It’s good news for the homeless and their advocates, but bad news for homelessness statistics, making it even better news for the advocates.
According to The Courier Mail the Queensland Government plans to spend $50 million upgrading “run-down hostels” and building “extra boarding houses”.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows 105,000 people to be homeless, statistics which are regularly trotted out by homelessness advocates to prove that Australia has a crisis that must be fixed. Closer examination of the statistics shows that if you live in a boarding house or hostel you are classed as homeless.
So, by maintaining and extending the stock of boarding houses and hostels, the Queensland Government will actually be increasing the number of homeless, as measured by the bureau, leading to increasing demands by advocates that even more money be spent to fix the “problem”.
Physicists (who generally don’t understand the mechanics of “rent seeking”) tell us there is no such thing as the perpetual motion machine. More fool they. In this instance we appear to have the breeder reactor of perpetual motion!

Schapelle Corby has been found guilty under a system of law which is very similar to many other systems which draw their provenance from France – an indirect legacy of the Napoleonic Empire. It should be a basic human right that in criminal matters one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. This is not the case under the continental system.
On Line Opinion’s top rating article at the moment takes the view that as long as due process in Indonesia has been followed, then we should abide by the judgement. This is a crock.
Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Human Being says: “(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.”
The term “law” is not well-defined, but I would suggest should be read as subsidiary to the presumption of innocence. Indonesia’s legal system, in common with many of those in Europe, breach this clause. Being in good company is not a sufficient alibi for the Indonesian legal system, or any other.
It’s about time that we campaigned to extend this important article of the Declaration to those who suffer under the continental system, and finish off the job that Wellington started at Waterloo.

I’m generally a bit of a fan of Peter Beattie’s but his most recent foray suggests he’s losing more than his hair. Beattie has chosen to celebrate his life by releasing his autobiography. This at a time when a Commission of Inquiry is hearing allegations that patients were murdered in one of the state’s hospitals so that “Dr Death” – Jayant Patel – could operate on more patients so as to turn a higher “profit” for the hospital.
Voters must be wondering where his priorities are that he can find time to write a book about himself while around him the state he holds in trust is descending into bureaucratically sanctioned pandemonium (Queensland, perfect one day, Paradise Lost the next).
The Opposition Parties are salivating at the prospect of an easy entree into government. They say that there are other problems to come out of the Gold and Sunshine Coast hospitals and Labor will be wiped out in many areas as a result.
Beattie may be putting his faith in the fact that many voters do not see the Opposition Parties as representing a viable alternative. That doesn’t necessarily matter. Rob Borbidge was at 19% approval in the vanity polls before he won in 1995, and he and Joan Sheldon had been written off by the Courier Mail as the “easy beats”. Low poll ratings are almost a pre-requisite for successfully winning government from opposition, as this article by Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington illustrates.
And the title of Beattie’s magnus opus? Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence either. It is Making A Difference. Sound familiar? It should if you’re from Queensland. It is a variation on the Coalition’s winning theme in 1995 where the pitch to voters was “You can make a difference”.
Puts an entirely different light on my quip that without me Beattie wouldn’t be Premier of Queensland – Wayne Goss would have won in 1995 and still be there.

It is amazing how many people miss the bleeding obvious, including those who should know better. Barnaby Joyce has been salivating with glee at the prospect of being able to hold the Howard Government to ransom on rural issues. (His latest demand a 15% tax rate for rural workers.) Others sound like they have just slashed their wrists and are on the way to the Bundaberg Hospital when they talk about how Howard will eviscerate the Senate. None of these people appears to be able to count.
There are actually 39 “balance of power” Senators, and yesterday one of them put the Prime Minister on notice a lot more quietly,and effectively, than Barnaby Joyce has.
Liberal Senator Marise Payne is backing Petro Georgiou’s private members bill on asylum seekers. Unless Georgiou gathers much more support than he has, Marise won’t get to play a role in changing government policy on this issue, because Georgiou’s bill will never pass the House of Representatives.
But other issues, such as how the committee system is run in the senate, how committees are constituted and what they inquire into will come within her sphere of influence because they are entirely matters for the Senate.
In an earlier post primarily on Brett Mason I drew attention to the fact that Marise was unlikely to win preselection for another term and speculated about what she might do with what time remains to her. We might now be getting some ideas.
One of the commenters on my post, Nick Ferrett, rebuked me saying “…being a good friend of Marise Payne myself, I doubt she wants to be set up in opposition to Mason.” Her actions suggest that not only would she welcome a comparison with Mason, but also with the other 38 of her Coalition colleagues.
Ferrett also notes “…you would be flat out finding anyone in the Senate with better human rights credentials than Brett Mason…His speeches in the Senate confirm his commitment to human rights in contrast to the soft-left cant which usually passes for such commitment.” Indeed. That being the case, will Mason and others take up the gauntlet that Payne has laid down to them?
Even if they don’t this will be an interesting term of Parliament, and may even confirm the usefulness of Upper Houses, even when the government notionally controls both chambers.

