Christopher Pearson on Rudd's GG and Turnbull's cabinet

The article below is for those who like a more detailed background on Australian politics. Pearson questions the suitability of affirmative action appointee Quentin Bryce as Governor General and also the shadow-cabinet choices of the new conservative leader, Malcolm Turnbull

Pearson is undoubtedly right that Bryce is a marginal choice for GG -- who is supposed to be above politics. Quentin Bryce is known for strong feminist and generally Leftist leanings and is obviously not about to tone that down. She also appears to be personally unpleasant (egotistical?) with her staff. When she was governor of Queensland, most of them resigned. Less well known is that she has been a strong supporter of my old church, Anne St Presbyterian, and she would have heard plenty of good old-fashioned values preached from the pulpit there. So there is some prospect of a balanced approach from her. After all, the quite egregious appointment of Bill Hayden, a former Labor Party leader, as GG worked out well in the end.

I think Pearson makes far too much of Bryce's quite impossible wish for the GG powers to be codified. She is simply wishing not to be vilified in the way the unfortunate Sir John Kerr was after exercising those powers. It may be noted that Kerr was also a Labor Party appointee.

Pearson is undoubtedly right in pointing out that Turnbull has not maximized the strength of his shadow-cabinet. Personal rivalries are the obvious reason for that. Perhaps he will reshuffle if egregious weaknesses in his shadow ministry emerge.

The point about prominent climate skeptics in the new shadow ministry is great good news however. Australia cannot afford to spend taxpayers's money on will o' the wisps and the more that is pointed out the better. Rudd's policies are not in general a large departure from the pragmatic policies of his conservative predecessor. It is only on global warming where he seems at risk of going seriously off the rails. So strong opposition there is just what is needed

QUENTIN Bryce, the newly installed Governor-General, broke with precedent by giving The 7.30 Report's Kerry O'Brien an interview last week on how she saw her role. He took it for granted that she had a personal agenda and asked: "Can you be a quiet activist?" She replied: "Oh, definitely."

Aside from harmless hobbyhorses such as endorsing the preservation of rainforests or promoting cancer research, activism of any kind is the last thing we should have to expect of a constitutional umpire who understands her duties. It was all of a piece with her undertaking at the swearing-in ceremony in the Senate: "I promise to be alive, open, responsive and faithful to the contemporary thinking and working of Australian society."

An indulgent reading would see this as nothing out of the ordinary: just the sort of sententious twaddle that has come to be expected of Australian viceroys. I have a horrible feeling that she means exactly what she said and that she's promising to be a slave to the zeitgeist. How else is it possible to construe being "alive, open, responsive and faithful" to contemporary thinking?

It's a sentiment that is completely at loggerheads with her pledge, minutes earlier, to do her best "to observe, sustain and uphold the principles, conventions and rule of law that are our foundation". You can keep faith with the self-effacing traditions - which she already has breached with her activism - and the constraints that serve to hedge appointed office and its vast reserve powers. Or you can be faithful to the will-o'-the-wisp of contemporary thought. I very much doubt that it's possible to do both.

Part of Bryce's problem is that she's not especially bright and is prone to saying the first thing that comes into her head. Considering that she was once a legal academic, her grasp of constitutional law in recent years has left a lot to be desired, too. I cited several howlers in this column in 2003 when she was appointed governor of Queensland.

Take, for example, her considered opinion on the reserve powers that have just been entrusted to her. "I like the idea of them being written down in the Constitution. I'm increasingly attracted to the need to codify as much as possible. It is another way of empowering people." Let us pass lightly over the notion of empowerment and concentrate on the main point. It is a given in constitutional law that codifying the reserve powers is a herculean task, virtually impossible as well as pointless.

First, it would involve a team of experts agreeing on the proper limits of emergency powers, which it has generally been thought prudent not to define too precisely because not all contingencies are foreseeable. Second, the whole process would need a large measure of bipartisan support. Finally, it would mean a referendum carrying by a majority of votes in a majority of states an amendment specifying in great detail every hypothetical circumstance in which a government's actions might warrant the exercise of the Crown's power to sack it. The consensus at the Constitutional Convention was that the existing checks and balances were the best available guarantee that the reserve powers wouldn't be abused.

