up the Cedar Meats outbreak, after all, and small numbers were continuing to appear, with the odd, refreshing zero-case day.

Health authorities didn’t test for community transmission in the first wave because they were anxious to focus testing capacity on high-risk returned travellers and their close contacts. But the serious cases that did appear in hospitals — the tip of the iceberg that was community transmission — made it clear there was a problem.

We may never know the true size of the first wave. Mercifully, though, with the big testing blitz in April failing to detect many more cases, we knew the lockdown worked. With measured steps, we managed to open up, having successfully eliminated all the community transmission caused by the first wave.

What’s critical about the hotel breach that sparked Victoria’s second wave is that a significant number of staff and guards were infected in quick succession, taking the virus home and into well-connected communities just as the government was easing the first-wave restrictions. In the third week of June, five additional hotel staff cases were reported in one day, a figure that doubled to ten and then to twenty in a single week, just as the second step out of restrictions commenced. The following week, total cases hit sixty a day; late the week after, 288 were recorded on one day.

Because authorities were increasingly testing symptomatic people (surveys suggest about half of Victorians with symptoms seek testing), this resurgence provided the data to build a more complete picture of the outbreak. We also gained a better understanding of transmission, with the sum of global evidence to date confirming that it mostly occurs via the respiratory route from droplets or, less frequently, aerosols. The evidence was also confirming that transmission usually occurs in clusters, most often when people are in close proximity indoors, with poor ventilation, for extended periods.

Melbourne’s second wave took off quickly because of the early superspreading, which also rapidly introduced the virus into a series of aged care facilities. The devastating acceleration of transmission in workplaces spread back into the workers’ homes and across workplaces or residential facilities. It’s likely that the early lockdown in the first wave prevented this, but it happened so quickly in the second wave — probably because of the demographics of those first local cases among hotel workers — that by the time the second lockdown took effect in wave two, it was too late.

Some commentators began arguing that Australia had opened too soon after wave one and that the resurgence in Victoria was evidence of a “failed suppression strategy.” This no doubt helped erode the public’s faith in the state government’s stage three lockdowns. This was one of the important lessons Victoria could have taken from wave one: that stage three for six weeks is effective in our setting, especially with the addition of masks. This insight was obscured by the unfolding story of what went wrong in hotel quarantine.

Despite the stage three restrictions having flattened the curve for a second time, and the addition of mandatory masks helping push the effective reproduction number below one, stage four was introduced just sixteen days later. Melbourne had already recorded 723 new cases in a single day, and a lack of confidence in stage three and an increasing concern about compliance pushed the setting to the next level of strict restrictions.

With lockdown tightening, and a night-time curfew added to very strict rules about how far and for how long individuals could travel from home, attention focused on the healthcare system’s capacity, and particularly the effectiveness of the contact-tracing process. Reassurances that it had sufficient capacity were countered by regular reports of clear failures. The concern was rising that lockdown would go on for much longer if the public health response was not up to the challenge.

Another sign that the authorities were losing control was the reversion to the most basic views about viral spread. Rather than a nuanced account drawn from the state’s experience and evidence from around the world, the premier’s daily press conferences increasingly focused on the “deadly,” “wildly infectious” virus rather than on the improving response.

Stage four added a series of time and distance constraints on leaving home, targeting the “aggregate movement” the government was starting to cite as the main indicator of risk. Rather than relying on people to follow straightforward rules — work from home, be conscious of the number of close contacts, don’t have visitors at home, take personal precautions and so on, all of which worked in pre-mask wave one — the second-wave restrictions were detailed and complicated.

In the process, an increasing number of the restrictions couldn’t clearly be explained in terms of risk or Covid-19 epidemiology. The curfew was one famous example, but other decisions also sought to micromanage behaviour in seemingly conflicting ways. Cricket nets could be used, for instance, but not tennis courts; a clinical Pilates class couldn’t be run with one instructor and three participants, but in the same space up to five clients could have sessions at the one time, each with his or her own instructor.

By step two of the second-wave restrictions, Melburnians could meet in groups of up to five people from two households in public, as long as they met within five kilometres of home. Many households had to split and take only a subgroup, but of course they then returned to their homes. Epidemiologists would be concerned about the number of households in a potential transmission network, not the number of people meeting in the park. On top of that, premier Daniel Andrews added that the rule was not restricted to the same household over time, effectively placing no limit on the households with which you could connect day to day, though this is where the potential for community transmission lay. Rules that could easily be enforced seemed to trump epidemiology.

When authorities start being prescriptive rather than providing high-level advice and broad principles, they confuse people and are then pressured into making even more specific rules to try to clarify the situation. Rules beget rules. People wait to be told exactly what they can and can’t do. They lose agency, and the government loses engagement.

Strict rules and large fines tied to enforcement also reinforce fear. People get the message that the second wave is somehow different, more “wildly infectious” than the first. They see neighbouring New South Wales managing to combat community transmission without restrictions and wonder how Victorians could be in this situation.

The coronavirus found the state’s capacities to be wanting in many respects. The health department had been pared back so severely that its starting point was behind those of other states. More importantly, though, the health authorities seemed to lack the capacity for the detailed analysis needed to inform and evaluate the components of the lockdown as it was unfolding.

Modelling was a feature of the “science” behind Victoria’s response, but it was communicated in a way that failed to instil confidence. The questions asked of the modellers focused on the implications of opening up further than the government was planning, and the high risk of a resurgence was then used to argue for stricter or longer restrictions. The time modelling was used to good effect, in my view, was when it evaluated risk among schoolchildren and led to an earlier-than-planned staged return to the classroom.

The aged care sector was not only woefully unprepared for the second wave, but authorities also took a long time to face up to fundamental challenges of workforce training, movement between facilities, and resident management. Lockdown played out in a different way in these settings, with many elderly residents confined to rooms and denied family access for extended periods. Aged care shortcomings were highlighted early in the second wave by both the unacceptable death toll and testimony to the royal commission into the sector. The case numbers, and especially the deaths, fed into the pressure for lockdown.

With part of the population now extremely concerned about the virus and/or our ability to contain it, and others unconvinced about the rationale behind the rules, public discussion — as opposed to assertion — largely closed down. The lockdown was politicised to a point where questioning any of the decisions, or the “science” behind them, could be met with threats of violence against the expert or journalist. In fact, divisiveness featured in the rules themselves, and was dominant in Premier Andrews’s commentary at his daily press conferences.

The five-kilometre rule and the “ring of steel” around Melbourne divided families, and divided customers and tourists from businesses and accommodation. Some services were unable to reopen because too many of their clients lived beyond the “ring” or outside a five-kilometre radius. Those on Melbourne’s fringes had fewer services within their five kilometres; a lucky few had a beach. Support services could open in step two, with indoor groups of up to twenty, but in regional Victoria twenty people could dine indoors at a restaurant while religious meeting places were closed and only ten could attend a prayer service outdoors. The former figure has now increased to forty, but the indoor–outdoor divide remains.

Importantly, some decisions ultimately determined which businesses and industries would survive. The loudest voices from different sectors can have more influence when the grounds for deciding what is and is not allowed become more fine-grained and arbitrary.

Regional Victorians were praised for their good behaviour and promised rewards. They were “fiercely protective” of their low-risk status, Melburnians were told, and didn’t want the metropolitan area opened because of the virus risk, even when case numbers fell to very low figures. As Melbourne was poised for step three, regional Victoria — which had already been granted additional leniency under step three — opened further; instead of returning to one state, the ring of steel was reinforced.

It will be a long time before we can see all the consequences of these extraordinary restrictions, much less measure them. The data collected on all 20,000 cases will provide rich evidence of transmission patterns, the effectiveness of different components of lockdown, and those mystery cases whose risk profiles we may be able to glean from the data.

Most of the information has been gathered via lengthy interviews with cases, which only moved from hard copy to direct computer entry surprisingly late in the piece. Artificial intelligence is now being employed to extract information from the data, but ideally this would be done at the time of interview for key exposures so that the epidemic dynamics could be monitored in real time and public health responses tailored appropriately.

Blanket restrictions were right for the first wave when we were still learning about this virus, its transmission routes and the consequences of infection. Somehow Victoria took a path that led to an even blunter set of restrictions in the second wave, and they didn’t work nearly as fast or as well. Public health benefits must always be weighed against the wider costs to health, economy and society.

In the end, the very failings of the second lockdown were used to justify more of the same. My main concern with these latest restrictions is that by September, with case numbers in low double digits, this lockdown was essentially being used to suppress transmission risk in the wider metro community so that, if public health responses failed, the collateral damage would be minimised.

By October, the health department had adopted the “contacts of contacts” approach to outbreak control that I had been advocating for months. Along with renewed efforts to find sources, which are critical in superspreader epidemics, rapid and comprehensive contact tracing promised to limit cases and end outbreaks sooner. In essence, it brings lockdown to the virus itself by asking all contacts of cases, and all of their contacts, to isolate until tests are completed and the extent of spread is determined. The second ring of contacts, if infected, are thus likely to be in isolation before they are even infectious, a game changer that removes the need for heavy state- or city-wide restrictions.

The biggest lesson from Victoria’s second lockdown is that everything must be done to prevent the need for another. We will no doubt see more cases, even if we get down to zero now. But the upgraded public health response we are told is in place — early-warning systems, workplace screening, sentinel surveillance, increased testing capacity, and a ramped-up, localised public health response — should prevent further waves and restrictions. Nonetheless, we must interrogate what happened, what we did well, and where there was more cost than benefit.

The final lessons of lockdown will be in the opening up. So far, the government’s extreme caution suggests a great fear of relying on the new system in the absence of strict lockdown. I trust this is a story of too much caution from our leaders rather than of concerns about the state’s capacity. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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A subcommittee of COAG, chaired by Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt and Coalition of Peaks chief executive Pat Turner, oversaw negotiation between Indigenous interests and all levels of Australian governments. The result, the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, released in late July, provides an opportunity to assess the ramifications and effectiveness of the Indigenous groups’ involvement in the process.

The agreement included not only sixteen new targets — mostly in policy areas that are primarily state and territory responsibilities — but also a series of priority reforms for joint national action. The latter, included at the insistence of Indigenous interests, were designed to tackle the systemic and structural underpinnings of Indigenous disadvantage; they focused on formalising Indigenous involvement in policymaking related to programs and services; strengthening Indigenous community-controlled organisations; transforming the operations of government organisations to improve accountability and responsiveness; and improving access to data.

The reaction to the new agreement has been mixed, focusing overwhelmingly on the scope, rationale and shortcomings of the sixteen new targets and the absence of other targets. Although a significant segment of public opinion (both mainstream and Indigenous) appears to be supportive of the aspirations and content of the new agreement, widespread scepticism has also emerged. Critics point to the targets’ lack of ambition, particularly in relation to incarceration rates and family violence, and the absence of the investment needed to ensure they are met.

Nationally, Labor and the Greens support the new national agreement, but both parties have called for extra funding. The most surprising criticism came from prominent architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, who pointedly questioned the representativeness of the peak organisations that negotiated with governments — a development that raises complex issues about how Indigenous interests are represented and advocated more widely.

Despite this debate, some of the key implications of the new partnership agreement have been overlooked.

The best way to unravel the deeper policy implications of the new Closing the Gap targets is to consider what each of the parties to the agreement — the Commonwealth, the states and territories, and Indigenous interests — were seeking.

While the governments’ objectives were opaque, their shape can be discerned by analysing past policy approaches and by reverse engineering the final agreement. It would be naive to take the public rhetoric of governments regarding their objectives at face value; for example, the Commonwealth refused access to an evaluation of the National Indigenous Reform Agreement, the COAG document that established the Closing the Gap targets in 2008, on the basis that to do so would reveal “deliberative processes” regarding the negotiations.

In my view, the Commonwealth is likely to have had four objectives in refreshing Closing the Gap:

• to shift the goalposts so as to diminish the significance of the annual ritual admission of failure to meet its targets (the “humiliation driver”)

• to avoid structural or systemic policy reforms that are necessary for greater Indigenous inclusion yet would impose unacceptable political costs (the “policy stasis driver”)

• to avoid significant new and ongoing financial investment in addressing Indigenous disadvantage (the “deficit driver”)

• to shift political and financial responsibility for Indigenous services to the states and territories to the maximum extent possible (the “fiscal federalism driver”)

All of these drivers are mutually reinforcing, and their attainment would combine to compound and reinforce Indigenous exclusion.

Because the original Closing the Gap targets, fixed by COAG, were expiring, the Commonwealth was able to corner the states and territories. The premiers and chief ministers were already at the table, and couldn’t easily avoid engaging. In many respects, they also share those four objectives, except that their fiscal federalism driver points in the opposite direction. Above all, they would want to ensure that the Commonwealth doesn’t offload responsibilities for servicing Indigenous citizens and communities without providing funding too, and to ensure that the agreed targets can be implemented and assessed flexibly. In theory, they could have pushed back, but the Commonwealth had cleverly brought Indigenous interests into the design of its strategy, making it politically harder for the states and territories to resist a new negotiation.

The Indigenous parties to the process were the most transparent. The Coalition of Peaks had laid out its overarching agenda in a number of public forums. It had no choice but to do this openly, because it had to build, and importantly sustain, an alliance of disparate organisations with no established organisational infrastructure. The Peaks’ initial core objectives (as set out on its website) were fourfold: shared decision-making, community control, structural transformation of government agencies, and better access to data.

Spelling out these objectives of the parties helps clarify the dynamics of the refresh. First, the Commonwealth’s fiscal dominance and legislative heft outweigh the states and territories individually and collectively, and its policy objectives — though never made explicit — are more straightforward and encompassing.

Second, the parties’ objectives are not “mirror images”: they don’t involve zero-sum calculations and therefore allow for win/win outcomes (admittedly constrained by the respective ambition and comparative strength of the parties).

Third, the Indigenous objectives were, of necessity, dependent on ongoing commitment and implementation by governments, whereas the governments’ objectives were not dependent on Indigenous responses and were essentially one-off decisions, albeit with longer-term institutional implications.

Fourth, while Indigenous interests traditionally prefer more rather than less Commonwealth engagement, it seems likely that they faced a trade-off between their own objectives and supporting the states in resisting Commonwealth disengagement. Their focus on building Indigenous capacity lessened their ability to insist on mechanisms to pressure on the states and territories to wholeheartedly implement the necessary policies.

Finally, a further “interest” is at stake in these negotiations — namely, the wider public interest — though it is inchoate and intangible and has no seat at the table. This interest transcends the partisan and institutional interests of governments and oppositions, and extends beyond the preoccupations of the current generation of Australians. It posits a simple question without easy answers: how might the negotiations contribute to the sort of nation we hope to bequeath to our children and their children?

While it will take some years for the agreement’s tangible outcomes to emerge, an informed assessment of likely outcomes is possible now that we know the detail of the proposal. After all, the strategists and insiders within each party who determined what was and wasn’t on the table made just such an assessment.

My own assessment, against the notional objectives of the parties, is as follows.

The Commonwealth, by achieving all of its likely objectives with minimal political cost, is the big winner. It has retreated from its overarching national policy role to essentially become a mere aggregator of statistics. By strenuously advocating the notion of shared accountability, and by choosing targets that overwhelmingly relate to state and territory responsibilities, it has shifted the responsibility for explaining failure largely to the states and territories, and to a lesser extent to Indigenous interests.

Importantly, the proliferation of implementation plans and performance data across eight jurisdictions and against sixteen (plus) targets, most of which are required to be disaggregated into four or more categories, will create an extraordinarily complex maze of outcomes to be monitored, assessed and (in theory) adjusted as necessary by policymakers. Commonwealth ministers will sleep soundly at night in the knowledge that when everyone is accountable, no one is accountable.

The Commonwealth’s success in avoiding policy responsibility is not just about Closing the Gap. It is the culmination of a decade-long push to shift Indigenous policy responsibilities away from the Commonwealth and towards the states and territories, and away from Indigenous-specific programs and towards mainstream programs. On issues as diverse as heritage protection, essential services, Indigenous housing and legal aid, the Commonwealth has been reducing its footprint. Where it retains responsibility — in relation to income support, for example — it has increasingly turned to mainstream programs rather than Indigenous-specific ones. The new Closing the Gap agreement is a major capstone on a pre-existing trend that will shape Indigenous policy for generations.

Measured against their assumed objectives, the states and territories have emerged from these negotiations as losers. They will each be obliged to develop detailed implementation plans against the various targets and introduce the necessary policies to deliver them. They receive no extra funding, which means they must either raise extra revenue or borrowings, cut services elsewhere, or — perhaps most attractively from their perspectives — find ways to replace tangible actions with rhetoric (which would shift the loss to Indigenous interests).

Assessing the outcomes for Indigenous interests is not straightforward. The first-order issue is that they leveraged their partnership status into an ongoing role in overseeing Indigenous service delivery both in Canberra and in the states and territories. If implemented, this is of huge strategic importance: it would be the first time Indigenous interests are present when decisions with life-changing implications are being made.

Second, the new national agreement gives Indigenous interests a commitment by the governments of eight jurisdictions, plus local government, to a new policymaking approach based on partnership and greater community control of service delivery. This commitment is built around a formal cross-jurisdictional agreement to four overarching priorities:

• Shared decision-making, including a joined-up approach to five policy priority areas and the creation of six place-based partnerships between all levels of government and relevant communities.

• Sector-strengthening plans in priority areas, starting in early childhood care and development, housing, health and disability.

• Transformed government organisations focusing on issues such as cultural safety, improved engagement with Indigenous organisations and, importantly, improved accountability through more transparent funding processes.

• Shared access to data and information at a regional level.

Implemented effectively and with imagination, these reforms will be far-reaching and will fundamentally increase the influence of First Nations people in policymaking across the nation. To have them embedded in a formal agreement signed up to by all levels of government in Australia is a monumental achievement.

Offsetting these nominal gains are two serious downsides for Indigenous interests; risks that I assess as both high-impact and highly probable. First, they will struggle to build — and, importantly, sustain — the organisational capabilities to engage persuasively and influentially both nationally and, most importantly, across eight jurisdictions. A “seat at the table” does not guarantee positive outcomes. This challenge will be more difficult if governments pursue strategies encouraging internal dissension.

The second risk is the one I foreshadowed earlier: that governments will avoid implementing, resourcing and sustaining the strategies necessary to achieve these reforms. Implementation failure is ubiquitous across Australian governments, even in contexts where policymakers have the best intentions and a relatively free hand. Nicholas Gruen recently framed this as a disjunction between what policymakers say and what they do; a problem he described as being endemic in policy circles. Memorably, he referenced Lord Acton’s observation on rowing as the perfect preparation for public life: moving in one direction while facing the other. The new agreement will require policymakers in a variety of jurisdictions to operate at levels of coordination and cooperation that are rarely achieved in mainstream services, and will require them to take account of Indigenous views in fluid policy and political contexts.

But are governments prepared to make such commitments? Two examples, incarceration levels and employment levels, suggest they may not be, and point to the likely impact of that failure on the lives of Indigenous citizens.

After a leaked version of the final agreement revealed a proposed (and not apparently ambitious) goal of parity in incarceration rates by 2093, Minister Wyatt announced that the target would be changed. The parties subsequently reframed the target as a reduction in Indigenous adult incarceration of 15 per cent by 2031. If achieved, according to the most recent data, this would bring the rate of Indigenous incarceration down from 2589 per 100,000 to 2201 per 100,000, against a mainstream incarceration rate of 223 per 100,000. After ten years’ effort, in other words, Indigenous incarceration rates would still be around ten times the rate of the wider community.

In relation to employment, Closing the Gap now aims by 2031 to increase to 62 per cent the proportion of working-age Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are employed. According to researchers at the ANU, around 47 per cent of working-age people — those aged fifteen to sixty-four — were employed at the time of the 2016 census, compared with 72 per cent of the non-Indigenous working-age population. The new target focuses on the narrower age range of twenty-five to sixty-four, sidestepping extremely low youth employment, both mainstream and Indigenous, and shifting the latter challenge to the target that focuses on youth employment, education and training.

Even if the new employment target is achieved, some 40 per cent of Indigenous citizens aged twenty-five to sixty-four — four out of ten — won’t be employed by 2031, with all the associated health and economic repercussions for individuals, families and the wider community.

If reducing Indigenous incarceration or increasing Indigenous employment were actually a real priority for Australian governments, these targets would be much more ambitious. In fact, their failure to commit to ambitious targets — and to the policy reforms and increased funding necessary to achieve them — clearly represents a lost opportunity for Indigenous interests. But it can’t credibly be argued that Indigenous negotiators — the party with the least negotiation leverage — bear responsibility for this outcome; instead it is a failure of governments to move decisively beyond the status quo.

Finally, what of the public interest? Australia’s continued failure to tackle deep-seated Indigenous disadvantage diminishes us all. The federal government’s ongoing retreat from policy responsibility is driven by short-term politics and doesn’t align with the expectations of the Australian population when they voted overwhelmingly in 1967 to give the Commonwealth the power to legislate in relation to Aboriginal people. More insidiously, the pretence and self-deception involved in reassuring ourselves that we are doing all that is possible, and that somehow the issues are “intractable” and thus insoluble, undercut the very integrity of our democratic culture. This is not a win for the public interest.

All of us, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, have a propensity to see politics and policymaking in terms of a destination rather than a journey. Yet, as we reach each milestone, others appear on the horizon.

The Closing the Gap negotiations saw Indigenous groups successfully demanding a role in developing future policies and programs, and forced governments to formally commit to structural reforms, shifting the nature of the journey ahead. Instead of the previously impenetrable terrain surrounding arid targets and arcane statistics, we now face a climb, admittedly steep, through more open terrain on which the milestones are more visible and are linked to a framework for developing further reforms. Despite my pessimism, the opportunities for the nation have expanded. •

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The divergence between the facts established by the intelligence services — sometimes by the decision makers themselves (as notably in the case of McNamara) and often available to the informed public — and the premises, theories, and hypotheses according to which decisions were finally made is total. And the extent of our failures and disasters throughout these years can be grasped only if one has the totality of this divergence firmly in mind.

— Hannah Arendt

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
— Hunter S. Thompson

1. Introduction

From 1788 till the 1960s, Europeans established themselves on Indigenous land in a brutal regime, first of dispossession and then of disregard. Yet some among them had strikingly good intentions. A year before Wilberforce took on the cause, nearly eighty years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Arthur Phillip accepted his commission insisting that slavery had no part in the new colony. Phillip sought to treat the Indigenous people fairly, at least according to his own lights. But mutual incomprehension reigned and those with murkier intentions soon prevailed.

Today, good intentions abound, though racism often lives on in unacknowledged assumptions. Governments outlay vast sums, whether adequate or not, on specific Indigenous programs and in general expenditure on Indigenous health, education and social security. Widely supported grand gestures are announced every few years. You might think “Closing the Gap” was Kevin Rudd’s idea but it rebooted (or is that rebranded?) a Hawke government initiative of twelve years earlier. But the results are meagre.

Now comes a new cycle of activity, this one focused on whether formal evaluation processes might allow us to identify and scale up those Indigenous programs that actually “work.” Most recently, the Productivity Commission has been hard at work on a national Indigenous Evaluation Strategy, which was the immediate trigger for this essay and to which I’ll return. Will this cycle of activity produce better results than earlier efforts? I’ll explain below why I have my doubts.

To first clarify where I’m coming from, it is not from deep knowledge of Indigenous policy. My focus here is rather on a prior question: how our formal institutions of government — and most particularly our bureaucracies — might need to change to succeed where previously they have so consistently failed. To make that question concrete I draw on my experience in other intractable areas of social policy that bear family resemblances to Indigenous policy.

Programs to protect children from abuse and neglect, particularly in disadvantaged families and communities, follow the same endlessly repeated cycle of failure followed by grand plans for reform that then run into the sand before the cycle begins again. This essay focuses on how little the system really appreciates the distance it would need to travel to really be effective, in terms of either its own values and objectives, or those of the disadvantaged communities — including Indigenous communities — it claims to be serving.

2. The “what” and the “how,” the saying and the doing

So here’s my very simple description of the problem: despite endless pronouncements of what we must do, there’s minimal comprehension of how to do it.

This is an endemic problem. Dependable know-how itself — whether it’s improving outcomes in an Indigenous community or representing government in the High Court — is not directly legible to government systems. Anyone can claim to have that know-how but a bureaucracy needs something more dependable than that. As a consequence, it will interact with know-how as a certified, decontextualised “what.” That “what” could be a credential, the meeting of a key performance indicator, or a particular bureaucrat’s informal reputation for being a “good operator” or a “safe pair of hands.” In improving Indigenous lives, however, know-how won’t align with any such things, not least because so much of it resides among Indigenous people and communities themselves. We need to access their knowledge and their agency to improve their own lives in ways that matter to them.

The cliché used to convey this idea is “putting people at the centre” or “putting people first.” However well-intentioned such slogans are, more often than not they operate as a kind of doublethink — as if adopting the slogan were to put its intent into practice.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum offers a story that illustrates this difference between saying and doing. She describes how a development program encounters a woman in a traditional rural community who is uninterested in education for herself or her children. Nussbaum is showing how our (reductive) framing of the other’s perspective can cut us off from the wisdom of the other’s lifeworld. “Clearly,” she writes, “a one-shot logical argument” wouldn’t be enough to engage the woman:

[S]uch a procedure would only reinforce her conviction that education has nothing to do with her. Nor would the exchange get very far if the development workers sat down with her… asking… calm and intellectual questions about what she thinks and says. But suppose, instead, they spent a long time with her, sharing her way of life and entering into it. Suppose, during this time, they vividly set before her stories of ways in which the lives of women in other parts of the world have been transformed by education of various types — all the while eliciting, from careful listening over a long period of time, in an atmosphere of trust that they would need to work hard to develop, a rich sense of what she has experienced, whom she takes herself to be, what at a deeper level she believes about her own capacities and their actualization. If they did all this, and did it with the requisite sensitivity, imagination, responsiveness, and open-mindedness, they might over time discover that she does indeed experience some frustration and anger in connection with her limited role; and she might be able to recognise and to articulate wishes and aspirations for herself that she could not have articulated to Aristotle in the classroom. In short, through narrative, memory, and friendly conversation, a more complicated view of the good might begin to emerge.

Nussbaum’s scenario is based on actual fieldwork in Bangladesh, and couldn’t be cost-effective if it involved professionals engaging rural women en masse. But, as I discovered when I was chairing the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, the spirit of this translational endeavour is already captured in existing and cost-effective programs in Australia.

The centre’s Family by Family program takes families who feel they’re close to crisis. A trained coach then takes each family through a structured program of mentoring by another local family that has come through similar stresses. The family seeking help chooses the family that mentors them and sets the objectives they want to work on.

The program was co-designed with families over many months, but the simplicity and obviousness of the end result gave those involved in it and many lookers-on numerous “aha” moments. Family by Family embodies the rare art of professionals vacating centrestage in a therapeutic intervention to create space for those who must do the real work. Professional knowledge, which grows with the program, is always there — but as midwife, not obstetrician.

Talking to some of these families, I was struck by their visceral engagement with the program and their mentors. To take just one example — of which there were many — one mother in the program had received twenty-seven statutory “notifications” documenting outsiders’ suspicions that she was neglecting her kids. The relevant department was heading to court to take her four kids into guardianship. When her mentor family took her family camping, she learnt many things from them — not least to hug her kids. The department stopped proceedings against her.

The thirty-week program cost around $13,000. If that sounds expensive, it’s a fraction of what social workers would have cost, and much more effective. Moving all four kids into care would have cost around $224,000 per year. So, if Family by Family steered just this family from the shoals of state intervention it probably paid for its development and first couple of years of operation.

Before I saw Family by Family in action, I’d have described my outlook as that of a tragic liberal — committed to fairly generous spending on social disadvantage, but with very modest expectations of how much it could turn things around. After seeing Family by Family, the penny dropped. Ingrained patterns and social reinforcement are immensely powerful, almost immovable forces. But people’s desire to work towards better lives for themselves, their families and their communities is similarly elemental if they can somehow unlock their own agency and that of those around them.

3. Lord Acton’s fault line

After acknowledging the vast gulf between identifying the “what” and mastering the “how,” between the saying and the doing, we should then do something I’m doing for the first time in this essay. For decades I’ve referred to it in asides, but it needs to be brought centre-stage so we can look it in the eye. It’s significant that it’s a joke, just as it’s significant that so many of the best insights into bureaucracy are provided by comedies like Yes Minister, The Office and Utopia.

More than a century ago Lord Acton quipped that rowing was the perfect preparation for public life. Why? Because you face in one direction while moving in the other. One crucial reason that we’ve made so little progress is that in a thousand ways, large and small, the actors in the system face in one direction — with their mission statements, corporate values, strategic plans, evaluation strategies and all the rest of it — while moving in the other.

Of course, they’d prefer to do a good job — most people would. But when push comes to shove, their animating imperative isn’t to keep progress going in the field. It’s to keep up appearances. Seen this way, all those grand announcements we keep making are part of the problem. They’re really directed at our own anxieties. They alleviate and distract us from facing our disappointment — our discomfort — that the world remains so resiliently impervious to our good intentions.

Lord Acton’s fault line appears between the two feet on which we stand — between what we say and what we do. That’s why the words we use matter so much, and why we should take George Orwell’s advice to choose the simplest and clearest words we can. As he put it:

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations, this is true of all political parties [and here we can include officialese]… is designed to make lies sound truthful… and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Since those in the system are the ones with the power, all we have to appeal to is their own self-respect — their own desire to feel better about themselves. When they say they want to change, the real question is how much. The system has said that it wants greater Indigenous agency in its programs for ages. But as I’ll illustrate, our programs are so dominated by that same system’s routines and perspectives that Indigenous agency barely gets a look-in. Instead it gets reduced to things that are legible to the system — such as Indigenous ethics codes and certified cultural sensitivity. These things may have some benefits. They may also have costs, which I’ll discuss. But they are mostly the system saying rather than doing.

This takes us to the nub of the problem. It is only humility, or some institutionalisation of it, that can create that space within which Indigenous agency might be nurtured and grow. But “humility” itself is now turning up as a cliché in all those “how to” guides (it appears just before “nuance” and after “authenticity” — yes, authenticity really was a corporate value of PwC for a while there). So I’ve tried to revivify it with Iris Murdoch’s magnificent words above. For the non-Indigenous among us who fancy we care, we must find ways to untangle ourselves and our institutions from the “the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self.”

4. Enter evaluation

Like a patient resisting therapy, the system constantly initiates new beginnings. But Lord Acton is never far away. At the political level leaders talk of evidence-based policy, but then shunt it aside when convenient. In fact, substantial performance evaluation was built into the structure of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission but sidelined after ATSIC was dismantled by John Howard’s government. The failure of the Northern Territory Intervention to take an evidence-based approach is legendary, worked up as it was over a few days in Canberra in the run-up to an election and yet largely maintained by the incoming government.

More recently, while stressing his own commitment to following the evidence, newly elected prime minister Malcolm Turnbull expanded income-management schemes without mentioning that the independent evaluations were highly equivocal. However well the idea played in non-Indigenous Australia, the evaluations suggested that compulsory income management has clear, positive impacts in very few cases and gives rise to “considerable feelings of disempowerment and unfairness.” As one might expect, voluntary income management is more successful.

Now, it is one thing for senior officials not to speak publicly of their political masters’ hypocrisy. But their complicity goes deeper. In 2009, a finance department review of Indigenous expenditure stressed the need for “a more rigorous approach to program evaluation at a whole of government level.” In 2016, the nation’s most senior public servant, the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Martin Parkinson, echoed those sentiments. In response to such concerns, $40 million over four years was allocated for evaluation. Parkinson’s department was responsible for Indigenous affairs, but the Audit Office reported three years later that its performance was desultory.

As ANU researcher Michael Dillon has suggested, even the Audit Office’s report was “extraordinarily hedged and timid, and failed to make a substantive assessment of the actual independence of the evaluations undertaken” by the department:

Of thirty-five evaluations on the department’s 2018–19 workplan, fifteen had not commenced. Of the remaining twenty, eight had been published and twelve withheld from publication… In at least four cases (involving very significant and sensitive program evaluations) the department was waiting to brief the minister or awaiting his noting of a brief. In plain language, the minister was preventing timely publication of the evaluations.

Further, Dillon observed, Parkinson’s response to the audit “fails to acknowledge or address in any way the negative content of the audit.” Is it likely that the system will engineer something better if it can’t acknowledge its own failure to do as it says?

Which brings us back to the Productivity Commission’s Indigenous Evaluation Strategy, a draft of which was released in June. The PC has always attempted to pitch its proposals to government within the “Overton window” — that range of options that will be taken seriously by powerful people. Given that constraint, as I’ll explain, I respect its compromises on policy. But the point of the PC’s independence is that, however much it compromises on the policy, it spares no one, least of all itself, the truth. What the great scientist Richard Feynman wrote about science is also true of social science. For me, it’s a holy grail of social policy and aligns nicely with Orwell’s advice: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

5. Putting Indigenous people at the centre: the words

There’s a kind of ambiguity at the very heart of the PC’s draft strategy that’s increasingly common. It’s Orwellian in the bad sense. I guess the genre was introduced into polite society by the “vision statement.” Here one states an aspiration as a fact. You know the kind of thing: “PHP Residual Solutions is the world’s foremost residual solutions provider.” At least in its awkward baldness, it’s not misleading. We all know that global domination is an aspiration, not a fact.

But this fusion of fact and fancy appears as the fundamental building block of the PC’s draft strategy: “The Strategy puts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at its centre, and recognises that governments need to draw on the perspectives, priorities and knowledges of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people if outcomes are to improve.”

One of the ways to ensure we remain fixed to the spot with Lord Acton’s fault line yawning beneath us is to encourage the idea that saying something is doing it. Does the PC know how to put Indigenous people at the centre of its strategy? Can it point us to better and worse examples of doing so? Can it highlight cautionary tales where grand claims have been made that are belied by the facts on the ground? These are some of the questions — pointed, uncomfortable questions — that we need to answer if we’re ever to step over Lord Acton’s fault line and enter the promised land of “how.”

At the level of programs, rather than evaluation, there are at least two perilous steps in the expedition to get from saying to doing — from signing the cheques to putting the resources of government properly at the disposal of Indigenous people and their communities:

1. We need to learn how to put Indigenous people and communities at the centre of these programs — or, to put it differently, how to realise their agency within them.
2. Then we need emerging successes to spread. That requires validated new knowledge of what’s working in the field — always fragile in large organisations to say nothing of systems of organisations — to trump the institutional imperatives that so often frustrate the spread of successful practice.

To me, these are the great priorities for the Indigenous-specific programs I have focused on in this essay, though analogous priorities would apply when considering the impact of general welfare programs on Indigenous people and communities. And any evaluative strategy would emerge from an appreciation of how evaluation might contribute to their wellbeing. As progress was made it would shed light on how further priorities might be set.

But the draft strategy makes clear that this is not the kind of priority-setting the PC has in mind. Its initial priorities reproduce those of COAG’s Closing the Gap report, and their foremost characteristic is their legibility to the system. They’re even arranged around the system’s existing organisational structure, which includes families, children and youth, health, education, economic development, housing, justice, land and waters. Makes you wonder what isn’t a priority! And all of them identify a “what” rather than a “how.”

