Tuesday 29 April 2014

Concentration Camps and Democracy

Concentration Camps and Democracy


Post by John Keane

 Professor of Politics at University of Sydney

Concentration Camps and Democracy







Manus Island camp
Refugee Action Coalition
Click to enlarge


The dust of public controversy over the Sydney Biennale may have
settled, but there are other questions for Luca Belgiorno-Nettis in
light of the Australian government awarding Transfield Services a $1.22
billion contract to manage the Manus Island and Nauru detention centres.




In addition to his philanthropic contributions to the arts, Belgiorno-Nettis is also the founder and spokesman of the newDemocracy Foundation.
It is funded by the Anita and Luca Belgiorno-Nettis Family Foundation.
Transfield Holdings, a company privately owned by the Belgiorno-Nettis
family, has a 12% shareholding (though, it must be acknowledged,
currently no board directorships) in Transfield Services.




So how does a foundation that seeks “a better way to do democracy”
regard a company that has taken on the dirty business of running what
are actually offshore concentration camps and the site of terrible
rights abuses?




This is no idle question, but as the phrase concentration camp is
contentious, it’s important to be clear about its exact meaning and to
examine the entangled histories of democracy and concentration camps,
including here in Australia.




Without sparing the subject much thought, you’d imagine a democratic
country founded on long-distance transportation and the incarceration
and systematic violence against indigenous peoples would harbour deep
antipathy towards concentration camps.




You’d think the country would enjoy an abundance of brave citizens,
journalists, politicians and public opinion leaders willing to speak
against the cohabitation of democracy and camps.




After all, democracy rests on the radical idea that nobody on our
planet is entitled to rule arbitrarily, without restraint, over others.




Concentration camps, you’d say, stand at the polar opposite of democracy in this sense.



The Manus Island and Nauru centres are concentration camps, in my
view. Concentration camps are places where people, often in large
numbers, are indefinitely confined, against their will. In overcrowded
settings, they’re denied proper toilet and sanitation facilities, pushed
to the limits of their endurance, beaten, driven crazy.




In extreme cases, such as in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union,
concentration camps become sites of extermination where camp victims are
punished through such measures as forced labour, torture, starvation
and mass execution.




Here it’s wise to pause, and to think twice: the local Australian
brand of democracy doesn’t measure up to these standards, at least not
for the moment. Groups of petitioners and bodies like the Refugee
Advocacy Network and their supporters are doing good work,
yet in recent weeks the septic subject of concentration camps - Manus
Island and Nauru, for short - has gradually become a conversation
stopper at parties and dinner tables. It’s been disappeared from the
headlines by journalists hungry for the next chunk of bite-size breaking
news; or the topic’s been reduced to a version of the boys-only story
(how the Australian navy is running out of sea-worthy ships to run Operation Sovereign Borders) published recently by The Saturday Paper.




The silence is uncanny. It’s as if opal-hearted Australians
collectively want to smudge their reputation for fair-go generosity by
confirming the grim provocation of the radical Italian political thinker
Giorgio Agamben, who insists there’s an ‘inner solidarity’ between modern democracy and concentration camps.




There are more than a few pebbles of truth in his claim. While both the phrase (from the Spanish reconcentrados)
and the institution predated the coming of one-person, one-vote
universal suffrage, democracies soon built camps, often with enthusiasm.




In the name of democracy, the United States first indulged the double
standard when it militarily occupied the Philippines (1899 - 1902).
Parliamentary democracies, among them Canada and the United Kingdom,
readily wielded concentration camps as weapons against their ear-marked
domestic opponents during World War II. Australia had its share: more
than 15,000 people were locked up, mainly in remote locations, in such
places as Cowra, Hay, Holdsworthy, Bathurst, Long Bay and Orange (NSW);
at Harvey, Rottnest Island and Parkeston (Western Australia); Tatura and
Dhurringile (Victoria); Loveday (South Australia) and Enoggera
(Queensland).




Then along came the ‘War on Terror’. Well beyond the public gaze and
rule of law, it saw the development of Guantanamo Bay as the hub of a
global network of interrogation camps that treated ‘enemy combatants’ as
nothing better than crushable insects.




Yes, concentration camps are a cancerous feature of modern
democracies; but in each and every case, the connections have been
contingent and context-dependent. That’s another way of saying that
Agamben and his admirers both confuse and conflate democracy with forces
such as government bureaucracy and military might.




They also understate the way concentration camps have sparked public
resistance by citizens who know in their guts that the equalising spirit
of democracy contradicts the whole dirty principle of mass detention
without trial.




Sometimes resistance takes the form of remembering, mourning and
public confessions. Post-1945 Germany is a powerful case in point: its
second transition to democracy happened in the frightening shadows of
Terezin, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz.




Australia is no exception to this democratic rule. The earliest concentration camps, for instance (from October 1914) on Torrens Island in my native South Australia, sparked court action and public outcries against the incarceration and brutal treatment of ‘enemy aliens’, mainly people of German and Austro-Hungarian background.



