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Category: Government

26/11/2022

The IR Bill- two problems and a suggestion

25 November 2022

When I buy petrol, I sometimes ask the attendant how much he or she is paid. Often they glance at the CCTV camera and say that they cannot answer that. But the other morning early I asked an attendant who looked like a very tired student from the Indian subcontinent. Yes, she had worked all night, a 12 hour shift for $10/hour cash. I asked her how she thought she might get a decent wage. She replied, ‘Well, an Australian boss might help’. I took this to mean someone who paid an award wage.

As small business tries hard to exempt itself from ‘sector-wide’ bargaining, I wondered how she will fare if there is still no industry-wide award or no enforcement. What will change?

I have a friend who runs a small business and he says that although wages have not risen, neither have small business profits. I asked why? He said that the supply chain had ‘consolidated’ and took a larger share of the final price. One might note that Deliveroo just left food delivery, Amazon is taking an increased percentage of online retail sales, Airbnb takes an increasing percentage of accommodation spending, Uber has increased its percentage take from its rides, and Spotify pays very little to those who make their music. It is the Monopoly game in real life, the big get bigger and the frail are pressed to the rail. The view that the biggest problem small business has is big business seems a neglected truism. The question is whether this will or indeed can be addressed by Federal Parliament. The point is that competition drives down prices, but cartels and oligopolies develop if not stopped. A new book looks at this problem, Chokepoint Capitalism www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/books/2022/11/30/chokepoint-capitalism#mtr

Another aspect is that the system seems totally unable to restrain is the salaries of top executives. One person I know advised, ‘I always vote against the management salary increases at the AGM’. There is legislation that salary rises have to be approved by the shareholders, but it seems that the top executives always have enough proxies to ensure that they salary rises come despite the efforts of small shareholders like my friend. So I suggest legislation that stipulates that no executive may get more money than, say, 20 times the full time equivalent hourly rate of the lowest paid person in the organisation. It seems that a few hundred thousand at the top does not matter, but a few dollars at the bottom do. This needs to brought into perspective.

25/11/2022

Fire Bombing of Friendly Jordie a Litmus Test

24 November 2022

The fire-bombing of the Bondi home of Friendly Jordie on 23/11/22 will be a litmus test for the NSW Police.

Friendly Jordie is a comedian and political commentator who took on John Barilaro, famously staying at his luxury property while filming commentary critical of him. He was then accused of stalking Barilaro, using Police powers usually limited to terrorist suspects, which looked very much like abuse of Police powers.
He has a considerable audience, particularly among younger viewers.

Clearly this was a threat to him personally.

I have some experience of this. In 1983 I was living alone in Newtown in an upstairs bedroom and at about 3am I was woken by the sound of breaking glass downstairs. I looked out, but could see nothing. Quite quickly there was a smell of kerosene and immediately after the whoosh of a fire being lit and a raging fire in our back lane, like a car on fire. In some trepidation I ran downstairs, went to the back door, turned on the outside light and started to hose the back fence. There was no response from any neighbours and I reflected that in a house full of semi-detached houses almost everyone except me slept in the front bedrooms away from the lane. My hose did not have a nozzle, so I stood at the back door and had put my finger in the end of the hose to direct the water. There was an explosion and the light went out. This was pretty frightening, but it turned out that some of the water from my hose had squirted upwards onto the light, which had exploded, luckily a little away from directly overhead.

After a while the fire died down somewhat and I took stock of the situation and ventured to the back gate. A car was burning out close to the fence, but the fence was undamaged. I called triple zero and reflected on the situation. There was a World Congress of Advertising Agencies at the Opera House on and two days before, BUGA UP had staged some street theatre on the forecourt with a confession booth with ‘Redeematiser’ sign on it, and a ‘priest’ in a cassock urging advertisers to come in and confess their sins. I had been there to get interviews for my radio program ‘Puff Off- Australia’s leading program on smoking.’ An executive from the ‘Tobacco Institute’ had walked by and been conspicuously unamused.

The Fire brigade arrived very quickly, put the rest of the fire out and prised open the boot, which was empty. I waited for the Police for about an hour, then went back to bed. The Police turned up about an hour later, more than 2 hours after I had called and the officer smelled strongly of alcohol. I told him of my concerns about who might have been responsible for the incident, but he was quite dismissive. He said that people often set cars alight. I said that I had lived in the area for more than a decade, went for long evening walks and had never seen a car set alight. He said that he would get the chassis number from the number plate on the computer, (as he did not want to bother even looking under the now-cooled bonnet). Some years later there was a lot of publicity about corruption allegations in Newtown Police Station.