Bryce also has said: "I feel very strongly the Constitution doesn't deliver representative democracy." Her reason for saying so? "A very serious lack of representation of women." Had she given more than a moment's thought to this proposition, she'd have seen that the problem is not with the Constitution but with the political parties, which preselect almost all the members of federal parliament. Nor, in the Westminster system where people's votes decide who wins each seat, would it make any sense for the Constitution to predetermine that a fixed percentage of seats be filled by either sex.

Until recently, it would have been hard to imagine a candidate with Bryce's limitations and ideological baggage winning the level of broad acceptance within the conservative wing of the political class necessary for her to function as governor-general. Indeed, since Brendan Nelson, Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull could not be described plausibly as conservatives, it may not be safe to assume that Bryce does enjoy that kind of acceptance. In less than a year, the values for which John Howard, Peter Costello and Alexander Downer provided so formidable a bulwark are no longer taken for granted in the Liberal Party room.

Turnbull tends to see every issue through the prism of Wentworth, the inner-Sydney seat he holds by a narrow margin. It's reckoned to be the gayest, richest and perhaps the most bohemian electorate in the country, light years away from the preoccupations of most of the people who regularly vote for the Coalition.

Given the need to conciliate that broader constituency and not to be seen as taking it for granted, it's surprising Turnbull should have made so few concessions to the conservatives in the party in the selection of his shadow cabinet last week. For example, Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott were the two most senior and experienced cabinet ministers in the Howard government still ready to serve on the front bench. Minchin was demoted, moving from defence, a portfolio that takes a long time to master, and replaced by David Johnston, a neophyte. Abbott, who'd made it clear he wanted a more demanding job, was left in family and community services and Aboriginal affairs, and effectively sidelined.

Unlike most of the front bench, more than half of whom were not ministers in the previous government, Minchin and Abbott have shone in difficult portfolios. Abbott in particular, in industrial relations and health, has proven he can handle tough political problems. He was probably the Howard government's most effective ideological champion and, notwithstanding Costello's brilliance, its most consistent parliamentary performer.

Minchin's imperturbable style and forensic approach are well suited to the Senate, where he remains the leader. Magnanimity in victory towards Nelson's main numbers man would have been a much smarter strategy for Turnbull. No doubt it's true, as some have argued, that Minchin will soon have the measure of Stephen Conroy, whom he shadows in broadband and communications. However, Conroy is widely seen as an easy scalp and a lesser target than Labor's Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon.

It seems that Turnbull is going to have to learn the hard way that he has to field his best team and make sure they're well matched to the ministers they shadow. He'll need to give players such as Minchin and Abbott more of a stake in his victory if it is ever to materialise. The indulgent gesture of giving Bishop the shadow treasurer's job is already beginning to look like a big miscalculation and evidence that he thinks he can just about run the Coalition as a one-man band. The Opposition needs to think carefully about product differentiation because the Rudd Government, by virtue of its leader, is about as conservative-friendly as it's possible for a modern Labor administration to be. Thankfully, it doesn't aspire to be much more than a "mind-the-store" government - except in the matter of climate change - and Rudd often gives the impression that he has already fulfilled his great ambition in life simply by getting elected.

I was agreeably surprised - bearing in mind Turnbull's views on climate change and his performance as environment minister - by one feature of his shadow ministry that should gladden conservative hearts. Three of the five frontbenchers whose portfolios impinge on climate change are known sceptics. They are John Cobb (agriculture, fisheries and forests), Ian Macfarlane (energy and resources) and Andrew Robb (infrastructure, COAG and emissions trading design).

Robb has been a bit more coy than the other two about airing his reservations. But according to Penny Wong, in answer to a Dorothy Dixer last week, he told The Australian Financial Review Magazine that anthropogenic climate change is "lies, lies and damned statistics". He apparently called it a fad, too, saying that after the fall of communism it had become the cause celebre of the Left.

Employing sceptics in shadow cabinet, who will be more than a match for Greg Hunt, his main spokesman on climate change, is a good idea. It leaves the Coalition well-placed in the event that there's no further global warming or unmistakable cooling in the next few years. Then again, in the wake of the turmoil on global markets, emissions trading schemes may suddenly look like the kind of luxury even the developed world can no longer afford. Sceptics are also the best people to be asking the hard questions on how much an ETS is going to cost, cost-benefit analysis and who will be expected to foot what share the bill.

