Centre for Policy Development's Blog, page 99

John Menadue | Talking policy sense in response to asylum seeker deaths

John Menadue, CPD founder and former Head of the Department of Immigration, joins ABC Radio National's Fran Kelly to discuss the recent deaths of eight asylum seekers in a boat that sank off Java. Indonesian Police say the crew members of a boat could face up to five years in jail. It has now emerged that some of the 48 survivors thought the boat was unsafe, and were demanding it be taken back to shore. Following the tragedy, the political debate in Canberra turned into an unedifying game of 'I told you so' as both sides of politics argued that their policy would have avoided people dying.

LISTEN to John Menadue talking sense in the face of what is a political not policy problem.

Laura Eadie | ABC Local Radio Newcastle

CPD researcher Laura Eadie appeared on ABC 1233 Newcastle Local Radio this morning – interviewed by Jill Emberson –  talking about Australia's future sustainable economy and the increasing recognition of climate change in Australian coastal planning within public policy.

Laura is the author of Stocking Up: Securing Our Marine Economy the first in a series of reports that will look at how different sectors of Australia's economy can benefit from policies to preserve the environment and resources that sustain them.

Public Service in the News | UK continues to analyse 'Big Society' reforms and with it comes increasing criticism

<p><strong><a title=" title="Accounting">Why 'John Lewis jails' are better for corporations than for prisoners >  A thinktank wants to cut crime with 'John Lewis jails', but the plan to get prisoners working looks more like a new opportunity for giant corporations

Ben Eltham | And it passed! Australia Sets A Price on Pollution

As the carbon tax passes the Senate, NM's national affairs correspondent Ben Eltham looks at the historical significance of today's vote

This momentous change to Australia's economic architecture has been a long time coming. Say what you like about Julia Gillard's decision to change course, and break a promise on introducing a carbon tax in the wake of gaining minority government in a hung Parliament, but this decision is hardly without precedent in the Australian polity.

As former Hawke government science minister Barry Jones reminded us in a typically succinct article earlier this year, the idea of pricing pollution as a so-called 'negative externality' originally goes back to 19th century economist William Stanley Jevons, while the scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect was first outlined by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. Jones himself was a prominent early proponent of taking action to combat climate change in the 1980s, as Julia Gillard noted in a July address to the National Press Club.

Indeed, the idea of a carbon tax was first mooted by the Hawke-Keating government, although it was never formalised as legislation. During the Hawke-Keating years, Australia signed up to the UN Framework process on climate change, and although the Howard government notoriously refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol, Australia stayed involved at a diplomatic level throughout the tenure of the Howard government. It's easy to forget nowadays, but John Howard's government even set an emissions target for Australia in line with our Kyoto responsibilities, and the Howard government took an emissions trading scheme to the people as an election promise in the 2007 election.

The course of climate policy since Labor took government is better known. Kevin Rudd's government spent much of its first two years in office developing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. It invested huge political capital in passing it as a bipartisan package, rightly judging that a significant economic reform such as this would soon become deeply unpopular as soon as it become politicised. But Labor played plenty of politics itself, using climate policy as a wedge to drive between a Liberal Party divided on the merits of anthropogenic global warming and the policy response to it.

Kevin Rudd reaped the whirlwind in late 2009, when his strategy of using climate policy to destabilise the Liberal Party backfired spectacularly. Instead of splitting the Liberals, Rudd ended up unifying them behind the ruthless leadership of Tony Abbott. The CPRS bills were voted down twice in the Senate. Labor's poll figures started to bleed. Factional leaders started to become uncomfortable.

Climate policy was also the cause of the key event that set in train the downfall of Rudd as Prime Minister. This was Kevin Rudd's April 2010 decision to postpone all further attempts to pass theCPRS. As we noted at the time, it was a backflip that could only damage Rudd's reputation and standing in the electorate. As it turned out, his leadership never recovered. Julia Gillard was Prime Minister in a few short weeks.

I made a further prediction in my article about the CPRS back-down in 2010: that the death of the CPRS might even be good news in the long term for the likelihood of Australia embracing a sensible climate policy. "The Greens will almost certainly control the Senate in the next Parliament," I argued, "so if Labor does move an ETS bill after the election, the resulting policy will have to be stronger [and] featuring tougher targets."

And so it has come to pass. The eventual shape of the climate policy Australia is adopting today is in many respects stronger than that proposed under the CPRS. The so-called "gateway targets" are more stringent, the industry compensation slightly less generous, the mechanisms to adjust targets and compensation better. Most importantly, there is a mandated floor price on carbon for the first three years of the scheme. This particular measure is looking prescient, given the recent collapse in international carbon markets owing to the struggling European economy.

