Letters to the Editor

Land Ownership for Aborigines 

SIR: While it is certainly true that Aboriginal land does not currently carry with it any right to freehold title (“The Denial of Private Property Rights to Aborigines”, Helen and Mark Hughes, May 2012) this wasn’t always the case. There have in fact been instances when Aboriginal folk have been offered freehold land in the Northern Territory. About 1970, when the Territory was still administered by the Commonwealth, and under a Coalition government, it was decided that, as the town of Ngukurr (then Urapunga) in the Roper River area was growing so rapidly, some blocks should be set aside for “half-caste” families so they could build their own homes. Offers were made and accepted by about five families but in 1973 the Whitlam government withdrew the offer. (Northern Territory Archives Service, F639, Lands Branch, LAP7248, Ngukurr Housing Association.)

Helen and Mark Hughes note that under various governments Aboriginal policy has become more and more disastrous, but the blame should be put where it really lies. The Whitlam government turned Aboriginal policy on its head overnight in 1972. Harry Giese was NT Director of Welfare (all welfare, not just black or white) and had been since 1953. He became assistant to the Administrator overnight. Government stations, such as Maningrida, which had been self-sufficient in food, began their decline. Missions were told to pack their bags and so began the general descent into the chaos we now see.

But freehold land for some Aborigines goes back even earlier. The Darwin suburb of Stuart Park had a number of blocks set aside for “half-caste” families in the 1930s. When there were calls for land rights in the 1980s (after self-government) one of the loudest voices came from an Aboriginal woman who, according to the records around 1940, had two blocks of land registered in her name. Darwin was bombed from February 1942 and was under military control until early 1946. By then it had been decided to withdraw all the freehold titles and turn the land into leasehold in the Canberra manner. This lasted until just after self-government in 1978 when freehold again became the norm in Darwin.

The 1930s were an interesting time for the long-settled part-Aboriginal families in Darwin. It was decreed that they could drink alcohol provided they declared themselves “white”, and there are pages and pages with these notices in the Government Gazette in these years. But many of the descendants of these people now consider themselves Aborigines. It is time that all Australians became just that—and all were dealt with equally by government. It would be a better use of available funds.

Helen J. Wilson, Fernleigh, NSW

Sir: I’m always glad to read an article by Helen Hughes about the condition of Aborigines in remote communities. Her excellent piece in the May issue is persuasive.

As a Canberra patriot, however, I protest at her misleading reference to the system of ninety-nine-year renewable land leases that operates here: “Canberra public servants have devised efficient and secure leasehold titles for their houses.”

Public servants can’t really be held responsible for our system of land tenure. It was introduced by King O’Malley when, after the 1910 election, he became Minister for Home Affairs in the Fisher government. In this portfolio O’Malley was responsible for the planning of the new national capital. Like many in the labour movement then, he advocated the land tenure and taxation theories of a fellow American, Henry George, expressed in his book Progress and Poverty (1879). The system was intended to prevent land speculation and works well to this day in the ACT.

Suzanne Edgar, Garran, ACT 

A Rise Too Far

Sir: I am constantly being quoted as averring that sea levels will rise by 100 metres (see the article on the Academy of Science in your June edition). I do not believe this, never have, and, being a journalist rather than a climate scientist, have no authority on sea levels anyway.

The original smear arose as follows: I was interviewing Andrew Bolt about his misleading the public, according to Dr Tony Haymet, CEO of the Scripps Institution in La Jolla, on the role of carbon dioxide in warming. I had not met Bolt before and was unaware of the chaos and non sequiturs such an encounter engenders. Bolt suddenly said some rude things about Tim Flannery including his supposed support for large sea level rises. I was asked whether a hundred-metre rise was possible by next century (200 years).

I had just returned from Arizona where I had interviewed Professor Jonathan Overpeck, an expert in the field. He had told me of his research tracking overall rises and falls going from 100 to 120 metres in history. So I politely gave an answer accordingly: that rises on that scale (including surges) have been published and that extreme stimuli could possibly have such an effect over a long period.

Journalists quote sources. Overpeck was broadcast accordingly on my Science Show. He is the expert, look him up.

I know it is easy to capture a distorted line and repeat it forever, despite repeated (and lengthy—see COSMOS magazine) correction.

Climate is a serious topic affecting everyone. Indulging in puerile debating points demeans it.

Robyn Williams, ABC Radio, Sydney, NSW 

Child-Minding Universities

Sir: In response to Keith Windschuttle’s Chronicle (June 2012), the reason for the additional enrolments can only be political.

