Creating a home for the 'reluctant Liberals'

Where now for the Democrats? asks Greg Barns Rather than merge with the Greens, the Democrats should provide a home for ‘reluctant Liberals’, argues Greg Barns RICHARD Dennis

Selling the Australian government

There’s no justification for taxpayer dollars being used to fund party political activity by governments, argues Greg Barns THE NEXT TIME you ring your local federal member of parliament’s office to talk about an issue of concern to you, consider this. Your name, address, and the nature of your call will be noted by the MP or his or her staff, and that data will then be entered into an electronic database. If you ring a Liberal MP your details will be fed into a software system called FEEDBACK and if you call a Labor MP those details will be housed on the ELECTRAC database. And let’s say you are a community activist in your neighbourhood and you have frequent dialogue with your local MP’s office. You get to know them and they get to know you. They know you hate four wheel drives, that you read broadsheet newspapers rather than tabloids and that you listen to and watch the ABC. You might tell them you have three kids all of whom attend private schools and that your partner is a self employed businessman. All that information will also get filed away in the computer database. Oh, and you have had your fair share of arguments with the MP and his or her staffers. Sometimes you are fiery and you do have a tendency to thump the table when you are trying to get a point across that you think is important. You tell them you met last week with the local mayor and the chairman of the local neighbourhood watch. And most importantly, you tell them you are swinging voter. All that valuable knowledge gets fed into your file. Your valuable file is then fed into huge databases that the Liberal Party and ALP keep at their national headquarters in Canberra. These databases contain information on almost every voter in Australia. In an era when a handful of seats and voters turns elections, these databases are the jewel in the political strategy crown. By the way, you can’t see your file. Five years ago, the Howard government and the Labor opposition combined to ensure the defeat of a suggestion by the Australian Democrats and the Commonwealth Privacy Commissioner that political parties should be covered by the Privacy Act. But while you have no access to your file, it’s your taxes that are paying for MP’s offices to build political databases. Taxpayer funded staffers operate the Liberal and ALP electronic databases and for Liberal MPs an organisation called the Government Members Secretariat assists electorate office staff in their utilisation of the electronic database. The Government Members Secretariat, or GMS as it is known in the trade, operates from Parliament House in Canberra. It’s a small unit of taxpayer funded staff who are overseen by the chief whip for the government. Because the chief whip is not answerable to parliament, the activities of the GMS are not subject to scrutiny by parliamentary oversight, even though it is expending over $1 million of taxpayers’ money a year. The GMS is the latest incarnation of one of the staples of Australian politics over the past thirty years - what we might term taxpayer funded propaganda units. The need to control the media’s ‘spin’ on stories, to ensure that all MPs in the government are consistent in their communications with the electorate, and to ensure the media and the public knows about the Oppositions gaffes and flaws, are why these units exist. And while opposition parties rail against their existence, as soon as they are in government they create their own propaganda machine, courtesy of the taxpayer. The ALP complained bitterly about the Fraser government’s media unit but one of its first actions when it was elected in 1983 was to create what would be become known colloquially as the aNiMaLS, a well oiled Hawke and Keating government media and political tactics unit. The aNiMaLS was the subject of the Liberal Party’s ire for 13 years but this did not stop the Howard government from creating the GMS as soon as it assumed office in 1996. Collecting data on voters, churning out political propaganda on behalf of the government and running campaigns against your political opponents are all part and parcel of modern Australian politics. But there’s no justification for one cent of taxpayers’ money being spent on these exercises because they serve the interests of the political parties and not the community. And for political parties and MPs’ offices to hide behind a wall of secrecy about their voter databases simply fuels the unhealthily high level of cynicism about our democracy. • Greg Barns is a former Howard government adviser and a former chair of the Australian Republican Movement. A member of the Australian Democrats, he is author of Selling the Australian Government: Politics and Propaganda from Whitlam to Howard, published in APO’s Briefings series by UNSW Press. Photo: iStockphoto.co

