Below is a comprehensive list of all of my publications.

2009 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

2008 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

2007 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

2006 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

2005 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

2004 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

2003 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

2002 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec


September 2009 | ^Top^


Pass the climate parcel
Opinion article in the The Australian on Thursday, 24th September



International negotiations are like a game of political pass the parcel and every government is desperate to ensure they're not holding up negotiations when the music stops.

Last July India was left holding theparcel of negotiating text for the World Trade Organisation's Doha talks when the music stopped, and was internationally condemned for the failed negotiations.

At this week's UN Climate Change Summit in New York, the grand rhetoric from political leaders shows they are seeking to make sure the music keeps playing when they are in the spotlight.

Kevin Rudd is proposing a ``grand bargain'', Chinese President Hu Jintao has proposed per capita emissions cuts and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is celebrating proposed domestic legislation for emissions targets. Their statements aren't about securing agreement but laying the foundations of blame for when the December Copenhagen meeting collapses in attempting to replace the failed Kyoto Protocol.

The New York meeting exposes how wide the fracture lines are.

Earlier this year the US House of Representatives passed a bill for an emissions trading scheme. But the bill's passage through the Senate was predicated on an agreement in Copenhagen that will see developing countries reduce their emissions.

Under the negotiating principle of common but differentiated responsibilities a cut to emissions doesn't have to be equivalent to that of the US, but it certainly needs to be more than curbing emissions growth until 2020, as China proposes.

At the summit, Hu restated China's position that climate change ``is an environmental issue but also, and more importantly, a development issue''. The only development was a commitment to ``cut carbon dioxide emission per unit of GDP''. But China's chief climate change negotiator, Yu Qingtai, has consistently argued ``the difference in per capita emissions between China and the developed nations is still huge'' and China's commitment to combat climate change is tempered by pride that ``more and more ... countrymen can afford a car and go to work in a car''.

Similarly the Indian government has previously argued that they are committed to ``per capita emissions of greenhouse gases not exceeding those of the developed countries''.

The UN's chief climate change bureaucrat, Yvo de Boer, may be hailing these statements as a significant achievement, but without developing country commitments to emissions cuts, American officials cannot negotiate a politically palatable agreement for approval by the US Senate.

Politically China and India have been smart in passing the parcel to US President Barack Obama while he's stymied because his Congress is thrashing out healthcare reform.

And developing countries are not alone in playing climate politics.

In a speech delivered at New York University's School of Law, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong flagged negotiating text for ``national schedules'' that would require countries to report their emissions targets and efforts to achieve them.

According to Wong, one of the benefits is to ``deliver the environmental certainty of knowing that there is consensus on a vision for our global future''. Considering this is the objective of establishing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that oversees negotiations, it is hardly a step forward. Instead Wong's proposal is designed to keep the music playing a little longer.

At the G8 summit in Italy earlier this year, leaders agreed to a long-term goal of reducing global emissions by 50per cent by 2050, and 80 per cent by developed countries.

Japan's announced aspiration to reduce emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 is consistent. But like the hot air being expelled at the New York summit, G8 leaders' statements are non-binding and are primarily used for political positioning.

Next week climate change negotiations resume in Bangkok to iron out details for a Copenhagen agreement.

Present negotiating texts include radically different and mutually exclusive visions for emissions targets and how to secure them through instruments, including international financing and undermining intellectual property on low-carbon technology.

Expect another round of media savvy statements to ensure no attending minister looks like they are holding back a deal. But the music will stop by the end of the December Copenhagen meeting and if ministers are smart, they won't be passing the parcel, they will be dropping it.

And while Rudd and Wong seek to pass their emissions trading scheme they will be committing Australia to unilateral action to harm our economy while the rest of the world points fingers for Copenhagen's failure.

So even if Australia isn't left with the parcel in Copenhagen, Rudd and Wong will come home to start a new game: ETS hot potato.

Ends


Nanny knows best
Opinion article on Friday, 4th of September 2009



Rather than being a nudge towards a healthier society, the Preventative Health Taskforce's report is a government shove on how average Australians should live their lives.

One of the objectives of the report is to influence markets to achieve preventable health outcomes. And it recommends doing so using measures that are popularly grouped as ``nudge'' policies.

American academic Cass Sunstein's nudge theory is that governments should direct people in the preferred direction without limiting their choices. Recently Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner argued in favour of the nudge theory because it ``holds enormous potential for reforming government and regulation'' towards more desirable societal outcomes.

But the taskforce report's nudges are really more like shoves. The report argues that those most vulnerable to obesity, tobacco and alcohol-related health problems are ``those Australians with less money, less education and insecure working conditions''.

Following the nudge brief, the taskforce recommends imposing heavy sin taxes that will increase the price of food, alcohol and cigarettes. But these tax increases are unlikely to have any additional effect on existing taxes, advertising bans and horrific warning labels about the consequences of smoking. They are likely to act as a regressive imposition on the least well-to-do in our community. The only beneficiary is likely to be government coffers. Increasing taxes as a deterrent has a poor record of success.

Since 2001 Australia has had a ``fat tax'' called the GST. The GST acts as a fat tax because it applies to all cooked and processed foods but not to fresh food. If tax increases are supposed to nudge Australians into a healthier lifestyle, then they have spectacularly failed. Processed foods have had an additional 10 per cent tax over fruit and vegetables for the same period that the taskforce has argued obesity rates have been rising.

The argument that additional taxes need to be collected to support the consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle also go up in a puff of smoke when you look at the facts.

Traditionally governments have argued that increasing taxes on cigarettes is necessary to help offset the additional costs of those who contract cigarette-related illnesses such as lung cancer. But according to the Cancer Council of Victoria's Tobacco in Australia report in 2004-05, total state and federal government revenue from tobacco-related products exceeded tobacco-attributable costs by more than $3.5 billion. In other words, smokers already pay far more in tax than they cost in healthcare.

Recommending that the price of a packet of fags should be taxed until it costs $20 or more will only exacerbate the imbalance.

Another recommendation is for the government to end the act governing cigarette advertising to require that they cannot be sold ``except in packaging of a shape, size, material and colour prescribed by government''. Family First senator Steve Fielding has already introduced a bill to this effect.

In the taskforce's discussion on food, it recommends that within three years there should be ``standard serve-portion size(s)'' in restaurants.

These measures are designed to stop us going to a fast-food restaurant and, if we do, to realise that we should not order a large combo meal when our stomachs cry upsize.

People may make decisions about what they consume and do that government does not like, and there may be legitimate measures that can be taken to stop people making the poorer choices. But to bring Australians along, public health activists need to learn to treat us as grown-ups.

The 26 potential pieces of legislation, 18 new programs and frameworks, seven new bureaucracies and 71 other recommendations by the taskforce do not communicate respect for the individual's choices.

Australians can make rational, informed decisions and still smoke, eat fast food and binge-drink beyond the technical standard of three glasses of booze without destroying our health, as long as we are encouraged to take responsibility for our lives.

Instead of encouraging responsibility, the taskforce is trying to shove us into thinking it can make those decisions for us.

The necessity to implement the report's recommendations is being sold with predictable alarmism. Health Minister Nicola Roxon has argued that ``we are killing people by not acting'' and taskforce chairman Rob Moodie has argued that ``sitting on our hands is not an option''.

The real decision facing the government isn't about whether to accept the report's recommendations. It is about whether government thinks its role is to ensure consumers can take the responsibility to make informed choices or to decide for them.

Unfortunately, the taskforce's report is recommending the latter, not the former.

Ends


Health Taskforce wishes you all a long, dull life with nanny
Opinion article on Wednesday, 2nd of September 2009



Yesterday's National Preventative Health Taskforce's report is a monument to why elites think the average Australian needs a nanny to hold their hand through daily life.

The three core chapters of the report analyse the great sins of our time -- obesity, alcohol and smoking -- and recommends Australians need help to stop making the wrong choices about what they put in their mouths.

The problems and solutions are entirely predictable. According to the taskforce, people get fat because they eat too much and don't exercise enough. The taskforce's solution -- the government needs to make sure people eat less and exercise more. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Any taskforce member would be rightly offended if another Australian recommended they needed many of the measures they included in their report. But it hasn't stopped them paternalistically arguing that we don't know to exercise or eat chocolate responsibly.
For example, the taskforce has recommended that the government should legislate to introduce healthy workplace programs and phase out vending machines that dispense afternoon treats.

The taskforce could have been creative, but instead they are just rehashing the same measures for food and alcohol that were used to attack cigarettes -- advertising ban and tax increases.

And by recommending tax increases on alcohol and tobacco, the taskforce is clearly on the same wave length as our parliamentarians. After the report's release, some Opposition MPs argued that volumetric taxes should be introduced so a magnum of champagne opened for a family celebration attracts a higher tax rate than those piccolos that people drink on the train on the way to the horse races.

But if the taskforce has its way, tobacco won't just face tax increases, but the removal of all forms of advertising, including on the packets.

The taskforce's recommendations steal the thunder of Family First Senator Steve Fielding, who recently introduced the aptly titled Plain Tobacco Packaging (Removing Branding from Cigarette Packs) Bill 2009. The Bill stipulates the exact size of a cigarette pack - 69-72 millimetres wide x 87-90 mm high x 21-24 mm deep - and also requires the removal of any branding images and that a pack can only be wrapped in a wholly transparent plastic. That stops pesky cigarette companies putting branding on the plastic surrounding it.

But the most absurd measure in Fielding's Bill is that a plain packet cannot even be white. It has to be Pantone 154 - known in layman's terms as poo brown.

Considering the Australian Parliament isn't known for its gym-junkie, teetotalling MPs, it seems a bit rich that they are now going to legislate to make sure we are.

Understandably, the report isn't being sold because of its economic benefits, but that its recomendations could help save up to 800,000 Australians from an early death. The taskforce has clearly decided it would be better if we all had long, dull lives, rather than somewhat shorter, but more interesting ones.

But the real shortcoming of this report isn't what it recommends. It is what it doesn't. Rather than 316 pages of nanny-statism, it could have had one simple recommendation -- Australians should take responsibility for their choices and should accept the consequences. But that'd be too hard for the Government to legislate.

Ends


August 2009 | ^Top^


Palm oil boycott will hurt impoverished farmers
Opinion article on Wednesday, 5th of August 2009



Over the past few weeks New Zealand-based green groups and activists have called for a boycott on Cadbury products because of the use of Malaysian palm oil in its chocolate.

The boycott was prompted after Cadbury clarified using palm oil as one of the total vegetable oils used in its products.

And doing so has whipped activists into a tizz. Opponents of palm oil claim that farmers burn forest in poor countries to create available land for plantations.

The claimed cost is less forest, and threats to endangered species that rely on the forest for survival. They also argue that plantations have a lesser capacity as a carbon sink to offset carbon dioxide emissions.

Because of these allegations Auckland Zoo removed Cadbury products from its shelves a fortnight ago, and anti-palm oil activists have established a "Boycott Cadbury" Facebook group arguing "Only d*cks eat Cadbury".

But in doing so they aren't seeing the palm oil plantation from the forest.

Palm oil is a produced all across South-East Asia because it is a sustainable, high-yield product that helps small farmers lift themselves out of poverty. It is also a vital food supplement which can deliver up to a third of a person's daily Vitamin A requirements.

The benefits are so great that the anti-poverty Asian Development Bank (ADB) has a strong repayment rate from palm oil producers who take on loans. And growing palm oil provides an export industry for developing economies like Malaysia into markets like Australia and New Zealand.

But international NGO, Friends of the Earth, has campaigned against the ADB's support for palm oil because it actually helps alleviate poverty. According to a recent report they're "sceptical" about "a broad-based economic growth model lead (sic) by the private sector".

Rather than having evidence that growing palm oil won't increase living standards, FOE's reports expose that their agenda is motivated by ideology, not practical environmentalism.

And FOE's claims and motivations cannot be trusted. According to a 2007 press release the palm oil industry is involved in "illegally logging rainforests, setting forests on fire and violating the rights of local communities". The evidence they provide is a photo of a hilly area in Indonesia that 'proves' a forest fire. The problem is that the photo shows no flames amongst the trees, and based on the angle of the sun's reflection the photo was taken at either dawn or dusk, and the 'smoke' could just be mist.

FOE might be right, but the evidence they provide is more of a misting, than smoking, gun.

And FOE's ideological opposition to the use of palm oil won't deliver environmental benefits. The palm oil sourced by Cadbury is certified by GreenPalm - an organisation that certifies the oil has come from sustainable sources. And Cadbury is a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil which was founded in part by international environmental NGO World Wildlife Fund.

The supposed impact of palm oil on Malaysia's forest is questionable. Of Malaysia's forest 16 per cent is zoned protected with sixty per cent of the country's total land mass allocated as forest. By comparison the United Nation's minimum zoning target is 10 per cent and Europe's allocation of land mass to forest is only 25 per cent.

It is easy to be an armchair environmentalist from Australia or New Zealand. What consumers are missing is that the financial saving of not buying a block of chocolate is costing Malaysian's their livelihood.

According to their corporate website Cadbury introduced palm oil to "soften (their) chocolate and maintain affordability". Cadbury did so because it offered better value-for-money and that's good for business. But their decision is also providing a development dividend for the world's poor.

If consumers don't like the taste of chocolate with palm oil then they can vote with their wallets.

But by boycotting palm oil what activists are actually doing is shutting down the industry in developing countries, and with it their opportunity to raise living standards and increase wealth. And if you think you can do without chocolate because it goes straight to your hips, imagine the cost to an impoverished farmer's family who can barely afford to eat.

Ends


July 2009 | ^Top^


Marriage for church and gays
Opinion article in the The Australian on Friday, 31st of July 2009



WE need a range of matrimonial contracts.

FOR his new book, Battlelines, Tony Abbott has called for a conservative "coming out" by proposing the establishment of covenant marriage in Australia.

Covenant marriage is a marriage contract offered in parts of the US that applies more rigid rules. The principle is to provide for those who want a less secular institution by restricting no-fault divorce and requiring counselling before a union is entered into.

Covenant marriage is effectively the secular equivalent of Catholic marriage. Abbott's argument is that if society is going to recognise gay marriage it should also "surely be capable of providing additional recognition to what might be thought of as traditional marriage".

A recent poll commissioned by Australian Marriage Equality found 60 per cent of Australians supported marriage for same-sex couples. Support peaked at 74 per cent among 16 to 24-year-olds. These numbers appear abnormally high considering a 2007 survey found only 43 per cent support, but other polls here and overseas show a clear trend supporting reform, especially among younger voters.

Tomorrow's same-sex marriage national day of action, last weekend's resolution at the Tasmanian ALP conference supporting gay marriage and the Australian Greens-led Senate inquiry into gay marriage demonstrates the issue isn't going away.

Put simply, marriage is a contract. The problem is the existing contract is a civil and religious institution in one. Everyone's contract is the same, but some religious civil celebrants require extra obligations in return for overseeing entry into the contract.

But in arguing for same-sex marriage most gay activists don't appreciate the significance of marriage to religions. In response, many religious conservatives have bunkered down for the fight. They shouldn't. The solution is to establish alternative options such as Abbott's covenant marriage.

Doing so will stop religions having their marriage contracts secularised and government mandating its extension to same-sex couples.

The government can allow multiple marriage contracts. Registering a contract would require meeting minimum standards set by government, and religious bodies could set additional requirements for a marriage to conform to their faith.

For example, under competitive marriage the government could have a default contract between two people. The Catholic Church could register a marriage contract recognising it as a sacrament, including restricting it to a man and a woman and requiring that it be ordained by a Catholic priest.

Competitive marriage would replace the one-size-fits-all model. Importantly, it would address the imbalance inherent in government reserving marriage for heterosexual couples. All marriage options would have the same social, legal and political standing.

The benefits would be manifest. Religions would no longer have their institution threatened by government influenced by political activists.

Competitive marriage should also be desirable to gay activists. Same-sex couples could have their relationships legally recognised.

And if heterosexual or homosexual couples wanted to upgrade their marriage from civil to religious they would still need to conform to the tenets of that faith.

Most important, competitive marriage contracts are consistent with the principles of a liberal society, respecting that the private laws of God can discriminate but ensuring the laws of man don't.

Tim Wilson is a writer based in Melbourne.

Ends


Mere words won't save free trade
Opinion article in the the Australian Financial Review on Thursday, 30th of July 2009



Despite Labor's posturing; the evidence is mounting that the party's free-trade credibility is weakening. Last month, the NSW government introduced budgetary measures giving local industry preference in major projects. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said the commonwealth wouldn't be following suit.

Yet on Tuesday, Industry Minister Kim Carr released his "Boosting Australian Industry Participation" policy that requires tenderers for government work to outline their use of Australian suppliers in every bid. Carr's policy may not be all-out protectionism, but it is by stealth, by requiring tenderers to declare their suppliers and suggesting bids that don't use local industry will be subject to hazing. Even the Australian Industry Group is backing Carr's latest plan, claiming it will "boost" local industry.

The announcement was made to appease the union movement, which wants "Buy Australian" provisions in government procurement, and to stop a fight on the ALP National Conference floor this weekend.

In a bid to affirm his free-trade credentials, Victorian Premier John Brumby said recently he "strongly opposed" the NSW regime. "If you want more growth opportunities in the future, more job opportunities in the future, the answer to that is not to put up trade barriers," he said.

But Brumby isn't practising what he preaches. In November, similar measures to give local producers a 10 per cent advantage for Victorian government projects were introduced. The measures appear to be in breach of Australia's obligations under its free-trade agreement with the United States.

And in the ALP's draft national platform to be debated this weekend is consideration of whether "appropriate mechanisms are introduced to prevent environmental dumping". That's code for supporting an Australian carbon tariff. The only clear saviour in the government is Trade Minister Simon Crean, who is prepared to rail against any protectionist sentiment from the union movement or inside the government

Over the past 30 years, Australia has benefited enormously from a bipartisan consensus supporting free trade. Australia is a free-trade country because it serves our economic interests. We cannot produce everything, and if we try the cost would be so outrageous it would reduce our bang for buck.

But recent action coupled with reducing migrant intakes earlier this year, suggest the government espouses open markets and borders but behind closed doors is turning the clock back.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said last year he had "a low tolerance threshold for importation" in relation to goods purchased with government stimulus money.

Rudd has previously argued that protectionism "brought on the Great Depression" and "throws a spear at the heart of the economy because so much of our jobs, so many of our jobs are generated by the trading sector of the economy". He clearly understands the cost of protectionism, but it hasn't prompted him to stop the current course being set. But to stop it and Australia's consensus for free-trade from crumbling, Labor needs more than words - it needs uniform action to support free trade

Ends


Death of author unlikely
Opinion article in the The Australian on Thursday, 16th of July 2009



PROTECTING the book industry panders to the cultural cringe.

THE biggest barrier to the Australian book industry's success won't be the demise of parallel import restrictions; it'll be the cultural cringe spruiked by authors and the publishing industry that stops it being globally competitive.

Yesterday the Productivity Commission released its final report recommending the scrapping of import restrictions for books. The final report's recommendations went well beyond the draft report's recommendations and proposed the abolition of import restrictions after three years.

In response to the inquiry, book publishers and printers whipped authors into a tizz. And authors have been used to oppose liberalisation by pulling at the heartstrings of consumers and their sympathy for Australiana.

For example, after Tim Winton recently received his fourth Miles Franklin Award for his book Breath, he used the platform to claim that import restrictions helped foster local authors and end the cultural cringe that pervaded Australian books pre-1980.

But the claims are baseless.

In its review the Productivity Commission asked for evidence since the removal of parallel import restrictions on sound recordings in Australia and most copyrighted works, including books, in New Zealand.

Both occurred in 1998 and the evidence is overwhelming.

Data from the Australian Performing Rights Association shows that since the liberalisation of sound recordings the total royalties paid have more than doubled and the number of artists paid increased by more than 50,000. Meanwhile the average price of CDs has collapsed by 32 per cent, while total sales have remained relatively stagnant.

Book prices may not collapse as much, but the data from the CDs shows that Australia's cultural industries can still thrive without protectionism. Evidence from a NZ government-commissioned report found there was no appreciable decline in the publication of local works after the country scrapped import restrictions. And in 2004 an industry spokesperson conceded that since liberalisation there was an increase in the number of NZ books published.

The case is so clear that Melbourne University Publishing chief executive Louise Adler walked out of a radio debate against Dymocks board member Bob Carr, who simply repeated these facts against the publishers' and authors' claims.

Opponents of decreased liberalisation also argue that without protection the printing industry won't have the economic certainty necessary to invest in the technology that will make the industry more competitive. But post-liberalisation the NZ printing industry has continued with comparable investment as the manufacturing sector overall.

Arguments that printing industry jobs will be protected also have beenshown up. An analysis of printing jobs in Australia and NZ shows both are in decline; the only difference is that Australia's have declined faster, and we are the ones with import restrictions.

The other claim from industry interests and authors is that removing import restrictions will undermine territorial copyright.

But even if import restrictions are in the Copyright Act, they are not necessary to protect copyright.

In every book there are two property rights. The first is the physical book: the cover, pages, binding and ink. The second is the copyright, which is the order of the text on the pages. So long as a book is printed in a country that is a party to international copyright treaties, import restrictions don't do anything for copyright; they only protect the publishing and printing industries and unnecessarily hike the price of books.

But the real problem for the industry is that by opposing book imports it is sticking its head in the sand. We all know the direction of retail book sales isn't just through the local bookstore. The real growth of sales is through the internet. Pending foreign exchange fluctuations, books are regularly cheaper to buy on Amazon and import into Australia, even with postage costs.

The recommendations from the Productivity Commission review should have been a wake-up call to industry that government-sponsored protection in a global economy won't last forever. Instead of trying to perpetuate protection, the industry should be using the remaining three years of protection to make structural adjustments and become globally competitive. And the best way to do that is to find ways to reduce costs and pass on the benefits to consumers.

The book industry may fear the removal of import restrictions, but consumers won't want imported books if those produced in Australia are the same price or cheaper anyway.

Tim Wilson is director of the Intellectual Property and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs and author of Unbinding Book Barriers, available at www.ipa.org.au.

Ends


Fighting Climate Change with Patents
Opinion article in the the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, 15th of July 2009



GENEVA -- World leaders are talking a lot about climate change, not least in their flashy statement on controlling global temperatures at the recent Group of Eight summit in Italy. One of the smarter ways they can put this determination into effect will be to protect the intellectual property of green innovators from a growing onslaught by developing-world politicians and mistaken activists.

Intellectual property rights are the underappreciated link in the environmentalist chain. By rewarding inventors and entrepreneurs, well-enforced patents provide the right incentives for the innovation that will produce technologies necessary to manage climate change. Yet this fact is getting lost. Access to low carbon technologies has become a central issue in international climate change negotiations as rich countries put more pressure on the poor to cut their emissions. Understandably the poor aren't prepared to do so unless they are given cheap access to technologies. Patents are increasingly viewed as the main obstacle to cheap technology transfer.

So a representative of the Brazilian government, Haroldo Machado Filho, this week told a World Intellectual Property Organization conference in Geneva that leaders should consider the possibility of allowing "compulsory licensing" for green technologies. This would be a new loophole in international intellectual property rules that would allow developing-country governments to break patents "for the public good"; such a loophole already exists for pharmaceuticals. In a similar vein, Indian Climate Change Minister Shri Ramesh asserted late last month that access to intellectual property for low-carbon technology is a "global public good." This kind of thinking lays the intellectual groundwork for patent violations down the road.

Most worrying, opponents of patents have succeeded in having included in the current negotiating text for a post-Kyoto agreement paragraphs to undermine patents. The final text won't be finalized until at least the December U.N. Copenhagen meeting, but current proposals range from "compulsory licensing" to the "creation of a global technology pool for climate change" that would socialize intellectual property.

These proposals fundamentally misunderstand why low-carbon technology is expensive. A January report by Copenhagen Economics, a consulting firm, found that the high prices are most likely a result of the immaturity of technologies, not patents. New technologies are generally more expensive when there are fewer products competing in the market. As more technologies are innovated the price is likely to drop. Most promising green technologies are so new they simply haven't had time to decline in price yet.

The Copenhagen Economics report also notes that weakening intellectual property for green technologies would be bad for the developing world countries whose governments advocate such measures. A growing number of patents on these technologies are held by developing-country innovators. China is one of the largest owners of solar and fuel-cell technology patents. The balance is still in favor of developed-world innovators, but the gap is narrowing fast. Allowing entrepreneurs in poorer countries to profit from their discoveries will be good both for the environment and for developing-country economies.

Undermining patents won't help access to technologies, but it will stop the next generation of technologies being invented, and with it a long-term solution to achieving the twin goals of developing countries to reduce emissions and alleviate poverty. Rather than breaking patents, policy makers could re-evaluate tariff regimes and other barriers that can add up to 165% to the cost of some imported green technologies, according to a 2007 World Bank study. The best path to a green future is not to break free-market principles, but to return to them.

Mr. Wilson is director of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia.

Ends


Readers pay a price for authors' greed
Opinion article in the The Australian on Wednesday, 1st of July 2009



The campaign by wealthy Australian authors such as Tim Winton and Bryce Courtenay against reforms that would enable Australians to buy cheaper books is all about feathering their nests and has nothing to do with protecting Australian culture.

Yesterday the Productivity Commission handed to the federal government its final report on whether restrictions on importing copyrighted books, or parallel import restrictions, should be eased. These restrictions inflate the price of books by limiting competitive imports, and the beneficiaries are the local printing and publishing executives, at the expense of consumers.

The industry operates under the 30-day rule, which allows import restrictions for the life of the copyright -- which means the life of the author, plus 70 years -- so long as the book is made available in Australia within 30 days of being published overseas.

Exemptions are provided for booksellers filling a single order and for consumers buying books directly from online retailers.

It must be hoped that the commission recommends scrapping the restrictions altogether. Its draft report recommended only paring back the restrictions from the life of copyright to a single year.

But, in response, publishing industry executives such as Louise Adler have worked local authors up into a frenzied opposition to these modest reforms.

Author Peter Carey described the proposed measures as "cultural self-suicide", and others have argued they will cost jobs and reduce authors' income as well as the number of local authors published.

Their claims are baseless. When the Howard government removed import restrictions on compact discs in 1998, it was accused of gutting the music industry and jeopardising the income of musicians. But industry data shows royalties increased from $81.8million in 2003 to $108m in 2007, and the number of performers receiving royalties also increased. Meanwhile, the average price of a CD album has fallen by 32per cent.

Similarly, New Zealand's removal of parallel import restrictions on copyrighted works in the same year also points to benefits. Jobs in the publishing industry have been lost on both sides of the Tasman, but the NZ industry has not lost nearly as many.

Part of the reason for slower job losses in NZ is that, without protection, publishers focused on being internationally competitive and increased their exports. It is similar to the experience of Australian industries following the liberalisation of tariff barriers in the 1980s and 90s.

But the most absurd claim is that easing import restrictions would water down the exclusive rights copyright confers. In a book there are two property rights: one relates to the physical book and the other to the copyright text. Import restrictions are designed to protect the former and don't affect the latter.

Although parallel import restrictions exist for the three main branches of intellectual property -- copyright, patents and trademarks -- they are inconsistent and unnecessary for copyrighted works. Patents and trademarks need parallel import restrictions because the property rights afforded are not automatic. They need to be registered with a government agency country by country. But they rarely are because of the cost involved, and as a result there is no guarantee that royalty payments will be made to the right holder on an import.

Copyright, on the other hand, is automatically conferred to the right holder and it is protected in all countries that are signatories to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic works. Royalties are paid to copyright holders when their works are published in those countries, based on the laws of each country. The only justification for import restrictions for copyright is to guard against counterfeit products.

Australia's parallel import restrictions may be included in the Copyright Act, but they are not a part of IP protection. They are a trade barrier disguised as IP protection.

The costs of these restrictions are borne by the least affluent Australians, who are paying higher prices for books than necessary. And that is harming education opportunities for Australia's poorest.

Rather than seeking industry protection, Australia's book industry should be focusing on how to expand the market for books by making them cheaper. It's the only sustainable way of guaranteeing their income. And consumers win, too.

Tim Wilson is Director of the Intellectual Property and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs and author of 'Unbinding Book Barriers' available at www.ipa.org.au

Ends


June 2009 | ^Top^


Authors on clown street over book prices
Opinion article on The Punch on Thursday, 25th of June 2009



Tim Winton is the master of fiction. But his latest tirades prove he doesn't understand when reality kicks in.

Last week Winton won a fourth Miles Franklin Award for his book, Breath. And to celebrate he used his moment in the spotlight to attack the Productivity Commission's review to scrap protection for Australia's book industry.

Parallel import restrictions require books sold in Australia to be produced in Australia. It's an idea so bad the New South Wales government could have thought of it.

The PC is releasing its final report at the end of the month. The draft recommended partial-liberalisation, because exposing Australia's book industry to competition is a bridge-too-far.

And even that recommendation has caused alarm bells. Fellow author, Peter Carey, has attacked liberalisation as a form of "cultural self-suicide". And Winton has previously slammed liberalisation arguing it will result in "great bitterness" amongst Australia's authors.

Authors been deceitfully whipped into a lather by the publishing and printing industries who want to ensure books are more expensive than they need be, delivering profits to line their pockets.

The publishers and printers argue that import restrictions stop competition that would crush the industry, while guaranteeing jobs stay in Australia; and the minimal extra cost is added to the price tag of a paperback that can be significantly cheaper overseas.

And in arguing their case, they've convinced authors that liberalisation will also diminish their copyright. They clearly don't understand the nature of copyright.

In a book there are two property rights. The first is the physical book - the paper, binding and printing ink. The second is the copyright, which is basically the idea expressed through the arrangement of the letters printed on the pages.

Without the copyrighted text a book is just something to jot notes onto.

Import restrictions exist to protect the physical book, not the copyright. So long as the book is produced in a country where Australian copyright is respected and royalties are paid, Winton's copyright is safe. And if it doesn't, the book's a fake in the Australian market and can be pulped.

Similarly the authors claim the industry will stop seeding new talent with cross-subsidies of the profits from existing authors.

But the evidence doesn't support them. In my recent study, Unbinding Book Barriers, industry data is analysed to assess the impact of removing import restrictions in 1998 on copyrighted sound recordings, read CDs.

The results are clear. The total funds distributed are up. The total number of recipients of royalties is up. And the wholesale price of CD albums is down by 32 per cent.

Winton's real beef is that authors get paid diddly-squat. And he's right. But most earn diddly-squat because they write things people don't want to read.

And Winton knows it. In his submission to the Productivity Commission's review he says he has "enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success". He does so because he produces fiction that people want. Not because of any import restrictions. They just go toward beefing-up the salaries of publishing executives.

But the greatest irony of Winton's criticism is that in his own submission he uses evidence of the failings of import restrictions to justify their perpetuity. Winton argues that when he first started being published Aussie authors could be "edited and published in Australia and forego a British readership entirely, or to have work originate from London and have Australian(s buy) imports".

He's right. That was because of market segmentation through import restrictions that were partially liberalised in the early 1990s.

Australian authors, publishers and printing companies will do well when they adhere to the simple principle of ‘supplying' what consumers ‘demand' - and that's an interesting read.

In the meantime authors seem happy to enjoy protection that author, Di Bates, hails as essential to stop Australia being "flooded with cheaper book(s)". Because the income streams of our less-talented of authors is a higher national priority than making tools for education more affordable.

Tim Wilson is Director of the Intellectual Property and Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs

Ends


Labor finds red herrings under Chinese-made beds
Opinion article on The Punch on Tuesday, 16th of June 2009



You know things are bad in New South Wales when its government led by left-wing Premier, Nathan Rees, is trying to find ways to blame the Red Menace for its economic woes.

Today’s State budget includes protectionist measures to give priority for nearly $4 billion in goods and services to be purchased from Aussie companies, mostly at the expense of China.

It’s an idea with the intellectual depth of a children’s cartoon. Admittedly, by the end of the clip I am not really sure whether NSW Treasurer, Eric Roozendaal, is the scarecrow or the lion. But I know the NSW public is represented by the tin man who ultimately gets a punch in the face.

The NSW proposal is bad policy, and it is not even original. The Victorian government did something similar in November last year.

Mimicry is the greatest form of flattery, but for once it'd be better if Victoria wasn't flattered. And I'm a proud Victorian.

According to the ABS the biggest imports from China are things like TVs, furniture and clothes. It is going to be a tough sell, or should that be a 'tough buy'. The story of the past 20 years has been that Australia isn't good at producing these products, and that's why we're importing them.

The whole point of free trade is for countries to become specialised and competitive in the goods and services they can produce at the lowest cost. If everyone does it prices drop, people trade in better value goods and the extra money left over is used to increase people's standards of living.

The biggest problem for the New South Wales budget is the black hole that needs to be filled. And the best way to do that is for the government to get as much 'bang' for the taxpayer's 'buck'.

Roozendaal may think his plan anti-trade plan may result in showing some heart, but with a budget black hole he should trade it for a brain so he learns to stop digging.

Tim Wilson is Director of the IP and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs - www.ipa.org.au

Ends


Unbinding Book Barriers
Report into the Productivity Commission's review into parallel import restrictions on books, June 2009



Unbinding Book Barriers

Ends


May 2009 | ^Top^


Spread the virus to stop it
Opinion article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, 1st of May 2009



The death toll from swine flu is mounting. But in one respect we can count ourselves lucky: The virus originated in Mexico, a country that quickly shared samples with the World Health Organization.

Scientists in the United States and Australia are already working on developing a vaccine.

Such cooperation may seem like a no-brainer in the face of a potential global pandemic. But some countries don't see it that way. Consider the case of Indonesia, which in 2006 refused to share critical samples of avian influenza with the world health body, jeopardizing efforts to create a vaccine.

At issue here is a long-running debate about patents on vaccines developed by private companies in response to pandemic diseases. In the days immediately following the discovery of swine flu, international activists have called for generic flu vaccines to be licensed for manufacture in developing countries. They have regularly attacked drug patents on the grounds that they keep treatments out of the hands of poor people by allowing patent holders to charge high prices.

Representatives from the Third World Network, a group based in Malaysia, have stated access to vaccines "is going to become a problem" and that developing countries will need "access to technology." This mindset has encouraged some countries to stop sharing the virus samples that make the research possible.

Most seriously, in 2006 Indonesia's Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari asserted that the country owned the "genetic resources" of the sovereign state. She protested that the WHO was providing virus samples to pharmaceutical companies which then developed vaccines, patented them and made profits without any compensation to the virus-providing nation. To "right" this "wrong," Indonesia stopped sharing samples.

Indonesia's underlying worry has been access to the vaccines these companies develop. According to Dr. Supari, part of the problem is that once the WHO is supplied with the sample, "originating countries do not have any right about the destiny of the shared viruses." Indonesia also complained that the limited supply of vaccines was then being bought up by developed countries, with nothing left over for poorer countries.

Indonesia's concern is understandable, and officials of many other countries have expressed similar views, including Cuba and India. According to WHO data, vaccines are distributed to at least one in five people in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Russia and Australia. By contrast in most developing countries it is less than one in 20. But the solution is to find ways of making vaccines accessible after they're developed -- not to undermine the intellectual property rights, and the international cooperation, that allow vaccines to be developed in the first place.

As it is, Indonesia's withholding exposed the international community to significant risks, and was built on the false premise that patents act as a barrier to access to vaccines. In reality, the vast majority of medicines and vaccines are developed by private companies. These companies do so because they are afforded patent rights. Without patents the commercial incentive for the development of a vaccine does not exist.

Fortunately in March 2007 the Indonesian government resumed virus sharing, on the condition that an international agreement be negotiated to increase vaccine stockpiles and potential licensing for patented vaccines for developing countries. Those negotiations are ongoing. But the dangers posed by this misguided thinking on patents and virus-sharing remains. Without private-sector support, governments will be left owning viruses in pandemics, but not the vaccinations to protect people. And that will be a real public-health disaster.

Mr Wilson is the Director of the intellectual property and free trade unit at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia.

Ends


April 2009 | ^Top^


Emerging Leaders | Society
Recognised in The Australian's list of emerging leaders of Australian society on Saturday, 11th April 2009



As part of the full ten recognised.



