Tag Archives: failure
Another day, another hotel quarantine fail. So what can Australia learn from other countries?
Maximilian de Courten, Victoria University; Bo Klepac Pogrmilovic, Victoria University; Deborah Zion, Victoria University, and Jaimie-Lee Maple, Victoria University
This week, we heard how conditions at a Sydney quarantine hotel were so bad almost 400 returned travellers had to be moved to another one.
Before that, we heard from Victoria’s inquiry into hotel quarantine. We learned the bulk of cases during the state’s second wave could be tracked down to a family of four returned travellers staying at a single quarantine hotel.
But Australia isn’t the only country to have quarantine issues. Some countries don’t use hotel quarantine at all. And others have turned to technology to keep track of returned travellers.
So what can we learn from other countries’ successes and failures?
A short trip around the world
The Mediterranean island of Cyprus also uses hotel quarantine for international arrivals. But rather than “hotel quarantine hell”, hotels in Cyprus are said to have a “holiday vibe”, despite not being able to leave your room.
Travellers praised Cyprus for its luxury and positive hotel quarantine experience. Some have even said they would return for a (real) holiday.
Hotel quarantine, Cyprus style.
Cyprus recorded a peak in daily cases of only 58, in early April, and now has an average of new cases a day in the teens.
Returned travellers must give Canadian authorities a plan for how they intend to spend their mandatory 14-day quarantine. This doesn’t have to be in a hotel; it can be at home. You have to monitor your own symptoms, and police will check up on you.
However, violations can result in large fines of up to C$750,000 (A$788,000) or six months in jail.
Taiwan introduced 14-day hotel quarantine for returned travellers who didn’t have a single room with a separate bathroom or who lived with vulnerable people.
Since late June, business travellers from low-risk countries can visit Taiwan and spend only five days in quarantine. But they need to take a COVID-19 test before leaving quarantine.
Taiwan has 18 active COVID-19 cases.
After flattening the curve, Singapore decided to relax its 14-day hotel quarantine to seven days self-quarantine for travellers arriving from specific countries.
But all travellers over the age of 12 not staying in a quarantine facility have to wear an electronic tracking wristband. Authorities are alerted if people go outside or tamper with the device.
Hong Kong and South Korea have also introduced wristbands to track people’s movements upon arrival and to check people comply with quarantine regulations.
Travellers arriving in Poland have to install a home quarantine phone app developed by the Polish government.
For 14 days, the app uses facial recognition and geolocation algorithms to monitor people. It also prompts people to take selfies at random times during the day.
Individuals have 20 minutes to respond to these prompts, otherwise they risk police knocking on their door.
A major “quarantine failure” was the UK’s experience at the start of the pandemic, when 10,000 travellers spread the virus across the country.
Members of parliament accused the responsible ministers of making errors, such as having no border checks, no specific quarantine arrangements, and lifting self-isolation regulations.
This eventually led to the UK dealing with a total of 328,846 cases and 41,465 COVID-19-related deaths.
The UK has since tightened its quarantine arrangements.
These ideas are worth adopting in Australia…
More than 70,000 returned travellers have been quarantined in Australian hotels since it became mandatory in late March. We don’t know exactly how many of these people have gone on to test positive. But about one in five of Australia’s cases were acquired overseas.
Is aggressive hotel isolation worth the cost to fight COVID-19? The answer depends on family size
As the headlines show, we can clearly do better in how we manage our quarantine system.
Adopting a “Cyprus-style” model of luxury hotel quarantine is simply beyond reach in Australia given the sheer number of people requiring quarantine facilities. However, improving the quality of facilities, ensuring a safe environment, and supervising staff is vital. This includes training both staff and travellers on infection control measures.
People in quarantine also need access to health care as well as to financial, social and psychosocial support, to ensure their safety and mental health.
…but we need to be careful about electronic tags
We would be particularly concerned about the human rights implications of returned travellers having to wear electronic monitoring devices.
Although we might be familiar with electronic monitoring devices in the criminal justice system, when used in the context of infection they could stigmatise people for simply being at higher risk of disease.
Lockdown returns: how far can coronavirus measures go before they infringe on human rights?
They go against the presumption that all persons will be law-abiding and perform their civic duty, with no evidence to the contrary.
There are also potential privacy concerns. There is no guarantee data collected through electronic monitoring — especially when using smartphone apps — will not be used for purposes other than monitoring pandemics.
No system is perfect
Even if we implement a world best quarantine system for returned travellers, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can still slip in.
That’s because people can still be infectious before feeling sick, before being diagnosed, or before being directed to quarantine. This becomes more likely the more people are kept under quarantine.
Maximilian de Courten, Health Policy Lead and Professor in Global Public Health at the Mitchell Institute, Victoria University; Bo Klepac Pogrmilovic, Research Fellow in Health Policy at the Mitchell Institute for Education and Health Policy, Victoria University; Deborah Zion, Associate Professor and Chair, Victoria University Human Research Ethics Committee, Victoria University, and Jaimie-Lee Maple, Research Assistant and Policy Analyst, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University
Posted in Australia, Health and Fitness, New South Wales, news, Victoria	| Tagged article, Australia, coronavirus, failure, health, Hotel, New South Wales, news, NSW, quarantine, Victoria | Leave a comment
Vital Signs: Victoria’s privatised quarantine arrangements were destined to fail
Posted on July 26, 2020 by particularkev
Richard Holden, UNSW
Most people agree there are services government should pay for. Primary and secondary education, a dignified level of health care, emergency services and the military come to mind.
