So you thought trade agreements were really about win-win free trade?
Friday 9 March 2018
Two perspectives on global economic and social inequality
So you thought trade agreements were really about win-win free trade?
John F.
Kennedy School of Government Harvard University, Dani Rodrik, excerpts from What
Do Trade Agreements Really Do?, February 2018:
As
trade agreements have evolved and gone beyond import tariffs and quotas into
regulatory rules and harmonization, they have become more difficult to fit into
received economic theory. Nevertheless, most economists continue to regard
trade agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) favorably. The
default view seems to be that these arrangements get us closer to free trade by
reducing transaction costs associated with regulatory differences or explicit
protectionism. An alternative perspective is that trade agreements are the
result of rent-seeking, self-interested behavior on the part of politically
well-connected firms – international banks, pharmaceutical companies,
multinational firms. They may result in freer, mutually beneficial trade,
through exchange of market access. But they are as likely to produce purely
redistributive outcomes under the guise of “freer trade…..
The
consensus in favor of the general statement supporting free trade is not a
surprise. Economists disagree about a lot of things, but the superiority of
free trade over protection is not controversial. The principle of comparative
advantage and the case for the gains from trade are crown jewels of the
economics profession. So the nearly unanimous support for free trade in
principle is understandable. But the almost identical level of enthusiasm
expressed for the North American Free trade Agreement—that is, for a text that
runs into nearly 2,000 pages, negotiated by three governments under pressures
from lobbies and special interests, and shaped by a mix of political, economic,
and foreign policy objectives—is more curious. The economists must have been
aware that trade agreements, like free trade itself, create winners and losers.
But how did they weight the gains and losses to reach a judgement that US
citizens would be better off “on average”? Did it not matter who gained and
lost, whether they were rich or poor to begin with, or whether the gains and
losses would be diffuse or concentrated? What if the likely redistribution was
large compared to the efficiency gains? What did they assume about the likely
compensation for the losers, or did it not matter at all? And would their
evaluation be any different if they knew that recent research suggests NAFTA
produced minute net efficiency gains for the US economy while severely
depressing wages of those groups and communities most directly affected by
Mexican competition?
Perhaps
the experts viewed distributional questions as secondary in view of the overall
gains from trade. After all, opening up to trade is analogous to technological
progress. In both cases, the economic pie expands while some groups are left
behind. We did not ban automobiles or light bulbs because coachmen and candle
makers would lose their jobs. So why restrict trade? As the experts in this
survey contemplated whether US citizens would be better off “on average” as a
result of NAFTA, it seems plausible that they viewed questions about the
practical details or the distributional questions of NAFTA as secondary in view
of the overall gains from trade.
This
tendency to view trade agreements as an example of efficiency-enhancing
policies that may nevertheless leave some people behind would be more
justifiable if recent trade agreements were simply about eliminating
restrictions on trade such as import tariffs and quotas. In fact, the label
“free trade agreements” does not do a very good job of describing what recent
proposed agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the
Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and numerous other regional
and bilateral trade agreements actually do. Contemporary trade agreements go
much beyond traditional trade restrictions at the border. They cover regulatory
standards, health and safety rules, investment, banking and finance,
intellectual property, labor, the environment, and many other subjects besides.
They reach well beyond national borders and seek deep integration among nations
rather than shallow integration, to use Robert Lawrence’s (1996) helpful
distinction.
According to one tabulation, 76 percent of existing preferential
trade agreements covered at least some aspect of investment (such as free
capital mobility) by 2011; 61 percent covered intellectual property rights
protection; and 46 percent covered environmental regulations (Limão 2016)…..
Consider
first patents and copyrights (so-called “trade-related intellectual property
rights” or TRIPs). TRIPs entered the lexicon of trade during the Uruguay Round
of multilateral trade negotiations, which were completed in 1994. The US has
pushed for progressively tighter rules (called TRIPs-plus) in subsequent
regional and bilateral trade agreements. Typically TRIPs pit advanced countries
against developing countries, with the former demanding stronger and lengthier
monopoly restrictions for their firms in the latter’s markets. Freer trade is
supposed to be win-win, with both parties benefiting. But in TRIPs, the
advanced countries’ gains are largely the developing countries’ losses.
Consumers in the developing nations pay higher prices for pharmaceuticals and
other research-intensive products and the advanced countries’ firms reap higher
monopoly rents. One needs to assume an implausibly high elasticity of global
innovation to developing countries’ patents to compensate for what is in effect
a pure transfer of rents from poor to rich countries. That is why many ardent
proponents of free trade were opposed to the incorporation of TRIPs in the
Uruguay Round (e.g., Bhagwati et al. 2014). Nonetheless, TRIPs rules have not
been dropped, and in fact expand with each new FTA. Thanks to subsequent trade
agreements, intellectual property protection has become broader and stronger,
and much of the flexibility afforded to individual countries under the original
WTO agreement has been eliminated (Sell 2011).
Second,
consider restrictions on nations’ ability to manage cross-border capital flows.