So there is a real question whether the fire bombing attack on Friendly Jordie will be investigated adequately. He has a far higher profile than I had, and fire-bombing a house is more extreme than torching a car. But his allegations touch Caesar nearer.

Here is the story in the SMH:

ARSON INVESTIGATION
YouTuber ponders suspect shortlist after latest attack
Sally Rawsthorne, Sarah Keoghan, SMH 24 November 2022
YouTube personality Jordan Shanks-Markovina, better known as Friendlyjordies, says he has a ‘‘long list of suspects’’ in the alleged arson attack on his Bondi home on Wednesday, the second time the address has been targeted in a week.
Police and Fire and Rescue NSW have launched investigations after the property in the eastern suburbs sustained ‘‘significant’’ fire damage in the early hours of the morning.
Shanks-Markovina, 33, who is an Australian political commentator and stand-up comedian, said yesterday he had a ‘‘long list of suspects’’ based on his work.
‘‘We’ve done some extremely dangerous reporting over the last year on a bunch of extremely powerful people and corporations; there are many people that would want to do that,’’ he said.
‘‘I do have a shortlist in my head of who I think could’ve done it. I would hope that the NSW strike force that is supposedly set up for fixated people and terrorists would be looking into this instead of a comedian and his team for six months straight,’’ he said.
Friendlyjordies producer Kristo Langker was charged by NSW Police’s Fixated Persons Unit in June last year and accused of stalking former NSW deputy premier John Barilaro. The charges were later dropped.
There is no suggestion Barilaro is involved in the alleged arson attack.
‘‘Someone has just tried to kill Jordan Shanks,’’ his lawyer, Mark Davis, said.
It is the second fire at the home, which is a subdivision, in a week. Davis said last Thursday’s arson attack hit the other dwelling mistakenly. ‘‘It’s the second time, there was an attempt [last week].’’
Shanks-Markovina yesterday posted an image of the fire to his Instagram account, captioning it ‘‘I’m still alive’’.
The YouTuber was not home at the time of the alleged attack because he couldn’t find his key, instead spending the night at another property.
Emergency services were called to Wilga Street by multiple neighbours just after midnight on Wednesday. ‘‘The fire is being treated as suspicious,’’ Fire and Rescue NSW’s Adam Dewberry said.
Specialist forensic police and dogs ‘‘trained in the use of detecting accelerants’’ will investigate the cause of the fire, he said.
NSW Fire and Rescue said it took crews half an hour to extinguish the blaze, which ‘‘caused fairly significant damage’’.
The home remained a crime scene yesterday, with detectives arriving at the address in the afternoon as the smell of smoke hung in the air.
‘‘Officers from eastern suburbs police area command attended along with Fire and Rescue NSW and found the veranda of the house well alight,’’ police said.
‘‘The fire was extinguished with significant damage caused to the home and an adjoining property.’’
Shanks-Markovina has been a YouTube personality for around a decade. He has interviewed Kristina Keneally, Tanya Plibersek and former prime minister Kevin Rudd among others.
Recent videos on his YouTube channel, which claims 627,000 subscribers, include ‘‘KFC Workers Confess Their Sins’’ and ‘‘Anthony Albanese: Enemy to Women?’’.

24/11/2022

The US is in Trouble and we with it.

24 November 2022

The re-election of Biden and the much-hyped failure of the ‘Red Wave’ at the US mid-term elections has given rise to the perception that although the US is deeply divided, it will be OK.

Sadly, this is probably not the case. In the Anglo world, people do not really win elections, they lose them and the alternative gets in. The quality of the alternative is often not considered. Trump was generally seen as a narcissistic psychopath, who did nothing but criticise and create fantasies. He lost the election, but continued the fantasy that he was robbed, despite the fact that the US electoral system is quite corrupt with the politicians setting their own electoral boundaries and changing the voter registration rules to rort the system and actually hugely favours the Republicans.

President Biden got in, but inflation has hugely increased, leaving the US, with its very poor welfare system in real trouble. Traditionally the ‘mid-term’ elections decimates the party in power. So the Democrats were supposed to be decimated by a ‘Red wave’, (red being the colour of the Republicans remarkably enough). Because of the memory of Trump’s incompetence and the poor quality of the Republican candidates, the Democrats retained control of the Senate, but narrowly lost control of the House of Representatives.

So things may appear to be stable. But the US is a deeply divided country, quietly sinking as a world power, and though the Republican majority is slim, they will be able to frustrate any action that Biden and the Democrats try to take to improve the situation. And if nothing improves, the government i.e. the Democrats will be blamed next election.

