Public policy - thegoodwills.com

Bare bones budget for jobseekers

Just as well the Commonwealth Government Budget wasn’t tabled last week – that would have been too much of a mixed message.

A nation’s budget is all about redistribution of wealth, a concept worth keeping in mind at a time when £100 million of British taxpayers’ money was spent on an unnecessary coronation pageant.

As has been repeatedly pointed out, Prince Charles became King by default on September 8, 2022, on the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. There was no pressing reason to stage a mediaeval pageant, however splendidly well done.

This week, the media’s attention swung back to the King’s southern hemisphere colony, as Treasurer Jim Chalmer presented his budget.

So much had been flagged already that one does have to question is there a critical reason for the media embargo till 7.30pm on Tuesday.

As I started writing this on Tuesday morning, much of the Budget’s headline measures had already been revealed. This included a $15 billion spend on cost-of-living relief; $1.5 billion of it in electricity bill relief for 5.5 million households and 1 million small businesses. I should point out that this is from an ABC article published on Tuesday morning. The ABC’s business reporters Ian Verrender and Gareth Hutchens were all over it.

One of the other measures flagged earlier aimed to change the dispensing rules at pharmacies. Australians will be able to buy two months’ worth of medicines on a single prescription, with the change affecting more than 300 common medicines. This overrides the current rule that only 30 days’ supply of medicine can be applied to one prescription.

The ABC and other media outlets also seemed confident, ahead of the Budget, that Chalmers would produce a surplus and indeed he did. You can’t please everyone, though. Greens leader Adam Bandt said the government had prioritised delivering a ($4.5 billion) surplus over supporting people in poverty.

“Labor’s second budget is a betrayal of people who were promised that no one would be left behind,” he said in a tweet on social media.

Other leaked or pre-announced budget measures included cheaper child care and a (long overdue) pay rise for aged care workers. Welfare recipients received higher payments, but nowhere near the level asked for by lobbyists.

The Budget is a document which sets out how taxes paid by Australian businesses and individuals will be spent. It is a massive number, equating to 29% of GDP. In 2021-2022, $683 billion was raised in taxes across all levels of government. This was 15.2% higher than the previous year. A table prepared by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows an upward trajectory for taxation revenue. The slight blip in 2019-2020 was due to disruption to employment by the onset of Covid-19 and its attendant lockdowns. Total tax revenue includes all Commonwealth, State and Territory taxes, GST, those indirect taxes that still exist and excises imposed on alcohol, tobacco and fuel.

The cost-of-living package is one thing, but the government has been under enormous pressure to raise the level of unemployment benefit. The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) last month presented a detailed brief to Treasurer Jim Chalmers. A former Commonwealth Treasury head, Ken Henry, appeared on television as the ACOSS brief’s anointed spokesman. In a call to raise the level of NewStart and Youth Allowance, ACOSS said some 750,000 people in communities across Australia live on unemployment and student payments that do not cover the cost of housing, food, transport and healthcare.

The single rate of Newstart is (or was) less than $40 per day and living on Newstart and Youth Allowance presents the biggest risk to living in poverty. ACOSS wanted the rate raised to within 90% of the aged pension, so were almost certain to be disappointed.

In an open letter to the Prime Minister, ACOSS said 80% of people receiving JobSeeker payments have been receiving the benefit for more than 12 months. The same research found that seven in ten people on income support were eating less or reporting difficulty getting medicine or care. In December 2022, Anglicare found that there were 15 Jobseekers competing for each entry-level role.

“The longer people remain on income support, the harder it is to transition back into paid work,” the letter said.

ACOSS chief executive officer, Dr Cassandra Goldie, said post-Budget that while the $20 per week pay rise was welcome, it did not go far enough.

“The (increase) to JobSeeker and related payments is well below the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee’s findings. The committee said that it needs to rise by at least $128 a week to ensure people can cover the basics.”

ACOSS and others are right to complain. Australia has the lowest rate of unemployment payment in the OECD. One in four people on Newstart have only a partial capacity to work because of illness or disability.

The ABC’s business reporter Gareth Hutchens wrote an intriguing analysis in May 2021 about the ‘full employment’ policies of governments prior to the 1970s. Then followed a policy aimed at creating a permanent pool of unemployed as a means of promoting economic growth and making Australia more globally competitive. Along with rising unemployment came a political ploy to blame the victim. The term ‘dole bludger’ emerged, first used by Liberal MP Bert Kelly, a pioneer of “New Right” political ideas. But the phrase was also promoted by Clyde Cameron, minister for labour in Gough Whitlam’s Labor government (1972-1975).

As unemployment soared in the mid-1970s, being without a job was recast as the fault of workers for being ‘too lazy’. There was much debate about the need for ‘overly generous’ income support. (Anyone who has ever been on it would dispute its ‘overgenerosity’. Ed)

Policymakers from the early 1980s started using an unemployment rate of 5% as a deliberate policy tool.

“How could everyone be expected to find a job,” Hutchens wrote. “There haven’t been enough jobs to go around, by design.”

Now, almost 50 years later, the long-term unemployed are still being victimised over a deliberate policy to keep them out of work.

