To anyone out there who looks forward to reading about what irritates me, I apologise for the long time between blogs. In my defence, I have actually been on holiday in the 3rd world (US and Mexico) and on my return for some reason I got addicted to Ancestry.com. I knew however it was time to stop when I found out: (a) I am partly descended from a line of French folk who bred like rabbits back in the 1700s; and (b) I had a great uncle who was an alcoholic politician and wound up topping himself at age 44. Further investigations may have led to an even more awful discovery, such as finding out that some long-lost relative came from New Zealand. As a result I am leaving that Pandora's box closed for now and focussing instead my other hobby of complaining.
There has been a lot of ordinary policy put forward by the Labor government since Kevin Rudd went off the rails in 2009, but one that I thought at the time wasn't a bad idea was the concept of a mining "super profit" tax. Of course, the delivery of the policy was a train wreck and Rudd wound up paying the ultimate price for that and a number of other debacles. However, the idea that mining companies who were enjoying the benefits of a once in a century boom ought to be sharing that largesse with the rest of us didn't seem like such a bad idea in principle.
In the last 3 weeks or so, I've read a number of articles in the paper featuring morbidly obese mining magnates and after that, I am completely convinced. The mining tax is a great idea, and may it pass through Parliament with all speed. In fact, may it even be doubled or tripled. These odious fatties can clearly afford to pay it, and unless we start taxing them soon, they will keep getting fatter and richer devouring our precious resources while the rest of us battle to keep our heads above water dealing with the pointy end of the two speed economy.
The first of these articles featured the ebullient Clive Palmer, who couldn't help crowing to all and sundry about how he had put one over BHP when he purchased a nickel plant from them. In fact, verbatim, this is what he said:
"It has been a great buy. Thanks very much to BHP. I've really enjoyed this. It provides me with about $US250 million of beer money a year. That's why I've got larger and fatter, thanks to BHP."
I don't know why Palmer would think getting larger and fatter is a good thing when he already resembles Mr Creosote from the "Meaning of Life", but then coal magnates are an odd breed.
Another featured the highly litigious and equally corpulent Gina Rinehart, someone who is never shy about going feral on things that might stop her current $10 billion cash pile reaching $30 billion. In what must rank as one of the biggest non-sequiturs in the whole mining tax debate, she declared that the Pilbara would be facing labour shortages of up to 450,000 in the next decade and then in the same breath announced how the mining tax and the carbon tax would drive away investment in the region. Right - so a boom so large that it needs more people than live in Canberra to service it is going to be shut down by a piddling tax on "super" profits. Of course, that poor excuse for a toilet roll "the Australian" completely failed to see the innate absurdity of her statements and duly reported her other wish-list items such as tax concessions for mine workers and government-funded infrastructure in the region.
Now when I have a crack at these people, don't think for a minute that I am doing a Bob Brown and advocating a tax on anything that can either be dug up or which lets off gas. Nor am I taking aim at one of the great things about our capitalist system, namely that anyone who has a level of intelligence and is prepared to work hard to achieve their goals can become very wealthy and very successful in this country. However I do think that both the current circumstances of the economy and the special case that large mining companies represent means that they ought to be making a greater contribution to the public purse than what they currently do. Here's why.
First, as anyone who lives in Sydney will tell you, the 2 speed economy is a bleak reality. While Rinehart counts her billions and throws daggers at the government from her compound in Perth, people who work on the east coast are continuing to lose their jobs at an alarming rate. The finance industry is taking a pounding from the constant bad news out of Europe, and while people are unlikely to shed a tear over a lot of investment bankers being made redundant, it does paint a picture of two wildly disparate sets of circumstances as normally the finance sector would march to the same beat as the mining sector. Some square up is desperately needed so that the sectors of the economy that employ most of the workers (such as retail and tourism) can have a fighting chance while the rest of the developed world works through its issues.
Secondly, it is not as though mining magnates make their vast fortunes out of inventing something which either is devilishly clever (such as the microchip or Google Maps), which doesn't involve the permanent depletion of wealth, or which doesn't require vast amounts of public investment. Instead they make their money by getting their mitts on a lucrative ore seam via a mining lease and then asking the government to set up port and rail infrastructure so they can dig the gear up and ship it off overseas. Excuse me for oversimplifying things, but shouldn't the starting point be that this stuff in the ground is the birthright of all Australians, not just the few who strike it lucky? Again, I don't begrudge mining companies making a profit but given we aren't going to see all this iron ore and coal again, I would like some of the sale proceeds to stay in the country for everyone to enjoy.
Thirdly, while Gina can bang on all she likes about the Pilbara needing 450,000 workers, the simple reality is that the mining industry, while growing strongly relative to other sectors, employs a very small part of the Australian workforce. For example, a quick look at the ABS figures from last August show total employment in mining to be only 193,000, compared with over a million in health and retail and almost the same in construction and tourism. Therefore, if you were the government looking for "bang for your buck" in terms of stimulating jobs growth, why wouldn't you take steps to bolster those industries who are actually going to hire people? The fact that some mining companies are now experimenting with driverless trucks, presumably in a bid to save money, should show the rhetoric coming out of the mining lobby about them being all for job generation for exactly what it is - a load of camel droppings.
So to the Ginas and Clives of this world, I say well done on amassing your fortunes, it takes a lot of chutzpah to so audaciously fleece the wealth of the country from right under our noses. However, a word of caution: don't go complaining too loud about the mining tax or gloating too publicly about how rich you are. If enough of your fellow Australians start finding your carry on as irritating as I do, then you might run the risk that the idea of a mining tax actually becomes popular. And if that happens, where would you be? Not even Tony Abbott would be dumb enough to revoke a popular policy and you would be stuck with this heinous tax forever.
As a result, my parting words of advice concerning the mining tax are: suck it up. And more generally, for heaven's sake, please just shut up.
14 November 2011
13 September 2011
The Pacific Debacle
I realise that by saying this, I might risk being perceived as agreeing with the asinine neo-con lynch mob a.k.a. the mainstream Australian press, but the Gillard government really have outdone themselves this time. As if the Carbon Tax fiasco and general policy paralysis wasn't enough, the fact that the High Court has confirmed what would be obvious to most 3rd year law students, namely that the Malaysian asylum-seeker deal is illegal, might just about be the final straw that brings them down. In some ways this is a shame, because when you look behind their idiotic focus on the 24 hour news cycle and political point-scoring, some of Labor's policy initiatives have been quite sound and well-considered. However, when you constantly muck up the execution of this policy and then have to cede ground to a bunch of eclectic minor parties and independents who most of us didn't vote for, then as a government you are just asking for trouble.
What the government were trying to do in Malaysia is another example of this, but I will get to that later on. First though I would like to look at the question of asylum seekers more generally and why they are such a hot political issue. I personally find it incredible given the amount of genuinely irritating things that go on in this country how people can get so worked up about a few hundred boat people. In case you are in a happy place at the moment and are struggling for things to get annoyed about, here are just a few:
- It being illegal to shoot on sight anyone either listening to an iPod on the train at volume 11, moving into the right lane on the freeway and failing to overtake or paying for beer with a credit card when the bar is 10 deep. Show some consideration, jackasses.
- The fact that when Queen Elizabeth dies, our head of state will not be an eminent Australian but instead will be someone who once expressed a wish to be Camilla Parker-Bowles' tampon. Quality.
- A few hundred Tasmanians getting the same amount of senators as a few million Victorians and New South Welshmen.
- A company like News Limited who have just been caught committing outrageous breaches of privacy in the UK controlling 70% of the print media in Australia - and the fact that most of us couldn't care less about it.
- Cab drivers whose vehicles stink of cigarettes and BO and who (a) don't know where the airport, MCG or Collins Street are; and (b) clearly think airconditioning controls are put into cars for decoration only.
Actually that last one is a nice segue into my point about immigration and boat people. I will sometimes strike up a conversation with these cab drivers once I have explained to them what the South Eastern Freeway is and we are headed in the general direction of my house. Almost without exception, they say they are "students" doing a degree in "IT" but that is invariably where they get very shifty and the flow of information ends. The reason for this is simple: there are thousands of people who come into the country under student visas but who abuse the system by indefinitely deferring their studies and going off to work full time - which under the terms of their visa, they are simply not allowed to do. Recognising that the student visa system was being exploited, the government moved quietly but effectively to put an end to this abuse and preclude people staying in the country under false pretences.
What is puzzling though is that people don't get peeved about the thousands of people engaged in this flagrant and frankly, illegal queue jumping but work themselves into a frenzy about a few hundred refugees whose circumstances back home are so dire that they are prepared to sail a few thousand kilometres in a leaky sieve just to escape their country. Think about it - a few hundred people in a country of over 22 million. It's hardly an invasion, is it? We get at least 100 times as many Kiwis coming over here and making a nuisance of themselves whenever there is a big Rugby match on. I personally find that much more annoying than some banged up dinghy landing near Port Hedland.
Nevertheless we Australians are a strange breed and the Howard government quickly learned from Pauline Hanson that there was a rich vein of political capital to be mined by belting up on boat people. Shortly after lying about people throwing their children overboard, they developed a plan called "the Pacific Solution" which involved re-directing boats to offshore processing centres. While this morality of this plan was questionable to say the least, it proved very effective in putting a stop to the number of boats arriving here. The message had obviously got back to those in the people smuggling racket that they couldn't guarantee to their "clients" that rather than being allowed to stay in Australia, they wouldn't be shipped straight back offshore to some remote 3rd World Pacific dump like Nauru - not that I could imagine Nauru being a whole lot worse than being holed up in Baxter or Port Hedland detention centres.
When the Rudd government came to power, it tried to remove some of the worst aspects of the Pacific Solution by limiting the amount of time people could be locked up for and shutting down the Nauru centre in favour of on-shore processing. The problem was, though, that this immediately caused a sharp increase in the number of boat arrivals and let the opposition have a field day about how poor the government was at border control. Not for the first or last time under Rudd, Labor had managed to turn the implementation of its policy into a political own goal.
