Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 20

CPD is hiring

CPD are seeking to hire people for two positions.

Bookkeeper

Executive Assistant

Bookkeeper

The successful candidate will be based in CPD’s Sydney or Melbourne office. The position will be part-time (0.1-0.2 FTE) . Remuneration for the position will be determined based on the experience of the selected candidate. For further information please contact Shivani Nadan at admin@cpd.org.au or call (03) 9929 9915.

Candidates should include the following in their application:

Covering letter and CV;
Name and details of at least two referees.

Candidates should apply by emailing their application to admin@cpd.org.au with the subject line ‘Application for Bookkeeper’. Review of applications will begin on 6 July, 2020 and will continue until the position has been filled. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

 Executive Assistant

The successful candidate will preferably be Melbourne-based, however due to COVID-19 restrictions, our Melbourne office is currently closed. The successful candidate can expect to begin in this position working from home. The position can be part-time or full-time. Remuneration for the position will be determined based on the experience of the selected candidate. For further information please contact Shivani Nadan at admin@cpd.org.au or call (03) 9929 9915.

Candidates should include the following in their application:

Covering letter and CV;
Name and details of at least two referees.

Candidates should apply by emailing their application to admin@cpd.org.au with the subject line ‘Application for Executive Assistant’. Review of applications will begin on 8 July 2020 and will continue until the position is filled. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

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Peter Mares: Housing the Australian Nation

CPD Research Committee Member Peter Mares investigated the Australian housing market for ABC Radio National. You can access the four-part series here.

COVID-19 has exposed the failings of Australia’s housing system like never before: rough sleeping, homelessness, the insecurity of renting, and a real estate boom-bust cycle.

Our housing mess can be measured in lost productivity, poor health, high debt and growing inequality.

Writer and researcher Peter Mares visits four capital cities, to investigate what’s gone wrong with housing in Australia, and what we might do about it.

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Zoe Whitton: Our Energy Future

CPD Board Member Zoe Whitton appeared on Q+A to talk about Australia’s energy future.

You can listen to the program here.

The Federal Government has unveiled its roadmap for Australia’s energy future, shifting focus from coal to gas.

The new plan includes investment in low-emissions technologies, but identifies gas as the most reliable energy source for the transition to renewables. Critics say however that developments in battery storage and renewables have overtaken the need for a transition technology.

So could we be backing the wrong horse? Will the new energy plan benefit all Australians now and into the future?

The post Zoe Whitton: Our Energy Future appeared first on Centre for Policy Development.

How prepared is our financial system for climate shocks?

CPD CEO Travers McLeod was was on Radio National Breakfast with Norman Swan.

You can listen to the interview here.

The Reserve Bank of Australia has joined with 66 central banks from around the world in urging nations to embrace ambitious emissions targets, warning that global gross domestic product could fall by as much as 25 per cent by the century’s end.

In a report by the Network for Greening the Financial System, the banks compared the impact of different warming scenarios on the global economy.

The findings will now be used by the Australia’s banking regulator to test how prepared our financial system is for climate shocks.

Guest: Travers McLeod, chief executive, Centre for Policy Development

Producer: Gregg Borschmann

Duration: 9min 32sec

Broadcast: Fri 26 Jun 2020, 6:35am

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Annabel Brown and Caitlin McCaffrie: A chance to do better for migrants, and for the economy

Published in Inside Story on 25 May 2020

Covid-19 has exposed the flaws in Australia’s treatment of temporary migrants. Fortunately, a blueprint for change already exists.

The tragic death of an international student in Sydney this month has highlighted the precarious lives many migrants, temporary and permanent, have been leading out of public view. As the economy has closed down during the pandemic, our disjointed approach to migrant services has come sharply into focus. We have the ideas and tools to do better, though, and the dividends from harnessing the full potential of all our migrants are too good to miss.

Public discussion about migration to Australia tends to simplify a complicated and nuanced reality. Annual permanent migration to Australia stood at 179,085 in 2018–19, made up of approximately 62 per cent in the skilled stream, 27 per cent in the family stream and 11 per cent in the humanitarian stream, which includes refugees. As of 4 April 2020, around 2.17 million people were living in Australia on temporary visas, including roughly 672,000 New Zealanders, 565,000 international students, 203,000 international tourists, 118,000 on working holiday visas, 139,000 temporary skilled visa holders and about 90,000 on temporary graduate visas. This total also includes more than 280,000 on bridging visas but not the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people without a visa.

