Guest essay by Viv Forbes
To compete in today’s world we need to score well on resource availability, capital assets, energy costs, tax burden and workforce/management. It also helps to have secure property rights and a sound currency. Today’s Australia scores poorly on all counts.
In 1901, the year of Federation, Australia was the richest country in the world per capita.
The Pioneer generations, with freedom to explore and invest, had developed valuable mineral assets – gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, coal, tin and iron. And they had bred up large numbers of sheep and cattle on our native grasslands.
Energy was abundant – wood, horse power, kerosene, gas, hydro and coal powered electricity – we were among world leaders in cheap energy. Sydney had gas lights in its streets as far back as 1820.
The Pioneering innovators also invented game-changers such as the stump jump plough, the Ridley-Sunshine Harvester and froth flotation of minerals, and they developed better Australian versions of Leviathan coaches, Southern Cross windmills, Merino sheep, Shorthorn cattle, Federation wheat, Kelpies and Blue Heeler dogs.
The Builder generations who followed the pioneers invested heavily in productive capital assets like flour mills and wool sheds, mines and collieries, smelters and saw mills, power stations and electric trams, trans-continental railways and overland telegraph lines, orchards and plantations, stockyards and abattoirs, breweries and vineyards, dams and artesian bores, factories and universities, exploration and research, pipelines and harbours, railways and roads. There were no “Lock-the-Gate” signs.
Governments were decentralised with minimal taxes and red tape, creating new business was easy and union power was minimal and generally beneficial for workers.
But then the Termite generations took over, and for much of the last forty years taxes, handouts and green tape have been smothering new enterprise. We are sponging on the ageing assets created by past generations and building little to support future Australians. The monuments left by this generation are typified by casinos, sports arenas, wind-energy prayer wheels, sit-down money and debt.
The trendy war on carbon has already inflated our electricity costs – this will hasten the closure of more processing and manufacturing industries. Green tape is shutting-the-gate on new investments in exploration, grassland protection, dams, power stations, fishing, forestry and coastal development. Taxes are weakening existing industry and the savings that could build new industries are being wasted on bureaucracy, delays, legalism, subsidies, climate tomfoolery and green energy toys. Finally, union featherbedding is crippling any large survivors.
Australia’s future prosperity demands cheap energy, more investment in productive assets, reduced government costs, more productive labour and the freedom to explore and innovate.
We must change, or more jobs will follow Holden.
More at carbon-sense.com
[ Mark Bofill says:
December 27, 2013 at 12:46 pm
Climateace,
Some bureaucracies (whether in large multi-national corporates in the private sector, large religions, or in the public sector) are efficient and effective. Others are not.
That most dreadful non source gives me this:
A bureaucracy is “a body of nonelective government officials” and/or “an administrative policy-making group.”[1] Historically, bureaucracy referred to government administration managed by departments staffed with nonelected officials.[2] In modern parlance, bureaucracy refers to the administrative system governing any large institution.
So, yes, there are corporate bureaucracies. This said, I believe there is a fundamental difference between any sort of government and any sort of private activity. The difference is, if the private activity is too inefficient the company goes broke and ceases to operate, where the government does not operate under this constraint.]
Good post, IMHO.
We could debate the issues here almost endlessly but I would like to make a couple of points:
(1) government bureaucracies tend to be more efficient and effective in natural monopolies. The reason is that private corporates will simply loot the economy if they control a natural monopoly. (Where there is not a natural monopoly, they will try to create one). Where a private corporate controls a natural or manufactured monopoly, they will be relatively indifferent to the inefficiences of their bureaucracies because it is not the quality of their bureacracies that determine their profits.
(2) private corporates routinely use rent-seeker activities which generate all sorts of inefficiences in of themselves. Again this takes the pressure of both their bureaucracies (and incidentally, on the quality of their management staff and processes).
(3) chrony capitalism is used by private sectors in certain countries both to suppress effectiveness and efficiency in bureaucracies and to suborn it.
(4) where private and public sector managers are corrupt, their bureaucracies will tend to corruption. Inefficiency is a normal byproduct of corruption.
(5) there are tendencies in all bureaucracies (private, public and religious) to develop a set of behaviours which cluster around self-propagation, self-protection and nest-feathering.
(6) private sector bureaucracies have it easy, compared with public sector bureaucracies. The fundamental reason is that they have only one corporate bottom line which stays consistent: profit. Public sector bureaucracies have to cope with changed lots of politicians and frequent and abrupt changes in policies and programs as well as multiple bottom lines.