6. Putting Indigenous people at the centre: the actions

How will we get Indigenous people and perspectives into the centre of evaluation? In their submission to the PC, researchers from Inala Wangarra and the University of Queensland argue that:

“Accountability” has become a lopsided concept, whereby the focus is overwhelmingly on service providers being accountable to government, and where there is no concomitant focus on the accountability of government to the most important stakeholders: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

So might placing Indigenous people at the centre of an evaluation strategy involve making service providers and government policies accountable to Indigenous people? This possibility doesn’t seem to have made it into the PC’s strategy, even as a “what.” And even if it had, I’d argue that what the PC has endorsed is likely to be implemented in a way that actively obstructs getting to the “how.” The PC talks about the importance of “whole-of-government” approaches to evaluation. That sounds innocuous enough — commonsensical even. But why does it have me thinking of “whole-of-church” approaches to the solar system at the time of Galileo?

The only way I can imagine a whole-of-government agenda not doing more harm than good is if it were to imagine itself as being at the service of solving the concrete and urgent problems in the field — by identifying good practice in the field, for example, and coordinating the system to expand its influence.

Despite senior officials’ and politicians’ protestations that they aspire to encourage innovation in the field and spread and scale “what works,” progress has been conspicuously lacking. Peter Shergold saw this as a major problem as he rose through the ranks of the public service, but after over a decade at its commanding heights conceded there’d been little change. As he put it in 2005:

If there were a single cultural predilection in the Australian Public Service that I could change, it would be the unspoken belief of many that contributing to the development of government policy is a higher-order function — more prestigious, more influential, more exciting — than delivering results. Perhaps it is because I have spent so much of my career in line agencies, learning to deliver Indigenous, employment, small business, and education programs that I react so strongly against this tendency.

Eight years later he confessed that little more progress had been made:

Too much innovation remains at the margin of public administration. Opportunities are only half‐seized; new modes of service delivery begin and end their working lives as “demonstration projects” or “pilots,” and creative solutions become progressively undermined by risk aversion and a plethora of bureaucratic guidelines.

In its preoccupation with grander narratives than identifying what works and spreading it, the PC sets its evaluation process up to be driven by the system rather than its intended beneficiaries, however much it protests that they’re “at the centre.” In a familiar move, the PC suggests that its strategy is driven by four principles, each identified by a pleasing adjective with them all arranged in a pleasing diagram. According to this diagram, evaluation should be “Credible, Ethical, Transparent and Useful.” But these words are so general, so capaciously flaccid, that they constrain no one, like a scientific hypothesis that couldn’t possibly be falsified. And so, rather than constraining (and so guiding) practice, those words will come to mean whatever people want them to mean, often in retrospect to justify whatever practice is chosen.

Note two further aspects of the high-level pronouncements echoed by the Productivity Commission. First, the PC speaks of evaluation as if its function is to bolster the accountability of those in the field to their senior managers, with evaluation’s function being to objectively certify the extent to which the program meets the system’s stated objectives. Second, it shows little awareness of how broad and permissive this relatively new discipline of evaluation is. In reaching for some actionable means of validating that it is embracing a thing called “evidence-based policy,” evaluation is taken to be something far more settled and definitive than it is — as if getting something evaluated were like getting an auditor to check financial accounts or an engineer to check the structural integrity of a bridge.

As Michael Dillon has observed, the assumption that there are or should be simple linear relationships between objectives and performance is “problematic in cross-cultural contexts and certainly not necessarily the case in the… Indigenous domain.” In that regard the system — and the PC — seems oblivious even to the existence of “goal-free evaluation.” There, the evaluator investigates the impacts of the program without referring to — or ideally even knowing — a program’s stated goals.

In an increasingly managerial world oriented to the needs of organisations and their senior managers, this unconstrained focus deploys the evaluator’s skills in an open-minded way that can more fully reflect the interests and aspirations of other actors in the system — most particularly, intended beneficiaries of the program and the families and communities of which they are a part. Goal-free evaluation puts the evaluator in the best possible position to notice and document all consequences, both good and bad. It can also improve program hygiene just as double blindness adds to the hygiene of a randomised controlled trial.

7. The anatomy of Lord Acton’s work

Then there’s the question of exactly how evaluation will identify what is and is not working, and how these findings will find improve policy and practice.

This raises several challenges at the heart of the PC’s draft strategy. First, evaluation should be independent so that it is candid. Second, it should be published, in order to help develop a “knowledge commons” around “what works” (and what doesn’t) and to strengthen incentives for policy, programs and practice to follow the evidence. Yet past behaviour shows that the system responds to such constraints by saying one thing and doing another. So why would it be any different here?

Indeed, the woods are full of regimes in which higher-order objectives are foisted on policymakers to do the Lord’s work (Lord Acton’s work that is). These systems allow those at the top to say one thing as they face towards an objective in general, while they do another thing that quietly prevents it happening in particular. And thus ensues a prosaic variant of something Oscar Wilde told us about life:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves…
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Freedom of information regimes sit atop Lord Acton’s fault line. And the discomfort this induces is all too often relieved with strategic cowardice. Having been lowered from on high, freedom of information faces boldly towards transparency. At least in general and at least when it comes to the saying. When it comes to the particular, to what is actually done, officials travel in the other direction. Transgressions go off the record — into corridors, personal phones and email accounts — or are reclassified “cabinet in confidence” or some such. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as actions that are routinely taken to delay and obfuscate transparency under FOI.

If FOI solves its problems the coward’s way, regulation reviews use the sword. Today, new regulation can’t be introduced without a “regulatory impact analysis” duly demonstrating that its benefits exceed its costs. Australia introduced it in 1986, and it seemed like such a good idea that it was replicated around the world — but invariably with the same (desultory) result. Here’s the British Chambers of Commerce back in 2007:

Both Conservative and Labour administrations approach deregulation with apparent enthusiasm, learn little or nothing from previous efforts and have little if anything to show from each initiative.

Sound familiar? Regulation review is another take on the Lord Acton quickstep. Those at the top introduce a compliance regime, but those administering it are trying to get things done for their ministers. So they obey the letter but not the spirit of the regime, and it degrades into empty box-ticking.

8. Getting past Lord Acton’s fault line

To recap: as attractive as they sound, independence and transparency cannot be imposed without setting off powerful and perverse incentives. Any attempt to deal with these dilemmas must look them in the eye. I foregrounded them in 2016 with my own proposal for an evaluation architecture. I called it the evaluator-general to stress the importance of independence and transparency, and also to structurally separate the delivery of services from the means by which we validate their fitness for purpose.

The organisation of the public sector already honours this principle of structural separation — between doing and validating the effects of what we’re doing. Thus, the Audit Office and the Bureau of Statistics are independent information and integrity agencies whose work helps inform us of the success or otherwise of other “doing” agencies directed by ministers — such as the health department and Treasury. At the same time, we expect all these agencies to collaborate — sometimes quite closely.

My proposal for an evaluator-general provides the institutional scaffolding within which the same close collaboration amid structural separation between doing and knowing can be brought right down to operations in the field. That way independence and buy-in can grow quietly from the bottom up within organisations rather than being heroically imposed from the top in a grand gesture that experience suggests will fail and fail again.

My aim was to nurture the self-accountability of those out in the field — Feynman’s imperative that one mustn’t fool oneself — and to build system accountability on that foundation. That’s how Toyota revolutionised manufacturing productivity in a way that’s now imitated the world over. It found a way to build from “how.” It did so by placing the workers on the line, the suppliers and the customers at the centre.

Are my ideas viable or just naive? We’ll only know when we give something like them a good try. We’d need no more than a dozen or so teams to try them. In the PC’s near 400-page background paper there’s some reporting on these problems of independence and transparency, but not in the context of any critical vision or clear explanation of how they can be overcome.

9. Independence-for-hire and the he-who-pays-the-piper problem

The PC’s incuriosity extends to its ignoring the incentive issues arising from how evaluation is commissioned and conducted. As I’ve argued, allowing firms in our private sector to appoint their own auditor profoundly compromises auditors’ independence. By contrast, the auditing of government finances is overseen by an independent auditor-general. Still, while it’s far from optimal, we’ve made the independence-for-hire of private sector auditors work tolerably by specifying highly prescriptive auditing standards. With evaluation, things are very different, there being any number of ways to conduct evaluations to serve numerous tastes and purposes. So evaluators’ independence-for-hire provides wide scope for doing Lord Acton’s work.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, independence-for-hire sits at the heart of a “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t” catch 22 that prevents promising developments in the field even becoming visible to the system, let alone having their expansion supported by it.

It goes like this. Responding to all the stirring visions of government “scaling what works,” non-government organisations seek government funding to expand their most promising programs. At this point, departments of finance oppose such funding, as well they might, until the programs are independently evaluated. They don’t take responsibility by commissioning the evaluation themselves or even specifying what kind of evaluation they require. Thus, when the NGO returns, a few hundred thousand dollars poorer, with a Deloitte, PwC or Lateral Economics report in hand (we’re cheaper!), it’s ignored again because independence-for-hire isn’t independence. And so the process of “scaling what works” is stopped dead in its tracks.

Though it understands the value of independence in evaluation, the PC completely flubs the “independence-for-hire” problem, simply associating contracted-out evaluation with independence. And it won’t bite the bullet and recommend true independence because it knows this would be rejected out of hand. But to keep the idea of independence in play, it proposes Lord Acton’s independence — an independent Office of Indigenous Policy Evaluation that will “oversee” evaluation, though the actual evaluation will continue to be conducted within the very agencies whose performance is being evaluated.

No doubt the PC hopes that this might introduce some independence into the process. But progress, if any, will be agonisingly slow. Allowing agencies to do their own regulatory impact analysis has kept the tiger of regulation review pristinely toothless for thirty-five years now in every country where it’s been introduced. The old Office of Regulation Review operated within the PC itself, but the greater notional independence it had there made not the slightest bit of difference. The requisite boxes were ticked and regulations — both the good and the bad — went on piling up as normal.

10. Stated intentions and animating imperatives

It’s Lord Acton pretty much all the way down. The PC’s draft strategy stresses the need for evaluations to:

• be done ethically
• involve and engage Indigenous people
• be respectful of and in sympathy with Indigenous cultures and knowledges.

Now, each of these is a commendable objective as a “what.” As I keep saying, the hard part is working out the “how.” And tackling each of these matters productively requires great insight. Further (and astonishingly), the importance of each of these requirements is relatively new to the system even as a “what.” Should we really put that same system in charge of learning the “how”? What will happen is already a foregone conclusion — the PC more or less recommends it. Rather than proceed humbly, foregrounding its ignorance, the system will go through its well-worn routines. Codes of practice will be developed. I assume there’ll be lots of consultation.

But these codes won’t deliver what is written on the packet any more than the mission statement “putting families at the centre” would have delivered Family by Family. However well-intentioned, these codes’ animating intent — what will matter when push comes to shove and someone might end up on the telly or in a headline — will be the institutional safety of those developing and administering the codes.

This is what happens when the system’s commanding heights are put in charge of delivering something that is difficult and context-sensitive but not highly valued in our political culture. Those defending Indigenous interests would be well advised to look on the burgeoning performance regimes in numerous sectors — particularly education and university research — where more and more practitioner time is taken up complying with relentlessly expanding requirements from bureaucracies that have neither the slightest knowledge of nor regard for what’s going on out in the field. As the accountability theatre ramps up, administrative numbers and salaries swell at the centre and performance declines. As Britain’s Institute for Government documented in a different context, inquiries and restructurings abound and new ten-year plans are announced once every three or four years.

I recall when, in response to another paedophilia scandal, South Australia strengthened its child safety requirements. The very department whose lapses had produced the outrage refused to stagger the starting date of the new system for different community organisations. With the department’s processing capacity thus overwhelmed, it took over a month to clear the new paperwork. Family by Family was paralysed. If exceptions were allowed to the deadline, they were for more important folks than us. Overnight, practices that had worked brilliantly and safely for several years — that placed families at the centre of the program — became an offence. I don’t know about then, but today the department describes itself as “a customer-focused organisation that puts people first.”

In fact, an evaluation was done on Family by Family. The process was a train wreck. From memory numerous preliminary ethics processes took around nine months, though this was simply to ask families questions about their progress — as they’d been asked regularly within the program. The evaluation ignored the program’s effect on children. Why? Because getting that aspect through the ethics procedures would have been too expensive, uncertain and time-consuming. How ethical can you get?

When the evaluation finally began, the department funding the program wouldn’t give evaluators the data to identify our cohort of families. So the evaluation was forced to compare impacts on all families in the host suburb against two other areas (one of which was bizarrely incomparable). As I recall, the result was mildly positive but inconsequential — unsurprisingly, given the small number of families involved. To use J.K. Galbraith’s term, it was all “innocent fraud” — that is, all that effort and money produced an outcome that amounted to nothing. But its worthlessness was a system failure despite the best of intentions of everyone in it.

I expect that the National Health and Medical Research Council, which issued the ethics guidelines, the family services department and the university centre for family studies thought of themselves as putting people first. But far from nurturing the innovation breaking out on the edges of the system — driven by bright, idealistic, young professionals and increasingly enthusiastic families — the incumbent organisations imposed their own routines and imperatives, each one making the labyrinth denser, more bewildering, more dysfunctional, each one making it harder to put the families first.

Whether or not the evaluation report was released (I don’t believe it was), we all cooperated in covering up its worthlessness, which required nothing more than not to advertise it. This is just one close-up of a phenomenon the disillusioned development economist William Easterly has called “the cartel of good intentions.” It is built on Lord Acton’s fault line. But you won’t see any serious engagement with any of this in the PC’s material on Indigenous evaluation.

11. The perils and the promise of candour

You may think what I’ve written so far is scathing. Yet, as I indicated above, I think the PC makes the right basic calls in its draft strategy. Bereft as the report is of suggestions about how to bring it about, it nevertheless endorses more Indigenous involvement in evaluation. And it backs independence and transparency. In a system that’s nowhere near ready to seriously engage with such things, it also makes defensible compromises in shepherding those values into policy. The real shame is that the pathologies of the existing system are deeply entrenched and yet they hardly get a look-in in the commission’s analysis. So any strategy for shifting them requires something much more hard-headed — more problem-focused — than four pleasing adjectives and a well-intentioned tagline about putting Indigenous perspectives at its centre.

Here we get to Orwell’s point. The greatest service the PC could do Indigenous people — the way it could really put their interests at the centre of its concerns — would be to express itself simply and candidly. Its draft strategy asserts that program participants and the broader community should “have confidence that policies and programs are being assessed objectively and independently.” Poppycock. It should stop pretending and fess up on behalf of the system. Having recommended a highly compromised form of independence for now, it should explain that the system isn’t ready for much candour right now and explain why.

Now you can see the power of Orwell’s advice about speaking simply. Speaking simply makes it hard, excruciating even, for you to cover your tracks — to mask your motives — with the usual sophistry. Once the officialese is jettisoned (or should that be official-ease?) the discomfort that the system is defending itself against becomes its own discomfort in explaining the sorry situation it is dealing with. And the only way to relieve that discomfort would be to go further and sketch out a longer-term plan to reach the outcome described in the honeyed words.

12. Towards the final strategy

For the final strategy to deliver a minimum viable product, I think it needs changes to the draft.

First, it should base its policy compromise on a much harder-headed understanding of the obstacles that stand between us and the land of “how.” After explaining why the whole system can’t possibly embrace real independence and transparency at the moment, it should go on to sketch its own vision of how that might be grown from the bottom up. I’ve shown one possible model with my proposal for an evaluator-general, which involves structural separation between the system’s doing on the one hand and its knowing and evaluating on the other. It needn’t be grandiose and system-wide: it can be built on a small scale and grown from there. Some submissions to the PC seem to think it has merit. The PC itself gives the idea considerable elaboration, but only as reportage. If it has a better model it should set it out.

Second, if the strategy is its contribution to thought, its direct contribution to action should be to call for and begin the process of designing a new burst of energy and innovation that might grow at the margins of current activity and begin to spread through the system.

Here, the current weakness of the system lies not so much in the lack of promising experiments in the field as in the relationship between them and the system itself. The system must be able to identify, validate and acknowledge the best of those experiments. Currently, it can’t do that. Evaluation can play some role in fixing that, though we should guard against something that’s already clearly in evidence — the system grabbing hold of evaluation as a deus ex machina, it’s next fad diet that will save it from itself.

And there are two far graver obstacles to progress. First, as those in the field can attest, our politicians frequently play to their own political advantage irrespective of the evidence. Second, bureaucracies have terrible trouble responding to knowledge of what’s working from the field, for such bottom-up learning is countercultural in a hierarchy where power is at the top. Further, if learning were to rise from the bottom at any scale, it would involve the discomfort and uncertainty of change for large numbers of people.

The PC can do little about the first of these more serious problems. But it can hope to be influential regarding the second. I think it’s possible to be very concrete and specific about what is necessary here. The system can only sustainably expand what works by bolstering the status of the individuals and communities who have made it work and giving them much more authority and resources within that system.

Those at the centre of the system are just as important as the successes in the field, but there’s nothing unique about them — or there shouldn’t be if the system is working properly. Those in the system need to be made accountable not just for talking about expanding what works but for making sure it happens, despite the discomfort it will undoubtedly cause. To that end, a regular report could be recommended, by the auditor-general or some other independent guardian of integrity in the system, to document, say every two years, what progress was being made towards this goal of spreading “what works” and particularly the increasing empowerment of those who make it work.

For those of us who call ourselves Australians to properly begin the task that governor Arthur Phillip began with such high ideals and so little to show for it, we can only do it to the extent that non-Indigenous people and their institutions unloose themselves from those “anxious avaricious tentacles of the self.” To the extent we falter, the soft voice of conscience will keep whispering that destiny to us. •

This essay benefited from helpful comments on earlier drafts from Romlie Mokak, Keryn Hassall, Janina Gawler, Michael Griffith, Jon Altman, Mike Dillon, Christos Tsiolkas and Clive Kanes. As always, I am wholly responsible for the essay’s remaining inadequacies. The title “Orwell that ends well” is shamelessly stolen from my friend Konstantin Kisin.

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Trust in government is vital. Without trust, markets fail. Reform is near impossible. Economic growth is weaker, investment stalls, consumption flatlines, the tax system fails. Critical institutions ranging from the police and the courts to the Reserve Bank and the tax office can’t do their job. It took a pandemic to reveal just how big the cost of mistrust in government can be. When the public don’t listen to the health advice coming from their governments, the virus spreads, people die.

But why should they listen? Many of those in government who have pleaded with the public to heed scientific advice on Covid-19 have been the same people who told us that scientists are corrupt and untrustworthy on climate change. The people who warned us about the inherent incompetence of government and the inherent dangers of big government are now telling us that the biggest government in Australian postwar history is a good thing.

The consequences of these past short-sighted political wins have come home to roost. The result of historically low trust in government and institutions is on display for all to see.

The Edelman global trust survey asked Australians to rank government, business, the media and non-government organisations by how competent and ethical they were. None were found to be both. According to those surveyed, businesses are competent but unethical. NGOs are ethical but not competent. And the government and the media? Neither competent nor ethical. Forty-five per cent of Australians distrust these institutions. Only 12 per cent of Australians believe the government is run for “all the people,” according to Essential Research.

Nor is distrust limited to government and media. Revelations from royal commissions have shaken trust in the financial system, trade unions and the institutions charged with protecting our children. The Black Lives Matter movement has shone a spotlight on the deep systemic failings of our police and legal system. The scourge of tax avoidance among multinationals, the rich and big companies has undermined trust in our tax system, while rising wage theft and depressed wages feed the narrative of a system rigged against workers.

Political scandals involving Bridget McKenzie, Sam Dastyari, Pauline Hanson, Stuart Robert, Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald — too many to mention from all sides of politics — have shaken confidence in our political system. The private sector does little better. In the context of Covid-19, a third or more of Australians believe that cruise liners, big banks and insurance companies will “always act in their own interests, even if it endangers people or is detrimental to the public.”

Luckily, the news is not all bad. There is some evidence that Covid-19 has marginally increased the public’s trust in government and the media. In April, an Essential Research survey found that the number of people who believed the government was giving honest and objective advice rose from 56 per cent in March to 62 per cent in April. Trust in the media to provide honest and objective information about Covid-19 jumped from 35 per cent to 51 per cent over the same period.

Whether these positive developments can be sustained remains to be seen. But building trust in government and institutions should be seen for what it is: central to economic growth. Building trust will be a prerequisite for the government’s reform agenda. Any reforms will struggle without it.

The OECD shows us where to start. A lack of trust is strongly correlated with a perception of government corruption, a lack of confidence in the judicial system and a lack of confidence in the country’s leadership.

There is plenty of low-hanging fruit. Establishing a national anti-corruption authority and reforming political donations are no-brainers. Criminalising wage theft across Australia would boost confidence in our labour markets. Closing generous tax loopholes exploited by the rich would boost confidence in our tax system. Harsher criminal penalties for financial wrongdoers would boost confidence in our financial system. Disqualifying company directors who engage in anti-competitive conduct or who persistently mislead consumers — with financial penalties that are more than a mere cost of doing business — would boost confidence in our product markets. And stop cutting the ABC’s budget: the public have more trust in that institution than in our legal system, police, businesses, charities and every parliament and political party in the country.

We need to pick the low-hanging fruit because the other sources of distrust — rising inequality and diversified flows of information, social networks and technology — are much harder to solve in the short term. The statistics show the scale of the challenge. Thirteen per cent of Australians believe Bill Gates played a role in the creation of Covid-19. Thirteen per cent believe that Covid-19 is not dangerous and is being used to force people to get vaccines. Twelve per cent believe that the 5G wireless network is being used to spread the virus. Twenty per cent of Australians believe that the media and government are artificially increasing the number of people reported to have died from Covid-19 in order to scare the public. Google searches for “is the world flat” have tripled in the last three years.

The Australian economy is in desperate need of reform, but the government cannot implement reform without trust. Covid-19 has produced a rare uptick in public trust. Whether the government develops it or dashes it remains to be seen. •

The post Who do you trust? appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s clear from the letter that the governor-general is hurt by the attacks on him but is taking the advice of “my few close friends and advisers” not to defend his position publicly, although “this is difficult for an extrovert and activist.” He suggests he could still be tempted, though, if “the calumnies and criticisms become unbearable.” The message that comes back from Charteris is unambiguous — please don’t — and that advice is accepted.

With due allowance for hindsight, Gough Whitlam made a bad choice in appointing Kerr to a position where he revelled in the trappings of office and refused to see himself as a “cipher” — the description once used by Whitlam — who was duty-bound to follow the advice of the democratically elected prime minister. It points to one of Whitlam’s weaknesses: he was a poor judge of character.

The letters confirm what Kerr has previously claimed: he did not tell the Queen beforehand of his action on 11 November. In his letter to Charteris on the day of the dismissal, he writes: “I should say that I decided to take the step I took without informing the Palace in advance because under the Constitution the responsibility is mine and I was of the opinion that it was better for Her Majesty not to know in advance, though it is, of course, my duty to tell her immediately.”

This is an impeccable exposition of the principle that the Queen should be kept away from political controversy. But the letters reveal much more: the months of voluminous correspondence between Kerr and the Palace that not just kept the Queen informed of the unfolding political and constitutional crisis but also canvassed all the options available to him, including dismissal. Most strikingly, the response from Charteris, who was passing much of the correspondence on to the Queen, was to support Kerr in his view that he could use his reserve powers and to commend him once he had done so.

On 4 November, a week before the dismissal, Charteris writes to Kerr in the following terms:

When the reserve powers, or the prerogative, of the Crown, to dissolve Parliament (or to refuse to give a dissolution) have not been used for many years, it is often argued that such powers no longer exist. I do not believe this to be true. I think those powers do exist, and the fact that they do, even if they are not used, affects the situation and the way people think and act. This is the value of them. But to use them is a heavy responsibility and it is only at the very end when there is demonstrably no other course that they should be used.

Here Charteris was taking a partisan position, even if the legal position was accurate. It was Whitlam who argued that the reserve powers did not exist or, if they did, that they were a dead letter. It is the difference between law and convention. The governor-general is the constitutional head of the armed forces, but no one suggests he or she should be the one calling out the troops. Whitlam’s argument was that in a democracy the power to dissolve parliament and call an election could be exercised only on the advice of the prime minister. Others disagree, but that is not the point: Charteris was siding with Kerr and the Liberals against Whitlam.

More than that, he was actively supporting Kerr: “I think you are playing the ‘Vice-Regal’ hand with skill and wisdom.” While Charteris counselled that the reserve powers should be used only as a last resort, he never suggested they should be avoided altogether.

After the speaker of the House of Representatives, Labor’s Gordon Scholes, writes to the Queen on 11 November asking her to restore Whitlam to office as prime minister on the grounds that he continued to command a majority in the lower house, Charteris replies that only the governor-general could do this. “The Queen has no part in the decisions which the Governor-General must take in accordance with the Constitution.” (My emphasis.)

This too was siding with the Liberals, who argued that the governor-general had no alternative but to act, and against Labor, which argued he must not.

Charteris not only supports Kerr: he is effusive in his praise of him. When Kerr tells him after the dismissal that he received a complimentary letter from Sir Robert Menzies, Charteris says he is “delighted… It must have been reassuring to find that he thinks history will credit you with having acted rightly.”

History has not been so kind. Though it is generally accepted that the reserve power of dismissal does exist, there remains fierce argument over whether it should have been used.

Kerr was faced with a deadlock created by two implacable political enemies unwilling to give ground. But there is substantial evidence that the situation could have been resolved politically. By 11 November a number of Liberal backbenchers were prepared to concede defeat and pass the budget. Kerr made a series of political judgements: that the opposition senators would not break ranks; that Whitlam’s proposal to temporarily fund government services through the banks would not work; and that an election had to be held before the end of the year.

At the same time that Kerr was canvassing his options and ultimate intentions with Charteris, he was keeping Whitlam in the dark. More than that, he was actively deceiving him by suggesting he was playing a passive role, and giving no hint of his intentions for fear that Whitlam would ask the Queen to sack him first. At the same time he was leaving Malcolm Fraser confident enough to stick to his guns in blocking the budget at a time when he was coming under enormous pressure, including from members of his own party, to buckle.

Kerr’s justification for deceiving Whitlam was to avoid exposing the Queen to an impossible situation. As far back as September, before the opposition had blocked the budget in the Senate, Kerr is expressing concerns that Whitlam would ask the Queen to sack him before he had a chance to sack Whitlam. Charteris is sympathetic but ultimately offers Kerr no comfort, writing on 2 October:

If such an approach was made you may be sure that The Queen would take most unkindly to it. There would be considerable comings and goings, but I think it is right that I should make the point that at the end of the road The Queen, as a Constitutional Sovereign, would have no option but to follow the advice of her Prime Minister.

Nine days after the dismissal, Kerr raises with Charteris whether he should have given Whitlam prior warning of his intentions to give him the option of calling an election rather than be sacked:

History will doubtless provide an answer to this question but I was in a position where, in my opinion, I simply could not risk the outcome for the sake of the Monarchy. If in the period of say twenty-four hours, during which he was considering his position, he advised The Queen in the strongest of terms that I should be immediately dismissed, the position would then have been that either I would in fact be trying to dismiss him whilst he was trying to dismiss me, an impossible position for The Queen, or someone totally inexperienced in the developments of the crisis up to that point, be it a new Governor-General or an Administrator…

Maybe, but this didn’t justify the ambush of Whitlam. It was one thing for Whitlam to threaten to go to the Queen as a means of putting pressure on Kerr; it is uncertain whether he would have acted on that threat. Kerr was more focused on protecting the monarchy than on safeguarding Australian democracy.

The correspondence captures the bizarre nature of our system of constitutional monarchy: the Queen, sitting on the other side of the world, has a role in our system of government that, though largely symbolic, can on rare occasions involve real decisions. Kerr’s fear of dismissal points to a flaw in the system that has yet to be addressed, along with the Senate’s power to block supply — the trigger for the 1975 constitutional crisis. The Queen has less independent power in Britain than she does in Australia.

The National Archives released the Palace letters on Bastille Day, a celebration of the French revolution. The Palace letters deserve to revive the debate on an Australian republic. •

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Australia’s first case of Spanish flu was detected in Melbourne in January 1919. Three months earlier, the states and the Commonwealth had agreed that, if the flu broke out, the states could impose border controls to try to limit its interstate spread. The affected state would notify the Commonwealth, which would then take complete control of all interstate traffic. Movement between the affected state and other states would be suspended for as long as the latter remained influenza-free; if they also had cases, then interstate travel could resume between infected states.

An exception was made for local movement across state lines by residents within ten miles of a border “in an area which is clean.” This meant that the residents of the twin towns of Albury and Wodonga, for instance, were permitted to cross the border.

Despite all the planning, the Victorian government took a fortnight to acknowledge that Australia’s first case of Spanish flu had been detected in Melbourne. By then, a soldier infected in the Victorian capital had travelled north across the state border. Within a day of New South Wales being proclaimed infected, Victoria finally informed the director of quarantine, John Cumpston, that it, too, had cases. Faced with Victoria’s tardiness, the NSW government considered the prior agreement to have been revoked and unilaterally shut the border.

Although Victoria carried on with business as usual, these events provoked a free-for-all among other states. Queensland prohibited interstate movement even for people living within ten miles of the border. South Australia blocked land traffic from Victoria, and Western Australia prohibited all land traffic from other states. Tasmania, meanwhile, required a week-long quarantine period, either before departure or on arrival.

Despite its own view that internal border closures were impractical and ineffective, the federal government was left powerless. This was seen as a real test of Commonwealth authority in the new federation, with an article in the Warwick Daily News arguing that “the actions of the State Governments in maintaining their own border quarantine restrictions was rapidly producing a crisis in the affairs of the Commonwealth.” The acting prime minister, W.A. Watt, negotiated a “system of cash and travel vouchers for citizens stranded outside their home states,” writes historian Humphrey McQueen, but beyond that, his powers of persuasion were “negligible.”

In practice, border closures were commonly evaded. People were smuggled across the NSW–Victoria border at points where supervision was lax, and the flu spread. New South Wales subsequently created a permit system at most border crossings and established quarantine detention camps at a couple of others, requiring people to stay for four days.

Not a single case of influenza was detected in the camps, though that seems to be a result more of poor testing than of an absence of disease, since numerous cases were discovered on ships arriving in Sydney and Brisbane during the same period. The director of quarantine scathingly described the camps as “either a useless infliction on persons travelling, or a positive danger, not only to the travellers, but to the community concerned.” While the ships were “entirely under control,” he wrote, “Inter-State quarantine has to face the difficulty of traffic at many hundred points along a border hundreds of miles long.”

Despite the innovations of the past century, it seems remarkable that we are still facing challenges at the borders. We now have drones and other surveillance technology, but the pandemic shows just how reliant we are on people themselves — to observe physical distancing protocols, to manage movement and, ultimately, to stop the spread of the virus.

Given how preoccupied successive governments have been with Australia’s external borders, it is also interesting to see a renewed focus on internal borders — which are, in fact, where the regulation of people movement began, centuries ago. The international controls on mobility with which we are so familiar — manifested in passports and visas — grew out of monitoring of movement within states, which was common across medieval Europe and continued into the modern period. Even Australia had its own “colonial passports” in the 1810–20s, issued to convicts, free settlers and visitors to establish their identities and facilitate movement within the colonies.

Up until Federation, the colonies had full discretion over who crossed their borders. But the High Court ruled in 1912 that section 92 of the Constitution (which provides for “free intercourse” among the states) and the act of federation itself limited states’ ability to deny entry to “undesirable immigrants” from other states. The court did recognise, however, that a state was entitled to take precautionary measures against dangerous people or other risks to “its health, or its morals.”

Subsequent cases have affirmed that while the Constitution guarantees freedom of movement across state borders, “a law may incidentally restrict movement interstate, provided the means adopted are neither inappropriate nor disproportionate.” It is now generally accepted that the Constitution’s “guarantee of internal mobility within Australia” may be subject to reasonable, legitimate restrictions which, in principle, include protecting the public from a pandemic. •

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Six months into this pandemic and some patterns are becoming clear. For countries that have taken a strong containment-and-control approach and were able to catch the epidemic early — like Australia but also like China and South Korea — the daily count of new cases has come down from its initial peak, but relatively small upsurges have been occurring as new clusters of infection come to light. This pattern speaks to the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 — any amount of active virus, no matter how small, will break out at an exponential rate.

In a handful of countries, rates have been brought down to close to zero, and these are touted as places where elimination may be possible. New Zealand and Iceland are the prime examples, both having the advantage of being an island with a relatively small population. But even when numbers have reached zero, new cases have appeared, albeit attributed to arrivals from overseas.

The press briefings delivered by the World Health Organization on a near-daily basis since the end of January have been remarkable for their accuracy and consistency across a rapidly evolving pandemic. One of the very few cases where a correction was issued came after Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead at these events, remarked on 8 June that transmission from asymptomatic individuals seemed rare. Her remark was seized on by the world’s media and interpreted as a reassuring signal that the majority of cases of Covid-19, which are asymptomatic, would not be able to transmit the virus onwards. The WHO quickly walked back that interpretation, making a distinction between those who are truly asymptomatic and will never go on to develop signs of illness, and those who are simply pre-symptomatic.

In fact, it seems that one of the keys to the virulent spread of SARS-CoV-2 is that its infectiousness is greatest a couple of days before symptoms appear. There is a relationship between viral load and both the likelihood of developing symptoms and the likelihood of transmitting the virus to others, but the extent of transmission from those with a low but not non-existent viral load is not entirely clear. The issue is important, because it goes to the question of elimination. If people who are asymptomatic and will never go on to develop illness can nevertheless transmit virus, even if rarely, then true elimination becomes massively difficult, short of testing the whole population on a regular basis.

In practical terms, there may be little difference between tight control and elimination strategies. The control strategies adopted by Australia and many East Asian countries depend on finding active cases and immediately implementing the isolation, quarantine and contact-tracing strategies needed to contain them. If this isn’t done, we now know that exponential spread will be inevitable.

In 2011 a previous pandemic, HIV, yielded a new term in the public health lexicon, “virtual elimination.” The example was the elimination of the transmission of HIV from mother to child: in the absence of any treatment, around a third of infants born to mothers living with HIV would become infected either prenatally, from blood contact during the birth itself, or postnatally through breast milk. But suppressing the mother’s viral load through effective antiretroviral therapy could bring this risk down to nearly zero.

In practice, of course, it was an enormous challenge to ensure that all mothers with HIV not only were diagnosed but were also given access to and used effective antiretroviral therapy. The global resolve to overcome these challenges meant that the goal of virtual elimination — defined as fewer than fifty transmissions per 100,000 births and a transmission rate of under 5 per cent — was seriously pursued.

Back in early April, the Grattan Institute was arguing that Australia should set itself the goal of total elimination of Covid-19. Only with total elimination, it said, could physical distancing be abandoned and full economic activity resumed. What we have learnt since then, not only from Australian experience but also particularly from China, suggests that virtual elimination may be more realistic. Precise criteria would need to be developed, and would include working towards zero levels of community transmission monitored by a mix of sentinel surveillance (random testing of slices of the population), location-specific quarantine when outbreaks appeared, and the mainstays of isolation and contact tracing.

The current Victorian upsurge has exposed some of the limitations of both state and national strategies. Any criticism seems churlish when Australia’s situation is compared with the constant news of the unmitigated disasters in the United States and Britain, but, even so, improvements can be made. In particular, the highly centralised Victorian response has given authorities there little flexibility to respond to changing conditions. Neither local hospitals nor local government are informed about the location of new cases as they are identified. Every positive case has a case management team assigned and cases are notified centrally, from where contact tracing is managed, but this leaves little capacity to develop a sense of local control of emerging cases. The lack of mutual commitment at the local level will make it much harder to introduce the local lockdowns that would seem to be necessary to manage outbreaks.