What is less clear is what services government should directly provide, and what it can safely contract out.
Past experiments in privatisation include the running of prisons and detention centres, and hiring private military contractors to guard embassies.
We have just witnessed a real-time experiment with the Victoria government’s hotel quarantine debacle.
Melbourne’s hotel quarantine bungle is disappointing but not surprising. It was overseen by a flawed security industry
This week an inquiry headed by former Family Court of Australia judge Jennifer Coates began into failures in Victoria’s hotel quarantine system, believed to be responsible for Melbourne’s second-wave viral outbreaks.
But what can economics tells us about why this happened?
Thanks to the literature on “incomplete contracts” that led to a Nobel Prize for Harvard University economist Oliver Hart, quite a bit.
Using private contractors for hotel quarantine was destined to fail. It all boils down to a trade-off between costs and quality.
Using private providers is a good option when keeping costs low is more important than high quality. This was not such a case.
Incomplete contracts
Hart’s classic 1997 paper on “The Proper Scope of Government” (co-authored with Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny) mostly considers privatisation in theoretical terms, with some discussion of prisons, garbage collection, schools, health care, policing and a few other things.
The animating idea behind the “incomplete contracts” approach is that there are some contingencies that contracts, no matter how detailed, can’t cover.
This could be because parties can’t conceive of all future contingencies. Or perhaps they understand what’s at issue but it is hard to codify that in a way a non-specialist court could understand.
For instance, a famous legal case concerned the definition of a chicken, with the judge writing:
The issue is, what is chicken? Plaintiff says ‘chicken’ means a young chicken, suitable for broiling and frying. Defendant says ‘chicken’ means any bird of that genus that meets contract specifications on weight and quality …
Philippe Aghion and I expanded on incomplete contracts and prisons as well as many other applications in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2011.
To keep things simple, imagine there are two things someone running a prison can put effort into: reducing costs or improving quality.
Improvements in quality could involve increasing rehabilitation rates, reducing violent incidents and or minimising escape risks. Lower costs lead to lower quality. For example, employing fewer guards might result in more escape attempts or prisoner-on-prisoner violence.
People have lost faith in privatisation and it’s easy to see why
Cost versus quality
When the government owns the prison and employs a warden to run it, it doesn’t have to rely just on an written contract to get what it wants in terms of investment in quality. It can tell the warden what to do, and replace them if they don’t produce the goods.
If it’s serious about quality, though, the government will likely have to provide more resources. Quality costs.
When a prison is privatised, the government’s control over how the operator acts is limited to its contract.
In a perfect contract, the government could stipulate how much the private contractor is allowed to reduce costs and how much it must improve quality.
But these things are difficult to write into contracts. Wherever there are gaps, any contractor providing a fixed-price service will look to cut costs instead of improving quality.
So that’s the trade-off. When low cost is very important, private contracting is best. But when quality is more important, government ownership is optimal.
The Victorian quarantine
What’s more important in hotel quarantine during a pandemic: cost or quality?
The Hart-Shelifer-Vishny rationale tells us the Melbourne hotels should not have been policed by private security contractors, because the highest possible standards were paramount.
Moreover, even if one could write a complete contract, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no real recourse in this case for a breach of contract. The cost is billions of dollars in damage to the economy already. What good is a contract with a bankrupt contractor?
Victorian COVID crisis to deliver $3.3 billion hit to nation’s growth in September quarter
Of course, police (and other public servants) aren’t always perfect either. But at least there is more training, a code of conduct, a sense of duty and a whole apparatus for disciplining misbehaviour.
The Coate inquiry may uncover valuable details about where and how the quarantine system failed, but economics can already point us to why it was destined to fail.
When high quality matters more than low cost, governments shouldn’t outsource unless absolutely necessary.
The choice for hotel quarantine should have been clear.
Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW
Posted in Australia, Health and Fitness, news, Victoria	| Tagged arrangements, article, Australia, coronavirus, failure, health, news, privatised, quarantine, Victoria | Leave a comment
Scott Morrison’s biggest failure in the bushfire crisis: an inability to deliver collective action
Posted on January 10, 2020 by particularkev
Morrison has been too timorous to take the tough decisions needed to prepare for the bushfire season, including confronting rancorous dissenters in his own ranks.
James Ross/AAP
James Walter, Monash University
With the mega-fires consuming enormous tracts of country Australia, we are witnessing not only a national disaster, but also a failure of national leadership.
In a federal system, much responsibility for local services, and local emergencies, devolves to the states. But fires observe no boundaries.
It is a situation that was foreseen by experienced fire chiefs last April. Indeed, fire chiefs had made a case for more federal resources two years ago. But their calls for national leadership and national coordination were ignored.
Now that what they feared has come to pass, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his team have handled matters poorly. They have been laggards in their response, reactive rather than proactive, more preoccupied with image management and partisan messaging than the job at hand. They have also responded inappropriately to criticism.
As a result, commentators have weighed in on Morrison’s lack of political authority, judgement and feel for public opinion – and whether the “miracle man” of the 2019 election can regain his footing.
