The democracy conundrum. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

G’Day. I did a rave at a recent politics in the pub do organised by the Redfern Peace Group, after which a bloke called Cameron Andrews told me about a new political discussion group with the daunting aim of reviving Liberalism.

Cameron used to work for former NSW Democrats Senator Vicki Bourne and was incoming NSW president of the Democrats when the party fell apart last year. He wrote a piece for Webdiary about where the Democrats needed to position themselves to survive which I published in Across the Democratic divide in July last year. I’ve republished it at the end of this entry.

Anyway, he left the Dems and now works for David Barr, the independent state member for the North Shore seat of Manly. He and others – including Syd Hickman, a former ALP adviser – have formed The Reid Group, to be launched next Tuesday in NSW Parliament House. Here’s a piece on the Reid Group Cameron wrote for Webdiary, followed by an invitation to the launch. The group’s website is reidgroup.

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The Reid Group: a forum for national renovation

by Cameron Andrews

The term ‘liberal’ has taken a battering in Australia. After a century of misappropriation by conservative politicians, the mere utterance of the word liberal is now met by scorn and derision from anyone who believes in a progressive vision for Australia. But it hasn’t always been so.

Australia has a fine tradition of genuine liberalism. In the late 1800’s it was the dominant paradigm in Australian political life. Our country led the way in introducing liberal reforms like extending suffrage, creating public education and health systems, improving working conditions, and encouraging religious (though, sadly, not racial) tolerance. We were seen as a laboratory for democracy to which other liberal-minded nations should aspire.

As NSW Premier (1894-1899), and fourth Prime Minister (1904-1905), George Reid’s moderate and pragmatic approach to politics epitomised a true liberal leader. As Minister for Public Instruction in the Stuart Government in 1883, George Reid did the hard work in setting up New South Wales world-leading public secular education system. When he later succeeded Parkes to become Premier, Reid reformed land laws, introduced a public health act, modernised the public service, and championed a strong and open economy through his passionate belief in free trade. He believed that Government was about creating equality of opportunity, was cautious with finances, and strongly opposed conservatism.

Yes-No Reid, as he was known, was also a key player in the Federation debate. His refusal to publicly endorse an early version of the Constitution led to the first Federation referendum being defeated in NSW. Reid later reconvened a meeting of the Premiers and successfully negotiated a substantially improved version of the Constitution, which was then voted on and accepted by the Australian people.

George Reid was destined to become Australia’s first Prime Minister, but was denied this honour by the prevarications of the newly emergent Labor Party. Reid’s rejection of the populist position on Federation left him open to attack from opponents and weakened his standing in the electorate. He finally gained the Prime Ministership in 1904, but only held office for eleven months.

The rapid growth of the Labor Party proved to be Reid’s downfall. While he had worked hard to improve the lives of working people, such as through better mining regulation and the introduction of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act, Reid was vehemently anti-socialist. In 1908, he sacrificed a lifetime commitment to free trade in order to oppose socialist Labor by allowing his Free Trade Party to be fused with the Protectionists. This new Liberal Party moved away from its liberal roots and aligned itself with conservative rural interests in order to counterbalance the fast-growing ALP.

George Reid’s liberal legacy is little known. He kept little in the way of diaries or correspondence, and much of the material on Reid has been written by his opponents. The illiberalism of the modern so-called Liberal Party means they have shown no interest in maintaining his memory.

The Liberal Party of Australia, its modern incarnation having been reformed by Menzies in the 1940s, has now left any pretence to true liberalism far behind. As a party of social conservatism and market fundamentalism it is more closely aligned with the conservative English Tories and American Republicans, than any true liberal party. Indeed, Prime Minister Howard is the Chairman of the International Democrat Union a conservative and Christian alliance of which arch-conservatives Ronald Reagan and George Bush snr were founders.

A century on, there is no party, or group, in Australia occupying the true liberal position.

Today, Australia’s true liberals have become a weak and fragmented force dispersed among many political camps. Our once great liberal public institutions are under attack, support for tolerance and diversity is in decline, and the demands of special interest groups are being allowed to burden the economy. The aspects of liberalism which have from time-to-time been pursued by both sides of politics are now being subsumed by the mean-spirited individualism that much of the current thinking is geared towards.

The Reid Group, to be launched next week, seeks to provide a forum for the revival of Australian liberalism through the promotion of policy and ideas that will lead to a revitalisation of our public institutions, an open and environmentally sustainable economy, the growth of the community sector, empowered local communities, and efficient government.

The Reid Group does not merely seek to be yet another addition to the ranks of the old left. The failure of the old left to recognise the death of socialism means that it is now completely irrelevant to the majority of Australians. Riven with contradictions, bereft of ideas, and obsessed with the negative, the old-left’s inability to reorganise itself is now allowing the thinking of the so-called new-Right to run rampant. A better approach is needed.

Any proposal for a new vision for Australia must take into account the new factors driving social change in Australia: increased individual responsibility, over-stretched and under-resourced public institutions, a more pluralist and complex society, and a new role for corporate responsibility.

The Reid Group seeks to promote a positive vision for an open economy, progressive society, and sustainable future. Nothing less than a national renovation of Australian political life is required to renew Australia’s place as the open, liberal society to which all should aspire.

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INVITATION TO THE LAUNCH OF THE REID GROUP

Tuesday 19th August at 1.30pm. Jubilee Room, NSW Parliament House. All welcome

George Reid – Australia’s only true liberal leader

As Premier of New South Wales (1894-1899) and Prime Minister of Australia (1904-1905), George Reid lay the foundation for Australia’s secular public education system, eliminated patronage and corruption from the public service, introduced a public health act, reformed land laws, and championed a strong and prosperous economy through his passionate belief in free trade. His moderate and pragmatic approach to politics helped create a tolerant and prosperous Australia. The merging of George Reid’s Free Trade Party with the Protectionists in 1908 saw Australian liberalism pushed into the background. A century later and there is no party or group in Australia occupying the true liberal position.

The Reid Group – A forum for the revival of Australian liberalism

The Reid Group seeks to promote a national renovation of Australian political life and renew Australia’s place as an open society based on liberal values.

The Reid Group supports:

* Revitalising our public institutions

* Strengthening support for an open and environmentally sustainable economy

* Encouraging the growth of the community sector

* Devolving government authority and empowering local communities

* Maximising the efficiency of government

Launch speakers: Cameron Andrews – Chair of the Reid Group and former Australian Democrats State President, Syd Hickman – Deputy Chair of the Reid Group, speechwriter and former ALP senior adviser.

Launch hosted by: David Barr MP Independent Member for Manly. RSVP/Information: info@reidgroup.org, 0414 366 383

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Division in the Democrats is not new

by Cameron Andrews, July 2002

Some say it goes back to the party’s beginnings. As a party born from the marriage of the Australia Party and New Liberal Movement there has always been an internal tension between traditional left and small l liberal thinking.

That the Democrats have been so successful – despite these internal contradictions – reflects the strength, skill and resolve of a succession of strong and potent leaders over the party’s 25 year history. The clarity of vision shown by Chipp, Haines and Kernot galvanised the party and give it political direction. They were rewarded with the balance of power in the Senate and the opportunity to play a role in shaping the future of the nation.

Now, at a time of weakness, the welding that held the political fault line together has opened up, with very public and potentially disastrous consequences.

The Democrats are not alone in experiencing an internal clash of ideology. A rapidly changing political landscape is calling into question the relevance of all our traditional party structures.

In the Hawke/Keating years Labor forged a highly successful alliance between its working class roots and a new class of urban, tertiary educated social progressives. The Accord with the unions allowed Labor to embrace the economic reforms that attracted the Chardonnay socialists into the fold.

Labor’s recent defeat is conclusive proof that this alliance is unravelling. Labor’s traditional working class support base is rapidly evolving into what Labor frontbencher Mark Latham describes as the aspirational voter – a new breed that more readily identifies with Howard’s portrayal of mainstream Australia than Labor’s brand of a fair go for all.

The Liberal Party, while seemingly unassailable under the politically ruthless stewardship of Howard, also faces an uncertain future. Backbench revolt over issues like changes to media ownership regulation, anti-terrorism legislation and the International Criminal Court point to an internal rupture between the conservatives and the genuine liberals.

The party’s move to the right may have won back the disaffected Hansonites and given Howard a third term, but has left many liberals questioning why they should continue to belong. The party’s failure to hold government in any state in Australia also points to a decay in its party structure.

Even the Greens, currently enjoying a wave of popular support as the protest party of choice, is showing early signs of a conflict between its environmentalist founders and the recent influx of the socialist left. Bob Brown’s recent outburst on Telstra and his subsequent silencing by his party may be a sign of tensions to come now that NSW red Senator Kerry Nettle has joined Senator Brown in the Senate.

If there is to be a future for the Democrats it doesn’t lie in petty bickering over who should be leader. The current turmoil presents the party with the opportunity to finally resolve the crisis of identity that has loomed over the party since its foundation. Going back to Meg or rallying behind Natasha will both lead to political destruction if the underlying root cause of the division is left undiscussed and untreated.

The Democrats have to make a definitive statement as to which stream they will follow. The political landscape is changing in a way which forces the party, even if unwillingly, to reevaluate its identity. As the Greens now firmly occupy the fundamentalist left and both Liberal and Labor have abandoned any pretence of liberalism, the small l liberal course presents an enormous opportunity to take advantage of an emerging political landscape that is leaving the small l liberal voter with no representation. This has been the option pursued by the Liberal Democrats in England which, coupled with excellent campaigning, has led to their recent spectacular rise.

If the Democrats cannot take that decisive step, the only alternative will be to entertain a formal split. The Senators who most closely align with the small l liberal approach have the opportunity to stand as independents. The media attention that such a move would attract would give this group the opportunity to create a new identity and party structure. They would then be free to focus their efforts on developing the policies and vision needed to contest the next election.

The remaining Senators under Stott Despoja, as discussed by political commentators including you, would then face open competition with the Greens.

Times of crisis present opportunity for rebirth and change. With courage and vision the Democrats can embrace the opportunity that the current crisis brings and, with it, the chance to genuinely change politics in Australia.

G’Day. More reader reaction to ethanol and Brendan Nelson’s nastiness to end the week, including more from Mitchell Beston, who explains why this traditional Labor voter is sticking by Howard. To begin, more bad ABC news.

The Australian’s Amanda Meade has a sad story today on major cuts worth $5.4 million to ABC current affairs. (ABC cuts corners on current affairs). She writes:

A cut of $5.4 million to the ABC’s news and current affairs budget has delivered a savage blow to its flagship, Four Corners, which will be forced to shorten its season, curtail its international coverage and rely more on buy-ins from foreign broadcasters.

All other programs in the news and current affairs stable will be forced to cut back on staff or come off air for several weeks each year under the ABC’s cost-cutting drive.

The Four Corners team was given the bad news yesterday. The program will lose three episodes a year and journalists will be encouraged to seek co-productions with other broadcasters to share costs and to minimise travel.

One journalist said it was the worst cut in a decade and the program’s coverage of international affairs would be severely compromised by a lack of overseas travel.

Other programs in the news stable have not had their cuts detailed yet, but The 7.30 Report is likely to lose staff and the award-winning Australian Story is expected to be trimmed from 40 weeks a year to 37.

When asked who would scrutinise the activities of Packer and Murdoch after the government lets the big two buy just about everything under his new media ownership laws, Richard Alston claims the ABC will do the job. Fat chance! The government is trying to destroy Fairfax and the ABC at the same time, leaving the big two and Howard to avoid scrutiny and divide the spoils.

As you know, I’m on a committee organising a campaign to try to stop the Senate passing the cross media legislation when the government presents it again in October. Our website is still a work in progress, but have a look at Xmedia and let me know what you think.

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BRENDAN NELSON’S CENSORSHIP SPIN (See Nelson hides behind Sir Humphrey and Nelson’s purge escalates as the education department burns)

Jonathan Pagan

Disclosure: I am an Arts/Law student at Sydney Uni completing an Honours year in Philosophy, mostly focussed on Ethics, Responsibility and Philosophy of Law. I am also a volunteer refugee caseworker for Amnesty International.

I just wanted to draw your attention to a wonderfully appropriate typo in ‘Nelson’s purge escalates as the education department burns’. Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet head Peter Shergold says:

I think the ministerial adviser and the public servant have complimentary roles.

Too funny! They most certainly do, and that’s the problem isn’t it ? It would be nice if they had complementary and disinterested roles instead, but there you go.

I notice Shergold also says that ministerial advisers are responsible to the Parliament through their Ministers. Well, that’s risible. Just look at Jane Halton (PM’s helper on the PM’s People Smuggling Taskforce). The buck stops with the Minister. If their advisers screw up, they take the responsibility. It’s not very complicated really. Shergold says as much.

So I have a question. Out of curiosity, when was the last time a Minister (from either side of the ideological fence) actually resigned? I don’t mean one that was stabbed in the back and then had it dressed up as a resignation – when did a Minister accept responsibility for a screw-up and resign? I certainly can’t remember one.

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Peter Funnell in Canberra

I thought Children Overboard ate everything for audacious, cynical manipulation of the public service, but this one indicates that it is in effect “policy”! Defended by the Head of PM&C – again. This is very dangerous stuff for our democracy, mate. When does the bloody bell ring for people? I hope it’s soon, but…

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Peter Woodforde in Canberra

It appears that the high research standards insisted on by those who doctor official documents for the lacklustre federal Minister for Education do not apply to official records of meetings of the Prime Minister or other matters of cooked-up “context” – the demise of bulkbilling, the cock-up in defence spending, the grubby Pacific refugee bribery program, Manildra, Tampa, SIEV-X and kids overboard.

Oh, and weapons of mass destruction. Those flames you see are the pants of the entire Howard frontbench going up in smoke. This government does not tell the truth.

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Robert Lawton

An interesting issue is stuck away at the end of the August 8 Herald editorial 5.8.03 editorial:

“The debate… has been about what is a fair balance between public subsidy and private contribution. The Department of Education’s finding that fee increases are now discouraging poorer and older students – especially away from expensive, high-status courses such as law and medicine – is a crucial part of this debate. Broad access to higher education protects social and economic mobility based on merit and effort – a concept deeply embedded in the Australian psyche. Within the existing user-pays model, barriers to entry to universities could be addressed through means-tested scholarships or fee relief, for example. No solution, however, can be formulated unless all the facts are on the table.”

I have little sympathy for these people [the discouraged ex-aspirant solicitor or doctor]… potentially very wealthy professionals once their courses are finished and they are a few years out of university.

Frankly the trend away from law and medicine is due to something else even more “deeply embedded in the Australian psyche” (and by the way, who let that ancient cliche go by the delete button??)

I’m talking about making money fast with minimum effort. Rum Corps ring a bell?? People with IT and business degrees are replacing the old professional graduates. You might not like that, but that’s not the heart of the story as written.

I think Shergold has noted the varying levels of embeddedness of these “concepts” and gone with the one that makes sense in these times.

The political manipulation of the issue is another matter. As I said, it is what governments do now.

