John Quiggin

My latest Guardian article is headlined https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/29/privatisation-is-deeply-unpopular-with-voters-heres-how-to-end-it. The core of the argument is that, to make a success of renationalisation, we need to do more than buy back privatised enterprises, and run them as publicly owned corporations. We need a different model. A starting point would be the statutory authority model used in Australia with great success, before the Hawke-Keating government adopted the corporatised model as a step towards privatisation.

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

… whatever issue on which I want to avoid justifying my firmly held, but indefensible, position.

One of the rhetorical tricks I’ve noticed becoming increasingly common (though I may just have been sensitized to it) is opposition to some proposal, based on the claim that “there are more important issues to discuss”. Here’s a typical example from right wing culture warrior, Kevin Donnelly, campaigning against equal marriage in the leadup to the recent postal survey. Before commencing a lengthy diatribe against gay activism, Safe Schools, alcoholic and abusive parents, surrogacy and so on that barely mentions the topic of marriage, Donnelly says

about 98 per cent of Australians identify as heterosexual and according to the 2011 census figures only 1 per cent of Australian couples are same-sex, with surveys suggesting only a minority want same-sex marriage. There are more important issues to worry about.

If Donnelly believes the issue is unimportant, why is he writing about it? Why not just leave it up to the good sense of the majority of Australians, as the rhetoric of the plebiscite suggested? Why not focus his attention on problems like protecting children from the effects of alcoholism and domestic violence.

The answer is, of course, that Donnelly has no case, or none he is able to make publicly, but nonetheless is very concerned to stop equal marriage. In the absence of a case, he must resort to diversions. So, rather than explain why gay people should be denied the right to marry, he starts off by saying the issue is too unimportant to bother with.

Of course, there are plenty of questions that are too trivial to bother with, and the sensible response is not to bother with them. If pressed, one could reasonably respond “this issue isn’t worth my time, I’ll just go with whatever the majority decides”, but this is hardly ever done.

The only case where this trope is at least possibly justified is as an admonition to political allies not to be diverted into big efforts on trivial issues, when there are more important problems to deal with. Again, though, this only makes sense for someone who is themselves indifferent regarding whether and how these issues are resolved.

That’s the title of my latest piece in Inside Story. Nothing that will surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to what I’ve written on this, so I’ll just cite the conclusion

Since bitcoins are not useful as a medium of exchange, or desirable in themselves, their true value is zero. The highest price at which bitcoins have traded is around $20,000. At the time of writing, the market price is halfway between that level and zero. Pay your money (or not) and take your chances.

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m a sucker for taxonomies, and Ross Douthat has quite a good one in the New York Times

Like any strange and quarrelsome sect, the church of anti-Trump conservatism has divided and subdivided since Donald Trump’s election. Some members have apostatized and joined the ranks of Trumpists; others have marched leftward, with anti-Trumpism as a gateway drug to wokeness. There is a faction that is notionally skeptical of Trump but functionally anti-anti-Trump, a faction that insists it’s just calling “balls and strikes” and a faction screaming that the president rigged the game and needs to be thrown out.

What’s interesting is that, from my observation, he has the factions about right in order of size. The group who have gone left is probably smaller than its ranking suggests, but contains most of what was left of serious thought on the conservative/libertarian side of politics. The smallest group, and the one treated most dismissively, consists of those who have remained politicaly conservative while being unremittingly hostile to Trump. Its members are either out of active politics already (like the Bushes) or are kicking Trump on the way out (like Corker and Flake). By 2020, it will probably be an empty set. That obviously raises the question of what will remain of the conservative movement when and if Trump is defeated.

A point of purely sporting interest is to classify Douthat himself. I’d say, some mixture of “anti-anti-Trump” and “balls and strikes”. The main part of his column, arguing that Trump is more of a joke than a menace, is consistent with this, I think.

I mentioned a while ago that I was making a submission to a Senate inquiry into Vocational Education and Training in South Australia. My submission has now been published on the Committee website with the title “The failure of vocational education and training policy in Australia”

I was a bit surprised to be told it was Submission Number 1, but it turns out they’ve only published two so far. The other one, from Dr Gavin Moodie makes most of the same points as mine.

