Crispin Hull

The innovation statement brought down by the Government this week has much to commend it. Australia’s performance in research and development has been getting worse for a decade. The percentage of GDP Australia spends on research and development is well below that of major Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development countries, and below even some countries emerging from the old Eastern Bloc, such as the Czech Republic. It has been causing a brain drain, as discouraged researchers left Australia to places where their talents were better recognised and those that had invented and discovered left to places which took a greater financial interest in developing.

In an increasingly globalised economy, Australia has been in danger of losing its position in the top rank of nations on the standard-of-living scale. In this environment, Australia could no longer rely on natural resources as the main component of wealth generation. The lesson of the past decade or so has been that brains and education generate wealth.

In an election year, it is easy to question the motives of a Government.
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New rules for job-seekers announced last week by Community Services Minister Larry Anthony verge on the petty and vindictive. At present job-seekers are obliged to do between two and eight job interviews a fortnight. Under new rules that will rise to between four and 10. The more remote and fewer jobs there are in an area the fewer interviews have to be done. Mr Anthony hinted that people might be forced to move to places where there is more work — a move that would give rise to charges of hypocrisy given that Mr Anthony’s boss refuses to live where his job is. The unemployed do not have the luxury of moving much of the work to their preferred place of abode, however. Moreover, it is unfair to ask jobless people to move away from family and other support networks, especially for low paid work. It is an outlook that sees people as units of production rather than human beings seeking happiness.

The justification for the new rules appears to be the jobs boom in Sydney. The theory is that no-one serious about looking for work should be unemployed in Sydney. The fact that there are unemployed people in Sydney indicates they are not trying hard enough, so the Government will make they try harder by insisting that they go on more job interviews.

The bizarre thing about the new proposal is that it has put a higher burden on the unemployed in job-scarce regional Australia than on people where there is more work. In job-scarce places the number of job interviews an unemployed person has to do has doubled. In job-rich areas it has gone up just 25 per cent. True, in absolute terms jobless people in both areas have to do two more interviews each, but the increase in percentage shows how silly the Government’s thinking is. Where there are fewer jobs the percentage increase in job interviews goes up more.
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The collapse of Hunter Valley company National Textiles reveals again the urgency of the question of protecting employee entitlements. The Government and the Minister for Workplace Relations, Peter Reith, have attempted to pass blame to the states for the fact that 342 workers will lose their entitlements. The company can pay only $3.5 million of $7 million owed.

Mr Reith argued that the delay by NSW to agree to contributing to a national scheme was to blame. Not so. He and his government should have acted with leadership and diligence more than a year ago when the problem became evident. They should have put in place a comprehensive scheme to protect employees. That they did not indicates that their priorities lie with favouring employers when they should be acting more impartially. How long does it take to enact laws that will make it more difficult to misspend their employees money and to rearrange priorities of payments if they do?

The scheme proposed by Mr Reith is not good enough. It sets a cap of $20,000 per worker for owed pay and leave. Mr Reith argues the need for a cap because he says taxpayers should not have to pick up the tab for unlimited entitlements. He is right about taxpayers not picking up an unlimited tab. But he is wrong about a cap on entitlements. Mr Reith’s scheme should include a mechanism that prevents employers from using their employees’ money as working capital in the business. Employers should be made to pay entitlements into a trust fund, perhaps set up by the Tax Office. Employers are obliged by law to remit PAYE and other tax instalments taken out of pay every week or every fortnight as a matter of law. So it should be straightforward to insist that leave, long-service leave and other entitlements are also sent to the tax office, or at least a sizeable percentage be remitted.
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A debate has been running this week over access to medical records.

The Australian Medical Association wants medical records to remain confidential between doctor and patient unless each individual patient gives permission for the records to be used or the records are de-identified.

But there are other interests at stake, individual and general. On and individual level, it would be helpful if some or all parts of a patient’s records were available on computer to every emergency ward in the country. The records of an unconscious patient might show things like drug incompatibilities, allergies, illness records which will enable emergency doctors to avoid inappropriate treatment. On a general level, records of patients are an invaluable aid to medical research. At present the controlled trial is often the only medially accepted way of telling the value of a treatment. True it is the best way, but it is expensive and time-consuming. With the aid of modern data-creating techniques on computer, researchers could add immeasurably to medical knowledge. Moreover, in Australia there are huge untapped databases of raw information with the Health Insurance Commission (Medicare, pharmaceuticals and veterans), state health departments (hospital admissions) and private insurers. Further, if doctors abandoned paper records and comptuerised, data could be collected more easily. Cross correlations on treatment, lifestyle, age, sex, medication could yield important results which would be better than our present void in many areas of treatment.
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Prime Minister John Howard is suffering from the same difficulty faced by an earlier reforming Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Mr Whitlam bemoans that change was always difficult because those who supported change were at best luke warm, whereas those who were against a change were usually vehemently against it.

It is probably because it is more difficult to see benefits than it is to see the detriment of change. Opponents of change will seize on any point and make the most of it. And so it is with the GST on tampons. Women see an immediate detriment. At present there is no wholesale sales tax on tampons. After July 1, there will be a GST on them and their price will rise accordingly. In theory, the Government’s tax reforms should offset this because of cuts to income tax and other efficiencies gained by a more streamlined tax system. Women could pay the 10 per cent GST on tampons out of their tax cuts. The amount is trivial. But the symbolism of it is not.