Yesterday’s Australian revealed that Federal Cabinet is to take submissions on proposed changes to the Child Support regime. I don’t have time to send them a paper-based submission, so here are my random digitally produced thoughts.
First thing is that I don’t see how anyone living below the average wage with an ex-wife who does not work can afford to survive. Take a non-residential parent earning $40,000 per annum. According to the tax office calculator they will pay 8,172 in tax and say they have three children, 8,492 in child support, leaving them $23,336 to live on.
The legislation tends to look at the amount of money required to raise children, which is fair enough. But what if contributing to that leaves either or both parents unable to live decently? For many separated parents the solution is to set-up house with a new partner to at least defray residency costs. Statistics show that those who are divorced once are more likely to divorce again. No wonder, if these sorts of pressure lead to them prematurely forming live-in relationships.
While it might actually marginally encourage more divorce, it could well be cheaper for the government to provide more financial support to children in situations of parental separation. By relieving financial pressure now it it might reduce the likelihood of them making further and more costly mistakes down the track.
They might also look at calculating payments on an afer-tax basis. Take a payer at the other end of the earning spectrum from my first hypothetical at say, $130,000 per annum – the approximate point where child support is capped. They would pay child support for their three of $37,292 and tax of $46,812, leaving them $45,896 to live on.
Their net position is therefore only twice that of the first person’s, even though their gross earnings are three-and-a-bit times more and net earnings three times. On top of that they pay child support which is four times higher. The problem is the intersection of child support and the income tax system, where someone on the top tax rate and paying support for three children will only earn an additional $1,800 for every $10,000 of gross. That probably leads to a lot of potential high-earners deciding to scale back their activities in favour of a more relaxed life style – another loss to government coffers, if nothing else.
While they’re at it, the government might also give some thought to whether it makes any difference what they decide. Over the years since my separation and divorce I’ve swapped notes with a lot of men and women in similar positions. One thing that comes through quite clearly is that, despite the law, the Child Support Agency, and to a lesser extent the lower extremities of the judiciary, do what they like, irrespective of the legislation. They are dealing for the most with people in financially straightened positions who do not have the money to appeal their decisions, so they set-up mutually reinforcing and incorrect precedents which are rarely challenged.
In some cases their lack of attention to the law could well amount to malfeasance.
I know of a numebr of cases in which people are paying, or have been paying, well in excess of the statutory amount. The legislation allows the CSA, and the courts, to decide to increase payments where children have “special needs”, it also allows them to look at the “financial resources” and “earning capacities” of the parties. “Special needs” could be cosmetic dentistry, and “earning capacity” can be well in excess of what they have ever earned. This can lead to awards which are punitive and unsustainable – no wonder the agency has so many bad debts.
In the worst case I know of a man actually earning $50,000 was deemed to have the capacity to earn $85,000 and retrospectively and prospectively assessed on this basis. Assume three children and the wife earning no income and the maths go like this: tax – 11,172; CSA – $22,892; net income – $15,936.
The Brisbane Institute recently produced a paper on taxation which showed that it didn’t appear to matter whether a country was high taxing or low taxing it could still have high rates of economic growth. That might be so, but in higher taxing countries we allow governments to purchase more of our needs for us, and frequently this occurs in ways which we don’t need.
Child support is a good example of a bureaucratic cure which is possibly worse than the disease. In separate incidents involving Queensland Health – Bundaberg Hospital (and more to come) – and the Department of Immigration and Multi-cultural Affairs – Rau or Alvarez, take your pick – we can see again how government “provides” for our needs. If either of these bureaucracies had to find real clients they would have gone broke long ago.
That the likelihood of a decision from Cabinet of long-lasting good effect on child support is unlikely is demonstrated by the failure of the Howard government over the last 9 years to cut back on government. While it continues to seek bureaucratic solutions, the economy may continue to grow, but the people will start to shrivel.