In the same way, public advice has been anodyne and not designed to foster active and ongoing commitment to control measures. In effect, the message from government, federal and state, has been “Trust us, we will find all cases and eliminate the threat. Go about your business normally.” This is the implicit message of the COVIDSafe app and the “snapback” slogans. A much more robust strategy would involve building mutuality into the response, with citizen action serving as a sign of social solidarity.

This is the real significance of the debate about mask wearing. Face masks undoubtedly contribute to slowing the spread of Covid-19, and the federal government’s reluctance to advocate, much less mandate, their use amounts to telling its citizens it has the problem under control, rather in the tradition of former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s catchphrase, “Don’t you worry about that.”

Although its situation is very different from Australia’s, South Africa has been among the better responders to SARS-CoV-2. It has provided a very good example with its recent advice to citizens, developed by a collective of experts and based on the science of distancing, patterns of dispersion and amounts of exposure or dose needed for infection to occur. A range of practical tips are provided: as far as possible meet and conduct business outdoors, open windows, wear masks, keep one or two metres from others, avoid crowded spaces.

The key to harm-reduction measures is that they take the world as it is and reduce risk, rather than making impossible demands. The science is still unclear about how much transmission takes place from touching surfaces, for instance, or the extent to which the virus can float long distances in the air. But we do know that the risk attached to hugging and kissing is vastly higher than that of touching a banister, and spending a prolonged period in a closed room with someone else is orders of magnitude more likely to cause transmission than going to a physically distanced supermarket. And while touching your nose or face may provide a route of access for the virus, there is little point in telling people to avoid an almost constant unconscious action.

Quite rightly, Victorian health authorities have been reluctant to call the current spike a second wave of the epidemic. Waves are a way of describing long-term patterns involving thousands of cases — in many ways Australia has not even seen a first wave yet. But spikes, outbreaks and lockdowns are all terms with which we will need to become familiar. As Australia pursues the path to virtual elimination, and if we are not to succumb to an overwhelming fatigue, the most urgent priority is far more active citizen engagement than we have seen to date. •

The post Pandemic fatigue appeared first on Inside Story.

Of course, none of these interpretations was self-evident to those who sought to make sense of the event at the time. As senior journalist Phillip Coorey wrote on the morning of the challenge, “Only six months ago… Mr Rudd and his government appeared unassailable.” Since then, the popular and scholarly analyses of the night of 23 June 2010 have had one thing in common: they have attempted to draw historical meaning and political precepts from an event that bewildered much of the electorate.

In the years following Gillard’s ascension, Labor MPs argued vigorously for their preferred interpretations of Rudd’s downfall. The first wave of history-making took place in February 2012, when Kevin Rudd made his initial attempt to return to the leadership. Gillard loyalists used the media to expose the dysfunctionality of his government as they saw it. Gillard ultimately won that battle over Labor’s recent history and immediate future by a margin of 71–31.

Labor’s partisans clashed again in 2015 in ABC TV’s three-part documentary, The Killing Season. Rudd talked of a “coup”; Gillard referred simply to “the leadership change.” Presenter Sarah Ferguson suggested that the goal of the series was to put the leaders “side by side and let the audience decide,” but senior ministers such as Wayne Swan and Craig Emerson have told me they felt its account was decidedly pro-Rudd.

Finally, the debate was taken up in the published memoirs of key players and observers. Both Rudd and Gillard explained the challenge as they saw it, within broader accounts of their careers, as did their senior colleagues Wayne Swan, Greg Combet, Peter Garrett and Craig Emerson. High-profile backbench MP Maxine McKew joined in, as did Australian Workers’ Union leader and reputed “faceless man” Paul Howes, and one-time Rudd speechwriter James Button. Despite the inevitable flaws in these subjective accounts, they cumulatively reveal much about the structural challenges that led to it.

The close personal friendships and political alliances among members of each camp shape the picture of history that emerges from these memoirs. It’s also important to remember that political memoirists don’t craft their narratives on their own: as the former chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing, Louise Adler, once wrote, modern political memoirs are constructed with the help of “the unacknowledged ghostwriter, the credited co-author, advisers, researchers, fact checkers and a legion of loyal staff.” To this throng I would add the “friend,” the “parliamentary colleague,” the “internal supporter” and others.

Members of the Gillard camp, in particular, have acknowledged these wider groups. Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard both thanked one another directly in their acknowledgements. In his memoir, The Good Fight, Swan also paid tribute to Stephen Smith and Stephen Conroy, fellow “roosters” in the party’s national Right faction. Gillard thanked Craig Emerson, cabinet minister and key supporter, for offering “valuable feedback on sections” of her book, My Story. Emerson in turn thanked Greg Combet, another Gillard minister and loyalist, for “encouragement” and Gillard herself for “wise counsel” during the drafting process of his book, The Boy from Baradine.

When asked about these literary interactions, the memoirists have revealed that they spoke with one another, swapped drafts and corroborated memories. Combet, author with Mark Davis of Fights of My Life, confirmed to me that he and Gillard “did liaise over some of the elements.” Gillard recalled that her deputy, Wayne Swan, “shared his manuscript” with her during his own writing process. When I asked him if his account was partly intended to support Gillard’s legacy, Craig Emerson responded, “Definitely, and I discussed it with Bob Hawke, not in fine detail, but having had that discussion he said, ‘History will judge Julia Gillard well.’”

When Rudd published his own two-volume memoir, the contest of peers gave way to a contest of pages. Recognising the “minor phalanx” of memoirs arrayed against him, he produced an account of the challenge, in The PM Years, that spanned six chapters and ninety-four pages.

In different ways, then, the friendships forged during these political battles shaped the form and content of the memoirs produced by those who sided with Gillard. They told a version of history in which a good government was in terminal decline prior to June 2010, largely because the prime minister was almost totally dysfunctional. Cabinet ministers in particular recorded dozens of examples of Rudd’s poor interpersonal skills, his inability to make decisions and the centralisation of power away from cabinet and towards the prime minister’s office.

Peter Garrett (in Big Blue Sky) and Wayne Swan both accused Rudd of “micromanagement.” Combet explained that Rudd “took all responsibility upon himself,” which “made decision-making slow.” Gillard referred to Rudd’s tendency to “kick the can down the road” by “announcing an inquiry” rather than making a final policy decision. Even those on the edge of the process, like speechwriter James Button writing in his book Speechless, found that Rudd’s “fretful need to obtain more data… was constantly holding up the workings of government.”

In Swan’s account, Rudd’s style became increasingly corrosive over time, and “infected the way officials and staff interacted with him, his office and the cabinet.” Garrett bluntly described Rudd as a “brute” in his handling of both the bureaucracy and his colleagues.

Even those who ultimately supported Rudd recognised his weaknesses. Discussing Rudd’s return, in his book Diary of a Foreign Minister, foreign minister Bob Carr recorded in his diary, “plans are not Kevin’s strong suit.” What is astonishing is not that insiders are critical of Rudd’s governing style but that those criticisms are repeated regardless of factional or personal loyalties.

These memoirs also present a consistent picture of deteriorating cabinet processes. Swan claimed that Rudd was “an extremely poor chair of cabinet meetings,” while Combet recorded that “[m]any ministers felt excluded from discussion of the policy and political implications of decisions.” In the throes of the global financial crisis, the government was led by its four most senior ministers (Rudd, Gillard, Swan and finance minister Lindsay Tanner) in the Strategic Priorities Budget Committee; by 2010 that, too, had broken down. Its “agendas became unwieldy, the meeting schedules erratic,” wrote Gillard.

For Craig Emerson, one of the virtues of the Gillard government was that “the cabinet processes worked, in stark contrast to the shambolic Rudd processes.” Against these charges, Rudd mounted the relatively weak reply that his cabinet process was “as systematic as it could be.”

These flawed processes ultimately led to failed policies. In late 2009, with the number of asylum seeker boat arrivals growing rapidly, Rudd made the crucial decision to send an Australian customs vessel, the MV Oceanic Viking, to assist a distressed boat of Sri Lankan refugees, without having consulted immigration minister Chris Evans. When the vessel arrived at an Indonesian processing centre, the refugees refused to disembark. As Swan wrote, “Not only was [the failure to consult Evans] very poor protocol in a system of democratic cabinet government, it was politically disastrous.”

At the same time, Rudd was seen to be mishandling the government’s contentious carbon pollution reduction scheme. According to Gillard, climate minister Penny Wong “did not know whether her political instructions from Kevin were to get a deal or to crash the prospects of a deal… Kevin was obviously equivocating on, indeed hiding from, such a profound decision.” Ministers were shocked when Rudd dumped the scheme; Garrett wasn’t alone in saying that the decision to defer this crucial plank of climate policy “wasn’t communicated to cabinet before being made public.”

Again, as the Rudd government began to develop its proposed resource super profits tax on minerals wealth in May 2010, key ministers were left unconsulted. Gillard claimed that Rudd sidelined them “to prevent leaks,” while Swan recorded that Rudd “distrusted [resources minister Martin] Ferguson because he was close to the industry.” Policy failures and political headaches were the inevitable product of the Rudd government’s warped cabinet processes.

That’s the policy substance, but what of the sales pitch? In most of these memoirs, the Rudd government engages in a form of media manipulation that, by June 2010, had failed. In James Button’s assessment, “the audience did not matter to him, only the media.” From the backbench, Maxine McKew saw a prime minister who was obsessed with presentation. “Rudd was a puzzle…” she wrote in Tales from the Political Trenches. “[H]e could be persuasive and sophisticated, but on other occasions, he seemed to struggle with deciding which Kevin the public should see.”

The government’s quest to manipulate the media cycle, by McKew’s account, was relentless, culminating in a “command and control” system of political messaging. For union leader Paul Howes, writing in Confessions of a Faceless Man, the decision to abandon the carbon-reduction scheme revealed Rudd as a cynical media performer, “all spin and no substance.”

In the absence of a clear policy vision and sound administrative processes, Rudd would be fatally exposed when his supremacy in the public opinion polling began to wane. In accounts from the Rudd and Gillard camps, polling proved central to the question of whether the events of June 2010 were justified.

In the first of the “insider” accounts of the event, McKew argued that public polls and commissioned internal polls were the “principal tool in the enterprise” of Rudd’s removal. In The PM Years Rudd pointed to the last Newspoll taken before his ousting to show that he was still running a good government that had “recovered a solid lead” over the Coalition, and that “the Australian public did not share the views of the plotters on the allegedly terminal state of the government I led.”

Gillard’s camp referred to party polling that pointed, according to Howes, “not just to defeat, but to electoral annihilation.” For Gillard, “as the polling tightened,” a sense of panic developed in the Labor caucus. Rudd is, of course, right to say that the public polling was not bad enough to validate the move against him, but it is significant that in his narrative the polling appears to be his last line of defence, and one that became shaky when the public and party findings contradicted each other.

Did Labor insiders see the change of leadership coming? In their accounts, several prominent members of the Rudd ministry confessed surprise at the series of events in which they were swept up. Combet admitted he had “no inkling of the move against [Rudd].” Craig Emerson, aware of the disaffection with Rudd in caucus, claimed that until the night of 23 June 2010 he “didn’t place a lot of weight” on the media reports that warned of a leadership change. Peter Garrett, who was overseas at a conference about whaling, recorded that he had left Canberra “with one prime minister in charge and flew back in to find another.”

If others perceived Rudd to have been jittery about his support in mid June, Rudd’s own memoir offered a picture of total surprise when Gillard moved against him. Referring to the article that triggered the event — a story in the Sydney Morning Herald by journalist Peter Hartcher claiming that Rudd now distrusted his deputy leader — he wrote, “It suggested a leadership crisis when, to the best of my knowledge, there was none.” For the majority of those involved, the events were fast-paced and unexpected.

At the core of their accounts, Rudd, Gillard and Swan confront the essential meaning of the event. For Rudd, the only explanation of 23 June 2010 was ambition and opportunism: “the coup was primarily about personal ambition, power and, in some cases, revenge,” he wrote in The PM Years. In his version of history, the leadership change had little to do with either the administrative processes or the policy outcomes of his government, and was sealed by a broken promise for more time.

For Swan, on the other hand, the events were an attempt to save Labor from the dysfunction of its leader: “Kevin had brought these events upon himself and we now had no choice but to make the best of the situation.” For Gillard, who considered her partnership with Rudd to have been the backbone of the Labor government, the Hartcher story sounded the death knell of the “only remaining bond holding the government together.” The differences between the Rudd and Gillard–Swan narratives are wide, with little or no agreement about issues of policy, process or, especially, polling.

A decade after the event, what lessons can be drawn from these insider accounts? First, cabinet remains the central institution in Commonwealth administration. To misuse or abuse that institution in the 2010s was to create a large vulnerability for one’s leadership. The removal of Tony Abbott in September 2015 was equally premised on the need to “restore” cabinet government.

Second, bad process breeds bad policy. The Rudd government’s missteps on asylum seekers, the carbon pollution reduction scheme and the resource super profits tax were all products of poor consultation, a tendency to stifle policy debate, and a chronic fear of leaks.

Third, though it never pays to be naive in politics, spin is rarely a sound substitute for substance. Rudd’s quest to control the media cycle was central to the story of the dysfunctionality of his leadership.

Finally, the political class’s obsession with opinion polling — an obsession confirmed and reiterated in most of these accounts — was a key part of the structural weakness of Australian politics in the 2010s. Having alienated much of his parliamentary party and failed to enlist the support of key groups in the community, Rudd had to live or die by the polls, which left him critically exposed in June 2010.

Both Labor and the Liberals have since altered the rules for selecting their leaders in the hope of slowing the churn of the past decade. But the events that led to June 2010 could still be repeated. A leader who sidelined cabinet and governed by spin might not be replaced by the party room, but a political crisis could still unfold swiftly.

If history is never to be repeated, policymakers and bureaucrats must read and learn from those who have lived it, made it, and published it for posterity. Amid the self-serving arguments and coordinated narratives propagated in this group of political memoirs, there are key lessons about how not to run a government. •

The post Bringing order to chaos appeared first on Inside Story.

The simplified system, said Morrison, “will make it easier for people to comply with requirements and spend more time searching for jobs, which is the key element of welfare reform.” Moreover, “this investment will also help us stop the rorts by giving our welfare cops the tools they need on the beat to collar those who are stealing from taxpayers by seeking to defraud the system.”

Those were the days. The government was in its first term and Morrison was an ambitious, gung-ho minister with a fondness for the police and military analogies that had stood him in such good stead in party circles when he was overseeing Operation Sovereign Borders.

Robodebt started the same year — though it didn’t acquire its pejorative nickname until later — and it reflected Morrison’s punitive approach. The increasing potential of automated data-matching — in Morrison’s words, the fact that more government systems were talking to each other — was for the first time making it cost-effective to pursue overpayments of welfare benefits.

The problem was that the systems were talking different languages. Crucially, the tax office was supplying income figures that couldn’t be matched to the benefits people were receiving. The government went ahead anyway, putting the onus on welfare recipients to prove the figures wrong, and causing real hardship and trauma, including reported suicides, among vulnerable people.

A program that had previously reviewed 20,000 cases a year conducted more than 900,000 reviews in the four years to the end of August last year, with 734,000 identified as having been overpaid. Except that many of them hadn’t been. Most of the reviews looked at benefits paid under Newstart and Youth Allowance, though they were eventually extended to other payments, including the age pension, the disability support pension, Austudy and the parenting payment.

Subsequent events have culminated in the government’s promise to pay back $721 million to 373,000 Australians for 470,000 illegally recovered and often non-existing debts. With almost two-thirds of the debts having been reversed, the government’s early depiction of the sunlit uplands looks particularly ironic.

Speaking on the same day as Morrison in 2015, human services minister Marise Payne was just as effusive about how data analytics would inform policy decisions. “Improvements to real-time data sharing between agencies will mean that, with customer consent, their information won’t have to be provided twice,” she said. “Improved data sharing will also significantly increase the government’s ability to detect and prevent fraud and non-compliance. This means customers who [simply] fail to update their details with us will be less likely to have to repay large debts and those who wilfully act to defraud taxpayers will be caught much more quickly.”

When applied to robodebt, this enumeration of the new system’s benefits turned out to be wrong or misleading in every detail. The data shared was not real-time: annual income figures from the tax office were averaged out to compare them with fortnightly benefit payments, producing many wrong assessments. Customers were not asked for their consent: they were pursued to provide information the government already had or was responsible for obtaining.

On top of all that, the relatively few perpetrators of welfare fraud are also being repaid their robodebt money because the government finally had to concede that the whole scheme broke the law. That admission came more than two years after Terry Carney made exactly that point as a member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Carney, now a professor of law, has since described robodebt as “illegal, immoral and ill-constructed.”

The government is continuing with “online compliance intervention” — robodebt’s official title — but it will no longer use income averaging and it has promised other “refinements.” It has yet to give a clear commitment not to try to recover some of the same debts by different means. As Morrison put it earlier this month, the decision to refund the money “doesn’t mean those debts don’t exist. It just means that they cannot be raised solely on the basis of using income averaging.”

The government is also forging ahead with upgrading and increasingly automating its welfare payments system. Properly designed — and that’s a big caveat in the light of recent experience — the modernisation should make it easier for people to claim their correct benefits and easier for the government to make sure that they are paid the correct amounts.

The Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation project — the one described as among the biggest in the world five years ago — has another two years to run. Services Australia, formerly the Department of Human Services, claims that it has made practical improvements, including introducing prefilled claim forms using information already available to the government, enabling claims via mobile devices and verbally, and speeding up claims processing for some students and the unemployed. It boasts that the number of questions on the online claim form for students and trainees has been reduced from 117 to thirty-seven.

But, as the robodebt experience demonstrates, many of the new system’s claimed advantages are double-edged. The “digital assistants” introduced to answer customer questions, for example, mean less human interaction, which is reflected in staffing reductions that have already taken place. But most of us already know just how frustrating it can be dealing with digital assistants.

Similarly, analytics will be used to “proactively provide support to those who need it.” And also to take it away? A new “payment utility platform” promises same-day payments but also “simpler debt repayment processes.” In the wake of robodebt, how many people will be keen to use it?

A new “entitlement calculation engine” will determine payment levels. And if a person wants to challenge the calculation? Presumably they will be expected to sort it out with one of the new digital assistants.

It is one thing to increase automation for people well versed in the ways of the digital economy, but it is entirely another to impose it on vulnerable people who may or may not be familiar with online processing. As Australian Council of Social Service chief executive Cassandra Goldie told Inside Story this week, “Robodebt fundamentally failed because we stripped out the ‘human’ in human services. Instead it was up to individuals to try and prove their innocence in a David versus Goliath battle with automation.” For Goldie, humans must have a role in decisions about essential services like income support and “we must build in ways to enable people to easily correct decisions where mistakes have been made.”

In the end, it is how the system is designed that will determine the nature of the experience for its users and how much emphasis is placed on ferreting out suspected wrong claims.

Judged by the guidance from the top, the bias will be towards limiting entitlements. In 2018 the government introduced ParentsNext to add another layer of obligations to those already imposed on parents on low incomes who receive parenting payments. According to a Senate committee report, one in five parents had their payments suspended for missing appointments or failing to participate in “pre-employment” programs under this new scheme.

The social services minister who promised in 2015 to use the modernised welfare system to sool the “welfare cops” on to beneficiaries is now the prime minister who says the refunded debts still exist.

Having initially refused to apologise for robodebt for fear of legal liability, Morrison thought better of it and, in response to a pointed question from Bill Shorten, assured parliament of his deep regret for any hardship caused. But government services minister Stuart Robert immediately added that 939,000 Australians had $5 billion worth of debt “that the government lawfully has to collect across a whole range of programs.” Message? We’re still coming after you.

In her 2017 book Automating Inequality, American political scientist Virginia Eubanks describes how digital eligibility systems, matching algorithms and other tools have been used in the United States to drastically cut the welfare rolls. “At their worst these systems act as empathy overrides, allowing us to turn away from the most pressing problem of our age: the life- and soul-threatening legacy of institutional racism, classism and sexism in America,” she said in a speech last year. “They allow us to ignore our moral responsibility by replacing the messiness of human relationships with the predictable charms of systems engineering.”

It doesn’t need to be that way. But governments will have to resist the temptation to succumb to the convenience of allowing machines to make decisions that require judgement, compassion and humanity. •

The post Machine learning appeared first on Inside Story.

The more I think about the aged care impasse, the more I have come to see the sector’s seemingly intractable issues as symptomatic of a more fundamental failure: one that underpins the litany of ineffectual policy reforms, deficient regulation, negligent provider practices and lamentable outcomes experienced by many aged care recipients. This failure is not unique to politicians or providers, but their failure in this respect is more consequential. It is a collective failure that implicates us all. Fundamentally, the failure of Australian aged care is a failure of imagination.

“For all the death, we also die unrehearsed,” Les Murray writes at the end of his poem “Corniche.” This line of Murray’s has been on my mind lately, because it strikes me as incisively true, and yet not. Death is the surest thing we know, but its particular contours are unknowable. It is out there for each one of us like a distant comet in the night sky, hurtling towards us at an incalculable velocity. We do not know when death will reach us — only that it will.

And yet it could also be said that in the twenty-first century, we rehearse our deaths continuously. We live in a golden age — a dark age, perhaps — of cinematic and literary dystopianism. We voraciously consume scenarios in which natural disaster, climate change, alien life forms or malevolent technology threatens our survival. We contemplate death and the ways we might die all the time.

The appeal of this dystopian ideation is clear: it offers us a cathartic encounter with fears of societal collapse and the animalistic return to Darwinian imperatives, and then a predictable return to order at the narrative’s end. The lights of the movie theatre come up, the last page of the novel is turned, and we are back in our own unscathed bodies, exhilarated to be spared.

Many recent cinematic dystopias centre on the body’s vulnerability and fallibility. In the blighted desert landscape of Mad Max: Fury Road, humans are vampirically mined as “blood bags” and select women are held captive as breeding stock, useful only for furthering the human race. The characters in Bird Box must navigate the world blindfolded to avoid eye contact with monstrous entities that, upon being seen, force them to involuntarily commit suicide. In A Quiet Place, Earth has been invaded by extraterrestrial predators with hypersensitive hearing, consigning the human characters to creep around trying — and often failing — to avoid making any noise. In Get Out, the bodies of young black men and women are parasitically occupied by white counterparts, who leach the vitality from their hosts.

Many of these narratives also serve as morality tales: the virtuous, able, alert and tough survive; the immoral, weak and clumsy perish. Watching these films, the viewer is encouraged to adopt a position of superiority and to anticipate the disaster before it befalls a character: I would never make that fatal mistake, we tell ourselves. I would know better; I would survive.

Amid all this feverish post-apocalyptic speculation about the manifold ways humanity might be brought to the brink of extinction, there is one pervasive unacknowledged norm. The protagonists with whom we identify — whose struggles and trials and fears we vicariously experience — are overwhelmingly young. The healthy body is the default. The young have more at stake; their prospective loss is imbued with the poignancy of a life cut short in its prime. The middle-aged are at best ancillary characters, killed off through overconfidence or acts of self-sacrifice for the greater good. And the elderly? The elderly are nowhere to be seen in these brave new worlds. They are invisible. They don’t exist.

Of course, there is a notable exception to this rule of narrative exclusion. Senicide — the killing of the elderly, most often at an age of perceived inutility — stretches back centuries as a fate meted out in literature. The Jacobean satirical play The Old Law (1618–19) by Thomas Middleton and others — in which men are involuntarily executed at eighty and women at sixty — is an early progenitor of what is now an established geronticidal trope within dystopian fiction.

Anthony Trollope’s final novel, The Fixed Period (1882), envisages a future in which euthanasia is mandated after a fixed period; the elderly are shunted off into a college, the Necropolis, for retirement at sixty-five and then execution at 67.5. In Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), the elderly are killed at sixty, then cremated and recycled into fertiliser. In P.D. James’s Children of Men (1992), sixty-year-olds are subjected to a mass drowning called the Quietus. In Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday (2007), baby boomers are offered incentives to commit suicide at seventy. In Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017), the execution age is set at fifty; humans are recycled into a water supply for a colony orbiting the Earth on a satellite. In the horror film Midsommar (2019), elders of a cult must commit ättestupa — a ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff, drawn from Nordic folklore — at seventy-two.

It is no accident that the extermination age in these examples hovers around retirement age. Retirement is typically the point at which one is no longer economically productive, and therefore ceases being of value to the community. In many of these examples, the inutility of the aged body is further underscored by its transformation into useful resources such as fertiliser, water or fuel; this commodification underscores the fundamental importance of contributing productively to the community, even after death.

Senicide is, of course, not solely the province of fiction; documented instances exist of various cultures having supposedly killed the elderly through history, including in Sardinia, where women known as accabadoras would bludgeon or suffocate the elderly, and in Japan, where the possibly apocryphal practice of ubasute involved dumping elderly relatives on a mountaintop to die of exposure. In present-day India, in the southern districts of the state of Tamil Nadu, the well-documented phenomenon of elderly relatives being killed by family members is known as thalaikoothal, a practice in which the elderly are given cold oil baths to reduce the body temperature, then fed tender coconut water and milk, prompting renal failure. These overt acts of senicide are supplemented by the decades-old epidemic of “granny dumping” in the United States and elsewhere, wherein elderly relatives are abandoned far from home by family members who can no longer afford their healthcare and who view care giving as overly onerous.

This senicidal thinking is founded on the premise that human worth is aligned to productivity: a concept that stretches back to Plato’s Republic, where Socrates argues that medical treatment and intervention is only appropriate if it allows a productive citizen — Socrates proffers the example of a carpenter — to fulfil his role in the community. When the carpenter ceases to work and contribute productively to the community, Socrates argues, there is no sense in unnecessarily prolonging his life; therefore, medical treatment should be withheld: “No treatment should be given to the man who cannot survive the routine of his ordinary job, and who is therefore of no use either to himself or society.”

In dystopian literary narratives, the ruling generation typically justifies overt violence towards the aged through the lens of economic rationalism: the elderly, according to Margaret Cruikshank in Learning to Be Old (2003), are viewed as burdensome “parasites [who are] expensive to maintain” and consume resources without contributing anything of worth to the community.

Lionel Shriver picks up this theme of the economic burden of unproductive elderly citizens in her 2016 novel The Mandibles, set in 2029 after a market crash devalues the US dollar, consigning families to live in cramped squalor. In Shriver’s future, inheritance impatience is rife, and the elderly are shot en masse as an act of retribution for the crime of having sent the inflation rate soaring because of the cost of their pension benefits.

Yet the elderly are punished not only for perceived economic crimes but for environmental ones, too. Margaret Atwood’s 2014 short story “Torching the Dusties” underscores how easily scapegoating morphs into legitimised violence. “Torching the Dusties” centres on the residents of a retirement community, Ambrosia Manor, who are besieged by a mob of irate protesters who belong to an anti-elder movement, Our Turn. Our Turners burn down nursing homes with their occupants inside while wearing baby-face masks, and see their vigilantism as retribution for the wastefulness and greed of the previous generation.

It is not difficult to see real-world echoes of millennials’ visceral dislike and resentment of baby boomers in Shriver’s and Atwood’s dystopias. This intergenerational hostility has been further underscored recently by “OK Boomer” memes, and accusations such as those made by Bruce Gibney that boomers are a “sociopathic generation” who have “mortgaged the future.”

The eldest of the boomers, now in their mid seventies, will be the next cohort to enter residential aged care, if they haven’t already. While the average age of home-care adoption is eighty for men and eighty-one for women, and the average age of admission to permanent residential aged care is eighty-two for men and eighty-five for women, there is no minimum age requirement for access to aged care, and boomers suffering from early-onset conditions will already be receiving care in one way or another. The most common term used to describe the looming influx of the balance of the boomer generation into the aged care system — “silver tsunami” — likens boomers’ longevity and the associated ballooning cost of aged care to the onset of a natural disaster.

Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” goes further in directly apportioning blame to the elderly for the degradation and depletion of Earth’s resources. Set in 2158, in a world in which a drug called anti-gerasone has drastically extended the lifespan of Earth’s inhabitants, Vonnegut envisages a future in which insatiable pursuit of longevity by the elderly is responsible for nightmarish overpopulation, food shortages and the depletion of natural resources, consigning the remainder of the population to live in squalor and subsist on seaweed and sawdust. While Vonnegut illuminates the cruelty and greed of impatient descendants who try to kill off 172-year-old protagonist Harold “Gramps” Schwartz by sabotaging his anti-gerasone, he also offers a cautionary tale about the perils of failing to gracefully accept one’s mortality. It is desirable to die at an appropriate time, and indecent to live too long.

So it goes.

In truth, the apocalypse has already arrived for Australia’s elderly. We treat older people as a separate and subhuman class, frequently viewing them as a burden on their families, the community and the state. Increasingly, this dehumanisation has taken a corporatised tone; as the elderly exit the workforce, they become a commodity to be mined for profit and dividends by the aged care industry.

The profits posted by Australian aged care providers are directly financed by the government, which contributes the vast majority of the sector’s funding. Commonwealth funding is tipped to reach $21.7 billion in the year 2019–20, which represents 80 per cent of the sector’s total funding. Of this amount, approximately 68 per cent is spent on residential aged care; the rest goes to home-care, home-support and flexible aged care packages. Consumer contributions finance the remaining 20 per cent, either through often exorbitant Refundable Accommodation Deposit bonds, which at the most recent estimate represent a $27.5 billion contribution to providers’ coffers, or through Daily Accommodation Payments, basic daily fees or home-care payments.

Yet in spite of the high proportion of government funding underwriting the aged care industry, there is little transparency about how much providers spend on primary care. Reforms ushered in by the Aged Care Act 1997 mean that providers no longer need to demonstrate that the funding they receive via the Aged Care Funding Instrument is spent on care; rather, expenditure of taxpayer funds is entirely at providers’ discretion, and they don’t need to return any unspent monies to the government. The correlation that one might expect to see — higher funds equating to higher expenditure on care — doesn’t always play out. In 2017, Bupa’s funding from both the government and residents’ fees increased, yet it paid almost $3 million less to employees and suppliers.

Compounding this lack of transparency are the financial reporting requirements themselves. While three providers — Regis, Estia and Japara — are ASX-listed entities and therefore subject to stringent reporting requirements to ASIC, many other providers can file limited financial statements under the reduced disclosure requirements set by the Australian Accounting Standards Board, meaning there is minimal scope for scrutiny of their financial practices. While not-for-profit providers represent 55 per cent of all residential aged care providers and two-thirds of home-care providers, the ever-increasing share of for-profit providers, especially in the residential sector, signals that aged care is big business in Australia.

Australia’s top six for-profit aged care providers — Bupa, Opal, Allity, Regis, Estia and Japara — received $2.17 billion in government subsidies in the 2017 tax year while also posting significant profits and using aggressive tax-minimisation strategies such as discretionary trusts. Bupa, Australia’s largest private aged care provider, made a profit of $663 million in 2017, 70 per cent of which ($468 million) came from government funding. Opal, Australia’s second-largest private provider, posted a total income of $527.2 million in 2015–16, 76 per cent of which came from government funding, yet it paid a mere $2.4 million in tax on a taxable income of $7.9 million.

The foreign-ownership structures of several of the major players — Bupa is headquartered in the UK, and Opal belongs to a parent company in Singapore — have further enabled providers to pursue aggressive tax-minimisation strategies. In 2019, after a ten-year dispute with the Australian Taxation Office, Bupa paid $157 million in restitution for the alleged practice of “thin capitalisation” — that is, using high-interest offshore debt to artificially reduce its taxable income. The abolition of probity requirements by the 1997 Aged Care Act has further eroded the government’s capacity to assess, scrutinise and regulate ownership of aged care providers.

Yet at the same time that private providers are posting huge profits and paying minimal tax, the standard of Australian aged care is cratering. Most sensationally, Bupa posted a $560 million profit in 2018, the same year it made headlines when more than half of its aged care facilities across Australia were failing basic care standards, and 30 per cent were deemed to pose a serious risk to the health and safety of residents. With approximately 6500 frail and vulnerable residents spread across its seventy-two facilities, Bupa is now considered “too big to fail” and remains open in spite of repeated sanctions and scandals. Clearly, in the absence of strict regulation and public reporting, privatisation has only served to enable and entrench abuse and negligence, rather than to drive poor providers out of business.

The monumental failures of Australian aged care have been in plain view for a long time, well before prime minister Scott Morrison called the royal commission in 2018. Over the past decade, seventeen reviews and inquiries into the aged care sector have been handed down, many of which have passed with little media interest and the implementation of few or none of the proposed reforms.

To take one prominent example, the 2017 Carnell–Paterson Review of National Aged Care Quality Regulatory Processes — intended in part to probe how horrific abuse at the Oakden nursing home in South Australia could occur while the facility remained fully compliant and accredited — made ten sweeping recommendations to achieve tougher regulation and greater transparency within the aged care sector. These included the creation of a public register of the outcomes of complaints and investigations, the implementation of a public star-based rating service to track provider performance, increased powers for the complaints commissioner, and the adoption of clearer clinical-care measures in the assessment and accreditation processes.

More than two years after these findings were handed down, only a handful of aged care reforms have been passed, and none of the recommendations specifically aimed at achieving tougher regulation and greater public transparency have been implemented. Many have not even been considered. The government cites statutory secrecy under the Aged Care Act, Commission Act and Privacy Act as its justification for not making the reporting of complaints about provider performance more transparent. But the undue influence of peak bodies — which represent the interests of providers and vehemently oppose transparency measures — has also decreased the government’s appetite for reform. The government’s hands-off, market-driven approach to aged care is grounded in economic rationalism, callously ignoring the inconvenient fact that the physical and mental frailty of aged care recipients, combined with the dearth of public information about provider performance, preclude aged care “consumers” from exercising meaningful “choice.”

Perhaps most frustratingly, many of the issues plaguing the sector today were foreseen and thoroughly canvassed more than twenty years ago during the Senate inquiry that preceded the passage of the 1997 Aged Care Act. The removal of staff-to-patient ratios was predicted to result in compromised care, and experts also predicted that the accreditation process was inadequate to stop this from occurring. In the two decades since, review after review has exposed chronic understaffing, inadequate regulation and accreditation, the lack of transparency, and the poor care outcomes in the sector — and in each instance, successive governments of both political persuasions have responded with piecemeal reforms or no reforms at all.

This government inertia has played out against a backdrop of escalating failures in the sector, including a 170 per cent increase in serious risk notices in the year prior to the royal commission being called, and a 292 per cent increase in serious noncompliance. The standard of care in residential facilities has deteriorated unabated: between 2003 and 2013, there was a 400 per cent increase in preventable deaths in Australian aged care facilities from choking, falls and suicides. In 2017–18 alone, there were 3773 reportable assaults, including 547 reportable sexual assaults and rapes. These statistics represent a fraction of the true number, because they only account for incidents in which the perpetrator does not have an assessed cognitive or mental impairment. Given that more than half of aged care residents suffer from dementia, the actual assault figures are likely to be significantly higher.

In addition to these extreme instances of neglect, mistreatment and abuse, baseline levels of primary care are also shocking in both residential and home care. In the royal commission’s interim report, commissioners Richard Tracey and Lynelle Briggs noted a voluntary survey filled out by 1000 aged care providers that cited 274,409 self-reported instances of substandard care over a five-year period, including 112,000 instances of substandard clinical care and 69,000 incidents of substandard medication management. Considering that this survey was undertaken by fewer than half of Australia’s 2695 aged care providers and that there are only approximately 240,000 aged care residents in Australia today, along with approximately 118,000 home-care package recipients, it is evident that Australian aged care is failing on an industrial scale. And as Australia’s population rapidly ages — the number of Australians aged seventy years and older is projected to almost triple over the next four decades, reaching seven million by 2055 — the size of the problem will only grow exponentially.

