In the 1960s State Aid for Church schools was initiated in NSW. Then there became an emphasis on ‘choice’ of school and subsidies for children to catch a bus away from where the child lived to the school that they wanted to go to.
Governments, particularly conservative ones want more children in private schools as this lessens total government expenditure, though private schools have successfully demanded closer to the amount of money per student that the public schools get. The subsidies also favour their conservative voters.
Private school parents, seeking advantage for their students pay high fees so the government funding seems to be spent along with the other money on swimming pools and ‘luxury items’.
Meanwhile Australia is slipping down the world education ratings, because public schools are neglected. The sociology also needs to be considered. The ‘choice’ is only for some. The parents who do not have the financial means for a private school, nor the grades to get into a selective school have to take what they can get. I visited a school in a disadvantaged area in Sydney, and looked at the school photos in the foyer. There was not a white face in the last 15 years- all the students were either of Pacific Islander or Middle Eastern origin. The Principal said to me that she just wished she had a few Anglo students to model what the majority of Australians do. There had been a stabbing in the playground about 30 years ago, and this had led to ‘white flight’. There were also a considerable number of children with disabilities, which may be related to marriages within ethnic family or religious groups. With poorer facilities, disadvantaged students a lack of role models and teachers with lower pay, the Principal said it was very difficult to get her graduates good results and able to compete for jobs.
I live in a relatively good suburb near a place where buses can turn around. Each day 8 busses leave from close to me to go to 8 different private schools, 4 single sex male, and 4 single sex female. I think of them as Apartheid busses. The buses are all branded and new. The students getting on board can go in relative luxury from the civilised suburb to the well-endowed schools. They need have no contact with poorer folk, even on public transport. These advantaged students will go to universities, into top jobs and make decisions for us all.
I am reminded that in the US in the Johnson era there was ‘bussing’ which took more wealthy students to schools in poorer areas to make richer students aware of how the poorer student lived and to increase equality of opportunity. Australia, supposedly the land of the ‘fair go’, is now quite the opposite, subsidising inequality as we become the country with the most privatised (and unequal) education systems in the world. Now, just to emphasis the point, ‘for profit’ schools are coming in. ‘Hey, what is wrong with making a profit?’ we hear them cry.
When I went to school in Port Kembla, half the school were children of post-WW2 migrants from Europe, ‘displaced persons’, or what we would now call refugees. Half the children arrived at kindergarten unable to speak a word of English. There were 46 in my class. All this was ‘normal’. There was no anti-discrimination legislation. But the over-riding unifying factors were that all the kids in the school had the same experience, all the parents had jobs and the Housing Commission was building whole suburbs of houses as fast as they could to settle the new migrants. By the end of 3rd class there was really no difference between migrants and Anglo-born. It was equality of opportunity, a ‘fair go’. This is what is being lost. We see the example of the US where the gap between rich and poor keeps growing and we are subsidising the same process!
We forgot about the first Gonski report on educational inequality as the politicans did not want to offend the middle class by lessening their education subsidies. Gonski was pressured to do a weaker second report and inequality of opportunity keeps growing.
The politicians tell us that their education funding has never been higher. Perhaps this is so, but while the money is spent on luxuries for some and there is not enough financially or sociologically to help disadvantaged areas, Australia will continue to slide down the international education rankings and the entrenched disadvantage that continues from generation to generation will continue.
Labor has opposed a Teal move to have infrastructure proposals publically available. The lack of transparency has allowed the pork-barrelling that was rife in the Liberal administration, but it has also continued under Labor.
One would have hoped that Labor would support the move, as most of the Labor electorates, being less well-off are more likely to justify more spending. But they have teamed up with the Liberals to defeat the move. Very disappointing. Labor seems happy just to clear the Liberals very low bar.
Dutton and PM unite to block teal demands
DAVID CROWE
Chief political correspondent SMH 25 May 2023
A bid to tighten safeguards on major road and rail projects has been blocked in federal parliament after Labor and the Coalition joined forces against moves by teal independents to reveal more about the $120 billion cost.