The confinement of our own indigenous peoples in reserves,
institutions and camps, following the Aborigines Protection Act 1909,
remains a running sore for many Australian citizens.




And during World War Two, on both the European and Asia Pacific
fronts, Australian women and men bravely gave their lives in total
opposition to camps. An uncle of mine, Private Robert Charlick, was
among them. Captured by the Army of the Greater Japanese Empire, he was
starved to death in Tan Toey concentration camp, on the island of Ambon.
My family is still in mourning.





Ambon camp survivors bound for home, reading newspapers, on board a rescue ship, September 1945
Department of Veterans' Affairs

Click to enlarge


I count myself blessed to have a black and white photograph of him.
There he is, glancing at me from my study wall, beaming and jesting
before the camera, wearing a silly hat, just days away from boarding a
troop ship, a young fighter for democratic decency, a good bloke who
wasn’t to know he’d soon be robbed of his right to have rights in a
concentration camp that reduced him to a nobody.




Published reports from the camps of Manus Island
and Nauru suggest more than a few parallels with the taunting, torture
and general deprivation that took place on Ambon, and in all
concentration camps.




That’s why, just over a month ago, amidst the public uproar over the Sydney Biennale, I wrote to Luca Belgiorno-Nettis,
founder and funder of the newDemocracy Foundation and the Executive
Director of Transfield Holdings. I asked if we could speak on record
about the relationship between democracy, the public responsibilities of
people in high places and his financial involvement in a chain of
personal and corporate connections with Transfield Services. I reminded
him that in the history of democracy violence has always corrupted the
spirit and substance of equality. I explained my concern about possible
public reputational damage to his newDemocracy Foundation and to other
democracy initiatives, such as the Sydney Democracy Network, which I am now building with colleagues inside and outside the University of Sydney.




I asked him whether he had plans to make a public statement about his
political interest in democracy, the work of his foundation and the
Manus Island and Nauru contract. For instance, would he be willing to
come to the University, in a well-hosted and well-moderated arrangement,
to discuss the issues on neutral public ground?




Luca Belgiorno-Nettis graciously replied, saying he’d be pleased to
oblige. He emphasised that the death of an inmate at the Manus Island
camp happened before the implementation of the off-shore
detention contract by Transfield Services. I was intrigued by his
suggestion that Transfield Services could better service the camps, so I
pressed him for an exact date for our meeting. Next day, he wrote to
say things were pretty busy (they were: he had just tendered his
resignation as chairman of the 2014 Biennale) and, after further
correspondence, said there was just too much going on for our meeting to
take place.




I decided to pen some questions, which I hope Mr Belgiorno-Nettis
will publicly answer. These questions are not personal. They’re
political questions that bear on his sense of public responsibility and
the behaviour of governments stretching back to the time of Malcolm
Fraser.




First: You’re the founder of the newDemocracy Foundation and at the
same time you are the beneficiary of investment in Transfield
Services.Given the clash between democratic ideals and the realities of
concentration camps, don’t you have a responsibility to divest your
interests in Transfield Services?




Second: Is the quality of democracy damaged when governments, Tony
Abbott’s for instance, try to operate camps on the sly? His government
has clamped down on journalists. It has breached its obligations as a party to the Refugee Convention, refused access
to the camps by UN monitors, launched a review that will probably never
be publicly released. Doesn’t all this herald a form of moral collapse?
Isn’t it tragically at odds with the stuff of democracy: fair-minded
equality, human rights, public openness and due process of law?




Third: The newDemocracy Foundation funds small-scale, face-to-face
experiments with Greek-style ‘deliberative democracy’. Don’t these
experiments in effect encourage people to turn their backs on
parliamentary politics, government and the corporate world, where the
biggest decisions in fields like environment and immigration policy are
increasingly taken without any measure of public accountability? In a
strangely unintended way, isn’t there a mental and practical connection
between your dabbling in ‘deliberative democracy’, where little real
change happens, and businesses and governments that build concentration
camps, and try to run them in silence?




Finally: The newDemocracy Foundation website says ‘the research
evidence is compelling’ that ‘trusted outcomes are achieved when a
diverse and representative group of citizens, randomly selected,
deliberate together’. The inmates of Manus Island and Nauru are
non-citizens. They’re the outcasts of a democracy that treats them as
inferior foreign invaders, but they do have urgent stories to tell. So
could someone in the Transfield group arrange a live-streamed public
forum in the camps? Or perhaps you could fund an assembly featuring
people who’ve spent time in such camps? It’d be technically easy, and
low-budget. You’d surely have a huge audience of public witnesses, plus a
long tail of follow-up social media coverage.




Will Mr Belgiorno-Nettis, or those who speak on his behalf, reply to
these questions? I don’t know. Quite probably, his spokesmen will
grumble and complain privately they’re being unfairly picked on. They’ll
insist they do good work, and perhaps ask where all this talk of public
responsibility ends. The real culprit, they might add, is government
policy. Go pick on them.




