My piece in today’s Fin is about the productivity blip – I posted an extract a couple of days ago, and now you can read the whole thing, over the fold.
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Blogwiki meet wikiblog
Tim Worstall, who also has a blogbook coming out, sends news of a wiki for blogs. To quote from the site
For the love of God, no!
They said it shouldn’t be done, and they were probably right, but here it is anyway
The project is still in its infancy, but will be a good resource if it works.
Some good news on the terrorism front
The Blair government has been defeated on the floor of Parliament over a proposal to let police hold terrorist suspects for up to 90 days without charge, with 48 Labour members joining the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in an amendment reducing the period to 28 days. It would certainly be good if Australian “conservatives” were conservative about things like habeas corpus.
And having lived by the bomb, JI bombmaker Amrozi Azahari has apparently died by it, blowing himself up to avoid capture by the Indonesian police. The Indonesians have done a great job in capturing, trying and convicting the main members of the JI terrorist network. Their one failure, not nailing “spiritual leader” Bashir on a major charge, was due, as much as anything else to the refusal of the US authorities to allow Bashir’s main lieutenant, Hambali, whose evidence could have been vital, to testify.
Game over ?
Among the many long-running policy debates in which I’ve been involved, the most drawn-out (except maybe for the one about private infrastructure and PPPs) has concerned micro-economic reform and productivity growth. For the last decade or so, the Productivity Commission and others have been claiming that reform has generated a surge in productivity growth, notably multifactor productivity growth (the term ‘multifactor’ refers to the fact that capital as well as labour inputs are taken into account) estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
One reason the debate is so drawn out is that the ABS presents estimates for ‘productivity cycles’, which are supposed to smooth out year-to-year fluctuations. Until very recently (in fact, until two days ago), the most recent cycle for which estimates were available ended in 1998-99, and this showed strong MFP growth. Arguments that this was a cyclical recovery or the result of increased work intensity were waved away.
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How to deal with terrorism
Sixteen people have been arrested in Sydney and Melbourne and charged with terrorism offences. While the individuals involved are legally entitled to a presumption of innocence, the police were right to act when faced with evidence suggesting a threat.
What’s important here is that the threat has been dealt with under criminal law, rather than through the use of arbitrary powers of secret detention, as proposed in the new anti-terror laws. Moreover, it appears that the offences created by the 2002 legislation are sufficient to encompass a wide range of terrorist activities. By contrast, it’s hard to imagine how the revival of the notion of sedition in the 1914 Crimes act could have proved useful in this, or any similar case.
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Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
At the Academy
I’m at the annual meeting of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. I’ll be talking in a symposium on Ideas and Influence on the topic “Economic liberalism: Fall, Revival and Resistance”. This evening there’s a public lecture from Paul Kelly on Rethinking Australian Government, at the Shine Dome (Academy of Science).
I had dinner last night with Max Corden, one of the great names in Australian economics, and we had a fascinating discussion about trade and current account deficits and the ways they might come back into balance smoothly (or not).
Then there was a colloquium on the topic of a Bill of Rights, at which Hilary Charlesworth and Larissa Behrendt spoke, which produced a couple of new (to me) developments. First, most people seem to have abandoned the idea of inserting a Bill of Rights into the Constitution, favouring a legislated Bill instead. Rather than being entrenched, this would require courts to interpret laws consistently with human rights as far as possible. If governments wanted to pass laws inconsistent with the Bill of Rights they could do so, but they would have to be explicit about it.
The second point is that the ACT has already passed such a Bill and that other states are considering it. This is part of a more general trend where the old assumption that the only way to achieve desirable progress is to centralise power in the federal government is being overturned.
Mine enemy’s enemy
I haven’t found enough information on the riots in France, to make any useful comment on what’s happening, except an obvious one, that the Chirac government has made an awful mess of things.
In this context, there’s an expectation about that leftists should defend Chirac and his government, and therefore be embarrassed by his failures. The first time this expectation arose was when (thanks to poor performance and co-ordination on the left) Chirac ended up in a run-off against Le Pen for the presidency in 2002. Hence it was necessary for the left to campaign for a strong vote against Le Pen and, necessarily, for Chirac. Then in 2003, Chirac’s government led the opposition to the Iraq war at the UN, by virtue of its permanent membership of the UNSC, rather than because of its great moral standing. Still, the war had to be opposed, and Chirac therefore had to be supported.
But the argument that ‘mine enemy’s enemy is my friend’ can only go so far. Much of the reason why French Gaullists annoy US Republicans is that they have so much in common. There’s little doubt that, if Chirac had the kind of global power that Bush does, he’d abuse it in exactly the same way. Australians and New Zealanders, who’ve seen Chirac and his predecessors throwing their weight around in the South Pacific (long used as the site for French nuclear tests), are well aware of this. The same kind of heavy-handedness is evident in domestic policy and seems to have contributed to the riots.
Have PPPs matured ?
I’ve been involved in the debate over private infrastructure and public-private partnerships for more than a decade, and have accumulated lots of evidence that the public sector generally loses from these deals. One response I get a lot is that the process has matured and that the failures of the 1990s are no longer relevant.
Sydney’s Cross-City tunnel fiasco makes it clear that this is not the case. This deal has all the features that I and others have been criticising for years – secret clauses, restrictions on future planning, closure of alternative routes, crippling penalties for changes and so on. But there’s more. The inclusion of an upfront payment to the RTA, effectively creating a slush fund outside the normal budget process, is an abuse that wasn’t even contemplated a decade ago.
It’s reported Treasury is furious over this and I’m not surprised. They’ve been trying to establish a coherent PPP process, but toll road projects seem to fall outside its scope. But the fundamental problems are, as far as I can see, inherent in the whole concept.
Other recent developments make it clear that we need a moratorium on PPP deals. How can the public interest possibly be protected when any politician or public servant involved in these processes can expect a multi-million dollar sinecure on retirement, provided they don’t upset the applecart? You only have to look at the payrolls of the major players in the industry to see what I mean. Tony Harris, the former Auditor-General who exposed the dodgy accounting behind many of the early schemes is one of the few people involved in the process who doesn’t have a cushy job or consultancy of some kind.
Sistani rules, again
I haven’t seen much discussion of this AP report that Ayatollah Sistani is likely to call for a withdrawal of US troops after the elections on December 15 (found via Juan Cole).
It’s unclear whether this is an accurate report of Sistani’s intentions, a trial balloon, or an attempt by some in his circle to create a fait accompli. But assuming the report is accurate, it seems clear, as Cole says, that any attempt to resist such a demand from Sistani would be futile, especially now that the Sadrists, still violently opposed to the occupation, are likely to play a large role in the new government. Nevertheless, the US, backed by current PM Jaafari is currently seeking a 12-month extension of the occupation mandate from the UN, instead of the 6-month extensions sought previously.
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John Quiggin 