As I mentioned the inquiry appears to have been called as a stunt to embarrass the SA Labor government, but it has provided an opportunity to bring the Senate’s attention to the continuing bipartisan failure of vocational education policy. To restate my key points, they were

* The impact of decades of cuts in public support for vocational training
* The disastrous effects of subsidising for-profit providers
* The goal of universal participation in post-school education and training
* Integration of technical/vocational and university education

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

A while ago I had one of those “Someone on the Internet is Wrong” arguments with the authors of an article arguing that we would need massively more evidence before we could conclude that autonomous cars are safer than those driven by humans. Rather than dig back to find those arguments again, I thought I’d <a href="http://I thought I'd link to this Bloomberg piece and, in particular the following passage”>link to this Bloomberg piece and, in particular the following passage

GM’s autonomous test cars were in 22 accidents in California last year, according to data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles … In a November interview, GM President Dan Ammann attributed the accidents to testing in a dense urban environment and noted the company’s cars weren’t at fault in any of the incidents.

Suppose that in any crash between autonomous cars and humans, each is equally likely to be at fault. What is the probability of seeing 22 crashes caused by humans and none by autonomous cars. Obviously, it’s the same as that of a fair coin showing 22 heads in a row, which is 2^-22 or about 1 in 10 million.

Of course, the drivers involved in the crashes aren’t likely to be a random sample of the population. As is standard in such things, the 80/20 rule applies: 20 per cent of drivers are responsible for 80 per cent of crashes and traffic infringements. THe 80/20 rule is derived from a Pareto distribution, and we can apply it a second time to say that 20 per cent of the remaining 80 per cent of drivers are responsible for 80 per cent of the remaining 20 per cent of crashes. That is, 36 per cent of drivers are responsible for 96 per cent of crashes. On that basis, it’s perfectly possible that the remaining 64 per cent of good drivers are as good as autonomous cars or even better.

It might also be argued that autonomous vehicles may fail in defensive driving, that is, in reducing harm in a crash caused by the failure of another driver.

Still, it seems pretty clear that autonomous cars are a lot better than the drivers responsible for most crashes and infringements. It isn’t that hard to identify a lot of these drivers before they kill themselves someone else, since prior driving record variables, particularly a driver’s prior traffic citation history, are the most consistent and powerful predictors of subsequent accident risk. Now that cars don’t need steering wheels or pedals any more, there’s no obvious reason to put people with bad driving records back in charge of them. Bad drivers should have their cars driven by robots.

International Studies Quarterly has just published a symposium responding to a paper by Henry Farrell and me, which has been released from behind the paywall for the occasion. Our paper has the fairly self-explanatory title “Consensus, Dissensus, and Economic Ideas: Economic Crisis and the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism ” In our paper we looked at the resurgence of fiscal Keynesianism in the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and of the successful counterthrust leading to the adoption of austerity policies in the US and Europe.

The symposium has comments from a multidisciplinary group of political scientists, sociologists and economists: Abraham Newman, Andrew Baker, Elizabeth Popp Berman, Paul Krugman, Stephen K. Nelson along with a response from us. It’s great to get these different disciplinary perspectives all in one place, since they all have key pieces of the puzzle, and we are very happy they have chosen to engage with us.

Since I wrote my post on good climate news for 2017, a couple of news items have caught my eye

* Britain now generates twice as much electricity from wind as from coal, and around 30 per cent from renewables in total
* More than half the vehicles sold in Norway are now electric or plug in hybrid

My thoughts on these examples over the fold:

TL;DR version: These examples show that, at least for developed countries, massive reductions in CO2 emissions are feasible right now, with no discernible effect on living standards.

Read more…

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’ve just been advised that my latest article “The importance of ‘extremely unlikely’ events: Tail risk and the costs of climate change” has come out online in The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. For those who can use it, the DOI is 10.1111/1467-8489.12238. For everyone else, here’s a link to a pre-publication version. The main points are

* The IPCC convention is to use the phrase “extremely unlikely” to refer to outcomes (in particular, values of climate sensitivity) in the range of 0–5 per cent.
* Most of the risks against which we act to protect and insure ourselves (for example, car crashes, premature death in any given year) are “extremely unlikely” by this definition
* Around half, or even more, of the expected welfare loss from climate change arises from the worst-case 5 per cent of high values for climate sensitivity.