As an organisational psychologist, I spent over forty years in the careers area, assessing people for suitability for thousands of jobs. As long ago as the First World War the United States military carried out a massive study on IQ cut-offs for various levels of jobs. Cut-offs are levels below which success in a particular job is unlikely.

The proportion of people who benefit from a full university education is around 20 per cent of the general population. Why then in the face of economic reality is the Labor government pressing for 50 per cent? The answer is simple: to keep unemployment statistically acceptably low. If young people are engaged in education at any level, they do not count as unemployed.

The additional political device is to measure unemployment by an artificial measure. No one in the careers area seriously believes that real unemployment is less than 10 per cent, despite the published 5 per cent.

A previous event of social engineering occurred with the advent of equal pay for women and the simultaneous increase of youth wages to price the young out of jobs. Fifteen-year-olds were encouraged to return to school rather than hold low-level trainee jobs.

The old elite university system has gone by the board. Australia and other Western countries are following the US political model in keeping youth out of the work force. Expect the child-minding role of universities to expand.

Philip Webb, North Turramurra, NSW 

Compulsory Voting and the Right to Indifference

Sir: James Allan’s considered piece on compulsory voting (May 2012) misses the mark somewhat. Low turn-out where voting is not compulsory is almost exclusively reasoned as apathy. One interpretation Mr Allan does not apply to not voting is indifference between the choices on offer. Indifference can occur for lots of reasons. Rational ignorance by voters where information costs are high, differing levels of participation in civil society, or the actual lack of difference between candidates (making the choice between them inconsequential) are three that come to mind.

The problem with Australia’s compulsory preferential voting system is that it does not allow for indifference. A properly completed ballot paper requires one candidate to be preferred over all others. This is most problematic in local government elections where information costs are high or information is incomplete. In urban areas local council candidates are almost exclusively environmentalists or socialists or some combination of the rainbow that is equally unpalatable. Choosing one over any other is almost impossible as there is little basis for understanding what a candidate stands for, or there is no material difference between them, or there is no candidate that the voter would prefer at all. Surely we should be allowed our indifference in such circumstances.

Matthew Heeney, Como, NSW
 

Sir: James Allan, in his article “In Praise of Compulsory Voting”, said that compulsory voting may have been introduced to favour left-of-centre political parties. Not so. Compulsory voting was introduced in Queensland in 1915 and the Commonwealth in 1924 as right-wing initiatives to remove a perceived advantage for the Left from shop stewards who got out the vote for the ALP. 

Tony Minchin, Canberra, ACT 
 

Sir: James Allan’s “thin democracy” versus (European Union-style) “fat democracy” argument for compulsory voting is compelling. Its clarity may owe something to his coming to the subject recently after living elsewhere in the Anglosphere. Though he foreshadows a further instalment in his concluding references to the political parties elsewhere which have to “spend big chunks of their resources ‘getting out the vote’ … that are unnecessary here in Australia”, he has opened up more than one further line of inquiry. 

His brief mention of waste in “getting out the vote” is enough to point to a wider problem, especially in the USA. Many congressmen spend much of their two-year terms raising money for the next battle, often selling their votes to local commercial or labour interests, and the battle is not just to get out the vote but to get people registered as voters at all. The content of policy and election promises is also inevitably biased when there is a need to fire up voters’ passions so they will actually bother to vote. 

This last point brings me to what Australian politicians who have tried to win marginal seats would agree was the big argument for compulsory voting. With compulsory voting you only have to fear single-issue voters a little. Right-to-lifers did cost one of my colleagues his lower house seat by a handful of votes in a conservative lower-middle-class corner of my generally freethinking upper house electorate, but, if only 60 per cent of voters were likely to vote, it wouldn’t even have been worth his while to stand. Sadly he could be tarred with pro-choice sentiments expressed as a Young Liberal fifteen years before. A fortiori in America, but …

While it might well be true that highly intelligent US politicians would not have to sound so extreme, almost deranged, if it weren’t for the fanatical and organised single-issue (or single-syndrome) voters, what would happen if there were compulsory voting? What would happen in a country where fewer than 50 per cent vote, if 95 per cent of potential voters actually voted? About 13 per cent of the population are the descendants of slaves who were often discriminated against by law until about fifty years ago but have since, with famous exceptions, become significantly different from the mainstream in education and employment levels, crime and incarceration, families with absent fathers and controversial or merely resented affirmative action. About the same proportion are first- and second-generation Latin Americans with many of the distinguishing social characteristics of African-Americans. Poorly educated white males who, with some justice, blame their loss of employment on globalisation and immigration of cheap labour would be easy to mobilise against any more free trade agreements. Who and what would America’s underclasses of all hues vote for?