I’m guessing these replies, in order to spotlight unanswered
questions. I would like Mr Belgiorno-Nettis to address them, and to say
something about why language matters in politics and what he thinks
about the official double-speak that defines concentration camps as
‘detention centres’ holding victims renamed as ‘transferees’ and
‘customers’ of ‘people smugglers’.




I’d urge him to talk about weeping children; what it’s like to have
no name, just a boat ID number. Or how it feels to be dragged without
warning from bed in the middle of the night; and why camp inmates sleep
in shifts, and shit their pants out of fear for their lives.
How does he react when he hears their complaints that the very worst
thing of all is uncertainty: the mental torture that results when
nothing is explained by those who run the camps, so that victims have no
idea what’s happening to them, for how much longer they’ll be
imprisoned, or what the future holds?




It’s possible such questions have become politically redundant.
Everybody may be terminally bored by the whole subject. Perhaps the
country that once had an opal heart is giving up on democratic politics.
Might the mainstream pundits and politicians have a point? Perhaps
people deluded enough to still worry their heads about concentration
camps are simply passé: crotchety moribunds from a bygone era.




First published on ABC’s The Drum.






Talk of levy takes budget debate into a bad place for the government

Talk of levy takes budget debate into a bad place for the government



Talk of levy takes budget debate into a bad place for the government




Prime Minister Tony Abbott is weathering a backbench revolt over his paid parental leave scheme.
AAP/Julian Smith



A fortnight out from budget day Tony Abbott looks to need Houdini’s skills to get out of the prison of his own promises.



Those prolific pledges he made so confidently before the election. Negative commitments and positive undertakings.



He wouldn’t change pensions, nor raise taxes. He would give women
parental leave to dream of. Above all, whatever he promised, he’d
honour. Cross his heart and hope to die.




Abbott was (or seemed to be) obsessed with keeping promises - he had
demolished Julia Gillard in large part because he had been able to
exploit her breaking the “no carbon tax under the government I lead”
pledge. Like some of his promises, that was made late in the piece, when
election day was all that mattered.




Gillard was skewered by one promise in particular; Abbott is grappling with how to deal with many.



In his Sydney Institute speech
on Monday the prime minister tried to square off on the pension pledge.
Age pensions would not be touched for this term, he said. But in three
years, they would be harder to get and increase more slowly.




If you shut one eye and squint, perhaps this is not exactly a totally
broken promise, but it is certainly a stretched one. A bit like John
Howard’s handling of his “never, ever” GST pledge. He took the GST to an
election. If voters don’t like the prospect of future changes to the
age pension, they can vote against them in 2016.




The tax levy that is being considered is harder to bring into any
line with what Abbott said before. “We are absolutely committed to
avoiding … extra taxes on individuals, we think that the people and
families of Australia pay quite enough tax already,” he declared last
August.




Abbott is now trying to quarantine the notion of a temporary levy
from a tax rise. “If there was a permanent increase in taxation that
would certainly be inconsistent with the sort of things said before the
election,” he argues. The distinction he is trying to make is a
nonsense. Long term or short term, a tax rise is just that.




The story that a “deficit reduction levy”
was on the table broke in News Corp papers on Sunday, with a follow-up
about detail on Tuesday ($800 extra tax for earners on $80,000). These
were assumed to be authorised leaks, because the government regularly
uses these papers as bulletin boards. But government sources say they
weren’t and that the second story’s figures are incorrect.




The leaks about the levy have been extraordinarily damaging; the
government now has to manage a backlash, including from some of its own
backbench and especially from the business community. From what Labor
and Greens are saying the legislation would be struck down in the
Senate.




Meanwhile, Abbott is weathering a very overt backbench revolt over
another promise – this time one he so far refuses to breach. His
commitment to an expensive paid parental leave scheme has concerned many
colleagues for a long while, but he continues to argue he has seen the
light on the issue and they should too.




Business is chiming in once again against the scheme, and it will get
another going over when the Commission of Audit report is released on
Thursday. The Greens, who have supported a less generous version and
whose votes would be vital to pass it in the Senate, will come under
increasing pressure to back away.




At this point, the government has almost lost control of a pre-budget debate that it had been so carefully trying to frame.



So let me get this straight.....

So let me get this straight.....

So let me get this straight…..

So let me get this straight,


If I earn over $80,000 I am going to asked to pay for the $68 billion
that Joe Hockey has added to the deficit by his party’s policies.



I have to pay for Hockey’s $9 billion gamble on the Aussie dollar going down.


piggy-bank-locked-up
I am going to have to cough up money to give billions to the worst
polluters so they can upgrade their factories and many more billions in
fossil fuel subsides to wealthy mining companies.



I am going to have to pay women on very high salaries almost
$3000/week to watch their nanny look after their kid for 6 months whilst
they get a rebate for employing her.



I am going to have to pay for a huge fleet of fighter jets to protect
me from who? Do you really think we can beat China in a war? If America
needs us to help then I am sure they would provide the jets. Hey we
could even lend them an airbase to use their own bloody jets to bomb
whoever the hell they want to next time. Won’t it all be done by the
unmanned drones that I will also be paying for?



