Election B.S. part 2 - the Left

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about the various inadequacies of the election debate in terms of the bullshit coming from the right. At the time I promised to follow up within a week with things that pissed me off coming from the left. Then I got distracted. I realise that posting this now takes away some of the thunder, but better late than never. 

...Turning to Labor, my biggest gripe is with the NBN debate. Labor supporters talk about speed as though every teenager using MSN messenger needs 1000 mega-bits per second. On an apparently funny video floating round YouTube some young lefties mock the idea that under a coalition NBN you could download a DVD movie in ten minutes – apparently you might as well walk to the video store. In my first year of university I remember being ecstatic that I could get a low-definition movie in less than an hour. This obsessive focus on speed is, as usual, totally superficial. The coalition policy delivers 25 MBS by 2016 and 50MBS by 2019 base. If you want faster internet then you can pay for it. That’s the point of only running cable to the street corner—you can charge people to run it all the way to their residence/office. This is called price discrimination, and it’s very good economic policy. It means that you capture maximum rent from everyone who wants to use the infrastructure, and nobody pays for anything they don’t want.

The key issues in NBN policy for me are whether you need to run cable across the entire country, including to remote communities (I suspect it might be more efficient to pay for satellites uplinks for such communities instead) and whether or not you should run cable into buildings or just to the street corner. The issue is not speed. If a business needs 1000MBS they can pay for it. Who other than massive firms need that kind of speed? We don’t have virtual reality video games yet and the games we do have run fine at 1MBS. There is this simplistic dichotomy rolling around suggesting that the coalition policy is just a crappy product now that will inevitably need to be upgraded, while the Labor NBN is, in a sense, a build and forget piece of infrastructure that will be good for decade, as though that is a good thing. But overcapacity is intuitively bad. We need to talk about whether we need that overcapacity and about the extent to which the coalition supported network can be upgraded in a cheap and effective manner or whether it will just involve grossly wasteful upgrading that requires ripping out the existing infrastructure every decade. I’m not getting that discussion from anyone.

Next up we have manufacturing. The attitude of Labor that auto manufacturing is either a part of the cultural fabric of Australia and/or an integral part of our economy is so much horseshit, and policies in this area, namely increase the subsidies with no accountability, are pathetic. Now granted, coalition rhetoric on this was equally dismal, but at least they have the manufacturing transition fund. It is a measly 50million, while the subsidies are in the billions, but at least there is some acknowledgement that transition is in order. Australian car manufacturing is not competitive because our labour is too expensive for the low skill required by this sort of manufacturing, and other countries pump more subsidies into their car industries than Australia.  We have no comparative advantage in this area. The most obvious policy would be to let our industry go bust and import cheap foreign cars instead. Let other countries subsidies our car consumption! Alternatively, we could gradually (over say, 3-5 years) move the industry subsidy and our tariff protections across to a transition fund that helps manufacturing workers retrain and relocate to industries where we do have a comparative advantage (like renewable energy and pharmaceuticals) where they could earn higher wages and not be a drag on the economy. I’m all for humanitarian welfare policies as long as they aren’t just delaying the inevitable. At the very least, subsidies to the car industry should be predicated on the production of cars that people actually want. As everyone moves to driving either hatchbacks or four wheel drives Holden continues to produce falcons and commodores. There is no market, in Australia or overseas, for large family Sedans, and where there is it is typically captured by heavily subsidised domestic producers (like Chrysler).   

The last thing I want to talk about on the left is refugee policy. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere so I won’t go into too much detail here. Labor failed to distance itself at all from the coalition on this issue, which was the number 1 reason why I didn’t want to vote for them (but who could resist Andrew Leigh’s resume). The Greens did distance themselves, but in almost entirely unconstructive way. The ‘open door’ policy they seem to espouse is farcical. There are legitimate security concerns and legitimate concerns about Australia’s absorptive capacity that need to be met with well thought out, robust policy if the Australian public is going to be able to get behind a progressive, humanitarian policy towards refugees. Any such policy needs to address assimilation (how much do we expect and how much do we need to ensure harmony in coming decades), employment (we could certainly use more labour but how do we encourage refugees to move to areas where jobs are available, like country towns, when we can’t even get existing unemployed people to move there), welfare services while refugee families transition and just how many people we can feasibly take. The last point would necessarily involve extensive dialogues with South East Asian countries. There was not much talk of such things from left wing groups during the election. Instead, there was just the chorus of humanitarianism; a line I am sympathetic to but is rather un-pragmatic. There was also almost no talk whatsoever about managing the aspects of the current system. What are the greens doing about ending the detention of children, the separation of families while in detention, the ban on family reunions for individuals on temporary protection visas that just encourages more people to get on boats, the abuse of human rights in detention centres, the appalling staffing of our visa processing departments and our government’s ridiculous attempts to bypass legal values that we consider sacrosanct (like no detention without trial)? Not exerting more pressure on the government on these aspects of the existing system is an appalling failure on the part of the greens and other progressive parties in Australia.