Nothing really startling here, but it’s the other side of the coin to the contrarian suggestion that since there’s a 5 per cent probability that global warming will turn out not to be a problem, we should do nothing.

David Blowers from the Grattan Institute has a piece in The Conversation (also on the ABC) headlined A high price for policy failure: the ten-year story of spiralling electricity bills. It’s not bad, and is notable for the observation that

History may judge the introduction of competition to the retail electricity market as an expensive mistake.

I don’t think we need to wait for history; in fact, we didn’t need to wait until 2017.

Most of the problems that have subsequently emerged were evident when I first addressed this issue in a paper in 2001., published in the Economic and Labor Relations Review

Here’s my conclusion

The National Electricity Market is still developing. Some problems that have emerged in the early stages such as the disparity between the substantial price reductions for large customers and the largely unchanged prices paid by households will fade away as the market matures. Other issues such as the structure of the industry and the degree of horizontal and vertical integration will be resolved by a mixture of market processes and regulatory interventions.

Some problems, however, are likely to become more rather than less acute. The Australian National Electricity Market commenced operation in a period of oversupply so that problems of market power and excessive prices have not emerged until recently. It remains unclear whether an electricity auction market can produce adequate incentives for investment while generating appropriate prices for consumers. Similar problems are emerging in relation to the regulated monopoly component of the industry, the transmission and distribution sector. Regulators must set prices that do not reward inefficiency or allow monopoly profits, but nevertheless provide appropriate incentives for new investment. This is a delicate balance.

In the longer term, the problem of the environmental impact of an industry relying predominantly on carbon-based fuels remains to be addressed. A market solution would involve the creation of emissions credits that could be traded along with electricity in national markets. Although limited steps have been taken in this direction, much remains to be done.

I’ve published a couple of articles recently on climate issues. One, in Inside Story, is an expansion of a post here, making the case that 2017 was a good year for climate policy globally. One more item to add to the list: India’s additions of coal-fired generation capacity are running at the slowest pace since 2006.

The other, in New Matilda, was about the (lousy) economics of the Adani coal mine-rail-port project. It’s part of a series on the struggle against the mine by indigenous Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) people. Publication has been a bit slow, so my article doesn’t keep up with all the latest events, which seem likely to ensure that this disastrous project won’t proceed. The most important has been the split between Adani and its main contractor EDI Downer, one of a handful of companies with the expertise to run a mine on this scale. Adani’s current claim that it will operate the mine itself seems untenable, according to everything I’ve read.

I’m working with Troy Henderson from the University of Sydney on a book chapter looking at union responses to the idea of a universal basic income (UBI),which have covered a range from supportive to strongly hostile, with the latter view predominant in Australia. Here’s a draft of my section of the chapter. Comments much appreciated.

Read more…

As I mentioned in relation to their advocacy of an end to coal, the Greens occupy a position where they can put forward policies that are outside the range of possibilities taken seriously by the commentariat. Another recent example is their proposal, during the Queensland election campaign for four additional public holidays. Of course, this idea was ridiculed by the major parties, which are still stuck in a mode of thinking where “jobs and growth” are ends in themselves rather than means to a better life. Jackie Trad, for example, was quoted as responding that “the election was about jobs, and that the proposal was “populist”, while Tim Nicholls described it as “loopy”. The attitudes expressed by Trad and Nicholls are typical of the neoliberal* thinking dating back to the 1980s that still dominates much of the political class.

Before the 1980s, it was generally understood that the benefits of technological progress included reductions in the paid work time needed to achieve a decent standard of living. Over the first three quarters of the 20th century, standard working hours were reduced from 48 per week to 44 then to 40, annual leave became a standard condition of employment, increased to four weeks a year in the 1970s, and the number of public holidays was increased. The last significant move in this direction was the 38 hour standard working week, introduced in 1983. Some more progressive Labor governments, such as that of the ACT have pushed for more public holidays. That’s the exception though: the general direction of public policy has been to push for more “flexible” (that is, flexible at the employer’s discretion) hours and working conditions, fewer long weekends and so on.

If we are to move to a more sustainable economy, a shift away from ever-increasing material consumption is necessary. A reduction in the time devoted to market work and production, as well as being desirable in itself, is an essential part of this process. An increase in the number of official public holidays, and a restoration of penalty rates for holiday work, would be an important signal that the era “jobs and growth” neoliberalism, setting the alarm clock early, and so on, is behind us.