Indeed, as the commissioners noted, if population trends identified in 2014 hold true, “more than a third of all men and more than half of all women will enter residential aged care at some time in their lives.” The difficulty the sector faces in attracting and retaining qualified staff, combined with the high rates of turnover and low skill base of the workforce, places even more pressure on providers’ capacity to accommodate these ever-increasing numbers. And while some providers are posting colossal profits, others are not making any profit at all. In 2019, the Aged Care Financial Authority reported that approximately 44 per cent of residential aged care providers are operating at a loss, and many are at risk of closure: factors that are only likely to wreak more chaos in the sector in the future, and produce more catastrophic outcomes like the recent shock closure of Earle Haven.

The sector’s failure to provide safe and dignified care is compounded by inadequate regulation; too often, providers are asked to “self-assess” or interpret vague and elastic guidelines rather than conform to hard and fast quantifiable standards. The commissioners also noted in their interim report that the regulatory regime administered by the newly formed Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission is “unfit for purpose.” The lack of effective oversight means that families often turn in desperation to installing hidden CCTV cameras to confirm their suspicions of abuse and neglect.

As the distressing footage screened on the ABC’s two-part Four Corners investigation, Who Cares?, in September 2018 and subsequent news bulletins have shown, our most vulnerable citizens are being slapped across the face by abusive carers, injured through “rough handling” — a dehumanising euphemism that anywhere other than an aged care facility means “assault” — raped and sexually assaulted in their most vulnerable state, drugged unnecessarily, cruelly restrained, and left to sit in distress in their own faeces and urine. There have even been several cases of aged care residents infested with maggots, including a dying woman in palliative care who was found with maggots living inside her mouth. Much of this abuse and neglect would never have come to light without the determination of relatives and advocates.

While media coverage of aged care has been dominated by the failures in residential care, the home-care sector has not performed any better. Due to a near total lack of regulation of home-care providers, there has been rampant rorting, including exorbitant administration fees levied that, in some cases, effectively halve the package for the recipient, as well as neglect, abuse, assault and even rape of older Australians in their own homes. The issues of unskilled, unqualified and unscrupulous staff in residential care also extends to home care: in March 2019, the royal commission heard from a health department witness that eight out of ten applicants applying to provide home-care services were unqualified “bottom feeders” who view the provision of care as nothing more than a “business opportunity.”

Even accessing care in the first place is proving increasingly difficult for older Australians. Thousands die each year while waiting for the Home Care Packages, or HCPs, they need, while others endure extraordinary time frames for their HCPs to come through. In the financial year ending June 2018 alone, more than 16,000 people died while waiting for HCPs, and as of June 2019, 119,524 people were languishing on the waiting list. The royal commission reported that actual wait times are significantly longer than the public guidelines cited on the My Aged Care website, which provides an estimate of twelve-plus months as the expected time for levels 2–4 HCPs.

The stark reality, according to the health department, is that for those requiring the highest level of support — a level 4 HCP — the mean waiting time is twenty-two months, and a quarter of those people will wait three years to receive care. The consequences of this logjam, the commissioners note, are dire, including “inappropriate hospitalisation, carer burnout and premature institutionalisation.” The federal government’s response to the royal commission’s interim report was to announce funding for a further 10,000 packages, which represents less than 10 per cent of the number required to clear the waitlist.

While the royal commission has played a valuable role in exposing the policy failures that have wrought the current state of affairs, as well as the shocking scale of the endemic abuse and neglect across the sector, it is fair to say that the concomitant outrage has been muted. Real-time media monitoring demonstrates 300 per cent less media coverage of the aged care royal commission than there was of the banking royal commission. It is difficult to imagine the mistreatment of any other vulnerable group being met with such widespread indifference. And the apathy and cognitive dissonance of politicians — many of whom, like aged care minister Richard Colbeck, who is sixty-one, are not far from retirement age and may be facing entry to the aged care system far sooner than they think — are profound.

As someone who cares deeply about this issue, having given evidence to the royal commission about the sadistic mistreatment my father has been subjected to in aged care, I admit I am baffled by this lack of empathy for older people. It is a failure that flies in the face of the obvious: as Proust says in Time Regained, “life makes its old men out of adolescents who last many years.” We are all ageing every day; it is the one activity that every human being on earth is doing continuously.

If we are lucky, we too will one day grow old. Old age is, ultimately, what we are supposed to aspire to.

The utopian fantasy of a comfortable retirement — years replete with travel, golf, walks on the beach, and bouts of grey nomadism underwritten by a fat super account and a paid-off mortgage — is the enduring (if increasingly unobtainable) Australian dream. Even the faintest suggestion from Labor that it might tinker with franking credits and therefore impinge on the lifestyle of retirees was enough to swing a federal election. Yet in spite of all this aspirational saving and leisure planning, we devote no time to contemplating the realities of ageing or the possibility that the frailty and vulnerability that often accompany old age may one day arrive for us. The one way we cannot imagine ourselves spending our final years is in an aged care facility. It is not an exaggeration to say, as Simone de Beauvoir once did, that “old age fills [us] with more aversion than death itself.”

Perhaps this is because, for all of our utopian and dystopian imagining, the reality of ageing is too frightening to contemplate. When I think about my father — a man who was once a livewire, a brilliant scholar and mineral metallurgist, and who is now consigned to a wheelchair with Parkinson’s disease, dementia, incontinence and a host of other complaints too numerous to list — his loss of selfhood, independence and agency overwhelms me.

My father relies on carers for the basic actions that so many of us take for granted: they brush his teeth; they toilet, shower, dress and feed him; they hoist him in and out of his wheelchair. He frequently hallucinates, finds himself lost mid-sentence, suffers from sudden panic attacks when he loses his bearings, and often doesn’t recognise his own bedroom. He cannot co-ordinate his movements to even pick up a cup and drink from it. He has difficulty swallowing due to his Parkinson’s and is at constant risk of choking: a common cause of death among Parkinson’s sufferers. His personality has changed. His body and mind are no longer in sync; he lives in continual frustration and confusion. He will spend the rest of his life wandering lost in a wilderness of his mind’s own making. The French philosopher Catherine Malabou, writing about destructive brain plasticity in Ontology of the Accident (2012), best describes the state my father lives in: “Between life and death,” she says, “we become other to ourselves.”

The fear of becoming other to ourselves — of not knowing who we are, of losing agency and control — is so acute precisely because it threatens the very foundation of selfhood. We spend our childhood and youth striving towards self-sufficiency and independence; the notion of that independence eroding is terrifying. While I am bereft for my father and the precarious, vulnerable state he is consigned to, I resist imagining myself in his place, even though I know intellectually it is possible the same things may happen to me. The very thought produces an overwhelming existential terror in me, a visceral fear.

So what would it mean to admit to myself that one day I may become old? It would mean accepting that my mind, which I prize above all things, may flicker out like a tired filament, that I may not be able to keep pace with the conversations and arguments I take for granted, that I may forget the people around me, that I may forget who I am, my very name. I may not know where I am. I may become vulnerable — utterly vulnerable — to strangers. That, worse, I may lose control over my body, which may rebel against me in humiliating ways; that I may not be able to walk, or speak, or even swallow. I may become diminished in the eyes of others. There may come a time when nobody listens to what I say because I no longer make any sense. I may no longer be able to taste food, as dementia sufferers cannot; I may no longer be able to see, or hear, or smell. My world may become blanched of colour, texture and joy. It is hard to imagine that a life without all those powers and pleasures is any kind of existence at all, but I am haunted by the knowledge that this litany of privations is exactly how my father experiences his days.

It is tempting to embrace the consolatory fantasy that those with diminished cognition don’t remember or can’t understand the full weight of what is happening to them — but the painful truth is that, bereft of memories of the past or the prospect of the future, my father only experiences an unceasing present tense. His impossible fate is to inhabit his every remaining minute in the throes of his needs, his discomfort, his hunger, his longings and his frustrations without the refuge of nostalgia or the prospect of change. Above all, to imagine becoming old is to admit a fundamental truth that threatens me viscerally: I may one day become worthless to others. I may become invisible.

But my father’s frailty and diminished quality of life are not the only things I must try to imagine: I owe it to him to also try to comprehend the negligence, neglect and abuse he has experienced in his aged care facility, which formed my testimony to the royal commission. Dad sustained a broken hip and was lying on the floor for God knows how long before someone found him, because there was nobody to take him to the bathroom. He suffered six broken ribs — including two that went untreated and were partially healed by the time they were found by a radiologist — from two other falls incurred for the same reason. He has been given contraindicated medication that effectively left him without his Parkinson’s medication for months. He has been frequently left unclean, without his dentures or his glasses, or without a cup of water within reach. He has suffered numerous injuries and infections that have gone undiagnosed and untreated.

Most unforgivably of all, he has been deliberately abused and neglected by a malicious carer, who left him in soiled incontinence pads for hours, who shut the door on him and told other staff he was sleeping when he was awake and desperate to be showered, who taunted him and told him to get his own nappies out in the hall, and who pushed his wheelchair away from his bed on purpose, leaving him immobile. When I try to imagine myself in my father’s place, I can only begin to speculate about his emotions — fear, despair, sadness, impotence, helplessness — before I’m overcome with grief and rage.

It would be destructive, perhaps even madness-inducing, to live with the continual awareness of our mortality. We go to extraordinary lengths to repress our awareness of death; this repression is a protective mechanism that likely serves an evolutionary function. The poet Philip Larkin described this repression in “Aubade,” his great contemplation of death, as the mind “blank[ing] at the glare.” To live in constant terror and awareness of death is no life at all. Yet we rarely interrogate the cost of the fantasy of our own immortality. As Ernest Becker says in his extraordinary work The Denial of Death (1973), man literally drives himself into blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness — agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.

Among the most destructive forms of shared madness are our collective fantasies about the end of life. I have heard these same stock fantasies from my friends, colleagues, family members and acquaintances so often that I have even started to catalogue them: they are varieties of magical thinking, delusional and destructive because they stand in the way of genuine concern and understanding for the elderly. These fantasies also hamper our capacity to imagine our own futures realistically and contemplate our own far more likely fates as recipients of some form of aged care.

The most common fantasy I hear when I mention aged care is that of voluntary suicide. “I’ll kill myself before I ever go into a nursing home,” people tell me nonchalantly: a farcical pronouncement that presumes that they will be well enough to kill themselves before life gets bad enough that they need to. Nobody does this, and nobody will, but it is a powerful and enduring fantasy because it suggests we will exert agency at the precise moment when we have none. It is also something my father used to say repeatedly; of course, he, like everyone else, never really meant it.

People my own age (late thirties/early forties) often buy into what I call the commune fantasy, in which a group of friends age and die together, chipping in to buy a common property to live in, pooling resources and paying for carers together like a geriatric co-op. This fantasy presumes, of course, that all the friends in the group will have the same care needs at the same time, will sell their assets simultaneously, will be able to oversee their own care needs even if those needs include cognitive impairment or dementia, and will somehow be able to afford the astronomically expensive medical equipment used in aged care facilities, including hoists, pneumatic mattresses and a twenty-four-hour nursing and caring staff. Essentially what someone means when he or she tells me about their utopian aged care kibbutz is this: I will build my own private nursing home from scratch. This, for all the obvious reasons, also never happens — but it is a powerful fantasy precisely because it suggests that in our time of greatest need, the tribe will be there for us.

Then there are the technological optimists, who believe that by the time they reach old age, the conditions that the elderly suffer from now will have been eradicated by science, or a fountain of youth will render these problems moot. This is, of course, a profoundly narcissistic approach — what about all the elderly suffering in aged care in the meantime? — as well as a ludicrous one.

People also fantasise about dying peacefully in their beds, although as our life expectancies increase without a commensurate extension in our quality of life, we are more likely to become institutionalised than previous generations, rendering this scenario less and less likely.

And finally, there are the fatalists who joke darkly about how we won’t know any better because we’ll all be drooling in wheelchairs parked in front of a television. I don’t get the sense that those who say this really believe it. Rather, they say it flippantly, jokingly, although the subtext is more sinister. The system’s broken and nothing can be done to fix it. Why bother trying?

My blood thunders when people repeat these fantasies to me, because ultimately such magical thinking begets apathy and inertia. If we refuse to imagine what it is like to age — and accept that one day we, too, will become old — then nothing changes and the appalling status quo will continue. Our collective failure to imagine the lives of the elderly is the primary obstacle in the way of genuine empathy: an empathy that should be predicated on the acknowledgement that one day we will join their ranks. If we spent as much time contemplating the realities of the end of life as we do fictive dystopias and the extermination of humanity, we would have the reforms we need in aged care, and greater human rights and dignity for our elders.

In the meantime, the shambolic, diabolical state of aged care remains a horror each successive generation seems bent on discovering for itself, when it’s far too late. More’s the pity. As Larkin wrote: “Most things may never happen: this one will.” •

This essay is republished from GriffithReview 68: Getting On, edited by Ashley Hay (Text), where a referenced version can be found.

The post Magical thinking and the aged care crisis appeared first on Inside Story.

But should this process — known as contact tracing — be automated? And if so, how?

The Australian government’s Covid-19 app highlights the complexities of rolling out digital contact-tracing technology in a democratic society. Dealing with a public health crisis is vital, but it mustn’t be an excuse to infringe personal privacy and extend government surveillance. Can the two goals — controlling the virus and protecting privacy — be achieved simultaneously?

Debate is raging globally about the design conventions needed to ensure contact-tracing apps do exactly that. International conventions and frameworks are being established collaboratively at breakneck speed.

The speed is important, not only because governments are looking to use these tools that are in many cases privately managed, if open-sourced, but also because the new data-tracking conventions are likely to stick around long after the vaccine arrives.

Fighting the coronavirus asks all of us to collaborate, constructively, in using digital technology to solve a public health crisis. Given we’re not coming off a strong base of cooperation, this is not going to be easy.

In Australia, the government faces a major personal-data trust deficit. The botched implementation of the NBN, robodebt and the digital census all bolster concerns about the government’s capacity to manage data and raise fears that it is unlikely to get it right this time.

Internationally, trust in the big digital platforms — in their capacity to govern the flow of information in ways that uphold the principles of a free and open internet — has been at an all-time low since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The incapacity or unwillingness of Facebook and other major platforms to stem the tide of misinformation has acted as a wrecking ball among the major global democracies.

China’s rapid pivot towards artificial intelligence, meanwhile, has amply demonstrated how vertically integrated digital infrastructure can be mobilised to limit the freedoms of citizens and quash dissent.

Not surprisingly, many technology critics have been quick to argue that technological tools alone are not the answer — that we need to look beyond the “solutionism” offered by tech companies seeking to bake public health systems into their own infrastructure.

But just as we shouldn’t accept the false trade-off between public health and digital privacy, as many rightly argue, should we also simply accept that public authorities are incapable of implementing technology systems effectively? Must we tolerate a trade-off between trust and innovation, reinforced by lack of confidence in how government uses personal data?

The trust deficit now means many see government as lacking “a social licence to operate.” To people like Lizzie O’Shea, chair of Digital Rights Watch in Australia, the government “has a long way to go before it comes close to earning it.” As a result, there remains an ever-accelerating divide between what governments can achieve and the magic tricks the private sector is capable of.

To chart a path forward, we need a different approach — and a different kind of public dialogue about the nature and purpose of public sector technology innovation. Right now, we need to define exactly what technologies are fit for purpose to fight the coronavirus in our technologically advanced, contemporary democracies.

The past couple of weeks have seen rapid progress on these questions. New frameworks and protocols are emerging quickly, and the Australian government would do well to adhere to them.

The first and most important is data decentralisation. This is critical to limiting the danger of “surveillance creep” that comes with digital tracking apps and services. Decentralisation essentially involves limiting how any data collected through trace-and-track apps can be stored and shared.

The Morrison government’s app, which is adapted from Singapore’s TraceTogether app, depends on a central datastore. An infected person’s data logs are submitted to the datastore, where they are used by local health authorities to notify anybody whose device has logged a “digital handshake” with the infected person’s device during his or her contagious phase.

This centralised approach to data collection is potentially more vulnerable to hacking, and leaves open the possibility that personal information will be used or shared across government agencies.

Prime minister Scott Morrison has been at pains to emphasise that the data logs used in the government’s proposed app won’t be accessed by federal government agencies. The data is only for state-based health authorities, he says, “not the tax office, not government services, not Centrelink, not Home Affairs, not Department of Education — the Commonwealth will have no access to that data.”

Will the data logs be secure? And can the assurances about data sharing be trusted? A satirical headline this week, “‘Trust Us on Covid App’ Says Government Who Lied about Sports Grants, Water Licences, Travel Expenses, Asylum Seekers, ASIO Leaks and Robodebt,” pretty much sums up the mood.

Against this centralised approach, the international technology community has been advocating what’s known as decentralised privacy-preserving proximity tracing, or DP3T.

To achieve this, a coalition of technologists, epidemiologists and privacy experts have established what is known as a TCN protocol. TCN stands for “telephone contact number,” and it can be used to ensure phones get notifications without any identifiable tracking information being passed on.

Technology giants Apple and Google have come out in favour of the more privacy-enhancing decentralised approach. They’re hoping to encourage this through a new API — essentially the rulebook for how software connects — due for release in May. This will provide a set of new protocols needed for health authorities and governments to publish their own apps via iOS and Android devices.

As well as a more decentralised approach to contact tracing, the API is also expected to modify how Bluetooth-based proximity contact detection actually works.

Currently, Bluetooth can only ping or create “digital handshakes” when a person’s device is not locked. This limits surveillance or location tracking “in the background,” but it also means users need to keep their phones unlocked for any contact-tracing app to work.

The new API will address this issue, allowing digital handshakes to be created even when a person’s phone isn’t in active use. The API will only be available for use by official contact-tracing apps developed by public authorities (the Covid Trace app, for example, developed by ex-Google and Uber engineers, doesn’t qualify). It will help make contact-tracing apps work better, and is also expected to accelerate decentralised data-sharing protocols.

In the meantime, a set of Data Rights for Digital Contact Tracing and Alerting has been published, and work is accelerating in the United States to enable the TCN protocol to be used within open-source contact-tracing apps such as the Private Kit: Safe Paths and Covid Watch.

So, where does this leave the Australian government’s plans? Perhaps because it’s based on a Singapore government model, the app relies too heavily on centralised data collection. We are left to trust Scott Morrison and government services minister Stuart Robert when they argue that the data collected is safe and outside the control of their government. That’s not enough, and won’t help build the trust needed for this app to be effective. At least 40 per cent of the population must opt in to make digital contact tracing effective.

It’s important to remember that our government doesn’t call all the shots here. It appears that plans for digital contact tracing will need to be implemented in the context of the major platforms’ new publishing policies. Much depends on the new API — which highlights how powerful digital-governance protocols are in shaping digital futures.

As we have seen, the majority of Australians are willing to surrender significant freedoms to fight a common enemy. This public health crisis requires a reinvigorated set of principles and protocols that not only protect individual privacy in a digital age but also accelerate the opening up of data platforms and services for the public good.

After all, the internet was built around the principles of decentralised knowledge-sharing in order to advance scientific collaborations. Now is the time for these principles to return to centrestage.

We should at least try to get this right. •

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The reality is quite different. The vast majority of Australia Covid-19 cases acquired overseas had a recent history of travel to Europe or the Americas, or arrived on cruise ships such as the Ruby Princess. Hardly any (in fact none, as far as I can determine) were new migrants to Australia.

It could scarcely be otherwise. Australia (or at least some Australians) welcomed 162,000 migrants in 2019. The same year saw forty-two million passenger arrivals. On average, a Boeing 787 landing in Australia with a full load of 300 passengers contains just one permanent migrant.

This is the contradiction within the thinking of immigration restrictionists. While many like to cast themselves as “left behind” “stayers” — in contrast to “rootless cosmopolitans” — lots of them enjoy international travel. This was strikingly illustrated by the Brexiteers’ attachment to the traditional blue-covered British passports — hardly something that would matter to anyone content to stay in their home country.

More generally, the push to reduce international migration has been matched by all-out efforts to promote tourism. Scott Morrison embodies these contradictions. As managing director of Tourism Australia he famously asked, “Where they bloody hell are you?”, inviting the entire world to enjoy our beaches and charming cities; as prime minister, he cut the immigration intake by 30,000 (about one day’s worth of passenger arrivals) declaring “enough, enough, enough… The roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full.” Tourists, of course — who are by definition engaged in travel — use our roads and public transports at least as much as permanent migrants.

It’s not only migration that ethnonationalists have in their sights, but also any kind of international cooperation (unless it involves waging war). Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian and admirer of Hungary, Poland and other anti-democratic regimes, says that “coronavirus is the hunter-killer enemy of globalisation”:

The centre of every citizen’s sense of accountability for this virus is their national government. No one asks: what is the Indian Ocean Regional Association for Co-operation doing about this? They ask: what is Canberra doing?… When the Morrison government first banned direct travel to Australia from China, Beijing was furious. Then a lot of countries did the same.

That was on 18 March. The next day, the sidelining of “Canberra” began, with the premier of Tasmania announcing that the state would effectively be closed to interstate travellers. South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland quickly followed suit, with Queensland introducing an internal border to protect vulnerable Indigenous communities in the Cape York Peninsula.

As the federal government floundered, state governments increasingly disregarded its edicts, closing schools and accelerating the process of locking down the economy. The same was true in the United States, where state governors have responded to federal inaction with increasingly drastic measures of their own.

The absurd, but inescapable, implication of Sheridan’s argument is that we should recognise state difference by unwinding not only globalisation but Federation and breaking Australia up into six to eight separate countries. But the reality is that viruses pay no attention to states, nations and confederations. The appropriate restrictions on travel, and other preventive polices, will be determined by physical realities, whether or not they respect national boundaries.

The other crucial factor is what public policy analysts described as “state capacity.” This is the ability of a government (supranational, national, state or provincial) to formulate a coherent response to a problem, such as a pandemic, and the effectiveness of the tools at its disposal. The coronavirus crisis has revealed huge gaps in capacity at the federal level in Australia. The much touted Border Force, for example, has proved incapable of implementing basic health checks at our borders. (The blame-shifting between Border Force and the NSW health department over the Ruby Princess fiasco is a prime illustration of weak state capacity.) Similar breakdowns are even more evident in the United States.

Inevitably, state-level governments have stepped into the breach, with varying levels of effectiveness. Readers can make their own judgements as to how they have performed. Strikingly, though, a crisis seemingly tailor-made to enhance the power and prestige of national governments has, if anything, done the opposite, even as the need for action by all levels of government has become so much more urgent. •

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A few months later, in January, the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report contained a sentence that should have put most countries into a cold sweat: “no country is fully prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic.” The source of this declaration was the inaugural Global Health Security Index, released last October by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Johns Hopkins University.

As it happens, Australia did remarkably well on the index, ranking fourth out of 195 countries. (The United States was ranked first.) But buried in the data was a key reason why Australia has been slow off the mark in dealing with Covid-19: we were weakest in our capacity to respond quickly. The eye-catching number is a zero in the “rapid response” category for “exercising response plans.” This was a failing everywhere, but scoring zero is a real problem — the average was 16.2.

Australia scored zero because we had not completed a biological threat–focused international health regulations exercise, or IHR, with the World Health Organization during the past year. Nor, on the evidence, had we recently undergone a simulation exercise to identify gaps and best practices using an after-action review or a biological threat–focused IHR exercise with WHO.

Put simply, Australia looked good on paper but we hadn’t been practising. We had a 232-page guide, but no apparent worked experience.

A Hansard search of parliamentary records for the words “pandemic” and “coronavirus” produces forty-eight results since 2000, only three of which are earlier than 2020. The most instructive result comes from a Senate estimates hearing in June 2013 featuring Jane Halton, secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing, Chris Baggoley, chief medical officer, and Megan Morris, first assistant secretary of the Office of Health Protection. A question by senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells elicited an illuminating exchange in which the “novel coronavirus” is described as “very interesting” and “very scary,” followed by a discussion about preparation, including the questions of whether an adequate medical stockpile existed and whether money had been put aside to deal with a pandemic.

The fact that we have never before faced a crisis of this nature doesn’t mean we can’t look to history to offer examples of how we can improve our management. Prime minister Scott Morrison has convened a national cabinet in the style of a war cabinet, and other military-inspired mechanisms can also be used to manage this crisis.

Military forces often put together “red teams” to imitate an enemy and uncover a way to defeat it. As one American military figure puts it, they are viewed “as a bright light we shine on ourselves to expose areas where we can improve effectiveness.” When authorised by the ultimate decision-maker, they provide an independent critique and a counter to groupthink.

Most importantly, they must be set up quickly, not as an afterthought. The British military has a red teaming guide that outlines how it is best done. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute describes how red teaming activities are “purpose built to test and evaluate strategies, policies, frameworks and strategic level plans,” and often involve “stakeholders from across government and external organisations, whether corporate or non-government.” Across sport, politics and business, the process is best known as war gaming.

With federal parliament possibly not sitting until August, it is entirely appropriate for the prime minister to bring the opposition leader into the national cabinet. Another no-regrets decision would be to authorise a red team for Covid-19. This is no drill: we need the very best playbook to defeat the pandemic, and we need to test it fast. Outside public commentary, we need a group the government authorises and expects to shine a light on plans formed by the national cabinet — to challenge, stretch and improve them in real time, in line with the public’s expectations of speed and effectiveness.

An Australian red team for Covid-19 would ensure we constantly test orthodox thinking. It would analyse scenarios to help us get in front of the situation, and diligently prepare the transition back to normalcy once it is under control. Tasks would include: training and deploying surge workforces in health and essential services; addressing an immense debt overhang; restarting and reinvigorating industries sector by sector; getting the workforce back into jobs; institutionalising planning for national disruptions; identifying new expenditures for capacity and capability; and rebuilding local communities so they can better support the most vulnerable.

There is no shortage of names of brilliant and experienced Australians who have worked at the highest level in government, health, the military, industry, business, investment, unions and the community. Some, like former Labor minister Greg Combet and former senior bureaucrat Gordon de Brouwer, have already been enlisted to work on strategies to counter Covid-19. Now is the time to ask a select group to red team our leaders and help their decision-making during our most complex crisis in generations. •

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The government’s aim should be to shape public understanding and behaviour in a way that contributes to mitigating the spread of Covid-19. Backed by clear and effective policy planning and implementation, public messaging can be a highly effective way of mobilising populations to become stakeholders in damping down widespread “black swan” societal threats like this virus. Can the experience of governments overseas help Australian policymakers to do this as effectively as possible?

Authoritarian versus democratic responses

Because they can use coercive measures much more swiftly, authoritarian governments might seem to have an advantage over democracies when it comes to dealing with diseases like Covid-19. But there’s a clear caveat: pandemics require whole-of-society efforts, and that means the “authoritarian advantage” only kicks in when the iron fist has a velvet glove. Regardless of their political system, populations will only put up with aggressive quarantine measures, for instance, if they feel they have a stake, their basic human needs are still broadly taken care of, and their collective efforts are having demonstrable results.

Despite signs that China’s efforts are paying off, other nations have been reluctant to follow its tough example. China specialises in speed, scale and obedience, things that decentralised democracies find very difficult to match. But already Britain and other countries have been warning their publics that life may need to change substantially if efforts to flatten the Covid-19 epidemic curve fail, and that they should be prepared for constraints on their liberties and choices for the broader public good.

So far, Australia’s navigation has been broadly creditable. The federal government’s pandemic action plan needed to be amended to deal with the specifics of Covid-19, but that effort didn’t need to start from scratch. The immediate emphasis on detecting illness among people arriving from overseas helped buy time, and testing and tracing has helped identify those who slipped through the net and might start local transmission clusters. The government has acknowledged that surge capacity and supplying protective gear to frontline workers remain challenges. And it urgently needs to engage with general practitioners about their role in the battle, engage better with the general public about what part they can play, and coordinate more effectively with state and territory governments and other authorities.

Maintaining a balance between encouraging wariness and preventing hysteria is crucial, as the perplexing panic buying of toilet paper shows. The rush on supermarkets is an indicator of a level of public fear and a lack of confidence in government. Panicky behaviour like this suggests that the official response can’t afford to become complacent and take public compliance for granted.

Denial, delay and distrust: what not to do

Iran is the leading example of failed policy and flawed messaging. Tehran hid its Covid-19 outbreak until well past the point when doing so was rational, even if the primary goal was to protect the regime rather than the public. Members of the elite have been infected, and some have died. The country’s relatively robust health system is verging on collapse, yet the regime failed to use its brutal but effective power to prevent the movement of people. In fact, its messaging has only recently begun moving from “everything is fine” to “this is a challenge we will overcome,” and public trust has crumpled as a result. The government reacted too slowly in preventing dangerous behaviour, with the most chilling example being videos circulating of devout worshippers licking shrines in Qom in order to prove that their faith could overcome any virus.

Japan’s early responses to Covid-19 are another good example of what not to do. The Abe government badly botched its quarantine of the Diamond Princess cruise ship: not only were people still being infected while the ship was in lockdown, but authorities subsequently let twenty-three people go without testing them. And with Tokyo desperate to host the Olympics later this year — a prospect that looks increasingly unlikely — the government decided to keep official infection numbers down by testing as few people as possible. Coupled with the social distancing measures being rolled out throughout Japan, the recent decision to close schools in Hokkaido for two weeks makes clear that the situation is by no means under control.

Italy’s performance has also been poor. Because the government missed the chance to catch local infection clusters early, it was forced to take the aggressive step of quarantining the Lombardy region. Regardless, Italy’s disease burden has increased markedly, making its next step, nationwide quarantine, also virtually its last resort. The sheer number of cases Italy has exported to Europe and elsewhere makes clear that its infected population — like Iran’s — has been badly undercounted, dramatically eroding domestic and international confidence in the Conte government’s ability to rein in the outbreak.

Britain’s response to Covid-19 has been mixed. Concerns about the capacity of the National Health Service to “surge” against Covid-19 were reflected in a poll of 1600 doctors, which found that 99 per cent of respondents believed the NHS was not ready for the task. No doubt keenly aware that Britain has only 2.5 hospital beds per 1000 people, health secretary Matt Hancock announced plans to recruit an army of retired health professionals — nearly all of whom are in the age group most at risk of severe complications or death from Covid-19 infection. And whereas Hancock has tried to raise public awareness with a “catch it, bin it, kill it” campaign, he has also faced criticism for statements that seemed to suggest Britain was giving up on containment and preparing the nation to take the outbreak on its chin. For his part, prime minister Boris Johnson has faced questions about his lack of visibility during the crisis.

Forget China, worry about America

The United States’s Covid-19 response has been hamstrung by political infighting, a lack of coordination and a number of bizarre errors. Many Americans already distrusted Donald Trump’s leadership; many among his support base, as well as media organisations like Fox News, have continued to back him even when the advice he gives is dangerous.

Trump’s incoherent press conferences on the epidemic have revolved around boosting his image in an election year rather than reacting quickly with the best possible expertise. His decision to put vice-president Mike Pence in charge of the US response — a man whose belief in prayer and gay conversion therapy led to a massive spike in HIV infections in Indiana — seemed more about finding someone who could be blamed for failure than identifying the best candidate for the job.

Press conferences featuring Pence and Trump’s health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, have devolved into obsequious fawning over Trump’s leadership of the kind we associate with the world’s most autocratic regimes. Trump himself has continued to hold mass rallies, even referring to concern about the virus as the latest Democrat “hoax.” He demonstrated his wilful ignorance of the emergency by falsely claiming that a vaccine was mere months away, and also claimed that Covid-19 would vanish like a miracle. He asked a team of health professionals to prepare a strong version of the influenza vaccine (which treats a different virus altogether) to be used against Covid-19. And in a phone call to Fox News he seemed to suggest that the majority of Covid-19 sufferers could simply go to work as usual.

America’s disease coordination agencies have also reacted poorly. The recently defunded US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, in Atlanta has dropped the ball on several occasions, allowing the virus to circulate for at least six weeks. The CDC allowed a patient in San Antonio who tested positive to the virus to go home, only to hastily recall him. It rarely updates its public guidance.

Having eschewed the World Health Organization’s recommendations on testing in favour of developing its own field kit, the CDC discovered that its test was faulty. But instead of letting other jurisdictions develop their own tests, it simply stopped testing anyone who didn’t fit a very strict set of criteria: air travel to China, exposure to a known positive Covid-19 case, and all the known symptoms of a disease that often affects patients differently.

What made matters worse was that once the United States did declare Covid-19 a public health emergency, any new test needed to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. When an FDA official arrived at the CDC to inspect their initial test kits for contamination he was denied entry for twenty-four hours. We should be deeply concerned about the capacity of the United States to weather the epidemic.

Many commentators in the West have claimed the disease will be China’s “Chernobyl moment.” At the very least they foresee a Hong Kong–style flowering of dissent born of a public realisation that the Chinese leadership cares more about politics than the population. Above all, they stress that China cannot be trusted: that the Silk Road is a transmission belt for disease as well as development. Hence, this thinking goes, there is an urgent need for other nations to economically decouple from the People’s Republic.

These predictions are flawed. If anything, China’s ability to blunt the advance of Covid-19 will allow it to deepen its internal control, tracking and tracing a population that willingly signed up to forced quarantines, movement checks and colour-coded travel statuses. More than that, the epidemic has had a mobilising effect on the Chinese population, which the leadership in Beijing will exploit. China is likely to try to turn what should be a global PR disaster into a soft power coup, the gold standard model for containing major threats to societies.

For other countries, decoupling from China may make strategic sense in the name of diversification of supply, but precisely how and where nations will recouple remains unclear. China will be an integral part of the global recovery from Covid-19, in terms both of its experiences and of its capacity to keep global supply chains moving.

Success stories

So far it’s the countries that have combined rapid responses with effective public messaging that are weathering the storm of Covid-19 most successfully. Taiwan and Hong Kong are good examples, but Singapore’s response has been particularly noteworthy. Pragmatically, officials stressed from the outset that the government could not ensure complete safety. Instead, it focused on immediate isolation and forensic contact tracing of cases, along with consistent messaging stressing that it is a civic duty to seek assistance in the event of infection. As a result, local outbreaks are relatively well controlled.

South Korea’s misfortune was that its outbreak quickly reached the Shincheonji cult, a closed and secretive religious organisation, many of whose members are now contributing to the nation’s large caseload. But Seoul’s decision to test as many people as possible, combined with best-practice social distancing and a blizzard of information for the public, seems to have contributed to a declining infection rate. It has also provided a wealth of data about Covid-19’s attack rate, not to mention more reliable information about disease severity and mortality.

While China’s response has been criticised as overly draconian, it has clearly had a major impact in bringing infection rates under control. As a visiting World Health Organization team noted, China’s response combined aggressive control of population movement with rapid deployment of medical staff to hotspots, swift updating of treatment plan guidance, and the use of big data to trace infection spread and predict future outbreaks. This was not only effective in flattening the epidemic curve; it also arguably saved many lives and prevented the spread of the disease outside Hubei province.

Although these controls would be difficult to replicate in Australia, China’s approach is still instructive. Many Chinese citizens may not have believed official figures, and there was significant evidence of corruption, but centralised messaging ensured that citizens understood their roles and responsibilities in the plan to fight the outbreak.

The experiences of Singapore, South Korea and China all illustrate that no “one size fits all” model exists for responding to Covid-19. Singapore in particular can readily trace people within a very small geographic area, but a large-scale outbreak would threaten national stability very quickly. Australia probably faces the reverse problem: pockets of transmission in urban hubs that crop up quickly and require drastic action to contain their spread. Even if each nation is successful in mitigating its own outbreaks, though, the struggle against Covid-19 will continue to face the risks created by imported and sleeper cases.