How Morrison compares to other leaders
We can gain a surer sense of how this might play out by asking: how should effective national leadership operate in times like these?
Consider other examples of how leaders have reacted to similar situations. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Adern’s ability to act immediately, reach out compassionately and connect inclusively in response to last year’s Christchurch massacre provides one measure against which Morrison fails to measure up.
Jacinda Ardern’s response to the Christchurch shootings has been memorialised very differently in New Zealand.
Former PM John Howard’s brave pursuit of gun control, and willingness to face down opposition within his own ranks, after the Port Arthur massacre is another.
Morrison, confronted by distressed representatives of the small towns and regions who delivered his slim election victory, could not summon the humility to listen to their concerns. He walked away from questions from victims in Cobargo, and the outrage of these no longer “quiet Australians” attracted national and international attention.
Morrison’s reiteration of carbon reduction policies that are manifestly inadequate and his unwillingness to deal with the climate change realities presented to him by fire chiefs – but disputed by some Coalition colleagues – have also shown a lack fortitude.
Listen to your people Scott Morrison: the bushfires demand a climate policy reboot
A failure of collective action
More significant, though, is Morrison’s inability to facilitate collective action.
A national crisis in a federal state demands strong and decisive leadership. But it also requires collective action. This means a willingness to seek and listen to the best sources of advice and an ability to generate bipartisan consensus to confront an unusual challenge. It also means the capacity to orchestrate different levels of government, a variety of agencies, relevant NGOs, relevant branches of the public service, and in this case, the Australian Defence Force.
We know the Coalition, and Morrison himself, have been advised about the likelihood of worsening bushfires – and their inextricable link with global heating – for a considerable time.
Mr Morrison, I lost my home to bushfire. Your thoughts and prayers are not enough
Climate change could not be avoided in discussion of the ill-fated National Energy Guarantee. The risk factors of intensifying natural hazards, such as bushfires, cyclones and flooding, and the need for climate adaptation were front and centre in the Home Affairs Department’s National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework in 2018.
It beggars belief that Morrison’s departmental secretary until last August, Martin Parkinson, would not have given him an unvarnished evaluation of policy directions, given his lament for a decade of climate change inaction shortly after leaving office.
And, as noted, fire experts called for more federal resources two years ago and warned of what was to come last April.
Yet Morrison, far from the strong leader, has been too timorous to take the tough decisions needed, including confronting rancorous dissenters in his own ranks when the “miracle” win had given him the authority to do so.
Partisan attacks instead of real leadership
The failings are compounded by the tendency of the Coalition government to treat even issues related to national emergencies as “political”, when what matters on the ground is survival.
This is the antithesis of what is needed to promote collective action. Morrison has struggled throughout the crisis to put the national interest above party interests. Too often, image management has prevailed over action – until the more resolute state leaders, Gladys Berejiklian and Daniel Andrews, showed him up.
There’s no evidence ‘greenies’ block bushfire hazard reduction but here’s a controlled burn idea worth trying
Critics have been devalued as greenies who are said to have impeded necessary hazard reduction strategies. Fire authorities have debunked this canard, suggesting it to be a deflection from the real issue of the government’s failure to consult and its lack of preparedness.
It follows, then, that using the PM’s office to issue a social media post on the military mobilisation authorised by Morrison, with a Liberal Party header, was bound to be seen as a political act. The conventional route for such information has been via the national broadcaster, the ABC, to whom most turn for emergency alerts. But the ABC is seen as suspect by this government.
From the start of the crisis, the Morrison government disregarded the conventional means for crisis management: adequate consultation with state agencies, the expected channels for disseminating information, and drawing people together effectively to work jointly on what is a collective action problem.
Only at the end, after the significance of so many missteps had dawned, did Morrison open the cheque book for measures that might have been initiated well before the fire season.
One might hope the belated launch of a National Bushfire Recovery Agency will prove a learning experience, illuminating when troublesome colleagues within the Coalition should be firmly managed and partisanship must be put aside in the interests of collective action.
This was never a problem Morrison could expect to manage alone.
James Walter, Professor of Political Science, Monash University
Posted in Australia, bushfires, news, Politics, Scott Morrison	| Tagged action, article, Australia, bushfire, bushfires, collective, deliver, failure, news, Politics, Scott Morrison | Leave a comment
There’s no airport border ‘crisis’, only management failure of the Home Affairs department
Posted on October 14, 2019 by particularkev
Regina Jefferies, UNSW and Daniel Ghezelbash, Macquarie University
In the past five years, more than 95,000 people who arrived by plane have lodged a claim for asylum in Australia, new statistics show.
Labor’s Immigration Spokesperson, Senator Kristina Keneally, has labelled this a “crisis”, stating:
Peter Dutton’s incompetence and recklessness has allowed people smugglers to run riot and traffic record-breaking numbers of people by aeroplane to Australia.
But the “crisis” is not that visa-holding travellers are flying to Australia, then later lodging a claim for asylum. It’s not unprecedented for tourists or students to later lodge a claim for asylum due to circumstances beyond their control.
Peter Dutton is whipping up fear on the medevac law, but it defies logic and compassion
In 1989, for example, after events in Tiananmen Square, Australia provided refuge to thousands of Chinese students who had entered Australia with visas.
