When is a Political Party not "the opposition"

Yesterday's Crikey reported that while the Liberal Party recently expelled Michael Danby for campaigning for the Christian Democrat Party, two leading Liberals, Tony Abbott and Greg Smith, will be addressing the party's conference.

Now the party itself says "As we look to the future, CDP is seeking to become a strong grass-roots Political Party. This weekend will motivate and inspire you to go back and serve God in your local community through CDP. We will be looking to conference together about the forthcoming Federal Election, and strategise on how to elect our first CDP NSW Senator, Paul Green, into the Australian Parliament." I wonder if any other Liberals are planning to address the party conference of political parties who are trying to knock Marise Payne out of a Senate seat!

Of course we know that Abbott and Smith are leading members of the LiberaL party - the one with no small l. Interesting to see their strategy once the right was unsuccesful in gaining the third spot on the Senate ticket.

It is interesting to note that while the Liberal and National Parties are in coalition I am not aware of any front bencher from one party ever addressing a conference of the other.

Howard's LiberaLs - curiouser and curiouser.

What constitutes a glass jaw?

Crikey today lists a series of media appearances by the PM for which transcripts do not appear on the PMs website.

Now there is nothing saying he should - but it is a bit rough when in the desperate attemps to find something to criticise Rudd for his supposed "glass jaw" in relation to negative media is one of them.

There is no small "l" in Howard's LiberaL Party

Sad news yesterday that my former colleague Paul Fletcher had lost the pre-selection battle for Cook 82-70.

While I think the Liberal party will suffer because (from personal experience) Paul would make a fantastic MP, the geater loss is the extent of the takeover of the Liberal party by the right.

The winner, Michael Towke, won using what is now a well worn Liberal party technique - the branch stack. But it was the modern "stack with twist". Moderates thought the stack was designed to support the incumbent and were surprised at the end by the nomination of Towke and the fact these votes would support him.

This is now familiar ground and follows what happened in Epping and Hawkesbury at the State election; and what happened with Alex Hawke getting pre-selected in Mitchell.

Howard doesn't know which way to turn. This is the party he has created - or rather this is the end stage of John Howard destroying the party Menzies created. The parallels between the Liberal Party today and the UAP of the 1940s are quite large.

It is not how Howard wanted to be remembered.

Strange Bridge Hand

One of my hobbies is playing Bridge. This hand I got to play in Bridge Baron 14, hands were

N | S 9 8 |H A J 9 7 3 |D K 10 8 3 2 |C 6
E | S K 4 3 |H 10 8 5 4 |D Q 6 4 |C K 8 4
S | S A 6 2 |H K Q 6 2 |D A J 7 |C 7 3 2
W | S Q J 10 7 5 |H - |D 9 5 |C A Q J 10 9 5

Dealer North N/S Vulnerable

Bidding

N E S W
P P 1D 3C
3D 3NT Dl P
P P

South leads D7 - and can take 12 tricks for 2000 in penalties - enjoy.

Make Poverty History - ZeroSeven

I was given the opportunity today to represent Senator Lyn Allison at the Make Poverty History Roadtrip today. While there seemed to be some confusion with the RSVP I was allowed in.

The first observation is just how heart-warming it was to see so many young idealistic kids prepared to campaign for somthing as esoteric as Make Poverty Hitory. I just hope they have all enrolled to vote!

It was also fascinating to see the reception they gave to Kevin Rudd when he came on stage. He was his convincing yet - but making his commitment of foreign aid of 0.5% of GNI by 2015 was short of what the crowd wants.

Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja put the Democrat position well. We need to commit to the 0.7% - and sooner not later.

Howard's Inaction

Saturday's SMH had two items, by Alan Ramsey and Michael Duffy, both of which point out that the Howard government had been alerted to the sexual abuse ad violence prblem years before.

What made it noteworhy that these writers are typically bastions of the left and right respectively, but on this point they agree - the Howard government move looks like a cynical stunt of the first order.