This picture is complex enough without delving into the quagmire of visa categories and conditions that apply to refugees and asylum seekers, depending on how they arrived and where in the immigration process they are.

Rather than focusing on visa categories, though, we want to explore two much more important questions. How can Australia respond to the individual needs of migrants as they settle here, regardless of their visa category? And how can we best support all migrants to participate fully in Australian society and the economy?

Despite the fact that temporary visa holders benefit Australia in many ways, the federal government largely expects temporary migrants to look after themselves while they are here. Yet they bring many benefits. They pay tax; they fill skills gaps and labour shortages in sectors including health and care, logistics and agriculture; and they often live and work in regional locations crying out for residents and workers.

Temporary migrants also support some of our largest industries. The Victorian government estimates that just one group — the 250,000 international students who came to the state last year — contributed $12.6 billion to state revenue. And, while there have been calls to put Australian workers first, studies show migrants don’t disadvantage local workers, and can actually lift their participation in the workforce.

A new report by Eve Lester has found that the federal government treats migrants predominantly according to their visa status rather than their individual needs. Funding or contractual arrangements often mean that non-government agencies largely follow these government policy and program settings, leaving temporary migrants particularly vulnerable.

Lester stresses that the term “temporary” is in many ways misleading. For many migrants a temporary visa is a step towards permanent residency, although this goal has become increasingly hard to attain. Lester notes the growing underclass of “permanently temporary residents” that live in “a holding pattern that makes them highly exploitable and in which they hover at the margins of socioeconomic engagement.”

The current approach to migrant services “creates cracks through which those in the grey areas will invariably fall,” says Lester. Women on temporary visas who are experiencing intimate partner violence, for instance, often face barriers to seeking help, such as fear of deportation, loss of custody of their children or limited English skills. Most are ineligible for Centrelink financial support or childcare subsidies, and social and community housing is largely inaccessible to them. They often have no option but to remain in a dangerous situation.

While the federal government has funded the Red Cross to provide a small one-off emergency relief payment to temporary visa holders at risk of destitution, the exclusion of temporary migrants from its broader response is only deepening this disadvantage. In the short term, expanding existing pandemic measures to include temporary visa holders in vulnerable situations is vital. Australia could also learn from how other countries are tackling labour shortages in the health sector, including by fast-tracking overseas skills recognition for refugees and new migrants.

All states and territories are now providing grants or other support for international students and/or other temporary migrants unable to return home. Some universities are also filling the gaps with emergency support funds for stranded international students. In each case, this reflects an understanding not only of the short-term imperative of supporting these Australian residents, but also the long-term implications of their exclusion.

Nearly 300,000 temporary visa holders are thought to have left Australia since the start of the year. With immigration paused indefinitely, none will be arriving to replace them. This gives us the opportunity to ensure that migrant services are more effective when borders reopen.

Fortunately, we already have the blueprint and tools we need to achieve this. Last year a panel led by former senior public servant Peter Shergold set out a compelling blueprint for improving the settlement experience of humanitarian migrants. Their proposals would link the efforts of Commonwealth, state and local governments to industry and the community sector, reducing the wasteful fragmentation built into the current system. This approach could equally be used to support other vulnerable migrants in Australia.

Their proposals for humanitarian migrants have been endorsed and promoted by the federal government, and many are already in train. For instance, the Department of Home Affairs, where Australia’s immigration programs sit, took over management of settlement services and English-language programs in mid 2019. Alison Larkins has been appointed to the new role of the Commonwealth coordinator-general for migrant services, and a new Refugee and Migrant Services Advisory Council, with members from civil society and the private sector, was announced in February this year.

Reforms are being tested now to ensure the national employment services system, Jobactive, adapts much more effectively to an individual’s journey, employers’ needs and local circumstances. This should mean a far better service for all unemployed and underemployed Australians, and more resources for those with complex needs. More flexible delivery of the Adult Migrant English Program is also slated for testing this year. Experience with JobSeeker and JobKeeper should point the way towards targeted wage subsidies and higher levels of unemployment support for the most disadvantaged jobseekers.

