Other politics
AUKUS in context
The Juice Media have been running a 3-minute explainer about the AUKUS deal, in their trademark no-holds-barred style. They also have a conventional 43-minute podcast in which Giordano Nanni interviews the Australia Institute’s Allan Behm about Australia’s relationship with China: We need to talk about not going to war with China. The emphasis in the discussion is security, but not simply in the sense of countervailing military power. Behm rejects binary views about hawks and doves or “good China” vs “bad China”. Foreign relations are complex: our security is best served by diplomacy, and doing our best to ensure that we can live in a prosperous region. Nations that share in prosperity are unlikely to go beating one another up.
As for AUKUS: we need to have strong defence capability, but what does the vague promise of having a few submarines in 20 years’ time have to do with defence, and how are Australia’s interests served in helping the UK make up for its Brexit idiocy?
The Coalition’s war on knowledge
Why is the government locking universities out? asks Denis Moriarty of ourcommunity.com.au, writing in the Canberra Times. Why has the Morrison government been so concerned about the jobs of 38 000 coal miners while allowing universities to lose 30 000 jobs because universities were ruled out of Jobseeker? Is it simply about marginal seat politics? Is it that Morrison and his supporters see university education “as a conspiracy to radicalise naïve Christian undergraduates into atheism, socialism, wokeness and anything that isn’t traditional nationalism?” Or is it that the Morrison government doesn’t see the need for ideas?
Government by consultants
In last week’s Saturday Paper Rick Morton described How consultants took over the public service. There has been a huge increase in the Commonwealth’s use of consultants since 2013, the year the Coalition started its current run in office. Morton’s article is not about use of consultants for specialized services, such as IT support. Rather it is about the use of consultants for what should be the basic tasks of public servants, particularly providing policy advice to governments.
One of the absurdities Morton identifies is the imposition by government central agencies of “staff ceilings”, specifying the maximum number of staff that can be employed as public servants. But the same departments are permitted to hire consultants, even though they are more expensive to employ, and because they are on limited contracts they never develop the deep knowledge or specialization that public servants can develop.
Some of the consultancies Morton describes seem to be grossly expensive with little, or nothing, in terms of tangible public benefit, and they are fraught with the possibility of conflicts of interest.
The situation is so absurd that one firm, Boston Consulting Group, is quoted as recommending that functions be returned to the public service:
Our view is the government should invest in growing the capability of the APS, and it should do so by ensuring that consultants are held accountable for skills and knowledge transfer to build APS capability.
Consulting buyers should be looking to engage consultants who bring unique skills, experience and expertise that complement or enhance those available internally, not as a substitute for core functions that should be done by APS staff.
(See Schwartz Media Help for advice on paywall access to The Saturday Paper and other Schwartz publications. This same edition of The Saturday Paper also has an article by Toni Hassan on What happened to the asylum-seekers on Siev X?)
Another audit report critical of Home Affairs
On Monday the ANAO report on the Department of Home Affairs’ management of civilian maritime surveillancewas tabled. In short, it found that the Department’s management of this $1.5 billion contract “has not been effective”. As a result “while surveillance services have been provided, the quantum and range of those services has fallen short of the contractual requirements”. It found that over the contract period, the target for overall contract performance was not met 92 percent of the time, and that contract variations resulted in a 29 percent escalation of costs.
The report won’t make headlines because it does not expose corruption. There are no colour-coded spreadsheets drawing attention to marginal electorates. But it reveals a deep-seated problem in public administration: the devaluation and de-skilling of the public service over many years. (See the above piece on consultants displacing public servants.) As could be written for many areas of public administration, it found “There has been a high turnover of officers responsible for the management of the contract and the department has not ensured that each of its contract managers had appropriate training or experience”.
Literary dabblings
What do the following people have in common: John Howard, Peta Credlin, Jake Thrupp, Nick Cater, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Tom Switzer, James McGrath, Gary Hardgrave, Rita Panahi, Judith Sloan, Tim Wilson, Michaelia Cash, Maurice Newman, Gemma Tognini, Jason Falinski, Adam Creighton, Alan Jones, Tony Abbott, Peter Gleeson, Alex Dore, John Alexander, Julian Leeser, David Crisafulli, Alex Antic, David Flint, Campbell Newman, Jacinta Price, Jim Molan, Amanda Stoker, James Allan, Elizabeth Lee, David Elliott, Brendan Nelson, Gina Rinehart, Dallas McInerney, Caroline Di Russo, Peter King, Ben Small, Barnaby Joyce, David Maddox, Matt Canavan?
They’re all contributors to a newly-published book Australia tomorrow. Already a chapter by Gina Rinehart, warning Australians to be on guard against the “ruining effects of socialism” has drawn the attention of those reasonably defending the role of government, particularly in preserving lives and livelihoods during the pandemic. Michael Cooke and Lionel Bopage, writing in Green Left, set the record straight on Rinehart’s claims: Stuff and nonsense: The musings of Gina Rinehart. Her warning that Australia is on the same track as Sri Lanka has drawn heavy criticism: Cooke and Bopage point out that many of Sri Lanka’s problems stem from its adopting the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, including economic deregulation, sale of public assets, concessional taxes for foreign corporations – exactly the opposite of socialism. Nipuna Kumbalathara of the University of Colombo has a particularly hard-hitting correction on Open Forum: Watch out for Gina and her clan of billionaires.
Australia – a complacent nation
“Resilience” is a word loosely inserted into Powerpoint presentations by management consultants, but seldom do people make the effort to state just what it means, and more important, to assess systematically the nation’s resilience when confronted with an external shock.
Our experience with Covid-19 has provided an opportunity for such a review, and that is what 250 businesspeople, public servants, academics and others, convened by Global Access Partners and The Institute for Integrated Economic Research, have done over the last 18 months. Their report, Australia – A complacent nation, has been published this month.
They postulated three key attributes of a resilient society: “shared awareness and shared goals; teamwork and collaboration; and the ability to prepare and mobilise in the face of a crisis”. They found a lack of resilience in all three attributes. They don’t rank us among the world’s poorest performers, but we could have done better. We seem to be content at having scraped through the pandemic, without attending to weaknesses Covid-19 has exposed in our health care systems, in our governance structures, and in our politics, as we confront the challenge of reducing emissions and coping with climate change. The authors are particularly critical of our political culture: “the prevalence of political spin in lieu of substance” and the intrusion of partisan politics into our federal-state processes for dealing with the pandemic.
One aspect worth noting is its call for “a broader long-term vision for domestic manufacturing and trusted supply chains [which] would prepare the ground for a more sustainable recovery, and better prepare the nation for the future”. It would be disappointing if this desire for more self-sufficiency degenerated into an old-fashioned “free trade” vs “protectionism” debate.
Gambling: the winner is Labor
Ever wonder why Australia is one of the leading countries in the gaming market, with one gaming machine for every 128 people, or why a casino (or a wannabe casino) dominates the Sydney skyline?
Political donations may have something to do with it. The ABC Digital Stories Innovation Team has an interactive web page where they match payments from gambling interests to state and federal politicians and political parties. They trace $82 million paid by the gambling industry to politicians over the last 22 years – while acknowledging that it’s an understatement because of the opacity of our political donation laws.
The Australian Hotels Association is the biggest gambling-related donor: it tends to favour the Liberal Party. In overall receipts, however, Labor comes out the winner, receiving $40 million, compared with $22 million for the Coalition parties, and $4 million for other political parties.