Reset

I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense
And watch this hurtin' feeling
Disappear like it was common sense

It was a fine idea at the time
Now it's a brilliant mistake

- Elvis Costello Brilliant mistake

Insofar as the Coalition was honest at all before the last election, it is fair to say that the Abbott government is pretty much doing what it indicated it would do - and what the IPA said it should do.

It just hasn't done this very well. The Abbott government basically outsourced its capacity to generate ideas, and in doing so it has lost the capacity to advance and defend and modify ideas, and to keep to a basic set of beliefs through the tempests of politics and compromise without selling out.

When Chris Berg frets for the government, he is being disingenuous. Chris Berg is Policy Director at the IPA, yet he has given up directing policy and opted instead for the disguise of a passive, disinterested observer. He rattles through recent history and illustrates that policy ignorance, far from making you more politically flexible (as Abbott clearly believes) actually makes you much, much less so. Then there's this:

The Medicare co-payment is going to have to be restructured and revised if it is going to pass the Senate. (Even that may not be enough. Clive Palmer yesterday announced he would vote against any co-payment, no matter how small.)

The mining tax will have to be decoupled from the measures it was supposed to fund - the schoolkids bonus, for instance.

The changes to welfare are unlikely to pass in their current form, so it'll be back to the drawing board with those as well.

The Government hasn't even begun the university fee deregulation debate, but when it starts it will be bruising.

And then there's the paid parental leave scheme - not formally part of the 2014 budget but its generosity casts a shadow over every austerity measure. PPL is meant to be up and running next year.

With the possible exception of PPL, not one of those measures is inconsistent with the urgings that the IPA have put to this government. He mounts no defence of them at all, merely cataloguing them as political roadkill as though he were part of the press gallery.

What makes the Government's problem even worse is that it's trapped by both legislative forces and public opinion.

Not to mention a third force, at its back, ready to squeal that the government has sold out and stands for nothing were it to depart from any of those policies - the IPA and commentators like Andrew Bolt comprise that Praetorian Guard, fully supportive so long as the government sticks to the agenda they have written for it.

The Abbott government is in a similar position to the Lyons government of the 1930s. A Roman Catholic Labor voter found himself hoisted atop a government of conservatives, whose agenda was driven by a business cabal (including Keith Murdoch) with the politicians responsible for providing the PR necessary to secure community acceptance. Rupert Murdoch, Tony Shepherd, and others who run the IPA and BCA are the business cabal of today, fizzing with ideas but unable/unwilling to execute them; Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey et al are perfectly willing, but far less able than Lyons or his largely inept ministry to execute the deal, within Parliament or in the country beyond.

Tony Abbott's prime ministerial predecessors have only had to deal with one ["legislative forces and public opinion"], rather than both ... Howard didn't have an obstructive senate. In fact, he had the opposite problem - a compliant upper house that offered no check on his government's longstanding urge to centralise labour market regulation.

From 1996 to 2005 - nine of the Howard government's eleven-year tenure - the Coalition lacked a majority in the Senate. It was not as legislatively paralysed as the Abbott government is now. Its contrast with the previous government, which almost passed one legislative instrument for every day it spent in office, is stark. When you consider that a majority of the Abbott ministry were in Parliament over that 1996-2005 period, their deficiency in managing the default state of the Senate (where no party or formal coalition has a majority) is absurd.

Perhaps this is the wrong metric for Berg, of all people, to apply. In my day libertarians cheered governments that legislated as little as possible. From the US we saw pictures of President Reagan riding a horse, or Bush I playing golf, or Bush II clearing scrub - they were demonstrating to their supporters that they were not jacking up taxes or clamping down on freedoms, which are the only two things that libertarians believe governments do. Berg and his fellow-travellers should be pleased at Abbott's lack of success at a process they tend to disdain.

The bottom line for Abbott is this, and it's dire: the Government is unable to legislate policies that voters don't want anyway.

Yep, it coasted into office with a compliant media that didn't test its ideas or its ability to get them through, lest the then opposition go the way of the Labor Opposition in 2004. The Abbott government has failed its side of the bargain: it has failed to sell the ideas handed to them by Berg and others.

Berg does not resile from or re-examine those ideas, for their applicability to the position facing Australia today (the Lyons government did not set Australia up well for World War II or its aftermath, either). Abbott rightly bears the responsibility for failing to get his agenda through. Unlike previous Liberal leaders, he also bears responsibility for not using the Liberal Party (and for lacking the sense and wit himself) to challenge the half-baked agenda of the IPA and other rentseekers. Berg must be disappointed in Abbott and his gang. It would be one thing for Berg to castigate Abbott for departing from IPA ideas, and to suffer in the polls as a result; it is quite another not to admit his own agency here.

So it's hard to see any alternative. The Government has to affect a policy reset - a mini budget. The budget needs to be redone and relaunched.

A newly elected government resets the agenda with a mini-budget after it gets elected. If the Abbott government was going to do that it would've had one before last Christmas, fitting with that 'budget emergency' stuff. As it stands, any 'budget emergency' is well and truly down to this government rather than its predecessor.

I can't think of a single instance where a government has successfully "reset" itself after a poor start; governments that stumble as badly as this one has. Toward the end Kristina Keneally was resetting her NSW government several times a week, pushing an overworn button that was disconnected from any source of power. Governments in this dire position tend to rely on outside help, such as the opposition splitting and/or choosing a poor leader.

The budget needs to be redone and relaunched. Contentious policies have to be revised, and, critically, argued for on their own terms. If the Government wants to reform Medicare, then great: let's hear the case for reform. We haven't yet.

That whole paragraph is oddly passive. Peter Dutton was the Liberals' spokesman on health for six years; his predecessor in the role is the current Prime Minister. There is no evidence that they have done any thinking on health policy at all, except to entertain IPA disparaging the very idea of public universal coverage, and to dishonestly deny Labor accusations that they would "cut, cut, cut".

The longer the Government delays that reset, the more trouble the festering budget is likely to cause.

"Festering"? It is full of the purest essence of IPA policy. Surely the IPA would regard the budget as "misunderstood" or "underappreciated". If I was a member of this government I'd be livid at Berg's gutless attempts to distance himself and the IPA from it (maybe even to the point of briefing Peter Hartcher, see below). Berg is trying to tiptoe away from a disaster he helped create.

This blog invalidated Chris Berg's very first gobbet in The Age and has found him a rich source of both a-musement and be-musement ever since. It is one thing to float silly ideas but the actual enactment of them should be taken up with those in more responsible positions than Berg's, and those who ought to know better. Berg, however, it rightly a target when he veers into hypocrisy.

There has been an uptick in anti-PPL sentiment over the last few weeks. Madonna King's Joe Hockey biography - which revealed that Rupert Murdoch knew more details of the scheme than Abbott's treasurer before it was launched - didn't help.

So now he's a poll jockey?

The idea of that was that Murdoch would promote the government's PPL policy while Coalition candidates got themselves photographed, with government as content-provider to the supposedly free enterprise NewsCorp. It didn't happen - NewsCorp turns on hysterical pro-Abbott pieces when the government falters but otherwise won't stick its neck out for particular policies. Or when it does, it's confused - it supported the axing of subsidies to the car industry, with mawkish pieces on despairing workers as a sop to their readership. It agreed with having naval vessels built overseas without looking at the exorbitant cost of the foreign-built F35 (or the aforesaid despairing workers looking for future employment). If only there were some way to test the utility of having Murdoch on side.

Paid parental leave has, perhaps, been an exception for which disloyalty is excused. It was the subject of internal grumblings from the moment it was announced by Abbott.

Who is being disloyal to whom here? Was Abbott disloyal to the party he led by failing to consult them and expecting their unstinting, unthinking support? Would Abbott's leadership survive having him or Credlin demanding full support from all quarters of the Coalition?

Yet we discovered yesterday that the culture of dissent around PPL is spreading to other issues. Coalition backbenchers are now freely floating ideas about how to adjust the co-payment to make it more equitable and popular.

This is called politics, Chris. It's been going on for years. Basically, ideas get thrown around until there's a decision, and then that decision (which often can't be foreseen exactly at the start, even by the smarter pundits) is implemented. The idea that all ideas are handed down from the leader's office and are implemented in full with a tokenistic endorsement is a recent development, and one that appears unsustainable.

And more concerning still is the infighting revealed in this piece by Peter Hartcher - backbenchers and ministers lining up to apportion blame for the budget's unpopularity. It is apparently easy to find Government members willing to anonymously rag on their colleagues.

That, too, is part of politics - both the anonymous backgrounding, and the fact that Peter Hartcher (and his editor) regard this as the very essence of his job.

Something needs to change. Some commentators have called for a reshuffle. There are, after all, a large number of young and talented politicians in the outer ministry and backbench, and a few too many Howard-era holdouts in the cabinet.

Again, the passivity: something, someone, just not this.