Tony is spending over $10 billion on his war games against asylum
seekers. I refuse to pay for that. I don’t want to pay over $1 million
for Jim Molan to be our “Special Envoy” never to be heard from again. I
don’t want to pay $200,000 for every orange life raft that gets used
once to set asylum seekers adrift on the ocean. I don’t want to give
billions to a security firm that maims the people they are hired to
protect.



I don’t want to spend billions on roads whilst ignoring public
transport. I want cost benefit analyses done by Infrastructure Australia
and I want THEM, the experts, to decide on priorities rather than our
“Infrastructure Prime Minister for Women and Aborigines”.



I don’t want to pay over $600 million for Tony to buy two big new
planes to fly himself and his entourage of Murdoch press, film crews,
and businessmen around the world.



I don’t want to spend over $5 million on bomb-proof BMWs to drive Tony around.


I don’t want to pay millions for Tony Abbott to fly backward and
forwards to Canberra because he decided to live at Kirribilli House so
Margie could keep working and he could keep surfing. When John Howard
did that it cost us over $18 million in flights to and from Canberra.



I don’t want to pay for a Royal Commission into the Home Insulation
Scheme. There have already been 8 investigations which have made many
recommendations. This is a pointless political witch hunt that you want
US to pay for. Same for the RC into unions. We have ICAC and similar
bodies, as well as the police and judicial system, who already have the
resources, experience, and authority to deal with corruption and
intimidation.  Why not set up an integrity department that keeps an eye
on all you bastards.



I don’t want to pay $16 million for Cadbury to reintroduce factory tours.


I don’t want to pay $10 million to the Manly Sea Eagles to upgrade their grandstand.


Must I pay $4.3 million for a research company to trawl through
millions of Australian social media posts to advise the government on
its immigration policies? Between Scott Morrison and the immigration
department alone, you already employ 90 spin doctors. What are THEY
doing that you need to pay millions to someone else to look at stuff
that is freely available?



All of these reviews and audits and consultants and white papers and
green papers are costing us a fortune. The Commissioners of Audit were
paid $1500 a day each. Does this imply that NONE of your policies had
any basis in fact or solid grounding or research behind them and now you
must pay people to make them into something credible? Why use
PriceWaterhouseCoopers when we have Treasury, Finance, the Productivity
Commission, the Parliamentary Budget Office? Am I to pay for you to get
the answers you want to hear?



I don’t want to contribute $2.2 million legal aid for farmers and miners to fight native title claims.


As Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott claimed over $1 million a year in
entitlements, on top of his salary. I don’t want to pay thousands of
dollars for him to take part in fun runs and charity rides.



I don’t want to pay for jobs for the boys like $320,000 for Tim
Wilson who had a job made for him and gifted to him with no
qualifications, experience, interview, or application process.



I don’t want to pay for George Brandis’ bookshelves or Tony’s designer rugs.


If we keep the carbon tax and the mining tax and cut all the above
wasteful expenditures then we will be a long way towards cutting the
deficit without ME having to foot the bill for your decisions which,
might I say, show you have absolutely NO idea about spending priorities.
I doubt any of you have ever had to work to a budget before because you
are making a god almighty mess of it and if I am going to pay to get us
out of trouble then I want a say on how it is spent!


Monday 28 April 2014

Tony Abbott: no pension cuts before 2016, but family benefits may change

Tony Abbott: no pension cuts before 2016, but family benefits may change



Tony Abbott: no pension cuts before 2016, but family benefits may change

As
Labor attacks the prime minister over pre-election promises, Abbott
tries to reassure aged pensioners, but has left open cuts to other
social security benefits





Pensioners protest 2010
Pensioners protesting for a rise in the aged pension at parliament house in Melbourne in 2010. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

The prime minister is reassuring pensioners they won’t suffer any
reductions in payments before the election due in 2016, but is warning
that tougher eligibility rules for pensions are likely after the poll
and that family benefits could be reined in even sooner.


As
Labor ramps up its attack on the government for considering budget cuts
that Tony Abbott categorically ruled out before the 2013 election, the
prime minister used a speech on Monday night to clarify that much of the
budget pain won’t be felt for a few years.


The prime minister
sought to explain how his promise that there would be “no changes to the
pension” could fit with his government’s clear signals that it is
likely to raise the pension age to 70, and its floating of changes to
the assets test for retirees receiving part pensions and less generous
annual indexation for pension payments.


“To keep our commitments,
there will be no changes to the pension during this term of parliament
but there should be changes to indexation arrangements and eligibility
thresholds in three years’ time,” Abbott said in an address to the
Sydney Institute.


“I want to assure vulnerable people that the age
pension won’t be less tomorrow than it is today and that people turning
65 tomorrow are certainly not going to have to wait five years to
retire.”


But he said “there are other social security benefits
where indexation arrangements and eligibility thresholds should be
adjusted now so that our social safety net is more sustainable for the
long term.”


“Such benefits won’t be less tomorrow than they are today, but the rate of increase will be slower and needs to be slower.”

