Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 93

The Social Innovator Dialogues | February Festival 2012

Taking place in February across various cities in Australia, The Social Innovator Dialogues brings internationally renowned leaders in social innovation together with local changemakers, with a view to fostering a dialogue about social innovation in Australia. The Dialogues series is a joint effort by the Centre for Social Impact, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and the Australian Social Innovation Exchange.

MASTERCLASS: Participate: the new tools of digital engagement with Richard WilsonMelbourne - Wed 15th February, 2012. More info and registrationAdelaide - Thu 16th February, 2012. More info and registrationSydney - Mon 20th February, 2012. More info and registrationFREE LECTURE: The Arab Spring: What Happened, What Happens Next? with Tarik YousefAdelaide - Tue 21st February, 2012. More info and registrationFORUM: What's Working? A forum on young people, skills and jobs – Presented by: Jonty Olliff-Cooper & Tarik YousefMelbourne - Mon 27th February, 2012 – More info and registrationSydney - Tue 28th February, 2012 – More info and registrationTBC: Serving Beyond the Predictable: A New Frame for 21st Century Public Service with Jocelyne BourgonVenue TBC - Wed 22nd February, 2012 – More info and registration

This "February Festival" has three main components:

One is focused on Richard Wilson, founder of IzWe in the UK and a young entrepreneur, writer and thinker around the issues of citizen engagement and more open models of participation in policy and service reform.  He is running sessions in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, where he has already started some useful discussions with the Department of Premier and Cabinet.Another session will be a couple of forums featuring Tarik Yousef and Jonty Olliff-Cooper.  Tarik was the founding profession of public policy at the Dubai School of Government and has recently taken up a role as CEO of Silatech, a leading social enterprise in the Middle East with a focus on young people, skills and entrepreneurship.  Jonty is part of the leadership group at A4E, a major UK-based employment services organisation with operations now in the UK, Europe, India and Australia.  Jonty was also part of the "progressive conservatism" project at Demos in London.The third piece of the Festival is a session that Jocelyne Bourgon will be leading in Melbourne, based on her "new synthesis" project.  The project, based on action research over the past 3 years in 6 countries (including Australia), is exploring new models of 21st century public administration to, as Jocelyne puts it, "serve beyond the predictable."  She's in Australia to formally launch the book that summarises the research program outcomes, together with her Australian partners ANZSOG and the Australian Public Service Commission.

Full details on dates, venues, and video presentations of past speakers can be found here

Find more ideas and publications on the Australian Public Service in one of our major research programs here.

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Mike Seccombe | Economic Hypochondria Down Under

After having lived in the United States for almost six years, Mike Seccombe returned to his homeland of Australia and to report at the just launched The Global Mail. And one of the first things he noticed was the chorus of voices of the Australian public saying, 'the cost of living is killing us'.

But why all the fuss?

With Australia boasting low unemployment and government debt, coupled with high and growing wages (Australia is the country with the highest median wealth according to Credit Suisse Research Institute), Mike Seccombe debunks a few myths on why our perceptions of cost of living are far from reality.

Drawing heavily from CPD fellow Ian McAuley's research paper, 'What Are We Complaining About? An Analysis of Cost of Living Pressures', Seccombe illustrates how Australia has reaped the rewards of "Australian exceptionalism" grounded in the most successful economic system of the late 20th and early 21st century: a low-tax country with high quality public institutions, a low-debt country leading the world in human development and infrastructure.

So why do so many Australian's have the perception that they are 'doing it tough'? Quite possibly, we have confused cost of lifestyle, with actual cost of living. For instance, there are certain expenditures that are nowadays considered the norm, such as home extensions and private-schooling. It may also have to do with the fact that the more 'salient items' (such as fruit, utilities, housing) have risen, while 'less-salient items' (appliances, electronics, shoes, computers) have decreased dramatically. We deal with salient items almost everyday, therefore we are more likely to take a conscious note of these rising prices. Little is our attention taken by the drop in less-salient prices, hence the disproportionate outlook on the overall cost of living.

