Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 105

Asia One | Prominent Australians reject refugee response

Singaporean media outlet; Asia One covered the release of our refugee report A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees and Asylum Seekers.  

Asia One - Filmmakers, politicians and business heavyweights are among 34 high-profile Australians who have endorsed a study by public interest think-tank the Center for Policy Development critical of refugee responses.

Australia has long had a policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, sending most to the remote Christmas Island outpost for processing, and recently announced deals to ship hundreds to Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

The Center for Policy Development's report describes these measures as a "disproportionate reaction" to the small number of people, who amount to one per cent of all applications for asylum worldwide, who arrive in Australia. 

For the complete article click here.

Read the full CPD report, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate of Refugee & Asylum Seekers here.

A New Approach comprehensively critiques Australia's refugee and asylum policies and finds they are inhumane, ineffective and expensive.

Prominent Australians reject refugee response | AAP

Filmmakers, politicians and business heavyweights are among 34 high-profile Australians who have endorsed our recent report, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees & Asylum Seekers.

"Australia's asylum and refugee policy is still sadly characterised by human tragedy, political opportunism, policy failure and great cost," the group, which includes former immigration minister Ian Macphee and writer Thomas Keneally said in a statement.

People seeking asylum in Australia had been the subject to "a toxic debate" which had polarised large sections of the community and paralysed politicians of most persuasions from engaging in constructive dialogue, it added.

Other signatories included actor Bryan Brown, classical musician Richard Tognetti and filmmaker of Happy Feet and Mad Max fame, Margaret Sixel.

They were joined by ACTU head Ged Kearney, business leader Heather Ridout and Janet Holmes a Court.

Australia has long had a policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, sending most to the remote Christmas Island outpost for processing, and recently announced deals to ship hundreds to Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

The Centre for Policy Development's report describes these measures as a "disproportionate reaction" to the small number of people, who amount to one percent of all applications for asylum worldwide, who arrive in Australia.

Read the full article in The Australian here.

[image error]Read the full CPD report, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate of Refugee & Asylum Seekers here.

A New Approach comprehensively critiques Australia's refugee and asylum policies and finds they are inhumane, ineffective and expensive.

Kate Gauthier | There are better alternatives to the 'Malaysia Solution'

CPD Fellow and co-author of our report, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees & Asylum Seekers, Kate Gauthier offers a detailed perspective on the present asylum seeker debate.

Kate Gauthier chats to The Conversation and provides a structured categorical alternative to the Gillard government's current 'Malaysia Solution'.  Gauthier endorses a framework divergent from classical deterrence models; promoting the inception of an independent commission to facilitate factual debate on immigration, and mitigating the politicization of refugee policy.

Our report calls for an independent commission to be established to facilitate informed public debate. There is currently a lot of misinformation around so no-one is forming opinions about this issue based on fact.

We should also establish another independent authority which will administer our refugee and asylum seeker programs.

At the moment, this function is embedded in the Department of Immigration, headed by Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen. That makes it essentially political. Refugee issues are not an immigration or migration issue, they're an international law and human rights issue.

The full article on The Conversation here.

Kate was a co-author in the recent report released by the Center for Policy Development entitled; A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate of Refugee & Asylum Seekers.

Access the full report here.

Gunter Pauli | The Blue Economy

Gunter Pauli has a dream. The Belgian economist and entrepreneur has a plan to develop 100 manufacturing innovations with viable business models that could generate 100 million jobs in 10 years. All with zero emissions and no waste.

He calls it "The Blue Economy" with innovations covering the full gamut of industrial activity, from energy to mining, from medicine to banking … all of it inspired by science and biometrics. And Pauli isn't all talk … there's plenty of action in the many startup-style projects around the globe funded by his organisation Zero Emissions Research and Initiative, which is now a global network.

Memorable achievements include recycling coffee waste for mushroom farming, making biodegradable detergent from discarded citrus peel, and the conversion of petrol stations into 'charge stations' for electric cars.

Last month we presented a talk with Gunter Pauli at Sydney University together with Sydney Ideas  titled: The Blue Economy: 10 Years, 100 Innovations, 100 Million Jobs.

WATCH Gunter Pauli's talk here.