Starting with its bilateral trade agreements with Singapore and Chile in 2003,
the US government has sought and obtained agreements that enforce open capital
accounts as a rule. These agreements make it difficult for signatories to
manage cross-border capital flows, including in short-term financial
instruments. In many recent US trade agreements such restrictions apply even in
times of macroeconomic and financial crisis. This has raised eyebrows even at the
International Monetary Fund (IMF, Siegel 2013). Paradoxically, capital account
liberalization has become a norm in trade agreements just as professional
opinion among economists was becoming more skeptical about the wisdom of free
capital flows. The frequency and severity of financial crises associated with
financial globalization have led many experts to believe that direct
restrictions on the capital account have a second-best role to complement
prudential regulation and, possibly, provide temporary breathing space during
moments of extreme financial stress. The IMF itself, once at the vanguard of
the push for capital-account liberalization, has officially revised its stance
on capital controls. It now acknowledges a useful role for them where more direct
remedies for underlying macroeconomic and financial imbalances are not
available. Yet investment and financial services provisions in many FTAs run
blithely against this new consensus among economists. A third area where trade
agreements include provisions of questionable merit is socalled “investor-state
dispute settlement procedures” (ISDS). These provisions have been imported into
trade agreements from bilateral investment treaties (BIT). They are an anomaly
in that they enable foreign investors, and they alone, to sue host governments
in special arbitration tribunals and to seek monetary damages for regulatory,
tax, and other policy changes that reduce their profits. Foreign investors (and
their governments) see ISDS as protection against expropriation, but in
practice arbitration tribunals interpret the protections provided more broadly
than under, say, domestic US law (Johnson et al., 2015). Developing countries
traditionally have signed on to ISDS in the expectation that it would
compensate for their weak legal regimes and help attract direct foreign
investment. But ISDS also suffers from its own problems: it operates outside
accepted legal regimes, gives arbitrators too much power, does not follow or
set precedents, and allows no appeal. Whatever the merits of ISDS for
developing nations, it is more difficult to justify its inclusion in trade
agreements among advanced countries with well-functioning legal systems (e.g.
the prospective Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between
the U.S. and European countries).
Read
the full paper here.
So you thought globalisation was a good idea?
Harvard
Business Review, Lucas Chancel, 40
Years of Data Suggests 3 Myths About Globalization, 2 March 2018:
Globalization
has led to a rise in global income inequality, not a reduction
Inequality
between individuals across the world is the result of two competing forces:
inequality between countries and inequality within countries. For example,
strong growth in China and India contributed to significant global income
growth, and therefore, decreased inequality between countries. However,
inequality within these countries rose sharply. The top 1% income share rose
from 7% to 22% in India, and 6% to 14% in China between 1980 and 2016.
Until
recently, it has been impossible to know which of these two forces dominates
globally, because of lack of data on inequality trends within countries, which
many governments do not release publicly or uniformly. The World Inequality
Report 2018 addresses this issue, relying on systematic, comparable, and
transparent inequality statistics from high-income and emerging countries.
The
conclusion is striking. Between 1980 and 2016, inequality between the world’s
citizens increased, despite strong growth in emerging markets. Indeed, the
share of global income accrued by the richest 1%, grew from 16% in 1980 to 20%
by 2016. Meanwhile the income share of the poorest 50% hovered around 9%. The
top 1% — individuals earning more than $13,500 per month — globally captured
twice as much income growth as the bottom 50% of the world population over this
period.
Income
doesn’t trickle down
The
second belief contests that high growth at the top is necessary to achieve some
growth at the bottom of the distribution, in other words that rising inequality
is necessary to elevate standards of living among the poorest. However, this
idea is at odds with the data. When we compare Europe with the U.S., or China
with India, it is clear that countries that experienced a higher rise in
inequality were not better at lifting the incomes of their poorest citizens.
Indeed, the U.S. is the extreme counterargument to the myth of trickle down:
while incomes grew by more than 600% for the top 0.001% of Americans since
1980, the bottom half of the population was actually shut off from economic
growth, with a close to zero rise in their yearly income. In Europe, growth
among the top 0.001% was five times lower than in the U.S., but the poorest
half of the population fared much better, experiencing a 26% growth in their
average incomes. Despite having a consistently higher growth rate since 1980,
the rise of inequality in China was much more moderate than in India. As a
result, China was able to lift the incomes of the poorest half of the
population at a rate that was four times faster than in India, enabling greater
poverty reduction.
The
trickle-down myth may have been debunked, but its ideas are still rooted in a
number of current policies. For example, the idea that high income growth for
rich individuals is a precondition to create jobs and growth at the bottom
continues to be used to justify tax reductions for the richest, as seen in
recent tax reform in the U.S. and France. A closer look at the data demands we
rethink the rationale and legitimacy of such policies.
Policy
– not trade or technology – is most responsible for inequality
It
is often said that rising inequality is inevitable — that it is a natural
consequence of trade openness and digitalization that governments are powerless
to counter. But the numbers presented above clearly demonstrate the diversity
of inequality trajectories experienced by broadly comparable regions over the
past decades. The U.S. and Europe, for instance, had similar population size
and average income in 1980 — as well as analogous inequality levels. Both
regions have also faced similar exposure to international markets and new
technologies since, but their inequality trajectories have radically diverged.
In the U.S., the bottom 50% income share decreased from 20% to 10% today,
whereas in Europe it decreased from 24% to 22%.
