Monthly Archives: April 2011

Doco spin as easy as ABC

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Murdered toddler Evelyn Greenup

Last night’s Four Corners on the Bowraville murders of three Aboriginal children some 20 years ago in northern New South Wales made rivetting TV.  It painted a picture of a dysfunctional Aboriginal community riddled with alcohol and substance abuse; a racist local community with white males preying on young Aboriginal girls by plying them with drugs and alcohol; a seriously deficient initial police investigation marred by racist assumptions about the local Aboriginal community; and most dubiously claims that subsequent prosecution decisions and actions have been incompetent or half-hearted.

However, the Four Corners program raised as many questions as it answered, mostly about the propriety of its own actions and decisions and the slant that it put on the story.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the program was that it:

  1. accused a particular individual named Jay Hart of being a serial killer even though he was acquitted of two of the murders and has never been charged with the third, mostly because no body has ever been found and it isn’t truly certain that the alleged victim is even dead;
  2. canvassed the evidence against the alleged killer in very considerable detail; and
  3. argued that it still wasn’t too late to recharge the accused man with at least one of the murders despite the usual double jeopardy rule that precludes recharging a person who has been acquitted of a crime.

Presumably Four Corners’ lawyers advised that the case against the accused killer was sufficiently strong that the ABC would be able to successfully defend any defamation action he might bring against Four Corners, either on the basis of truth or some combination of fair comment and qualified privilege.  Detailed legal advice is always obtained in relation to any program of this sort.

However, and given that Four Corners was arguing for the accused man to be retried, I wonder what their legal advice said about the prospects that, if any new charges were in fact laid in the near future, the content and prejudicial slant of the Four Corners program itself would certainly result in defence lawyers applying to stay the trial on the basis that it was impossible for the accused to receive a fair hearing.   There’s certainly no current legal prohibition on running such a program because there are no current charges and no supression order.  However, on the prevailing authorities (especially R v Glennon which concerned an alleged pedophile Catholic priest and prejudicial statements by media shockjock Derryn Hinch) there would be a real possibility that last night’s Four Corners program might cause any new trial to be aborted or stayed for a significant period of time.

However, that’s far from the only problem with last night’s program.

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The winner’s curse, power station edition

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Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote of Victoria’s two oldest power stations that they were bought by their owners “when the issue of climate change was well known”.  Though he made that remark in the middle of a longer article focused on different issues, the point is important. The winners of Australia’s power station privatisation auctions all knew they might someday face a carbon price. And the losers knew it too. It’s one of the reasons they lost.

Since some appear to doubt this – for instance, commenter Patrick in this Ken Parish post – it should be made clear.

Patrick argued: “Anyone in 1996 who seriously envisaged carbon trading/caps/etc would have been considered delusional. Can you remember how long ago 1996 was?”

In fact, 1996 was not that long ago in the climate change debate, which is more than 30 years old. Dr Sinclair was teaching my Year 10 science class about the greenhouse effect back in 1979; the first substantial federal political discussion of a carbon tax occurred in 1990. The prospect of a carbon tax or trading scheme was very real by the time the Victorian electricity assets came up for sale in the mid-1990s. And the prospect of a carbon tax was particularly real for the community of people trying to figure out what a brown coal power station was worth. The conversations I had with keen potential buyers (or more often, their investment bankers) at the time could be summed up like this: “Carbon pricing will come. One day. But there’s plenty of money to be made before that happens.”

Now step back a bit and take a careful look at the potential buyers who made it to the final stages of the Victorian power auction. They were by definition the biggest optimists about the industry’s prospects. They could see the greatest opportunities, and had the greatest myopia about the risks. Fifteen years later, what I remember most is their intense optimism. In contrast, people who were worried about carbon pricing couldn’t justify the sort of prices that were being talked about, kept their wallets in their pockets, and didn’t even bother flying to Melbourne. Continue reading →

Tell us what you really think Christopher . . .

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Christopher Hitchens loves writing paragraphs like this. And it’s fun when you come across them.

How dispiriting to see, once again, the footage of theocratic rage in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. The same old dreary formula: self-righteous frenzy married to a neurotic need to take offense; the easy resort to indiscriminate violence and cruelty; the promulgation of makeshift fatwas by mullahs on the make; those writhing mustaches framing crude slogans of piety and hatred, and yelling for death as if on first-name terms with the Almighty. The spilling of blood and the spoliation of property—all for nothing, and ostensibly “provoked” by the corny, brainless antics of a devout American nonentity, notice of whose mere existence is beneath the dignity of any thinking person.

