Speak­ing of eco­nom­ics… my almost res­i­dent eco­nom­i­cally minded friend Ben has kindly pro­duced a three part series on the Min­ing Super Tax that every­body keeps bang­ing on about in the news. If you’ve been won­der­ing about the eco­nom­ics of the issue, then won­der no longer… all will become clear.

The Resource Super Profit Tax (RSPT) falls into the deep­est pit of my tax­a­tion sys­tem inter­est. Much has been writ­ten about it by the main­stream papers, much of it oddly con­flict­ing. The source doc­u­ments of note can be found in here (pdf) and here.

At present, min­ing com­pa­nies have to pay roy­al­ties, which are pay­ments made to the states for tak­ing their resources. Com­par­a­tively, the RSPT will tax prof­its, or more descrip­tively, will tax the value of the resource at the tax­ing point (which seems to be a derived value at the mine gate) less all allow­able costs in get­ting the resource to the tax­ing point, such as explo­ration costs, mine/well devel­op­ment costs, pro­cess­ing and haulage costs. The stated inten­tion of the RSPT is to col­lect an appro­pri­ate return for the com­mu­nity from pri­vate firms exploit­ing non-renewable resources, via imple­ment­ing a tax­a­tion sys­tem that responds to changes in prof­its. Fair enough.

The min­ing com­pa­nies have com­plained the tax is too high, and that it will stunt busi­ness invest­ment, and thus impact on eco­nomic out­put (and there­fore employ­ment). The Gov­ern­ment was of the opin­ion the RSPT will “remove imped­i­ments to min­ing invest­ment and production…[and] encour­age greater invest­ment and employ­ment in the resource sec­tor”. At face value, the logic would be that higher tax­a­tion or decreased prof­its would reduce invest­ment, how­ever it is the intri­ca­cies of the tax that sug­gest this might not be the case.

The real intrigue about this tax is its appli­ca­tion to company’s losses. Arti­cles have thrown around the idea that it is a brown tax, which isn’t the case, though it is under­stand­able why the com­par­i­son is being made. Sim­i­lar to a person’s income tax, a com­pany will be able to use any of its costs of the project as a type of tax deduc­tion. Impor­tantly, as most min­ing com­pa­nies are likely to spend the bulk of a project’s costs dur­ing the ini­tial phases when set­ting up a min­ing process, which will likely also be a period where they make lit­tle rev­enue or prof­its to off­set their costs against, they will be able to carry their costs for­ward to be deducted as a loss against future income (or deduct them against prof­its made else­where if avail­able). Due to the delay between accru­ing costs and receiv­ing the credit, the cost off­set will grow at the long term gov­ern­ment bond rate. This is all fair enough.

How­ever, con­tro­versy has stemmed from the ini­tial announce­ment which sug­gests that the RSPT sys­tem pro­vides that if the com­pany never makes a profit to off­set these costs against, they can sim­ply get this amount payed out when they wind-up the project.

This effec­tively means that the Gov­ern­ment will be fund­ing project start-ups, and effec­tively tak­ing on some of the risk of the project. For exam­ple, a new project might be to develop a coal mine at the cost of $1 bil­lion. Ten years later, the coal mine may not have ever made any prof­its, so the Gov­ern­ment may not have received any rev­enue from it, but will have to pay the com­pany 40% of the $1 bil­lion (grown at the long term gov­ern­ment bond rate, so the $1 bil­lion may have grown to $1.1 bil­lion over the ten years). How­ever, this poten­tial cost to the gov­ern­ment will be off­set by poten­tially higher rev­enues from decent min­ing projects (which, in Queensland’s case, given the absolutely boom­ing sit­u­a­tion sur­round­ing global coal demand and prices, will be a lot).

Another thing I would like to touch on is quot­ing experts in argu­ments. I don’t like it when peo­ple argue that, as their stance is backed up by the word of an expert, they must be right. Most knowl­edge is quite read­ily and eas­ily obtain­able. Most peo­ple who do research have a ten­dency to pro­mote their find­ings (I know, it’s crazy). So, if any­one is will­ing to really find out about a topic, if they are will­ing to spend the time to trudge through the lit­er­a­ture, there wouldn’t be too many points of view, argu­ments and sup­port­ing evi­dence they wouldn’t have stum­bled across. Researchers may add to the pool of knowl­edge, but I think most peo­ple will be able to under­stand the cur­rent pool of knowl­edge, and make their own infer­ences once prop­erly informed.

Dur­ing the cam­paign of the last fed­eral elec­tion, the top issue of the day was the envi­ron­ment, specif­i­cally cli­mate change. My friends and I used to bicker about the use­ful­ness of hav­ing so much cam­paign time ded­i­cated to the issue of the envi­ron­ment. They were of the belief that finally politi­cians were focused on some­thing that mat­tered. I was of the opin­ion that the hys­te­ria build­ing around the cam­paign about the envi­ron­ment was lead­ing to mostly empty, reac­tive ban­ter­ing, and no mat­ter how much focus was put on the topic, the addi­tional impact on Australia’s envi­ron­men­tal pol­icy was going to be minimal.

