My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for today

Rebuild after the coronavirus with a Green New Deal

As with the climate crisis, neoliberal capitalism and the governments where it holds sway, such as ours, are proving particularly ill-suited to deal with the coronavirus.

Though the Morrison government seems keen on putting the economy on life support while we ride out the crisis, attention is already turning to how we will rebuild once COVID-19 has passed.

I was though struck by a comment from journalist Niki Savva on ABC TV’s Insiders program. She spoke of the need to resurrect our business system, and how difficult that is going to be.

My response was surely we need to take this opportunity to radically change the system that has so obviously failed both the planet and the people.

This led me to investigating how the Australian economy, and all that flows from it, works.

Since the 1980s privatisation held sway. This is known as neo-liberalism. Championed by Ronald Regan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, it was brought to Australia by Labor Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

The number of Australians languishing in under-employment or trying to exist on Newstart, stagnant wages, the failure to respond to the bushfire crisis in a timely manner, and the wholesale economic collapse from COVID-19 show that neo-liberalism has so thoroughly failed us

Adopting the old adage of ‘Never waste a crisis’, can we ensure that the 99% come out stronger from this crisis than we did from the global financial crisis, and ensure that this time the structures of inequality are seriously challenged?

Some imperatives come to mind. Top of the list of course is the adoption of the universal basic income, so as to provide everyone with a wage to cover a quality lifestyle.

Closely following is the need for government, not just governance.  Bring the state back in as both a guarantor and a provider of social and economic security and solidarity. Also provide support bailouts for essential industries, but only with strict conditions.

Localism before globalism will be necessary. Support solutions which encourage local and community self-reliance, social networks and local economic exchange, and which reduce our dependence on complex supply-chains.

Also important is real internationalism, as opposed to cosmopolitanism. Promote solidarity across countries and regions and ensuring all emerging treatments are available to all people globally.

We must be prepared to bring into public ownership key sectors that are struggling. Other bailouts should be conditional on adapting corporate activities to the public good.

But we can go further, for as Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt wrote, “We need a political revolution to address the crises in inequality, climate and jobs which are ‘smashing’ Australia, paving the way for a radical ‘Green New Deal’ to overhaul the country’s entire economy.”

It’s a term popularised by progressive American politicians Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; it’s been popular with environmental activists for years before that; and it traces its roots back to the depression era ‘New Deal’.

The Green version is a wide array of proposals, not all related to climate or ‘green’ ideas; but all linked to ideas of fairness, equality and reform

Academic and political economist Tash Heenan explained that “It’s about tackling the climate crisis and an economic crisis at the same time. It’s a structural solution to structural problems that are connected to each other — you can’t separate economy from environment.”

“It’s adaptation and mitigation together. It’s an enormous mobilisation of resources and investment, in a way that’s socially fair. This includes giving people good jobs, and investing in energy, housing and health.”

“It recognises we can’t keep going the way we’re going, whether that’s politically, economically or socially,” Dr Natalie Osborne, lecturer in the School of Environment and Science at Griffith University said.

Band explained that “I want to make Australia the renewable energy superpower where people bring their businesses from overseas for cheap, clean electricity as we urgently phase out coal.”

But one thing needs to be clear. A Green New Deal must not be a way of saving free market capitalism. It is an opportunity to both restructure our society and mitigate climate change, thereby saving the planet and the people.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for 24 March 2020

Bigots must stop weaponising religious faith

My column this week begins with the cancellation of Wagga’s LGBTIQ Mardi Gras parade, but it leads towards a major issue – levels of discrimination still existing in Australia, and then on to an impending law that will legislate the right to discriminate.

Though the cancellation of the parade was a sad if necessary solution to a major health crisis it reminded me that much more was at stake beyond an excuse to dress up and party.

The campaign for LGBTI rights is by no means over. The plastering of the Wagga CBD with stickers in the week leading up to the parade violently expressing extreme hostility to trans people is an indication of how much further we have to go. Its cruelty was doubly distressingly given that Wagga’s Mardi Gras is organised by Holly Conroy, a very strong and proud trans woman.

The successful attacks on safe school programs and gender free bathrooms are other examples.