Ends


March 2009 | ^Top^


Australia's delinked and non-compliant Emissions Trading Scheme
Report into the legisaltion for Australia's Emissions Trading Scheme, March 2009



Australia's delinked and non-compliant Emissions Trading Scheme

Ends


A return to growth involves nurturing free trade
Article published in The Age on Tuesday, 3rd March 2009

This week, the director-general of the World Trade Organisation, Pascal Lamy, is in Australia warning against the threat of protectionism. When Australians are taking lessons on free trade from a Frenchman, it is a sign of how sick the campaign for free trade is.

The global financial crisis is fanning the flames of economic nationalism and Australians are not immune. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd likes to parade as a free trader, but in reality he sends mixed signals. Free trade remains a key pillar in the neo-liberal ideology he has recently sought to condemn.

Rudd has also stirred economic nationalism by calling for the pink insulation batts bought from his stimulus package to be Australian made, commenting he has a "low tolerance threshold for importation".

Around the world, winding back free trade reforms justified by economic nationalism is all the rage. French President Nicolas Sarkozy hinted that bailed-out car companies must keep production in France. British unionists are protesting under the banners of "British jobs for British workers".

The justification for economic nationalism is to "protect" or "save" local jobs, but it actually does the reverse.

In 1930, the US Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. It raised tariffs on goods into the US and, in response, countries around the world responded in-kind. Global trade suffered and the measures played a significant role in turning a recession into the Great Depression.

Economic nationalism raises the cost of production for local manufacturers, reduces access to technology and makes Australian products less competitive. Ultimately, economic nationalism slows economic growth and job creation.

If the Federal Government legitimises trade barriers under the banner of economic nationalism, we should expect the same treatment for our exports and the cost will be dire. One in five Australian jobs is directly related to exports.

And when governments stir economic nationalism, vested union and industry interests are not far behind.

The Australian Steel Institute has released a proposal to "promote Australian jobs first" by requiring projects funded by the Federal Government's stimulus package to use Australian goods and services.

Meanwhile, the national secretary of the metal workers' union, Dave Oliver, has called for local content requirements in manufacturing, arguing a stimulus package should have "less emphasis on the economics and more emphasis on the social benefits".

But Oliver has got it wrong. The best "social benefit" the Government can deliver is promoting free trade that grows the economy and creates jobs.

In the second half of the 19th century, organised labour argued against Chinese workers coming to Australia through the establishment of the White Australia Policy. In his essay on Race and organised labour in Australia, 1850-1901, Professor Raymond Markey argued that the racism of the time correlated with "economic rescissions, when fear of unemployment lent credence to the notion that the Chinese were an economic threat".

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The national secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, Dave Noonan, has called for an end to the Federal Government's 457 immigrant worker visas because they are displacing Australian workers.

Noonan may not be invoking the spirit of racism akin to the White Australia Policy, but the anti-competitive spirit of his policy is.

Stopping immigration isn't going to help Australian industries grow when there is still a need for skilled workers.

Rudd's leadership in opposing economic nationalism has been left wanting, but he has the opportunity to reassert this, and in the process, Australia's credibility as a free trade nation.

In late 2001, the global community united to start the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation negotiations. They did so to send a signal of confidence to the international marketplace following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

If it took a crisis to start them, a global financial crisis provides the same impetus to finish them.

Concluding the Doha Round would not just help kick-start the global economy, it would also be a lance in the heart of economic nationalism.

But to conclude the round, leadership is needed. Trade Minister Simon Crean has been providing it even before the global financial crisis hit. But by toying with economic nationalism, Rudd is undermining his efforts.

Ends


February 2009 | ^Top^


Investment key to free trade
Article published in The Age on Wednesday, 11th of February 2009

Martin Feil's criticism of the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (Trade millstone around Australia's neck, 10/02) ignores its real gains. Feil argues that to assess the FTA, you only need "look at the numbers". According to him, a nominal increase in our deficit of goods and services trade of $4.41billion with the US is proof of a failed FTA. But the deficit is in his numbers - they show only half the picture.

The FTA covers almost all sectors of both economies, from trade in goods and services to government procurement, intellectual property and investment. Assessing the gains of the FTA by goods and services trade ignores the real success of the FTA - promoting investment.

The AUSFTA came into effect on January 1, 2005. ABS data shows that in the 2005 calendar year, US investment in Australia was $325.3billion. By the end of 2006, it was lifted to $362.8billion. And by the end of 2007, it had risen to $445.9billion, or an increase of $120.6billion since 2005.

Arguing that the FTA is a failure because of an increased annual deficit of $4.41billion in goods and services trade against an increase in total investment of $120.6billion in only three years is absurd.

Growing investment matters. In February 2004, former chairman of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (predecessor of the World Trade Organisation), Alan Oxley, opined in The Age that "in today's world, investment is as important for growth as trade ... (because it) is the vehicle that delivers new technology".

Modern industry is heavily dependent on sophisticated technology to help business achieve increasing levels of productivity. But that technology need not be developed in Australia. Similarly, technical expertise can also be an important business import.

Instead of assessing the dividends of the entire agreement, Feil's criticisms smacks of discredited mercantilism. And in doing so, he ignores these dynamic gains from free trade.

Australia's prosperity doesn't rely solely on ever-increasing exports. Imports help Australian businesses grow by providing cheaper or more advanced inputs, and in doing so make our businesses more competitive.

Free trade also provides economic benefits because it maximises the return consumers and producers can get from the allocation of scarce resources - or put simply, buying more with less. And with the remainder, they are free to use excess capital to invest or buy other goods and services.

But that doesn't mean that the results of the FTA are perfect and there isn't room for reform.

During the passage of the enabling legislation for the FTA, then opposition leader Mark Latham introduced amendments to the Therapeutic Goods Act that have harmed Australia's investment potential. Latham's amendments included provisions requiring patent holders to determine whether they had a "reasonable prospect of success" before seeking to enforce their property rights in court. If the court deemed they didn't, they could be exposed to a $10million fine. Meanwhile, a mischievous patent infringer could only be fined $110,000.

Latham's changes are arguably in breach of the FTA. And such an extreme has diminished the incentive for US pharmaceutical companies to conduct research and development and manufacturing operations in Australia. Any reform should include amending Latham's amendments.

But the biggest loss to Australia's national interest results from inconsistency between our FTA with the US and Australia's other FTAs.

In theory and fact, the boon from the AUSFTA was in the investment chapter. Under the FTA, US investments don't need to be screened by the Foreign Investment Review Board unless they are above $913million.

Yet, non-US investors have a screening once a substantial investment hits as little as $100million.

Australia also has FTAs with New Zealand, Chile, Thailand and Singapore. But these countries don't enjoy equivalent privileged treatment. And the cost is being borne by Australia's economic potential.

When completed, the AUSFTA was hailed as a "living agreement" that would deliver significant dividends in the long term.

The evidence shows that Australia is enjoying the gains. But it should cement the gains from free trade with all countries, not just the US, by completing the work the AUSFTA started.

And that means revising the Latham amendments and unilaterally harmonising and liberalising barriers to all investment into Australia.

Ends


January 2009 | ^Top^


Taking the club to Hulls
Article published in the Herald Sun, Friday, 16th January 2009

Attorney-General Rob Hulls said this week: "It seems to me that a contemporary, enlightened and diverse world demands that clubs... should really change their fossil-like views."

Hulls spoke about the Athenaeum Club excluding female members. But he could have been talking about the ALP, which requires membership applicants to "be a member of an affiliated union if eligible".

Considering only 20 per cent of workers are unionised, this surely is "fossil-like", a 19th century view.

In 1999, then premier Steve Bracks called for private men's clubs to allow female members to join. Now Hulls has proposed to change the Equal Opportunity Act to force them.

But private clubs should be able to decide who can and can't be a member. If prospective members don't like the rules, they don't have to join. If current members don't like the rules, they can try for change - or leave.

The issue at stake is property rights, not equal opportunity. And making it equal opportunity makes it impossible to design a system that makes everyone happy. Take Fernwood Fitness Centres.

It's a female-only fitness club that believes there's a "need for women to have their own special space - a comfortable sanctuary to work out and enjoy regular exercise".

Similarly, gay nightclub The Peel. In 2007, it was exempted from the Equal Opportunity Act, allowing it to exclude heterosexuals and women to make its target patrons, gay males, feel more comfortable.

There's fundamentally no difference between The Peel, Fernwood and the Melbourne Club. All are private institutions admitting patrons based on self-imposed rules. In all cases, patrons believe they need a sanctuary from the broad community.

All should operate under the same rules. But that won't suit anyone. The real objective of Hulls's proposed changes isn't equal opportunity, but affirmative action, rooted in "progressive" ideology, to tinker with societal outcomes.

Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner Helen Szoke let the cat out of the bag when she talked about Hulls's proposed changes.

Szoke said "men are over-represented in positions of power and positions of seniority in terms of being significant decision-makers in the community".

Hulls' introduction to the Charter of Human Rights says "freedom of association... and other basic human rights are almost universally recognised, yet not always practised".

But Hulls isn't practising what he preaches. If he did, he'd let private clubs, not the Government, decide their membership.

Ends


Green car plan won't help spluttering car markers
Article published in the Herald Sun on Friday, 9th January 2009

News that exports of Holden utes to America have been cancelled is the latest nail in the coffin of the Australian automotive industry.

It is an industry in terminal decline, and it's time the Rudd Government admitted it.

Yet in 2008 prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his Industry Minister, Kim Carr, did the opposite and expanded automotive industry assistance to $6.2 billion.

With 64,000 workers employed in the industry, the package is equivalent to nearly $100,000 per worker. And that's on top of tariff protection.

But neither subsidies nor tariffs are helping to create a long-term, viable industry. Tariffs and subsidies make industries unresponsive to consumer demand. And being unresponsive has caused the problem that now plagues the industry.

The Australian automotive industry has traditionally produced large passenger vehicles. But Australians clearly don't want them.

Last year just 171,432 of the 1,012,432 cars sold were made locally -- less than 20 per cent. Tougher economic times have seen overall sales drop 3.6 per cent on 2007. But sales of locally made cars dived by 14.5 per cent. Meanwhile, demand for small and medium cars, primarily made by importers, account for more than 50 per cent of the market.

At least 60 per cent of locally made cars are sold through fleet to corporates. With company belt-tightening, the pressure to turn over their fleets may wane. There have been some markets that demand Australia's large cars, notably the Middle East.

Cars being exported to the Middle East are being subsidised by our taxpayers' dollars. But we aren't getting subsidised oil in return.

The Rudd Government may argue that it's reforming the sector by continuing to phase out tariffs. But with every drop in tariffs, it is simply increasing equivalent subsidies.

The only difference is, the cost is being spread to every taxpayer, instead of just to consumers of new cars.

The Government is also using its $1.3 billion green-car fund to achieve its industry and climate-change objectives by encouraging research and development of lower-emissions vehicles.

If the objective of the fund is to get consumers to buy lower-emitting cars, subsidising research and development isn't the best way to go about it.

Estimates show that State and Federal Government taxes and tariffs add $7000 to the cost of a Toyota Prius. Removing these taxes and tariffs would be the best way to increase sales.

And Australia is highly unlikely to become a green car innovator. At best, Australia will contribute to the development of their next range of vehicles. And any short-term benefit will be small.

During a global economic downturn, the first concern of consumers is not to buy expensive ``green'' cars. It's to buy cheaper ones.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than a million new cars are bought annually. Yet only 5000 Priuses are estimated to be sold this year. Consumers are still voting with their hip pockets, not their green thumbs.

The Rudd Government may argue their plan is working. Days before Christmas, Holden announced that it was to develop its new four-wheel-drive model out of Adelaide and will deliver 1200 jobs.

But so long as these 1200 jobs are built on the false foundations of government subsidies, no worker can have faith in the sustainability of their job.

Successive governments have conned automotive industry workers into thinking their jobs are viable.

They never have been, and it is the Government's job to clean up this mess.

To be fair to workers, the Rudd Government should use its industry assistance to retrain workers and find them alternative employment. Government spending on infrastructure projects provides a potential pathway.

The geographic concentration of the industry in Geelong and Altona will mean any collapse will be devastating. Retraining will lessen the impact on these individuals and communities.

More importantly, young workers need to be stopped from entering a dead-end industry.

But the Government won't, because the affected communities correlate strongly with marginal seats.

And the cost of inaction will be borne by consumers with higher car prices, and workers with an uncertain future.

Ends


December 2008 | ^Top^


A bad climate trade-off
Article published in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, 12th December 2008

The high priests of climate change are wrapping up their latest meeting today in Poznan, Poland, where the United Nations is hosting a conference on global warming. But don't expect a real solution to emerge. While most of these politicians and negotiators concur global warming is a man-made problem, there is still fierce opposition to the quickest method for spreading man-made solutions: free trade.

Numerous technologies already are on the market or in development that can increase energy efficiency or directly reduce the volume of global emissions. Solar panels provide an alternative source of power generation for countries currently dependent on carbon-dioxide-emitting energy such as coal. Clean coal technologies can significantly reduce pollution from existing coal-fired power stations. Fluorescent lamps can increase energy efficiency over traditional lighting systems.

But trade protectionism inhibits the international spread of these and other technologies, especially to high-polluting developing countries. Low-carbon technologies are classed as "manufacture" and are treated as an industrial good on each country's tariff schedules. Developing countries have high tariffs on industrial goods as a form of industry protection. A 2007 World Bank study found that of four major low-carbon technologies - clean coal, wind, solar and fluorescent lamps - tariff and nontariff barriers can be as high as 160% among the top 15 greenhouse-gas-emitting developing countries. Such products also face stiff nontariff barriers like quotas and import ceilings.

Even worse, many developing countries are now calling for compulsory licensing of patents on low-carbon technologies to reduce their cost. Under this regime, governments ignore patents on these technologies and allow for local production or importation of knock-offs. At last year's United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Meeting in Bali, Nigerian Environment Minister Halima Tayo Alao argued that patents are a "barrier" to transferring low-carbon technologies to developing countries.

In reality, compulsory licensing may give countries access to cheaper technologies in the short run, but in the long run, the incentive to invest in new technologies is diminished. Patents encourage innovation by letting inventors profit from their hard work. A World Bank report published in 2007 found that weakening patents will actually harm the transfer of low-carbon technology to developing countries.

Environmentalists, oddly, are supporting protectionists on both tariffs and patents. Environmental NGO Friends of the Earth, for instance, has argued that tariffs on low-carbon technologies are necessary "to enable developing countries to build their own supply capacity in developing environmental products." This is fundamentally mistaken. Low-carbon technologies are in their developmental infancy. Suggesting developing countries will innovate the next generation of low-carbon technologies is a fantasy.

Some leaders do recognize the problem. The European Union and the United States have been leading the charge in favor of an Environmental Goods and Services Agreement which would separate low-carbon technologies from other manufactured goods on tariff schedules, paving the way for tariff reductions on these products. It would also make it easier to spot and reduce nontariff barriers. Unfortunately, these talks are making little progress. Developing countries like Brazil and India fear that conceding too much in these talks will diminish their leverage in broader trade negotiations underway in the Doha Round.

Leaders in Poznan are talking loudly of the need to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions, but until they put their trade policies where their mouths are, it will be just a lot of hot air.

Ends


October 2008 | ^Top^


Congress is no green house
Article published in The Australian on Friday, 3rd October 2008

THERE are two great myths perpetuated by Kevin Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong as a foundation for Australia introducing an emissions trading scheme. Both are deceitful and misleading the public about the cost of an ETS.

The first myth appears in Wong's green paper, which argues Australia is "acting with the rest of the world" because other countries are supporting an ETS, in particular the US, where "both presidential candidates are committed to introducing schemes".

Wong is correct that Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, support the introduction of a cap-and-trade system. But their support doesn't guarantee anything and the $US700 billion ($895 billion) financial bailout package demonstrates why.

The bailout is one of the grandest bipartisan political measures taken in US history. It was supported by Republicans President George W. Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and McCain, and the Democrats' house Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Harry Reid and Obama. Yet the bill failed in the House of Representatives.

A bill may yet pass, but it has nothing to do with bipartisan support. There isn't similar party discipline as in Australia and therefore bipartisan support doesn't mean success.

Members of the House of Representatives are elected every two years and are highly accountable to their electorates. Their allegiance is to their electorate first and their party second. And US voters are very sensitive to thegovernment voting for legislation that will simply take money from their back pockets.

The present 110th Democrat-controlled Congress provides ample evidence. To date there have been eight bills introduced to establish a cap-and-trade system. None have passed. Bush didn't even need to pull out his veto pen.

These failed bills are merely following in the footsteps of the Kyoto Protocol, which was voted down in the Senate 95-0. Similarly, in 2003 McCain and then Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman proposed the Climate Stewardship Act. The bill was defeated 55-43.

Both senators then proposed an amended version in 2005 that was defeated by an even wider margin.

Ultimately, the reason for each bill's demise has been the cost it would impose on American consumers and industry without corresponding costs on competitor nations. The fallout from the financial crisis is just going to make negotiating an ETS harder.

And that leads to the second myth: Australia needs to develop an ETS to participate in the forthcoming international trading scheme. But there will not be a comprehensive international trading scheme. Establishing one requires every major emitting country toparticipate.

At the G-8 meeting in Japan earlier this year Chinese President Hu Jintao reiterated what has long been the mantra of the Chinese Government: "China's central task now is to develop the economy and make life better for the people." The attitude of the Chinese Government is that "developed countries should make explicit commitments to continue to take the lead in emissions reduction".

China is not alone. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said to the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly: "The outcome must be fair and equitable ... we are committed to our per-capita emissions of greenhouse gases not exceeding those of the developed countries." In short, India may only slow the growth of its emissions to correspond with developed country levels.

For the US to participate requires developing countries to take proportionate emissions cuts. For developing countries to participate, developed countries need to shoulder most of the burden. In this scenario the developed and developing world are caught in a game of climate chicken. But outside Australia and the European Union no one appears interested in playing.

The final Garnaut report points out: "The only realistic chance of achieving the depth, speed and breadth of action now required from all major emitters is allocation of internationally tradeable emissions rights across countries." But it is simply not going to happen.

The likeliest outcome will be a voluntary international trading scheme. Countries that participate will be guinea pigs. Their role will be to iron out problems, such as developing an accounting system for an industry's carbon footprint, the equivalence of permits and how to respond to the nightmarish impacts on trade.

If we keep heading down this path, the myths will become clear, and it won't take long before Australians start to ask why we are harming our economy while achieving virtually no reduction in emissions.

It is an answer Rudd and Wong should think long and hard about.

Tim Wilson is director of the IP and free trade unit at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Ends


September 2008 | ^Top^


A change is patently needed
Article published in the Australian Financial Review on Wednesday, 10th September 2008

Patents are a private property right designed to incentivise innovation. But the incentives that patents provide for pharmaceutical innovation have been undermined at the expense of research and development investment.

Yesterday, Innovation Minister Kim Carr released the Cutler innovation review's report, Venturous Australia. The report identifies reforms to Australia's intellectual property (IP) regime including a review to ensure that the grounds for granting a patent are more stringent.

Tight patentability criteria are vital to ensure innovators can have confidence in the scheme. But so is the capacity for a patent's enforcement. Patents provide legal, tradeable status to an intangible asset. The right and responsibility of a patent holder is to stop others infringing on their rights, and where they do so, to take action.

Yet in 2004 the then leader of the opposition, Mark Latham, moved an amendment to the law to stop patent holders protecting their rights.

Under the amendments parliament agreed to, if a pharmaceutical patent holder enforces their rights against infringing patents they must determine whether they have ''reasonable prospects of success''.

If the court deems the patent holder didn't think they did the court can award a penalty of up to $10 million.

Considering the subjective nature of interpreting ''reasonable prospects of success'' the penalty is extreme. In comparison, a mischievous patent infringer who is found to have been misleading in the same proceedings can be fined only $110,000.

The Latham amendments were not good policy at the time and are now undermining Australia's attractiveness as a centre of innovation.

But the Latham amendments are not alone. Many non-pharmaceutical inventions enjoy the full commercial potential of the patent term. But pharmaceuticals are required to demonstrate efficacy and safety of their products before they can be sold. In addition to placing huge commercial costs, doing so also eats into their patent life.

By the time they reach commercialisation, pharmaceuticals normally have only half a patent life remaining. The reduction in the patent life is so egregious that governments provide for a limited pharmaceutical patent extension period at the back-end of the patent for up to five years.

But at the front-end new regulations are regularly added, by parliament and the Therapeutic Goods Administration, that eat into the patent life.

The 2006 OECD Science, Technology and Industry Outlook found that a mature IP system was ranked as the second most important consideration for the location of research and development in developed countries.

Carr should take the opportunity the Cutler Innovation report provides and fix the barriers to investing in an innovative Australian pharmaceuticals industry.

Tim Wilson is Director of the IP and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs

Ends


How to halt progress
Article published in the Pioneer (India) on Monday, 1st September 2008

The article appears below, or a PDF of the page can be found here.

More than a hundred countries met in Accra last week in negotiations for a new climate change agreement after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Understandably, developing countries refused to sacrifice economic growth in order to cut emissions, so they want new low-carbon technology.

India, China and a variety of pressure groups have been campaigning for "compulsory licences" on low-carbon and renewable-energy technology, saying the developed countries are to blame for climate change and should underwrite the alleged solutions.

This will destroy any incentive to develop new inventions. Developing countries should instead remove the tariffs and other barriers that they impose on their own people and that increase prices dramatically.

Mr D Raja, the Environment Minister, has said he wants an agreement "paralleling" what he calls "the successful agreement on compulsory licensing of pharmaceuticals," which has undermined supply, quality and trade.

Some even claim patents confer a monopoly that reduces competition and stops downward pressure on prices. But patents are not a monopoly on a market, they are an exclusive right over a specific product. Patents on existing products do not in any way prevent the development of other inventions.

Without the property rights that patents confer, many inventions that cost millions of dollars to develop can be copied. So without patents there are no incentives for investors and innovators to spend time and money researching and developing new technology. This is especially counter-productive as low-carbon technology is still in its infancy and requires high investment for the next level of innovation.

The low-carbon or "renewable" inventions that would be undermined by removing patent rights include wind turbines, clean coal, solar panels and fluorescent lamps.

A 2007 United Nations Development Programme study found compulsory licensing of low-carbon technologies would directly reduce investment. Similarly, a World Bank report from the same year found that weak Intellectual Property regimes act as a barrier to the transfer of low-carbon technology, meaning that patent owners are reluctant to transfer their technology to countries that do not respect patents and other property rights.

Attacking patents is a distraction when there are policies that require greater attention. For example, the top 15 greenhouse-gas-emitting developing countries impose hefty tariffs and other trade barriers that can drastically increase prices on "green" technology they claim is essential.

Zambia and Egypt have tariffs on solar panels at 30 per cent and 32 per cent respectively. In Nigeria, barriers against 'clean coal' technology add 160 per cent to the final product cost. In Egypt, the extra cost on fluorescent lamps is 87 per cent, in the Philippines 93 per cent, in Brazil 96 per cent and a staggering 102 per cent in India.

The egregious extent of tariffs and other barriers on low-carbon technologies has prompted the United States and the European Union to propose an Environmental Goods and Services Agreement in the World Trade Organisation, to encourage the transfer of technology. But since the collapse of the Doha Round last month, that seems unlikely.

By ignoring these self-imposed barriers, the anti-patent campaign is gaining traction because it is always more attractive to blame someone else.

That spells bad news for the poor. Companies that invest in low-carbon technology are dependent on capital to develop new products. If patents are waived investors will not see returns and the funding for new technology will dry up.

Forget patents: Governments in poor countries can make newer, cheaper and more efficient low-carbon technology available now by dropping their self-harming trade barriers.

Ends


August 2008 | ^Top^


Attacking patents is a way to halt progress on climate accord
Article published in the China Post (Taiwan) on Friday, 29th August 2008

The article appears below, or a PDF of the page can be found here.

A hundred countries are meeting in Accra this week in negotiations for a new climate change agreement after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Understandably, developing countries refuse to sacrifice economic growth in order to cut emissions, so they want new low-carbon technology.

India, China and a variety of pressure groups are campaigning for "compulsory licenses" on low carbon and renewable-energy technology, saying the developed countries are to blame for climate change and should underwrite the alleged solutions.

"The developed countries should get off the backs of India and China. Instead, they should help India and China move towards a low carbon economy with technology and finance," said Rajendra Pachauri, the (Indian) head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in July this year.

Shri Raja, the Indian Environment Minister, wants an agreement "paralleling" what he calls "the successful agreement on compulsory licensing of pharmaceuticals," which has undermined supply, quality and trade.

This will destroy any incentive to develop new inventions. Developing countries should instead remove the tariffs and other barriers that they impose on their own people and that increase prices dramatically.

Some even claim patents confer a monopoly that reduces competition and stops downward pressure on prices. But patents are not a monopoly on a market, they are an exclusive right over a specific product. Patents on existing products do not in any way prevent the development of other inventions.

Without the property rights that patents confer, many inventions that cost millions of dollars to develop can be copied. So without patents there are no incentives for investors and innovators to spend time and money researching and developing new technology. This is especially counter-productive as low-carbon technology is still in its infancy and requires high investment for the next level of innovation.

The low-carbon or "renewable" inventions that would be undermined by removing patent rights include wind turbines, clean coal, solar panels and fluorescent lamps.

A 2007 United Nations Development Program study found compulsory licensing of low-carbon technologies would directly reduce investment. Similarly, a World Bank report from the same year found that weak Intellectual Property regimes act as a barrier to the transfer of low-carbon technology, meaning that patent owners are reluctant to transfer their technology to countries that do not respect patents and other property rights.

Attacking patents is a distraction when there are policies that require greater attention. For example, the top 15 greenhouse-gas-emitting developing countries impose hefty tariffs and other trade barriers that can drastically increase prices on "green" technology they claim is essential.

Zambia and Egypt have tariffs on solar panels at 30% and 32% respectively. In Nigeria, barriers against "clean coal" technology add 160% to the final product cost. In Egypt, the extra cost on fluorescent lamps is 87%, in the Philippines 93%, in Brazil 96% and a staggering 102% in India.

The egregious extent of tariffs and other barriers on low-carbon technologies has prompted the United States and the European Union to propose an Environmental Goods and Services Agreement in the World Trade Organization, to encourage the transfer of technology. But since the collapse of the Doha Round last month that seems unlikely.

By ignoring these self-imposed barriers, the anti-patent campaign is gaining traction because it is always more attractive to blame someone else. That spells bad news for the poor. Companies that invest in low-carbon technology are dependent on capital to develop new products. If patents are waived investors will not see returns and the funding for new technology will dry up.

Forget patents: Governments in poor countries can make newer, cheaper and more efficient low-carbon technology available now by dropping their self-harming trade barriers.

Ends


Tariffs, not patents, hurt low-carbon innovation
Article published in the South China Morning Post on Friday, 29th August 2008

The article appears below, or a PDF of the page can be found here.

A hundred countries are meeting in Accra, Ghana, this week in negotiations for a new climate change agreement after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Understandably, developing countries refuse to sacrifice growth to cut emissions, so they want new low-carbon technology.

India, China and a variety of pressure groups are campaigning for "compulsory licences" on low-carbon and renewable-energy technology, saying developed nations are to blame for climate change and should underwrite the alleged solutions.

"The developed countries should get off the backs of India and China. Instead, they should help India and China move towards a low-carbon economy with technology and finance," Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian economist and environmental scientist who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said last month.

Shri Raja, the Indian environment minister, wants an agreement "paralleling" what he calls "the successful agreement on compulsory licensing of pharmaceuticals", which has undermined supply, quality and trade.

This will destroy any incentive for invention. Developing countries should instead remove their tariffs and other barriers that increase prices dramatically.

Some even claim patents confer a monopoly that reduces competition and stops downward pressure on prices. But patents are not a monopoly, they are an exclusive right over a specific product. Patents on existing products do not in any way prevent the development of other inventions.

Without the property rights that patents confer, many inventions that cost millions of dollars to develop can be copied. So, without patents, there are no incentives for investors and innovators to spend time and money researching and developing new technology. This is especially counterproductive as low-carbon technology is in its infancy and requires high investment to take it to the next level.

The low-carbon or "renewable" inventions that would be undermined by removing patent rights include wind turbines, clean coal, solar panels and fluorescent lamps.

A UN Development Programme study last year found compulsory licensing of low-carbon technologies would directly reduce investment. Similarly, a World Bank report found that weak intellectual property regimes act as a barrier to the transfer of low-carbon technology.

Attacking patents is a distraction when there are policies that require greater attention. For example, the top 15 greenhouse-gas-emitting developing countries impose hefty tariffs and other trade barriers that can drastically increase prices on "green" technology they claim is essential.

Zambia and Egypt have tariffs on solar panels at 30 per cent and 32 per cent, respectively. In Nigeria, barriers against "clean coal" technology add 160 per cent to the final product cost.

In Egypt, the extra cost on fluorescent lamps is 87 per cent, in the Philippines, 93 per cent, in Brazil 96 per cent and 102 per cent in India.

The egregious extent of tariffs and other barriers on low-carbon technologies has prompted the United States and the European Union to propose an environmental goods and services agreement in the World Trade Organisation, to encourage the transfer of technology. But, since the collapse of the Doha Round last month, that seems unlikely.

By ignoring these self-imposed barriers, the anti-patent campaign is gaining traction; it is always more attractive to blame someone else.

That spells bad news for the poor. Companies that invest in low-carbon technology are dependent on capital to develop new products. If patents are waived, investors will not see returns and the funding for new technology will dry up.

Forget patents: governments in poor countries can make newer, cheaper and more efficient low-carbon technology available by dropping their trade barriers.

Ends


Protecting industry in carbon plan may be illegal
Quoted extensively in an article by Tracy Sutherland in the Australian Financial Review on Wednesday, 27th August 2008

The federal government's proposed emissions trading scheme ignores the plight of import-exposed industries but imposing a tax on imports to protect them would be illegal under global trade rules, the freemarket think tank the Institute of Public Affairs says.

The government's green paper on the model for an ETS proposes giving free permits to emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries. Some trade experts fear this could amount to an illegal subsidy under trade laws.

These concerns and the implications of other countries imposing ''green border'' taxes to protect local manufacturers have sparked calls for the government to examine the issues in more detail.

The director of the institute's freetrade unit, Tim Wilson, said the government's proposed free permits would be used ''almost entirely by export-exposed industries''.

''Just about every firm is import-exposed in some way but they're not getting free credits,'' he said. Of the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed sectors identified by the government as qualifying for free permits, Australia's chemicals and cement industries are among the most vulnerable to cheap imports.

However, Trade Minister Simon Crean and his coalition counterpart, Ian Macfarlane, have ruled out implementing a green border tax.

The European Union and the United States are debating the implications of implementing such a measure.

''A lot of import-exposed industries may not be emissions-intensive but will have to pass on increased costs through higher prices - the only way to help them is through carbon tariffs [green border tax],'' Mr Wilson said.

Under World Trade Organisation rules, a green border tax could be imposed at the same rate as the equivalent cost imposed on domestic industry by an ETS.

But Mr Wilson said that because the price of the emissions permits would fluctuate, the level of any green border tax would also have to - something that was illegal under global trade rules.

''The ETS means the price of the carbon credit will fluctuate. You can't have a floating tariff, a border tariff can't fluctuate - it's illegal under WTO rules,'' he said.

Critics of a green border tax in Australia also point to the administrative complexities involved in measuring the amount of carbon in each imported product, before imposing a tariff on it.

Mr Wilson also raised concerns about the impact of an ETS on domestic industry if the Australian scheme began in 2010, while the next Kyoto commitment period does not begin until 2012, when it is hoped a global ETS could start.

''There is a two-year window where Australian business will be exposed. A lot of damage can be done in two years,'' Mr Wilson said.

Ends


Climate talks should focus on removing low-carbon tech tariffs, Australian report says
Extensively quotedin an article on AfricaScienceNews.com on Wednesday, 20th August 2008

"UN Climate Change Talks commencing in Accra, Ghana tomorrow should focus on removing tariff and non-tariff barriers on low-carbon technologies, not patents", Tim Wilson, Director of the Intellectual Property (IP) and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs, said today.

Wilson's comments coincide with the release of the new paper - Undermining mitigation technology: compulsory licensing, patents and tariffs.

The paper is the world's first comprehensive paper bringing together the international debate on intellectual property rights, notably patents, on low-carbon technology.

"Research shows developing countries are pushing for an international agreement to compulsory license (waive patents) low-carbon technologies in line with the agreement on pharmaceuticals", Mr Wilson said.

The report now sounds an alarm and says the incentives to develop the technologies to reduce global CO2 emissions are being undermined. Internationally, a campaign is being run to undermine the intellectual property that incentivisesresearch and development on CO2 mitigation technologies.

These technologies are vital to assist developing and developed countries to reduce their CO2 emissions based on their commitments ininternational treaties.

"Developing countries want patents removed because they have been conned into thinking patents cause the price of new technologies to rise. In fact of the top 15 greenhouse gas emitting developing countries the real barrier to making low-carbon technologies affordable is high tariffs and non-tariff barriers in excess of 165 per cent".

NGOs and developing countries are now advocating for amendments to the WTO's intellectual property rules (the TRIPS Agreement) to allow for compulsory licensing of CO2 mitigation technologies.

Compulsory licensing allows for the property rights to be waived on patented inventions and the commercial return they provide. Without the commercial return there is no incentive for investors to fund research and development into new technology.

The campaign to undermine incentives for new research and development is not without precedent.Advocates are using the successful campaign to compulsory license essential medicines under the TRIPS Agreement as precedent.

They are also advocating for the issue to be debated and includedin the next agreement out of the UNFCCC process scheduled to be completed in Copenhagenin 2009.

By promoting compulsory licensing NGOs and developing countries are claiming that technology will become more accessible.

"Numerous studies including by the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and the Stern Report show patent rights are not a core barrier to transfer of low-carbon technology into developing countries". "The low-carbon technology industry is very much in its infancy. Removing the patent rights for new low-carbon technology will ensure investment will quickly dry up. Worse, existing investors may never see a return on their investment".

The research shows that the campaign against patent rights is being led by the Government of India, with the support of numerous other developing countries.

"Removing patents will simply undermine the development of new low-carbon technologies. Everyone loses. Patents are vital to create the incentives for investors to fund research and development in new technology". "Why would anyone invest in technologies with high, up-front costs when patent rights are expected to be removed?" Mr Wilson said.

"Investors should be wary. If developing countries have their way the low-carbon green goose may not lay golden eggs", Mr Wilson said.

Ends


Undermining Mitigation Technology - Compulsory licensing, patents and tariffs
Paper published on Wednesday, 20th August 2008

Undermining mitigation technology - Compulsory licensing, patents and tariffs, August 2008

Ends


Wong toes party line
Mentioned in an article in Melbourne Community Voice on Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Openly lesbian Labor MP Penny Wong has angered gay marriage advocates.

Comments about same-sex marriage made last week by Federal Labor MP, Penny Wong, the Minister for Climate Change and Water, have outraged gay rights activists.

Wong, a lesbian, appeared as a panelist on the ABC TV program Q&A last Thursday, July 31, alongside Shadow Treasurer Malcolm Turnbull, and openly gay Melbourne man Tim Wilson, representing the Institute of Public Affairs.

The program allows its audience to question the panelists directly. One such question, put to Turnbull and Wong, asked whether they personally supported their party's respective stances on same-sex marriage.

Turnbull stated that he personally believed marriage was a union between a man and a woman; Wong also toed the party line with her response.

"We made it clear as a party that we would not look at gay marriage; we would recognise the fact that marriage is a heterosexual institution," she said.

After an additional question by the program's host, Tony Jones, Wong went on to say, "My view is that I'm a member of the party. The party has a very clear view, and that is a view that is supported, let's be frank, by the vast majority of Australians."

Tim Wilson then suggested Wong's public stance was at odds with her private beliefs.

"I find it really frustrating that within the party room you may very well be vocal, but when you come out here you take this position; the public respects that people can have different opinion from their party but it doesn't seem that you are allowing that," Wilson said.

