Whitlam has said he hasn’t had a significant disagreement with Fraser for 30 years. There are outward signs that the bad blood of the past has been purged. At 95, Whitlam has already written (and probably pre-recorded, just in case) the introduction he will give when Fraser presents the Whitlam Oration on 6 June next year.

Bitter rivals though they were, Fraser and Whitlam in fact displayed unity on many issues. The fraught events of November 1975 notwithstanding, it is pertinent to consider how these political enemies contributed, not perhaps jointly, but separately to a much better society than we had in 1972.

Both were supporters of the US alliance , but sceptical of a lot of US policies. They were cautious about any US resolve to protect Australia when US relations with regional countries such as Indonesia were involved. Both were certain Australia’s future depended less on North Atlantic protection and more on developing close relations within our region.

Following Whitlam’s breakthrough in establishing diplomatic relations in 1972, Fraser’s first overseas visit as prime minister was to China and then to Japan, where he continued the negotiation of a Treaty of Friendship that Whitlam had initiated.

Both sought to reduce sectarianism in Australian public life. Through state aid, for Catholic and other private schools, Whitlam turned the tide on sectarianism in Australia. Fraser was always critical of Billy Hughes for playing the sectarian card against Irish Catholics in Australia in WWI.

Both were concerned about Indigenous rights. The implementing bill on land rights was awaiting introduction in the Senate on the day of Whitlam’s dismissal. In the first year of the Fraser Government, Parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976.

But the most effective unity ticket was race relations — ending the White Australia policy and cooperating in the settlement of Indochinese refugees.

Whitlam, Don Dunstan and others campaigned successfully to remove the White Australia plank from the ALP platform. The Whitlam Government removed racial discrimination from the statute book. But the new policy was never put to the test. The immigration intake under Whitlam was minimal — the lowest for 30 years and, excluding the Depression and war years, the lowest for 70 years.

In accepting 150,000 refugees from Indochina and with the 90,000 family reunions that followed, Malcolm Fraser broke the back of White Australia. We are now proud of what he and we did together — although it must be said that race relations and refugees remain difficult issues, with populists always ready and willing to exploit fear of the foreigner and the ‘other’.

The Whitlam Government was cautious about taking evacuees after the fall of Saigon, limiting the intake chiefly to persons associated with Australia and to orphans. The Fraser Government faced a larger outflow from 1976 onwards, with many Vietnamese forced into harsh ‘re-education camps’.

Whitlam in Opposition and later Bill Hayden supported Fraser in his leadership on the Indochina intake; because of our commitment to troops in Vietnam we felt we had a particular moral obligation to act decently and generously. And we did. We are now proud of what we did at a difficult time.

The successful Indochina resettlement in Australia could not have occurred without the cooperation of regional countries. They provided temporary asylum for 1.4 million who fled Indochina.

Our dependence on those countries back then provides a lesson that we still have to learn today. Just imagine how Australia would have responded during the Fraser years if 50,000 to 100,000 boat people from Indochina had arrived directly on our coast — which they likely would have, if not for the intervention of countries such as Malaysia.

As Australians, we are still self-righteous in our attitudes to countries such as Malaysia who carry a much higher burden of asylum seekers than we do. Malaysia is making great progress in human rights protection, particularly when it comes to protecting vulnerable people fleeing Burma.

The betterment of society is always a work in progress. The fruitful rivalry between Whitlam and Fraser provides a salient contrast to the more destructive negativism that seems to be the hallmark of the Julia Gillard/Tony Abbott contest. They could learn much from these elder statesmen.

This article first appeared on Eurekastreet here

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CPD Executive Director Miriam Lyons joined forces with Per Capita’s David Hetherington to defend and highlight the merits of a progressive agenda against conservative think tank panelist’s Dr Oliver Hartwich from the Centre for Independent Studies and Tim Wilson of the Institute of Public Affairs. The issues discussed ranged from the traditional ‘nanny state’ battleground to the role of free-market libertarianism in the GFC and the recent debt-crisis. 

WATCH the full event on ABC’s Big Ideas here.

The Gillard Government’s announcement last week to cut public sector spending by $1.5 billion is unwise fiscal policy, out of step with community attitudes and a significant broken promise.

