As the AWB hearings go on, one important question doesn’t seem to have been asked[1]. If $300 million was paid as bribes to Saddam, whose money was it, and should they be repaid?

Although the AWB paid the money on behalf of Australian wheatgrowers, they got it back (and probably some more on top) in the form of inflated prices. So the money was in fact stolen from the UN, which in turn held it on behalf of the Iraqi people, who were supposed to be trading oil for food, bypassing the Saddam regime.

AWB, or failing that the Australian government, should repay this money to the Iraqi government, which is in dire financial straits now that US reconstruction funding has stopped.

fn1. There’s a similar question to do with misappropriation of Iraqi money under the Coalition Provision Administration, but I need to look into this one a bit more.

A correspondent reminds me I haven’t posted on the latest proposal for an ID card. The only difference to previous occasions is that the proposal is being pushed by Philip Ruddock (reversing his previuos stand). Unlike the usual case with proposals of this kind, we don’t have to ask the question “what would happen if this power fell into the wrong hands” – the power would go straight to the wrong hands.

As far as physical cards are concerned, there are two possibilities. One is that the card would be required only on the kinds of occasions, photo ID is required at present (boarding a plane, for example) in which case there are no great costs in terms of civil liberties, but also no great benefits. The other is that police would be able to demand production of the card at will, which would reduce us to the level of the quasi-dictatorial regimes where people went in fear of losing their “papers”.

It’s also worth noting that non-residents are presumably the group of greatest concern wrt terrorism and they could scarcely be issued with cards, so they would continue to use passports as ID – it does not appear to be hard to get a fake passport from many countries.

The real issue in most debates of this kind is not so much the cards themselves as the associated system of data matching. Most of the time, the assumption of proponents is that the card should be tied to a comprehensive database, accessible by all sorts of government officials. An inevitable consequence is that corrupt officials will, on occasion, make the data available to private parties. Some data-matching is inevitable and desirable, but this should be against a general presumption that information supplied to a government agency or department is confidential to that department, unless a specific case for sharing classes of information can be made.

I’ve always thought that the Oil-For-Food scandal and the parallel scandal (promoted mainly on the left of the blogosphere) about corruption in Iraq’s postwar reconstruction were overblown. Under the circumstances, corruption was inevitable in both cases.If you supported feeding Iraqi children or attempting to repair the damage caused by the war, you had to expect, as part of the overhead, that those with power in Iraq would seek to skim money off the top, and that they would find willing accomplices in this task. Having said all that, corruption shouldn’t be passively accepted. It’s a crime and, wherever they can be caught, those guilty of it should be punished.

By far the biggest fish to be caught in the net so far is Australia’s monopoly wheat exporter, AWB, which was, until 1999, the government-owned Australian Wheat Board. It has become evident that AWB paid hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam’s regime, and it has now been stated in evidence that the deals in question were discussed with Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer.

Based on past experience, particularly the Children Overboard case, we can be pretty confident of the following

* Both Downer and Howard knew that the AWB was paying kickbacks to the Iraqi regime

* This information was transmitted in a way that preserves deniability, so no conclusive proof will emerge

* No government minister will resign

* Endless hair-splitting defences of the government’s actions in this matter will emerge from those who have previously made a loud noise about Oil for Food.

On the point of resignation, I’d note that the information that had come out before today, showing the AWB up to its neck in corruption, would have been enough, under any previous government to require ministerial resignations, on the basis of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. But that doctrine is now obsolete in Australia. If anything short of a criminal conviction is considered sufficient to justify an enforced resignation under present conditions, I’m not aware of it.

“Gandhi” has a bit more

Martin Ferguson’s comments in support of the Howard government’s bogus climate forum[1] remind me of why I dislike the hereditary principle in politics. Australian politics and the Parliamentary Labor party in particular is full of people who are there only because their fathers (or, more rarely, mothers) were politicians themselves.This wasn’t true, or not to anything like the same extent, thirty years ago.

A few of these hereditary princelings have made a reasonable contribution, but on the whole, they’re a dead weight, and Ferguson is a prime example of the latter category. If he’s done anything to justify the positions he’s held, I’m not aware of it.

The core of the problem is that the membership of the major parties has collapsed to the point where an extended family and its retainers can form the basis of an effective sub-faction, capable of winning preselections. Short of radical changes in both politics and society, it’s hard to see this changing.

One possible response would be to move to a primary system for preselections, on the US model. This hasn’t, of course, stopped the operation of the hereditary principle there, but I think that there is less of a cult of political celebrity here – I can’t imagine that names like Downer or Ferguson command many votes among the Australian public.

fn1. The derisory contribution offered by the US Administration (a budget request for $52 million, equal to about 0.0005 per cent of US GDP, which will probably not be delivered anyway) is an indication of the seriousness with which the US took the meeting, as is the fact that (as far as I can tell) it wasn’t even reported in the US press. The same is true, from what I can see of the other participants. The whole thing is, in essence, window-dressing to cover the Howard government’s failure to ratify Kyoto.

I didn’t say anything about the career of Kerry Packer on his death, because I think it’s reasonable at such a time for family and friends to have an opportunity to mourn or celebrate the departed without interruption from others[1]. However, state memorial services are another matter. The provision of such a service, at public expense, implies that the person concerned has done substantial service to the public.