Rather
than openness to trade or digitalization, it is policy choices and
institutional changes that explain divergences in inequality. After the
neoliberal policy shift of the early 1980s, Europe resisted the impulse to turn
its market economy into a market society more than the US — evidenced by
differences on key policy areas concerning inequality. The progressivity of the
tax code — how much more the rich pay as a percentage — was seriously
undermined in the U.S., but much less so in continental Europe. The U.S. had
the highest minimum wage of the world in the 1960s, but it has since decreased
by 30%, whereas in France, the minimum wage has risen 300%.
Access to higher
education is costly and highly unequal in the U.S., whereas it is free in
several European countries. Indeed, when Bavarian policymakers tried to
introduce small university fees in the late 2000s, a referendum invalidated the
decision. Health systems also provide universal access to good-quality
healthcare in most European countries, while millions of Americans do not have
access to healthcare plans.
Thursday 8 March 2018
International Women's Day, 8 March 2018
A voice I am listening to on International Women's Day 2018.....
IndigenousX, 7 March 2018:
“Racism is one that all women in the women’s movement
must start to come to terms with. There is no doubt in my mind that racism is
expressed by women in the movement. Its roots are many and they go deep.”
– Pat O’Shane
Those words were written
by former magistrate, First Nations woman Pat O’Shane more than two decades ago
and yet still represent an uncomfortable truth for mainstream feminism. Similar
criticisms have also been made by First Nations women like Jackie Huggins, Judy
Atkinson and Aileen Morton-Robinson and are revived and re-spoken by younger
feminists like Larissa Behrendt, Celeste Liddle, Nayuka Gorrie and many more
who continue the fight to hold mainstream feminism to account.
The roots of racism
within mainstream feminism are still there, under the soil. But that’s not to
say there haven’t been changes in the mainstream feminist movement. Rather than
outright denial on racism and how race impacts gender, an even more damaging
phenomenon has taken hold: co-option.
Intersectionality,
grounded in critical race theory, is now used by many white feminists but has
been watered down to a buzzword: a superficial display of “inclusiveness”
whereby it is used to deflect rather than interrogate the way race impacts the
lived experience of gender, class, gender identity, sexual orientation and
disability. An example of this, is the way Aboriginal women are consigned
to a footnote with no context in articles about domestic violence, aligning the
staggering statistics with the continuing colonial portrayal of the Aboriginal
‘other’ as inherently violent.
Much like International
Women’s Day, which has become a day for corporates and fancy breakfasts that
few women outside of the upper and middle classes can attend – the term has
been re-purposed to fit into a limited type of white feminist thought.
Over the years, I’ve
spent a lot of time being angry at the failings of white liberal feminism,
largely because it is the type of feminism that finds the loudest voice in
mainstream media. Because it has this voice it has become synonymous with
‘feminism’, despite the movement itself being a broad church. I even questioned
whether to continue calling myself a feminist.
I have realised that as
an Aboriginal feminist, I don’t have to continue reacting to these failures.
There is already a foundation built by brilliant black women which allows us to
continue developing an Aboriginal feminism. And the reason this is so important
is because the unique experiences of Aboriginal people, the way racism impacts
our lived experiences as women, brotherboys, sistergirls and non-binary
peoples, is a matter of life and death.
While the national
conversation around domestic violence and sexual assault is undoubtedly
important, often Aboriginal voices are bypassed altogether. An example of this
was the recent Our Watch media awards, where a white male journalist was given
an accolade for reporting on “the violence no one talks about”. Aboriginal
women have been talking about violence for decades – the ‘silence’ is not the
issue. It is that no one listens unless it is spoken in a way that bypasses the
role of white Australia, and places blame right back onto Aboriginal people
themselves.
That is why arguments
about Aboriginal culture being inherently violent are so appealing. There may
have been instances of violence in pre-colonial Aboriginal society –
but from my perspective, if Aboriginal people were participating in
the level of violence we see now in many communities, we would not have
survived for tens of thousands of years, and we would not have developed a
sophisticated system of land management, astronomy and science that intertwined
with our spirituality.
But the cultural
arguments around Aboriginal violence find an audience in a white Australia that
denies its continuing role in the current circumstances affecting our people.
And white feminists can often be complicit in the perpetuation of the myth,
particularly when it comes to ‘saving black women and children’ from the hands
of Aboriginal men. The fact is, Aboriginal communities are not inhuman – we
care deeply about violence and the impact on our people, particularly our
children. But the conversation has become dangerous due to the centring of
white outrage and the appetite for black pathology which borders on
pornographic.
Meanwhile, Aboriginal
women are painted as depraved for this perceived silence. Like the colonial
images that rendered Aboriginal women as uncaring ‘infanticidal cannibals’ who
did not love their children, we are again caricatured as powerless and
unconcerned about our children. This is the real silence: the silencing of the
strong Aboriginal women all across the country who have worked day in and day
out on this problem in the face of continual slander. …..
Full article can be read here.
Labels:
access & equity,
feminism,
Indigenous Australia,
inequality,
IWD,
racism,
women
Australian workplaces still hostile territory for women
“When asked
about a range of job attributes, women placed most value on having a job where
they would be treated with respect (80%), where their job was secure (80%),
where the job paid well (65%), was interesting (64%) and offered the
flexibility they might need (62%). The majority of women viewed their job as
being useful to society (69%) and felt that their job allowed them to ‘help
others’ (73%). Two in five working women (43%) said they felt stressed at work,
with it more likely being an issue for younger women, those still in education,
and those in lower paid or casual roles. One in five women (20%) said they felt
isolated at work, particularly those self-employed and working at home.
