Club Troppo

At exactly the time late last year when the Wikileaks saga was occupying seemingly endless media column centimetres, important amendments were implemented to the Commonwealth’s Freedom of Information regime.  They flowed from a reform process implemented by Senator John Faulkner.  Their commencement attracted almost no attention in the mainstream media.  I wrote about the amendments the previous year and expressed the opinion that the reforms they contained were welcome if incomplete.

Specialist FOI blogger Peter Timmins writes about these issues all the time but otherwise FOI doesn’t get all that much attention in the populist media or the blogosphere, although Fairfax has a FOI editor in Matthew Moore and Murdoch has Michael McKinnon in a similar role.  Yet effective official FOI mechanisms are much more critical to a functioning liberal democracy than strange individuals like Julian Assange or the random public sector leaks they publish.

The biggest omission from the Faulkner reforms in my opinion was that it failed to address the often very high cost to FOI applicants.  The Act allows departments and agencies to charge applicants the cost of retrieving and perusing documents the subject of a FOI request, and that might amount to many thousands of dollars if the request isn’t carefully framed.  Moreover, s 24 allows agencies to refuse to comply with a FOI request which involves an “unreasonable diversion” of the agency’s resources.

However, these problems could be relatively easily fixed, as my previous post argued:

Requiring all departments and agencies to invest in and maintain “state-of-the-art” document management systems would greatly reduce the cost and time involved in processing FOI applications, even ones where the application criteria are broad enough to encompass thousands of documents. If all government documents (inwards and outwards) were digitised and indexed by a Google-like searchbot, and also indexed on creation by humans against obvious basic non-disclosure criteria (created for dominant purpose of legal proceedings; Cabinet document; obtained in express situation of confidentiality etc.), then the time for retrieving and assessing even very large FOI applications, and therefore the costs charged to applicants, would be vastly reduced. Moreover, such systems would deliver numerous other efficiencies and cost savings to government entirely unrelated to FOI.

I’m interested in Troppo readers’ thoughts on such a reform.  It seems to me that it would in many ways be what Nicholas Gruen refers to as “low-hanging fruit” of policy reform.  I implemented an incomplete version of the digital “paperless” office in my own legal practice before I closed it down to enter academia, but I didn’t really get far enough to gain a clear idea of the obstacles and opportunities it might involve for large public sector organisations.  No doubt that would involve a range of information security and document integrity issues that are much less problematic for a small private firm.

Andrew Norton has some interesting posts distinguishing between classical liberalism (to which he regards himself as an adherent) and libertarianism (to which he doesn’t). His explanation of the distinction – at least skimming his posts again quickly – is that libertarianism is rights based whereas classical liberalism is more intellectually eclectic. I agree and can’t support a political ideology that’s as simple as libertarianism – there are too many things to consider to encompass them in a single principle, as important as that may be.

Be that as it may the issue of gambling is a good touchstone.  It’s hard to justify heavy curbs on it from either tradition, but at least IMO being more eclectic allows one to be more pragmatic. I don’t know what Andrew’s views on casino regulation are.

Though one can acknowledge the force of Mill’s test – which is that one should allow adults to make their own decisions to do things if they’re not hurting others – I’m afraid I don’t feel that strongly about the right to gamble at a casino – it’s a pretty trivial right.  Who am I to judge?  No-one in particular, but it’s a free world and I’m happy to put strong curbs on the kind of gambling that generates the social problems that casinos do. I was reminded of this by a tweet by Matt Cowgill referring to the diagram above.  ”When gambling regs are debated, remember this graph from The Economist”. To which I tweeted back – having recently visited Singapore – “@MattCowgill And in Singapore gambling is for visitors only – locals must pay $100 to get into the casino!”

I remember how amazed I was when I heard the kinds of figures in the diagram bandied about in the wake of the PC reports. If the annual figure quoted is the best part of $1,300, that’s an average figure so the average amount lost by regular gamblers is a lot more – and it’s losses not expenditure or turnover which must be at least five times more.