Abbott
said the budget was only one “installment” in the long-term
restructuring needed and would not promise to return to surplus by a
particular date but would “bring us close to surplus and on track to a
strong surplus within a decade”.


He flagged education cuts after
the four years of the budget’s forward estimates, saying the Coalition
had promised to match Labor’s “Gonski” funding for four years but
“explicitly refused to commit to Labor’s changes beyond that” as well as
“more price signals” for government services – such as co-payments.


In
2011, when the Gillard government tried to slow the rate of increase in
spending on family payments by freezing the indexation of the income
level at which they were no longer paid, then opposition leader Tony
Abbott went on the attack labeling the move as nothing less than “class war”.


“Why
is this government always targeting people who want to get ahead? Why
is the government against the aspirations of people?,” he asked at the
time.


And in the lead-up to the 2012 budget
then then treasurer Wayne Swan was arguing that the country could no
longer afford to pay “welfare” to people who didn’t really need it,
Abbott again attacked the suggestion.


“What is middle-class
welfare? Is Medicare middle-class welfare? Is the [pharmaceutical
benefit scheme] middle-class welfare? What the government calls
middle-class welfare is actually a fair go for families with kids,” he
said.


In his speech he attempted to deal with such arguments being used against his own budget measures.

“Not
for a second would I label families as ‘rich’ just because they are
earning $100,000 a year … but the best way to help families on $100,000 a
year is long-term tax relief and more business and job opportunities,
not social security hand-outs.”


The pension age is already slated
to rise to 67 in 2023 and the government has all but confirmed it will
now eventually rise to 70.


Abbott did not comment on reports the
government is considering a “deficit levy” on high income earners as
part of its budget, but did say everyone would suffer some budget pain
“including high income earners such as members of parliament”.


“The budget pain will be temporary but the economic improvement will be permanent,” he said.

And
he held out the prospect of personal income tax cuts sometime in the
future if Australians endure some pain now to get the budget back into
the black.


“The changes in this budget will make personal income tax cuts much more likely in four or five years time,” Abbott said.

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said pension cuts or any increased taxes would be clear broken promises.

''Here's
a couple of ideas for Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott – don't break your
promise ... don't say nine times in a 32-day election period when you're
chasing people's vote that they won't touch pensions and then as soon
as you get elected have twisted priorities and broken promises and
introduce a new deceit tax,'' he said.


The commission of audit
report, which will inform budget spending cuts, will be released on
Thursday. The budget will be brought down on 13 of May.

How Abbott lied, trashed protocol and offended everyone — including the Queen

How Abbott lied, trashed protocol and offended everyone — including the Queen

How Abbott lied, trashed protocol and offended everyone — including the Queen

Barry Everingham 29 April 2014, 10:00am 1


(Image via @astewartau)


Prime Minister Tony Abbott trashed vice-regal protocol in the
last moments of the term of Quentin Bryce as Governor General, at the
same time as causing grave offence to the monarch.




After revealing earlier this month that PM Abbott misled the public over his decision to reinstate imperial honours, Independent Australia can now reveal that the now Dame Quentin Bryce heard of her elevation from ABC radio news.



Sources close to Abbott have told IA that the Prime Minister was “concerned” she would not accept the honour if she knew of his plans.



Mr Abbott, a confirmed monarchist, tore up the rule book and, in two
fell swoops, not only insulted Governor General Bryce but also Queen
Elizabeth — who was left out of the loop until the very last moment.




Dame Quentin, Australia’s most successful and arguably the most loved
Governor General was delivered the ultimate insult by Abbott, whose
actions reeked of misogyny.




If Abbott had followed tradition, he would have advised the Queen to
dub the then Ms Bryce a Dame in the Order of Australia. Buckingham
Palace would then have asked Ms Bryce if she would accept the honour.




But Abbott heaped praise on “Dame” Quentin in his speech at her official farewell.



His unilateral decision to resurrect the archaic honours attracted disbelief and ridicule
from most of his own Party across the broader community and even his
mentor the former Prime Minister John Howard declared he would refuse such an honour if one were offered.




Traditionally, any Prime Minister can advise the Queen to bestow an
Order of Australia and his or her advice is accepted. In the case of an
honour for a Governor General, however, this protocol differs.




Had Abbott not side-swiped the then Ms Bryce, he would have called
her and advised her that he had been in touch with the Palace who, of
course, would have advised that the Queen would be “pleased” to confer
the honour on her representative.




If Ms Bryce did not want the honour ‒ as we have been told she allegedly didn’t ‒ she could have informed Abbott accordingly at that stage.





And as we revealed earlier,
Abbott claimed he had followed procedure and been in touch with London
so “letters patent” – another archaic colonial hangover – could be
issued.




Our own contacts in London emphatically denied the Prime Minister had
made contact and, as the mess unravelled, the Palace and Abbott’s
department moved into damage control.




Rather than being prepared with their customary care and attention to
detail, the letters patent were allegedly hastily cobbled together and
flown out at the last minute in a special despatch.




