Column in the Financial Review

Published in the Australian Financial Review on June 4, 2014

Budgets are about choices. Yet the Government would have you believe it has no choice but eventually to deny the age pension to everyone under the age of 70 years, apply a $7 charge for visiting a doctor and having a blood test, cut funding for public hospitals and schools and hike university fees to whatever the market will bear.

There are alternatives and there is a better way. Before going to these, it should be acknowledged that the Budget contains a raft of sensible measures that the Senate should support. They include the Coalition’s very own carbon tax – the resumption of fuel excise indexation that the Howard Government abandoned. Political parties that agree with carbon pricing should feel comfortable supporting fuel excise indexation.

After an indulgent period of ramping up middle-class welfare when last in office and opposing most Labor Government efforts to pare it back, the Coalition has finally acted responsibly and tightened the income tests for family payments and other benefits. These include the Private Health Insurance Rebate whose means testing the Coalition had promised to reverse when the Budget permitted. Also courtesy of the Howard Government, most of the one-fifth of retirees not receiving a part-pension have been eligible for the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card, but the Abbott Government is tightening it for new entrants.

In justifying an increase in the age of pension eligibility to 70 years, the Government asserts that Australians are living longer.  But it is not necessarily true of the poor. The life expectancy of poor Americans has barely improved over two decades, leaving Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman to ask why the poor should lose benefits as a consequence of better-off Americans living longer. Australia can afford an age pension system for the genuinely needy. Yet, as the Treasurer pointed out in his Budget speech, a couple with a home and almost $1.1 million in assets qualifies for the pension. That’s the problem that needs fixing, rather than expecting labourers and nurses to work till they reach 70 years of age.

In an earlier speech the Treasurer lamented that costly superannuation tax concessions were meant to prevent the present situation of four-fifths of retirees receiving the age pension. Yet the Government refuses to consider reducing the generosity of those tax concessions at the top end, instead scrapping Labor’s savings measure for the top 16,000 superannuants and leaving the top 5 per cent of superannuants to scoop up more than 20 per cent of the value of concessions.

As for the $7 Medicare co-payment, this is a policy explicitly designed to discourage people from going to a doctor and having pathology tests. Early detection gives people with chronic diseases the best chance of survival. No analysis of increased hospitalisation rates, or their cost, has been done.

The Government claims it is not cutting back on funding to the states for hospitals and schools, since the Labor Government never included funding increases its Budgets. If that were true, the Budget Papers should not be counting savings on public hospital funding totalling $1.8 billion over the coming four years. The needs-based school-funding model proposed by David Gonski is effectively gutted at the end the four-year Budget period.

Full deregulation of university fees has unknown economic and equity consequences. Vice Chancellors can only guess at the impacts on courses such as engineering and science.

An alternative to political head butting is available. Labor would wave through most of the structural Budget savings measures, including fuel excise indexation and the tightening of income tests on family payments, age pensions and entitlements. While opposing an increase in the pensionable age to 70 years, Labor would offer to work with the Government on further tightening means tests for new entrants so that the pension is a genuine safety net. Putting retirement incomes policy on a sustainable footing must include reviewing the generosity of superannuation tax concessions, but only at the top end, where it is both unfair and unsustainable.

Since the Medicare co-payment does not affect the Budget bottom line, it can be deferred with no fiscal consequences. The uncommitted funds in the existing Health and Hospitals Fund will be tipped into the new Medical Research Fund anyway. An independent inquiry would be established into the sustainability of health funding.

Similarly, an independent inquiry would be conducted into the sustainability of the higher education system, with the major parties seeking to agree on the terms of reference.

For those who believe a delay in any savings measure is unconscionable, the impact on the Budget bottom line in 2014-15 of all decisions taken by the Coalition Government since coming to office is an improvement of just $1 billion. If the controversial health and education measures did not proceed at this stage, and the Government suspended new spending on Direct Action and regional pork barrelling, there would be no change to the bottom line in 2014-15 and a negligible effect the following year.

Structural improvements in the Federal Budget are in the nation’s interest and, incidentally, in the interests of the major political parties. It is open to the Coalition and Labor to pass most of them and to work together to achieve further savings that are fair to the vulnerable and truly end the age of entitlement for the better off.

Column in The Australian - Repeal Protects Rights of Bigots

Published in The Weekend Australian on 5.04.2014

In considering the case for the proposed repeal of sections of the Racial Discrimination Act, surely the basic question is: “Just whose quality of life is being diminished by these laws?”