I don’t think it has been the gov­ern­ing domain where any per­ceived fail­ures in envi­ron­men­tal activism have occured. I think, prior to becom­ing a media sta­ple, the envi­ron­ment received ade­quate con­sid­er­a­tion by gov­ern­ment. I would even go as far to say that the gov­ern­ment was the plat­form where much envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness was raised, dis­cussed and launched.

Then came along the GFC, which took some of the momen­tum out of the environment’s pil­lar of cur­rent issue drive.

A lot of peo­ple have been quick to say that cli­mate change is such an impor­tant issue, other issues should be given very low con­sid­er­a­tion in sav­ing the environment.

One idea raised was that Aus­tralia should stop export­ing coal.

Dur­ing the GFC and its after­math, job reten­tion became a key issue. I still believe that Anna Bligh won an elec­tion by stir­ring peo­ples fears of low­er­ing job secu­rity. In 2008-09, coal rep­re­sented well over half of Queens­land inter­na­tional mer­chan­dise exports (PDF).

I still think a lot of peo­ple need a real­ity check when it comes to the impacts of some of the poli­cies being flouted. Pro­posed energy trad­ing schemes, taxes, quo­tas, etc etc is going to have a real impact on the costs of basic pro­vi­sions. Queens­land is already suf­fer­ing from height­ened costs asso­ci­ated with basic infra­struc­ture (trans­port, water). Queensland’s future is look­ing increas­ingly pre­car­i­ous. It’s strong pop­u­la­tion growth, inad­e­quate and increas­ingly expen­sive infra­struc­ture will need to be repaired over the com­ing decades, and Queens­land needs to ensure that it can cope with a chang­ing land­scape of the resource sector.

Nathan often uses Hitler in reli­gious discussions.

From what I know Europe at the time was a gen­er­ally dis­jointed, unhappy place, and every­one knew that war would even­tu­ally out­break, it was just a mat­ter of when. So I wasn’t exactly sure what he was get­ting at between Hitler’s reli­gion and religion’s involve­ment in war.

So I got Nathan to explain his point:

“It’s not that wars are based on athe­ism — it’s that athe­ism doesn’t rule out wars.
Athe­ism is not a cause of war any more than Chris­tian­ity is.
The fact that peo­ple are sin­ful — greedy, power hun­gry, angry, evil — is what causes wars.”

I would like to make some points:
1. I don’t think evil exists as a being, thing or intan­gi­ble pres­ence. Evil is a descrip­tion of behav­iour.
2. Hitler didn’t do the things he did because he was evil. Some of the things he did were abhor­rent, ter­ri­ble, dis­gust­ing and/or evil.
3. When peo­ple do bad things, its not because they are inher­rently evil, or were over­taken by momen­tary evil­ness. They did it because they were human, and humans make bad deci­sions for what­ever rea­sons, are prone to being incon­sid­er­ate, to cer­tain extent, and have dif­fer­ent util­ity func­tions, such that some believe risk­ing other peo­ple being injured is out­weighed by the ben­e­fit of rob­bing the bank.
4. Morals don’t need to come from an exter­nal source. Peo­ple are per­fectly good at devel­op­ing them themselves.

From my under­stand­ing, the French/English civil rev­o­lu­tions weren’t upris­ings against God, they were class wars, where the poor and oppressed wanted bet­ter. I think this could be said to an extent about com­mu­nism and the dis­putes in the first half of the 20th century.

Most recently, the war on ter­ror­ism has been labeled as a war against evil. I don’t like ter­ror­ism, but I also don’t like the way it has been dis­cussed at times. I have always won­dered, with­out being par­tic­u­larly knowl­edge­able of the sit­u­a­tion over­seas, if by label­ing ter­ror­ism as acts of pure evil results in more harm than good, as it fails to address the root causes of off­shore grievances.

Fur­ther mil­i­tary action in the region is not going to help in the heal­ing of decades-old wounds, which stem from mil­i­tary action of the West into these regions for the past cen­tury plus. Dare I say, I think many peo­ple within these regions would hold griev­ances against the West. Fur­ther, rely­ing on non-western media, these nations would also have dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions of why the West was involved in these regions (I am not nec­es­sar­ily talk­ing about pur­pose­ful dis­tor­tions of his­tory here either, his­tor­i­cal accounts and per­cep­tions would likely be dif­fer­ent between those who lived through it and those who lived back in the invad­ing coun­try). We can’t expect to be able to inter­fere with any of these regions, and not step on a few toes.