So who are the Rebublicans who are likely to choose? Front-runner for Republican Presidential candidates is Florida governor, Rick DeSantis. Sadly, he is almost Trumpian in his simplicity and wants to lump all progressive policies together as ‘woke’ (a word that is really extending and working overtime). So the tried and true formula of not being ‘for’ something, but being against ‘woke’ or ‘marxism’ (hey, what’s the difference) will be used to turn against any progressive ideas and look after the big end of town. This could be called fascism, but perhaps we should avoid name-calling at this stage.

How any of this will fix the huge problems in the US is beyond my ken, but when the US becomes dysfunctional the ramifications for the world, including us are likely to be significant, particularly if we continue to follow their policies like lapdogs.

DeSantis’ ideology is clearer, darker and more coherent than Trump’s

24/11/2022

iCare- a letter to the Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald

24 November 2022

Dear Editor,
iCare was set up by private insurers on their model with the NSW government keen to minimise costs, take profits and distribute them (just before the last election). So iCare delays or refuses treatments to the needy, and was very careless about what their Pre-Accident Average Weekly Earnings (PIAWE) were. Many accident victims complained that they were underpaid, and that was before their compensation was stopped or cut because they were certified partially fit to do jobs that could not be found.

The overheads of Medicare are about 5%, iCare about 38%, so it is totally inefficient as well as incompetent with bloated salaries for the top executives who think it is a financial problem rather than a medical one and hence are unable to solve it. The real solution would be to fund Medicare as the only medical system and let the insurers have widespread income-guarantee insurance.
Sincerely
Dr Chesterfield-Evans- works as a GP specialising in Workers Comp and CTP injuries.

Here is an article from today’s SMH

EXCLUSIVE
Injured workers to lose benefits
Adele Ferguson

Greg Dayman is one of almost 400 workers who will get a Christmas ‘‘present’’ they will never forget.

The Sydney construction worker was badly injured on a building site in 2013, which left him unable to work with chronic pain in his neck, the side of his head, down his arm, torso and leg.

In 2017 he was among thousands of employees whose compensation payments to cover wages were cut as part of controversial reforms to the state’s scandal-ridden icare organisation. Changes to the legislation terminated injured workers receiving weekly wage benefits after five years unless they met a whole body impairment assessment of more than 20 per cent.
However, he still received medical or health benefits. Now he has found out even these will be cut from December 25.

‘‘It’s another upper-cut,’’ he said. ‘‘And to do it on Christmas Day, that’s just cruel.’’

Dayman is one of 395 workers facing a grim future as a crisis at icare deepens, with a document prepared by the State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) revealing the workers’ compensation scheme ‘‘has deteriorated to the point the longer-term sustainability of the scheme is under threat’’.

NSW Auditor-General Margaret Crawford will hold a performance audit into icare next year that will examine how effectively key risks are managed, including the rising cost of workers’ compensation claims and its payment processes. Dayman said he lost everything after his injury.

‘‘I lost my health, my career, and financially I’m in a position that if my specs break I can’t afford to buy them. The system dehumanises you, so you give up.’’

He does now qualify for a disability pension but will have to rely on Medicare for future medical treatment. ‘‘I have been suicidal at times because of the system and the way it treats you,’’ he said. ‘‘My time is spent trying to survive.’’

In the executive summary of SIRA’s review into icare’s Nominal Insurer Improvement Plan, dated September 26, the authority said it had a ‘‘low level’’ of confidence icare’s strategy would improve return to work rates and overall performance.

In 2015-16, 93 per cent of injured workers were back at work 26 weeks after their injury, compared with 84 per cent in August 2022.
SIRA said it believed icare’s strategy ‘‘encompasses an increase in work capacity decisions to cease worker benefits instead of focusing on improving health and recovery through return to work’’.
Richard Harding, icare’s managing director and CEO, said it was the insurer’s role to implement the law, and legislation ‘‘does not give icare any discretion to act outside that’’. ‘‘Tailored and individualised support is provided to workers transitioning from the workers’ compensation scheme,’’ he said. ‘‘This may include support from NDIS, Community Support Services and Medicare in conjunction with their GP.’’

This masthead this week revealed a third underpayment scandal of injured workers and concerns raised by NSW Treasury in August that a deterioration in icare’s finances would require insurance premiums to rise 33 per cent by 2025, or $1 billion a year, to cover the shortfall.

Against this backdrop, the icare board granted pay increases to 116 of its executives, including Harding, making him one of the state’s top-paid public servants, earning more than $1 million a year.
Shadow Treasurer Daniel Mookhey said icare’s finances were in a catastrophic condition.