Instead, the “crisis” is the Australian government’s failure to properly manage the refugee-processing system. It gutted the ranks of experienced decision-makers and made organisational changes that undermine the quality of decisions, contributing to long processing delays and backlogs.
These organisational failures may have contributed to the increase in asylum applications over the last five years.
High staff turn-over
Protection visa decisions are highly complex. They must examine a variety of factors, including country-specific conditions and individual circumstances.
Yet, as the Australian National Audit Office noted in 2018, the Home Affairs department experienced a significant loss of “corporate memory” due to staff turn-over, “with almost half of SES officers present in July 2015 no longer in the department at July 2017”.
In a Senate Estimates hearing last year, Home Affairs officials said the average processing time for permanent protection visas, from lodgement to primary decision (not including appeals), was 257 days, or 8.5 months.
And the department’s training deficiencies are well-documented. The most recent Australian Public Service Employee Census put the department’s organisational management problems into stark relief: only 35% of employees said the department inspired them to do their best work, while two-thirds of respondents said they did not consider department senior executives to be of “high quality”.
These publicised problems raise important questions about the quality of decision-making at the primary level.
Stacking the AAT with political allies
Poor decision-making at the primary level can lead to higher numbers of appeals. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that appeals to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) from people who arrived by plane are also experiencing significant blowouts.
The number of active refugee cases to the AAT has ballooned from 8,370 two years ago, to 23,063 in 2019.
Cruel, and no deterrent: why Australia’s policy on asylum seekers must change
This results in a backlog. In 2017, the tribunal made 5,153 decisions on refugee claims, and so far this financial year, only 815 claims have been concluded.
In part, these worrying figures are due to the federal government appointing people with Liberal Party ties to the AAT over the last couple of years.
The Attorney-General recognised these problems in the 2019 Report on the Statutory Review of the Tribunal, which pointed to “competencies of members” as a key contributor to complications in the operation of the tribunal.
Stacking the AAT with political allies, many of whom are not lawyers and who are not appointed on merit, has removed independent expertise from the tribunal, risking errors and further delays.
How the Biloela Tamil family deportation case highlights the failures of our refugee system
And with more errors come further appeals in the courts. This not only places a heavy burden on the resources of the Federal Circuit Court and Federal Court, but also leads to more delays and backlogs in the AAT, where the court sends matters which were unlawfully decided for re-determination.
Address organisational failures
The solution is in proper organisational management. Instead of blaming refugees for fleeing persecution by safe means, the government must address the failures of its refugee processing system.
To this end, an urgent review of the Department of Home Affairs policies and organisational failures is needed. A review could find out whether there’s a management culture stopping Home Affairs from attracting and retaining staff who can make reasoned and well-supported decisions in an environment they can be proud of.
‘Stop playing politics’: refugees stuck in Indonesia rally against UNHCR for chronic waiting
Similarly, there must be a transparent and independent system for appointing AAT members that prioritises skills and experience over politics – exactly what was recommended by the Attorney-General’s recent review.
If people seeking asylum can have their claims assessed quickly and fairly, then those who are not refugees can be sent home, while those needing safety could receive it.
Without the chance to remain in Australia for years while their claims are assessed, there would be no loophole for traffickers and others to exploit.
In turn, the number of non-genuine claims will go down, allowing decision-makers to focus on those who are actually fearing persecution.
Yes, Peter Dutton has a lot of power, but a strong Home Affairs is actually a good thing for Australia
We should be supporting refugees to access safety by air. If people fleeing persecution can access a flight to Australia, they won’t risk a dangerous journey by boat to find safety.
This is not an airport border “crisis”, it’s a management failure that can be fixed with more staffing, better resourcing, and transparent and meritorious appointments of decision makers.
Correction: A previous version of the article stated 815 refugee claims were concluded this year. This has been updated to clarify that 815 of claims were concluded during this financial year.
Regina Jefferies, Affiliate, Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW and Daniel Ghezelbash, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University
Posted in Australia, news, Peter Dutton, Politics, Refugees	| Tagged airport, article, asylum seekers, Australia, border, crisis, department, failure, home affairs, management, news, Peter Dutton, Politics, refugees | Leave a comment
Why Tony Abbott’s appointment as Indigenous envoy was a diplomatic blunder and policy failure
Posted on December 1, 2018 by particularkev
Abbott’s previous policies on Indigenous issues were characterised by funding cuts, exclusions and silencing – all of which makes his role as envoy highly questionable to Indigenous communities.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Alison Holland, Macquarie University
This piece is part of a series on race and racism in Australia. The series examines this complex and incendiary topic, and the role it plays in contemporary Australia. You can read the rest of the series here
When Indigenous Referendum Council member Megan Davis stood on the red sands close to Uluru and read the Uluru Statement from the Heart in May 2017, she was enacting a tradition steeped in Indigenous cultural and political significance.
It was not just a response to politicians’ requests to consult the Indigenous community on constitutional recognition, it was a powerful political act, enshrined in a message carried by elders and subsequently inscribed in art.
Following substantial months-long consultations, Davis, as envoy of the people, delivered a message to the nation concerning the resetting of “inter-tribal” relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia. The Uluru Statement from the Heart was an act of Indigenous diplomacy solemnised in song, dance and ceremony.