The monarch was, according to reliable sources, "not amused".



While all this was going on, the traditional place where all these
events would normally be coordinated – the office of the Governor
General – was getting all its information from the media.




In my own case, when I called the office for a comment, a bemused ‒
and, indeed, angry ‒ official suggested I would know more than he did.




Tony Abbott’s thought bubbles have the knack of getting him tied in knots.



His trip into yesterday in this case had damaged the government’s relations with Buckingham Palace and with Yarralumla.



As the situation stands, while ever Abbott is Prime Minister, General Sir Peter Cosgrove
would be well advised to watch his p’s and q’s. Dame Quentin Bryce
conducted her tenure with openness and included all Australians to make
the journey with her.




Cosgrove, a distinguished warrior used to dealing with men and women
of integrity, might find himself relegated to cutting ribbons and
planting trees. What is certain is that every word he utters will need
to be ticked off by Abbott’s office.




Not quite the role he probably envisaged.



As Whitlam’s famously said:



“Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor General.”






Barry Everingham
is long-time commentator on royalty, including formerly being the
“royal guru” for MSNBC, Extra! and Court TV. Dame Quentin Bryce was not
interviewed for this story.


Sunday 27 April 2014

'Deficit levy' would be a broken promise from Tony Abbott, Labor warns

'Deficit levy' would be a broken promise from Tony Abbott, Labor warns

Deficit levy' would be a broken promise from Tony Abbott, Labor warns

Date
Opposition treasury spokesman Chris Bowen: “This is the deceitful, voodoo economics of Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey from before the election catching up with them,”
Opposition treasury spokesman Chris Bowen: “This is
the deceitful, voodoo economics of Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey from
before the election catching up with them,” Photo: Alex Ellinghausen







Labor has warned a “deficit levy” would define Tony Abbott as
a Prime Minister if he pursued the new tax and  says the government was
paying the price for the “deceitful, voodoo economics” of its election
campaign.





Mr Abbott has not ruled out a short-term tax on high incomes
to  reduce Australia’s deficit, as the opposition accused the the
Coalition of preparing to break an election promise of no new taxes.




The Australian Financial Review is also reporting that business and industry leaders are urging the government not to raise taxes to reduce debt.




Mr Abbott on Sunday refused to comment about speculation the
government was preparing to introduce the levy on high incomes but said
the government would not “squib on the challenge” of addressing “debt
and deficit stretching out as far as the eye can see”.




“We are going to do it in ways which are faithful to the
commitments that we made to the Australian people, but we are not going
to squib the challenge,” he said.




“We are attracted to good economic policy and the reason why
you’ve got to fix the budget is because you can’t have in the long run a
strong economy without also having a strong budgetary position.”




But Opposition Leader Bill Shorten attacked the Abbott
government, accusing them of reneging on promises made before the
election.




"They've doubled the deficit, now because they've doubled the
deficit they want all Australians to pay a deceit tax," he told
reporters in Brisbane.




''Here's a couple of ideas for Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott -
don't break your promise . . . don't say nine times in a 32-election
period when you're chasing people's vote that they won't touch pensions
and then as soon as you get elected have twisted priorities and broken
promises and introduce a new deceit tax.''




Mr Shorten also criticised the Abbott government over
speculation of changes to the aged pension, saying the pension was not a
''king's ransom or like winning lotto''.




''The fact they're letting these rumours, this fear, run
tells me that the Abbott government is using the Australian people to
scare them, to prepare the ground for unpleasant, unnecessary
decisions,'' Mr Shorten said.




Opposition treasury spokesman Chris Bowen said earlier on
Monday that the government was preparing to breach its election
promises.




“This is the deceitful, voodoo economics of Tony Abbott and
Joe Hockey from before the election catching up with them,” Mr Bowen
told ABC radio.




“They said they could introduce a budget surplus while
cutting taxes and having no spending cuts over and above those
announced.




“It was always fallacious and it’s been shown to be so now.”



Labor’s family and payments spokeswoman Jenny Macklin warned on Monday that imposing a levy would define Mr Abbott’s leadership.



“He was quite adamant about it, just like he said there would
be no changes to pensions, he said there’d be no new taxes,” she told
Radio National.




“So, you’d have to wonder how many promises Tony Abbott could break.



“This will define Tony Abbott if he goes ahead and introduces a new tax.”

The price of power

The price of power

The price of power

Sunday 27 April 2014 8:05AM
With Australian electricity prices amongst the highest in the
world, more and more households are going solar. The big power companies
say the Renewable Energy Target is undermining their businesses and
they want it wound back. The federal government agrees, so who is to
blame for the high price of power? Jess Hill investigates.




Never
has it been more expensive to turn on our appliances. In the last few
years, our power bills have doubled, making Australia's electricity
prices some of the highest in the developed world.


Prime Minister
Tony Abbott blames two things: the carbon tax and the renewable energy
target. He says the government's review of the target will look at its
impact on bills, because 'renewable energy targets are significantly
driving up power prices right now'.


