Other public policy
Labour relations – claims and counter-claims
Aspects of the government’s proposed amendments to the Fair Work Act have generally been well-received by economists and business lobbies particularly in relation to their reforms of the bureaucratically complex “Better Off Overall Test”. But their proposals to facilitate multi-employer bargaining have met with a degree of resistance, and extravagant claims they will lead to more strikes and unemployment.
Chris Wright and Russell Lansbury of the University of Sydney, and Søren Kaj Andersen, of the University of Copenhagen, deconstruct these claims in a Conversation contribution: Employers say Labor’s new industrial relations bill threatens the economy. Denmark tells a different story. Denmark has provision for multi-employer sectoral agreements, with some provision for variation at the enterprise level. Even though Denmark’s laws endow workers with a strong right to strike, Denmark has even fewer work days lost to industrial action than Australia.
Some employer groups accept the need to lift pay in industries with concentrations of low-paid, often female workers. See, for example Tim Reed of the Business Council of Australia on ABC’s 730. But for the most part business lobbies say they fear that extension of multi-enterprising bargaining could lead to more disputes, and hurt some small and medium-sized businesses.
Maybe some businesses that have remained profitable through paying low wages would struggle to pay higher wages, but a lift in industry-wide wages should not place any one firm at a competitive disadvantage. The business lobbies seem to be defending an economic model based on competition through low wages, rather than a model based on productivity improvement through product and process innovation, thus allowing decent wages to be paid. Are the business lobbies yet to learn that capitalism has replaced feudalism?
Health policy – Covid-19 isn’t going away
Covid-19
We learn from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance that at least two-thirds of Australians have had Covid-19, as revealed in antibody studies. In rough numbers that means that although 10 million cases have been reported, about 18 million Australians have had Covid-19. Therefore about 8 million Australians either don’t know they have had Covid-19 (mistaken for another condition, or too mild to notice), or haven’t registered their illness.
New variants of Omicron are emerging. Manal Mohammed of the University of Westminster, UK, outlines what is known about these variants in a Conversation article: Omicron BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 – an expert answers three key questions about these new COVID variants. Compared with earlier Omicron variants they are more transmissible, they are more likely to evade the protection offered by vaccination or prior infection, but they don’t appear to cause more severe illness.
Health authorities in Victoria and New South Wales have warned that a new Covid-19 wave that should hit Australia within the next few weeks. Australia now recording a significant risein reported case numbers – up 17 percent in the week to November 1. As yet, however, there has been no rise in hospitalizations or deaths.
Health authorities are concerned that although Australia did well in first and second-dose vaccination, we are dragging our feet on third and fourth-dose vaccination. The Health Department reports that only 72 percent of the eligible population have received three or more doses. Also the uptake of third or fourth-dose vaccination has slowed to a crawl – around 6 000 a week in an eligible population of almost 20 million, of whom 28 percent have not had three doses. (By my calculation, at that rate we should achieve 100 percent cover by 2040.)
According to information collected by Our World in Data, only 55 percent of Australians have had a third dose of vaccination, which puts us well behind most other “developed” countries that have achieved around 70 percent third- dose cover.[1]
Health and climate change
We tend to see health and climate change as different domains of policy concern, but an article in the Medical Journal of Australia – Countdown on health and climate change: Australia unprepared and paying the price – brings them together. It covers the mental and physical health consequences of summer heatwaves (more days of extreme heat stress), fires (smoke inhalation as well as physical danger), and floods (including water-borne diseases).
The authors urge our government to follow the example set by some other countries, and produce a regular national health and climate change risk assessment.
1. These figures are compatible because the Health Department figures refer only to people eligible for vaccination, while Our World in Data figures refer to all Australians. ↩
Coalition corruption has cost us $455 billion
Alan Austin, writing in Independent Australia, has calculated the cost of corruption over the Coalition’s nine years in government. His estimate, without any adjustment for inflation (which would make it higher) is $455 billion.
Because I find it hard to think about such big numbers, I would like to think about it as about $45 000 per household, there being around 10 million households in Australia. That’s about the price of a high-quality car, which one may replace over such a period.
He gets to this figure by adding known rorts, including “COVID JobKeeper corporate handouts, consultants and external labour; the inland river rorts; corrupt discretionary grants; the aborted French submarine contract and other defence waste; the carbon credit scheme; offshore detention waste, and the ‘clean coal’ rort”. He also includes tax evasion, and the gift to foreign entities through the Coalition’s blocking of the Rudd Government’s super-profit tax. In classifying all waste as “corruption” Austin takes a pretty tough approach, but it doesn’t change his calculations of the cost.
He illustrates how, when Labor was in office between 2007 and 2023, the “craven media” made much of the government’s deficits, but it has been much gentler on Coalition deficits. Labor deficits bad, Coalition deficits good.
His calculations, laid out in his article, seem to be based on the premise that had the government not engaged in these rorts, including its permissive approach to mining company profits, the Commonwealth’s budgets over that nine years would have been in balance. Nine years is probably a reasonable period for deficits and surpluses to balance. In other words, he attributes the accumulated fiscal structural deficit to the Coalition’s rorts.