In today's Crikey Christian Kerr puts the blame on the PM's excessive reliance on Mark Textor. Textor's success over a number of elections has given him an aura of infalibility. But remember Cosby Textor were not successful in either the UK or New Zealand. It is startng to look like he migh be about to experience that in Australia.

That Country Club

The brewing story of the week has been the appropriateness of the function John Howard hosted at Kirribilli House during the recent Liberal Federal Council.

The event was drinks on the lawn to which were invited all the conference delegates and the business observers. The focus has been on whether the business observers paying their $8,000+ were engaged in a fundraiser.

It is important to note that the Liberal Party did NOT promote the reception as being at Kirribilli House in any of the pre-event publicity. In fact there was blessed little pre-event publicity - I had to ask three times for the forms to be able to register and fork out my dough.

When you come to the function how much of a bait was it to have to queue for buisses from the Westin Hotel at 5pm for a 40 minute trip through peak hour traffic to get the opportunity to have drinks and canapes from 6pm to 7pm and then wind your way back on busses for the dinner back at the Westin. Many of the business observers, while appreciating the opportunity to see the "big house", were really questioning the use of their time sitting on busses for drinks that could have been held in the city.

So maybe the issue is not the imppropriety as such, but the simple lack of judgement. Perhaps it should have been reserved for the good folk of the Party and simply let us professional "hangers on" go home!

Button Up Burgess!

That was the heading of an excellent item by Stuart Corner on his iTWire newsletter site. The item starts "Telstra motor mouth, Phil Burgess, really has gone too far in his xenophobic rantings against Singapore, whose national carrier just happens to own Telstra's main rival."

The xenophobic pitch of Telstra really has gone beyond the pale, but the beauty of this post is that Burgess has had a crack at Singapore because it "executes people". Corner rightly points out that Burgess comes from a country that "executes people" and has just recently invested heavily in a country that "executes people".

What we can learn from this is that polling Telstra has done on Singapore tells them that Australians associate negative comments about Singapore with the execution of Van Nguyen in December 2005. Pretty pathetic really.

For those interested there was a related couple of comments to Crikey by Andrew Maiden from Telstra with a response from me.

You just have to say - Telstra is getting desperate when they call Investec "dodgy African bankers".

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics - Part 2

On a completely different front - the Menzies Research Centre launched StateWatch yesterday, based on research by Henry Ergas.

The way the paper accompanying the launch, and the presentation, ran the claim was that the State Governments have received a "windfall" in GST revenue as this tax has grown at 7%p.a., that the States have been profligate in spending this as it has almost all been consumed in recurrent expenditure. The recurrent expenditure growth has been primarily consumed in paying higher wages. The higher wages haven't been matched by productivity improvements as we would expect in the private sector.

Which is all a bit strange really. Firstly 7% growth in the GST is not great really - it is a function of inflation and GDP growth.

More importantly, elsewhere the Government likes to claim credit for a 19% real wages growth since 1996. The State Governments as employers have to compete in the same labour market as anyone else and therefore have to follow this growth (unless the claim is the State Governments have led it, in which it is not a Federal Government achievement). So they had no choice where to spend it - the real claim is there hasn't been an improvement in productivity.

But even here we have extremely dodgy statistics. Firstly the measure for hospitals is hospital beds, whereas productivity improvement in hospitals is getting people through them faster...and this does continue to improve. I don't know how you can apply technology or work practices to teach more pupils with less teachers - and anyway reducing class sizes is what taxpayers want. Finally police forces are equally highly labour force driven.

So, nice try - but no cigar!

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics - Part 1

There has been much public debate about broadband over recent weeks and the Canberra Times ran a story which Helen Coonan latched onto to expose Labor's "Furphy" in the debate.

The central claim being that Labor was overstating the potential economic benefits of broadband by relying on a 2001 study, the bulk of the forecast benefits of which would already be achieved. A few days later we had a flurry of activity when Market Clarity questioned the validity of the broadband league table published by the OECD.