Calling for more scrutiny of the mammoth spending, the independent MPs sought changes to stamp out pork barrelling and force governments to reveal the costs and benefits of new proposals before sinking taxpayer funds into the projects.
But their bid was lost when the major parties used their numbers to defeat the moves, which included an amendment copied from a proposal from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese when he was in opposition nine years ago.
The debate heightened tensions between Labor and the crossbench over integrity in government and the priority for vast projects including the rail line to the Western Sydney Airport, the Melbourne Airport Rail, the Inland Rail and competing road-building proposals in every state.
Independent MP Allegra Spender wanted the government to accept changes that would prevent the peak agency for big projects, Infrastructure Australia, approving proposals that could not show the benefits outweighed the cost.
‘‘This is, you would think, an uncontroversial amendment, one which simply requires public money be used prudently and one which was previously proposed by the Prime Minister himself,’’ Spender said.
‘‘It is only controversial because it takes away the power of the government to make investment decisions which are positive politically but negative economically.’’
Another amendment put to parliament yesterday would require Infrastructure Australia to release its regular audits of the priority list so the public could learn more about costs and benefits of projects.
Spender gained support from Greens leader Adam Bandt and his fellow MPs as well as all other crossbenchers in the lower house
But the amendments were defeated when Infrastructure Minister Catherine King gained Coalition support, sending a signal that the government would also have the numbers in the Senate to defeat any similar amendments. The government passed its draft law in its original form.
King defended the decision to reject the amendments because some information was too sensitive to be released.
Coalition infrastructure spokeswoman Bridget McKenzie wanted an amendment to increase rural representation at the peak agency but did not support the push from the teals.
‘‘Other proposals would have increased costs, decreased investment, and reduced the ability of governments to initiate projects – which is surely fundamental to a democracy,’’ she said.
Kylea Tink, the member for North Sydney, warned that defeating the amendments would mean the Labor government was ‘‘no less likely’’ than the Coalition to engage in pork-barrelling.
Dai Le, who represents Fowler in western Sydney, said voters should not be surprised that Labor promised greater transparency before the election but voted against it after gaining power.
‘‘The two parties are the same – they go to an election, make a promise to make a change, and when they’re in government they don’t do it. They keep the status quo,’’ she said. ‘‘As a result of that, our society, our communities, pay the price for the lack of infrastructure planning.’’
The spectacle on tonight’s ABC news of visiting Indian Prime Minister addressing a rally in Melbourne sent shivers up my spine.
I had realised that Modi was acting as a Hindu nationalist, and doing quite bad things to Muslims Sikhs and other minority groups. He was and is using religion as a way of increasing his vote as over 80% of Indians are Hindu. But in a country of 1.3 billion people are lot are not Hindu, and areas in the North of the country have been suppressed, with the historic separation of Pakistan and Bangldesh (formers called East Pakistan), as well as problems in Sikh Kashmir, where the people actually want independence from both Hindu India who controls them and Muslim Pakistan who wants to.
Modi has used very authoritarian tactics, but has got away with it because the Indian economy has done well.
Australia is very pro-India at present as the China trade embargos have meant that we are looking to diversify our markets and a rising nation with 1.3 billion people looks just the ideal partner. Not to mention defence ties, though India has traditionally tried to create a group of non-aligned nations to cool whichever Cold War is going on at the time.
But the rally in Melbourne as shown on ABC News tonight had a huge stadium shouting with Modi in the centre like a rock star. Our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, said that the last time he saw this was a Bruce Springsteen Concert and the crowd were more adoring of Modi than they had been of the Boss, Springsteen. They also hugged, like footballers after scoring. But it went on. Modi stood alone in the centre and addressed the crowd in their own language. It was doubtless staged for the Indian elections which are next year. It seems that our government was complicit. It is very hard to think that they were unaware of what was being organised, and their part was as direct an endorsement of Modi personally as could have been done.