Living on the border: a tale of two cities

Illegal immigrants are treated quite differently in two American cities, reports Greg Barns Phoenix/ Scottsdale, Arizona IT’S RELENTLESSLY HOT at this time of year in the desert cities of Phoenix and its satellite, Scottsdale, in the fast growing south-western state of Arizona. Day after day of dry desert heat saps the energy of everyone, slows people down and empties the streets as the locals stay indoors escaping the midday sun. But if you want to fire someone up, to get them talking fast despite the heat, mention Mexican migrants. When a Phoenix resident opens up his or her newspaper - the Arizona Republic - each morning over coffee they are more likely than not to read a story about the ‘problem’ of illegal Mexican migration and how Arizona’s border is leaking like a sieve. Last week, for example, one opinion page writer complained that by taking unskilled jobs Mexicans were denying the opportunity for college and university students to earn dollars over the summer vacation period. When they step outside to head to work, or to shop, or to drop the kids at school they see Mexicans working in the manicured cactus gardens, or collecting the garbage, or working on a road crew. Mexicans clean dishes in the cafes and restaurants frequented by the residents of Phoenix, and some even serve them at the table. Last week, I wandered into a Scottsdale institution, Stan’s Diner (‘Breakfast, lunch, and maybe Dinner’ says the sign outside), and got a firsthand feel for the passion that the migration issue engenders in this part of the world. Take Natalie, a waitress at Stan’s Diner. She rails against Mexicans. Arizona, she tells me, is becoming ‘mexicanised’. ‘They are taking over,’ she says. As for border control, well, there’s not enough of it. ‘Some of those soldiers over there in Iraq and Afghanistan should be brought back to protect the border,’ Natalie reckons. I ask her what she thinks of the Minutemen - the anti-immigration vigilate group. They’re doing their best she says, ‘but it’s not enough’. Sitting up at the counter where Natalie is serving him a kosher hot dog and chips, is Sid, a pharmacist. Sid’s one of a rare breed around these parts - he describes himself as a ‘liberal Democrat’. And he’s an immigrant to America - his parents came from war-torn Poland. Sid doesn’t share Natalie’s views. He thinks that the solution to illegal migration is to simply make it legal. In any event, Mexican migrants, legal or illegal, are ‘good moral citizens,’ says Sid. ‘Family is important to them.’ As I wander out of the diner I stop to chat with Rob, who works at Stan’s and is on his ‘smoko’ break. Rob is 49, he’s lived all his life in and around Scottsdale and he’s a little less strident than Natalie about Mexicans. They employ them at the diner, he tells me, hastily adding that they are ‘documented migrants’. And let’s face it says Rob, Mexican immigrants are ‘filling jobs most of us wouldn’t want to do’. For Rob illegal Mexican migration is a bit like burglary. ‘It’s like someone breaking into the house through a side window rather than knocking on the front door and asking for permission to enter.’ I thought I’d be on safe ground with Rob about the evils of the Minutemen. ‘Bush calls them vigilantes,’ I say. That’s not right, says Rob. The Minutemen, he tells are me, are mainly ‘honest people’ who are preventing Mexicans from dying of thirst in the Arizona desert. There is no doubt that Arizona is, like many border states in the US, changing as a result of the impact of the forces of globalisation that is seeing Mexican, and central and South American labour crossing the border to meet Arizonian population driven demand. The Latino and Hispanic population in Arizona, which is predominantly Mexican, has risen 17 per cent since 2000. There are schools in this state in which the vast majority of students are Spanish speakers and the Democratic governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, is arguiung with the Republican controlled state legislature about funding 175,000 English language teachers. In downtown Phoenix over half the population is Hispanic. And the average age of Hispanics in Arizona as a whole is around 26, compared with an average age for white residents of around 35. In other words, the growth in families is more likely to come from Hispanic people rather than whites. Of course, many Latinos and Hispanics have migrated legally to Arizona over the past forty years. But as a report from the Pew Hispanic Centre released in March this year says, around 85 per cent of Mexican migrants are undocumented or illegal. The report noted that 200,000 illegal migrants have crossed the border into Arizona in the past five years. Why? Because the state’s rapid population growth - from 3.6 million in 1990 to 5.7 million today - means there are plenty of jobs available and a chronic shortage of unskilled labour. And, of course, Arizona offers a quality of life for Mexicans that they cannot achieve in Mexico. Typical are the comments of one migrant, Jose Antonio Acegueda, who crossed into California sixteen years ago and who became a legal resident under a US amnesty program. ‘There were more opportunities to live a normal life here,’ Acegueda told the Arizona Republic in March this year. ‘It’s quieter here, no gangs. Not so much violence compared with LA. It was tough for me there. All those elements put together, I decided to come here.’ Houston, Texas STANDING at the door of his neat but basic caravan, Bernardo tells me has an eight year old daughter in Mexico he rarely sees. That’s because he’s making money for her working at a small horse riding school about forty minutes north of Houston, Texas. Bernardo, who also has a fourteen year old son, wants his children to have the opportunity he never had - an education. And he wants them to be able to remain in Mexico and secure jobs there. Nearly all of the US$225 a week he makes at the riding school goes back to his mother-in-law and some of it is spent on his kids’ schooling. It doesn’t sound like much of a salary but Bernardo isn’t complaining - it’s double what he can earn back home in Mexico. Bernardo arrived in America eight years ago as an illegal immigrant after his cousin Isaac, who had been in the US for some years, also as an illegal immigrant, found a job for him. But Bernardo wishes he could regularise his status now. He wants to bring his children into the United States, but because neither the US nor Mexico has formalised a migration program for the millions of unskilled workers who pour across the border, this seems unlikely. In contrast to the situation in Arizona, in this part of Texas the local authorities accept that there are illegal Mexican and central American migrants working for businesses and farmers. Bernardo’s employer, a decent and thoughtful man, tells me that when Bernardo gets pulled over by the local police for a driving offence, they simply call him to come down to the police station so he can pay the fine and thus avoid having to turn him over the US immigration authorities. Houstonians have a long association with migration and there is a greater tolerance here for the porous border, says Mark Lacy, who works with a not-for-profit education foundation, the Houston Institute. Lacy, a writer and photographer who has written extensively about the work Houston’s renowned medical profession does in caring for people who live in impoverished border communities, has just returned from a camp for the children of illegal migrants. Lacy and his team took a small group of eleven and twelve year olds from a school in Houston on a camping trip to the Arizona-Mexico border. These children, Lacy says, rarely see their parents, who are eking out a living for their families by working at night in Houston’s restaurants and bars. The camp, designed to show these children the archaeological, historical and natural beauty of the Arizona border area, opened Lacy’s eyes as much as it did those of the children. These youngsters, Lacy told me, are self sufficient from the time they arrive home from school each day. According to a recent Urban Institute report on young migrant children, a staggering 1.3 million children in the US who live with at least one illegal migrant. And Houston has its fair share. There is talk at the moment of opening a school specifically for the children of immigrant parents - whether the parents are in the US legally or illegally. Lacy shows me a photo of a twelve year old Mexican boy who lives on the border with the US. He is holding a donkey in a rubbish dump, which serves as home for himself and his parents. This smiling young boy told Lacy that he thinks in America everyone is rich and he wants to get across the border as soon as he is able to do so. By the age of 15, Lacy says, this boy will make the hazardous journey across the border and find a job in the US. The tragedy of the current US policy on border control is that it ignores the reality of globalisation - that workers and their families will seek out opportunity for improvement even if it means risking their life - that’s human nature. As Walter Ewing, a Research Associate at the Immigration Policy Center in Washington has argued, Rather than funnelling immigrants into deadly border terrain and trapping others in the United States, sensible and comprehensive immigration reform would make legality the norm. A well-regulated flow of workers across the border and a process for granting legal status to those law-abiding undocumented immigrants already living in the United States would benefit the US economy, enhance national security by bringing undocumented immigrants out of the shadows, save billions of dollars now wasted treating job seekers as criminals, and weaken the grip of immigrant smugglers. What a pity that short term politics is getting in the way of heading down such a sensible path. • Greg Barns is a former Howard government adviser and a former chair of the Australian Republican Movement. A member of the Australian Democrats, he is author of Selling the Australian Government: Politics and Propaganda from Whitlam to Howard, published this month in APO’s Briefings series by UNSW Press. His first report from the United States can be found here. Photo: Houston skyline. Jennifer Rolwes /iStockphoto.co