Increasing the efficiency dividend from 1.5 per cent to 4 per cent will tighten the vice on Australian Public Service agencies that are already stretched after two decades of belt-tightening. The direct consequences will include contracted services and increased workloads.

The shaky rationale for increasing the efficiency dividend has received widespread criticism from economists and other commentators. This is not an intelligent or evidence-based strategy to motivate innovation, economy and creativity but a blunt instrument that can reduce or compromise agencies’ outputs. After 20 years, few agencies have further room for further cuts without reducing their core functions. Government reviews of the mechanism in 1994 and 2008 found that it places significant stresses on agencies and recommended alternative measures be investigated.

Treasurer Swan last week justified the increase in the efficiency dividend by invoking the bipartisan obsession with a rapid return from a modest deficit to modest surplus. This is now widely recognised as an unhealthy fetish. Australia has a remarkably low level of public debt and a low level of public sector investment. A survey conducted by Essential Media just this month found that more than 70 per cent of Australians support deferring the return to surplus in order to maintain public services. Other surveys during the last 20 years have found strong support for increasing public sector spending, even if it means increasing taxes.

Before releasing the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), Treasurer Wayne Swan admitted that it would be, “counterproductive to take an axe to the budget in these uncertain times for the global economy”. This was echoed by Deloitte Access Economics Director Chris Richardson who argued that the fate of our surplus was in Europe’s hands and that, during turbulent times spending cuts are unwise. Peter Martin observed that a $40 billion deficit was inconsequential in the context of the Commonwealth’s budget of one third of a trillion dollars and that OECD forecasts have Australia’s economy growing faster than any other developed nation in the coming year.

Describing the increase as a ‘one-off’ measure was no more than spin. Last year’s budget included a ‘one-off’ increase in the efficiency dividend from 1.25 per cent to 1.5 per cent, and there was another ‘one-off’ increase to 3.25 per cent in 2008. In July 2010, Prime Minister Gillard pledged that the Government had “no agenda or plan to cut overall public service numbers”. In July this year the Treasurer committed to maintaining the efficiency dividend at 1.25 per cent and ensuring that efficiency gains are realised “without resorting to job cuts”. This week’s announcements contradict these prior commitments and indicate a change in Labor’s public sector policies.

How will public service cuts affect the Australian community?

Firstly, services are likely to contract. The workforce of the 130 agencies that comprise the Australian Public Service has not kept pace with the growth of the Australian population. This week’s budget cuts have been predicted to result in up to 3,000 retrenchments, further widening the gap between growing community expectations and diminished agency capability. This will be experienced soonest and most acutely by community members who rely most on public services, increasing social and economic disparities.

Secondly, a protracted program of retrenchments would have direct and visible economic consequences, especially in cities and towns with significant numbers of public servants. Between 1997 and 1999, the Howard administration retrenched almost 30,000 public servants. Four years later, the impact was still visible in closed businesses and empty shop fronts, according to the Member for Canberra Gai Brodtmann.

Thirdly, despite Minister Wong’s assertion that some savings might be found by reducing spending on consultants, the job cuts prompted by the increased dividend could be more likely to increase the Government’s long-term dependence on expensive consultants for policy advice. Governments of both persuasions have relied heavily on consultant advisers: the Rudd government spent almost $800 million on 6,534 consultancy contracts during its first 18 months. If the rollercoaster trend in public service firing and rehiring in the last two decades is repeated the short-term cost saving will be costly in the longer term. After gutting almost one-third of the public service and spending $300 million on redundancy packages in its first year, the Howard government steadily rebuilt agencies to restore the required capability.

Deferring the return to surplus is one of several obvious alternatives. Cutting fossil fuel subsidies could save more than $10 billion and reduce carbon emissions. Restricting the first home buyers grant to new housing could save up to up to $600 million a year. Redirecting the private health insurance rebate to direct spending on hospitals (Treasury’s advice) could save over $1 billion.

We need strong and capable public services to build Australia’s resilience in times of global uncertainty. Instead, Australia’s major parties are locked in a race to the bottom.

James Whelan is the Research Director for Public Service Research Program at the Centre for Policy Development.

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

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As first published in New Matilda

Step back from all the sound and fury about budget surpluses and the European debt crisis for a moment, and have an unbiased look at the latest Treasury figures on the health of Australia’s economy.