Having kow-towed to the US on defence last week, and mumbled a few platitudes about Julian Assange, this was another example of the Albanese government being very weak on human rights, or even standing up for anything. We should have been friends with India without such a party-political statement.
www.themonthly.com.au/the-politics/rachel-withers/2023/05/24/yes-boss?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The Politics%20 Wednesday 24 May 2023&utm_content=The Politics%20 Wednesday 24 May 2023+CID_646eeca792ac1e467a7fad04b06e163a&utm_source=EDM&utm_term=Read on free&cid=646eeca792ac1e467a7fad04b06e163a
The PwC scandal is serious, but it seems to have been lost in the background noise of a coronation and a federal budget. Yet the scandal raises some very big questions about how we are being governed.
The facts are simple enough: in 2013, Australia was engaged in an international effort to crack down on multinationals avoiding corporate tax through cross-border income and asset transfers. Specialists from PwC were brought in as consultants and given access to highly secret materials, subject to confidentiality agreements.
PwC’s top international tax partner, Peter Collins, took the information and shared it widely inside the firm. It was then sold to the targets of the crackdown, teaching them how to sidestep the same anti-avoidance measures PwC was helping to draft. The misuse of the highly confidential material was given a name reflecting the targeted market – ‘‘Project North America’’. PwC probably made many millions of dollars.
Disgraceful conduct, but highly lucrative for the partners at PwC.
So how do we know about this? Well, we did not hear it from PwC. In fact, PwC was obstructive: when the Australian Taxation Office sought information, PwC declined to cooperate, claiming legal professional privilege – a tactic commonly deployed by those clients of PwC. Instead, we only know about this from the outstanding work of two journalists at the Australian Financial Review digging into the reasons why the Tax Practitioners Board was resisting the reregistration of Peter Collins as a tax agent. If not for them, this sorry tale would not have come to light.
As usual, there seem to have been few adverse consequences for those involved. Collins and the chief executive of PwC, Tom Seymour, have left PwC, but we don’t know upon what terms – they may have received handsome payouts. We don’t know how much money PwC made from its Project North America because the partners won’t say – and they have not made an offer to disgorge their wrongful profits. PwC has not told us to whom they sold the information, so we have no idea how much tax has been avoided. PwC has announced it will commission an internal inquiry, but that is obviously insufficient.
But this is much more than a story about misconduct by a Commonwealth contractor; it is far darker than just that. There are many questions, all unanswered.
The first question: Why on earth was PwC – a substantial contributor to the global problem of crossborder tax minimisation – involved in designing Australia’s response to that very problem? Anyone could see this was going to be a problem.
That raises the second and even larger question: Why is Australia outsourcing so much of its governing to private enterprise? Policy development and implementation are now routinely taken from the public service and turned over to private ‘‘consultants’’. Some will say this is because the most highly skilled and experienced people are in the private sector and, you know, this is probably true – but it is only true because the private firms have poached the most skilled and experienced public servants from the public service. This makes good economic sense for the big firms who can charge those services back to the Commonwealth at high rates.
I am not exaggerating. Look at the audit results published by the APS for 2021-22. The Commonwealth paid $21 billion for external labour – i.e. consultants, contractors and labour-hire contracts – in a single year. To give some perspective, that is roughly the same as the federal government spent on secondary education that year. This spending was not made public. The Coalition had boasted of massive costs savings through cuts and caps on public service employment without telling us the holes were filled by payments to private enterprise. Our government was being privatised by stealth.
It may be a coincidence but, over the last decade, the major beneficiaries of mass privatisation were donating heavily to both sides of political power – Labor and the Coalition. PwC was one of the largest donors. It is another sad story of inadequate federal election funding laws and the pernicious role of big money in our election cycle.
Will Labor be better? So far, the new government’s response to this debacle has been strangely muted. Existing contracts with PwC must be investigated. Negotiations with PwC for further contracts must be frozen. Heads must roll. We need an inquiry – surely we should not be outsourcing that to PwC.
We need to take a deeper look at the way in which we have been outsourcing government. It seems we have been going down the wrong path. It is time for change.
Geoffrey Watson SC is a director at the Centre for Public Integrity.
I haven’t had a problem with secrecy since last week.