My last serious interaction with a poker machine was decades ago in Queanbeyan where residents of Canberra went to gamble.  I had two dollars and decided to play on ten cent machines to spread out the joy of gambling. Then I started winning – my winnings went up to the huge sum of $5. But I’d already decided I’d keep pulling the lever until I lost it all or the night ended and I had a huge haul.  I kept pulling that lever and as I hovered around $5 for quite a while I caught myself hoping I would lose so I could stop doing something so boring. And so I left the machines and the purple shag pile carpets on the walls and ceilings and went back to Canberra comfortable in the knowledge that I was unlikely ever to get addicted to those horrible machines.

I notice that a UK MP has just “outed” soccer player Ryan Giggs as the prominent sportsman who had a well-publicised extra-marital affair.  His identity was (and remains) the subject of a “super-injunction” issued by the UK High Court and based on rights to privacy in the Human Rights Act 1998.

This adds an interesting additional dimension to my recent post on privacy in a cyber-glasshouse world (which attracted almost no comment box debate for reasons I’m still at a loss to understand).  My own view is that there is a distinct difference between the “public interest and stuff that is interesting to the public” (as Richard Ackland succinctly phrases it) from a privacy viewpoint, so that privacy should be protected by the law where the public’s interest in knowing stuff is overwhelmingly prurient.  Where that is the case I don’t see that the public interest in freedom of speech has much force, irrespective of the degree of fame of the subject of salacious information.  The fact that a person is famous does not mean they forfeit all moral claim to personal privacy in my view.

On the other hand, the “outing” of Ryan Giggs suggests that, whatever we might think as individuals about whether a right to privacy should exist, the borderless and almost universal nature of the Internet means that a court in any given country is unlikely to be able effectively or for very long to prevent disclosure of information about the identity of a person about whom salacious rumours are circulating.  In one sense I suppose that’s not very different from the social situation in western societies before the urbanisation of the 18th and 19th centuries.  Most people lived in villages and knew everyone else’s business anyway.  Rights to privacy in that sense are just an artefact of a short period of history when the practical anonymity conferred by large urban agglomerations of people had not yet been rendered ineffective by Wikileaks, Twitter, blogs and Facebook and the underlying Internet architecture that makes it almost impossible for the courts of a single country to keep information confidential.

Nevertheless I can’t help thinking that this seemingly irreversible loss of privacy is not really a case for rejoicing, except perhaps for tabloid media proprietors like Rupert Murdoch.

US congressman Paul Ryan wants to "strengthen welfare for those who need it" and "end it for those who don’t". And to hard working Americans that sounded reasonable enough … until some of them realised he might be talking about Medicare and Social Security. How could benefits for people who’ve worked and paid taxes all their lives be welfare?

When Washington Post columnist Robert J Samuelson insisted that Medicare and Social Security were welfare readers were incredulous and offended. As one put it: “Let’s refrain from insulting individuals who have worked all their lives and contributed to the system for 50-plus years by insinuating that [their] earned benefits are welfare.”

Now Paul Ryan is attracting the same kind of criticism. As Dr Bill Thomas put it: "Sorry dude but neither Social Security nor Medicare is ‘welfare. They are social insurance programs that provide pensions and health care to older people who have paid into them their entire lives."

But according to analysis by the Urban Institute, most seniors will receive much more in benefits than they ever paid in contributions. For example, a two-earner couple turning 65 in 2010 with one spouse earning an average wage ($43,100 in 2010) and one earning a low wage ($19,400 in 2010) will receive $800,000 in benefits but will have paid in only $500,000.

At The Monkey Cage, Henry Farrell writes: "Medicare is about as obvious an example of welfare as one could possibly imagine – a program intended to spend government money on providing services to a population that would otherwise be vulnerable".

It’s funny. I think academia is too theoretical, and politics isn’t theoretical enough. In this post I’ll defend the second proposition on politics, and if I manage it, a subsequent post will defend the first. I’m  also thinking particularly about the ALP.  In a sense my proposition is commonplace – that they’re not too good at ‘the narrative’ as we’ve come to call it.

It’s also a commonplace that elections appear more as auctions than they did a generation ago. Yet in what’s a pretty much zero sum game, participating in an auction is a dangerous business.  Of course you have to bid in the auction, you can’t go into it with people thinking you’re going to make them worse off. But how are the punters going to keep tabs on all those promises you make?  Not only don’t they understand the transmission mechanisms and the difference between where a tax notionally falls (GST and PAYE are notionally paid by business) and who really ends up feeling the tax in their hip pocket (who does?). But even if they cared to spend lots of time adding up the parties’ various promises like Charles Darwin added up the pros and cons of getting married (a pro was that his wife would be better company than a dog which on all accounts she ended up being) how are they going to divine it through the spin and counterspin of the parties and the fog of the media’s infotainment coverage?