Megan Davis has called the government’s rejection of constitutional recognition ‘gutting’.
Peter Eve/Yothu Yindi Foundation handout
The history of Indigenous envoys
Historically, such ambassadorial moments were the glue of politics and negotiations between Indigenous peoples. They built cohesion and peace, facilitated inter-community exchanges and allowed for the settling of disputes.
As messengers, envoys were critical to this diplomatic mesh. Carefully selected, they were highly respected members of their tribes. They often possessed the ability to speak different dialects and were skilled negotiators. They were the bearers of important information, such as the deaths of leaders, appointments of successors and important gatherings and ceremonies like marriages, burials, corroborrees and initiations.
Indigenous recognition in our Constitution matters – and will need greater political will to achieve
Given their significance, it is little wonder that many Indigenous peoples described former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent appointment as special envoy in Indigenous affairs as deeply disrespectful.
On every level this was an act of egregious political misjudgement, as many Indigenous people have been quick to note.
Why Abbott’s appointment was controversial
Not only was Abbott’s appointment hasty, ill-planned and unsolicited, it lacked a key requirement for the role – the wider support of his own community.
Beyond lacking all merit, Abbott’s previous policies on Indigenous issues had been characterised by funding cuts, exclusions and silencing. His Indigenous Advancement Strategy was criticised for its destructive consequences to governance within Indigenous communities. Someone who had caused such injury and grief in the past, stripped communities of their capacity for self-determination and seemed so lacking of respect in their own community was largely unwelcome.
There were some, however, who were willing to give Abbott the benefit of the doubt and saw an opportunity in his role.
For them, his task was clear. In accordance with tradition, he needed to come with models and messages of agreement-making and considered responses to the Indigenous peoples’ own message, as conveyed by the Uluru Statement. He needed to bring news of progress on constitutional recognition and the Makaratta Commission – the Indigenous-inspired body to facilitate agreement-making and help reset relations.
A new way to recognise an Indigenous nation in Australia
He needed to engage in dialogue, be open to consultations, and most importantly, listen.
As Dennis Walker, the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority chair, believed, Abbott would come to listen to Ngarrindjeri about their concerns: economic development, stable governance and developing better relationships with non-Indigenous political leaders. For Jeffrey Newchurch, the Kaurna Nation Cultural Heritage chair, Abbott’s visit presented an opportunity to discuss important issues affecting them, like burials, social cohesion and how to build good intergovernmental relationships.
Yet, this is not how Abbott saw his job. Disregarding cultural protocols, he arrived with dictates and outsider rules, and a specific agenda aimed at improving school attendance and performance in remote communities.
Even in this, his apparent lack of knowledge, a critical trait of the position, was apparent.
Over a decade’s worth of reports into remote schooling have overwhelmingly stressed the connection between education, language and culture, and the importance of family and community involvement for children. Education programs succeed when Aboriginal people are the architects of their own policies and services. Partnerships between the people and governments must be based on local priorities, and these must be mutually understood.
The proposals Abbott arrived with – more police in the communities and learning in English – only demonstrated his ignorance.
Abbott’s ignorance was compounded by the impropriety of another white elder of his tribe. Earlier this month, news broke of Indigenous Affairs minister Nigel Scullion’s approval of grants to a fishing industry lobby group from a fund intended to address disadvantage in Indigenous communities.
Scullion transferred significant sums to the Northern Territory Amateur Fisherman’s Association to pay their legal fees in disputes over Aboriginal land claims.
As the former Indigenous affairs minister, Dr Jak Ah Kit, said, this was totally against the rules. Aboriginal elders are skilled negotiators of their resources, particularly their fisheries. There had been no consultations or efforts to negotiate with them.
Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion has defended his dispersal of grant money to a fishing lobbying group.
Chloe Erlich/AAP
Diplomatic blunder and policy failure
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s appointment of Abbott as special envoy was more than a diplomatic faux pas. It was a diplomatic blunder and a policy failure.
In foreign policy parlance, a diplomatic blunder results from a judgement blinded by bias and ignorance, while a policy failure is caused by behaviour that is both costly and has undesirable and unanticipated consequences.
Abbott is quietly failing on his ‘PM for Aboriginal affairs’ promise
Abbott’s bias and ignorance are palpable and demonstrable. And the policies he pushed — more police in the communities and learning in English — would be costly in the human and economic sense. Investing in policies that aren’t wanted and don’t work will do nothing to reset intergovernmental relations.
Abbott and the federal government would do well to learn from the examples of deliberative and democratic governance demonstrated by the Indigenous political negotiations leading up to the Uluru Statement.
These negotiations demonstrated how politically astute Indigenous elders are. The network of regional dialogues were not about political platitudes of the sort Abbott said to the Anangu – “thanks for putting up with the invasion” — but a recipe for action.
Abbott could also learn from the likes of Megan Davis, whose diplomatic credentials, by contrast, are impeccable.