One of my patients, a 46 year old single Mum with a 12 year old daughter, was working as a school cleaner for a personnel agency that has a NSW Education Dept. contract. Her boss told her to clean the classroom ceiling. The method she was to use was to have a desk and use a chair to climb onto it, wash a bit of ceiling, then get down and move the desk and chair and do the next bit. She said that she did not think that this was very safe, especially as she was working alone. Her boss told her that if she wanted to keep her job, she had better shut up and get on with it.
She did this for some time, then she stumbled as she was getting down and landed awkwardly on her sacrum with her leg underneath her. Her knee was badly injured so she went to ED in distress and later had surgery on it. The ED was so focused on the knee that her back pain was overlooked. Later, her GP added it to her Workers Comp claim, but the insurer bullied the GP into taking it off her certificate and is now refusing to pay for its investigation and specialist referral. Her situation is bad, as she has a lot of pain and may never work again in a physical job and has poor English skills. She is upset and depressed as her main pleasure was to play basketball with her daughter, and now she is concerned that she may not even be able to support her.
I wrote to Safework with a signed letter of approval from her to ask them to investigate the accident and take some action. She was keen that there be some accountability and she was not confident of her English. Safework called her briefly without an interpreter to check some details and we heard nothing further. Some months later I wrote to Safework and asked what they had done, pointing out that I had acted for my patient and we wanted some feedback. They replied that I could only have this if I made a GIPA (Government Information Public Access= FOI) request. One might ask why a complainant needs a request to see the outcome of their own complaint.
Rex Patrick, the ex-South Australian Senator is in his more major battle with the Federal Attorney-General, who seems to be hiding Liberal scandals in the ‘Sports Rorts’ affair with Bridget Mackenzie and Scott Morrison. One might ask why Mark Drefus is hiding the Liberals misdemeanours, but the explanation may lie in Labor’s similar efforts with ‘Solar Rorts’ after they were elected.
New Zealand has the ‘Official Information Act 1982 which makes all government information available on request unless permission is asked from the Ombudsman to keep it secret, and if it is withheld there are specific reasons which must be stated. The Act was reviewed in 1997, but retained because it was felt to be in the public interest. Australia has a long way to go.
I was lucky enough in my surgical training years to have most of a year working as neurosurgical registrar for Dr John Grant. He set up the 1st spinal Injuries Unit in Australia saying that while everyone was looking for a miracle cure that would allow injured spinal tissue to repair, most paraplegics were dying of bedsores or infections coming up their urinary catheters and much better practices and training was needed.
He went to England in 1960 and with Sir Ludwig Guttman started the Stoke Mandeville games, the precursor of the Paralympics. He developed the Paralympic Games to help his patients, who were mostly young men whose lives had been shattered after a catastrophic injury, often after doing something daring or unwise. Wheelchair athletics was a major part of this, as it gave the young paraplegic people something to strive for. John Grant became head of the Australian Paralympic movement and Chair of the Organising Committee of the Sydney 2000 Paralympic Games. My part was merely to help treat the spinal patients.
Later I moved into occupational medicine so as to fund my work in the anti-tobacco movement. There I found impairment from workplace injury and had to decide who could work and who could not. This got a nasty edge to it as insurers wanted people classified as fit, so that if they would not work their pay could be suspended. The Courts argued about this until the legal process was deemed so expensive that the American Medical Association worked with the insurance industry to devise a complicated medical examination which measured ‘Whole Body Impairment’ as a percentage. This was not supposed to simply translate simply into how much money an injured person was awarded, but of course that is exactly what happened. Since pain cannot be measured it had to be left out of the calculation, so you can have terrible pain, but if you have only lost a few measurable degrees of back movement, your percentage impairment may be minimal. The system also makes no distinction between an impairment and a disability. If you are a labourer and have a lower body injury and cannot work at all or are someone who works at a desk and can maintain their previous income, the impairment is the same. I have never learned the details of the system, as I think it a bad farce, but it is used to assess impairment in Australia, makes a lot of money for the doctors who do the medicals, and saves the insurers a fortune. Of course there are few who try to fake injury, but in my experience this is fairly rare, far rarer than insurance companies would have you believe.