"My view is that frankly that is where most of the community is at … most Australians still regard marriage in the way I have described, and the Labor Party respects that," Wong replied.

This week, Wilson told MCV he thought Wong's response "weak", and that "she was clearly uncomfortable with someone taking her to task on the issue".

He also refuted Wong's claim that the "vast majority of Australians" are opposed to same-sex marriage.

"There is a small majority and that's withering away every day," Wilson stated.

A 2007 survey backs up Wilson's claim. The poll, conducted by the grass roots political lobby group Get Up, found that 57 per cent of Australians supported same-sex marriage.

Wong's comments came shortly before the National Day of Action, held last Sunday, August 3, commemorating the impending anniversary of the Howard Government's 2004 ban on same-sex marriage.

Co-convener of the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby (VGLRL) Stephen Jones said the Lobby was "disappointed by Ms Wong's comments, and the blatant inaccuracies that Australian society rejects same-sex marriage".

"Sunday's event showed there is stronger public acceptance than is perceived by political representatives," he told MCV.

Mainstream media coverage of the issue was welcomed by the VGLRL, Jones added, as it portrayed same-sex couples as deserving of gay marriage.

Activist Rodney Croome said it was a badly-kept secret that behind closed doors, "Wong is a strong advocate [for same-sex marriage], and that Wong is bound by cabinet solidarity".

"It's not the people against same-sex marriage, it's the government," Croome concluded.

Ends


Wong stance challenged
Mentioned in an article in BNews on Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Senator Penny Wong was under fire this week for standing by the Labor party's continual refusal to allow gay marriage.

The openly gay senator was taken to task on the ABC's open forum program, Q&A, with host Tony Jones challenging Wong over civil unions by asking, "is it enough for you?"

Wong responded said she believed the government has done what it said it would in removing sexuality discrimination and recognising same-sex relationships.

"We made it clear as a party that we would not look at gay marriage, we would recognise the fact that marriage is an heterosexual institution, but what we did say and what we have done... is to deal with the discrimination issue," Wong said.

"It's not where you want to be, is it?" Jones responded.

"My view is that I'm a member of the party, the party's got a very clear view and that is a view that is supported, let's be frank, by the vast majority of Australians."

Director at the Institute of Public Affairs, Tim Wilson, challenged Wong, asking what she had done inside the party room to advocate for an alternate position on same-sex marriage.
"There's two gay people on this panel, you and I, and I find it very frustrating that within your party room you may very well be vocal, but when you come out here you defend that position. It's okay to have a different opinion from your party. I think the public respects that people have different perspectives from time to time," Wilson said.

Green's Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said Wong was out of touch with the view of the majority of Australians, citing a poll in The Age this year which showed 79% of respondents support gay marriage.

"The community is way ahead of the old parties when it comes to this issue. Australia is ready to honour the basic human right of allowing adults to marry whomever they love, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation."

Ends


A tale of two pollies
Mentioned in an article by Tim Duggan on samesame.com.au on Friday, 1st August 2008

The Labor Party may be projecting a unified front regarding their refusal to allow same-sex marriages, but it seems things are a lot more heated behind closed Parliamentary doors.

Speaking on 2DayFM yesterday morning, the Prime Minister was questioned directly by gay newsreader Geoff Field. "Mr Rudd, I don't want to be rude to you," said Geoff, "but can I just put this to you, while Jason [my partner] and I are not legally allowed to marry that makes us second class citizens. Do you get how we feel?"

"It's important that everyone's relationships are treated with respect," Rudd trotted out, "Marriage is a particular type of relationship… Our position is that marriage is between a man and a woman. I don't mean any disrespect to same sex relationships."

Blah, blah, blah - we've heard this nonsensical argument many times before. Rudd says that he wants to remove all discrimination against same sex couples with one breath, and with the other says "except marriage - we want that to ourselves."

So it was very interesting when Penny Wong, Kevin Rudd's openly lesbian right hand woman, was on a panel on ABC's Q&A last night.

Referring to marriage as a "heterosexual institution", she was quizzed by host Tony Jones over whether civil unions were acceptable: "Is it enough for you?"

Penny fumbled her way through an answer.

"It's not where you want to be, is it?"

"My view is that I'm a member of the party, the party's got a very clear view and that is a view that is supported, let's be frank, by the vast majority of Australians."

Tim Wilson, another openly gay panel member from the Institute of Public Affairs, would not take this for an answer. "But what have you done, Penny Wong, from inside the party to advocate for an alternate position?" Wilson said. "There's two gay people on this panel, you and I, and I find it very frustrating that in your party room you may very well be vocal, but when you come out here you defend it. It's okay to have a different opinion form your party. I think the public expects that people have different perspective from time to time."

"I've been in parliament now for six years and I've put my view forward on a whole range of issues in the party room," replied Wong. "We do that in parliament, we put a range of views and then we come to a particular decision. My view is that frankly that's where most of the community is at. It may not be where you are… but most Australians still regard marriage in the way I've described and the Labor Party accepts that."

Despite towing the party line, it sounds like there were indeed some pretty heated discussions behind closed doors in Parliament.

Come on Penny, it's time for you to come out and tell us what you really believe.

Ends


Flawed focus drove Doha to collapse
Article published in ABC News Online Opinion on Friday, 1st August 2008

The Doha Development Round is in a deep, deep coma. A lot of excuses will be made for a failure to reach agreement. But the real problem is that the round stopped focusing on the World Trade Organisation's primary purpose - trade liberalisation.

The round was launched shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks to provide certainty to the underlying framework of the global economy. The spirit of that moment called for the outcome of the meeting to be coined the Doha 'Development' Agenda.

The issue of development became central to WTO agenda to seek maximum cooperation from developing countries and to secure a big commitment to liberalise to help lift millions out of poverty.

The WTO is designed to secure reciprocal reductions in trade barriers. To prioritise 'development' objectives trade ministers agreed to "less than full reciprocity" in reducing tariff barriers by developing countries.

In essence, it gave developing countries the policy space to liberalise less than developed countries.

The goal of the WTO is to "improve the welfare of the peoples of the member countries". To achieve this goal the WTO is one instrument, with one purpose - trade liberalisation.

Structurally designing the round around 'development' through less than full reciprocity doomed it from the beginning. Doing so undercut the objective of achieving progressive liberalisation.

Securing an outcome in the WTO requires trade ministers to agree to a liberalisation package deal. By minimising the obligations on developing countries to cut tariffs, the round has limited the political flexibility developed countries need to secure an agreement.

In the US, the heavily protectionist Democratic Congress was not going to accept a big commitment to liberalise if developing countries were not going to reciprocate at an equivalent rate. The elevation of Nicholas Sarkozy to the rotating EU Presidency guaranteed the same attitude in Europe.

And ultimately the focus on 'development', not trade liberalisation, has been what has brought the round down.

As recent as last Friday it looked as though a breakthrough had been secured to move the Doha Round forward. The deal was between the EU, US and Brazil on a less than reciprocal reduction of developing country industrial tariffs against developed country agriculture subsidies.

But India and China wanted more 'development' policy space through the right to enact temporary tariff increases to protect local producers from a sudden influx of cheap agriculture imports.

China and India's demand was essentially about prioritising perceived 'development' interests ahead of trade liberalisation.

Doing so undermines any deal that can be struck. It is for this reason that there is resistance to include other sensitive policy priorities, such as labour and environmental standards, in the WTO. Their inclusion would make negotiating a deal almost impossible and shift its focus away from the organisation's core purpose.

China and India's position also ignores the reality of trade liberalisation. Too many developing countries still believe that erecting tariff barriers and providing subsidies to help infant industries is good for their economy. Doing so stops countries from getting the best value for their scarce capital and builds a false foundation for their industries to grow from.

Nothing will be achieved in the WTO for at least a few years and willing liberalisers are likely to increase their focus on liberalisation bilateral agreements. But this will be a poor outcome.

Bilaterals are good for reducing tariffs and barriers for cross-border trade in services. But they fail to address many of the most egregious protectionist measures, such as agriculture subsidy programs. Reducing subsidies programs can only come through pressure in multilateral trade negotiations.

Similarly, many bilateral agreements are hard on rhetoric and weak on substance. Many do not cover all areas of trade and often exclude any sensitive sectors. Trade ministers have found it too easy to place any sensitive issue in the 'too hard basket'.

And that is the tragedy of the Doha Round. Without a focus on 'development', developing countries would have seen an increase in their share of global trade through a reduction in subsidy programs and reductions in their own tariff barriers.

Much of the gains from the Doha Round could still be secured by developing countries through unilateral reductions in tariff barriers. The World Bank has estimated that if developing countries removed agriculture tariff barriers they would be US$110 billion better off. But it is unlikely they are going to take the lead.

In the absence of a WTO agreement or unilateral liberalisation their economies will stagnate with limited export-led opportunities for growth. And to survive least developed countries will still be dependent on the international equivalent of the soup kitchen - foreign aid

Ends


July 2008 | ^Top^


Money and trees - the green stuff
Appearnace on ABC1 TV's 'Q&A' program on Thursday, 31st July 2008



I was a little honoured and gobsmacked to be asked to appear on ABC1's Q'&A'. The program is generally reserved for elite opinion makers. The episode I was on included Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong, Shadow Treasurer, Malcolm Turnbull, Former Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery and Chair of Harris Farm Markets and former Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, Catherine Harris. For some reason I was also invited. It went well and the feedback was overwhelming. I've never got so much positive email, phone calls, SMS' etc from the general public. And I'm reliably informed my final comment stole the show. The video can be viewed here.

Ends

No Doha deal better than a dud one
Article published in The Australian on Friday, 25th July 2008

Free trade remains in Australia's best interests. This week trade ministers descended on Geneva for negotiations to try to break the deadlock in the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation negotiations. But if a good deal cannot be reached, no deal would be better than a bad deal.

The present bottleneck in negotiations surrounds the preparedness of the US and European Union to cut deep into their agriculture subsidies. In exchange they want developing countries, led by India and Brazil, to reduce their tariffs on industrial goods.

But if a deal is struck in the next week it is likely to be short, because commitments to liberalise will be low. In particular, the US and EU are likely to give little and developing countries will reciprocate. Poor negotiating positions by the US and EU are driven by domestic politics and demonstrate why politicians should be kept away from trade policy.

At the last mid-term elections protectionist Democrats took control of the US Congress. As a result, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab has her hands tied. For political and protectionist reasons the Congress is unlikely to agree to a trade deal that would provide outgoing President George W. Bush with a moral victory.

And the official campaign for the US presidency has begun. Lurking in the shadows is the prospect of a Barack Obama presidency. To date Obama's trade positions have pandered to ignorant anti-trade populism. But at least the US problems are cyclical. The problems of securing a deal from the EU were entirely avoidable.

On July 1, French President Nicolas Sarkozy took on the rotating presidency of the EU. Following his accession he launched a tirade against the EU's trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, and his commitments to end export subsidies and reduce production subsidies.

As Mandelson admitted, Sarkozy's attacks make his job harder. Because of Sarkozy's attacks it is now unclear what the EU negotiating position is and what Mandelson can commit to.

Negotiating a successful round is being bookended by difficulties. The prospect of a global economic slowdown is also likely to cause a retreat to protectionism in the US and EU. Populist politicians are likely to blame lost jobs on off-shoring and cheap Chinese labour. However, there remains a slim chance it could be a wake-up call. With scarcer funders the US and EU governments might finally realise the excesses of their subsidy programs.

All these factors make the successful conclusion of the Doha Round in the next week unlikely. And that might be good news for Australia.

Core gains for Australia from the round stem from agricultural subsidy cuts. Only deep cuts meet our interests. And beneath the surface of the main negotiating issues are two concerning proposals.

In the committee dealing with intellectual property, the TRIPS Council, there are negotiations to expand the mandatory scope of geographic indications. GIs are a questionable form of intellectual property that allows only select products to be branded based on their geographic origin.

Under present rules special GI status is provided for wines and spirits. The EU wants to push it into agriculture. The risk is Australia would no longer be able to export cheeses under their common names -- parmesan and cheddar -- like we cannot export Australian champagne.

Developing countries are also championing amended intellectual property rules related to the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity. These changes would nationalise genetic resources, introduce international regulations on how to distribute commercial gains from innovation and increase the cost of innovation.

The consequence would be to remove the commercial incentives for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to prospect for new medicines and treatments.

Boosting the pharma and biotech sectors has been made central to the Government's innovation review. They may find their efforts are undercut in the WTO.

The EU has already stated they expect their GIs proposal included in the text of the final round. In a text circulated last week the EU and developing countries have joined in alliance to support each other's intellectual property reforms.

The consequences of the proposed amendments to international intellectual property rules have not been fully considered. Their inclusion is premature and dangerous. Unless these intellectual property reforms are offset by deep cuts in agriculture subsidies there will be few gains for Australia from the round.

It looks as if the best outcome for Australia from the WTO is to wait and pray. France's EU presidency will end and there is hope Republican candidate and staunch free trader John McCain will be elected the next US president. If these things happen negotiations are much more likely to meet our interests. There is a need to finish this round. But, for Australia, no deal remains better than a bad deal.

Ends


Moral maze
Mentioned in the Sun Herald on Sunday, 20th July 2008

HOWEVER cynical, ideological and pathetically out-of-date it may be, the attack by right-wing experts on fair trade just won't go away.

As most coffee drinkers know, Fairtrade and its new competitor Rainforest Alliance are dedicated to increasing the ethical footprint of Western consumers by encouraging them to buy products that offer a better deal to those in the developing world who make them.

In essence, fair trade schemes ask us to pay more for things we are told have been farmed in a sustainable way by workers protected by International Labor Organisation conventions.

Implicit in the very project of ethical consumerism is a critique of the way we do business when it comes to global trade, and the values that underlie the free trade ideal. No wonder Tim Wilson, from the free market Institute of Public Affairs, is purse lipped. In an interview on ABC

National's Background Briefing, Wilson claimed to be worried that consumers buying fair trade products were being "duped": "Developed country consumers are buying these products with the expectation that the right thing is being done by them and the developing world producers, and that isn't always occurring."

The problems to which Wilson refers are ones that no one, most notably Fairtrade officials and advocates, deny. Namely, that Fairtrade isn't perfect, and that one consequence of its imperfection can be a disconnection between what consumers are promised for the premium they pay, and what is delivered. For example, an investigation a few years ago by Britain's Financial Times found some fair trade farmers were not paying their labour the legal minimum wage, though these workers were getting 25 per cent more than those picking coffee on conventional farms.

In an article on the IPA website, Wilson suggests that on the evidence of history, such problems are without remedy. "The International Coffee Agreement operated for most of the Cold War period to help developing world coffee producers lift themselves out of poverty. It was a monumental failure."

Elsewhere he contends that even if fair trade could be made to work, there is little reason to bother, because free trade provides all the equity and justice this world needs: "Free trade has ... worked for many, many years now ... The fairest outcome [results] from a system where prices are set by the marketplace."

Yeah, and pigs fly. Throughout history an unregulated market has brought us gross disparities of wealth, corruption, child labour and sweatshops. The IPA has long been funded by the major corporates: BHP Billiton, Monsanto, Caltex and Gunns, to name a few. Businesses that have done well from existing trade conditions and would like to see them roll on. We're still waiting for Peruvian coffee-growers to fund an expert panel. The IPA's objections to ethical consumerism are vested and ideological; in other words, not a response to the occasional promise-reality gap that the fair trade movement is working hard to fix.

It is easy for self-serving cynics to drain our idealism. Easy to make us feel that however good our intentions and however much we try, there is nothing we can do to make the world a fairer place.
Don't believe the hype. While it is neither enough nor perfect, ethical consumerism is better than business as usual. Drink your coffee, join the movement and keep the faith.

Ends


Radio interview on ABC Radio National's Background Briefing on 'fair trade'
Aired on Sunday, 14th July 2008

Tim Wilson on 'fair trade'

Ends


Clubland
Quoted in The Australian Magazine on Saturday, 5th July 2008

What happens when a night of alcohol and violence spills over into the daytime world of office workers? Kate Legge delves into the events that led to a triple shooting and the murder of Brendan Keilar in Melbourne last year.

Sarah Durrell's husband roused her at 6am on Monday, June 18, last year with a mug of coffee because she's a slow starter. She showered, dressed in a black suit and drove "bleary-eyed" along the beachfront through bayside suburbs into Melbourne's CBD for an early meeting.

In the north of the city, John Hughes boarded a tram bound for the multi-storeyed concrete hive, gazing out at commuters, their faces as glum as he felt on an overcast day the wrong side of the weekend.

Wise to budget-saving tricks, Dutch tourist Paul de Waard spent the night at Southern Cross rail terminal, waking at 7am to freshen up before shouldering his backpack and heading towards the city's heart in search of a McDonald's to fill up on coffee.

After nabbing a car space in Alexandra Avenue, between the Botanical Gardens and the banks of the Yarra River, solicitor Brendan Keilar, 43, set out west towards Norton Gledhill, the legal firm where he handled commercial property cases. Dressed in a red fleece jacket over khaki shorts, his routine allowed for changing into a clean business shirt and suit once he arrived on the 23rd floor of 459 Collins Street.

Eighteen-year-old clerk Natalie Galluce caught a lift into town with her father, Carl Galluce, who, since losing his oldest daughter to meningococcal, took no chances shepherding her sibling to the office where she worked, processing insurance claims on the corner of William Street and Flinders Lane.

The wave of early birds sweeping towards the intersection with briefcases, homemade sandwiches, appointment books and lingering memories of the weekend was about to collide with a netherworld crawling forth after a night of partying in 24-hour licensed premises. This clash of civilisations would kill Keilar and wound de Waard as they went to help Kaera Douglas, a woman unable to wean herself from a dangerous man who spun out of control in the middle of a city street on a Monday morning. The tragedy awoke Melbourne to a subculture of alcohol and drug-fuelled violence that has spiked assaults during weekend revelry. One stark incident has a way of illuminating dark crevices in the landscape.

Night and day used to be different as. People partied but you didn't see long queues snaking outside clubs at 6am. An average 55,000 patrons pass through Melbourne's Crown Casino precinct every Friday and Saturday night - almost as many as a Saturday football crowd at the MCG. Midnight to dawn is no longer the graveyard shift. Downtime is obsolete. A casualised workforce, 24hour liquor licensing, ice, speed, ecstasy and the club scene are just some of the trends scrambling circadian rhythms.

Former Victorian premier John Cain, whose Labor cabinet deregulated liquor licensing 20 years ago, says: "I guess we never contemplated this culture when the laws were amended." Chief architect of the reforms, Professor John Nieuwenhuysen, winces at the unintended consequences but believes the increase in the number of licences from 3200 to 17,000 has spearheaded Melbourne's quest for a European-style sophistication with its graffiti-covered laneways and vibrant mix of commercial, residential and creative activities.

No one wants a wowser-style crackdown so the Brumby Government last month announced a fiveyear alcohol action plan. Most controversial is the 2am lockout curbing traffic from bar to club in and around 150 high-risk premises. Of particular concern is the King Street strip, where the tide of white-collar innocence crashed into wretchedness just after 8am on Monday, June 18, 2007.

ON the SUNDAY NIGHT before the mayhem, cleaners, clerks, lawyers and finance brokers slumbered in their beds while a disparate group of dancers and waitresses finished their shift at the Spearmint Rhino "gentlemen's club" and propped at the bar. The King Street entrance to this venue is stuccoed with Las Vegas-style glitz that palls by daybreak just like Christmas tinsel turns tacky out of season. While this club shares a postcode with the temples of capitalism, they are parallel universes. One skips all day to the tick-tock of conference calls, meetings, emails and laptops. The other grinds through the night to the beat of lap dancers, music, alcohol and sometimes drugs and sex.

Like a grotesque version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the menagerie of bottom-feeders drinking shots through the night and disappearing into the toilets unleashed mayhem in the bitumen and glass forest when the sun rose. The dancers have stage names - Jazz, Savannah, Brianna. For some it's a second or third job; others come from abroad, here on working holidays. Jazz is Marie Gamard's nom de plume. A backpacker who'd been working at Spearmint Rhino for six months, she calls herself an entertainer.

Performing on the podium in the VIP room around midnight that Sunday, Gamard noticed patron Christopher Hudson, or "Huddo", in his black adidas top, white stripes down the length of his arms, the bogan's tuxedo. He was drinking and talking with Carly Rheinberger, who'd knocked off after a two-hour stint strutting around as "Brianna". She'd been a dancer at the club for a year and a half.

In the VIP club, clients must spend a minimum of $250. Hudson, 29, was a temporary member, a privilege extended by purchasing a bottle of liquor. The theme for Sunday was disco night. Autumn Daly-Holt, who used the name Savannah, had given one private show and one stage performance that evening before she joined off-duty club manager Steve Kyriacou at the bar. His girlfriend had left early because her job in a logistics firm started at 6am.

Daly-Holt had been working at the club for six months, dancing Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 6pm to 4am. She'd graduated from McKinnon Secondary College, one of the state's best public high schools, growing up in rural Western Australia where her father started a'70s-style alternative school, light on discipline, big on self-expression.

The dancers were told no drugs during their shifts but they could drink alcohol in moderation. Once they'd clocked off and changed into civilian clothes they were supposed to leave the premises.

Asked by police to judge the level of intoxication of the others there that night on a sliding scale of one to 10, Gamard reckoned Kyriacou was an eight, while Daly-Holt and another waitress, Cassie Hudson, were into the teens. "Both of them were the drunkest I have ever seen anybody in Australia," she recalled.

Some time in the early hours of Monday morning, a senior staff member asked Rheinberger to go home, which annoyed her because Daly-Holt was drinking freely with Kyriacou. Rheinberger wanted to stay and hang with Huddo, and felt she was the victim of double standards.

There was some argy-bargy over this, with Huddo trying to intervene on Rheinberger's behalf, so that resentments had begun simmering already when the motley troupe gathered their things about 4.30am and shifted to Bar Code, a neighbouring dive that occupies the same building as Spearmint Rhino.

When Rheinberger got there, she couldn't see Huddo so she rang him on his mobile. He was in the toilets. She and Gamard banged on the doors and found him in one for the disabled, appearing "a little agitated and distant". Rheinberger told police she asked if he was using drugs because she wanted some too, but he denied it. Half a long drinking straw floated in the pan. Huddo told her that he was "off the drugs" as he was back in training, trying to get fit again.

Everyone had been imbibing rocket fuel of one sort or another. Cassie Hudson's police statement documents the pattern of consumption. Despite being on antidepressants she'd downed three-quarters of a bottle of wine before arriving at Spearmint Rhino around 10.30pm, where she tossed back champagne shots. "I was blind drunk," she says. Not surprisingly, she vomited. She caught a cab home to Carlton, then, realising she'd lost her necklace, came back at 4.30am. At Bar Code she ordered Fresh Pussies, cocktails of schnapps, vodka and cranberry juice. She saw Huddo disappear into the toilets with Kyriacou, who had joined the crew at Bar Code. "We knocked and kicked at the door and nobody answered. When they came out, they both looked happy. I said, 'Excuse me, where is the love?'"

Happy one minute, crazed the next, Huddo paraded membership of the Hells Angels as a conversation starter. The Queenslander had no job, drove a black Mercedes convertible, boasted more than 60 prior convictions and was prone to violence, breaking doors or noses if someone forgot to leave a door key out for him.

AS A RAT CRAWLS up from the sewer to pillage restaurant bins late at night, there's a toxic underworld that thrives in certain licensed venues, where patrons can't remember what they argued over or why they told someone to "f..k off", where disinhibition and ugliness grow like fungus on rotten food. Hundreds of pages of police interviews with the patrons who congregated at Bar Code provide a peephole into this subterranean world, the flesh on the statistical bones linking intoxication with random atrocities and acts of aggression.

"Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol," says Professor Jon Currie, director of Addictive Medicine and Mental Health at St Vincent's Hospital, when I ask him whether the rise in amphetamines, ice and steroids has given unruly behaviour a violent edge. Currie heads the Victorian advisory council that was set up late last year to address alcohol and drug-related injury. He points to the figures: between April and December 2007, alcohol made up 40 per cent of drug-related events requiring ambulance attendance in Melbourne, up a staggering 30 per cent from 2006; hospital admissions caused by alcohol involving Victorians aged 15 to 24 are also up substantially.

"Intoxication and violence go hand in hand," says Currie. "Intoxicated people make bad decisions. Their reflexes and judgment are impaired. If you are still looking for an environment to be with friends at 3am, 4am or 5am, you're often searching for trouble."

Currie might as well be describing events in Bar Code that Monday morning as the mood grew foul. Daly-Holt had begun stripping for Kyriacou in a seamy seduction, at one stage biting his tongue until he bled. This sideshow was the loose thread that led to the night's unravelling, self-control undone by alcohol, testosterone, lust. Even in dens of iniquity, there are dos and don'ts and Daly-Holt's friskiness stirred jealousy and muttering among women dishevelled by grog.

When Daly-Holt bared her breasts, Gamard tried to halt the exhibition but Kyriacou brushed her aside. Rheinberger told Huddo: "Autumn shouldn't be flirting with Steve when he has a girlfriend." Huddo agreed with her and explained he had a sister and that he really "wouldn't want her behaving in that manner either". DalyHolt remembers being upset when the pair ticked her off.

The altercation overshadowed news from outside that a tow operator was preparing to hook up Rheinberger's car as the city readied itself for morning peak hour, when King Street becomes a clearway. Huddo offered to go out and talk the truckie round but he was too late, the car had gone.

Inside the bar, Daly-Holt removed her Gstring to dance naked for Kyriacou. Egged on by Rheinberger's disapproval, Huddo strode over and pulled the dancer by the hair in an eerie prelude to what lay ahead. The caveman antics suggest sexual tensions in a company with scant humanity, intelligence or reason - behaviour bordering on barbaric.

Around the corner in the Flinders Lane block of Punt Hill apartments, 26-year-old Kaera Douglas, one of the drama's main characters, was still sound asleep. She'd told Daly-Holt on Friday she was going to a city hotel to see a guy she'd been having sex with on and off for about three months.

Douglas worked part-time as a travel consultant for Flight Centre, dancing in clubs and doing modelling promotions to earn extra cash. She'd gone to bed on Sunday morning after spending all Saturday night clubbing with a girlfriend, and had dozed through until 6am on Monday when Huddo sent a text message telling her to come down to Bar Code. Her initial instinct was to stay put. Then she noticed her car keys and money were missing.

She'd been trying to detach herself from Huddo, but he would ring and wear her down. He'd broken her nose on two previous occasions, scaring her so much that she once refused a ride to her brother's place because she didn't want him knowing where her family lived. She says she wanted to be "good" - less drinking, more gym visits - yet she couldn't end this unhealthiest of relationships. Why she stayed with him beggars belief.

Douglas says when Huddo contacted her that Monday morning he was "blind drunk" but she wanted her keys back. "I couldn't leave my car there because it would have been smashed to pieces ... I just know what sort of person he is" - a violent man bent on satisfying his cravings.

Moments before Douglas arrived at Bar Code, Rheinberger was sitting with Huddo on the couch. "When he got off the phone he started telling me something and then he crunched his phone in his hand and broke it to pieces before throwing it across the floor," said Rheinberger. She noticed Douglas entering: "I said hello to her and she gave me a look, a pissed-off look."

Douglas asked Huddo for her keys and he stormed off. "I'd been in bed all night, I'd just woken up to this disgusting zoo of people, just repulsive," she recalled - and she's no stranger to the animals on show, or the cage where they lounged.

Daly-Holt told police she'd had "some kind of argument" with Huddo and vaguely recalled leaving the premises and sitting somewhere. "I remember being approached by him and not wanting him near me," she said, fearful since he'd grabbed her hair. She brushed him away "because he was invading my space" and the next thing she felt was sharp pain.

OUTSIDE, the early-morning symphony wasin swing. Banking operations manager Sarah Durrell clocked her car in at Crown Casino's parking station at 8am. The 45-year-old mother of three crossed the bridge over the Yarra and walked up King Street as Huddo emerged into the daylight carrying the topless Daly-Holt. Durrell saw him dump the girl on the footpath but she kept walking, one eye on what was happening, "not really knowing what I should or could do to help". Huddo began to kick the dancer in the face. Now running late for her breakfast meeting, the sight of his face "white with rage" made Durrell avoid eye contact, keeping to herself.

Every witness to this drama made a split-second decision determining their involvement. The "what ifs" that chase sanity into the landscape of madness haunt some of them still.

Shannon Molloy was driving to her office in Custom House Lane when she pulled up at the lights on the corner of King Street and Flinders Lane. "I saw him draw his foot back and kick through with what looked like absolute force straight into the girl's face ... her whole head and upper body went flying back onto the concrete." Molloy dialled triple-0 on her mobile. "I was horrified by what I had seen and I was petrified for the girl." The lights turned green and Molloy headed for a car park as she fired details of what was unfolding to an emergency operator. Durrell walked past Molloy weighing up her response to a man she thought was "one angry person".

A security camera outside Bar Code recorded the assault. Homicide detective Matthew Garbutt says it captured the most violent, vicious attack he's seen since joining the force 15 years ago. Daly-Holt suffered a broken nose, fractured eye sockets, chipped teeth and bruises to her skull and face.

Inside Bar Code, brain synapses were so impaired that some patrons went on drinking as if Huddo had crunched a paper cup rather than Daly-Holt's cranial structure. Cassie Hudson learnt an ambulance was collecting her co-worker but "it went in one ear and straight out the other".

No bouncers stood guard at the doors of Bar Code. Huddo walked out and up to the corner of King Street and Flinders Lane with Kaera Douglas following him. He grabbed her by the arm, revealing the 40-calibre handgun down the front of his pants. "He goes, 'Walk with me' and that's when it started," she said. "It was horrid, it was psychotic ... I couldn't believe it was happening ... he's bigger, stronger, faster than me ... he was completely out of his mind, insane, just completely gone ... I was trying to calm him down, saying, 'You don't have to do this, and he's like, 'No, walk with me. You and me we're going for a little walk', and then I wasn't walking and he goes, 'Have you forgotten how to walk? I'll show you how, you stop and watch me. Now this is how we walk, one foot in front of the other ... now you try it.'"

That's how they stumbled down Flinders Lane towards William Street.

On the corner of the intersection is Swann House, an elegant, 10-storey tower striking for its old-world charm of brass door fittings, dark wooden panelling and a carpeted foyer that houses literary enterprises such as Text Publishing and crikey.com.au.

Huddo shoved Douglas inside the Flinders Lane entrance, spilling her bag as he forced her down a set of stairs to the car park, pinning her against the wall. Emmanuel Borg, the janitor, was junking armfuls of rubbish into a skip parked in William Street when he heard screaming and went to investigate.

All he remembers as he rounded the corner of the stairwell is Christopher Hudson's weapon pointed between his eyes. He yelled "gun" as he swivelled into his co-worker, who ran left into a storeroom, scaling a one-and-a-half-metre cabinet that he couldn't have climbed without adrenalin pulsing through his veins. Borg flew across the car park and out into William Street. Hudson chased after Borg, giving Douglas a chance to grope her way back upstairs to Flinders Lane, where she ran to a taxi waiting at the lights. She tried to open the back door, then the front door, but they were locked.

Nearby at THE Southern Cross rail station, backpacker Paul de Waard had brushed his teeth, eaten breakfast and, wearing a green hoodie, was walking up Flinders Lane towards William Street looking for the nearest McDonald's where he could read a newspaper and drink multiple refills of coffee for free.

Brendan Keilar was walking west towards the crossroads. He might have been thinking through the business appointments he'd lined up, or maybe his thoughts were entertaining improvements to the Point Lonsdale weekender he'd just bought with his wife, Alice, for holidays with their young children.

John Hughes was on the tram gliding uneventfully down the Williams Street hill. "It was a pretty dull Monday morning. Everyone was on their way to work, no one seemed particularly keen to get there, but I remember later the contrast between this mundane feeling as we headed into the eye of a scene that few of us would ever imagine witnessing."

Once Huddo realised Borg had got away, he raced back upstairs and into Flinders Lane where Douglas was wrestling with the taxi's door. He grabbed her by the hair.

Borg watched from the foyer of 15 William Street, where he'd run for sanctuary because he knew Huddo was armed. Douglas was petrified for the same reason. No one else nearby had a clue the thug in the adidas top manhandling the girl with the long hair had a weapon, and wouldn't hesitate to use it.

De Waard crossed William Street certain the man was drunk, although he couldn't smell alcohol fumes. "The thing that stood out about Hudson most was that he had a mad look in his eyes," the Dutchman recalls. "I remember the look in her eyes and she was totally frightened. Also, her voice sounded scared. She was saying, 'Help, help.' I thought about the recent commercials in Australia about violence against women. I felt that I had to stop him. Then I looked around to see if there were more people to help me."

De Waard thinks Keilar was walking with him in the same direction, but the father of three, grey streaks in his thinning hair, was crossing from the opposite side when he stopped halfway across William Street. De Waard felt Keilar behind him lending support. "As we walked towards them, I said, 'What are you doing, mate? Let her go.' I can't remember if Brendan said anything. It all happened so quickly. I was just trying to settle [the attacker down by talking to him. Brendan did not physically intervene either - he was behind me."

Hughes watched the disturbance escalate from the stationary tram. He struggled with whether to jump off and assist. "I was actually looking around me to see if anyone else was helping. I could see Brendan walk past. He stopped and stood for a while, watching, like all of us, hoping it would stop by itself. When it didn't, he started to walk back towards them. I remember thinking, 'I hope this guy's OK.'"

Keilar typified the commuter crowd, whereas Huddo's aggression telegraphed an alien intruder. The lawyer appeared smaller, older, greyer than the menacing Hudson. Hughes thinks Keilar's hands were by his side. Others describe them as raised up in a questioning gesture. Borg thinks Keilar was about halfway across William Street, only turning around to face Hudson when the first shot was fired.

The precise chronology of who was hit first - Keilar, de Waard or Douglas - eludes police. Witness statements tell what happened from every imaginable angle, accuracy distorted by shades of fear, recollections blurred by shock and panic. Hughes describes Keilar as a man reluctantly, tentatively, reeled in to the fray: "Everything about his body language was non-threatening. The reaction from Hudson was an extraordinary, devastating, violent response to the mildest of interventions."

Passengers on the tram crouched on the floor as the gunfire sounded. Natalie Galluce hid behind a pillar in front of her workplace diagonally opposite Swann House. She was on the phone to her mother. "I heard five or six shots ... I saw the orange flame come from the gun. I screamed and dropped my phone and bags." Her mother, who'd already lost a daughter, was hysterical when she rang her husband, Carl. He sprinted from his Bourke Street office, praying as he ran, his eyes skyward, pleading for Natalie's life.

Donna McGowan was on the first floor overlooking the intersection. She ran downstairs and knelt beside de Waard, holding his hand, telling him how brave he'd been. He was losing blood fast. "I saw the other guy [Keilar gasping for breath. I watched him die."

Emergency training kicked in for nurse Coralann Walker, who leapt out of her car to assist Keilar. "His pulse was very weak. I tried to reassure him that he was going to be OK and stroked his hair." She performed 20 cardiac compressions before she was relieved by paramedics who'd converged on the scene, sirens blaring; but they were unable to save him.

CHRISTOPHER Hudson has pleaded guilty to charges of murdering Brendan Keilar, attempting to murder Paul de Waard and Kaera Douglas, and intentionally causing serious injury to Daly-Holt, and awaits sentencing. He was a conflagration in the making, his personal history littered with brawls and weapons, drug-taking, drinking and wanton aggression, notching up 62 offences in Queensland and NSW since 2001. Six days before the Melbourne rampage he'd fired shots into the air as he sped across the Bolte Bridge with AFL footballer Alan Didak a passenger in his Mercedes. They'd met at Spearmint Rhino after Didak had gone on a sevenhour post-game drinking binge ending at 4am when the Collingwood forward accepted Huddo's lift home via the Hells Angels clubhouse at Campbellfield.

But there's more to this singular tragedy than the smoking fuse of a psychotic personality. The Bar Code nightclub where Hudson exploded had attracted notoriety, too. The venue migrated to King Street in 2004 after Crown Casino bought the business out of a tenancy deal because the gaming giant didn't like its modus operandi. Crown paid about $5 million to get rid of Bar Code and three other nightclubs from its Southbank location, believing they bled trouble.