Unemployment is expected to peak at 5.5 per cent next year, and remain at the level into 2013. Inflation will be 3.25 per cent. Wages will grow at 4 per cent. Consumer spending will grow at 3 per cent, and the economy as a whole at 3.25 per cent.

These are figures that would make finance ministers in Europe weep. The Australian economy is growing. We’re adding jobs and keeping unemployment low, consumers are still spending, and inflation is modest. And yes, the budget will return to surplus.

They’re not quite “a beautiful set of numbers” in and of themselves — they show that Australian growth will be moderate, rather than booming — but in comparison to our northern hemisphere trading partners, they’re almost utopian. Take a look, for instance, at Britain’s latest economic data. British numbers tell a tale on unalloyed misery. Growth is a sickly 0.5 per cent and falling. Unemployment is at 8.3 per cent and growing. Despite this, inflation is galloping along at 5 per cent. This is stagflation of a particularly nasty variety. And Britain, like the Euro area, Japan and the US, remains awash in a sea of red ink (see below).

Government deficits and surpluses in Australia, the Euro area, Japan, the US and Britain, 2010-16. Australia will be one of the only countries in the OECD to enjoy a balanced budget in the near future. Source: Treasury.

You can argue about precisely how much credit Wayne Swan and the government are entitled to take for this world-beating performance. What you can’t deny is that this is a world-beating performance. Sure, the economy is not enjoying the frothy exuberance of 2007. But it’s still ticking along quite nicely; these figures suggest that this could be the best Christmas for retailers in several years.

Wayne Swan and Penny Wong have had to cut reasonably deeply to keep the budget in surplus. Nearly $7 billion in extra money has been found, through a series of measures such as cuts to the Baby Bonus, deferments of tax cuts, some tweaks to superannuation, cuts to a tax break called the living away from home allowance, and an extra 2.5 per cent “efficiency dividend” imposed across the public service.

Expect to hear more about this last item, the new efficiency dividend. The measure is a blunt instrument, to say the least, as it imposes a uniform cut on all government departments and agencies, no matter their size. Some job losses and program cuts are almost certain.

But then again, cutting government spending was always on the cards, because Treasury says slower growth has wiped something like $20 billion off expected tax revenues. Politically, Swan and Wong will be only too happy to ear a bit of pain in return for the giant black ribbon reading “Surplus!” that they can pin on the government’s chest.

That’s assuming we record a surplus next year, of course. Events in Europe could yet take a disastrous turn, with many commentators predicting the break-up of the Euro currency zone within weeks. Should something so truly catastrophic occur in Europe, we can expect another global credit crunch, a plunge on world markets and some serious repercussions in our own economy. All bets, in other words, will be off. Even draconian government cuts will not be enough to keep the budget in the black.

But if Europe can muddle through, as the government is so desperately hoping, then there is every likelihood that Swan will be able to announce his first surplus on budget night next year. This means almost nothing, economically. But politically, it’s a very big deal indeed. With its reflexive bleating that all deficits everywhere are always bad, the Opposition has long exploited misconceptions about economics widely held in the Australian media and citizenry. Rather than try to educate voters, the Government has instead staked much of its economic credibility on returning to surplus next year. It’s become something of a millstone around its neck.

On the other hand, if Swan can get over the magic plus-minus line, it will blunt one of the Opposition’s best talking points, and buttress the Government’s economic standing leading into the 2013 election year. In the meantime, the Reserve Bank might even lend a hand by lowering interest rates another quarter of a percent. I’d say that’s exactly what Wayne Swan is writing away to Santa for.

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CPD’s James Whelan argues that the community does not support drastic cuts to public services. Below is his response to Institute for Public Affairs Director Julie Novak’s call for savage Budget cuts, published in Online Opinion this week.

Let us know what you think by postiing a comment below.

Evidence please, not more  public sector bashing

The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is no friend of public servants or of the idea of public service. They champion privatisation and outsourcing, believing instinctively that the private sector cannot help but maximise efficiency. By their definition, the public sector is an inefficient and ineffective way to meet community needs.

IPA research fellow, Julie Novak, launched her latest broadside on the public service in Online Opinion this week.