The rem­nants of America’s war tech­niques in Korea and Viet­nam still remain to impact the gen­eral pop­u­lace. Many of these peo­ple no doubt hold some anger towards the tech­niques that were used dur­ing these dis­putes that have a con­tin­u­ing legacy.

So, in sum­mary, it may not be best labelling ter­ror­ism as acts of evil, which seems a sim­plis­tic excuse. It may be that more effort should be made to recog­nise that the seeds for these peo­ples anger were sown a long time ago, and that the West played a larger role in cre­at­ing this anger than we are will­ing to acknowl­edge. What we per­ceive as ter­ror­ism could be the rem­nants of a group of peo­ple fight­ing a decade-old war the only way they have avail­able. They may be cow­ardly tac­tics, attack­ing easy tar­gets of civil­ians. But they didn’t agree to any war con­ven­tions, nor have any large mil­i­tary bud­gets or technology.

Going for­ward, hope­fully lead­ers will acknowl­edge these lessons, and realise that you can’t inter­fere with a coun­try and expect it not to have reper­cus­sions in the future. The con­flict doesn’t end with the end of the fight­ing. More needs to be done to rebuild inter­na­tional relations.

The last post I did touched on the issue of non-hetero cou­ples hav­ing the right to have children.

Nathan sug­gested that hav­ing chil­dren has become a right.

Then he asked if par­ents have the right to raise chil­dren as they want.

Address­ing the third issue first, cur­rent inter­na­tional law and domes­tic leg­is­la­tion favours the well­be­ing of the child over the rights of the parents.

Sec­tion 61DA of the Fam­ily Law Act (Cth) requires the Court to apply a rebut­table pre­sump­tion that it is in the best inter­ests of the child for the child’s par­ents to have equal shared parental respon­si­bil­ity for the child (also see s 65DAA). Sec­tion 60CA cements the posi­tion that the Child’s best inter­ests are para­mount when mak­ing a par­ent­ing order. A child also gets their own rep­re­sen­ta­tion sep­a­rate from all other party’s whose pri­mary task is to ensure the child’s best inter­ested are represented.

In my opin­ion the cur­rent ideals are a lit­tle weak in recog­nis­ing a parent’s right to raise their own child. for exam­ple, if a child is removed from their par­ents cus­tody at a young age, say they are given to their father’s par­ents, and a few years later a mother, now sin­gle with the father gone, wants to retrieve cus­tody of the child from the grand­par­ents, the grand­par­ents will have a very strong case to retain cus­tody, on the grounds it is in the best inter­ests of the child (s 65C Fam­ily Law Act). This con­cerns me as I think it may not nec­es­sar­ily lead to a pre­sump­tion that the best inter­ests of the child would be a longer-term plan focused on return­ing the child to the parent’s cus­tody, despite the parent’s efforts.

How­ever, back to Nathan’s issues, the leg­is­la­tion doesn’t recog­nise a parent’s right to do what­ever they want with their child. I think to a cer­tain degree the State should put lim­i­ta­tions on par­ent­ing. Like with most top­ics, I think a cer­tain level of reg­u­la­tion of par­ent­ing is ben­e­fi­cial. I think in this sense, act­ing in the best inter­ests of the child is the cor­rect approach. How­ever, it should take into con­sid­er­a­tion where pos­si­ble the wants of the parents.

So, now onto the bit I think Nathan really wants me to address, evil homo­sex­u­als deserve the right to have children?

My basic though process, which I admit I think needs fur­ther refine­ment, is that the State (and inter­na­tional bod­ies such as the UN, see the Wiki arti­cle on rights of a child,  has defined the require­ments of parent­age, and can fur­ther add and vary these require­ments. There is noth­ing in my mind that sug­gests that homo­sex­ual par­ents would not be in the best inter­ests of the child. Aside from issues that derive from social stig­mas, a child with same-sex par­ents should have as qual­ity an upbring­ing as any other. So really, the only rea­son a child with same-sex par­ents should be at a dis­ad­van­tage is because of the seg­ment of soci­ety who doesn’t believe in this lifestyle and chooses to cre­ate difficulties.

Same-sex par­ents aren’t the enemy to chil­dren, or adults. The bad things in this world are vio­lent peo­ple, incon­sid­er­ate peo­ple, peo­ple that will­ingly cause harm or dis­tress to oth­ers. Homo­sex­u­al­ity does not mean that a per­son car­ries these traits. They are not mutu­ally exclu­sive, but they are also def­i­nitely not psy­cho­log­i­cally attached.

Pro­vided par­ents pro­vide ade­quately for their chil­dren, that’s where the judge­ment should end. We should put our efforts into mak­ing soci­ety more accom­mo­dat­ing, rather than rein­forc­ing its limitations.