About the speakers:

Gunter Pauli was born in Antwerp, Belgium. His entrepreneurial activities span business, culture, science, politics and the environment. He founded Zero Emissions Research Initiative (ZERI) and the subsequent Global ZERI Network which uses science and publicly available information to find and develop sustainable business solutions. Serving clients from remote communities to major corporations, solutions are inspired by what is locally available, building on local knowledge and culture. Pauli has been visiting lecturer and professor at universities around the world, and a board member of NGOs and private companies in Asia, USA and Latin America. Since 2009, he has taken responsibility for the design of an economic development concept based on GNH (Gross National Happiness) principles and values as part of his advisory role in designing an economic development strategy for Bhutan. Pauli has published 19 books and 36 fables bringing science and emotions to children. He is fluent in seven languages and has lived in four continents.

Ian Dunlop is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Development and a contributing author to their latest book, "More Than Luck: Ideas Australia Needs Now". He is Chairman of Safe Climate Australia and chaired the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading from 1998-2000.

WATCH Gunter Pauli's talk here.

John Menadue | Our Muddy Refugee Debate

John Menadue offers his perspective on the enduring refugee debate; voicing his opposition to 'dubious' statistics and imploring the Australian public to refrain from armchair activism and empathise with the plight of these desperate individuals.

Governments need to be concerned when asylum-seekers use people smugglers to take them on dangerous and possibly fatal journeys. But where there is persecution and violence and no legitimate or obvious way to escape, asylum-seekers will probably turn to people smugglers, if they have the money. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who came to Australia and other countries after WWII paid people smugglers or agents or brokers to escape. And why wouldn't they? If there is a market need and opportunity, someone will provide the service.

If I were an Hazara husband and father, particularly of daughters in Afghanistan, I would sell my farm and pay a people smuggler to help get them to safety and away from the Taliban. Armchair critics should try to put themselves in the position of threatened people and families.

Read John Menadue's opinion piece in The Canberra Times here.

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John Menadue is founding chair of the Center for Policy Development, and has worked with CPD to produce a new report evaluating the state of refugee policy in Australia.  You can find A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugee & Asylum Seekers here.

Radio Adelaide Breakfast | Refugee Debate: Interview With Arja Keski-Nummi

Radio Adelaide Breakfast host Tim Brunero interviews Arja Keski-Nummi – one of the authors of our recent report, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees & Asylum Seekers.

To hear the full interview click here. 

Before working at the CPD Aria worked with the Department of Immigration for 30 years. She's been a senior advisor to Hawke government immigration ministers like Gerry Hand and Mick Young. In 2010 she received the Public service medal for her work delivering Australia's humanitarian program. Tim Brunero spoke to Arja and he asked her what needs to be done to take the nastiness out of the issue. 

CPD has released A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees & Asylum Seekers, a report which comprehensively critiques Australia's refugee and asylum policies and finds they are inhumane, ineffective and expensive.

Download the full report here. 

Angela Priestley | Big Names Chase Leasership on Asylum Seeker Debate

Major business figures have come out in vocal support of our recent report A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees & Asylum Seekers.

The emergence of prominent business leaders weighing in on this issue is anomalous but report co-author, John Menadue assures us that acquiring their backing isn't difficult – however no one seems to ask.

"They're busy people but it's not hard to get them to respond to a request that we've made to them to comment on the present state of asylum refugee policy in Australia."

It's the first time business leaders have publicly backed such a far-reaching response to the asylum-seeker debate, but Menadue says this isn't because such support for a renewed focus isn't there, but rather that nobody's specifically asked such leaders for their backing.

The entire article can be accessed .

Read the full CPD report, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate of Refugee & Asylum Seekers here.

A New Approach comprehensively critiques Australia's refugee and asylum policies and finds they are inhumane, ineffective and expensive.

Ben Eltham | An Economy For Citizens, Not Shareholders

The plight of Australia's manufacturing sector is prompting unionists and industry groups to revive long-scorned ideas of industry policy, writes Ben Eltham.

First published in New Matilda here.

Who says Australian politicians never discuss policy? Rather surprisingly, our national debate is currently absorbed by one of the oldest debates in the policy book: industry policy.