But making an objective assessment of what a person can and cannot do is not easy, and so one is to pity the classifiers who want a level playing field by classifying people for the Paralympic Games. Given that each country wants to pick a team of winners and they classify their own athletes, it is little wonder that in some countries ‘intellectually disabled’ are as smart as anyone else, or that you cannot even notice a limp in some of the runners.
The 4 corners of Monday 2 April looked at the whole Paralympic Classification system and produced damning figures that 10 of 12 of the gold medal winning Spanish basketball were not disabled at all, and that in some areas 69% of the winners had minimal disability.
As this sad farce continues there is a huge kerfuffle lest the tiny number of trans athletes with the genetic advantage of having had male hormones might get an advantage over females.
The NSW election is over, with the result we largely expected, Labor victory, but not enough for an absolute majority. I had hoped that they would get fewer seats so as to have more discipline from the cross bench, but they took a small target strategy and promised no privatisation and some key wage rises, so Minns did quite well. It remains to be seen if Labor has shed the fundamental dishonesty of the Obeid era and the long history of being captured by property developers and the gambling industry. Minns weak policy on the latter is cause for concern- the public are ready for serious action on the harms of gambling, but the chance may be squandered by Minns. The Australian gambling lobby are our equivalent of the US gun lobby. If Minns simply increases their taxes, it will merely increase the State’s dependence on gambling revenue and lessen the possibility of future reform.
The key structural problem of Australia’s finances remains that the States are responsible for providing the majority of services, but the Commonwealth collects the taxes and solves its own budget problems by not giving the States the money that they need, so States budgets are cobbled together with stamp duties, gambling taxes, and ‘dividends’ from State-owned enterprises like Sydney Water that have to get a profit and pay it to the government, (which boils down to water rates having a tax component).
Allegra Spender, the Federal Independent for Wentworth in Sydney’s affluent Eastern Suburbs, held a Tax Summit on 31 March as she correctly recognises that we need to address tax revenue as the Federal government seems paralysed even to get minor reforms to superannuation on people with over $3million, or cancel the silly Stage 3 tax cuts which were merely a Morrison promise to stave off election defeat, and then matched by Labor in a silly ‘race to the bottom’ for taxes, government revenue (and services). Meanwhile there is a housing crisis, caused by negative gearing pushing property prices up, then landlords trying to get a return as interest rates rise. The fact that reforms on issue like this have stalled shows the extent to which the Liberals are rule from the grave by making silly promises, wedging Labor to promise to match them, then criticising ‘broken election promises’ when Labor tries to act. Federal Labor, who lost the unlosable 2019 election to Morrison’s scare tactics are as spooked as rabbits in the headlight. Hence the importance of Spender’s Summit.
Perrottet spruiked his government’s credentials as builders of infrastructure, though his concept of ‘recycled assets’ seemed to be borrowing using the government’s credit rating to build underground freeways to give to the private sector, so we can all drive cars and pay tolls to monopoly suppliers for years. The whole scheme was conceptually flawed. The money should have been used for a good underground Metro system. Now Minns want to cap tolls for citizens, which really mean just the government endless paying the monopoly companies they have given the freeways to.
Perrottet seems to have lessened what could have been a rout by drawing attention to infrastructure as if it is a long-term good no matter what it costs and no matter what sort it is. He also tapped into the gambling issue, which Minns was weak on, but did not seem to press this advantage fully. One Liberal I spoke to was very critical of Perrottet for this policy and said that it did not have widespread support among the Liberal Right. Perhaps this was why Minns was not pursued more energetically. The general atmosphere of decadence, corruption, tiredness and the inability even to preselect candidates until the last minute seems to have less attention than might have been expected. The swing against the Liberals was 5%, but the Nationals only 0.9%.
Minns small target policy with wage increases for essential service workers, ceasing privatisations, particularly Sydney Water and subsidies to residents for tolls seem to have helped him. But the swing to Labor was only 3.8% while the swing away from parties to Independents was almost as large, 3.5%.