Postscript: As has been pointed out in the first comment, a better heading would have been ““Hitch 22; god yet to score”

Sorcery and the black Hatfields and McCoys

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The Hatfield clan circa 1897

I had a long chat recently with an old mate from my politics days who I hadn’t seen for some time.  The conversation turned to Aboriginal affairs issues, as it does when you’ve both worked with and for Indigenous groups for the best part of thirty years.

Somewhat surprisingly for an aging lefty, my old mate’s attitude was quite similar to mine (and that of another old lefty in Bob Durnan who I often mention in posts like this).  The former left-liberal approach to Aboriginal affairs, based as it was on “self-determination” and symbolic issues like treaties, apologies and recognition of customary law, just didn’t work.  The plight of Aboriginal people actually became progressively worse by just about any measure.  Of course, some supporters of that approach continue to argue that self-determination was only ever tried in a half-hearted, piecemeal, stop-start fashion.  There’s probably some truth in that , but you still can’t argue that those policies even remotely resembled a raging success.

Similarly, the Howard Intervention  and its relabelling by the ALP government as “Closing the Gap” has also enjoyed underwhelming success to date despite multi-billion dollar spending, as a recent article by Indigenous legal academic Larissa Behrendt highlights.  Part of the problem, as Behrendt argues, is the “top-down”, prescriptive, paternalistic nature of the federal programs.  As Behrendt observes, successive Productivity Commission reports (hardly a bleeding heart, left-leaning organisation) have found that the programs that work in Aboriginal communities are those based on consultation, partnership, mutual respect and communities “taking ownership” of initiatives.  That must not obviate acountability or efficiency, but the two are not incompatible.

However, I strongly suspect after nearly 30 years of observation that the lack of a  “partnership” approach per se isn’t the main problem.   The principal and possibly insoluble problem is that key central aspects of traditional Indigenous culture are simply fundamentally incompatible with a contemporary, post-industrial, western capitalist individualistic culture like that of the dominant Australian community.  However, as soon as you make such a statement, other than privately and sotto voce, you end up being howled down as a “racist” (or at the very least an arrogant xenophobe).  Even undeniably well-motivated, knowledgeable experts like veteran anthropologist Peter Sutton have experienced this backlash after daring to critique aspects of Aboriginal culture.  Here is Sutton talking about the inherent extreme violence of Aboriginal society:

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Regulatory Responsibility NZ style

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I’ve posted before on New Zealand’s Regulatory Responsibility Bill which has become the Regulatory Standards Bill on its passage from advisory taskforce into the Parliament (and it’s often referred to in this post as the Regulatory Responsibility Bill or RRB). In the spirit of virtually all the other initiatives around to world to improve regulation, it does so by reference to the Michelangelo theory of regulation. This teaches us that all we have to do to get the best possible regulation is to increase the difficulty of making bad regulation. In furtherance of this approach governments around the world have regulated regulators to require new regulations to receive satisfactory regulatory impact analysis in order to become regulation. It’s a good idea (at least as far as it goes – it might be useful having some specific attention given to enhancing regulatory outcomes, and not just minimising regulatory costs). But it turns out that even the negative part of the agenda doesn’t seem to work very well.

Here are some reasons why:

The need to win elections leads politicians and their parties to develop a very good understanding of the factors that drive public opinion. Media exposure is “political oxygen”, mainstream media analyse the politics and not the policy of an issue, and the media require instant reactions and ready sound bites.

Consequently, Ministers feel the pressure to:
• respond quickly and decisively to the latest risk, accident or misdeed;
• commit to concrete action, even without evidence that the action will address the problem, or that benefits are likely to exceed costs;
• stick to a political commitment once made; and
• deliver on the commitment as soon as possible.

In the case of legislation, the pressure to deliver quickly is exacerbated by two factors – pressure to deliver results within a short three-year Parliamentary term and pressure to minimise the call made on precious House time.

The incentive issues are not just confined to Ministers:
• MPs have limited incentives to carefully scrutinise and improve proposed legislation, as it does not bring them media attention;
• Government MPs who hope to be Ministers won’t readily risk disfavour by providing strong independent scrutiny or insisting on good process;
• Public servants are often reluctant to give advice that Ministers don’t want to hear, because of their duty of loyalty to the government and their desire not be dragged into the political contest if the advice becomes public;
• Agencies tend to work in policy silos – they lack a whole-of-government perspective and are reluctant to put resources into playing a wider role;
• Private interests are often willing to lobby for regulation that will benefit their interests at the expense of others; and
• Anyone that promoted a particular piece of legislation has few incentives to look for and publicly report evidence that it isn’t working as intended.

