Australian Left supports dam-building

No doubt the Greenies will be fuming but I think they know they have lost this one. They will certainly get no joy from Australia's conservatives

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley says a federal Labor government would make water a national responsibility and might put extra money into state projects such as dams and pipelines. Mr Beazley told an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce function in Brisbane yesterday that Labor would release a water blueprint before the next federal election. "We regard all these issues of infrastructure require national leadership and national responsibility," Mr Beazley said. "There is too much finger-pointing that goes on with the states but they don't have the resources. "They are important players and important deliverers but they simply do not have the resources."

Mr Beazley said it was also the Federal Government's role to help the states manage the "political problems" associated with building dams and pipelines. "The states confront, often, so much local pressure they atrophy," he said. "And the commonwealth has to be able to move beyond that and sometimes provide the resources at least to leverage some of the very big projects which need to be put in place." Queensland's state Labor Government recently established water as a separate portfolio.

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Howard hits out at wealthy nations over subsidies

The Doha talks remained deadlocked last night in Cairns as Prime Minister John Howard lashed out at wealthy developed countries for protecting farmers while Australia opened itself up to competition. An upbeat World Trade Organisation director-general Pascal Lamy told early sessions of the Cairns Group that Doha could be revived by early next year, using diplomacy and "strong political will". But by late yesterday Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile admitted talks with US Secretary of Trade Susan Schwab had produced little hope of compromise. "The US is still sticking to its position on domestic support," Mr Vaile said. "But the important thing here is that people are still talking."

The central sticking points remain America's refusal to lower its agricultural assistance from an already reduced $22 billion to $17 billion while Europe refused to cut what it says are considerable reductions in tariff protection by a further 5 per cent. The stand-off led to a collapse of Doha in Geneva last July.

Mr Howard, who flew to Cairns yesterday and held meetings with the US, said Australia had a vital national interest in unlocking Doha, including an estimated $20 billion in trade for the 18-member Cairns Group. He pointed the finger at key developed countries who still protected farmers while Australia opened itself up to the realities of global economics. Mr Howard said America had shown good faith initially in offering to cap its agricultural assistance at $22 billion, but that offer had produced no response from Europe.

Mr Lamy told the Cairns group, marking its 20th anniversary, that Doha had required a quantum leap from previous agreements. He suggested there was still a window, specifically between November this year and March next year, to get the talks back on track which would allow US President George W. Bush to push any agreement through Congress. But Mr Lamy warned it was no use returning to the negotiating table without doing the hard yards. "It is at the national level in each WTO member country that a deal needs to be worked out," he said. President of the National Farmers Federation David Crombie also stepped up the pressure to reignite Doha. He said we need not settle for a diluted deal: "Doha Lite won't do."

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The socialist happiness experts

Nanny state activists should heed the message of a federation free-marketeer Bruce Smith

Perhaps the most penetrating one-liner in the history of political philosophy is P.J. O'Rourke's observation that government is to life what pantyhose is to sex. Yet, according to recent polls most people have an illogical yearning for pantyhose. They seem to believe that governments should be doing more, not less, to regulate our lives. Even more troubling is the belief that by doing more, governments could be making us more happy.

Last weekend The Sydney Morning Herald splashed with a new survey that found 77 per cent of those polled believed that "a government's prime objective should be achieving the greatest happiness of the people, not the greatest wealth". This segued into a full-scale push for government to get involved in the happiness industry. For analysis of the poll, the Herald drew upon Clive Hamilton's Australia Institute, a body devoted to whingeing about Australia's economic prosperity. Hamilton concluded that Australians are an unhappy lot and "we need a wholesale shift in the orientation of government away from a focus on the economy and towards national wellbeing".

Let's try to work out what these dulcet sounding words - wellbeing and happiness - mean. The Australia Institute points us to the Wellbeing Manifesto which assures us that Australians are unhappy with the values of the market - individualism, selfishness, materialism, competition - and pining for the nicer values of trust, self-restraint, mutual respect and generosity. Ergo, government must regulate a utopian world where we all have fulfilling work, but not for more than 35 hours a week, and live in cities with advertisement-free zones because "advertising makes us more materialistic".

That may make the fellows over at the Australia Institute happy, but the problem with happiness is that it is hard to find a more individual phenomenon. Like beauty, happiness is in the eye of the beholder. Imagining that some government Department of Homeland Happiness can second guess what makes us happy makes little sense. It's even more illogical given that, when people are asked which profession they trust the most, politicians are routinely ranked at the bottom of the list behind lawyers, journalists and psychics.