Of course, there is a certain faction of the Australian public that are feeling the pinch of cost of living pressures, such as those renting and those who are dependent on government benefits. Yet, it is not these groups who are doing the "complaining on talkback media" and being stirred into resentment in politics and the media.

"Real people are more subjective. Behavioural economics shows that the fear of a loss is more keenly felt than the anticipation of a gain. And despite Australians' current wealth, the evidence is that we look out to the world and see uncertainty."

Read the full article in The Global Mail here.

Want to do some further reading on this issue? Have a read of Ian McAuley's paper on cost of living pressures in Australia.

Ian McAuley | What are we complaining about? An analysis of cost of livng pressures

In our second paper Ian McAuley asks: are most Australians really 'doing it tough'?

In response to the widely-held notion that we are all suffering from cost of living pressures, Ian McAuley goes looking for the evidence. He finds that for the majority of Australians rising incomes have kept well ahead of rising prices. Some people are feeling a squeeze: renters and people who rely on government benefits other than the age pension have seen their living costs rise faster than their incomes. McAuley draws on studies of consumer behaviour to explain why others might feel like they're struggling.

Ben Eltham | Carbon Free Will Be A Hard Slog

Can we meet our 2020 renewable energy target? The new report from the Grattan Institute pulls no punches as it highlights the magnitude of the task at hand, writes Ben Eltham in New Matilda.

"Australia will have to make hard decisions over our future energy policy. We will have to invest significant amounts of taxpayer money if we want to abandon business as usual — as indeed we must. And we will have to navigate some very treacherous political waters, as the combined might of the status quo mobilises to protect the profits embedded in our existing energy infrastructure."

Read the full article in the New Matilda here

 

Miriam Lyons | ABC Q&A

In the much anticipated return of Q&A in 2012, CPD director Miriam Lyons casts her political lens on the hot topics for this year. Along with finance minister Penny Wong, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey, economist Judith Sloan, and journalist Joe Hildebrand, the panel discusses, analyses, and of course, disputes over issues such as the ALP leadership debate, the state of the economy, global wages, bank job cuts and many more polemic topics.

Watch the full program on the ABC website here

What Are We Complaining About? An Analysis of Cost of Living Pressures

Are most Australians really 'doing it tough'?

In response to the widely-held notion that we are all suffering from cost of living pressures, CPD fellow Ian McAuley undertakes a thorough research of the evidence. Ian finds, in fact, that for the majority of Australians rising incomes have kept well ahead of rising prices. Some people are feeling a squeeze: renters and people who rely on government benefits other than the age pension have seen their living costs rise faster than their incomes:

From 2003-04 to 2009-10, rents rose by 41 per cent in today's dollars.While age pensions are linked to average earnings, some other benefits are linked to the official inflation figures (Consumer Price Index). Costs have been going up by 3.7% a year for these people, while incomes have only been going up by 3.0% a year.

For most Australians, the paper finds that 'expectation inflation' is a much more likely explanation for perceived cost of living pressures.

Some people are possibly feeling poorer because house prices have stopped rising. This is the flip side of the illusion of 'wealth' associated with the strong rise in house prices from 1995 until 2009.

Some household bills, such as electricity, attract particular attention. Even though electricity takes only around two percent of our income, electricity bills can come as a nasty shock, particularly if there is some combination of higher usage and a price rise.

Research in consumer behaviour finds that we are far more attentive to price rises than price falls. While we are very conscious of price rises for items such as bananas and school fees, we are less aware of price falls, such as those which have occurred in clothing, telecommunications and domestic appliances.

DOWNLOAD and read 'What Are We Complaining About? An Analysis of Cost of Living Pressures' here.

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Chris Bonnor | The 'State' of our schools

The very schools that the education bureaucracies are supposed to champion are increasingly becoming a safety net for the children that no one else wants.

Chris Bonnor writes:

The media stories at the start each school year are usually predictable: getting ready for school, the cost of schooling, the odd crisis or two. Most of these are written well in advance.

But a story this week broke the mould and created more than a little interest. The Australian told of a leaked report which dispelled any doubt that government policy was largely responsible for the increasing residualisation of public schools – and at a great cost to their enrolled students. The report by Professor Richard Teese added new and disturbing information to what we already know.