‘‘They’ve lost billions. They are planning massive premium hikes. And their next step is to expel even more injured workers from the system,’’ he said.

‘‘It is a ruthless tactic stemming from their financial desperation.’’
In a statement, SIRA chief executive Adam Dent said its views on the Nominal Insurer Improvement Plan in September were made with limited detail on how the plan would be executed.

‘‘Over recent weeks, SIRA has continued to engage with icare to address information gaps, including detailed briefings on managing IT and transition risks associated with the onboarding of new claims services providers.’’

But SIRA said poor return to work performance continued to be an issue of concern.

‘‘Icare’s targets for 2023 are lower than current return to work rates, and they are projecting a further decline of 2.5 per cent on 26-week return to work rates through 2023 and 2024 as the scheme transitions to new claims providers,’’ Dent said.

Icare said its focus was building injured workers’ capacity for employment using rehabilitation providers and associated vocational placement interventions. ‘‘This includes assistance with job seeking and vocational retraining. Work capacity decision-making is applied when the worker has a demonstrated capacity for work and has been provided the right support.’’
Lifeline: 13 11 14

24/11/2022

Australia’s Role in the COP 27 Farce in Egypt.

24 November 2022

It seems that there is a growing view that gas is part of decarbonising the world to save it from Climate Change. The term ‘Climate Change’ is itself a euphemism for ‘Global Warming’ as the latter is a bit more threatening, like we have ‘new prices’ rather than ‘price rises’.

Natural gas is largely methane, which is carbon and hydrogen and burns to carbon dioxide and water. But methane is itself also a greenhouse gas, far more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of its warming effects, and quite a lot of it escapes into the atmosphere unburnt, especially if it is released by fracking. One may remember Jeremy Buckingham’s videos of him lighting the gas coming out of the river in Grafton. Carbon Capture and Storage or CCS is a bad joke, with the fossil fuel industry getting grants to research this. My view it is merely a tactic to play for time, like the search for the ‘safe cigarette’. It allows them to keep doing what they are doing, as regulators hope for a technofix.

The fossil fuel industry was in Egypt and seems did quite well, getting agreements to cut down on coal, but not gas and oil. And Australia’s approval for more gas was not criticised here, presumably because Europe is in such a mess with no Russian gas that they had become dependent on.

The cost of extracting gas has not changed, but Australia’s gas companies can just charge the world’s prices and can pocket the extra margin, known in economics as ‘super normal profits’. It might be noted that silly Liz Truss in the UK was going to subsidise gas for the people, i.e. simply give the extra profits to the gas companies by creating a taxpayer debt; a Tory idea of ‘welfare’. In Australia we just let the money go from consumers to the companies with few royalties. Norway and Qatar benefit from their resources- we don’t.

It seems that the COP meeting in Egypt was overshadowed by the G20 and the ASEAN meetings, but it is also likely that Egypt was leaned on by its affluent neighbours, the Middle East fossil fuel producers.

Here is a summary- it is not encouraging. The much-praised Albanese government has not done enough!

COP27: Australia promotes fossil fuels as pathway to carbon neutrality

24/11/2022

Danny Lim Bashing a bad sign of the times

24 November 2022

Danny Lim is a regular at many protests. He is a very kind and gentle man, and his protests are quite individual and idiosyncratic with very humane values. He would never harm anyone, and the way he was thrown face first onto the tiled floor at the Queen Victoria Building by the Police is frankly a disgrace.

As the gap between rich and poor widens with neo-liberal policies and a welfare system which is starved of funds, the level of social frustration rises. Many times in Parliament I was asked to pass legislation which simply increased Police powers, mostly in response to an item in the media where some crime had occurred. There was never any question as to why the crime occurred, there was simply an increase in Police powers and usually the maximum fines or sentences. The Police Service was re-named the Police Force, presumably to reflect the same philosophy. No one ever asked if this would actually work.

I have formed the view that the defence industry increasingly uses the Australian War Memorial as a temple of militarism. A couple of years ago, Nick Deane of the Marrickville Peace Group asked me to help him hand out leaflets on Anzac Day that said, ‘Honour the Dead by Working for Peace’. So I dressed in suit, wore a discrete sign with the slogan on it and went to the edge of the public area in the Hyde Park ceremony and started handing out his leaflet. People took it, and most agreed that it was reasonable.