Those aren’t my words, but the words of a regulatory impact statement.

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O’Farrell’s big challenge

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There’s a certain macabre fascination to watching the NSW ALP’s post-election recriminations, a bit like watching the aftermath of an horrific train smash.  However, it’s an essentially pointless exercise given that the size of the Coalition’s majority means that there isn’t an even slightly realistic scenario that would have Labor back in power in New South Wales inside 8 years at the very least.

The only useful questions revolve around what policies the O’Farrell government intends pursuing and, even more importantly, how it proposes to fund them. Troppo colleague Richard Green has been focused on those issues for some time, as evidenced by his excellent post recording and analysing an enterprising interview with (likely) incoming Liberal treasurer Mike Baird.  Judging from an article in The Australian only a few days ago, Baird continues to favour a financing scheme involving infrastructure bonds assisted by “incremental tax financing” rebates from increased stamp duty revenues generated by the infrastructure in question.  It’s an interesting idea.  Even more promisingly, Baird seems so far to have retained the scepticism Richard noted about the discredited vehicle of Public Private Partnerships for which NSW Labor became notorious.  Baird and O’Farrell also propose setting up Infrastructure NSW, which we can only hope will be a body with sharper regulatory teeth and greater independence than its federal equivalent created by Kevin Rudd.

However, even if Richard’s reservations about infrastructure bonds and tax increment financing prove unfounded, they’re unlikely to prove capable by themselves of underpinning more than a small proportion of the massive public infrastructure backlog which is just about the only lasting legacy of the failed Labor government (apart from a successful Sydney Olympics early in its 16 year term in government).  The central challenge for O’Farrell, Baird and the NSW Coalition is to find an economically and electorally sustainable means of financing these huge public expenditures that is also consistent with Liberal principles.  The Libs certainly won’t get away for long with Labor’s hackneyed recipe of empty spin and dressing up in hard hats to provide a televisual illusion of growth and development.  NSW voters’ bullshit detectors are well developed after 16 years of training from local Labor spin doctors.

If (as I hope) PPPs are no longer a favoured vehicle, there’s always the option of increased public borrowing.  However, as Richard Green reported, Baird is understandably wary of going far down that road, in part because of the perceived danger to NSW’s AAA credit rating.  Despite Nicholas Gruen’s regular arguments in favour of increased public borrowing to fund productive infrastructure, and the simplistic Costello-induced public aversion to government debt, I’m rather persuaded by this observation from veteran Troppo commentator Derrida Derider:

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“We are in an emergency situation and cannot meet with you”: Postscript to the Christchurch Earthquake

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I recently posted about the Christchurch earthquake and the way in which Crisis Commons was able to help. Here’s an email exchange from someone in the crisis centre working on the government side with Tim McNamara who was doing a lot of the organising on the Crisis Commons side.  I recalled Tim telling me of some unhelpfulness from Government (though many agencies were very helpful and also keen to use the new resources that the community had managed to muster.) Interestingly as a generalisation, those further away in Wellington seem to have been more helpful, when you might imagine they would find themselves more weighed down by elaborate hierarchical structures of authority.

A week or so into the process Tim ended up going to Christchurch and wanted to talk to someone in the government’s central crisis centre because they had rung him complaining that non-official information was going up on the site he was running (http://eq.org.nz/) concerned that it might be mistaken for official information. Tim responded that he’d be happy to try to represent the information differently and asked how the crisis centre would prefer him to do it. At that point the person said she didn’t know and that she’d get back to him. As you might have guessed she never did. Then the following email exchange ensued.  At Tim’s request I’ve changed the name of those receiving and responding to emails from Tim.

On 8 March 2011 07:51, Tim McNamara wrote:

Morning PIM team,

I would be delighted to be able to come to discuss some of the issues that have arisen around http://eq.org.nz/.

It may be worthwhile to discuss:
- representing official sources
- showing your team how a report becomes public

I’ve discovered that the meeting I was told about between [three people] around representing official sources actually never happened. I know representing official information properly is a big thorn. I would like to fix the problem. More importantly, I would like to understand your misgivings about the information that we’re providing. I think you’ll be quite reassured by the processes we have to prevent vandalism and misinformation being disseminated.

To be clear, the very large majority of our data is sourced from official channels, rather than via community reports. For example, most banks have their staff inside the system and the Ministry of Education is inputting data directly. Additionally, we are increasingly getting buy-in from central government agencies, LINZ staff are volunteering their own time to be moderators on the message queue.

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