Inside the propaganda machine

EXCLUSIVE TO APO The taxpayer-funded Government Members’ Secretariat is doing party political work, according to former government adviser Greg Barns WHEN Liberal backbencher Jim Lloyd told ABC Radio’s AM program on 7 July that the Howard government’s taxpayer funded Government Members’ Secretariat is ‘there to assist government members in the duties of being a federal member,’ he was being disingenuous. The GMS, as it is known, is no different from its notorious Hawke and Keating government predecessor, the National Media Liaison Service (NMLS). Both are propaganda units, with shadowy objectives, which should be funded by the beneficiaries of their activities - political parties. Since 1983, when the newly elected Labor government of Bob Hawke established the NMLS, the legitimacy of governments spending taxpayers’ dollars on coat-tailing the opposition’s every word, and pumping out propaganda to backbenchers to ensure the government’s ‘spin’ is reverberating throughout the breadth of this large continent, has rarely been questioned by a compliant and grateful media. It is only occasionally that these propaganda machines - costing in excess of $1.5 million a year to operate - become objects of scrutiny and controversy. And that’s generally because the machine has bitten the opposition a little too hard and a little too often. When the Liberal Party spent thirteen years in the wilderness of opposition from 1983-1996 it had one consistent gripe: it was outrageous that the Labor government was spending taxpayers’ money on the NMLS. They promised that when the Liberals were returned to the Treasury benches that nefarious and shadowy unit would be abolished. In 1995, a neophyte senator from Tasmania, and the man who is now John Howard’s Special Minister of State, Eric Abetz, and the Shadow Administrative Services Minister, now Sports and Arts Minister, Rod Kemp, campaigned relentlessly against NMLS. On 30 August that year, Senator Abetz characterised NMLS as ‘a$1.5 million free kick in relation to the advertising campaign $1.5 million per annum to try to defeat the Liberal Party, the National Party, the Democrats, the Greens, Independents, anybody other than themselves. The people of Australia, who I am sure have a spirit of fair play embodied within them, would condemn such behaviour.’ Fast forward to July 2004, and you won’t hear a peep out of Senators Abetz or Kemp, or any other member of the Coalition parties, about the ‘child’ of NMLS, the GMS. When John Howard was elected to office in March 1996 he abolished NMLS and had their Parliament House offices cleaned out within days. But only weeks later, Mr Howard’s own office and other senior Liberal Party heavies were designing and establishing a replacement - the GMS. When I, along with other chiefs of staff to ministers in the Howard government, attended the regular Tuesday morning briefings with Mr Howard’s senior advisers and the then federal director of the Liberal Party, Lynton Crosby, we were constantly told that the ‘GMS is not the NMLS’. It was a case of say it often enough, and you will believe it. Of course, the reality is vastly different. The job of the NMLS was to monitor media around Australia and to distribute government media releases to backbenchers and senators’ offices. It was effective and therefore hated by the Liberals because if an opposition spokesperson or leader made a statement or conducted an interview the Hawke and Keating governments would have their hands on it within an hour. Check through Hansard and you