Crown is hypersensitive to security. For years, its management has urged the State Government to increase uniformed policing within the Southbank precinct at night, even offering free accommodation for a visible mobile unit to discourage a criminal element drawn like moths to the neon glow.

Superintendent Stephen Leane heads the strategic response to public disorder in and around high-risk licensed premises. In July last year, he thought he'd never win the war as assaults, property damage and theft around the city spiked at 33 offences every weekend. Twelve months later, the average has fallen nearer 30. "We've taken the edge off it but we've got a long way to go," he says.

New late-night liquor licences have been frozen; a state taskforce is targeting hot-spots to enforce compliance with existing regulations; the 2am lockout pilot began on June 1 with nine weeks to run; police have the power to ban troublemakers from entertainment precincts for 24 hours; and campaigns against binge-drinking are being rolled out.

Leane says police and government are struggling with a phenomenon he attributes to a fistful of trends from increases in disposable income to heightened intoxication from drugs and alcohol and the sheer numbers flocking to all-night venues.

City apartment dweller Tim Wilson , a director at the Institute of Public Affairs, takes the bad with the good but worries at increasing signs of disorder. "It's been getting noticeably worse for the past year. After about 9pm the streets become a law unto themselves. Not just drunks, but people who are out very, very late with no particular purpose."

Paul Mullett, spokesman for the state's police association, says nothing works so well as a uniformed presence on the street. He doubts the lockout will solve a problem aggravated by increased drug use, and advocates the return of a stand-alone unit to monitor licensed premises.

British chief constable Peter Neyroud, who visited Melbourne the week young Harry Potter actor Robert Knox was stabbed to death outside a London bar, confirms that days are as busy as nights in big cities. When he started out decades ago, the 6am shift was a sleepy time for doing paperwork. "Now coppers are straight out the door dealing with drunks coming out of clubs," he said.

Borrowing a slogan from the gun lobby, liquor industry advocates insist that alcohol doesn't kill, deranged individuals do. Peter Iwaniuk, director of Entertainment Management Services, says: "It's a cheap shot to blame licensed premises for the actions of Christopher Hudson." He argues the 2am lockout "would have had no bearing whatsoever on the tragic consequences of his actions".

But if Hudson and his crowd had been refused entry to another licensed club that Monday morning, Brendan Keilar might have lived.

AS POLICE began containing the crime scene, news of the shooting fanned across the city. Staff rom Norton Gledhill were concerned when their senior partner failed to show up for his appointments. They rang the police station to report his absence. Some time after midday, a member of the firm accompanied Detective Daniel Ryan to the Hawthorn home of Keilar's wife, Alice Edwards.

Perhaps she hadn't been listening to radio or television coverage, or if she'd heard the news maybe she didn't think the unimaginable, because she didn't seem to have any forewarning that the victim might be her husband, her kindred spirit. Together since university, they'd married in Scots' Church up the Paris end of Collins Street, where the European ideal of restaurants and bars that Melbourne celebrates is a world away from the King Street scourge at the other end of town.

A pillar of kindergarten and community, Edwards' friends doubt she's ever been to a nightclub. She has endured her grief privately. Her brother-in-law, Paul Firth, collected her husband's car from Alexandra Avenue that night. Another family member identified the body. "We'll never get over the loss," Firth says.

Other witnesses nurse scars. Galluce sleeps with her light on. She hasn't been able to resume work and still undergoes counselling for the trauma.

Hughes says the events of June 18, 2007, are never far from his mind. "I don't ever go by that corner without thinking about it," he says. "Before this incident, I'd never felt scared or threatened going about my business. I try to rationalise it as an extremely rare event, an isolated incident, but I know now that there are people around who are armed and dangerous ... it's a strange thing to fear that going about your life."

One of the last images of Brendan Keilar flickers brightly in Hughes' memory. He can still see the solicitor stopping, turning around, borne by a strong sense of obligation, his gentle bearing, the concern on his face, his daily journey interrupted by a monster he could not have fathomed in the minute before he was felled. Hughes has thought of contacting Keilar's wife to pass on his vivid glimpse of her husband, but he hasn't, holding on to the relic of a day she will carry with her forever.

Ends


June 2008 | ^Top^


EU's cheese naming proposal are on the nose
Opinion article in The Australian on Wednesday, 11th June 2008

It's almost enough to make you choke on your Aussiemade camembert. The European Union is trying to use complex intellectual property rights rules to lock out Australia's dairy industry from export markets through the Doha round of World Trade Organisation negotiations.

Australia's dairy industry is valued at more than $3 billion at the farm gate, and $9.2 billion wholesale, of which more than $2.5 billion is earned in exports.

But under the EU's proposal, Australian cheese producers may no longer be able to use simple names like ‘‘parmesan'' or ‘‘brie'' in export markets. Cheeses at risk also include mozzarella, fetta and many others.

At the start of the Doha round of WTO talks in 2001, participating governments committed to negotiate an international system of registration and notification for geographic indicators, or GIs.

GIs are a comparatively new - and very questionable - form of intellectual property.

GIs assign rights to names that indicate the geographic origin of a good, or a certain quality, reputation or characteristic linked to its origin.

The regularly cited example of a GI is ‘‘champagne'' - a word that can now be used to describe only sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France.

The negotiation for international registration of GIs was supposed to be limited to wines and spirits. WTO members are required to prevent the registration of trademarks for GI-covered wines and spirits in their home country.

The EU is now trying to extend GIs to include all agricultural products, in particular cheese. Under the proposal, countries would have to argue why a GI should not be registered and enforced in their territory.

The EU has deliberately designed the rules to place the burden of proof on the protesting country, not the applicant.

For Australia, there are incentives to fight most, if not all, applications on cheeses. But for countries that do not produce or export cheeses, fighting a GI registration may be more effort than it is worth.

Japan, other parts of Asia, and North Africa all import cheese from Australia. Yet it is doubtful they would bother fighting GIs on largely imported cheeses. If they don't, Australian diary producers will no longer be able to export those cheeses under their consumer-recognised names.

The EU proposal is trying to claw back generic product names. In doing so, they are also hoping to expand exports into markets where cheeses with generic names have become commonly used.

For example, parmesan cheese has become renowned across the world for a particular taste, not for its origins in Italy's Parma region.

The EU is trying to achieve its objective by negotiating GI extension as part of the final WTO agreement for the Doha round, which encompasses all areas for potential liberalisation. By doing so, the EU is trying to use GIextension as part of the negotiation package for reducing its agriculture export subsidies.

The risk for Australian industry is that in the haste to get a broader agreement in the Doha round, Australian interests will be sold out. The main event of these negotiations is reduction of European and American agriculture subsidies and developing country industrial tariffs. GI extension is merely a side event.

Indeed, some developing countries are now supporting the EU's GI extension proposal in order to get support for their own amendments to WTO intellectual property rules.

The Australian government needs to take further, strong action now to oppose the EU's plans. Not doing so will bring a short-term political cost. But the long-term cost will be borne by a diminished Australian dairy industry.

Ends


Tariff cuts do more
Opinion article in The Australian on Wednesday, 11th June 2008

KEVIN Rudd likes to project himself as the heir of the Hawke-Keating reform agenda. But Bob Hawke and Paul Keating reformed even when it hurt politically.

The Government's own data shows that automotive industry assistance and tariffs are costing the economy the equivalent of almost 30,000 jobs. Rudd and Innovation Minister Kim Carr should demonstrate the same ticker for reform by phasing out tariffs.

Last Thursday the Productivity Commission released its report into the economy-wide modelled effects of removing automotive tariffs and support. The commission's modelling found that the benefits could be as high as $500 million, with most of the gains coming from removing tariffs. The present tariff rate is 10 per cent and is scheduled to be reduced to 5 per cent in 2010.

The commission's report coincided with the announcement by Holden it would cut 500 jobs at its Fishermans Bend plant. Following the announcement, Carr gave the strongest hint yet that the Rudd Government would act to protect jobs by freezing the tariff phase-out.

A tariff freeze would be a disaster for the Australian automotive industry and Australians generally.

The problem the industry has suffered from is that government support has shielded it from the need to adapt to changing consumer demand. It isn't until consumer demand collapses that the industry faces a crisis and adapts. During the past 20 years consumer demand has shifted towards smaller vehicles and sports utility vehicles.

Advocates of a tariff freeze believe it will protect jobs. It won't. Instead it costs sustainable jobs in viable industries. Australian Bureau of Statistics data demonstrates the cost to jobs caused by tariffs. In the 1980s, tariffs were as high as 57.5 per cent and Australia exported slightly less than $400 million worth of road vehicles.

Since then tariffs have been gradually phased down to 10 per cent. In 2007 Australia exported $4 billion worth of road vehicles.

Rudd and Carr should let the numbers speak for themselves: higher tariffs equal fewer exports, lower tariffs equal higher exports.

Analysis of the Government's data shows the true cost of protection.

Import duties on passenger cars and light commercial vehicles in the 2006-07 financial year totalled $1.2billion. According to the latest ABS data, the average full-time Australian income is $57,860.40. A simple calculation shows tariffs have cost the Australian economy the equivalent of 20,740 jobs. Similarly, between 2001 and 2015 the industry will receive $7.2billion of assistance through the Automotive Competitiveness and Investment Scheme. This program amounts to about $480 million a year in assistance. The ACIS program alone costs the equivalent of 8296 average Australian jobs.

Advocates of tariffs will argue that losing these 30,000 jobs comes at the expense of saving the present 61,200 jobs in the industry.

But such an argument is based on false logic. In the absence of existing jobs, the capital used to pay their wages would be redistributed to other sections of the economy, creating sustainable jobs elsewhere. Government trying to protect jobs during a skills shortage is absurd. Australia is importing labour from across the world to fill a growing void. Yet the Government thinks it is appropriate to act to protect jobs for workers who are in dire need in other industries.

Tariffs are also unduly cruel on those working in the industry. Temporarily propping up jobs creates disincentives for workers to reskill and adapt to the changing market. Instead they are encouraged to stay in their present jobs until the industry falls apart. Then they are left high and dry. They have only the Government's tariffs to blame.

But, ultimately, the cost of tariffs are felt by ordinary Australians. They are the ones who have to pay higher prices for vehicles because of tariffs.

Now the Government is going to splurge a further $35 million of taxpayer money to subsidise Toyota to build hybrid cars in Australia. Doing so is building an industry on false foundations. It is a symbolic measure so Rudd can appear as if he is doing something to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to support jobs.

Rudd shouldn't go weak at the knees because Holden has finally cut unsustainable jobs. When the automotive industry review's report comes to cabinet, Rudd should prove his commitment to reform, promoting innovation and reducing the burden on working families. He can do all of this by opposing a tariff freeze.

Tim Wilson is director of the IP and free trade unit at the Institute of Public Affairs.

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Radio interview on Alan Jones' 2GB radio show regarding Australia's automotive industry and car tariffs
Aired on Thursday, 12th June 2008

Tim Wilson on the automotive industry and car tariffs

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May 2008 | ^Top^


Clubs protestors hail tribunal victory
Quoted in a news article in the Herald Sun on Saturday, 31st May 2008

A PROTEST against Melbourne's proposed 2am lockout turned into a minor celebration last night after news of a court victory filtered through to the crowd.

After a slow start in Treasury Gardens in the late afternoon thousands of party-goers and hospitality workers marched to Parliament House to protest against the State Government's plan to lock people out of venues after 2am in a bid to curb street violence.

The crowd cheered as news of the VCAT win was announced.

Melbourne Locked Out protest group organiser Andrew Ranger said he was thrilled with the turnout.
"I am very happy . . . we have been flabbergasted with the response. This shows exactly what a large bunch of people do when they get together, that they can be responsible and not be violent," he said.
"We will not stop. We are going to keep protesting until we have won this thing."

The 21-year-old RMIT student, who was behind last month's fare-evasion protest, said he was not an anarchist or aligned politically, but felt strongly about the issue.

"The lockout would shut down the industry and ruin Melbourne's reputation as a 24-hour vibrant city, and small businesses will not be able to survive," he said.

Melbourne DJ Grant Smillie said a 2am lockout could cause chaos on the streets between 1am and 3am as people tried to get into venues or get home, and could harm Melbourne's reputation abroad.

"I am lucky enough to play all the way around the world, and this is such an international city -- a culture and lifestyle city -- and it's a shame we have to resort to this kind of lockout. Surely there's a better way to solve the problem," he said.

Protester and nightclub promotions organiser Jessica Mariolis, 22, said a lockout would prevent her from going out after she finished work.

"I look after about 40 staff who all work until 2am, and if they want to go out afterwards they are not going to want to work, because they'll be scared of not being able to get in anywhere to see their friends," she said.

"I don't think they've thought it through at all."

Melbourne's Tim Wilson, 28, said a lockout failed to address the real problem of a lack of police on the streets.

"It's penalising the majority for the actions of a few. I am affected, as some of the bars I go to close at 3am. And then I'll have nowhere to go," he said.

Coral East, 22 of Northcote, said she was proud of Melbourne people for protesting.

Ends


Channel 9 News on the 2am lockout
Appearing on Channel 9 news on Friday, 30th May 2008


























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Petrol price promise non-core
Opinion article in The Australian on Tuesday, 27th of May 2008

KEVIN Rudd's election promise to keep petrol prices low has been exposed as non-core. That was confirmed when Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong announced that the cost of carbon credits from the forthcoming emissions trading scheme would apply to petrol. The cost is likely to be equivalent to doubling the GST at the bowser.

The cost of signing the Kyoto Protocol and establishing an emissions trading scheme was always going to flow on to the price at the bowser. The cost of the next international agreement, to be completed in Copenhagen in 2009, is unknown but will probably only amplify the pain. And the tax increases on petrol will flow throughout the rest of the economy as higher transport costs increase grocery prices.

Now that he's in government, Rudd cannot deliver on his empty promises and is drawing voter ire. The absurdity is that Rudd seems genuinely surprised by the Opposition and the public's anger over rising petrol prices when he promised to keep them low.

Rudd can hardly feign ignorance. In Opposition he played the same kitchen-table politics that is being used against him to tap into voter resentment over the rising cost of living. Further, in 2001, Treasurer Wayne Swan led the Opposition's attack that ensured the Howard government capped petrol excise.

Soon after coming to government, Rudd attempted to deflect attention from his non-core promise by establishing a petrol commissioner at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to watch over petrol prices. Following a naming-and-shaming of Coles Express for increasing prices, the commissioner, Pat Walker, claimed he was helping to stop price rises.

Walker's claim is akin to suggesting he can stare down prices. In fact, Coles Express was merely the first petrol retailer to increase prices that day. Its competitors followed with similar price rises later that day. The irony is that if all the companies had increased their prices at once, the ACCC would have complained about collusion. Petrol retailers simply cannot win.

The Government is claiming that a petrol commissioner will help reduce prices by having an observant watchdog that will increase transparency. But petrol is already a highly transparent consumer product. Standard unleaded petrol is an interchangeable product that can be bought from any service station. As a result, consumers are able to buy petrol from any retailer they like.

Further, petrol prices are advertised on large boards along the road. If consumers don't like the price they see they can simply drive to the next service station. But there is one significant exception in the pricing transparency: government taxes. Oil companies make only a few cents' profit from each litre of petrol sold. By comparison, state and federal taxes are more than 41 per cent of the final sale price.

In his budget reply speech, Brendan Nelson proposed a reduction in fuel excise to reduce the burden on working families. Nelson's proposal is reasonable and economically responsible. The federal Government imposes the GST on petrol after including excise. Because the GST is percentage-driven, the Government take increases as the price goes up. Therefore, any loss of government revenue from reduced excise will be reclaimed through the increased GST take.

Rudd's response has been to review the application of the GST component on retail petrol before the excise. Doing so will reduce state revenue from petrol without harming the federal take.

Now Rudd is considering options to stop intra-day price changes at the bowser. The consequences are predictable. By removing the opportunity to reduce or raise prices, petrol retailers are left with limited options and are likelier to raise the price than reduce it for fear of lost profits.

A similar regime already operates in Western Australia. Some petrol stations have been fined for reducing, not increasing, the price of petrol.

What is clear is that Rudd was deliberately deceptive or hadn't done his homework. World petrol prices are largely set by supply and demand. Demand is up and therefore so are prices. China's consumption has increased by more than 50 per cent in seven years and is meeting this demand almost entirely from new imports.

The vast majority of Australian petrol is sourced locally but is priced at the market rate of our region's local trading hub, Singapore. The reason is simple. Why should Australian producers sell oil cheaper than the world price when it can be exported to the highest bidder?

Rudd should not be surprised that voters are angry about his failure to keep petrol prices low. The only way he can redeem himself is to reduce the Government's profit margin on petrol, the excise. Instead, Rudd and Wong are proposing to increase the Government's tax take through all of the costs that come with reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and with it placing further pressure on working families.

Tim Wilson is director of the IP and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs and author of Facts: Who Prices Petrol, available at www.ipa.org.au.

Ends


Taxes key to petrol prices
Opinion article on ABC News Opinion Online on Monday, 26th of May 2008.

The Rudd Government's efforts to reduce petrol prices are a sham.

The ACCC's new Petrol Commissioner cannot do anything to reduce the price of petrol. Creating a Petrol Commissioner is also a distraction from how government can actually reduce the price of petrol: reduce Government taxes.

Petrol is priced by the simple forces of the market - supply and demand. Despite the fact that Australia sources most of its petrol locally, prices cannot help but be set at the world price. This is because if it were priced lower, Australian petrol would simply attract a higher price internationally and be sold there. The net result for Australians world be petrol shortages.

Specifically, the Australian world price marker is the Singapore market price. Singapore is the major oil trading hub in our region. Despite its petrol price hysteria, the ACCC has found that Australian bowser prices closely correlate with the Singapore price. The ACCC's own evidence defuses suggestions that petrol companies are deliberately gouging consumers.

The Petrol Commissioner cannot reduce the price of petrol without effectively getting petrol retailers to sell below market price.

One of the supposed benefits of the new Petrol Commissioner's office is that it has increased pricing transparency. But prices do not go down just because someone watches them. When the Petrol Commissioner Pat Walker named-and-shamed Coles Express for a recent increase in petrol prices, he argued that his action proved the need for his role.

But the facts don't support Walker. Coles Express was merely the first of the petrol stations to so increase their prices - they were shortly followed by other stations on the same day. The Petrol Commissioner did nothing to stop price rises; only managing to condemn one company as a scapegoat.

Lose lose

The irony is that if one company increases its prices first and others follow, they are attacked by the ACCC for increasing prices. If all the companies do it in unison they are attacked by the ACCC for collusion. Either way petrol companies cannot win.

The reason petrol prices are consistent is not because of a lack of transparency. Quite the opposite - it is because they are transparent that they seem uniform. Standard Unleaded Petrol is an interchangeable product and can be bought from any service station regardless of the car you drive. Petrol prices are advertised on giant billboards alongside roads, so if consumers are not happy with the price they can drive to another station for a better price.

Blaming petrol companies for the high cost of petrol also ignores one of the major reasons that petrol is expensive: government taxes. Petrol companies make only a few cents profit per litre of petrol. In comparison, 41 per cent of the price of petrol is state and federal taxes.

If the Federal Government really wants to reduce prices they can reduce fuel excise. In his budget reply speech Federal Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, proposed a fuel excise cut. The Government has attacked the proposal for being economically irresponsible. It is not.

Fuel excise is added onto the price of petrol before the GST. The GST is a percentage tax that is added after excise and increases as the final price. As the market price of petrol continues to rise, so does the Government's GST take. Any cut in excise will be sufficiently compensated in the increased take from the GST.

Short reprieve

Even if the Government cuts fuel excise it will be a short reprieve for consumers. The Government has proposed a new scheme to stop retailers from changing petrol prices throughout the day. In Western Australia a similar program already exists and retailers have been fined for reducing prices.

Further, the Government has already proposed a new tax on petrol through the carbon trading scheme. Along with electricity, transport is one of the primary emitters of carbon dioxide. And under a carbon trading scheme the Rudd Government will impose additional costs at the bowser. Modelled projections show that the cost of the carbon trading scheme on petrol prices could effectively double the GST component.

Consumers should be wary of hollow promises to reduce petrol prices by Government. The real obstacle to keeping petrol prices low is government taxes. And if you think they are bad now, just wait until the cost of a carbon trading scheme hits you when you fill up.

Tim Wilson is director of the intellectual property and free trade unit at the Institute of Public Affairs.

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Fair trade is an unworkable attempt to rig the market
Opinion article in the Australian Financial Review on Saturday, 10th of May 2008.

Good intentions used to pave the road to hell. Now they can be found in your coffee cup, and in a host of other ''fair trade'' products. Fair trade activists are celebrating Fair Trade fortnight. They will be out pushing fair trade products with the argument that their goods help lift people out of poverty, and that fair trade can succeed where free trade appears to fail.

Fair trade is promoted as a providing environmental, social and economic benefits in developing countries by modifying consumerbehaviour and harnessing market forces. There are two components to this social justice campaign.

First, the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO) has a certification standard for using the Fair Trade brand. Certification allows producers' products to carry the fair trade label and be identified to consumers.

Second, fair trade advocacy groups like Oxfam run campaigns to regulate international markets to promote fairer trade outcomes.While economists have long been sceptical, there is now increasing evidence that the benefits of fair trade are not being delivered. Indeed there are questions as to whether the FLO certification standards are actually enforced.

A study titled Unfair trade by the London-based Adam Smith Institute argued that there was no hard evidence that fair trade hadworked. Activists tend to rely on anecdotal evidence from farmers, rather than environmental, social and economic indicators orstatistics that would provide real evidence of fair trade's success.

Another recent study published by George Mason University found compliance costs absorbed much of the fair trade premium. Advocates tell consumers the fair trade premium goes to farmers to help in the fight against poverty. Yet Unfair Trade said only about 10 per cent of the premium got to coffee producers, who have greater compliance costs and, very often, can only sell a fraction of their crop at the fair trade price.

Fair trade is not just structurally flawed. The certification standards keep farmers and workers poor. For example, fair trade farmers are prevented from owning more than 12 acres (4.8 hectares) of land, and farms cannot be dependent on hired labour. Successful farmers are prevented from expanding their business and from employing fulltime labour. Fair trade coffee encourages casualisation. Seasonal workers are the poorest in many developing economies. Fair trade practices keep them poor.

FLO insists workers be paid the minimum wage, but doesn't require records of wage payments. Further, a Financial Times studyfound the minimum wage standard is not always being enforced.

Overall, fair trade farms must be operated by families, with labour hired only in picking season.

A particularly troubling claim was made by a Guatamalan coffee producer, who suggested that fair trade organisations went toGuatemala to build clinics or schools and then published photos suggesting these outcomes were normal benefits of fair trade. Iftrue, this is an outrageous manipulation of the facts.

The problems with fair trade are not just limited to developing-world producers; consumers are also being conned. Fair trade coffee is marketed as a speciality coffee, yet fair trade producers sell their lower-grade coffee through fair trade channels and keep bettergrade coffee for the free market, where they are able to get a better price. Fair trade principles are anti-free-market principles. At its heart, fair trade is an attempt to fix prices.

This has all been tried before,and failed. The International Coffee Agreement operated for most of the Cold War period to help developingworld coffee producers lift themselves out of poverty. It was a monumental failure. All efforts to rig commodity markets end in rentseeking and failure.

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Logic locked out
Opinion article in the Herald Sun on Tuesday, 6th of May 2008.

John Brumby's proposed trial to ban entry into bars and nightclubs after 2am is a demonstration of the latter.

Rather than addressing the core problems that result in drunken violence, Brumby has proposed a Band-Aid solution that will not solve the problem and harms more people than it helps.

When announcing the 2am lockout Premier Brumby argued there is a problem with drunken revellers being kicked out of inner-city venues, only to bar-hop to another licensed venue.

The consequence is drunken revellers turn into violent ones.

After a trial 2am lockout in Bendigo and Ballarat, the Government now wants a similar trial regime in inner-city Melbourne.

But what works for Bendigo and Ballarat doesn't necessarily work for inner-city Melbourne.

Outside of the regional centres of Ballarat and Bendigo choice is limited for late-night venues. The same cannot be said of Melbourne.

The lockout will not stop drunken revellers from going to bars after 2am, it will simply mean they will go to the suburbs.

One result will be increased pressure on venues and police resources outside of the inner city.

Such a scenario poses serious concerns about drink-driving between venues that may not otherwise occur if partygoers simply moved between the bars and night clubs of places like Chapel St.

And even if drunken revellers are not allowed into bars and nightclubs at 2am, it needn't mean they are without choice in the inner city.

If drunken revellers still want to party past 2am the casino will still be open and serving alcohol.

Considering the hoopla the Government makes about reducing the volume of gambling in society, it seems hypocritical to allow the casino to continue to accept new customers past 2am when non-gambling venues are required to refuse entrance.

At 2am there will also be a spillover of party goers on inner-city streets.

While no one will be kicked out of venues unless they are already intoxicated, most major nightclubs and bars have queues of people to get in. Any bar-hopper left in line at 2am will be left out in the streets.

Having such a large group of people roaming the streets will only add more problems for an already stretched police force.

Having lived in the CBD for a number of years and having had physical violence threatened toward me by drunken revellers, I am sympathetic to the Government's concerns.

But ultimately the policy will not address the root cause of the problem -- bar tenders serving alcohol to intoxicated patrons which exacerbates the problem, and a poor police presence in the inner city at night.

A 2am lockout is a lemon policy, and I don't mean the type served as a wedge in nightclub cocktails.

Ends


New evidence of old concerns: Fair trade myths exposed ... Again
Paper published on Friday, 2nd May 2008

New evidence of old concerns: Fair trade myths exposed... Again, May 2008

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April 2008 | ^Top^

Submission to the National Innovation Review
Submission co-authored with Professor Sinclair Davidsonon Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Innovation Review Submission, April 2008

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Intellectual Property Matters
Paper published on Saturday, 26th April 2008

Intellectual Property Matters, April 2008

Ends


Celebrate World Intellectual Property Day
Opinion article in The Accra Mail (Ghana), AllAfrica.com (Washington, DC), Business Standard (India), Economic Times (India), Greater Kashmir (India), Hindu Business Line (India) and Individual.com (Washington, DC) on Saturday, 26th of April 2008.

To achieve environmental, social and economic progress, humanity needs to innovate. Yesterday (April 26) was World Intellectual Property (IP) Day, a day that should be about celebrating the essential role IP plays in promoting innovation. Instead, World IP Day has become a day to take stock of how much human innovation and ingenuity is under threat.

IP has always been a niche public policy area understood best by policy wonks and lawyers. Unless there is a major controversy, IP tends to escape public consciousness. But that is changing. Over the past few years, campaigns to undermine IP have increased and are now reaching a fever pitch.

IP is essential because it provides the property rights needed for research and development to attract investment with the prospect of a long-term dividend. Undermining IP is equivalent to the traditional socialist ethos — divvy the spoils of today's research and development, rather than focusing on expanding it. And a lot is at stake — according to the most recent figures from the United Nations, the Indian patent registry receives more than 90,000 applications for patentable inventions each year.

In spite of this significant contribution, there has been a global campaign to undermine IP rights by a group of anti-market activists, self-interested politicians, vested interests, and more recently, the infiltrated World Health Organisation.

Innovative medicines have been one of the big targets. These activists have argued that IP rights increase the cost of medicines for the world's poor. Yet they ignore that one of the biggest contributors to increasing costs is actually government-imposed taxes and tariffs that raise the price of life-saving medicines. For instance, in India the combined taxes and tariffs on imported medicines are 55 per cent; for China, they are 28 per cent.

But this reality has not stopped governments acting to undermine IP. In early 2007, the then-Thai military government waived the patents of three patented medicines through a process called "compulsory licensing".

Compulsory licensing is an instrument recognised under the World Trade Organisation's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement, grants governments the ability to license the production of patented products "in the case of a national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency or in cases of public non-commercial use."

In the case of medicines, the provision was designed to ensure patented products could be mass-produced during serious public health emergencies. Yet the Thai government allowed a profit-making government agency to produce the medicines. They also compulsory licensed Plavix, a heart disease medication. A heart disease medication hardly fits within the criteria of "national emergency" or "extreme urgency."

The Thai government's actions were an abuse of a reasonable interpretation of the TRIPS Agreement. Instead, the Thai military government used it as an opportunity to reduce public expenditure on health and diverted it to boosting their own salaries and military budget.

Now the World Health Organisation has waded into the debate. Last year, a WHO-designated team assessed the Junta's actions and later issued a brief report legitimising the government's actions, which was followed by a how-to guide for countries to waive their international obligations and issue compulsory licences.

This report is feeding into a WHO-initiated Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on Public Health, Innovation and IP formed in 2006. From its inception the IGWG has been an attempt for health bureaucrats and the activists that advise them to re-write — and undermine — global IP rules.

The activists are now using their campaign against IP on medicines as a precedent to continue their assault on IP; and global warming has become the new battleground.

In a joint statement at the 2007 G8 Summit, the governments of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa called for an agreement to assist in compulsorily licensing the IP related to carbon dioxide emission-mitigating technology being developed in wealthy countries.

In subsequent media reports the officials argued an agreement is needed "paralleling the successful agreement on compulsory licensing of pharmaceuticals." Similar themes appeared in a resolution passed by the European Parliament in November last year recommending a study to assess amending TRIPS "to allow for the compulsory licensing of environmentally necessary technologies."

And the tragedy is that those who are likely to suffer most are the world's poor. They are the ones most likely to suffer from a lack of investment in essential medicines or the predicted consequences of not reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Technology transfer is also vital for developing countries to grow their economies and improve their standards of health and the environment. A 2006 World Bank study and a 1998 International Energy Agency/UNEP study have identified that strengthening IP rights assists in technology transfer.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation has designated 2008 as the year for "celebrating innovation and promoting respect for IP." With the IGWG convening in Geneva in a few days' time and the assault on IP on climate-friendly technologies, World IP Day is becoming an opportunity to reflect on IP's demise.

Tim Wilson is Director of the IP and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne — www.ipa.org.au

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Not what he says, but what he does
Opinion article in The Age on Wednesday, 23rd of April 2008

Kevin Rudd should stop his Government's doublespeak on free trade. In his recent address to the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC, he tried to convince his audience and the media that he was committed to free trade, but considering his Government's actions at home, his audience should be wary.

Rudd advocated for free trade, arguing his Government would make "no retreat into protectionism". Embracing free trade means more than just not increasing tariffs. It means eliminating tariffs - subsidies and industry assistance packages that still exist.

Rudd clearly understands the contribution a successful conclusion to the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation negotiations would deliver for Australia and, more importantly, the world's poor. He has spruiked the need for a successful outcome on his visits to Washington and Brussels, and is right to say that a successful conclusion would give the global economy a "psychological shot in the arm".

Most of the media focus on the Doha Round has focused on reducing agricultural production and export subsidies by the US and Europe and increasing market access for developing countries' agriculture products. As a unilateral liberaliser, Australia can play a sanctimonious, honest broker in negotiations on agriculture. But industrial products and manufacturing liberalisation is also important to global prosperity. Since taking office, Innovation Minister Kim Carr has established three reviews that are likely to recommend anti-free trade measures - an Innovation Review, a Review of the Australian Textile, Clothing and Footwear Industry and a Review of Australia's Automotive Industry.

The tragedy of the Government's doublespeak should not be lost on Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner. In a speech to the Melbourne Institute last week, he attacked "producerism". According to him, "producerism exists wherever the state implements regulatory and ownership arrangements that favour or protect particular producer groups at the expense of society as a whole", such as "tariffs, monopolies and other distorting regulatory regimes". He is spot on.

Since taking office, the Government has appointed reviews that are likely to increase public subsidies through research and development funds, industry assistance and freezing tariffs. The cost will come at the expense of Australian consumers, a competitive Australia and helping the world's poor.

Perhaps the Prime Minister would do well to stop listening to Carr and start listening to Tanner.

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March 2008 | ^Top^


Myths on CO2 food miles
Opinion article in The Australian on Monday, 10th of March 2008

Last week federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Tony Burke, exposed the "food miles" campaign as "nothing more than protectionism". Burke is right, but beneath such transparent protectionism, the food miles emperor is still naked.

Food miles is the latest chic campaign for environmental activists to reduce CO2 emissions. But perhaps counterintuitively, if activists and consumers want to reduce their CO2 footprint they may want to support their food travelling longer, not shorter, distances.

The principle of the food miles campaign is simple. There is a significant - and, activists argue, an unnecessary - CO2 footprint associated with transporting produce. The solution is therefore to avoid these emissions by "buying local" and exercising caution when purchasing imports.

Late last year a Melbourne organisation, Community Environment Park, released a report drawing attention to the carbon footprint of food purchased by Melbourne consumers. The report unsurprisingly outlined the large footprint for much of the food bought in Melbourne's supermarkets, regardless of whether it was produced domestically or internationally.

It may seem logical that the further the distance a product travels, the bigger its CO2 footprint. But as Trade Minister, Simon Crean yesterday pointed out, this view is simplistic.

First, only a full life-cycle carbon footprint can accurately measure total emissions. A life-cycle assessment would require a calculation of the total CO2 emissions from the seeding of crops and the birth of livestock, to their delivery to the consumer.

Second, the fuel efficiency that comes with bulk transport, and the mode of transport itself, need to be factored in. Agricultural products from our region transported by sea to England can produce equivalent emissions as comparable products travelling by road to England from southern Europe.

In his address to the trade ministers' meeting held alongside the UN's Bali climate change summit in December last year, director-general of the World Trade Organisation, Pascal Lamy, made this point clear. Lamy argued that "90 per cent of internationally traded goods are carried by sea. And maritime transport is by far the most carbon-efficient mode of transport, with only 14g of CO2 emissions per tonne-kilometre".

In many cases, a more accurate life-cycle assessment will show that importing food that travels long distances can be better for the environment than producing it locally.

The inputs would not simply be limited to transportation costs, but would also consider such items as fertiliser, electricity, feed, tools and housing.

A recent study done by New Zealand's Lincoln University demonstrated this well. The study looked at the life-cycle carbon footprint of apples, onions and lamb exported to Europe. For all three items, the total energy input per tonne of output was substantially less if the product was produced in NZ and exported to Europe, than if it was produced locally. In the case of lamb, the CO2 emissions were more than four times less.

Third, the food miles campaign ignores the environmental benefits of international trade.

The primary determinant of a product's life-cycle carbon footprint is the level of inputs. The costs of inputs are not ignored by competitive food producers. If a producer successfully reduces these inputs, it will be able to bring its product to market at a lower price, with the added benefit of a smaller footprint. Free markets are environmentally sustainable because they seek the maximum output for the minimum input.

And herein lies the challenge for the Labor Government. Despite Kevin Rudd's general commitment to the efficiency of free markets, many of his MPs are not so sure. Among the ranks of Labor's caucus is a number of protectionists who question the environmental benefits of free trade.

Equally Rudd has a number of climate evangelists who actively support reducing CO2 emissions at all costs.

And following the change of the Senate in July, the Greens are likely to move from the fringe of public policy debate to the centre. The Australian Greens should follow their NZ counterparts. In 2006, co-party leader of the NZ Greens highlighted the Greens' opposition to food miles and argued that environmental activists "need to consider the emissions released during production, not just the transport emissions".

Despite the evidence not stacking up, too many advocates of food miles ignore the complexity of proper accounting for carbon footprints, and instead rely on anti-trade rhetoric to get their message across. And even fewer consider the beneficial role international trade and free markets can play in reducing emissions.

Agriculture is a diminishing but still vital component of the Australian economy. Burke is right to expose the food miles campaign as a front for protectionism and should campaign heavily against it.

Tim Wilson is a director of the IP and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne

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How to win Government
Opinion article in the March 2008 edition of IPA Review

"How to win Government", IPA Review, March 2008

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Petrol FACTS
Petrol FACTS publised on Saturday, 1st March 2008

Petrol FACTS, January 2008

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February 2008 | ^Top^


Tariffs drive competition - what nonsense
Opinion article in The Age on Friday, 22nd of February 2008

Following the closure of the Mitsubishi plant in Adelaide, the Australian economy and consumers would support Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Industry Minister Kim Carr freezing car tariffs.