In terms of the overall percentages, using ABC News figures available today with 79% counted, the Liberals got 27% and Nationals 8.7% for a total Coalition of 35.7%, Labor got 37.1% and the Greens 9.4% (down 0.2%). The Shooters Farmers and Fishers got 1.5% (down 1.9), but it must be noted that two of their lower house MPs Philip Donato in Orange and Helen Dalton in Murray, left the party and were re-elected as Independents. One Nation at 1.8% increased slightly, 0.7%.
The major parties, the Coalition and Labor together polled 72.8% of the vote yet got 81/95 seats – 85%. The current preferential voting system always favours the major parties and optional preferential worsens this effective gerrymander.
There are a number of seats where the optional preferential system has resulted in a major party winning when it would not have done so if preferences were compulsory. It is because the smaller parties exhaust and the candidate with the larger primary vote wins. In the Willoughby by-election when Gladys Berejeklian resigned a little-known Independent, Larissa Penn, would have won on preferences if the exhausted votes followed the pattern of the ones that did not exhaust. That would have made a big difference to the minority government. It will be interesting to analyse this whole election. It might be noted that NSW is the only State with this inequitable system, which was introduced by Neville Wran in 1980 in reforms which otherwise allowed redistributions for equity in the size of electorates (The Constitution (Amendment) Bill, Parliamentary Electorates and Elections (Amendment) Bill- Act 39 of 1979).
Anthony Green’s blog notes that historically the Liberals have done better than Labor under optional preferential voting, but that Independents have surprisingly done even better. But when the Independents have won, it has often been in safe Liberal seats. Currently with the Greens and the majority of smaller parties favouring Labor they may be willing to contemplate returning compulsory preferential voting to NSW.
The other important feature of this election was the Teals, the name the media gave to relatively conservative independents who wanted to do more for the environment and integrity in Parliament. I have to confess to an interest here as I helped my local Teal, Victoria Davidson. The Teals won 6 seats in the Federal Election in 2022, all with women in relatively safe Liberal seats. It was taken to mean that the Liberals had moved too far to the Right, had moved away from a reasonable climate policy, and had not preselected enough women.
A number of Teals ran in the November Victorian election without success. This may have been because the Liberals in Victoria ran a very negative campaign that made the main issue the harm done to Victoria by the COVID lockdown mandated by Premier Daniel Andrews. The election turned into a referendum of Dan Andrews’ leadership, in which he triumphed and the Teals did not take seats from the fading Liberals. It was generally assumed in the major media that the Teals would similarly fall short in NSW, particularly due to optional preferential voting.
In my Teal seat of Lane Cove, the candidate had been selected by a group that derived from the Voices of North Sydney, group pf experts who had tried to influence town planning and been heard politely and ignored by Councils. So a sub-group decided to find, select and help people who had not previously been active in politics to stand as their Independents. This was similar to the genesis of other Teal candidates. There was considerable energy remaining after the success of Kylea Tink in the seat of North Sydney and this spawned the candidatures of Victoria Davidson in Lane Cove and Helen Conway in North Shore. Larissa Penn, buoyed by her near-success in the by-election stood, but was not considered a Teal.
The key feature of these campaigns that did not get much a run in the major media was the degree of enthusiasm and organisation that they generated. Victoria Davidson had 250 volunteers and door-knocked over 6000 households. A large number of homes displaying corflutes and a new publicity technique of waving corflutes at suburban intersections helped name recognition to be built quickly and with the low budget imposed by the NSW legislation. The Liberals could not hope to match the number and energy of the Independent campaigns. What they did was claim that Simon Holmes a Court was funding it all and the Independents were either crook or dupes. They used the incumbents electoral and postage allowance at the last moment they were allowed to, just before the polls were declared, and they put up many signs saying the ‘You only have to Vote 1’, which looked like electoral messages, though they had a small Liberal logo in the bottom corner.