And so we come now to Julia's latest blunder. Recognising the political need to pander to boat people-haters, but also understanding the moral and monetary issues associated with re-opening the Nauru centre, the government struck a deal with Malaysia for a certain amount of boat people to be processed there. On the basis that Malaysia by all accounts has running water and isn't reliant on bird droppings to prop up its economy, this on its face looked like a more palatable solution than Nauru for the government and refugees alike. The only problem was, under the criteria in the Migration Act which are required to be satisfied by a country that Australia wants to ship refugees to, Malaysia pretty clearly failed the test, a view the High Court resoundingly agreed with by a majority of 6-1. This outcome of course delighted the peanut gallery of the Murdoch press, whose reaction to pretty much anything the government does is either utter disgust or vitriolic contempt. Unfortunately with this one it's pretty hard to argue with them.
As of the time of writing, Gillard appears determined to stare down her critics and resuscitate the Malaysian option, even to the point of doing a deal with Big Ears himself. The alternative option - which would be to put the asylum seeker "problem" in proportion, appeal to the public's better instincts by educating them about just how desperate these people are and how they aren't any threat to people's jobs and then letting them into the community while their cases are heard (just like it lets the illegal immigrants do) - clearly is too hard a sell for this moribund government to even bother trying.
Is it really any wonder then that people despise politicians?
What the government were trying to do in Malaysia is another example of this, but I will get to that later on. First though I would like to look at the question of asylum seekers more generally and why they are such a hot political issue. I personally find it incredible given the amount of genuinely irritating things that go on in this country how people can get so worked up about a few hundred boat people. In case you are in a happy place at the moment and are struggling for things to get annoyed about, here are just a few:
- It being illegal to shoot on sight anyone either listening to an iPod on the train at volume 11, moving into the right lane on the freeway and failing to overtake or paying for beer with a credit card when the bar is 10 deep. Show some consideration, jackasses.
- The fact that when Queen Elizabeth dies, our head of state will not be an eminent Australian but instead will be someone who once expressed a wish to be Camilla Parker-Bowles' tampon. Quality.
- A few hundred Tasmanians getting the same amount of senators as a few million Victorians and New South Welshmen.
- A company like News Limited who have just been caught committing outrageous breaches of privacy in the UK controlling 70% of the print media in Australia - and the fact that most of us couldn't care less about it.
- Cab drivers whose vehicles stink of cigarettes and BO and who (a) don't know where the airport, MCG or Collins Street are; and (b) clearly think airconditioning controls are put into cars for decoration only.
Actually that last one is a nice segue into my point about immigration and boat people. I will sometimes strike up a conversation with these cab drivers once I have explained to them what the South Eastern Freeway is and we are headed in the general direction of my house. Almost without exception, they say they are "students" doing a degree in "IT" but that is invariably where they get very shifty and the flow of information ends. The reason for this is simple: there are thousands of people who come into the country under student visas but who abuse the system by indefinitely deferring their studies and going off to work full time - which under the terms of their visa, they are simply not allowed to do. Recognising that the student visa system was being exploited, the government moved quietly but effectively to put an end to this abuse and preclude people staying in the country under false pretences.
What is puzzling though is that people don't get peeved about the thousands of people engaged in this flagrant and frankly, illegal queue jumping but work themselves into a frenzy about a few hundred refugees whose circumstances back home are so dire that they are prepared to sail a few thousand kilometres in a leaky sieve just to escape their country. Think about it - a few hundred people in a country of over 22 million. It's hardly an invasion, is it? We get at least 100 times as many Kiwis coming over here and making a nuisance of themselves whenever there is a big Rugby match on. I personally find that much more annoying than some banged up dinghy landing near Port Hedland.
Nevertheless we Australians are a strange breed and the Howard government quickly learned from Pauline Hanson that there was a rich vein of political capital to be mined by belting up on boat people. Shortly after lying about people throwing their children overboard, they developed a plan called "the Pacific Solution" which involved re-directing boats to offshore processing centres. While this morality of this plan was questionable to say the least, it proved very effective in putting a stop to the number of boats arriving here. The message had obviously got back to those in the people smuggling racket that they couldn't guarantee to their "clients" that rather than being allowed to stay in Australia, they wouldn't be shipped straight back offshore to some remote 3rd World Pacific dump like Nauru - not that I could imagine Nauru being a whole lot worse than being holed up in Baxter or Port Hedland detention centres.
When the Rudd government came to power, it tried to remove some of the worst aspects of the Pacific Solution by limiting the amount of time people could be locked up for and shutting down the Nauru centre in favour of on-shore processing. The problem was, though, that this immediately caused a sharp increase in the number of boat arrivals and let the opposition have a field day about how poor the government was at border control. Not for the first or last time under Rudd, Labor had managed to turn the implementation of its policy into a political own goal.
And so we come now to Julia's latest blunder. Recognising the political need to pander to boat people-haters, but also understanding the moral and monetary issues associated with re-opening the Nauru centre, the government struck a deal with Malaysia for a certain amount of boat people to be processed there. On the basis that Malaysia by all accounts has running water and isn't reliant on bird droppings to prop up its economy, this on its face looked like a more palatable solution than Nauru for the government and refugees alike. The only problem was, under the criteria in the Migration Act which are required to be satisfied by a country that Australia wants to ship refugees to, Malaysia pretty clearly failed the test, a view the High Court resoundingly agreed with by a majority of 6-1. This outcome of course delighted the peanut gallery of the Murdoch press, whose reaction to pretty much anything the government does is either utter disgust or vitriolic contempt. Unfortunately with this one it's pretty hard to argue with them.
As of the time of writing, Gillard appears determined to stare down her critics and resuscitate the Malaysian option, even to the point of doing a deal with Big Ears himself. The alternative option - which would be to put the asylum seeker "problem" in proportion, appeal to the public's better instincts by educating them about just how desperate these people are and how they aren't any threat to people's jobs and then letting them into the community while their cases are heard (just like it lets the illegal immigrants do) - clearly is too hard a sell for this moribund government to even bother trying.
Is it really any wonder then that people despise politicians?
11 August 2011
Wise Up, Charities
I suspect what I am about to say could provoke a backlash similar to that which Mia Freedman copped on "Today" a couple of weeks ago when she refused to fall into line with the rest of the country and gush obsequiously about Cadel Evans' Tour-de-France triumph. However after recently suffering yet another irritating experience with a charitable organisation, I can no longer swallow my bile and must vent my frustration. Frustration, I hasten to add, that is directed not at the causes that charities represent which are generally very worthy, but instead at the way some charities deal with donors and their modus operandi in general.
Before you start thinking of me as some form of misguided niggard who pulls the wings off flies as a hobby, let me first give you a couple of examples of how I have been treated by charities I have lent significant support to in the past. If you have had a similar experience and haven't felt even slightly aggrieved, you can then stop reading and go off and do whatever it is patsies do for entertainment.
The first experience happened around the time my wife and I had our joint 40th birthday party. As we were blissfully unaware that the GFC was just around the corner, we spent up big and asked about 100 people along. Instead of bringing presents, we asked everyone to instead donate generously to our nominated children's charity, which they duly did. We then went to my employer at the time, showed them the amount raised which was well into 4 digits, and got them to match the donation - bringing the total amount raised to well over $5000. After doing all this, what do you think the charity did? Well, to be exact - nothing. Not a thank you letter, not a call to say, "Well done, we really appreciate your effort". The next time we heard from them was 3 months later when we got a "print merge" letter from them asking us to give them some more money. Clearly our efforts had registered at one level in that we had made it onto their database, but clearly not enough for them to give us a simple "Thankyou". As you can well imagine that letter, along with all subsequent correspondence from the charity, quickly found its way into the bin.
The second concerns a major international charity who I have donated a lot of money to over the years via colleagues doing fun runs, walking the Kokoda Trail or generally making an ass of themselves in a good cause. Being a web-based system, you are required to leave certain basic details of your donation but given my wish to not be constantly harangued, I was careful to always check the box on the web page which said that I neither wanted to be contacted nor receive any correspondence.
Imagine my surprise when some time later, I received a call from their call centre at home asking for my credit card details so they could set up a regular direct debit to the charity. Obviously they had been tracking what I had donated over time and so had somehow made the assumption that despite my express wish not to be contacted, I would like to nominate for a regular monthly debit. Well, they thought wrong, and the consequences of their irritating invasion of privacy was that my charitable dollar now gets directed away from that organisation as well.
I can understand and forgive small charities treating their donors in a less than ideal fashion because generally, these organisations run on the smell of an oily rag and are no doubt too run off their feet taking care of business to worry too much about what their donors are thinking. Hence any failure to show the appropriate level of appreciation is generally inadvertant. However, where large, multi-national charities such as the ones we were dealing with treat donors in such a high-handed and dismissive fashion, then they really are doing the people they are trying to help a serious disservice. After all, its not like they are a bank or phone company where there are only a handful of organisations active in the market and you therefore generally have no choice but to put up with execrable service. Worthy charitable organisations are a dime a dozen and it is very easy for a donor to vote with their feet - or worse, decide not to donate to charities at all.
The fact that many large charities are sub-optimally run is even more concerning when you consider the prevailing world-wide political sentiment. In an age which is increasingly dominated by a neo-conservative bent towards lower taxes, smaller government and shrinking welfare services, the need for charities to step up and fill the void left by governments that are now bereft of funds is more critical than ever. In order for charities to maintain and grow their income streams, they need to be both get their processes right in terms of how they relate to their donors and manage their affairs, and be prepared to be more innovative than they have in the past. This may sound like anathema to anyone working in the not-for-profit sector, but in order to get their organisations to be the best they can be, to my mind they would be well served by engaging more thoroughly with the business world and be prepared to learn some operational lessons from successful and well-run businesses.
I was at a charity lunch a couple of months ago put on by "Western Chances" at which the Australian of the Year and Macquarie Banker Simon McKeon was the guest speaker. Having been active in both the business and not-for-profit sectors for some time, he had some interesting insights into how businesses and charities relate to one another, and in particular, what sort of things charities should be focussing on. Too often, he said, charities adopt the approach of simply asking businesses for money, blissfully unaware of the fact that the primary objective of a business is to make money for its shareholders, some of whom would quite likely feel non-plussed about their profits being given to charitable organisations whose objectives they may not feel passionate about. Instead he said that charities needed to look more at how businesses might help them in other ways than straight donations, for example, law firms conducting pro bono work or the marketing department helping out with promotional material during non-busy periods.