All this reflects how far away we are from the kind of debate that Telstra's Phil Burgess tells us is what he has been trying to encourage. In a speech to the Australia British Chamber of Commerce this week he talked admiringly of William Wilberforce and went on to explain his relevance to fact based public policy. While Phil then tried to provide a speech based on facts, unfortunately I think many of them fell into the categories above. My favourite remains the idea that high speed broadband will make mammography more widely available - cause it appears to me the investment limitter there isn't the specialist staff it is the cost of the bloody machine - but maybe I'm wrong. Hopefully Dr Phil's speech will make it unto Telstra's nowwewaretalking site (see links).

A small aside. The word "furphy" comes from a brand of water cart. These were used by Australian troops in WWI and it was at the cart that people would pick up and spread rumours. Furphy had a slogan on the end of the tanks on the carts that went "Good better best, we will never rest, till our good is better, and our better best" which was also the last brand campaign run by Telecom Australia before the merger with OTC and becoming Telstra!

I do seem to keep using that title though.

Climate Change and the Precautionary Principle

With apologies to Crikey I want to quote in full one comment from last Friday's edition.

Cameron Bray writes: Re. "Liar: Howard backs Bracks into a corner" (yesterday, item 8). There has been some talk about the precautionary principle at play in working out what to do about climate change -- on the basis consequences of doing something and being wrong about climate change are way less than doing nothing and being right. Taking this one step further, Australia is vulnerable if other countries decide to pursue the precautionary principle, regardless of what we do. John Howard's endless wittering about how he won't risk jobs to address climate change is dependent on other countries pursuing his blithe “she'll be right” approach as well. If the international community decides to take it seriously then some of our key industries may be in big trouble. To grab a few examples: There is already some evidence of a global downturn in long distance tourism. If other countries decide to tackle air travel as a way of reducing CO2, then the Australian tourist industry is stuffed, no matter if warmer water destroys the reef or not. As for the coal industry, if the rest of the world decides to pursue drastic change in power generation towards greener options, then our fat dirty brown coal mines will have no markets. And as for the logging industry, if international agreements pursue serious carbon sequestering and make agreements on the purchase of old-growth timber or products that industry is cactus too. So the Howard government’s approach is a double-ostrich stupidity; not only does the climate not have to change, but the structure of trade and markets have to remain as they are now as well.

What Bray is - rightly - saying is that Howard's line about any action being designed not to harm the Australian economy is just that, a line. It is inaction that will harm the Australian economy.

Corporate Social Responsibility

In response to a post on Crikey I had something to say on the topic.

The original post appeared under the heading "Corporate Social Responsibility: Milton Friedman right again" and pursued the typical line that if corporate execs wanted to give money to good causes they should give their own money, not that of their shareholders - a position advanced by the late Milton Friedman.

Corporate Social Responsibility is about one heck of a lot more than just good works and donations to the poor. It is, primarily, a recognition that everybody is a stakeholder in the business - customers, its neighbours, the communities in which it trades, the environment it possibly pollutes, its employees, their families - not just the shareholders (are you listening Sol Trujillo).

Individual charity largesse by the rich managers is not a substitute for the genuine concern for the sustainability of the business versus the desire to achieve this quarter's targets to get paid the bonuses that got constructed because Milton Friedman wanted to align the supposed interests of managers with the supposed interests of shareholders.

Perhaps someone has noticed the conundrum - the goal of managers is supposed to be to maximise profit which requires minimising all input costs, which must include shareholders returns, but the goal of management is to maximise shareholders returns. If the conclusion is both P and not P, then the premise is false.

As to the original post - the heading should have been "Milton Friedman wrong again" as he WAS with monetarism - no one targets money supply these days.

It's About Us not Them

In his Fitz Files yesterday morning Peter FitzSimons told a great tale under the heading Hooray for Simon.

It tells the tale of how a local cricket comp introduced modified rules to enable a kid with dwarfism to not just play but also compete.

Unfortunately he ruined the good news story by starting his conclusion with, "There are, happily, a lot of these kind of stories out there, but there could be more if our State Government could make the inclusion of disabled kids in sport, where possible, part of official policy."

