Australian politicians shun "enviro-friendly" cars

POLITICIANS are spending taxpayers' money on gas-guzzling cars and four-wheel drives while telling average Aussies to cut their carbon emissions. More than 100 federal MPs drive taxpayer-funded 4WDs and V8s, and 113 MPs have family-size sedans and wagons. But there are only 10 Toyota Prius hybrids in the privately plated vehicle fleet. And only five MPs have bothered to request LPG vehicles, which are better for the environment than petrol models.

The Herald Sun obtained details of MPs' taxpayer-funded vehicles after months of bureaucratic buck-passing. But the Department of Finance refused to reveal the vehicle choices of individual MPs, claiming the information was private. The Government, which signed the Kyoto Protocol as its first official act, does not impose any environmental restrictions or guidelines on the selection of privately plated vehicles. MPs must select their car from a list of Australian-made vehicles. If they want a non-standard or imported vehicle, such as a 4WD, V8 or hybrid, they must pay the difference from their electoral allowance. "At present, the onus of choice is on the parliamentarian," said a spokesman for Special Minister of State John Faulkner.

Most of the four-wheel drives selected are Australian-made Ford Territorys, which burn about 13 litres of fuel in 100km on the open road. Ford Falcons and Holden Commodores use about 10-11 litres/100km, while the Toyota Prius uses 4.4 litres/100km.

The Australian Conservation Foundation said politicians should drive the most efficient cars available. "I think it's clear the Australian people would like to see the Government leading the way on this," acting executive director Chris Berger said. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, who drives a Mitsubishi 380 but has a Prius on order, said the Commonwealth was looking at ways to improve its environmental performance. "The Government has committed to leading by example in reducing emissions from its own operations," her spokesman said.

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Hot air about black health

By Christopher Pearson

LATE last year Kevin Rudd, along with the premiers and chief ministers, announced they were committed to the target of closing the 17-year gap in life expectancy between indigenous Australians and the rest of the population. That resolution was formalised last week in a statement of intent, signed by Rudd and Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson and various health organisations, during a health equality summit in Canberra. The plan is that the gap is to be bridged within 22 years, in 2030.

There's something inescapably Mickey Mouse about an in-principle commitment to an outcome at a distant date with a suspiciously round number. By that time, of course, the main signatories and all their front bench colleagues will be long gone from parliament and in many cases from public life altogether. Still, that doesn't mean the undertaking won't keep coming back to haunt them, like Bob Hawke's line about no child left in poverty.

The level of seriousness with which the federal Government is approaching the issue can be judged by its programs and its rhetoric. Last week Rudd claimed that 17 per cent of the life expectancy gap, almost three years, could be attributed to Aborigines smoking at about twice the rate of other Australians. He promised $14.5 million over four years to tackle high smoking rates, which strikes me as no more than a drop in the bucket. Rudd says another seven years of the gap can be accounted for by factors such as alcohol abuse and poor nutrition, which lead to higher than average incidence of diabetes, renal failure and other chronic diseases.

He and Nelson committed to providing healthcare services and facilities that "are capable of bridging the gap in health standards by 2018", a phrase gnomic to the verge of meaninglessness.

Let us take the Prime Minister at his word and, for argument's sake, accept that 10 of the 17 years' gap can be put down to smoking, drinking and poor diet. The first thing to note is that these are all matters of individual choice, rather than anything that could even remotely be considered an occasion of national disgrace. In a pluralist society, the nanny state can deplore people's lifestyle choices but Aborigines are as entitled as the white proletariat to tell nanny to mind her own business. As well, at least in the short term, addictions to nicotine and alcohol are largely unresponsive to health awareness campaigns.

There are other elements of Aboriginal life, especially in remote communities, that are no doubt prejudicial to good health but are nonetheless matters of personal choice. The dogs to be found in rural encampments, for example, carry all sorts of infections and parasites, yet adults and children often curl up with them at night. Likewise, those indigenous mothers whose vestigial education didn't extend to hygiene often choose to steer clear of bush clinics and visiting doctors. In doing so, they leave untreated ear infections that can easily lead to hearing loss or deafness in young children, who are then themselves almost beyond the reach of education. Yet the state cannot and surely should not be in the business of compelling adults, with or without children, to attend a clinic.