In a recent post I congratulated Queensland Senator Brett Mason on earning a PhD whilst being a full-time senator for Queensland. The post attracted a couple of very heated responses, suggesting that I had hit a raw nerve. While no-one denies anyone the right to further educate themselves part-time while working full-time, an issue could arise for their employer as to whether they are performing satisfactorily. As Brett’s co-employer (along with somewhere around another 3.999999 million Queenslanders) I decided to do some research.
As so much information is now posted to the web, it should be possible to construct a proxy for employee activity, particularly in an area which is a public office, based on the number of appearances that person’s name makes on the World Wide Web. Google have kindly provided a counting tool which will work for this purpose in the top right-hand corner of their search page.
So, to measure the activity of Mason and bench-mark them against his fellow Senators from Queensland, I have done a google search on the following search terms – “[christian name] [last name]” Senator. The first and last names are in inverted commas to avoid bringing up every page where the senators christian name and last name appear, but are in fact unconnected to each other or to the senator. The word senator is included to try to further refine the search.
This methodology is not fool-proof – there will be some names that come up in the search that don’t belong to the senator in question – but the inexactitudes are likely to even out over the total sample.
So, here are the results, ranked in order from most mentioned to least.

Andrew Bartlett is easily the most mentioned. He will have been assisted by being for a while Democrats leader, but with a figure almost twice the next highest – Ian MacDonald, who has the advantage of being a minister – this is an outstanding result.
It turns out that Brett Mason doesn’t do the worst in what is a very undistinguished field. He’s at the top of the bottom third of the field with 683 mentions, twice that of the plodder of the class, John Hogg, who is on 325.
As a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party, I have a double employment interest in this, and I’d have to say that I am unimpressed that with the exception of MacDonald, the best Liberal Party performer is Brandis at number seven, with both Mason and Santoro towards the bottom of the class.
I also did a google ranking on neophyte senator Barnaby Joyce. Despite not taking up his term for another month and a half, and having only just recently leapt to public prominence, he scores 548 mentions, which puts him ahead of Hogg, Santoro and Ludwig already!
Just to be fair I tried a search on – “Graham Young” Editor – and that scored 520 mentions.

Could Vivian Alvarez receive $2 million damages for her wrongful deportation? According to this morning’s ABC Radio National Law Report former HREOC Commissioner and Federal Court Judge, Marcus Einfeld, believes she could, at a rate of $1,500 per day (net of GST?). This story in the SMH suggests it might not be so cut and dried.
At the risk of being accused of flippancy, they can deport me for that rate of pay. There’s the little known fact that when I first came here in 1964 I was travelling on my Mum’s passport as a British Subject, and now that the Queen is Queen of Australia, maybe that means I shouldn’t be here at all? If I forget to tell them about taking out nationality in the 70s, it just might work.
Now, I’m not denying that Ms Alvarez should be awarded some compensation, nor that the Department of Immigration should be penalised for its shoddy work (it’s a market economy afterall). Just that $2 million sounds like an excessively large sum for the damage she’s suffered, and one that’s likely to encourage people to consider fraud, or at least encourage lawyers to discover more claims than they otherwise would.
It does, however, raise the question of how we keep public servants and the departments they administer honest and competent. When a government department makes a mistake there should be a penalty, but frequently mistakes are recklessly made in the knowledge that there are none.
Perhaps the damages could be split between payment in compensation and punitive damages – afterall, while $2 million might be too much for Alvarez, is it enough to deter DIMIA? The punitive damages could perhaps be put into a charitable trust for, in this case, refugees, and partly funded by a reduction in the pay and bonus of the DG of DIMIA.