Her ‘cutting the slack’ invective echoed another missive earlier this year where she yearned nostalgically for the ‘meat axe’ to wield ‘savage spending cuts’ and appropriately decimate the ‘new endangered species’ of ‘pen pushing bureaucrats’ (public servants).

Before the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) launched our Public Service research program this year, the IPA enjoyed considerable political space where their anti-government and anti-public service rhetoric was unchallenged.

When Novak described an upward trend in the number of Commonwealth public servants, no-one responded that this upward curve came after years of retrenchments that saw almost one-third of the Australian Public Service gutted.

In this week’s baseless vent she again describes the public service as ‘fat’, contrary to the reality that there are no more public servants now than in 1990 despite 20 years of steady population growth.

In September, CPD released ‘The State of the Service: An Alternative Report’. Our analysis of public service staffing and funding trends, public sector reforms and community attitudes toward public servants and services was based on extensive research including twenty years of attitudinal studies, scrutiny of five years’ parliamentary and media discourse and included 174 citations.

In contrast to the IPA’s casual ‘poison pen’ approach, we found that Australians have high expectations of public services, consider public servants ‘highly committed’ and a growing proportion of Australians would cheerfully pay higher taxes to increase the funds available for public services (by OECD standards, we under-invest in the public sector).

Our research highlighted the gap between the IPA’s anti-government politics and the attitudes of ordinary Australians.

Novak argues that a speedy return to budget surplus will require increased pressure on agencies through the efficiency dividend and the elimination of some programs. In reality, popular programs have already been cut, and almost 70% of Australians support delaying the return to surplus.

Novak asserts that CPD’s report ‘bemoans’ Australia’s successful privatisation record’. The IPA’s ideological passion for privatisation is shared by few Australians.

Who benefits from privatisation? An EMC survey conducted just this month found that only 6% of Australians believe that the general public has benefited most: 59% believe that private companies have benefited most. Significantly, Coalition voters share this belief.

Privatisation and outsourcing have been key elements of public sector reforms by both Coalition and Labor governments, contrary to community wishes.

Most Australians support government exercising an active role in society and the economy, strongly prefer public (rather than private) sector agencies to deliver services such as transport, policing, health and education and have much more confidence in public service agencies than major companies.

And no wonder. Just last week, New Matilda learnt through Freedom of Information that Serco, the international service company engaged to operate Australia’s immigration detention centres, hires untrained guards, check’s detainees’ welfare only four times each day and has no obligation for an independent audit.

We welcome this discussion. Decisions about the staffing, funding and role of the public service are decisions about what kind of society we want to live in.

Equally, though, we hope for a rigorous discussion rather than oppositional ranting.

We drew attention to the lack of justification in Joe Hockey’s pledge to retrench 12,000 public servants, and will continue to advocate a considered and evidence-based approach to public policy.

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

First published in New Matilda here.

Here are three riddles.

If a large industry with significant public profile and a demonstrated recent history of legal malpractice tried to pretend that there is essentially nothing wrong with the way it does business, how would the media report that?

If a company that supplied 70 per cent of — I don’t know, let’s say telecommunications — to Australia’s capital cities had recently had several of its parent corporation’s key executives arrested in London for a series of major crimes, how would the media report that?

If the major corporate players of the coal seam gas industry were called before a government inquiry and they told that inquiry that there should be absolutely no government regulation of their industry whatsoever — none — how would the media report that?

If that company was News Limited and if that industry was the media, then the response would be to attack the very basis of the inquiry and to confidently assert, not only that nothing has gone wrong in this country, but that any regulation of the media is self-evidently a Bad Thing.

I’m talking about the government’s Media Inquiry, of course, and the quite astonishing hypocrisy that has been demonstrated by key sections of the industry it is investigating.

According to outgoing News Limited CEO John Hartigan, “the inquiry has been called by a government that is on the nose with the public and is looking for someone to blame”. That sentiment has been echoed throughout the newspapers he has presided over. The Daily Telegraph, for instance, carried this piece of corporate propaganda by Vanda Nelson last week, while also taking the time to cock a snook at Margaret Simons’ sandals.

Hartigan went on to attack the very basis of the inquiry, which he claimed rested on “three presumptions” — all of which were false. These are that News Limited hacks phones, that it is biased against the government, and that the Press Council is not working.