As a result, Australia now enjoys one of the highest carbon prices in the world, with one of the strongest policy architectures to ensure the decarbonisation of our economy. I say "enjoys", but of course many will lament Australia's decision. They will trot out all the usual arguments that Australia is "going it alone", that the carbon price will harm the economy, and that nothing Australia does will make any difference to global emissions. But they will be proven wrong on all counts. This is an historic day for Australian economic and environmental policy. It is the beginning of a long and necessary path towards carbon neutrality.

It would be preferable, as a political commentator, to be able to write columns such as this without ever mentioning opinion polls. But the truth is that opinion polls exert a powerful influence on public affairs through their psychological impact on journalists and politicians, and even on ordinary voters. And so it does matter that Labor today enjoys a long-dreamed for bounce in the polls. Labor's primary vote has climbed out of the 20s and into the low 30s, narrowing the Coalition's lead from all-conquering to merely convincing. The only poll that matters is not for another two years. But with recent polls heading in the right direction, Labor's internal rumblings will quieten, and the media may even start to take more notice of the government's achievements.

What, then, of the Opposition? Under Tony Abbott, the Coalition has reaped maximum political gain from playing irresponsibly to public opposition to the carbon tax. But that tactic is now reaching its use-by date. More generally, recent events suggest that Tony Abbott's days in the sun may already be behind him. A strategy based on complete and total negativity has many advantages, including clarity. But it inevitably suffers in terms of relevance as decisions are taken and the public debate moves on.

One big problem for the Coalition's policy of opposing everything is that sometimes this is a lot more complex than it seems. The Coalition's recent contortions over superannuation policy are a good example. The government is committed to raising compulsory employer-paid superannuation to 12 per cent in small increments out to 2018. It's going to pay for this with money raised by the Minerals Resource Rent Tax, which the Coalition opposes. So most people thought the Opposition would also oppose the increases to superannuation.

But over the weekend, in a decision apparently taken without full approval by the shadow cabinet, the Opposition decided to support the increase in superannuation. As a result, the Opposition will have to find billions of dollars in extra "savings" (let's leave aside the fictitious nature of most of their previously-announced savings for the moment) in order to meet their various budget commitments. The whole thing has looked messy and improvised.

The point is not whether the Opposition is divided on the merits of raising Australians' retirement incomes, although it is certainly confused. The broader point is the increasing difficulties Tony Abbott and the Opposition face in trying to explain how to unscramble Labor's policy omelettes, once in government. The Coalition has committed itself to rolling back so many of the government's policies that it now faces a huge policy development challenge simply in working out how to sensibly roll them all back. The task becomes explaining exactly how an Abbott government will repeal swathes of complex legislation and policy in areas such as the mining tax, the carbon tax, the NBN, poker machine regulation … the list goes on.

Unfortunately, policy development has never been the Opposition's strong suit. How will these roll-backs work? How will they transition? Who will be compensated? How much will it all cost? There will be many more backflips and confusions in coming months as the Coalition attempts to pin all this down. In the meantime, the rest of the country will move on, even as the Coalition continues to thrash around on the details.

And let's not forget another important point about today's vote: the government has had a big win. Conversely, despite all the drama and controversy of the past year, the Opposition must actually confront the reality that it has lost the carbon debate. A price on carbon has been implemented. It will be exceedingly difficult to unwind, except in the unlikely scenario in which the Coalition controls both houses of Parliament sometime in the future. Long before that happens, the Coalition may be forced — by the business lobby, or simply by political expediency — to the tacit acknowledgment that the climate debate in this country has effectively been settled.

In the article earlier mentioned, Barry Jones observes that "the failure of the opposition … to play a meaningful role in discussions on mitigating climate change is a profound historic misjudgment". I agree. Under Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party has, quite unnecessarily, put itself on the wrong side of the most important political and economic issue of the century. The decision to vote against meaningful policy to address climate change will haunt the Liberal Party in years to come, as the planet warms, Australia dries, and the world wakes up to the catastrophe that awaits us.

First published in New Matilda here

Ben Eltham | A Naked Conflict Between Profits And Wages

The IR dispute that stopped the nation is a handy yardstick for gauging just how hostile our general public conversation has become to organised labour, writes Ben Eltham

"The enigma of trade is that it can make a whole country richer and yet most of its people poorer," writes US economist Dean Baker in a recent book. This melancholy conundrum is the crux of the Qantas dispute.

Baker is writing about the way trade liberalisation has eroded jobs and wages in the US manufacturing industries, but the experience of airlines in Australia is no different. Exposed to stiff gales of creative destruction in the form of the cut-throat international airline industry, even famous brands like Qantas are experiencing fierce competitive pressures. Running an airline is a brutal equation at the best of times: wages, fuel and the planes themselves make up a huge proportion of an airline's cost structure, and there is relentless pressure on management to keep these costs under control.