Lessons for Australia

Enlisting broad public support with well-communicated information coupled with rigorously implemented policy will be critical to how well Australia emerges from the Covid-19 epidemic. A whole-of-society approach, not just a whole-of-government one, is fundamental. Drawing on the experiences of other nations will help considerably to target our response for the best possible outcomes. These ten points are therefore intended to identify what has so far worked well in other nations and apply it to an Australian context.

1. Messaging should be clear, transparent and, above all, agile. We still don’t know enough about Covid-19, but our understanding of case–fatality ratios, attack rates and vectors of transmission will firm up with more reliable data. This information should be shared as soon as possible, and officials should make clear why new approaches may differ from past practice. A national Covid-19 information centre should be established to share reliable, user-friendly information in a variety of media, as well as combating fake news.

2. Depending on the severity of the outbreak, it may be necessary to adopt increasingly tight movement controls. The reasons for each step in this process must be clearly spelled out to minimise confusion, and every effort should be made to avoid politicising unpopular decisions or crowing about government success. As the experience in Italy and Wuhan demonstrates, any decision to close off an area needs to be implemented swiftly to avoid people fleeing and potentially spreading the virus outside containment areas.

3. Australia’s messaging should draw the link between top-level decisions in the public interest and individual circumstances. Panic buying partly reflects a desire to preserve a degree of control. Maintaining public confidence in supply chains and the ability of government to maintain order will be necessary, but even more crucial is to enlist public compliance. Examples of risky behaviour should be outlined just as clearly as safe behaviour, with messaging deployed along the lines of “we will not overcome this challenge without your help.”

4. In spite of the best efforts of government, many individuals will resist official guidance out of a lack of trust. Government should therefore consider enlisting civil society champions to reinforce its messaging. This should especially be available on social media, where much of the public gets its news, as well as via conventional TV and print media.

5. Information vacuums will inevitably be filled by fearmongering and misinformation. This is especially true when reliable news is often paywalled whereas fake news is free and readily accessible. People come to rely on daily case counts and the location of victims, for example, so they can assess risk. This information can and should be provided without personal information being compromised. China and South Korea have successfully developed apps that show where cases and clusters are located, and similar tools should be considered in Australia.

6. Health services may become overwhelmed at the peak of an epidemic, and the national ability to enforce order may be challenged. Coercive measures can be effective in minimising rule-breaking if they are judiciously applied and communicated, including as a sensitisation measure before an outbreak deepens. Mandatory isolation backed by penalties have helped Singapore and China to maintain compliance; Korea, by contrast, vacillated on penalties before deciding to threaten Lee Man-hee, the leader of Shincheonji, with murder charges for covering up the spread of the virus.

7. The public is unlikely to tolerate buck-passing. Commonwealth–state relations may present legal and practical challenges to implementation, but the public will not be persuaded that interruptions to essential services are unavoidable problems of federalism. They will look to the Commonwealth to lead, backed by the best information from the states and territories. This underscores the need for a unified national effort to communicate what the public should do, and how and where individuals can seek help. Access to welfare payments will be crucial for casual and “gig” economy workers who decide to self-isolate, as will rent support for small businesses and other assistance for those cut off from their regular sources of income by quarantines.

8. Media and government catastrophising is unproductive — even though the public need to be sensitised to the likelihood of significant disruptions to their lives, as well as the potential for Australians to die during the outbreak. Messaging should therefore be as neutral as possible when conveying information about deaths and new infection hotspots, and the mainstream media should be enlisted to assist. Conversely, downplaying or softening information may lead to riskier behaviour or public disappointment if the situation worsens. Factual information based on the best evidence — even when it is distressing — can and should be communicated in the context of how society will be able to move to a recovery mode as swiftly as possible.

9. Mistakes will unavoidably happen. When they do, government must take responsibility, and explain what is being done to mitigate the problem, and how this will ensure that it does not recur.

10. Measures to encourage people not to place additional strain on healthcare resources are vital. Telemedicine, medical hotlines and clear messages about whom to contact before travelling to a healthcare facility will relieve the burden from the “worried well” and reinforce public confidence.

Much more, of course, will be required to contain the spread of Covid-19. The disease will have deep and far-reaching effects on Australia, the region and the global economy. But a more visible public messaging campaign will do much to help Australia ensure that its most critical resource — its people — are a part of the solution. •

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Although nothing he told us about ASIO’s operations was particularly surprising, it’s important to place his remarks in a wider context. Accepting that the threats ASIO identifies are the only threats to our political wellbeing would be unwise, as would seeing its operations as the only solutions. Some threats are beyond ASIO’s remit but no less important for being so.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was established in 1949 in response to evidence that Soviet espionage was damaging both Australia’s national security and its relationships with its allies. Its primary role was counterespionage — catching spies — but it had the secondary roles of countering subversion — activity aimed at overthrowing or undermining the elected government — and preventing sabotage of key defence facilities and infrastructure.

The cold war might be long behind us now but the capabilities developed by ASIO during that period remain highly relevant to the contemporary threats outlined by Burgess. He identified three main areas of activity for ASIO: counter-terrorism (protecting Australians and monitoring extremists who might threaten people in other countries, such as occurred in Christchurch in March 2019); detecting and countering espionage; and detecting and countering foreign interference.

ASIO also provides protective security advice to government and business and is responsible for security-checking prospective immigrants or visitors. And, of course, it security-checks people whose jobs will entail access to classified information.

ASIO undoubtedly has a serious and difficult job to do in relation to potential terrorist attacks, regardless of their religious or other motivation. In his assessment, Burgess assured us that the agency operates in full accordance with Australian law. No doubt that’s true, but we should be mindful of how wide a field that leaves open, given that over-zealous Australian governments have enacted more than eighty anti-terror laws since 2001, many of which have given extra powers to police and increased surveillance within Australia.

This blizzard of legislation has created and reinforced an over-reliance on the law, and law enforcement, leaving far too few community-based measures to minimise the chance of people succumbing to the siren songs of terrorist recruiters, and with no thought whatever of reintegrating into our society what Burgess himself calls “the vulnerable and impressionable young people [who have become] ensnared in the streams of hate.”

Burgess acknowledges that ASIO has what he modestly calls “significant powers under law,” but he assures us that its application of these powers is proportionate to the security threat or matter at hand. Maybe so, but how can we be sure, and how can we be sure that will remain the case? Those very laws give ASIO and other agencies such wide surveillance and coercive powers that they themselves are a potential threat to the very freedoms we are trying to protect.

Equally, espionage remains a fact of life. The motivations for espionage include traditional efforts to ascertain the capabilities of other countries’ military equipment, in order to find ways to counter it. But another motivation stems from arrangements like the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States, and from the fact that we use US-origin defence equipment.

It would be fair to say that the Soviet Union’s interest in conducting espionage in Australia in the late 1940s was motivated more by what it might be able to discover about what was going on in Washington than any particular interest in what was going on in Australia’s tiny capital. This was the key driver of the establishment of ASIO: the need to protect our access to allies’ information and technology by protecting them from Soviet espionage. That led inevitably to ASIO having prime responsibility for security clearance of personnel who would have access to classified information.

So much for our adversaries, but what of our friends? Governments of all stripes are interested to know what is really going on in Canberra’s corridors of power. Does the information conveyed by Australian officials and diplomats reflect Canberra’s real position? Where is its bottom line? These questions are as important when bargaining with friends (in trade negotiations, for example) as they are in negotiations with adversaries. So all diplomatic missions in Canberra, if they are doing their job, are seeking to find out more than our government is prepared to tell them.

And of course, there is also common or garden industrial espionage — people seeking to steal our intellectual property without paying for it. To the extent that ASIO can counter such activities, we should applaud.

It should be noted, however, that the first line of defence against espionage is not catching spies — important as that is — but protecting sensitive information. We must do all we can to ensure that the people who handle sensitive information are unlikely to divulge it, either through carelessness, personal vulnerability or a misplaced desire to assist a foreign actor for whatever reason. Here ASIO’s security vetting role is critical.

Another important protection is the “need to know” principle, which limits access to information to those who actually need it to do their job. If the cables downloaded by Private Manning and passed to WikiLeaks were as sensitive as the United States now claims in its pursuit of Julian Assange, how did this worldwide trove of US cable traffic become accessible to a lowly soldier sitting in an office in Baghdad?

Another threat mentioned by Burgess was foreign influence, which he described as “a broader, more nuanced concept.” He went on to say:

All foreign states seek to influence deliberations of importance to them. When those activities are conducted in an open and transparent manner they are not of concern.

However when it is conducted covertly by, or on behalf, of a foreign actor; when it is clandestine, deceptive corrupting or threatening in nature and when it is contrary to Australia’s sovereignty and interests, we classify this as foreign interference.

The foreign interference in the front of people’s minds is widely attributed to the Chinese government, which reportedly monitors the behaviour of Chinese students in Australia, pressuring those who step out of line, and also seeks by various means to influence our politics. We should undoubtedly seek to resist such interference. ASIO’s attention is rightly focused on activity that is “clandestine, deceptive corrupting or threatening in nature,” but I suggest that we as citizens should also keep a wary eye on a variety of activities that are conducted “in an open and transparent manner.”

Shortly after I became defence secretary I received a visit from the late Sir Peter Abeles, whom I knew from my days in the trade department. Sir Peter was accompanied by the Israeli defence attaché. They talked to me for a time about various Israeli defence technologies, including Israeli precision-guided munitions. All very interesting, but what I took to be the real point of the meeting came as it was drawing to a close. Sir Peter invited me to make a visit to Israel, at Israeli government expense, accompanied by my wife. No doubt the expected quid pro quo for this generosity would be some kind of benign view of Israel that I might not otherwise have had.

I thanked Sir Peter politely and said I would bear it in mind, and was left wondering just how many people of influence in Australia were in receipt of such invitations. Certainly Israel seems to appear on the itineraries of a remarkable number of Australian politicians, and it can hardly be a coincidence that Israel is virtually immune from criticism in federal parliament, or that Australian governments don’t even pretend to have an even-handed view of a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Foreign influence on our politics is not limited to covert activities by governments. Consider, for example, the way the Australian Minerals Council, an industry association whose membership and board are dominated by foreign-owned mining interests, killed off the Mineral Resource Rent Tax, and with it Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership, in 2011.

ASIO has a real and difficult job to do, but we should be alert to the threats that it — and our other national security agencies and over-zealous politicians — pose to the freedoms they are supposed to protect. And we should bear in mind that our friends as well as our adversaries can seek to influence our politics in ways that are inimical to our interests. •

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Presenting the report to parliament yesterday, prime minister Scott Morrison described it as a “stark and sobering” tale of “hope, frustration and disappointment.” He said something very similar last year, calling out the failure of the current approach and the hubris of those who had created it.

Yet the past year has not only seen problems go unresolved, it has also seen considerable progress in some areas — and enough of each to generate both scepticism and optimism.

The basis of the optimism is the December 2018 commitment by the Council of Australian Governments, or COAG, to partner with Indigenous people in refreshing the Closing the Gap framework and creating a forum for ongoing engagement. The formal partnership agreement between COAG and the National Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peak Organisations (Coalition of Peaks) came into effect in March last year.

Since then, a series of community consultations has considered how this new partnership might work. In January, the Coalition of Peaks released its Community Engagement Snapshots report, which found strong support for the three reform priorities it had proposed: developing formal partnerships between government and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to close the gap, boosting community-controlled services, and improving mainstream service delivery. A fourth reform priority — local data projects led by local communities and organisations — will be sent to COAG.

The Indigenous leaders engaged in this process are feeling optimistic that a full partnership approach can show the way forward. But their view is offset by the prime minister’s refusal to commit to an Indigenous recognition referendum until “there is consensus,” a position at odds with his commitment to the beginning of a “new era.” It will be hard for Indigenous people to trust the government to deliver a new approach when it consistently sidelines the work of the Referendum Council and the central importance of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

How can Closing the Gap be improved? Fully recognising that their validity is limited by my non-Indigenous status and a lack of formal consultation, these are a few thoughts.

In policy terms, the focus must be on the key underlying causes of disadvantage.

First, racism. The lack of progress on this key determinant of the physical and mental health of Indigenous Australians may explain part of the unremitting gap in health and socioeconomic outcomes. Tackling and reducing racism, including ensuring that healthcare is culturally safe and respectful, should be an integral part of policies and interventions aimed at improving Indigenous health, especially that of children.

Second, very high rates of Indigenous incarceration are, in the words of a recent PwC report, “unfair, unsafe and unaffordable.” Inappropriate imprisonment and the failure to ensure needed post-release services lead to loss of culture, identity and connection to the land, aggravating the cycle of disadvantage and poverty. A new justice target is part of the refresh of the Closing the Gap framework, but if it is to be effective then the courts, police, corrections services and social services will all need to adopt its principles.

Third, safe and secure housing is key to the health, wellbeing, safety and dignity of Indigenous Australians. A new report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that in 2016, 29 per cent of Indigenous Australians were living in a dwelling with major structural problems, with 15 per cent of households lacking at least one basic facility (a functioning kitchen, bathroom, laundry or toilet). The proportions are higher in remote areas.

In focusing on these three areas, the government must commit to a real and enduring partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and organisations. Despite the rhetoric, the Morrison government’s commitment to consultation has generally been deficient.

Not long after the last election, the prime minister announced a new National Indigenous Australians Agency within his own department. Indigenous affairs minister Ken Wyatt described it as a “new era of co-design and partnership,” but the decision was made without consulting Indigenous groups. Meanwhile, the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples lost its funding and the government persisted with its expansion of the cashless welfare card in Indigenous communities.

The decision to double down on the cashless card came despite growing evidence that it is adversely affecting many lives, has failed to get users into jobs, and is opposed in many communities. Many people subject to the card feel they have been punished by a loss of control over their own finances. This blanket imposition of a political ideology backed by very little evidence is completely counter to a partnership approach.

Another consultation-free act was the axing of funding for the secretariat that oversees the thirteen-member National Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services Forum. This annual $244,000, a tiny outlay for government, was justified by reference to an independent evaluation that, on the contrary, recommended increased resourcing.

And on the day Scott Morrison was promising a new approach to Closing the Gap, it was rumoured that the government had taken a unilateral decision to end funding of Indigenous housing — a dismayingly plausible possibility that highlights how little attention is paid to the social determinants of health.

These various government decisions also highlight the lack of coordination across departments and agencies. When prime minister Tony Abbott moved responsibility for the majority of Indigenous programs to the prime minister’s department in 2014, under the rubric of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy, the shocking news that he also cut more than $500 million from the programs hid the fact that the move might facilitate a whole-of-government approach to tackling Indigenous problems.

That has never come to pass — and it still doesn’t happen even within portfolios. Hearing loss, trachoma and rheumatic heart disease, for instance, all involve a similar healthcare approach (cleanliness) for prevention, yet these conditions continue to be tackled under a series of separate programs. Their high incidence in Indigenous communities won’t be reduced without a coordinated effort to improve housing.

“Every minister in my government is a minister for Indigenous Australians,” the prime minister declared yesterday. Given the known occasions on which the real Indigenous affairs minister, Ken Wyatt, has been sidelined (the referendum, for instance), Indigenous communities will need some convincing on this point.

They will also be looking for evidence that programs are introduced — and evaluated — where they are needed. Here, the signs haven’t been good. A June 2019 report from the Australian National Audit Office identified delays in evaluating the five-year-old Indigenous Advancement Strategy. The prime minister’s department had not met guidelines, the report said, and nor had the department kept records of key decisions or set targets for all programs and projects.

In October 2019, the new National Indigenous Australians Agency released an equally, if not more, damning report on the past ten years of Closing the Gap. (Oddly, the date on the report is March 2018, more than a year before the agency was established.) Among its findings were three fundamental criticisms. Cultural determinants are not captured in the policy framework, which makes collaborating with Indigenous Australians difficult. The evidence base to support many programs is lacking or weak, and programs are rarely evaluated. And the effort to close the gap has been hampered by inconsistent political leadership, constantly changing policies, insufficient resources, and workforce and funding cuts.

Finally, the funding maze needs to be streamlined and made more transparent. Organisations and communities deal with a level of complexity and “red tape” that would never be tolerated by the general business community, with the evidence suggesting that some Aboriginal health services are juggling forty or more funding sources with separate application and reporting requirements. Too often communities are unaware of services for which they are eligible.

A 2016 study identified 1082 separate Indigenous-specific programs. Less than one in ten had been evaluated, and most have produced little evidence of effectiveness. Multiple service providers often compete in the same communities (assuming there are providers), and duplication and waste are rife.

The impact of funding conditions on the governance and performance of Indigenous organisations is under-researched. Evidence suggests that the public financing of Indigenous organisations is successful when the focus is on the organisation rather than the program. Funded organisations should always be required to be accountable to their constituents; performance indicators should be negotiated rather than imposed; achievements should be rewarded.

Encouragingly, the health department will introduce a new funding model for the Indigenous Australians’ Health Program’s primary healthcare program in July this year. Three-year funding agreements, annually indexed, will become the norm, and the administrative burden will be reduced.

Recent efforts by the Productivity Commission have gone some way to tackling the lack of transparency. Preparing an analysis for Oxfam in 2017, I found it very difficult to track spending on Indigenous programs on the basis of publicly available data. But I did find every indication that the government is increasingly looking to mainstream services and programs to meet Indigenous people’s needs, especially in non-remote areas. While 55 per cent of the programs funded under the Indigenous Advancement Strategy were run by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations, 81 per cent of direct Indigenous expenditure went towards mainstream services.

Pat Turner, lead convenor of the Coalition of Peaks, has described the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians as “a gaping wound on the soul of our nation.” This wound won’t be healed without the best efforts of all Australians. The prime minister is right to say that the Closing the Gap strategy has reinforced “the language of failing and falling short” and neglected to “celebrate the strengths, achievements and aspirations of Indigenous people.”

Refreshing the program must involve building on the expertise and wisdom of Indigenous individuals and communities and the abundant success stories that have largely been unrecognised and uncelebrated. The Oxfam report In Good Hands: The People and Communities Behind Aboriginal-led Solutions is just one of the many excellent places to start. •

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This is not to question programs designed to give more Australians access to good-quality sporting facilities and encourage them to participate in physical activity. Even hard-nosed Treasury economists acknowledge that money spent supporting physical activity saves money down the line by reducing heart disease, diabetes and other lifestyle-related conditions.

Those economists also know that while the market may be able to fund elite sports, there is no way that the Wilcannia Football Club can sell tickets to spectators to see its games or that the Victor Harbor Bowls Club can sell TV rights to its tournaments. These cases of what economists call “market failure” justify public funding.

But why should the Commonwealth, rather than state or local governments, be involved in such a program? After all, section 51 of the Constitution — the part that spells out the powers of the Commonwealth — makes no mention of sport.

Of course, we are not rigidly bound by a document drafted 130 years ago. Many areas of necessary cooperation have been achieved through referral of powers by the states (as allowed by section 51) or by negotiated agreements between the Commonwealth and the states. For example, until Commonwealth and state officials got together in the 1980s to address emergency management issues, different states had incompatible standards for fire hose couplings: it’s fortunate that we sorted that one out.

When it comes to community sports, however, it is hard to find any need for harmonisation or standardisation that may dictate Commonwealth involvement. It is indeed a problem that different states have different rail gauges, but it doesn’t matter that they have different football codes. Surely funding of swimming pools, ovals and so on should be the task of state and local governments, consistent with the principle of subsidiarity.

So how did we get to this point of such Commonwealth involvement, particularly under conservative Coalition governments that have traditionally stood on a platform of “states’ rights”? Why, in 2018, did a federal Coalition government establish this Community Sport Infrastructure Grant, or CSIG, program when there were so many other calls on public revenue and when it was supposedly bound by a commitment to small government?

A pragmatist will answer that question by reference to the difficult financial conditions experienced by state and local governments. In a tough fiscal environment, state governments have to prioritise vital services — school education, hospitals, policing and transport, leaving community sport well down on their list of priorities. The Commonwealth has easier access to funds, so it makes sense for it to take on funding community sport.

The problem in that justification is that it takes the present distribution of funding between tiers of government as an immutable condition. It ignores the reality that state and local governments, whose responsibilities are largely for services employing skilled labour, should have a better financial deal. Just to sustain a given level of service, their revenue base should be a growing share of GDP — a reality the Coalition refuses to recognise.

A political analyst — a hardened cynic in the Canberra press gallery perhaps — would consider the question about Commonwealth involvement to be naive. All governments like to be seen doing something, and programs that have a regional component are all the better because they can be shaped to yield electoral benefits. A pork barrel is one of the trophies of office.

That’s the “obvious” conventional political wisdom. When checked against reality, however, it doesn’t stack up. Academic studies of the effects of regional boondoggles show that they’re usually neutral in terms of electoral outcomes. While electors like an upgraded road, a refurbished stadium or a new cycle path, their liking is not accompanied by gratitude. Rather it’s the satisfaction of an exchange — they have paid their taxes and are getting public goods in return. It’s the same transactional relationship we may have with our local supermarket or hairdresser.

Specifically in relation to the CSIG grants, William Bowe (keeper of the Poll Bludger site) has found that in spite of its politically targeted outlays, it had no net effect on the Coalition vote in the 2019 election. (By now the program would be yielding net political costs.)

Even if it doesn’t pay much attention to research, one may wonder how, in designing the CSIG program, the Coalition hadn’t learned from the Ros Kelly whiteboard affair, which contributed to the defeat of the Keating government, or from the problems the Rudd government had with its home insulation program (which involved poor administration rather than political interference). In both cases the government would have been far better off politically had it handed the money to the states as tied grants, acknowledging that the Commonwealth just isn’t equipped to administer such programs.

Perhaps, in failing to learn from these cases, the Coalition was so blinded by a belief in its own competence that it believed it could succeed where Labor had failed. That’s plausible, but there is also another possible explanation: the Coalition doesn’t really have any firm principles guiding the way public money is spent, because it sees all public expenditure as wasteful. For its part the Liberal Party, in its statement of beliefs, is explicit: “businesses and individuals — not government — are the true creators of wealth and employment.”

If you believe that nothing of value comes from the public sector, it doesn’t matter how public money is spent. A grant to a gun club, a new railway, Medicare… it’s all waste, and may as well be spent in order to maximise the government’s chances in the next election. Such a view of public expenditure underpins the political economy theory known as “public choice,” a theory that arose in the United States in the late twentieth century and that caught on in Australian universities in the 1980s.

Traditional economic theory sees public expenditure in terms of providing public goods that the market cannot provide or cannot provide so well, but public choice theory sees public expenditure quite differently. Its assumption is that public expenditure is used to appease interest groups — private health insurers who want subsidies, commuters who want a railway, or the Betoota Cricket Club, which wants a change room so the crows and galahs aren’t embarrassed by cricketers’ nakedness. The aim of elected office holders is to spend just enough money appeasing these interest groups, to get them over the line in the next election.

Lending evidence to this interpretation of public administration is Morrison’s handling of McKenzie’s misdemeanours. In requiring the head of his department to inquire whether she breached ministerial standards he is rejecting the Audit Office’s assessment, an assessment based on traditional principles of public expenditure and on laws regarding the separation of ministers from the administrators of statutory bodies. Rather, the question according to Morrison is whether she has breached “ministerial standards,” the standards set by his executive government.

McKenzie’s behaviour has been in line with the standards set by the Coalition, particularly as seen in the behaviour of the prime minister in his nonstop political campaigning. Is it fair that she becomes a scapegoat for the Coalition’s entrenched disregard for the public purpose? • 

This article first appeared in Pearls and Irritations.

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I wait seven minutes before the car arrives. My driver this time is Australian-born, and we get chatting pretty quickly. I learn he’s driving Ubers on the side while doing his MBA. While we talk, we also negotiate with the digital map that lurks on the dashboard, giving us instructions on where to go. I have my own favourite routes through the local streets that get me to Sydney’s airport, but the map, fed by data obtained from all of us going about our daily business, has its own ideas.

I tell my driver about a photographer friend of mine, also an Uber driver on the side, who likes to run two versions of Google maps when he’s driving, one within the Uber app and one straight from Google. My friend says the Uber route is just slightly longer, and therefore more expensive, most of the time. That seems hard to be believe, my driver told me, but yeah, maybe.

My driver and I get to talking about Uber’s opening up to public shareholders earlier this year, which saw the company attract a lower sharemarket price than was anticipated, mostly because of revelations by the company that it was struggling to make a profit from ride-sharing. My driver was pretty well informed about all this. “For Uber, long term, it’s about the data, not the ride-sharing,” he explained to me, not knowing quite how obsessed I was with the company myself, and with the rise of data-driven urban platforms more generally. I nodded and agreed. Yep, it’s all about the data.

We’d probably been reading similar stories about Uber in the news recently. Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive, seems to be running a PR campaign about the company’s ambitions to become the “broker of human movement” — specifically, of “people, food, and freight” — in cities. Kind of like the Amazon of transportation, he has been saying. When it was first launched, Uber created a new marketplace for ride-sharing by better connecting people who needed a lift somewhere with people who could trade some, or most, of their spare time for extra money. Uber Eats, launched in 2012, has likewise provided a simple way for people to order takeaway food, by connecting these people with others in their city who would happily deliver it to them for a small fee without having to be tied to one particular restaurant. Uber Freight is coming too, an app that “matches carriers with shippers” in a way that presumably will aim to beat systems people use now to get their freight where it needs to be.

For Uber, creating a technology platform to improve human movement was more a way to grow a company quickly — really quickly, faster than any company before.

I wonder aloud, to my driver, what kind of “broker” of human movement Uber is. Is it really so “data-driven’? Isn’t this still, really, about human capital, and how it’s being put to use? Uber spends a lot of money on incentivising drivers, “shippers” and food deliverers to use its platform to generate their own income, perhaps swapping what they’re already doing for this gig, or perhaps squeezing it into their spare time to make some extra cash. The amount of money Uber spends on marketing and user incentives is why they don’t yet make money on their ride-sharing business, despite the considerable fees they charge drivers, food deliverers and restaurants to use the platform. Being big, being part of more and more urban interactions taking place across every city around the world, is what matters most here. I put it to my Uber driver: Isn’t that just classic rent-seeking behaviour?

The difference here is the data, he explains to me. He says “dayta,” like an American, not “darta” like most Australians. You can’t work in tech or business these days and get away with “darta.” Uber can make all kinds of uses of the dayta created by users — which means, he explains, their brokerage service is not non-productive, in that classic rent-seeking sense. They’ve accelerated into self-driving cars, and they can also use all that dayta they’re generating to capture a granular sense of how cities really work.

Yes yes, that dayta.

It’s one of those conversations that pokes around some big topics, but won’t jump fully in. My Uber driver and I know we’re only going to be speaking for a few more fleeting moments before I jump out of the car with a cheery goodbye, trying not to slam the door too hard lest I damage my rider rating. Good luck with everything! I say.

Once out of the car, the Uber app hits me with a rating request. How was your ride today? I enthusiastically tap on the five-star option, and choose “Great conversation” to describe why my trip was so great.

The experience I’ve just recounted is not quite true — it’s more an amalgam of many different Uber trips I’ve taken over the past few years, and the conversations I tend to strike up with drivers. During much of Uber’s life in Australian cities, I’ve been reflecting on how platforms of this kind have been affecting the way we live in cities together.

Despite all kinds of misgivings about the kind of company Uber is — a massive, US-based outfit that fleeces the very people it seeks to “partner” with to sell its technology, and puts taxi drivers like my neighbour out of a job — I’ve become fascinated by the kinds of interactions it and similar companies have introduced.

There’s a sense of heightened sociability between strangers that seems to occur, perhaps because we’re protected by that threat of algorithmic-generated banishment if either party takes a misstep. Or maybe it’s the kind of people who have been quick to take up Uber as a transport option. As an iconic company of the “gig economy,” Uber often attracts people who aren’t looking to drive cars for the rest of their lives — which means you get to chat with people like my Uber driver, who also happened to be studying for an MBA and thinking about the future of data platforms.

The translation of myriad kinds of urban interaction into data points for more sales is what attracts the brightest and the wealthiest to thinking about all kinds of new ideas for Australian cities.

Uber is also, in many senses, the realisation of a quite radical idea advocated for many years by sustainability planners. What if we could get people to stop thinking of transport through the lens of the privately held motor vehicle and instead encourage people to share their driving experience? Couldn’t this cut the number of cars on the road, and free up space for other kinds of uses?

Like the car-sharing company GoGet, founded by sustainability advocate Bruce Jeffreys, Uber advocated its way into our cities as an innovative way to get people to move around them differently. Assets once considered purely private could become shared resources. Instead of ownership being the goal, we could reduce consumption and shift towards an economy based on access.

Apart from GoGet, these companies haven’t focused on creating cities that use fewer of the planet’s scarce resources. For Uber, creating a technology platform to improve human movement was more a way to grow a company quickly — really quickly, faster than any company before, generating huge benefits for its business leaders, investors, and shareholders.

For a company like Uber, the future of cities, and how we live in them, is primarily about the possibility that digital infrastructure built today will stick around as a foundational platform for future generations, in cities all around the world, to use as their first choice. Time to go to the airport? Better Uber it. Getting people around the world to use your company name as a verb to describe some of the most basic things we do in cities is, really, the ultimate, multi-billion-dollar goal. Want to know where you’re going? Better Google it.

Those who think about cities and digital innovation are often people like my Uber driver, busy coming up with start-up business ideas in this brave new world of tech-driven urban interaction. Many, it seems, focus their minds on new ways to do takeaway food. After all, people are time poor, but they also need to eat. Why not better service the needs of those who not only lack the time or wherewithal to cook, but would also prefer not to have to actually go fetch their order?

The success of digital food delivery apps has probably caught your attention. Australia is, it seems, becoming “an Uber Eats nation,” as one journalist puts it, with online food delivery services now worth 12 per cent of all sales in the $44 billion cafe, restaurant and takeaway food industry, and one in three adults living in Australian cities reporting use of food delivery apps.

No wonder, then, that moving around our major cities now seems to involve a lot of interaction with bike-riders carrying large square boxes of food to the time-poor customers. A relative of mine has told me that university campuses, like University of Sydney and UNSW, are hotspots for these delivery services, as many overseas students prefer the ease of using an app to order their lunches rather than having to negotiate campus food options.

Australian digital entrepreneurs are hoping to cash in on the trend. Two founders of a company called Kloopr have created an app that allows anyone travelling from point A to point B to become a delivery driver. Just think: you might be able to earn a bit of money on your way home, just by checking if one of your neighbours has ordered take-out. Others, like Bring Me Home, let you buy and pick up discounted surplus food from nearby cafes, restaurants, bakeries, groceries and supermarkets. This company is targeting Australia’s food waste problem in a way that’s also attractive to those who would prefer not to cook tonight or go out.

In other words, today’s digital platforms have made Australian cities attract spaces for disruptive new ideas about how to connect people differently. Most Australian citizens are now equipped with their own GPS receiver, bundled into the shiny, glowing, advanced computational device they carry around with them everywhere, otherwise known as the smartphone. On that phone are likely to be abundant maps, apps, recording devices, listening devices, maybe fitness trackers, maybe also air quality monitors. The phone many of us are carrying with us may also be listening to us in various kinds of ways — whether through the tiny microphones used to listen in on conversations (who knew?!), or by “listening” in the sense of analysing the information we churn through as we go about our daily business.

The translation of myriad kinds of urban interaction into data points for more sales is what attracts the brightest and the wealthiest to thinking about all kinds of new ideas for Australian cities. How can all this information be used to build new businesses, sell more, but also make our cities “smarter,” more responsive to infrastructural breakdowns, “closing the loop” between human interaction (or malfunction), infrastructure, services, and utilities?

Those people who come up with the best and brightest ideas for using data to make Australian cities work better are showered with investment money to help them scale as fast as possible. One such company, Neighbourlytics, offers “the data you need, to create cities people love.” Founded by two Australian women, this urban platform offers “simple ways to collect and understand rich digital data about what makes places thrive” by using social media data to capture community sentiment about a place. It’s particularly useful for real estate companies and city leaders who want to “see places through local’s eyes.”

Countless other digital platforms are also vying to change how we learn about, manage, govern, experience, connect and interact with each other in cities. For each, it is the data — the dayta — that drives innovation and new ideas about Australian cities. If data is the new oil, cities are the new goldmines, ripe for data-mining machine-learning, behavioural nudging and, ultimately, value-extraction.

Many who work in urban tech these days tend to think the possibilities offered by information technology are quite new. This, like my Uber story, is only partially true. Certainly, all the computational innovations that underpin our digitally mediated experience of cities today are new. But, at the same time, this way of seeing cities has its own peculiar history. In previous decades, it was spurred on by ideas from cybernetics, emboldened by the potential of clever “counting machines” to decode the complex webs of interaction that make up a city.

Will lots of things be missed? Historian Hugh Stretton. University of Adelaide

Despite their novel techniques, many urbanists railed against these computer-mediated visions, not because they weren’t passionate about better understanding complex urban problems, but because they worried what kind of city this way of seeing would bring into focus.

One such worrier was the Australian urbanist and historian Hugh Stretton. Paying close attention to the relationships between urban form, urban marketplaces and diverse urban sociality, Stretton was ambivalent about the use of “information” as a lens through which to understand Australian cities. In his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, now half a century old, he reflected on what he described as a kind of urban “ideology” that looked to create objective measures of urbanity to plan and manage Australian cities. He wrote:

What are cities, essentially? They are systems of intense, hyper-efficient interaction. Interaction is quintessentially the transmission, reception and exchange of information. The basic unit of information is the simple clause or image, the “bit.” The basic unit of interaction is the transmission of one bit from one human to another. Call this basic transaction a “hubit.” Private, face-to-face hubits are not countable. But the public channels of communication are all metered, one way or another. Count the hubits they carry. Weight them for distance carried. Divide by time and population, and you have indexed the intensity of interaction. Indeed, you are on the way to a universal, abstract and reliable measure of urbanity, and a general theory of it. You also have a political program: to maximise urbanity.

Stretton saw problems in this way of seeing cities. It proposed that they could best be understood through the lens of science, specifically “systems analyses” that used mathematical methods to understand and manage things like traffic flows. These were fine, in some instances, but shouldn’t be used as the basis from which to understand other things about cities. The risk, as Stretton saw it, was that only some things would get counted. If cities are intense interaction systems, the kinds of interactions we would pay most attention to might end up being those that could be counted most easily. Lots of things might be left out:

Making love is an interaction; so is a business deal or a visit to the doctor or a sparkling conversation about art in somebody’s salon; so is every jostle on a crowded pavement, every bit of unwanted commercial soliciting, every exchange of complaints about the noise or pollution or segregation of the city; so is every eviction, extortion, blackmail threat, sale of dope, or crime of violence in the city.

In this way, as Stretton put it, “Objectivity begets its own politics.” Certain kinds of interaction may grab most of the attention, simply because they can be counted, and the counting of them becomes beneficial to some parts of society, but not others. So, to Stretton, here was the basis of a political program: “to maximise urbanity.”

To many of today’s urbanists, who look to the potentials of “smart cities” and data-driven methods of managing infrastructure and service provision, Hugh Stretton’s cantankerous views might feel a bit old-fashioned. Certainly, Ideas for Australian Cities is not easy to find (I had to borrow my father’s copy in order to re-read it for its coming anniversary). His reflections on information and urban science, in a chapter called “Ideology,” are tucked away in chapter six, after a series of quite quotidian reflections on the strengths of mid-sized Australian cities like Adelaide and Canberra.