The pity is that as the story itself showed the outcome sought can and was achieved directly at theclevel of community action - which is really where the exhortation should be directed. Every community sporting group should be taking action like this - like the Eastwood Ryde Netball Association who for years had a deaf team playing (what whistle ump?) or games modified so that individual disabled players are allowed a little shuffle.

Good stuff happens by us deciding to do it, not by waiting for "them" to.

A Win in the History Wars

William McInnes writing in Saturday's SMH scores (as far as I'm concerned) a small win in the history wars.

Not, of course, that I think calling it the history wars is particularly useful, because at one level only one side is trying to win. That is, those who shout at the other side "relativist" as a form of abuse are trying to win because they think there is "one true history", while the other side is simply saying history is richer than that.

McInnes concludes, after recounting a tale of a caged cockie that says "Hello" to his daughter;

History is many things. For every listener it can be a different tale, just told with the same characters. But it mustn't be bent and shaped to serve the purpose of those who decide that history must be taught.

It can be like a caged bird. Taught to mimic words as a trick. But my daughter is right. History, like that bird, will always try to talk to you. The least we can do is listen.

The piece about history being bent is relevant to both sides of the debate.

For my part I went off to re-read E.H.Carr's What is History? as I got immersed in the history wars (as one does if one is foolish enough to read Quadrant). While the book itself is criticised for its relativism, and hence would be deemed an invalid source by the Quadrant crowd, there are a few points from it that I think are compellingly relevant. These are;

What is a historical fact? There are lots of facts, there is the fact that Adolf Hitler was born on April 20 1889 and the fact that my father was born on 26 December 1921. The former is generally regarded as a historical fact, the latter is not. What makes a "fact" a "historical fact" is that it plays a role in the chosen explanation of the ultimate event - in this case usually something to do with the origins of World War II.

What is historical narrative? A narrative can just be a description of events in order, or it can be a description of events in relation to what caused what. So we have the fact of Hitler's birth and the fact that the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. The historical narrative exists to weigh the relative importance of these (and other) events as causal bases for another event - WWII.

Which narratives are worth telling? There are an endless series of historical narratives that could be constructed. The ones that are worth telling are those that (like science) are useful, that might help us with the decisions we make today. This is the twin of the aphorism about the need to study history to avoid remaking the errors of the past.

These three together explain why history is a relative not an absolute concept, why there is not "One true history" as Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop would have us believe, nor is it just a collection of "facts."

Most importantly, history will always try to talk to you - the least we can do is listen.

Setting National Goals

The Business Council of Australia has published a brochure titled Policy that Counts which sets out reform standards for public policy.

While much in the brochure is laudable, I was struck by its inclusion of a table comparing Australia's ranking on a league table of GDP per capita in 1990 and 2005. This is published because, evidently, "The Business Council has set an aspirational goal for Australia to move into the top-five band of those countries with the world’s highest living standards by 2012."

I have two fundamental difficulties with establishing this as a national goal.

Equity The first difficulty is that I look around the world and I continue to see the horrors of poverty, war and pestilence in other countries. Against that reality I genuinely wonder whether increased relative prosperity for Australians is a worthwhile goal.

I don't want to make a standard "redistributional" argument, that we should be aiming to make others better by making us worse, but I certainly don't think that being in the top five rather than top ten or twenty on this measure is anywhere near as important as raising the absolute level of well being of some of our nearest neighbours. Especially so when the consequence of the latter could well be to advance our own national security. So making the South Pacific a region of prosperity is certainly more important than increasing the GDP/capita in Australia to the top five.

More than GDP Every first year economics student gets taught that GDP is just a measure of output, that it doesn't include some outputs and it certainly doesn't measure happiness in any meaningful way. Discussing this with my wife Marg she told me of a line Little Pattie had used in a recent episode of Talking Heads.

I like it when I feel we're living in a society, rather than in an economy.

Marg I think said it better - when did Australia stop being a society and become an economy.

People actually like "society" - they actually like the sense of belonging, the sense of jointly created stories that is culture and most like family, friends and kinship. And these are things that don't get measured by the GDP, and in fact are things that many feel are under assault from economic policies like a view of the labour market that employeees should treat Sunday as any other work day.