Instead, Rudd and Carr should use the closure as an opportunity to reduce tariffs, bolster the economy and reduce prices for consumers.

It is always difficult for workers when a factory closes. The loss of jobs, the need for reskilling and fears for workers' ability to put food on the table is an understandable reaction.

The immediate response from the Government is to try to save jobs. A large proportion of their response is driven by the need to "be seen" to be compassionate and caring. Rudd and Carr should not follow this formula.

The Mitsubishi plant closed because it was inefficient and produced cars that few wanted to buy. Days before the closure, Carr asked whether there was anything the Government could do to keep it open. Had Mitsubishi taken his offer, it would only have delayed the inevitable.

Now, Rudd and Carr are focusing on how to bolster the rest of the car industry. Their solution is to consider "freezing" tariffs that are due to be lowered in 2010.

In the late 1980s, tariffs on cars were 45%. Since then, tariffs have been reduced to 10% until 2010, then to 5% until 2015.

The argument for tariffs is that they make inefficient car makers competitive and keep workers in jobs. This logic is poppycock.

No job is "saved" by a tariff. Like most government-imposed regulations, tariffs keep people out of jobs.

Tariffs act to increase the cost of imported cars and aim to make Australian-manufactured cars more price competitive.

Every time an inefficient job is "saved" by government intervention, consumer capital is directed away from an efficient job to keep an inefficient job alive. This is simply not sustainable.

Sustainable jobs are necessary to provide long-term economic security to workers and the Australian economy. Tariffs provide a false foundation for job growth.

Tariffs also remove the incentive to innovate. They limit exposure to competition and remove incentives for car makers to innovate.

In the Productivity Commission's latest Review of Automotive Assistance report, it identified a core justification for the industry becoming an "exporter and innovator" since the late 1980s.

It was a "reduction in tariffs that exposed the industry to increased international competition and also reduced costs for consumers and increased their vehicle choices".

The point has not been lost on Mitsubishi. Its chief executive in Australia, Rob McEniry, admitted that one of the main reasons for closure was the domestic decline in the large-car market and changing consumer demand.

A tariff freeze will also have wider, negative consequences - it will keep prices high for consumers.

At the last election, Rudd claimed he would stop price rises in petrol and groceries. He has already expanded government regulatory power to try to stop price rises.

Rudd cannot stop price rises on groceries and petrol, but he can reduce car prices. Tariffs add to the price of vehicles. For consumers, that means higher loan repayments, particularly when coupled with rising interest rates.

Instead of pretending to care, Rudd and Carr should act in the best interests of Australians.

They should ignore the temptation of a tariff freeze and continue the gradual reduction in car tariffs to deliver sustainable jobs, a more innovative industry and cheaper prices for all Australians.

Ends


December 2007 | ^Top^


What's the appeal of "totalitarian chic"?
Opinion article in the December 2007 edition of IPA Review

"What's the appeal of "totalitarian chic"?", IPA Review, December 2007

Ends


Liberalism must evolve to match generational shifts
Opinion article in the December 2007 edition of IPA Review

"Liberalism must evolve to match generational shifts'", IPA Review, December 2007

Ends


November 2007 | ^Top^


Make way for youth
Opinion article in The Age (republished in the West Australian the next day) on Thursday, 29th November 2007



The clean removal of John Howard from the leadership and Parliament, and Peter Costello as a leadership contender, provides the Liberal Party with a fresh slate.

Since the 1980s the Liberal Party has been dominated by the big personalities that were able to impose their will across the party.

The federal parliamentary party has fought on both philosophical and personal differences — the "wets" and the "dries", Howard versus Peacock and then Howard versus Costello.

In Victoria there has been the ongoing battle between Kennett and Costello. While recognising both men's enormous contribution to Victoria, Australia and Liberal politics — they are now men of the past, and so should be their battles.

On the policy front, the party has largely converged on the principles that guide economic policy. What differences remain between liberal factions are minor.

But on social policy the party is increasingly polarised into two groups — social conservatives driven by a minority, but vocal, religious infiltration; and the substantial majority who want a more progressive social liberalism that reflects contemporary Australian society.\

In fact, among Liberals under 40 there is a strong convergence of values that supports a classical liberal, or libertarian, approach of free markets and a free, open and pluralist society. And their values are closely associated with those of their non-party peers.

Among younger Australians, respecting choice is central to their values. But the Howard government was either unaware of or unable to adjust to the major shifts in social attitudes in the past decade.

The Howard government's philosophical perspective was frozen in 1996, and it paid the price for it. For example, while census data shows that the number of "working families" is declining, the Howard government took swathes of childless people's tax dollars to prop them up.

Equally, the Howard government foolishly failed to recognise in law the basic dignity of same-sex couples, despite their broad acceptance within Australian society.

The future of the Liberal Party is through inclusion. Looking to the future, the party needs to develop a contemporary, progressive liberalism that resonates with the electorate. With the inevitable attrition of MPs after the election, the next generation of Liberals will bring with them their more representative policy positions to support the Liberal brand.

The next generation of Australians coming through are the most truly natural liberal generation in modern Australian history. Social research emphasises the coming generation's belief in a free market and a free society with individual responsibility central to their way of life. Equally, their liberalism is organic.

Their openness to market capitalism comes from growing up in a dynamic capitalist society that has provided for the material wealth of them and their peers.

Similarly, their sympathy with social liberalism is a consequence of being raised in a diverse and multicultural society, and having travelled extensively. They have grown up looking for traits that unite not divide them from the diverse range of people with whom they interact.

Individual responsibility is also central to younger Australians' attitudes. Research by the Centre for Social Change at Queensland University of Technology argues that younger Australians demonstrate the highest participation rate in civic activism since those born at the start of the last century. The Liberal Party needs to harness the political opportunity that Australia's next generation provides.

First, the party should never be ashamed of its history. Every government makes mistakes. One of the specialities of Labor is to revise history to extol its virtues and demonise Liberal governments.

But the Howard government's legacy has been to bring economic responsibility back into favour. Without it, Rudd would never be able to deliver the social and environmental programs he now plans to implement.

Second, the Liberal Party should promote generational change within its organisational and parliamentary ranks. Doing so will allow liberal philosophy to evolve to a more progressive liberalism, which involves dumping social conservatism and becoming more closely aligned with community attitudes.

Third, the party needs to explain its philosophy to the community. Opposition is about more than just opposing the government of the day. Oppositions need to go back to basics and explain the philosophy that underpins their party's existence. Liberalism is about the primacy of individual responsibility and action over the collectivism of government fiat. Above all it respects choice.

In recent election campaigns the Liberal Party shied away from arguing in favour of smaller government and foolishly fought on Labor's turf. The Liberal Party can never win an election auction fought on who can best spend recurrent government expenditure. By explaining the philosophy underpinning the party the opposition can then communicate to the electorate how it has come to its policy positions.

Finally, the party must work to engage younger Australians. They are the largest generation to enter the workforce since the baby boomers and will be a significant voting demographic for at least the next three generations. Considering younger Australians' attitudes heavily align with classical liberal thought, the party's job must be to join the dots between their values and how they line up against a revitalised, progressive liberalism.

Tim Wilson is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

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October 2007 | ^Top^


Cronyism buys into wheat sales
Opinion article in the Australian Financial Review on Tuesday, 30th October 2007

Australian wheat marketing arrangements are a monument to why trade policy and politics don't mix. A Federal Court decision earlier this week was a victory for cronyism and vested interests at the expense of the public interest.

The Federal Court ruled on a case between niche wheat and grain exporter, OzEpulse and the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Peter McGauran.

Under current wheat marketing arrangements, the veto for wheat exports, previously held by the AWB, is now held by the Minister to exercise in the "public interest".

OzEpulse appealed the procedural fairness of the Minister's decision for rejecting the applications. The Minister took advice from the AWB and did not define the "public interest" test before OzEpulse's application.

One of the three applications was to amend an existing license to export 10,000 tonnes of wheat to Italy in containers. OzEpulse simply wanted to export it in bulk because it reduced costs and boosted profits.

It is inconsistent with the Minister's obligation to act in the public interest to oppose exports simply because of the mode of delivery. The Minister's decision is only the latest in Australia's sad wheat export tale.

Current wheat marketing policy was developed post-war to secure income for growers. The Hawke/Keating and Howard Governments have made reforms to liberalise the sector. But their efforts are still a long way from achieving the national interest - a free market in wheat exports.

Recognising the political potency of wheat politics, particularly in Western Australia, the ALP has committed to deregulate. The ALP policy proposes a single desk that would accredit wheat exporters to maintain standards, but otherwise allow for a free market.

Considering Kevin Rudd's me-tooism, wheat is likely to be one of the few stark areas of policy difference between the ALP and the coalition.

The coalition's plan is a policy of one step forward, two steps back. Driven by the Nationals a new self-appointed organisation, the Wheat Export Marketing Alliance (WEMA), looks set to be gifted the single desk and its veto.

Raising finance for WEMA has been slow, but Nationals Leader Mark Vaile has already provided financial assistance for a business plan and is spruikingmore.

Not surprisingly the most vocal supporters are wheat growers in the eastern wheat belt that bares a strikingly similar footprint to National's heartland. Meanwhile WA growers are forced to accept lower payments and cannot target premium markets.

Current wheat marketing arrangements are a testament to the National's claim that they represent the interests of farmers in Government, but they come at the expense of wheat farmers outside of Nationals' electorates, and the public interest.

Tim Wilson is Director of the IP and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs

Ends


Burning off the petrol price myths
Opinion article in the October 2007 edition of IPA Review

"Burning off the petrol price myths'", IPA Review, October 2007

Ends


Radio interview on Radio National's "Australia Talking" regarding the first week of the Federal Election
Aired on "Australia Talking" on Monday, 22nd October 2007

Tim Wilson on "Australia Talking "

Ends


Gunns go-ahead puts heat on ANZ
Quoted in article in the Australian Financial Review on Saturday, 6th October 2007

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group has been caught out by its embrace of voluntary environmental standards and will review its financing of Gunn's controversial $2 billion pulp mill.

It is unclear how much profit the bank's shareholders could forgo if ANZ finds the pulp mill is inconsistent with its obligations as a signatory to the Equator Principles, which requires environmental and social factors to be considered in evaluating projects.

The federal government this past week approved the pulp mill in Tasmania's Tamar Valley.

In a statement on Friday, ANZ said it was still considering if it would finance the mill for Gunns - a customer since 1995 - given it had adopted the Equator Principles in late 2006 and implemented them globally this year.

"The review is testing the technical aspects of the mill's design and its overall feasibility with reference to engineering specifications, design plans and other supporting information", ANZ said.

"As this proposal involves significant social and/or environmental issues, the technical review will also include an assessment of the adequacy of measures proposed by the company to manage these risks".

Gunns executive chairman, John Gay said he had no reason to believe ANZ would not support the mill, but Gunns could also seek funding elsewhere.

"We're not only with ANZ. I have no belief that ANZ isn't supportive of the mill. We're still paying fees to them to get the financial approval in place", he said.

Tim Wilson from the Institute of Public Affairs said shareholders should be concerned about companies they invested in signing treaties such as the Equator Principles.

'By adopting the Equator Principles, Australian banks risk disqualifying themselves from business in important emerging markets, and particularly in the high growth Asian markets", he said.

Corporate governance expert Ian Ramsay of Melbourne University said there was no conflict for directors signing these sorts of voluntary codes.

Ends


Radio interview on Triple J's "The Hack" regarding same-sex couples and the Federal Election
Aired on "The Hack" on Wednesday, 3rd October 2007

Tim Wilson on "The Hack"

Ends


Film classification laws out of sync with the 21st century
Opinion article(co-authored with Chris Berg) in The Age on Monday, 1st October 2007

Globalised production and niche markets make more flexibility essential.

Recently a small St Kilda video store, Out Video, drew the attention of the federal Attorney-General's Department for selling and renting imported titles that have not been classified in Australia.

Bureaucrats may be doing their job, but by acting against a small niche video shop, they have inadvertently exposed critical flaws in our film classification laws.

Out Video markets films primarily directed at the gay and lesbian community. Many are produced overseas and never achieve general or selected release in Australia. And because of the prohibitively high cost of classification, they never get classified.

The A-G's Department contacted Out Video because they were selling and renting out titles not given the all-clear by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC). As a result, Out Video says nearly half their stock will have to be shelved permanently.

This highlights two major flaws in Australia's classification regime:

1. The regime has not adapted to a marketplace that allows media to be accessed through more than just domestic broadcasters and distributors. Consumers demand access to an increasingly wide selection of entertainment from overseas, and they can get it through the internet.

2. Our classification laws are not designed to accommodate small markets. Instead, the classification processes are optimised for large, general-release films. The system simply doesn't lend itself to small-run films, and the law unfairly harms businesses trying to service niche markets.

The targeting of Out Video by the A-G's Department should give it and the OFLC impetus to review the classification laws. With a vibrant and diverse international entertainment sector, these laws should not blanket-ban content. Such a policy makes a mockery of the liberal legal principle that all things should be legal unless there is a reason to make them illegal.

Many of the films these niche providers import have already been classified in the UK, US and Canada. So one possible solution is to recognise comparable classifications from other media-exporting countries.

But a preferable outcome would be the elimination of mandatory classification. If consumers demanded classification to guide their decisions, then distributors would have a commercial incentive to seek it.

Furthermore, classification need not be the preserve of government. Many private classification regimes exist to rate films on special criteria (the Christian community, for example, has pioneered many alternative rating systems). Under such a regime, films that failed to obtain any form of classification would be burdened with the trepidation of some consumers to buy or rent the product.

The removal from sale or rent of Out Video's titles will do nothing to reduce their availability. All the "offending" titles are available from online stores outside the country. Australians can order them online and watch them at home, avoiding the scrutiny of the censors.

Furthermore, internet-aided piracy is now extremely common. By denying consumers legal access to small-run films, mandatory classification provides additional incentives for consumers to download illegal copies.

The sale of unclassified material is hardly uncommon. If government bureaucrats want to clamp down on unclassified videos, they should take a walk down Victoria Street or Sydney Road. Both are hives of foreign-language video stores that stock unclassified foreign-language films. In all likelihood the Government wouldn't dare act in these cases: the electoral backlash would be considerable.

It is unlikely that homophobia played a part in the Government's decision to enforce the law: it acted because it received a complaint. But if homophobia was the cause of that complaint, it would merely demonstrate how the classification laws can be manipulated.

Current film classification laws undermine access to films for different sections of the community. And businesses that are trying to meet a diverse market demand for unique niche content should not be punished for doing so.

Ends


September 2007 | ^Top^


Some retailers are not playing fair - coffee
Quoted in an article in The Australian on Friday, 28th September 2007

A lot of companies are selling Fairtrade products at a different price to free trade products and pocketing the difference, Ed Charles reports

SOME companies are exploiting the fair and sustainable certification schemes by charging over and above the premium they pay for Fairtrade coffee beans and boosting their own profits.

Getting to the bottom of which is the best and fairest way to buy coffee is a tricky one requiring a deep knowledge of international commodity markets as well as the work practices of developing countries.

The two major certification schemes in Australia are the Rainforest Alliance, which ensures coffee farming is sustainable, and the Oxfam-backed Fairtrade, which ensures coffee farmers also receive a minimum price for their beans.

Tim Wilson, a critic of Fairtrade and a member of the Institute of Public Affairs, says: ``What you are finding is a lot of companies are selling Fairtrade products at a substantially different price to free trade products and pocketing the difference. People are just going around and gouging consumers with their profits.''

Oxfam's CEO, Andrew Hewett, is also aware of the problem, even in cafes near his office in Melbourne.

``We want to increase the number of people who will purchase Fairtraded coffee,'' he says. ``We've seen the market grow and we want to see any barriers to Fairtrade coffee to wither away or be removed. Clearly, price is one of those barriers. I would prefer them not to charge a premium but they are charging a premium and pass the cost on.''

Hudsons Coffee charges online $8.95 for 200g of its Fairtrade coffee, while other blends cost between $7.95 and $8.50 for the same quantity.

Cafe 16 on Little Latrobe Street in Melbourne explicitly states that there is no price differential on its Fairtrade products versus free trade.

At Starbucks, Fairtrade coffee costs less than coffee from its own approved growers who themselves have to meet special conditions. At Jasper Coffee, a Fairtrade pioneer in Melbourne, there is little difference between the cost of its Fairtrade and other blends and it is benefitting from the growth in the market.

According to Ben Romeril, marketing manager at Jasper Coffee, the market for Fairtrade coffee is one of the fastest growing in Australia. In 2003, barely any was sold -- about $113,00 worth. In 2006, almost $5.2 million worth of Fairtrade coffee was sold in a market worth about $900 million. That gives Fairtrade a 0.6 per cent share compared to Britain, where the certification has a much higher profile and has about a 20 per cent share of the market through cafes and the shelves of supermarkets.

Romeril says that Fairtrade isn't necessarily about the quality of product but about philosophy for sustainability. ``We are are very keen on rehumanising the supply chain and that's what Fairtrade is all about,'' he says.

``Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world behind oil. There are plenty of wealthy oil companies but there aren't many wealthy coffee growers and 50 per cent of the world's coffee is grown by small-plot farmers. These farmers don't have any market power and they don't have the ability to dictate prices. As a result, the market price of coffee is very low and for many of these farmers is below the cost of production.

``The real benefit of Fairtrade isn't just that it is a higher price but also that it is a guaranteed price. The second aspect is that the farmers are getting a greater share of that higher price.''

Brett Simpson, operations manager at coffee importer HA Bennett & Sons, says that Certified Fairtrade organic coffee costs US151c a pound compared to a base price of about US118c a pound. Different grades can cost up to 40 per cent more and the theory is the price differential goes to the farmers.

In reality the cost of the beans should make little difference to the prices paid for roasted coffee beans or a cup of coffee bought in a cafe.

Most micro-roasters will pay between $5 and $8 a kilo for the green coffee that they roast, some, such as St Ali in Melbourne, even visiting them to help with the harvest.

About 20 per cent of that coffee will be lost in roasting. The costs of roasting equipment and packaging add about another $3 to $4 a kilo.

Phillip Di Bella, founder of Brisbane-based roaster Di Bella, says he makes a net profit of $10 on every kilo of roasted beans, which retail for just under $30.

Ends


Same-sex equality a basic Liberal ideal
Opinion article in The Australian on Tuesday, 18th September 2007

Conservative does not mean the same thing as regressive. You wouldn't know it from the decision by Prime Minister John Howard late last week to oppose any reforms to remove discrimination against same-sex couples.

Howard's decision follows a federal cabinet split on the issue. Lacking a uniform view, the cabinet decided to leave the final decision in Howard's hands. And at a party room meeting last week he announced he was not going to support reform because it was "complicated".

Howard has clearly taken the lead from the small number of Liberal ministers who argued in cabinet that the recognition of gay relationships didn't fit in with the agenda of an avowedly conservative Government.

The proposed reforms would have allowed same-sex couples to have the same government benefits as heterosexual couples in areas such as the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the Medicare Safety Net and reforms in migration law.

A conservative approach to social policy is non-interventionist.

Conservative philosophy holds that it is society, not the latest fashions of the political class, that should shape social norms.

In 2007, it would be impossible for Howard to argue that same-sex couples are not a part of contemporary Australian society. If the Government chose to recognise their existence, it would be the fulfilment of a traditional conservative approach to social policy.

The reality is that the Liberal Party platforms of each state division provide support for the cause of reform.

As it is a federated organisation, the philosophical platform varies from one state and territory division to another. Party platforms provide an insight into the guiding principles of the division and what it would do in government.

None of them argues for perpetuating known discrimination. In fact, the reverse is true. In every state, the Liberal Party makes a commitment to the principle of equality.

The ACT's division platform is strongest. It states its support for "respecting the value, dignity and contribution of all members of the community regardless of sexual preference". It goes on to argue "all people should enjoy the same rights and opportunities and exercise the same responsibilities in a community that values and respects diversity".

The Victorian division states in its platform that Liberals have "shared values of liberty, fairness, equality for all and favouritism to none". Other states and territory divisions offer comparable statements.

The platform providing the most comfort to opponents of gay civil rights is that of the Northern Territory. It supports a "progressive party committed to social, economic and political progress within a framework of traditional conservative values". However, the NT platform provides Howard with little to work with.

The federal platform commits the party to continuing Robert Menzies' vision for adapting to a changing society. "Liberalism," it argues, "is not a fixed ideology but a broad-based political philosophy that relates a core set of enduring values to the changing realities and challenges that societies confront over time."

Perhaps the most telling argument in favour of reform is how each division of the Liberal Party treats same-sex couples. Every division except Queensland offers a joint, couple or family membership. If you apply online, none of the membership forms stipulates requirements for the gender mix of a joint membership. In fact, the default setting on the Tasmanian and ACT division websites is for two people, both with the title "Mr".

Of course, each Liberal Party platform also supports the role of the family. But none chooses to define what constitutes a family, rightly leaving that question open to the diverse interpretations appropriate for the contemporary mix of modern Australian society.

The party has always had divisions between its conservative and liberal wings. In the cabinet debate, ministers Malcolm Turnbull, Brendan Nelson, Joe Hockey and Philip Ruddock argued for the reforms. It is believed Howard also argued in favour of reform.

In a tight election, Howard has clearly been spooked by the Australian Christian Lobby, which is campaigning against reform. Given his low polling, Howard needs all the friends he can get. But to win an election campaign a party always needs to hold its base, and the base is rarely impressed by short-term policy shifts.

Howard's conservatism should lead him to support reform recognising the dignity of same-sex couples. His critics have always wrongly equated his conservatism with regressivism.

The Prime Minister has, unfortunately, missed his chance to prove his critics wrong.

Ends


TV appearance on SBS' Insight "Fear Factor" Program
Link to appearance on SBS Insight on Tuesday, 11th September 2007.



The video of this program can be viewed here

Ends


August 2007 | ^Top^

Tariffs the real barrier to HIV treatment
Opinion article on ABC News Online on Friday, 3rd August 2007

The close of the International Aids Society Conference in Sydney ended the publicity train of posturing activists and non-government organisations. In the conference's wake, it is time to refocus on ensuring access to HIV/AIDS medicines for the world's poor through real solutions, not political catchphrases.

Two groups particularly active last week in Sydney have provided poignant examples of how discussion about serious science and public policy can be outshined by ideological PR campaigns.

Oxfam Australia lays the blame on the increasing prevalence of HIV and AIDS in the developing world on the patent system and intellectual property for drugs. The executive director, Andrew Hewett, argued in ABC News Online that Thailand provides a "model" for dealing with treatment of HIV/AIDS

What exactly is that model? The military junta which seized control of Thailand earlier this year has nationalised the patents of a series of vital drugs. It has gone on to manufacture cheap, but extremely low-quality, drugs which have contributed towards a growing resistance to the medicine amongst the poorest Thais.

The danger of these medicines has become so apparent that the World Health Organisation recommended that they not be sold outside of Thailand. Now many Thai HIV/AIDS patients are unnecessarily reliant on second-line therapies that cost more and require more substantial health infrastructure to administer.

Indeed, the Thai Government's approach to health care has little to recommend it. Since the beginning of the year, it has cut health spending by $US12 million per annum, increased the salaries of military leaders by $US9 million and defence spending by more than $US 1billion.

If Thailand provides a model for managing an HIV/AIDS crisis, it is one to avoid, not emulate. But Oxfam praises the Thai Government because the military junta has stood up to 'Big Pharma'.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) released a report citing the high cost of second-line medicines as a barrier to effective treatment. Their report also blames Big Pharma and their drug patents. But were it not for the Thai "model", many Thai HIV/AIDS patients would not need these second-line therapies.

Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres are far too quick to blame the HIV/AIDS crisis in the developing world on patents and intellectual property regimes. But their concern does not match the facts - patents are not the major barriers preventing access to vital medicines.

For instance, one recent scholarly survey found that of 18 single dose AIDS medicines available in developing countries, 14 patent-protected drugs were in a similar price range or cheaper than their generic counterparts.

The real barriers to access are unfortunately familiar. Many developing countries impose high tariffs that can double the cost of medicine to patients. Such trade barriers are illegal for developed countries like Australia and the United States, but not so for developing countries - another sad result of the anti-trade mentality pushed in international forums by some misguided NGOs.

Other major barriers are also not surprising. Poor medical infrastructure the limits effectiveness of drug regimens - particularly where ineffective, or even counterfeit drugs are common. Widespread government corruption raises the cost of medicine by necessitating bribery, and often prevents the medicines from reaching the patients at all.

Yet in their haste to blame drug companies, Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres have ignored these factors. While extolling the virtues of nationalisation programs like the one in Thailand, they wrongly dismiss the negative consequences of such radical measures.

The real tragedy is that the sufferers of HIV/AIDS in Thailand are being used as political fodder in a campaign that ignores the real challenges of the disease. Some NGOs may need to decide how serious they are about fixing this problem, and perhaps consider a reconciliation with private enterprise.

Ends

July 2007 | ^Top^


No, really - what are the 'equator principles'?
Opinion article in the July 2007 edition of IPA Review

"No, really - what are the 'equator principles'", IPA Review, July 2007

Ends


The 'food miles' fallacy
Opinion article in the July 2007 edition of IPA Review

"The 'food miles fallacy'", IPA Review, July 2007

Ends

Cut-price drugs weaken industry
Referred to in an article in the Herald Sun on Saturday, 28th July 2007 by Alan Moran

OXFAM Australia and other anti-business advocacy groups have long been antagonistic to the idea of patent protection for new medicines.

The prevalence of AIDS within the world's poorest countries has brought intensified demands on ``unscrupulous big pharma'' to reduce the price of drugs.

Oxfam evidently believes pharmaceutical firms are ripping off people in poor countries.

In Thailand (not, incidentally, a particularly poor country) the military government has already forced pharmaceutical firms to dramatically cut the price of anti-AIDS medicines.

Thailand has also licensed a government company to make and distribute copies of pharmaceuticals patented overseas.

A recent IPA study by Tim Wilson, HIV/AIDS Medicines for All?, examined these issues. It found the company licensed by the Thai government is making unconscionable profits.

It also found other governments in developing countries exploited their citizens by taxing the drugs.

These concerns aside, forcing down the prices of patented drugs undermines the global pharmaceutical industry's incentives.

These incentives have proven to be invaluable in bringing an endless stream of new drugs.

Once discovered, a new remedy is often very cheap to produce.

But behind that new discovery are massive costs, including searching for the needles in the haystack that comprise the complex molecules of a new wonder drug; costs of shepherding it through regulatory agencies.

And they include the costs of persuading a necessarily conservative medical profession of its merits.

There are hundreds of fruitless searches for every one that offers value, and years of trials before a success can be brought to market.

After that there are sometimes fewer than a dozen years during which it can be marketed before its patent expires.

It is a simple matter for governments to seize a patent or to require a cheap price, but the outcome brings a reluctance of companies to look for new formulas.

We have one home grown drug company, CSL, with a $16 billion capitalisation, and many smaller players such as Biota, Avexa, Starpharma, Peptech and Cytopia.

These are local start-ups developing intellectual property.

They hope to become either a global force in their own right or to forge a lucrative combination with one of the majors.

Pharmaceutical research and development is one area where Australian companies have enjoyed success and are optimistic about the future.

The industry is assisted by good domestic medical infrastructure, even though the dominance of government purchasing in new pharmaceuticals is a disadvantage.

Calls for artificially low drug prices are misplaced. They rebound on the real interests of consumers and could abort the growth of some promising Australian businesses.

Alan Moranis the director, deregulation at the Institute of Public Affairs

Ends


Why YouTube solutions lack even a grain of truth
Referred to in an article in The Sunday Telegraph on Sunday, 23rd July 2007 by Piers Akerman

The YouTube generation has joined the Kumbaya crowd in its love for simple solutions to complex problems, from global warming to global poverty, and they both seem to relish any chance to flaunt their boundless compassion.

It's becoming the same with legions of non-government organisations, which reek of sincerity as they attempt to dress their political agendas in non-partisan colours. It's a pity that so many well-intentioned deeds so often go astray and their bumper-sticker nostrums pass their use-by dates in something less than a nano-second.

Just last week, the world's poor found themselves on the receiving end of a misguided unintended whacking from the environmental movement when it was finally realised that the new demand for biofuels to meet the need for feel-good renewable energy has come on the back of a series of poor European harvests and the Australian drought, pushing up the price of grain and leaving those with less moral vanity without a crust.

The demand for grain for industrial uses has grown by 23 per cent to 229million tonnes in 2007-08, according to the International Grains Council, with 107million tonnes destined for use in ethanol products.

Worldwide, the world's cereal stocks are predicted to fall to just 111million tonnes, their lowest level in 28 years, and the European Union's buffer stocks will drop from 14million tonnes to just 2.5million tonnes. How does it feel taking food out of someone's mouth to get the warm inner glow guaranteed with every tankful of biofuel?

This week in Sydney, a small but extremely significant attempt will be made to replace the warm inner glow with some serious science aimed at saving lives.

The International AIDS Society, for years a target of street performers masquerading as political leaders, will meet in Sydney to hear of one feel-good experiment that has had disastrous results for those it was meant to help.

Several major NGOs, including Oxfam, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, also known as Doctors without Borders) and Knowledge International, have been running international campaigns to overturn the World Trade Organisation's agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property (TRIPS).

They have claimed that the patents on drugs have kept the price of essential medicines prohibitively high and inaccessible to the world's poor.

The agreement permits countries to issue compulsory licenses and temporarily suspend patents in cases of national emergency. However, dispensing with licenses and patents has not actually been a huge success.

After a campaign co-ordinated by MSF and supported by Oxfam to provide access to essential medicines for developing nations, the Thai government early this year seized the licenses for three medicines (two in the AIDS area and one for the treatment of heart disease).

But a study prepared by the Institute of Public Affairs, to be released this week, shows that the real barriers to access to cheap drugs in Thailand were not the patents but corruption, a prevalence of counterfeit drugs -- and a misconception that generic medicines were less expensive than patented drugs.

Tim Wilson, author of the paper, says myths, innuendo and misguided blame-shifting have dogged the debate over making HIV/AIDS medicines accessible to the world's poor, but the real barriers need addressing.

The pressure on the debate has come from the NGOs' street theatre supporters, who have turned past meetings of the AIDS Society into circuses. They should largely be absent this week because the society, wisely, has split its conference into two.

The serious scientists will be heard in Sydney; the others will have their party elsewhere.

The feel-good campaign against major drug companies has done nothing for the welfare of those in real need. Wilson says it has distracted policymakers from the real priorities and from helping AIDS sufferers in the developing world.

The no doubt well-intentioned bleeding hearts behind the campaigns should forgo the opportunity to bask in the warmth of their self-generated approval and let the health-care professionals get on with the real task of delivering effective medicines at the cheapest possible prices to those in need.

The world has to realise that these, and many other policies, are really too important to be decided by mimes in face paint.

Ends


IPA Backgrounder for the International Aids Society Conference in Sydney

HIV/AIDS medicines for all? The consequences of ignoring the real threat to access to essential HIV/AIDS medicines

Ends


June 2007 | ^Top^

Not free, but fair: Oxfam cleared of coffee chicanery
Quoted in an article in The Age's Business Section on Thursday, 28th June 2007

A COMPLAINT accusing Oxfam Australia of misleading consumers over fair trade coffee has been dismissed by the competition regulator.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was asked by two members of conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs to investigate claims that Oxfam was selling coffee produced by underpaid workers under the fair trade label.

In April, Tim Wilson and Sinclair Davidson referred the ACCC to reports Peruvian coffee workers were being paid less than the minimum wage, and argued Oxfam was misleading its customers by labelling the coffee as fair trade.

The ACCC dismissed the complaint, saying it was based on evidence that "may be subject to different interpretations".

The complaint was based on an article published by the Financial Times.

The ACCC also said interpreting fair trade principles was outside its jurisdiction.

Oxfam executive director Andrew Hewett welcomed the decision and said it vindicated support for fair trade.

Under the system, small landholders in developing countries are paid a fixed price for crops, such as coffee, and receive a premium to fund development projects.

Despite the complaint's dismissal, Mr Wilson - a fair trade critic - said he would keep arguing against the products.

"We're actually much more concerned about the fact that fair trade as a system does not achieve the best interests of people in the developing world as free trade does," Mr Wilson said.

"We would like Oxfam to abandon its campaign for fair trade and recognise that free trade actually lifts billions of people out of poverty."

Fairtrade Labelling Australia, which regulates the labelling of fair trade goods across the country, said the Peruvian coffee did not break its standards.

Ends


No Oxfam investigation
Referred to in an article in The Australian Financial ReviewThursday, 28th June 2007

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has decided not to pursue a complaint against the non-government organisation Oxfam Australia over its sale and promotion of fair trade coffee.The complaint had been lodged by a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, Tim Wilson, who asked the ACCC to investigate whether Oxfam had contravened the Trade Practices Act because the benefits of Fairtrade coffee for Third World Farmers were being misrepresented. Oxfam executive director Andrew Hewett said the decision of the ACCC not to pursue the complaint vindicated consumers who bought Fairtrade-accredited products because they believed they would help lift Third World producers out of poverty.

Ends


How green is that apple?
Referred to in an article in The Age's Epicure Section on Tuesday, 26th June 2007

Andrew Masterson wonders if that apple is that good for you, is also good for the planet?

A FEW days back a couple walked into my little Central Highlands produce-store-cum-cafe and asked for meat pies.

They had travelled from Ballarat, they said, because they'd been told that my shop stocked Boscastle pastries, which, they said, were really nice and not available within a bull's roar of Lake Wendouree. I gave them a couple and they went away happy.

On the surface, a good result all round; good for the shop, good for Boscastle, good for the distribution company that delivers them each week, and good for the punters.

But - and here the agonising, contradictory and frequently absurd ethics of food come into focus - was it good for the environment? The customers had driven on a 150-kilometre round trip. The pies had been made in Brunswick, picked up from there by a Castlemaine company and driven back, and then dropped off at my joint, 45 kilometres down the road.

At a rough calculation, those two pies had travelled roughly 500 kilometres between manufacture and consumption. That's a lot of petrol. And that's without adding in the distance travelled by the meat and other raw materials before they reached the Boscastle factory.

The politics of food is marked by bumper-sticker slogans, all of which are as undeniable as motherhood. Local is best. Organic is best. Small is best. Seasonal is best. Free-range is best. The trouble is, once polemic gives way to practice, corollaries between these statements are few and far between.

Take eggs, for example. "Do you have any local, organic, free-range eggs?" my customers often ask. I do, sometimes. When Selena and the kids down the road bring in a dozen or so, warm and covered lightly in chook poo. They sell about 30 seconds after they reach the counter.

Usually, therefore, I have only free-range and cage eggs from a big chookery in Ballarat, delivered in a truck by the case-load. The free-range ones come from happier hens (according to the dogma) but are smaller and more expensive than the battery jobs. I can make a lovely, chocolate mud slice with six of the latter but require 10 of the former. How much do you want to pay for a slice of genuine country cake?

"Why don't you have more local, organic, free range eggs?" Well, madam, Selena has tried whispered endearments and bribing them with food. I've suggested using an electric cattle-prod. The trouble with your local, free-range chickens is that the little dears lay only when they damn well feel like it and don't give a toss about consumer demand.

Olive oil is another case in point. The kitchen uses olive oil as its primary cooking medium, because it's healthy. (That's another bumper sticker: cholesterol-free is best.) There are a number of oil producers in the region and their products are excellent. It's also eye-wateringly expensive when you're churning through 12 litres a week. Factoring the cost of the local product into the prices of my meals would push them up, out of the range of many of my customers.

Therefore I use oil from Turkey. It's cheaper to buy from Ankara than Kyneton and better to be a cook than an economist.

And better to be either than a food bureaucrat. "Are those tomatoes local and organic?" I'm asked. Yes, I reply. "But are they certified organic?" No, in most cases. My suppliers, such as Shane the brickie up the road, Robert the odd-job man up the other road, or Murrell the retired school-teacher round the back, are hobby-growers who drop their surplus round to the shop, proud as Punch. They get a bit of extra cash and I get beautiful, tasty tommies which I cook or sell cheaply to other villagers. (Local is good, right?)

