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Tag: Swiss Democracy

10/02/2022

Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame at the National Press Club

February 10 2022

They were riveting watching on 9 February.

Brittany Higgins talked about a toxic culture in Parliament House with sexual harassment, and Grace Tame was careful to define her area of activism as action to stop paedophiles. Grace was quite insistent that this was not a gender war as she said that most of the people she met until relatively late in her journey of discovery were men, as it seems that more males had come out to discuss their grooming process than females. It is about the behaviour, not about gender, though she conceded that most perpetrators were male. She noted that her perpetrator had a known history (covered up) of abusing students and she was only one of his many victims. Grace made no secret of her view that Morrison had done as little as possible, but when a question from a Murdoch journalist tried to get her to support Labor against the Liberals she declined to be drawn. She said that the existing power structures of the Parliament, the law and the media protected paedophiles. She also said that when she criticised the Prime Minister there was an inquiry as to the funding of the Council that awarded the Australian of the Year honour. She took this to be a hint that they had to find one who was not critical of the government. She also described a caller who was “asking for my word that I would not say anything damning about the Prime Minister on the evening of the next Australian of the Year awards”.

“‘You are an influential person. He will have a fear,’ they said. What kind of fear, I asked myself?”

“And then I heard the words ‘with an election coming soon’.

“And it crystallised — a fear for himself and no-one else, a fear that he might lose his position or, more to the point, his power.”

Grace did not say who it was that called her, and declined to answer a question on the subject. Now the Prime Minister himself wants to know. Ho hum. Obviously someone was trying to protect him. Is this person to be hung out?

Brittany Higgins was unimpressed by the Parliamentary apology for the sexual harassment except as a first step and commented that the plan to deal with sexual harassment has a great statement of intentions, but these are so vague as to be able to be accepted by everyone, but not actually to specify any action, much less a time frame for such action. Another highly relevant comment she made in terms of the working of Parliament was the relationship between the minders and the public service, with a huge increase in the power of the minders despite their lack of worldly experience or knowledge and the corresponding downgrading of the influence of the public service, who of course should be a big reservoir of politically unbiased expertise. She said that the public were unaware of the power relationships of minders and this was a problem. She was speaking more broadly than merely of sexual relationships.

As a person particularly interested in prevention, I think that the environment and pressures on individuals makes a huge difference to their decisions. I first figured this out in boarding school where behaviour options were decidedly constrained, then observed it as people were pressured to take up smoking. Social disadvantage and crime also stand out.

My state government minder gave me his opinion that if you went to Canberra it took about 18 months to lose all contact with real people and their issues as the Canberra bubble of politicians and the media were so isolated and both used each other as reality contact. He went on to prove his own theory, as he went to Canberra to work with Meg Lees, Democrat leader, was there about 18 months and believed that she would beat Natasha Stott-Despoja in the leadership spill after Lees had enabled Howard to pass the GST. Natasha won with 76% of the vote. As an MP I went to a Young Democrats Conference in Canberra and was invited to a party that they were all going to with some of their friends who happened to be young Liberal staffers. No one took much notice of the old guy in the corner, but I could not help but overhear the stories of their tactical victories over Labor. Everything was entirely binary. The object was to win, which was to get ‘our’ agenda passed. It was exciting, a chess game, and at no stage was there the slightest discussion of any policy or the need for discussion or compromise. My overwhelming impression was that these folk had far too much power and far too little knowledge for the national good. I think there are 3 stages of knowledge; those that know, those that don’t know, and those that don’t know that they don’t know; those kids were in a last stage. (Later I added a 4^th category, those who do not want to know and will actively resist knowing; this class being such as anti-vaxxers, religious folk and political ideologues).

I am also of the view that structure governs function. If you wanted a Parliament that was out of touch, you would put it in a place isolated from the people (say Canberra), in a very secure building (say Parliament House) with excellent facilities in each room so that you did not need to meet anyone but your own. You would isolate them from their families, have unusual domestic arrangements, then have pressure situations where they worked long and emotionally exhausting hours so that they relied very much on their work colleagues. Added to this there are male/female, age and power imbalances. All this leads to a situation conducive to frenetic relationships with sexual harassment and marriage breakdowns. Add a hierarchical binary system with winner takes all with a surfeit of powerful lobby groups and you get bad political decisions as well.