Phone hacking? Doesn’t happen in Australia. “We do not hack phones and we do not pay bribes,” Jonathan Holmes reported him saying. News Limited biased against the Gillard government? Nonsense. If News Limited was really powerful, Australia would be a republic by now, as the company has always campaigned strongly for that. And what bout the Press Council — isn’t it a toothless tiger? Not in the slightest, argued Hartigan. “We don’t control what it does and we don’t have any say in its adjudications on complaints about News Ltd. Our editors publish its adjudications prominently, and absolutely hate it when the umpire finds against them.”

So there you go: nothing to see here, folks.

Over at Fairfax, matters have been every bit as sanctimonious, albeit with a more high-minded tone. Fairfax boss Greg Hywood also appeared at the inquiry, apparently aggrieved that he should even have to answer to such an affront. “What problem are we solving here?” he asked the Inquiry’s head, Ray Finkelstein QC. “What’s the issue current in the media, in the way that we’re operating, that needs a solution?” Given that even a first-year cadet (if indeed Fairfax is still employing any) can look up the Inquiry’s terms of reference, it was an arrogant response.

Hywood has lately been spruiking a Panglossian perspective of news media. In his recent AN Smith Lecture on journalism at Melbourne University, he claimed that the “the future of journalism has never looked stronger,” which must be news to the hundreds of journalists his own company has let go in recent years. The internet, he claimed, is just another technology, and journalism would be able to adapt to whatever format audiences wanted to consume it on.

Given the recent history of the newspaper industry — given the well-known industry gossip that The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are already money-losing propositions — it was crazy-brave stuff. I watched Andrew Rossi’s documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times this week. At least the high priests of the famous Grey Lady know their business model is threatened. Captain Hywood seems to be celebrating the sighting of icebergs as the possible savior of the Titanic.

The recent public performances of Hywood and Hartigan show that, when it comes to self-delusion and denial, few industries are as richly endowed as the media. If you to read about the Media Inquiry in the Herald Sun or Daily Telegraph, you would think it is all just a political scape-goating exercise. If you’ve followed it in the online media or the ABC, you’d probably just be confused about what it’s actually supposed to be doing. Very few reports have attempted to contextualise the Inquiry in terms of its actual terms of reference, or the existing regulatory architecture of Australia’s multi-faceted media sector. At the very least, audiences need to be given a brief primer on the dynamic changes being wrought by media convergence — such as those neatly explained by this recent ACMA paper.

Instead, the bulk of the coverage has been fulminating jeremiads against the evil of government regulation. This is disingenuous at best.

The media is an industry with huge power over the lives of ordinary citizens. It currently suffers little in the way of regulation, and yet has a demonstrable record of getting things wrong. In the case of newspapers, the industry is almost completely self-regulated, while in the case of radio and television, it is very lightly regulated. Despite — or perhaps because — of this, the media regularly trespasses on the private lives of ordinary citizens, meddles in the everyday workings of democracy, and peddles untruths, distortions and falsehoods for commercial gain. To argue that the media should be completely free of any fetters of regulation, as many in the media are so fond of, is merely a particularly self-serving form of special pleading, up there with the best efforts of the mining lobby.

I’m quite disappointed with the tenor of the Media Inquiry’s questioning, which I think has been rather too accommodating so far. There are some very serious issues that must be grappled with here: particularly the way our democracy curbs and regulates the power of those who control the means of producing symbols in our society. Convergence seems to have hardly been touched on, while the role of television current affairs shows — in Australia, some of the worst abusers of media privileges — have not yet been called to account for their standards.

A final word needs to be said about the usual arguments trotted out about “the public’s right to know”. Like most cliches, this one contains a grain of truth. But the very fact that so many journalists cling to it as some kind of get-out-of-jail card to justify the worst excesses of the industry shows the impoverished standards of much of what passes for journalism in this country.

Rights, if they are anything, are a complex bundle of legal traditions, ethical standards and social norms. The “right to know”, like that other cliché, “speaking truth to power”, is something that can never be absolute in pluralistic democracy with a rule of law. It must be balanced against other rights, like the right to not be defamed, and to right to go about your everyday life without a media scrum shadowing your every move. More generally, even in a country that values free speech more highly than our own, such as the United States, there are curbs on the exercise of that right, and there are limits to what can count as speech itself, free or not.