For example, take the government's self-inflicted wounds over the notion - urged on them by the IPA - that section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act be repealed or significantly amended.  Berg wrote a very silly book about this, titled something like There Were No Aborigines In Ancient Greece But Plenty Of Racists, Why Can't Melbourne Be Like That Today?. If you want to understand why there's so much hoo-ha within the government over that issue, I'm sorry but you'll have to read it.

Brandis may well be a dead Attorney General walking on that issue. Would the issue be significantly advanced were he replaced by, say, Julie Bishop or Malcolm Turnbull? What about Steve Ciobo, or Berg's erstwhile IPA colleague Alan Tudge?

A reshuffle is a drastic thing, especially so early in a first term of government. Yet it wouldn't fix the budget gridlock, or make the individual items in the budget more popular.

The problem, in the end, is that budget. And the only way to resolve it is to reset it.

Trying to survive for six months with no income support, or fielding thousands of applications from people in that position - that's drastic in a way that a reshuffle really isn't.

The problem is the ideas behind what came out in the budget - the idea that taxes and subsidies to companies and higher-income earners, the false economy of cutting aid while over-egging Defence, the social vandalism of cutting support to low-income families while issuing marriage counselling vouchers, to name but a few. Those ideas came from, and are sustained by, Chris Berg and those who maintain him in the style to which he has become accustomed. When those ideas go back to the drawing board - as they will, before the next election or afterwards - Berg will be waiting there with pencil in hand, as he was when those ideas were drafted.

He believed that Abbott, Hockey, and others in the Coalition could negotiate both the public and the parliament better than they have. He was wrong to do so. When Abbott was a minister under Howard he frequently had to invoke Howard's authority rather than stand or fall on his own. His failure to negotiate government in the hung parliament of 2010 was telling. It was not an unlucky flip of the coin, nor was he dudded by a capricious Gillard as the press gallery had it at the time. He did not become PM in 2010 because he was crap at negotiating ("sell my arse" indeed). The PPL was the only policy development they did in opposition, and it was rubbish. Nobody has any right to expect that such people would be competent, let alone capable of driving far-reaching but sustainable reform across multiple policy areas - not the press gallery, not Chris Berg, not anyone.

That said, and though he doesn't let on in this article, Berg watching the current Coalition government botch his agenda must be a bit like watching that Monty Python skit where The Gumbys do The Cherry Orchard.

Let us look to what is possibly his most strident and comprehensive piece of policy advocacy, along with "Third Preference" John Roskam, and its reflux. By my count, the Abbott government has gone a long way toward fulfilling these Hundred Theses:

• Already enacted or well advanced: 1, 2, 10 (effectively if not ceremonially), 11, 19, 29, 30, 69 and 71. I would not be surprised if IPA people spent budget night playing bingo with those numbers, with economic incentives of course.
• If it was possible to "quietly shelve" 4 without Andrew Bolt turning on the government, it would have done so. This is what happens when a political party outsources its capacity to generate and advance ideas.
• Bit late for 5, and somewhat overtaken by events.
• 15 is honoured more in the breach than the observance.
• Let us be fair to IPA alumnus Tim Wilson and assume that he is fulfilling 82 by example

Credit where it's due: the IPA has a fantastic record of success in driving the agenda of the Abbott government. No branch of the ALP, no union organisation, no coven of lefty academics nor any other NGO can boast a comparable record of getting its agenda through any Labor government within its first year in office.

But back to Elvis Costello:

She said that she was working for the ABC News
It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use ...

The IPA will miss the ABC. Lenin said that the capitalists would sell the rope with which the socialists hanged them, but I have no idea who paid for the ropes that in the 1990s pulled statues of Lenin from their plinths. In that spirit, Berg has once again used ABC resources to advance an agenda that is hostile to it. Thank goodness for that gibbering dupe Chip Rolley, who only engages brand-name writers for ABC's The Drum without really considering what barrow they're trying to push. I'll do what I can to boost his web traffic, enhancing his position and Berg's; it's the least I can do.

There is a Chinese saying that says having your wishes fulfilled can be as tragic as not having them fulfilled, but I doubt Chris Berg sees it that way. He has gone the full dingo on Abbott and Hockey, who relied on him and his ideas more than they dared admit. Berg has done so in such a charming way that you can see why he will survive the fall of a government that is dedicated solely to advancing his ideas, and will be part of the future of the Liberal Party in ways today's senior members won't. Hardworking and dedicated local MPs will lose their jobs, prominent pollies will become taxeating retirees who get bored easily, staffers will be chucked into the Canberra cold - but Chris Berg, like death and taxes, just rolls on.

Comparing apples

When you ask a politician a question about policy that they find uncomfortable, their standard fob-off is to say "I think you're comparing apples with oranges", and then to recite the talking-points that has been prepared for them, forming a protective shell for the half-baked assumptions that you were attempting to examine with your question.

The debate over importing New Zealand apples has been fascinating for someone whose political outlook began with the whole role-of-government-in-the-market perspective, one that used to be fairly strong within the Liberal Party.

Firstly, I expected the Kiwis to be faster out of the blocks in spruiking the excellence of their apples. I thought they would present the scientific evidence that allayed the WTO in more consumer-friendly terms to Aussie consumers, in keeping with that "100% pure" image, maybe handing out free samples on Martin Place or Collins Street. WTO rulings are a start but you only get income when consumers actually stump up cash for the product. At the moment NZ need all the export income they can get.

Secondly, I expected someone in the Liberal Party to stand up for consumers (other than Mary Jo Fisher). Cheaper and better apples: what's not to like? At a time when banana prices skew the Consumer Price Index, does that not fit with notions of "easing the squeeze on Australian working families"?

Apparently not: the Liberals have no opinion on cheaper produce as any sort of bonus for consumers. To find their stance on this policy, you have to click the "Regional" tab, because apparently city-slickers in Liberal seats like me don't consume apples. People in marginal seats apparently don't consume apples. That's why they've flicked their position on the issue to the Nationals:

‘The retrograde protocols agreed today by the Gillard government to import apples from New Zealand almost guarantee the import of the disease fire blight to Australia,’ the Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security John Cobb said today.

You're meant to start a press release with a statement that grabs the reader's attention. This is such bullshit that the reader is repulsed.

‘The acceptance of standard New Zealand orchard practices without on-farm checking by Australian inspectors is an abrogation of Government responsibilities.

‘The Minister in his wisdom has implemented his new secret weapon in the fight against fire blight:

“A supply chain trace-back system for apples from orchard to arrival in Australia”

‘Wow!!! The Minister has really outdone himself. This means that when Australia gets fire blight we will know which orchard it came from in New Zealand.

When negotiation fails to get you into government, use sarcasm?

Seriously though, what does this mean for a Coalition in government? Are we really going to have Australian quarantine inspectors travelling far and wide, inspecting NZ orchards and Indonesian abattoirs and Malaysian palm oil plantations? Forget the Navy, join AQIS and see the world. No wonder they hid this over on the Regional tab: Joe Hockey's search for $70b of savings is doomed once he discovers this hidden batallion of the Green Army.

‘Unlike the government the Coalition believes Australia’s robust, science-based quarantine protections must not be compromised.

That is rich: the Coalition, standing up for science and acting on the basis of its findings.

Mostly, the Coalition generate more heat than light with their blanket opposition to everything the government does. There are times, however, where you have to stop rolling your eyes and pleading for a political debate that is worthy of this country and the issues facing it - and just have a good laugh. I mean: Coalition! Science! Who is the Shadow Minister for Science anyway? Talk about laugh.

Our pest and disease-free status has been hard won and the government’s rubber stamping of NZ apples imports into Australia, without the same checks and balances applied to other countries, sets a dangerous precedent.

If the WTO were satisfied with NZ's scientific position, on what scientific basis is the Coalition not satisfied?

‘I am so concerned about the disease risk that this government presents for our nation that I have been forced to take the extraordinary measure of introducing this Quarantine Legislation Amendment (Apples) Bill 2011 to safeguard against fire blight.

‘This Bill, to be introduced on Monday 22 August ...

Here is the list of bills before parliament as at close of business on Monday 22 August 2011. Protection of the Sea, Remuneration ... what, nothing? For all their talk they really are rubbish at blocking legislation, aren't they. Why would Cobb do such a thing, break a promise in order to stand up for the science?

Oh wait, Coalition MPs are going to second-guess the scientists:

Opposition agriculture spokesman John Cobb was due to introduce a private bill to parliament yesterday ... But he said in a statement he's holding off until he and a small coalition delegation return from New Zealand.

Wouldn't it be easier just to read what the WTO said? Cobb will find NZ has scientists of its own, and people every bit as committed to stamping out fire blight as Cobb appears to be. This might be another "Wow!!" moment for the excitable Mr Cobb, and at least some Nats will get a junket in. There is no indication as to what will happen upon his return, or whether the cheap headlines of Monday 22 August will result in expensive policy of any sort.

