Australian politics

New South Wales election – Labor on track to take office in spite of a regressive policy platform

Labor has sold out to the gambling lobby

The New South Wales branch of the Labor Party seems to be out to confirm that it is ready to yield to political opportunism rather than to pursue responsible economic policy.

The Perrottet Coalition government has a proposal to require gamblers to use a cashless gaming card with pre-determined spending limits to operate gaming machines. This would limit outlays by problem gamblers and would crack down on money launderers who have been churning cash through gambling venues – a process described by Crispin Hull in his post Cashless pokies should be just the start. Hull goes on to present a strong case for getting rid of cash out of the economy altogether. Gambling reform advocates support Perrottet’s move, as does Unions NSW. The RSL, which many years ago unwisely allowed clubs to use its name, also backs Perrottet’s reforms.

Labor, however, is proposing a weak set of reforms, which would see only a trial of cashless gaming on 500 machines in selected venues. Labor’s ideas have some merit, as described by The Guardian’s Michael McGowan, including a ban on political donations from clubs, and a (glacially slow) reduction in the number of gaming machines in New South Wales, but they are weak and slow-acting. Perrottet has had the guts to stand up against the National Party and people in his own party, but Labor has yielded to the well-financed and coddled gaming lobby.

The strongest condemnation of Labor’s weakness comes from Tim Costello, whose Guardian article – The rest of the world is in disbelief at what the gambling industry has pulled off in Australia. We need real reform – puts the issue into a global context. New South Wales, he points out, has 35 percent of the world’s pokies, and the gambling industry, with its $95 billion annual turnover ($11 000 for every resident of the state), has managed to exert huge political pressure. Costello suggests that Labor’s policy was “written in the backrooms of Clubs New South Wales”.

Mike Seccombe, writing in The Saturday Paper – Perrottet, the pokies lobby and the Nazi uniform, describes Labor’s long relationship with the poker machine lobby. It goes back to 1956 when the Cahill government (Labor) allowed clubs to install poker machines. Then in 1997 the Carr government, under pressure from hotels who were facing pressure from licensed clubs, allowed pokies in pubs.

Labor offers a pathetic defence (9 minutes) of its policy on ABC Breakfast, presenting the usual bureaucratic tactic of indefinite procrastination, suggesting more trials and more inquiries are needed. In response Hamish MacDonald suggests that because Labor is responsible for the present situation, it should be up to Labor to fix it.

Unsurprisingly the pubs and clubs put up the defence that they provide jobs, particularly in non-metropolitan regions, and the National Party, never renowned for sound economic reasoning, has largely been persuaded by that argument. But their argument is ridiculous: as an analogy, would anyone seriously suggest that the government should refrain from upgrading a dangerous stretch of road because it provides so many jobs for crash repairers, nurses, surgeons and undertakers?

If pokies could be eliminated from clubs and pubs, food and drink may become a little more expensive without the cross subsidy from addicted gamblers, but people aren’t going to give up drinking and eating. Restaurants and other entertainment venues would no longer find themselves at a competitive disadvantage against clubs, and would be employing more people. State governments may lose some gaming tax, but money not spent on gambling will find its way into state coffers through GST, and governments will benefit from not having to spend so much to deal with the social costs of problem gambling. So long as there are public parks community sports will thrive. The only losers will be the overpaid executives in the big corporations that clubs have become: they may have to find real jobs.

And there may be a revival of Sydney’s pubs. We may even see the return of jazz bands. At present there are precious few places where people can enjoy a beer without having to go into a gambling den. James Thorpe, CEO of Sydney’s Odd Culture Group, a Sydney-based hospitality group that includes a handful of pubs without gaming machines, puts it plainly:

Our pubs are shit, Sydney. I’m sorry to be the one to say it, and I do so as a true lover of pubs and an operator of some of Sydney’s best. But it’s the simple and honest truth. Our watering holes stink. And the poker machines are to blame.

New South Wales is the most infected state, others, apart from Western Australia, are not much better. A google search for “pubs without pokies” yields few results.

Pokies are not the only area where New South Wales Labor is moving to the right of the Coalition. The ABC’s Michael Janda, describing the state government’s hesitancy in replacing stamp duty with a land tax, points out that Labor is even more reluctant than the government to implement such a reform: NSW land tax and stamp duty debacle again shows how politics trumps policy. Labor is missing an opportunity to implement a wealth tax.