In the old days, Australia's airlines solved this problem by charging very high fares, protected by government regulations that ensured the most lucrative routes and airport slots were saved for Qantas and Ansett and kept international competitors away from lucrative domestic routes.

But nothing lasts forever, and the new strategy at Qantas is to turn the airline into a low-cost carrier, apparently by whatever means necessary. This means all the airline's resources and capital will be ploughed into Jetstar, allowing Qantas to wither away into a legacy business carrier that flies a few remaining profitable routes.

And that in turn means driving down the wages and conditions of Qantas' staff, by shifting pilots, maintenance and other operations offshore. It's Offshoring 101, and it should be no surprise that the airline is undertaking it.

But nor should there be any surprise that the unions are resisting it. The underlying logic of offshoring is all about reducing the wages and conditions of a corporate workforce. The idea that unions should somehow see this as business as usual — indeed, as the only way to ensure Qantas' survival — is neoliberal ideology, pure and simple. In the fantasy land of the business lobby, self-interest is something that only applies to management and shareholders, not to unions and workers.

The planes are now back flying and the airline and its workers are back at the negotiating table. But the real lesson of the Qantas lockout is about capitalism itself. It's not surprising that management wants to cut costs and lower its wages bill. So why should we be surprised that unions and workers want to protect job security?

The minute-to-minute details of the dispute are revealing. By grounding the fleet at a moment's notice, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce forced the hand of the Gillard Government. The Prime Minister was in Perth for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which was due to break up, leaving thousands of diplomats and public officials stranded in Western Australia. Qantas must have known that cancelling half the flights in Australia was an unacceptable proposition for any government, and so indeed it proved.

As a result, the Government invoked its rights under the Fair Work Act to refer the matter straight to the industrial umpire, the full bench of Fair Work Australia, under Howard appointee Justice Giudice. After a marathon overnight hearing stretching into Monday morning, Fair Work Australia ruled that Qantas and the unions had to stop all industrial action and return to the negotiating table.

It was a victory of sorts for Qantas, which was able to shut down the rolling strikes by engineers and baggage, and a blow to the unions. The balance of legal opinion seems to believe that issues of so-called managerial prerogative, such as job security and offshoring, will not be subject to a binding judicial arbitration. In other words, the workers might get a pay rise, but Qantas will be free to continue its ambitious plans to turn itself into a low-cost Asian-based carrier.

The Qantas dispute has become a handy yardstick for gauging just how hostile our general public conversation has become to unions and organised labour. Much of the media has covered the dispute as though it is a litmus test for the Gillard Government's industrial relations legislation, the Fair Work Act. While it certainly is this, the foundation of the dispute is much simpler than arcane legal arguments about protected action and managerial prerogative.

Here is an old-fashioned showdown between organised labour determined to negotiate to protect the interests of workers, and a company management determined to use any means at its disposal to break that union power, in order to drive down the costs of its labour and make more money. This dispute could have happened in any earlier industrial relations regime: yes, even under Work Choices.

And yet much of the media seems unable to understand this dispute for what it is: the naked and unpleasant conflict between wages and profits inherent to capitalism. For instance, the rolling industrial action by the Transport Workers Union and the licensed aircraft engineers has been widely portrayed as holding a gun to the airline's head, or threatening it with a "death by a thousand cuts". On the other hand, when the CEO shut down an entire airline because his enterprise bargaining negotiations weren't going well, this has been justified as a bold tactic to resolve the industrial action and bring the dispute to arbitration.

In reality, of course, the notion that Alan Joyce had no alternative but to lock out his workforce and ground the airline is absurd. There was an alternative: Qantas could have kept negotiating. Perish the thought, it could have even accepted the demands of the three unions, which amounted to below-CPI pay rises and a commitment to keep Australian jobs onshore.

Indeed, as Bill Shorten pointed out on Lateline last night, if Qantas was really committed to bringing its workforce with it on its low-cost journey, it should have started three years ago. "Qantas has had 1150 days to persuade some of their workforce, who are intelligent, educated, dedicated professionals, that things need to be done differently," he said.

But Qantas clearly didn't want to persuade its workforce. Indeed, its actions over the past few days seem to have confirmed that it has been pursuing a premeditated strategy of open warfare with its unions. If Qantas truly wanted to engage with its workforce, why did it lock out its pilots, whose industrial action has so far amounted to nothing more militant than making announcements on aircraft intercoms and wearing different coloured ties? The reason Qantas decided to ground its fleet was not because it had no alternative. The reason was because the unions were winning.

It seems clear that Qantas has in fact long been preparing for this action. The appointment of Alan Joyce himself may well be part of this strategy. Joyce's background before Jetstar was in low-cost, de-unionised airline operators in Europe. In contrast, the man who many think should have got the job, John Borghetti, seems to be pursuing a much friendlier industrial relations strategy at the helm of Virgin Australia.