From the coal-fired power station point of view, you couldn't
have a worse competitor, because solar is at its best when the market is
at its most profitable.

Richard Denniss, executive director of the Australia Institute
But Mr Abbott's claim that the renewable energy target
is expensive is not supported by the data. The Australian Energy Markets
Commission says the renewable energy target adds four per cent to the
average electricity bill. For an average household, that's about a
dollar a week.


'For all of the attention that carbon price has
got, from the increasing attention the renewable energy target's got,
the main reason that electricity has been getting dearer is the
overinvestment in poles and wires, and the fundamental inefficiency in
the way that the national electricity market's working,' says Richard
Denniss, executive director of the Australia Institute.


Federal
Treasury estimates that 51 per cent of an average household bill is
spent on network costs. Most of that is going towards paying off the $45
billion network companies have spent on updating our poles and wires
over the last five years.


This investment was justified by the
network companies' own data, which showed that Australia's energy demand
was going to increase dramatically. But in 2009, just as they were
beginning to spend, something unprecedented happened. Energy demand in
Australia didn't go up—it went down. And it's continued to go down every
year since.


Despite the clear reality of falling demand, the
network companies insisted that demand was rising, and they carried on
investing billions of dollars into the grid. Every dollar of that
investment is now being recovered from consumers, via our power bills.
Every dollar, plus ten per cent—a guaranteed return granted to them by
the regulator.


In 2012, three years after the spending began, the
Senate held an inquiry into electricity prices. It was chaired by Labor
MP, Matt Thistlethwaite.


'What we found was those network businessesthat
earned the most profits were the ones that invested the most,' he says.
'So there was a perverse incentive in the system for an overinvestment
in the poles and wires, and that led to dramatic profits for those
businesses, but of course it was the consumer that paid for that cost of
that additional capital.'


Mr Thistlethwaite says that the inquiry
was presented with many examples of infrastructure being built where it
wasn't needed. 'We discovered a network business that had invested $30
million in a substation in Newcastle, and I actually visited the
substation. It wasn't connected to the grid. The reason why it wasn't
connected to the grid; when the decision was made a couple of years ago
to invest in this particular piece of infrastructure, it was projected
that the demand would be there. But the demand didn't eventuate.'


Energy
analyst Bruce Mountain from Carbon Market Economics says that although
some old infrastructure needed updating, the amount of money wasted on
the poles and wires was substantial. 'I would estimate as an aggregate
across the national electricity market, perhaps at least a half of that
total spend was not actually necessary, but it does vary by state.'


The
staggering rise in electricity prices brought on by this investment has
had a rather unintended consequence. 'Because the price got so high, it
made solar even more competitive from the customer's point of view,'
says David Leitch, a utilities analyst with UBS. 'Because when you use
the solar in your house, you don't use the wires and poles in the
system, so you're eliminating half the final price.'


The fact
that households with solar can save more than half on their power bills
has made solar panels an economic choice, not just an ethical one. There
are now 1.2 million households getting their daytime power from solar
panels.


'It's essentially turning households into competitors of
the electricity companies, because all of a sudden households are
producing electricity, and they're deciding what to do with it,' says Mr
Leitch. 'As opposed to just having a choice of take it or leave it from
your friendly electricity retailer.'


This article represents part of a larger Background Briefing investigation. Listen to Jess Hill's full report on Sunday at 8.05 am or use the podcast links above after broadcast.
Solar
rooftops are wreaking havoc on the traditional power industry, says Mr
Denniss, because they produce the most amount of energy at the time of
day when the power industry makes the most money.


'Solar panels
have got this great trick, they make lots of electricity when the sun is
shining; that's when we like to turn our air conditioners on,' he says.
'When everybody turns their electricity on at four o'clock on a hot
Thursday afternoon, we have enormous demand for electricity for these
short periods of peak demand. And that's when solar panels are at their
best.'


'Solar panels are actually pumping quite a large amount of
energy in during these periods of peak demand, and that's pushing down
the peak price. Now that's great for everybody, except the so-called
baseload power stations. Because the baseload power stations used to be
able to sell their electricity for a much higher price at four o'clock
on that hot Thursday afternoon. From the coal-fired power station point
of view, you couldn't have a worse competitor, because solar is at its
best when the market is at its most profitable.'


What that means
is that the big coal-fired power plants are earning less for the energy
they produce. That's because Australia has more electricity than it can
use.


That's a big problem, says the federal industry minister,
Ian Macfarlane. 'We're facing an enormous challenge in terms of an
excess generating capacity in electricity in Australia. To be adding
large quantities of generation into that situation has to be questioned.
The review process will go through those things.'


With energy
demand going down, and renewable energy supply going up, Australia
simply doesn't need as much power from fossil fuels anymore. In the last
few years, several large coal-fired power stations have been shut down
or mothballed.


'Australia doesn't need more generation; if we
have more wind at the moment, it will displace some other form of
generation,' says Mr Leitch. 'So no-one wants to be displaced in this
world, and we can all understand that.'