Alison Holland, Senior Lecturer in Australian History, Macquarie University
Posted in Aborigines, Australia, Liberal Party, National Party, news, Politics, Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott	| Tagged Aborigines, article, Australia, blunder, Coalition, failure, Indigenous Envoy, Liberal Party, National Party, news, policy, Politics, Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott | Leave a comment
A high price for policy failure: the ten-year story of spiralling electricity bills
David Blowers, Grattan Institute
Politicians are told never to waste a good crisis. Australia’s electricity sector is in crisis, or something close to it. The nation’s first-ever statewide blackout, in South Australia in September 2016, was followed by electricity shortages in several states last summer. More shortages are anticipated over coming summers.
But for most Australians, the most visible impact of this crisis has been their ever-increasing electricity bills. Electricity prices have become a political hot potato, and the blame game has been running unchecked for more than a year.
Read more: A year since the SA blackout, who’s winning the high-wattage power play?
Electricity retailers find fault with governments, and renewable energy advocates point the finger at the nasty old fossil-fuel generators. The right-wing commentariat blames renewables, while the federal government blames everyone but itself.
The truth is there is no silver bullet. No single factor or decision is responsible for the electricity prices we endure today. Rather, it is the confluence of many different policies and pressures at every step of the electricity supply chain.
According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), retail customers in the National Electricity Market (which excludes Western Australia and the Northern Territory) now pay 44% more in real terms for electricity than we did ten years ago.
Four components make up your electricity bill. Each has contributed to this increase.
How your rising power bills stack up.
ACCC, Author provided
The biggest culprit has been the network component – the cost of transporting the electricity. Next comes the retail component – the cost of billing and servicing the customer. Then there is the wholesale component – the cost of generating the electricity. And finally, the government policy component – the cost of environmental schemes that we pay for through our electricity bills.
Each component has a different tale, told differently in every state. But ultimately, this is a story about a decade of policy failure.
Network costs form the biggest part of your electricity bill. Australia is a big country, and moving electricity around it is expensive. As the graph above shows, network costs have contributed 40% of the total price increase over the past decade.
The reason we now pay so much for the network is simply that we have built an awful lot more stuff over the past decade. It’s also because it was agreed – through the industry regulator – that network businesses could build more network infrastructure and that we all have to pay for it, regardless of whether it is really needed.
Network businesses are heavily regulated. Their costs, charges and profits all have to be ticked off. This is supposed to keep costs down and prevent consumers being charged too much.
That’s the theory. But the fact is costs have spiralled. Between 2005 and 2016 the total value of the National Electricity Market (NEM) distribution network increased from A$42 billion to A$72 billion – a whopping 70%. During that time there has been little change in the number of customers using the network or the amount of electricity they used. The result: every unit of electricity we consume costs much more than it used to.
There are several reasons for this expensive overbuild. First, forecasts of electricity demand were wrong – badly wrong. Instead of ever-increasing consumption, the amount of electricity we used started to decline in 2009. A whole lot of network infrastructure was built to meet demand that never eventuated.
Second, governments in New South Wales and Queensland imposed strict reliability settings – designed to avoid blackouts – on the networks in the mid-2000s. To meet these reliability settings, the network businesses had to spend a lot more money reinforcing their networks than they otherwise would have.
Third, the way in which network businesses are regulated encourages extra spending on infrastructure. In an industry where you are guaranteed a 10% return on investment, virtually risk-free – as network businesses were between 2009 and 2014 – you are inclined to build, build, build.
The blame for this “gold-plating” of network assets is spread widely. Governments have been accused of panicking and setting reliability standards too high. The regulator has copped its share for allowing businesses too much capital spend and too high a return. Privatisation has also been criticised, which is slightly bizarre given that the worst offenders have been state-owned businesses.
Retail rollercoaster
The second biggest increase in your bill has been the amount we pay for the services provided to us by retailers. Across the NEM, 26% of the price increase over the past decade has been due to retail margins.
This increase in the retail component was never supposed to happen. To understand why, you must go back to the rationale for opening the retail sector to competition. Back in the 1990s, it was felt that retail energy was ripe for competition, which would deliver lower prices and more innovative products for consumers.
In theory, where competition exists, firms seek to reduce their costs to maximise their profits, in turn allowing them to reduce prices so as to grab as many customers as possible. The more they cut their costs, the more they can cut prices. Theoretically, costs are minimised and profits are squeezed. If competition works as it’s supposed to, the retail component should go down, not up.
But the exact opposite has happened in the electricity sector. In Victoria, the state that in 2009 became the first to completely deregulate its retail electricity market, the retail component of the bill has contributed to 36% of the price increase over the past decade.
On average, Victorians pay almost A$400 a year to retailers, more than any other mainland state in the NEM. This is consistent with the Grattan Institute’s Price Shock report, which showed that rising profits are causing pain for Victorian electricity consumers. Many customers remain on expensive deals, and do not switch to cheaper offers because the market is so complicated. These “sticky” customers have been cited as the cause of “excessive” profits to retailers.
But the new figures provided by the ACCC, which come directly from retailers, paint a different picture. The ACCC finds that the increase in margins in Victoria is wholly down to the increasing costs of retailers doing business.
There are reasons why competition might drive prices up, not down. Retailers now spend money on marketing to recruit and retain customers. And the existence of multiple retailers leads to duplications in costs that would not exist if a single retailer ran the market.
But these increases should be offset by retailers finding savings elsewhere, and this doesn’t seem to have happened. History may judge the introduction of competition to the retail electricity market as an expensive mistake.