So how could the Government have made such a political hash of it? — In a word insensitivity.

The issue could have been handled so much better. Instead, Health Minister Michael Wooldridge made inappropriate comparisons with shaving cream and condoms. The former has a wholesale sales tax on it now, so will come down in price with the GST. If the latter can be classified as a health item, surely tampons can be, too. Besides, tampons are a necessity. Dr Wooldridge made matters worse by accusing the Women’s Electoral Lobby of being funded by tampon manufacturers, as if women were incapable of running their own campaign.
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Few countries in the world treat their national day with such ambivalence as Australia. National days in the United States, France, India, for example, are celebrated with universal acclaim.

In Australia, though, we continue to argue over the appropriateness of the day. Many indigenous Australians say that January 26 marks invasion day when Europeans came to Australia and dispossessed them. That argument has emotional appeal, but no logic. There are very few full-blood indigenous people living today. Nearly all owe some of themselves to the gene pool that arrived after 1788. Still, logic is not the issue. The question of a National Day is an emotional and spiritual one. If a significant portion of the population reject the day, then either the day must change or at least the marking of it must change.

Aside from indigenous objections, January 26 marked the founding of the colony of NSW, so the other states, particularly Western Australia which was never part of NSW, might felt left out.

And then January 26 might be seen more as an Anglo-Australian celebration in that it marks an extension of the British Empire. The convicts, particularly the Irish convicts, who resented authority leave a legacy that does not actively celebrate January 26.
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Opposition Leader Kim Beazley must have spent too much time on the beach during his summer holidays. He has been seeing too much empty Australian coastline. On his return from holidays on Monday he announced that Labor would set up a coast guard, “a maritime cop on the beat” to fight illegal immigration, drugs and other border problems. It was good populist stuff. It played on people’s fears of being swamped by illegal immigrants. It conjured up images from American television programs of speeding boats protecting freedom and justice against evil.

A coast guard might make good sense for the US and some other countries, but not Australia. There is little if any evidence that the Australian Defence Force, Coastwatch (a branch of the Customs Service) Australian Search and Rescue (a branch of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority) are not doing an adequate job. There is little or no evidence to suggest that any better job would be done with a coast guard.

Australia’s large unpopulated coastline might seem like a liability when it comes to coastal surveillance. In fact it is more an asset. People and drug smugglers are more noticeable in sparsely populated places. They stick out more. Moreover, the people being smuggled find it hard to blend in. Chinese people smugglers tried to get closer to the main population bases for this very reason. In the north-west the people simply do not make it to major population centres and illegal work.
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The Institution of Engineers has pointed to the dangers of de-skilling the public-sector in a study issued last week. The institution is a professional body and not exactly a hot-bed of big-government thought.

It suggests that down-sizing and out-sourcing in the public sector might have led to such disasters as the fire on HMAS Westralia, the explosion at the Esso Longford gas plant and the Royal Canberra Hospital implosion.

The report could not have been more timely. Presumably while it was being printed another catastrophe unfolds with the Mobil aviation fuel contamination. It has been suggested that regulators had stopped fuel inspections several years ago. They might have avoided the problem.

Each of these cases has resulted much human misery and the loss of millions of dollars in costs to industry and costs of inquiries and compensation.
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Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser has had an interesting change of thinking over defence. Formerly an ardent supporter of the American alliance, he now sees it as dangerous. He warns that it might get Australia into a dangerous war with China that it would not win.

Mr Fraser’s change of mind comes about through a change in the position of the US in the past decade rather than a change in his own core belief which presumably the best defence of Australia.

The reason for Mr Fraser’s rethink is that with the end of the Cold War, the strategic position has changed radically. We now have one super-power not two. And that super-power, the US, according to Mr Fraser is playing its hand in Asia in a way that could be contrary to Australia’s best interest.

That argument has some difficulty. True, the Cold War is over, but Russia is still a nuclear power. Moreover, its new president Vladimir Putin has recently issued a new policy on Russia’s nuclear arsenal. He says it must be kept in good shape. It is too easy to dismiss this as domestic grand-standing of no consequence. The trouble is that domestic grand-standing is most often the prime reason for leaders taking their nation to war. That is precisely what is happening in Chechnya now.
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The lesson is clear for the government school system. Perform to parents’ expectations and the money will be available. Don’t perform and parents will vote with their feet and take their children to private schools. And under the Federal Governments enrolment benchmark adjustment scheme money will be taken from state governments and handed directly to private schools.

This was made clear by Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on schooling issued this week.

The benchmark scheme has a certain amount of raw attractiveness. However, it has several flaws. The major flaw is that it does not allow for economies of scale. Education cannot be costed on a strict per-capita basis. For a school to educate an extra child costs virtually nothing. But to educate the first child requires huge capital and labour investment. Taking money away on a per-capita basis is wrong. It has the potential to cripple the government sector. And as the government sector suffers from less money, parents are more likely to take their children away from it. The Federal Government’s scheme will become a self-fulfilling prophesy that private schools will take a larger slice of the cake. This is unless the teachers and administrators at government schools see the urgency of the situation and retain parental confidence in the government system.

The second difficulty with the benchmark scheme is that it is not predicated on any objective test on the standard of education offered. Rather is is based on parental judgment based on what parents do with their children.
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