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Navy has right to fire at illegal fishing boats

Very pleasing that Rudd has not gone to water (excuse pun!) on this one

ILLEGAL fishing boats caught inside Australian territorial waters can be stopped by direct gunfire if they fail to heed orders to heave to. The Department of Defence today confirmed the extreme measure approved by the former Howard government and upheld by the Rudd Government was available to Royal Australian Navy warships as a last resort. The good news is that the option is increasingly unlikely due to a dramatic decrease in the number of detections of illegal foreign fishers this year.

"In exceptional circumstances the use of (gun) fire to stop a non-compliant vessel in the water may be permitted following consideration at senior levels within Defence," a Defence spokeswoman said in reply to questions from The Australian. Fisheries and Defence officials are now quietly confident they are winning the war on illegal fishing in Australia's northern waters, with only four boats apprehended since May. It compares with a peak of 365 illegal boats apprehended and boarded in 2006, 125 in 2007 and 77 for the current year.

Much of the success is due to a package of tough deterrent measures authorised by the former Howard government which allowed RAN commanders a range of graded options to stop illegal fishing boats. They included the use of "riot control agents" to incapacitate foreign fishing crews, distraction ammunition, the use of warning shots, acoustic devices and as a last resort, direct gunfire to sink or disable poaching vessels.

Other contributing measures are due to new education programs in Indonesia - the main offender country - warning against illegal fishing and the deployment of the new Armidale Class patrol boats has also played a major role. "The Armidale Class patrol boats have proven to be a successful presence due to their increased endurance on task, increased capabilities," Defence said.

The decrease in the number of illegal fishing boats entering Australian waters does not mean the problem has disappeared. "With this decrease in detections inside Australia's EEZ (370km Economic Exclusion Zone) the illegal fishing boats have been observed operating legally just north of the EEZ. "The continual presence of the defence and customs assets conducting surveillance and response patrols is proving to be a deterrent," Defence said.

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The NSW Department for hurting kids ("DOCS")

Their own bureaucratic power trips are all that they care about

THEY were two boys who had lived their whole lives in a house with windows covered with sheets of black plastic. They had never been to school and nobody was allowed to visit them. Their mother, who cannot be named because it would identify the children, was in the grip of a serious mental illness. She feared the outside world. When police broke down the door, they found the boys, by then aged eight and 10, wearing clothes so thick with grease they stuck to their skin. Their hair had grown long and wild.

"They looked like they'd just come out of a cave," says the foster mother who took them in, who likewise cannot be named. "The oldest boy was obese, and had a knot in the back of his hair the size of a fist; it was so thick and mangled he had to sit with his head tilted forward."

The case is one of several The Weekend Australian examined as part of its ongoing investigation into the child welfare system. It is hardly a secret that the system is broken. One inquiry after another has exposed the myriad ways in which it does not protect children. What surprises is that foster parents - the volunteers who take the nation's abused and troubled children into their homes - are themselves among the shattered victims.

The foster mother above is a case in point. She took the neglected boys back to her home - a modest but clean demountable with a covered verandah, west of Sydney. She peeled their clothes from their bodies, cut their hair "into a short back and sides, like navy Seals" and enrolled them in school. "I was the flavour of the month," she says. "The Department (of Community Services in NSW) couldn't say enough good things about me."

She keeps an album of photographs of the boys taken at a gala dinner two years after they came into her care. Kim Beazley, then the Opposition leader, shook their hands, comedian Wendy Harmer was the MC. "It seemed to me I was doing everything right," the foster mother says. "But social workers have their way of doing things."

As the boys barrelled towards adolescence, they became more defiant and harder to control. One of them wanted to get an earring in his eyebrow; the other wanted to bleach his hair and get a mobile phone. "I told them, 'there are rules here and you have to obey those rules', but social workers would undermine me," the foster mother said. "The case worker would say: 'They are not your children; they are only in your care.' They wanted me to let them treat my home as if it was a boarding house, let them do whatever they wanted, because as long as the placement didn't break down, they wouldn't have extra work."