Those who follow the modern-day push to get happiness on the top of the government agenda will notice that Bhutan always gets a mention. If you haven't heard of Bhutan, you haven't missed much. Except that, as the SMH tells us, Bhutan's Government, presiding over a people where the average income is $3 a day, has created a world first with its Gross National Happiness Index. In its quest for happiness, the Bhutan Government has banned MTV and show wrestling.

Transplanted to Australia, the Australia Institute's preferred government would, perhaps, start by banning McMansions as crass symbols of affluenza and hand out tax breaks for inner-city terrace dwellers. Driving this push for government to get into the happiness business is a basic mistrust of the average punter's aspirations. And a belief that only elites can determine what makes a nation happy. For these happiness bureaucrats, it's nothing more than an old-fashioned grab for power where government gets to play god.

To justify this power grab, the happiness experts are keen to convince us that, despite growing economic prosperity and rising incomes, we are an unhappy bunch. They tell us we are still unhappy in a booming economy because somewhere someone is always better off than we are. "It's a rat race," concluded the Herald, before deferring to an expert who said that east Germans have plummeting levels of happiness (despite soaring living standards) because they now compare themselves to west Germans.

You don't have to be a psychic to see where this is going. The implication is that only an equal distribution of wealth through central planning will ensure eternal happiness and wellbeing. In earlier times, we'd call that socialism or, in its more egregious form, communism. The only problem with that model is history. Whatever you call it, central planning doesn't work. The only equality of outcome it delivers is equality of misery. Everyone is worse off. Test it this way. It's 1988. Where would you rather live? East Germany or West Germany?

More than a decade after Tony Blair convinced the British Labour Party to ditch clause IV of its constitution which encapsulated the old socialist ideal of "common ownership", the left-wing guys at the Fabian Society in Australia are finally catching up. National secretary, Evan Thornley, feels that the Fabian Society's objective to abolish "the economic power and privileges of individuals and classes... through the collective ownership and democratic control of the economic resources of the community", is outdated.

Perhaps Thornley, a Labor candidate in the forthcoming Victorian elections, has been listening to Mitch Fifield. A few weeks ago, the Victorian Liberal senator, did something rare. During the last sitting of federal parliament, he introduced Australians to a chap named Bruce Smith. Most people will say Bruce who? But unlike Bhutan, Smith is worth discovering before we succumb to the alluring, but flawed, happiness movement. As Fifield said: "Bruce Smith is not exactly a household name, nor has he been graced with a parkland statue, but his unassuming name masks his legacy as one of Australia's significant and early liberal thinkers." An Englishman, Smith entered federal parliament in Australia in 1901 and remained there until 1919. During that time he was a strong opponent of immigration restrictions, the White Australia Policy, compulsory arbitration and the more liberal welfare policies advocated by his colleagues.

His political philosophy is set out in his timeless book, Liberty and Liberalism, published in 1887 and republished last year by the Centre for Independent Studies. Fifield summed up Smith's most important political message as being "the reminder that governments have limited capacity to improve the welfare of individuals. Australians are better off when encouraged and nurtured to work on improving themselves rather than turning to the state for answers." As Smith said: "Liberalism does not seek to make all men equal: nothing can do that."

Victorian Labor senator Gavin Marshall rose a week later to admonish Fifield for "taking part in a Government that limits freedoms and personal liberty like some totalitarian state". Pointing, among other things, to the federal Government's anti-terrorism laws as evidence, Marshall summed up the fundamental distinction between the two sides of politics. One believes that government's most fundamental role is to keep people safe. The other is wedded to more government as the way to make people happy. If the latest polls are accurate, Smith's book should be on the curriculum in our high schools if only to educate the next generation away from this hopelessly romantic notion.

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Left and Right unite in native title fight

The ruling clashes with a High Court ruling so the case will almost certainly be lost in the High Court

Both the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, have encouraged the West Australian Government to appeal against a decision that granted native title of Perth and its surrounds to the indigenous Noongar people. The Federal Court on Tuesday ruled the Noongar people had proved their claim to an area of land three times the size of Tasmania, the first time native title has been recognised over a metropolitan area.

Mr Howard, whose government earlier this year radically changed the Land Rights Act, said his immediate reaction was "one of some considerable concern". "Many people will regard it as somewhat incongruous [that] there could still be some residual native title claim in a major settled metropolitan area," he said.

Mr Beazley said the Federal Court decision appeared to be different from previous native title rulings made by the High Court. "But people ought to understand completely there is no threat entailed in any of this for anybody's property rights in Western Australia," he said.

The Noongar claim covers 193,956 square kilometres, from Hopetoun to north of Jurien Bay. The Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox was satisfied the Noongar people had shown their society had been maintained since European settlement in 1829. The WA Government has 21 days from the date of the decision to lodge an appeal

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