Is this really such a scandal? Where’s the significant policy issue? The real issue in this story is making sure that graduates pay for AND care for the institutions which fuel their success.

ETHANOL

Peter Woodforde in Canberra: As a fun-loving Kirribilli party-hound, the Prime Minister should know that if you line up for a full Brazilian under the influence of alcohol, within a short time you’ll be facing all kinds of prickly questions.

Pierre du Parte in Worrigee, NSW: Just read Mitchell Beston’s email in Guilty, your worship, but who cares? wherein he says, “The Australian people … are more concerned with the destination than they are with the journey, and rightly so.” I am NOT enjoying the journey – and fear the destination even more.

Jonathan Pagan in Sydney: Destination rather than journey, Mitchell Beston? So the ends justify the means, do they? Why do you think he makes those ambiguous and heavily qualified statements, Mitchell? May I suggest it is because he has no intention of being held responsible for any nastiness that should result, while if it all turns out well he will be there hugging service women and men, shaking battlers hands and generally providing the ringing endorsements and I-told-you-sos? That may be good politics, but it is also immoral, irresponsible and down-right despicable. Some leader.

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Simon Disney

I used to be an adviser/researcher to six Democrat Senators and MLC’s, including John Coulter, who pushed for years for an ethanol bounty which was eventually introduced by the Keating Government for three years. (I was most recently employed by the Dems as industry, environment and transport adviser to Meg Lees.)

I am probably one of the few people now in this debate who have actually met all the key players at some stage and have actually been to the Manildra plant near Nowra – and who have absolutely no vested interest either political or financial.

Politics and porkies aside, I can’t help feeling sorry for Dick Honan. He’s a smart self made bloke, but probably not the most sophisticated political player on the block. I get the feeling that all he wants to do is run a business that he believes is of some benefit to the country and the environment and that he holds politicians generally at all levels – like the rest of the community – with a fair degree of contempt.

I first visited the Manildra ethanol plant in Nowra in around 1993. Honan had not yet put it into full commercial production, but I was amazed at the ingenuity of the plant and the brilliance of Dr Russell Reeves, the quiet Dungog-based research scientist who developed the enzymes that broke down the waste product gluten to convert it into ethanol.

Honan had bought the majority of the plant lock stock and barrel (from Italy I think) from a company that had gone broke and shipped it over. There were bloody great stainless steel vats lying around in a paddock. Previously, the Manildra company had been under fire for polluting the local creek and had a problem getting rid of the gluten from their flour milling operation.

Manildra, by using their noggins, turned a hard to dispose of polluting waste product into an environmentally friendly, biofuel.

All this crap about car engine damage is precisely why we need a limit on how much you can put in petrol. A blend of 10% in four stroke petrol engines is fine as is a limit of 15% in diesel. Ethanol in diesel can also reduce black sooty particulate emissions by up to 50%. It can damage some plastic parts in some 1980’s car’s fuel systems and cause the fuel gauge of one particular model of 80’s Falcon to misread a bit- but that’s about it as far as I know.

Dr Russell Reeves has also developed enzymes that break down lignocellulosics (the stringy stuff that holds plants and trees together), which means that all those kazillions of green waste bins people drag up their driveways once a week could potentially be used to make biofuel- as could a range of crop wastes and other wastes.

I suppose my point is that the potential is there for dozens of regional ethanol plants in the rust-belt towns and states of Australia to be built. These would use farm wastes and city waste to produce biofuel that keep down fuel prices for farmers. In these days of non-tariff barriers to trade, etc, keeping down farm fuel costs (perhaps the biggest bill in the average farmer’s shoebox) is one of the only ways we can keep a legitimate price edge over some of our overseas competitors.)

The current bun-fight will do nothing to provide a bit of hope and employment to people in RARA-land. People wondered how and why the Hanson phenomena took off like a mid-January bushfire. It was because nobody was offering them any hope.

It looks as though yet again, ‘Canberra’ is going to snuff out another bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

Come the next election, let’s hope that the light at the end of the tunnel is not another steam train full of angry Hanson-type voters heading for the major parties.

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Mitchell Beston in Woy Woy, NSW

I just find it fascinating that people expect our Prime Minister to be morally perfect. He is no different to any other Government that has run my country while I have been alive. I have been a Labor voter traditionally, however I feel that the Labour Party is too focused on minority groups whereas the Liberal Party is focusing on middle Australia.

I hate the way that American culture is invading the Australian way of life, but I am also realistic enough to realise that as an unimportant country in the great scheme of things, our best opportunity to move forward while other countries flounder is to get in bed with the USA. I am hoping that in 40 years time, our country is much the same as it is today.

I grew up in PNG. When you have lived in another country, it enables you to understand how great our country is. I am continually dismayed at how Australia’s people denigrate this country and its Prime Minister when comparatively we are well above the average as a country and John is trying to keep it that way.

PS: To Andrew Byrne – the police were out and about on the Thursday too. Looks like it’s back to the drawing board. Oh, and the threat actually occurred at around lunchtime, not in the late afternoon.

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David Shanahan

With all the discussion of politicians lying and covering it up afterwards I’d like to suggest we voters adopt a new policy towards them – zero tolerance of politicians lying to us. As soon as a pollie (ANY pollie, party is irrelevant) is caught fibbing in parliament or during an election campaign we all agree to vote against them (or their party) at the next election – no excuses, no forgiveness, completely zero tolerance for liars and the party they belong to.

It is useless to keep complaining about them or expect their laughable “codes of conduct” to improve things. Only tough love will cure them of this cancer that grows worse every year. WE are the only ones who can stop it.

Just saying (as so many of Johnny’s supporters are currently, and Paul’s did years ago) “Oh they all lie, what can you do about it?” achieves nothing and in fact encourages them to keep doing it.

It will require discipline and planning on the part of us voters – every time a politician lies and gets caught we need to write it down in an “election diary” that we can consult before we next cast our votes. They know we have short memories, and people like Peter Reith and Max Moore-Wilton will soon be forgotten, so write it down so you remember how they lied to you at the next election!

Get angry, get very angry. Go to the polls in a white hot rage and let them have it where it hurts. Do it with hatred in your heart – irrespective of what party they belong to, whether you have a job or not, whether the value of your house has gone up or down since the last election and whether you like the opposing candidates or not.

It’s for their own good, they’ll thank us later… We’ll only have to do it a couple of times before their behaviour changes, I promise.

Of course once they start telling us the truth we’ll have to face up to some unpleasant truths. We’ll be faced with difficult choices, and we’ll have to stop hiding behind politicians skirts on many issues. Hmm, maybe that’s why we’re where we are today?

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Matt Walker

Jack Robertson writes of the ethanol scandal in No clothes, John, but what a spinner!:

“(It) captures beautifully the cowardly, corrosive, buck-passing, arse-covering sickness of this now out-of-control and civically-bankrupted gaggle of conmen and women we call Federal Government. Howard’s personal tactical armoury, and thus that of the entire crowd, is now nothing but a grab-bag of all our most base Human instincts. Division, populist stirring, bureaucratic delay and ‘security’ suppression, policy hypocrisy and piecemeal opportunism, waffling obfuscation, faked conviction, endless condescending exploitation of the battler, the Anzac, the non-existent Ordinary Australian….”

Thank you Jack, you have sadly summed up my deep loathing for everything John Howard is, everything John Howard says, and everything John Howard stands for.

I keep having this horrible feeling every time that I see the newspaper, seeing the endorsement of his spins, his lies, the continual deceiving of us and the compete apathy of a nation. A nation that is just VERY happy not to know, not make a fuss, and just go on about your business.

Australia is now Howard’s own Matrix – Which pill do you choose, the Blue or Red pill, Oh the dilemma !!! Plug me back in for f…ks sake.

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John Crockett

As Alston says of the ABC, “You can’t have Caesar judging Caesar”. Perhaps the same panel that investigates allegations of bias should determine whether Howard lied to parliament.

This is really 3rd world stuff – crony capitalism and a corrupt public service.

I still can’t work out Howard – is he delusional? Surely he cannot pretend that his debasement of democratic traditions and conventions is in the interests of the Australian people. Are any back-benchers worried by his performance? What are they saying in the board rooms?

This little creep should be laughed out of office. This is a government beyond shame, satire, scruple, or restraint.

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Meg Ryan (nom de plume)

Running inexorably through Guilty, your worship, but who cares?are two inextricably linked themes – the state of the Howard mentality and the state of the nation’s mentality. Are these two related?

Increasingly, John Howard seems to employ a language to describe his actions which, whether by accident or design, follow a circuitous route into some murky nether region never to be seen again. Whatever did happen to those WMDs, children overboard and the legal, not to mention the human rights of detainees?

Nearer perhaps to the nation’s heart, whatever happened to the huge wine bill racked up by our noble leader? Did he ever manage to put his hand in his pocket and pay for that one? Who knows? Does anybody care? Are our memories in danger of becoming as short as the PMs?

These are worrying questions. The Ethanol debacle, so fleetingly and ineptly debated and so easily dismissed by Mitchell Beston as something all Governments apparently do almost as an expectation, is just another example of our ability to gloss over anything which does not directly affect us.

I seriously question Howard’s wits, have been pondering the increasingly muddled state of his language, his complete inability to answer a straightforward question, his falling back time and again on a sentence structure which reminds me of Edward Lear at his most fantastic.

Stuart Tomlinson mentions the word Alzheimers, and I must admit to having wondered about this on more than one occasion recently. As far as the state of the nation’s wits, or at least as far as what interests us, what gets our pulses racing, I have found the answer in the bottom right hand corner of today’s SMH online:-

Most Viewed Articles

1. Stripper joins queue of women with a tale about Warne

2. North America hit by mysterious power shortages

3. Struggling mags lose to web

4. Pass the sheep’s embryo wrinkle cream

5. Johns played on with serious neck injury

All power to the people, say I.

The purge escalates. The education department burns. Brendan Nelson, education minister, turns his back and pretends it’s nothing to do with him or his desk, where the buck’s supposed to stop.

I detailed the censorship scandal over Australia’s higher education policy and the refusal of the minister to be told that his government’s policy has seen fewer disadvantaged and mature age students able to access our universities in Brendan Nelson hides behind Sir Humphrey.

In summary, the allegation is that the then department head Peter Shergold – now head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet – ordered that sections of the department’s national report on higher education be cut to delete unpalatable facts. Shergold allegedly did this to assist the ‘presentation’ of Nelson’s new policy – to bump up HECS fees even more, thus locking out even more disadvantaged students, and allowing the rich to jump even more queues by paying more up front.

It appears that Nelson and/or his office was involved, but that’s very murky because Nelson won’t talk about it, choosing to hide behind a letter by new department head Jeff Harmer which begs more questions than it answers. Harmer won’t say what Shergold did. Nelson won’t say either, and Shergold says he can’t recall.

Since Tuesday, when I published all the key documents in the scandal:

* Labor revealed that the author of the report, Dr Tom Karmel, was sacked as head of the department’s research team and research team member Phil Aungles was transferred out of the section. Labor also revealed that since the censorship, the research capacity of the department had been gutted – department now focuses on opinion polling via the Liberal Party’s political pollster Mark Textor. (Expert out after adverse report)

* A department witchhunt has begun into who dared tell the Australian people the truth and all public servants in the know have been instructed by Harmer to shut up or else. The department refuses to say whether it has called in the Australian Federal Police and Nelson continues to avoid responsibility by saying it’s a departmental matter. (Education officials face leak inquiry)

In view of all this, I thought you might be interested in the full text of a recent interview Peter ‘can’t recall’ Shergold – who ran the industrial relations department under Peter Reith during the waterfront dispute – gave on how he saw his job as public service chief. You’ll be relieved to read that according to Shergold the public service is still frank and fearless and not reduced to a mere instrument of government spin and deception. You’ll be particularly reassured by this little Shergold gem:

There is a disease running round Australia at the moment and it’s not SARS, it is conspiratorialism. This view that somehow public servants have become politicised and are brow beaten in not providing advice to ministers or that ministerial advisers are putting up walls to ensure that Prime Ministers and ministers don’t hear that advice. I’ve got to say that its absolute balderdash and poppycock.

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Interview with the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) and leader of the Australian Public Service Peter Shergold on Canberra ABC Radio, July 30, 2003

Chris Uhlman: You’re someone who’s got an academic background and has spent a lot time thinking about the public service, and of course in your role as head of public service commission you’re largely responsible for changing the public service in many ways. How do you see the job of the head of PM and C? What is the role?

Peter Shergold: Well Chris, I think that probably there are two parts to the role. The first is to ensure that the PM is provided with robust policy advice, preferably policy advice that reflect an approach that runs right across government. In other words my department should be there to ensure that you have the coordination of the robust policy advice going through to the PM. So that’s key role. But it also has this second role, I suppose, of giving some leadership to the public service, and it is one that I take very seriously because frankly, certainly outside Canberra, I don’t think there is great enough recognition of the role public servants play within our democracy.

Chris: You say robust advice – of course that’s one of the criticisms that comes now we’ve seen a lot of changes, a generational change to the public service over the last fifteen or twenty years or so… One of the key criticisms, and it came up I know under the Labor government, has come up under the Coalition government – that there is no longer robust advice. It started I guess with the move to contracts, people started saying, ‘Oh well you’ll never get people giving you frank and fearless advice’.

Shergold: Yes, I just don’t believe it. I mean I tend not to use the term frank and fearless advice, and the reason I don’t is that the words slip off the tongue too easily. And they’ve become a cliche, and because they’ve become a cliche they’ve lost power. This is why I tend to use the words ‘robust policy advice’.

Now I have to say to you I can see no evidence whatever that the advice that goes to ministers, the advice that goes to the Prime Minister, is mitigated or softened in any way for political reasons. I have to say I’ve always been surprised that people think it’s somehow courageous to give strong policy advice when you’re usually doing it within the confines of the minister’s or Prime Minister’s room.

I’ve worked for ministers of very different political persuasions. I’ve yet to work for a Minister who didn’t enjoy the fact that they got strong policy advice from their departments. They may not take it, they may want to argue with it, but they saw that there was a real benefit in getting that advice in terms of thinking through the approach they wish to take.

Chris: So have you found yourself in a position where you’ve said ‘No Minister’ or ‘No Prime Minister, that’s not a good idea’?

Shergold: In fact that’s a daft idea. I probably wouldn’t express it in that way because I’m well trained as a public servant. But look there are many many instances when the advice that I’ve provided to ministers is not necessarily the advice they would have been expecting or the advice that they initially wanted to take. In some instances the advice that I propose is taken, in other instances not. I suppose in most instances it is a matter of discussion about the nature of that policy advice. I have never ever dealt with a minister, and I’m certainly not dealing with a Prime Minister, who says for goodness sake don’t give me that policy advice because I don’t want to hear it. Now of course the policy advice has got to be sensible, I mean the way the Westminster system works is you have a professional apolitical, nonpartisan public service, but that is responsive to the elected government of the day, so the policy advice you provide is couched in that way. But the danger is of course you mustn’t make that advice party political advice.

Chris: Do you think then sometimes (that when) people say they’re not giving frank and fearless policy advice anymore (they) mean that people aren’t seeing policies that they want to see emerging perhaps, that they’re not getting their way?