If I may hark back to a FOMM from 2018 when we speculated about what one could do were one made King for a Day:

King Bob decreed: “I’d single out the dysfunctional tax and welfare systems and propose the following reforms:

Introduction of a universal basic income for all adults: $25k a year, indexed, no strings attached. Adults are free to earn money over and above the $25k but will be taxed on a sliding scale to the maximum rate for anyone earning more than, say, $100k.

In my Kingdom, all forms of social welfare would be replaced by a new regime, overseen by the Office of Financial and Social Opportunity and Incentivisation (NOOFASOI). The office would oversee payment of the UBI and iron out the inevitable wrinkles in a new and untested system.”

In the real world, countries as diverse as Finland, France, Ireland, Norway, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, Iceland, India and Brazil are either talking about a UBI or trialling it in one form or another. In 2016, the Parliament of Australia published this comprehensive yet concise policy paper by Don Henry, for those who want to find out more.

While I leave you to make of that what you will, I’ll be delving into the 997-page Budget, seeing what’s in it for me. As we all do.

Australia’s most over-analysed Budget

We’d been out to dinner on Budget night, so turning on the TV later, I caught the last comment from Lee Sales: “That completes our first hour of this special Budget coverage.”

Budget analysis is a challenging topic for extended television viewing. The ABC borrowed David Speers from Insiders (wearing a blue suit and maroon socks), who took over to talk to a bank of television sets, splitting this up with breath-taking interludes (“Crossing now to Canberra for insights from…”).

It continued on Wednesday morning, while having my first coffee of the day with ABC Breakfast. Good television needs live action images and variety. I was bemused by the vox pops segment when a reporter went into the streets of Parramatta to interview everyday people. It was surely accidental than in the background a homeless person strayed into view, trundling a supermarket trolley, laden with the detritus of life on the streets. As Ralph McTell once famously sang:

“She’s no time for talking, she just keeps right on walking
Carrying her home, in two carrier bags…”

Such was the need for live footage, we had to endure repeated scenes of Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg walking across a forecourt, huge umbrellas clashing in the wind as they sheltered from the rain. Around them, photographers, reporters and camera operators were likely making memos on their phones to claim laundry expenses. The pair stopped briefly and touched elbows (photo op) before going inside, leaving the media pack to pat dry their hair with tissues and soggy hankies.

Also in the live footage were scenes of Budget papers rolling off a printing press and being stacked in boxes.

Given that anybody with an internet connection can download the entire set of Budget papers at no cost, the printing of thousands of hard copies does seem like over-kill.

I asked a Treasury official: “How many copies were printed and what is the total cost?”

OFFICIAL

Hi Bob

Thanks for your enquiry.

We do not yet have final costs.

Media Unit -The Treasury

Now you see why journalists spend much of their time cultivating contacts who can find out stuff not yet made official.

Clearly I do not have such contacts (any more) but point you instead to this story, about the Canadian Government’s printing contract in 2017.

Despite a widespread move to the paperless bureaucracy, Finance Canada had committed more than $500,000 to print Budget documents. Opposition members were not impressed.

In 2015, I discovered a Choice Magazine survey of consumers’ household budget worries. At the time, rising electricity costs was the main preoccupation and it is still in the top three. The policy thrust by the Morrison government in 2020 is to push liquefied natural gas (LNG) as an energy alternative.

Although the solar panels on our roof cost around $7,000 to install, our power bills for the calender year so far total $33 and we are now in credit.

Those who made an investment in solar panels in 2015 would be enjoying similarly small power bills, more attractive feed-in tariffs and, five years on, closer to breaking-even on the capital cost of installation. Just saying.

The annual Choice householder survey update in June found that private insurance had replaced energy costs as the number one worry. Some 81% were concerned about the costs of health insurance – up from 75% 12 months ago.

Even in May 2019, long before COVID-19 disrupted the economy, Choice said 65% of people were “barely squeaking by” in terms of household finances.

The June 2020 survey found that private health insurance, fuel and electricity are the main worrying items for households, one in four of which are struggling to make ends meet.

A report from APRA shows a continuing trend for young people (20-49) to ditch private hospital cover because of premium costs.

A one-page item in Tuesday’s Budget will mean a lot to young people, families and people with disabilities. The Government has increased the age at which dependent children can be covered under a family PHI policy. From 1 April 2021, the Government will increase the maximum age of dependants for private health insurance policies from 24 to 31 and remove the age limit for dependants with a disability.

The aim is to encourage young people to continue with PHI when they reach the age of 31 (the age at which premiums for Lifetime Health Cover starts, if the customer has not had private health insurance prior to that date).

Locked up with Laurie, Kerry, Laura and the rest

Labor PM and Treasurer Paul Keating is credited with introducing both the budget ‘lockup’ and Budget night’s televised speech in 1984. I have worked on several Budget lockups over the years. Journalists from all over the country congregate in a (large) locked room within Parliament House.

At 2pm, Treasury officials distribute Budget documents to scribes, who then have time to analyse the key points and prepare stories for the next day’s edition (and post-Budget analysis for TV and radio). Scribes keep on filing updates until their publication deadlines and then adjourn to the bar or a late-night restaurant.

The real Budget stories often surface weeks after the documents have been made public. Business scribes in particular enjoy input from sources in the accounting profession: “Cracker yarn there, Bobby, Budget Paper 4 page 97, 7.1”.