The man ultimately responsible for appointing Joyce is Qantas' chairman, Leigh Clifford. Clifford is a veteran industrial warrior with a background in some of Australia's most bitter industrial disputes of the 1990s, including Rio Tinto's Robe River conflict. There are many who believe he is actively driving the current round of union-busting under Alan Joyce.

The other thing that shows us this dispute is about union-busting is that the sticking point on the negotiations is not wages, but rather job security. Unions want a say in how the airline operates, for instance by guaranteeing that Qantas flights will be flown by Qantas pilots. If you think that sounds reasonable, you've obviously not been listening to Alan Joyce. For Joyce and Qantas' management, conditions like these are an unacceptable intrusion on the right of the management to make tough decisions. Joyce and Clifford obviously decided it was better to bring the crisis to a head than to cede any authority in the running of the airline to their staff.

But is Qantas' new low-cost Asian strategy necessarily the right one? And is it necessarily bad for unions to have a seat at the management table? The hard-line economists and management theorists say no, of course. And yet in Germany, all companies with more than 500 employees must have staff representatives on their board as a matter of law. Despite this, Germany still manages to be an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse.

No, the real lesson of the Qantas dispute is about capitalism itself. In a system of brutal competition, unscrupulous managers and owners will do whatever it takes to drive down wages and grow profits. That's what they're paid the big bucks for.

First published in New Matilda here.

Media Ownership and Regulation in Australia | DISCUSSION PAPER

By Rob Harding-Smith, CPD Researcher

In theory the media should diversify a nation's democracy, serving as a channel through which many different groups can participate in national debate. Yet with the high levels of media concentration in Australia, are we hearing the voices of the many or simply the few?

CPD Researcher & intern Rob Harding-Smith submitted this report as part of research commissioned for Avaaz who are using this in their submission to the independent media inquiry being conducted by  the Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy.

DOWNLOAD & READ the Discussion Paper here.

Main Points in the Discussion Paper:

Australia's print media ownership is much more highly concentrated than that of most other Western countries
The ownership of Australian TV and radio is following the international trend towards increasing concentration
Changes to Australia's media ownership laws have tended to increase this concentration over time
The emergence of new media does not remove the need for regulation to prevent too much media power from becoming concentrated in too few hands – all but one of the 12 news sites in Australia's top 100 most visited sites are owned by major existing media outlets
Audience and reader complaints about the media are increasing:

Complaints to the government regulator of broadcasting, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, have risen 57% in 5 years, and complaints to the newspaper industry self-regulator the Australian Press Council, are 42% above the long-term average.


DOWNLOAD the discussion paper here.

This publication was commissioned by Avaaz. CPD thanks Avaaz for the opportunity to help inform public debate on media ownership, regulation, and self-regulation.

Reforming public services summit | Melbourne, 26-27 March 2012

Real reform towards citizen-centred social policy
 and empowered users of public services


Why a Summit on Reforming Public Services? Reform of public services has been a constant theme amongst governments, policy officials, and service delivery organisations for the last two decades.

Despite the constant talk, real change towards citizen-centred social policy and empowered users of public services is hard to find. What is more common is a pattern of frequently restructured financing arrangements for service delivery and re-badged programs which have little impact on the experience of users of services. For instance, in the name of 'health reform', the Commonwealth Government has in the last 18 months established no fewer than eight new national statutory authorities to administer health care.

This Summit over two days will review the progress, and the stalemate, in reform of public services, and explore prospects and strategies for reform.

Full details and registration here>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James Arvanitakis | It's a bit rich to just dismiss the poor Occupiers

The Occupy movement has certainly been grabbing many headlines over the last two weeks. One area of contention has been the protestor's agenda (or lack there of according to some). James Arvanitakis, writing for The Punch looks into the message and meaning behind the #occupy protests.

Read the full article in The Punch here

Ben Eltham | Will negative Abbott get a positive result?

Just how negative, opportunistic and hollow is Tony Abbott as Opposition Leader?  Does it really matter? And is it really working in Australian political space? Ben Eltham, building off Laura Tingle's Australian Financial Review criticism of Tony Abbott, looks into the Opposition leader's personally, politics and management style.

Read the full article in The Drum here

Chris Bonnor | Schooling in leadership

When you think about it, politics in todays developed world is amongst the few pursuits that do not require specific training, especially within party and poltical leadership. All an aspiring politician must do is demonstrate some ability and be noticed in her or his pre-selection. Core Education writer Chris Bonnor for ON LINE Opinion looks into the concept of leadership and power within the political space, making an argument for increased trust and respect between all the stakeholders within the political game.

Read the full article in ON LINE Opinion here.