Other politics
SIEV-X twenty years on
SIEV-X is the name assigned to a tiny Indonesian fishing boat carrying more than 400 asylum-seekers on their way to Australia, that sank with 353 people losing their lives in October 2001, shortly after the Tampa affair.
Twenty years on, Phillip Adams on Late Night Live has interviewed Tony Kevin about the SIEV-X tragedy. It is clear that both Indonesian and Australian authorities had a great deal of intelligence about the people smugglers’ intentions and the boat’s planned voyage, but there was no attempt to intercept it and no party from the Indonesian or Australian governments came to its aid as it sank.
Kevin, author of A certain maritime incident: the sinking of SIEV-X, and of Reluctant rescuers, still seeks answers about who knew what and when. Much information is held by Australian authorities, but little has been revealed. What is being covered-up – incompetence or callous inhumanity? (15 minutes)
Freedom of speech: the Peter Ridd case
Professor Peter Ridd of James Cook University was an outspoken critic of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. He vehemently disagreed that the Great Barrier Reef was threatened by climate change.
He was fired by James Cook University, and following a series of appeals the High Court last week finally upheld the university’s right to sack him. Because his views on climate change were seen to align with those of climate change deniers his case became a cause célèbre for the political right. The story became one about academic freedom: the university had supposedly fired him for expressing his views on climate change.
Those who want to read about Ridd’s views on climate change, the support he has received from the Institute for Public Affairs, and his media interviews can find a full account on the DeSmog site.
But as Frank Brennan carefully explains in Eureka Street – The sacked professor Ridd's freedom of speech – in its decision the High Court actually upheld the principle of freedom of speech. Brennan concludes “Intellectual freedom is the freedom to be very robust and critical of your intellectual peers, but it is not a freedom to ride roughshod over processes for determining workplace complaints lodged by your intellectual peers, even if you vehemently disagree with their views on matters you know a lot about”.
Our enfeebled public service
Last week I linked Rick Morton’s Saturday Paper article How consultants took over the public service. On Saturday Extra Geraldine Doogue interviewed Rick Morton, and Verona Burgess, a regular columnist for The Mandarin: Why is the public service outsourcing so much of its work?. They expand on Morton’s article, particularly in relation to the reasons why governments, Coalition governments in particular, bypass the public service and outsource so much to consultants and contractors, and when they do seek external advice they don’t get it from universities.
Morton suggests that Coalition governments “want to be alerted to a world view they think they already agree with”. It’s also about the loss of skills in the public service: contracting out produces its own positive feedback cycle of de-skilling. And it’s simply because Coalition governments don’t trust the public service. (It’s extraordinary to think of an enterprise of any sort whose board does not trust its own well-qualified employees.) (15 minutes)
The Australia Institute document to which they refer is Talk isn’t cheap: making consultants’ reports publicly available via Senate order by Bill Browne. It’s a call for the Senate to use its powers to require consultants’ reports to be made public, even though governments rarely comply with parliamentary orders. (Again, it’s extraordinary that private sector workers, who are not bound by the ethical and professional standards of the public service, can be trusted more than those who are elected to Parliament.)
Our enfeebled Commonwealth
The item above is specifically about the weakened Commonwealth Public Service. Writing in The MonthlyJohn Quiggin considers the same matter in the context of a deliberate policy to weaken the whole administrative capacity of the Commonwealth Government – a move that has thrown far more responsibility on to state governments, as we have witnessed during the pandemic: Dismembering government.
Over recent times the Commonwealth has come to be seen as an entity that, apart from maintaining armed services, doesn’t really do much. It sets policies, and spends money for others – state governments and increasingly private companies – to do things, but, compared with state governments, it does nothing much itself.
It hasn’t always been this way, Quiggin reminds us. If the Commonwealth still had the administrative capacity it had in the 1970s it would have handled the pandemic from its own resources. It had its own hospitals and the CSL to produce vaccines. It had the government-owned airline, Qantas, to bring stranded Australians home. It understood its constitutional responsibilities and would have met its quarantine obligations.
The rot set in in the 1970s with a movement known as New Public Management. (See the September 11 roundup for a description of this managerialist drivel under the heading “Steering, not rowing”.)
Under these “reforms”, designed to reduce the capacity of the nation-state “to make room for market forces and to unleash the untapped dynamism of the business sector”, citizens became customers, and ill-fitting private-sector models were forced on to government services. In the name of “competition” well-functioning government utilities were broken up, regardless of the cost of fragmented services and the cost of satisfying the demand for private owners to extract monopoly profits from these enterprises.
Perhaps we will elect an economically responsible and administratively competent government next year, but even if we do it will have a massive task ahead in restoring good government.
Australia’s new president
Did you realise that our Constitution makes no reference to the position of prime minister, but that it does have specific reference to the position of President – of the Senate? The President of the Senate occupies a position broadly similar to that of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Writing in Inside Story – Presidential politics – John Hawkins draws our attention to the fact that we have a new President of the Senate. The previous president, Scott Ryan, has stood down and been replaced by Slade Brockman. Because neither the government nor the opposition has a majority in the Senate, it matters “that a competent, impartial and respected president is presiding over it”.