As members of Australia’s rapidly ageing over-70s cohort, we were mild amused to find we are yet again to be stimulated by ScoMo. We were already the recipients of two payments of $750 (each) and now are to receive $250 in December and again in March 2021.

“Crivens”, as my Dad would say (informal Scottish dialect for an expression of surprise).

This money has already been earmarked for the little luxuries one struggles to find within the constraints of a fixed income budget. In my case that may well be a year’s supply of guitar strings, a new set of harmonicas and an ocarina (don’t ask). It may be wiser to put both payments towards a return flight to NZ to visit whanua, when allowed to do so.

As usual, individuals will scrutinise only the parts of the Budget that directly affect them: welfare payments, tax cuts, low-income tax offsets, Job Maker etc.

But if, as the Choice survey highlighted, 65% of households are ‘barely squeaking by’, I can’t see the government’s wage subsidy plan will do much to alleviate those concerns. The Job Maker scheme offers employers $200 a week for every under-30 worker they employ (minimum 20 hours a week). It will also pay $100 a week for employees aged 30-35. The government says this will create 450,00 jobs, whereas Labor says 968,000 unemployed people over 35 will miss out completely.

It remains to be seen if this wage subsidy scheme will be rorted by employers, as has happened with such initiatives over the years. The usual outcome of such incentives is that employers sack people hired under the subsidy scheme once it lapses. (Not to mention the possibility that over 35s will find themselves out of a job that has then been offered to a worker who attracts a subsidy. Ed)

But hey, I’ve already received $1500 and now promised $500 more from ScoMo for doing sweet bugger all. So I should shut up now, eh?

FOMM Back Pages:

More reading

Working From Home In The Time Of COVID-19

working-from-home-covid-19 — Working from home through covid-19

Fifteen years ago, just after SARS but before the GFC and COVID-19, I opted out of full-time paid employment and started a consultancy business, working from home. This was an era when many large organisations did not want their employees working remotely. The resistance was hard to understand, given that even in 2005, the technology to do so made it easy, particularly for people in the communications industry.

Now, in plague-ridden 2020, many employers have made working from home mandatory. A Morris dancer friend, whose work often takes her to places like India, has her office set up in one corner of the house. That’s K’s home office above.

“Contrary to others perceptions of this period, I am finding that I am extremely busy (hence the short note), because I have to carry out my usual job achieving the same minimum number of hours. I also have to work out a family timetable and supervise and enforce the online learning that the children have been given. It is a real handful, and with limited computing resources in the house, we are packed like sardines into the office and dining room space. This results in a lot of distractions and consequently late hours of work.

“But I am finding this period more social because people are uploading virtual folk clubs, sessions and dance events I would not otherwise have the time to attend. It is an exciting and vibrant time, full of possibility for musical and creative pursuits.”

Mr Shiraz, who recently attended a virtual board meeting via Zoom, said he has seen some inventive ways of setting boundaries when someone is working from home.

“This can range from a sign on Mum’s closed office door “Mummy is at work,” to a friend who posted a list of possible answers to things the kids want to ask her (“Have you looked in the fridge?”).

Residential property researcher Michael Matusik, who has been working from home for nearly five years, has a few practical tips. The most important one is: “Put your arse in the chair” for a set time every day.

“You need to focus and the best way to do that is to be at your desk and sticking to a routine,” he said in a recent Matusik Missive.

”Make a to-do list for the day, week and month ahead and stick to it.

“It is easy to labour unproductively when working from home. It is best to set yourself timeframes to do certain tasks and to take set breaks each day.”

(see link below)

Freelance writer Lisa Southgate started working from home in late 2001 and loves it, so is intrigued to find that friends forced into it by COVID-19 are not coping.

“I was fresh from a job in a big newspaper office, and I knew, because I had a teenager on the spectrum, that whatever I did next it had to involve the late-ish start to the day we used to have in newspapers then. “My son was in his teenage years, and it took him forever to get to school.

“At the time I was getting heaps of freelance offers. I was working in property, tourism and business, and there was a property boom, a tourism boom, and an increase of interest in investment. So I called my accountant, set up an ABN and a business structure and went to it.

“It was great! I could get my son off to school – I could take the endless whingey phone calls from the school staff. And I could concentrate on work and not office politics.

“I didn’t have to spend so much money on clothes and makeup for looking presentable in the office. I sometimes wondered what my interviewees would have thought if they’d seen me sitting there in my Ally McBeal pyjamas.”

The key to working from home, Lisa says, is to work out when your brain works best and design your day around that.

Musician and instrument-maker Andy Rigby reports from rural Victoria that while there are no COVID-19 cases in the vicinity, he thinks it is only a matter of time. He is accepting that this (home isolation), will go on for some time, which might be a problem for his daughter, who is in Grade 6 and bored after day one.

For his part, Andy plans a re-union with the local bush (“which has been sadly neglected in our busy lives”.)

“I have several harp orders, plus whistles, and a fair bit of potential on-line teaching to arrange, so I don’t think I’ll be bored for some time yet.

“I reckon I would qualify for some Government assistance as a small business with most of my income (gigs and school jobs) denied by the virus.”

Self-sufficient people who live on rural properties have no shortage of things to do, although they don’t describe it as ‘working from home’.