What is industry policy? Very simply, industry policy is the funding and regulation of various industries by the government. It includes things like tariffs, which are special duties levied on foreign imports, as well as subsidies for various activities, like making cars, clothes or Air Warfare Destroyers.

Once upon a time, Australia had one of the most protected manufacturing sectors in the rich world. High tariff walls were erected in the 1930s, and they stayed high for half a century. This was protection: the purposeful cosseting of certain industries in order to keep jobs at home, even at the cost of more costly goods and lazy manufacturers.

But in the 1980s and 1990s, the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments dismantled the tariffs barriers, opening Australian industry up to foreign competition. The result was a wholesale structural change in the nature of our economy. Many businesses failed, and job losses in the recession of the early 1990s were particularly severe in the former industrial heartlands of Melbourne and Adelaide. However, in the wake of the savage restructuring, Australia emerged into a long boom. Jobs were lost in manufacturing, but more jobs were created in the growing services sector: nurses, teachers, financial planners, personal trainers and the rest.

Now industry policy is back on the national agenda. There's no secret why. Manufacturing in Australia is struggling. Our manufacturers are suffering weak demand and are competing against cheap international imports, made cheaper by the high Australian dollar. As a result, the sector may actually be shrinking. "I think manufacturing is effectively in recession", NABeconomist Alan Oster told Lateline Business back in June, and things have only deteriorated since then.

Manufacturing matters because the sector employs around a tenth of the workforce. It also represents some of the key inputs to broader economic activity, from cement, steel and bricks to the more complex, so-called "elaborately transformed" goods that modern life depends upon, such as electricity turbines and mobile phones.

Of course, Australia has long been a nation that imports the bulk of our manufactured goods. We can't compete with Asia when it comes to laptops or shoes, and for the most part we no longer try. Successful Australian manufacturers tend to be those that retain a technological edge, such as the Cochlear corporation or biopharmaceutical giant CSL.

But for the many Australian businesses that have to compete on price, times are lean indeed. to Heather Ridout of the AI Group, trading conditions for manufacturers right now are "stressful". The AI Group mentions "weak demand fuelled by global uncertainties and rising interest rates (which are arguably already too high); rising labour costs which are not backed by productivity gains; rising electricity and other input costs; and a high dollar which has pulled the ground out from below our export and import competitiveness."

Union leaders are worried too. The AWU's omnipresent national secretary Paul Howes has been vocal about the issue for some time. Last Monday, when the BlueScope lay offs were announced, he issued a media statement arguing strongly for a policy response to the problems in the sector. "We've got to face the reality of the manufacturing crisis that's before us," Howes said. "We can't accept job losses as the norm and we can't rely on imported goods in our strategic sectors."

The BlueScope job losses and the broader problems of local manufacturing represent the background for yesterday's well-publicised meeting between the government and industry leaders over the future of the sector.

At the meeting were Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Industry Minister Kim Carr and representatives from two of the country's biggest manufacturing unions, Dave Oliver of theAMWU and Paul Howes from the AWU, as well as Heather Ridout, long one of the government's favourite industry lobbyists (the ACCI, for instance, get rather frostier treatment, given that group's strident criticism of the government's carbon policies).

Ridout and the union bosses want the government to announce a policy inquiry into the sector, geared around providing a new plan for restoring sustainability. Though they didn't say it publicly, the unspoken assumption was that some new money from taxpayers should also be found.

Howes and Oliver seem to have something like the Bracks review into assistance for car manufacturers in mind. "That was a short, sharp inquiry," Oliver told reporters after the meeting. "[It] came out with some significant recommendations which I know had secured the future of the automotive industry in this country."

But the reference to handouts to carmakers shows the problems in trying to prop up uncompetitive industries. Over the last two decades, Australian governments have given billions of dollars to multinational automobile corporations, even while the industry itself has continued to shrink. The most notorious example of this was of course the hundreds of millions given to Mitsubishi to keep its plants in South Australia open. Mitsubishi took the money, and closed the plants anyway.

It's no wonder most economists think industry policy is a bad thing. As Paul Krugman wroteall the way back in 1997, "for 170 years, the appreciation that international trade benefits a country whether it is 'fair' or not has been one of the touchstones of the professionalism in economics." This remains especially true of the boffins working in the key policy institutions like the Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the Productivity Commission, who almost universally think that industry policy is a bad thing.