That’s where you’re much better off selling the vision itself, not just the benefits. Despite the great collapse of ideology in the last couple of generations, it’s not the case that the two parties don’t have recognisably different sympathies (however much they feel they’re actually able to indulge them).  The ALP is more concerned with ‘fairness’ and those doing less well. The Libs would argue that their own philosophy actually delivers fairer and better results for all, including those not doing that well – especially in the long term. But they’re more inclined to emphasise the importance of incentives to encourage people to make money – and to discourage them from doing harm.

But (Continued)

When I was in the market for young kids music entertainment, my favourite entertainer was Peter Combe (pronounced Coom). The Wiggles were nice enough but very anodyne - so much so that, when Disney took them up they never even really had to be Disnefied – they came readymade. Peter Combe is in the same market of recording, selling and performing songs to young kikds – from say 3-7 or thereabouts.  He’s much more lively, quirky, energetic and much more musical. His songs are very enjoyable, and, I’ve discovered, etch themselves into your memory (though this was via a great deal of repetition.)

(And if you are in need of a little kids band, the Hooley Dooleys are (probably this verb should be in the past tense) a lot better than the Wiggles too – far more musical and inventive. But I digress.)

Anyway about three years ago, Peter Combe agreed to do a set at (I think) a beer festival in his home state of South Australia (this is from memory but you can check in the link below).  This was for adults but mainly involved him singing his kids songs with a backing band. . . And it caused a sensation.  He could barely hear himself sing, so loudly were the audience of 18-30 year olds who’d grown up with his songs singing back to him. So he put on a couple more shows. Same reaction. So since around 2007 when he’s done his national tours of kids matinees, he adds evening performances for the adults.  The result is the same.  I didn’t grow up with Peter Combe’s songs but my kids did and I think I’ll pop along if I can manage it.

And you can hear all about it, as I did on ABC RN’s Music Show. I chose the video above, not because it’s his best song, but to illustrate his manic energy (though the second video below will do that for you as well). You can click here to check out some riffs from some of his best loved kids songs.   And you can play the videos below the fold should you wish.  (Continued)

OK – so I just read it from a link on a Krugman blog post, but it’s worth repeating.

An example of fad economics occurred in 1980, when a small group fo economists advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue. They argued that if people could keep a higher fraction of their income, people would work harder to earn more income. Even though tax rates would be lower, income would raise by so much, they claimed, that tax revenue would rise. Almost all professional economists, including most of those who supported Reagan’s proposal to cut taxes, viewed this outcome as too optimistic. Lower tax rates might encourage people to work harder, and this extra effort would offset the direct effects of lower tax rates to some extent. But there was no credible evidence that work effort would rise by enough to caues tax revenues to rise in the face of lower tax rates. George Bush, also a presidential candidate in 1980, agreed with most of the professional economists: He called this idea “voodoo economics.” Nonetheless, the argument was appealing to Reagan, and it shaped the 1980 presidential campaign and the economic policies of the 1980s…. Congress passes the cut in tax rates… but the tax cut did not cause tax revenue to rise… tax revenue fell… government began a long period of deficit spending… largest peacetime increase in the government debt in U.S. history. Fads can make experts seem less united than the actually are… when the economics profession appears in disarry, you should ask whether the disagreement is real or manufactured… [by] some snake-oil salesman who is trying to sell a miracle cure…

Answer over the fold:

(Continued)

(did Marx appreciate that his capitalist nightmare of complete separation of labor and capital would actually come to fruition in local government?)

Who wrote this?

… we will have true reconciliation when millions of Australians speak our Australian languages from coast to coast. It is then that we will have the keys to our landscape, our history, our art, our stories. The Australian languages, and the literatures and cultures that live or have lived through them, are the most important things we have in Australia. Their revival, growth and use in all social, political, educational, commercial and cultural domains are the most important matter for Australia’s future.

Answer over the fold.

(Continued)