Former Queenslander Marion lives on a 52ha farm, in Victoria, which includes about one hectare of ornamentals and vegetable gardens.

“I have no problem productively filling my day with just this work.

“I have had a vegie garden for the five years I have lived here and we have our own meat (cows and sheep) and chooks for eggs. So there is no shortage of food and we are relatively self-sufficient (except for the dreaded toilet paper which I am now rationing).”

Marion, like so many of the kind readers who responded to my request for home-alone anecdotes, advised us to: “Stay well, stay safe and stay sane. This too will pass.”

Teri from the Granite Belt is not troubled by isolation, keeping in touch with friends and family via group messages test and phone calls. She prefers the latter because “hearing someone else’s voice is the next best thing to a face to face visit.”

“Because we live on a bit of land, we love being at home. Nature is good company. There is always plenty to do here, both practical and creative, with veggie garden, repairs and decluttering top of the list at the moment.”

Ralph from South Australia says staying at home is something he has become used to in recent years and offers some tips.

“I go for days without utterance sometimes, but I am never bored, because there is so much to do. There is the variety of household chores, the cycles of gardening, getting dirty with weeds and compost, harvesting and house repairs.

“There’s writing the letters you’ve long forgotten to send to old friends and rellies, learning poetry, reading the world’s best speeches, playing chess and, can you remember the rules for cribbage and euchre?”

On a serious note, we know people who are at various stages of chemotherapy or have compromised immune systems. For them, self-isolation is literally a life-preserving strategy.

David, who has just finished his last round of chemo, is susceptible to coronavirus and understands that he needs to self-isolate, along with Mrs David. He tells me, in a fairly neutral way, I thought:

“(Mrs David) is doing her choir practise in the kitchen on her iPad for the first time ever, and it is working.’’

Peter from the Hinterland speculated that there is an important-sounding future PhD thesis in: “Priorities in Panic Buying as an Indicator of National Character.”

“Data I have noted to date (according to impeccably reliable newspaper reports):

Australia: toilet paper, then alcohol
Britain: toilet paper, then all groceries
Italy: pasta and tickets out of the country
USA: more guns
Argentina: viagra

Or as another Pete friend said, in a postscript to an email sent when we were travelling:

“Drive safe and keep your bum clean.”

More reading: Wise words from travel writer Lee Mylne https://aglasshalf-full.com/2020/03/23/a-freelance-writers-top-tips-for-working-from-home/

Lisa Southgate’s tips:

Michael’s tips https://matusik.com.au/?s=working+from+home

Tales of quarantine and homelessness

quarantine-homelessness — Image: Nurses wearing surgical masks during the 1918 Spanish Flu’ pandemic which killed 15,000 Australians and millions worldwide. State Library of Queensland CC

Had it not been for the coronavirus outbreak (the WHO calls it COVID-19), few Australians would have known of Manigurr-ma, a purpose-built accommodation village 30kms from Darwin.

Manigurr-ma, or Howards Springs as it is zoned by Australia Post, was built in 2012 at a cost of $600 million as part of the Ichthys LNG gas project. Developed by infrastructure company Aecom for the multinational INPEX consortium, the village can house up to 3,500 people in 875 accommodation units, each with four rooms. There is a 1,750-place dining hall, a commercial kitchen which can produce 10,000 meals per day, a licensed tavern, a cinema, medical centre and laundry.

For the next fortnight or so, the village will be home to 266 Australians evacuated from the coronavirus epicentre, the Chinese city of Wuhan. Despite assurances that the risk to the general public is minimal, Howard Springs residents are making their opinions known.

After the LNG plant at Howard Springs became fully operational in 2018, the village was closed, after housing 3,500 construction workers at its peak. In May last year, Ichthys LNG Pty Ltd transferred Manigurr-ma to the Northern Territory government at a ‘peppercorn’ rental. A spokesperson for the NT Government told FOMM a ‘have your say’ campaign was carried out last year.

“Proposals were received from a range of parties, including public feedback for the future use of the Village and its assets.

‘‘The various submissions will be considered in the final decision by the Government about how the site and its assets will be used”

FOMM notes that the proposal required submissions to be “commercially viable”.

Given that a shortage of housing is a key issue for Darwin’s homeless population, I hope someone threw that particular hat in the ring.

Quarantine, from the Italian Quarante (meaning ‘forty’), has been around since Old Testament days. The word referred to a rule introduced in Venice that all ships suspected of harbouring people with infectious diseases stood offshore for 40 days.

Several small islands off Venice known as Lazarettos were established in the 1600s when plague was rampant. Some of these off-limits islands were later converted to mental hospitals or convents. But as far as the general populace were concerned, they were, and still are, ghost towns.

Most countries had a place where people with leprosy or plague were banished. China had a well-established policy from 600 AD to detain plague-ridden sailors and foreign visitors, preferably at sea.

North Brother Island in New York’s East River was used for decades as the site of an infectious diseases hospital. A reporter from the New York Post who was recently taken on a guided tour of the now-closed station wrote that the island’s remote location was deemed perfect in the 1880s for a hospital to treat contagious smallpox and typhoid patients.

“Mary Mallon, who earned the name Typhoid Mary by passing the disease to 51 people while working as a cook in Brooklyn and Long Island, was its most infamous tenant. She displayed no symptoms herself, but was quarantined until her death in 1938.”