And yet, re-reading his critical reflections on what we might call urban informationism today, Stretton’s writing feels urgent, and altogether necessary. With a wave of urban apps hitting the streets, encouraging us to stay home, watch Netflix, stay away from restaurants, and keep swiping, we’d do well to remember that all this data we’re producing, through our myriad ways of interacting digitally, may benefit particular ways of being “urban.”

Even if they are mightily convenient, these services may, in the end, not be in our best interests. During these years I’ve spent observing and writing about this new wave of “urban apptivism,” I’ve noticed how many of the best, most responsive digital platforms are those built by technology companies that have access to very large amounts of user interaction data. And they like certain kinds of interaction over others.

Take Uber. Over fourteen million trips occur on Uber’s platform each day, by people like me and my MBA student, who Uber counts as a “driver partner” of the company, a “micro-entrepreneur” out to hustle. Uber likes our transaction to be considered a mutually beneficial transaction between two individuals in a marketplace — not a service delivered by a global multinational company. The user experience Uber offers us is also unparalleled among Australian taxi apps — no surprise, considering the $22 billion in investor finance ploughed into Uber over the past decade.

As Uber extends its muscle into the hospitality business, Australian restauranteurs are now experiencing something akin to what Australian news media outlets have gone through, in the wake of Google and Facebook, recently the subject of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry. They are finding their capacity to reach customers increasingly depends on nifty apps, which have figured out how to connect buyers and sellers, or readers and writers, in highly location-aware, responsive and “human-centred” ways.

With teams of global developers working to ensure the best user-interaction experience possible, it’s not surprising Australians love these apps. An ex-Google employee compares them to casino slot machines. With all this swiping going on, the data exhaust of our urban lives can in turn be ploughed into creating new, cleverer ways of interacting with each other. Like Stretton said: this is a program to “maximise urbanity” — except it’s an urbanity that amplifies the intelligence of machine-learning systems but doesn’t care much about our high streets, so long as we’re all interacting.

When I re-read Stretton today, I can’t help but wonder: who is championing our cities with these ideas in mind? His Ideas for Australian Cities influenced a generation of urban planners and policy-makers, including people like Tom Uren, who led bold interventions on behalf of the federal government to protect and champion particular mixed-use precincts in cities like Sydney, Fremantle and Hobart. This wasn’t anti-development, it was strategic intervention to protect what worked best.

Today’s cities likewise need a strategic government intervention to better shape their data infrastructures. Specifically, we need a new deal on city data, to ensure urban digital innovation doesn’t also mean digital feudalism.

And if Australian cities are going to be hotbeds of data-driven innovation, we would do well to remember Stretton’s cautionary words. To remember to cherish that which can’t be counted as possibly among the very best things that make our places thrive. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Grube co-opts the term “megaphone diplomacy” to create “megaphone bureaucracy,” an approach to the business of bureaucracy that will have many Australian public servants gasping in horror, and their political masters apoplectic. His basic premise is that, in order to serve modern democracy, senior bureaucrats need to step up to the microphone (or raise their megaphones) and contribute their well-informed opinions to public debate.

At this point, some public service leaders will need a stiff drink. It’s one thing to develop a level of subject matter expertise — it’s quite another to enter the public fray and argue your corner. While Grube understands this reluctance, he is adamant that bureaucrats really don’t have a choice.

That’s because advanced democracies are sitting in a pivotal moment: if they want to respond to the rise of popular discontent (yes, think “Trump” and “Brexit”), they must do something. Grube’s contribution to arresting this slide into democratic dysfunction is to mobilise senior bureaucrats. For every “alternative fact” and bit of “fake news” being bandied about, there should be a public servant ready to correct the record.

But what about the obvious counterpoint, and the likely objection of senior public servants: that public policy discourse is a matter for politicians, and that public servants must stay in the background? Grube has considered this objection, and honestly, he doesn’t much care for it. He deals with it swiftly, in the opening lines of his second chapter: “Civil servants are political actors. Period. Claims to the contrary are constitutional fictions invented for convenience.” In other words, public servants who believe they are somehow above the political fray are kidding themselves.

For those senior public servants still intent on resisting, Grube provides a further piece of advice: the world is already changing, and public servants must adapt in order to perform. For Grube, the “relentless public scrutiny” of the political class has changed the game utterly. The 24/7 media cycle and the rise of social media mean that the once watertight information pipeline, controlled by ministers and government leaders, is now an “information colander.” In these conditions, the idea of public service leaders refusing to engage is absurd.

To his credit, Grube doesn’t simply dismiss concerns about public service politicisation and move on. His goal is to be persuasive, and to take his readership along with him. The strength of this book is the author’s absolute determination to win over sceptics, and he assembles his argument with skill.

To make the case for change, Grube reminds us of how far we’ve come, and how quickly. The modus operandi of government has changed enormously over the last twenty years: the speed with which decisions are now made and announced means there is a “lack of private spaces to engage in any kind of reflective decision-making.” This point alone may be enough to make many of us weep. The media-driven mania that powers twenty-first-century government may be disturbing, but Grube doesn’t dwell on it. Ever the pragmatist, he accepts the nature and pace of change, and says that senior bureaucrats need to keep up.

The centrepiece of the book is a new model for how public service leaders should operate in this new world. He proposes a “Washminster” hybrid that applies some of the slicker, bolder skills of US administrators to the Westminster model of public service. Grube does remain loyal to one of the central tenets of the Westminster model, that senior public servants should not argue with ministers in public or express partisan views. But all other elements of accreted Westminster practice are ripe for shedding.

The idea that a public servant is simply an extension of her or his minister, and has no separate identity, no longer stands up to scrutiny, in Grube’s view. Ministers have abandoned key elements of Westminster convention, notably that of taking full responsibility for the actions (or acts of omission) of their departmental public servants. When was the last time an Australian minister took responsibility for a departmental stuff-up and fell on his or her sword?

If senior public servants have an identity separate from that of their minister, then it is their responsibility, Grube argues, to contribute their individual talents and expertise to serve the public directly — while also continuing to serve their minister. Yes, the potential for conflict here is very real, and Grube does not shy away from the fact.

Heads of public service agencies must walk a line that avoids cheerleading for the government of the day but also keeps them out of the line of fire if they withhold “full-throated support” for a government policy. Grube acknowledges that this is tricky terrain — but he says that bureaucratic leaders simply need to assess the risks and weigh the potential benefits on a case-by-case basis. They may not always get it right, but it’s often riskier — to the quality of government and democracy — not to act.

Grube’s method for teasing out issues and advancing his argument is very effective, and frequently entertaining. The book is part manual, part narrative. The author selects four of the Westminster system democracies — Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — and compares them with the United States, where the independence of public officials is often formally protected.

The book is full of well-chosen case studies. While some of these are from the United States (think James Comey), most are drawn from the four Westminster countries and are therefore immediately comprehensible to an Australian audience. They allow for plenty of “compare and contrast” moments, along with the occasional “he did what?”

Crucially, Grube also has access to a pool of forty-five retired (and anonymous) public service leaders from the four Westminster countries. He quotes extensively from interviews with them, and part of the fun is in trying to guess which former secretary said what about whom. Tellingly, Grube’s interviewee pool is divided between those who applaud a more public profile for bureaucrats and those still clinging grimly to the Westminster traditions.

Of course, the question for an Australian audience is: how do we fare in the book? How does Grube think that Australia is doing?

Briefly, he concludes that public service leaders in Australia (and New Zealand) are more likely to “embrace a public persona” than their counterparts in Britain and Canada. To do this, he makes good use of case studies, including the tale of Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s role in developing the Rudd government’s mining tax. The “resource superprofits tax” was a recommendation of the Henry tax review in 2010, but it quickly became mired in bitter political debate, largely because of the mining industry’s belligerent response. Henry was seen to “own” the policy, and he responded to the political furore very publicly and with considerable vigour.

Grube emerges as a fan of Ken Henry’s public leadership style, holding it up as an exemplar of his Washminster model. But Grube also reveals that at least two of his interviewees — retired Australian secretaries — remain critical of Henry, claiming that he “weakened Treasury” and “went too far on [sic] a number of instances.”

Grube’s analysis of press reporting turns up a fascinating result. Sifting through newspaper archives in the four Westminster countries for the period 2010–13, Grube finds that Henry attracted much more press attention than both his own Australian colleagues and the heads of agencies in the other three countries. As Grube notes, a kind of “exceptionalism” in Australia allows the head of Treasury to rise above the parapet and engage with the public via the media.

In fact, Grube thinks that Washminster-style leadership may already be emerging in Australia. Readers will be able to think of other examples, beyond Treasury, of strong “public personas” among federal mandarins — Martin Parkinson at Prime Minister and Cabinet, Mike Pezzullo at Home Affairs, and even heads of traditionally reticent agencies, such as Frances Adamson at Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Grube even wades into the murky waters of public servants’ use of social media, and for those wondering, he does mention the Banerji case (recently the subject of a landmark High Court decision) although only in passing and not by name. He concedes that social media is the riskiest field of public engagement for public servants — at all levels — and that Australian policies on social media use are highly risk-averse.

By the end of Megaphone Bureaucracy, Grube has decided that some sacred cows of the Westminster tradition need to be slaughtered. Pondering the hallowed relationship of trust that allegedly exists between political leaders and public service mandarins, Grube asks whether it is “essentially illusory already.” The tradition of ministerial responsibility is already “hanging on by the skin of its teeth.” If these supposedly central tenets of Westminster practice are almost gone, why should public servants feel incapable of change? For those public service leaders tempted to forge a new path, Dennis Grube has written the guidebook. •

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All prime ministers need to engage in agenda management and spin control, both to govern effectively and to maintain the political advantage. Increasingly though, politicking has been taking priority over governing, and Morrison’s prime ministership promises to be the apotheosis of this trend. Here are four strategies from the Morrison playbook.

Provoking fruitful confrontations

When Labor was fumbling for new directions after its election loss, talk turned to whether Anthony Albanese would try to narrow the differences between the opposition and the government. But any attempt to lower the partisan temperature was bound to fail for the simple reason that the government has a clear interest in magnifying differences rather than conceding similarities. Even if Labor agreed with all the Coalition’s policies except one, the prime minister would cast that remaining point of difference as “a test for Labor,” if not the makings of a national cataclysm.

We usually think of oppositions seeking to embarrass governments, but governments pursue oppositions with just as much zeal, keen to demonstrate to the public that they are irredeemably unelectable. All the evidence suggests that the search for opportunities like these will be a prominent feature of the Morrison government.

Secondary players have already become targets. Last month, Morrison launched an attack on GetUp!, accusing it of bullying Coalition candidates, lacking accountability and promoting the cause of Labor and the Greens. If the activist group wanted to be involved in politics, he said, it should set itself up as a political party. In fact, GetUp! is already registered as a “political campaigner” under the Electoral Act, and is subject to extensive regulation. The Australian Electoral Commission has inquired into its role and status on three occasions — most recently earlier this year — and in each case concluded the group was not associated with a political party. But no inquiry is likely to stop the Coalition seeking to portray GetUp! and its criticism of the government as illegitimate.

Unions — as always — are another target. After the election the government introduced the Ensuring Integrity Bill, designed — according to the Australian’s Ewin Hannan — “to give the Coalition more power to deregister unions, disqualify union officials, torpedo union mergers and reduce the multi-million-dollar revenue streams flowing to unions.” In a speech in Perth, Morrison made clear whom the real target was: “Labor can talk about banning John Setka from the ALP, which they still haven’t done. Australians know there’s plenty more union thugs where John Setka came from.” The government will be looking for opportunities not only to discredit unions but also to generate conflict with them, partly to keep Labor off balance and partly to keep the political contest on the government’s preferred terrain.

Morrison and his colleagues will also maintain the heat on national security — defined to include the threat from asylum seekers — which it calculates will create divisions within Labor and appeal to a sympathetic public constituency. Within weeks of the election, the Australian Federal Police took draconian steps to identify public servants who had leaked to the media, its raids clearly designed to draw lines, have a chilling effect on whistleblowers, and cast political dissent as treacherous.

Paradoxically, the government has an interest in cultivating and heightening conflict in order to portray itself as the custodian of national security. Like his political mentor, John Howard, Morrison uses terms like national interest or bipartisanship less out of a concern for security or harmony and more with the aim of wedging Labor.

Creating narrative-reinforcing diversions

Spin doctors know that if you allow a political vacuum to develop, your opponents will fill it. In this era of continuous campaigning and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, no government can dominate media coverage solely with its own decisions and actions; increasingly they use gestures to fill the void. A government like this one, with a very thin policy agenda of its own, will have an even greater need to create diversions.

In August energy minister Angus Taylor announced a parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy, which several backbench MPs had recently been promoting. Not only is there very little prospect of a nuclear power industry emerging in Australia, we also already have plenty of information about its prospects and worldwide decline. Less than a year ago the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator concluded that nuclear power will be more expensive than all other forms of power generation for decades to come. According to economist John Quiggin, nuclear power would only become economic if a very substantial carbon price were introduced; even then, any nuclear power station would be at least two decades off.

Over the past six years Coalition governments have managed neither to contain electricity costs nor to cut emissions. Nuclear power is not a short- or even medium-term solution to either problem, but it performs the politically useful function of confusing the debate about renewables while painting a picture — plausible to some voters — of a forward-looking government.

The government’s proposed compulsory drug testing and cashless credit cards for welfare recipients are two other examples of diversions used to distract attention from more intractable problems. Newstart recipients who refuse a drug test will have their payments cancelled, and those who test positive will have to complete unspecified “treatment activities.” Drug abusers are a small fraction of the unemployed in general and of Newstart recipients in particular; these measures won’t significantly reduce either group, but they will reinforce narratives about undeserving welfare recipients and a tough government determined to cut down on waste.

Substituting truisms for evidence

Scott Morrison’s ability to project energy and optimism is probably one of the main reasons he won the election. He will continue to seek out opportunities to be cheerleader-in-chief, but inevitably he will also need to defuse difficult moments.

Morrison is a great deflector. He dismisses unwelcome lines of questioning by saying they reflect the arcane interests of people inside the Canberra bubble, that he is concentrating on matters much more important to the Australian people, or — less successfully — that he doesn’t respond to gossip. Interviewers find him hard to pin down. Turnbull engaged with questions, even if on his own terms; Abbott’s evasions were obvious and clumsy; Morrison is more agile.

Morrison is also an Abbott-style simplifier, but more adept at reframing questions to avoid being weighed down by unwelcome facts. “We all know the current system is not working,” he recently remarked about skills training. “The point is getting someone trained with a skill that someone else needs, and that’s the clarity I want to bring to what we plan to do in skills. I’d be happy to invest in skills but I’m not going to invest in dud projects that aren’t working. I’m not going to pour more money into a bottomless pit.”

Evident here is Morrison’s gift for talking about a problem as if it has just arisen. He doesn’t acknowledge what his government has or hasn’t done over the past six years, and he pays no attention to the very considerable policy work and expertise that exists inside and outside government. Rather than look at the evidence, he uses clichés that could apply to almost any government spending at any time.

Discussing the drug testing of Newstart recipients, he does not allow the uncertain evidence of its effectiveness to muddy the narrative. When critics of the scheme focused on its punitiveness and its stigmatising of Newstart recipients, Morrison deftly turned their point on its head: “I am really puzzled by the level of opposition to the government trying to tackle a problem of drug addiction for people who are not in work.”

The shift from considering evidence to reciting truisms is also found in his response to Greta Thunberg’s speech on climate change at the United Nations. Morrison didn’t attempt to argue about the science on global warming. Rather he seized on a study showing many children were anxious about climate change. “You know, I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future,” he said. “And I think it’s important that we give them that confidence, that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, but they’ll also have an economy that they can live in as well. So I think we’ve got to caution against raising the anxieties of children in our country.” Again he prefers noble sentiments, impossible to disagree with, over any consideration of evidence.

Asserting absolutist common sense

Just as he doesn’t like to get bogged down in detail, Scott Morrison is averse to weighing options. He prefers to talk as if no reasonable person could contemplate anything but the course he has embarked on — as if his side is all pro and the alternative is all con, and the choice is between common sense and absurdity. This absolutist rhetoric projects certainty and decisiveness, and aims to close down debate.

He criticises Labor for wanting to increase the Newstart allowance, for instance, denouncing its “unfunded compassion,” without acknowledging that government spending is always a matter of balancing priorities. Whenever questions about welfare or inequality arise, Morrison’s first instinct is to invoke a rhetoric of opportunity and reward: those who have a go will get a go; the best welfare is a job. This fundamentally rosy view — uncomplicated, reassuring, glossing over injustices — avoids confronting messy everyday realities.

Absolutism of this kind is most dramatically on display in the government’s attitude towards asylum seekers. It wants to reverse the medivac legislation, which the crossbench and Labor forced on to the government before the election, even though no adverse effects have become apparent.

Even when their views are clearly at odds with majority opinion, ministers are determined to maintain the hardest of lines. Morrison justified the decision to expel a Tamil family from Biloela, even though the local community wanted them to stay, by saying that the government must pursue the national interest rather than be guided by public sentiment. On other occasions, though, he appears to believe that public sentiment — the views of “quiet Australians” — is a great repository of wisdom.

Getting through the moment

Will the four-pronged playbook keep working?

So far, it has been remarkably effective. But there are no magic formulas in politics, and every approach has its risks. Spin is a self-diminishing resource; today’s success invites tomorrow’s cynicism. Morrison’s concentration is on the quick fix, on getting issues off the public agenda rather than considering substantive solutions. In awkward interviews, he is intent on getting through the moment, hoping that any contrary versions will only catch up later, if at all.

Last month, agriculture minister David Littleproud told parliament that Barnaby Joyce didn’t produce any reports during his period as special drought envoy. An indignant Joyce responded that he had sent many text messages directly to the prime minister. When Scott Morrison was quizzed about this on his return from America, he initially responded to a journalist’s question with: “Well, you said text message, not me, I said he wrote to us, he presented reports.” When told that it was Joyce who had referred to text messages, he immediately pivoted: “Well he did. And Barnaby is a master of all forms of communication. He spoke to me on the phone, he spoke to me in my office, he presented to cabinet, he wrote me letters about this issue, which is what I asked him to do, so it was a pretty comprehensive set of advice that we received it, and I was happy to receive it and it has informed much of what we have done.”

Few people would have felt reassured about the quantity and quality of Joyce’s work after this rhapsodic praise, but Morrison had got through an awkward moment with an upbeat message, and avoided any damaging admissions that might provide future targets.

During the election campaign, the government kept environment minister Melissa Price away from the media, afraid of what mistakes she might make. It was clear that she wouldn’t continue in that position after the election. When confronted, though, Morrison blithely asserted she would stay on as environment minister in the event of an election victory — and got through that moment. After the election, he said she had asked for a new challenge and was moved to the defence industry portfolio. In the after-glow of victory, he got through that moment too.

Much clumsier was his categorical denial that he had used the epithet “Shanghai Sam” to attack Sam Dastyari. Past TV news footage was immediately used to show otherwise. Then he made the excuse that he had misheard the question, which also stretched credibility. In itself, this trivial incident probably did him little damage. But his willingness to say whatever is necessary to get through an awkward moment is fraught with longer-term dangers.

In what may be an interesting indicator of what is to come, Labor has already changed tack on how to handle this tendency. Albanese initially banned his caucus from using the word “liar” when referring to Morrison and his government, but he himself recently charged the prime minister with being “loose with the truth.”

Further and more difficult tests of Morrison’s capacity to determine the agenda and control the spin almost certainly lie ahead. To mollify extremists within its ranks and cater to external constituencies, the government is likely to continue the culture wars.

On the basis of his religious beliefs, Morrison has adopted extremely conservative stances on a range of social issues, including marriage equality, and has chosen not to send his daughters to a public school because of the attitudes they might encounter there. These views are clearly very different from those of most Australians — and the Liberals are convinced that any attacks on his religion would backfire on Labor — but they might nevertheless lead him to act in politically damaging ways. The newly announced parliamentary review of the Family Court, for example, which will be chaired by conservative backbencher Kevin Andrews and One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, is almost certain to arouse passions that could deepen party divisions and highlight the conservatism of its key figures.

Of course, all governments risk fatal damage either from a major scandal or from an embarrassing policy imbroglio. Whether any scandals will gain traction is hard to predict, but it is already clear that global warming is going to be an area of continuing contention for this government. Climate change deniers, still prominent among its members and supporters, got through the election period with some simple but essentially dishonest claims about Australia’s Paris commitments, even though national emissions have not fallen. The knots in which the government ties itself in order to justify its inaction are likely to get ever tighter, and strong, well-informed external critics won’t disappear.

Labor underestimated Morrison’s marketing prowess before the election, and the media have often failed to hold him to account. His playbook may not be subtle, but so far it has been effective. •

The post The Morrison playbook appeared first on Inside Story.

Departed? Well, not quite.

As it happens (and without spending a single day on the dole queue), Pyne appears to have found highly remunerative work with consultancy firm EY. His colleague Julie Bishop (who was also on the wrong side of the Liberal leadership stoush that delivered us prime minister Scott Morrison) has been similarly besieged with requests to join boards or take on chancellorships. It seems Pyne had only to leave the building for his (genuinely remarkable) skills to be recognised by business.

Having spent more than half of his life in politics, the former minister probably can’t remember how to blush. EY, however, has apparently been surprised at the public backlash from its new hiring. The company is, however, highly unlikely to fire the irrepressible politician who has been known to so many, for so long, as “young Christopher.”

There’s a reason for that. Pyne’s been such a fixture that I still expect his smiling face to suddenly bob up, infusing Canberra’s drab corridors with colour and quick laughter. “Ah, Nicholas,” he’d reliably begin, before identifying which particular atrocity I’d committed in my latest column: how I’d actually got it all wrong and why I really should pay proper attention to his particular deconstruction of the facts instead of making assumptions that may not necessarily be true.

That was — is — the singular talent of Pyne. Even when he was busy telling you off, you knew it wasn’t personal. He’s always been emotionally clever enough to quarantine any personal feelings; intellectual enough to grapple with alternative ways of constructing the world; and knowledgeable enough to strategically marshal appropriate arguments backing his particular conclusion, whatever that happened to be at that particular time — even if, just possibly, he may have privately argued for the exact opposite position in cabinet.

Many people, particularly those who’ve never met him, will happily offer up their opinion of his character. First elected at the tender age of twenty-five way back in 1993, he occasionally claimed to be “father of the house,” or the longest-serving MP. As with many of his assertions, alas, this depended on exactly how you counted, which is the secret of politics and, no doubt, consulting as well. Adding two and two together does, indeed, make the number four. Nonetheless, with some imagination and a solid sprinkling of fairy dust, the result can also be construed as a very solid foundation for the number five. Indeed, almost six, really. Sell that idea to a politician and suddenly you’ve got a deal: one that’s often worth a lot of money.

And there’s the rub. The last time anyone asked the federal Parliamentary Library to research the influence of lobbyists was back in 2014. It seems this is not an issue that our government is concerned about. Perhaps it should be.

After all, was Pyne employed by EY simply because he is an ornament to their consulting practice? Or might it be because he possesses inside knowledge that he’ll use to subvert the proper process of government as it slowly works out how to spend billions of dollars of your money? Can we trust the processes of government to roll on ponderously and smoothly, regardless of the enormous quantum of inside knowledge, goodwill and patronage that departs with someone like Pyne? Is it desirable to regulate former ministers or, perhaps more appositely, is it even possible to do so? What’s the experience of other countries?

By happy coincidence, these questions are tackled in the newly released second edition of Regulating Lobbying, a sweeping review of the international scene, including Australia. New transparency and regulatory initiatives have required the landmark first edition to be urgently replaced, the authors tell us, and their book “comprehensively examines jurisdictions worldwide and investigates whether some measurements of the robustness of lobbying laws are more valid and reliable than others.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Australia is slated as merely possessing “medium robustness” when it comes to regulatory measures governing lobbying (although you need to get to the second-last page of the text to discover this damning judgement).

This book was, of course, sent to the printer well before the furore about Pyne and Bishop, but way after a succession of similar jobs had been taken by Coalition and Labor MPs over the past decade. (It’s probably also worth noting that Bishop apparently won’t be paid for her work as ANU chancellor, and both former MPs have been cleared by the PM to take on work.) Indeed, Pyne’s move to EY appears to demonstrate considerably more integrity than the options some of his former colleagues have rushed to accept. He has eschewed working for communications companies accused of acting as agents of a foreign power, or for armaments companies that have overcharged the government, or, come to think of it, for gambling concerns.

Regulating Lobbying offers a path to a better way of navigating the murky waters between the decisions of politicians, the urging of paid lobbyists and the process of government. If you want an overview of what should be done and how appropriate standards have been pursued and implemented overseas, this is your book. It’s all laid out clearly. Here are legislative frameworks introduced by the early adopters of such systems (Canada, the European Union and the United States) and by countries where regulations have been introduced more recently (Hungary, Poland and Australia). Detailed comparisons are made and examples from different jurisdictions carefully drawn. The key insight here is the critical role of transparency.

But, of course, drawing comparisons between countries with widely differing societies and histories can be hazardous. It’s clear, for example, that even though Australia, the United States and New Zealand are all democracies and share so much culturally, every instance is different, and recognising that controls operate within particular political environments is vital. This is nowhere more obvious than when considering regulatory systems designed to stop people, or organisations, attempting to get around the rules.

Different countries have tackled this in different ways. What this book manages to do, very effectively, is offer an overview of alternative approaches. The reader is left in no doubt that there is no silver bullet, no single way of taming lobbying, and that’s because the cultural and historic context is always paramount. Nevertheless, using a light touch to pursue particular examples allows the authors to find a way of integrating a myriad of regulations into a broad overview. This makes the work a useful contribution to the field, even if it doesn’t provide a recipe book for Australia.

It’s no surprise that lobbyists manage to infiltrate weakly regulated systems, and it’s tempting to draw up a list of “best practice” regulations from the many examples, but this will only be half an answer to the problem. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the book is that reducing the influence of lobbyists won’t come from simply implementing legislation. This is a deeply cultural issue. That’s why the question this book sets out to address isn’t really the first one Australia needs to answer. Instead of asking how we can better regulate lobbyists, a question with a more illuminating answer might be why we haven’t really bothered trying.

Even if they’re not prepared to articulate such sentiments openly, lobbyists are, by their very nature, attempting to influence and change political outcomes. Boiled down to its essence, this is their role. Lobbyists exist to influence politicians and subvert straight political processes to reflect the desires of those who employ them. The key is to reduce or confine their malign influence while still allowing genuine representations from individuals or interest groups that might otherwise be adversely affected by legislation.

It’s clear that the authors believe transparency is the answer. Nothing will send the cockroaches peddling malign influence scuttling away faster than the spotlight of exposure. Unfortunately, this is desperately missing from the Australian scene. The leading home-grown expert on integrity regulation is David Solomon, from the University of Queensland. He recently made a scathing comment about the influence and success of people like Pyne. “The government just doesn’t want to acknowledge how much lobbying these professions actually do.” •

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The story was based on a leak designed to pre-empt a cabinet decision, and it clearly related to national security. Yet no investigation was launched. It’s true that no official documents appeared to have changed hands (or perhaps even existed), but in other respects the incident had strong parallels with Annika Smethurst’s controversial April 2018 article in the Sunday Telegraph, the subject of the first of this month’s highly publicised Australian Federal Police raids. In Smethurst’s case, the government’s reaction couldn’t have been more different.

Smethurst’s article quoted from confidential correspondence between Mike Pezzullo, secretary of the home affairs department, and Greg Moriarty, secretary of the defence department, about a plan to have the Australian Signals Directorate spy on Australians in certain circumstances. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, neither prime minister Turnbull nor defence minister Marise Payne had known of the plan before Smethurst’s story was published, and they promptly vetoed it. Yet 401 days later, on 4 June this year, the journalist’s Canberra home was searched for seven hours by AFP officers.

Similar treatment was meted out to the ABC the following day, after an even longer hiatus. Six members of the AFP raided the broadcaster’s Ultimo headquarters as part of an investigation into a news story, “The Afghan Files,” that went to air in 2017. The story was part of the wider probing of the conduct of Australian military personnel in Afghanistan by various news outlets, which had already sparked a judicial inquiry. During their visit to the ABC, the AFP officers used keyword searches of scripts, notes, memos and emails to identify 9214 items they wanted to copy.

Coming on successive days three weeks after the government was re-elected, the two raids brought a strong reaction from the media, Labor and the Greens. The pursuit of the leakers after such a long time suggests that intimidation was the main aim.

These aren’t the only high-profile investigations of alleged leaks in Australia at the moment. Australian Taxation Office debt collector Richard Boyle is facing sixty-six charges after disclosing unethical practices and a toxic work culture in his workplace to the ABC and Fairfax papers. Although his revelations led to reforms in the ATO’s practices, he still faces a possible jail sentence. And attorney-general Christian Porter is pursuing lawyer Bernard Collaery and former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer “Witness K” over the disclosure that ASIS bugged Timor-Leste’s cabinet room during 2004 negotiations over Timor Sea oil. Not only is Porter prosecuting the pair fully fifteen years after the alleged offences, but he also wants the court proceedings held in secret.

When prime minister Scott Morrison dismissed criticisms of this month’s raids, he told journalists that “it never troubles me that our laws are being upheld.” But efforts to control leaks and punish leakers have little credibility precisely because they lack the basic ingredient of justice, namely consistency. If police investigated only some thefts rather than treating all theft as crime, the law would lack credibility. But that is exactly how leaks and leakers are treated.

“Leaking blows apart the Westminster tradition of confidentiality upon which the provision of frank and fearless advice depends,” the head of the prime minister’s department, Peter Shergold, told an audience in Sydney in late 2004. Not only is it a criminal offence, he added, it is also “democratic sabotage.”

The senior public servant was justifying his request that police investigate the National Indigenous Times, which had quoted from leaked cabinet documents in an article revealing the federal government’s plan to abolish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC. When AFP officers arrived at the home office of its editor, Chris Graham, he immediately handed over the documents, but they insisted on searching the house for a further two hours.

Shergold’s insistence on the sanctity of policy processes would have been more convincing if successive governments, including the one he was serving under, had not engaged in selective leaking of their own. Indeed, immigration minister Philip Ruddock had been caught on tape the year before revealing confidential information to a journalist about an ATSIC commissioner and promising that he, Ruddock, always looked after his friends. You could call it democratic sabotage, but far from being punished for the leak, Ruddock was promoted to attorney-general.

Another internal leak, and another Telegraph scoop, came in September 2014 when an intelligence review found that the security of Parliament House needed strengthening. The finding was almost certainly leaked to the paper by prime minister Tony Abbott’s office, and resulted in a front-page story under the headline “Red Alert Over Plot to Attack Nation’s Leaders.” There was no plot — the review identified only potential vulnerabilities — and if security were really the government’s primary concern, it would have kept the report secret until the problems had been fixed.

But if raising the political temperature about terrorism was the priority, then leaking the report to generate sensational coverage was obviously the best option. The following August leading Canberra journalist Laura Tingle reported that the National Security Committee of cabinet had asked “for a list of national-security-related things that could be announced weekly between now and the election.” No attempt was made by the government or the police to identify the source of the leak to the Telegraph.

Soon after this month’s dramatic raids the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that the AFP had quietly abandoned an investigation into a separate leak that occurred in February this year. At the height of the controversy over proposals by the crossbench and Labor to transfer asylum seekers in medical need to mainland Australia, a front-page story in the Australian revealed the contents of a home affairs briefing paper about the potential impact of the draft bill.

The paper had included input from ASIO, and its publication in the Australian drew an angry response from director-general Duncan Lewis, who said that it had undermined the organisation. Labor charged that the government had done the leaking, but the AFP eventually decided not to continue its investigation because the prospect of identifying a suspect was “limited.” The contrast with its zeal in pursuing the other two raids was stark.

In another incident, in October 2017, police raided the headquarters of the Australian Workers’ Union in Melbourne and Sydney. They were on a quest to discover whether donations to GetUp! — made more than a decade before, during Bill Shorten’s period as secretary of the union — had breached the union’s rules. Someone had leaked details of the raid to the media, though, and reporters and camera operators had arrived half an hour earlier to see it unfold.

The portrayal of a major union (and Bill Shorten) in a bad light on the evening news would no doubt have pleased the government. But attention shifted almost immediately to the question of who had tipped off the media. Industrial relations minister Michaelia Cash denied five times in a single day that she or anyone in her office had anything to do with it. But during the dinner break her media adviser, David De Garis — who had been outed as the source in a BuzzFeed article — admitted to her that he had told the media, and resigned. Inconsistent and changing versions of who told whom proliferated among the media advisers in the offices of Cash and justice minister Michael Keenan.

Labor and the union claimed the raid itself was a stunt. It was authorised by the Registered Organisations Commission, a body set up by the Coalition government following the long-running royal commission into trade unions. Cash’s chief of staff, Ben Davies, testified that the commission’s media officer Mark Lee told him there had been a tip-off that the union might have been preparing to destroy documents. Given that the actions in contention had happened more than a decade earlier, that at least some of the donations had been declared to the Australian Electoral Commission, and that a royal commission had probed similar issues, it is hard to understand the sudden urgent need for a raid.

A senior AFP officer told the Senate that eight people had refused to testify about who else was involved in the leak and expressed regret that the police could not compel people to give statements or assist in inquiries. The AFP wanted to talk to ministers Cash and Keenan, but both of them twice refused to be interviewed, although they provided written statements. Cash said she referred police to her statement in Hansard and they had asked no further questions. (Cash’s bill to taxpayers for the legal advice was $288,000, while the Registered Organisations Commission’s was $550,000.) In the face of this intransigence, the AFP meekly surrendered.

Sometimes the AFP seems not simply dilatory but determined to avoid finding a leaker. In 2003, in the lead-up to the Iraq war, Andrew Wilkie, an analyst in the Office of National Assessments, and a former military officer, resigned in protest at the way he believed the Howard government was misrepresenting intelligence to back its case for joining in the United States–led invasion.

Wilkie protested in a very public way, but he also observed the proper forms. He first informed the head of ONA that he was resigning, then walked out the door to give his story exclusively to the doyen of the Canberra press gallery, Nine’s Laurie Oakes. After making a series of public criticisms, he stood as a Greens candidate in prime minister John Howard’s electorate and now sits in parliament as the independent federal member for Clark.

As soon as Wilkie entered the political fray the government counterattacked. It argued that he had not been closely involved in processing intelligence about Iraq and attempted to rebut his specific claims. But while Wilkie was careful never to disclose confidential material, the government leaked a classified report Wilkie had prepared on the possible dangers of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction against invading forces. The report was used in parliament by a Liberal backbencher and reported by News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt. Presumably it was leaked to suggest that Wilkie believed in the existence of the weapons and to show how the scenario he had envisaged had not eventuated during the successful US-led push to Baghdad.

Whoever engineered this attempt to discredit Wilkie clearly committed an offence. The document was a fairly recent one and all copies were accounted for at ONA. A few days before the leak, though, foreign minister Alexander Downer’s office had requested a copy. When questioned about the leak and the possibility either he or his staff were involved, Downer prevaricated and blustered.

Yet the police investigation failed, even though a senior security official told Canberra Times editor Jack Waterford that “a cop who couldn’t solve this one couldn’t find his bum with both his hands.” Current treasurer Josh Frydenberg was among Downer’s staff members at the time; it would be interesting to have his recollections of events.

One particularly worrying feature of this month’s raids was the open-ended nature of the searches and the large amount of material consequently taken from the media organisations. In this situation, journalists can only rely on the police exercising voluntary restraint in their handling of information not related to the alleged offence.