The major media merely noted that no Teals were elected and went on about the progressive count to see if Labor could get an absolute majority. Ross Gittins in the SMH of 29 March however commented that it was ‘Voting out our political duopoly’. He recognised what many commentators have not, that a large chunk of the population have lost faith in the major political parties, which is why so many volunteers can be found for Teals and other Independents in upper middle class electorates. The figures in the 3 State seats which are part of the North Sydney Federal electorate are illustrative. The Liberals won all three.
Willoughby
Candidate
Party
Percentage
Sarah Griffin
Labor
19.7
Edmund McGrath
Greens
7.51
Larissa Penn
Independent
27.15
Michael Want
Sustainable Aust.
1.73
Tim James
Liberal
43.91
Lane Cove
Candidate
Party
Percentage
Victoria Davidson
Independent
20.88
Anthony Roberts
Liberal
45.43
Penny Pedersen
Labor
23.68
Heather Armstrong
Greens
7.85
Ben Wise
Sustainable Aust.
2.16
North Shore
Candidate
Party
Percentage
Michael Antares
IMOP
1.61
Helen Conway
Independent
22.48
Geoff Santer
Labor
16.8
Lachlan Commins
Sustainable Aust.
1.78
James Mullan
Greens
10.53
Felicity Wilson
Liberal
44.66
Victoria Walker
Independent
2.14
As can be seen, the combined primary vote of the Independent, Labor and the Greens can be compared with the Liberal primary votes as follows:
Lane Cove (20.88 + 23.68 + 7.85) = 52.41 v Liberals 45.43
North Shore (22.48 + 16.8 + 10.53) = 49.81 v Liberals 44.66
It might be noted that in Willoughby and Lane Cove there were quite enough preferences to have changed the results, and in North Shore it may have needed the small parties and the other Independent, but preferences that did not exhaust could easily have changed that result also.
It is important that the Independents and Greens try to influence the Minns government to improve the voting system by introducing compulsory preferential voting in NSW.
The idea that a political duopoly is needed for stability in government is complete nonsense. The NZ electoral system was changed to ‘top up’ Parliamentary seats so that any party that gets over 4% of the vote gets extra seats so that the percentage of seats reflects as accurately as possible the percentage of votes that they got. The German parliament has a system where no party can get an absolute majority, so there is a period of negotiation after each election as coalitions are put together. The German constitution was deliberately written by Winston Churchill so that a single party could never get an absolute majority and Hitler could never rise again.
The Swiss government has 3 levels, similar to ours, and tries to make decisions at the lowest level possible (unlike Australia). They also have their politicians part-time and limited to 2 terms so that they retain good connections with the ordinary people and their superannuation is to return to their pre-Parliament job. They have a number of parties and the Parliament’s decisions can be overturned by a plebiscite with vote held every 3 months.
There are plenty of alternatives to the duopoly system that is not working very well in Australia, the US or the UK, and the success of the Teals and Independents suggest that there is a nascent move for change in Australia. The alternatives need to be publicised so a serious discussion can begin.
The word ‘defence’ seems innocuous enough, and discussion about is generally starts with a diatribe about the threat of Russia or China.
But just as the tobacco industry was responsible for the smoking epidemic, so the Arms industry is responsible for military spending and the consequent need to have wars to justify that expenditure.
The US has had continuous wars for many years; when one ends, another starts. The wars are not because of a threat to the US, but represent the US exerting global influence, and selling weapons to itself and others.
US foreign policy is hugely affected by its military and a perceived need for global hegemony. There is pressure on countries that seem susceptible (like Australia) to buy weapons systems (like AUKUS) to fit into this hegemonic world view. How long this can be afforded by US taxpayers is a key question; the Roman Empire imploded when its tax base could not pay for the mercenary armies that guarded its frontiers.
A list of some of the wars is; The Cold War 1945-1989, Korean War 1950-55, Vietnam 1955-75, Lebanon 1982-84, Libya 1986, Panama invasion 1989-90, 1st Gulf War 1990-91, Somalia 1992-95 and 2007, Bosnia and Croatia 1992-95, Kosovo 1998-99, Iraq War 2003-2010, Afghan war 2001-2021, North West Pakistan 2004-2018, Libya 2011 and 2015-19, Iraq intervention against ISIL 2014-2021, and now Ukraine 2022-.