Sydney’s Quarantine Station at North Head (Manly) took in immigrants who had fallen ill (as well as some residents). As the authors of a book published in 2016 found, some recovered and were released. Some never made it out.

‘Stories from the Sandstone’, published in 2016 by the University of Sydney’s Peter Hobbins, Anne Clarke and Ursula Frederick, chronicled the history of Sydney’s Quarantine Station. The title of the book comes from archaeological discoveries of inscriptions carved into sandstone by some of the 16,000 people kept at North Head between 1830 until its closure in 1984.

In the mid-1880s, infectious illnesses like smallpox, tuberculosis and scarlet fever were common and there was even a recorded case of bubonic plague in 1900. As Dr Hobbins says in the book, as a result of extensive immunisation programmes, effective antibiotics and improvements in the public health system, infectious diseases do not decimate the population as they did in the 1800s or even during the Spanish ‘Flu pandemic of 1918-1919.

The most visible (and possibly the largest), quarantine station in the world in 2020 is the cruise ship Diamond Princess, moored off Japan with its 2,666 guests and 1,045 crew ‘couped (sic) up’ as an ABC report had it, until time dilutes the fear of contagion. Princess Cruises this week confirmed reports of 39 new coronavirus cases aboard the ship, berthed at Yokohama.

“We are following guidance from the Japan Ministry of Health on plans for disembarkation protocols to provide medical care for these new cases,” the website update states.

The Diamond Princess had been due to leave the Japanese port of Yokohama on February 4, but cancelled the cruise on advice from Japanese health authorities.

The cruise ship’s situation fits the definition of ‘quarantine’ – preventing the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease, but do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis.

The key difference between Coronavirus (now known as COVID-19) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) is that people with Coronavirus are infectious before exhibiting symptoms. This may explain the comparatively higher numbers of people contracting the disease and the overly-cautious approach to quarantine here and abroad.

A Medical Journal of Australia report compiled after the SARS epidemic had abated in 2004 demonstrated the effectiveness of Australia’s border screening. Of the 1.84 million arrivals into Australia during the study period, 794 people were referred for screening to the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. Of these, four travellers met the World Health Organisation (WHO) definition for SARS. None of these people were confirmed to have SARS.

The media loves contagion stories about as much as it drools over earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and croc and shark attacks. Are they beating it up? Time will tell. Whatever you read on social media, as of February 13, 2020, 15 Australians had been confirmed as being infected with coronavirus. Five have since recovered.

As usual, the trail of research leading into the history of quarantine stations lured me away from the point I wanted to make.

When the Northern Territory has 12 times the national average incidence of homelessness, how is it there are 875 living units sitting vacant near Darwin (for at least 18 months)?

NT Shelter estimates that 16.5% of Territorians under 16 are experiencing homelessness. The system seems unable to cope, with Shelter’s findings that 48% of people get turned away due to a ‘lack of resources’.

As Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison conceded, we are no closer to Closing the Gap. The policy was announced in 2008 with noble intentions to help bridge the gap between health and welfare outcomes for indigenous compared to non-indigenous Australians. There are no simple answers to the fact that 90% of the Territory’s homeless are indigenous. As a Triple J story revealed, a survey of non-indigenous people in Darwin revealed a lot of ignorance about ‘long-grassers’ – indigenous people who sleep rough.

Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation’s random survey of 300 people found the majority romanticised the notion of sleeping under the stars. Only six people identified a lack of housing, failed public policy and the impact of assimilation and integration policies as reasons for homelessness.

When the last person at Manigurr-ma is cleared to leave, it would be an interesting exercise, at the very least, to trial the centre as a homeless shelter. After all, though homelessness is not contagious, it does have far-reaching effects.

Fifty years of Cabinet secrets and media leaks

Cabinet-secrets-media-leaks — The magnet to the left of “Cabinet secrets — keep locked’ reads ‘The more people I meet the more I like my dog”.

The Australian Federal Police ‘raids’ on the ABC and a lone News Ltd journalist have been taken to signal a new era of scrutiny when confidential government files are leaked to the media. The media has gone overboard on the ‘journalism is not a crime’ front. As a former journo, I have adopted the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) Facebook frame in solidarity. But it is interesting to learn that that on June 5, the AFP was unable to rely on the much-feared espionage and foreign interference laws. An AFP spokesman confirmed that the revised secrecy offences inserted into the Criminal Code did not apply as the ‘alleged conduct’ occurred before the new law was enacted (in late 2018). The same can be said of a separate ‘raid’ on the home of News Ltd journalist Annika Smethurst.

The AFP said in a statement there was no link between the Smethurst and the ABC search warrants, which relate to separate allegations of publishing classified material ‘contrary to the provisions of the Crimes Act 1914’.

Barrister Gray Connolly, commenting in his blog Strategy Counsel, argues that the events of June 5 hardly constituted a ‘raid’. Much like the time on February 1, 2018, when ASIO visited ABC headquarters in Brisbane and Sydney to retrieve classified documents which had ‘accidently’ ended up there, the ABC knew the authorities were coming. On June 5, AFP officers signed in at the ABC front counter and the search was conducted peacefully.