Legislators who make and repeal laws do so where there is an identified problem they consider needs addressing. What is the problem that repeal of section 18C will remedy or at least ameliorate? Who are the punters, cowering in their lounge rooms, repressed by a law that stops them publicly giving a gobful of racial abuse to indigenous Australians and ethnic minorities?

Certainly the Institute of Public Affairs and commentator Andrew Bolt lobbied the Coalition to make a pre-election commitment to repeal sections of the Raci­al Discrimination Act.

But there was no obvious groundswell of opposition to legislative provisions that had been in force for two decades, including for the entire 12 years of the Howard Liberal government.

The present government asserts that section 18C has had a chilling effect. For this to be true, there must be lots of people who are not only aware of the section but frustrated by it holding them back from doing what they really want to do.

It is with these as yet unidentified people’s liberties that the government is concerned. Indeed the title of the proposed amendment is the Freedom of Speech Bill.

Yet the government has assured the Jewish community that Holocaust denial would remain unlawful. Why? If freedom of speech is paramount, it follows logically that racial vilification — defined as inciting hatred — should be lawful.

Clearly, then, the government does not consider freedom of speech to be paramount; it believes some restrictions are warranted. But those justifiable restrictions do not include, ­according to the government, offending, insulting and humili­ating people on the basis of their race. Australians, we are told, have a right to be bigots.

Yet even the protections against racial vilification and intimidation are so heavily qualified in the amendment bill as to be virtually meaningless.

Free speech is well protected by section 18D, subject to the requirement that this freedom is exercised reasonably and in good faith. But reasonableness and good faith are no longer required in the government’s preferred version of these laws. If vilifiers are participating in a public discussion then they can vilify to their hearts’ content.

Intimidation in the amendment bill is confined to causing fear of physical harm. Moreover, the sweeping exception for matters of public discussion also applies to even this narrowly constricted protection, enabling intimidators legally to create a fear of physical harm as long as they do it in public discussion.

Within the Liberal Party in particular there is a tradition of libertarianism. Fair enough.

But to be true to the cause, libertarians should be arguing for freedoms such as same-sex marriage, euthanasia and, logically, the right not to wear seat belts. Yet none of these is Liberal Party policy.

If it’s not a matter of the consistent application of a high principle of freedom, we come back to trying to identify the problem that the amendments are meant to fix.

In support of the amendments, a number of indigenous Australians have pointed out that the Racial Discrimination Act hasn’t ended racism. Nor have the anti-violence laws ended violence, the anti-rape laws ended rape or the anti-drug laws ended drug trafficking. But that doesn’t mean they should be repealed.

A Jewish ALP member living in the US who supports the amendments has pointed out that the existing Australian law would violate the US Constitution. So would laws that prevented people wandering around with semi­automatic weapons, but most Australians would much rather have our gun laws than those in the US.

And who introduced those freedom-inhibiting Australian gun laws? John Howard, a Liberal prime minister in the libertarian mould, in what was perhaps his finest and most courageous achievement.

Others advocating repeal of section 18C have argued that we are better off getting racism out in the open so that we can counter it. Repealing laws against offend­ing, insulting and hum­iliating people on the basis of their race certainly gets out a strong message to bigots: that in 21st-century Australia racism, including racial vilification, is now OK, especially if you do it in the course of public discussion.

Perhaps if the penalties for breaching the existing legislation were onerous a case could be made for reviewing the legislation or at least the penalties. But breaching the act is not a criminal offence.

Nor does the existing legislation create a basis to sue those who breach the protections, as also has been sug­gested, wrongly. Conciliation meetings are org­anised, and if the person who breaches the act refuses to co-operate a judge may order that an apology be published and offending material removed from public display.

Come on, ministers, let’s abandon the proposed amendments. They’re a bad idea.

Column in The Australian - Reconciliation Best Model for New Leaf on Refugees

Published in The Weekend Australian on 29.03.2014

Refugee policy is tearing at our nation’s soul. Our treatment of asylum seekers is marked by violence and beset by acrimonious, partisan bickering. Though Australia has a duty of care for asylum seekers it has contracted out that duty to Papua New Guinea and Nauru. A 23 year-old asylum seeker has been beaten to death on Manus Island. More than 1,000 asylum seekers have drowned at sea in the last six years. 