Cobb has capitalised the Apple Industry, the first time I've seen it referred to in that way: I assume that puts it on par with the Aboriginal Industry.

All this mucking-about by Cobb and the Coalition created the perfect environment for someone to step in with a clear policy direction. Nick Xenophon represents a state with a small number of orchardists and a large number of apple consumers. You'd think he'd stand up for consumers, right? It would be consistent with every other position he's held.

Not a bit of it:

Senator Xenophon says his bill will be based on scientific evidence and will be compliant with World Trade Organisation rules ... "Fire blight is like the herpes of fruit, once you get it, you can never get rid of it, it just keeps coming back and back."

NZ apples will fuck with your mouth, eh?

If John Cobb and his junketeers can't find the science, I'd love to see what Xenophon comes up with. We haven't even addressed the whole issue of NZ as a market for >$8b of Australian exports, and their rights to exact reprisals for the sort of Cobb-lers proposed above.

Politically, the free market is down 2-0. Apart from partisan support for the government, where to turn for intellectual support in understanding what is going on?

I looked to Catallaxy to see if they had anything to say on the subject: at time of writing (and with that crucial day 22/8/11 fading into history), nothing.

I looked to the oligopolists of free market theory in Australia, the CIS and the IPA. Nothing from the IPA: the CIS had a useful summary from before last year's Australian election but that's about it. These omissions support the theory that the CIS and IPA are lobbyists rather than purely interested in free and open markets for their own sake.

The case for any sort of reform has to be made continuously by its adherents: either you believe in the idea and the benefits that flow from it or you don't. If you're going to stand against one form of restrictive trade practice (e.g. tobacco packaging) surely you will praise incidents where restrictive trade practices go down (e.g. apples), particularly measures where the technology is ahead of where it was in 1921. All the Australian apple orchardists "protected" by that measure are now dead; as are the NZ apple exporters disadvantaged by it, enacted just six years after the ANZAC bonds forged at Gallipoli.

The case for free market reform has waxed and waned within Australia's right-of-centre parties. The IPA and CIS have always enjoyed close links with the Liberals but we are now in an age where libertarians have to wonder what they get from an arrangement where they are so obviously being played for mugs.

People like Chris Berg and John Roskam keep their profile up and hope the Liberal Party will notice them, rather than offering intellectual coherence and badly-needed research capacity to a major party in opposition - a party that bears out what Hayek meant when he insisted that he was not a conservative. In Victorian Liberal preselections Roskam is everybody's third preference rather than a force to be reckoned with and accommodated, in terms of both positions and policy. A libertarian who wants to get things done must push aside the IPA and CIS, with all the dead weight of its Fellows and what have you. C D Kemp would be disgusted at this avoidance of real debate over real issues, especially with so little to show for it in terms of achievement and impact.

Whatever game the libertarians are playing, it better be lucrative - otherwise they'll have sold out with nothing much to show for it. The Coalition and Xenophon aren't going to get many votes out of apple prices either way, but a bit of relief from scaremongering as a substitute for science-led debate would have been nice. Next time farmers complain about "food security" I'm going to be sceptical, aren't you?

This leaves us with a policy outcome forced on the Australian government, an outcome that could be good for consumers or terrible for both consumers and producers in this country (well, insofar as a temporary disease-led shortage of apples might be considered "terrible"; I miss cheap bananas but let's keep things in perspective). Where do we go with this?

Public debate over policy issues is impoverished where nobody who isn't turning a dollar from one possible outcome participates in the debate. Journalism and politics both fail when it can't present quotes and stunts within that wider context. You can participate and do what you can, but you're still at a disadvantage when those who set the context are in thrall to the most hysterical advocates and especially their insistence that they are the only "players" who count.

Berg's bitter brew

A liberal is apparently someone too reasonable to prefer his opinion over that of others. Chris Berg would have you believe that a conservative is someone who doesn't know what they believe, who believes contradictory things, and yet believes very passionately - and that their passion justifies their argument, whatever it may be.

Berg ends his piece with a mistake, which is kind of fitting really:

But the Tea Party isn't wrong. America has serious problems. Those problems have energised the conservative base.

On the fact that America is not without blemish - the Tea Party movement may be wrong there, but it's entitled to be judged on the policies it identifies as remedies, or at the very least salves, for said problems.

The slander against President Obama's nationality and religion demonstrate that at the base of the Tea Party movement is a core of radicalism and unreasonableness, a lack of goodwill and good faith that renders nonsensical any description of "conservative".

New technology is giving conservative activists the power to form the sort of genuine grassroots movements the left has been for decades.

For many "conservatives", any development that puts conservatives on level pegging with the left might seem like a good thing. Ayn Rand always wanted to be the right-wing John Steinbeck, and while I doubt she succeeded she did make more money than Steinbeck, which would have been the point for her (and, probably, Berg). This is a category error, a bit like evolutionists declaring victory over Darwin 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species - to declare such a victory is to fail to understand your own argument.

Most conservatives would take pride in having secured the moral, intellectual, economic, political and social high ground over the festering swamp of the left as being the greatest triumph and vindication of their creed in whatever form you like - capitalism, the right to practice religious faith, parliamentary democracy, take your pick. For Berg to crow about drawing level with, say, the Socialist Workers' Party in about 1977 is genuinely pathetic.

Castle is the embodiment of an establishment Republican. He's enjoyed a nine-term run in the House of Representatives. He was Delaware's governor for seven years. He's a great-great-great-great-great grandson of Ben Franklin. He's very, very moderate.

Being moderate is not the embodiment of any sort of Republican since, say, John Lindsay or Nelson Rockefeller. Was Castle as "moderate" as Newt Gingrich, or Donald Rumsfeld, or Henry Paulson? If you're going to mount any sort of intellectual argument (or even write a blurb for The Age) it is important to define your terms.

Mike Castle has actually cut more tax than Christine O'Donnell has or will. It is no accident that News Corporation and many other American corporations have their headquarters in Delaware, Mike Castle deserves a great deal of credit for that. The tax and regulatory environment of Delaware is the very sort of environment that people like Chris Berg have keened for over many years. If any Australian politician had done half of what Castle had, he would be hero-worshipped by the CIS, IPA and other outfits of their ilk.

With his snide dismissal, Chris Berg shows why you should pay libertarians no heed: nothing you ever do for them will ever be enough.

True, Berg describes Tea Party perspectives as "eccentric and jumbled". He wrongly paints them as purely economic: antisemitism, paranoia about migration and a determination to wind back equality for African-Americans is an inescapable part of this movement. The idea that they are just as harmless as the IPA but with the kind of appeal that escapes Chris Berg or Terje Petersen is to willfully misrepresent the Tea Party. Berg deserves scorn for turning a blind eye to the hateful elements of this movement in the name of asserting the simple truth that America's economic and geopolitical position isn't what it could be. To claim the Tea Party as purely an economic movement is like claiming that Stalin in the 1930s was simply focused on boosting tractor output in the Ukraine.

The revolt against the Republican establishment is as much a revolt against big spending, big taxing George Bush as it is against the Obama administration.

The Tea Party drew great strength from Bush. Conservative activists ended up on the payrolls of PACs and other organisations because the Bush Administration shovelled taxpayer dollars and public borrowings at them. Sarah Palin was a big-taxing, porkbarrelling public servant, and the fact that she's seeking to do the same on a grander level shows the sheer hollowness of the Tea Party.

Look at how many Obama supporters feel let down by his pragmatism in office. Many conservatives rightly foresaw that the outpouring of hope that Obama engendered could not last. Is it not true to say the same of the Tea Party? What about all those Republicans who signed the "Contract on with America"in 1994, promising to stay for six years tops but who still hold public office today? It is another major weakness of Berg's piece for him to warm his hands by the conflagration of the Republican Party while taking it on trust.

A Bloomberg poll found overwhelmingly the thread which ties the Tea Party together is a belief the US has lost its way in the past few years.

The same could be said of the Communist Party, Chris, or the Branch Davidians, or social workers, or the people who blew up the US government building in Oklahoma City in 1994 - or, indeed, of "establishment Republicans" or even people who could genuinely be regarded as "very, very moderate".

A CBS/New York Times poll found Tea Party supporters tend to be more educated than the general public.

And when left-of-centre voters are described the same way, Chris, this is put down to a bad case of trahison des clercs (it is a little known fact that no edition of Quadrant magazine may go to press without the phrase trahison des clercs appearing in it).

The political class isn't sure what to make of the Tea Party. It comes from outside the polished environs of Washington.

The same could be said of the Obama Administration from Chicago, the Bush Administrations from Texas, the Reagan Administration from California, the Clintonians from Arkansas, or the all-seeing Eye Pee Yay from Melbourne.