Shergold: Oh yes, I think that there’s an element of that – if you don’t see the policies coming out of government that you’d hoped for that somehow it’s that the public servants are not doing their jobs in providing that policy advice. I can only tell you from everything I see that the policy advice that goes forward to government is robust, is strong, is well argued, hopefully is timely and accurate and that does continue to have a significant influence on the decisions the government of the day takes.

The environment has changed. I mean the person who held my job a generation ago probably had a greater monopoly of the advice that went to the Prime Minister than I do. The fact is that the policy advice I provide is now contestable. We’ve got the people that work in the Minister’s offices, we’ve had the huge expansion in universities, you’ve got a large number of academic think tanks and research institutions, you’ve got strong advocacy organisations. All of those now vie with me for the ear of the Prime Minster and that’s what makes a thriving democracy.

Chris: You bring up ministerial officers, and of course this has come up a lot quite recently and it came up quite controversially during the children overboard affair. We know that the public servants have to appear before committees, that they are responsive to their ministers, they are in a sense open to public scrutiny. We know that politicians have to go up before elections, but we saw with children overboard (that) it doesn’t seem ministerial officers are accountable. Now are they in a certain sense acting in a way that needs to be reformed in your view?

Shergold: I have to go a little bit careful here, simply because an inquiry is about to take place on the accountability of ministerial officers. I am of course accountable through the minister, or in this case through the Prime Minister, to parliament and that’s the reason I sit before the parliamentary committees. Those who work for ministers or Prime Ministers – the advisers – are responsible to parliament through their minister. It is usually their minister who appears and takes responsibility for the actions of advisers. There is an inquiry to see if those lines of inquiry should be made clearer in some way.

But I think there’s a broader issue, which is a concern somehow that the ministerial advisers who have played an increasing role over the last ten or fifteen years are undermining the Westminster tradition. That somehow it’s politicising the public service. Now I have to say I do not share that view.

I think the ministerial adviser and the public servant have complimentary roles. I find it a great relief that when policy advice goes forward from my department to the Prime Minister – of course it is responsive to political direction, as it should be – but it does not have to think about how is this is going to go down in the party room, how is this going to be dealt with (in) the media. Because I know that complementing my work are people sitting in the Prime Minister’s office who have that job. Now I’m a professional public servant, they are ministerial advisers. The key is is that it is a complementary role, and as long as you understand your respective roles I think it is a very healthy relationship.

Chris: Would it not be made more healthy by having it exposed to a little bit more sunlight, to having ministerial advisers perhaps fronting parliamentary committees?

Shergold: Well that’s something that the inquiry in parliament is obviously going to be looking at. I think it is a relationship that is exposed to a great deal of sunlight. It seems to me that it is those outside the system who sometimes imagine and write that the ministerial advisers and the public servants are in a state of almost warfare in terms of the advice that goes to the ministers or Prime Minister. It has not been my experience. In most instances, day in day out, it is a very strong and effective working relationship between the public servant and the ministerial adviser.

Chris: It can get reasonably robust though, if the way they speak to me on occasions is the way they speak to the department.

Shergold: Well it can get robust in terms of the discussions I have with my colleagues or between departments, of course it can. Public policy is serious. These are very profound issues that we’re dealing with, whether it’s security of Australia or violence in indigenous communities. These are issues on which we should argue, we should argue across government, within government, and of course there should be arguments that take place between public servants, ministerial advisers and ministers. That is how the Westminster tradition works.

Chris: We saw recently a lot written about the rebranding exercise, with the Australian government replacing the plethora of logos that we’ve seen spring up over the last ten or fifteen years or so. What’s behind that?

Shergold: Well this is a government decision. It has been based on policy advice in part that been provided by my department in discussions with the Prime Minster’s office. You’ve got a policy decision and now of course it is one that I’m actively seeking to implement.

Because the public service has to do two things. It has to seek to influence the policy decisions, and when those policy decisions are taken it has to get out there and implement those decisions with conviction. Now the thinking behind this is (that) increasingly Australian citizens are not easily able to recognise who is delivering the services they receive or where to find the agency that is delivering the service.

The devolution of responsibility in the public service to agencies has been a very good thing. The fact that departmental secretaries and agencies head now have to take responsibility for financial management or now have to take responsibility for workplace relations or personnel is a good thing. But what has happened, both in the nomenclature of agencies and in the logos they use, is that citizens don’t understand what is being provided by the Australian government anymore. My guess is if you did a call, at least outside Canberra, about Environment Australia many people would think it was a non-government organisation rather than a department of state.

Chris: Is is deeper than that though? Does it go the other way? Do sometimes secretaries or perhaps heads of statutory authorities forget who they’re working for?

Shergold: The fact is in a way we work for two institutions. All of us work for a particular department or agency, (and) we can lose sight of the fact that we also work for the Australian government and are part of a wider entity, the Australian Public Service. The sum of our parts is greater than the individual components. And I do think it is important that we run our departments as productively and effectively as we can. We also recognise that there is a wider interest and that’s why I’m putting such an emphasis on having a whole of government approach to issues and why I am emphasising so much the importance of collegiality across the public service.

Chris: I am wondering whether we are seeing a little bit though of the pendulum swinging back. Are we entering the post corporate age of the public service that we saw so much of in the 90s? The neon signs coming down and the coat of arms going up?

Shergold: Well perhaps we are. I think the key here is to have a single identifiable brand in which is the Australian coat of arms, and for people to be able to understand what it is that the Australian government is providing. And to be able to distinguish that, for example, from state and local governments.

Chris: The opposition (suggests) we may see a loss of the intellectual property there. Is that a concern?

Shergold: I really don’t have concerns in that regard. The intellectual copyright in terms of those logos that have been designed very much rests with the departments and agencies. We’ve made it very clear that this is to be an evolutionary process. We’re not just saying that on 1 September all the old logos have got to be removed and all the stationary burnt. We’re making it clear that we want to do this in the most cost effective manner to bring about this transition. But the intellectual copyright of these designs sits with the agencies who use them. I have to say that most of the response I’ve got has been very positive, both within and outside the public service. If there’s any criticism, it is how did we get into this situation over the last decade.

Chris: Back in 1997 I spoke to Peter Reith about coming into government and I asked … whether or not there was a deep suspicion in the Coalition of the bureaucracy and whether or not they came to government feeling that the bureaucracy just wasn’t on their side. His answer to that question was, ‘Well, Canberra did vote Labor’. Do you think there has been in the past a suspicion by the Coalition of the bureaucracy, and has that changed?

Shergold: I think that there is always a healthy suspicion by politicians of public servants, and if I may say so by public servants of politicians. We do understand that we have different roles within the democratic organisation of Australia. I would hope it would be seen that my appointment to this position, for example, is that of a career public servant who brings a strong public service ethos to the job. Everything that I have seen, both in terms of working for this government and for previous governments, is that ministers and Prime Ministers have a great respect for the policy advice that is provided to them from their bureaucracies. They don’t want to absolutely accept it, they don’t want to feel that the public service has a monopoly of that advice – they are quite right to have that view. The policy advice that I provide needs to be tested in the marketplace of ideas.

Chris: Do you have a concern though that you have to be an advocate for government policy, you’re an instrument by which government policy is implemented, that even if you say ‘I’m acting as an impartial public servant’, (you’re) doing everything (you) can to serve the government of the day? …. And they’ll say ‘Well if there’s a Labor government in a years time then Dr Shergold won’t have a job’?

Shergold: I understand that is the perception, and it is a tricky issue because I want to see a public service that is as much respected for its ability to deliver public policy as to be able to contribute to the making of that public policy. The two go hand in hand.

Now if I go out to ensure that public policy is being implemented there is always the danger that I am being seen as an advocate for a particular political position. Whereas what I see myself doing is making sure that the political decisions that have been taken by the government of the day are being implemented in a committed way. Yes, you do have to walk a borderline, and it is almost inevitable that at some time you will come under criticism for doing that.

The other thing is that I tend to speak with a certain amount of passion on issues. I am engaged by them – they interest me – and the passion that I bring is often interpreted as being political. In fact what I’m speaking with passion about is the nature of public service and how important it is to our democratic institutions. If you look around the world – if you look around our region – you can see so many countries where they have elections every few years, (yet) if you visit those countries you and I would not see them as democracies. And one of the key indicators is that the public service who serve the government and serve the citizens are corrupt or nepotistic and can’t be trusted, and of course what that does is to undermine democracy. Now we don’t have that in this country, I think because of the way the public service has served Australia since federation.

Chris: Since S11 people keep saying the world has changed. One thing we can be sure of is that people keep talking about security and people keep talking about intelligence. Now in the absence of a department of homeland security – which is the track that they’ve gone down in the US – how do you ensure that all of the advice gets to government? That seems to be a bit of a problem in the last month or so… How do you coordinate that?

Shergold: Well first of all I think you’ve got to avoid, as a bureaucrat, thinking the answer lies in bureaucratic structures – it rarely does. In other words if you just slice and dice the public service into different chunks, if you set up something called the Department of Homeland security or an agency for fighting terrorism and you bring together people from transport and the intelligence agencies and Attorney-Generals and put them together in this new box and give it a new label, that is not going to solve your problem, because all you’ll find is that whatever the big issues are … it won’t neatly fit in a bureaucratic box. The answer lies in efficient workplace systems and a cooperative workplace culture.

So what we have to do to get a whole government approach, (to ensure) people are working together and make sure, for example, that the information that comes from the intelligence agencies is then analysed and becomes part of the policy advice going to government.

Let me just – one quick little thing you slipped in there was the notion that somehow the government hasn’t been getting the policy advice in recent months. I think probably you’re talking about the issue of WMD. Now I see this written about in a newspaper on a weekly basis and I can only tell you that it has no resemblance to fact.

The fact is that the Prime Minister and ministers and the National Security Committee were getting detailed information, often on a daily basis, from our intelligence agencies in a coordinated manner. With my dept and DFAT and Defence there was very strong flow of information going through to government which they were using.

There is a disease running round Australia at the moment and it’s not SARS, it is conspiratorialism. This view that somehow public servants have become politicised and are brow beaten in not providing advice to ministers or that ministerial advisers are putting up walls to ensure that Prime Ministers and ministers don’t hear that advice. I’ve got to say that it’s absolute balderdash and poppycock. It is not the reality.

The major speech that the Prime Minister gave in parliament was not something that was simply drafted in the confines of his Prime Ministerial office… There was to-ing and fro-ing, he asked for more information, more information was put in the speech, the speech was then checked by the Office of National Assessments. The process was absolutely correct. There was this very strong flow of information, and yet the media have been writing as if that is not the case. As if what you see is a cowed public service not being able to get its advice across.

Chris: How is it then that the particular issue that we’re talking about (the false claim that Iraq tried to buy Uranium from Niger, a claim known to be false by the US intelligence services and communicated by them to Australia) – do you think that that advice is still correct or was there a mistake there or what?

Shergold: I’m not going to comment on whether the advice was correct. Intelligence I’ve discovered in my time in this department, is a remarkably difficult area. It is every bit as much art as science. You have huge amounts of intelligence coming in, some of which turns out to be accurate, some which is inaccurate, some of which is qualified over time, and then of course the job with this huge amount of intelligence coming from many different sources is to analyse that in the best way possible and that’s why we have the Office of National Assessments. It has that key job in analysing the advice and then of course my department and other departments of state will comment on that advice. But let us not kid ourselves, intelligence is never ever going to get everything right.

 

The silent, stoic republic. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

Pioneer psychologist Carl Rogers defined authenticity as “the stubborn refusal to let one’s true self travel incognito”. Our conservative contributor Daniel Moye is doing lots of self examination lately in the light of John Howard’s third term rule. Here’s his latest piece. Dan is now a Webdiary columnist. His archive is at moye. He is on a promise to send me a mugshot.

Owning my beliefs

by Daniel Moye

How do we own the ideas, ideals and institutions we label ourselves with?

When contemplating the array of debates going on in the Webdiary, I have been tempted to confronted each argument and debate the merits or otherwise of every one, to engorge myself with each battle and become lost in the swirling minutiae of fors and againsts.

Having tossed around many of the problems of each argument I was left with the disheartening realisation that there would barely be enough time in the day, even if all I did was think and write, to barely touch upon the surface of one of them. When this sickening reality finally struck home, I was tempted to throw the towel in and go to sleep.

Unfortunately for all Webdiary readers, I stayed awake and came to the conclusion that I would have to go back to the philosophical foundations of my worldview and begin again.

Finding myself defending the messenger more so than the message – in political discussions on the Web and in the real world – became depressing. Having been found guilty or gullible by association in these conversations, I thought I should dig around some philosophical books to see if I really had conservative beliefs or not. Rather than bore you with multiple references, I will provide you with a brief extract from The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought:

Conservatism/Conservative

As a political doctrine, conservatism emphasizes ‘the politics of imperfection’. Philosophical conservatism emphasizes tradition, authority, law and order, and the impossibility of achieving anything resembling the utopias which radicals have longed for. Human nature, in the eyes of most conservatives, is too imperfect to allow society to dispense with the guidance of tradition and the government of firm authority. Mankind is too shortsighted and too passionate to agree on one answer to the question how best to order our social and political affairs, let alone to do everything that it would demand. It is better to emphasises known duties, to accommodate individual diversity by letting individuals use their own property in the ways they see fit, to preserve the authority of the state by limiting its role to national defence and the policing of the market place, and to strengthen institutions such as the family, schools and churches as a means of securing a sound public morality. Many conservatives have objected to attempts to elicit a ‘philosophy’ of conservatism on the ground that conservatism is not a creed but a disposition, and that the conservative differs from radicals and intellectuals precisely because he is willing to change his mind and abandon any particular doctrine or any particular goal for the sake of conserving the vital interests of his society.(pp167-168)

Having read this outline, I was fortified in my belief that a ‘conservative’ I am. Having found out this answer and the reassurance I sought, a larger question begged itself.

In an age of brands, spin (call it propaganda if you choose) and ‘shoot the messenger’ politics, how do we own the ideas, ideals and institutions we label ourselves with?

Carmen Lawrence underlined many of the problems that face the Australian democracy in Ideas to save our withering democracy, and whilst I do not agree with every characterisation that she made or agreed with the remedies she put forward, there were some valuable observations. The following is my characterisation of some of them.

Are political parties unduly sacrificing ‘the national interest’, political debate and accountable and responsible government by focussing on strategies to maintain power?

How is the medium of communication (TV, mass media, sound byte politics) shaping Australian political debate, and is this directly undermining the confidence of the Australian people in our democratic institutions?

What role are intermediaries between the people and our representatives – journalists, spin doctors, party machine men, special interest groups and corporations – having in our democracy? All may have a role and even a necessary voice – but do we have the institutional transparency to be able to monitor whether there are intersections of undue influence with our major political parties?

Without debating the issues that Ms. Lawrence raised, I would like readers to consider the problem from this point of view: How do we own the ideas, ideals and institutions we label ourselves with?