will find Bob Hawke and Paul Keating constantly citing material from transcripts of interviews that John Howard, Andrew Peacock, John Hewson or Alexander Downer had given only hours earlier. Of course, the Coalition didn’t have the same resources and could never hope to keep track in a timely fashion of every piece of media that the government would churn out seven days a week. Having seen how effective the NMLS was, but hamstrung by a commitment to abolish it, the Howard government simply outsourced the media watchdog role. Media monitoring companies such as Rehame have made millions of dollars in the past eight years providing thousands of pages of media clippings each day to ministers’ offices and the GMS. With the media monitoring function outsourced, the Howard government’s GMS has been able to concentrate on assisting backbenchers with marketing material for government programs, dossiers on how to attack Labor policies and strategies for keeping onside with constituents. Well, at least that was its role. When I worked in the Howard government from 1996-99 the GMS was a benign office, occupying - ironically - the former NMLS offices and run by Lynton Crosby’s wife, Dawn. (Like the ALP, the conservatives are all for keeping it in the family!) But now the GMS is run by a person who is as different to Mrs Crosby as John Howard is to Malcolm Fraser. Enter Gerard Wheeler. Mr Wheeler is a hardline right-wing member of the Liberal Party who was once part of a group known as the ‘bronweenies’ - young Tories who worshipped Bronwyn Bishop, who for a brief while fancied herself as a saviour of the Liberals after John Hewson lost the 1993 election. With Mr Wheeler comes an attitude that strikes one as being like that of the rabid anti-communists of 1950s America. Formerly an adviser in Mr Howard’s office, although what he actually did there was always a mystery to most of us, Mr Wheeler is a man who detests the ALP - and the left of the Liberal Party for that matter - with a passion. Under Mr Wheeler the GMS has become more sharp-edged. Not content with kindly assistance to lonely backbenchers, it is now part of the Howard government’s efforts to destroy a resurgent ALP under Mark Latham. But is Mr Wheeler’s GMS digging up dirt on Mr Latham and feeding it to an ever-grateful media that publishes it, and then pretends to be outraged by personal attacks on politicians? It’s hard to know. Certainly, given the way governments work, it would be naïve to think that Mr Wheeler and his team didn’t work in closely with the man Mark Latham accuses of running the ‘dirt’ campaign against him, Howard government media adviser Ian Hanke. But whether or not they go further is anyone’s guess. Perhaps instead of focusing on who is digging up the dirt on who, now is a good time to ask a broader question - should taxpayers’ be funding propaganda units for political parties who happen to be in government? With billions of dollars spent by each government department in Canberra on marketing government initiatives and programs is it not reasonable to expect that organisations like the NMLS and the GMS are funded by, and work from, their respective party Headquarters, all within a stone’s throw of Parliament House? The answer is clearly an unambiguous yes. But would a Latham Labor government take that step - not on your life. The NMLS and GMS have become indispensable to governments. Greg Barns is a former senior advisor to the Howard government. After being disendorsed as Liberal candidate for the Tasmanian seat of Denison he joined the Democrats