Few in this country want to see Australia move to heavily regulate the media or to control what gets said about the government of the day. But just as rare are the journalists and editors who appear to be genuinely thinking hard about the role of the media in our society, and in particular, how their daily craft can advance the final phrase in the Media Inquiry’s terms of reference: “the public interest”.

—————————————-

Read our Media Ownership and Regulation in Australia | DISCUSSION PAPER

DOWNLOAD & READ the Discussion Paper here.

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

Change can happen faster than you think – help us seize the moment and point to the alternatives.

Given the complex challenges we face, our hopes for a better world can’t be distilled into a tweet, placard or media sound bite. But we do need more than a shopping list of criticisms if we are to create lasting change.

What if we were all ready to treat the next crisis as an opportunity to build support for progressive policies? Wouldn’t it be great if grassroots movements like Occupy were armed with a coherent and transformative policy agenda to deal with the root causes of the problems they highlight?

That’s where the work of the Centre for Policy Development comes in. We translate the desire for a fair, sustainable and democratic society into well-researched, viable ideas for change.

We can’t keep doing this work without your help. BECOME AN IDEAS SUSTAINER.

REFUGEE POLICY | A pathway beyond today’s toxic politics
Asylum seekers continue to suffer unnecessarily because their lives are the subject of political point-scoring by both major parties. Recent improvements in domestic policy were reached via the worst possible route.

Stepping back from the heated political debate, the authors of our recent report, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees & Asylum Seekers, provide a comprehensive critique of our current policies and map out a politically viable pathway to fairer and more practical alternatives.

Our report was endorsed by 34 prominent Australians, including Heather Ridout from the Australian Industry Group, Ged Kearney from the ACTU and National Australia Bank chair Michael Chaney. We gained much media attention, and the chapter on detention policy became the focus of a GetUp! campaign.

Help us Occupy public debates about refugees and asylum seekers with good ideas not more fear and misinformation – Become an Ideas Sustainer.

_________________________________________________________________

SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY | Our ocean wealth at risk
In a world of increased competition for resources and rising environmental threats, it makes sense for Australia to protect the oceans we love and the marine resources that sustain jobs in tourism and fishing. Yet policies being developed for Australia’s Commonwealth marine areas are in danger of ignoring much of the economic value they provide.

Our groundbreaking report, Stocking Up: Securing Our Marine Economy found that Australia needs to act now to secure $25 billion a year in essential ecosystem services, along with 9,000 direct jobs in commercial fishing and a marine tourism industry worth $11 billion per year.

We got the attention of the politicians and decision makers with these numbers. Stocking Up was launched with support from Labor, Liberal and Greens politicians at Parliament House. We received a lot of media coverage and our ideas were taken up by environment groups campaigning to save our marine life.

Stocking Up showed how we can manage the long-term risks that climate change, pollution and rising fuel prices pose to our marine economy. With decisions being made now on the size and placement of Commonwealth marine parks, the next challenge is to make sure long-term value is not trumped by short-term thinking.

Help us Occupy public debates and keep the spotlight on the economic case for preserving our environmental wealth – Become an Ideas Sustainer.

_________________________________________________________________

PUBLIC SERVICE | Moving past the public service bashing
Given the complex problems Australia faces we need a capable public service more than ever. Yet public debate on the public service is locked into an evidence-free slanging match between the politicians about who has the biggest axe and who will return the budget to surplus the fastest.

Our State of the Australian Public Service: An Alternative Report provides a critical and independent analysis of public service staffing, funding and community attitudes. We expose the myth of a bloated public service and show how to track citizens’ real views on how public sector agencies are performing over time. Our report kick-started a public discussion on the future of our public service – in the media, in Parliament, and through roundtables (conversations) held in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.

Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey’s vision includes sacking 12,000 public servants and wiping out entire departments. A more informed debate is crucial if the public sector is to maintain and improve its capacity to meet the public’s needs.

Help us Occupy public debates and counter evidence-free attempts to downsize and privatise our public sector – Become an Ideas Sustainer.