The polls – Labor well ahead

At this stage opinion polls have Labor easily ahead of the Coalition, and with a good chance of being able to form government in their own right in next month’s election (March 25). Adrian Beaumont reports on a Resolve poll that gives Labor 37 percent of the vote (33 percent in the 2019 election), the Coalition 34 percent (42 percent in 2019), the Greens 12 percent (10 percent in 2019), and independents 11 percent (5 percent in 2019). Beaumont suggests that this and an earlier poll point to a 9 to 12 percent TPP lead for Labor. The latest Essential Report suggests that there is little difference in the approval ratings for the leaders of both main parties.

Between now and the election, polls will inevitably tighten, and they generally understate support for independents. Even allowing for some tightening, on these figures it would be extremely difficult for the Coalition to form a majority government. In fact it is already in minority.

Notably, that Coalition support at 34 percent probably includes about 8 percent support for the Nationals (10 percent in 2019), suggesting support for the Liberal Party is around 26 percent. It had 32 percent of the vote in in 2019. If it fails to make up that lost ground this will be the 21st out of 22 elections in the last nine years in which the Liberal Party’s primary vote has fallen.

Human rights in Australia – promises and tokens, but not much has changed

Human Rights Watch has released its 2023 World Report. The worst reports are about Russia, not only for its brutal invasion of Ukraine, but also for its associated repression at home. Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Myanmar, Ethiopia, China, Sri Lanka, and India are among countries that receive particular mention.

In its country report Australia is not off the hook. It mentions our treatment of asylum-seekers and the over-representation of indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system, reporting that 17 indigenous people died in custody in 2022, and that the government has violated the rights of Torres Strait Islanders by failing to protect them adequately against the adverse impacts of climate change. (In listing every conceivable violation of rights is HRW inadvertently trivializing the issues? There is direct moral culpability in relation to treatment of asylum-seekers, but it is debatable whether our government can do a great deal to protect specific communities against the consequences of climate change.)

The report notes that at the time of writing Australia had not joined the UK, US, Canada and the European Union in imposing sanctions on Myanmar’s military strongmen, or on senior Chinese officials accused of serious human rights violations against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim communities in Xinjiang. It also suggests that we could have a stronger anti modern slavery act than the one the government is proposing.

On Wednesday our government announced that it is imposing sanctions against officials in Myanmar and Iran, but Transparency International Australia suggests they still aren’t thorough enough.

In the Saturday Paper – What’s all the Dreyfus about? – Mike Seccombe has a major article about Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. It’s mainly about his values, political philosophy and his time in Parliament, but it is also about the government’s actions and intentions in relation to civil rights issues, including abolition of the corrupted Administrative Appeals Tribunal and its replacement, and establishment of a judicial commission. Dreyfus promises action on the “tens of thousands of people who live in Australia in a state of migration limbo”, holding temporary protection visas, but there is no mention of the 100 or so asylum-seekers still on Nauru.

Former senator Rex Patrick reminds us of another area where the government seems to have neglected human rights – the plight of Julian Assange. Writing in Michael West Media he reports that documents obtained from the government under FOI requests show no sign that the Albanese government has lobbied the US to bring Julian Assange home. Member for Kooyong, Monique Ryan, will keep pressing the matter in Parliament, asking the government when we can expect Julian Assange to return to Australia.

Integrity in government – slow progress

From the time the Coalition was elected in 2013 Australia’s score on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index slid downwards. In 2012 we were ranked #7 among 180 countries. By 2021 we had slipped to #18.

In Transparency International’s latest report for 2022 we have started to claw back our reputation, ranking #13. The Nordic countries, Singapore and New Zealand still occupy the top six places. (The most spectacular fall in 2022 was the UK, which slipped from #11 to #20.)

In its section on the Asia-Pacific region it reports positively on our government’s having passed legislation for an anti-corruption commission, but it states that there is still much to be done to protect whistleblowers, to establish a beneficial ownership register, and to combat money laundering.

Writing in The Conversation Adam Graycar, now of the University of Adelaide, comments in detail on the Transparency International report. Besides the shortcomings noted by Transparency International, he is concerned to see progress on election campaign financing. “We need to ensure all campaign donations are reported in real time, and with lowered thresholds. We need to make sure that political donations are just that – donations and not transactions.”