A great example of a charity that adopts the right approach to business and does get things pretty much right is one that I sat on the Victorian committee for a few years ago, namely the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. First of all, they hand picked committee members from a broad range of business sectors, thereby maximising the number of business contacts that could be collectively called on for either donations or to participate in their major fundraising event, the national "Walk for the Cure". Secondly, they encouraged the committee to think not only about how they could get their colleagues to participate, but also how their businesses might help the fundraising effort in innovative, non-monetary ways (for example: a building company allowing advertising banners to be placed over hoardings at prominent building sites). Finally, while it was (and remains) a significant charitable organisation, its back office was well run meaning that at least 80% of all money raised went to the actual research - a staggeringly efficient number when compared to most charities.
Now - is finding a cure for Type 1 diabetes more important or critical than the work that Oxfam does, or the Anti-Cancer Council does, or Beyond Blue? I suppose it depends on your point of view, but what I did know was that by being well run, having a sensible and innovative approach to fundraising and treating their donors with the appropriate level of appreciation and respect, JDRF punched well above its weight given the fairly limited "in house" resources at its disposal.
So there we are, charities. Rise to the challenge and lift your game. After all, the way things are unravelling in the western world economies right now, and with the Tea Party right-wing loonies pressing to an end to taxes and government welfare, we might all need to call on your services sooner rather than later.
Before you start thinking of me as some form of misguided niggard who pulls the wings off flies as a hobby, let me first give you a couple of examples of how I have been treated by charities I have lent significant support to in the past. If you have had a similar experience and haven't felt even slightly aggrieved, you can then stop reading and go off and do whatever it is patsies do for entertainment.
The first experience happened around the time my wife and I had our joint 40th birthday party. As we were blissfully unaware that the GFC was just around the corner, we spent up big and asked about 100 people along. Instead of bringing presents, we asked everyone to instead donate generously to our nominated children's charity, which they duly did. We then went to my employer at the time, showed them the amount raised which was well into 4 digits, and got them to match the donation - bringing the total amount raised to well over $5000. After doing all this, what do you think the charity did? Well, to be exact - nothing. Not a thank you letter, not a call to say, "Well done, we really appreciate your effort". The next time we heard from them was 3 months later when we got a "print merge" letter from them asking us to give them some more money. Clearly our efforts had registered at one level in that we had made it onto their database, but clearly not enough for them to give us a simple "Thankyou". As you can well imagine that letter, along with all subsequent correspondence from the charity, quickly found its way into the bin.
The second concerns a major international charity who I have donated a lot of money to over the years via colleagues doing fun runs, walking the Kokoda Trail or generally making an ass of themselves in a good cause. Being a web-based system, you are required to leave certain basic details of your donation but given my wish to not be constantly harangued, I was careful to always check the box on the web page which said that I neither wanted to be contacted nor receive any correspondence.
Imagine my surprise when some time later, I received a call from their call centre at home asking for my credit card details so they could set up a regular direct debit to the charity. Obviously they had been tracking what I had donated over time and so had somehow made the assumption that despite my express wish not to be contacted, I would like to nominate for a regular monthly debit. Well, they thought wrong, and the consequences of their irritating invasion of privacy was that my charitable dollar now gets directed away from that organisation as well.
I can understand and forgive small charities treating their donors in a less than ideal fashion because generally, these organisations run on the smell of an oily rag and are no doubt too run off their feet taking care of business to worry too much about what their donors are thinking. Hence any failure to show the appropriate level of appreciation is generally inadvertant. However, where large, multi-national charities such as the ones we were dealing with treat donors in such a high-handed and dismissive fashion, then they really are doing the people they are trying to help a serious disservice. After all, its not like they are a bank or phone company where there are only a handful of organisations active in the market and you therefore generally have no choice but to put up with execrable service. Worthy charitable organisations are a dime a dozen and it is very easy for a donor to vote with their feet - or worse, decide not to donate to charities at all.
The fact that many large charities are sub-optimally run is even more concerning when you consider the prevailing world-wide political sentiment. In an age which is increasingly dominated by a neo-conservative bent towards lower taxes, smaller government and shrinking welfare services, the need for charities to step up and fill the void left by governments that are now bereft of funds is more critical than ever. In order for charities to maintain and grow their income streams, they need to be both get their processes right in terms of how they relate to their donors and manage their affairs, and be prepared to be more innovative than they have in the past. This may sound like anathema to anyone working in the not-for-profit sector, but in order to get their organisations to be the best they can be, to my mind they would be well served by engaging more thoroughly with the business world and be prepared to learn some operational lessons from successful and well-run businesses.
I was at a charity lunch a couple of months ago put on by "Western Chances" at which the Australian of the Year and Macquarie Banker Simon McKeon was the guest speaker. Having been active in both the business and not-for-profit sectors for some time, he had some interesting insights into how businesses and charities relate to one another, and in particular, what sort of things charities should be focussing on. Too often, he said, charities adopt the approach of simply asking businesses for money, blissfully unaware of the fact that the primary objective of a business is to make money for its shareholders, some of whom would quite likely feel non-plussed about their profits being given to charitable organisations whose objectives they may not feel passionate about. Instead he said that charities needed to look more at how businesses might help them in other ways than straight donations, for example, law firms conducting pro bono work or the marketing department helping out with promotional material during non-busy periods.
A great example of a charity that adopts the right approach to business and does get things pretty much right is one that I sat on the Victorian committee for a few years ago, namely the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. First of all, they hand picked committee members from a broad range of business sectors, thereby maximising the number of business contacts that could be collectively called on for either donations or to participate in their major fundraising event, the national "Walk for the Cure". Secondly, they encouraged the committee to think not only about how they could get their colleagues to participate, but also how their businesses might help the fundraising effort in innovative, non-monetary ways (for example: a building company allowing advertising banners to be placed over hoardings at prominent building sites). Finally, while it was (and remains) a significant charitable organisation, its back office was well run meaning that at least 80% of all money raised went to the actual research - a staggeringly efficient number when compared to most charities.
Now - is finding a cure for Type 1 diabetes more important or critical than the work that Oxfam does, or the Anti-Cancer Council does, or Beyond Blue? I suppose it depends on your point of view, but what I did know was that by being well run, having a sensible and innovative approach to fundraising and treating their donors with the appropriate level of appreciation and respect, JDRF punched well above its weight given the fairly limited "in house" resources at its disposal.
So there we are, charities. Rise to the challenge and lift your game. After all, the way things are unravelling in the western world economies right now, and with the Tea Party right-wing loonies pressing to an end to taxes and government welfare, we might all need to call on your services sooner rather than later.
18 July 2011
Don't Be Shy
For this instalment, I would like to break the mould a bit and move away from my pet topics of political idiocy, appalling airline standards and the status of St Kilda's season - even though with the Greens now running the country, Tiger Airlines being grounded and the Saints winning 3 on the trot, there is much to ponder. Instead, I would like to explore something that I suspect has been a blight on humanity ever since we emerged from the primordial slime 2 million years ago, namely shyness.
Most people would have memories as a child growing up of their parents constantly giving them trite advice or telling them what to do. These pearls of wisdom would range from the mundane, such as "sit up straight" to the blatantly untrue or bizarre, eg. "don't pull a face, the wind might change and you'll be stuck that way" or "eat your crusts or your hair won't turn curly". However one seemingly banal bit of advice that often would get wheeled out, especially when distant and very elderly uncles and aunts would come to visit, has to me at least proven quite sage - that is, "don't be shy".
Funnily enough, this is advice that a lot of people tend to ignore as they go through life. On the surface, this behaviour seems odd when you consider the relative benefits one can get from steeling yourself and putting yourself out there as opposed to retreating into your shell. In my 40 plus years on the planet I have come across a lot of extroverts and introverts, and while the latter substantially outnumber the former, it is the extroverts who have disproportionately more successful lives, whether that be financially, career-wise or with the opposite sex. This is despite the fact that in many cases, the introverts are superior to the extroverts in terms of talent, attractiveness and pure brainpower. This seems to explode the myth that no-one likes a blow hard, especially in Australia. If we don't like them, then why are we so happy to hang out with them, give them a promotion at work and sleep with them?
When you think about it, it's odd that such a social species as mankind has developed powerful inhibitors to our social and professional success. There are of course obvious reasons for keeping your guard up in any particular situation, be it social, professional or otherwise. Fear of failure or rejection, embarrassment and potentially suffering unwanted attention or consequences are just a few. I'm not saying either that there aren't certain situations where it pays to keep one's reserve, such as when you are on a train full of Collingwood supporters who've just suffered a 1 point loss and it's still 12 stops to your station. However, when someone's reticence starts to seriously impinge on what they could otherwise achieve in life, then they need to receive the message loud and clear - get over it, or be prepared to suffer the consequences. Consequences that could well involve curtailed career opportunities, vastly reduced scope for sexual engagement and being mistakenly considered boring, uptight or retarded.
It's frustrating that some people wind up this way as a lot of the time, shy people have a lot to offer. I think most of us would have a story about a painfully shy person they have known who on the odd occasion has come out of their shell and dazzled them with their wit, intelligence or at the very least, drinking ability. This certainly applies to the most introverted person I have ever met, a solicitor in the Brisbane firm I worked with as a graduate in the early 1990s. This individual would scuttle past you in the corridor, eyes firmly fixed to the floor, then mutter an apology to you as he passed even though he'd avoided any physical contact by a good 2 metres. He would then retreat at speed into his office, shut the door and immediately immerse himself in some document or other leaving you with the firm impression he would rather go visit the proctologist than be disturbed by another human being.
Yet on the one occasion where he gave a training session to the junior lawyers, he spoke eloquently and at length about his topic, displaying a fierce intellect and leaving everyone in the room with the undoubtedly correct impression that here was a highly capable practitioner who should have clients running to his door. The problem was, as soon as the session was over, rather than hang out for a bit and let us bathe in his wisdom, he scuttled off back down the corridor to his office, shut the door and immersed himself in his document again. The net result of this sort of behaviour was that people junior to him and far less capable got promoted ahead of him and more than likely, paid more. What he thought of this I suspect no-one will ever know, however to anyone with any level of talent, it's a salient lesson in what can happen if you're not prepared to put yourself out there and let people know what you are capable of.