Invited to speak at a dinner in Boston in 2000 I came up with the opening, “I thank God for America saving the world from democracy.” My follow-up points included the conception of American government as “A plutocracy, tempered by meritocracy and a framework of law, and flavoured with the rhetoric of democracy”. My firm conviction was that the great American gift to the world throughout the 1990s of comparatively free trade leading to rising Asian prosperity (and later to Australia’s great good fortune) would not have been possible if America was a democracy like Australia.

There is an alternative history or two to be written for the world after 1950 wherein the United States is a democracy with Australia’s compulsory voting, with or without the preferential system in single-member electorates, possibly too the Westminster rather than presidential system of forming government. Whether we regard America’s Vietnam War as wholly misguided or an element in the defeat of the Soviet Union, we might be content to assume that, in the alternative version, the Cold War would have turned out much as it did up to 1989. And after 1989? Compulsory voting might have prevented the most damaging of single-issue groups, the public sector unions, squeezing the life out of state finances. Perhaps US Middle East policy and its expensive and incompetent war-making since 1989 would not have left it in humiliating debt to China and with very limited possibility of using military might to advantage.

I acknowledge that there are Australians of substance who oppose compulsory voting, Nick Minchin being another. Allan rightly refers to the weakness of the argument that it infringes liberty, putting emphasis on the “small levels of compulsion”. But he should have gone further and noted that the compulsion is only to attend at a polling place or post in a postal ballot paper.

The “thin democracy” case is that what matters is to give a sufficiently large proportion of dissatisfied people the right to get rid of a bad government. Also that it gives governments the incentive to get themselves re-elected because of their whole record in exercising state power and authority. The “fat democracy” in which most UK law is now made in Brussels or Strasbourg, or the United States Supreme Court can participate in the political process as it has on such issues as abortion, desegregation of schools by bussing, the tests which may be used for employing or promoting people and hundreds of others dependent mostly on the Bill of Rights amendments to the US Constitution is one which, at best, tends to make people seethe resentfully and to hinder the healing of divisions in the community. On the contest between the two I am with Allan and thin democracy. However …

A major omission is Constitutional Democracy. In the real world where Allan would not, for a moment, deny the importance of the constitutions within which the institutions of democracy have to function, what are the definitions, what the constraints which need to be put on the executive and even the legislative arms of democratic government and how they are formed? Who are to be the adjudicators? Foreigners? Professionally trained common lawyers? Brussels bureaucrats from a Continental civil law background? Elected judges? That these can be vital questions to answer is proved by the historical example of Hitler’s being democratically elected by a majority of a fairly homogeneous people. Without going into the complexities of African tribalism in poor countries with uneducated populations, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Fiji all lead one’s thoughts to what one would make of a majority of religious enthusiasts being able to vote for laws which greatly curb the freedom of non-believers. In the USA too, but there one can easily enough move to another state, assuming the lesson learned from Prohibition by constitutional amendment is not forgotten.

James Allan might be tempted to answer that constitutional guarantees of rights haven’t had a great record worldwide, to which I would respond that the issue of how to protect minorities is still worth concentrated thought. But I suspect that he would prefer to answer that, if I haven’t missed the point of his article, I should recognise that he is simply stating the limited case for compulsory rather than voluntary voting in Australian circumstances. Still, I would like him to consider how different voting systems might affect the case for compulsory voting. If, for example, Henry Kissinger was right in his aphorism that all Israeli politics was domestic politics, the problem of piecing together coalitions when MPs are elected by proportional representation with no or very low quotas could be an additional strong argument for compulsory voting. 

At the risk of sounding like the reviewer who wishes the author had written a different book, I look forward to reading James Allan on the practical consequences which may flow from abolishing second chambers, a perfect subject for a Queenslander who has lived for years in New Zealand, on the differences caused by different sizes of government party caucuses (say 350 in the UK down to twenty or fewer in Tasmania), whether government measures have to be voted on by party caucuses (as they do not in the UK), on the intended and unintended consequences of proportional representation, voting by party caucus for ministerial positions and such apparently minor technicalities as whether the party caucus is chaired by the party leader or a backbencher. 

James Guest, East Melbourne, Vic