So I think the prob­lem is not should “non-traditional” cou­ples be allowed to have chil­dren, but rather how it should be imple­mented, as even tra­di­tional cou­ples who can’t have chil­dren have not found the path to hav­ing a fam­ily easy. And I guess this leads to Nathan’s last ques­tion, is hav­ing chil­dren a right. I would like to say every­one who deserves chil­dren should be able to have them, how­ever I don’t think this is pos­si­ble, due to if noth­ing else sup­ply con­straints. I think many peo­ple think of chil­dren as a right to the point that they believe they should be sup­ported in their right to have chil­dren, to the point soci­ety should sub­sidise and pro­vide for their right. I do not agree with this. I think, like any­thing in life, chil­dren are some­thing par­ents should have to work for, and pro­vide for them­selves. I do think there are instances where the State can assist, but not to the extent I think many peo­ple believe they are enti­tled to. One area that I think State can assist in is equal­ity in oppor­tu­nity, and for this rea­son I find no dif­fi­culty sup­port­ing con­sid­er­a­tion of extend­ing the sur­ro­gacy laws.

This week is turn­ing out to be very interesting.

First up, the Trav­e­s­ton Cross­ing Dam is no more. A rather belated move by Peter Gar­rett destroys his Labor coun­ter­parts plans. The Courier mail con­tains good cov­er­age of the issue today, and high­lights some very inter­est­ing points.

I don’t like Anna Bligh much. I didn’t like her much prior to her becom­ing Pre­mier, but I decided to give her a chance and a clean slate. She has failed mis­er­ably in pretty much all respects.

How­ever, she did have a tremen­dous task in front of her. She inher­ited a gov­ern­ment that had spent up in the good times and left lit­tle for the bad, a SEQ grap­pling with water issues, a tar­nished health sec­tor, oncom­ing infra­struc­ture prob­lems (that many fore­saw were approach­ing, but the past Labor gov­ern­ment did lit­tle to avoid), and, it has to be said, a not overly sparkling bunch of MPs around her. So, it could be said, the pre­vi­ous Pre­mier Peter Beat­tie bowed out just before his legacy took its crip­pling hold on the State.

It was nice though of Gar­rett to wait so long to enter the fold here. Good deci­sive­ness by the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment, who took the best part of two years to make a real stand against a project that has impacted so many peo­ple. Still, the move will prob­a­bly win them fur­ther acco­lades as the sav­iours of the area. Maybe they were hold­ing off so they didn’t impact Bligh’s chances, but then when they realised Bligh was too far gone, and there was no point try­ing to save a fel­low party mem­ber if they are going to lose any­way, they may as well do some­thing. It would be inter­est­ing to find out what hap­pened behind the scenes there.

Still, Bligh has yet to dis­play any real propen­sity for the job. She man­aged to intro­duce flouride, which was gen­er­ally well received though con­tro­ver­sial, and begin some water projects (all of which have so far had far more fail­ings than suc­cesses). Many attacked her media pro­file, but I think this is a bit of a meh point. In today’s world of gov­er­nance, pub­lic expo­sure is impor­tant. She used her leave for Mas­ter Chef, so while it was arguably a dumb move, it wasn’t exactly a deci­sion deserv­ing of major criticism.

Fur­ther into today’s Courier, the new Fam­ily (Sur­ro­gacy) Bill has got­ten some cov­er­age. Not con­tent with the (very poorly writ­ten) arti­cle, I went and found the Bill. Indeed, sec­tion 9 (2) of the Bill pro­vides eli­gi­ble cou­ples to only include mar­ried cou­ples or mixed gen­der de fac­tos. Spring­borg appar­ently has said the Bill is designed for het­ro­sex­ual cou­ples only. So it might be a bit hope­ful to sug­gest the lan­guage of the Bill almost sounds like it would be open in the future to pro­vid­ing sur­ro­gacy to all types of mar­ried cou­ples (depend­ing on who was defined as ‘mar­ried’). So, depend­ing how you feel about sur­ro­gacy, this is at least a step for­ward. But, while mak­ing the step, there is also a bit of throw­ing the leg out and trip­ping some peo­ple over. It seems the LNP is adher­ing to its more con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers on this one.

Which leads on to the next inter­est­ing hap­pen­ing. Sen­a­tor Sarah Hanson-Young of the Greens has intro­duced a Bill to allow same-gender mar­riage. High fives all round Sarah Hanson-Young. So it seems there is one awe­some Green. But then she goes on and says this:

“I’m call­ing for the prime min­is­ter to … grant his mem­bers a con­science vote so we can get a true reflec­tion of how the Aus­tralian com­mu­nity is feeling.”

Pfft. A con­science vote has no chance of reflect­ing how the Aus­tralian com­mu­nity is feeling.