"But not certified?" No. Just good fruit grown, as Shane often says, "with nothing but water and shit". This sometimes makes visitors grimace, prompting the question of just what they think "organic" means. You want certified, I'll get you certified, from bigger growers further away who can afford the thousands of dollars in paperwork costs, and then pass on the expense, along with the petrol bill, ultimately to you. This is why people often complain that organic food is often half the size and twice the price of the chemical-soaked, agribusiness equivalent.

Then there's the bacon, which comes from a family business 15 kilometres away and is beloved by foodies. Which is good. Some folks even travel out of their way to eat it. Which is bad. And whether the pigs were free-range or not is moot. Don't tell me. I don't want to know.

And, oh hell, the coffee. It's not Fair Trade, which means the cafe is exploiting Third World growers. Then again, two Melbourne academics have just hauled Oxfam, which owns Fair Trade, up in front of the ACCC, claiming the charity's certification costs deny pickers decent wages.

So maybe the shop is actually helping the Third World. In any case, our stock is Map, which is a comparatively small Melbourne business, which has to be good for the local economy, right?

Ends


Fortune requires much less negativity
Opinion article published in The Australian on Monday, 4th June 2007

Tax reform, the environment, improving living standards and education; they are all big challenges facing Australia. We need to address them with an open, optimistic mind. Yet we are dominated by a generation that approaches these issues with negativity, not hope.

Last Tuesday night I appeared on SBS's Insight program. The theme was how to spend the federal budget's $10.6 billion surplus. Throughout the program I was the devil's advocate arguing for less tax and government, preferring individual leadership and empowerment. I was also the only panellist in their 20s.

The postwar, baby-boomer panellists who control Australian institutions argued for government solutions through government spending. The roll call of programs was predictable: broadband, education, foreign aid, all under the umbrella of promoting the interests of youth.

This is admirable and their commitment was sincere, but there was a prevailing attitude that each baby-boomer participant brought to the debate: the world is getting worse and government needs to fix it. This claim doesn't hold up.

Even more bizarrely, Harold Mitchell, chairman of Mitchell Partners, even stated that "this is the first generation since 1788 where the kids won't have as much as the parents did".

Australia's gross domestic product per capita has only been going in one direction: up. Over the past 10 years Australia's average standard of living has surpassed all G-7 countries, except the US, and our economy has grown by 40 per cent; and it has not all happened during the resources boom.

Australia is not alone. Last week a US congressional report showed families in the bottom 20 per cent income bracket have had the strongest real income growth since the 1990s, followed by the richest 20 per cent. The trends in the developing world are the same. Sixty million people were lifted out of poverty in China between 2001 and 2004 alone.

Yet this growth has happened when we have relied less, not more, on government for solutions.

The benefit of this growth is that we are able to financially address the social, environmental and economic challenges we face now and into the future. Yet boomers seem to miss this. They need a dose of hope in themselves and young people.

The panellists demonstrated a professed support for government taking a leadership role, while also articulating that government is failing to lead us now.

The boomers have missed the lessons of history. As an institution, government is bad at leading societies. Government is the most conservative, slow and oppressive institution we have.

The largest economic and social growth has been achieved in societies that have reduced their dependence on government. These societies are those that unleashed the maximum potential of the individual, not the maximum potential of government.

If we want to solve challenges into the future we need to look to individuals to be independent and responsible for their own lives. The fruits of individual responsibility are people enriching themselves and society in the process.

Sadly, government has responded in kind to boomer cynicism. Instead of leadership through hope, governments all around Australia have led through fear.

This attitude pervades all levels of government. State governments have been on many measures as bad, if not worse, than the commonwealth. They spend all their time perpetuating that government as a provider and protector is essential to avoid the collapse of society.

Kevin Rudd is also symptomatic of negativity. He claims to be an eternal optimist. He then promptly waxes lyrical about the threat of jobs from China, our environment from global warming and our apparent broadband deficit. He plays to fear to create electoral resonance. Rudd argues that to solve these problems we need to have faith in him, not ourselves. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We live in an age of super-empowered individuals where people live largely without borders. Today anyone can develop a blog that costs nothing but time and has potentially the same influence and exposure as a newspaper. Our access to information and technology undermines the very authority of the institutions that the boomers lead.

Of course it is a gross generalisation to say all baby boomers are negative, they aren't. Young people have much to learn from them and their experience.

But too many of those who seek to lead us are approaching our challenges with a cancerous attitude. This was demonstrated best through an email from a viewer following the program. He commented that my optimism was essentially a sign of immaturity. If being jaded and negative is a part of maturing, I am happy to suffer from Peter Pan syndrome.

Tim Wilson is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. A video and transcript of the program can be found at www.sbs.com.au/insight

Ends


May 2007 | ^Top^


TV appearance on SBS' Insight "On the Money" Program
Transcript of appearance on SBS Insight on Tuesday, 29th May 2007.

The video of this program can be viewed here

For years now the Federal Government has been running big Budget surpluses. There's been plenty of money to spend thanks to the longest period of economic prosperity in our history. Even after the recent Budget, there is still at least $10.6 billion left over, and that's our money. So what could we be doing with it?

JENNY BROCKIE: Tonight on Insight, some big ideas on how to spend or not spend the Budget surplus, and we'd like to hear your ideas too. You can post them on our website, sbs.com.au/insight. So let's get a taste for what we could be doing with all that money. Harold Mitchell, I'd like to start with you. You're the chairman of the largest media company in Australia, what would you do with $10.6 billion if you were in government?

HAROLD MITCHELL, MITCHELL GROUP: Jen, this is very easy. This is the first generation since 1788 where the kids won't have as much as the parents did, and we just have to make our kids competitive with the world. If you had $10 billion you would have broadband in this country and you would have all of our kids and their kids the smartest kids in the world and we return to great riches.

JENNY BROCKIE: So number one priority for you broadband?

HAROLD MITCHELL: Broadband in Australia.

JENNY BROCKIE: Tim Costello in Melbourne, your brother Peter has just handed you the Budget purse strings, what do you do with all those billions?

TIM COSTELLO, WORLD VISION AUSTRALIA: I thank him for the honour and it's great to have a surplus but I would, like Harold, spend it on youth but slightly differently. I really believe charity begins at home and our home is actually the region where most of the world's poor live. Most of the world's poor are a long way from Europe and America. If we kept our promise of increasing aid to 50 cents in every $100, that's about an extra $4 billion, 40,000 children's lives would be saved in our region, our home, not to mention 9,000 who die from TB and another 9,000 from HIV. So I think young people, like Harold, need hope, they need to smell it and taste hope and I think the hope of saying, "We've made a difference for people our age in our region," would be where I'd spend the Budget.

JENNY BROCKIE: Ann Sherry, you sit on the Westpac executive, you've been a bank CEO. Would you spend the surplus and if so what would you spend it on?

ANN SHERRY, GROUP EXECUTIVE, WESTPAC: I would spend it also on youth. I think in times of such prosperity we need to look forward and give the current generation of kids the same opportunities that we had. And I think in times of such prosperity, the fact that we've got a long tail of kids in who come from long-term unemployed families, many Indigenous communities who just do not have access to the sort of education that we would have all taken for granted.

JENNY BROCKIE: So education, you'd spend it all on education?

ANN SHERRY: I would spend it all on education.

JENNY BROCKIE: Alright, Harold, let's flesh out your idea a bit. Why put all the money into broadband?

HAROLD MITCHELL: Well, Jenny, it would cost $10 billion to do something called fibre to the home. You would have heard of something called fibre to the node. That is a disgrace, an absolute disgrace that we should tie up a fibre network, which is a wonderful thing we must have that means we must be world competitive and then take it to place where it runs into the old-fashioned copper wire. It's like having brand-new, wonderful trains, electric, that move really quickly and tie them up to a steam engine, that's the wrong thing to do. Now, we are 14th in the world in our broadband and we should be in the top five. This is a great big country, this is the one chance for the next 40 years where we can make our kids world competitive and right now we are delivering to them an absolute and total disaster. $10 billion would do the job. How do I know that? Ziggy Switkowski told me he should do that, that would be the cost. I said to him "Why the hell didn't you do it, Ziggy?", because he should have.

JENNY BROCKIE: You say he should have. Why do you think the Government should?

HAROLD MITCHELL: Firstly it's a round of drinks for the Government. $10 billion, I might say, I don't know if you noticed the other day but they bought four aeroplanes, great big aeroplanes, four that cost $500 million each - that's $2 billion - and I don't think we even noticed them. This is so we can carry great big tanks around the world to go and find a war for them. Now the money is absolutely nothing but the future of our kids is critical because these kids will miss out. They will not be as wealthy as we are, they won't have what we've got. And 14th in the world right now and we are scrapping over the most ridiculous reasons to try and put it in. It should happen.

JENNY BROCKIE: OK, Chris Richardson in Canberra you're an economist with Access Economics. Is Harold's idea a good one?

CHRIS RICHARDSON, ACCESS ECONOMICS: Broadband's great and information like that can make an enormous difference. But you've got to remember people can pay too. It's not enormously clear to me that we should have governments paying for broadband. If we have a market and we have prices, why shouldn't people be paying for it themselves? I know Telstra's the big name and everybody else is snapping around its heels, that makes it hard. I can understand some public money going into broadband but certainly not that much.

JENNY BROCKIE: Bill Beerworth, what do you think? You're an investment banker. Should industry be funding broadband or government be funding it?

BILL BEERWORTH, BEERWORTH AND PARTNERS: I think it's probably a bit of each, Jenny. But if we've got a surplus of $10.6 billion that means the Government's overtaxing us anyway, if you think about it, and that includes the money they've given to other purposes. I agree with great deal with Harold. I think we're falling horribly behind the rest of the world. Infrastructure, including the information highway, is absolutely critical for the future of the country. I'd certainly be putting some money into it. I agree with him, you don't just fight, whether it's G9 or Telstra, you need to go out and do it so that the next generation will have access to real information, real knowledge.
JENNY BROCKIE: Joy Baluch, you're a mayor in regional South Australia. Would you be putting all the money into broadband?

JOY BALUCH, MAYOR, PORT AUGUSTA: Not all but certainly a great percentage of it because the future of this country depends upon the education of our young.

JENNY BROCKIE: So do you have a specific plan for education? Is there something specific you'd like to see happen in that area?

JOY BALUCH: Only that more money be injected at the bottom end into primary schools, into primary schools to ensure that they have the education to get into trades.

JENNY BROCKIE: Ann, you mentioned education before. Why and what area of education? It's a huge area. Why do you have that particular focus?

ANN SHERRY: Well, again I think if We spend a lot of time talking about the fact that we don't have enough skilled labour and that we're When we look out 10 to 15 years that we're going to have a labour shortage and yet we know that we've got about 20% of kids in our community who are struggling to maintain decent skill and education levels that even give them proper entry into the labour force. So I think picking up that tail and making it work. And one of the difficulties with education - and it's the reason I'd focus on the Federal Budget - is that there's endless scrapping between States and Commonwealth governments about how education is run. I think instead of arguing at the margins we need to in fact get a decent injection of money in, lift the skill levels also and the pay of teachers. We say education's critical to our future, some of the lowest paid professionals now in our community are teachers. It doesn't make sense to say that that's where we want to really, you know, put our resources and yet we just, we just nickel and dime around the edges.

JENNY BROCKIE: But both the parties are trying to outdo one another on education.

ANN SHERRY: But not in a coherent way. I guess I'm struggling to see the coherence in a lot of it and because again of the Federal/State debates you end up with people in federal government focusing on the areas where they've got direct control. You end up with the States arguing that they need more resources, which is essentially primary, the stuff we're talking about is largely in the State hands.

JENNY BROCKIE: Maybe should spend the money doing away a layer of government in Australia.

ANN SHERRY: There's plenty who would argue that let me tell you. There'd be lots more than $10 billion.

JENNY BROCKIE: Liz Ann, you run the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and you were recently principal for a day - part of this program where you go into a school and you act as principal for a day in a State high school. What did that tell you about education? And how would you spend all these billions of dollars as one who runs an arts organisation?

LIZ ANN MACGREGOR, MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART: I think it's very important that children have an opportunity to access a whole range of skills. And one of the interesting things that's happening to us is we're finding more and more that business are business is very interested in how to develop creative skills within companies. So going into those schools - and interestingly it was a common theme in the feedback sessions we had afterwards with a number of people from industry who took part - was the need for a rounded curriculum and the academic achievements obviously have got to be focused on but also to give kids other skills, life skills, the kind of creative thinking, to think differently, to have access to a whole range of different skills that you can actually get through the arts.

JENNY BROCKIE: I feel compulsory arts training coming along in schools in your spending, is that right?

LIZ ANN MACGREGOR: It doesn't have to be compulsory but what I'd love to see is children given access to the arts. The principal arts organisations run fabulous education programs anyway and everybody can tell you amazing stories. And I was talking to, actually, the head of one of the schools from Macquarie Fields and she talked very movingly about dealing with that school and the aftermath of the riots and the way they used the arts to give those kids a sense of self, to tell their stories, to get them thinking differently about who they might be in the world, and I think those kind of things are actually critical to the future of our society. It's not an add-on, it's actually critical to the way children develop.

JENNY BROCKIE: What do some of our businesspeople think of some of these ideas? Harold, arts training in schools, would that be useful in your business?

HAROLD MITCHELL: Absolutely. I can remember one very quick story - Xanana Gusmao became very good friends with a lot of people in Melbourne, myself included. As he became president I said, "Mr President, what can we do for you?" And he said to rebuild his nation, 700,000 people in East Timor living on $1 a day, he said, "Could you send us 300 of the little tin whistles, the recorders. I must rebuild the spirit of our people." And I've never forgotten that. He sent to me three wonderful little pictures he'd done whilst he was in prison. If we feel good in here, we feel good in the back pocket and I think there's something in all of that.

JENNY BROCKIE: But how is the Government going to sell that in political terms to the public? Spending lots of money on things like that?

HAROLD MITCHELL: Jen, one of the things about governments - and this is good from the business point of view - that if you're in a business you've got two things you can do - you manage a business and you lead a business. And you can get very confused sometimes. It's fun managing, it's really wonderful - Bill would know this - you can do things every day, people come back and forth. But the real trick is to be a leader and you've got to say is a government leading, is a government looking into the radar and beyond the horizon, are they planning what we need to do for another 50 years? Can they be like...?

JENNY BROCKIE: They're not thinking beyond the next poll half the time.

HAROLD MITCHELL: Is long-term Sunday week or is long-term 2030? Can they be like Alfred Deacon in 1903 who said we must have irrigation and so he went and found the Chaffey brothers to do that. And that's the great, great problem that we have in modern life - the difference between being a leader or a manager. And people in government have to be leaders because bureaucrats, God love them all, are the best managers of it, but if you start to confuse it we're all in trouble.

JENNY BROCKIE: Both parties are trying to outdo one another on education, Chris, and education's been mentioned by a lot of people here tonight. I know you don't want to spend the surplus, being an economist, but is there a case for spending more on education, do you think, despite what both parties are doing?

CHRIS RICHARDSON: There is, there is a very, very clear case to spend money on education. I might be Mr Grumpy about the Budget, I might be worried that we're already spending too much, but I would make room in other programs to do more on education. If we want the Australians of tomorrow to have high incomes, to have prosperity, they've got to have high skills. And if you want them to work, you've got to give them the skills to equip them to do that. It is very clear in economic terms that education is an investment, we can do it a lot better, it is mostly primary schools or even early childhood education and more so amongst the disadvantaged. We can make big gains.

JENNY BROCKIE: Catherine Harris, you run Harris Farm Markets, which is a big food chain, and you're a former deputy chancellor of the University of New South Wales. What do you think about this issue of education? I know you've travelled recently so you're quite passionate about it, aren't you?

CATHERINE HARRIS, HARRIS FARM MARKETS: Well, certainly because I've just been to China and Japan and any thought that Australia is out there and we're the leaders in Asia, absolutely that is changing so dramatically now. Asia, every different Asian country is catching up to us, especially in education. And one of the things that concerns us is that a lot of the our educational budget actually comes from our international students. If we lose that, so I don't think the $10 billion is enough, quite frankly, just to even keep education going as it is. But I think the other thing is that when we're a small country and we're operating in a global world, we've got to be the best - to compete we've got to be the best. This is a global economy. And we can only do that by being clean, green and clever. And how we get clever is through our educational system. And I just think that we've really got to start thinking about this, picking the industries we're best at in the world and making them clever. So I would like to see not only education but a lot more money spent on research in the areas that we're really good. So for example, we're fabulous at resources, that's how we've got all this money. So let's make them clean, green and clever.

JENNY BROCKIE: We'll get on to that a bit later. But on education the Government has just set up a $5 billion fund for universities. Not enough?

CATHERINE HARRIS: Not enough. And by the time it's spread over all the different universities, it is definitely not enough. And most of them need capital, big lumps of capital injection to go the next step and that's not going to come by spreading it over.

JENNY BROCKIE: We're talking about what to do with the billions of dollars the Government has at its disposal thanks to a record run of economic prosperity. And you can post your ideas on the Insight website as well. Now Tim Wilson, you're from the Institute of Public Affairs. Should we spend the surplus?

TIM WILSON, INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS: That's where... An excellent question. Often we come from the perspective of there's a $10 billion surplus, how do we spend it, rather than should we spend it. And I'm very supportive of the idea that the Government should be increasing the number of tax breaks that are being given, currently reducing the tax rates for Australians because we're currently a very high taxing country. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have some program sometimes to fill holes and to provide a basic safety net but a lot of the tax cuts that we've had over the past years have been very much to address issues of bracket creep, and we should be looking from an attitude of not how should we spend this money but should we and should government be interfering instead of individuals taking responsibility for their own lives.

JENNY BROCKIE: So you want it back in individual pockets, you don't want any of these other ideas about spending on infrastructure like Harold wants - broadband or education?

TIM WILSON: I'm not against those ideas at all, in fact I'm very supportive of the idea of spending money from individuals on education. I really think that we should be moving towards a system of an education vouchers program where government issues people vouchers, parents vouchers for children going to school, and they can use them in a competitive environment, at a tertiary and a primary and secondary level where they can trade and encourage competitiveness amongst schools to try and drive up standards. Plenty of research has been shown all around the world that happens. But I think it's better for people to put the money back in their pocket and then they can decide what their priority is. I know a large number of people who strongly believe that broadband is a high priority and happy to spend their money but I think for people who don't have access to broadband, telling them that they should have to have invest in this infrastructure for themselves whether they like it or not is not a good attitude to take.

JENNY BROCKIE: OK, the individual versus the infrastructure.

TIM WILSON: Absolutely.

JENNY BROCKIE: Ann, what do you think? Should the money go in individual pockets, in tax cuts?

ANN SHERRY: I wouldn't support that. I think theoretically what Tim says makes sense but in practical terms there is no competition. If you live in some of the poorer suburbs of Australia or remote areas of Australia, it's a theoretical proposition, not a real proposition. And I still think we need really good base-level infrastructure upon which you build the adults of the future and that ultimately pulls them up through the education system.

JENNY BROCKIE: Bill, what do you think about the idea of tax cuts, more tax cuts? We've already got $31 billion in tax cuts over the next four years.

BILL BEERWORTH: There's no question about it and we're all very strong about education. But guess what happens to our highly educated people? They go overseas to do another degree and they stay there because the tax rates are so much lower. We have to come down in our tax rates to induce those people to come back. It's a critical issue. I also agree with Tim on the idea of vouchers. You can use vouchers if you do it intelligently. You can do it if you want for trade, you can do it for higher degree. The beauty of HECS - I think HECS is a great system - you borrow the money but you pay it back when you've got the capacity to pay. It makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.

JENNY BROCKIE: Tim Costello what you think of this talk of tax cuts?

TIM COSTELLO: I think that's a nonsense. I don't think we've ever been richer, much richer than our parents or grandparents. I think the global picture is what we're missing here. We can no longer speak in terms of national interest and really serve the national interest by more tax cuts. The seamless connection between global poverty, global warming and global terror in this region means that if we don't deal with global poverty and global warming, guess what, there's going to be 100 million environmental refugees knocking on our door. That's why next month when thousands of young people actually go into marginal electorates to argue for investing in our region, they get the seamless connection. They know it's not Bush and Blair and Howard's world, that their world is a global village and they're saying in this region we actually have to deal with the issues that are 21st century issues, which are clean, green and dealing with poverty right on our doorstep.

JENNY BROCKIE: So you see this as an opportunity for some really big spending on those big-picture issues?

TIM COSTELLO: Absolutely. Look, what Australians don't know, and this is terribly embarrassing to tell them, is that in terms of private giving to the poor, Australians are the second-most generous nation on Earth. Only the Irish beat us - take a bow Bono and Bob Geldof. When it comes to government spending - and I remind you we're in the poorest region of the world, the most poor live in our region, on our doorstep - we come something like 22nd out of OECD countries. Now, our Government promised to spend 50 cents in every $100, keeps repeating that promise. We're only spending 30 cents when the rest of Europe, a long way away from the poor, are already spending 50 cents in aid. So the 21st century issues of national interest can't be solved by leaders who just say, "We'll spend on ourselves," as if that will solve the global village, global ethic issues of problems that float across national borders.

JENNY BROCKIE: Gary Glazebrook, you advise governments on transport, which I think is an interesting area to talk about with all this money sloshing around. How do you feel about things like cash handouts and tax cuts when your interest is in that kind of public transport infrastructure?

GARY GLAZEBROOK, URBAN PLANNING, UTS: I think we have to take a step back and realise that we're facing two major crises that the world hasn't faced before. One of course is global warming, the other one is peak oil. And not only Australian cities but cities right around the world within the next 20 years are going to have to rebuild themselves to cope with those two realities. Now, we are the most urbanised country on Earth. We have one of the highest uses of motor car in the world, one of the highest per capita engine consumptions for transport, and our public transport systems are struggling. In the last two years public transport patronage has grown by over 20% percent in Brisbane and 18% in Melbourne, and in Sydney people are crammed on the trains and buses and simply cannot get on to the public transport system. Yet we have a Federal Government that hasn't spent a cent on urban public transport.

JENNY BROCKIE: Well, they'd say it's a State Government responsibility.

GARY GLAZEBROOK: That's nonsense. They're spending billions of dollars on urban motorways which just encourages more cars, more travel by car, more car dependence. We need a balanced transport infrastructure and balanced transport system and we're not getting it at the moment.

JENNY BROCKIE: And you have actually costed an idea, haven't you, for spending $10.6 billion. What would you spend it on?

GARY GLAZEBROOK: Well, I think immediately we need, actually, more trains, buses, trams, more rolling stock. We now have a number of State governments In Perth, they're building... they're doubling the rail system with a new rail line. In Brisbane they're expanding their busways and rail system. In Sydney they're waiting to get the money to build a north-west, south-west rail link. And all of those cities are running out of capacity on their systems because they haven't got enough rolling stock. So the Federal Government within three years could basically increase public transport by at least 30%. In addition to that, we have a major obesity and health-related problem. We still have air pollution problems in our cities, we have the State Government here trying to warn people through SMS messages when there are going to be high pollution days. We need to be actually addressing the root cause of the problem by actually encouraging people to use to walk more, to cycle more, to use public transport. If you go to countries like Denmark in Copenhagen through a process over the last 20 years of gradually taking away road space and giving it to pedestrians and cyclists, over 36% of their trips are now on bicycle.

JENNY BROCKIE: Harold?

HAROLD MITCHELL: Well, at my weight it's an absolute necessity at 6:00 in the morning. And I've got to tell you it doesn't work too well for me but good for you.

JENNY BROCKIE: But if all the money goes to broadband, and this is all about priorities, isn't it?

HAROLD MITCHELL: This is my very point. Big cities don't work. I'm sure everyone in this room would know exactly that, all the points we've just heard. They're very, very expensive, people have to crowd into them. They don't live in the little towns quite so much anymore, Port Augusta and everywhere like that.

JENNY BROCKIE: A little town, Joy.

JOY BALUCH: It is the centre of the universe.

HAROLD MITCHELL: Joy's been telling me about that outside and I'm with her. But if we can make people work at home, can be involved where they are and the city in the country to revive again, the bigger regional areas. The point is we're so urbanised and it just doesn't make sense for the future. My point is that we have to be able to look beyond the next one, two, three years into the 40 years hence and we have to be able to do things at home, things away from being in the centre of the city - the only way to make it all work.

JENNY BROCKIE: Julian Burnside you're a QC. You have an environmental idea, don't you?

JULIAN BURNSIDE, QC: Yeah, I think the threshold question is do we spend it on ourselves or give it to the next generation? I'm strongly with those who want to give it to the next generation and infrastructure is the only way to do that.

HAROLD MITCHELL: Your kids agree with you, I suppose.

JULIAN BURNSIDE: But all of your ideas I mean, I think education and broadband are brilliant ideas but one of the other things we have to think of is the recent drought has made us see just how tenuous is our hold on this land. And in all the cities and all the towns millions and billions of litres of water, good, useable water go wasted in run-off, goes straight into the stormwater system. Now it is technically easy to install water storage systems underneath the roadways and to divert stormwater into them and then - and this is the great trick - put a second pipe into every domestic house. The second pipe delivers water for the gardens and water for the toilets. If you took..

JENNY BROCKIE: Has that been done anywhere, Julian, or is this your own idea?

JULIAN BURNSIDE: I'm not aware of it being done anymore but it's an idea I discussed with an engineer friend of mine recently over a couple of glasses of red.

JENNY BROCKIE: The best ideas often come this way.

JULIAN BURNSIDE: Absolutely - it got better as the night went on. In fact it was the idea of drought sort of ruining the vintages that sparked this off. The point is you can do this feasibly for 25 cents per litre of storage. And if we just took three-quarters of our surplus once off, you could say you could install storage for 30 billion litres of water. Now, if you place that in the right areas you're going to save 30 billion litres of water on a continuing basis.

JENNY BROCKIE: You're in the wrong business, Julian.

JULIAN BURNSIDE: I should be a water salesman?

JENNY BROCKIE: You should be a water salesman. Greg Bourne, you're the CEO of the World Wildlife Fund. What do you think of this idea?

GREG BOURNE, WORLD WILDLIFE FUND: There's a key point about it and that is efficiency and the use of water. I think a number of people have talked about global warming, and global warming together with water shortages are going to be a real problem for us in the future. We have to learn very much how to become efficient on both energy and water.

JENNY BROCKIE: And is that going to cost a lot of money? Are we looking at spending huge amounts of money to do that?

GREG BOURNE: I think spending is exactly the wrong word, exactly the wrong word. We should be thinking about investment. And in fact the discussions on education, the discussions on broadband are all about investment. The worst thing we could do is spend money on vote buying. That probably will happen but the key thing I think is investment. Investment and thinking about energy efficiency, that actually doesn't take very much money and actually has a return very, very quickly.

JENNY BROCKIE: So what sort of things, Greg?

GREG BOURNE: The sort of thing I would expect us to be doing is looking at energy efficiency at homes, energy efficiencies in commercial buildings, changing regulations, energy efficiency in our car and our transportation system.

JENNY BROCKIE: So forcing people to change?

GREG BOURNE: Encouraging them wherever we can. We need a whole combination of sort of policies and measures and regulations but sometimes incentives as well. If we had better buses, we would probably get on them more often. So that is a type of investment.

JENNY BROCKIE: And would there be equity issues with that? I mean, if you're introducing regulations, there are obviously going to be big issues for people most people that live in houses that are old, that were built a long time ago?

GREG BOURNE: I think one of the key things with government's role is to balance those equity issues and to think them through and work them out and transfer the wealth appropriately to do that. But I really do come back to the fact that if we have $10 billion of surplus - and my guess is we'll have $10 billion of surplus in the next three to four to five years - we should be investing in our future and we should be thinking 20, 30, 40 years ahead - not 3, not 5, but 20, 30, 40 years ahead. We're going to have a very changed environment, very, very changed environment over the next 20 years.

JENNY BROCKIE: And do you feel those issues aren't being addressed properly by either side of politics?

GREG BOURNE: I think Harold made a very good point about managership as opposed to leadership. I think we've had probably quite excellent managership of this economy over the last 10 or so years but we've had very little leadership. Leadership is about looking forward, it's providing vision, aspiration to the nation. It's taking them to places where they would like to goWHERE they were excited. But it's certainly not just spending money on votes.

JENNY BROCKIE: Chris Richardson, back to you, our self-proclaimed grumpy economist. What do you think about some of the ideas you've just heard? Gary's idea about public transport infrastructure, we've heard about energy efficiency, about providing incentives for that, would those be good ways of spending a lot of money?

CHRIS RICHARDSON: They're all good things to spend on but you've got to remember the limits here. For example, we already have a Reserve Bank that's sending up hints that it might raise interest rates again. If we're spending the surplus, we've got to live with higher interest rates. That's one trade-off. Or down the track, you would ask the question why do we have so much money today? Why has this very unusual situation developed? This is now the fifth Budget in a row with tax cuts. The answer is we're getting all this off the back of the China boom. If the prices for the likes of iron ore and coal fall away again, so does all this money and if we spend more of it now, we will face deficits down the track. And finally, I am a baby boomer. I will be expensive as I get older. And if we throw away too much money now on some things, then we simply won't have enough in 30 and 40 years time when Australia will be a lot older than it is today.

JENNY BROCKIE: So is Peter Costello right in handing a lot of money back in tax cuts?

CHRIS RICHARDSON: I can understand Tim's point that tax cuts allow people to make their own choices. But on the already announced tax cuts, the share of Australia's income that is going to Canberra in terms of personal income taxes is about to fall back to the lowest share that we've seen in 25 years. So we've already had a lot of tax cuts. Now, you could have certainly had better tax reform than we've had. You could have had the top marginal tax rate rather lower and things like that. But I would certainly wonder about spending more in total on tax cuts.

JENNY BROCKIE: What about some other members of the public here. Who would prefer to see tax cuts or infrastructure spending?

EMILY AMADIO: I think the point of investment in the train systems and in water savings systems was the best idea I've heard so far because the next 20 or 30 years…

JENNY BROCKIE: But would that make you vote for people? If somebody's waving some dollars in front of your nose and saying you've got them in your pocket or we're going to spend a whole lot of money on public transport and you might not see the benefits of it for another 10 years, who are going to vote for?

TIM WILSON: Well, I think a large part of the problem is we're actually looking at it from the perspective that who is it... what would make you vote for somebody in a particular circumstance. What policy proposal would encourage you to vote for X group? And I think that's actually the wrong question to be asking because by giving tax cuts and by giving the dollars back to individuals, the government's role in the Australian society actually is reduced significantly. I mean, we have a situation now we're looking to government for leadership rather than looking for leadership within ourselves, and as a country we should be the ones leading to the government, we shouldn't look to John Howard.

JENNY BROCKIE: But we can't make the trains... we can't create a train line.

TIM WILSON: No, but we can definitely spend the money to invest and we can definitely have private companies that come in and develop this sort of infrastructure. It's been done many times before. It doesn't mean the government doesn't have a role in doing it, it's saying we recognise the national priority - we need a particular road network or a particular train network - but it doesn't mean that the government has to fund it. If the money's put back into the economy where people can invest it themselves, there will be nothing wrong with that. We shouldn't be looking at the government for leadership.

JENNY BROCKIE: Julian.

JULIAN BURNSIDE: Charging roads and railways has been a catastrophe in this country. To think we'll leave it to private industry in this country is an awful thought.

TIM WILSON: I disagree entirely. There's a number of problems with toll roads but they've just come at the expense of otherwise using taxes to spend for that. So you still end up paying, it's just a matter of who's managing it. And there's been some excellent cases of private roadways.

JENNY BROCKIE: Young woman up the back, what tollway experience?

WOMAN: How much did it cost - $8 - to get here today? I just think that there's some simple things, as these gentlemen just said, simple things like water saving. How hard is it to take your bucket or put it into the road. These roads get maintained 24/7 so digging them up really wouldn't cost much more. Maybe some... like not spending it all in some one situation, maybe doing half where some immediate things such as rainwater tanks in old people like old homes can have rainwater tanks. It's an easy solution. But also then put more towards obviously the sort of later things such as the transport, potentially the Parramatta train system, et cetera.

JENNY BROCKIE: The Parramatta train system. I'm sure people all over the country with their own particular. Now, Tim Costello, I'd like to go back to your big idea for spending this money, and I'd just like to you spell it out a little bit more exactly what you want to do, because it really is about foreign aid, isn't it?

TIM COSTELLO: Yes, it is. But it's also really about saying a global village needs a global ethic. We can no longer just think in terms of ourselves and national interest. And I'm just saying let's meet the promises we've made to those who are voiceless and voteless who are the absolute poor, which we repeatedly make in international forums but we're way behind Europeans. The most striking thing I've seen with young people who travel, particularly whether it's a World Vision tour or something else, is they come back and they say, "We are so blessed And we've got to do something about the rest of our region and our world." But to actually understand the global village, which increasingly in the 21st century says our problems aren't just those problems in Australia, they are now the global warming, global poverty, global terror problems, and now we need a global ethic with real imagination and leadership to deal with these.

JENNY BROCKIE: So what would you do though, Tim? What are you suggesting actually be done? Are you wanting to send every Australian kid overseas to see what it's like?

TIM COSTELLO: Well, that would be too expensive. However, I think the opportunity for overseas kids to travel and to not just go to Europe, is already starting to happen. I think the opportunity for development studies here in Australian curriculum is really fundamentally important. And I think above all, there is a really strong sense that we actually have the means to fulfil our promises, that the world has the best global plan it's ever had called the Millennium Development Goals - to halve absolute poverty by 2015, to end it by 2030 - which actually spells safety, safety in terms of our own lifestyle for us. And it's dealing of course with global warming because it's the poorest countries most devastated. So if we actually just keep our promises, we've made some promises to the world that Australia is so far behind, then the fair go that most Australians think is true of us, actually is enlightened self-interest. We're doing something for ourselves because we're in the poorest region.

JENNY BROCKIE: Mark, you're a doctor from North Queensland. What do you think of Tim's focus?

DR MARK WENITONG,GENERAL PRACTIONER : I think, well, we've got a grumpy economist, so let me be the grumpy Aboriginal doctor. I'm saying that with a smile on my face. But look, how can we actually prioritise our children's children, how can we be leaders in the area, how can we address global disadvantage when we can't address it in Australia? We've got Aboriginal kids in Australia who are basically starving, OK. So what I'm proposing is that we spend a lot of money, a lot of this money on increasing the nutrition of Aboriginal kids from 0 to 5 say, the time when they're developing. So, I mean, we all want kids to develop, we all want kids to grow and be educated. If you don't have the right nutrition in those years, you can't get educated properly because your cognition doesn't develop properly and your brain doesn't develop properly. So we need to put a lot of money into this as an outlay. And the benefits have been proven in the US and the UK with actual programs that provide free food for kids and for mothers who are child-bearing mothers, and the US has shown pretty conclusively that if you invest in that for every dollar that you invest you'll get two to three dollars back savings in the health system later on. So we're talking about a good investment here. We're not talking about welfare.

JENNY BROCKIE: You're talking about food, free food?

MARK WENITONG: I'm talking about food, free food, good fresh food.

JENNY BROCKIE: Joy Baluch, what would you think about that as a mayor?

JOY BALUCH: It's all very well for Tim to be benevolent but like Mark, I believe that charity begins at home and we should be stitching up our own problems out there in rural Australia. And this ludicrous idea of spending billions of dollars on fixing up a transport system - why encourage people to live in three cities? If we draw out broadband, if we roll it out, you are going to bring Australia closer together.

JENNY BROCKIE: So you think that broadband could address some of Gary's concerns about public transport because people wouldn't need to get around as much?

JOY BALUCH: That's right.

HAROLD MITCHELL: Well, we're all encouraging more people to live at home, to work at home, and to be there but if you're cut off from the rest of the world it won't happen. And so, Jen, that's the reason that we all know that the kids, the Aboriginal kids, whoever else it might be, if they are equal with others in the world, they've got a real chance because that's got to stop at the home.

JENNY BROCKIE: Mark, how relevant is broadband to Aboriginal kids?