In Australia, we just saw how potent a conservative grassroots can be. The implosion of the parliamentary Liberal Party late last year over climate change was driven by a membership which saw Malcolm Turnbull's support of the emissions trading scheme as unacceptable.

Thousands of emails were sent by party members and others calling for the position to change. In the end, they had to change leaders. Hopes for bipartisan climate action disappeared, and Kevin Rudd's prime ministership died in the Liberal party room. A conservative grassroots destroyed a Labor prime minister.

In other words, there was a bit of a kerfuffle within Canberra but the Labor government remained in office, and in a stronger position to take "climate action". So much for your analogies, Chris.

The Tea Party is another populist movement harvesting dissatisfaction and letting it molder into ever more toxic forms. It probably isn't fascism per se but it sure won't "Restore Honor" or any of the claims made for it. These are the successors to the Know-Nothings and those who sneered at the 33rd US President as "Jewsevelt": they are not honest toilers who want to pay less tax, because Americans who want that voted for Mike Castle or the John McCain of 2000. Those of us who admire the United States see this rabble-rousing as an illness to be borne and overcome, not admired and misrepresented like Chris Berg has done.

Sloppy research is unhealthy

I remember when libertarians had initiative in questioning the basic assumptions of how we govern ourselves, and are governed. You still get small numbers of classical liberals, like Stephen Kirchner or Andrew Norton, who bother to do research to test their theories, but these tend to be the exception. Even Jason Soon will do this to some extent, and when he doesn't you can criticise him for it knowing that he recognises sloppy research is a bad thing.

I suspect that the disappointment of John Howard, who talked a good game about small government when in opposition but who abandoned libertarianism once in office, has turned libertarians to cynicism. These days, libertarians distinguish themselves by pooh-poohing any suggestion that comes up, that any change at all will be worse that what we have and might get.

The prime example of this is silly Chris Berg.

The Federal Government's Preventative Health Taskforce has spent the past year coming up with creative little ideas ...

Because any idea they could have is "little", or even "bad"(see below) eh Chris?

On Tuesday, the taskforce delivered its recommendations to Canberra. But they've been dripping out their proposals to the media for a few weeks.

Indeed, the taskforce seems to have adopted a tactic new to policy debate: if you propose enough bad ideas in a short enough space of time, it's impossible to rebut them all.

Assuming that the only thing to do with these ideas is to rebut them, or that you have the knowledge to distinguish a good idea from a bad one.

One of the least convincing ideas is the one that has got the most attention: subsidised gym membership and fitness equipment to tackle obesity.

Yes, gyms can be expensive ... Maybe we are all craven, stingy fatties, but if we are, then it'd be a good bet that we're lazy too. A few small tax breaks or a small government-sponsored reduction in the price of a gym membership is not exactly a compelling motivator to cast aside the pizza boxes and pump weights.

Speak for yourself, Chris. Nobody is going on a jihad against pizza. A few small tax breaks don't necessarily help all the causes for which charities are set up, but the tax deduction signals a social good that adds some incentive (and you can donate less than the price of a mobile phone plan). Where did that figure come from? I'd suggest the fact that few gym memberships are used to their full value makes this a blunt instrument for achieving desired ends, and would like to see a bit of research into that. Blithe sneering doesn't help anyone.

What also doesn't help are fatuous celebrity references. Is Gwynneth Paltrow (an American lady who used to act in films) the only person you know of who goes to gyms? Does she endorse your policy, or oppose it, and would it matter either way Chris?

One of the more prominent anti-smoking proposals of the taskforce is to scrub cigarette packs of all brand identification — logos, colours, everything — as if stencilled gold foil pasted onto a cardboard box is all it takes to eliminate an individual's willpower.

The nature of an addiction is that ingesting more of the product represents a continued failure of willpower, Chris, not a demonstration of it. You'd find that out if you'd done a bit of research, fellow (there are plenty of celebrities who are addicted to nicotine, why not use them for your next piece?).

Are there really that many people who want to quit smoking, but keep being drawn back by the shiny wrapping, like a nicotine-addled magpie?

Apparently - that would explain why nicotine companies spend millions producing said packaging in that manner. As this is against the wide public interest, to reverse this would discourage non-addicts from taking it up while reinforcing its lack of appeal to those who are addicted. There's plenty of information on this if only you'd research, fellow.

We're a lot further down the nanny state's slippery slope than anybody could have predicted a few decades ago.

Not really, and again a bit of research would put the lie to that.

In the 1940s, for example, the Nazi state had been in operation for more than a decade: governments to the west and east of Germany were devoting considerable resources to its destruction. The Marshall Plan and the Warsaw Pact poured many millions of taxpayer dollars toward rebuilding societies and economies devastated by war. In the face of all this state activity, men like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek complained that various states were re-enserfing the populations who paid taxes, voted and were governed. This took considerable gall but they became recognised as great thinkers once the postwar states were strong enough to be sneered at. An English writer named George Orwell wrote a number of essays and books in which he foresaw what you call the "nanny state", Chris.

There's a big chasm between the medical world and the world of public policy ... They may have good intentions. Nobody wants Australia to be needlessly unhealthy.

You've missed the point, Chris, and that's why your article is so silly.

The health system in this country is overwhelmingly state-funded, and as such there is a public interest in driving down health costs. The demand on our health system is increasingly as a result of "lifestyle factors", ailments where the sufferer could have avoided being in a position where they need expensive medical care if only they had avoided certain addictions, or other behaviours which ultimately impose great cost on individual and state.

What would constitute needful unhealthiness? Does anyone need to be unhealthy?

But these medicos with ambitious regulatory proposals rarely consider some critical questions. Will there be unintended consequences? (Such as drinkers changing from alcopops to hard spirits since the tax was increased.)

Will there be unintended consequences of anything? Why bother getting out of bed? What made you think the alcopops tax was imposed by "medicos"? I thought it was politicians who did that. I'd be interested in seeing the research on that, and if you have it might add some of the credibility you currently lack.

There is an almost unanimous agreement among public health lobbyists and the commentariat that the Government should ban junk food advertising to children. But the Royal Journal of Medicine argues there is "no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children's food consumption".

Is this in Britain, or some part of Britain, or is it universal? If so, why haven't food companies cottoned on to this and axed their marketing departments? Did you have to wade past voluminous research to the contrary to find one piece that may support your view (or may not - volume, chapter and page no. please Chris).

Our peak communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which has repeatedly looked at the issue over the past decade, agrees.

Thank goodness they agree with Chris Berg, otherwise they'd just be another mob of bureaucratic busybodies.

Nevertheless, we still get vacuous claims about "pester-power" — claims which seem to be driven by the belief that only the government can stop kids nagging their parents.

Advertising is meant to inform consumers of their options in the market. Younger children do not earn nor control sufficient money or freedom to get to junkfood stores and consume said products, and they lack the ability to discern implicit claims against their wider self-interest. Advertisers know this: they seek to manipulate children into altering adults' purchasing behaviour toward the commercial interests of producers (= advertisers' clients), in an emotional manner, away from the interests of the children and the healthcare system. See how it works, Chris?

In modern capitalism, costs are foisted onto government if that's the cheapest place for them to be. That's why the healthcare system is government-run: it's cheaper to offset healthcare costs as part of government than have the market provide them. Every country in the world bar one accepts this, and the US looks increasingly likely to take this step once they realise the sneers of people like Chris Berg count for nothing. It's cheaper and easier for the state to have a monopoly of violence, and there are other issues besides: once you accept that you can understand the place of the state within a capitalist society. You'll be a better Research Fellow for such a realisation.

Mark Twain was concerned that giving the government the power to "meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens" risked people losing their "independence of thought and action".

Yes, and Twain was a funny man, wasn't he? Always calling for this or that to be banned. Richard Doll hadn't reported on nicotine addiction and lung cancer during Twain's life, and there's been plenty more research done since then. New and different information can often required new and different responses, Chris.

The Melbourne curmudgeon is a cliché tradition in The Age. Columnists like Keith Dunstan or Ranald Macdonald wrote columns in favour of the rotary-dial telephone or against teabags, or that Aussie Rules football was better when players weren't paid to play it - but these were always leavened with a genuine understanding of the alternate viewpoint, they were well-written and witty. Kenneth Davidson writes grim columns against capitalism in all its forms, hoping Melbourne will become like East Berlin c.1958, but he at least will draw on empirical research to support the platform from which he whinges. They are running Berg in the hope that he might be a "young fogey", but he isn't a patch on these other grumpies.

Berg is wilfully ignorant of that at which he sneers, making a mockery of the "research fellow" tag and those who slapped it on him. By treating his opponents' points as beneath him, he denies himself both intellectual respect for his own position and personal respect for any generosity toward theirs. Andrew Norton takes great pains to be civil and respectful to those who takes a different view, and to fail to do so fails to advance your cause - such as it is.