The misery of refugees sitting dirt poor in camps for years is no lesser a tragedy. These refugees are too impoverished to buy air tickets to Malaysia and Indonesia and pay people smugglers for the onward boat journey to Australia.

Though it might seem that after 15 years of rancour and political enmity there is no agreeable way forward, the experience with an earlier, divisive, debate could offer guidance for how Australia might go about developing a fair, humane approach to refugee policy.

Australia has made genuine progress in reconciliation between its indigenous and non-indigenous people.  What has demonstrably changed for the better is the community’s attitude towards Australia’s first people.

The starting point for progress was general acceptance by the community that the plight of indigenous Australians demanded attention. A broad consensus had been reached that we could not advance as a nation if, in the words of Paul Keating at Redfern, we have not managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous people of Australia.

Reconciliation has not been achieved, injustices have not been removed, disadvantage has not been eradicated but progress has been made.

That’s where we must start on refugee policy: agreeing a common goal for public policy based on facts, not misinformation, exaggeration and fear mongering.

Australia, like all other democracies, has limits on the size of the immigration intake its citizens are willing to accept. Worldwide there are more than 15 million refugees. Australia’s recent total annual immigration intake has been around 210,000 people, comprising skilled migration of 130,000, family reunion of 60,000 and a humanitarian program of 20,000. Allowing all refugees arriving by boat to settle in Australia permanently would swamp the annual immigration program many times over. The community won’t accept it nor would it be fair to migrants in Australia seeking family reunion or the millions of refugees in camps.

Last year 7,500 visas were issued to asylum seekers who arrived in Australia unauthorised, while 50,000 asylum seekers applied offshore for resettlement in Australia.  Both Labor and the Coalition have adopted tough policies towards asylum seekers arriving by boat, including refusal to resettle in Australia even those found to be genuine refugees. If the Australian government no longer wishes to meet its obligations under the Refugee Convention it should withdraw from it.

Some refugee advocates have argued for the establishment of a large asylum-seeker processing centre in Indonesia. While at first glance this seems a way of stemming the flow of asylum seekers risking their lives at sea, it would increase, probably greatly, the number of asylum seekers flying to Indonesia. It is therefore an unattractive proposition for Indonesia. And asylum seekers who couldn’t afford the air tickets would miss out.

None of the present policy approaches is sustainable in a fair, decent society. So how do we go about fashioning a policy that is acceptable to the community, compassionate and fair to all?

As with reconciliation, we need to develop a broad consensus that refugees deserve our care and respect.  As a whole, Australians are more generous than most in their attitudes towards migrants coming to their country. Wanting an orderly immigration program doesn’t make Australians racists it makes them fair-minded.

Just as the process of reconciliation required the development of a broad, though not universal, consensus, so the achievement of a compassionate, fair and sustainable asylum seeker policy requires the building of a consensus in its favour.  Realistically, this might take years to achieve. But we must make a start. That requires the abandonment of the bitter, partisan brawl over asylum seeker policy.

The appointment by the previous government of a group of eminent persons to advice on asylum seeker policy and the coming together of large numbers of MPs from all political parties to seek common ground gives good reason to be hopeful. Though the recommendations of the eminent persons group could not all be passed through the parliament, they based their work on a simple, appealing principle of no advantage to an asylum seeker arriving by boat over one arriving from offshore.

So the first step in achieving a sustainable asylum seeker policy is to appoint a small group of people respected across the political spectrum to begin the process of consensus building within the community based on the same principle of no advantage to boat arrivals.  However, the Australian government should also boost its financial support for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to expedite processing in countries of first asylum.

In circumstances where Australia, through these processes, developed an orderly, fair refugee program and overall immigration program, the humanitarian component should be lifted to around 40,000 per annum: double the humanitarian program of 2012-13, and almost treble the existing program, which has reverted to 13,750 a year. Many refugees are highly skilled, so some of the increase in the refugee intake could come from within the existing skilled migration allocation.

Political parties should agree not to seek electoral advantage through the asylum seeker debate. Throwing around terms such as ‘racist,’ ‘peaceful invasion’ and ‘armada’ deepens bitterness and makes a compassionate resolution of the asylum seeker issue impossible.

Australia is big enough and decent enough to embrace a compassionate approach to asylum seekers within an orderly and expanded humanitarian program. The question is whether the political system is capable of delivering it. The experience of reconciliation with indigenous Australians suggests it is.

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