* Here. I’m using “neoliberal” in the broad pejorative sense of “bad assumptions associated with the era of market reform that began in the 1980s” rather than in reference to a coherent theoretical position, for which I would typically use the term “market liberalism”. There’s nothing inherently free-market about the rhetoric of harder work, productivity and “competitiveness”, but the empirical fact is that they go together.

Ten years ago, when Bob Brown and the Greens called for a plan to end coal exports, their position was way outside the Oveandrton Window (the range of opinions taken seriously by the political class and commentariat). Ten years later, it’s entirely normal for financial institutions to announce that they will no longer fund coal projects, and for major national governments to join an alliance with the self-explanatory title Powering Past Coal.

The news isn’t all good. For a variety of mostly temporary reasons, China has increased its coal consumption in the last year, so that CO2 emissons are likely to have risen in 2017. But the general direction of public policy and energy investment is clearly right, and even reactionary governments like those of Turnbull and Trump have been powerless to do much about it. After all the posturing of the National Energy Guarantee, the coal lobby in the government had to swallow the announcement that the AGL Liddell power station would be closed and replaced by renewables.

More significantly, the threat that the massive (though low-grade) coal reserves of the Galilee Basin might be developed as a result of the Adani mine-rail-port proposal appears to have been staved off. Labor’s victory in the Queensland state election meant a veto of public loan funding through the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (a veto which also encompasses a rival rail project put up by Aurizon) makes it highly unlikely that Adani will find any commercial lenders. This conclusion was confirmed by the announcement that Adani has parted ways with Downer EDI, with which it had a $2 billion agreement to operate the mine. Downer is just the latest in a string of Adani partners to walk, or be pushed away (Posco, Worley Parsons and the bankers who were lining up to lend a few years ago). In the US, Trump’s efforts to save coal have been similarly ineffectual.

Looking beyond coal, we’ve had major developments in battery technology, symbolised by Tesla’s 100 MWh SA battery, which has already proved its worth and discredited the Turnbull/Abbott rhetoric about the reliability of coal. That goes along with electric cars and the announced decision of numerous national governments and some carmakers to go all-electric.

None of this should cause complacency. Turnbull, Trump and various likeminded governments (mostly nascent or actual rightwing dictatorships) are still doing their best to sabotage the planet, and the urgency of the problem is clearer than ever. But overall, this has been a very good year for the global climate.

A plug for a recent paper: one of my Twitter followers asked for a non-technical explanation, so here it is.

Flavio Menezes and I just released the latest version our paper “The Strategic Industry Supply Curve,” available here. The central aim of the paper is to extend the standard graphical analysis of supply and demand, familiar to every first-year economics student, to cases where markets are imperfectly competitive (monopolies and oligopolies). At present, these markets are analyzed using quite different theoretical tools, making only limited use of graphical representations.

The main innovation is the notion of the strategic industry supply curve, representing the locus of Nash equilibrium outputs and prices arising from additive shocks to demand.  Special cases include monopoly, Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly and competition in linear  supply  schedules.

As in the standard graphical analysis, we can
* use measures of consumer and producer surplus to determine the distribution of the welfare gains from trade between consumers and producers
* derive elasticity measures for supply and demand
* analyse the comparative statics of cost shocks
 
Our analysis allows us to view imperfect competition as analogous to a case where producers engage in ‘cost-padding’.  That is, the difference between the strategic supply curve (an equilibrium concept) and the industry supply curve (the sum of the supply curves of individual firms) can be seen as the measure of the ‘economic rents’ afforded by imperfect competition.
 
Our analysis has important implications for competition policy. For example, competition regulators examine industry supply curves, but do not directly assess the efficient costs of production. So, they are unable to distinguish directly between efficient costs and the ‘cost-padding’ associated with strategic behavior. Rather, the extent of such cost-padding is implicit in the the specific form of competition that it is assumed in the analysis (e.g., Cournot versus (differentiated) Bertrand). Conversely, assumptions about the form of competition are largely arbitrary and not informed by data. The approach in merger regulation contrasts sharply with that of monopoly price regulation, where the focus is on determining the monopolist’s efficient cost, so as to set efficient (in a second-best sense) prices.