After a while a Police sergeant came and told me to move 150 metres away as I was ‘offending people’. I said that no one had been offended, (not that there is a law against offending people in any case) and I was not going to move, as I had a right to stand there. He said words to the effect of, ‘You will do what I tell you or you will be arrested and charged’. I told him that he was there to enforce existing laws, not make them up, and if he charged me he would merely be told by the Magistrate that he did not have a case. I agreed to move about 2 metres so he could save face. He was furious, and went off asking to find someone who was offended. He came back and we had a second altercation. I really thought that if I had not been in a suit and told him I was an ex-MP, I would have been thrown down and roughed up. It was a line ball as it was.

The Police are there to keep us safe, not remove people harmlessly expressing opinions, and certainly not to do so roughly. They must obey laws of reasonable behaviour the same as we should. Clearly pressure on them needs to be maintained. The presence of cameras on every phone will help in this- no longer will stories of people ‘falling over’ be believed.

Fortunately Danny has come out of hospital and seems OK, but the video below leaves little doubt that he was assaulted by Police.

www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/excessive-police-force-is-damaging-sydney-s-reputation-minister-told-after-danny-lim-arrest-20221123-p5c0no.html

23/11/2022

British American Tobacco launches new Campaign to legitimise Vaping.

23 November 2022

Almost all the vaping products are owned by tobacco companies, and the marketing is almost a re-run of their tobacco campaigns. i.e:

1. Assume that it is here to stay, and hence legitimate and unstoppable.
2. Suggest that ‘courtesy and consideration’ is all that is needed.
3. Fight regulation as much as possible.

Naturally they are keen to say that any attempt to restrict nicotine is doomed to failure as it is already totally available on the Black Market.

It might be noted that when there were different regulations in Canada from the US for tobacco labelling, cigarettes were smuggled through the Indian reservations, and all labelling that used to allow the source of the cigarettes to be identified was removed from the packaging, which showed what contempt the tobacco industry had for regulations that lessened their sales.

We might expect that similar things are happening in sales of vaping products and liquids. Naturally as they talk about how hopeless it is to regulate vaping products they want to hark back to the failure of alcohol prohibition in the 1930s, which led to Al Capone and his gangsters.

Older folk will remember that as the tobacco control movement grew stronger in the late 1970s we were attacked as ‘wowsers’ and ‘killjoys’, with the implication that we were stopping people having a good time, which was what smoking was all about. It is the same tactic again. We want to stop all the happy vapers.

The tobacco industry used the fact that some doctors think that vaping can help people QUIT to allow them to sell their product without having to prove it was safe. They only had to prove it was less dangerous than tobacco- a very very low bar.

Now vaping is used more as a gateway to smoking than a path from it, and often if there is nicotine in the vape it can be used alternately as a substitute. So presumably will be a move to push vaping in smoke-free areas. Then vaping will be the ideal product for the tobacco industry, being used everywhere, helping consumption, and keeping some people smoking at other times. Just like the good old days.

Health interests have to keep the government onside, but also demand some serious anti-vaping campaigns.

Vaping uses solvents, which dissolve fats. If this is the case, it is like upmarket petrol sniffing, as it will dissolves cell membranes, especially in the brain, which has the highest blood supply of any fatty tissue in the body. This is likely to lead to gradually progressive dementia. Naturally this may take years to manifest, and even longer to be identified and scientifically proven, given that a highly sceptical Industry that will criticise the research; in short a re-run of the tobacco wars.

If we look at the history of tobacco, it was used in relatively small quantities until the invention of the cigarette rolling machine by Duke in 1898. It was massively marketed during and after WW1 from 1914. It was shown to cause lung cancer in 1950. Advertising bans started in the mid 1970s, but full sponsorship bans and smoke-free indoor air did not come until 2000. The tobacco epidemic lasted a full century; so watch out for a vaping re-run with a dementia epidemic in older folk. Unlikely? No;. quite possible. So will the tobacco industry prove it is is safe. They can’t, don’t want to; now don’t have to, and have put out this BS new organisation.

www.theaustralian.com.au/the-oz/news/big-tobacco-company-behind-vaping-overhaul/news-story/1078baf2358e5ba3d96c6235aac49610

19/11/2022

Immigration – it is Time to Clean it up.

19 November 2022

One of the legacies of the Morrison Government is a complete mess in immigration.

I grew up in Port Kembla where a huge influx of ‘displaced persons’ (i.e. refugees) from post-war Europe came to Australia and worked in the Steelworks. Initially the kids at my primary school came from the migrant hostels that had been set up in the old army accommodation, but then the NSW Housing Commission built whole suburbs to cope with the load. These were initially rented, but eventually they bought their homes. The kids learned English, we got used to their funny names and unusual school lunches and they grew up as good Aussie kids.