Bureaucracies are indispensible. All large organisations have them. The solution to efficiency and effectiveness is to fantasize a world without bureaucracies: the solution is to vote for politicians who promise and deliver on efficient bureacracies, and to vote out those who fail this test.
An open, transparent and accountable democracy, a well-regulated society, economy and environment need an efficient and effective bureacracy.
Blofill
[obvious glaring problems.
1 – we are extrapolating from .09% over 200 years a linear trend that will continue for 10K years?]
This is a reasonable question. My understanding is that there are around ten times as many endangered as extinct species so a reasonable extrapolation is that if we don’t modify our behaviour the mass extinction event will continue. In fact, the list of endangered species continues to grow rather than to decline. If anything, the trend looks to be increasing.
[2 – it is unarguable that we have initiated a continent-wide mass extinction event.
Is it? Who’s we? What’s the nature of this event? Specific mechanism? Evidence? As Willis says, can you show me the bodies?]
The documentation of Australian vertebrate extinctions is, zoologically, quite sound. In terms of bodies, most Australian natural history museums have collections of skeletons. In terms of endangered species, the process for allocating status is fully documented.
[3- he only thing standing between our mass extinction event … are government laws and regulations about environmental standards.
This has not been demonstrated or supported, merely asserted. For that matter, the extinction event has not been demonstrated or supported, merely asserted.]
Extinction processes and causes for Australian vertebrates are generally well-documented in scientific terms. In nearly every case activities of the sorts positively supported by Forbes (above) are complicit. Green regulations and government activities such as the declaration of national parks respond to these processes and causes.
So, there are no ‘obvious or glaring problems’: only the reality that we have choices about whether to proceed with our mass extinction event.
@ur momisugly Climateace
Eugene McCarthy, Time magazine, Feb. 12, 1979
climateace says: @ur momisugly December 27, 2013 at 12:40 pm
…Clearly, the issue is not whether to have a bureaucracy because bureaucracies are indispensible…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Talk about serendippity, I just now finished read an article by Mark Stoval addressing that very issue. An article about a long lasting civilization WITHOUT BUREAUCRATS!
This was a real eye opening article for me because I alway considered anarcho-capitalists to be nice people but not living in reality. No nation-state? How could that possibly work? Stoval goes on to explain what is meant here: The State versus Governance – “One of the problems that gets in the way of many people understanding our position is that they confuse the ‘State’ with ‘governance’ or with ‘government’. As I have mentioned many times in the past, there is no one that I know of that wants total chaos.”
SO Climateace not only can a society exist without a bureaucracy, but it lasted a heck of a lot longer than the civilizations that DID have bureaucracies. Two hundred years vs ~ 3,000 years? That alone seems to prove bureaucracies strangle civilizations not prolong them.
And in answer to Lord Monckton’s article on morality:
Remember this dated back 2000 or more years before Christ.
Chris R
[climateace puts forth a nice strawman agrument, doesn’t
he? His statement was:
It always amuses me that the same people who say this sort of thing are often righteously apoplectic about sovereign risk in countries where governance is weak, the laws chaotic, the rule of law largely absent and the bureaucracy inefficient, ineffective and riddled with corruption. Such countries notoriously also have badly educated workforces prone to the sorts of disease absent in well-ordered countries. The infrastructure in such countries is absent or poorly maintained. Using the infrastructure by way of a car ride can be lethal. Ecosystem services in terms of clean water, clean air are often lacking. In the absence of effective regulation the food can be lethal. Managing currency risk in such countries can be a nightmare. Finally, in terms of law and order you might wake up one day and find that your mine workforce has been murdered and your mine taken over by a local warlord.
As if there is no choice between an overbearing, smothering government
and a third-world hellhole.]
A good point IMHO. The statement to which I was respond was something like ‘government and bureaucracies’ prevent economies from growing’. It was not a straw man. It was a statement of a position. I then provided a scenario in which it was quite obvious that the lack of democracy, governance and efficient and effective bureaucracies prevented economies from growing.
I agree with your basic point here, which is that there is a happy medium in running efficient and effective bureaucracies and that the problem is to find it.
Climateace,
You merely reiterate your assertions.
Look, it shouldn’t be too hard to go find climate studies that suggest climate change will cause extinctions. I’d open fire on those if they were presented, but you’re not even meeting me halfway by doing that. Give me something to shoot at.