Locally connected, place-based approaches to delivering critical services have been widely commended and are achieving good results. These approaches use local networks to lift social and economic participation. In Victoria, for example, Wyndham City Council and its partners have been running the Wyndham Employment Trial to boost economic participation for young people and humanitarian migrants. Eighteen employers are recruiting, and ninety-four humanitarian migrants have been placed in employment.

Working arrangements built during the trial are helping local organisations to respond in a coordinated way to the challenges of finding work for jobseekers in the wake of Covid-19. The success in Wyndham sheds light on how we can better support refugees and vulnerable migrants to settle in Australia.

Fully implementing the necessary governance and service reforms, and scaling up effective place-based approaches to include broader groups of migrants and others facing disadvantage, will ultimately lead to more successful settlement and a more inclusive society.

It has been estimated that greater social and economic inclusion will yield serious economic benefits for Australia. Queensland alone stands to gain $250 million over ten years by making better use of the skills of migrants and refugees. Reducing gaps in participation, unemployment and income by 25 per cent relative to the average Australian jobseeker for just one annual humanitarian intake could be worth $180 million to the federal budget over ten years as well as $484 million in income for those refugees and their families.

Refugees are known to be Australia’s most entrepreneurial migrants — they are nearly twice as likely as other Australian taxpayers to run businesses — and every 1000 new refugee businesses generates $98 million in annual economic activity and taxes.

The pandemic has exposed Australia’s disjointed approach to migrant support, but it has also inadvertently created a chance to do better — to enhance Australia’s recovery and, at the same time, bed down the reforms we need to harness the full potential of Australia’s migrant population.

A lot of the necessary thinking has already been done, and Canberra has created the necessary governance mechanisms. Now is the time to grasp the opportunity to scale up these initiatives.

Annabel Brown is Program Director and Caitlin McCaffrie is a Policy Adviser with the Centre for Policy Development.

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Travers McLeod: Here are 10 steps to build a stronger Australia after Coronavirus

Published in The Guardian on 05 May 2020

The steps Australia takes after Covid-19 can’t take us back to the way we were. The prime minister’s message after briefings from treasury and the Reserve Bank has been clear: we need to grow differently. Here are 10 steps to do that and build a stronger nation.

1. Never underestimate systemic risk again

Pandemic or coronavirus weren’t new words when Covid-19 began. This risk was foreseen. Australia had a script but lacked dress rehearsals. Pandemics aren’t the only risks that can cripple our social, economic and political systems. Climate change, water scarcity, ecological collapse, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, infrastructure failure, cyberwar and antibiotic resistance are others. We ignore their cascading impacts at our peril. On some we have held joint exercises. But we must do more to understand Australia’s vulnerability to systemic risks and boost mitigation efforts.

2. Don’t focus on the last war

The war analogy used for Covid-19 can help us plan a better future. We need a post-war legacy like the one after the second world war – investments in the nation, human services and global institutions – not the sort of legacy that followed the first world war. Beware a “no more Covids” mindset ruling us like “no more Munichs” and “no more Vietnams” infected previous post-war planning. We should document what we learned in response to Covid-19. We must improve and practise more because pandemics come in all shapes and sizes. But we cannot fixate on pandemics and devote deficient bandwidth to risks with similar or greater orders of magnitude.

3. Align our growth agenda with a zero carbon future

The first two steps will reinforce what should be obvious, that locking in carbon-dependent growth is a recipe for greater disaster. The experts we’re relying on have also told us climate change will cause first order economic and health impacts. Growth will be a shared national priority, but its composition and direction matters. National missions can spur innovation, new industries and skills, underpinning collaboration between government, industry, universities and vocational training. Most importantly our post-Covid growth agenda must be aligned with decarbonisation. Embedding Ross Garnaut’s superpower story into Australia’s recovery story will create jobs immediately and accelerate the transition of our lives and livelihoods to a zero carbon future.

4. Revalue care

Covid-19 has exposed the Faustian pact our society has made with our carers. Nurses, teachers, childcare, disability and aged-care workers are among the many whose work has been undervalued. More often than not these carers are women. Just as carers and essential services have underwritten Australia through this crisis, revaluing the service they provide must be at the centre of our national recovery. We can restructure our federation to guarantee care for all, especially in early childhood education. This is the moment to secure a new consensus for care.