In our democracy we impart our sovereignty to elected representatives and through this social contract our ideas, ideals and institutions live and change. Does it require us, as Dr Lawrence puts forth, to actively reform our parliamentary democracy to disintermediate and make our representatives more accountable? Put another way, how do we ensure that our political parties hold the national interest first and foremost in their policy framework? Also, just as importantly, how do we restore the ownership of the people in the ideas, ideals and institutions we associate ourselves with?

The central issue I am trying to draw attention to is this – we need to reinvestigate our beliefs. Do you feel that you own the ideas, ideals and institutions you label yourself with?

You could argue each and every issue on Webdiary and be lost in the minutiae of each battle. There are lots of people attempting to own your ideas, ideals and institutions – are you winning battles but losing the war? Or alternatively switch off Carmen, Margo and myself – throw in the towel and sleep well. Goodnight.

 

The silent, stoic republic. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

How do we own the ideas, ideals and institutions we label ourselves with?

When contemplating the array of debates going on in the Webdiary, I have been tempted to confronted each argument and debate the merits or otherwise of every one, to engorge myself with each battle and become lost in the swirling minutiae of fors and againsts.

Having tossed around many of the problems of each argument I was left with the disheartening realisation that there would barely be enough time in the day, even if all I did was think and write, to barely touch upon the surface of one of them. When this sickening reality finally struck home, I was tempted to throw the towel in and go to sleep.

Unfortunately for all Webdiary readers, I stayed awake and came to the conclusion that I would have to go back to the philosophical foundations of my worldview and begin again.

Finding myself defending the messenger more so than the message – in political discussions on the Web and in the real world – became depressing. Having been found guilty or gullible by association in these conversations, I thought I should dig around some philosophical books to see if I really had conservative beliefs or not. Rather than bore you with multiple references, I will provide you with a brief extract from The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought:

Conservatism/Conservative

As a political doctrine, conservatism emphasizes ‘the politics of imperfection’. Philosophical conservatism emphasizes tradition, authority, law and order, and the impossibility of achieving anything resembling the utopias which radicals have longed for. Human nature, in the eyes of most conservatives, is too imperfect to allow society to dispense with the guidance of tradition and the government of firm authority. Mankind is too shortsighted and too passionate to agree on one answer to the question how best to order our social and political affairs, let alone to do everything that it would demand. It is better to emphasises known duties, to accommodate individual diversity by letting individuals use their own property in the ways they see fit, to preserve the authority of the state by limiting its role to national defence and the policing of the market place, and to strengthen institutions such as the family, schools and churches as a means of securing a sound public morality. Many conservatives have objected to attempts to elicit a ‘philosophy’ of conservatism on the ground that conservatism is not a creed but a disposition, and that the conservative differs from radicals and intellectuals precisely because he is willing to change his mind and abandon any particular doctrine or any particular goal for the sake of conserving the vital interests of his society.(pp167-168)

Having read this outline, I was fortified in my belief that a ‘conservative’ I am. Having found out this answer and the reassurance I sought, a larger question begged itself.

In an age of brands, spin (call it propaganda if you choose) and ‘shoot the messenger’ politics, how do we own the ideas, ideals and institutions we label ourselves with?

Carmen Lawrence underlined many of the problems that face the Australian democracy in Ideas to save our withering democracy, and whilst I do not agree with every characterisation that she made or agreed with the remedies she put forward, there were some valuable observations. The following is my characterisation of some of them.

Are political parties unduly sacrificing ‘the national interest’, political debate and accountable and responsible government by focussing on strategies to maintain power?

How is the medium of communication (TV, mass media, sound byte politics) shaping Australian political debate, and is this directly undermining the confidence of the Australian people in our democratic institutions?

What role are intermediaries between the people and our representatives – journalists, spin doctors, party machine men, special interest groups and corporations – having in our democracy? All may have a role and even a necessary voice – but do we have the institutional transparency to be able to monitor whether there are intersections of undue influence with our major political parties?

Without debating the issues that Ms. Lawrence raised, I would like readers to consider the problem from this point of view: How do we own the ideas, ideals and institutions we label ourselves with?

In our democracy we impart our sovereignty to elected representatives and through this social contract our ideas, ideals and institutions live and change. Does it require us, as Dr Lawrence puts forth, to actively reform our parliamentary democracy to disintermediate and make our representatives more accountable? Put another way, how do we ensure that our political parties hold the national interest first and foremost in their policy framework? Also, just as importantly, how do we restore the ownership of the people in the ideas, ideals and institutions we associate ourselves with?

The central issue I am trying to draw attention to is this – we need to reinvestigate our beliefs. Do you feel that you own the ideas, ideals and institutions you label yourself with?

You could argue each and every issue on Webdiary and be lost in the minutiae of each battle. There are lots of people attempting to own your ideas, ideals and institutions – are you winning battles but losing the war? Or alternatively switch off Carmen, Margo and myself – throw in the towel and sleep well. Goodnight.

The Prime Minister’s spin on today’s Mike Seccombe ethanol scoop (PM’s officials labelled as ethanol spies) is so transparent, so predictable, so lame and so typically cowardly that he really is, now, doing little more than exposing his complete contempt for any voter with a brain by even trying it on.

Now we have coal-face Australian embassy staff at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) joining that long line of public servants, ADF personnel, anonymous advisers and sundry Howard fall-takers who have in their bemused day been subtly maneuvered, by this most devious of Prime Ministers, into absorbing the worst of whatever the scandal of the day may, or may not, bring down.

Here is what Honest John had to say today about our Free Market government’s poxy case of retrograde, 1950s, State-mandated protectionism, as reported in the Herald. Watch how the firewall manoeuvre, in all its magnificent subtlety, is set in motion, just in case it turns out to be needed later. My bold:

But Mr Howard said there was nothing wrong with the phone calls.”What the embassy was doing, and I’ve no doubt it made inquiries, what the embassy was doing the normal thing that a post would do because the government was considering a change of policy to remove the excise exemption,” he told Sky News. “Whenever a decision like that is taken some companies benefit, and some companies are disadvantaged. I am sure that inquiries were made, that was an entirely routine proper thing to have been done.”

Mr Howard said the information gathered was routine, about the size of the shipment and its planned departure time. He said the government may have first heard about the shipment from Manildra. “I think in factthat we first would have heard from Manildra about the possibility of the shipment coming,” he said. “I’m not the least embarrassed about the fact the embassy made inquiries, that’s their job.”

Now it may seem on the face of this that the Prime Minister is defending the embassy staff for their ‘four phone calls a day’ zeal here, but that is wrong. He is only ‘defending’ the embassy staff in the same way that Max Moore-Wilton ‘defended’ the Royal Australian Navy and Defence Department people on the day he announced his own retirement as head of the Prime Minister’s Department, when he was quoted on kids overboard in an Australian article by Dennis Shanahan (18 December), as follows. My bold:

“I understand the criticisms, and, of course, mistakes were made. But all of the people concerned did what they could to the best of their ability. I stand by them 100 percent. There was no malice.”

Again, it sounds like Moore-Wilton is defending the RAN and the bureaucrats. In fact, by introducing the idea that they need to be defended, he is doing precisely the opposite – setting them up, in a gutless mock-innocent way, for him or his successors, should future developments require it, to shaft them completely.

Webdiary readers may recall my Christmas Letter to our Leader, in which I requested the PM to take on board full and explicit responsibility for all aspects of Operation Relex, precisely because the games his team were playing had become so obvious. It came as no surprise to me, then, when I read this Shanahan interview just a few days after Liberal minister Mrs Danna Vale had acknowledged receipt of my PM’s letter. In turn, I sent her this further email. Introducing it here will help amplify why the PM’s comments in ‘defence’ of the embassy staff today are nothing of the sort, are equally just a grubby preliminary act in the now-standard firewall process. My bold:

From: Jack Robertson, BALMAIN NSW 2041

To: Ms Nicholls, Electoral Office for Ms Danna Vale, MP

Information copies: All Federal MPs and Senators; the Parliamentary Press Gallery

18 December 2002

Dear Ms Nicholls,

Thank you for acknowledging receipt of my letter to the Prime Minister, of 14 December 2002, in which I expressed serious concern over unanswered Human Rights Watch allegations of brutality during Operation Relex made against our Australian Defence Force (ADF).

Ms Nicholls, in this holiday period, I would be grateful if you could urge Ms Vale to bring this matter to the attention of the Prime Minister as a matter of considerable priority. I draw your attention in particular to press reports today of imminent preparations for war (although noting the PM’s comments on them), and suggest that it would be unfair of us to deploy our men and women to Iraq with any allegations hanging over their heads.

On what I can only consider a more ominous note, I noted the recent resignation of Mr Howard’s Cabinet Permanent Secretary, Mr Max Moore-Wilton, and was particularly unsettled by his comments on the so-called Children Overboard affair quoted in the front page article of today’s Australian as follows: “I understand the criticisms, and, of course, mistakes were made. But all of the people concerned did what they could to the best of their ability. I stand by them 100 percent. There was no malice.”

Ms Nicholls, I would be grateful if you would ask Ms Vale to stress urgently to the PM that, in fact, despite these words, Mr Moore-Wilton is actually NOT standing by anyone ‘100 percent’, as he is now heading off to some lucrative and unaccountable position in private industry (arguably, in a similar way as did Mr Peter Reith last year). Since, also like Mr Reith, Mr Moore-Wilton was a very powerful and influential man at the very epicentre of Operation Relex, the last election campaign and what can only now be described as your government’s sloppiness, incompetence, recklessness or economy with the truth, its wilful ignorance, and/or the outright malicious dishonesty that resulted from this combination during the kids overboard matter, you will naturally understand my growing anxiety as to whether or not the men and women responsible for exposing our ADF people to the allegations in the Human Rights Watch Report are truly committed to standing by them.

As you may be aware, Ms Nicholls, when a public official or politician starts to say things like: ‘I stand by my subordinates 100 percent’, even as they cut and run, it is usually the time to start watching your back! And if I may be perfectly frank, I personally do not believe anything Mr Moore-Wilton says, I do not ever trust him, I do not think he should have been a senior public servant in the first place, and I do not believe he cares one bit for anyone else in Australia but himself. (I do, on the other hand, think that he is a liar, a thug, an intellectual coward, a bully, a wrecker and an opportunist.) Naturally, you will understand why I am so keen not to allow any member of our ADF to be screwed by him, and similar non-military people, in any way.

To that end, Ms Nicholls, please urge Ms Vale to bring my growing concerns, and the respectful requests I make of the Prime Minister in my previous letter, immediately and urgently to the appropriate people’s attention, in particular to that of Mr Howard, and Mr Moore-Wilton himself, who naturally will remain responsible for any and all of his decisions and actions during his time as Prime Minister’s Department head long, long, long after his appointment technically expires on Friday.

Ms Nicholls, thank you for your prompt and courteous response in the first instance.

Jack Robertson

***

Nothing further from Mrs Vale, and sure enough, with utter predictability, just a few months later, that great and fearless and honourable ex-Public Servant Max the Axe – with his fat public purse payout tucked snugly in his bank account, and with his fat snout now buried deeply and safely in the utterly-unscrutinised pig-trough that is the newly-privatised Australian Airports Free Market Game – showed us what he meant when said he was ‘standing by the kids overboard crew 100 percent’. This from the Sunday program’s 64th birthday special on the PM a few weeks ago. My bold:

JOHN LYONS: The Government’s position on the so called “children overboard” issue also polarised the nation. Clearly, sections of the government misled the public but supporters of the government now blame the defence forces.

MAX MOORE-WILTON: In future I think the defence force including he captain of the vessel should be more careful in the reports they give to their superiors because the one thing that’s never been said, I think clearly enough was, this report would never have past unless the captain of the vessel at the time had said something. Now the captain of the vessel has been regarded by the senate and others as a semi hero.

Forgive my by-now standard bile, Daniel Moye, but I put it to you and fellow conservatives and small ‘l’ Liberals that Mr Max Moore-Wilton, like everything he represents, is a foul, opportunistic destroyer of Westminster conventions and principles, and a self-incriminating enemy of the health of Australian civic life.

But I digress. My more relevant point is to demonstrate the pattern, to show more clearly why I am contemptuously sceptical of the PM’s apparently sincere ‘defence’ of embassy staff and their exposed role as politically-manipulated ‘spies’ in this matter.

Notice how the PM’s language becomes abstract in tense and voice, oh-so-subtly disengaging itself from the actuality of the Manildra case – as if our PM is an aging Sir Robert Menzies conducting a fatherly tutorial in Westminster & Civic Administration 101, rather than an incumbent Prime Minister caught red-handed misusing DFAT channels and assets to enable rank political favouritism, and then misleading Parliament thoroughly about it. Such is Howard’s now-instinctive capacity and appetite for removing himself from the specific consequences of his style of governance when the specific consequences of his style of governance backfire on him. Examine the habitual way that he says: “I have no doubt (the Embassy) made enquiries”, and “I am sure that enquiries were made” (as if he is musing on detached first principles), instead of saying simply: “Yes, the embassy made enquiries”, and “Yes, enquiries were made” (as he surely knew and probably directed then, and as he in any case absolutely would know now).

It’s precisely the same mode of speech as when he generally preferred to argue: “If a country like Iraq is allowed to keep WMD, it would be dangerous if we did not invade”, rather than the more concrete: “Iraq has WMD, so we must invade”; and “I don’t want the kind of people who throw children overboard in this country” rather than: “These people threw children overboard, so I don’t want them here”.

Executive government by foolproof Motherhood statement, firewalling-as-you-go.

The truth on Manildra? My guess is that the Prime Minister, or more probably one of his tame anonymous underlings, picked up the phone (or whatever) last year and left relevant embassy staff in no uncertainty about what he required – hard, specific information about this shipment, way above and beyond the ‘normal routine thing’ of DFAT practice. However it was done, all such instructions would have naturally been conveyed in that soft, clubby, oh-by-the-way off-the-record mode, the greasy cogs of our once frank and fearless and proper Public Service turning ever-more easily and automatically at his unspoken wink-and-nod, lubricated as it has been by long years of politically-loaded appointment and patronage. Precisely the same way as Howard fixers spoke by phone directly to the Commanding Officer of the SASR at the height of the Tampa crisis and various naval Captains during Operation Relex intercepts, equally doubtless leaving these coal-face operators in no doubt of the lack of policy compromise he demanded (regardless of their own on-the-spot operational judgements), and yet equally leaving almost nothing on the official Public Record for Parliament or his Citizens to nail him down with later.

So, my prediction on this latest buck-passing outbreak is hardly rocket science: if Ethanol-gate proves to have any legs at all with the public (if it gets past Howard’s first defence, that of public apathy), then ultimately – once the Prime Minister’s Department has directed DFAT to conduct an internal enquiry into what commercial spying (tut-tut) the Embassy staff did in fact do at the government’s behest – it will transpire that some staff were perhaps a little zealous in their pursuit of information; that inexperienced junior DFAT personnel possibly overstepped the bounds of the DFAT ‘routine proper thing’, blah blah blah. And so ‘lessons will be learned’, and ‘procedures will be tightened’, and somewhere deep in the lower reaches of DFAT, another few decent and honest public servants who tried hard to do the right thing on an unwritten wink-and-a-nod basis will have the Westminster scales torn from their eyes, and learn to make bloody well sure that they get something in bloody writing next time around. And hell, the PM will possibly even say something statesmanlike and magnanimous and generous to wrap the latest storm-in-a-teacup up in his usual relaxed and comfortable, populist, Public Opinion-proofing, prophylactic persona.