While this may be a sad individual story, the reluctance of intelligent introverts to give us the benefit of their wisdom has greater repercussions for society as a whole as it allows those with the loudest voices and not necessarily the biggest brains to run things. The fact that someone like Sarah Palin can get to where they have is testament to this. It's also an indictment on those of us who, having the ability to make a difference or make the most of our talents, choose not to because of some misguided fear of embarassment or God knows what else.
Get over it people, what are you worried about? Plenty of higher profile people than you have made a public ass of themselves and lived to tell the tale - Bill Clinton, George Michael and Tiger Woods just to name a few. Do youselves a favour and listen to your parents - don't be shy.
Most people would have memories as a child growing up of their parents constantly giving them trite advice or telling them what to do. These pearls of wisdom would range from the mundane, such as "sit up straight" to the blatantly untrue or bizarre, eg. "don't pull a face, the wind might change and you'll be stuck that way" or "eat your crusts or your hair won't turn curly". However one seemingly banal bit of advice that often would get wheeled out, especially when distant and very elderly uncles and aunts would come to visit, has to me at least proven quite sage - that is, "don't be shy".
Funnily enough, this is advice that a lot of people tend to ignore as they go through life. On the surface, this behaviour seems odd when you consider the relative benefits one can get from steeling yourself and putting yourself out there as opposed to retreating into your shell. In my 40 plus years on the planet I have come across a lot of extroverts and introverts, and while the latter substantially outnumber the former, it is the extroverts who have disproportionately more successful lives, whether that be financially, career-wise or with the opposite sex. This is despite the fact that in many cases, the introverts are superior to the extroverts in terms of talent, attractiveness and pure brainpower. This seems to explode the myth that no-one likes a blow hard, especially in Australia. If we don't like them, then why are we so happy to hang out with them, give them a promotion at work and sleep with them?
When you think about it, it's odd that such a social species as mankind has developed powerful inhibitors to our social and professional success. There are of course obvious reasons for keeping your guard up in any particular situation, be it social, professional or otherwise. Fear of failure or rejection, embarrassment and potentially suffering unwanted attention or consequences are just a few. I'm not saying either that there aren't certain situations where it pays to keep one's reserve, such as when you are on a train full of Collingwood supporters who've just suffered a 1 point loss and it's still 12 stops to your station. However, when someone's reticence starts to seriously impinge on what they could otherwise achieve in life, then they need to receive the message loud and clear - get over it, or be prepared to suffer the consequences. Consequences that could well involve curtailed career opportunities, vastly reduced scope for sexual engagement and being mistakenly considered boring, uptight or retarded.
It's frustrating that some people wind up this way as a lot of the time, shy people have a lot to offer. I think most of us would have a story about a painfully shy person they have known who on the odd occasion has come out of their shell and dazzled them with their wit, intelligence or at the very least, drinking ability. This certainly applies to the most introverted person I have ever met, a solicitor in the Brisbane firm I worked with as a graduate in the early 1990s. This individual would scuttle past you in the corridor, eyes firmly fixed to the floor, then mutter an apology to you as he passed even though he'd avoided any physical contact by a good 2 metres. He would then retreat at speed into his office, shut the door and immediately immerse himself in some document or other leaving you with the firm impression he would rather go visit the proctologist than be disturbed by another human being.
Yet on the one occasion where he gave a training session to the junior lawyers, he spoke eloquently and at length about his topic, displaying a fierce intellect and leaving everyone in the room with the undoubtedly correct impression that here was a highly capable practitioner who should have clients running to his door. The problem was, as soon as the session was over, rather than hang out for a bit and let us bathe in his wisdom, he scuttled off back down the corridor to his office, shut the door and immersed himself in his document again. The net result of this sort of behaviour was that people junior to him and far less capable got promoted ahead of him and more than likely, paid more. What he thought of this I suspect no-one will ever know, however to anyone with any level of talent, it's a salient lesson in what can happen if you're not prepared to put yourself out there and let people know what you are capable of.
While this may be a sad individual story, the reluctance of intelligent introverts to give us the benefit of their wisdom has greater repercussions for society as a whole as it allows those with the loudest voices and not necessarily the biggest brains to run things. The fact that someone like Sarah Palin can get to where they have is testament to this. It's also an indictment on those of us who, having the ability to make a difference or make the most of our talents, choose not to because of some misguided fear of embarassment or God knows what else.
Get over it people, what are you worried about? Plenty of higher profile people than you have made a public ass of themselves and lived to tell the tale - Bill Clinton, George Michael and Tiger Woods just to name a few. Do youselves a favour and listen to your parents - don't be shy.
06 June 2011
Now for Public Enemy Number Two
A few weeks ago, a murmur started going around the office about the US Army finally tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden. A quick visit to "the Age" website subsequently confirmed the rumour and after almost 10 years on the "most wanted" list, it was apparent that the USA had finally got their man.
I have to say the news prompted mixed emotions. Yes, there was some element of relief that the perpetrator of such a despicable act as the September 11 attacks had finally met a sticky end. Although I also have to admit to some surprise, in that I was not entirely convinced that the Americans actually wanted him dead. In much the same way that the Machiavellian "Inner Party" in George Orwell's novel "1984" used the heretical fugitive Emmanuel Goldstein as a focal point for the hatred of the masses, I often wondered whether the US government actually preferred having Bin Laden at large so as to sustain popular support for their "War on Terror".
What I really found disturbing though was the reaction to the news in America and more particularly, New York. I know that many New Yorkers would have lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks and having recently had the opportunity of visiting the harrowing "Ground Zero" memorial, I also know first-hand that feelings about what happened still run very deep there. But seeing hundreds take to the streets celebrating and cheering the fact that someone had been gunned down in cold blood was not something I expected in a city as educated and liberal-leaning as New York. It made me realise that if New Yorkers are capable of behaving in such an atavistic fashion, then we shouldn't be surprised or shocked at the violent reaction of lesser-educated Middle Easterners when terrorist incidents occur there, as they all too frequently do.
It also made me realise that while people continue to react instinctively and respond in kind to acts of savagery, then there is no chance whatsoever of this so called "War on Terror" coming to an end. As the US and to a lesser extent, the other members of Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" have found out to their detriment, any engagement like Afghanistan or Iraq where people shoot first and think later is hardly one which is going to lay the groundwork for a successful diplomatic and economic partnership with the people of those countries. It also creates fertile recruiting ground for organisations like Al Qaeda, whose modus operandi involves inciting hatred of Western "infidels" and preying on the emotions of those affected by military and economic sanctions imposed by the west on rogue states like Iraq.
This is why the killing of Bin Laden to my mind will ultimately prove to be little more than a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, Bin Laden might have bankrolled and masterminded the September 11 attacks and any number of other atrocities, but it would be ingenuous to treat this as more than a temporary setback for the broader Al Qaeda organisation. The best analogy for Al Qaeda I can think of is that of the Hydra in Greek mythology; namely if you cut off its head, then two others grow back in its place. The USA might have dealt with public enemy number one, but in his place will surely arise a new public enemy number two, one potentially who is not familiar to western intelligence services and who therefore may prove more dangerous than his predecessor.
I think I have rabbited on about this before, but you won't successfully exterminate an organisation like Al Qaeda by shooting their leaders whenever they stick their heads up. As the expression goes, the cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people and the organisation will just keep reinventing itself. You need to do it by starving it of recruits by removing the reason for its existence. And doing that requires a degree of intellect, courage and diplomacy that has so far proven beyond the capabilities of the western powers.
In this vein and as the 10th anniversary of September 11 approaches, it is a good time to reflect on the aftermath of the attacks and the lessons learned. Unfortunately, the legacy that has been left the Americans is not good: record sovereign debt, an economy that is barely growing if at all and too many soldiers still coming home in body bags almost 10 years after the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq began. While Iraq now seems to be settling down into some semblance of normality, disturbingly the Afghanistan conflict seems no nearer to resolution now than when it started, and with mounting issues to deal with at home, you have to question whether the Obama administration will have the fortitude to see it through.
Given the mess the USA finds itself in, inevitably you have to ask the question, could this have been dealt with another way? Certainly given the knife-edge result in the 2000 presidential election, it's a question that I'd love to ask Al Gore. While I query whether Gore would ultimately have stood up to the warmongers in the Pentagon, at the very least I suspect he wouldn't have sat in a year 2 classroom like a stunned mullet for 10 minutes upon being told.
It might be naive, but I wonder whether a better way might have been to first, harness the sympathy of the rest of the world and seek their co-operation in rounding up the perpetrators. If necessary, this could have come with an offer of $1 billion in foreign aid for the country who handed over Bin Laden. While this is a lot of money, it's still a lot less than the more than $1 trillion spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Then, having satisfied the public bloodlust for revenge by trying and executing those responsible, setting up a global taskforce on terrorism which is designed not just to round up terrorist cells but also getting to the bottom of why it exists and thereafter dedicating resources to foreign aid or other benevolent purposes which help change the perception of the west in the developing world and take away the motive to engage in terrorism.
Not only would this measured response gained the respect and admiration of the rest of the world but it would have avoided the ghastly personal, political and financial toll of the "shoot first" option adopted by Bush and Cheney.
Then again, such an approach would require levels of political courage and restraint which haven't been seen in the USA since the end of WW2. Far easier just to drop some bunker-busters on Al Qaeda installations. Now where was that public enemy number 2 hiding again?
I have to say the news prompted mixed emotions. Yes, there was some element of relief that the perpetrator of such a despicable act as the September 11 attacks had finally met a sticky end. Although I also have to admit to some surprise, in that I was not entirely convinced that the Americans actually wanted him dead. In much the same way that the Machiavellian "Inner Party" in George Orwell's novel "1984" used the heretical fugitive Emmanuel Goldstein as a focal point for the hatred of the masses, I often wondered whether the US government actually preferred having Bin Laden at large so as to sustain popular support for their "War on Terror".
What I really found disturbing though was the reaction to the news in America and more particularly, New York. I know that many New Yorkers would have lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks and having recently had the opportunity of visiting the harrowing "Ground Zero" memorial, I also know first-hand that feelings about what happened still run very deep there. But seeing hundreds take to the streets celebrating and cheering the fact that someone had been gunned down in cold blood was not something I expected in a city as educated and liberal-leaning as New York. It made me realise that if New Yorkers are capable of behaving in such an atavistic fashion, then we shouldn't be surprised or shocked at the violent reaction of lesser-educated Middle Easterners when terrorist incidents occur there, as they all too frequently do.