Connolly also argues that just as the media claims it has rights to publish in the public interest, the government has rights and indeed a moral obligation to protect secrets, particularly those applying to Defence matters. And he exposes the folly of media calls for a US-style Bill of Rights to protect journalists, pointing to successive US governments pursuing whistleblowers, itself a threat to press freedom.

Law lecturer Rebecca Ananian-Welsh of the University of Queensland argues that the raids on Australian media present a ‘clear threat to democracy’. Ananian-Welsh, writing for The Conversation, said these developments were hardly a surprise, given the expansion of national security laws, notably enhanced data surveillance powers and the ‘secrecy’ offences introduced in late 2018.

“The crackdown of the past few days reveals that at least two of the core fears expressed by lawyers and the media industry were well-founded: first, the demise of source confidentiality and, secondly, a chilling effect on public interest journalism.”

Former head of ASIO Dennis Richardson told ABC Radio that (government) agencies needed to be “cautious” about referrals to the AFP.

“If you refer a matter to the AFP they take control of that, and it goes where it goes – they drop some, they pursue others,” he said.

Richardson understood the emotional reaction to the raids, but said it was “misplaced” to suggest the AFP was trying to intimidate the media.

“It might have had the consequence of that, but everything I know about the AFP would lead me to believe that the AFP is not in the space of deliberately setting out to intimidate the media.”

Nevertheless, the new secrecy laws have teeth, even if so far they have not bitten anyone. In an unprecedented display of bipartisan muscle, 15 competing media outlets and the journalists’ union last year lodged a submission to Parliament attempting to circumvent the espionage and foreign interference laws. Media publishers unsuccessfully sought an exemption for working journalists and now have to rely upon a ‘public interest’ defence. The new laws expanded the definition of espionage to include mere possession of classified documents, rather than the old offence of ‘communicating’ secrets.

This arguably makes working journalists, researchers and indeed anyone who physically handles leaked documents vulnerable to prosecution. Journalists are also fearful of controversial laws introduced last year which allow authorities to co-opt telecommunications companies to assist them in their investigations.

It’s a long way from the unruly 1970s, when Canberra leaked like Tim Finn’s lyrical boat. Political journalists made free with Cabinet secrets and leaked confidential information, earning the 1970s the sobriquet “the Xerox era”. This was because so many of the leaked documents were photocopied and furtively passed on.

One notable leak was Mungo MacCallum’s detailed story in 1972 of Australia’s rising opposition to the Vietnam War. The story was based on highly classified cables recording the Whitlam government’s criticism of US bombing operations in Vietnam (and the US government’s response).

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Philip Dorling, in a 2013 feature about famous political leaks, explained how MacCallum was so careful to cover his tracks he flew from Canberra to Melbourne to deliver the story in person to his then employers, The Nation Review. As Dorling described it, the story was “the equivalent of a political and diplomatic hand grenade”. Dorling says MacCallum was interviewed by the Commonwealth Police (forerunner of the AFP), and asked to reveal his source and hand over the leaked documents. He did neither, telling Dorling the affair was investigated in a ‘desultory’ way. The source of the leak was never uncovered.

If there’s a point to this, MacCallum, 77, is still writing fearless commentary about Australian politics. Dorling, a senior writer who has himself been raided twice by Federal police, made this prophetic observation in April 2013:

“Given the pervasive use of electronic devices and the evidence they produce, it is probably only a matter of time before a journalist is prosecuted for the little-known federal offence of knowingly receiving an unauthorised disclosure of Commonwealth government information.”

There were no such constraints involved with the 20^th century’s biggest political scoop. In 1980, political journalist Laurie Oakes climbed his way to the top of the Canberra Gallery flagpole by publishing the entire Federal Budget, the day before PM John Howard was scheduled to table the document in Parliament. Oakes told The Drum how he delivered one of the biggest leaks in Australian media history.

“I had a copy in my hand for a total of 15 minutes and garbled into a tape and read the whole budget. Later I had to transcribe my own garble, which was quite difficult.”

Governments have themselves been to blame for unauthorised leaking. Last year secret Federal Cabinet files dating back 10 years were found in two old filing cabinets, bought from a second hand shop by an ACT farmer. The farmer handed the documents over to the ABC. After some judicious publication, ASIO ‘raided’ the ABC to secure the Cabinet secrets. The ABC subsequently negotiated the return of the documents.

An investigation by the AFP found there was no criminal or malicious intent involved as the department had simply ‘lost track of’ the files. While the AFP investigation was not made public, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Martin Parkinson reported the results of the AFP probe and released a review by former Defence Secretary Ric Smith, urging reforms to security measures.

Smith’s review, which seeks to prevent a repeat of accidental leaking, reveals much about the strengths and weaknesses of government protection of secret data. Not the least is difficulty in recruiting, retaining and training staff. Smith also warns of the potential for similar incidents to occur in every government department.

The more serious implications of accidental leaking are the risks for innocent outsiders being caught by the new secrecy laws. Consider this a warning, should you ever find confidential documents at the local tip.

FOMM back pages https://bobwords.com.au/keeping-cabinet-secrets-safe/

Keeping Cabinet secrets safe

Zounds, it’s only the ninth day of February and some records have been set, including the biggest ever accidental leaking of Cabinet secrets. In un-related news, the weather bureau said last Saturday (the 3^rd) was the coldest February day in 100 years. We didn’t have a fire on because we had no dry wood, but some Hinterland folks were better organised. BOM said it was 18 degrees but with the rain, fog and all-day and all night drizzle, it felt like 16.