I have also become all too aware in recent weeks that the heterosexual community here in Wagga is also suffering from discrimination, for a month-long investigation by The Saturday Paper into abortion access in the city of Wagga Wagga found it is almost impossible for a woman to get an abortion locally – in part due to “ doctors’ fear of professional and personal backlash from the town’s deeply religious community.”

Jan Roberts, who helped found the Wagga Women’s Health Centre 40 years ago, blames not only the town’s strong Catholic community for the lack of reproductive services, but also an influx of doctors from other Christian denominations, for creating “a more conservative medical world here”. Ms Roberts is deservedly the recipient of this year’s Wagga City Council Peace Award.

Neither of Wagga’s two hospitals, nor its private day surgery, provides surgical terminations to women who want one for social, financial or personal reasons. Very few local GPs prescribe the MS-2 Step – two tablets to induce a medical abortion – which can be used up to nine weeks into the pregnancy.

This brought to mind something that could make matters even worse: the federal government’s proposed Religious Freedom Bill.

During the Sydney Mardi Gras parade I proudly marched with the Greens float, where our placards read “Don’t give bigots a licence to discriminate: No Religious Freedom Law”.

A revised bill is due to come before federal parliament soon, but as columnist Van Badham wrote recently in the Guardian Australia “The government of Australia is pushing a so-called religious discrimination bill that has nothing to do with religion. It excludes it and discriminates”. Indeed it does.

The religious discrimination bill will allow schools, employers and the medical profession to discriminate against LGBTIQ people and women. Advocacy organisations have made the point that under the bill’s proposals, hospitals and healthcare providers could abrogate medical responsibility towards LGBTQIA+ patients and simply refuse them healthcare, citing naught but the will of a self-designed god.

“Specifically, they say this could have an impact on transgender people accessing hormone therapies or lesbian couples wanting fertility treatment,” a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald said.

The religious discrimination bill is a Trojan horse that undermines the few gains that have been made. The Human Rights Law Centre called it “the biggest threat to reproductive healthcare access in decades”. Various state laws already enfranchise doctors a right to conscientious objection in regard to abortion, but oblige the doctor to make a referral elsewhere so patient care is not compromised. The new bill will remove this obligation.

Should a doctor cite ‘religious belief’, the existing professional duty to provide referrals or information to women seeking reproductive healthcare services or products, would be undermined. The whole country could easily become like Wagga.

Furthermore, not only do Wagga’s strongly conservative religious doctors not perform abortions, they weaponise their faith to prevent other doctors performing this important aspect of a woman’s reproductive rights. The religious freedom bill will enshrine that weaponisation as law.

And let’s not forget that our state MP, Joe McGirr, voted against the abortion law reform bill in state parliament late last year.

This is bigotry in practice, and it is something we should all be resisting with all our might.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for today

Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?

It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it will destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure.

I’m not referring to the coronavirus pandemic, but to the climate crisis. In 2018, more than 60 million people suffered the consequences of extreme weather and climate change.

Yet our federal government seems oblivious to the greater threat posed by global warming. For the coronavirus pandemic Scotty from Marketing has launched a $2.4 billion health package, and with much ballyhoo $17.6 billion worth of economic stimulus, which thankfully does include a $750 cash handout at a cost of $4.8 billion to welfare recipients. Too little too late, but better than I was expecting.

As the DA editorial noted last Friday, and only referring to the coronavirus and the bushfires, our government’s “responses are worlds apart”.

Referring to the wider issue of climate change, in contrast to the virus, we have seen zilch about mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis, except waffle about vague future technological developments. Scotty from Marketing’s response to the bushfires was to offer some businesses financial support but did nothing to address the underlying cause, the climate crisis.

Though hundreds of thousands have succumbed to coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone, just one aspect of our existential planetary climate crisis, kills seven million people every year. There have been no COAG meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public.

In time we’ll overcome the coronavirus pandemic, but with the climate crisis, we are already out of time. All that is left are hopes of adapting to the inevitably disastrous consequences hurrying towards us.

While coronavirus is understandably and justifiably treated as an imminent danger, the climate crisis is still presented by the government and most media as an abstraction whose consequences are decades away.