5. Rewire business for the long term

Business models were broken before Covid-19. The banking royal commission should have signalled the end of shareholder primacy. The 2020 Edelman trust barometer found inequity continued to undermine trust. Over half of respondents globally thought capitalism was doing more harm than good. Australians want business to back long-term value creation for a larger set of stakeholders, especially their employees and their suppliers, and to broaden what we mean by capital. Covid-19 has signalled a capacity to do both. We must sustain this spirit to rewire capitalism for good.

6. Work differently

Those of us still in jobs are lucky. But most of us are working differently – even medics. Parents are seeing more of their kids. We’re convening improbable virtual meetings without costly flights, catering and logistics. The last thing we’ll want after Covid is to run our lives via Zoom, but many employers – public and private – will be able to give staff more flexibility, expect less travel, and foster a healthier work-life balance. We can go further. Sally McManus and Christian Porter have shown what can be done to protect jobs in the national interest. Now it’s time to create more secure work and job guarantees through a Covid-inspired accord between government, unions and business.

7. Back places, people and the public service

Efficiency dividends and gutting public sector capability came home to roost in March. Watching the Australian public service respond to Covid-19 was like watching a footy team starved of first-round draft picks for a decade and using software written for amateur leagues buck the odds and make the finals. Never again. We need to invest more in our public services and grow talent across them. The common thread in national reviews of our public service, employment services and settlement services has been to double down on place-based responses. “Community deals” can do this, connecting funding sources in local networks to boost economic and social outcomes.

8. Get serious about substantive equality

Covid-19 has exposed big inequalities in Australians: between women and men, young and old, for people with disability and for Indigenous Australians. Ours is a polity of paradoxes, chief among them that we want our democracy to boost equality, especially for our most vulnerable, yet we struggle to achieve substantive equality for them. Indigenous Australians over 50 being singled out as a key risk group for Covid-19 shames us all. So should our ranking in the bottom third of OECD countries for employing people with disability. An Australia that strives for equality not just of opportunity but of outcomes will be a healthier, more prosperous nation. Walking together, as Megan Davis has explained, starts with realising the potential of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

9. Influence the world stage

A moment from 2018 has stuck with me. At the end of a roundtable on trade and climate change an EU official said, unprompted: “You Australians, you don’t lead any more – you just wait.” Our foreign service is tremendous but it is true that we have stood back this past decade as megatrends reshaped the globe. Partly because of resources, but largely because of political instructions, Australia is too often a bystander or obstructer on the world stage. We have a one-track foreign policy that lacks balance and invests insufficiently in our region. That must end. The world wants Australia to lead because of our competence, geography, history, openness and relative prosperity. We must be on the right side of history and seek to shape it positively, helping to reform institutions to tackle 21st century challenges.

10. Walk the talk

We can only lead if we know what we stand for. A retired leader from another foreign service told me this year that Australia is viewed as a chameleon in world affairs – saying one thing and doing another. That’s a problem. “You’ve got to walk the talk,” Justin Langer told Barrie Cassidy recently. “If you talk excellence and walk mediocrity, you’re nothing but a common liar.” Langer was talking about our men’s cricket team but the same holds for Australia. How we act during and after Covid, whether it’s for sporting stars or international students, will speak volumes for our national integrity.

Covid-19 has exposed fault lines and frontiers for Australia’s future. We should roll up our sleeves and start paving a new path – actions will speak louder than words.

Travers McLeod is CEO of the Centre for Policy Development.

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Sam Mostyn and Travers McLeod: Coronavirus is a human crisis beyond most of our scariest dreams – we will need to restart our society

Published in The Guardian on 4 April 2020

Whether we like it or not, our economy – and indeed our society – is going to be remade over the coming months. But we do have a choice about how this remaking is done – in fear or in hope – and we need to make that choice now.

That is the choice Mariana Mazzucato offers us in her prescient book The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018) – which seems to lay out in advance what governments, businesses and communities around the world are learning fast amid Covid-19.