Generational problems
So far, we have accounted for 65% of the bill increase of the past decade, and neither renewables nor coal have been mentioned once. Nor were they ever likely to be. The actual generation of electricity has only ever formed a minor portion of your electricity bill – the ACCC report shows that in 2015-16 the wholesale component constituted only 22% of the typical bill.
In the past year, however, wholesale prices have really increased. In 2015-16, households paid on average A$341 a year for the generation of electricity – far less than they were paying in 2006-07. But in the past year, that is estimated to have increased to A$530 a year.
Generators, particularly in Queensland, have been engaging in questionable behaviour, but it is the fundamental change in the supply and demand balance that means higher prices are here to stay for at least the next few years.
The truth is the cost of generating electricity has been exceptionally low in most parts of Australia for most of the past two decades. When the NEM was created in 1998, there was arguably more generation capacity in the system than was needed to meet demand. And in economics, more supply than demand equals low prices.
Over the years our politicians have been particularly good at ensuring overcapacity in the system. Most of the investment in generation in the NEM since its creation has been driven by either taxpayers’ money, or government schemes and incentives – not by market forces. The result has been oversupply.
Up until the late 2000s the market kept chugging along. Then two things happened. First, consumers started using less electricity. And second, the Renewable Energy Target (RET) was ramped up, pushing more supply into the market.
Demand down and supply up meant even more oversupply, and continued low prices. But the combination of low prices and low demand put pressure on the finances of existing fossil fuel generators. Old generators were being asked to produce less electricity than before, for lower prices. Smaller power stations began to be mothballed or retired.
Something had to give, and it did when both Alinta and Engie decided it was no longer financially viable to keep their power stations running. Far from being oversupplied, the market is now struggling to meet demand on hot days when people use the most electricity. The result is very high prices.
A tight demand and supply balance with less coal-fired generation has meant that Australia increasingly relies on gas-fired generation, at a time when gas prices are astronomical, leading to accusations of price-gouging.
Put simply, Australia has failed to build enough new generation over recent years to reliably replace ageing coal plants when they leave the market.
Is it renewable energy’s fault that coal-fired power stations have closed? Yes, but this is what needs to happen if we are to reduce greenhouse emissions. Is it renewables’ fault that replacement generation has not been built? No. It’s the government’s fault for failing to provide the right environment for new investment.
The right investment climate is crucial.
Marcella Cheng/The Conversation, CC BY
The current predicament could have been avoided if we had a credible and comprehensive emissions reduction policy to drive investment in the sector. Such a policy would give investors the confidence to build generation with the knowledge about what carbon liabilities they may face in the future. But the carbon price was repealed in 2014 and replaced with nothing.
We’re still waiting for an alternative policy. We’re still waiting for enough generation capacity to be built. And we’re still paying sky-high wholesale prices for electricity.
Green and gold
Finally, we have the direct cost of government green schemes over the past decade: the RET; the household solar panel subsidies; and the energy-efficiency incentives for homes and businesses.
They represent 16% of the price increase over the past 10 years – but they are still only 6% of the average bill.
If the aim of these schemes has been to reduce emissions, they have not done a very good job. Rooftop solar panel subsidies have been expensive and inequitable. The RET is more effective as an industry subsidy than an emissions reduction or energy transition policy. And energy efficiency schemes have produced questionable results.
It hasn’t been a total waste of money, but far deeper emissions cuts could have been delivered if those funds had been channelled into a coherent policy.
_Read more: One day we won’t need a Renewable Energy Target, because we’ll have good climate policy
The story of Australia’s high electricity prices is not really one of private companies ripping off consumers. Nor is it a tale about the privatisation of an essential service. Rather, this is the story of a decade of policy drift and political failure.
Governments have been repeatedly warned about the need to tackle these problems, but have done very little.
Instead they have focused their energy on squabbling over climate policy. State governments have introduced inefficient schemes, scrapped them, and then introduced them again, while the federal government has discarded policies without even trying them.
There is a huge void where our sensible energy policy should be. Network overbuild and ballooning retailer margins both dwarf the impact of the carbon price, yet if you listen only to our politicians you’d be forgiven for thinking the opposite.
And still it goes on. The underlying causes of Australia’s electricity price headaches – the regulation of networks, ineffective retail market competition, and our barely coping generators – need immediate attention. But still the petty politicking prevails.
The Coalition has rejected the Clean Energy Target recommended by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel. Labor will give no guarantee of support for the government’s alternative policy, the National Energy Guarantee. Some politicians doubt the very idea that we need to act on climate change. Some states have given up on Canberra and are going it alone.
We’ve been here before and we know how this story ends. Crisis wasted.
David Blowers, Energy Fellow, Grattan Institute
Posted in Australia, economy, electricity, news, Politics	| Tagged article, Australia, bills, economy, electricity, failure, high, news, policy, Politics, price | Leave a comment
The case of Michaelia Cash and her leaking adviser illustrates a failure of ministerial responsibility
Michaelia Cash has refused to resign over misleading parliament, claiming she was unaware of one of her staffer’s actions.
AAP/Lukas Coch
Yee-Fui Ng, RMIT University
The federal opposition is continuing to call for Employment Minister Michaelia Cash’s resignation, claiming she misled parliament this week after repeatedly telling a Senate estimates committee that neither she nor her office had any involvement in tipping off the media about a police raid.