Subsidise silence

The next target for a bailout should surely be our old friends at the Eye Pee Yay. Their product is rubbish, their managers are fools, their title-encrusted minions are too many and yet inadequate - poorly monitored for quality or relevance of output.

First we had Stephen Kirchner warn us in the AFR last week that all this bailing out would transfer risk from the private sector to the public. Yep, that was the whole idea Stephen. Now we have Chris Berg, who starts with pop psychology and then veers into voodoo economics:

Presented with the biggest economic crisis in 50 years, the Federal Government first tried to ignore it and then angrily blamed it on greedy capitalists.

As opposed to whom, Chris? Ben Lee? Brett Lee? Bruce Lee? I blame Tom Switzer. Come on, we must be told.

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard appears to have spent the past few months moonlighting as the liquidator for a chain of child-care centres.

I thought she was trying to ensure that parents were able to participate in the workforce by having their kids looked after, Chris. I'd rather Eddy Groves not receive another cent myself, but if the Eye Pee Yay has any ideas of achieving the same result without ... stop that laughter at once! With so many Research Fellows, surely the Eye Pee Yay would actually have a clue? A set of policy alternatives that ... what do you mean, no?

Collectively, the NSW Government is far worse than the most reckless, hard-partying, due-diligence-ignoring Wall Street CEO. When NSW inevitably goes into receivership, its citizen-shareholders will wish they could sue.

The NSW government has achieved the gold-standard of all economic rationalists, Chris - the AAA rating, which is more than anyone on Wall Street could expect. Everyone thinks they're a disaster except the economic rationalists, so you should be the last person using them as a punchline.

None of the traditional policy justifications for propping up failing companies ... seem to apply to our great bail-out bonanza.

For example, child-care organisations ... Car dealers ... the decision about which companies deserve a bail-out — and which companies should join whale oil merchants and abacus makers in the cemetery of dead businesses — is entirely arbitrary, dependent only on the political winds in Canberra.

Whale oil merchants were rendered redundant by technological change. Abacuses are still being made and sold, but as toys rather than commercial tools - again, technology. You haven't made the case that technology has rendered child care redundant. A bit of silliness in rating high-risk products as low risk is not the same as the march of economic history.

There is a critique to be made about propping up doomed industries like coal-powered electricity, if you can get it past your stablemate Tom Switzer. That's the point you should be making here, not confusing hysterical irrationality of risk assessors, spreadsheet jockeys and other mendicants with the March of Progress.

Shareholder capitalism should be pretty simple. People bet their money in the market on businesses that they think might be a good thing. They profit when they are correct and lose when they aren't. The companies that make bad decisions, or make products that no one wants to buy, fail. And the good ones survive.

And there's plenty of money to be made in the gap between "should be" and "is". Plenty of excellence goes down the toilet just because some doofus from the Club for Growth can't distinguish between a mortgage in Cincinatti and one in Carlingford, not because Progress is Marching On. ABC Learning didn't fail because children weren't adequately cared for. The Peter Ruehl routine is all very well, but if you've missed the point then your column is a waste of space. Look at all that luverly advertising clustered around your piece, Chris, and know that the advertiser's money was wasted (which may make them eligible for a bail-out!).

Bail-outs mean that people aren't financially punished for their bad financial decisions.

Financial decisions are not the only decisions to be made, Chris. Those who make financial decisions aren't competent to make them. That's the point, and you've missed it.

They keep companies afloat that probably should sink — if your business model isn't working, do something else with your time.

"Probably"? What pissweak analysis that is. It either does or it doesn't.

Bail-outs are paid for by everybody, but they're not available to everybody.

Considering the limitations that come with public funds - all that soul-destroying red tape, Chris, all those taxeater fetters - thank God we free men are spared.

Does anybody doubt that if the Government was presented with the imminent collapse of Ansett that it would have quickly ponied up the cash? At the time, the Howard government resisted the howls of Ansett executives and the unions and let Ansett die the death it deserved.

Ansett was one of the few dud companies of that time which did not feature John Howard's brother Stan on the board. Remember all those bail-outs Stan was able to pull, Chris? Do some research, fellow.

If anything deserves that title, it was the asset bubble that was burst in the crash last year.

All the downsizing and unemployment that we face over the next year is not the crisis, it is the correction.

You can't know if it is a "correction" until after the event, and it is not "correct" that productive businesses should fail and that non-shareholders should be punished financially merely because financiers have taken leave of their senses.

Things fail ... Baz Luhrmann's Australia failed to be the next Titanic.

Luhrmann aside, Australia is still afloat and the Titanic is not. The sense of enjoying oneself in the face of impending doom is a little exciting, actually, but is only so if we can be sure that economic stabilisers have kicked in and not left us to the mercy of hysterical clowns who can't tell a good risk from a bad one. Those automatic stabilisers are worth paying for, worth a change of government, and the fact that the government is ignoring geese like Chris Berg is a matter of no small satisfaction, if not pride.

Andrew Elder is researcher, editor, fundraiser and ambassador for mendicant industries at the Politically Homeless Institute.

Update: here's someone who knows more about economics than Chris Berg, if you can imagine that.

Liberal studies

In the face of the slow decline of George W. Bush and the uncertain burial of the Howard government in this country, is the energies of Liberal youth really best spent in trying to stoke dying fires? Is Tim Andrews wasting his time and others' calling for a situation "whereby young Liberal people are recognised as an intellectual force"?

The Education not Indoctrination (ENI) campaign appears to be warmed-over crap from the US seeking some Pol Pot-style purge of leftist intellectuals. It is absurd that the people held up as the intellectual powerhouses of the right (e.g. David Horowitz, Keith Windschuttle and Christopher Pearson, to name a few) tend to be ex-leftists, and they have brought a lot of leftist baggage with them in their Long March rightwards. Much of this has, at best, no value to liberals or conservatives; at worst it's toxic. Worse, younger liberals and conservatives can't tell the difference. People who were determinedly, actively wrong about Uncle Joe Stalin and Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh are doubtful - not in terms of commitment but judgment. They were wrong then, they might be happy to partake of the fatted calf if offered to them but they could well still be wrong.

Leftist students become leftist intellectuals. Conservative students go into politics, they abandon politics altogether for the private sector, or they inhabit the shadow-world in between (e.g. journalism, lobbying) abhorred by libertarians. They don't, as a rule, become liberal/conservative academics.

There's no encouragement to do so, either. A young Liberal spends their career-formative years in an environment so hostile to academics that there is no incentive to become one - especially when a fully-fledged academic earns about what other uni graduates are making by their late 20s. Whenever an academic says something that a liberal/conservative doesn't want to hear, liberals/conservatives don't address the issue at hand - they get all nasty about the academic profession generally.

The alternative is an endless whinging. Gerard Henderson complains that a) liberals and conservatives don't celebrate their own history, and b) history of liberal/conservative achievements tends to be written by leftists like Allan Martin and Judith Brett. His alternative, writing poorly researched and badly written history on his lonesome, is not a longterm option nor a recipe for understanding, valuing and building on liberal/conservative successes.

Nobody should or does rate Janet Albrechtsen as a thinker - doing a Google search and then boiling down Krauthammer, Kristol or Will for a local audience doesn't count. If Rudd's salute counts for nothing, Janet, don't write about it. A conservative should resist petty and transient fancies. When the decline of Bush reveals Kristol to have been wrong about absolutely everything, Albrechtsen (and Sheridan, and Shanahan, etc.) should be replaced by postgraduate liberal/conservative students and up-and-coming academics.

The Centre for Independent Studies and the Eye Pee Yay have a plethora of Adjunct Fellows, Research Dudes and other impressive-sounding titles mainly of a voluntary nature. It puts out position papers and floats ideas in articles into which contributors and editors clearly put considerable effort. The Liberal Party could (but probably won't) learn important lessons about doing the hard work involved in researching and putting position papers together. Mind you, considering that these unpaid honoraria go to people like Jason Soon or Chris Berg, you have to wonder about their success in fostering a generation of like-minded thinkers. They adorn these thinktanks like the "gilded youths" in The Man from Ironbark.

The CIS is not part of the Liberal or National Parties but then again neither is the ALSF; there is a correlation between supporters of the CIS and liberal/conservative politics which would benefit the latter. Those raising money for the CIS would have an easier time of it than those raising money for the Liberal/National/Joh Barnaby Nationals Queenslander Party.

Liberals and conservatives should do more to encourage like-minded academics. They could eventually end up with a fully conservative university, an Australian Pepperdine or Liberty U. At the very least, they might have the kind of balance for which Liberal students will only keen, not work. The Catholic Church has done this with Campion College and a secular academy ought not be beyond means and will. Instead of this flatulent exercise in nostalgia by the Shadow Education Minister, what about some concrete proposals and encouragement for an academic elite working from liberal/conservative assumptions?