It also made me realise that while people continue to react instinctively and respond in kind to acts of savagery, then there is no chance whatsoever of this so called "War on Terror" coming to an end. As the US and to a lesser extent, the other members of Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" have found out to their detriment, any engagement like Afghanistan or Iraq where people shoot first and think later is hardly one which is going to lay the groundwork for a successful diplomatic and economic partnership with the people of those countries. It also creates fertile recruiting ground for organisations like Al Qaeda, whose modus operandi involves inciting hatred of Western "infidels" and preying on the emotions of those affected by military and economic sanctions imposed by the west on rogue states like Iraq.
This is why the killing of Bin Laden to my mind will ultimately prove to be little more than a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, Bin Laden might have bankrolled and masterminded the September 11 attacks and any number of other atrocities, but it would be ingenuous to treat this as more than a temporary setback for the broader Al Qaeda organisation. The best analogy for Al Qaeda I can think of is that of the Hydra in Greek mythology; namely if you cut off its head, then two others grow back in its place. The USA might have dealt with public enemy number one, but in his place will surely arise a new public enemy number two, one potentially who is not familiar to western intelligence services and who therefore may prove more dangerous than his predecessor.
I think I have rabbited on about this before, but you won't successfully exterminate an organisation like Al Qaeda by shooting their leaders whenever they stick their heads up. As the expression goes, the cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people and the organisation will just keep reinventing itself. You need to do it by starving it of recruits by removing the reason for its existence. And doing that requires a degree of intellect, courage and diplomacy that has so far proven beyond the capabilities of the western powers.
In this vein and as the 10th anniversary of September 11 approaches, it is a good time to reflect on the aftermath of the attacks and the lessons learned. Unfortunately, the legacy that has been left the Americans is not good: record sovereign debt, an economy that is barely growing if at all and too many soldiers still coming home in body bags almost 10 years after the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq began. While Iraq now seems to be settling down into some semblance of normality, disturbingly the Afghanistan conflict seems no nearer to resolution now than when it started, and with mounting issues to deal with at home, you have to question whether the Obama administration will have the fortitude to see it through.
Given the mess the USA finds itself in, inevitably you have to ask the question, could this have been dealt with another way? Certainly given the knife-edge result in the 2000 presidential election, it's a question that I'd love to ask Al Gore. While I query whether Gore would ultimately have stood up to the warmongers in the Pentagon, at the very least I suspect he wouldn't have sat in a year 2 classroom like a stunned mullet for 10 minutes upon being told.
It might be naive, but I wonder whether a better way might have been to first, harness the sympathy of the rest of the world and seek their co-operation in rounding up the perpetrators. If necessary, this could have come with an offer of $1 billion in foreign aid for the country who handed over Bin Laden. While this is a lot of money, it's still a lot less than the more than $1 trillion spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Then, having satisfied the public bloodlust for revenge by trying and executing those responsible, setting up a global taskforce on terrorism which is designed not just to round up terrorist cells but also getting to the bottom of why it exists and thereafter dedicating resources to foreign aid or other benevolent purposes which help change the perception of the west in the developing world and take away the motive to engage in terrorism.
Not only would this measured response gained the respect and admiration of the rest of the world but it would have avoided the ghastly personal, political and financial toll of the "shoot first" option adopted by Bush and Cheney.
Then again, such an approach would require levels of political courage and restraint which haven't been seen in the USA since the end of WW2. Far easier just to drop some bunker-busters on Al Qaeda installations. Now where was that public enemy number 2 hiding again?
28 April 2011
Don't Go There, Wayne
I never thought I would reach the point in my life where I could be bothered writing twice in two months about something as tedious as tax. However as St Kilda's season sinks into the toilet, the gardening has been successfully outsourced and the latest instalment of "Angry Birds" is still some weeks away from being released, I am a bit stuck for things to fill my leisure time. Accordingly, thoughts turn once again to the blog, and seeing the question of tax both here and in the USA is quite topical at the moment, it is as good a subject to complain about as any other.
In the USA, after years of profligate spending under Bush, the Republicans are now so hell bent on fiscal restraint that key government social initiatives will need to be either cut entirely or curtailed severely as a condition of Obama securing supply. The only thing seemingly off the table is the reversal of Bush's tax cuts for high income earners. One should of course expect these sorts of double-standards from the Republicans, but more on them later.
Back home, the debate is raging about the government's new carbon tax and how this will affect both industry and individuals alike. Leaving aside the merits of the government's scheme (which could fill pages on its own), there has been a lot of discussion about how the government will compensate those affected. A lot of this was pure waffle that will never see the light of day, but what really piqued my interest was when Wayne Swan went on television and raised the possibility that income tax cuts might be a viable option.
I know most people might punch the air when they hear the words "tax cuts" uttered by any politician, and I used to be the same, especially when I got my group certificates during the last economic boom and saw the prodigious amount of tax I was paying. However, I have come to realise in recent years that tax cuts are a double-edged sword and any government looking to introduce them needs to think very, very carefully about the consequences.
This is because taxes are there for a reason. I know Kerry Packer once famously went on television and launched into a diatribe about how the government didn't spend tax dollars properly and anyone who didn't therefore avoid paying tax needed their head read. However it's of course entirely logical for someone like Packer to take that view because he was wealthy enough to be entirely self-sufficient and didn't therefore require any of the things that government provide. What staggers me however is when you hear about people who earn $50,000 per annum and rely heavily on government services that agree fervently with Kerry and cheer wildly when they receive a $12 a week tax cut like that received in the 2008/9 year. Honestly, do they think having the means to buy a medium-sized pizza for dinner on Friday night is really going to improve their quality of life more than having better roads, hospitals, or schools? Because that's really the trade-off inherent in any debate about tax cuts.
Let's think about this in the context of some hard numbers. According to recent ABS figures, there are approximately 11,000,000 employed Australians and let's assume of these, roughly half earn at least $50,000 per annum. Although it is not realistic given tax cuts are always on a sliding scale, let's assume for the purpose of the exercise everyone in that bracket receives a $12 per week cut. That works out to an annual cut to government revenue of $3.43 billion, more when you consider what relief people in the higher tax brackets got. When you consider the constructive public use that sum of money could be put towards, it seems a very high opportunity cost to pay in exchange for the Friday night pizza. Especially if the pizza comes with anchovies which you didn't order.
It is indisputable that in a capitalist society we need to encourage hard work and entrepeneurialism and therefore need to design a tax system which gives people the incentive to work hard and by doing so achieve a comfortable lifestyle. It is also indisputable in part what Kerry Packer says, namely that governments often don't get their spending priorities right. However, on the flip side, unless you are a loony-right Tea Party follower, it is clear that governments need to play a role in both the economy and broader society to stop them descending into chaos. In order for them to perform that role properly, they need an appropriate amount of funding.
As with many things, the tax debate comes down to a question of balancing the rights of the individual to spend their money as they see fit against the needs of society as whole. If, as an economist friend of mine recently said, taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society then you have to seriously question both here and in the US whether the balance has tipped too far towards the individual. This is particularly when you consider some of the following worrying phenomena:
Still, while we have our challenges here, at least we don't live in America. It simply defies all logic that despite polls saying that over 80% of Americans favour tax hikes for the rich as the best means of digging the country out of the budgetary hole they are in, the same Americans then go and elect a heap of Republicans at the Congressional elections who then go and do what? Rather than doing what the public wants and rescinding Bush's tax cuts for the rich, they force Obama to instead affirm the cuts, and push him to balance the budget by cutting public services instead.
Then again, in a country where Donald Trump can be a semi-serious candidate for President, anything is possible. Let's all pray that he doesn't get in, because if he does, our tax assessments will be the least of our problems.
In the USA, after years of profligate spending under Bush, the Republicans are now so hell bent on fiscal restraint that key government social initiatives will need to be either cut entirely or curtailed severely as a condition of Obama securing supply. The only thing seemingly off the table is the reversal of Bush's tax cuts for high income earners. One should of course expect these sorts of double-standards from the Republicans, but more on them later.
Back home, the debate is raging about the government's new carbon tax and how this will affect both industry and individuals alike. Leaving aside the merits of the government's scheme (which could fill pages on its own), there has been a lot of discussion about how the government will compensate those affected. A lot of this was pure waffle that will never see the light of day, but what really piqued my interest was when Wayne Swan went on television and raised the possibility that income tax cuts might be a viable option.
I know most people might punch the air when they hear the words "tax cuts" uttered by any politician, and I used to be the same, especially when I got my group certificates during the last economic boom and saw the prodigious amount of tax I was paying. However, I have come to realise in recent years that tax cuts are a double-edged sword and any government looking to introduce them needs to think very, very carefully about the consequences.
This is because taxes are there for a reason. I know Kerry Packer once famously went on television and launched into a diatribe about how the government didn't spend tax dollars properly and anyone who didn't therefore avoid paying tax needed their head read. However it's of course entirely logical for someone like Packer to take that view because he was wealthy enough to be entirely self-sufficient and didn't therefore require any of the things that government provide. What staggers me however is when you hear about people who earn $50,000 per annum and rely heavily on government services that agree fervently with Kerry and cheer wildly when they receive a $12 a week tax cut like that received in the 2008/9 year. Honestly, do they think having the means to buy a medium-sized pizza for dinner on Friday night is really going to improve their quality of life more than having better roads, hospitals, or schools? Because that's really the trade-off inherent in any debate about tax cuts.
Let's think about this in the context of some hard numbers. According to recent ABS figures, there are approximately 11,000,000 employed Australians and let's assume of these, roughly half earn at least $50,000 per annum. Although it is not realistic given tax cuts are always on a sliding scale, let's assume for the purpose of the exercise everyone in that bracket receives a $12 per week cut. That works out to an annual cut to government revenue of $3.43 billion, more when you consider what relief people in the higher tax brackets got. When you consider the constructive public use that sum of money could be put towards, it seems a very high opportunity cost to pay in exchange for the Friday night pizza. Especially if the pizza comes with anchovies which you didn't order.