Perhaps when unprecedented bushfires ravaged large parts of Australia recently there could have been an urgent conversation about how the climate crisis was fueling extreme weather and a plan to mitigate it, yet there wasn’t. Scientific and veterans’ advice was ignored in favour of stories blaming arsonists or the Greens for having a policy against hazard reduction by burning off, when in fact they have a very definite policy in favour.

But imagine that we felt the same sense of emergency about the climate crisis as we do about coronavirus. What action would we take? A judicious response to global heating would provide affordable transport, well-insulated homes, skilled green jobs and clean air.

The Greens have a plan to reach 100% renewable energy by 2030, and to help get there, in this state PowerNSW will run annual competitive tenders to award contracts for the construction of low cost renewable energy projects in NSW, including wind and solar. Naturally, coal mining will cease by 2030.

A fully costed training program to re-skill affected workers would be implemented, along with schemes to place them in comparable jobs of the new industries.

Which leads to a ‘bleeding obvious’ difference between a medical pandemic and climate change – mitigating the latter will create many new enterprises, including thousands of new jobs, with plenty of opportunities for those affected by closing down the old polluting industries. If the government treats it with the same urgency as it has the coronavirus, that is.

There is a key difference between coronavirus and the climate crisis, of course, and it is in timing. “We didn’t know coronavirus was coming,” said the New Economic Foundation’s Alfie Stirling. “We’ve known the climate crisis was on the cards for 30 or 40 years.” And yet the government can swiftly announce an emergency pandemic plan.

Coronavirus poses many challenges and threats, but few opportunities. Urgent action to prevent a pandemic is of course necessary and pressing. But the climate crisis represents a far graver and deadlier existential threat, and yet the same sense of urgency is absent. Coronavirus shows it can be done. It needed determination and will power but when it comes to the future of our planet, these qualities are desperately lacking.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for 10 May 2020

We need to move beyond the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

For decades now we are subjected to a regular measurement of Australia’s well-being known the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

As the total financial output of our economy would not benefit those on low or no income, I have often thought that it is a very misleading way of measuring the well-being of the nation. A high GDP would not improve the lot of those on Newstart or the old age pension, and would be of no value to those enduring stagnant wage growth.

And of course, there are many contributors to the well-being of a nation apart from its economy. Social health, for example, though it will be difficult to persuade Scotty from Marketing & Co to agree to such inclusion.

As almost every coronavirus news story tells us of its impact on the stock market and the GDP my mind turned to alternatives to measuring national well-being.

Initially my wondering often took me to the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan, which instead of the GDP measures its well-being by its Gross National Happiness (GNH). Its four pillars are sustainable and equitable socio-economic development, environmental conservation and good governance.

This led me to researching if the rest of the world was considering identifying alternative pathways to measure the health and wellbeing of the population and, following on from that, establishing ways to ensure the information is used in policymaking.

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, has put forward the idea that government policies should be directed towards the future wellbeing of our societies and even be influenced by values such as kindness, fairness and compassion.

Over the past two decades the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the UN have been committed to measures other than GDP to evaluate the success of governments in enabling effective, equitable and sustainable societies through its millennium and now sustainable development goals.

At the last OECD global forum on ‘Beyond GDP’, more than 100 nations reported progress on developing indices to measure wellbeing, equity and sustainability as well as economic success.

From the 1950s, some economists and policymakers began to question its limitations as the singular measure of a society’s success. GDP gives the same value to sales of goods that are harmful to our health and well-being, such as alcohol, tobacco and guns,  as to sales that are of benefit. It tells us nothing about standard of living, quality of our environment, our houses, our education system, our health or how our children and disabled are cared for.

And while GDP rises it does not show the costs to the environment or to income inequalities that may result from such activities.

Recently Professor Fiona Stanley, an Australian epidemiologist noted for her public health work said “ How good it would be to identify for all subgroups in the population the best pathways to improve health and wellbeing and to ensure that this information is used in high level federal and local policymaking?”

If we took into account the problems facing society today, including environmental degradation, climate change, water scarcity, suicide, poor mental health and many others, and used data to guide us, our situation would be significantly better than today.