In some settlements, betrothed girls as young as 12 and 13 are encouraged or permitted by their parents to have sexual relations with a prospective husband. This often leads to emergency caesarian sections because the girls are too small to bear a baby in the usual way, and it contributes to higher infant mortality rates. These liaisons are legally problematic, of course, but traditional. A government that tried to enforce the law regarding criminal dealings with a minor in cases such as these, regardless of particular circumstances, would be asking for trouble and would be roundly condemned for interfering with time-honoured practices. These are some of the culturally specific reasons for the bleak indigenous morbidity and mortality statistics.

However, there is a school of thought in public health that holds that the meaningful comparison is not with the rest of the population considered as an amorphous mass but with the non-Aboriginal members of the bottom income decile. It's thought to be much more of an apples and apples comparison and more instructive when it comes to gauging the nature and scale of the problems.

Leading British epidemiologist Michael Marmot has shown (in Inequalities of Health) that socioeconomic characteristics of communities, as well as individual characteristics such as income, education and occupation, affect health outcomes. When it comes to across-the-board comparisons in the lowest decile, we can extrapolate from American studies that suggest whites tend to have worse health outcomes than blacks, though on the same income. It also follows from Marmot's findings that for Aborigines to achieve the same health outcomes as the rest of the population they'd have to cover something approaching the same socioeconomic spectrum: a very tall order in only 22 years.

He has another publication, The Status Syndrome; How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health and Life Expectancy, which is worth mentioning here. Its focus is also on the relationship between socioeconomic position and health outcomes. This holds even when you control for the effects of variables such as income and education and risk factors such as smoking. The direct link he identifies concerns the psychic benefits of being in control of your life and having opportunities for the full range of social engagements.

The land rights movement has always maintained that there is a considerable sense of personal and collective empowerment in returning to ancestral territory, more important than easy access to up-to-the-minute facilities. These are considerations that David Scrimgeour, an authority on indigenous epidemiology, points to when trying to explain why health outcomes in recent West Australian research are in some respects better in remote settlements on traditional lands than in cities. He told Michael Duffy, co-host of Radio National's Counterpoint, that rural mortality rates were lower, especially with "the big killers of Aboriginal people: heart disease and diabetes".

Those outcomes also suggest that access to medical facilities may not, of itself, make as much of a difference as is usually assumed. Elsewhere, in The Medical Journal of Australia, Scrimgeour says that indigenous morbidity rates from all causes appear to be the same across the urban-remote continuum, which supports Marmot's view that socioeconomic status is the central issue.

Rather than taking a health-based approach to achieve better health outcomes, there's a compelling case for adopting a wider social policy approach. Its main emphasis is going to have to be on extending the operation of the real economy into as much of rural and remote Australia as possible. If Rudd Labor is serious about Aboriginal health, it will confine itself to tinkering at the margins with the Northern Territory intervention. It should give wholehearted support to 99-year leases, building more privately owned housing in outback communities and generating real jobs. If the ALP is going to address the socioeconomic basis of indigenous morbidity and premature mortality, it is first going to have to take on board Noel Pearson's critique of passive welfare.

A less rhetorically driven and more factually based version of the relative positions of the poor and those in the middle-income deciles would be helpful, too. A recent Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey showed that those of the poor who participated in the real economy have been getting better off during the past five years. That means, among other things, that in the lowest income decile the task of catching up -- in terms of income and health -- will be that much harder for Aborigines who've been entirely reliant on benefits.

Tony Abbott, a seasoned health minister whose shadow portfolio includes indigenous affairs, takes a sceptical view of last week's announcement. "There has been no shortage of good intentions in this area but precious few good outcomes," he told The Australian. "I have a deep suspicion of statements of aspiration unless they are backed up by specific measures that can realistically be expected to make a difference. Unfortunately, that's where our modern reluctance to be judgmental about other cultures kicks in. A lifestyle characterised by domestic violence, substance abuse and unemployment is not conducive to good health, regardless of people's ethnicity or culture. There will be little change in Aboriginal health outcomes until the way they live comes more closely to resemble that of other Australians."

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West slowly awakening from suicidal slumber?

It is, by any measure, a sunny day when moralising elites are forced to eat their words. Only a few short years ago many were busily deriding Australia as an "international pariah" on immigration. Indeed, only last year our new citizenship test was labelled as nasty stuff by people such as journalist David Marr and former Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser.