Cash’s senior media adviser, David De Garis, later confessed he had leaked information about the raid on the Australian Workers Union’s offices to the press. Cash retracted her statements and De Garis resigned.
Labor frontbencher Tony Burke argued that “the wrong person has resigned”. But Cash has refused to resign, claiming she was unaware of her staffer’s actions. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has defended Cash, saying she acted properly.
Who are these advisers?
Ministerial advisers are partisan staff who are personally appointed by ministers and work out of the ministers’ private offices.
The number of Commonwealth ministerial staff has increased over the years from 155 in 1972 to 423 in 2015.
Ministerial advisers undertake a wide range of functions. Tony Nutt, a long-time former adviser, has said:
… a ministerial adviser deals with the press. A ministerial adviser handles the politics. A ministerial adviser talks to the union. All of that happens every day of the week, everywhere in Australia all the time. Including frankly, the odd bit of, you know, ancient Spanish practices and a bit of bastardry on the way through. That’s all the nature of politics.
The question is what happens if advisers overstep their roles?
Ministerial responsibility and political advisers
According to the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, ministers are responsible to parliament for the acts of their departments.
British academic Sir Ivor Jennings wrote that the “act of every civil servant is by convention regarded as the act of the minister”. And British MP Lord Morrison proclaimed that the “minister is responsible for every stamp stuck on an envelope”.
But it is doubtful that this principle has ever reflected reality. It is rare for ministers to resign or even accept responsibility for the actions of their department, where they were not personally involved.
Ministers should also technically take responsibility for the actions of advisers in their own offices, who are at an even higher level of direct ministerial control than departments.
Even more than public servants, advisers are seen to be acting as alter egos of their ministers. This means ministers should be accountable to parliament for the actions of their advisers – even those they did not authorise.
But what happens in reality is that ministers tend to use their advisers as scapegoats and blame them for controversial events. This is consistent with “public choice” theory, which predicts that politicians have the incentive to deflect all the blame that comes in their direction while accepting the credit for anything that goes right.
How are advisers regulated?
Australia has inadequate legal and political regulation of ministerial advisers. They are subject to a Statement of Standards, which sets out the standards they are supposed to meet in preforming their duties.
Sanctions under the standards are handled internally within the executive through the Prime Minister’s Office. This means any breaches of the standards by ministerial advisers would be handled behind closed doors, without the scrutiny of parliament or any external bodies.
Ministerial advisers have also refused to appear before parliamentary committees on their minister’s instruction. This has impeded the investigations of significant parliamentary committees, including the Children Overboard affair.
Australia thus has minimal legal and political regulation of ministerial advisers. This has led to an accountability deficit, where ministers have been able to utilise their advisers to escape responsibility for public controversies and scandals.
How can we fix the system?
Other Westminster jurisdictions have more stringent regulation of political advisers.
There are a few forms of regulation of advisers. The first is restrictions on the employment of advisers, either through a cap on the numbers of advisers, as in the UK, or a cap on the total budget for advisers, as in Canada.
Second, regulations can restrict the actions of advisers themselves. For example, in the UK, there is a prohibition on advisers leaking confidential or sensitive information, which would have been applicable in this scandal.
Canada has post-employment restrictions banning advisers from becoming lobbyists for five years after ceasing their employment.
Third, transparency measures also exist, such as requirements that departments disclose all meetings that advisers have with the media (as in the UK) and what hospitality these advisers receive (in the UK and Canada).
Ideally, the Australian regulatory framework should be reformed so it is policed externally from the core executive. In Canada, the conflict of interest and lobbying provisions are policed by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, who has been independent and ready to criticise the government.
And, in the UK, the rules provide for political advisers to appear before parliamentary committees. Similar guidelines could be drafted to facilitate the appearance of advisers before Australian parliamentary committees.
In the last 40 years, ministerial advisers have become an integral part of Australia’s system of government. But the law and rules have lagged behind, and our system should be reformed to ensure greater accountability.
Yee-Fui Ng, Lecturer, Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University
Posted in Australia, Liberal Party, Michaelia Cash, news, Politics	| Tagged adviser, AFP, article, Australia, Australian Federal Police, Australian Workers Union, AWU, failure, leaking, Liberal Party, Michaelia Cash, minister, ministerial, news, Politics, responsibility | Leave a comment
USA Foreign Policy Failure in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Posted on October 4, 2015 by particularkev
Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIL - Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, Islam, news, Taliban, USA, video, War on Terror	| Tagged Afghanistan, failure, foreign policy, Iraq, Is, ISIL, Isis, Islam, Islamic State, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, Muslim, muslims, news, policy, Taliban, USA, video, War on Terror | 1 Comment
Capitalism: Success or Failure?
Posted on July 3, 2013 by particularkev
Posted in economy, news, video	| Tagged capitalism, economy, failure, news, success, video | Leave a comment
Italy: Failure to Form a Government
Posted on March 29, 2013 by particularkev
The link below is to an article that reports on the political crisis in Italy.
For more visit:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/28/italy-leader-bersani-unable-government
Posted in Italy, news, Politics	| Tagged article, crisis, failure, form, government, Italy, news, political, Politics | Leave a comment