Even given such studies, even if we accepted them as the simple truth, … well, we’ll blow up that bridge when we come to it.
Bryan A says
‘@ClimateAce
Considering that nearly 10,000 new species are discovered each year, 1 loss every 3 or 4 years over a 225 year timespan in any given geographic area is bordering on the verge of being ecologically insignificant rather than Mass extinction indicative’
Bryan you have probably inadvertantly shifted the goal posts. My specific reference was to a mass extinction event in Australia, given the context of Forbes’ original post. Someone then raised vertebrate extinction numbers in Australia so I followed that one up.
Of course it is more than reasonable to extrapolate from well-documented vertebrate extinctions to invertebrate extinctions which would be proportionately far more numerous.
climateace said @ur momisugly December 27, 2013 at 1:30 pm
One “obvious and glaring problem”: farmers and foresters being put out of business through green regulations. A local greenie was skiting about the success of destroying thye forestry industry to a friend the other day. My friend commiserated with the woman over the imminent loss of her orchard adjacent to bushland when the bush caught fire. “I’ll just call the fire brigade,” she said. Unfortunately, the “fire brigade” were volunteers from the forestry workforce. The foresters have sold their machinery including the large bulldozers used to cut firebreaks.
So it goes…
Also I note that your “mass extinction” doesn’t rate in the list of mass extinctions on the wiki-bloody-pedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
[Mark Blofill
Climateace,
You merely reiterate your assertions.]
I expanded on them. I could give you chapter and verse in the peer-reviewed literature on extinction processes. The accounts of explorers, settlers, and collectors of animals that they saw alive but which are now extinction are all publicly available. The acquisition numbers from Australian museum collection for items relating to species that have gone extinct are public available. The processes for determining conservation status are explicit and public and the documentation for determinations open to the public. The taxonomy for Australia’s vertebrates is all available in peer-reviewed literature.
It is massive, if you feel like following it up, go ahead. I am not going to do it for you.
@ur momisugly Gail Combes
Iceland had a working anarchy in the past. Sadly, it was destroyed by the church:
The Pompous Git
[One “obvious and glaring problem”: farmers and foresters being put out of business through green regulations.]
In general, Australian farm commodity exports by quantity and value (depending on seasonal variations) are higher than they have ever been. Clearly, regulations aimed at preserving water quality, food quality and biodiversity are not stopping Australian agriculture from making a quid.
As with every industry, there are individual failures spotted amongst the general success.
According to you theory, this would be impossible.
Forestry is a vexed and very complex issue.
I would like to see more selective harvest logging over more native forests than is currently the case, rather than the resort to plantation forestry.
The Pompous Git says: @ur momisugly December 27, 2013 at 12:52 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Farmers also get squeezed because there is only one buyer who sets the price, at least here in the USA. If you look at the retail cost of food over time the farmer is getting a smaller and smaller chunk.
Doreen expresses my sentiment towards those bashing farmers: LET THEM EAT GRASS
Climate Ace,
I’m not going to looking for your evidence. If you don’t want to link any, that’s certainly your prerogative. Still, if you don’t link any, all we have is your unsupported assertion.
Be reasonable. What if I made a preposterous claim and refused to offer anything to support it? Obviously you wouldn’t accept it as fact. Obviously, you wouldn’t go looking for evidence to support my claim, that’d be my job.
So, you don’t want to support your claims, that’s fine, but let it be noted for posterity that I don’t accept them, and we can move on.
The Pompous Git says: @ur momisugly December 27, 2013 at 1:42 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Unfortunately I doubt the woman is capable of putting 2 + 2 together when her orchard and home burns to the ground thanks to ‘Green practices”. Unless of course she also earns a Darwin Award.
[Ian Wilson says:
December 27, 2013 at 9:34 am
Climateace said:
“In fiscal terms the Australian national government debt is small and manageable.”
This is one of the great myths of the Left here in Australia.
Our National Public (i.e. Government) Debt is only $ 300+ billion dollars. This is small and manageable when compared to most affluent countries, given that Australia has a 1.5 trillion dollar economy.
Unfortunately, what Climateace fails to mention is that our National Private Debt is almost equivalent to our total GDP. Hence, the total National private plus public debt puts Australia in the same league as basket case economies like Greece.
Fortunately. most of the Private debt is in the form of foreign investment and loans that are being used to purchase mining and industrial machinery, essential infrastructure for industry and mining and other productive enterprises. This means that there is good possibility that this debt will get paid back.