Once dubbed the world’s scariest economist, and then an economic rockstar, Mazzucato’s work on public value and the entrepreneurial state doesn’t pit government against business, unions or the community. It has them working together to imagine the future.

That’s the opportunity we have today – and we’ve seen it in real time as government, the opposition, business and unions have worked together to shift our economic response from one of fear to one of hope. The jobkeeper announcement was a “yes, we can” moment brought about by a crisis that is unprecedented but was not unexpected. It should signal a new norm – alliances activated to develop a national Covid19 mission anchored in hope.

In December 2018, the Centre for Policy Development hosted Mariana Mazzucato’s first Australian tour. At the time she wrote for this publication and asked if Australia was too focused on our rate of growth, and not its shape or direction.

It’s a warning many made about the dangers of Australia’s direction of travel during our 29-year record run of GDP growth. There have been a number of warning signs, whether it’s company behaviour brought to life by multiple royal commissions, government reliance on consultants and contractors over deeper capability and memory, broken employment services that have left long-term jobseekers with anaemic Newstart payments and wait-lists of more than five years, and a system that doesn’t value our caring professions anywhere near as much as they should.

Our reflection at the end of Mazzucato’s tour was that, with few exceptions, neither the public nor private sector in Australia had enough capability, confidence or the right incentives to chase missions that were cross-cutting, far-sighted, smart and sustainable. The penny was yet to drop.

Finding a pathway out of Covid-19 will not be easy. It will be a huge feat to restart our society and our economy once the worst passes. First and foremost, this will be a human crisis beyond most of our scariest dreams. Many of us will have families, friends, relatives or colleagues directly impacted. Many already have been, whether it’s because they are sick, are on the front line, are out of work, have lost their business, or are losing hope.

But it would be a huge mistake for Australia to go back to where we came from. We need to reflect seriously on our national capacity before the crisis – the lack of complexity in our economy, diminishing capability across our public sector, and the inequity in our communities. Our headline growth indicator was okay but struggled to be clean, sustainable or inclusive, particularly coming out of a summer bruised by drought, heat, fire and storms.

We now have a chance to mobilise the nation around the Covid-19 missions and moonshots that help us to deal with this crisis and prepare for the future. We have a unique chance to rebuild our uniquely Australian society together, in a way that works for all, including our most disadvantaged, and makes us better prepared for systemic shocks. A focus on missions is perfect for a country like Australia with our unique disposition to democracy, and where businesses are stepping up on purpose and broader social responsibilities.

What could a Covid-19 mission look like?

It starts with recognising this crisis will affect our society differently and, for once, recognising those that need the most care are our elderly, our young, people with disability, Indigenous Australians, homeless, those in our criminal justice system, and our migrant communities.

It moves to rethinking how we value care: recognising that at this moment of crisis it is the teachers, nurses, carers and cleaners who are delivering the essential services to hold society together. It is about wondering why these jobs, largely performed by women, are paid less than some of the high-flier careers that now seem to be peripheral to core purpose.

It is about rediscovering the art of service delivery at local level. We are recognising that community is a centre of both production and support that can never be privatised or outsourced. From developing local caring circles for neighbourhoods in lockdown to looking at how local streets can produce fruit and vegetables to sustain each other. Community deals will help us to grow our society and protect the most vulnerable.

Our Covid-19 mission will be about rebuilding broken industries, with a view to the future and not a relapse into a flawed past. In childcare, for instance, where many providers may not survive the lockdown, there will be an opportunity to create a sector that truly honours the international research that early learning is the passport to a happy and thriving life. Dealing with these challenges will, by necessity, force us to rethink the way our federation is working. At the moment, the federal government funds long-day care while the states are largely responsible for “kinder”. It is not a national mission for our kids but a mishmash.

Our mission can end the false dichotomy between the economy and the environment and rebuild industries that serve both. Embracing renewable power, rethinking the way we consume energy and embracing the challenge to get to net zero emissions will make our economy more competitive, more equitable for women and more productive at the same time. We can rethink local manufacturing and supply chains and with it a richer, more diverse set of jobs and skills for our people.

Hope about the new normal that can emerge in the wake of Covid-19 is now the best currency Australia has at its disposal. Agreeing on a set of Covid-19 “missions” for Australia will help us to deal with the complex and cascading human, health and economic crises now upon us.