In one sense the situation it portrays isn't new. The residualisation of public schools, the ones which are obliged to be free, accessible and inclusive, was inevitable from the day governments funded private schools to compete with their own. The charging of fees alone would guarantee that they would harvest the middle class, leaving the public provider – as John Howard once put it so – as a safety net for others. You couldn't write a better script to create social, resource and academic divides between schools.

Read the full article in On line Opinion here

Change can happen faster than you think – help us seize the moment and point to the alternatives. Add your voice to ours!

 

Ian McAuley | The Howard Years Were No Golden Age

If Tony Abbott is serious about the Opposition's claims of economic competence, he should stop harking back to the Howard years as he did yesterday at the National Press Club – and here's why.

CPD Fellow, Ian McAuley, writes in New Matilda:

"The only foundation for a successful country is a strong economy", said Tony Abbott in his National Press Club address yesterday.

That much is uncontentious, but his claim that previous Coalition governments had delivered sound economic management was outrageous.

"Australians can be confident that the Liberal and National parties will provide good economic management in the future because that is what we have always done in the past," he said. "We have done it before and we will do it again."

That's a wild statement. The Coalition has had the fortune to hold office in good economic times — including the postwar boom of the 1950s and 1960s and the period from 1996 to 2007 when the Howard government enjoyed the dividends of the Hawke-Keating economic reforms, and when the world economy was enjoying a long speculative-driven boom. Good luck, perhaps, but not good management.

In fact he went on to praise the Howard government specifically, saying: "16 members of the current shadow cabinet were ministers in the Howard government which now looks like a lost golden age of reform and prosperity."

If he were serious about the Opposition's claims of economic competence, he would hardly mention service in the Howard ministry as an endorsement. The Howard government's economic report card is overall a dismal one.

Read the full article in New Matilda here.

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Ben Eltham | A Wealthy Amateur Who Wants Respect

It's not easy turning dirt into power. Gina Rinehart has the money but she's struggled to wield national influence. That may change now that she has a bigger stake in Fairfax, writes Ben Eltham in New Matilda:

Money and power sometimes walk hand in hand….

Rinehart thinks it is far too costly and difficult to build new mines in Australia. She is against the mineral resource rent tax and the carbon tax, which she claims will "will diminish Australia's attractiveness to foreign investment". (Luckily, the bosses at Korean steel-maker Posco apparently weren't listening. They decided to invest $1.5 billion for a stake in one of Hancock's iron ore mines shortly after this speech was made). She also wants to open up mining to overseas workers on short-term visas, and create "special economic zones" (read: tax havens) in the north-west "with policies conducive to opening and developing successful businesses, to enable more opportunity for exciting vision and development, with low taxation for those Australians who want to work and live in our north".

Such attitudes are commonplace among Western Australia's corporate elite; indeed, some of them Coalition policy. Getting rid of the mining tax and the carbon tax are scarcely fringe positions, after all. The difference between ordinary businesspeople and Coalition voters and Rinehart is … well, it's the money. "The very rich are different to you and I," remarked F. Scott Fitzgerald, "they have more money." And for no-one is this truer than for Rinehart, who has the wealth to buy up large swathes of the media and run it according to her own prejudices, if she chooses.

Given Rinehart's attitudes and proclivities, many have understandably begun to speculate about whether she really does intend to take over Fairfax completely, and if so, whether she could exert control over the media company's editorial positions. The answers, I think, are yes, and yes.

There's not a lot of point of owning a stake in a failing newspaper business unless you want to use it as a mouthpiece for your own political ideas. Even Rupert Murdoch understands this: News Corporation has long subsidised under-performing media assets like The Australian and the Wall Street Journal precisely because of the political clout they contribute.

And the answer to the question of whether a media owner can drive the editorial positions of the media outlets she owns should also be obvious with reference to the Murdoch examples. 

Read the full article in New Matilda here.