Two-thirds of women said they received paid sick (67%) and annual leave (65%).
Fewer received paid parental leave (42%) and paid carers leave (43%), and one
in five women were unaware whether or not they received these entitlements at
work.”
[Marian Baird et al, 2018, Women and the Future of Work: Report1of The Australian Women’s Working
Futures Project, p.4]
University of
Sydney, News and Opinion, Significant
gaps between working women's career goals and reality, 6 March 2018:
First study to examine
women and future of work
Australian workplaces
are not ready to meet young women's career aspirations or support their future
success, according to a new national report by University of Sydney
researchers.
“We are talking more
about robots than we are about women in the future of work debate – this must
change,” said co-author of the report, Professor
Rae Cooper.
Launched today,
the Women and the Future of Work report reveals the gaps
and traps between young working women’s aspirations and their current working
realities.
“There are significant
gaps in job security, respect, access to flexibility and training,” said Dr Elizabeth Hill, co-author of the report.
“Government, businesses
and industry need to step up and take action so that our highly educated and
highly skilled young women are central to the future of work.”
The team of researchers
from the University of Sydney’s Women, Work &
Leadership Research Group, surveyed more than 2000 working women aged 16 to
40, who were representative of the workforce nationally.
The report is the first
of its kind and found that young women were generally not concerned about job
loss as a result of automation and economic change.
“Almost two-thirds of
the women we surveyed said they didn’t fear robots coming for their jobs in the
future,” Professor Cooper said.
“Our national debate
about the future of work is too often a hyper-masculinised, metallic version of
work.
“For young women, their
picture of the future workforce is quite different: they see themselves
balancing family and work commitments, and having long, meaningful careers. For
this to be a reality, we need mutually beneficial flexibility in all
workplaces.”
Respect and access to
flexibility critical for women
The survey found being
treated with respect and having job security were critical to ensuring young
women’s future careers.
Despite 90 percent of
women identifying access to flexibility as important, only 16 percent strongly
agreed that they have access to the flexibility they need.
“Young women workers are
generally optimistic about work and ready to contribute,” Dr Hill said. “But
they find themselves caught in gaps between what they need and what the
workforce offers.”
The majority of working
women report that developing the right skills and qualifications is important
for success at work (92 percent). However, only 40 percent said they can access
affordable training to equip them for better jobs.
“Public policy settings,
while improving, remain inadequate,” Dr Hill said. “Projected growth in
feminised, low-paid jobs in health care and social assistance suggests an
urgent need for government action to ensure these jobs meet the criteria of
decent work.
“Current trends toward
fragmentation and the contracting out of employment are undermining many of the
criteria of decent work, making this a pressing policy issue for gender
equality in the future of work,” Dr Hill said.
More women than robots
in future workplaces
The survey also
indicated young women often feel ‘disrespected’ by senior colleagues and
supervisors because of their gender. This was the case both for highly paid
professionals and low‐paid
workers.
Ten percent of
respondents said they were experiencing sexual harassment in their current
workplace. Some groups of women reported higher rates of harassment including:
*
women currently studying (14 percent compared to 8 percent who are not
studying)
*
women living with a disability (18 percent compared to 9 percent not living
with a disability)
*
women born in Asia or culturally and linguistically diverse women (16 percent
compared to 8 percent who are not culturally or linguistically diverse).
“Employers need to
commit and act to create workplaces where women are respected and valued for
their expertise,” Professor Cooper said.
“There will be more
women than robots in the future of work. It’s time that households, government,
businesses and employers listen to them.”
Dr Hill said: “We are
urgently calling on the government to facilitate and implement a public policy
framework that supports young women’s career aspirations.
“We need to work towards
a future where women are valued in the workplace and for their work.”
The study was funded by
the University of Sydney’s Sydney
Research Excellence Initiative 2020. It was authored by the Co-Directors of
the University’s Women, Work & Leadership Research Group, Professor
Marian Baird and Professor Rae Cooper, with Dr Elizabeth Hill, Professor Ariadne Vromen and Professor Elspeth Probyn.
The data collection and
analysis for this research focused on working 16-40 year old Australians, and
was undertaken by Ipsos Australia. It was collected in September-November 2017,
and includes: a nationally representative online survey of 2,100 women; a
survey of 500 men; a booster survey of 50 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
women; and five in-person focus groups of working women.
Full report
can be found here.
“At the time
of study, women with the following characteristics were found as being less
likely to be working (noting that the first of these characteristics may be
age-related):
- Those who have only completed secondary school (70%
compared to 86% of those who have completed tertiary education, for example);
- Those living at home with parents (71% compared to
84% of those living in their own home);
- Women with disability (74% compared with 82% of those
without disability);
- Culturally and Linguistically Diverse women (75% in
comparison to 82% of women who are not Culturally and Linguistically Diverse);
and
- Low-income earners (70% of those earning below
$40,000 as opposed to 88% of those earning above $80,000, for example).”