It is indisputable that in a capitalist society we need to encourage hard work and entrepeneurialism and therefore need to design a tax system which gives people the incentive to work hard and by doing so achieve a comfortable lifestyle. It is also indisputable in part what Kerry Packer says, namely that governments often don't get their spending priorities right. However, on the flip side, unless you are a loony-right Tea Party follower, it is clear that governments need to play a role in both the economy and broader society to stop them descending into chaos. In order for them to perform that role properly, they need an appropriate amount of funding.
As with many things, the tax debate comes down to a question of balancing the rights of the individual to spend their money as they see fit against the needs of society as whole. If, as an economist friend of mine recently said, taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society then you have to seriously question both here and in the US whether the balance has tipped too far towards the individual. This is particularly when you consider some of the following worrying phenomena:
- The appalling state of the Victorian train network
- The appalling state of the Queensland Health System, where people have ridiculous waiting times for non-urgent surgery and chances are they might get operated on by Dr Death - who due to a major computer system failure, probably hasn't been paid for 6 months
- The appalling state of Sydney - generally
- Bastardisation of and severe funding cuts to important public institutions like the ABC and the CSIRO
- The fact that governments at all levels have effectively thrown in the towel on constructing most forms of major infrastructure. For example, look at major road bypasses in our capital cities, which have typically been left for the private sector to fund through tolls which motorists generally refuse to pay, creating both congestion on the existing road network and financial pain for the investors. In the rare case that governments do pay for these roads, they do a half-assed job like the farcical one way southern expressway in Adelaide
- Unlike those of us lucky enough to go to University in the late 1970s and 1980s, students these days are unable to complete a degree without emerging at the end of it with a crippling HECS debt. This leads to a huge disincentive for young Australians to pursue university studies and leads to places being instead given to affluent, fee-paying foreign students who have little interest in furthering the interests of our country
- Despite going through the biggest mining boom in our history and our economy becoming ever more reliant on exporting our non-renewable resources, we have no national sovereign fund to help ease the pain for when these precious resources run out. Contrast our situation with that of Norway, which has built up a fund worth $525 billion, or $105,000 per person.
- The alarming number of seriously mentally disturbed people wandering around city streets. In years gone by, these people would be housed in government-funded institutions for their own and the public's safety. Now instead they are pushed back out into the community where they are demonstrably unable to cope and already over-stretched charities have to try and clean up the government's mess.
Still, while we have our challenges here, at least we don't live in America. It simply defies all logic that despite polls saying that over 80% of Americans favour tax hikes for the rich as the best means of digging the country out of the budgetary hole they are in, the same Americans then go and elect a heap of Republicans at the Congressional elections who then go and do what? Rather than doing what the public wants and rescinding Bush's tax cuts for the rich, they force Obama to instead affirm the cuts, and push him to balance the budget by cutting public services instead.
Then again, in a country where Donald Trump can be a semi-serious candidate for President, anything is possible. Let's all pray that he doesn't get in, because if he does, our tax assessments will be the least of our problems.
12 March 2011
Stop, Greedy Gerry, Stop
Let's face it, this Australian summer has been horrific. What few parts of the country that haven't been underwater have been on fire, and thousands of people have either lost their homes or had them substantially damaged. Crucial infrastructure has been destroyed, particularly in Queensland, and the rebuilding effort will take years. To top it all off, our exhausted emergency workers now have to fly over to Christchurch and Japan and deal with the devastation caused by the recent earthquakes.
There are very few positives to all this, but one small one is that the band of large retailers behind the campaign to start levying GST on on-line purchases have thankfully crawled back under whatever rock they emerged from. I don't know if the disasters had any contribution to this but one would hope that even they realised that with so many of their countrymen facing dire circumstances, the limited public sympathy they got in the first place would pretty much evaporate when the first images of the Queensland floods started showing on television.
In fact, it's hard to grasp why Harvey Norman, Borders and the others thought the campaign was going to garner public support in the first place. Australians have about as much affection for big retailers as they do for the big 4 banks, which to be brutally honest is not much higher than the level of affection they have for child molesters. Did the people behind the campaign really think the public would get on board with a campaign that would have the sole effects of: (a) boosting their profits relative to on-line retailers; and (b) Australians paying more tax?
I think there definitely would have been a secondary agenda at play, in that running a big and splashy campaign would highlight to the Gillard government just how much tax leakage they were suffering due to the rise of on-line retailing and therefore cause the current tax exemptions to be put on the government's radar. However, based on subsequent comments from Gerry Harvey in the media, there seems to have been some genuine shock at the backlash, which suggests that the group expected the campaign to push the public's patriotic buttons. Which in turn shows just how out of touch retailers are with what their customers and the general public are thinking. There are of course other factors at play but when you consider this disconnect with their customers, is it any wonder therefore that retail sales across the board are in the toilet and groups like Borders are going broke?
I have to declare before going on that like most non-metrosexual men, I enjoy a shopping expedition slightly less than I enjoy a visit to the dentist. I recognise that in an industrialised economy, unless you are Bear Grylls, hunting and gathering is highly impractical (not to mention illegal) and shopping is the most efficient means of procuring the things required to ensure your survival. However this obvious logic doesn't counteract the sick feeling I get at the pit of my stomach when one of the children blithely suggests a trip to Chadstone on a Saturday morning. Very few experiences are as frustrating, annoying and stressful as visiting a major shopping centre. It all starts with trying to find a carpark within a 15km radius of where you are going, all the while trying to stay out of the way of some idiot in a 4WD who is either chattering away on a mobile phone or stopped in front of you blocking the carriageway. You then have to pick your way through a crowded foodcourt with its ghastly Subway corn-syrup odours before arriving at your destination only to be told by some sullen teenage clerk that the Wii game your child had their heart set on is either sold out or in fact, isn't due to be released for a few more weeks. You then leave the premises with your distraught progeny in tow and drive home, fuming all the while with a form of atavistic rage similar to the one that our distant ancestors must have felt when they'd spent all day out on the freezing tundra and failed to spear a single caribou.
Which, in a nutshell, is why on-line retailing holds such appeal. Why waste precious leisure time driving to and from Borders when you can simply hop onto your computer and download the title you want directly to your iPad? Why risk being led up the garden path by some clueless Harvey Norman employee with English worse than Borat when you can browse an on-line catalogue and pick exactly the size, model and make of plasma that your kids can throw their Wii remotes through? I know which method of procurement has my vote. Furthermore if the item you are looking to buy happens to come from overseas, then the argument becomes even more compelling given the current strength of the Australian dollar.
In defence of large local retailers, it is reasonable for them to argue to the government that they should not be disadvantaged relative to foreign on-line retailers. But to think given the universally awful shopping experience they inflict on their customers, the public would be worked up into a impassioned frenzy to demand the governemt change the rules? Please, give me a break. It's about as useful as running an ad campaign directed at 8 year olds extolling the virtues of brussels sprouts. This is the sort of issue that is best dealt with behind closed doors in Canberra, not in the media.
My message to the retailers would be simply this: by all means continue your campaign for a level playing field, but leave the rest of us out of it. However please don't spend a lot of time and effort on it. You should direct that instead to working out why exactly people are choosing on-line shopping as opposed to visiting your stores, and what you can do to improve your service to your customers so as to arrest the decline.
Because, let me tell you, the reason we are choosing to shop on line has everything to do with that, and nothing to do with avoiding a piddling amount of tax.
There are very few positives to all this, but one small one is that the band of large retailers behind the campaign to start levying GST on on-line purchases have thankfully crawled back under whatever rock they emerged from. I don't know if the disasters had any contribution to this but one would hope that even they realised that with so many of their countrymen facing dire circumstances, the limited public sympathy they got in the first place would pretty much evaporate when the first images of the Queensland floods started showing on television.
In fact, it's hard to grasp why Harvey Norman, Borders and the others thought the campaign was going to garner public support in the first place. Australians have about as much affection for big retailers as they do for the big 4 banks, which to be brutally honest is not much higher than the level of affection they have for child molesters. Did the people behind the campaign really think the public would get on board with a campaign that would have the sole effects of: (a) boosting their profits relative to on-line retailers; and (b) Australians paying more tax?
I think there definitely would have been a secondary agenda at play, in that running a big and splashy campaign would highlight to the Gillard government just how much tax leakage they were suffering due to the rise of on-line retailing and therefore cause the current tax exemptions to be put on the government's radar. However, based on subsequent comments from Gerry Harvey in the media, there seems to have been some genuine shock at the backlash, which suggests that the group expected the campaign to push the public's patriotic buttons. Which in turn shows just how out of touch retailers are with what their customers and the general public are thinking. There are of course other factors at play but when you consider this disconnect with their customers, is it any wonder therefore that retail sales across the board are in the toilet and groups like Borders are going broke?
I have to declare before going on that like most non-metrosexual men, I enjoy a shopping expedition slightly less than I enjoy a visit to the dentist. I recognise that in an industrialised economy, unless you are Bear Grylls, hunting and gathering is highly impractical (not to mention illegal) and shopping is the most efficient means of procuring the things required to ensure your survival. However this obvious logic doesn't counteract the sick feeling I get at the pit of my stomach when one of the children blithely suggests a trip to Chadstone on a Saturday morning. Very few experiences are as frustrating, annoying and stressful as visiting a major shopping centre. It all starts with trying to find a carpark within a 15km radius of where you are going, all the while trying to stay out of the way of some idiot in a 4WD who is either chattering away on a mobile phone or stopped in front of you blocking the carriageway. You then have to pick your way through a crowded foodcourt with its ghastly Subway corn-syrup odours before arriving at your destination only to be told by some sullen teenage clerk that the Wii game your child had their heart set on is either sold out or in fact, isn't due to be released for a few more weeks. You then leave the premises with your distraught progeny in tow and drive home, fuming all the while with a form of atavistic rage similar to the one that our distant ancestors must have felt when they'd spent all day out on the freezing tundra and failed to spear a single caribou.
Which, in a nutshell, is why on-line retailing holds such appeal. Why waste precious leisure time driving to and from Borders when you can simply hop onto your computer and download the title you want directly to your iPad? Why risk being led up the garden path by some clueless Harvey Norman employee with English worse than Borat when you can browse an on-line catalogue and pick exactly the size, model and make of plasma that your kids can throw their Wii remotes through? I know which method of procurement has my vote. Furthermore if the item you are looking to buy happens to come from overseas, then the argument becomes even more compelling given the current strength of the Australian dollar.