Obviously one can argue about the merits of any of these wars, but the success rate of them is not good from a US foreign policy perspective. The returns to the arms industry, however, are always positive.
But the opportunity cost of these wars in terms of the possibility of diplomatic settlement or the use of monies to address the problems in the warring parties is considerable. The loss of social services and infrastructure to the US population is probably the most critical part from a political level. Inequality and polarisation in the US are increasing with consequent social disharmony.
The arms industry has to be reined in. Its subsidies to the Australian War Memorial have tended to make this a temple of militarism rather than a place for regret and remembrance.
There was a book, ‘The Secret State- Australia’s Spy Industry’, by Richard Hall which came out in 1978 and compared the reports of the intelligence agencies of 25 years previously with the current affairs commentaries of the major daily newspapers of the same time. (The 25 years was the time for the release of the spy agency documents). The rants of the intelligence agencies and their fear-mongering were almost comic and the predictions of the major newspaper editorials were largely proved correct.
It seems that as ‘Security studies’ replace ‘History ‘ in university courses likely to result in graduates getting jobs, the people who teach world events are changing their perspectives, and not for the better. Our current policies with AUKUS would seem to derive from a believing a current spy’s paranoid world view. The Arms Industry is to be feared and opposed in Australia as well as the US.
On 27 March the UN Security Council rejected a Russian motion to have a UN investigation into the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines on 22 September 2022.
Interestingly there were 3 votes in favour, Brazil, Russia and China and 12 Abstentions. No votes against! The abstentions were from the US, UK, France, Gabon, Switzerland, Ghana, Ecuador, Malta, Japan, Albania and the United Arab Emirates. The reason mostly given for the abstentions was that there are already investigations going on by Germany, Denmark and Sweden.
China’s representative pointed out that the UN investigation could encompass and cooperate with all these, and that blocking the Council from launching and investigation only raises suspicions that ‘something is being hidden’. He tactfully did not say that any national investigation would have to be filtered through that country’s foreign policy considerations.
Of course, the elephant in the room was the report published on February 8 by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh which claims that U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior White House staff ordered the Pentagon to take out the natural gas pipeline that runs along the Baltic Sea bed from Russia to Germany.
Some years ago, I was a farmer in New Zealand. I met a cashed-up American who was in NZ trying to buy farmland. I asked him why he was NZ rather than Australia. He said, ‘Australia is fuc*ed , mate. The governments have let them frack it all, and soon they won’t be able to farm’.
He was from the US and had seen it happen there. The problem is that politicians are mostly lawyers and accountants and do not know what they do not know. Perhaps they are easily conned by lobbyists in suits. The fact is that the surface of the earth is like a layered cake with rock strata that stop water simply going to the lowest level. If an underlying impermeable level is broken, the water which may have been kept in the overlying soil drains to a deeper level. So big mines or fracking, which means fracturing and cracking the stratum, allows gas to be released upwards, but also allows the water to flow downwards. This leaves the topsoil without water, which eventually will turn it to sand as the organic matter dies.
The nett effect is that the gas is released once, but the water escapes forever. The gas company makes its money and moves on- the yield of the land is forever damaged. The farmer is the first economic casualty, national production notices it more slowly. The chemicals used in fracking also pollute the groundwater, so bores used for stock produce undrinkable water. There is no method for removing these chemicals from the groundwater.
The advocacy group, ‘Lock the Gate’, are doing their best but are still losing the political battle and the gas companies are still expanding activities. Some of the best agricultural land is the Darling Downs in Queensland and the Liverpool Plains in NSW, which are both under threat. What is also likely to happen is that they will frack near the Great Artesian Basin, which is a huge water body under a third of Australia. It is currently unpolluted by fracking chemicals, but if it becomes polluted, which seems inevitable, there will no usable water in huge areas of arid Australia. It will be a national ecological disaster.
The words of the American entrepreneur are ringing in my ears.