The lat­est Elec­toral Reform Green Paper, Strength­en­ing Australia’s Democ­racy (avail­able from http://www.pmc.gov.au/consultation/elect_reform/strengthening_democracy/index.cfm ), was recently released. While it cov­ers an issue that has been jumped all over recently by main­stream media, that of low­er­ing the vot­ing age, which while some­what inter­est­ing, it also cov­ers issues which I think are far more dis­cus­sion worthy.*

I love talk­ing about elec­toral reform. It is one of my favourite top­ics. I could talk about this paper a lot.

For today, sec­tions 5.42 to 5.62 dis­cuss the vot­ing sys­tem used in the house of rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Cur­rently, the house of rep­re­sen­ta­tives uses a pref­er­en­tial vot­ing sys­tem. In effect, this means you can choose to give each can­di­date a num­ber, and if for some unknown rea­son you give your first pref­er­ence to a Fam­ily First can­di­date, throw­ing your vote away, you get an auto­matic reprieve and your vote is real­lo­cated to your sec­ond pref­er­ence. This process of pref­er­ence skip­ping is repeated until a pref­er­ence for a sen­si­ble party (or occa­sion­ally the greens) is reached.

In all seri­ous­ness though, the pref­er­en­tial sys­tem is a mostly sound sys­tem. The main prob­lem from most per­spec­tives is pref­er­en­tial sys­tems always favour major­ity groups. A can­di­date needs to be the first to reach 50% of votes, via an ini­tial major­ity or through pref­er­ences. For exam­ple, in Queens­land, in each elec­torate, the can­di­date who gets to 50% first will win. Thus, as one of the main par­ties will gen­er­ally get to 50% on pref­er­ences first in each elec­torate, minor­ity par­ties will gen­er­ally fail. Thus, even if 10% of Queens­lan­ders sup­port the anti-environment party and every­one else puts them as last pref­er­ence, if those who sup­port are roughly dis­trib­uted evenly across all elec­torates, they won’t win a thing. Thus, size­able minori­ties that oth­er­wise do not form the major­ity views in any elec­torate will have no rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the lower house.

Alter­na­tively, the Sen­ate has a pro­por­tional sys­tem. A fan­tas­tic arti­cle on how our pro­por­tional vot­ing sys­tem for the Sen­ate works can be found here : http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2004/guide/senatevotingsystem.htm . Or if you are dull like me, go read (the incred­i­bly wordy and com­plex) sec­tion 273 of the Com­mon­wealth Elec­toral Act 1918. The way our pro­por­tional quota vote count­ing sys­tem works is very inter­est­ing, and I don’t think too many peo­ple in Aus­tralia have much idea how the Sen­ate is actu­ally elected.

So, back to the new green paper. One of the oppor­tu­ni­ties it out­lines is for the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives to shift to a form of pro­por­tional rep­re­sen­ta­tion, with divi­sions at the state or sub-state level. The green paper even dis­cusses many of the argu­ments for and against the idea (it is quite the paper). This change has the poten­tial to change the polit­i­cal land­scape. It also raises some inter­est­ing issues for how the bal­lots will be devel­oped (i.e. will the option remain of vot­ing “above the line” for a sin­gle polit­i­cal party, thus accept­ing the party’s pref­er­ence order for candidates).

I am still mak­ing my way through this paper (at 260 pages it is quite a study). And there have already been a few parts of it I have been dis­ap­pointed with (the dis­cus­sion of cur­rent pro­por­tional vote count­ing in the paper is poor). But this thing pro­vides topic fod­der for months.

*Util­is­ing Nathan’s asterix tech­nique, and not­ing my prior post, low­er­ing the vot­ing age is pulp news. Fur­ther, a 16 year old who wants to sail around the world is not news, and every­time the State Premier/Deputy Pre­mier etc has a press inter­view, they should not be asked their opin­ion on said teenager sail­ing around the world, and their com­ment is not news.

I thought long and hard about what my next arti­cle was going to be. I have been work­ing some­what on a series of arti­cles related to chil­dren, includ­ing should chil­dren be sub­sidised and are cur­rent cus­tody laws in the Fam­ily Law Act ade­quate. How­ever, these arti­cle take a fair amount of time to do.

How­ever, for me, there were two events last week that really stood out. The first was the release of the lat­est Sen­sis Busi­ness Index.

On Wednes­day the Sen­sis busi­ness index came out, and included one of the find­ings that, after 21 con­sec­u­tive quar­ters of this pres­tige title, New South Wales was over­taken by Queens­land as the least pop­u­lar Gov­ern­ment amongst Small and Medium Enter­prises (in terms of their opin­ions of gov­ern­ment poli­cies impact­ing small business).

Anna Bligh is already strug­gling in the poles, and you think that this would be a fine source to use to ridicule her. Instead, the Queens­land oppo­si­tion seemed unbliss­fully unaware of this. Instead, from my lim­ited media expo­sure, the main topic for jour­nal­is­tic report­ing for the day was the Trea­surer beat­ing up the oppo­si­tion over teddy-bears. Fur­ther, few media out­lets even realised the Sen­sis report. Queens­land Busi­ness Review picked it up rather early, but oth­er­wise it mostly went missing.