Our New Zealand, Canadian and UK friends and relatives would no doubt scoff at 16-18 degrees being described as chilly. But this is the sub tropics after all, and a week earlier we were enduring temperatures in the mid-30s.

Although it was comparatively balmy in Canberra last weekend (25/10, 27/14), the atmosphere was decidedly chillier. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull turned up for the ABC’s Insiders programme on Sunday vowing that “heads would roll” over the accidental disposal of two filing cabinets full of Cabinet secrets.

The cabinets went to a Canberra second hand office furniture store and were purchased by a citizen who later drilled them open. The (Parliamentary) Cabinet papers dating back 10 years, many marked Top Secret or AUSTEO (Australian Eyes Only), were handed to the ABC. The national broadcaster published nine stories based on the Cabinet secrets over the following days before explaining how they came into the broadcaster’s possession. The ABC deemed some material too sensitive for publication because of national security issues.

In the meantime, Australia’s spy agency ASIO visited ABC headquarters in Sydney and Brisbane and negotiated secure storage for the documents and eventually reclaimed the Cabinet secrets.

Patrick Weller, Griffith University’s Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, judged that the use of the papers by the ABC seemed random. “The ABC was probably aware they had limited time to play the story before it became public and everyone else jumped aboard,” he wrote in The Conversation.

“The story was more about the filing cabinets than the cabinet papers, about the carelessness rather than the content,” Prof. Weller said.

Prof. Weller argued that the leaking of (historical) Cabinet papers is not such a disaster for governments in that they are often time specific, advising about matters long forgotten and maybe even now seen as minor incidents.

As the rules go, historical Cabinet papers are made available after 30 years; once a year in January we get to see another batch. They make for interesting reading if you are a historian or a political academic, but rarely anything more than that. Prof Weller says most Cabinet papers could be released within five years. Only a few would matter.

International eyes on sloppy Aussies

Nevertheless, the story caught the attention of the world’s media and Australia’s international allies – the US, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. The Washington Post commissioned a piece from Australian writer Richard Glover, who pithily summarised the Cabinet secrets affair as “Deep Drawers”.

As Glover observed, the key problem with the sale of unchecked government furniture is that anyone could have bought them, then handed their contents to a foreign agent or government.

He quoted Andrew Wilkie, a former intelligence analyst now sitting MP: “It sends a signal to our intelligence partners and allies that Australia might not be trustworthy when it comes to sharing information and intelligence with us.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Sunday the “shocking failure” would be fully investigated and the people responsible held accountable.

“The idea that public servants, entrusted with highly confidential documents, would put them in a safe, lock the safe, lose the keys, and then sell the safe without checking what was in it – it beggars belief,” he told Insiders

It’s not just governments. Forbes magazine guest writer Mark Emery, director of a document management company, cited examples of big organisations mishandling confidential data. They included paper documents from four hospitals in Massachusetts found un-shredded in a public dumping facility. Another hospital in the same state admitted that personal records of 800,000 people were “missing”.

In Dallas, Texas, prisoners on parole were allowed to work off community service hours by sorting and shredding confidential documents, such as birth certificates and medical records. The practice was scrapped in 2012.

Richard Glover mentions similar circumstances in the 1990s when diplomatic bags were sent to be laundered at Wandsworth prison in the UK. In 1991, Canada’s diplomatic bags (full of top-secret NATO documents) were mistakenly sent there too, and went missing soon after.

Mistakes happen, in business, in government and in our private lives. Who has not sent a sensitive email intended for one person to many people? The digital data system is just as prone to this kind of mishap as the traditional paper file system.

When computers first started becoming dominant in business (in the 1990s), we were sold the myth of the “paperless office”. Twenty years later, even a micro-business like mine goes through a couple of reams of paper per month. Most people I know who run any kind of consulting business buy a shredder and keep it working (don’t forget to take staples out first!)

Last year in Sydney and Melbourne there were reports of medical files and legal papers found dumped in unlocked kerbside recycling bins. When stories like this make it into the media, they should at least make individuals aware of the need for safeguarding sensitive information.

In the 1980s, I’d been court reporting in a country city for several years. I always archived my jumbo-size reporters’ notebooks – filled on both sides with untidy scrawl – a mix of shorthand and my unique form of notetaking. The second time we moved house, I looked at the four archive boxes full of musty notebooks and decided I had to get rid of them.

I found a waste recycling firm which offered “secure disposal”. They dropped off a big wheelie bin at my place, the lid secured with chains and a padlock. Once I’d filled it up, I called the firm and they picked up the bin. The firm assured me the notebooks would be “burned or pulped”. This exercise cost $75, but what a salve for my conscience. The majority of matters heard in court never make it into the news or are briefly summarised. More importantly, magistrates and judges may decide to supress reporting. There was an example of a district court trial where I took copious notes only to find out that the defendants’ and plaintiffs’ names could not be published. Later a blanket ban was issued and we couldn’t print anything. Notwithstanding, a good court reporter will write everything down – better to have too much than not enough.