The arbitrary nature of economists’ assumptions about the strategy spaces appropriate for game-theoretic representations of economic problems has been a long-standing theme of ours (refs). In this paper, we have turned this criticism around and shown how an explicit treatment of the strategy space can not only yield powerful new tools for economic analysis but can enhance the scope of such familiar tools as demand-supply diagrams.

I’ve had plenty of disagreements with Andrew Norton about education policy. But I couldn’t write a better response to the government’s decision to end open access to university education for young Australians than this one. So, I’ll just link to it and open comments.

From a comment on a Facebook post by Max Sawicky, asking about the difference between socialism and social democracy (sadly, I think the context was one of the internecine disputes in which the left has long specialised, though the right has now caught up and surpassed us).

Socialism and social democracy

I’ve switched back and forth between the two terms, with a more or less constant understanding of their meaning. For me, “social democracy” refers to the actual policy program advocated and to a significant extent implemented by social democratic parties in the mid-20th century: free and universal health care and education, a social welfare system sufficiently broad and generous to eliminate poverty, full employment and strong unions, in the context of a mixed economy. “Socialism” refers to a fundamental transformation of the capitalist system incorporating and going beyond the social democratic program to end large-scale capital and dependence on wage labour.

That is, as I use the terms, social democracy refers to a contemporary policy program and socialism to a utopian aspiration. During the period of neoliberal dominance, , I described myself as a social democrat, defending the achievements of the 20th century and trying to extend them where possible. Now that there is an opening for the future, we need the kind of utopian vision I associated with “socialism”.

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

My observations on the electricity demand associated with Bitcoin made it into the ABC News Quiz last week, which is a kind of fame, I guess.

Meanwhile, I had another piece in the Guardian, this time looking at the fact that, despite being called a “cryptocurrency”, Bitcoin is used even less as a currency now than it was several years ago. The core problem is that the system is so overloaded by miners creating new coins that processing transactions is slow, costly or both I mentioned the fact that game company Steam had stopped accepting coins and that the list of merchants accepting Bitcoin is small enough to fit on one page. Checking further I concluded that this list is out of date, but not in a good way. Lots of those included, such as Expedia, no longer accept Bitcoin, if indeed they ever did. Here’s one person’s experience. Bitcoin is now a “crypto asset” which is even more obviously a Ponzi fantasy than the original currency story.

One response I got was that transaction speed would soon be greatly improved by something called Lightning. Checking on this it appears that this is software in an alpha (very early) stage of development, which would allow any two parties to set up a transactions account separate from the main Bitcoin blockchain, and only occasionally update the main account. An analogy, for readers of a certain age, is the era before Bankcard, when, if you wanted to do something other than paying cash, you maintained a separate credit and debit account with every store you dealt with. This does not seem like the dawn of a new era to me.

Lots of commentators are making a fuss over the prospect of the Greens taking the seat of Batman following the likely and unlamented departure of Labor MP David Feeney (if not under S44 then at the next election). The underlying claim is that the election of Greens candidates represents an existential threat to Labor. This is typical of a commentariat mindset that sees anything other than majority Labor or LNP governments as recipes for disaster (the phrase “hung parliament” is indicative), even though we have decades of experience of such governments operating successfully both federally and in (I think) every state and territory. The reality is that, however fractious their relationship may be at times, Labor and the Greens constitute a centre-left coalition. As I said a year ago

For Labor that means giving up the idea that the Greens are a temporary irritant that will go the way of the DLP, if they are abused and/or ignored long enough. For the Greens, it means abandoning Third Way rhetoric suggesting that they represent an unaligned alternative to a two-party duopoly.

The details of the alignment between the two will vary according to the circumstances, from formal coalition to general support, but there is no alternative.

The problem of coalition politics is much more problematic on the right. Despite the frictions, I’m not thinking primarily of the LNP “coalition” (so rusted together that, even where they aren’t merged, the two are lumped together as a single “major party” in most commentary). Rather, the problem is the relationship between the LNP as a whole and the tribalist/Trumpist right, represented in various forms by One Nation, the Liberal Democratic Party, Bernardi’s Conservatives* as well as a large faction within the LNP itself. These two groups have nothing in common except that they have common enemies, and even that common ground is limited. They all hate greenies and unions, but the overt racism of One Nation and the religious bigotry of Bernardi repel lots of mainstream LNP types, while the Trumpist base is suspicious of banks and multinationals.