[Marian Baird et al, 2018, Women and the Future of Work: Report1of The Australian Women’s Working
Futures Project, p.18]
Labels:
access & equity,
inequality,
jobs,
women
Murray-Darling Basin: water mismanagement just keeps rolling on
Image sourced from Twitter
Having miserably failed to enforce even the most basic of safeguards against widespread water theft in the Murray Darling Basin - such as not allowing unmetered water extraction - the Murray Darling Basin Authority and then water resources minister and now humble Nationals backbencher Barnaby Joyce have left us having to rely on leaks to the media to find out the true state of play in the national water wars.
The
Sydney Morning Herald,
4 March 2018:
The ailing state of the
Darling River has been traced to man-made water extraction, according to a
leaked report by the agency charged with overseeing its health.
The "hydrologic
investigation", dated last November and obtained by Fairfax Media,
analysed more than 2000 low-flow events from 1990-2017 on the
Barwon-Darling River between Mungindi near the NSW-Queensland border down to
Wilcannia in far-western NSW .
The draft report – a
version of which is understood to have been sent to the Turnbull government for
comment – comes days after WaterNSW issued a
red alert for blue-green algae on the Lower Darling River at Pooncarie
and Burtundy.
Bourke
is among towns also on stage-two water restrictions as the Darling
dries up in places
The paper by
Murray-Darling Basin Authority's (MDBA) own scientists found flow behaviour had
changed since 2000, particularly in mid-sections of the river such as between
the towns of Walgett and Brewarrina.
On that section, low or
no-flow periods were "difficult to reconcile with impacts purely caused by
climate", the scientists said.
Indeed, dry periods on
the river downstream from Bourke were "significantly longer than
pre-2000", with the dry spells during the millennium drought continuing
afterwards.
Water resource
development – also described as "anthropogenic impact" – must also
play "a critical role" in the low flows between Walgett and
Brewarrina, the report said.
The revelations
come after
the Senate last month voted to disallow changes to the $13 billion
Murray-Darling Basin Plan that would have cut annual environmental water savings
by 70 billion litres…..
A spokeswoman for the
authority said the report was "undergoing quality assurance processes
prior to publication", with a formal release on its website likely in
coming days.
The MDBA commissioned
the internal team to "address some of the specific concerns raised"
by its own compliance reviews and those of the Berejiklian government, she
said.
Terry Korn, president
of the Australian Floodplain Association, said the report confirmed
what his group's members had known since the O'Farrell government changed the
river's water-sharing plan in 2012 to allow irrigators to pump even during
low-flow periods.
Poor policy had been
compounded by "totally inadequate monitoring and compliance systems",
Mr Korn said.
"Some irrigators
have capitalised on this poor management by the NSW government to such an
extent that their removal of critical low flows has denied downstream
landholders and communities their basic riparian rights to fresh clean
water," he said. "This is totally unacceptable."….
Fairfax Media also
sought comment from federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud.
Once publicly outed for sitting on the review report the Murray Darling Basin Authority finally decided to publish it this week.
https://www.scribd.com/document/372999806/Murray-Darling-Basn-Compliance-Review-Final-Report-November-2017Once publicly outed for sitting on the review report the Murray Darling Basin Authority finally decided to publish it this week.
The
Sydney Morning Herald,
20 February 2018:
The NSW government
intervened to urge the purchase of water rights from a large irrigator on the
Darling River that delivered a one-off $37 million profit to its owner while
leaving downstream users struggling with stagnant flows.
Gavin Hanlon, the senior
NSW water official who
resigned last September amid multiple inquiries into allegations of
water theft and poor compliance by some large irrigators, wrote to his federal
counterparts in the Agriculture and Water Resources Department, then
headed by Barnaby Joyce, in late December 2016 urging the buyback of water from
Tandou property to proceed.
The Tandou water
purchase proposal "should be progressed...given the high cost of the
alternative water supply solution" for the property south-east of Broken
Hill, Mr Hanlon wrote, according to a document sent on December 23, 2016 and
obtained by Fairfax Media.
Early in 2017, the
Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences estimated
the property's annual water entitlements of 21.9 billion litres to be
$24,786,750 "based on recent trade values", according to another
document listed as "Commercial in Confidence".
Despite this valuation,
the federal government by 16 March, 2017 would pay Tandou's owner Webster Ltd
more than $78 million. At its announcement on 21 June last year, Webster said
in a statement it "expects to record a net profit on disposal in the order
of $36-37 million".
The transfer of the
water rights are apparently the subject of inquiries by the NSW Independent
Commission Against Corruption, with several people saying they have discussed
their knowledge of the deal with the agency. An ICAC spokeswoman declined to
comment.
Webster Ltd
styles itself as a leading
Australian agribusiness company with a rich, diverse history spanning over 180
years.
Liberal Party donor Christopher
Darcy “Chris” Corrigan is Executive Chairman and a significant shareholder in this company
Wednesday 7 March 2018
When it comes to human rights and civil liberties is it ever safe to trust the junkyard dog or its political masters?
On 18 July 2017, Prime
Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull announced the establishment of a Home Affairs
portfolio that would comprise immigration, border protection, domestic security
and law enforcement agencies, as well as reforms to the Attorney-General’s
oversight of Australia’s intelligence community and agencies in the Home
Affairs portfolio.
On 7 December 2017, the Prime Minister
introduced the Home Affairs and Integrity Agencies Legislation Amendment Bill2017 into the House of Representatives.