So that’s why I was feeling suitably smug, all these years later, when the strange case of “Deep Drawers” hit the news. It’s hard enough to keep secrets secret in the era of digital ‘cloud’ storage, super hackers and whistle-blowers. But Richard Glover’s oblique reference to “Deep Throat” (nickname of the Watergate source), nevertheless reminds us that if we want to discard sensitive paper files, dispose of them as I did.

If that was all a little heavy for an early autumn Friday, here’s a few songs about February to help you cope with the cold (or the heat).

The list did not include February, a poignant tune by Dar Williams, but here it is anyway.

John Hewson and integrity in a post-truth world

Photo of John Hewson – Crawford School of Public Policy

Nobody can call out an errant politician better than former Liberal Opposition Leader John Hewson. In the 22 years since he resigned from politics, Hewson has become a respected academic, the darling of TV panel shows like Q&A, and a regular on the celebrity speakers’ circuit. Yesterday, Hewson was a keynote speaker at Griffith University’s two-day summit, Integrity20.

Who better to address the opening topic “Post-Truth, Trust and the Ethics of Deceit?” Hewson has been speaking out about fake news and the propensity of politicians to stray from the facts, long before Donald Trump made it a catch phrase. He is also an advocate for evidence-based public policy, often identifying where politicians have used models and commissioned reports to suit their version of the facts.

So to Hewson’s opening address yesterday, where he used the climate change debate to support his argument for ‘evidence-based public policy’.

“We had a very hard-line position as a response to the climate challenge back in the early 1990s. I was calling for a 20% cut in emissions by the year 2000 off a 1990 base. We are yet to know how we are getting the 5% reduction in emissions by 2020 off a 2000 base. And of course, we’re committed under the Paris Accord to cut emissions by 26% to 28% by 2030.

“What’s happened over that period is drift – the issues have been left to drift. Housing affordability’s been left to drift, the climate response has been left to drift and the final line of that drift is the mess we have in the energy sector. Electricity and gas prices are running away to the point where the average household is struggling to afford to pay its power bills.

“These are the outcomes of negligent government over a very long period of time.”

Hewson believes the situation can be turned around, but it will take some years to reverse the damage. He said what the country needed was an honest debate about leadership.

“And leadership is going to be about telling people honestly the way it is. To get good policy up we have to educate people to accept the magnitude of the problem.

“But we don’t have any debate now in this country – it’s all negative. One side puts its hand up and says let’s do X and the other side immediately says no.”

One in three voted for someone else

He said people had lost faith in the two-party system. In the last election, one in three people did not vote for one of the major parties. The protest vote was not just something that had happened only in Australia, he added, citing Brexit, the US, France and Germany as recent examples.

“It’s a longer term trend and it will get worse before it gets better.”

The path to restoring voter confidence, he said, was by focusing on the issues that affect people – the cost of living, health, housing, childcare and education.

But the main problem was that the ‘wrong people’ were in government.

“If you asked them why they went into politics, they’d say to make a difference and leave a better world for their grandchildren.

“And then they do the opposite.’

Hewson, who will be 71 next Sunday, had a distinguished career in politics. He was leader of the Australian Liberal Party and Leader of the Opposition between 1990 and 1994. Before and after politics he has worked as a senior economist for organisations, including the Australian Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In this context, it seems uncharitable to recall that in 1991 he advocated an unpopular goods and services tax. He lost the 1993 election to Paul Keating over the “Fightback Package”, of which GST was a central element. Ironically, Paul Keating (who first advocated a GST in 1985), shamelessly exploited public opinion to thwart Hewson.

All that aside, Hewson at least clearly outlined what he was going to do in 1991-93 and stuck to it. He is known still as a straight shooter, a man who once said he lived in hope of ‘spin-free politics’.

Day one of the Integrity20 Summit was not just about politics and truth. ABC presenter James O’Loghlin chaired a panel discussion about solving the world’s problems through innovation.

Inventor and futurist Mark Pesce showed a short video of a robot working on a farm in Indonesia. He described it as just two wheels, an axle and a smartphone on the end of what looks like a selfie stick, collecting data and producing crop reports. These robots cost about $2,500 and can be shared around a farming community. He also demonstrated how 3D printers, aligned with a simple robot used in smart phone technology, can reproduce all the plastic parts to build another 3D printer. Eventually, robots will also be able to assemble the printers – and that’s just the edges of the innovations universe.

CSIRO scientist Stefan Hajkowicz said the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the future of work had been greatly over-stated. He thought there were many areas where robots and humans would work side by side – in hospitals for example. The robot would do the blood test and the nurse would soothe the patient’s concerns.

But it turns out robots are crap at irregular tasks we humans take for granted, A robot cannot tie your shoelaces, for example. And, as Hajkowicz added, they can’t fold towels. They tried to get a robot to fold a towel. It took 20 minutes and did the job badly.

Today I attended the final full-day session of Integrity20, hastily scribbling notes and pressing stop/start on my hand-held recorder. You may wonder how I met my deadline – marvel at my prowess.

M.Y Prowess (sub-editor): “Isn’t it time I had a byline?”

BW: Ghost writers should be read and not heard – and try using commas instead of dashes – please – some of my readers find it tiresome.”

Next week: Bryan Dawe on satire, media censorship and the global rise of populism.