The Centre for Public Integrity also takes up the issue of campaign financing – A few loud voices – noting particularly the dominance of a few large donors for both Labor and the Coalition. It seeks real time disclosure of donations, with a lower dollar cap for disclosure. It notes particularly the influence of the Minerals Council of Australia.

David Crowe, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, also comments on the work of Transparency International and the Centre for Public Integrity – Elite donors call shots in political funding race – and notes that Special Minister of State Don Farrell will be introducing draft laws on financing later this year including real-time disclosure. But will donors still be able to hide behind entities that consolidate donations, such as Labor Holdings Pty Ltd, or the Liberals’ Cormack Foundation? At least Clive Palmer has been open about the $110 million he has spent over recent years.

The state of democracy – Australia enjoys strong institutions, the public are unengaged

Only 24 countries, with just 8 percent of the world population, are classified as “full democracies” as defined by The Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index for 2022. At the other end of the scale 59 countries, with 37 percent of the world population, are classified as “authoritarian regimes”.

Unsurprisingly it finds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to be the greatest violation of democracy in 2022. It has a large amount of information about countries’ support or otherwise for Ukraine.

Overall there has been little change from 2021. The EIU had expected its indicator scores to improve with the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, but these were countered by negative developments in many countries.

New Zealand comes in at second position of the 167 countries surveyed. The Nordic countries occupy the other 5 of the 6 top spots. Australia is at #16, a slip from #9 in 2021. Our score has been slipping since 2010.

The EIU measures democracy on five dimensions. We score top marks on “electoral processes and pluralism”, and highly on “civil liberties”, but we fall down somewhat on “functioning of government”, and we score very poorly on “political participation” and “political culture”.

That mixed report card suggests we have strong political and legal institutions supporting democracy, but political participation and political culture are matters to do with the society at large. Maybe one reason for our low score on political participation is our system of compulsory voting: in their scoring system, described in the appendix, they mark down countries with compulsory voting. Also our low membership of political parties may have pulled down our score.

Or maybe the EIU is simply observing a lack of political passion in Australia, reflecting historian Keith Hancock’s observation that “'Australian democracy has come to look upon the state as a vast public utility”.

You can have access to the report from the EIU site. They ask a number of rather annoying questions about occupation and so on, but there is no charge for the report.

A town like Alice

A town like Alice was a 1950 novel by Nevil Shute, later made into a movie and TV series. Its plot is around a war-time romance, and it represents Alice Springs as an idealized oasis of civilization. It involves Japanese, English, Malays, and of course the hard-working settlers who have conquered the outback, but there is no mention of Aboriginal people.

TV clips of an angry crowd at a town meeting last Monday night suggests that Shute’s depiction endures.

That vision of “The Alice” has been mugged by reality, and there is a plethora of media coverage, which is tending to a polarized presentation of options: lock up these wild kids in some establishment like Don Dale, or let them run wild destroying the community. There is the usual allocation of blame – the Murdoch media is helped in this regard by Labor holding office in both the Commonwealth and the Northern Territory, as if the problems in Alice Springs and similar communities have developed only since last May. And there is the usual simple solution for a complex problem – make it harder to buy booze.

So far there hasn’t been much of what could be classified as a serious public debate on the problem. There has been some analysis: it is not hard for people to comment on the causes to do with 235 years of racism, neglect, and unwise policy. One such unwise policy was the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act: this and other interventions are analyzed in a Conversation contribution by Thalia Antony of the University of Technology Sydney and Vanessa Napaltjari Davis of ANU: Alcohol bans and law and order responses to crime in Alice Springs haven’t worked in the past, and won’t work now.

But so far there is not much commentary suggesting practical solutions. Maybe that is because any solution would cost a heap of money (something governments don’t want to talk about), would involve taking the children off the street into some controlled setting (too close to “law and order” for the left), and would recognize that the children themselves are no less the victims than the people whose businesses have been vandalized and vehicles smashed (which the right doesn’t acknowledge).