Most importantly, the ideological framework of market liberalism (aka neoliberalism, economic rationalism) and so on has lost its power, which always rested more on the idea that There Is No Alternative than on any positive appeal. Sermons about the need for reform, budget surpluses, more competitive tax regimes and so on no longer get the kind of automatic approval from the political class as a whole that they used to. So, the mainstream LNP no longer stands for anything in particular. Meanwhile, the Trumpists want nostalgic gesture politics without any concern for coherence or practical consequences.

For the immediate future, at least, politics in Australia has resolved itself into a struggle between two coalitions. Both are going to be fractious, but the big problems are going to be found on the right.

* There’s also the Katter party, but Katter is too idiosyncratic to fit into any classification.

That’s what Keynes called the gold standard nearly a century ago, and he was right. I was reminded of this by the commentary on my latest piece on Bitcoin, published in the Conversation and also the ABC. I restated the points I made in my 2015 article on the massive and wasteful use of electricity in Bitcoin mining. The key points are that the cost of mining Bitcoins will inevitably rise until it is equal to the price for which Bitcoins can be sold, and that the great bulk of this cost is the electricity used to run specialised computer systems.

The responses included a great deal of huffing and puffing to the effect that I know nothing about cryptocurrency and shouldn’t comment, but showed no understanding of the central point, let alone any attempt to refute it. The scale of Bitcoin’s electricity use (which was hard to observe directly when I wrote in 2015 is now so massive as to be undeniable.

The other response, standard in cases like this, is whataboutery, that is, attempts to point out other wasteful uses of electricity compared to which Bitcoin is allegedly insignificant. I addressed one of these in the article, responding so someone who claimed that the electricity used by Bitcoin (serving at most a few million people) is “only” one-third of that of the rest of the global financial system.

Some other whatabouts led me to some interesting thoughts. One, which I plan to look at further is the use of electricity in electronic equipment on standby. The other, pushed with some vigour by commenters is gold. So, is gold worse than Bitcoin

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I’ve just been invited to make a submission to a Senate inquiry into TAFE in South Australia. From what I can glean, this is a politically motivated exercise by the Turnbull government to make capital out of some embarrassing failures in a Labor state. But it gives me the incentive to write something about the catastrophic failure of vocational education and training in Australia, a failure for which there is plenty of blame to go around. Rather than making political capital out of such incidents, we need to rebuild the TAFE system as the core of a greatly expanded vocational education and training system, including public and non-profit institutions, free from the discredited ideology of markets and competition.

Among the points I want to cover

* The impact of decades of cuts in public support for vocational training
* The disastrous effects of subsidising for-profit providers
* The goal of universal participation in post-school education and training
* Integration of technical/vocational and university education

The contradictions in the LNP/IPA attack on free speech became even more evident today with the appointment of Gary Johns as the head Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission. Johns was once a junior minister in the Keating government and used this position to give a non-partisan veneer to subsequent career as a hack for the IPA, which was followed by a stint at the Australian Catholic University.

Johns has been at the forefront of the push to suppress political advocacy by charitable organizations eligible for tax-deductible donations. So his appointment by Minister Michael Sukkar followed logically from the LNP/IPA anti-free speech agenda.

There’s just one problem. The announcement came on the day of the vote on equal marriage, an issue on which numerous religious charities campaigned on the losing side. So, in the same breath as announcing Johns’ appointment, Minister Sukkar expressed the hope that the legislation might be amended to allow charities to continue advocacy on this issue.

This is silly, of course. It was already obvious that no amendments would be passed. And, as Warren Entsch pointed out, under current interpretations of the law, there’s no need for them. As Entsch says “A charity may advocate on any issue relevant to that charity and nothing in this bill will change that”. He’s right of course, but the whole idea of appointing Johns was to change this situation.

Hopefully, the government will realise what a trap they are setting for themselves here. If they attempt to remove tax-deductibility for conservation organizations that engage in advocacy, they will create a precedent that can subsequently be used against religious organizations. Turnbull should overturn Johns’ appointment and find someone who actually supports charities and non-profits.

Assumming, as seems likely, that the government is in too much of a mess to work this out, perhaps the churches will do so. If they want to protect freedom of speech for themselves, they’d better start defending it for others (cue Ditrich Bonhoeffer).