Could we for instance, commit to planting 100 million trees and vegetable gardens as part of rebooting of our economy? This would lift the Landcare initiative for 20 million trees to be planted in Australia by 2020 five-fold. This bigger mission would be a practical way to reduce emissions, generate income, create jobs and foster community engagement, something many Australians can do while self-isolating or while observing physical distancing.

Whatever we decide, our collaborative response to Covid-19 should help Australia to build a bridge to a stronger society, one that allows us to solve some of our biggest problems and renew trust in democracy at the same time.

Sam Mostyn is Deputy Chair and Travers McLeod is CEO of the Centre for Policy Development (CPD).

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Special Covid-19 Roundtable

On 30 March, CPD convened a group of leaders from health, business, policy and philanthropy to discuss Australia’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We held this roundtable virtually, in lieu of our 2020 John Menadue Oration, which was to be delivered by Megan Davis on the topic “Can Australia deliver?”. Instead, we asked our guests to help us answer a different question: “How can Australia deliver during (and after) Covid-19?”

Experts joining the roundtable included Oxford University’s Ian Goldin, immunologist and Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty, ANZ Chief Economist Richard Yetsenga, Non-executive director Sam Mostyn, APRA Executive Board Member Geoff Summerhayes, and CPSU National Secretary Melissa Donnelly. We heard insights from those at the frontlines in health, finance and service delivery, including Clare Skinner from NSW Health, Don Russell from Australian Super, and Disability Discrimination Commissioner Ben Gauntlett. The full participant list can be found here.

Ahead of the roundtable, participants were asked to submit ideas about how Australia can deliver during and after Covid-19. These suggestions spanned a range of issues and sectors, and both near and long-term responses, reflecting the breadth of the crisis we are confronting. They included ideas to strengthen health policy and delivery; to address critical issues in care, equity and human services; to boost economic and social capacity; and to improve our governance and institutions. Together, participants reviewed these ideas and discussed other priorities. Our focus was the immediate response to Covid-19 but also how this crisis can inform Australia’s future. A major theme of our discussion was the idea of care and its ongoing importance to the skills, policies and principles for rebuilding Australia’s post-Covid society and economy. We looked at options for restarting industries and communities once the crisis passes, how to keep people engaged amid physical distancing and social isolation, how best to train and upskill surge workforces across public services and the economy, how to make the most of Covid-related actions to deliver health and environmental dividends, and the institutions Australia will need to deal with other systemic risks on the horizon, including future pandemics.

CPD will work with participants to develop several of the ideas presented. We will advance them as appropriate to the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission, parliamentary processes, philanthropy, businesses and community organisations. We would like to thank participants for their time and contribution. We look forward to an ongoing conversation with them and our wider network about Australia’s response to the challenges ahead.

CPD’s mission is to build better policy for the long term. The immediate challenges we face locally, nationally and globally are more profound than at any moment in recent history. Decisions and developments in the days, weeks and months ahead will fundamentally shape Australia’s society, environment and economy for years to come.  Now is the time for clear analysis, good ideas, strong values and effective partnerships. All of us have a duty to contribute. We have been heartened that colleagues in think tanks, NGOs, business, social services and government are rising to the challenge. Like everyone, we are inspired by the resilience and resolve of medics, educators, carers, cleaners, friends and families at the frontlines of this crisis. At CPD, we will continue our existing work: connecting vulnerable people to jobs, building better services for disadvantaged communities, shaping an economy that is more resilient to climate and other risks, and pushing Australia to lead on regional challenges like forced migration and displacement. We will respond to the crisis by connecting experts, uncovering the best ideas, and getting them in the right hands – focussing on both immediate responses and the recovery to come.