This bill amends the Anti-Money
Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006, the Independent
National Security Legislation Monitor Act 2010, the Inspector-General
of Intelligence and Security Act 1986 and the Intelligence Services Act 2001.
The bill was referred to Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security which tabled its report and recommendations on 26 February 2018.
This new government department on steroids will be headed by millionaire former Queensland Police detective and far-right Liberal MP for Dickson, Peter Craig Dutton.
His 'front man' selling this change is Abbott protégé, former Secretary
of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and current Secretary of the new Department of Home Affairs, Michael Pezzullo.
The question every Australian needs to ask themselves is, can this current federal government, the ministers responsible for and department heads managing this extremely powerful department, be trusted not to dismantle a raft of human and civil rights during the full departmental implementation.
It looks suspiciously as though former Australian attorney-general George Brandis does not think so - he is said to fear political overreach.
The
Saturday Paper,
3-9 March 2018:
On
Friday last week, former attorney-general George Brandis went to see Michael
Pezzullo, the secretary of the new Department of Home Affairs.
The
meeting was a scheduled consultation ahead of Brandis’s departure for London to
take up his post as Australia’s new high commissioner. It was cordial, even
friendly. But what the soon-to-be diplomat Brandis did not tell Pezzullo during
the pre-posting briefing was that he had singled him out in a private farewell
speech he had given to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation on the
eve of his retirement from parliament two weeks earlier.
As
revealed in The Saturday Paper last week, the then senator Brandis
used the ASIO speech to raise concerns about the power and scope of the new
department and the ambitions of its secretary. Brandis effectively endorsed the
private concerns of some within ASIO that the new security structure could
expose the domestic spy agency to ministerial or bureaucratic pressure.
In
a regular Senate estimates committee hearing this week, Pezzullo described his
meeting with Brandis – on the day before The Saturday Paper article
appeared – as Opposition senators asked him for assurances that ASIO would
retain its statutory independence once it moves from the attorney-general’s
portfolio to become part of Home Affairs.
“I
had a very good discussion on Friday,” Pezzullo told the committee, of his
meeting with Brandis.
“He’s
seeking instructions and guidance on performing the role of high commissioner.
None of those issues came up, so I find that of interest. If he has concerns,
I’m sure that he would himself raise those publicly.”
Labor
senator Murray Watt pressed: “So he raised them with ASIO but not with you?”
“I
don’t know what he raised with ASIO,” Pezzullo responded. “… You should ask the
former attorney-general if he’s willing to state any of those concerns … He’s a
high commissioner now, so he may not choose to edify your question with a
response, but that’s a matter for him. As I said, he didn’t raise any of those
concerns with me when we met on Friday.”
The
Saturday Paper contacted George Brandis but he had no comment.
“ANY
SUGGESTION THAT WE IN THE PORTFOLIO ARE SOMEHOW EMBARKED ON THE SECRET
DECONSTRUCTION OF THE SUPERVISORY CONTROLS WHICH ENVELOP AND CHECK EXECUTIVE
POWER ARE NOTHING MORE THAN FLIGHTS OF CONSPIRATORIAL FANCY…”
Watt
asked Pezzullo for assurance there would be no change to the longstanding
provisions in the ASIO Act that kept the agency under its director-general’s
control and not subject to instruction from the departmental secretary. The
minister representing Home Affairs in the Senate, Communications Minister Mitch
Fifield, said: “It is not proposed that there be a change to that effect.”
The
new Department of Home Affairs takes in Immigration and Border Protection, the
Australian Federal Police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the
Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, known as AUSTRAC, and ASIO.
ASIO
does not move until legislation is passed to authorise the shift, and will
retain its status as a statutory agency.
Pezzullo
addressed the fears of those questioning his department’s reach. He said some
commentary mischaracterised the arrangements as “being either a layer of overly
bureaucratic oversight of otherwise well-functioning operational arrangements
or, worse, a sinister concentration of executive power that will not be able to
be supervised and checked”.
“Both
of these criticisms are completely wrong,” he said.
Pezzullo
had already described his plans, both to the committee and in a speech he made
in October last year, in which he spoke of exploiting the in-built capabilities
in digital technology to expand Australia’s capacity to detect criminal and
terrorist activity in daily life online and on the so-called “dark web”.
But
the language he used, referring to embedding “the state” invisibly in global
networks “increasingly at super scale and at very high volumes”, left his
audiences uncertain about exactly what he meant.
Watt
asked if there would be increased surveillance of the Australian people. “Any
surveillance of citizens is always strictly done in accordance with the laws
passed by this parliament,” Pezzullo replied.
In
his February 7 speech to ASIO, George Brandis described Pezzullo’s October
remarks as an “urtext”, or blueprint, for a manifesto that would rewrite how
Australia’s security apparatus operates.
Pezzullo
hit back on Monday. “Any suggestion that we in the portfolio are somehow
embarked on the secret deconstruction of the supervisory controls which envelop
and check executive power are nothing more than flights of conspiratorial fancy
that read into all relevant utterances the master blueprint of a new ideology
of undemocratic surveillance and social control,” Pezzullo said.
As for day to day human resources, financial management and transparent accountable governance, media reports are not inspiring confidence in Messrs. Turnbull, Dutton and Pezzullo.
The Canberra Times, 2 March 2018:
The Canberra Times, 2 March 2018:
Home Affairs head Mike
Pezzullo was one of the first to front Senate estimates on Monday.