This com­pares to ear­lier in the week, when the most recent Tourism data was released. The big story was Vic­to­ria over­took Queens­land in Domes­tic Tourist Vis­i­tors. It led to quotes like this:

“The offer of big events, cul­tural events, retail, food and wine is con­sid­ered more attrac­tive than stuff like theme parks, Big Pineap­ples and gee-whizzy type of stuff,” Vic­to­rian Tourism Indus­try Coun­cil chief Anthony McIn­tosh said.

Appar­ently cul­ture includes the absence of severe storms, floods, an oil spill and all the bad PR stem­ming from these. But this is beside the point.

Last week high­lighted two things, the severe dis­ad­van­tage the oppo­si­tion is at due to its lack of human resources, and the absolutely woe­ful state of Queens­land journalism.

I have always hated Today/Tonight. I think it more mise­d­u­cates the pub­lic rather than pro­vides a good con­sumer watch­dog type ser­vice. While I think the media has become to an extent the method of expos­ing and crush­ing cer­tain ele­ments of soci­ety that seem­ingly fall through other safety nets (e.g. expos­ing dodgy deal­ings, etc), I am not sure Today/Tonight deserves much kudos in this regard. I tend to think Today/Tonight more high­lights rather unim­por­tant issues, direct­ing atten­tion away from issues that deserve focus and onto things that ben­e­fit less from con­tin­ual over­sight. It gives many issues that really don’t deserve much more than a pass­ing com­ment a place in the lime­light, deter­min­ing the con­tent of talk­back radio switch­boards the fol­low­ing day. And the ABC isn’t much bet­ter. I watched some Tony Jones inter­views a while back that were absolutely ter­ri­ble. He got var­i­ous politi­cians on to dis­cuss pol­icy, and Tony Jones’ inter­view­ing tech­nique was all about aggres­sive­ness and try­ing to get the inter­vie­wee to trip up. If a cer­tain issue wasn’t work­ing, he moved on to the next one. Pro­vid­ing an inter­view that pro­vided infor­ma­tion to the pub­lic and dis­cussing the actual pol­icy was non-existent. It was all about the spectable.

In a per­fect world, the media would be on-top of issues, and be able to dis­sem­i­nate and present it to the pub­lic in under­stand­able chunks. While it seems many jour­nal­ists aspire to report the facts and avoid opin­ion, it seems that dis­ec­tion, infer­ence and expla­na­tion also have dis­ap­peared. Instead, they go for the candy issues, the stuff that BTN would present to school­child­ren if all BTN’s employ­ees were dead.

Analy­sis should be an inte­gral part of jour­nal­ism. Jour­nal­ism has become a spoon-fed role. Jour­nal­ists get given a pre­pared state­ment, and they put it through the jour­nal­ism machine and out pops an arti­cle. I think the machine applies quo­ta­tion marks and a snappy head­line. Still, the com­mer­cial goals of the media are not in align­ment with Australia’s demo­c­ra­tic processed. With the media more con­cerned with the easy sto­ries and the politi­cian cheap-shots or trips-ups, politi­cians will be more focused on media and per­cep­tion man­age­ment rather than gov­er­nance and pro­vid­ing pol­icy related information.

With­out the resources and per­son­nel the gov­ern­ment has avail­able, oppo­si­tion attacks seem to be lim­ited to what they can derive from main­stream media. These days, Aus­tralian oppo­si­tion par­ties are very lim­ited in the extent of their gov­ern­ment over­sight roles, and win­ning an elec­tion is more a case of the gov­ern­ment los­ing the sup­port of the pop­u­lace rather than the oppo­si­tion win­ning it.

We have to begin to won­der, given the impor­tance of the media in our polit­i­cal struc­ture, does some­thing need to be done?

There have been many arti­cles pop­ping up the last few weeks on gen­der pay inequal­ity, and I have noticed many con­tain the fol­low­ing analysis:

Women:

1. Get paid less.
2. Work fewer hours around the work office as they under­take more fam­ily related duties.
3. Gen­er­ally have less work-related expe­ri­ence com­pared with a man of the equiv­a­lent age, due to hav­ing a more dis­rupted career (due to fam­ily com­mit­ments).
4. Have less super at retire­ment, due to working/earning less.
5. Have dif­fi­culty get­ting into higher work posi­tions, some­times linked to the impact of fam­ily duties on work com­mit­ments or a dis­rupted career path.
6. Are worse off finan­cially, and do not have the same career progress as men.

Fur­ther, this can lead to second-degree prob­lems, such as women being finan­cially dis­ad­van­taged when involved in a rela­tion­ship break­down, due to los­ing the finan­cial secu­rity built into the fam­ily unit and hav­ing lower savings/lower future earn­ing capacity/less super­an­nu­a­tion than the male counterpart.