I’m not aware of any such service in Packer’s case. He was a man of great wealth and power, but he used his position almost entirely to accumulate more wealth and more power. Although the bulk of his wealth came from government-created licenses to print money (TV stations and casinos) he boasted of paying as little tax as he could. As Andrew Leigh notes, claims of great philanthropic activity also don’t stand up. Most stories of his generosity seem to reflect the grandiose largesse of the ‘big man’, also reflected in high-rolling gambling, rather than any real concern to do good.

In doing all this, Packer was no better and no worse than plenty of other people in business. The commentary on his death said that he was a good father despite having a miserable childhood himself, and obviously plenty of people liked and admired him. But if those were the criteria, we’d be having state funerals every day.

Packer justified his own tax minimisation by objecting to the waste of public money. Giving a memorial service to someone solely for starting out rich and getting a lot richer is a prime example.

fn1. There are exceptions. In 1953, Frank Packer’s Telegraph memorably, and rightly, ran the headline Stalin is dead. Hooray

There’s not much to say about the riots that hasn’t already been said, but one point that hasn’t been stressed enough is the small numbers of people actively involved. The crowd at Cronulla on Sunday was large, but it seems that only a couple of hundred were engaged in violence. Similarly, forty car loads of thugs were said to have been involved in the subsequent round of attacks on Monday night. That’s alarming but again it amounts to a couple of hundred people. The same was true in the French riots, which mainly consisted of small groups burning cars under cover of darkness. The availability of mobile phones makes organising this kind of thing a lot easier, and calls for a response. I hope that, in addition to those already charged, the police will pursue everyone involved in this shameful behavior. Many of them have been recorded on film and ought to be easy to identify.

Then there are the instigators of the violence. The senders of SMS messages will no doubt be hard to trace, but there’s no doubt about the role of talkback radio and 2GB in particular. It’s unclear whether Alan Jones or his talkback callers have committed a criminal offence, as suggested in comments here and elsewhere, but if he hasn’t, then the government’s spanking new sedition laws are clearly a dead letter.

The laws governing broadcasting are also relevant. Radio stations like 2GB get free allocations of valuable spectrum under a system of licensing which includes a prohibition on broadcasting matter that is likely to incite violence. If this system is to be maintained, 2GB should be stripped of its license by the Australian Broadcasting Authority for broadcasting people like Jones.

Last weekend, I went to a seminar organised by the Ngiya National Institute of Indigenous Law, Policy and Practice to discuss various issues relating to economic policy affecting indigenous communities. In doing some background research, one point (familiar to those who’ve followed the debate closely, but not to most others) cam through very clearly, particularly in this paper by John Taylor and Owen Stanley

Contrary to claims that the problems of indigenous communities have had buckets of money thrown at them with nothing to show for it, expenditure on services for indigenous communities is typically less (or no more than) what would be spent on comparable non-indigenous communities. In discussion over dinner, the case of Jigalong in WA was mentioned. This community has been trying for some time to set itself up a town council so that it can get funding comparable to nearby, mainly white, communities, notably Mt Newman. Today’s Oz has a prominent report on this.

A nice feature of the weekend was that quite a few participants turned out to be readers of this blog. Since my site counter broke a few months ago, I have no idea how many readers there are at present, but these days I seem to meet them wherever I go.

I’m not a huge fan of political scandals, but I’ve seen enough of them unfold to have a pretty good feel for the process. The vast majority can be put into one of three categories: beatups, stonewallers and one-hit wonders.

Beatups are bogus scandals where claims that look damaging turn out to have an innocent explanation, or at least a plausible rationalisation. Mostly these do the government concerned no harm.

Stonewallers are cases where the government’s response is to brazen the whole thing out, on the principle “never apologise, never explain, never resign”. Some governments are more given to stonewalling than others, and (after a brief and costly period of upholding high standards) this has been the Howard government’s response in nearly all cases.

Finally, there are one-hit wonders. In these cases, the pressure is severe enough to force the resignation of the person most directly concerned, usually an expendable junior minister or public servant. Once the resignation has taken place, attempts to push the issue further, and look at the involvement of more senior figures go nowhere.
Read More »

James Farrell advises me that Professor Tom Valentine[1] has been dismissed from the University of Western Sydney for “misconduct”, which apparently consists of criticising the (mis)management of the University in relation to matters such as the creation of a new medical school.

I’ve rarely agreed with Valentine about anything, but I’m unreservedly opposed to the University’s action in this matter. Obviously, it violates everything a university is supposed to stand for. Unfortunately, that consideration doesn’t weigh much with the managerialist hacks who’ve been pushed into positions of power by the reforms of the past 15 years.

A more general problem is that, with the scrapping of the collegial role of faculties and academic boards, universities have some of the least accountable governance structures of any institutions in Australia. There are no shareholders as there would be in a private company. The universities derive most of their funding from the Commonwealth but operate under state acts of Parliament. Although DEST imposes all manner of burdensome reporting requirements, it lacks any effective power to constrain rogue vice-chancellors, of whom we have seen quite a few. On the other hand, state governments have the legal responsibility and power, but no budgetary control or interest.

For an institution so unaccountable to victimise and suppress internal critics and whistleblowers is deeply concerning. This affair should be investigated by ICAC.

fn1. I’ve had several disputes with Valentine over a variety of issues, but I’d be the last to deny that he has played a significant role in Australian economics, notably in his work with the Campbell Committee.