At the age of 14, the younger boy ran away with Matthew Norman (one of the Bali Nine drug-runners). The foster mother grounded him and told him "he would have had to live by my rules. But the social worker said no, and they found another foster placement for him". "That placement broke down, too, and within 12 months, he was in a group home, and that's where things really started to go wrong."

Four years ago, the boy pleaded guilty to two counts of supplying a prohibited drug, after selling an ecstasy tablet to a girl who took it and died. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't know that things might go badly for that boy because he was damaged," the foster mother said. "But I think the do-gooders helped."

Other cases encountered by The Weekend Australian during its investigation include that of a baby girl, born to a teenage mother, who was placed in foster care with an infertile couple desperate for a family of their own. She stayed with them for three years; social workers reported that she was happy and stable. "They treated her like a princess," says a woman who acted as an advocate for the foster parents. "They had her enrolled in ballet classes. "But when her birth mother reached the age of 17, she applied to the department for a 'restoration' - meaning she wanted her little girl to live with her, and another newborn baby.

"The foster parents resisted in court, saying: 'Can't you just wait to see how she does with the new baby?' They went to court and they lost, as couples in that situation almost always will, because restoration is what the department wants, and not necessarily because it's for the best, but because it's cheap. "But the restoration failed. Within months, the little girl was back in care and yet DOCS refused to return her to the foster parents who had cared for her for three years. "It was spite, pure and simple. This couple was exactly the kind the department hates: educated, capable, and prepared to take them, and they took their revenge. It was pretty sick to do that to a tiny child, but they were on a power trip. "They trot out this line - it's in the best interests of the child - but they have their own agenda and it's often to the detriment of the child. The couple were devastated. They never fostered again."

In another case, a retired couple in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, took a 12-year-old troubled boy into their care, and even built a wing for him on the side of the home. "They were totally committed to him," said the parents' advocate. "He went from a Grade Two level to Grade Four in six months. "But then he moved into the teenage years and he got difficult. He complained about his foster parents to DOCS, saying: 'They treat me differently from their own kids.' "But their own kids were 18 and 24. Of course he couldn't do the same things. And kids will do that. They'll have a big whinge, and say 'Life's so unfair' and if it's your own kids, you can say, 'Well, that's the rules'.

"But foster kids, they have the department. They have a way out and they don't understand the rules are good for them. "So he complained and was moved and three years later he was living on the streets in Katoomba."

NSW is the latest state government to call an inquiry into the problem of child welfare, but it dissolved into farce long ago. Complaints have been pouring in but inquiry head justice James Wood has declared that 90 per cent will remain secret. The secrecy compounds a problem in the department, of not wanting to know. A woman who works with foster parents says: "The department doesn't do exit interviews (when foster parents quit) and you've got to assume it's because they don't want to know the answer. "The foster parents say: 'I'm sorry, but I can't do it any more, and it's not the kids. It's the department. Department.'

An exodus of good-quality carers leaves the sector stacked with those described by one worker as "well below standard". The woman, who once worked for DOCS, says: "I'm not exaggerating when I say to you 70 per cent of them (the foster carers) I would not leave my dog with. They are the most inappropriate, weird people." The woman says some foster parents "are what I'd call compulsive care-givers. They have five or six kids and people are saying to them 'You're a saint', and they are all puffed up with self-importance". "One woman said to me the other day: 'I've got five under five here, and I just line them all up in the morning and spoon some food in their mouths'," says one carer.

The public face of foster care - a retired couple eager to help the troubled young, or a widow wanting to pour love into needy toddlers, "is the ones they wheel out for the gullible media", says one foster carer. "There's some of those, but there's a lot of the others."

Many foster carers are wary of raising their concerns. They speak of the department's "appetite for vengeance" and "revenge". "I went to court with one woman who was distraught at losing the girl in her care," says one advocate. "She lost and when we were walking out of the court, the DOCS worker said to her: 'Don't forget, you've got another one of ours.' I took that to mean, don't take us on again, or we'll come for the other child in your care."

Until recently, foster carers had the support of the Foster Care Association, a 20-year-old group started by foster parents who wanted to support each other. Over time, it received more than $3 million in DOCS funding. It had an office in Westmead, in western Sydney, and a 24-hour crisis line for foster parents who were at their wit's end. A former president, Mary Jane Beach, says the group was effective. "It was never my goal to be popular with DOCS," she says. "It was my goal to work with DOCS to perhaps show them things from our side."