It might be noted that there was an influx of Hungarians after the 1956 uprising against the Russians there and some of those became captains of Austr;ian industry. Australia took a lot of refugees from Vietnam, claimed it was a multicultural country and had benefited enormously from the influx of foreign talent. Paul Keating tried to fund an initiative to foster language teaching so that a large number of Australians would become bilingual, but this and the free ESL (English as a Second Language) classes were defunded by John Howard, who won an election by demonising refugees and promising to ‘turn back the boats’ The fact that there were numerically not very many boat people and that political refugees are generally the elite from when re they come was ignored and Australia was set on a path of not only being totally callous with refugees, but also wasting huge amounts of money on dodgy contractors and facilities. The delays were also a disgrace.

But meanwhile other immigration developed with migration agents charging exorbitant amounts, stories of people of dubious character buying visas, and even sex slaves. Some employers brought people in with a sponsored deal that they had to work for 2 years to then be eligible for a permanent visa, and in my own experience I saw a couple on five 12 hour night shifts a week to get this. Many students, allowed to work only 20 hours a week and unable to live on this were paid sub-award wages, obviously dragging Australian wages down in all the casual industries.

I have tried to help a number of good people who were injured and in danger of deportation to save insurers money, and found there are many dodgy practices and practitioners, as well as a very unresponsive system.

The current ‘labour shortage’ shows how dependent we all were on work visa and student casual labour, and the fear of industry-wide awards that are actually enforced says quite a lot about what was going on.

At last, after a lot of publicity about sex trafficking someone is cracking down on the Industry. Hopefully, this as well as adding a lot of public servants to process the applications in a more honest way will improve the situation.

Taskforce targets migration criminals

Nick McKenzie SMH 19 November 2022

The federal government has established a new multi-agency taskforce to target criminals exploiting Australia’s migration system after revelations of widespread visa rorting linked to sex trafficking, foreign worker mistreatment and drug crime.

Operation Inglenook is led by Australian Border Force and backed by other state and federal agencies, and will target the organised crime gangs and migration fixers exposed by Trafficked, a major investigative series by the Herald, The Age and 60 Minutes.

The taskforce is focusing on 20 migration agents with suspected links to the rorting, and one federal government-licensed agent has already been issued a notice that the Office of the Migration Agents Regulation Agency will ban him from providing migration advice.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has promised major reform to the system, and said yesterday that the new taskforce was being staffed by investigators and regulatory officials aiming to reduce rampant exploitation of the migration system.

‘‘Its goal is to disrupt the networks exposed by the Trafficked series. The taskforce includes intelligence and compliance teams to assist with an investigation into the vulnerabilities of the migration system,’’ O’Neil said.

The minister said that after years of neglect by the former Coalition government, Labor was now acting. The Office of the Migration Agents Regulation Agency was working closely with the new taskforce.

The Trafficked series cast a light on visa rorting, sex trafficking and foreign worker exploitation in Australia. Among the reports was that of a human trafficking boss who entered Australia in 2014 and built a criminal underground sex empire despite having previously been jailed in Britain for similar offending.

That crime boss, Binjun Xie, is in hiding and being sought by authorities after being exposed in the series. Border security failures enabled Xie to allegedly set up a nationwide sex network that police said moved Asian women around like ‘‘cattle’’.

Trafficked also revealed how state and federal agencies have spent years issuing confidential warnings of migration rorting involving syndicates gaming the visa system to bring criminals or exploited workers into Australia. This is facilitated by networks of corrupt federal government licensed migration agents, education colleges, fixers and people who rort the English language test.

The investigation also focused on migration agent Jack Ta, who had boasted of ‘‘cosy’’ meals with Coalition ministers and who donated more than $25,000 to the campaign fund of former Liberal assistant home affairs minister Jason Wood. Ta is suspected of repeatedly gaming the visa system to help more than a dozen drug offenders remain in Australia.

Wood was the chair of parliament’s migration committee when the donations took place and he hosted Ta on at least two occasions to dine with now opposition leader Peter Dutton when he was home affairs minister.

This masthead has also confirmed that Ta attended the launch for O’Neil’s election campaign when she was a shadow minister and bought items at an auction worth $5200. The funds were donated to a charity after Ta’s conduct was exposed by this masthead.

Authorities have linked Ta’s migration agency to dozens of unmeritorious asylum seeker claims, including at least 15 made by convicted Vietnamese drug offenders.