 

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Ben Eltham | The Mob Violence That Wasn't

The media has framed it as violent but the tent embassy protest was basically peaceful. It's this gross distortion – and the heavy-handed response of the AFP – that warrant criticism, writes Ben Eltham

Ben asks whether the protesters were really violent:

Despite no arrests being made, no physical harm coming to any of the guests of the ceremony, indeed, no real threat to the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition at all, through lazy reporting and the distorting lens of the television footage, the protests have been reported as though a group of violent protesters took Australia's two most senior politicians hostage.

It hasn't taken long for the usual suspects to rear their heads and issue forth with pompous outrage.

"The Aboriginal tent embassy has never engendered public respect," thundered News Limited's David Penberthy. "It has never done anything to bring black and white Australia together." Penberthy also made wild claims about an "illegal assortment of galvanised humpies" and an "unprecedented outburst of violence that saw our Prime Minister being dragged along the ground and our Opposition Leader cowering behind a riot shield."

The Herald-Sun's Andrew Bolt went one step further, calling the protest a "riot", writing of "Gillard, fear on her face, being monstered" and calling the end of the reconciliation movement. "It's just too dangerous," he averred.

It's easy to see why Indigenous leaders such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda were so exasperated by the events yesterday, and the inevitable backlash they will provoke. "An aggressive, divisive and frightening protest such as this, has no place in debates about the affairs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or in any circumstances," he has been reported as saying, and it is true that the protest will not advance the cause of reconciliation.

But Tent Embassy spokesman Pal Coe made a point largely lost in the media coverage today, which is that Warren Mundine and Mick Gooda don't speak for those involved, much less for Aboriginal Australia as a whole. "You cannot work a peaceful way when governments rely upon certain Aboriginal people to justify a position, a political position, a policy position that they take and they conveniently choose to ignore the rest of Aboriginal people because they have one or two convenient spokespeople," he told the ABC's George Roberts.

 

The original article can be found in New Matilda here

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What would 'Big Society' mean for Australia?

Our first major report in CPD's Public Service research program, The State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report, analysed political commentary and media coverage that, at times, depicts the Australian Public Service as inefficient, large, costly and unwelcome in some aspects of our lives. Our research revealed the disconnect between this rhetoric, community attitudes and the reality of public service staffing, funding and functions.

We now turn our gaze to the radical public sector reforms that are in full swing in the United Kingdom and to consider what they could mean for Australia.

Since mid 2011, we have been monitoring British Prime Minister David Cameron's Big Society agenda to ask:

•  What could the Big Society ideology and the associated public sector changes mean in Australia?

•  Why it has been resisted so vigorously in the UK?

•  What type of society does the 'Big Society' agenda create?

We hope the next stage of our Public Service program will inform and energise debates about the future of public services in Australia. Read more about our work here and here, and follow us on Twitter for more regular updates.

Join the 'Big Society' conversation on social media

If you want to get beyond the Orwellian doublespeak and find out what the 'Big Society' is really about, then join a conversation you won't find in the mainstream media. Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. We'll be sharing links to topical online resources including CPD's publications and media.

We're also making our Delicious Account (the place where we save media and analysis about the 'Big Society' agenda) publicly available. You can find a stack of recent links here. Read what we are reading. Learn how 'Big Society' would change the public service and its place in society, and be part of the public service debate in Australia.

Staying Ahead of the Game: The World's Best Public Service

Just over a year ago, the Australian Government concluded a major review of the Australian Public Service. Ahead of the Game, the review's final report, contained 28 actions to help create 'the World's best public service'.

One year on, what has changed?

Later this year, CPD hopes to run public workshops to hear how various government agencies are implementing these actions. CPD intern Rob Harding-Smith has analysed over half of the 182 submissions made to the Moran Review, examining the relationship between concerns and issues raised by public service stakeholders and the 28 recommended actions.

View an online summary of Rob's analysis here.

Our Public Service Research Program

The CPD Public Service Program aims to develop a robust knowledge base about the state of the public service: its funding and capacity; performance in delivering community services; and attitudes toward and expectations of the Australian Public Service. Click here to read more.

Find more ideas and publications on the Australian Public Service in one of our major research programs here.

 

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