At least once, though, that faith has been abused. In February 2003, a Nine Network news report forced Alexander Downer to deny the “completely outrageous” allegation that Australia was already committed to fighting the Iraq war. The story was based on a minute of a conversation between Downer and the New Zealand high commissioner in which the foreign minister said that Australia would be sending troops to Iraq irrespective of any UN decision. Nine’s interpretation of those remarks seemed to be confirmed the following month when prime minister John Howard announced the commitment of troops.

The government believed that the minute of the conversation had been leaked by Trent Smith, a foreign affairs officer who had once worked for the Labor Party. He was suspended on full pay and subjected to a three-year investigation, at a cost of more than $1 million, which drew a blank. Not long after that, though, he was sacked for another offence: sending an email from his home computer while he was on holiday to a member of shadow foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd’s staff. In response to an enquiry, Smith had merely pointed out where certain information was available on the public record and suugested asking questions in Senate estimates if further detail were needed. He had not divulged any secret information in the email, which had been caught up in the investigation of a completely different matter.

Smith appealed against his dismissal, and in October 2007 industrial relations commissioner Barbara Deegan described his sacking as “harsh, unjust and unreasonable.” Four and a half years after his suspension, she ordered that he be reinstated.

The pursuit of leakers is marked by inconsistency, hypocrisy and this kind of opportunism. A look at which leaks were pursued vigorously, and which were not, shows that the energy of the police efforts seems to align almost perfectly with the government’s political priorities. For anyone who thinks the AFP investigation of leaks is marked by independence, consistency and competence, I have a harbour bridge you might like to buy. •

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More often, though, re-elected government have only a short time to savour victory. Internal discipline had ruled in the lead-up to the election, but conflicts and rivalries re-emerge once the contest is over. Governments that managed to keep divisions and embarrassments under the radar now find them spilling out.

The signs suggest that the Morrison government is unlikely to break the pattern. One set of troubles surfaced briefly during the election — the “Watergate” allegations and related failures in the Murray–Darling basin — could well come back to haunt it. More broadly, has the public been getting value for money from the government’s contracting decisions, especially when they are let without tender?

Another potential time bomb is the government’s erratic performance on global warming, energy and the environment. Scott Morrison deftly deflected concerns during the campaign, but it’s unlikely he can forestall embarrassment and failure indefinitely. When Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister, he and environment minister Josh Frydenberg failed three times in their quest to introduce environmentally oriented energy policies. Morrison’s victory will give him far more internal authority than Turnbull had, and perhaps he will be able to get the considerable rump of climate change deniers in the government to submit to new policies. Equally, they could turn into a major political headache.

Those problems are particular to the Morrison government, but a third — the difficulty of translating campaign promises into budgetary realities — is common to all returning governments. With the best will in the world, this is a challenging and hazardous process.

The cynical view — that politicians break promises without a second thought — is much too glib. Most of the time, if it is politically and economically feasible, they stick to them. The real sleight of hand tends to happen during the campaign, when voters are misled by omission; once the government is back in office, previously unmentioned nasties suddenly emerge.

But some governments do break election promises blatantly and comprehensively. That’s happened at least three times in contemporary Australian politics, in each case resulting in post-election budgets so out of step with campaign promises that they did lasting damage to the government.

The first of these budget ambushes was engineered in 1978 by Liberal treasurer John Howard, following the Fraser government’s first re-election in 1977. The triumphant campaign had produced a landslide almost on the same scale as Fraser’s first victory in 1975. Its negative side had included ads featuring the pop song “Memories” with unflattering pictures of opposition leader Gough Whitlam and his ministers, and labelling Whitlam “the unemployment expert.” The positive side involved promises about cutting income tax. In ads featuring a fistful of dollars, the government promised to continue the tax indexation it had introduced and to make further cuts. Journalist Paul Kelly called it “one of the most blatant appeals to greed in many years.”

Instead of delivering income tax cuts in the 1978 budget, Howard announced “temporary” tax increases. The government also raised taxes on petrol, cigarettes, beer and cars, introduced an airport departure tax, and gutted Labor’s Medibank scheme. After the temporary tax surcharges were made permanent the following year, the Illawarra Mercury headlined its front page “Lies, Lies, Lies.”

Morgan Poll figures showed the Coalition ahead of Labor in the first half of 1978 but behind after the budget. The government didn’t lead Labor again until March 1980. The polls during that year fluctuated, but as another election neared, Labor pulled ahead.

The election “was particularly heavy going,” Liberal federal director Tony Eggleton wrote in his diary, and the polls were “not encouraging.” The government was rescued by a spectacular scare campaign triggered by a Labor MP’s tentative reference to the prospect of a capital gains tax on the family home. This new tax “was made the dominant issue for the last week of the campaign,” wrote Eggleton. “Television and radio messages and full page press advertisements warned of Labor’s threat to the family home.” The tactics “were controversial even among the Liberals,” he added, “but the political hardheads were of the view that the end justified the means.”

The Fraser government won another thirty months in government, but on a much smaller two-party-preferred vote of 50.4 per cent. Its lower house majority was halved — from forty-eight to twenty-three seats — and five Australian Democrats and an independent gained the balance of power in the Senate. From May 1981, according to Morgan, the Coalition consistently trailed its opponent, and this period ended with Labor, led by Bob Hawke, winning a large victory in March 1983. The 1978 budget ambush had been the turning point in the Fraser government’s political fortunes.

A decade after Fraser lost power, another post-election budget ambush was performed, this time by a Labor treasurer, John Dawkins, following the re-election of Paul Keating’s government. Labor had trailed consistently in the polls in the lead-up to the election, with extremely unfavourable ratings of Keating himself, and commentators had taken to describing this as an “unlosable” contest for John Hewson’s opposition. The economy had been through a painful recession — the recession we had to have, as Keating called it, in a phrase that would haunt him forever.

Hewson had grabbed the political initiative more than a year earlier with his detailed Fightback! policies. As the election neared, Keating challenged elements of Fightback! — on health, industrial relations and a new goods and services tax — fiercely and forensically. Although conventional wisdom attributes the Coalition’s loss to the proposal for a GST (“Whenever you put your hand in your pocket, Dr Hewson’s hand will be in there too”), Hewson has said that the proposed cuts in Medicare bulk-billing cost him the election. During the campaign Keating also promised tax cuts — famously describing them as “L-A-W law” tax cuts — with the first to be delivered in 1993 and the second in 1995.

Leading into the campaign, and for much of its duration, most polls and commentators forecast a Coalition victory; even as the election night count began, Labor was far from confident. But Keating was soon proclaiming what he called “the sweetest victory of all.”

Now came the problem of living up to the promises made to secure victory. Dawkins was faced with an impossible task: as he wrote later, “We now had to accommodate some very expensive promises that had been made in the lead-up to the election when the deficit was already too large.” By the time he delivered the budget in August, he had threatened to resign three times in private meetings with Keating. (If Dawkins kept up this wilful behaviour, Keating reportedly told his staff, he would knock his block off.)

“The budget was the horror that everyone was expecting,” Keating staffer Don Watson recalled. The first round of tax cuts was introduced but the second round deferred until 1998 (later to be abandoned). Wholesale tax rates were increased 1 per cent across the board, several other indirect taxes were raised, and spending was cut by $2 billion.

The reaction was strong and immediate. Predictably, and with some justification, the Liberals charged that Keating had lied his way back into government. Less predictable was a caucus revolt and ACTU president Martin Ferguson’s description of the budget as an “indefensible… betrayal of working people.”

A Sydney Morning Herald poll found 72 per cent of voters believed the budget would make them worse off. Labor’s primary vote was down to 31 per cent, the Coalition’s up to 54. Hewson led Keating as preferred prime minister 53–33. Keating rarely admits to mistakes, and more than two decades later author Troy Bramston reported that, “given the problems with the 1993 budget, Keating now believes he should have combined the role of treasurer and prime minister.” It was never likely that Labor would win a sixth election in 1996 against any sort of competent Liberal opposition, but the 1993 budget almost certainly made it impossible.

Undeterred by these precedents, treasurer Joe Hockey followed the 2013 election of Tony Abbott’s government with his own post-election ambush. But where governments were juggling difficult economic conditions in the two previous cases, Hockey’s decisions were not based on surprise discoveries or changed conditions.

On election eve, in an interview with Anton Enus on SBS, Abbott had been unequivocal: “no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST, and no cuts to the ABC and SBS.” His would be a government of “no surprises, no excuses.”

Elected, the government moved with alacrity in the opposite direction. During the campaign Abbott had sought to neutralise education as an issue by declaring that “as far as school funding is concerned, Kevin Rudd and I are on a unity ticket.” In late November, just ten weeks after the election, education minister Christopher Pyne attempted to renegotiate Labor’s funding deals with the states. The resistance was immediate.

The Abbott government has the distinction of being the quickest first-term government to lose its lead in the history of Australian polling. Just three months after the election, it dropped behind Labor; the Coalition never led again in the polls while Abbott was prime minister.

The horror budget came the following May. Ten days beforehand, the government released the report of its National Commission of Audit, chaired by business leader Tony Shepherd. The commission recommended major cuts and privatisations. According to the Financial Review’s Aaron Patrick, “the new government wanted to reset the nation’s expectations far lower.” Naturally enough, no such resetting had been attempted during the campaign.

The cuts came as a shock not just to the public but also to many MPs. Abbott and his office had been so concerned to prevent leaks that they had severely restricted the flow of information, making the government’s own MPs ill prepared for the news they had to sell to the public.

Apart from the substance of the measures, the budget was a PR nightmare. Hockey was in high spirits in the lead-up, reportedly dancing to the pop song “Best Day of My Life.” In a devastating interview, Channel Nine’s Laurie Oakes suggested that it might not be the best days in the lives of the unemployed, the sick and other welfare recipients. Later, questioned about the impact of petrol tax on poor people, Hockey replied, “The poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases.” Having been the government’s strongest performer, he never recovered from his first budget.

Labor sprang into action. It spent $1.5 million on an advertising campaign centred on Abbott’s election-eve promise of no cuts. Newspoll found that 48 per cent of respondents disapproved of the budget and just 39 per cent approved. In contrast, the first poll of the Rudd government had a 60–12 approve–disapprove margin. Just 5 per cent of those polled thought they would be better off, while 69 per cent thought the opposite.

Like Keating and Dawkins, Abbott and Hockey lacked control of the Senate, and many of their most contentious measures had to be abandoned. Although they had campaigned on their greater ability to rein in government debt and deficits, they never seriously attempted to address these issues again. Over the next five years, government debt doubled.

What this fiasco revealed was that Abbott and Hockey, who had spent most of their adult life politicking, had no idea about governing. But this may be a problem within the political class more generally.

Weeks before this year’s election, political analyst Sean Kelly wrote that if Shorten were to lose, his name would forever be linked to that of John Hewson and the 1993 election. In both cases, an opposition lost what it should have won by campaigning on an ambitious and detailed reform agenda that provided too many targets for scare tactics.

Some commentators were already focusing on what they thought was the folly of the franking credits policy; since the election, such sentiments have become the conventional wisdom. Finance writer Alan Kohler has concluded that “best to just shut up about tax increases or any other difficult reforms” during election campaigns, and if you must say something, lie.

Bowen and his economic team, Jim Chalmers and Andrew Leigh, had presented what is probably the most precise budget blueprint any opposition has produced. It specified which tax concessions would be abolished to fund extra spending on health, education and environmental initiatives, all the while promising to keep the budget in surplus and address the mounting debt. Its reward for this honesty was to be attacked for its “retiree tax,” its “housing tax” and its “death tax,” and to have its economic credentials lambasted. John Howard’s small-target conventional wisdom of 1996 has been restored.

But there is a cost to such electoral pragmatism. As politics has become more professional, it has become more cynical. The concentration on short-term tactics, on winning by whatever means it takes, has become stronger, but at the expense of governing skills and with the likelihood that the tactical spin of both sides is making people more disillusioned with the democratic system itself.

The 2019 election was a triumph for Scott Morrison and the Coalition. Will they be as successful at governing as at politicking? They won on a reassuring platform of continuing economic good times and sound management, of budgets that will deliver both tax cuts and surpluses. Will Josh Frydenberg’s next budget fulfill these expectations, or will he deliver a budget ambush? •

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That scepticism is a healthy ingredient of any vibrant democracy — but only up to a point. When the assumption that government is stupid, arrogant and perfidious becomes ingrained, healthy scepticism gives way to damaging and self-perpetuating cynicism. By that measure Australia may well be “at risk,” if we’re to believe recent figures about public attitudes towards public office-holders and institutions.

For those still sitting on the fence, our new book, Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand, may be a welcome antidote to the barrage of negativity. It presents twenty chapter-length case studies of governments getting it right and doing valuable things on both sides of the Tasman. For Australia, think Medicare, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, and programs to combat smoking — not to mention the Child Support Scheme, gun control, curbing HIV/AIDS and, yes, even the GST.

Success is often attributed to the right people doing the right thing in the right place at the right time. That sentiment might contain a seed of truth, but associating success with serendipity, luck or the perfect confluence of disparate threads heavily discounts the careful and detailed work that goes into creating momentum, identifying the opportunities and seizing the moment.

One recurrent theme in our case studies is importance of pacing in turning an idea into a smart, fair and effective policy intervention and catalysing broad support. Our cases suggest at least three scenarios for smart timing and pacing.

First — in stark contrast to the current culture of frantic, real-time “issue management” in government — good things often come to those who have the resolve to persevere and the wisdom to wait, to bide their time while preparing the groundwork, and to strike when the iron is finally heating up again. Take the GST story, for example. For a long time it was a tale of false starts and roadblocks. And yet, beneath the ebbs and flows of political manoeuvring, work continued on building an ever-stronger case, ever so gently crowding out the space taken up by its opponents, until Liberal prime minister John Howard felt confident enough to bite the bullet and press ahead.

Likewise, the 2010 announcement that Australia would become the first nation to adopt plain-packaging laws for tobacco was the product of a long journey of evidence-building. The recommendation that tobacco be sold in standardised packaging, without any branding, had a firm evidence base assembled over two decades. But certain conditions needed to be created to allow the idea to gain broad acceptance. By recognising that plain packaging was both legally possible and politically desirable, the government was able to enact a policy that was previously considered too extreme.

The second route involves aligning separate streams of policy work. Take the development of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. This highly innovative proposal was advanced on the basis of equity and access, but there was no solid international evidence of how it would work in practice. But when the scheme’s architects became aware of the Australian Taxation Office’s mechanism for collecting child maintenance payments, they were able to draw on that experience in responding to any doubts about the scheme’s feasibility.

The third scenario involves thinking strategically about how to respond to adversity. Being caught up in a crisis like the spread of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s or the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 can be a dreadful experience for people directly affected. But by their very nature these circumstances generate focused attention on hitherto hidden or stalemated issues among the public and policymakers. The need to do something big becomes a moral imperative and a political opportunity. Key figures in the bureaucracy and civil society keep their bottom drawers well stocked in case such a window of opportunity comes along, and this is precisely what enabled the speed and effectiveness of Australia’s gun-control scheme, which continues to be held up as a model worldwide.

So, yes, governments do get it right at least some of the time. As our study shows, the ballot box and the rhythms of rotating governments are not the only sources of policy innovation. Other levers can be used by those ambitious and courageous enough to embark on change that will make a difference. •

The post Getting it right when the time is right appeared first on Inside Story.

Multiply that across the public service and you can see why staff numbers are no longer anything like a reliable indicator of the size and scope of federal government departments and agencies. The role of public servants in supporting government functions has been cut back by a more extensive use of consultants and contractors (for reasons including government and ministerial distrust of government organisations at all levels) combined with an ideological faith that private sector organisations can do things better and a craving for the alleged benefits of greater flexibility.

Last year the Australian National Audit Office, or ANAO, analysed AusTender data to estimate the extent to which the Commonwealth relies on services from organisations other than its own agencies. Between the financial years 2012–13 and 2016–17, for example, the Commonwealth spent $39 billion (yes, billion) on external “management and business professionals and administration services,” $36 billion on “information technology, broadcasting and telecommunications” and “engineering and research and technology-based services,” and $17 billion on “politics and civic affairs.” There was more, and it all added up to enough money to build twelve new submarines and, with luck, have billions left over.

Most of this spending is likely to be entirely warranted. It includes a few very large but entirely reasonable amounts, including a National Blood Authority contract with the Red Cross to supply blood. And besides, few government agencies were ever entirely self-reliant. (In its heyday, the postmaster-general’s department used staff not employed in the public service to provide postal services in country areas.)

Reflex opposition to outsourcing is as often mistaken as it is justified. No one with a due sense of the proper use of public money would want to revert to having relatively highly paid military staff wasting their professional time on grounds maintenance, catering and cleaning when those things can be done more efficiently by private providers. But outsourcing on purely ideological grounds, on the other hand, often goes wrong. In the 1990s, against the wishes of just about all other departments, the finance department persuaded the federal government to outsource a large range of IT functions — a disaster for which no heads have ever rolled.

So it was no particular surprise when last year’s ANAO report on contracting confirmed that all was not well. No overall data is collected on outsourcing, so the ANAO was forced to trawl through the government’s AusTender listings, which are opaque, not necessarily complete and often tardily updated. There, it found evidence of “contract splitting” to avoid full, open tendering, and discovered that around half of all contracts are let by limited tender.

In all, the ANAO report detected an odour strong enough for the parliamentary public accounts and audit committee to establish an inquiry. Before the federal election was announced and the process came to an abrupt end, it had attracted fifty-eight submissions and held several days of hearings.

To hope that improvements in contracting might be generated from within the bureaucracy is to hope against hope. Departmental and agency submissions to the inquiry were, at best, models of complacency. Finance and the attorney-general’s department offered only modest suggestions about certain definitional matters, while the prime minister’s department, whose secretary has attracted the informal title of “head of the public service,” hardly managed to get even that far. The Public Service Commission, more on which a little later, washed its hands of all responsibility or interest.

The two best and most useful submissions to the inquiry came from Paul Barratt, a former secretary of the defence department, and Paul Munro, a former presidential member of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (and its successors) and a member of the famous 1970s Coombs royal commission on federal government administration.

For Barratt, who saw a considerable amount of outsourcing at first hand in defence, pushing core functions out of the public service “inevitably results in deskilling.” He warns that the “successful definition and management of contracts requires… an understanding of the subject matter at least comparable to that of the service provider.” In other words, outsourcing — especially of more complex functions — can lead to what economists call “information asymmetry”: with officials lacking the knowledge to write a satisfactory statement of requirements for contracts, providers are given scope for exploitation. Barratt also says that ministers and officials can use outsourcing to evade responsibility when things go wrong.

Munro’s submission is a telling analysis of the staffing consequences of contracting, which he says has hastened a trend away from “a standing, strong, professional corps undertaking administrative services” for governments. The “move away from… a strong, responsive, merit-based public service is very marked,” he says, and the downgrading of integrity and resilience has provided “opportunities for corrupt practices.” He points to a 2007 ANAO estimate that some 19,000 workers had found their way into the federal public service other than through the merit recruitment provisions of the Public Service Act. That number is now likely to be much greater. Thirty, forty, fifty thousand? No one seems to know.

The rules that are being circumvented can be traced back to the Northcote–Trevelyan report on the British civil service in the middle of the nineteenth century, which attempted, largely successfully, to root out the nepotism and corruption in staffing that had become a devastating blot on British public administration.

There is nothing untoward, of course, about consultants providing one-off policy or management advice for departments, or contractors being used for cleaning, building maintenance or even call centres. But when consultants, contractors and labour-hire staff are used to perform work indistinguishable from that of public servants — when they effectively occupy public service positions, supervise public servants, exercise financial and staffing delegations and the like — then the relevant constitutional and legal provisions are abused and bypassed and the doors are left open for a return to the bad old days of nepotism and corruption.

It’s easy to imagine how this works. Consultants are engaged on contract to occupy line-management positions. Faced with the need to fill subordinate positions, they can either go through the exacting legislative procedures to ensure merit recruitment and promotion or, without undue fuss, bring in on contract people they know or people employed by the same consulting firm. Serving public servants can be sidelined because the consultants simply don’t like them. Nepotism returns and grows, the efficiency, effectiveness and integrity of the merit system goes up in smoke and we’re back in the British civil service of the 1840s.

It’s not simply that tens of thousands of consultants and contract staff are being brought in to the public service outside the employment provisions of the Public Service Act. These people owe their primary allegiance to their separate employers and they’re not covered by the Public Service Act code of conduct and its associated disciplinary provisions.

This is what is happening in the federal public service, and yet the Public Service Commission, the nominal guardian of its merit system, doesn’t seem to care. When the parliamentary committee asked if it had undertaken assessments of “the impact of the growth in the use of on-hire labour contractors” and “the use of consultants to deliver core public service functions,” the commission replied that it “has not undertaken such assessments.” When asked what should be done to track the use of “contractors and on-hire labour contractors,” the commission said that “this is a matter for agencies” and that it does not itself “gather data or analyse statistical data about consultant and non-consultant numbers.”

This issue should be dealt with prominently in the recommendations of the current Public Service Review, being conducted by a panel lead by former Telstra chief executive David Thodey. But it would be unwise to hold one’s breath on that count.

Paul Munro would like to see a new, independent review of Commonwealth public administration “with powers commensurate with those of a royal commission.” Given that the Thodey review is not independent and its track record thus far has been unimpressive, there’s something to be said for that idea.

Regardless, whoever gets control of the parliamentary public accounts and audit committee in the next parliament should revive its inquiry into the ANAO’s report on contract procurement, and attempt to bring greater integrity and discipline to this major area of government activity. Most importantly, any new government and its ministers should, in their own interests, get on to it too. •

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The two Swedish women deserve their day in court

So much of what follows goes back to Assange’s treatment of two women in Sweden about eight years ago, when WikiLeaks was at the height of its fame. Both had consensual sex with Assange, according to their accounts, but were later unwillingly subjected to unprotected sex. They felt strongly aggrieved, and wanted Assange to be tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. He initially refused.

During this stand-off, the women went to the police and “sought advice.” As a result, Assange was charged with sexual assault. On Friday 20 August 2011, though, courtesy of a mutually trusted intermediary, Assange and the women were nearing an agreement. By the time Assange agreed to the test, the nearby clinic had closed for the weekend.

Almost immediately the women’s visit to the police was leaked to the Stockholm tabloid Expressen, which splashed the rape allegations across its front page. As the news flashed around the world, journalists were demanding a response from Assange. Caught off balance, he replied with characteristic pugnacity, referring to dirty tricks and implying he had been the victim of a “honey trap.” Naturally enough, the two women were affronted by the suggestion that they were dupes of the American government or anyone else.

Public hostilities escalated. The women hired a high-profile celebrity lawyer. Assange, now in London and supported by a similarly glittering team, faced bail and extradition hearings that attracted saturation coverage. As the legal proceedings followed their own immutable logic, both sides had to endure damaging public attention and allegations.

Several commentators observed the irony of the world’s greatest champion of leaks himself becoming the victim of a leak. But the most telling aspect of these events is the way publicity transformed the process — how the fluidity of private negotiations solidified into formal adversarial proceedings in which each party’s interests lay in sharpening rather than resolving the conflict.

Without publicity, conciliation might well have been successful. Assange could have taken the test at that point (which would later showed him to be clean); the women could have been reassured although not reconciled to their former lover; and the whole matter could have disappeared. Instead, it became a turning point in Assange’s life, and the women received neither conciliation nor the chance to have their charges heard in court.

Assange should face the consequences of breaking bail

Pending his extradition to Sweden, Assange was allowed out on bail by the British court. In August 2012, he made the seemingly precipitate decision to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. It is not clear whether the people who put up very substantial sums of money for his bail knew what he was planning, and that their money would be forfeited. By absconding, Assange was committing a criminal offence for which he has now been tried but not yet sentenced. The maximum sentence is twelve months’ imprisonment.

Assange was desperate to escape extradition to Sweden, which he thought would result, in turn, in extradition to America. While seeking refuge solved his immediate problem, he seems never to have had an exit strategy. He spent seven years, one-seventh of his life, in the confines of the embassy, and it isn’t clear that he is any better off than he would have been if he had observed his bail conditions in 2012. His existence for much of his time in the embassy is likely to have been miserable.

Nor is it likely that his Ecuadorian hosts knew what they were getting into. The new president, Lenín Moreno, terminated Assange’s immunity after a period of deteriorating relations, and the new foreign minister described Assange as ungrateful, rude and unhygienic. The Ecuadorian government says it has spent more than US$5.8 million on his security and $400,000 on his medical costs, food and laundry.

It should be stressed that it was Assange who chose that fate. Yet a UN working panel said in February 2016 that he was being arbitrarily detained. It is hard to know the logic behind that statement: should people be able to escape criminal prosecution just by staying away for a certain period?

Being a narcissist is not against the law

A week ago, on 11 April, a British judge dismissed as “laughable” Assange’s argument that he could not get a fair trial, and described his actions as “the behaviour of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest.” Such gratuitous character judgements, confidently expressed without any benefit of expert testimony, are well beyond a judge’s legal role. But they are characteristic of a much larger public humiliation process to which Assange is being subjected.

So many people have anti-Assange stories, many of them of course soundly based. “Of all of Julian Assange’s undoubted talents, maybe his greatest gift is the ability to make enemies,” wrote the former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who was directly involved in the original WikiLeaks publication. “He trusts, likes and respects almost no one,” Rusbridger added.

Nevertheless, Assange’s personality is not the important issue. The legal proceedings and the political role of WikiLeaks are central.

The original 2010 WikiLeaks revelations did much more good than harm

Julian Assange had been building WikiLeaks since 2005, but it wasn’t until 2010 that it gained global notoriety. First the organisation released a video of Americans in an Apache helicopter killing several innocent people, including two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. Then came the Afghanistan war logs, which showed the extent of official pessimism about the course of the war. The third release, the Iraq war logs, consisted of 392,000 US military communication records. Finally and most spectacularly, on 28 November 2010, came the long-anticipated release of a massive tranche of US diplomatic cables.

According to Rusbridger, the largest single leak of the analog era, the Pentagon Papers, consisted of two and a half million words. The diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks amounted to 300 million words. For the demanding task of processing and publicising them, WikiLeaks initially joined with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

The diplomatic cables provided the citizens of many countries with insights into their own governments’ behaviour and relations with the United States. They disclosed the low American opinion of the ruling clique in Tunisia, for instance, and may have been a factor in the uprising and regime change that occurred there not long after. The venality of the regime was well known to Tunisians, but they did not know that American officialdom shared their critical views.

My favourite Australian WikiLeak was a cable from the US embassy in Canberra that cited an unnamed “key Liberal Party strategist” as saying that the issue of asylum seekers was “fantastic” for the Coalition and “the more boats that come the better” — a case of public hand-wringing and private relish.

The publication of the cables was met with a flood of hyperbole. Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, called it “the 9/11 of world diplomacy.” US vice-president Joe Biden called Assange “a high-tech terrorist” and his 2008 vice-presidential opponent Sarah Palin thought that the perpetrator of this “sick un-American espionage” should be pursued with “the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda.” One Republican presidential hopeful, Mike Huckabee, believed that “anything less than execution” would be too kind a penalty; another, Newt Gingrich, thought Assange “should be treated as an enemy combatant, and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” There were at least thirty calls for Assange to be assassinated. The violence of the rhetoric and its lack of interest in legal process are striking.

At the same time as some were calling Assange the most dangerous man in the world, others thought he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This heady brew would encourage both hubris and paranoia in even the most balanced person. Perhaps as a result, Assange became more autocratic and erratic, and fell out with many former colleagues.

WikiLeaks had been an amateurish, idealistic, shoestring organisation, reliant on the erratic endeavours of volunteers, famous in its own subcultures but barely known outside, held together by Assange’s charisma and energy. Suddenly it was playing on a global stage for huge stakes, facing enormous information-processing and political challenges, and caught up in its founder’s personal dramas.

Characteristically, the politicians’ rhetoric about the cables exaggerated the harm and failed to acknowledge the benefits. After the extravagant claims about the damage WikiLeaks had done in 2010, later assessments, uttered without any fanfare, were very different. “Is it embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest,” said US defense secretary Robert Gates. Years later, BuzzFeed News obtained a Department of Defense taskforce report concluding, in BuzzFeed’s words, that the disclosures “were largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to US interests.” They did not affect the military situation or operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, although they did serious damage to intelligence sources and informants in Afghanistan.

It is easy for officials to elide their own embarrassment into some larger, nobler cause. After the leaking of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971, for example, the White House tapes captured Nixon’s adviser Bob Haldeman quoting a very young presidential aide, Donald Rumsfeld. “Rumsfeld was making the point this morning,” he said, that this is all gobbledygook to “the ordinary guy” but it “badly hurt” the “implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America” because it shows “the president can be wrong.” Protecting the “implicit infallibility” of presidents is a considerable distance from most conventional notions of national security, and shows how such concepts can be almost infinitely expanded in willing hands.

While the hyperbole from politicians reflected their pain at losing control rather than any substantive damage, one recurring concern about the disclosure of confidential material — and one to which Assange seemed indifferent, at best — was the breaching of individuals’ privacy and their exposure to danger. Guardian journalists Declan Walsh and David Leigh were worried about the repercussions of publishing the names of informants who could easily be killed by the Taliban or other militant groups if the Afghan war logs were published in full. Assange’s response “floored me,” wrote Walsh. “‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’” Assange vehemently denies saying this. The US defense secretary was sufficiently concerned to set up a taskforce to arrange protection for anyone in Afghanistan who could be identified in the leaks.

Much later, in a bizarre turn of events, Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding published the password Assange had given the Guardian to access the files. Everyone had assumed that this password would have been changed since, but differences of opinion at WikiLeaks meant that it still worked on one encrypted file. Rumours that this was the case spread quickly; in response, amid much criticism, WikiLeaks made the whole file public in its raw form.

In the years since, it has been charged that the failure to redact sensitive sections of the diplomatic cables revealed the identities of psychiatric patients, teenage rape victims and gays in Saudi Arabia; anti-government activists in Syria; and dissident academics in China. Assange’s counter to these charges was that “it’s nearly all bogus; [and] in any case we have to understand that privacy is dead.

Assange has peculiar political views that have led him into some terrible decisions

Julian Assange thinks of himself as an anarchist, and believes that radical transparency is the key to real democracy and accountability. His attitudes are well captured by the title of his now-famous essay “Conspiracy as Governance.” He has argued that leaks produce the most fear and paranoia within the most secretive and unjust organisations, and described the work of WikiLeaks as “enforcing the First Amendment around the world.”

This general view has led him to think that all governments are equally bad, and even to the view that Donald Trump was preferable to Hillary Clinton. In January 2017, he declared that “the libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice in the US Congress.” Assange had long cultivated a dislike of Clinton that was “partly personal and partly philosophical.” He suspected she wanted him assassinated and aggravated his problems with Sweden. “He saw her as the main gear of a political machine that encompassed Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and overseas client nations, like Saudi Arabia,” wrote the New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian. “In his view, Clinton was corrupt, pathetically driven by personal ambition, a neoliberal interventionist destined to take the United States into war — the epitome of a political establishment that deserved to be permanently ousted.”

WikiLeaks released a series of emails in June and July 2016, after Hillary Clinton had secured the Democratic nomination, the chief theme of which was how the party establishment had aided her over rival Bernie Sanders, revelations that resulted in several resignations. The more damaging leaks, in September and October, showed that many of Clinton’s campaign team were privately aghast at Clinton’s use of a private email server when secretary of state, and thought she handled the resulting controversy too arrogantly. Other emails suggested “Clinton seemed uncomfortably close to selling political access in exchange for large donations to the family foundation.”

There is little doubt that these leaks came from Russian organisations. In October 2016 the US intelligence agencies took the extraordinary step of formally naming Russia as the culprit and stating that only Russia’s most senior officials could have authorised the hacking. In 2018, the Mueller investigation named more than a dozen Russians it believed were involved. Assange vehemently but unconvincingly denied that Russian state agencies were directly or indirectly his source. The Washington Post fact checker awarded Assange Three Pinocchios for his denial. He had, anyway, earlier declared himself indifferent to the sources or their motives: “If it’s true information we don’t care where it comes from.”

Or presumably whom it helps: “By October, just the mention of WikiLeaks could start a roar of applause at Trump’s rallies,” reported the Washington Post. Trump, who in 2010 had declared that there should be the “death penalty or something” for the WikiLeaks releases, now declared, “I love WikiLeaks.” According to Assange, Trump mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times during the last month of the election. Clinton mentioned WikiLeaks as one factor in her defeat.

Outside the United States, New York Review of Books contributor Sue Halpern reports, Assange’s most egregious error was his collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally. Late in 2010, Assange gave him all the State Department diplomatic cables relating to Eastern Europe and Israel, and Shamir sold them on to others, including the president of Belarus, who used them to imprison and torture dissidents.

There is every reason to fear that Assange will not receive fair treatment in the United States

ince 2010, Assange has feared what would happen to him if he were extradited to America. The fate of the person who leaked him the bulk of the 2010 material, then Private Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, suggests that that fear is well founded. Manning was held for a lengthy period without trial and then sentenced to an unprecedented thirty-five-year prison term. She was locked up at five different facilities in conditions a UN expert called “cruel” and “inhumane,” and made at least two suicide attempts. After she had served seven years, double the second-longest sentence in any leak case in America, Obama commuted the bulk of her remaining sentence in one of his last acts as president. In March 2019, she was imprisoned again — indefinitely — for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

In theory, international law offers many protections for people facing extradition. ANU professor of international law Don Rothwell has pointed to several reasons why Assange would not face the death penalty. Under extradition law, people can only be tried for the crime they were being extradited for — a requesting country cannot increase the charges after they are in custody — and extradition cannot be for “political offences.”

The American extradition order is based on conspiring to illegally reveal government secrets, an offence that carries a maximum of five years in prison. The charges seem to have two main strands. The first is that Assange offered to help Manning crack a password. He failed to do so, in fact, and — more importantly — the password would not have given Manning access to any more information than she already had. It would have helped her hide her identity better, though, by helping to bypass security mechanisms that identified her as the one doing the downloading.

Assange’s prosecution is a threat to journalistic activity

The second strand concentrates on how Assange encouraged Manning to reveal information. The indictment’s “manners and means of the conspiracy” section describes many actions that are clearly common journalistic practices, such as using encrypted messages, cultivating sources, and encouraging those sources to provide more information. After one upload, Manning told Assange, “That’s all I really have got left,” to which Assange replied, “Curious eyes never run dry in my experience.” The pair also used an encrypted dropbox, commonly used by investigative journalists, to exchange information. Prima facie, this seems to me very weak material on which to base a conspiracy charge, and some of it could be used against many journalists.

The greater fear is that other charges will be added even though extradition should not permit this. The Trump administration does not have a strong record of complying with international codes, and it may seek ways to justify circumventing the law.

In particular, the administration has not so far charged Assange for publishing classified information. The Obama administration decided that it couldn’t prosecute Assange for disseminating classified information without threatening the First Amendment. The Trump administration, in its war on “fake news,” is likely to have fewer scruples. “If Assange can be prosecuted merely for publishing leaked classified documents,” wrote the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg, “every single media outlet is at risk of prosecution for doing the same thing.”

The Australian government can’t stop Assange’s extradition from Britain to America, but it’s clear that its consular responsibilities towards this Australian citizen would need to be fully exercised if he did wind up in American custody. •

The post WikiLeaks deconstructed appeared first on Inside Story.