After all, supporting local industries in the face of stiff international competition is a form of protection, and protection is a economic concept that finds few supporters today. As the University of Sydney's Evan Jones put it in a 2006 paper, "the conventional economic wisdom is oriented to austere macroeconomic policy (budgetary surplus, anti-inflationary monetary policy) and eradication of impediments to free market operation ('microeconomic reform')."

Perhaps that's why Minister Carr promptly ruled out an inquiry.

"We're in the business of acting, (so we're) not having another inquiry," he told ABC Radio. The government is apparently of the belief that its commitment to economic rationalism casts it in a positive light.

Unfortunately, the argument that Australian governments should not "pick winners" by industry is not backed up by the facts. The problem with arguing against picking winners is that governments do it all the time. According to the Productivity Commission's Gary Banks, thetotal spend on industrial assistance by the federal taxpayer was around $15 billion in 2008, and "state and territory assistance programs, which are less transparent, would add a few billion on top of that". The special treatment comes in all shapes and sizes: from fossil fuel subsidies such as the diesel rebate for mining and primary industry, to the Australian government's wholly owned naval manufacturer, the Australian Submarine Corporation.

The point here is not to argue that all industry policy is inefficient, but rather to point out that Australia is still a long way from being a paragon of micro-economic reform. Indeed, one way to think about industry policy is that it is another way of structuring the economy for the benefit of citizens, rather corporate shareholders.

In the end, the issue comes down to whether you think Australia needs to maintain a manufacturing base, and whether spending taxpayers' money is the best way to promote future employment outcomes. Rather than propping up money-losing steel-makers and car makers, a better industry policy may well be to follow the recommendations of Terry Cutler's 2008 innovation review, which recommended that Australia increase federal spending on research and development to boost us to levels comparable to trading partners like Germany and Japan.

A forward-thinking government would take the opportunity represented by the current manufacturing malaise to ramp up Australia's investment in innovation, creating new opportunities in new industries that will stand us in good stand for the coming century. The Australian Research Council, for instance, still only supports around one-fifth of its applicants. That figure could easily be doubled without any risk of supporting "useless" research.

Of course, investing in innovation is expensive. It means spending more taxpayers' money. And that's something else politicians and economists currently oppose.

Michael Gordon | Call Goes Out For Asylum Policy Based on 'Better Angels of Our Nature'

With the release of A New Approach, Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees and Asylum Seekersand the full High Court hearing of a legal challenge to the Gillard government's Malaysia Solution, 30 well known Australians, including former Liberal Leader John Hewson, scientist Sir Gustav Nossal, playwright David Williamson, violinist Richard Tognetti, novelist Thomas Keneally, Heather Ridout, Michael Chaney and Janet Holmes a Court, along with the ACTU president, Ged Kearney, have come out in support of CPD's asylum seekers policy that would have mandatory detention phased out within two years and Australia's intake of refugees significantly increased over five years.

For CPD Board Director John Menadue, Ausralia needs to overcome it's "collective paranoia" to achieve sensible decision-making in the asylum seeker domain.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/call-goes-out-for-asylum-policy-based-on-better-angels-of-our-nature-20110821-1j4sf.html#ixzz1WS8LYCPd

today will coincide with the start of a full High Court hearing of a legal challenge to the Gillard government's controversial "people swap" agreement with Malaysia.

To read the full report, click here.

 

Ian McAuley | Abbott Does Truck All for Democracy

Relentless negative messages from Tony Abbott, most recently on the truckies in Canberra, are eroding the Coalition's capacity to make good policy – and that's bad for everyone, writes Ian McAuley.

The Liberal/National Party Opposition, aided by the Murdoch press and by talkback radio hosts, is doing a remarkably effective job not only in tapping into people's discontent, but also in fomenting discontent.

The messages, crafted to create anxiety, are simple: we are crippled by massive public debt, a carbon price will result in unbearable hardship, and our country is being overrun by illegal immigrants. Facts must not be allowed to displace gut feelings.