The reason why Christopher Pearson is blowing smoke is because Liberal students have expressed no interest in the kind of academic rigour Pearson is talking about. Liberal students want to be able to drop quotes from climate skeptics or intelligent design gurus without some Marxist impugning their academic rigour. Why learn to write an essay when you can cut-n-paste some cliches into a press release?

Pearson is, however, right that this article is silly, assuming that all university students have to be fashionably leftist and that any movement to the contrary is "sinister". Fancy asking Carolyn Allport whether academics are running their own agendas!

Depends what you mean by conservative, really. I reckon there's nothing more conservative, even homely, than the insistence by Foucault or Derrida that we're all unable to transcend our backgrounds, social class, gender or whatever. Patrick White's novels warned against frivolity and vulgar ambition, and supported work, faith and stable relationships. Not everyone shares my belief in their stifling conservatism but then again I'm not an academic.

Like Pearson, Mark Bahnisch engages in nostalgia for his alma mater as proof that good teachers can elevate students of a different persuasion with a shared respect for facts and ideas. He and Andrew Norton rightly call the bluff of Liberal Students claiming bias: whether you're making a claim in a public debate or in an essay, you have to prove your case or you can piss off.

Not only will they not do the hard work of building academic careers in areas run down by the left, they can't even build a simple case of bias against one - just one - academic.

Despite the fact that academics rate highly in public surveys of trustworthy professions, Liberals regard them as soft targets. When you lose office in a democracy, you can't attack the voters - you can't attack outgroups like women or ethnic minorities or even gays, these days. A mob whose self-identity depends on being able to beat up on defined outgroups needs a soft target, and academics seem to be that target. Again, what Liberal Student wants to join the targets?

To be recognised as an intellectual force, you have to become one. Liberals and conservatives disdain academics - the challenge for them is to not only stop this, but turn it around. The onus is on liberals and conservatives to create incentives for conservative students who can both chalk a campus and pass exams to pursue higher study with a view to becoming academics. The sheer dimension of this cultural shift ought not be underestimated. It is beyond an organisation that oscillates between three states:

• sulky resentment at being denied the perks of office


• blithe smugness that no substantial reform on their part is required, and


• whingeing, whingeing, whingeing.

Banning silly op-eds not an attack on free speech

Whenever people propose bans on junkfood advertising on kids' TV, they make it really clear they are not seeking to ban the product advertised altogether. They make it really clear that they are not against letting consumers know that a product exist, and that their real problem is the emotional manipulation of children too young to know they're being manipulated for commercial gain.

Chris Berg has no excuse for ignoring this painstaking work.

But are we that easily manipulated by brand managers and advertising firms? Does the Government have to step in to protect us, and our children, from harmful ads?

Depends who you mean by "we", really. It should be possible for children to be given appropriate entertainment without the parent having to resist demands for junk food. Anyone who doesn't realise that if kids aren't regularly reminded about something they don't need, they might forget about it, has forgotten a lot about their childhood.

They might have also forgotten that the Eye Pee Yay, which hires Chris to edit their journal, is funded by tobacco companies whose sales have declined since the ban on advertising their products. It's dishonest of Chris Berg to wade into this debate without even acknowledging that key event in the advertising/ public health issue. And let us have no protest from Chris Berg that he was writing an article, not a book: there is so much padding in his article that the issue could at least have been addressed, earning him and his views more respect than either is due.

Advertising is, at its core, just the simple delivery of information.

Why not strip it back to its core? Why allow the emotional manipulation element targeting children, who are not making mature decisions over their own money?

The anti-capitalist Naomi Klein famously took this argument one step further when she decried the psychological power of corporate brands — we are all, apparently, oppressed by tyrannical graphic designers.

This is several steps further, actually. If you haven't done the hard work with the painstakingly balanced reports coming out of government and NGOs, you have no business representing Klein's simplistic pap as representative.

Klein sees what she wants to see, and so does Chris Berg: they deserve one another. The rest of us deserve better.

This view does not just reduce us to the level of dumb automatons, passively waiting for advertising executives to beam their instructions directly into our brains, it also creates a profound dilemma for democratic politics. If we don't have free will in the shopping centre, we certainly don't have free will in the voting booth.

There is nothing profound in a Chris Berg article, and this is another example of overreaching. Berg conflates children with adults. If he believes that consumption is performed by well-informed individual - adults - with free will, why would he not extend the same view to consumers as voters (or other facets of their citizenship)?

Minors are depicted by policy-makers as unable to defend themselves against a well-planned onslaught of marketing. However, as the new book Prohibitions published by Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs shows, children as young as five form preferences about their favourite TV programs. And by the age of 11, children demonstrate a pronounced scepticism about claims made in ads.

Children as young as five form preferences but are unable to distinguish between emotional manipulation in a story and emotional manipulation in demanding their parents buy them a given product. Some but not all eleven-year-olds make the judgments Berg would ascribe to them; ramping up the quantity and targeting of ads makes formation of this judgment harder, not easier.

During the federal election campaign, anti-advertising rhetoric took a decidedly surreal turn.

Assuming it actually was against all advertising per se, Chris. At least you've tried.

... the Howard government promised to fund a new ABC channel for children completely free of junk food ads. It was a bizarre train of thought that led Liberal policy-makers to think that the best way to combat childhood obesity was to make sitting on the couch and watching TV more appealing.

Once again, Chris Berg has a firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick. The poor lamb expects you to be impressed by the firmness of his grasp. Kids will watch TV anyway, why not better quality than crap? What of the Rudd government's decision to can this channel, anything? No?

The belief that an individual's free will is crushed under the jackboot of catchy advertising jingles is, of course, nonsense. We have just as much autonomy over our personal decisions as we did before an ad break.

Bit of a straw man, then, wasn't it.

So what, then, is advertising for? It informs us that new products are available in the marketplace.

Like a dog returning to its vomit, really. The Eye Pee Yay, like the French monarchy, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

An ad that informs us that McDonald's now sells salad only interests those people who would probably like to buy a salad from McDonald's.

Those ads are not run during kids' TV programming. They run different ads during those times. Nice try at shirking the hard work of research, though.

If McDonald's have commissioned you to write this article Chris, you should have said so. It's a form of dishonesty to pretend you're motivated by "public affairs" generally if you're acting on behalf and behest of an interested party.

What child is going to abandon chocolates and lollies when their ads disappear off television? Kids will always like junk food. Any parents who think that a government ban will make walking up the chocolate aisle less stressful are deceiving themselves.

The frequency and severity of the demands will lessen in most cases. It's certainly worth a try.

And anybody who thinks that teenagers will refuse the next "alcopop" just because they are no longer being specifically marketed to under-25s has forgotten a lot about their youth.

The media environment of our youth and that of today's youth are different, Chris, and loosening the linkages between teenagers' lives and alcohol use is no bad thing for anyone without shares in a small number of companies.

... people are smarter than advertisements.

Well, some people. A child can be clever and yet unable to form a mature, considered judgment. Both are smarter than Chris Berg op-eds.

Screwing Wollongong

If only Beth Morgan had hooked up with Joe Scimone, they could have had a good time and saved the people of Wollongong and NSW a great deal of embarrassment, money and time.

Much has been made of Wollongong Council, and the fact that an organisation only gets like that when there is no way of overturning the elite that runs it - in this case, the NSW ALP. Sorry Morry has done enough to get this matter off the front pages of media that marginal seat voters are going to read (i.e. not the Illawarra Mercury), but not enough to lose face for his faction of his party in the one Labor-voting part of Australia that yielded the least numbers of "Howard battlers".

Worse than having the mask of local democracy ripped away by Sorry Morry and Miss Hot Pants in the planning department is being dumped on by Chris Berg, the democracy-hater from the Eye Pee Yay.

Compared with other levels of government, there is little accountability and scrutiny of local government. It is no wonder it often makes expensive mistakes and is susceptible to corruption.

Local government is scrutinised heavily by state government. Much of its administrative effort is spent in filling out forms and otherwise being accountable. In many local government authorities this would have gotten worse after Wollongong - one of the country's biggest local government authorities - was sacked, as fearful administrators engaged in arse-covering at the expense of locally governing. Local government decisions on planning and other issues are subject to judicial appeal to an extent unknown at state and federal levels. It is much easier to get information from a council than it is from any state or federal jurisdiction. More people will have scrutinised local government decision-making processes more closely than any other level of government.

Once again, take the opposite of a Chris Berg assertion and it is likely to be true.

Part of the fault lies in the sorts of people who are drawn to council office. Local government politics tends to attract those excited by the machinations and manipulations of political life but disinterested in public policy.

Yairs, because Federal Parliament is some sort of Elysium where folk talk about philosophical principles, and state politics is full of policy wonks. Well spotted there. If anyone had weak grounds for snobbery, it's Chris Berg.

There is one good thing to be said for politicians motivated by ideological fervour: at least they want the best for their constituents.