She recalls a dinner where she asked all the case workers to get up and move to a new table, leaving purses and handbags behind. "They were horrified. I said: 'That's what it's like for a child to be picked up and moved, like you do to them, making them leave all their stuff behind."'

Funding to the group was axed in July. President Denise Crisp believes the association had become a thorn in the department's side. "We have grandparents who would come to us, fighting for their flesh and blood, and DOCS would be saying, no, the kids have to go back to some druggie mother and we'd fight that." The association was badly managed. Some of its key members were so completely poisoned by their experiences with DOCS they could not be effective advocates for other foster carers.

Security guards had to be employed to keep the peace at such events as the launch of the group's website; police were called to a board meeting that went on for more than six hours; one board member took out an apprehended violence order against another member.

DOCS says the group lost is funding because it changed its constitution to allow "non-registered" carers to join. Ms Crisp says this was done to allow "retired carers, with no kids in their care any more, to stay on the board and give us their experience". DOCS said the change opened the way for deregistered carers - that is, carers whose children had been removed because of fears for their safety - to become members of the association and, potentially, to sit on the board.

DOCS has redirected the funding toward another foster care group, the Foster Parents Support Network, which has entered into a partnership with Karitane. Together, they have formed Connecting Carers NSW, a group that will soon have a website, and offer online training, a crisis line, and holiday camps for carers.

Ms Crisp sees the group as a front for the department, and says its workers are too scared to stand up to DOCS. "We're going to have to see if they are quite happy to just go along with whatever DOCS says," said Ms Crisp. "That might make DOCS happy, but it won't be much good for foster kids."

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There's no such thing as a happy Greenie

AUSTRALIA'S most active unionist pushing for clean coal technology says the Greens are becoming increasingly marginalised by maintaining their opposition to clean coal. Greenies will never be happy because what they want is self-contradictory: A return to a primitive past plus all the comforts of modern life

CFMEU mining division president Tony Maher said his union had done polling that showed roughly 5 per cent of the population supported the Greens' position of opposition to clean coal. "A few years ago there was some scepticism about clean coal, but now you even have environmentalists ... like Tim Flannery who say 'we've got to fix coal'," Mr Maher said.

"I don't think their position has any environmental credibility or any economic credibility. On the environmental front, while coal is a big industry for Australia, we still only produce 4 per cent of the world's coal. We could shut down the industry tomorrow and other countries would just pick up the slack. And economically it would throw a huge amount of people out of work."

He said clean coal research in Australia was moving to a new level and that, while individual states had pursued worthwhile projects in the area, there was now a need for a nationally co-ordinated approach.

Mr Maher said as the states had control of the power system - and in the case of Queensland, were active participants in power generation - it was natural they would initially do most research into clean coal technology. He said that he was hopeful that Kevin Rudd's Global Institute for Carbon Capture and Storage, announced last week, would be able to fill such a role. "Energy is a state-based matter, and while all the research so far has been great, it all needs a bit of direction," Mr Maher said.

"The missing link so far has been co-ordination. In my view there's sufficient money now from both government and industry to get us to the stage of building pilot plants with zero emissions. But the real issue will be the large-scale plants which are commercially viable. Being able to get them coming on stream will mean you're going to have to guarantee commercial viability, and that will need a solid business case, and that's where you need to put together all this research that's being done."

He said Queensland had been the most active state in clean coal research, followed by Victoria. "NSW have got a bit of ground to make up," he said. "There is some research being done at Newcastle University, but it's nowhere near the amount being done in Queensland with Zerogen and with Victoria's Otway Basin project."

The Queensland Government has put $300 million towards the Zerogen project in central Queensland, which involves the construction of a zero-emissions pilot plant near Rockhampton. The Howard government refused to back the project, which is proceeding on a new basis with mining companies putting in extra money. The Queensland Resources Council, which represents coal mining companies, said that, while there was a need for more research, the issue was who paid for it.

QRC chief executive Michael Roche said: "The coal industry knows that in the long term, its social licence to operate does depend on successful commercialisation of low-emission coal technologies. "And as Professor Ross Garnaut has pointed out, this will require a huge investment of public funds, alongside industry funds, over the coming decade."

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