It’s a brave assumption, and it may be a little tough on the Coalition, but it’s not a bad starting point. In any case, his calculations cover only the direct fiscal costs of the Coalition’s corruption. It does not cover the opportunity cost to the nation of the Coalition’s neglect of economic restructuring, its deliberate devaluing of university education, its general policies of promoting income and wealth inequality, and its allowing our physical infrastructure to run down.
Labor squibs on gambling reform
New South Wales has 86 640 poker machines.
That’s one of the more startling figures in Charles Livingstone’s Conversation article: Pubs and clubs – your friendly neighbourhood money-laundering service, thanks to 86,640 pokies. Startling because it equates to one machine for every 75 adults, or about one for about every 25 adults who play the pokies.
Livingstone points out that in just the first 6 months of this year people in New South Wales have lost $4.0 billion to pokies. Annualized that comes to $1230 per adult – probably at least twice that amount for those who regularly play the pokies.
His article is mainly about the New South Wales Crime Commission’s recommendation that there be a cashless gaming system for all electronic gaming machines in that state. That would not only remove opportunities for money laundering, but would also allow for daily loss limits to be set, as is the case in some other states. The proposal is for that limit to be $1 000.
The New South Wales government has been under pressure from the crossbench to implement the Crime Commission’s recommendations, and Premier Perrottet has expressed his concern about the extent of losses, but it seems to have caved into lobbying by Clubs NSW and the Australian Hotels Association. Its proposed legislative response is weak and it does not include a cashless system.
It is easy to criticize the state’s Coalition government for caving in to pressure, but it is already governing in minority and faces an election next year. It has seen what the poker machine lobby did to Tasmania’s Labor Party at last year’s state election.
The real culprit in this case is New South Wales Labor, who have refused to commit to a cashless system. Here was an opportunity for Labor to support the government to do something to make the poorer people of New South Wales better off, and to combat the spivs engaged in money laundering, but it has squibbed.
The changing trade landscape
In what are known as the “postwar years” Australia benefited greatly from the liberal economic order hammered out at Bretton Woods in 1944, which saw the emergence of GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, later to expand into the much larger WTO.
On last week’s Saturday Extra Geraldine Doogue interviewed Jeffrey Wilson, director of research and economics at the Australian Industry Group, about how the trade landscape is changing: Tough times in trade. Wilson points out that the WTO multilateral rules-based system is giving way to more complex and less stable arrangements. Trade relations, which were politically neutral under the WTO, have become more politicized as countries seek to do deals with countries with shared values. Countries have joined small trading blocs while putting less faith in large multilateral arrangements. Governments and businesses have experienced the shocks to international trade of the pandemic and Putin’s war.
Perhaps Wilson is a little nostalgic about the age of multilateralism. In the postwar years Australia was notoriously protectionist, and our trade freedom was constrained by bilateral restrictions, such as British Preferential Tariffs negotiated by Anglophile Coalition governments. There was a political struggle, resolved in the 1980s by the Hawke-Keating government in a protracted process, to get Australia committed to open trade.
Boyer Lectures – a call to bring out the best in our nation
Noel Pearson is delivering this year’s Boyer Lectures.
Although the series of four lectures formally starts tomorrow, the first is already on ABC iview, in which Pearson outlines 234 years of relationships between the British invaders and the original owners of the land. He divides that history into three periods: 1788 to Federation in 1901; 1901 to the 1967 referendum, and 1967 to today. Different periods, different attitudes.
We are still not free of the most blatant forms of racism, which still arise in incidents such as the vile offences directed at Adam Goodes. That clear-cut racism has given way to what still is an uneasy relationship between First Nations people and other Australians. He describes that relationship in frank terms: “we are a much unloved people”.
That relationship has to develop into a positive one, guided by the ideals in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Successful passage of the referendum on the Voice is essential for that development, but he warns that it would be easy for “no” campaigners to derail the Voice.
It is not yet clear how the ABC is to handle the lectures. It advertises the lectures on its standing Boyer Lecture site, promoting its podcasts and its Listen app, but in his first lecture at least Pearson makes powerful use of visual media, including clips from the 1968 Boyer Lectures by Ted Stanner – “After the Dreaming”. Watching is a richer experience than just listening.
The ABC’s Carly Williams provides some background to the lecture and a short summary of the first lecture: Push for Indigenous Voice to Parliament is about justice and unity, not identity politics, Noel Pearson says.
Monarchists – a call to grovel to the Old World
In most countries people who assert loyalty to a foreign government or to a foreign head of state are called “disloyal”, or even condemned as “traitors”. Here they are called “monarchists”.
The Guardian’s Josh Butler reports on the Australian Monarchist League – not to be confused with the stuffier and more established Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy. From Butler’s account about the League having invited Pauline Hanson and the controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves as speakers, it seems that the League represents an extreme fringe of the monarchist movement. It is strange that Hanson, who has often appealed to nativist sentiments, should seem to be aligning herself with an oligarchic monarchy in a distant class-ridden country.