MARK WENITONG: In the future, yep, I think it will be a fantastic thing to have information technology getting to our remote communities, but currently it's not our critical issue. Our critical issue is health. We know we've got a chronic underspend in health - that's been definitely proven and shown to be the fact. We know that we're saving the health system in Australia hundreds of thousands of dollars by just dying early, by our kids dying at two times the rates of other children. So our critical issue is actually health at the moment and getting, you know, health discrepancies addressed.

JENNY BROCKIE: Ann.

ANN SHERRY: As I listen to everyone, Jenny, in some ways if we were running Australia as Australia Inc. We would have a 5 to 10-year plan. We'd be looking at the $10 billion a year that we're generating in surpluses and we'd be building a program that started with making sure our communities could eat, that the kids were ready to go to school, that they had broadband to connect them and to give rural communities, you know, more sustainability and you'd have some decent transport.

JENNY BROCKIE: But wouldn't the Government argue it's doing that in its own terms? It might not have all these priorities but wouldn't Peter Costello say, "Look, I do have a plan. I'm worried about the ageing population, that's why I'm socking all the money away into Future Funds," and so on?

ANN SHERRY: I guess the question is why are we having the debate if the plan is that clear? It seems to me that your.. to have a plan is fine but if you're leading a nation the clarity of the long term. I think everybody can see the short-term bits of it, but my question is where's the clarity of the long-term because all of the issues all of us are talking about require longer term solutions.

JENNY BROCKIE: Tim, has the country forgotten about Aboriginal health? Is that something we should be spending more money on?

TIM WILSON: Well, I think there's a problem where we keep talking about management versus leadership throughout this debate and I think that we need to start looking at leadership within ourselves. And there's obviously a clear problem with Aboriginal health in Aboriginal communities and we do need to address that, but at the same time we need to be looking for leadership from within ourselves on how we're going to solve the problem. We can't keep looking to the government as the solution to all of our problem. And I agree with issues in relation to long-term planning. I think that's an important point. Long-term planning is an issue. And partly we're going to get, I guess, to vote on different models of long-term plans into the future later this year but we should also be looking within ourselves in which we as a society want to contribute to towards developing long-term plans instead of making our decisions, instead of taking short-term decisions of "this is what I want, this is what my vote is worth and this is how you can buy it."

JENNY BROCKIE: Joy, do you think more money should be spent on Aboriginal health?

JOY BALUCH: To a degree. But there again there are many members of the Aboriginal community who are killing themselves with alcohol and drug abuse, and so we have to get to the children. We have three and four generations of unemployed. They have been reliant upon the welfare system for a long period of time. But although I agree that money should be injected into Aboriginal health, there are many, many issues that they can address themselves.

JENNY BROCKIE: Mark.

JULIAN BURNSIDE: That's blaming them for having symptoms of generations of neglect, isn't it? All you're pointing to is the symptoms of the disadvantages that they've suffered from the time of white settlement.

JOY BALUCH: Oh, so we're going to go back 200 years, are we?

JULIAN BURNSIDE: No, no, no. Help them out of the position that we've put them in.

JOY BALUCH: They've been reliant upon the welfare...on the welfare system for a long period of time. White man has made them reliant. Aboriginal elders say to me, "Don't throw money at us, give us jobs." Well, they can't get jobs until they're educated and with education comes good health.

CATHERINE HARRIS: In a very poor, remote Himalayan village it was with great pleasure I was shown that Australia is feeding all these schoolchildren the most lovely meal for lunch. If I had of known that in fact that would be fantastic for Aboriginal people, I would much sooner that our money quite frankly went to feed did exactly the same process for Aboriginal children. I mean, I think this country really needs it but if it's right here in Australia that would do the same program, we could put it in. And what's coming up is we don't talk we don't have these forums to talk. We need to have this talk, we need to have this dialogue.

JENNY BROCKIE: Bill.

BILL BEERWORTH: Jenny, a couple of points. First, it isn't $10.6 billion. Governments traditionally can borrow. There's no reason why we shouldn't borrow and borrow to create infrastructure to do many things we're talking about. Chris will get worried about interest rates but so be it. The second thing is many of the things that we need to do, as Ann is saying, don't require a lot of money. We haven't even talked about immigration. What built America was immigration, endless immigration for about 20 years coming through Ellis Island. Here we only bring in 130,000 a year.

JENNY BROCKIE: We're bringing in more.

BILL BEERWORTH: But not a hell of a lot more. We can bring in large numbers more. Next, some of the vision things that Paul Keating used to talk about. Why don't we revamp the Constitution? Why don't we have a Philadelphia Convention and talk about re-divvying the right of States and the Commonwealth because it's a continual debate in this country. Why don't we have a serious discussion about a bill of rights? All these big ideas ought to be attended to.

JENNY BROCKIE: Gary.

GARY GLAZEBROOK: I'd just like to say I think the issue boils down to some years ago there was a statement made in America that "It's the economy, stupid." But I think the reality is the statement should be "it's the society, stupid." We have had quite a few years of economic growth and we've become so accustomed to talk about the economy and dollars and tax rates and all the rest of it, but what sort of society are we living in now, what sort of society will we have for the future? We actually have to change the way we, you know, think about the way we value things generally in society.

JENNY BROCKIE: Alec, you're an architect and I know you have some big ideas for spending money. What are they?

ALEC TZANNES, ARCHITECT: Well, I'm in favour of leadership by government and I'm concerned about the environmental sustainability of our country in the world. And I think the Government has to do a lot more in relation to providing us the framework for sustainable cities and towns, and that does extend to remote areas. Whatever we say, we mostly live in cities and towns. The Government's not doing that. It has to rewrite the planning development framework. It also has to show through its own work that it understands the commitment it needs to make, communal commitment, only they can do it, they are custodians of the public environment, they are custodians of public infrastructure. They've abdicated that responsibility to some degree in the past and I think the results are there. We have Darling Harbours and monorails and they're very unsuccessful public environments, they're unsafe environments.

JENNY BROCKIE: And what about actual buildings?

ALEC TZANNES: Well, they are responsible for the fabric of our educational system, for the...one way or another, all levels of government, the health system, the fabric of our health systems.

JENNY BROCKIE: But I'm thinking big buildings, I'm thinking things like the Opera House. Would
something like that get built today?

ALEX TZANNES: It was an accident it got built, in some respects, in the past. And that's where the government does need to rewrite the development framework to create a proper environmentally based system of managing investment. And right now we have kind of what I call scenographic rules which are somebody's vision of what's beautiful, and you might have some bolt-on environmental issues but I think they have to be rewritten to face the challenges today so they're fundamentally sustainable development controls, development and planning laws. So I think the government can only do that. That's our communal responsibility represented through government.

JENNY BROCKIE: Ann, you talked about the vision thing, what should the vision be? What should we be thinking about as a vision for Australia in the future, given that we've got all this money?

ANN SHERRY: Well, I guess my vision would be that we're clear about the sort of society we're building for not ourselves but the next two generations, that we have a society that doesn't leave people behind. So much of our society's affluent. Living in a society where you leave a big chunk of your community behind I think is unacceptable. And then we need to lift that up and be, to borrow Cathy's words, clean, green, clever where we're a big country, we're a dry country, we should be a smart country and we should be connected. So I think everyone's ideas are... form a view, a vision. But I also think to Tim's point about personal leadership, I think we shouldn't underestimate how many people in this room and others are directly engaged, whether it's with Indigenous communities, with environmental issues, building good buildings. We are trying in the spheres that we influence to show more of what's possible but all of that ultimately comes together under a civil society banner. I think that's the piece that I want to see more of and clearer.

JENNY BROCKIE: And the role of government to actually drive some of those things?

ANN SHERRY: It should be enabling. There's much more enablement that government could and should be doing, and more integrated. I don't think government should do everything but it needs better integration.

JENNY BROCKIE: Tim.

TIM WILSON: I particularly agree that governments should be enabling. I mean, government should be looking at things like big infrastructure projects which help people in their capacity to drive our society forward but it doesn't necessarily mean they have to fund them. They can work constructively, build the framework of our society to encourage individuals to prosper and to show their own leadership to deal with issues like Aboriginal health.

JENNY BROCKIE: Liz Ann.

LIZ ANN MACGREGOR: Having lived in '80s Britain when Thatcher famously declared there's no such thing as community, I'm quite heartened to hear everything tonight to counter Tim because I think that there is a strong belief that we do need government to be putting these frameworks in place and putting back the money into society and not leaving it up to individuals. Because sadly if it's left to individuals, we'll have a very skewed society with a very small number of people with the wealth in their hands, not being able to make the holistic decisions. Government has the overview, they're able to look right across the country at the different priorities and pull together those different needs and hopefully create a society for the young people which does cover everything that we need - basic bread and butter, our souls, our artistic environment, our skills base and everything else.

JENNY BROCKIE: Tim's shaking his head - very unimpressed with that speech, very unimpressed. Harold, what do you think?

HAROLD MITCHELL: I think they're going to hit each other at the moment. I think we got through that one, so well done. I think this..

JENNY BROCKIE: What do you think about balancing up that role of the individual that Tim's pushing - that money to the individuals and to private industry - and Liz Anne saying it's up to government?

HAROLD MITCHELL: Well, I think this - we should stop being greedy, pardon me, Julian, 60-year-olds and make sure that generation beyond that, our grandkids and their kids after that have got a bright start into the future because right now we're spending their lifetime away.

JENNY BROCKIE: Julian, quick comment from you.

JULIAN BURNSIDE: Well, I agree. We are borrowing the place we occupy. We need to improve it and pass it on to the next generation in better shape. So far we haven't done it. We need to invest a great deal so that what we pass on is better than what we inherited.

JENNY BROCKIE: Greg.

GREG BOURNE: If I spent a little bit of money it would probably be on educating all politicians on climate change. We actually have such an issue coming down towards us it's going to radically shape the way we are in the future and yet there's such a huge opportunity. So in fact I'm actually looking to business and many, many business leaders to provide the inspiration of where we should go, and I worry a little bit about politicians. Spend a little bit of money on politicians and educate them.

JENNY BROCKIE: Tim Costello, final comment from you tonight about what you've heard.

TIM COSTELLO: Yeah, look, I think it's been a great debate. I think we've got to nourish hope in our young people, to nourish the hope that they can make a difference, that it is their world. And when it comes to government, government is just us collectively acting together, to actually encourage young people to say, "We can make a difference even to our government," and get our ideas up there.

JENNY BROCKIE: And Chris Richardson, a comment from you about all that you've heard. There's a lot of money-spending going on here.

CHRIS RICHARDSON: There is. But think of everything we could achieve without spending one more cent. We could have a better federation, better Federal/State relations in Australia. That would help lots of the problems we've talked about tonight. We could spend more on early childhood education without spending more in total. A number of other things - we could cut or taxes. We could have tax reform, particularly lower top marginal tax rates, without having tax cuts. Whole bunch of things we could do and they don't necessarily cost a cent.

JENNY BROCKIE: And Mark, final comment from you about everything you've heard.

MARK WENITONG: I think the fantastic thing is we're thinking about children and we're think about the future and we're thinking about the Australian community moving together, that's Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people working together. But I do think that the Government has to take leadership and coordination of a lot of things that happen that are going to push us towards a better future.

JENNY BROCKIE: Well, we are going to leave it there, we've run out of time. I'm sure we could keep going with this and there are lots more ideas too. And I'm sure a lot of you at home have those ideas you'd like to share with us. That is all this week but do feel free to add your ideas to our website - sbs.com.au/insight.

Ends

Wheat export plans break US trade deal
Article published in The Australian on Thursday, 17th May 2007 by Caroline Overington

PLANNED changes to the wheat marketing system could put Australia in breach of its free trade
agreement with the US.

Institute of Public Affairs research fellow Tim Wilson said AWB's status as a monopoly wheat
exporter is protected under the FTA, which came into force in January 2005.

New arrangements, which are yet to be finalised but are likely to strip AWB of its monopoly while
still favouring Australian companies over multinationals, are not protected and must be approved by
Washington.

The US is opposed to Australia's "single desk" for wheat exports, saying it distorts trade.

The Howard Government removed AWB's right to veto rival applications to export wheat in the wake of fallout from the Iraq kickbacks scandal.

Under interim measures, Agriculture Minister Peter McGauran can approve applications by rival traders.

So far, he has approved only a handful of licences, including one to export wheat to Iraq that has never been filled.

Mr Wilson said the interim measures were "contrary to relevant sections of the FTA". Any new measures would require an exemption from the agreement.

"For Australia to comply with the FTA, it will need to seek to make an amendment, which would
require the agreement of the US," Mr Wilson said.

The principle of the FTA is to establish a free trade area between Australia and the US. A national pool, single desk and veto rights on exporting a commodity are contrary to the principle, but the Government had wheat exports excluded from Australia's obligations.

Mr McGauran confirmed yesterday that a planned demerger of AWB, creating two companies, was now a "key option".

Ends


Radio interview on ABC 774 regarding fair trade
Aired on "Sunday nights with John Cleary" on Sunday, 6th May 2007

John Cleary, Andrew Hewett and Tim Wilson debating the failure of fair trade

Ends


Union wrong on China
Opinion article published in the Courier Mail on Tuesday, 1st May 2007 and later republished under the title "China Dills: Union suffers a free trade syndrome" in the Geelong Advertiser on Monday, 7th May 2007.

AUSTRALIANS are lucky the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union doesn't write horoscopes - if it did, every day would be "stay in bed" day.

If you want a pessimistic view of the future just ask the AMWU. Its recent "study" on the impact of an Australia-China Free Trade Agreement doesn't deviate. According to the AMWU, free trade already hurts our economy and an FTA will worsen the effects.

But what more can Australians expect from the AMWU? During the debate on the Australia-United States FTA, the AMWU commissioned a study showing Australia would lose up to $52.4 billion from its GDP and lose more than 57,700 jobs. This FTA has been in place since 2005. Is union secretary Doug Cameron really going to argue we have higher unemployment because of the FTA?

Similarly its China FTA report concludes our manufacturing sector would be decimated under a flood of cheap imports produced by cheap Chinese labour. The report's tone of economic xenophobia is disappointing when most Australians left behind these sorts of attitudes following the dismantling of the White Australia Policy. Clearly it still resonates in the manufacturing sector.

Yet even with the cheap flow of imports consumers would win. The AMWU argues that it would come at the expense of machinery and textile, clothing and footwear jobs, primarily.

Furthermore, it argues that 170,000 manufacturing jobs will be lost and will be offset with only minimal gains in the agriculture and mining sectors due to increased exports.

This is bogus. It ignores the fact that capital now directed to manufacturing jobs will be lost, when it will really be reinvested to create new sustainable jobs in another part of the economy. But the larger problem with the AMWU's argument is its static view of Australia's economy. Protectionists of all stripes have always failed to comprehend the dynamic potential of a free market economy. While they argue that jobs are lost, they do not comprehend the cost of the present situation and the unpredictable benefits of liberalisation.

They spin their argument as protection for the industry to preserve jobs, families and livelihoods, but they are actually arguing for a halt to Australia's economic growth to protect their way of life. The beneficiaries of protectionism can always be seen, but the unseen costs dog our economic potential.

When an industry is liberalised it is always easy to point to the losers. It is much harder to point to the people who have been losing out because of the existing protection precisely because everyone is losing in small doses. It is just as hard to point to liberalisation's beneficiaries because the benefits haven't flowed yet.

The AMWU excels at this short-sightedness. It is not surprising that its union leaders push this position - any drop in membership numbers hardly benefits the power and prestige of their union. But it comes at the long-term expense of their members' interests. While in the short term their members' interests may be preserved through protectionism, their long-term job sustainability is
undermined. The higher the protectionist wall is built, the further workers and industry have to fall when it comes crumbling down.

If we have learnt nothing from the structural reform of the Australian economy, the sooner industries begin structural reform and liberalise the more likely they are to adapt and provide sustainable jobs.

The real opportunity of free trade flows from the decisions of the allocation of resources by the market. Dismantling protectionism brings benefits to the economy because it frees up capital dedicated to an unproductive purpose and redirects it to a productive one. The consequence is the development of sustainable industries and jobs. It is also impossible to predict the industries
that would develop. Recent history demonstrates this well. In the 1970s it would have been impossible to predict how our economy would appear today. The extent and impact of technology and the growth of technology-dependent industries were unknown, largely because much of the technology and its application had not started.

As a case in point, only a few years ago the US Bureau of Labour suggested that travel agents were going to be in high demand as rising incomes and decreasing flight costs encouraged more people to travel.

What the study didn't predict was the role the internet would play in individuals taking responsibility for booking their own travel arrangements. The eventual outcome was the demand for travel agents decreased in a short time-frame.

Cameron and the AMWU genuinely believe manufacturing jobs will be worse off if Australia has an FTA with China. But hindering free trade will only delay an inevitable restructure of an uncompetitive industry. The best interests of AMWU members will be served when their jobs are sustainable, regardless of the industry they work in.

Tim Wilson is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Ends


April 2007 | ^Top^


Radio interview on "The Wire" regarding fair trade
Aired on "The Wire" on Monday, 30th April 2007

Tim Wilson and Professor Sinclair Davidson on "The Wire"
CEO of Oxfam, Andrew Hewett's response on "The Wire"


Oxfam coffee 'harms' poor farmers
Article published in The Australian on Saturday, 28th April 2007 by Caroline Overington

TWO Melbourne academics have lodged formal complaints against Oxfam Australia over the sale of Fairtrade coffee, saying it should not be promoted as helping to lift Third World producers out of poverty because growers are paid very little for their beans.

Tim Wilson, a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and Sinclair Davidson, professor of institutional economics at RMIT University, have asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate Oxfam, saying it is guilty of misleading or deceptive conduct under the Trade Practices Act.

Mr Wilson said there was evidence that Fairtrade products could do more harm than good for coffee producers in undeveloped nations. He cited reports alleging producers had been charged thousands of dollars to become certified Fairtrade providers and some labourers received as little as $3 a day.

In order to lodge the complaint, Mr Wilson purchased a 250g pack of Fairtrade organic decaf ground coffee from the online Oxfam shop.

"We purchased this product in good faith, with the aim of lifting people out of poverty while enjoying our favourite brew," Mr Wilson said, in his letter to ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel.

Mr Wilson and Professor Davidson have long held doubts about whether Fairtrade products help coffee, tea and cocoa producers in undeveloped nations. Sales of such products in Australia total about $8million.

The complaint to the ACCC refers to an article published in the Financial Times last September, which said Fairtrade coffee beans were "picked by workers paid below minimum wage". It claimed workers received the equivalent of $3 a day.

The coffee is sold at a premium to people concerned about Third World poverty.

The academics quote an analysis of Fairtrade, published in the US-based Cato journal, which says coffee producers in poor nations are charged $3200 to become certified Fairtrade providers. The producers' costs are therefore higher than on the open market. The Fairtrade campaign aims to manage the international coffee trade by fixing prices at $US1.26 ($1.64) per pound (454g) and eventually fixing supply.

"Oxfam says the Fairtrade coffee allows growers in developing countries to sell coffee 'at a decent price' but we don't accept that the Fairtrade system can work," Mr Wilson said.

"Our primary complaint is that this is an unsustainable system. The only sustainable mechanism is through free trade. They are artificially cooking up the international coffee trade, to promote the interests of the Fairtrade brand and the people who sign up to it."

Fairtrade coffee is stocked by Coles and the Hudson coffee chain. Origin Energy and Orica make Fairtrade coffee available to staff in their Australian offices.

Oxfam rejected the academics' claims. It is this week promoting a Fairtrade Fortnight. To mark the event, Oxfam Australia invited Costa Rican coffee farmer Guillermo Vargas to a series of lectures on Fairtrade.

Oxfam's Neil Bowker rejected criticism of the Fairtrade coffee project, saying: "It's all audited and monitored, from beginning to end, and we've got no doubts about the effectiveness.

Ends


Radio interview on Joy FM regarding Youth Week 2007
Aired on Joy FM on Sunday, 22nd April 2007

John Heard, Tim Wilson and Johnathon Wilkinson on Allegro Non Troppo


March 2007 | ^Top^


Fair trade no substitute for intellectual property
Opinion article in the March 2007 edition of IPA Review

"Fair trade no substitute for intellectual property", IPA Review, March 2007

Ends


Leave wedded bliss to those who can make babies
Opinion article attacking me in The Australian on Monday, 19th March 2007

(TRW's Note: The article appearing below is in response to an opinion article I had published a week and a half prior. It can be viewed here. Anyone who glanced at my piece would know that I did not argue for gay marriage directly or in "shorthand". I simply argued that it is a conservative principle to oppose discrimination and that it is possible to recognise same-sex relationships if you are a conservative. A number of conservatives have since told me that they agree with this sentiment. The best way I can describe Mr Heard's comments on my article is that they are comical and he has simply twisted my words to provide the justification for him writing an anti-gay marriage piece, which is his agenda. That is fine, this is a free society and that means freedom for everyone. I am actually quite flattered that a person and a national newspaper found my article sufficiently relevant, and perhaps influential, to justify an entire opinion article in response. What this shows is how open to genuine debate The Australian newspaper really is and why I love it so.)

IT is strange indeed that gay marriage - largely forgotten on the Left, eschewed by the ALP in most places outside the ACT and vastly unpopular in the US - should receive a fresh hearing in Australian conservative circles.

I'm not talking about Malcolm Turnbull or those other Liberal politicians who'd like to see superannuation rules reformed and other minor injustices cleared away. I'm talking about what appears to be an undeclared pro-gay marriage push operating out of the offices of the Institute of Public Affairs, one of the most respected conservative think tanks in Australia. I'm sure the Prime Minister and not a few donors would be surprised.

First, there was a pro-gay marriage piece featured in the December edition of the IPA Review. This did not stand alone. On these pages last week Tim Wilson, a researcher with the IPA, also argued for equal recognition for same-sex couples. That is shorthand for gay marriage.

Then, an anti-gay-marriage piece I'd drafted, and later extended at the editor's request, was dumped at the very last minute from the IPA Review because it was apparently too long.

Are Australian conservatives ready to support something not even the Greens will champion outright?

Contrary to what left-wing activists have been invited to claim, no serious conservative should argue for gay marriage. To start with, private arrangements regarding shared resources and property should not be surrendered to a nanny state. Despite the window-dressing, ostensibly right-wing arguments for gay marriage usually reveal a big government, welfare-state bias.

So homo-activists shift to tax. Conservatives hate tax, right? So they claim that childcare rebates are a kind of tax on being gay. More nonsense.

Most people recognise that, unlike male and female coupling, male-on-male unions are not obviously likely to produce children. This is a biological and empirical fact.

They are not directly taxed. Rather, the childcare rebate operates to encourage those who can produce children to do so. Regardless of your position on the sagacity or otherwise of such encouragements, it is irrational to extend a rebate to those who will never need it.

That didn't stop the IPA from publishing the idea before reinforcing it in Wilson's opinion piece.

Such rebates, however, also have the effect of making it easier for families after child acquisition, whether via natural birth or adoption. Some people ask why we don't extend those benefits to homosexuals who do acquire and raise children.

A "homo-con" like me would likely look at how many people are being affected by the apparent injustice and which wider goals are served by the same.

If the net result is a gain for the common good, then the discrimination is, far from an injustice, rather a boon for families and an exercise in good government.

Such thinking operates when we restrict drivers' licences to over-16s and drinking to certain licensed venues.

So how many same-sex attracted individuals want to get married and raise children? Homo-activists regularly suggest that all of the 40,000 people who identified as same-sex attracted or homosexually paired in the census were actually in homosexual relationships and, indeed, actually same-sex attracted individuals.

Regardless, 40,000 homosexuals living together still does not equal 20,000 proto-marriages.

It is certainly irrational to leave unchallenged any claim that all of these couples would also want to acquire children.

This is especially true because focused studies have found otherwise. The Private Lives survey (LaTrobe University, 2006), the only rigorous study of the intentions of homosexuals in Australia, found that the vast majority of respondents were not in any kind of relationship and of those few who were, only one-third indicated that they wanted to formalise their relationships.

The numbers are only slightly higher when lesbians are taken into account. Those discriminated masses are actually a fringe subset.

No study has asked how many of the few homosexuals who want to get married also want to acquire children, but even if it is as high as 100per cent and one assumes that 100 per cent of homosexual couples do acquire children (which is highly unlikely) the most reliable evidence suggests that only 6666 homosexual partnerships would be "disadvantaged" by maintaining the existing marriage regime.

A real conservative - indeed any person schooled in the need to distribute finite resources equitably among various worthy but competing potential beneficiaries - must ask then what impact the interests of those 6666 couples might have on a population of 20 million.

Most people are convinced - and consistent social and developmental research suggests - that millions of Australian families would be worse off if marriage laws were further diluted.

Indeed, gay marriage creates a perverse incentive for heterosexual couples to either reject marriage outright or dissolve a marriage already contracted.

What incentive to get married would government policy provide if Joseph and John down the road get all the benefits and have none of the setbacks (school fees, increased shopping costs and so on) that marriage often brings?

Finally, gay marriage supporters often elide the fact that marriages are naturally productive of children. There is no separating the legal institution from the biological or human reality.

Thus, rather than removing what few consider unjust discrimination against a tiny number of same-sex couples, gay marriage legislation, or ACT-style backdoor unions that give equal recognition but leave the term marriage aside, would rather levy a tax on being fertile. This would negatively affect most Australians.

It would be a peculiarly old Left attempt at coercing by force of state fiat what biology will not admit.

It is not the kind of idea to excite or convince serious conservatives. It is certainly not a plan that should sway cabinet.

John Heard is a Melbourne writer.

Ends


Submission to the DFAT review of the TRIPS and Public Health Amendment

Amending TRIPS: Protecting Property Rights and Public Health

Ends


Nothing radical about equalising opportunities for all citizens
Opinion article published in The Australian on Wednesday, 7th March 2007

John Howard' s conservative stance justifies strong support for gays.

IT'S no surprise that the Prime Minister is considering reforming access to government benefits for same-sex couples. Based on his own brand of conservatism, John Howard should support equal recognition for same-sex couples.

In 2005 Howard gave a speech to launch the publication The Conservative. He articulated his interpretation of conservatism, its values and how it is held in Australian society. The Prime Minister discussed the role of institutions and said conservatives "believe that if institutions have demonstrably failed, they ought to be changed or reformed".
There is little doubt the institutions charged with respecting the legitimacy and choices of same-sex couples have failed them.

Government institutions are perpetuating discrimination against same-sex couples in superannuation law, Medicare payments, migration law and taxation.

Liberal values and a belief in small government should promote downscaling these benefits, but if they are to be available, they should be provided without discrimination.

In the same speech Howard confessed to being a "profound opponent of radically changing the social context in which we live". It would be hard to argue that providing access for benefits to existing relationships would radically change the way homosexual or heterosexual individuals live their lives.

Same-sex relationships are an irreversible feature of Australian society. If there were a radical change in our social context that recognised same-sex relationships, it happened years ago when Will & Grace gained a prime-time television slot. Howard aligned his personal values to the values of average Australians: "(We) live in a classless society (where) a person's worth should be determined by a person's character and hard work."

Those Liberal MPs pushing for reform have shown that, as yet, the PM's words have not been put into practice. Warren Entsch became the proponent for equalisation of government benefits to same-sex couples following a constituent complaint from a gay military serviceman denied resettlement benefits for his partner. This example should directly offend Howard's ethic. Perhaps most poignantly, Howard articulated his strong belief "in the concept of mutual obligation, the reasonable expectation of a society built on individual achievement that, having given a fair go, they will return the compliment". Same-sex couples have paid their taxes, taken responsibility for their lives and are active contributors to society. Unlike other debates in society, the lapse in mutual obligation in this debate is not on the individuals. The Government cannot say the same for itself.

Howard also professed his support for the institution of the family because it provides emotional support and reassurance as "the best social welfare policy that mankind has ever devised".

The Prime Minister's interpretation of the family was traditional, but that needn't mean its social welfare capacity doesn't apply to other mutually supportive relationships outside his model. Pushing gay rights is hardly Howard's wheelbarrow, but the move to provide government benefits to same-sex relationships shouldn't cause social conservatives discomfort. The Liberal Party is a combination of two distinct political traditions, liberalism and conservatism. Whether conservatives believe sexuality is by choice or design, respecting individual choices is a shared position of conservatives and liberals. Still, this action may seem surprising in light of Howard's efforts to overturn the ACT civil unions bill. It shouldn't. The ALP used the gay community as patsies to try to retrieve its credibility on gay issues.

Gay activists felt abandoned by Mark Latham's support for Howard's commitment that marriage should be between a man and a woman. The ACT Government's bill was designed to enrage the federal Government and be overturned for Labor's political benefit. Had a state government passed the same bill it may have stood, but sections would likely have been in conflict with federal law and the federal government's constitutional responsibility to define and establish marriage.

Political pragmatism has always ensured the PM is attuned to backbenchers' concerns because they are often attuned to voter sentiment. Voters may not support gay marriage but they don't believe same-sex couples should be locked out of government benefits. Debate on gay marriage has been suffocated by a failing to consider why government is regulating marriage in the first place.

Regardless, Howard faces the challenge that many gay Australians vote Liberal because of their support for small government and fiscal conservatism. But their patience has been wearing thin.

In the face of a difficult election the PM is also playing smart politics. Reforming government attitudes to same-sex relationships may even appeal to doctors' wives. It will also pre-empt the forthcoming Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report that details government discrimination against same-sex couples. Howard should be able to take confidence that, according to his values, he is delivering conservative reform for same-sex couples.

Tim Wilson is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne.

Ends


February 2007 | ^Top^


Rudd's hollow words mirror Latham's
Opinion article published in The Courier Mail on Friday, 16th February 2007

KEVIN Rudd's announcement for a phased withdrawal from Iraq lacked all the pizzazz of Mark Latham's "troops home by Christmas" pledge.

It is the clear difference in style between the two men.

Latham was reckless and headlines-driven. Rudd is presenting himself as considered. Yet the costs of each of their pledges carry similar weight.

The difference is only in style.

Rudd has committed to a phased withdrawal of Australian troops. He will not be drawn on exact deadlines. Doing so is akin to passing the ball to John Howard when he is in full view of the goal posts .

Rudd acknowledged yesterday that deadlines would simply provide insurgents with a time line.

Howard would also find some evidence that the Iraqi administration or the US Government says they are unrealistic.

But does Rudd's ambiguous withdrawal statement alleviate him of responsibility for the consequences of his commitment? They are significant.

He can't take the easy way out by saying he is "not in the business of providing a rolling external commentary". Sorry buddy, when you are the alternative prime minister you are.

It is impossible to predict what will occur if Australia and the US withdraw before stability has been achieved.

The suggestion that the insurgency will disappear is naive. It is more likely to turn the country into a bloodbath as US Ambassador Robert McCallum told the National Press Club this week.

Few are prepared to dispute this. Yet Rudd needs to justify the likely number of Iraqi deaths. He may argue that they are not responsible because they did not start the war.

This is true. However, Labor does purport to have a plan to end it.

If withdrawal is his option, he should defend the likely body count - in line with the expectations he places on the Prime Minister.

As the alternative prime minister, the consequences of his policies, not just the rhetoric, matter. And the body count could be much higher on withdrawal.

Insurgents knew that the more they killed US troops, the weaker the Coalition forces would become.

The US mid-term election results and recent Australian polls show they are right. After withdrawal, insurgents will just redirect that energy to Iraqis of influence to increase their control.

The insurgents' battle is about getting America out and dictating who will subsequently gain control.

Even if Iraq were not the epicentre of the War on Terror at the invasion, it is now. The continued US presence provides impetus for insurgents from inside Iraq and neighbouring countries to maintain their fight.

Withdrawal is embarrassing to the US and damages its resolve to exercise its authority internationally.

Withdrawal will also hasten US action in future conflicts, even those they did not invite, despite the global expectation the US should use its military might to enforce resolutions in conflicts outside its borders.

Withdrawal will be akin to handing the country over to insurgents and their cause. The outcome will be to create a new shelter for training terrorists that was lost with the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Long-term consequences for Australian, British and American security will be dire. Terrorists will have found a new safe haven from which to launch their attacks.

In the short term, US and British troops may stop dying, but it will come at the long-term expense of citizens from Western countries at home and travelling abroad.

Should the US withdraw, there will be a void of authority in Iraq.

Rudd's phased withdrawal announcement is understandable. He is not going to be skewered in the same way Latham was. Howard is expected to quantify and justify the cost of his war policy. This obligation extends to Rudd as well.

Tim Wilson is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs

Ends


January 2007 | ^Top^


Aussie working record hours
Reporter: Greg Hoy
Transcript and video of segment on the ABC's 7.30 Report on Tuesday, 30th January 2007


























Transcript

KERRY O'BRIEN: As we move more and more into an election year, the Prime Minister will no doubt be banking on maintaining the current low unemployment rate. Economic management is his biggest single perceived advantage over new Labor leader Kevin Rudd but there are, of course, layers of complexity behind the stats, complexities that go to much longer hours of work for some and not enough work for others. One social and economic institute points out, for instance, that many Australian workers now work harder than their counterparts anywhere in the rest of the industrialised world, even Japan. Church leaders are expressing concern about the impact of work stress on families, and one health study points to higher levels of work related depression and more visits to doctors. So much for the lotus land of a few decades ago, and while we're awash in consumer goods and lifestyle choices, as a nation we're also awash in personal debt. Greg Hoy reports on some of the realities of a modern working life.

GREG HOY: Summer time and the living, well, the late Melbourne photographer Rennie Ellis celebrated the theory that life's a beach down under and lately, you might have agreed with him. Before he headed off to the beach himself to smell the salt air and tread the sandy foreshores, the head helmsman of the nation's capital gathered the press at the prime ministerial mansion on Sydney's foreshore to remind Australians how good things are right now, as measured by historically low unemployment figures.

JOHN HOWARD, PRIME MINISTER: I think the jobs figures today are wonderful. And isn't this what it's all about? There's no greater indicator, there's no greater mark of economic success than low unemployment.

GREG HOY: Enough to raise some eyebrows to the heavens. No one denies we have much to be thankful for but there's a genuine concern about a strong undercurrent in the workplace that is largely ignored in Australian economic policy.

REV DR PHILLIP FREIER, ANGLICAN ARCHBISHOP OF MELBOURNE: Modern hours of work that span all of the time we have available seem to pay no heed to the ancient wisdom that saw even the Creator take rest on the seventh day.

DR CLIVE HAMILTON, AUSTRALIA INSTITUTE: Australians now work more hours each year than workers in any other country in the industrialised world, more than the super-efficient Germans, more than the Americans, who only get one or two weeks annual leave, more even than the Japanese, who are famous for a phenomenon known as karoshe or death by overwork.

TIM WILSON, INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS: It's important that we understand that some people's working hours and their workloads have increased. That's partly to do with a skills shortage and the fact that we have an ever-rising number of job advertisements and they're not all being filled, because we do have a skills shortage.

CHARLES BRASS, AUSTRALIAN FUTURES FOUNDATION: The work force is really being divided into two groups those who are working full time and who are working longer and longer and more intense hours throughout a seven day working week, and those who are working part time, casual, what we tend to call contingent, who are struggling to find the requisite amount of work under appropriate conditions to allow them to live their lives.

JOHN HOWARD: We now have the best labour market in this country in my lifetime, the best. This is what it is all about. If it's not about providing jobs for Australians, and thereby security and stability for Australian families, what is economic policy all about?

GREG HOY: It's an emotional argument, riddled with contradictions. There are, of course, those workaholics delighted to have longer working hours. Just as, conversely, there are those economists who seriously question the accuracy of unemployment figures, suggesting they mask a serious underemployment problem. That's an old argument that predates the Howard Government but one, it's argued, that's more pronounced with the deregulation of the workplace and the casualisation of many full time jobs.

CHARLES BRASS: Now, according to the statisticians, a job is working for pay two hours a fortnight. So, if you create 20 jobs at two hours a fortnight, that's the same thing as creating one full time job. But the statistics look like 20 jobs have been created whereas otherwise it's only one. But I'll give you a statistic. In 1963, 65 per cent of the Australian population worked nine to five, Monday to Friday. In 2007, that's 8 per cent.