Moving to a system of measuring wellbeing is being tested in many countries with OECD guidance and support. Most models are firmly anchored in a process of citizen engagement. Asking our citizens what they value most and what priorities they want governments to focus on to deliver the kind of Australia they want in the future enhances their participation in the democratic process. Countries as diverse as Italy, Canada, New Zealand, Wales, Bhutan, Ecuador, Costa Rica and many others have shown this approach is feasible.

The most successful models are those which are initiated by and embedded in governments though it is unlikely that this will be attractive to the current federal government. In 2003 the Australian treasury’s mission was to “improve the wellbeing of the Australian people” but by 2017 it had changed to “be the preeminent economic adviser to government”. It also stopped funding the ABS Measuring Australia’s Progress which was admired internationally.

It is high time Australia caught up with the rest of the world.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for this week

We need real action to prevent domestic violence

The gruesome murder of Hannah Clarke and her children in Brisbane emphasises the need for real action to once and for all put a stop to domestic violence.

Rowan Baxter’s treatment of his estranged wife was an act of horrific violence which needs to be viewed in the context of one woman a week being murdered by her current or previous partner.

I’ll first look at the reaction of the Queensland police. Though the extent of police interactions with the couple remains unclear, police detective inspector Mark Thompson did say that domestic violence orders had been granted against Baxter.

“I can confirm Queensland police have engaged with both Hannah and her estranged husband in relation to domestic violence issues,” he said. “When it comes to Hannah, we have dealt with her on a number of occasions and worked with the Brisbane Domestic Violence Centre in supporting Hannah throughout her family issues. And we’ve also referred Rowan Baxter to support services as well.”

Police initially suggested their task was to review interactions between the family with an “open mind”, though the Queensland police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, later apologised on behalf of the officer who had said that Baxter “may have been driven too far”, and stood him aside from the investigation. Thompson was in fact blaming the victims, which was apparent when viewing his to the camera television news interviews.

Baxter’s killing of his family followed a pattern of behaviour familiar to domestic violence specialists. It is pattern of two or three acts known as “changing the project”.

“We know from the research, and what we often tell police and service providers is, to look for evidence that the perpetrator is changing the project,” says Claire Ferguson, a forensic criminologist and homicide researcher. “Whereas the project was most likely previously being about regaining control, we’re looking for those instances where the goal isn’t about regaining control anymore, but it changes to be about punishment and revenge.”

The reference to a ‘pattern’ is important because it shows where the situation is heading. Kerry Carrington, an expert on gendered violence from the Queensland University of Technology, said the murder was preventable because Baxter’s pattern of behaviour was predictable. “Had we had the kind of supports in place to protect and support women in that period, and we don’t have it, then a lot more could have been done.”

Molly Dragiewicz, a domestic violence research professor from Griffith University, said that a period of separation heightened the risk of violence. “What happens is once a couple separates, the abuser loses a lot of routine ways of controlling the family they had before, so that contact around children becomes one of the primary avenues for abuse. Somehow that system doesn’t really recognise the intensity of the risk at separation. We know there is an escalation of risk at separation.”

Angela Lynch, the chief executive of the Women’s Legal Service Queensland, said police often framed domestic violence cases as “tit for tat between two parties, rather than an abusive pattern of violence”. She said domestic violence matters were often not dealt with effectively, and that police and the family law system should act to prioritise the safety of those involved, rather than treating incidents as difficult family law matters.

Lynch said “It’s quite clear we must use these tragic circumstances as the catalyst for change.”

The Morrison/McCormack government seems to be asleep at the wheel on this issue, but commendably Labor leader Anthony Albanese renewed calls for a national summit on domestic violence, and criticised the government for plans to abolish the family court.

The Greens have been very active on the issue. They established a Senate Enquiry into Australia’s domestic violence crisis, exposing harsh cuts the Liberal government made to the sector, resulting in some of those cuts being reversed. Last week Greens spokesperson for Women Senator Larissa Waters condemned the Federal Government’s announcement of a pitiful $2.4 million funding for men’s behaviour change programs to address domestic violence as a drop in the ocean, saying it will not stem the tide of violence against women.

What we need is a target of zero acts of domestic violence by 2021 and, borrowing from Scotty for Marketing, a clear road map of how to get there.