It's been up and running
for only weeks, but his new department is part of one of the largest government
portfolios.
Having brought
several security agencies into its fold, and if legislation passes letting ASIO
join, the Home Affairs portfolio will be home to 23,000 public
servants.
Mr Pezzullo was also
quizzed on the investigation into Roman Quaedvlieg, the head of
the Australian Border Force who has been on leave since May last year,
following claims he helped his girlfriend - an ABF staff member - get a
job at Sydney Airport.
It was revealed the Prime Minister's department has had a corruption watchdog's
report into abuse of power allegations for at least five months
while Mr Quaedvlieg has been on full pay earning hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
Tuesday 6 March 2018
Is Australian welfare reform in 2018 a step back into a dark past?
Last year saw the completion of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse which revealed generational abuse within the Australian education and child welfare systems.
That year also revealed the ongoing failure of the Dept. of Human Services and Centrelink to fix its faulty national debt collection scheme, which possibly led to the deaths of up to eleven welfare recipients after they were issued debt advice letters.
The first quarter of 2018 brought a scathing United Nations report on Australia's contemporary human rights record titled Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders on his mission to Australia.
Along with a report into elder abuse in Oakden Older Persons Mental Health Service in South Australia and the release of a detailed Human Rights Watch investigation of 14 prisons in Western Australia and Queensland which revealed the neglect and physical/sexual abuse of prisoners with disabilities, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme represents yet another crisis. The Productivity Commission has warned there is now no carer of last resort for patients in an emergency, care provider agencies are reportedly owed up to $300 million and disabled people are often receiving inadequate care via untrained staff or sometimes no care at all, as government disability care services are being closed in favour of the new privatised service delivery scheme.
None of these instances stand in isolation and apart from either Australian society generally or government policies more specifically.
They all represent the frequently meagre nature of community compassion and the real level of care governments have been willing to organise and fund for vulnerable citizens. In reality the ideal level of support and care for the vulnerable - that politicians spout assurances about from campaign hustings every three years - is just so much political hot air unless ordinary voters insist that it be otherwise.
As the Turnbull Coalition Government clearly intends to push forward with the full gamut of its punitive welfare reforms perhaps now it the time to consider if we have made any great strides towards a genuinely fair and egalitarian society in the last two hundred years or if we are only dressing up old cruelties in new clothes and calling this "looking after our fellow Australians”, "an exercise in practical love, "an exercise in compassion and in love".
History and Policy, Katie Barclay, Creating
‘cruel’ welfare systems: a historical perspective, 1 March 2018,
excerpts:
Over
the last two decades, commissions and reports on institutional care across the
western world have highlighted widespread physical, sexual, emotional and
economic violence within caring systems, often targeted at society’s most
vulnerable people, not least children, the disabled and the elderly. These have
often come at significant cost not just to the individual, but the nation. As
Maxwell has shown, national apologies, that require the nation to render itself
shamed by such practices, and financial redress to victims, have impacted on
political reputation, trust in state organisations, and finances. As each
report is released and stories of suffering fill newspapers and are quantified
for official redress, both scholars and the public have asked ‘how was this
allowed to happen?’ At the same time, and particularly in the last few years as
many countries have turned towards conservative fiscal policies, newspapers
also highlight the wrongs of current systems.
In
the UK, numerous reports have uncovered abuses within welfare systems, as
people are sanctioned to meet targets, as welfare staff are encouraged to withhold information about services or grants to
reduce demand, and through systematic rejection of first-try benefit applications to
discourage service use. Often excused as ‘isolated incidents’ on investigation,
such accounts are nonetheless increasingly widespread. They are accompanied by
a measurable reduction in investment in welfare and health systems, that have
required a significant withdrawal in services, and have been accompanied with
policies of ‘making work pay’ that have required that benefits be
brought in line, not with need, but with low working incomes. The impact of
these policies and associated staff behaviour have been connected to
increasing child and adult poverty, declining life expectancy, growing homelessness, and the rise in foodbank use.
Importantly,
public commentators on this situation have described this situation as ‘cruel’.
One headline saw a benefits advisor commenting ‘I get brownie points for cruelty’; another noted ‘Welfare reform is not only cruel but chaotic’. The system
depicted in Ken Loach’s I Daniel Blake (2016), described by reviewers
as a Kafka-esque nightmare, a ‘humiliating and spirit-sapping holding pattern of enforced
uselessness’, and a ‘comprehensive [system of] neglect and indifference’, was
confirmed by many as an accurate depiction. Whether or not this representation
of the current welfare system is held to be true, such reporting raises
significant questions about when and how systems designed to provide help and
support move from care to abuse. A focus on ‘isolated incidents’ today can be
compared to the blaming of ‘isolated perpetrators’ in historic cases of abuse,
an account that is now held by scholars to ignore the important role of systems
of welfare in enabling certain types of cruelty to happen…..
The
capacity of welfare systems to support individuals is shaped by cultural
beliefs and political ideologies around the relationship between work, human
nature, and welfare. Here late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Ireland
provides a productive example. Ireland in this period was marked by significant
levels of poverty amongst its lower orders, particularly those that worked in
agriculture. The capacity to manage that poverty on an individual level was
hindered by several economic downturns and harvest failure, that pushed people
to starvation. As a nation without a poor law (welfare) system until 1838, the
poor relied on charity, whether from individuals or institutions for relief. In
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the ‘state’ (usually local
corporations) introduced more direct welfare, sometimes in the form of relief
payments but more usually access to workhouses.
