Economic boom lures Australians home

One can only hope that the new Labor government will not meddle too much with the conservative policies that enabled the boom

Australia's booming economy and its lowest unemployment rate in more than a generation is luring home thousands of expat Aussies from Britain and the United States. As signs of an economic downturn emerge in the UK and recession looms in America, Australian bankers, lawyers and other professionals are flocking back to their homeland. About 34,000 Australians have returned from Britain in the past 12 months, the highest number ever registered, according to international placement firm Link Recruitment.

In the first quarter of 2008, there was a 14 percent decline in the number of Australians heading to London for work, according to a survey conducted by Link Recruitment. The boomerang trend is fuelled largely by economic factors but also helped along by the superior lifestyle Australians know they can experience in Melbourne or Sydney compared with London or New York.

For decades it has been a rite of passage for Australians and New Zealanders to head to Britain to gain valuable work experience. Whereas in the past they may have been scruffy backpackers crammed into dingy flats in Earls Court, these days they are more likely to be highly qualified professionals. But the trend appears to be reversing - temporarily, at least. While the City and Wall Street are reeling from the credit crunch, Sydney is brimming with multi-million pound corporate deals. Fuelled by a commodities boom, Australia has become the world's fourth largest mergers and acquisitions market so far this year.

"Australia is more interesting, there is a lot more going on here in the fixed income markets than a few years ago," said Mr Lovett, 40, now head of fixed income at UBS Australia.

Unlike the flagging economies of the northern hemisphere, Australia is into its 17th year of consecutive growth. Unemployment is at a 33-year low, companies are struggling to fill job vacancies and the Aussie dollar has hit an 11-year high against the pound. Much of the growth has been built on the commodities boom, with Australia selling billions of pounds' worth of coal, iron ore and other resources to China. The country is awash with cash, with the government enjoying a huge surplus and the national mandatory retirement savings scheme, known as superannuation, now exceeding A$1 trillion.

Source




A flawed system of medical training

I have just failed my final examination before being deemed a medical specialist, along with half the people who sat the exam. This is despite each and every candidate being of the highest calibre, then working in the field for several years and undertaking backbreaking preparation for several months. A large proportion of the candidates had never failed anything academic before this final hurdle. A considerable number were sitting for the third or fourth time. Each had to pay several thousand dollars for the privilege.

Welcome to the college system of training doctors. It is a system grounded in traditions and old-school philosophies, much of it a throwback to the English guilds of previous centuries. Until recently, the results of these exams were handed to the candidates in the hallowed halls of college buildings. A door would then open for those who passed, who were offered a glass of sherry or soft drink, while those who failed were given directions to the nearest taxi rank.

There are few professional equivalents as archaic. The closest would possibly be the bar association for barristers, but even they have examination pass rates of up to 80 per cent. The market is then free to value their services accordingly. If a university course were run where half the students failed, the course would quickly be modified, dropped or there would be an urgent review of the selection processes. If a business undertook training of staff for a particular task and later found half to be incapable of doing so, the business would be highly dissatisfied and undertake immediate measures to ensure the vast majority were ready. They would have every incentive to do so.

The colleges have absolutely no incentive to pass anyone. Each and every person who passes represents a new competitor with access to the total pool of fees from specialist services. The same doctors deemed unqualified to practise independently are often doing the work of the specialists within the public hospital system while their bosses are running lucrative private practices.

The system is a reflection of the many inefficiencies and difficulties of our health system - rule by committees which are unable to respond to consumer needs and changing trends, little "outcomes measurement" and a disabling level of bureaucracy and duplication.

Last month, just before the 2020 Summit, Dr Bill Glasson, an ophthalmologist and former president of the Australian Medical Association, called for a greater range of health professionals to address the hopeless shortage of workers that our system suffers. This kind of statement would have been a heresy during his days as the AMA boss. But it is a reflection that our current system of training health workers simply does not meet the needs of consumers. Nowhere is this more true than with doctors, where it takes a decade and a half to produce independent practitioners who are then grossly overqualified for the relatively routine presentations they deal with each day. And when you consider that despite this and the gross shortage of doctors, that colleges do their best to keep the numbers as low as possible, it is a travesty.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has already had multiple dealings with some colleges, particularly the surgeons, who have been forced to amend many of their practices as a result. And this year there has been a submission to the ACCC by a group representing training psychiatrists. If that is not enough, the Productivity Commission is investigating the low pass rates in several colleges.

As monopolies go, one feels that the number is almost up for this one. Macquarie University is attempting to set up an alternative path for training surgeons, despite huge disapproval from specialist bodies such as the AMA. In Britain, the system has been overturned, for many of the reasons stated above. While it has been implemented poorly and caused initial chaos, there is widespread agreement in Britain that doctors' training will be shorter, more streamlined and better equipped to deal with the public's needs.

Any changes here will take time. Meanwhile, I remember what a silver-haired eminent cardiologist said in my final year of university. After a casual teaching session, he gave me a stern look and said: "Son, now that you're almost finished the course, my advice to you is to get out as soon as you can. Things are going from bad to worse and it will be very difficult for you lot. Get out while you can." While I shrugged off the comments back then, now that I am demoralised and heavy with resentment, trapped within a public hospital system that utterly devalues me, I feel he was right. I regret not taking his advice.