Such as: “Well, obviously, Kerry, in the end I have to take full responsibility for these small errors of judgement at the Embassy, even if perhaps they went a bit overboard (whoops!) on their Trafigura enquiries. And I do that, I really do. I mean, it’s my responsibility in the end, I accept that, of course I accept that. And you know, our DFAT people are truly excellent people, and I stand by them 100 percent. But I mean, you can’t expect Old Bailey standards of perfect judgement all the time, especially given that our DFAT staff are under so much pressure in these uncertain TERROR times.”

And then The Australian’s editorial writers will write another mildly wrist-tapping apologia and a wink-wink call for tighter accountability next time, and then a Janet Albrechtsen will line up and have another go at us sad, nit-picking Lefty wannabe elites for our ‘anti-Howard obsessions’, and then Paul Kelly will drone on over the weekend in his sanctifying way about how the ALP is missing the point on Manildra anyway, which is the Howard government’s on-going failure to fully re-embrace economic reform, and blah blah blah.

And the whole thing will blow over, and the government will have got away with lying through its teeth once more, to cover its bum for blatantly feathering the nest of its big end of town mates, in a dirty and hypocritical Protectionist episode that makes a total mockery of the vicious treatment meted out not so long ago, by this government, to every battling waterfront worker who ever had an alsation dog set on him in the name of ‘global economic competitiveness’.

And Howard’s popularity ratings won’t budge an inch, and white will turn a darker shade of black, and one day, pretty soon, when someone grown-up and honest in the government or public service says: “Terror alert!” and it’s actually for real, not one of us will take them at their word, anyway.

Again, sorry sorry sorry to harp, but this relatively minor kerfuffle has it all. It captures beautifully the cowardly, corrosive, buck-passing, arse-covering sickness of this now out-of-control and civically-bankrupted gaggle of conmen and women we call Federal Government. Howard’s personal tactical armoury, and thus that of the entire crowd, is now nothing but a grab-bag of all our most base Human instincts. Division, populist stirring, bureaucratic delay and ‘security’ suppression, policy hypocrisy and piecemeal opportunism, waffling obfuscation, faked conviction, endless condescending exploitation of the battler, the Anzac, the non-existent Ordinary Australian.

Howard is like a school-yard gossip-stirrer, setting up fight after fight after exhausting, community-cleaving fight, and then standing back to await the arrival of the schoolmarm – Electorally-Usable Public Opinion – so he can lord it up as the Statesmanlike Teacher’s Pet, well above the domestic fray. (“Hey, I’m not saying I believe this myself, Penny, but I heard Timmy say that Betty said that maybe Jimmy said that you said that refugees are terrorists and we should reintroduce Capital Punishment so we can get the bastards who did this! Eh? Eh? Eh?”)

And there, too, are all the other kids in the playground – there’s Peter, and Phillip, and Brendon, and Amanda, and Tony, who all should know better – all playing his dirty game, even jumping in there defending the grubby little bastard whenever anyone who is not in his gang catches him at it red-handed, as Costello is defending now. There’s a deputy mug born every second, I suppose.

Oh look, maybe I am obsessed now, and maybe this sort of transparent tosh doesn’t matter to most people – especially when it comes to mouse poo like ethanol and public moneys and rich, industry-protected Liberal Party donors. But it matters a hell of a lot to me, because it represents a pattern, and the more and more I observe the way this gutless government firewalls its way clean out of any hint of electoral trouble (whether it be Iraq reconstruction casualty-grief, or WMD lies fallout, or kids overboard, or Education Report censorship, or plasma TV or phone card mischief, or whatever), the more I worry what such shameless adroitness might one day mean, when it comes to assuming full responsibility for what our soldiers, sailors and airmen might or might not have been forced to do during Operation Relex.

All in the name of an uncompromising, election-winning Border Protection beat-up.

 

For a full view of this image, click on the link directly below.

Related:  Ethanol timeline Pop-up graphic: Record of meeting between Howard and Honan

John Howard said yesterday while defending his alleged deception of the Australian people last year in Parliament over ethanol that “I look forward to the next occasion when I submit myself to the judgment of the Australian people alongside the Leader of the Opposition”.

Hey, you don’t have to wait that long. Here are his answers to the questions asked in Parliament last September, and yesterday, and the document which unravelled his decision – whether he technically misled or not – to withhold the truth about his dealings with Mr Honan from the Australian people. Judge for yourself whether he’s a truth teller or a tricky deceiver. To end, Laura Tingle’s latest expose of how quickly Howard jumped to Honan’s tune last year, published in the Australian Financial Review this morning. The Sydney Morning Herald will have a good new yarn on the scandal in tomorrow’s paper, courtesy of our own Mike Seccombe.

LAST YEAR’S HOWARD DENIALS IN PARLIAMENT OF MEETING MR HONAN

17 September, 2002

Ms BURKE: Prime Minister, was the government contacted by the major Australian producer of ethanol or by any representative of his company or the Industry Association before its decision to impose fuel excise on ethanol? If so, when? Was the government urged to take action to prevent Trafigura Fuels Australia from importing a shipment of ethanol from Brazil at a commercially competitive price?

Mr HOWARD: Speaking for myself, I did not personally have any discussions, from recollection, with any of them. I would be very surprised, in relation to a matter like this, if representations had not been made by all of the interested parties to various levels of the government – in fact, I would be quite amazed.

18 September, 2002

Mr McMULLAN: Prime Minister, yesterday, in answer to a question of whether the government had been contacted by the office of a major Australian producer of ethanol before making the decision to impose fuel excise on that product, you answered that you had no personal recollection of any such discussion. Will you now advise the House whether, in the past month, your office received any such communication, whether in person or by telephone, fax, letter, email or other means?

(Government interjections)

The SPEAKER The member for Fraser will commence his question again.

Mr McMULLAN: Prime Minister, would you advise the House whether, over the past month, your office received any such communication, whether in person or by telephone, facsimile, letter, email or any other means? If so, when?

(Government interjections)

The SPEAKER: … The member for Fraser has the call and will commence his question again.

Mr McMULLAN: Prime Minister, were you or your office urged to take action to prevent Trafigura Fuels Australia from importing a shipment of ethanol from Brazil at a commercially competitive price?

Mr HOWARD: The answer I gave yesterday was based upon recollection of personal contact with me. I cannot tell you, without checking, whether somebody in my office got a fax or a telephone call or read an AAP report.

Mr Crean: Go and check.

Mr HOWARD: I really do not know… I will be very happy to have a look at whether there were any communications. I think I may have said yesterday that it would not surprise me if there had been communications from that company. Why not? This is a democracy, after all. Let me say that this idea that there is something criminal or sinister and that a company or a citizen who believes that an event is going to disadvantage them commercially has no right to put a view to the government of the day – this idea that if they do put that view it is a crime or something sinister or corrupt – is absolutely absurd.

…Just for the record, I have been informed by the Minister for Trade that the first time he heard about it was when a lobbyist for the company that was importing the ethanol from Brazil informed a senior member of the minister’s staff at a Canberra function. I suppose we should have a criminal investigation into that as well. I will have a look. As far as I am concerned, I am quite happy to disclose to the House that I know Dick Honan. He is known to a lot of people in the parliament. He is known to a lot of people opposite. I know that and they know that I know it. I think this is absolutely ridiculous but, for the purposes of the record, I will check the faxes, I will check whether I have messages and I will also check the AAP wire – I will check it now and I will check it in two hours time as well.

19 September, 2002

In answering another question, MR HOWARD said:

This is perhaps a good opportunity, seeing as the company Manildra was mentioned by the Leader of the Opposition, to answer the question that was directed to me yesterday by the member for Fraser. The member for Fraser asked me some questions about communications between Manildra and my office. In the time available, I have had a search made and this is the latest advice I have. I put it in that conditional sense because sometimes – as the member will know from his own experiences as a minister – you are not always given the full story right at the very beginning. Bits and pieces turn up later on, and you have to be careful. That is not said negatively; it is just a fact of life.

The member asked me what communication my office had with Manildra relating to the decision to change excise arrangements for the ethanol industry. As I stated earlier, I had not spoken to Dick Honan on this issue. I have, on checking, found that a number of letters were received on this general issue – not just on ethanol but on the general issue. In fact, my office received 16 in all, from different sources, from January until now. Some of these dealt with the shipment from Brazil while others dealt with options to promote the ethanol industry more generally. My office did receive a letter from Mr Honan but that letter was not passed to me. I point out to you that I receive 2,400 letters a week and I have to say that not each of them is drawn personally to my attention…

***

THIS YEAR’S SCRAMBLE AFTER LABOR DID ITS JOB AND PUT IN A FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST

Parliament, August 11

Mr CREAN: Prime Minister, do you recall telling the parliament that you had not discussed ethanol policy with Mr Dick Honan prior to your announcement on 12 September last year – a policy which has already benefited Mr Honan’s company to the tune of over $20 million in the last year? Prime Minister, doesn’t the record now show that a meeting between you and Mr Honan did take place on 1 August 2002 and that it involved discussion of ethanol policy? Prime Minister, why did you mislead the parliament and the Australian people on this very important issue?

Mr HOWARD: The question that was asked of mein fact there were several questions asked of me – related specifically to a shipment coming from Brazil. The meeting I had with Mr Honan on 1 August did not relate to that issue. I do not believe therefore that I have misled the House, and I reject the allegation that has been made. All of the questions that I answered in this series of questions were in the context of the shipment by the company, Trafigura. I would remind the Leader of the Opposition that the series of questions commenced with a question asked of the Treasurer by the member for Fraser, and it said as follows:

My question is to the Treasurer and concerns last week’s government announcements concerning the ethanol excise. Treasurer, can you confirm that Trafigura Fuels Australia’s contract to import ethanol was excise free when it was signed?

Then there was a question asked of me by the member for Chisholm, Anna Burke, which said:

My question is to the Prime Minister. Prime Minister, was the government contacted by the major Australian producer of ethanol or by any representative of his company or the industry association before its decision to impose fuel excise on ethanol? If so, when? Was the government urged to take action to prevent Trafigura Fuels Australia …

All of these questions were in the context of the importation of that shipment from Brazil by Trafigura. They are all in that context, and it was in that context that I gave the answer that I did. I do not believe therefore that I have misled the parliament because, when I was asked these questions, I did not know of Trafigura’s importation nor indeed is it my understanding that Mr Honan knew of it. As evidence of that, on 28 August, Mr Honan wrote to me drawing attention to this shipment and arguing that a certain course of action be followed. In fact, I disclosed the existence of that letter during the series of questions I answered, so I reject the claim made by the Leader of the Opposition.

Mr CREAN: I refer to his last answer in which he claimed only to have been answering questions on a shipment of ethanol from Brazil. Prime Minister, is it not true that the question asked of you on 19 September made no reference at all to the shipment of ethanol from Brazil and that you responded by saying that you had not spoken to Dick Honan on the issue of excise arrangements for the ethanol industry? Given that you did meet with Mr Honan on 1 August to discuss ethanol policy, why do you continue to mislead the parliament and the Australian people about the discussions that you had with Mr Honan?

Mr HOWARD: I do not continue to mislead the public. The context of these questions was the shipment from Brazil. I did not know anything about the shipment from Brazil when these questions were asked nor, apparently, did Mr Honan. In fact, it is my understanding that the first time anybody in the government became aware of this was around 21, 22 or 23 August, which was three weeks after I met Mr Honan.

Mr CREAN: My question is again to the Prime Minister and I refer the Prime Minister to his answer on 19 September last year when he told the parliament:

The member asked me what communication my office had with Manildra relating to the decision to change excise arrangements for the ethanol industry. As I stated earlier, I had not spoken to Dick Honan on this issue.

Prime Minister, given that the record now shows that you did meet with Mr Honan on this very issue on 1 August 2002, why do you continue to mislead the parliament and the Australian people in saying you did not have a discussion with him on this issue?

Mr HOWARD: In answer to the Leader of the Opposition, this issue to which I am referring is the decision which was made and announced on 12 September by me, which triggered this series of questions in parliament, which of course was based on the pending importation of the shipment from Brazil.

On 12 September we announced certain arrangements which withdrew the excise exemption and introduced a production subsidy, and the pattern of the package of questions that began to be asked on 17 September sought to draw a link between that decision and some allegedly improper support for the Manildra company. The big revelation that the Labor Party is talking about was a meeting between me and Mr Honan on 1 August.

Mr Crean: Which you said didn’t happen.

Mr HOWARD: Of course it did, and that actually goes to the very nub of the issue because the answers I gave about not discussing this issue with Mr Honan were based on the fact that we did not discuss that issue, because, as the Leader of the Opposition helpfully interjects, neither of us knew about it. Therefore, we could not have discussed it.

Mr LATHAM: I will refer to his answer on 19 September last year when he advised the House that he would check whether he had spoken to Dick Honan in relation to excise arrangements for the ethanol industry; not the Brazilian boat but excise arrangements for the ethanol industry. The Prime Minister informed the House that he had ‘not spoken to Dick Honan on this issue’. Did the Prime Minister check with the departmental officer present at his meeting with Mr Honan on 1 August 2002, with the written record of that meeting dated 2 August, or with any of the seven departmental officers that received a copy of that record? Why was the Prime Minister able to find 16 letters on the ethanol issue and report those to the parliament on 19 September but was unable to find his departmentalrecord of the 1 August meeting with Dick Honan?

Mr HOWARD: As I have already indicated to the House, these questions were asked and the answers were given in the context of the shipments from Brazil. That remains the position.

Mr LATHAM: Again, I refer the Prime Minister to his answer on 19 September last year when he said that a search had been made and checks undertaken of communications between his office and Manildra. The Prime Minister assured the House that he had not spoken to Dick Honan on the question of ethanol excise arrangements. When did the Prime Minister become aware that he had in fact spoken to Dick Honan about ethanol excise and that his department had prepared a record of his meeting with Mr Honan on 1 August 2002 detailing this very fact?

Mr HOWARD: The context in which these questions were asked – and let me remind the member for Werriwa of the question asked by the member for Fraser of the Treasurer on 17 September:

My question is to the Treasurer and concerns last week’s government announcements concerning the ethanol excise. Treasurer, can you confirm that Trafigura Fuels Australia’s contract to import ethanol was excise free when it was signed? Can you also confirm that the government’s new arrangements, introduced after the contract was signed and entered into, will impose a crippling $5 million excise bill on a contract which was excise free when it was signed?