TIM WILSON: People want choice in their work environment and that means that some people will be casualised, but the casualisation of that is a demonstration of their choice, to be able to balance out their life, work and personal choices.

GREG HOY: You sure they want that?

TIM WILSON: I think different people want different things. It's not one thing or the other. Different people want different arrangements in work and a one size fits all category doesn't mean that Australians are going to have their needs met.

CHARLES BRASS: Underneath what appear to be quite good, politically quite good, economic figures are actually some quite disturbing human figures and I think that's one of the reasons why this work-life balance is on the agenda politically at the moment.

GREG HOY: The work life balance is set to be tested as an election issue, with the political parties divided as to whether recent workplace reforms have helped or exacerbated the problem, which is compounded by the pressure of rising household debt as the cost of housing soars, and the risk of rising interest rates a perennial possibility. Indeed, the Australia Institute says rampant consumerism and unsustainable ambitions of affluence remain a big factor in increasing workloads. Regardless of the causes, the costs are becoming more evident.

CLIVE HAMILTON: There are plenty of marriages that have broken down as a result of the pressure that overwork has placed on people. The need to pay off big debts and the excessive hours they work, and it's tragic.

PHILLIP FREIER: And you add that then to the reality of many modern workplaces where people are expected to be available, maybe 24 hours a day, maybe seven days a week, where people are living with a constant low level of anxiety.

GREG HOY: Researchers like Dr Rennie D'Souza at the ANU's College of Medicine and Health Sciences have been studying the impact of workplace changes on a sample of 2,250 ACT workers, half public servants, half not.

DR RENNIE D'SOUZA, MEDICINE AND HEALTH SCIENCES, ANU: They rated low on poor physical health and they also had higher number of visits to the GP. We also looked at another aspect, looking at job insecurity and how that was affecting physical and mental health, and we found similar or even stronger associations between high job insecurity and depression, anxiety and visits to the GP.

GREG HOY: These factors, according to the researchers, had a clear impact on sick leave. The conclusions drawn are unlikely to be popular with the Government.

RENNIE D'SOUZA: This amount of job demands and long working hours is not going to be sustainable in the future. It's going to have an effect on people's mental and physical health, it's going to be a burden on the health care system. That in itself is going to be a large cost for the nation.

GREG HOY: It all makes the next summer holiday seem a long, long way away. So is life really a beach in Australia these days, or is that just a fanciful notion? It's a question that might well be answered at the ballot box.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Greg Hoy with that report.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1836677.htm

Ends



Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the nature and conduct of Public Diplomacy

The Values Deficit: How the ABC fails to deliver Australia's message around the world

Ends



ABC must put national values first
Opinion article published in The Australian on Monday, 29th January 2007

The public broadcaster is in breach of its charter to promote the Australian identity to other countries

THE ABC treats Australia like a bag of mixed lollies. The public broadcaster is strong on many key Australian values; others are discarded like a licorice-flavoured jellybean.

It is unambiguous in its support for liberal democracy. It has taken a strong position in favour of democracy and the institutions that support it. But its support for the free markets that ensured our prosperity leaves a lot to be desired.

The ABC is usually strong on human rights, regularly producing news editorials scathing of the injustices inflicted by government against individuals. In September last year, Lateline compiled a report on the state executions of innocent Chinese prisoners and showed unequivocal support for due process and a fair trial.

On the other hand, the ABC has produced critical reports that questioned the rights of the individual in Australian society. A report into industrial relations reform and the choice of workers to take responsibility for their conditions reflected a very different attitude to Australian values. The concept that workers and employers could come to a mutually agreeable arrangement without government interference is reported as a fait accompli.

This is where the ABC's ambivalence towards Australian values is most glaring. It has produced segments on the operation of the free market that hold it in contempt. Late last year stories on Lateline and The 7.30 Report flouted the benefits of media ownership deregulation. Segments were framed with a tone and structure that argued that where the market operated, Australians lost. Credibility was given to baseless speculation. Support for free markets was limited.

A story on foreign investment presented a similar scepticism of the operations of the free market. The message was clear: foreign business is bad, and where it invests its money, ordinary Australians lose. The tone of the segment reinforced narrow-minded, Hansonite prejudices against foreigners, an unfortunate position considering Australia has always been reliant on foreign capital and we benefit enormously from it.

Ultimately, it is no surprise that the ABC opposes free markets. Its very existence is anathema to competition: the public broadcaster is protected from the creative destruction that characterises the market economy.

Australians should not be afraid to unequivocally promote the superiority of its values. Our commitment to liberal democracy, human rights and free markets should be resolute and firm. They are a package deal, intrinsically intertwined and mutually supportive.

They are the framework for Australia's success as a nation.

Our strength comes from the framework of our society that unleashes the maximum potential of each individual. These are the values we wish for ourselves. They should be the values that we wish for others.

And they are the values espoused by the main political parties. Although there is often legitimate disagreement, there is a remarkable level of consensus: free markets, liberal democracy and human rights animate Australian public policy.

Each year, Australians pay tax dollars to the ABC to promote our values in the region. But instead of promoting these values, it insists on redefining them and promoting its own interpretation.

The consequence is a distorted message promoted to our neighbours, who would benefit from an unequivocal message: Our values created our prosperous society; adopting them will ensure your prosperity as well.

Societies formed in opposition to one or more of these values have always failed to achieve a similar standard. Failure to recognise the importance of these values to the establishment and maintenance of societies is to turn a blind eye to history.

The 20th century was a testament to the failures of societies that did not adopt these values. Instead of enjoying stability, dignity and prosperity, they suffered under tyranny, injustice, servitude and scarcity.

The failure to achieve prosperity through central planning and control ensured those societies brought conflict to Australia and its allies. They also ensured our prosperity was stifled.

It has become trendy to believe that these values are not universal, do not suit or are not the ambition of each society. History shows that every time people have a choice, they have voted with their feet. Just ask the refugees who risk their lives to get from Cuba to the US, or the North Koreans who seek out South Korea or Japan. There are few who make the return trip.

But when we try to ask the ABC to deliver this message to our neighbours, it is being lost along the way.

Under its charter, the ABC is charged with responsibility for promoting Australia's identity abroad. For instance, Lateline is broadcast to the region as part of the satellite Australia Network.

Criticism of the ABC's role in public diplomacy should not be grouped as part of a broader chorus of the failings of the ABC. The ABC often attracts criticism. Complaints of bias by the Government, Opposition and think tanks are common. It asserts its claim to be independent but, if we are to be honest, the best it can hope for is to be non-partisan.

But the rules are different in its responsibilities for public diplomacy. To fulfil its charter, it should not be merely neutral on Australia and its values. It should actively promote our interests and project our values to increase their appeal and adoption in the region.

The ABC is failing this mandate. In public diplomacy it is time to put the national interest and the values that support it first, and the ABC's role last.

Tim Wilson is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne and made a submission on Australian values and the role of the ABC in promoting them in the Asia-Pacific to the Senate inquiry into public diplomacy.

A copy of the Submission can be found here

Ends



Call for panel to vet ABC on values
Article published in The Australian on Friday, 26th January 2007

A COMMITTEE drawn from business and non-government organisations should be created to ensure all ABC programs, including its news and current affairs, project liberal democratic values.
The Institute of Public Affairs says the ABC is failing to promote Australian values as its programs are broadcast throughout Asia.

And in a submission to the Senate inquiry into public diplomacy, the conservative thinktank says one solution could be a representative oversight panel to ensure liberal democratic values "are central to all programs and communications" used in Australia's diplomacy.

It contends the ABC bears much of Australia's foreign influence, particularly through Asia, by broadcasting Australian values through Radio Australia and the satellite television channel, the Australian Network.

It also notes it has a responsibility under the ABC Charter to "encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs".

But after an analysis of the content of Lateline and The 7.30 Report during the final three months of last year, the IPA says in its submission the broadcaster's "record raises questions about the ABC's capacity to promote Australian values".

The IPA submission deduces Australia's current values as liberal democracy, human rights and free markets, based on the Howard Government's two white papers on foreign and trade policy.
On these criteria, ABC news and current affairs broadcasts were "limited in support for these values, surprisingly neutral and on occasion not supportive".

"The ABC has an important role to play in the `soft power' activities of Australia through Southeast Asia but at the moment, we're sending a dithered message," the submission's author, IPA Research Fellow Tim Wilson, told The Australian.

He dismissed the notion the submission's findings were predictable given the IPA's previous criticism of the public broadcaster. "It was an analysis conducted without any foreknowledge of what the outcome would be," he said.

The executive producer of Lateline, Peter Charley, said: "I haven't seen the report but feel we're fair, balanced and thorough."

"Three months is not a large amount of time in the life of a TV program or broadcaster, so I'm looking forward to reading the report in full," he said.

The fact that a Senate committee specifically asked the IPA to make a submission, will send tremors through ABC employees already lamenting the appointment of a director of editorial policies, Paul Chadwick.

The Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee invited submissions to its inquiry in November.

It will report by March 29.

A copy of the Submission can be found here

Ends



No benefits with strings
Opinion article published in The Courier Mail on Friday, 12th January 2007

Any Qantas takeover should not include government protection, writes Tim Wilson

The Foreign Investment Review Board is a relic

If it wasn't an election year, the recent suggestions that the Federal Government will attach highly restrictive strings to the acquisition of Qantas would seem ludicrous.

The downsides of these strings are obvious: they will undermine sustainable jobs and services and all at the expense of consumers.

But when it comes to Qantas, it seems good public policy loses every time.

There are two proposals under consideration beginning with a requirement for the consortium to commit to existing regional services.

Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile, who is also Transport Minister, has all but admitted that the Government will require commitments to regional services. As Nationals leader, the politics leave him with little room to move.

Such a proposal will do nothing to assist delivery of regional services.

Regional airline services should be provided on the basis of demand. If there is not the demand for these services, Qantas should not be obliged to provide them.

However, if this demand exists and if Qantas has not filled it, then there is no reason existing smaller airlines with lower overheads cannot move in and fill the market gap.

Small, independent airlines are flourishing in deregulated airline markets around the world to fill exactly these sorts of niche demands.

If Qantas is regulated to provide services they do not find economical, it will pass the costs on to consumers -- perhaps directly to regional consumers or even by raising ticket prices across all routes. In neither case do consumers benefit. The other string the Government is considering attaching is the requirement for jobs to be kept in Australia.

When the Macquarie-led bid was first proposed, Prime Minister John Howard made it clear -- you cannot preach the virtues of the free market and introduce laws to inhibit it every time it does something you don't like.

The decision to approve the takeover will ultimately be the Treasurer's on advice from the Foreign Investment Review Board. Peter Costello should be listening to the Prime Minister.

The entire approval process through the FIRB is a relic of days when foreign direct investment was treated with suspicion. More enlightened attitudes about foreigners investing in Australian companies have since developed but the FIRB remains an anachronism, particularly for a country that has always been dependent on importing capital.

Were it not for Qantas' size and transport deemed a "sensitive sector", the United States Free Trade Agreement would have done away with the need for approval.

To a certain extent, Qantas is in no position to complain. It already enjoys unnecessary protection as Australia's national carrier with preference for government flights and a near monopoly in trans-Pacific flights. It was only recently that Virgin Blue has been granted limited access on these routes. Companies that enjoy the benefits of government protection also have to wear it when that government turns on them.

Yet the Government is vulnerable on industrial relations because of the introduction of its WorkChoices package. Regardless, the Howard Government should know better than protecting existing jobs if it wants to promote long-term job sustainability and to create new jobs in the industry. Job protection will make Qantas less nimble in a competitive market. The more it is inhibited from reducing delivery costs, the more ticket prices will need to rise. This will make other, foreign-owned airlines more competitive taking ticket sales and the jobs attached to them.

It is clearly not a recipe for keeping Australian jobs and profits in the country.

Unions are supportive of the proposal. Their view is short- sighted. The job of a union is to protect the interests of its members and the people who pay the wages of union officials. Their job is not to represent the interests of working Australians, our national interest or the millions of Australians who fly with Qantas each year.

The best way to promote the interests of existing workers and create new jobs is to allow the industry to grow and develop by responding to consumer demand. This will ensure ticket prices are low and more people fly. Trying to rig the outcome will decrease the flying population. It also will ensure Qantas is sensitive to external shocks that have plagued the industry for the past five years.

Consumers already suffer because of Qantas entitlements on trans- Pacific routes. There is limited competition direct to the United States. If consumers want a cheaper price or do not want to fly with Qantas they have to fly via Asia or New Zealand.

Additional requirements to protect jobs will make Qantas uncompetitive.

If management decides to cut jobs to save costs and are blocked from doing so they will use other avenues.

It could include selling off or restructuring its Frequent Flyer program. It could also involve restructuring the company.

In that scenario jobs will not be lost to other countries, they will just be lost.

Tim Wilson is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs

Ends

December 2006 | ^Top^


The passing of a legend
Opinion article in the December edition of IPA Review

"The passing of a legend", IPA Review, December 2006

Ends


PM's hidden APEC emissions agenda
Opinion article published in The Age on Friday, 15th December 2006

HAS the Prime Minster already outflanked Kevin Rudd on climate change? Despite the focus on the global warming issue, by the time the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit is held in Australia, the Opposition Leader may have no policy left.

ALP strategists would be hoping Kevin Rudd's elevation would neutralise foreign affairs as an election issue. As Labor's foreign affairs spokesman since 2001, his understanding of this policy area should be considerable, and elections are rarely fought on foreign policy.

Yet, the context of the next federal election is likely to make foreign affairs a headache for Rudd. He may have much of this headache for himself. He has already outlined climate change as one of his key attack points against the Government.

Climate change will be central to the context of the next election. If there is any doubt about the contribution of context, just ask Kim Beazley about the 2001 election.

It presents a significant challenge for the Coalition. Regardless of the science, climate change is a policy issue that is resonating.

The politics of climate change is played on its opponent's turf. This is more true than ever: Rudd's widely acknowledged strength is foreign policy.

Rudd has tried to boost Labor's climate change credentials with the promotion of Peter Garrett as Opposition spokesman on the subject. But by the election, Labor will have little room to move. The politics of climate change is as much about the environment as the economy. The Howard Government is acutely aware of how an obsession with carbon dioxide reduction targets must correlate with job losses.

Australia will host APEC next year. There is no set date for the 2007 election, but dates in October or November are likely because of the APEC summit in September. It is protocol that an election cannot be called while a foreign head of state is in the country.

The APEC ministerial and bureaucratic forums will be held throughout 2007. At present the only meeting that gets any serious attention is the summit — when John Howard, George Bush and all the Asian leaders stand in a line and wear funny outfits

Howard will use APEC to support his electoral prospects. He has already indicated he will use APEC to establish a new climate-change pact. It is the perfect forum. APEC includes economies that are or will be the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the world.

More importantly, it is a forum where Europe is not at the table. The Kyoto Protocol failed because it was an agreement written for Europe. Kyoto suited Europe because it didn't undermine their energy production. Targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions are unsustainable for developing economies or economies dependent on coal, such as Australia.

They are not prepared to sacrifice economic growth and keep people trapped in poverty.

With Europe off the negotiating table, they will be bystanders. They will be locked out of negotiating the framework for one of the most important international pacts for the next 20 years. It will also mean the focus will shift from reducing carbon emissions through reduction targets to use of technology.

Meanwhile, Australia, the US and the major developing economies of Asia will endorse a pact that promotes growth, reduces emissions and is sensitive to alleviating poverty. The focus will be on developing, using and sharing technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

This will leave Labor with limited options. Rudd cannot harp on about Kyoto. It is already yesterday's agreement, with so many European economies failing to meet their emissions targets. The prospect of a new international agreement with the endorsement of the US and Asia will ensure it is officially buried.

And the Labor leader has already signalled his opposition to nuclear power. He cannot side with Europe and its emissions targets unless he is prepared to embrace a nuclear future. Such a proposition would tear federal Labor apart. It would also put federal Labor at odds with state Labor governments.

Targets will also provide ample evidence to the Coalition to aim at areas where Labor prioritises appeasing the Greens over keeping their jobs. Mark Latham learnt this lesson the hard way. Rudd will be forced to either support the pact or look like a pariah.

Howard can then call an election and bask in the images run on television of presidents Bush and Hu applauding his efforts. He will be able to crow that Australia has punched above its weight in securing one of the most important environmental pacts in history. And he will have demonstrated his capacity to marry relations between the current and emerging superpowers.

Howard will also be able to take quiet, personal satisfaction that he will have finally killed Paul Keating's image as Australia's big man in Asia. Rudd, the new head of Keating's party, will only be able to watch.

Tim Wilson is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. He previously worked at the Australian APEC Study Centre.

Ends



November 2006 | ^Top^


Friedman's success is based on his passion for freedom
Opinion article published in The Age on Tuesday, 21st November 2006

Freedom lost one of its foremost soldiers last week. Until his passing, Milton Friedman remained committed to the causes he championed. He is best known for his work on monetarism and its adoption by Reagan and Thatcher, but his success stemmed from his commitment to freedom.

I met Friedman last year. As a young and enthusiastic free marketeer, I took the chance to contact him when I was in the US. He invited me to his home on Knob Hill, San Francisco.

Friedman and I discussed global trade, the European Union, and his workload. What struck me was the depth of his understanding of contemporary issues. Most 93-year-olds would be enjoying their twilight years. But Friedman said he spent most of his time keeping on top of events, and literature. He was cogent and analytical and still contributing to intellectual life.

Until the day he died, he was senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a position he held since 1977. This office contrasts from the days he influenced the Oval Office or No. 10. Yet it is largely representative of how he conducted his life's work. He never sought high office, and used the power of ideas to sway government policy.

Critics have tried to rewrite his history. During the ceremony for his Nobel prize in 1976, protesters attacked him for working with the Pinochet government of Chile. What they ignored was his purpose and achievements. Pinochet brought Friedman to Chile to slay the dragon of hyper-inflation. It was bankrupting the country due to the communist inflationary policies of Salvador Allende. Friedman successfully argued that reducing state intervention in the economy would slow inflation and promote growth. For Friedman, his aim was as much to slow inflation as it was to promote economic freedom.

He believed that by promoting economic freedom, social and political freedom would follow. History shows he was right. In an interview for the 2002 television series Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, he pointed to the link between the return of democracy in Chile to the economic liberty he was responsible for. He can also take much credit for Chile's wealth that embarrasses neighbouring socialist economies. Not surprisingly, his help to structurally reform an oppressive Chinese communist state did not attract the same ire.

In the 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, he argued for economic freedom to protect social and political freedoms.

He convinced a generation of Americans that free markets were under attack from the false promise of socialism and the welfare state. When governments take responsibility for economic security they must use its coercive authority to direct resources to achieve this goal. The nightmare of 1984 is shared by Orwell and Friedman.

Free markets trade security for liberty. Friedman argued the most successful societies were those that unleashed the maximum potential of individuals, rather than trying to suppress it for equality or stability.

Free markets also curtail the excesses of government by promoting individual power and responsibility. This comes to the core of his faith in freedom and the individual, and that "underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself".

To have faith in free markets, you have to have faith in freedom; to have faith in freedom you need to have faith in humanity. He did. His faith in humanity is the essence of his contribution and attitude.

Many have cited his preference for the Republican Party as evidence of a conservative. Friedman was a radical. He often said he was philosophically a classical liberal and for pragmatism, a Republican. Yet he championed causes that riled many of his Republican contemporaries, such as the decriminalisation of drugs, his opposition to conscription, and the US invasion in Iraq. Friedman had what so many other self-anointed radicals don't - a consistent framework that he saw the world through. He saw everything through its impact on human freedom.

This is what drove him to establish the Friedman Foundation. Its charter remains the promotion of school choice for parents. Friedman believed vouchers would marry the benefits of choice with the need for universal access to education.

Despite his work, teacher unions resisted any push for increased demands in an education market. They used the weapons of class envy to promote fears parents with privilege would top-up the value of their children's education.

Friedman remained undeterred. He said when parents used money to buy alcohol and cigarettes no one complained. When it was spent to top up the financial contribution of their children's education, parents were charged with anti-egalitarianism.

Compared with fighting back the tide of Keynesian economic policy, his work on school vouchers remains unfulfilled. But trials have been held, and the idea has moved from the fringes to the mainstream. In 2000, then governor Bush announced his support for a school vouchers program as part of the platform for the presidency.

We have lost one of freedom's greatest advocates. Yet his legacy is not the sum of his individual contribution, but the promise of the benefits of his life's work extending to those who do not now enjoy them.

Tim Wilson is a consultant on market and trade liberalisation and globalisation, and a contributor to the Institute of Public Affairs journal, Review.

Ends



September 2006 | ^Top^


Free markets vital for a free world
Opinion article published in The Age on Tuesday, 26th September 2006

There's plenty more at stake if the Doha Round of trade talks fail, writes Tim Wilson.

THE Cairns Group — which represents 18 of the world's largest agricultural economies — met in Cairns last week to discuss the ailing state of the Doha Round of negotiations in the World Trade Organisation. The aim was to provide impetus to restart talks following their indefinite suspension in late July.

The group's message is clear: it does not want the round to fail. Free trade brings wealth creation and provides the most powerful force for economies to develop and meet the material needs and expectations of the poorest. The five-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks should help refocus the developed and developing world on the benefits of free markets and our ailing commitment to one of its pillars, free trade.

On September 11, planes flew into the symbols of America's success. American 77 flew into the Pentagon, a building that represents America's military strength. The precise destination of the doomed United 93 remains unknown, but it was almost certainly heading for symbols of America's mature democracy, the Capitol building or the White House. When flights United 175 and American 11 flew into the World Trade Centre, they were attacking the symbols of the United States' economic wealth, a wealth built on the foundations of free markets and a wealth enjoyed by other free-market economies, notably allies of the US.

Al-Qaeda wants Islamists to gain control of the levers of government, like the mullahs of Iran, the Taliban of Afghanistan and the Hamas of the Palestinian Authority. Their aim is to impose their will on people, resorting to the legitimate use of force that government provides. Free markets remain an anathema to this agenda. Free markets represent the empowerment of the individual against the excesses of government power. They stand for voluntary exchange over coercion. They provide the material abundance government cannot provide.

Meeting people's material needs can be achieved either by a central authority or by encouraging individuals to take responsibility through the marketplace.

Through central direction, government becomes responsible for meeting the material needs of people and, in the process, must gain control over our lives to ensure that outcome. Where it needs to, it can rely on the legitimate use of force to impose its will.

Free markets keep checks on the excesses of government regulation. Where government becomes too large, it discourages the flow of investment capital necessary for economic development. In the process, it undermines the capacity for it to meet the needs of the population.

Free markets ensure a free media that can remain critical of the excesses of government authority. The absence of a free market places the media in the hands of government that can use and abuse its authority to impress its ideas on people. Communist dictator Joseph Stalin once famously said: "Ideas are more powerful than guns, we would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?"

The spirit of Stalin's quote is representative of the challenge that oppressive governments now face in trying to control our thinking. We now live in an age of super-empowered individuals where the internet has provided each person with the opportunity to produce websites and blogs that can command the readership of newspapers.

The tragedy is the licence it also gives to terrorists and their sympathisers. It is little wonder that oppressive governments are working hard to limit the reach of the internet because of its capacity to empower individuals and expose them to new ideas outside the government-sponsored line.

Free markets are the foundation of the wealth and decadence terrorists so despise. Our wealth and success embarrasses them and the false hope they promote through religious servitude. Perhaps, most importantly, free trade promotes peace. In the past, countries have gone to war to accumulate resources and land. Free trade enables goods, services, skills and technology to be acquired through voluntary means, undermining the justification for conflict.

When al-Qaeda and its sympathisers gain control of government, they can abuse the legitimate use of violence and authority that comes with it. Iran and Afghanistan provide ample evidence of how it will be used. Mistreatment, torture and execution through the judgement of moral police will follow.

The victims will be the same as all the victims of the abuse of government power, those most vulnerable, including ethnic and religious minorities, women and homosexuals. Free markets promote wealth creation and empowerment of the individual and that undermines these excesses. Yet July's suspension of WTO talks shows how little we understand of the benefits of free markets for building and maintaining social and political freedom. The fate of millions of the world's poor lies dormant while trade ministers debate how the round can be saved to help enrich their countries.

The anniversary of September 11 should remind us there is more at stake than just poverty eradication. If we want to live in a world that stays on the offensive against terrorism, it is time we got the Doha Round back on track.

Tim Wilson is a trade consultant for ITS Global. www.itsglobal.net

Ends



August 2006 | ^Top^

Fair-trade coffee only brews more poverty
Opinion article published in The Australian Financial Review on Saturday, 12th August 2006

More and more consumer goods are proudly displaying the "fair trade" moniker. Shops are now proudly presenting the fair-trade brand in catalogues, shopfronts and websites.

It's branded on clothes, chocolate, soccer balls and its most prominent vanguard, coffee. In the United States, Wal-Mart - regularly attacked by self-anointed "progressives" for its sale of cheap free-trade imports - has started stocking fair-trade coffee. Starbucks has been doing so for years. McDonald's recently announced it is now following suit. Fair trade has become the new chic brand to appease Western consumer guilt.

Critics claim unregulated free trade undermines labour standards, ensures cheap wages and delivers little to anyone but big multinational corporations. They argue that laissez-faire trade is essentially tipped in favour of the rich, against the poor.

In opposition, the fair-trade campaign aims to create a level playing field that tips the rules of the game in favour of the poor, through stabilised wages, prices and profits to producers and workers. Marketed as a means for consumers to "satisfy their palate and their conscience at the same time", it is a wildly distorted campaign of misdiagnosis and misrepresentation.

Certainly consumers are welcome to purchase "social justice" with their morning latte. But rather than aiding development, the fair-trade coffee campaign implicitly promotes a return to the managed trade system in coffee that has hindered coffee-producing developing nations since the 1960s.

The fair-trade campaign aims to manage the international coffee trade by fixing prices at $US1.26 ($1.64) per pound and eventually fixing supply. In doing so, it is similar to the former International Coffee Agreement established in 1963. The ICA was developed by a UN agency, the International Coffee Organisation, to manage trade for developing countries and provide an industry to grow a product that could be exported to rich countries. The ICA stabilised prices through quotas and controlled supply. When there was an excess of supply, surplus coffee was destroyed or withheld to ensure the price never fell. The result was endemic corruption as dictators in developing countries doled out coffee-growing licences to mates or the highest bidder.

In 1989 the ICA collapsed with the end of the Cold War and so did its controls. Coffee production exploded as opportunities for individuals and countries previously locked out established production. Brazil alone doubled its output. New countries entered the market, including Vietnam, which increased its production tenfold. Textbook economics applied then as now - when supply outstripped demand, prices plummeted. By 1992 coffee futures had bottomed and supply had massively outgrown demand.

Concurrent to the bottoming of the market, consumer consumption of coffee went through a renaissance, particularly in the United States. The exemplar of the trend is the now common international trademark, Starbucks. Starbucks changed coffee consumption in the world's largest economy from a standard "cup of joe" to a personalised coffee experience; and they paid a premium for it. While consumer prices rose for soy-macchiatos, little of the benefit flowed to producers in developing countries.

Critics cited the high consumer prices coupled with the bottoming of the market wholesale price as evidence of the failure of the free market. To lift prices for developing countries NGOs proposed a repackaged form of the old managed-trade system - fair trade.

In an influential 2002 report, Mugged: Poverty in your coffee cup, Oxfam International dubbed the lowered prices as a "coffee crisis". Yet, comparing current low prices against old ICA prices is simply naive. The ICA artificially inflated prices and locked producers out, keeping prices high to the benefit of a select few - certainly not the poor. It did not tie price with demand or quality, just the relationships of producers to those doling out the licences.

Rather than blaming the tired, corrupt ICA system for inflating prices, Oxfam has ferociously attacked corporations who buy coffee from the producers and retailers, blaming them for the low prices. By blaming excess profit, the campaign makes for good populist politics but ignores reality. The actual coffee component in your latte amounts only to between 5 and 7 per cent of the total cost, outstripped by double-digit labour and rental costs.

Fair-trade rules can actually work against poor producers. Enterprising individuals are excluded - perhaps reflecting the dominant ideology of the movement, fair-trade coffee is only purchased from collectives.

Collectives are supposed to be established along democratic lines where individual producers trade their product as part of a collective agreement, but with a fixed price there is no opportunity to leverage higher prices. Nor is there any incentive for each producer to deliver a better-quality product when theirs is not differentiated from other collective members. Returns are distributed according to collective decision, presenting opportunities for cronyism and preferential deals based on personal and political relationships.

Despite its shortcomings, the fair-trade campaign has caught on with left-wing activists and it has become central to social-justice campaigns such as Make Poverty History.

But years after it was introduced it has failed to attract consumer support. In 2004 Starbucks' total sales of fair-trade coffee amounted to 1.6 per cent of its total coffee sales. It sells it only in 17 countries, despite operating stores in twice that number of countries. Unsurprisingly those countries are almost entirely in the developed world. An internal Oxfam Australia report shows it is worth only $2 million. Internationally it is only worth $US87 million of the total $US10 billion trade.

Using emotive language, Oxfam claims coffee companies are "exploiting Third World farmers". This is a deliberate tactic to play on the middle-class guilt of consumers in developed countries who have escaped poverty. What Oxfam ignores is that developed countries have escaped poverty because they chose the decentralised, wealth-creating free-market system. Oxfam's repackaged managed-trade system, now branded as fair trade, is the same system that has locked out the wealth-creating potential of developing countries.

Economic development for poor countries is essential. The best means to achieve it is to ensure that market-flexible, competitive industries are established to provide sustainable avenues for employment and wealth creation. When this is done countries will be able to use the wealth-creating opportunities of trade to export into rich countries.

Fair trade, or any other attempt to engineer global commerce, will not achieve this. Oxfam and other fair-trade advocates want us to focus our consumer dollar on buying from their select few collectives. They want our consumer dollar to go a shorter distance, not a longer one. The benefits will flow to these select few who get it, but it will be devastating for the people it misses. They will be the people who never got employed in a job consumers never created for failing to spread our limited resources wider.

The fair-trade campaign misses the point of why products are cheap and its "remedy" will do nothing to help the material lot of the world's poorest. The best solution to fix the state of coffee prices is to allow market forces to decide the price, not reinstitute managed trade.

Blind devotion to "fair" trade will only lock up coffee production again for the select few. As an alternative to the trade liberalisation model of development, it is sorely wanting.

Ends



July 2006 | ^Top^


Macchiato Myths
Opinion article published in the July 2006 edition of the IPA Review

"Macchiato Myths", IPA Review (Cover Story), July 2006
Cover, IPA Review, IPA Review, July 2006



June 2006 | ^Top^


Retarding Development - Compulsory disclosure in IP law of ownership and use of biological or genetic resources
Paper co-authored by Alan Oxley and Sophie Edelstein on proposed amendments to the WTO's TRIPS Agreement and the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity

- "Retarding Development - Compulsory disclosure in IP law of ownership and use of biological or genetic resources", The Australian APEC Study Centre, June 2006


December 2005 | ^Top^


Should business just say 'no'?
Opinion article published in the December 2005 edition of the IPA Review

"Should business just say 'no'?", IPA Review, December 2005



Fair traders make point with donkeys
Article published on ninemsn.com.au on Saturday, 10th December 2005

A protest rally through central Melbourne that included eight donkeys won some support from the British government in the fight for fair international trade rules.

Some 200 campaigners, marching under the banner of "Make Poverty History", called for the United States and European countries to drop their multi-billion dollar agricultural subsidies during next week's World Trade Organisation meeting in Hong Kong.

As well, the protesters want poor countries to be allowed to set their own timetables for how and when they liberalise their own protected agricultural markets.

The protesters and their caravan of donkeys delivered their message to the French and British consulates in Melbourne.

A delegation, led by Oxfam Australia executive director Andrew Hewett, returned triumphant from the British consulate where they were given a prepared letter from the United Kingdom's trade minister Alan Johnson.

In an open letter to the trade justice movement, Mr Johnson said his government agreed to lobby the European Union against forced liberalisation.

"The UK believes that developing countries should not be forced to open up their markets either through trade negotiations or aid conditionality," Mr Johnson wrote.

Developing countries should make their own decisions in opening their markets "in line with their own national development plans and poverty reduction strategies."

Agricultural trade - heavily protected by both poor and rich nations - will top the agenda at next week's sixth WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong, commonly referred to as the Doha round of trade negotiations.

Earlier, Mr Hewett told the gathering the US and EU poured $350 billion worth of subsidies into their farm sectors each year.

"A cow in Europe is subsidised to the tune of $2 a day. That's more than what two billion people live on every day.

"It's grotesque, it's a scandal and it needs to be stopped here and now."

But as the Oxfam chief was urging fairer trade rules, a lone counter-protester from Monash University's Australian APEC Study Centre was handing leaflets saying poor countries should also abolish trade barriers.

Tim Wilson, a project manager at the centre which delivers AusAID-funded development programs, said Oxfam's "fair trade" policy would keep poor countries poor and make rich countries richer.

Ends



September 2005 | ^Top^


Friedman at 93
Opinion article published in the September 2005 edition of the IPA Review

"Friedman at 93", IPA Review, September 2005



July 2004 | ^Top^


Mark Latham and the AUSFTA
Letter to the Editor published in The Australian Financial Review on Friday, 30th July 2004

Opposition Leader Mark Latham insists he is not prepared to commit to supporting the Australia-US free-trade agreement despite all Labor premiers backing the deal.

Why can't Latham be more like Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, who has the courage to stand up to the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary, Doug Cameron, and say openly that the AMWU's numbers are based on "voodoo economics".

Latham has made it clear in the past that he thinks Cameron is a neo-protectionist. Why has he suddenly backed down in the face of the challenge of an FTA?

Beattie is right. The sooner the FTA is passed, the sooner the economy will enjoy the benefits. Our business needs investment flows from rich countries like the US to help us finance capital projects.

Without this investment the likelihood of jobs growth is zilch, and the likelihood of gradual decline is high.

Ends



Michael Moore's cultural imperialism
Letter to the Editor published in the Herald Sun on Wednesday, 21st July 2004

Michael Moore should stop telling us who we should and should not be voting for. This is our
country, so stop telling us what to do.

Ends



Education is sticking it to Moore
Letter to the Editor published in The Age, published in The Age's Victorian Certificate of Education Backgrounder Section on Monday, 19th July 2004

Michael Moore's call for 'regime change' in Australia (The Age, 8/7) has only solidified my
support for sticking by our 'man of steel', John Howard.

Ends



Latham's crocodile tears
Letter to the Editor published in the Herald Sun on Wednesday, 7th July 2004

Considering Mark Latham's history of defaming people under parliamentary privilege, it really is
crocodile tears when he complains that former colleagues in the ALP and his ex-wife are running a
campaign to demonstrate his incapacity to lead Australia.

Any campaign against him is more demonstrative of Mark Latham's past behaviour.

Ends



June 2004 | ^Top^


Labor's advertising joke
Letter to the Editor published in the Herald Sun on Wednesday, 30th June 2004

Any demand from a Latham government that the Howard Government repay money spent on government advertising programs should be followed by similar demands to Paul Keating and Steve Bracks.

Ends



They'll get it one way or the other
Letter to the Editor published in The Australian on Tuesday, 22nd June 2004

Mark Latham's announcement to over-regulate banks is merely the 2004 equivalent of past ALP policy to nationalise banks. Now the ALP has "grown up" and learnt there is little achieved by owning
banks, but it has not stopped them wanting to run them.

Latham's plan will only force up the price of banking services. Knowing this, Latham has also
decided that they should not be able to raise fees. Banks are unlikely to take less profits to help
Latham's electoral support. What is their next best option to reclaim lost income?

Increase interest rates on home loans, hurting working families trying to buy their own home.

Under Mark Latham's plan all Australians will be worse off as we are held captive to interest rate
rises to help boost the Opposition's electoral support outside the big cities.

Ends



Spurlock's Sham
Letter to the Editor published in The Age on Tuesday, 15th June 2004

I was glad to read that the managing director of McDonald's has decided to expose the sham that is
Morgan Spurlock' s Super Size Me (The Age, 14/6).

The simple fact is the consumption of any food in excess, including