Official statistics show that unlawful movement across the southern US border is at a twenty-year low, and that most undocumented migrants don’t sneak in overland but arrive through normal channels and then overstay their visas. Experts point out that illicit drugs, too, are generally smuggled through official points of entry (or perhaps tunnels) rather than across the unfenced frontier. Investing US$20 billion or more in extra walls won’t solve the problem Trump claims he is trying to fix.

But it’s far too easy for us to smugly criticise Trump’s plan. Australia already has its own equivalent of his pointless wall — the continued offshore processing regime in Manus and Nauru. What is worse, it is a folly that enjoys bipartisan support and also costs an enormous amount. Federal budget papers show that offshore processing cost $1 billion or more in every year from 2013–14 to 2017–18.

Defenders of the policy claim that this extravagant use of public money has achieved the twin policy goals of maintaining the integrity of Australia’s borders and saving lives at sea. John Menadue, a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, dismisses such arguments as propaganda. Even if the position is argued sincerely, it is hard to sustain, since offshore processing has been far from crucial in preventing asylum seekers from reaching Australian territory by sea.

As another former senior public servant, Paddy Gourley, wrote recently in Inside Story, boat numbers had already slowed after the Rudd government accelerated the assessment of Sri Lankan asylum seekers and quickly returned those who weren’t found to be refugees. Tighter visa controls in neighbouring countries, no doubt encouraged by Australian diplomacy and technical assistance, also reduced the numbers boarding boats to Australia.

But the most powerful measure was the interception and turnback of boats by the navy and the Australian Border Force. This was true in the Howard era, and it has been just as true under the prime ministerships of Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison. According to the Parliamentary Library, since late 2013 at least 810 people on board thirty-three boats have been turned, taken or assisted back to their point of origin. No vessels have managed to reach Australian territory via established smuggling routes from Indonesia or Sri Lanka in that time. The only boat to get here — a fishing trawler carrying seventeen people from Vietnam in August 2018 — came a different way and landed in far north Queensland.

It is disingenuous to assert, as Scott Morrison has, that resettling refugees from Manus and Nauru in New Zealand amounts to “putting a bit of Kiwi sugar on the table for people smugglers.” Even less persuasive is Peter Dutton’s claim that the medivac bill to allow sick refugees to be treated in Australia would be read as a “green light” to the maritime smuggling trade. If anything was going to help smugglers market their services, it would have been the prospect of eventually reaching the United States via Nauru or Manus; yet the boats didn’t return when Malcolm Turnbull struck a resettlement deal with Barack Obama in 2016. Nor did they return between 2002 and 2006, when the Howard government quietly resettled a significant number of people from Manus and Nauru in Australia.

The only conceivably plausible counterargument — put to me privately by senior officials involved in Operation Sovereign Borders — is that the smugglers could overwhelm Australia’s border defences by launching a coordinated action, sending so many vessels simultaneously that it would be impossible for the navy to intercept them all. According to this argument, continued offshore detention remains a necessary deterrence. But this outlandish scenario would require an unlikely degree of coordination between rival smuggling outfits willing to take a massive financial gamble.

To understand why, it is important to remember that passengers generally don’t pay the smuggler in full for the passage to Australia; instead, they deposit funds with a trusted third party. Researcher Khalid Koser has followed the money trail of the smuggling networks and found that the cost of passage is usually paid to a hawala, or money changer, and held in trust. “The money is only released by that third party to the smuggler once the migrant has arrived safely in his or her destination,” he says. Koser calls this a money-back guarantee on smuggling: “If you don’t make it to your destination safely, I as a smuggler get nothing at all — nothing.”

Research cited in a parliamentary library report also found that smugglers used payment systems “designed to minimise the risk to clients,” including “using intermediaries who passed on parts of the fee only as stages of the journey are completed [and] offered guaranteed services, whereby further smuggling attempts are free of charge if the first is unsuccessful.” It would be a reckless business operator who chanced their arm at beating Australia’s naval defences under these operating conditions.

That’s not to say that Australia’s turnback policy is impregnable. It remains dependent on maintaining good diplomatic relations with neighbouring countries, for example. If relations with Indonesia were to falter, as they have in the past over East Timor — and might in future if, say, Australia pursues a decidedly pro-Israel foreign policy — then sections of that country’s security forces may see assisting smugglers (or engaging in smuggling themselves) as a way to hit back at Australia. If political oppression or ethnic violence were to generate a significant outflow of refugees from Indonesia itself — a remote but not unthinkable scenario given the nation’s history — then Australia’s turnback policy would immediately become unsustainable.

Boats could also start arriving from other countries. Malaysia hosts an estimated 40,000 Rohingya displaced from Myanmar, for example, and it’s conceivable that some of them might try to make their way to Australia by sea. In such an eventuality, the Malaysian government is unlikely to accept turnbacks, and Australia would surely not send the stateless Rohingya back to Myanmar like it has sent “failed” asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka.

The security-minded might see such possibilities as a reason to maintain an offshore processing capacity, but they certainly don’t justify the continued refusal to resettle the people left on Manus and Nauru. Boat turnbacks make this both unnecessary and cruel. As Robert Manne wrote recently in the Saturday Paper, leaving the remaining 1000 or so adults on Manus and Nauru is much worse than a breach of the ethical position that human beings must never be used as a means to an end: “The lives of the 1000 are being destroyed not as a means to an end but for no reason.” As a philosopher friend put it to me, the means has now become the end; we maintain offshore processing in order to maintain offshore processing. It achieves no practical purpose, only the symbolic job of signalling to the Australian electorate that both major parties are “tough on borders.”

To draw on the thinking of early twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt via the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, what began as an emergency measure — a circuit-breaker to stop a surge in boat arrivals — has become standard operating procedure. Introduced in response to extraordinary circumstances, this “state of exception” has been rendered routine, reinforcing and exaggerating the security mindset that accompanied its inception. Once certain thresholds of policy and action were crossed, they became unexceptional, and the administration of Australia’s immigration program and border controls has changed across the board as a result.

It is this “state of exception” that enables normal government procedures to be set aside so that $423 million worth of contracts can be granted to a company with little track record in providing the relevant services — a company run by directors of questionable character and registered to a beach shack on Kangaroo Island. Official efforts to explain the Paladin affair since it was exposed by the Australian Financial Review have been far from convincing. The case is reminiscent of the cold war–era defence procurement scandals in the United States, another normalised “state of exception,” when the Pentagon discovered that it had been shelling out for “$7600 coffee pots and $400 hammers.” The Paladin affair is not a failure of procedure; it is an example of the kind of procedures that become normal under a “state of exception.”

This is not the first time procurement for offshore processing has been scrutinised and found wanting. In 2016 and 2017, the Australian National Audit Office published two reports criticising the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (as it was then) for its handling of contracts worth $3.386 billion for garrison support and welfare services on Nauru and Manus. Garrison support includes security, cleaning and catering services; welfare services include healthcare, recreation and education. The businesses involved were not pop-up companies like Paladin but established corporations including Broadspectrum (formerly Transfield Services), KPMG, Serco, G4S and, from the non-government sector, Save the Children and the Salvation Army.

The first audit report, which dealt with procurement, identified “serious and persistent deficiencies.” The audit concluded that the department “significantly increased the price of the services without government authority to do so,” not least by cancelling a planned tender and extending an existing contract with Transfield instead. The second report, on contract management, found that the department had “fallen well short” of effective practice. The audit could find “no documentation of the means by which the contract objectives would be achieved” and judged that contract variations totalling over $1 billion had been made without “a documented assessment of value for money.”

In a statement in response to the first audit, the department justified its record “in the context of the unique operational environment the department faced at the time”:

The department met the requirement of the government of the day in an environment that was high-tempo and complicated by logistics and procurement activities in foreign countries. Delegates were required to make decisions on complex matters within very short timeframes. It remains the department’s position that decisions taken in this period were reasonable under the circumstances. The environment remains extremely complex.

Having invoked a “state of exception,” the department then normalises it, by arguing that the average annual cost of operations had been “relatively stable,” ranging from $427,000 per person in 2012–13 to $464,000 per person in 2015–16. The fact that the government was shelling out well in excess of $1000 per person per day on offshore processing was less an exceptional circumstance than a mark of competent administration.

Since the Paladin affair broke, more stories of dubious contracts and poor management have emerged. The Guardian reported that the Australian government paid Pacific International Hospital $21.5 million over ten months to provide healthcare on Manus Island “without finalising a proper contract.” The Australian reported that PNG-based NKW Holdings Ltd received an $82 million contract to provide catering and site-management services on Manus without a competitive tender. The contract ended up costing “$1390 per resident per day,” said the paper, far more than rival companies charge for similar services on mine sites. Both firms had links to influential political figures in Papua New Guinea.

This helps explain why spending by the home affairs department on “illegal maritime arrival offshore management” last financial year was close to $1.5 billion, more than double the budgeted $714 million. Spending this financial year is anticipated to top $1.16 billion, again massively higher than the budgeted $760 million. This pattern of blowouts is well established.

Offshore detention spending blowouts 2015–16 to 2018–19

Source: Home Affairs Portfolio Budget Statements and Additional Estimates

Home affairs portfolio budget statements only include the day-to-day expense of running the offshore program. Although the costs of setting up offshore facilities aren’t transparently reported, we know from answers in Senate estimates hearings that capital expenditure totalled $816 million in the first three years of the policy. As UNICEF and Save the Children point out, the true costs of offshore processing are higher still, given the money Australia spends “to maintain, interrogate and defend the current approach,” including responding to legal challenges and inquiries by parliamentary committees and regulatory bodies. Resources have also been expended on extensive but largely failed diplomatic efforts to negotiate third-country resettlement deals.

Sticking to the numbers we can confirm, the cumulative cost of offshore detention in the six years since it was reintroduced by the Gillard government is at least $7.6 billion, as the chart below shows. It might be less than the US$20 billion Trump wants to waste on a border wall, but it is far more as a proportion of government revenue and national income. As Daniel Webb from the Human Rights Law Centre points out, Australia’s annual spend on offshore detention is “more than five times the UN refugee agency’s entire budget for all of Southeast Asia.”

What is at issue here is not just the neglect of due process, nor the waste of money that could have been spent more usefully, nor even the terrible human cost of lives damaged and destroyed, though we should never lose sight of that. This behaviour has wider implications and opportunity costs as well. By transforming immigration into a security issue, the government has generated avoidable problems and dropped the ball on other complex policy issues.

In separate articles, former senior immigration officials Abul Rizvi and Peter Hughes have recently slammed the government’s broader immigration record. Hughes says the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments have “delivered an immigration shambles — a policy vacuum, a degraded administration and huge processing backlogs.” Rizvi says the “visa system, and by implication our borders, have never been so out of control.”

The evidence to support these assertions can be found in home affairs data. For example, between December 2013 and December 2018 the number of people in Australia on bridging visas more than doubled, from 93,000 to 189,000. Generally, people on bridging visas are waiting for the department to process their application for a substantive visa, or else have sought review of a decision and are waiting for the Administrative Appeals Tribunal or the minister to make a determination. The caseload of matters on hand in the AAT’s Migration and Refugee Division blew out from fewer than 17,000 on 30 June 2016 to more than 44,000 on 30 June 2018.

Meanwhile, the attorney-general stands accused of stacking the AAT with “scores of former conservative politicians, failed candidates, former staffers, party members, donors and other mates.” The AAT is receiving (and rejecting) growing numbers of appeals by asylum seekers from China and Malaysia. Given that nationals from these two countries are unlikely to be recognised as refugees, this suggests deliberate and possibly systematic abuse of the system, with people flying into Australia on visitor visas (or being brought in by labour contractors) and then lodging applications for protection as refugees. Since a claim takes years to wend its way through clogged bureaucratic and legal systems, the applicant can be confident of securing the right to live and work in Australia for quite some time, though probably in exploitative conditions for well below award wages. As Rizvi argues, immigration backlogs and processing delays are “a honeypot for the spivs; the carpetbaggers; the people smugglers.”

At a time when conflict, oppressive regimes, resource constraints and climate change are displacing ever-growing numbers of people around the world, Australia has spurned international efforts to manage migration more collaboratively through the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration — despite the fact that Australian diplomats worked assiduously on its development with other participants in the Bali Process, which Australia co-chairs with Indonesia.

Returning asylum seekers to Indonesia and Sri Lanka may prevent boats arriving on Australia’s shores, at least for now, but it does nothing to address the bigger issue of forced migration. It is easy to be cynical about efforts to build a coherent humanitarian regional response to human displacement, and negotiations of this kind are by their nature tediously slow. Yet the significant, incremental advances made by the Centre for Policy Development’s Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration show not only that progress is possible but also that high-level support exists in neighbouring countries for a truly cooperative regional framework to manage displacement and counter human trafficking and smuggling in a humane and dignified way. It is impossible to know what progress we might see if Australia devoted more than $1 billion a year to developing such an approach with neighbouring countries, instead of spending it on warehousing vulnerable people in the Pacific.

Perhaps worst of all, the securitisation of immigration policy has severely damaged the vision of Australia as a diverse and inclusive nation in which migrants quickly become citizens with the same rights and responsibilities as the established population. This is not just the result of race-baiting comments by senior politicians about “African gangs,” or the pandering to claims that migrants are to blame for rising house prices, stagnant wages and urban congestion, or the repeated use of statistics that exaggerate the impact of migrants on population growth in Sydney and Melbourne, or even recent assertions that bringing a few hundred sick refugees here for treatment will force Australian citizens off hospital waiting lists or out of public housing. It is also the result of the push to make the pathways to permanent residency and citizenship harder and longer, through poor policies, misguided legislation, basic maladministration and neglect.

Alongside the backlogs in visa processing is a backlog in approving applications for citizenship. According to another Audit Office report, citizenship applications on hand blew out from around 23,000 in June 2014 to more than 244,000 in June 2018. The claim that delays are caused by additional security screening is unconvincing, since applicants for citizenship are, by definition, permanent residents who have undergone intense vetting to get a visa. But the normalised “state of exception” justifies and enables such groundless responses.

Citizenship applications lodged, decided and on hand per year

Source: Australian National Audit Office

The effects of the securitisation of immigration have also bled across from home affairs into other portfolios, most notably defence. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Defence Force has had to cancel a range of international exercises and patrols because it is “picking up the slack” for the Australian Border Force. Leaked briefing notes reveal that the Border Force is unable to adequately staff and maintain its own fleet of vessels and aircraft.

Whether the Coalition or Labor wins the federal election, the incoming government will need to appoint a highly capable minister to renew immigration policy and rebuild administration. Energy, imagination and resolve will be needed to repair the damage inflicted on the ethos of citizenship-based multiculturalism that underpins an inclusive migrant society, and to grasp the opportunity to work closely with neighbouring countries to craft a coherent response to forced migration. Dealing with legitimate public concerns about the scale and nature of Australia’s temporary and permanent migration intakes while fending off hate speech and xenophobia will call for deft political skills. As both Paddy Gourley and Peter Hughes argue, an incoming minister may also have to unpick the failed experiment of the home affairs portfolio, which will require careful thought and patient negotiation.

Sadly, such a combination of qualities is not easily found in the parliament, and it’s hard to blame senior politicians for preferring a less challenging portfolio. For whoever ends up in the chair, however, the essential first step will be to end Australia’s “state of exception,” dismantle the expensive and punitive border wall represented by offshore processing, and help those remaining on Manus and Nauru to find a safe home and rebuild their lives. •

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Prominent in the saga leading up to last week’s vote were prime minister Scott Morrison’s claim that he “stopped the boats” and secured Australia’s borders from asylum seekers. These claims have been systematically debunked by a former immigration department head, John Menadue, and two former deputy secretaries, Abul Rizvi and Peter Hughes, on Menadue’s website, Pearls and Irritations. Their rebuttal has been ignored by the mainstream media to the point where the journalist Peter Hartcher recently told his readers that “Scott Morrison was the immigration minister who restored control of Australia’s borders.”

The truth is somewhat different. In September 2011, Morrison, opposition leader Tony Abbott and the Greens blocked Labor legislation that would have implemented the “Malaysian Solution.” In all likelihood, those new laws would have significantly deterred asylum seekers from attempting the dangerous journey by boat. Without the legislation, 591 boats brought 39,070 people to Australia from October 2011 to July 2013. Tony Abbott has since expressed some regret about his role in blocking the plan; as far as I can tell, Scott Morrison hasn’t joined him.

In July 2013, prime minister Kevin Rudd announced that no people who arrived by boat would be settled in Australia. His government accelerated the assessment of Sri Lankan asylum seekers, quickly returning many of them home, and Indonesia slowed the arrival of people on its shores by introducing visa requirements. Immediately the number of boat arrivals fell dramatically. When the Coalition took government towards the end of September that year, 829 people had arrived by boat in that month compared with 4230 in July. In December, after he became immigration minister, Scott Morrison began turning boats back.

By knocking off the Malaysian Solution, the Coalition might well have allowed about 30,000 extra asylum seekers to arrive by boat. As Menadue has written, Morrison (and Abbott) didn’t want to stop the boats; they wanted to stop Labor from stopping the boats. Morrison then adopted Rudd’s policies and added boat turnbacks, and the supply of asylum seekers evaporated, as it almost certainly would have done without him. In large part, Morrison’s Operation Sovereign Borders was a PR stunt.

Nevertheless, asylum seekers are now arriving in greater numbers and at an increasing rate by the safer and cheaper means of the aeroplane. In the year ending June 2018, 27,931 people with visitor visas, the bona fides of which may be difficult to assess at points of departure to Australia, applied for protection visas, compared with the 18,365 boat arrivals who made such claims in 2012–13. The backlog of applications for protection visas at June 2018 was 177,140, and the backlog of appeals to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has increased from 17,480 in 2016 to 52,491 in 2018.

In other words, Morrison and Peter Dutton have allowed the arrival of asylum seekers to spin out of control. By not clearing visa applications quickly, and so allowing people to remain for long periods without a long-term decision, they have provided additional incentives for people to try their luck as visitors. More asylum seekers are arriving by plane than did by boat, and delays in finalising their cases have provided an immense amount of work for those assisting them to get the visas they desire. As they wait in the queue, many seem to fall into the hands of unscrupulous Australian employers who sweat the devil out of them. It’s a considerable achievement and one diametrically at odds with the government’s excited rhetoric.

And it’s not as if that rhetoric is simply being used to hide the truth. It is also being used as a political lever to encourage fears about outsiders that make the effective settlement of the current high number of migrants more fraught.

Home affairs minister Peter Dutton uses alleged crimes by a few to tarnish whole groups of people. Morrison and finance minister Mathias Cormann rattle on about rapists and murderers in detention centres, as if most of the people in these hellholes are guilty of such crimes. The secretary of the home affairs department, Mike Pezzullo, plays up the threat of terrorists operating in a “dark universe” of “global contract hit men” and “fly-in assassins.” (Could Mr Pezzullo tells us how many “fly-in assassins” have plied their trade in Australia over the past five years?) Most recently, of course, having failed to get his way with laws on the medical evacuation of detainees in Nauru and Manus Island, the prime minister unconvincingly alleged that the boats will start arriving again, indulged in the kind of hyperbole that might just encourage some to give it a go, and then said that if they do he’d blame his political opponents.

The thinking behind this language not only has a political impact; it also has consequences for the institutions of government — and most notably for the home affairs portfolio, now not long past its first birthday.

The creation of this portfolio offended just about every generally accepted principle of machinery of government. Departments should be built around services to be performed rather than groups or individuals to be served. Like functions should be grouped together. Police, prosecutorial and intelligence gathering should be kept apart from related policy functions. And major responsibilities, like immigration, should have standalone departments.

But when ministers and Mike Pezzullo made their case for the department, they sidestepped those principles. “We are all one function,” said Pezzullo, “wielding state power to keep our fellow citizens safe and secure.” Such glib rhetoric exposes a pattern of empire-building at both political and bureaucratic levels.

The home affairs portfolio includes immigration, customs and multicultural affairs, and a range of security-related functions — including what its website weirdly refers to as “countering terrorism policy.” Organisationally, there are an astonishing ten deputy secretaries, some of them responsible for only one division. Deputies are supposed to relieve heads of departments from difficult spans of supervisory control; this department has used them to create that very problem.

Border Force contains customs and other functions, and its staff members are uniformed and in some cases armed. Notionally “operationally independent,” its budget and employing authorities are held by the secretary of the department. The Australian Federal Police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC and ASIO are also in the portfolio.

In its short life, the home affairs portfolio has racked up an impressive number of administrative bungles, not just on Fijian citizenship and Interpol red notices, but on major matters exposed by the Audit Office. The main strike against it, however, is that it has allowed a range of unrelated functions to smother and corrupt the development and administration of immigration policy.

Immigration is about people; customs and excise administration is about goods. While immigration authorities need to exercise a quasi-policing role and be able to detain people who arrive in the country without their claims and fitness having been assessed, the government’s immigration function is fundamentally about bringing in people the country wants and needs, and helping them to adapt quickly. Immigration is not essentially about “keeping our fellow citizens safe and secure”; it’s about nation-building in many guises, including supporting the labour market, economic growth and prosperity.

Notwithstanding its infancy, it is time to call the creation of the home affairs portfolio for what it is — a failure that should be unpicked before it gets worse, regardless of who wins the forthcoming election.

The first step should be to create a Department of Immigration and Citizenship, headed by a senior cabinet minister. It would contain all immigration functions, including visa compliance, together with migrant settlement, language education and other migrant-support programs that have been dispersed to other departments.

Second, a Customs and Border Agency should be created to house most of the functions of the existing Border Force, perhaps with staff clothed in uniforms of a less martial shading. The agency would be well placed in the attorney-general’s portfolio.

Third, as political policy imperatives can skew police and intelligence functions, the AFP, ACIC, AUSTRAC and ASIO should be placed back in the attorney-general’s portfolio. Facts should inform policy, not be made to fit around it.

Fourth, remnant home affairs functions should be distributed to other ministers and their departments and agencies in accordance with generally accepted principles of machinery of government.

It’s unlikely the present government, either now or if it is re-elected, would have the slightest interest in such changes. It seems keen to keep immigration where it can be used relentlessly for political advantage. Scott Morrison’s recent disclosure of advice from officials about the reopening of detention facilities on Christmas Island following the medivac legislation is just the latest example of such impulses, which politicise and discredit agencies.

Labor, however, should reflect closely on the damage being done to immigration by having it in the home affairs portfolio. It should also think closely about the political dangers of maintaining an accident-prone organisation based on little more than empire-building by members of the old regime. A major reshuffle has risks, of course, but they are unlikely to be as great as the risks and costs of maintaining the present structure.

Fixing the machinery of government will not of itself restore sanity, decency and honesty to immigration policy and administration. Indeed, the parlous condition of that machinery is in many ways a symptom of the appalling way immigration is too often discussed. The most important thing is to lift the standards and quality of debate so it becomes an effective influence on policy instead of being used as a political meat grinder.

It follows that there would be value in establishing a royal commission on population policy and Australia’s immigration future, with the usual powers to require the production of documents and take evidence under oath. The commission should take into account regional geopolitical and population trends, including Australia’s labour market needs, and environmental considerations. It should recommend longer-term population policy and propose how immigration could support that policy consistent with broad economic goals.

At times immigration has been lucky enough to be based on genuine bipartisanship rather than the current rough consensus forced by political opportunism. Immigration needs to be renewed around a new consensus based on the public interest. A royal commission could help to do that in ways that seem at the moment to be beyond the will or ability of politicians left to their own devices. •

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God’s secret weapon in securing Trump the presidency was the electoral college. The United States is the only democracy in which a popular election for president is mediated through a body made up of representatives of the candidate who wins each state. This system has always had the potential to produce a different majority from the popular vote, and the second-placed candidate has won the college on five occasions — three times during the nineteenth century, and in the twenty-first-century elections that brought George W. Bush (who lost the popular vote by 500,000) and Donald Trump to power.

Trump’s victory produced the biggest-ever discrepancy between the two results. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 2.9 million votes yet Trump won the electoral college 306–232. Clinton lost the electoral college because of Trump’s narrow victories in three Midwestern states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), each by a margin of 0.77 per cent or less, or a total of 78,000 votes in an election at which 136 million votes were cast. God is quite the joker.

With such a knife-edge result, many explanations can plausibly be advanced about what made the difference. Most have focused on the campaign and/or the weaknesses of the defeated candidate. Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment and the deleted emails saga figure most prominently. In particular, her use of a private server for official emails revived memories of Clintonesque arrogance and a willingness to bend rules. The revival of the FBI’s investigation into improper email procedures, made public less than two weeks before the election, gave Trump fresh fuel for his “crooked Hillary” diatribes. It probably didn’t shift many votes to Trump but may have led some people who’d been inclined to vote for Clinton to stay home instead.

Although Trump’s victory was made possible by immediate factors and some improbable contingencies, the very fact that a candidate like Trump would be a serious contender was unthinkable a decade earlier. What broader currents in American society and politics made such a candidacy possible? Many have concentrated — justifiably — on growing inequality, how the living standards of many Americans have stagnated or declined, and also how many reasonably well-off voters still feel they’re losing status. But another clue is to be found in changes in the country’s political culture.

The three charts below all point to growing political alienation in the United States in the decade or so leading up to 2016. Each uses data from eighteen stable, affluent democracies, and each shows that changes in American political culture were homegrown rather than reflecting international trends.

Chart 1 shows that the proportion of Americans who thought corruption was widespread in government rose (from an already high level) by 17 percentage points over the decade. Among the eighteen democracies as a whole, the average figure barely changed. Indeed, several countries — Germany, Canada and Sweden — moved strongly in the opposite direction. America is second last, ahead of that perennial wooden-spooner, Italy.

Chart 2 reveals a similar picture. Across the eighteen democracies, citizens’ confidence in the legal system actually rose slightly. But in the two bottom countries — the United States and Italy — confidence declined further. In 2016, barely half as many Americans, proportionally, had confidence in their legal systems as Danes, Norwegians and Swiss.

The figures in Chart 3 are not so stark, but show similar trends and ordering. In terms of citizens’ confidence in their national government, the United States, France and Italy were at the bottom of the table in 2016. Again, countries moved in opposite directions in these nine years, with America one of several to experience a substantial decline.

So, on these three measures of political disaffection, the United States rates almost at the bottom among eighteen democracies, and on each measure Americans showed a substantial decline, more substantial than in most other countries. Why was political alienation in the late Obama era so much greater than it was in the late George W. Bush era? And why is the United States such an international outlier over this period?

To the external observer, it is far from clear that corruption had become more widespread, or that the legal system and national government had become worse under Obama. What, then, accounts for the sharp fall in public approval?

The answer, I suggest, is found in changes in American political culture, driven by trends in both the Republican Party and the media, and especially the influence of Fox News. While much of America rejoiced at Obama’s 2008 victory, the new presidency immediately energised the far right of the Republican Party. Most strident was the Tea Party, which gained growing influence inside Republican ranks after its formation in early 2009. It was a powerful force in Republican primaries, where its main targets were what its leaders call RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). Any congressional figures who seemed too friendly to Obama’s policies were targeted. The most endangered species in American politics became the moderate Republican.

The rise of the Tea Party was aided by constant sympathetic publicity from Fox News. Fox’s chief executive for the twenty years from its creation in 1996 was former Republican propagandist Roger Ailes. The most obvious feature of Fox is the outrageous and intolerant claims of its far-right commentators, but its more important and distinctive appeal comes from relentlessly driving its own news agenda.

An insightful critic of the trend to “media tribalism” is ex-president Obama. He believes that “a Balkanised media” contributed to the partisan rancour that worsened during his tenure, bemoans the absence of a common baseline of facts underpinning political debate, and accuses Republicans of peddling an alternative reality.

The first two decades of Fox were accompanied by a growing partisan divide in terms of Americans’ attitudes to the media. In 2002, according to Pew surveys, 76 per cent of Republicans and 67 per cent of Democrats thought Fox News was believable; by 2012 the figures were 67 per cent and 37 per cent. So the partisan divide had increased from 9 to 30. In attitudes to Fox’s main competitor, CNN, 84 per cent of Democrats and 72 per cent of Republicans thought the network could be trusted in 2002. By 2012, the parallel figures were 76 and 40. The partisan divide had grown from 12 to 36. So overall attitudes to the news media declined somewhat in the decade, but the more important trend was the contrasting movements among party supporters.

Trump exploited and then escalated these trends. More than any other president, whether by instinct, strategy or an inability to do otherwise, he has practised the politics of polarisation. By many conventional measures this is not working well for him. A Washington Post–ABC News poll in late January 2019 found 56 per cent of Americans said they would “definitely not” vote for Trump in 2020, while just half that number (28 per cent) said they definitely would. This follows the midterm elections in November 2018, where Democrats secured 52.5 per cent of the vote to Republicans’ 45.8 per cent, a further swing of over 4 per cent since the 2016 elections.

Yet, in other ways, his strategies are bearing political fruit. His constant denunciations of fake news and the media as the enemy are having an impact among his base. According to Pew, in 2016, the last year of the Obama presidency, around three-quarters of both Republicans and Democrats endorsed the idea that criticism from news organisations keeps political leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done (Republican 77 per cent; Democrat 74 per cent). But by the second year of the Trump presidency, 2018, the percentage of Democrats taking that view had climbed to 82 per cent, while the percentage of Republicans had halved to 38 per cent. Across at least fifteen Pew surveys under six presidents, this is the lowest percentage of Republicans endorsing the sentiment, and the biggest gap between supporters of the two major parties.

In the same survey, 12 per cent of Democrats said they had not much or no trust in the information they got from national news organisations, compared with 38 per cent of Republicans.

Assuming Trump doesn’t retire in triumph in 2024 after being re-elected in 2020, one prediction is safe. Whether his exit is brought about by electoral defeat or by some politico-legal process, it will not be dignified or gracious. He and his supporters will allege bad faith, fraud and conspiracy.

During the political turmoils in America in 1968, Republican candidate Richard Nixon pronounced that “there is nothing wrong with this country that a good election wouldn’t fix.” Many critics of Trump feel the same. But American political culture is deeply fractured, and the jaundiced Fox News view of the mainstream media and of all political participants to its left has attracted a constituency sufficient to make it difficult for the next presidency to be a time of healing. •

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The problems with Howard’s position have long been recognised. His confusion of personal with government and national responsibility; his inability to recognise the intimate links between past policy and present circumstances; his inconsistency in embracing pride in the past — such as the achievements of the glorious Anzacs — while denying any shame. Howard is diminished as a public figure by his stubborn refusal to grapple with the nuances of this issue.

Yet, as I listened to him, I realised I was not just hearing the words of a man attending to his legacy. This was the denialism of a generation of Australian conservatives who saw Mabo, Wik and Bringing Them Home as nuisances and impositions rather than landmarks in the history of this country. They were the words of a generation that repeatedly bends over backwards to extend empathy towards the whites who devised and executed policies and practices that caused pain, but stubbornly refuses to extend a parallel empathy to Indigenous people.

The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families would never have come into existence under Howard’s stewardship. Appointed by the Keating Labor government and chaired by Sir Ronald Wilson, the inquiry’s report, Bringing Them Home, would become another of the modern landmarks in the history of race relations in this country.

Child removal had long been part of the Australian Indigenous experience. The term itself — the Stolen Generations — had been coined by historians Peter Read and Jay Arthur in the context of a study carried out in 1981 for the NSW government. The slow and meandering journey of these stories of suffering and trauma to the centre of settler consciousness was a long one, which Bringing Them Home would complete in 1997. In July 1996, however, the newly minted Howard cabinet — assisted by a submission from attorney-general Daryl Williams — faced the dilemma of how to respond to an inquiry already in progress.

Williams’s submission has been heavily redacted. Apart from the several substantial instances in the main body of the submission (all of points six and seven and much of point eight), the entirety of Attachment C — two full pages — is blacked out. The two grounds for exemption are stated in accordance with the requirements of the Archives Act. Under section 33(1)(c), “a record is exempt from public access if it contains information or matter the disclosure of which under this Act would have a substantial adverse effect on the financial or property interests of the Commonwealth or of a Commonwealth institution and would not, on balance, be in the public interest.” Under section 33(2), a record is exempt if it would be subject to legal privilege and, again, “disclosure of the record would be contrary to the public interest.”

All of this can be summed up fairly simply: the federal government still fears releasing material that a member of the Stolen Generations could use in a court to gain compensation. It is not in the “public interest” to provide them with any assistance to do so. The managers and custodians of Commonwealth records in the National Archives, which is part of the attorney-general’s portfolio, play a significant role in protecting past, present and future governments and officials from scrutiny, and litigation, by the Australian public.

The Howard government also took the view that no compensation should be offered, and was concerned that the inquiry might give rise to financial claims. The government’s priorities lay in dealing with “current disadvantage in health, housing, employment and education” and it believed that “special compensation in respect of the issues being addressed in the Inquiry is inappropriate and unacceptable.”

“Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are classic weasel words, especially when unaccompanied by elaboration. They are indispensable to governments. “Costly” — in both political and financial terms — would be more accurate.

Daryl Williams was opposed to the whole-of-government submission that Wilson had requested, and his submission fails to engage with the complexities of the issues raised by the inquiry. To be fair, though, the government had little reason to anticipate that it would be made to wear Bringing Them Home like a crown of thorns from the moment it arrived on the desks of government ministers until the day Kevin Rudd delivered the National Apology in 2008.

“I understand that Indigenous peoples’ expectations of the Government’s response to the Inquiry are diverse,” Williams told cabinet. “They range from deep scepticism to a more optimistic view that the Inquiry will result in reparation and/or compensation, an apology, Government assistance to individuals in accessing records, guidance on welfare policies for indigenous children and provision of sensitive and appropriate mental health services for affected individuals and families.”

Williams considered that the government could probably avoid raising expectations of a positive response to the inquiry report by saying nothing at all for the time being. “In my view,” he continued, “it is unlikely that any such expectation will arise from the Government’s ‘silence’ in relation to the Inquiry.” After all, the previous government had set up the inquiry, “presumably with a particular policy outcome in mind,” and “the public would not expect a new Government uncritically to accept its recommendations.”

If Williams had been discussing, say, an inquiry into the sale of defence department land in western Sydney, this would have been an astute and reasonable prediction. In the circumstances, it was folly.

The government’s eventual response to the report, summed up in a cabinet document from late 1997, is much better known than the deliberations beforehand. There would be no formal apology, cabinet decided. Rather than compensation, $54 million would be spent over four years on indexing and copying archival records, providing “Link-Up” services to help Indigenous people trace family members and effect reunions, expanding mental health services, and running an oral history project to record the stories of separation.

It was a minimalist response to a report that had clearly left the government unmoved. Aboriginal affairs minister John Herron said the report was “very emotive” and “one-sided,” and “focuses only on one view of the separation process.” The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was scathing about the government’s response, which “will severely disappoint Indigenous people.” The government’s refusal to address most of the report’s recommendations compounded the distress already caused by its announced refusal to countenance either compensation or an apology.

There was no prospect of the government joining with ATSIC in a more considered and comprehensive response. Pauline Hanson was in full flight with her complaints about “reverse racism” in favour of Aboriginal people. In 2000 Herron would make a government submission to a Senate inquiry into the Stolen Generations whose argument was essentially that no such generations existed because only a minority of children were separated from their families — and for a variety of reasons, many of them valid. Government policy on separations had an “essentially benign intent,” it said. There was that empathy again.

But by this stage the government’s friends in the right-wing intelligentsia had decided to make the Stolen Generations their Alamo. And there were now a million One Nation voters — many convinced that Indigenous people had been long coddled by bleeding heart governments — up for political grabs.

In the end, it was these people that the government was mainly concerned with bringing home. •

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