All donations to CPD are tax deductible. If you’d prefer to donate offline download, print & post our donation form here or give us a call on 02 9043 6815 – we’d love to hear from you.

James Whelan, CPD’s Public Service Research Director, today responded to Novak in Online Opinion. James debunks some of the myths about the public service being ‘fat’ or bloated and summarises research that indicates Australians’ support for government exercising an active role in society. James responded that:

The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is no friend of public servants or of the idea of public service. They champion privatisation and outsourcing, believing instinctively that the private sector cannot help but maximise efficiency. By their definition, the public sector is an inefficient and ineffective way to meet community needs.

IPA research fellow, Julie Novak, launched her latest broadside on the public service in Online Opinion this week. Her ‘cutting the slack’ invective echoed another missive earlier this year where she yearned nostalgically for the ‘meat axe’ to wield ‘savage spending cuts’ and appropriately decimate the ‘new endangered species’ of ‘pen pushing bureaucrats’ (public servants).

Before the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) launched our Public Service research program this year, the IPA enjoyed considerable political space where their anti-government and anti-public service rhetoric was unchallenged. When Novak described an upward trend in the number of Commonwealth public servants, no-one responded that this upward curve came after years of retrenchments that saw almost one-third of the Australian Public Service gutted. In this week’s baseless vent she again describes the public service as ‘fat’, contrary to the reality that there are no more public servants now than in 1990 despite 20 years of steady population growth.

In September, CPD released ‘The State of the Service: An Alternative Report’. Our analysis of public service staffing and funding trends, public sector reforms and community attitudes toward public servants and services was based on extensive research including twenty years of attitudinal studies, scrutiny of five years’ parliamentary and media discourse and included 174 citations. In contrast to the IPA’s casual ‘poison pen’ approach, we found that Australians have high expectations of public services, consider public servants ‘highly committed’ and a growing proportion of Australians would cheerfully pay higher taxes to increase the funds available for public services (by OECD standards, we under-invest in the public sector).

Our research highlighted the gap between the IPA’s anti-government politics and the attitudes of ordinary Australians. Novak argues that a speedy return to budget surplus will require increased pressure on agencies through the efficiency dividend and the elimination of some programs. In reality, popular programs have already been cut, and almost 70% of Australians support delaying the return to surplus.

Novak asserts that CPD’s report ‘bemoans’ Australia’s successful privatisation record’. The IPA’s ideological passion for privatisation is shared by few Australians. Who benefits from privatisation? An EMC survey conducted just this month found that only 6% of Australians believe that the general public has benefited most: 59% believe that private companies have benefited most. Significantly, Coalition voters share this belief.

Privatisation and outsourcing have been key elements of public sector reforms by both Coalition and Labor governments, contrary to community wishes. Most Australians support government exercising an active role in society and the economy, strongly prefer public (rather than private) sector agencies to deliver services such as transport, policing, health and education and have much more confidence in public service agencies than major companies.

And no wonder. Just last week, New Matilda learnt through Freedom of Information that Serco, the international service company Serco engaged to operate Australia’s immigration detention centres, hires untrained guards, check’s detainees’ welfare only four times each day and has no obligation for an independent audit.

We welcome this discussion. Decisions about the staffing, funding and role of the public service are decisions about what kind of society we want to live in. Equally, though, we hope for a rigorous discussion rather than oppositional ranting. We drew attention to the lack of justification in Joe Hockey’s pledge to retrench 12,000 public servants ‘for starters’, and will continue to advocate a considered and evidence-based approach to public policy.

You can also find James Whelan’s article in Online Opinion here.

First published in New Matilda here

It’s not very often that foreign policy breaks through the carapace of insularity in Australian media. For most of the year, the journalists who cover Australian politics stay focused on the intrigues of parliamentary politics.

But every so often, something obviously important happens in the world — important enough to jolt news editors away from their default preoccupations with leadership intrigue and opinion polls. It could be a gathering of international leaders, a visit from a foreign power, or an opportunity to hop on a plane to somewhere that isn’t Canberra.

This week’s political agenda involves all three: the APEC leaders forum, just concluded in Honolulu, followed by the visit of US President Barack Obama to Australia. No wonder the media corps is salivating. As The Australian’s Peter Brent noted today, “few things excite Australian journalists more than a photo op between the Prez and our Prime Minister.”