However, As a mid-level economic power spanning a whole continent and have a population of only 23 million people, Australia cannot provide the funds needed for the necessary investment and loans that are required to maintain healthy levels of economic growth. This means that we must seek these funds overseas.
Hence, if Australia is to maintain access to future foreign investment and loans, its Government must keep the National Public Debt as low as possible so that the Public debt structures does not suck up money that are needed to service the Private Debt Structure.]
A reasonable discussion, IMHO. The reason I raised Australian government debt was because Forbes raised Australian Government activity as if it was axiomatically destructive of the economy – bizarre.
Some public debt is good. Too much public debt is bad. Some private sector debt is good. Too much private sector debt is bad.
The issue is finding the appropriate balance. Give me a room full of economists and I will give you a room full of different expert opinions on the appropriate balance.
Incidentally, you appear to be using gross rather than net debt figures which does rather skew the position.
Number of Australian vertebrates
http://www.environment.gov.au/node/13866
List of vertebrates rendered extinct over the past 200 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_animals_of_Australia
@ur momisugly Climateace
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-17/tassie-apple-exports-end/4264910
Indeed, when I purchased my farm in 1982, one of my orcharding neighbours told me he had only made a loss one year in thirty five.
So how did Tasmania’s apple and pear growers fail? They set a goal of decreasing pesticide inputs by 95% in ten years and achieved that goal in five years. The Greens response: Not good enough. It should have been 100%
I don’t really have much time to spend on this issue and finding detailed stats takes more time than I can momentarily spare.
The situation has not improved and it seems that the last vegetable processor is contemplating shutting up shop here.
As a conservationist, I can tell you that we campaigned vigorously and successfully for more plantation forestry in the 1970s and 80s. Having succeeded, the greenies want to reverse this! Yes, we should be selectively logging for high quality timber, but guess who opposes this! The greens took over the Triabunna mill and what did the manager Alec Marr (ex-Wilderness Society) say? They would not be processing any timber from private landowners.
This is not a picture of “farm commodity exports by quantity and value (depending on seasonal variations) [being] higher than they have ever been”, but rather the reverse.
http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicthreatenedlist.pl
TPG
I think we are more or less on the same page as regards forestry.
In relation to apples, you raise the issue of pesticides. But the orchardists, quoted in the article you link, raise the high aussie dollar (note that Forbes refers to a ‘weak currency’ when the situation is actually the reverse) which knocks off as much as 30% of their revenue. They also cite a lack of infrastructure (transport) and finally they cite high labour costs.
Australia has the Dutch disease – too much export revenue from mining is driving the Aussie dollar too high for farmers and manufacturers to compete.
http://collections.ala.org.au/public/show/co12
Hundreds of thousands of accession records for plants including extinct plants.
@ur momisugly Climateace
The list of extinct vertebrates you link to includes rather a lot of birds on islands: Norfolk Island, Lord Howe Island, Kangaroo Island, Macquarie Island… This is to be expected. Isand bird species go extinct frequently everywhere due to becoming overspecialised.
I recall a biologist speaking on the ABC Science Show saying that Australia was the only place on earth she knew where you could find a new species almost every week. We would seem to have a long way to go towards “mass” extinction (and that is a good thing).
Climateace,
Thank you. I’m reading your stuff now.
[The Pompous Git says:
December 27, 2013 at 2:50 pm
@ur momisugly Climateace
The list of extinct vertebrates you link to includes rather a lot of birds on islands: Norfolk Island, Lord Howe Island, Kangaroo Island, Macquarie Island… This is to be expected. Isand bird species go extinct frequently everywhere due to becoming overspecialised.
I recall a biologist speaking on the ABC Science Show saying that Australia was the only place on earth she knew where you could find a new species almost every week. We would seem to have a long way to go towards “mass” extinction (and that is a good thing).]
So, extinctions don’t matter because they are birds on islands?
It reasonably rare to discover entirely new vertebrate species in Australia. They are certainly not being discovered at the rate of one a week.
MB
http://www.ala.org.au/
climateace says:
December 27, 2013 at 12:36 pm
My point was that this is a bizarre position when Australia is moving up the rung of world economies. Further, if these things are so damaging, why has the Australian economy – virtually alone among OECD countries, grown for 21 consecutive quarters?
—-
The Aussie economy has grown because it has huge mineral resources — which are mostly in the middle of nowhere (no one else’s backyard).
It has nothing to do with the Rudd\Gillard governments, which inherited a Howard surplus and pissed it away in record time.