Source




Battle for Rudd's mind

Rudd is good at tokenism. But more than that is now needed

WHEN Martin Ferguson wrote to his cabinet colleagues in his now famously rational letter pointing out the socially regressive and market distorting effects of Kevin Rudd's proposed FuelWatch petrol price monitoring scheme, he did so in economic terms. What Ferguson remained silent on was his political strategy. But according to those closely involved in the intense and now obviously divisive negotiations surrounding FuelWatch, Ferguson's aims went beyond the economic.

What the Resources Minister was trying to do with his letter, though he did not refer to it directly, was to re-cast a strategic template which he feared would ultimately engulf the Rudd Government and place it in jeopardy. That template was this: the Carr, Beattie and Bracks state Labor Governments which have dominated the past decade. Why, you might ask? Weren't they all electorally successful over successive polls? Well yes. But were they seriously reformist governments? No. Are we all now paying, across the nation, for their lack of foresight and initiative in areas such as health and urban infrastructure? Yes.

Those involved in the FuelWatch saga say that apart from the obvious economic nonsense of the scheme, Ferguson's overarching concern was that to cede to such nonsense so early in the term of the Rudd Government would be to see federal Labor inevitably set on the same course as the Carr, Beattie and Bracks administrations.

The message, I'm told, from Ferguson was that there are governments dedicated to "actions" and there are governments dedicated to "outcomes". And in Ferguson's judgment federal Labor's state antecedents were in the former category; lots of largely meaningless activity that captured the 24-hour media cycle, but which ultimately amounted to not much in policy terms. Ferguson, rightly, wants the Rudd Government's reputation to be based on "outcomes", code for dedicating itself to the big structural reforms. "That is the lesson from the Hawke and Keating governments," he has told colleagues.

Why should we be surprised by this? After all it was Ferguson who pushed through the final reform of Labor's absurd "three mines" uranium policy from Opposition, and from his position as a scion of the Left. Ferguson, like Lindsay Tanner and Craig Emerson, the other ministers who opposed FuelWatch, wants to come to the task of government as a Labor, market-driven moderniser. If it comes to a choice they each would prefer to make a difference over the long term in favour of the nation's prosperity and wellbeing, rather than simply perpetuate themselves in office.

Implicitly in the crosshairs here is Chris Bowen, the young yet apparently already politically fully formed Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Consumer Affairs. Watching him in parliament the impression you get of the 33-year-old Bowen is that he spent his entire youth watching question time tapes of Paul Keating. Except that Keating was almost always about substance. Ferguson sees Bowen as being quintessentially spawned from the NSW state Labor Right, cast in the form of Bob Carr; dedicated to "actions" - like FuelWatch - rather than "outcomes"; the quick political fix, rather than the big structural shifts.

Ferguson would know. While he now occupies a Melbourne seat, courtesy of his previous role as ACTU president, he originally cut his teeth on NSW state politics where his father, Jack was the longtime left-wing deputy premier to Neville Wran.

This "actions" v "outcomes" paradigm is the internal battle for Rudd's heart and mind that is yet to play out inside the Labor Government. The victors and vanquished will be judged by history. For his own sake let's hope Rudd goes down the Ferguson rather than the Bowen road.

More here




Rage about Rudd from a self-proclaimed cultural elitist

Kevin Rudd represented mainstream Australia in expressing disgust at an "art" exhibition that used young girls in erotic poses. Below is part of the backlash from the arty-farties. The febrile and impotent rage is amusing. Are they going to support the conservatives now? Hell would freeze over first! Unsurprisingly, the writer is a philosophy academic

Elizabeth Farrelly, in her tour de force on this issue, "Adults overboard", points to the Henson affair as a turning point in the history of the Rudd administration. She claims that until now it has been possible to remain optimistic towards Rudd, but now there is the sinking feeling that things are no different under Rudd. As a fellow member of Australia's small cultural elite, those who are somewhat alive to artistic considerations, I share Farelly's feeling, and this is precisely the point: Rudd's comments have powerfully alienated the Australian cultural elite. And this was not a smart move politically.

Though the cultural elite are not the opinion-leaders they might be in some other societies, nor large enough in numbers to matter electorally, we are somehow an important part of the fragile consensual coalition gathered behind Labor's conquest of state power.

Rudd's 2020 summit always seemed to me to be a mark of how seriously he took our role. But it's hard to overstate how offended we are by his philistinism. For me, Rudd's comments were much more disturbing then anything Howard ever said, because with Howard we knew he was evil and hoped for deliverance via a Labor victory. With Rudd, there's no hope for salvation.

Now, this might generally incline us to allow Rudd his populist foibles. The problem is here that he's crossed an absolute line by associating himself with a crackdown on high culture itself. Rudd in these circumstances becomes unsupportable for a cultural and intellectual elite for whom free speech is everything (that and grant money, but free speech first, please).

Indeed, with Malcolm Turnbull taking the opposing view on this issue, and with it being very likely that he will lead the Libs sooner rather than later, this becomes a cultural wedge issue that confuses the choice of who to support for intellectuals who grew unquestioningly antipathetic to the Coalition during the Howard-era history wars.

Source. (H/T Leon Bertrand)