And, sure enough, the APEC meeting and the Obama visit have generated media discussion of foreign policy and international relations — essentially for the first time this year. The small band of professional foreign policy analysts who get a look in when it comes to foreign policy commentary in the Australian media have been appearing on our television screens: Hugh White, Geoffrey Garrett, Michael Fullilove.

There has even been some debate of the actual issues: the “trans-Pacific partnership”, the announcement of an ongoing US Marine Corps presence in Darwin, and the future of Australia’s relationships with the United States and China generally.

Mind you, it’s not as though the media did a very good job of it. As the University of Sydney’s Richard Stanton points out, the trans-Pacific partnership has been in negotiation since 2005 and won’t be finalised until late in 2012, if then. Many in the media seem to think it is a new announcement. Stanton calls the media’s coverage of the trans-Pacific partnership “fabricated, lightweight and embarrassingly inaccurate”.

But that’s par for the course when a US president comes to town.

Nothing is going to stop the media writing stories about the “special relationship” and “enduring friendship” enjoyed by Australia and America. It certainly helps that Barack Obama looks like he gets on well with Julia Gillard, at least on camera. But the truth is that the Australian political system — and its associated elites in the foreign policy and defence establishments, as well as in the media — is so invested in the US relationship that even a diffident and uncomfortable US visit would still be written up as a prodigal reunion of unprecedented amity and joy.

Consequently, the political optics are finally skewing the Government’s way. For a beleaguered Labor Prime Minister, the Obama visit is a gift from the gods. Gillard has long struggled to convince voters of her legitimacy in the office of PM, so television coverage of her convening with world leaders is doubly valuable. Those shots of the US President smiling and joking with the Prime Minister must be worth a couple of percentage points in the preferred prime minister polls all on their own.

It’s not just that she gets to look prime ministerial. The added bonus of the Obama visit is that it removes attention from domestic political issues, including from Tony Abbott and the Opposition. Labor has been presented with more than a week of that most precious of political commodities: “clean air”.

What about the substance of recent events? The details have been much more prosaic. The proposed trans-Pacific trade pact may eventually boost trade between the various signatories, but there is a long way to go before the details are negotiated. Australia already has relatively low tariffs, so consumers here will barely notice any improvements in the flow of foreign imports. Meanwhile, our exporters will benefit far more from a cheaper Australian dollar than from any far-off and piecemeal trade liberalisation.

The APEC announcement regarding greenhouse gas emissions is another well-meaning but ultimately insubstantial announcement. APEC’s communique states that the leaders have signed up to a non-binding commitment to reduce the energy intensity of their economies by 45 per cent on 2005 levels out to 2035.

Energy intensity is an important issue — Australia, after all, has one of the dirtiest economies in the rich world — but it’s a poor substitute for what is really required: binding commitments to reduce overall levels of greenhouse gas emissions. The world continues to sleepwalk towards climate catastrophe, even as many speculate whether the capital of Thailand may have to be moved in future decades as rising sea levels slowly submerge most of Bangkok.

The APEC statement also included an agreement to “rationalise and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption”. Australia’s fossil fuel lobby will be quite surprised to hear about this one, given that the federal budget still contains many examples of such subsidies, such as the diesel fuel rebate. It will be interesting to see whether the Government moves to cut such subsidies in the next budget, given that it needs to find several billion dollars to deliver its precious 2012-13 surplus.

The big picture issue is of course the future of Australia’ strategic relationships with the US and China. Simply put, Australia needs to stay friends with both nations, and keep them engaged with each other at all costs. The alternative — a cold war between the two superpowers that represent Australia’s largest trading partner and closest military ally — is such an unimaginably awful outcome for this country that it bears little contemplation.

And yet, the content of Australia’s key strategic policy document for this century, our Defence White Paper, takes increasing military competition with China as the starting point for its considerations. Ultimately, as I have long argued, the real threat to Australia’s national security from China comes from the fossil fuels it is emitting, not the navy it is building. Solving that problem requires engagement, rather than confrontation.

In that respect, serious action from the United States on climate would provide far more value to Australia’s future national security than any number of marines in the Northern Territory.

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

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