Earlier this month, the federal government cleared the way for an overhaul of the visa rules by naming former Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson to review the system.

The new taskforce to investigate the migration scams will complement his inquiry.

Parkinson said it was ‘‘indisputable’’ the migration system was not working.

19/11/2022

The Myth of Liberal Competence- 2

19 November 2022

One of the concepts I tried to advocate while I was in NSW Parliament was ‘evidence-based’ legislation. There were many cases when an anecdote was told, and the conclusion from it was ‘therefore we need this legislation.’ It was particularly the case where there had been some crime that was in the media and the penalties were being racked up. Despite the fact that it had generally been shown that higher penalties did not change the incidence of crime, the same response always seemed to occur.

During one of these endless debates, I suggested that what was needed overall was evidence-based legislation. Hopefully someone would collect facts as well as they could be ascertained and that would result in appropriate legislation. One might have even hoped that this was the norm. My speech resulted in hilarious laughter from the chamber, which was naturally not recorded by Hansard. But it said quite a lot about how Parliament thought and acted.

Another unsuccessful request I made was that the Social Issues Committee of which I was a member, and Committees generally should either do ongoing research on issues or commission a neutral outside group, such as a university department to do longitudinal studies, so that the effect of social policies could be quantified and decisions based on real world experience. This seemed particularly necessary on vexed questions like whether it was better to take children from dysfunctional families to foster homes or to try to support the children in situ. It was pointed out that this would change the nature and need for funding in the Parliamentary committee system, which was obviously true, but not a reason not to try to get better information on which to base legislation.

Evidence-based legislation was famously attempted by Angela Merkel in Germany, who was a scientist by profession and also by one of the New York mayors, with excellent results so I was encouraged to find that there are now efforts to look at Australian legislation in terms of its evidence base, though an initiative ww.evidencebasedpolicy.org.au, which uses the same survey method by both the Right-wing IPA (Institute of Public Affairs) and the progressive Per Capita Australia to assess legislation. The criteria were developed by Prof Kenneth Wiltshire at the Uni of Qld and then applied by both groups to 80 pieces of legislation with surprisingly similar results from the two groups.

Morrison’s government did slightly worse than the NSW, Victorian and Qld State governments. His efforts worst were; to reduce the number of people necessary to register a political party; to allow new political parties to have names similar to existing ones; and to reduce fuel excise just before the election.

Perrottet efforts to put extra changes on electric vehicles and to massively crack down on protesters also ranked a mention.

If you look at the website above, you will note that Labor fared only a little better.

The SMH gave some publicity to this, which is how I became aware of it:

Morrison, Perrottet made bad laws: report

Shane Wright, Senior economic correspondent SMH 19 November 2022

The Morrison, Perrottet and Andrews governments all delivered laws over the past year that followed ‘‘unacceptable’’ practices and helped undermine confidence in how legislation is put together, an independent analysis has found.

A report produced for the Evidence-Based Policy Research Project found laws that changed everything from the number of people a party needed to become registered to a crackdown on protesters failed to be properly debated, opened to scrutiny and considered against other options.

Every year, the research project uses a left- and right-leaning think tank to assess the creation, debate and passage of laws passed over the previous 12 months at the federal level and across NSW, Queensland and Victoria.

Experts from the left’s Per Capita Australia and the right’s Blueprint Institute bench-marked 20 pieces of legislation against 10 separate criteria.

They included whether there was a need for the law, its objectives, alternative options, how it would work, if a government considered all the pros and cons, parliamentary debate and the consultation process.

The worst-ranked piece of legislation by both think tanks was the Morrison government’s change to federal electoral law that increased the number of members a party must have to be registered to 1500, from 500. It also stops a party that has a similar name to an existing party from being registered.

Of the 10 criteria, Blueprint and Per Capita found the legislation passed just two – that it had set objectives and that the law was properly communicated.

Five other laws were ranked as unacceptable. They included NSW’s road user charges on electric vehicles and its new laws aimed at protesters who disrupt traffic.

Two federal laws, covering the sixmonth reduction in fuel excise and changes to foreign intelligence laws, were also ranked among the poorest of the past 12 months.

The chair of the project’s governing committee, former NSW Treasury secretary Percy Allan, said faulty decision-making processes at all levels of government contributed towards corruption, misallocation of resources and waste of public money.

‘‘Having auditors-general, integrity bodies and select committees of inquiry rake over failed policies and processes does not fix the underlying problem, which is that no government in Australia consistently addresses the above questions when making policy,’’ he said.

Western Sydney University chancellor and former secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Peter Shergold, said policy and lawmaking had to improve.