Enter the British Labour Government, which last month announced its intention to introduce tough new citizenship tests and, get this, bring in immigration controls "based on the Australian model". Far from pariah-dom, Australia is a role model on how to control immigration and integrate migrants. More important, as Western nations learn from one another, each new step taken looks more confident and assertive than the previous one.

Finally, perhaps, the West is realising, as Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said late last year, that "it is confidence in your own heritage that allows you to be generous to those of another heritage".

Old ideas that should have never been discarded are being revisited. Although the Brown Government is pitching this as a "vision of British citizenship for the 21st century", it is, in reality, an old one. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's vision of British citizenship as one "founded on a unifying idea of rights matched with responsibilities" marks a long overdue turning point in Western thinking, a return to more sensible times where basic Western values were asserted with confidence.

For the past few decades, the progressive fad of minority rights, fuelled by multiculturalism, has flourished. Once a hard form of multiculturalism took root, one that treated all cultures as equal, the values of the host country were effectively under attack. Cultural relativism morphed into a virulent strand of Western self-loathing where tolerance was reinterpreted to mean tolerating those intolerant of Western culture and values. Brown's reforms are aimed at overturning that rights fetish, a counterproductive and indeed dangerously one-sided notion where people could demand of the state but the state could not demand of them.

These days the multiculti crowd is dwindling to a few stragglers. But they include people who should know better. Last month, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, called for the introduction of some aspects of sharia law into Britain and told the BBC that Muslims should not be required to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty and state loyalty".

The cultural loyalty that Williams robustly defended explains why parts of British society are already unofficially dispensing their own form of sharia law. A few weeks ago London's Daily Mail exposed how parallel courts were operating in Sheffield, Milton Keynes, Manchester, Dewsbury, Birmingham and other towns settled by the 43,000-strong Somali population. Violence within the Somali community is dealt with by groups of elders who meet to hand out punishments in the form of an apology and compensation to the victim. Aydraus Hassan, a Somali youth worker from Woolwich, told the Daily Mail that families rarely called in the police because they preferred their own system of justice. "This is how we have dealt with crime since the 10th century. This is something we can sort out for ourselves," he said.

Cultural loyalty also explains the heartbreaking reports of female genital mutilation among African communities in Britain. Last month, a Liverpool newspaper reported that, despite new laws to prohibit FGM, up to 90 per cent of women in some ethnic communities are mutilated. African tribal elders are being flown into Britain to perform the mutilation. This is happening under the noses of authorities for the simple reason that Western nations such as Britain succumbed to the scourge of cultural relativism where migrants were allowed to openly spurn Western values.

Brown's reforms are a small but important step in reasserting the traditional three-way contract: majority tolerance, minority loyalty and government vigilance in both directions. That contract, well understood by migrants in the 1950s and '60s when they arrived with a sense of obligation to the new country, knowing what was expected of them, was scuppered by multiculturalism. In a sign that the British Government is finally learning the lessons of the past three decades of multicultural mayhem, the 60-page green paper published by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith mentions the M-word only once, as follows, quoting from an Aberdeen participant: "Multiculturalism is a two-way street; they must accept us and change too."

As Brown outlined in his speech in London to launch the reforms, British citizenship will depend on migrants entering into a contract where rights are matched with responsibilities. For example, he says, people are protected from crime but in return agree to obey the law. People can expect and receive services but in return will pay their fair share of taxes and have an obligation to work. Britain will support families but will expect families to take care of their own. Importantly, the Brown Government will consider amending its Human Rights Act to create a new British bill of rights and responsibilities that will detail "not just what people are entitled to but what they are expected to do in return".

In line with Brown's notion of "earned citizenship", a new category of probationary citizens will not be entitled to full rights associated with citizenship. The Brown Government will explore whether some services - such as the right to post-18 education, the right to public housing and social security benefits - will apply only on full citizenship. Probationary citizens will be required to donate to a fund to help finance local public services.

The Brown Government's reforms are an acknowledgment of the "progressive dilemma" - the conflict between solidarity and diversity - outlined a few years ago by David Goodhart, editor of the progressive Prospect. Coming from a member of the Left, Goodhart's observations packed a punch. He talked about us not just living among strangers but having to share with them. "All such acts of sharing are more smoothly and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common values and assumptions," he said.

The changes outlined by Brown are unashamedly about cementing solidarity, outlining a common identity and expecting migrants to sign on to the traditional social contract in an era of globalisation where more and more people born in one country want to live in another. It is Goodhart's thesis writ large and long overdue.