An exception is a contribution in The Conversation from Rolf Gerritsen and Tanya McDonald from Charles Darwin University: Beneath the Alice Springs ‘crime wave’ are complex issues – and a lot of politics. They cover the complexities of alcohol regulation, and they take us into the politics of the situation. Politicians are hoping that the crime wave will abate “as the cooler weather forces countrymen back to their communities”. (Anyone who has lived in the outback would realize that any kid would choose the street over an overcrowded house without air conditioning on a summer evening). The problem is seasonal and shouldn’t interfere with the Northern Territory election, due in August 2024 when evenings in Alice Springs will be chilly and frosty. As Gerritsen and McDonald point out, governments are likely to go on ignoring children’s welfare.

Will the strife in Alice Springs and other remote communities derail the Voice process? It will certainly be raised by the “no” campaigners, who will conveniently ignore the fact that the problem relates to a tiny proportion of Aboriginal children, and the inconvenient reality that non-Aboriginal children are committing similar crimes in our large cities, but without the concentrated effect on specific communities. A group of Alice Springs Aboriginal grandmothers quite reasonably sees these problems as a compelling case in favour of the Voice.

Some Aboriginal people are opposed to the Voice. It’s hardly surprising that among a group as diverse as indigenous Australians there should be some differences of opinion, but The Guardian reports on an IPSOS poll (which IPSOS has not made publicly available) revealing that only 10 percent of “Aboriginal and Islander” people are opposed to a Voice to Parliament, while 80 percent are in support.

Breaking news from the Productivity Commission: teachers are overworked

Just before last year’s election, then Treasurer Josh Frydenberg sent a reference to the Productivity Commission to review the Commonwealth-state National School Reform Agreement. It was a narrow reference, mainly about the appropriateness or otherwise of the way the agreement is being assessed. The adequacy of funding was not to be considered.

The Commission reported on 20 January, finding that the “agreement’s initiatives have done little, so far, to improve student outcomes”. Its main recommendations are about lifting outcomes for the most disadvantaged students, and it tentatively recognizes that the school education system can help promote student wellbeing, noting that “many children and young people struggle with poor wellbeing because of experiences in and outside their schools “.

School
Milparinka schoolroom of earlier times

Unsurprisingly it finds that a great deal of teachers’ time (which is well in excess of 40 hours a week) is taken up with administrative tasks. The Commission reports:

Despite working more hours than their international counterparts, Australian teachers spend less time teaching, both in terms of absolute hours and as a proportion of their working week. Teachers spend more time on general administration, such as communication, paperwork and other clerical duties. At just over 5 hours a week, this is the fifth highest number of hours in the OECD.

It reports on the reasons teachers consider leaving the profession. Only a small proportion mention insufficient pay. The overwhelming reasons have to do with the workload imposed on teachers:

On the ABC’s Breakfast program Pasi Sahlberg of Southern Cross University comments on the Commission’s findings, and agrees that more attention must be paid to student well-being. The problems observed by the Commission, particularly the widening disparities in education outcomes, have been developing for at least ten years. He also calls for improved funding for public schools. (9 minutes)

Dreamers and schemers – a political history of Australia

Australians who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century became conditioned to see politics in terms of a Labor-Liberal choice, a model that still holds in the mind of journalists and pollsters even as it is becoming detached from political reality.

Our political history is actually much more complex, and less constrained by partisan loyalties.

On Late Light Live Phillip Adams interviews political historian Frank Bongiorno about his recently-published book Dreamers and schemers. The dreamers are the political idealists and the schemers are the people who have been involved in the practical task of elective politics. His work takes us back to 1788 – and earlier – and up to the 2022 election, covering the ideas and practices that shaped our political history well before the present parties were formed, and that still shape our political ideas. The main enduring idea Bongiorno identifies is the non-ideological model of government as a public utility.

The interview covers the long and changing politics of race relations, gender politics, early moves towards republicanism, and conflicts around the church-state relationship, with sketches of individuals who contributed their ideas – John Dunmore Lang, Daniel Denahy, Adelaide Ironside – to name a few.

Australian politics has always been fluid, and less bound by partisan ideologies than we may believe. It’s a story of liberal ideas emerging from those on the right and conservative ideas from those on the left. It’s a story of people changing parties (the Labor party, in particular, has seen many people changing sides). And it’s also a story of strong non-partisan movements.

The book is an easy read, weighted about 50:50 to pre and post 1945 politics. The Late Night Live interview (53 minutes) has the bonus of extracts of speeches, such as Herbert Evatt’s Bondi Speech, an occasion when a dreamer was able to warn about the risk to our democratic foundations posed by a proposal to ban a political party.