You may be able to fix one aspect of a dysfunctional system if you try very hard, but my view is that a Swiss-style democracy with multiple parties that have to compromise, part-time politicians limited to two terms so that they are not in a personal hierarchy and referenda where citizens can overrule the Parliament with plebiscites would seem to be likely to fix sexual harassment as well as a lot of other things.

28/04/2020

Limits to the Market and a Solution for Australia? 15/5/17

09/09/2018

Swiss Democracy. 9/9/18

I visited Switzerland to see the Swiss Parliament and to try to get a feel for how their direct Democracy works. Their basic system is more like Australia’s than might be imagined. They have two houses of Parliament. The lower one has members elected by a first post the post from individual electorates, and the […]

15/05/2017

Limits to the Market? A New Paradigm Needed!

15 May 2017

Since the last two world wars were over markets, it was assumed at the conference at Bretton Woods that if there were free markets everywhere there would be no wars and countries who did well would prosper. It worked. Germany and Japan traded in markets that had been denied to them pre-war and ‘won the peace’. The dogma was that because there was efficiency in production we would all be better off as goods would be available all over the world quickly and cheaply. And, helped by the overwhelming dominance of Milton Friedman’s economic theories the market has spread into every aspect of life. The fact that when Friedman’s theories were actually implemented in South America that they failed miserably was merely a blip ignored.

Now the market is assumed to be better than anything else as a way of allocating resources efficiently. It is better than government, better than planning, hey it is infallible, and probably inevitable as well!

Governments do not have to manage anything; they can sell it, even if they do not need the money. Inner city buses are the latest.

If you read Chapter One of most economics books, it tells you about competition and how you cannot charge too much or a competitor will uncut you, so prices are kept down.

The rest of the economics book tells about monopolies or oligopolies, where there is poor competition and you can charge what you like, or there are high set up costs as barriers to competition, or regulatory hurdles, artificial training or registration requirements, geographical limitation, existing facilities, impractical duplication costs etc etc, which make monopoly or ‘supernormal’ profits a certainty. Yet Governments plough on creating private monopolies and compliant political parties are rewarded by campaign funding to keep on winning elections.

What I am writing is not new or original and is known by anyone with even the most basic grasp of economic theory. Do the politicians not read past Chapter One? Do they never think that they are creating uncontrolled monopolies as they transfer assets from ownership by all the society to ownership by a moneyed elite? Are they so ideologically committed to privatisation that they no longer think at all? Do they not care, or will they do anything for their own short-term interest? It seems that the answer to all these questions is YES!

They have sold the airport, the sea port, the water supply (an endless subsidy to an unused desalination plant), the railways, the electricity, the road network and easements under it, the world standard database of land titles registration, the small councils power to control development, the list goes on and on. The health system is being sold by stealth. Medicare is being starved to death, as private health insurance is just subsidised inefficiency, and NDIS disability services will go the same way, no government services, oligopolies for profit paid for by the ‘Medicare’ levy rise, which is not even committed to Medicare. The education system no longer produces tradesmen to do the job and private education rip offs abound from dodgy day cares to non-Gonski funding to schools to post-TAFE colleges selling dubious certificates to phantom colleges ripping off visa-seeking migrant students.

The public service is being ‘hollowed out’. It no longer retains centres of expertise as it can always buy ‘consultants’ who carry briefcases and impressive CVs and have no interest except the public good. It closes offices, hires short term workers, relies on PR driven websites and replaces people with knowledge by ‘Services NSW’ which has someone who might know which department might do what you might want.

Our existing political system seems unable to govern in our interest. The interest of the political parties no longer coincide with the public interest. Our governments’ decisions have been bought like everything else. I do not think that money can be held at bay by electoral funding law reform. When we fought the tobacco industry, it sponsored sport and culture to get political allies. When that was banned, it sponsored ethnic groups, rescue boats and helicopters, any worthy cause that could lobby for it, and that was without gifts in kind, dodgy ‘foundations’ or other less visible influence-buying.

The only answer that I can think of is Swiss-style democracy where major decisions are taken by referenda of the people, and Parliaments merely implement decisions that the people have made. Any other suggestions?

09/11/2016

Trump’s Win- Why?

9 November 2016 Here is my theory. Basically democracy in English speaking countries has been taken over by private entities. There are only two entities who can win power in the UK, USA and Australia. They are called political parties. They are not in the constitution, but because they vote as a bloc, they control […]