In defence of large local retailers, it is reasonable for them to argue to the government that they should not be disadvantaged relative to foreign on-line retailers. But to think given the universally awful shopping experience they inflict on their customers, the public would be worked up into a impassioned frenzy to demand the governemt change the rules? Please, give me a break. It's about as useful as running an ad campaign directed at 8 year olds extolling the virtues of brussels sprouts. This is the sort of issue that is best dealt with behind closed doors in Canberra, not in the media.
My message to the retailers would be simply this: by all means continue your campaign for a level playing field, but leave the rest of us out of it. However please don't spend a lot of time and effort on it. You should direct that instead to working out why exactly people are choosing on-line shopping as opposed to visiting your stores, and what you can do to improve your service to your customers so as to arrest the decline.
Because, let me tell you, the reason we are choosing to shop on line has everything to do with that, and nothing to do with avoiding a piddling amount of tax.
26 January 2011
Increase Airfares before Someone Gets Killed
Another day, and yet another mid-air near miss from Qantas. Yesterday, a routine and normally mundane flight from Adelaide to Melbourne suddenly lost cabin pressure and was immediately taken by its pilot down 16,000 feet in altitude, scaring the bejesus out of the passengers on board and doubtless a few high-flying bird life.
Being a regular on that Melbourne-Adelaide route I am not at all surprised that they have had another incident, albeit one that is different in nature to the landing gear failure that happened in 2008. Domestic air travel has been gradually becoming more and more crowded and uncomfortable during the past 20 years, but on that leg, Qantas regularly outdo even their own ghastly standards. I don't know whether it is because Sydney-based Qantas deliberately favours Rugby Union states over AFL states, but every time I get on that battered 737 to and from Adelaide, it is a nightmare. The legroom is almost non-existent, there is never a spare seat anywhere on the plane and the pint-sized overhead luggage bins barely fit a laptop case, let alone the plethora of bric-a-brac that most passengers insist on carrying on board. Not that you can blame them, mind, because the other day at Melbourne I spent 45 minutes after I arrived waiting for the baggage handlers to unload my luggage - hardly an acceptable situation for anyone with important commitments to get to. Frankly with the sheer volume of people and junk on the plane I am amazed that something that old and decrepit can take off at all, let alone somehow fly 750 kilometres without incident.Which of course yesterday it didn't.
This latest misadventure led me to ponder the compromises to quality of service that all airlines have made over the past 20 years with a view to achieving ever-lower airfares. If, as the latest spate of incidents suggests, they are now starting to compromise safety standards, then it is high time for them to stop their ridiculous predatory pricing and halt the decline in standards by putting fares back up.
Anyone who has used air travel for any length of time would realise that the real cost of air travel (namely, the cost of air travel relative to inflation) has been dropping continually since the domestic industry returned to normal after the 1989 pílot strike. In some cases, the actual dollar cost is less as well. By way of example, I remember flying return to Melbourne from Brisbane on Compass in late 1991 at a cost of roughly $240. Nowadays, if I booked early enough and weren't too fussy about the time of travel, I could undertake the same trip for about $210 - which is incredible when you think about how the price of most other goods and services has risen over the same period.
This is of course not a bad thing, as it has enabled thousands of people who could previously not afford air travel to have the benefit of flying instead of clogging up the highways of Australia with their caravans. However as with any good or service, where you cut prices to the bone to try and build volume and/or market share, something has to give. And to anyone who has flown recently, they will know only too well that what airlines have sacrificed is the quality of their service.
To illustrate how far standards have dropped, take a look at this TAA commercial from the 1980s (to anyone under 30 reading this, TAA was the precursor domestic airline to Australian Airlines, which was subsequently bought by Qantas in 1992):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysg4CZX8R9Y&playnext=1&list=PL2A0CC4BF8444E468&index=17
Amazing, isn't it? I know it's a commercial, but look at the legroom. Look at the restaurant quality food that the cook is preparing. Look at the attractive and attentive hostesses pouring more alcohol into their dreamily contented passengers. It actually makes you WANT to get on a plane just for the pleasurable experience of flying. Except for the privileged few up at the pointy end of the plane, its hard to imagine this sort of service nowadays. Instead you're lucky if you get flung a rock hard cookie by a Medusa-like child-hating hostess and land within 90 minutes of your scheduled arrival time.
What baffles me is why airlines the world over have done this. Running an airline is an incredibly risky business, so why do airlines cut their margins to the bone and chase volume so aggressively as opposed to insisting on ticket pricing which properly reflects these risks? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there is always a lot of new competition entering the market. For some reason, any billionaire with more ego than sense seems to want to own an airline, so the established operators tend to react to new upstarts by starting a pricing war which puts them out of business. Protecting your market share is of course sound business practice, however not to the point where your customers either dread getting on one of your planes or worse, are too frightened to do so,
Which is why I think the balance has to come back the other way. Often I find myself comparing notes with friends and colleagues about overseas holidays and the thing that invariably dominates the conversation is how crapulent the flight was. When this sort of thing happens, it is clear that standards have hit rock bottom and things are at a point where people will be prepared to pay more in order to enjoy a standard of travel that doesn't leave them physically and mentally scarred. If, in the interests of saving money, other passengers are prepared to impersonate a concertina for 12 hours and eat food that any self-respecting Somalian would turn their nose up at, then fine, let them do it. But at the same time, the airlines should cater for those who are prepared to pay a bit more for a modicum of comfort. Who knows, maybe the extra dollars might enable them to pay the long-suffering maintenance workers a bit more and help cut out the frustrating delays that seem to be part and parcel of air travel today.
For all their flaws, Qantas have started to lead the way with the introduction of a "Premium Economy" class on international flights. It would be a good start for them to roll this out domestically as well. They would probably find that business travellers unable or unwilling to justify travelling in business class might see this as an effective compromise. The extra room might also enable them to get some work done in-flight, which under current conditions is nigh on impossible unless you own a laptop the size of a postage stamp and worked for 5 years in a circus as a contortionist.
Until then, my fellow passengers, you will just have to grin and bear it. When, however, you find yourself delayed for 3 hours or sitting next to a morbidly obese individual whose butt is occupying 35% of your seat, at least you can draw some small level of comfort from the fact that you aren't travelling on an American domestic airline. For that, my friends, is an experience truly not worth writing about. Unless of course your name happens to be Stephen King.
Being a regular on that Melbourne-Adelaide route I am not at all surprised that they have had another incident, albeit one that is different in nature to the landing gear failure that happened in 2008. Domestic air travel has been gradually becoming more and more crowded and uncomfortable during the past 20 years, but on that leg, Qantas regularly outdo even their own ghastly standards. I don't know whether it is because Sydney-based Qantas deliberately favours Rugby Union states over AFL states, but every time I get on that battered 737 to and from Adelaide, it is a nightmare. The legroom is almost non-existent, there is never a spare seat anywhere on the plane and the pint-sized overhead luggage bins barely fit a laptop case, let alone the plethora of bric-a-brac that most passengers insist on carrying on board. Not that you can blame them, mind, because the other day at Melbourne I spent 45 minutes after I arrived waiting for the baggage handlers to unload my luggage - hardly an acceptable situation for anyone with important commitments to get to. Frankly with the sheer volume of people and junk on the plane I am amazed that something that old and decrepit can take off at all, let alone somehow fly 750 kilometres without incident.Which of course yesterday it didn't.
This latest misadventure led me to ponder the compromises to quality of service that all airlines have made over the past 20 years with a view to achieving ever-lower airfares. If, as the latest spate of incidents suggests, they are now starting to compromise safety standards, then it is high time for them to stop their ridiculous predatory pricing and halt the decline in standards by putting fares back up.
Anyone who has used air travel for any length of time would realise that the real cost of air travel (namely, the cost of air travel relative to inflation) has been dropping continually since the domestic industry returned to normal after the 1989 pílot strike. In some cases, the actual dollar cost is less as well. By way of example, I remember flying return to Melbourne from Brisbane on Compass in late 1991 at a cost of roughly $240. Nowadays, if I booked early enough and weren't too fussy about the time of travel, I could undertake the same trip for about $210 - which is incredible when you think about how the price of most other goods and services has risen over the same period.
This is of course not a bad thing, as it has enabled thousands of people who could previously not afford air travel to have the benefit of flying instead of clogging up the highways of Australia with their caravans. However as with any good or service, where you cut prices to the bone to try and build volume and/or market share, something has to give. And to anyone who has flown recently, they will know only too well that what airlines have sacrificed is the quality of their service.
To illustrate how far standards have dropped, take a look at this TAA commercial from the 1980s (to anyone under 30 reading this, TAA was the precursor domestic airline to Australian Airlines, which was subsequently bought by Qantas in 1992):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysg4CZX8R9Y&playnext=1&list=PL2A0CC4BF8444E468&index=17
Amazing, isn't it? I know it's a commercial, but look at the legroom. Look at the restaurant quality food that the cook is preparing. Look at the attractive and attentive hostesses pouring more alcohol into their dreamily contented passengers. It actually makes you WANT to get on a plane just for the pleasurable experience of flying. Except for the privileged few up at the pointy end of the plane, its hard to imagine this sort of service nowadays. Instead you're lucky if you get flung a rock hard cookie by a Medusa-like child-hating hostess and land within 90 minutes of your scheduled arrival time.
What baffles me is why airlines the world over have done this. Running an airline is an incredibly risky business, so why do airlines cut their margins to the bone and chase volume so aggressively as opposed to insisting on ticket pricing which properly reflects these risks? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there is always a lot of new competition entering the market. For some reason, any billionaire with more ego than sense seems to want to own an airline, so the established operators tend to react to new upstarts by starting a pricing war which puts them out of business. Protecting your market share is of course sound business practice, however not to the point where your customers either dread getting on one of your planes or worse, are too frightened to do so,
Which is why I think the balance has to come back the other way. Often I find myself comparing notes with friends and colleagues about overseas holidays and the thing that invariably dominates the conversation is how crapulent the flight was. When this sort of thing happens, it is clear that standards have hit rock bottom and things are at a point where people will be prepared to pay more in order to enjoy a standard of travel that doesn't leave them physically and mentally scarred. If, in the interests of saving money, other passengers are prepared to impersonate a concertina for 12 hours and eat food that any self-respecting Somalian would turn their nose up at, then fine, let them do it. But at the same time, the airlines should cater for those who are prepared to pay a bit more for a modicum of comfort. Who knows, maybe the extra dollars might enable them to pay the long-suffering maintenance workers a bit more and help cut out the frustrating delays that seem to be part and parcel of air travel today.