That lovely Mr Stalin, beavering away in Moscow with the sole aim of getting schools and hospitals and sealed roads for rural Georgia. And of course, all those Coalition MPs with eleven years of ideological whiplash to work through. Nice line Chris, shame you hadn't thought about it.

A main cause of the corruption in local government is the often cited problem of lack of transparency and accountability.

There he goes again. Trot out a line once, and it's rubbish: trot it out again and again and it becomes a given. Or, so Chris Berg hopes.

Few media organisations are interested in the day to day goings-on of individual councils, at least until a corruption watchdog puts a councillor in front of a judge.

Yeah, because the media do such a fantastic job of scrutinising government. Kevin Rudd assembled an entire government behind closed doors and what dd the media report on? The living conditions of his dog and cat, because that's what Rudd's people gave them by way of press release. It's taken the NSW state parliamentary press gallery a decade to realise Labor are full of shit and couldn't run anything.

It is perhaps indicative that some of the earliest casualties of the sub-prime crisis have been local government investment portfolios.

It is perhaps indicative, Chris, of the accountability and transparency of local government that this has come to light so early. Less accountable and transparent organisations will have similar exposures, but we will have to wait for the media to uncover those.

Limiting political donations creates its own problems, not least that doing so tends to favour incumbent politicians who are able to harness the full resources of their government.

The Howard government's $200m ad campaign in 2007 worked so well in getting itself re-elected. Another Chris Berg pearler!

Most of the time, local governments are doing little more than imposing petty, nanny state, regulations: putting up noise restrictions for street parties; forcing us to use smaller rubbish bins; ensuring that nobody paints their front door red; and other similar important things.

Is this really what it does "most of the time", or are these just the things that make it to the attention of the watchdogs in the media?

Local government tends to resist urban infill, putting extra pressure on our already critical land shortage.

Local councils don't have power over transport and utilities and other infrastructure that might provide some ammunition in favour of such projects. Rather than focusing on power, what about focusing on the nature of the poke rather than the pig therein?

When councillors and their staff have the power to determine town planning restrictions according to their subjective judgment ...

And what else are they supposed to use, clear guidelines set down by enlightened state government? Planning law is so vague that virtually anything can b judged right or wrong, or simply overridden by a minister at any given time. There is no guarantee that a state minister is immune to offerings from alternately hopeful and grateful supplicants, either.

Chris Berg has, once again, identified a headline-grabbing problem, diagnosed it wrongly and suggested the wrong solution. Poor research, fella.

Polly filler

John Roskam doesn't understand the sovereign role of the majority of voters in setting the direction of government in this country, apparently.

Keating had dragged reform of economic policy along at a cracking pace. Issues such as Mabo, the Redfern speech and the republic threatened to do so with social policy. The whole idea of John Howard was to ease the pace of social reform and see which elements really were unsustainable, and which were just victims of Keating's sharp tongue.

Howard showed that the republic was not an issue that burned in the national soul, and that Australia wasn't so desperate to be shot of the monarchy as the old Fenians in the NSW ALP Right. Howard thought that 1950s paternalism was an idea not properly tried in Aboriginal policy. He thought that unions could be legislated out of the employer-employee relationship. He thought that processing a refugee application required the refugee him/herself to be "processed". He thought that if the Americans went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Australia should send a deployment that was big enough to attract political attention from Washington yet small enough to minimise monetary and casualty cost.

Howard has now outlived his usefulness. He was wrong not to apologise to the Stolen Generation, those who were removed from Aboriginal families for no reason other than they were Aborigines. He was wrong about refugees, the incarceration of people within a legal void is a poor preparation for life in Australia or anywhere else. He was wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan has developed to a point where Australian forces are no longer required.

Good policy doesn't turn into bad policy overnight.

No, but an idea that upset a majority of the population was never sustainable. The Rudd Government's policies on the matters Roskam identifies as the core policies of the Howard government surprise only those who dismissed the very prospect of a Rudd Government until it actually came about.

If key policies can be ditched so quickly after what, in the end, proved to be a relatively narrow election loss, voters will inevitably ask whether Liberal MPs ever believed in those policies in the first place.

Those policies were imposed on Liberal MPs, who did not question them closely. They accepted Howard's assurances that they were both good policy and that they would lead to electoral success, and are now bearing the consequences of his failure of judgment. Roskam feels that they should bear this and other failures of judgment in perpetuity, like the rock of Sisyphus.

There's also the problem of what replaces the old policies.

This is a pressing problem for the government, which promised to replace them but was less than precise about what; they are responsible for governing, and responsible also to their Labor base. They have to replace WorkChoices with legislation that is acceptable to the Labor base but which is also sustainable across a diverse national workforce in a growing, changing economy. Good luck!

The Liberals have been excused the pressing responsibilities of government. They have to come up with a policy before the next election, and can learn from the mistakes that Labor are making. They needn't be hurried as John Roskam would wish, and indeed Roskam does himself no favours by urging them to do so. This lot are busy exercising the freedom to think for themselves, a precious quality that must be nurtured over time.

None of this is to say that policies cannot ever be changed. When circumstances alter, policies should be altered.

This assumes that WorkChoices adequately addressed the challenges facing Australia in 2005, much less in 2007-8. It didn't, and doesn't. It was a policy for 1985, when the ACTU and the H R Nicholls Society were at the peak of their influence.

What's notable about each of the Liberals' recent policy changes is that each was done in a hurry and each was done in reaction to something that Labor did.

Sounds like the Liberals are getting used to Opposition, John.

The Liberals can't afford to be put into such a position again.

This is why they shouldn't have frittered government away, and should act as an incentive for them to get it back again.

But at the moment there's every chance that the Liberals will respond to Labor's moves on the republic in the same way as they responded to Labor's initiatives on the apology and the Pacific Solution.

This is true, they run the danger of following Kim Beazley into reactive, crumbling opposition. It took Beazley ten years to get to that point, not ten weeks.

Many Liberals would say that the very last thing they need is a divisive internal debate about the republic. But if you can't have a divisive internal debate when the party is in opposition, federally and in every state and territory, then it's legitimate to ask when would be a better time.

Well said. Some debates cannot be fobbed off an it is poor political management even to try.

The best thing for the Liberal Party would be if the decision on the republic were taken out of their hands: if the voters decided on a republic, Liberals would have to decide whether they really wanted to be part of a governmental process from which the Crown was absent. Some Liberals feel they should take an active role in shaping the republic, but it would be extraordinary - too much to expect, really - for any Liberal leader to do that and keep a united party at the same time.

It will probably take three years for the Liberals to arrive at some sort of position on the republic. The advantage of starting the debate now is that they'll have the time to engage in analysis and reflection.

This assumes an environment tolerant of differing opinions, and the Liberal Party is the opposite of that. Moderates found this out in the late 1980s when they started losing preselections, political death being the ultimate form of censorship. Roskam has no excuse not to know better.

It's something the party hasn't done enough of since November 24.

Nor for the decade-and-a-half before that. There's the flaw in your argument John. For some time yet, debate within the Liberal Party will lumber and lurch like awkward teenagers learning to dance (the presence of cretins like Sophie Mirabella won't help). Clapping your hands in annoyance and insisting they all bounce and glide like Nureyev might make you feel better, but any sensible person knows it will be a slow process - until the next Leader comes along, with a gang of enforcers compelling everyone to shut up.

Roskam's despair of the political process is echoed by his colleague Chris Berg, and reflects a tendency of denigrating democracy itself - not just the odd dodgy decision, but the very idea of having government policy responsible to and reversible by the popular vote. Insofar as the Eye Pee Yay warrants concern, this is a worry and deserves close attention.

One for Chris Berg

No wonder The Sunday Age is getting a new editor. The genius who gave us a double serving of Jase (it is still only a fortnight since his last Pine 4 Pete) and Chris Berg needs to move on as soon as possible.

ANYBODY who remembers that photograph of Peter Costello gleefully surrounded by newborn infants knows one thing:

... you are a political tragic from Melbourne who needs to get over your Costello fetish.

Let's fossick through this train smash and see what, if anything, we can pull from the wreckage.

Chris says the baby bonus is poor policy, and he may even have a point. It has come in mighty handy here at PoHo. The general and the specific collide once again, a dilemma bedevilling both governments and institutions analysing public affairs. Does Chris Berg face this challenge squarely? You have to be kidding. All we got was this lazy piece:

Costly, blunt and poorly designed policy instruments have just as many unintended negative consequences as benefits.

Pathetic.

So when the Federal Government this week announced an inquiry into the possibility of paid parental leave, it was tough to remain optimistic.

Oh no, the Federal Government has announced an inquiry! Better for the current government to keep on keeping on and avoid all those costly inquiries, surely.

... most proposals for paid parental leave would require the Government to pay a nominated parent roughly the minimum wage for a dozen or so weeks.

Certainly, this is far better than simply requiring businesses to pay the cost of the leave out of their own pockets. The biggest risk that government-mandated workplace entitlements pose is that they make it more costly to hire workers — and the unintended consequence is that employers are reluctant to hire in the first place.