This is all fair enough. How­ever, I think it is impor­tant to recog­nise that the char­ac­ter­is­tics above are not nec­es­sar­ily evi­dence of dif­fer­ent earn­ing real­i­sa­tions due to pure gender-related pay dis­crim­i­na­tion. It seems that most of the argu­ments that stem from these points is mis­di­rected, often mis­tak­ing inequal­ity of oppor­tu­nity or pure wage dis­crim­i­na­tion based on gen­der with dif­fer­ent earn­ing capac­i­ties due to cir­cum­stance lead­ing to inequal­ity of out­comes. A true exam­ple of dis­crim­i­na­tory pay rates would be if, for the same inputs, there were dif­fer­ing out­puts, as in for the same fac­tors (includ­ing hours worked, qual­i­fi­ca­tions, expe­ri­ence), there was dif­fer­ing pay. and at present, with the recog­ni­tion of the above fac­tors, I think the evi­dence being spread doesn’t align with the sug­gested prob­lems, or required solu­tions, being touted.

How­ever, the main point I want to make is that cur­rently it seems that the pro-equality groups direct their anger at the businesses/employers for fail­ing to ignite gen­der equal­ity. Why is it the employer’s role to do this? Busi­nesses should not be required to ful­fil social wel­fare redis­trib­u­tive role. Employ­ers should be required to pay an employee what their work-related char­ac­ter­is­tics require. Employ­ers shouldn’t have to act on the idea that 10 years of life expe­ri­ence is equiv­a­lent to 10 years of on-the-job expe­ri­ence. If, as a soci­ety, we want to under­take wealth redis­tri­b­u­tion on what­ever grounds, there are bet­ter insti­tu­tions and bet­ter ways of doing this.

It is unclear exactly what the ulti­mate goal/solution of recog­ni­tion of gen­der wage inequal­ity will be. How­ever, I think it is impor­tant to recog­nise the above dis­tinc­tions, and most impor­tantly, be care­ful what solu­tions are imple­mented, and not use busi­ness enter­prises as a blunt weapon for attempt­ing to right the per­ceived wrongs in society.

In these ini­tial posts I thought I would con­tinue the Chris­t­ian themes that are abun­dant on this blog, so I thought I would com­ment not on why/why not I believe cer­tain Chris­t­ian beliefs, but rather my opin­ion of reli­gions as a whole.

A lit­tle back­ground, I think it would be awe­some if there is a God, and it would be almost as awe­some if peo­ple were born believ­ing in God and this never changed. This would be good as every­one could just live out this life, and then move onto the next one. It would be one big spring break. I also think that this would prob­a­bly make the world a much less stress­ful place, and every­one would treat each other bet­ter. There would be no need for self­ish­ness, no rea­son to feel sad if any­one was lost, this world would be only temporary.

How­ever, mov­ing away from the crazy per­fect dream, in the actual world it is dif­fi­cult to tell if reli­gion has more ben­e­fi­cial points than bad points.

Nathan and I have had the dis­cus­sion of the ori­gin of morals before, which I firmly estab­lished my belief that morals aren’t a deriv­a­tive of the Chris­t­ian faith. Still, I accept the role of reli­gion in devel­op­ing many peo­ple val­ues, morals and ethics, and I think for the most part Chris­tian­ity does instil peo­ple with a cer­tain stan­dard of good­ness. From this per­spec­tive, if the Chris­t­ian faith was more dom­i­nant, maybe we would have a bet­ter moral ground­ing, how­ever it is hard to tell. It is pos­si­ble that morals devel­oped to an extent through gen­eral life expe­ri­ence. Maybe reli­gion helps peo­ple devel­oped these attrib­utes at a greater rate. This seems likely.

How­ever, what I think is more ben­e­fi­cial to the devel­op­ment of good soci­etal morals and ethics is the com­mu­nity group that reli­gion often fos­ters. Church groups bring peo­ple together, teach the group the expected stan­dards of behav­iour, and the younger gen­er­a­tions learn how to behave form the older. This almost tribal over­sight on the devel­op­ment of younger peo­ple I would think would result in them devel­op­ing bet­ter behav­iour prin­ci­ples. I would think that belong­ing to a com­mu­nity group would ben­e­fit the morals of peo­ple almost as much as being within an organ­ised edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion and even a strong fam­ily unit.