That's one of the reasons
why the conventional power industry is lobbying the government to wind
back the renewable energy target—known as the RET. The Energy Supply
Association of Australia, which speaks on behalf of the conventional
power industry, says that now demand has gone odwn, 41,000 gigawatt
hours will represent around 30 per cent of Australia's energy supply,
rather than 20 per cent.
'The conditions under which the RET was
designed no longer exist, and we think the RET is broken and can't work
in an oversupplied market,' says Matthew Warren, the ESAA's CEO.


But
there has already been a review. At the end of 2012, the Climate Change
Authority reviewed the target and recommended that it be maintained.
Their review was supposed to provide certainty to the renewable energy
industry.


The chair of the Climate Change Authority is Bernie
Fraser, a former Reserve Bank governor. He says that just by holding
another review, the government has ensured that the 41,000
gigawatt-target won't be met. 'Investment is actually being cut back and
delayed, and I think because of that, I think it's apparent now that
the 41,000 gigawatts for large renewable energy power plants, is not
going to happen. It's going to be a lesser figure and I think that's
what the opponents, the critics of renewable energy want to see.'


'Policymakers
need to look beyond short-term economic considerations in the interests
of some of the big companies to longer-term community interests. And
that's what governments are supposed to do, but unfortunately it's not
happening at the present time,' he says.


So it's a bit… well, it's
more than a bit, it's very disappointing that we're falling behind, and
we are falling behind what many other countries are doing.'
ABOUT THE SERIAL LIAR PRIME MINISTER TONY ABBOTT AND MEDICARE

Government policy to blame for rising cost of pension, not ageing population

Government policy to blame for rising cost of pension, not ageing population

Government policy to blame for rising cost of pension, not ageing population

Date
  • 25 reading now

Peter Martin, Gareth Hutchens



Clive Palmer
Clive Palmer said his party will not support Joe Hockey's push to increase the pension age to 70. Photo: Eddie Jim







The notion that pensioners are about to become a burden on Australian workers is ridiculed in a research paper.



The report, by Monash centre for population and urban
research, says that while the cost of the age pension has grown faster
than gross domestic product over the past decade, demographic ageing is
not the cause.





"The rising costs have been due to discretionary policy changes," the report says.



On Sunday, Clive Palmer – whose Palmer United Party will hold
the balance of power in the new Senate in July – said his party would
not support a rise in the aged pension to 70.





Mr Palmer’s position will cause a headache for the
government. Treasurer Joe Hockey has spent the past few weeks explaining
why a rise in the age pension is inevitable.




On Monday, Katharine Betts of Swinburne University will publish The ageing of the Australian population: triumph or disaster.  



Her report says fears a dwindling proportion of tax-paying
workers will be unable to support a growing proportion of age pensioners
are "unfounded".




"Even with no further growth in labour force participation
rates, the proportion of workers will not fall as low as it was in the
1960s," the report says.




Ian Hammet, 69, juggles his time running an online games store on eBay and managing the Australian Cricket Society’s website. 



Mr Hammet, who used to own a chain of shops selling board
games and puzzles, started working from home eight years ago after he
sold his flagship city store.




"I kept doing what I did best, which was selling games. I’m pretty busy with both jobs," he said.



Mr Hammet said raising the pension age was "inevitable" and older Australians still had a lot to offer the workforce.



"When you get to your 60s, you start slowing down but I think
it's good for people to keep working," he said. "It keeps the mind
active. We can still contribute and we're active and capable of
working."




Dr Betts blames government decisions for the apparent
increased costs of ageing, such as the decision to widen access to the
pension and to abolish tax on superannuation payouts.




She also notes that the labour force participation of older Australians is close to a record high.



"Some opinion makers are happy to deride baby boomers, [but]
this does not help older people cope with discrimination," she writes.




"In a more positive social environment, labour force participation rates for older people would be even higher.



"A comparison of data from 31 OECD [Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development] countries shows no association between
their age structure and rates of labour-force participation."




The Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Canada all have
older populations than Australia but have higher labour force
participation.




Dr Betts says only about 40 per cent of taxes are based on
paid labour, meaning the remaining 60 per cent are likely to be
unaffected as the population ages.




Other OECD data shows no association between the proportion
of a country’s population aged over 65 and the proportion of its GDP
spent on health.




The US has one of the youngest populations in the OECD but
spends 18 per cent of its GDP on health. Japan has the oldest but spends
only 9 per cent.




The health of older people is improving. 



"British research finds that dementia rates among people aged
65-plus fell by 24 per cent between 1991 and 2011," the paper says.




On Sunday, Mr Palmer said his party would not support increasing the age pension to 70.



"I just couldn’t employ Joe Hockey or Tony Abbott at 69 no
matter how competent they are," Mr Palmer told the ABC. "They wouldn’t
have a good future and I wouldn’t invest the time in training them
because they’d be retiring the next year.




"I know Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey are not too concerned about
the pensioners of Australia because they’ll have a big fat parliamentary
pension that you’ve paid for. I think that’s the whole nub of it,
really."