Then the first question to me on that same day, from the member for Chisholm, which elicited the comment which I continue to hold to, that I had not discussed this matter with Mr Honan, was in these terms:

My question is to the Prime Minister. Prime Minister, was the government contacted by the major Australian producer of ethanol or by any representative of his company or the Industry Association before its decision to impose fuel excise on ethanol? If so, when? Was the government urged to take action to prevent Trafigura Fuels Australia from importing a shipment of ethanol from Brazil at a commercially competitive price?

Plainly, that question was about the behaviour of the government in relation to that shipment. That is the context in which this was asked. That is the context in which I gave the answers I have given, and it is why I asserted then and I continue to assert that I have not misled the House. The whole thrust of these questions is to try and allege that by this decision we had done some kind of special favour for a particular company.

Mr Crean: That’s right.

Mr HOWARD: ‘That’s right,’ he says. You can always rely on the Leader of the Opposition to helpfully interject. He said, ‘That’s right.’ That was the whole thrust. I have demonstrated that at the time I had this meeting with Mr Honan, on 1 August, I did not know about the Trafigura shipment; neither, apparently, did Honan.

Mr Crean: You didn’t know about it.

Mr HOWARD: Once again, helpfully, the Leader of the Opposition has interjected, saying, ‘You didn’t know about it.’ I did not know about it then, and that is why the answer that I gave was palpably correct and why I have not misled the House. The strange thing about the allegation that we have meant to have done enormous favours for Dick Honan is that the two things that Mr Honan’s company wanted most of all were, firstly, for the government to mandate

Mr Latham: Mr Speaker, on the question of relevance, the Prime Minister has been going for some time now and he has not once mentioned his answer on 19 September, which was the sole purpose of the question that I put to him.

The SPEAKER: The Prime Minister was asked a question about the search for records in his office on the question of meetings with the Manildra Groupas I noted it, about dates and conversations. By any measure he is referring exclusively to Manildra exercises and is relevant.

Mr HOWARD: Continuing what I was saying, the argument is that we have done some special deal for this company. The two things that this company has advocated and lobbied – not only the government but, I suspect, also the opposition – fairly actively over the past few months are, firstly, for the government to mandate a minimum use of ethanol in a blend of petrol and ethanol, and, secondly, they have argued vigorously against the imposition of a 10 per cent cap, because they are, in fact, blending ethanol up to levels of 20 per cent. Has the government acted in response to either of those pieces of advocacy? No. The government has not mandated a minimum. The government, a few months ago, having got proper scientific advice on the matter, introduced a 10 per cent cap for ethanol. So not only does the opposition leader have his facts wrong but he has his conspiracy theory wrong as well.

Mr CREAN: My question is to the Prime Minister. In your answer on 19 September you stated:

I have, on checking, found that a number of letters were received on this general issuenot just on ethanol but on the general issue. In fact, my office received 16 in all, from different sources, from January until now.

Prime Minister, if the issue you were referring to in your answer today was simply that related to Trafigura and, as you have also admitted today, no correspondence was received by your office until about 20 August last year on that issue, why did you disclose the existence of documents going back to January but not disclose your meeting with Mr Honan on 1 August?

Mr HOWARD: I remind the Leader of the Opposition of the central reality of this issue, and that is that the context of the questions asked of me was the shipment from Brazil. Those opposite interject, but it was they who framed the questions. I did not frame the questions; the tactics committee of the opposition framed the questions. They framed the questions about an ethanol shipment, and the reason they framed them about a shipment from Brazil was that I had made a statement five days earlier and they thought, ‘Aha, this is a conspiracy between the government and Mr Honan and Manildra. He’s made this statement, and we will ask a whole lot of questions.’

Well, I am quite happy: if the opposition wants to ask me questions about an issue, I will answer those questions, and I have made it plain that the context in which I answered these questions was the context in which they were put to me, and that was in relation to this particular shipment. I disclosed particularly the existence of a letter from Mr Honan dealing with the shipment, because, quite apart from anything that may be said by the Leader of the Opposition, I had absolutely no difficulty in disclosing to the House that I had received a letter from Mr Honan on 28 August about the Brazilian shipment.

So, if he had specifically raised the Brazilian shipment with me during a personal conversation, why would I not with ease have mentioned that? In other words, if I had no reason to suppress public knowledge about the letter about the Brazilian shipment, why would I have had a reason to suppress the existence of a conversation about the Brazilian shipment? It is obvious that the discussion I had on 1 Augustwhich has the opposition salivatingwas not about the subject matter of their questioning, and it is equally obvious that I have not misled the house.

Mr CREAN: My question is to the Prime Minister. I ask: does he recall his comments in August 1995 when he said:

We want to assert the very simple principle that truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life.

So said the Prime Minister. But with commentators like Andrew Bolt saying that the Prime Minister has betrayed himself and the parliament by not telling the truth about his meeting with Mr Honan, isn’t it time, Prime Minister, to fess up and be man enough to admit that you got it wrong, that you did meet with Mr Honan but that you told the parliament you hadn’t?

Mr HOWARD: Even in his questions the Leader of the Opposition cannot get his own assertions correct. The fact that I met Mr Honan is not in dispute. It is not in dispute. I am not the only one who has met Mr Honan. You used to meet him fairly regularly when you were a minister in the Keating government. That is not the issue. The issue is whether what I said in parliament regarding the shipment of ethanol from Brazil was correct, and nothing that the Leader of the Opposition has said, after 45 or 50 minutes of questioning, has altered the fact that I did not discuss the Trafigura shipment in my meeting on 1 August with Mr Honan. That was the basis of what I said then and that is the basis of my continuing to reject the absurd claim by the Leader of the Opposition.

Mr CREAN: My question is to the Prime Minister. I ask: does he recall saying in his time in opposition:

The simple principle … here boils down to whether the man holding the supreme office in this country tells the truth to this Parliament or not.

If the Prime Minister really were the national leader he aspires to be, he would be big enough to come into this parliament and say, ‘Look, I’m sorry; I got it wrong.’ Why is the Prime Minister never big enough to live up to these words, never big enough to come up into the parliament and say, ‘I’m sorry; I got it wrongwrong on kids overboard and now wrong on ethanol and the meeting with Dick Honan’?

Mr HOWARD: The question of what sort of leader I am is a matter for the Australian people to judge – not the Leader of the Opposition and not me. I am very happy on all occasions to submit myself to the judgment of the Australian people and I look forward to the next occasion when I submit myself to the judgment of the Australian people, alongside the Leader of the Opposition.

***

PM’s office in ethanol paper trail

by Laura Tingle, political correspondent

Australian Financial Review, 12/08/2003

Facing repeated allegations that he had misled parliament over his dealings with the Manildra Group, Prime Minister John Howard yesterday told parliament that the company and its chairman, Liberal Party donor Dick Honan, had not got what it wanted from his government.

But new documents show the federal government last year responded within days to suggestions by Manildra that it should develop a multimillion-dollar production subsidy for ethanol to protect it from a looming shipment of Brazilian ethanol a few weeks later.

The revelation comes as Mr Howard was yesterday forced to defend repeated claims that he had misled parliament over his dealings with Manildra in the lead-up to making a decision that favoured the company last September.

But according to documents received by Labor Senator Kerry O’Brien under a Freedom of Information Act request, the government’s decision to exchange an excise exemption for a domestic production subsidy which made Brazilian ethanol imports uncompetitive fulfilled requests put to the government in August last year when news of the shipment broke.

The executive director of Manildra’s lobby group in Canberra, Bob Gordon, wrote to a number of government figures, including a member of Mr Howard’s staff, on August 21.

This was three weeks after Mr Howard had held a one-on-one meeting with Mr Honan to discuss protection from Brazilian ethanol imports the meeting he did not disclose to parliament and which is now at the centre of claims that he misled parliament.

“To the best of our ability, our industry has been monitoring, through contracts in Brazil, the possibility of fuel ethanol imports into Australia,” Mr Gordon wrote.

“Our association has, for some time, been advocating moving biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesels from the existing excise scheme to a producer credit scheme funded by fuel excise revenues.

“We have reliable advice from Brazil that a significant shipment of fuel ethanol from Brazil is scheduled to be delivered to Australia in September.

“We would be grateful for an early opportunity to discuss the issues and options associated with imports of biofuels, preferably this week.”

Other documents show that the then head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Max Moore-Wilton, spoke to Mr Honan within the following days and personally set up and chaired an interdepartmental committee to oversee the implementation of the change in policy.

Mr Moore-Wilton’s intervention had already got under way at the time Mr Honan then personally wrote to Mr Howard seeking the same policy change a letter the Prime Minister told parliament last year he had not personally seen.

Question Time yesterday was dominated by questions to Mr Howard about why he had told parliament on three separate occasions in September last year that he had not discussed the ethanol industry with Mr Honan and his company, when records now revealed the one-on-one meeting in August.

Mr Howard stuck to his defence that his answers were “in the context” that Labor had asked specifically about the decision taken in the wake of the specific Brazilian shipment, which had not been discussed with Mr Honan on August 1.

But the Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, said the Prime Minister’s code of conduct “says that if a minister misleads, whether knowingly or unknowingly, he has the obligation to come in and correct the record immediately”.

“We know why he did not want to correct the record. It was because the discussions and decisions that were being taken were to the significant advantage of a friend of his.”

The Government is systematically destroying its education department in retaliation for daring to tell it the truth about its higher education policy – that poorer and mature age students are being turned away.

The annihilation of truth – this time perpetrated in the name of education minister Brendan Nelson – has also exposed the new public service head and former education department head Dr Peter Shergold to the charge that he not only doctors reports he doesn’t think the minister wants to read, but shamelessly misleads the public with Orwellian assurances that the public service is strong, apolitical and fearless and the government likes it that way.

The children overboard affair raised deep suspicions that the public service was now reduced to yet another government spin machine, but the doctored report scandal confirms it in spades. It also confirms that yet another institutional check and balance on the abuse of government power is on the verge of destruction.

Today a timeline of the scandal, the latest Herald stories disclosing the censorship, the nonsensical letter from new department head Jeff Harmer trying to weasel the minister out of trouble, Shergold’s recent shameless eulogy to dead public service values and transcripts of Nelson’s point blank refusal to answer any questions on the scandal in Parliament. I have never seen a minister so brazenly hide under the skirts of his department head as Nelson did in Parliament today. The only reasonable conclusion is that the minister has something to hide.

The big question in my mind is: Does the government not want Australians to know the facts or is it that it doesn’t want to know itself? Is it so ideologically determined to privatise universities and make the user pay regardless of circumstances that it closes its own eyes to the truth? Is spin the only priority? Is the government so corrupt that it will only see facts which justify its pre-determined position? Does it care at all how its policies affect Australians?

The scandal has all the hallmarks of children overboard, down to the startling fact that Nelson’s media adviser, Ross Hampton, is the very same Ross Hampton who helped Peter Reith lie his way through the election campaign on children overboard. You’ve got “plausible deniability”, you’ve got advisers calling the shots and supposedly not telling ministers and you’ve got a public service which wants to tell the truth sat on and spat on by senior public servants whose chief loyalty is to the government, not to the truth and not to the Australian people who pay them.

The Herald will report the latest body blows to the department tomorrow. The Government is in the process of dismantling the department’s research section to ensure it doesn’t hear what it doesn’t want to hear again. Officials who tell the truth when asked, and write the truth when briefed, are on the run. Much better to employ consultants who know their job is to tell the government what it wants to hear and get paid handsomely to sell their souls.

***

Table of contents:

1. Scandal timeline

2. SMH report yesterday

3. Brendan Nelson’s statement to Parliament yesterday

4. SMH report today

5. Nelson’s question time stonewall today

6. The report’s alleged censor, public service chief Peter Shergold, tells the people the public service is fearless and honest and ministers like it that way.

***

ITEM 1 – Doctoring a report

May 10-August 27, 2001

The National Report on Australia’s Higher Education Sector 2001 and other reports commissioned by the Department of Education Science and Training.

March 2002

Draft chapters made available to external consultants and departmental officers and meetings held.

March 31, 2002

In-house work concluded.

April-May 2002

Report ready for publication; alert and briefing note to minister prepared; key sections pulled under instruction from the Secretary of Nelson’s department DEST Dr Peter Shergold, according to senior departmental officials.

19 March, 2003

Labor Senator Kim Carr puts a question on notice to Education Minister Brendan Nelson asking why the report had not been published and why the cost of the consultancies were not declared in the Department’s annual report as legally required.

June 5, 2003

Under questioning in Senate estimates on the suppressed report. Department officials say it has been with the Minister since the first quarter of 2003 and the other reports have been reclassified ‘for Minister’s eyes only’.

July 23, 2003

The National report, as doctored, is posted on Department website.

August 5, 2003

The Department issues a press release denying that parts of the report were deleted on political grounds.

August 8, 2003

Two more reports previously “for Minister’s eyes only” are posted on DEST website.

August 11, 2003

Brendan Nelson tables a letter in Federal Parliament from Department Secretary Jeff Harmer saying he (Harmer) had not ‘not formally’ briefed the Minister before 23 July 2003.

August 12

Nelson avoids all questions on the matter in Parliament.

***

ITEM 2 – Sydney Morning Herald report yesterday

Nelson hid uni fee risks, say officials

by Aban Contractor

Sydney Morning Herald, 11-8-2003

The Federal Government hid from the public the adverse effects of raising university tuition fees, current and former Education Department officials said yesterday.

Reports prepared for the year-long debate on higher education were meant to be published at the same time as the Government’s first Crossroads discussion paper in April last year, they said. The reports were ready about then, they said.

A senior source, who asked not to be named, said they showed the risks of policy approaches, such as charging higher fees, on poorer students. “The Minister [Brendan Nelson] chose not to make it available for the public debate,” the source said.

On Friday the Department of Education, Science and Training posted two of the reports on its website. One looked at the impact of increasing Higher Education Contribution Scheme fees. The other examined student access and quality. Each page is stamped “Draft”.

A media release says Dr Nelson wanted them published because “it is in the public interest”.

This followed last month’s release of another report, The National Report on Australia’s Higher Education Sector 2001, which was dubbed for the Minister’s eyes only, after it was written. It was published on the website after politically sensitive sections were deleted.

Another senior Department of Education, Science and Training official suggested the research was flawed and should be used with caution. This angered many in the department, especially because some of the authors have been cited in respected international journals.

Labor’s public service spokesman, Kim Carr, said the department’s research and evaluation branch had a reputation for quality research and the reports were always intended for publication.

“The branch has now been broken up, its funding cut back and its research capacity crippled,” Senator Carr said.

“We are entitled to know who ordered the reclassification of this research and on what date, and what was the involvement of the Minister and his office.”

HECS and Opportunities in Higher Education found that changes introduced in 1996 reduced the number of older people applying to study at university by about 17,000 a year. The number of school leaver applicants fell about 9000 a year.

It also showed that a person on an annual income of $30,000 paying off a HECS debt lost about $15 a week in disposable income. That increased to about $50 a week for those earning $50,000.

Dropping the HECS repayment threshold from $28,495 to $20,701 caused particular harm, and was more likely to have deterred people from combining work and part-time study.

“Persons within this income range experienced falls in disposable incomes of between $12 and $24 per week,” the report said.