Have you learned any lessons at all from similar proposals for compulsory superannuation, Chris, and if so what were they? At a time of skill shortages and NAIRU, could this be any more than a scare campaign?

Paid parental leave could also break a fundamental principle of good welfare policy — the most effective policies are means-tested policies.

I'd have no trouble with the baby bonus being means-tested, but we're talking about paid parental leave - which looks like becoming a condition of employment rather than a transfer from the state. As a working condition it is partially determined by my own ambitions, talents and capacity for hard work, rather than arbitrarily-defined means tests from the dead hand of the state.

It is the sort of campaign that used to come from the union movement, and the fact that it is now coming from a government inquiry gives an interesting insight into the role of the union movement under a Rudd Labor Government.

At least the issue of parental leave has been referred to the Productivity Commission — the government's independent research department that can claim much of the credit for advancing the cause of economic reform since its inception. This contrasts with the worrying reluctance of Labor to trust the commission with anything else important.

Inquiries into climate change, car manufacturing and international trade have all been established separately — Kevin Rudd may not trust the government's experts to give him the answers he wants.

One would have thought that putting the Productivity Commission to work on the Australian car manufacturing industry would have been an exercise in cognitive dissonance, similar to driving a Mercedes Benz into a lake. To have the PC take on these many weighty matters would require of it the kind of bloat we have seen from the various security organisations, an increase in quality not necessarily matched with quality and decried by people not dissimilar to Chris Berg.

But the biggest problem with a paid parental leave scheme is how it encourages the redefinition of our relationship with government.

No it doesn't. There have been enough examples of poor outcomes resulting from the absence of parental leave, plenty of kite-flying and submissions from various organisations - this is a clear example of government responding to community concerns as it should.

The baby bonus has already established in the mind of Australians that having children is more than just a personal decision — it is part of a long-running negotiation between parents, the Federal Government and the tax office.

Rubbish! It was a policy determined by a political party which won an election. The Tax Office did what it was told - no negotiation there. The Federal Government that introduced his policy was voted out. That just leaves parents - if there's money available by filling out a form, then fill out that form!

This poor framing leads Chris to an inevitable bout of silliness which could have been avoided:

soon no one will start a family without lengthy consultations with the Australian Taxation Office and Prime Minister's Department.

Oh dear. Put down that copy of Brave New World and take a serious look at the community in which you live, Chris. Only then should you be assessing policy against that. Instead, it's once again with the silliness:

But the people whose decision could be influenced if they are given a few grand by the government may not actually be the best parents.

Who are these people? Where are they? If the government taxed people every time a child was born to them, would this really - no, not in theory - discourage irresponsible people from becoming parents?

We can't have government policy hostage to figments of your imagination. That's probably why there's an inquiry. Is the Eye Pee Yay making a credible submission to that inquiry, Chris, or are you going to slap something together in your careful way?

And the problems of ageing populations and skills shortages don't have to be resolved by funnelling subsidies to young families. It would instead be better for children if individuals were allowed to come to their own decisions about parenthood uninfluenced by politicians desperate to pay their way out of the latest political crisis.

I always thought the link between the baby bonus and the skills shortage was fairly tenuous. Your article would have been better had you stuck to that, Chris.

Who are these individuals whose decisions about parenthood depend upon a sum of money that doesn't begin to meet the medical bills associated with childbirth, let alone the costs of child-rearing? Who are they, Chris, and why do you flay imaginary people for bending weak politicians to their will?

Perhaps if the government really thinks that we have a population problem, it could be looking carefully at increasing immigration — skilled and non-skilled — and relaxing the high costs of work visas.

Considering that Australia has one of the world's largest migration programs - skilled and unskilled - already, this off-the-cuff suggestion might not be the thunderbolt you seem to regard it as. Plenty of studies have examined the pros and cons of that in the current context - go review some and stop wasting everyone's time.

Nevertheless, introducing subsidies to new parents conveniently supports Rudd's working families narrative. It's politically savvy to pay off your supporters.

Considering that the whole idea of the baby bonus was to forestall the very idea of a Rudd Government it can't have been that savvy. You wouldn't know political savvy if it bit you, Chris.

The fundamental question that the Labor Government's proposal for parental leave raises is whether parents should have children for themselves, or for society.

No, the question it raises concerns the nature of remuneration for labour, Chris.

what parent spends time thinking about how starting a family could help Australia's OECD rankings? Hopefully none.

You've lugged this straw man through your whole article and now you've finally let it drop. How much better if you'd set fire to it and gone and done some research instead.

Think about it

It seems that John Roskam's straw-man work has spread throughout the organisation he heads, the Eye Pee Yay. Thankfully this peanut holds an honorary title, but it's the thought that counts: the thought that attacks can be prefabricated, targetted at imaginary abstractions and used to develop useful perspectives on government and society - abstractions that seem to wheel back and smite those who launch them. Chris Berg shows you don't need to be a committee to produce poor outcomes.

There is a strange fantasy held by many serious people in politics that if you get enough experts in a room, some sort of magical consensus will emerge and everything will be wonderful.

Really? Where, whom?

Given that it is unlikely the Rudd Government will adopt any of the summit's proposals - at least, none they weren't already familiar with - the 2020 talkfest is unlikely to do too much harm.

What a silly set of givens this is. The government is expected to commit to ideas that haven't been thought through yet, so that even Chris Berg could go them.

No doubt the proposals from 2020 will be as pedestrian as those produced by the half-dozen "future-oriented" conferences around the country each year. That is, we should do more on climate change, spend more on education, infrastructure and innovation, engage more with Asia, the republic is the most important issue facing Australia today, children are our future, and on and on and on.

Not much credit due for foresight there - where is the straw man who seriously believes that the republic is that important? I suppose that any progress on these issues will be step-by-step, incremental changes to the forward positions of individuals under their own locomotion - i.e., pedestrian. Berg's use of the word seems to be pejorative. Strange.

So if the only big idea behind Rudd's education revolution was to set up an education committee at a gigantic conference, it's hard to avoid wondering why we bother having revolutions at all.

Assuming that was the 'only big idea', Chris.

We've just had 11 years where any idea that departed even slightly from an already-decided official line was attacked, not on any intellectual level and not in terms of competition, but in petty, sub-Keatingesque ad hominem attacks on individuals who dared question that the policy of the incumbent government was in any way sub-optimal. Nobody expects this hundred-flowers thing to go ion indefinitely, but getting people's ideas engaged with the machinery of government will be a nice change from what had gone before. If you're going to have an education revolution, for example, you need the whole unruly bunch of educators involved. That's revolutionary, and that's the point, Chris.

After all, what great idea ever came from a committee?

Well, I won't count those wackers on Mont Pelerin if you won't. Do the Wright Brothers count as a committee? Does the IPA? Led Zepplin? The Diet of Worms? The AIF? Geelong Cats?

The dirty secret of Australian politics is that conflict makes good government.

Not really. The Howard government ramped up the conflict, and government got worse rather than better. "The blame game" is only a game until it becomes tiresome, which it has.

The idea behind Federation was that the states would compete to develop the best public policy and that the Commonwealth would do the things that the states didn't. If they start working closely together, as Rudd has assured us will now happen, it will only further erode our critically weakened federal system.

I'd love to see an example where this competition yielded positive results: a better way of teaching maths, or running hospitals, anything would do. You have 106 years of examples from 1901 to 2007, go to it Chris. Give us something to be sorry for that which has disappeared, other than a vague dream.

Similarly, trying to get business and government working together is fraught with difficulty. Usually, the only things business want from government are money or protection from competitors. The only thing governments want from business is help achieving political goals.

And when the government works with the "community", it inevitably ends up consulting special-interest groups who harbour ideological views not shared by the community as a whole. It is us, as citizens and consumers, who get the raw deal.

Yep, that governing is difficult Chris - not sure what solution you're offering there, if any. It's difficult, therefore not worth doing?

I liked this self-defeating argument best, the intellectual boomerang that smacked Chris Berg on the back the head thus:

It would be easy to run a country on consensus if everybody shared the same views. But not only do people disagree on means, they also disagree on ends ... special-interest groups who harbour ideological views not shared by the community as a whole.

Having established universal agreement as a fantasy, he then criticises government for not even attempting to struggle toward a fantasy, which would, one assumes, make it easier for someone like Chris Berg to complain.

The 2020 summit is more than just a happy-clappy approach to governing.

Is it? I thought you started your article saying it was exactly that, that and nothing else.

Rudd has to be careful that his eagerness to build "consensus" doesn't leave the Government open to interest groups and poor policy.

But could you expect anything else from a government, Chris? If so, what would it be?

- Andrew Elder is a Senior Mountebanke and Pifflemeister-General at the Politically Homeless Institute, similar to the IPA but less well funded and much more poorly edited.