Everyone deserves a right to privacy

Opponents of a proposed privacy law are mistaken, argues Greg Barns in The Drum Unleashed. . Last week Justin Quill, a lawyer who has represented, among others, some News Limited papers, warned that a statutory right to privacy would be simply a means for the elite of Australia to protect themselves against the media. "There\u27s no doubt in my mind. This is a law for politicians - the rich and the famous and politicians," Mr Quill was quoted as telling The Australian - an opponent of the idea of a legally enforceable right to privacy - on July 22. Mr Quill, and others who take a similarly cynical view of the law being extended in this area of human rights are mistaken at two levels. Read the full article Photo: diylibrarian / flick

Making Healthy Places: NSW Built Environment Practitioners' Perspectives on Place-making Opportunities that Help Deliver Health and Wellbeing Outcomes

The built environment can positively impact the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Where you live shapes how easy it is to buy healthy food, use active transport, and make social connections. The evidence is clear. But how do we go about creating places that help deliver positive health and wellbeing outcomes for all? There is a longstanding recognition that strategic policy and health promotions fall short in the implementation of healthy placemaking. As such there is an ongoing question about how to bridge the gap between the rhetoric of current healthy planning principles and the reality of what is being delivered and managed by practitioners on the ground. Work to achieve environments that are supportive of human health is as old as the human endeavour itself. It is also apparent that this work has been characterised by an on-going dynamic of convergence and divergence between those individuals, professional groups, organisations and governance structures responsible for health and those responsible for urban planning and construction. It is possible to identify a range of contemporary and positive convergent processes within NSW (Part 3: below). However, it is also possible to identify concurrent divergent processes arising from competing interests at state and local government, a potential to deal with health-supportive environments indirectly through other more politic initiatives, and lingering difficulties with professional communication and different standards of accepted ‘evidence’ needed to justify action. In addition, although in Australia the health profession has high standing, built environment professions do not have the same level of acceptance. It presents a lingering difficulty in integrating health (or often any other matter) into new urban policies. This project looks at such convergences and divergences within a particularly instrumental environment – the barriers and opportunities that present to built environment practitioners when making healthy places

Effect of Noninvasive Respiratory Strategies on Intubation or Mortality Among Patients With Acute Hypoxemic Respiratory Failure and COVID-19: The RECOVERY-RS Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) and high-flow nasal oxygen (HFNO) have been recommended for acute hypoxemic respiratory failure in patients with COVID-19. Uncertainty exists regarding the effectiveness and safety of these noninvasive respiratory strategies. Objective To determine whether either CPAP or HFNO, compared with conventional oxygen therapy, improves clinical outcomes in hospitalized patients with COVID-19-related acute hypoxemic respiratory failure. Design, Setting, and Participants A parallel group, adaptive, randomized clinical trial of 1273 hospitalized adults with COVID-19-related acute hypoxemic respiratory failure. The trial was conducted between April 6, 2020, and May 3, 2021, across 48 acute care hospitals in the UK and Jersey. Final follow-up occurred on June 20, 2021. Interventions Adult patients were randomized to receive CPAP (n = 380), HFNO (n = 418), or conventional oxygen therapy (n = 475). Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was a composite of tracheal intubation or mortality within 30 days. Results The trial was stopped prematurely due to declining COVID-19 case numbers in the UK and the end of the funded recruitment period. Of the 1273 randomized patients (mean age, 57.4 [95% CI, 56.7 to 58.1] years; 66% male; 65% White race), primary outcome data were available for 1260. Crossover between interventions occurred in 17.1% of participants (15.3% in the CPAP group, 11.5% in the HFNO group, and 23.6% in the conventional oxygen therapy group). The requirement for tracheal intubation or mortality within 30 days was significantly lower with CPAP (36.3%; 137 of 377 participants) vs conventional oxygen therapy (44.4%; 158 of 356 participants) (absolute difference, -8% [95% CI, -15% to -1%], P = .03), but was not significantly different with HFNO (44.3%; 184 of 415 participants) vs conventional oxygen therapy (45.1%; 166 of 368 participants) (absolute difference, -1% [95% CI, -8% to 6%], P = .83). Adverse events occurred in 34.2% (130/380) of participants in the CPAP group, 20.6% (86/418) in the HFNO group, and 13.9% (66/475) in the conventional oxygen therapy group. Conclusions and Relevance Among patients with acute hypoxemic respiratory failure due to COVID-19, an initial strategy of CPAP significantly reduced the risk of tracheal intubation or mortality compared with conventional oxygen therapy, but there was no significant difference between an initial strategy of HFNO compared with conventional oxygen therapy. The study may have been underpowered for the comparison of HFNO vs conventional oxygen therapy, and early study termination and crossover among the groups should be considered when interpreting the findings. Trial Registration isrctn.org Identifier: ISRCTN16912075