While this tactic does wonders for the Coalition's electoral prospects, it is at great cost to the Liberal Party's capacity to formulate and implement anything approaching a responsible economic policy should it win office. An Abbott-led government would face the choice of having to respond to the discontent it has fueled by abandoning the party's traditional support for market-based policies, or being thrust out of office by those same angry crowds.

Nowhere was this better illustrated than by Tony Abbott's riding into Canberra in the cab of a semi-trailer on Monday as part of the "Convoy of No Confidence", like a triumphant rebel leader making a final assault on a dictator's capital.

The convoy started as a protest about the carbon price, but it morphed into a protest about almost everything, including gay marriage and the ban on live cattle exports. On the so-called climate change sceptics' JoNova website in support of the convoy is a contribution by "Carbon Worker", capturing the feeling of this and other recent protests:

"The general population is being radicalised by the communists in power. And I say communists advisedly. We don't need to and shouldn't play the sheltered workshop media game of letting communists rebadge themselves as "socialist forum" or "green". They are what they are — ideologically devoted followers of the discredited and disgraced death cult of communism, gillard, brown and the rest." 

We may ridicule the logic behind such statements, but we should not dismiss the intensity of feelings — feelings fuelled by the intemperate, dishonest and spiteful language of those who stand to gain from their anxiety.

Ironically, the cause of the truckies' plight is not some central-planning government. Rather it is the market itself.

Trucking is one of the most ruthlessly competitive industries imaginable. There are around 50,000 trucking businesses in Australia, a number which, over the last 30 years, has been growing much faster than the market for freight transport.

Trucking is an industry with few barriers to entry: anyone who can find the finance to buy a truck can set up. Once he or she has that truck and the associated obligation to repay the loan, there is every compulsion to keep it operating, even at prices which cannot cover long term costs; that's the nature of competition in capital-intensive industries.

Worse, owner-drivers are in competition with large trucking corporations who have lower costs of finance, and who can use their nation-wide networks to get their fleets operating at high capacity. Those firms can keep their fleets modernised with fuel-efficient vehicles and, when a carbon price eventually kicks in, will have no trouble in passing that cost through to customers. That's why those companies are reasonably at ease with a carbon price. Freight comprises only 5 to 10 per cent of the cost of final goods, and because fuel is only about 30 per cent of the cost of trucking, fuel only a small component of the costs of the goods we consume. Even a large rise in fuel prices would have little effect on the trucking industry because we would still be buying those goods. 

Few of the owner-operators appreciate that the industry is already heavily subsidised — heavy trucking does not pay its share of road costs. If they did realise this, they would not fear a carbon price, because just as these subsidies have passed through to customers without benefit to individual operators, so too will a carbon price pass through to customers without harm to individual operators.

Their underlying problems to do with the structure of the market will remain, however, and unless a government were to establish a Soviet style bureaucracy to regulate every aspect of the industry, the truckies will continue to suffer the harsh discipline of market forces.

As it turned out, the truckies' "Convey Of No Confidence" was not a major event; one wit in Parliament called it a "Convoy Of No Consequence". Tony Abbott and Alan Jones looked lonely on the podium addressing a demonstration of only three or four hundred (including many curious Canberra onlookers). We are not about to be overrun by angry truckies.

The real problem is the political one for the Liberal Party in the way it blames the Gillard Government for every real or imagined problem. In so doing it raises expectations among those who are left behind by economic progress, and it re-kindles the notion, once prevalent in Australia, that every problem faced by society can be solved by government.

In ridiculing the Government's market-based solution to climate change it is proposing a return to the paternalistic and stifling industry policies which held back structural change in the 1950s and 1960s. When Abbott appeals to forestry or coal industry unionists, promising that he can protect them from economic change, it is reminiscent of the times, long ago, when the Labor Party was under the thumb of a conservative old guard, unable to face a changing world — and, in the process, keeping the party out of office for 23 years.

Abbott's simplistic rhetoric may help project him into office, but if he succeeds it will be because he has trashed the Liberal Party's platform and any hope it has of contributing to the nation's capacity to adjust to global economic forces. The uncertainty for business, already having to evaluate the possibility that he would reverse the Government's carbon pricing measures, would be severely damaging to investment. And worse, the resulting disillusionment in the community would be a force with unpredictable and frightening political consequences.