That Western governments are forced to articulate the importance of Western values and the traditional social contract tells you how far these core principles fell into disrepair. But at least, finally, it suggests that the West is slowly waking from its suicidal slumber.

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Let rest of world (mainly Europe) make climate errors

KEVIN Rudd has an unfortunate proclivity for proclaiming Australia should lead the world in its response to global warming. For a country so richly endowed with carbon-based energy resources, this does not immediately commend itself as the most obvious policy course for us to follow. And the latest discussion paper on emissions trading from the Garnaut review, released last Thursday, should have set political alarm bells ringing on the potential costs of action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong is right to describe emissions trading as one of the most far-reaching and complex reforms in Australian history. Economist Ross Garnaut, who is conducting the review of climate change policies for the state and federal governments, defers to nobody in his alarm at the pace of global warming and his sense of urgency about responding to it.

However, among the "core factors" his terms of reference require him to take into account is this one: "the costs and benefits of Australia taking significant action to mitigate climate change ahead of competitor nations". While Garnaut is keen to see Australia play a full part in international efforts on climate change, his interim report suggests we should calibrate our responses so that they mirror "similar adjustment costs to other developed nations". Just what this will mean in practice is a fascinating question.

The indications are that even the relatively trivial emissions targets set under the Kyoto Protocol are likely to be missed by many signatory nations, including Canada, New Zealand and various European countries, which are looking for ways to avoid the penalties involved for so doing. Britain, which has claimed it will meet its Kyoto target comfortably (because it shut down its coal industry in the 1990s, for reasons that had nothing to do with climate change), turns out to have been using dodgy measurements. According to the method preferred by Britain's National Audit Office, there has been no reduction in its emissions from their 1990 level.

But even more interesting is the way things are unfolding when it comes to future action. The European Union has been a leading proponent of the apocalyptic view of the consequences of climate change and an advocate of strong global action. Yet in recent months there has been a far from unified response to proposals from Brussels on emissions targets and related matters from the EU's members. Germany and France, the EU's two most powerful members, have been unhappy and vocal about the effect on their energy-intensive industries, including the steel and car industries, of targets such as a 20 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020.

Ironically, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chaired last year's EU spring summit (where she was all for the adoption of such targets), did an about-face this month. Germany led a push to get energy-intensive industries special treatment, alarming the Greens in the European parliament, who described it as small-minded and "a frenzy of bargaining for exemptions and further compromises".

There is growing concern in Europe that energy-intensive industries could move offshore if the EU is too ambitious in setting its emission reduction targets. The summit communique provides for special treatment for energy-intensive industries if international negotiations fail to get other countries to match Europe's emission targets.

The European Commission's president Jose Manuel Barroso is concerned this compromise will undermine Europe's credibility in international negotiations. He is talking of the possibility of protectionist measures against imports from countries such as China, with lower environmental standards, if international agreement on climate change action isn't reached by 2009. This would be a disastrous move, for Europe and the world.

Japan is also running into difficulties with its Kyoto target and appears to be looking for ways to shift the goalposts in the next round of climate change negotiations.

In the US all the presidential candidates are talking about commitment to an emissions trading system and targets, but there is no reason to think Congress, which is in a protectionist mood, will sign on to any international agreement that doesn't impose obligations on China and other developing countries to accept binding targets for emissions cuts. There is no sign China or India will agree to that, and if China and the US don't play ball, then it's game over for any meaningful international agreement post-Kyoto in 2012.

Garnaut has acknowledged that at the present rate of progress in global negotiations, agreement on a comprehensive plan to substantially slash greenhouse gas emissions could be decades away. This is not an environment in which Australia should be rushing to set up an ambitious national emissions trading scheme. The Rudd Government should think again about its aim of finalising its plans by the end of the year.

It is not only a matter of not getting ahead of our international competitors in imposing substantial costs on key national industries. What Garnaut proposes also involves vast transfers of wealth, jobs and resources domestically, as government reallocates the billions of dollars in revenue its emissions trading scheme would raise. Garnaut has suggested ways to use these enormous revenues to compensate households and other victims of the higher prices and job losses involved. But the whole of economic history suggests the scope for misallocation and misuse of these funds by government is great.

Neither climate change alarmism, based on still uncertain science, nor misplaced ambition to be a world leader in emission reductions should rush us into premature decisions on such a fundamental issue. The rest of the world isn't in any hurry.

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