After 1838 and until the crisis
of the 1847 famine, relief payments were removed and all welfare recipients had
to enter the workhouse. Accompanied by a growth in institutional charitable
services, the success and ‘care’ of the system could vary enormously between
areas and organisations. What it did not do is significantly reduce poverty
levels in the population.
Indeed,
it was important that the poverty levels of welfare recipients were not reduced
by the workhouse system. Like current ‘make work pay’ policies, poverty relief
measures were designed so that those in the workhouse or receiving charity
elsewhere did not have a significantly higher standard of living than those who
provided for themselves. This principle was determined based on the wage of an
independent labourer, one of the poorest but also largest categories of worker.
The problem for the system was that independent labourers earned so poorly that
they barely managed a subsistence diet. Their living conditions were extremely
poor; many slept on hay in darkened huts with little furnishings or personal
property.
Those
who managed the system believed that a generous welfare system would encourage
people to claim benefits and so could potentially bankrupt those paying into
the system. This encouraged an active policy of ‘cruelty’. Not only were
benefit recipients given meagre food and poor living conditions, but families
were routinely broken up, the sexes housed in different wings and prohibited from
seeing each other. Welfare recipients were often ‘badged’ or given uniforms to
mark their ‘shame’, and workhouse labour was designed to be particularly
physically challenging.
It
was a system underpinned by several interlocking beliefs about the Irish, the
value of work and the economy. Hard work was viewed as a moral characteristic,
something to be encouraged from childhood and promoted as ethical behaviour.
Certain groups, notably the Irish poor but also the British lower orders and
non-Europeans more generally, were viewed as lacking this moral characteristic
and required it to be instilled by their social betters. Welfare systems that
were not carefully designed to be ‘less eligible’ (i.e. a harsher experience
than ‘normal; life for the working poor), were understood to indulge an innate
laziness…..
Throughout
history, welfare services have required considerable economic investment.
Unsurprisingly, this has required those who run institutions of care for people
also to keep a careful eye on their financial bottom line. More broadly, it has
also required a monitoring of services to ensure value for money for the state
and its taxpayers and to protect the interests of the service users. As has
been seen recently in discussions of targets placed on staff providing welfare
provision in the UK, such measuring systems can come to shape the nature and
ethos of the service in damaging ways.
A
relevant historical example of this is from the Australian laundry system in
the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Young women were placed in youth
homes and registered as delinquent for a wide range of reasons from petty
criminal behaviour to perceived immorality (ranging from flirting with the
opposite sex to premarital pregnancy), to having been neglected by parents.
These homes, often run by religious organisations, were designed to ‘reform’
young (and occasionally older) women, preventing them from entering
prostitution or other criminal pursuits. The main mechanism for ‘reform’ was through
a moral discipline of work, which in many of these organisations revolved
around a professional laundry service. Work was often unpaid or paid at very
nominal sums, given to women on their release. The service, which catered to
the general public, kept institutions financially afloat, and many became
significant-sized businesses. They required women to work very long hours, in
challenging conditions. Accidents, particularly burns, were not unusual. As
businesses grew, other ‘reform’ efforts that ran alongside, such as education,
became rarer.
The
laundry became the driving focus of the institution. The women were cheap
labour, and managing that machine became not just a means to an end, but shaped
the logic and functioning of the care service. It is an example of how an
economic imperative can come to adversely impact on care, by disrupting the
purposes and functions of the service. It was also a process that significantly
reduced the level of ‘care’ that such institutions provided, not only through a
physical job that wore on the body but one reinforced with physical punishment,
which came to include emotional and sexual abuse, and poor food and living
conditions……
There
are significant variations between the institutional care described here for
the nineteenth century and a contemporary welfare state that encourages users,
as much as possible, to remain outside ‘the system’. The capacity for ‘the
state’ to control every dimension of a person’s life today is significantly
reduced; conversely, the ability of those in need to fall into service ‘gaps’
as they cannot access services or negotiate bureaucratic systems, is in some
ways increased. Nonetheless, there are parallels in the operation of both
systems that should give contemporary policymakers pause. Abusive care does not
just emerge from individual perpetrators, from the institutional model, or even
a lack of policies on staff-client relationships, but also from the wider
values and beliefs that shape the production of welfare systems; from the
financial and emotional investments that we place in institutions; and from the
corruption or occlusion of institutional targets and goals.
Ensuring
that the ‘cruel’ practices reported of current systems do not become systematic
issues on the scale of previous institutional abuses therefore requires not
just monitoring a few rogue individuals, but a clear goal about what our
welfare systems should achieve. The needs and interests of service users should
be placed at their heart, coupled with a significant social, cultural and
political investment in ensuring that goal is achieved. All other goals and
targets for welfare service providers, especially their frontline staff, should
be secondary to that and carefully designed so as not to interfere with that
end. With rising rates of poverty, homelessness and illness, welfare systems
look to continue to hold a central role in society for the foreseeable future.
It is imperative that the abusive practices of previous ‘caring’ regimes are
left firmly in the past.
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