I think if you asked the average bloke in the street which would they prefer - that Australia got moved another notch up in the GDP/capita stakes or that they got to watch their kid play sport on the weekend that they would rightly go for the latter.

Prius and Prima Donna

On the basis that I should publish here everything I write I draw attention to another Crikey comment.

This one started as simple praise for Lyn Allison in her determination to obtain a Prius as her parliamentary car, but ended defending her against a ministerial staffer who seemed to completely miss the point.

Credibility Mr Howard

Buying into the whole Sunrise debacle, John Howard has said, "The Australian people will make a judgement about Mr Rudd's credibility in the same way they'll make a judgement about mine," he said.

It is to be sincerely hoped the Australian people will make a decision about Mr Howard's credibility. This is the PM who told us about children thrown overboard and who told us about weapons of mass destruction when neither the act occurred or the weapons existed.

And while Kevin Rudd has shown the poor judgement to deny things occurring in his office without realising how stupid the people are in his office, at least it is far less significant than ignoring 46 suggestions that we should inquire into our wheat trade, as Mr Downer did.

Bring on the "credibility election" - I know who I'll back to win.

Climate Change Denial Gone Mad

I had the great pleasure to attend an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch yesterday addressed by Michael Hawker, CEO of IAG on how climate change will affect business.

One person got up to ask a question and implied that people like Hawker were only on the climate change bandwagon because they had something to gain. She used the Y2K bug as an example of fear mongering and "nothing happened."

I took the time to see her afterwards - because this is a crock. All firms that I have any direct experience of did find in their extensive remediation programs instances of date coding that would have made systems unworkable on 1 Jan 2000. The preventative work is WHY nothing happened. So far be Y2K a reason for not acting on climate change, it is a reason for acting now.

As to the suggestion that we should be suspicious of self-interest - well that is a whole other issue that revolves in part around the meaning of "profit". That is for another day.

Vale Democracy

Big call I know, but a theme I've run consistently here - that we've lost the sense of what democracy is. There is a whole post I could and should do on the history of "democracy" based on a few great books I've been reading.

But what has really blown me away has been feedback from a lobbyist I use to a couple of comments I've sent to Crikey lately. The first was last week while the second was the one I referred to here. My lobbyist has told me that my comments to Crikey have been noted - with sort of hints that I shouldn't write things like that if I wanted to have access to Government.

Let's just hope they don't read my blog, huh?

Anyhow, another colleague sent me a note saying why do we need Keating! The Musical - we should get the bloke on stage doing stand-up. They covered snippets on the news - but this was the whole show on The World Today. Enjoy.

Rudd and Campbell

Lobbyists get a bad press because of the way our politicians choose to do politics. Instead of there being regular frequent open inquiries, most public policy decisions are "announced" after some brief private consultation and usually a political analysis - will the decision either (a) be easy to implement through the parliament or (b) have a rocky road but provide an opportunity for "differentiation".

But as for the wild acqusations that Rudd was somehow involved in a long planned exercise - a dinner on 1 August with an invitation of 28 July is the ultimate in short run events, and is entirely consistent with the Rudd description. The invitations I've received from lobbyists and backbenchers to attend "functions" with front benchers are typically organised much further in advance.

As for the conclusion that it must have been well prepared because Rudd spoke on China - heck the man does that stump speech everywhere, including last year's ALP Business Forum.

The person I feel sorry for is Senator Ian Campbell, who lost his front bench position for just doing his job. Meanwhile, a host of front benchers haven't lost their jobs for NOT doing their job - Downer for not inquiring into AWB, Ruddock for not representing an Australian citizen illegally interned in the US, Peter Reith for not telling the truth about children overboard, etc.

Anyway, all credit (again) to Senator Andrew Murray for his release that highlights the need to change the system if we want different outcomes.

(Addendum. The text of this post was also published by Crikey today, but unfortunately I sent that before I found the useful Andrew Murray media release.)