‘‘Having just completed a review of Australian governments’ response to COVID-19, I am utterly convinced that we cannot make good policy decisions in a crisis if we are not better practised at developing evidence-based legislation during more ‘normal’ times,’’ he said.

‘‘Assessing the diversity of short- and longer-term costs and benefits, based on… stakeholder consultation, is vital.’’

19/11/2022

BUGA UP – the issues keep resurfacing

19 November 2022

BUGA UP originated in 1979, when its 3 founders were prevented from a regular evening out to re-face tobacco billboards by pouring rain. As it they sat and waited, they thought about how to publicise their work so that it did not appear as random anti-tobacco graffiti. They wanted a word that would be irreverent and would embody the concept of hitting back against the unhealthy promotions. After some discussion, the word BUGA UP was developed, an acronym for Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions. From that night they signed all the re-faced billboards with BUGA UP.

The major problem at that time was tobacco promotion, which accounted for over half outdoor advertising, with alcohol second. The concept was self-regulatory in that anyone taking up a spray can had to make their own decision about what they wanted to say, i.e. what they were willing to be arrested for.

A relatively large number of graffitists, especially from the medical fraternity, were inspired by what appeared to be a large campaign and were willing to be arrested for spraying on tobacco billboards. Other activists were concerned about alcohol promotion and some were concerned about sexism in advertising. A relatively small percentage were willing to be arrested for junk food or drink ads. (There were no ads for gambling at that time).

BUGA UP, however, looked at the whole issue of the regulation of advertising, asking that it not be one-way communication with no input from consumers or regulators as to the content or consequences of the promotions. The advertisers’ position was that it was their money, they could say what they liked, as this was ‘freedom of commercial speech’. Note the extra word in the cliche ‘freedom of speech’.

The advertisers set up a farcical ‘Advertising Standards Council’ which had very loose ‘codes of practice’ and an industry dominated judicial system, which took so long to work that the ad campaign was invariably over even if they banned an ad, which very rarely happened as they had the numbers in the kangaroo courts. One hapless paediatrician was recruited onto one of these committees, had his name used to champion the quality of its membership, and of course was outvoted in every deliberation. He eventually acknowledged sadly that he had been ‘used’ and he resigned.

But BUGA UP was active, producing a publication, ‘Billboard’, which was sent to all the major players in the advertising industry to emphasise to them that their regulatory systems were recognised as farcical. BUGA UP invented the ‘Advertising Double Standards Council’ to satirise the ‘Advertising Standards Council’. Its slogan was ‘If advertising standards are good, double standards are twice as good’.

One of BUGA UP’s members, Peter Vogel, wrote over 400 complaints about many ads. He was labelled a ‘serial complainer’ and they wanted not to respond to his complaints. He insisted that by their own charter they had to. They rejected all 400+!

Eventually there had been so much publicity about advertising regulation that the advertising industry wanted the Trade Practices Commission to re-legitimise its self-regulatory system, presumably as they thought government regulation was possible in the future. The Fairfax newspapers fronted this action, and it was opposed by ACA, The Australian Consumers’ Association. The advertisers said that their codes and practices were working well. At this stage Peter Vogel of BUGA UP came out of the woodwork, with his huge file of denied complaints. He had systematically made complaints using every item of the advertisers codes of practice and had a farcical response to every item, which the Commission could judge for itself.

Two academics, Shenagh Barnes and Michael Blakeney wrote a book called ‘Advertising Regulation’ (Law Book Co 1982) which concluded that the self regulatory system manifestly lacked credibility’. But despite the moral victory, the consequences of the trial were not good. The Trade Practices Tribunal concluded that it was not able to set up a regulatory structure, but could only either approve or reject what was put in front of it, so in the absence of any alternative it approved the self-regulatory system as it might have a bit of benefit over nothing at all. ACA, the Consumers’ organisation, was almost sent bankrupt by the legal fees involved, and overall the Industry had got what it wanted. A few years later when the issue had faded from the public eye, the Advertising Standards Council faded too.

The original BUGA UP guide, ‘Ad Expo- a self-defence course for children’ from 1983 is still available online, but of course its ads are now dated. (ww.bugaup.org/publications/Ad_Expo.pdf)

But now, as gambling wreaks havoc with families, and childhood obesity skyrockets, the issue of irresponsible advertising is back in the spotlight. Let us hope that there is more success this time, but a lot of work will be needed even to get up the momentum that BUGA UP had in 1983.

Here is an article on sugar and obesity:

Sugar shovellers are making us sick, fat and poor (and check out what they pay in tax!)