 

Related reading and media

Fiona Armstrong, Anthony Capon and Ro McFarlane, Coronavirus is a wake-up call: our war with the environment is leading to pandemics, The Conversation

Jennifer Doggett, After coronavirus, private hospitals should not be allowed to return to ‘business as usual’, The Guardian 

John Durie, Coronavirus: Sam Mostyn says governments must prepare the community for change, The Australian

John Durie, Here’s hoping idea of special deals doesn’t have wings, The Australian

Miranda Stewart and Peter Whiteford, Canberra must create a huge new welfare-state system, Australian Financial Review 

Sam Mostyn and Travers McLeod, Coronavirus is a human crisis beyond most of our scariest dreams – we will need to restart our society, The Guardian and Holding the nation together: Sam Mostyn in conversation with Travers McLeod, Australia at Home

 

Key documents

Agenda


Participant list


Summary

 

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Travers McLeod: we need a red team for COVID-19

There has been no shortage of commentary on the government’s response to Covid-19. With the greatest respect to all our leaders, who have Australia’s best interests closest to their hearts, pandemic or coronavirus are not new words to them. We have not prepared properly for this pandemic and that needs to be recognised and accepted. We can shift, but it requires a change of thinking and bringing a range of experts into the tent.

Poor preparation

In his foreword to Australia’s latest Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza last August, home affairs minister Peter Dutton acknowledged the inevitability of an influenza pandemic with the “potential to cause high levels of disease and death and disrupt our community socially and economically.”

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 Senates estimates hearing in June 2013 featuring Jane Halton, secretary of the Department of Health and Housing, 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 question of whether an adequate medical stockpile existed and whether money had been put aside to deal with a pandemic.

The Australian Red Team

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 group-think.

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,” often involving “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 will ensure we constantly test orthodox thinking. It would analyse scenarios to help us to get in front of the situation, and diligently prepare the transition back to normalcy once it is under control. Tasks might include how best to train and deploy surge workforces in health and essential services, what to do about an immense debt overhang, how to restart and reinvigorate industries sector by sector, how to get the workforce back into jobs, how to institutionalise planning for national disruptions, identifying new expenditures for capacity and capability, and how to rebuild 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 decisionmaking during our most complex crisis in generations.

 

Travers McLeod is chief executive of the Centre for Policy Development and holds adjunct positions at the University of Melbourne, the University of Western Australia and the University of Oxford.

 

This piece appeared in Inside Story on 24 March 2020. You can access the original here.

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Ninth meeting | ASIA DIALOGUE ON FORCED MIGRATION | February 2020

 

Key documents for the ninth ADFM meeting:

Full agenda and participant list
Participant profiles
Briefing papers

The ninth meeting of the Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration (ADFM) was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on 19-20 February 2020. The ADFM Secretariat was delighted to meet in Dhaka for the first time, and for the opportunity this provided to return to Cox’s Bazar before the meeting to follow up on its trafficking risk assessment.

The meeting offered an important and rare opportunity to exchange and devise new ideas and practical proposals to address our region’s shared forced migration challenges. The focus of the ninth ADFM meeting was on:

Renewed support to the Governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar in responding to the Rohingya crisis, including supporting pursuit of safe, dignified and voluntary repatriation, and strategies to support the refugee and host communities;
Future regional priorities for forced migration responses, including a proposal for analysis of progress of Bali Process initiatives since the 2016 Bali Declaration;
Climate-induced displacement and its impact on vulnerable groups.

In response to the Rohingya displacement, we identified a number of proposals for action. These focused on building trust and confidence and advancing safe, dignified, voluntary and sustainable repatriation, mitigating the risks of trafficking in persons, and responding to the short and medium term development needs of displaced and local populations in Cox’s Bazar and Rakhine State.

In addition to the displacement crisis, ADFM participants developed practical proposals for improving the region’s ability to respond to significant forced displacement and protection issues, including through: collating existing research and data on hotspots and risk scenarios for climate related displacement; and conducting an assessment of future regional priorities for forced migration responses, including analysis of progress of Bali Process initiatives since the 2016 Bali Declaration.

We are grateful to the Government of Bangladesh, the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), UNHCR and IOM for all of their help and support on the ground in arranging the Dhaka meeting and Cox’s Bazar visit, and particularly the Bangladesh Ministry of Home Affairs and IOM for co-hosting the ADFM Dinner on 19 February.

The ADFM was established to incubate ideas and new approaches to more effective, durable and dignified approaches to forced migration in the Asia-Pacific. It is co-convened by a Secretariat including the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), the Institute for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Mahidol University, and Centre for Policy Development (CPD) in Australia The ADFM has met eight times since August 2015, in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

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