The number of men from poorer families studying in the most expensive courses such as law, medicine, dentistry and veterinary science had dropped significantly, by 38 per cent.

“The lesson from this study is that any future changes to HECS arrangements would need careful design to minimise their impact, particularly among groups more sensitive to student charges,” the report said. Newcastle University said yesterday that one of 15 international students accused of plagiarism had graduated and could not be disciplined.

***

ITEM 3 – Statement to Parliament yesterday by Brendan Nelson, and the letter he tabled.

The Sydney Morning Herald today imputes that I or my office has withheld and/or amended reports produced within my department in relation to reports that have been examining, in particular, the impact of HECS on student participation in higher education. By way of clarifying these issues and explaining why I have in fact been misrepresented, I table a letter dated 8 August 2003 which sets out all of these issues from the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training. (Margo: Note he says nothing in his own defence, or in defence of his office, and instead hides behind the letter of his department head.)

***

Hon Dr Brendan Nelson,

Minister for Education, Science and Training,

Parliament House,

CANBERRA 2600.

Dear Minister,

I am writing in the context of recent media reports about the publication of the National Report on Higher Education 2001. The purpose of this letter is to provide you with an accurate account of the circumstances relating to the preparation and publication of the report.

In early 2001 the Department decided to begin preparation of such a national report as a retrospective look at policy developments and other changes in the higher education sector during the decades 1992 to 2001. The report was intended to be a companion volume to the 1993 National Report on Australia’s Higher Education Sector which examined the decade 1982 to 1991.

The Department subsequently commissioned a number of contributions from people in the sector including recently retired vice-chancellors and researchers with particular expertise. The report also drew on a wide range of internal Departmental material, both published and unpublished. Numerous Departmental officers were involved in drafting and editing various parts of the draft report.

A number of drafts of the national report were compiled between 2001 and the publication date of the final report on 23 July 2003. In around April 2002 work such as professional editing, formating and indexing was begun in preparation for the publication of the national report.

In November 2002, or thereabouts, the Department took the decision to remove material regarding HECS that has recently become the subject of media reporting. This decision was made because of the Department’s concerns in relation to the methodological difficulties inherent in analysis of this kind and the incompleteness and inconclusiveness of some of the findings which meant that it did not have a valid place in the report.

The Department’s concerns relate to the small size of the effects observed in the analysis, the difficulty of disaggregating other factors from any HECS-related factors and our inability to quantify the likely impact of statistical changes over the period studied. The Department’s reluctance to use the above material in the context of the national report was strengthened by the fact that the analysis had not been published, nor subject to wider scrutiny or review by experts in the field.

An interim draft of the national report was provided to the Higher Education Adviser in your office in late December 2002 for information and comment. I would stress that the Department had already taken the decision to remove all material relating to unpublished internal Departmental analysis before that draft was provided to your Higher Education Adviser. The material relating to the impact of HECS was edited out of this and subsequent versions by the Department. The Department received no feedback from your office on that draft. Revised drafts were handed to your Higher Education Adviser progressively from March 2003 onwards. Between March and July 2003 your Higher Education Adviser suggested some minor changes, largely of a stylistic or grammatical nature.

Some of your adviser’s suggestions, along with other further edits initiated by the Department, were incorporated in the final version of the national report in July 2003. On 23 July 2003 we provided advice to you that the national report had been published on the Department’s website. You issued a media statement on the same day announcing the publication of the report.

I would like to make it clear that the report was purely an initiative of the Department and was not begun or prepared with any consultation with you or your office with the exception of the relatively late and minor input from your adviser as noted above. I can confirm that you were not formally briefed on the report by the Department at any time before 23 July 2003.

I trust this information clarifies this matter.

Yours sincerely,

Jeff Harmer

Secretary

8/8/03

My comment: Harmer’s reasons for deleting the offending material is classic Sir Humphrey-speak. Don’t like want a report says? Question its “methodology”. Note the statement that “the Department had already taken the decision to remove all material relating to unpublished internal Departmental analysis before that draft was provided to your Higher Education adviser.” This says nothing about any phone calls between the department and the adviser or the minister before the draft was sent. Note the wording “The Department received no feedback from your office on that draft.” Harmer does not rule out “feedback” prior to “that draft”, and fudges the question of what Nelson’s adviser asked to be changed. Note the use of the phrase “formally briefed”. This is classic public service speak – it does not address the question of INFORMAL briefings. Formal briefings are the ones in writing, signed off and recorded. As we learned in the children overboard inquiry, this government doesn’t like formal briefings – it much prefers phone calls or other unrecorded contact.

Why didn’t Nelson issue his own statement setting out HIS version of what he knew when, and what his office knew when, and what he or his office did or didn’t do about the embarrassing report findings? Why has he hidden between a diabolically carefully worded statement from his department? What has he got to hide?

The Opposition wondered the same thing. But the Herald had more…

***

ITEM 4 – Sydney Morning Herald report today

PM’s man once doctored uni report

by Aban Contractor and Gerard Noonan

Sydney Morning Herald, 12-8-2003

The head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Peter Shergold, intervened to have politically sensitive material cut from an official report on universities when he headed the federal Education Department.

The action to suppress the material before an intense debate on the future of higher education has caused deep divisions in the department.

Senior Education Department officials have said the National Report on Australia’s Higher Education Sector 2001 was completed and ready for printing just before Easter last year, but Dr Shergold insisted that key parts be rewritten or removed.

Current and former departmental officials said Dr Shergold claimed inclusion of the sections would jeopardise the Federal Government’s position that no one would be worse off if it were to introduce new fees under proposed changes to university entry.

The deleted material included figures showing that applications for university entry had fallen since the Government raised fees in 1997, particularly from poorer and older students.

A Senate committee examining the Government’s higher education restructuring plans will begin hearings next month.

Dr Shergold said he could not remember telling anyone to take anything out of the report.

“I certainly don’t have any memory of that.”

Dr Shergold discussed the matter yesterday with the current head of the Department of Education, Jeff Harmer. A spokesman for the department said it was not prepared to speak on Dr Shergold’s behalf.

“The minister has tabled a letter on the matter and we don’t want to make any further comment,” the spokesman said.

The Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, told Parliament yesterday that the letter he received from Dr Harmer showed he had not seen the report before it was published.

The letter outlined the way the department removed material from the report, saying the research “did not have a valid place in the report”.

Dr Harmer included a timeline showing the department’s actions and its links with the minister’s office.

“I can confirm that you were not formally briefed on the report by the department at any time before 23 July 2003,” the letter said. Parts of the timeline contradict information obtained by the Herald from senior departmental sources and evidence given to a Senate committee in June.

Labor’s research and public service spokesman, Kim Carr, said the officials responsible for the research always believed the material would be made public.

“This is the politicisation process at work where officers are punished for telling Government things they don’t want to hear,” he said.

“These reports were reclassified as advice to the minister in an inept attempt to deny the Senate and the taxpaying public this information.”

Dr Shergold was secretary of the Department for Education between December 2001 and February this year, before he was appointed to his current post, replacing Max Moore-Wilton.

The sections deleted from the report included assessments of data showing a significant drop in the number of poorer students applying to study courses such as law, medicine, dentistry and veterinary science after the Government raised fees in 1997.

The data also showed that since then the number of older people applying to study at university had dropped by about 17,000 a year.

Dr Nelson’s office responded to questions from the Herald yesterday by saying: “The minister has today tabled a letter from the departmental secretary which covers all the substantive aspects of this matter. He has nothing to add to that.”

***

ITEM 5 – Brendan Nelson in Question Time Today

Question one

Ms Macklin: Why has the minister ignored his own department’s research which found the 1996 increases in HECS ‘reduced demand for higher education among school leaver applicants by around 9,000 students a year’ and ‘lowered demand for higher education among ‘mature age’ applicants by around 17,000 persons per year? Minister, isn’t it true that these damning findings were deleted from the national report on Australia’s higher education sector 2001 by Dr Shergold, the minister’s former departmental secretary and now the head of the Department of Prime Minister and cabinet, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald today?

Dr Nelson: Whilst I thank the member for Jaga for the question, there are a number of quite false assertions in the question.Yesterday afternoon immediately after Question Time I tabled a letter from the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and training addressed to me and dated 8 August. The letter said, in part:

I would stress that the Department had already taken the decision to remove all material relating to unpublished internal Departmental analysis before that draft was provided to your Higher Education adviser.

As the letter was tabled yesterday, I presume it has been read by the member for Jagajaga. The real question we seek to address in facing Australia’s future in higher education is … (he spoke at length statement on matters unrelated to the question.)

Ms Macklin: Was Dr Shergold responsible for deleting the findings referred to in the department’s letter that the minister tabled yesterday?

Dr Nelson: My answer again to the member for Jagajaga is that, firstly in terms of the references to editing in the secretary’s letter addressed to me dated 8 August, it is a matter for the department as to who within the department actually did that….(he continued on matters not related to the question.)

Ms Macklin: Minister, did not a departmental officer tell a Senate estimates committee on 5 June this year that a version of the national report on Australia’s higher education sector 2001 was sent to the minister in the first quarter of 2003 and that the department would require the minister’s approval to release the report? How does this fit with what the minister told a press conference on 23 July this year when he said that he had only seen the national report on Australia’s higher education sector that morning after it had appeared in the press? Is this ministerial incompetence or ministerial coverup?

Dr Nelson: This report, which seems to be occupying the attention of the ALP whilst this government is actually thinking about building Australia’s future, was initiated by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training and was produced by the department. Any alterations, as the secretary said, were made before it was sent to my office. It is a 500 page report and essentially the government has been working earnestly on building a foundation for Australia’s future. It was not up until that point a report which I had personally read. Can the Labor Party just get it into its mind that this is a report amongst many reports that the Commonwealth department is doing frequently on a whole variety of issues? As the secretary’s letter says, the report was sent to my office late last year. All I can say again to the member for Jagajaga is: read the secretary’s letter. It sets it all out …. (he proceeds to discuss matters not relevant to the question.)

***

ITEM 6 – What Peter Shergold told the Australian people about the state of the public service

A mandarin’s rosy view of Australia

by Geoffrey Barker

Australian Financial Review, 31-7-2003

Don’t worry; be happy. Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and Australia’s national government is the best of all possible political and bureaucratic worlds.

Peter Shergold, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, offered this Panglossian analysis of public service-federal government relations yesterday in an interview on ABC radio.

There was no softening of advice to ministers for political reasons; all advice was “robust, strong, well-argued and, hopefully, timely and accurate”; far from undermining the Westminster tradition, increasingly powerful ministerial advisers were complementing the role of public servants, Dr Shergold said.

Since taking over from Max “The Axe” Moore-Wilton as head of PM&C early this year, Dr Shergold, as titular head of the Federal Public Service, has sought to bring a less abrasive style to the job. But don’t think he’s a softie.

“Public policy is serious,” he said. “These are very profound issues, whether it’s the security of Australia or violence in indigenous communities.

“These are issues on which we should argue across government, within government and, of course, there should be arguments that take place between public servants, ministerial advisers and ministers.”

And don’t think that Dr Shergold would not do the government’s dirty work when necessary.

sure that political decisions taken by the government are being implemented in a committed way,” he said.

“You have to walk a border line. It is almost inevitable that at times you will come under criticism for doing it.

“I tend to speak with a certain amount of passion on issues. I am engaged by them. They interest me. That passion that I bring is often interpreted as being political. In fact, what I am speaking with passion about is the nature of public service, and how important it is to our democratic institutions.”

EARLIER HERALD REPORTS

Damaging uni reports were buried: Labor

by Aban Contractor

Sydney Morning Herald, 5-8-2003

The Federal Government is sitting on at least four more reports on the detrimental impact of increasing student fees, the Opposition said yesterday.

The reports, which are believed to show poorer people are finding it harder to get into university and meet study costs, were handed to the Government up to two years ago.

Yesterday the Opposition accused the Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, of doctoring critical data from publicly funded research in a bid to stymie debate. However, a spokesman for the Department of Education, Science and Training said the reports were in “the nature of internal policy advice prepared for the deliberative processes of Minister Nelson”.

Labor’s education spokeswoman, Jenny Macklin, said the Government hoped to lift fees by another 30 per cent so it was not surprising data showing many people were being priced out of an education had been deleted.

Labor’s public service spokesman, Kim Carr, described the deletions as “further examples of the public service telling the Government things they don’t want to hear and, as a consequence, their reports are no longer for public release”.

***

Ugly details cut from uni policy report

by Aban Contractor and Gerard Noonan

Sydney Morning Herald, 4-8-2003

Politically sensitive material showing that poor and older students have been hurt by the Federal Government’s higher education policies has been deleted from an official report.

Large sections were cut from the Department of Education document some time between it reaching the office of the Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, last year and being posted on the department website just over a week ago.

Chapter four of the now 380-page report titled Access and Equity has been particularly affected, with whole sections from the original document, including graphics, gone.

Twelve days ago the Herald quoted from the original, which revealed a fall in the proportion of school leavers applying to study at university.

It suggested the rise in Higher Education Contribution Scheme fees could be part of the reason. It also showed a fall in the proportion of older people applying to study, especially those who had not studied before. All of the quotes used have been cut from the version posted on the Department of Education, Science and Training website.

The original report also showed the number of less well-off students taking so-called Band 3 subjects such as law, medicine, dentistry and veterinary science fell sharply when the Government increased tuition fees seven years ago.

It said: “After the changes were introduced in 1997, not only did the numbers of students in Band 3 of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme decline but the proportion from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds was less than previously.” This has also been cut from the version on the website.

A spokesman for Dr Nelson, Ross Hampton, denied the minister had tampered with the report. “There’s been no dialogue, correspondence or any form of discussion between the minister or anyone in his office about the report,” Mr Hampton said.

The Herald was told by a senior government official that the deleted sections had since been deemed “internal research to inform the minister”. Subsequently, they were not for publication and removed from the report before it was given to Dr Nelson.

Current and former senior public servants said that before any report was published it had to go before the minister and the minister’s senior staff.

“Stuff is not published if the minister doesn’t want it published,” said one source, who declined to be named.

Another senior public servant said the snapshot of universities over the past decade, the National Report on Australia’s Higher Education Sector 2001, was completed about 12 months ago and should have been released during the Government’s year-long review of higher education.

Yesterday, Labor’s public service spokesman, Kim Carr, said the deletion of sections of the report was part of a pattern of deceit that began with the “children overboard saga” and continued with Government attempts to suppress a report on hepatitis. “The public service told the Government the truth but the Government sent it back for correction; this is the politicisation process at work,” Senator Carr said.

***

The privilege of higher education

Herald editorial. August 5

Censorship is a harsh charge. Yet it is hard to see the deletion of sections of a politically sensitive Department of Education document – some time between its arrival on the desk of the federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, and its public release last month – as anything but political censorship. Material which showed poor and older tertiary students are being disadvantaged by rising university fees was belatedly deemed “internal research to inform the minister” after it was published in The Sydney Morning Herald. The finding itself is not surprising given the steady shift towards the user-pays principle in Australia’s universities since the tuition fee increases of 1997, and funding declines since. What is alarming is the selective suppression of research which might reflect unfavourably on the Federal Government’s higher education policies.