Where clashes occur is across reli­gious bound­aries. It seems reli­gions aren’t good at being friends. And some reli­gions aren’t even good at lik­ing their own mem­bers if they aren’t reli­gious enough. This is a major mark against reli­gions, and causes divides within the larger com­mu­nity. This con­cept is one of the prime rea­sons I do not like any reli­gious divi­sions in schools. There are enough arti­fi­cial lines drawn in other areas of soci­ety along reli­gious bound­aries. I strongly believe that if any­thing we should be try­ing to get schools as cul­tur­ally diverse and free from any types of poten­tially divid­ing lines as pos­si­ble. This means remov­ing all religious-focused edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions, and try­ing to ensure that we pre­serve this one insti­tu­tion where devel­op­ing chil­dren inter­act with chil­dren from other cul­tures and reli­gious back­grounds. I under­stand that many will feel this some­what impacts on their reli­gious choice and abil­ity to make deci­sions for their chil­dren, how­ever from a whole-of-society stand­point, I think this aids in devel­op­ing a more inclu­sive, open society.

Fur­ther, reli­gions, rel­e­vantly the Chris­t­ian reli­gions, are not tol­er­ant. Some say they are, but they are not. To some extent I think Nathan has both become less tol­er­ant and more acknowl­edg­ing of the fact the Chris­t­ian reli­gion is not tol­er­ant. I think it is impor­tant not to get con­fused between the recog­ni­tion that dif­fer­ent views exist, the tol­er­ance of dif­fer­ent views such that there is a will­ing­ness to allow those dif­fer­ent views to be incor­po­rated into soci­ety along­side your own.

This is not the case with many reli­gions, well at least west­ern reli­gions any­way (but I’m not overly famil­iar with the reli­gions of the world, so I am likely unfairly stereo­typ­ing far too many reli­gions into this broad reli­gion umbrella). In the grand scheme of things, it has to be said that rarely do reli­gious ideals greatly impact on non-religious day-to-day choices or lifestyles for the most part.

How­ever, the laws that reli­gion has spurned, as well as the soci­etal stigma’s and opin­ions in cre­ated still remain, and often it is cer­tain minor­ity or mis­for­tu­nate groups that they have the most impact on. I find it absolutely infu­ri­at­ing at the thought of gay peo­ple being beaten or dis­crim­i­nated against on reli­gious basis. Nathan seems to have an issue with same sex mar­riage due to the poten­tial impacts it could have on fam­ily units. There are argu­ments on either side of this, many dif­fi­cult to truly val­i­date (such as stud­ies that tells me that tra­di­tional fam­i­lies are better/worse than a dif­fer­ent fam­ily type), but at least if they are approached log­i­cally and ratio­nally, I am will­ing to think through them, and come to a con­clu­sion. I like ratio­nal argu­ments and evi­dence. What I find more dif­fi­cult is argu­ments based on reli­gious grounds. I accept that reli­gious peo­ple devel­oped per­sonal val­ues around their reli­gious beliefs and val­ues. How­ever, I find it unfair and unjust to reg­u­late the lives of oth­ers based on such groundings.

I am also becom­ing con­cerned that Chris­tians have a cer­tain supe­ri­or­ity com­plex that extends fur­ther than their belief they have the cor­rect the­o­log­i­cal choice. As already men­tioned, it includes Christian’s belief in their supe­rior moral com­pass, but I think it also may extend to thoughts that Chris­tians may be just gen­er­ally more enlight­ened in all con­texts. How­ever, Chris­tians prob­a­bly make this argu­ment against non-Christians.

There is also a tear within myself to an extent. While I want to pre­serve everyone’s right to choose and prac­tice their own reli­gion, I also realise that the way in which reli­gions impede upon each other, it is not real­is­tic to believe all these dif­fer­ent views could live con­tently side by side. I think this source of con­flict has a neg­a­tive impact on society.

Finally, I don’t mind being preached to. while I think a lot of non-Christians are both­ered by this, I think most of my reli­gious friends under­stand cer­tain bound­aries, and for the most part in Aus­tralia it is quite easy for Chris­t­ian and non-Christian group­ings to get along quite eas­ily. In fact, the way smi­ley puts it, if my Chris­t­ian friends didn’t try to drag me in once in a while, they are prob­a­bly not being a good Chris­t­ian in try­ing to save their friends. That said, the extent some peo­ple have gone to spread the word I think has been some­what unac­cept­able. Organ­i­sa­tions that organ­ised for mis­sion­ar­ies to enter coun­tries where Chris­tian­ity was not wel­come is a grey area I find some­what dif­fi­cult to vin­di­cate. They may be heroes of the reli­gion, but again it shows an ele­ment of elit­ism that exists within a group that is will­ing to do this. It may have been done with the best of inten­tions, but in the big pic­ture, being so direct may have done more instances of harm than good. And it unlikely caused fur­ther ten­sion between already strained inter­na­tional ties.

So to be a true Chris­t­ian, you seem­ingly have to take the good attrib­utes with the bad. And, from the require­ments of Chris­tian­ity of spread­ing the word and liv­ing by the bibles teach­ings, it seems that there is no solu­tion for the incom­pat­i­bil­ity between the Chris­t­ian v non-Christian world.