For all their flaws, Qantas have started to lead the way with the introduction of a "Premium Economy" class on international flights. It would be a good start for them to roll this out domestically as well. They would probably find that business travellers unable or unwilling to justify travelling in business class might see this as an effective compromise. The extra room might also enable them to get some work done in-flight, which under current conditions is nigh on impossible unless you own a laptop the size of a postage stamp and worked for 5 years in a circus as a contortionist.
Until then, my fellow passengers, you will just have to grin and bear it. When, however, you find yourself delayed for 3 hours or sitting next to a morbidly obese individual whose butt is occupying 35% of your seat, at least you can draw some small level of comfort from the fact that you aren't travelling on an American domestic airline. For that, my friends, is an experience truly not worth writing about. Unless of course your name happens to be Stephen King.
07 January 2011
Assange - Hero or Villain?
Happy new year to one and all. May it be a fulfilling and financially prosperous year for you, although the way Europe is imploding, the US is continuing to struggle and with China likely to do something about reining in inflation, I have my doubts about the second point. Whatever is in store, however, I'm not in the business of getting everyone down about 2011 just a few days into it, so let's talk about something else - Wikileaks.
I have to say that while I find the current Wikileaks saga fascinating, I was somewhat hesitant to blog about it. The reason for this is that the mainstream press has been all over the story for weeks - 5 pages in the Sunday Age 3 weeks ago were dedicated to it alone and there have been daily updates since - hence there are more than enough points of view out there without me adding my amateur 2 cents worth. Encouragingly, a lot of the commentary has been quite thoughtful and well structured, perhaps demonstrating that journalists are prepared to dig deep and do their best work for matters that are close to their hearts. Whatever the reason, there have been some very valid and well-expressed concerns raised about the right to free speech and attempts by governments to curtail and prevent it for no better reason than they don't want egg on their face. That said, there are some other matters relevant to the whole debate about Wikileaks that I think have been missed by the mainstream press or at least glossed over. These issues I think are worth examining in more detail, hence my decision to jump into the fray.
Perhaps the most exciting and terrifying thing about the Internet is the unprecedented access to information humanity now enjoys. While a lot of what is on the Internet comprises uninformative rubbish such as social networking sites, dig deeper and you pretty much have the entire wealth of human knowledge at your fingertips. This information can then be shared instantaneously between users in a manner that would have been unthinkable even 30 years ago using tools such as e-mail.
The other feature of the Internet which endears it to hackers and hell-raisers of all persuasion is that it is a truly global network and is therefore more or less completely incapable of being regulated or limited by governments or courts within a particular jurisdiction. Witness the recent unfortunate events surrounding Nick Riewoldt, Nick dal Santo and the jilted 17 year old schoolgirl - despite court injunctions in Victoria prohibiting their publication, pictures of the players nonetheless spread like wildfire thereby rendering the court order essentially useless. Similarly, when the Victorian government attempted to block the broadcasting of the first "Underbelly" series some years ago, it took literally a day for pirate copies to reach Victoria from other states via the Internet.
How governments around the world (or even domestically) ultimately decide to deal with the Internet is going to be very interesting, seeing most of the time they can barely agree on what day of the week it is. However, the generally cavalier approach adopted by Internet users to the spreading of information does raise some real concerns about how governments and companies can maintain security of information that is truly sensitive in nature and needs to remain confidential. Which is why I have some sympathy for governments that are trying to limit or control Wikileaks.
I think in this vein a couple of key points have been largely ignored in all the hysteria surrounding Julian Assange's arrest. First, there is a big difference to leaking information that is merely embarrassing to governments and exposes their shortcomings as opposed to information that ought, in the public interest, to remain confidential. I fully support the release of any document which, for instance, shows that Bush and Cheney ignored clear warnings from the CIA about September 11 or exposes Kevin Rudd as a micro-managing, foul-tempered control-freak (not that the last one is a particularly explosive revelation). Hopefully the threat of these sorts of revelations will prompt governments to conduct their affairs in a less nefarious and more open way. On the other hand, I have a big problem with anyone leaking the formula for a nuclear bomb to any country in the Middle East or leaking details of our foreign trade agreements with China to the US or any of our other major trade partners.
Secondly, who decided anyway that Julian Assange and his cohorts should be the sole arbiter of what information gets leaked and what stays under wraps? Certainly not you or I, and definitely not any international body established for the purpose of regulating information flow on the Internet, which is probably the only logical place where such power should lie. Apart from the fact that Assange used to live in Melbourne and be heavily involved in computer hacking, there's not a lot that anyone knows about this rather shadowy customer - which is hardly reassuring given the power he seems to have at his disposal. While it is true that most of the information that has been released to date falls into the embarrassing rather than dangerous category, what's to stop him getting a big head and losing his judgement if he gets through his current troubles and Wikileaks emerges stronger than ever? I don't think any of the bleeding-heart champions of free speech who are currently jumping to his defence will be particularly chuffed if all of a sudden Kim Jong-Il mysteriously winds up with the codes to the US nuclear arsenal.
So, is Assange a hero or a villian? Well, I love the fact that he's shown what American troops on the ground really think of the way the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are being run; I love the fact that he's demonstrated what we all intuitively know about the way the US regards Australia and you have to dip your hat to someone who's got right up the nose of such a diverse group of objectionable people as Mike Huckabees, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin and Julia Gillard.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing is that we simply don't know enough about Julian Assange and what bombshells he still intends to release in order to make that call. And that, not whether his right to free speech is being unfairly curtailed, is perhaps the biggest concern in the whole debate.
I have to say that while I find the current Wikileaks saga fascinating, I was somewhat hesitant to blog about it. The reason for this is that the mainstream press has been all over the story for weeks - 5 pages in the Sunday Age 3 weeks ago were dedicated to it alone and there have been daily updates since - hence there are more than enough points of view out there without me adding my amateur 2 cents worth. Encouragingly, a lot of the commentary has been quite thoughtful and well structured, perhaps demonstrating that journalists are prepared to dig deep and do their best work for matters that are close to their hearts. Whatever the reason, there have been some very valid and well-expressed concerns raised about the right to free speech and attempts by governments to curtail and prevent it for no better reason than they don't want egg on their face. That said, there are some other matters relevant to the whole debate about Wikileaks that I think have been missed by the mainstream press or at least glossed over. These issues I think are worth examining in more detail, hence my decision to jump into the fray.
Perhaps the most exciting and terrifying thing about the Internet is the unprecedented access to information humanity now enjoys. While a lot of what is on the Internet comprises uninformative rubbish such as social networking sites, dig deeper and you pretty much have the entire wealth of human knowledge at your fingertips. This information can then be shared instantaneously between users in a manner that would have been unthinkable even 30 years ago using tools such as e-mail.
The other feature of the Internet which endears it to hackers and hell-raisers of all persuasion is that it is a truly global network and is therefore more or less completely incapable of being regulated or limited by governments or courts within a particular jurisdiction. Witness the recent unfortunate events surrounding Nick Riewoldt, Nick dal Santo and the jilted 17 year old schoolgirl - despite court injunctions in Victoria prohibiting their publication, pictures of the players nonetheless spread like wildfire thereby rendering the court order essentially useless. Similarly, when the Victorian government attempted to block the broadcasting of the first "Underbelly" series some years ago, it took literally a day for pirate copies to reach Victoria from other states via the Internet.
How governments around the world (or even domestically) ultimately decide to deal with the Internet is going to be very interesting, seeing most of the time they can barely agree on what day of the week it is. However, the generally cavalier approach adopted by Internet users to the spreading of information does raise some real concerns about how governments and companies can maintain security of information that is truly sensitive in nature and needs to remain confidential. Which is why I have some sympathy for governments that are trying to limit or control Wikileaks.
I think in this vein a couple of key points have been largely ignored in all the hysteria surrounding Julian Assange's arrest. First, there is a big difference to leaking information that is merely embarrassing to governments and exposes their shortcomings as opposed to information that ought, in the public interest, to remain confidential. I fully support the release of any document which, for instance, shows that Bush and Cheney ignored clear warnings from the CIA about September 11 or exposes Kevin Rudd as a micro-managing, foul-tempered control-freak (not that the last one is a particularly explosive revelation). Hopefully the threat of these sorts of revelations will prompt governments to conduct their affairs in a less nefarious and more open way. On the other hand, I have a big problem with anyone leaking the formula for a nuclear bomb to any country in the Middle East or leaking details of our foreign trade agreements with China to the US or any of our other major trade partners.
Secondly, who decided anyway that Julian Assange and his cohorts should be the sole arbiter of what information gets leaked and what stays under wraps? Certainly not you or I, and definitely not any international body established for the purpose of regulating information flow on the Internet, which is probably the only logical place where such power should lie. Apart from the fact that Assange used to live in Melbourne and be heavily involved in computer hacking, there's not a lot that anyone knows about this rather shadowy customer - which is hardly reassuring given the power he seems to have at his disposal. While it is true that most of the information that has been released to date falls into the embarrassing rather than dangerous category, what's to stop him getting a big head and losing his judgement if he gets through his current troubles and Wikileaks emerges stronger than ever? I don't think any of the bleeding-heart champions of free speech who are currently jumping to his defence will be particularly chuffed if all of a sudden Kim Jong-Il mysteriously winds up with the codes to the US nuclear arsenal.
So, is Assange a hero or a villian? Well, I love the fact that he's shown what American troops on the ground really think of the way the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are being run; I love the fact that he's demonstrated what we all intuitively know about the way the US regards Australia and you have to dip your hat to someone who's got right up the nose of such a diverse group of objectionable people as Mike Huckabees, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin and Julia Gillard.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing is that we simply don't know enough about Julian Assange and what bombshells he still intends to release in order to make that call. And that, not whether his right to free speech is being unfairly curtailed, is perhaps the biggest concern in the whole debate.
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