Good government demands open, informed and continual policy debate. Education and training is the key to Australia’s international competitiveness. One prominent British study concluded that about 80 per cent of future jobs will require skill levels equivalent to a university degree. Yet Australia’s universities and its students are under intense financial pressure, academic standards are under attack, classrooms are overcrowded and the personal debt burden of students and graduates has reached $9 billion.

The Federal Government is committed to ensuring tertiary students – who benefit financially when they enter the workforce – contribute partially or fully to the cost of their education. This is partly in response to the free university years of the 1970s and the rising cost to the public purse that followed. Despite the abolition of fees in 1974 in favour of access on academic merit, universities remained largely the domain of the middle class, and costly fee subsidies became an increasingly costly form of middle-class welfare.

The debate since has been about what is a fair balance between public subsidy and private contribution. The Department of Education’s finding that fee increases are now discouraging poorer and older students – especially away from expensive, high-status courses such as law and medicine – is a crucial part of this debate. Broad access to higher education protects social and economic mobility based on merit and effort – a concept deeply embedded in the Australian psyche. Within the existing user-pays model, barriers to entry to universities could be addressed through means-tested scholarships or fee relief, for example. No solution, however, can be formulated unless all the facts are on the table.

Since political ‘manifestos’ seem to be the order of the Webdiary moment, I’d like to take the opportunity to write in defence of being Green.

To me, voting Green, as I have done in every election post-1990, is much more than just an expression of political support for the only party that seems to be serious about safeguarding our collective ecological future, but that the Greens are such a party is alone enough to win my vote.

Yes, it’s true that the jury remains out on much of the science associated with the hot Green issues – global warming, threats to biodiversity, genetically-modified crops, and so on, but there is already more than enough Empirical evidence on such matters to convince me, a science graduate. The way I look at an issue like climate change is very hard-headed: we can either take the chance that the doomsdayers are right (and there are increasing numbers of them), and thus make major strategic changes now (while they would still have an effect); or we can wait and see. Most scientists seem to think that the ‘Old Bailey jury proof’ on global warming won’t be available for another twenty years or so – by which time, of course, it will probably be too late. And then what? The Greens get to say ‘We told you so’ as a thousand Pacific Islands disappear under the waves?

Sorry, but I’m not prepared to take that chance. What I find bemusing is that so many allegedly ‘practical’ mainstream voters of a more conservative (left or right) bent are – the kind of voters, what’s more, who were prepared to support, on almost no evidence, a speculative invasion and occupation of another country to ‘pre-empt’ a future WMD catastrophe. (Laugh at Greenies like me on far more potentially-disastrous threats, dismiss me as a scaremonger? Curious double-standards here.)

I suppose it’s sometimes easy to ridicule Green tactical excesses – the ‘feral’ aspects of environmental protest, the unorthodox economic theories, the ‘dancing with pixies at the bottom of the garden’. And yet, I have no doubt that future generations will look back upon the turn of the third Millennium, and conclude that the Greens, of all political groupings of our era, were the only ones with their eye on the real ball, the most far-sighted of us all.

Climate change, salination and soil erosion, the looming crisis in fresh water supply, rising sea levels, depleted global fish stocks, the advance of deserts – these are surely not chimeras in a strategic sense, however much we might care to debate the nuances of the short-term numbers. They are real and, arguably now, exponentially-accelerating processes, and only Green parties the world over are placing the finding of timely solutions to them at the heart of their political philosophies, which is what it will take to deal with them effectively. We can argue about Kyoto until we’re blue in the face, but something, ultimately, will have to be done about carbon emissions on the kind of globo-strategic scale that individual, short-term, left-right domestic political cycles simply cannot effect.

The truth is that neither mainstream party in Australia is truly serious about Green issues, and the same is generally true of politics worldwide: Conservatives and neo-conservatives increasingly dismiss them outright, while Progressives usually still pay patronising lip service only, seeing such matters as just another opportunity to rope in a few extra bleeding heart votes by cynical, opportunistic default.

To make a real difference to our ecological future, Green issues must form the bedrock, not the periphery, of a political party’s platform. Legislative aims must begin with the question: ‘What is good for the sustainable future of the planet?’ and then flow from there into all other policy areas – economics, public infrastructure, employment, research and development, education, industry – not the other way around. Otherwise, you might as well not bother.

And it’s for this reason that my support for the Greens as a growing global political force goes beyond matters that are merely ‘ecological’ (if such a distinction is meaningful anyway). Of all global political philosophies available to us, only the Greens’ has a central theme that is, ultimately, still grounded in any meaningful practical expression. You cannot get a more benign and utilitarian and accessible ‘Big Idea’ than the future health of the planet on which we all live.

True, so far, some environmental groups have at times embraced extreme methods and varying degrees of fanaticism – and, yes, ill-judged scare-mongering, too – but as the Green movement has evolved, a startlingly-diverse range of political strands have begun to coalesce around the one central aim of taking care of Humanity’s home. Tree-huggers, farmers, billionaires, students, baby boomer Seachangers, international scientific groups, local mothers clubs, industry leaders, rock stars, grass-roots ‘save-the-local-parkers’, New Agers, indigenous groups – all are increasingly finding common philosophical ground in Green issues.

And it’s not just a matter of saving this forest or that whale or that other piece of Kiribati shoreline over there. It’s far broader, far more holistic and, I suggest without a speck of embarrassment, far more beautiful and Human, too. As the pace of contemporary western life accelerates, as our befuddled idea of ourselves as a species – who we are, why and how we live, what things are truly important to us – fragments under a thousand artificial and self-created pressures, perhaps now to the point of collective Human schizophrenia, there is, I think, a growing hunger afoot in the developed world for us all to stop, pause, and snap out of our mild collective madness. To me, the Green movement is by far our best shot at giving meaningful political expression to that hunger.

And in any case, there is no longer any worthwhile democratic political alternative available. I am, at last, thoroughly through with both ‘Conservative’ and ‘Progressive’ political groupings, for the simple reason that there are no such creatures any more, at least not in the Australian political landscape. There are only populist opportunists for whom power, and power alone, is the only political principle embraced. I read Daniel Moye’s fine articulation of the Conservative Ideal (Why conservatives fear John Howard) and found it admirable but utterly unrecognisable.

I listen to a Bob Carr or even a Paul Keating speech, and for a short moment, I start to believe that ‘Progressivism’ too is still possible in mainstream Australians politics – until the harsh reality of the next ALP branch-stack, the next grubby and cynical attack on a Carmen Lawrence idealist, bursts that hopeful bubble.

Ultimately, I realise that the gap between the expressed ideals and the dirty daily realities of traditional political groupings has been rendered too wide by the entrenched habits of pragmatism. There is always a ‘reason’, an ‘excuse’ for the jettisoning of principle by our two mainstream political groupings, and the net result is two mainstream political groupings that operate according to no over-arching principle at all.

Left and Right is over; it is a dead division; it has ceased to be. There is only the fight for raw power now, and perhaps a little half-hearted window-dressing to disguise that ugly fight. The John Howards and their power-opportunists pay their hollow ‘tributes’ to Deakin and Menzies, while the Simon Creans and Bob Carrs and their power-opportunists lift their goblets of Grange in hollow ‘homage’ to Curtin and Chifley and Whitlam. But it’s all the same game, and that same game is telling believable lies.

“The things that unite us are more important than the things that divide us,” declares the Prime Minister, even as he wedges the nation apart with a casual brutality that will take a generation to heal.

“We are a tolerant and inclusive country,” he says, before dog-whistlingly ‘reminding’ us that that gay men and women have no place in the future of the species, let alone the nation.

“We are fulfilling our legal and moral obligations to refugees and treating them with compassion,” Phillip Ruddock assures us, even while fighting, inch-by-bloodless-inch, a court determination that the detention of a few scared kids behind razor-wire is not merely illegal but also, as anyone with an ounce of honesty and Human instinct would agree (if they allowed their better instincts to prevail), inhumane, cruel, harmful, ludicrous.

“The Australian Labour Party is committed to re-embracing its grass-roots membership,” says the too-clever-by-half ‘intellectual politician’ Bob Carr, even as the Mayor of Parramatta is summarily dumped as Labor candidate in favour of the nobody wife of some nobody Right Faction power-broker.

“This is a victory for the True Believers,” announces Paul Keating smugly, having just destroyed, with breath-taking cynicism and shameless scare-mongering, a Liberal Party opponent who, for once, was actually presenting a political package of considerable idealism and vision.

“Trust me, I am a born-again Greenie,” puffed Graham Richardson once upon a time, and like a fool, I took him at his word. (Never again, Richo. Never, ever again, mate.)

“I did not have sexual relations with that women,” said Bill Clinton, with a hot tear of ‘Progressive’ conviction in his eye.

“Saddam Hussein has sought uranium from Africa,” said George W. Bush, with a resolute, Churchillian gleam of ‘Conservative’ conviction in his.

“Iraq can launch WMD in 45 minutes,” swore Tony Blair, and his brand of political conviction goes, I’m told, by the dull bureaucratic name of ‘The Third Way’ – but it was just another cynical, power-grubbing lie, too.

Such rank public dishonesty has many mournful effects on the civic health of a democracy – disengagement being the political word of the day – but by far the most damaging effect of all is, I think, the long-term damage that it has done to the idea of ‘public truth’ itself. Because when a politician stands before us and, in the face of all the evidence we can see with our own eyes, swears blind – eloquently, passionately, with conviction – that mandatory detention of children is ‘compassionate’, or that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda are working together to attack us with WMD, then what is destroyed is not just our belief in that particular politician, or their party or political philosophy, or our belief in politics as a civilising force, or our belief in the institutions of democracy, or even our belief in the worth of civic participation in general.

What is truly destroyed, with each rotten public lie – big or small, explicit or implied, outright or dog-whistled, lie of fact or lie of spirit – is our collective belief in belief itself.

And that is why, the older I get, the more comfortable I am with embracing what is quickly becoming an unstoppable global political movement – the simple belief in doing whatever we can to nurture and protect the future of our planet, which is no less, of course, than nurturing and protecting the future of our kids, and their kids, and so on, for all time.

Because for all the many criticism that can be directed at the Greens as a political force – and I concede that there are still many – one that cannot honestly be made to stick is a lack of belief in their own expressed principles and philosophies; Green principles and philosophies which, even better, an individual like me can try to put into meaningful practice. It’s becoming easier to ‘live Green’ all the time, and that doesn’t just mean taking the bus, not flushing the dunny and rolling your own cigarettes. Unlike all other political parties, aspiring to being a ‘good Green party man’ is an entirely personal, individual, and non-ideological lifestyle choice.

Sure, the Greens are no more in possession of all the answers for the future than anyone else, but what I do know is this: what I want from my public representatives is that what they say in public retain some core connection to what they do in public, to the policy decisions and positions they make.

I want Public Truth from our leaders, and the only place I’m getting it consistently these days is from Senator Bob Brown and Company. Liberal, Labor, National, even the Democrats – as parties, they’re all the same to me now: populists, cynics, game-players and patronisers of one sort or another.

And so, in the absence of honesty from Conservatives and Progressives out there in a dinosaurian political Luddite Land where two plus two is now five and white is fast becoming black, the only conclusion any rational voter can draw is this one: that the future story of Public Truth – of global democracy and meaningful civic participation – will be a future written with a billion and more nutty Green Pens.

John Howard and Simon Crean yesterday discarded decades of bipartisan policy on capital punishment, and in the process left Australians more vulnerable to being put to death overseas.

Our principle had been crystal clear, and was last enunciated in 2000 by Attorney-General Daryl Williams.

At that time political controversy raged over whether the federal government should overrule laws in Western Australia and the Northern Territory which gave the courts no choice but to send children to jail for property offences. Then WA Premier Richard Court upped the ante by threatening to introduce capital punishment in his state.

Williams immediately ruled that out, saying the federal government would overrule any such law. “We have international obligations which commit us to maintaining that abolition [of capital punishment], and we have actively lobbied other countries which have the death penalty,” he said.

As so the government did on behalf of David Hicks, an Australian to be charged with terrorism in the United States. Williams said on July 8 that Australia had “re-iterated to the US Australia’s long-standing, strong opposition to the death penalty”.

But yesterday, in the wink of an eye, Howard and Crean created an exception by refusing to make representations to Indonesia to commute the death penalty. John Howard has gone much further, saying he supports the death penalty for Amrozi, not merely that he won’t oppose it. “If the law of Indonesia requires that he be executed, then I regard that as appropriate,” he said this morning. The logic of that statement is that Australia could no longer credibly lobby for Australians who end up on death row in Indonesia, and would face huge credibility hurdles in lobbying other countries on such matters. Is he thinking straight?

Would we make representations if an Australian citizen had been found guilty of the charges against Amrozi? If not, then we have decided that in certain matters, Australian citizens will be left without the support of their nation when convicted of a capital offence overseas. If so, then we are clearly saying to the Indonesian people that our citizens are superior to theirs.

This is a consequence of making exceptions to a nation’s commitment to universal human rights. In the context of the war on terror, we are simply playing into the enemy’s hands.

Then there’s the question of our blatant double standards on due process. Neither Australia or the United Kingdom passed retrospective new criminal laws against terrorist acts after September 11. The reason is simple – it is a bedrock basic to a Western democracy that the country is ruled by laws, not men. In other words, if your liberty is at stake, as it is for a criminal offence, the law as it is laid down at the time you do something is the law that applies. Otherwise, the society is wide open to capricious ex-post-facto abuses of power by political leaders and the enforcement apparatus of the state.

Yet Indonesia did make its anti-terror retrospective, and charged Amrozi under that law. That law is in clear breach of a specific clause in the Indonesian Constitution banning retrospective criminal laws, the core fact Amrozi’s lawyer will argue on appeal. The Indonesians failed to also charge Amrozi with murder or offences under the law as it stood at the time of the Bali bombing, meaning that if appeal courts strike out his conviction as unconstitutional, he will walk free.

So how could Australia, through Howard and Crean, back a death penalty resulting from the degradation of the rule of law, a core standard the principle our nation says it’s fighting for in the war on terror? Did Australian authorities assist Indonesia in laying the charges against Amrozi as it did in investigating the bombing?

If Australia did not help ensure that the Indonesian judicial process was watertight and scrupulous, our government has failed us in a profound sense. The precautionary principle is crucial in handling the war on terror. It appears this principle has been ditched along with quite a few others in this trial.

A legal injustice – and this one is blatant – gives explosive ammunition to our enemies in the war on terror. How, for example, can we now credibly lobby other governments on behalf of our citizens caught up in overseas criminal proceedings on the basis that our citizens did not receive a fair trial? For the values we are fighting for to survive, we must consistently apply those values in practice.

These grave consequences of our leaders backing the death penalty are in addition to the fear of many – after seeing Amrozi’s spectacular propaganda throughout his trial to other would-be martyrs – that the death penalty is manna from heaven to the enemy, particularly if Amrozi dies laughing.

And that result would be disastrous for our neighbour Indonesia, and for us.

See also Howard to the states: capital punishment your call